tomorrow will be december - the first weekend of december - and the last month of the year. and it will be momentous on a great many levels. in many ways, this has been a very great year for me - i've moved to a fabulous city full of intriguing experiences and opportunities, and i've made some great friends and acquaintances, and i'm exceedingly proud of the achievements that i've made in the short time that i've been here.

it has not come without a very very high price, but i guess that is to be expected of any great risk. i've learned a great many things about myself - about my capacity for love, and my capacity for hate . i've learned things about myself that are terrifying to me, and things that are very gratifying and comforting.

tomorrow, everything changes for me. i enter the holiday season with a sense of calm that will overshadow my tradition detestation for the season's commercialism and traditionalism and essentially opportunistic mongering of a hackneyed overture to peace and love, and i will try and express myself with a sincere sense of gratitude and hope that i would hope that most self-aware people would try and carry with them through all the months of the year.

everyone who knows me knows that i lament the passing of this year and all that it has brought to me that was good, but now is the time that i celebrate the opportunities that the future affords me. i choose to revel in the present and the bright future ahead. bullocks to the past.

- g

today, i finally finished off a book that i’ve been working at for almost a year now - “a short history of nearly everything” by bill bryson. i wanted to share one of my favourite snippets of it, because it moved me to learn of the utter insignificance of man and all of his machinations in the cosmic scheme of things

“If you imagine the 4.5 billion odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jelly fish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australian. At 9:04 P.M., trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M., plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:34, the Earth is covered in great caboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight, they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded up day, continents bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one eve larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”

i love that passage.

- g

the other night, there was a knock at the door of my apartment (which i always greet with suspicion, because my assumption is that most high-rises have non-solicitation statements) and i thought that it must have been a mistake - so i went to the door to see who it was. i was surprised to see an incredibly sexy, dark-haired woman through the peep hole, so naturally, i opened the door.

the woman had incredibly bright blue eyes (which were probably coloured cosmetic contacts), a luscious tan, dressed in flattering tight black suit from head to toe, and her soft, bronze and bountiful breasts fairly spilled out of her blouse.

it turned out that she was there collecting donations for the sick kids foundation , the fundraising arm of the sick kids hospital here in toronto . i was intrigued to learn the following:

• sickKids is rated among the top four children's hospitals in the world
• they perform over 80 surgical procedures ever day
• more than 725 babies were admitted to their neonative intensive care unit last year
• they treat over 14,000 children in almost 300 beds each year
• their emergency department sees almost 50,000 children each year
• there are more than 1,834 research projects currently underway at sickKids

i've often walked down king street or yonge street or even here at bloor west village and seen the canvassers for donations, but i've never felt that i had the time or the inclination to donate to something that i've always felt was a worthy cause. and i felt ashamed. i mean, financial support is perhaps the weakest form of support (second only to refusal to offer any support - and well below volunteering or more active support), but i was pleased to offer an ongoing monthly donation.

they have the ability on their website to collect donations at any time - and i think that this is a very worthwhile cause. while i have no children of my own, i was one once, and i can imagine that if i did have kids, i would want to have absolutely the very best resources available to protect the life and future of my kids.

- g