Shamrocking your world/Viva la revolution.

It seems that $103 million that has been cut from Quebec student loans and bursaries. As someone who is totally dependent on loans, I'm not exaclty thrilled about this. Most Quebec University and Cegep students decided to strike on Wednesday. Unfortunately, I had a mandatory 3 hour class then, so I couldn't go to the big march.

Luckily 200,000 others did. Besides, McGill wasn't even officially on board for Wednesday. Rather than join all the protesters who lined McGill college, SSMU (our students' council) changed its mind four or five times before deciding to strike. "Umm...we're going to join the student strike, but in a much lamer and more agreeable way, so please hire us to be investment bankers when we graduate next year ". Though our strike was Friday, there was no definitive news the night before. Weak, dudes.

As a result, I had a restrained St. Patty's day Thursday night, thinking that I had to be in class at 8:30 Friday morning. Denise, Sofi, Maryanne, Jo and a bunch of old peoples from my old job all braved the Crescent street hooch that had invaded Mad Hatter's and tried to soak up all the St. Patty's day jubilation. Hatter's was a very different scene that night. The old guy in the EXTREMELY tight leather pants who kept rubbing his ass on my leg while he lined up his pool shots wasn't even the skankiest thing there.

On St. Patty's day 2004 I had some sort of plague and went home right after work to crawl into bed. The closest thing to green beer I could manage was NyQuill. Actually, those two are pretty similar. Anyhow, I vowed then to make up for it on St. Patty's 2005 by Shamrocking the world. Nope. We ended up leaving the bar around midnight, sober enough to walk without a visible stagger.

Hangover-free on Friday morning, I got to class on time (for the second time ever for this particular class) only to find that my class voted to go picket instead of hear a lecture. Since the class is called "Anti-Oppression Practice" I had a feeling this might happen. Most people just went home, but a few of us stood around the Milton gates trying to keep cars and students from entering campus. Of course the man (ok... three elderly security guards and two female cops) stopped us and made us let people through. We waved signs and shook tambourines and drew on the sidewalk, but no one seemed to care. It seems that people are just not in the mood for hippies at 8:30 AM.

Actually, I noticed that the hippies at McGill have been getting progressively crappier since my first year. Hardly anyone has dreadlocks anymore, there's no Che Guavara shirts anywhere and the few remaining punks look more like Avril Lavigne than....well, punks. I think the time could have better been spent sleeping. Oh well, !Viva la revolution!