Well yesterday was the day - half a million people lined the streets of Toronto to see the annual Santa Claus Parade. There were children everywhere sitting on the pavement excited, yelling and screaming, asking their parents when Santa was coming… Everyone was excited! That was until the 2-hours of waiting and 40-minutes of freezing rain came along.

The parade was set to start on the North end of the city to head South at 12:30pm, but already by 12:00pm at the end of the route the streets were being lined with camping chairs and blankets on the sidewalk. Sure, at this point 90% of these chairs were empty, being guarded by a lonely parent, but the streets were filling up. By 1:00pm everyone assumed that Santa wouldn’t be too far away and so the streets were suddenly flooded with children pushing to the front of the crowds and parents trying to make sure they get there. I personally found this whole thing to be sheer insanity - why would anyone want to come out into the streets on a day like that!? Now, I have no idea what the temperature was on Sunday, but I can tell you it was insanely cold! (From my Australian perspective) Within a matter of about 10-minutes once everyone had taken their spot and stopped running around the chill started to seep in. The children slowly became more and more recluded into the folds of their blankets and the parents started hopping from foot-to-foot behind them. Apparently winter had arrived to see Santa too. During the 2-hour wait we had in store for us (Santa was apparently slow getting going) we experienced 40-minutes of freezing rain, followed by a few minutes of snow. We also suffered through winds shuffling between the buildings and the sheer lack of movement that let all this go straight through the skin, and of course the rain had formed puddles along the pavement. Now all the children’s blankets were soaked and unusable. No one could move, otherwise they would lose their spot! What fun it was.

Suddenly, as if the children all caught a fever with the picking-up winds that made them delerious - I started to hear more and more children tell their parents that they wanted to go home. I was surrounded by a group of about 5, 3 of which asked this exact question. One of the children I was standing near pleaded to go home, saying that she’d watch it on TV later. But no, not a single parent gave in. We all stood patiently, waiting for Santa. About an hour into this long wait a thunder of marching band trumpets and drums echoed through the streets. Hundreds of clowns, followed by postal workers collecting letters to Santa and the band marching through passed us. The children were showered with candy. Then they were gone. It was a glimmer of hope, taunting us as we stood in the cold for another hour after that. A little cruel, don’t you think?

But, in the end the parade started. Float after float, all clever tools of advertising for companies like McDonald’s and WalMart, and all surrounded by countless filler - people dressed in costumes for close to no reason, with no relation to the float they’re walking with. The parade went on for another hour at least, with huge gaps in between the floats sometimes lasting 10-minutes at a time. But in the end it happened. In the end… Santa came!

And then he left…

As he approached you could hear the roar of the shivering crowd, screaming out to their idol, the one they had come all this way to see. His voice boomed, “HO! HO! HO!”, over a loud speaker and walking christmas trees circled his float. And then about 30-seconds later he was gone… After all that waiting someone had clearly stepped on the gas pedal. He went past faster than any other float, most of which passed at a crawl. Maybe Santa was cold? Either way, Santa quickly past and with him the crowds went into a frenzy. New friends that had met each other in the two hours of waiting suddenly said goodbye and charged off. Another 40-seconds after he was gone there wasn’t a single person standing still on the pavement anymore, and about 75% of people were just walking in the middle of the street to get away from the cold and to get home to a heater.

It’s amazing what alure a fat man in a red suit can have. All of us, all half a million, stood in freezing rain for the man… and all we got was 40-seconds!  Ah well, at least the children were happy. Either that or they were too cold to complain. All I can say is that Starbucks must have made a killing that day…

Wouldn’t it be nice to sit down, watch some TV, maybe read a book - and when it’s time to go to bed actually be able to fall asleep without waiting for hours?? The “Tired Button” simply isn’t enough anymore…

Lately I have once again started to contribute to society, and to do that I have gotten a job! Naturally it comes with all the perks, like a salary and something to do during the day. So it’s a pretty good deal if you ask me! Unfortunately, it comes along with a strange need to get there. For some reason the people at CIBC didn’t consider that when they started up their company! Well to put it simply, I need to catch the GO Train every morning to commute with countless others into the city, all the way from Whitby, Ontario. The train ride takes about 40-minutes (since I get an express) but in order to get to the train on time I have to be awake by 5:30am. Now THAT is a serious issue. Before getting this job I became accustomed to sleeping in until 10am, 9am at the absolute least. That means I am getting up 3 and a half hours earlier, every morning! Let’s just say that translates into me being very tired at particular times of the day. However, no matter how tired I am, I can never get to sleep.

My tiredness seems to operate like this - I wake up early in the morning, and am incredible tired to the point of having to struggle to get out of bed. I am then fine after breakfast and a shower, and then I head off to work. I then start to feel a little groggy mid afternoon, especially when there’s no work to be done. Once I leave work I am fine again. Then I don’t get tired until around 10pm. So, naturally I occasionally choose to go to bed around that time! The logical thought process behind this would be, since I am feeling tired at 10pm, maybe I should go to bed at 10pm. It never works. Generally, by the time I am ready to go to bed, I am awake again, and then I spend a good hour lying in bed thinking, “this sucks”, or, “what a waste of time…” EVENTUALLY I get to sleep, but it is incredibly inconvenient to not be able to fall asleep instantly. Especially when I wake up tired in the morning! It doesn’t make sense. Throughout the day, suddenly out of no where I have an overwhelming urge to close my eyes and sleep - as if someone had hit a button, a tired button. But at night, that person is on a coffee break!! In the end, though, I think it has something to do with the getting ready for bed process. When I start to think that I am tired, I am generally sitting around doing nothing. But when I get ready for bed, I am up and moving. Hence, I have come to the conclusion that it must be the activity - my body has realised that something is happening and has decided that it should send some energy my way, to get me through. That energy doesn’t get used, and hence I stay awake.

This becomes especially evident when the following occurs:

I am ready for bed, all the preparation is done. I am lying in bed watching TV, all rugged up and ready to go to sleep. I decide that what I’m watching sucks and I’m extremely tired anyway, so I reach over, pick up the remote and turn the TV off………… And I’m perfectly awake.

I have had enough of the tired button, it gets pushed throughout the day. I want more. I am sorry but it is simply infuriating! When, oh Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms Scientist… (have to be all inclusive there to be politically correct) … when will you invent the sleep button that’s not on a computer!?

As strange as this may sound to some people (especially people in the North American area, like Canada and the US who have grown up with it - I don’t know if they do in Europe or anywhere else) I have never experienced a Halloween before. Back home in Australia it is literally a non-event. It is printed on every calendar sold in the country, perhaps with the exception of the small-time charity calendars, who knows? However, even though everyone knows about it, about when it is and what people in some countries do - it is not celebrated at all in Australia. In fact, in my entire eighteen-years of life I can only remember two instances of it having any significance what so ever:

Once trick or treaters came to our door, and when I say once I mean only one group on only one year of my entire life. It was a pair of young boys in their school uniforms with plastic masks on, and a plastic bag. Luckily I had been to a birthday party recently and hence had candy to give out, but that’s all. A few years after, my friends and I decided to try out this Halloween trick or treating thing, just to see what we could get - between us all we got a packet of 2-minute noodles, an apple, some mints and $2 to share between the five of us… Let’s just say that it wasn’t a very bountiful harvest!

That was all my Halloween experience right there for you. However, this year was different. Because I am living in Canada at the moment, I got to see how the Canadians do their Halloweens, and trust me it was pretty exciting for me!! I wont go into details to explain exactly what I did, but I will point out a few of the interesting things that I noticed along the way, although I personally think that most people MUST have thought about all this at one point or another themselves.

During Halloween parents encourage their children to approach complete strangers and accept candy from them. Now I realise that this is the whole fun of the night for young children, some even make it their nights ambition to get as much candy as physically possible, but it does seem rather odd to me. Throughout my entire childhood I was bombarded with the “Stranger Danger” philosiphy, and one of the main points of this is do not talk to strange adults and do not accept candy from them!! When I was at primary school we actually watched a video that showed us a child (an actor, obviously) be approached by an adult, offered candy and then kidnapped - it is just not something you do, and everyone knows it! However, on Halloween children are taught to run up to a complete stranger’s door and practically beg for candy, and to continue doing this for a few hours, and what’s more, they’re often encouraged to approach strangers in costume, who are thus normally scary to the child and hence they wouldn’t approach them! Children are being told to approach people they’re naturally scared of here!! In fact, I even saw some parents speaking to their children who had had enough and wanted to go home, forcing them to keep going to get more candy - “Just one more house”. Now I realise they do this because they want their children to have the best possible experience with Halloween, which, of course, equals seventeen bags full of candy, but it just seems rather odd, and I would assume that a few children get left with mixed ideas from their parents. I even heard some children talking about coming out and doing it again tomorrow night - might be a little more dangerous on a night without so many people on the streets.

Another thing that seems rather counter-productive about the whole Halloween tradition is the mountains of candy that are amassed by each child over the course of the night. Parents all over the world have a huge fight on their hands when they want their children to put down the chocolate and move away from the lollypops, and to come and sit down and eat their vegetables. Candy is generally given as a sometimes treat, often for good behaviour, but on Halloween the children are given piles and piles of candy that, I would assume, would just make it all that much more difficult for parents to try to keep their children away from the stuff!

With all that said, though, I went trick or treating with my three-year-old cousin Shannon and I had an absolute blast. Both while I was walking Shannon up to the door to ask these strangers for candy, and when I was hanging back with the other adults watching their children from a distance (although many children were set out through the neighbourhood alone - natural with age, though, I suppose)… I had a great time and I want to know why we don’t celebrate it back home!

At this point in my life I am travelling across the world - I am living away from my home country, Australia, with my Aunt and Uncle in the sunny ol’ Canada, and I have been travelling across Europe in the past month. To keep a record of the events that shape my travelling life I am keeping a diary. Not a diary of my thoughts and feelings, but merely a diary of what I had for breakfast that morning in Venice, and similar such things. The bottom line is: I keep a diary. Over the past 7-months I have actually accumulated a nice little pile of books filled with my scribbled handwriting, and they are the best souvenirs of my trip by far.

However, I do not see them as finished. Despite the fact that some of these diaries were written in the early stages of April and May, they are still being written. They are changing, evolving with my thoughts on my travels today. Occasionally, when I get time, I flick through the diaries of yester-month (it’s not a word, but it should be) and read what I wrote - what I found interesting, what I found new - and I can’t help but have a completely different perspective on what I experienced back then. One day I thought to myself that it would be a shame to lose that new perspective, in contrast with the old one… and so I started to make notes. If you look through my old diaries they are littered with post-it notes with tiny scribble trying to get my new perspective across, marks in the margins to remind me of things I forgot when I was writing the diary all that time ago, new thoughts and ideas overflowing the pages…….. As I said, my diary is still changing, evolving into something new every time I read it.

Most people, from my limited knowledge of the subject of what other people do in the privacy of their own homes (for all I know they could do the cha-cha until 6am), do not see their diaries this way. They spend maybe an hour pouring their hearts out onto a little piece of paper, or in more modern times, a tiny piece of a computer screen, and then it is put away and forgotten for years to come. Sure, the author may come back in years to come to read what their thirteen-year-old self reacted to their parents divorce, or the maths test next Friday, but it ends there. How do they feel about their parents divorce now? What about that maths test? Even the tiniest fragment of the past can be seen in a completely new perspective only a short time later. A diary should not be treated as a completed record of the past, but instead a growing record of developing perspectives on past events.

Besides, it makes it a lot more interesting to read the next time!

So if you keep a diary, or have diaries from past years, go back and flick through… Read a couple of pages here and there, and while you’re at it grab that post-it pad sitting on your desk and make some notes, anything, and leave a new record, keep your diary alive. If you don’t write a diary and never have, try it sometime! They’re good fun to read, even a month later, and I’ve been told that your grand kids will thank you for it!