It must be October, because responsibility just came knocking at my door this morning and hit me over the head with a sledgehammer when I went to go answer it. After pulling what was essentially at 12-hour day between UBC and Sierra downtown, the last thing I wanted to hear is that my client -- whom I kind of wanted to be done with by the beginning of September -- would like me to redo the entire site because she's decided it's not legible enough. It's in 12-point Tahoma, that's legible in my books!
As if I didn't know this was coming -- I've been overcommitting myself for time immemorial. It's a chronic condition. The more interesting bit of the day came from a 2-hour long conversation with Marisa, however. I idolize that girl, I swear; negative media influences bounces off her, she sticks it out in physics still, and has a perpetually cheerful disposition that pharmaceutical companies would be able to cure this depression epidemic with by distilling it into pills. And she drinks a whole lot of tea, which makes it a winning combination.
I'm a little miffed on the one hand that depression and eating disorders weren't unique to me, but far more concerned now that almost everyone I know in my generation has become hypersensitive to an unrealistic standard of beauty. The feminist arguments -- that as women gain more social power, the ideal female body has become weaker and the ideal stronger -- has some resonance with me, I suppose, but the obsession with thinness (or muscle definition, in guys) strikes me as much a self-destructive behaviour as smoking, drinking, or the casual use of soft drugs; this tendency becomes reinforced at point in life, on TV, as we look in the mirror, or in the words of our friends. How did we ever convince ourself that our worth is tied to a number, any number?
The fog has been rolling in for a full day now, hugging the campus trees and lampposts until all you can see is white and spots of light. From the back seat of a car, the ugliness of human construction has been wiped away with cloud, the broken dirt, bare wood, and swaths of concrete replaced by a primordial mist. Here, in the same place, we see what this place could have been; freed of our own illusions, we come to be aware of how space holds us together, as the streetlights glow its diffuse yellowness. Here, we can be content in time. Here, the beginning comes again, and we still live free.
As if I didn't know this was coming -- I've been overcommitting myself for time immemorial. It's a chronic condition. The more interesting bit of the day came from a 2-hour long conversation with Marisa, however. I idolize that girl, I swear; negative media influences bounces off her, she sticks it out in physics still, and has a perpetually cheerful disposition that pharmaceutical companies would be able to cure this depression epidemic with by distilling it into pills. And she drinks a whole lot of tea, which makes it a winning combination.
I'm a little miffed on the one hand that depression and eating disorders weren't unique to me, but far more concerned now that almost everyone I know in my generation has become hypersensitive to an unrealistic standard of beauty. The feminist arguments -- that as women gain more social power, the ideal female body has become weaker and the ideal stronger -- has some resonance with me, I suppose, but the obsession with thinness (or muscle definition, in guys) strikes me as much a self-destructive behaviour as smoking, drinking, or the casual use of soft drugs; this tendency becomes reinforced at point in life, on TV, as we look in the mirror, or in the words of our friends. How did we ever convince ourself that our worth is tied to a number, any number?
The fog has been rolling in for a full day now, hugging the campus trees and lampposts until all you can see is white and spots of light. From the back seat of a car, the ugliness of human construction has been wiped away with cloud, the broken dirt, bare wood, and swaths of concrete replaced by a primordial mist. Here, in the same place, we see what this place could have been; freed of our own illusions, we come to be aware of how space holds us together, as the streetlights glow its diffuse yellowness. Here, we can be content in time. Here, the beginning comes again, and we still live free.
