le jour du poisson!

what I liked:

-I texted my brother saying, "Can you help me with a prank tomorrow?"
13 nanoseconds later he responds, "Hell yeah".

No questions - not who or what or when - but YES. Not just yes but HELL YEAH. It's good to have an understanding.

what I did not like:

-having some of my pranks fail
-not planning enough pranks

what I did like:

-getting my team leader to send an email to the whole team about doing something that we'd hate. they all bought it and I got to play along. the ruse wasn't discovered for about 12 hours. I'm pretty pleased.

what was crazy:

-that while I was at my teammates' flat at 4.20 in the morning, one of their alarms went off...because they were planning to sneak into OUR flat. (we have a really sick team.)

-even though I called him a veteran and talked about how on edge I would be, I had NO IDEA what I was tangling with in one of my teammates. when he was pretending to leave our flat, he ended up sneaking right back in...and hung out in a vacant bedroom (in the dark) for more than an hour, waiting for us to go to sleep. sick part was that he didn't plan it...he was just going to sit there, on the fly, and do whatever struck him.

-the paranoia and distrustfulness that befell me..you have no idea.

what I regret:

-giving one teammate, a Brutus, immunity. I shoulda struck a better deal.

-giving in so easily when I was caught. (I thought I was REALLY caught but instead I was duped by heavy suspicion. You'd think I'd have learned from all the ways my brother used to do that to me. He would act like he already knew where I was hiding so that I would give up.. It's a wonderful smoking-out technique.)

my pride and joy:


in other news:
I have resolved to be more explicit, in general, as a person. I don't.... I don't know the benefits that will come from is but I'm starting to see why it's right and why I have avoided it.
I realized that, growing up, the expectation was that I either should know something or should be able to figure it out. What's more, if/when you DID figure it out, there was no pat on the back to be had because you weren't doing something above and beyond the call - this is just what is expected..however unreasonable those expectations might be.
I just committed to this with the above term "smoking-out" where I wanted to write "smoking" because it seemed to fit better grammatically and that's how I picture the process. But what I meant was similar to how you get bees out of their hive...or a rabbit out of its hole according to some cartoon short I used to watch called "Doggone Tired". So I said "smoking-out" hoping people wouldn't have to guess as much.
[I think this idea has repercussion further than I realized. Saying less - I've been discovering - makes me seem more closed and cryptic and, to the degree that's true, I don't really like it.]
In this commitment I'm thinking also of the realization I had this afternoon (the above one about "should know") and how I promptly explained it to my housemate who happens to be as extremely explicit as I am implicit. Maybe you can guess that we have had a few communication problems. I told her that partly because I think realizations are cool, partly because I watned to see how it would sound outside my head but mostly because I wanted her to understand how hard it is for me to understand how she expects as much as she does in terms of details and explanations. At a certain point it makes me cringe. When it seems people are asking to be spoon-fed it's really hard for me to not pull a nauseated face and/or walk away.

So, I'm learning.

And the final moment I'm thinking of is about..2 or 3 years old. I was on the grey stairs in the UC of the University of Guelph and talking to one Silas Wong whose name I will use because I don't think he'll mind. It was the day (or the next meeting) after he'd first commented on my blog and so I asked what he thought. He said - and I forget the exact words - something about me not giving context, about how it's hard to know what I'm talking about. It's a bit like reading the middle 60% of a book, isn't it? Or taking weeks 3 through 8 of a 12-week course where you don't get the set-up and you don't know how it ties together but you do get the sense that you're in the thick of things. I don't really know what to say about that but I realized that, as I have unrealistic expectations for how much people infer (because inferring is what I do....all the time) I have been leaving out bits of the story that I actually want people to know. I'm not trying to be standoffish or unapproachable. I wish people would ask questions. I've set myself up here. I'm trying to fix it. And by that I mean, I should be asking Jesus repeatedly to help me fix this.

[EST]