Losing Time

I feel that University has began to crush me. There are so many things that I WANT to learn, this I feel are of such great importance for me, but for which I do not have the time. The essay my English teacher wants me to write is, frankly and in my view, sterile. Drop the name of the literary device, slop on the page number, "This means this now please give me a 4.0 or at least a 3.7". It's barbaric how readily the study of English encourages us to rape the intent of the author to fuel our own forced and contrived false convictions for the sake of appeasement. We need room to breathe! I never want to study English, I want to read and contribute. Read and Write. Do something or bask in another's life, deconstruction is action for no end BUT satisfaction. I begin a phrase with "This story made me feel very- " and my professor's eyebrows droop and sag in the anticipation of reason-less drivel. I tell myself to explore the world in the way he does, to write with a narrow mechanical field of drag-and-drop vision but my empathy for Joyce wins out in the end. I can't help but feel him rolling over in his grave, his motions more violent than those caused by the astronomical price of a pint on Stephen Avenue. If I were to ever accomplish something with my writing (and I don't have the strong desire to, the way I've been lead to the English language so far in my life), I would cry if a man told me he made his students study it. I think I would cry because unless he himself was a great man, my love would be lost. I am going to have a meeting with some English and Film studies higher ups and see if I can transfer my second semester English class to a writing class (and talk with some Drama higher-ups to see if they will accept writing as a BFA requirement). That'll give me some control, I hope.

Health wise I haven't been doing so well. I get these episodes where I can feel a putrid, horrible poison rotting in my gut and I begin to dry wretch so hard my ribs crack and my eyes tear. My vision blurs and I slump to the side. Walking is a struggle. And then it's gone. And then it's back. And then it's gone. Each cluster of episodes is flanked by extreme fatigue and an aching pain in my stomach - the whole process takes about three hours, with the worst condensed to a twenty minute period in the middle. I had a conversation with a girl in my class with Celiac Disease and my struggles seem to be similar to those she experienced before she was diagnosed. I've cut gluten out of my diet and it's fucking expensive but I've been fine.

I went to see a doctor and she said I had the flu, which made no sense because I was fine an hour and a half later. Her recommendation was no food for the rest of the day. I had spicy chicken (for the first time in weeks) and potatoes and I felt on top of the world. She blames the constant pains on me breaking my vegetarianism - that's not true. Had chicken again today and I feel comparatively stellar. She also thinks my stomach produces too much acid. Not true. I struggled with chronic heartburn in grades eight and nine. This, my friend, is no heart burn. I am not going to pay seventy dollars a month for your crazy anti-acid that isn't covered by my insurance. I can eat spicy vermicelli with clams and I'm fine. I can have crazy salad with banana peppers, olives, pickles, pickled onions and egg and I'll be 100% alright.

Hopefully I start to feel better on a gluten-free diet. I really don't want to be gluten-intolerant but if it gives me a way to avoid incapacitating sickness I have no complaints. I've already lost enough time to sleep and solitary miserable torpors.

Time to go over all the French I missed. I have an accent that native French-speakers can understand with no difficulty but my grammar and vocabulary are falling behind.

My Self! I've created a monster!

As of late, my philosophy class has been discussing God's relation to happiness, love, and morality. I'm finding it challenging because I have such an unwavering faith in God's nonexistence that I have to first bypass. By the end of class I had this nice little theory relating to a question to do with God's commands and granting us free will (what's the point of letting us choose, but saying what we really ought to do? Why do we have free will if God has already decided what is holy and what is not [or at least pointed out to us what is holy and what is not. That's a whole other bag of worms.], an why are we presented with temptation and sin when God could just work them out of the world) but I never got to share it because my professor treats me like one of the kids who ALWAYS speaks. I get chosen only if I'm the last person with my hand up, and only one other time. And that is fucking ridiculous because that's how I've been regarded since the beginning, I don't actually get to speak as much as the people who are often called on. Yes, I put my hand up all of the time, but I know it's because if I only raise my hand once or twice, the chances of me being called on in any given are slim. Regardless, I love the class to death. We're generally quite intelligent (generally), and there isn't one person who dominates conversations.

My theory was jumpstarted by Descartes' idea that humans are set apart from animals in that we possess souls which are connected to our otherwise mechanical bodies though the pineal gland. From my knowledge, animals are not expected to follow God's word in any way because they are as mechanical and natural as the sun, the tides, or a rock. They are not expected to follow God, they are exempt from morality and are lacking in souls. For my purposes, I have speculatively decided that free-will and the soul are intrinsically linked (I don't believe any of what I'm talking about, but I'm suspending my disbelief to for the sake of argument because my brain is saying "God doesn't exist, this is pointless"). I decided to lump everything together into a simplistic theory of the soul. 1) The purpose of a soul is to grant consciousness, a by-product of which is free-will. 2) Human beings are the only possessors of souls. By my view, God desires to be worshipped. Worshippers require consciousness to exist, otherwise they would empty automatons who went though the ritualistic actions of worship without intent. For this reason, God had to grant his worshippers souls so they could truly love him. As stated above, souls also granted them free-will. Now, I'm not terribly familiar with The Bible (Read: at all) but I know that Adam and Eve were the first human beings. They were conscious. They possessed free will and could defy commands as proven by Eve eating the Apple of Knowledge (Or whatever the fuck it was called) - this lead to God punishing humanity for some horribly petty and bratty reason. I mean, in his wise holiness and great knowledge he punished humanity for the sins of one woman because he knew that it was a good idea because he is omniscient. Skipping ahead to know, humans are faced by sinful temptation every single day. Thanks to our free-will, nothing is preventing us from indulging save God's word (if you heed his words) and perhaps, if you believe it, an inborn and/or learned sense (Lets not get into Plato vs. Aristotle right this moment) of morality. Regardless of how we approach the decision-making process or where we draw knowledge from, we always have the option of breaking God's word. As we all know, this makes him extraordinarily displeased - which raises the question of why he doesn't just stop us? Why doesn't he simple exert his divine will and prevent us from performing sinful actions? For the sake of argument I am going to assume that he is TRULY omnipotent and omniscient. I believe that God doesn't reach down and directly influence our behavior because to do so would be to subjugate, and thus, tarnish, free-will and thus, the soul. Seeing as God is perfect, it is unthinkable that he would willingly unmake the crux of the that which he cares most about - the untarnished soul. In addition, if the soul is the source of the worshipper's ability to worship truthfully, God wouldn't want to deprive himself. If this person is a true worshipper they will not give into sin so intervention is not necessary. Those who would are clearly lacking the will to worship God despite his words and are thus unworthy of his love in the afterlife. The widespreadness of sin is, as I see it, not a natural state for the world to be in, but humanity's punishment for Eve's defience of God's single command. He's testing us. My French teacher is also testing me tomorrow so I need to stop this and begin studying. I may come back to this later, review, rewrite, condense down to points. I may not. We'll see boys. First some brief housekeeping notes I already made at the bottom:

I suppose God might have said "My Self! I've created a monster!"

Only a few of the many problems with my theory:

1) Why couldn't God make consciousness without free-will?

2) God is perfect. Why would he desire something so base as worship?

IN ADDITION, I have begun to instinctively capitalize the word God, a tendency which would have saved me from being docked spelling marks on multiple occasions by my unignorably religious Social 20 teacher. In a related field, I have noticed a tendency to capitalize the word Art without intending to.

White-haired girl wasn't in Psych today, but we DID have to evacuate the building ten minutes before the lecture finished because of an emergency. Wonder what it was. I'm sure I'l find out friday.

I apologize for forgetting about paragraph breaks for so long, feeling guilty, and then overusing them. I may not be a consistent lover, but at least I try to make up for past mistakes.

It's the one in your head that matters

There is this girl in my psychology class and I find it hard to stop thinking about her. Well, no, that is a lie, but I think about her multiple times a day. I don't know her name and we've never exchanged words or even held eye contact for any length of time. She doesn't even know that I exist. It's not creepy, I don't have some strange crush or attraction for her. Maybe it's creepy. Regardless, there is no attraction. She just exists. Or. Well, she doesn't.

She always always always looks like she is on the verge of tears. She constantly pulls herself in and her walk is of a person who is painfully aware of her own existence. Step wince step hide step whyamihere. She watches the floor when she moves. She has very red cheeks and very pale skin and her hair is the purest white that I have ever seen. Eyebrows, eyelashes, every thing is the definition of white. #FFFFFF.

That's where the problem is. I don't know her. Would she be so naturally emotive if her hair had colour? Maybe she feels alone maybe she feels ugly maybe she feels left out maybe she feels spotlit maybe she feels horrible maybe she feels absolutely fine and I'm reading into her body language too much because she has beautifully white hair and maybe there are hundreds of people who walk around just like her but I never notice. If I spoke to her I'm sure she'd think I was pitying her. Hell. I think that people are pitying me when they speak to me - and I'm pretty normal. I think that people are pitying me when the speak to me - SO I'm pretty normal? I'm convincing myself that she's truly unique when maybe she's just trying to avoid the people in our five hundred person class. I do feel lonely. University so far hasn't exactly been a social buffet that I was hoping for. I'm not exactly the reinvented me that was beginning to show by the closing weeks of Summerstock. I had promised myself that I would be real and friendly and sociable and considerate and sensitive and tough and now I just plug myself into my iPod, not even listening to music all of the time and ignore everyone on my hall. Floor. Class. I'm not socially stunted. I'm sure of that. I can deal with people. In fact, once I'm dealing with someone I'm rarely worse than uneasy (thank you Summerstock). The one thing I'm incapable of is asking for friendship. Looking at the past, almost every friendship that I have formed has been initiated by the other person or formed without thought because I am so afraid of being rejected or having my intentions misread. I love it when friendships form without thought. But that's not true, I'm always the one being approached for the first time with a Hi or the beginning of some conversation of somekind and I always end up wondering to myself WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO ME? Because I'm sitting right here and we're early for class. Because I'm friends with one of your friends. Because I'm eating a grapefruit. Because we're the two guys in this group who vocalize their opinions. Because we're in scenes together. Because we're in a show together. Because I sort of knew you from something in our past and even though we never spoke, that makes us best friends now, in your books. Because for the next two weeks we are the only people of our age.

Back to the girl. Saying hi to her could be the biggest punch in the face ever. "Hi. You look like you have troubles dealing with life AND you're a freak. Can I feel good about myself?"

I feel like everyone can read my mind all of the time and when I look into someone's eyes they tell me "I know how useless you are."

Unlike normally, I'm not going to X out of this window now because I should actually POST something in this blog one of these days. No one is reading this anyways.

On an up note, the readings I've been assigned for English have all been fantastically enjoyable and yes, I have started speaking to a few people in my French, Philosophy and Drama classes.

I'm terrified doing improv because I hate being in front of people (most of the time) and it's hard to be not-me when I have so much time to think followed by so little time to think. I only went up once in drama today but I think it went alright because I don't remember what happened.

I watched Julie & Julia the other evening and it was enjoyable, if not mindblowing. It mirrors the book I'm reading, Water Music by T.C. Bolye in many ways stylistically that I finding fascinating. A single line stuck out at me from the movie.

"It's the one in your head that matters."

20% of the recorded H1N1 deaths have occurred within the past week. Which is especially note worthy because countries haven't been obligated to report cases or deaths for the last little while.

Personally, I'm not worried. But I never thought this would actually get so big. Projections place the number of ill at a third of the world's population. I wonder if the university is going to get hit. That really wouldn't be a blast for us in residence.

I went to see 300 yesterday. They play free movies sometimes in the conference rooms here in the Lister Centre. Only ten of us showed up, and it wasn't the best movie. Alright acting. Alright plot. The fight scenes were frequent, and great to watch. One thing I noticed was the strong Spartan identity amongst the characters - the fact that they were Spartans was the source of their strength. It was a big put-on at times, but interesting to observe. I don't want to spoil the end, but it didn't make sense to me, considering how much of a tank their force is before then.

I also went to the Drama Department Loading Dock party yesterday. Joel and Maddie introduced me to people they knew. Joel and I were going to sing If I Had $1000000 for the Karaoke, but some other guys sang that song after we signed up so we switched it to Take Me Out (By Franz Ferdinand) but they didn't put our marker back in the lineup. Then they cut Joel off of Karaoke so we didn't even get to go up. Oh well.

Love is hell, hell is love, hell is asking to be loved.

The key is not in remembering to blog. Partially, it's in figuring out what you want to say. But mostly it's in posting your posts after you write them, rather than self-censoring and discarding them afterwards.

University life hasn't really begun. I had my first day of classes today but I only have a few pages of reading to do for tomorrow. Got most of my textbooks, though they don't have all of them there. Not quite sure what I'm going to do about that at this point. The bookstore is less bookstore and more hour-long-sauna thanks to the hundreds of people in line. Amazingly, no one was openly grumpy. I was listening to my iPod when I realized that NO ONE ELSE was listening to theirs to I took my earbuds out just in case I was missing out on some horribly witty banter or important information. I wasn't, so I put them back on. I chose the wrong line up because it went through the section with all of the English to (insert language here) dictionaries so I didn't have any interesting books to look through.

Two days ago I was feeling claustrophobic in my dorm room so I went for a train ride. I ended up getting off at Churchill station which leads to this ginormous mall that was all closed down for the evening and I walked until I started to see people, which took a while. I discovered a movie theatre tucked away in the corner of the top floor after two sets of escalators. While I really wanted to see a movie, I wasn't sure if I would be able to see one and not miss the last train back to campus. 500 Days of Summer was short so I settled on that, though I wasn't overly excited at the idea. Romantic comedy. Whatever.

Boy was I wrong.

It is amazing. It's not a romance, rather it was an exploration of love meeting like. Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't. Anyone who's ever loved someone, or even come close, can get something from this movie. I'm not sure how there were dry eyes in the house. I found it hard to laugh because I spent the entire second half on the edge of tears and - I'll admit it - I wound up crying despite myself on several occasions.

The way Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt)lists the things he loves about Summer (Zooey Deschanel), it's perfect. Love is a force that pulls you towards a person. Well, I'm not sure if that's true actually... It puts your field of focus on them. Your orbit isn't the closest perhaps, but everything is pointed towards them. All of the little specifics that nobody else notices. Tom points out her birthmark, her laugh, the way she gently moves her lips before speaking. It's so refreshing to see a movie that truly, truly reflects reality. The writers (Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber) crafted the screenplay perfectly. Tom never comes off as unhealthily obsessed even though thoughts of Summer become the only thoughts he is capable of. As Summer's affection wanes, Zooey Deschanel pulls out some exquisite acting (the entire movie is nearly flawless in this regard) as she responds to Tom. The way she looks away when he pulls out a record by her favorite Beatle with a big smile broke my heart. Desperate to get away, though giving a half hearted attempt to be friendly while expressing her discomfort. Precisely what people do. I do it when I want to get away from someone.

One scene that I didn't like was the scene where Tom was telling Summer that "we're in a relationship, dammit!" I felt Joseph Gordon-Levitt's acting was, I don't know... It didn't match up with the rest of the film stylistically. Maybe that's a directing (Marc Webb) flubb (one of the very few in this film). Still, I found it jarring and I lost contact with the world for a few moments - though I was drawn back in just as quickly.

The only other part that I questioned was the voice-over narrator. I am so, so, happy that Tom's voice wasn't used to narrate but I wasn't happy with the voice that was chosen. It was very movie-announcer-guy and that didn't fit. Too epic. I don't know what would have. Some other male non-character voice that had a little bit more realism to it might have done it. A nondescript voice that drew attention to the words and not the sound. Audible text that would flow directly without misleading inflection. Running the middle of monotone and expressive, unique and uniform. Honestly though, I loved the presence of the narrator. The quirky exposition and philosophizing and commentary was essential. It was a story about love, not a love story - it required narration! These more to it than what we can see if we are to fully understand.

Walking home from the movie was more of a sprint. I almost missed the last train. Edmonton has this huge river valley and the feeling you get when the train shoots out into it was indescribable in both darkness and light. In the night because can't see anything through the glare of the in-train fluorescent lighting, and in the day time because the view is magnificent. Just like flying. Got back to my residence. My floor isn't a party floor and I'm thankful. I mostly refuse to use the elevator so my hips hurt from going up eight flights three or four times a day. Dodgeball on friday. The Lister Centre (my res) has one of the largest dodgeball leagues in the world so there's no way in hell I'm not going to participate. I hope I get into the mixed chorus - I think my audition went great. He said that I'm a baritone-bass and will sing bass (didn't mention the "if you get in" part. Goodnewsbears?) which is unfortunate in that I want to improve my high register. F# would be an extraordinarily handy note to have in my pocket most days.