Sunday morning, praise the dawning

This morning I woke up at 8:00 to mellow Czech folk music from my iTunes alarm. Unfortunately, at 8:02, the entire residence was woken by the piercing shriek of the fire alarm. I suppose this simply expedites my plans for the day, which are - drumroll please- to spend at least eight hours studying organic chemistry for my last midterm tommorrow. Thus, I urge you: If you have ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING else to do, please do it. I can't bear the thought of the rest of the world being that pathetic.



A Markovnikov addition. I understand it but am none the happier for it.

Also, the Velvet Underground are a good thing to listen to on a Sunday morning.

In physics, you don't have to go around making trouble for yourself - nature does it for you.
-Frank Wilczek

Everybody stand back (I know regular expressions)

It has been documented that I am a closet nerd. This is probably why I find xkcd funny and when someone raves to me about the shape of the graph of tangent theta squared, I think it's cute rather than worrisome. I see nothing wrong with nerd-dom, in fact. The stereotypical junior high school boy nerd story is a pretty great one - finding the light side of the sometimes awkward process of growing up, being socially inept, zits, insecurity, too many videogames, forming a microculture to protect oneself against a macroculture. Watching it from the outside, seeing the poor, besotted, spotty thirteen-year olds of the quebecois school across the way from me, it makes me smile. Huzzah for the emo kids and goths and mathletes and socially awkward gamers, for the boys who teach themselves the C-chord on the electric guitar in the basement in a sort of futile chase of cool. You'll get over yourselves, eventually. But treasure the halcyon Donnie Darkoesque times you get to experience before you get there. They'll be over before you know it, and there's something irreversible about it all.

I'm not sure why I'm waxing nostalgic about junior high - God knows seventh grade wasn't that fun. Now that I'm out of high school, at the ripe old age of eighteen, with life all figured out, I'm free to reminisce about the adolescence microcosm, AOL and junior high dances.


xkcd.com

This post is dedicated to my best friend Emily, who never let the large amounts of rather bad comic books she read get in the way of awesome.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Thank God. Watching the election last night was something I'll remember for the rest of my life. I'm Czech, and I was singing the American national anthem - with pride in my voice and heart for the country that partially raised me. The feeling was electric. When the screen announced that Barack Obama won the national election, the room erupted with screams. No words, just pure desperate vent of emotion.

And now we come back to the everyday. There are ideals to be upheld and love to carry and disillusion to face, but it will be remembered, and that night to me represents a hope shared by the sometimes disaffected kids of my generation. On the bright side, I just snuck the phrase "soon-to-be-ex-President Bush" into my hydrology (!) midterm (who gives a midterm the day after the future of the free world is decided?).

As Penny Lane said, it's all happening!

Incidentally, it snowed lately.

Campus in the brightness powder light.

This is England, this is how we feel

I have to confess: I'm absolutely terrified. I don't know what I'm going to do if the worst happens, and I have bad experiences with the ole U.S. of A. My father is cynical, my crazy liberal Vermont friend says there's no chance of the worst happening. Everyone in my residence has had literal, vivid nightmares and woken up in cold sweats. Meanwhile in my hydrology class I'm learning about the world literally collapsing around our ears. The status quo can't go on and I, the daughter of a post-communist credo, am tempted toward anarchy. Yes we can? We had better be able to. Because we already ran out of time. Maybe it's not visible in the Hollister-filled shopping malls of suburbia and the Gossip Girl on television, but time is out. The country's forests, lakes, and farmlands are dying, the Dow Jones is like a piece of sodden, rotting meat splayed to bits on Wall Street, all around the country and the world regular people are being, what is it, left behind. I'm not a weatherman, but I can sense the wind in my face and it's a gale-force hurricane.

I'm not naive. I know that a change in presidency won't fix everything and it'll take a whole lot of work to fix anything. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't matter. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin', that if this man doesn't win on Tuesday:


I may be tempted to go the way of the Clash.

You may not have cold eyes, but you'll have cold feet.

I was biking down Rue Prince Arthur when a bike racer type pulled up to me and said something in French. I awkwardly smiled and replied my standard line, "Je ne parlais pas le francais." He grinned and told me "In French we have this expression. You may not have cold eyes, but you will have cold feet." He pointed to my birkenstocks, downshifted and sped off.

It took me about three blocks to remember the secondary meaning of "cold feet" in English and appreciate the appropriateness. The primary meaning, however, was more than clear. It's a totally stupid idea to wear birkenstocks in Montreal in November. I know this. I should attempt to be less of a fool.

The cold weather, however, means a proper Halloween. None of the crappy suburbia plastic decorations. The wind bites, the dark menaces, Montreal sings with its own eerie seductive wail. My Halloween, though not very spooky in and of itself, was fairly great. Several compatriots on the nordic ski team attended a funk concert of the New Groove Orchestra, which was relatively magical. Getting to said concert also had its own specific charms, as it meant riding double on Dorian (my old steel seventies bike and primary lover) with a friend from the ski team. We sped down Universite in a precariously exhilarating fashion. Riding double on a bike tends to be quite dangerous and rather fun. Because of a general lack of costume in the world, I lent out my various bits of clothing to various people and we painted faces. So it was two girls with pigtails and Maori-like warpaint weaving through the cars and pedestrians. In short, fun. Combined with the home-brewed beer and omeletes and gramophone records and general revelry, it was quite good.

The concert itself was more than good. Molly always raves about funk on her blog, and now I truly know why. Funk is just kind of fun. It's the type of thing that makes you want to crazy dance because the rhythm validates itself. New Groove Orchestra is a ten-piece(!) band with a five-piece brass section and an electrical frontwoman wearing a shiny leotard and huge afro. It was crazily intense and crazily fun. Even white a-musical girls from eastern Europe get mad into it, which indicates the general goodness. Incidentally, price of concert? $7 canadian. Whut?

We got funked.


(photo not taken by me, and not of the concert I went to, but features ngo, so one out of the three)
www.newgrooveorchestra.com is worth visiting.