Categories
montreal poetic school

Things I’ll Miss

montreal at night

City lights glowing through the blizzard;
the air infused with falling faerie
dancing gently down to rest in piles
among their silent brethren.

Twenty minutes through the blizzard,
or through the sunny cold,
or the tepid spring;
that walk to class down
charming city streets.

The closeness of the east,
one city piled atop another;
this family of cities
that I never took the time to see.

Energy. Frenetic energy built
around community; the
we-are-all-in-this-together-ness
that made each word bearable.
The thrill of the hunt,
bringing down that big assignment so
we could feast during winter.

And more, perhaps. Perhaps more
than I can say. But
I can say,
Oh, things,

how I long to miss you.

Categories
montreal music personal

Inclement Weather Blues

It was raining when I went to class this morning. Muggy and nearly warm and I began to sweat halfway through my not-even-fifteen minute daily commute. For kicks I checked the weather on my laptop in class, and saw that there were two weather warnings. Weird, I thought, it seems so temperate. The weather people were right, though. All that rain flash froze as the temperature fell to -10C, and the windy picked up to steady gusts of 90kmph (nearly 60mph).

The result? I practically had to ice skate over to the Archambault to at last get new guitar strings, and everyone’s trash bins are merrily ice skating around as well, usually right into the middle of the street. Thank goodness they’d already been emptied, I suppose, or it would be trash-a-go-go.

Now I’ve got new guitar strings, cold cheeks, two new blues guitar books, cold fingers, and a sweet 10-disc set of old blues songs. Oh, and a cold tookus. Whatever that is. Once I thaw out, maybe I’ll even give ’em a shot.

Categories
libraries love montreal olympia personal

All of me

In which the author goes on at length about not very much at all and yet still somehow covers a significant distance in both time and space, and most likely tries your patience in the process.

So there I was, a brand new shiny blog and the year was 2004 and I thought Oh my, how I’ll dazzle them. And I was dazzling, occasionally, though I often blathered on insubstantively, and rarely had anything of general interest to say. But this was a blog, and it was new, and other people were exploring it as well and we were all trying to figure out the right things to say in this venue, with these people reading that we didn’t know, some that we did. Who did we right to? To whom did we write? Why did we sound pretentious when we were only trying our best to use the proper grammar?

Some of us figured it out, I think. Perhaps they just faked it well, all the time feeling the same insecurities about their thoughts, about the personalness of an enterprise like a blog, as well as the publicness. Personal blogs are a paradox. LiveJournal seemed like a solution: personal blogs that were less public. It was all the same in the end, though. Who was it for?

I fell off the blog-wagon entirely. Multiple times. Mostly onto my head. Often I thought to myself, There are probably at least several people in the world who do not have a blog, and I thought that perhaps I could be one of them. But I wanted to blog. I really did. Maybe it would be more true to say that I wanted to write; one is strictly the other, but not when you reverse the two.

Up to speed. Right. The part where I talk about me. What I’m doing. How I feel about what I’m doing. How I feel about what I’m feeling. Good writers take their lives and turn them into stories. I guess they don’t even have to write them down, technically. Some people are just good story-tellers. I’m a decent writer, sure … but stories? Who knows.

So, anyway … I was living in Ohio, right, in Oberlin, and trying to pretend to like Ohio when really I never felt like I fit in. Getting work was hard and I didn’t know anyone except for my girlfriend and her family and for some reason, having left the comfortable womb of college and armed with a BA, I had no idea how to make new friends. I tried working in restaurants, but Ohio had this ridiculous server wage of like $2.50 an hour and the place I managed to find work was strange, poorly managed, and fairly unpopular. The only perk was that I got lots of free scones.

I got my first library job in Ohio, due to this horrible restaurant business and my desperate need to do something different. It was small, part-time, low on responsibility and fairly cookie-cutter. Alright, so it was basically retail work, but it was in a library after all and I thought that was pretty damn cool. Cool enough, at least, so that when a full-time library job opened up in the neighboring town I took it and never looked back.

By 2006 I was living back in Washington and had experience working in no less than … four libraries. Good for me, sure, but I’m getting off track with the library thing.

By 2006 I was living back in Washington. I had ended a three-and-a-half year relationship. We had ended. I had no more reason to be in Ohio after that, and fled back to Washington, moved in with two guys, and spent some serious time being confused by the female gender. Breaking up is liberating. It’s heart-breaking, and it sucks, and you feel like you’ve wasted time and that you’ll never find the person that is right for you, but all the same it’s liberating and at times you feel like your entire future is wide open and you can do anything at all that might strike your fancy. The problem is that my fancy was inordinately dull.

That’s not true. My fancy was pretty … well, eccentric. My actions were what was mostly mundane, but that makes all the difference. All the same, I went through a series of … relationships involving poor judgment on my part, and some that involved fine judgment but just didn’t work out anyway. I dated people much older than I was, much younger, and more or less in between. I never did become the slut I always kind of wanted to be, but then it’s so far against my nature that the chances of it ever happening, despite the earnestness of my desire for it, was always slim at best. All the better.

By 2006 I was not only living back in Washington, but I was living on my own for the first time and I was absolutely loving it. I was dancing, I was feeling attractive, I was accepted to graduate school at a major Canadian university to get a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies (i.e. I was goin’ to library school), and I had successfully broken enough hearts to feel as though maybe I’d burned off all the good karma I’d earned in my life and could finally start the life of crime I’d always dreamed of. Of which I’d always dreamed. Fucking prepositions.

By 2006 I was living in Washington and I joined a softball team where I was the pitcher and despite my best intentions I fell in love with a girl I’d just met, because who was I to fall in love with a girl when I was about to mosey off to Montreal and become an actual, factual librarian, and who was she to fall in love with me when she knew I was about to do such a thing anyway; but there we were, regardless, and by July of 2006 I was living in Washington and in love and ready to mosey off to Montreal for library school and I found myself proposing one quiet evening as we lay in bed with all the sincerity and love I ever knew I could possibly feel.

By September of 2006 I was loading up my brand new Scion breadbasket with all of my worldly possessions and moseying off to Montreal as I knew I would, though at this point it felt much less like a mosey and much more like a very important and serious trip that I had to take before I would be able to move on with my life in any meaningful way. For clarification, saying mosey is much more light-hearted than saying a very important and serious trip that I had to take before I would be able to move on with my life in any meaningful way. And so you can only imagine how it actually felt at the time.

This was no breakup. It wasn’t liberating, at least not in the same way, nor did I want it to be. It was a new adventure and sure, exciting, but also kind of “meh” because I’d found this great thing, this person I’d been looking for my entire life, and yet somehow almost as soon as we met I had to say “All right, well … see ya later, then,” and go trekking off into another country and for a two-year commitment, no less. Yeah, sure, Montreal is magical. I don’t say it with disdain, just the simple knowledge that yeah, it’s true but it doesn’t matter so much to me anymore as maybe it did right at first.

Since first arriving in Montreal I’ve gone through the adventure stage. It’s well over. It was fun and all, a new city with new customs, setting up new bank accounts was fun and getting a cell phone was fun and finding places to eat and buy things and going into bookstores with books in French was all fun and good and new; of course school was a big deal, too, being back in it after so long and wondering what everyone would be like and finding out that while library students are exceptional people, and interesting to a one, that a feeling of impermanence even early on pervaded everything and I felt nearly incapable of making friends as I once had back in college. We were all adults now, our lives completely underway, and it seemed like we were so much pickier about who got in and how far. Maybe it’s all just perspective. I don’t know.

Montreal is almost over, now. Library school almost done, and this mosey/muchlongerdescription thing that I’ve done is ready to buy its one-way ticket back west and bury itself beneath the damp rainforest peat of the Pacific Northwest, never to mosey again. At least, not alone and not for such a long time. Some places feel like home, after all, for whatever reason. Home is the place where your heart resonates and where you can feel the intent of everything around you: every raindrop, every leaf that falls from every tree, every bite of food and every dance is something that adds into the story of you in that place. That home.

Montreal is almost over now and I’m pulled so strongly to the west that concentration is difficult and I feel like a climber who has gotten himself onto a difficult ledge after a long climb and though he only has a little ways left to the peak he’s already spent so much energy that he doesn’t know how he’ll ever finish. Even though he can see the peak, now, part of him doubts that he’ll ever really reach it; he’s climbed so long and hard already, and maybe he never even really wanted to go climbing in the first place.

But Montreal is almost over now and with everything inside me that is capable of being certain I know that it will end, that I will reach that peak, that I’ll turn my eyes west and then I’ll turn my body west. I’ll find solace in the cool Pacific winds and in the warmth of this love that has sustained me so well for so long and that finally, soon, I will be able to devote the attention to that it deserves.

Montreal is almost over now and most of the time I believe that we will, all of us that have been involved in this story in some way or another, be better for it having happened. In the meantime I’ll occupy myself with the little stories, the day-to-day accomplishments between now and then, and the soft moments of sweetness that rest even within these, the most frenetic of days.

Categories
montreal personal

Spiteful Mistress

Montreal is a spiteful mistress. Feeling my heart turning from her, my warmth moving west, she lashes out at me with all her fury. She opens my windows, destroying the solace of my home as I come home to strange energies and missing money; she turns me away from lines I spent time and money to reach, mocking my unfit paperwork; she soils my clothes, even as I’m washing them. Her energy and mine no longer run in parallel, as is apparent with every fickle wrong she turns my way. But she can’t reach me now, not really. I’m already too far away, already awash in feelings of home, of belonging, of being in the arms of my true beloved.

I console you, Montreal, and beg your patience. I’ll leave your shores soon enough, and not return if you won’t have me.

Categories
montreal personal

Sometimes I forget …

Sometimes I forget the events that led to my being here. Sometimes I forget the days before the voyage, the glimmer of an idea of a thought, a glint of the mind, sent out so far to the east that it seemed more fantasy than possibility.

The first time I mentioned Montreal was in November of 2004. Politically motivated, I was determined to abandon the festering conservative madhouse that I felt the United States had somehow become. At the end of my rant, a brief remark: “Well, I’m off to explore the web, and see if I can find any viable ways to move to Montreal.” By the next day, I had found McGill, and my “escape route” was all planned.

Sometimes I forget the tribulations that followed;
relationships ended for my imagined lover,
a city that I’d never met.

“I’ve been thinking about Montreal. If I end up going, I have to go alone. I need to leave my attachments and start fresh, to seewho I am.”

I remember clearly reading the first letter from McGill,
“We’re sorry, better luck next time”,
and my first conversations with the administration that,
then chimaera, invisible roadblocks in my path,
are now just another everyday
part of my existence.

I continued my illicit love affair regardless,
my obsessive stalking;
I knew what Montreal was doing as I
peeked through the windows into its secret mechanisms.
I lifted up its skirts and found an impenetrable wilderness:

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. / It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will / bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish / the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again.

– from ‘Montreal’, by Leonard Cohen

Sometimes I forget this path that led me here.

Now I’m here. All that build-up and anticipation,
and now I’m here, wondering what to do with it all.
There’s magic here, absolutely,
loneliness too, as I wander through this wilderness;
remembering, and
waiting for the Brightness to manifest again.

Categories
montreal photo

Fire and ice

fire and ice

I was rudely rousted from slumber at two in the morning by the building’s fire alarm. Ten minutes later, four fire trucks showed up outside my window. Fifteen minutes later, they were gone and I was back asleep. It was worth it for the lights and the snow.

Categories
montreal photo

Weather Update

winterweather

Sufficiently snowy.

Categories
montreal personal

Goddam it’s cold!

I think that may be the first time in my life that as soon as I got home I felt I had to peel off all my clothes and immediately take a warm shower. It’s below freezing outside, it’s windy, and it’s raining. What the hell kind of weather is that!?

On the plus side, it’s neat when every branch of a tree looks like it’s been attentively wrapped in a little, clear blanket of ice.

Categories
libraries love montreal personal tech

Unconnected ramblings…

pistedusinge

With a title like that, I’m sure you’re excited to read on.

My Sony Dream System ™ arrived, and as I had feared it doesn’t have a digital audio connection. Also, it has an integrated dvd-player. WTF!? Okay, so I ordered it and I should have known. But I had thought to myself “NO WAY does a decent receiver in this day and age NOT have an optical port!” Well, I guess you showed me, Sony. FutureShop, for their part, were annoyingly vague in their description of available ports, and had no pictures on the website of the back of the receiver, which you’d think would be the most informative part to show prospective buyers. I thought that true DTS support required a digital audio connection, but somehow mine is still working through my handy red and white connectors. Perhaps my presumptions all this time have been wrong, in which case I blame Theo. Also possible is that the receiver is faking the DTS connection, but I don’t know how that would work exactly, either. In any case, my apartment is tiny and it actually sounds pretty good, so I decided to keep the damn thing, though I’ll try to sell it before I move for the summer. I’ll take a loss, that’s fine. No optical as a temporary situation is okay, but in the long term I simply can’t exist in such a state of squalor.

Did I mention that FutureShop has listed, as a recommended accessory, an optical cable? That’s just tricky, that is. The bastards. Oh yeah, and as a dvd-player it doesn’t have an hdmi port, which seems ludicrous what with television going digital and all. Here’s a link to the system, if you wanna see.

Some guy in Lawrence, Kansas wrote an op-ed piece essentially positing that libraries are worthless and obsolete. The write-up itself is incredibly annoying, but the responses to it have been really interesting. I forwarded the story on to my classmates, since it’s the kind of thing we’re going to have to stand up against soon enough, and we may as well start now. To briefly outline my description here, libraries are NOT worthless and are, in fact, AWESOME. These are facts, and therefore undeniable. So there, Mr Hirschey of Lawrence. I wrote a more eloquent proclamation (if you can imagine such a thing), in the comments proper. I encourage everyone to go and have their say. Lawrence could be a masthead for the library advocacy movement, if enough people took notice. Michael Stephens and the Librarian in Black have both posted verbose rebuttals, which is a start, but I think we really need to steamroll this issue. Their posts are worth reading, in any case.

My trip to New Jersey to see Abigail was fantastic. It was a slice of heaven, spread over a little less than two days, and that’s even considering the fact that I was suffering from some flu symptoms. Ain’t no disease was gonna get me down! The wedding itself was very sweet, and got us talking about how we want to do OUR wedding, which was fun in itself. If you’d told me a year ago that I would be making wedding plans in Jersey, I’d have given you my quizzical eyebrow look. Now it makes all the sense in the world, except for the Jersey part, of course. We’re looking at July of 2008, which will be right around our second anniversary, so it seems like a good time. Mark your calendars, etc.

I just finished watching season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which took me all of … oh, three days to get through. Maybe two. Much to my homework’s chagrin. But hey, once you start watching Buffy, it’s all over. I was powerless to resist its spell. It’s my first time through the series, as well, and a journey I began with Tim back when we were living together in Olympia. I’ll get through the rest of the series before the end of the year, and will finally be able to call myself a fulfilled and cultured individual. Until then, I have seasons 1 and 2 of Deadwood to keep me occupied, as well as, oh yeah, schoolwork.

Go figure. On one last note, the Pharmaprix up the street has Orangina for sale for $1.99 CAD per 1.75L, which makes me the happiest and orangest guy in the province, at least until Oct 13th or so, or until they run out. I bought four, which wasn’t nearly enough, but a guy only has so many arms. Until later, then: stake em if you got em.

Categories
libraries montreal personal photo school

Sunny with a chance of winter

McGill GSLIS

Today I can feel the first gusts of winter, flush with cold, though I’m sure that it’s a meager herald of the coming ice age. I’m a rain-baby, you see, born and having lived most of my life in the Pacific Northwest, I know fancy words like “rainshadow” and I’m used to more green than white, even in the winter. Granted I spent quite a bit of my youth in eastern Washington, where there is a real winter, including temperates well below zero and snow up to your belly-button, at times. But it’s been awhile since then and from what I’ve been told the winter here will be make eastern Washington seem a tropical paradise. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to it.

Tomorrow marks the end of my first two weeks of classes. They’ve been going well so far. My classmates are – so far in my experience without exception – intelligent and interesting people, and though I wouldn’t say that I’ve made any “fast friends”, I’ve made some nice connections and shared some good conversations and conspiratorial smiles. We’re all in this together, after all, for the next two years, which means plenty of time to conspire, work, and share this experience called grad school.

The GLIS at McGill is modeled to resemble real-life work in a lot of ways. It’s considered a professional degree, so the studies rest much more on the practical than the theoretical, which I think is reasonable and very useful. The graded work in most of my classes is based almost entirely on group projects. Much as a real work environment, you have a project, people to work with (or you work on your own), and a completion date. Much as a real work environment, you generally have multiple ongoing projects at the same time, and you have to schedule the projects around other aspects of the job, in this case lectures and labs (which one could equate at work to time at the reference desk, or cataloguing, or other daily tasks). This is a good model for me because even though I’ve gotten much better at working in groups over the last couple years than I used to be, I consider it an essential part of effective library practice and it remains an area where I feel like I could still grow and learn. Working with people is always the most difficult, and most rewarding, part of the job.

I have some exams as well, and term tests, and individual projects to work on. I have plenty to work on, indeed. I’m not too stressed. Yet. Give me a couple weeks.

I’m working on creating a bibliographic database with a partner in a program called InMagic. We create fields – author, title, keywords, etc – decide how we want these fields to be searchable – term search, word search, both, or neither – and then enter records using the field information. We also have to identify our purpose and audience, and pick a subject, which for us is French Poetry. So far it’s been the most daunting of the projects assigned, though hopefully once we put some elbow grease into it then it won’t seem so insurmountable. For the moment, I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it.

Other projects involve creating a diagram describing how information flows within a library, which I’m working with two other people on, as well as creating original card- and MARC-format descriptive bibliographies for three books and comparing my records to records for the same books entered in other libraries. Like I said, I’m quite busy.

If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out my Flickr photos (I added some new ones on Sunday and now there is a link over to the right), and check back here when you can. I’m going to make an effort, now that my life here in Montreal is solidly underway, to be more bloggerish. No, really!

Categories
internet montreal news personal

In case you were worried, I’m still alive.

My thoughts and condolences go out to the victims of yesterday’s attack. I’ve spent the past hour or so reading Gill’s online journal and looking at his pictures. I really don’t understand what drives a person to such acts of violence, but then, I don’t think I’m capable of any form of actual violence, on even the smallest level. I wish that people realized that there are other options and other ways to be. I wish we could always show each other kindness and compassion. I wish that we would respond to … well, President Clinton was quoted by Sarah Vowell in her essay Ike was a handsome man, and perhaps he said it best (at that time at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial service):

When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death let us honor life.

I’m avoiding linking to articles about it. The news is too sad as it is, and certainly easy enough to find and even hard to avoid. As for me, I’m fine, alive, and not afraid. I’m just so sad that things like this happen to people, both the victims and the shooter. Why must it come to this? It’s a question with no good answer.

Categories
montreal personal

Montréal, Mon Amour: Part One

I left Burlington, VT after a couple days stay with my friend Tim and headed north into Quebec early on Thursday, August 31st.  The drive was fairly short, as I had been told it would be, and I had no troubles at the border.  They looked quizzical regarding my temporary plates, since I own a new car, and the customs agent scratched his head slightly as he tried to pierce the veil of my packing in order to ascertain the actual contents sequestered deep within the dark chasms and carpeted crevices of my car's interior.  Suffice it to say that I was not able to use my rear-view mirror during my journey across the country, and that the car rode very, very low over the back wheel, as one can see here.

Upon entering Quebec, the interstate became more rural, and before long I was driving through fields of corn at a leisurely 50 kph.  Kind of like driving through  Wisconsin, only in Wisconsin the corn moved much faster.  Wisconsin corn would beat Quebec corn in a race every time, I wager.  The signs, of course, were in French where they weren't bilingual (which most of them weren't), and so I spent the drive proudly reciting signs out loud to myself, happy that, with sometimes a small amount of reflection, I knew what they meant.  "Maïze Sucré", for example, actually means that they are selling sweet corn and not that they are trying to lure tourist rubes into any unsolvable labyrinths.  

As you might expect after so much anticipation, consternation, and aggravation surrounding moving to Montreal, to actually drive into the city was a landmark event.  I had managed not to get lost so far on my trip – excluding my brief, circular tour near Toledo, OH as I searched for the Super 8 – and gave myself a pat on the back for a trip well done.  Driving into Montreal was like opening to a new chapter in the checked-out library book that was my life.  My first impression was that the city was big, that I yet had a chance to get myself horribly lost, and that at least the architecture was pretty.  I managed not to get lost, despite a great deal of construction that led me on a merry detour and made a halfhour trip through downtown take at least an hour and a half.  Finally I parked in front of my apartment building, stretched my legs, and intrepidly strode inside to claim the keys to the small 1 and 1/2 that would likely serve as my castle for the next two years.  Much to my chagrin, my apartment was being retiled and was unlivable until the next day.  Happilly, upon my confession that I had not another place to stay the night, my kind apartment manager offered me the key to an empty fourth floor apartment until the next day.  I did my best to be more heartened by his kindness than frustrated by the fact that I would have to put off unpacking, and walked out into the city to do important things (as one does).

Following the apartment manager's advice, I followed Saint Laurent south for a short time until I found the Canada Trust Bank.  I had already spent $80 wiring money to this bank, so I figured, at the least, they owed me a checking account.  Setting up my account was easy and speedy.  The gentleman who helped me, Pierre-Luc, was Francophone though he spoke English well, and he was very friendly.  Approximately thirty minutes after entering the bank, I left with a new account and debit card, and decided to continue south on Saint Laurent to see if things would continue to go so fortuitously.  In nearly no time, I spotted the Telus store across the street – which is where I had decided to get a call phone plan after a great deal of research during my stay in Burlington – and an hour later I walked out with my student plan (100 minutes long distance, including into the US, and unlimited incoming calls from anywhere!) and my fancy new phone.  The best part was that the phone came activated and about half-charged, so it was ready to use immediately.  I called Abby at work and bragged about my productivity, for which she was properly appreciative, and then went back out into the vast, vast city to explore, my productive phase at an end (being that it was now after 5 pm), and my curiosity now ready to take over.

My first exploratory excursion covered, exclusively, the length of Rue Saint Laurent.  Saint Laurent is quite long and definately thriving, packed with bars that are packed with people that are packed with booze, which in concert with the many clubs and restaurants that line the street, makes for a caterwauling sort of affair that remains yet alluring through its vibrant variety of offerings.  I kept my curiosity at street level, feeling too overwhelmed to venture into a maelstrom of drunk bodies, and by the time I got back to my night's lodging it was nearly midnight and I had walked what I suspect was nearly a total of ten miles, half of it uphill – okay, so up a gentle, barely noticable incline.  Feeling accomplished, if exhausted, I liberated the mysteriously present Ikea mattress from its resting place against the wall, layed out my pillow, spread my quilt, smoked a Canadian cigarette, and proceeded to sleep like a giant, syrupy maple log.

To be continued … 

Categories
internet montreal personal photo

Flickr Powr!

Hy hy, I'v got m som Flickr powr going on!  That includs picturs from my trip across th country!  Chck 'm out, and b sur to chck back for updats.

Pics from th Montral trip

Categories
montreal personal photo

Keep on truckin’

Dear friends,

My bloggish silence is due to the fact that I have been laboriously moving, by automobile, across the country.  I left Tuesday and arrived in Oberlin, OH yesterday afternoon for a short reprieve.  The final destination is, of course, Montreal, and I will probably arrive on Friday after hanging out with Tim in Vermont.

Rest assured that I'll be sharing my adventures with you once I've landed, that I've taken some fun pictures of my travels as well, and that I'm even considering making a small, amateur music video, if I can find the time.  Does anyone know a nice, free program I could use to edit together some video footage and throw music behind it?  If so, do tell!

'Til then, love and truckstops.

Ahniwa 

Categories
montreal personal school

La Nouvelle France

We’ve a ways to go yet,
time to spend,
waiting …

for me to get nervous.

Will this whole financial aid thing work out? Will I be able to go to Montreal? I’ll sell me soul to do so, but I hear they’re not going for much these days.

In this regard, I was price-checking colleges again the other day. McGill is a good choice, financially. For instance: U. of Wisconsin: Madison charges about $500 per credit instate, and over $1500 per credit out of state. Simmons College in Boston, as a private institution, charges just under $900 per credit, across the board. If I were lucky enough to be a resident of Quebec, McGill would only cost $60 per credit. As it is, it’s still only $375 per credit, which is chump change compared to my other options. So that’s good, but I still don’t know, as an international student, exactly how my aid works out. US Aid should apply to me just as if I was attending a US school, but I need to doublecheck that. Instead, I’m writing about how I should be doublechecking it. Priorities, I know.

Rent is affordable in Montreal as well, according to their Craigslist. Bearing in mind that those numbers, as well as the tuition numbers, are in Canadian currency, actual price is about %88 of the amount listed. Even better.

Wikipedia has (as usual) a great article on Montreal, with lots of links, shiny buttons, and pikters. If you like that sorta thing. Back in the day I was reading the Montreal City Weblog, which has fun dirt on local political stories, and well as news on various artistic events. Good times.

Montreal proper is about three times as populated as Seattle, which gives you an idea of how big it is. Visually, I find it to be an attractive city.

So how close am I to getting there? Well, I got my official acceptance packet from McGill, which was exciting in its own right. Included were immigration papers for Canada and Quebec, seperately, to let them know that I’ll be there attending school. I filled out my FAFSA, always a joy, and I’ve started filling out mad scholarship applications. Between four years of library employment and good references from coworkers and professors, I think I demonstrate a dedication to the job and the ability to excel that scholarship committees are looking for. But having never been through this process before, I admit to no small amount of trepidation.

My undergrad process was so easy. I filled out the FAFSA (not entirely easy, but easy enough), and the state and federal government practically threw grants, aid, and loans in my face. After four years I ended owing a little over $20k, which isn’t horrible by any means, which is now down to about $7k. I’m a giant fan of subsidized loans for education, and if they want to offer me a whole ton of money in loans, I’d be happy to take it. The education is the thing, and I can’t think of a cost too great to not make it worthwhile. Which is all well and good, but doesn’t mean they’ll give me the money, anyway.

So that’s my state of the union, as it were. I’ve been out dancing a lot, again, which is great fun, and I’ve been meeting some super people. And it helps me not worry so much about the grad school money thing, because it will work out, one way or another. Until it does, I’ll just keep dancing.

Categories
montreal personal poetic

Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter.
It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will
bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish
the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again.

– from ‘Montreal’, by Leonard Cohen

The news is official,
though still too early to pack my bags.
I’m ready now for that trek, again;
ready again to consolidate my life into
a two-door on wheels and to drive like flying.

In August I will take my leave from this rain,
from these domes and evergreens,
lakes and quiet inlets.
August, a day away at best and yet
still too far to taste.

And long past August, when the hard winter falls,
we’ll corrode together,
Montreal and I,
and eat away at the institutions,
at the heartbreaks and the lonely solitudes
and we’ll emerge and be stars upon the earth.

And every step will be a search for new constellations.

Categories
humor montreal school

Guerilla warfare is for monkeys

And monkeys are awesome, so it’s all good.

I think we all need to do more stuff like this.
Imagine the possibilities.

Tickle-Me Elmos could stop giggling and start screaming “Bad touch! Bad touch!” to teach kids that it’s okay to speak out against their local priest. The Pee-Wee Herman doll could make lewd comments about how much he likes it when you pull his cord. But nothing’s quite as good as a G.I. Joe doll idly wondering, “Will I ever have enough clothes?” Thanks to Kevin for the link.

So I’ve been in absolute la-la land lately. A lot of those “complications” I mentioned in a previous entry have worked themselves out, and I’ve been having a blast. Last night I cooked borscht for the first time, and it actually turned out pretty well! Granted, we cheated a bit and used a food chopper device, which made the beets a little more minced than I would have liked, but the end product was superb. We sucked that down with some red wine and some warm bread, cleansed our pallettes with a raspberry liqueur (which was heavenly, oh my god), and watched a couple movies. Everyone had left after the first movie, and so just the two of us were left to snuggle through Gods and Monsters, which saw us both passed out within a half-hour. So I guess I can’t say I really watched it. But the first half-hour seemed quite interesting!

Something which may surprise some, dismay or anger others. I’ve pretty much decided that if I get accepted to McGill that I’ll defer for a year, during which time I’ll also apply to the University Of Washington’s MLIS program (which I was too late for this year, unfortunately). McGill would be awesome, and Montreal looks fantastic, but ya know … I gotta see about a girl. It’s not an easy decision, and nothing’s written in stone yet, but for now I feel like putting grad school back a year and perhaps not doing it in Montreal is a smaller sacrifice than letting this amazing woman possibly slip away. Hey, it’s a surprise to me too!

As Theo‘s mentioned, tonight we’re going up to Seattle for a bit of club-hopping. They have a deal in Pioneer Square where you can get a club pass (7 clubs) for $12. Not bad! We’re gonna start out with some grubbin’ at The New Orleans, a place I mentioned previously when I went up to Seattle with Christine and met some great swing-dancers, and then the guys are gonna swing over to The Owl ‘N Thistle for to take advantage of their nice dart boards and fine brews. Then who knows what the night may bring. I’ll be sure to let you know.

That’s it for now. I’m gonna go try and write a micro.

And now your moment of zen.

Categories
cinema dance love montreal

If at first you don’t succeed …

… shoot first and ask questions later.

I watched The Boondock Saints for the first time the other night. I’d been avoiding it because of all the 1337 D3WdZ who said how awesome it was. I trust not the ‘leet doods. But then, some movies are enjoyable to many different kinds of viewers, doods and modest geniuses alike. Chances are (and wouldn’t it be ironic) that geniuses is not actually the correct word. I’m too lazy to check. The title for this post is in honor of the autistic bar-tender, for whom I mourn when he is shot, and all his mixed idioms.

————————

There’s a beautiful woman in my life now, with whom I connect amazingly well. This last week we’ve spent nearly every free moment together, without a trace of boredom or dischord. We’ve admitted openly that we’re completely smitten with each other, and have both acknowledged that we have an uncommon bond, one which very much entices the fatalist in me. Unfortunately, and perhaps I should say, of course, there are complications. I’ve a knack for complications, it seems. And in this case, the least of which is my moving to Montreal in the Fall. Funny, isn’t it?

I won’t get into particulars. My theory is that no relationship is perfect, and despite the fact that our connection honestly seems to be, chance has tossed in factors that make things tricky. So what to do? It’s only been a short while, so I figure it’s best to take things slowly, and see if maybe some of these snags work themselves out on their own, or with minimal tweaking. Which will leave others that will require care and attention. Who knows what the future holds? Each passing moment, and each day that goes by, I feel a little luckier to be alive.

My friends are alternately supportive and critical, and when they start to question me my response is: There may be the “one true love” out there; there are probably a few people, at least, that are extraordinarily compatible with you, but there are certainly not millions of them. When an opportunity comes along in such a way that it seems right and good and meant to be, to be put off by “minor” details is a matter of cheating yourself.

Which is not to say it will work out, necessarily, but that it is definately worth the effort. This is a brand new adventure.

————————

Supposedly we’re performing our “Tainted Love” routine on Tuesday. I say “supposedly” because I highly doubt that we’re actually prepared to do so (though I could probably muddle through it today, there are seven other people involved), and pushing back the date may be the best recourse to avoid someone’s head getting split open during a botched back-flip. Yes, swing dancing: fun AND dangerous.

Aside from that, I’ve been dancing my ass off even more than before, thanks to having a fantastic dance partner that loves to learn new things as much as I do. We lindy, we shag (dance *cough cough*), we salsa, we balboa, we charleston, we may learn tap, we sway (what I like to call blues dancing), and we have a rockin’ good time. My legs are getting tough, my arms are getting sore, and I tend to laugh a lot. Dance is a good thing, go try some.

In parting, one last bit of autistic Boondock wisdom:

“If you can’t get out of the kitchen …
… don’t cross the road.”

Categories
art montreal photo

More Montreal Madness

I steal all my Montreal links from the Montreal City Weblog, so you can always just go there and read more. But these are just the links I find of particular interest.

A man named Richard Florida talks about how Montreal has become a “creative center”, a “cutting-edge city that others would love to emulate.”

Over 2000 pictures indexed under “Montreal”. Woo, pictures!

A snazzy-looking journal from Montreal, with some slick film reviews.

David Carr of the New York Times talks about Montreal’s anglo-music scene, mentioning The Stills, Simple Plan, and others. One Montrealer scoffs at the attention, saying “What is going on here will continue to go on long after the attention has gone elsewhere.” Montreal is hip with or without attention from the New York Times, thank you very much.

The Hour talks about Montreal’s recent mention in Spin Magazine. More talk of music, and how the creative scene has been molded by the political background, though it sounds like Spin may have been a bit off the mark, there.

The following from Google News:

A tourist trip to Montreal,, and talk of art. Neat!

CTV offers proof that telemarketers are evil. Like we didn’t already know that. The shocker of this entire story is that people actually talk to telemarketers.

Ubisoft plans to create 1000 jobs in Montreal. Yay, video games!

And thus ends, for today, my obsession with Montreal.
À la prochaîne.

Categories
dance montreal music

Simply mad for Montreal

Ignore the gibberish, this story’s tantalizing.

Last night, live band rockin’ the swing,
mostly older tunes: St James Infirmary,
Blue Skies, Take the ‘A’ Train; live with
the Kevin Buster Quartet.

On the slower tunes, I made like a blues bandit;
stole away into the arms of beautiful women and
sssssswwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeddddddddd.
Leg against leg, movement in the shoulders and hips,
pushed close by gravity and rhythm;
not grinding, but closing your eyes and trying
to translate the music into movement,
into the connection you have with your partner,
into electricity and light and heat and breath.

Slow songs, as played by a band, last a good ten minutes,
if not more. After, you peel away with a sense of loss,
but also a new connection with whoever you danced with.
It’s not romantic, really; just intimate,
like sharing a secret. Afterwards, we hugged a moment,
and smiled, and tried to remember how to breathe.

Later, she told me I was officially the best lead
she’s danced with since her grandfather. This from
someone who’s basically started to come dancing because
of her fond memories of dancing with her grandfather.
I was flabbergasted by the compliment, and my gast
doesn’t often get flabbered. Quite the pick-me-up.

I feel like I might, finally, be getting the hang
of this connection thing, and especially
these slow, sultry stylings. It’s a matter of being
comfortable in your own skin, of letting go of the
attachment involved in being intimate with someone,
of relaxing and connecting and listening.

In short, it’s neat and it’s liberating.
I’ve no doubt I’ll still approach it with some
jittering of nerves and anxiety, but trudge on
I will, into that brave new world.