morrisseyed

9. killing time.

i’m killing fifteen spare minutes before running off to shower and then to work.  it appears that i may miss out on the toronto fc game this afternoon, given the timing of my shift at the restaurant, but there’s a chance i’ll catch the last half.  this isn’t so bad, since david beckham is missing from LA Galaxy’s lineup.  becks has got the call to show for his country in an exhibition against trinidad and tobago this weekend, so he’s had to skip out on a TFC game in Toronto again.  oy.  there’s always youtube for those maniacs in the stands, i guess.  (nb: i’ve kinda given up on hockey, i think.  it such a massive advertising production.  i cant’ stand sitting there, constantly hearing that the next 30 seconds or minute is brought to me by Ford, Esso, Labatt’s or Mikita.)

Speaking of work.  there’s a good chance we may not be so poor this summer after all.  it looks like i may actually pick up a marking position by way of the department at school and its connections - nothing is for certain yet, but i hope to have sorted it out by the end of the weekend.   if i do get this position, i don’t think i’ll give up on the restaurant, though.  they did me a favour again this summer, so i don’t want to bail on them so suddenly.  i can also control my schedule quite a bit there (they understand just how little i can work), and, the money they can offer me may come in handy in September and October.  Ultimately, there’s too much up in the air regarding our income in the fall to completely bail on them, however much i’d like to do so.

and also speaking of work, i think the online esl tutoring thing is not a scam after all.  i may be able to score a hundred bucks a month out of the process by not doing very much at all, so we may be able to eat dairy again… some time soon.  it would be great if this could turn into a permanent on-the-side slush fund, when the time comes when we can buy whatever we want at the ASS, and i can pocket this cash for race registrations or beer money (the two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive).

I’m sitting down watching the inaugural game of the first Nutrilite Canadian Champions’ League Cup (Canadian Soccer Championship?) match, between Toronto FC and The Montreal Impact (or is that L’impact de Montréal?) on CBC Bold. Actually, I’m watching the match on the cbc.ca/sports website. In order to really keep an eye on the game, though I’ve had to reduce my mac’s screen resolution to 640×480 - and even then the window is perhaps three inches wide, at best.

Everything swirls and ebbs and flows with live steaming. The soccerball (football-ball?) has a definite tail that swaggers behind it - it reminds me of the ever-fascinating FoxPuck(tm) from the late 1990s, but lacking the fluorescent pinks and blues. These trails and shadows definitely turn my high-res screen into a low-res, murky picture tube. I’m sure if I were to mess around with the colours and make this screen resolve itself in black-and-white that I might be able to get a sense of what it was like to watch soccer (football?) (futbol?) on TV (telly?) back in the day.

(How cute. a sea gull is flying about in the space above the pitch)

Montreal has got some fancy new digs to play in. Its brand new Saputo Stadium (I’ve given up on linguistic existentialism now, I promise) only has 13000 seats, so it it still a little tiny compared to what the MLS would like to see in a soccer-specific-stadium, but I like just how close the fans can get to the field, and its something that might be emulated elsewhere (Van City, Seattle? I’m looking at you). The stands come within a few feet of the grass along the length of the pitch, which I’m accustomed to seeing, but that which is just so goddamn great that I’m compelled to tell the World about is the stands at the ends of the field - they come so close to the grass that the Team/Stage Management has erected netting over and above the nets themselves to protect the fans from stray balls (not nearly as dirty as we’d all like it to be, of course). Its reminiscent of some of the fields completely surrounded by fence in South America, and central and eastern Europe, except with a far more pleasant twist.

[at the Half: No Score. (or is that nil-nil?)]

I’m real impressed with this Toronto FC/MLS business and the way its turned the popularity of soccer on its head in Canada. Soccer has always been popular yes - there has been the CSL and Canadian teams in the NASL and the APSL and the USL etc etc, and it is the most popular amateur sport in Canada (yes, far more popular than Hockey - I’m sure the cost of gear and ice time might be a reason for this), but it has taken a combination of nurtured multicultural communities in the nation’s media centre as well as admission into a glitzy American corporation for it to take stride. Myself, it doesn’t matter if the banner the game is played under has leaves or stars in it - I’m just happy to watch an acceptable level of action (on the field and in the stands) in the late afternoon as opposed to turning on the TV on weekned mornings, which is necessary if one really wants to keep up with the FA Premiership. I’m simply too busy on a saturday morning to see what’s what. I’m sorry Liverpool, but most of the time you really are walking alone when it comes to coverage of your team and your league in North America.

I do wonder how far the Professional-Soccer-in-Canada-!!! business can go, though. We’re Canadian, so we typically don’t follow sport in a big way unless its either American, or is hockey or the CFL in the west. Of course, the USL teams in Montreal and Vancouver are rocking the socks in that league’s first division (and Vancouver has arguably the only real soccer-club-development-programme in North America, fielding amateur and professional teams of both sexes and at various skill levels in various leagues and divisions), but their admittance into the MLS is anything but assured. Both teams have garnered a lot of press, given the construction of stadiums (or plans, in the case of ‘Couver), but in the end the MLS remains an American league whose mandate comes from an international body based on national lines. The formation of the MLS essential to FIFA’s granting of the 1996 World Cup t USA Soccer. And the MLS’s mandate, historically and presently, is the development of an American soccer programme and an American soccer cultural product. Not Canadian, and not North American.

7. shredded

another day, and another two pages. rock the solids. i don’t know what rock the solids mean, but the torontoist would suggest it’s something scatological. i’ll let the web-wide-world decide that one, i guess.

i spent the last two days shredding extraneaous matter. that’s a lie. no extraneous matter was shredded. i simply wanted to say “extraneous.” i’m not even sure how “extraneaous matter” fits within a shredding metaphor. “extraneous” is one of those words that sounds like it should really be two. Like some wordsmith developed a linguistical-nuclear-fission between “extra” and “simultaneous” or “spontaneous”, with the lost letters served up as a lexical fallout upon the pages. wondrous.

anyway, i spend the last two days shredding extraneous matter. it consisted mostly of three-plus years of bills that the pineapples’ grandmom ought to have destroyed long ago but instead retained because they are in her son’s name. it became my duty to erase from the world, like an Enron accountant, any trace of my in-laws’ financial existence since 2005. i began with some gusto, making cute little origami ducks and airplanes before sending the leafs of paper to certain doom. but within the space of an hour i grew annoyed with the entire process and had to move toward an efficient separation and organization of matter to be shredded and matter to be simply disposed of. i was both god and monster to the paper, all made with at least 30% post-consumer fibre. not one piece was spared from the malice of my will, my deeds, and the machine that facilitates the doom. there are now two LARGE bluebags full of minced paper in the recycling bin awaiting to find bliss, or at least a subtle peace, after My destruction of their race.