A Friggin' Time Machine, Ladies + Gentlemen.

You know what, pudding? I should probably never tell people what I plan on doing when I get home if it's something I actually need to do. Here's how that works out:

PEOPLE: We are going to do something fun and perhaps boozy! Come with?
ME: No! I must write an essay/do my dishes/assassinate somebody who is doing bad things/save a whale!
PEOPLE: Laaaaaaaame. JK, je t'adore; have fun with that! Kisses, 'bye!

[ME goes home and does something that is obviously not whatever she just told PEOPLE she was going to do.]

So yeah.... I may have said I was going home to write a proposal for a future essay about the inside of Willy Loman's skullmachine in Death of a Salesman, but actually I'm writing to you guys. Whatever. It's been too long. I have no regrets. (I may feel differently about that when it's Monday morning and I'm scrambling to remember what a semi-colon is for at the tail end of an all-nighter, but whatever. I live for the present.)

So, long time no blog, eh?

There are a couple things I'd like to tell you about. I'll work backwards. Then you can feel like I have given you a ride in a time machine.

The event I declined the invitation to go out to the bar after tonight was a staged reading of Salad Days, a musical co-written by Jason and Landon, two ambitious young gentlemen of my acquaintance.

This was the second time in my Mount Allison career that I have gone to Windsor Theatre to see work by students performed in a not-yet-cooked state. The first time was near the end of last semester, when Jenny Munday's playwriting class read excerpts from each other's work. Over the past year-and-a-bit I've become increasingly interested in the things that happen to a script between the first time the writer sort of feels like it's kind of finished in a (completely false but still important to the process) sense and the time it gets a full production in front of people who aren't necessarily related to, sleeping with, or even particular friends of somebody on or backstage. I've always had this kind of paralyzing terror about the prospect of people actually saying things that I wrote out loud. Bad quirk for a playwright, obviously, which is why I've been trying to drop that terror, or at least ignore it enough to, you know, do what I want to do. Earlier this semester I even took (what felt to me like) the giant leap of inviting a bunch of friends over and drinking just enough wine to prevent me from wanting to curl up and die while they read my script out loud. (Not curling up and dying was important, so I could scribble furiously in the margins about how much shit I was going to cut the fuck out.)

After seeing what Jason and Landon and twelve awesome singing/acting friends pulled off tonight in front of a nearly full house of spectators...my giant leap is beginning to look more like a teeny tiny eeny weeny little baby step. Forget the ballsiness of letting an audience in on an unfinished piece of work (although that is certainly a level of ballsiness I admire); let's just stop and appreciate the basic ballsiness of setting out on a collaborative project like this in the first place. That is ballsiness I aspire to, my friends. But I think I'll have to get over my need to self-medicate when hearing my words spoken before I'm ready to, you know, get somebody else intimately involved in making those words exist in the first place. Still: a girl can dream, and I do. Jason and Landon, you are an inspiration. (And by that, I of course mean that you make me feel totally pathetic, and now my choices are either to wither and become compost, or desperately attempt to display comparable ballsiness in the not-too-distant future.)

Not to mention it's nice to learn/be reminded that certain people around here can friggin' sing their faces off when given the opportunity. Very nice indeed.

Earlier this week I woke up to a 1998 flashback. That's an exaggeration, obviously, but there was an ice storm, and it had knocked the power out at some point during the night. Although power had returned by the time I woke up, my alarm clock didn't know what time it was. Fortunately the outage had effected most if not all of Sackville, so I wasn't the only one stumbling sheepishly into first-period classes fifteen minutes after they began -- or simply not making it to them at all.

By a strange coincidence, the year of the aforementioned ice storm of my youth was also a year in which there were multiple Friday-the-13ths in succession, as there are this year. Spooooooky.

But like I said -- it's not really comparable to '98, aside from the fact that the trees are really beautifully glass-looking in a sad we-are-oppressed-and-it-is-breaking-us-apart kinda way, and the stairs leading up to my apartment are almost certainly going to result in death or serious injury to somebody some time soon.

Speaking of Friday the 13th, Alistair friggin' MacLeod just so happened to be speaking at the Owens gallery on campus that day. Definitely not unlucky. Even if you've never read anything by him, if you get the opportunity to hear this man speak, DO IT. What happens is, he talks and you laugh and you laugh and you laugh, and then he starts reading his work and you cry and you cry and you cry. I think I've inherited my father's penchant for people whose stage patter style is incongruous with the tone of their artistic work. What I just said about Alistair MacLeod was pretty much a direct thievery of what my dad is always saying he loves so much about Lynn Miles, with the appropriate verb subbed in. But now I've credited him, so he can't sue me. Right? Anyhow. Go read some Alistair MacLeod, pudding. It'll be good for you. And it'll hurt. But in a good way. I promise.

I know I said I was going to do this whole post backwards like a time machine, but what kind of time machine only goes one direction? I'm now going to take you one day forward from the last jump, to February 14th.

February 14th means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Heck, it's meant a lot of different things to me over the years, and I'm just one person. It's meant a day to roll one's eyes at straight couples humping in the hallways who one will later freak out by coming out to. It's meant cuddle puddling with hippy friends and hippy guitars and vast quantities of hippy chocolate on the floor of one's friend's place in Ottawa, and later going out for a midnight skate on the deserted canal while singing showtunes. It's meant wishing one was around to see what pretty cards were being made for "Validation Day" at the commune one visted the previous fall. It's meant hanging out in the Kingston public library with one's new girlfriend reading random bits of poetry about buses full of fat black gospel singers while waiting for the rabbi to show up for the story circle. It's meant reluctantly agreeing to go on an obvious date with a boy because if there's any day one is supposed to at least act like one wants to be going on dates, one supposes that February 14th is probably it. It's meant hiding crazy collagey valentines with kazoos hidden inside all over campus as a means of expressing one's love for those fine folks who listen to one's campus-community radio show.

One thing that anyone who knows what's doing at Mt.A. knows, though, is this: February 14th means Sweetest Little Thing.

Consequently, I would like to share with you some of my favourite cakes that were prepared for this year's cake walk:


Armadillo cake!


Leaning tower of cake! (The good people of Cuthbertson house ended up with this impressive piece of edible entropic architecture...which they had a mighty fun time trying to figure out how to transport back to said house, let me tell you.)


Wedding cake!


Nude marzipan lady cake!


Voodoo cake!


Imitation cake wreck cake!

Just to give you an idea of how many cakes I didn't end up including in this post:

Many of them were also totally gorgeous. Apologies if I didn't photograph your cake. It was probably just because there were too many people standing around it talking about how friggin' darling it was and I couldn't get a camera in edgewise.

Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at the gallery they were fresh out of cake walk tickets, so no cake for me, but I did aquire some mighty fine mollusks. (In fact, they have been mating in my living room for almost a month solid now. That, my friends, is stamina.)

Also, it's cute when little kids dance with balloons.


Also, this ring game was cute.

(It doesn't seem to have been captured in the picture, but this was much like other ring games, except that the "rings" were made of wire bent in the shape of rickety hearts. The arrow goes through the heart and you win, get it? Cute!)

Awright puddin', that's enough outta me.

I love you.

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - I know, I know, I just took you to the past and dumped you there. Build your own friggin' time machine if you want to get back, I guess? Or you could be patient, relax, and let the current take you back to the present. Not my problem kid; I got proposals to write and squid-things to admire and samosas to hopefully get up early enough to consume.

You know a week is bad news when it requires the creation of a new acronym.

This, pudding, is what a student looks like at the end of the week before reading week (hitherto referred to as TWBRW):

Except that that's a lie. That's me at the beginning of TWBRW, sometime mid-afternoon on Monday following the first of several all-nighters pulled during the past seven days.

Yeah. I broke too soon.

As you might imagine, following that, the rest of the week was...actually, surprisingly bearable.

Yes, I found myself twitching more than usual (and as anyone who's had the misfortune to spend any regular time with me IRL knows, my "usual" level of twitchery tends to be somewhat higher than most people's to begin with). Yes, I gave up the entire notion of actually cooking meals and subsisted almost entirely on granola and gummi worms. Yes, I came to the conclusion that I am an insufficient human being in almost every possible respect, and I hated myself to bits and I just wanted to curl up in my mermaid cave and die.

But then Geoff Berner came and played a show at Struts, and my twitches were twitches of happiness and everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Seriously. I love that man. He is a lovely, lovely man. For example: he started the show off by passing a bottle of Jameson's around the audience. For another example: in spite of continuously consuming the remainder of said bottle throughout his performance, when I went to purchase a CD from him after the show, without any prompting from me, he recalled having met me before. Which we had: last year at a house concert here in Sackville, which I had gone to without knowing who he was, because he happened to be performing alongside the great and wonderful Carolyn Mark. I had swooned like crazy over his performance and subsequently bought his previous album (Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride) on that occasion, and then geekily told him I couldn't go to the bar because I had to go home and write an essay. Then he asked what my essay was about, because he's a lovely man. Funnily enough, it being TWBRW, this scenario was repeated when we met on Wednesday night, only this time I was buying Klezmer Mongrels. (They're both amazing albums, by the by.)

A word (or possibly a tirade) on essays: I don't really understand how anybody ever writes a paper of any kind without also staying up all night at least once in the process. I don't mean the poorly-researched, last-minute, total bullshit kind of all-nighter, necessarily. I just mean that, in my experience, getting so tired that you don't care if somebody important thinks you're stupid is an essential step in the process of creating anything that is going to be read by anybody you think is in any way intellectually admirable. Having written that last sentence, I think I'm beginning to understand why an elder once very sweetly and sincerely advised me to try smoking some marijuana the next time I had to write a paper. I also think that it's probably patently obvious to anyone reading this blog that I am not what you call cut out for academic pursuits. So why do I pursue them?

...that, pudding, is one of those questions I'd like to defer addressing until possibly never. Certainly until some time after reading week.

In the meantime, me and my dinosaur will be spooning with various published works of Tony Kushner in the mermaid cave.


More Life (or something),
Emmet

P.S. - I am sure that the above-linked Wikipedia article on T.K. is just brimming with inaccuracies, but come on pudding, it contains the most nerdfighterly picture of him (or perhaps any human being) I have ever seen. It's literally a picture of him simultaneously being awarded a degree for dedicated nerdiness and standing up against worldsuck, with puff levels even the young John Green could never hope to achieve.

P.P.S. - Oh gee, I just confused and alienated soooooo many readers, didn't I? I'm sorry pudding. You'll figure it out some day.

A Few Shiny Things.

This happened today:


I was at Bridge Street Cafe listening to/playing with these nice folks tonight:

(The one you haven't seen before is Brendan the Brilliant Buddhist Bassist. I'm pretty sure he's been in every Religious Studies course I have taken so far at Mt.A. So of course when deciding what to play tonight, I went with a song from Hank and Lily's new album that begins with the lines everyone I know is going to burn in hell / oh well. He seemed to appreciate it.)


This was on the lawn between the fine arts building and the library a week or so ago:

(I don't know what it is, but look how cool it looks up close!)


This is happening on Saturday.

And this exists in perpetuity or at least until its corner of the internet collapses. (I really can't explain how pleased I am to be responsible for a blog where one of the most frequently used words is "pudding," pudding.)

Yay!

More Life,
Emmet

The Hell, the Hobos, and other Things I Love.

Hey pudding,

(I’ve decided I really do like that as a collective term for all of you. I think it’s going to stick. I like how many different images I can make out of the term. Are you people made out of pudding? Am I addressing these entries to a literal bowl of pudding that represents the body of individuals who might potentially like to go to Mount Allison some day? Are there great symbolic implications? Am I just being an affectionate goof? THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS.)

Anyhow. This here is an entry about some of the things I mentioned were coming up in future entries when I wrote my first entry. I’m going to be surprising by not telling you how many parts there will be or what they will consist of, but mark my words, there will be parts. Oh yeah, baby.

Part One:
The Burning Hell!

Struts Gallery (one of several fine art-showing establishments in the shire) was host to a truly rockin’ band known as The Burning Hell on Wednesday night.

The Burning Hell are named after a religious tract, and they feature such handsome instruments as ukulele, banjolele, cello, violin, glockenspiel, and our old friend electric guitar. They come from Peterborough, but I get the sense they’ve got a bit of a towncrush on Sackvilleshire, as they were here just this summer as well, and they played two covers of local bands in their set last night: a Shotgun Jimmie song and a Construction/Destruction song—the latter with guest vocalists from the original band. It was a great show, and I danced in wellington boots for the very first time ever (at least within memory). If you have never danced in your wellies before, I’d like to officially state that I wholeheartedly endorse it, especially if it’s a Burning Hell concert that you’re trying to choose footwear for. The boots and the band complemented each other’s marchiness very well, I found. If I had been wearing sneakers or bare feet (my usual dancing attire), I think the marching would have felt silly, but in wellies I was filled with a sense of joyous certainty that marching was just the very thing to do as the basis for a dance to TBH. In fact, go grab yer boots right now and you can practice at home.

I like that they have a lot of songs about death and a lot about birth/gestation. Those are important times, and I like hearing songs about them! It’s really fun dancing like a corpse and like a fetus. Are you doing it right now? In your rain boots? I hope so! If not, I’m sorry, but you might just not be cool enough to come to Mt. A.

Part Two:
Hobo jungle in front of the library!

Yesterday there was a protest initiated by the SAC (Students Administrative Council) and also attended by a fistful or two of non-SAC-affiliated students (comme moi). The idea of the protest was to make a case for the notion of putting a cap on student debt. In order to illustrate the point, we dressed up as classic dirty-thirties-style hobos. I of course brought my mandolin out to join the cause, as well as a washboard, some spoons, and a couple of egg shakers so we could get a nice hobo jam band going, but by far the best prop involved in the whole affair was a real live oil drum fire. This was also quite practical, for although it was nice and sunny out at 10:00 AM when the demonstration began, it got quite chilly as the day went on, and at 6:00 PM when it was time to clean up, we had a handy way to eliminate the cardboard boxes we’d built temporary hobo-shelter-type structures out of. (Did you know that corrugated cardboard is kind of like red hot rippled potato chips as it burns? If not, I have just offered you a little nugget from my amazing hands-on learning experience here at Mt. A. But um, don’t eat red hot cardboard. Potato chips aren’t very healthy, but at least they don’t give you third degree burns on the inside of your face. Actually, I’m not sure exactly what degree the burns would be from putting burny cardboard chips in your mouth, but I’m thinking that’s one of those pieces of information I am totally okay with not learning.)

It was nice to have an excuse to pull out some of the hobo songs I’ve loved since I was a kid (remind me to explain how much more I love Woody Guthrie’s East Texas Red now that I’ve studied Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sometime...or just Google both of them and love for yourself), but even better was the kind of open discussion forum that it became. One of the things we talked about for a while was the Allisonian obsession with the Maclean’s ratings. I guess it’s fairly natural for the administration of the school to fixate on and not criticize a rating system that consistently gives our institution such high marks, but I’m not administration, so I can say whatever I want about it. Muahaha.

The general consensus we reached around the fire was that the idea of ranking universities from “best” to “worst” was sort of fundamentally flawed. I can say with reasonable confidence that Mount Allison combines a lot of factors that make it a really good school for me, but it would be ridiculous to say that those factors make it THE BEST SCHOOL FOR EVERYBODY. People are different, and therefore thrive in different environments. Personally, I know I couldn’t deal with a big school in a big city; I have an affinity for a lot of the way things are in the maritimes; I have a family connection to Mt. A. that makes stumbling upon bits of history I’m walking over every day a really special feeling; I want to study theatre from a primarily literature-based perspective...and lots of other things I’m sure I have/will cover in other blog posts. For me, the things about Mount Allison that suit me are worth sticking around for even when the kind of cruddy things (ej- high tuition fees, lack of tempeh in the grocery stores...) make my experience here a tad less awesome. So yeah, Maclean’s likes Mount Allison, and so do I. That doesn’t mean that the things Maclean’s and I like about it are necessarily at all relevant to how good a school it would be for you. Just something to think about as you’re looking at the messages from/about Mount Allison and other schools you’re looking into right now, I guess. The official ranking a school gets on some list is worth absolutely nothing if it’s not a good fit for you, you know?

Now back to your regularly scheduled propaganda!

Part Three:
The Bitch Complex!

A few weeks ago, quite out of the blue, I was asked by my Women’s Studies professor if I’d be interested in co-facilitating a lunch hour discussion session entitled “The Bitch Complex”.

This kind of thing tends to happen a lot at Mount Allison, in my experience. I highly recommend practicing the art of politely declining invitations to take on enticing jobs you simply don’t have time for in advance of your arrival in the shire—because believe me, you will receive them in abundance, especially if you get involved at Windsor Theatre. I was asked to be both Master Carpenter and Sound Tech on a show that played there recently, in spite of the fact that I have no skills or experience in any way relevant to either of those jobs. If you said “yes” to everything at Mount Allison, you’d burn out and die pretty quickly—but it’s also pretty neat to jump into a job you’re not entirely sure you’re ready for every once in a while. Trial by fire and whatnot.

So I said yes to my Women’s Studies prof, and today was the first PACWI (President’s Advisory Council on Women’s Issues) Brown Bag session. My co-facilitator, Toni Roberts (who has some crazy number of degrees in seemingly incongruous subject areas under his belt—very Mt.A.) was well-prepared with a series of power-point slides to frame the discussion, which served to make both of us less anxious about covering the important areas we wanted to cover, which would have been easy to do given the broad applicability of the topic at hand. Perhaps not unpredictably, one chapter of our discussion that fuelled a lot of impassioned response was the Sarah Palin problem. Herein was the biggest highlight of the hour for me. Not because I find Sarah Palin and her supporters and detractors to be chock full of interesting dilemmas for feminist-minded individuals to ponder (although I sure do!), but more importantly because Toni used the acronym “MILF” on his slide about her, and several of the attendant professors were unfamiliar with the term, so I got to say “Mother I’d Like to Fuck” crisply and clearly for all to hear.

Also, there were cookies. All in all, it went well , and left me feeling relatively capable and glad that I’m at a school where this kind of frank, intelligent discussion between students and professors is a big part of my experience. It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens often enough to reassure me that I probably am smart enough to be here on some level, even if this whole “transformative process” that is postsecondary education sometimes leaves me feeling like I must have about the same IQ as the moss which grows on sloths if they stay lazy for long enough (which they usually do).

Part Four:
My flat-mate was a sweetheart and made perogies for dinner, and later tonight I’m going to dance my face off!

Wow, that’s kind of cool, we’ve come full circle-ish, what with the dancing and all. Tonight’s danciful adventure will be experienced to the tunes of the undoubtedly great Guy Davis trio, courtesy of the Tantramar Blues Society. I love TBS for the following reasons:
a) BLUES!!
b) Multi-generational dance floors are infinitely more interesting than those composed entirely of youngsters. Grown-ups FTW!
c) The price of admission to the shows is only $6 if you flash ’em your student ID at the door—this is exactly half the regular ticket price.

The only noticeable drawback for me is that the Blues Society events mostly happen at George’s Fabulous Roadhouse, which is a grand old place, but not an all-ages venue. I’m lucky (read: academically retarded) enough that I was already of age by the time I came here, but I still consider this a pretty sucks thing on two levels:
a) A biggish number of my friends (including my darlin’ flat-mate) are still underage, so they can’t come, and that’s way lame.
b) Multi-generational dance floors are even more awesome when the generations include little kids, who everybody knows are naturally amazing dancers because they haven’t learned how to be boring yet.

However, I think it is clear that the pros outweigh the cons, and once a year there’s a free blues show under a tent on Bridge Street, which is just all pros and then some.

Awright. Signing off now. I’ll throw another video in here, to compensate for the lack of pictures in this entry:

This is Amelia Curran, who was one of the opening acts for Jenn Grant when she played the Super Amazing Top Secret Old Sackville Music Hall (a place I will definitely have to post more about some day, with pictures!). I’m not gonna lie, I swooned a bit when she played this song. I’m a big Swoony McSwoon-Pants.

More Life,
Emmet