The next day was spent at Six Flags, a great theme park that is less “family-friendly” than Universal Studios and therefore packed with thrilling rides. What ensued were sore throats (from screaming), aching necks (from straining against gravity) and completely drenched clothing (from the water rides), but definitely no regrets! Of course, Halloween had encroached upon Six Flags also, the mazes being considerably more intense than those in Universal Studios the night before!

Actual Halloween was a hurried affair. Due to midterms, I was unable to start shopping for a costume until the day before and by this time, shops were almost bare, despite the seemingly excessive number of Halloween costume stores and their extravagant prices. However, I managed to dress up for Halloween for the first time in almost 10 years and join in the nationwide celebrations. There were parades in every town, parties in every house and fully-grown university students trick-or-treating.

While Halloween consumed a large part of the past fortnight, other aspects of life in LA soldiered on too …

Academic: I’m very happy with my midterm results so far, reinforcing my opinion that difficulty and workload at UCLA is comparable to Sydney.

Social: Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to devote as much time as I would have liked to club activities or travelling during the past fortnight, but I have made sure to pack the coming few weeks, which I look forward to sharing next time!

Adapting to America: I’ve definitely settled in – not in a routine since everyday continues to offer new experiences, but I feel comfortable in LA. This doesn’t mean I don’t still suffer from “America shocks” however, the most recent shock being due to my first visit to Costco, a wholesale warehouse chain to which Walmart is nothing in comparison. I’m trying to forget how much I ended up spending there …

Video by Winey Suen
Some photographs copyright USU

Its only a 10 minute ride but its long enough to give you an appreciation of what it would be like to have frost bite!! (too dramatic?) All was saved though when it snowed on my way home! Its impossible to feel pain while its snowing :)

What’s clear is that thinking about thoughts is a tricky thing. I mean, think about it.

Ok stop.

You might be thinking about how you weren’t thinking about thoughts anyway. I mean, who does this guy think he is? Telling me to think things?

My point is, considering how inescapable the act of thinking is, it amazing how little we’re aware of how exactly we all do it.

To me it seems, at least so far, as though it makes sense that our conscious thoughts arise from our having the most complex arrangement of physical stuff in our heads. More synapses, more chemical reactions, more electric impulses zooming hither and thither at enormous speed, that sort of thing. I mean, we are talking about a system which is really, truly unimaginably complex. No really, I just tried to imagine how complex it is, and my brain almost imploded at the thought it thought it might be thinking.

However this week, everything changed.

It wasn’t so much that we made some fantastic breakthrough concerning theories of the mind. There was no moment which prompted the lecturer to suddenly stop, hysterically scribble the solution to all of our thoughts on the mind on the back of a dirty Hungry Jacks napkin, thrust it into the shaking hands of his most trusted post-graduate and have it whisked off on horseback to an underground lair known only to a secret society of bored academics.
No. That would be weird.

Instead, what I mean by “everything changed” is really that the subject changed, as it so often does in Philosophy. Our lecturer, perhaps noticing our confused, concerned and confounded faces as we attempted to grasp just what it was that that last famous dead gentleman was trying to say about Psychophysical Parallelism, decided to go in a new direction.

“Did you know,” he said, “That scientists aren’t exactly sure whether or not the universe is infinite?”
Admitting quickly that it was unlikely that it in fact was infinite, it was nonetheless true that it could be. What this means, he explained, is that anything in the entire universe which has even the slightest probability of ever happening, will in fact happen. If there is a possibility, no matter how small, that there could be a world out there where everything is the same as it is on earth except that you, yes you, have different coloured hair, then there will be such a world. If there’s a chance that there is a planet out there inhabited by millions of Bert Newtons, then there will be one. If there was a chance someone would go and see Mariah Carey in Glitter, it will happen somewhere in the universe.

At this point, my philosophy class let out an enormous collective gasp, and a first year boy who accidentally walked in at just that moment fainted in a heap with a girlish whimper. It was, it almost goes without saying, about as stimulating as things get for a bunch of philosophy nerds on a Thursday morning.

As much as I’d like to keep talking about the universe (what exactly is it supposed to be expanding into anyway?) I think that if there is to be any probability that you might read my blogs in the future, I should stop now.

The bilingual nature of Montreal is also a great aspect to the culture of Montreal. Although McGill is an english institution you can still hear some French being spoken and once off campus you are immersed in French which is a great experience.

One drawback of McGill has to be the dingy uni bar, it's definitely got nothing on Manning.

Saluting Bruce the Eclipse

Now a week later it’s FREEZING! I’m sitting writing this all curled up in a dressing gown and ugg boots (the height of fashion I know!). But seriously: dust storms, record high temperatures for July, record low temperatures for October, summer in winter and winter in spring. Come on weather – work yourself out!

I kind of wanted to write this blog to advise against overloading. It is a great way to speed up your degree, or in my case catch up subjects I didn’t do in previous semesters (because of things like travelling and internships), but it is a lot of work. I’ve actually had three subjects for the last two semesters so my rant and rave now is probably all part of the shock of having a lot of work due at one time!

So five subjects – a good or bad thing? It’s really up to you to judge how many other commitments you have, but prepared to be super organised (or there’ll be no sleep for you!).

XD.

that's all for now...next post will be a legitimate honours post with pilot study action.

Later monkeys!

The other thing about canada is that you need to get ready for winter early, so the shorts are going away, and jackets are coming out, even though its only the 3rd week of autumn. It's an exciting time, starting uni in a new city - everything is new and you feel like a first year again, I dont even know where the uni bar is!

...although it would have been much more convenient if the spiders hadn’t been hiding from predators and honours students during the daytime, but hey – we did find some! Luke’s project is going to find out about the webs of orb-weaving spiders (like those giant 2-dimensional webs you see around campus with the large colourful spiders sitting in them) – where they put them and why. Hopefully, he will be able to expand upon the current hypothesis: because they can.

Despite our partially spiderless search for field sites, we did however see some interesting things:

[Right] A Short-winged Heath Grasshopper (Rhitzala modesta, Orthoptera:Urnisina), the only known species within its genus: It lives in heath habitats with eucalypt canopies and tends to hide in amongst the woody parts of shrubby plants.

Several wildflowers:

[Left] Twining Guinea Flower (Hibbertia dentata). [Right] Lesser Flannel Flower (Actinotus minor)

[Right] An amazing chain of blue orchid-like (probably not orchids) flowers. [Right] A damselfly.

...and that was the sum of it really.