Hi, welcome to my livejournal. It's positively ancient by blog standards!

Over time, it's evolved from one which was almost completely open to one which is mostly friends-only posts.
If you have a livejournal account, feel free to add me to see the hidden posts. Just leave a note on here asking to be added if that's your wish.

Thanks!

Hi everyone!
I've been chided by a longtime friend for neglecting to post here anymore.
Since I've been in an introspective mood lately, perhaps brought on by rain and an inactive social circle, maybe I should try to start posting here again.

I've halved my friends list in an effort to make it so that I am engaging with a smaller group of active people when I post on here. I've also installed the ElJay app on my phone again which will perhaps lead me to post from more unusual places.

Best of wishes to all of you out there who still read and write!

Even though I'm not a daily coffee drinker, since I don't drink alcohol I spend a fair amount of time in cafés.

One thing I'm regretting lately is that fewer and fewer cafés seem to stock daily newspapers. Is it not a thing anymore to go to a café and read the newspaper? Sure, there are still places that do it, but I feel like most of the fancier places have stopped it completely.

:/ ...

Well, today is the last day of my 20s, because I'm turning 30 tomorrow!
I'm actually a big fan of aging gracefully, and I'm hoping to be more "together" in my 30s than I was in my 20s.

Still, it feels like the end of an era! I can't pretend to be a "youth" much longer :)

Heh, I started going to a meetup.com based French-language club that meets once or twice a month in a café not too far from where I live. Today was the second time I've been to this particular group.
However, soon after I got there, I started talking to a woman who came even though she doesn't really speak French, she just admires it.. I ended up talking to her for 2 hours or so, until the café closed.

Nice person, but I feel somewhat...cheated, heh. The organizer came over and lectured her a bit about how she won't learn anything by speaking English...

Anyways, those groups attract an interesting and weird assortment of people, with varying levels of fluency. I like going just to get the chance to meet different weirdos than the usual circles I travel in (college employees, lesbians, klezmer fans..)

I ended up having a decent holiday. I did almost nothing.
What I planned to do with my non-socializing time: Practice cimbalom daily, reading books, try to compile some of my writings into a zine, do exercise, etc
What I ended up doing: Playing "Dead Rising 2" for hours every day, farting around watching restaurant reality TV shows.

I'm now back at work and school for a few days. I was supposed to have the same schedule and profs as last semester, with some slightly different subjects. I decided to ditch one of my profs who was nice and interesting, but too flaky. She was months late handing back assignments and only posted the course grades the night before the next semester started. Her lectures are interesting, but rambling and mixed with anecdotes about "That reminds me of the time I was taking the local bus in [insert regional Indian city here]..."
At the last minute, I switched her classical Indian culture course for a French literature course of African and Caribbean novels. I was nervous about it being above my level because it's a 400-level course and taught entirely in French. However, when I got there I felt better, because I am easily one of the most fluent people in the class, this being British Columbia where the native French population is rather minuscule. The only people more fluent than me are a few international students from Francophone countries...

As for my grades for last semester, I did get all A's, and actually had almost the same grade for 3 very different courses: 87, 87, and 85. Being a perfectionist, I still wish they had all been in the 90s, but it's probably the best I can expect while working an office job with the other half of my time.. Anyways, I'm being lazy about doing homework at the start of this new semester with my full discipline, as usual I'm easing myself into it.

Phewf, sorry for not updating at all lately.
After farting around for a lot of the semester--well, to be fair, I have been working an office job while taking 3 classes--I had a lot of stuff to do in the last few weeks.

I'm just finishing up my last term paper which had an extension past the exams until the last possible day of the semester, tomorrow. I'm at the library of the college where I work--it makes sense to come here, since home is too distracting and I have to go to the office right after. It seems a little weird to sign onto a computer in the building across from my desk at the office, but then again I know people would keep asking me stuff about work if I tried writing an essay there.

My exams went pretty well, I expect to get good results.

After my Indonesian exam, about 6 of us from the class took the bus to go to an Indonesian restaurant (Pondok on Broadway) to blow off some steam and to say goodbye until the next semester.
Sadly, it was just closing as we got there! We even tried calling another Indonesian restaurant but it didn't open til 5:30pm! Who knew it was so hard to get some decent Indonesian food at 3 in the afternoon. We tried knocking on a few other doors along Broadway, until we finally settled on a really sad 24HR Thai place with a murky fishtank and Queen playing over the speakers.

I had a humiliating moment when I choked on a clod of burned chili powder in my Pad Thai and had to run off to the little guy's room, clutching a handfull of food. It was also awkward when my classmates and prof were doing the rounds of "most tragic celebrity death" and asked me who would be the one celebrity that it would break my heart to hear about their death. I couldn't think of any musicians on the spot, so I said Slavoj Zizek, which is obviously kind of a preposterous answer, especially since none of them had heard of him. When I said he was a philosopher, one guy said "Oh, like Deepak Chopra?" ..whoops, tough crowd. Although on the other hand he said his idol was Donald Trump, so I'm not too broken up about it.

One bit of disappointing news that came out is that the Indonesian language program at UBC is being discontinued. I guess it's good that I took it when I did, because we'll be the last cohort to go through it! I guess the old permanent prof retired, and there aren't enough students to keep the program going--only 12 people or so in my course. I always find the politics of university language programs so weird. I know they have to be tied to who will actually sign up for them, but it always seems so weird to me that they have so many European languages that are unheard of in Vancouver, but not Cantonese, Punjabi, Tagalog, or other languages that tons of students' parents speak.

I had my last day of class yesterday. It seems to me that it went by before I knew it!
My exams are at the end of next week--Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I'm feeling confident about them.

Phewf, I'm feeling like I'm sliding into Winter Mode bigtime--not biking much anymore, just hiding indoors and eating a lot of junk food.
I finally worked up the necessary energy to go skating today at the place I went all the time last year--but decided to do the week's grocery shopping first, and ended up not having time to go skating before the public period ended. Oh well.
Another day!

Yesterday, at work, my co-workers and I were surprised to notice an RCMP (national police) helicopter making erratic circles above our building.

With my over-rich imagination, I was certain that someone had stolen the helicopter and was joyriding. It was veering erratically in all directions, and seeing black SUVs with sirens come screaming into the parking lot only confirmed my fantasy that this was a disgruntled pilot on a rampage.

My co-worker sensible suggested that the helicopter was probably there to look for someone, especially since security guards had been seen running around campus on the ground. (In my theory, they were just panicking about the stolen helicopter--OK, I guess I should give up on that one...)

There were no news bulletins about it and eventually the helicopter left, so I shrugged and forgot about it.

Today, in the student paper, however, there were photos of an arrest of a First Nations man on the sidewalk in front of campus (he identified himself as being from Haida Gwaii). The paper reported that they were chasing him for a Break & Enter in the area.

I admit that I don't know the details of the case, but in any B&E case, isn't a helicopter and 7 police cars a crazy overreaction?

I wonder if it has anything to do with this being in the papers that morning: Cops watched porn, skipped work instead of investigating missing women: Galliford...