Examland

Classes at McGill ended on Tuesday, meaning that from the 4th to the 19th it's exam period. This is my first exam period not living in Douglas and it's like entering another world - Examland. In Examland, there are no classes you have to get up for, no scheduled mealtimes like in Douglas, and no parents to judge you for sleeping too long. For the first time in my life, there's absolutely no reason to live by any sort of schedule. Because the sun sets at about 4:15, I only see a couple hours of daylight each day. The roommates are either taking exams, out somewhere, or in Genna's case, studying at her grandparent's house somewhere else in Montreal. And my first meal is usually around 5, with another at about 10:30.

No matter how many groceries I buy, though, there's never anything to eat. The exception is bagels. Today I made the long, snowy walk up to Fairmount Bagel and ordered 6 All-Dressed, 3 Cinnamon Raisin, and 3 Sun-Dried Tomato. The woman gave me a very large bag and charged me $15, which seemed a little steep and chalked up to the high price of Sun-Dried Tomato. When I got home, though, I found 6 All-Dressed, 6 Cinnamon Raisin, and a dozen sesame. Great.

Maybe the weirdest thing about Examland is the fact that the Tribune doesn't publish during exam period. Throughout the semester, I've seen the guys that I edit the paper with - James, Tom, Bernard, Adam, and Matt - almost every day, as I spent at least as much time in the office as with GG, Genna, and Kate. It made living with women a lot easier. Now it's all women all the time. Mostly it means a lot less takeout and a lot more bagels.

Birthday Season

November is the month of birthdays in the apartment - GG's was the 6th and mine was last week. In France the cutoff for school is by calendar year instead of academic year though, so GG turned 19 while I turned 20. This means I'm now a 20-year-old guy living with a bunch of 19-year-old girls.

The roommates and Becky and Madeline chipped in to get me a book about Barack Obama for my birthday, which was really sweet, and we went out to dinner at Le Pistol. I don't think I'd been there since going for my birthday last year. Le Pistol is a wonderful restaurant for many reasons:

• All the lighting is red.
• They play good music that's not painfully obscure.
• They show all the Canadiens games.
• They have great beer, great sandwiches, and great fries, which is pretty much all you can ask for.

We got GG a rice cooker for her birthday and I don't think I've ever seen anyone happier to get a gift. I've mentioned before that 75 per cent of GG's diet is rice, but without living with her it's difficult to understand how much she loves it. Today she told me that when she went on vacation with her family to Japan, she was always happy because they had rice with every meal. And a couple weeks ago I carried a ten-pound bag of rice home from Provigo for her.

GG is also a vegetarian, which recently got me thinking that I should try being one for a week to see what it's like. There are occasionally days when I don't eat meat just because I don't happen to have any, so it would just be like seven of those days in a row. Then I'd have to eat nothing but meat for a week to make up for it.

Provigo

Except for Kate, the everyone in the apartment stayed in and did work this weekend. On Saturday night, GG, Genna, and I went to Provigo together and it made me think about how differently men and women like to eat. In general, I like to buy bread, meat, cheese, apples, carrots, juice, milk, and beer. These are pretty simple foods. GG and Genna, on the other hand, normally like to eat lots of vegetables and some rice/pasta, but occasionally crave foods like chocolate and social cookies. On Saturday at Provigo, for example, GG wandered around the produce section eating mushrooms while Genna spent five minutes trying to decide the best kind of ice cream to buy. Strange.

I just bought capicollo, Nutella, and a scone.

Cosmopolitan

One of the women (GG, I think) bought Cosmopolitan last week, a much better magazine that the British Glamour, and it's been sitting on our kitchen table ever since. I'd occasionally read the sex stories in Cosmo when at the houses of girls I knew in high school, but I'd never before had one sitting in front of me while eating breakfast every day. After looking at the cover for several days while eating Oatmeal Crisp, I realized that just how different Cosmo's headlines are from a magazine like GQ. The main headline reads: "BAD GIRL SEX: 75 Tricks for Nights When You Want to Be Just a Little Naughtier." That's ridiculous - imagine if GQ's headline read "BAD BOY SEX" or "BAD GUY SEX." Another reads "Lauren Conrad Answers Her Haters." Do guys even have haters? Do Brad Pitt or Tommy Lee Jones ever "answer their haters"? The best one is "'A Cougar Stole My Man'." A magazine like GQ or Esquire would never run a headline like "An Older Man Stole My Girlfriend." I don't think that really happens, and if it did, guys definitely wouldn't want to read about it.

Other than buying Cosmo, GG and Genna went through two strange phases last week. One was a obsession with Britney Spears that I still don't understand, but I think is thankfully over. The second was that Genna baked cookies for us all week, winning her our Roommate of the Week Award. I think the two balanced each other out.

Gong Show

The roommates and I had been looking forward to Imogen's formal birthday party last night for a while and I don't think any of us were disappointed. It was a wonderful party full of cute girls I didn't know, some that I did know, and one I wasn't expecting to see (Zoe Daniels). By far the best part was the performance of Girl Scientist, the play written for Imogen's birthday. How can you go wrong with Kyle Foot playing a high school polo captain, Chris Firger as a pedophiliac high school teacher, Spencer Thompson as an inspired Christopher Walken, and Becca as the eponymous Girl Scientist? All star cast. I've been singing "I Insist" all day and getting some weird looks from people on the street.

I was reminded last night of a story that I told the last time I was at Imogen's apartment after playing tennis with Ian and Genna (though she wasn't there) that I was encouraged to put in this blog and never did. It must have happened about a month ago by now. I was in the bathroom with the shower running and had undressed but not gotten in yet when Kate knocked on the door. She wanted to brush her teeth and asked if I was in yet. Our shower curtain is a map of the world with the countries in colours and the rest clear, so it's pretty revealing when someone's in the shower. This means that we don't normally go in the bathroom when someone's showering. I thought she meant that I should get in the shower so she could brush her teeth, so I hopped in and told her she could come in. It seemed a bit weird to me, but I figured if Kate was comfortable with it I wasn't going to be standoffish. She could probably concentrate on her teeth well enough not to sneak any glances. Anyway, it turned out that Kate had meant to ask if I was still dressed and did not in fact want to brush her teeth two feet away from a naked man only partially obscured by South America. She was a bit shocked when she opened the door and was gone by the time I finished showering. I made joke about joining her in the shower the other day, but she didn't think it was very funny.

Canadian Thanksgiving

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving (as opposed to the real Thanksgiving in November), so most of my friends have gone back home for the weekend. Last year I spent the long weekend in New York City visiting my friend Zach, but this year I'm stuck here studying the theories of international trade policy for my midterm on Wednesday. I'd much rather be wandering around the MoMA than memorizing subcommittees of the WTO.

Kate has gone to visit Madeline's family in Toronto and Genna is with Becky in Niagara Falls, so it's just GG and me studying in the house all weekend. It's pretty fun actually, at least as fun as a long weekend of studying can be. Last night I brought home takeout for dinner and surprisingly found GG watching Lord of the Rings, so I ate my Thai food with her watching that. After spending most of today in the library, I went to Provigo with GG around 9:00, where she bought several kinds of dried fruit and tortilla chips. As far as I can tell, rice, vegetables, dried fruits, nuts, tea, and an imported type of British tea biscuit make up 95 per cent of GG's diet. I just bought chocolate milk.

Life in the Blender Family

Becky and Madeline came over again last night, this time because Kate was making lasagna. Thank God for Kate, I think she's the only thing keeping me from starving. For some reason I have not bought any food that is easy to prepare, which can create some problems. When they're with Becky and Madeline, all the women have started calling everything "fucking cute," which is pretty fucking annoying for me and, I'd imagine, fucking hilarious for them.

While I've never learned to grill steak, can't gut a fish, and permanently damaged my car's radio when I rewired it, there are some things that I'm required to do as the man of the house (surprisingly the roommates refuse to use this as a nickname). Things I have done recently: changing lightbulbs, openning jars, fixing Genna's bike, and many things that actually just require being tall. In return, there's always a hot meal and a cold Keith's waiting for me when I get home. Kate's so domestic.

Understand Women: The Little Things

Ian Good came over for dinner tonight and GG was gone, so it was half girls/half guys at the table. It was pretty great, except for the part where Ian, Kate, and Genna talked about Gilmore Girls. I've seen enough of the show when Sonia watches it to know that Rory is pretty good-looking, but that's about it. The women on it just talk really fast and it's hard to keep up.

Anyone who tells you that women are easy to understand is lying - it's actually very difficult. I think the key is to start with the small things, though. Like shoes. When I worked at DSW selling shoes back in Illinois, I had to learn a bit about women's shoes. Women always describe shoes as "cute" and this was very hard to understand. Puppies are cute. Girls can be cute. Shoes are just shoes. After months of working there, however, I realized that when women describe shoes as "cute," they actually mean "don't look stupid and will match the kind of clothes I wear." I guess "cute" is just way of shortening this.

This also explains why some (usually really annoying) girls call things "fucking cute." I'm sorry, but this is just not acceptable. Things can be fucking stupid or fucking awesome, fucking ugly or fucking gorgeous, but not fucking cute.

Another Year

One of the strange things about McGill is the fact that there are attractive girls all over campus, but they never make it into your classes. At least not my classes. Maybe doing an Honours in History wasn't the best idea if I wanted to have classes filled with hotties, but you'd think at a university with so many beautiful girls that more of them would find their way into my classes. I wonder what classes they're in? Probably sociology, or French maybe.

Add-drop period continues for another week, so maybe some girls will switch into History of the Italian Renaissance. Otherwise I'm transferring to sociology.

Food

I've been out a lot recently because of my work for the Tribune, so I haven't seen so much of the women. One of the problems of living with girls is that they sometimes invite more girls over. Last night GG and Genna had Becky and Madeline over for pasta. I had just gotten home from the Trib and Kate was here too, so we had six for dinner. And it was nice because we're all friends from Douglas and I got free dinner, but it is a lot of women. At least it reinforced an important truth: women are good for making you food.

Magazines

One of the things Kate and I have been talking about is getting a magazine subscription to something all four of us would like. It'd be nice to get mail and have something to read when eating alone. Anyway, we don't have one yet, which means that the only magazine here is GG's copy of the British Glamour.

The British Glamour is kind of like Cosmo but way less fun to read. Cosmo is mostly about sex, but the British Glamour is mostly about marriage, clothes, and how to avoid stalkers. This is not interesting. There was a useful part about men and women living together though. I think it was really about people who are dating, but I figured it might be applicable to us. It gave this advice: "[I]f you're going out so that he can have a lad's night at home, he should make sure the house is clean when you get back."

If you reverse the pronouns, this means that when I go out, Kate and GG should clean the apartment. Guess even British women's magazines can have good advice.

Living with Women

My name is Theo and I am in my second year at McGill University in Montreal. After living in Douglas Hall last year, I've joined my friends in migrating to the Plateau and getting an apartment. For various reasons, however, all three of my new housemates are women. I am starting this blog to describe the experience of living with one American, one Canadian, and one Frenchwoman.

I'm obviously pretty much the typical American guy. Interests include camping in Mundelein, my Swiss-American heritage, Anglo-Quebeckers, sporadically following the Cubs, and quality newspapers.

Kate, GG, and Genna are my housemates. Kate came to McGill from Westchester, New York, and sometimes sasses me too much. GG is from the south of France and does not understand North American culture. Genna is the only Canadian, from Calgary, and naturally loves oil.

Everyone arrives today. It's crazy.