words & death

Apart from doing a ridiculous amount of hard labor today (we are doing landscaping on our backyard), I had two very interesting events occur to me.

Event the first: Whilst my dad went to Petro Canada to fill our wheelbarrow tire with air (can you believe they charged him $1.40!?), I fired up a game of my all too favourite ScrabblePLUS. I typically play against an Advanced opponent, which is probably about the standard individual with a college degree (the higher tiers are, respectively: Pro, Expert, Master, and Genius - the latter three are pretty much unfair). I had a good start, making use of lots of opportunities to create words parallel to other words, which any good Scrabble player will tell you is one of the key strategies to achieving consistent +20 point scores per turn. At one point in the game, about halfway through, I blew the game wide open by playing the word "generous" in the top right hand corner going down, creating two words that hit the triple word score, one of which spanned both triple word scores for a whopping point count of +131 points in a single turn. Needless to say it was simply a cruise from there, and I ended up with my very first 400+ game, scoring 438 points in the end.

Event the second: I took Ecology in second year, and in my lab in the dank, dark basement of BioSci, I befriended a classmate with the initials JB. This guy was really funny, super chill, and always invited the entire group to head to Duke's near Windsor for drinks...like all the time. I don't think I ever went a single class without hearing him request that we head to Duke's after. We finished that class and bid each other farewell in the way that lab partners say bye and have a good life without thinking too much about it.

Just yesterday, I added a UNE that I met at work on Facebook, and we noticed that we shared JB as a mutual friend. We started talking about this, and then my friend asked me if I knew that JB passed away...what!? Apparently in December 2007, he came home around Christmas and committed suicide.

This was obviously a shock, especially since I was particularly dense and didn't realize that people on his page saying, "I miss you" didn't mean he was in Africa on some extended missions trip or something, but that he had actually gone on to greener pastures. It's just so bizarre that someone like JB, who was so ridiculously happy-go-lucky, could be alive and well in my mind when he had died more than a year ago. It honestly reminded me of when Kutner died on House - you'd never guess it'd be him. It's always strange when it's someone you know, even stranger when that person is one of the happiest, nicest people you've ever met.

I guess you can never really know. You expect suicide to only be junior high or high school kids filled with teenage angst and looking for attention, but this event makes me realize depression happens to anyone.

So be nice, kids. (RIP JB)