Thus concludes another holiday frenzy. The last few shifts of the holiday season were, well, the busiest our company ever gets, anywhere. It should have and could have been outright mêlée, but we actually got through it with no injury and quite a bit of fun.
Now I'm in K-W after yesterday's ridiculous slog down a rain-soaked 401. It was good to have a little dose of family time, what with the turkey and the catching up and the gifts. I'm now the proud owner of a French coffee press and various useful household items for my new lair, as well as a cheque that will wind up who-knows-where (probably, frankly, in rent).
And yes, my uncle loved his flaming suspenders.
Things currently rocking my socks:
- After a lengthy battle, endless skeezy landlords and ugly apartments, and weeks of checking Craigslist religiously, I have an apartment. Best of all, and perhaps surprisingly, it's actually a step up from my current place. I'm a subway stop closer to downtown, the ceilings are actually to code, the main room is huge, and it's a walkout rather than a conventional basement (i.e. I have enormous windows and a ground-level private entrance). I'm only paying a wee bit more for the convenience, and even that doesn't really matter, because...
- The Indigo folks gave me a hefty raise and a performance appraisal that practically glows in the dark. They like me! They really like me!
- KT Tunstall's cover of "Sleigh Ride" in particular, and in general the strange trend this year of remaking Christmas carols with lots of jazz/big-band instrumentation over gigantic and grimy hip-hop drumbeats. When I have to hear Christmas music for 40 hours a week, that stuff is a hell of a lot better than (may his personal Hell be a never-ending Slayer mosh pit) Michael Bublé.
- A semblance of a social life, with visits from Rebecca and a recent habit of hitting the bar with coworkers
- The holiday customers have been far nicer than one might expect. I've had very few assholes so far, and nothing that's really gotten under my skin (though admittedly I'm pretty damn jaded after seven Christmases).
Things not currently rocking my socks:
- Food court Thai food. Never again.
So I'm done for the semester. Hooray? The last exam was a bit brutal, though. My Writing Systems prof is a treacherous bastard when it comes to writing exams. The wonderful lectures lure you in, his quaint Texas drawl and cute anecdotes making you lean in closer and closer, but it's all a ploy so he can stab you in the face come finals season.
I has a fireball! I happened to be taking out the trash when that fucker went off last night, though I was far enough away that it was more of a whoomph and a warm glow on the horizon than anything. Shit's got to stop blowing up in this town.
And for some reason I just can't stop laughing about the Muntadhar al-Zaidi shoe toss. That took diamond cojones, though I fear that he's going to have a one-way ticket to Guantánamo for his efforts. I hate to say it, but Bush also did a remarkable job of avoiding. He's spry! I guess all that draft-dodging was good practice.
(On a related note: Wikipedia, is there anything you can't do?)
Today's phonetics mêlée had me visiting whole new corners of campus. Random thoughts:
- The E.J. Pratt Library, Vic College's squat little study space, is fucking gorgeous inside! Wow! Ultra-modern, bold colours, nice layout: it's like something out of a Bond movie, as terrible as that simile is. Why can't that be the one with the extended hours, rather than the béton brut monstrosity that is Robarts?
- St. Michael's college contains a church with a massive bell tower. Thus, as we entered the exam room at 7, bells tolled. Not ominous at all, no sir.
- There's something inherently wrong about walking through Queen's Park and the century-old flagstones of Vic College, taking in the history, only to pass basement windows filled with the blue glow of a Pepsi machine.
Also: that Leslieville landlord has not called back yet. Dammit.
OK, the first fabulous piece of news: I think I have a friggin' apartment. I just filled out an application for an adorable little bachelor apartment behind a café near the corner of Queen and Leslie. Ground floor! A full-sized fridge! Free cable! Reasonable rent (i.e. only about $15 more than I currently pay)! Apparently the application is just a rubber-stamp thing, so I should be receiving word in a couple of days. Fingers crossed, folks.
Both exams and the feverish insanity of the bookstore continue as expected. As an added bonus, I just got a wonderful performance review and raise at work; it's good to know that they actually do like me there.
Linguists have awesome names for things. I give you glottal fry.
Finally: I had one of those flirting-without-realizing-it moments at Starbucks today, and the guy behind me in line gave me shit for not following through. Damn!
Possibly the best out-of-context professorial quotation of the year:
"I don't know; I can't really sex a turtle from over here."
On that lovely note, it looks like most of the skull-crushing Fall 2008 semester has come to an end. Most of my classes are done (having lived out their full natural lives, he says, with a sympathetic wince towards York), and the only remaining coursework is a few undergrad exams. The syntactics one tomorrow has me a bit spooked, but the others should be walks in Queen's Park.
Life has been hectic but predictable otherwise. Recession/depression/eschaton aside, it's been a booming holiday season at work, and the holiday season is somehow actually less stressful here than in Guelph. I suspect that a lot of it is the wonderfully drama-free staff; last Thursday, the entire night shift, even the manager (granted, one of the cooler, less ex cathedra managers) went out for post-shift pitchers and had a grand old time. I can't even fathom that happening at my old stores. I also seem to have a new gaming (or at least game-swapping) buddy in one of the new fiction girls; she's lending me Ico after having heard me rave about Shadow of the Colossus; I in turn am introducing her to Fallout.
Speaking of work-related awesomeness, my dearest colleague Vicky's birthday party was also this weekend, and that was absolutely awesome. Engineers, it seems, party like engineers wherever you go, and that pizza-, Wii-, and beer-fueled bash was no exception. My Toronto social network continues to expand, which is always heartening.
In music news, Steven Wilson is still friggin' awesome. I just got his solo album Insurgentes, and my mind is duly blown. Wilson is generally in about five wildly divergent bands at any given time, and it looks like he's taken this opportunity to say "Dude, I'm going to be Porcupine Tree and No-Man and Blackfield and Bass Communion and the Incredible Expanding Mindfuck all at once." Pretty chime-y guitars and random electronic noises and beautiful vocal harmony and horrifying industrial squelches and (hey, why not?) a friggin' koto all feature. He even gets people like Tony Levin and Jordan Rudess to guest-star, and somehow manages to get Rudess to play a reasonable amount of notes per bar (unlike, say, that live "Lazarus" debacle where everyone's favourite keyboard wizard decides to swamp the quietly pretty acoustic ballad with as many cascading arpeggios as he can manage).
Also: apparently I'm in a band again? Besides my honourary membership in the fictional Myspace-only lower-floor-of-Indigo band (every instrumentalist who works in the basement is automatically a member, and "we don't need music! We just are."), I'm now in the world's foremost twin-viola-wielding prog/electronic/alt duo with the encyclopedically-knowledgeable music savant from our store's CD/DVD section. We have between us two violas, four guitars, a banjolele, a pretty sweet synth, two soaring tenors, a small studio setup, and absolutely no idea what we're getting ourself into. We will rule the world. All we need now is a name. Current suggestions tend toward the animal kingdom; he likes Sacred Bovine, whereas I think Ungulate is an inherently funnier way of saying almost the same thing (and almost rhymes with undulate, which might be close to the desired effect of our music). Either way, it's going to be very hard to resist the temptation to give us some heavy metal diacritics. You know you'd listen to a band called Ừñģǔłäŧə.
Thursday was another one of those ridiculous brush-with-fame mayhem days at the bookstore. This one was interesting, if only because our celebrity guest was notable less for his fame than for his staggering influence. I'd only heard of him in passing prior to his arrival, but Canada's own David Foster is apparently a forty-year going concern in the music business, and has been the producer for a ridiculous amount of ginormous pop acts. The guy discovered Céline Dion and Michael Bublé, for crap's sakes (treason, really, but I digress). Funny thing is, despite all the wealth and the glory, he's definitely in the top five for the most down-to-earth A-listers I've met. I find it hard to judge the celebrities' moods on tour; if I had to keep their schedules, I'd probably be surly too. Mr. Foster, though, is my nominee for writing How To Flog Your Products Without Being a Dick. He even brought some random budding songwriter from the signing line over to our piano and gave him a few tips. Hats off, sir.
As an aside, I also got to have a brief chat with Ben Mulroney, who is apparently an old friend of Foster's and was brought in as an interviewer. The man is orange, bright Star Trek orange, but also a really nice guy.
I also finally finished reading the Illuminatus! trilogy today. It's interesting stuff: a solid introduction to the hilarity of Discordianism, a ridiculously far-reaching and entertaining conspiracy satire, but also a weird product of its time. It's amazing how even a late-70s novel feels really dated and odd, though this one in particular was so rooted in the drug culture and wonky politics of its era that it's hard to imagine it any other way. At least now I more fully understand references to Erisian nerddom fnord.
Well then. That was a weekend to remember! Rebecca came up to visit again, with all the usual merriment and chaos.
Because everybody at work has been on my case about not having been there, we made the trek down to the mighty Salad King for yummy Thai goodness. Strikingly, there are only two salads on the menu; I have no idea why they call it that. However, the food is excellent (about a billion different Thai curries and stirfries), and the almost cafeteria-like setup (gigantic stainless-steel communal tables, shared benches, etc.) pretty much force you to make new friends. I can also report that Thai beer tastes...pretty much exactly like North American lager. However, it is Approved by the King, which surely means lots.
After that, we moseyed on down to Richmond and John (having to elbow our way through a crowd out front of Muchmusic, as apparently the cast of Twilight was in the building, and Twihards were blocking both Queen and John Streets) to climb the longest escalator I've ever seen (holy shit, four stories!) and see Quantum of Solace. I really don't understand all the critical hatin' on the movie; it's not "great cinema," and it wasn't quite as innovative and awesome as Casino Royale before it, but it was still a solid, entertaining action film. The new Bond girls were winners, the fight scenes were great, and even some of the oft-decried Mark Forster arty touches (oil is the new gold!) were pretty spiffy. I was satisfied, anyway.
For Sunday, I threw Rebecca at Jess for the day so I could go to work, and what a crazy shift that was. It was the perfect storm: the Santa Claus parade, the buildup towards Christmas, and a huge sale. The crowds were massive, and the lineup at my till never really ended. Thankfully, I was in such contagiously good spirits that not even the grumpiest of customers really got to me or got mad at me. In fact, the day would have gone off without a hitch had one of the head cashiers not made a counting mistake earlier in the day that made it look like I was hundreds of dollars off on my final totals. Cue a minor panic attack, until we dug the truth out of the back of the safe.
To conclude the awesome weekend (actually, this was the raison d'être for the weekend), Rebecca and I reunited at Lee's Palace (with a hilarious cameo appearance from Jess!) to see a concert at Lee's Palace. The opener was painfully, painfully bad; his voice was passable, but his songs were hopelessly cheesy and bland. After that, though, came a band I got into in the first year of my undergrad and still love: Ours. They aren't so much a band as a vehicle for the three-and-a-half-octave post-Buckley insanity of Jimmy Gnecco's voice, but damned if it doesn't all come together brilliantly live. Such a huge voice coming from a man who is probably less than 120 pounds (starvation? Heroin? Theories abound) just doesn't seem possible, and his chosen backing band is both tight and hilariously versatile (trumpet and bass at the same time? Why not?). I might've cowered in fear during the outro of "Murder," and all the songs from the first album (i.e. the ones the audience might've actually known) brought the house down. Why the hell is that band not more famous?
In fact, Ours was opening for somebody more famous: Lukas Rossi, that eyelinered dink from reality TV. Thus, I did something I've never done before: walked out on a show. It only took two songs (and the predations of a disturbing amount of local cougars trying to get closer to the stage) before Rebecca and I fled in terror. At least I got my money's worth from Ours.
President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama. Not too shabby, America!
To be honest, I never fell under his spell the way so many people have. He's as tangled in and beholden to Beltway politics as any mainstream American politician, a lot of his platform is disappointingly wishy-washy centre-right (though I say this coming from a land where many of our "Conservatives" would probably be moderate Democrats), and he's really not all that experienced, which feels rather crucial when his reign is going to consist of tidying up one of the worst messes his country has been in. Goddamn if the United States didn't need Barack Obama right now, though. He's a calming voice in terrifying times, a rational intellectual in the aftermath of eight years of wrath and the celebration of ignorance, and a loud refutation of the American racial divide; most importantly, he's everything the current kleptocratic junta isn't. He's not the messiah the Democrats seem to see him as, but at least he's a proud stride in the right direction.
In watching the election coverage (mug of minty green tea in one hand, pen in the other, distractedly doing my usual spectrograph analysis and X-bar trees while live video streamed on my laptop), I wasn't sure whether to be more surprised by the utter routing the Democrats dished out (both houses, the popular vote, and the presidency? Now that's a mandate) or by the grace with which McCain took it. Had he been as eloquent and dignified throughout his campaign as he was during his concession speech, rather than turning into the contemptible, lie-spouting gila monster he became after securing the Republican candidacy, last night might have actually been a tight race. If the Republican kingmaking machine can make such an inelegant mess out of a good man and turn a noble maverick into a grotesque echo of the most corrupt presidency in recent memory, it's about time they take some time off.
And let's not even mention Sarah Palin.
As for Obama's acceptance speech, I'd put it on the same shelf as some of the classic speeches from Kennedy and FDR. I'm nowhere near Grant Park, and I still had goosebumps for the duration. If you can run a country like you can talk about running a country, Mister Obama, I think things will be okay.
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On a lighter, much more local note, I had a lovely Hallowe'en weekend in Guelph this year. Rebecca was kind enough to lend me a place to sleep, and thus I spent much of the weekend with her: dancing at the Underground in Hallowe'en outfits (serendipitously, I was supposed to be at the much-sleazier Palace upstairs with other friends, but couldn't get in, and probably had a better time downstairs anyway), hassling her housemates with guitar noises, and attending a very drunken screening of Rocky Horror (plus Truth or Dare Jenga!) at Kate's townhouse with Coach, Michael, and a host of others.* I saw tons of other old friends (Laura from the bus! Meg! Katie! Melissa! Potato! Sarah! Nate! Lauren! Others who will give me shit for forgetting them!), though, and was reminded painfully of how much I miss them all. I definitely need to come to Guelph more often this year.
My costume was a surprise hit, too; I decided the night before that going as xkcd 's blogging balloon-pilot version of Cory Doctorow was the best I could do at the last minute, but I was surprised by how many people picked up on it and enjoyed it. Rebecca's Kingdom of Loathing Disco Bandit outfit totally out-nerded me, though.
I returned to some rather crappy news here in Toronto, though: apparently my landlord just lost his shirt in the market crashes, he's got to sell the house to dig himself out of the hole, and whatever plans the new owner has, they do not include a student apartment in the basement. I've been served an eviction notice dated October 31, and the law gives me 60 days to get the hell out. Dammit, I liked this place. Here's hoping that I find a comparable lair in short order.
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*it needs to be recorded here: two beers and a jello shot is enough to
make Rebecca pitifully, incoherently, hilariously drunk, and we have
the pictures to prove it.
So midterm marks are starting to come back. Some things I'm destroying. Others...well, let's hear it for heavily-weighted finals. Welcome to my quarter-life crisis; something about this first post-BA academic crunch has me questioning everything: am I smart enough, hard-working enough, stable enough to be here? Is linguistics the field I love, or am I just a language nerd who's diving into the wrong end of the pool? Do I even like the ivory tower at all, or am I just kidding myself because it's the traditional landing pad for an arrogant pseudo-intellectual with no real marketable skills or desire to grow up? The euphoria has worn off, I feel like I've woken up in a stranger's bed, and I have no idea whether this is the beginning of a third severe bout of depression or a genuine misstep in life. I've got an appointment with an academic counselor on Thursday. Time to figure some things out.
It kills me that my mind-numbing retail job has been giving me more comfort these days. As much as I hate being such a consumerist cog, I'm damnably good at it, and my coworkers are the closest thing I've had to a steady group of friends since I moved to the big city. Heaven help me, though, if I don't either fall back in love with my linguistics MA or find something else more meaningful and real to do with myself. I can't do this forever. For twenty-two years, life has thrown golden opportunities into my lap, and now I feel like I'm running on autopilot waiting for the next one. It's hard to search when I don't even know what I'm looking for.
On a brighter note, I met Christopher Plummer on the weekend. He was charming and old and possibly drunk. Deepa Mehta stopped by the store for another event, too, equally charming, but neither old nor drunk. It's funny how I've become so inured to celebrity encounters. Meet a few of them, and it humanizes them; without the intervening camera and makeup and mythology you realize that they're flesh-and-blood people with smelly socks and cola bottles and hayfever just like anybody else. Work with them and their teams of handlers, though, and they become even less: an event, a fluke of the weather. "Oh, they're calling for an Oscar winner today? OK, put up some velvet ropes and chairs, and don't forget your umbrellas."
