Month: May 2005

They were serving tacos for dinner at SJC tonight. I’d been looking forward to this meal for several days now. I love tacos. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if there was a Taco Bell on campus, I’d be in big trouble.

Anyways, these things were fantastic tonight. I got three beef tacos with salsa, cheese, and sour cream. I thought last night’s dinner of fish and chips was good, but the tacos were over and above that.

I had an interesting thought this morning. I was wondering if anyone at SJC would eat their tacos with a knife and fork. SJC has residents from all over the world, but I got the feeling that if someone were to eat their tacos with a knife and fork, it wouldn’t be because they didn’t know any better. The most likely reason would be that they were just too prim and proper to eat with their hands. There are a few types like that at the College. They must have had an interesting upbringing.

When dinner started, I was thinking it was quite unlikely that anyone would eat their tacos using a knife and fork. It just seems so impractical, how the hell would you even do it? I can see eating a pizza using a knife and fork, but a taco? As people sat down to have dinner, I noticed everyone was using their hands. Would I finally be surprised by the residents of SJC?

Then the “librarian” sat down with her food. The “librarian” is a resident who is in her early 20s and is by all accounts a very nice person. The interesting thing about her is that she seems very prim and proper. She dresses immaculately at all times. She’s very formal with her clothes and comes to dinner looking very sharp. While others come to dinner in sweats, I doubt she would even entertain that thought.

I noticed that she was consuming her meal with meticulous detail. Using the knife and fork, she broke open the taco shells, carefully loading her fork with all the taco fillings. If it had been socially acceptable, I would have just stared at the whole facinating process. I’m a slow eater, but being the uncouth heathen I am, I completely finished my three tacos in under ten minutes. I wasn’t timing it exactly, but I think at the 20 minute mark, she was still working on her first taco.

Carl was bugging me to explain it to her that it’s ok to sometimes get your hands dirty when you eat. I declined.

I still believe in a “to each their own” type of philosophy, but I saw something today that I’d never seen before. I wonder how she eats chocolate bars?

The teaser trailer for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is now out. Them kids are gettin’ older.

I took my mother out for dinner tonight. We usually go a few days before Mother’s Day because the service is crap that day and it’s too busy. This year my mom got two dinners because my sister took her out earlier in the week. She’s at Disneyland for a few days, they had to go beforehand.

Anyways, after dinner, I’m waiting at the bus stop along Broadway near Heather. As the 99B is just pulling up, I see this flash of a hippy silhouette out of the corner of my eye. I only know one guy who has a hippy silhouette and it’s Greg Williams. As this blur raced by me, it grabbed my arm and I saw it was indeed Greg Williams.

“Oh sorry man!”

“Greg, come home with me!”

“I can’t man!”

Greg never stopped his running as he sprinted to catch a bus behind mine. I didn’t have time to ponder what just happened as I needed to board my own bus. I bet he had a good lunch today.

You know what I had for dinner tonight? Baked paneer tikka prathawrap with dhal curry. It was damn tasty. Probably one of the best meals I’ve had in a while. Next week is shaping up to be a culinary delight as well at SJC. Sunday night is fish and chips. Monday, they’re having tacos. Let me repeat that… they’re having tacos on Monday. Sweet. Wednesday, it’s BBQ chicken with spicy wedge fries. For dessert, it’s choice of novelty ice cream.

No time for a detailed post tonight. I have a job interview tomorrow to prepare for. This one will be quite thorough and long. This company will not leave a single stone unturned. Guessx which company it is?

In the meantime, I invite you to view the trailer from Will Ferrell’s new movie, Kicking & Screaming. Ferrell will be hosting SNL May 14th, so mark it on your calendar.

UPDATE: I’m not exactly certain, but I think the issue has been resolved now.

If you want to experience bureaucracy, you should try enrolling in a large university. There are a million different little tasks you have to take care of to graduate from UBC. Even though I meticulously completed every single one of those tasks, I had a strange feeling that I’d encounter a hiccup because of the large bureaucracy machine at UBC.

Well, I was right. Just before I was scheduled to head downtown today, I received an e-mail from my academic supervisor. The contents of the e-mail raised immediate concern. According to my supervisor, the grades for the last two classes I took had not been submitted yet and without those grades, I wouldn’t be able to graduate until November, a seven month delay. I was told to get in touch with the instructors of those two classes and have them submit those grades immediately.

So I did not hesitate to call both those instructors immediately. Both were not in their offices, but I left a detailed message explaining my situation. As an additional measure, I also e-mailed both of them. Having no other way of contacting them, I decided I could steal away for a couple hours downtown.

While I was downtown, I checked my voicemail and one of my instructors had already replied. She had indeed submitted my marks yesterday. To her credit, she even double-checked with one of the departmental assistants. My mark had been entered into the computer yesterday and from their end of the computer system, they could see it.

When I returned home shortly before 5pm, I checked my e-mail and the other instructor had replied as well. He submitted my mark on Friday or possibly even Thursday, but regardless, he told me he physically handed in a sheet of marks to the departmental office staff for entry into the system.

At least to me, I can’t see where anyone did anything wrong. Both my instructors submitted my marks prior to today. One instructor even confirmed it shows up on the system, the only system is used to check student grades. Hell, I just checked my grades on-line and even I can see both of them. The record is complete.

So, the question remains, why am I teetering on the edge of a delayed graduation? Because this is what happens when a huge, complex series of events have to occur for even just a single student to graduate. It’s almost amusing to think that something that is completely out of my control might cause me to not graduate in May.

I am hoping that in the morning, everything will have cleared up, but the cynical part of me won’t be surprised if the fun has just started.

There’s an interesting article over at the Dose web site. It promises to get readers all caught up on the Star Wars lore so they can understand the next movie that’s coming out. This might be useful for some of my readers… erm, Sarah Kidd… I’m looking in your direction.

Please note, this is the farthest extent of media I’ll be showing from Sith. This blog remains a spoiler-free zone.

I’m too tired to post anything coherent or entertaining. Instead, here’s a tiny picture of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. If you ask me, and most people do, that dude don’t look 42.