driving home

+ there's a very curious dichotomy between my professional/academic interest in bureaucracies and committee structures and systems of power and "canada" and my abiding fascination of apocalyptic fiction. the fact is that everything i am proud of knowing and understanding in a professional sense would be profoundly useless if everything changed. at the same time, i am fascinated by organisational development and structure and obsessed with its total collapse. the absence of order. there are passages in end zone where gary harkness imagines thousands, millions dead in major cities around the world. nuclear fallout. in other words, the total elimination of any field that i have any comparative advantage in.

+ at the end of november, i walked up victoria drive to sam's house in the snow with vol. 1 of battlestar galactica. it was snowing and my shoes were completely soaked. amanda had spent the night snowed in. the night before, we all trekked out to krisztina's house(at fraser and kingsway, where jan and i had searched for campaign offices a year ago while listening to fleetwood mac) and gar and i walked home in the middle of snowed-in 12th avenue drinking beer. i had a paper due on webCT that night i went to sam's, but i didn't really care. it was a paper on breed-specific legislation for my vegan course (which i got a C+ in). sam cooked chicken. i was asked on sunday night to use my connections to get a snow day called for monday. that wednesday i went to brentwood mall on the way home to buy boots.

+ i'm reading driving to detroit by lesley hazelton. i'm enjoying it, but not as much as i'd hoped i might. i was hoping to be surprised. i'm nervous to read delillo's the names again, in case it's not as good as i recall, which is just silly.

+ i went to washington state four times this summer, and i don't feel that i've examined it all sufficiently yet. i went to seattle, ellensburg, whidbey island, spokane, the grand coulee dam, bellingham, centralia. i also went to portland, oregon and coeur d'alene, idaho. that's all. and i did it all in the passenger seat, because i can't drive. if i could drive, i would.