What are you rushin' towards? I can't keep up with you no more.

Oh my pudding,

I know, I stay away too long. I don't consider your needs. If we were married, this would be grounds for divorce. But this is the internet. We're all children of the new morning, selfish and greedy and loveless and blind.

I'm joking, of course. I love you dearly, pudding. Of course I do. You know what else I love?

Food shaped like letters of the alphabet.




Also, when Matthew gets carried away spiffing up the chalk board during a Catalyst meeting.


It starts innocently enough with a flowering vagina plant...

A few phallic mushrooms, for equal representation...

But then somewhere along the line, somebody gets into the ENCHANTMENT...

M. TotallySinisterLookingRabbit makes an appearance...

Accompanied, as always, by the Caribou of Questionable Motives...and...well...I don't think I can show you what happens next. It's TOO SILLY.

Contrary to what my blog may sometimes lead you to believe, Catalyst does actually get some pretty serious work done around here from time to time. For example, we recently held a forum to discuss religious perspectives on queer sexuality. And just this Monday, we showed a film called Boy I Am, about FTM transgender issues.

Hey look, you can watch the trailer. It was a really well-made film, I thought. Definitely recommended viewing, if you ever get the opportunity.

We're also nearing completion on our fabulous ZINE PROJECT, which is probably the endeavour that I've put the most work into as Activism Chair this year. I'm really hoping that this can become an annual Catalyst undertaking, so I've suggested that we elect somebody to the position of Zine Editor next year, mitosing it off from the Activism Chair position so that whoever is working on the zine next year doesn't end up having their zine work detract from other good activisty Catalyst things they are responsible for, or vice versa. This position will be open to frosh, so if you're interested in queer stuff and cutting and pasting, it could very well be you! (If you don't know what a zine is, or you just want to see lots of them all in one place, I recommend taking a gander at the Queer Zine Archive Project, which is just sexy beyond compare. Hopefully before too long, we'll have Catalyst content archived there!)

By the way, if you ever have any questions about Catalyst or queer life in Sackville, you're more than welcome to get in contact with The Current President (currently Katie "Gaypants" Saulnier) at catalyst(at)mta(dot)ca, or you can always just get in touch with me at elcameron(at)mta(dot)ca. Neither of us promises to know all the answers, but we are pretty hooked into the folks and the haps in the area, so the least we can do is direct your question to somebody who is more qualified to answer it than we are.

NEW SUBJECT TIME!

Actually, it's kind of an old subject, by which I mean I'd like to go back to something mentioned in my last entry.

Not 24 hours after I posted that entry, I got a very lovingly pissed off email from a friend who was involved in the workshop reading of my play. She said a lot of outrageously sweet things, but the general gist of it was, "don't belittle what you've done just because it wasn't the same thing that Jason and Landon did, bitch." Which upon re-reading my entry really does sound like something the girl who wrote it needed to hear, but here's the thing:

It's all a lie.

Well. Not quite all of it. I really did think Salad Days was a pretty remarkable achievement, and I really do think I need to be a touch more courageous about exposing my work if I'm really serious about this playwriting thing.

But...well. Okay. I'm going to quote from Sheila Callaghan's blog (pretending for a moment that it's not entirely ridiculous to compare my experience as an undergrad scribbler of as-yet-unstaged carnival adventures to the experience of a playwright who's cartoon likeness has appeared in the New Yorker):

"I don't want to get all braggy on the blog...but I FEEL braggy. Like, very. WILDLY. Which is why I am keeping my mouth shut."

Only, of course, I'm not keeping my mouth shut so much as I'm excitedly burbling that I HAVE DONE A THING every chance I get, and then hurriedly covering it up with self-deprecation, lest anybody think I'm actually, you know, pleased with myself.

But okay. Here's the big news: I wrote a play. Which is not a first for me, but I do have a pleasant tingly feeling that it is a best-so-far for me, and that's nice. And I invited a bunch of friends to my apartment and we ate muffins and drank wine and they told me what the play sounded like to them, and I made notes, and then I...made it better. Which is a really comforting thing to find you're still capable of doing, after spending two years with a series of words, and having reached the point where you're not quite satisfied with 'em, but don't quite know what's causing the dissatisfaction, either. It's nice to know, after spending all that time alone scribbling and tapping away at this thing, that what I've created does, at least in places, make sense to people who aren't me, and that there's hope for the parts that don't make sense too -- that people don't mind talking about them with me if I ask nicely, and that I'm not utterly incapable of seeing my work from the outside. (Although it's difficult, and never something i can really get a solid grasp on...but that's okay. It's like oobleck. And I like oobleck.)

Anyhow. A month or so later, you find you've sold your soul to the university store in exchange for photocopying and coil-binding services, and you're holding something like this...

...and trying to sort out how something this fat...

...is going to fit into this envelope...

...which of course, it simply is not.


But it's all right. All you need to do is perform a little reverse-gastric-bypass-surgery with packing tape and donor tissue from another specimen.

Ta da!

It's mailing time.

Which is to say that with any luck, these fine people have by this time received my freakshowishly fat envelope, and will soon be making professional judgements on the quality of its contents.

It's not that I'm not ready to let go of the project (for the time being), or that I don't know what to do with myself now that it's gone, but...well. It is a little strange. All these other writing projects that were on the back burner while I focused on finishing that particular script are now vying for primacy, and I'm like, "Woah, dudes, hold on, I have a huge friggin' pile of unwritten papers to take care of before I even start to think about you." And, as is the way with me and research, the process of writing papers leads to the conception of further ideas to shove aside at least until the end of the school term. (I think I need mind-condoms. For safe, clean, chemical information-sex. Messy, but not dirty.)

Speaking of playwriting and things I'm going to do with myself, though, I have Really Exciting News! A while back I applied for an internship with the Playwright's Atlantic Resource Centre, and just recently I was offered the job. This means I'll be hanging out in the shire for the summer. Should be good times, not only because this is a job I am looking forward to learning from, but because my flat-mate and several of my particular friends have also decided to do the summer-in-Sackville thing. I predict fantastic adventures. Picnics, perhaps? IT IS A DISTINCT POSSIBILITY.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, when what I really need to be doing is avoiding falling behind. Time to return to my stack of books, pudding. I'm very excited about Shakespearean triangles right now.

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - Yesterday I voted emphatically in favour of continued funding for 7 Mondays, Mt.A.'s fab little student poetry-shortfiction-photography journal, which I continue to be infatuated with, even if it doesn't love me back. As part of the Save 7 Mondays movement, the current editorial board has been keeping up this neat little blog, which aside from spreading the word about how 7 Mondays may be saved, is also being used to display examples of why it should be saved, i.e.: particularly juicy bits from volumes past. I recommend checking it out.

P.P.S. - Um. In case you prefer it when you know why things are called what they're called, you might like this entry better after viewing this:

PARTYWANKERY TO THE MAX.

Oh pudding,

I’m exhausted.

There’s a lot of stuff I haven’t told you. That’s the ironic thing about blogging. When you’re busy doing the kind of things that would make really interesting blog posts, you don’t have time to blog.

I didn’t tell you about the English Society Wine and Cheese (where we all tried to be subtle about perusing Dr. Brown’s record collection and Dr. Lapp read selections from A Christmas Carol and everybody smiled like little kids on a postage stamp and I convinced Katie to get tipsy with me and then I left my cake pan there and we went to somebody else’s house and spooned under a Boy Scout blanket watching Fight Club and The Tudors).

I didn’t tell you about regaining broadcasting powers at CHMA (which I’ve used the past two Tuesday nights to spew out my little radio show Skeleton Food, which you can learn more about here).

I didn’t tell you about submitting some of my poetry to our pretty little literary journal, 7 Mondays (which required an hour or so of fretful consultation with three trusted friends to decide which of my names to submit them under, and why).

I didn’t tell you about the in-class presentation of the Shakespeare in the Schools project (which will be revisited and performed in a more polished form a the high school in January).

I didn’t tell you about the Lessons and Carols service at the chapel featuring Elliot Chorale (which was beautiful).

I didn’t tell you about how incredibly amazing the Guy Davis Trio turned out to be (which was a superfantasticallymuch, and also Guy Davis totally hit on me because I poured his tea for him…which was equal parts extremely embarrassing and totally awesome).

I didn’t tell you about going to see Cloud Nine at Windsor Theatre in October (which broke my mind in a much-needed way).

…and no doubt a lot of other stuff too. It’s been a busy semester. Oh well. You know what I’m going to tell you about now? My tea party. You know why? Because it was a good tea party. I haven’t felt proud of very many things lately, but damn…my tea party hosting skills are nothing if not epic. (Photo credit for all pictures below unless indicated otherwise goes to Talisa Tims. I live with her!)


My flat-mate decided to document the progression of the cleaning of the flat photographically, perhaps under the (entirely realistic) assumption that we will never see our common areas this clean again. It took three friggin’ days, pudding. This is one of the pictures where you don’t see a bag of garbage perched on any of our furniture. (And yeah, that one wall is painted a completely different colour than the rest of the walls visible in the picture. That is only the beginning of the many paint-related anomalies in this apartment. Perhaps I will gve you a photograhic tour of them some day...because they are legion, and I kind of love them.)


CHMA radio personality and all-around nifty guy Grant Hurley described this table setting as “romantic”, and who am I to disagree? (Er, ignoring the plastic spice bags lurking behind the candy dishes.)


Later, as people arrived with baked goods and supplementary teacups it got perhaps a little less romantic-looking and a little more…how you say…AWESOME. (That loaf. That loaf is the loaf-love of my life. Made by the multi-talented Sara Williamson.)


My friends Katie and Roland are salsa dancing machines. Sometimes you stop paying attention to them for a second and when you turn around they’re doing salsa moves in your living room. It’s cute.


I made a huge pot of chai tea! I’ve been wanting to do this for ages. A friend of mine’s house used to constantly smell of chai tea, because his mother made it so often that the smell kind of seeped into the walls. His mother has since moved away to the country (close to where my parents live, in fact), and the smell has faded as a cluster of delightful but non-chai-obsessed students have taken up residence in the place. The point is, I’m a fan of home-made chai, and it turns out it’s not as difficult to make as I thought it would be, and it seemed to go over well with my guests.


Of course, this whole thing is really just an excuse to play with fire.


In a display of extreme awesomeness, Dr. Lapp, of reading-stuff-so-you-get-shivery-in-the-spine fame made an appearance at our little tea shindig (he is the bearded fellow pictured above). That was rather nice, as I used to like inviting a favourite teacher to advent tea at my parents' house, and I've been hosted for dinner at the Lap-Petlock residence a number of times over the past year and a half (mostly in conjunction with Catalyst events, as Dr. Lapp's partner, Melody Petock, is our staff advisor). It was quite sweet to be able to say that I'd put together a homey environment close enough to a real house to continue traditions from my childhood, and for invitations to go two ways with real grown ups.


Later, the aforementioned Grant Hurley tried to break the newly instated "No Leaving Without Hugging" rule. I was not impressed. Or at least that’s what this picture looks like to me. This may be revisionist history. We may not have even written said rule until some time after Grant’s departure. WHATEVER. (Note the cute number 7 on Grant’s shirt. That’s the 7 Mondays logo! Grant has somethingorother to do with 7 Mondays. That possibly means he’ll end up reading my poems even if they’re not deemed publishable. That’s a little embarrassing, because Grant is definitely a better writer than I am. But that’s okay. I am slowly trying to convince myself that a big part of being a writer is being embarrassed when your work is seen by people who are much better writers than you. This is, I suppose, incrementally less true for people who are better writers than I am, but shush. That part does not aid my personal mythology.)

That’s all I have to say about my tea party. It was nifty, though.

Today I wrote two exams: Lit. Periods to 1800 and Women’s Studies. Hence the exhaustion.

Strangely, I feel pretty good about the essay portion of the first one, aside from the fact that I could have used more time. I’m kind of in limerence with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight lately. And Beowulf, a bit. My essay was about how poets are in charge of ripping holes in you and your ideas about the world (or rather, widening the holes you leave open in your carelessness), and both of those poems are very good examples of that. And that, in itself, is a very good example of how I feel about my major. I’m impressed by the daring work that good writers do, and I’m drawn to studying it, but it’s also really, really uncomfortable, and sometimes I wish I had something even remotely approaching the idea of "ability" in a less emotionally/spiritually probing field. But no, I'm here with my English major and my Drama and Religious Studies minors, driving myself crazy by choice. Excellent.

Then you get a three hour break before geting depressed all over again blaming everything on patriarchy. (Oh Women's Studies...we've had some good times together, but I think this may be the end for you and I. It just Was Not Meant To Be. Although perhaps I shouldn't say such things.)

So yeah. I’m tired. And now it’s time to get to studying for my Hebrew Bible exam—wheee, more patriarchy!

I hope all is well with you, pudding. Make sure you’re drinking too much tea.

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - Oh geez, I can't not share this with you.

If any of you are this brilliant at coming up with satirical protest ideas, please come to Mount Allison. We're pretty cool, but we need more rabble-rousing of this caliber.