The day is grey. The geese here don't fly south. I wouldn't either.
Lentil soup with pumpkin puree and beefsteak tomatoes from my balcony last year. Something about the way I froze the tomatoes made them incredibly sour. In retrospect the tomato pumpkin combination wasn't a good idea but it doesn't matter because all I'm having is one rice bowl's worth and two saltines. I'm just never hungry these days.
Today I'm interested in the geography of places that don't exist. I'm picturing webs and graphs and coloured lines around my head, geographic, thematic. They follow me like a cloud. Baudelaire, boulevards, modernity, street photography, Fred Hertzog, Susan Sontag. Cross-cultural perspectives on memory and rememberance.
I gave a presentation today and a whole bunch of people came and told me that mine was the best, at least so far. I can't say I'm not pleased to hear that. But mostly I just brought in a slideshow of some of my photos, talked about them and coincidentally said some stuff that some people hadn't thought about before.
Random strangers talk to me all the time. I guess I have a friendly face. Today it was Joseph who is getting the runaround from university admissions because they won't accept his proposal of experience in liu of high school graduation, because he's doing research and writing a dictionary for a native language. But getting into university's a bitch, especially if you're adult and returning to school.
I have my own university admissions story. I applied to a bunch of schools and then all of a sudden I got notice that every single one had rejected me. I went to investigate and found out that credit for Latin 11 was missing from my official transcript in Victoria, and even though I had 100% in Latin 12, language 12 doesn't count for university admission, only language 11.
I went down to the office to see if whoever communicates with Victoria could fix it up, but I guess they didn't understand what I was asking for so one of the principals was called out and she said "You got 94% in French 11," and that was that. I never ever got credit for the 96% I got in Latin 11.
What's more is I failed the English provincial exam the first time I wrote it and I didn't do particularly well on my second write. But fortunately for me, I was in the International Baccalaureate Program, and when you're in IB, English 12 shows up as three separate courses on your transcript. You get automatic credit for regular English 12, which includes your provincial exam mark, and then credit for IB English 12A and 12B. IB12A was your English mark without the provincial added in, and the difference between the two marks for me was a good 25%.
In Creative Writing 12, I wrote a story about how all men are bastards because that's what my teacher believed and I got a really good mark.
I didn't bother to study for the Geology 12 provincial but I had one of the top scores in the province so I got $1000 for it.
And those were the four marks I used to get into university. So when people say university admissions are bullshit, I'm inclined to agree. But to be fair, I know a lot of people who entered university with legitimately good marks who flunked out after a semester or two, so I'd say at this point it doesn't matter. My gpa keeps climbing.
Up, up and away.
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