How my leap day turned from awesome to crappy to awesome again

(The pictures in this post were taken on my iPhone from my (shitty) vantage point in the crowd. In other words, the pictures in this post are crappy. Forgive me.)

A few weeks ago, I was started to come out of my Beach House obsession and decided that I wanted to listen to some new music. So I decided to listen to some online radio. When the station I was listening to played “Origins” by Tennis, I fell in love with them and immediately downloaded both of their albums.

A few days after this, I found that Tennis were going to be playing a concert in Toronto on February 29 and I got really excited. I asked some of my friends if they wanted to go with me, but none of them could either because they were under 19 (it was a 19+ show) or because they had midterms either that night or on Thursday or had a super early class on Thursday. I was not discouraged, though. The person that I met with for the first time in 7 years lives in Toronto, so I emailed her and asked if she wanted to go. Turns that she loves Tennis and totally wanted to go. So I bought the tickets to the show, my bus ticket, and booked a room at a hostel near the Horseshoe (which was where Tennis was playing). YAY!

By the time Wednesday came, I was ZOMG SUPER EXCITED CAN THE CONCERT JUST HAPPEN NOW? I only had one 50-minute class that day, but I spent the entire time not paying attention because a) it was Genetics and everything in that class is just repeating what I learned in high school biology and b) TENNIS TENNIS TENNIS. I listened to Tennis for the entire bus ride from Guelph to Toronto.

But just as the bus passed the “Toronto” sign on the highway, I got a text from the person I was supposed to go to the concert with saying that she had been called into work but was trying to get out of it. That’s when I started internally freaking out. But then, just as my bus was pulling into the bus station, I got another text from her saying that she had gotten out of it by saying that she was still sick (which she was, so she wasn’t lying). I calmed down until I got ANOTHER text saying that her work had instead called her in for a shift starting at 5:45 on Thursday morning, so she couldn’t come because she had to go to bed super early because she had to be up super early. Totally not her fault and there was nothing she could have done about it. But it meant that I was either not going to the concert, or I was going alone.

Yeah.

I figured that since I was in Toronto to go to the concert and because I LOVE Tennis, I might as well go alone. So I went, even though I was in a shitty mood. When I first got there, I felt super awkward because I was alone at a bar and everyone there was with someone. So I was pretending to text a lot, and I tried to kill some time by buying a t-shirt from the merch table and ordering a drink.

Once Hospitality (the opening band) started, everyone crowded in front the stage, so I felt less awkward being there alone. Hospitality were awesome and they had a great poppy sound. I would say that they’re somewhat comparable to Metric. Their lead singer was also hilarious. I will definitely be looking out for more music from them!

When Hospitality’s set ended, it was about 10:15 and Tennis wasn’t supposed to start until 10:45. Although the thought of just standing there for half an hour didn’t really appeal to me, I decided to stay where I was because I didn’t want to lose my somewhat okay spot in the crowd. I ended up talking to a drunk guy that was standing next to me and he amused me until the background music faded and Tennis came on the stage.

The fact that the first song of Tennis’s set was “Baltimore” which is from their first album Cape Dory lead me to believe that their set would be an even mix between that album and their new album Young and Old. I was wrong: I’m pretty sure that they played every song on Young and Old with a few songs from Cape Dory here and there, which makes sense because it just released about two weeks ago.

AND THEY WERE SO AWESOME. Seriously, if you have the chance to see Tennis live, DO IT. They don’t really talk much, but seeing them perform live just made me love them even more. And they looked like they were having so much fun, which is so cute to see.

The best part of the night was the fact that Tennis played my favourite song by them as the last song of their encore. I had spent the entire night wanting to hear “High Road” and after they didn’t play it in their main set and then didn’t play it as their first encore song, it wasn’t looking like they would and I was sad. And then they played it and I screamed and then I sang along loudly.

After “High Road” ended and Tennis left the stage, I ran/gently pushed my way to the stage to try and get a setlist. I didn’t end up getting one, but that’s okay. I had an great time at the concert, even if I ended up having to go alone.

(More pictures!)

Music, Personal

concert review, concerts, tennis (the band not the sport)

March 3, 2012

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My Apple arsenal is complete

You might remember the goals I made at the beginning of this year. So far, my progress towards meeting those goals has been kind of fail. I should have at least 16 blog posts written by the end of February to be on track for meeting my goal of 100 blog posts; this will be my 12th blog post of 2012 and I don’t think I’ll be motivated enough to write 4 more in the next 6 days. I should have almost 4 not-for-school books read by now; I’m finally almost through my first. And budgeting? LOL NOPE.

So far the only goals that I’ve been keeping up are my yoga one (I’m taking a yoga class this semester) and probably my 80% GPA one. And now I can add another one of my goals to that pitifully short list: upgrade my phone.

On Tuesday, I became the owner of an iPhone 4S. I know that in December, I said that I would probably go for a cheaper smartphone, but the multitude of apps available for the iPhone convinced me to go with it. I’ve already fallen in love with Instagram, as seen by the number of pictures that I’ve tweeted already (mostly of my cat).

My iPhone also completes my Apple trifecta. I already own an iPod touch and a Macbook Pro, both of which I couldn’t function without. My iPhone is my third Apple product, and I’m already very attached to it. I guess this means that I’m an official Apple fangirl. I will be accepting my Apple cult membership card now.

I’ve also already named my new phone. I have a tradition of naming my Apple products after female musicians. My iPod’s name is PJ (after PJ Harvey), and my Macbook’s name is Fiona Apple. Following this tradition, I have named my iPhone Regina, after Regina Spektor. I think it’s quite fitting.

In other news, it’s Reading Week at my university (which is the equivalent of Spring Break/March Break at other schools), and I’m spending the second half of the week at my grandma’s place. This is why you are currently being spammed with cat pictures if you follow me on either Twitter or Tumblr. This is the first time I’ve seen my cat Cookie since Christmas, and I’m going a little nuts with my iPhone. These two things combined means taking ALL THE CAT PICTURES.

I’m hoping to get another blog entry up before the end of Reading Week, but that may not happen because I kind of left my laptop’s charger at school. I brought the extension cord for the charger, but not the charger itself. I ARE SO SMRT, I know. I have a WordPress app on my iPhone, but actually writing blog entries on it is kind of a pain in the ass. But we shall see.

Have you made any exciting purchases lately? Is your Reading Week/March Break/Spring Break more exciting than mine? Do you want to spam your cat pictures? Comment!

 

 

Personal

cats, iphone, materialism

February 23, 2012

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Losing my religion

(Blog title stolen from an overplayed REM song because I’m original like that)

As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog before, I used to be a Christian, and a pretty devout one at that. For the past few days (particularly since writing my last blog entry), I’ve been reflecting on how exactly how became an apostate. I’ve realized that it was a fairly gradual process.

My grandmother raised me as Christian, beginning with having me baptized at some point before my first birthday. For most of my childhood, I went to church and Sunday school on a regular basis. During this time, I casually believed in God. I saw Him as grandfatherly man who loved me and wanted me to be good and wanted me to talk to him. I wanted to please him, so I prayed on a regular basis and did my best to follow the rules that my Sunday school teachers had told me about.

When I was 11 or 12, I starting hanging out with a girl that was also a Christian. By this point, my grandma and I stopped going to church regularly, so my friend convinced me to go start going to her church with her. Unlike the churches that my grandma and I gone to (which were more liberal), my friend’s church was much more like the stereotypical evangelical churches that are commonly associated with Christianity, except much smaller. The sermons at this church talked about how evil abortion and homosexuality were, and in my Sunday school classes, we studied a book that supposedly “refuted” the theory of evolution (I still have that book and recently reread it. Now that I have a basic understanding of evolutionary biology, I can safely say that it does not refute evolution). Being 12 years old and rather impressionable, I easily accepted everything that the church preached.

When I was 13, I went with the same friend to a church camp. By then, I was a fervent believer and being surrounded by other fervent believers only made me more so. I was on a “spiritual high” for a long time after that. I felt God’s presence in my life and wished that others could feel it as well.

But then God disappeared from my life.

Early in high school, I realized that I was attracted to women. At that time, I still considered myself to be a Christian. How could I be both a Christian and queer? For the past 2 years, I had been explicitly told that LGBTQ people were evil. If I was attracted to women, I had obviously done something wrong. I prayed every day, asking God for forgiveness and for him to make me straight.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

When I realized that my prayers and sincere expressions of repentance were going unanswered, I began to question whether they had been heard in the first place. I began questioning why God that loved would make me suffer like this. At this point, completely separate from my sexuality issues, I began seeing the inconsistencies and logical issues in the Bible.

I also truly began to see how unlike Christ some Christians truly are. After realizing that I was gay, I became much more sensitive to the dehumanization of LGBTQ people that many Christians leaders subject us to. They accuse of all being child molesters, perverts, rapists. Instead of denouncing the discrimination that LGBTQ people face in every aspect of their lives, they help to perpetuate it.

Jesus would not approve and I did not want to be associated with that.

It was the culmination of all these things that slowly began my distancing from Christianity. Eventually, I realized that I no longer truly believed what I used to believe. In fact, I realized that I doubted the existence of a god entirely. I wasn’t a Christian anymore.

And that, my friends, is how a devout evangelical Christian becomes agnostic.

Personal

agnosticism, christianity

February 20, 2012

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“Modest” no more

If you’ve ever been involved with Christianity, you probably know about “modesty,” or the expectation that women wear clothing that doesn’t expose her body. According to most evangelical Christians, women should wear “modest” clothing because if they don’t, men will be tempted into “sexual sin.” Sometimes they also talk about being “modest” because that’s how you respect your body, etc. but the main reason is the “not tempting men” thing.

If you’ve read my About page, you’ll know that I was an evangelical Christian when I was younger. During this time, I took the concept of modesty very seriously. I even pinned the necklines of some of my dresses and shirts to make them less revealing. I refused to wear dresses, skirts, or shorts unless they were either hitting my mid-thigh or I had tights underneath. I believed that I had a duty to “not lead boys into sin.” I believed that I had more respect for my body than my classmates who were wearing more revealing clothes. Even after I left Christianity, I still felt uncomfortable wearing more revealing clothes for a long time even though I was no longer worried about “tempting” anyone.

About a month ago, I was getting ready to go to a friend’s birthday party. The plan was to pregame in my friend’s suite before heading to a bar downtown. Because we were going out, I wanted to wear something dressier and was trying different dresses and skirts. That’s when I found a dress that I hadn’t worn for a while. The dress’ neckline was pinned; it was one of the dresses that I had made more “modest” during my evangelical years.

I suddenly got really pissed off. Why I had been so preoccupied with “tempting” men? Why was it my responsibility to ensure that Christian guys didn’t sin? Why can’t those guys worry about their own salvation? I’m sure they’re perfectly capable of controlling their sex drives, so why do they need my help?

I took the pin out and tried the dress on. I could see why I had pinned it for “modesty” reasons; the neckline was fairly low. But I looked awesome. I realized that I was wrong all those years. Respecting your body has nothing to do with whether you cover it up or not. It’s about feeling good about it. If you the most confident about your body when you’re dressing modestly, more power to you. If you feel the most confident about your body when you’re barely wearing anything, great.

I was revealing some skin and feeling sexy because of it. I felt liberated.

I wore that dress to my friend’s party that night. Yeah, I wore tights under it, but not because I was concerned about the dress being too short, but because it was January in Guelph. I was using logic, not slut-shaming, to guide my clothing choices.

And that’s what “modesty” is: thinly veiled slut-shaming.

Opinions, Personal

christianity, feminism, modesty

February 18, 2012

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Even Guelph has its homophobes

If you’re a regular reader of my blog (or if you know me offline), you probably know that I grew up in a small town. Like most small towns, it was rather close-minded and religious (it was town of <2000 people, but there were AT LEAST 8 churches there). Although I realized that I was queer when I was 14 or 15, I never came out during high school. I knew that if I did, I would definitely be verbally and socially harassed on a regular basis (and rumours about my sexual orientation did go around, even though I was in the closet), and I may have been physically or sexually harassed. My school did not have Gay-Straight Alliance and when I tried to start one, nobody came to the meetings. Needless to say, my school and my community in general were not best environments for a queer teenager to be in. Because I was having enough internal problems surrounding my sexual orientation at the time, I decided that coming out in high school wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t wait to go to university and finally be honest with who I was, and part of the reason why I chose to go to university in Guelph was because of its reputation for being (for the most part) queer-friendly.

Guelph has delivered on that promise. During O-Week, the queer rights group on campus ran a few events. I met almost all of my current friends at the these events, and they’re all either queer themselves or straight allies. And everyone else that I have come out to on campus has been supportive (although I have purposely avoided coming out to people that I think might not be, such as a girl on my floor who is an evangelical Christian). I had succeeded in my goal of surrounding myself with people who supported me, and in my goal of finally living “the homosexual lifestyle”.

Spoiler alert: it is much like the “heterosexual lifestyle,” except with a Thursgay (aka queer night at one of the bars in Guelph) thrown in here and there. Oh, and I get to reference Effing Dykes in conversation and have my friends actually understand what I’m talking about.

ANYWAYS.

Needless to say, I’m much happier here than I was in the town that I grow up in because compared to that town, Guelph is a queer-friendly utopia. However, despite the acceptance of most students here, there’s still homophobia. Something that my friends and I experienced last week makes that clear.

Last Friday, some of my friends and I decided to go to a pub night thing that the agriculture students were running (the only real reason we decided to go to this was because it was all-ages and one of my friends with us is under 19). It was alright for the 15 minutes that we there before a couple of my friends got kicked out for a really stupid reason, but I was happy when we left because I would rather leave dancing to “Cotton Eye Joe” in my elementary school memories where they belong. While we leavingand walking to the buses to go a bar downtown, we saw a group of people standing around smoking right by the doors…and right by the sign that clearly said that smoking was prohibited within 9 metres of the doors. One of my friends called them out on it (I didn’t catch everything that she said, but it was something about being illiterate).

The group starting calling her things like bitch, slut, etc. And then my friend delivered her amazing line that I want to use myself someday: “At least I get more pussy than you do!”

AND that’s when the homophobic bullshit started. They definitely yelled “you lesbian whore” and probably said some other shit as well. Even though it definitely isn’t the first time I’ve experienced homophobia, it was still weird for me to be hearing it in Guelph.

But then my friends and I went downtown, got even more drunk, and danced with each other (yes, sometimes in a sexual manner). It was our “fuck you” to those homophobic idiots.

Personal, Queer Things, University

homophobia, life in guelph, queer rights

February 10, 2012

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