Blog: Articles from October 2006

It all started with The Little Book of Calm…

I was putting together the semblance of a costume to wear tomorrow to school, since it’s Halloween—aka an excuse to wear a housecoat to school. Anyway, I wanted to make a fake Little Book of Calm. It’s an actual book, but in this case I’m referencing a British comedy series called Black Books. For some reason I looked it up on Chapters’ website … one thing led to another … eventually it disappeared from my shopping bag but I found myself staring at other purchases.

I think that after seeing The Little Book of Calm I decided I should go ahead and buy American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. Then it occurred to me that Chapters now sells DVDs, so I could search for Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (the Sci-Fi miniseries). I’ve wanted that for so long but couldn’t find it in stores. Just my luck—it was there! Then it occurred to me to search for the soundtrack to Love Actually. Into the shopping bag it goes.

After this was all over, I looked at the shopping bag page and stared at it for a good long while. I made tea and got ready for bed. Online shopping can be dangerously addictive—it is all too easy to get caught up in the moment; it’s hard to decide what you want and what you just think is a cool purchase, even with books (okay, so I’m actually only getting one book…). Fortunately, this is all birthday money that I’m spending. My friends know I like books, and so as usual I received tons of Chapters gift cards, which I can conveniently use online!

Anyway … I am looking forward to this order’s impending arrival before next Thursday! Oh, and I got free shipping.

For those who observe Daylight Saving Time, we changed back to standard time this morning. I was there when it happened (no secrets of the universe were revealed to me, however, so I want my money back).

This morning at about 11:15 I was getting ready for work when the phone rings. Who is it? It’s my coworker, Danielle, calling from work.

Danielle: Ben … you do know you’re supposed to be working, right?
Me: Yes…
Danielle: Well, you‘re late. It’s after 12.
Me: Um … no it’s not.
Danielle: All the clocks around here say 12:15.
Me: You didn’t set your clocks back?
Danielle: (Calling off to our curator) Glenn did we set our clocks back? (To me) Oh my god…
Me: I’ll see you in about half an hour.

Yes, suffice it to say, we aren’t going to let her live that one down. She spent the rest of the time looking for the manual to reprogram the front desk phone’s clock, though, which is good because it was always ten minutes slow and annoyed us to no end.

Other than that work was pretty slow.

Oh, last night the American Movie Classics channel was playing The Exorcist at 9 followed by The Exorcist II. At 10, guess what Space started playing? That’s right, The Exorcist. To up the creepiness factor to another level, they were showing The Exorcist II right after. Two completely different channels, one number 53 and the other number 52, decide to show the same two movies just hours apart?

Talk about 200 channels and nothin’ to watch.

Tonight we’re having hot dogs. Now, it is common knowledge that hot dog buns and hot dog sausages come in disparate ratios—8 buns, 10 sausages—so as to create an inconvenient discrepancy for the cook. Life is great, is it not?

Well, my dad bought two packages of hot dog sausages, each one containing six sausages. That makes a total of 12. Guess how many buns are in the package he bought? Twelve.

I think I’ll email the Vatican and volunteer this as one of the miracles required to canonize John Paul II.

Seems like an appropriate title.

I’m sick, in the “runny nose, sore throat, unable to focus because of massive tissue usage” sort of way. It’s the sort of sickness that lines the pockets of all those people with stock in Kleenex and Scotties and whoever else sends tissue my way. So, in light of this, and the fact that I worked four hours tonight and am really tired, this isn’t going to be a long post.

We finished doing our play in drama today. It went a lot better than yesterday; I wasn’t nervous, and even though I was sick I don’t think I did so bad. Kudos to everyone, especially to Cortney and Krista, who had to play two characters each.

Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 today. It’s nifty. Not enough visible changes to really throw me off, but just enough to keep it fresh (and this is going directly from 1.5.0.7 to 2.0; I don’t download the betas and release candidates). There are a few changes that require some getting used to, but I like this new quick jumping menu thingy to the right of all the tabs; it’s useful for those of us who have a bazillion and one tabs open.

I wonder if it’s a coincidence that Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 were released so close together … meh, whatever. I have not downloaded IE 7 (and do not plan to any time in the near future) so I shall refrain from espousing any sort of opinion about it, since I’ve never used it. I hear a lot of mixed opinions about it (yay for transparent PNGs, boo for standards? ).

The world will continue to revolve around the sun, at any rate.

Apparently this is my definition of a “short post”. I would hate to see what I call a long one. Oh well. Bath time, maybe (maybe) some writing, maybe some reading, a little tea, and then bed. Good night.

It’s true. A U.S. teacher convicted of sexual abuse has been exiled to Canada as his punishment (post your view here). He lives here already with his wife and kids, but now he just can’t come back to the U.S. for three years. Oh my. Such a terrible punishment. We all know how harsh it is to live in Canada.

Since when did Canada become the America’s prison? “Let’s not waste the taxpayer’s money on storing our criminals in little buildings in America. Let’s just send them to Canada instead.” Ouch. Firstly, what does that say about the U.S. courts‘ view of Canada? Apparently living here is equivocable to living in jail in America? Secondly, and I may be going out on a limb here, what with my radical Canadian liberal views on morality, but shouldn’t a sex offender be, oh, I don’t know, behind bars? What sort of message does this send to other sex offenders, or other criminals in general, in America? Be good and we might let you go to Canada?

It’s astounding at the audacity of politicians sometimes. Just when I think it can’t get any more entertaining, it does.

Wow. I feel really detached from everything today, but it hasn’t only been today. The past few weeks have been really saturated—not necessarily busy, although some days were. But every day was saturated with activities. Now I feel like someone cut my tether and I‘m lost in space.

I’m attempting to muddle through this scholarship application for the Canadian Merit Award, and uh—yeah, it’s really difficult. They expect me to be some sort of leader who contributes a lot to the community. I’m not going to delude myself: I haven’t contributed much to the community, and I’m not much of a leader. It’s these sorts of activities that really rub it in. It’s like writing my resume all over again—in fact, it is precisely that. I‘m trying to sell myself to them, and I hate it. I hate the entire process of trying to tell a bunch of people I don’t know how great I am and why they should give me money.

So I‘m filling out all of this stuff, and I hit the essay questions. Ouch. As I’m trying to answer these questions, I more and more feel like I‘m not a leader. Which is fine. I’m a follower with leader-like qualities that means I‘m the reliable right-hand (or left-hand, depending upon where the comfiest chair is) man. I don’t mind. What’s with all this focus on being a leader anyway? I think that society has falsely associated leadership with original thinking. These are two distinct concepts. Leaders don’t have to be original thinkers, and original thinkers don’t have to be leaders. I’m an original thinker, or at least more so than I am a leader, what with my whole introverted personality. Yet due to a consistent lack of conscious social engineering policies in our education system, the schools attempt to treat the concepts as one in the same: leaders are thinkers, followers are not, and they disproportionately award leaders.

(The contributions to the community thing I can understand, although I admit it’s ironic that I espouse socialist sympathies yet don’t really participate much in “community” stuff. )

I really need to stop going to bed at 1 AM too. I try to cram too much into my evenings, because that’s the only time I have, but I pay for it by being tired the next morning.

Sometimes I feel like a tachyon. We go so fast, we move faster than light.

So in short, I have lost track of the meaningful stuff and been swept up in the minutiae of my life. If you or anyone you know has a tractor beam, transporter, Goa’uld cargo ship, or even a really long rope, please pull me back down to Earth.

Interesting observation about the world of television—or rather, our view of the world behind television. Especially now that the Internet provides a 24/7 resource for us, we’ve become increasingly interested in the behind-the-scenes aspect of production. Who directed? Who was that guest star in season 6, episode 3? And when the producers of our favourite television show make a bad decision, or the writers introduce a clichéd plot twist, what do we do? We turn around and say, “Ugggh, I could do better than that!”

Well, some of us probably could. Most of us probably couldn‘t. And the truth is, not many of us actually want to. That’s the thing with TV, you see. The entire concept of fiction is centred around watching things happen to people without being able to do anything about it. This extends beyond fiction itself, however: most of the television industry happens without the public having direct control over it. We can’t control who they’ll hire as that new regular or who will write the season finale, and we wouldn’t want to be in control. It’s good to have things to complain about, after all.

Boy, this sounded a lot more interesting in my head. I think I’ll stop now before someone throws a pie at me—speaking of which, the pumpkin pie we’ve still got left over from Thanksgiving is really, really good—and go to school.

Oh, The Hour premiered for season 3 last night. For those of you aren’t aware, it isn’t a hip new drama on ABC—and don’t let George Stroumboulopoulos’ attitude fool you. I‘m glad that it’s back on now, because I can finally catch up with what’s going on in the world. Nuclear weapons, insane dictators—oh, and Kim Jong-il too.

Last night was the Canadian premiere of Battlestar Galactica, season 3. It was fantastic as television episodes go, but only okay by BSG standards—it was no “Kobol’s Last Gleaming”. The main problem was not enough action, too much talk—they had to spend too much time explaining what had happened during the four months that elapsed over the summer. It was too rough of a transition into the BSG universe for me. That said, I did enjoy it and I’m sure that the season will pick up as we see more episodes.

Air Farce is still no longer funny, but luckily both This Hour Has 22 Minutes and The Rick Mercer Report are carrying on the tradition of Canadian political satire. I‘ve also been watching The Colbert Report lately. And tomorrow The Hour starts again, so I can actually catch up with the real news! Doctor Who starts tomorrow as well, but unfortunately it conflicts with Stargate Atlantis. Why?! Why must you do this to me?!

Drama class is putting on a play; we’re doing 7 Stories, by Morris Panych, and I got cast as the lead role of “the Man”, who is a jumper. That’s right: I spend the entire play on a window ledge (on the seventh storey) trying to decide whether or not to jump while zany characters interrupt me. I have a lot of lines to memorise. But it’s a fun play.

And the epic novel writing continues, as much as it can. I really want to finish this second draft. I need a title. Blah. That’s what I feel. Very blah. I’ve been tired so far this weekend, and I really should relax, since it’s Thanksgiving and all. Happy Thanksgiving! Oooh … turkey. Mom’s turkey. There’s no excuse to eat like turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie. Can’t blog now. Must … eat … delicious … food.