a walk on the dark side

I love this city. I spent the evening having dinner and people-watching on Prince-Arthur with Iris, Gord and Dotan. Montreal is so fine in the summertime, it completely compensates for the winter.

I love my street. When I got home there were some guys I had never seen before playing some lovely guitar on the stairs. I’m leaving the window open tonight.

Dotan just got back from Israel, where a cafe was bombed two days after he had lunch there. I’m getting almost blasé about all these stories I hear from my Israeli acquaintances, like the stupidity of it all should be as obvious to them as it is to me. But it goes back to what I was writing earlier. Sadly we don’t see clearly in conflicts we’re involved in. Ironic…

And in other news, I’m preparing for my short stint in Baltimore. This trip feels a bit like a walk on the dark side of the force. The sales department where I work has been trying hard to get me to join them. This is obviously NOT tempting in the least. In my opinion, there’s just more dignity to being a teacher, at the risk of being a snob here.

But I’m going to Baltimore with them, and there I’ll be making a presentation to a potential client. I kind of had to accept, as things in the training department were rather slow, and frankly I’d prefer almost anything to sitting in a cubicle thinking up new disasters to use in class. So I accepted - this one time - on the condition that I be allowed to tell the whole truth exactly as it is. They might stop bugging me if I really suck at the job anyway.

Well, with the return of new training upcoming assignments, I am assured that this time on the dark side will be very short, and this is a very good thing.