Sarahisms

Online Presence, No Gray Areas in Making It

Everywhere I turn I am bombarded with a barrage of articles that point to one thing: online presence.

With papers and articles lined up to be written, I quickly pretend as if I didn’t see anything. After all, acknowledging that I did is almost synonymous to admitting that I’m not as dedicated as my “online-present” colleagues. 

But alas, if the journalism world is good at one thing it’s persistence.

A couple of blogs and tweets after, I find myself digging through the web for my website, which I haven’t updated for over a month - a century in web years.

I ponder what to write about and then it comes to me: online presence, of course.

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“Where’s the Pause Button?”

Phases

I’m at a point where I can say, “What more can I ask for than life itself?” and never turn back.

Second Nature

I’ve been so caught up with how much fun Explore is that it is not until I am studying for my final exam that I realized how much I don’t want to leave.

I’ve gotten so used to living here that I can only imagine how it will be to go back…to “real” life. First, you meet people as strangers then sooner or later they become your family. You start taking your own share of house chores, showering at a different time because someone else showers at that time, rolling your eyes good-naturedly when your roommate does something peculiar because through time you’re accustomed to these eccentricities, waking someone up because you know she always tends to sleep in…

Suddenly, what was once foreign soon falls into place, becoming second nature.

What will be known as the best $31 of my Trois Rivières life has been spent purchasing a new fan and pillow.

Must send extreme love to Canadian Tire.

Also, I now have high hopes for this program, everyone is great! There’s nothing as eye-opening as getting plucked out from your comfort zone and thrown in a completely foreign place. I seriously revel about the fact that I am surrounded by total strangers who’ve done some pretty awesome stuff.

Difference has never been so refreshing.

In fact we even discovered a good yet cheap Italian restaurant called Mike’s - and you all know I love my food.

The Dirty Room Situation hopefully will be fixed soon as Roshan and I have courageously trudged to the room of the Program Administrator to request room changes.

Hope is in the air and it smells even better than fresh cut grass.

(Though maybe not as great as Old Spice deodorant, clean laundry and 20 bottles of Cool Citrus Basil.)

Independence Never Felt So…Disappointing.

Lately, I have made it a point not to complain about my life when there are others out there who I know have it worse like the (presumably) innocent policemen experiencing persecution under the iron hands of extremist G20 protesters and the thousand motorists stuck in the currently chaotic streets of Toronto. Today, however, I believe that I have full rights to today I am able to abuse this luxury.

Or maybe not.

See, I was cracking my knuckles, about to let out steam by making furious keyboard-bashing strokes on my laptop while narrating about the Disappointment that has so far been Trois-Rivières. But of course Mario called and created a perfect diversion.

However, now that I am left alone in my sparse, AC-less, electric fan-less room, I am able to let my mind fly freely and seethe about the more depressing points of my day. Then I start thinking again about how doing so will require me to exert more effort as I feel the need to enumerate every single mishap I encountered today - and that would just take too much time.

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When I Grow Up by Fever Ray

When I grow up…

I want to be a forester
Run through the moss on high heels
That’s what I’ll do, throwing out boomerang
Waiting for it to come back to me

When I grow up… 

I put my soul in what I do

You’ve got cucumbers on your eyes
waiting for a moment to arise
I wait for him to catch me

Waiting for you to embrace me.

Do you ever wish that sometimes you can just fast forward time? That you can just envision a moment in your would-be future and suddenly be transported to a parallel world where when you are able to finally reap all the rewards that you have worked for in your youth?

Because I do.

I suffer a severe case of anachronism.

anach·ro·nism \ ə-ˈna-krə-ˌni-zəm \ noun \

1 : the state or condition of being chronologically out of place
2 : a person or a thing that is chronologically out of place; especiallyone from a former age that is incongruous in the present

I’ve always felt that I was suppose to have been born years ago. It’s as if I was somehow misplaced in the otherwise smooth fabric of time and came to the world too late, ages after my 9 months in the womb are up.

The even more disastrous counterpart of prematurity. 

As a result, I am still 19 years old, seven months shy of 20. Residing under my parents’ roof, abiding to every single one of their rules. Yes, I know I have it great, free (almost) everything and almost always in the company of my family, but as much as I appreciate everything, there is always that odd time when…

Even comfort is just stifling. 

You want what you can’t have and right now I want pure unadulterated freedom. Being to sole person responsible for my own actions. Not having to restrain myself from doing what I want to do because of a curfew, even because of money. I want to grow up, and be in the field, working, doing what I love, having fun with friends regardless the day, coming home to a household I have crafted with my own bare hands and you - instead of waiting, waiting, waiting.

I want to possess the ability to move around freely, flap my arms and shake the chain that is Age, the Great Wall that separates me from Independence.

Ah, but alas! The Young wish to be Old but when Time comes and catches them in her minute hands, the Old pleads that they become Young once again. And the cycle repeats, continuing, up to now, to be one of the biggest ironies that has ever existed.

Oh, Time be my friend.