Four: Who do you want to be tonight?

Oh, SWP. you understand me better than anyone.

So a couple nights ago - Sunday, by my count, when the last post was made - I was feeling kinda stressed. It's hard to express exactly what was bothering me at the time. Some of it is easy to explain, some of it is the usual, and some of it is so irrelevant that if this were another site I wouldn't waste the energy trying to explain. Fortunately, I think Blogspot can manage the bandwidth.

What's easy to explain is the school situation. I had to write up a "prospectus" for my history term paper due today. Like everything related to school I'm not really on top of this. Last Thursday in my tutorial some guy turned to me and asked what I was planning on writing about. I said I had no idea. Then I improvised and said I was thinking about doing a paper on the economic climate in Weimar Germany that allowed the Nazis to ascend to power. He thought a moment and concurred that was a very fertile subject. I was pleased with myself that my short-notice bullshitting skills, while slightly rusty, are far from gone. So Sunday night I was all "bugger, I've got to do this shit and I've got jack." Yesterday I took care of business by climbing aboard the computer, researching every book I could find with Hitler and the Economy as subjects (turns out, a fair number) and hunting them down at Robarts. I love the Robarts stacks. They're fucking creepy. It's such a cliche of librarianism. Alyssa, if you still read this, I bet you really dig those stacks. Now I've got about 7 hardbound books on Nazi Economy sitting in my locker at Innis (there's $10 well spent!) waiting for me to pull out juicy quotes.

So one prospectus down, one other one to go (although this one is called an abstract or something. Fuck inconsistent nomenclature.) This would be film history. I e-mailed my TA about a week or more ago with a potential topic and she just... never got back to me. And I was so caught up in all my other shit (or, you know, nothing) that I didn't e-mail her again to check. So I'm going to type this thing up, slap some partial bibliography on it and call it a day. I was having a talk with this guy I know who is in both Film History and Contemporary Europe and he seems to have similar habits as I do, although he seems to have it better in hand. I am a very secret fuckup.

On top of this, Shakespeare. I really gotta finish Lear (or at least find a good scene to analyze. Goddamn.) Kinda under the gun on that one, too.

Next week is going to be a pretty busy reading week. But finishing up that History prospectus and finding all them books really helped ease my stress. In my panic I turned to the sweet release of MSNing someone you've not spoken to in a while: in my case, Robyn, who was, thankfully, all too glad to hear my vaguely-outlined pleas. Her solution, which I liked, was that we should hang out at some point over the break. And so we shall!

I'm relieving my stress somewhat with writing. I've been putting those random lines of poetry to good use by stringing them together into one very, very large conceit about fish (that is, a lengthy prose poem about commitment, loneliness, creative and sexual frustration, city life, and... fish.) It's been so gratifying to just pour all this shit out onto the page. I actually enjoy the process of creating this one. I do about a page every day or so, to a planned five (maybe less.) Anyway, this is all good pen-to-paper stuff, which is the most gratifying form of writing in my view.

That'd be the "usual stuff" - the creative frustration, the schoolwork, the pining for human interaction. Nothing out of the ordinary for SWP.

The irrelevant stuff comes into play when I explain that Sunday night I was engaged in the battle for the life of a dog. Not my own, or even a real one - Vincent, the dog from Lost. See, there's this game we play on forums, Hurt or Heal, where you list a bunch of characters (in this case, from Lost) and they get 3 points. You then have to post that you HURT them (take a point away) or HEAL them (add one.) You can't post twice in a row, obviously, and I was desperately going back and forth with this other guy, as I tried to save Vincent. I was up at about 7 points but he wouldn't let up, and I knew I would eventually lose because I was getting no support and I didn't have the time or energy to sit around refreshing my browser to see when he would hurt the dog again. Eventually, yesterday, due to my commute, he seized the opportunity and killed the dog. It hurt to lose, but it was a load off, I guess. Like I said, it was kind of inevitable. The deck was stacked against me. I just really wanted to save that dog.

Meanwhile, this situation with my monitor has got me bummed. My dad was willing to go to the extreme of buying me a laptop to just clearcut the problem, since he couldn't get a video card to work with this motherboard. Well, ballz. So it's either $500 laptop (of which I'd pay about half and feel guilty) or have my dad re-install my old motherboard, let my computer go back to its previous slowness, allowing my monitor to have a valid resolution. I don't know why I talked myself into delaying the laptop, which is objectively a good idea. In this day and age, desktops - for home, if not office - makes less sense. It's just that, well, I've got this computer, and it works okay except for this one thing, why spend $500 I don't really have, nor does my dad? You get the idea.

I was walking by WOSS the other day (yesterday) to pick up a book at the library and drop a movie off at Blockbuster, when I ran into Guthrie. He seemed very glad to see me, and glad to briefly catch up in a stop-n-chat about my recent U of T exploits, correctly surmising that I was commuting, and noting that he was glad to hear I was doing what I am. That made me feel good.

So... there. I've let all that stuff out. Pretty good scattered blog entry without any real point to it. Just like the good old days (which my or may not have ever happened.)

With that in mind, keep on rockin'
-Scott