Back in Ontario. It's hard to believe one can cross the country in a day and still have a few hours to relax after the fact. I had a connecting flight back this time at Winnipeg. WestJet was an okay airline. It was reasonably priced and got me were I was going. But I still resent having to buy a sandwich on a plane if I'm hungry. But hey, when you're in a plane you feel like the king of the world, in a position to demand all sorts of luxuries bestowed upon you. Make with the slippers and sceptres!

I bought a bunch of crap food after I returned to ease back into life. I still haven't unpacked. The next couple of weeks are going to be busy. Let me break down the list:

Monday, April 21st - Biography paper due (18-25 pages)
Friday, April 25th - Race and Cinema paper due (15-20 pages)
Tuesday, April 29th - Tragedy paper and annotated bibliography due (5000 words, 40 items)

It's going to take me hours to transcribe the interview footage I collected this weekend. I'll try and get a portion of it done today.

I posted trip photos on my Facebook account. Check 'em out.

My passport is now firmly in my possession, faux male supermodel posed picture and all. Everything looks set for my New Year travels. Andrea sent me a bit of an itinerary and man am I excited. Lots to see and do, lots of pictures to be taken.

I felt tired most of the day and took a nap before finishing off the Dietrich presentation, and not a moment too soon because I'm starting to have dreams in which she tells me I'm the cream in her coffee (and the salt in her stew). Speaking of food, I picked up a box of Reese Puffs at the grocery store. Heaven. God bless General Mills for shoving chocolate and peanut butter into a cereal bowl and calling it breakfast.

The presentations in Opera class are becoming more elaborate - costumes, media projections, piano stylings and the like. It seems everyone's a born actor. I have a good feeling about my group, however, and that we'll pull off something awesome. Anything that allows me the opportunity to wear an outrageously false moustache is something I can get behind (see the pics of my Beastie Boys gala event outfit for proof).

I finally got my new health card in the mail, so I'll feel a lot better about contracting potential sicknesses and injury. I'm still coughing and despite my first-ever foray into Buckley's cough medication (an experience akin to swallowing a nuclear explosion), it's a persistent bugger.

I watched Smiles of a Summer Night today and quite enjoyed it. It's a rare comedic effort by Bergman, but he still manages to stick in moments of existential unrest, characters who despise life because they can't communicate directly with God, which seems even unintentionally funny in itself in this context. You know you're watching a Bergman film when a character suddenly faces the camera and delivers a monologue about their perpetual malaise. For the most part, though, he winks at the audience through the treatment of his characters, trying to stumble into the proper slots for happy relationships.

I also watched Wonder Boys, one of my favorite films, while eating some Oven-Baked Eggplant Parmesan and Spaghetti I whipped up for dinner. This past week I've been getting to know eggplant, trying to find some common ground because I want us to get along, and I think we're one step closer.

I finished my bibliography assignment, but I don't really know if it's what the prof wants - a reading list for a proposed research project along with a 300 word max paragraph talking about the books I've selected. I chose Charlotte Lennox as a subject. The thing is, the assignment mentions proper MLA citations for the paragraph. Why would I be citing ANYTHING directly if I only have 300 words to explain the presence of each and every work on the list? Plus, I put all of the works on from doing net research and taking brief looks at some of the material. I don't really know what's in them, so I can't very well cite them. Doesn't strike me as that kind of assignment.

Whatever. It's done. I'm catching Don Carlos at the opera tomorrow, which looks bombastically frightening. I'd like to get some scary movie time in before Halloween, too. But what I'd like most is to see The Darjeeling Limited this weekend. Is there anyone out there who will take a couple of hours out of their busy lives to accompany a poor Wes Anderson fan to the cinema this weekend?

I wasn't feeling quite like myself today. I skipped my African-Canadian Literature class in order to regroup a little bit. I feel like it's time to make a few resolutions.

I'm going to start working a bit harder at school. I'm going to involve myself more with the readings and prepare myself with talking points for classes. Tomorrow I'm going to spend a few hours in the library to work on some readings and assignments.

I also want to start eating better. I feel like my diet is making me lazy, lumpy and tired. I made Tomato Eggplant Mozarella Stacks for dinner tonight (wild).

Finally, I need to pick up my writing. I did about 800 words today. That makes a few thousand since I moved here. A promising start, but I'd like to add many more. If I'm going to sit around, I'm going to sit around doing something.

I went a little nuts tonight and wrote an ode, but not before reading some John Keats and Pablo Neruda. I'm going to look at it in the morning and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But at least it's something.

WHAT I'M IN FOR (PART FOUR)

Bibliography is the study of research methodology. Solves that little mystery. Really, it's just a course that teaches the latest research methods, proper citation, and, yes, bibliography preparation. We spent our first class in a computer lab in the EJ Pratt Library going over journal databases. In fact, we'll be spending most of our classes in libraries all over the campus, including the Robertson Davies Library in Massey Hall, where we'll be privy to seeing a relic of a printing press at work.

I was feeling like a shut-in last night (being indoors for almost two straight days will do that). I ended up spending a lot of time outside today, walking around the campus looking for book stores, and it helped my constitution as much as it put a hurt into my feet. I ended up walking down College and up Bathurst, and I stopped in at Honest Ed's discount store, which to be honest I found unsettling. I took a look at some information about Ed Mirvish online, and the man was a god in Toronto until he died about two months ago. He did a lot to help out the city's artists. His store, however, looked like a Dollarama blown freakishly out of proportion and my prolonged search for the exit left me feeling, ironically, a little claustrophobic. I also, for one reason or another, take issue with a business that insinuates so forcefully that it's "honest" (yet another item in a growing list of incriminating factors revealing that I am not, and probably never will be, a true Torontonian).

I made some yummy chicken salad pita sandwiches for dinner and watched The Wizard with Jay, which is essentially an hour-and-a-half-long commercial for the Nintendo Entertainment System with a little family drama thrown in. Nevertheless, it was a movie from my youth that I was incredibly stoked over at the time. "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." Truer words were never uttered on celluloid.

Jay showed me how to rip Touch of Evil, so I should be able to grab a couple of clips this weekend. He's going down to Buffalo tomorrow to buy an iPhone. I'll be going over my grant and catching up on readings. But mark my words - I'll be getting out of this place on a more regular basis come October.

There's a panoramic shot of the CN Tower from my balcony, taken on the new camera (click for a bigger version).

I devoted as much of today as I could handle to Opera readings, and I'll have most of them finished by the time I go to bed. This interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter is throwing me for a bit of a loop. One of the readings was comprised mostly of music scores to illustrate its thesis regarding the impact of shifts in musical structure on the dramatic whole of an Orpheus production. I kind of understand what it's getting at, but it was clearly written for students of music. The stuff on the interaction between libretto writers and composers is more my speed. There's certainly an element of competition in place when deciding which discipline is best to get at the dramatic core of a production.

I watched Citizen Kane in the spirit of my Orson Welles class. I always forget how absolutely perfect it is. Not a bad performance, none of the dialogue is gratuitous, it looks gorgeous, and it uses incredibly poetic metaphor.

For dinner tonight, I chanced a recipe for baked penne pasta with Italian sausage. Really delicious but really heavy. Here's a picture:


Cameras are fun.

I talked with Andrea a bit today. She's found a place to live, so it's a load off both our minds. I'm proud of her for being as determined as she is.

Finally, I got some more writing done, about 200 words. Still pretty dark in tone, but at least I'm getting used to writing on emotional impulse again. I missed the weight it lifts. Like successfully detoxing.

I'm going on the Robarts Library tour tomorrow morning before heading to Peterborough. Classes start Monday, and my first will be "Interdisciplinary Approaches to an Interdisciplinary Art Form: Opera." I found a brief course outline online, and we'll be focusing on Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, a 15-hour, four opera cycle that you can find out more about by clicking on the link. Or, you can have a gander at this:

Yep. That opera.

Today I watched Top Gun for the first time ever, believe it or not, and I'll have "Take My Breath Away" in my head for at least two weeks straight. I was suitably impressed with the film's dogfight sequences, which showed early signs of promise for Tony Scott, whose visual style goes completely mental in his more recent films. Too bad all that plot gets in the way. It was pretty cool to see James Tolkan in a new role (for me), and it just goes to show that Tolkan was the 80's go-to guy if you needed a short, bald, tightly-wound authority figure in your movie.

I played Wii-Boxing for about an hour and worked up a sweat. I've NEVER worked up a sweat playing a video game before. It felt amazing. Playing the sports games every so often might prove beneficial. For dinner, I came back from my tomato-basil pasta debacle with a tasty vegetarian chili that cost me ten bucks to put together and will last me another four nights.

Lately I've been adhering to the regimen of cleaning up after myself, and it feels good. I'll make a meal, eat it, and immediately wash the dishes. I'll make sure the bathroom is relatively free and clear of any indication of my presence in it. I want to make sure I'm not a bother to Jay, but I'm also draining myself of the will to put up with squalor.

I've changed the background and added a few links to other people's blogspots, if for no other reason than to help me access them easier. If you have a blog that I don't know about, send it along and I'll add you.

I'd recommend listening to some Otis Redding, if your heart's feeling low. Absolutely nobody sings it out like Otis.

More details on the apartment: the balcony is a tiny thing, but you can see the CN Tower looming in the distance, which is invariably cool. All of the balcony railings on the east side of the building are painted either red, yellow, or in my cousin's case, blue and make the wall look like a playworld from the street. Little kids who walk by must comment on how they want to live here when they grow up, in the building with the brightly coloured windows. The main entrance looks very condo-ish and oddly shaped.

I went to the adjacent wholesale grocery store today and resisted the urge to buy a box of chocolate bars for twenty dollars. I did, however, purchase ingredients for my first culinary "creation": Tomato-Basil Pasta, which I pretty much ruined by putting in far too much basil and undercooking the noodles a little. Jason seemed to like it, though. He put in dibs on the leftovers. I will not let this defeat discourage me.

I spent a great portion of the day looking up schedule information for classes (they'll be falling on Monday, Tuesday and Friday) and found out that my classes don't start until the 10th. I completed my Fall term schedule, filling in the one gap I had with African-Canadian Literature, which is being taught by George Elliot Clarke (!). To have both Clarke and Linda Hutcheon as professors in the same semester is... intimidating, but exciting. I also spent time looking at transit maps and pondering how I'll be getting to certain locations over the next few days. It's going to be a lot easier once I start thinking of the city in terms of north, south, east, and west. Tomorrow I'll be meeting Andrea at the downtown bus terminal; she's going to spend some time with me here before she heads off to Germany for the year.

Other than that, I've been watching episodes of The Office on Jay's computer, and downloading episodes of Flight of the Conchords to keep me smiling.