The Recess... (welcome to the alcoves of my mind)

El cottagio

Marty Havlat says: Woohoo!! It’s FRIDAY!!!






















It’s been a good day! The Sens won again last night, and as I am now known as “That Senators Girl” around my office, people were stopping by all day to talk about the game. Not sure how I acquired the title, though I think it may have something to do with the towel, Wade Redden poster, and jersey I currently have hanging up in my office.

Could be…

I also brought in my Sens jersey beer-hug for my water bottle. Earlier this week I got bored and printed out a psychotic-looking picture of Zdeno Chara and stuck it on the bottle so that it actually looks like a person instead of a jersey with a water bottle-head. Then I got even MORE bored, and made him a little talk bubble, the contents of which change as often as I feel necessary. He’s become somewhat known around the office now, and people stop by every once and a while to see what Zdeno has to say. So far he’s said:

“I am Zdeno Chara and I will crush you.”

“I am Zdeno Chara and my stick is bigger than yours.” (that’s been an office favourite)

And
“I am Zdeno Chara and I eat lightening for breakfast.”

I’ll be leaving that one on there for the weekend in hopes that it’s true and we can close out the first round against Tampa Bay tomorrow night. We’re up 3-1 in the series, and I can’t wait to move on and crush Carolina or Montreal.

The other reason this is an oh-so-fabulous Friday is because I’m off next week! Seeing as I just graduated, and I’ll be a working stiff basically from now until Christmas, I figured I’d take a week and head up to a cottage to party with my fellow j-schoolers before they head off to start their own careers and adventures. I’m looking forward to it, though the lead up has been nothing short of hellish. I came out of it learning two things: 1) even people who don’t really know you can have no problem taking complete advantage of you without any appreciation what-so-ever, and 2) that if I ever organize a week at a cottage with a bunch of people, they're finding their own goddamn ways up. But anyway, this fiasco has taken up far too much of my week already, so we’ll leave it at that.

Well that’s pretty much it. So, in conclusion: GO SENS GO!!!!!! And if you’re looking for me next week, I’m in Calabogie, and most likely pissed out of my skull.

See you in a week.

posted by Megan at 4:13 p.m.

New medium, old message

Song for the Moment:
Song: The River
Artist: Live
Album: Songs from Black Mountain





***

I’ve discovered something new. Or old, depending on how you look at it.

As most of you know I’m currently doing that working-stiff thing in a government office at Tunney’s Pasture, wasting away my youth and talents in an administrative job until something (anything) better comes along, or June 2 arrives and my contract is terminated.

But, leaving my possible impending joblessness and therefore adoption of life as a hobo aside for the moment, I have good news. Thanks to this new discovery I am now very much enjoying a job which could have potentially caused me to launch myself off a tall building out of sheer boredom (or perhaps triggered by hearing the sentence “can you photocopy this?” more than 216 times a day).

This discovery comes in the form of reading books online. You see, my boss knows that I’m often left with long stretches of time with not much to do but stare and the phone and yell “RING!!” intermittently in hopes of getting a call I can then promptly forward on to someone more qualified to answer it (I’m an integral part of the team, did I mention that?).

She’s told me point-blank that she doesn’t really care what I do with this extra time, as long I keep a “professional air about it.” Since salsa dancing was then obviously out of the question, I turned to my loyal friend, the Internet. I remembered that a couple years ago, right before my children’s lit exam I had realized that I had forgotten to buy/read one of the books hinted to be the focus of one of the essay questions, and had gone on a frantic search online in hopes of finding it or at the very least, the Coles Notes version. I was successful (and a little pissed that most of the books I had spent over $100 buying had been available for free), and had tucked the address away in my email for future use.

The only drawback (if you can even call it that) is that the sites are actually legit, meaning they aren’t illegally publishing these books for free on the Net. How do they get away with this, you may ask? Well, the selection is limited to books whose copyright has expired, or are at least 75 years old.

Some people may see this as hugely problematic, but since I have a habit of discarding classic literature in favour of a book with a prettier cover, it has instead opened up a whole new world of amazing stories for me to peruse at my leisure. I’m very excited about the whole thing :D.

So far I managed to get through The Time Machine (H.G. Wells) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), and am now working my way though Around the World in 80 Days (Jules Verne).

I absolutely LOVED Dorian Gray, and insist that all of you who have not yet read it do so at the earliest possible juncture (see I’m sounding all old-timey already!).

For those of you who are interested, the two websites I’ve found with the best books are as follows:

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/title.html

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

Page By Page has few selections, but it’s mostly all the big classics. Contrarily, the U-Penn library has a gazillion books, but it’s harder to navigate if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

There’s also Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). It’s got a fair amount (like 18,000 books and counting), but is again hard to navigate if you don’t have a specific title or author in mind. If you’re just browsing I’d suggest clicking on the “Online book catalogue” link, and on the left-hand sidebar there’s a link called “Top 100.” That’s where all the goodies are.

Happy reading all!! I heart summer :D.

posted by Megan at 3:05 p.m.

Red Bull gave me wings...and a migraine

Holy shit that stuff is strong.

Went to Foundation on Saturday night with Rebecca and ordered a Red Bull champagne thing (sounds gross but was actually quite tasty). This was at around 9:00 p.m.. I was subsequently kept up by the sound of my brain spinning around inside my skull for the next EIGHT HOURS.

Never...ever...again.

posted by Megan at 4:00 p.m.

DONE.

posted by Megan at 9:02 p.m.

Why couldn't all four years have been this good??

Song for the Moment
Song: Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)
Artist: Big & Rich
Album: Horse of the Different Colour







***

J-school's almost over, and I'd just like to take the opportunity to say:

Tear.


I can't believe how much I'm going to miss these guys. It's like how army cadets must feel after boot camp. You've survived four of the toughest years of your life by venting to and depending on each other to get through it and now its just...over. Just like that. Where did it all go?

Although I must say as wrap-ups go, the last couple weeks have been some of the greatest of my life. As previously mentioned, PR kicked ass, followed soon after by my J4000 presentation on the last day of j-school class (Apr 3). I dressed up as Screech Powers (our topic was "youth and the media" so we decided to do a Saved By the Bell skit) and ran around the classroom in Marc's afro and one of my dad's horrible Hawaiian shirts. We killed. Even Prof Dornan said it was a great way to cap off the end of the year. And since I made the whole background/logo and ppt. for our presentation from SRATCH (!!) I felt super duper proud that the hard work paid off.

Please view my fabulousness with Photoshop below:



















Inspiration from the original:









Not bad eh?

So yea, that was Monday. Tuesday was oral presentation number THREE for my Mass Com class on punk music as a form of rebellion. This was the presentation I'd been looking forward to the least, not because it was the hardest (the opposite is true) but because the people I was working with lacked any and all imaginative capabilities. Three of the four of them also didn't speak English as their first language which also made things slightly more complicated. Anyway, being a seasoned performer by that point, I pulled it off OK, and having made the ppt for that presentation too, I received top marks from my group members, which was nice :D.

Tuesday also capped off my university class career with my Can-US relations course. It was boring review, but Prof. Hilmer is so freakin' awesome, I was just glad I got to finish off my undergrad with his class. Way cool.

Tuesday night I promptly collapsed, having not slept more than four hours a night for about a week at that point, but woke up early on Wednesday and dragged my ass to school to shoot a very special present for my fellow j-schoolers.

Ok, there's a story here. Lee's boyfriend Jon (Rotondo) is this hugely hilarious guy who's obsessed with Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report. Lucky for him, his J4000 topic was "comedic journalism" which included studying these kinds of "fake" newscasts. Well, his group decided to do their own version and called it The Rotondo Report. It was quite frankly the funniest thing ever filmed in human history. It was such a hit he came back for a cameo in the "business journalism" group's presentation and he managed to kill it again.

So, for a good-bye j-school gift, we could think of nothing better than shooting a full-length half-hour version of The Rotondo Report. We paired Jon with Lindsey Neely, basically his female counterpart in the program (that girl makes me piss myself laughing almost daily) and two correspondents: Kiel Edge, a very tall man known for being the laziest guy in the program, and Brian Joe Jackson, one of the quietest people in the program. Brian's bit was PRICELESS (it was called BJ on BJs -- BJ = Bachelor of Journalism). I won't go into details, but lets put it this way, his first line was "Hello. Today I'm reporting from the inside of an 18 year old journalism student's dorm room. Ususally I'm here for pleasure, but today it's aaaall business." YA. Did I mention this guy says NOTHING...EVER? I died. It was so awesome.

So Wednesday was production day. I volunteered to be part of the crew, and was at school at 9:00 a.m. for training on the switching equipment. Turns out it's pretty much just pushing buttons really fast, which apparently I'm very adept at. I also just had fun hanging out and talking with all my j-school buddies. With classes over and assignments pretty well complete, it was nice to be able to chat without someone freaking out about something.

Here's some pretty visuals of the day:

Jon and Lindsey laughing jovially and "getting ready" for the big newscast
















Erin and Lee on cameras one and two.























Yours truly looking all classy-like next to Mr. Joe Jackson (if ya nasty) himself in the control room (like I said...buttons).
























Muchos fun.

Production ended around 5:00, and after grabbing some dinner with Colleen at Ollie's I went home and passed out once again.

That brings us to yesterday, the j-school grad party at Griffin's downtown on Elgin. SO MUCH FUN. Seriously, the best party I've ever been to in my entire life.

I went to Lee and Kel's early to get all dolled up. As Brandon's home from France, he agreed to be my date, and came over to meet da girls (they had seriously thought I'd been making him up:P) before Kel, Lindsay (a different one, "a" not "e") Brandon and myself went to meet Jill downtown at the hotel her and her boy had rented for the night (Jill lives far, so it was just easier for them to get a room in the city). We pre-drank there and then met the rest of the crew at the restaurant around 7:00.

Wanna know what's fun? A room full of drunk journalism students days away from graduation. That, my friends, is a fucking riot.

Highlights (besides the massively huge highlight of getting to party with everyone) included free drink tickets (and then MORE free drink tickets), an illegal amount of picture-taking, and the professor (yes that's right, I said PROFESSOR) I've had a crush on since second year pinched my ass while I was waiting at the bar. OMG that man is hot. When confronted about it later by Lee and Kaila he said simply "it was just there. I had to."

Can I get some mad props for having junk in the trunk? I think so.

I had such a fabulous time, drank about six diferent kinds of alcohol (don't do that) and have since lost feeling in one of the toes on my right foot because I was dancing so long in bad sandals that I pinched a nerve.

More pretty pictures:

Jana, my PR group-mate, and myself (looking damn sexy)























Me and ma boys outside taking a breather (from left: Tyler, BJ, me, Brandon and...guy with cigar??)
















Lee and Jon looking like their adorable selves
















Too cuuute.

Today was hang-over day. I had a 5-page essay due by 4:00 for my mass com class (basically a written repeat of our oral presentation) which I hadn't started yet. I left Brandon's early and wrote the whole thing in about three hours in a very tired/still half drunken state and handed it in. I didn't even read it over, that's about how much I was not caring about that.

So now I'm home and ready to collapse yet AGAIN. I get the day tomorrow to study for my exam on Monday. Sunday is a group studying fest at Lina and Rebecca's, also for Monday. I gotta go to work after the exam, as well as on Tuesday. Wednesday I have off to study for my history exam on Thursday, the end of which will signal the end of my undergraduate career.

Haha, did you get all that? Wow, what a ride.

posted by Megan at 11:12 p.m.

A Metaphor, if you please

This is me today:
















This is me a week from today:















See you then.

posted by Megan at 2:04 a.m.