This is one of those nights where it looks like the fog is trying out for a part in a new horror film. It’s low, misty, and hugs the road in great slow swirls and drifts. It’s not difficult to image the scene where we suddenly drive right into a person standing alone in the middle of the road, only to find there was never anybody there to begin with. The wind sculpts the mist into all sorts of shapes an overactive imagination can play with.

But tonight it was not people we were worried about while making our late night drive home from Fredericton to Saint John. Along these New Brunswick highways it is well known that the Moose is King, especially at night. I don’t think anybody has grown up around here without hearing horror stories of somebody hitting a moose. Deer are relatively common, small animals more-so, but it is the moose that has a reputation for being able to withstand a hit from a bus and barely notice. Exaggerated, sure, but you get the point.

So our drive, almost completely free from other traffic though it may have been, was anything but relaxed. A battle between outside—where Mother Nature’s minions stalked the night—and in—where clouds of moose-shaped mist trick our imaginations. It was quite a relief when after fifty kilometres of nought but roadsigns and shrubbery we finally spotted the first house signalling a return to relative civilisation. It was a very brief reprise, and we were quickly back in moose country, greeted by those bright orange diamond warning signs that do nothing for your blood pressure, with another 40 klicks to go before Saint John proper.

By the time we saw the cityscape ahead we had counted, with reasonable certainty, just one deer and one moose. We had gracefully cruised past both of them in the night—as graceful as you can hope to be in a large red stationwagon. From there on in we had streetlights to show us the way—scourge of the astronomer but angel of salvation to the midnight driver. Within twenty minutes I was home again without having killed any animals, or ourselves. Mission accomplished.

Well as usual, it looks like the end of a semester has brought on fewer blog posts. It’s no surprise really. Either it’s because I have more people around to chat with and am busier in general (ok, that last part is a lie, I slept until 3 today), or else I just don’t have much to talk about. Considering the comment in parenthesis, I’m willing to bet the latter.

For the record and those interested, the highlight of the week has been me trying to steal my car. That is, the car thought I was trying to steal it and set off its alarm. Twice. The spare key I was given for it did not have the remote starter gizmo so I couldn’t turn it off, which would have been highly embarrassing had I been in the grocery store parking lot and not my own garage. Instead I ran inside, grabbed my parent’s set of keys, shut off the alarm, and only had to endure huge fits of laughter from my family members.

It’s good to be home.

Sorry, Audrey, one photo isn’t really enough for a whole gallery, but it was a yummy meal. Cheers to the first jacket-free day of the year—a balmy 15 degrees just four days after the snowstorm!

I was reading about the origin of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, about string theory, about how merging forces could have caused a fast expansion of the universe, and how we might fix the problem of that damn big bang, and for once I felt like it was something that I could actually dedicate myself to studying. My goal in life now is now to solve all outstanding mysteries about what the hell happened 13 or 14 billion years ago.

But as I was thinking this, I was flipping through a presentation overviewing some of the early evolution of the universe, when I hit a slide that presented, without any explanation, this parable:

The Emperor of the South Sea was Fast, The Emperor of the North Sea Furious, the Emperor of the center was Primordial Blob. Fast and Furious were discussing how to repay Primordial Blob’s bounty.

“All men have seven holes through which they look, listen, eat, breathe; he alone doesn’t have any. Let’s try boring them.”

Every day they bored one hole, and on the seventh day the Primordial Blob died.

- Chuang-tzu (c. 350 BC)

Would any Taoists in the audience care to enlighten us? I’m no expert in ancient Chinese philosophy, but suddenly I don’t feel so eager to poke my nose into the primordial plasma of the big bang anymore.

Note the date. That’s really all that needs to be said. Bienvenue au Canada!

(It’s not the best photo imaginable, but there’s a good chance by tomorrow when the sun comes up it’ll be reduced to slush and not nearly as nice and Christmas looking.)

Saturday nights are for drinking and partying and all sorts of debauchery, right? Or else they’re for sitting in Tim Horton’s reading paper after paper on the cosmic microwave background. It may be kind of sad but at least I wasn’t the only one. It is exam season afterall. Although I think that one couple in the corner did more making out than reading their books. The annual challenge between mating season and exam season, I suppose.

Of course I could have been reading all these papers and making notes earlier in the afternoon, but for me exam season means procrastination season. Anybody surfing around this site earlier in the evening might have noticed things spontaneously moving around and new things temporarily popping into existence as I played around with positioning nested divs instead of studying. CSS may in principle make layouts easier but it’s awfully finicky. I spent no less than a couple hours trying to get the sidebar and footer to play well together and only ended up making the main column jealous.

And going onto yet another tanget, I lately realised a nice advantage to blogging regularly. I’ve heard it said that they should print out the entire internet so it wouldn’t be only on computers anymore. I find writting every day (which, in theory, I would do) like printing out my brain so that I don’t have to depend on the unreliable wetware of my own memory.

More often than not my blog has a better memory than I do—I only have to search for what I want. It’s like googling my own brain. Weird. I was walking home a few days ago and had a thought about something that I know I had written about before and wanted to look up on this site when I got home. I had intended to say what it was here and link to the post, but as if to drive the point home, I didn’t write this post soon enough and now I’ve forgotten what it was. Damn this non-digitized long term memory of mine.

There’s nothing like waking up on a bright sunny morning for a bright sunny last day of school only to find a two metre hole in the ground directly outside my front door. That could have been a nasty start to the day, especially considering the pool of who-knows-what at the bottom of it.

I suppose the giant industrial jackhammer the size of a backhoe working on the front walk since 7 am would have tipped me off to something going on, but no, as soon as I determined that the head pounding noise and earthquake vibrations were not something I could shut off with a snooze button I went right back to sleep and forgot about it. Cross that off the list of possible future alarm clocks.

A few days ago I heard on the news that Sook-Yin Lee was approached about doing a naughty photo shoot for a naughty magazine, but CBC said they’re fire her if she did it. I didn’t think much of it at the time and just filed it away as an interesting tid-bit.

Imagine my surprise when last night, knowing nothing about it beforehand, I sat down to watch the movie Shortbus and only a minute into it I see Sook-Yin herself getting eaten out on a piano. The scene quickly progressed to all manner of graphic (as in pornographic) kama sutra like acrobatics, intersperced with someone trying out a little autofellatio and another being put in his place by a dominatrix. Not exactly CBC approved material, no doubt.

It wasn’t any surprise when I did a little searching around the internet about the movie. As it turns out, CBC threatened to fire Sook-Yin back in 2003 when she took this role as well. It was only through much pressure from other musicians, actors, and artists, as well as the public, that they backed down. I don’t know if she’d get the same support for a pornographic spread in Playboy, though. (If that’s even what it was. I don’t remember the details, so the offer might have been more tame than that.)

That is was Sook-Yin, who I wake up to and spend every Sunday afternoon with via CBC’s Definitely Not the Opera, made it feel like I was watching a friend go through her trials and tribulations on screen. Is that creepy? Maybe. But I already felt a connection with a lot of the characters, seeing a bit of me in all of them. Maybe that’s also a bit creepy. But that’s what good movies should do, right?

I never feel more masculine and heterosexual than when reading about feminism and queer theory. I don’t say that to brag (because what kind of thing is that to brag about? and how seriously can you take someone who’s bragging about being masculine on his blog while baking vegan banana bread in the background anyway?) even though it may come off that way. What I mean is just that I don’t find any sympathy in myself for what people write about under those headings.

The final assignment in one of my philosophy class asks me if feminism is dead, so naturally I go look up some papers on the topic and start reading. Feminism is something that a lot of people have concerned themselves with quite a bit for decades, yet nothing in any of the papers I looked through was in the least bit interesting. There were no poignant philosophical debates. No ethical dilemma to ponder. No greater meaning to comprehend. Sure, sexism is bad, but does that necessitate an entire philosophical framework to believe?

At many points it bordered on what I have heard termed “queer theory”, by talking about social constructions of gender, etc. From my earlier post on hetero-normativity, it’s probably pretty clear that I don’t have much sympathy for these questions either. It’s not that they don’t deserve to be answered, it’s just that the answers aren’t very interesting.

Yet reading these articles make me feel not only that a prerequisite to being feminine or queer (neither of which describes me) is to believe that these issues are, in fact, issues at all, but that if I don’t think these things are important then I must be misogynist and homophobic (queerphobic?). I’m inclined to think that the South Park quote on that same earlier post applies to these topics as well. Regardless, I find it disturbing to think that in order to identify with, say, the queer community, I must identify their causes with my own, even when they border on being militant phobias in their own right.

I’m sure in most cases it isn’t as antagonistic as that. It’s quite likely that the vast majority of people who write about feminism or queer theory, certainly in academia at least, do so because they are interested in these topics. It is the same reason that I would tend to write about religion and cosmology and study astronomy, even though I’m certain many people out there don’t care about the particular features of the big bang might be. The difference is that to be an astronomer you must learn about astronomy, but you need not learn about feminism to be female.

In the end I’m faced with the same dilemma of writing about feminism in a moral context where I believe that it not only has nothing to do with morality but also nothing to do with philosophy at all. At best it is mere cultural studies, as is queer theory. Attempts to define either of them and give them some context are lost on me. I can only hope it’s more for the same reasons Stan and his friends didn’t find the South Park flag racist than the alternative.

It’s funny how a song I don’t particularly like, and whose lyrics I can’t hear or follow, can suddenly feel so appropriate for the moment without any explanation.

I have a backlog of books I’ve been meaning to write something about. The library keeps sending me emails saying they’re due back in a few days, and I can no longer renew them. Several have already gone back but I made some notes about them—passages I liked, particularly poignant themes, that sort of thing—so one of these days I’ll write a review or reaction. There’s also a pile of chocolate bar wrappers that I want to make notes on. (Sneak preview: Ghirardelli Intense Dark tastes like purple, and is one of my top three favourites now.)

For today, for those interested, the play I described two weeks ago turned out to be Romanoff and Juliet, by Peter Ustinov. It’s a comedic clash between East and West (cold war style) in a fictitious country of Europe:

You will find us only onthe very best atlases, because we are the smallest country left in Europe—and when I say country, I don’t mean principality or grand duchy. I don’t mean a haven for gambing or income tax evasion—I mean self-respecting country which deserves, and sometimes achieves, a colour of its own on the map—usually a dyspeptic mint green, which misses the outline of the frontier by a fraction of an inch, so that one can almost hear the printer saying damn.

– The General, Act I

Unfortunately, complimentary to the mediocre song that suddenly sounds perfect, this favourite play of mine didn’t quite live up to its memory. I suppose that’s to be expected—one’s tastes change. We see things where there was nothing before, and we see nothing where we once thought there was something.