Every day, I walk to university. I see many of my kind, heads down against the wind, squinting into the sun checking for traffic and shifting anxiously, waiting for the College Drive crosswalk light to turn.
Lately, however, we have faced a new enemy on our daily jaunts. I see my comrades’ eyes glued to the sidewalk, their feet placed carefully, walking in fear of the slippery ice that causes gymnastic feats more appropriate for some twisted Cirque du Soleil performance.
On Jan. 23, Tim Hortons hot cup sizes were shuffled down in scale to accommodate the new and improved extra large size.
Your small double-double is now an extra-small, your medium is now a small and so forth. The newest addition to the homegrown franchise’s cup family is a rather large 24 ounces. This new size sits neatly between the McDonald’s medium (21 ounces) and large (32 ounces) soft drink sizes, and stands a couple ounces shy of that two-six one must have consumed the previous night to warrant a coffee so large.
For years I’ve held a strong belief that, given two products, the older one is probably cooler, more authentic and better made. So I cling to the past whenever I can. Being fed up with this my brother told me, “Mike, you can’t pretend you’re living in the ’60s.” — which is precisely what I did all weekend.
And when it came time to write up this article, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.
Remember the episode of Seinfeld in which George tries to mix two of his great loves, food and sex? It all starts innocently enough with a vanilla-scented candle, but by the end of the show his partner catches him chowing down on a pastrami sandwich mid-foreplay.
George probably took things a step too far, but he’s not the first person to combine food and sex. Open up an issue of Cosmo or Men’s Health and you will be sure to find a list of foods that will feed your libido. But do these so-called aphrodisiacs actually work?
I went into my first term of university in September of 2011 with over $5,000 in my savings account. This was a pretty healthy sum, I thought. Well, try telling that to my currently draining bank accounts.
Am I taking a student loan? Oh, hell no! Was I smart enough to win a scholarship for my tuition? Not as long as I’m an arts and science student.
So my only option is to pay tuition in cash. Currently I have enough money for the 2012 winter term, and a bit for the start of my second year, but either way, I am royally fucked right about now.
If you’re as careful with your money as I am, you will choose to walk some distance to find your own bank’s ATM in order to avoid being charged fees just to access your own funds.
However, there are days when the weather is horrible, or you don’t have time, or there are just no ATMs from your bank within walking distance. That’s when you’ll find yourself staring at the ATM, annoyed with the fees. These fees are unfair because they disproportionately hurt low-income individuals like students.
When it comes down to Saskatchewan winters, there really is no pleasing us prairie folk.
According to the annual Weather Outlook released in November by The Weather Network, we were expected to experience “below normal” temperatures in Saskatoon this winter — although up until the heavy snowfall we received last weekend, we have felt nothing but wondrously warm temperatures.
Aristotle once said that “no great genius ever existed without some touch of madness.” People are rarely surprised when they hear an artist took copious amounts of drugs or committed suicide. And when it happens, the media loves to mythologize that artist as “a misunderstood genius.” As a result, we end up thinking that creativity and mental illness are inevitably linked.
Perusing my bookshelf and music collection, I do see overwhelming evidence that artists are more susceptible to mood disorders. But are their illnesses making them creative, or are mood and creativity not causally linked; or could mood disorders actually stifle creativity?
Sometimes I envy all the Lisa Smiths and Mark Williamses of the world. Your dull and generic names protect you from the all-seeing eye of Google. To an employer, a search of your name may just prove an exercise in tedium as millions of your generically-named brethren are displayed. Your cookie cutter names shelter your awkward drunk Twitter updates and DeviantArt page of “artistic” macro photography.
I’m not that lucky.
Google my name and you only get me. And speaking as someone who learned to build websites at an early age and possibly once had a thing for fan fiction — don’t judge me — that’s a damn dangerous thing. I’ve learned some tricks for keeping my online entity clean; for my fellow uniquely-named users, these may prove invaluable.
As I venture into another semi-productive academic term, I am once again forced into the post-holiday banter with “insert name here” acquaintances. Now I can handle the occasional “Did you go back home for the break?” or “Did you get any good presents?” But it’s the question “So what’s your new year’s resolution?” that I find most irritating. This is when our mouths go dry and we meticulously pick our minds to come up with a perfect answer to such a question.
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