Sexy Time at the Pity Party

The first official breakdown allowing me to rank on Carla's RRJ breakdown meter occurred around noon today.

I cried.

Then I ate a falafel pita, drank some sweetened peppermint tea and disrupted masthead by replacing words like "gum" with "game," using politically incorrect phrases, and telling everyone that after three years, I no longer feel shame when they think I'm an idiot for not knowing who some retired Ontarion journalist is.

(This last one was spurred when a classmate asked, complete with interrobang and a look of slight disgust and disbelief on her face; "You don't know who [input name of former journalist turned Ontario policitian] is?!" I don't want to play the 'woe is me, I come from a random small town' card again, but in this case it applies. Let's face it--I grew up in an isolated Albertan town where we only had regular access to one newspaper for the first 14 odd years of my life, and that paper was the Edmonton Journal. Occassionally after returning from a business trip, my dad would bring home the Globe and Mail, but that was a special and foreign treat.

Three years of sometimes living in Toronto can never compare with their 21 years of growing up in a media-saturated hyper environment. I've spent the last 3 years feeling guilty for not knowing who these "obvious" people are, and I'm sick of it. If they were in my situation--"they" being both professors and fellow students--they would feel the same way and would be wondering who Fish Griwkowsky or Todd Babiak or even Lois Hole is. I'm done with the guilt and the shame and the franctically trying to read every news source I can lay my hands on just so I can catch up with my peers.*)

I spent 6 hours sitting in the same chair, in the same room. Three different meetings.

Eleven hours later, I got to go home.

Oh, and I think I have pink eye again. Round 3?

It's definitely sexy time at the pity party.

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*This is the first time in three years I've ever said this, and I hope it's the last time I'll ever say it. But it's true: Toronto really does think it's the centre of the universe. This isn't western alienation speaking here. This is the rest of Canada. We exist, and we don't care who your lieutenant governor is, nor do we memorize his name just because he works for the province of Ontario and once wrote for an Ontario paper that I had never even heard the name of prior to 2004.** (I'm in a bad mood and probably will regret writing this. But I'm basically saying that people who have never left their homes, regardless of whether their home is Vancouver or Edmonton or Toronto or Cold Lake, seem to think their home and their politics is the only system of existance. It just seems to be that it's a little more extreme here. But then again, I'm writing this as an outsider.)

**Yes, that's right. I didn't know the Toronto Star existed until 2004. This doesn't make me a bad person. I mean, I knew Toronto would have a paper, but I didn't know what it was called, and I obviously didn't read it. This also totally legitimizes why I thought Guelph was a fictional place like Narnia for the first three months that I lived in Ontario.