To be honest, I thought I had reached the absolute limit of Air Canada hatred. After all, how much more could you hate a company, once you hate everything about that company (barring my cousin Heather, who's pretty cool, despite being one of their mechanics)?
The answer, for the aviation industry anyway, is to hate their partners. Lufthansa, for displaying disturbingly AC-esque incompetence and inflexibility, is first on the list. Lufthansa, for running one flight per day out of Kuwait, and scheduling it to depart at quarter to two in the morning. Luftansa, for not allowing me to schedule a layover in Frankfurt, despite not being able to connect me to the required onward flight.

The best thing about depression is that having been through it once, you can usually see it creeping up on you the next time.
Then again, the worst thing about depression is that once you see it coming, you know that past a certain point there's fuck all you can do about it, and you just need to ride that shit out.

A Kuwait simulator, in five easy steps:

1. Line the walls of your house with ovens.
2. Place one (1) fan on top of each oven, facing the same direction as the oven door.
3. Heat ovens to four hundred (400) degrees Centigrade.
4. Open oven doors.
5. Turn fans to medium low.

...and you're done! You can now enjoy the delights of the desert in your own home. For the authentic Kuwaiti experience, keep two or three rooms air conditioned to approximately fifteen (15) degrees centigrade, and shuttle between these 'comfortable' areas, pausing long enough to begin sweating profusely in the heated zones.

So I figured, instead of spending the next couple of weeks lining up health insurance, taking my car in for a tune-up, and reacquainting myself with my friends and my 'new' 'home', I'd fly to Kuwait. With a day's notice. After being assured that I wasn't needed, and that I'd have plenty of time in Canada to sort out my life.
Hopefully, I'll make it home without dying of sudden onset skin cancer. Other than the sun, I hear it's pretty safe, but how safe can a place that's walking distance from friggin' Iraq be?