Andy H.

In the student union building, when I passed through it on my way from my Ethics class to the library, they were playing music very loudly; I think that it was Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. In the part of the room that sometimes functions as a stage, a man in an executioner's mask and several others in masquerade masks stood against one wall watching gravely as a man in a Spider-Man mask (with backup dancers) breakdanced furiously in the centre of the floor.

I keep forgetting that it's Hallowe'en, which makes these experiences a lot more surreal.

I was able to get a Sufjan Stevens ticket, after all. The show is tomorrow. Financially it probably wasn't a good idea, but how could I not? Emotionally (you may recall, faithful reader, how disappointed I was not to be going to this show) I can't really process it yet; I'm just kind of bewildered.

At Zulu, they were playing the new Decemberists album, and I asked, "Is this the new Decemberists?" and I was right, so I got to sound hip. Everything I've heard off of that album -- this was, to be precise, the second thing -- has been really good.

Meanwhile, homework! I've been sort of furiously treading water where school is concerned; my taking four classes has not at any point actually overwhelmed me, but having it continue not to do so takes a lot of my attention. I often feel like it takes much less to get my life filled up and busy than it does the lives of many of my friends or acquaintances and the people I read about, which maybe has to do with my constitutional tendency to want to potter around and breathe a lot between the things I'm doing, but anyway I feel quite busy right now and that's pretty much just my Langara classes and the homework therefrom. (On the other hand, a couple of people including a professor have responded to my description of my courseload by remarking that it's a heavy one, so maybe it really is. It's kind of worrying that, having nearly completed two calendar years in college, I still have only the vaguest ideas of a lot of things that other students seem to know instinctively.)

I think that my research essay for English class, which is currently in the preparatory stages, is probably going to be the most unpleasant part of this term. Since I was pretty much bound to be stressed about it, thinking about it that way feels a lot more hopeful than it sounds.

While I'm talking about school, I should probably mention in public that it looks like I'm going to be transferring into UBC's philosophy department as a second year student this coming summer. And then I guess I'll get a philosophy degree. This has by slow degrees come to seem the obvious course of action, though my answer to the question that everybody asks next ("What does one do with a philosophy degree?") is still very vague. But hey, UBC! Where I've been telling my weblog I'd like to go for years before even Langara. It has kindly waited for me to be ready.

Autumn is remembering how to be my favourite season again. The sun is leaving, but -- after a sadly overheated September -- has relented its way back to a temperature that I find basically perfect, kind and warm and windy. I feel filled up and inarticulate in the usual way, in love with the whole atmosphere, skin on out, and crunching wherever I step.

This (late) afternoon, a key fell off of my laptop. Rather than evincing any sensible reaction, such as trying to work out how to fix it, or just typing on the newly bare stump of its function (which still works), I've spent the evening trying to speak lipogrammatically without the missing letter. So far, I've been managing pretty well, though I'll probably cast off my arbitrary chains the moment it turns out actually to be any significant inconvenience.

Among the things I can't say while I keep to this restriction:

• Cola's real name, or mine.
  
• Most of the usual names for the religiously numinous.
  
• The most basic conjunctions.
  
• A lot of things in the past tense.
  

Last night, I was triumphantly able to complete an essay for English class, which I went on to turn in this morning (my professor was sick, so I left it just within his office by the usual means. On my way to school, before I knew about that class' cancellation, I saw two of my classmates from it walking along 49th on exactly the wrong trajectory to get there on time; I was in remarkable confusion about what this might signify -- might I have somehow lost two hours? Or they, got two back? Were they aliens, with some clever machine by which they might seem, to anyone who saw them, to be some familiar but not well-known acquaintance? -- until I got to class, so learning the truth.) Tomorrow there is a kanji quiz as well as an Existentialism exam, after which I may relax somewhat about schoolwork at least for the rest of the week -- that is to say, the last part of the week. Man, this paragraph was troublesome.

It is, in fact, a long last-part-of-the-week, because of Thanksgiving. (Yes, really, America.) It is also time for V-Con, but I probably won't go.

Having now been twice to shows at the Media Club, I feel like I'm in a position to say that I do not like the venue. Tonight it was stiflingly hot and there wasn't really anywhere to sit and one couldn't see the stage for the crowd, and the place I eventually found that rectified the latter two problems was pretty uncomfortable. For some peculiar and heretofore unexamined reason, when I imagined this show in the time leading up to it, I always pictured it taking place at the Cultch; as a setting, that may have really felt a bit too domesticated for a concert like this one, but I would have been a lot more comfortable.

The performance itself was good. He varied his singing from the recorded versions a lot more than I'm used to, altering the whole rhythm of song-segments or rephrasing lyrics in apparently improvised ways. This was interesting but difficult to sing along to.

There seemed to be a really disproportionate number of rowdy drunk people on the buses tonight. They certainly weren't all at the concert; I wonder if something else was going on?

Final Fantasy was amazing. I want to use the word 'euphoric'; anyway it induced euphoria in me, an heady and uncritical joy. The rest of the audience seemed to be in a similar place, and we cheered him hugely and called him back for two encores, at the second of which he seemed gratifyingly incredulous. Several people called things adoringly salacious at the stage; I am pretty sure that all of them were men.

So far I see that I have said nothing specifically about the performance, and reported only on our reactions to it. Umm. He played a version of 'Arctic Circle' that in my mind totally eclipsed the recorded version. He played I think four songs that I didn't recognize, not including the two covers during the first encore, but including a manyfold-extended version of the arrow song from the second album. He played the piano sometimes, but not (amusingly) for 'This Lamb Sells Condos'. He did not play the song in my music field, although somehow it was the one in my head by the time I got home. I love his violin and his voice and his charm and self-effacement.

The opening acts were also a pleasant surprise, although later hugely overshadowed in that way that good openers to an awesome show so often are.

Now I am post-euphoria, which was manifesting itself as gloom for a little while, but I managed to get through most of that by ranting to my sister about Kierkegaard for a while. (I probably don't really understand Kierkegaard.) So mostly I am just enormously tired and slightly unsteady.

Elise asked me if I had any enemies. I said that I didn't think so. If you are my enemy, you should probably let me know. Perhaps we can come to some settlement?

Wednesday evening, at the play, a number of members of our party declared their intention to come with me to the Final Fantasy concert on the 19th; I went to bed happily anticipating the company. Thursday morning, Zulu's website had that show listed as sold out. There was scrambling, fretting, coordinating by e-mail. On Thursday afternoon, three of the (apparently) five tickets remaining at Red Cat Records were bought by people affiliated with me.

Against the Sold Out Tickets demon, that tormented me so in the matter of Sufjan Stevens, I am mightily avenged.

Few-months-old writings that I'm getting around to posting in my livejournal: poem, song.

On Tuesday (which was the first day of school), sometime during the two hour gap between Ethics and Japanese, the power went partially out. Some halls and classrooms were still lit, and others dark; about half the lights in the library were on, and a third of the computers. I went to Japanese, anyway, but before we were even through the roll call, the Langara security guard with the bushy moustache came in and told us that they were evacuating the building.

I hung around outside long enough to pick up on the general gossip that all the classes had been cancelled because of the power, and to run into Jen, from the Japan group, who was something like the third of the Japan people I'd seen that day, though aside from Marilee I haven't seen any since. It's good to know that they still exist. We talked a little (ruefully) about the tendency of that sort of group trip to develop a close camraderie among people who afterward, for the most part, immediately get about the business of never seeing one another again, and made vague suggestions toward counteracting that; eventually.

Most of the power was back on for Wednesday, but there are lingering aftereffects, the most noticable of which is that all the air-conditioning is down. This does not make it as fun as it might be to take classes on the stifling-even-in-late-autumn third floor of the A building. (Handy guide to Earth's northern hemisphere seasons: it is right now a late, and rallying, summer.) Estimates vary widely as to when this is liable to be corrected; Leduc-sensei, in Japanese, reported direly that she'd been told that it could be as long as six months, whereas Marilee on Thursday told me that she'd heard it would be fixed the next day. There was another power-down today -- that is, Sunday -- this one scheduled, for maintenance, so I suspect that this, if it didn't solve it outright, was at least part of the effort.

I've been kind of exhausted the whole week, stumbling over the sudden need to get up about three hours earlier than I'd been accustomed; this combined with the heat and the starting-school hecticness has often left me feeling in a sort of haze of mental slowness and clumsiness communicating. Because of this in turn I've been responding to my classes in general with slightly more anxiety than I might have otherwise, and feeling out-of-breath already keeping up. They justify this to greater and lesser degrees; Dale, teaching Ethics, is as charming and comfortable as always (he made all the same jokes the first day), while the English teacher has informed me to my horror that he expects handwritten drafts of all the take-home essays.

I do not remember if there are other things I meant to talk about. Wait, yes I do; I've been wanting to say at least a little bit about my impressions of Ursula K. LeGuin's original Earthsea trilogy, which I read for the first time immediately before school began. But I'm pretty tired, so I should probably do that later.

Here are the classes I'm planning to take this fall, plus helpful annotations. They have the interesting and convoluted property that none of them are on quite the same set of days (which unfortunately means that there are no days off this time, though Friday is but lightly loaded).

Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday

11:30 - 12:30: Philosophy 2202 - "Ethics"

Both the philosophy courses I'm taking this term are second year, which feels pretty daring because I've never taken a second year course before; but it's philosophy, which I sure do like. This one is by Dale, who also taught the first year course on ethics that was one of my first classes ever at Langara, so there is some continuity for you.

Monday Wednesday

12:30 - 2:30: English 1128 - "Short Prose Sls & Composition"

This class also evokes the past. Remember a long time ago when I took the Langara English Test and failed, or so I thought, because I didn't finish my essay, and the rules for the test said that this meant automatic disqualification? (I guess that was here.) Some time possibly measured in years later, I was poking through my information on the langara website and discovered there that I was recorded as having completed the test with a '5' (which is, for extra surrealism, the highest mark). So, yeah. Either the rules lied to me, or the examiners liked my essay so much that they wrote a computer simulation of me that finished it within the allotted time, and declared that good enough. In either case, nobody thought to mention it to me.

This is the beginning English course recommended for people who got that score, which I'm finally taking because I might transfer a university which would expect it of me, and because there are interesting English courses later on for which it's a prerequisite. I don't know what an 'Sl' is, but it probably involves writing essays, sigh.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday

2:30 - 3:30: Japanese 1215

The second part of the first year Japanese course I began in the fall. I wanted to take this from Hayashi-sensei, who went to Japan with us, but alas, he isn't teaching it this term, so I'm back with Ms. Leduc (who isn't terrible; I just like Hayashi). If they tend to stagger the classes like I suspect they do, then he may never be teaching the one I need next, unless I wait a term fallow; that would be sad.

Tuesday Thursday

3:30 - 5:30: Philosophy 2225 - "Existentialism"

And here is the other of those second year courses, taught by Bernelle Strickling, the mysterious and reclusive* head of Langara's philosophy department. I am extraordinarily vague on what existentialism is (except I think it convinces people to drink themselves to death?), so I look forward to a great deal of education.

(* I've actually just never had her.)

So, that's four. (Pictorial representation.) I have fond hopes of not dropping any of them; we'll see how that goes.

Hey, look: a significant number of this year's Hugo nominees are available online. That's neat.

A few days ago I got a ride home from Andrew's mother, and when we were so near to my house as to actually be on my street, we saw a skunk crossing the road. It would be hard to miss that there are skunks in this neighbourhood (as there were in the neighbourhood we lived in before), but I think this might be the first time I've seen one. They certainly are distinctive.

A little while ago I took the cheap harmonica which has been neglected on the shelves of this house for as long as I can remember and put it on my desk next to my computer. (It's red, with gold patterning and letters which say 'BRELLI' and 'Jiangsu   China'. It has a cardboard case with a price sticker on it for $4.95.) I don't know if this was consciously because that's a place where I'm likely to pick it up and fidget with it, but it has worked out that way, so I've been periodically and absently trying to play it.

Harmonica observations: Once I've found one note I can usually find where another note is nearby, so I can improvise very simple progressions, and sometimes I'm able haltingly to harmonize with music I'm playing. Breathing in or out at a given place makes for a different note. One thing I've noticed is that everything is one note or another, or sometimes two at once, but I can't make that smooth and sliding wailing sound that I associate with harmonica parts in a lot of songs; I think I understand that I'd need a 'blues harmonica' for that, or maybe just a better one.

On Tuesday I was at Langara, and I saw a posting on a job board there asking for native English speakers to participate in a linguistics study being done at SFU. "That sounds interesting," I thought; so I took one of the contact information paper tendrils from the bottom (I was the only person who had done so) so that I could e-mail them later.

(As you know, Vancouver readers, 'SFU' is Simon Fraser University, one of the two big universities in the city; the other is UBC. I realized today that I actually have a habit of thinking 'UBC' to myself when I mean 'SFU', probably both because it's the more euphonious of the three-letter university names and because UBC tends to pop up a lot more in my life. I managed not, quite, to do this out loud to anyone. SFU always makes me think of my Sociology professor, who, in a discussion of academia seen as elite and set apart from the rest of society, was amused that it's actually on a mountaintop.)

Today, as a direct result of taking that piece of paper, I went to UBC^H^H^HSFU for the very first time. I was struck by the architecture, which seemed marvellous and impractical, giving the impression of being a maze even when directions were fairly straightforward. There were courtyards and landings with stairways leading off in improbable directions, and walkways, and many-storied buildings with outside entrances on each of their floors. It was like being in some relative of Ico's castle. Naturally and immediately lost, I managed to enlist a voluble lady university employee of some description to direct me and to walk me part of the way; she had no idea where the phonetics lab was, personally, but once I pulled the location out of my e-mail on one of the computers there ('RCB 7301'), we were able by careful scrutiny to find where I was to go on a map painted discreetly on one of the interior walls, so I was in the end only fifteen minutes late.

The experiment itself involved sitting at a computer whose fans laboured alarmingly; the 'a' on its keyboard had been labeled with a large 'L', and the number pad's '5' with a large 'R'. I was told to rest my forefingers on these. The computer would flash a sentence in English (like "The girl rides a bicycle"), and then a pair of pictures, and I would press the appropriate button to choose which of the pictures , the right or the left, better illustrated the sentence.

I figured out what was going on pretty quickly, which was that the sentence would be either in the present or the past tense, and then the pictures would illustrate each of these; there would be one, for example, of the girl speeding along on her bicycle, and one of her getting off of it, looking exercised. Once I realized this, of course, I started to second-guess myself, despite my best intentions. It is probably precisely to limit this tendency that I had a three-second time limit on choosing, but that led to another problem, which is that I would sometimes choose something by accident just because that finger was feeling particularly twitchy. I stumbled, corrected, and stumbled in the other direction; sometimes, and maybe most times in the end, I managed to go with my first impulse. One thing I noticed, which was a genuine reaction and not a studied one, was that I often tended to want to choose the present-tense picture for the past tense sentences; that is, that when I read, "The grandmother watered the plants," what I picture is the grandmother who is industriously watering, and not the one that, it's implied, has put down the watering can and maybe died since. This might be common sense, or it might be because I've read a lot of fiction from an early age.

After that the woman running it asked if I had an extra fifteen minutes to participate in another experiment, and I said that sure I had, so she put me in a soundproof booth, with a microphone, and showed me cards with words on them which I was supposed to say. (At the beginning I said, "I am Speaker 308," and before each word I said, "Now I say...". These were my instructions and I held to them.) It felt very strange inside the booth; the sealed-up silence sort of hummed high-pitched in my ears. The words were all 'p' words: 'paw', 'pa', 'pat', 'pet', 'pit', etc.; the release form said that they were studying perceptions of vowels.

So, that was actually a lot of fun. In the end, I spent about half an hour there, and they gave me ten dollars for it; it's somewhat embarrassing how significantly this increased the amount of money I currently have in the world. I think I'm going to start selling things on eBay, not least because I want to buy some people birthday presents this month.

On my way to SFU, I thought, 'I wonder if seeing this campus will make an enormous change in my future, because I will fall in love with it and decide to go there, instead of to UBC, eventually, as I currently dimly plan'. Then I thought, that isn't going to happen, because I thought of it beforehand, and things like that surprise you. This is an example of the ways I think when I'm not bothering to be carefully rational; actually, I think these ways then, too, but I ignore them. Anyway, I indeed had no epiphanies about the future, although I liked the campus a lot.

On the way home I saw an unusual number of neat t-shirts (my favourite: "the rock is a culture"), people (including an unusually skilled and enthusiastic girl busking with her guitar outside the Granville station), advertisements (what on earth do they mean by that new one promoting the transit police?), and errata (a sticky label attached to a bus stop that said, "Stop consuming animals!"). Maybe I was just looking.

The weather was also very nice.