2002-09-21 - 7:30 a.m.

Not much to write since last time, but that's good because I need to leave in half an hour to go volunteer for the AA fall assembly.

After my entry last night, I ended up on a Quebec MSN chat channel :o) I didn't say much, but I was very entertained by watching everyone else write so I couldn't quite rip myself away and go to bed. Then someone asked nicely for help with their webcam and I ended up spending almost two hours trying to help them. It wasn't my plan to go to bed at 12:30 or to not be able to fall asleep right away. I was really conscientious of my volunteering this morning but I just didn't want to quit trying to help this person. Sigh.

I love the way French people chat online. Well I suppose I should qualify with "Canadian" - because French Canadians have such interesting accents and slang. It reads like Uncle Remus or any other story that has characters with thick accents expressed by weird spellings or even onomatopoeic sequences of letters that don't resemble any kind of word. I'm trying to think of a typical example... there was this woman on the chat channel, Nathalie, and I could just hear her speaking because of the way she typed: "chu pas cochonne sti lolllllllllllllll" would be an example. I wish I had some logs or something because some of the sentences were almost all garble, but you could follow them through if you read them out loud. In the case about, "chu" = "je ne suis" and "sti" is short for "ostie". "lollllllllllll" should be instantly recognizable but all these french people had the habit of holding down the last letter when expressing the word more loudly: "clisssssssssssssss", "lolllllllllll" and "mdrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr". The first being short for "caulice", a swear, the second laugh out loud and the third, I *think* means "mal de rire" which translates to "I'm laughing so hard it hurts".

There's just something you gotta love about French Canadians. They have so much more life and expression than the average person I meet in English speaking places. Mind you there are the odd ones here and there that are up to that standard, but you just seem more likely to hit on a real person with cool expressive emotions and a down-to-Earth nature when you meet a French Canadian. I think this helps explain some of the alienation I felt growing up, because I was so hyper and expressive and so many people around me were a shade above automaton mode that I couldn't handle it or associate with them properly. Funny, that last sentence reminds me that I always read automaton as "auto-MAY-tun" and not "UH-toh-ma-TON". Just another relic of my French upbringing, I'm sure. Just like how I used to pronounce "toilet" as "twallet".

I'm kind of surprised I am so entry-worthy. Firstly I'm quite tired and secondly nothing much has happened since the last entry, but I'm still just typing away coming up with interesting stuff to spout. I was remarking just the other day to my coworkers over lunch that for once in my life I'm writing something every single day. I've always had dreams and aspirations of being a writer, but before this diary I never did make the effort to write every single day and I understand that's one of the best foundational practices on which to become a better writer. I have been fairly decent at poetry, but that's a different story altogether. Music is coming along but will be a while.

Anyway, it just goes to show that, yes, if you write every day, you will get better at writing, even if you were already decent at it. I've had dozens of novel ideas (as in ideas for books ;o) that have never been acted on but now I see that if I told myself to write 1/2 an hour or an hour every day on one, that I would eventually pile up the words and expand the story line and be able to write an actual novel. I think it's something I want to do before I die :o) I'll have to add that to my goal list at some point.. maybe as my next 3 monther, who knows? "Have written 10,000 words of a novel" or something similar. And to know how many words I can write in a month, all I have to do is tally up all the words I've written in this diary and that will give me an estimate of my average output :o)

Sounds like a plan.

Life is full again. Still has some holes that need patching, still has some desires that need to go away before I can return to normal, still have some unhealthy obsessions on a girl that isn't interested any more, but full and worth living every minute of.

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