Concordia: the C is for Cool!

Well, dear friends and spy-bots, I made it. I am sitting in my bright orange bedroom, wearing my pajamas (fluffy pink pants and a threadless T), and, at last check, I am fully in tact and lucid after a very successful Concordia TA orientation yesterday. You may think that the fact that I'm in my pajamas at 10pm on Friday night in Montreal might be evidence that orientation was not such a success after all, but you would just be silly! I am taking time to regroup after the stressfest/boozefest of Thursday. I went, I met, I conquered - and I left them wanting more! That is the trick to social prowess (and to a decent night's sleep - though this factor is easily and welcomingly dismissed under the right circumstances) (I realize that welcomingly isn't a word, but neither is technoculture, yet it's printed on my UWO degree!). The whole day was a bit exhausting, but it got me reasonably excited about being a TA, and very much excited about being a grad student in general! We got doughnuts, name tags, and very animated speeches by some very animated professors who tried to describe to us what we're in for. It seemed to me that most of the grad students there were returning MA students who hijacked the orientation day in order to reunite with each other after a summer apart, but that made it even more fun! Montreal people are niiiiice.... seriously nice... here are a few of the many things that I did yesterday:

1. Ate a (free) doughnut!

2. Met a fellow student who spent his summer as the manager at a slaughterhouse near Guelph. Over lunch I told him that my memories of slaughterhouses involve going with my Dad to the abattoir and being given a fudgesicle while I waited for the hogs to get unloaded. Now fudgesicles are forever tied to squealing slaughter in my mind. The guy, Andrew, listening to my story with the ears of a slaughterhouse manager, had a conniption fit at the thought of a farmer bringing his tiny kid with him to deliver the pigs. The other people at the table had connpition fits because they were eating a pork stir-fries.

3. Found out that my MA creative writing thesis needs to be about four times as long and about ten million times as good as my undergrad creative writing thesis.

4. Met the prof I'm TAing for, who is fabulous, and who bought me a beer at the pub and told me not to work too hard. He's only been in Montreal for a year so we bonded over our mutual feeling of displacement... and our mutual love of television melodramas. (him: Buffy, me: Six Feet Under)

5. Got bored during the library info session (think: MIT 026 in two hours or less) and accidentally made myself sick'n'dizzy from spinning on my office chair... no one noticed that I nearly toppled. At least, I think no one noticed.

Today I hung out at Parc La Fontaine, which was soooooo nice. I was there from late afternoon to late evening, the perfect time of day, and I found a great spot to spread my blanket near the fountain, under the trees. That park is so amazing... the whole time you could hear bongo drums and guitars, little kids laughing, dogs playing together, and everywhere you looked people were spread out in the grass, reading and talking and eating. It was total paradise, especially because everyone else seemed to think it was a sort of paradise, too. No one was in a hurry, no one was closed off to the world, no one minded the music. It was sort of like Jamaica ... but less scorching hot. (disclaimer: I have never been to Jamaica and do not claim to have any real idea of what it's really like there)

Anyway, time for tea and reading. Tycho is on patrol in the apartment. The bedroom and kitchen windows face out onto the alley behind my building, and every now and then a tough-looking alley cat saunters past. Tycho knows this and has been scampering between the bedroom and the kitchen for the last couple of hours, pressing his head against the window and breathing heavily whenever he spots a cat. Seriously, he does this sort of snorting-puffing thing with his nose, and his fur spikes up like mad. I feel bad for the alley cats because some of them stop and look up at Tycho and I in the window, and I feel like they are looking at us with envy. I have visions of the Little Match Girl, starving and freezing cold on Christmas Eve and peering into the windows of jolly families gathering around their feasts. I know that these cats aren't freezing cold, and they don't even look starving, but still, I hope they have a Megan to go home to who squeezes them and gives them toys!