sketches of the mind

The only official public holiday for Easter here (booo!). After the extremely late night/morning I woke up around 11am or midday and decided to head down to Little Italy to catch the Jesus Christ procession being put on by St Francis church group. For the record I’m not religious in any way, I just thought that it would be interesting to witness.

The plan was to check out the procession, then head to High Park (I discovered that it’s not “Hyde” after some googling) for a bit of nature in the city, and then head to Innis College at UofT for a free movie screening of The Mirror.

I arrived 30 mins later than I had planned to College Street (Little Italy) and ended up missing the procession as they hadn’t reached College yet. Furthermore Nicole and Jose were already at High Park, our next destination. So Nadja and I took the train to High Park and seeing as I hadn’t had any real breakfast yet our first stop was the restaurant where Nic and Jose had been waiting for the past hour. Judging by the way that Jose was passing out on the table inside the restaurant I guessed that walking around the park at this point wasn’t a good idea. It was also freezing outside, and Jose hadn’t brought any gloves or a warmer jacket.

So we were soon on our way to Innis College to catch the free movie. Inside the theatre, once the lights were turned down it was mine and Nic’s turns to drift off. It didn’t help that the film made absolutely no sense. At first the novelty of reading subtitles on the screen for this Andrei Tarkovsky Russian masterpiece kept me awake but soon the randomness and lack of clear plot lost me. It was just too weird for me.

When the movie finished we met Marie-France from Montreal, my surfer for the weekend. I was worried when she hadn’t contacted me an hour after I had given her directions to the cinema but she had found her way to the cinema and caught the movie from the beginning so all was good.

After bidding farewell to Nadja - Nicole, Marie-France, Jose and I headed to Jose’s new place. It was the first time I had seen it and it had been weeks when Jose first told me about it. I could smell the “new place” scent the second I walked through the front door. The place had recently been renovated. I loved the polished floor boards immediately. It was a nice place, a bit removed from the centre of town (it’s actually closer to where I live) but it was a good choice.

We talked, laughed and at pizza. Jose’s jeans/denim covered couch also made for good entertainment. I forgot to take a pic though, doh!

After a long day Jose dropped Marie-France and I off at home. It was around 2am when I crashed.

Thurs, the night before Easter - I skipped out on studio time at uni with some classmates to attend the final day of L’Oreal Fashion Week being held inside tents at Nathan Philips Square.

Following the show (which we didn’t really see because it was packed!) I headed over to unofficial Couchsurfing Toronto ambassador Garry’s cinema (basically his back room with a projector projecting the movie onto a large back wall) for a movie night. I arrived around 10:30pm and the small group had yet to commence the movie watching. We ended up watching 1979 film Being There which featured Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine.

IMDB Plot summary:

A simple-minded gardener named Chance has spent all his life in the Washington D.C. house of an old man. When the man dies, Chance is put out on the street with no knowledge of the world except what he has learned from television. After a run in with a limousine, he ends up a guest of a woman (Eve) and her husband Ben, an influential but sickly businessman. Now called Chauncey Gardner, Chance becomes friend and confidante to Ben, and an unlikely political insider.

It turned out to be a pretty interesting movie. Sellers’ performance as Chance earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor the following year. I can totally appreciate why, he was great.

The movie night then went off on totally different tangent when the next DVD to inserted into the player was Madonna: Truth or Dare. It was two or three in the morning and I spent the entire duration of the movie juggling between karaoke and grooving (whilst lying down on the couch with Nicole, Nadja and Jose mind you) and trying to catch bits and pieces of sleep. Just imagine… it’s 4am and blasting out of G’s apartment is Madonna singing “If we took a holiday, Took some time to celebrate, Just one day out of life, It would be, it would be so nice!” I was amazed that none of his neighbours had raised a complaint yet.

We left around 4:30 am and an hour or so later my bed finally hit my pillow in my comfy bed at home.