Valentines + Sexy Crimes.

I know, it's been a while. But only because I'm about to give you a lot of sexy pictures, and I'm a douchebag who needs extra time to manage to have her camera and her USB cable and her computer in the same room, not to mention the extended periods of head-scratching and failed attempting that go with trying to remember my photobucket username and password.

Anyhow. I've just come back from a rather pleasant Tuesday evening on campus: I left the house for my acting class at 3:45, and managed to not quite entirely die of failure during our first of two guest lessons by fourth-year student Justin Collette (who is for some reason this crazy funny improv guru guy). Then, as I generally do on Tuesdays, I lolloped across the street (well, okay, I shuffled cautiously over the ice, fearing for my very life) to my friend Katie's house to prepare for Catalyst.

Tonight's Catalyst meeting was a little more laid back than most. We didn't have any particular business that needed attending to, so the central reason for the meeting was to hang out and eat candy and make valentines. And that we did indeed!

Look!

Candy! (Those spiral things on the pink plates are made out of potatoes and peanut butter. I don't understand either, but they were delicious.) And what's that in the middle of the table?

Omigosh, it's a super sexy valentine by Matthew! Awesome.


This is one my friend Johnathon made for me. It's a graph! A graph of affection! Nice!


Johnathon also experimented with expressing his emotions in the third dimension.


And here are Corey's hands working on a cute valentine for somebody. I'm not sure who...but also pictured is the valentine I made for him. I couldn't think of what noun best described his essence as a sexy individual, so it became a mad lib. I think we can all agree that that's pretty haat, no?

After cleaning up from the Catalyst valentine session, I and several other members migrated on over to the conveniently timed biweekly meeting of the Creative Writing Society.

Now, ordinarily I might be inclined to share a snippet of what I wrote there, but the thing is, tonight happened to be "the umpteenth annual erotic writing night", and I feel as though I might find my position on the blogging team under serious review if I were to take it in that direction. So I'll just say that there was some hot lesbian kitchen sex, and post this fantastical thing Claire created on the tabletop using the foil from the chocolates we consumed as we were writing and leave it at that.

Isn't that lovely?

Yes. It is. In fact, one might almost say it's too lovely.

I mean, my god, what is this blog becoming? I've just posted about a bunch of nice kids getting together in a church basement to make wholesome construction paper cards to validate each other's self-worth, and then having some good clean fun with the English language.

And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, What is she trying to hide? Surely the Shire of Sack cannot be as idyllic as she claims. It must hold some dark secrets, some vile underbelly the admissions people don't want us to know.

And you're right. And the interesting thing about my job is that even though I technically work for the people who want everybody everywhere to aspire to an academic career at Mt.A., I'm allowed to say whatever the crap I want. I'm allowed to expose this place for what it truly is.

Yeah, Sackville may look sweet and sunny on the surface. You may be tricked into thinking this is some kind of maritime utopia. But you would be wrong. Dearest pudding, do not tremble; do not fear; be bold, and do not look away, although what I am about to tell and show you may frighten you to your very marrow.

Sackville has CRIME.

I'm going to call upon the late playwright Joe Orton to introduce this next selection of photos:


Thanks Joe. Although one slight editing suggestion: you could perhaps scratch the word "PASSION" and replace it with "BOREDOM". It's up to you, but I feel that might be a more appropriate adjective in this case.

What are these crimes, you ask? I'll tell you!

GRAFFITI!

You're shocked. I know. However, I would urge you not to entirely rule out Mount Allison as a potential location for your higher education on the basis of this criminal element alone.

In fact, it may be safe to say that it was an encounter with the graffiti of the Mount Allison campus and surrounding village that confirmed for me my desire to attend this particular institution. In the late summer of whatever the heck year it was when I came on an exploratory visit to the Mt.A. campus, somebody somewhere in Sackville decided they didn't like somebody named Trevor, and they got themselves a can of black spray paint and proceeded to broadcast really nasty, predominantly homophobic things about this Trevor person upon many of the concrete surfaces in the shire. That part didn't make me happy! The part that did make me happy was that somebody else had come along with a great quantity of white chalk and written much nicer messages in much nicer penmanship next to all the nasty, homophobic ones. Where the spray paint said "TREVOR SUCKS", the chalk said "I THINK HE'S COOL"; where the spray paint said "TREVOR IS GAY," the chalk said "PEOPLE SHOULD BE NICER TO TREVOR"; where the spray paint said "TREVOR LIKES DICK," the chalk had amended the message to "TREVOR LIKES DILL PICKLES ON HIS SANDWICHES AND THAT'S PRETTY NORMAL" -- and so on and so forth. I was sincerely touched by the effort to which somebody had gone to counteract all the Trevor-bashing, and I decided that a town containing such a somebody was a town I'd like to get to know better.

So now you may be wondering, "Have your hopes for this town been satisfied? Have you seen further works by this or other good-natured imps in the shire?"

I would like to answer those questions with the following photograph:

I do not know who is responsible for the above sign alteration. I do not know their gender, age, sexual orientation, or level of physical attractiveness. But I do know that I would probably make out with this person if they identified themselves to me. Or I could not make out with them, if that's what they're into. Whatever. Know that I love you if you are reading this, mystery sign vandal.

This is perhaps my favourite exhibit of mischeif marking in the shire, but there are others of note!

I am choosing not to identify the locations of the following pictures, so that you can seek them for yourselves when you come to visit or live here.

Can your heart stand the shocking facts?

If not, too bad. THEY ARE COMING TO GET YOU.






















Gee, I sure am glad somebody took the effort to highlight the mortar between the bricks that make up that wall. I might have missed it otherwise, and goodness knows what horrors that could breed!

So you see, it's not all paper hearts and sapphic skillets here in the shire. It's also ICY DRIVEWAYS and MILDLY ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES THAT MAKE THE BORING EXTERIORS OF BUILDINGS LESS BORING!

But wait! Sackville graffitiists are not always content to leave their criminality in the out-of-doors! On occasion, they bring their scandalous intentions indoors, into our libraries and our public washrooms and our residence bulletin boards. Stay tuned for further enticing installments of CRIMES OF BOREDOM!

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - Funnily enough, the front page story in the Argosy this week actually is about vandalism on campus. When I first saw it I kind of freaked out, because I thought perhaps some harm had come to the Alex Colville mural which is the pride and joy of Tweedie Hall, and kind of a big deal about the university in general...while I wouldn't have wanted anything like that to happen, I was frankly a little bit disappointed to discover, upon reading the article, that the only thing that was harmed was apparently a light fixture or something. Not that I want things to be harmed, but seriously, a light fixture? Only at Mt.A. is the need to replace a bulb front page news.

P.P.S. - My dad is one of those hip grown ups who knows about the internet, so he has a livejournal, and it just so happens that he recently posted an entry there in defense of the marvelous fun that can be had in the province of New Brunswick. It includes some very shiny pictures taken under less wintery conditions than those above. Check it out!

P.P.P.S. - WHY ARE YOU STILL AWAKE? Oh yeah, it's because you need to watch this totally gay video about how it's not cool to force people to be divorced just 'cause their genders match:

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
More info here, loves. Personally, I think this video is really well-done (excellent use of an excellent song), and although it's too bad we didn't get this kind of honest display of queer families in the media (even from the anti-prop-8 side) leading up to the election, I still think it could do a lot of good to spread this around now. So go forth and spread the gospel of Regina!

Heroic Saturday Morning Exploits In The Shire!

I'm about to shock you, pudding.

Are you ready?



Brace yourself.



Sometimes I wake up on Saturday mornings.

I know, I know, one word: disgusting. But there are certain advantages to such a repulsive practice. One of these is going to the Sackville Farmer's Market. I actually can't think of a single other advantage right now, but whatever. Farmers are worth getting up for! So sometimes I do. For example, I did last week, and I took pictures while I was at it.

One way in which you can tell you're getting kind of close to the Bridge Street Cafe (inside of which the market is held in the winter months) is that you come across this plaque, which I think it's safe to say is my favourite plaque ever:

You probably can't read the fine print on this, so I'll tell you what it's all about. Not only did this guy Harold Geddes have a helluva fine hat, but he also contributed greatly to the overall enjoyability of the shire by eliminating litter and just generally being a nice guy.

Basically, the existence of this plaque gives me faith in the ability of humanity to live up to the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. Dude said a lot of smart things, but my favourite might be this:

"If a man is called to be a street-sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well."

So yeah. Turn right at the sweet plaque and pretty soon you'll find yourself looking at this:


Entering the cafe, you will notice a) a pleasant combination of markety aromas, and b) some swell live music going on in the front window area. Sometimes if you ask nicely, musicians will pretend not to be annoyed that you are taking pitcures of them:

Those people above are pretty great people. The one with the guitar teaches some kind of science at Mount Allison and organizes the open mic nights on Thursday. The one with the drum is my friend and fellow English major Tim. There's a rumour going 'round that he also plays mando, but I've yet to see the evidence.

For obvious reasons, the market has a little less to offer in the way of vegetables in the winter months, but this guy was still totally supplying the shire folk with tasty root veggies:

It doesn't get much more heroic than that, pudding.

What you'll find a lot of at the market in the winter months is tasty baked goods. Like so:

Yumminess above created by Alyssa Greene of Piece of Cake Catering.

Over on the other side of the cafe, you'll find this guy with his various breads and sweets:

(And yes, that is an Obama-Biden sign stuck into that potted plant. It has been there since mid-October. And no, there are not now nor were there at any time any Canadian election insignia in said cafe. Sigh. We need some dudes and ladies with more decorative names on the ballot this side of the border, I guess?)

The lady with the stall across from him is hella multi-talented!

Pictured above are some of her jams and marmalades, bookended by some banana bread and huge blocks of cheese. Not pictured, but present on her table were various other types of bread, beef jerky, peanut butter balls, and peppermint patties, all home-made and delicious. I've also bought beets and cranberries from her when it was more seasonally appropriate. If you're ever trying to win my heart, any red fruit or vegetable that isn't a pepper is usually a good call. (I used to like red peppers too, but then I had a traumatic experience on a commune in Virginia. That's one of those story-beginning sentences that is actually much more interesting than the story it corresponds to...so I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Bonus points if you imagine me with go-go boots and a fashionable lady-beard.)

Unfortunately, I didn't end up taking a picture of the samosa stall. Those familiar with the S.F.M. will recognize this as a terrible oversight and be calling for my impeachment. The samosa lady is one of the most popular vendors at the market. In fact, she's so popular that my 10 o'clock arrival last Saturday morning meant that the last samosa sold while I was somewhere in the middle of the samosa line. Tragedies! In fact, the samosa lady sells not only samosas, but a rather delightful array of Indian food. The thing is, I was in an uncompromisingly samosaish mood last Saturday morning, so I quit the line immediately upon becoming aware that my dream wasn't going to come true. I'm sorry samosa lady! I should have gotten some of that chickpea stuff instead. It is equally delicious, even if it doesn't come wrapped in an edible triangle.

Tucked away in the opposite corner is this lovely table of year-round goods:

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "those don't look edible!" And the fact is, they aren't (unless you've got a taste for paper and mactac), but they sure are pretty! These sexy exciting collages are made by Jessi, a.k.a. One Crafty Mama, and they come in the form of bookmarks, greeting cards, notebook covers, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting about. Cuteness with glue is like, my favourite kind of cuteness.

Speaking of nice things you shouldn't consume orally, at a right angle to Jessi's table you'll find Raymond and Shirley's table o'soap:

The smell of this soap is one of my favourite things about coming to the market, and I say this as a dirty, scent-sensitive hippy who can almost always find a reason not to like soap. Seriously, this stuff is kind of alarmingly hippy-friendly, what with the lack of animal fat, chemicals, and colours, and the whole biodegradability factor. Nice!

We're moving back towards the door to the cafe now, and there's just one more stall I have to show you. (There are others I've missed, but you'll come to the market and meet those people and their farmy goodness yourself some time, right?) This here is Aliper:

Aliper is the superfantastic hippy-fairy-witch-mama-goddess of baked goods both sweet and savory in the shire. Can we get a close up on said goods?

Thank you. See that basket? See its intriguing contents? Those, my dear pudding, are what Aliper calls "elf cakes". And they are soooooo good. They're so good that the guy I was living with this summer who is basically afraid of hippy food is nonetheless bewitched by them. They are so good that I'm going to name my firstborn child after them. They are so good that...well, you get the idea. To the left of the basket, as well as just behind it, you can see some delicious chocolate hippy truffles also for sale. They are likewise soooo good. They are so good that I am tempted to plagiarize Jessica McLeod in order to describe them. (Fortunately this is the internet, and linking is almost as easy as plagiarizing, and twice as sexy.) They are so good that I will probably name my second born after them, or my other firstborn if I happen to have twins.

It might be said that Aliper's stall is among the principal reasons to haul your ass out of bed on a Saturday morning, and this would be true, were it not for the fact that the goods of Aliper can actually be obtained throughout the week at "Aliper's Hearth", a sweet little bakeshop (with soup!) tucked into the back of the Cackling Goose natural food store. So all is not lost if you really can't bring yourself to leave the blankets unattended on a Sabbath morn. But you won't get samosas!

Well my dear pudding, that is all I have to say about the Sackville Farmer's Market. Except that I need to start waking up earlier on Saturdays, because it has been far too long since my last samosa.

More life,
Emmet

P.S.- My awesome, sexy friend Ruby displayed her awesome sexiness this week by pointing out that I had two Confession #4s in my last entry. Her prize is me making you all aware how awesome and sexy she is. You could win a similar prize! By pointing out my silly mistakes. Because golly gee is it ever inevitable that I'll make more of them in the future. Or the present.

Impending Examinations + Upcoming Tea-centric Gathering + Potlucks Are Magic

December 5th means:
• Five days until my first two exams. (English Boot Camp and Women’s Studies on the same day, ouch.)
• Two days until my second-Sunday-of-advent tea party. (So much cleaning and baking still to be done!)
• One day after the last day of classes. (Awesome potluck at Cuthbertson House in celebration last night!)

Allow me to relate some details of each of these happenings in turn.

Uno:

I’m not happy about this. But I can’t do anything about it. (Although the university does allow you to switch up your exam-taking arrangements if you have three exams within a 24 hour period, which is nice of them.) Oh well, I guess it’ll at least make every day of the exam period after that seem like tasty tasty cake in comparison. Especially the big chunk of days in the middle where I have nothing to do but make ceremonial jabs at studying for what I anticipate to be my easiest exam, and radically alter the landscape of my head (oh my goodness all my friends are so tired of hearing about the haircut I haven’t gotten yet).

Dos:

I’m having a tea party on Sunday! This isn’t quite the first time I’ve held a party at this apartment, but as the last one was during the summer, only three people besides myself were in attendance (which was just about the right number of people to play surrealist poker, eat lasagna, and share a bottle of wine with optimal but not excessive tipsyfying results). I don’t expect all those invited to show up this time, but I think a lot of them will, and that will be nice.

Here’s the thing: I grew up in the woods. This had many advantages, but persuading townspeople (and/or their parents) that it was worth the effort to make it out to parties I threw was not one of them. It’s quite exciting to me that I now live in a place which, when I describe its location, people nod in recognition, and maybe even note their knowledge of former tenants of the same place, as opposed to furrowing their brows in confusion and asking, “isn’t that just a big gravel pit?” (Yes. It is a big gravel pit. It is a big gravel pit in the woods and my family built a house in it. Now come to my damn birthday.)

Anyhow. So close. So close to tea and cookies and candles with good company and and and and love.

I’m excited.

Tres:

Classes done for the semester! Woohoo!

The celebrations began as I was washing the dishes and heard a knock at my door. I shook off the suds and went to answer what turned out to be my landlady with a tray of sweets for me and my flat-mate. How darling is that? So maritimes.

After washing said dishes (and, okay, eating some of said sweets), I began making date squares. Well, I guess I can’t call them squares, because I made them in a heart-shaped pan, but

[LAUNDRY INTERLUDE!
Mm, delicious hot clean fluffy laundry, at long last.
You don’t want to know how long I’d been putting that off for.
/laundry interlude.]

you get the idea. With non-square-shaped date concoction in hand, I proceeded from my home to the far end of campus, where I entered Cuthbertson House, a.k.a. Eco’House, a.k.a. Sustainable Residence.

Cuthbertson is one of two houses on campus dedicated to a particular purpose (aside from housing Mt.A. students). The other one is Carriage House, a.k.a. Animal House—a new experiment in allowing students to have pets by putting abandoned and rescued animals of various species in their care. I haven’t had the opportunity to visit it since this experiment began, but last year I had several friends living in the house when it was a.k.a Academic House, and was considering applying for residence there at one point. For the most part, places in these houses tend to be occupied by non-frosh, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Of course, you should have a strong interest in the environment/animals if you apply for residence in one of these houses, but there are other things about them that are different from the other residences. Cue the bullet points:
• They’re real houses. Personally, I find this really comforting. It’s also kind of funny to be sitting in what for the most part is like a totally normal living room, except that it has a pay phone and an exit sign in it.
• Unlike other students in residence, those living in Carriage and Cuthbertson are not required to purchase a full meal plan. Instead, they generally get a meal plan which allows them to have a few meals a week at Jennings (the Mt. A. meal hall), and be in charge of their own food otherwise. This is coupled with the fact that these houses (Cuthbertson in particular) have real kitchens. There’s a lot of communal suppering that goes on.
• A party in one of these houses has the capacity to be infinitely classier than your standard “floor crawl”.

Which brings us back to what I was doing at Cuthbertson last night. I was invited to this potluck by the lovely Miss Charlotte: Cuthbertson resident, Tintamarienne and all-around nifty lady. Upon entering the house, I found myself waving hello to an adorable tiny blonde person — yes, this was a party with real kids, accompanied by their real grown-ups! I think I’ve mentioned this here before, but one of the things that sometimes makes my Mt. A. experience a little glum is that I don’t get to hang out with enough people under the age of seventeen. When I’m at home, I often work or volunteer for a children’s theatre. My former sources of employment also include an art camp and a toy store, and a lot of the “big kids” from when I was small are starting to have kids of their own, so just walking around my home town, I’m pretty likely to run into kids and their parents who I know. It’s kind of important to me to feel like a part of an intergenerational community in that way, and while I have had some really sweet kid-encounters in the shire, they were mostly over the summer, when I was only taking one course, and there were more outdoor, all-ages events I could get involved in without too much planning ahead. Point is, it was really nice to go to a potluck with babies and other non-adults climbing all over the place. That was Phase One of the potluck, along with SO MUCH GOOD FOOD. My goodness. I have to confess, in the midst of everything I’ve been trying to get done, there have been some skipped meals. I can safely say I got all caught up on my nutritional needs last night, and then some. Mmmmmmm…

Then, not long after most of the family units said their farewells and went home to early bedtimes, I had joined a predominantly Tintamarien cuddle puddle in the living room when a Cuthbertson resident by the name of Nico came in and sneakily transitioned us into Phase Two: the dance yer face off portion of the evening. I have to admit, I was not expecting this, which was fairly evident from my attire. It was the first time I’d danced in a long skirt for a while, and while it was an interesting difference, I think it’ll be the last time for a while as well. Not to mention I was wearing what was decidedly a winter dress (made of heavy blue corduroy) and even opening the door under the green EXIT sign didn’t let in anything colder than spring. (Have I mentioned it’s spring again? It is, for some crazy reason. I guess we live in Sackville or something.) Still, Nico threw us a haphazard, delightful mix of tunes, and I danced my face off quite merrily except when I went to take a breath and tune into the ongoing kitchen conversation of the non-dancers for a while.

Phase Three was more cuddle-puddling and conversation in another room. When at last people began to think it might be time for bed, we decided the classy thing to do would be for those of us who remained to form a parade, dropping people off at their various dwellings along the way. Not only was this an inherently charming suggestion, but I was pleased to note that the remaining people represented a nice mix of friends I’d been happy to run into at the party and new people I’d been happy to meet. And, having walked me right up to my door, they officially can't say they don't know how to get to my apartment, and therefore have no excuse not to come to my tea party.

Awright. That’s it for relating my experiences this time around. I do however have some important mystery instructions for you, which you will follow if you know what’s good for you:

Come up with things the acronym G.A.T. could/should stand for, and send them to me either via comments or email (elcameron at mta dot ca).

Some Examples:
Ginormous Arctic Trampoline
Grew A Tail
Galloping Antelope Trail
Gain All Trust
Gay As Turing
Girls Are Tricksy
Gape At Trains
Grateful After Tornado
Giants Ate Tina
Give Ants Trapezes
Gibbons Alter Things
Going After Tinkerbell
Gruesome Albino Thugs

JUST FOR EXAMPLE.

This is for reasons which are 100% awesome, I promise.

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - Apparently Odetta just died. Damn.

She sang my favourite versions of a lot of songs, and this was one of them.
Thanks for being so generous with your talent and so tireless with your activism, Odetta. Also, you had such great hands.

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