hazy dreamy moods are here again...
I really don't want my LJ to be all about work, but I guess that was my life for the past week. I handed in the thing on Friday around lunchtime. My prof said to put it in her home mailbox, as she wasn't going to be up on campus for a while. She lives in east Vancouver as well, only about a 10 minute bike ride away from me, right at the end of a road with a million dollar view (literally) of the North Shore mountains from her living room window. Health technology research pays handsomely, as she not-so-subtly mentioned a handful of times this past term... and it will be paying my rent and beer money as well, as I will be working on her project a day or two a week this summer...
But anyways, like I said, I want to talk about something else here. I spent the rest of Friday afternoon relaxing in a nice, hot bath with a nice, cold can of beer, listening to Primal Scream (it's a lot mellower than the name suggests...), then biked to another end-of-year grad party, this one held in a private room at the back of a bar in downtown Vancouver called Malone's. Couldn't escape from the shop talk, but then we had all spent the past week pretty much the same way, so we didn't have much else to talk about, but what we had been writing about... everyone in my department is doing very different, specific topics, and sometimes I don't think there is much that ties us together, like a shared understanding or belief about how the world works.
Perhaps it is simply that we all want to become academics (or more accurately, theorists).
Although I'm finding that as I get older (he says in his croaky old-fogey voice, pulling his belt up over his belly), I'm getting more interested in the actual processes of how people work, how policies get put into practice, how the way people know each other translates into things getting done (or not). I've been moving away from my philosophy-major roots (sorry Alden!) towards a more unreflective, immediate existence over the past half-decade or so... but this reminds me that I wanted to hold on to some of that hazy, dreamy mood that I had a lot of in my early twenties. Maybe it only comes with mopey-ness... which I also had a lot of, and don't particularly need to revisit.
But that was why I went back into school, dammit, so that I could get back to living a more reflective, actively thoughtful life, and there hasn't been as much of that as there should have been over the past eight months. Maybe I'm still recovering from the intellect-numbing experience of working in a government library.
But anyway... After Malone's we went down to an authentic Korean karaoke bar (where it is all big separate rooms with booth benches all around the walls for a dozen or so people) and drank even more pitchers of beer... I found two songs that got everyone up and gathered around the mic singing - 'Bohemian Rhapsody' (everyone knew most of the words, and it got hilarious when we split the different voices) and 'Everybody Hurts' (sure, it's a sad song, but it gets uplifting at the end...). I left around midnight to go to yet another party, a homebrew-drinking party by fellow Victoria ex-pat Sarah (who's around here somewhere on LJ, but just never comments... heh). Her friend Matt, who is in the community and regional planning program at UBC was there, and he always has interesting stuff to talk about when it comes to urban agriculture and building more eco-friendly buildings. I keep promising him that we'll hang out more, and it will happen, once I'm finished all this other stuff...
Wanted to write about the film about Berkeley in the sixties that I watched last night, but I think I'll save it for later...