Yesterday was kind of funny. I had a psych midterm, which was fine. Afterwards I spent 5-10 minutes in a friendly debate with the teacher about the wording of one of the 70 multiple-choice questions. There were two correct answers for it, technically (says my bias), but he thought there was only one. So we had to agree to disagree. Actually, he agreed to disagree and I disagreed about agreeing to disagree. Most teachers actually like to be argued with, you know. It shows that the student was paying attention (too much, perhaps). Dr. Wong even told me the technical, psychological name for over-thinking instructions (i.e., for what is wrong with me). For those of you fortunate enough not to interact with me in school-world, I’m a wee bit of a hairsplitter (read: annoying). I am fine with this though; it’s easier to be the annoyer than the annoyee.

I had the same problem during the second midterm I wrote, even though it was a 3-essay English exam, rather than multiple-choice. In this case, I was actually supposed to wrangle with the wording of the question; Dr. Rans intentionally used controversial language in his question to throw a postmodern monkey wrench (which is much heavier than a normal monkey wrench) into the works. So, that was fine, except I spent 5 pages writing about why I couldn’t answer the question, and only 1 page answering it. I also spent 1.5 of the 2.5 hours on one third of the exam. Time management is not my forte. I need a person with a cattle prod to attend exams with me: “Bzzzt! Keep writing. You don’t have as much time left as you think. Bzzzt! Bzzzzzzt!”

Along with faking/sleeping my way through my 3rd class, that was my day. Usually I prepare a ton for that class, then I talk too much and everyone tunes me out. But this time I just made shorter general comments and everyone was like: “Ooooh, yeah, that’s what I thought too.” Which probably translates to: “thank you for not annoying us to death.”

Later Rock & I went to some b-day type thing for Stamos. No, not John Stamos, we had already filled our quota for early 90s sitcom hunk birthdays in May. Stamos is actually Stephanie & Amos. Btw, it wasn’t both of their birthdays; it was only Amos’s. I ate cake and listened to a guy called Dan who had had so many concussions that he couldn’t remember the number. He is going to Kyrgyzstan and/or Tajikistan next year to climb mountains that have not yet been climbed because they were formerly behind the iron curtain. He’s also going to work with youth-at-risk in those countries. Presumably bringing them along on mountain climbing expeditions will put them less at risk. He’s kind of like Jake Doyle (if I can infer anything from a half-hour conversation); you know, a person who likes to raft, swim, climb, jump, or ski (etc.) off of things just to see if it can be done. I think this is a healthy ethos, and I would gladly trade some teacher-arguing skills for some of it (not that the two are mutually exclusive).

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I came across this fairly stupendous flash mosaic today on digg.com. It is about 4,022 times more awesome than the emoticon with the bowler hat below:

C:-)

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This morning I found my coffee trove empty, so I bustled about and made tea instead. A cult I was once in commanded that tea is only to be drunk in the afternoons or evenings (although tea drinkers can be drunk whenever they wish). Fortunately, I am not longer in that tea cult. They made a switch to Kool-Aid, with unfortunate results. The point of all this pointlessness is non-existent. The tea, however, did provide me with a fairly more fair than average amount of energy, which surprised me and compelled me to write and think happily inconsecutive thoughts.

I try not be a link-linky-link-all-time-blog (which is maybe why I never have any posts), but here is an interesting article I read (eye red) this morning, and below is another one. This first one is about Edmonton's English-Mandarin Bilingual public education system, which has about 1,700 kids in it, if memory serves (Serve me memory! You foolish slave of the brain!). Sorry for that outburst, it's just that abstract concepts are one of the few things I don't feel bad about being violently abusive to. The peculiar thing is that, in terms of language education, Edmonton seems to have one of the most progressive approaches in the country, yet it is in probably the most politically conservative province in the country (Albania, that is).

The other article is an essay by A. O. Scott (another NYT journalistic superstar adored by those geeky mediaphile types) about a recent--inevitably problematic, yet still fun--poll done by the NYT about what the best American 'work of fiction' in the last 25 years is. Toni Morrison's Beloved won. Don Delillo cracked the top 5 with Underworld, which is one of my favourite novels (my profile even says this, therefore this is absolute truth: capital A, capital T). For the life of me I don't know why we have read the stupid A Clockwork Orange (which I love), instead of Delillo or at least something American, in my stupid Post Modern lit class (which is my favourite class ever), but I digress. By the way, 50% of that class is just practicing how to say pretentious things like "I digress."

Baby beavers are semi-nocturnal. This I learned during my adventure to the Beaver Dam (no room for any joke there) located at the South-East (or some other direction) end of Ft. George Park last Thursday. We (me, Rocksand & Shawntel) also had a picnic and rocked the world of Bocce Ball (which is suprisingly easy to rock). Rocksand killed an ant, presumably because she hates all ants. I could write a paragraph or so about how ants belong at picnics, but this post is already stupid (or brilliant?) enough. The main point is that Roxanne's ant holocaust should be hyperbolically exaggerated, blown out of proportion, and quickly forgotten (did I mention I hope to work in the media some day?).

Thursday was good; Friday was probably better. Possibly because we ate mammoth (adjective not noun) Pita Pit pitas and briefly hung out (not to be confused with hanging out in briefs) with the people whose wedding we are attending on Monday. Said people are Tracy (sister to sister-in-law of Rock) and Jonathan Livingston. He is excellently named, since, as you might know (and as wikipedia has recently informed me), Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a cultish 70s novel about the life of a seagull. It's funny that it is a text about flying around everywhere, because the real-life Jonathan Livingston has recently become an air-traffic controller. So, maybe the name is meant to be allusive, although it is more likely that I am just on crack. Also, on Friday he was showing a healthy contempt for warranties and not stealing software by modding a 250GB HDD onto his Xbox, which will allow him to copy any Xbox games he might wish to "own" after renting them. Anyway, good people.

Speaking of Edmonton, how 'bout them Oilers?! Holy Mighty Peca Hemsky Horcoff! Since when are the Oilers so good? Not since 1992 (?), which is the last time the made it to the final 4. I don't feel guilty about jumping on the bandwagon of team that I third most wanted to win the Stanley Cup. You see, my approach was that I would cheer for Canadian teams in based on which city has won the fewest Stanley Cups. Hence I cheered for Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton, then Montreal. Since Edmonton is the only one left, my bandwagonry is somewhat justified. Also, I feel like I deserve to cheer for a hardworking team for once, given that the Canucks are listless, hapless, and spiritless. Anyway, Edmonton is pretty great. They've had the offensive depth all season, and everyone is firing on all prisoners (or is it cylinders, I need to work on my metaphors). They really do have a great mix of veterans with something to prove (Smyth, Smith, Peca, Pronger, Roloson) and youth with talent (Horcoff, Hemsky, Pisani). Plus they have Space K, who is probably like an alien, or some kind of astronaut, or at least from Europe.

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Has anyone ever read the original book version of Bambi? It's pretty disturbingly violent. All the animals keep dying in pools of blood. Bambi's cousin Gobo (who is the shy runt of the family, really cute), dies near the end: "Gobo lay with his bloody entrails oozing from his torn flank" ... "Then they heard Gobo's wailing death shriek." And humans are described as having a "dark, unknown, controlling power." It's pretty nice and wistful at times too, when the animals aren't being maimed. I guess it balances out the 'Disneyfied' version, but maybe it does so a little too well. Anyway, nevermind, trivia. I met a faceless teacher of mine today. Well, actually she has a face. It's just that I've spent 4-5 months in teleconference classes with her, but I hadn't met her until today. It turns out she is Kylie Minogue. Actually that's a lie, I just made it up because there is no point to this story. And the random insertion of Australian celebrities will give any story a point. Or something.

To continue my theme of recounting the dreams of the mentally handicapped (i.e., me): last night I had a dream I was trying to kill a cat, but I couldn't, and it starting freaking out and attacking my hand and everything got messy and it just wouldn't die. I think this is because yesterday Holly (owner of the house I live in) told me to chase away the cat that had digging up her garden. But I couldn't, because I loves teh cats too much. So I just petted the cat instead, and it tried to jump onto me back, in a friendly way. Anyway, the moral is that cat dilemmas = cat mangling dreams. Now I have to go to my next class, so I will just post this and assume that it is not completely idiotic.

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The last 2 nights I have had similar dreams. Both involved me going on a trip, and while I am away I come into the possession of a largish amount of money, and then the end of the dream is me trying to get that money back home. In the first dream I travelled to some island or something (this dream was less detailed), and I made acquaintances with 2 guys (father/son) who were in a mob family of some sort. When I was leaving the dad gave me some money and like winked slyly, or something. All the money was in red 100 RMB notes (like in China). I was wondering about what would happen when I carried it through customs (since I was flying), but I wasn't worried.

The dream lastnight was more vivid (btw, I slept for 12 hours, from 7 to 7, which is a very rare thing). I think the place I travelled to was the moon, some floating spherical thing anyway. It was very colourful and lit-up everywhere. Everyone was staring up into the sky, because some spaceship was in orbit, and that ship released a smaller vessel, which was also traveling in an orbital pattern. The smaller vessel was hundreds of miles away and spaceship-sized, but somehow it turned into a small stone, which everyone was looking for. Somehow I found this stone, which was like a gold nugget, except silver ("It could only be SPACE TITANIUM!" sorry, an old Godzilla line). Anyway, the nugget crumbled and broke into 3 pieces, but when I brought it to an inspection place (which was a store) they verified that it was the real one. So they gave me 15,000$ in cash, Canadian bills. My dad and my sister Kelly were there too, but didn't really do much. So I had this pouch, and all the money was in it, and I held onto it really tightly, and then I headed back to our hotel, which was in NYC, which somehow was also where we were at that point. I couldn't find a taxi, so I took a bus. Kelly and Dad had their own plans about what we should do, but I lost them somehow, which was fine, since their plans weren't very good. I got off the bus near our hotel, but I couldn't quite find the hotel. I was on this big, circular promenade, which was colourful, brightly-lit and very futuristic. It was also a mall of some sort. All of this was all pretty weird and could have been overwhelming, but it wasn't. I didn't find the hotel before I woke up, but that was fine, I felt at peace and I knew I would eventually find it without trouble.

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Yesterday I watched A Clockwork Orange at the house of one of my English professors. The class was supposed to watch it at school, but a codex was missing, so the DVD player didn't work. And no, I don't know what a codex is, only that it is something that always seems to be missing. ACO is a rare case in which the book and film are both really good, yet for different reasons. It doesn't make sense to say one is better than the other; that would be like comparing apples and ... some other fruit that is somewhat similar to an apple. Anyway, both are recommended. Horroshow cheloveck that Kubrick, eh? A funny thing I found out is that this professor--who is a 50+ year-old literature professor from Great Britain--plays World of Warcraft. He's like a level 55 priest or something, meaning he plays it a lot. How weird is that? I've always assumed that whenever a literature professor isn't teaching he is sitting at home with a glass of brandy, listening to Beethoven and watching Masterpiece Theatre (as Roxanne put it). At least he has a standard poodle named Sir Lancelot, and his minivan is named after a work of literature (1 of only 2 such vehicles I can think of).

Last week I participated in 2 psyhcological research studies. Now you might be thinking that these studies were designed to measure awesomeness, but that is not so. I was actually in them because I can earn 4% bonus on my term mark if I participate in 4 of them. Now that I think about it, this anecdote has not point and is not funny; I'm just mentioning it because I've never been in a psychological experiment before, unless you count that time I rented a gorilla suit and ran around throwing peoples' dogs into oncoming traffic. If you're wondering, the results were inconclusive.

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Hi, ouch.
Stupid library closes at 6pm in summer term, so I not am getting much face time with the computer. The good news is that Roxanne has started a new blog. It is about health. A lot of people don't know what health is, but if you break the word down you get: "heal-th." Now you might be wondering: Heal th what? Well, that is a question you can only answer yourself. The th can only be found in the toe of your inner spirit cave. I think I just accidentally wrote the intro to a self-help book. Oh well, your ass is mine Deepak Chopra!

My hockey pool is effed-up owing to the elimination of Dee-troit. That's ok though; now I can just cheer for the team I want to win (Ottawa!), and not care about who scores. Stupid Martin Havlat, he's so great. I had him in the regular season pool, and he was injured the whole time. And now he scores 45 goals in the playoffs. Frig! I mean: yay!

Anyway, I've got some lemon-grass rice to eat. Btw, if you are wondering about the image, that is the 4th image that came up when I googled "health."

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