The Best Things #7: Subtitled at long last

That house of cards of yours will come down like a house of cards, and look at you, you’re still piling aces on queens. Every turn of the doorknob brings new hope, and we can hardly hear the highway beneath the sound of each other. I’m thinking you’d love me forever if I just said the right words, but so far all I can think about is cartoons from the 1980s, and the quiet hum at the end of this song.

These are the best things ever for September 9, 2004.

I get it. Don’t you get it? I get it!

I’m sitting here now at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night that’s disguised itself as a Friday morning and all I can think about is how everything has sort of slid into place. And it shouldn’t have, really. As weeks go this hasn’t been one of the best, nor has it been one of the worst. It’s been a standard week, probably a bit lacklustre as far as first weeks go, and yet I am having a moment in which I feel unbelievably secure in my place in the world. It’s not a feeling of happiness, nor is it a feeling of sadness, but rather a feeling of clarity. Because jesus man, I’m only 20 years old — my biggest worries are the number of essays I’ll have to write this semester and falling in love before I hit 30 — not necessarily in that order –, so what right do I have to feel at all melodramatic?

This isn’t to say I won’t end up feeling all mopey again by the time the sun rises, but it is nice to know that I’m not doomed to mope. I worry sometimes that I’ll become an emo cliche, humming Dashboard Confessional songs as I shop for thick-rimmed glasses that I don’t even need and buying my clothes three sizes too small (instead of one size too big, as I currently do for no discernable reason beyond, well, planning for potential bloating). As it stands, I’m pretty sure I’m not an emo cliche. I might be another kind of cliche — maybe a whole NEW kind of cliche! — but I’m sort of okay with that. I just really don’t want to be emo.

As far as the love thing goes, I’m still trying to figure out the best place to meet someone. I’m thinking it would be pretty great if I met someone at a Tim Hortons, so I might start hanging out there a lot. Or, maybe, in a Staples: Business Depot. I’m not exceedingly picky.

My schedule

Hey check this out:

Mondays and Wednesdays
20th Century Europe through Literature, Art and Film
1:35 - 2:55 p.m.

Narrative of the Cinema
3:35 p.m. - 4:25 p.m.

Tuesdays and Thursdays
Cuba from Colonial Times
1:05 - 2:25 p.m.

Soviet Russia
2:35 - 3:55 p.m.

Social History of Canada from 1870
6:05 - 7:55 p.m. (Tuesday only)

Friday
NOTHING

I think that’s pretty well final. Jesus Christ, how crazy is that? And how desperate was I to get Friday off and avoid Tutorials? “Cuba from Colonial Times”?! Who takes stuff like that! I don’t care about Cuba! It is a tiny island with a bearded guy and also when the crew got shipwrecked there in the film Captain Ron, Martin Short really flipped the fuck out. So I don’t know; I guess it could be interesting.

Changing formats

I’ve dispensed with the numbers this week, as I think I’ll do every week from now on, mostly because this column is clearly just a ‘random thoughts’ column so numbering the random thoughts made little-to-no sense, and also because it was really tough coming up with five things to talk about every week. I mean, seriously, who do I look like? I’m not that interesting a person. I’d say maybe TWO interesting things happen to me per week, and that’s during a good week. If three interesting things were to happen to me, I’d probably go into convulsions and not update anyway. So not numbering the entries really does make the most sense.

An open-ended question

If I wrote a novel about robots, would you read it? It wouldn’t have a lot of robots in it, actually. It would just be ABOUT robots. I’ve tried to kick this robot thing, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I NEED to write about robots. There’s just no getting around it.

This edition has five points anyway

For some reason I really like covers of really bad songs. Travis’ version of Hit Me Baby One More Time always finds its way onto my playlist. I recently acquired a copy of an album called Even Better Than the Real Thing which features a bunch of artists I’ve never heard of covering cheesy pop songs. The title is pretty funny, considering most of the songs covered were originally done by bands like Nickelback or Beyonce Knowles. It’s not really much of an achievement to be better than these artists. It’d be kind of like me claiming to be a better lounge singer than Steven Hawking.

In any case, I debated posting the cover of This Is How You Remind Me, but came to the conclusion that no matter how acoustic you make that song, it still really sucks. In its place, I’m posting Glen Hansard’s cover of Justin Timberlake’s Cry Me a River because, well, he makes it sound much meaner than Justin did, and I find that kind of cool.

Click here to download

And you really HAVE no excuse to download, now that everyone is back at university with their broadband connections.

You said that you loved me,
Matt