2001-01-05 - 11:46:57

2001!

That's what I saw as I was biking down Sherbrooke today.

(you may start to realise that this bike trajectory - down Sherbrooke - has become so concretised in my head I could probably bike it upside down)

It was also at that moment that I fully realised the ridiculousness of 2001! I would much prefer to celebrate Adam's hair grew five centimetres! than 2001! Or how about It takes a month for broccoli to grow! I would much rather learn publicly about vegetable-growing methods than the changing of an artificial, arbitrary and random ordering of time. Here's one for us all: yay we can count!

Enough of that. I spent this day starting classes all over again. I've got three six-credits so only two are starting anew - Sociological Feminist Theory and Development and Democracy.

(democratic development? maybe finally i can figure out the finite definition of democracy and then apply it globally! 2001!)

I was telling a friend today about my misadventures of returning to a place that seems a world away from good old South Gillies.

(fact: South Gillies is geologically the safest place to live in Canada)

Coming to my door I spent about five minutes attempting to unlock the two locks and then convinced myself that my landlord changed them. It was a surreal moment and in my panic a few crazed thoughts tended to entertain me like, "OH NO, maybe I never even lived here!" and "Am I in Montreal" or "What an elaborate three-year dream sequence!". As it turns out, none of the former apply and as I was going up the stairs to ask my landlord what was going on, I realised - it was the grey key not the brown key and the round key not the square key and the bottom lock not the top lock- all in that order.

AIDS and HIV was heavy tonight. With a topic like melodrama I wasn't expecting a documentary about a filmmaker dying of AIDS with footage of his entire ordeal. I suppose it wasn't even his story or even the imagery that shocked me into being disturbingly upset but rather it was a particular scene. In this scene, the filmmaker's partner took the camera and filmed him seconds after his death. The image of an emaciated, shrunken, KS-lesioned, shell of what was once a healthy, vibrant man who was presently dead shocked my entire consciousness infinitely and fundamentally. It definitely wasn't the movie-of-the-week format and that's the point. Imagine if all of America was subjected to those images during the movie-of-the-week timeslot. Imagine! I wonder if many would turn the TV off, switch the channel or complain to CBS that these images are too graphic for their children.

(save the children eh? we north americans are famous for that scapegoating of infancy in order to protect our fragile psyche from cinema verite or uh, ahem .. life!)

I wonder if I would turn it off?

2001!