Part XVI: He believes in nothing, Lebowski!

The only movie quotes I tend to use are totally random. I was huffing around U of T yesterday and all I could think of was the Peter Stormare character from Big Lebowski. The title should actually read "He believes in nussing" but for whatever reason I spelled it properly.

Whatever reason... like there's a reason or rhyme to anything in my life especially on SWP.

It's actually Saturday March 1st at about 6:30 in the evening, but I've jumped back in time for a rare occasion because this blog has never existed on February 29th before and I didn't want to miss the opportunity since hopefully I won't be lame enough to keep this site going for another four years. In the very likely event that I am, thanks for sticking around.

So the time on the blog is 11:55 PM, at which time I would have been in the midst of a heated Risk feud and watching High Fidelity. But let's jump back to the beginning of Friday.

Mom wanted to go earlier. That's what she told me the night before, that she was concerned about snowfall. I told her not to worry, that the snow would come in the afternoon, we should just go as normal. I was right.

I don't know whether the soul and the body are the same thing, and absorbed very little of that disccusion from Philosophy. I was in fact silent throughout that class, deeply infatuated with my own thoughts. Do we have free will? I think so. In fact, one of my recent anecdotes doesn't even make sense if you don't take free will into account.

It was a couple Sundays ago when I hurt my ankle on the ice. I had fallen twice, it wasn't nice (yes ladies I'm a poet.) The third time was what broke my ankle. It was cold and I had already fallen and I could've just stayed in. I turned back and started to walk home, then turned again and walked back toward the coffee place. My TA Cathal brought up the suggestion that because we make these decisions without knowing why, we can't really call that free will, but I disagree. I know why I made that decision. I wanted the coffee, even though I knew it was not to my benefit. I made the decision, weighing, at that time, my love of cofee against my dislike of cold/falling down. It was my choice, borne from the material that consists of me, and I lived with the consequence for the rest of the day. We can't always make decisions, and we are often too subject to the whims of others' free wills, but free will cannot help but exist.

That's my take, anyway. Of course, my take doesn't really matter because I'm not in the textbook. What's important is that I can memorize other peoples' opinions on these very pressing philosophical matters. Sigh.

This entry is actually now on a time-loop because I had to do something and have left it undone. I'll explain toward the end, or possibly in my next one, which will come immediately following this.

Between classes I dove into the Foucault text. It's basically the definition of "dense" as far as language goes, damn near impenetrable... and there's an awesome pun in there, considering the book is "The History of Sexuality." My skills are just too dull to think of it. According to Nintendo DS, my brain age is somewhere in the mid-to-late 30's which is not good.

As I was reading, I actually got depressed, because although the book doesn't really deal with this aspect of its subject*, it reminded me that I'm not having sex/am single/am alone/am unaccompanied/unloved/other depressing adjectives. It doesn't take much to get me depressed and I'll get morose at the drop of a hat, provided that hat reminds me of a girl. For all the progress I've made of the years (which, let's not kid ourselves, is plenty,) I'm still stuck. My life story has gotten very dull.

*It's kind of a deconstruction of societal perceptions of sex and the perceptions of those perceptions.

Anyway, I was distracted by my own self-pity when I got to the tutorial and thus continued my pattern of quiet. Now, I had to talk a little. Every time I've ever spoken to Stewart 1-on-1, he's mentioned how glad he is that I participate in discussions and told me that my class participation mark is "about 100 right now." So I can't break that pattern even if I'm having a bad day, which Friday was turning out to be. While there are those in Philosophy who are more adept at the class discussion than I am, in English most of the people just get that blank look on their faces.

Another hour passed after class. Lunch, reading, blah blah bluh. Tutorial on Art films, discussion, girl sitting next to me, muttering of "hey how's it going," polite response, Scott feelin' sorry for himself, etc etc.

I was unconscious for a great deal of the train ride. I read some more Foucault (whose very name sounds dirty actually) and just conked out between Port Credit (or was it Long Branch?) and Clarkson. So when I found that the White Oaks bus was MIA, I got a coffee and walked home.

After an uninteresting afternoon, into a tedious evening, I was already about to zonk out, again, on the couch when Chris said the words I always long to hear; "How woudl you feel about Risk or taboozing?" Well naturally I'd be up for either but I lacked booze. We came to the conclusion that Risk was probably going to happen. round up the usual suspects.

After stopping by White Store Inc to grab a 2L of Dr. Pepper (which was well-received,) I got to Casa Ferguson where Chris was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Linda. He served me a fresh-baked cookie (warm and soft) and bid me join 'em. Nobody writes sentences the way I do and I don't know that's a good thing.

So we watched the episode and Ryan showed up, then we went downstairs and Edgar arrived. As we set up Chris popped in High fidelity, which I'd brought over, along with various other DVDs.

The game was fun if a little by-numbers. Ryan had the Australia strategy, Chris played the Americas and I of course finally got back to Europe after being gone oh so long. Edgar was a man without a country and thus made himself a target early on to get steamrolled. So I knocked him out. He complained as usual about our rules and style of play, although I sense his heart wasn't in it this time. He was gone from the game by the time High Fidelity ended, so Chris had him select whatever he wanted to watch. From Chris' DVD collection, he chose a bizarre obscure old Hong Kong action flick starring Jackie Chan. When Edgar pulled it out, Chris said "Can we please watch that? I bought it forever ago and never got a chance to see it, nobody else wanted to watch it." So we put it in and after watching a nutty Jackie Chan interview, got to the movie.

During the course of the movie, it was revealed that Ryan Lai's British accent is in fact better than his Chinese one. He also snagged a good Arrested Development reference that was already on the tip of my head, earning him a high five.

The 2:05 alarm was upgraded to the 2:06 alarm. The game started to wind down after the movie ended, when I lost my foothold and got caught between the two of them and didn't have a strategy to properly react in the situation. We put on How I Met Your Mother S2D2 and Ryan had to leave in the midst of destroying me. He left it to Edgar, who couldn't get the job done, and so Chris finally eliminated me. I'd say that, when we called it a day (around after 4,) Chris was the ultimate winner of the showdown.

So I went home and passed out.

Saturday was a quiet day. Eric went out to Toronto and I just hung around the house mainly watching Degrassi etcetera. Mom was kind enough to make some dinner and I wrote this entry...

And then... well, check the next entry. I'll get to it momentarily.

Keep on rockin'
-Ole Scotto