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September 27, 2006 >> iLL (L and I)I have noticed that within two or three weeks of being in a new place - continent, country, or blasted up-end of Ontario's sprawl - I will inevitably fall ill. My immune system is confounded by minor microbe variations on sicknesses once dealt with and defeated; hence, I suffer repeatedly from the same flu family as inflicted by the Virus Mother, Virus Sister-in-Law and Ancient Ancestor Asian Virus (Most Honourable strain). And I have destroyed them all systematically, by method of allowing them to infiltrate and make me sniffle and cough on the subway, then sucker-punching those bitches through the sheer tenacity of outlasting them until my white blood cells ratify their union contract and get back to work. The flu never sees it coming.
Still, it is difficult to be bright and chirpy amidst this temporary organic strife. It is hard to hear, and people on the phone sound like goblins and ghosts and pumpkin pies. Pulling the age-old compensation trick of laughing lightly at everything you don't hear doesn't work; neither does just saying "Okay, uh-huh, yeah." You always get caught out. And it sucks because you want to hear, it's just that your immune system is holding out for more vacation time. But you look like an asshole in the meantime.
And you know when you're lying in bed and the only thing you can think about is not coughing? It's like somehow, if you don't succumb, you will have won a minor victory over yourself. But you spend so much time thinking about not coughing that, in the end, your throat spasms and you end up biting your tongue and fall asleep cursing yourself for not just having gotten a drink of water.
In conclusion, I don't support trade unions.
Posted by Chris at 01:48 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
September 26, 2006 >> Turn, Return and Strike Forth Again
Homecoming is like how I always imagined a high school reunion might be. Acquaintences don't recognize you, you don't remember acquaintences, and the cat's tail falls off on Sunday morning.
But you find yourself surprisingly pleased to run across someone you wouldn't have given a damn about if you had just met them through the Concourse several years ago. Somehow a half-decade of head nods has turned into actual conversation. The bobbing head becomes a person, as if they were always on the brink before but never quite had the time to bubble over.
There are little pieces missing, like the roommates who you always saw together, a true-o duo, and now there's just one of the pair left. She's a marketer now, in Toronto. Stuff is going good. Stuff is never going badly - if it was, you wouldn't have come to Homecoming to tell everyone how well stuff is going.
At least it's more interesting than waxing about midterms for mutual classes. And you now know where your friends lie, now that we're done with the lie and have moved out to pasture in the grand GTA.
Have you ever noticed that green eyes are always green, even in the dark? It seems ridiculously straightforward until you really pay attention.
Posted by Chris at 01:44 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
September 22, 2006 >> Weekend update
After wrestling my way through six of twenty-six introductory papers to mark (one of which refers to me as "Lap Partner Kris"... what the fuck?), I am shirking my responsibilities and running away to Waterloo for the weekend. Will you be there? Probably. Will pop culture be there? Definitely, for as long as the venerable reign of Campus Crew - may it live forever - presides. Is pop culture, as one particularly astute student claims, "something that will last forever, until we are all dead from terrorists"? God I hope so.
Posted by Chris at 02:55 PM >> Commentations (1) | Permalink
September 19, 2006 >> Grimmetal
Yo, so if humanity ever does manage to develop autonomous robot units they are gonna have to look like gigantic fluffy bunnies or something. Holding lollipops. We've already exhausted all the potentially cool robot designs in apocalyptic, robot-kills-human movies like Terminator, I Robot, the Matrix, Battlestar Galactica and so forth. We have, through our media, essentially shattered any hope of bad-ass looking robots sharing our planet because we have managed to terrify ourselves with the thought that, ultimately, these bad-ass robots will slice our faces off. With 100% certainty. Or shoot us in the ballsack with rockets.
Basically we wasted all the good robot aesthetics on science fiction, and now we'll be stuck with something purposefully goofy to assuge public fear of AI. No retractable knife-fingers, no jet pack shoes, just a big fucking metal teddy bear.
WE HAVE BARRED THE WAY AGAINST A FUTURE WITH COOL ROBOTS.
Posted by Chris at 11:06 PM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
September 18, 2006 >> Assisted Learning
So I ran my first tutorials as a TA last week, and man was that strange. You'd think that dealing with endless classes of Korean kids - kids who barf and hide in cupboards and try to jam their fingers up your ass - would equip you for any further teaching, but...
Basically you can no longer entertain with hand puppets (although I might try that this week). You have to appear at least mostly knowledgeable about the topic at hand, and try to steer kids into talking about 'big ideas' while they're intent on babbling about 9/11 conspiracy theories. I ended up swearing a lot and telling farfetched stories about Korean infidelity to recapture attention, and then smoothly segued into the next area of discussion: "See, these stilted wives are out for revenge... and sometimes they'll look for Westerners... and did you guys know there's a 2 year jail term for infidelity? Wow that would've sucked. You know what else fucking sucks? Having your Mexican identity framed as a dirty gangster by the media conglomerates, just like the Torvales reading talks about!"
In the end, I think I managed to scrape through with some degree of credibility. I was able to quickly utilize my boundless mental resources to answer questions like, "So ... like, what is fascism, anyway?" Basically it's a liberal arts crash-course for Radio and Television students, so I have a lot of interpretational leeway.
Remember Hitler? His mustache was fascist iconography: its thin, sleek veneer a symbol for unrelenting nationalism and goose-stepping Aryan thugs on parade. Right.
But it was kind of funny to have students ask, in all seriousness, whether I was taking attendance and sorry for being late and is this an easy course do I think? And the ones who tried to make immediate connections: "My sister's thinking about teaching in Korea!" And the ones who seemed chill about the whole thing and could talk to me like I was just some guy in their class. And you suddenly realize that the kids in your undergrad tutorials who made a point of staying behind after class to ask stupid questions for which they already knew the answers - they were fucking themselves over, so bad, and they had nooooo idea.
[teaching assistant] [university] [tutorials]
Posted by Chris at 12:45 AM >> Commentations (2) | Permalink
September 17, 2006 >> An Endless March of Citation
Fitting back into university life feels a bit surreal at times - and not just because my first order of business back at school happened to be surrealism.
Everyone in my program is either academically hapless and floated in on the buoyancy of Xtreme work experience, or they are fucking smart and make me feel like a philistine donkey. Grad school, as one of my contemporaries pointed out, is a world apart from the undergrad situation: "Here, everyone already has lives. They're married or have girlfriends or whatever. Nobody hangs out because they already have their friends; they have stuff at home to do. In undergrad, nobody knows what they want or who they are. Everyone's new, and they all just drink and fuck while waiting for it to come to them."
I have been conducting tests involving nonsensical robot diagrams in an attempt to locate the cool people in my program. If they can appreciate the fact that a robot with chainsaw arms does, indeed, belong alongside a brainstorming list of "what being a grad student means to YOU," then I have hope for them. If they chastise me for ruining our group's chances at impressing the prof, they are tools. Of course, if the professor happens to like robots with chainsaw arms, the aforementioned tools are all sunshine and smiles at their good fortune at being placed in a group alongside a robot-drawing idiot savant. A lot of people appear to be altogether too serious about their academic standing at this particular juncture.
And if I hear one more girl talk about how she intends to critically examine representations of the female body in [insert media here], I will freak out. I mean, how much more North American gender research do we need, people? After a year away from academia, the endless march of citation and theory seems less and less relevant to anything going on in the world, anywhere. Surrealism is the natural conjuncture of dream and waking life: grad school seems like a bloody collision of smarts and elitist irrelevance in a dark room where nobody can hear the thud of impact.
Posted by Chris at 06:45 PM >> Commentations (5) | Permalink
September 11, 2006 >> Computer Lab, Underground
A strange thing has happened. Somehow I have emerged from this abrupt Inter-Cultural Turnover with a revitalized work ethic and the uncanny ability to rise from my bed at a decidedly AM hour. Every morning I creak down the dilapidated elevators in my building and board the TTC for some hearty cultural exchange with my fellow Torontonians (read: hearty exchange of hostile stares and tussles over subway seating).
I don't have any friends at Ryerson so I usually try to get shit done (like this blog, for example). Other shit that has been done includes:
-Reading a book.
-Reading a book about Surrealism. (GAH!)
-Getting lost on campus, and then feeling stupid because it is a very small campus.
-Trying to impress people with pelvic thrusts.
-Getting a Ryerson OneCard. It looks cooler than the Laurier OneCard, but that's only because my WLU one has the face washed out so I look like an albino.
-Getting lost again in some crazy underground swimming pool place.
-Trying to actually have classes.
One thing that is - and will always be - less than peachy is dealing with the bureaucratic side of an academic institution. Course registration. Oh whoops, you only have one class this semester! Perhaps you could take Performing Arts in the City? I realize it has absolutely nothing to do with your educational focus, buuuuuuuut...
So now I am enrolled in two classes. Watch for my performing monkey sex show on Bloor & College this winter.
In my momentary dispair at being forced into yet another university course I didn't really want, I was reminded of a strange sight in Seoul a few weeks back. Walking down the main strip of Sincheon, we ran across this procession of silent demonstrators marching in costume, pushing shopping carts full of odd, indiscernible symbology before them. It was a rather grim parade.
We thought perhaps it was a protest of the commoditization of Korean culture, given the nearby Arts college and the rampant numbers of tourists always purchasing 'authentic' Korean merchandise in the area. I couldn't make anything of the imagery: maybe it wasn't designed to be accessible to me, or maybe it was just fucking crazy avant-garde.
But - cutting back to the future - maybe studying this kind of thing is what Performing Art in the City is all about. Masters courses are supposed to be more flexible, right? We bring our interests into alignment with an approximated area of study and POW! there's rabbit-fast procreation of ideas. Self-driven study. I also seem to remember that the courses you don't really want always turn out to be the most interesting in the end, whereas the seemingly sure-fire winners tend to suck in practice. So, by these standards, I should have a rockin' first semester back.
Also it occurred to me that I can be a jackass and try to relate my experiences in Korea to any academic topic all year long, no matter how disparate they may be. Contemporary surrealism? Yeah Korea did that long ago: they had all these whack-ass TVs set up in the shape of a face and it was TOTALLY LIKE A DREAM, man. Mad surreal. Economic sustainability? I think there was one of those tied up in the petting zoo at Everland, it was like the best econo-whatever I ever SEEN. In Korea.
I am also a TA for a Sociology undergrad course in Popular Culture. Needless to say, I am pumped to teach young adults the age-old adage of "MTV sucks," and maybe also "the medium is the message, you bitch-ass trust fund babies!" Jokes, jokes. I run a respectful classroom.
Posted by Chris at 03:48 PM >> Commentations (9) | Permalink
September 07, 2006 >> Back Home
I am alive and well in Toronto... as well as can be expected for someone living on the cusp of Jane & Finch. It's actually not too bad... the building is dingy but the apartment is clean and has a good balcony view of the sun burning Mississauga to cinders every evening. Only one person per day has been physically assaulted in the area thus far, and none of them were me.
Air travel has become the least fun thing in the entire world as far as I'm concerned. Taking off your belt and shoes, arms spread akimbo as a metal detector beeps and boops along your body and your pants slowly fall down is rather humiliating. After your third consecutive flight reroute, you begin to wonder whether swimming might've been a better idea, or sitting down and finally inventing that personal teleporter.
And so, after a wide variety of less than comical airline mishaps I am back in a place where everyone speaks English and spend their afternoons standing around, looking jaded and multicultural. It's okay, I guess.
I am still in massive disarray, so posting will be infrequent until I get my room/school schedule/life into some semblance of order. Having no internet at home is unnerving - it is my lifeline, my blood.
Posted by Chris at 11:27 AM >> Commentations (6) | Permalink