On a Slow Night
Feature playing this weekend was the Toronto appearance of Metric! I totally thought I was going to miss them, as I knew they were playing Hillside in Guelph with Broken Social Scene, which I decided not to go to. But luckily, I found out about their concert (well, there was an article in NOW, it's not like it was actually difficult to find out about) and went to Lula Lounge. Lula lounge is a great place out west in Parkdale, which I've never been to before. It's very slick without being greasy if you know what I mean. Like an upscale sort of Gypsy co-op. I did, however, get there really early when it was almost completely empty and so felt like a huge nerd reading my book in the dim light in the corner. Especially because I happen to be reading a book on Representing in the philosophy of science (an old class book, which I had never read in the laziness of youth and am now really enjoy, but it's a pretty nerdy book, you gotta admit). Anyways, the opener turns out to be Amy Millan of the Stars doing a solo act. It was a real treat and she was joined by a couple of the BSS people for a few songs. Metric were actually even better than I thought they would be. They were really polished and tight and it felt like a performance of an arena band in a small club. They also must have been completely coked up or something as their nervous energy level was over the top. Emily Haines (ex-Stars, of course) didn't look anything like I thought. She was this wisp of a thing, with angular features and had this ability to look like a machine on cue.

Apart from being the first time I've been west to parkdale, it also marked the first time I made it out east to the Beaches. There was some sort of Jazz thing going on and there were tons of people. We walked along the boardwalk to Woodbine and I do now understand the allure of living there. It's one of the few places in Toronto where the waterfront is a complete disaster.

I do envy Matt's and even Andrew's ability to say, take a short train or car ride and end up in Starling or the Gatineau hills.

Right now, I should be working on my thesis. I've been trying to fix up my protocol and make it very clear, but in my usual route to clarity have only suceeded in confusing myself. I've also been playing with the dummy files (exactly like the real survey data I'll be using, but chunchks of it have been randomly switched around to maintain confidentiality) which has been fun, if not distracting. I found out that my data will be even messier than I thought and that it's a pain in the ass dealing with a database that's 17000 rows by 1600 columns. That's a lot of data, boys and girls. I've tried to eliminate as many of the columns as I could, but the way that the data was randomized makes it harder than it should be. I do really like running big programs that take a while for the computer to compute. Calculate this! I say.