Every time there is a major social or political change in the United States, the Internet floods with panicked Americans announcing that they are going to move to Canada. Many of these people know nothing about Canada, except that it is a colder, friendlier America where the bad thing they are upset about is not currently happening. My American friends talk to me about how…
On a sunny Saturday in September, my boyfriend and I decided to take the N train from his apartment in Astoria, Queens, to Manhattan, to get some brunch in the city. Because God forbid we not be the physical embodiment of gentrification at all times. The train was crowded that day, but we managed to get two seats together at the end of a bench….
The summer between my second and third year of university, I worked in the computer department of a big-box office supply store that happened to sell computers. This is a chain named after a tiny piece of metal that binds paper together, and for legal reasons, we’re going to call it “Paperclip”. Me, seen here in my bright red polyester “Paperclip” uniform. I was hired…
When we left off last week, I was standing in a parking lot with a dozen other teens who were exponentially fitter than me, waiting for our teachers to send us racing up a mountainside on skis that I barely knew how to use. I was in last place from the moment our teachers said “go”. Well, fuck. My dreams of staying at least within…
Like many other strapping, red-blooded Canadian youth, I spent my teenage years participating in the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award program. This is an award program dedicated to finding and recognizing outstanding young Canadians, so that they may be spared the next time Prince Philip comes around to consume a child from one of the colonies in order to sustain his unnatural life. I may…
The summer before I turned 25, I quit my job, packed my things, and moved from Edmonton, Canada, to New York City, a glittering metropolis I’d never been to, and one where I knew absolutely nobody. Like so many generations of young immigrants before me, I arrived in New York with nothing but a dream, a few meager possessions, and $20 in my pocket. I…
When I was eleven years old, my family finally got the one thing that was missing from my Thomas-Kinkade-painting suburban childhood: a purebred Golden Retriever. Depicted here as Air Bud, despite the fact that ours never quite got the hang of basketball. We were naive about dog ownership and we had shitty, unreliable dial-up internet at the time, so we didn’t do as much research…
I am the oldest of three siblings. After bringing me forth into the world in 1992, my parents failed to realize that they had already reached the Genetic Promised Land by creating the best possible human that could be recombined out of their collective genes; in a foolish quest to improve on perfection, they went on to have Viking Brother in 1994, followed by Jesus…
Buckle up, kids, because we just passed the six-year anniversary of the time I caused more property damage to my university than the cumulative effects of Hurricane Sandy, and I am breaking my silence at last. During the 2012/2013 academic year, I spent some time as a transfer student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, because I was 20 years old and going…
I’m back, fuckers. I am as terrifying as I am strangely proportioned. As some of you may remember, I kept a blog during the last years of my undergraduate degree and the first years of my brief-yet-terrifying foray into adult life. That blog can still be found right here, for your perusing pleasure. I named it after myself, because I dramatically overestimated how many people…