At the foot of a snow-capped hill September 30, 2007

Everything is wrong. My fifth day here, I met a girl in nursing. Now, I haven’t spoken to her since but her existence has given me that feeling of fathomless wrath akin to walking out of an exam and having the answer to the 20-point essay question float into your head and realizing how much bull was just shitted. Now I’m stuck in arts, the resin of my former good idea, ‘trying to find my way…’ and wasting lots of time and money. Yesterday, while procrastinating, I found myself absolutely glued to this article from the John Hopkins Medical Journal… it took only about 20 minutes to read. Then I studied for midterms – for about three hours. Later while trying to sleep, 90% of my mind was firing on saline, epilepsy, and hemispherectomies, 7% was waddling over solstices, and sun angles, and the other 3% was watching in confusion. Now, I can spare myself grief by denying this obvious strength and focusing on what I actually can control… but I won’t because I’m detrimental and having to know something and wanting to learn something hardly ever go hand in hand.

Presently, I listen to relatively happy songs (some written and preformed on drugs!) and completely break down because a lyric or instrumental bit reminds me that I can’t fly a plane or sing or play music or do anything to expel the flammable happiness those things must. Then, depending on what I’m listening to, I get this twisting pang of realisation that I will never go to a Beatles concert or I pour ammonia in my eyes because I didn’t buy tickets to The Who because I was saving up to go to Jamaica. Which turned into New York. Then, for what would develop into an unstomachable longing for places not home.

I need OUT.

i am jinx September 29, 2007

It’s odd feeling to start the morning when the kettle won’t make hotwater for my tea, and the lightbults turned off the moment I step by them.

Life in the clouds is still wonderful, not so much for the people and things around me though. As I was only standing in front of Renaissance coffee shop, a truck driver reared into a flagpost. I took pictures, you’ll see. The damage was only two meters ahead of me. I thought that was enough excitment for a 10-minute walk to class. So then, apparently a bus also got into an accident. Six students in my same Cohort couldn’t get to class on time. The teacher could care less, test next class. Then comes the ring ring, hello, your uncle is in the emergency – some falling, some fainting… I still don’t know what’s the full story.

Let’s talk about car accidents in a separate paragraph.
There was one on highway 91. Now I don’t understand why the police blocked off all the traffic, even when the car accident itself was already on the side of the road, no life was taken away, just metal deformation. Such inefficiencies and inconveniences. Then there are children who just should not be on the road. The Chius (the taiwanese twins). Two accidents each in the first week of school. The younger child can’t drive a stick properly, the other one just loves to talk on his cellphone while driving. Expensive cars. Now their insurance together totals at least 7000 per month. That money can pay for my tuition for two semesters. So simple multiplication tells me that 5 months of driving for them equals all the money I’ll need to pay for 10 semesters – 5 courses each sem. Five! That’s not an easy workload I tell ya.

Well, moving on, so I got home at 3 this morning. Why? Well, I didn’t want to stay in Richmond and I have an online group assignment to do in 45 minutes. The concept of rules always comes to mind when I’m driving late at night. I don’t bother to wait for a red light at some intersections – for example, railway and moncton. And I don’t feel guilty. Rules are only true when it is in relation with other people. So then, what does it mean when people say “I live by my own rules” ? I don’t see how you can escape from rules unless you’re an existentialist… or a member of tea collective, who is going to start a commune and be a self-regulated community. now there, I still thought of “self-regulated”.

We’re monkeys, that’s all. We need rules to live by and imitate.

So no, not “I think therefore I am”, I am because I imitate.
It’s just another version of survival of the fittest. Excpet now we’re not starving, we’re just thriving to be a part of some form of society. The best way to get by is just doing as we’re told. Going to school, getting a diploma, getting a steady job, and create babies. Then we have little passports that tell us our nationality. A chinese man who showed my mother and I around in Shenzhen (mainland) asked me what does nationality, or a nation mean to me? I was stumped by this question. Because really, I probably would continue to fonction in the same way as I do now in any other developped country. Just another form of education maybe, maybe heavy taxes but great health care, and just another set of rules. I would adapt just fine.
Yeah, it’s not survival now. It’s just adaptation.

I don’t know why I ranted. I apologize. My terribly-written political science book (Irene would attest just how terrible this french is) always puts me in a more abstract mind/thinking. Now I’ll go and read more about les composantes de la representation des interets – l’influence, le controle, et le conflit.
All that probably made no sense. I’ve only had 6 hours of sleep in the last two days.

Jasmine-Green and smelling of friends…. September 29, 2007

I apologize. This lack of postiness has been due to part of my brain continually…well..being eaten by UBC, leaving me therefore in my present state, which is WOW! I made it this far! I have come to that feeling after being SO positively scared for UBC, not wanting to go, and then voila! I have friends! I am not the only loner on campus! People want to spend time with me! So yes….ArtsOns, my little program of 100 people or so, is lovely and CONFUSING to the hilt. As I have mentioned to others, I have genius children in my 20 person discussion group, who are captivating and intelligent to the extreme. They word drop with suggestions like “this text has an effect of self-effort” and ” the concept of natural Pantheonism” among others. Besides that, I am thoroughly involved with a great Christian group on campus that I absolutely love, despite having to bus an extra hour out to their meetings on days when I don’t even NEED to go to school. Such is life… and life is so much better now that I imagined it would be a month into UBC. I am actually thinking of staying here for a second year before running away to Paris, but living on campus for sure, which seems to be the key to all magick-ness. And today I had coffee with a girl who also has IBS at her house and I was amazed! There are really cute little complexes out there that strongly remind me of Katy’s apartment in Steveston. I practically expected to see her lovely face around the corner!

On that note I must go as the 496 comes soon and I miss all of you too much!

M

Waiting To Hear September 27, 2007

I just had a fun game/time-wastey idea! Let us all document and show off our respective libraries! As I am finally spending a great amount of time in mine (a GREAT, sixteen-hours-a-weekish amount of time) I would like to see your cubby spaces and crannies that you go to to enjoy the smell of paper and guile.
ALSO
There are a few “patrons” of the Tea Collective who are not being very patriotic to our community. IF you have not written yet, please just say hello. (Of course, if you’re not writing, you’re probably not reading, thusly nullifying my entire plea.)

I Miss You ALL in oddly capitalized letters.
Daniellas coming home.
The VFF is coming to town.
My library is awsome.
I’m wearing two coats, and a scarf.
Life is warm.

We’re Above It. September 27, 2007

And yet, I can’t help but laugh the hell out of myself when I watch these:

Also, I apologize.

I wrote this a long time ago and forgot about it… September 21, 2007

My experience so far as a ubc student has consisted of amazing discoveries and agonizing back pain. I have not attended any parties yet as I am exhausted partially from having just returned Sunday night from New York and walking everywhere every day. Classes are so short only 50 minutes compared to hour and fifteen minute classes. I also have at least a half hour break between most of my classes if not 1 and a half hours. I thought i was doing myself a favor though I am still not sure. I does make my lectures seem extra short though. 3 days in and I still have not stepped foot in the library I need to get over my fear. Art history is going to be mind stretching especially for me since I have not exercised my mind in that way for a long time. Its exciting to have a challenge like that where I know I have to work my butt off to do remotely well.

I feel so plain. In New York everyone was fashionable to an extent and I felt the opposite though working at the pool all Summer let me free myself from obsessing over my image. Now that I am back in class and First impressions seem to be ever important I feel plain. I crave instantly that “I am finding myself at University with piercings and chic clothing” coolness. Also it takes a year or two to find that groove and so i wait. the other thing I crave is the tight knit group that is the tea collective. I want to be surrounded by such intelligent enjoyable people once again but I know that that deep of a relationshipcant be built in a day and no one can replace The tea collective. I cant wait for clubs to start up so I can meet some hopefully enjoyable people with which I can not be a loner.

Don’t give me no more peppermint friends. September 21, 2007

So here I am on Thursday night wishing that I was napping on Daniella’s couch. It’s eleven o’clock and I’ve just come home from the theater. It is like any other day of high school, and yet there are no commonalities between tonight and the past year as far as I can tell, except for that one faint link: theater. I’m not even sure if I like the theater. I loved Stefania and Alex and George and McCarthy and I loved backstage… being let in on the secret of the show. I loved the reek of the smoke machine. I loved working on the stage. I loved working under the stage. I even found a place in my heart for the various wood chips and screws that would end up in my bra at the end of a day of construction. What of this remains in theater here? I am left with the technicalities.

I will be stage managing later on this semester.

I like the people here. I have a friend who dances like a hippie. I have a friend who is silly and who I have giggled with as we walk through the graveyard late at night. I have dozens of acquaintances. I know peoples names. I recognise their faces. I have people to sit with at meals. I like them well enough. I also like peppermints.

I have peppermint friends, but I miss my clothes-fresh-from the dryer friends, my cheese-stuffed pepper friends, my really fuzzy sock friends, my fedoraed swing-dancer friends, my hoodie-when-I’m-cold friends, my barefooted on the dyke friends, my nap friends, my Christmas-morning friends, my tea friends.

I must console myself with the snacking nori my mother has sent in a care package. I eat it and think of Agnes’s brilliant snacking ability.

Goodnight my cheese-stuffed pepper friends.

An (embarassing, evidently) Admission September 20, 2007

Sweet Dreams herbal tea.

I have never heard of City&Colour before. In one day, the same day that a certain Grounder editor decided to ask me to take photos for the show, I found out that the lead singer ( and indeed, to many people’s knowledge, the only bandmember) was the wailing whiner of Alexisonfire, a band which, in no stretch of even the most elasticiest imagination, do I respect. So, it is a perfect illustration that I walked up to a show where I cared not even a pea’s worth what any of the mush-brained concert-goers would think of me, and yet, I strutted, for I was with the press. Exciting. First off, it was in a place that no bus-driver knew of. Malkin bowl, ever heard of it, well, it’s just a short walk, or strut, away from a bus stop in Stanley Park. So I strutted up to the gates and said, off handedly,
“Hi, where’s WillCall?” (For those of you who aren’t, y’know, in the bizz, that’s where…well that’s where I was told to go.) The nice guarder-man said to me, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’m a photographer, see,”
“Yeah,”

Time passed.

“Do you want to talk to WillCall?”
“Yeah, that would be what I want to do.”
“Well, you gotta get your bag checked”
Well, the long and short of it was that I had to get my bag checked. I was called over to a table by a tall-standing, straight-backed young woman with a serious grin, who took one look at my camera and said “Don’t let them see this, they’ll take it away; it’s a professional camera.”

Panic.
What? No, go away panic, I AM a professional. Anyways, I ignored her, she was to pretty to be right, and I strutted over to WillCall, where they handed me a small, secret envelope with my name written on it in sharpie. I slipped it in my back pocket and the man at the desk and I exchanged a secret handshake and letters written in invisible ink. Then he instructed into my ear to go wait for Brandon Dong (?) to come by and take us in, and he waved his hand to his left, whence I looked, up into the night sky. Evidentally I was to float around the stratosphere for this Brandon guy.
So nothing happens for a while, insignificant music plays in the background, some funny stupid people try to return their tickets on the heavy ground that ‘this show sucks.’ Heartening. Then Brandon comes, talks, and drifts off absent-mindedly, and then a lovely girl arrives, looks worriedly in Brandon’s waivering direction, and then leads us into the lounging crowd of guppy-teens.

At the front, I take two pictures, my camera dies, and I cried Aaaaallll the way home.

Let me paint you a picture with my imagination brush… September 19, 2007

I’ve gone through a background of perpetual nausea, breakfasts, classes, snacks, classes, rendez-vous’, and walking to and fro these past days like a pregnant woman. I’m not even abusing the term. Allow me to paint.

Old news: across from my res, construction is underway for the much-anticipated cinema and…personally less so, pub. So the construction men people whom I assume are qualified and fully capable, spent a week digging a hole. Now this isn’t an afternoon-at-the-beach job, it’s one with digger machines and trucks and some very careful manoevering the hole is really quite noteworthy. Walking along the frontier of construction each day has led me to admire the work these guys do with more than just a passing awe. Now, this you probably already know about me, but I thrive on understanding and researching on my own. I don’t learn things if they’re laid out for me, I have to dig. Much like the construction workers. Oooh. So, this may seem a flimsy explanation, but understand this: through my passive observation of the massive tonnes of dirt being excavated each time I pass, I led myself to conclude this was a crucial step in construction. This conclusion was completely satisfying to me because it simply explained all of my observations.

Monday morning, I awake to find the hole (which by this time had gone from superficial to about 10 meters deep) being filled in by the precise people who had finished a week in 35-degree temperatures, digging from the break of day until it got too hot to continue. Troopers. I gaped through the window for a couple minutes. This entire week they have spent flattening layer after layer of dirt into the hole they just dug. Now, I have no explanation. I thought maybe one or two layers would suffice to make the bottom of an acceptable flatness… but they must be on the 10th layer or so by now. They’ve built it up so much that it would be a safe jump from top to bottom. With the exception of this one side. It remains the original deepness. Maybe to symbolize all the effort wasted to originally dig the hole. It’s too small to be a swimming pool I heard was also being built. I noted today that there are a series of smaller shallow holes in seemingly random spots. I’m passing those off as places for cables and plumbing and such, but only so much can be explained. I now walk to class explanationless. I actively wanted to grab the fence and shake it and scream like someone lost at sea. The confusion of it all actually drove me to class today with salty rivers running down my face.

Maybe I set myself up for an emotional day, but I took my hour in between Geography and History to read about Mesopotamia. What resulted from that was clinical anxiety. Apparently History textbooks find it imperative to reference Islam and explain to me everything I miss about Morocco, along with rashly expositing a photograph of the Code of Hammurabi and explaining that it now resides in the British Museum. I suppose it was unwise of me to assume reading as a safe activity, in this allocation of vulnerability I seem to be finding myself in. My location was not choice either, in the student center by the deli. I raised my head from my hands and my eyes came to rest on a rack of pamphlets, entitled lovely things such as “Cutting”, “Getting What You Want Out Of Sleep”, “Don’t Go Down The Dark Path”, and rot to that effect. At least my eyes stayed moisturized. The air up here is dry.

You may think and hope this is over. It’s not. It does get better, though! I took a brave step to help myself out and went outside to read. Not about Mesopotamia. That was nice. I wore my Essaouira … cape. People practised ultimate. By observation, I drew the conclusion they were wicked good. I may have gawked. Who knew disc-tossing could be so skillful? Then I headed over to the Library. And fell in love. So I’m in the library now.

It may have been the flights of stairs, but my first glimpse at the colourful and size-according organisation of the first bookshelf made my heart patter. I wanted to take a picture. I think tomorrow I will re-batterise my camera and make you all a photo tour. It was like entering Narnia. There is light (take a hint, RPL!), and narrow lanes of literature to the ceiling. It is everything charming about those old, seemingly gravity-defying libraries, but modern. And stuffed. This may be a baby university, but the library is timelessly accommodating.

Today may have started out trying, but vats of tears would be worth my current bliss, as I lie sprawled in a comfy chaise, hooked up to an IV of The Beatles, with a mocking view of the outside, flawed world. And the indecisive construction.

Espresso and prelims September 18, 2007

I’ve finally met an interesting Cornellian.  Soren Jahan, freshman, half French and half Korean.  I randomly met a couple people at the dining hall and visited his room with them.  We got there and he’s not in his room so one of the people I’m with yells his name to which he replies, “One sec, I’m reading in the washroom.”  He was reading a book from his senior level French Literature class.  He comes out and, before he even introduces himself, offers us all peach gummies from his desk drawer.  He has his own espresso machine in his room so I had a cup.  We exchanged phone numbers but I’m more than positive that we won’t end up seeing each other again or recognizing each other if we do.  Still, it was a refreshing encounter.

 Asides from that, it’s prelim season.  Yikes.  I’ve already given up on my gpa though so I’m not as stressed (hence, I’m posting).  I’m taking this weird Bio Autotutorial course instead of the standard lecture - which I love since there’s no class to go to - but am fucked because there’s only been 3 A’s given out in that class for the past 20-30 years.  Bye bye premed.  I’m not switching out of it though, I like the class too much and I’ve learned now to do what I like.  I’d be lucky to hit about 70% in that class but I actually feel like I’m learning something and that’s worth more than an A (never before expected that to come out of my mouth).