This is as festive as I get

Christmas is about to hit me in the face like a festive baseball bat with nails of good tiding and great joy driven through it. Despite the massive penetration that Christmas has into day-to-day life, I've been fairly well insulated from the holiday season so far. I have not decorated my home, the office is bare of all Christmas cheer, and I avoid any and all Christmas music like vampires avoid sunlight. However, I am about to fly home where I go from the green lawns of Ottawa and my Noel-proof environment to three feet of snow and high levels of holiday spirit. I will likely have an aneurysm from the shock of it.

Before I'm labeled as a Scrooge/Grinch hybrid monster that can hate Christmas with twice the efficiency of a sociopathic German atheist I want to set the record straight on this. For the first 18 years of my life I spent every winter being bombarded with holiday cheer starting in mid-October and running all the way into late January. My mother played Christmas music 24/7 in our house, there were wreaths on every door and flocking in places that I never thought one could flock. Preparation for Christmas was an all-consuming event. Getting out of the house offered no reprieve; high school is an institutionalized festive machine, because amping up the kids about the holidays means not teaching, which everyone can get behind. All my friends has similarly festive parents, so there was no relief there either. However, what cultivated my hatred for the holiday season was working in a grocery store.

The grocery store is a place where all the general hustle, bustle, stress, anxiety, and pressure of the holiday season that generally weighs on people is concentrated, condensed, and focused into a hard, sharp, festive-tipped spear and rammed between your ribs. First, it's a hellish time to sell food. Everyone goes nuts cooking elaborate and senselessly massive meals for family, friends, and strangers, meaning that they need to buy an inordinate amount of food. That means we're ridiculously busy. Of course, we also have to do stupid things like sell Mandarin oranges during this time of the year. This is problematic. I can tell you from personal experience that an otherwise intelligent person's IQ will drop at least 40 points upon entering a grocery store. If they encounter Mandarin oranges, it drops directly to zero. Nothing on the face of the earth makes people more stupid than Mandarin oranges. People become totally incapable of understanding basic concepts when they are set around Mandarin oranges. Let me illustrate:

Customer - "How much are the oranges?"
Me - "$5.99 a case for the Japanese, $3.99 for the Chinese."
Customer - "Which is which?"
Me - "The ones that say 'Japanese' are Japanese and the ones that say 'Chinese' are Chinese."
Customer - "What's the difference?"
Me - "One is from Japan and one is from China."
Customer - "Why are they different prices?"
Me - "Because people say the Japanese oranges are better."
Customer - "Can I get the Japanese for the same price as the Chinese?"
Me - "No."
Customer - "Why not?"
Me - "Because it undermines the entire capitalist system."
Customer - "But they're both oranges."
Me - "Sir, you come in here every day and purchase things for the posted price without complaint. Yet, upon seeing these oranges something inside your brain has told you that the laws governing grocery stores that apply every other day to every other product do not function here. I would like to remind you that there are signs placed on the product. These signs indicate the price of said product, and often give more information about it, like where the product is from. Sir, I assure you that if you just pretend that it is not Christmas and these are not Mandarin oranges that you will be able to purchase them and everything will be alright, but you need to trust me on this."
Customer - "So how much are these again?"

What I discovered after years of research is that Mandarin oranges give off waves of paranoia and greed that people who do not wear protective green staff aprons have no defense against. Humans are totally incapable of approaching a box of mandarin oranges and trusting anything about it. They do not trust the price and will attempt to haggle:

"No, you do not get a deal if you buy six boxes. Yes, I do understand that is a lot of oranges and frankly I fear for your health. No, asking me again will not change my mind. Sir, you have now asked me for a fourth time and if I am inclined to do anything it is raise the price as a form of punishment."

They do not trust the quality of the oranges and will dig through the boxes with their dirty, claw-like hands:

"Ma'am, I have personally inspected every one of those boxes. It took hours. I had to do it in our cooler and I was very cold. It was perhaps the most horrible experience of my life. You opening the box is not only forbidden by the store, it is rude and spreads whatever infections I am sure that you carry. What you are doing not only invalidates my job, it creates more work for me cleaning up after you. I quite sincerely wish to murder you."

And they will regularly try to stuff their boxes, often with oranges of the more expensive variety, which they somehow feel is not theft:

"Sir, put down the box and run. I am about to hunt you for sport as if you were an animal. You have no one to blame for this but yourself."

Combine the horrid state of humanity that I had to interact with on a daily basis, combined with the God-awful country-music Christmas carols that were played on the store radio all day and I hope you can begin to understand why I grew to fear and loathe the holiday season. I have been so over-exposed to the holiday season, and so embittered humanity being at its worst during the most wonderful time of the year, that I've needed the last four years to purge the pent-up holiday angst. I may yet need a few more.

And I just found out that my contract isn't being renewed for the new year so come January I am officially unemployed.

Happy Holidays everyone!!

Post #59

As I was walking down Rideau St. on my way home from work tonight there was a homeless man sitting on the street shouting things at the passers by. He seemed to be enjoying himself. Some of his shouting was crazy, most of it was rude. He literally barked at the woman walking ahead of me. Barked as if he were a dog.

When I walk past he looks up at me and says: "Nice tie."

I just don't know what to think about that.

I just flew in from Montreal, and boy are my arms tired

To those who didn't know, I spent the last week in Montreal at the National Liberal Convention. The whole ordeal began last Tuesday. My colleague Jay (heretofore LL Cool Jay) rented a cargo van (heretofore referred to as "Big Pimpin'") and loaded it up with approximately $40,000 worth of computers, TVs, VCRs, and digital video equipment. My boss made a point of softly muttering the price of each piece of equipment as he handed it to me to load into the van. "Digital editing board... twelve thousand dollars..." That sort of thing. Now, I was already stressed out enough about driving to Montreal, seeing as I've never driven in Ottawa, in Montreal, or between the two, I haven't been behind the wheel of any vehicle in months, and Big Pimpin' is no small vehicle. Knowing that I could be killed for less than the price of the equipment I was responsible for was not helping my stress level.

Around 2pm LL Cool Jay and myself hit the road in Big Pimpin'. We fixed the radio to a classic rock station for most of the trip, except for the brief period during which we were stopped at a red light in front of the Rideau Centre (translation: the most ghetto block in Ottawa), where we switched it to a gangsta-rap station and proceeded to "Raise The Roof." Two white guys in a rented cargo van tossing down gang signs would get a person shot in most places. How we survived I still do not know.

We didn't leave Ottawa as early as we had hoped, so I got to experience the wonderous joy of driving in Montreal during rush hour. In a cargo van. I cannot reinforce this next statement enough, so I will use a lot of capitals,put it in italics, and ask you to read it at least twice: Never Drive In Downtown Montreal During Rush Hour In A Cargo Van. There is no reason that you can justify doing this, especially if you have no idea where you're going. The drive into Montreal is a half-hour of freeways that always seem to be jammed. When you get close to downtown, it appears that the freeway designers got bored with building their roads on simple solid ground, so they put them in the etheral air. There's tons of perfectly good earth beneath these freeways in the sky, but apparently we just don't drive down there anymore. The whole place looks like an M. C. Escher Painting.

The freeway ordeal ends when you hit RueRené-Lévesque. If one has not realized by this point that you are no longer in Anglophone Canada, this hits you like a plate of poutine in the face. Here there be Quebecois. At this point, driving changes from stressful to confusing. As it turns out, you cannot turn left in downtown Montreal. Moreover, if you get on the wrong street, your inability to turn left puts you on a bridge out of town, and the only way you can get back is by driving through ghetto Montreal. That is a half-hour of my life that I want back. Every time I was able to turn left after that, I thanked Jesus just a bit.

The convention itself was a four day whirlwind of sign-waving, speeches, man hugs, and cheesy music. I don't have a lot to say about that part of it, because I was stuck in our media monitoring center changing VHS tapes, running from room to room to fix Powerpoint presentations, and getting free pepsi from the Liberal Party office. Plus, since our office has to work for whoever wins we were strictly forbidden from picking up any campaign swag until we elected someone.

The thing about conventions is all the work happens after hours. When we leave the convention hall we don't go home, we go to hospitality suites. Some of these suites are put on by leadership hopefulls in effort to persuade delegates to vote for them, others are put on by organizations in an effort to have as much incestuous party networking as possible, and in the case of the Atlantic Caucus party they have them just as an excuse to get drunk. Regardless of who puts them on, there is always drinks to be had, and usually for free. On any given evening there were at least three major parties going. One could go to any one of these events and find Members of Parliament. One could also go to any one of these events and find the sameMember of Parliament at all of them. One could also go to one of these events and see a particular Member of Parliament standing on a table and singing, and singing very well at that. He got a standing ovation. In my next life I want to be from the East Coast.

Ignatieff had two parties a night. The Atlantic Caucus party was called a phenomenal event by some, and a fire hazard by others. The Canada-Israel Association party had a giant chocolate fountain. I had to sneak into a Dryden party through a back hallway, a service elevator, and a kitchen. The Young Liberals party had underage drinking, blackberries, glowsticks, senior citizens, senior citizens with glowsticks, teenage sex, middle aged sex, drugs, aid for Africa, a live acoustic cover of "Bust a Move," and near fistfights over who was best suited to lead the party. When the cover band publicly supported Bob Rae one Dionista nearly bum-rushed the mic. She would have done it too if she had been tall enough to scale the stage.

Safe to say that with parties and free booze every night, plus early mornings at the convention, we were all bleary eyed. Moreso after we were awoke by a 3am fire alarm in our hotel. Hell is standing in a cold stairwell with a hundred people in their bathrobes, with everyone wondering what's going on.

In the end we elected a new leader who doesn't speak the best English. I consider this an asset. Our last great Francophone Prime Minister didn't speak very good English either, but as the speech he delivered at the convention shows, that doesn't matter much. When we didn't understand what he was saying, we took it as our cue to applaud. We applauded a lot.

We drove out of Montreal in both a traffic jam and a snowstorm.

In Conclusion: MPs know how to party, Atlantic MPs really know how to party, the Jews have the best buffets, being in Montreal is awesome, getting into and out of Montreal sucks, and clearance heights on parking garages are really just a suggestion. Just don't tell Hertz that.