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

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

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

Yeah. I broke too soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


More Life (or something),
Emmet

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

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

A Few Shiny Things.

This happened today:


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

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


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

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


This is happening on Saturday.

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

Yay!

More Life,
Emmet

Valentines + Sexy Crimes.

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

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

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

Look!

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

Isn't that lovely?

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

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

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

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

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

Sackville has CRIME.

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


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

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

GRAFFITI!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can your heart stand the shocking facts?

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






















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

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

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

More Life,
Emmet

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

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

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

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

Heroic Saturday Morning Exploits In The Shire!

I'm about to shock you, pudding.

Are you ready?



Brace yourself.



Sometimes I wake up on Saturday mornings.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More life,
Emmet

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

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

Hey, I still exist. Fancy that.

Well pudding,

It's 1 o'clock on a Friday afternoon, and as of half an hour ago, I have finished my first week of classes of the 2009 Winter semester.

I've got a somewhat peculiar schedule this semester, in that on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have a class at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM, and my last class doesn't end until 5:30 PM. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, however, I start class at 10:30 AM and I'm left entirely to my own devices for the rest of the day by noon-thirty. As much as it's tempting to sleep in those three days a week, I'm starting to think it might be a Good Idea if I try to make a habit of just waking up around 7 o'clock in the morning regardless of whether or not I have an early class, just so as to develop something vaguely resembling a sensible, predictable sleeping pattern.

That said, there are plenty of good ideas I have had and entirely failed to follow through on, and this may very well be one of them. We'll just have to wait and see!

Anyhow. I guess I'll just give you a little rundown of what my classes are this semester and how I'm feeling about them so far.

T/Th, 8:30 AM: Advanced Shakespeare, with Dr. Blagrave
You know how I was talking about the ungodliness of 8:30 classes? While I'm not backing down from my position that such things should not exist, and that they may indeed constitute uncontestable proof of the nonexistence of a loving God...in light of how awesome this one promises to be, I have sucked up my fierce night-owl resistance to being functional before noon and chosen to take it anyhow. Promising aspects include but are not limited to the following:
a) Smart friends and smart people I want to become friends with in the class. This means lots of opportunities to talk about the class material outside of class, and lots of potential study partners come exam time. Yay!
b) A prof who actually makes economics seem like something I want to know about not just because it's "important", but because it's interesting. ("Economics," you say? Yes. Eco-friggin'-nomics. One of the major themes of the course is the economic context in which Shakespeare wrote. "But that will cause explosions of doom in your little humanities student brain," you say? Oh yes. I have no doubt of this. It will be glorious.) Seriously, as inherently terrified as I am of anything that involves numbers and/or the harsh realities of life, this is something I definitely need to be examining, so how cool is it that I get to do that in the context of my chosen major, as opposed to having to leap into a straight-up Economics course which (let's face it) I would never actually do.
c) A prof who softens the blow of having to wake up so friggin' early by saying things like "[Shakespeare] wasn't unique; there were lots of people with cute goatees," and either swearing or narrowly avoiding swearing every 53 seconds. That is my kind of academia.

T/Th, 11:30 AM: Apocalyptic Consciousness, with Rev. Perkin
Um. This is a class about how the world is [not] going to end. Sells itself, really.

T/Th, 4:00 PM: Introduction to Acting, with Linda Moore
This class is taught in Hesler Hall, which is one of my favourite rooms on campus...for pretty sentimental reasons I guess, but whatever. It's one of the older parts of campus. When my grandmother went to school here, it housed the library. In my first year, I ended up there for a lot of different reasons because it was this big cavernous open space all ready to be used in what was the university centre at the time. Don't get me wrong; I think it's tres rad that we have a shiny new student centre that's, you know, actually accessible, with ramps and elevators and so on for our non-perambulatory community members, but it is awfully nice to have a reason to hang out in the old stud a couple of times a week this semester. It just feels good.

As for the class itself, I think it's going to be pretty great. Ms. Moore is this year's Crake Fellow, which translates to Awesome Person In The Field of Stagery Who Hangs Out Teaching Classes And Directing Plays And Just Generally Being Awesome Around Windsor Theatre And Other Places Where Dramatic Things Can Be Made To Happen. I don't know too much about her so far, but I have gathered that we seem to have very similar taste in playwrights, she and I, as she's been using a lot of Daniel MacIvor in class, and is directing Sharon Pollock's Blood Relations at Windsor Theatre this semester. I'm awfully fond of both of those playwrights, and of that play in particular. Yay!

M/W/F, 10:30 AM: Literary Periods 1800 to Present, with Dr. Lapp
Dr. Lapp was the first faculty member I met at Mt.A., the first person to tell me about the secret Bridge Street music hall, and the first professor I had in what ended up becoming my major of choice, and it's quite splendid to be taking a class with him again, I dare say.

One thing I think I've mentioned before about Dr. Lapp is that he's a professor who makes poetry seem like something I have the capacity to understand -- not by oversimplifying it, but by reminding me that it was written not by automated confusion generators, but by, you know...human beings trying to communicate something to other human beings. Every student taking a class with Dr. Lapp is required to submit a "freewrite response" on one of the readings every class day. When I first heard this, I'll admit, it sounded hella tedious, but I started to actually like it pretty fast, and I'm glad to be doing it again. As I've confessed before, poetry is not really my strong suit, but I can usually pick out a couple of lines I sort of get even from the really impenetrable-seeming verse, and I find the freewrite approach is really helpful in finding ways to widen my little peep-hole into the text. ("Hey," says the part of me that has Good Ideas, "why don't you just do freewrites for your own academic benefit even when nobody says you have to?" The part of me that has Good Ideas is smart and everything, but I don't think it hangs out with the rest of me very often. It seems to have some fundamental misunderstandings about the sort of person I am.)

M/W/F, 11:30 AM: Introduction to American Literature, with Dr. Brown
My only previous knowledge of Dr. Brown was that he hosted the pre-holiday English Society Wine & Cheese party where we all oohed approvingly at his record collection and Dr. Lapp read selections from A Christmas Carol and I got tipsy and forgot my heart-shaped cake pan on the kitchen table. Now I've spent two classes with him as a professor, and I am definitely looking forward to more. Hopefully he doesn't hate me for naming punk as a musical genre with non-American roots. I didn't really mean it, which is to say I don't have an opinion about the origins of punk. I just like it when people make noise.

So, yes. That's what I'm looking at this semester academics-wise, pudding. In less academic news, I'm working on getting content and funding for the Catalyst zine, figuring out when and how to hold the Day of Silence, and maybe tonight I will put on some tarty and/or vicary clothes and get kind of drunk and wish Trina a happy birthday. Or maybe I'll stay home and put comments and stickers on my classmates' freewrites and patch my pants, because that's the kind of exciting life I lead.

More Life,
Emmet

P.S. - If you're one of those forward-looking individuals who wants to have some sort of idea of the kind of adventures that might be available to you after Mt.A., there's this friend of mine named Jenn who graduated last spring and is currently teaching English to cute little schoolchildren in Japanland. For extra awesomeness, she has been blogging about her experiences here. I particularly like this review-of-lessons-learned-in-2008 entry, because a) it covers time spent in both Canada and Japan, b) I was there for some of those quotes, and c) oh my goodness am I ever impressed with the bravery involved in committing to live in a country where you can neither read nor speak the principal language. So yeah. Jenn's great, and I get to see what picture-sized parts of Japan look like without having to feel illiterate my own self because of that blog. You should too!

P.P.S. - Ben Folds is the new Chuck Norris.

I like to celebrate the end of studyseason by spending a couple hours re-reading my notebooks for fun.

Well puddin’,

I spent a nice long time this evening in the bathtub reading Joe Orton’s teleplay The Good and Faithful Servant. I liked it a lot, but the thing I liked most about it was that I did not at any point while reading it feel a pang of guilt that I should have been reading/studying something else.

Yes, that’s right pudding, I am DONE for the semester.

I know we’re all big fans of learning and everything, but it must be said: I’m also a big fan of sitting around eating candy canes and making my family wonder why they thought they missed me.

I get on the train bound out of the shire tomorrow afternoon, so this will be my last post of 2008.

I know, it’s madness!

In honour of the madness, I would like to share with you some selections from my class notes this semester. Some of these are direct quotes from profs you might well find yourself studying with if you come to Mount Allison. Harass me in the comments and I may even tell you who it was!

CAN YOUR HEART STAND THE SHOCKING FACTS? (Note: Some of these are not actually facts. Some are opinions, some are song lyrics that were distracting my brain, and some are just hilarious.)

-This grace is forced upon us.
-I AM THE SCARECROW MSTAKENLY BROUGHT TO LIFE WHEN THE ZOMBE APOCALYPSE CAME. (I actually wrote this twice on opposite sides of the same page, once vertical and once horizontally. I guess I must have had it earwormed pretty bad that day.)
-NETS ARE LESS FUN THAN THEY MIGHT APPEAR
-Sophocles—was old!
-THE END-->why?
-Philoctetes-->heeheehee
-she tries to make her children immortal and oops...
-(fuck I cannot spell)
-screamy curses!=horror
-it’s always spring la la la
-MADNESS!
-We’re civilized. We don’t run around drunk in the forest killing animals with our bare hands. We have theatre.
-feelthegod
-Oh THERE’S Dionysus
-it’s a staff. Looks like a pinecone on it.
-culty culty culty
-the stranger is soooooooo handsome
-they name their children after sad things so they’ll suit them later on.
-feminism was sort of invented by Charles Fourier, a dead white French dude...
-the whole process of pants
-HISTORY IS NECESSARILY ‘REVISIONIST’
-“Don’t Let Your Girlfriends Ruin Your Marriage”: Lesbian Imagery in Chatelaine Magazine
-OMG THERE’S SO MUCH LEARNING!
-Happy Birthday Benjamin!
-um let’s build a new house.
-In what context can I really dance?
-herosexuality + mole dominance.
-treatment=“pelvic massage”—masturbate!
-“A very useful and satisfactory home service.”
-we’re an enchanting place
-everyone has some power—rec’ze it + exercize it!
-hey, you’re a human being and a citizen!-->that’s friggin’ radical.
-be a co-conspirator!—change reality!
-collecting baby teeth to test Stronium 90
-YOU CAN TELL THAT I’M PLANNING PREVENGE
-being buried alive is scary shit
-OMG, queering a text is a thing
-A pair of giant statue king feet in the middle of an onion field.
-Ziggurat (shaped like a stacky cake)
-Tiamat is a sea serpent with wings and mammal claws!
-YHWH is a G-d who beats the odds!—he likes a good show
-Weiderholungswang—the compulsion to repeat.
-Do stuff you don’t think you can do and you will be rewarded with milk and honey...yum.
-Manna!=Man-hu=“What is this?”bug poo.
-That’s a lot of oral tradition!
-G-d comes to dinner!
-suspected wives have to drink icky abortion water
-Saul could have been killed while having a pee
-“a thousand women at his bidding, I suppose...that’s a lot of sex.”
-I MISPLACED IT
-they do some weird shit.
-verbs and nouns are different, bitch!
-the goddamned golden calves again
-King Asa...something something something
-BE PREPARED!
-a prostitute, obviously.
-[G o d i s v e r y b i g.]
-eat this scroll (nom nom, tastes like honey)
-it’s not nice to be exiled.
-Remosesification
-eschatological sex
-uncontrolled, impossible creatures, tearing everything apart.
-“English is a language that ambushes other languages in dark corners and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.”
-“This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsmen”
-Maps are pretty...
-OH MOONY MOON O MOONY MOON sometimes you’re yellow and sometimes you’re orange
-“looking for the aboutness”
-Hooray for Culture
-JSTOR + Project Muse win our nerd <3s!
-“it might seem reasonable to expect that, but you would be wrong, because this is academia”
-Librarians will fuck you up!-->so will architects.
-walking monster fetus!
-heroes stick out and it’s obnoxious
-“The better you get the more you fail.”
-like fucking gods.
-COMMA SPLICES ARE FOR CHUMPS.
-the fae always get you in these glas spaces.
-asking for Arthur’s monsterness
-I’m spelling Britain wrong.
-there will be other stories later when we get in trouble again.
-“It’s not that you have a chiuaua, it’s that you keep your chiuaua in a purse.”
-we do this with text. other ppl do it w/ other things.
-Henrys always come in clumps.
-hysterical pregnancies!
-Did Anybody See The Gorilla?
-“I can’t find any words in this poem.”
-Oh Boy We Have Cultural Anxiety Too!!!
-I want more tea.
-IF YOU’RE A BAD READER, YOU’RE A BAD PERSON
-anatomy makes it weird
-birth is death but death is birth (Jesus stuff)
-he spends pages beating you up and has 20 lines to make it better.
-NOT TO AVOID IT BUT SO YOU CAN MAKE AMENDS
-off doing weird things.
-Dear Geoff Berner,
Every time a professor refers to Queen Victoria, I hear you scream. It’s very distracting.
Thank you,
<3e
-Epic Stuff
-Whales are gonna take you down to Hell.
-Pope was an angry little man.

LET THIS BE A LESSON TO YOU.

A lesson that sometimes taking notes in class is awesome because sometimes it helps you to remember awesome things that were said in class. Sometimes you don’t even remember the original awesome, and that makes it like fresh awesome all over again.

Speaking of awesome, today was the 2nd Annual Nerdfighter Project for Awesome on Youtube. FOR EXAMPLE:

If you’ve got some time on your hands, do please take a look at some of the neat-o P4A videos people have made. There are some truly excellent causes being championed in some really effective audio-visual ways by this fantastic bunch of hoodlums called “nerdfighters” that I couldn’t be prouder to call myself a member of.

More Life,
Emmet