I met my hipster alter-ego today. He was shorter than I (I'd guess 5'8?) but had exactly the same facial structure and roughly the same build, with skinny-ass jeans and Buddy Holly glasses and a gross mustache and Pete Wentz hair. Let it be known that:
- I will never, EVER look like that.
- He even had a friggin' acoustic guitar and a Coupland novel
- It took every ounce of my will not to take one of the broadswords off of the Trinity College wall and slay my doppelgänger where it stood.
- Aaaaaaagh.
(apparently it's my New Year's resolution to use at least one diacritic character in every post I make)
Be it resolved that one of my profs is kinda violent. She's starting to creep the class out with all of her ultra-violent example sentences. You can show instrumental-case movement with other phrases than "with a knife," y'know.
But it's been a good week, good golly! Somewhere between the academic shitstorming and the madness that is Indigo, I'm managing to have quite a bit of fun. The almighty Jess threw herself an awesometastic birthday party (Rebecca! Dervla! Sundry hipsters!), and even though my work schedule caused me to be ridiculously late, I still got to hang out with some awesome folks. However, I also had my first experience with Toronto's Blue Night buses, and now have no reason to question why they are called the "Vomit Comets." Sharing the same stale air as a guy who's passed out in a puddle of his own design makes the ride back to East York that much longer.
And last night was Settlers night! Vicky, bless her heart, plied me with beer and chili and dragged me over to the Village for an epic board game showdown with her engineer friends. Of course, she wrecked all that good-host karma by winning the game immediately before I was about to get the requisite thirteen points, but hey. I can't win `em all.
Random aside: this is really cute in an oh-you-silly-metalheads kind of way. And I really, really, really want to see this. Who's in?
Doing a quick Venn diagram overview of symbolic logic for a tricky semantic point: "You could have a cat that is both orange and ugly! I'm talking about this little bastard right here."
After yet another tense/lax vowel gaffe brought on by a strong Italian accent, and really off-key: "La la la, this is my laaaaaax vowel song, la-la!"
Skipping a really, really subtle point while trying to explain a syntactical process: "You'd have to be married to syntax and have three kids with it before you'd care about the distinction here. Don't worry."
So I met my first cokehead banker yesterday. I opened one of those newfangled tax-free savings accounts (kinda handy! I sure don't see a catch, and neither does my dad's financial advisor, apparently), and the branch manager who took me into the office and did the paperwork had the most obvious over-long pinky nail I've ever seen. Stay classy, Toronto.
Also, I have the biggest Internet crush on this girl here. Quirky, cute, talented, funny. I highly recommend her ukelele-based cover of "Dream a Little Dream of Me," performed in front of her open refrigerator.
Of course, as I develop such geek lust for an online folk singer, my own guitar playing has gone heavier than ever. I spent a couple of hours yesterday learning Opeth tracks, and I've been piecing together a messy riff-fest of my own that's certainly a lot less melodic than what I usually write.
Finally: my phonology professor's Italian accent makes her sound like she's saying "mattresses" instead of "matrices." It's pretty damn adorable.
So on Wednesday I got knocked to the ground by two enormous German shepherds. Thankfully, it wasn't the dire mangling you'd expect; it felt more like a clever prank. The first dog came up to me all a-slobber and did its best I'm-too-cute-to-ignore face at me. Naturally, I reached down and started scratching him behind the ears. The other dog, hitherto unseen, vaulted out from behind a snowdrift (how about that snow, eh? It's the kind of blizzard that makes random people strike up conversations, if only to have somebody to kvetch to) and pretty much jumped right on my back, taking advantage of my posture and sending me sprawling into a snowbank. If dogs could laugh, that's what these ones were doing.
The new semester is trundling along nicely. A recurring theme with my profs seems to be the inscrutability of accents; my sociolinguistics prof was red-faced when I rose to her challenge to identify her accent (she's right in her opinion that linguists, being both a multicultural, multilingual bunch and particularly phonetically self-aware, are trickier to pigeonhole, but "born in the American Midwest, educated in New England" is hardly exotic), while my phonology prof has so carefully clipped and moderated her speech as to be practically post-accent; her name is Italian, but her (infrequent!) solecisms are Germanic ("das Handy" for "cell phone"). The game is afoot.
This weekend also marked the loss of my IKEA virginity. I needed a monstrous bookshelf to round out my apartment furniture, so (summoning Jess for some help and spiritual guidance) we made the trek up to North York for some affordable Swedish furnishings. The place is pretty much what I expected: cavernous, sleek, modern, full of unfortunate Swedish names (Skänka frying pans being my favourite), and with the most bizarrely generous customer service model ever (there's a friggin' shuttle bus that drives you the half-kilometre between Leslie Station and the store). The meatballs, though? Kinda icky, until you drown them in lingonberry and gravy.
Also: holy crap, Sheppard Line. I've heard a lot of grumbling about what a cash cow that line was, and how the local condo developments never really materialized, and it looks like it's all true. Those stations are baroquely huge, gorgeous, but basically empty. At least it made it relatively easy to cart around an enormous bookshelf, running it onto train cars like a battering ram.
(to carry on the in-joke: fuck Bessarion)
King of Coxwell no longer, I'm now mostly settled at the my enormous new Bradlands on Greenwood. Only upon returning and getting all of my stuff into the place did I realize how fucking massive it is. I used to be all covetous of Jess' giant northwestern hipster lair, but darned if this place isn't almost as big (albeit underground). Full-sized fridge, 8-foot ceilings, and still under $600; I'm damn good at this real estate thing.
Of course, I've barely spent any time at the new place. After my first sleep there, I was back 'home' to Guelph for a much-deserved vacation. First up was a wonderful New Year's party down in Ayr with the HQ/Longhouse/Toko gang (apparently the latest social epicentre for that crowd is a downtown apartment christened "The Lion's Den," which is possibly the coolest place they've found yet), which was a much-needed dose of festive insanity. I don't think we've ever had such a fine spread of food at one of our shindigs, either: there were samosas, fancy cheeses, mushroom caps, an ungodly amount of shrimp, and even some awesome mojitos.
The next day saw me back in Guelph, making ratatouille with Rebecca before we made the balls-rattlingly frigid hike down to Kate's place for video games (let it be observed: I'm still the king of Mortal Kombat, but not so hot as a robot with guns) and liquor (things I wasn't expecting to enjoy: Coke and Fireball).
Now I'm back in Toronto, having one last stretch of full-time shifts before returning to class on Monday. Things have been stupidly busy at the store, but there have been enough laughs and cameo appearances from friends to sustain me.
Finally: I have a date on Tuesday? She works in insurance and is a brilliant photographer and is gorgeous and just generally has her shit together 1500% more than I do, but apparently she likes me? Fingers crossed, everybody.
