YES!!
School is finaly over, i wrote my last exam today at 6:30 pm. Its been a long couple of weeks, but im excited to get back to working full time, and making lots of money...so that i can spend it on school...hmm. Its good to rest my brain.
homes in calgary are WAY too expensive
experts are forecasting the average price for a starter home in calgary to hit about $500,000.00 by the end of the year. Currently they sit at about just over $400,000.00. How the heck is a kid like me supposed to buy into a housing market like that?
Here is an old school myspace style blog for all y'all
i just recently went back and read all of my blogs off of my myspace page. I wrote on a lot of deep subjects back then, i pondered things that deserved to be pondered, i also spelled way worse.
This one is about faith i guess. I've been reading Soren Kierkegaards "Fear and Trembling", he comments on faith quite a bit, actually, that's what the book is about. A couple passages really struck me. He says to really understand God you must make a personal leap of faith. You cannot have the faith of someone else, or ride the 'coat-tails' of people that are more faithful, it must be your own actions. I know this seems so simple, but in practice its much more difficult. He gives a nice annecdote. Its about someone learning to swim. He says that you can try to describe swimming to someone, you can even lower them into a pool and hang them from a rope to the waist and have them pretend to swim, but they are still not swimming. They can say they are swimming, describing the movements perfect. They may even appear to be swimming. This though is not swimming. To swim you must jump in head first surrounded by the water. This is like faith. I can tell you that i believe in God, i can tell you how to believe in God, but the only one that knows for sure is me. Faith is only tested for sure in the tough times, you only know if you have faith when disaster and hardtimes are all around you, trying to drown you like cold water. Only then do you really practice faith.
He also talks about a young man who falls in love with a princess. The young man believes will all his heart that he will someday have the princess, even though this is impossible because he is not royalty. He devotes his entire life to the princess, and has one chance to get her. At the moment that he asks her to marry him, she turns him down. This is because he is not royalty, but unphased he still believes that he will marry her. Keikegaard says that this is faith.
What im trying to say is that faith is a personal issue that only you yourself know. This is not really that far fetched an idea, but when this book was written it was, and it still shakes you everytime you read the words. Highly recommend is. Fear and Trembling - Soren Keirkegaard
peace,
don
I wrote this about a year ago.
Why do i write better then than now? I think i've changed a lot, i want to return to this state of mind:
i dont really know
im really bored right now so if thought i would just sit down and right about whatever came to mind. hmm... i wish i had a band-aid for my mouth when i was at a loss for words. You know those times when you are just stunnded by something or someone that all you can do is the uh uh uh thing. maybe its just me but i blather on like an idiot. I was also just thinking about the people i "help" at work. Those guys who come in and put on shoes that are 379.00 and buy them without even walking in them. 1) Why did they try those on? Is it because they look nice? Yes they do, but they are not the nicest looking shoe on the wall. and 2) this is my real point, DO I WANT TO BE LIKE THAT? Do i want to be so wealthy that things that are ridiculously expensive become mere trifles? I wonder where people like that place value? I don't have an anwser for that, thats why im asking all of you guys out there. My last sort of point, i guess, is why did i start blogging. I guess the imeditate anwser would be to tell everyone something instead of just e-mailing it to everyone. Those that know me well know how lazy i am. But the deeper anwser is, i guess, that it feels good just to sit down and right. hearing the sound of the keys pitter pattering away as i type is relaxing. Since i'm out of school i don't get to type enough, and now when i do its really enjoyable. Probably because its not a english assignment or something.
Another thing that just came across my mind was where do we as individuals get our identity. This thought was spawned by my friend Kara. She's writing her under-grad paper on it. But more to the point... My question is where do we get our individual identity from? what drives us, where do we get our sense of self. Where do we get that sense of uniqueness? I think a great deal of our identity comes from our friends, the people we hang out with and talk with on a daily basis. I know it seems pretty simple. But it must go deeper than that because we hang out with people that share similar intrests as us, but where do we get those intrests? Is it from our parents, i think so. There is evidence of musical talent being passed on through the gene pool.
Wow I just wrote a whole lot of nothing, asked a bunch of questions that i didn't anwser, if you actually read this i want a comment, anything. just let me know you read that "thing" above
peace
don
100
not as epic as 300, but this is my One Hundreth post. I feel so weird knowing that it is to complain about the weather.
It has been snowing ALL day, when i woke up it was snowing, and it appears that when i go to bed it shall be snowing.
I just thought, as i was writing this, that because this is such an important post i should at least add something intellegent to it, so here is a nice poem:
Welcome to Hiroshima
is what you first see, stepping off the train:
a billboard brought to you in living English
by Toshiba Electric. While a channel
silent in the TV of the brain
projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud
that brims its risen columnful like beer
and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head,
you feel a thirst for history: what a year
it started to be safe to breathe the air,
and when to drink the blood and scum afloat
on the Ohta River. But no, the water's clear,
they pour it for your morning cup of tea
in one of the countless sunny coffee shops
whose plastic dioramas advertise
mutations of cuisine behind the glass:
a pancake sandwhich; a pizza someone tops
with a maraschino cherry. Passing by
the Peace Park's floral hypocenter (where
how bravely, or with mistaken cheer,
humanity erased its own erasure),
you enter the memorial museum
and through more glass are served, as on a dish
of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves
a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh
hang from their fingertips; or as if tied
to recall a duty for us, Reverence
the dead whose mourners to shall soon be dead,
but all commemoration's swallowed up
in questions of bad taste, how re-created
horror mocks the grim original,
and thinking at last They should have left it all
you stop. This is the wristwatch of a child.
Jammed on the moment's impact, resolute
to communicate some message, although mute,
it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen
and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again
while tables of statistics on the wall
update the news by calling on a roll
of tape, death gummed on death, and in the case
adjacent, and exhibit under glass
is blass itself: a shard the bomb slammed in
a woman's arm at eight-fifteen, but some
three decades on-as if to make it plain
hope's only as renewable as pain,
and as if all the unsung
debasements of the past may one day come
rising the to the surface one again-
worked its filthy way out like a tongue.
-Mary Joe Salter (1984)
Banff
so today i woke up nice and early, borrowed the family Jeep (which saved my life, more bout that later) and akwardly drove into downtown Calgary. I say akwadly because i have never actually driven downtown by myself before, on that thought i have never actually been the driver downtown before. A thought just occured to me, which is good because thoughts in general are good (they let you know your still thinking), when driving north into the downtown core there is a very beautiful site, you climb steadly up the cemetary hill, graves on either side of you, symbollizing to me death all around, but when you crest the hill the sun bursts off the skyscapers and buildings of glass all around, as if to say we are alive. But again, as i seem to always do, i digress... i think i write much like the writers did at the end of the middle ages, they were becoming enlightened and when a thought occured to them, they just ran with it, for pages even.
So i get downtown to residence and meet up with some friends, unfortunatly a few of my cohorts are running behind, to the tune of a full hour behind. It does get frusterating! I had a car full of beautiful girls, which i most definately cannot complain about, a tank full of gas, satellite radio for when we got into the mountains, and all was right with the world.
Since i have never personally driven to Banff myself i didn't know the way... that's not entirely true, i can get to Banff from anywhere but Calgary, so i was at the mercy of the cars in front of me.
Now, im not exactly a crazy fast driver, i do like to drive fast, i mean i will regularily drive 130 on the highway, but no more. The people that i was following, although it felt more like catching up with, had a tendancy towards a led foot, for instance: A couple times i looked down to see my speedometer reading out a nice big 160. This troubled me, mostly because the roads were not in perfect condition, so i slowed to my usual 130, which was still 20 over the speed limit!
I was justified though, because as you enter Banff National Park you must stop and pay the nice lady in the box 17.00 for the "right" to park in her lovely National Park. But there is more than one nice lady, there are a few, i chose the line less travelled and got out to a nice lead, ahead of the other 2 cars that i had been chasing.
We arrived in Banff, which really seemed to be our only goal, as we actually had not specified WHERE we were going to meet, or stop, or even what we were going to do. After some confusion we met up and went to lunch at a "Very" eating establishment. I say this because it was Very tasty, Very nice, and Very expensive. Mind you EVERYTHING in Banff is expensive. I commented on how if you took the mountains away from the town, it would just be another expensive town, not too many towns of 20,000 get a Louis Vuttoin dealer.
After lunch we went to the mall, which is confusing to me, as there are malls in every city, but there are not waterfalls and mountains in every city. But im becoming cynical.
We had to go home a little earlier than usual because one of our friends had to sing at a concert in calgary.
They say hindsight is 20-20.
We should have either left earlier, or just stayed longer. This is because we ran into quite the storm. From Banff to Canmore was great, a little falling snow, but no biggie, but for some reason as soon as we exited the other side of Canmore (an area ironically titled "Deadman's Flats") we ran into (literally) a white out. The two vehicles directly in front of me disappeared into white cloud of snow. I didn't know what was going on so i started to slow down. Not fast enough i found out rather quickly, as approaching VERY fast was a line of cars all over the road. Now the people in the back have entrusted me with their lives, im not just gonna run into the back of the car in front of me, so i calmly swing the vehicle at the ditch, but before i get there i have to dodge a truck that is also headed for the ditch. The highway was FUBAR'd, if you don't know the term, google it. My backend slid out on me, but i reigned it in and crused down the shoulder of the road past the streams of car. If i had slammed on the breaks we would have been pulled into the ditch, and probably rolled. The drive there took just over an hour, the drive home took just over two hours.
It was a good trip though, im glad we went. Can't wait to "remenice" on tuesday when i see everyone at school
