Road Trip

I am on a road trip. I will return to blogging when I get back.

Tristen and Kaylor

There is a little bit of back story needed here. These are two of my closest friends, I love them and can sing nothing but their praises, and some Disney songs. Both have finished their degrees and are moving away from Ottawa this weekend. It is so hard to see them go as they are a big part of my life here, lump in my throat. I met Kristen in the first week of first year (well, her first year.) Through Kristen I met Taylor, who I became friends with in second year. What should also be noted is that a lot of the memories I have of them from the last year or so are also tied to Heather, who thankfully is staying around for at least the summer.

In rough chronological order, I will always remember...

-meeting Kristen in first year French where I terrified her and forced her to be my friend

-never learning that 'Je suis une chat' means 'I am a cat'

-going as a guest to the cafeteria

-getting kicked off their residence floor for having alcohol in the hallway

-discovering The Lonely Island

-cooking Kristen perogies at Glen

-studying for Human Rights with Kristen and Taylor from a page of predetermined questions

-the Gentleman way

-hanging out in Taylor's big room on the first floor of 998

-Socrates and Jesus

-meeting M- during a random make-out at the bar

-Taylor's issues with pee and Kristen's issues with first dates

-the Numa Numa dance

-Kristen milking her birthday for weeks on end and me milking a break up to go to Pizza Hut

-Kings

-being quoted in a number of articles both for The Charleton and journalism classes

-having Kristen stay with me at Le Manoir off and on throughout the summer she was Productions Editor

-Kristen always convincing me that we should just walk downtown

-Taylor as a raptor

-nights sleeping on the futon

-Jeopardy

-being told that a box of chicken fingers and a bag of baby carrots does not count as a dinner

-visiting Kristen at work both at the Charleton and Smithbooks

-Kristen crashing on my futon after watching Amanda Bynes

-fierce Wednesdays with the girls along with dinner and great desserts

-painting Die Höhle

-going camping and having Taylor cook incredible meals over a fire

-being 110% sure

-the alcove becoming the cubical

-creating strange sound effects for rummy, the birth of a cow, and what a raccoon says, 'heeeey'

-babysitting Friends DVD's for over a year

-offering to help paint Taylor's new house but just ending up drinking for the whole weekend

-downey paper, the plastic lattice, and fear of sleeping with Kristen

-Taylor's short bangs

-being purposed to by Adam, as Eve, at The Big Apple

-issues with Acers

-going to see a show about sex put on by children

-photoshoots

-playing rummy, learning honeymoon bridge, and teaching two handed euchre

-Kristen's strange eyelash

-falling in love with Taylor's bed and sleeping in it whenever she wasn't there

-picking Taylor up from the airport

-all nighters in the library, frantically trying to print, rushing around campus, only to find out that St. Pats was locked

-Mark's Easter egg hunt

-Guuuuuy La Douche

-winning at the Wii because I was the only one who was sober

-Mark getting ready to lunge and me screaming while Kristen did nothing

-sleeping with Kristen when I was scared of the monsters

-Taylor leaving her mark on Ottawa and the walk home along the canal

.... and so many more that it is impossible to list them all. While new memories are sure to be made I will miss having Taylor and Kristen living just around the corner. I love them both so much!

Or So I Thought

Breathing stops, at the mention of a name

I look away

I thought it all had left, as quickly as it came

-

I had thought our eyes were meeting

I still dream

Moments that seemed so very fleeting

-

Needing a challenge, I aimed so high

I felt hope

But looked as though, I was going to cry

-

Awkward and small, I stared at the ground

I don't regret

It took quite a while, but courage I found

-

Said it was alright, when nothing happened

I was lying

A reference is made and my heart quickened

-

Broke so long ago but the pain is still there

It is time

Wishing for something to come and repair

-

I thought I was over him

I thought I was over you

I thought it was good

I thought it was gone

-

But my breathing stops

At the mention of a name

--Christine Sweeton

Final Project

It has been a long time since I could say that I was working on a final project. My courses pretty much always have final essays, so I just call them that. However, for my British Literature II class, because I have already written 3 essays, I had the option of doing a fun assignment. The assignment was to write a series of letters between two of the characters in The Portrait of a Lady. I think I am the only person in the class who chose it so when I talked to the T.A. we decided together how to do the assignment. We agreed on 8 letters that had to show the progression of the characters that occurs in the novel. I went a little overboard. It ended up being 31 letters, plus a letter to the T.A. at the top of the pile. The letter for the T.A. explains the thesis I am trying to prove in the letters and tells him that I identified the 8 most important letters with a special symbol both on their envelopes and the letters themselves. Jerrica helped me put the pretty addresses and return addresses on all the envelopes and the entire project ended up taking me two all-nighters to finish. I think the final product is super adorable!

X & Y

The past few weeks I find that I have been repeating a similar statement to my friends. I keep saying; To Z, 'Have a great time X, I will see you when I get back from Y.' At the end of this week I am going with Teri and her friend out west. We are spending the first few days driving out, Road Trip! On the way, I get to stop into Edmonton to visit Erin, Anne, and hopefully Little Brother Mike. Teri's friend lives in Vancouver so Teri and I will be staying with her and touring the city for a little over a week. We are planning on spending a bit of time in Victoria as well before we fly back to Ontario on May 10th. In the above statement I am obviously referring to this trip, but I word it a number of different ways. Y = 'Vancouver', 'Out West', 'B.C.', 'My Vacation', 'My Road Trip.' While Y is fairly random, logistically in this statement, X is dependant on Z. Obviously the location (X) I'm wishing my friend (Z) to have a great time time in is directly connected to which friend I'm talking to and where they are going. So the remaining variables for this statement are:
If Z = 'Heather', Therefore X = 'In Pittsburgh', 'With S'
If Z = 'Anna', Therefore X = 'In Mexico'
If Z = 'Taylor', Therefore X = 'In Europe', 'On Your Trip'
If Z = 'Kristen', Therefore X = 'In Europe', 'On Your Trip'
What this has made me realise is that my friends and I travel alot. It confirms that I'm really excited about my trip and have been probably talking about it with alot of my friends. This also shows that helping Taylor study for statistics last night has really made me look at the world from a more mathematics standpoint and that I'm totally lame.

Seriously - No Time

My schedule is jam packed over the next week and a half. Leading up to my trip out west I work every weekday except the Wednesday of my exam. Leading up to my exam I'm meeting with my study group everyday. I'm trying to see a bunch of my friends before I go since I really haven't seen many of them this crazy exam month and I want to visit before I leave the province for two weeks. I'm really not good at balancing school, work, and social at the best of times but now everything has been cranked up a notch. I really need to see my friends, especially those who won't be in Ottawa when I get back in May. Also, work projects are really big right now and since I have been screwing up at my job so much I really need to step it up. Of course school is first priority and exam time even more so. I don't feel overwhelmed or stressed, just busy. Really busy!

Media Photography - Final

For all those that modelled for me during my Media Photography course this semester, and to everyone who followed my progress through Always Standing, thank you! I have received my final mark and I got a A- which I am pleased with.

Trip Home

I went home for Easter and one of the things I did while I was there was to sort through my old memory boxes. It was really fun to go through my old keepsakes, toys, and school work. In honour of that I thought I would post a really bad poem. This is the first poem I ever wrote, well ever officially wrote down. I composed it completely myself, randomly just for the fun of it. (In later years my mom would often work with me, come up with rhymes, and write some of the lines.) It has won a couple of competitions and been published in an anthology at one point. I was pretty young when I wrote it, I know that I entered it in a contest in 1996 when I was 11 and it was probably written a year or more before that. It is not very good.

I've Got The Keys
I've got the keys
Mom gave me responsibility.
I could climb the statue of liberty.
I'm walking home,
All alone.
I have to open the door,
But I want to do so much more .
The whole key chain?
Is my mother insane?
Got the keys to the office, pool, and van.
Man Oh Man!
I got the keys to the car.
I could go really far.
The chain says "#1 Mom,"
But boy this time she was dumb!
I opened the door.
Didn't do more.
Oh well! Responsibility.

-Christine Sweeton

Speaks To My Soul

I hate how much this article represents my life. Everything except the relationship part, but that is only because I'm single, I'm sure most of my friends who are dating can relate. These are the parts that I liked the best:

Welcome To Your Quarterlife Crisis

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"...he doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school..."
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"...at her government job, she instant messages her friends and mostly ignores the report she’s drafting because she’s planning on quitting anyway ... She spends her lunch hour buying boots that cost slightly more than her rent..."
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"...she walks to the house that she shares with three friends and spends a few more hours on celebrity gossip websites, then clicking through the Facebook photos of girls she knew in high school posing with their husbands and babies, simultaneously judging them and feeling a deep pit of jealousy, and a strange kind of loss..."
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"...unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction ... urban, middle class and well-educated ... can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want..."
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"...parents with more money and autonomy than their predecessors has resulted in benignly self-indulgent children who were sold on their own uniqueness, place in the world and right to fulfillment in a way no previous generation has felt entitled to, and an increasingly entrepreneurial, self-driven creation myth based on personal branding, social networking and untethered lifestyle spending is now responsible for our identities..."
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"...works at a non-profit, wants to travel and get a master’s degree, but feels conflicted about doing either. 'I want to have kids, and every day that goes by, I have this number in my head. It’s 32. It used to be 30. That’s only a few years from now. I’m thinking, if I don’t do some of this stuff now, before I have kids, am I going to be able to do it?' Women are roundly considered to be in biologically ideal form for baby-making in their twenties and early thirties, which are also prime fun-having and career-building years. For women who want all of the things promised by (theoretically) equal education, work and sex lives, the conflict of desires can be catastrophic..."
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"...inundated with constant but mostly empty communication, as the increasingly primary social sphere exists online instead of real life. Nothing could be more alienating to someone in the midst of a crisis than a tool like Facebook ... half-forgotten acquaintances and abandoned friendships reappear in this spreadsheet of potential reasons to feel terrible about yourself ... gauging your own feelings of inadequacy in direct relation to other people’s success. All these people you couldn’t give a shit about a couple of years ago are now these omnipresent benchmarks and counterpoints to measure against whatever you have or haven’t got going on in your life...”
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"...attempts to manage the Quarterlife Crisis might be as banal as drinking a lot, doing a bunch of drugs, sleeping with idiots and myriad other kinds of self-flagellation, but broader attempts are made to find some sense of purpose. An obvious choice for panicking twentysomethings with a post-undergraduate sense of displacement and for the ones that aren’t fulfilled by their jobs is grad school..."

So Bad It Is Good

I was looking up movie times and I ran across a description for Duplicity. I don't think this was written by some random person online, I think this might very well be the official description released from the production company for the movie and that scares me. The description itself is shockingly horrible and the movie it describes has got to be just as painfully bad. Makes me want to see it though. I have very poor taste in movies.

CIA officer Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts) and MI6 agent Ray Koval (Clive Owen) have left the world of government intelligence to cash in on the highly profitable cold war raging between two rival multinational corporations. Their mission? Secure the formula for a product that will bring a fortune to the company that patents it first. For their employers: industry titan Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and buccaneer CEO Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti), nothing is out of bounds. But as the stakes rise, the mystery deepens and the tactics get dirtier, the trickiest secret for Claire and Ray is their growing attraction. And as they each try to stay one double-cross ahead, two career loners find their schemes endangered by the only thing they can't cheat their way out of: love.

Yes, It Is Snowing

This is so many people's Facebook status right now, something along the lines of how nice it was before, and how horrible it is now that it is snowing. I'm sure Twitter is alive with the same sentiment, though I don't have Twitter so I can't be sure. I don't understand how snow is worth all this talk, the weather is about the last thing I care about. I'm fairly indifferent to it, most days. It isn't even cold out, I don't understand the fuss. It is Ottawa, it is Ontario, it is Canada. It is early April. Sometimes its nice, sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows.

A Bit Of A Wait

I watched Twilight, the movie, this evening. I am not going to lie, it was pretty hot. (And it didn't feel as much like I was cheating on Harry Potter as I thought.) Now of course I want to read the book and then of course read the whole series. The thing is, as an English major, I have no time to read things that aren't on my course lists. Even during my upcoming two weeks off from school, I'm going to have to look up what is required reading for my summer term courses to get a head start. Seriously, I won't be reading Twilight until January 2010, that is if school goes according to plan.

Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

This is one of my favorite songs. Sometimes when I hear it, it makes me cry, other times it makes me smile, and it always reminds me of my dad. Every time my dad had a Sunday off when I was growing up, which I guess was about once a month or so, he would play this song while we had breakfast. He also sometimes played it more than once, which he tends to do with songs he really likes. So basically I heard this on a regular bases for the first 19 years of my life and for the last 6 intermittently I will listen to it on my computer or hear it when I go home. Ironically those Sunday mornings having breakfast with my family are some of my happiest memories but this song, while great, is really very sad.

Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

By Kris Kristofferson

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Well I woke up Sunday morning

With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt

And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad

So I had one more for desert

-

Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes

And found my cleanest dirty shirt

Then I shaved my face and combed my hair

And stumbled down the stair to meet the day

-

I'd smoke my brain the night before

On cigarettes and songs that I've been picking

But I lit my first and watched a small kid

Cussin' at a can that he was kicking

-

Then I crossed the empty street

And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken

And it took me back to something

That I'd lost somehow somewhere along the way

-

On the Sunday morning sidewalk

Wishing Lord that I was stoned

Cause there's something in a Sunday

Makes a body feel alone

And there's nothing short of dying

Half as lonesome as the sound

On the sleepin' city sidewalk

Sunday morning coming down

-

In the park I saw a daddy

With the laughing little girl who he was swinging

And I stopped beside a Sunday school

And listened to the song that they were singing

-

Then I headed back for home

And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringing

And it echoed through the canyons

Like a disappearing dream of yesterday

-

On the Sunday morning sidewalk
Wishing Lord that I was stoned
Cause there's something in a Sunday
Makes a body feel alone
And there's nothing short of dying
Half as lonesome as the sound
On the sleepin' city sidewalk
Sunday morning coming down...

-

If you have never heard it, go find and listen to it. It is truly great country. Be sure though to listen to the Kris Kristofferson version. Strangely, while he wrote it in 1969, it was realised by three different singers around that time. The original version is actually sung by Ray Stevens in 1969, I don't like it because his voice is too sweet and happy, there isn't the same emotion in it. Then in 1970, Johnny Cash did a cover of it which I'm also not a fan of, as it has a very Cash-like beat in the background that is too strong for my liking. The true version, sung by the writer, and appeard on Kris Kristofferson's first album, Kristofferson, also in 1970. This song, and many of the others on the album were already hits when covered by other artists. In spite of this the album was a commercial failure. It was re-released under the title Me & Bobby McGee in 1971, after the success of Janis Joplin's cover of his song 'Me & Bobby McGee' and the success of Kris Kristofferson's second album, The Silver Tongued Devil and I. It became a hit upon re-release and 'Sunday Mornin' Coming Down' has always been one of the songs that he is known for.

She Makes Me Smile

Walking downtown, passing a hot dog stand.
Me: Oh, I have been craving a hot dog for a while now
Ottawa Erin: I had hot dogs last night, with buns and everything. Well, actually they were just normal buns not specifically hot dog buns. I thought that I would buy normal buns from the bakery and then I could use them for the hot dogs, making sandwiches, and, umm you know, bread nuggets.
Me: Bread nuggets?
Ottawa Erin: Yea, when you just eat a bun plain because you want bread.
Me: Like a roll?
Ottawa Erin: That's the word I was looking for.

FML

This is an acronym I can get behind. In general I don't like to swear too much on Always Standing but some days it just can't be helped. Fuck My Life!! Truly a sentiment that I feel wholeheartedly right now as I'm exhausted and struggling with school. Unfortunately I'm struggling at work even worse. I can't seem to do it all, something always slips by and gets screwed up. In an effort to cheer me up, because I am having such a dreadful day, Ottawa Erin sent me a link to the site FMyLife. It was a cute little treat. These short little notes from people talking about how much their life sucks. It sounds negative and pessimistic and it is, but at the same time it seems cathartic, genuine, and often humourous.

Feeling No Guilt

I'm on campus at a library computer. I'm pretty much doing what I always do on library computers, checking my e-mail, going on Facebook, doing a blog post. I swear though, at least three times, I have overheard someone behind me say with annoyance 'Uhh, Facebook.' I am assuming that they are doing this because myself and probably a lot of my other peers sitting at these computers are on Facebook not in fact researching, doing projects, or writing essays. I chose to feel no guilt. I waited in line for my turn, I pay tuition, and in fact I have a laptop that I usually use when I'm on campus so don't normally take up the schools computers. I will not be guilted, shamed, or forced off before I had intended, which is in about 10-15 minutes when Anna gets off work so we can walk home together. Yes, it is true that I'm just on this computer to fill time and maybe I should be doing some readings and not wasting time on the internet. Damn, I feel guilty about that now.