Up to date with J

The odd things that happen in J's wombling through life.

wom·ble

  [wom-ble]

verb (used without object)

1. to wobble and walk unsteadily like one is walking on jello : he wombled his way to the door
2. to act without future direction or instruction : he wombled on the decision and decided to buy a spider

J has been studying hard about computers, programming and psychology. Everything around him has become wires and memory and programs. Sometimes when he is sleeping, he dreams that the entire world is made out of metal and he can understand everything that ever existed. He has a better understanding of the Matrix and sometimes holds experiments to see if he is the One.

J has been thinking hard about what the future holds and how he is going to approach it. With complete financial independence and big decisions coming up, J has never felt so young in his life even if this is the oldest he has ever been. Life has become simple steps and hurdles lined up in a row to be completed one at a time. Getting tuition set up, allocating money for rent, making sure the milk in the fridge doesn't go bad, talking to phone company about my plan, taking care of insurance. He believes that if he keeps it up, he'll just keep getting better and better at it until he levels up and it all becomes a breeze. Or so he hopes.

J has realized that the milk in the fridge has probably gone bad.

J has decided that he wants a dog. Sometime in the next 5 years, J is going to find a Samoyed puppy to take care of and call friend. J has been doing a lot of research as he has heard that it is a big responsibility. He watches video after video of dog training, reads articles about health and grooming, and sometimes talks on dog forums. He has been thinking about what to name the puppy, but he should wait until he meets the puppy because the name has to fit the puppy.

J has discovered that the expiry date of the milk in the fridge is next Wednesday. He will eat cereal for breakfast tomorrow. Tomorrow is a big day for J. He has to do a lot of assignments and prepare for his lab. He also realizes that his room is very messy and needs to be vacuumed. In fact, J decides that since he has so much to do this weekend, he will stop writing, press the publish button in the top right hand corner and work on writing his code. J stops typing on his keyboard.

JPlane

J vs UPS

or How to Self Clear Your Package and Avoid Brokerage Fees

 Oculus Rift

This. This thing has been my love, my muse, my raison d'etre for 6 months now. And I haven't even touched it yet. The reason I'm not holding this beautiful marvel of human creation in my hands? UPS.

The Stats

Cost of the Oculus Rift: $300.00
Cost of Shipping: $45.15

The Start

The story started 3 weeks ago when I received an email that my Oculus Rift has shipped from the warehouse in California and was now on board a UPS plane heading to the border. All was going well and I was checking the tracking status every second for updates. Anaheim to Los Angeles. Los Angeles to Detroit. Detroit to Windsor. And then suddenly the tracking status which was set to Shipping changed itself to Exception. I immediately called UPS to see what was up and as it turns out, it was a simple error on their part and that my package was going to be delivered on time and I could pick it up after I paid the COD. I'm sorry? The COD? Oh that's just some simple fees that the driver collects on delivery. You mean taxes? Yes sir. Taxes and brokerage fees. Brokerage? What's a brokerage fee? Oh it's the fee for clearing your package through customs since it's an international package. Oh okay. How much is that? A hundred and five dollars. What? The brokerage fee for your package comes to a hundred and five dollars. My package cost three hundred dollars. I'm sorry sir, every package crossing the border must pay a brokerage fee.

The Research

I called bullshit. How does it cost over a hundred dollars to simply cross a border? UPS was trying to tell me that brokerage fees were going to be more expensive than the shipping itself. So I did my research. I looked into some sites about brokerage fees and how they were basically scams and how to self clear your package. Armed with this knowledge, I once again called UPS and this is how it went down: Okay I am looking at your information now sir, how may I help you? Hi, I'm looking information about self-clearing my package. I'm sorry? Can you provide me with information about clearing my package with the CBSA (Canadian Border Services Agency more to come later) so I don't have to pay brokerage fees? I'm sorry but brokerage fees must be paid in order to receive your package. What if I want to broker my package myself? That's not possible, unless the sender indicates otherwise, UPS will automatically broker your package at the border. You should have mentioned this before the sender sent the package.

UPS support was very unhelpful and gave conflicting messages every time that I called them. Eventually one agent who knew what he was talking about told me that in order to self clear my package, all I would have to do was wait until my package was delivered and then reject payment forcing the package to back to the depot. Once at the depot, I can state my intentions to self-clear and the depot will email me the necessary forms and hold my package there. Nice guy.

The Rejection

And so I waited. Waited until my package entered Missisauga. Waited until the driver left with my package and came to my doorstep, where nobody was waiting. Failed first attempt. And so the driver, with my package in tow, returned to the depot and placed my package back into the system. At the same time, I was on the phone with UPS once again, requesting that they hold my package at the depot and that I would drop by and self-clear my package. After much debate about how UPS works, I finally got them to agree to hold my package for five business days. I felt satisfied, I felt like I had broken through the system, got them to admit to something no matter how reluctantly they fought it. The next afternoon, I received a notification from the tracking service: Failed second attempt. What?
How may I help you? I put in a request to hold my package at the warehouse and that I would self-clear it. I got a notification saying that the driver tried to deliver to my house again. You put in a request to hold the package at the depot? Yes. When? Yesterday morning. I have no record of such a request being placed. What?
This time I made sure. I sat on the line until the agent confirmed thrice that the request was made and that the driver would hold the package. I waited until I saw the tracking notification: Destination Changed. It took some effort but progress was made. The feeling of victory was diminished but at least we were going somewhere.

Lie #94833

The next afternoon, I received two notifications from the tracking service: Destination Changed. Failed third and last attempt. 
How may I help you? I made TWO requests to hold my package at the warehouse. TWO but the driver still tried to deliver my package. Why did my destination change again? My records show that the destination was changed yesterday to make the package go the UPS store for pickup instead. Who made the change? Let me check for you, may I put you on hold for a bit? Yeah. Doo doo bee do. Boo boo boop bop. Hello? Yeah. As for who made the change, we're not sure. How can you not be sure? Somebody must have made that change. I'm sorry, I'll put in a request for that now.

3 tries and I finally got the notification: Package held at warehouse for 5 business days.

Call Me

Now, once you got the package at the depot, somebody there will call you about sending the necessary forms to self-clear your package. You can't call them yourself or email them yourself (which is stupid considering that they can email you your forms) but you have to wait for them to call you. Herein lies the next challenge in the process. You have no way of contacting the depot and must depend on them to call you and they're not dependable at all.

How may I help you? Hi I was supposed to get a call from the depot about getting forms for self-clearing yesterday but I never got the call. Okay it says here in my record that they tried to call you at 7:45AM but you did not pick up. I checked my phone logs, I did not have any incoming calls at 7:45AM. Is your number still XXX-XXX-XXXX? Yes. I did not get any calls from UPS. Can I have them call again at noon - 1PM tomorrow? I'll wait for the call. Yes I can do that. I'll put in the request now.
How may I help you? Hi UPS was supposed to call me yesterday but I didn't get a call.  My records show that a UPS employee tried contacting you at 8:30AM yesterday but did not receive a response. I was unavailable at that time. I thought you guys were supposed to call me at noon. Yes I see that request. I'm not sure why they called you at 8:30AM. Can you give me their number or email so that I can call them? No we do not have that kind of information. But they work for you. How do you not know what their phone number is? We're not allowed to publicly give that information out. I can set it up so that they try contacting you at noon-1PM tomorrow.

So I waited. Sitting with my phone in my hand upon waking, I waited. Finally I got a call at 4PM.
Hello Mr. J, we got a message saying that you were trying to self-clear a package? Yes. I was supposed to get this call at noon today. I'm sorry we just now got a notice saying that we were to contact you. Okay fine, I'm trying to self-clear a package being held at your depot and I need some forms to bring to the CBSA. Oh yes we see that, if you could provide us with your email, we can scan those forms to you. Okay.

Three days of waiting for a single minute long phone call which lead to a single email. What is wrong with this company?

Finally Some Competence

Forms in hand, I made my way to the CBSA offices (near Union station in Toronto) and was quickly ushered to an agent.

Hey, I'm looking to self-broker a package that's waiting at the UPS depot. I have my forms here all filled out. Alright, let's see. Oculus Rift? That's a hardware technology right? I heard about those things, they look really cool. Let me quickly check my chart to see what the import fees for these kinds of things are. The total will come out to $42.15, you can pay at my partner over there in that other booth and then we'll send these forms to UPS. Do you guys take credit? Cash, credit, debit, cheque. We take anything. Alright cool thanks! Have a good day. You too.

Done done doneroo. I got my forms stamped, picked up my receipt and everything was sorted in a grand total of 10 minutes. Now that wasn't so hard was it?

Can I Kill Myself Now?

Forms, receipts, call logs, emails, everything in my handy dandy folder, I made my way to the UPS depot after work. Double checking that I had everything they could possibly ask for, I stepped into the depot where my package was lying. I was nearing the end of my journey and I could feel it. So close.

Hi, I'm here to pick up a package that's being held here. I'm self-brokering it and I have all the forms here ready to go. Uh... Self-brokering...? Let me get my manager. (to manager now) Hi, I'm self-brokering a package, I have my forms here and receipt proving that I've paid the fees and taxes. Oh okay... Uh... Let me... call the fulfillment center... I have all the forms here, signed, stamped, dated and ready to go. Okay let me grab your package and call the fulfillment center. (He left and came back with my package. I finally see it, the thing I paid for, the thing I spent weeks of my life getting. I could finally touch it) So the fulfillment center never got your forms. What? They don't have your forms. The CBSA sent them my forms. I watched the agent fax them to your center. I don't know. They say they never got them. I have the main copies on me right now. Can I fax them right now? Uh... Let me call... We can fax your forms to them but it's going to take a few business days to process them. Are... Are you kidding me? My package is only scheduled to stay here for a couple more days. How does it take a few days to process a single form. It's stamped, marked and there's a receipt saying I paid the fees! I'm sorry I don't know what to do, here's their number if you want to call them yourself.

Hello UPS how may I help you? Hi, I'm at a UPS depot, trying to self-broker my package but the fulfillment center is saying they never got my forms and that I can't get my package until they process them. Is there a way I can talk to the fulfillment center myself? Uh... Self-broker...? *click*

Something like five tries later: Hold on let me look into that for you. doo doo doo beep doo bo beep! Hi thanks for waiting, so what we can do for you is to reimburse your COD fees once we get the forms. So I pay my COD at the depot and you guys will give me that COD back once the forms are processed? Yes. How long does it take to get reimbursed. We can't say for sure but usually about 4-5 business days. Uh... Can I get that in writing?

The End

After confirming multiple times that there was a written record that I was promised a reimbursement for the entire fee, I finally stepped back into the UPS depot and paid the $100 fee with the bitter-est expression on my face. I got it. The box was stained with the blood, sweat and tears of my fight with UPS but it looked like I had finally won. I managed to save $60 of completely useless fees and while it probably wasn't much, it was my own personal blow to a company which gave such a terrible experience. About a week later, I got a cheque in the mail for the entire COD fee and that was it, my ties with UPS are finally severed. No more would I have to deal with that company ever again! I won! J beat UPS!

AIRPLANE

Toronto skies have not been this clear lately. It's been all smoggy and gross, but the planes fly through it as often as it ever. I've been obsessed with trying to get some clean airplane shots; this is the best I've been able to do with my camera and Adobe Elements.

Cupcakes galore

My friend took me to Ginger's Cupcakes and Desserts the other day. It's an adorable little dessert shop up in Richmond Hill.

I absolutely love all of their themed cupcake designs; they're so much fun and very well done. When we were leaving they were working on Mike Wazowski cake pops!

Head over to their Facebook page and give them a like! They post regularly with awesome dessert projects and behind the scenes-type updates.

Cynical much?

I just saw Teens React to this on The FineBros channel and I can't believe it took me this long to see this video. His Harry Potter in 99 Seconds video is still number one in my heart, but this parody is just on another level. I very much admire his talent.

Dinner at Banjara

(what I had)

Yum.

Also, we made a brief stop at BMV where I bought this.

My new favouite notebook.

when I was 5...

After J moved, his life got just a little more schedule-y.

Justin Timberlake is magical.

I've been listening to his Greatest Hits album and have come to the conclusion that he will always be on my  favourite artists list.

His songs never get old. There's something in his voice.

I will always rock out to SexyBack.

Drawings

Hey Sarah I'm bored. Tell me to draw something.

_________________________________________________________________________________

King of Spain:

_________________________________________________________________________________

An old lady

I didn't want to draw an old lady

_________________________________________________________________________________

Iron Man

I learned

_________________________________________________________________________________

Bitchy Mango

_________________________________________________________________________________

Kpop Superhero

They're both wearing too much black

_________________________________________________________________________________

Gaming Experiences I

A huge portion of my best memories in childhood involve sitting in front of the TV, playing Nintendo 64 with my older brother. Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros, Pokemon stadium (one and two of course), and the Banjo Kazooie franchise summed up my raison d'etre as a little kid. Growing up, and getting new consoles, getting a laptop, diving headfirst into the world of game development and production, I experienced my share of gaming moments but there are 5 that stand out for me as the pinnacles of gaming and that had the most impact on me as a gamer.

5. FIFA '07
    (otherwise known as the "BEST TWO OUT OF THREE! BEST TWO OUT OF THREE!" game)

This game. This motherflipping game.

Whenever me and my brother got into a dispute (or were in a gambling mood) it was straight to this game. Holy shit I lost upwards of $15 on this game (HUGE money as a kid. Think of all the popsicles you could buy with that money).

Probably not this one.

 Pulling off nasty moves, nail biting penalty time, beating each other up if we lost. We hated this game but we HAD to play it. It was malevolent, omnipotent, infinite, this game was the final word in seeing who gets the last waffle in the box.

4. Rainbow Road on Mario Kart 64

God damn it. Just looking at that picture makes me want to throw my controller away. This final map on Mario Kart 64 was the biggest problem in my life as a kid (now that I've grown up a bit, my biggest problems right now have also grown up ie. how do I make eggs, rice and shrimp into an edible meal). My entire life, I've been a perfectionist. Pretty much everything had to be high score, I would rather eat my own fingers than be in second place in something.

This is the first result I get when I google "delicious human fingers". Whew

Rainbow Road was my very first introduction into how FREAKING hard and punishing the world of gaming could be. The thing about this map was that there are so many jumps and so many obstacles that one small step and you're flying over the railings or eating a face full of chain chomp. This map helped teach me to man up, grit your teeth and finally finish first.

3. Halo 2 Multiplayer

Halo 2 was a great game in so many regards. It was rather innovative, it had fabulous graphics (for the time) and an intriguing story but what makes this game so important to me was that it was the first time that I actually played a game with friends. The multiplayer on Halo 2 was one of the best things invented except maybe the wheel. It was fast paced, exciting and it felt amazing when you finally finished a round undefeated. Despite all the rampant screen watching (when somebody looks at your part of the screen to see where you are) it was incredibly fun with friends. I remember rushing home during lunch to pop in Halo 2 into the x-box and spending the next hour just fighting it out mano el mano. I got pretty good at that game.

Damn screenwatchers

Week 2 of VEDA 2013

Another week as gone by and I managed to keep up this project! This is definitely going to be one of the biggest accomplishment of my life (exaggeration, but still significant).

Given, I cheated a couple of times by uploading my "stock videos" and I wasn't able to upload the video on time sometimes, but the important thing is that I'm still putting out a video for every day of the month. It's more like Video Every Day in April.

Here's the YouTube playlist of all of my VEDA posts so far..

And after the jump is all of my videos from Week II of VEDA 2013!

Too many people forget that contributing to the Internet is a two step process.

A friend of mine posted a discussion of his opinion on the question: "Should everyone write?"
This got me thinking, so I decided to make a blog post out of my answer to this question (not so much a reply to Sai's post anymore).

Should everyone write?

"... yes, everybody should be mentally and physically capable of expressing themselves through a written medium, but not everybody should share their writing."

For a while, I would have been in the same boat with Sai on this one. But in the last couple of years I have noticed the trends in social media, how content on the Internet is shared and viewed by its users; this has changed my mind. Anyone is deserving of criticism for the quality of their content, but I also think that everyone needs a critical look into how they are sharing their content.

If one finds themselves on a blog run by a 16 year old girl who laments about her 16 year old life in pure text speak and has an opinion about it, they have every right to express their opinions, no matter how biting it may be. Why? Because it's the Internet, and this 16 year old girl has decided to share her lamentations on it.

However, if a content creator coming out of this experience and has an opinion about who gets to share their content on the Interwebs, they need to criticize how they are sharing their content every bit as much as they are criticizing the decisions made by the text speak blogger. What is she doing right to get people on her blog? Will your blog also be getting the pageviews that she's getting?

Just today I received a Twitter follow by a small YouTuber in the States. It was clear that he was doing random Twitter follows to bring more people to his content. He's not a big shiny YouTuber with lots of subscribers and connections with super famous YouTubers, and I don't think his videos are amazing or that funny, but he's steadily making his way up there with his efforts on Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. 

He does commitment and outreach very well, a department in which I have failed throughout my last 5 years of trying to keep up livejournals, blogs and YouTube channels. This is why he's gaining a wider Internet audience in only a year of putting out content, and I won't even after five. 

So, should everyone write?

Yes, everyone write. Everyone should share their content. I think that everybody should seize their opportunity to explore their creative passions and share their ideas, opinions, and stories with the world. I think it's a wonderful opportunity to develop as a person and a content creator, as long as it is approached with an open mind to feedback and possibility. Even if someone's content sucks, they either quit after some time or learn how to improve, but they all have to start somewhere.

To go on a tangent, don't forget that this is the Internet. Don't take everything too seriously. For example, watch the video.

Too many people forget that contributing to the Internet is a two step process. 

1. Create quality content.

2. Promote it with quality shares.

It's especially a shame when only one part is done well, but that is the reality of many content creators.

Week 1 of VEDA13 (Vlog Every Day in April 2013)

I have successfully completed my first week of VEDA. I'm very happy that I started the project, but there comes a certain time of day every single day where I just want to kick myself for doing it.

Here, you can make the preferential decision to
a) Ignore my offering of daily videos
b) Check them out via
     i) this post, after the jump break
     ii) on my YouTube playlist where they will automatically be played, one by one.

GO!

I miss UQTR.

Summer is soon coming which triggered the prospective Explore students around me to start freaking out about whether they had been offered a place at any of the schools they applied to. This promptly stirred up some memories from my 6 weeks at l'Université de Québec à Trois-Rivières last summer. 

The Explore program is a 5 week program run by the Canadian government to encourage Anglophone students to travel somewhere in the country to learn French (and vice versa with the Francophone students with English). A ton of Glendon students go during their undergrad years because we are a bilingual campus and it's an incredible booster for practicing French speaking. It's paid for entirely by the government (except for travel fare there and back) which is pretty awesome. I stayed an extra week to take another course, which turned out to be a terrible week (I`ll vlog about it or something).

UQTR at night

The view from inside the building looking out to the front.

The lovely Michel Sarrazin residences! 

We got meal tickets which covered all of our weekday meal costs...

but over the weekends we had to resort to groceries, or in my flatmate's case, heating up McDonald's.....

When we went on trips we tried some "cultural" food. Italian pizza, poutine, onion rings = white people food?

Their cafes were pretty awesome though. Café Morgan is as rampant in Québec as Starbucks is in New York.

I think it was the first time I had ever tried macarons too!

Yeah.

And now I'm super determined to get a camera for this summer so I don't have to look back at my gross camera phone pictures for memories. Hopefully I'll be working full time this summer but I have some plans for new photo and vlog creations!

The Banana of Time

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

While this is interesting and for the most part, true. If you actually delve into the complexities and the metaphysical aspects of the statement, you'll find that it's not exactly correct.

fig 1: banana

There are three ways to tell time. Not by your watch, clock and computer, but rather by three "arrows" of time that point in a direction. These three arrows are mental, thermodynamic, and expanding universe. The easiest of the three to understand is mental. We experience time in one direction, forward. We can't suddenly say oh hey I want to go back to yesterday please. Take me there. That doesn't work (unless you're Hiro from Heroes), "forward" is the only direction we have ever lived with. 

fig 2: exception

The second arrow of time is thermodynamic. This is taking advantage of the second law of thermodynamics which states that the entropy in an isolated system NEVER decreases. We can imagine this as such. Say I have a wine glass in my hand and I toss it at the ground with great force. Unsurprisingly, it would shatter into hundreds of tiny tiny tiny pieces of glass that scatter everywhere (don't try this at home. unless you want to). The "disorder" in the system increased since the glass is scattered around the room instead of being a single, uniform entity. The second law of thermodynamics broadly states that in this case, it would be impossible to put the wine glass back together again without exerting some sort of energy upon it. We define the thermodynamic arrow of time to be pointing in the direction of increasing entropy. The universe is always continually getting more and more chaotic. Coincidentally (or maybe not) this is pointing in the same direction as our mental arrow of time.

fig 3: physics

The third arrow of time is a tricky one. The universe is expanding and we know this by observing various galaxies and calculating their speeds using the Doppler Effect. This arrow of time specifies that it is pointing in the direction at which the universe expands. In the early 1990's, scientists thought that theoretically the universe's expansion is slowing down and eventually it would stop expanding and being contracting. This is a mindbogglingly weird answer. If you think about it, all mass in the entire universe is attracted to everything else through gravity. Since everything is attractive in the universe, it would only be a matter of time before things being attracted to each other causes the universe to start shrinking right? So what happens to the expanding universe arrow of time then? Would it point in the opposite direction of our mental and thermodynamic arrows?

Things got even more messed up when the Hubble Space Telescope discovered something amazing. The universe's expansion isn't slowing down, it's speeding up. What? How? What's making it speed up? That's what scientists are dubbing as Dark Energy. 

fig 4: dark energy

Judging by the acceleration of expansion, it was discovered that about 70% of ALL the mass-energy in the universe is made up of dark energy. This dark energy is continually pushing the universe away from itself and countering the force of gravity felt by galaxies. For something that has such a huge impact on the universe, we know surprisingly little about it except that it exists.

Weird.

Gotta write my own list.

I don't know about you engineers, but choosing courses as a liberal arts student can be a painful process. We actually have some choice in what we take, and for an indecisive person like me with a general interest in pretty much everything.. it can get pretty frustrating.

While I need to take courses that will get me through my program I also just really, really want to take a bunch of courses that just sound cool and interesting. But of course to make things even more difficult, I have reached the point where I am questioning my entire program and why I am in it. How typical of me.

I grabbed my friend for some advice while I was at the cafe and he said some interesting things. This man is very wise, but halfway through his talks I end up questioning whether he even remembers the original question. Regardless of if he really answered my question or not, I found what he told me insightful so I thought I'd share:

Think of each of the courses you take as an investment. 
Of course, you could think this way about your program or your university degree in general, but for the purposes of simplicity we'll just consider a single university course.

Ask yourself the following questions and try to find the balance:
1. What is the return on this investment? Employable skills? Good grades?
2. What makes me happy?
3. What is the purpose in my life that I am trying to fulfill with my education?
    a) employment
    b) achieve financial freedom
    c) intellectual fulfilment
    d) to delay a reality check

He went on to point this out: "Look how the question of happiness is right in the middle on the list. It's the key balancing point."

He does have a tendency to elevate things to a grandiose level, but talking to him got me to face the questions that I hate having to answer. I don't think I've ever been able to answer these questions with answers that were fully my own. Especially the third one... the answer to that was always automated as answer a) which would eventually lead to b). Why? I'm a pro at second-guessing myself and my parents want me to follow the tried and true path to "success" in life.

Oh hai Mr Drew Dudley and Glendon LeaderShapers :D

Here's the thing though; I think I'm ready to write my own list. I heard a talk by the wonderful Drew Dudley yesterday and one of the things he said was that everybody needs to write their own list. That point really struck me because it's basically the same message that I've been hearing for the last two months, over and over again. My friend jokingly said this yesterday, but I think it really is a sign.



I've still got a lot to figure out and I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by all of this, but somehow I'm still super excited for our TEDxYorkU event this Thursday and I've got the rest of my second year of university to wrap up...

Screw Game of Thrones. Summer is coming.

Those other happy things I like to take close up pictures of

Jack Layton quote shirt from vintage thrift store Exile. I liked the quote, and I liked Jack Layton. I cried when I found out he had passed. I like hope, optimism, and love. I want to change the world. I like this shirt.

I have a folder in My Pictures called Those other happy things I like to take close up pictures of.
I don't know why I take pictures of half the shit I do, but there are some gems in there.

Still not off the roller coaster but...

HEY J YOU GREAT POOHEAD you stopped posting :(
But to be fair, I stopped posting AND responding. I admit, I haven't been the best at catching up (as usual).

This second year of university has been a crazy roller coaster.
There's still two weeks of class and a month of exams left, but I'm in a rare mood to recap so here we go...

Academically, this year has been hell. I've been driven to the point where I've finally realized that I shouldn't be studying what I am if I don't want to compromise my happiness and interest in my education. Making that realization and decision to change it was a long and torturous process, but I will be making a visit to my favourite Academic Advisor first thing on Monday to talk about what's possible for me. This struggle has helped me to realize what I should be doing, but it probably won't fly as smoothly past my parents and that is a battle I will have to face in a couple of months.

Other than my academics, everything else has been absolutely amazing. It will infuriate Mother to no end that I have made more progress in gaining work experience and networking than in improving my grades but I guess seeing the learning curve is just a cultural, generational, societal difference that we will have to struggle through. The two campus jobs that I have been working have taught me so much this past year, and I've met incredible people through them. I've also further developed great relationships with my peers, colleagues, and bosses, and I am so grateful for how much I've gained and learned from them. They are great people that helped me through my struggles that had been occupying my brain for the majority of the school year.

I went to LeaderShape, which kept me out of the city while the rest of my old friends were back to visit. Although I was a little upset at the missed opportunity to see them, I really could not have traded my experience for another. The leadership conference put things into perspective, clarified things that I didn't even know I was questioning, and created a whole new batch of connections to some amazing people I would never have been able to meet otherwise. It also stirred up an incredible amount of confidence and determination in myself to be more outwardly true to who I am. I came back with more emotion and willingness to express my thoughts and opinions on the campus issues I was concerned about.

LeaderShape has gotten me to come out of my comfort zone and take these kinds of "bare my soul" projects like the Draw My Life video.

So what exactly have I come to realize?
- I missed having J around in my second semester. Although we could only hang out once every two weeks while he was still in Toronto, those chill times helped to keep me distracted and sane in the fall semester
- I probably won't go to teacher's college as I had planned to for the last 3 years. I want to approach a career in education not through teaching but through administration and policy work, so I'm looking at other options after graduation
- I will still do a Masters in Education at one point in my life. But I am now very open to whatever career paths and life experiences come my way between my undergrad and that masters degree
- I cannot finish my English degree. Ideally I will be able to do Communications and Linguistics at Glendon as an Individualized Studies major (since Communications is not a Glendon program until 2015) but that's what I'll have to talk to Advising about
- I cannot repress my creative side any longer. I need to do things that will let me experiment and learn in design, photography, and story telling through other (digital) mediums
- My videos on my Glendon channel mean a lot more to me than I thought. I really care about what I have been doing as an eAmbassador and continuing to do this type of thing as a vlogger, editor, or producer is in my plans for the next while

I think that makes for a sufficient recap at this point. There are still so many things that need to be clarified and figured out, but I just need to take the time for them so I don't make my decisions based on stress and confusion again. I'm not off the roller coaster, but I feel as though I've been on enough rides to know what to expect and how to deal with it.