On Christmas lights and being lazy

I like to walk, a lot. There is a certain zen appeal to walking as opposed to the other options for travelling. Even if the weather is bad I will still walk; if I have some music to listen to, good shoes and my warm coat rest assured I will walk wherever possible.

So I am walking last night down the streets of my childhood, and I noticed a number of things about my neihgbourhood. I live in a part of Toronto (when I am not at school in Hamilton) called Don Mills. This is a strange neighbourhood in the North East of Toronto, not quite north enough to Thornhill and not quite east enough to be Scarborough. 60 or so years ago Don Mills was the suburbs of Toronto untill the city expanded and pushed suburbia farther and farther away. It also used to be a overtly Jewsih part of the city. Today I feel like my family are the only Jews still living here and the neighbourhood looks just like most of the other residential parts of Toronto. We have lost the cookie cutter look of suburbia (that's a good thing), the treess that were just saplings planted by the developers have had 50 or 60 years to grow and the houses have seen enough owners and remodeling that the street looks like a nice collection of unique houses. That's just on the surface, if you scratch just a tiny hint below that you can see the unifromity of the houses, there are really only three maybe four basic house designs and on top of that they are all worth roughly the same amount. This socio-economic platuea means that everyone in the neighbourhood is about as well to do as everyone else and it becomes apprent in a lot of ways. Every family with kids on the street has a basketball net in their driveway (including my own driveway), every mother has a minivan or for some a useless luxury SUV. Every driveway has two cars, usually a sedan of some sort that the dads drive and a minivan or other large, whole family accomodating vehicle.

Now before I get any farther off topic, let's go back to last night at around 10:30 when I went for my evening constitutional around the block. I like Christmas lights, although I don't know why or how the christians got a hold of the naming rights to string lights and why many Jewish families don't think it appropriate to put them up but never the less they can be very pleasent to watch...CAN be very pleasent. Many of these lights, especially those "iceicle" lights look terrible in the day-time, like the house sneezed and left a stringy green goober hanging off the roof. At night time though, they twinkle like little diamonds shimering in the cool winter dusk. There are some beautiful lights in my neighbourhood. Carefully done to compliment the shape of the house and artfully warapped around the trees and bushes. They have found beautiful colors, not the grade-school bold primary color lights but nice shades of blues and purple and white/oranges that gradual fade between one or two or even three colors.

I guess what this post is really about is being lazy. I have studying to do, I have two exams left before I can fully enjoy my winter break. I am sick of school, I am sick of my classes. I am now past the half-way point to getting my degree but have recently become very unsure of what I am doing or why even bother doing it. I am going to stop reading Kerouac; the last bok I read by him ( "The Dharma Bums" it was fantastic) made me want to drop out and begin a simple life living in a modest cottage in the woods learning to meditate and write and be at peace. I think these ideas have immense importance, I really believe that there is value in doing things that are profoundly useless. Unfortunatly I live in a society overly obsessed with functionality and now I need to start figuring out which cog in the giant machine I will replace.

Well that's enough procrastination for now. I have updated the books section and the music section so check it out. I think I am slightly less bored than when I started.

P.S. A final though to pose to all my readers: If I put my study notes under my pillow when I go to sleep tonight, do you think I will keep absorbing information? Kinda like osmosis (now before all you science kids jump on my lack of knowledge, I am in Peace St. but I do know that osmosis is kinda the idea I am going for, or is atleast a good description of what I am hoping will happen.) What if I were to record myself reading the notes and then layer it into some music and then fall asleep listening to that song on repeat...would that work? Basically I am looking for the easiest, laziest way to add new information to my brain. Any and all suggestions are welcome