Becoming an early-riser

For most of my life I´ve been a notoriously early riser, and the whole thing can be blamed on one incredibly traumatizing incident that occurred when I was around the age of 6. My family had been visiting my aunt and travelled home by train, which took several days. After the first night spent on the train, I woke up rather late, and an absolutely horrifying thing had happened. My family had gone for breakfast without me. Not only that, but my sister had been allowed to keep the flower off the table in the dining car, and had brought it back to the sleeper car with her. When you are a child and you get to keep a real, live (and by that I mean freshly cut and slowly dying) flower from a train dining car, that puts you in the same class as your favourite Disney princess (which is probably Belle since she´s so smart and still gets to wear a ballgown and be emotionally abused by someone who you know deep down would be a nice guy if he wasn´t so hairy and would allow your sweetness to nurture his soul). My sister was a Disney princess who got hot breakfast and flowers and I was the sad anthropomorphic lamp (or tea cup or whatever) who slept until 11 on a train. So I learned at an early age that sleeping in is a sure-fire way to miss out on breakfast, romance, and all the other adventures that occur before noon on a weekday. For the next 15 years I shot out of bed at 7am.

Airplane trips and other things that are never as exciting as sitcoms would have led me to believe.

I know it is the job of a sitcom to make incredibly mundane events seem like hilarious adventures, but I still haven´t gotten over the fact that in real life, most flights, weddings, and attempts to order soup tend to go off without a hitch. Other than confusing my travel mates by becoming overly excited about buying a zebra print neck pillow, and getting loopy towards the end of the 22 hours we spent in transit*, the flight was rather like every other flight I´ve ever taken (as in, with a surprising lack of crashes, cannibalism, David Bowie or any other celebrity making a surprise appearance from the first class cabin, 10-hour delays, marriage proposals, escaped animals, or children being separated from their parents and ending up in New York City).

Pack light...

For me, the excitement of traveling has always been linked to an excessive willingness to sacrifice comforts along the way. This determination to experience hardship usually begins in the preliminary packing phase of trip preparations. I shove everything I need into a bag, decide the bag is too bulky, and convince myself that my trip will be ruined if I insist on bringing more than the barest of essentials with me (no way will my adventure be ruined by the misguided notion that I need both a toothbrush AND a hairbrush on this trip! Only one may stay!), as if backpacking through Europe is akin to fleeing the bolshevik revolution.

Inevitably, while I sacrifice an essential item, I will also have packed multiples of an item, or one bulky and oddly specific item, which I would only need in the rarest of cases. The result of this is an awkward conversation with my travel partners, about 8 hours in to the journey, when I have to explain why I made a conscious decision to leave my shampoo/towel/pajamas/clothes* behind, but I still brought my recorder/stapler/entire jewelry box with me. Will I regret packing three pairs of footwear, three kinds of tylenol, and all the bandaids I own, but only one pair of shorts when I arrive in Madrid?

Maybe. But in my mind, being in Europe will be such a grand adventure that having only one pair of shorts to wear for a 30 day stretch will hardly make a difference in the grand scheme of things (but having 3 different kinds of a headache could).

*That was an awkwardly memorable instance that did NOT make me any friends.

Oh look, my cousin is ruining my life again

Today I discovered the Other Amy (my arch nemesis) used to operate under the email address I am using now. I've started getting emails from people asking how it is in Toronto and trying to track down old friends from the days when she was young and less capable of muscling me out of everything that is mine by right (example: a gym membership with the correct birth date and an ID photo that actually has my face in it, and a Google search that doesn't result in photos of a thong-clad stripper cuddling up to a one-eyed gunslinger. I liked her better as a red-head anyway). Just when I thought we'd put an end to this game. I should just give up and start impersonating her. We both seem to have a knack for attracting zombies, after all, so I'm already half way there.

Meanwhile, in the less glamorous life of the Antihero Amy...

The perks of living alone: another lazy lazy list

The perks of living alone:

-There is no such thing as an inappropriate time to take your clothes off.
-Anything in the apartment can be a dirty laundry hamper. Here is my rocking chair hamper, my patio table hamper, my 4 chairs from the biology department hampers, and my floor hamper
-Any hour is Guilty Pleasure Pop Music Being Played Embarrassingly Loud hour.
-I can use the same knife for the jam and the cream cheese without having to feel bad about leaving crumbs in either of them and making the rest of my housemates wonder what foreign objects are now floating around in their food.

The drawbacks of living alone:

When people come over the only things I have to offer them are chairs covered in dirty laundry to sit in, embarrasingly loud pop music to listen to, and cream cheese full of crumbs.

Things I have learned this month

No cause for ceremony or explanation there. Things I have learned this month:

1) Don't blog about the hilarious time you met a drunken stranger dressed up as a zombie stripper, if you later realize you want to be friends with said drunk zombie stripper and then have to pretend she wasn't the main focus of your blog this month.

I'm not Undead yet, either! (More on that to follow)

I was walking back to the Village from a church celebration on a Saturday night during the zombie apocalypse, wondering how far the undead minions had spread from their original nest on Osborne, when I suddenly ran into one. It was a darkened street corner just before River intersects with More of River to become a 5-lane death street, and there was a six-foot-tall creature of the undead who may have been a schoolgirl or a stripper or a schoolgirl stripper in a past life, calmly wandering across River in her stiletto boots, waving down cars.

She was playing the part of a zombie (unfocused eyes, inability to stand straight, walk straight, or speak straight) so well that I was at first a bit afraid of her, and elected to remain on the other side of the street, but soon she was lurching towards me, until we were both on the corner of the 5-lane death street, and I was cowering against a lamp post and asking her to please not eat my brain.