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charloweenMost normal people, when faced with the first day of classes, would attend their one class, hang around the ol' hang-around spots to see old friends and then retire gently to a pub for some celebratory beer.
But not me. Oh, no.
I arrived on campus just before 9am yesterday morning so I could trot my way up to the Dean's office to offer explanations and profuse apologies for missing Tuesday's Mentor orientation to various Directors and Coordinators. Sigh. Tuesday was a wacky mess involving a morning-adventure to the grocery store to buy like everything we'll need food-wise for the next month and an evening-aventure to IKEA which took more than four hours and resulted in me assembling an ottoman at 11pm.
In between those two adventures I raced around campus and more-or-less rolled crit fail on finding the room. I was, it turns out, STARING RIGHT AT THE DOOR but silly me... I read the sign that said the room was "closed for maintenance" and figured I'd written it down wrong. But this isn't a story about Tuesday.
This is a story about Wednesday. So after kowtowing most completely and thoroughly I grabbed the keys to the FASAM office (FASAM stands for something like Fine Arts Student Ambassadors/Advisors and Mentors, but I always get it slightly wrong) and having grabbed said keys, set out to set up the booth for its inaugural run of the year. As is always the case, the questions were 1% advising-related and 99% directional.
After the third person asked "where's room xxx" I started to get kind of angry, 'cause the booth is at a junction of three buildings. You, hypothetical MORON of a student, must tell me WHICH BUILDING said room xxx is supposed to be before I can direct you to it. There are over 100 buildings on campus. Some people get horribly lost and think they're on the other side of the campus so I can't just guess which building they mean. SIGH. I whined about that to the assorted Directors and Coordinators and they're going to make a sign for the most common directions.
Actually, we were wondering if any of the theatre students or performance artists would mind being signpost-mimes. Tee hee.
That's where I met New Friend #1. She popped by, a third-year student and newly-minted Mentor, just to say hello and check out the booth she picked up one of the York Exchange brochures and shook her fist at York International for not letting her go on exchange. I replied (still a little loopy from the early hour) that I'd wanted to go to China for a particular internship but it wasn't offered. Then I told her of the Wacky Plan #47, to "go to England in 2009 'cause one of my favourite actors is going to be in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet". Keep in mind I didn't mention any names. SHE replied "OMG DAVID TENNANT" (without any prompting) and flailing ensued.
I'm sure you can imagine.
Since I had my computer there, I showed her the Yummy Chocolate Dalek Cake that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pyratelady linked for me. And THEN I showed her a picture of the Daleks I'd knitted. She looked at the picture and then cried out, "AH! Do you watch Brotherhood 2.0?" To which I replied, "ARGH! YOU SAW THAT POST? I DIDN'T THINK ANYONE SAW THAT POST!" ...because the one thing I've ever posted on YouTube was a reply to one of their videos. In that, I'd posted a picture of the knit Daleks 'cause I'm a huge geek. New Friend said, "YOU'RE THE KNIT DALEK GIRL" and by this time I'm alternately mortified and freaked out and amused, 'cause dude... I never expected to be known for anything online. Even something so small. ESPECIALLY something so small. I know it weirds out eyesmiling every time I mention her here (which is why I'm endeavoring to mention her as much as possible) and this was kind of the same thing.
Lolz ensued.
So I was stuck at the Mentorship booth thing for four hours, and by the end of it Victor dropped by. This was lovely 'cause I haven't seen him in a while. We have plans to watch BBC's Casanova sometime soon.
By the end of my FASAM booth shift I had about an hour and a half before my one class of the day started. So I went to my Work/Study job, 'cause Laura had emailed me, begging me to come in to get some edits put in on some documents. My Work/Study term isn't supposed to start until next week but they needed my fingers for a few hours this week, too. Yay money! Laura had a bad day on Tuesday, so by yesterday she was past her point of sanity and was also really giggly. Everyone was. Good times.
After an hour of making text and formatting changes in Quark, I skedaddled off to class: MUSI 3335 Music of the Avant-Garde. The professor ("Matt", he told us to call him "Matt" because there are only 11 students in the class, woo) is pretty darned cool: he says "dig" rather than "understand" and other fun things like that. Part of the handouts he gave us was a stack of sheet music (haven't had to read sheet music since, oh, 2003) and a CD full of concertos and études and stuff to read/listen to as homework. The class looks pretty neat - different than anything I've taken, and it'll force me to listen to music in a totally new way. Matt-the-prof played some Beethoven for us, and one of my music-major classmates said it sounded like the orchestra was chasing the solo piano. Yeah, didn't hear that.
After class, New Friend #2 and I grabbed some tea and sat out in the lovely late afternoon (it was about 4:30 by this point) and talked for about an hour. New Friend #2 sat beside me in class and we drew matching topic out of a hat to do a paired presentation for Matt's class. We're both in our last year, considering grad school and really hit it off.
She went home, and I snuck in to the Steacie Science & Engineering Library to work on some film-related stuff. Tee hee. I wasn't working on science at all! I got the thing done juuuuuust before 7pm, which is when I then went to a meeting/focus group thing as part of my ongoing participation in redesigning the York students' website. Almost three hours later we had discussed the hell out of the graphics for a banner, quibbled about wording in the guiding principles and ate some really good free food. Only half of the expected students came out for the meeting, so there was a lot left over. I grabbed two full large pizzas and brought them home...
...to find an apartment with people in it! Dee had some people over and Amy's dude was here, too. I offered cold pizza and was offered beer in return! Dee's friends became New Friends #3 and #4 because they both liked Firefly, Doctor Who and District 13. Geek bliss is having conversations with drunk people about Nine vs Ten and Rose vs Martha and the new series vs Tom Baker. Neither had seen the Shakespeare episode, y'see. Obviously deficient, despite being otherwise awesome.
Dee and her friends went out dancing, Amy and her guy retired to her room as well and I collapsed into bed at midnight, having been "on" for, like, 16 hours almost constantly.
And that was my first day of school. *whew*
...
The radio's playing Pavarotti's version of "Nessun Dorma". And now I'm crying. On the one hand, he lived a full and varied life (good thing) but on the other, it's a shame he hadn't been able to perform for quite some time... and as a selfish fan of the arts, it's so sad to have lost such a passionate and charismatic singer. He'll be missed.
But not me. Oh, no.
I arrived on campus just before 9am yesterday morning so I could trot my way up to the Dean's office to offer explanations and profuse apologies for missing Tuesday's Mentor orientation to various Directors and Coordinators. Sigh. Tuesday was a wacky mess involving a morning-adventure to the grocery store to buy like everything we'll need food-wise for the next month and an evening-aventure to IKEA which took more than four hours and resulted in me assembling an ottoman at 11pm.
In between those two adventures I raced around campus and more-or-less rolled crit fail on finding the room. I was, it turns out, STARING RIGHT AT THE DOOR but silly me... I read the sign that said the room was "closed for maintenance" and figured I'd written it down wrong. But this isn't a story about Tuesday.
This is a story about Wednesday. So after kowtowing most completely and thoroughly I grabbed the keys to the FASAM office (FASAM stands for something like Fine Arts Student Ambassadors/Advisors and Mentors, but I always get it slightly wrong) and having grabbed said keys, set out to set up the booth for its inaugural run of the year. As is always the case, the questions were 1% advising-related and 99% directional.
After the third person asked "where's room xxx" I started to get kind of angry, 'cause the booth is at a junction of three buildings. You, hypothetical MORON of a student, must tell me WHICH BUILDING said room xxx is supposed to be before I can direct you to it. There are over 100 buildings on campus. Some people get horribly lost and think they're on the other side of the campus so I can't just guess which building they mean. SIGH. I whined about that to the assorted Directors and Coordinators and they're going to make a sign for the most common directions.
Actually, we were wondering if any of the theatre students or performance artists would mind being signpost-mimes. Tee hee.
That's where I met New Friend #1. She popped by, a third-year student and newly-minted Mentor, just to say hello and check out the booth she picked up one of the York Exchange brochures and shook her fist at York International for not letting her go on exchange. I replied (still a little loopy from the early hour) that I'd wanted to go to China for a particular internship but it wasn't offered. Then I told her of the Wacky Plan #47, to "go to England in 2009 'cause one of my favourite actors is going to be in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet". Keep in mind I didn't mention any names. SHE replied "OMG DAVID TENNANT" (without any prompting) and flailing ensued.
I'm sure you can imagine.
Since I had my computer there, I showed her the Yummy Chocolate Dalek Cake that
pyratelady linked for me. And THEN I showed her a picture of the Daleks I'd knitted. She looked at the picture and then cried out, "AH! Do you watch Brotherhood 2.0?" To which I replied, "ARGH! YOU SAW THAT POST? I DIDN'T THINK ANYONE SAW THAT POST!" ...because the one thing I've ever posted on YouTube was a reply to one of their videos. In that, I'd posted a picture of the knit Daleks 'cause I'm a huge geek. New Friend said, "YOU'RE THE KNIT DALEK GIRL" and by this time I'm alternately mortified and freaked out and amused, 'cause dude... I never expected to be known for anything online. Even something so small. ESPECIALLY something so small. I know it weirds out eyesmiling every time I mention her here (which is why I'm endeavoring to mention her as much as possible) and this was kind of the same thing.Lolz ensued.
So I was stuck at the Mentorship booth thing for four hours, and by the end of it Victor dropped by. This was lovely 'cause I haven't seen him in a while. We have plans to watch BBC's Casanova sometime soon.
By the end of my FASAM booth shift I had about an hour and a half before my one class of the day started. So I went to my Work/Study job, 'cause Laura had emailed me, begging me to come in to get some edits put in on some documents. My Work/Study term isn't supposed to start until next week but they needed my fingers for a few hours this week, too. Yay money! Laura had a bad day on Tuesday, so by yesterday she was past her point of sanity and was also really giggly. Everyone was. Good times.
After an hour of making text and formatting changes in Quark, I skedaddled off to class: MUSI 3335 Music of the Avant-Garde. The professor ("Matt", he told us to call him "Matt" because there are only 11 students in the class, woo) is pretty darned cool: he says "dig" rather than "understand" and other fun things like that. Part of the handouts he gave us was a stack of sheet music (haven't had to read sheet music since, oh, 2003) and a CD full of concertos and études and stuff to read/listen to as homework. The class looks pretty neat - different than anything I've taken, and it'll force me to listen to music in a totally new way. Matt-the-prof played some Beethoven for us, and one of my music-major classmates said it sounded like the orchestra was chasing the solo piano. Yeah, didn't hear that.
After class, New Friend #2 and I grabbed some tea and sat out in the lovely late afternoon (it was about 4:30 by this point) and talked for about an hour. New Friend #2 sat beside me in class and we drew matching topic out of a hat to do a paired presentation for Matt's class. We're both in our last year, considering grad school and really hit it off.
She went home, and I snuck in to the Steacie Science & Engineering Library to work on some film-related stuff. Tee hee. I wasn't working on science at all! I got the thing done juuuuuust before 7pm, which is when I then went to a meeting/focus group thing as part of my ongoing participation in redesigning the York students' website. Almost three hours later we had discussed the hell out of the graphics for a banner, quibbled about wording in the guiding principles and ate some really good free food. Only half of the expected students came out for the meeting, so there was a lot left over. I grabbed two full large pizzas and brought them home...
...to find an apartment with people in it! Dee had some people over and Amy's dude was here, too. I offered cold pizza and was offered beer in return! Dee's friends became New Friends #3 and #4 because they both liked Firefly, Doctor Who and District 13. Geek bliss is having conversations with drunk people about Nine vs Ten and Rose vs Martha and the new series vs Tom Baker. Neither had seen the Shakespeare episode, y'see. Obviously deficient, despite being otherwise awesome.
Dee and her friends went out dancing, Amy and her guy retired to her room as well and I collapsed into bed at midnight, having been "on" for, like, 16 hours almost constantly.
And that was my first day of school. *whew*
...
The radio's playing Pavarotti's version of "Nessun Dorma". And now I'm crying. On the one hand, he lived a full and varied life (good thing) but on the other, it's a shame he hadn't been able to perform for quite some time... and as a selfish fan of the arts, it's so sad to have lost such a passionate and charismatic singer. He'll be missed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-06 05:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-06 09:36 pm (UTC)And it looks like I'm done at York tomorrow at 1pm and home at 2/2:30. If the Stars thing doesn't work out, would you like to wander up to the Manulife Centre and see what cheap same-day tickets we can get for the TIFF?
don't forget the teabags :D
Date: 2007-09-06 10:03 pm (UTC)you can pick them up when you're here!
Date: 2007-09-06 11:49 pm (UTC)Come over whenever you'd like, I guess?
Re: you can pick them up when you're here!
Date: 2007-09-07 01:06 am (UTC)Re: you can pick them up when you're here!
Date: 2007-09-07 02:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-07 01:20 am (UTC)In orchestra, I loved playing Mozart more than any other composer (well, except maybe Holzt) because of how technical the pieces were. You had to be dead on and in the zone for it to sound the way it was intended. It was a lot of work and tiring and lots of practices but when it came together it was magical.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-08 03:20 pm (UTC)I prefer Back because it's so tidy. I like tidy. I'm looking forward to seeing what this CD he'd given us will be. I get what you mean about being in the zone - singing in a massed choir of 1000 ppl is both a challenge and a crazy rush. Ditto an ensemble. I don't think Mozart wrote much for women's choirs, though, 'cause I don't recall doing any of his work. (Mostly it was Nancy Telfer, die die die)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-08 08:24 am (UTC)2. Hope to visit your new haus tomorrow night, if'n I can manage buses.
3. Need tape recorder. Get me a tape recorder?
4. sleeeeeepfrog
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-08 03:08 pm (UTC)2. Yay - should be fun! We have no idea who's showing up. Looks like it'll be a good mix of film kids, lesbians and nerds.
3. No? I has none?
4. sheeplog