courting crazy environmentalists on film

ENGB24 - Courtship in Literature | Professor: Dr. Natalie Rose
same professor from Victorian Prose and Poetry, but with much more interesting topic, though no less Victorian. i was a bit aprehensive about taking this course as there was a high probability that it would be full of girls (and girls have cooties). i underestimated a) the number of guys looking to acquire cooties b) the number of guys who have cooties and have been dragged into it by their infector c) the number of people merely interested in the topic. i will be required to read (and sometimes watch):

1. Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
   
2. Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre
3. Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
4. William Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
5. Martin Amis - The Rachel Papers
6. Helen Fielding - Bridget Jones's Diary (the movie only)
7. some raunchy poetry - the professor wanted to assign a Harlequin romance or something equally trashy but did not have the guts to. John Donne will have to do.

i watched Mansfield Park on Monday. i liked it very much. it had some quirky Amelie moments. the book is quite different, and likely more long-winded. i haven't read it yet, but i found the pdf for it on Project Gutenberg's online catalogue.
this will help give you an idea of what we might talk about: Take Girl. Add Boy. Bring to Boil.

ENGB75 - Cinema and Modernity I | Instructor: Natalie Papoutsis
i am really excited about this class because i get to learn about film and cinematography. i've always wanted to know the terms and technicalities so that my movie reviews could be a bit more authoritative. i watched a short film from the 70s that presented and explained and showed a lot of cinematographic terms. it was hilarious.
there won't be any reading in this class, apart from a few short articles. it will mostly be watching movies once a week from three genres: the Western, Film Noir and Melodrama.

1. Shane (1952)
   
2. Unforgiven (1992)
3. Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003) - tentatively, if she can get the license
4. Double Indemnity (1944)
5. Blade Runner (1982)
6. Memento (2001)
7. Broken Blossoms (1919)
8. Stella Dallas (1937)
9. All That Heaven Allows (1955)
10. Far From Heaven (2002)

ENGC03 - Studies in Canadian Fiction | Professor: Dr. Marlene Goldman
this is a continuation of last semester's Canadian fiction course. some of my favourite authors are Canadian and megasuperstars (Atwood, Davies) and so this will be a fun course. the teaching and marking style i am already familiar with so i will just need to keep up with my readings. there are a lot, on top of the Courtship readings, but they're really good books and i'm working very hard on perfecting the art of reading three books 'simultaneously'. currently i am reading Alias Grace, Mansfield Park and Little Men (the continuation of Little Women - for fun. can you believe that Jo shoots down Laurie? poor Laurie). the course will be all about the crazy. reading list:

1. Margaret Atwood - Alias Grace
   
2. Jane Urquhart - Away
3. Robertson Davies - Fifth Business
4. Timothy Findley - Pilgrim
5. Michael Ondaatje - Coming Through Slaughter

PSCD02 - Current Questions in Science | Professor Donald Cormack
last year (technically 2005) i took PSCD01, which was basically the same thing. this time around i seem to have a lazier professor and less work. there was a huge debate project last time. this time there is merely a group presentation about some topic that is probably environmentalistic. we will be watching the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (which i have promptly downloaded and watched an hour of), which is quite a scary piece on global warming. it follows Al Gore around as he does presentations on the same topic to academic institutions and so on. contrary to Royal Canadian Air Farce belief, Al Gore quite a dynamic speaker and is quite funny in that deadpan way that i like. i highly recommend watching it for the sake of your future children.

"what happened to grape soda?"

i ordered a new hard drive on wednesday because my existing hard drive was making quite a ruckus even when idling. a quick google told me that my hard drive was probably on its last legs of life. so i did a bit of research and found a lovely deal on a Western Digital Scorpio 120GB 5400rpm 8MB cache hard drive for $150 counting tax and shipping. i planned on backing up my data on thursday after school, or friday morning because i had no classes.

during my first class on thursday the hard drive failed as i was typing some notes on an Atwood poem. i had to try my hand at taking lecture notes by hand (after a year without doing so). the results were less than spectacular. fortunately, it was an introductory lecture to cinematography terms. i had a nice and relaxed night. couldn't do any real work, so i read a good chunk of Alias Grace and watched The Office.

friday was when the drive was slated to arrive. i hoped that it would arrive early in the day so that i could spend a few hours installing stuff because i had a small research assignment on Intelligent Design due on wednesday. alas, it arrived at 5, just in time for me to head over to the church. i tried to install xp before aletheia, but i was silly and only brought an xp pro ugrade disk. hurray for wasted day.

i sat down to install xp at around 12:00 and met setback after setback (the product key didn't take). after 5 tries to repair the installation and 3 hours, i ended up deleting the partition and starting from scratch. that finally worked. i loaded the necessary drivers and went to sleep.

some time later this week i will likely install a Linux distro. here are the ones i'm eyeing:
Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) - the most Windows-like distro
Zenwalk (based on Slackware) - the screenshots i've seen makes it look a bit like the set up i have now
Symphony OS (based on Debian) - a completely different desktop environment which might be fun to try

i have only very limited Linux/Unix experience, namely a computers class a few years ago with a Linux nerd. everyone had to use Red Hat. this puts Gentoo out of the picture. suggestions?

EDIT: i "release gas" (give up). this is too much hassle for no actual gains. other than bragging rights.

that's disgusting

on sunday, during dinner, my cousin of 6 yrs old asked her dad surreptitiously, "deem guy biu goh mo sai di uhm chong geh?" (why doesn't herman have pimples anymore?), to which he replied in Chinese, "he was hungry so he squeezed them out and ate them all."

that is a myth. someone was hired to squeeze them out for me. though i was hungry (because i was not to eat seafood or beef or other yeet hay - hot air - things), the extracted pimples were not eaten.

throughout grades 8 to 11, i proceeded to acquire as many pimples as i could (not that i wanted to, but it builds character). my mom became quite worried about my face so we went on lots of trips together to doctors of Western and/or Eastern medicine, trying out fancy topical creams, acid peels or herbal potions (bitter tea) that contained the dried out husks of some round, brown insects amongst the twigs and sprigs. nothing worked to any sort of satisfaction until we went to a beautician who had emigrated from China.

many hours and days were spent at the little clinic with me lying on a massage bed that had been converted to a regular bed, listening to soft, flutey elevator music while my face was steamed, pimples were picked or squeezed out with a pick/loop, then my face was covered in thin strips of gauze soaked in a medicinal liquid while an electrically charged wand was rubbed around my face before a good hour and a half under a heat lamp with my pimpled areas stippled with tiny acupuncture needles.

turns out that i have pear-shaped pores; the openings are small while the recesses are bulbous. that, coupled with genetics, hormonal imbalances, poor diet and sleep habits resulted in several layers of super duper pimples. after about 2 months of procedures, my face shrank noticeably. after the 3rd month, they decided that i needed some blood recycling (i have no idea why), so at the end of each appointment i would have some blood drawn from one elbow and reinjected into the other. i didn't really bother to complain or ask why because i was having so much fun already. no, it wasn't really fun.

now i look back on it after 4 years and i am thankful. not simply because i would ruin fewer pictures (i can ruin them perfectly fine with or without ugly) or gain self-confidence (too much of that already), but because all those hours of discomfort and pain and embarrassment bred much patience and humility and gratitude in someone who wasn't naturally born with those things.

my last first day

even though i hid in one spot watching Mystery Men and The Office and browsing the increasingly boring internet for about 4 of the 6 hours i spent at school day, the short walk i took from hiding nook to class netted me half a dozen familiar faces and conversations. while i do have about 2/3 of one foot out the "door", i know i will look back on these past four years with fondness, both for the countless hours spent alone and for the brief moments spent in communion with physics and english nerds alike.

if all goes according to plan, i will have many more first days of school to go through, but from the other side of the classroom. as a sign of growth, i have resolved to not fall into the trap of slack i fell into in my senior year of high school because there is so much more than myself at stake. eventually, there will be dozens of fertile minds entrusted to my tutelage. even if teaching does not pan out and other avenues open up, eventually there will still be lives entrusted to my care. i tried to motivate myself in first year with the same reasoning, but it was too overwhelming and i despaired. this time around, i still feel overwhelmed -- not with despair, but rather excitement for the real troubles and fun to begin.

renewal

 i got my driver's license renewed, so now that photo is not as bad. it's quite decent actually, though the lighting makes me look like a corpse - a corpse with a scarf. better than oven-baked like my student card though.



i unintentionally used the exact same facial expression three and a half years apart.