Three-Day Weekend! Woo hoo!

Hit Buffalo on Sunday for a day of shopping, food, and art. We hit all the stores we don't have in Canada. I got cute rain boots from Target! We also went to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery for an exhibit on abstract art, which was super interesting.

Oh, and this is the song I loved from my high school days that I was trying to sing in the car on the way back... It comes complete with cheesy early 90s video!

Place Des Grands Hommes (1989).

How Can You Not Love A Website...

Which has an entry this long about swearing in Quebec? Awesome. As you can see, unlike English where most curse words are associated with sex and/or bodily functions, all the curse words in French-speaking Quebec are derived from religion, most precisely Catholicism. It is so funny to read a list of curse words, especially since stringing them together makes them that much more potent when we curse. The person who wrote this was fairly thorough, because they even explains why derivations of the words fuck and shit are actually very mild curse words for us (the kind of stuff you hear on TV, and which offends few people.)

I never swear in French (or very rarely), whereas it doesn't bother me as much in English. I'm not a total potty mouth, but I have some favourite words when I'm exasperated. My poor mom who thought she raised a lady. LOL

Ode To Sleep

This morning was one of those mornings when I just wanted to stay all bundled up in my bed. Sadly, it was not meant to be. I was actually composing an ode to sleep in my head while riding the subway. LOL As I was thinking of rhymes, I dozed off (LOL), so I can't really remember it all now! Anyway, my poem was free form rather than following the structure of an ode but the word "ode" sounds more dramatic!

This is what I remember of it:
Sleep so sweet
Nestled under a sheet
Enveloped in peaceful slumber
Made of dream and wonder

I'll need to work on this poem since my whole semester will be a worship at the altar of the hours of sleep I do get. Despite my lack of sleep, I shall have to stay up (or at least program my VCR) this Thursday night, because Late Night with Conan O'Brien has a full hour with U2!!! Mmmm...good music!

I'll leave you with a smart quote I heard this morning on my favourite French radio show. "Parfois, l'envers de la vérité n'est pas le mensonge mais la bêtise." This can be translated to: "Sometimes, the opposite of the truth is not lie but stupidity." Deep, huh?

Music & Sitcoms: Chicken Soup For The Soul

This blog is a funny thing. It allows me to be as neurotic as I want to be, a luxury not really afforded to me in the real world. Well, except when talking to my mom & my very close friends, who know the weird intracacies of my mind. I was rereading my recent posts, and some of it reminds me of the tortured teenager I used to be. I was a good girl as a teenager (except maybe for the heavyhanded sarcasm! LOL) but boy, was I an anxious mess. I used to have a lot of difficulty managing it. Everything was a crisis. I was succeeding, at least mildly, at most everything I did but I was always waiting for the impending failure or the other shoe to drop. Fortunately, I grew up, and things got better. I became more adept at managing stress, and I noticed that things have a way of working themselves out. At the same time, I've also learned that I'll never be happy in a job where I have too much stress. Having to repress the anxiety-filled side of me has had its consequences at time, especially in terms of my health.

Anyway, two of my surefire weapons against stress are music & sitcoms. I've termed them chicken soup for the soul because I was being so new age, and had to borrow the names of those books! LOL I'm listening to classical music at the moment, and it just made whatever knots in my stomach I may have had melt away. I think that's why I love singing in a choir so much. There is such a power in singing at the top of your lungs. This semester, we are singing Summertime by Gershwin! I love Gershwin as many of you know; I just wish we had also sung Someone To Watch Over Me, which is my favourite song. We're also singing some Rachamaninov & Dvořák pieces, and one badass Bach piece, Lobet Den Herrn, Motet #6. This Bach is so tough because it have no melodic line that repeats. The harmonies constantly change, and it is just so hard to count the beats because it goes so fast. Still, it is an entertaining challenge.

I have now changed my CD to classic 70s Quebec granola rock. LOL It's from one of the most popular bands of all time in Quebec called Beau Dommage. They've sold an incredible amount of records/CDs over the years considering only 8 million of people live in Quebec. It's urban poetry about love, friendship, city living (mostly in Montreal),... I feel home just listening to it. They wrote one of my favourite songs in French called La complainte du phoque en Alaska (literally The lament of the seal in Alaska). It's about a male seal who sits by itself on his iceberg in Alaska, missing his girlfriend who joined a travelling circus in the continental US. He ponders whether the ephemeral joy gained from exhibiting in the circus is really worth leaving loved ones behind. Anyway, it's a beautiful love song to which I could never do justice. I never tire of listening to it. Another balm to my soul.

Sitcoms are the comic relief in my life. You never get enough laughter in life. I love my NewsRadio and Friends DVDs. Oh, and they've been airing Cheers on the Comedy Network, which makes me happy. :) I got say, Cheers has aged well (unlike The Cosby Show) but the one thing that has not aged well about it are the clothes. Dear God, Sam wears horrifying sweaters, and Diane's clothing is plain scary.

Finally, I did forget one other stress relief in my life. Cute, ain't she? :) I need to scan even better pictures of her.

Live from Toronto, This is Tuesday Afternoon Live...

Wow. The creativity well is a little bit dry if we consider the title I've given to this post. It's funny for me to have this blog, where I'm basically blabbing on to myself. It's nice though. It's just an outlet I can turn on to blatter on about my non-work thoughts. Considering I spend the bulk of my day doing one of the 4 following things : working on my computer, reading research/teaching material, watching TV when I'm too tired to do anything else(not much of that one) or more work on my computer, I do tend to spend a lot of time alone. Certainly, it depends on the day (sometimes, I spend a lot of time with students or patients) but overall, my work tends to be solitary. Such is the life of the graduate student. The introvert in me likes the time alone working but my extrovert side needs distraction from it every so often, and feels it is communicating with the world somehow. So this is my gift to my extrovert side. Hee.

Friday is St-Jean-Baptiste (for all my non-French-speaking readers, if this blog turns out to have any, it's the celebration of Quebec heritage). Big day! So there are having some French concerts in TO. Paul Piché is the main act. As one of my friends mentioned, what is HE doing out of Québec on the day of St-Jean? No idea! Maybe independentist singers have been exiled under Jean Charest? LOL Anyway, so I'm hoping to go with a fellow grad student friend on Friday night.

Anyway, back to work for me...