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Tuesday, February 25, 2003
You know how some people, after a shower, take towels and wrap it around their bodies, tucking in a corner so that the whole thing magically stays on? I found, while walking in front of the large window, that I don’t know how to do that.
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Email of the Week:i thought you were cool until I found out 8w stands for eigth wonder. That’s so cocky – Excerpt from a very serious yahoo address, a fourteen year-old girl named Priscilla from Georgetown. Yes, admittedly, it’s a proud statement, my being the Eighth (note the correct spelling) Wonder of the world. I’ll try to explain why people call me this. First off, you see, no one can get beaten up by someone two years junior like me. That takes considerable talent. Eighth Wonder talent. Just today, a sizeably unremarkable nineteen year-old floored me and proceeded to scrape snow all over my face. Very humiliating. The public play-fight was all my own idea, too. And, though I lost, I maintain that I was suddenly wary of cops, or even worse, someone we knew, driving on the street, as the scuffle would look like an engaging fight from afar. At that exact moment, a few cars seemed to slow down while we were grappling for control. I realized then and there how bad we looked, just two kilometres away from our church; I, in a suit, and he, having his bubble coat freshly torn off by my clumsy maneuvres in our passionate wrestling. So, I paused and relaxed my grip, while trying to see whether it was someone like, my pastor or something in the passing car. It was then that I found myself kissing snow. This stands, of course, only as an excuse to anyone reading. And if you saw me now, you’d think so even more. I wish my roommate’s digital camera was here. The snow somehow scratched and swelled up my face and, coupled with my now disheveled hair, I look like I’ve been severely jumped. On my way home, a ridiculous amount of ice and snow fell all over me from the roof of the 2002 building on University Street. Only on me. Not the guy five metres behind me, or the two girls walking a few feet in front of me. It’s like that cosmically happened on purpose or something. Now I'm walking home looking like I've been beat up, picking icicles out of my hair. Then, one of those crazy Quebecers operating those mini snow-removal machines (which look like Roto-tillers), backed up into me and bashed my knee while I was turning up Aylmer. Now I'm still picking ice out of my hair, with the added pleasure of spitting snow out of my mouth and limping. (Really.) As if that wasn’t enough, a guy riding a bike, a bike of all things on this snowy afternoon, mauled me over while I was crossing the street. Apparently, he didn’t see me, though everything around me is white (except for the unheeded stop sign) and all I’m wearing is black. Numb Nose, who must have been outside a long time on his bike, then accidently drips a surprisingly long garland of snot on my dress-coat as he awkwardly tries to help me back on my feet. (Really.) Now, with a swollen, red face, trace amounts of ice still in my hair, newly caked snow on my butt, and feverishly trying to wipe away foreign snot on my sleeve, I'm still limping home. Ah, almost there. Whoops. Slip in a puddle outside my apartment, barely meeting again my new best friend Cold Hard Ground, and in order to keep my balance and avoid falling yet again, perform a solo ballerina suite for onlookers warming up inside the vestibule of my building. Sounds impossible all in one afternoon, right, Priscilla? Never! Not if you’re the Eighth Wonder.. I'm actually really scared to go back out to school now. Saturday, February 22, 2003
I have arrived back in Montreal from Cleveland. Contrary to what you’ve heard, Cleveland, though plain, isn’t ugly. However, in light of all the bountiful, border-crossing, blogs, I had a tiny incident myself.The following is my own confession: I misrepresented Canadians on the whole and made us all look like a bunch of Rabelaisian idiots. I rolled down my window. “Hi,” I said, trying to be friendly. A boarish grunt was the only response from this burly lumberjack of a U.S. Customs officer. “Where are you headed.” We all know there are some people who, disgruntled with life and embittered for reasons too hurtful to recount, ask questions without its conventional upwards inflection – and in writing, I’d think it’d be equivalent to a question delivered without its question mark. I treaded carefully. “Um, Cleveland.” “And the reason.” “I’m auditioning at the Cleveland Institute of Music.” “Documentation.” “Uh, what?” He sighed. “An official letterhead of some sort that proves you’re really going to Cleveland. For an ‘audition’.” “Uh, I have my cello,” I said, pointing over my shoulder towards the trunk. One has to wonder, however, who would want to lie about going to Cleveland. He says, “That doesn’t help me any.” I look frantically over at my mom. He repeated himself, “Do you have any documentation.” I knew my mom was going to have a mild conniption, whether we passed the border or found ourselves driving back home a little earlier than expected. See, she had reminded me already that I should bring the Cleveland invitation thing we got in the mail, in light of the tighter security. I had forgotten it. There was a quick shuffle of papers, all useless, and I decided I’d give him, hmm.. this one. It was an email I had sent my mom. “Hi Mom,” it read. “Here is the list of the hotels and the numbers in Cleveland we can stay at. Love, Adrian.” He looked at the paper incredulously. “What’s this? Do you know somebody in Cleveland?” I said, weakly, “No.” “Who’s Adrian?” I lifted my stupid hand like I was in a classroom. “That’s me.” “Who’s Mom?” “That’s, uh, my mom.” “Let me get this straight. You and your mom want to cross to go to an audition and, as proof, you’re showing me something you wrote your mom.” “Well, um.. yes, sir.” He sighed. “Just go.” Friday, February 21, 2003
8Wondering:Who else thought that Columbia University was in Columbia? Friday, February 14, 2003
On Valentine's Day, some twenty four years ago (1979), Rod Stewart peaks at #1 in contemporary charts with "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?" to which we must all insist no, no, never in your life, and no once again.
Thursday, February 13, 2003
You see, for someone who’s not terribly endowed with brawny muscles, you’d expect of me to at least be mentally present. I’m not. If it weren’t for the fortunate circumstance that I live in a more or less civil world, and not, say, in the Mesolithic, I’d be very much dead. If it’s survival of the fittest, I’m a goner. A chess match to the death, it’s a forever goodbye. However, if my life depended on a chance game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, I might weasel my way into further existence.So being absent-minded is one of my strongest traits, it seems. In the case of this following story, some may choose to use the above word, ‘absent-minded’, interchangeably with the word ‘stupid’. But as I’ve gone through a terrible time of bashing myself by recounting such pitiful stories as the Taboo, Hannah and Zit incidences, let’s at least pretend I’m smart enough to be absent-minded, without the immediate assumption that my actual mind is absent. Survival in the Fitness In ninth grade, gym class was my most humiliating subject (as I was subject to much humiliation). Eternal dread draped itself on all my peers when they discovered that I, as the outcast picked last when choosing teams, was going to have to join their ranks. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a bad athelete. I just had recurring trouble concentrating on the game and would engross myself in such deep mysteries as why velcro shoes went out, why no one else had worn them since the fourth grade, and why I was still wearing them now. I would also lose myself in deep wonder as to why no one else had tapped into the ingenious fashion statement of combining an outfit composed solely of a Blue Jays cap, Blue Jays shirt, Blue Jays track pants, and a Blue Jays warm-up jacket with matching blue-and-white shoes. I mean, how could it not be cool? Was I just ahead of my time? When other kids point and whisper, is that a good thing? Surely I have found myself the highway to popularity by being different with an assortment of tacky colours. I should do this more often. These types of fashion revelations seemed to only occur to me when other sweaty boys captivated themselves with chasing after a dirty ball. This caused such catastrophes as wobbly shots meandering into the net unhindered with me being goalie, unnoticed basketball passes to me that eventually caused the game to abruptly stop for my nose to bleed, and glorious feats of me scoring against my own team. “Okay,” Coach Skinner (and that was his real name) snapped. I had just finished tightening the velcro fasteners and was proudly shaking my head at my stylish foresight. He launched into his instructions. “There will be four teams playing ball hockey today. We’re going to split the gym in half using the electric partition. Be careful you don’t get in its way, boys. People have gotten hurt before.” Some chuckled at the impossibility of someone getting a hurt by a wall that moves at 0.00056 kilometers an hour. I feel it important to insert this quote at this time, not that it in any way applies to me: “Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” - Douglas Adams The motor-run partition lurked across the gym floor. With its dimensions reaching from the floor to ceiling, it was big and required a lot of power to move it. Its thickness, however, measured maybe only eight inches. In any case, there were two people manning the thing, one on each side of the partition, each holding a key that turned its respective switch. Both keys needed to agree in order for the partition to move or not move. Skinner assigned two of my fellow students to the job. The group of boys I was with became incensed with the sudden conviction that I belonged to the team on the other side, and backed up this assumption with vehement reasoning, so I started for the other side of the gym. Oh, look, there’s like, five meters of space left between the closing partition and the wall. If natural selection had its way, I would have been wiped off the face of this earth by now. It would seem I misjudged the speed of a looming wall; I felt that I had time to get by, possibly even read the Bible in its entirety while in its path. Just as I was crossing the Jordan, the moving wall, the immobile wall, and my head had a frank exchange of who had the right of way. (It was a fierce debate.) Even in retrospect, I don’t know how my head was able to lodge itself right between the partition and its docking wall. Usually, such an instance like getting your head stuck from a perpendicular angle would be deterred by what some call shoulders. But maybe I was trying to step over something, so my head propelled itself in front of my whole body. In any case, this being a true story, I can offer no real convincing argument. Maybe I walk like a pigeon or something. My ears started to ring with a dull and high-pitched sound. My head really felt like it was going to cave in. Sad to say, I’ve had my share of run-ins with elevator doors, not unlike what was happening now, and each time, the elevator doors would bounce back to let me pass. An elevator door, this was not. A meter away from me, directly facing me, was the boy manning one half of the thing (I couldn’t see the other one now that my head was securely wedged between two walls). He was conveniently looking the other way, so I said something very to the point, like, “Stop this thing. My head is stuck.” He turned and was startled to see my face, now contorting into an ugly grimace because of the sheer amount of pressure it was taking. I felt like my head was going to explode. I think he would die too if his survival depended on his reflexes. It took him a seemingly infinite amount of time to turn the key to ‘off’. The wall stopped moving, though, and the pain now held consistent. The guy behind me, he finally clued in and he was like, “Oh shoot. What happened??” “I decided I wanted to see how wide my head is. What does it look like happened, you jerk! I got my stupid head stuck between these two walls!” “Hahaha, that’s funny—” “No it’s not!! It hurts!” I’d have kicked him with my Blue Jay shoes if I had more mobility at the time. The boy that was facing me was a little more serious, thank goodness, and he said to the other boy, “Hey, how do we make this thing go the other way?” The boy at my back replied, “I don’t remember, man. What did Skinner say again?” I couldn’t believe the two were having a leisurely discussion over my head as they tried to remember how to make the wall go in reverse. “Let’s just try turning the key to the left,” said the boy facing me. “AAAAAAH!” The dull, throbbing pain shot back sharply. “Wrong way! Wrong way!!! It must be the other way!! Turn it to the right!” The boy behind me said, “Like this?” Infinitely more pain. “ARGH!! Stop stop stop!!!” At this moment, I was keenly aware that getting my head unstuck was entering an experimental method, and my head was its guinea pig. Which led to another realization: there’s nothing like finding yourself in a predicament borne only of your own stupidity, and to have that stupidity countered with more stupidity from the stupid hands of equally stupid people in the position to save you, which they stupidly aren’t doing. “What an awkward way to die,” I thought. Enter Skinner, the terror, the menace, the horribly insane slave driver that made me run around in circles for no intellectual reason every single day, as my deus ex machina to this potentially fateful episode. Too bad I couldn’t look into the face of my temporary saviour, since he was behind me. I never realized until then how affecting it was that God decided to put my two eyes on a certain side of my head. Skinner growled instructions to the boy facing me. Both of them had to turn the key opposite ways, and soon my head was alleviated from the pressure and pain. As I’m fond of leaving readers with applicable knowledge for everyday living, the moral of the story is: if any of the walls around you move, run to the safest corner in a shuddering croach until it’s done. Sunday, February 09, 2003
I think at two years of age, one is at the zenith of honesty and candid approval.I was in Pastor Dave’s house, playing with one of his three daughters. The playroom was impeccably clean before. Now it had books strewn all over the floor. Toy cars, dolls, all sorts of pink trinkets. Among these tiny things was Hannah, a perfect chameleon in terms of size to her surroundings. Boundless energy are children at two. I had been reading the same story from a Disney collection for what seemed like forty minutes. After forty minutes, Ariel becomes a very one-dimensional character. Plus if I was King Triton I would make my daughter wear a whole lot more than just a scanty seashell bra – especially if she was going to star in a Disney movie. This particular story I was reading had an underlying moral that we shouldn’t wander too far from home. At two, it doesn’t matter that this story has no plot development. I was almost scared Hannah was going to demand another rendition when she peered up at me from the hollow of my crossed legs. She suddenly pointed at her actively blue eyes, “Look! Eyes!” Happy to do something different, I smiled and pointed at her ears. “And do you know what these are?” “Ears,” she said. “Good girl!” Wow. She’s advanced. My mom still dressed me when I was seven. (Um, I didn’t just say that.) “And what is this?” I asked, squeezing her nose. “Nose!” She liked this game. She pointed at my face, “Big nose!” “…” I believe this game is over. There comes a time in life when one realizes how utterly true something is from other means than just popular opinion. That is the sincerity of a two-year old. I was fighting for an escape from embarrassment. “Basically, Hannah,” I said in my professional parent voice, glancing at her tiny button nose, “you’re saying that I have a big nose compared to yours, right?” I didn’t realize that, at two years of age, one could convincingly express skepticism. Flustered, I said, a little more forcefully, “What you’re saying is that my nose is bigger than yours, simply because of the undeniable fact that I’m generally bigger than you.” I decided at this time that the more words she didn’t understand the better chance of her nodding assent. I added quickly, before she could enter a rebuttal, “Moving right along… Um.. What’s this? Your, uh, chin? This is your chin, right?” With her characteristic glazed smile, she didn’t answer, as she was now captivated by the sheer size of my nose. Mumbling, I suggested she go play with someone else. Friday, February 07, 2003
An Excerpt from an Interview with 8W:Reporter: So with all the time you spend juggling school, rap, and cello, where do you get the inspiration to write? 8W: Well, I'll tell you my secret. Wednesday, February 05, 2003
I caught sight of a wannabe character in an alleyway near my apartment spray-painting some illusive masterpiece on a brickwall. The whole event lent me a vivid flashback of my own indirect participation of such illegal activities.Beautiful nostalgia. I give you an entry from the Puerile Files: It was only street chalk, equivalent to washable markers. I find that a very important thing to point out -- that, and the fact that I had nothing to do with it. I was just there. Being in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time. I was nothing more than an innocent observer. When D-Grey insisted he write his name on the side of a dilapidated wall opposite Uptown theatres – which rests, oddly enough, downtown – Bolo and I laughed, as usual, at his jejune attempts to be cool. The ribbing got even worse when he produced pink chalk from the indiscriminate folds of his baggy clothing. Why he wanted to try his hand at graffiti at that precise moment is beyond me. Why Bolo and I stood around watching him also is beyond me. Why we all participated in this ingenious activity in broad daylight? Beyond me. I believe Grey aimlessly scrawled the first letter of his name before a police squad car pulled up. You may wonder why we ran. I think the sight of police uniform still makes me fidgety, even if I’ve done nothing wrong. There was a point in my life when I used to wave energetically at cops. But that was from my car seat and through a mouthful of pacifier. After that, police only gave me trouble. Some have attributed that to my spiky hair and my quondam high school punkishness. It's a strange thing, but when someone suddenly breaks into a run, you end up running too, even if it's for no apparent reason. So we ran. Bolo, being fat and horrendously out of shape, got caught. In short, the cops would have had the same victory over Bolo had he decided to stand still. Grey, demonstrated unequaled prowess, as if he had been through this cop-at-my-tail thing many times, by running around a corner and, not unlike Saturday morning cartoons, hid alongside the adjacent wall. Grey was, well, wearing grey, and he later bragged of his prescience to have worn camouflaged clothing for the concrete jungle. Incredibly, his stunt worked, and the cop passed right by him. The cop, who struck a remarkable resemblance to Robert Patrick, aka T1000, instead focused all his snorting and hoofing rage at me. I searched frantically for something I could, like Grey, blend in with. But it dawned on me that I had picked this unlucky day to wear my neon yellow jacket. I confess I was ignorant to the possibility of trying to outrun the law this afternoon. In such cases, at the height of adrenaline, my mind conjures up the most insightful of solutions: I was actually entertaining the idea of slowing down to a pedestrian gait to blend in with nature, thinking such positive thoughts as ‘I am one with the sun’. Fortunately, my legs rejected the idea. The rest is a blur. I think I scampered into an office building opposite the Manulife Center and proceeded to lose myself in such conveniences as novelty shops and Loblaws. Grey called me later that night and tirelessly embellished his account of victory against unsurpassable odds, glorious rebellion against order. I couldn't believe my ears. This was not a story you'd tell to impress even my two-year old cousin. We were about as manly as fleet-footed gazelles scurrying over the hillside. But, alas, his talent lies right there: he can turn a crudely skill-less expression of chest-beating egoism into a heroic example of gotterdammerung. As for Bolo, he only got a chuckle and a reprimand when the cop that detained him realized D-Grey’s rebelliously pink “D” for “Dumb” came off the wall with but a rub of the finger. 
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