My Friend Reilly

Another uneventful morning. Remember back in elementary school and high school when summer seemed endless? Three months of summer vacation is enough to completely wipe out anything you might have unwittingly learned during the other nine months of school. I'm still in school and I technically had four months of summer vacation. But it means fuck all when you live on your own. My goal for this summer is to save $4,000 for the school year. This means I have work 8.5 hours every single day and I have to curb my spending despite my blood-lust for summer clothes.

I'm still trying to decide what I want to do during Labour Day Weekend. Ryan is going to be in Regina for his great-grandma's 95th birthday. And I think by September, I'll have reached my $4,000 goal and will have a couple hundred left over for some last-ditch fun. Part of me wants to find some last-minute flight somewhere and have an adventure. A completely unplanned, crazy adventure starring me and my digital camera. I also have the option of flying to Calgary to hang out with my friend, Dr. Reilly Smith, but unless the flights to Calgary go down in price significantly (right now they're at $388 return), I don't think I'll be able to afford to go.



Let me talk a little about Dr. Reilly Smith. When I met him oh many moons ago, he was just Reilly Smith, medical student with a student loan he has to repay in pennies. We met when I went to Montreal for a French-immersion program for the summer and while I was expecing mostly high school students like myself, it turned out that university students (like Reilly) used it as a cheap excuse for a vacation. The deal went that you paid an $80 application fee, and they give you a free room at l'Université de Montréal for 5 weeks. Included was supposed to be three meals at the cafeteria, but because it was under renovations, they gave us all $600 instead, which most people spent on booze and lived off of canned soup. The downside was you had to attend classes 3 days a week - some people even got homework and tests! The rest of the time, there were group-arranged excursions to places like the Biodome and the beach and an Expos game. For the month, I basically hung out with my neighbours on the 14ième étage - Reilly, Colin and Margie. Colin was in school for engineering and Margie was in school to become a French teacher.



Reilly is the only one of the people I met in Montreal who still keeps in touch with me. He's a very decent fellow who goes on crazy back-packing adventures all over the world. He's also a doctor - some kind of mental-health type doctorb in Calgary. He has wild curly red hair he keeps cutting and letting grow back. I am obsessed with his hair. I have many pictures of the back of his head from Montreal. It's like Orphan Annie's hair all shiney red and orange tumble curls. Mmm... For someone who has straight black hair that resists a curl like an 8 year old boy in a conjugal visit, Reilly's hair is like the Holy Grail of hair. He's extremely useful in all kinds of situations, like if you need someone to peel the skin off your sun tan on your back or if you need someone to walk you home at night who'll find a giant piece of wood to hold as protection.

AND he's single! If anyone's interested in this stud, let me know! Starting bid is at $100.



These pics were taken by Reilly - he's also a photographer with a real analogue camera. Ooooohh... special.