pt IX: Meeting beautiful girls is the hard part.

As for the title, well, figure it out for yourself if there's any meaning there. It's up to you.

It's been a strangely emotional day. It's gonna end up being one of those entries where I jsut pour all my shit out and attempt to sort through it, and it takes a long time and multitudes of paragraphs and by the end you can't remember what time it was when you started reading, but you're really tired. So if you need to get something to eat or drink, I'd suggest going right now because by the time I get going, you are not going to want to pull yourself away from the computer. Everyone good? Great, let's strap ourselves in.

I had to peel myself outta bed this morning for my 8:30 class with John Clarke, which inevitably ended up being the presentation of the storyboard he wanted us to do on Wednesday. If only I'd had a storyboard on Wednesday, a lot of my woes could have been avoided in the past two days. As it was, it was about 5 minutes of telling Clarke exactly what Dave and I were doing and going into vague specifics (oxymorons are fun, no?) Beyond that it was about an hour of hanging out and drinking the coffee I'd gotten to wake myself up (ultimately pointless, I suppose,) and then going home at the first available moment so I could shower, kick back, watch TV, make another failed attempt at exporting Half-Past to video (God I need to figure that out, I hate when things are expected of me,) and catch up on the fershlugginer chores.

The sink was full of dishes. It was almost comical how many dishes we'd allowed to pile up. But there was nothing funny about having to do them, since an inordinate amount were cookware that don't go in the dishwasher, and had to be manually scrubbed. And guess who always happens to have to do this? Well, usually mom, sweetheart that she is, but it just wasn't happening and I had 4 hours to kill, so it looked like it was going to be me. In the process of doing this, of course, I had to deal with all the chunks of crap that accumulated in the sink thanks to Eric's thoughtlessness/carelessness/recklessness. So after I'd scrubbed all the crap off the pans, pots, baking sheets, etc, I had to race around the house looking for drain cleaner (which I found under the upstairs bathroom sink,) and use it. Now, inevitably, I feared, some had splashed on my hands, but after scrubbing with much ferocity, I went ahead and made a sandwich because the entire point of doing the dishes was that I was effing hungry and couldn't eat until those dishes were cleared from the sink. It just wouldn't feel right. So I theoretically might have poisoned myself, but that's okay. I'm fine now. Of course, ni the process of doing this, I somehow managed to snap a big plastic spoon in half, but that's bound to happen every now and again.

And beyond that, I went back to class and wrote my review (of "The Grizzly Man,") for Roy Wilson, and was annoyed by how particular he was in teaching the review structure. I don't know about you, but it's a little annoying to be taught something you've been doing, to some acclaim, for over three years. "Short sentences, short paragraphs." My ass. Go tell Roger Ebert to write short paragraphs. Most decent film critics are too in love with their words to keep sentences short. "You should establish an opinion right away." No shite. Y'know, that's what star ratings are for, but yeah, I was just gonna write a plot summary and let the reader draw his own conclusions. And the perturbing thing about Roy's class is that he begins each class with a (completely deserved, admittedly,) guilt trip about all the ways we fucked up on the most recent assignment. Today's topic of choice was our inability to make deadlines. He wrote on mine (a perplexing assignment to review the building - which I flopped, since I'm not a bloody architecture student, and regardless of the supposed format, you need to know something about a subjectif you're going to review it,) that it was 25 minutes late, which was due only to the very real and very annoying flaw in the printer system. and he just didn't seem to care. He was very apathetic to anything contradicting his edict that things must be handed in at a certain time - which makes sense, given that they're teaching us to make deadlines, but it's a little unreasonable. This whole "teaching one thing through another subject" is a little annoying and shallow for my liking. So transparent. Like how Mitrovica never even keeps up the illusion that his class is about anything other than trying to make us like him.

And I mean that in both senses of the word: he wants us to make us to be like him as a journalist, and to think of him as a good journalist and a decent guy. I don't see either happening in my case, which might explain my usually low mark in his class (and that unless I got 0 on the "Future of Journalism," I should have at least gotten a "B.")

Was I going somewhere with this? Not really, but when do I ever go anywhere with anything? Come on.

So I decided I'd show Roy by not only writing a kickass review, but also handing it in 30 minutes before the deadline for stopping writing, copy-edited and everything (though I find it hard to find flaws in my own work, being the egotist I am.)

It would be a lie to say that everything were going well at school, but at the same time I don't feel as though I have too many desperately pressing matters to attend. We'll see how this changes in coming weeks when I'm forced to deal with my general incompetence at doing my work, and the imprending supposed strike of college teachers. Yeah, nobody's quite sure what's going on, but apparently they voted 80% to go on strike if agreements can't be reached by March 7th. It looks do-able, but there's a very ral possibility for a strike. Hm. I don't know what I'd do if I, say, lost the year, my money, etc etc. Probably make as much financial restitution as I could (I am, after all, there largely based on QEII,) and find something else to do. I have this feeling that if the whole thing turned out for the worst and I had my first year of Sheridan stolen from me, maybe I'd just cut and run and start again elsewhere. I have no idea how I'd put this plan into motion, or even if it's necessary, but you never know.

Some other, less significant stuff went on today, but those are the big beats. Oh, and the final four episodes of Arrested Development aired today. I've seen numerous great television series sail off into the night - Futurama, Seinfeld, um... others that were cancelled far too soon, but those are the best that *ended* - and this was the greatest finale of all. It wasn't too in-jokey, it didn't fall prone to that smarmy self-awareness that infected this season and made it incomprehensible to new viewers. It was the pinnacle of what the show could be: intelligent stories featuring innovative use of classical comedic devices such as visual gags, puns, recurring jokes, pop culture references, verbal humour, high, middle and low comedy... Rosser should use it to show his Grade 11's during the comedy unit. Or not. The point is, it was an emotional yet satisfying night.

I'm listening to the Spamalot soundtrack right now. It makes me want to tear up a bit, as well. I understand it is supposedly coming to Toronto and that's interesting, but I just don't feel like that could be as good. Then again, what could beat the original Broadway cast? Oh the sentimentality...

No crisis of identity tonight. I'm too spent. I hope I've provided you with a few minutes/hours of spare entertainment for no cost. Seriously, you people, I don't get nearly enough credit for the free entertainment I provide by kvetching and moaning about every minute detail of my life. Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff, as Pekar once said ,and it makes for a pretty decent read, I'm told.

Or you people are severely, dangerously bored. Either way, whatever, that's your deal, I don't dare question it.

Signing off from SWP, the most popular site on the internet (with its dozen-or-so-fans,)
Keep on rockin'
-Scott Williams