^^^^ As in Winnie the Pooh reference……… the less Disney-fied version of this headline reads: “Holy *@)@#@ #(#!*@DJS)@(_*(#) is it cold and shitty outside”

……

So YAY! I’m nearly finished university, only one take-home exam to go and I will have completed my undergraduate degree in Journalism.

I had a major assignment due every day this past week, so I spent the majority of my time writing articles, reading articles, and writing essays. Needless to say I got little to no sleep this past week: my best estimate lies somewhere between 6-9 hours, though things get a little hazy in the math department.

I went from Sunday until Wednesday afternoon without sleeping with the help of about 10 Tim Hortons French Vanillas and several 710ml Monster Energy Drinks – Rockstar and Full Throttle aren’t cutting it anymore, and Red Bull tends to be scarce on a university campus locked in an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola. But it was on Wednesday afternoon that fatigue finally overcame my compulsion to finish my assignments and I passed out for 2 hours on the couch in The Charlatan office (the Carleton Student Newspaper). Thursday night I ended up having a nap because my eyes just couldn’t take being open and staring at one of many Microsoft Word documents any longer.

We aired The Love Machine documentary on Friday night and it was received pretty well; the other groups put out some really good docs as well, so all in all the night was a hit. I was hoping to start some serious work on the music video, though I’ve been told there might be some copyright issues involving the footage we shot and it being owned by the school now, so fingers crossed that this can sort itself out without any hitches.

School stuff aside, the title of this post derives itself from a performance I was asked to do on Saturday at noon for the “Canada for Khadr” group – who organized a protest at Ottawa’s Parliament Hill in an effort to raise awareness and push for the repatriation of Omar Khadr, the sole Canadian prisoner of Guantanamo Bay, so that he might face trial instead of torture and imprisonment. I was approached to do this with my friend Diarmid after the Amnesty International coffeehouse a few weeks ago, but Diarmid couldn’t make it and I decided I’d take the opportunity to do some of my own songs.

While this would ideally have been a great opportunity, Mother Nature decided it shouldn’t be so great. As a result, it was fairly cold and windy and it rained the entire time….needless to say I could barely feel my hands and had trouble even playing a few songs. I’d say things went relatively well, all things considered, but it still would’ve been nice to have nice weather – the turnout might’ve been better and I could’ve probably played a little longer.

But for the rest of the day I came to the realization that I hadn’t really slept in a while…..this dawned as me as I passed out unexpectedly at 5:00pm and woke up at 3:00am – not exactly the best way to learn these things, but I suppose the alternative could have been worse.

The rest of this weekend Dave and I have been working on a pair of music videos for our class graduation video based on The Flight of the Conchords songs “The Humans are Dead” and “Business Time” – obviously, like the PR Wars video these are both journalism themed, such that THAD has been renamed The Newspapers are Dead and BT has been renamed InDesign – after the Adobe publication layout program of the same name.

We’re going to be up all night tonight getting these two finished for tomorrow so here’s hoping we can get them done quickly and get some semblance of sleep before tomorrow morning….though that aspiration is looking pretty grim right now….

<3 Stephenson