Author: nemofish

Coffee Week

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Hello again. As I sit here and drink my coffee, I think about how nice coffee meetups are. Work has been busy lately and people in general have other priorities, so the usual crowd hasn’t met up as much lately. In any case, if we can’t meed for coffee during the day, we can always meet for a boozy time later. So many choices.

Come to think of it, it’s coming on two years since I met this one group through Gunter, an old co-worker. One day, Gunter invited me to join them for drinks and the next thing I knew, I’d been given the stamp of approval and was inaugurated into the coffee gang. I haven’t looked back since. Coffee breaks are our smoke breaks. It keeps us from going mental at work and our eyes from glazing over too much.

Naturally, when Ritual introduced Coffee Week last year, we were all on top of our coffee game. Until we weren’t. Salim and Morag the Destroyer (yes, since I’m the storyteller, I get to come up with the names too) started sounding the coffee bells and it was off to the races.

Day 1 was great. Everyone ordered $1 coffee from the usual joint at the time (and I do mean at the time because there are just so many pop up and hipster coffee shops these days).

Day 2 was also great. Everyone got their $1 coffee from a different coffee shop.

Day 3 was more of the same. We each ordered our own $1 coffees from a third coffee shop on the approved list.

Day 4, we decided to go back to our usual joint for more $1 coffees. And that’s when it happened. As we met up and started congregating towards the coffee shop and ordering on the Ritual app at the same time, we realized that the coffee was no longer $1. But it was coffee week! What happened?

After a moment of confusion, we realized our mistake. The Coffee Week deal was only good once at any coffee shop. We considered our options. How many coffees do we need to buy in order for the shop owner to offer us a free coffee? Probably too much. Mcdonald’s was running its dollar coffee deal as well and there’s always that apple pie special. We could pick another coffee shop off Ritual or we could just get coffee from the favourite anyway at regular price.

At the end of it all, there was just never really any other option. Old comforts are old comforts. We headed back to our usual place and paid regular price for our usual coffees. So much for being savvy dealfinders. I am fairly positive that every time any of us does something like this, we hear our parents’ voices in our heads asking us why we didn’t just drink the free (crappy) office coffee, but we had all successfully suppressed these little voices for better coffee. What’s work without enjoying the fruit of our labour?

Normal Aches and Pains or Aging Muscles?

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I can’t tell if my body is simply screaming at me, asking me not to put it through things it hasn’t done before or if it’s that I’m hitting that point where my body just tires out more easily than it used to, especially since I don’t generally condition or put it through workouts.

I joined a friend for a muay thai class last Thursday. I felt it in my calves during the class. I knew I’d pay for it and I did. My calves felt it for the next four days. Two days after, my shoulders and chest were feeling it and screaming every time I tried raising my arms. Stretching is a must. It loosens up the body so much more. Especially when there’s so much soreness happening.

That same friend asked if I’m ready for round 2 this week. Should I keep pushing through and keep working those muscles or should I be lazy? If I push forward, then maybe my body won’t scream at me. Or maybe it’ll just scream at me less. One can only hope.

April Rain

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I never considered myself a storyteller, but I’ve been told that telling the story will help with the healing process. It’s been some time since everything happened, so you’ll have to bear with me if my memory fails me.

It was raining the day I met him. The day I learned of my brother’s accident. I had been sitting in a coffee shop studying for my finals before work when I got the call. I will never forget my mom’s broken voice as she said “Jordan is gone”. I remember wondering what she meant by gone, but I knew. The second she said it, everything just seemed to freeze and I must have known what she meant, but I didn’t want to believe it. My older brother, my rock, the one I went to for almost everything couldn’t be gone. I mustered up the strength to ask mom what she meant by that and she started crying even harder.

“There was an accident,” she said. “It’s raining hard and the other driver was speeding…” I didn’t catch the rest of what she said because my ears had started ringing. I must have sat there for a really long time looking distraught because I bolted when I suddenly felt a hand on my shoulder.

In a deep voice, he asked if I was alright. He had picked up my phone from the ground because I’d dropped it in my shocked state. How did he know that the world wasn’t okay anymore? One of the most important people in my life was no longer around. I had to make sure my mom was right. I didn’t even answer his question. I grabbed my phone from his hand and speed-dialed Jordan. The phone kept ringing until his cheery voicemail recording played. Maybe mom was mistaken. Maybe it was just a bad accident and he wasn’t gone. I finally stopped long enough to breath and realize the guy was still standing there looking concerned at my frantic state.

I took another deep breath and told him thanks and that I would be fine. Just needed to sort something out. He didn’t look convinced, but it wasn’t something I was ready to share with someone I didn’t know. I packed up my belongings since studying was so far from my mind by this point and headed home. Walking through the front door was a gargantuan task. My always steady hands shook so hard when I turned that knob, hoping so bad that maybe I had heard wrong or that I had just cut my mom off at the wrong time of the call. As I opened the door and took those steps through the door, I knew. I just felt it. I could hear her crying. I could hear the pain and I could feel it in my gut.

And Off We Go

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This has been brewing for a while now. Finally decided to start with the basics and work my way from there.

My world might be a bit quirky and awkward with a wandering streak and random musings, but it is most definitely all me. As I stare at this blank white (editor) page and my mind hops from one thing to another, there is a stray thought about whether I know what I’m doing here. Probably not. That’s not going to stop me. What’s my end goal? Not really sure right now, but maybe in another year or two or five, I will read one of these posts again and be able to recall my thoughts and feelings at the very moment I wrote it. Over time, certain memories stand out more than others and it’s the emotions tied to these memories which make them stand out. For example, I recall riding bicycles with my younger brother to the neighbourhood Macs as a child to get one of those sugary blue and red slush drinks, but I couldn’t tell you what we talked about throughout that entire trek. I only have this one vivid memory in my mind because I had dropped my slush drink while crossing the street and was really upset about it since child me did not have any change to go back for another.

I feel like a lot has happened in my life over the past two years. I’d like to think that everything that has happened helped me grow as a person. I want to be able to look back at this and say oh, did this actually happen to me? Did I feel this way? Even if I don’t capture every moment or feeling in my life, this will be another piece to the whole puzzle for me. Even though the title of this blog is ‘Nemo Travels’, I want it to be more than just geographical travel.

Welcome to my journey.