9 posts tagged “drippiness”
So apparently the Pope took it upon himself to move St. Patrick's Day this year, as you apparently can't have a saintly feast day during the week before Easter. It happened in 1940 and won't happen again until 2060, but hey. Good for the pope! It's nice to see a bit of ex cathedra rulemongering that isn't killing the poor or oppressing anybody. I think he just wants to make sure he can knock back a pint of scary-ass black beer without feeling guilty.
Last night was the last night for this year's Curtain Call musical at Guelph, and I figured that I had to see at least one of those things before I graduated. This year's play was Zombie Prom. What a gloriously weird musical. Imagine Grease with John Travolta dying a horrible death and coming back as a singing, dancing zombie. My good friend Nathan is officially my hero for bringing the house down with his portrayal of a benevolent-but-sleazy news baron, and everyone else was spot-on too. Since it was the final performance, there were more than a few risqué pranks, but that only added to it. I definitely need to see more musicals.
Finally, here's my latest musical "oh, neat!": YOAV. He's like some kind of strange bastard child of Justin Timberlake and Kaki King; he plays really nifty, intricate dance-pop using only an acoustic guitar and some kind of loop station. Actually, I don't think I've ever had such a good week for CD reviews in the Ontarion. I took three and had glowing reviews for all of them.
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
This weekend, I have no privacy. It's time for my landlord to sell the Bradlands (*sniff*), so there's been a never-ending parade of students (all of whom so far in peacoats, oddly enough) coming through and marvelling at my lair. The landlord is lucky I'm such a nice guy, or I'd so be cooking sauerkraut or something.
There was an excellent movie night over at Coach's place last night. We marvelled at the insanity of another horrific Chuck Norris movie (explosions and fake tans and breasts, oh my!), and then went for 90's cyberpunk nostalgia with The Fifth Element. In between, we also ate an ungodly amount of chips, and Rebecca unveiled her Velociraptor Dance (coming soon to a club near you).
Tonight's little rant is coming to you from a window seat on the noisy fourth floor of the Guelph Library. Jen is breathing down my neck and insisted that she be mentioned, so here you go, Jen. Also: way to be incredibly frank in the library and scare the hell out of your friends.
For the rest of the weekend, I'm going to be hanging out in Hamilton and Toronto, visiting folks I haven't seen in ages and also scoring some free books from my good friends at Random House. Not sure how wise it is to be skipping a day of class at this time of year, but it should certainly be worth it.
- My new favourite would-be saviour of humanity is the woman who was sitting outside a crowded LCBO (the government-run booze store, for all you non-Canucks) shouting "ALCOHOLISM! ALCOHOLISM!" at all the beer-laden students.
- Chocolate banana cake is officially the greatest thing ever. I want to Facebook-stalk the girl responsible simply to try to get a recipe.
- The hot new euphemism is "having the sex," with accompanying, completely-non-representative hand gestures.
- In a loud-enough party living room, "Imogen Heap" sounds just like "Ichabod Crane."
- Stacey's house is entirely decorated in mint green. It's kinda eerie.
- You know you're hanging around with an interesting batch of people when the inevitable game of "Never Have I Ever" is plagued by people being unable to think of things they haven't done.
The wind gods are angry today. The weather websites are clocking a 70km/h gale, and the air is cold enough that the first good gust numbs your face instantly. This is not a day to hold loose paper, folks.
Last night was pretty damn nifty. Jen and I went down to the new Japanese place downtown (Fuji, on Carden), and it turns out that it's an all-you-can-eat sushi bar. It's hella pricey (word from the wise: go at lunchtime for $6 less and the only thing you can't order is sashimi), but very, very tasty, with excellent variety. All of the standard fare was there, with the occasional surprise monster like their "Guelph Roll," a salmon-cucumber maki with...cheddar cheese? My poor arteries. I think we managed to piss off the waiter with our waffling and staggered ordering, but it was a good experience. I will return, just not at night.
After that, we went to a poetry night put on by the magazine Jen edits. I ranged from trying not to laugh at the pretense to dying of boredom to truly enjoying the wit and/or passion of some of the performers. The dude who was reading when we arrived was so painfully sure of his own genius that I wanted to throw lettuce at him, but Jen's colleague Michael was bloody hilarious (a donut-themed parody of Eliot's "The Wasteland" entitled "April is the Cruller Month"? Yes, please), and this random girl at the end of the show read poems of jilted love with a homicidal passion. May that dude never cross her path again.
Fine ways to spend an evening: drunken Mortal Kombat at Kate's place. I'm amazed by how goddamn fancy those games have gotten: 3D arenas, ostensibly-accurate mixed martial arts, elaborate combos...dammit, get off my poorly-rendered 16-bit lawn.
I feel like I haven't been reading nearly enough lately, especially given the very nifty novel Jen lent me. Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup has the strange distinction of being the only major cyberpunk novel written by a woman. So far, so good, though it's one of those truly evil books that peppers the dialogue with phrases from a language I don't speak. If anyone knows of a good romanized-Japanese-to-English online dictionary, I'm very open to suggestions.
Also: eight weeks until I'm not an undergrad anymore? Holy. Shit.
Find your own pose!
________________________________
I was hoping never to sully this thing with memes, but WOW is this one ever spookily accurate. This is exactly how I sleep when there's a bed to be shared, and apparently many of my LJ friends have had similarly precise results. Weird.
And the semester trundles on. German and English are both fun and easy, the French Linguistics course is the happiest I've ever seen Dr. Thomas, and Ujimoto? Well, he's the kind of guy who throws twenty cents across the room, grins a mile wide, and says "Paradigm shift!" I am at home there.
Finally, greetings to a certain somebody who Facebook-stalked their way to this place. I hear she's kinda awesome once you get past the bus-sized ego.
A book never to be read on a bad day: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It's the most morally ambiguous, unyieldingly depressing end-of-the-world fairy tale I've ever read, which is saying something considering my usual literary tastes. No redemption, no mirth, just a laundry list of post-apocalyptic sorrows chasing a man and his son across the radioactive remains of America. That said, it's a bloody brilliant novel. McCarthy is a brilliant writer, and he knows how to keep the plot moving. He'd certainly have to to keep the average reader from throwing the book away and crying in a corner somewhere. I honestly had nightmares.
Also: today, I was "that idiot" at the library help desk. My English homework included a bunch of [fænci fonɛtɪk sɪmbəlz], and apparently the library computers don't recognize the entire IPA character set. Thank goodness for the saint at the counter who suggested exporting the file from my laptop as a PDF. I can't believe I didn't think of that.
Also: Three cheers for the late-night bus driver who managed to get us back from the middle of fucking nowhere last night, even if he did almost tip the bus going over a parking barrier.
Life has been so bizarrely up-and-down lately. My grandfather is back in the hospital again, with an apparent white blood cell count of zero and constant shaking, and I get a bad feeling that he might not be coming out this time. Likewise, my uncle's shiny new kidney isn't the perfect match they'd hoped for, he's now a diabetic, and they're scrambling to get him back under the knife again to fix whatever went wrong in Round 1. And my parents wonder why I'm afraid to go home. With my grandfather quarantined out of fear that the common cold might fell him, I'm afraid that I'll have to make my next visit to Waterloo clad in a grey suit and tears.
Maybe I'm a coward for clinging to the stability over here in Guelph, but the joy in this town is what's keeping me afloat. From the all-around most interesting and entertaining academic semester I've had since first year, to the din of jamming and trivia nights, to the rum-soaked hilarity of Meg's 22nd birthday party (nobody parties like the rock climbers, and I got to hang out with a lot of people I haven't been seeing nearly enough of lately), things have never been this good in the Royal City.
Naturally, I've also gotten myself into another odd personal situation. A random acquaintance from this summer spontaneously turned into quite a bit more last week, and now I'm simultaneously enjoying the most honest, open, affectionate, supportive friendships I could hope for, and living in fear of what might happen when one of us finally tires of the ambiguity and tries to put a label on whatever the hell we are (no passive-aggressive jab implied. Could be me, could be her). The fact that we've been so accepting of each other's sundry anxieties has been amazing, but I just hope that we can keep those same anxieties from wrecking everything again.
