Sunday, February 11, 2007

The big guns

Here's a post I started writing this past summer. It's still not finished but I'm pressed for time - there's quite a bit more to this story and I'll finish it later:

I’m writing this to preserve a moment in time that many may find hard to believe (I know I do). It starts off, as so many of these stories do, when I was a younger, thinner man. Having just finished both Canada World Youth and my first summer at Camp Chief Hector I was heading off for my first year at a community college. It was a hard year as I was removed from all the people that had come to have so much meaning in my life. It was also hard because I really didn’t want to do a year of upgrading. My marks in high school were generally in the low 50s, with the exception of math which stayed much lower. I was capable of much more but chose to do the absolute minimum, and in some cases not even that much, and this was my penance.
I lived in a four bedroom apartment at the college residence. Looking back, I can’t help but feel that my indignation at having to pay $210 a month for rent was a bit naïve. My roommates were something out of a teen gross out comedy, only I didn’t find it funny. The guy whose room was right next to mine was a former member of a satanic cult who found redemption through heavy metal drumming. He was a in the music programme and I’m not sure what I disliked more – his drumming at 3:00am, the severely messed up girl he brought home one night and who then wouldn’t leave (the first morning she sat in the corner of the kitchen on the floor and wouldn’t get up), the hamburger he thought it was okay to freeze and thaw multiple times and had turned green/grey colour (I was torn - he could eat it, as he seemed about to, or I could (and did) tell him that it was long past being safe to eat), his friend ‘captain Dan’ (I later found out that Dan didn’t like the ‘captain’ nick name so it then became ‘admiral Dan,’ he didn’t like that one any better), or the time he mentioned having crabs while he was in his underwear and sitting on the couch.
My other two roommates lived down the hall and passed the living room. One of them was an aspiring coke user and, if he could have afforded it, full time drunk. The other, R2 I’ll call him, had some strange ideas that I am certain will make him the centre of several news programmes. You know the ones where people look for answers and insight into the mind of a deviant and terrifying criminal. “He was a quiet guy…”
None of my roommates ever went to their classes. They slept in to the early afternoon (or late after some hardcore drumming). The two guys down the hall smoked a lot. We lived in a basement apartment and some days I would come home and see a haze of smoke blurring the number on our door. It was certainly not an ideal living situation. However, those three paled in comparison to someone else I met that year - 'The Stalker.'

Monday, February 05, 2007

and then there's no mystery left

I like to figure out the cost of things - not in money but in time spent or people hours. For example, during my classes I would take the number of class hours, multiply by the number of students, divide by 24 and arrive at how many days were being being wasted for all the people in the room.

Tonight I took the formula to new heights:

8 million people who have subscribed to 'World of War Craft'
x
40 hours of game play ( this is probably a very low average)
= 320 000 000 hours spent playing the game.

320 000 000 hours/ 24= 13333333 days

13333333 days/365= 36529 years

That's crazy.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Her own tv show

I don't consider myself to be a morning person. This isn't to say that I'm a big grump and a 'danger' sign should be hung around my neck after the alarm goes off until I've had a chance to fully wake up. However, if given a chance I would happily turn off the alarm, roll over and go back to sleep. If the school day started at 10:00 that would be terrific.
I find it hard to believe then, that there was a time when I would willingly wake up at 6:00am on school days. It wasn't that I had to catch a bus or discovered that I worked well in the morning. My reason was far more lame - I loved cartoons. So much so that it didn't really matter what I watched. Case in point, I woke up at 6:00am to watch Maxie's World, at 6:30 I watched Jem and the Holograms, I think Ducktales came on 7:00 and Inspector Gadget followed that. Cartoons bookended my school day, there was always something on YTV's 'the zone' after school.
Looking back I cannot fathom how I woke myself up to watch 'Maxie's world.' The only thing I can really remember is the theme song. Here's the gist of it - Maxie is a girl on the go, and good times are happening in her world.
I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that popularity seemed to elude me.