Stori 6

She sits in front of the computer, it is July 5, 2008, she sits and types away. It is kind of chilly here, she is sitting in the Irving K.Barber Centre @ UBC. The name might be slightly different, but the “barber” part is right. She can see it on her monitor, which has a yellow sticker that says BARBER-109. The prints here are pretty expensive, twenty cents, but she can then copy them in the AMS building, where copies are 5 cents per copy. So the original will be 20 cents, whereas the copies are a fourth of that price. Being a writer seems to become kind of expensive, especially because she cannot make herself stay at home, she wanders out into the “wilderness” to write. She needs inspiration and she cannot get that @ her kitchen table. Isolation stifles her creative genius. It is very fickle, the genius part of her brain. Which is on her left lobe right near to the hipposomething, thalamus or something. She had to learn the exact term for a psych test, but does not remember it exactly. The h- thingie. In her brain. Behind her to the left is a wall mural that says the “Origins of the Learning Centre”. and has a wall sized photograph of the ubc-library. Nice. She ponders what she should write about. She does not really have a theme. A woman in a white shirt, blue jeans and beige sandals walks by. She could write about that, about fashion choices. She herself is wearing a brown T-shirt and blue jeans. Her favourite T-shirt, the one that adds instant gorgeousness to her otherwise average aesthetic value. She ponders if the printer will work. She ponders how many words she should type. She ponders around. Like yesterday, like tomorrow. She should get paid to do this. She should submit her observations to some place that will ultimately dispense some hard cash for her efforts. She would send them a paper full of scribbles, they will exchange it

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for some paper with a queen or a president on it and she will then pay her mortgage with that or at least get a coffee at the local coffee shop. Maybe a donut. She looks at her red portfolio. Which is waterproof, transparent and cost her one buck at the dollar store. It is very sturdy and one can put a lot of letter sized paper in it. She still has her notebook in it, which she should type up. It is about her trip to New York, about the part where she approaches Penn Station coming from Montréal. That was three months ago and she still is busy transcribing it and typing and typing and then type some more. She ponders if she should write about other stuff than herself, she should write about the world, not sit here and describe her immediate surroundings. She should do this, she should do that. Maybe she should start spellchecking and go from there. Find something plausible to write about. Maybe she should go to the AMS building and make her way to the pizza place, which has by far the best pizza in town. By far. If you ever are in Vancouver, go to ubc, then ask for the student union building and then ask for pie r squared. The best pizza, you ever had. I totally endorse it. She ponders whether she should mix up “I” and “She”, first person singular mixed with third person singular, should the tense used throughout the text be consistent, should orthography be consistent? That kind of stuff keeps her up at night. Keeps her so very happy, geekdom is far away. People are talking here in the library, she cannot see them, she can hear the, two men, they are very serious, now she can see them, they are very polite, studios, well, they sound very polite, serious, one is wearing black, one is wearing white. They sit opposite of each other, at a beige table near the window that has the hallway and the stairs behind

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them, they hold pencils and have paper in front of them. They are debating important stuff. They sound important. She on the other hand writes not so important stuff into her BARBER-109. she feeds nothing but bullshit to BARBER-109. she is just poeting around, not seriously working on her dissertation, because she is not in a place where she could write a dissertation. Her GPA sucks, is barely above 2.0. thus she might not be grad school material. Then again, she might get her grades up and then somehow get into grad school and write seminal texts. Actually she could write seminal texts right now, too. End note and footnote it properly. Schoolasticky stuff. She is good at scholastic stuff. Maybe typing faster could help. Maybe spellchecking would help. Maybe, having a pizza would help. Maybe group working would help. She ponders why it is so cold here. It is July and the sun is nowhere in sight, no global warming here on July fifth over ubc. It is cold, rainy and miserable. She listens to her own halted typing, the staccato of her keyboard, rythmisized by the staccato of a keyboard somewhere behind her- to the right. She feels like having that pizza after all, she feels that consistency is not king nor queen, that it is ok to use ubc and UBC in the same text, capitalize once, lowercase another time, centre once, center the next time, she has to word count this, print it out and push it into the red portfolio, call it story number six and take it home to be put in her manuscript pile for her second book: “stories of west”, the sequel to “stories of east”. Like Tropic of Capricorn following Tropic of Cancer, like “Das Kapital 2” following “Das Kapital 1”. She feels like crying, exhausted. She feels like having pizza. That always helps.

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The page is coming to an end, the two black and white shirted creatures still talk, so very politely, it is 12:53 pm on July 5th in Vancouver , at the University of British Columbia. Life is so very eventless, so utterly boring.

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