I realized tonight I haven't been eating properly and that I've skipped too many meals this past week. It finally got to me and I had a massive mood swing. I took it out on my blackberry, since it was lagging just when I was texting something important, and then eventually it decided to die. I made up with it after I took out the battery (for the tenth time) and it recovered. I guess we just needed time apart.

Today was a really random and long day.

I woke up this morning feeling sore and as if I had just had conquered a mountain last night, even though yesterday evening consisted mostly of chopping, grinding, and frying. Lately, I feel like I've been getting tugged and pulled at every direction, and I have this feeling things will start to mellow down. At least I hope. One thing I learned from this is that Korean Dramas are not that far fetched after all, and yes, people will go crazy and do unexpected things because people are, well, people.

So maybe I exaggerated about not having any friends in my classes. Earlier last month, I discovered that Jessica, this girl I went to jr. high and high school with, was also in my class. I tried to avoid her because I didn't feel like socializing, but she eventually spotted me and said, "Oh my god, Ann! What are you doing in this class?!"

I think I've semi-forgotten how to write a normal blog entry, since I feel like everything I've been writing lately has been too abstract.

The other day Taylor Swift was on the radio advertising her new perfume, and she said something along the lines of, "Certain scents always brings back memories!"

On the streetcar someone is speaking French. The driver asks, “Montreal?” To which the man laughs in response and asks a question of his own, “does this go down to Dundas?” With the answer he gets off, sure that he’s lost himself.

After him an elderly couple walks in. The man let’s the woman sit first near the window and the young couple near the back takes no notice, too busy making plans of their own when all the plans they need to make are in front of them.

There’s a baby wailing, and a toddler looking out the window, his eyes wide with wonder at the street passing by him. His parents explain in rapid Mandarin the scenery. “This is Chinatown,” I would imagine them say, while hushing the baby, “and we’re on a streetcar. We went to eat at that restaurant, remember?” The toddler can’t recollect, and instead says, “streetcar! Look!” as another streetcar passes by him.

A stranger beside the family chuckles, and makes faces at the baby. The baby is fat and stops wailing for a moment, mesmerized by the strangers attempt at making friends with it.

Outside, pigeons eat crumbs on the floor, squirrels attack people and seagulls loom around on street poles so that their feces fall on innocent pedestrians. Even they’re interesting to look at. It’s a concrete, messy, sticky jungle that’s easy to ignore and easy to pass by, unseen.

But what of it? Should we turn a blind eye to it or be mesmerized by it? Should the streetcar ride just be like all the others, or should we take notice of the people around us? What stories do they have to tell? Perhaps maybe we’re all content to just happy strangers living side by side.

Last night, I was recounting what happened during GST on Tuesday with Annabelle and she said, "is GST really even that necessary? Is there there a need for it?"

My mom came home with seven of these colourful Japanese knives that completely freaked me out. First of all, whose idea was it to make knives in happy, rainbow colours? As if your food would magically taste better if it were cut with an effervescent pink knife?

Too tired to write anything coherent. Here's a list of things that made me happy today:

Sitting in Gerstein at the moment, and I just witnessed Elton ninja kill a flying, yellow bug with his binder.

Smack!

It’s poor splattered body lay dead and dismantled on the table and his binder. The death of this bug is amusing because the smack snapped our heads out of our books (in my case, my macbook).

Mondays are the best days for sleeping in. When you sleep in during the weekend, it almost seems indulgent since you know there are a lot of other things that need to get done, but sleeping in on Mondays is perfect because you know it’s Monday – the start of a new week – and already you deserve a break.

I recently encountered this Chinese essayist named Liang Yuchun who wrote a piece called “The Priceless Moments of a Spring Morn: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, #1” and when I read it, I totally empathized and understood what he was writing.

Basically, the piece Yuchun wrote is in defense of the art of sleeping in. He writes:

“Where else, except in art, can we find all the consolations associated with getting up late? Even now there are many people who do not appreciated the advantages of getting up late. This, too, proves that it is an art, for only art is ignored in such a manner.”

Eventually, the supposed form of getting up late as ‘laziness’ became a type of meditation for him, even suffering through hunger, just so he could perfect the art of sleeping in.

I found this brilliant. I’m the master of sleeping in, as I’ve blogged about countless of times before. What I also found interesting was that Liang Yuchun is from the Fujian province and was an English Specialist in some Western University. The coincidences are uncanny. I wonder if we’re related somewhere down the line.

Lately though, sleeping in has caused me to pray. I’ve caught myself waking up in prayer and wondering how that happened a few times already. There are a lot of things going on in life right now, and my life is starting to resemble a Korean Drama, but prayer is keeping me grounded.

Alright, back to work. Turns out I have to redo the student reports I did over the weekend because the parents want something more substantial although I felt I did a thoroughly substantial job.

Here’s one for the team …

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Oh and it turns out this is my 300th post, not the other one. Woops. False alarm. I had a 'draft' post that I never published sitting around, and blogger counted it as a post. THIS is officially my 300th published post.

I ran into Khevna again this morning, on the train at Wilson Station this time, and she gave me the magazine. One of the pages displayed the word LOVE in big, bold letters, which got me interested since I presume that the thought of love makes everyone, like me, happy.

But not any kind of love. There’s a specific type of love that gets everyone giggly.

After class today, Amy Tang and I saw a cheesy movie called ‘What’s Your Number,’ which is about one woman’s quest to finding ‘the one’ (as is the running theme all chick flicks) as she goes through all 20 of her ex’s to see if any of them were worth a second chance, only to realize in the end that the guy who was helping her the entire time was ‘the one.’

Side note: anyone else notice how amazingly boring and predictable recent chick flicks have become? My theory is that it’s because it’s based on the romantic ideals of extreme situations that could happen. For example, in the movie, the girl has slept with 20 other guys in her life, before finding ‘the one,’ and the guy has presumably slept with just as many different girls (if not more). This is so extreme that it’s become unromantic, stale, and frankly, kind of depressing, even if they end up together.

Anyway, my point is, everyone, even in predictable chick flicks, is looking for ‘the one,’ a.k.a romantic type love. The magazine Khevna gave me featured an article called ‘500 days of disappointment’ which is a journal in which an unnamed girl wrote in for 500 days that mostly details about her desire for unconditional love. She looks for this love in relationships with guys, only to constantly come out feeling short handed, as if something was missing. There’s always that horrible, cheated, lonely feeling that can’t be made sense of, that sense of dread that you won’t be able to fill in this gap. If this guy can’t make you happy, then what will? Isn’t love supposed to the ultimate source of happiness?

The conclusion here is a happy one. She writes:

“I come to the conclusion that if I have this craving, there are two possibilities: this love – a love sans conditions - actually exists and can be found, or this love doesn’t exist and I’ve all deluded myself into thinking it does … I realize that I am wired to want and desire a kind of love that exists, but that I haven’t found. But if this is the way I am wired, then maybe, there is an outlet to experience this love and to output this love as well. I just need to find it … But if all the love that we have experienced has been finite, then this love probably can’t come from other humans.

Maybe, then, I’ve been seeing love the wrong way. Because if love has limits, if love is finite, if love has conditions, it may not be love. But if love is unconditional, unmerited and undeserved, then maybe religions version of love – as in, a set of rules and decrees to be followed, in order to satiate the wrath of a particular deity – has it all wrong. Maybe I don’t need to toil and labour and travail in order to be loved. It seems to me that if there is an infinite God, He has wired me so that, in search of this infinite love, I turn to Him, connect with Him and experience relationship rather than religion."

So if God’s love is the infinite love everyone is looking for, then to love others we must show them God’s infinite love.

(But I've recently realize this is easier said and done. Maybe more on this later.)

Although it's early in the morning, and I'm sure that there will be plenty of other things that will make me happy later on today, my fingers are twitching and I am excited to get started on this 30 day challenge proposed by Ariel. Basically, she proposed the challenge of blogging about something that makes us happy, even if it's only one line, everyday for 30 days.

To Kirsten: