8 posts tagged “bar night”
Sometimes you report in just to say that nothing is new. I, however had a pretty fucking fantastic Guelph visit last week and have been a terrible blogger. There was couchsurfing! Nostalgic hangouts with my much-missed friends! A crushing two-pitcher victory at Jimmy Jazz trivia night! Mario Kart! Hilarity at Vinyl! A surreal visit to my old bookstore (man, does it ever feel small now!)! Hiding behind a bus shelter! I have to say, though, it's completely disorienting returning to what had been my hometown for four years and being a couchsurfing bum.
Back in TO, it's the same ol' cycle of work and downtime, though there have been occasional adventures in the names of sushi and friendship. Kudos to the sushi bar at the corner of Logan and the Danforth for somehow hitting the grail combo of cheap, delicious, and non-toxic.
Also: goddamnit, Rebecca has gone and gotten me back into Kingdom of Loathing. An adventurer is me.
So I've been in the City of Toronto for one week. Goddamn, I love this town.
- The downtown Indigo store I'm working at is pretty much perfect. The scale of the thing is taking some getting used to (two floors, each bigger than the Guelph store, and sales volume in May like what we did at the height of December), but the staff are all hilarious and awesome, and the managers seem really cool. The interesting bit is that it's the "flagship" store of the chain, meaning that the CEO is a frequent visitor and we get all kinds of crazy-huge events. My very first shift included an hour and a half of security detail for professional neoconservative grumpypants Mark Steyn (good Lord, is that man ever a blowhard. When I had to tell a heckler to quiet down, I did so with apologies because I agreed with his jeers). Apparently this is the Indigo where the rich and famous shop, so I'm sure I'll have many more celebrity stories in the months to come (current tally: two MuchMusic hosts and a guy who I think was on Due South).
- I love the TTC. I live about ten kilometres from the bookstore, but thanks to the almighty 22A bus and the subway (Coxwell Station is really too giggle-inducing a name. At least three people have said something to the effect of "HAHA, BONER" when I've tried to explain my locale), it only takes me ten minutes to get there.
- I have friends in town! I got back in touch with Erika, a former coworker from my Chapters Waterloo days, and she dragged me out to the Golden Griffon on Runnymede, an adorable pub with the most incredible burger menu I've ever seen (8 possible meats, 35 possible topping combos. The mind boggles). The two of us and four of her friends got rather shitfaced while we reminisced, and walking her home caused me to miss the last subway, so I got to have my first experience traversing the entire city of Toronto via the 24-hour streetcars. I highly recommend this approach.
- The local No Frills (300m from my door! YES!) has the most incredible selection of Indian things. I love my neighbourhood.
- I ran into Gooch on the subway on Thursday night! What the hell are the odds?
- My one beef so far has been the difficulty getting Bell to hook up my damn Internet. It was supposed to be done by Friday, but now they're sending one of their lackeys down next Thursday to poke around in my walls. This means that all of my Internet usage over the past week has been mooched wireless in public libraries and coffee shops. It's a good opportunity for urban exploration, mind you. Beaches Public Library is a lovely restored fossil of a thing, all red paint and black wood, Coxwell-Ashdale is much more suburban and bland, and the big Toronto Reference Library downtown is an epic, sprawling thing. This post comes to you from a Coffee Time on the Danforth (thankfully a nicer one than my old oh-shit-I-missed-the-bus haunt at Bay and Dundas).
- I have the next two days off? Wow. Now accepting suggestions for places to explore.
I swear, I should just become a sociologist of the Bullring (or at least start charging them for the free advertising). Today's amusing sights include a quartet of retirement-age women with a daunting amount of pilsner bottles at their table, and a very metro guy I saw at the bar last night, passed out on a couch in a puddle of his own drool.
Now that I've got a way to record my guitar directly to my computer, I've possibly been spending a bit too much time building crazyass soundscapes. My lack of a vocal microphone and a bass limits things a bit (I'm doing entirely without the former for now and replicating the latter using an embarrassingly-farty pitch-shift effect), not to mention the fact that I'm using programmed drums (sorry!), but it's a hell of a lot of fun so far, and a great creative outlet for stress; a better vent than reading and much more constructive than goofing around with my SNES emulator. Actually, since Vox can apparently host small audio files, there's a good chance that a Mogwai-ish tangle of riffs I'm working on (tentatively titled "Seven Bricks for Seven Windows") might be coming soon to a schlimmbesserung.vox.com near you. The biggest problem right now is waiting for my guitar chops to catch up with the songs I write in my head.
Jen and I went out to the Albion last night for an evening of dancing and revelry. Sadly, the strange and mythical force that unleashes my dancing skills was not in attendance last night (not manic enough? Not drunk enough? Incompatible dancing partners? Not being much of a techno fan? Who knows?), but fun was still had. I hadn't seen some of those people in a long time, and I owed it to myself to see the Gosh Damn kids DJing at least once. Besides, the "Eye of the Tiger" dance-off was hilarious enough to make it all worth it.
End-of-Semester Bestiary (mostly to remind myself)
- 25-page SOC*4310 paper on high school dropout rates: 5/25 done
- 10-part SOAN*4230 portfolio: 2/10 done
- GERM*3530 presentation: Nada
- ENGL*3080 group project: Nada
Dispatches from the life of Brad:
- Who's the jerk who put Eating Disorder Awareness Week and Hunger Awareness Week at the same time?
- Last night I got a phone call from Texas saying that some stuff I ordered online had been blocked because it was an "overseas" transaction. Shades of Britney Spears, but at least the dude was funny. "Y'all are gonna hafta call yer bank up an' tell `em ya rilly, rilly want it."
- My trivia team is quickly becoming its own worst enemy. About half of the points we lose are because we manage to talk each other out of correct answers.
- Sometimes I think Powell wants me to teach his class for him, or he's misread me as the kind of browner who gets off on hijacking a class. We were discussing grammatical cases in his class today, and he had me explaining eight of them in a row. At least now I know that I've been pronouncing ablative wrong.
- Am I a bad denizen of Waterloo for never having had visited the much-ballyhooed RIM Park? I just got down there today for an employment fair put on by Guelph, WLU, and UW (tragically advertised as the RIM Job Fair. Somebody wasn't thinking very hard when they named that one). Sadly, the trip turned out to be kinda pointless; most of the jobs there were either menial things no better than my current job, technical jobs I don't have the skills for, or teaching-English-in-Korea gigs (yes, I love language, but I HATE children, and teaching children I couldn't even understand seems like a downhill move). There were supposed to be a lot of sweet government jobs up for grabs, but apparently the gross weather kept DFAIT and CSIS from making the trek down from Ottawa. Sigh.
A month without blogging. Good heavens. I don't know what turned me off from Vox/Livejournal for so long (I suspect a nasty case of seasonal-affective winter blues, given how haggard I'd been for most of December), but I think I'm back now.
What was December? An uphill battle, mostly. Exams, full-time holiday frenzy at Steve-ist Chapters (the beatings will continue until morale improves!), what might have been a few too many nights on the town, and this weird sense of crushing holiday apathy. Christmas was kinda weird too, with half my family now quite unhealthy. My parents' house is comically wheelchair-unfriendly.
Other tidbits from December:
- II'm still trying to decide what to do with my Christmas cheque. My current temptation? A bass guitar.
- I'm officially sour on Van Gogh's Ear after some jerk tried to pick a fight with me. At least the bouncers saw the altercation and escorted him out before he actually started swinging.
- Movies you should see: "The Darjeeling Limited" (not even Owen Wilson can drag down the hilarity), "The Ten" (easily the most surreal movie I've ever seen, but also damn funny)
- Movies you might want to reconsider: "The Golden Compass" (gorgeous, but it majorly fucks with the plot), "Die Elementärteilchen" (a German adaptation of a very bizarre Québécois novel, and poorly paced to boot)
- My new mug says "Decaf is for sissies."
- I'm now on friendly speaking terms with people who once wouldn't even acknowledge my presence on campus. Three cheers for reconciliation!
And finally, to finish this bloated month-long roundup, the mandatory overview of the semester's courses:
- ENGL*3080, The History of the English Language: With my plans to go to grad school for linguistics, I feel like I can't really miss this one. Mote and Dan both spoke very highly of Dr. Powell, and they seem to be right. He's super-young for a prof, and edgier than anything. He takes great pride in making fun of students and being wildly politically correct, and he seems to know his shit. Definitely worth the sign-in waiver rigamarole.
- GERM*3530, Deutsch im Beruf: Season Six of the Waldemar Scholtes show. It's now assumed that I'm fluent in German (holyfuckingshitnotquite), and we're focusing on practical things like the intricacies of German politesse.
- FREN*4900, Applied French Linguistics: Another rematch with a venerable languages prof, this time the always-hilarious Dr. Thomas, king of the vaguely-creepy French scholars. The material looks neat, and I still seem to be on his good side.
- SOAN*4320, Transition from School to Work: Why this weird little soul-searching course exists, I don't know, but it looks quite interesting, and the prof, one Dr. Ujimoto, is this hilarious retired Japanese dude who I wish I'd met a bit sooner in my career.
- SOC*4300, Alternative Social Possibilities: I'm pretty sure that my first visit to this class was my last. The prof seems well-meaning enough, but comes across as an elbow-patched old-guard tyrant of the first degree, and I'm not too keen on writing a gigantic paper, with a partner, on a topic mostly of his choosing, for 70% of the term. I'll miss laughing at that accent, though. He sounds exactly like Davy Jones from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.
- SOC*4310, Advanced Topics in Canadian Society: Basically the same course as above, except with Ujimoto and not an undead pirate captain who might rip my face off with his tentacles.
London, Ontario is such a very strange town. The place is permanently stuck in the 1980s, all run-down brick and sleek lettering. There are some cute used bookstores, though, and some great restaurants, and I'm really impressed with how efficient the bus system seems to be.
The nightlife, though. Ugh. Every bar is just like Trapper's, minus the redeeming Guelph ratio, and the shawarma and fries were a gross tactical error.
Oh well. It was still an epic weekend with a good friend. Now, back to the grindstone.
Good heavens, it's Potter Eve. I wouldn't care were it not my line of work, but, well, that's the book business for you.
The thing that amazes me is that there's apparently an honest-to-God leak this time, a series of JPEGs that the fandom is calling "the Carpetbook" because it's photographed against a lovely gray office carpet. I certainly didn't feel like reading the grainy text myself, but a diligent friend has since reported all of the spoilers to me, and I'm in the strange mental-time-bomb situation of knowing exactly how the story ends. I will say nothing else on the subject, though.
As an added note, the gyros place on MacDonell makes the best fries ever.
And already I've gotten pretty negligent of this thing. For shame, for shame.
I attended my first official Ontarion Board meeting on Thursday. It's a cruel sea of Robert's Rules and parliamentary procedure, but at least the people are cool and the food is free. The Editor in Chief and I are also working on a brilliant scheme to promote the paper on Frosh Week. It might just involve yours truly dressed up like a 50s newsie, screaming "Extra, extra!" and running around campus. Heaven help me.
The birthday party last night was pretty epic, too. Movies, wine, and then my first raid on the Albion in far too long (Bubba the Bouncer: "Dude, hadn't seen you in ages! I was getting ready to celebrate!" Me: "You weren't in the will anyway.").
Today is feeling decidedly more low-key. I discovered that the fume hood in the kitchen is not optional (my latest stirfry set all the detectors off and made every dog in the neighbourhood bark like mad), and now I'm working on my Ontarion articles (bike safety, and two CDs: an Arcade Fire knockoff and some bizarre punk). With any luck, it'll be off to the theatre tonight to see Spiderman III. Now, if only my sources for the bike safety article would mail me back...
