last Saturday sucked
...but better things are on the horizon!
Otters,
No idea why I took last week off. I think I honestly forgot this Substack existed. But we’re back! I swear to god for real this time. Ignore the 15 million times I’ve said something along those lines in the last month. We’ll do two a week beginning next week.
We had a bunch of new Otters roll in over the course of April which is so awesome. Thanks for being here! If you have no idea what this place is, awesome! Neither do I, and I invented Things You Otter Know. (Though the About page might help you out a little bit.)
Also! You may have missed my mini-thinkpiece on the new Taylor Swift album. Here it is embedded for your reading pleasure (or perhaps anger):
But now that we’re back, there’s much to discuss. Much in the works. Much to complain about. As ever!
I want to start first of all with last Saturday night. May 4th, to be exact. I am very pissed off about that night. Not that anyone cares but I’ll be incredibly overdramatic about this anyway.
I had tickets to see Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service here in Toronto at Scotiabank Arena. I bought them on the first day of presale at the beginning of December. I spent too much money on seats in the 300s but whatever. I was looking FORWARD to this.
I love both bands but especially Death Cab. Transatlanticism is probably in my top ten favourite albums of all time. I consider it a good omen that it dropped the year I was born.
They’ve been celebrating that milestone with an anniversary tour where they play the whole thing front to back. And then the Postal Service comes out and they play Give Up (another masterpiece) in full, since that album also came out in 2003.
I had been trying to see them live for years and I kept missing out. They played Echo Beach five years ago but I guess I didn’t know about it. Last June they played two nights at Massey Hall—both dates sold out fast, and trust me I tried to get in there.
So I honestly thought last Saturday night would be the moment I made my dream come true. But then things started unravelling.
The friend I was planning to bring along to the show could no longer make it. I couldn’t sell off their ticket, even at minimum price. (For a band big enough to play arenas I thought someone out there would want it, but I guess not.)
Then I had to help my brother move in to his new dorm room hours away from Toronto. So I wouldn’t be able to make it back in time for the show.
The other thing was that the Toronto Maple Leafs were playing the seventh and final game of their first round series against the Boston Bruins. And as big of a Leafs fan as I am, I was willing to miss it so I could go to the show.
It would’ve been a vibe. Because during the playoffs there’s all these people that crowd in front of the west entrance to Scotiabank Arena in what’s called Maple Leafs Square to watch the games on a big TV screen. (See the photo above of some Leaf fans crying, a very common sight in Maple Leaf Square).
Just imagine heading inside the arena with all your new indie head friends and there’s Leafs fans just EVERYWHERE in blue and white. Like, those are my two favourite types of people.
But since I couldn’t go to the show I just watched the game with my dad once we got home. And of course the Leafs lost. In overtime.
I imagine there were people after the show ended who went to nearby bars to watch the overtime period. And they must’ve went home absolutely crushed. So in a way I’m glad that’s not me. But at the same time, I feel a little worse off than they do, because they got to see Death Cab and the Postal Service live and I couldn’t. And I was now $170 less rich than I had initially hoped to be, and my favourite sports team on the face of the earth was eliminated in game seven overtime against one of their biggest rivals.
I just had to mope about that for a second because this is my space to do that. Thanks for reading!
Now to the positive stuff, because I am constantly trying to rewire my brain into being more positive and it is noooot easy. Yes, last Saturday sucked, but things are on the come up again, and thank god because for a second I felt like I had lost all of my reasons to live.
For one my stress levels are way down now that school’s over. And besides a 51 in my truly horrendous Victorian novels course, my grades came out okay!
There’s all this stuff happening with my volunteer team at New Majority that I will hopefully get around to telling you about in the weeks ahead.
Also, new music always gets me stoked. Was listening to the new Knocked Loose album that came out today as I wrote this post, and holy mama it is a behemoth.
The other thing is I’m not going to be having an internship this summer (more on the reasoning behind this soon) so I have pretty much the next four months to just…write. Which is weird! I’m not used to this much free time. I already feel pressure to come out of this break with some banger poems or whatever. It’s self-imposed pressure. But it's fine. I’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.
See you Monday or Tuesday or whatever.