Hi, how’s it going.

When talk­ing about hair­cuts, I always say, “My styl­ist”. As soon as this comes out of my mouth, I won­der if this makes me sound snooty and pre­ten­tious. Most peo­ple seem to say, “hair­dresser”, which I imag­ine is the same thing, with the for­mer being a way to charge an extra $15–30 for a hair­cut. But the only rea­son why I say “styl­ist” is because that’s what the recep­tion­ists say (“…and what styl­ist would you like?”) when book­ing appoint­ments. But styl­ists are so dif­fer­ent from bar­bers, in my expe­ri­ence. And my styl­ist has gone for courses in the US, so I’m think­ing this actu­ally gives him the title.

I also say “cha­cun à son goût” when the phrase is appro­pri­ate. I won­der if this makes me sound pre­ten­tious too. The only rea­son why I say that instead of “each to his own taste” is because I learned the expres­sion first in grade 8 French class. There was a pic­ture of King Henry say­ing, “cha­cun a MON gout!”, as if he was famous for being in demand­ing king. Ever since, I relate the phrase to the French. Sometimes, I imag­ine I’m in late Imperial Russia, when French was con­sid­ered the hall­mark of a civ­i­lized soci­ety, so peo­ple threw in French phrases to impress peo­ple or fit in. I imag­ine myself say­ing, “Ho ho, mon cher, je méprise les femmes pour ne pas les aimer car autrement la vie serait un mélo­drame trop ridicule”, while throw­ing my head back with dainty laugh.

Sometimes my nights are spent like this:

My favourite pas­time at the moment is play­ing Flight Control while lis­ten­ing to music. I have a sort of run­ning com­pe­ti­tion going with Pat (high score 99) and John (high score 67). So far I’ve been able to best their scores at 292, but now I’m try­ing to pad the vic­tory even more, because Pat and John have as much of a healthy com­pet­i­tive streak as I do, and actu­ally spend some extra effort try­ing to beat each other. So some­times I’ll just sit down and put some music on and play. I’ve also tried cook­ing while play­ing, but my foods ends up get­ting burnt. There has also been some stand-up com­edy lis­ten­ing while I play, but laugh­ter always gets in the way of fine motor controls.

When I was younger, my par­ents owned a con­ve­nience store. It got held up a cou­ple of times, late at night when my dad was work­ing. He never talked about it, not because it was shock­ing, but because he didn’t care. Sometimes, I won­der how my dad felt with a gun pointed at him. One time they caught the three or four guys involved in one hold-up, and my dad had to go to court to tes­tify. Somehow my dad han­dled it, but going through all of this would prob­a­bly freak me out.