February 13, 2004

As soon as the Cord arrived on campus, I picked a copy and eagerly flipped through it looking for my puzzled and dishevelled picture. I found it right beneath a feature article on democracy. “Now that I’ve been elected,” the picture seems to say, “I’m puzzling over representation and efficiency while wearing my collar. And I have massive muscles.”

“You look as though you have car-crushing arms,” Fraser said pointing at the newspaper.

I nodded, remembering the roll of paper I placed in my shirt for the picture, and I continued flipping through the pages to find the two articles I’ve written for this issue. My mildly uninspiring story on blogging made it in the Arts section, and the filler piece I wrote on orifices and identity appeared in the centrefold. Surprisingly, it was the filler that attracted the most attention.

On production night, Bryn, the International editor, had a bit of space to fill.

“How would you like to write a short piece on identity,” he said. “I can give you 200 words.”

“But ‘identity’ is such a load of crap,” I complained.

“Excellent,” he said.

I left the office thinking there was no ‘self’ and 20 minutes later I returned with a short rant about the absence of identity. Bernard sat next to me while I was writing, feeding me some of the chocolates he won in a raffle. The distractions made the article jarringly repetitive and somewhat anal, so I didn’t expect anyone to take the piece seriously. But apparently some people did.

When I showed up at the office yesterday afternoon, the Cord already received two angry letters to the editor about my story. Both letters seemed to attack my political persona, rather than my article.

“Tudor has wasted no time in following the time-honoured tradition of elected officials pumping out self-indulgent drivel,” said one of the letters.

The other letter used an equally soothing tone to accuse me of making “buzz-word filled statements, such as: ‘it’s time for something different,’” in reference to my election slogan.

I’ll have to formulate a response when my amusement dies down — I’m usually quite an asshole when I’m in a good mood.

But I enjoyed the letters, especially since yesterday I needed a good laugh after my visit to Health Services: my cold made it hard for me to function.

“It must be some sort of viral infection,” the doctor said after checking my orifices, “though I can’t see anything wrong.”

“Nothing wrong? I’ll show you something wrong!” I said to myself.

Five minutes later I was running in the cold without a coat trying to catch Katie West. I sprinted for about half a mile before I finally caught up with her, and when I did I was out of breath and my head was hurting. We were supposed to meet for a Fringe rehersal, but my visit to the doctor took too long and she got tired of waiting.

She fed me painkillers when we arrived at her place, and once the headache died down we went through our lines. I’m getting pretty excited about Fringe, especially since I’ll show up naked on stage. There’s a shower scene in the play … and I get to drop the soap.

So be there! We go on stage on Thursday, February 26th in the evening, and Saturday, February 28th in the afternoon.