T-T-Torontofied

So, I went crazy and had to leave Kingston, so I decided to get together with friends from high school and have a quasi-reunion in Toronto. Where did we go to high school? Kingston. Whatever. First, allow me to introduce to players:

Myself


Cheryl, a film student at Humber and friend from high school improv


Kate (left) from high school improv too, now in the Improv Show with me. Caitlin (right), exclusively dates men who are profiled in magazines.


Dave (left) my token black friend and hetero life-mate. He's at Geulph now and studies Biological Chemistry or something, also did high school improv with me. Sandy (right) is another friend from LCVI, goes to Mac, not sure what she studies.


So that's who went. We all met in downtown Toronto Friday night, and headed to Cheryl's house.

This is the girls on the subway. You might not recognize Sandy there on the right - she hasn't applied make-up yet. I am not in the picture.

Man, isn't it cool how all these pictures are tagged with the time? I can like, relive the night down to the minute.

Anyway, after dropping excessive luggage off at Cheryl's, we started to get tired from lack of alcohol...

...so we decided to head to the nearest bar and get drunk. I, for the first time ever, ordered an entire pitcher of Guinness with Dave. I've never seen that before. Needless to say, it dissapeared quickly. We also discovered that Kate's hair moves over to the front of her face when her body decides its time for her to stop drinking:


Later, we saw a poster for some kid that was addicted to heroin.


So we got home, and fell asleep drunk. Thank fucking god Cheryl knows (somewhat) her way around the transit system.

SATURDAY

So next morning, based on the fact that estrogen out-numbered testosterone on this trip, we went to the mall. Also, it snowed, which we had never seen before in our lives.


Dave and I wandered aimlessly while the girls "shopped" or whatever, and we had lunch at the rainforest cafe. Our bill is below.


Then, I put on some women's clothing and did some model shots.


While walking back to the bus at some point my bus token fell into something I can only describe as a mixture of dog feces and gum that was caked onto the already-dirty tile with a mixture of hot, cold and big-city indifference. I am probably seriously infected with something. Ignoring that, here is me and Kate on the bus. I am taller because I am sitting on some sort of child seat.


We then to Bad Dog Theatre to see some long form improv, which was sweet. The poster for it is the leftmost one in the picture below. I don't know why we aren't doing this at the improv show yet, its amazing.


So then, we got the urge, again to get outrageously drunk. We proceeded to do so at Green Room, this really hard to find bar in Toronto. I think this is because it is meant for actual Torontonians that want to avoid people like us, which is of course why we went there.

Amazingly, it was pretty sweet, and I think I shall refer to it as my Toronto Hangout from now on. Dave is trying to impersonate Jesus in this picture, but fucked up.

Some of Cheryl's filming friends were there is well. I can't remember the name of the guy in the middle, I just know he drives race cars in India, his dad works for Bollywood, and once he punched Greg Luce in the face. Oh man.


So we got really drunk really fast. I drank two pitchers in two hours, which isn't Olympian, but made me drunk. Here is a picture of us somewhere after we got lost on the subways home.


The next day was mostly a wasted recovery day. We had breakfast at McDonald's, which was expectedly unsatisfying except for the ice cream.


And that's pretty much it. Here's a video of me trying to feed Dave ice cream like an airplane. Kate accidentally took this because she doesn't know how to use Dave's camera.




So that's Toronto. I feel like such a small town person whenever I visit there. Like you know how you can hold the entire map of a city like Kingston inside your head, yet in Toronto that's impossible. Frustrating. Also, the whole improv and artistic community is overwhelmingly large. Dammit, when do I get to grow up?

End Scene.

Improv Show Cast

What an awesome picture. Props to our photographer Steve.

Kate, Irene, Thom and Kristin are missing.

We also took individual headshots. I'm going to print mine on glossy paper, sign it, and hand it out en masse to Japanese school girls. [drool]

Fame, Performance and Halloween Costumes

So, for this halloween, me and two friends (Matt Reid and Matt "Schomberg" Clayton) had an epically awesome costume, as seen below.

We're plastic toy army men, the kind you get by the dozen, probably last seen in toy story. We would go around and pose everywhere for Halloween.

Our schedule was as follows:
FRIDAY - Kidnap someone from class and thus make a scene, Ritual
SATURDAY - Night-time Parties. Walk Around
SUNDAY - Rest
MONDAY - Walk around campus on actual Halloween, make more of a scene.

This costume is undeniably cool. Lots of people have said so, and I know so. We went out on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I think over 200 pictures were taken of us (not including ones we took). Here's another



So, eventually we became famous. We would walk into parties a few houses down the street from one we had just left, and people would be like: "I heard of you, someone at another said they saw you." - this was on Saturday night However, fame is not without a price. We were all wearing thick rubber, the only material that would hold the fourteen cans of glossy green spray paint that we used on ourselves. This was hot and sweaty. Our helmets were heavy, we couldn't sit down because our pants were too tight, actually Schomberg and I tore ours later, our face paint rubbed off, and we couldn't carry alcohol around.

A costume like this, with such an investement in time and money ($40/person?) means you have to make sure you really enjoy it. By the third day, Monday, where we planned to get into the Journal, our campus newspaper, we felt like living statues who make a living this way.

It began to feel more like an ordeal, a job, than something we did for fun.

Me, looking like I'm having more fun that I actually am.

Fortunately we did actually get our picture in the journal, and then even more people knew about us. So, I've been hearing alot of congratulations.
Saturday night was our big walkabout, where we heard a bunch of comments, which would get repetitive after a while. The most unusual was "Are you scuba men?" which I don't think I will forget for a while. Such is fame.
All in all, I'd say it was worth it, definitely, but it certainly sucked at the time. Beauty is pain.


Other Awesome Costumes I saw or heard of:
- Eight Oompa Loompas, with song
- Village People, with song
- Rock Paper Scissors (who I never saw, damn)

On (my) personality

As I have been aging, maturing, etcetera, I have always noticed people tend towards certain things they enjoy, often my left alone as I do or am interested in almost anything. I think the science of psychology defines these differences as "personality", why people differ. Sometimes I've had to resort to defining what I don't like.

THINGS I DON'T LIKE
- watching sports

Shit, that's a short list.

Anyway, I've been wondering: can people change thier personality? Not in the practical sense that I want to do it, but more so in the sense like does it happen. In mythological narratives (I am using that in the archetypal sense - 8 mile is a mythological narrative) people seem to come rushing out of the womb with an installed personality, which pre-determines the rest of thier life. It seems like things they do as a kid are premonitions for what they will do later. Is personality really that set?

I'd think its more malleable, at least using myself. I think I've changed, although not drastically, over several years, especially if you use the Four Colours thing (Orange, Gold, Green, Blue). While Green has always been one of the two top, Orange and Blue have moved around in there. The only one that has never really been there is Gold, which is confusing because I seem to be attracted to Gold people.

THINGS I'M NOT
- Gold

Again, a short list.

This personality thing worries me then. If everyone else is sort of easily defined and slottable, what the fuck am I doing everywhere at once yet nowhere? Because I mean if you aren't specifically something then you are nothing, right? Of course, I'm asking rhetorical questions, one because no one is going to answer in text conveniently if I ask a regular question [schizophrenic crisis] and two, because I'm asking them because they are silly questions. I do stuff, lots of varied stuff that's really inter-disciplinary, but not nothing.

So I geuss I'm not going to get some easy answer and path coming straight out of the womb towards my pre-defined goal. However, if I have some sort of tragic struggle for existence, I'd rather have it for a specific thing than for the answer to the question "what am I?"

JOBS I THINK I WOULD ENJOY
- Television/Film Director
- Special Effects Co-ordinator
- Game Design/Developer/Writer
- Science Journalist
- Wise hobo
- Mathematics Researcher
- Modern Artist
- Improv Performer (The Improv Show doesn't count - something I get paid for)
- Psychology/Human Factors Researcher
- Astronaut (the kind that actually builds stuff, doesn't do crappy experiments)

But why do I feel I need to "define" what I want to do? This is the existentialist crisis moment, and that was another rhetorical question.

This brings up stuff about immortality I have been thinking about. I'll write about it later.