Transplanted Life
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
 
Does doing nothing for your birthday make you mature, or just old?
At least, I don't think I'm doing anything for my birthday today (and there's not much today left); I certainly haven't planned anything. It would, after all, be kind of tacky to get back from vacation and then immediately expect your friends to do something for you.

It is kind of amazing, though, that after three years in this body, it's still finding ways to surprise me. Alex and I took the bus to and from Montreal for a week and a half of the Fantasia film festival (which is great fun and something that everyone in the Northeast or that part of Canada who likes sci-fi/fantasy/horror/asian film should try to go to), and I found that I could not get to sleep on the bus ride home. In order to squeeze as many movies as we could it before returning to the day job, the plan was to take the 11:15 bus from Montreal to Boston, get some sleep while riding, and then head off for work when we got in at 6:30. Sure, it would have allowed a maximum of seven hours of sleep, but I routinely function on less.

I didn't try to get to sleep before midnight, though - we learned on the way up that everybody would have to get off the bus at the border to show their passport and answer a few questions that any would-be terrorist would have information memorized for, and since that's about an hour outside of Montreal Alex and I felt kind of clever that we had our books out for the first hour - we may have been the only people with the little overhead lights going, but at least we weren't staggering around half-dead when it came time to get off the bus. So we finished that, got back into our seats, and prepared to hit the hay.

And I couldn't.

Alex did - he dropped off within minutes and mostly slept all the way to South Station, but I was completely unable to get comfortable. I don't know what it was, specifically - I'd always been able to sleep almost anywhere in my old life - but it just wasn't working. Maybe my butt's rounder so it's harder to fall asleep with my legs straight out; I notice that when I'm relaxing on the couch, I do tend to get into that "legs-up" posture. Maybe it's having more curves so that when I lie back on a flat seat, my body is being supported by less surface area or something. I don't know. I just know that no matter how I fidgeted, I wound up uncomfortable, or with some part of my body spilling into the aisle or Alex's side of the seat (the bus was too crowded for us to grab seperate seats at any point). Which is tricky; Alex isn't fat, but he's sort of husky, so there's not a lot of spare room there.

And he's a guy who defends his turf when he sleeps. I've known girls who think this is mean or insensitive, but you can't exactly train yourself to behave differently when you're asleep. So if I tried to rest my head on his shoulder or chest, or my butt was pressing against his legs, he'd sort of push me away. It's just reflex, and he doesn't do it when I'm being frisky in bed (I guess the sex drive overrides the defensive imperative), but otherwise, he's a fortress, staying put and repelling all invaders. I suppose I could have given him a little punch or two and either shifted him or woken him up so that we could fall asleep tangled together - that would have been okay - but I didn't want to interrupt his sack time. I know I would have been annoyed if the shoe had been on the other foot.

End result was that I was dragging all through work Monday, and dropped off pretty darn quick when I got home. Then last night I had to go with him to see a band one of his friends plays in. They're not very good and the beer at the pub was crap, but he'd just spent a week and a half doing the thing I wanted, so I couldn't really say no.

Not that he didn't enjoy the trip. It was gorgeous all week long; I figure a vacation is going better than expected when you have to buy new clothes because you'd packed under the assumption that you'd need to dress for rain at least one or two days. We ate breakfast at Cocktail Hawaii four times and fit dinner in around screening at the film festival, and did touristy things in between.

It was, really, a nice vacation; I'd planned to update here during it, but there was no time. Which is the way you want it, right?

-Marti

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Note: This blog is a work of fantasy; all characters are either ficticious or used ficticiously. The author may be contacted at JaySeaver@comcast.net