Who is Yank?: Character Profile

Well if you read back enough months (sometime shortly after the start of this blog) there is a "Who is Bob?" Entry? In that entry, if memory serves, I elucidated the nature of our multi-Bob system. Which involves two Robs calling each other by the same nickname, thereby nullifying their attempt to clarify who's who. Well the other Bob is Rob, Rob Orton, also known as Yank. I will start from the begnning:

When I was in high school my friend Chris James (a guy I worked with in a computer retail store in the mall, whole different blog entry) asked me if I wanted to be roommates should we both be accepted to the University of Guelph. I politely declined telling him how I cherished his friendship and how I thought we shouldn't risk fucking that up, which I knew could happen easily in a year of living together. He conceded. We did, however get our first choice of residence. We both spent one of the funnest years of our lives in Johnston hall, south wing, third floor. Chris James was my neighbour. When I opened my door, I say his room. I was 319, I guess he was 320. One night at Compucentre Chris was all like: "Yo, my room mate is from Maine eh? Some American dude."

"Sweet." I replied.

Fast forward, summer has ended. Chris James moves in, I move in, Rob Orton from Dover-Foxcroft Maine moves in (and while we're on the subject, Lil' Jeff, my roommate moves in) He was Lil' Jeff cause we had 3 Jeffs, all of very distinct sizes, so you guessed it: Lil' Jeff, Big Jeff, Medium Jeff. The names stuck. We still call them Big, Lil' And Medium for short when we see them. I love that there's a guy I call Medium.

A mosquito just flew by my field of vision. . . WTF it's NOV 26. Or is it? (Refer to last blog entry)

Anyway, there are lots of people from our floor with nicknames, I would say a majority go by a name other than their own. Rob was from the states, so we called him the Yankee, then just shortened it to Yank. He liked it, it grew and it stuck.

So Rob Orton and I hit it off.

We hit it off to the point that after going our separate ways in second year we decided in third and fourth to be housemates. Oh the stories.

The topics are endless. . .

First Year:

-Chris James gets his first girlfriend. Poor form: She's from our floor, AND he constantly locks Yank out of his own room so he can make out with her in there

-Yank's meal card money runs so low he goes on a Rice and Tang diet, which consists of eating rice and drinking tang. After a week or so of this malnutrition rears its ugly head and he changes his ways (Rob, elaborate on this, did you finally ask your parents for money?)

- Rob's foot odour gets to the point tha the decides to febreeze his feet. I was just waiting for the silhouettes of his feet to be burned into the carpet outside his door, just stencilled in from the concentration of the stuff like the shadow of an A-Bomb victim.

Second Year:

-Rob lives with the Trinis - the two guys on our floor from Trinidad, Brendan and Kyle, who we genuinely refer to as Trini

This is the only story you need to hear, it's self explanatory

Third Year:

-Youden (our third housemate, in trusty townhouse #2) Moves in, all hell breaks loose

Youden's ADD and destructive nature combine to make him smash bottles against a wall, set his stomach on fire with lighter fluid, fire spudguns inside the house, shoot paintballs inside the house out of slingshots, drink heavily and ride off really high things on his mountain bike, a pursuit we joined him in.

-We ski off the jumps in front of lambton - this in combination with our biking habits forms a small unit we like to call urban extremes I took some pictures then left it by the wayside, but the pics were cool

-I go to Maine for Reading Week for a ski vacation with Yank, his parents are awesome, I meet his friends and see where he grew up. This is where I conceive the idea of a book I will one day write entitled "Against All Odds, the Rob Orton Story"

-Spring I go back to Maine to work for an old dentist named Hap Garrish, who just wants to pay us for something, so we paint his whole compound by the lake a nice forest green, tear down some buildings, help build some new ones and do some hiking while we're down there

Fourth Year:

- Yank and I live with our RA, who smokes more weed than both of us combined (not too hard since we both hover around the zero mark on this)

- We meet Timmy our Vietnamese housemate as I always refer to him, though he's not really from there - he is the prototype of the modern timmy which we have grown to love

The two summers before this Yank worked at the camp I have been going to since i was 11. We had totally different jobs, but both had the time of our lives there. One summer Yank and I were both on senior boys staff, which was awesome, and got a taste of whitewater canoeing, which he loved, and the next summer I was a tripper, but there was still a day off or two in there. . .

- The following summer Yank leaves for 2 years. He has decided to serve the Peace Corps and make a change in his life. Rob is assigned to Costa Rica, where he is now, afte a year and a bit of service. This is the Yank/Rob that sometimes comments on this blog, and recently complained of 'being replaced' which I assured him was not possible.

Yank lives fast and hard, Yank lives on the edge, Yank speaks more spanish these days than he does English. Yank has been knocked out, robbed and cheated in Costa Rica, all on separate days. I miss Yank - and this is a small tribute to his former presence. Yank will be back soon I hope, he's been saving up a lot of vacation days and has been planning somewhat of a trip to Canada in the future with them so that would be pretty cool.

Rob was a Witch for Halloween one year. Rob loved it, and so did the rest of us.

Rob Loves Baseball, Pretty Girls, well hell, why rewrite this list when I can steal it from another website:

Rob Orton

Things I enjoy:

tropical fruit that isn't papaya

cold weather when it's supposed to be hot or hot weather when it's supposed to be cold

reading books that noone else has heard of

a good puke

feeling foreign

horoscopes

posters with inspirational quotes

baseball

riding on the bus when i am hungover

So yeah, I think I've said my piece - Rob, I miss you, you're irreplaceable, come home soon after you show those Ticos how the Yank does it. . .before this sounds like a eulogy I am going to sign off.

Peace.

How about this

You step outside in mid February and realise the scarf and toque you have on make you far overdressed, since the weather is 25 degrees out. You freeze in your steps to contemplate how you could have made a mistake like this, is it the right time of year or did the weather change? Just as you look up you see a sparrow fly by in front of your townhouse, but the weird part is, it drops a copy of the Ontarion at your feet. The last thing you see is the headlines that say "April Fool!" above a picture of a snowman with goggles, flippers, and a snorkel. The look on his face is a little distraught as he peeks out from inside his diving mask, because the charcoal bits that make up his grin are slipping as they melt out of their sockets, giving him a bewildered look, framed by his snorkel dangling uselessly next to his mouth. Right after that you wake up, and you don't know what month it is.

Severed Heads

A little background here first. This is an excerpt from my summer 2006 trip log. A looper is a 3 day trip led by my camp around the lakes in our immediate vicinity. 2 nights out, 3 days. Usually the kids are around 8-9 that go on this trip. Mike was my co-tripper on this trip. Usually counsellors go on trip with trippers, unless it's a 25 day trip, but this is how the schedule worked out, 2 trippers. That means LOTS of safety, but very tactless handling of kids. Usually we have counsellors to do that, and since most trippers have been counsellors for awhile, we like to take a break from the soft skills side of things and focus on getting shit done. . . well Mike got this done.

Looper B2

Mike and I are leading a looper. We are at the rope swing site, and I just saw one of the worst “foot in mouth” cases ever. One of our attention seekers, Theo, suddenly mused out loud during dessert, interrupting the conversation,
“I wonder how my house is doing. . .” We both looked at Theo, and he continued,
“A car ran into it.” With kind of a smirk on his face to match Theo’s, Mike began to laugh out loud. Mike was in a jovial mood and we’d been appreciating the randomness of the kids’ comments all trip. Theo looked at Mike incredulously. “What, you don’t believe me?”
Mike looked back and asked, jokingly,
“What, did somebody die?”
Theo immediately lapsed into tears. It was all Mike could do to console him. “Oh Jesus Theo, I’m sorry.” Mike looked at me with panicked eyes as he patted the sobbing little Theo’s back, as it heaved with his crying. “Who died Theo?” Mike asked between Theo’s sobs. “Who died Theo?”. Between his sobs also, Theo answered, mouth full of tears,
“I saw the guy’s head fly off!”
Mike apologized profusely, and when the sobs subsided Theo told the story. It was 9:00 on a Sunday morning. The house was shaken by a noise. Theo’s brother looked out the window and saw a car in the front yard. His brother called his parents, and in so doing woke Theo. He ran down to see what happened. Through the window he saw a wrecked car, a partly smashed deck, and laying on the deck, the boy saw the severed head of the 34 year old driver who passed out at the wheel of a car he shouldn’t have been driving due to a heart condition. Horrifying. Theo continued the story lucidly and with little emotion, citing that the bright side of the story was that they would get a nice addition and a brand new deck for their house. It didn’t seem like Theo was all that broken up about it in the end, but man did he get Mike good. He seemed pretty proud of the fact that “the story was in the paper and everything”. I felt like I was watching the most awkward movie scene ever.

Turning Lead Into Gold

There's a certain measure of cognitive dissonance that occurs when the sensation strikes that you really want to blog, but are certain that you can't write anything inspiring or even funny. . . You just have the feeling you're about due for an update. So I will go ahead and write. I will waste the time of you and the time of me. Graeme keeps organizing these gatherings every week, and we just keep having them. Seems these days people need between 12-24 hours of notice and no more than they are going to a party and they will show up. Fine by me! These things are fun. The last one was so fun we never even left the friggin house. I hope next time to reach downtown though. . . There was hammered karaoke, fake arguments, absurd dialogues about atheists killing seals. Good for us right? Then, in a daring feat of poor judgement that turned out to be the best decision we've made all month, Pipes and I cleared our afternoon schedules for another gorge
run. We realized the gorge was running at 15.5, more than twice the level we'd witnessed last time we went, so there was that. We looked at each other and decided, "If it's warm, or it's cold and sunny, we're going." We woke up hungover, met at our place at 1:00 as planned, looked outside, looked back at each other. The weather report said a low of 2, high of 8 or something like that. It was drizzling, had been all day, with no sign of cessation. Welp, good enough for us! We got our warm shit together, loaded the boat in the face of drizzly adversity and off we went. We got a lucky ride (instead of a taxi) from a prof Derek knew that just happened to pull up as we were dropping gear off at the top and I was getting ready to shuttle down. We had a little crowd of hikers gathered at the put in, I guess it seemed like a cold day to be paddling. We thought so too, but something inside us was telling us we had to do it. We were not disappointed. The grey weather added to the rugged beauty of the gorge, and it certainly deterred too many folks from accumulating there. The higher water flow also kept people away from the river banks and cliffsides, along with the fact that the conservation area is now closed for the season. This required some sneaking around the place and portaging barbed-wire fences with boats at the take out. I tell you, I will take tripping in remote wilderness with natural hazards over tripping in cities where there's people with attitudes and barb wire any day. Humans are more dangerous than animals. It was a fantastic run, we whipped some huge eddy turns and cleaned some technical moves - we were pretty proud of ourselves. We even caught a little front-air off a standing wave and landed in an eddy. Derek almost got launched out of the boat, it was rad.

I think often when one feels inspired to write, but has nothing to write about, it could be that there is a subconcious inspiration that simply needs to be recalled. I think that because I just remembered something I'm pretty excited about. I got this idea. Some poeple I can already hear going "uh-oh". Yeah well, hear me out. I found this book at camp called "Heavy Weather" The nature of the book is irrelevant. The book itself sucks. I found it and read it, and I passed it on to Frankie, who read most of it and gave it back, because it sucks so bad. This made me think. What if it was good? What if she passed it on? What if I knew who she gave it to? What if we made it interesting and she left it somewhere else for someone else to find?
Here's my idea: I start a branch to this blog, name it something that has to do with my plan, and do the following: Buy a cool book that's really short, something with an inspiring story or philosophy of life. Not cheap and contrived, but something that everyone can take something away from. I was thinking The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I remember it fitting this description perfectly back when I read it in high school. I'd write a little note on the inside cover about passing it on to see where it goes, etc. Then I'd make a form on the blog where the finder could write who they are, where they are from, where they found the book, something they liked, such as a quote or an aspect, or how it hit home, etc, and where they left it for the next person. I want to see how far this book goes and how fast it moves around. Maybe I should have a clause in there about if the book gets tattered, or if someone is the 100th person or something to keep it, buy anohter book and then send another into circulation. Maybe I could even have it sent back to me after! Imagine a collection of books that have been all over the place and read by all sorts of people? This is getting cooler the more I think about it. If anyone has any suggestions to add to this, reasons why it wouldn't work, hate messages, or a book they think is better for this than The Alchemist then let me know. . . though I am kind of hell-bent on that book now since I liked it so much. I can't wait to get started on this idea.

the adventures of bob

www.bobventure.blogspot.com

The ball is in Bob's court now.

Grip it n' Rip it.

smrt

So we're sitting there Frankie, Derek and I watching a youtube video. At the corner of Derek's eye a flash of light runs by the window in the darkness outside. "Welp, Graeme's home."

"That was Odin" came the reply.

Odin is our neighbour's dog.

This is where I ask "You just mistook a jack-russell terrier for our roommate?"

"Well he did get a haircut. . ."

Nice Derek. Nice.

Where isn't Waldo?

It's one of those days. I'm a little late for the entire day, you know, for life, but strangely ok with it. I sit here contemplating going to the gym, and I know I will, but not until I make a small entry. A warm yellow sunlight filtered in through my window all morning. I thought "It's warm out today - nice". I glance out the window and see what looks like a little milkweed seed fly by. You know, those little fuzzy guys with the seed cargo dangling precariously below, hoping against hope like a hot air balloon out of hot air that the wind will take it to a fruitful destination. My heart falls as I see another, then another. You know this, it happens all in less than a tenth of a second. You see ten of these in one second and then you know: it's fucking snowing out.
Don't get me wrong, I like snow. I like to ski, I like to walk in the snow, I like to throw it at people, I like to take pictures in it, I like to look at the flakes that make it up, I like to make lists of reasons I like snow. But snow is like popcorn. This is a wierd analogy, because I don't really care for popcorn, but most people do, so I think it's appropriate. Snow is like popcorn, one little flake is nothing but a frustrating, annoying tease that leaves a funny taste in your mouth. It makes you wonder, was that stale? Was that worth it? Did I actually want that? You have to have a pile of popcorn. You have to have so much you can't see the depth of the bowl or bag or cupped palm that contains it. So it is with snow. Don't give me ten flakes, I'm not having fun till I'm surrounded. So until that time, here I sit dreading it like wading in to cold water that's about to be balls deep.

The other night (sunday) Graeme decided we were going to have a party on Halloween (Tuesday). We managed to get a pretty good turnout considering the short notice we gave and the busy night it was. Oddly we all left and waltzed right into Doogie's - no line - right afterward. It was a good time, some fun costumes, and Graeme's friends are a cool group of people which I have the master plan of assimilating into my life as my own friends. Don't fight it Graeme's friends, resistance is futile, you will be assimilated. So there's not much to write other than this. Business as usual. I'm tutoring these days. I got 4 people asking me for help, somehow my name got put up on the tutor connection website again. So now I tutor 2 people, 1 in physilogy and the other in chemistry or biology, depending on the day. Yeah - chemistry. Yikes. Rats came in 2 days ago. Going in to see them today, experiment starts saturday, that's all I'll say about that for now.

So last night Graeme, Derek and I went through the pics from the party. My god we had a blast. Their friend Jordan pulled a little prank without telling anyone about it, taking the risk that it would go unnoticed. . . His costume was Waldo. And I don't know if he had this plan all night or if he came up with it after he arrived, but our friend Kath loves to take pictures on these nights, which is good because I stopped doing that long ago. Waldo decided, ever so discreetly, that he would appear in the background, as Waldo, of as many of these pictures as possible. We were too drunk to notice, but last night as we looked through the collection of shots we were rolling in mirth. Waldo is in about 30 of the pictures, and 22 or so of them he's not even looking at the camera, because no one knows he's there. I made a collage to document this, and I'm contemplating decorating a wall of our house with only these pictures. Striped toques off to you Jordan, you got us.

It is well worth clicking this to blow it up so you can see the individual shots. If you want to see the collage, well hell, just come over here.

Also, I talked to Bob today and he is in Rome. Nervous about whether or not his flight with Malaysia Air is going to leave Vienna on time or not, and it's a hassle to find out from where he is. He says he has some awesome stories he might log and send out tonight, and I suggested a blog. That way he could write the emails there instead, and people could read and link to them any time. He said he didn't have time. This is bull since it takes the same amount of time as writing the email. Let's vote on whether or not Bob should start a blog. I'll vote first.

Even if you don't know bob, but you want to read fun stories of european travel, just vote. Even if you don't know what I'm talking about, vote.