i have been enjoying the nice weather very much. i am taking the bus to quebec city in an hour or so and meeting up with two people i have never met, who are also doing the same summer program as i am. i hope we will have a nice time and i do have a backup plan if it is painfully awkward.
this week, i wrote part of the feature piece in arthur focusing on the (RED) campaign, which i mostly think of as a pretty ridiculous "solution" to a hugely complicated problem, which is largely due to western consumption habits, which this model only encourages. but that's besides the point.
so i was opening my email account, i saw a link on a sidebar, you know, the ones that usually say "britney and k-fed break-up" and "5 tips for a great relationship." this one read "activism made easy."
silly me! here i was thinking that activism was hard work, frustrating situations, facing impossible odds but sometimes making small, important gains. MSN can tell me how easy it really can be!
i had a crazy day today! i called my parents after i spoke briefly with the douche-bag minister of education (of ontario). the more politicians i speak to the more i hate them all. fuck the party line bullshit, tell me what YOU think and what you think your government can do. fucking bullshit about making university more accessible? you're telling that to a bunch of student reporters who probably have over $100,000 (aka YOUR ANNUAL SALARY) in debt and who aren't even finished their studies. dude, chris bentley, stop blaming everyone but yourself. take some responsibility.
when a student journalist asks you if it's right that they are $20,000 in debt but has worked full-time every time she is not in school and works part time during 80% of her studies and she still can't afford to feed herself and probably will have a really hard time finding a decent job once she's done, you don't give her a bullshit answer like "well the NDP and the Cons fucked it up and we can't change history!"
somebody asked him how his govt was making education more accessible and he went on and said "WE RAISED THE AMOUNT OF OSAP you can get" which is basically saying "WE'RE PUTTING YOU DEEPER INTO DEBT, PLEASE THANK US FOR THAT."
as you can tell, i was a bit cranky after that. i need to leave this office, what am i still doing here?!
on a completely random note, it makes me happy when i find typos and mistakes in big publications (i find at least one every sunday when i read the toronto star) or in big websites, like the product red manifesto. see if you can spot it.
will and i are together. we took a week apart to see how we felt, and it was pretty hard on both of us. it took us another week to find the time to talk and work things out. the future is so scary, but so is the present, and it's a little less scary together, as barfy as that may sound.
wax mannequin will play scrabble with me tonight in sadleir house.
i need to do readings, write a paper, and sleep, and then go to a meeting, and set up for wax, all in the next 10 hours. also, i need to get out of the office i have been in for 24 hours.
nostalgic
