I had another near-death experience again the other day. In fact, tonight I sat down and reckoned them up… I’ve had four in the last week or so. (One of them was nearly choking on an orange segment in my law class, and the other three are about to be described.)

So about a month ago I decided to quit wearing my ratty old Aerosole winter shoes and switch to a snazzy new pair of hiking boots which fit better with my new faculty as well as increasing my chances of surviving another Alberta winter. I found a pair that seemed to fit both prerequisites, and best of all, they had deep dramatic grippy grooved soles, studded with rubber spikes at the edges. I could hear them suck at the sidewalk as I strode proudly along.

Yeah, turns out they’re not so hot on ice. The very first thing those grooves did was pick up a pound or so of gravel, thus turning my snazzy boots into essentially a pair of rollerblades. I skate ineptly from building to building with my arms out to the sides, hoping that the tiny contact area of my gravel-filled boots is enough to overcome the essential frictionlessness of the campus walkways. Every night I pick out the gravel. Every morning it returns.

I hate you, physics.

Must’ve been doped up on stupid pills - I responded to a flyer on the CAB Public-Use Notice Board begging for volunteers to consumer-panel some kind of fruit substance at the Sensory Lab in the Nutrition department. Big mistake.

Turns out they’re doing this on behalf of a company called New Era Nutrition or something like that, which is trying to make snack food healthier. “What a laudable goal!” I said as I unwrapped my first FruitSponge (TM) bar.

The name alone should have tipped me off to the horror that was to ensue.

It turned out to be a garish red and sweeter than treacle, but worse than that was the texture - it was, and I wrote this on the evaluation, “like sucking on a piece of cellulose sponge that sucks back.” The next one was supposed to be peach-flavoured, and it tasted like… some kind of Glade air-freshener. When I removed the third bar (”blueberry”) from its thick foil wrapper, I took one look and immediately put it down again. Don’t ask how, but somehow they took a fairly innocent list of ingredients - dried apples, rolled oats, vitamin K - and crafted something that looked exactly like a brick of poop.

I managed one dutiful bite and then poured vitriol all over the evaluation form while attempting to pick slimy pieces of dried apple off the back of my teeth. On Friday I get to try the cold-busting fruit balls, which look like ju-jubes but probably taste like something you’d swirl around in a separation funnel. Oh man. Will update on Friday. Why do I volunteer for these things?!

Oh Pravda… whatever will we do with you…

My longstanding love affair with fortune cookies - those palate-gouging little shells of wisdom and warning - was finally validated a few days ago. See, my hotrodding brother finally got caught by the photo-radar van and he had to pay a ticket which we all thought was pretty reasonable, but which to a kid living off the savings of a Safeway courtesy clerk job spelled instant bankruptcy. That night the parental units brought home a huge container of fortune cookies.

The first two cookies that Al ate held the following belated advice:
“He who hurries cannot walk with dignity,” and - I love this one -
“The laws sometimes sleep, but never die.”

Heh. Truly, baked goods possess powers we puny mortals cannot even begin to conceive.

“The elders tell of a young ball much like you. He bounced 3 meters in the air… then he bounced 1.8 meters in the air… then he bounced 4 meters in the air. Do I make myself clear?”

Bom-diggity weather, eh, folks? I killed some time today dodging squirrels in the river valley - it was gorgeous and warm and fragrant and sunny and quiet. Highly recommended. Plus which, you get a great workout on the way back up (especially if you get massively disoriented and miss the stairs and have to claw your way up a perpendicular face of soil).

In other news, I’m finishing off Boris Pasternak’s ‘Dr. Zhivago’ (even more highly recommended), and something is bugging me, which is the fact that it was translated from Russian. Many many of the great books I’ve read (’We,’ ‘Les Miserables,’ practically anything else worth reading) have been translated from other languages. This creates a deeply literary problem for me. What I’m reading isn’t what the author meant to say, it’s what the translator meant to say. So… really… I’m reading a completely different book. This guy I know says, “Well, if I learn to read German, then I can read the original ‘Faust’!” And that isn’t quite true either - he’ll just be translating it into English in his head, and it’ll be just as bad. I’m not sure why this bugs me so much. Feedback would be appreciated. Hello, psych majors?