Horrified gasp!

"Where are the managers?" BK, from the Staples Copy Centre, asks me as I try to find my boss, who has vanished for the past four hours.

"I don't know," I say. "Last thing I knew they were having a meeting in the office. But the door's closed and all you can hear from time to time are loud bouts of laughter."

BK pouts, her face thoughtful. "I bet they're jacking each other off."

I am horrified. "Oh my GOD!" I exclaim. "Of all the mental images, BK...!!"

She laughs. "It's my theory."

As I try to shake the picture out of my head, the office door swings open and the five managers walk out, looking smug. I turn to glance at BK. She's smirking. I struggle to keep from screaming, and fail when Slim walks around a shelf and throws me a box of pencils.

"For you," he says. "Also, do you have an X-acto? I have a lot of boxes to open."

Anyway. Work nonsense.

By the way, I swear I don't mean for the time between updates to grow longer. To be exact, it freaks me out.

In my defence, I haven't been sleeping full nights in three weeks. In some cases, I don't even sleep in my own bed!

Who knew studying screenwriting could be so exhausting? Hell, I'm studying screenwriting and I don't even have time to write anymore. Now THAT's preposterous. Or, if I DO write, it's essays on other movies, some of which are so boring that you end up BS-ing your way through to make the film sound like it has some meat on its extraordinarily boring bones.

And I still love my program, which I shouldn't because it keeps fucking me over. Last Tuesday I slept on the floor of the editing room at UQAM, because we had pulled the midnight to 8 AM shift and needed to get the work done. I couldn't go home because the trains stop running at 11:30PM, and anyway, we were locked in the pavillion. No one goes in, no one goes out.

Not to mention I had class the following morning, and my teammates woke me up by pouring water on my face, and they were SO SLOW working their films in Avid XPP that I shoved them out of the seats and did the remaining films myself. It's incredible how slow they were, and how fast I was considering I never had used the program before that night.

And Slim and Gabriel are relentless. Where I say something, I inevitably get ridiculed or ignored. But if I don't get the work done out of spite, they sidle up to me and act really nice.

The number of times I warned them I'd leave them is now countless.

On the upside, having proven my worth to the rest of the team, Jeremy and Patricia seem to appreciate me. And they help me to make things happen. Like dressing Slim as a woman on the public plaza of UQAM, and having him parade with dress, wig, lipstick and heels for a few hours, all for the pretense of making a movie exercise funnier. Or like forcing Gabriel to sleep overnight at UQAM with us, and harassing him to finish his essay section for the following morning (thereby keeping him from sleep).

So I get my sweet vengeance from time to time.

At work things are still good. Staples treats me well, and even Slim can't argue that they aren't accomodating. When my schedule at school prevents me from showing up on time, nobody says a word, and I don't get any pay reductions, or warnings, or anything. When I have a shitty week, they offer to give me Saturday off.

When Slim decides that pressure sales in the electronics department make him sick to the stomach and he asks to be moved to another department, they move him to floor. With me.

I have to say that I'm getting a little bit of an overdose of Slim. I still love him and all, but we get so edgy now that our tempers flare very easily...

And we still find the time to have movie ideas and consider buying prosumer Panasonic cameras worth 4 000$ because we want to make things happen. So as friends go, we get along well, but I'm slowly weaning off my desire to jump his bones. Because the last thing I need is to see him even more than I already do... not that I think it's possible.

I mean, we have the same university schedule, we travel together, we work together (and, because we have the same availability schedule on account of having the same classes, we have all the same shifts at work), and we go out to places together.

If that isn't conducive to murderous ... I can't imagine anything more efficient.

So I let Gabe flirt with me. And I kinda flirt back. Because Gabe is sharp, funny, he thinks I'm funny, and he seems to think I'm attractive. At 23, he probably has an idea what kind of girl he likes, and he isn't the type to mess with a girl then drop her the moment the honeymoon's over. He's steady, it looks like, and he's a little crazy.

And he's cute. I have to say I had noticed him way before I ever started liking Slim. So I'm holding out for that. :D

As per writing the oneshot for y'all, don't give up hope. I actually have a specific release date in mind, so yes, I AM waiting. Hee hee hee!

I'll try to be more consistent in updates, but only if sleep doesn't take priority.

Lotsa love,
CM