I can't believe I'm almost done 2/3 of my degree.
and that I'm starting to like jazz music.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (1/2*)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliott
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis *
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Gold
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding *
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (0.5*)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon *
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (1/2*)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding *
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert *
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White *
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery *(en francais!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare *
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

23! I've read more than Cory, whom I stole this from! Also, I started reading three of these books and didn't finish. That doesn't happen to me very often. What a random list of books.

a man

So according to the irate man that was banging on my door, him and all the other tenants in my building want to get me evicted because my harp practicing is disturbing them. So... uh... he's going to lodge a formal complaint against me. This is not good.

"Trans fats are bad for your brain. Trans fats also have a detrimental effect on the brain and nervous system. Neural tissue consists mainly of lipids and fats. Myelin, the protective sheath that covers communicating neurons, is composed of 30% protein and 70% fat. Oleic acid and DHA are two of the principal fatty acids in myelin. Studies show that trans fatty acids in the diet get incorporated into brain cell membranes, including the myelin sheath that insulates neurons. These synthetic fats replace the natural DHA in the membrane, which affects the electrical activity of the neuron. Trans fatty acid molecules alter the ability of neurons to communicate and may cause neural degeneration and diminished mental performance. Neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson's Disease, and Alzheimer's Disease appear to exhibit membrane loss of fatty acids. Unfortunately, our ingestion of trans fatty acids starts in infancy. A Canadian study showed that an average of 7.2% of the total fatty acids of human breast milk consisted of trans fatty acids which originated from the consumption of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils by the mothers. "

I say....

"yikes"

Isn't it weird how Leonard Cohen and Irving Layton were friends. I guess Irving Layton was a bit of a creep (e.g. here is a bit of a poem called  Fanatic in San Feliu)

"They said I would find
and finger
multitudes of young girls
with tight butts
and tits like pistols"

BUT the guy wrote a great physics poem, as follows:

OHMS by Irving Layton
ohms
is such a beautiful word
soft as a marshmallow in the mouth
as a lover's sigh
hearing it for the first time
in Physics 6
I was electrified
it was like my first kiss
my first piece of ass
but cleaner purer

Since then I've loved ohms 
passionately
especially ohms of resistance

if you try to say the word 
in anger 
or vindictively
you can't ohms is pure poetry

below it
it comes out a muted cry of pain:
the sound the universe makes

yet poets have written
about owls yes about owls many times

nightingales snakes daffodils bridges
graveyards
but not about ohms

therefore I've written this poem
and now wish to add only this:

ohms is immortal
chaste and lovely as a rainbow
it will delight our seed 
on Venus Jupiter Mars
When the great Florentine
even he
is gibberish to their ears



So here is a nice poem Leonard Cohen wrote about Irving Layton. Nice.

Layton's Question

Always after I tell him
what I intend to do next,
Layton solemnly inquires:
Leonard, are you sure
you're doing the wrong thing?

 I went to an Eco-Mafia meeting at school yesterday (Eco-Mafia is the student association for the environment at school). It was so much fun, there were lots of people there and I participated in a lot of the discussion, which was good, because usually I'm too shy to do that sort of thing. I like EcoMafia.

I like my sex class. It is fun. I am doing a presentation to the class on this article:
"Keeping body, soul and earth together: Revisioning justice-love as an ecological ethic of right relation"
Should be a good time.
Some girl in my class yesterday said that since the pill came out, women don't have an excuse NOT to have sex (like saying they're afraid of getting pregnant), and then she said the result is women getting fucked more and caressed less. She said the real f-word in class too. It sounded a little bit feminist. A little too feminist for my taste. I think western women should just give up feminism already. We already cut off our noses to spite our faces. I have to admit that I have this innate desire to have children. I daydream about keeping house and raising kids, because it IS a real job. Now women have to be totally independent, so if they want kids, they have to have a job AND kids, and life becomes twice as hard. As far as spreading feminism to other cultures though, I think it's not our place. It's like the war in Iraq basically, impinging western ideals on a different culture. I don't think it's right.

Sex class makes me think a lot. Also about if women should even be having sex if they don't plan to conceive. Most things we do to keep from getting pregnant and harmful for the Earth, and.... unnatural. Especially birth control: the urination of synthetic hormones that are proven to be harmful to aquatic life. Even using condoms produces waste, both during production and after they are discarded. Ideally, women should all use diaphragms or IUDs I suppose. Did you know if an IUD is inserted improperly, it can puncture your uterus though? and how effective are diapragmns without spermicide (which i'd bet is not that good for the environment).

Well, I can ponder these questions all I like, but it doesn't change the fact that I buy pizza pops.

So if anyone still reads my lj, they might wonder how my new scholastic adventure is going.

Well, my french classes were unbelievably hard, so I dropped both and switched into "Human-Environmental Interactions" and "Sexuality in the Religious Context". These new classes are fun! My Environmental prof is a little nuts in a good way. My sexuality prof is a former archaeologist. That sexuality class is a fun mix of religious studies (technically is IS  a religious studies course), sociology, anthropology, psychology, fun mish-mash complaining about how bratz dolls are a bad influence on young girls fun time.

Based on that last sentence you are all happy that I am taking Academic Writing next term.

Other classes: Latin is nice, Bio is easy, Chem is the bane of my existence (I'm signed up for tutoring this week -- quantum theory --- gag me with a spoon).

Apartment is nice. I bought some twinkies.

I had a harp lesson. Not what I expected. I thought it would be this huge turning point in my life, because it was like my ultimate goal for years, and I thought it would be life-changing. My teacher, when I first met her years ago (I bought my first harp from her) seemed so stately and impressive when I was younger. At my lesson, it seemed that she was a bit of a cat lady. I noticed a cat purse in her harp room. She had a blind cat downstairs that kept mewing and she was calling down to it "it's all right [insert name of cat here]". I was slightly weirded out. In addition, the lesson focused a lot on arranging music, versus technical skill, which is basically what I wanted. Maybe she didn't want to overwhelm me on my first lesson.

I actually tried busking at the forks. Not good. I only made two dollars, so basically I broke even, because I spend two dollars on bus fare to get there, even though I took the wrong bus and ended up walking anyway. Walking and crying, because I hate buses. They are confusing. 

Anyway, I did get a business card from a lady who wants a harpist for her wedding in march, so i should phone her and do a bit of follow-up. I also met another busker who seemed like an interesting guy but then i realized he was a bit of a creep because he kept asking me if I thought he was beautiful. He wasn't. He was 26 and lived with his parents and had been working on his album for 7 years. Apparently it was epic. I only heard him do one song: scarborough fair. His voice was high and breathy and underwhelming. It's sad when someone is only moderately good at something and chooses to dedicate their lives to it. Especially something in the arts. If someone was moderately good at being an X-Ray technologist, there you go, you can make a living. I don't know, I just don't have enough passion for any sort of art to get it. I guess I could have pursued music but realistically, I'm not that good at music. I can play because I practice. I have no skills at playing by ear. I'm not a real musician. 

But I'm a real University student, and it is okay.
 

Strange to think that Emily Dickinson is dead. She seems to have thought about it a lot. I wonder if she was actually afraid. Most of the time, I think Emily Dickinson reminds people of bees and meadows and all the pretty things she wrote about.
I love Emily Dickinson's poetry about death too. Basically, there's at least one poem by her for every emotion I've ever felt. She is my Ultimate Favorite poet.
Now I will conclude with one more poem:




How many poets named Robert can you list?

I was looking at programs at the University of Toronto, because no matter how many times somebody tells you to become a doctor, they might not always be right. Who is really want to be is: Sue Johanson.

Anyway, UofT has a sexual diversity studies program. I think that would be the right thing to do. I have the feeling that is someone really wanted to, they could find a way to make it into medicine after getting a bachelor's degree in sexual diversity.
The thing is: why am i even going to Winnipeg?

How many years am I comfortable to sacrifice as a means to an end? I definitely didn't enjoy being a student during highschool, what if it's just as shitty at university? I just don' t like studying all the time and then working a job to pay for it that has absolutely nothing to do with my interests. I just feel so useless when I work a job that I'm not particularly good at just so I can pay for school.

How many years of my life do I want to spend in school? An eighth of my entire life? Am I really going to be living while I'm in school or still waiting for my life to start (which is how I feel now). 

How about this:
What is life? What is the appropriate use of "time"? I feel like time stares me in the face like such a finite thing when I consider my future. I'm afraid of dying. I'm afraid of being unhappy and thus wasting away my life. 

Help me I'm having a one-fifth life crisis!

I finished my physics exam!!!!!
o god o god o god im happy!
Bio on Monday. I don't begrudge my sweet love for probably consuming my weekend. 
I also have to return about a million text books (i had doubles for the heavy books because of my hernia).
Six days from now I'll be graduating.
On the one hand, I guess I'm old now.
On the other hand, I've been feeling old for a few years already, in my mind.

Should I take


or

?


I am already going to take environmental biology, environmental ethics, and french normative grammar. Human-environmental interactions is a prerequisite for all the second year environmental courses, but the french course sounds pretty fun... and maybe a lot of that environmental stuff will be talked about in my other environmental classes so I won't get as much variety.