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12/14/2002 Archived Entry: "Lighting up my life"

It's been a day of lights:

It started yesterday night, actually, when I was trying to get a socket-based plugin installed in the bathroom for Jen's handheld hairdryer. This takes some explaining though, so please bear with me. When I moved into this place, I was two days past being dumped by Psychobi*ch From Hell, and I had spent the ast two nights sleeping in the Userfriendly.org offices. I was a complete wreck, and desperately needed something I could call home to lick my wounds and recover my sanity. It was a whirlwind romance and had one of those nasty endings where Person A says: "It's over", Person B says: "Uhhh...why", Person A says: "I don't have to tell you, get out", Person B gets out and tries to figure out a problem more complex than Fermat's Last Theorem without the requisite equation. I was Person B, obviously. So I, desperate to find a place, called every rental ad I could find in an area that I knew had a lot of apartment buildings, and took the second one I found. The first was so vile I never got past the drug dealers at the elevator. This place at least was reasonably clean, though the hundreds of nail holes in the walls and crappy fixtures needed to be fixed/replaced. Specifically, the light fixture in the bathroom is horrid, rusted metal, which is barely attached to the wall. The 4 sockets in it are regular sized, but one of the large (6" across) bulbs has been burnt out since I moved in. Attempting to unscrew a bulb to screw in the two socket plugin, I managed to break one bulb in it's socket and burnt out another and make the entire fixture off-center and tilted. In the end I just removed all the bulbs, straightened the fixture, then replaced all four bulbs with new 100 watt ones. I swear that when Jen stands behind me when I shave or brush my teeth she can see the outline of my skull.

This morning we went out to Zellers (for non-Canadians, this is like a crappy Target or Walmart) to return a clamp-on desk lamp that Jen bought. It was missing the actual clamp part of the lamp, so we had to take it back. The annoying part is that this is the second thing we bought from Zellers this month that was incomplete when we got it home. The first time, we bought a $100 set of pots that was missing two lids and returned it for exchange. This time (calmly and nicely, because it's not the customer service reps fault, and they have a crappy job), we took it there and I asked if they wouldn't mind informing the manager that this was the second time we had this happen. The woman, who I think was named Tracy(?), nicely called the manager, said the nicest words I think I've heard someone in a department say in a long time ("I'd like to satisfy this customer") over the phone. Then she returned to us and gave us 20,000 "Club Z" points for our trouble and refunded us the money we paid for the lamp. That's not a huge gain, 20k points is what you get when you spend $200 in the store, but it was a heck of a nice feeling.

This evening when we got home we put up the Christmas lights on our balcony. White 'icicle lights', which in the past I have derided as horribly middle-class blandness. I was happy to put these up tonight though; they look nice and it's surprisingly warm-feeling to do christmas-y stuff with Jen, even the typical stuff. Too many years in the past I've done no Christmas things; last year I cooked chili for myself, petted the cat and went to bed late on Christmas day. I didn't open a single present or give anyone anything. As much as I hate the commercialization of Christmas, because I basically hate the commercialization of anything, being alone and present-less on a day when you know 99.9% of people are being with friends or family (whether happily or not) leads one to realize just how alone you can be in a city of 2 million people. It's not loneliness really, just a lack of good feelings. This Christmas I am filled with all sorts of feelings and...well, light. :)