Possibly the Most Honest Post I Will Ever Write

Consider yourself warned.

If you look closely at this blog you will find that the attempts at witty self-deprecation mask roiling inner turmoil. Like most people, throughout my life I have found myself in many states besides contentment: teen angst, burning insecurity, tense undercurrents of anxiety, inexplicable but pervasive moodiness. But the past few months can only be described as depression, in the truest sense of the word.

I woke up late every morning and desired only to sleep more. The remnants of usual human duty whispered to me that I had to go to school. On the better days I listened, but many days I opted to remain as removed from daily life as possible, lying prone and blank until my joints ached from lack of movement.

Depression is like losing parts of yourself in a slow steady succession: first your thirst for social contact goes, then your interest in usual pastimes wanes. You stare at your book, your music, consider watching a DVD. But none seem particularly attractive. By this time, your disconnect from reality has obscured whatever goals you may have held. Finally your sense of self slowly erodes, because without things to go out and do, people to do them with, and objectives to look ahead to, how can you know what you want? After all, each day is driven by a want and the pleasure we get from fulfilling it, whether it’s talking with a friend or reading a book or working towards a degree by attending a class. Each day should move you forward in some way, and depression renders you completely static.

I’ve been out of commission, not just from this blog, but from life itself. There are many things I have to go about doing, from getting back in touch with people to finding a job to  not failing out of Concordia (ah, summer school: the ever reliable second chance). This blog isn’t particularly productive, in the way that there is nothing concrete to show for it except some letters floating in cyberspace. Because of this it often gets pushed back to the end of my list. After all, blogs are just indulgent ramblings. But I’d like to think there is a small amount of insight or humour to be found inside these ramblings.

Plus some self-help book declares that if you want to succeed at something you have to practice it for something ridiculous like 10,000 hours so I have a lot more inflicting of the interwebs with my half-baked ideas to come.

I LOVE YOU ALL AND IT FEELS GOOD TO BE BACK.

Moving Day

Interestingly, this is perhaps the most false representation of moving, or indeed life, I could find on the whole of the Internet.

I am moving in with my sister this weekend and am currently packing in a languid fashion, stopping frequently to try on shoes that I dug up from the forgotten depths of my closet or to consider the transient nature of living  as a student. Basically I’ll finish at three AM and will probably watch an episode of The Sopranos or find some other brilliantly productive use of my time to ring in the morn. This will be in perfect alignment with my personal edict on how to live one’s life: Think of every no-nonsense, Oprah Winfrey, Good Housekeeping piece of advice you’ve ever heard and run, blind-folded and flailing, into the other direction.

Anyways, it will be interesting to see what it’s like to live with my sister without my parents there to mediate our arguments. I’m guessing shitty, because as the youngest they always took my side. This favouritism probably dates back to when my  sister was born with a cone head and chose as her first utterance ‘potato.’  Although now she is very attractive and is going to do some fancy graduate degree in London so the playing field of our parents’ affection is more even. On second thought, it really was quite a gentle cone, perhaps “oval head” is more appropriate.

I am moving in with her after all.

My Special Day

Tomorrow I turn 22. In a thoughtful act my mother presented me with a box of assorted pastries, crumpets, etc, so that I may sample their delights on my Birthday with friends and loved ones. After much thought (two seconds) and some restraint (next to none) I proceeded to consume about 67 percent of the festive cakes standing at my counter, alone, whilst listening to Chemistry today. Not very celebratory, perhaps, but when can you drop the preschool facade of ’sharing’ if not on the day of (before) one’s birth? Further, Girls Aloud were the perfect guests, entertaining me with their catchy ditties and not once asking to partake in the snacks. It’s probably more fun than I will have on my actual birthday, which generally people use as an excuse to get drunk and remind you that your precious youth is slipping away and your cold, hard grave grows nearer everyday. Then at the end of it all they ask you to give a speech.

So Happy Birthday, Adele!

UPDATE: Today I called my sister and she took about one full minute to remember my birthday, leaving me crestfallen, and then my Dad called and I leapt for my phone in anticipation, only to be greeted by the sounds of muffled speech and elevator music. He was confused (I have inherited much from him). He called right back, so thanks Dad.I If I have learned anything from your motto-laden power speeches it is that, ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’

Anyways, this just proves that the post above and the cynical girl it portrays is probably just an act I use because I’m embarrassed I come from the suburbs, and I am in fact a drooling, flailing little baby who needs constant love and attention. But, deep down, aren’t we all?

Q: Despite the ‘Don’t Stop’ Album Debacle and Annie’s General Career Anti-Climax, Can She Still Bang Out A Good Pop Song?

A:

(Postscriptum: that video indicates a ‘yes.’)

School Daze

It gets harder and harder to remember why I went to university as the years go by. It’s not that I’ve completely forgotten, just that I have to stop and purposefully remember. Obviously after the suffocating and obligatory high school period university seems like a haven of new ideas  filled with dynamic people but it’s really just triple the workload with the option to relieve stress legally with beer, which in the end proves incredibly expensive. But I try to remember that beyond the scholarly knowledge I am accumulating I’m also acquiring valid life experience, and in short, am a different person now than before I entered Concordia and overall, the better for it. Plus having a degree means not feeling inferior at dinner parties when I’m in my thirties.

The third year is a bit of a rut, though, isn’t it? First arriving at university for most students is the first time they have truly been on their own, and, thrilled with their new found freedom, often they discover a budding sense of responsibility and are determined to set their life on course now that they have finally been given the tools to do so. Or they take a path of excess straight into the gutter, giddy with the fact that no matter how many times they skip class to experiment with heating Kraft Dinner on the rez hallway heater, Mommy won’t yell at them. Fortunately my trajectory was closer to the former, but part of the problem is as the memory of what it felt like to be a sixteen year old living in a stifling suburban milieu with no way out fades, so does my  gratitude for the opportunities university can provide.

But next year will be my last year, and that means the finish line is in sight. Much readying, studying, intellectual debating and playing of Diddy Kong racing on my Nintendo DS when I should be doing my homework await. Because, in the end, while I have grown immeasurably these past three years, at my core I am still that sixteen year old broody teenager hiding with my sweet, sweet gameboy in my bedroom closet while shouting assurances to Mom that I’m working on my algebra problems at this very moment.

Madonna: I Miss the Cone Bras

These days Madonna’s known for having terrifyingly large biceps and publicly divorcing Tarantino-redux film directors, so it’s easy to forget she was one of the most fascinating and provocative pop stars known to man. I just watched ‘Truth or Dare‘ and realized that if it were fifteen years ago Madonna would be granted a fairly large slice of my pop star devotion pie, on par with Sophie, Roisin, and Nicola. She seemed so utterly in control of her career and aware of the superficial, fleeting nature of stardom that instead of treating it cautiously she milked it for every hedonistic pleasure it had to offer. Instead of criticizing modern culture she reveled in its excesses:  she saw the growing exorbitance of capitalism and give us ‘Material Girl,’ she saw promiscuity being flaunted in the face of the Catholic Church and give us ‘Like a Prayer.’ And all whilst singing timelessly catchy pop tunes.

The Blond Ambition Tour shows her at the peak of her career, because although she has had moments of brilliance afterwards, including ‘Secret’ and ‘Hung Up,’ they don’t feel as relevant or classic as anything included on the flawless ‘Immaculate Collection.’ Soon after she would loose her touch and cease to easily identify the pulse of modern society; ‘Sex’ seemed coldly calculated and tired, not spontaneously conceived and gleefully executed as her earlier controversies had.

But in ‘Truth or Dare’ Madonna is an international pop star of epic proportions, living her life exactly as one of her status should. Lounging in a hotel somewhere in Europe with Sarah Bernhard, she declares she is bored. “Who do you want to meet?” Sarah asks her, and Madonna ponders over all the possible movie stars, artists, and royals who could be beckoned to her for her pleasure. “I don’t know,” she replies, “I’ve meet them all.”

The Universe Would Benefit From More People Reading Christopher Walken’s Twitter Page

Click.

On a somewhat related note, I just watched The Deer Hunter and it affected me in a way movies rarely do. It seemed to reveal some innate truth about male relationships and made me fall in love with Meryl Streep a bit.

USB Nightmare

Your pleasing array of colours do not fool me into forgetting you are the Devil's agent

In theory, the concept of a USB key is amazing. Write loads of stuff and pop it into a tiny magical stick which holds it for you until further use! Yet there are literally dozens of things that can go wrong in execution. The amount of times I’ve accidentally copied a shortcut instead of the actual document, or the wrong version, or thinking I’ve finally done it right this time only to learn I forgot to convert from .wps and my paper is a strange collection of dots and dashes resembling what I assume Morse code would like were I the seafaring type. Now anytime I must get my work from my humble laptop to the second-rate computers within the hallowed halls of my educational institution I go through so much double checking and e-mailing as backup that as I might as well copy the entire thing BY GODDAMN HAND as it would probably take less time and cause less stress-induced sweaty palms. Anyways, enough ranting. I must now channel my energy into recalling the last third of my Religions paper.

Outcomes and Some Long Overdue Merriment

So I finally did that ‘go out and get beer’ thing I was mentioning earlier. Actually, it was red wine mixed with Oasis ‘tropical punch’ juice in a relatively successful attempt at a poor man’s sangria. First I went to see some outcomes from the directing class at school. What is an outcome, you ask? Well! It is a Concordia University Theatre Department term denoting the product that comes out of a traditional one semester class, be it an acting class, a directing class, or what have you. In this case, there were fifteen different ten minute scenes broken up by two intermissions during which I partook in some cheap wine of dubious quality. The emotional upheaval of watching so many different scenes, several of which were quite intense, combined with my warm feelings of pride for my peers and the effects of the aforementioned wine meant I came out of the outcome feeling a bit light headed and somewhat gutted. Plus, I was feeling pretty tired, it was already eleven, and I was an hour away from home. The sensible decision seemed to go home. But then my friend said she had just purchased several bottles of that cheap wine and was having people over and sensible started to seem a bit overrated.

Small parties of fifteen or so consisting of people you all know and like really are the best, aren’t they? The more the merrier does not always hold true. Who wants to be in a room full of strangers? Popular opinion and National Lampoon movies have convinced us that huge amounts of people is what makes  good party, and it should start with beer hats and raging and end in an explosion of vomiting and passing out.  But while we all have a soft spot for beer hats, instead of a huge party I prefer the more intimate ‘get together’ : you can wander from room to room and find pockets of people who are in the middle of giggling over some silly anecdote and feel comfortable enough to slip in and add to the banter. Because what really  makes a good party is conversation and jokes and a hangover the next day is an unnecessary and unpleasant appendage.

Lest I start sounding like a geriatric, however, let me add that in my experience sometimes the celebratory spirit takes over and the night goes to places both unintended and unforeseen:

(That is a joke, Mom).

Depeche Mode are Back!

Although I can’t promise they will sport such sexily jaded stares as they did in the Good Old Days:

They are releasing a single called ‘Wrong’ and, as is tradition these days, have put together a promotional musical video clip to be shown on music channels, Youtube, etcetera, for the viewing pleasure of the public at large in exchange for the possibility that said public would consider throwing some money in the general direction of the Dep Mode and their upcoming album:

Now, as much as we all love watching Nadine pout fiercely and Nicola shoot lasers out of her iron-clad ‘Death Stare,’ it is nice to have a video with a bit more ’substance.’ This one  is a tense mind fuck involving a bound and masked man and punctuated by bouts of fatal violence culminating in a sudden car crash. Are Depeche Mode trying to express the claustrophobic mindset of the modern man? Whatever it is they want to get across, you can be sure it is deep because replacing the requisite boobies and bums in pop videos with this is a definite bucking of the trend:

As a side note, the Mode’s return has reminded me how incredibly amazing ‘Personal Jesus’ is. Will there ever be a  riff as deliciously addictive as those first few opening notes? No, there will not be. It is enough to make  guitar-toting, future indie-pop saviours everywhere throw their hands up in dismay and go home to cry their eyeliner-rimmed eyes out.