Boot to the head

This morning I had a feeling that today was going to be a good day. Last night I went out with some Linguists and Philosophers to a pub just down Sherbrooke from me. That was fun, it was nice to get out and not to just be by myself, wandering around my little apartment, washing dishes and putting things away for lack of more interesting things to do. I met some cool people, got to talk other who I already knew. There was an interesting discussion on the use of oral and written language for divine information to be passed throughout time and between peoples. The argument was that such a method of correspondence runs the risk of being eliminated from the face of the planet by loss of all physical text and people who know the stories and that it should be possible for us to start again from the beginning again. I assume this is fully possible since the whole people of God things started before written text and holy stories passed on between generations.

Anyway, it didn’t turn out to be a good day like I had hoped. Just because of reasons….

I talked to the head of graduate studies in the Linguistics department today trying to get more novel courses on my course list semester. It could turn out that I will end up doing work outside a course framework which could be really good anyway and give me a chance to write and learn about some things independently rather than being constrained to strict curriculums.

I went with a couple of other new linguistics students to grad orientation at the grad house. It was super boring. Just old people droning on and on mostly about things that were common sense. It would have been equally beneficial to give us all the info packets and let us go, but the lollipops were pretty good.

I like Montreal a lot better than Ottawa, and I’ve devised a reason for that. I have realized that my main problem with our nation’s capital is it underlying, yet undeniable, feeling of exclusivity. If you’re not from there then you don’t know where’s fun to go, and its very difficult to get in as an actual friend of an Ottoweenie amonst their Ottowanish comrades. I’m sure this is not true in every sense, but I am really not the only person who has made comments to this effect. Montreal, on the other hand, just feels very open and free, like its ok for you to be there. Perhaps this stems from the greater cultural diversity and size of Montreal over Ottawa, but I’m presently tempted to consider Ottawa snot-city. Toronto was somewhere in between. I wouldn’t say it was terribly welcoming and warm when I first got there, but it did not persist in its coldness for 12 months like Ottawa did.

Now my apartment smells like fried onions.