Bagging was fun. No, really.

"It was fun in the way that manual labour with people you don't really talk to usually is."

-Me

"Who's Pippin?"

-Me

I am having a good time with APS in band, though.

No posts for awhile, I think. But you should check out Alicia's artblog.

By the way, if anyone is going on the bio trip, what are your room situations like?

Get Plastered, You Bastard

"For WAR.
...And for pots."

-Mr. Zigby on the uses of copper

Alicia's birthday. She's already written a lovely post about it, so I will try to avoid redundancy.

Predictably, all my friends looked stunning -- Kelsey fabulous in a short black...uh...slip...Arthi gorgeous in gold and brown, Alicia and Jocelyne in their beautiful and vastly different green and blue dresses, and Ariel in a magnificent electric&black skirt that defies description. (I'm exercising my command of synonyms.)

Alicia was indeed stressed.

(on the bus on the way to the Colombian restaurant, coming up from Place-D'Armes)

Alicia: "Well, the metro station you're really supposed to get off at is Mont-Royal."

Me: "Oh, uh, then...Alicia? Afterwards, couldn't we take the metro from there, then? Alicia?"

Alicia: "No."

Me: "Why not?"

Alicia: "Because we don't have enough time." *nearly bangs head on pole*

Me: "...?"

(Dufault correctly pointed out the other day that, in true Canadian fashion, I tend to finish all my sentences on a high note. As if I'm asking a question, you know? Like this?)

The food was good (although I don't recommend it to vegetarians) and the waiters were all wonderful (Alicia fell for the one who gave her alcohol "from his country"), and I generally had a very good time. We were kind of immature when it came to sing, though.

So what went wrong, for me? (You knew this was coming. The post reeks of shoe-drop.) It was my decision to leave. I had a lot -- a lot -- of work to do the following day, so I called my father and asked him to pick me up at midnight. It was only at ten minutes to midnight that I realized that I was making a mistake. We were eating cake in the kitchen, when I suddenly arose and flew out of the room, aiming to catch him before he left the house, but I was too late. It was a crushing experience, having to watch the wrong thing happen, as though in slow motion.

Kelsey, as we walked to meet my father at the door: "It's like we're walking you to your execution."

Alicia, I'm glad you had such a great quinceañera.

That's all for now. I have loads of drafts, so more will probably appear.

Speaking of slow motion....

More about Memory and Visions

"Your lab report won't taste good."

-Mr. Zigby

My grade five teacher, Mr. Brown, once told us that he had a blackboard inside his head. When he closed his eyes, it was there; he could write things out on it, and erase them, watching the letters appear in his deliberate but fluid handwriting. None of us in the class understood what he was talking about, but somehow the comment lodged itself within the dark recesses of my brain and very slowly trickled into my subconscious.

The idea lay somewhat dormant until a short time ago, when my piano teacher explained to me his own particular perception. He sees a keyboard when he shuts his eyes, sees his fingers spreading over the monochromatic levers, sees the familiar groups of three and two. I understood what he meant, but I couldn't share in his vision.

It was only last week that I was speaking to a boy now in the seventh grade and I had the presence of mind to inquire as to whether he, too, had anything imprinted on the inside of his head. He informed me that he sees gears, and I accepted this without comment, pensive.

There is a reason I take so many pictures. I don't have a very good visual memory. I will always recognize a face as one I have seen before, but I cannot easily summon an image of a particular person in my mind. There is only one image I can retain without any effort at all, and this is my own recurring vision, a vision that I cannot control.

Ah, the suspense.

I see printed words. I see letters and sentences parading past me. I see the curve of the m in smile, the particular purplish tone of the ou in colour. I see marsh and mouse and precipice, but I do not see the things the words describe. I cannot listen to a song I know well without simultaneously reading the lyrics. I do not associate characters in books with the physical characteristics they are described as posessing, but rather with the appearance of their names.

At my second or third piano lesson with Earl, he spoke to me of how, in most cases, human visual memory far exceeds auditory. He asked me to hear an E in my head, which I did (an entirely different subject which I have doubtless already mentioned).

For comparison's sake, he then asked me to picture the colour red. I couldn't. I couldn't picture red. All I could see was the word.

I am extremely pleased that the week is over. I apologize for the lack of a decent conclusion, but you have doubtless become accustomed to that on my blog. Endings are my favourite, but they are also very diffcult.

You know, I'm just going to twist everything until it suits me.

By the way, it is a really bad idea to play the electric guitar for more than an hour

while standing up. Talk about shoulder pain. How do the pros do it?

Because the world is round
It turns me on
Because the world is round

Because the wind is high
It blows my mind
Because the wind is high

Because the sky is blue
It makes me cry
Because the sky is blue....

-messrs lennon and mcC

Wherever you will it to be.

Listening to: Quadrophenia (The Who)

This is the first and last time I use Alicia's opener.

When I was younger and lived downstairs in the blue room with my sister, we had two clocks on the wall: a green plastic Ikea clock, shaped like a green plastic Ikea plate with a bee on a stick for a second-hand (secondhand!), and a Sylvester-and-Tweety clock that my grandparents gave me and that I've had for ages (unfortunately, it's a little broken now). They both ran off single AA batteries, and these batteries tend to run down after awhile. A little over two years ago, both of them stopped within a few weeks of one another. This was unexpected, but not unusual. What was truly staggeringly unbelievable was that both of them stopped at exactly the same time, to the second. They stopped at 7:51 and forty-five seconds.

How?

A few months ago, I took the metro from Tyndale to Vendome, where my father had volunteered to pick me up. I stepped onto the train at the Georges-Vanier station, wrapping an arm around a silver pole at one end of the car. Then, looking to the other end, I noticed the hair. Not one hair, but two hairs -- one short and black, one unmistakably distinctive...I had walked into Ariel and Kelsey's metro car.

How?

Over and over, we dismiss such apparent "coincidences". We do not understand why such things happen, and therefore we pretend that they do not happen. Much is based on perception, yet no matter what our carefully established opinions, something always happens to shock us, to make us lose faith in our preconceived ideas.

The unpredictability of life is difficult to capture in literature or in analysis. No matter how carefully you evaluate all the potential outcomes of even the smallest event, what winds up happening will surprise you. There ought to be a scientific law...nothing that is expected will happen, or will happen in the way it is expected to do so. I have never been able to say, with complete certainty, what will happen in the future.

Because the few times that I have known, with complete certainty, I did not conciously realize that I knew until I looked back on the event. Had I realized it, the outcome would, I am sure, have been different. This is why premonitions, from what I gather, are impossible to prove.

I am no Cassandra, but I think that everyone makes a few surprising predictions in their lifetime. And in a lifetime, much more than we would like to believe is inexplicable.

We like to have explanations handy, but knowledge is not always the same as understanding. Think back to Grade Nine biology. Think about everything you learned about the cell. Think about DNA. You learned what the basic substances in DNA were; you learned that DNA transmits genes, that it coils up during mitosis, that bits and pieces of it are interchanged, somehow, with other cells. But did your teacher even once attempt to explain to you how a strange shape composed of protein can contain all the traits of the cell? How can a code composed of only four "letters" transmit information, and how can a cell, an organism without conscious thought, adopt that code and become as the code specifies? I have absolutely no idea. Of course, I won't even mention that question so taboo in the world of science -- the why.

That is why I find so much of school so frustrating. Book learning deals very much with what, very rarely with how, and almost never with why. (And, no, I don't like ME.)

I believe that all things are interconnected. I don't subscribe to the notion that art and science and religion and athletics are four concepts in direct opposition with one another. Rather, I feel that all four are complementary. Indeed, I have never come across two areas of human interest that were mutually exclusive. I am fortunate enough to have never been required to confine myself to one field, and therefore I have become very interested in learning to perceive more of the whole. I can never see the trees for the forest.

I dislike being asked what I want to do when I'm older, what I want to "go into", because I don't want to "go into" any one thing. I want to understand things, and I want to help others to understand things, and I know I would not be able to do so if I chose to specialize.

This two-part rant has been brought to you by the creator of such anti-classics as Being Born in the Wrong Decade Runs in the Family and Somewhere, Anywhere. Life is thus shining.

(Yeah, I've been looking through my archives again).

Let's all battle our own demons.

She came in through the bathroom window.

The five of us were walking along fielding yesterday, after having been to see Across the Universe. Alicia and I were talking about movies, or more specifically about The Science of Sleep (which I haven't seen) and Amélie (which I have, and yeah, the full title is longer). Just before she turned off on her street, I mentioned the scene where Amélie calls a public telephone booth.

Me: I'd like to learn a whole bunch of public phone numbers. I'd call one of the phones on the second floor during recess.

Five minutes later, walking along with Jocelyne on Fielding, we passed a telephone booth. The phone was ringing.

I kind of loved that movie, by the way.

I guess I don't expect it anymore.

Like Father, Like Daughter

Mr. Dufault: What I'm going to do is, when I look at all your marks for all the quizzes, I'll drop the lowest mark. So if you're going to blow it, you can blow it -- once.
Manraj: Can this be my first time blowing?

Yogourt. It appears to be one of the family curses. The bane of the Malcolms.

My father's famous accident took place when I was very young -- although still old enough to remember scenes from the event. The lesson he learned? Never to hold a full container of yogourt by the top. No, the lid wasn't on properly, and yes, there was much yogourt and gnashing of teeth. Mainly my father's teeth, as my mother was rather preoccupied with laughing.

Newton provided us with laws of gravity, and my father seems determined to prove them as creatively as possible. Action: container hits floor. Opposite and equal reaction: yogourt sails out of container, hits cabinets, refrigerator, ceiling, and father.

As science-oriented as my house tends to be, it is hardly surprising that another famous scientist enters my story. His name is Charles Darwin, and proving his theories appears to be my unconscious goal. Unlike my father, however, I dropped only half a container of peach-flavoured, and no one was in the house at the time.

Your turn, Tom.

Find me....

I dream of coconuts that crack open to reveal tiny dinosaurs with amber eyes and tiny dagger teeth.

Title is taken from an old correspondance between myself and a friend. I unearthed it in my inbox a short time ago. I have no idea what I was talking about.

Home from a day that seemed like cheating and at long last holding my sheet music for the band I wasn't sure I was in, I decided to look over said music in preparation for rehearsal tomorrow -- a rehearsal for which the majority of my fellows, who played said music all summer, are vastly better prepared. Three are okay, but the other two pieces look like hell on a staff. One in particular. I can't play the first line. I can't play the first note.

My strategy for tomorrow? Hope no one asks me to play it.

But before this occurred, a strange encounter made me halt in my progress toward my attic dwelling.

Passing Jenna's house, an unexpected motion caught my eye. I say this although I do not remember any unexpected motion, so perhaps an unexpected presence caught my soul. However it was, I found myself looking down to the base of her tree, where I spotted a tiny pair of eyes and a thin, silver tail. A squirrel the size of my fist was sitting in the grass, eating a tomato.

I was worried about him or her, squirrel being so small, but she or he managed to climb up the tree in the time it took me to go home and get peanuts. She or he also didn't seem interested in the peanuts. Jenna, I think you should keep an eye open for squirrel, just in case.

And so I draw my post to an end. The english in this one is often bizarre.

Haze.