Here's my new plan: instead of doing a Master's about Tolkien...I'll just read the Lord of the Rings again. That seems like it will be much less work. Maybe I'll read Siegfried too. There's a lot of things I'd like to read, and after these summer classes I'll finally have time to do it. Woot! Three more months to go!

I'll never understand the way English profs mark. I was expecting a high-90s in my Crakespeare midterm, but got shockingly less, even though all she wrote on my paper were things like "Well put," Very good," "A clearly excellent response: sophisticated analysis and effective writing," "Full and thoughtful response," "√√√." And it isn't even that I write bad; I consider myself a pretty darn good writer (I'm arrogant in that way). And even so, content should matter more in this level of English class than how well one writes. Personally, I think the writing well should be stressed more in 100 and 110, and good writing should be rewarded more there than it currently is. There are a lot of people out there who haven't the faintest grasp of the English language, and I often wondered how they managed to speak. So why, then, do people who obviously have a fantastic command of English not get recognized for it in their classwork? I just feel like there's no point in trying if a half-ass job will get me just the same results as if I actually try. Profs, take note: your lousy marks are inhibiting my potential!

Fun fact: "niggardly" has an entirely different etymology from a certain inappropriate word (i.e. Old Norse as opposed to Spanish). A few years ago, some politician in the States was fired after he referred to a budget as "niggardly." Here's what my Methods prof had to say on the subject in class: "Why should I apologize because you completely misunderstood something I said, and the only reason you misunderstood me is that you're fucking illiterate?? If I were in that situation (and I would definitely get fired for this) I would have said 'You're right. It was terrible. I'm sorry you're illiterate.'"

The cafeteria makes me irate. I've been trying to avoid it.

I think I'd like to do a Masters in English after all, not this year but possibly next year. But only if they'll let me study Tolkien. That would be so awesome.

Yesss! Finally, I got some returnable junkmail.

Round 2 of Operation Junkmail

To whom it may concern:
I thank you deeply for your continued concern about my credit situation. I am sending you some offers that I think you may be interested in. They are all very good deals, so I encourage you to consider them. I have many more offers that would not fit into the return envelope, but I am confident that you will write me again soon, so I'll send the rest to you then. HAVE A NICE DAY :)

I saw two kids with wandals today. Seriously! Their feet were made of wheels! Like this.

The Roughrider directly below me likes to say "WOO!" a lot.

I'm working on some bee poetry. I'm thinking, something along the lines of "I like to caress rusty bees." Ah yes, I also watched every episode of Salad Fingers this afternoon. For the first time. It's creepy, but what's most creepy about it is that Salad Fingers' voice is exactly like the Music Department Head's voice (or at least, exactly like how I talk when I'm quoting her).

Good old Luther gatherings...


Moustaches for all!

aw CRAP! Too many things plugged into outlets. My one outlet-and-lightswitch unit suddenly quit, which reduces my outlets by half. Good thing I got that power bar, but I'll probably have to wait until Maintenance returns on Monday for that to get fixed.

Blasted little girls shrieking... but I can turn my bass louder than them. NIN will drown them out.

I started a new page for poetry (see sidebar). I expect it will be mostly about scones and oranges. That's my priorities in life.

There's some highschool kids in residence now. I hear little girl shrieking.

This is a bee.

I now get Wednesdays off work, and took the opportunity to go for a walk by the lake this afternoon. It's the first time I've really been outside (other than crossing the street from my car to work--by the way, last time people started honking at me as I waited patiently on the corner. Uncouth, if you ask me) in a long time. If it weren't overly windy (a little wind is good), I'd say the weather's perfect right now. If I can't see the sun, it's a good day for me.

• mario in person

Today was Freud-day in Methods class. I quite agree with my prof that "I hate this shit...it sends me into paroxysms of rage." Well, perhaps I don't get worked up about it like she does, but I do think Freud is entirely wrong about everything.

I finally got to see my new nephew Nathan (aka "Sockhands"):
Well, I've had quite enough of babies for a while. Just like my brother told me once when I was little: "Stop being a baby. Nobody likes babies."

I went to my parents' farm this weekend. It was nice to eat a real meal for once. Man, vegetables! And fresh fruit! No visit home would be complete without a picture of Jaden with a bee on his face:

So Ryan gave me an orange-peeling lesson, and I think we've isolated my problem. I can peel them just fine, but the eating part becomes disastrous. You can't eat the under-peel, I tell you! And it doesn' t peel off, or else it makes a fantastic mess. So you have to just eat the inside out of the orange-halves. That's the problem. Orange-corpse everywhere.

I wasted most of my free time today playing piano and making beep-beep noises on my computer (you can find the results of that in the new MIDI Excursions on my music page. There's also a new impromptu).

Every day I walk across the street from my car to the unidentified place where I work. There's no pedestrian crossing, but I don't mind waiting until all the cars are gone, then standing on the boulevard until all those cars are gone. But for some reason, a whole string of cars will go by, then the last car in the line stops and waits for me to cross the street. Very couth of them, but not really necessary.

All right. Which one of you broke my blog earlier?

Should this really be in my bottle of vitamins? "DO NOT EAT."

Those purple-flowered trees are pretty but they make me sneeze.

Today was a surprisingly good day.

Methods class is always tough, but I love the fact that it's interesting, we have good discussions (it's even better if I don't have to contribute, but I usually do), and I'm finding myself applying all these crazy theories to stuff all the time. Actually, it would be a perfect class if I could somehow remove my name from the deck of cards she uses to determine who will say something next, because then I wouldn't have to feel obliged to learn the material beforehand (which doesn't really happen), and I could just go to class and benefit from listening to the discussions. We're supposed to be learning how to argue a case, and I think I've made several successes in an ongoing argument by applying a bunch of obscure terms and making alarming connections between literary theory and general life. Don't you just love the word "quiddity"?

For the first time ever, I didn't have a headache during Crakespeare class (and probably won't in the future since I'm getting Wednesdays off work). The prof always calls on me to answer questions that nobody immediately answers, partly because I sit closest to the front, but also (I suspect) because she knows my name (mostly because I drew attention to the fact that it's Meeeegan), and also because I always give the right answers. Maybe I'll even get decent participation marks this semester. Go forced participation!

Quiddity: the thingness of the thing. E.g. The stoniness of the stone; the treeness of the tree; the smockness of the smock. "Waiter! I say, this soup is of questionable quiddity!"

Oh my goodness...I don't know why it's always so disastrous when I peel oranges. There are bits of orange-corpse everywhere. How does it get in my hair?

This has been a remarkably bad day.

I woke up with a worsened version of what I've termed a "Monday/Wednesday headache," which, ideally, I could get rid of with a special blend of pills, some earplugs, near-complete darkness, and a solid morning of sleep in my special headache-recovery position and my headache-recovery pyjamas. Instead, I went to class because I didn't understand any of the material for today (I still don't).

I had my usual crappy Methods class (which actually has some fantastic discussions in it, it's probably one of the most useful and un-pointless English classes that exist), which today I had no idea what was going on because the readings make no sense, and the assignment I wrote makes even less. Of course, when the prof drew my name (indicating I was to speak), I demonstrated my general lack of understanding and said something only slightly intelligible, but the prof seemed to understand it. We didn't actually get time to go over the assignments, so I'll never know what the heck "discourse" is supposed to be, or how you get it (as far as I've been able to discern, "discourse" is what you call a literary work when you examine it as not being present, or not being a thing, or the things inside it are not things...so you look at the work but imagine it's not there--I don't get it, and we never really got at discourse in class).

Then I tried to nap for twenty minutes before I left for work. The sandwich they gave me in my bagged lunch was soggy (and sad...), so I've basically eaten nothing yet today.

Then at work I started taking my first calls, and I don't know what the heck is going on, or how to solve problems. Plus, I'm even more incoherent over the phone than I am in person.

[there was never anything in this space]

So my headache gradually worsened and I was happy to go home. But...climbing stairs generally makes things worse so I took the elevator. The elevator rose about a foot and then stopped. The phone in it doesn't freaking work! So I was stuck in the elevator for a generous amount of time, ringing the pitiful alarm bell (Bernil was sitting in the lounge right beside the elevator, apparently, and was going to come and tell the person inside the elevator to shut up because he was trying to study. This is what I was afraid of: it doesn't occur to people that someone might actually need help) until Maintenance finally pulleyed me down to the basement. At least Maintenance was still there.

Then I went to pay tuition and residence fees, which is always traumatic, but I couln't actually pay it all.

Then some Roughriders told me I was rude.

My roommate habitually slams her door, more loudly than I would have expected possible.

I have a cold. Who gets a cold in summer? It could also be allergies, but I'm betting it's a cold.

I definitely won't get to go visit my sister and her baby in the hospital today.

And now my head is aching, I have to read a Crakespeare play for tomorrow (the first reading I'll have done for that class yet) as well as Criterary Theory reading and assignment. It would behoove me to get rid of this headache because tomorrow is another one of those days...

My sister had her baby today. Some sort of Nathan boy, I believe. Woot.

I logged onto the phone system at work today for the first time...but no calls. I guess I was only logged on for about half an hour.

• Customer: "I want to download the Internet. Do I need a bigger hard disk?" You can download the Internet here (so now you can forward an internet to your friends after all!). Stick around for the error message.
  

Also at work today, I was gifted some Lungbutter CDs:

Super banana, he's here to save the day.
Super banana, use a pen to draw his face.
Super banana, he's never ever late.
Super banana, he's really really great.

Aaaaah! Aaaaah!
I'll save you!

Do do-do do-do do. do-do. do-do do-do do-do do. do-do...

Whenever I have music playing while I'm doing homework, I tend to not do homework and just listen to the music, so I usually listen to my low-attention playlist (i.e. I'm able to do other things at the same time as it's playing). Today I've just been listening to the same song over and over and over and over, because it's just that awesome and I can tune it out if necessary.

There are new drawings and phototoons. Back to homework. I finally figured out how metaphor/metonymy/similarity/contiguity applies to this crazy "second-order semiological system of signs being signifiers and whatnot" that some fellow keeps talking about.

....do do-do do-do do, do-do, do-do do-do do-do do.

I feel sorry for the next credit card company that offers me a credit card. I just added a whole pile of junkmail to my alarmingly large stack today. It definitely won't all fit in one envelope.

I think there's another Shea (I guess Shea-ette) lurking somewhere on the quad, but my only evidence is the loud thumping bass that occasionally changes in frequency. At least it's not my neighbours.

RRRRRGGGGHH!!!!! Intolerant fanatics who ask your opinion on something, and then ignore and dismiss everything you say, no matter how well you argue, and are set in their opinions and refuse to even try looking at an issue any other way, and then contradict you even if you try to defend their opinion....they make me wrathful. Rhgpftblk.

I finally got myself a watch today. I haven't known what time it is for about 5 or 6 months now. I've rushed through exams because I didn't know how much time I had left, and sat through classes that (I'm pretty sure) went two hours overtime, and gone to class twenty minutes early just so I'd be there when it got around to starting. But all that's remedied now. And it's not even bee-time!

Hoo boy. I've already started missing classes, but I'm justifying missing Thursday on the argument that I've destroyed linguistic literary theory. I'm not too concerned about not being there to "participate" when she draws my name (which is how she determines who will have something to say on any given issue), because last time I participated I got ridiculed.

Mostly, I really need some do-nothing time in every day. These Mondays and Wednesdays are pretty detrimental. But, my plan is to do the entire week's readings (and ideally assignments) the weekend before. Hopefully that should solve everything. And tomorrow I finally, finally get to sleep in...if all goes well.

Except still no time for MIDI or silent films yet.

Whoops, wasn't allowing random people to comment on phototoons, but that's remedied. Drawings/phototoons on hold until friday.

This is retarculous. For tomorrow, I have to read King Lear and a 40-page essay about it for my Methods class, and Romeo and Juliet for my Crakespeare class; revise the written assignment after today's discussion; do the written assignment for tomorrow; I should finish the Methods readings that I was supposed to have finished for today but didn't despite getting up before 7:00; and, I should also read the three essays for Thursday Methods class, since I'm in class and at work from 9:30 to 10:00 tomorrow (not just half an hour, unfortunately) and found out yesterday that Methods homework takes more like five hours than three.

Or maybe University is supposed to be challenging. I'll try to stop complaining.

Today was the first day of classes. Cancel all silent film schemes, and probably put drawings from the library on hold, because it would appear that I'll have no time for the next two months to do anything besides classes, work, and homework. My morning class will require at least 3 hours of homework a night--the type of reading that you have to decrypt every sentence for five minutes before you realize that it's not really saying anything at all, plus written work that I need to have done each day in order to even get into the classroom. How am I supposed to read an entire play plus a couple literary theory-type essays for one class? And that's about the amount of reading every day. The Crakespeare class will have tons of reading too.

Speaking of Shakespeare, I don't care about Shakespeare. I mean, come on: "O woe! O woeful, woeful, woeful day! Most lamentable day, most woeful day, That ever, ever, I did yet behold! O day! O day! O Day! O hateful day! Never was seen so black a day as this: O woeful day, O woeful day!" And so on. Not even a comedy. Well, I suppose I do sometimes go around saying "O day! O day! O day!" But I wouldn't want to watch a play about it. Blasted Shakespeare, thinking he's so great and we should all read his crappy plays.

And why is it so darn loud here all the time? Gotta go start my massive homework so they'll let me go to class tomorrow.

I suppose phototoons is up and running. I'm hoping to do the grandest silent film yet in the near future--actually, un-silent, since I'm planning on making an elaborate soundtrack involving mostly the word "scone"--but won't have a lot of time to waste on that pretty soon. It will probably feature most of you who read this blog (hope that's ok. If not, I'll think of a hilarious pseudonym to call you).

• New Jersey needs a new slogan? I've got the perfect slogan generator for them. It's how I got all the "great" slogans for this site. How about, "How do you eat your New Jersey?" Or "Good New Jersey has Danish written all over it." Haha, this one is so awesome: "Nothing sucks like a New Jersey." ...by the way, I'm not picking on New Jersey or anything, for those of you who happen to live there.

I forgot to audition for National Youth Choir, which will wrap up at Podium 2006 in Victoria this year. Ah well, if I didn't take classes in May I wouldn't be able to graduate. Still, NYC is better than graduating. That reminds me, when I was in it in 2004, some newspaper in Manitoba published an article all about how we were rehearsing at the University in Brandon, but the title said something like "Young singers headed for New York City." I suppose they were confused by the NYC (which is supposed to stand for National Youth Choir).

Adsense is so clever. The ads on my drawings page are always for banjos or banjo sheet music. Somebody was looking for "mean bee drawings" on my site the other day. I mostly specialize in happy bee drawings, but I'll add a mean bee or two anyway.

Yesterday I moved up to 4th floor as required. Now I have about twice the floorspace that I had in my old room, but about half the number of outlets and one third the amount of shelves. I also found two of those ugly bugs dead under the mattress.

In theory, there ought to be a multitude of new MIDI ditties in the future, but what with classes and work, I don't think I'll be able to spend as much time on that as I'd hoped (although I'll have to remedy the outlet situation before I can do anything anyway). Actually, what with classes and work, I don't think I'll have time to do as much required reading and homework as I ought to. So it will probably be a most unrelaxing summer.

I was going to congratulate myself on getting through a whole week of work without a single headache, but Friday broke the record. The feverfew panacea has failed me.

Wooooohooooot! I haven't had an all-90 semester for a few years now.

Somebody performed this at the music festival the other day:

• Lieder (from Fascinating Aida)

Personally, I think his was much better, if only because he pronounced every "and" as "und." And he did the German bit in the middle way better too.

Today was my first day of work--all hail Amy!--(which is conveniently located across the street from a feverfew store. They might sell other stuff too, I wouldn't know). So this is kind of my first "real" job. You know, one where I have to do stuff. Camp and the library don't count, and Sask Express certainly doesn't count. The only problem at this point is that I know absolutely nothing about anything at MarkeTel, and will have to remedy that as quickly as possible.

• May Day!

Last year I missed May Day in Berlin by just a couple weeks. According to Whatshisface and his stupid hat, East and West Berliners traditionally throw stuff at each other across the river (as seen in the picture). Whatshisface seemed to think that this--as well as every squatter house in Kreutzberg--would be highly significant to us. I think he chose a tour route that deliberately took us past all the squatter houses he knew of. The prof was not impressed.