believing in the country of me and you

the bay and the lake are massively flooding and it is AWESOME. like, i'd say the shore of the lake where i live is pushed back about 3/8 of a km since last year. driving over the bridge between the bay and the lake, it feels like i am at the ocean. i will try to take some pictures tonight and post them soon.

yesterday i talked to debbie on the phone (one of my guyanese youth who's in calgary, remember?) and i asked her where micaela lives (that's who she's staying with), because i wasn't sure if it was calgary or canmore. she said, "um, she lives not far from the grocery store." so cute.

okay! my crafting date yesterday:
i went to this boy robin's house at about 11:30. he is living in high prairie with his mom. he just finished his master's in fine arts. he is quite a bit older than me - maybe late 20s or early 30s? i don't know. anyway, i helped him with this neat project he was working on as part of this art swap. i guess a bunch of people/groups all submitted different ideas for an interactive art project they'd wanted to do but hadn't done yet, and then they got to pick someone else's idea and then do it. so the one that robin got was supposed to be for a group of people, but he is not a group of people. anyway, this group was supposed to divide into smaller groups and write/get other people to write fortunes. ideally, there would be about 200 fortunes. then each fortune would be sealed in an envelope and they'd all be put in a pile at this art show and people could take a fortune and open it up and take it home, and maybe put it up on their mantle or throw it away or give it to someone they like or paste it in their diary or whatever. and there would even be blank envelopes and paper so people could leave a fortune for someone else if they wanted to. so... there was just the two of us, so this is what we did:
robin had already made a stamp that said "fortunate one," and had stamped about half the envelopes with that. then he just handwrote that on some more, and i handwrote on the rest, so that they would all be different. then we cut up some fortunes that he had already made up, and we put one in every envelope and licked them shut. then we still didn't have 200, so we wrote some more. we handwrote some and we typed some up on a typewriter, using some homemade cotton paper. i gots to gets me a typewriter soon. i've been wanting one for a long, long time. some of my fortunes were edward estlin-inspired ("forgetting if, remember yes"; "there's nothing as something as one"; "buds know better than books don't grow"; "whatever we lose, like a you or a me, it's always ourselves we find in the sea"); some were anti-grammar-nazi-inspired ("don't worry about a misplaced apostrophe"; "only capitalize the words YOU think are important"); one was rushmore/"marginalia"-inspired "write your own thoughts in the margins of library books. use pen."); one was an-email-i-wrote-to-landon-last-week-inspired ("your life deserves an exclamation mark: !."); others were random ("live today in italics"). i think i am going to start writing out fortunes and just leaving them places. i need to get some pretty paper and a nice brown sharpie, i think. so neat.
robin also told me about some other projects he's done. one was where he made some books and left them in cities like calgary and new york, and they had directions inside them on how to get back to him (kind of bookcrossing.com-esque). the other project was ridiculously cute: he set up chairs and couches and reading lamps in the library of his university, and kept them up for a week during midterms for "naptime." students were invited to come in and take a nap, and they'd tell him how long they wanted to sleep for and he'd write it down and then wake them up in time. apparently about 400 students came to see what was happening, and about 100 actually napped. he kept the whole place really really quiet and everyone talked in whispers if they talked at all. then, when it was time for him to wake them up, he'd gently nudge them and say, "hey, it's time to wake up. there are some cookies and juice right here when you're ready for them." isn't that adorable!?! they'd be so happy! i am going to quit school and quit life and arts-and-crafts full time.

so, that boy that i met at the powwow has been calling me and i think he's coming to my work later today so we can go for a walk when i get done. yikes. i really don't want to. i only like awkwardness when i am in control of it. but i am so bad at conveying the notion that i am not interested. i think i will say i am sick or something. or that it's too cold. or that i need to get home to watch oprah.