Monty Living

I wrote the exam on Monday. It probably isn't the finest exam I have ever written. By the end, I was so desperate for the warmth and sunshine the open window in the exam room promised, I was barely managing to write a coherent paragraph. The last question may not even have coherent sentences. Some of them may just be sentence fragments. But I had scheduled dollar tacos and beer with my friend Erika, so I didn't really care. There's this slightly gringo Mexican resto and bar on Peel, Carlos and Pépés's, that has loonie nights- cheap pints and cheaper tacos for me. Is there really beef in those tacos? What do you care? It's a dollar!

Furthermore, that was game seven between the Habs and the Bruins. Watching a game in a bar in a real sports town is amazing. The way the bar goes nuts after every goal, even when it's the fifth, everyone dressed in jerseys and Canadiens gear, the general sense of merry, drunken, abandonment. And then, walking along Ste. Catherine after the game, you see traffic backed up for blocks and blocks. Everyone is honking the horn and screaming, waving flags and hanging out of car windows. Because an event hasn't happened until it's been Facebooked, everyone who isn't part of the revelry is taking pictures of it with their cellphone. It's too bad it descended into rioting and vandalism, but it was nice to feel a part of an imagined community for a while.

Tuesday was somewhat less eventful. I had to work, but at least pal Josh called Katie and me up and invited us over, even though I was a little whiffy with sandwich grease. He was going to make us matzo pizza if we brought over a movie (only stipulations: dry, "non-fiction.") I was initially a little wary of the matzo pizza. It sounded... unnatural. But it wasn't so bad. Tasty, even. The boys rejected our choice of documentary, "Gay Sex in the 70s", though. They preferred the crossword puzzle doc, "Wordplay." It wasn't a bad choice, but not nearly enough grinding.