Or, "Why I'm a huge idiot: part 1 of many."

My friend made me feel guilty that I haven't posted in months and that my most recent one was boring.

So here's a riveting story of student self-preservation and my idiocy on the subject.

It's the end of the school year and I wrote my first final exam today, on Petrarch's Canzoniere. The thing about university exams is that the atmosphere is pretty damn tense, and understandably so, and it's kind of a time that's very much "every man for himself." For a lot of them, especially if you go to a large uni, you're in a huge room packed with people writing on various subjects (my friend wrote his physics final today just a few rows from me) and you have a couple of clocks on the wall and hopefully there isn't a cold going around or else half the room is sniffling and you're in danger of catching it. There's hardly ever any real silence; somebody is always rustling papers, or some chairs are always creaking, or, if you've had the unfortunate luck of sitting near an asthmatic, there will be frustratingly loud breathing going on.

The most prominent feature, however, is how in this room, for two hours, everybody becomes selfish. It makes sense, because it's their GPA on the line, and they don't want distractions, so this is entirely reasonable.

But god forbid you forget a writing utensil.

I had two in my bag; a pencil, and a pen. The pen has served me well so far, and it holds a special place in my heart. I got it in my frosh kit in first year and never really wanted to use it because it brazenly displayed information about the UofT Sex Ed centre, complete with numbers and URLs, and as an ickle froshie I felt more comfortable sticking to my classic blue-inked BIC pens.

And then one fateful day halfway through autumn I had to write my first ever midterm, and it was in Art History, and it was a second year course. And all I had was my Sex Ed pen.

Since then, it's become a bit dear to me, and holds great memories of getting me through tough essay questions and subway travel with newspaper crosswords, so when I left the house this morning and checked for writing utensils, it was with a fond smile and a skip in my step that I tucked away my lucky black-ink pen.

I went to lunch with my friend and we did some last-minute review, and as we walked to the gymnasium in which we'd write the final (yes, gymnasium) I told her about my awesome pen, and how much it's gotten me through, and "Haha wouldn't it suck if I ran out of ink?"

Ohhh our conversations are always a riot. I just love it when foreshadowing happens in real life.

I got into the exam and it was one of those where you must write in ink and the first time since I've had it, I doubted my pen. I turned to my friend, who had three blue ones lined up in front of her, and asked if, just in case, I could borrow one. She gave me the one with the least amount of ink.

So the exam started, I read over the questions, and began to write my first answer: "The Ascent of Mt Ventoux is a perfect way for Petrarch's coll---"

And then my pen ran out of ink. Hardly fifteen words in.

So I switched to the blue one from my friend.

This is what's left of it:



You can probably make that out. If not, that's an empty, empty shell. And it happened just as I finished writing my exam.

I cannot even explain how stressful it is having to write essay answers with very little ink left.

A similar thing happened last year. I showed up to an exam with just a pen, and it was all supposed to be filled out on a Scantron. With an HB pencil. And I had no friends in the room with me. I had to walk around like an asshole asking people for a pencil. And nobody would give me one. I understand that, I suppose, because your spare pencils aren't there to be given out. They're there if the worst happens and by some chance even the second and third fail you. I don't know; maybe you drop your pencil case a lot and the leads are prone to breaking easily and you didn't bring a sharpener. Whatever.

But there was this one girl in particular....She looked so pathetically undecided, because she wanted to be nice, but didn't want to fail her exam if all her pencils broke and she was left with nothing.

Except that she had ten of them lined up on her desk. She was practically supplies closet. Don't even get me started on how many freaking erasers she had.

Finally some chick gave me a break, probably because she'd been watching me going from person to person like a beggar, and gave me one of her mechanical pencils.

And there was half an inch's worth of lead in it.

Half an inch.

But beggars can't be choosers, and since giving away a pencil during an exam is apparently a saintly deed, I wasn't about to ask more from her, so I had to fill in over a hundred Scantron bubbles with half an inch of lead.

I managed, but just barely. It involved crazy faith and a lot of miserly coaxing. And maybe throw in the possibility of fairy dust in there, too, because I really don't know how I did it.

Moral of the story. Bring your own damn writing utensils to university exams. Because chances are, nobody will want to give up theirs.




Also, I am an idiot.

In the past year I've had the pleasure of taking a class on Indigenous Literature. I have to say it went beyond my expectations. Going into it, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect; the stereotypes? Loads of reading about residential schools and how terrifying they were? A lot of talk about the wrongs that were done during colonization?

Well, there was some of that, but there was also a fair amount of...normal. With all the preconceived notions I had, I was worried that it would be a really heavy course. But most of the readings were just...readings. It was literature.

This was the point of the course, I think; to expose us to the fact that though horrible pasts contribute to a culture, they do not define it. There's humor and love to be found in every existing corner. And there's a certain flavour to all the readings. In the same way that Western literature will drop in allusions to popular myths or events that I don't think twice about, things like trickster spirits and medicine (the Native equivalent of of magic) are mentioned with no fanfare. As they should be, because the moment you make a big deal about something, it seems like a thing that's exclusive to that piece.

Anyways, reading these books and short stories and poems gave me a really good idea of what indigenous literature is; that is, literature that speaks of issues, social norms, spiritual ideals, and historic events in ways that can range from passionate to matter-of-fact, righteous to accepting, complex to simple, and serious to satirical.

In other words, it does what all literature should do; educate, enlighten, and, of course, entertain.


Here are some of my favourite reads from the course. Mostly I've found that I gravitated towards the short stories. They were phenomenal.


The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King

The Moon of Letting Go, by Richard Van Camp

Love, Medicine, and one Song, by Gregory Scofield

Red Rooms, by Cherie Dimaline

The Undiscovered, by William Sanders

Borders, by Thomas King

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, by Drew Haden Tayler

Monkey Beach, by Eden Robinson

I'm turning twenty in three days! I'm kind of freaking out. Uni starts up again tomorrow, too, and I haven't looked at anything in over a month. My plan to catch up on readings for my full year courses hasn't exactly been realized, mostly because of too many fun times with friends and too much playing Skyrim alone in my basement. Gotta counterbalance the wild social life somehow, right?

Anybody who knows me knows I'm not a big fan of change. I'm hugely nostalgic about things, most of the time before they even end. I've already started fretting over where all my closest friends will be when we finish school, and that's still a few years down the road. There are also times when I look at things, wishing they were as they were a year ago. Even if I know that they're done, and there's nothing to look for anymore, memories keep me chained to them.

I'm sure this isn't unique to myself, but it's still a mean kind of heartache. Emotions can be so easily confused, and when something's lost, the transition between loss and acceptance is so muddled by longing that it obviously takes time. It doesn't help that this in-between is a constant flip-flop. One moment, you think you're fine, and you feel at peace with fate. The next, you're running in circles trying to make sense of things that intrinsically can't be understood.

There is a part, though, that I consider dangerously close to denial. It's the stage of "I'm just sad because it was fun and I miss it."

When you're in this stage, you have to reach deep and ask yourself: Is that really why you're sad? And do you miss it because you've accepted that it's gone? Or are you just waiting, dormant, for it to come back? Do you miss it because it was fresh and new and uncharted and that kind of thing is too brilliantly fleeting to ever happen again anyways? Or is your sadness a veiled jealousy, you feeling territorial over things you were so secure about once, where even if you could only reinforce it bits at a time, you felt like you had your whole life to explore it? Back when you'd be grateful for four days uninterrupted and say so, and receive the answer that four years wouldn't be enough?

If you think back to those moments and feel a kind of reserved regret, followed by thoughts of bad timing, and fun while it lasted, and soft smiles and special places in your heart, then maybe you're okay.

If, instead, you're sitting at your computer typing "Why Why Why" you're probably not in as good a shape as you thought you were, no matter how many times you tell yourself you're fine. Or tell others you're fine, trying to convince yourself. Or how many people you try to reassure to protect them from guilt of total helplessness in your plight.

So.

Why, why, why.

I guess we'll see in the future.

Twenty in three days!

In lighter news, I went to a swing dance workshop with a friend of mine a few days ago. I didn't know it when I signed up for it, but it was for aerials. Aerials, my friends, are those things where you're thrown around constantly at risk of dying.

I have trust issues. They're not emotional trust issues; I tell everybody about my shit (to the annoyance of some others). These issues more stem from not being comfortable with, you know, flying in the air unfettered. With hardwood floors beneath me. And only human limbs to break my fall.

Long story short, it was terrifying. I had to do handstands against my partner and each time I saw my life flashing before my eyes. There was one moment where I almost died, which consisted of my teetering on my partner's shoulders and watching people around me freak out and lunge over to catch me. Watching, from six feet in the air.

Still. Loads of fun, even though I have four epic bruises from some silly clumsiness and my muscles still ache because of my lack of fitness. Though to be honest I was surprised they hadn't already atrophied. And I guess, in the end, I do have more confidence in myself with these things.

This, by the way, is the move we learned:




We didn't get it to anywhere near that smooth, but we weren't too shabby either! Actually, of the six couples, there was only one that had it almost as smooth as that. And the girl was just over five feet tall and the guy was huge and muscly. So. Just saying. If you can toss your partner around like a rag doll anyways, that is a great advantage.

...What bitterness? :P



Peace out my homies! Till next time!

It has truly been ages! Many, many things have happened. I have a killer week coming up and this whole weekend has been a meagre attempt at getting everything done and studying for all my tests.

How's it going, you ask? You tell me. Here's an excerpt of a conversation between myself and the always lovely and encouraging Kat Zhang, who is going through similar/even worse trials.

Notice how immediately, the mania sets in.

Word of the entry:
 
nerd: 1951, U.S. student slang, probably an alteration of 1940s slang nert "stupid or crazy person," itself an alteration of nut. The word turns up in a Dr. Seuss book from 1950 ("If I Ran the Zoo"), which may have contributed to its rise. (from etymonline.com the freaken coolest site of life.)
example: read the post.



I went to Fan Expo with my friend Vanessa last weekend. Fan Expo is pretty much Toronto's equivalent of ComiCon; way smaller in scale, but still kind of cool. Vanessa had called me up a few weeks ago saying she needed an extra volunteer to sell books at a booth so I jumped on it, especially when she said I'd get a free four-day pass.

Guys...it's bad. It's bad because when it comes down to it, I'm not even that big of a nerd. I mean I've played some video games, but as I've ranted about here before, my house was video game free until eight months ago, so everything I played was on crappy emulators or at other people's houses. In terms of movies, I've seen them and I know the music but because there was so much of my life that was ultimately removed from it all, it never felt genuine to categorize myself with a group of admittedly kind of awesome weirdos.

So what I'm left with is looking around at all the people there and wishing I was cool enough to dress up as San from Princess Mononoke. There's a certain amount of courage a person needs to so blatantly wear their love for comics or fantasy on their sleeve. (See what I did there? Sleeve. Cus it's clothing.) And as much as I'd love to put on a Princess Peach costume and flounce around prattling about the cakes I've baked for Mario, I can't see myself doing so convincingly.

Unless I were acting.

I guess that's what all this comes down to, in the end; how far you're willing to take the ruse. Are you just trying to fit in and have fun, or do you deserve to be Link? Have you dedicated enough of your life and emotions to genuinely feel like you are entitled to carry his shield? Have you spent enough time getting to know the character, enough to do him justice, enough to have nobody self-righteously question your motives? Do you know how to answer when somebody asks if you've ever beaten The Running Man?

Or am I just overthinking?

Something I've noticed is that I tend to romanticize everything a bit too much. Romanticize in the original sense of the word: of making things epic and profound, giving people heroes' roles and cheering them on as they quest to defeat the embodiment of rage and evil. And I have this mentality, this sort of "earning your right to wear the name" for almost everything I do. It's why it's taken me years of writing and slaving away over drafts before I felt comfortable calling myself a writer.

I suppose I like to be able to back up my passions with legitimate proof of effort. That way when somebody gives me acknowledgement, I can accept it guiltlessly, without feeling like I have to follow it with a self-deprecating "Well I'm not that into it," because I am. It's why I'm not ashamed of my relationships and friendships, and why I don't bother trying to be friends with people I don't respect. It's why writing has been the only passion of mine that hasn't been short-lived. The only one that would really crush me if I lost it. Science, acting, baking, music....they can't hold a candle. Eventually maybe history, but even that is so connected to writing with me that it would never be able to take over.

And it's why, in retrospect, it makes complete sense that the only picture I took of myself over the weekend, was this one:

Apologies for being absent! Much has happened in the past two months, summer has taken over, I'm pretty much at the query stage, and I visited Cuba with my parents and Florida with some besties!  

I went to Jacksonville with Susan Dennard, Sarah Maas, Savannah Foley, Kat Zhang!! It was brilliant. I cannot even describe how amazing a time I had. The amount of writing we didn't do was a perfect reflection of how much more eager we were to just talk and chat and gossip and spend time with each other and be real friends, not just "writer friends". On top of everything we were in Sooz's amazing family beach house which her family generously let us use and oh my god...it was gorgeous. Ocean view of the Atlantic.

But let me tell you some plane stories.

Seriously. Flight attendants. I have some insane respect for them.

On my way there, I went through Atlanta, and, of course, had nightmarish delays. It almost came to the point where I'd have had to spend the night there. I got on the last plane to Jacksonville, one of last seats, and had the interesting fortune of sitting beside an off-duty flight attendant.

Oh the stories she told me. We chatted a bit, and I asked her a question I'd always had about flight attendants: did she have an established home?

She told me, yep, and she was flying there right now. So that she could stay in a hotel to get three hours of sleep before setting back out again. At this point it was already midnight. Then she told me about how she commutes from Jacksonville to Atlanta every time she starts work. See, when somebody tells me they commute to work, I imagine, you know, a car, or the subway. Nope. She commutes by plane. "In fact, I have a friend who commutes all the way from Greece each time she wants to start her day at work," she said. Greece! From Greece to Atlanta, every time you want to start working!

Then I asked her if she's ever been in any close calls. I've flown in planes a fair amount of times in my life but at worst I just experienced some rough-ish turbulence. She looked at me with these big wide eyes and said "Yes, yes I was in a close call."

Apparently, about half a year ago, while they were flying, the pilots came upon turbulence that both couldn't be seen and didn't show up on the radar. People were milling about, going to the washrooms, flight attendants handing out drinks, and she was out of her seat helping somebody out, when suddenly their plane just started dropping. Just flat-out began to fall.

They fell a mile through the air. Three business men had to hold her body down with their legs so that she wouldn't fly up and hit the ceiling of the plane. Afterwards, when they landed, 30 people were admitted to the hospital with broken bones. And she had to go through four months of therapy to ever get on a plane again.

At this point I asked her what the fuck she was still doing working as a flight attendant and she just shrugged, said, "It's been my job for twenty years," gave me a small smile, and sipped her water.

Mad respect. After that, I probably would've shit my pants just at the sight of a plane, let alone flown ever again.

But on top of all the improbable risks of crashing, flight attendants have to deal with people.

Ugh. The people.

On my way back I flew through Detroit and my connection flight to Toronto was delayed for an hour. Then we got in and six or seven people in the back started complaining really bitchily about the smell from the toilet, asking for new seats, blah blah. Meanwhile it's 11:30pm. So they call a cleaning crew, which meant about 50min of waiting, then the smell turns into shit bathroom smell plus heavy astringent, and the people in the back start freaking out. Get me new seats, you call this a service, I paid money for this ticket....Meanwhile, I sat one row away from the bathroom and it was not that bad. At all. There was a group of random high school kids, who applauded the cleaning crew after they left, and a flight attendant, trying to be positive, high fives a kid when he offers one for getting the cleaning crew there and gives a little funny victory dance.

And then shit goes down.

"WHY ARE YOU DANCING. THIS IS DISGUSTING. YOU DUMB BITCH WE HAVE TO SIT HERE AND SMELL SHIT FOR THE REST OF THE FLIGHT."

And this is like seven people ganging up on these two poor women (it was a tiny flight of like 65 people). This one woman with two kids starts screaming that she doesn't want her kids travelling in the stench and she's really stressed because apparently it was the fifth flight they tried for to get to Toronto. So the captain's called in and he starts a whole "Are you gonna sit down so we can leave? Yes or no?" and the whole time in the background you have the other people complaining chiming in with muttered choruses of "This is disgraceful" and "My money to waste". So the crew starts threatening to call security and this woman BREAKS DOWN. Like actually breaks down; starts rambling, doesn't listen to anything anybody's saying. Even her kids are like "Mom it's fine, just sit down and relax." But by the time she does sit down, she's absolutely drained, and sitting there with a hand on her face looking broken.

And then a cop comes in and takes her and her kids off the plane. She just accepted it. She was like "Fuck it. I don't care anymore," and went with him to identify her baggage to get it out of the plane's hull.

We didn't leave until 1am.

And get this: it's only a 30min flight in the air.


And that's why I'd never want to be a flight attendant.

It's been a weird couple of weeks. Some good things have happened, and some bad. I'm still trying to figure out which ones outweigh which.

If two month's ago you'd asked me what would happen up to this point...actually I don't even know what I would've said. But I definitely didn't expect what has happened, one of the bigger surprises being that I somehow landed a job as something akin to a dental assistant and am now in training for it. It involves having to cover most of my skin for what is called "infection control"; pretty much, if the patient's blood splashes out of their mouth it should land somewhere it can't access my own blood stream, so away from things like eyes, mouth, cuts... I wear a lab coat, a face mask, and blue surgical gloves. I have to admit, it makes me feel supremely badass, even though all I do is hand the dentist gauze or tools and from time to time suction out spit, water and blood from the person's mouth.

In lamer news, there were tentative plans that I go to Italy. If they had come true, I'd have been in Ravenna while typing this, either on the beach, or coming back from visiting monuments, or sitting in a little cafe off an all-pedestrian street. Still super bummed about that, but I guess there will be more opportunities for travel. And I did end up getting a job, which now would be the main reason I wouldn't want to go, when before it was leaving certain people behind for a few weeks. Or if you're my mom, "It's dangerous to be alone in a foreign country!" That was the final say in the matter.

I'm still not finished editing TIAFT, but that's partially due to the fact that I had to get my laptop fixed. It's also due to the fact that I realized my brilliant plot point that ties things together could be replaced by something much, much less complicated, so the knowledge of having to go through it all again right after I finish the first time is somewhat bogging me down, but as I'm almost at the fast-paced stuff (or at least it felt fast-paced when I wrote it) I should be finished soon.

The roses outside my window are going to bloom very, very soon. My window's already full of green leaves and stems.

It just occurred to me that it sounds like I care for them. I don't. They're just pretty and I don't let my mom cut them down when she works on the garden.

It also just occurred to me that I'm taking on a rambling tone. I'll admit that I am just typing out whatever comes to mind. I'm in that mood where everything's a bit grey, so you think of something special and try to bring the colour back with it. My trouble is that thinking of special things has me looking back on the last few months and registering all the disappointments, because in the end they had to be special to be disappointing.

I'm not quite over it all. I wish I were, but I suppose you can't choose to lose your vulnerability when it's already been intentionally or unintentionally used against you. And though I know it was unintentional, that makes it harder to be angry at people, you know? So all you have left is some form of regret or sadness or, dare I say it, despair. Sometimes I wish I understood things less, and let my bad feelings show more. Maybe shouting matches help more than I think they do. Perhaps talking things through isn't always the answer.

Either way, I'm blaming a lot of this melancholy on what I'm listening to, which is absolutely heartbreaking whichever way you spin it.

And yet, it seems to suit...

Please forgive the drama. I'll post again soon.

Word of the entry:
 
supercilious: haughtily disdainful or contemptuous, as a person or a facial expression. From Latin supercilium, lit. "eyebrow", as in you raise it to express loftiness.
example: She raised a supercilious eyebrow at my dirty jeans.



School is done! My first year of university is over. Has been for about a week and a half, now, and the idea that I won't have school from now till September kind of makes my mind go blank. It hasn't even been two weeks and already I don't know what to do with myself.

I've started up my revisions again, now that I don't have to worry about neglecting school work, so that's going...alright. Some days it's awesome and I'm excited, other days I hit a section and just....no. Especially since I found out yesterday that I have two drafts, and the one that's supposed to be more recent is missing some revised goodies from an older one, so from time to time I have to compare them, which is always tedious.

Back to school though, I lied a little bit when I said it was done till September. I'm taking a free language course on Old Norse that a couple of PhD students are teaching at my uni for kicks. I am so insanely excited for it and I feel like the biggest nerd that walked the planet. But while we're on the topic of Old Norse, I have a really cool story to share.

One of the professors at my uni studied at Oxford. He's extremely well learned in old languages and when he reads Old English it's as fluid as water. At Oxford, when he was learning Old Norse, he'd go to the library to the neglected sections that held old books on the language.

So he's flipping through the books and a page opens to a loose leaf of paper. On it, written in Old freaking Norse, with little pencil corrections, was a rough draft of an invitation to a reading group written by C.S. Lewis.

C.S. Lewis, people, not even joking. He showed it to us, got it appraised, had it validated, and it's his handwriting.

An invitation to a reading group written by C.S. Lewis in Old Norse. That I held. And wished I could read. My taking Old Norse this summer may have been inspired by this.

Damn.

By the way, just taken from Wikipedia: