Tuesday, September 11, 2001
I'm sort of on a life-imposed online hiatus right now. I'm working on it. Back soon, I hope.
[posted on 9/11/2001 02:29:09 PM] [$]

Sunday, September 02, 2001
It's time to move back to school again, which means it's time for eight months of academic onslaught, mediocre nightlife, and involuntary celibacy. And (as you can see) this also means having to peruse the digital monstrosity known as the University of Waterloo website ("UWInfo", as it's called).

There's a generic, oft-repeated kvetch at our school that goes something like this: "For a school that is supposed to be Canada's technological leader, it's amazing that we can't even do [insert technological feat of administrivia enjoyed by every other school except ours] properly!" Usually, this gripe is peppered with comments about our high rankings in the Maclean's Magazine university survey, and about how our reputation follows us around for the rest of our lives, or something like that. I'm about as tired of hearing about it as you are, but the complaint is a perfectly valid one.

I mean, what kind of tech-friendly school would allow a site like this on its web servers? A flaming-skull animated GIF and a MIDI sampling of "O Canada" would not be out of place on this page. On the other side of the spectrum are the excessively terse and un-designed academic pages, created by grumpy Unix users and showing a steadfast resentment toward any kind of sensible visual imagery. The UW site is a complete disaster. Even the front page — with its cross-platform incompatible pulldown menus and its too-small text — is a mess. Every sub-site features a different, hackneyed design, and it's extremenly difficult to tell where you are in the site at any one time.

I fully realize that university sites are difficult, usability-speaking. They are huge and each section is made by a different person with a different agenda. But UW isn't even trying. They're balking. Every part of the UW administration process is as ugly and convoluted as its website, of course, but no attempt is really being made to improve any of it.

So, I'll deal with the next eight months as I always have: by sleeping in until 3 PM every day, ignoring/obviating lectures, surfing the web, going out drinking with friends, and walking home alone in the rain. This routine gets easier after a few years of practice.

Updates will be sparse over the next few days, as I am moving. In the meantime, FREE TV's WIL WHEATON (who, I should mention, is a very nice fellow). Also, I just got my copy of Words!³ Magazine, and it rocks, and I highly recommend supporting Ben's worthy cause if you care at all about your own life. And hey, everybody loves Ben Brown.
[posted on 9/2/2001 02:43:36 PM] [$]

Thursday, August 30, 2001
I predict that the next hot new pseudo-mystic phrase on everyone's lips will be "deus ex machina". Kinda like how "vox populi" was all cool and popping up all over the www a few years back. You heard it here first, folks.

Anyone in the Ottawa area want to see The Flashing Lights with me on Sept 5th? Somebody, say yes. Please.

Anyway, so tomorrow's my last day of work, and my last day of co-op to boot. I might be out of commission for a few days here, with no internet (is this word still capitalized? or no?) access. Busy business.
[posted on 8/30/2001 08:39:12 PM] [$]

Sunday, August 26, 2001
I just caught myself doing something I find unsettling. While preparing a cup of tea, I noticed myself steering clear of the sugar bowl, even though I generally like a tiny bit of sugar in my tea. And it wasn't because I'm not in the mood for sugar, or that I wanted to try a new routine. It was because, for a split second, I felt that putting sugar into my tea was somehow uncool; that sugar in tea implies an unrefined palate. "Real tea drinkers don't use sugar," I thought, "and I, Mr. Mainstream Man, am a REAL TEA DRINKER."

I have officially become a goddamn, stinking Hipster.

I feel a tremendous amount of shame in this adopted attitude, because Hipsterism is a dreadful disease that afflicts thousands of unsuspecting culture-lovers worldwide. You feel a certain gloom in your heart — and your soul — the first time you hear yourself lambasting Steven King ("You can buy his books in the GROCERY store. WhatEV."), or Frasier ("Dog jokes? Pff."), or choosing "Pop" as your favourite U2 album because "nobody will see THAT coming." It's a sad game of one-uppsmanship that gets taken by many (including myself) to a much higher intensity level than it ever should, ever.

I just picture myself in my late twenties, dressed in black and bitter and nearly entirely bald, sitting in my apartment organizing my Elliott Smith and Modest Mouse CD's while everyone else my age is out living their lives, having lots of no-strings-attached sex, wheeling and dealing and watching goofy summer movies, not caring about the fact that they are uncool merely for liking Weezer and American Pie 2. It's a sickening cycle of that I've caught myself in, red-handed, and that I want to break right this very second.

(Dave Eggers has already said all of this much more eloquently and cantankerously than I could ever aspire to.)

There are no winners in Hipsterism. Sure, there is argument aplenty to be made for looking beyond the mainstream to find the real diamonds — and everyone should do this to some degree, I feel — but like everything (except a good scalp massage), it can be taken too far. It's entirely possible to end up living your life in a sort of paranoid self-awareness, where you're no fun at parties because you refuse to rock out to Everclear or whatnot since you only listen to music that nobody but you, the band itself, and three other people have heard of, and just the mere idea of being viewed as conventional in any way could send you bee-lining into your room and bolting the door and drowning yourself in esoteric sensory deprivation.

So, do any of you aging ex-Hipsters have any advice for me? Should I force myself to listen to pop radio stations while forcing my eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style, in front of a television showing Friends reruns 24 hours a day? Help me: I fear that I might be considering REM's early work the only stuff of theirs worth listening to. It's never too late to be saved.
[posted on 8/26/2001 01:26:37 PM] [$]

Thursday, August 23, 2001
Today was like the longest week ever. And it comes as no surprise to myself that I've begun digging deeply within, trying to discern where I went wrong along the way. What turn of events in my life made me into the unattentive, mentally-flighty person I am today? Because blame is what I do best, I choose to blame this character trait on the gifted program.

Back in grade 5, I was unceremoniously plunked into the Ottawa-Carleton area "gifted students" academic program. It always struck me as an incomprehensible move on the part of the school staff — and it still does — because I was exibiting neither signs of good work habits, nor signs of any real intelligence. I was just sort of a mopey, predictable, and yet sometimes surprisingly wise child. Kind of like my present-day self, except I'm old enough to drink now, and do so with abandon. Anyway, every teacher I've ever had "saw something" in me — you know that old story: an unfocused child who's considered to have a "gift" because he can read grown-up books at an early age, or he can program computers, or whatever, and the teachers basically drown him in attention, snuffing out the feral flame of academia before the university bigwig researchers can get into his addled brain. My parents saw it too, but with the exception of the first and second grade (both of which I finished in one school year, total), I've had no grounds to apply the term "child prodigy" to myself. From grade 4 to the present, I've done little productive work at school, and that's probably not apt to change. I never built bottle-rockets to fly cottage beetles to the moon, nor did I ever whip my old man at chess on a nightly basis. I was — and am — mentally divergent, neither here nor there.

The gifted program tried to throw a big heavy boulder onto the Pathway to Recklessness, as so many child geniuses are prone to disillusionment and discomfort in later life for not finding their niche. You know, not finding their groove. The program failed miserably in doing so, its main folly being that I had no reason to even try to be interested in succeeding.

Neither the school nor my parents told me they'd enrolled me in the enriched program; two staff members merely appeared one Wednesday morning and said "come on, Nick....you're coming with us," like a mob coming to pluck their victim from his home. They loaded me and two other students from my school onto a short yellow school bus, and brought us down the road to Fielding Drive Public School. Inside, we sat in a nondescript room tucked away in a hidden corner of the building, seven of us — five boys and two girls, from different schools city-wide — and two boisterous, overbearing female guidance counsellors. They'd all been there for weeks prior; I was the "new boy".

While I don't remember the teacher's names, I still remember the condescending way they treated us. Say something silly, and you were ostracized by the instructors, and thus by the whole class. They wanted very desperately to play hardball with us, and ended up working against everyone. I distinctly remember a thread of indignitaion in the teachers' voices, as if they expected us to be wholly grateful for being given the emancipating experience of sitting in a dull room writing insipid poetry for their amusement. This wasn't a gifted program; it was an exercise in humility.

And there were no "gifted exercises" or anything like that. We didn't sit around solving complex mathematical equations, or playing intellectual ping-pong with brain teasing workouts. We just sort of, well, sat around and wrote poems, and drew pictures on lined paper with felt-tip markers, and talked about families. To this day, I still don't know what made one student's work better than another's, or whether we were ever evaluated at all. It didn't show up on our report cards.

The program would last about four hours every Wednesday, until we got too old, at which point they brought in the next fresh batch of pre-pubescent phenoms. I spent a good portion of my childhood moving in and out of exhausting rituals like the Fielding gifted program, being put under the microscope or into the fishbowl without ever really grasping the purpose of it. And that, I think, is the problem with these navel-gazing tutelages. You could argue that smart kids need unmitigated freedom to roam, and that you should just hand them the paintbrush and let them fly. But personally, I needed more direction. I needed a point to all this academic poking and prodding. Never once was I asked to solve a difficult problem, or even get anything "right" or "correct". And without discrete challenges to conquer, I grew uninterested and tired, and wanted very badly to go home and play Ms. Pac Man.

So here I am, twenty-two years old and still the same plodding, easily-distracted boy I was back then. These gifted programs, they don't work. Not at all. They're meant to serve the teachers, not the kids, and their complacency about that sort of thing is what makes me wish I'd just sat there and played dumb the whole time, sticking pencils into my ears, and messing up my times tables intentionally. Don't believe the hype.
[posted on 8/23/2001 05:43:00 PM] [$]

Tuesday, August 21, 2001
Well, another internship is coming to its droopy-eyed, hung-over conclusion, and that can only mean one thing: it is time for me to turn my head 90 degrees and look back over my shoulder at another four months spent in the technological jungle, using cutting remarks intended to promulgate as many new tech-worker stereotypes as possible. This summer will be known as the Summer I Learned Foosball, because if you were to take me and lay me on a cold, metallic operating table, and jam a spigot into my fleshy cerebellum to drain out everything I gained from this summer's work placement, you'll get one thing and one thing only: a wicked wrist shot using the defensive 3-rod. Because that's the only knowledge I will retain.

Everything else will be lost. Not in the sense where I might look back at this summer over a few cold Stellas at the Lone Star Cafe five years from now and pronounce to my friends "Oh wait, now you're reminding of that one summer I spent up there in Kanata. Man, I forgot all about that!", either. I'm talking about the kind of loss that happens when the shower water goes down the drain every morning (along with my withering hairline, of course). It's gone forever.

I wandered over to the Kanata Centrum mall for a while tonight, and I thought it a fitting finale to the summer, since now that I'm home, I don't remember where I've been for the last few hours. And that pretty much summarizes it all: I don't know where I've been. Neither here nor there. Just...here. In this chair, in this bedroom. For four months. Clicking icon after icon, and breathing the limp, pallid air-conditioned oxygen.

Of course, I've made some life decisions. I'm never coming back to Kanata, for starters. I'm hopefully — and I say hopefully because sometimes you can't prevent the inevitable, although you can certainly deny it — never going to work for another web-oriented company. I'm merely going through the necessary shooting of my career, financial freedom, and interest in stock prices in the foot now, to save time later. To work at a company which promotes the web and usability and all that gooey tech goodness, and yet has nobody even possessing a rudimentary knowledge of Internet culture (nobody even reads Slashdot, or any other computer news site for that matter...yes, this is supposed to be a tech company, I hear your squeals), is somewhat disheartening. This summer I learned for certain that people can be technically intelligent and well-schooled, but not really care one single bit about anything other than their stock options. Of course, I also learned that CEO's are people too.

Anyway, I bid adieu to the fine skateboarding teenagers of Kanata, the plaid-and-sandaled coworkers, and the empty promises. Hopefully I'll be able to recover from this summer with a new leaf or two glaringly overturned. Another week or so and I'm finished.
[posted on 8/21/2001 08:57:55 PM] [$]

Sunday, August 19, 2001
I haven't had much to talk about recently, nor have I had any good ways of saying the same old things.

Anyway, I got a phone call from my landlord tonight. He tells me — in typical last-minute landlordian fashion — that a girl is moving into our house tomorrow. A French girl. From France.

I have lived with only two females throughout the course of my life. The first was back in Waterloo, and it was an experience much like puberty: awkward, frustrating, irritating, and the source of many pimples. She left maxipads in the kitchen garbage can, for chrissakes. She stirred two tablespoons of white sugar into every mini-cup of yogurt she ate. I did not like her much. The second was in San Francisco, and if it weren't for her devilish feline accomplices, all would have been perfect. So I'm batting .500.

But my current predicament sounds like something out of a trashy grocery-store novel with Fabio on the cover. Innocent French girl, dropped headfirst into an unknown landscape (Kanata), into a suburban townhouse replete with hunky men (myself, and, well, ok just me), the scene just begging to devolve into wanton bacchanalia. In my head, I'm picturing sweet, nubile Claire (her name), pouty lips and a sinful French smile, begging, pleading, making the following smalltalk (right after gnawing alluringly on a stick of French bread, of course):

Me: Bonjour Claire!
Claire: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?
Me: Mais, oui!
Claire: Voulez-vous du beurre?
Me: Mais, oui!

But we all know in our stiff, blackened hearts that the conversation will be like such:

Me: Hey. I'm Nick. Your room is here. Anything I can do for you?
Claire: Uhhnnn, non? (awkward grin)
Me: Nothing? Not even a foot massage?
(sound of Claire's door closing in my face)

I don't know much about French girls. Will she be put off by the towering stacks of dirty dishes festering on the countertop? Or the large lump of fishbelly-white flesh sitting lifeless in the basement (also known as "Mark", my roommate from Newfoundland)? These are questions that only fate, and glass after glass of French wine, can answer.
[posted on 8/19/2001 07:58:53 PM] [$]