Back in the spring, I wrote about my problems with big pharmaceuticals. I had just come off of a course where pharmaceutical interventions for mental illnesses seemed to be disproportionately pushed. It may stem from my own discomfort with my family doctor seemingly being in the hand of pharmaceutical companies, it may stem from the fact that I live in one of the hippie capitals of Canada, or it may be the fact that I have always tried other options before resorting to popping a pill. Any way you look at it, I think there is a problem with the way North Americans relate to medications. That is why this post on The Ethics of Western Pharmaceutical Companies caught my eye. It is from jordoncooper.com, a blog I read from time to time. He shares some chilling quotes that are worth a read.
Author Archives: Gillian
SALTS
I have been associated with SALTS, the Sail and Life Training Society, for over ten years now. My first trip was a three-day coastal voyage in high school. I’ve been on board nearly every year since then. For two years, I worked for SALTS in the position of cook. Coastally, I’ve sailed all around the Gulf Islands and Sunshine Coast/Desolation Sound as well as circumnavigating Vancouver Island at least once. Offshore, we circumnavigated the Pacific Ocean: Hawaii, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, China, Japan… I lived and breathed SALTS for those two years – at times literally never leaving the boat for weeks on end (the longest passage we had was 30+ days without sighting land). I had to miss sailing with them this summer because of school, but I am looking forward to getting back on the water next season. It is hard work, but it is some of the most rewarding work one can ever do. Enjoy the short video. If you watch closely, you might pick me out once or twice in the offshore footage at the end.
Because it never just rains
… it floods.
I’m flooding the world with postings all of a sudden. I finally got around to updating my photo site. In the Daily Life album, you can find a half-dozen or so new photos at the end, including the one and only photo from my time in France this summer that I saw fit to add. There is a limited-time San Francisco album with about 20 photos from our trip earlier this month. It will stay up there for an undetermined time and, when I get around to it, my favourites will be shifted to other albums and I’ll delete the rest to clear up space. Enjoy!
How do we get more young people in church?
I am kind of, it feels like, the token “under-30” at church at times. Not that I am the only under-30, I am just one of the more involved under-30s who appears at church on a fairly regular basis. By and large, however, my generation is dramatically under-represented in church, at least many of the ones I frequent. Many of our churches, especially in the mainline denominations, are struggling with numbers; churches are slowly (or not-so slowly) getting smaller and smaller as parishioners die with no one to replace them.
It is a sad state of affairs and it leads to the above question often being asked. As the apparent spokes-person for the “young people” at church, I often get asked variations of that question. My favourite version so far went something like this:
The Christmas bazaar is coming up in a few weekends, Gillian, I’d love to have you and some of your young friends help out at it. It would be a great way to get them to come to church.
I’m sorry, in what universe would I invite my friends to church to volunteer at a Christmas bazaar that amounts to little more than a giant rummage sale that serves lunch? I’m sure that is the best way to get more young people in church. If you can’t hear the sarcasm dripping off of my words, please reread that paragraph and insert sarcasm.
What, then, do we do? I have lots of unformulated and inarticulate ideas, but most of them revolve around one simple premise: stop trying. Stop trying to get young people into church. Instead, start going outside of church and hanging out with young people and start enjoying life with them. If they decide to come and check out your church, cool. If they haven’t, you’ve still made a new friend and you can both be blessed by your friendship.
If, however, you are like some people and like lists, I highly recommend this post by an American university chaplain. It was recommended to me by the blog of an English priest. It is worth the few minutes to click over and read, and I think that many churches need to implement it least some of her suggestions.
Anything and Nothing
I am reveling in the fact that I am all done my coursework until the New Year! It is an incredible feeling, after 14 months of more-or-less non-stop school, to have time to do anything or nothing. I am enjoying being able to come home from work and read a book or knit, guilt free. I can go to bed at 9pm without feeling that I’ve missed out on school work. Or I can stay up until midnight reading a book “for fun”. It really is a wonderful thing. Whole days have gone by without me turning on my computer. The computer may feel left out, but I love leaving it off! The downside is that I am getting out of practice writing and my journaling and blogging suffers.
I’m also beginning to prepare myself for a busy January. I’ll be doing my practicum (here and here) four days a week as well as hopefully working two days a week. That will give me approximately only Sunday, and the odd Thursday afternoon, to sleep, read, and catch up with people. As a result, I’ve started to let go of other commitments. The major weight lifted is that I’ve resigned from the committee at church that was sucking up my time (and my soul…).
Until then, I’ll be reading up a storm and working on some knitting projects. I sewed a skirt on Saturday and started a new knitting project on Sunday. I’m ambitiously reading a 700+ page non-fiction book “for fun” and have four more on the floor to get through between now and Christmas. I have a good supply of chocolate and tea, not to mention the leftover mulled wine and spiced apple cider left from my party on the weekend. I could get used to this.
#yyjsnowapocalypse
For those of you not in the Twittersphere, the title of this entry is a Twitter hashtag. What is a hashtag, you may ask? It is a way to create groupings on Twitter. For example, people “tweeting” in Victoria often use #yyj to signify that the content of that tweet relates to the city of Victoria. YYJ is our airport code.
Monday, the Victoria hashtag of choice, however, was “yyjsnowapocalypse”. Plain and simple, this means that when it snows, we freak out while the rest of the country enjoys a good laugh at our expense. What constitutes a snowstorm in Victoria has the rest of the country merely increasing the speed of their windshield wipers. Jack Knox, of the Times-Colonist, wrote a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek piece about this in his article last week.
Consequently, I’ve devised a step-by-step guide to Victoria’s snow weather:
- Environment Canada issues “Heavy Snowfall Warning” for the region.
- Mass hysteria and panic ensues: salt and snowshovels sell out, stores close early, people leave work early, a run on tire shops occurs as people rush to get tires installed.
- The first few snowflakes fall.
- Hysteria continues and the weather is now all that we can talk about.
- It continues to snow. Perhaps a collected accumulation of 4-6 cm.
- Public transit is running 1 hour behind on the routes which are still open. Many routes are suspended or have altered routes.
- CRD Police forces close down certain roads, specifically anything with a slight incline or decline.
- Anyone who did not already leave work early, does. Shops close, meetings are cancelled. Taxis make do a roaring business driving everyone who was too afraid to drive their own car home.
- Three days later, the city is still reeling and Gillian is still riding her bicycle.
Friday Photo
I’m going to San Francisco tomorrow.
With my sister.
I’m excited.
Seven
Everyone has defining moments, the kind that you can point to and say “I remember where I was when…” For many people of my generation, we can remember where we were, what we were doing when Princess Diana died, when the aeroplanes crashed into the Twin Towers. For my parents generation, they remember when man first walked on the moon, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and so on.
For me, I add November 5, 2003.
November 4, 2003 was a fairly normal day in our abnormal life. We had some good friends from our Ontario days visiting us in Prince George, where we lived at the time. At home was Dad, Mum, and me. Jen was at school in Edmonton. We did the usual dinner, spend some time with Mum, go to bed. I likely stayed up late working on a paper in the den. I don’t really remember anything special about November 4th.
Sometime between 5 and 5:30 am on November 5th I woke up to Dad pounding up the stairs. He had been sleeping in the living room on one of our bunk beds, beside the hospital bed Mum had been sleeping in for a few months. I jumped out of bed and met Dad at the top of the stairs.
“She’s gone. She must have stopped breathing sometime after we were up at 1am. I woke up and didn’t hear the oxygen going any more and I knew something was wrong. She’s gone.”
And now, when people recite the old verse, “Remember, remember the Fifth of November…” I remember. But I remember someone else.
November. School and San Fran.
And then it was November. I’m not sure where October went. Nor September for that matter.
One week left in my coursework and I am frantically researching and writing my final paper for the course. It isn’t supposed to be long but there is a lot of research in the area and it is harder to write something when there is a lot already written on the topic. I feel like I have to read absolutely everything before writing the paper which has meant at least 3 days of reading and note-taking so far. All of that for a ten page paper seems excessive.
Because I am doing all of that, I haven’t spent nearly as much time planning the upcoming trip to San Francisco as I would like. I’m relying on my sister’s preparation and the guidebook given to me by my friend. A week from now, I’ll be basking in San Francisco-ness and enjoying the many shows there. I have no idea how/what to pack as it looks like it is 10 degrees warmer there than here but I need to be ready for rain and fog. Plus, I need to bring my computer as I’ll have to do some school work from there. At least I can travel and do school all at once.
gillian's island 