Spent the day in the room, furiously finishing my Origins review, and reading Oedipus for tomorrow.  Discovered that rain is particularly comforting in Winters, but only if you've nothing to do for the rest of the day.  Today would be perfect for curling up under the duvet, but alas.

Boisterous October weather.

Well, hello there October!

I can't even express how happy it makes me the leaves have started turning here, because the campus is made twenty-six times (that's a calculated number, by the way!) prettier with all the colours.  It makes me really hope that Winters decides to have a leaf-raking-and-jumping bonanza, just because that's the sort of thing we would do.  That would make me the happiest little university student ever.

As for actual university-related things, all seems to be going okay.  Theatre classes are all still amazing, Film is okay, but my tutorials aren't that great, and French is... French.  It's nice to be speaking the language again, but I still don't really know how I feel about my prof.  She just seems sort of... aloof and unapproachable, at least right now.  Maybe, after a few weeks, I'll have a better feel for her.

I've finally finished up my Carpentry classes for Stagecraft (lots of fun; we built boxes and learnt some very basic things about set design and construction, and I guess that'll be expanded upon next term), which means, I'm in the Costuming labs next, and guess who's over the moon? This girl! That's the reason I'm going to interview for Production at the end of the year (well, also because I genuinely like backstage work as much as the onstage stuff), to be honest; if I can spend five hours a week in front of a sewing machine, I will be pleased as punch.  And they tell us to keep an open mind about all aspects of the program, which of course, I'm trying to do, but I'm already interested in everything, so it sort of simplifies everything for me!

This weekend's going to be cut a touch short because I have Crew on Friday and Saturday, so I won't be getting home until Saturday aft, but I suppose it's still a decent amount of time off.  It'll be nice to have dinner with the fam-jam, but I don't think I'm going to be able to help make dinner this time around, because we're having our do on Saturday night because of conflicting family plans (boooooo!).  Maybe I can still make gravy or something.

Meghan and I also realised that we aren't going to go broke the way normal university students do; we're going to end up on the streets because we see too many shows.  We've gone to two already, and we're seeing two more (Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead at the Hart House Theatre; Tear the Curtain at the Bluma Appel) in the next... two weeks, I think? But both sound like absolutely amazing productions, and I've heard G&R has been very well received, especially by the people in our program who have seen it.  Can't wait! I've started keeping a journal of the shows I see (as prompted by my Origins of Theatre prof - an absolute gem of a man), so I'm hoping those will both be very positive entries.

One last thing: books!  And words, of course.

 
Last week, I started - and finished - The Emperor of Paris by C.S. Richardson.  This book.  This book, darlings.  It is the bitter-sweet chocolate of the literary world; absolutely delicious prose, and sentences to make a bibliophile sigh and swoon, but with a story which reads like a photo album, and feels like a skinned knee.  The format of the book is a bit of a puzzle, because it has two separate chronologies which fit together individually, and then collectively at the end (much like Memento, but minus the amnesia), but it's not inaccessible or elevated by any means.  It flows far too well for that.  And the language.  Poetic and simple and beautiful and certainly not something I expected to find in the New Releases section of Indigo (really, it was just lying on the table - and of course, an historical drama which unfolds in le Gai Paris is mandatory reading), but I'm ever so glad I did.

I cried, at the end.  Just a little, but I did.  And I'm still sitting here like a besotted teenager just thinking about it.

I've also made a sort of introspective realisation: I can never be a book critic.  Ever.  But that's okay, really.

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