I’ve been dreaming of getting a Mont Blanc for years, ever since I tried one out at a jewellery store back home before I bought it for my boss. I loved the way it felt in my hand, the perfect weight, the balance, the shine, the smoothness of the nib, the effortlessness of the writing, the click of the cap, the elegant but timeless design. A few years later, I went for a surprise visit to my old workplace, and when my boss went to sign something he pulled out the Mont Blanc, my Mont Blanc, from his blazer pocket. That made me happy.

The thing is, I could never justify buying one for myself; I would always tell myself to wait until I could celebrate my graduation or marriage. My boss was a businessman, so he could use a nice pen to sign his contracts. Every time I’d pass the Mont Blanc display in the mall I’d check out what the most current series was.

While I was in Hong Kong, I found a little shop selling them at very low prices.

Then I realized that I had already graduated.

I bought a jet-black Meisterstück Classique Rollerball with platinum finish right then and there, and my god how sweet it is. I can’t imagine using another pen for the rest of my life. Sometimes I put my hand in my pocket and then realize, “Holy shit, I have a Mont Blanc in my pocket”. So far, this is the only thing that I can think of putting in my will.

Sometimes I’d walk the streets of Hong Kong and see a guy selling fake Mont Blanc’s, a bunch of them clipped to a cheap felt board. It’s as easy to spot a fake Mont Blanc as it is to spot a fake Rolex. The price I got mine for in the little shop was cheaper by more than $150 CAD than the price in stores here. I want to get it engraved with my signature but it costs $120 to send to the Mont Blanc main headquarters, which is fucking insane (it’s a cool process though, where they take four of my signatures, then mix and match the best parts of each to come up with the engraving). I suppose that for someone who’s buying a pen from the Meisterstück Solitaire Platinum line, $120 is almost nothing. I’m considering my next Mont Blanc purchase as a fountain pen from the new super sweet Starwalker series Resin Line, but that’ll be sometime far into the future.

Just when I thought I was over my jet lag, along comes a LAN party at Trolley’s and Wheaties’s. I haven’t played games in over a month (aside from some addictive Tony Hawk Underground on my GBA), so I’ll be pretty damn rusty. It officially starts tomorrow, but I’ll be heading over there tonight with Nick to get an early start. We’ll be having the usual suspects, along with a few less familiar faces. This should be good.

The legless man in the motel room next to me
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman’s love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you’d seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn’t know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be

next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You’d been
on the phone and I’d turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable — move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail — acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we’d made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body

had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cries. You drove

deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew

at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of that stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad bag, then tote her to the park.

They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I’d want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!

She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting their privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.

—Susan Musgrave, The Moment

After reading Things That Keep And Do Not Change, I deleted my poetry/prose section. There is nothing that I could ever write that would actually be considered as such. Susan Musgrave has put me to shame.

She writes so…ghastly, so raw, so erotically, and so piercingly. It’s unbelievable how she can come up with the ideas in her poems; often it’s as if she’s lived in that moment and describes what she sees. And yet, one knows that she only creates the images she talks about because of their very permanent and scarring nature. One of my favourite things about her writing style is the way she begins with a very ordinary situation and leads the reader along with her thought pattern.

The way she sees the simple things around her with such vivacity, the passion and emotion she expresses in her written voice, the poignant way in which she views the world…she is someone who lives life to the highest degree.

And some day I hope to do the same.

Got a compliment the other day on the new cranberry colours I’ve integrated into my wardrobe.

I sent in an application to the economics programme at Carleton before I left for Hong Kong last year, and got an offer of admission when I got back. I accepted the offer on Monday, registered for two courses, and started going back to university for a second degree. One of my courses is on TV, so I’m getting Trolley to tape it for me as an excuse to head over there and try some of my duty free Villager Premium No. 7s with him. My other course is a concentrated introduction to economics, so it’s two three hour classes each week, making it the exact equivalent of two courses itself. I’ll try to get an introduction to accounting course next week as a fourth course, when the academic advisor is free and not being a bitch.

I’m going to switch my major to business in the summer and specialize in marketing. Since I have a degree in computer science, I’m considered a third year student already, since a lot of my credits transferred over. If everything works out (prerequisites, degree restrictions, course availability) I could have a second degree at the end of the year.

My first class was yesterday with quite a few first year students, some of them six years my junior I’m willing to bet. Six years. More than half the class was Asian.