Everyone needs to listen to:

Andre Bluteau http://www.myspace.com/andremartinbluteau

Emma-Lee http://emma-lee.com/ and;

Peter Katz http://www.peterkatz.com/

They will make you happy. I guarantee it.

Ok, so maybe I’m still on a bit of a concert high, but still…

I went to their show at the Cube Gallery last night, as part of the Blackbox Concert Series, and it blew me away. First of all, the space was incredible. It’s a tiny gallery, and there were probably around 60 people there (although I could be quite wrong about this…I’m terrible at judging crowds) but that was a sold out crowd, so it gives you an idea of the space.

There were paintings and other artwork everywhere, so, as Peter Katz put it, there was “inspiration literally plastered on the walls.” It was so intimate, and the musicians were obviously used to performing in similar spaces, because they were just so at ease and having a great time doing their thing, and the crowd was so into it…it was perfect.

Ok, I’m going to attempt to stop gushing and actually talk about the performances. Some gushing may ensue, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

Andre Bluteau:

I could listen to his voice for hours. It’s so raw and gravelly in the best way possible.

So unique.

You could tell that the whole crowd was captured from the first note he sang. He just got up on stage and did his thing and it was wonderful to watch. He also had a great moment of self-consciousness when it came time to plug his album, which was completely endearing in itself.

Emma-Lee:

Another surprising voice, but in a different way.

Emma-Lee took the stage, and she was confident but fairly soft spoken. But then she started singing. She has this beautiful, effortless voice that reminded me of Ingrid Michaelson in the way that she progressed through the songs and jumped octaves, and rolled between notes so easily. But also not (like Ingrid), at the same time. It’s hard to describe (and this is why I’m not a music writer…).

Suffice it to say that I was completely floored by her. Her song writing is brilliant and her performance gave me goose bumps. So amazing.

Peter Katz:

I love Peter Katz.

From the second I heard him perform during music week in Toronto I have been so in love with everything he does.

He says that he likes to have at least one song per show where he is really “in the space”. This means that he steps away from the microphone and steps off the stage and just fills the room with his voice and his guitar and his amazing music and I love it.

When the show was technically over, Peter and Emma-Lee decided to play one last song in the lobby of the gallery because they thought it had great acoustics. So the entire crowd piled out of the gallery and into the lobby and just milled around listening to them play unplugged.

Ok, ya, gushing. But I can’t help it. You had to have been there to understand the mood in the room after the show. Everyone was so happy, and just excited to have been there.

I don’t know what it is, but amazing music in a small venue is some sort of magical combination that puts me on a high for days.

New Years resolutions!

Every year, I have a general idea of things that I want to achieve over the coming year. And since I live my life through lists, I usually even write them down.

This year, I am going a step further and sharing them with the internet! Maybe some somewhat public scrutiny will inspire me to actually achieve these things.

So here are my resolutions for 2011:

Be less contrary
I love to argue, and I have a tendency to play devil’s advocate a lot. I don’t do this with everyone, but I definitely do it a lot with certain people. One of those people is my boy, who is currently trying to complete a very stressful master’s degree. As such, he has pointed out to me that sometimes it would be nice for me to not challenge everything he says. I think this is more than fair enough, and I plan to work on it.

Learn a new skill
Obviously, I want to learn more than just one new thing this year. But I really want to learn an entirely new skill.

The reasoning behind this is that for the past five years, I’ve been in school—I was always learning how to do something new.

I don’t want that to stop now that I’m working full time. Especially given WHERE I’m working, I don’t want to stagnate and stop learning. And it would be all too easy for that to happen.

Get a new job
My goal, when I started working full-time in July was to last a year here. But once my year is up, I really want to find another job. I’m starting my search now, as we all know how very long it can take to find employment.

Go somewhere I’ve never been
Pretty self explanatory! I think Australia is the goal.

Read all of Neil Gaiman’s books and graphic novels
I love him and I love his style of writing. I always feel so excited and inspired after reading his work. But given that, I’ve only read a few of his books. This needs to be remedied.

Get fit
This is so overdone as a resolution, I know. But this is the first year that I’ve had an actual gym membership, and I am GOING to use it! This is also not an “I wanna lose 10 pounds!” resolution. I want to be healthy. I have not been feeling wonderful lately, and I want to work on my fitness so that I can actually have the energy to do everything I want to do.

Make a movie
A real one. With funding, and a budget and a cast and crew and everything.

This is what I want to do with my life. And I feel like if I don’t do it this year, it might never happen.

So this leaves me with no option.

Stop overbooking myself
I have a really bad habit of booking my time up to the last minute.

I hate that I do this.

I just have so many things that I want to do, but it tends to mean that I’m always running to be somewhere, always checking the clock to make sure I’m not late. And whenever I am with someone, I’m not really entirely present. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be able to be spontaneous and not have to worry about the five other places I should be that day.

Be happy with the way things are, at least a little bit.
I tend to complain a lot. But even though I’m not exactly where I want to be in life, things really are going quite well. I have a well paying job (even though it is anything but ideal), I see my friends more than I have in years, I have my own film company, and things with Boyfriend are going really well. I want to be able to trust that the things I am not happy with will get better. I know it will take a lot of hard work, but it can’t hurt to be happy in the interim, right?

Write! Really write.
This one is so important to me. I feel like I’ve gotten so far away from writing. And corporate communications really don’t count. I miss learning the way I did when I worked as a science writer. I miss talking to people who are doing what they love, and who honestly believe that they are helping people (which they usually are). Obviously, my overall goal is to write about science. But for now, any writing is better than nothing.

Overall, I must say that I have pretty high hopes for 2011.

Candy will be my downfall

Recently, my roomate and I purchased a 4lb bag of Rockets.


(Sidebar: Apparently in the US, Rockets are called Smarties. To me, Smarties are chocolate. This caused me a moment of great confusion when googling them. Also, if anyone's interested, "rocket candy" is apparantly NOT sugary deliciousness in most circles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_candy)

I love candy, but I’ve never been too partial to Rockets.

Anyways, having a 4lb bag of them to go through has given me a strange affinity for the little round, mostly flavourless candies. Forget that the bag smelled like evil chemicals and fake sugar when we opened it, Rockets are awesome.

Fun fact: A roll of Rockets is seven grams. This tiny, seven gram roll contains six grams of sugar.

This is awesome. Any candy that is actually 85% sugar is pretty amazing in my books. But I was always under the impression that Rockets consisted almost entirely of sugar. There’s a whopping 15% there that’s made up of stuff that doesn’t end in ‘ose’!

So I conducted some research.

Rockets basically consist of sugar, more sugar, citric acid and caclium stearate.

Having no idea what calcium stearate is, I looked it up as well (i'm just a googling fiend today). According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia it is a “carboxylate of calcium that is found in some lubricants and surfactants. It is a white calcium salt of stearic acid. Chemically it is related to the components of hand soap.”

Yum.

I love Halloween.

Who knew dancing scientists could have such universal appeal?

Inspiration is evading me. So I will regale you with tales of Utah at a later date. For now, onto more breaking news!

The DeRosa lab from Carleton University won the dance your Ph.D. contest!! Why do I care? I helped make the video, of course.

Some of the girls in my boyfriend’s lab found out about this contest in which grad students from around the globe attempt to interpret their scientific research through dance.

Gonzolabs, the site that puts on the contest, explains it like this:

“The dreaded question. “So, what’s your Ph.D. research about?” You take a deep breath and launch into the explanation. People’s eyes begin to glaze over…

At times like these, don’t you wish you could just turn to the nearest computer and show people an online video of your Ph.D. thesis interpreted in dance form?

Now you can. And while you’re at it, you can win $1000, achieve immortal geek fame on the Internet, and be recognized by Science for your effort.

How to enter:

1) Turn your Ph.D. thesis into a dance.
2) Get the dance on video.
3) Put the video online.”

So, of course, as a favour to the lab, I offered up our mad filmmaking skills in exchange for pizza, to help them dance their Ph.D.

I have to say that the girls were significantly more into the dancing at the get go...

Girls, working hard

Guys....taking a "well deserved" break?

...but the guys came around eventually and everyone did a great job.

The final result looks something like this.

I have to say that my dreams as a filmmaker never really encompassed using Lady Gaga to explain SELEX, but hey, you take what you can get.

Surprisingly (or maybe not..?) the video became insanely popular. They won the chemistry category of the competition and the video was immediately scooped up by blogs all over the world. It now has 64, 000 views on Vimeo.

And last night, they won the entire competition, and the video was screened at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this.

Other than science is awesome.

Especially when set to pop music.

Seanchai part two- Wyoming

So back into it. I left off in Wyoming: Beautiful blue sky, hills and all that jazz.

Day became night once more and we were still driving. It got later and later, and we seemed to get further and further from anything remotely resembling civilization.

At some point in there, I think our tired brains registered that the last city we passed was many, many miles back, and the next service station was still many in the distance.

And then, it rang out. The most ungodly sound a traveler on a desolate Wyoming road, miles from anything, could ever hear.

The ‘bing’ of the gas meter, telling us we were nearly out.

That sound has always had the ability to incite extreme panic in me, even when driving in populated urban centres. Which is nothing compared to the all-encompassing wall of despair that I hit upon hearing it then.

Luckily, I managed to conceal my terror relatively well, and the guys didn’t seem to think it was that big a deal.

We decided to hunt for a gas station.

Alex pulled the car off the highway at the first exit we found. This did nothing to alleviate my growing terror. The exit we chose could have been from any horror film on the market. A desolate road, with a small (seemingly deserted) town a little further on (no doubt harboring psychotic, machete wielding cannibal serial killers, waiting for fresh meat to enter their death trap of a town).

I think at this point, someone suggested knocking on a door to ask where we could find some gas, but in my fright induced panic (I was sure that I was going to die here) I think I ‘calmly’ suggested that we get back on the damn highway and find a truck stop or gas station at which to fill up.

Most likely sensing that I was about to have a full-scale psychological breakdown if we didn’t get out of death-town soon, the guys agreed.

Unfortunately, as it turns out, truck stops in Wyoming only have diesel fuel. And some gas stations apparently don’t work after 2:00 am. We visited three different gas stations, each time to be thwarted in our attempted to find fuel. We even knocked on the doors of sleeping truck drivers (a dangerous pastime, to be sure) to ask if THEY had any gas. No such luck.

In an act of sheer desperation, Alex finally called a towing company (one of the drivers was kind enough to give us the number). They told us that apparently, for our model of car, we could get at least 60 miles after the gas light came on. We remembered passing a full service station several miles back. It was a gamble and it would take us backwards on our journey, but it was probably our only hope of not being eaten by psychopathic townsfolk. We decided to go for it.

It was at this point that I fell asleep. Somehow, even though I was sure that I was in mortal danger, I managed to pass out for the remainder of our gas-finding adventure.

All I know is we did eventually end up finding gas and in a cloud of happy relief, we set off once again on our epic journey.

Some hours later, the decision was made to stop for the night. This time at a real service station, with lights and everything! The threat of freezing to death was still there, but at least rescuers would be able to see our frozen bodies when they found us.

Miraculously, we survived (huzzah!) and woke up to a very cold, desolate kind of morning. But as we continued to drive we discovered how wickedly beautiful Wyoming can be:





After stopping to take some pictures (at which point Jer started doing handstands, losing his brand new camera in the process) we got back in the car for the final stretch.

From that point on, it was relatively straight forward. We just kept driving down the I-80 until we got to Utah.

Seanchai Part one- Slamdance

Seanchai is the title of the film we’ve been working on since March. It’s actually pronounced shen-icky and is the Gaelic word for storyteller.

And, most importantly, it’s almost done! We’ve reached the final stretch of editing. After this it’s submissions to film festivals (followed, no doubt, by crushing rejection. I know filmmakers are supposed to have a thick skin, but said rejections will likely reduce me to a blubbering mess).

In any case, I thought it would be an appropriate time to share how this film actually happened. It’s a story that stretches way beyond last March. It’s also a very long story so I thought it best to divide it into parts.

Welcome to part one!

It all started just under a year ago, when I half-heartedly applied to go to the Slamdance film festival with Real Ideas Studio, a program I had been with previously. I wasn’t all too keen on heading to Utah for 10 days, but I thought it would be a good opportunity and as my prospects for travel at that point were lacking, at least it was an excuse to get out of the country for a few days.

Unfortunately, due to lack of interest in the program, the Slamdance program was cancelled. Totally unexpectedly, I was seriously upset by this. How was it that so many of my friends could be off having the times of their lives halfway around the world, and I couldn’t even go to Utah??

As I was explaining this to my school friends, Jer and Alex, over breakfast after filming the local zombie walk, someone floated the suggestion of going to the festival ourselves.

Note: Normally this would be the kind of idea that everyone at the table agrees to, but no one has the true intention of actually following up on. Someone makes the suggestion, everyone agrees with exclamations of “oh! That would be such fun! Let’s do that!” And the idea rests, never to be dredged up again. Not so, in this case.

(I should also mention that Jer and Alex have this ability to take a truly insane idea and run with it until I’m convinced that it’s actually a good idea.)

So the idea of going to the festival ourselves was planted, and sat insidiously in the backs of our minds for the next month, when, in class one night, it was brought up again.

Jer: “So, are we going to Slamdance?”

Me: “Sure….How are we gonna get there?”

Alex: “I don’t know…drive? It’s not that far. And it will be cheap.”

And that was it. Those five short sentences were the extent of our discussion on the pros and cons of driving more than halfway across the continent in the dead of winter.

I don’t know what made me do it. But ignoring the best intentioned advice from my parents, friends and (justifiably) concerned boyfriend, I started to plan a cross-country trip with two guys I had more-or-less just met, to go film a film festival we didn't know much about in a place we had never been.

Brilliant.

Needless to say, the date of our departure rolled around rather quickly, and after promising said concerned friends, family and boyfriend that I would keep in touch regularly to assure them that I was not dead on the side of the road somewhere in rural Nebraska, we left for Utah.

This is what 36 hours of driving looks like.

I started the journey squished in the back of Alex’s Subaru Outback, trying to find room amidst the military issue blankets, camera case and mysteriously large, heavy bag (I was later assured that this was, in fact, Jeremy’s satchel).

About halfway to Toronto, I realized that I didn’t really have a good grasp of where we were going.

Me: “Can I see the map?”

Jer: *Looks in glove compartment* “Where’s the map?”

Alex: “We don’t have one. I plotted our trip on my iPhone”

Me: "..."

We crossed the border at Detroit and experienced only the tiniest of glitches when the border guard did not believe that we were travelling for pleasure, given the large amount of professional looking film equipment we packed with us. This resulted in having the car thoroughly searched at the border.

Once we got everything back together, we were again on our way.

We continued to drive, pausing only to consume some terrible diner food somewhere close to Flint, Michigan.

After the boys had taken a post-dinner run around the parking lot, we continued driving. As we headed further into the US, the weather took a turn for the slightly less-than-awesome. This was late January, after all. But we pressed on.

Eventually we started to notice car after car in the ditch on the side of the road. There were also several transport trucks that had gone off the road, some facing the entirely wrong direction.

We were slightly puzzled by this, seeing as how not one of us had noticed that the weather was particularly bad. You have to be from Ottawa to understand this. But we have an incredibly high tolerance for shitty weather. So, chalking up the cars-in-ditch situation to American’s not knowing how to drive in the winter, we kept driving.

Eventually, we pulled over at a highway truck stop, just after crossing the border into Nebraska. And this wasn't one of those cushy truck stops, with washrooms, food and light.

No.

This was a desolate stretch of road, somewhat offset from the main highway, the purpose of which was to provide tired truck drivers with a place to pull over for an hour or two.

To this day I don’t know what possessed me to agree to stop there. Perhaps it was a combination of exhaustion and really terrible food, but I didn’t even bat an eyelash when Alex pulled off the road at around 3:30 am.

I should have been frightened of a great number of things that night. These included:

-Being squashed and horribly mangled by a gigantic transport truck, driven by a sleepy truck driver unable to see our car in the darkness
-Being attacked by rogue Nebraska cowboys (this particular danger was brought to my attention after the fact)
-Freezing to death.

Yes, in the middle of January, we slept on the side of the road, in a car, with nothing but slightly warm-ish blankets to save us from dying a slow, ice cube-ish death.

Through a combination of luck and neuroses, I woke up the next morning relatively unscathed.
And our journey continued on.

Now, I mentioned above we had just entered Nebraska when we pulled over. There is nothing in Nebraska. Seriously. It is flat, and because it was January, the entire state was a white-ish-brown-ish-grey colour. There are no distinguishing features in the entire state. So we drove. Through a horrid vortex of white-ish-brown-ish-grey flatness and finally emerged into the glory of Wyoming.

At this point, Wyoming seemed like a gift. Blue sky! Slight topographical variety!!

Little did we know that Wyoming had it’s own surprises in store for us.

I'll stop here because, as I said, it's a very very long story. And Wyoming really does deserve a post of its own.

LiveJournal

Recently (and possibly through a total stroke of lunacy) I had the urge to revisit my old LiveJournal account.

Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten back into reading my friend’s blogs, and I can’t help but think how our blogs are just the newer, wiser (better written!) and less teen-angsty versions of our LiveJournal account.

So after braving my old hotmail account to attempt to retrieve my login information (note to all: hotmail deletes EVERYTHING after a certain amount of time, apparently) and failing, and then attempting to go through LiveJournal itself I got into my old account! Totally miraculous.

After all that effort, I thought it would be a shame if I didn’t post a few gems from the good ol’ days of LiveJournal:

“Ok, lets read some interesting facts about king James...well, supposedly he was a 'flaming homosexual'...i think we'll have to verify that before putting it in the summative though.”

“FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!”

“You know what? Marco Polo wasn't that good looking. Now i'm disappointed.”

“Have you ever seen a cow run? It's very amusing...to say the least.”

“So, fourthly: Plaid should only be worn in controlled amounts”

“So...the hulk (aka. my HUGE green van :S ) is, as of today, officially mine. Until my sis starts to drive...by which time I hope to have another car. So woo. Now let's just pray that it keeps working for another couple of years :P”

(I wish I could go back and tell my 17 year old self that the van would, in fact last FOREVER, that my sister would start driving quite soon thereafter, and that my parents would never get another car. Until I moved out.)