Daffnee

I found this while surfing for law student financial guidance (full text here):

Crayons and Crime (from Texas Lawyer)

A young California artist has produced the ideal stress-reliever for attorneys who need to get in touch with their creative side: the "Law & Order" coloring book.

Brandon Bird created the coloring book after getting hooked on the TV show. In January 2003, he started watching reruns while preparing a canvas for a painting. "I would be spending four to five hours watching every night, and [I realized] I could die alone and never leave the house watching 'Law & Order,' or I could do something kind of productive with it."

I would've gladly just died alone -- especially seeing as he's using Adam Schiff-era L&O!

UBC Housekeeping pulled through this morning -- my Fairview unit has been deemed the training zone for this summer's crop of university sludge-busters, which means those toilets I really wasn't looking forward to cleaning now don't have to be cleaned by me! Not that I mind housework, but our bathrooms really are war zones.

On a more theoretical bent, I'm beginning to see the greater applications and implications of Saussere's signifier-signified theory of language. Language, Ferdinand argues, really is just a system of signs; arrangements of letters (the "signifier") that point towards the idea of an actual thing (the "sign"), even though the letters themselves have nothing really to do with the thing itself. A classic example: the Latin word arbour, and the concept of a "tree". Arbour refers to a tree, but isn't a tree; it's just a name for the idea(l) of the tree, which incidentally is an ideal that a real tree never quite stands up against.

Saussere's theory has been roundly criticized by a load of theorists, but I like it for its directness. My take on it is that language (whether cultural language, body language, verbal language, etc.) inspires us to be dissatisfied with our lives in that our quality of life can never approach the ideals conjured up by the very words we use to think about reality. The Boy and I are no longer "dating" -- what the heck does that mean? -- but are as close, if not closer, than before; any name we have for a feeling, like love, happiness, sadness, anger, or despair, cannot also consider the constellation of interactions and variations on the human experience. Language can be such a confining and disappointing thing.

Isn't it great that I still dwell on stuff like thing after having handed in the thesis and now sit before my laptop essentially free from having to think about theory for the next four months or so? The sun shines, my fridge waits to be defrosted, and I'm looking forward to a nice little brain holiday once May hits. The violets from Patti and Quinton's wedding are in full bloom again, and I stayed up until 2 AM watching the Space Channel. Sweet.

Herein lies the source of so much grief: THE THESIS

Are there any grammatical or spelling mistakes?

Saint Syl's been published!

And, my favourite moment of the day:

Asian girl on cellphone in front of the SUB says, "I can't believe some of the questions they asked on the History final...I mean, what country was ruled by a general in 2004? He never taught us that!"

Answer: Pakistan, but Dubya didn't know who Musharraf was either.

Wisdom from That Boy: "Everything sounds stupid if you have to describe it to an alien." Maybe not in so many words, or in such stellar grammatical form, but that's the gist of it.

I think I'm feeling a bit bad about only bringing glazed carrots ("vitamin-A rich carbon concotion") to tonight's potluck to my old Fairview haunt and odd collection of first-year classmates, second-year housemates, and associated significant others. Does peeling 2 pounds of carrots, dumping it in butter, water, sugar and thyme, and cooking for twenty minutes equal the social worth of a meatloaf or Safeway cheesecake? Is it better if I had to lug the carrots back from Broadway and Macdonald? My parents host absolutely insane dinners when they have friends over, and I think my mother has an astral projection that berates me whenever I try to cook. As though black beans and ketchup isn't good enough for her. I can get some crazy iron absorption happening with that combination.

People are starting to leave, for home, work, or other. I still can't get this thesis finished. But I'm managing to have a relaxing time everyday.

The phrase "Are you having a relaxing time everyday?" comes from a lime-green stationary set purchased at Daiso's in Richmond. If I could figure out a way to ship the excess English grads from here to label manufacturers in Asia and get people to pay me for it, I would be a millionaire.

I wrote a long schpeal on Pauline Kael (former film critic for The New Yorker) and all the jumbled thoughts that Kill Bill Vol. 1 inspired, but my wireless internet cut out again and it disappeared into cyberspace. The meaning of life was in there, believe me.

We had a little news board where we posted up random wellness-related stuff, and one of the last articles to go up had to do with Extreme Makeover -- how it raised the expectations of viewers to unrealistic proportions, normalised plastic surgery, promoted a homogeneous aesthetic ideal, etc. But surfing channels at 11 PM tonight, I'm wondeirng if What Not to Wear should have been included in that article. These guys are cruel! Describing a long plaid skirt as "looking like you were attacked by a tablecloth from a very untrendy Irish bar" goes beyond what I would expect even from late-night TV, and the fact that all these contestants were nominated by their friends -- well, with friends like these, who needs fashionistas?

Part of this might be the typical post-haircut angst that hits anyone who doesn't have the resouces to hire a Vidal Sassoon. Give me a week, and I'll figure out something novel to do with gel and a hair dryer; until then, please consider my head a work in progress.

Oh my. David Duchovny is not only alive, but still making movies.

The Scientologists are coming!

No, really. I got this happy greeting in my mailbox on Tuesday (the real, snail-mail one, not the inbox): "Drugs and toxins destroy your life. THINK CLEARLY." I'm a little embarassed, actually; they seem to like ZapfHumanist font, just like me. Anyway, they're want me to start on a Purification Program to find a "unique, sparkling stream of new life" and move forward "to greater mental and spiritual vitality." I'm rather excited, and not just because I believe that "the filthy effects of drugs and toxic residues can send my whole life crashing"; we always lived in remote suburbia or other places where your usual door-to-door evangelists never visited, so this is a bit of a novelty for me. Scientology pops up a lot in Hollywood fictions too (I'm Losing You and On Spec are particularly scathing) so it's nice to be able to see a little bit of Los Angeles in my mailbox.

To all the Alberta boys out there (and I know there are at least two): do you guys know anything about Vegreville? Apparently it's 90 km from Edmonton, and someone from Citizenship and Immigration Canada e-mailed me about a position there.

New York and Toronto pictures up on the archives page.

Someone I knew once remarked that, in theory, one could only understand 60% of everything taught to them in university and still walk away with a university degree. That was incredibly comforting when I was bottoming out in the company of Honours Physics students, but less so after I traded in Thermodynamics for Modern Critical Theory and was taught to start questioning everything (because in these postmodern times, everything's going to hell in a handbasket, of course).

There was this guy from my high school, in the year behind me, that wrote an op-ed piece for the local paper after his first summer at Yale; how an Ivy education was worth mortaging his parents' house because of the extraordinary students in his class, the Olympic swimmers, Amazon bush-whackers, American versions of Craig Kielberger, etc. To which I say, whatever -- I found out last night at Janet's birthday party (happy birthday, Janet!) just how extraordinary UBC kids can be. Marta's going to McGill Medicine; Sylvia H. to Columbia (yay!); Mark to MIT; Rich to Berkeley; Bruce to probably anywhere at all if he still wanted to do math. And people that I haven't heard from yet, but expect to. Wow.

I griped for such a long time over how I couldn't make myself fit into what I understood to be the college mold -- no speed-dating, partying, clubbing, class-skipping (honestly), foreign exchanges, or real "hanging out" time. No experimentation with my sexual orientation. No wild road trips. Nothing ever more wild than trying to block out the sound of raucous debaters with an excruciatingly expensive Irish coffee at an Irish pub on Alma. I have yet to buy a pair of truly impractical shoes. I used to think I was missing out, but no longer. And thankfully, that revelation hasn't come too late.

These are exciting times.

My birthday's coming up, by the way.

Guess who made it into the Storm the Wall semi-finals, after a repeat of 2002's roll-out-of-the-pool exit and a marked inability to stand up on guys?

Come check out the fun on Friday @ 1045h. I'm skipping my final French chapter test with a semi-heavy conscience, but I kind of like being branded by permanent marker on my arm and leg. This time I'll make sure I towel off completely so I'm not dripping chlorine while trying to scale the wall, too.