we can die in peace knowing we tried to change our own ways
Date: Sunday March 28th 2004
Feeling...: excited about everything (and will elaborate in due course)
Listening to: Hootie and the Blowfish. (Damn it why did they have to give themselves such a stupid name?) They always make me smile, there's something genuinely happy about their music. *singing: "there's nothing I can do, I only wanna be with yooooooouuuuuu.."
Excitement brewing over: my train trip, getting my license soon, getting residence info from Mac in a few days, Amaan (possibly...please?) coming to Montreal with me, Amaan being back home in the first place, hearing from Julia, the weather gradually warming up...and literally just discovering the "table maker" button at the bottom of my screen which writes the html script for a table layout FOR you (why didn't anybody tell me about this before???)
Concerned about: nothing, at the moment. I feel *light*
People/things that made me smile: spending time with my dad. My mom and sister are in Vancouver for a couple of weeks, so it's been just the two of us for a few days already and I'm enjoying it. As with anything, you tend to take a situation for granted when it becomes too usual. I see my dad all the time, of course, but it's never usually just the two of us, and we're making the most of it while it is. He's even taking time off of work next week and we're going to Kensington market to get some soursop :)
New thing(s) I�ve learned: I'm currently reading "The Trouble With Islam" by Irshad Manji. The ideas she discusses are not new to me; in fact I've been turning them over in my mind for quite some time now. What the book offers are examples and facts which support these ideas and which (though I don't like using this expression, it seems appropriate) beef up my own arguments.
On My Mind:still mulling over a debate with Carly, Denise and Amaan on Friday night which began with a discussion about "The Corporation" and quickly evolved into an argument over, in the simplest terms possible, whether corporations manipulate us or we control their actions. I think that the latter is more true than the former. I strongly believe that we, as consumers, have far, far greater power over companies than any of us may even realize; that through the simple yet numerous choices we make every day of whether or not to purchase certain products, we have the potential to instigate great changes in the world. Just think...if everyone in the world said "no" to animal testing, for example, what would become of companies like Clairol, Revlon, L'Oreal, Procter and Gamble, Cover Girl, Maybelline, Clinique, Johnson & Johnson...
Additional witty comments (heh heh heh): Haven't updated much recently but that doesn't mean lots hasn't been going on. First, Amaan finished the Canada World Youth program and has been home since last weekend. I don't think I realized how much I'd missed him until I saw him again, although it didn't feel like he was gone for that long (seven months and change, altogether). Maybe that's just because, looking back, I've been through a fair bit meself in the past few months which makes it seem as though time passes faster.

If that's the case, the next few months are gonna fly by me. On Tuesday I went down to Union station and booked my train trip out west. Leaving on the 29th of April, I'm going to Edmonton, Reddeer, Calgary, back to Edmonton, Vancouver, back to Edmonton again (it's right in the middle of everything, what can I say...), home for a night, and then tentatively to Montreal for a bit, finally returning home sometime in early June. I'm as excited about getting there as actually being there...altogether, eleven days of beautiful scenery, likely meeting other travellers along the way, and all the uninterrupted reading time I could ask for. Yum :)

*sigh* gotta run...I have a driving class in half an hour and am still in my pjs. Cheers!

cooooome oooooooon summer...
Date: Thursday, March 11th 2004
Feeling...: like I'm wasting a really good hair day by not going anywhere, but at the same time, it's delightfully relaxing to just get a bunch of stuff done at home
Listening to: "Boys of Summer" by the Ataris and wishing it was warm again
Excitement brewing over: my aunts are coming to our place, one from Vancouver and one from Calgary, albeit for a funeral. *sigh* everything doesn't always come in a nice, rosy package, I suppose.
Concerned about: planning my train getaway. I didn't realize how close it's getting to my ideal date of departure and so far all I have are vague ideas of what's going on.
People/things that made me smile: large, scary men wearing kilts, emblazoned with "Korn" patches and a skull and crossbone belt, alternately screeching indecipherable lyrics into a microphone and playing bagpipes as accompaniment to an already-loud rock band. In other words, Saturday night. (It was something to remember, anyway...) Also, have been going through old Pandywaff entries in an effort to compile a "best of" list...I amuse myself :P
Additional witty comments (heh heh heh): I was watching hockey the other day and it occurred to me that if you really step back and look at it, we're all slightly insane to be able to take it seriously. Ten grown men, training for years, getting paid millions of dollars to battle eachother for the possession of a small, plastic disc. Whoever is able to get hold of the damned thing is then cheered on wildly as he makes a mad dash for his opponents' goal, where another man struggles to protect his team's *special area*. Occasionally someone will tell someone else his mom's a whore and they'll start smashing eachother as though they've never heard that one before, and the referees will jump in and send one or both of them to sit in the corner and think about what they've done. And every Saturday night it's the same routine, yet we find it so incredibly exciting...what odd creatures we are :P

Speaking of odd creatures, we finally got a new microwave after our old one decided it no longer felt like cooperating with us. It took a long time for Sears to get the one we wanted in stock, and in the meantime we'd been relying on our old, old one...we bought it when I was three years old, I think, and compared to our new one it's a fossil. This thing has a BRAIN, for Christ's sake...it has an option where you just press the "reheat" button and it stays on until it senses your food is warm. Imagine that. Gone are the days of pressing a disgusting amount of buttons and waiting for far too long to nourish thyself...and that, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, was sarcasm. We're solving problems we didn't even know we had until we were given the "quick touch express" solution - but I'll give it credit for one thing, it has permanently revolutionized making microwaved popcorn in my house...