This page was born of Kari's desire to fill in the blanks while waiting for Brenda to produce her first batch of recipes.  It really consists only of Kari's random thoughts.  In the beginning, the random thoughts were all about food, but Kari now seems to be moving away from food and towards Life, the Universe, and Everything.  However...if you like blog-like documents about nothing in particular, keep reading.

The page will be updated whenever Kari feels like it.  She may feel like it every Monday, but she's not really sure about that yet.


Monday, January 30, 2012:  A Rowse by Any Other Name

I'm at my parents' place at the moment.  Yesterday, I answered the phone; the called said, "Is that Jan?"  Jan, my sister, had been staying with my parents for a week and was just about to head home.

I said, "No, it's Kari."

"Oh," said the caller, "Carrie!"

I was so used to this sort of thing that I didn't even notice what had happened.  My sister, on the other hand, did.  She could hear the caller's voice, and she laughed out loud.  Admittedly, it's pretty amusing when someone corrects my pronunciation of my name.

I really don't understand why people do this.  I know some names are difficult to pronounce or remember, and that's fine; what baffles me is when an otherwise sane person will immediately respond to my name by telling me what it's supposed to be.  Frankly, my name isn't even that difficult to say.  You can pronounce "car," yes?  Then you can pronounce "Kari."  But there seems to be a sort of general disbelief that I am getting my own name right.

When I was a little kid, I would correct people all the time.  My dad picked up on this little quirk of mine and called me "Carrie" just to get a rise out of me.  I now frequently just let the error stand.  It's too exhausting to go around explaining the proper pronunciation of my name to everyone I meet.  And I haven't even mentioned my surnamed yet.  No one can pronounce my surname.  Those who try and fail generally ask me why I pronounce it the way I pronounce it.  "Because that's how it's pronounced" is not a reply that goes over well.

I recognise that mistakes happen and people mishear things.  However, I would ask you not to correct the pronunciation of an unusual name immediately after the person to whom it belongs utters it.  There's something just a teeny bit insulting about the whole situation.

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Monday, January 23, 2012:  Unrantiferous

I'm afraid I'm too worried about actual problems at the moment to feel justified in writing a long Rant about imaginary ones.  I suppose I could do a short list instead.  Here, then, are the Top Six Reasons I Am Unhappy With My Boots:

6)  When I put them on, my left big toe begins hurting like crazy.  I don't know why this is.  It doesn't hurt at all when I'm not wearing my boots.

5)  I have a bad habit of dragging my heels.  I do it so persistently that I generally end up wearing the heels of my boots away.  The heels of these particular boots are so worn that they can probably most accurately be described as "completely gone."  If I rock backwards on my heels too far, I fall over.

4)  I'm not sure what the point of boots that height is.  They're too low to keep the snow out but too high to count as ankle boots.  They certainly aren't a fashion statement.  I don't really get them.  They were the only ones in the entire store that fit me.

3)  They are always covered with salt, meaning that...

2)  They are beginning to leak.  I think the salt has eroded the leather.

1)  Because of my weirdly shaped feet, they cost about the same amount one would pay for, say, a banjo, and they haven't lasted nearly as long.  I wish I wasn't always being disappointed by my boots.  That's life, I suppose.

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Monday, January 16, 2012:  Open Letter to the Jerk Who Drenched Me in Slush the Other Day

Dear Jerk:

I understand that it's probably a great deal of fun to drive as close to the sidewalk as possible so that you can hit the puddles that have formed right next to the curb and therefore shower pedestrians with freezing cold water and small chunks of ice.  It probably feels good to see someone standing dripping on the pavement, screaming imprecations, while you drive away in your toasty automobile.  Why do pedestrians expect anything different, after all?  They choose to walk instead of driving like sensible human beings.  They want to expose themselves to the elements.  They therefore deserve to end up covered in grimy liquid that can really only be called "water" by an optimist.

Yes, there are bigger problems in the world.  One of them is your car, dear, dear jerk.  Your car is a polluting money pit that is a danger to everyone who encounters it without being enclosed in--in point of fact--another car.  It's lovely that you are contributing to the destruction of the environment, endangering the lives of cyclists and pedestrians, and ensuring that the contents of puddles are forever spraying gracefully over sidewalks instead of remaining in the puddles themselves.  Thank you ever so much for not driving in your actual lane.  Why would you want to?  The pothole-riddled bit of the road next to the curb offers you a much smoother ride.  If you're lucky, perhaps you'll kill a cyclist.

The funny thing was that you were the fourth jerk to splash the sidewalk on the day you got me.  I escaped the first three but thought I saw a window of opportunity once they had passed.  I was wrong.  Thank you for showing me the error of my ways.

It's much colder now, and there are no longer any puddles for you to drive through, which is sad.  Let us both hope for warmer days so that you may return to your campaign to terrorise those pedestrians who, obviously, so richly deserve it.

Yours sincerely,
Kari.

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Monday, January 9, 2012:  On Negativity

I've been sitting here trying to figure out what to Rant about today.  Every time I come up with a possible topic, I end up telling myself, "No, I can't write on that; it's too negative."  I try something else, and it's too negative too.  This has been going on for a while.

So now I'm wondering:

What is it about negativity, exactly, that makes us assume it makes someone's opinion less worthy?  I know I'm often a bit too much of a pessimist about things, but people do sometimes use that fact to dismiss what I say.  On the other hand, people who are unrelentingly cheerful and optimistic are taken very seriously and assumed to be in the right.

This may seem like the beginning of another Kari is Feeling Sorry For Herself Again session, but it's actually not.  I'm genuinely interested in this phenomenon.  What makes Pollyanna more reliable than Eeyore?  Why is someone who always expects the worst automatically less accurate than someone who always expects the best?  As far as I know, there is nothing in the physical laws of the universe that says that sunshiney beamers who see the good in everything are more likely to be right about what is going on than grumpy sulkers who are always looking for problems.

Maybe the myth of Cassandra is more than just a clever bit of classical irony; we really do tend to regard the Cassandras of the world as mere naysayers and Negative Nellies.  Frankly, it's probably self-defence.  Sure, maybe the volcano is going to erupt and kill us all, but if we're always harping on it, we're missing out on enjoying the three or four hours left before it happens.  If we sing and dance through life, we don't end up paralysed by the knowledge that no one lives forever.  People who do nothing but point out the negative tend to be unhappy themselves, and they can be seen as spreading their unhappiness.

On the other hand, it may not be entirely fair to place less of a value on negativity.  The people who launched the Titanic were pretty optimistic.  The people responsible for maintaining aircraft might, in contrast, be regarded as having pessimism built into their very jobs; if they just smiled and trusted that everything would turn out okay, there would be a lot more plane crashes than there are.  The devout belief in Murphy's Law ultimately leads to stringent safety standards and a lot of double-checking.  Perhaps this double-checking is unnecessary 99% of the time; it's the remaining 1% where it comes in handy.

The prejudice against pessimism also prompts some people to look askance at the grieving process.  Mourning leads to tears, denial, rage, confusion; certain perpetually happy individuals think it should be possible to skip over all those inconvenient reactions, and they express puzzlement when this doesn't happen.  The emotions somehow become the fault of the mourner and stand as signs of weakness.

I am fully aware that it is bad to be negative all the time.  However, I don't accept that the opposite--being positive all the time, whether or not the situation warrants it--is an improvement.  Optimism is not strength, especially when it persists in the face of the facts.  Perhaps the ideal would be a mixture:  the ability to be either positive or negative at need.  I do think we should be able to recognise the necessity for sadness and anger and suspicion of "too much of a good thing."  Sweeping negative emotions under the carpet may make them less visible, but it doesn't make them go away or solve the problems that have provoked them.

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Monday, January 2, 2012:  To Boldly Go Where Everyone Has Gone Before

Well, it's early 2012.  It is a time of resolutions, apparently.  Let me make one.  But first, a story:

John Troutman, the creator of the webcomic Lit Brick, which I follow and admire, has made a resolution himself. Basically, he has declared that since his comic has existed for over a year and has gained what he has declared via Twitter to be "1000ish readers," which he doesn't regard as anywhere near enough to count as success, Lit Brick will be "entering a hiatus" that Mr. Troutman's tweets are pretty much implying will last forever.  This makes me rather sad, as Lit Brick--which I discovered a few months ago, and which, due to a combination of laziness and a complete lack of spare time, I have not added to my links page--is devoted to reproducing the contents of the Norton Anthology of English Literature four panels at a time.  Mr. Troutman regularly describes his readership as "niche," but I prefer to think of it as consisting of people capable of finding this funny.  Okay, maybe it is niche.  If you remember the end of Beowulf even a little bit, you will likely understand why that strip gives me the giggles.

I completely understand the need not to continue with a project in which one has lost faith; several of Mr. Troutman's comments have hinted at a general discontent with the episodic nature of Lit Brick and the frustration of not having a proper continuing storyline to work with.  However, the "my readership isn't growing" argument is one with which I must respectfully beg to differ.  I suppose this makes me a masochist or maybe just delusional, but I've got to say it:  West of Bathurst has been running for five and a half years, and it has a few hundred readers at most.  Does this mean I am going to abandon it?  Hell, no.  I shall continue with my aggressively niche comic until the story is finished, whenever the heck that might be, or until my computer bursts into flame, which may very well happen first.

Which of us has the right of it?  I honestly don't know.  Do low numbers mean a project is no good?  Do they mean that the person gaining them should give up and try something more likely to be popular?  It's true that "success" in the webcomic world equals "ability to gain enough readers that one can make a living via merchandising and advertising," and it's also true that only a very few webcomic creators possess such an ability.  There are some fantastic comics with huge readerships.  There are also some terrible comics with huge readerships.  Conversely, there are some fantastic comics and some terrible comics with small readerships.  Meh comics can be found in both categories, as well as in between.  Does popularity equal success, and does success equal worth?  Am I an idiot to spend all this time creating a comic that, in the larger scheme of things, hardly anybody reads?

I don't care if I am.  As far as I'm concerned, West of Bathurst doesn't have to be Penny Arcade.  (You know, now that I think of it, I've never even portrayed characters playing video games.  I think Baldwin is probably a gamer, though.)  It has only a few hundred readers?  Well, they enjoy it, and so do I.  It's kind of fun to be a little fish in a big pond.  If you do something outrageous, there will be a mere few hundred people who want to kill you.

I don't mean this as a criticism of Mr. Troutman, though I am disappointed that there will be no more She-Jesus (don't ask).  He's got to do what he's got to do.  His declaration just got me thinking, and it has prompted me to declare:

I hereby resolve that West of Bathurst will stubbornly continue, even if its website keeps going down and its readers forget about it for months at a time.  Have a happy New Year.

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Monday, December 26, 2011:  Another Week of Not Ranting

It's 10:30 p.m. on Christmas night, but since I was in Toronto two days ago and am now in BC, it feels like 1:30 a.m. on Boxing Day morning.  Also, there have been small children going mad with excitement all over the place since 5:00 a.m.  I am tired and need to skip the Rant.   Next week, however, things should return to normal.

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Monday, December 19, 2011:  The Joy of Marking

I'm afraid I don't have time for a Rant this week.  I have marked 146 exams in the past two days, and I still have about twenty essays and several hundred discussion responses to go before the mark-submission deadline on Tuesday afternoon.  Why didn't I finish my marking earlier, you ask?  That would be the fault of the 200 essays I had to get through before I started the exams.  "I just want to cry" is probably the most coherent thing I'm capable of saying right now.  I do hope everyone else is having a great break.  Imagine me simultaneously glaring and weeping as I type that.

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Monday, December 12, 2011:  Bullying Mark Two

First of all, I would like to thank everybody who has commented, both publicly and privately, on last week's Rant.  The subject is one that is important to me.  A lot of you have had similar experiences, some much worse than mine.  Some have been witnesses of bullying rather than victims themselves.  I have heard from nobody who claims to have been a bully, but one of the interesting--and terrifying--things about this issue is that the categories are not mutually exclusive.  In a recent Globe and Mail article, a number of kids were asked to speak of their experience; the majority of them identified themselves as belonging to at least two of the three categories of "bully," "witness," and "victim."  Some claimed to be all three.

When you're ten years old and people are hurting you, you want to hurt them back.  Sometimes, you want them to die.  But the truth of the matter is that they're not monsters.  They're kids.  They're louder or physically stronger or more charismatic than you are.  Often, they're just as scared, and of the same things:  of being singled out.  Of being laughed at.  Of being bullied themselves.

If we want to solve the problem, we need to stop treating the categories as entirely separate, and we need to stop focusing solely on the victims.  Yes, the victims certainly need our help.  They need support; they need to know that the teachers are not just "letting kids be kids."  They need some assurance that they are not alone.  But bullying is not a natural disaster.  If we simply teach the victims to cope, we are accepting bullying as a fact of life, something that will happen no matter what.  We have to start talking to the bullies too.  Punishment isn't enough.  Punishment doesn't teach empathy.  It also tends to drive bullies to revenge.

Perhaps there will eventually be some way for us to change our definition of "strength."  Our society tends to view the loudest, pushiest people as the strongest; we do not highlight the strength necessary to choose not to kick and shove one's way into the alpha position.  In actual fact, it's braver to refuse to taunt a classmate--thus risking scorn oneself--than it is to join in on the ridicule.

In the last couple of weeks, I have noticed two sitcom episodes that have dealt with bullying, one on The Big Bang Theory and one on Community.  They are worth looking at briefly because they offer, respectively, very conventional and rather unconventional portrayals of bullies and their victims.  There will be some spoilers below.

The Big Bang Theory, a traditional multi-camera sitcom, offers a familiar portrait of childhood bullying.  The now adult victim, Leonard, is about as typical a Hollywood nerd as it is possible to find:  small, weak,  smart, glasses-wearing, suffering from various digestive ailments.  In the episode, he is contacted by a former bully who wants to have drinks with him.  The majority of the episode consists of Leonard describing all the things the bully and various other bullies did to him, to uproarious laughter from the studio audience.  The bullying incidents, some of which are genuinely horrifying, are played for laughs.  When the bully turns up, he is a large, crude alcoholic who is clearly not very bright.  His drinking features heavily, implying karmic retribution for the bullying.  When Leonard finally confronts him, he seems remorseful, though it later turns out that the remorse stemmed from the drinking; he has forgotten it by the morning, at which time the bullying--again played for laughs--resumes.  The B plot involves Leonard's next-door neighbour Penny being forced by her much nerdier friends to realise that she was herself a bully in school.  She phones her former victims to try to pacify her conscience, but they all reject her overtures.  She continues to mock them (for laughs, of course) even as she apologises.

Community is a less conventional comedy, and it takes a less conventional approach.  One of the protagonists, Jeff, is bothered by some loud, obnoxious foosball players at his community college, and when he tries to get them to stop, they humiliate him in a game of foosball.  He tries to persuade his friend Shirley, who is a foosball genius but never plays, to teach him how to beat them.  Neither Jeff nor Shirley has played since childhood; both were once devoted to the game but eventually driven away from it.  In the course of their training session, they discover they have a linked past:  at twelve, Shirley was the bully who tore into ten-year-old Jeff during a game of foosball, abusing him so violently that she made him wet his pants.  He quit foosball because of the bullying; she quit because the incident made her recognise herself as a bully.  The coincidence is, of course, contrived, but it leads to a foosball-themed shouting match in which the two of them both scream out their anguish, Jeff pointing out what the bullying did to him and Shirley countering that she was trying to divert attention from her own difference.  The interesting bit is that the adult Shirley is a devoutly Christian mother of three, while Jeff is an outwardly arrogant, manipulative lawyer; in most stories, their positions as bully and victim would be reversed.  They reconcile at the end of the episode.

Community trumps The Big Bang Theory here by focusing on both bully and bullied without stereotyping either.  Both are portrayed as human beings, neither overly kind and good nor ridiculously mean and rotten.  Shirley has not been overtaken by karmic retribution, and she is not identical to her twelve-year-old self.  Jeff, despite his seeming confidence, has been haunted by the incident well into his thirties; by the end of the episode, the viewer realises that Jeff's motivation for attacking the foosball players in the first place must have been linked, perhaps subconsciously, to his memories of Shirley's bullying.  In The Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, everything is black and white.  The bully is a cardboard cut-out; I watched the episode only a couple of days ago, but I've already forgotten his name.  The bullying itself is clearly meant to be hilarious.  In Penny's plot, Penny's obliviousness is mocked, but the audience laughs just as loudly when she is making fun of someone's stutter as it does when she is demonstrating her own selfishness.  Leonard's lists of the bully's physically violent treatment of him elicits more laughter, and the episode ends with the bully once more asserting his physical superiority by chasing both Leonard and his roommate down several flights of stairs in their own apartment building.  The episode gives us the bully as natural disaster and simultaneously provides us with the false but doubtless comforting fiction that bullies will end up as alcoholic losers (unless they are female and pretty).  Community offers no karma and, in the actual bullying scene, no laughter.  It's still a very funny episode, but it doesn't take the easy way out.

I'm sure I could write on this subject for another year or so, but I'd better stop now.  Please do keep thinking about this issue.  If nobody thinks about it, nothing will ever be done.

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Monday, December 5, 2011:  "Kids Will Be Kids":  A Refutation

Note:  I'm going to start posting my weekly Rants on the WoB Talk blog as well as on this page.  Some people do like to comment on them, and these comments tend to confuse people who just want to talk about the comics.  I'll continue to post the fortnightly comics threads, but Ranty threads will be appearing on Mondays as well.

The permanent link for today's Rant is here.

This week's Rant is likely to be less goofy and sarcastic than usual.  I apologise for the lack of ironic humour.  However, this issue is one I've been thinking about a lot.  It seems to be ending up in the news quite frequently lately (I think the Toronto Star may have just done a series on it, but I've seen it elsewhere too).

I have an unfortunate habit of reacting to social situations with impulsive and bitter references to Bad Things That Happened to Me in High School.  When I do so, my acquaintances tend to respond by telling me to get over it.  High school was a long time ago; why am I still complaining about stuff that happened to me when I was fourteen?  I should grow up and move on with my life.  Theoretically, these people are correct.  I'm thirty-six, not fourteen.  I was in high school decades ago.  There is no logical reason I should still be harping on that time of my life, which is over and done with.  My references to the "unfairness" of high school doubtless come across as self-centred and pointless.

The fact that I can analyse my own behaviour like this is actually a symptom of what I am about to tell you.

I was bullied--viciously, unrelentingly, mercilessly--between the ages of eight and sixteen.  I expect that in realistic terms, the bullying began in a minor way in kindergarten and didn't truly end until I graduated from high school, but I have a crystal-clear memory of what I think of as the beginning of the terror:  the moment in grade 3 when one of my classmates discovered that my last name sounded quite a bit like "moron."  In grades 11 and 12, on the other hand, I was still ostracised somewhat, but I also managed to find some similarly ostracised friends, and we formed our own nerdy little defensive group of outcasts.  It was in between these two periods that my life became a living hell, and no, I do not use that term lightly.

"Kids will be kids," adults say indulgently.  Of course there's some bullying, but it's harmless; it's just children squabbling amongst themselves.  Adults who talk like this were rarely ever bullied themselves.  Being the class pariah is terrifying.  There is no other word for it.  The pariah is despised.  She is ugly, fat, stinky, clumsy, nerdy, stuck-up.  She spits when she talks, and that's hilarious.  She is blamed for every fart, every belch.  Her clothes are wrong.  Her opinions are stupid.  She has no right to speak; she has no right to play.  If she has a friend, that friend must be weaned away from her.  She must be singled out.  She must be made to see how worthless she is, how incredibly lame her achievements are.  Anyone who treats her kindly must be ostracised too.

I wasn't the only kid in my cohort who was treated like a worthless piece of garbage by the others; there were a number of us low on the totem pole.  We weren't friends.  A couple of girls who were mocked for being poor stuck together, but because they were sticking together and therefore counted as a group, they saw themselves as superior to me.  I was rejected even by the other nerds.

I did play with some other kids in my neighbourhood; they tolerated me but didn't really like me.  None of the members of this loose neighbourhood gang were in my class at school.  I had one "best" friend between grades five and seven.  Let's call her Amelia.  She wasn't academically gifted, but she was nice; we used to play together almost every day.  In grade seven, when the bullying was at its height, one of the boys made a loud, crude joke about me in front of the class, and Amelia laughed.  That was the end of my single real childhood friendship.  Looking back now, I realise that Amelia's reaction was probably spontaneous and that she may not even have thought about how it might have affected me.  At the time, as a lonely twelve-year-old who spent every day in an atmosphere of hostility and mockery, I saw Amelia's laughter as the worst sort of betrayal.

The bullying took many forms, most emotional rather than physical.  I couldn't open my mouth without being mocked.  Everything I said was proof that I had no right to exist.  I was "Kari Moron," the ugly, fat, smelly nerd.  I wasn't athletic, which made the boys laugh at me.  I wasn't pretty, which made the girls laugh at me.  My parents told me that junior high school would be better because all the bullies would have something else to occupy them and would lose interest in me.  In fact, the bullies made friends with other bullies and graduated from name-calling to physical intimidation.  One boy walked past me in class and violently punched me in the arm.  A group of boys followed me home from school, throwing rocks at me, aiming for my bum, since that was "funny."  A boy grabbed the front of my shirt, yanked it open--breaking my necklace in the process--and shoved a handful of holly leaves down my front.  A couple of girls took me aside in class and described in detail what was wrong with me and how I could fix it.  A group of girls sat in front of my locker and refused to move.  I occasionally felt in physical danger from my classmates, the people I was expected to interact with on a daily basis.  A lot of this stuff may seem relatively trivial, but imagine enduring it day after day for eight years.

There were periods when I cried every day.  I hated going to school; I told my parents I wanted to stay home.  Contemplating another day as the class punching bag made me feel nauseous.  There was nothing I could do to stop it.  My parents advised me to "ignore" the bullying.  Any bullied child will tell you that ignoring the abuse just makes it worse.  So does fighting back.  If your classmates want to bully you, they will bully you.  Complaining to a teacher is one of the stupidest things you can do.  Snitches do not prosper in elementary or high school.  I occasionally had to beg my parents not to phone the parents of the children who had been tormenting me.  In retrospect, I suppose I was just enabling the bullying, but I was also afraid of what the bullies would do to me if their parents punished them.

When I was a very little girl, I was happy and outgoing, probably almost obnoxiously so; I wasn't afraid to insert my opinion into any conversation.  I even remember having a crush on a boy and actually telling him to his face that I liked him.  Adults tended to describe me as "precocious."

By the time I graduated from high school, I was seething with internal rage that I didn't quite dare express aloud; when it escaped, I was ashamed, immediately assuming that I was in the wrong.  I had no self-esteem or self-confidence.  I knew I was a failure.  Even when I was good at things, I knew these things were essentially worthless.  I would never have dreamed of telling a boy I liked him; I would have expected to be laughed at and publicly humiliated if I had.  I hated almost everything about myself.  I thought of myself as grubby and ugly and insignificant.  I was aware that my opinions were always wrong, that my ideas were always stupid, that I didn't really deserve to win at anything.  I did become resentful when I felt I had been treated unfairly, but the resentment was always accompanied by the thought:  "But was it really unfair?  Maybe it wasn't.  Maybe you're wrong again."  I knew my natural state was to be wrong about things.

I can look back on this time of my life and see why I felt the way I felt.  What I can't do is stop it from affecting the way I feel now.

I still feel like a failure.  I still feel as if my thoughts are worth less than everybody else's.  When I express my opinion aloud, I expect it to be rejected; I expect everyone to be wondering at my presumption.  Even now, as I write this Rant, I am worried that its readers will roll their eyes and assume that Kari is just being Kari again.  I tend to get clingy with my friends; when they draw away from me, I take it as personally as I did the day someone made a joke about me in elementary school, and my "best friend" laughed.  I have never been in a relationship.  I would never in a million years announce to a guy that I had a crush on him.  I still feel ugly.  I'm incapable of small talk or of interacting comfortably with strangers, especially strangers I see as being superior to me (which would cover almost everyone).  I become angry very easily, and I react badly to the anger in public, then assume any confrontation is almost entirely my own fault; I also assume that everyone else is blaming me as well.  I expect not to succeed.  I approach the world so negatively that everybody sees me as a pessimist.  In reality, the pessimism is my way of steeling myself against the inevitable disappointment.

I am never going to "get over it."

It's hard to "get over" eight years of being told by the people you see every day that you don't matter.  It makes you who you are.  Maybe it shouldn't.  Maybe kids really will just be kids; maybe the fact that it still bothers me genuinely means that I am weak.  Maybe if I were a better person, I wouldn't let my appalling childhood shape me like this.

Or maybe that appalling childhood is something I need to accept, not so that I can forget it but so that I can acknowledge that it is part of me.  Many people seem to be willing to admit to the influence of the past only when that past is a happy one or involves positive aspects such as a personal, individual triumph over a bully.  Many others will even now be thinking that my experience wasn't that bad.  I didn't grow up in a dictatorship.  I didn't see family members tortured or killed.  I had rights and privileges; I had enough to eat.  I had a loving family and a place to live.  I had an education and teachers who cared about me.  This is all true.  But you can't take a happy little girl and spend eight years telling her she is a waste of space, then expect her to remain a happy little girl.  If you dismiss her experience because she never got over it, you are implying that you could have withstood similar abuse without effect.  I would invite you to try.

Kids will be kids; that doesn't mean kids will be reasonable or kind, and it doesn't mean their "play" is harmless.  It also doesn't mean that their victims will ever "get over it."  For better or for worse, the bullying made me me.  I'm not trying to excuse my own bad behaviour or claim I shouldn't take responsibility for being cowardly and, occasionally, anti-social; I just want you to know how hard some things are to overcome.  I can't even say that the current me is any worse a person than a non-bullied me would have been.  She's certainly a different one, and most likely a much sadder and more bitter one.  She is undoubtedly less well adjusted and more difficult to get along with.  But she is probably also more empathetic, more willing to see the point of view of the underdog, even if she doesn't always show this side of herself to her acquaintances.  She is a better critical thinker, since she approaches everything from at least two perspectives simultaneously.  When she takes refuge in sarcasm, she does feel bad about it; in fact, she feels a bit like a bully herself.  She hates this aspect of her personality more than all the others combined.

And she does very much hope that children--or adults--who find it necessary to mock the "weird kids" in order to make themselves feel better will put themselves, for just an instant, in the shoes of the girl sitting alone in the corner because she is "different" somehow.


Monday, November 28, 2011:  Zombie Season

I've been sick for two weeks now; I'm getting better, but my voice is still not 100%, my nose remains stuffed up, and I occasionally go off into violent bouts of coughing for no particular reason.  What I've mainly noticed, however, is that I'm not by any means alone.  In fact, it sometimes seems as if most of the people around me are sick.

I go to class, and half my students are away.  Sure, some of them are skipping because it's the end of term and they are getting really tired of Canadian short stories, but about seventy-five percent of the ones who do show up are cough, sneezing, and/or rasping.  There's a guy coughing--that hollow, desperate sort of coughing that denotes more than just a polite clearing of the throat--in the grocery store.  The streets are full of coughing and sniffling and general misery.  People give each others sad, knowing smiles.  I have an appointment that involves both me and the other person clutching tissue boxes and blowing our noses every two minutes or so.  Nobody seems to be feeling very well.

I know it's flu season, but it doesn't seem fair that this illness has hit in mid-to-late November.  I'm so far behind on my marking that it isn't even funny.  My students are preparing for their exams.  Presumably, retailers are rather busy at the moment too, despite the lack of Black Friday in Canada.*  Why do we all have to get sick now?

If I end up with another cold before Christmas, that will be my third this term, and I shall be very angry and make vague, impotent threats.  It's all we can ever really do when we catch colds.

*Except online.  Why did I receive so many Black Friday ads from Canadian retailers last week?  There is no Black Friday here!  Christmas shopping starts in Canada on November 1st!  Nobody in Canada is going to put all the waffle irons on sale for $2 apiece at midnight, causing a riot!  We have to wait until Boxing Day for that!


Monday, November 21, 2011:  Speechless in Toronto

A few minutes ago, I had got quite a ways into a bitter Rant about how when you have laryngitis, people tend to pretend you're not there.  However, realising that it was probably an unfair accusation born of frustration, pain, and the knowledge that I was going to have to give a two-hour lecture on Harry Potter in a whisper, I deleted it.  It's true, however, that people don't know how to deal with someone who has laryngitis.  I expect many of these people have never had laryngitis themselves.  How does that even happen?  I've had it (the full-blown variety, whereby the voice vanishes entirely) at least four or five times.  I wouldn't describe it as "fun"--in fact, I would describe it as "maddening to the point where if I still had a voice, I would scream loudly and try to knock down a wall with my head"--but it's a fact of my life.  How are there people who have escaped it?  If they are smug in my presence, am I allowed to hit them?  My first impulse would, of course, be to yell at them, but somehow, I'm expecting that wouldn't work out.

One thing I learn anew every time I have laryngitis is that when you can't talk, your facial expressions become progressively more exaggerated.  The necessity to communicate entirely with your face and hands leads to some truly remarkable grimaces and a lot of fruitless flapping.  During the Massey Belles' performance of "The Night Pat Murphy Died" on Friday, one of our singers started on the wrong note, and I apparently terrified him into stopping dead when I whipped around and scowled at him silently.  I shall doubtless lose this superpower when my voice returns.

Tonight, I have some limited voice function back.  I sound rather like Mickey Mouse, and I doubt I'll be able to speak for more than a few seconds at a time before my vocal chords begin to swell again, but it's nice not to be totally silent any more.  Now just watch these be Famous Last Words; I'll probably wake up in the morning to find I've caught another cold.  If anyone has something I can punch, let me know.


Monday, November 14, 2011:  Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid...

I'm sick again.  I think I need not to write a Rant today.  My head hurts, and my throat hurts, and everything is stupid.


Monday, November 7, 2011:  Marking is Pain, Princess

In the course of the last ten days or so, I have marked about 155 midterms.  On my best day, I got through forty; on my second-best day, I managed thirty-four.  By the time I finished up yesterday, my right arm hurt so badly that I was only able to write notes for about ten seconds at a time.  I had to lug my accordion around today, and I learned, in doing so, that even my elbow hurt.

I know marking is a necessity, but I wish there were some way of doing it directly with my brain without getting my hand involved at all.  Why has this technology not yet been developed?  Hordes of teachers the world over would be grateful if someone invented a way to beam thoughts directly onto exam papers.  Of course, there would be problems, but I'm sure the program could be taught to translate "This paper has no redeeming qualities and may yet cause me to weep in despair at what is apparently the current state of the human race" as "You may need to work a bit on your verb tenses."


Monday, October 31, 2011:  Once Upon a Graaaaaaargh

For some inexplicable reason, television has caught the fairy-tale bug lately; two new fairy-tale-themed shows, Once Upon a Time and Grimm, have recently launched.  I am passionate about fairy tales and am always willing to try new fairy-tale adaptations.  Despite common belief, I'm not really a purist; I don't think it's possible to be a purist with fairy tales, which have changed constantly down through the centuries in order to retain relevance to the societies in which they have been told.  My discontent with many of the Disney adaptations lies not with my feeling that Disney has "adapted the stories wrong" but with my disagreement with Disney's forced imposition of some rather repellant morals onto the stories, especially where female characters are concerned.  I do very much like some of Disney's films, but others make my want to punch things.  I also get agitated when people equate "fairy tales" with "Disney cartoons," as if the older material has been erased by the popularity of the Disney films.  Many people who have grown up with Disney have no idea that "good vs. evil" is actually not an inherent property of fairy tales or that the "handsome prince" is less a typical fairy-tale hero than he is a minor character who acts as a reward for the protagonist of the female-centred story.  At any rate, while I don't object to Disney's adaptations per se, I do object to their dominance, which is so prevalent that when people talk about creating "darker and edgier" fairy tales, it is assumed that they are doing something new, not returning to something very old.

I say all this because I want to make it clear that I was quite happy to view the pilots of Once Upon a Time and Grimm, both of which I thought would probably be fun to watch.  My impression, after having watched the first episode of each, is as follows:

Once Upon a Time infuriates me to a degree I associate with Glee, only more so.  It's not so much that the show works on the assumption that the Disney versions are canon--though that's certainly a distracting element--as it is that the show's writers are apparently setting out to vilify everyone involved in the adoption process.  I don't really like the word "offensive," which is used far too often in ad hominem arguments, but I'm not sure what other word applies here.  The writers have apparently set out to insult birth parents (the birth mother in the show is accused of throwing her son away like trash; a kinder character also implies that she has caused permanent damage to him by abandoning him), adoptive parents (the adoptive mother is the patented fairy-tale Wicked Queen, and she all but states that she doesn't love her son), and adoptees (who are apparently deeply troubled and desperately in need of their birth parents).  As an adoptee, I am used to a certain amount of prejudice in American film and television, but this is more blatant than anything I have ever seen.  The writers also treat fairy tales with contempt and laziness by not bothering to go beyond Disney's black-and-white world view, but for me, the fairy-tale idiocy is eclipsed by the cruelty of the adoption plot.  The show's basic set-up is also stolen quite blatantly from the excellent comic series Fables, incidentally.

Grimm is an improvement on Once Upon a Time, though frankly, almost anything would be.  It has a lot of good bits, but it could be better.  Basically, it's Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a forgettable male Everyman in the lead.  Part of the reason Buffy worked was that the protagonist was a teeny blonde cheerleader-type high-school girl who found herself thrust to the margins by her unwanted role as the "chosen one."  Buffy was simply an appealing character, and at the time, no one had seen anything like her before.  In Grimm, Nick has no real personality; he is characterised mostly by his bafflement.  Every other character presented thus far has been more interesting than him, from his partner to his girlfriend (who has had perhaps one line) to the "big bad wolf" he is obviously on the way to befriending.  However, what frustrates me the most about this programme, which does have plenty of potential, is that I want Nick's Aunt Marie to be the protagonist.  Aunt Marie is fantastic.  Who wouldn't want to watch a show about a little bald cancer-ridden old lady who goes up against scythe-wielding death-faces in hand-to-hand combat?  Why hasn't there been a show about a little bald cancer-ridden monster-fighter before?  Marie is clearly going to pop her clogs very soon, which is simply too bad.  I would take her as a main character over Nick any day.  As for the fairy tales:  so far, they seem like an excuse for the show to line up a bunch of monsters to be slain.  Where are Xander and Willow when you need them?

I'll continue to give Grimm a chance, but I'm not sure about Once Upon a Time, which left me crying with anger after I viewed the pilot.  I know I shouldn't take TV shows so personally, but I'm a bit tired of the convention that makes it all right to treat adoptees and their parents like freaks of nature.


Monday, October 24, 2011:  And Now I Have a Terrible Headache

I don't think I shall be able to Rant much tonight.  Just looking at the computer screen for more than thirty seconds at a time hurts profoundly.  The headache is basically the culmination of my many activities today, from marking to cartooning to random poster creation to make-up-exam composition to essay-assignment-sheet production to lugging five instruments halfway across Toronto and playing most of them for an hour and a half on an empty stomach.  It's all sort of added up.  I do need to do more marking tonight, but I'm honestly not sure I can.  This is the kind of headache that just makes me want to cry.

Ah well.  Maybe there will be a real Rant next week.  I would like not to have another headache like this any time soon.


Monday, October 17, 2011:  Well, This Isn't Working

I have attempted to write a Rant today.  Every try has come out bitter, vindictive, and swimming in terrible wrath.  Since everything I have done this week has apparently been wrong, I see no reason this Rant should turn out any differently.  I thus leave you with a picture of a tentacled monster from a LARP I was in a couple of years ago:


Monday, October 10, 2011:  On Pie

What is it about pie that's so comforting?  I don't mean just apple pie, either.  I actually can't stand apple pie, and I'm not all too fond of that other standby, cherry.  I am allergic to both apples and cherries in their raw forms, so it is sad that I find it difficult to choke down the cooked versions as well, but cooked apples and cherries tend to make me gag, not figuratively but literally; I am actually unable to chew and swallow them without having to fight an almost uncontrollable urge to hurl.  Other types of pie are generally fine, as long as they're fresh and have not yet begun to dissolve into mush.  Blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, pecan, pumpkin, chocolate:  they are so very, very bad for me, but they taste so very, very good.  Eating a nice piece of pie fresh from the over is like being hugged by your mother, only in the form of food.  Yes, this sounds slightly odd, but you know what I mean.

I generally spend Thanksgiving alone.  My family is on the other side of the country; my friends have their own plans.  I have a hard time getting through Thanksgiving without shedding an awful lot of tears, actually.  The only good bit of the holiday is the pie.  I don't bake it because that would take effort, but pumpkin and apple pies abound at various grocery stores.  Luckily, pumpkin pie is one of my favourites.  When I was a kid and went for Thanksgiving dinner at my grandparents', there would always be pumpkin pie smothered liberally in whipped cream.  My sister went for the lemon pie, but I always chose the pumpkin.  There were other things served, of course--turkey, stuffing, ham, corn, potatoes--but the pie was the meal's crowning glory.  To me, pumpkin pie tastes of those evenings with my family.

I may be alone in wishing that Thanksgiving weekend would hurry up and end already.  However, at least I have my pie.  Seeing as there's only one of me, I'll be eating it for some time to come.


Monday, October 3, 2011:  Ode to the Accordion

After limping along for a year and a half with a broken accordion, I finally got my act together and took it in to be fixed.  The problem was that the air-release button (which allows one to expand or contract the bellows without making any sound besides a sustained "FSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS") had fallen inside the instrument, resulting in a breach in the airtightness of the bellows.  I could still play the accordion, but every note was accompanied by a hissing noise, and the bellows would leak air constantly if I didn't hold them in place.  The problem was getting the accordion to the out-of-the-way repair shop, which required an appointment and a lengthy subway trip.  I could have done it ages ago, but I just never did.

I got the repaired instrument back yesterday, and today, I have been happily playing at full volume during lecture-writing breaks.*  I know nobody else cares, and many people think I am insane, but I just need to express my affection for the accordion.  I've been playing for sixteen or seventeen years now.  Unlike the ukulele, an instrument I have also been playing since long before anybody began to realise it was anything other than a toy, the accordion is still not particularly well regarded in North America and frequently substitutes for the bagpipes in jokes about musical instruments as instigators of unbearable torture.  I've lost count of the number of comic strips, comedy routines, television shows, films, books, stories, and probably even songs designed to mock the accordion.  I remember even catching a glimpse of some episode or other of The X-Factor or Britain's Got Talent or something similar, probably while I was researching reality TV for my television course last winter, in which the Requisite Acerbic Member of the Judging Team claimed, after a tiny this-is-supposed-to-be-hilarious clip of two people quite competently playing a duet on their accordions, that the very fact that they were playing accordions at all disqualified them.  The only positive pop-cultural accordion references I can think of are:  1)  Weird Al Yankovic plays one, damn it; 2) so does Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket; 3) the short-lived British sci-fi spoof Hyperdrive includes a character who plays a sort of space accordion, but frankly, he isn't very good and generally uses the instrument's "automatic" setting, which corrects his errors or simply plays the music for him.  Two of these "references" are cheats, as they are really just the names of prominent people who play the accordion well, and the third isn't really positive at all, as the accordion in question is played incompetently by a buffoon.

I find all this quite sad, as the accordion is actually a pretty versatile instrument.  What people do often seem to object to is the kind of music often played on it.  Who says a particular instrument can only be used for a particular kind of music?  Am I restricted forever to polkas because of my chosen instrument?  Why is the harmonica considered so much cooler than the accordion, though they do, in many ways, produce similar sounds?**

At any rate, I shall continue to play the accordion, and if you insist on laughing at me, that's up to you.  If you want to give the poor slandered accordion a chance, however, I encourage you to do so.

*I hope my neighbours are not preparing to break down my door and kill me.
**I'm sure there is a legitimate answer involving jazz and note-bending and things like that, but I'm still going to be sulky about it.


Monday, September 26, 2011:  Negative Rant, Positive Rant

I do Rant negatively quite often, so today's Rant will contain one negative item and one positive item, just to prove that despite my reputation, I can be both negative and positive about societal change.  So there.

Negative Rant:

Dear City of Toronto:

You know what?  Not everybody has a freaking cell phone.  Your systematic removal of public telephones from the city is more than a little maddening for those of us who don't go around with tiny mobile devices in our pockets all the time.  Last weekend, I ended up towing a huge accordion up and down Bay Street, crying, because I couldn't find the building in which I was supposed to meet my friend; I also couldn't find a phone so that I could call him and ask him where the hell the building was.  I understand that Bay Street is occupied mostly by well-off businesses and ridiculously expensive condominiums, and you are thus probably assuming that everybody who sets foot on the street owns a cell phone, but thank you ever so much for making less flush people feel unwelcome there.  I've noticed that there are still public phones in subway stations and, in fact, in my neighbourhood, both of which tend to be frequented by people who cannot afford million-dollar condos.  It's nice to know we are encouraged to stick to our kind and not soil the hallowed monied neighbourhoods with our despised presence.

The lack of public telephones in, you know, public spaces would be a bit more understandable if the idea of the public telephone were brand new, but you have actually been systematically removing phone booths from the streets of Toronto for years.  In other words, the booths were already there, but you've taken them away because they cost you money, and you don't know anyone who needs them.  I hope your damn phone battery runs out on Bay Street next week, Faceless Public Servant.

Positive Rant:

I am continually amazed by the inventiveness of the clever people who have realised how trendy cloth shopping bags have become.  These bags have been around for years, but the tax on plastic bags has propelled them into the spotlight and shifted the public perception of them from "Oh, that's a good idea...I should get one of those eventually" to "I MUST HAVE CLOTH BAGS IMMEDIATELY."  When I was in Calgary for the summer a couple of years ago, I noticed that these bags were very difficult to find.  In Toronto, they're everywhere.  I own far too many of them.  They're just so very difficult to resist.  Also, Sobeys was giving them away in a promotion last month.

The thing is...companies have realised that these bags offer endless possibilities.  You can make them in different shapes and sizes.  You can print different images on them.  They must be absurdly cheap to produce.  Sobeys has the bags in at least three different sizes and at least six different patterns; it also offers "thermal" versions of the bags designed to keep your food warm, plus an entirely different sort of bag that can be folded up into a tiny little package and tucked away into a pouch.  Sobeys is really quite enthusiastic about this whole bag thing.

But no one beats Shoppers Drug Mart for Cloth Bag Ingenuity.  Shoppers has the various sizes, the various patterns, the pouch bags, and the thermal bags, but yesterday, I discovered yet another permutation of the Shoppers cloth bag.  I had gone to Long and McQuade for a sale and had foolishly taken my bike with me; the foolishness became apparent after I went mad and bought some bongo drums.  I had always wanted bongo drums, and these ones were bright red, damn it.  I have a thing for bright red instruments.  I own two bright red accordions, a bright red low D whistle, a bright red high C whistle, a bright red djembe, and a bright red simplified melodica, plus a deep red Xaphoon (bright red wasn't an option).  I once tried to purchase a ukulele that was half bright red and half white (all in natural wood, interestingly), but someone sniped me on eBay.  As far as I'm concerned, happiness is a bright red musical instrument.  The bright red bongos were impossible to resist.  However, they were also extremely heavy and did not come with a carrying case.  I knew I would have to get home via subway, and I needed some way of carrying the bongos in one hand while guiding the bike with the other.

Fortunately, there was a Shoppers across the street from the music store.  I went there in the vague hope that I would be able to pick up a couple of cloth bags and double them up for strength.  I would have done so if I hadn't spotted Shoppers' latest attempt to suck in people like me who simply can't resist those damn bags:  a cloth bag with wheels.  With wheels, I say.  It works like those shopping carts you see everywhere, except without the actual cart.

Well, it was inevitable:  I had to have the wheely bag.  As it turned out, it was the most practical possible way of getting the bongos home intact, as they were too heavy to hang comfortably on the bike's handlebars.  It's probably a good thing I didn't go for the congas instead.

Yes, I realise that these bags are a cynical cash grab capitalising on pseudo-environmentalist populism, but I still like them, and I approve of the idea of bags with wheels.  Long live cloth-bag creativity.

Unexpected Positive Addendum:

At Word on the Street this afternoon, I spent quite a lot of time sitting on the ground drawing comics.  At one point, two girls who looked about ten started peering over my shoulder and commenting on my work.  They eventually sat down beside me and told me all about the comics their parents had bought for them; they asked me what I was drawing and what my various pens were for.  They were very excited about seeing someone actually drawing comics, and one of them called her dad over to see.  The dad did ask me a question that always infuriates me--"Why do you pronounce your name 'Kah-ri' and not 'Carrie'?"--but I suppose it wasn't his fault.  He probably thought I was just being pretentious until I explained to him that my family was, in fact, Norwegian.  At any rate, it is oddly awesome to have two small girls deciding you are their new best friend because you have been quietly drawing comics in a park.  It kind of made my day.


Monday, September 19, 2011:  Fun with Formulae (concl.)

For the thrilling conclusion of my series on how it is actually possible to create original stories that people will like, I shall move away from film animation and, in "honour" of Glee's third series, which begins this week, deal with television for a bit.

I know I have Ranted about Glee before, and I'll try not to repeat the same tired old arguments.  In this case, however, Glee seems to me to exemplify the problem I highlighted in Part 1 of this little collection of essays:  the tendency of writers, producers, and directors to substitute "new" and "exciting" surface details for fundamental originality.  While Up takes a common plot--the coming-of-age adventure--and adds a unique thematic spin to it by delaying the coming of age by about seventy years, films such as Igor and Robots merely sprinkle equally common plots with crazy, crazy settings, assumedly on the assumption that most eight-year-olds aren't going to notice they're watching the same story over and over again.

Glee, in my opinion, does something similar.  It presents itself as an "edgy" show that provides a clever, ironic look at American high-school life...in song!  By drawing on popular music from a number of genres--from straight pop to hip-hop to Broadway--Glee explores the dynamics in what is assumedly meant to be a typical high school.  We get all the high-school-related issues covered decades before in the various incarnations of Degrassi (teen pregnancy, cliques, drugs, alcohol, dating, homosexuality, you name it), plus an extra focus on the hang-ups and foibles of some of the teachers.  However, we get these issues as filtered through pop music and sprinkled with Magic Realism Dust.  Many viewers and critics call Glee a satire.  It does have the requisite elements; it portrays a larger-than-life version of one aspect of American society, in the process revealing the cracks in the surface of both that one aspect and the society as a whole.

However, I do see Glee as leaning more towards Igor than it does towards Up.  As I have previously posited, Glee pretends to be from the perspective of freaks and geeks while actually giving us jocks and cheerleaders.  One of the reasons Canadians are proud of the old Degrassi, despite its inherent corniness, is that while American teenagers were eating up the plastic, skewed Beverly Hills 90210, Canadian kids were watching a fourteen-year-old who was not from an appallingly rich family get preggers and deal with the consequences.  Glee follows Degrassi rather than 90210 in giving us mostly kids from lower-middle-class families, many of them broken, but it pushes the American Dream so hard that after a while, it begins to feel as if an anvil is repeatedly being dropped on our heads.  LOOK, says Glee.  THESE KIDS ARE DISADVANTAGED.  DO YOU SEE US MAKING THEM DISADVANTAGED?  DO YOU NOTICE THE WAY WE ARE CLEARLY BEATING THEM DOWN INTO THE DIRT?  WON'T IT FEEL SO MUCH BETTER WHEN THEY FINALLY WIN?

It kind of won't.  The Glee characters feel like popular kids in disguise.  They're walking around with little signs on their foreheads--"poor" and "gay" and "unpopular" and "fat" and "handicapped" and "delinquent" and "pregnant at 16"--but they're not convincing in the roles.  Their collective goal in the show is to get the rest of the school to realise that they're worthy of being popular too.  While they claim they've accepted their outcast status, they never stop working to shed it.  Realistic?  Sure.  Sending a message that unpopular kids are people too?  Not so much.  Unpopular kids are potential people who will eventually emerge from their cocoons as beautiful butterflies and take the American Dream by storm.

There is a difference between surface and essence.  Too many popular films and television shows choose to change the former rather than the latter, paying lip service to an "edgy" idea but really just telling the same tired old story that has been told for decades.  I find it sad to read newspaper comics now, but at least many of them are honest about being stuck in the 1950s forever.  I do hope we can eventually dig beneath the surface and produce more original works with popular appeal.  If Pixar can do it, so can others.


Monday, September 12, 2011:  Fun with Formulae (cont.)

Last week, I discussed how recent animated films seemed to be substituting quirky surface details for actual creativity.  This week, I would like to take a brief look at a recent animated film that has done (almost) everything right so that with luck, the difference becomes clear.

I'll start with the negatives first, just to get them out of the way.  I love Pixar's Up to bits, but I do find the lack of female characters frustrating.  This film fails the Bechdel test with a resounding crash.  Yes, I know that not every story ever told has to include female characters, but the point with Up is that it so easily could.  There is no reason we couldn't follow Ellie's story rather than Carl's.  There is no reason Russell couldn't be a girl.  I've heard people claim that an old man / little girl combo would be creepy, but gosh, thanks for the double standard.  Old man / little girl is creepy, but old man / little boy isn't?  What about old woman / little boy or, heaven forbid, old woman / little girl?  There is nothing in the story that requires the protagonists to be male; they simply are because "male" is considered a neutral category in Western literature.  The only female characters in this film are a dead woman and a large bird.  Even the many talking dogs are exclusively male; it's difficult to see how there can possibly be so many of them, as Muntz doesn't seem to have a single bitch in his pack.  Pixar, I adore you, but come the hell on.

However, what Up does well, it does very, very well.  It is known for having audiences howling with grief within the first ten minutes; the introductory montage is extremely nicely done and allows the audience to establish a connection with Carl without really ever hearing him speak.  Carl himself is a refreshingly unexpected hero, a cane-wielding old man who just wants to be left alone with the memories of his dead wife and his regret that he was never quite able to give her what she wanted.  This is, please note, a children's film, and it has an elderly protagonist who has given up hope.   Carl is a far cry from the quirky-outsider-young-man-with-talent who keeps popping up as the Patented Animated Hero these days.

When a young character sets off into the world to seek his fortune, we know what's coming.  He'll go through many trials and tribulations, then slay some sort of monster and settle down for a nice happily ever after with a princess equivalent.  When an eighty-year-old curmudgeon sets off into the world to seek his fortune, we're less sure what to expect.  Carl's journey is also complicated by the presence of a Wilderness Explorer named Russell who is determined to "assist the elderly" and earn himself a merit badge.  The interactions between Carl and Russell are those of a reluctant mentor and his protege, but whereas in a traditional plot, Russell would be in the spotlight, here, it's the mentor character whose growth is important.  One reason it's slightly tragic that Carl is not female is that he is, in a way, sending himself over the rainbow, an elderly Dorothy setting grimly out for Oz even though he half believes it's too late to get there.

As with most good stories, Up offers not only external conflict--mainly between Carl and his idol Muntz, but also between Carl and Russell--but internal:  Man vs. Man but also Man vs. Self.  Carl has to learn to let go, not of Ellie herself but of his own rigid association of Ellie with their house and the dream that never did quite pan out.  What Ellie always really wanted was adventure, and in the end, Carl begins to live for the present, not the future or the past; he accepts that he is on an adventure now, even if it isn't quite the one he thought he wanted.  His growth is not hammered into our heads; we see it gradually in the sacrifice of the house and its contents.  Yes, Carl's redemption is predictable, but by the time it happens, we are so invested in him that we don't care.  Since Carl himself is a unique, living character, the plot grows from his personality instead of forcing him to march to its beat.

Up is not perfect; it does contain some pretty cliched elements, and it's got that worrying lack of gender diversity.  However, its imaginative plot and reliance on character development allow it to transcend the dreariness of Hollywood animation and give us something simultaneously old and new.  I just hope that Pixar continues in this direction instead of going the lazy Cars route.  I'm looking forward to Brave.

Addendum:

To the guy who sarcastically shouted, "Work it, baby!" at me as I biked home tonight:  you know which part of my anatomy you can bite, right?  I'll give you a hint:  it's behind me, and it's made of shiny metal.


Monday, September 5, 2011:  Fun with Formulae

A couple of days ago, when I was slogging through the boring bits of my colour comic, I watched a pair of animated films, Dreamworks' Megamind and Exodus's Igor.  Though the films are rather different in subject matter (despite the quirky evil-is-good theme, which has become a little too tediously popular in animated movies lately), they follow similar plot trajectories and have thus made me think about how very, very many other animated films have exactly the same plot.  I honestly think animators are missing the point.  They are attempting to copy Pixar in being inventive and imaginative and fun, but they're really just telling the same story over and over again.  Even Pixar falls into the trap occasionally, though admittedly, less often than the other studios.

Let's take a look at this plot, which I sometimes feel applies to the great majority of non-princess-centric Western animated films:

1)  Enter our hero.  For the sake of argument, let us call him a young man, though depending on the film, feel free to replace the word "man" with "robot," "alien," "insect," "rodent," "monster," or any other appropriate term.  In human terms, he is equivalent to someone in his teens or early twenties.  We shall, for the moment, call him--and yes, he is invariably male--"Bob."

2)  Bob is well-meaning but misunderstood.  He is very talented, but his talent is unrecognised or unappreciated by his peers.  He is regarded as an outsider, a rather odd person who doesn't know his place and is unable to accept his fate, which is usually to follow his parents/ancestors/predecessors/etc. into a job as a menial worker.  Bob wants to please his parents and teachers, but he can't give up his unsanctioned activities.

3)  Bob has an unrequited crush on a girl.  He may have known her since childhood, or he may meet her in the course of the adventure that follows.  In either case, she is spunky and slightly quirky.  She has guts and brains, and her current boyfriend, if she has one, is a meathead.  At this point, she sees Bob as "just a friend" or even as an enemy, if she knows he exists at all.  As per tradition, let us call her "Alice."

4)  Bob is driven from his society.  It is his own fault; he gets carried away while trying to do something helpful (usually, he is trying to avert a disaster that he has seen coming but no one else believes is going to happen) and causes some sort of catastrophe.  He finds himself alone.  Alice will believe the worst of him and reject him outright.

5)  The disaster that Bob has foreseen occurs.  This new threat puts Alice in immediate danger.  Despite her spunk and intelligence, she is kidnapped / staked out to appease a monster / used as bait / etc.

6)  Using the talent everybody originally scorned, Bob saves Alice and eradicates the threat.  His actions are witnessed by many people, all of whom realise that Bob was right all along and deserves to be allowed to follow his heart.

7)  The story ends happily.  Bob gets the girl, the villains are killed or imprisoned, and society adjusts to accommodate Bob and his unusual talent.

This plot is a version of the rather common hero's-journey pattern; it is not surprising that it turns up so often.  However--and here's where I have a problem--there are other plots.  Honestly:  this is not the only story out there.  I was never surprised by Megamind or Igor.  I knew exactly what was going to happen and exactly when it was going to happen.  Megamind was quite amusing to watch, but it was also drearily predictable.  Have you Hollywood writers ever taken a peek at actual children's literature?  There is a lot of it.  It varies widely in tone, and it involves all sorts of different plots.  Why can't you film some of those?  I know I go on about this a lot, but what about letting Alice into the limelight every once in a while?  Not Princess Alice, mind you:  just plain Alice.  Why not leave out the love story?  Does every film need a love story?  Do you really think the average eight-year-old is sitting there longing for a romantic subplot?  Look at some of the Pixar films that buck this formula:  notably, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and Up.  The first one concentrates on the relationship between a big furry monster and a toddler; the second and third acknowledge the importance of love stories but certainly don't make everything about saving the girl.  (Admittedly, Boo in Monsters, Inc. eventually ends up in need of rescue, but she is, after all, barely old enough to speak.  Saving a baby and saving a grown woman are rather different propositions.)

There are many stories out there waiting to be told.  It seems to me more than a little bit unnecessary to keep telling the same one over and over again.  Simply changing a story's setting does not make one "edgy" and "inventive."


Monday, August 29, 2011:  On Humidity

I'm in Prince George visiting my sister at the moment.  One thing that has really been striking me lately is how effective humidity is at making one feel like a weepy, exhausted puddle of slime.

Prince George is the kind of place that tends to have quite high temperatures in the summer and quite low temperatures in the winter.  I realise that everybody who lives easy of Calgary believes that British Columbia is continually drowning in rain and that British Columbians wouldn't know a proper snowfall if it walked up to them in the street, but the truth is that British Columbia is actually quite a big province.  What holds true for Vancouver does not necessarily apply to the rest of it.  Prince George gets very heavy snowfalls in the winter, while its summer weather isn't typically particularly wet.  In both summer and winter, Prince George lacks humidity.  Unlike Toronto, which is achingly dry in the winter and bone-meltingly humid in the summer, Prince George produces both a dry heat and a dry cold.

Yesterday, I was outside in 28C weather.  It was warm, but I wasn't sweating at all.  It was actually kind of freaking me out.  28C in Toronto is likely to have me sitting five inches from my fan and wringing out my shirt every forty-five minutes.

Toronto, why can't you have dry heat?  I really wish you could.  I like you pretty well by now, but I can't freaking stand your weather.  When even a thunderstorm doesn't clear up the oppressive humidity, you know there's a problem.  You hear that, Toronto?  There's a problem.  You are the problem.

Prince George also makes me tired, but that's a whole other story.


Monday, August 22, 2011:  Marking and Why It Should Be Banned Forever

I'm not quite finished living through this terrible, terrible nightmare, but no matter what happens, I'll be done by 4:00 p.m.  Luckily, I somehow managed to mark something like 150 essays this week, and I now have mostly the grade collation left.  It will still take me at least three hours, as I need to go through the old discussion responses to make sure the students have earned their participation marks.  I've done one class and have two left to go.

What I Have Learned This Summer:

1)  When you are teaching three sections of an online course, and the institution for which you are working suddenly raises class sizes from 45 to 65, the outcome is not going to be a happy one.

2)  When one of those classes is condensed (seven weeks instead of fourteen), which would work better if one of the course texts were not the seven-hundred-page-long The Shining, you will experience a great deal of stress.

3)  In university-speak, "part time" means "seventy hours a week, though you only get paid for twenty."

4)  Being sad makes marking harder.

5)  Well, okay...blinking makes marking harder.  Eating potatoes makes marking harder.  Everything makes marking harder.  Marking is hard.

6)  When the people who are in charge of designing Blackboard claim they have introduced "modifications" to make it "better," you can bet your bottom dollar that what they really mean is:  "We have made the interface more difficult  to use and hidden all the useful commands."

I think I need to go to sleep now.  Tomorrow, I must slay the mighty Beast of Collation.  Farewell.


Monday, August 15, 2011:  Another Short Note about Why This Note is Short Again

Once more, I am frighteningly far behind on my marking.  I'm also desperately tired.  I am thus going to skip the Rant and cry myself to sleep.  The Rants will expand once I'm finished this cursed, cursed marking.


Monday, August 8, 2011:  I Think I'd Better Cheat on the Rant This Week

I do need to get some damn marking done tonight, so I'm afraid today's Rant is going to be a repetition of what I've already got over on the West of Bathurst portion of the website.  See...I recently finished getting a novel ready to send out to be rejected by publishers.  I didn't mean to Rant about this on the WoB site, but it just sort of turned out that way.  However, that's all the Ranting I have in me right now.  I'm tired and headachey, and I seem to have contracted some strange variant of the flu.  Also, I really need to mark until I cry tears of blood.  So I'm just going to paste the Rant I did over there over here. 

The Rant in Question:

I have finally whipped one of my novels into shape.  Lemme tell you about me and novel writing.  I've been doing it since the age of 17 (technically, I wrote my first "big" work when I was 15 or so, but it was only about 40 pages long.  The next one was something like 600 pages in longhand).  However, while I can churn out a fantasy epic on my summer vacation, I find writing query letters nigh on impossible and can spend weeks agonising over a one-page synopsis.  I sent out a mauscript to one publisher once when I was twenty or so.  It was, of course, rejected, which I knew would happen, but I apparently decided that the emotional turmoil involved wasn't worth it, and subsequent manuscripts ended up hidden away forever.  I'm also a perfectionist who can always find something wrong with my writing.  I tend to like my stories for about three days after I'm finished writing them; then I start ferreting out the flaws.  Most of the time, I decide that these flaws are huge and unfixable, and I let the story languish because I know it would be rejected if I sent it out.

This latest story is flawed because, let's face it, what isn't?  However, I've persevered and pounded it into shape.  And you know what?  Even if it isn't good enough to be published--even if it's rejected by everyone and his dog--I'm proud of it.  This time, I didn't take the easy way out and give up on it.  I rewrote Chapter 1.  I picked away at the other chapters until most of the plot holes were plugged and the protagonist's motivations were much clearer.  I added stuff and took stuff away and got rid of a lot of unnecessary adverbs and most of the appearances of the word "realised."  I wrote the bloody synopsis--twice--and wrestled with the page-numbering weirdnesses of WordPerfect.  And I am going to send it out.  I am not going to hide it away.  So what if I get rejected?  Everyone gets rejected.  It's better than not trying at all.


Monday, August 1, 2011:  A Short Note about Why This Note is Short

Alas, it is 2:30 a.m., and I am nearly too tired to think.  I'll have to skimp on the Rant today.  Tomorrow, I get to mark some more.  HURRAH!


Monday, July 25, 2011:  Enough About the Weather Already

I did think about writing another open letter to Mr. Summer, but what's the use?  Mr. Summer has clearly gone mad.  It was on the day it hit 37C (48 on the humidex) that I finally gave up.  This is not being a happy sort of summer.  This is being, quite literally, the summer from Hell.

There is no need for it ever to hit 37C.  Do you know that when it's that hot, standing in the sun genuinely feels like standing in an extremely large, extremely moist oven?  Australians may love that kind of weather, but I think they may all be crazy.  Also, on the horrible day in question, this happened:

The night before, the City of Toronto turned off the water in my apartment building so it could tear up the street and hack the water main to pieces.  The workers were planning to be finished by eight, meaning, of course, that they spent all night operating heavy machinery beneath my window.  Was the water back in the morning?  It was not.  On the hottest day of the summer thus far, my apartment building was bone dry.  The City issued a notice "apologising for the inconvenience."  To their credit, the bureaucrats in charge did leave some portable sinks in front of our building, but it would have been much nicer to be able to bathe.  I eventually escaped to my office, which I'm supposed to be moving out of very soon but which at least has air conditioning.

If the temperature doesn't go down soon, I am going to punch a wall hard enough to break it.  Damn you, Mr. Summer.  Damn you.


Monday, July 18, 2011:  Did I Say the Weather Was Sucky?  I Meant the Weather Sucked

Last week, I whined about how consistently warm and sticky the weather had been lately.  It cooled down ever so slightly this week, meaning that the median temperature was probably around 25 instead of up near 30.  I didn't really plan on doing two weather-related Rants in a row.  Today, however, the temperature hit 35C.  It's 8:30 p.m., and it's gone all the way down to 31.  It's 29 inside my apartment.  I walked to the drug store to buy allergy medication at 1:00 p.m. and nearly melted.  Some friends and I had been planning to see a Fringe play tonight, but after realising that we would really only have a chance at tickets if we lined up for three hours, we decided to wait for the Best of Fringe next week instead.  I'm kind of glad.  I'm not convinced I would have survived the bike ride.

It's the humidity that really does it.  Sure, it was 35 today, but it felt as if it were at least 40.  It also felt as if I were moving through a swimming pool filled with sweat.  When I lived in Vancouver, I hated wearing sleeveless shirts and really only regretted this hatred on three or four days every summer.  Now I have a vast collection of tank tops and short skirts.  Even shorts are too warm for this weather, and pants are out of the question.  I see people walking around in jeans and cardigans, and I think they have probably gone mad.

Could someone please punch the weather in the face for me?  I would do it myself, but I'm not a very good puncher.  I need someone with real muscles in his or her arms.  This weather is stupid.  It's just stupid.  There's no reason for weather like this to exist.  Stop laughing at me, Australians.  You can have our summers in exchange for your winters; I don't mind at all.


Monday, July 11, 2011:  How Consistently Sucky the Weather Is

The suckiness of the weather has really been extraordinarily consistent this week.  You may remember that last week, I nearly killed myself while attempting to buy an eraser from Staples on very hot, very humid day.  The heat and humidity have continued for eight days straight now.  I have come to hate the feeling of clothing in general.  The temperature inside my apartment has been averaging 27C.  I went to play ukulele with a bunch of people in a pub last Wednesday night, and I didn't even bother to take a jacket.  I cycled home at 11 p.m.; it was probably still about 25C out.

I have some acquaintances who hail from very hot and humid parts of the world and who can't for the life of them understand why I find 33C plus humidity uncomfortable.  The Australians are my favourites.  The typical Australian tends to talk like this:  "33C?  33C is cold.  I wear my winter coat went the temperature goes below 30.  Once I had to walk half a mile when it was 27 degrees and windy; I almost died.  When the temperature drops below 25, my hands get so cold that I can't type.  Seriously, I have to type in gloves.  Anything below 20 is like being in Hell shortly after it has frozen over.  I'm cold just talking about it.  Could I borrow your duvet?"*

I'm not sure I would survive in Australia, a land in which 35C is considered "pleasantly cool" and all the flora and fauna are trying to kill you.  Maybe I should just count my blessings.

*Not even slightly exaggerated, trust me.


Monday, July 4, 2011:  Adventures in Heatstroke

1)  So this afternoon, I run out of mechanical pencil erasers.  As I use these erasers constantly, I decide to pop down to Staples and get some more.

2)  The closest Staples is at Gerrard Square, a 15-minute bike ride away.  That's 15 minutes to get there, as it's all downhill.  It probably takes twice that long to get home from there.

3)  I ride to Gerrard Square.  I do notice as I do so that it's rather warm out, but I am, after all, zooming happily down the hill the whole time.  It's not until I'm actually inside the mall that I realise how very dehydrated I have become.

4)  Staples may be the devil.  You go in to buy erasers...and then you see the double-sided Sharpies.  And the key-ring Sharpies.  And the pencil lead.  And the external hard drives.  And...

5)  Realising that it is, after all, not exactly cool outside, I stop at the dollar store, which inexplicably carries every type of sugary drink known to humankind but no bottled water.  I buy a sugary drink.  I reason that it isn't that far back to my apartment; I should be fine.

6) Every time I visit Gerrard Square, I end up biking home down a road that eventually turns into a one-way street and forces me to take an awkward detour onto Pape.  This time, I decide to get onto Pape right away so that I don't have to take the detour.  I forget about my own complete lack of a sense of direction.

7)  Thinking I am biking north on Pape, I cycle along for ten minutes or so.  "Hey," I think, "this isn't so bad.  The slope is a lot gentler than I expected."  This is, in hindsight, remarkably stupid of me.

8)  It is only when I have reached Coxwell that I realise I have been going east the whole time.  Coxwell is three subway stops beyond Pape.

9)  I go north on Coxwell.  In this part of the city, all the north-south streets have slopes ranging from moderate to steep.  Coxwell has one stretch that doesn't quite count as properly steep but lasts for some distance and is punishing in 30-degree heat.  A number of us are biking up it at the same time.  I see one woman get off her bike and walk.  She later passes me, as I have had to get off my bike and sit down.  The sugary drink sort of helps but may also be contributing to my impression that my chest may explode at any moment.

10)  At long last, I reach Danforth, but my legs have turned into rubber, and I have to find some shade and sit down for ten minutes.  I don't even care that the only place to sit is the sidewalk.  I come pretty close to fainting.  There are a lot of dubious gentlemen hanging around this particular corner.  It's a pretty seedy intersection, actually.  The sugary drink is giving me chest pains.

11)  I get on the bike again and make it to Pape and Mortimer before I have to take another break.  This time, I manage to find a seat on a bench in one of Toronto's tiny parks.  One of the other benches is occupied by two women, one with a guitar and the other with a banjo.  They don't play anything while I'm there because they're talking to a couple of friends.  I finish the sugary drink.

12)  I arrive home nearly two hours after I left.  I have spent about $110 more than I expected to spend, almost passed out twice, and developed a repulsion towards orange-flavoured pop.  From now on, I'm just going to stay inside.


Monday, June 27, 2011:  On Adverbs

I have a love/hate relationship with adverbs.  I suspect this is not uncommon.

In a way, adverbs--that is, words or phrases that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs--are useful beasts.  I can write, "He ran down the road, his legs pumping, his lungs straining, the sweat trickling down his face," or I can write, "He ran desperately down the road."  The first version, which is adverb-free, offers a more detailed picture of the scene.  The second version is in a sort of literary shorthand.  The reader interprets "desperately" herself, filling in the pumping legs, the straining lungs, and the trickling sweat.  Different readers may have different ideas of what desperation entails.  The version with the adverb is more concise but also less precise.

The occasional adverb can be useful.  Problems arise when adverbs multiply beyond control, at which point even the conciseness is lost, and the writing comes to seem both vague and flabby.  "Joan eased back the safety on the small gun and turned to face Ryan" is a stronger sentence than "Joan gently eased back the safety on the ridiculously small gun and defiantly turned to face Ryan angrily."  Too many adverbs will have the opposite of their intended effect, lengthening a sentence instead of trimming it down.  Adverbs also tend to be a way of cheating on the "show, don't tell" rule.  There is a difference between a sentence that describes what a woman looks and acts like when she is furious and one that explains she is doing something "furiously."

I often write with too many adverbs, then go back and take most of them out later.  My favourites are "probably," "actually," "possibly," and "apparently."  They have become crutches for me; they sneak into my writing without me meaning them to.  They're not even particularly (there's another one) descriptive adverbs.  I think I use them mostly for the rhythm.

Please treat your adverbs with respect.  Don't abandon them altogether, but don't lean on them either.  A few adverbs go a long way.


Monday, June 20, 2011:  The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

I have nothing good to say about last week.  It was hideous in multiple ways.  I'm technically glad it's over, but realistically, I spent it avoiding all the things I have to finish by tomorrow.  Therefore, this week is probably going to suck too.  Joy.

I wish I had something else to say, but I think I'd better leave it at that this time around.


Monday, June 13, 2011:  I Am Ahead on My Marking.  What the...?

This has never happened before.

Usually, my marking strategy goes as follows:

Day 1:  Papers are due.  I can't start marking on the day the papers are due.  That would be wrong.

Days 2-12:  I can't start marking now.  It's too late in the day / I have to write a lecture on How I Met Your Mother / I'm behind on my comic / Ooh, pretty website.

Day 13:  I promised I would hand the essays back in two weeks!  Why haven't I started yet?  What's wrong with me?

Day 20:  I hand the essays back.  Apologies happen.

This time around, to my vast and unending surprise, I started marking the day after the papers were due.  I marked ten papers that day.  I finished the first class's papers in four days; the second class's took seven.  Even so, I managed to hand back the second class's papers eleven days after I had collected them.

It feels so strange not to be frantically marking twenty-five papers a day.  The lack of stress is kind of stressful in and of itself.  I just don't know what to do with myself.  How did I manage to mark nearly one hundred essays in eleven days?  Have I been possessed by aliens?  Why is it that marking essays during the first eleven days is so much less soul-destroying than marking essays during the last eleven days?

I hope I'm able to force myself to do this again in three weeks when Assignment 2 comes due, but I wouldn't bet on it.  I can't seem to stop myself from making my own life difficult.


Monday, June 6, 2011:  GO, 'NUCKS, GO

Okay, I admit it.  Sad but true:  I am a die-hard fan of the Vancouver Canucks.

It's not as if I have even watched hockey much lately.  It's just...well, I remember 1994.  A lot of Vancouverites remember 1994.  That was the year I was dragged unwillingly into the insanity that was sports fandom.  I don't watch any other sports.  I am genuinely terrible at playing sports.  But the year the Vancouver Canucks made it all the way through the Stanley Cup playoffs, only to lose to the New York Rangers in game 7, I was hopelessly ensnared.

I wasn't even watching the games.  I listened to them on the radio, then wrote bits of a story on my computer during the breaks.  My parents were watching the game downstairs; every time someone scored a goal, I heard them yell.  Either the radio or the television broadcast--I can't remember which--was slightly delayed, and so there was a slight difference in when we would react.  I know I liked the radio commentator better than the TV ones.  The radio guy would get very, very excited.  Yes, the TV guys would raise their voices whenever a player neared one goal or the other as well, but the radio guy sounded as if he were enthusiastically peeing his pants.  He could scream the word "SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!" for about a minute without taking a breath.  I got to know the players by their names, not the numbers on their ugly orange jerseys.  Pavel Bure, the Russian Rocket, was the Canucks' golden boy back then.  I did see him skate more often in subsequent seasons, and man, was that little guy fast.

Of course, the Canucks did eventually lose, at which point Vancouver actually erupted in a riot that lasted all night and into the next day.  I found out later that my seventeen-year-old sister was there.  She had told my parents that she was going over to a friend's place to study,* but she had actually gone downtown to party.  She and her friends did not find it easy to get back home, but they didn't get arrested, either, so that was a plus.  Possibly the most galling thing about the riot was the reaction from New York; newspaper articles proclaimed New Yorkers to be "shocked" at the antics of the Vancouverites, and also rather smug about their own peaceful celebrations.

At any rate, the exciting progress towards the final, accompanied by the rather less fun excitement of the riot, permanently warped my brain.  After that, I liked hockey.  I cheered for the Canucks.  I could speak hockey speak.  For the first time in my life, I was a sports fan.

It's happening again this year.  I do hope it goes right this time.  My sister hasn't been seventeen for seventeen years.

*Do teenagers even need any other excuses?


Monday, May 30, 2011:  Where Did May Go?

It seems wrong that tomorrow is the last day of May.  My memory is telling me that the old term just ended; the calendar is telling me that there are only three months left in the summer term.  I am upset about this.  Time is not supposed to move this quickly.

Week 4 of my summer course started two days ago.  The Canadian election happened four weeks ago.  I bought a banjo a fortnight ago.  Doctor Who just had its sixth episode, and most of the American shows had their season finales one, two, or even three weeks ago.  The Stanley Cup playoffs ended three--no, wait, those are still going.  It may be just a little bit silly that the hockey season extends into June, but let's leave that aside.  Go, Canucks.

I would like time to stop for a bit; I need to catch up.  The hell that is marking starts for me on Tuesday.  I haven't had even a month away from it.  Time really sucks sometimes.


Monday, May 23, 2011:  SPROING

I'm sorry I've forgotten about Ranting for the last couple of weeks.  This is the first Sunday in a while on which I've finished my Monday comic relatively early and have thus had time to write a Rant before bedtime.

It has been a rather odd week.  Last Monday, I bought a banjo.  Last Friday, my soprano ukulele committed suicide.  A friend has suggested that these two facts might be connected; his theory is that the ukulele was so jealous of the banjo that it caused its own bridge to become unglued and fly violently across the room.  I'm not entirely convinced that he's right, but who can really say what might go through the mind of a small string instrument as it leans quietly against a piano bench?  Perhaps it was actually aiming for the banjo.  Perhaps it was a David-vs.-Goliath sort of situation; a banjo is, after all, several times the size and a great many times the weight of a ukulele.  Perhaps the ukulele was anticipating the supposed end of the world the next day.  I don't know.  At any rate, it was very sad.

I do like the banjo, though I'm still very slow at it, and I'm afraid my neighbours may hate me; it is the loudest instrument I own, and that includes the accordion and the electric piano.  I've ordered a mute so I don't get lynched by a mob.  The banjo seems to exist for the express purpose of drowning out every other instrument in the world.  It's feisty.  I approve.

I just hope my other instruments don't explode any time soon.  If they all decide to attack the banjo, there are going to be strings and keys and bridges flying around in here, and it's really not a very big apartment.


Monday, May 2, 2011:  Third Monday of Panic

You know the feeling you get when it's three days before your marks are due, and you still have nine essays and one hundred and fourteen exams to mark, plus the summer course you're teaching will probably be online as of tomorrow, and you haven't modified the course's two websites yet, even though this modification will take hours because the people in charge of cloning the website always erase over half the discussion forums you use, and for some reason that escapes you, the university has gone and raised the cap for this course from 45 to 65, and since you're teaching two sections, that gives you forty extra students, plus you haven't paid your rent yet, and two of the exams you need to mark by Wednesday afternoon are probably in your box at Ryerson right now, except you don't know when you'll have time to go and get them, and you've had a miserable cold since Thursday and wish you could just curl up in a corner and cry*?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.

*There is a reason I have ended all three of my most recent Rants with a similar question.


Monday, April 25, 2011:  Second Monday of Panic

You know the feeling you get when it's one day before half your marks are due and two days before you have to hold an exam for 112 people whose term papers you have still, for the most part, not yet marked because you had to finish marking stuff for two other classes first, and now you have to collate the marks for those two classes, which is going to take hours because it will also involve calculating participation marks in a particularly cumbersome way involving 65 separate searches and probably a lot of crying, and you are still taking breaks to play the ukulele, only it's a different ukulele this week, since you own more than one, and this one's plinkier and thus more conducive to angry strumming, and you start getting tired every evening by 7:00 or so and have a hard time concentrating on the everlasting marking that you will never ever finish, and it's way too easy to get distracted by the Internet, which you cannot switch off because half your marking is on it, and damn it, maybe you should just play the ukulele for a bit again while you ignore the huge pile of essays that is making you want to cry?

I really want it to be May 5th.  My brain hurts.


Monday, April 18, 2011:  First Monday of Panic

You know the feeling you get when it's the last week before half your marks are due and also the last week before you have to hold an exam for 112 people whose term papers you have not yet marked because you need to mark 65 term papers for two other classes first, plus an untold number of discussion responses, and you've just given yourself a headache marking ten essays in a row, and you keep taking little breaks to play the ukulele because it is a small instrument that you can easily keep next to your chair and that doesn't hurt your head as much as the piano probably would if you played it, which you don't, because you should be marking, and the ukulele seems like less of an outright procrastinatory instrument, though that's probably an illusion fostered by a desperate need to do anything other than mark, and it's eight o'clock p.m. and the headache is already really bad and you know that you will need to mark for at least four more hours before you go to bed and you also have to create an exam because the lady who photocopies stuff needs it a week ahead of time and you really just want to throw yourself down on your bed and cry?

That is the feeling I'm having right now.


Monday, April 11, 2011:  Last Monday of Doom

I just spent all weekend becoming very, very tired, so this entry will be brief.  I would like to celebrate the fact that today is my final Really Early Monday of the semester.  From here on in, I may go insane from all the marking, but I shall do it at a relatively decent hour of the day.  I like my Monday class just fine, but I'm pretty sure that everybody in it just wants the pain to end.  There should be some sort of law against classes being scheduled before 9:00 a.m.  I long to punch Monday in the face.  Luckily for Monday, I'm currently too tired to do so.

Happy Random Day in April.  Enjoy things.


Monday, April 4, 2011:  April is the Cruelest Month

Over the course of the next month, I must do the following:

1)  Mark 57 2,000-2,500-word papers.

2)  Mark 40 4-5-page papers.

3)  Mark 112 6-8-page papers.

4)  Mark 65 1,500-2,000-word papers.

5)  Mark 650 discussion responses.

6)  Write a three-hour lecture on Pleasantville and deliver it twice.

7)  Deliver (twice) a three-hour lecture on Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.

8)  Create a two-hour exam about television.

9)  Mark 112 two-hour exams about television.

10)  Sit on three panels at the SF convention Ad Astra, thus occupying an entire weekend I should really be devoting to #1-9.

I think my brain is going to explode.  I'm going to go sit in a corner and cry now.


Monday, March 28, 2011:  Saturday, March 26, 2011

Diana Wynne Jones died on Saturday.  You may not have heard of her, but she was one of my favourite authors, the creator of many strange and wonderful fantasy books for children, teens, and (occasionally) adults.

There's no way I can say anything about this that doesn't sound both pretentious and presumptuous, so I'll let people infinitely more qualified do it for me.

Neil Gaiman's tribute is here.  Emma Bull's is here.  Diana Wynne Jones's official website posts the news of her death (and talks about her last two books, which will be published later this year and next) here.

All I can really say myself is that Diana Wynne Jones is one of the reasons I write children's fantasy.  She is, simply put, one of the best fantasists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and I am going to miss her brilliant stories.  Please read her books if you can.


Monday, March 21, 2011:  Random Notes

1)  My package arrived in Prince George on Tuesday, which happened to be my niece's birthday.  I suppose all's well that ends well.  However, Canada Post can still kiss my shiny metal posterior.

2)  Saturday was not a good day until I ended up on the TTC in tears, at which point three complete strangers were unexpectedly nice to me on three separate occasions.

3)  One of the better parts of Saturday was actually the bit where my band fell spectacularly to pieces in the middle of a song.  It was largely my fault; I had neglected to open my music before we began.  Realistically, I didn't need it; psychologically, I did.  I lost my head and played wrong chords all the way through, prompting everyone else to screw up in various intriguing ways as well.  The overall effect was so charmingly hilarious that the flautist and I ended up giggling through our final duet.  I'm not sure how she even managed to retain her embouchure.  Possibly the best that can be said about the performance is that it was "wacky."  Even so, I had a surprising amount of fun watching the song implode.

4)  I have to finish writing a lecture about a TV show involving a lunatic who talks to a dead man and keeps chocolates inside a skull.

5)  Have a good week.


Monday, March 14, 2011:  Canada Post Has Done It Again

One thing I frequently feel guilty about is my tendency to send birthday gifts and cards to my sister and her family so late that I almost might as well just wait for the birthday in question to come around again.  I don't like the fact that I do this, but I can't seem to stop myself.  It is a type of procrastination of which I am ashamed.

Therefore, I decided that this year, I was damn well going to send my niece Lindsay her birthday present ahead of time.  I was not going to become known as "Aunt Kari, who gives me my present in August, even though I was born in March."  So I bought Lindsay's present in mid-February.  I made her a card.  Secure in the knowledge that Lindsay's birthday wasn't until March 15th, I wrapped everything up nicely and had the package on its way by February 25th.

Well, I talked to my sister yesterday.  Had my package arrived yet?  No, it had not.  As of this Monday, it will have been on the road between Ontario and British Columbia for seventeen days.

Seriously, why?  Is the package hitchhiking?  Is it relying on transport by carrier pigeon?  If one were completely insane and willing to survive on no sleep at all, one could drive across Canada five times in seventeen days.  Where is my bloody package, Canada Post?  For once in my life, I was on the ball; I mailed the present in good time.  You charged me twelve freaking dollars for it.  It wasn't even a very big package.  It would, of course, have cost me thirty-six bucks to send via Express Post.  Since I sent it so early, I didn't think I would need Express Post.

With great good luck, the package will arrive by the 15th.  If it doesn't, I suppose my reputation as "the late Aunt Kari" will be upheld.  I'm just a wee bit frustrated because this time, I really did try.


Monday, March 7, 2011:  Not Cleaning My Apartment:  A Justification

1)  Wow...my apartment is a mess.  I'd better clean it.

2)  First, though, I should finish writing this lecture.  The class is tomorrow, so it can't wait.

3)  I've written a page and a half of my lecture.  I should take a break.  Maybe I could do a bit of cleaning.

4)  No, that's not fair; I've worked really hard, and I deserve a real break.  Ooh...TV Tropes!

5)  Okay, I'm done my lecture.  Now I need to finish my comic.

6)  I'm finished my comic, but I've got some marking to do.  If I don't start it now, I'll be doing it all at the last--

7)  Ooh...TV Tropes!

8)  Now I'm behind on my marking, and I still haven't cleaned my apartment.  I think I'll have a snack.

9)  I wonder if my ukulele is still in tune.

10)  It is!  That was fun.  Time to clean my apartment.

11)  Damn it; I have to answer e-mails from students.  I should also really start in on this marking.

12)  This reminds me of that episode of Castle where the investigation kept being delayed for various reasons.  I should try to find that episode.

13)  I was right; it was a good episode.  Of course, I had to watch four episodes before I found the right one.  Time to clean my apartment.

14)  I haven't called my sister in a while.

15)  Damn it all, I keep forgetting about the marking!

16)  It's really, really time to clean my apartment.

17)  Too bad it's two o'clock a.m.

18)  I'd better go to sleep so that I can give my lecture tomorrow.  After I get back from the university, I'll clean my apartment.

19)  For sure.


Monday, February 28, 2011:  Reality TV:  A Question for the Universe

I am teaching a course on television at the moment, and there's a unit on reality TV coming up.  I am not exactly the world's greatest reality-TV fan, so I decided I had better force myself to follow one show, then watch single episodes of some of the others the week before the class.  The show I chose to follow was American Idol.  Perhaps I should have followed Jersey Shore, which half my students seem to love, but American Idol is about all I can handle, and frankly, it's bad enough.

I understand that a lot of people like this stuff, but it just makes me so very, very angry.*  The thing that makes me the most angry is that I can tell that the show is manipulating me.  I don't mean that I loftily see past the manipulation and am not affected by it; I mean I am affected by it, and I can actually watch myself being affected and know exactly how and why the manipulation is happening and yet still feel the damn feelings that the show is making me feel.  It has even made me cry a few times, mostly due to the heartstring-tugging backstories of certain candidates.  Idol presents these backstories in such a way that they have to cause tears.  They've got the swelling music, the slow-motion shots, the interviews with proud, weeping family members, the lingering focus on the fresh young candidates tearing up over what they see as the only chance they will ever have to escape from the horrors of Real Life and become famous.  I can almost see the show's editors sitting around calculating the most effective ways to present these sob stories.  I know exactly what they're doing to me.  The fact that I still bloody well cry makes me want to punch someone.

Even more fury-inducing is the fact that this show has somehow pushed an entire generation of talented young people into believing, fiercely and wrongly, that American Idol is the only way for someone to become a musical sensation.  Quite frankly, a lot of these kids are good musicians, or they will be in a few years.  They're not just singers, either; they play guitars and pianos and a myriad of other instruments.  One candidate this year plays the melodica and has twice accompanied himself on the double bass; he also has a fantastic voice.  Yet over and over, they say the same things:  "I want this so much."  "This is my last chance."  "I need this."  "This is my dream."  "If I get voted out, I don't know what I'll do."

Guys.  You're kids.  Some of you are kids who don't know who the Beatles are (really).  Go out and play music in pubs.  Form bands.  Experience rejection and defeat.  Practise.  Buy a CD of music by the freaking Beatles.  There is not only one road to the top.  Sure, the Idol road is shorter.  Why should you have it easy?  You say again and again how "hard" Idol is, but it lasts only a few months; most successful artists try for years before they gain fans.  Why must success be instant?  Why must the words "I'm sorry, you didn't make it" mean that you will never make it?

Reality shows are about wish fulfilment.  I know that.  But when the "dream" becomes tied explicitly to the show, problems arise.

Dear American Idol:  I recognise your entertainment value, but gosh, do you ever make me angry.  Also, you've got me addicted to you, completely against my will and even though I know exactly how you did it.  Damn you, American Idol.  Damn you.

*Sort of like Glee.  Clearly, there is something wrong with me.


Monday, February 21, 2011:  Why Phones are Terrible

For a couple of months now, I've been receiving phone calls from people who clearly cannot accept that I am not someone else, despite the fact that I cannot speak their language and tend to get rather abusive when they wake me up for the twentieth time in a row at four o'clock a.m.  When I say "the twentieth time in a row," incidentally, I a) am not exaggerating and b) am actually meaning that they wake me up twenty times in a single night, at five-minute intervals.  I have absolutely no idea why.  If I don't answer the phone, they call back.  If I do answer the phone, they call back.  They speak no syllable I can understand.  Occasionally, they leave long, incomprehensible messages on my answering machine.  I call them "they" not because I am finally embracing the singular "they" but because there are several of them.  It's usually a man on the phone, but there are always numerous people in the room with him.  Sometimes, I hear nothing but muted voices speaking in the background, while the person who presumably made the call remains silent.

I don't understand any of this.  Their area code is 909, so they must live in California, but they generally call me between 4:00 and 8:00 a.m., which would be 1:00 and 5:00 a.m. on the west coast.  Yesterday, they made only a single call at 6:44; the day before, they called me twenty or thirty times between 6:00 and 8:00.  Do they stay up all night dialing my number?  Why would they do that?  Why would anyone get up at 3:00 a.m. to make twenty phone calls to a very tired person whose responses ranged from, "You've got the wrong number.  Bye" (call #1) to "LISTEN.  It's SEVEN FORTY-FIVE IN THE MORNING.  You have been calling me for TWO FREAKING HOURS.  I hate you.  Leave.  Me.  Alone'" (call # 20)?  When you get a wrong number, don't you generally check to make sure you've written down the right number?  When someone doesn't answer the phone at 5:00 a.m., is your first impulse to call again?  If the person who answers the phone screams imprecations at you in a language that is nothing like the one you are speaking, might you possibly deduce that you are talking to the wrong person?

It's 3:25 a.m.  I am fully expecting the phone to ring in an hour or so.  Perhaps I should give in and turn off the ringer, but damn it, I shouldn't have to do that.  I would like to gather together the numerous people on the other end of those calls and punch them all very hard.  It's probably just as well that I have no idea who they are.


Monday, February 14, 2011:  Oh, Goody, It's Here Again

Dear Valentine's Day:

How happy I am that you have come around again!  I look desperately forward to you every year.  There is nothing I love so much as watching happy couples goo-gooing along, hand in hand, with little pink hearts all over their sweaters.  If only you happened more than once a year!

Some people call you a cynical holiday devoted to leaching as much money as humanly possible from hapless young men who want to keep their ladies from nagging them.  I think these people are wrong.  You are a great little time of year and not at all designed to make single folk feel like crap simply for existing.  You are also clearly not a way for popular girls to keep score.  No, of course I am not still haunted by the trauma of high school.

Keep on keeping on, Valentine's Day.  May you spend many, many centuries provoking nausea in those terrible spoilsports who don't buy into your beautiful message of love and folded squares of cardboard for six bucks a pop.

Yours with a great deal of gush,
Kari.


Monday, January 31, 2011:  Because 6:00 a.m. is Such a Happy Time

Again, I apologise for skipping Rants.  The problem is that I now have to give a three-hour lecture every Monday at 8:00 a.m., meaning that I spend all weekend scrambling to complete it and generally end up without time to finish my comic and Rant.  By Monday afternoon, I'm too tired to do more than finish my comic.  This goes for today as well, but I'll do a Rant anyway.

Today's Rant constitutes an open letter to the Canadian version of Netflix.

Dear Canadian Version of Netflix:

I quite like the idea of you, and yes, I have subscribed; you're not that expensive, after all.  However, are you ever going to acquire any actual content?  It's getting a bit wearing to see the words "X is not available" over and over again.  So many films and TV shows are "not available" that I sometimes wonder if you're really worth it.  I mean, okay, you have The Republic of Doyle, so good for you, but I could get that perfectly legally via the CBC's website.  You don't have Lost, which I do want to watch, or any film that isn't zany fun and dates from 1982.  I'm hoping you will improve over time, but so far, you haven't really.  The most I can say for you is that you have acquired a few more British TV shows, some of which I'll probably try.  Have you thought of adding some current American TV shows that haven't yet been cancelled?  It would be awfully nice if you did.

I saw the musical version of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels this weekend (not bad if you like that sort of thing), and I attempted to get the original film on Netflix, but no.  The film is twenty-three years old, and you can't get the rights to it?  You don't have The Shining either; it's thirty-one years old.  The "recommendations" you toss at me every time you reject one of my requests aren't appreciated, either.  I can't get Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, but I can get Dirty Dancing:  Havanna Nights?  How does this help me?  What is wrong with you?

I'll stick with you for now, Canadian Version of Netflix, but please build up your collection a bit.  Republic of Doyle is not going to sustain me forever.  It would also be nice to be able to find at least one of the shows I'm teaching in my TV class in your database.  At the moment, I can't.


Monday, January 10, 2011:  Evil, Evil Early Classes

Sorry about not writing a Rant last Monday.  I tried, but I kept falling asleep.  I need to stop leaving everything to the last minute.  Yet again, it's 12:45 a.m., and I haven't finished proofreading the syllabus for the course I have to start teaching tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.

Why is there such a thing as an 8:00 a.m. class?  Why must such a class run for three hours?  I'm not good at mornings.  I like evenings quite a lot, but mornings are not my friends.  The only good thing about this particular 8:00 a.m. class is that it is not in Peterborough.  I can therefore get up at 6:00 instead of 4:00.  Hurrah...?

8:00 a.m. classes exist solely to torture people.  They don't discriminate; they torture both instructors and students.  Everybody has to get up way too early and spend three hours thinking longingly of bed.  I don't mind teaching the course, but why 8:00 a.m.?  Why not 9:00 a.m.?  9:00 is a relatively sane time of day.  I don't mind being awake at 9:00.

The infuriating thing is that those of us who don't like rising at 6:00 are generally labelled lazy, even if we've stayed up working until 2:00 a.m., whereas people who enjoy popping out of bed at 5:30 are praised as go-getters, even if they went to bed at 7:00.  I would like to lodge a protest, please.

I must finish preparing for tomorrow.  Note that I am up working.  If you must think I'm slothful for not being pleased that I'll be getting maybe four hours' worth of sleep tonight, please go right ahead.


Monday, December 27, 2010:  I Think I've Gone Critical (Again)

I really need to stop falling in love with various musical instruments.  It's getting a little worrying.

This past year, it's been mostly whistles, flutes, and ukuleles, all of which are instruments with which I have a lengthy history.  I've been playing the uke since I was eight or nine, the flute since I was eleven, and the whistle since some point in my teens.  In fact, I have long relationships with all my instruments:  the piano (since I was a toddler), the accordion (started at about twenty), and even the mandolin (been playing for eight years or so).  I should really just quit while I'm ahead.  However, I've recently been given a little harp by someone who can't play hers any more.  It's a cheap one made by Mid-East Instruments,* and regrettably, the wood is splitting in several places, but I've played it a bit, and now I really want a bigger one.  I'm not talking a twenty-thousand-dollar concert pedal harp here...just a decent standing lever harp.

This actually isn't a new desire.  I've been wishing for a harp for most of my life.**  However, harps are expensive, and I've never quite been able to justify spending food money for a year on one.  I nearly gave myself a heart attack eleven years ago when I spent something like three thousand bucks on an electric piano; I'm not sure I could handle the harp thing, though since I have no way of getting the tiny splitting harp back to Toronto, I'm sorely tempted.  I'm sure playing all these instruments can't be good for me.

There's no real point to this Rant.  I simply feel moved to observe that I am probably addicted to musical instruments.  I suppose it's better than being addicted to crack, though you never do know.

*Very prolific, instrument-wise, but does not have a fantastic reputation, justifiably so.
**Yes, I realise the harp is a floaty sort of instrument and doesn't seem my style.  I have been making my little one do some decidedly non-floaty things.   My theory is that harps don't have to be exclusively floaty any more than accordions have to play exclusively polkas.


Monday, December 20, 2010:  IN THE ZONE

In the past five days, I have marked, on average, thirty exams and/or essays per day.  Panic is a fantastic motivator.  I am now slightly ahead of where I thought I would be at this point, though that doesn't mean that tomorrow is not going to be just as frantic as today was.  It just means that there is a slim possibility that there won't be very much crying.

It's funny how in the middle of the term, I struggle to mark two papers per day, while at the end of the term, I fly through twenty in an afternoon.  I think I need to be under extreme stress to get anything done.  Ironically, I don't actually have any more fun while I'm struggling with the two papers than I do when I'm zooming through the twenty.

I am taking a short break tonight, and I already feel guilty about it, even though I marked eighteen pieces of work and collated an entire class's grades today (I only did fewer papers than usual because I ran out of papers.  Tomorrow is all about the collation).  I do hope I don't end up working right up to the last minute on Tuesday afternoon, though knowing me, I probably will.

Have a good break, everybody.  I shall resume my whining shortly after Christmas.  Hurrah!


Monday, December 6, 2010:  Four Bloody A.M. Again

I really have to stop doing this.  I would be truly pleased if I ever got to bed before 4:00 a.m. on what should be a Sunday night but is actually a Monday morning.  Next term, I'm going to have to change my habits, as I've got an 8:00 a.m. class on Mondays.  Hurrah...?

The horror is going to continue for at least two more weeks.  Frankly, I can't believe I have only two more weeks to mark all this stuff.  If I stop and think about it, I'll start screaming and looking for things to bang my head against.  It's much nicer to be in denial.  I can even pretend that I'll have time to do my Christmas shopping.*  I have about sixty essays to mark in the next two days so that I can make room for the ninety coming in on Tuesday and the sixty exams I'll be picking up on Wednesday.  In the meantime, I get to deal with the Joys of Bureaucracy.  Just don't even ask about that one.

Looking forward to the break would be nice, but I get to spend the break frantically reading up on television.  I have to teach a course on television next term.  I need to learn the relevant terminology really, really quickly.  I can rag on Glee, but when my office-mate started talking to me about "flow" and "simulacra," I got lost very quickly.  (She taught the same course this term.  I shall be reading all the books she read, I think.)  I have other things to do as well.  Nothing ever ends, ever.  Dr. Manhattan was right, albeit not in the way he thought he was.**

Tomorrow, ideally, I should mark about thirty essays.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  I need to go to bed and cry now.  I hope you guys are having a good December.

*I won't.
**I am allowed to make Watchmen references at 4:00 a.m. when I am really grumpy and tired.


Monday, November 29, 2010:  Hitting Stuff Alleviates Stress

Whenever life gets to be a little bit too much for me, and I need to resist the urge to fling all my marking off the balcony and then lock myself in the bathroom and cry, I purchase a small rhythm instrument, and suddenly, everything seems all right.

I cannot explain this.  I like all musical instruments, and I play several, but rhythm instruments have a special place in my heart.  It's not as if I know how to use most of them properly, either.  I can hit stuff with other stuff in patterns, but until recently, I didn't know the correct way to hold my claves.  As well, it's generally other people in my band who end up playing my various shakers and clickers and boomers, as I am needed to play instruments capable of making actual melodies.  The members of the band keep comparing me to a kindergarten teacher, possibly because I tend to wander around with bags of maracas.  I have actually lost count of the number of castanets I own.

For some reason, however, just knowing that I have access to a vast array of objects that go CLICKETY-CLICKETY-CLICK is comforting.  My latest acquisitions include a bell tree, a cowbell, finger cymbals, and a triangle; I think I'm feeling loud and clangy at the moment.  The bell tree is particularly delightful; it has twenty-five sleigh bells on it, and the sounds it can make range from "distant, delicate jingling" to "Santa Claus has lost control and is about to crash in my front yard."

It is possible that percussion makes me happy simply because it gives me something to hit productively.  It's actually a pity almost all my percussion is at Massey at the moment; I feel like shaking something vigorously right about now.  Luckily, I do have some castanets and a couple of güiros shaped like toads hanging around my apartment.


Monday, November 22, 2010:  Why Do I Hate Glee So Much?

Last week's Rant was written more or less on autopilot; I was so tired that I didn't even remember afterwards exactly what I had put down.  Reading the document over this week, I am startled to see that I actually wrote in complete sentences that made a certain amount of sense.  I'm not entirely sure how I did that.

Since it is now morning and I am fully awake, I am able to reflect more coherently on Glee and why it is that I really want to punch it in the face.

I have always had an odd relationship with Glee, about which I have written before.  I don't like it, but I still watch it faithfully every week.  I really don't want to be one of those people who follow a show just to be able to rip it to shreds; however, it kind of seems that I am, albeit only in terms of Glee.  Watching Glee is kind of like eating Sour Skittles right after a tooth extraction.  You know it's going to hurt, but you just can't freaking stop yourself.

My current source of rage is the episode that aired two weeks ago.  In it, Kurt, the only "out" gay student in his high school, has to deal with a bully who keeps smashing him into the lockers and flinging homophobic insults at him.  As it turns out, the bully is himself deeply in the closet, and he eventually plants a passionate kiss on Kurt.  A parallel storyline has the school's rather masculine female football coach, Shannon Beiste, finding out that the kids have been cooling off during their heavy petting sessions by imagining her in lingerie.  Coach Beiste is deeply hurt, but this hurt is apparently assuaged when the ultra-cute Spanish teacher takes pity on her and gives her her first kiss (followed by a comradely hug).

The twin storylines insult everyone.  Seriously...the writers have outdone themselves this time around.  What the bully is doing to Kurt is actually quite violent physical assault, but the teachers just stand around and watch; the most proactive of them talks to Kurt about one of the incidents, but no one actually thinks to talk to the bully.  What seems to have happened, as per usual, is that the writers are so focused on their little group of central characters that they have completely forgotten to deal with the implications of what they are doing to the minor characters.  Bully walks on...bully does something that proves he is a deeply confused individual...bully walks off.  Oh, and we don't need to develop him at all, besides hanging a huge "REPRESSED HOMOSEXUAL" sign over his head.  That will do for character development, right?

The bit with the coach is even worse.  Dear writers:  has any of you ever been a forty-year-old female virgin?  No?  Nothing wrong with that.  It's hardly a universal condition.  However, has any of you ever talked to a forty-year-old female virgin?  No?  Has any of you ever gone on the Internet and read a blog written by a forty-year-old female virgin?  No?  Is there a single one of you who believes in forty-year-old female virgins?...No...?

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if a forty-year-old female virgin who had just been thoughtlessly insulted by a bunch of spoiled idiot children with no conception of how the world worked had had her cute friend, the kind of guy who generally had to fend off hot women with a stick, kiss her in the locker room just so she would know what a first kiss felt like, her reaction would not have been tender tears and a hug but instead a vigorous attempt to strangle said cute friend and dump his body in the sea.  First kiss?  Cool.  First kiss given out of pity by someone who probably had his own first kiss when he was twelve?  NOT FREAKING COOL.

Dear Glee writers:  stop pretending you know anything at all about unpopular people.  You don't.  You really want to be writing about the jocks and the cheerleaders, not the freaks and the geeks, but you think your approach is "ironic."  Please go watch Freaks and Geeks.  Hang around in a real high school and condescend to talk to actual losers.  It's very difficult to write an effective satire when you don't understand the reality of what you're satirising.


Monday, November 13, 2010:  Well, It's Only 4:30 a.m. This Time...

...so let's do a list:

Five Reasons We Should Take Matters into Our Own Hands and Burn Glee to the Ground

1)  It thinks it's satirical, whereas ninety percent of the time, it's really not.
2)  It presents as an "ideal" teacher, apparently without irony, a man who habitually lies, changes his mind for no reason, gets distracted by the incidental deails of his life, is willing to put on a high-school production of The Rocky Horror Show in which he himself appears half-naked while he tries desperately to seduce someone else's girlfriend, and apparently never ever teaches the subject that the school is paying him to cover.
3)  The writers may very well have been popular in high school, as their idea of "misfits" is a group of football players and cheerleaders with the occasional obnoxious lunatic sprinkled in.
4)  The writers are also clearly not forty-year-old female virgins, as their treatment of Coach Beiste has been astoundingly condescending.
5)  The characters are driven by the plot to such an extent that they will sometimes change their personalities without warning, just so that a particular plotline can go through.

I could go on for a while, but it's now 4:45, and I need to go to bed immediately.


Monday, November 8, 2010:  I Need to Stop Staying Up Until 5:30 a.m.

There is something terrible about 5:30 a.m., especially when the clocks have just turned back.  I would prefer never to stay up until 5:30 a.m. again.  Since I am going to have to start marking once more on Tuesday--after a one-day break--I am somehow doubting that my wish will be granted.  I'm afraid I'm too tired to write a real Rant.  I hope you all had good weekends.  I remember when the word "weekend" meant something to me.  Farewell.


Monday, November 1, 2010:  I Think I Am Losing My Mind (Again)

1)  Today, I shall be visiting the dentist's office for the third time in as many weeks.  I have a fourth appointment next week.  I am tired of going around with my jaw frozen.

2)  I have nearly finished one mountain of marking, albeit about two weeks after I should have done so.  I now have to get through sixty midterms in the next four days.  I also have to write a lecture on The Hobbit, which, incidentally, I have not yet finished rereading.

3)  Last "night," I went to bed at 5:30 a.m.  I was woken up this morning at about 9:15 by the sweet sounds of a pneumatic drill.  Could I get back to sleep?  No.  Has the drilling stopped yet?  Nuh-uh.  Is it going to stop at any point today?  I don't freaking think so.

4)  I cannot for the life of me play a C#m chord that does not sound like the noise a cat makes when you dunk it into a bath.

5)  I have heard there are people who go out and have fun sometimes.  I would like to be one of those people.

6)  Did I mention that I had a "part-time job"?  HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

7)  Oh, right:  I have to reapply for that part-time job this week.  You know...because I have all this free time in which to do so.  The interesting bit is that I must fill in a separate form for every single class I apply to teach.  I am going to bang my head on the wall and sob.

8)  If that GODDAMN DRILL does not shut up RIGHT THE HELL NOW, I am going to DICE somebody.

9)  What a lovely sunny day it is.  I remember when I used to have the time to go outside for five seconds or so late in the afternoon on every second Thursday.

10)  Maybe in a hundred years, I shall actually have a very short break.  That would be really, really nice.


Monday, October 18, 2010:  Ode to the Toothache That Has Destroyed My Weekend

O toothache,
you are quite unpleasant.
I think it is possible that you
have moved beyond mere "discomfort"
and into the realm of OH MY GOD THE PAIN THE PAIN SOMEBODY MAKE IT STOP.
Of course
you had to do this on the damn weekend.
All the dentists are home doing whatever dentists do when they have
no access to instruments of sublime torture.
Possibly they watch a lot of TV.

O toothache,
I think it is possible you are causing my throat to hurt too.
I do not know how you are doing this,
but I suspect you of being behind everything
that is currently wrong with me.
Why can't you leave me alone?
Yes, I probably eat too much sugar.  I KNOW.
I can see another root canal in my future.

O Monday morning,
please come swiftly
so that I can beg my dentist for mercy,
plus lots and lots of painkillers.


Monday, October 11, 2010:  How I Didn't Quite Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Retail

I skipped last week because I finished my comic at something like 6:00 a.m. and just couldn't bring myself to write a Rant as well.  This week, I may be finished the comic as early as 3:30 a.m. (speedy), so I can squeeze a Rant in here.  It's funny how little time I always seem to have, especially as the most productive thing I actually did this weekend was teach myself how to play "Skullcrusher Mountain" on the ukulele.  Yeah, I need to re-evaluate my life.

I paid a visit to Long and McQuade (a musical instruments and supplies store) on Saturday.  The experience made me think--as per usual after I have had to enter any retail establishment that does not sell books or food--about phobias and how very much I wish I didn't have any.

I am mortally afraid of shopping.  I know it is something that has to be done, but I have never liked it or been able to handle it well.  Aggressive salespeople love me; I am easy to bully into spending money because I am reduced to a jelly of terror every time I enter a store.  In fact, an aggressive salesperson I met on Friday is indirectly responsible for my adventures with "Skullcrusher Mountain," since he sold me the ukulele on which I played it.  Granted, I had been wanting a new uke for a while (my old one is made of laminate and plastic and generally sounds rather as if it is being played off-key under water), but I wasn't sure I was willing to commit until this guy started haggling with me.  I don't deal well with haggling; I freeze up and let the other person make all the moves.  I did check up on my new uke online afterwards, and as it turned out, I got a fairly good deal on it (unless it has yet-to-be discovered flaws)--and it is pretty, and it plays in tune, and I love it very much--but the thing is that even if it hadn't been a great ukulele, I could easily have let myself be herded into buying it.  I've had this happen with computers and extended warranties, though admittedly, my luck with computers is so bad that I should go for the extended warranty every time.

The problem is that this phobia, which is as about as stupid a phobia as has ever existed anywhere, is in play all the time, even when the salesperson in question isn't aggressive.  I know it's supposed to be possible to conquer one's fears, but the effect this particular fear has on me doesn't seem to be under my control.  Whenever I address a salesperson, I lose the ability to form coherent sentences in English.  I get flustered.  In the music store (not Long and McQuade but a smaller store) on Friday, I lost my ability to tune a ukulele, an instrument I have been playing since the age of eight or so, and I broke one of the strings on a baritone I was trying because I had wound it too tightly.  In Long and McQuade on Saturday, I found myself unable to articulate the sentence, "I need a gig bag for a tenor ukulele."  As often occurs in such situations, I was reduced to using sign language and stuttering incomprehensibly.  The salesperson was very nice and did eventually come to understand what I wanted; this just made me more ashamed of myself and thus more incoherent.

I don't know if there is a technical term for the Fear of Shopping, but damn it, it's crippling.  I sometimes describe it as the "fear of people behind desks," as it extends to any situation in which I have to approach someone in charge of something.  People occasionally tell me to get over it.  I wish I could, but the problem is that even when I tell myself I am going to be brave and boldly storm a store, I end up losing my head and behaving like an idiot once I'm actually inside.  My intentions are always good, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between my intentions and my brain.

Ah well.  The experience was excruciatingly painful, but I did manage to make purchases on Friday and Saturday without dying of embarrassment.  I really hope I don't need to buy anything else for a while.


Monday, September 27, 2010:  I Try to Make My Peace with Technology

I realise I am always complaining that technology--specifically, computer-related technology, but also just technology in general--hates me.  I have had so many problems with computers, printers, scanners, tablets, modums, DVD players, VCRs, space heaters, electric pianos, toasters, ovens, refrigerators, staplers, watches, clock radios, remote controls, lamps, phones, answering machines, harmonicas, harmoniums, accordions, piccolos, bicycles, bike locks, and sliding closet doors that I'm pretty sure inanimate objects that contain fiddly bits are out to get me.  My watches are an interesting case in point.  I had a perfectly good Timex that lost maybe half a second a day until my parents gave me a really good watch for my B.A. graduation.  It never worked properly; it lost at least thirty seconds a day, stopped for no reason at random moments, and was generally untrustworthy, even after several sessions with the Really Good Watch Doctor.  It is now in my parents' house somewhere; they were going to try to get it fixed again, but I suspect they finally gave up the whole business as a bad job.  I now have a Caprice (i.e., a really cheap watch).  It worked fine for two or three years.  Then, about a month ago, it decided to mimic the really good watch and lose time for no reason every once in a while.  I thought the battery might simply be in the process of dying, and I took it off...but no, it has run perfectly ever since.  It only loses time when it is on my wrist.  I am now wearing a digital watch I found on the street.  I don't particularly like digital watches, but I seem to have no choice.

At any rate, I thought I would try to escape from my depressing and almost wholly negative relationship with technology by finding some technology that has improved my life instead of making it deeply frustrating.  It hasn't been easy.  This is what I've come up with:

1)  My hand-binder.  Many years ago, I bought a little machine capable of punching the holes necessary for a comb binding.  My reasoning was that it would a) save me on three-ring binders and b) just generally be cool.  I have used the binder frequently over the years, completely justifying the purchase.  It is a little decrepit now, but it still gets plenty of use.

2)  Books.  Books count as technology.  I like books.  I read them a lot.

Actually, that's it.  I can't think of anything else.  Even the chair on which I am currently sitting is problematic.  Even my couch is falling to pieces.  I don't think this Rant has helped me escape from my depressing and almost wholly negative relationship with technology after all.


Monday, September 20, 2010:  End of the Epic Computer Saga

And lo, late on the Day of Thor, a messenger did come to me bearing glad tidings.  "Rejoice," quoth he, "for thy patience has profited thee.  Seven weeks and two days have passed since thou broughtst thy computer to our realm for repair.  At long last, 'tis ready for pickup!"  My heart wept with joy at these words.

On the Day of Frigg,* two days and fifty after the computer was submitted to the Lords of the Machine, 'twas returned to me.  "O laptop," quoth I, "how I have missed thee.  I hate thee with a fiery, all-consuming passion, but still I have missed thee.  Do not ask me to explain this."  My gladness was somewhat tempered by the fact that my new hard drive meant that I had to reload every single damn program onto the machine, but what are hours of boredom next to the joy of a cheap Acer laptop that actually turns on every once in a while?  Cry huzzah!

If my laptop breaks again, which I am suspecting it will, I shall weep tears of terrible sadness.  Alas for the grief that the future imposeth upon our miserable lives!

*Or perhaps of Freyja, or perhaps of both, assuming that the two names are cognates.  I shall stop talking now.


Monday, September 13, 2010:  Random Thoughts About Nothing in Particular

1)  As of Tuesday, I will have been waiting for the return of my ailing laptop for exactly seven weeks.  My dad tells me that if the lovely people who currently have my computer sitting in a warehouse somewhere take more than sixty days to return it, the store officially (according to store policy) owes me a new one.  The fact that this may actually end up happening kind of appals me.  What can possibly be taking so long?

2)  I have stumbled upon more excellent British TV (for some reason, I seem to be doing that a lot lately).  The BBC has produced a three-part series called Sherlock; it is a modern retelling of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series, and it is much better than it sounds.  Actually, I'm going to have to go out on a limb here and call it excellent.  The Holmes story fits surprisingly well into twenty-first-century London; the updated elements are tastefully done (i.e., the writers don't point at them with giant neon arrows and go, "Eh?  EH?  LOOK AT THE CLEVER THING WE HAVE DONE HERE!").  It is oddly logical that Watson should be a blogger and that Holmes should obnoxiously text Lestrade the word "Wrong!" in the middle of a press conference.  The writing is very good (no wonder, as Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss of Doctor Who fame are in charge), the portrayals of Holmes and Watson are spot on, and the show does not forget to be funny.  Showcase is currently airing it; it is also available online, rather less legitimately.  The DVD will be available in Canada in November.

3)  Since I've somehow got onto British series, you might also consider checking out Blackpool, which is, unfortunately, impossible to view in North America by legitimate means.  It's a 2004 six-episode musical that is a little too odd to describe accurately; however, once you get used to the strange format (the characters sing along to pre-existing versions of well-known songs that somehow manage to fit perfectly into the plot), it becomes absolutely mermerising.  It tells the story of a man who is attempting to turn his two-bit Blackpool arcade into a Vegas-style casino; complications arise when a body is discovered on the premises, and these complications multiply after the investigating officer falls for the arcade owner's dissatisfied trophy wife.  You can see one of my favourite sequences, the opening of the second episode, here.  North Americans are probably most likely to recognise Tenth Doctor David Tennant, but frankly, all the actors in this one are great.

4)  The school year has started again.  This is really my favourite time of term, simply because the marking hasn't begun yet.  However, it will be upon us soon enough.

5)  I don't actually have anything more to say, but I wanted a fifth entry.  Have a good second half of September, everyone.


Monday, September 6, 2010:  Definitely a Curse

It is once again 4:30 a.m., so in the interests of easing myself towards a more sane sleep cycle, I shall do only a short Rant, this one a follow-up to last week's.  I am still waiting for my computer, which has now been in the shop for six weeks.  The Puture Phop people have finally given me my data back, but the machine itself is absent.  In the meantime, I am stuck with my desktop.  This computer is actually better than my laptop because it does not have Vista on it, but it has its idiosyncrasies.  For instance, the display occasionally turns pink or yellow for no apparent reason.  The useful USB ports on the front of the tower actually fell inside the box a year or so ago, meaning that I had to knock out one of the front panels, pull the loose ports out the front of the machine, and plug a USB extension cord into one of them (the other had somehow become completely bent out of shape and now works only sporadically).  My scanner does not like the extension cord.  When I plug it in, it will often decide that it is going to disconnect, then reconnect, then disconnect, then reconnect, and so on forever.  Of course, the computer goes ding every time this happens.  I am sometimes able to force a connection by squeezing the plug and the extension cord really firmly together in my hand, but not today.  Today, only plugging the scanner into the defective port worked.  In the meantime, my DVD drive has gone wonky and will not reproduce sound properly (it's definitely the DVD player's fault; if I play something off the Internet, the sound is fine).

I just don't know what to do any more.  I can make a computer or piece of computer-related equipment self-destruct simply by looking at it funny.  I would really like to punch technology in the mouth.  Since I can't, I think I'll retire to a corner and weep gently for a bit.


Monday, August 30, 2010:  It's a Curse, I Tell You

In late July, my one-year-old laptop stopped working.  This is not exactly an unusual state of affairs for me; I don't seem to be able to keep a functional computer for more than a year at a time.  Fortunately, I had gone for the extended warranty, which tends to be a scam unless you're, you know, me.  I should always go for the extended warranty.

I took my computer in for repairs on July 27th.  I had bought it from a well-known chain whose name I shall cleverly disguise so that no one will possibly be able to guess what it is.  Let's call it Puture Phop.  The guy at the desk told me I would have my computer back in a week to ten days.  He also charged me seventy-nine bucks to back up my data.  Good old Puture Phop.

'Twas exactly one month later that I returned to the Phop to inquire into the fate of my computer.  I could have phoned, of course, but I find phone conversations with people in computer stores very frustrating.  No one listens to anything you say, and when you arrive at the store, the person at the counter contradicts everything the person on the phone told you.  There is no record anywhere that you have spoken to anyone at all.

Events at Puture Phop played out as follows:

I approached the repairs/set-up counter.  There were two people being helped, so I stood a few feet back and waited.  Ten minutes later, the same people were still being helped, and when I came out of my daydream, I noticed that some guy had calmly cut in front of me.  The two people left, and the jerkwad started talking to one of the clerks.  The other one left the desk and went to talk to about six other Puture Phop employees who were just standing around, doing nothing.

About twenty minutes passed.  The jerkwad kept on being helped.  A couple started hanging around near the desk, but they eventually got impatient and left.  At long, long last, the jerkwad was satisfied, and I moved up to the desk, though by this point, there was no longer anyone behind it.  There continued not to be anyone behind it for a good five minutes.

At last, an employee, Bob (Not His Real Name), wandered up to the desk and asked me what the problem was.  I explained that I very much wanted to locate my computer, please.  Bob said a month was excessive for a repair job and promised to check.  Meanwhile, just like magic, another employee had appeared to deal with the enormous line that had formed behind me.

Fifteen more minutes passed.  I could see what was going on off in the staff area, and it was instructive.  It went something like this:

1)  Bob checked a computer for my information.
2)  Bob moved to another computer and checked there as well.
3)  Bob returned to the first computer and did yet more checking.
4)  Bob called over two other employees and showed them my receipt.
5)  The three of them opened a huge cabinet that looked to be full of laptops and went through it.
6)  They went through it again.
7)  They went through it a third time.
8)  They stared at the receipt a bit more.
9)  Bob returned to one of his computers and checked it again.

By this point, I was pretty sure that Puture Phop had lost my computer.

Bob eventually returned to the desk and informed me that my computer was off somewhere, probably "waiting for a part."  He would photocopy the receipt and ask someone senior about it.

To his credit, Bob (who actually was quite helpful) phoned me today and told me that my computer had been located and really was waiting for a part.  He said I would probably get it back in about a week.  I'm not holding my breath, but it was nice of him to call.

I seriously think I'm under some sort of curse.  Computers make me sad.


Monday, August 16, 2010:  It's Five Fifteen in the Bloody Morning

I would love to write you a real rant.  I truly would.  However, when I go out on my balcony and look east, I can actually see the damn sky getting light.  I've stayed up all night again.  I expect this (very short) little document is going to be full of typos that I shall miss because I am too tired to proofread.  Under the good points, I was able to watch last week's episode of Futurama while I was finishing up the last boring mechanical aspects of my comic.  It was about evolution, and it actually made me laugh more than once.  There is hope for Futurama.  I'm not sure there's any hope for me, on the other hand.  I have three classes again this fall, two of them online and one with sixty students in it.  I plan to break down and weep very, very soon.  The West of Bathurst book will probably be finished in the year 10,000,000,000 or so.

It is currently 5:25, and I think I need to go to bed right freaking now.


Monday, August 9, 2010:  An Open Letter to the Perpetual Construction on Bloor Street

Dear Perpetual Construction on Bloor Street:

We have known each other for a long time, you and I.  I can't remember exactly when we first met, but I know it was many, many years ago.  Ever since, you have been a presence in my life.

I have to admit that I never thought we would be together forever.  I was initially under the impression that you felt the same way; in fact, I expected you to stick around for a few months, then move on.  I knew that ours was a casual relationship, not meant to last.

Yet as time went on, you seemed to settle in.  Oh, you weren't entirely anchored in one place; you progressed slowly down Bloor, transforming the roads and sidewalks into pretty much exactly what they had been before, only with more planters.  However, your apparent movement was really an illusion.  You were clearly in it for the long haul, while I was still not ready to commit.

We have now, I think, reached a crisis point.  You have spread out over several blocks in one of the busiest parts of downtown, reducing traffic to one lane in each direction and causing bicyclists to go in constant fear of their lives.  I, alas, am one of these bicyclists.  I just don't think we mesh any more.  We have grown apart.  Your interests directly contradict mine, and your stubborn refusal to get the hell off my bike route demonstrates an extreme lack of sensitivity.

I really think it is time for us to spend some time apart.  I know you mean well, but you seem to want to stick around forever, and I would like my freedom.  Perhaps you should consider retiring to the suburbs.  Surely there is someone there who will be willing to love and appreciate you.

Goodbye, Perpetual Construction on Bloor Street.  For both our sakes, please consider finding some new interest a very long way from here.

Yours temporarily, with luck,
Kari.


Monday, August 2, 2010:  It's Official:  Computers Hate Me

I went to Newfoundland last weekend.  It was a good trip, though I fear I was grumpy enough to make several of my friends quite angry with me.  I would like to apologise to these friends.  I know I should hide my bad moods and not impose them on others, but I find it difficult to do this.  I can see myself being a jerkwad; I just can't stop.  The result is that I feel bad about it not just afterwards but also while it is happening.  This is difficult to explain to normal people, who are generally able to control how they behave.  Clearly, there is something wrong with me.

At any rate, one of the things causing the grumpiness was the fact that the second I arrived in Newfoundland, my laptop stopped working.  I had wanted to get some comics finished so that I didn't fall behind and could mark without interruption once I returned home; instead, I got hours of fruitless frustration.  One of my friends eventually managed to revive the computer, but only for an evening.  It is now in the shop, and I am using my other computer, which is slightly less dysfunctional.

I do not understand why computers hate me so much.  Perhaps they sense my computer-related weakness and go wrong simply because they can.  Other people keep their computers for years; I go through laptops the way most go through Kleenex.

I just want a computer that will turn on and do stuff.  That is all I ask for.  I'm tired of the inexplicable freezing and the data loss and the blue screen of death.  I'm tired of not understanding why neither my mic or my headphones work on my desktop any more.  I'm infuriated by Vista, Word, and all their little friends.  If Future Shop charges me for any aspect of these repairs beyond data recovery, for which it is already bleeding me dry, I shall punch someone.  You sold me this utter piece of crap, Future Shop.  You fix the damn thing.

I shall probably wander off and cry now.  Have a good holiday, Canadians.


Monday, July 19, 2010:  The Unfortunate Thing About Board Games

Last weekend, some friends and I were reminded of one of the unofficial Rules of All Board Games:  no matter how fantastic a game is, if no one in your group knows how to play it before you start, you will all hate it forever afterwards.

It's always advisable to learn a board game from someone who understands the rules.  These things tend to come with twenty-page-long rulebooks badly translated from German or Chinese; you can certainly read them, but they will answer your questions in the wrong order, if at all.  An experienced player will explain the rules as they come up.  The first ten minutes of the game will involve some fumbling, but people will probably catch on after that.

Sometimes, however, you will find yourself with a game everybody assures you is "good" but nobody knows how to play.  Such was the case last weekend with my copy of Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot.  My sister gave it to me for Christmas about two and a half years ago.  She usually plays the games she gives me with me, but this time, she was banished from my parents' house because she was pregnant and they had been exposed to German measles.  She told me the game was a good one, but I didn't have a chance to try it out until last Sunday.

I'm sure it is a good game.  I'm not sure we'll ever play it again.  We seemed to spend endless amounts of time looking stuff up in the two instruction booklets, often fruitlessly.  There were all sorts of fiddly rules that went along with certain types of cards, and we kept doing things wrong, and friend #1 cluelessly used what was probably the nastiest card in the game to give us all Ebola Virus and basically bring the game to a standstill, which, as we discovered later, shouldn't have happened because we were actually using the Ebola card wrong.  Friend #2 decided early on that he hated the game, and he actively tried to lose.  Friend #3 played skilfully and with intent to win, only to be taken down accidentally by friend #4.  I won, mostly by virtue of staying quietly under the radar throughout the game; I had no idea what I was doing and was employing no strategy whatsoever.  The effect was basically what you would get if five people who didn't know what nutmeg was were turned loose in a kitchen and commanded to bake a pie.  Any resulting edible substance would probably be a fluke.

I am a little sad about this game, which I suspect is actually kind of neat, and is certainly no more complicated than Munchkin, which it resembles.  At our next games night, however, I hope we stick to games at least one of us knows.  It is hard to keep track of one's bunnies when one doesn't know what they are for.


Monday, July 5, 2010:  Free Music and Other Sad Stories

I apologise for not posting last week.  Marking and the comic conspired together to eat my life.  They should also be eating my life now, of course, but I am currently pretending they shouldn't.

Since nothing besides marking and the occasional film* has happened to me in the past two weeks, I shall simply reflect briefly on the nightly concert at the pub across the street from me.  The place has a live band on the patio just about every night of the week in the summer.  I dimly remember the days when it stuck to Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  Those days are gone now.

It's not that I particularly mind; I quite like the whole thing with the free music.  It's just that some of the band choices are...odd.  Back in the days of Monday/Thursday/Saturday, it was all jazz, all the time; now we get various styles played on various instruments.  Tonight, it's jazz.  Occasionally, there's old-fashioned rock and roll or country.  On Canada Day, it started in the middle of the afternoon and was just freaking weird.

I mean, okay, give me Elvis all you like, but a jazz version of "On Top of Old Smokey"?  Whose idea was that?  Was your band bored?  It's bad enough that you felt obliged to turn it into jazz; the fact that it's purely instrumental is just going to make people think of the much more commonly known parody, "On Top of Spaghetti."  It was a kind of strange thing to find myself listening to, to tell you the truth.  I was waiting for you guys to segue into "London Bridge is Falling Down," but you never did.

I seem to remember that there was other odd music that afternoon as well, but now, of course, I cannot for the life of me remember what it was.  At any rate, I'm sure there will be odder stuff some evening soon.  Tonight's rather anonymous jazz is relaxing in comparison.

*Damn you, Pixar.  Damn your ability to make me sob for ten minutes, even though I know perfectly well how you are doing it.  Damn your sad music and poignant moments of silent character interaction.  And damn you, M. Night Shyamalan, for taking what could have been quite a good little story and trapping it forever in Expositionland, where it falls prey to such deadly lines as, "It is time we show the people of the fire nation we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in theirs."  Damn you.

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