"Tahraaahnah" is evidently how the cool kids say it. Stick with me, kid.

Did I ever tell you guys about my love affair with big cities?

I have one.

After thinking about it, I've been living in coastal areas all my life, essentially moving from one small town to another. Guelph is the 'biggest' place I've lived in, unless you count Ottawa. Can I count Ottawa? I'm here like four months of the year. I don't know. Either way, I want to try living in a big city. And it's not just because small towns are, in general, creepy, inbred, devoid of all life and miserable (though lets be honest, they are). I love the energy, life, and size of the big cities. Anywhere that contains so many humans has to be something amazing, right? Because we're amazing. Hurrah for the  human race. Go us.

Anyway, the point of this post is to say that I had a recent trip to Toronto where these feelings were solidified. Toronto is awesome and wonderful. It is vibrant, and I want to be a part of it. My parents are both Torontonians, which I think I've actually mentioned before, so I think it's almost a duty I have to my heritage to discover their city and make it my own. At least for a little while.

For instance, this shot (which turned out waaay too bright) was taken in front of old City Hall, where my parents got married. : ) It's actually the exact spot where their sort of 'most used' wedding photo was taken. If I had it scanned I'd do a comparison shot, because it's pretty neat and time travel-y to look at them together. Especially since you can see that all those little signs around me are no-smoking signs, and in my parent's wedding photo Dad is of course holding a cigarette. We live in such a different world.

Also you see that purse? It is wonderful. It is so pretty and so functional.

As for the trip, it was super-fun! I went with my Mom to visit her sister, whom I hadn't seen in a very, very long time. I'm not especially close with any family that isn't immediate, but visiting always makes me wish that I were. When I become an aunt, hopefully this blog post will remind me to be annoyingly close to my little nieces and nephews.

Also, final thought - another thing that I love and completely don't care if it sounds horrendously childish is dressing thematically for movies. It doesn't have to be obnoxious, but it damn well should be. I feel like if everyone only went to see movies they were willing to dress thematically for they wouldn't be nearly so busy and you wouldn't always end up sitting beside someone who chose to have a coughing fit throughout Man of Steel rather than go home and hack a lung out in the comfort of their own bed. 

...Go human race! Yeah...

I guess that's it! Just a little post this time. Short posts can be fun too. I think I'm doing a lot of museums and galleries and far too many trips to Value Village so that I don't really feel as though I'm out of school and jobless for the summer. Does that mean success? I think it does. Yeah.

STAR WARS Identified... With Twi'leks!

I went to the STAR WARS: Identities exhibit at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum last week! I heard about the exhibit in March, so the excitement as been building up for a while now and I'm happy to say that I really enjoyed it! If you're in the Ottawa area I highly recommend the trip out to see it (and if you aren't in the Ottawa area, the exhibit should be heading to other cities soon).

Top among my favorites at the exhibit was Anakin's podracer from The Phantom Menace. Big and impressive props are always a winner for me. I think scale is my favorite thing about movie or television related exhibits. I love being able to stand in front of the podracer and appreciate how large it actually is, or discover that Chewbaca is in fact ridiculously tall. How did he even fit into that cockpit. I don't know. In any case, seeing them in person is like creating a new moment or a new experience with something that's been with you for a long time, which, for many of these guys, means as far back as I can remember. Plus podracers are totally awesome.

Of course one of the best experiences was going face to face with the actual Yoda. One of the things I noticed when we got home and (naturally) started to watch all of the movies, was that there weren't any cool things from the gungans, or the new clone troopers (aside from a few neat concept drawings/sculptures), because of course, there are essentially no props. You can't come face to face with  Jar Jar because he never had a face outside of a screen. So I think we can officially list the lack of physical props as another negative of relying too heavily on CGI. I'm not going to attack the prequels, but I do think that puppetry is the way to go for realism, and puppetry with CGI enhancements might be even better.

They have Jaba's eyes. Just his eyes. Apparently that's all that's left of the enormous puppet built for Return of the Jedi. There's just these two big eyes on sticks, staring at you. I found them so incredibly cool, and I think they might have been my favorite thing in the whole exhibition. I don't know why, but my mind just keeps going back to them.

They still have his eyes.

I feel obligated by eight-year-old Ronnie to mention Padme's clothes. They only had three of her outfits, and my pictures didn't really come out (in my defense, lighting was shit and I was, according to my family, "taking way too long") but I still loved loved loved this. I can't be the only one who derived at least part of my love of Star Wars from the pretty outfits. They had so many clothes. It was so pretty. We're talking Leia's slave outfit (which included cute little boots I've never noticed before!), Leia's Hoth outfit, Padme's ceremony gown from Phantom Menace, her Attack of the Clones outfit (with wicked-awesome poncho wrap thing), and a random but gorgeous senator outfit. They didn't have Leia's Bespin outfit, which is, for whatever reason, my favorite. And  they didn't have Padme's classic red gown/headdress or Leia's classic white outfit, which was odd. But still. So pretty. I was so happy. I said earlier that I wasn't going to attack the prequels (even if, perhaps, I should) because one thing that the exhibit did remind me of was that I loved all of the Star Wars movies growing up. Phantom Menace came out when my brother's and I were kids, and we loved them. We didn't care that there was an annoying kid, or that the plot made little to no sense, or that none of the characters had any depth whatsoever. It was still Star Wars and we loved every second of it.

The exhibition does cost a pretty penny to get in, but if you're a fan of the series then I think it'll be worth the money to see some really cool stuff. : )

The 'Identities' part of the exhibit relates to the interactive activity they had were you 'build' your own Star Wars character. I really liked it! It was essentially a real-life self-insert, and I wish they had this for everything. Everything. It also reminded me of why Star Wars: The Old Republic is so much fun - because you're immersing yourself in that wonderful universe. You started off by choosing your species, and they recorded all of your choices in a bracelet you wore throughout so that at the end, you could see your character and their bio which was emailed to you. Naturally, I was a Twi'lek. I think we can officially say that a new life-goal is to write a book centered around the life of a Twi'lek. Anyway, as you went through the exhibit you chose your characters skills, upbringing-style, planet of origin (Bespin, of course), mentor, occupation, friendships, as well as other things, and ultimately you had to choose whether or not you would align yourself with the dark or light side of the force. My family and I mutually agreed that it would have been way cooler if the exhibit took all of your choices and told you what side of the force you came out on, but it was a really neat activity all the same. Check out Onnie-Ka, my Twi'lek senator. Because senators can be cool too.

One More Academic Hurdle Obliterated.

If there is one thing that I love about university, it's planning out all of the courses I'm going to take. At least once every semester (usually more than that) the master plan is revamped and updated according to what I liked or didn't like about a course I was taking, or some other great new idea I had. One of the best things about my degree is that it's so incredibly flexible that I have the room to do whatever I'd like. I just love my degree. I love it so much. And I'm president of our Student Association (sorry, sorry, but I am never going to get tired of saying that!).

Back to the point of this post (as there is a point), I was switching around my courses to suit the new master undergraduate plan and I started thinking about my master graduate plan (though I suppose I could just call it the 'Masters Plan', eh? Ha.). I decided to do something I'd been avoiding for weeks - checking the entry requirements. I mentioned a few posts ago that the newest graduate plan revolves around Glasgow's MLitt in Environment, Culture, and Communication. There are two major obstacles to the master graduate plan, the first being that I cannot in any way, shape, or form afford to go to Glasgow on international fees. I am seriously and horribly in debt going to Guelph on local fees. Ignoring that mountainous obstacle, the other issue was actually getting into this program, meaning whether or not my marks are good enough.

I used the university's US grade requirement (since I couldn't find any Canadian requirements), which meant taking all of my grades and calculating my American GPA. I made two discoveries. The first was that I actually, amazingly, meet the entrance requirements for this wonderful program. What. What? Still can't believe it. The second even more surprising discovery was that I'm on the Dean's Honours List!?!

To understand my amazement, you have to know that my grades have been atrocious since coming to university. I was one of those horror stories used to scare high school kids. I went from I think a 90-something average coming out of high school to a semester 1 average of 65%. I was passing. I didn't go crazy with the partying uni lifestyle or anything, I just couldn't seem to get the marks that I wanted. It had never been a problem before. In high school I put the effort in and got good grades, but in university that really wasn't working. The only thing I could think of to fix the issue was to work harder. And now, at the end of my second year, I'm on the Dean's Honours List. Job well done, me. Job well fucking done. (Apologies that this is turning into a super prideful post; I realize I'm essentially writing this to pat myself on the back.)

When I examined all of the data, I discovered (and had been vaguely aware previously) that since that horrible first semester my grades have been rising and my semesterly average has been increasing by about 5% each term (it's actually been a weirdly steady increase). This means that as of right now, after a very long and painful climb from essentially the bottom of the barrel, my marks could actually be considered decent. If I can keep it up then I should be able to graduate with a pretty good GPA, hopefully well above the entrance requirements, and with any luck at all, it'll get me into that MLitt program. Yeah! I still have no idea whatsoever how I could ever afford it, but if I can get accepted that's got to be the first step of this dream coming true. Yeah! So, in other words,

Dwarven Vow #16: You can do anything if you try.

Even Better Than the Iron Maiden Song - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I'm hoping to add a little more content to this blog and thought that diving into the world of reviews was a good place to start. It's another one of those things that I've just always wanted to do. : )

The concept for these reviews is to keep them short and sweet. I'll touch on a few quick ideas regarding the novel, and hopefully inspire some of you to pick it up. I will also endeavor to keep the posts free of spoilers, so I will never go into detail about the plot, though I will discuss the setting. I'll post a review as frequently as I read a new book, which you're about to discover is really not as frequent as it ought to be for an English Student.

Without further ado, I give you review number one!

A few days ago I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is a book that doesn't really need an introduction, but I'll give you one anyway. The classic science fiction novel shows a dystopian world where people are not born, but decanted from bottles. People are segregated  into a strict and genetically-enforced caste system while the World Controllers work to keep us all in an infantile state of blind happiness through drugs, sex, and other base pleasures. Already sounds like something I'd pick up in an instant, but as you undoubtedly know, what makes this dystopian society so interesting are the striking similarities with  our own world today. The thought is that Huxley's predictions are actually coming true.

This is a fantastic thought to have in your head as you read. It creates an atmosphere of panic and urgency around the novel. What if you're reading the future? Obviously that's the question any good dystopian wants to ask, but Brave New World is one of the few which has been receiving answers in the affirmative. The novel  starts off with the aspect of society that I suspect may have been the most outlandish when the book was first published in 1932 - the Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, specifically the fertilizing of an egg artificially and without sex. This is wonderful. You start off reading this book that's supposed to tell the future and the first thing it does is succeed. It's enough to get you started, to get you thinking, and even to get you believing it for a little while.

This beginning of the novel is fantastic, but not just because of the science - which falters, as it is wont to do in science fiction, but not out of this world. I should actually talk about the science a bit. As a biology student at university, I do notice and appreciate when a novel grounds it's ideas of new technologies in actual science. This gives science fiction, and particularly dystopias, that semblance of realism the readers need to really believe it. Huxley mastered this trick, and everything that he comes up with (if it hasn't already come to pass) is grounded in real discoveries and well-known science fact. The biologist in you will appreciate his imaginings in the hatcheries, and the psychologist in you will get a real kick out of what he does in the conditioning centres, and there are many more examples of this as the book goes on to expand on the world. But as I mentioned, this is not the only reason why the introduction to the novel is brilliant, it's also because of Huxley's style, which is clever and sneaky and cruel when it wants to be. I found endless enjoyment at how the introduction that seems to introduce the world is also introducing the main characters of the tale. There's a part where he switches between about three or four different scenes constantly, at times sentence by sentence, but he keeps it together so well and uses it to make his point in so creative a manner that I think it might be my favorite part of the book. (I've written a multi-scene scene kind of thing before, but nothing like what he did with it. Entirely going to try and bring some of that into my own writing.)

Another one of my favorite things is the huge part played by the works of Shakespeare. It's hard to go wrong when you incorporate the Bard, but 'Brave New World' (actually a quote from The Tempest - how did I not know this??) did some really neat things with his influence and the timeless quality of his works.

It's a very quick read, as the book isn't terribly long, so I definitely recommend it for a summer afternoon. I consider myself to be a slow reader and it took me two afternoons and a morning. As to whether or not it actually tells the future… perhaps not. I'm too much of an optimist to buy into it completely. However there are a few things in there that I could easily see coming about, along with a few things that already have, and a few that are too horrible and too possible for comfort, which is great.

This is one of those books that's been sitting on my to-read shelf for what seems like forever, so if any of you are in a similar position I can confidently tell you that the next time you browse for a new title, I hope your finger lands on Brave New World.