Just kidding, it isn't.

But I spent most of my Christmas break up in oilsand country, and it was definitely an experience.

Ft. McMurray Experience #1: Fried Bologna. This is apparently some kind of huge Newfoundland thing, and I just couldn't get my head around it. Were we talking a piece of Oscar Myer sandwich balogna thrown into a pan? That sounded awful, bologna in general is gross and is rightly confined lunch-wise to the portrayal of gross elementary school lunch sandwiches.

What it in fact is is this weird looking pink pressed meat that I can only assume is hacked off of a giant sausage they have in the back and fried alongside bacon etc (I ordered it instead of bacon at a diner I went to for breakfast, for the healthy alternative). It actually just looked like slices of fried pressed ham, but you'd be mistaken if you thought that is what it tasted like. Very mistaken. I was quiet that breakfast, lost in a kind of conceptual topology of pressed pork until finally, I realized why that fried bologna tasted so familiar. Hotdogs. Those shitty hotdogs you'd get at hotdog days in elementary school, when they are in turn fried, is what that bologna tasted like. It wasn't bad, but I would never order it again. Basically the image I had in my head was of this giant fuckin' hotdog as big as my leg with a hook through it, hanging in the back of the diner kitchen above the griddle, the cook squinting at it every now through a hangover fog as she delicately carves off uneven slices that fall neatly onto the grill.  Gross.

The wierdest thing is that as I was describing this to my dad he had a flashback and said "Oh yeah! That's good stuff, when I was a kid we'd just get those massive sausages of it and throw it on the pan." That actually made me pretty embarassed, I justify it in that my dad was poor as fuck when he was a kid.

Ft. McMurray Experience #2: Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart in general is an terrible experience that consists of the worst of humanity. There is some psychological effect that takes place when you walk into a Wal-Mart where you just want to be as big of a shithead as possible. Look at a DVD but don't want it? At HMV you might put it back on the shelf. In Wal-Mart your first thought is to just throw it on the floor and walk away, maybe kick it under the display or something. Opening goods? Absolutely. Make sure you damage the packaging as much as possible though, when you leave it sitting on the floor looking like an elephant used it as a chew toy, you want to leave that personal touch. It's like art, very avant garde.

Anyway, this is a universal truth. In Ft. McMurray I saw it displayed with more force than ever have I seen before. Some of the shelves looked like they had collapsed in the middle, and all the shitty, pre-opened products had fallen into the middle of this giant mass of garbage. Shit was everywhere, kicked to the sides of the aisles where it had been thrown aside from the shelves. There were people looking through piles of DVDs and reduced price goods whose goal seemed to be just to put their filthy, greasy hands on as many purchasable items as possible, and the shouting, oh god the shouting. Like nothing I have heard before. In Wal-Mart you expect shouting, for example the Toronto Wal-Mart I used to go to sometimes was like Mos Eisley in Star Wars or something, a zillion aliens screaming in their alien languages to their thousand children and dudes getting murdered everywhere. Disgusting. In Ft. McMurray I think this was worse because I could understand everyone (more or less, a thick newfie accent is almost unintelligible to the untrained ear), and the sheer sense of ignorance and entitlement to all that their great kingdom of Wal-Mart could offer was brutal. Ana panicked as we were walking through the ravaged toy section, and got this wild look in her eyes that I thought was going to lead to her pulling out her hair and smashing the 12 untouched boxes of monopoly they thad there. It looked like a riot scene, or maybe a post-hurricane Wal-Mart. Brutal. I am never going back there, ever.

The more I think about it, maybe that's just the Wal-Mart experience in general.

Ft. McMurray Experience #3: Ya' like tight-rope walkers? We were trying to find some movies to rent at a Rogers Video, and I'm looking at some stupid new release about a post-apocalypse zombie invasion or something, and this guy comes up beside me and hums to himself a little bit. After a moment of this, still looking at the movie wall he says (apparently to himself) "Ya like tight-rope walkers?"

What?

I look at him out the corner of my eyes, but it's too late, he sees me do it and repeats the question with this creepy, unbalanced intensity, "Ya like tight-rope walkers?"

I kind of snort appreciatively and go "Nah, not really my style, you know?"

He nods in appreciation before saying, "Me either, until I saw this movie, it's like this documentary about a tight-rope walker. He was the only guy in the world to walk between the Twin Towers before 9/11."

"No kidding!" I reply.

"Ya, it really made me think, good movie. The guy said that we were all tight-rope walkters you know... like  life, it's like being on a tight-rope all the time and we all have to balance on it and shit or you fall off and you're history"

"Maybe I'll check that out next time, have a good one." Then I slowly walked away.

I still laugh about that, "Ya like tight-rope walkers?" But it was fuckin' weird.

That is my Ft. McMurray experience in a nutshell. Can't wait to live there!
 

I just got my mark back for my final essay in my literary criticism class, worth 25% of my mark. I wrote an essay on discourse analysis in Raymond Carver's "Viewfinder" (which is a pretty sweet story), and figured it was pretty solid.

93%! HOLY SHIT!

That insane, I didn't even think it was possible to get a 93 on an English essay in university. I thought I had some pretty killer ideas but DAMN. I feel like I just completed one of the tasks of Hercules. Discourse analysis is a bitch too, basically the analysis of a ton of tiny little details that most people would generally brush off as being pedantic, but convey a lot of meaning and weight in communication.

To be fair I spent like 20 hours over the course of a week writing this thing, and obsessing over the tiniest of details in what could be considered an unhealthy fashion. I had no idea I could ever get so worked up over a goddamned semi-colon until I started writing these essays.

The nice thing is of course that this at least gives me some justification for quitting my budding career as some fucked up computer guy who was talking to his computer more than real people, since I guess it means that I am actually as good at this stuff as I liked to think I was. Step 2 I guess will be finding a job where I can use this stuff that is actually awesome, but generally I get the best results with things like that by not thinking about them until I am staring into the face of certain failure.

Basically, I rule.

Also, one of my proffessors said an essay I wrote on greek rhetoric was "truely remarkable" and "brilliant." YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.

So my landlord is this mid thirties cop who I think is on leave due to corruption charges being filed against him for pursuing outside contract work while still in the police. He was also reprimanded because while on duty he apparently got into an argument and threatened his ex-fiance or something like that in a public place.

Real classy.

I'm not really sure how to do justice to a description of this guy, so I guess I can start by saying that he he loves spending money making the house look what he considers "nice," but really that is consists of cheesy little oriental statues everywhere, and too much glass surfaces and walmart-purchased stainless steel wire shelving. He also gave me shit for using a flipper and a laddle that were on the counter because "they are just for show, not for use" and instead told me to use some ghetto utensils in one of the drawers. Seriously, in the corner of the kitchen is a little vase with a bunch of stainless steel cooking utensils that are just for show. Retarded!

The day I was moving in he was watching Alexander with my goblin-faced roommate who is in love with my landlord, and he looks at him and goes "Holy shit, Alexander was a homo?"

This is made classier with his recent habit of calling all attractive women on TV "sluts" while calling women he doesn't find attractive "bitches." A typical exchange between him and my roommate while watching TV is something like "Damn, look at the tits on her. What a slut. They're all sluts man, especially ones like that. Fucking bitches."

His favorite saying is "as a police officer" which he appends to everything. If you want to talk about anything, he is an expert and anything he doesn't know isn't worth knowing, because as a police officer he's seen shit, he's seen the world, he's got experience.

Usually when people ask about these guys on the phone or whatever I just have to say "they aren't really my kind of people" since calling your landlord and roommates ignorant, trashy misogynists doesn't exactly foster good relations.

How do I find these stupid stituations? Man, I just want to live with some normal people who can hold a decent conversation and aren't retarded. DAMN.

I hear this stuff all the time in my classes which are humanities and therefore 95% white middle-upper class people:

"The Muslims will feel that they are being given some power to have their own house of worship, but at the same time, they are still oppressed by the dominant white population."

It makes me laugh every time. The best part of these little nuances is how they just slip unconsciously into people's best-intended comments.

The poems community here is awesome, worth signing up to Livejournal again for alone. It is everything I loved about the creative writing workshop at uni and more.

Taking second year classes at university when you are almost 26 is pretty weird, in 95% of my classes I feel like I could be somebody's grandpa. I don't understand the way the kids these days communicate, I don't understand their slang or their clothes or their culture, it's all just a bunch of damn ganster gibberish. The average age for these people is probably 19 or 20, and I think there is some kind of generation gap going on all ready, because I feel really fuckin' old.

These darn kids in my one class about rhetoric are absolutely love with Barack Obama. We spent a week looking at the rheotric and metaphors used by the Obama campaign and the McCain campaign, and the entire class was spent basically ridiculing McCain as an ignorant fear-monger and talking about how Obama could almost be the second coming of Christ.

Except for me, I suggested that in one ad the camera angle made Obama look "submissive" and "weak" and a similar ad's camera angle made McCain look "dominant" and "like an emperor." You could have heard a pin drop in that damn classroom after I said that, even though I was right (the prof did say though "I'm not sure if 'submissive' would be my word choice"). I thought this was pretty ridiculous until I started thinking about it, because for most of my classmates, George W Bush was elected when they were between 10 and 12 years old and their biggest concern was trading Pokemon cards or some bullshit. HOLY SHIT. The only reason they know who Bill Clinton is probably stems from the lingering Monica Lewinski jokes that float around. For as long as these people have been aware of US politics, George W has been in charge. No wonder they think Obama is going to save the world. That really knocked my socks off. Jesus.

I'm trying real hard though not to be "that old guy" in the class who is always talking about "that's not how it works in the real world" I already have to submit to the lectures from single mothers about how every language theory is either right because "that's how my 2 year old son is developing!" or wrong because "my two year old son is pretty smart, and I didn't notice him developing like that".

The other day I was cooking some rice because all I eat these days is rice, chicken thighs and frozen vegetables and this really seemed to bother my landlord. I'm sitting in the kitchen, staring at the steam coming out of this rice maker thing and he's sitting in the front room watching TV (which he does for 90% of the time he is here) and he goes "Adam, what are you cooking there?"

"I'm doing some jasmine rice, it's pretty good"

"Really? Do you add anything to that? It's got this smell man, I can smell it all through the house."

"Nope, just rice."

"Really? 'Cause I can really smell it."

"Yeah, I don't know what to tell you, it's rice. I think you can get it in Chinese restaruants."

"Ok, it's just got that smell."

That was the end of that conversation, because I didn't know what to say after that really, so I just stopped talking. Then there was this awkward tension there where I think he wanted me to apologize and tell him I'd never cook rice again, but I don't want to live in a world where a man isn't free to cook rice in the kitchen of the crappy student house he's a renting a room in as he pleases; might as well go back to the Dark Ages.

My landlord is a funny guy, he told me he was a cop but I think he is currently on paid leave for corruption charges because I Googled his name last week and found some pretty heavy shit.