This is your life, this is your digital life

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time on the computer. I developed web pages, wrote stories and poetry, and designed graphics. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for me to spend all night on the computer (and this was before Facebook and Twitter). Sure, I had friends and family and extra-cirricular activities, but I loved doing this kind of stuff.

Well, my wish came true because now I spend every waking moment on a computer working for TalentEgg, updating my blog and, now, designing websites for other people.

My friend Mandy recently registered her fashion design business and had trouble creating a WordPress-powered site which was true to her brand. She was awesome with HTML, say, five to ten years ago, but things have changed a lot since then. I didn’t want her to have a website from 1999 for her business, so I offered to help. Partly because I really do want to help her, but also because the only way to become more familiar with CSS and PHP is to actually trudge through the code myself.

It’s coming along slowly, but I had to re-code the theme I chose because it didn’t work the way I wanted it to and the code wasn’t organized in a way my brain could process. It should launch within the next few weeks if all goes well.

Lucky for me, there is an endless number of tutorials written by experts and people who have gone through the same issues. It’s not rocket science or brain surgery, it just takes a little research and a lot of patience.

Thank goodness I don’t have a real life right now because it would definitely get in the way of my digital life!

I <3 T.O.

I don’t know to explain it, but whenever I’m in Toronto I feel like I’m home. I don’t even have a place in Toronto anymore, but I can walk around downtown for hours and be completely content. There are some bad memories, but I don’t have to think about them, and there’s something about the hustle-bustle that feeds my soul.

I love my family, but I wasn’t ready to come back home. I don’t know if it was a mistake, but it doesn’t feel like home to me now. Although I ended a romantic relationship, I didn’t end my relationship with the city. My heart is in Toronto and has been for the last 10 years.

Even being in the TalentEgg office again, almost in my old spot, with all the other young, fun people that make the company so amazing, was invigorating and energized me more than I’ve felt in a long time. It was a little surreal and my mind was elsewhere at times, feeling a little sorry for myself that I’m not part of the team every single day.

So, although my first pay cheque is practically already spent and I haven’t even cashed it yet (dresser from Ikea, spay Sahara, pay line of credit and credit cards, hopefully have a bit of fun and buy some clothes I feel good in…), I know my goal is to move to Toronto as soon as it makes financial sense.

I still need to make a budget, decide how much of my student debt I’d like to pay off and then stick to it for a while, but that’s not too hard when I barely leave my house for about a week at a time, the fridge and cupboards are stocked with food and I don’t pay any room and board.

Fingers crossed. Well, actually, it’s not going to involve any luck, just hard work and discipline.

Freshman 15? Try a fourth-year fat suit

Before I started university, I heard about the infamous Freshman 15 constantly. If you haven’t heard this term before, Freshman 15 refers to weight gain of any amount experienced by first-year post-secondary students thanks to the student lifestyle, which mostly involves fast food and take-out, copious amounts of alcohol, and a lot of sleeping, sitting in class and Facebooking.

First, second and even third year passed without any noticeable weight gain, for most of us. We were just too busy to experience it and, especially for those of us in Toronto, we walked everywhere we had to go.

But as we finished up fourth year, we noticed a lot of us gained some weight – whether it was recently or over the four years is impossible to know – and for me personally, it’s feels like I’m wearing a fat suit some days.

I’ve never been thin, but I can feel the weight I’ve put on recently more than at any other time in my life. And it’s not hard to see why:

I just spent months on computers writing, editing, designing. While I was an editor at The Ryersonian and a reporter at the National Post, I ate at least one meal each day from a food court, cafeteria or the ready-made section in a grocery store. There was no minimum-wage part-time job keeping me on my toes. I worked really long days, squeezing in the fastest, most convenient food when there was time.

I don’t even want to think about how many calories, grams of fat, preservatives, etc. I’ve eaten since January.

A few of my peers, like me, finished up university not being able to fit into their clothes. The future is a depressing enough prospect when we’re not only thrown from cushy university life into the real world, but we have to worry about your career, relationships and all the money we spent at university (which we now have to pay back).

Add to that a veritable fat suit, but under our skin, and it’s hard to feel good about life despite all we’ve accomplished.

However, lucky for me, I have a job. I earned my first real, substantial pay cheque on Friday, so on Tuesday I’m going to join Curves. It’s the only gym within walking distance of my dad’s house and, honestly, I hate traditional gyms.

I’m not going to be calorie-counting or obsessively weighing myself, so I hope eating more responsibly and exercising a little every day will give me some more energy and, you know, a bit of weight loss would be a plus too.

All settled in and ready to get down to business

So, I’ve been working on this new blog here and there as I’ve had time over the past few weeks and it’s finally to the point where I can actually accept visitors to my new home. Thank you for joining me again. I promise I will start to write regularly again now that I’ve made my new corner of the Internet all homey.

I suppose I’ve done the same in real life, too. It was a month yesterday I moved out of the apartment in Toronto I shared with my (now ex-) boyfriend and back into my dad’s house in Cambridge. Here, I’ve painted, decorated and unpacked most of my things to make it feel more like home again. Unfortunately, I can’t wait to move back to Toronto.

I’m grateful I have the opportunity to take a breather, to catch up on my finances now that I’m done university, to be with family, etc. But after being independent for so long, moving back to my dad’s house in a town where the only way I can get around is awfully planned, infrequent bus routes feels like a prison some days.

I miss being steps from the subway. I miss having everything I need within walking distance. I miss having common space that was more or less just my own.

Things have changed here, too. My little brother has his own life. My dad’s girlfriend moved in two weeks after I did. Many of my high school friends have moved away or we’ve just lost touch over the past five years.

Time just seems to pass more slowly here and I’m going to have to get used to it. I really hope the money I’m saving on rent, groceries and bills is worth it.

On evaluating and acknowledging our biases

There are few professions in which individuals are expected to be completely without bias. In most professions, our biases rarely interfere with the integrity of our work.

Yet, as a journalist, it’s a constant battle. Because we consume so much information on a daily basis, we probably have opinions on many more topics than the average person does. And since we’re natural communicators, we’re prone to spewing out our thoughts (on paper or otherwise) at any given time.

It’s something that is completely in conflict with the work we do, however.

Upon doing research on the very broad topic of rodents in Toronto earlier this week, I came across some information that wasn’t secret, but it hadn’t been published yet. Like a good little intern, I jumped on it, dug some more and made a real breaking news story out of it.

Rodent infestations continue to bedevil Chinatown and Kensington Market, with health authorities ordering five recent business closures in the span of a few blocks.

I was also lucky enough to have the chance to turn it into a larger, issue-based feature story the next day.

More than a third of the city’s 56 closures in the past year have taken place in this area, with most inspection records noting rodent or insect infestations, or both.

However, as I interviewed Toronto city councillor Adam Vaughan about the issue and some of the things he’s been doing to make those neighbourhoods, which are in his ward, he raised a very complicated, loaded issue: bias in the media.

Now, he never said, “You’re a racist.” It was never that direct. But as a member of the media breaking and covering a story, I was clearly among those who he thinks approach the issue with a “tinge of racism.”

This has the tinge of racism to it and it’s unacceptable.

At first, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Am I being racist for covering this story? I thought. At first I panicked a little because, you know, I’m white. I don’t know what it’s like to be not white. I’ve never lived in a foreign culture. I’ve never been a poor immigrant struggling to make it in a new country.

But then I looked at how I drew my conclusions about this story. To start, I used real data: the City of Toronto’s DineSafe website has inspection records for every restaurant in the city.

Based on my knowledge of city street names, I could already tell many of them were in the Chinatown/Kensington Market area and the rest were scattered throughout the city.

But I wanted to be sure, so I created a Google Map which showed the location of every food premises which had been closed in the past year. My assumption was correct and clearly illustrated on the map; there was a high concentration of closures within those side-by-side neighbourhoods.

I also spoke to leaders in both of the communities, giving them the opportunity to tell their side of the story:

Barbara Kwan, vice-chair of the Chinatown BIA, said business owners in the neighbourhood are doing everything they can to combat the problem.
…
Kensington Market Action Committee chairman Chris Devita agreed but said many local residents and business owners are not doing anything to eliminate pests.

The only thing I can’t account for is widespread systemic racism.

It’s entirely possible that the city’s public health inspectors target this area more than others and hold business owners there to a higher standard than others because of their race.

And it’s definitely true that many new immigrants, people of colour and non-English speakers face extremely challenging societal barriers for a number of reasons, only one of which is racism.

While I’m aware of those issues, they’re not something I could tackle in this article — and they’re issues that, perhaps, no journalist could hope to tackle in any news article.

The easiest question I can ask myself, as a journalist, is: Would I still cover this story if one third of the city’s closures had occurred in another neighbourhood, in hoity-toity Yorkville, or the artsy-fartsy Beaches, or Little Italy, or the Church-Wellesley Village, etc.?

The answer is yes, I would.

I would cover the story if it could be found in any of those neighbourhoods, or any other community, because not only is it my responsibility as a journalist, it’s also what I would expect as a consumer who frequents restaurants in this city and doesn’t check the DineSafe inspection history of each one before I go.

Could I have done more to acknowledge my biases in this case? How do you acknowledge your own biases in your work life?