Have you ever been alone in a crowded room when I'm here with you?

Have you ever been alone in a crowded room; well I'm here with you...

"What are you wearing around your neck?!"
"Ah! It's my new ruff!"
"You look like a bird that's swallowed a plate."
"It's the latest fashion actually and as a matter of fact it makes me look rather sexy!"
"To another plate swallowing bird perhaps, if it was blind and hadn't had it in months"
-- Blackadder II

Bought a bunch of stuff at the poster sale, but none that I took a fancy to more than this:

Ok, for those of you who have never seen this, google The Gashlycrumb Tinies. It's somewhat horrific I warn you, but I find it strangely poetic... and hilariously funny. This may or may not be what Kay refers to when she talked about dark humor. I have blank spaces on my wall now that are more obvious because I've put more posters up. Before you could call it wall with a few posters... now it's a wall with blank spaces between posters. I'm heading back to the poster sale tomorrow.

Haggis is not only a lamb's stomach stuffed with lamb, oatmeal, and pepper, but also a mythical Scottish creature Rachel and I hunted down and captured the other day. It looks like a potato with four long skinny legs, a pig-like tail, a long horn-like nose, and a Scottish beret.

But on the topic of the haggis of lamb innards + oatmeal and pepper, if you ignore the fact that it's cooked in a lamb's stomach (ours wasn't even a real lamb's stomach... more like lamb intestine) it's actually not horribly bad. Imagine meatloaf with an oatmeal-like texture. With more on Scottish edibles, has anyone ever tried Iron-Bru (this drink contains no iron or alcohol)? It's available exclusively at Loblaws here in Canada but it's a common beverage in Great Britain. Grant, I am looking in your general direction with this question.

On the topic of Grant (notice this admirable train of thoughts I seem to be following despite it being half past three in the morning), I must say that although Queen's has a lot of expecations to live up to (with all the stories I've told), you also have a lot of expectations to live up to when you get here. Do try to confirm that you're actually going to be here next week or else I may be on the receiving end of a barrage of accusations. And if you can, try to appear in a demi-god like state although that may be a bit of a problem. Ha! I kid.

On the topic of kidding... my train of thought runs dry here so I shall take my leave. Take care of yourselves and each other.

Haggis: Lamb, oatmeal, and pepper cooked in a lamb's stomach...

I'm trying it tonight. It sounds disgusting but it was apparently Robbie Burns day on Wednesday and it's a traditional Scottish pasttime to eat haggis. When we went to the butcher's shop, the thing was $20... and the size of a grapefruit. I had imagined that we were going to get our own lamb and stuff its stomach with its meat, oatmeal, and pepper but apparently it would take too long and would have been too messy.

Apparently, the reason why it's impossible to keep your eyes open when you sneeze stems from the fact that if you didn't close your eyes, the force of the sneeze would force your eyeballs out of their sockets. And we wouldn't want that.

In other news, does anyone have any suggestions on how I can summarize my life in exactly 7 and 1/2 words. Seven and a half. I don't know what a half word is, but I need to do it to apply to be a Frosh leader next year.

Maybe I'm just hypersensitive to sound but the girl who sits next to me in English class is the LOUDEST laptop typer I have ever encountered in my life. God, it drives me crazy. It sounds like she's purposefully slamming her fingers on each key.

"Gargle with peroxide a steak for your eye
But I'm a pizzatarian so it's a frozen pizza pie
You tell me that you love me and you never do lie
You fight for my honor but I just don't know why
You fight for my honor and I don't understand
But hold on your honor I'll get ice for your hand"
-- Your Honor (Regina Spektor"

After three months, this song has finally, after repeated listenings and promises not to make a judgment, grown on me.

That took far too long.

I just the weirdest dream ever. The phrase that keeps repeating itself in my head is "99 Red Balloons killed Fluffy the cat"

Eating before you go to bed apparently makes you have very vivid dreams but I didn't eat before taking this late morning nap. Hum.

To put things in perspective, you have a better chance at winning the lottery 4 times (1 in 13,983,816) than conceiving quintuplets (1 in 65,615,000).

So...

So we're sitting in music 191 when all of a sudden, the classroom phone rings. Notwithstanding the fact that the classroom phone never rings, Dr. Burge picks up the receiver and says something like "hello, music 291, Dr. Burge speaking" again notwithstanding the fact that our course is music 191, not 291. But here's the thing. Two seconds later he bellows out "Well hello Paul Martin, how ya doing?!!!!!!!!!!!" By this time, everyone in the room was raising their eyebrows and muttering, "wtf?!"

Dr. Burge proceeds to have a long conversation with the supposed Paul Martin (he managed surprisingly well for a monologue) and ended up saying something like "here, to console you, let me give you a demonstration of why it's important to know how to harmonize 1 to 5-6." He puts the phone down, walks over to the piano, and proceeds to play our national anthem... twice. And being the piano virtuoso that he is, he plays two different versions which were in themselves amazing renditions. He finishes this, walks back to the receiver, and says "have a nice day" and hangs up. This is immediately followed by an encouragement to vote and letting us out of class 5 minutes early. As we leave, a voice from the back of the room is quoted as asking "how much of that was planned Dr. Burge?" to which he throws up his hands and proclaims "how much of LIFE is planned?!!!!!!!!!!" before storming out of the room, never to return.

This is why I love music 191 and the prof that teaches it (aside from the fact that I'm owning the course at 91%)

"Markham's part of Toronto. Now Barrie... THAT'S in the GTA!"
-- Dave Griese

That was more tomfoolery from the floor. The large poker game just finished and it was pretty entertaining to watch. I'm still not well-versed enough in the game to be able to play with any fluency but I'm catching on.

On a whole other note, I thought this might be interesting:

That's a picture of what Tanya labelled "Jon & Rachel's Moshi pillow (nameless)". In all accuracy, it's not actually my pillow, it's Rachel's... but in this particular picture, we had been fooling around with it and as you can see, it's eating my head. The actual name of this type of pillow is indeed "Moshi" although I had never in my life heard of it. It's like a stretchable polyester case with really small beads inside. It also makes for a very suitable gut if you were to shove it under your shirt. It's actually quite the novelty item. And no, it's not named, although I don't really see why it needs to be.

"I need another shot of tecuwillia"
"You mean tequila?"
"THAT'S IT!!!!!!!!"
-- Overheard earlier tonight

Heh, you know you've had enough to drink when...

Two weeks in a row may be somewhat too often. You spend all of Saturday recovering/cleaning up and don't actually get much done on Sunday. This is why parties tend to wreck weekends... which is why they're usually only thrown on the first floor every other week. To quote Courtney "Well, we have to do our homework at SOME time" which is indeed true if you consider how much work you could actually get done over the weekend if you sat down and focused. But no one really actually sits down and focuses over the weekend. These days, if there's nothing happening on Gord 1, there's usually Super Mario in the evening. That's right, the ORIGINAL Super Mario on the NES. But then, Super Mario does not usually last into the night nor does it require "recovery time" unless you're an addict, in which case you just need to get a life.

So I sit here at my computer at this ungodly hour in the morning, and I just remembered that I have to have my retarded lock on my laptop cut because for SOME reason, it ceased to function properly. I put the lock into the computer and BAM, it's impossible to unlock. Now although I won't actually need to bring this computer anywhere for a few days, I'm not sure I like the idea of having it permanently attached to my desk.

In other news, I have concluded that I will only ever enjoy the drinking (alcoholic) process if the damned liquor is mixed with something else. Call it a screwdiver if you like, but I think a screwdriver is a particular kind of mix so it doesn't quite fit the bill but you get the idea. I had a lot of spaced out shots of random stuff. As long as I'm not tossing it continuously, my body I think can handle it.

It can also be used to form nearly full sentences like "Fuck the fucking fuckers" or "Fuck, the fucking fucker's fucking fucked!"
-- Uses of the F-Word

Ah, what fun we have in university. These days since I've gotten back have been quite the blast considering that we don't consider the first week of school "frost week" or any other term. I should decide soon what exactly it is I want to teach. Music and English would be nice but I don't know if I have enough music background to be a good teacher at Music. I'm sure I can teach it, but the question is how well I can teach it. I think this may be one of my unusual moments of crazy aspirations that I get every so often. Whatever I teach, I don't want to be just a good teacher, I want to be the greatest possible teacher at that subject. I want my future students to be able to leave my class at the end of the semester and legitimately say "that was the best course ever." I've seen good teachers and I've seen bad teachers so I should know, especially at the end of four years, how to be an amazing teacher. I owe it to my program, my parents, and all the good teachers I've had to be everything a great teacher should be.

Good teachers know how to teach their subject. Great teachers know how to teach their students.

In other news, I've concluded: the smell of the cafeteria is sufficient to kill off your appetite, even if you're really hungry. Not only that, but your clothes can smell like fresh laundry (whether or not it really is fresh or you've just not done much sweating during the day), and you can be all fine and clean. But walk into that cafeteria around dinner time and BAM, you instantly smell like cafe... which is disgusting.

Jon Wong is official bored out of his skull on a Saturday night. Maybe I should go to bed.

"... hold on, do you promise that you're name's Rachel? Cause I'm pretty sure you're not called Rachel"
-- James (addressing Rachel Manson)

James may have had a little too much to drink last night. But then, almost everyone last night had too much to drink. It was another one of those crazy Doorbell Room parties that they seem to throw every so often. Apparently, next time we're running a thematic party: CEOs and Office Hoes. Most of the people there were from Vic Hall or RMC. Grant will no doubt recall the man from RMC whose face seems to be contorted in every picture. For those of you unfamiliar with who I am talking about, here is just a sample of what his face tends to look like in pictures:

He's quite the character. But I digress. A good time was had by all, even though we now have a large multitude of bottles we have to somehow get rid of because they're not permitted in residences. After the party ended at around 2 in the morning, Courtney and Jess went to bed while Rachel and I sat in her room and talked until the break of dawn. Ok, so we didn't talk quite till dawn. I took my leave at 6 or thereabouts because I was nodding off. But we had a good time. It was a good denoument to the wild party.

"You dissed my sheepskin! Now I'm going to have to caress it all evening."
-- Courtney Langton

It's weird. She apparently used to have a large piece of genuine sheep skin she used to treat like a security blanket. Then something happened and the thing got cut up into a few randomly shaped pieces so she now has them at different locations, one location being Queen's. That statement was made in response to Jessica touching the thing and prostrating herself in digust on her bed. I've never known anyone who used a piece of sheepskin as an equivalent to a security blanket. But she did propound a theory as to why most frosh gain 15 pounds. I don't know whether or not this holds for other universities but here at Queen's our food in the cafeteria is served to us in portions. You can have as many portions as you want, but it's not a "serve yourself" kind of thing. Now, Courtney says that because cafeteria food is so bad, we tend to take the portion given to us, sit down, and just pick at things on the plates. Therefore, we don't actually fill ourselves during our meals and seeing as how we're not allowed to enter the cafeteria more than once during each meal time, we tend to get hungry later on after each meal and resort to snacking on foods that tend to be unhealthy... hence the 15 pound increase in weight.

There was more tomfoolery about whether or not the bedsheet under your comforter/duvet is supposed to face up or down (face down if you're home decor savvy), but that would probably bore the socks off of all of you, as interesting as the conversation seemed at the time. This was after more tomfoolery when Rachel and I decided to browse her entire music folder of 7000 songs. We tested our memory of lyrics by singing Don Maclean's Bye Bye Ms. American Pie and fortunately, I had made it a project a few years back to memorize the entirety of this song. This girl has a damn good voice.

In other news, I grabbed my roommate's stomach and shook it. He was highly amused.

I have also set up my mudflap girl neon display on top of the ledge. The fire rock, lava lamp, and giant novelty pimp cup (which I have converted into a coin holder) rest on the windowsill. It's actually quite a sight. You can see the mudflap girl from across campus.

"If you jacked it, how come you got a receipt?"
"I stole that too"
-- Malibu's Most Wanted

So in the end, an interesting weekend with the Winestock brothers in Hamilton... and as I have just found out, Grant's name is no longer Plunkett... it's apparently reverted back to Winestock. But anyhow, getting back to the hilarity of yesterday. We were sitting at a table in the student center during lunch when I noticed that a girl had sat down across from us on a stool and the odd thing was that I noticed her looking in our general direction numerous times during the course of our meal. Now, this was no ordinary girl. Aside from that fact that Grant had seen her earlier in the day when we were buying his textbooks (she was a cashier), she was also really really really pretty. According to Grant, until today, he had never seen another girl at McMaster who was anywhere near as good looking as this girl. Getting back to the story, we would finish our meal and as we got up to leave, she also got up simultaneously and considering that she had also been staring at us repeatedly earlier, I found this extremely odd.

Turns out she was just staring at our table and waiting for us to leave so she could use it herself.

Not to be deterred, we headed up to an alcove in the student center and discussed what should be done and it was decided that Grant would go into the bookstore, buy another book, and attempt to strike up further conversation with her. Before that however, Grant had to have a beer to calm his nerves, which in the end did not serve its purpose because upon our reentry of the bookstore, we found a massive number of people waiting to buy books and we could not be bothered to wait in line. So we went home and watched Sorority Boys for awhile before coming back to the student center hoping that the mob in the bookstore would be gone. It was, but so was the girl so we went back to Grant's house and finished watching Sorority Boys before heading back out to the very same student center to have dinner at the same restaurant we were in earlier when Grant had his beer. After that, Grant and Brett partook in a poker tournament that was being held in the same building where Brett would lose early in the match and Grant would lose even earlier than Brett so needless to say, there was no prize winning. We walked back to the house (this day seemed to involve a lot of walking to and from the student center) where Grant would head out to a club whilst Brett and I entertained ourselves by signing onto Brett's MSN and talking to Ryan Parker and S. Wilkinson before deciding to create a blogger for him... after I swore that he would be added to my blog affiliates. As you all will have noticed, that blog is complete and a rip roaring success.

We would not go to bed until 4 in the morning due to a late night screening of Malibu's Most Wanted and would not wake up until late this morning because it being Saturday, Julie, who served as a wakeup call the previous day, found no excuse to wake up early and trampess around our sleeping quarters getting to and from the bathroom. And that is all.

New blog affiliate!!!!!!!!!!!1one

"Why don't you slide into my room
Just slide into my room
We'll run away run away run away..."
-- Slide (Goo Goo Dolls)

So...

Save for the massive headache I am currently experiencing, tonight was a good night. For those in the know, I am at the moment in Grant's basement where he lives in Hamilton. McMaster is a fairly nice place, but permit me to give you a full account of the debauchery that occurred during my stay.

Upon arriving at McMaster, we discovered that Grant, despite having a class not an hour from that time, had no clue where he was supposed to go, nor how to get there. He rambled on about some rubbish and how he could not, in any way possible, despite his efforts, find where his class was located and throwing his hands up, proclaimed "I guess I'll just have to miss class." However, Brett and I were not about to allow him to make excuses behind claims of idiocy so we proceeded to search for his class... and succeeded. However, disaster struck when it was discovered that Grant's class had been moved from the room listed on the website. We proceeded to gallivant about the comically thin campus in search for the "ITB building" which did not appear to exist. When we finally located this classroom, we were already horrendously late for our first English lecture. Grant refused to describe his experience with learning as "orgasmic" after the professor posed the question to the class and we were able to meet the fabled Chad after class. Chad was an interesting man. He is in every single one of Grant's classes.

Upon our return to Grant's condom(inium) (den of love, in which very little love had actually been made), I relieved myself and noticed the inordinately large amount of feminine care products he carried in his bathroom. I however, merely thought "whatever floats you boat" and did not say a word until I was informed that he, in fact, shared this bathroom with a girl named Julie... which explained the tampons and their ilk. It was in this very basement that I would smash my head... repeatedly against the ceiling due to its comically low height.

We headed out again, and decided to get pizza after calling the illusive Omair who apparently lives in an apartment somewhere off campus. Grant led us to what he claimed to be th "bus stop" and there we found that we were conviniently right on time as a bus was seen to near us. Imagine our surprise when the bus sped past us and Grant proceeded to say "that must not be the right bus." However, it was soon noticed that we were not even standing at the bus stop! The bus driver merely assumed that we were pedestrians waiting to cross the street. This was followed by a period of walking towards the pizza plazza, and stopping at each bus stop along the way in hopes that a bus would miraculously pull up next to us. There was a long period of indecisiveness at Pizza Nova when it was discovered that there was no chocolate milk, but after a long debate that spanned numerous customers, we decided to buy other beverages.

We came back to Grant's den where we met up with Omair and watched the hockey game between Canada and Russia. During the intermission, we proceeded to create what is known as an apple bong, which Grant smoked and ate with great relish after learning it was held in high regard by Charlize Theron. The rest of the evening was somewhat uneventful because we couldnt' get into quarters... but nonetheless, there was a lot of hand slamming, hair pulling, and phone throwing as Grant writhed in frustration at well... nothing really. It was a fairly good day all things considered.

and all that shimmers in this world is sure to fade...

"Please stay, until I'm gone
I'm here hold on
To me, I'm right here
Waiting
And take, my one last breath
And don't forget
That I will be right here
Waiting"
-- Not Now (Blink 182)

This is a SICK song. But then again, I'm a drummer so am duly biased. Aside from the crazy drum work in this song, it actually sounds like a medley of other Blink songs thrown into one. I don't actually know how they manage to pull that off but there it is. Blink 182's always been an interesting artist even from the standpoint of lyrics, which most of you know I usually don't care about. I had this discussion with Grant once. Incredibly, in a career that spans 10 years and 5 albums, they've managed remarkably well not to repeat themselves.

I would like to pose a question to everyone who reads this blog (all 3 of you or so). I had a discussion with a friend the other day about hinting and subtleties and she said she wanted to put a message into her MSN name that would, in essence, hint to a guy she liked to ask her out. Ok, first of all, don't get embroiled over how it's stupid for girls to hint to guys and all the like cause I already had this discussion with her when she said she wanted the message to be "very subtle" and I pointed out to her that most guys are stupid when it comes to picking up hints and tend to miss even the not-so-subtle ones let alone ones that are "very subtle" ones. She then went on about how this boy's "not most guys" and that he'd pick up the hint no matter how subtle it is (stupid assumption I know). The point I'm making now involves us discussing what "very subtle" meant. And I'm going to give you all a specific example. If you saw this as someone's MSN name, assuming you knew the message was directed to you, how subtle is it as an "ask me out" message:

"We turned up the country radio..."

I would argue that it's not really that subtle, but this girl who I was talking to pondered over it for awhile and concluded that if she saw it, she wouldn't be able to figure out what it meant and would consider it TOO subtle, which is odd because she had just gone on about how nothing could be too subtle. But that's neither here nor there. How subtle do you all think that is?

The following is the meaning behind that MSN name. If you're trying to figure it out and don't want to know what it means or understand my reasoning behind why it's not really that subtle, stop reading and keep thinking:

What that line really is of course, is a line taken from the song Take Our Cars Now! by Saves the Day. The full length of the line in the song is, if you know the song: we turned up the country radio, I said, "if you want me just say so." The line "we turned up the country radio..." would strike me as being fairly subtle, but not "very subtle" because even if you don't know the song, it's a fairly simple task to just google it and you'll see the next lines. It's just that most people don't bother to google other people's MSN names because who does that?! But then again, people are weird. Thoughts?