This Thanksgiving I'm Thankful for Jerks

Thanksgiving is the time to give our thanks...obviously. And every year, I'm thankful for the typical few things: good friends, great family, good year, etc. But this year I'm giving an extra thanks...to jerks.

Jerks? Why on Earth would I be thankful for them? 

I'm thankful to them because I love what follows their actions. 

A Purpled Goodes

Last December after the Engineering Class of 2016 got their GPAs and had them purpled, someone on Facebook posted on our university's Overheard group about seeing two Engineering frosh spilling purple paint (perhaps even gentian) on the steps of the Commerce building and then making a run for it. 

What jerks, right?!

Well, a few hours later, the following picture was posted by another student. 

Image c/o Alex B.

Apparently, another group of Engineering Frosh had gotten together and worked away for a couple of hours to clean up someone else's mess. I'm not sure how many students would have responded the same way. I will admit that I did not take up the initiative to clean it up. My response was similar to many others: "Why should I spend time cleaning up someone else's mess? This is ridiculous! It's going to be a pain for the custodial staff to deal with that." 

But someone had taken that initiative. Because they had realized that although two complete assholes had decided to spill paint on the steps and that it would be a LOT of work to clean it up, the school was their home and there was no way they were going to let someone else deal with the actions of their classmates. 

Homecoming 2013 - Part One

This past weekend, we got to experience our first Homecoming in 5 years. While most of the weekend is pretty tame, Saturday night is usually when it gets rowdy. And that too, on just one street. The infamous Aberdeen Street. Thousands of students gather on Aberdeen every Saturday night to party it up. This year was no different. 

However, what was different was how the street looked the next morning.

Image c/o Mike S.

Big deal, right? It's clean. But what I care about is who cleaned it. It was the students. There was hardly a beer bottle or red cup in sight. Many students woke up early Sunday morning and got to work to clean up the street. Now, I'm not calling everyone who was there partying jerks. That's not the case. However, I know that 85% of those people did not clean up their booze and cups.

Words cannot describe how proud I am to belong to a student community such as this. Leading up to the weekend, there was a lot of emphasis placed on ensuring that Homecoming was here to stay. So to have the student body come together and ensure this was truly amazing. 

I'm thankful everyday to go to this wonderful school. I'm thankful for how students always come together to fix a problem regardless of whether or not they played a direct role in creating the problem in the first place. I'm thankful for community and its importance to every Queen's student. 

So thank you, jerks. Your actions are often ridiculous and unnecessary but they manage to bring out the best in the rest of us. 

A Wolfe Island Wonderland

One of the programmes that Dons do around this time is Corn Maze with our residence floors. A family who lives in Wolfe Island (a short ferry ride across Lake Ontario) has set up a big maze out of their corn field. This is the one event that every residence will do and since I wasn't able to go in my first year, I was super excited this time around. 

So this past Saturday morning,  the girls of Addy-Ban Righ took to Wolfe Island and spent the afternoon enjoying a ferry ride, a hay ride, and then manoeuvring through a giant corn maze. We gathered bright and early outside our residence hall at 11:30am (yes, 11:30am on a Saturday IS considered early), and set forth to the ferry terminal. 

The walk to the ferry was filled with secret gardens, beautiful old architecture, and the farmers' market at the Market Square. After a while of waiting around in the wait area, our ferry came in so we hopped on and set sail.

LOOK! We found Waldo! 

We also met the cutest little creature. Meet Cosmo the rabbit! We got the chance to pet him and I have never, to this day, felt anything softer. Petting Cosmo felt like I was touching a cloud. I had a fantastic plan to steal and sneak him back into residence with me but sadly, he was well-supervised by the farmer. Maybe next time.

Once we all had the chance to pet Cosmo, we divided into teams to play a corn toss game to battle for the homemade chocolate chip cookies the farmer's family had made for us. 

After playing the corn toss game (which my team lost, sadly), we got some lunch and then finally started the corn maze. 

The weather was absolutely beautiful so the other residence staff and I took this chance to take some pretty impressive pictures. 

 

The afternoon finally ended when we realized that we had less than 20 minutes to get to the ferry terminal before it departed for Kingston again so we all rushed back to the hay ride and rushed back.

It was a crazy day and we were all exhausted by the time we got back to residence but I couldn't have traded the experience for anything. Just look at the view we got on our way back to the main land and tell me I'm wrong.



Should you ever find yourself in the Kingston area between August and early November, do yourself a favor and head to the corn maze. Or at least take a day trip to Wolfe Island. You won't regret it. 

The Idea of Infinity

One of my all-time favorite quotes come from Harry Potter and has to do with the idea of infinity. 

“Dumbledore watched [Lily] fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears. ‘After all this time?’

‘Always,’ said Snape.”

 –Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

This summer, I turned 22 and aside from a DSLR camera, there wasn't anything else that I really wanted. Nothing that I couldn't do without. However, there was a lingering want in me—that of a tattoo. I’ve wanted to get one for quite a few years now and there are only two that I really want.

The tattoo that I wanted to get on my birthday is the infinity symbol on my left wrist with the word ‘always’ embedded in it. 

I’ve come to really appreciate and love the concept of infinity. The idea that something can exist forever in this world of ours, where so many things are coming to an end, is simply enchanting. Marriages end, friendships end, and even life, inevitably, ends. But then I realize that there can be certain things, which will stand still through time.

When I told my mom about what I wanted for a tattoo, she didn’t understand the significance. It also didn’t impress her to learn that the tattoo was inspired by the above quote in Harry Potter. But it makes sense to me. When it comes to abstract ideas such as love, I’m a cynic. But even I can’t deny the rarity of Snape’s love.

Brought up in a culture where the primary interaction between guys and girls is filled solely with the thought of hooking up, it’s rare to find the kind of love that is found in books. It’s even more rare that someone’s love for a person can exceed the finite into the infinite.

And it is this part of Snape that completely enthralls me.

It is this part of infinity that leads me to hope that perhaps someday, I can come across something that will last infnitely.