13 posts tagged “friends”
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?
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.
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.
A weekend for the vaults, to be sure! Rebecca and her friend Ashley were visiting from Sault Ste. Marie for the Great Big Sea concert, and darned if I wasn't going to show them a good time while they were in my city. We had a nice wander around Queen West, stormed various parks and tourist attractions, laughed at Ashley's compulsive photo-taking (two months in Toronto, and already tourists make me twitchy!), and generally goofed around. I missed Rebecca, and I enjoyed having guests at the new Bradlands. It sounds like they had a good time at their concert, too, so huzzah.
On Friday night, we watched the new Hellboy movie. As with just about everything Del Toro does, the visuals were impeccable; the scenery, critters, and fight scenes were gorgeous. That was one uneven script, though. I couldn't believe how clunky the dialogue was compared to some of his earlier work. However, that little troll-baby has a hell of a one-liner.
Today was neat too. I mostly just relaxed, but also made the trek down to Kensington to see my old Guelph friend Jo for the first time in far too long. We had mighty burritos from Big Fat Burrito on Augusta, threw around the usual hilarious innuendo, got back in the Guelph gossip loop, and peoplewatched in the park. Next time, however, we won't let Jo navigate.
So I saw Iron Man a few nights ago. It wasn't the cinematic orgasm so many of my friends have made it out to be, but it was a pretty damn solid movie, certainly the best of the current epidemic of superhero flicks. Picking a troubled hedonist like Robert Downey Jr to play a troubled hedonist like Tony Stark was an inspired choice, and Jeff Bridges made a damn good evil tycoon. Even Gwyneth Paltrow, who normally bugs me on a level I can't even explain (this was true even before she married Chris Everything-That-Is-Wrong-With-Modern-Rock Martin), was a cute sidekick and convincing redhead.
Most of my life lately has been work. I've been pulling forty hours a week at the flagship, and I'm still in love with the place. I even have a German-speaking buddy on staff, which has been refreshing practice. Oddly enough, I also find that the stockbrokers and socialites actually have a more manageable sense of entitlement than the bitchy suburbanites we had at Guelph and Waterloo. Oh, Toronto, will you never cease to boggle my mind?
On the urban exploration front, I finally lost my Kensington virginity a few days ago. What a neat little neighbourhood! I went hat shopping, enjoyed the best burrito of my life and laughed at the crass service at Big Fat Burrito, and wound up demoing a doubleneck guitar for some of my fellow customers at the pawn shop. On the way home, I also popped by Yonge Street for some bargain-hunting and found an awesome alternate solution to my home electronics problem: why spend $40 on a cable to connect my laptop to my TV for movies when I can buy a $45 used Playstation 2, play movies on it, and be able to play some games? That's a victory, I think.
Good Lord, I'm 22. I guess it mostly feels like 21, but still. Balls to aging. That is all.
Today was a pretty spectacularly random day. As I was enjoying a nice bike ride around town for some exercise (all of this home cooking and relaxation has me feeling like a lard-ass), I ran into my old friends Alex and Danielle on King Street. That led to me winding up at an apartment full of Comp Sci majors, flexing the old Waterloo in-joke muscles (totally beat everyone on the "phone's a-ringin'" thing) and playing the new Smash Brothers game. Even on the fancy new system, I'm still a hopeless player, though Ganondorf (one of the coolest game villains ever) and his comical 300 kick served me well. It was good to see those kids again, too. Alex is going to go very far with that computer brain of his.
I got in touch with Esther today, too, and we went out for coffee and a movie. The Princess was showing La Misma Luna, a really touching story about illegal immigration. It's a damn shame that there were only four people in the theatre. I can't imagine going through the shit that those people go through to try to support their families. You know it's got to be a good movie, too, when it stars a precocious, silly little kid, and I don't hate him after two hours.
So, the war with the University of Toronto rages on. I've been phoning and e-mailing the bejeesus out of them, and the good doctors of the Department of Linguistics have been saints. If this shit works out, I owe them the biggest platter of homemade brownies in the world.
It's hard to believe that I only have two hours of scheduled academic playtime left in my BA. The German exam on Thursday was ein Kuchenstück, except for a few brutal questions about German cultural footnotes that we only touched on briefly in class. I'm going to miss Waldemar, though. Cool guy, great prof. Powell's Last Stand on Monday should be an entirely different battle. Having not written anything large for him, I'm a little terrified of a 40% essay question.
Between all the bouts of studying, I seem to be spending a lot of time hanging out with folks to watch bad movies and play video games. American Dreamz was a surprisingly cute political satire, and my SNES combat chops seem to be as good as ever. So much for my Mario Kart prowess, though.
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.
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.
