you may know him as Plato or Tom Cruise

Last weekend I picked up a box from storage at my mom's because she's finally forcing the kids to get their stuff the hell out of there. "You've got houses now! Store your junk in your own hallways!" (Fair enough.)

So in this box I found all kinds of books that I thought I'd lost and had silently cursed friends of mine for borrowing and not returning, those bastards.

Anyway, one of the great finds was an old letter from my younger sister, something she mailed to me when I was 20 years old and attending UBC in Vancouver, when she was about 16 and still in highschool back in Ontario. She came out for two weeks: one week spent with my parents, skiing I think, and one week spent alone with me, on the rampage, in the city.

On one side it says:

TOP SECRET, CONFIDENTIAL, PRIVATE

IM COMING!

I come March 4. I will be there at 10:00 PM your time. I leave March 21 at 2:30 PM your time. That's 376.5 hours of me in B.C. YIKES. let's see that's 1 week together.

You know the folks were really worried after the phone call. DO you think I was too harsh saying you were probably stoned? NAH, they need to be subjected to truth MOST of the time.

I have ASTHMA! EAT IT
BYE! HI! BYE; Hi. Bye? HI?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The front of the letter is this, which I had as artwork on my walls for most of my 20s.



In case you have trouble reading the small print, they are random supposedly-inspirational quotes she hacked out of a friend's religious teen magazine to re-jig as satire. (So very post-modern and absurdist, even in her teens.)

But of all the quotes, my favourite is her summary:

He thinks, he speaks, he makes history! His name is mankind, you may know him as Plato or Tom Cruise.

Tomorrow I fly to Whitehorse, to visit this same sister. (Now she's the one who lives in the cool town that delivers fun and adventure.) I'll be with her for almost a month. I come July 21 at 12:10 AM her time and leave at 7:35 PM her time on August 17. Yikes! That's about 667.4 hours in the Yukon (and Alaska). (And awesomely close to 666 hours.)