26 posts tagged “university”
I swear my phonology prof was under the influence of something today. That was one hilarious session. In addition to discussing the joys of stress placement algorithms, we also learned about ice cream, the Italian public education system, and Alabama Slammers (orange juice, Southern Comfort, amaretto, and sloe gin, apparently, which sounds like something I should try this summer).
Speaking of booze, yesterday was a terrifying day to be out on the town. I was too busy to take part in the St. Patrick's festivities myself, but I was downtown for just long enough to have to help some lost girls find a subway station, and then on my own ride home to be pelted with flung pamphlets as some drunken asshole had a fit and started throwing things. I felt sorry for police and security folks.
Other things. Um. Watchmen was pretty much what I expected. They nailed the 80s aesthetic super-well, the celebrity "cameos" were pitch-perfect (the opening-credits montage! Wow!), and Snyder's fetishistic devotion to capturing every tiny nerdy detail in the panels (and even adding a few of his own, e.g. Ozymandias' "Boys" folder on the computer) was fantastic. Alan Moore was right, though. The damn thing is unfilmable. The movie was a messy distillation of a much larger work, and I'm not just referring to the ending (which, while actually kinda clever, was still a travesty). I can't imagine how confusing it would have been for those who haven't read the book.
Also, if you haven't seen this yet, you need to. Some Israeli DJ watched thousands of those goddamn Youtube music performance videos (guitar in the bedroom, drums on the porch, trombone recitals, keyboard lessons, singing in the bathroom mirror, etc.) and layered them into some brilliant, brilliant music. My mind was blown.
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?
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)
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.
Well, those were some eventful days! Yesterday, the ol' bookstore had yet another huge event. This time, it was Deepa Mehta and the star of her latest film, the lovely Preity Zinta (who is apparently a big frickin' deal in Bollywood; I recognized her from the movie posters all along my end of Gerrard Street). We actually got a crowd equal to the one Spike Lee pulled on Friday, with the ethnic mix prompting Mehta to make a joke about how the entirety of Brampton had come down to see her (Brampton being a suburb of Toronto that is so predominantly South Asian, people jokingly call it Bramladesh).
That was a crazy shift in general, actually. Tomasz the indignant alcoholic libertarian stopped by for another loud impromptu dissertation (man, that guy creeps me out), and we accidentally broke a shelf in half while trying to move it across the store (I'll not speak of the horror that was the cleanup effort, as I don't feel altogether comfortable trashing a coworker in a public blog, but suffice it to say that I had a nice told-ya-so moment).
Today, though, was an even bigger event: my first real day at the University of Toronto. I made it, folks. They can't get rid of me now. I landed on campus around 1pm (observation: St. George's Station has perhaps more stairs than any other I've seen) and headed to Robarts Library for that vital rite of passage, picking up my TCard. Predictably, the photo is terrible. As my esteemed coworker Vicky put it when I bumped into her out front of the ROM, "Jesus Christ, did you smoke a fatty while you were waiting in line?"
Class #1 was to be my Syntactics tutorial. I wasn't clear as to whether the class was supposed to happen today, so I waited in a magnificently old classroom in University College for half an hour. Sure enough, no class. I used the surprise interlude to buy my books. It seems that those are the only thing that cost less here; I got my entire roster for under $200.
Class #2 was one of my fanciful undergrad throwaways, a Latin course in stately Victoria College (pictured at left). The instructor is this hilarious Slavic (Bulgarian, I think?) medievalist with a self-effacing sense of humour and a gift for informative digressions. From the looks of things, it's going to be a great year in that class. It'll be an utter bird, but I'm going to learn a lot, too. I even made a friend, I think; the girl sitting beside me and I seem to get along well enough. More on that after we talk for more than five minutes.
Tomorrow? Writing Systems. Coincidentally, the girl who rang through my stuff at the bookstore is in that one. Hooray instant acquaintance?
Four days left before my ballyhooed return to the ivory tower. I've martyred my bank account, dialled back my availability at the bookstore, gotten a feel for campus, and laughed off one quasi-threatening email from a professor asking if I was sure I wanted to take her "very difficult" class. Despite all that, I approach the coming year with zanshin and sharpened pencils. I'm excited to be moving forward again. It's going to be a good year.
Highlights of the past few weeks:
- I've been getting a lot of shifts in the music section lately. This is more fun than I can comprehend. Picking the store's music is a blast, as is talking music with the customers, and pretty much everyone seems to be happy to have me there. Here's hoping I can continue this trend.
- I had a pretty awesome visit to Guelph. What was going to be a standard paperwork run led to busking, surprise hangouts with all kinds of characters, and crashing on the last couch I ever thought I'd crash on. My spiritual hometown gets weirder and better every time I come back.
- On that note, I am now completely in love with hollowbody electric guitars. Sustain and heavy-gauge strings are my friends.
- Does anybody else remember Moist? I swear, I hadn't thought about that band for at least a decade, but "Breathe" came up on somebody's iTunes at a party, and I still remembered every word. Frickin' awesome song.
- One of my coworkers called me "quite good-looking" after a shift this week. Uh-oh?
- God help me, I've gotten hooked on jazz music now. After having heard some of John McLaughlin's Indian jazz-fusion work when I did a project on Carnatic music back at Guelph, I decided to look up the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and from there, wound up lost in Miles Davis and John Coltrane. How the hell did I miss this stuff? I knew they were brilliant, but it's about time I experienced it.
- Rebecca came up to visit me this week! Hooray! We mostly just walked around a lot, cooked delicious quiche, watched some movies, and played Soul Calibur in my basement, but hey. It was glorious to see her again, especially since the next time will probably be the Three/Alpha Galates concert at the end of the month.
- Speaking of ridiculously complicated academic twists on lowbrow media, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco is quite the interesting character. He's a semiotician by trade, so even though the plot (so far, anyway) is pretty standard thriller fare, the text and dialogue are so full of obscure references (particularly Italian historical footnotes and the occult), I find myself turning to Wikipedia once every few pages to get the full gist of a joke. That said, some of the banter between his main characters (a trio of occult-book publishers) is downright hilarious, and this is a much more interesting look at all the Grail/Templar/Rosicrucian stuff than anything Dan Brown has ever done.
Davidson himself turned out to be a lot of fun: charming, articulate, funny, and movie-star handsome. Funny, though, that all the papers describe him as "tall;" he's less than my 5'11, and a fair bit lighter. He still has that new-author love for meeting people, though, and he chatted with everyone as he signed their complimentary copies of The Gargoyle.
As for the book, though? I'm torn. The dude has a gift for lively, clever prose, and for combining conversational tone with some truly lush descriptions, but there are far too many places where his prose gets purple enough to make the Disney-cartoon gargoyles (remember that show?) in today's picture jealous. Likewise, his impeccable research into bookbinding, Middle High German, Japanese, Dante Alighieri, schizophrenia, and the physiology of burns rivals the kind of erudition you'd see from a Palahniuk or an Eco novel, but then he goes and makes garish historical errors like having a crossbow that fires arrows instead of quarrels or bolts (this isn't just my D&D-fuelled medieval-weapons snobbery talking; it's actually a fairly important plot point). Davidson's got potential, but he's also got a lot of room to grow.
On a happy academic note, I finally managed to get a Toronto student ID and pick my damn courses. It took a two-hour squat in the admissions building, but I'm finally officially one of them, and I have some damn fine classes to look forward to this semester. Phonetics! Syntactics! Writing systems! Historical Linguistics! Latin! I win.
First off! Holy crap, it's a lion webcam. A LION WEBCAM. I don't even want to admit the amount of time I wasted watching the cute little cubs feeding and the lioness expressing her disdain for everything and everyone. I love animals.
So. Graduation. That was a night to remember, to be sure. I got to see a strange medley of old friends, and the alphabetical seating arrangement miraculously put me right beside my old sociology soulmate Cait. President Summerlee's speech was suitably funny and inspiring (but he was wearing shoes! What the hell?), and Chancellor Wallin is far more stately and matronly than you'd expect. I take back every "is that your final Chancellor?" joke I ever made.
Speaking of jokes in need of abrogation, I was originally a little irked by the choice of honoris causa speaker for my ceremony; while the folks in the afternoon session got to hear Roméo Dallaire, we got somebody who was only listed as "the former finance minister of Afghanistan." That seemed like the perfect storm of boredom and small potatoes compared to the good General, until I looked at the rest of Dr. Ghani's résumé. He probably still wasn't the most relevant choice for a crowd of nutrition and sociology students, but that was a pretty cool speech.
Pride comes before the fall; the ensuing afterparty was nothing short of epic. Cait and her crew invited me downtown to Doogie's for one last disaster, and it was a perfect night: tons of my friends in one place, great music from the one-man bar band, and the let's-make-this-one-count vibe that defines a good goodbye party. I have the feeling I'll never live down making out with that random pierced girl during "Tonight, Tonight," but I blame the celebratory mood.
As if I didn't have enough nifty stuff to write about in this entry, today was Book Expo. The mighty swag festival, like the industry it represents, is having a bit of a lean year, which meant the lightest haul I've ever left the Convention Centre with, but I still had a great time and got some very nifty loot. Meeting Jay Ingram was a treat (turns out I know his daughter), I scored a copy of the new David Sedaris to get signed when he's at my store in July, and those crazy Scottish condo-flipping guys from television were fun to meet, too.
Currently on my nightstand: Glen Duncan's I, Lucifer. I refuse to judge it before I've read a bit more of it, but it's got a cult following over at the office, so I remain optimistic.
