Late Marks

Half A World Away – R.E.M.

And William’s latest consecutive post streak…is broken. What’s up Scoobie Gang? Let me get my excuses out of the way first:

1) I been bogged down with papers and even those have been neglected. I had four due in the month of March and not a single one was handed in on time. That’s new for me. I’m honestly just trying to pass at this point. Luckily, I’m a friggin’ genius and I’m doing slightly better than just passing. I got back a Documentary assignment that I handed in last week: B+ Some people are dumb. Some people are lucky. I’m just dumb fuckin’ lucky.

2) I’ve been having a steady e-mail exchange going on with Annia so a lot of my whining and crying goes into those e-mails. Luckily, the latest American Idol season is in full force and since that takes up most of our conversation I’ve come crawling back to you, my loyal readers.

But yeah, mostly the work thing.

Annia did send me this tasty link though, which sort of got the whole thing started. I know we all love ytmnd.com. You can thank Annia for this dramatic reading of a break-up letter. As per usual with all my links, if you’ve seen this before (or any others I post) then I give my most sincere apologies.

On with the show (oh guys, I know you’ve heard some of these stories so I’m just recording for posterity’s sake. Skim at your own leisure):

*****

New girl alert! New girl alert! I’m just playing. It ain’t no big thang, but I finally spoke to this nice Romanian girl in my Documentary film class with whom I share a subway route a couple of times every week. That’s right, with only a handful of classes to go I finally decided to walk up to this person and say “hello”. Jeez, I’m pathetic. Her name is Ana-Marie, though she prefers just Ana. I finally decided to give it a go when I had a particularly frustrating class with Professor Fucktard…excuse me, Armatage. This lecture included her answering one of my questions with a shrug of her shoulders and an “I guess.” I swear, I almost punched her.

After class, I semi-stalked Ana and eventually walked up to her and began to talk to her about how frustrated I was with the professor and all that. It flowed nicely into the usual getting to know you stuff. You know, what’s your major, where are you from, what kind of diseases are you carrying…pretty standard. She’s a laugher too, which is always good. Any time there was an awkward silence, I’d just start doing a little Irish jig and screaming “Shabba-HOO, Shabba-HAA” for about thirty seconds and then everything was cool again. No need to break out the good material yet. Anyway, it’s nice to have someone to talk to in my film classes for once. Too bad there’s only a couple left. Guh.

*****

My grad formal is this Friday and I’m taking TWO girls. Yeah, I’m a player. What’s happening is that Wendy Shen wanted to come to the New College party so that she could meet up with some of her peoples, so she needed me to say she was my guest. Then this other girl at our table dropped out and I asked my main man Julius (who’s running the event) if Annia could come and since he owed me a favour for saving him from that gang of Puerto Rican ninjas back in the day, he had no choice but to say yes. Of course, I’m not actually bringing either of them in the traditional sense, but there are two girls listed under my name so THERE! Let me have this one.

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I haven’t really been able to listen to anything new, though I did finally get to sit down and listen to “For Hero: For Fool” by Subtle. They’re the guys who opened up for TV On The Radio. It’s an amazing, amazing CD. Very, very weird though, so I don’t recommend it for everyone. It’s not something I would play for someone and then be outraged if they didn’t like it. It’s definitely for a certain taste. These guys make Gnarls Barkley look like Good Charlotte. It goes real well with my recent descent into madness.

*****

A couple of weeks ago I went to my friend Natasha’s 22nd birthday. It was a lot like her last birthday party, which was two years ago. Here’s a brief recap:

I got to Jack Astor’s at 6:45, wanting to be politely early. She didn’t get there until 7:50. Wow. I didn’t know anyone else out of the 40 people that were there. Actually, that’s not true. I recognized two people who I’m apparently taking Documentary Cinema class with and never talk to and later, this guy showed up who I spent a lot of time talking to at her last birthday party. He’s a nice talkative guy though. Too bad he didn’t show up until about 8:00. Between the time I was waiting for Natasha, I attempted to make small talk but the Chinese girl next to me wasn’t very receptive. I blew my “So how do you guys know Natasha? Does she owe you money?” line within the first ten minutes and it was rough sailing from there. Luckily, it’s a sports bar so I could just shut up and watch college basketball which is what I would have done if I hadn’t gone to the party.

As soon as Natasha showed up she was in character. She sat down for maybe, five minutes the whole night. She went around hugging people, making small talk, smiling for pictures. She’s a superstar. I knew better than to try and get genuine face time with her on this night. This was a woman at work. Besides, she’d had to deal with my mopey ass earlier in the week so I didn’t mind that we didn’t get to talk so much that night. Still, situations like this always remind you that you can never be sure how well you know someone. When it’s the two of you, you could have the closest, most personal relationship and think you’ve got something really special. But then you see how she acts around other people and you wonder how significant you truly are in this person’s life. I stopped worrying about that a long time ago. If I didn’t, I probably would have gone insane.

A few days later, I ended up seeing her again because I was at school late attending this “Culture and Christianity” Karaoke BBQ. Sadly, my main reason for being there was because I was hoping that some of the chicks from my first semester lecture were going to show up. Specifically this girl Cheridan, who I didn’t get a chance to talk to before. I need help. Needless to say, only the fugliest of the fugly showed up. Even worse, the song I was planning to sing (yes, I plan for these things), Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me by Elton John, was sung by another guy. And he was good. Not as good as I would have done it, but good enough that I didn’t feel like these people needed to be saved by my divine pipes.

After I stole some fruit, I bailed and met up with Natasha. This was a mistake. First, I had to sit with her and her classmates at Tim Horton’s for about half an hour. Then for some reason I decided to ride the train with her and some others all the way to Scarborough Town Centre. At this the wheels have completely come off. I did entertain myself by talking to her lesbian friend, Kelly. We’re both Scorpios and we both shared a disdain for Natasha’s constant need for attention. We spent the whole ride ignoring her. That was fun.

Then she said she was going to drive me home, but she tricked me into going out for chicken wings with a couple of her friends. One was also named Natasha, but went by ‘Tasha and the other was this girl named Mika. ‘Tasha perpetuated the classic stereotype that girls feel the need to fill their stories with every single detail. This is less common among men, but is often referred to as the “Alex Lee Method”. She was going on and on about her situation with this guy she works with and while I was interested, I also wanted her to get to the fucking point. Then, when I tried to impart a fraction of my infinite wisdom upon her, she essentially ignored me. Too bad for her. Mika was just straight up ice. I wasn’t exactly in top form (I wanted to go home), but she didn’t even chuckle at some of my C-level material. And that’s A+ material by anyone else’s standards, damn it!

At the end of the night, Natasha surprisingly did drive me home instead of just chopping my head off and leaving me in a ditch somewhere. I was still kind of annoyed though, so I forced her to sit through a quick rendition of Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me. She got my company for the night and I got to enjoy the sound of my own voice. That’s a happy ending right there.

*****

I finished my last paper today. My last paper, like, ever. That’s not entirely true since I’m short 1/2 a credit, but as far as serious, school-time papers go…this was it. It was so hard to do. The later it got, the more pressure I put on myself to do better so that I would at least get a passing grade until finally, at nine o’clock this morning I got ‘er done. I’m not proud, but at least I handed it in. I’m so messed up right now. I think I’ll save my whole, “Wow, I can’t believe it’s all ending” bit for next week when I’ve finished all my tests. After that…I have no idea.

*****

You’ve made it this far, just a little more to go. Links!

I love Demetri Martin. He’s going to explode any minute now, just you wait. If you haven’t already, download his album called These Are Jokes and his stand up called “Person”. Here’s his palindrome poem.

Some funny sports video game clips. These first two, Madden Ambulance Montage and Madden Injury Montage are both directly ripped off from the Sports Guy‘s blog. One of his old articles inspired me to search for this Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl clip. Lastly, from the same guy who made the second Madden video is this brilliant NHL 93 Bloody Games Montage. There it is Mikey, check it out, his head’s bleeding. Mikey, check it out, his legs, little Wayne’s legs are shaking all over the place.

Oh, and because William is too lazy to do this properly, here’s the Tommy Boy clip that me meant to refer to in his last post. All their car stuff is classic and a predecessor to similar car scenes like the one in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. I’m sure someone did it before Spade and Farley, but this was the first one for me. The best part about it is we’ve all been there.

Finally, my crowning achievement in internet stalking: The MySpace page for the Raptors’ Mop Girl! I know I told William and Max about this a while ago, but I had to put it down here. Hell, I should have made a whole article for it. Brian, Gary, Daniel, Jess, whoever, you might not think this girl is that hot but for me, there was this mystique about her for so long (who is she? how did she get this job? are there other mop girls as attractive as her?) that I find her absolutely irresistable. For the longest time she was just Mop Girl, but now I feel like I know so much about her. And not just because I broke into her apartment last night. Hey, don’t look at me like that. She was trying to mug me.

*****

Ah hell, I’m just going to say it. Happy 200th Post to me!!!

Okay, I run the videostore downstairs. So if you, uh, have some time drop by. We could watch “Jungle Fever” or “Taxi” with Jimmy Fallon and Queen Latifah.
Why would you think I’d want to watch those movies? Because I’m black?
And because I’m white. Hello!