So I’m expecting a pretty big pay cheque today… By which I mean, I’m getting paid from all my sources of pay (City, MCF, TEC, and UofT). But the stupid thing is, I’ve got a huge amount of money going out too…

I bought a bunch of stuff from Chapters – OSS History, Band of Brothers, HTML/CSS guide, and PHP Guide (for my dad)… Oh yeah and a “Learn French In Your Car” set that I want to try. That was about $150 worth of stuff, which brings my total of monies spent in Reading Material/Educational whatever up to like $1100 (for the year). Oh and that of course prompted me to join their book club, hoping to save a little in the long run, so that was another 25 bucks. Then I forgot that I subscribed to a bunch of magazines a little while back (Popular Mechanics and Macleans – I forgot cause they haven’t charged my credit card statement yet). But the stupidest out of all these is the stupid Parking Ticket I got last week (30 bucks)… Bleh.

What a waste of money.. And of course I know I’m gonna be getting a cell phone bill very soon, and I’m running low on TTC Tokens and Go Tickets… *Sigh*.

I’ve already had 2 kind-of-freak-out-moments with 2 friends seeing my “relationship” status – which is set to “In A Relationship” – in Facebook. I’ve had these questions before about it (from like Friendster for example) and I’ve always really wanted to write on this subject, but have not had the chance to do so before. Maybe not so much make a book out of it, like oh Joshua Harris for example (he wrote “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”) but at the least, a succinct little blurb explaining exactly what it is I believe about the subject.

“In A Relationship” is a series that I am writing to do just that.

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I think it was a cousin who first asked about “my girlfriend” when he saw that I had set my status on Friendster as being “In a Relationship”. I kind of laughed it off with him, explaining that I didn’t have a girlfriend, but that there was kind of a reason why I set it that way. It’s found in the “About Me” section a little further down my profile. It reads: “What am I about? Hmm.. Well, I’m a lot of things to a lot of people. I’m a son, a brother, a roommate, a friend, no not a boyfriend or anything like that, but I am in a relationship… In fact, that’s the characteristic that defines me most. Well actually, that’s the only characteristic that really defines who I am. I am related to Jesus Christ.”

Maybe people find this a little corny. But I was just thinking that it actually is really quite reflective of what I believe about relationships. That relationships can only occur in two ways: by blood, or my the law.

Let me explain that a little bit. Relationship is created by blood quite obviously. If you have the “same blood” as another person, then there’s really quite no doubt that you’re related. My mom. My dad. My brother. Cousins. Aunts. Uncles. etc etc. All related to me by blood. But then there’s the other way to becoming related: legally. This is actually another quite obvious one. When you get married, there is a legal document signed making you related. When someone adopts a child, they likewise become related by the law. So what does that have to do with dating?

Well it’s quite obvious I think. There is a prevailing school of thought out there that makes “dating” in to some kind of a relationship. Simple answer: it’s not. It can lead to a relationship – but it’s not. Now let me write an aside about this right now, because I know for a fact that some people will immediately be like “ooh ooh, he doesn’t think dating is a relationship, dating is wrong and evil”. Well I don’t. In fact I think just the opposite. It is the attitude that says dating a relationship that actually causes some people to demonize dating a little bit. It is this idea that makes people like Josh Harris write books like “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” – although by the way, I think “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” is an excellent book, well written and biblically based. I just disagree that the “answer” is to stop dating altogether. This brings up my point in this aside. I don’t think dating is wrong, and I don’t strive to “kiss dating goodbye”. I just think that dating needs to be put in its proper place.

So what is so special about this category of relationships anyway? Coming in Part 2.

Yah I’m skipping class again, *sigh*. In fact I was contemplating skipping tutorial too, cause it’s raining outside, and I don’t feel like walking too much… In fact I think I’ll do it. But argh. I have this suspicion that they’re returning assignments today. Which if I miss it today, I would be really angry. Lemme think about this…

But yah. I’m just so sick of Canadian History… if I can just come up with a haf-decent excuse to drop it (justifying the waste of 800 bucks), I would. But I can’t, so I won’t. Just suck it up… Bleh. But then I get into situations like this, I finally get a good chair at the student lounge and I have to give it up…. But I really really want to see my mark on that essay :S.

Last night I got the results of my American Politics test… My first mark of the year. It’s not bad. In fact it’s really good, above average – a B. But not as good as I was hoping – an A. Which also makes me quite fearful for the rest of the tests… cause I kinda had this idea that this test would be the easiest one. But getting a 70 is really bringing me down. Which is again, why I want to see my assignment from Canadian History (and maybe even POL208 if my TA is done marking them today).

Meh.. What to do. What to do.

Wow, so I actually did a little work on my blog – the look of it that is, if anyone has noticed. If you don’t notice (except for the obvious one, the background colour), just press the refresh button, and you’ll see how my main banner and verse changes. It’s so coo I want to share it with everyone… It’s javascript that basically rotates the images. There are so many different ways people try to do it – some have like complex php files (with if-else structures inside of it) that do it, i suppose it makes it better so that the same image doesn’t show up again. But mine is simple (mostly copied from a website, which I forgot now… but meh, if I hadn’t been so lazy, I would have figured out the syntax eventually).

So that’s really cool, as for the background, I did try to do that too, but so far I couldn’t find a satisfactory way to do it on CSS (again those complicated ones are there, but I don’t have the brain energy to figure it out right now). So I’ll just manually rotate my background image myself every month or so. Getting sick of just orange…

Oh yeah, I put my archives inside of a drop down menu too, to make the side a little more manageable. Fun.

Today was pretty amazing at church, I wish I had brought my camera now to take a video of myself playing the piano, cause the songs we were playing sounded amazing. Send the Light.. LOL, such fun we (the band) had.

I also heard some pretty distressing news today. We have dress rehearsal in 2 weeks :S. Oh man. And we looked at “Joy to the World” and I’m freaking out cause it’s so hard. I gotta buckle down and learn these songs now before those papers that I have to write (although those papers are really easy). But once rehearsals are over (and the shows actually begin), I can settle down a little bit, for my exams that is…

Meh. Here’s some pictures I’ve been wanting to put up for such a long time…

Hehe. This is from when me and Josh opened my old laptop up. It was really cool – we learned quite a lot of things. I was going to change the video card on it (16mb) but unfortunately the guy who I was gonna buy the new video card (supposedly 32mb) couldn’t tell me what the size was for sure, so I didn’t wanna risk it. So I’ll have to settle for the old crappy card, not that it matters anyways…

Ok, so on to boil some eggs, then to TREC.

The chords I found for “How cAn I Keep Form Singing” was actually pretty horrible so it took me like 30 minutes to figure out the real chords… Then I transposed it to a key I can actually sing in (Chris Tomlin for some reasons really loves to sing in these awfully high keys… This one was in Bb, making D or Eb the highest note to sing – which isn’t that high that I can’t hit it, but I don’t want to sing up there for too long… so I transposed it in E… pretty much my default key) and it was good.

But anyway, the real reason I am writing this just now is how amazed I am at facebook. Man. there’s like social networks for everything – high school, work, etc. Well I mean, there’s those things in MySpace and Friendster too, but I guess facebook appeals to me cause it’s so organized, and I’m just like that. LOL. Oh yeah, and oh man, I can’t believe Asian Avenue is still up LOL!

Oh man, I can’t believe how out of shape I am. I thought I was in pretty alright shape, seeing as I walk almost 45 minutes or more a day (probably 3 or so klicks worth of walking). But right now, I’m ridiculously out of breath (actually I just finally calmed down a little – but it took 15 minutes), after running for the subway and the train. Ok well actually it was a sprint, so that might be the reason, I don’t think I’ve run for anything as fast, but I was pretty determined to catch the 9PM train, after getting let out of work early.

Work was a bit of a joke tonight – basically I did nothing, because of the problems with the records that we were going through. So it was completely unproductive, but meh that was fine by me. The problem was, even though I was unproductive, it didn’t mean that I could kind of relax… I still had busy work (though mindless and boring – basically just clicking buttons over and over), so I couldn’t even read my book while I was working (we’re allowed to read books, but I hardly take advantage of this, I can’t seem to concentrate).

I think I mentioned already that I finished the Band of Brothers series already. Though I still plan to go through all the cool special features stuff – I’ll probably do that tonight, seeing as I have redeemed an hour (so much can be changed by just leaving work a little later… If I had left work 10 minutes later, I would have been forced to take the later train, meaning I would have been home an hour later… so I was actually a little ticked by my manager messing around with us a little at the end there). But yeah, I made it, I might even run grab a movie or something, but most likely I’m just gonna go to bed… No I’m not gonna do that, I’ll use this time for something.

Oh actually I set up a facebook account, at the insistence of an officemate so I think I’m gonna work on that a little (though it shouldn’t take long from what I’ve seen of it already, I just copy and paste my profiles from all the others anyway). Actually I’m really looking forward to this – I was looking for an excuse to get into facebook (it took friends from Capernwray to get me into myspace and hi5… my cousins to get me into Friendster). But yeah I’m looking forward to this cause I heard that Google was planning to buy Facebook (if it hasn’t already). Which if it does, then maybe it’ll be integrated into Blogger – and everything. So that’ll be nice to kind of really consolidate my blog with that.

Oh man, I think I’m gonna get an asthma attack. And I didn’t bring my puffer. But meh it’s not serious…

Hmmph. Ok I’m gonna do some journaling thing right now since I still got like 5 minutes till I get to my station, and I haven’t journaled in a while…

It’s pretty much been steady work and school the past couple of weeks. School is kind of settling down a little right now, but I know it’s just the eye of the storm, as the bulk of my assignments and tests/exams/whatever will be in late November + early December. And I’m still considering my work options right now.. so I might even cut out some hours but we’ll see how that works, cause UofT completely closes down during the Christmas holidays – meaning no pay past a certain time. By contrast, when I was working at Old Navy, I worked the most during Christmas, and actually had huge paycheques during that time. I’ll keep working at TEC of course, but I still don’t even know what my pay there is like right now with the raise…

Uhm. Last Sunday, the Orchestra played its first show ever. But this week I’m back on stage (actually the band is off the stage now that the stage for Christmas is being built) this week, which is going to be a common occurrence over the year, seeing as I’m in Orchestra and in one of the bands. I really don’t mind. The kind of challenges that Rob and Jeff throw at me really have me on my toes. I’m learning so much – especially technique and stuff. So it’s really amazing in that way. I feel like I can tackle Claire De Lune again in fact, and actually conquer it. LOL.

Tomorrow’s gonna be a relaxing day, cause Monday, I plan to dive right into studies. Yep, no more being lazy for me. I’ve got a bunch of readings to catch up on (they’re all recommended, LOL, yah I’m a nerd, but it’s ridiculously necessary). Oh and of course Sunday, I’m at Church all day as usual.

Oh oh oh. I bought Chris Tomlin’s newest CD, See the Morning. It’s pretty much the only thing I’m listening to right now. I actually wanna learn some of the songs, but how? And for what? Actually… forget it I’m gonna look for the chords right now real quick…

Yes found it, ok I’m gonna go down to the music room to play it… but I’m just gonna close this post off with a piece of the song… It’s really nice…

How can I keep from singing Your praise
How can I ever say enough, how amazing is Your love
How can I keep from shouting Your Name
I know I am loved by the King, and it makes me want to sing…

I think I mentioned before that I bought Band of Brothers from my birthday money (and I also got Prison Break from Yula… oh and a few months ago I also bought House). So my TV-Series DVD collection is really shaping up.

I finished the last episode of Band of Brothers this morning (I started it on Monday)… And yeah, I’m really liking it. Honestly, I just don’t have the time anymore to watch TV… I even started skipping Prison Break (Season 2) and Hosue (Season 3)… Well I miss it cause I’m at work, but I basically don’t take the time to try to catch it on the time shift (cause it means staying up till past midnight, which isn’t good for work).

So yeah, I’m just waiting for Prison Break to come out on DVD – this summer probably. I’ll probably get House Season 2 sometime in January – though I’ve seen the whole season already anyway so I’m not in a hurry). Then I’m good for now, I haven’t gotten into any shows anyway (except for Ugly Betty, which is the only show I can catch). Oh but I still do want JAG – and Commander in Chief, and grr, I forget the next one, oh yeah Tour of Duty… But again those can wait (cause I’ve seen every episode).

Anyway. Phew. My laptop’s about to die so I’m gonna finish this, but I do have quite a few things post about, but yeah, that can wait till later. LOL.

Wow, I can’t believe how close I was today to pretty much having a complete academic break down. What saved me unfortunately, but honestly it’s not a good thing, is the amount of good BS-ing I was able to do – at Tutorials, on my paper, etc.

Yah I know I know, it’s terrible, this morning I got to a point that I promised myself I would never get to… 3 readings and an assignment (750 words) due in about 3 hours…

So let’s start with the assignment… which actually, as I mentioned, despite the fact that I only started it this morning (when it was handed out 2 weeks ago), I really think I did pretty well. My grade on it will tell exactly how well I BSed my way through that, but as I said, reading through it now, I don’t really have too much regrets. I think I can pull off a B on it, maybe even a B+. Most papers that I’ve written on such short notice, that I read later, I’m like, wtf, what were you thinking? But deffinately, this one, I had a decent argument, and good evidence to back it up. And amazingly, there weren’t even any grammar errors that I could find (although for sure there will be some… there always are some, no matter how many times you proof read it). So overall, that wasn’t bad… Though then again, keep in mind that I already read pretty much the entire book I was doing the critique on (they were required readings from previous tutorials). So that helped alot.

Ok let’s turn to the readings. First there were the 2 Canadian History readings. Yah, I pretty much hate Canadian History right – in fact, so many of the rules that I’m breaking (rules that i made for myslef), I’m breaking because of Canadian History… I still remember sitting through that first agonizing lecture, after walking that first agonizing trek from Sidney Smith Building to Northrop Frye… I thought to myself as I listened to that idiot Montigny speak, “I’m going to tough it out… I’ll come to every frigging class if it kills me”. Well. Didn’t quite work out. I’ve skipped the past 5 lectures already… Grr. Yah I know it’s bad, but what can I say.. I just really have no tollerance for that nub “professor” – in fact I’m pretty sure he’s not even a professor at UofT yet… most likely he’s just a lecturer. Next semester will change of course – we’ll be doing mroe of my kidn of history, that is modern history, and the Professor Penfold will start lecturing. Now I haven’t exactly experienced Penfold’s lecture style yet, though, but I’m pretty sure almost anything beats Montigny…

Phew. So that was kind of off topic… The readings I had to do for my Canadian History Tutorials were LONG. And man, I can’t beleive it, but even on the train ride into downtown (when I usually am able to do some studying), I couldn’t concentrate. I ended up just listening to my Mp3 Player. It wasn’t until after my first lesson that I was able to actually sit down and start reading through the 3 readings that I had to do… well pretty much I skimmed through all three of them. The 2 Canadian History readings were a little harder to understand with just skimming, but I was saved when we got to tutorial… What my TA did was split us up into groups and had each group find a way to explain each article. Well… it just so happens that she puts me on the article that I already know a little about (not because I was able to read and understand the thurst of the article, but because the article was written on a subject I already know quite a lot about: democracy). So that was lucky…

Then there was the International Relations Article, which I already noted that i read during that 1 hour I was skipping the Canadian History lecture… Ok just to keep this into perspective how ridiculous what I did was… these articles are about 18 letter-sized pages each… almost 60 pages that I had to read in 1 hour. In comparison, it would take me 1-2 hours to read and completely understand just one of those articles. So yeah, I skimmed through it, but yet again I was lucky in that it was on a subject I already knew alot about – or rather, the paper was basically a summary of previous readigns that I’ve done. So it was kind of no sweat.

Phew, lots of close calls today. And yeah. I know. I know. I’ll be more diligent in the future… Starting tommorow, I’ll catch up on all of my readings.