Well. I suppose I didn't just get back and it wasn't altogether fabuloso, but, you know. Details.
I won't get into the how or why, but somehow fate fixed it so that I took the Greyhound to Calgary and back with my parents. Oh God. I am clearly the only person left on this entire planet that still manages to get into situations like these, so for that reason alone I actively consider myself unique. (Pollyanna, anyone?) Anyway, I really do make the best of things to the best of my ability, consistently, and I have at least a few people that can vouch for me on this. The way over actually went considerably well. A midnight hot chocolate and fries (wasted calories, anyone?) with my mother and father at McDonald's in Kamloops? A rare treat.
Did I mention that both of my delinquent parents had covert plans to consume alcohol whilst aboard? Oh yes. Adri, the boozatron, had to explain to them that this was wrong. I knew they'd hate it and they did. Luckily, my mother readily provided me with a tranquilizer so I slept through most of the chaos.
Anyhow, the ride back, however, was torture in its purest form. It started out all right, and I rested in peace all the way from Calgary until we hit Golden, at which time a trashbag couple delivered straight from a remote mountain locale (or perhaps pits of hell) to my bus got on board. As luck would have it, I was forced to sit with the woman. (Her husband was seated directly across from her, also in the aisle seat, beside a young South African backpacker.) She was, in terms of Greyhound companions, quite unsatisfactory from second one. I felt a distinct air of unfriendliness emanating from every pore in her body from the moment she sat down. It was as though she'd just lost her dog, though I knew deep inside that nothing of the sort had occurred recently, and this was in all likelihood the norm for this fine specimen. (For the record, I ordinarily have no desire to form friendships with bus companions or even engage them in the least formal of conversations; I'm only talking about a little thing called civility. Respect for our fellow humans. The inkling that some of us complete wackos still have that prompts us to acknowledge another human being's existence.) After a few minutes, at which point I'd lost the will to participate in any activity other than attempting to sleep, though oddly void of fatigue, I piped up and asked her if she wanted the overhead light on. (It was on.) As though answering my question took all of the effort she had left in the world, she paused dramatically and shrugged. I couldn't help but take note of her deep scowl, complete with fresh acne plus scars. When she finally realized that I continued to sit there somewhat expectantly, as in, I asked a question and dared to expect an answer, she reluctantly muttered, without looking at me, "it doesn't matter." Fine. I lay my head back on my pillow, and after noticing five minutes later that the light was still on as she sat there sighing repeatedly, I switched it off.
Lights out. I managed to doze off a little as we rolled oln towards Revelstoke, but she shuffled relentlessly and even groaned a few times as she spoke with her husband in hushed yet remarkably unsavory tones and generally managed to make her presence known through every second. Meanwhile, I couldn't help but notice that she was also taking up a considerable portion of my seat as well. I could tell that she was unhappy about something, but I tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with me. It was only logical.
However, as soon as we hit the next rest stop, she roused me via shaking my arm ungently and said, "Do you think I could ask a favor?"
Okay, this is the thing: strangers shouldn't really be requesting permission to ask for favours, now should they. What favour? We may surely request things of our fellow planetmates, and we certainly do, but why bring our requests into favour territory? It's hard enough for me to get a favour from a loved one, let alone a friend, let alone an acquaintance or coworker, let alone a frigging stranger. So why, when a person that hasn't even been introduced has somehow managed to be notably rude and unaccomodating, would she expect that I should deliver her a favour, especially after she woke me up to ask for it? Anyway, moving right along:
"If you're not too comfortable, I'd really like it if you switched seats with my husband so that he could sit here with me."
Was she kidding? No. As I mentioned, her husband was in an aisle seat and this was the middle of the night. This was not a one hour flight from Vancouver to Calgary. It was a 16 hour busride, and I got there first. My window seat was the only thing I had going for me at that point. Not only this, but her tone showed me straight away that she felt that not only was this a perfectly legitimate request, but perhaps I should have actually taken the initiative to offer my seat to him in the first place. Hello?! No. However, I hate to disappoint people and I am a terminal people pleaser, so I waffled a bit over whether I'd be willing to agree to switch later on down the road or even right then and there, when suddenly I had a terrifying vision of what trying to sleep in the aisle seat would be like. Also, crazily, I had to work in the morning, just a few hours after we got off the bus. Therefore, I gathered up all my courage and meekly responded in the negative. Well. Boy did I pay for it. As soon as the final words and the beginnings of an apology were out of my mouth she got a look on her face as though I'd just slapped her, then she whipped her head around and refused to face frontwords for the rest of the trip. Seriously. The two of them got off in Coquitlam, so she really dedicated herself to her rejection of me. The sighing, groaning, and shuffling continued in full force, as it would.
But that's not it. There was also a young fellow seated behind me who openly admitted to recently losing his mind. Oh yes. He was a real talker, too. Apparently, he'd been travelling by bus all the way from fucking Ontario, (unbelievably, I have also accomplished this and nearly lost my mind in the process as well), and hadn't slept a wink in days. I soon found out that he was Whistler bound in an attempt to shrug a life spent massacring cows at a factory farm. How do I know this? Oh, only because he spent a great deal of time describing it in painstaking detail, (at one point he was crying, I think), to his seat mate in a high pitched near-scream. Why was I stuck listening to this life-shattering tale? Oh, because I inexplicably LOST THE EARPHONES TO MY IPOD. Remember me, the "so sensitive I need psychiatric help" cow-loving vegetarian? I know what factory farms are like because I've researched them, but listening involuntarily to a first hand account while locked in such a predicament was just way over the top.
Other than that, I didn't get to visit much of Calgary due to time contraints and the fact that we were stuck in a creepy suburb called Mackenzie Town the entire time. No big loss. I would have liked to visit U of C in order to stand around laughing at people but, you know, I just didn't get the chance.
Here's a scene from the wedding:
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