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:

A Friggin' Time Machine, Ladies + Gentlemen.

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

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

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

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

So, long time no blog, eh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Armadillo cake!


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


Wedding cake!


Nude marzipan lady cake!


Voodoo cake!


Imitation cake wreck cake!

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

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

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

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


Also, this ring game was cute.

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

Awright puddin', that's enough outta me.

I love you.

More Life,
Emmet

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

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

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

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

Yeah. I broke too soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More Life (or something),
Emmet

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

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

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