Nuit Blanche 2015 and chinese food

Another year, another Nuit Blanche.
Another Nuit Blanche, another set of adventures.
Another set of adventures; a time to remember... and forget about proper sleep schedules.

I still haven't fully recovered from this year's white night. After spending a few weeks readjusting my sleep schedule, I now find that it is scrambled once again.
Sleep, insomnia, dreams; they've always been recurring themes on this blog, have they not? And so I find that, once again, I must make every effort to normalize after the unavoidable sleep disruption that Nuit Blanche inherently causes.

What I've taken to doing is a cold shower. Every. Morning. Okay, so I can't really call it a cold shower because it's not entirely all cold. But I make sure to have at least 10 seconds of icy cold water flow down so that I can zap the slumber (or lack thereof) out of me. It works quite well at changing my mindset. All the anxious and depressive thoughts that stay captive in my bedroom seem to trickle away when the water hits my skin.

My feelings of inadequacy, of a creative mind burned off by the toils of daily life also seem to momentarily disappear. Just thinking about today's cold shower helps me with the writing I'm doing here as well.

So Nuit Blanche was actually fantastic. I went with a rather large group (for once) and I managed to stick to the group all night. The lot of us ate a delicious but incredibly frustrating meal (and not because of the food, because it was awesome) at a Chinese restaurant downtown. My sister, her roommate, three québécois folk, a British psychologist and her local Torontonian friend, and finally, myself. The reason for the frustration was not what I anticipated: the issue was that two people in the group ordered just like everyone else, and one of them did not get what they ordered and the second just... didn't get anything at all. It took 30 min (we had to run the clock eventually; it was getting ridiculous!) after we were all served for the last guy to get his food, by which time we were all done. So it sucked for him. As for me, my hot pot chicken/ginger/onion dish was really amazing. And quite paleo. And although I can't be 100% sure that there was no gluten in the food, being with newfound friends was enough to make me forget all the trouble of eating like a hunter-gatherer in a modern world.

Not many pictures to share (my beautiful camera-phone is now but a broken remnant of its former self), but some highlights include:

• A white bubble not unlike the ROM's/Science Centre's planetarium projecting natural disasters and a scrolling marquee counting the dead. Very powerful, very intense, very unforgiving.
• A trade-in centre where I traded in one of the lanterns hanging around my neck for a handmade candlestick holder. I think the idea was to make a meaningful connection between denizens of the Western world and denizens of more (economically) impoverished countries such as Colombia.
• A voting both where you had to choose between YES for abolishing borders or NO for keeping borders. It was a really ambiguous question... and I voted no. I still wonder why I voted no. So it was a great exhibit, because it stimulated discussion in our group.
• My personal favourite: A rickety-floating-metal-monkey-dome-cage contraption that was shaped like a doughnut and which made ominous sounds as it was buoyed up on the edge of Lake Ontario

I will make a last commentary here. I don't understand why people feel the need to get absolutely trashed during Nuit Blanche. It's such a shame. There's so much to do! But I get it. It's a pretty special night and I admit that I smiled a couple times at some of the shenanigans that the drinkers were up to.
But the fight I witnessed on the Yonge line at 3 am was NOT cool, and it got to me that a crowd was encouraging two young men to fight in the middle of a subway.

Still, I am looking forward to next year. Maybe my phone will magically fix itself and I'll have a couple o' cool pictures to share. For now, my words will have to do.