Proof

Look at all the snow! Look at all the pretty!

Monolicious.

I have made it through another day.

I did not make it to lecture. After another night of little sleep with a stomach that has decided to feel ill every morning at five, I was completely exhausted. I spent an hour curled up on the cold bathroom floor.

At 11:45 I pulled my whimpering ass out of bed. My attempt at lunch failed miserably -- I choked down half of a breakfast in a pouch before giving up. Tutorial was totally brutal -- I barely remember anything from it. Before I knew it, the room was empty and my tutor was sitting next to me peering at me with a concerned look. I think the mother in her saw a sad, sick, lost little girl and she ushered my upstairs to see the head of the programme and only left once she was confident I was set up and introduced.

Daniel, it turns out, it a very nice man. He quickly realized I had no plan of action. My only plan was to get back to bed as quickly as possible. I wasn't even thinking about catching up on reading or preparing for orals. He was very understanding and gave me an extension on my paper so that I don't have to do it until I'm curled up in bed at home.

Home... oh, how I would love to be at home. That's basically all that I want at this point. My everything hurts and I just want my home. I'm trying really hard to have a stiff upper lip with my mom on the phone and my friends when I see them. It's not their job to take care of me (but I do love it when they come by) and my mom feels bad enough without hearing me whimpering into the phone. She sent me a care package with Vitamin C, oranges and banana bread. I'm basically set all weekend -- I won't even have to leave my room. Perfect.

So, I have mono.

Fuck.

My throat hurts so much that I can barely swallow, I can't eat, and the numbing shit the doctor gave me numbed my tongue but not my throat. Helpful.

Last night was College Christmas dinner. The dining hall was smothered in Christmas and food. It was so sweet to see all the people I see everyday giving me food dressed in adorable Christmas shirts serving the best food we've seen all year. Mussels... mmm... and salmon! And stuffing...

So much good food and yet... my throat. Kill me.

I wanted to write more, etc, but I feel shitty, it's almost 8:30 and I need to go to sleep.

Fuck. Mono.

Hot Water Bottle Season

When I woke up on Saturday morning and looked outside, I blinked. And blinked again. Because someone had waved a magic wand and turned Halifax into a winter wonderland. A thick blanket of snow covered everything. The kids from Vancouver Island freaked out. My friend Mark told me he'd never seen so much snow in a city before. Last night there was a snowball fight in the quad and the Middle Bay boys built an epic fort you enter through the first floor bathroom window. Everyone has gone snow crazy.

We went out in the snow last night to celebrate Seana's birthday with some fabulous cheesecake. I don't like cheesecake and I loved this stuff. I wish I could tell you the name of the restaurant, but I have no idea what it was. But it was delicious.


The walk home, however was freezing. When I got back to my room, I filled a water bottle and jumped into bed with my reading and TV on my computer. I turned in early, but no one else did and I was nice and awake at 3am. Oh, dorm life. So soon I will be home and I can sleep a full night. I can't wait.

Flannel is my new best friend

Today was a gray, rainy day, and it just put this heavy damper on my day. I went to class, I went to work, I'm doing reading... but I just feel so... deflated.

My solution is watching the last few episodes of Project Runway on the internets. I'm rooting for Jarell. Sshh, don't tell me how it ends!

The wind is blowing hard outside and I feel much better now, all curled up in my cozy, flannel* bed with my reading and my computer. I think I'll put in my earplugs and fall asleep early.

* These flannel sheets are the most incredible thing ever. I got them for my birthday and I now wish to spend all my time in bed. Ask Davis -- they're perfect for snuggling.

Snow!

I should be in class right now, but my head is all spinny, so I think that's a really bad idea. I'm not sure what my head is up to with this spinning business. It might have something to do with the lack of sleep (this is my mother's theory*). I was planning on sleeping early, but since it was Monday night, that did not happen. Too much drunken drama in the hall and in my room.

I had the most fan-freakin-tabulous birthday -- thanks to everyone who brightened my day. It was a weekend full of eating and dancing; two of my favourite things! I got cakes from my work, my mom and friends, and DanceCo. And I was showered with fabulous gifts like warm mittens, fab earrings and great books. My friends bought me Bitchfest, a collection of articles from Bitch magazine. I've been inhaling that over the past couple days and ignoring my reading. Oops...

PS: It's snowing here for the first time. I makes me miss the thick, crunchy snow on the ground in January in Ottawa. Crunch, crunch, crunch.

*My mom would interupt my birthday greeting to her to ask if I was in class. She would.

Blackout

So much for NaNoBloMo.

I have been completely MIA for a week, working on:

FYP essay
journalism article
journalism essay
journalism scrapbook OF DOOM
a book a day in reading

...and now, it's all done. I can go to bed before 3 am. I can hang out with friends without a knot of guilt. I can spend time in places other than my room. I am SO EXCITED for sleep.

In other news, the Dance Co's show, Clockwork, has been going so well. We've been having a blast, hanging out, rehearsing, chilling, and, of course, dancing. So much dancing. Dance parties all the time. Tonight, Dance Co hosted a dance part in the Wardroom after the show. It competed with the big Dante party in Middle Bay and totally won. I headed over there after my late dinner with my mom -- who is in town! For my birthday! Which started an hour and a half ago!!!

It's been a big week, and it will be an even bigger weekend.

At midnight, when it became my birthday, I was in the Wardroom, dancing my feet off with my closest friends and DanceCo ladies and my friends counted down to my birthday and then all cheered and hugged me. I feel so blessed to have incredible friends like these. And my birthday was awesome from the second it started.

At 11am, I'm having a birthday brunch with friends, and then my mom and I are going shopping. Having her here is so wonderful, and strange, and I love spending time with her and showing her my life. I wonder how she feels to be in it in Halifax.

OK. It's late, my brain is tired and can no longer compute. I hope this update made sense. It wasn't drunk blogging, I promise, although it is a Friday night and I wouldn't put it past me. No, tomorrow night is the night for partying it up at the cast party. This is going to be the best birthday ever.

Rain.

Today was the midterm. It's over. It's done. Every minute the day improves because every minute distances me from it more. And now I'm sitting around my room in my underwear watching TV on my computer.

It's raining today. That doesn't sound weird for Halifax, but it has been completely gorgeous the whole time I've been here. Even on overcast days, the air is fresh and the sun is glowing through the clouds. Today was just rain. Lots of rain. Pouring rain. It was complete pathetic fallacy. Before the midterm it was just spitting a little, but after, it was raining. I glared at it and then took the tunnel.

Yes, I should be studying for my midterm

First of all I love this conversation found at Megan's blog. It made me laugh and forget briefly about Plato.

Other than blog and watch the L Word, I called my family twice today. I was reading over my notes when it occurred to me that I haven't talked to my sister in quite a while. Why not phone her up? It seemed like the perfect study break. It went something like this:

LC: Hey!
Sister: Hey how's it goin.
LC: Oh, you know. I have a midterm tomorrow.
Sister: Yuck.
LC: I know.
Sister: I'm working on math.
LC: Good! Math sucks but you gotta get through it to access the Good through dialectic.
Sister: ...

What? Not everyone is in FYP? Bugger.

*******

Another conversation from my day:

Sarah: NO! No studying at dinner. Could you guys talk about weed or sex or something? Anything?
LC: That is so totally going on my blog.
Davis: It's a shame you can't write about juicy things on your blog.*
LC: I guess, yeah. But your dad reads my blog.** That's the weirdest thing ever.
Davis: He found it one time, I don't think he actually reads it.

So I guess I can be juicy? Maybe I should do juicier things so I can write about them. Have to stay fresh and exciting now, don't I? One too many posts about Dante and I'm screwed.

*I can't remember why I put an asterisk there.
**I met Davis's dad for the first time and the first thing he said to me was "Oh yeah! I read your blog!" Yikes. How many of my friends' parents read this secretly???

Clockwork

After dance practice today, I saw Davis. "You're so excited about dancing," she told me, smiling, "I haven't seen you like this."

I joined the dance show totally randomly. I stopped by Davis's room one day, for no reason, and her roommate, Seana, convinced me to join her at the Dance Co audition, for moral support. I didn't want to go at first -- I had work, I'm lazy, it's easier not to go. But I wanted bonding time with Seana, so I agreed. Plus, I have a big dancer envy and so basically, I think dancing = cool. So, why not?

It's been a really long time since I last danced. When I was little, I was such the girly girl. Barbie dolls, pink sheets, ballet slippers. What I wanted most in the world was to be a ballerina. My poor mother had to line up in the cold to register me for ballet classes at the community centre since I just HAD to be in and I wasn't the first little girl to have ballerina aspirations. Those first classes had little to do with first position and more to do with rustling tutus and soft, pink slippers. I learned to do the "princess wave" that became my signature.

Those first, tiny ballet shoes still sit on the top of my keepsakes box in my closet. Actually, there are a few pairs, each one larger than the last. My mom couldn't sew the elastics into my new pair fast enough for me.

I grew up and grew into classes at dance studios with mirrors and bars. My mother and I would sit in the waiting room and I'd gaze up at the older girls, duffel bags slung across their slender frames. The ballet buns gave them all incredible cheek bones. I couldn't imagine any creature more beautiful, more graceful, more confident than these divine spirits who breezed through my life for seconds every Saturday. My tondues and demi-pliers would become their arabesques, one day.

But then they didn't. I took ballet, tap and jazz combo classes and decided to try jazz at a new studio (the blue leotard probably did it -- I was 11 and so over pink). I quit all those and tried hip hop. After that I quit dance altogether. My busy, new teenage life didn't have room for my soft, pink slippers.

After auditioning with Seana, I looked back and scratched my head. Why did I quit? I really enjoyed dance -- I spent the last two years of high school trying to make room and quietly envying the ballerinas I knew. I wasn't able to get past the planning stages, the vague ideas. I watched "So You Think You Can Dance" instead.

So why the fuck did I ever quit? An hour after the Dance Co audition, I sat drinking a beer at a party and wondering. I'd felt a rush, dancing in the audition. The rush was awesome. Then I remembered my last class I signed up for. It was jazz; I went to the store to buy the leotard, but they didn't carry my size. "My size" wasn't really your normal ballet size. While it was being shipped, I wore baggy sweats and a T-shirt to dance. I have a vivid memory of standing against the back bar, looking into the mirror in the studio; week 3 of no leotard yet. The room was filled with slender, chinioned girls prancing around, and there I was, this monster at the back. I just knew there was no way my 11 year old, developing body would ever be like those mature ballerinas. I never went back after that class.

Except that's totally bullshit. None of the girls I know who are dancers are skin and bone the way I imagined back then. I have no idea what they actually looked like, these girls I looked up to, but I'm guessing they looked a lot like me. It only took me 7 years to figure it out.

I feel a little bit sad about the lost time. I see so many girls who have been dancing for so long and they are so beautiful. There's one piece in the show that makes my eyes fill with tears of beauty and regret when I see it. That's what I want to do. I want to be beautiful like that.

I'm in beginner level dances in the show this year, a far cry from the breathtaking pieces some other girls are doing, but there is this moment in one of my dances. It's the last one, in lyrical hip hop style, and there's this moment at the end of the song where the whole group is doing the same thing at the same time and it feels like we jump right in to the music. It feels good like improv felt good. I'm saving up my pennies for dance classes next semester -- I don't think I'm quite ready to give up my ballerina dream.

Let's ditch this and go to Europe.

Midterm studying actually did end up going down and I'm so totally gonna kill Plato. I hope. I think. Midterms are worth only one paper, but I want to kiiilllll this thing. My last essay apparently missed the mark -- this was the all nighter paper. Apparently the 5 am revelation... not so much. I need to counteract this totally shit feeling and own the midterm. Jules and Mark (above) are my very capable study buddies, and pretty nice friends to boot. They stopped making out with each other to study with me.

Ahh... the newspaper. My other love. Or my tumour. It's a painful, cumbersome, physical growth on my life. Assembled all in one place, they don't look so scary.... but the are. That's a big pile, I promise. And it's sitting there, weighing on my mind, quietly whispering its prescence -- a constant buzz in the back of my mind. I went today to buy scrapbooking stuff for the assignment and hoped this would quiet the voices. Instead? They got louder. Helpful.

Venus is for those with too much lovin'

Well, let's hope you made the right choice, America.  Also, someone make sure Fox shuts up.

That's really all I have to say.  I have to do some studying, and reading, and then I'm off to the Wardroom to watch the election coverage.  This is more interest than I had on Canadian election night, but can you blame me?  I couldn't vote in that one either.

Dante's Paradise

Moon

Mercury

Venus

Sun

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

LADDER

Stars

That had better be right.

Exhaustion has set in.

About two weeks ago I met with my tutor to talk about my essays so far. She didn't have much to say, so we ended up just chatting. "How are you doing? How are you liking it here?" Of course, I told her how much I love King's, but my eyes must have had giant circles under them. "You look... tired" she told me.

Truth is, I never get to bed before two. Living in res provides me with constant distractions at any time of day or night, whether I want them or not. It seems I have to budget an extra twenty minutes in to everything traveling time because I will aways end up distracted by someone. Then, suddenly, it's midnight and I haven't started my reading. How does this happen? I don't know. But then it's two hours of Dante or Plato or something. This is probably why I have been sick for two weeks. I sound pretty pitiful, hacking and wheezing every morning when I wake up and provoke and "Are you ok?" from my half-sleeping roommate.

Now the midterm is Friday and Dante needs reading and the essay needs writing and the journalism scrapbook needs starting and the dance show is gearing up and I would like to go to sleep and sleep for days and days and days. Saturday's afternoon of leisure only served to remind me of what I'm missing: a good, long rest. Several days, in fact, of rest. ...Later. Maybe I can pencil some in and get that....later.

"This is the way/ it's the way that we live and love"

So I'm half-heartedly participating in NaNoBloMo. Ish. Yes, it's true, my first post of the month says "November 2" BUT I wrote it before I slept from November 1, so I consider it from November 1.

This is all to say that I have got to write something for today. But the thing is that today is like, really boring. I read Dante, I went to a study session for midterms, I have dance later on. The usual.

I actually have a ton of work to do tonight since yesterday was spent curled up in bed nursing a nasty hangover and watching the L Word. It was surprisingly not awful; it was quiet and dark, my favourite show was on and soon all that was left was a general feeling of wanting to be warm in bed. With lots of pillows. A purring cat would have been nice too, but that will have to wait for another time.

Dance hell week is coming up... and midterms... and journalism assignements are due... Everything is piling up! But it all ends on November 14 when the last assignment is due and my mom rolls into town just in time for my birthday. Hurray! I'm so excited.

A Classy Halloween

The grocery list of the evening:
+3 flappers
+2 dressy gents
+ a burning bush
+a Freudian slip
+1 very broken window
+various fairies and ballerinas and peter pans
+a shitload of hairspray

So, Halloween happened.
In addition to the roaring party in Alex Hall, there was a screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the Alumni Hall -- we watched it and danced on the tables. It was liberating to dance and sing "Touch Me, Touch Me, Touch Me, Touch Me" in the room where Curran (one of the lecturers) loves to tiptoe around the word SEX. A fun and mostly classy night was had by all.