William Matheson's Journal

09:03 pm - Pre-Pre-Pre-Pre-Cal

This week has been nuts. Saint Mary’s is a sea of humanity. Sometimes it’s instructive just to watch the people stream by. Most folks are young and hyper-conscious about appearances and fitting in. People rarely speak up in my classes. I miss this summer’s dynamic of learning when a large percentage of the classes were other adults.

One of the courses I took this summer was Pre-Calculus Plus at Dalhousie. Perhaps our instructor was too kind to us – I performed unevenly, but I still managed to eke out an 83. I sat down last week at SMU to take the calculus entry test and scored 20 out of 40. I needed 26. I bought a review booklet and studied all weekend. I took the test again. I scored 23. “Sorry, William,” the professor said.

Before I launch into this, let me tell you something about the current state of math education: It’s somewhere between confusing and abysmal.

I mean when I was in high school, there was university prep math, open math, and, er, the euphemistically named “leaving high school math,” which was known as “trucker math.” And that was just for Grade 10. In Grade 11, the university prep branch branched further into “science math” and “academic math” (known as “arts math”). Same for Grade 12, but in Grade 12 you could also take calculus, though you could and can get into a B.Sc. program with plain old Grade 12 science math.

So let’s see… that’s three years of high school, with twelve different math courses. What a mess!

At Dal this summer I had three choices:

- Pre-Calculus, essentially a quick skim through G11 and 12 science math, yet for people who have G11 and 12 “math” (presumably academic)
- Pre-Calculus Plus, the same but spread over twice the time for students that have been out of math for a few years (this is what I took)
- Academic Math, a run through G11 and 12 “arts” or academic math, which requires G10 math.

This was confusing to me at first because my high school ran science and academic math in parallel, not in sequence. Anyway, a lot of people switched down to Academic Math, and I almost did, but I’d taken “arts math” in high school.

Ah, but there were things that are in Academic Math today that weren’t in the arts math stream in high school, and now I hear that even the “science math” and “arts math” terms are obsolete! So now I don’t even know what I have or how what I might have relates to anything.

Also, I never passed Grade 10 math. (Much to my chagrin, my first G10 math teacher was among the invigilators of these entry tests.) I failed it three times (16, 8, 25 – I’ll admit I wasn’t really trying) and was given the aforementioned “trucker math” credit, given because the guidance counsellors figured the folks in that class would eat me alive. I took a returning grad year of high school, and went into “arts math” because I feared that I couldn’t handle the science math after hearing from friends that were failing it. I did super: I got a 93 in the Grade 11 and an 80-something in the 12 (including a midterm grade of exactly 100 – I slacked off a bit after that and made Artifact).

Now what I should have done after that is taken science math in a summer course or something, but safe within the intellectual confines of a Saint Mary’s B.A. program, I disavowed math and majored in English, which offered the opportunity to be creative in a way that didn’t rely on math. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize at the time that math makes things more interesting, not less.

So I finally came back and did Pre-Calculus Plus but this course wasn’t the science parallel to “arts math” I was expecting – it built on G10 concepts I’d slept through and G11 and 12 concepts not taught or forgotten. But I still fought my way through it, somehow…

Only to find that there’s yet another tier of math. Calculus? No. OK, Pre-Cal? Nope. No, it’s “Pre-Calculus Review.” Based on the number of people being turned away from Calculus, I’d say it’s the de facto collection point for people who did not take calculus in high school. It purports to cover many topics “in greater depth than in Grade 12 mathematics courses.” Say again? Are the school boards and universities in cahoots and covering up a necessary tier of math education?

I believe so. “Pre-Calculus” should really be called “Pre-University Math,” (you get into university with it) and “Pre-Calculus Review” should then be called “Pre-Calculus,” (which you then use to get into calculus) because that’s the long and the short of the situation. There were a number of things on the entry test that I’d never seen before – so much so that I found myself wishing to see things that I knew I’d studied but didn’t fully understand. All my Rumsfeldian logic failed me, though, and I failed the test, and now I’m registered in “Pre-Calculus Review.”

To be fair, many science majors these days never set foot inside a calculus classroom. A lot of folks can escape with statistics and/or pre-cal. Calculus isn’t everyone’s first year math, but I’d gone in this year thinking that it could and should be mine, if only because I took an extended, expensive course called Pre-Calculus. It really should have been Pre-Pre-Calculus. Actually, I joked about not being prepared for Pre-Calculus, so in my ideal world there’d be a Pre-Pre-Pre-Calculus course on offer as well.

If you’re reading this and are still in junior high, do me a favour and study math from this moment forward as if your life depended on it. Take advanced placement and honours everything. At least let my tribulations send a message! ;-)

Current Mood: complacent

04:02 am - Play him off, keyboard cat.

I just discovered the keyboard cat meme today. Inspiration struck, and instead of going to sleep or working on precal, I mashed and uploaded this new epic, high-resolution masterpiece.

I may go back to this again someday - I only have Windows Movie Maker at the moment, as Premiere was taking up too much space on my computer. I'd like to time the impacts a little more accurately.

Inside the box is fellow CPA alumni Kevin Richter. I neither shot the original video nor witnessed this taking place, but I hear it was a real hit.

(Rocketboom has an interview with Brad O'Farrell, the person who made the original mashup. Failblog.org put out a few, too, like this.)

Current Mood: tired

05:36 pm - little sisters + knowing things

We had the girls over here last night. They were quite a handful! Ila's a little bit unhinged, and Rae gets scared and upset about the slightest things. But they're nine and seven respectively, so I suppose it's to be expected. Probably what really gets me is when I see in them behaviour that I used to exhibit as a child. Seeing what other people probably saw in me mortifies me to no end.

I visited J. and L. down in Dundas today, after dropping off the girls and their boatload of belongings (including two sacks for superfluous stuffed animals - one or two critters I could understand, but two whole bags full?). J. and I were talking about various things, and she suggested that I become registered as a substitute teacher. In PEI, as it is in New Brunswick but not in Nova Scotia, one can substitute with only a university degree, and maybe not even that, as the form for PEI suggests sending proof of 30 credit hours / 1 year of "post-secondary education." My stars.

So my problem isn't so much that I'm not certified. I could be teaching right now if I wanted to. Unfortunately, a larger problem is that I don't know anything. There is exactly one subject that I have a background in: English. The form for the Eastern School District alone has room for six subject preferences and three subject specialities. Somehow, I don't think writing "English" and "English" is going to make me look like a hot prospect. Now, this hasn't stopped a lot of people from teaching anyway. But it may stop me, for now.

In going to Dal this summer for continuing ed courses, I'm basically turning back the clock to Grade 11. I may well end up going to my 10-year high school reunion and saying yeah I've got Mr. MacDonald for chemistry. Well, that's if I can hack it and don't drop out on the first day. =) Ha-ha. No, I'm going in full throttle. I'm sick of being a simpleton.

Current Mood: hungry

12:12 pm - Artifact

Artifact is now fully deployed on willmatheson.com and YouTube.


I had hoped to get it up on Google Video too, but Google Video was belligerent. The in-browser upload form wouldn't work at all, and the uploading program would work sometimes - but when it did work (about 50% of the time), the uploaded videos wouldn't appear in my account. I even made up a new Google account and tried doing everything again in the most proper ways, waited several hours, and it still didn't work. I've been trying to get Artifact and the Seven Years featurette onto Google Video since Thursday - Google Video has a higher potential for quality, since it will theoretically accept uploads that are both larger than 100MB and longer than ten minutes - but now I officially give up.

That being said, the movie is uploaded to willmatheson.com, where it's available for download. (Windows Media, 844Mb) There's also a 100Mb version, and downloads and YouTube windows of the other features - it's all at the new mini-website. You can even poke the download links into Windows Media Player if you'd prefer to stream them (use the "Open URL..." command), and this can shorten your wait time a little bit since you can watch the beginning before you finish downloading the end.

The downloadable versions are of much higher higher quality than their YouTube counterparts (they're barely distinguishable from the DVD versions), and they're highly recommended if you want to sit back and really enjoy the movie.

And that's the note I'd like to end on. Enjoy!

Current Mood: pleased

12:12 am - Life After Y2K (2007)

I've just switched web hosts, so if you notice something wonky, drop me a line and let me know. I've gotten the e-mail accounts going, but only me and w_matheson and not the catch-all, so don't try to get too creative about contacting me until I sort that out. Like don't try heyithinkimetyoulastsummeratuniversitesainte-anneupinclareremember@willmatheson.com in the next few days.


Back in December while I was making web-friendly prints of Artifact (which I will be uploading within the next two weeks, after I get the supporting webpages ready to go), I figured I might as well make a new copy of Life After Y2K that could go on YouTube.

What I ended up doing was making a whole new cut. It's based on the already-extant MPEG, so the quality isn't on the same level as the Artifact transfer. However, given that ... egad ... the camera clock was recording what it thought was the current time to the camera for some of the scenes, and the fact that ANY edit of this movie would have to be based off the flattened final cut anyway, there's not a lot of point in digging through dusty boxes looking for a better copy and then finding or renting the equipment necessary to digitize it effectively.

Anyway, since I was directing, it counts as my first video (that certainly shows!) and I hope you find it a worthwhile diversion. Of course I didn't do this alone - it's quite unlike my later mini-movies where I worked autonomously. Calum MacLeod wrote a very funny script (that tragically wasn't filmed until after the Y2K he was prophesizing and/or lampooning), the actors had all kinds of great ideas, Ashlee Starratt found us clothes... the list goes on.

This video, and others, are also available for high-quality download at willmatheson.com.

Current Mood: tired

01:32 am - shuttle, Artifact, optical media, CPA night, don't make your papers too perfect

Okay, Christmas is over. Time to sit back with a glass of Rickard’s and take stock of things.

I wrote those two sentences in a coil-back notebook. Also, one of the Christmas gifts I received was a hardbound paper journal with a magnetic cover. But I just can’t bring myself to use either most of the time. When faced with the choice between chicken-scratching on the couch in the sunroom or typing in Word on Uncle Shane’s desktop computer, the computer usually wins. In Ukraine I wrote by hand a lot, but that was only because I didn’t have access to a computer very often; in most cases, I really only had time to type posts as opposed to composing them.

So here I am on the computer again.

I’m in Souris now, and staying with my aunt and uncle for two nights. Getting here on the shuttle was the usual torture – we had the crazy driver (but I’m used to him now, and he’s a friendly fellow), I kept nodding off and bumping into my seatmates every time we rounded a corner (he wasn’t particularly smooth going into and definitely not smooth coming out of turns), and the guy on my right had the zarking SMUflu and was sniffling the whole godda -shdarned trip. I don’t feel myself getting sick though, so maybe no harm was done. But the sound of his breathing through his nose drove me up the wall.

And to top it all off, we rush and tear and beat the band only to be dropped off earlier than our ongoing rides expect us to be, and so we wait in the cold in front of the Burger King for an extra twenty minutes or more.

The shuttle is also crowded, there’s little legroom, and forget about congenial space to work on anything, or even to take off your coat (I had mine on until Oxford!) And then there’s the whole dichotomy of public and private space; you’re riding in a van (a private sort of space) with total strangers (so it’s a public space). You’re sitting so close to people that it’s impossible not to acknowledge their presence (unlike the usual situation in a full-size transit or coachline bus), and yet you have to remain strangers – you can’t make small-talk (trust me, I’ve tried), and you have to ride out the hours in stony silence. God, it’s awkward.

So at least one thing is settled: when I make my fortune and come back here for the holidays in the future, I’m darn well renting a car for the month. But the shuttle isn’t all bad. The owners gave us a “Happy Holidays” note, chocolate, and a discount coupon. Well, it’s only valid for January, so I won’t be able to use it, but it’s the thought that counts. =)

* * *

I’m happy to tell you that Artifact has now been completed and is currently being distributed on DVD to cast members (the ones I could find at the CPA reunion – more on that in a moment), fans, and a few others who are connected with it. I made less than thirty copies, but I have the ISO, so I can always make more. Further to this, it’s easy to duplicate the discs already in circulation – I included no copy protection, and anyone with a DVD writer and a few gigs of hard disk space should be able to copy the movie bit for bit. I unofficially encourage this, since it’s a heck of a lot less work and trouble on my end. I only have a notebook DVD burner, and getting jewelcases for the discs is a pain in the butt.

Let’s take a moment to talk about DVD. DVD sucks. In this day and age when we can carry 2-4GB on a $25 wafer in our pockets, DVD isn't quite so magical anymore. Remember when CDs seemed limitlessly HUGE? Whatever happened to those days, and will something like that ever happen again?

That being said, Artifact on DVD is quite okay. Or at least the main feature is. I had to compress the crap out of the featurettes to get everything to fit. And don’t ask about how I discovered that you pretty much have to route the paths between your menu buttons manually, lest the user’s cursor wander into a no-man’s land (not an issue when you’re watching DVDs on your computer and have the mouse cursor, but a serious issue when you’re using a standalone player – you can quite literally get stuck and have to restart the player!).

Still, that can easily be fixed, and in my case, it was. But the larger issue remains: 4.7 gigs just ain't enough. (Dual-layer is prohibitively expensive and not really an option (and then there's the bloody layer pause); it would have been better to just publish on two discs, but I couldn't bring myself to the extra work that would have been.) Or, more accurately, it’s not enough for consumers such as myself. We don’t have access to the fancy high-end media encoders that the Hollywood studios use, nor the time to painstakingly manage the whole encoding process on even a scene-by-scene basis.

HD-DVD (17GB) and Blu-ray’s (25GB) extra capacity will be nice, but even they will still require the use of compression, although Artifact could fit onto a single-layer BD-ROM with only intraframe compression, so it would still be pretty darned pristine. But that’s just standard def! What we really need is a cheap format capable of carrying at least two hours of uncompressed 1080p video. It’s time to be talking in fractions of terabytes. Wake me when we get there.

(And, yes, HD-DVD and Blu-ray are also dual-layer capable, but as with DVD you are dramatically increasing the cost of the media, significantly decreasing your recording speed, and you’re subject to the whims of how DVD/BD player manufacturers engineer their players to handle layer pause. No thanks.)

Artifact has also been converted to both high-bitrate / quality (for Google Video) and 100MB (for YouTube) WMV versions, and will be available on those services and willmatheson.com sometime in January. I’ve still got some web space issues to work out before it happens; I don’t want to upload to Google or YouTube before I have the new webpages and media (such as photographs) to support the release. A lot may also depend on when I get internet access in my Japanese apartment.

(Hey, wait a second. Why should YouTube be dictating how I chose to encode my movies? Who do they think they are, when other services like Google Video operate without any time or filesize limits? They’re just making me go through a whole heckuva lot of extra work because as anyone knows, 100MB is enough for an hour of watchable video (thanks to the magic of QuickTime for Macs and the suprising utility of WMV in Windows Movie Maker), but not an hour of clear, fullscreen video. I’ve spent hours and hours encoding and reencoding my videos, and those are hours I would have gladly spent doing other things. Man.)

Oh, and last night while I was clearing up my render files and other junk from Artifact (but I’ll keep the raw footage and edit decision files; I’m not crazy!), I started playing around with something, and let’s just say that there will be a little low-fi bonus surprise that I’ll release to YouTube, Facebook, and willmatheson.com the day before Artifact.

Anyway, if you’d like a copy of Artifact, call me sometime on the 28th – 31st, and you can come by and pick one up or (preferably for me) get one burned onto your blank disc. You can also come to my going away party, since I'll have a few copies there.

* * *

Here's food for thought: It turns out that DVD-R and DVD+R aren't equal. I had known that there were drives out there (like on older Macs) that could only write DVD-R, and as recently as a few days ago I encountered a DVD-ROM that could read -R discs but not +R discs. But I didn't know why.

DVD+R is technically superior to DVD-R, with superior error correction, speed compatibility, and read/write efficiency. But I burned Artifact on -R, and now I'm glad that I have, for the simple reason that -R has (wow) a five-year head start on +R, and is therefore playable on a wider range of devices.

So use -R for wide distribution, and +R for your personal archiving, such as your photos.

* * *

Oh, yeah, the CPA (high school mini-reunion / Christmas) party. It stunk. There were a few people I knew there, but none I could call more than the casualest of friends. (Don’t get me wrong; I was happy to see them. But it’s hard to spend a whole night drifting among casual acquaintances.) The crowd was also young. It would seem that our time has passed, and while I won’t say that I’ll never go again, I can safely say that I’ll never go out of my way to go again.

The part that I hated the most was waiting for the 6am bus to go back to Bedford. I went down to Saint Mary’s (it being Christmas Eve morning, I was the only one in the McNally East computer labs – I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before) with the intention of blogging about the night in order to kill time, but I wasn’t able to get my password correct on the first few tries, and so I got locked out of my network account. I could do nothing but lean over the table and doze, and hope that the security people wouldn’t throw me out. That wasn’t much fun.

But it wasn’t over yet. Once I made it to Bedford, I had to wait at the Tim Hortons for almost two hours for a ride (I would have walked, but it was pouring rain) because Mom felt that our street was too slick to drive on. And then she wanted to wait for the Sun to rise fully so that she could see better.

Ah, crap. That wasn’t much fun, either.

Why can’t we just have 24-hour bus service? I mean, really. While still at the Palace, I came very close to giving in and dumping the $40+ on a cab ride home. But it offends me that I have to pay so much for the “privilege” of sleeping in my own bed. Crap crap crap.

Man, I’m going to be so happy to be living within a real city, within walking distance of everything, OMG like REALLY.

And I have my passport and visa now, so everything will be above board. Then again, so were Heinrich Himmler’s papers – true, a person the world doesn’t miss, but mentioned here because it’s the most famous case I can recall of someone arousing suspicion because their papers were too perfect. There are no guarantees in life, not for students, nor for officers who had been in charge of concentration camps and death squads who are attempting to escape prosecution, and thank goodness for that.

Current Mood: tired

02:49 am - Artifact news, new articles on the Nova fiasco

Man. It’s only been twelve hours since I sent my computer away for a new screen and a new optical drive, and I miss it already. I have everything backed up onto my external hard drive, but having that is still not the same as having your own computer. I’m totally raring to edit Artifact now, but it’ll have to wait at least a week.

Yep, that all went well! I now have virtually everything from the Artifact shoots digitized. It was shot on Video 8, so finding a capable camera to bridge to a modern DV camcorder (used to digitize the video; the digital stream goes from the camcorder to my computer via Firewire) was no easy task. On a recommendation from the Multimedia guys back at NSCAD, I ended up going to the Centre for Art Tapes to rent theirs (for a very-reasonable $7, as nobody uses this technology anymore).

Then we had to find the source tapes. Mike had a whole box of Video 8 and Hi8 cassettes, and while we found one easily, the other three were a challenge. On the other hand, we took a fantastic journey down memory lane. You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff even if I told you! Mike has a museum’s-worth of footage in that box.

Of course, what you’re looking for is always in the last place you look, and we spent hours looking at Video 8 tapes from the mid-to-late 1990’s and 2000-01 before finding what we were looking for: Three Hi8 cassettes with the mastered versions of early Film and Video productions from Fall 1998. The cassettes probably came from Mr. Savage, and we had been recording on the space left on the tapes. These tapes were also being used for video yearbook purposes: “William Matheson’s ‘The Artifact’ will be continued on another tape. We now bring you some video yearbook footage of… indoor girl’s field hockey.”

The video itself is, well, OK. There are lots of little defects and idiosyncrasies here and there, and even some tracking lines. Still, it’s far better than the VHS final cut, and the original video is not cropped, and preserves the original stereo sound. It’s a lot livelier, and it’ll be fun to work with. Colour looks fantastic, too – Sony was making some really nice Hi8 units in the mid-to-late 1990s. Also, Mike made a lot of really good shots, and his work in getting this movie from script to screening in less than three weeks has been underappreciated.

I even have the effects editing by Chris Spencer. I wasn’t worried about doing the people appearing and vanishing again (that’s a now-easy crossfade, although at the time it actually amazed people that we had the capability to do it) – I’m actually going to do it from scratch anyway and use different kinds of appearances and vanishings for different situations. I was worried about the fireball sequence (documented here), but I worry no more – I have it.

Here’s a little bit of what you can expect in the new Artifact:

- Shorter running time. Entire subplots are at risk of being severely trimmed if not outrightly cut. If something makes me cringe but isn’t funny or at least bitterly ironic, it’ll be tossed. The goal here will be to preserve and showcase the best of the film, which means dodging enough of the confusing material to be watchable. (The original cut will remain available.) I don’t think I’m going to be changing much, though – after the re-release, no one will have to say “Brooke shot first.”

- All the benefits of non-linear editing, which are too numerous to list. (Editing the entire feature on computer wasn’t feasible at the time – in that era, the height of technology was Premiere on a G3 with puny disc space – if you had ten gigs to play with, it was considered a blessing.)

- A musical “score,” as was originally intended. At the time of the original production I did not possess the intended CDs, just some downloaded MP3s that I had no way to get off my computer since we were without a burner or high-speed internet at the time. (Man, those were the dark ages.)

- Fullscreen presentation with stereo sound. The original cut was mastered on VHS, essentially in mono, with added letterboxes – portions of the image were cropped to create a widescreen presentation. We had this in mind when we were shooting, and the letterboxes mercifully excised a lot of garbage that ended up in our frame. But the shots seem to come to life in fullscreen, and there’s a lot of visual information available that adds to the school atmosphere. By going with fullscreen (keep in mind it was shot in fullscreen), things will have a more casual look, and I’m okay with that. The change will introduce new problems that I'll have to work around, so when you see 24-esque split-screen scenes, it’ll be because I’m trying to crop out things that shouldn’t be in the frame!

So stay tuned for news on the new Artifact, coming to Internet and DVD sometime in early 2008.

* * *

Japan approaches, like some sort of crippled ghoul or zombie that slowly and inexorably creeps up your driveway, approaching the abandoned mansion that you’ve holed yourself up in to survive the onslaught. Don’t get me wrong; I’m excited to be going to Japan. I’m only vaguely apprehensive. By all indications, this will be a terrific situation, but that first day at the school is still going to be a doozy. I mean, getting dropped into a new country and then attending some sort of “camp” (like in CWY) is one thing. Getting dropped into a new country and reporting for work the next day is something else!

R. at SMU invited me and a future co-worker to lunch next week, where we’ll, among other things, sign our contracts. After the Nova “schools” fiasco, I’ll be happy to be putting ink to paper before some freshly-unemployed ESL teacher beats me to my own job.

And, just in case you thought these two stories didn’t have anything to do with each other, Ashlee Starratt, who plays a lead role in Artifact, was interviewed in the Daily News – she moved to Japan and worked for Nova, but they paid her only about as much as we paid her to be in The Artifact. =)

Current Mood: nostalgic

05:53 pm - my life in high school + the "hit list" rumour explained

So yes, this is the last day of my undergraduate career. You may now call me William Matheson, B.A. (Hons.) Actually, strictly speaking I can’t be called that, because I have a B.A. from 2004 and what I will be getting now is simply an Honours Equivalency Certificate in Arts (English). Taken together with my 3-year / 90-credit B.A., it means the same thing as a 4-year / 120-credit Honours degree (and I never thought I’d have one!), but it is, at least formally speaking, not quite the same thing.

It seems rather inauspicious, though, to be finishing my degree on the very day of the largest school shooting in U.S. history. I suppose some would look back on my reputation in high school and say it is fitting… I vividly remember almost getting arrested in the days after the Columbine shootings because people thought I was keeping a hit list on my website. (You can imagine the resulting interaction with the police in the principal’s office. Fortunately for me, the Vice Principal knew it was all garbage and stood up for me, allowing me to explain the situation to them thoroughly. It was then I discovered that it was a very bad joke indeed to link a modified 404-error page to my “click here to see my non-existent hit list!” link (this was pre-Columbine) and make fun of people for thinking there’d be one there. People are just too dumb, and it wasn’t even all that funny.)

As for the hit list itself, it was one of those rumours that just wouldn’t die. Now that I have a huge audience of old high school acquaintances on Facebook, I might as well set the record straight on it now: the hit list idea was started in Grade 10 Math with Ms. Campbell (Semester II, 1996-1997), when Tyson Hubley was driving me up the wall with his usual shenanigans. In order that I might tell the absent teacher about it later (keep in mind that this is long before I learned about having a sense of humour or social skills), I asked Tyson for his name, and I duly wrote it down on my notepaper.

Someone standing over my shoulder asked, in a characteristic drawl, “Is that your hit list, Will?”

“Um… yeah! … Um, what’s a hit list?”

“It’s a list of people you’re going to kill, Will.”

“Yeah, okay, it’s a hit list.” And then I probably went back to drawing comic strips or writing stupid short stories or whatever it was I did in those days when I was supposed to be doing math. Someone probably thought I was serious, and since I hated them, I wanted them to think I was serious – but practically speaking, I wasn’t serious. And in a twisted way, the existence of this rumour and others like it gave me a perverse feeling of importance, which I probably fell back on because I wasn’t getting my feeling of importance any other way (for instance, being smart about things in class simply led to my derision and ridicule).

Through the intervening years, I was more than my worst enemy – if I had had the fortune to learn something about human relations (and general social skills), I could have nipped it all in the bud. Instead, I continued to be – well, I don’t apologize for being so, but I was weird. That’s basically my business, though. I think where the problem started (in general) is that I tended to be weird without reference to anyone else around me. I think that offended people somehow. And then I’d open my mouth to pronounce some opinionated judgement on something or other, and even if I was right I’d stir up the wrath of dozens every time. I’m convinced that it got to the point that for every friendly acquaintance I had, I had two naysayers who knew nothing about me but told stories nonetheless. I guess people do that, and who can blame them? At the time, though, I saw red. Deep red. It got to the point where I hated all “stupid people” – and my definition of stupid people grew to include people who were probably much smarter than I was – and I would walk through corridors swearing or giving everyone the finger just to show everyone how much I truly hated them for being so insufferably stupid.

And the harassment! I haven’t even really touched on this, except to mention Tyson, and he was just being a goof – he was just trying to get a feeling of importance from putting me down, and even when he did that he wasn’t cruel about it at all. I’m on great terms with Tyson now, and moreover – Tyson was just the tip of the iceberg! There were hundreds more much worse than him! The harassment was pervasive, persistent, and spiritually punishing. In the face of the constant, ceaseless harassment and ridicule I crumbled. I didn’t take the lemons of pariah-hood and make lemonade. Instead I continued to fight back (usually verbally), and I would always be the one getting in trouble. I felt utterly helpless, so all I could do was continue until I proved everyone wrong, even though my ridiculous behaviour was never, ever going to prove me right.

It was an argument that nobody could win (least of all me), and eventually Mr. Whitman (the principal) got sick of it and yanked me out of there. (And contrary to popular belief, I did not “punch him out.” There was definitely yelling and swearing involved, however.) I spent a good part of that 1997 spring semester expelled from school. In fact, I missed two full months – almost an entire term.

I came back at the end of May, though – partly medicated (I’m ashamed to admit that I was ever medicated, but by Grade 12 I gave up the pills and I haven’t gone back since) and partly beginning to realize that my antisocial actions had consequences. I didn’t quite understand why I had to restrain myself in the light of people being so relentlessly cruel to me, but I suppose if I understood that I would have been able to address people’s cruelty – I’m ashamed to admit that all though I school I barely ever tried to make people like me. I didn’t know how to make people like me, but I didn’t really want to try either – except for a few crushes and a couple of friends (and who knows how I made them?), I really didn’t care what people thought of me.

In Grade 11 (1997-98) I discovered the internet, and I think that helped me more than just about anything else. It certainly encouraged some bad habits like wasting time, but getting online really helped me get out of my shell and gain some perspective. Things were changing at school, too – more and more people were getting used to me, and I didn’t live every day in fight-or-flight mode.

Later that year, Brian Haas and Shawn Ahmed were instrumental in getting me to run for Student’s Council Vice-President. That was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done, and my advice to you is to not die until you’ve experienced a gymnasium full of students give stomping, cheering standing o’s, shouting your name repeatedly at the tops of their lungs – and this is just when they’re listing the candidates! Yes, that was the atmosphere for the candidate’s speeches, and they’re a cherished memory. After a tight race (the numbers were never revealed publicly), I finished just behind Colin MacDonald, who went on to do a better job that I could have done anyway – I knew nothing about dances or … well, it’s safe to say I knew nothing about nothing.

I got on Student’s Council anyway as a Grade Rep, and in that role I learned a lot of the tips and tricks of the popular people, a lot of the times without realizing it. I’m convinced that being on Student’s Council, even though I wasn’t really cut out for it in the traditional sense, was one of the greatest things that ever happened to me. It forced me to get involved in the world around me – I’m sure a lot of people made fun of me, selling pop at the dances like a little kid, but it was of critical importance!

I carried through this sense of involvement to Saint Mary’s, where I was neither a good SRC Frosh Rep (2000-01) nor a very good Frosh Leader (excepting perhaps my third and last go at it in September 2003), but I got to meet kajillions of people and, fortunately, most of them were pretty civil.

And after almost ten years and tens of thousands of miles travelled, I’m living in a whole new world. Still, when people ask me where I went to high school, I usually just say “CPA,” and change the subject. =)

Your Pal,
~ Will Matheson

Current Mood: cheerful

02:31 am - William Matheson's "The Artifact"

In case anyone's interested, the "epic" 2000 masterpiece thing then dubbed "William Matheson's 'The Artifact'" is now available on both willmatheson.com (where you can even save it and keep it, if you like) and on YouTube (in the director's account).

It shows its age and it needs to have about 45 minutes cut out of it, but recent advances in both bandwidth and video codecs have prevented this from becoming a lost classic. =) Michael Kidson was going to do a Pop-Up Video-like lampoon of the numerous errors in continuity and sound design (anyone want to count the number of times they hear me talking on the track?), which would have been pretty cool. He did, however, write this:

THIS IS YOUR ONE WARNING!

This is a very cheap, very bad movie, and should not be downloaded by anyone ever.
If you get brave and decide to watch this, I am in no way responsible for

1. concussions
2. broken bones
3. Insanity
4. Death
5. Spontaneous combustion
6. Strange dreams
7. Blindness
8. Detatched retinas

Enjoy, and blame Will.

That about says it. (You can also see pictures of the cast and from the production here.)

Current Mood: accomplished

03:16 am - Top 32 Signs You Might Be Will Matheson - OLD JUNK ALERT

I found this tonight while cleaning my room. I think I’ll share it with everyone, but please keep in mind that I wrote it a few years ago, definitely before I was whisked off to Eastern Europe and grew a mature personality.

If you think some of these are selfish, small, and harsh, you should see the ones I’m leaving off! =) But I’m keeping a few of the worst, provided that they’re funny. And I’ve added one or two more, but this list is largely obsolete. I’m glad a lot of it isn’t true anymore; for instance, it’s been a few years since anyone has done the honking-screaming thing – this is because they’ve forgotten about me, allowing me the luxury of forgetting about them.

Top 32 Signs You Might Be Will Matheson

1. You’ve seen 2,800 girls pass through your high school, who all know your name.
2. 0 will date you.
3. Not even the ugly ones.
4. Okay, one did date you, but after a few days she went back to and married her ex-boyfriend.
5. You’re a Returning Grad with High Honours.
6. People ask for your hidden motive when you want to hang out with them.
7. People whom you’ve never met don’t use your last name when they talk about you.
8. Everything you do in school is Front Page News. “OMG, Will passed my classroom today!”
9. Your driveway is a billion kilometres long.
10. People honk at you as they drive by.
11. This would be okay on its own, but they are often screaming and throwing things at you.
12. Your closest friends tell you that you have the maturity of a three-year-old.
13. You’re a half-member of virtually every clique, but accepted in none.
14. Your principal tries to prevent you from obtaining said High Honours certificate by making up new “rules” on the fly.
15. People interpret a link to your “non-existent hit list” as a legitimate web page error.
16. This misunderstanding almost gets you arrested.
17. Teachers physically block the doorway to their class and say that you failed the prerequisite course and therefore can’t come in.
18. You cash in on your infamy with an 80-minute movie.
19. You’re invited to parties under the conditions that you don’t scare the girls and that you leave at 10pm.
20. Thankfully, the hosts quickly change their minds about you, and you stay until 3.
21. You change the “P-A-R-T-Y Hard At S-M-U” chant to “S-T-U-D-Y Hard.”
22. Four years later, it’s still on the go.
23. Your principal successfully prevents you from receiving a course award in a subject when you get a 99.
24. You fail Math X three times and get a Trucker Math credit.
25. You fail English X twice; take English XII three times, and like English so much you major in it.
26. You get a 100 for a term of Math XII, but it’s Arts Math.
27. People wonder why you’re in first-year Computer Science, as “you teach this class.”
28. Nevertheless, they still despise you.
29. Your part in the dinner theatre gets you a glowing review of in the student newspaper.
30. Nevertheless, your co-actors still hate you.*
31. You’re a member of a civic committee on watershed management, yet people working at McDonald’s say you’ve broken into school in the summertime to write a death list on the chalkboards.
32. However, you are responsible for promoting National Skip Day on said chalkboards, at least at the ends of semesters.