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extremes

2003-01-05 - 9:42 a.m.

I got into Toronto late Friday night, after about 14 hours of driving (though K helped with some of it, which was nice), parts of it through a heavy snowstorm. When I got upstairs to my sister's apartment, I realized that I didn't have the keys to the rental car with me. I searched all over, but I figured I must have locked them in the trunk, so I decided to get a few hours of sleep and deal with it in the morning.

Well, in the morning things got more complicated. I found out that I must have lost the keys elsewhere than the after I got the car unlocked. Hertz was willing to take the car off my hands, but only for about 200 dollars. GM seemed to offer this free roadside assistance, but things were more complicated because the key had a microchip that needed to be programmed with the car. Finally I got my car towed to a dealership that said they could do it, but they had no key blanks. I then cabbed over to another dealership, that said that reprogramming these keys is impossible, but were willing to cut me a blank. Finally I cabbed back to the first dealership with the freshly cut blank, and an hour or so later I had a working key.

So I had a pretty stressful day. But I must be in a good mood these days, because one of the things that I kept noticing during the day is how nice most of the people I talked to were. The Hertz customer service people knew me by name by the end of the day, and while not all of them were that helpful, some of them really went out of their way it seeemed to offer me options and try to help me out. I only came close to getting angry at somebody (other than myself) only once.

During the day I had been planning to go to DarkRave to destress and unwind, but by evening I realized that I was much too tired. Instead, I had a mellow evening hanging out at Shar & Steve's with Molly. We had home-made Pad Thai (except without the Pad and over rice instead) and several bottles of wine. I don't know if it was the stress earlier in the day, the wine, or the reminiscing of years past, but it really felt like I had some excess serotonin stuck in my brain. I felt very emotional, wanting to hug everybody and to cry. I guess that's one advantage of leading a sleep-deprived high-stress life -- you get to go through extremes, and some of them are kind of exciting.

Now reading: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (aka the Sorcerer's Stone for those of you in the US).