I finally caught up on some much needed sleep last night. Thank God. i should be starting to feel better and get over my obnoxious behaviour very quickly as i have an exam Tuesday that i still haven’t studied for. It was nice seeing Veronica…a walk down memory lane in many respects. Seeing old friends, chatting about others, and looking through the yearbooks.

Though i don’t imagine either of the boys from Friday night will ever chance upon this, nonetheless, i thought i would share a recent insight from one of my more debauched moments: the key to comedy (according to the Wheatleys) is not timing, but repetition. if you say it enough it becomes funny because it also gets associated with all the other times it been said equally awkwardly. For example “Don’ Give” or, my favourite “Lisa’s on antibiotics” (sorry doll, you said this just one too many times in an evening and it got etched into my very tired, very guilt-ridden brain). It was nice to act crassly. Hopefully i will move on now. grow up. act like my normal prudish self and stop reliving thursday night evertime i fall asleep.

i got home at 4:30am last night. my dad picked me up. i only slept until nine. when i opened my eyes, i felt fantastic. until i tore back the covers and was confronted with my naked self. not only did this bring back all my body issues, but also reminded me how shamelessly i had attempted to make everything physical the night before.

Was reasserting i can be attractive worth living with the memory of acting like a cheap whore? sadly enough, it might.

neither of the men i was the worst with actually remember what happened. i am not inclined to fill them in. does that make it worse? if i want to revel in the secret? in being the only person who can hear the words running in my head?

and learn a little about yourself. i won’t be around a computer much for the next couple of days (end of semester partying and all), so i thought i would take the time to share the personality test i took as per skrud’s last blog entry. Apparently i am an advocating inventor? If, you psyche me, i’ll psyche you! Oh, is that a meme? i don’t understand the concept. if someone wants to explain it to me go ahead. otherwise, i’ll be back in a couple days, hopefully with some insight from many drunken conversation with many intelligent, stimulating people.

My Personal Dna Report

When i was about a kid, my Dad worked from the house. He was trying to start up a collection agency. Money was very tight because only my Mum was making any money, so we didn’t have a pool in the backyard or a summer vacation planned. However, my parents had seen a deal in a local newspaper whereby a family could purchase a season’s pass to the local hotel’s inground pool for a very reasonable price (i think it was something like $60, i don’t remember). My Dad used to walk over with my brother and i during the lunch hours when he couldn’t make the cold calls he spent the rest of his summer days doing. One day was particularly hot. I remember when we were walking home you could feel the heat radiating back at you from the grey concrete. I also remember how uncomfortable my wet bathing suit was under my shorts, which i guess were too tight because none of my clothes ever fit back then. When we arrived home we went into the backyard and, lo and behold, a raccoon, and not a baby, had climbed into the huge maple tree just outside my window to hide in the shade from the summer heat. We turned on the sprinkler, hoping he would dare come over for some water. the poor thing looked terrified of the contraption, so we left him alone. he stayed up there for a while, i know because i kept checking out the window in my room, but eventually his little nook had been vacated and the raccoon was nowhere to be found.

This was a horribly exciting story when i was younger. A raccoon in our backyard! Our tree! Last summer, a raccoon snuck into the house through the window we leave open for the cats at night. he was sitting on the kitchen table when my mom turned on the light at 2am. We don’t leave the window open anymore. we are too afraid for our cats.

Seeing the above picture on Broken Images, All Alike, one of the most well-written and beautiful blogs i have encountered thus far(written by a Canadian) reminded me of the incident from a summer long ago. I hope you don’t mind too much my sharing it. Visit his site if you get a chance. This isn’t the best of the pictures, but it meant the most to me.

I didn’t take this picture. i stole it off of someone’s old travel log. i am sorry whoever you are, but there was no way for me to check your copyright, name or location because there was nothing but pictures of montreal on your site. no links to the homepage. nothing. i am ever so sorry.

onwards to why this picture is here. on friday Steve and i went up to the mountain to talk about our possible reconciliation. for those of you who care, this spun into a very nasty fight, then we managed to talk again and then i spent the rest of the week-end thinking we might be able to work our differences out. apparently, i misunderstood a key aspect of our conversation friday. we are not together. this is very hard because i had thought we might be and we had actually spent a good two hours together…it was sweet, surreal and awkwardly funny. alas, it could not last.

ok. so… while i was on mt. royal, staring down at the the skyline from on high, i again was confronted with the realization that montealers aren’t half as proud of our little nature retreat as we should be. central park smentral park. i like my mountain. and i like my city. i am not the only one:

i starting reading my current issue of The Walrus (Vol. 3, Issue 4) and came across Daniel Singer’s article “Bombs Away!” I am going to excerpt two very poignant bits from the first section as they summarize my own thoughts very nicely.

My Canada includes Quebec, the earnest federalist saying goes. Okay. Sure thing. But only as long as my Montreal still gets to include the bald barber, the drunk accountant, the tranny taxi driver, and the Hassidic guy slipping into the strip bar mid-afternoon. These are the characters who give the city character, who help differentiate it from the Mr. Muffler sprawl that has washed over the rest of the continent and that laps at the island’s very shores….Maybe it’s the absence of fluoride in the water or the fact that everyone can lay claim to being part of a persecuted minority, but what might lead to scowls and dirty looks elsewhere — perhaps harsh words and a slashed tire if things got really ugly — ends with bombs and Molotov cocktails in Montreal. Read the Rest?

Montrealers are serious. Serious about politics, grudges, partying, friends, living, dying and culture. i feel safe walking down most streets, not because i don’t think something bad could happen, because i know it could, but because i truly believe that if i needed help, it would be there, even from a total stranger. i may want desperately to go away, but i know i will also want to return.

To find about more about Daniel Singer, pls click here.

until this past year, i have always found the peer review process pretty useless. if i wanted someone to argue with me about whether the last item in a list requires a comma before it or whether one needs to include an apostrophe “s” after all plurals, even those which the singular form ends in a “s” itself - rather than just an apostrophe, i would refer to my trusty “Little, Brown” Grammar. I think i end up doing a pretty good job of copy editing my own work when i take the trouble. what i have always wanted was someone who was pretty smart but knew nothing about the subject i was writing on (and this NEVER happened before in a class because we were always writing on the same class-covered subjects) who could read over the more obtuse sections of my drafts and say specifically “this isn’t clear,” “this paragraph is too long,” or even “maybe you should present these two ideas in a different order.” My wishes have finally come true.

Yes folks, it has taken me until my third year of University to finally find people who were (a) willing (and i always return the service) and (b) capable of such editing styles. There is nothing like seeing a peer write “expand” next to an idea. it may be criticism, but damn it’s constructive. Someone saying that they thought an idea you cursorily(?) presented could use more coverage means a lot.

In other words, i have finally gotten the concept of peer-review - at 21.

I was really tired of the antiquish theme. at first i liked it, but the pretensiousness was starting to get to me and i was surfing yesterday, reading people’s blogs that are much more well-written than my own; i couldn’t take it anymore. out with the pomp, in the simple flowers. if only they were in orange. i am also looking into hosting services. some are very inexpensive, though i am antsy about another location change so soon.

i was reading the article by Peter Svenson in today’s Gazette entitled “world of lovecraft.” It piqued my interest in one of the craziest online game scenarios i have ever seen. check out Naughty America: The Game for more info into this everquest-like-world of sexual encounters.

on another note, i was informed on thursday evening via email that i will be the web editor for the Void for the upcoming year. yes, i am worried, yes i am going to be doing a lot of research over the summer. in commemoration of this new post, which i do not have time to look into too much right now because of yet another pesky paper, i have added a new category: tech. it will include all blog, software and web-editor related stuff. hopefully there will be stuff in it in the near future while i hone some little-used skills. wish me luck!

Last night i attended the second performance of Po Production’s most recent endeavour “Goodnight Desdemona (Good morning Juliet)” written by Ann-Marie MacDonald. I must say that i was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the acting, staff and general performance (though the Mainline theatre is officially a dump).

the show was very nicely put together. a farce, that plays with stereotypes, refrained from going over the top and being that little “too much” that always turns my stomach. the actor’s managed to maintain that they believed their own seriousness at all times (well, except the return of the “humourous” character that appears in every play with Kelly Rigole have seen thus far and found mildly funny in Henry IV: Part One, un-necessary in At the Crossroads, and just tedious in this production. My Mum thought it was funny, but, then again, she hadn’t seen the same “character” twice before). The costumes were appropriate and a lot of fun to look at (thanks to the McGill theatre department) though obviously a nightmare when it came to changing backstage. the audience had no inkling of this logistics issue. well done!

i especially enjoyed the portrayal of the chorus by John McNeish-Hastings which stroked my pretentious, elitist sensibilities just enough to force me to actually maintain focus on the pompous psycho babble. Though i will not go into details about the performance of each actor, i will commend them all on a job well done. It was a highly professional job for an upstart theatre company run by a highly-motivated group of students. Definitely worth my $7 student rate ticket.

Synopsis of the play: “What would happen if Juliet’s and Desdemona’s death sentences were reprieved?In this exuberant revision of Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet, Constance Ledbelly, a dusty academic, deciphers a cryptic manuscript she believes to be the original source for the tragedies, and is transported into the plays themselves. She visits Juliet and Desdemona, has a hand in saving them from death and finds out what they are all about. In true Shakespearean spirit, Constance plunders the plays and creates something new, all the while engaging in a personal voyage of self-discovery. With an abundance of twists, fights, dances, seductions and wild surprises, the play is an absolute joy.

Roll Call: John McNeish-Hastings (Chorus/Ghost), Lindsay Petts (Director), Angela Potvin (Lighting Designer), Kelly Rigole (Desdemona/Mercutio/Ramona/Servant), Kristen Witczak (Constance), Jimmy Blais (Iago, Romeo), Elisabeth De Grandpre Stage Manager, Patrick Kwok-Choon (Professor Knight/Othello/Tybault/Nurse), and Yaelle Wittes (Student/Soldier/Juliet/Set Design).

Unfortunately, Po Productions does not have a website i can refer you to. i suggest you make the show if you are in the greater Montreal area over this week-end. Details can be found below in the graphic.

yesterday during the grad application seminar (god help me, where am i going to go, how am i going to find the time to apply, and who am i going to have to sell my body to for the money?) i made a stupid smart ass remark to a very nice professor who was leading the seminar. Note that she was giving the help on these cumbersome procedures out of the kindness of her heart.

She was instilling “the fear of God” in us with a lecture about how all the deadlines are the same day and you really need to be organized and plan in advance to avoid emergencies. Well, she then said that she didn’t have enough photocopies for everyone because the photocopier upstairs is broken. Yeah, i made the smart-ass remark that “that isn’t very organized and prepared is it?” yup, because applying to grad school and doing some volunteer-advising are even remotely comparable numbskull. besides the fact that professor Streip is VERY professional, keeps her appointments, answers her students queries and, in other words, is a remarkable professor. Please hit me.

So, i am torturing myself by posting my apology letter for the whole world to see.

Dear Professor Streip,

I am ever so sorry for my inappropriate remark yesterday during the grad application seminar. It is too kind of you to help us undergo the arduous project. The comment was not meant as a reflection on your professionalism, which I am sure all your students, as well as myself, are well aware is beyond reproach, but rather as a what should have remained an internal assessment of the irony of the situation.

I find myself being a jackass a lot lately, not that this seems to help me keep my mouth under control. I am very sorry to have shown you just how unprofessional I can be.

Please don’t think that I don’t think highly of you and that I didn’t appreciate your hard work and thoughtfulness during the seminar. I hope this doesn’t reaffirm your statement last semester that the students at the LAC seem to take the professors for granted. I believe your comment was that they acted as if a lecture was a movie? If anything I got over-involved.

Rambling is not going to lessen the obnoxiousness of my behaviour, but nonetheless, I needed to apologize. I was out of line and know it. I will make every effort I can to refrain from such actions in the future.

Sincerely,

Heather Stein

lemme know which one you think is the more awesome and why: Research it