Office life is as interesting as ever... but in the last few days I have managed to enjoy myself. I guess a big part of that is that it has been the weekend, and another big part is that the weather has been great.

On Saturday night, after Rae had finished her final paper for Discourse Analysis, we went over to her house to have dinner with her homestay Ark. Ark is a student from China who's parents we visited when we were there this summer. Until this point, I had never talked about politics with him. I guess I had just assumed that he was a typical Chinese student who studied hard, trusted authority and didn't concern himself with politics. I was quite wrong. When he asked me about my opinions of China I told him what I thought. I told him how the nationalism was scary, how students all have remarkibly similar ideas about everything and how people generally don't know much about the outside world. I also complained about the media and the anti foreign (especially anti-Japanese) slant on all the news. The thing that surprised me was that he was in general agreement. He was actually quite concerned about the nationalism and being stirred up, especially towards Japan.

Ark's father is a fairly highly placed Chinese Communist Party official in his home town. This satus allowed him to read the internal communist party magazine (which is strictly off limits to normal people) and to let his son read it aswell. This magazine is actually critical and open minded. It includes things like policy debate and disagreements. On hearing this I was both happy to know that it was possible for open minded writing to exist in China as well as dissapointed and scared that this was denied to the majority of the people who are force fed the government's propaganda.

Ark is actually a very interesting person who I should see more. I regret that it took me this long after I got back to Vancouver to see him.

On Saturday Rae and I watched Crash. I was impressed with its brutally realistic portrayal of racism and of the city of LA. It made me want to go back to LA to see it again and to stay away at the same time. I can see why it won the oscar.

On Sunday I met up with my friend Noah who has just gotten back from spending the better part of a year in Japan. He was looking good and was in good spirits. Since it was a nice day we went for a walk along Coal Harbour where we saw a boat rental place. The prices looked reasonable so we rented a boat and boated out to Deep Cove and back. It was great fun to be out on the water, surrounded by mountians, ocean tankers, sky scrapers and bridges. When we got to deep cove, it felt like we were in another city, that we were on vacation. We parked the boat at the public warf and went for an ice cream. It was great fun, definately one of the coolest things I have done in Vancouver and something I would like to do again.

Hanging out with Noah was fun. His time in Japan has made him very polite and also very excited about everything Canadian. I regret that I was not able to visit him in Japan while he was there.

On Sunday evening my sister came over to do the laundry. While here, she cooked an amazing mango curry... mmmm... mango curry.... and we watched cartoons. It was just like old times from when we were living together, except without the tension.

Today I went to work again. It was as fun as usual. I had lunch with Ashley and we talked about our weekends. It reminded me that I was having lunch alone too often. Life in the work world has so much less socialising built into it, it needs to be forced in in order to keep life worth living. After work I met up with Scott and a friend from econ last year. We had a beer on Coal Harbour and then dinner at the Korean place on Robson that I like. It was good times. One of those moments where I am happy to be working and to have money to enjoy myself, and happy to be stress free while off work.

The working life is just life. Work is the constant and life is a function of the other variables. To take the derivitive of life, work falls out of the picture and you are left with the other variables either going up or down. In a situation like mine where work is a constant, these are the areas where effort should be applied.

I am starting to wonder why I am staying in my job. The answer that I come up with is mostly twofold. Firstly, and most obviously, it gives me something that looks good on my CV. Everyone has heard of CIBC, and underwriting sounds pretty cool. Secondly, and probably just as importantly, it is training me for the workplace. It is a place where I don't necessarily have any power over my work, my coworkers or my environment. It is a place where I have responsibilities and where I have learned things like keeping my voice down when talking to people and not talking about anything too personal or contraversial because the people I offend will still be there with me every day. Although these are not lessons I want to learn, I am sure they will be required in any workplace so it is better to make an ass of myself while learning now than to screw up a job I really like later. Maybe I am just trying to rationalize a decision that I am actually making out of inertia and the happiness I feel making money. Maybe I just don't think that I will find anything better anywhere else. Either way, I will show up to work tomorrow.

Finally the long weekend.

On Wednesday after my last blog posting, I went to a seder hosted by my Aunt and her finance. This made me reflect that this was the first year that my Zaida (Yiddish for Grandfather) did not lead the seder himself. Given that he is now95, I don't think he will ever lead another seder again. Thinking about this leaves me with a lingering sadness. It makes me think back to those seders we would have when I was a kid. How we would sing songs and read the Hagada and be together as a family. It was something I always enjoyed, but now I fear that without my Zaida leading them, they will never be the same again. My father doesn't know all the prayers, or at least he is quite rusty with them and my Aunt's soon to be husband, Howard, is somewhat too religious and too Jewish nationalist for my tastes.

I love my Zaida and it is hard for me to see him ageing like this. My memories of him were of someone who was full of life. He and my Baba (Yiddish for grandmother) would always go for walks and swims. He loved to go out. Now, he has trouble walking up the stairs to his apartment. I am very grateful that my Baba and Zaida are still healthy enough to live on their own in their own place. I have heard about the quality of life in old age homes and I would not want to see them in a place where they do not get the respect they deserve.

In the past two days I have had my first non-work-related social contacts with my coworkers. Yesterday I went to see a movie about English teachers in Russia with Mick. The movie reminded me a lot of my life in Beijing. They teachers drank and smoked and swore and just lived the lifes of expats. Really, the only difference was the people in the background and the language they spoke. It also made me think that we, as North Americans, are very lucky not just to be able to teach English anywhere, but also that we are able to go anywhere and not feel pressure to assimilate. We can be accepted as expats in almost any country for as long as we like. After the movie Mick and I went for all you can eat sushi at Kishapopo. I must say that it is obvious that the place is run by Chinese, and not Japanese, people. But, it was still nice to stuff myself with raw fishand talk to Mick.

Today, I went to see another movie but this time with Ash. We saw lucky number Sleven, which was pretty good. After that we went for a beer in Yaletown and then a walk around. Although I did not ask point blank, I think Ash is older than I had originally though he was. He also had some interesting things to say. Ash wants to do business and wants to have me as a partner. I don't know what I bring to the partnership, but I would be willing to give it a try partly for the money and mostly for the experience.

I guess this is what office life is like. It is not particularly stimulating, but there are some good people around. At the same time, I really appreciate how many people say that university was the best time of their life. The university atmosphere full of young people thinking and discussing almost anything that can be thought or discussed. The sheer numbers of people, although alienating, also gives you a chance to find people you want to be friends with, not just friends of convienience. This is then all held together by the leisure time which enables the thinking and socialising which defined my university experience. Looking forward, I feel very lucky to be going back into this environment, even if it is only for one year and without the same leisure time I enjoyed as an undergraduate.

But its the working life for me now...

Ok, I think I am over it. I know my job is not super rewarding or interesting, but I can still manage to live a perfectly happy life anyway.

In the time since my last post, I made a concerted effort to get out more, see friends and do things so that I don't feel so terribly bored. On tuesday of last week I went for a good all you can eat sushi lunch with Ashley. It was kinda cool to leave work and do something fun like that. It really made me forget that I was working at all.

Wednesday night I met up with Ashley again, but this time with Scott aswell. While we were having a drink in my apartment, Rachel's former roommate came by with some money that he owed me. I took it as a great opportunity to enjoy, so I said I would put it all $60 of it towards our dinner and drinks that night (hehe, lots of face for me...) . We went to Wilson's steak house, which is owned by Scott's boss, the MP for West Van et. al. and had some good burgers and other stuff. One year ago we were all students, and now we were all office people. It is hard to say if it is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is definately a different stage. That night, on the walk down to Wilson's I broke my cheap Chinese dress shoes. I was pretty upset about that because, even though they were only $10, they were pretty nice and I didn't want to have to buy new ones.

Rae came over for most of the weekend. On friday night we had decided that we would cook dinner for eachother. The problem was that my roommates were around so it was not very romantic. They were in the dining area, around the table speaking Spanish. After dinner, where she cooked Korean hot pot and I cooked curry, we went out to rent some movies. We decided on "Brokeback Mountain" and "The Meaning of Life". To our dismay, when we got back to my place, I discovered that I didn't have the key. After we managed to slip in behind someone else to get through the front door, we went up to my apartment only to find it locked. We then spent the next 3.5 hours sitting by the apartment door waiting for my roommates to come back. In that time, we talked...

Saturday we went for a walk and then watched Brokeback Mountain. Brokeback Mountain is a great movie. It is definately deserving of all the praise it gets. The acting is very real and the characters are so believeable.

On Sunday, Rae and I went to Kintaro for ramen noodles. That place is also pretty great. After Rae went home, I went shopping with Rachel. I hadn't been to Sunrise in a long time and I was happy to stock up on veggies and rice, things which I had not been eating much of since I moved back downtown. Sunday night Dima came over with his friend and we played ping pong. Even though I thought I had improved, Dima still beat me every time we played. I think I should practice more and learn how to serve well...

Monday after work I got a text message from my friend Paul. He said that he was finished his last paper and invited me over for a drink. I was happy to oblige. We had a good time playing pack man and drinking er guo tou alcohol. Around 10, his friend came over and we all went out to the liquor store. It was at this point that it struck me how much freedom students have. While they could keep drinking at 11, I had to think about going home and getting up in the morning, but I guess the the bright side is that I don't have to write any exams.

Last night, Rae and met me after work. We went for a walk along English Bay and then went home and watched "The Meaning of Life".

My sister calls, I am off to my Aunt's seder.

Life is getting routine. It was bound to happen. After graduating from school and doing exciting things for a while, settling into a repetitive paper pushing job was bound to be a let down. The job, which requires no real thinking, is made worse by the lack of work that I have. I am forced to keep up a sharade of pretending to work to avoid being assigned work even more menial that my own such as data entry. The excitement of working at a big bank has all but worn off and I am starting to wonder whether this will even look good on my CV. Will my potential future employers know what underwriting is actually about? Maybe there is something better I can be doing with my summer before grad school.

I have found that I am now living for the weekends. Work days are spent in an underslept, caffinated haze of deliberate desensitization and floresent lighting. After work I am tired and lifeless. By the time decompress, eat, and gather up the energy to become a person again, it is dark and I don't bother venturing outside. If I am diciplined, I go down to the gym to work out, if not I watch mindless drivel on TV or read the Economist. Around midnight I grab whatever snack I can before reading the Mao book that Ashley gave me and going to bed, only to do the same thing again the next day. This is why I was so dissapointed that it rained on saturday. If I was working or if I was not working, could just shrug it off as a Vancouver day, but this time it felt as if half of my week was robbed by the weather.

Sunday was a different story. Partly because of the loss of Saturday, I was determined to make the most of the day. After having an all-you-can-eat sushi lunch with Dima I met Rae and we went for the longest walk we have ever been on together in Vancouver. We went from my place, over the Cambie bridge, over to Main, down to 33rd, over to Fraiser then back downtown to my apartment. On the way we discovered that Main st is pretty cool, perhaps cooler than Commercial drive we also saw that Fraiser is really dead and the talk that I had heard about Fraiser being cool was definately premature. When we finally got home we were both sore and tired. Rae fell asleep on the couch while we were watching TV, it was cute.

I long to travel. I had been hoping to go to New York once more before my parents give up the apartment. Unfortunately, that will be happening two weeks earlier than I had planned and flight prices are more than I can afford right now. As my thoughts race ahead to summer it dawns on me that I will have to spend those sunny days in the office pushing paper. Now more than ever I understand the appeal of a world in which it is "possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." But then that is not reality.

P.S. To the person who asked me:
I did go to Sydney Academy. I was there from September 1997 to June 1999 which was grades 10 and 11. I lived in Sydney for a total of four years before I moved to Vancouver in 1999 when I was in grade 12.