December 13, 2007 - Thursday

December 13, 2007 - Thursday

captain weather, and the fool in school

Well, It's that time of year again:
Time to wonder what the sweet fuck the early settlers of Canada were thinking. Were they on crack? I mean, we have a central heating and fireplaces, they had beaver hats and breezy log-houses.

Romantics would say they made love to stay warm. I would say that by the time they got through all the smelly layers of fur coats, scratchy hides, and wooly long-johns, spring would have already rolled around and it would be time for a shower. As far as the smart ones who thought they'd get a head start by trying to shag in early autumn –have you ever tried to screw in the bitter cold? It's like trying to fit a shrieking ferret into a calzone.

"Oh, the early settlers of Canada were a hardy bunch." No. They were a stupid bunch. They were the pawns of the warring British and French who were jostling for position in the new world. They heard "free land" and freaked-out trying to get on the boats that headed across the Atlantic. They were shuttled down the St. Lawrence where they were arbitrarily dropped off with their luggage and told to "settle where ye may". If it was summer they only had to deal with hungry grizzlies, mosquitoes the size of Cessnas, and very angry tribes of Indians who couldn't resist shooting arrows at them because they were slow-moving targets.

Then winter came along:

(Insert North London accent)
"Wot?"
"Wot?"
"It's fackin' freezin'!"
"I know mate, it's fackin' cold!"
"They didn't tell us it was goin' t'be this fackin' cold."
"Fackin' Hudson Bay Company twats…"
"Fack me. Where did we park the fackin' boat?"
"I don't know mate, I can't see shit..."
"Well, we have to get the fack out of here, which way is south?"
"Don't know mate, my eyeballs have frozen shut."
"Fack…Yeah? My toes just fell off!"
"Yer toes? Grab me one mate, I'm fackin' starved."
"Yer not eatin' my fackin' toes ye fackin spastic! Eat yer own fackin' toes!"
"'Ow the hell am I supposed to eat my fackin' toes if I can't feel them and I'm fackin' blind? Just give us a toe mate."
"Well…"
"Well, wot?"
"Fancy a quick shag first?"

Okay. I'll stop. I spent enough time last year griping about the cold so I'm just going to grin and bear it like a good little Canadian. Of course, last year it only started to get this cold in Mid-January when it was proper cold-getting time. This year it kicked off in November. Literally, in one day, it went from chilly autumn to three feet of snow and the kind of weather that Russians like to send their political prisoners to.

So I'll talk about other stuff. Like school stuff.

The first semester of my academic year has ended. I have learned many things:
It's possible to drink a pint of beer outside if you transfer it to an extra-large paper coke cup.
Algonquin College is a labyrinth that I wouldn't tackle without a map, compass and a fairly good knowledge of the stars.

The 174 bus only manifests itself once a day through the careful use of the dark arts.
As a matter of fact, trying to divine when any bus will show up anywhere requires some kind of knowledge that is beyond me. Trust me, I've tried everything from the internet to reading pig entrails.

College dorms look like sanitariums run by Desk-Nazis. Not that I live in one, but I've wandered through one in a drunken state and was met with Kubrick-like lines of repeating doors down very long, narrow, hallways. A tricky thing when say, your hat, umbrella, and scarf are all in separate rooms and you'd like to leave.

Beat-boxing is as un-cool as it was 15 years ago. Beat-boxing, by the way, is attempting to make drum-like sounds with your mouth by spraying spit on anybody standing within a meter of you. If you were watching someone beat-box with the sound turned off the impulse would be to pepper-spray them like a rabid dog.

The human brain has the consistency of crème brulée (actually it's not really a school thing. A neurosurgeon friend told me this last Saturday).

Some people, nearly half my age, can actually be pretty funny.
Some people, nearly half my age, watch too much television.
Some people, nearly half my age, are truly decent folk.
Some people, nearly half my age, need to sort it out.
Some people, nearly half my age, are quite bright.
Some people, nearly half my age, have crème brulée wobbling around inside their skulls.

Along these lines –and I knew this already– age is just a number. Take one particular soul who had a night of drinking and then continued it on for two weeks after... and dropped out. I am half that guys age. It's all relative and comes down to experience.

The phrase "…coming back to you in no particular order…" actually means stuff is coming back to you in a very particular order. Namely, alphabetical order.

"A" is not "Ay" it's "Ah", and It's not "kil-O-meter", it's "KILL-o-meter".
Singing Aqualung on air unhinges people.

People in radio do not have stupid hair.

People in marketing do.

The number 384 is a magical number. More so than 42. And like 42, nobody seems to remember what the question was.

The mic should be on when you speak.

The mic should be off when you swear.

My disdain for pop culture is narrowly outweighed by the overriding mandate that I need to understand it a little more. Trying to understand it is twisting my melon, man. Liking it is going to require a major mental re-adjustment. Like a lobotomy.

As far as writing news for the radio goes: I'm doing it wrong…The reasons will remain unclear.
The "On Air" light being on outside of a closed door is your cue to walk in and start talking very loudly.

I know less about breathing than I thought I did.

Some guys throw like girls, and vice versa.

Some people actually like the music they hear on the radio.

Along those lines, the music people like that's popular is unbendingly generic and steadfast: a lot more rock, a lot less roll. Same hip, same hop.

Some people actually care what Ottawa Mayor O'Brien is like in person.

It doesn't matter how many notebooks I have and what I have written on their covers, the notebook in my bag will never correspond to the class that I'm in. As such, studying is less studying and more of an 80's action movie.

With Adobe Audition I can have you saying anything I want.

A "Code Blue" is a tense time for medical personnel.

All the retarded people generally show up in the campus pub at about 11.30. Thankfully they keep to themselves.

The campus pub is owned and operated by twats.

Thus, it's a venue filled with retards and run by twats.

It could be the Canadian Government.

Asking yourself "What would Conan do?" does not always help in exam-type situations.
The term "flipping their shit" should not bring to mind a dude with a spatula over a toilet-bowl.In order to operate in the College I need to have in my head approximately 30 numbers, from computer login to Student I.D. For a numerophobic, such as myself, this is no easy thing. I often get a bad case of willies just opening my locker.

Timing is everything. Lateness; you should be shot and pissed on (I knew this already, but the point has been forced home).

A large man can be quite comfortable in a small space if he has all his stuff.

People shamelessly wear a baseball cap that has roughly the same shape as a cooking pot.
People shamelessly wear clothing with other people's names on them.Some people just need to learn how to operate a goddamned belt (shit, I am getting old).In many cases, intelligence can be measured in direct inverse proportion to the amount of time someone operates their mouth (mull over that one for a while).

Oh, I've learned a lot of other things; generally practical, technical, and theoretical things that I'm not going to bore you with. Needless to say a glaring light has been shed upon the radio industry. It's rather like an open cadaver: shocking and gross at first, and then interesting and alluring as you see how all the bits and pieces work.

Ideally the goal with school is to get the highest marks possible. In that sense I'm not doing too badly. This is a new thing for me. When I think about the last time I was in a scholastic environment I need to think in terms of a decade. A decade throughout which I spent most of my time whipping my crème brulée into tapioca in a place with cobblestones and a very weird atmosphere. I still miss that place, and all the people in it. That hasn't changed.

What has changed is that I live a lifestyle that is healthy, calm, and in word: "boring". I rarely get as twisted as I used to, and am not very good at it any more –out of practice. This can be illustrated by drunken argument I had outside of bar with a total stranger about the relative stupidity of our hats… Hats, for fuck's sake… I have unwillingly snapped back to a Canadian style of life with all the trappings: grinning about ridiculous weather, watching things move around on a large television set, stuffing my face like Caligula, and exercising. Which brings me to a strange point:

When does "exercising" become "working out"? I'm sore as hell right now. Did I just exercise, or did I just work out?

Well, whatever.

I suppose when you picture me, you should picture me sitting in a classroom hovering over a notebook. Any notebook. I won't be able to make heads or tales of those notes when I go over them later (if I can find them). Or I'm slouched in a semi-reclined posture listening intently. I focus on what the professor is saying and try to ignore the jack-asses whispering behind me. I'm getting old because I consider the whispering people to be jack-asses; there was a time when I cared what they had to say. I engage when I'm piqued. I avoid hypothetical questions. Just the facts.

What you see around me hasn't changed since many of you were wondering halls of academia many years ago. The walls are still hospital colours: pale blue, white, light grey. The bathrooms still stink and the toilets don't flush properly. The janitors still look annoyed and the dean still wonders how someone managed to get a dead elk into his office.

You still get the guys in the mullets wearing biker jackets with the word "ANARCHY" written in studs across the back. You still get the dorks with their pants hitched up too high who play D&D and are really into Star Trek. You still get the gloomy slouchers dressed entirely in black, with black lipstick, and black trenchcoats, even in the hard burn of summer. They don't call them "goth" anymore though. No, apparently they're called "emo" because they feel really deeply about hating everything and are considering killing themselves. You still get the concept of "Valley Girl", kept alive by people that talk and think like them, only with more of an ironic slant. They still have nothing to say. The hippy/bohemian types still exist in full force, smelling of Indian incense and marijuana smoke. I fear they might hug me because when I wear certain clothing, under a certain kind of light, I look like a tree.

And then you get me: tall, bald, incongruous, and strange, in a strange land.