Losing time at the movies

Opportunities to see films in Victoria must be snatched, because, unlike in Hades, they are unlikely to say more than a week or so. I guess too many Victorians are outside, enjoying the temperate weather.

One place to go to catch a movie before it disappears is the Cinecenta at the University of Victoria. While it's always spooky to return to UVic, which, for me, is littered with memories, the actual auditorium is completely unchanged, so I can almost imagine going back in time - except that I now found myself surrounded by grey-haired people. The current students were, no doubt, holed up in their dormitories, apartments, basements, and bedrooms, streaming stuff on their devices.

When I was a student here, films were usually well-attended by a young audience, many avoiding their homework - like me. The films were never first-run - they often are now - but usually art-house classics: King of Hearts, Bedazzled, Women in Love, The Seventh Seal.

After watching the film in the hard seat that, at least, discourages the movie-goer from nodding off (that much hasn't changed), I emerged, blinking, into the lobby, where I was flung into the present. The concession is very much fancier than I remember, and there's a dental clinic just down the hall. The washrooms are huge.

A lady was rescuing popcorn bags from the trash.
"This drives me crazy," she told me briskly. "They're perfectly recyclable!"
And she tucked them into the paper recycling bin.

It's been several years, but I guess some people just never left.

Midterminal illness

This sunny October Sunday morning, two blond Amazons have set up a study station looking out westward from Moka House. When they stand next to their high stools, they need to position themselves to avoid hitting the hanging lamps.

Their textbooks, blazing with multi-coloured tabs at the edges, are propped against the window. Their laptops (or tablets with keyboards, who knows these days?) are open to even more scanned pages. Their work-area is cluttered with thermoses, cups of various sizes, and glasses of water. They're clearly here for the long haul.

Along the south wall, a quartet of young men, each at a table of scrubbed wood, seated on a long bench that can accommodate plug-ins. Three stare fixedly at their respective laptops; one is hunched over his phone. One huddles in a grey hoody, and one blocks out the world with headphones.

Ah, mid-October in a town with a university and a community college. There is tension and concentration in the air, which I remember comfortably from a distance. I leave them to it.

Bass-ic conversation skills

Gotta dash tonight, but before I do, I'd like to give you a little taste of a concert I attended last night. The session-end presentation of "Basses Loaded", a first-come-first-served month-long series of intensive workshops offered by double-bass virtuoso Gary Karr, is, I understand, sold out every year, but Demeter, who has been a Gary Karr fan for at least thirty years, procured tickets for the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter, two mutual friends, and myself. This video is from a Basses Loaded concert of seven years ago, but this piece was featured, a passionate duet for double basses.

If you find that difficult to imagine, get a load of this:

As a matter of fact, some of my days at university were like that....

Oh, oh, oh. Tired. Too tired. This day has left too little of me and too much to do.

When a "UVic" in Catalonia (this is important, the speaker in the video says "Spain" but some Catalan posters took issue) did a widely-viewed "lip-dub", Sean Slavin, of my alma mater The University of Victoria in British Columbia, decided to see what could emerge, mainly because many viewers had apparently confused the two universities.

What follows is what he and about a thousand volunteers came up with last September. When I watch it, I'm nearly undone by an avalanche of memories, but I think someone who hasn't been a student here, taught here, met one's spouse here can still enjoy this on its own. (Hang on for the "Rick Roll"):

Write of Passage Number Thirteen: Four Solitudes

Younger daughter and I try to ride the double-decker buses in Victoria whenever we can. Today we caught one which runs from the campus of the University of Victoria to downtown. When we clambered to the second deck, we found the prime seats occupied by four Japanese girls, probably ESL students in one of the university's summer language programmes. They weren't sitting together, mind. Three sat one behind the other on the left side, and one sat across the aisle. All four seemed to be in their own worlds, gazing out the window or examining their cell phones. Each one had shoulder-length hair, parted on the side. Each wore slightly scuffed ballet slipper flats. The tops seemed to be artfully varied: a frilly blouse, a short-sleeved sweater, a navy hoodie, and a scruffy tee-shirt.

The girl across the aisle suddenly extended her arm, and snapped her own picture with her phone. As she fell back into gazing and poking at the buttons, another girl stretched out her arm and captured herself with a bright pink digital camera. She gazed at the result, then leaned away against the window and tried again. And then the next girl raised her arm, and so on. I felt I was sitting in the middle of a piece of performance art or some weird visual haiku full of single arms branching across the bus toward no one:

The girls of Japan
Make a forest of photos
What will be recalled?

Finally, one girl turned in her seat to talk to the one behind her. I could see them glancing at the girl across the aisle, while she watched them beneath lowered lids, pretending to check her phone. The row of three got off together at City Hall. Cell phone girl pocketed the same and got off at our stop, disappearing into the crowd.

How I met my husband

How I Met My Husband is one of Alice Munro's bitter-sweet short stories (more bitter than sweet, after all, it is Alice Munro...) When I was 10, Alice Munro taught us creative writing in Sunday School. This was just before she became famous (if you're not Canadian, let me assure you, she's one of our best-known Canadian writers), and it was heavenly.

But I digress. I've just checked my perpetual calendar which isn't so perpetual because it only goes up to the year 2000, and January 24th was a Tuesday the year I met my husband. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was doing what I habitually did when I had tons of assignments to complete. I was roaming the four floors of the library at the University of Victoria, looking for someone to talk to. My friend Guinevere was in her usual spot, one of the huge leathery couches set up like booths in the basement, the only place where smoking was allowed. Guinevere didn't smoke, so I guess the leather was the attraction. That, and being able to put her feet up. Sitting with her this day was a bespectacled young man with a nervous manner, a classmate from one of Guinevere's history classes.

Years later, we had an anniversary cake inscribed with "Indifference at First Sight". I thought he was neurotic; he thought I was "a typical English student". (I was in Education at the time, but switched to an English major the following year when I discovered I despised most of my fellow Secondary Education majors.) Things weren't helped the next day when, so he claims, he greeted me and I sailed past without responding. (See prosopagnosia, three posts back --- but we only have his word to go on that this actually happened.)

Today is the anniversary of that rainy January afternoon, one of those big round ones with an 0 at the end. Bitter? Some. Sweet? Some. You don't live with one person for so many years without wanting to belt them at least once. But we don't. Not yet, anyway. We may not know everything about each other, but we know the worst, and that, I think, is what keeps either of us from bailing out. There was an air of inevitability (a word I couldn't pronounce then) throughout the weeks of our courtship, and years on, we still can't avoid each other. And that, my friends, is bitter-sweet.