It’s official: I passed my final exam, which means I passed my final course, which means I have an MBA. I guess technically I wait until my convocation in October, but whatever.
So…now that I have BComm, FICB and MBA trailing after my name, what fun words can I scramble those words into? I suspect it could be difficult, given the paucity of vowels.
OK, I think I have this sorted. Here’re my choices (first / second) for the thirty films:
Now I just have to fill out the form and cross my fingers.
I have now read through the film festival guide book and marked off the films I would like to see. This is my first year seeing 30, and I think I may not have been sufficiently adventurous. Seeing 30 films means picking 60 (you pick a 1st and 2nd choice for each ticket) and I don’t think I’ve marked 60 films that aren’t off-limits because of venue.
Nellie’s going through hers right now. We have to have them all selected by the end of the night since I’m leaving town tomorrow. Speaking of which…must pack.
.:.
More film news: they’re making not one, but two sequels (probably) to Hard Core Logo (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Time to grow hair again, Hugh Dillon.
We got this message earlier today. It wasn’t even from a valid phone number, it just shows up as “3001″ in the call display.
Guudeneva [.wav, 25k]
Okay then.
I obviously haven’t had much to comment on the Olympics, though I have been trying to keep up. There’ve been lots of great stories — the little singing girl swap, Michael Phelps, Canada’s late burst of medal-winning, the Cuban guy kicking the referee in the face, and so on — but the one that’s really bothering me is the furor around Usain Bolt.
For those who don’t know, Bolt won the 100m dash, generally regarded as the showcase athletic event at the Olympics, without breaking a sweat. He actually cruised the last 20m or so (since no one was around him) and even pulled up a bit when he started celebrating his win. This caused a wave of indignation from…well, old people. They were angry that he didn’t “run through” the finish line, that he pulled up and started to celebrate (beating his chest, etc.), and that his celebration was a little too exuberant.
I find this patently absurd. Usain Bolt is 21 years old. He had just broken the record in the world’s premier race and become, pretty much officially, the fastest human on the planet. He’s from a country that’s fairly well known for exuberant celebrations. He’d just capped off four years of grueling work by winning in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. With all this screaming through his mind, in the final 1.2 seconds of that 9.69 second run, you expect him to become austere? Maybe show some emotion by pumping a fist? Ridiculous.
One of my enduring mental images of the Olympics is Donovan Bailey, having just won gold in the 100m in Atlanta, decelerating after the finish line with his arms spread wide, eyes bulging, screaming triumphantly. Was that, too, classless in the eyes of the likes of Bob Costas, one of Bolt’s biggest detractors? Many have taken Costas to task for this, but I think Heather Havrilesky from Salon might have done it best:
He became the fastest man on earth by a long shot, breaking his own record, while every other contender huffed and puffed along several feet behind him. How would anyone dare to claim that he owed it to the fans to run even faster, or that he disrespected them by celebrating a little early? What in the world is Costas, space alien from Planet Honky, talking about? Why should Bolt care about class, of all provincial, bourgeois values? What the hell is class, anyway, but some arbitrary code that soulless, high-capitalist professional robots live by? You know what I like to see in the world’s greatest athletes? Exuberance, and joy, and tears. I’d like to see them rip their clothes off and run around the Bird’s Nest naked.
Side note: the words “Planet Honky” made me laugh out loud.
As much as NBC would like to proclaim Michael Phelps’ 8 gold medals the story of these Olympics, I don’t know how it can’t be Usain Bolt. There are imbalances between the number of events available to swimmers compared to other disciplines, so I think it has to come down to who utterly dominated on the biggest stage, and who became a star in the process. In my mind Usain Bolt owned his competitors, the fans and these Beijing games.
Another beautiful morning in Halifax, my last on this trip. In an hour I’ll have breakfast with Stanzi (in town temporarily herself), then head to the airport.
Last night I met up with friends at Salty’s for a few drinks on the waterfront. Somehow I ended up with a bottle of Moosehead…tragic. Anyway, some of us left there and had a fantastic dinner at Il Mercato. Knowing I’d have pasta the following night I stuck to seafood (never a bad choice in Halifax) and had shrimp & salmon…both fantastic. We knocked off a couple of bottles of Chianti Rufina (and a glass of white for my fish) and ordered decadent desserts. One of our party may have over-extended himself, but he recovered quickly.
Feeling poetic, we decided to finish off the evening at The Bitter End. It wasn’t a long night for me by any means though. One friend hit the wall and left early. My glasses of Macallan lasted me ’til around 11, but I needed some solo recharge time. I walked back to the hotel alone, suddenly reminded of how quiet Halifax streets (those outside the downtown core, at least) are at night. It felt peaceful. It felt right.
I was done. It was time to go home. Home home. I know I talked about Halifax being my spiritual home, if there is such a thing, but home is ultimately wherever Nellie is, and that’s where I feel like I need to be right now. I feel like a little chunk of me hasn’t lived there for the past four years…it’s lived in a text book or the computer or a hotel room during a week away on course. It’ll be nice to have that chunk back, and for Nellie to have it all there too, since she’s done without it for the last ~1400 days. What’s more, she’s been amazing about it. If she were anyone other than herself I probably wouldn’t have made it to yesterday.
One final, funny note: last night, sitting at The Bitter End, they were playing (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis. Odd choice, since it’s an old album…then I remembered something: after writing the last exam of my undergrad — which happened to be the very same subject as the one I wrote yesterday — I met some friends at the campus pub to celebrate. That day in the pub they played the fairly recent Oasis CD (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and we discussed the ridiculousness of the lyrics to “Wonderwall” over celebration beer. Twice in my life I’ve had that particular celebration, and each time I had the same soundtrack. The world’s funny, if a little precious.
That’s it. Done. Finished. Kaput. All over but the crying.
I wrote my last exam this morning. I was the third one out, finished around 11:00. Went straight to the bar next door with the other early exiters and had a beer. Then another. Then some veggie burgers. Then more beer. Now I’m performing the very important post-celebration rite of relaxing in my air-conditioned hotel room. We’ll head for dinner a little later; for now I just need to chill and absorb.
It feels good. Really good. But I don’t think it’ll sink in until tomorrow. Or maybe Wednesday when we get our final marks.
We finished our last day in the classroom today, assuming everything goes well in my exam tomorrow. It started to feel long, but the fourth day always does. Wrapped up around 5, grabbed some dinner at the Economy Shoe Shop and came back here to do some work. Not studying really, but case analysis. It’ll be an odd exam.
I ordered a class ring today too. Not exactly sure why, since I can’t imagine ever wearing it. I asked if I could donate the money instead but that seemed to confuse things, so I just picked the smallest, plainest one I could in white gold (Dan doesn’t do yellow gold) and pulled the trigger.
OK, gotta go meet up with the group to review our brilliant insights.
A pretty easy day. Executive speech in the morning, grad photos at lunch, a full afternoon session and dinner at the Red Stag at day’s end. Only problem was the surplus of heavy food & beer, and now I’m far too sleepy to do any work.
Tomorrow’s my last day of class (and therefore my last night of studying) evah. I can’t say I’m not a little excited about that.
Just got back from a cruise around Halifax Harbour. People seemed to enjoy it; most of them haven’t seen Halifax from that vantage point. It was pretty gray and on the verge of raining, but the water was calm and wind not too cold. We ate on board the tall ship and the food was really pretty good. Nice time. A few of us stopped for a beer on the way home, but I was way too full to even finish it, and it started to rain anyway, so we walked home.
Half done the classroom portion of the week now…believe it or not, I almost wish we had more class time. There’s so much going on this week it feels like we haven’t had much time to really dig into this course, but I’m not going to complain at this point if they want to take it easy on us.
Day one is over. Pretty easy so far. The new business building is sooooo much nicer than the old one where I did my undergrad. Some people from the university gave the group a campus tour at lunchtime, which was nice…could see what’s changed. And it turns out one of the guys giving the tour grew up 15 minutes away from me and went to high school with some of our close family friends.
Anyway, tonight was a quiet one, maybe the only quiet one. We finished a case around 6:00 and had a bite to eat down at the Rogue’s Roost. I’ll enjoy my relaxation time when I can get it.
Sorry, there hasn’t been much time to post. It’s been a whirlwind since landing in Halifax…lot of catching up and celebrating and so on.
It’s amazing to be back in Halifax. Seeing old familiar places (like Pizza Corner) and new ones (like Rogue’s Roost), with so many good friends, many of whom have never been here before, has been fantastic. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the week — even the classroom time — and they’re keeping us busy in the evenings. Feels weird to be here without Nellie though.
I have to get up early, and I’m damned exhausted, so that’s it for tonight. I’ll have more later in the week. If you desire more updates and want to follow along with the minutiae of my daily life, you can follow me on twitter.
Suitcase is packed. Work is wrapped up for the week, as much as it can be. Web check-in is complete. Cats look sad. Wife has girly plans for the week.
It’s time.
I’m ready.
Let’s go.
In three days I’ll fly to Halifax (again…I was just there less than two weeks ago) to attend the final intensive week of my MBA and write my final exam. I’m excited about this, for reasons beyond the obvious…the obvious being that I really, really, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top want to be done this fucker.
Ahem…like I said: beyond that. Even though I’ve lived in Toronto for eleven years now, I still very much think of Halifax as another home. A different kind of home than the family farm, which is two hours northwest of Halifax, but home nonetheless. I spent four years at university there, where I met my wife. I visited Halifax with my family several times as a kid and have visited many times since I moved away. I was married in Halifax. I have good friends there. Some of my favourite places are there: the Public Gardens, the Daily Grind, the bottom of a glass of Granite Brewery Special Best Bitter. If there’s such a thing as a spiritual home, I think Halifax is probably it. If I love the farm for feeling familiar and comfortable, I love Halifax equally for being liberating. Not liberating from the farm or my family, but liberating from the nearby town where I went to high school and the life I was afraid I’d slip into there.
I’m glad I’ll get to enjoy next week with new friends, good friends. It’ll be fun to be one of the two people who’ve lived there and show the tourists around and explain what a donair is. It’ll be fun being on campus, even if it’ll be quiet during the summer. I think it’ll feel like closing a circle too, righting a small wrong. I’ve never felt like I wasted my university education; in fact I think I’ve done fairly well by it. However, I look back (as most people probably do) and shudder at the weakness my work ethic in those years, and regret the sloppiness of my first two most especially. I’ve been lucky enough to learn some of the stuff I, quite frankly, probably should have learned (or remembered) from my first go-round at business school. Not many people get a second crack at that.
How lucky, then, that I get to wrap it all up in the city where it started. Where everything started.
There are about 70 reasons why I will never watch Canadian Idol or any other temporary music brand factory show.
#71 is that the current season of Canadian Idol appears to feature someone named…Amberly? Really?
There must have been some soap opera character named Amberly around 1984, since the name really only registered between 1985 and 1991.
Deary me, I somehow managed to forget to blog about seeing The Dark Knight (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Nellie reminded me tonight while we were having a drink and some food at C’est What. That was tasty, by the way, even if they didn’t have half the beer I wanted.
Anyway…TDK. I liked it lots and lots. I liked that they finally introduced Bruce Wayne’s internal conflict into the series, the fact that he doesn’t want to be Batman, but maybe secretly he needs to be. I liked that Christopher Nolan doesn’t film fight scenes by just jump-cutting together dozens of quarter-second snippets. I liked that Maggie Gyllenhaal was in it instead of Katie Holmes. I liked that the batvehicles, as bizarre as they looked, moved like real vehicles. I liked how dark (mood, not lighting) it was…Batman’s supposed to be dark. Most of all, I liked that for all the hype I’d heard about how good Heath Ledger was as The Joker, I was still blown away. He was very good, and very scary. Nicholson was very good, but never scary.
I didn’t like that Christian Bale sounds like Tom Waits when he does the Batman voice and I didn’t like that they took Aaron Eckhart’s* storyline too far. Those are minor complaints, though; it was an excellent film.
* did anyone else keep thinking about the crooked cop from the Batman every time he was on the screen? “Eckhart…think about the future!” [blam!]
We saw Pineapple Express (imdb | rotten tomatoes) yesterday. I guess I liked it…I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie by any means, but it was very funny at times. I probably would’ve been confused by the movie’s style had I not known David Gordon Green was the director. He injected some of his style into an otherwise typically Rogen/Goldberg script, which worked for some scenes and made others feel odd. It gave the movie a pretty uneven feel, but the funny moments were good enough to make up for it. Some surprisingly prolonged fight scenes too.
After that we met up with CBGBLB and some of CB’s family for dinner at beerbistro. Much tastiness ensued…for the second straight night. I watched a little Olympic action and then slept like the dead, fortunately nowhere near all the explosions. Check out the pictures and video of that at Photojunkie.
Earlier in the week Torontoist reported that Yorkville’s Cumberland Cinema will soon be demolished.
The Cumberland Cinema is being demolished to make room for another towering condo development. We don’t know yet when it is going to happen, but we do know that this is a terrible shame: while the loss of the theatre isn’t significant from an architectural or stylistic standpoint, it’s a saddening blow to independent movie fare in the downtown core.
I’m torn about this news. On one hand, as Torontoist points out, the Cumberland shows a lot of first-run indie films that tend to start there, move to the Carlton and then disappear. It serves the niche of films that are a little too indie for the Varsity, and much to indie for the Scotiabank or Yonge-Dundas 24, but not so indie that they go straight to the Bloor. Put another way: I’m pretty sure every Wes Anderson movie had its Toronto debut at the Cumberland.
On the other hand, the Cumberland is a shite theatre. The screens are small, the sound is awful, the sight lines are bad (especially for my vertically challenged wife), and it’s always cold enough in there to chill white wine while you watch a film. I suspect I’ll miss the niche the Cumberland filled more than I’ll miss the Cumberland itself; my hope is that the Varsity picks up a little of the slack. It is, in my opinion, still the best theatre in Toronto.
Just a note: I was going to list the four movies currently playing at the Cumberland to demonstrate the quality of movies they usually show, but the lineup this week is Man on Wire, Closing the Ring, Step Brothers and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. That’s one well-reviewed documentary along with three pieces of crap. Maybe I’m not so torn after all…
Last night Nellie and I went to Amaya, which we’d so enjoyed during Summerlicious. Nellie had some errands to do in that neighbourhood anyway, so it seemed a logical place for dinner.
I arrived before her and had a Kingfisher. When she arrived we ordered a pakora and somosa trio and some cassava fries. Next up: aloo gobi (which I don’t normally care for, but this one was fantastic) and kala chana masala, paired with a very strong Australian shiraz. Lots of naan and rice as well, of course. I don’t know how (or why) but we shared the spiced brownie (with coconut ice cream) for dessert. At this point I was so full that I prayed for sweet, sweet death, but somehow paid the bill and grabbed a cab before lapsing into a coma. I spent the rest of the evening in discomfort. I haven’t been this full since I stopped eating meat. Stupid expanding rice and bread…
I woke up this morning still full. Normally I’m ravenous by 7:00, but this morning I still felt like a python digesting a pig. I just ate a croissant about half an hour ago and I think that should tide me over until dinner. Plan for today: go see Pineapple Express, visit CBGBLB and then go out for dinner. Again. Sucker for punishment = me.
Well, nearly.
I just submitted my very last assignment* ever. I’d celebrate a little if I didn’t have to sign in and answer a bunch of work emails now.
But…yay!
* assuming I pass this final course, that is. Actually, if I don’t pass, I’m likely to hurl myself from the parapets of Casa Loma, so I guess it’s my last assignment no matter what.
