Author: Steve Cavers

I always considered myself a laundry-savvy kind of guy. That is, I know the difference between the settings on the washing machine. I only ever use one, but I know which one it is. Admittedly, as a cubicle dweller, I’m better suited to cleaning a hard drive than cleaning clothes, but I get by.

Due to technical difficulties, my jeans weren’t entirely dry this morning and they were the only clean pair. No problem, I thought to myself, I’ll just put them on and they’ll — I’m embarrassed to admit this — get dry as I wear them. Most people will recognize this as a Stupid Guy Moment.

If you’ve ever tried this, you know it doesn’t work. Not only do you end up wearing sticky, damp jeans for hours, but on a crisp October morning such as today they also cause another more subtle form of embarrassment.

In the chilly air, the damp cotton was warmed by my legs and began to steam gently. Little wisps of fog, touched by the golden glow of the rising sun, curled around my legs and evaporated in the gentle air currents. I was the only employee leaving a vapour trail behind me as I strode up to my building.

And I remembered another fine day back when I was about thirteen, when I did exactly the same thing before going to school.

I will never learn, will I?

Hmm. I forgot to iron my shirt this morning. Oh well. The wrinkles will disappear after a while.

Continuing from where I left off, here is Bookshelf Number Three.

Because the photo is blurry, here’s the list:

Tolkien, The Two Towers

Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

The Best of Owen Marshall’s Short Stories

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse

The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories

Tennesee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

Michael Coren, Aesthete

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes, The Legacy of Heorot

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy

Edward M. Cohen, Working on a New Play

Canadian Short Fiction

Henry Fielding, Tom Jones

Kevin Chong, Baroque-a-nova (signed)

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Frances Russel, Mistehay Sakahegan: the Great Lake

Lunsford and Connors, The St. Martins Handbook

The Heath Introduction to Poetry

Joan MacLeod, Amigo’s Blue Guitar

Larry Niven, Three Books of Known Space

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

Here’s a quote from the Cubicle Dweller’s Survival Page:

The dictionary defines the cubicle as, “a working environment consisting of a number of easily separated walls containing an optional door”. If you are a cubicle dweller, which I believe you are, then this is where you spend your days. A dim space that has become a petrie dish which others come to inspect only to see the progress of their experiment. To find out if you are growing spores. To see if you are multiplying.

That is just all too accurate. Fortunately, the site owner also provides tips and tricks to stay sane.