Burial at sea.

Today while I was in class a procession of people appeared in the courtyard outside with an inflatable raft that they placed in the pond. Shortly afterward a second group approached carrying a stiff girl on their shoulders like a coffin.

They placed her in the raft and pushed her out into the middle of the pond. It was all quite mysterious and funerary looking, and pretty distracting to boot.

I had to turn back to our class discussion about how the US and UK killed NWICO because they don't like communication rights and why most people have never heard of the CRIS campaign.

When I looked next the courtyard was empty. After class we speculated. Rehearsal? Performance art? Hazing ritual? Fire arrows?

I'm sure we overthought it.

My funk continues

I took this picture a few weeks ago now, and I've been mulling it over ever since.

It's funny how a given medium will predispose you to think in certain ways or see from a particular point of view.

In a lot of ways I think some of my best pictures were taken in the first six months or so that I had my camera. Sure, some of them are really lacking in technical quality, but there was something fresh about them that the ones I take now lack. Maybe it's just me that thinks that, but getting a new camera was kind of like seeing with new eyes.



They say that if you have a hammer things start looking like nails, and for me, suddenly everything was a shot. I had pretty specific ideas about what "shots" looked like and in a way it kind of framed my existence. I was always looking for them. It annoyed me when people told me to take pictures of things where there were no shots.



Meaning, of course, not that there was nothing photo worthy to find there, but that I'd developed a way of seeing that was very hard to shake. Meaning also that gradually all my photos began to look the same.



I used to follow a lot of photoblogs but I found that more than the individual photos, I visited them because of their point of view. Once I'd figured out their style, they became kind of predictable and I'd get bored of them, regardless of what new content they had to offer.



I do this with blog posts too, or at least, I do when I'm on my game (which has not been for the last three months). There's a little monologue that happens in the back of my mind that's constantly concerned with structuring my existence into an interesting post. I see something and already I'm trying to put it into words, experimenting with different phrases more than living through the moment. Eventually that gets old.



My sister said I had taken the same picture before and she was right.

My mother, bringer of blizzards.

My mom wishes to apologise for the snow and cold weather we have been having lately. She believes she brought it on by not putting away the Christmas themed tablecloth that is on the kitchen table.

Forget groundhogs, the real reason why we have six extra weeks of winter is because the table is covered with snowmen and gnomes on skis. Kitschy, kitschy gnomes on skis.





We must rectify this. Stat.

29 cents

One of my friends limped into class the other day. She had fallen down the stairs at the skytrain station while running for the bus and her ankle was swollen to the point of looking gross and deformed. I decided I would go get some ice for her.

I had five minutes. I ran down two flights of stairs and then all the way to the other end of the building to get to the cafeteria where I filled up a cup with ice. I ran into problems at the checkout because apparently ice costs money. Twenty-nine cents worth of money. That's practically theft.

I didn't really have any time to argue and the cashier wasn't really the person to complain to anyways so I paid it. Good thing I had a loon in my pocket.

I ran the ice back upstairs and didn't tell her that it cost money, because that would be petty and stupid. But 29 cents? Bah!

Because who wouldn't want to write a paper about Eugene Hütz's mustache?

For my one class all the readings for this week have been about old school rap and hip hop, its links to the Caribbean, reggae and civil rights movements, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash.

For my other class we've been looking at diasporic identities, the Caribbean, Rastafarianism, voodoo and mythical narratives of Africa as a heartland.

I had a conversation with a colleague from another class today about music because it turns out that he's a huge reggae fan.

I have to come up with a paper topic to hand in in eight hours.

You know what this is all telling me?

I need to write a paper about Balkan Beat Box. Glad you made that leap with me.



I'm going to make it about Eugene Hütz too, because his mustache is awesome.

I have the best major ever.

Thinking green

I'm joining Project Spectrum this time around. It's a self-guided, open-ended collective art project that revolves around four themes over the period of 8 months. The theme for March/April is north/green/stones/earth so I'm going to make something with the above because it wants to be made into something. I'm still working on making up a design so I'm not really sure what it will look like just yet. We'll see.

One thing I know though, is that planning it out has been a lot of fun and completely absorbing so far. I think it's more the time of the semester than anything. Procrastination drives me to jump wholeheartedly into a whole lot of creative things.

You should join me because it's fun and it's cool to see what everybody else comes up with.

There are skunks living underneath the back porch. We are torn between choosing to coexist and choosing to get rid of them because they will likely eat everything out of the garden.