Why oh why do people have to ruin movies for me? I went to go see Up in the Air yesterday, and it was actually quite a well done film. Unfortunately, the entire plot along with the ending had been spoiled for me by a random person I met at a friend’s party. After going on about how she hates people ruining movies, she then of course proceeded to tell us the entire plot and ending. I’m still bitter. Anyhow, on to the movie.

I’ll leave the plot synopsis to the Wiki entry and movie trailer you can find at the bottom of this review.

George Clooney’s character definitely had me thinking. I suppose that’s the power of movies; they sometimes take my mind to places it would otherwise not go and often have me examining the different aspects of my life. This movie had me examining my decisions around choosing to focus on my career and not making too many connections.

Like the lead character in Up in the Air, I could very well end up old and alone. I have dedicated almost all my time to my craft and couldn’t possibly see myself putting a relationship above my dreams. Heck, if I wanted to live for human connection, I wouldn’t have thrown that all away and moved to Toronto where I effectively know no one. Who knows, maybe the movie is right, but at least for the next few years, I am content to focus on work.

The plot was well thought out, and the actors turned in terrific performances, especially George Clooney in the last third of the movie when his character is beginning to go through some changes.

Overall, I’d recommend this movie to anyone. A movie that can make you think about your life is definitely worth watching.

I’m living in downtown Toronto now, my first time living downtown in any city ever. It’s quite the experience, I must admit.

The best part of living downtown is that I feel so close to everything. I can walk down to the Eaton Centre and go shopping, and there’s no shortage of great places to eat. I’m even starting to feel the health benefits, as it’s much easier to walk to where I need to go than to take transit or a cab.

There are definitely some interesting characters down here, though. It’s a bit different than the crazy people from Winnipeg. I think in Winnipeg you can only be so crazy, because there’s always the risk of getting shot or stabbed if you anger the wrong person. Here it’s like people are crazier because they don’t worry about the immediate consequences enough. People have just shouted absolute craziness at me which doesn’t happen a lot in Winnipeg (since in Winnipeg they wouldn’t know if I’m crazy enough to be carrying a weapon). Strangely, that extra layer of fear helps people to be nicer to each other.

The place I’m living in is quite nice; I definitely lucked out. The rent is insanely low for this area, and I’ve already painted the walls and am well on my way to fully decorating the place. Next up on the list is a new rug for the living room.

I have to admit, I haven’t been the best son lately. With my parents being in Guelph, I should be able to come out here most weekends. Unfortunately, now that summer is over, I have volleyball clinics on Saturdays and can’t visit on weekends anymore. I’ll have to try and find some time to come out here and spend with my parents.

I’ve always been fortunate that my relationship with my parents has been so wonderful. Communication styles are very different in Eastern cultures, and my parents are perfect example of that. They never said they loved me while I was growing up. The thing is, they never had to. They made it so obvious by how they were and what they did that actually having to say the words almost diminished the fact.

Having my parents around is awesome. It’s not quite like being in Winnipeg, but at least I get a small touch of Winnipeg nearby when I can visit them.

I started off the week determined but that determination switched to bitterness in a hurry. It’s the type of bitterness I was used to feeling in Calgary but haven’t felt since until this week. I’m absolutely the weirdest bitter person ever. I spent two days listening to angry Justin Timberlake songs like What Goes Around and Cry Me A River while screaming out One Republic’s Apologize while walking down the streets.

You see, I’m the type of person who allows himself to feel emotions as deeply as I can. I always find that this helps me move passed the negativity much more quickly. Unfortunately, this leads to a couple of days of extremely raw emotions. Lukcily for me, my close friends have gotten used to my hot and cold cycles.

A lot has been happening physically to me in the last little while. I haven’t been to work for a full day in almost two weeks and haven’t played sports for almost a month. I was definitely on a downward spiral and just barely hanging on for dear life.

Amazingly, I think that the events of this week allowed me to finally let go and hit the bitter rock bottom. Yesterday, everything seemed to turn around. I completely felt on top of the world for the first time in a month. I saw the ridiculousness of my bitterness (though it was fun while it was lasted). I willed myself back to work and back on to the badminton court. I wasn’t able to survive a full session of either, but it was important to get back on the track.

I spent this afternoon weeping while watching Milk and My Sassy Girl. Good lord, how many times can I cry in one afternoon. My face is still wet.

On the bright side, I actually had some fun flirtatiousness going on in the middle of my bitter march to rock bottom. I suppose a spring fling wouldn’t be the worst thing for me at the moment, especially considering I haven’t had even a sniff of a love life since moving to Toronto. It’s strange how everything happens.

Oh, and on top of everything, my mom is in town, my improv classes start tonight, and I have an awesome sci-fi party to geek out at before I go to bed tonight. It looks like the rest of my day is going to resemble the start of my week emotionally: completely damn random.

“Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click post.”

Now, I’m going off the ruleset a bit and writing my 25 Things note on my blog instead. Feel free to leave a comment below as you would have on Facebook or comment on my Facebook status where this note will be showing up.

1. I always have a jar of pickles in my fridge to ward off emergency headaches (most headaches are caused by lack of salt or water).

2. I have never learned how to swim despite several valiant attempts.

3. I am lifetime banned from separate gay bars in both Calgary and Winnipeg.

4. I spent the first three years of my life in a Thai refugee camp.

5. I had five bicycles stolen as a child and now refuse to ever ride bicycles again.

6. I shattered my knee in a tragic badminton accident (yes, badminton).

7. I was diagnosed as being clinically obese (over 30 per cent body fat) after gaining 20 pounds following a year of inactivity after the knee accident.

8. My parents’ house in Winnipeg was robbed seven times growing up and another four times last year alone.

9. I’m a huge sports fan. I used to host an annual Super Bowl party in Winnipeg but have been unable to find a new group of sports fans to hang out with since leaving Winnipeg.

10. I wrote the obituary section for both the Winnipeg Free Press and Calgary Herald for many years.

11. I moved to Toronto specifically to pursue my dreams of becoming a stand-up comedian.

12. Everything I speak about including all stories in my comedy routine is true and reflects my actual life and opinions.

13. It’s been almost four years since my last actual romantic relationship.

14. My hero is Leonardo da Vinci because he showed the world that creative ability as an artist and technical ability as an engineer can be complementary and reside in the same mind.

15. I built this entire website myself by taking a week off of work and catching myself up on all the new advancements in the website design and build world.

16. My favourite movies of all time are Beauty and the Beast and Scream.

17. I captain the SuperPowerBottoms volleyball team but am not actually a bottom. I’m actually celebate. I just thought it was a great cause.

18. There was only one white kid in my elementary class, so I never felt like a visible minority growing up.

19. My entire wardrobe is from Club Monaco and Banana Republic (yes, every single piece).

20. I worked as a freelance photographer early in my newspaper career.

21. I compare my current career as Project Manager in Toronto to living a real-life version of Donald Trump’s The Apprentice (it’s really not that far off of reality).

22. I owned and operated the number two Street Fighter website on the internet while I was in high school. I also travelled to different cities to take part in multiple Street Fighter tournaments.

23. I worked as Long & McQuade music store after school in high school and can play alto sax and euphonium (a.k.a. baritone).

24. I had a stalker in university and sent him to jail after discovering he was on Winnipeg’s most wanted list.

25. I am absolutely inept at household duties and have paid people in the past to do my laundry, cook my food and clean my house.

Yesterday I tried my best to write but ended up with nothing more than half-page of unusable nonsense. I suppose I should have expected it after not writing for half a year. It took me until about four hours into my writing process today that it finally all clicked.

You see, I have a unique way of writing which doesn’t really follow the usual rules of comedy writing: set-up, punchline, tag, tag, tag. My style doesn’t completely follow classical literary narrative structure either, though I do try to work that in. When I first started writing comedy a couple of years back, I was able to develop a unique style that worked for the way that I think, which tends to be a little differently. Yesterday I completely forgot what the style was.

I started out by trying to speak the words and form my routine off of that. When that failed miserably, I tried more traditional free-form writing. I don’t know why it finally clicked later on, but boy am I happy that it did. I won’t go into detail over how I write (sorry, I have to keep some things secret still).

After getting together a rough draft composed of about ten short lines of text, I then tried sounding out the routine to my roommate and improvised a lot of it. Now I have to go back and write down some of the new ideas that came during the spoken improvisation.

I’ve submitted for time at a bunch of the open mics in town, so hopefully you’ll be seeing this new routine very shortly.

This being my debut long-form show, I’ve been thinking long and hard about what I want to present and who I want to be on stage. After some careful consideration, I’ve decided to go back to my roots, the ghettos of Winnipeg. I already have a bit of material written about my life in Winnipeg, but now I want to really dig in deep.

I’m a bit of a chameleon when it comes to my personality. I’m very much different depending on whether I’m with my parents or my family or my friends or at work. Part of this comes from my upbringing, as there were definitely rules applied to how I should act depending on who was in the room (more respect, for instance, is paid to elders and people of authority and so on). The other side of this, though, is perhaps a bit of my comedic playfulness.

Different people bring out different parts of me. I’m more gay with my gay friends; I’m more ghetto with my ghetto friends. This is all common in most people of course, but I think with me it’s a little more pronounced. With individual friends, I tend to almost absorb a bit of their personality and reflect it back in an enhanced way. I didn’t realize this until recently moving in with a co-worker, and I found myself acting differently.

This got me thinking about which version of me I want to bring on stage. The answer is simple: I’m the best me when I’m with my older sister in Winnipeg. She brings out the me that I like best. We have a chemistry and connection that is pretty damn special. I think I’ve also suffered a bit from being away from Winnipeg too long.

Back in Winnipeg, I was able to maintain an incredibly balanced life as far as my friends go. One-third of my friends were straight guys, one-third were female, and one-third were gay. My personality back then had the versatility to appeal to all three demographics. Since leaving Winnipeg, my life has been dominated by my gay friends as well as some women from school, work and comedy. The part of me that appeals to the straight male demographic is slowly fading away.

This brings up the question of whether I am able to go back to that personality on stage while being so far removed from that place emotionally. I’m writing about a period of my life while being in a completely new life in a new city. I’m not sure how possible it will be.

I’m going to continue writing this week and see where it takes me, but I am seriously considering using my summer vacation days to go back to Winnipeg and complete my writing there. I’ll let you all know how it goes.

Since leaving Winnipeg, I’ve been able to fill in the gaps as far as school friends and gay friends and girl friends, but it’s been extremely difficult to find a new group of straight guy friends who love to watch sports. You see, in Winnipeg I was surrounded by straight guys and am quite comfortable around the sporty jock testosterone-heavy scene. I’m not really sure how I will be able to really find a new group of friends now.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have some straight guy friends, though most of those friendships are superficial and come by way of my dayjob as well as fellow stand-up comedians. I could also get back into the competitive videogame scene, though that group of straight guys aren’t exactly sports-friendly.

I’m kind of lost as to how I’ll find a new “crew,” but I am open to suggestions.

Some of our conversation reminded me of how I was when I was younger: absolutely fearless and in my own world. I didn’t even remember that I used to carry around a butt pillow (yes, a butt pillow) around the university and would take it out of my bag and sit on it. I was so in my own reality, that I truly didn’t care what others thought. I wish I had that type of total abandon now.

The visit came at a great time, as I am delving into my past Winnipeg life as the centrepiece of my hour-long set that I hope to have completed before the end of this year. I was contemplating whether I should go back to Winnipeg for a few weeks in the spring or summer to help bring back the emotions to jump-start my writing process. I think after tonight, though, I’ve decided to hold off.

I think the best method would be to complete the writing process while I’m alone in Toronto. I would then go to Winnipeg and do a private performance to only friends and family, where I would ask for input.

I used this strategy back when I was preparing for my first ever comedy show in Calgary, Alberta. Since my family and friends know my stories by heart, seeing as how they lived through them with me, I was greatly helped by the comments last time. In fact, the whole part of my first set regarding “magical powers” came from a simple comment from my engineering friend, Erin.

Now, my style is generally fairly plain with the exception of one signature piece. Lately, this signature piece has been my red glasses. With the bright orange jacket, though, it doesn’t make sense to wear red glasses. The jacket should be the focus, and thus the red glasses had to go. The black glasses will allow me to focus on different pieces and this year my style will expand due to this much-needed variety.

To be honest, these black glasses are closer to my original vision when I went shopping for glasses a while back. Unfortunately for me, my head is much smaller than the average North American’s, so it is quite difficult for me to find a pair of glasses that fit my head. Instead of forcing myself into a pair that didn’t fit correctly, I went with the wild red glasses basically because they fit the best. Sure, they have grown on me, but black was definitely my original vision.

Okay, okay, I’ll stop all the worry by revealing that I still do have my red glasses. I did paint my glasses black, but . . . I had TWO PAIRS of red glasses. Haha!

Merry christmas y’all. I hope to see you all soon with my black glasses (and the red ones too).