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september 4, 2000.10 a.m. This laptop thing is great! I may feel like a moron when trying to do anything more complicated than open Word, but it will be my shield against boredom, that's for sure. This morning I got up at 8 in order to watch a Dean warn me of the dangers of university life to those who don't take it seriously. Hah. Been there, done that, dropped the course because I was too drunk to take the mid-term. I still graduated on time, and cum laude. So there, all you evils of alcohol speechifiers! I had a point. Ah, yes. So when we wrapped up the orientation for all the delicate frosh, I was suddenly left with an hour to kill. Going home seemed pointless. If I was 14, I'd just go to the library & find a book to hide in. Instead, I plugged in my laptop. And here I am, able to more efficiently spread drivel to the masses. Hurrah! It's a good thing, too. I need all the help I can get. I'm - make no mistake - bone tired right now. Last night the students' association put on their frosh week concert, and it was Sloan. I couldn't have been more surprised - they're Halifax boys originally, but they moved to Toronto years ago. Sometimes you see them at the HMV at Yonge & Dundas, for pete's. I thought that moving here would just be a sad reminder of all the music I'm leaving behind, but then they followed us up. It was, for the record, an amazing concert. I've seen them in gigantic outdoor crowds, I've seen them in old dance halls, but they truly work best in a small intimate setting. I was right up near the speakers, and I swear that Jay Ferguson was smiling right at me at various points. It's been a long time since I was at an honest-to-goodness mosh-till-you-get-a-stitch knock-down drag-it-out-till-the-last-encore bathed-in-sweat rock n' roll show. After the last song, Chris Murphy came down to the barrier to shake hands & chat. It's a lot of fun. Sloan is one of the few bands I really like. I just wish I wasn't so alienated from modern music. And secretly, I wish modern music was better; it seems like less work.
3 p.m. It's raining cats & dogs right now, a steady outpouring that reminds me of the fact that we'll have to give back the van in a few days. We live on the south side of the campus, which means that the walk to school slopes sharply downwards towards the Bay of Fundy. The walk home is tortuous, which has a lot to do with my past living arrangements. I was almost completely sedentary while living at home, having no place to go in Brampton for fun and no time to exercise in a real gym. I'm embarrassingly out of shape - I always have been, but it's particularly striking here. My only real consolation is that Princess Leah reports favourably of the hidden aerobic benefits to living in the valley - she claims to have dropped 10 pounds by accident one summer at Mount Allison. I could do with some of that action.
This morning was both depressing & refreshing. Depressing because I had to pick up my new university mandated notepad today and I'm a complete idiot on it. It's like speaking Spanish & trying to learn French - most of my regular PC skills don't seem applicable to this little beauty. All this comes after a year of running circles around most other clericals - you'd be surprised how much professional incompetence is hidden by a very basic knowledge of Excel. The other bad news is that we can't get free university net access from an off-campus location. The school has, to their credit, worked very hard at making the entire campus a network: you can port in virtually anywhere, which gives the place a strange David Cronenburg feeling at times. If I didn't feel so stupid, I'd be having much more fun with the whole thing. "I have nothing against retards, I just can't afford to employ them."
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