I do not deserve to be a grad student.

Haven’t written much because I’ve come home for the holidays and have been too busy eating high-calorie meals with long lost pals, getting drunk with elderly relatives, and making out merry all over the city of Toronto. This is a good place. 

While looking through boxes in my mum’s LOVELY new place in Cabbagetown, I found a folder full of my undergraduate essays, including a gem called: ‘“What a rant, say you, is here”: Problematizing Edward Young’s conception of ‘Originality’ and the Author in his ‘Conjectures on Original Composition’’. First off, I’m not sure when I discovered the formula for essay-titles, but if anyone is not aware yet, this is it:

Witty pun or quote/Colon/Explanatory bit about your essay with a few academic-sounding words. 

e.g. Pic of the Litter: The politics of cats, captions and ‘laughing out loud’ in the internet’s postmodern milieu.

A+.

The essay I found is not exceptional. I did fine on it, but reading it over, it mostly just ramblingly contradicts Edward Young’s opinion that imitation is a low and ultimately useless form of creative output. (Sorry, everyone after Madonna.) My chosen approach to debunking this theory was to craft some imitative poems of my own, and being the hopeless Bard-worshipper I am, I rewrote some of the more famous sonnets. About cheese. And Maury Povich.

Hoff the hook.

I'm not going to dignify the closed airports with a post. I think we can just all agree that 10 centimetres of snow should not completely shut down one of the world's busiest airports for 48 hours, and move on. Fuck you, Heathrow airport, you are terrible, the end.

In happier news, I don't even need to go home, or even stay alive, really. I could just die right now and it would be okay, because I saw this:

Look at those gentle yet mischievous eyes. They're looking right into your sense of childlike wonder 

(and love of dirty jokes about 'rodgering').

The photo doesn't make it clear what THIS is, but I think it does make it clear that this is amazing. Basically, when we heard that David Hasselhoff was starring as Captain Hook in a children's Christmas panto, we had no choice. Tickets were purchased, the train was ridden to Wimbledon in the bitter cold (a newspaper literally described it as a "bone-chilling -2 degrees", so...) and the greatest theatrical journey of my life unfolded.

"Just look at the camera for a.... there we go."

Watching Bridget Jones on my next door neighbour's telly (just kidding that is not a real word I would use, although I'm all about "chunder" to mean "vomit") last week I realized that its eponymous heroine lives right around the corner from my house. Mainly this lead me to consider why, despite the millions of times I have embarrassed myself in the area through "charming" Bridget Jones-y mishaps (falling, clothing malfunctions, a general lack of awareness regarding British traffic directions, etc.), I have not been asked on a date by a beautiful-if-horrible Hugh Grant type and then rescued from that terrible relationship by beautiful-and-perfect Colin Firth. Not the type, just the man himself.

And then I realized that I carry the reason in my wallet.