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.

That Emmet girl never updates her blog. Isn't that stupid?

Pudding pudding pudding,

It's been ages, I know. Here's the trouble: whenever one takes more than a few days to get around to writing one of these things, one begins to think that one should make up for the delay by providing one's readership with something truly epic in scope. The longer one waits, the less adequately epic one's adventures seem to be.

This is not to say that good times have not been had. Most prominently, perhaps, in terms of things that might interest you, Stereophonic just wrapped up.

Stereophonic is this big shiny crazy happy mid-winter music festival put on by CHMA in the shire every year. It features a whole lot of different performers playing in a whole lot of different venues over the course of a weekend and then also some weekdays just to be cheeky.

Confession #1: I only went to two shows this year.
Confession #2: That was one more than I went to last year.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be the big live music nerd. I have a reputation to uphold. But if there's one thing I love to do even more than upholding my reputation, it's failing to meet expectations. In any case, the two shows I went to sure were swell.

The first was on Friday evening at the Vogue, and began with a performance by a young man whose name I forget but who sang a rather charming little song about a halfway house, accompanied by really impressive facial gesticulations. (And no, the word "expressions" would not be more accurate in this case. The dude was unmistakeable gesticulating. With his face. Which I suppose is a good thing to be able to do if you play an instrument which occupies your hands. The funny thing is, he didn't gesticulate with his hands or his face when talking in between songs.) Following him we had a lovely little dose of local fella Al Tuck.

Confession #3: This was my first time seeing Al Tuck perform. Shameful, brothers and sisters, shameful.

Anyhow. Al Tuck turned out to be quite the charming dude I've always been told he was, so that was nice, and then we heard from a guy I had seen before, Mount Allison's own Pat LePoidevin.

Confession #4: If it were not for Facebook, I would almost certainly have spelled Pat's last name hugely, hilariously, humiliatingly incorrectly.

Pat played some songs I'd heard before and some songs I hadn't. Of particular note: the story of a musical encounter with a wise polar bear named George. Swoon. (Oh my goodness the internet knows about it already! Funnily enough, it seems that that footage was taken by my fellow blogger Geoff. Crazycakes!)

Speaking of people who make me swoon, Julie Doiron was next on the bill. If you are not yet aware of/in love with Julie Doiron, I submit the following for your consideration:

Definitely somebody Sackville has reason to be proud of. She's lovely, just lovely, hopping around the stage in her sockfeet, sweetly ranting about bicycle theft in between songs. (By the way, if you stole Julie Doiron's bicycle, you should know that the brakes don't work. Unfortunately, this discredits my theory that my own bicycle is safe from theft simply because it barely works.)

Now, as gorgeous as all of the aforementioned folks were, my real reason for crawling out of my hobbit hole for this particular show was yet to come...and his name was Old Man Ludecke.

Confession #5: I may have cried a bit when he played Willie P. Bennett's Caney Fork River.

Now, there are many good things to be said about the Vogue Cinema, but you can't say it's the most dance-friendly venue in the shire, what with the permanently affixed seating and all. Nonetheless, that sweet little man with his sweet little banjo got us all up on our feet for the last few songs, cheerfully jostling each other in the aisles as we shared what little space there was.

Confession #6: I definitely bumped heads with a shadowy figure at the back of the theatre during one of the intermissions.
Confession #7: It turned out to be my employer. Oops.

Walking home from the theatre, my friend Charlotte remarked that the evening had been a huge renewal of faith for her: specifically, faith that people can be drawn to participate in simple, beautiful things if given the opportunity. I thought that summed up the overall feeling the evening left me with quite well.

The next morning there was a "Pancakes for Parkinson's" fundraiser at the Anglican Church, which was nice because I like pancakes and my room-mate likes toppings, so we went together and were well breakfasted. Then at 2:00 PM, I was back at the Vogue once more for the second of the two Stereophonic shows I chose to partake of this year: the Bluegrass Jam. Although it was the same venue and lighting set-up as the previous evening's entertainment, the atmosphere was quite different. Rather than being a crowd of students with the occasional adult, this was a crowd of seniors with a tiny smattering of younger folks, most of whom were connected to the radio station. Apparently this was the first specifically bluegrass show in the festival's 6-year history, and it definitely seems like it was about time. As the fella who produces the Buegrass Jam show on CHMA remarked into the mic,
"Bluegrass fans are probably some of CHMA's most dedicated listeners. I know this because any time we have a mix-up with the Jam we get big bunches of you calling in to tell us right away."

I had been particularly excited for this show because, while there are frequent bluegrass shows in the Sackville area, they tend to be a touch outside of the student transportation/price range. As I mentioned earlier regarding the Blues Society nights at George's, student shows are nice, but multi-generational shows are better. Bringing bluegrass into the Stereophonic schema is awesome. Thanks for doing that, Stereophonic people. Looking forward to more next year!

The next day was Sunday, and I was relieved to wake up to snow, because it was a pleasant change from it being just plain bitter fucking cold all the time. To quote Dr. Blagrave:
"In Sackville we can be reasonably assured that the weather is going to suck tomorrow, and that it's going to suck a different way the day after that."

Anyhow. The day increased in awesome when I got a call from a nice boy named Tim (who happens to be in Dr. Blagrave's class with me, funnily and irrelevantly enough), inviting me to a drum circle which I could hear over the telephone was already in progress. So I bundled up and headed on over. I wound up playing my knees more than I played any actual drums. This is not to say that there was a shortage of drums, just that I am mindbogglingly sucks at maintaining a decent beat on anything that is not my own person. Between the Old Man Ludeke show and this, I seem to have given myself a lot of tiny cute bruises on my thighs, but whatever. Totally worth it, and by the end of the afternoon I had actually worked my way up to an egg shaker, and then a real drum. All in all, it's nice to have friends who have drum circles and like you enough to call you up when they're happening. You should try it some time!

At some point that has been lost in the fuzzy excitement of my formatting-addled mind, I finished, in a humble, drafty sense, a script I have been working on for the better part of the past two years. I'm feeling equal parts relieved and terrified about this. The relief is probably fairly obvious, but the terror comes in right after it and tells me, in a voice like every girl who understood the ways of the world infinitely better than I in middle school, that if I think the hard part is over now, I am an idiot. Then it kicks me in the face. Then it tells me to get back to work. Then I do.

To that end: I dropped the script off at the bookstore to be photocopied this morning. Friends are coming over to read it out loud on Saturday night. As soon as I can stop not liking the idea of everybody hating this thing I've been dodging their company to work on for the past as-long-as-I've-known-anybody-I-know-here-and-then-some, I'll be fine. This of course means that I'm going to be having an ongoing aneurysm of the soul for the rest of the forseeable future, I think. That'll be okay, so long as it's a productive one, right?

The only problem with writing is that it makes you like, completely disgusting. Oh well.

By the by, to tide you over if I take too long between entries again (because I know you're like, 100% dependent on my daily observations), it might interest you to know that I also maintain this here twitter account. So, you know, you can keep updated on the important stuff, like when I misplace kitchen utensils and completely fail to not be an embarrassing internet fangirl dork. BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW THAT OR THEY WON'T LET YOU INTO THIS SCHOOL.

Seriously.

Okay, this is just getting silly. I love you, pudding. I love you possibly more than I love pudding, although now that I mention that, I sure haven't eaten pudding in a long time, and that's a shame.

NO MORE SILLINESS, EMMET!

Fine, fine. But I love pudding. Ambiguously.

More Life (and pudding),
Emmet

We're going to plan a gala / For those who have no future / Because they are just creatures / Of the Arts

November 27th, 2008

Oh my pudding,

It’s been a strange week. Strange in a lot of ways, but I think I’m going to focus on the theatrical ones for now. It being Thursday, the week’s not technically over, but I think it just reached its climax (prove me wrong, remaining Intro to Shakespeare performers), so I’m gonna entry it up already.

I could also just make it a week by pretending that weeks begin on Friday. If I’d been brought up a good Quaker kid who referred to Sunday as “First Day” so there could be no mistaking it, I’d know better — but I was the child of the run-away-from-Reagan child, raised in the savage sugar bush of Eastern Ontario, where even our calendars are anarchists, beginning and ending their weekly units whenever it damn well pleases them.

That’s a lie, but whatever. A lot of things I tell people about my homeland sound like lies. The legendary mid-winter kangaroo sighting. The colours which people who’ve swum in the Tay River have turned. Drilling holes in trees to extract their precious life fluid and boiling it down to a viscous liquid sweetener. (You probably do believe that last one, but I met a guy in Montreal this summer who was entirely convinced that I must have been pulling his leg when I described the syrup-making process. I never realized how ridiculous it sounds until I was trying to explain it to somebody who didn’t believe me.)

Where was I? Oh yeah. Pretending this week started with last Friday. This makes sense, if this s going to be an entry where I talk primarily about theatrical affairs, because on Friday I had an audition. It was for a student-directed production of Sarah Kane’s Crave. In my pre-audition research on the play, one of the first things I stumbled across was this review, from which I extract the following two sentences:

“Ms. Kane killed herself last year in a mental hospital at age 28. Her first ever New York production…leaves little doubt why.”

Now, shortly thereafter I came across this touching article entitled 'Suicide art? She's better than that' — which was written by a friend and fellow playwright, and therefore merits being taken with slightly more grains of salt than the other. Nonetheless, it had become apparent to me that this was unquestionably dark stuff I was being asked if I might like to try out for an opportunity to deal with. Apparently this sounded like jolly good times to me, so I scribbled my name on the list on the call board, and showed up at my claimed time on Friday afternoon with my monologue memorised and ready to perform in a cozy little office that I didn’t even know existed. (The theatre was full of sets for another show or some such thing, and Hesler Hall, the other main rehearsal area in the building, was occupied by auditions for another student-directed show.)

Emily, the student assessing my merits as an actor, was really friendly and responsive in the audition — something I’ve noticed is more-or-less the norm here, which I find a pleasant change from some theatre groups I’ve worked with where they seem to really enjoy making auditioners as uncomfortable and unsure of themselves as humanly possible. Following my monologue, Emily gave me a brief rundown of each character’s motivations, and had me do cold readings for both of the play’s female characters. They were sort of peculiar readings, as the script doesn’t actually have monologues per se (with one notable exception), so Emily had chosen a selection of individual lines from each character, and requested that we try to make them sound as though they belonged together. It was a really interesting challenge, and I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

[SUSPENSE.]

I had to wait until Tuesday to find out the results of that whole business, so YOU DO TOO. Only in your case, Tuesday=later on in this entry. That’s not so hard, is it now?

That night I had a loooooong telephone conversation with my mother. It was much-needed. I had forgotten how much of my life used to get sorted out between the two of us on sleepy morning car rides into work/school. I had a lot of pent-up anxiety about the potential disparity between my two primary career goals: teacher and playwright. What if what I write is seen as unsuitable for a teacher? What if the person I become when I get very involved in my writing is a horrible teacher? What if I end up deciding not to teach and I end up a scrawny starving artist cliché and die miserable and alone? Et cetera. I can’t say that one telephone call home totally resolved all of these issues for me forevermore, but a mother’s wisdom is valuable stuff. Some examples from this particular call (paraphrased, as this was a week ago now, and none of these were written anywhere outside of my brainmachine, which is rather crowded this time of year):

#1 - “You don’t make a good first impression. None of us do. First impressions are not this family’s strong point.”
#2 - “Oh, you won’t starve. Remember, if worse comes to worse, we own this house and we can plant more gardens.”
#3 - “I think you just need to think about this play.” (In response to my neurotic explosion of my worries about one particular script I’m working on now into an issue the size of WHAT I AM SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THE REST OF MY LIFE AND WHETHER OR NOT I AM A TERRIBLE PERSON IF I DO/DON’T DO IT.)

So yeah. “This play.” I’m working on it. I had set down this script for quite some time — in fact, semi-despaired of finishing it, which would have been lametastic, considering how much time and energy and love and motions-which-will-no-doubt-lead-to-repetitive-strain-injury-sooner-or-later I’ve put into it over the past two years — but found myself wading into it again recently, albeit in that really wimpy first-swim-of-the-summer kind of way where you dip your toes in and act astonished that the water is in fact wet, and consider yourself accomplished when you get in up to your knees, while at the same time remembering fondly what it was like last summer when you were exceedingly brave and dove in froglike without even considering the details of the situation.

My, that certainly was a long sentence. I don’t think my grade six teacher realised that when he accused me of run-ons, I was going to start trying to master the punctuation to make them legitimate, rather than simply chopping them into nice bite-sized chunks with a couple of periods. Although. I’ve. Nothing. Against. Periods.

Er, right — the script. I’m a bit worried about ending it, on the grounds that I’m terrible at endings generally, and my characters are all up to some mischief they seem reluctant to explain to me. I’ve been working a very strange (there’s that word again) scene for what feels like ages now in which they constantly hold back from saying what I thought I’d been setting them up for the whole time, and then suddenly burst forth with something ridiculous that I definitely did not prepare for. My confusion is multiplied by the fact that this scene is actually three different scenes happening simultaneously, with a lot of overlapping dialogue/action. This is a new level of complexity for me as a writer, and I’m not in any way confident that the way I’m plotting this out on the page is going to make for good, or even vaguely comprehensible theatre with real voices and bodies. Which brings me to another thing I’ve been having cute little wee tiny mini fun-sized anxiety attacks throughout the day about…

I’ve brought up the possibility with a couple of friends who are silly enough to occasionally express encouragement for my scandalous escapades with the written word of perhaps some night gathering a group of willing victims together to…(swallow hard now)…read…the script…out loud…maybe? This idea both excites and terrifies me. I think the ‘terrifies’ would be a smaller factor if I were talking about a one-act two-hander, but no. Silly me had to go and write a full-length beast with eight friggin’ characters (assuming I don’t resort to Deus Ex Machina and throw a couple of gods in there to get the bloody thing over with). Eight seems like an unfathomable number of people to expose this script to just yet — not to mention the staggering unlikelihood of finding an evening when eight people who would be willing to do me such a tremendous favour might be available, the schedules of Mount Allison students being what they are.

My goodness, we’re still on Friday night, aren’t we? Well, fast forward through the weekend. I already mentioned the snow and the vegan muffins. Everything else was homework or script-work. Or lollygagging about on Facebook/twitter, but that goes without saying, right?

Monday afternoon I went to what was, in theory, the penultimate rehearsal of the Shakespeare in the Schools project for this year. I’ve been working with a group of high school students and my fellow Mounties on a fifteen-minute version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream every non-holiday Monday since mid-October. The idea of Shakespeare in the Schools is that the kids (sometimes elementary, sometimes secondary), with guidance from us, get to decide how they want to present one of William Shakespeare’s works that we, the university students, have been assigned at some point in our Intro to Shakespeare course (although participation in the program is also open to Mt. A. students not enrolled in said course who just want to do it because it’s awesome). This year, our small but mighty crop of high school participants decided to stick mainly with fragments of Shakespeare’s original poetry to tell the story — but with some Fresh-Prince-theme-song-style narration to tie it all together. This project is, for those students enrolled in Intro Shakespeare, an alternative to a more straightforward performance exercise with other class members. SitS is obviously a much bigger time commitment for those that choose it (not to mention a bit of a walk), but we knew that going into it, and it’s more than delightful enough to pay for itself. Besides, I personally couldn’t say no to it after Dr. Bamford began our first class of the semester by showing a documentary in which middle school children performed Othello on the Globe Theatre stage with a giant strawberry-patterned parachute. Yeah, if you want to capture my heart, kids and theatre are a winning combination. I also like kittens, brown paper bags, and candy flowers on sticks. Er, you’re not trying to capture my heart, are you? That could get awkward. I need it to live, see.

Oy. So. Some time Tuesday, I wander into the lobby of Windsor Theatre, investigate the call board situation and discover that…

I didn’t get into Crave.

I was kind of sulky and immature about it in my brain at the time, because I just wanted to feel loved and blah blah blah, but I’m actually a pretty big fan of just coming to watch shows, and I’m looking forward to watching this one in February. If I’m not too outrageously busy, maybe I will even say yes when I’m inevitably asked to do some kind of techy job I can’t even pronounce on this and/or some other show next semester. That may or may not be an idle threat. Tech work is like the extremely gorgeous and intimidating femme fatale of my theatre experience. I want her, and I have gotten vaguely close to her in the past, but I have usually fainted directly afterwards, and I can’t, if I’m being honest, see how that could be a good basis on which to form a lasting relationship.

Wednesday was not a theatrical day. Nothing theatrical happened on Wednesday anywhere. Unless you are a member of Tintamarre, in which case your grande spectacle Argument opened, and everybody who went realized that they have always loved you, because it was that good.

I’m not a member of Tintamarre, but a lot of them happen to be very dear to me, so I grabbed a handful of change and biked on over to the Windsor Theatre once again to take in the traditional Thursday night Pay What You Can performance.

Tintamarre is sort of a difficult project to do justice to in any way other than plunking you down in a time and place where you can watch a performance — or join the cast/crew, if you’re really brave. I’ve yet to graduate to the latter level of commitment to the beautiful, crazy, collaborative dream, but so far as I have gathered, what happens is this: anybody who’s interested in being involved gets together at the beginning of the semester with an idea — as simple as a couple of lines from Dr. Fancy (the French/Drama professor who leads this madness), and they begin to craft a story and a script in both official languages. Songs are written, super-exciting sets and costumes are fabricated, and before you know it, you’re wearing a lumpy silver body suit, melodically imploring a room full of people to tell you why they don’t like Thor, and punning (not to mention swearing) in a language you only vaguely remembered how to say “cup of tea” in a few short months ago.

Argument is the third Tintamarre production I’ve seen thus far, and I’m fairly certain it was also the longest (a factor I suspect will change when the script is shorn down for the school tour in April). It may also be my favourite to date. The really blatant attacks on the current (sigh) Prime Minister through a character known as “Stephen Artstalker” certainly didn’t hurt my appreciation for it.

My goodness it’s late. Shouldn’t you be in bed, pudding? Shouldn’t I? Yes. Yes I should.

Bonne chance with whatever you’re doing right now. Feel free to email me if you want to know more about something you think I might be able to help you with, Mount-Allison-wise: elcameron (at) mta (dot) ca.

Plus de Vie*,
Emmet

*You’d tell me if this was an inaccurate translation of “More Life,” wouldn’t you**? I’m looking at you, future Tintamarrrien.ne.s

**Our dear friend President Gaypants informs me that "Plus de Vie" in fact translates roughly to "No More Life" (at least if you're Acadian)...but I don't have an alternative up my sleeve. HM!

Holy Crap It's Winter, Mes Amis (+ Sometimes I Write Papers + A Somber Occasion)

Hey pudding,

My goodness! I leave this blog alone for a week and all of a sudden there’s a seasonal transition to be talked about.

Maybe “transition” isn’t quite the right word. Transition implies something gradual—something for which one can be prepared. That may well be an accurate description for winter as you’ve come to know it in wherever-the-heck-you-are-from-if-you-are-from-somewhere-with-winter-at-all, but we don’t mess around with those little, teasing autumn snows that look pretty in the air but melt as they hit the pavement and don’t really interrupt the grand scheme of things in the slightest here in the shire. Oh no, not us. We jump headlong into epic, undeniable, event-cancelling, library-closing snows.

As the season began to take over earlier in the week, I was a big grumpypants about it because I didn’t want to cease my daily shared experience with ma bicyclette just yet, but this morning I woke up and made (as they were retroactively dubbed by somebody I’m about to mention) “Go Go Gadget Vegan Muffins”, put some of them in a handy dandy Tupperware container, and trudged off through the snow to meet my friend Eric (the somebody you were waiting for me to mention) in his room at Hunton House, where we spent several hours eating muffins, talking about things that are TOO SECRET FOR BLOGGING (gasp, whatever could she mean?! ...use your imaginations, dudes and ladies), and recording things on garage band featuring his room-mate’s sparkly blue ukulele. Er, mostly Eric did the playing/recording...but I looked up chord charts and accidentally contributed the possible title Metronomes Are For Chumps.

So yeah. Winter and me are cool now. I think winter kind of works on the same principles as a baby. It makes everything so much more difficult and the things it likes to do make no sense whatsoever, but it’s friggin’ cute and it transmits contact cuteness to everybody who touches it, or sees it through a proective glass sheild. Examples noted on my journeys to and from Hunton this morning:
· A girl telling another girl about something ridiculous involving her brother and a wall of snow from when they were little kids.
· A girl saying to her friend, “I’ve lost my mittens / you naughty kittens / and you shall have no pie”.
· A faux-orgy in snowsuits on the football field.

Friggin' adorable.

Okay. Speaking of sudden non-transitions to completely different topics, somewhere in the midst of writing my most challenging paper of the semester, this came out:

I shirked house initiation when I was a frosh. I usually feel sort of weird about intentional group bonding activities in general: pep rallies; trust exercises; supposedly empowering retreat assignments that inadvertently end up just underlining the crushing, insurmountable loneliness of the high school student...these things are not really my bag — not least because they usually seem to be scheduled for just shortly after I experience a more organic bond-forming moment with some or all members of the group in question. Doing something artificially devised to make me feel close to the same people tends to feel at best silly, and at worst like it reverses the whole process so I have to start all over again. Thus, having consulted with the dons and a few of my particular house friends to make sure it wouldn’t be too big a slight to any of them, I hid away in my room with my radio and my notebook while my housemates got covered in condiments and oatmeal and tested on the anatomy of the average goat (Bennett’s mascot, don’cha know). The whole affair lasted maybe twenty minutes, and when my recently made friends had been given their congratulatory blue plastic beer steins and the opportunity to shower, we reunited and moved on to our premeditated evening activities (which to the best of my recollection involved slight inebriation of one kind or another and that movie with the stop motion gorilla and everybody’s favourite screaming Canadian). It’s entirely possible there was some kind of magic I missed out on by not participating in ye olde ritual humiliation, but I think I felt about as at home in my residence as somebody as socially inept as me could be expected to feel — in fact, quite a bit more so than I expected from the outset.

I will say that I am in some ways jealous of people who are able to accept these things at face value and grasp their intended qualities instead of getting wrapped up in their own minute little feelings about everything that happens to them moment-to-moment and coming up with a really depressing interpretation of the situation, but hey—I’m a compulsive-writer-turned-English-major, so did I ever really have a chance at joyful under-analysis? I’m thinking not. I mean sure, I’ve tried to let myself get away with it before, but I always end up feeling grumpy and incomplete and dashing off into a corner somewhere under the hood of my sweater to produce some questionable prosetry (read: that which is not good enough at being poetry or prose to legitimately qualify as either) about my inability to function like a regular human being. All in all, it seems a better move to just not get involved at the beginning, and write on a subject I’ve exhausted a little less thoroughly.

I mention this right now, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a paper, because it has suddenly come to my attention that I’m being initiated: not into my current domestic situation (which is shared with a charming young woman who I’m pleased to report is as much of a nerd as I am), but into my chosen academic discipline.

I suppose I should have seen this coming when, on the first day of my Lit. Periods to 1800 course, I was bade welcome to “English Boot Camp”, but I took that to be a light-hearted jibe about having to be in class at an obscenely early hour and respond to surprise quizzes before the caffeine had kicked in. Here in the middle of a puddle of open books, incomprehensible notes, and used teacups however, I’m beginning to believe it’s a little more apt an analogy than that. I don’t think I’m allowed to explain it in any more detail than that to anybody who hasn’t been through it yet (i.e.- the assumed readership of this blog), but trust me...it’s one of the most excellent feelings you’ll ever have on not enough sleep and way too much caffeine.

Oh, and in case you ever wanted to know what fancy university scholars sound like when they’re distracting themselves with MSN conversations...

emmet says: you know what's weird?
Eric says: what?
emmet says: being a writer who's been dead for years and years and years and having people write great big books about what you were probaby getting at.
Eric says: that is a bit odd....
emmet says: i mean, if you're alive it's probably weird if somebody writes something about something you wrote and interprets it in way you're not necessariy aligned/comfortable with...but then you can just be like "um dudes no", but if you're dead you can't say nohin', so it's like EVERYBODY'S RIGHT.
or at least that what's i'm going to tell myself so i don't feel like a big jerky jerk for trying to definitively make up my mind in one night about what chaucer was tryna say about women-folk.
Eric says: but I mean, there has to be a set sort of idea that people have, I mean people aren't that stupid i guess
emmet says: it's just odd because there are certain points that everybody hits and pretty much agrees upon, and then there are these radically different interpretations of what those points actually meeeeeaaaan. and the dude is uber-dead, which is most unhelpful of him. anyhow. back to essay.

That’s me in all my unedited, non-capitalised, typotastic glory, chillens.

At 8:32 on the night before the paper is due, I am suddenly stricken with an irrational fear that I am mistaken not only in my thesis, but somehow in the subject of my research altogether. A good 25% of my mind is paralysed with the conviction that I must have remembered incorrectly which text’s name I drew, or that I somehow failed to read the right thing in the first place. The better part of my brain assures me that I took most careful note of it at the time, and that it’s pretty unlikely for a second-year English major to read The General Prologue off of a piece of paper that actually says Sir Gawain or Beowulf or something, but I do this around this time with pretty much every major assignment ever. You know, the point at which I’ve officially put a whole lot of work into it and am entirely unprepared to turn around and change anything major about it. The thing is that I can never quite calm myself down about it entirely, because the whole oops-wrong-topic thing actually did happen to me on an assignment in grade 10 English. It was a really major assignment, and I ended up failing the course. (So yeah — if there’s some kind of myth out there that you only get into Mount Allison if you were an impeccable student in high school: BUSTED.)

Weird. I actually hadn’t put it together until just now, but yeah — since then I have at least one moment like this in every significant project, in which I am convinced I’m going to find out I’m OBSCENELY WRONG about what to do as soon as I walk into the classroom all set to hand it in. It’s probably a good sign, really. Means I’ve got something I feel is in some way valuable provided I am writing about the right thing, right? Right?

Hilarious retroactive addendum to this anecdote: when I arrived in class to turn in this paper (having completed it, I kid you not, less than twenty minutes before leaving the house), I was told to partner up with a particular fellow student. I wasn’t sure what the partnering was about, but I was pleased with the person I’d been partnered with on account of she’s really smart and friendly—but then she plunked herself next to me and asked, “So, I guess you did The Wife’s Lament too?” A vast desire to bash my head into the desk until one or the other was reduced to some form of pulp ensued…but was promptly assuaged when Dr. Rogers explained that, as a reward for none of us sending her any stupid questions by email at the last minute, we were all being given the opportunity to have our papers proofread by a peer chosen for complementary skills, not identical paper topics, take their suggestions home with us, and submit the edited versions on Thursday morning. I don’t know if it’s possible or likely for somebody to pee their pants with relief, but I’m pretty sure I almost did (although that may have had something to do with the massive quantities of tea I’d consumed throughout the night).

That brings us to Thursday, which brings me to an important Catalyst event that evening: the annualTransgender Day of Remembrance vigil.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is a day set aside to commemorate people whose lives have been truncated violently by other people who somewhere got the fucked up idea that people who don’t fit the standard male-female gender/sex dichotomy are not entitled to the same basic respect for their corporeal persons as those who jive easily with the system. We had intended to hold this vigil outside the library, as we did last year, but due to the aforementioned weather issues, we switched locations and gathered inside the chapel instead. Names of this year’s fallen and a few representative body shapes were chalked on the stone floor at the front of the chapel; candles were lit; Katie spoke very movingly on the importance of remembering these people whose deaths are too often overlooked in the media; Reverend Perkin led us in prayer; the list was passed and read aloud by the community, a moment of silence was observed, more candles lit; folks were thanked for showing their support, and copious embraces and handshakes were exchanged among friends and strangers as we began to disperse.

Katie and I were then drawn aside by a representative of the Argosy who wanted to interview us as Catalyst Executive members (President and Activism Chair respectively) on our reasons for organizing the event, and what we hoped people would come away from it with. These weren’t very difficult questions to answer (essentially: a. people are being murdered and that’s not okay by us, and b. we need to be putting more energy into loving and caring for each other, and less into setting up rigid, unrealistic, unfun social structures that leave out so many valuable, beautiful, fallible, loving, real people), but it is in some ways strange to suddenly be one of the people to whom people automatically turn for the official story on these things. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t considered that being Activism Chair would involve so much media interaction (sure it’s small scale, but everything is here) when I put my name forward for the position in September. It’s not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing — just something that’s surprised me. I’m pretty sure I’ve managed not to say anything too stupid in a public capacity so far (knock on particle board).

Oy, this has been a long entry. You want some kind of shiny reward at the end for your faithful display of literacy in reading this, don’t you? Fine.

^ Nothing to do with Mount Allison (she lives way over on the opposite coast, and one nation to the south), but I spent a good chunk of this afternoon learning to play this song, as the little lady who wrote it was nice enough to send me the chords to her original material. Her name is Molly and her birthday is tomorrow.

Oh! Before we part, the hobo demonstration I mentioned last post made front page of the Argosy, pudding. Er, the picture in the actual print version is much more exciting, in that it’s big. I’m not in either of them, because photos were taken at 1:30 whilst I was in class. A point is made in that article that the hobo aspect of the protest may have been somewhat offensive. This is…not entirely untrue. That said, I think the linking of hobos and education kinda strikes a chord for me. I may or may not elaborate on this later. Now it is most definitely time for this entry to be over.

More Life,
Emmet