Andy H.

This term I've been slowly watching a sort of graffiti gang war develop over the urinals in one of the men's washrooms in the A building at Langara, as a faction that writes positive, life-affirming messages like "Life is great!" has started to horn in on the traditional territory of one that writes grumpy abuse like "U ALL SUCK". It really is that polarised -- there's no mistaking one for the other, and there doesn't really seem to be anything in between; there really is, by the handwriting, more than one person on each side; and they really are not just working in parallel at opposing agendas but actually getting into arguments with one another right there on the wall. Here are some of my favourite exchanges:

• "YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL!" "Hippie."
  
• "F--- THE ENTIRE SCHOOL" "Wow u r sure energetic!"
  
• "Jesus died for nothing." "NO."

Meanwhile, livejournal seems to have started Microsoft Word-style red underlining of words it finds dubious, but seems stuck on American spelling. Also, it doesn't recognise 'livejournal'; awesome.

I heard back from UBC about my application, so far toward the outer edge of the period within which they said they'd get back that I had meanwhile become quite convinced that I'd made some awful and disqualifying error in submitting it. Since I didn't, it seems very likely now that I'll be in and taking at least a couple of their summer courses in May (which is the term I applied for). They've asked me for official transcripts from Langara and Windsor House; I ordered the former sent, but I guess that I'll have to call them up and explain about Windsor House.

(Dr. Russell suggested I think about trying to get into the honours philosophy program -- as though this whole thing weren't complicated enough! But it's tempting, and I am considering it, though I don't know how feasible it will be given the awkward angle at which I'm approaching the university 'years' system.)

Spring is progressing; it's raining a lot, but warmer, and when the sun does appear it is wonderfully moderate and fresh-smelling. The cherry trees have blossomed but not bloomed, or maybe the other way around, but anyway I mean that the flowers are colourfully in evidence but still demurely closed. Formal spring begins with the equinox, the perfectly balanced day, which is Wednesday (on the equator, where all days are so balanced and the seasons understood very differently, the sun will reach zenith). (Can you tell that I'm having fun in Astronomy?) Around here, because of daylight savings, that twelve-hour day's sunrise will be at 7 AM, its sunset at 7 PM, and its noonday sun at 1 PM! As weird as that is, though, when the light is still there in the evening I can never but consider whomever came up with it to be the most marvellous sort of Promethean thief.

Today being the 18th, it is clear not only that Wednesday is the 21st but that Friday was the 16th of March, which is one of my personal anniversaries -- or rather twice-personal, by which I mean that it is celebrated by twice as many people as it were by me alone. Specifically, it is the seventh anniversary of the time that I looked over through the window of the car next to ours in a parking lot off the I-5 in Oregon and unexpectedly met the eyes of a waving red haired 13-year-old, which was the first time Rachel and I had ever seen each other in the moving, present flesh. I'm not sure how we got to be marking and celebrating this, except that I guess the date stuck in both our minds. (Also, I delivered a time-delayed '0th anniversary' joke at the time.) Sometimes one of us will do something especially and premeditatedly affectionate for it, and sometimes, as this year, I'll just go through my day periodically noticing what the date is, and smiling unbidden whenever I do.

My sister is interning at the North Shore News, which is the culmination of her time in the Langara journalism program. So far she has had something like 8 stories in the paper, at least one of which was on the front page, and has conducted a couple of those "man on the street" polls (like The Onion parodies), with names, photographs and encapsulated opinions of people she met walking down Lonsdale. Right now I understand that she's working on a story about the local vandal who has cut holes in certain people's hedges. I've been seeing the North Shore News around all my life, but I've never read it, so for me, opening it and finding Tess there is almost like she was in there all along, if I had thought to look.

At Karen's birthday party at the Elephant House last Sunday, I saw Keely for the first time in ages (and then I saw her again the next night, after B5). She told me about how she is planning to bike from Vancouver down to Mexico with these guys, in May, to help raise money for the implementation of those moneylending systems designed by the fellow who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. She suggested that it would be cool if people put the word out about the project, so here I am doing that to the best of my ability.

Elise has a gig today, but although I am tempted to go watch I have some homework I really ought to do. Dear Elise: I hope it goes awesome even though I am not there.

The north portal to the Langara student union building (that is, the exit facing the library) has double doors, with friendly green frames, of the sort where one of the doors extends a sort of metal lip over the gap between them so that they have to be opened the one before the other. They have the curious property that everybody who tries to open them tries the wrong door first. It apparently doesn't matter that there's a sign, in bold, helpful, red-on-white letters, saying "OPEN THIS DOOR FIRST"; others who I see approaching the doors are consistently misled and balked, and I myself, who have been here more than two years, will, unless I'm keeping the problem firmly foremost in my mind, reach quite confidently and unthinkingly for the subordinate door.

I can think of a few explanations for this -- it could be because we're most of us right-handed, for instance (although it doesn't seem to matter which side of the doors we're on), or that there's a general standard for which door has the lip which these doors flout, and our subconscious has noticed that even if we haven't -- but I prefer, because this is what it feels like, to think that it's the side-effect of some nearby perception-altering magic. Something in that part of the SUB, or just outside of it, is out of the ordinary, and ought to draw attention, or at least we ought to wonder sometimes; so those who don't want it to occur to anyone to wonder have put up this spell, or equivalent sufficiently advanced technology, so that we automatically take whatever it is to be so commonplace and unremarkable that our perception of it doesn't even reach our conscious mind. And then, having adjusted ourselves quite unconsciously in response -- perhaps even stepped around it -- we walk into the door.

This is the first Year of the Pig I can remember remarking on, and the third I've lived through, counting the one in which I was born; I'm turning a multiple of twelve, so this recurrence, which startled me at first, would seem to be entirely on the up and up. Twelve years ago, I didn't have a weblog, or indeed a web site; I wonder if I'll still have some form of this one in twelve more? If so, I'll link back to this entry and say 'yes'.

According to my Astronomy class, the Chinese Zodiac is based on the position of Jupiter in the sky, rather than the sun. I don't know offhand which divisions of the Western Zodiac constellations correspond to which animals, though.

My mother told me that one's own year come 'round again like this is supposed to be a lucky time. I had never heard that, before, and she might have made it up, but, looking back, the last time -- 1995, early 1996 -- corresponded to my finding Windsor House. I don't think it's actually possible at this point for my life to improve by that order of magnitude, but if this year wants to happen to try to be anything like that fortunate again, I don't suppose I'll complain.

I noticed that the VPL had information about getting jobs there right on their website this whole time, so I have applied for a job there (as a "Library Assistant"). In the time leading up to doing so I felt excited and daydreamed about working at the library a lot, and now that it's done I've felt my brain make a fairly immediate switch to assuming that I got everything wrong and that I'll never hear back about it. Luckily, that outcome is no longer in a position to be affected by my insecurities.

I've started to get anonymous porn spam in the comments to old entries here. It's only been a couple, so far, and days apart; I hope that it doesn't swell to the point where I'll need to disable anonymous commenting. Very few of my regular commenters don't have accounts to post from (my parents, too infrequent to be 'regular', would be the closest), but I would very much like to remain inclusive on principle.

"What a stereotypical livejournal entry," I thought. "I should mention my dog!" Actually, I haven't mentioned my dog to my weblog in ages. Dear weblog: my dog is still awesome and cute. We just got him a toy which is just a laser pointer and you shine it on the ground and he chases the dot around furiously. I can't tell if he really likes it or is really frustrated by not being able to catch it; possibly some of both? It's strange the ways in which a dog remains dependent and basically uncommunicative. It's not like having a child, who would eventually become autonomous, and well before that was totally achieved would be able to articulate their feelings, open doors, etc. Bandit is capable of a certain amount of personal growth -- we're pretty certain by now that he's no longer liable to wantonly use the house as a bathroom, for instance -- but he's always going to need us to feed him, and to figure out without being able to ask whether he's happy or infuriated about the laser pointer.

(The other weird thing about the laser pointer is that it's totally just a laser pointer. This company apparently subsists entirely on taking ordinary laser pointers (with slightly customized cases) and putting them in packaging that suggests you use them to taunt your pets.)

I have been involved in starting a weekly group watching Babylon 5 at David/Karen/Jeremy's newish apartment and that's going pretty awesome. (The original impetus was that David has an impressively powerful movie projector, but he noticed eventually that that was actually overkill so now he uses something much more humble and with less expensive lightbulbs for this everyday stuff. We're still watching it gigantically projected on their living room wall, though.)

Generally, though in a transitional rather than a stable way, my life is pretty satisfying right now.

When I was down at Rachel's this time, she taught me how to brush my hair starting with the tangles at the bottom, and working my way up, which is much, much faster and more effective than the way I'd been doing it heretofore. I have to assume that this has been an established part of human hairbrushing technology for hundreds if not thousands of years, so I find it entertaining that I had long hair for more than a decade before I found out about it; what comes, I suppose, of descending from short-haired people!

Man, January is almost over. I answered Brendan a while ago about The Pinhoe Egg and Slave Day, and I've been taking classes for about three weeks now. Metaphysics is fun in the expected Philosophy way, as well as containing a majority of people I've either been in philosophy classes with before or recognize because I've often seen them about the halls. This seems very thematically appropriate for my last semester.

As you may recall, I eventually after a fair deal of consideration chose a section of English with an unknown professor, entirely because it was going to read Le Guin's The Dispossessed. I arrived on the first day of class to find that that professor had fallen victim to some unspecified misfortune, and that his classes had been taken over by one of the other professors in the department -- who brought with her an entirely different syllabus. So much for making decisions! Perhaps it was a little lazy, anyway, to try to keep so to studying books I already love, although I would like to take an English class focused on SF sooner or later. Meanwhile the revised class is adequately interesting, although I'm noticing a strange trend in the English classes I've taken so far of treating the students like we're younger and less, hm, trustworthy, than most of college has assumed -- a strange mixture of academic rigidity and intellectual tentativeness.

Astronomy is pretty awesome in a bunch of specific Astronomy ways I didn't quite know how to expect. Here are some of the awesome things we do in Astronomy:

• We talk about the night sky in ways that are fascinatingly anachronistic -- for instance, we speak as though the stars were affixed to a rotating 'celestial sphere' -- which feels very Steampunk to me.
  
  
• Sometimes we get laser pointers, which we use to point at where various stars would be if the room were the sky. We tend to sort of swarm; most of them will be clustered pretty close to the right place, but there are always a few outliers wavering nervously around the edges, so that, while they're clearly part of the general effort to point, they also wouldn't seem to be anywhere near it if no one else were up there. One of the laser pointers instead of a dot projects a large shape of the Eiffel Tower, which was apparently a prank of a previous term's class (the professor is French).
  
  
• We watch slightly corny Discovery Channel-style movies about the makeup and behaviour of celestial objects (one each for the sun and the moon, so far), which leave me feeling surprisingly but powerfully peaceful, like I'm exactly the right size in scale.
  
  
• Once she gave us grids and had us colour in the boxes based on charts of sunspot activity, so that we could see the patterns over years. (They sort of make eleven-year-long arrowheads.) The general joke is that they've misunderstood what type of 'arts students' we are, but actually that was a lot of fun.
  

Ha ha, I've been forgetting to write in my livejournal again. I'm not sure if it's that keeping my experimental commitment to the book posts is making me feel like my weblog doesn't need any extra attention, or if I'm just being a public-internet-hermit, like I sometimes am, and if I didn't have that obligation I wouldn't write anything at all; I suspect the latter. Hopefully it will break soon.

Anyway, dear livejournal: I am going to Rachel's! I get back the night of the 3rd.

Oh, right.

Steven Brust, Jhereg (reread)
Scott Westerfeld, The Last Days
John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
Dan Simmons, Hyperion
Steven Brust, Yendi
Steven Brust, Teckla

All the usual stuff applies -- I'm only keeping track of novels, I'm happy to be asked my opinion of any of these, and so on. (So far, the 'getting people to ask me about books' aspect of this experiment has gone really well.)

This month included the first time since I started keeping track that I reread something, and I even that I did in preparation for my first reading of the sequels, later. This might give the impression that I'm generally a pretty forward-looking reader, but actually I seem to go through phases, depending somewhat nebulously on my mood; there are periods sometimes when the familiar is firmly in the majority. It also contained the inevitable first time that the fact of the record-keeping put me through my arts student version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- there was a day or two early on where I couldn't decide what to read next in large part because I was, semi-consciously, trying to decide what would look best next on the list -- but it was, happily, transitory and not overwhelming.

I am trying to figure out which classes to register for, when I get to register for things on Monday. I am definitely going to take the second year Metaphysics course.

( Possibilities )

In the absense of unforeseen developments, it's looking (now that I can see them laid out like that) like it will probably be the first one.

I've finally replied to all of last month's book report requests.

Today was my birthday! I had a midterm (for the second year in a row! I guess it's that season), ate Chinese food, went to a Windsor House philosophy meeting, and thought about how it had been a year since J. was here. However did I pay attention to studying for the Sociology midterm I had last year while J. was here? But I must have, at least a little, because I remember that I got an A- in that course. I have received no presents yet (the presents my mother bought me got tangled in Amazon), but a surprising number of people wished me well, and my day as a whole left me with a warm general fondness for humanity such that it would be difficult for me to complain.

I had some other things that I wanted to write about, but I do not remember what they were. Oh, except that cola asked me a while ago to report on the Sufjan Stevens concert that I went to, since apparently a writer for the Straight pronounced it one of the two best Vancouver concerts of the decade (the other having been something in 2003). I didn't personally think it was as good as the September 19th Final Fantasy concert, but it was pretty good.

...I guess he probably wanted more report than that. Okay, a bad thing: we all (who got there ahead of time) had to stand in line in the cold and sometimes raining for long after the doors were supposed to open, and indeed, as it turns out, well after the show had started; by the time I got inside, from somewhere in the middle of the line, My Brightest Diamond's set was halfway through. Also, I had to sit near the back. Good things included My Brightest Diamond themselves (herself?), who were pretty cool, and the way that Sufjan's band/orchestra, which included a guy playing the saw, were all dressed as butterflies, and he was dressed as a bird, with paper wings that flapped. He also gave several-minute-long and totally arresting spoken introductions to some of his songs, including a rambling story-behind-The Predatory Wasp... that I have no idea how much of which to believe. The performances of the songs were also very nice (I knew only about a third of them, which only served to make me pretty happy that I still have so much to discover), though I think that he might have done well to temper, a little, his fondness for ending them all with huge crescendoes.

Man, what else did I want to talk about? I guess I'll remember sometime after sleeping.