I really don’t know how often this sort of thing happens. I’m not all up on the space stuff… but I’d imagine it happens at least moderately often? Maybe?

So, things are going really well. Im not losing it as fast as I want to, but I’ve changed how I eat and burn calories to the point where it actually has been a life change. I’m still about 50lbs more than I want to be (and about 40 lbs more than my doctor wants me to be) so I might pick it up a bit for the last end of the summer, but I’m not making any promises, if I push too hard it is easy to fall backwards, quickly. But at this rate by the end of the year I should be the weight that I’ve wanted to be! That’s really exciting…

I did join Weight Watchers, but I’m not using it as much as I should. Im not counting my points very carefully… but I should be. Now THAT I will promise myself about…I will count my points!!! hahah. Then that will speed this up too.

THEREFORE - the update?! it’s going really well, I look great and feel great! The feeling great is the motivator - I am not as lazy and way more willing to get up and run around. I feel lighter and have more energy everyday. Its great!

The one thing that has really be bothering me about this whole World Cup thing at work is how nationalistic people get. Like… this one guy got really upset that I was supporting an Asian team and not my own nationality… And I was like “Dude, I’m Canadian, we don’t have a team in it” and he was like “well then pick where your family is from” but they don’t have one either. I didn’t tell him that, I just told him it was stupid to pick a team just because that’s where my great great great grandparents may have been from. Maybe they hated it there!

The same guy got really offended (for some reason) whey the Japanese guy we work with said that he might pick South Korea, too. Same Guy got all uptight saying that a Japanese person shouldn’t support anything South Korean because of previous occupations by South Korea over Japan. … Japanese guy got really pissed off at Same Guy and schooled him in why nationalism is ridiculous. Plus, Japanese guy was born in California.

Nationalism is so irritating. Especially when the people talking about it are Canadian. What is there to be proud of??? Most Canadians are such mutts that they’d have to be proud of being from like 8 different countries, and at least one of those countries probably had a war with at least one of the other countries in the list.

But besides that, the World Cup at work has been a good time. Its getting me interested in the game, and I like to take interest in sports. It is fun to get excited about a team winning! And since the playoffs were a total bust for all the teams I picked… I hope the World Cup is better! GO S.KOREA!!

I quit my job and am moving back to Toronto on June 16th. Guelph has been nice, mostly because I’ve got to spend a lot of time with my mom… but I really miss Toronto. I miss my apartment, walking around without pants on, going down to the apartment pool whenever I want and being a 50 minute transit ride to downtown Toronto. These are all things that can’t be replaced by the shitty transit “city” of Guelph. They cut their bus service down, too. Which makes matters worse.

Work has been great though. I wish I could pick it up and move it to Toronto - that would be ideal. But I’ve decided to just go to school. This way I can get a work-study job on campus doing work at the library or something while I take 9 credits. I got into a Urban Social Policy class that I’m really excited about. I’ve really enjoyed my urban studies classes in the past, and this one seems to be taking two ideas that I’ve enjoyed and combining them together.

I know I said I’d blog all summer, but I lied… and I don’t care. I spend a lot of time helping my parents with the book my step dad is writing about dying congregations in the United Church of Canada. (Here is his website… I made that, too.) I’ll actually be going to the UCC conference in the middle of the month to help him sell the books and stuff. Doing this isn’t really helping my reputation as being a United Church of Canada spy in all my freethought groups.

Speaking of freethought groups - FAC has a new executive lead by Emily. I stepped down as president and took a role I had no intention of taking: VP-Special Projects. I really shouldn’t have taken it since I’m leaving the country in 6 months, but I guess it is good that I’ve been involved… it’s less irritating this way to make sure they have all the information/passwords for things that only I have.

About leaving in 6 months - I’m a little freaked out about the war-talk going on in Korea. While it seems like South Korea doesn’t want to get into anything.. North Korea is just such a sketch-bag. Now, I know that they have been at war for like the past 30 years - but this seems to be really serious. Even the South Korean papers (like the Korea Herald) are reporting about how serious it is, when in the past they have all but ignored stuff about North Korea that makes the news here in Canada. What I do find particularly interesting are the tones in news between Canada/UK and South Korea. The BBC has reported that SK has put complete sanctions into place with NK - but SK papers openly report all the things that are still being shipped back and forth and that the sanction is really just all talk. So… UK news does seem to make it look worse than it is, but it is a pretty serious thing.

But I haven’t given up - I still plan on going. If things are still particularly bad in November that I might look at waiting until April, or maybe even going to Taiwan, but I think things will be okay. We’ll see. My mom doesn’t want me to go, but… I really do want to…lol

There are so many conferences I want to go to this summer! CFI’s Discovery Institute in DC, the student leadership conference (for both CFI and SSA), TAM in Vegas… and a couple others. I think I’ll have to pick just one, though. I thought I was *super* cleaver picking the Sunday - Wednesday work week so my weekends start on Thursday morning… but it means they end on Sunday night. Which puts a cramp in weekends away. Bad planning on my part.

I lost 2 lbs a couple weeks ago, and none last week. I won’t be weighing myself until I get home to Toronto since my scale is there. (I guess I could remeasure on my mom’s scale and just use it for pound loss tracking…)

If I were blogging a lot right now these are the things I would definitely blog about! Enjoy:

The Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and how sad it is

USA banning Kinder Eggs and how that should lead to the USA banning Happy meals

Boobquake was super silly

Hipsters and their un-hip environmental practices

So, now that school is over AND I’m moving back to my mom’s house for the summer I have no more excuses. I’d go weigh myself right now and post it, but I weigh myself in the morning… … not after I’ve eaten and drank all day! That’s crazy! But I swear to do it first thing in the morning.

My plan for the summer is to go back down to 1200 - 1500 calories with exercising everyday (walking around my mom’s neighborhood, maybe even running!, swimming when I come back to Toronto for visits and using my mom’s super cool elliptical). I can’t even imagine how many calories I had today… (I just calculated at least 2110…) but I feel like crap and want to lose weight before I go to China. I want to be able to buy new clothes in China since it will be cheaper there! So…. I should be able to lose at least 35 - 40 pounds before I leave for China at the end of August. That leaves me 30-ish pounds away from my overall goal, but I think that the clothes size I wear won’t be that different at that point, the clothes will just fit differently. If I wouldn’t have screwed around last month and this month I’d only be like 8 lbs away from my goal when I left for China.

Oh well… Just look to the future! My mom, my friends and my blog will hold me accountable for the summer.

(PS - I think my blog needs a new look for the summer! Since I’m reviving my blog, it needs a fresh springy summery look! Then I will feel like I can blog more and be excited about it. I love redoing the look of my blog. )

update: i gained 6 lbs… which actually puts me back at almost the same weight as January first…THATS depressing, but I pretty much deserve it. Im ready to go again!

<3

But that’s not the good news.

The good news is that I got a job for the summer working midnights in Guelph. The good part about that isn’t that I’ll be living in Guelph. While I do love Guelph, and I do love living with my mom - it’s just not the best thing about it. Having a job isn’t even the good news. Having a job is a very good thing, making money to pay for things to do in the summer and in the following fall is always very helpful. But the GOOD news, the BEST news is that it is a midnight shift. This means I will have ample time to do a few things that I really want to do.

Things I Really Want To Do:

1. Publicly begin developing my master’s degree thoughts

I have started a few different ideas about what to do for my masters degree (and then probably extend that into PHD). There has been this constant craving to do something with religion, but I’m not sure if this interest can extend into the academic world without having taken more than 5 or 6 courses in Religion. Not sure.

There is the field that I have been interested in for a long time - urban planning and social geography. I’m interested in it in two different ways:
i) Urban planning in the Global South - specifically in the development/improvement of squatter/informal settlements. These places are often dealt with by simply clearing the slums and replacing the people, but it is widely documented that a) people don’t like that, b) the new areas become full of disease and poverty and crime very quickly and c) it’s expensive. I think there is probably a way to integrate eco-village-esque planning into urban squatter settlements to redesign them, slowly - cheaply - permanently. Not only would this hypothetical and non-existent solution be better for the slum dwellers it would directly feed into this new craze of “beautification” that is plaguing under developed nations.
ii) Urban renewal and sustainability - specifically taking the lessons from ecovillage and environmentally ridiculous plans and implementing them in tiny scales in currently existing infrastructure. For example - tiny little wind mills on the tops of buildings that help power them or using grey water more often or green roofing projects. I think there is a lot to be done in this area - but I’m far less interested in it.

Then there is this new area of interest that I’ve gotten into… technology and innovation. I took this ecological economics course this year, and totally loved it. But the one thing I *really* hated was that ecological economics, who otherwise seem totally rational and reasonable, are really really really against technology. So I started looking into *why* they are against technology and it lead to this idea that they aren’t really against technology. What, I think, they are so against is the innovation process of new technologies which generally cater to a) the public, who wants fun new technologies, not useful ones and b) rich companies who don’t want new technologies to happen that will run them out of business. So… the innovation process keeps ending up useless shit like the iPad instead of really great advancements of say - solar power. This leads to me wanting to argue that governments should have a direct influence into the innovation process, and that the future would be much better off if we started putting a ton of money into the innovation process behind new green technologies.

So these are my interests and one of them have to appear on a grad application in the relatively near future. So… I need to start doing some lit-reviews and looking into these topics further and really “flushing” them out to find out what I’m super interested in, what will be super useful and what could keep my attention for a long enough period of time. I will do all this on this very blog, I would imagine.

2. Start Writing A Book

I’ve had a few ideas for a book that I’ve wanted to do for quite a while.

Women’s stories - I worked on the women’s radio shows for about year and during that year i heard a TON of really inspiring, sad, hurtful, happy, devastating…etc etc etc…stories that would make for a really good series of short anecdotes. It would also be a good time for me to start sharing stories that had happened in my life, without revealing that they were from my life. I’ve written a few of these stories (mine, and others) out, and John (the lover) says that they read really interestingly and could definitely be made into something that other people would read. So…maybe I’ll work on that.

The Protestant Atheist - I think I have a crazy and unique view of religion and atheism. My time with both groups of people has given me really good and really bad thoughts about each side. I think i’d like to share it… and there is a lot to share starting from when I was a wee-tot all the way up until now - when I feel like I don’t fit in at church nor the atheist type places. Its an awkward place I’ve ended up in, and its an interesting story about how i got here

All About ME! - I want to write a history of my life for my kids. my dad died when I was really young and it would have been cool if something like that had been left behind. I mean, he had a journal, and I love reading it very very very much. I’d love to leave something like that, only more extensive, to my kids.

3. Refine My Talks

I’ve given a few talks over the past few years of my life on multi-media, atheism, religion, women’s studies stuff… and I think it would be pretty beneficial to write them up as formal talks instead of re-making them up every time I need to use one. Then I could also advertise that I have talks that I can do.

So - this is good news because these are things I’ve really wanted to do, and I am *very* happy that I will have the time to do them. It also means that this blog should see a bit more action than what it sees during the school year.

Anyway, that’s all for now. <3

I am by no means a stereotypical environmentalist who knows global warming is a *serious* problem just because I want to get environmentalism into policy… But I’ve read a lot about global warming, listened to debates and done a lot of schooling around the topic … and it happens to be one of the very few areas of stereotypical environmentalism that I agree with. Here is Ian’s reply which was short, sweet and to the point.

Everything you say has been thoroughly debunked repeatedly before.

There IS a consensus among real climate scientists (notice how, like in the evolution/creation debate, engineers are the major opposition “scientists” to the established facts).

The 1970s global cooling myth is a result of a Newsweek article not a scientific journal or consensus among scientists. In fact, articles being published were 44-7 in favour of warming over cooling hypotheses.

Also, if you were concerned about the CRU hacked data, analysis of the emails results in no real “gotcha” moments, and does nothing to discredit the mountains of evidence that exist. At most the emails demonstrate that scientists remain human with all the associated flaws (jealousy, anger, frustration, etc.) that result from continued attack by self-proclaimed sceptics.

Finally, most of the “scepticism” movement is heavily funded by the oil industry similar to how the tobacco industry funded PR against the notion of cigarettes causing cancer or how evangelical religions fund PR against evolution.

2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record and despite what high school chemistry teachers believe (similar to under-trained biology teachers) we are very likely to have caused it. The greenhouse effect is real (or else the planet would be 30 C colder than it is), and putting more carbon into the atmosphere that is normally buried under ground is bound to have an effect.

Scientists do share some of the blame for bad PR and not communicating their findings properly, but nevertheless, the data is in, and it’s time for action. I really did like Jon’s piece at the National Post about why he thinks people are keen to be doubters of the science on this piece, give it a read if you haven’t yet.

There is a lot of really good and easy to understand literature out there about global warming and “Limits to Growth”… It makes economic, mathematical and logical sense that something like global warming is happening and that we need to respond to it so we can be more readily prepared for the future.

Claiming that the science is too hard to understand and therefore it is best to just be agnostic is intellectually lazy. Scientists have devoted their lives to this topic, and have come to the same consensus - global warming is happening. The scientists have done the science for you AND done a good job of framing it for people who aren’t scientists for those willing to put the effort into learning about it.

I understand that some people want to go against the grain and be a skeptic about stuff… but being a skeptic about global warming at this point…is like being a skeptic of evolution. Only skeptics of global warming are VERY dangerous and will result in a lot of possible death and suffering in the potentially near future.

You start to notice how much food you ate before and the different ways that people try to get you to eat more food. Some people just love eating and will do anything to have you eat with them (including the good ol’ “ahh, its just this ONE time! lets get McDonalds!”). Companies try to make their food seem really appealing by going green and olympians (champions of athletics) appear in commercials for really crappy food. …McDonalds is notorious for that sort of thing.

It’s getting to the point where I’m getting really cynical about food and food advertising. Can Patrick Chan eat McDonalds and be a face for their brand while being an athlete? Are Cheerios and the other big names really “going green” or are they just trying to fit in? How could I possibly have spent $19 on a meal that I could easily make for $3 and it wouldn’t be 80% salt?

Eating less is better for the environment, for my health and for my wallet. Eating at home is better for the environment, for my health and for my wallet. I hate food advertising and I hate that athletes claim to eat at McDonalds.

I lost 9 lbs last month!

My first class is Monday morning at 11:30. It’s Resource Management - pretty straightforward. We are learning about policy making around resources, how to measure resources…and other…resource management things. The worst thing about that class is that over 1/2 of our mark is group work. I absolutely detest group work. Already I’ve had to do someone else’s part to make sure something got done in a good enough fashion. *hate group work* >.< The prof is nice, he’s this big fisherman-like guy who is really friendly and jolly.

Second up is ecological economics on Wednesday mornings at 8:30… This is my favorite class. The prof is brilliant and has a lovely english accent. He wrote a book on ecological economics called Manging Without Growth. I think he’s wonderful. I read a lot of the book and a few papers on the issue and Im pretty sure that I want to get into this for my senior honours thesis. It has quite a bit of potential.

Thursday is a busy day with into to senior honours work at 8:30, urban planning in developing countries at 11:30 and environmental politics and policy at 2:30. Senior honours is a waste of time…we’re basically using the time to learn how to develop a thesis and write a giant proposal. We’re also supposed to do interviews with faculty to find the right person to work with. The class usually only lasts like an hour each week then she just lets us go early. It’s silly.

Urban planning is okay. I thought it was going to deal more with the lack of planning in developing countries, but its more about the practical application of theories of planning. Lots of case studies… But I love the prof. He is this delightful Turkish man who is really intelligent and has a lot insights into things. He worked as an urban planning in the middle east for a few years so he has really crazy stories and experiences.

Policy and Politics is by far my absolute worst course…not only the worst class of this year - but the worst class of my entire university education. My prof is a phd student …which automatically rubs me the wrong way. I want to pay for someone who I am certain is smarter than me… Not someone who has yet to prove themselves to the academic community. The course content is so far…bullshit. And the people are really dumb. They have no depth… and think money can be gotten rid of and this will make the world better. They’re all ridiculous.

So…lots and lots of work… 2/5 are interesting… and 1/5 is absolutely amazing. This semester may not be a bust.