ooops.

I really need to update this more.

Sorry that I’ve been MIA for so long. Life kind of took over. Since my last post I’ve been loving life, spending a lot of time at the Library with my readings, writing essays and jetting off to New York City for the weekend…

New York City. It was only the most amazing experience of my life. I don’t think the city tops London for me (I will never be able to get over the fact that NYC is in the United States), but my Broadway, aka HAIR exxperience was beyond words. We met, tammed and took pictures with the entire cast. We met our IDOLS. At the show we DANCED and SANG on stage with the cast and many other audience members and we sang the last minute of Let the Sunshine In with Will Swenson’s arms around us (us being Ally and I). That moment on stage will forever be the happiest moment of our lives. At stage door that night (we went both Friday and Saturday…we had to meet Gavin Creel!) Allison Case showed up to get on the bus with the rest of the cast to DC for the National Equality March on the following Sunday. We didn’t think we’d meet her so seeing her there was one of my highlights of the trip. She’s so wonderful and I hate that she’s injured, it truly breaks my heart. Oh, and Caissie Levy (our fellow Canadian in the Tribe) is amazing, wonderful, spectacular…she’s every positive adjective in the book. She recognised us when we ran on stage after the show on saturday and both nights she talked with us for at least 5 minutes and it was amazing and ahhhhh.

I could go on forever about how wonderful they all are… I have to force myself to stop.  But honestly. Best night of my life.

Since then I’ve been doing a lot of essay writing, dealing with broken down computers (agian), the usual. I bought one of those mini netbook things because the idea of relying on library computers for a month again stresses me out, so it was worth the $250 I spent yesterday afternoon.

Anyway, I must go get ready for my favourite class ever now (autobiography seminar… I love everything about it; the topic, the prof, the discussion, the fact that it’s a 25-person seminar and not a 100-person lecture…).

peace, love, life.

a lot…

you know…there is a lot I have wanted to say recently about friends and experiences and the first week of classes. but as the first week dwindles to the last few hours there is nothing that i can say but LOVE. LOVE. LOVE.

I am filled with it.

I am defined by it.

I am BLESSED with it. (and trust that never in my lifetime have i used the word “blessed” to describe an emotion)

I am so overwhelmed by love that i find myself WEEPING at the thought of how much love i feel when surrounded by amazing friends.

I have never before appreciated my ability to love, my love of love, to the extent that i do now. I wish that i could emerse myself in it every second of every day.

It’s real…platonic…but so welcoming and warm and right.

I finally feel like I have real, unadulterated, uncompromising, forgiving, loving FRIENDS.

It sounds relatively insignificant, but to me it is huge, and wonderful, and life-changing.

Sad? Maybe…but we are no longer defined by high school and our friends (or lack thereof) but by ourselves. The SELF that we discover. The SELF who makes new friends. The SELF who is accepting and loving and wonderful. The SELF who LOVES, LIVES, and LAUGHS. The SELF who is not defined by others, but accepts itself and the others around them and loves them as individuals who are more complex and more interesting than they are.

I love. That is what i do.  I have finally found friends to love…and i think that’s probably the single best thing I”ve ever discovered.

Ah, back to school…

There’s something about early fall which brings the flutteriest of butterflies to my stomach. The slowly changing leaves, the smell of recently purchased school supplies and the jubilant cheers of the newest class at Queen’s make me so happy that I’m constantly on the verge of tears. Yes, I’m a crier, but I love the sense of community, sense of hope and new beginnings that this week leading up to classes brings. It doesn’t hurt that I am once again surrounded by the most amazing group of friends in the world.

Last friday night – when I was still in Toronto in a sort of cruel limbo between having finished work and the drive to kingston on Sunday morning – I was frantically texting with two of my good friends from school who were already in Kingston. These friends live together and at the time they were, of course, sitting about two feet away from one another, but I was texting them both in any case. Ally, (with whom I’m going to see HAIR) said to call her and when I did i was greeted heartily on the other end by a chorus of good friends yelling “SAMMMYYYYYY!!!”, “Come HOMEE” and “I WANT YOU IN MY LIFEEE!”. It brought tears to my eyes to think that there were people out there who actually appreciated me and my presence. I mean, yes, i’ve had a lot of good friends throughout my life and many groups of friends, but this is one that I think (and hope to the ends of the earth) will actually last. I’ve known most of these people for only a year (exactly, to this week, actually) and I feel closer to many of them that I have ever felt in my life with anyone else.

I had this discussion with several of my good friends from Toronto this summer. It’s not that we’ve changed since high school, but it’s that we were always the people who were different – who cared – in high school, which has resulted in the disintegration of friendships from the four years that we were told would be the best of our lives. I’m a friend person, I have a few really close friends, but i’ve always had a large network and cared deeply about all of them, so when I say now that I’m really not that torn up about losing friendships that I thought were quote, “lifelong friendships” in high school, it’s a pretty big deal… I mean, I’m a hufflepuff. We’re all about the friends and loyalty. But now I have a network of friends who actually share common goals and interests other than the basic human need to “belong”, which i’ve found to be the basis of most superficial friendships that are so ever-present in high school and even first-year of uni.

My housemates here are an entirely different story. I love them deeply. Yes, we’re all very different. And yes, we’re not as close and nor do we share as many inside jokes and even intimacies that I do with some of my other friends, but it’s a sort of familial bond which is so important and so comforting when you’re away from mom and dad. We come to each other for advice and for encouragement that comes from a deep understanding of what we want, who we are as individuals and who we are outside of the house, outside of Queen’s, outside of Kingston and outside of our backgrounds. It’s a family whose bonds go beyond a normal friendship, but we can still have an insane amount of fun together.

I’m just so happy to be back.

days until New York: 29

days until HAIR: 30

yoga classes this school year: 1

new york city blackout!!!

Now I just need to get to new york to see this cast…my life will not be complete otherwise.

My life will, in fact, be complete.

A few weeks ago my parents surprised me by saying the words I have been wanting to hear all summer:

We’re going to New York City.

The trip is happening this Thanksgiving weekend – a week after my birthday. The adventure will commence on Friday morning when my parents arrive in Kingston to pick up myself and my wonderful friend Ally. She’s my guest on our weekend in NYC because she’s a very good friend of mine and this trip and seeing Hair will be equally as important to her as it will to me, as she is one of the people I have been obsessing with all summer. Seriously, when we’d email at work, for at least two months our emails opened with a different quote from the soundtrack. I’m sure that if you piece together the random quotes we shared you could have the whole soundtrack. Hahah. Once we ran out of Hair quotes we moved onto Harry Potter quotes, and for at least a month we played “Amorentia, Imperius, Avada Kedavra” in each of our emails. Two peas, I tell you.

Anyway, back to the trip. We’re driving to New York City on Friday, then we’ll check into our hotel and go out on the town for dinner and everything. Saturday we will do some touristy things, walk through Central Park, 5th avenue, Times Square Magnolia bakery, FAO Schwarz, Tiffany’s etc etc. Saturday night is when Ally and I are going to see Hair, which will be sooo amazing.  After the show we will obviously go to the stage door and meet our idols (Gavin Creel, Allison Case, Caissie Levy, Kacie Sheik, Andrew Kober, Bryce Ryness, Will Swenson and the list goes on). I’m sure that we will be too excited to even think, let alone go to bed, so we’ll be out on the town until it’s socially unacceptable. Sunday we will be extending our stay as long as possible then we’ll be heading back to Kingston where my parents will be staying until they head back to toronto on the holiday monday.

Ally, my parents and I have been talking about the trip for about a month but even still it seems entirely surreal – like a dream. I’ve wanted to see the show since May and talked about having to go to NY, but never did I think I’d actually get there.

My first Broadway show…wow.

something i learned yesterday…

good friends are more important than their bad ones; endure, support, love.

tomorrow night…

so cool.

walking in space…

So,  I’ve been absent recently. I have no excuse other than that I have been at work every day since the beginning of May and therefore, not on the computer very often, because once I get home from work, where I stare at a computer screen all day, the last thing I want to do is go on the computer.

So, there.

Nothing much has happened since I got off school. I re-decorated my room, which is nice because, well, my room’s nice now. I also went to kingston for a weekend to visit friends which resulted in A LOT of drunken pictures, which are hilarious and surprisingly some of the best pictures of us…funny how that works…

But most of all, I’ve been listening and obsessing over the Broadway revival of the 1968 musical, HAIR. Words can honestly not describe the amount of awesome that radiates from the beautiful human beings that make up this new cast. There’s Gavin Creel, the beautiful, charming, marriage equality activist who plays the main character, Claude; Will Swenson, hilarious, witty and the perfect Burger; and my favourite…Allison Case. She only has a small role, but when you watch her, you cannot take your eyes off her. I’ve only seen youtube clips, but I swear she radiates the emotion of the entire cast through her face…it’s brilliant. I want to grow up to be her.

Now I just need to get to new york to see this cast…my life will not be complete otherwise.

Peace. Flowers. Freedom. Happiness. and of course…

i can haz?

please???

EPIC FAIL

Yes. I failed BEDA.

Studying for exams kind of took over my life and I also forgot about it until I was lying in bed, hoping to fall asleep. It was a really good idea, in theory, but I had a feeling that it would fail…sadly.

Anyway, exams went well and and marks are decent, but I definitely have to do better next year. I still find it surprising sometimes when I get marks in the seventies when I was used to high 80’s in high school, but then I look at the distribution and realise that in the 7 courses I took this year, only two of them had students with marks in the 80’s, and in both those courses I received marks in the 80’s…so that’s pretty sweet. Also, in one of those courses I was one of only three students who were in that marking range, and that I find very impressive (if I do say so myself).

Since I arrived back home in Toronto I’ve been pretty busy. I only had one week off before I started work, but I spent that time clearing my room of all of the crap I accumulated over the 19.5 years of my life. I think I ended up with about 15 bags of trash, 6 bags of clothes to go to goodwill, and 4 rubbermaid containers full of stuffed animals (and I gave 3 full bags of those to the children’s wish foundation). It was really entertaining to go through all of the memories I’ve collected over the years (needless to say, I’m a pack rat) and at times is was hard to get rid of things, but all in all it felt good to purge the clutter.

I decided to clean out my room because I felt like it was time to do one, final redecorating project. My parents won’t be moving out of this house (at least within the next 20 years) so it will be nice to have a nice, grown-up bedroom to come home to – unlike the formerly baby pink and blue room I had up to a  week ago. We’ve been working really hard at getting the room finished so every day after work during this past week we’ve been priming and painting, and yesterday night and about all of today we tore up the nasty carpet (that’s been in here since our renovations in 2000) and put down gorgeous, chocolate brown pergo. My walls are a sort of beigey colour and there’s one, deep purple accent wall. There’s currently basically no furniture in here except for my dresser, a cd/dvd shelf, a night table, a wicker chair and a purple ottoman. I’m getting a double bed next week along with basically the best thing EVER: bookshelves. I’m getting a bunch of bookshelves to fill an entire wall. This is so exciting to me because ever since I saw Beauty and the Beast when I was like, two, I’ve wanted a wall of books, like in the opening sequence, “Belle”.

Now, I’ll settle for the bookshop, but I’d REALLY love the the library in the castle…but that seems a little unrealistic. Don’t you think?

*sigh* If only….

Anyway, I’m off to watch more [Scrubs]. All of my friends who watch HIMYM with me all watch scrubs, so I need to watch it too.

Good day, peeps!

beda 15… unfair

Ya ya ya… I’ve missed a few days of beda.

Anyway. This pillow is new on urbanoutfitters.com . I want it but it’s “online only” and can only be shipped within the United States.

Unfair.

So, if there’s anyone in the states who wants to buy me this pillow and I’ll send you a cheque, that’d be great.

8 days guys!