The Passionate Friar
Monday November 14th, 2011 with Phelonius Friar
Back from Vancouver and in a bad mood because Ottawa public transit sucks

I had the opportunity to travel to TRIUMF in Vancouver (Canada's primary particle and nuclear physics laboratory) on Carleton business as part of my part time work in the physics department working on cosmic ray tracking systems. I had an amazing time in Vancouver, but after a couple of days, I started to get angry because I realized that Ottawa was *not a city*. I'm not sure what it is, but I've lived in cities and I've travelled to cities, and Ottawa is not one. A real city is alive and vibrant, Ottawa is more like a bank lobby with shitty mass transit. I grew up in this town, and over the past 10 or 15 years it's become a parody of what it used to be... all the life has been crushed out of it. And it makes me angry. The tracks I picked today were angry, or at least loud, or at least energetic. I'm hoping that by releasing some frustration that I'll be able to trudge through another few years of this -- going from suburbs of the living dead to this concrete and parking lot university that pushed out every single square inch that used to be there for students to enjoy being students and its nightmarish food services monopolies to add injury to insult.