Once a year, my junior high school decided that going through puberty in a giant cinderblock building surrounded by other people who were also going through puberty in a giant cinderblock building was not making any of us quite miserable enough for their liking. To solve this problem, they loaded us all onto school buses and drove us out to the edge of town for…
I have a confession to make: I don’t mind Tim Hortons coffee. Does Tim Hortons make excellent coffee? No. Do they make good coffee? Also no. Do they make coffee that tastes a little bit like one of the employees accidentally left all the freshly brewed pots underneath an idling exhaust pipe in the parking lot for a few hours and the other employees just…
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you already know that I’ve worked quite a few odd jobs in my life – it has been my lifelong goal to have the haphazard and chaotic resume of a Dickensian orphan, and so far I’m pretty much nailing it. But of all the strange jobs I’ve held in my life, one of my favourites…
What a year this has been. We’re approaching what is approximately the 487th consecutive day of March 2020, and by this point in the pandemic, we’ve proven as a species that we are more than willing to set aside our differences, work together, and sacrifice for the greater good. Thanks to our joint efforts, COVID-19 has become nothing more than memory; the pandemic…
When I was fourteen years old, I suddenly found myself in need of some extra spending money. I was too young to work at the local Starbucks and too sheltered to build my own international drug cartel, so I turned to the only form of employment that was available to me at the time: babysitting. Because this is not a face that anyone will trust…
For most of my adult life, I have lived more than a thousand kilometres away from my parents. This means that if I want to spend any quality time with my family, I need to shell out hundreds of dollars to sit thigh-to-thigh with a stranger in a joyless metal sky tube for hours and hours on end. My parents live Nova Scotia, Canada, and…
From the moment I moved out of my parents’ house for good at the age of 21, I wanted a dog of my own. I had grown up with an assortment of strange and wonderful canine companions, and I quickly discovered that a life of un-chewed socks and vomit-free floors was simply not for me. I figured I would wait until I’d finished grad school…
At a very early age, I decided that I wanted to be a paleontologist. My parents were well aware that I was the sort of soft, round Indoor Child who was probably not well-suited to a life of scraping bones out of sun-baked rocks in the 40-degree-Celsius heat of an unforgiving Mongolian desert. Nevertheless, they supported my dreams by shuttling me to and from the…
In the spring of 2014, I attended the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo in Calgary, Alberta, partially because I am an enormous nerd, and partially because there is no sunscreen known to man or science that will let me spend Spring Break at a beach destination without accidentally discovering a new kind of melanoma. Frankly, someone of my constitution and complexion has no business entering…
Like most people on Planet Earth right now, I am currently in quarantine. According to the CDC and the World Health Organization, I have at least eight more days of sitting on the couch in my pajamas ahead of me before I can determine if the cough I picked up in New York City last week is a potentially deadly coronavirus or just a natural…