I know why spring is mating season in the animal kingdon. It’s because people are better looking in spring.

I noticed this as I was walking across campus today, with my jacket unzipped and toque tucked away in my bookbag. With the temperature flirting with double digits (above zero, for once) I was finally able to be comfortable outside.

There was a day last week when it seemed like rue University, a busy downtown street sloping up the mountain, was much longer than usual. How could a street, one I had walked along almost every day for years, suddenly gain a few hundred metres in length? It was an optical illusion—it just happened to be warm enough that day that I could look up the hill and not have my eyes freeze.

Come spring, no longer do we have to cover ourselves in five layers, each one thicker than the last. We can bust out our favourite jacket if that’s what we want. In this perfect median termperature one person can be wearing a t-shirt and another a full ecclectic ensemble, but nobody is hunched over in a speed walk from point A to point B, trying to race the cold.

It’s not that people are scantily clad that catches my eye—its not that warm yet—its just that they can finally be comfortable and wear what you want. In the winter when someone tries to dress stylish, they look foolish. It doesn’t matter if you want to wear a short skirt to the club, nobody thinks that looks good outside at -20 degrees. It looks painful. In the spring you can dress as you will and not worry about losing an appendage to frostbite.

A person’s style shows through, and whether cutting edge, mainstream, offbeat, or unique, a person who looks like they feel good, like they feel confident and happy, no matter what they’re wearing, looks damn good in spring.

Today was the day of a provincial election here in Québec. I chose not to vote, because I’m still maintaining my official New Brunswicker status for such things, but I did watch the coverage on TV tonight. I noticed two things:

1) Each of the three english networks are so desperate for results and something to talk about early in the evening mere minutes after the polls have closed, they put up results from some ridings with only 5 or 6 votes counted and say what a surprise the standings are so far. Come on guys. When the frontrunner only has 3 votes so far, each of his opponents have 2, and there are still several thousand votes to be counted, I think it’s a little early to talk about what a surprise it is that Mr. So-and-so is winning the seat. I think everybody needs to calm down.

2) When I say I watched the election coverage I actually mean I watched the two minute updates during the commercial breaks in 24, but I loved the way the anchor tried to tailor the coverage to 24 fans.

“Well everybody, while Jack tries to solve his latest problem, Jean Charest is facing a problem of his own here tonight….”

“The Liberal Party needs to get some more seats fast, because time is ticking, just like on 24.”

“And from one thrilling drama to another, welcome back to our election coverage.”

“Looks like it’s going to be a minority government here tonight, which means once and for all that Charest is definitely not as cool as Jack Bauer.”

Ok, I made that last one up. None of them are exact quotes anyway. I wasn’t paying that much attention. Really what I’ve been doing is working with a computer program my lab partner and I have put together for our research project. We call the latest version “the puffy plotter”, and that alone I think is more entertaining than the election.

The disturbing thing is that, according to one pundit on CBC Radio, this is one of the best outcomes Stephen Harper could have hoped for. He doesn’t have to worry about a referendum, his federalist buddy is still in power, and there’s huge support for the closest thing this province has to the Conservative Party, the right-wing ADQ. Combined with rumours at the federal level of poll numbers turning significantly in favour of the Conservatives and an election looming in the spring, this makes another term with Prime Minister Harper seem all the more likely.

I’m going back to play with the puffy plotter.

What the hell does “hetero-normative” mean anyway?

I get the feeling that there should be some negative connotations associated with the term “talking heads”, but I can’t figure out why. What else should heads do? What else should be talking?

I had to write a paper on feminism last Friday. I couldn’t do it. All I could think of were those stereotypical types, “nazi-feminists” as a friend of mine called them. The kind of people who use words like “hetero-normative”. I can’t stand it.

I just read a novel, published online, called Lockpick Pornography. It’s fast, dirty, and angry. Full of what can only be described as “nazi-homosexuals”; the main character at least is militant and wild in his hatred of anything “normal”. It is a rant about gender issues, and though I do agree with some of the points, I could barely stand reading it. How can a person be angry at the heterosexual beauty myth? What does that even mean? I survived through it with the help of Mrs. Hubert and Michelle.

“Tough like set theory, but easy like Home Economics.” I’ve heard that line before. In different words, from a different author, but it’s the same line.

I sometimes think that I need to be a black transgendered woman in order to understand what people get so upset about sometimes. I am a middle class white male; such people have no clout in matters of discrimination. How are people offended by words? By actions, even? The things that offend me most are people trying too hard to be politically correct or non discriminatory. Sexism for the sake of sexism is probably wrong in most reasonable moral theories, like racism and homophobia, but these discriminatory “isms” can be only a consequence of some incidental correlation.

I’m reminded of Stephen Colbert. He claims on his show that he doesn’t see race, and in doing so, sounds racist. That’s the beauty of it. I think it’s completely realistic. Ignorance of your own racism and not being racist at all, at times, converge to the same thing. That’s not to say that racism (sexism, etc) is right or justifiable, it’s just that people often perceive things as racist when they’re nothing of the kind.

South Park. Episode 4×08. Chef Goes Nanners.

Chef: Whoa, whoa, whoa. You just missed the point entirely.

Children: Huh?

Chef: I’m not mad because the flag shows somebody getting killed. It’s because it’s racist!

Children: Racist?

Chef: Children, don’t you even know what this argument is about? That flag is racist because a black man is being hung by white people.

Children: Ooooh

Chef: Oh?!

Children: We didn’t really see it that way.

Chef: But that’s a black man up there.

Children: Yeah but, colour of someone’s skin doesn’t matter.

Chef: But of course it matters when… oh my god.

I’m definitely aware that I might be accused of just being ignorant of the subtleties of the issue—of racism, feminism, the social construct of gender, all of it. But I think it’s equally possible that it’s all the subtleties that are social constructions. Something for us to direct our anger at. Social construction as a social construction. It’s not something I’d be able to argue for if someone assaulted me on the street accusing me of conforming to hetero-normative expectations as they do in Lockpick Pornography, so I reserve the right to change my mind about the whole thing, but my intuition tells me that it’s a philosophy that could be developed further.

Every once in a while I remember something from years and years ago that I’d like to hear or see again, like a piece of music or a movie, but can only remember very vague details about it. In the past, I’ve turned to the internet for guidance, and it worked then so I’m going to try once more.

The object is a play. See if you can tell me which one.

In grade eleven or twelve we read this play in our English class. It was a comedy and had some genuinely laugh out loud moments. I’d like to read it again, or watch out for a stage production of it, but I can’t remember the name.

It was political in nature, but with fictional countries. Each half of the stage was part of a country with an embassy, and ambassadors and their wives would go back and forth with humorous results. What exactly it was about thematically, or even what the plot might have been, I can’t remember, but it was in a book with a blue cover and there was a particularly funny line three quarters of the way down a right facing page. Something, I think, about a particular ficticious holiday in this ficticious country.

That’s not enough information for Google to track down an answer (at least not with the keywords I tried), but it’s probably more than enough for at least one person out there on the internet somewhere. It’s probably somebody’s favourite play of all time, somebody who spends all day obsessively searching for even vague references to it like this one. I’ll just trust Google to direct them to this page and wait for the answers to come rolling in.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Craigslist looking for an apartment to sublet, and as is only natural with a midterm to study for, I’ve lately started wandering around other categories. In particular, I lose myself in Missed Connections.

I recently read The Hipless Boy’s eight one-sentence stories. That same feeling comes out of each of these ads. There is a mystery behind some of them. Who wrote them, and to who? What encounter inspired them to reach out into the cyber darkness for that connection?

They range from the sweet and innocent:

Thankyou
You might think you did very little, but you’ve given me a confidence I’ve been searching for for months. I hope one day I can somehow repay the favor.

to the slightly creepy:

The girl at McGill every Saturday
We keep looking at each other everytime. We have never been engaged in a conversation. I find you very cute. Do you feel the same thing I feel? [...] Hint: Not that I am handsome, but I am really visible in the classroom!

No thanks, Professor. But then, it is only what I imagine that makes them seem as such. My imagination makes almost every character cute and shy, and every word genuine. Many may be frauds, jokes, or without meaning. I have no way to know.

They remind me of similar missed encounters I’ve had. Sharing a look with a stranger, that girl that said “You’re welcome!” when I thanked her for holding the door, or a smile on the subway. Nothing ever comes of them and I don’t expect them to. I live for those moments. Craigslist’s Missed Connections is evidence that other people do too.

If I were to write one right now:

Tell me your secrets
Dear R&R,
We met in January; Your curvature attracted me.
I’ve crossed the event horizon and there’s no going back.
Let’s make naked singularities.

Time to study.

That I don’t like coffee is a fact that to some people is as incomprehensible as not drinking alcohol. My preference for tea is sometimes enough of an excuse as it is an equally respectable hot beverage (such a strategy does not exist for alcohol), but I have sensed mocking tones before. Not unlike that time someone poked fun at me for ordering milk to go with my chocolate cake. It’s all in good fun, but still.

Nonetheless, I still manage to make a habit of going to study at a nearby Tim Horton’s three or four times a week. My beverage of choice is generally the French Vanilla Cappuccino. It’s a sissy kind of coffee, but still a standard order. The problem is that there’s only so much of that stuff that you can drink in a day. It’s heavy and sits with you for quite a while, and there’s always an undefined fog of “unhealthy” floating around when I have one.

I could get tea, but it always feels so wrong to pay $1.50 for something I can get at home for ten cents. I could order that thing called hot chocolate but I know it’ll just be brown water. The alternative that I really want, that is just as satisfying and unhealthy as the cappuccino but without the coffee overtones, is a raspberry hot smoothee.

Few know these things even exist, but they do. I don’t even know what it’s made of, aside from using the same machine as the flavoured cappuccinos, but it’s hot and it’s raspberry flavoured and it’s pink. (Nutritional info is about the same as cappuccinos; 260 calories and 9g of fat for a medium, but no caffeine.)

The problem is that this all means it’s embarrassing to try to order one. I’m never entirely certain that anybody will know what I’m talking about when I ask for a hot smoothee, and if they do, then I’m equally embarrassed for ordering a pink drink instead of a real coffee. What will the cashier think? What if somebody in line overhears me? I should probably stop linking my masculinity to my beverage choice.

I might as well order a glass of milk in a bar.

Last night CBC had a two hour special called Test the Nation. It was essentially a 60 question IQ test that the viewers could take along with the studio audience.

Their hook was that as the test went on, they would give some statistics about how well various groups of people were doing compared to others—the in-studio group of surgeons compared to fitness instructors (surgeons came out on top), red heads versus blondes (red heads), and men versus women (men, but only by 1 point). Shaun Majumder came out ahead of the other Canadian celebrities, but the overall winner was from the millionaire team with an IQ of 137. He won a free trip somewhere, but somehow I don’t think Daddy Warbucks was overly ecstatic about that one.

Questions varied between Sesame Street style “one of these things is not like the other” style, remembering details in a picture or video, basic mathematics, word definitions, and recognizing patterns.

Though fairly entertaining, I don’t think the test was as focused on innate intelligence as they claimed. Since you generally only had 10 to 20 seconds for each question, it often only tested how quickly you could read questions and do simple calculations. (”If two people are walking two dogs each, how many legs are there?”)

“So, it’s like the GREs,” quipped one girl in my philosophy class. The same criticisms apply to any purported intelligence test, I suppose.

One question in particular really raised a red flag. The task was to fill in the blank and complete the series: Arden, Dion, ______, Lavigne, and another name I can’t remember. How, exactly, does recognizing the last names of several female Canadian musicians indicate how intelligent I am? I’m still not sure what the pattern was. Alphabetical? Age? Juno award wins? With 1 second left, I guessed Twain; the answer was Furtado.

In the end my IQ was 126, whatever that means. I’m not sure if being able to divide two numbers, remember the definition of “altruistic”, or recognize rotational isomorphisms in 10 seconds makes me any smarter than someone who takes 15. These things can be practiced. Then again I’m also not convinced knowing why Furtado fits in the sequence makes you any smarter than me. At least this is more believable than other IQ tests I’ve taken on the internet, which have put me as high as 154 and as low as 76. Take from it what you will.

Whoa. Where have I been all week?

In theory, I’ve been working and studying and being very productive, and thus had no time to write anything here. That might be partially true. It’s hard to tell.

I did have my regular assignments to do, and we’ve been going hardcore on our lab project. At long last we’ve even managed to produce an image of a quasar using data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico. Quite cool if I do say so myself. Including that one, there are four final papers and assignments due in the next four weeks in addition to the regular load. What fun.

I learned at least one thing today.

I needed to get some milk and bread, but of course when I go to the grocery store to get milk and bread I somehow spend forty dollars. Today, as I was walking to the store, I started thinking about some other things I needed—cereal, sandwich meat, cheese—and how much I was craving some carrot cake. But at the same time I realised that, being the clever guy that I am, I had left my wallet at home.

Luckily I didn’t have to turn back, since I had my Emergency Twenty in my pocket. Groceries don’t exactly qualify as an emergency, but I knew I could replace it as soon as I got home, so I let it slide. The trick now was that, without a credit card, I’d actually have to pay attention to what I was buying at how much it was going to cost me.

And that’s the lesson to take away from this. It’s much harder for a forty or fifty dollar grocery bill to sneak up on you when you’re counting every dime. Even if you are splurging on that carrot cake mix and vanilla icing.

Two days ago I wrote about how my energy consumption has gone down by quite a bit thanks mostly, in my belief, to putting up some extra insulations on my windows this winter. I speculated that my monthly payments would be going down on the next reevaluation. What I should have done was actually looked at my latest Hydro bill. Notification had arrived in my email inbox a few days prior, but who actually bothers to download the PDF to see if there’s anything interesting? Well, today I did, and look what I found:

Dear Sir or Madam:

To help you plan your budget as accurately as possible, Hydro-Québec has reviewed your monthly installment for it to reflect your actual electricity consumption. Following are the results of our review:

Current installment:
$ 45,00

New monthly installment as of the next billing date:
$ 31,08

That’s a reduction of over 30%! Now that’s satisfying.

How does one communicate with a song?

How can I put down in words the same sense that a simple tune played on only a piano convey. It is a simpler language but completely different. Sentences become phrases, a few bars at a time or held together with a long legato. Your voice becomes the instrument’s, your tone in the dynamics and tempo.

Dotted half notes move slowly in the right hand, telling their story, while the left hand plays the beat of a mournful waltz. The tempo itself flows like water. The upper octave joins and the feeling increases. Smooth arpeggios contrast the slow melody. The notes remain the same, repeating, but something in them changes to say what needs to be said.

Words themselves are something all their own, different from the language we speak and the meanings we understand. People can use words like music even in prose, or like colours in a painting.

Pianissimo. Ad lib. Cords play like chimes. Piano, a tempo. Base notes cross over the melody to meet their mates octaves above. Crescendo, mezzoforte. There is no voice but somebody is speaking.

There are not enough English sentences to describe everything which is true. Consult your nearest philosopher or mathematician. (They may not know it, but one should always be the other.) The proof talks about cardinality of the subsets of natural numbers. It’s a game of infinities that I don’t quite believe, but I guess it’s not as hard as I thought to find things which cannot be said.

Decrescendo, ralentir, pianissimo once more.