a couple of weeks ago, i tried prematurely to declare an end to summer by having my "back to school" adventure and thinking that the heat had broken. i was brutally dismayed to find that the days of sweating through my shirts and baking to the core as i walked the paths of concrete that wend their way through the landmarks of the big smoke were not altogether done. however, it gives me pause to think about all of the progress that i made personally this summer to try and live with the twin perils of global warming and urban heating.

the first best thing that i did was to buy an air conditioning unit. i tried to balance the amount of energy that this beast would consume with energy efficiency features, like independently switching to running with the fan only, dropping the energy used by the compressor, once a tolerable temperature is reached, or shutting down completely if the temperature differential is small enough over a long enough period of time. ironically, i've only had to run it a few days (for the benefit of my cats) and a very small number of evenings (having spent so very many of my evenings this summer away from home). i think the least comfortable aspect of acquiring this creature comfort was its installation. but now that that's over, i have to stay in this apartment until at least next autumn so that i don't have to go through the whole ordeal again next year!

the next big advancement in personal heat-management was to overcome a 30-year animousity towards sandals and learn to tolerate/wear them. i've never liked sandals. i don't like feet. i don't like how they look; how toes point this way and that; how feet have the lowly purpose of connecting you to the ground. i don't like being reminded that i even have feet. curiously, i don't mind ladies' feet, but since i don't have ladies' feet, i have never been able to tolerate them. this summer, i bought two pairs of sandals - a sporty pair and a slightly dressier pair. i still don't like them, but i have to believe that wearing them has helped to conduct a fair amount of heat away from my body, rather than trapping that heat inside my shoes. my lack of familiarity with how sandals worked caused me to bind them way too tightly at first, causing them to blister and tear my skin. but with a few months of practice, i can now wear them without having to pre-emptively mummify my feet with medical tape. this has been a huge coup for me.

the final big step for me was to respect the wife-beater. there was a particularly distressing episode this month where i had to walk around to do some errands around 5pm in downtown toronto, and after 10 minutes of walking in 40 degree heat, i had sweat through my dress shirt enough to make it look like i'd just crossed the sahara. i was utterly and completely mortified. i headed into the downtown core and found the nearest store, a winners, and bought a three-pack of nautica sleeveless t-shirts. i walked out of the office tower where the winners was located, stripped off my shirt and put on one of those wife beaters and it was as satisfying and relieving as having a dip in a pool. i walked through the financial district in my dress pants and shoes and trailer-park shirt pleased as could be, looking like i had just lost my shirt in a poker game - but i couldn't care less.

i honestly don't know why i have such poor tolerance for heat. i'm in fairly decent shape, my heart works great, and i'm pretty far from obesce... i guess my body is just exceptionally quick to emply the time-tested method of ejecting fluid from my pores to try and evaporatively cool my shell. i just wish that i wasn't so damn good at it.

- g

song of the day for making the best of an all-too unwanted summer – one more colour, jane siberry

if i sub-titled these adventure blogs, i would sub-title this one "death of a fanboy". i went to the toronto fan expo 2007, canada's largest convention for comic/sci-fi/anime/game/horror fans, and it was at this event that i discovered that i have no patience whatsoever for a bunch of new things i didn't previously realize for which i had no patience. therefore, i have to begrudgingly proclaim this the worst adventure this year.

as a relatively new torontonian, i've come to accept that things worth doing here are worth doing for a large - very large - number of other torontonians. accordingly, they all come with large queues of people all waiting to take in the great spectacle of ... whatever. this event was no exception. once again, i grossly underestimated the appeal of this event, or at least, the vast number of people who might find it interesting given that there are 50x as many people living within driving distance as in edmonton and underestimated the effort required JUST TO GET INTO THE EVENT. there were literally a thousand people waiting to BUY TICKETS to this thing - which compelled me for the first time in my life to buy tickets from a kid scalping his day pass. i guess that saved me about half an hour of irreplaceable life for the lowly additional cost of five bucks - all around an equitable arrangement.

i have fond recollections of the last comic convention i went to. i was twelve years old and with $20, i was able to fill in some gaps in my New Teen Titans collection that had been giving me some problems. this convention was like an acid flashback to that afternoon at the renford inn on whyte. there were fucking millions of comics at this thing - in fact, SO many fucking millions of comics that i was utterly discouraged from looking for a SINGLE one. i suppose that part of the blame rests with me for having left my comic collection at home (it weighs about 300lbs, which, when you are moving back and forth across the country, gets rather unwiedy) and not coming with a list of "need-its". but come on! if i need it that badly, i'll get the damn thing on ebay, right? so the comics were a bust for me.

they had other shit at this con too. there were collectibles for anime (re: perverse japanimation of schoolgirls with the skirts blown up so that you can see their white panties - who are invariably shooting at giant robots, while fending off the sexual attacks of demon-hoardes), sci-fi (for overweight guys who would have a heart attack if they had to run to catch the bus), horror (just about the only cool lot in the bunch, but altogether too leery for my tastes), and gaming (spindly-armed adolescent boys who must spend literally thousands of hours smacking down grumps like myself in online multiplayer environments). yes - you can see from the stream of bile issuing forth that i was rather surprisingly NOT in my element.

there were celebrities though - like number one, jonathan frakes here. poor jonathan frakes. he's tried so hard to rise above the star trek stereotype, and done better than most. however, here, people still want him to sign autographs of him as will riker and talk about the TNG days. hayden christensen couldn't be bothered to show up for the darth vader reunion, even though he lives in goddamn toronto. and i missed natasha eloi's autograph signing by scant minutes.

the one thing that did make me happy was seeing my favourite horror-lovin' friends and one of my very favourite couples in toronto, nicole and gary at the festival of fear booth for rue morgue. i also discovered that i can't get excited about comic illustrators anymore, being a pretty fair illustrator myself. but gary's really really good, and he's made a commitment to being an artist that i could never follow through on, so i bought one of his prints. it's actually really fantastic.

so, now i have a year to strategize whether i should plan properly, get a deluxe pass and show up to the con dressed as superman or the master chief or something, or whether i should put this whole fan-boy crap behind me. can you guess from this posting's tone which it will be?

- g

adventure cost:
scalped admission ticket: $30.00
"superman returns" logo t-shirt i've been craving for over a year: $29.00
macabre but fabulously-cool print by gary pullin: $20.00
doing what i really wanted to do - see Harry Potter V in 3D IMAX!!: $14.95
a large popcorn and bottle of water for HPV: $9.50
large chicken burrito at burrito boyz (plus tip): $9.00
renting 2 xbox360 games because i want to play too: $20.50

in the summer of 1985, i had to take physics 10 (first year high school physics) in summer school, because i had maxed out my course load during the regular year and i wanted to get all my sciences (biology, chemistry AND physics) in – and it was cheaper than summer camp.  i was so hermione granger back then.   in 1984, the movie, neverending story came out and i promptly disregarded it (and have not ever seen it since – since i had more important movies to watch like superman and star wars!), but the theme song was sung by a spiky-haired lad named limahl.  his song and everything by til tuesday were all i listened to throughout summer school. he changed everything in my world.

he had this “blue steel”, trash-bleach-blonde spiky hair mullet thing going on that was heretofore completely unseen and unknown in all of the history of man.  in fact, so inspiring was the limahl-look, that he spawned, single-headedly, the birth of my SECOND favourite comic book character of all time, longshot.  longshot was the coolest hero ever.  he came from another dimension where he was the preeminent entertainment star, but in retreating to our world, he lost all recollection of his former assholiness and was the perfect parsifal character – gallant, gullible and earnest to a fault.  his super power was that he could unintentionally bend probabilities to his favour in times of sincere need – a sort of super good luck power – but in whatever way he bent that probability to the favour of others, in some way or other, that deposed misfortune revisited him at some inconvenient time in the future!  it was a story-telling stroke of pure genius!

anyway, since reading that 6-part mini-series, all of my role-playing personas have been named longshot and i’ve never failed with him as my alter-ego.  he had a brief stint as an x-man, but longshot is best as a single romantic lead, swooping in to save raven-haired damsels in distress by absorbing their misfortunes into his own and suffering as a result.  god, i love that story!

the only reason that any of this came up today is that i was looking online for a video by sherry kean called “i want you back” from 1984 (totally failed to find the video), and i came upon a song with the same title by bananarama.  the blondie in bananarama’s video was so hottie, i googled her to see a better picture, and there was a photo from a recent thing where they were playing with limahl!!!  and there you have it!!! serendipity defined!!!

god damn, the 80’s were awesome!!

- g

song of the day – too shy, kajagoogoo

i sincerely struggled with this week’s adventure – not only because as i sit to write about it, i have to deal with two hyper-affectionate cats vying to rub their faces on my flickering fingers – but because it deals with the twin perils of expectation and disappointment.

this time of year – the time between my birthday and the middle of september, the “back to school” season –  is always one that i find to be filled with poignant lessons for me (especially the kind that i should have already learned).  i firmly believe that after the many many years of repeating the cycle of school-summer-school, especially among university graduates (for whom the cycle can occasionally appear endless), one cannot help but be programmed to feel a heightened sense of anticipation (trepidation for some?) and excitement (dread?) in these brief weeks when the weather turns, the heat breaks, and all eyes turn to labour day weekend when the heady days of summer relaxation mark their unavoidable end.

it just so happens that this month, i grabbed a book by one of my favourite authors, the late Robertson Davies, from my shelf – a book that i have not yet read, High Spirits.  this book is a collection of ghost stories that Davies presented to the graduate students of Massey College, where he presided as its founding master, on the events of the annual college christmas parties (i believe through the years 1963 to 1980).  it dawned on me that massey college just so happens to be here in toronto, and that i’ve never seen it, even though it is such a prominent feature in the life of my most beloved author.  so the adventure was to tour the college and marvel at the environs of its ghostly tenants.

i walked the seven or eight kilometers along bloor street to the college from my apartment at high park because the weather was agreeable and the sun not too hot.  i made special note of the shops that had closed, the bar where i have my martinis when i find myself without vodka, and the strip club where an acquaintance said i could get “hooked up” (whatever that meant), and that place where i went for sushi that one time.  finally after an hour or so stroll, i found myself on the university of toronto campus and near the area where massey college is to be found.

this was when the disappointment set in.  i had no idea what to expect.  davies writes of gothic castles and fabled european cities and in a style that calls to mind the most noble and aristocratic of settings, but, in the light of this expecation, the college itself seemed to me impossibly modern and altogether mundane.  designed by ronald j. thom in 1963, the college is highly geometric and rectilinear – bearing virtually no resemblance to a french cathedral, austrian fortress, english manor or any other suitably haunted construct.  on the outside, the building resembled not so much a bastion of higher learning and culture as a public works building or a telephone exchange.  and thus, i struggled – i literally struggled – to fight the feeling of disappointment with my own expectation of what i would find in this experience, but i failed miserably to overcome it.

not until today was i able to put this adventure into a suitable frame of reference.  we all live with expectations of how things are, how they should be, and how we would like them to be, and then rather often, we have to deal with the disappointment that those things are not that way and sometimes that they cannot be that way.  we dread the return to school because our leisurely pursuits are curtailed for another year, but we might equally welcome the new challenges that a new year brings.  we might be eager to return to our beloved campuses after a summer of listlessness, but we might also become disappointed when our fresh new courses turn into the same drudgery of cramming and examinations that we went through a year ago.  surely, it is this way with so very many of the things to which we look forward.  i think that the real lesson to be had here is to learn to revel in the anticipation of a thing for the sake of that excitement, rather than for what promise of pleasure it implies, but then to be equally aware of the thing itself – the object as it finally appears to you – and not to compare that thing with all of its inherent beauty and challenge to the idealized dream that preceded it.  this notion, i shall dub, “living in the moment”, and try and remind myself of its value, even when it applies to such iconic matters as my highly cherished Robertson Davies.

- g

adventure cost:
brunch on a patio near UofT: $16.00
a bottle of water: $1.00
subway ride home: $2.75