some search for things to burn

"until we all feel, we have enough things, to burn"

i've always had a difficult time saying no. saying no to people. saying no to things. saying no to work. saying no to anything. i'm a person who tries to give other people and other things the benefit of the doubt. and more often than not, it tends to screw me over.

as i'm getting older, i'm learning to say no as much as i can without it maybe screwing me over. although, at times, it will continue to fuck up my life. like that one time i said no at my last job and it played into my eventual demise with the company. that place was fucked with or without me and i saw it as a good thing.

i never said no when i was younger. i had a bad habit of treating friends who weren't very good to me better than how i treated myself. these friends would end friendships out of the blue for no reason (or a variety of reasons to be discussed at a later date) and come crawling back months or years later. and sometimes, i took them back. only to have the same thing happen again, and again, and again. i never fucking learned. i never understood how someone i thought was a friend could hurt me as much as they did.

i grew up and kept making the same mistakes with new friends, with old friends, and with dudes. until one day when it was about to happen, i said no.

there are 4 examples that stick out in my mind.

an acquaintance in high school had a thing for one of my friends. she would fuck around with every dude, including his friends, and not him. we kept in touch briefly after high school and then that ended for whatever reason. he goes through stages of adding/removing me as a friend on facebook for years. one day, he adds me back and confesses he's living in toronto with the girl. we hang out without the girl (because she already hates me) and things are fine. weeks later, i found out he (probably) stole some of my shit and had removed me from facebook. did i learn my lesson? nope, not yet. a little while later, he adds me back and tells me they broke up. i don't care. i don't even want my shit back. he goes back and forth deleting and trying to add me again until i finally said no and blocked him. i'm not sure what he wanted me to do for him, but i wasn't interested to have that kind of negativity in my life.

one of my better friends in high school did a similar thing, where she got really upset with me for saying something about a dude she was dating at the time. i have no idea what i said but apparently it was grounds for removing me from facebook without cause. when i finally noticed, i probably sent a message asking what the hell. she told me, i told her i didn't remember, and that was apparently it. by this time, she was already engaged to somebody else. i didn't care. i already knew this was the end of friendship and i'm pretty thankful for that.

i got pretty close to a friend after a year in university. the next year, we're hanging out and as far as i'm aware, things are just fine. i go home and don't hear from him for what seemed like a really long time. it's unusual, but maybe he's busy. he tells me he was mad at the way i left him the last time we hung out. he was mad because i didn't look at him when i was leaving. i don't even know what that means. he then goes on to tell me we were never friends. alright - we hung out every day for an entire year, but nope, we're not friends.

the last one is probably the worst one, because it's the broest bro doing bro things while not even being a bro. this dude i met through a friend and he became obsessed with me to the extent where he would make up fake profiles and send me horrible things. he didn't like me not being interested in him. little did i know at the time, he was one of the first of many dudes i would encounter who were exactly the same.

and maybe these people don't really have a purpose in my life. and whether i like it or not, they'll always try to come back to me. the trick is remembering i can say no at any time. and i don't owe shit to anyone who has hurt me before.

post graduate program review

i learned a lot of really neat things over the past 8 months.

although i won't go into ridiculous detail about everything that happened within the project management - environmental program, here are some of the highlights (expect some major use of cognitive dissonance!):

1. good professor, bad professor 

yes, i sure had a wide variety of instructors. one of them in particular that everyone in the program seemed to have a problem with. he had a tendency to not give any feedback, got angry when people came in late, wouldn't always give a break during class, wouldn't allow you to leave the class when you had to pee, argued with students over more/less grades, got angry if he taught something to us once/seven times and we still didn't understand, didn't see a problem when he handed back the midterms and then was approached by 95% of the class about grades, yelled at students... and the list goes on. he taught two of my classes. that was not fun.

a second professor had a very weird way of grading that was most of the time, extremely unfair. he wanted a ridiculous amount of information in order to be given full marks for each question. his first few tests/quizzes were like this, and once he discovered that only one person in the program had any knowledge on the subject and we had collectively decided that his grading was not good, he changed his marking scheme and made it slightly better for us. until the final exam, worth too much of our grade, which basically screwed everyone over. but i thought it was legit... i studied and memorized a lot of what was on it. i just sort of feel bad for the rest of my program during that exam.

a third professor started off alright and then i stopped going to class. this class had a very small number of people in it and rarely did i ever get any work done. the first assignment i submitted sometime at the end of january was returned to me in march; i had done the whole thing wrong. so i asked to resubmit the assignment and she agreed. then, i didn't hand it any of the other assignments, minus one that i did hand in. when it got to the end of the semester and the final assignment, i did each section of the final assignment and asked if i could still submit the other assignments i didn't do. she agreed but seemed extremely disappointed in me for not doing the work on time. she also yelled at me for not getting the work done on time like almost everyone else. honestly, i just didn't give a flying fuck about this elective course. i spent four days at the end of the semester trying to crunch out those assignments and email them in; she must have accepted them and i must have done a very good job on them despite the "late penalty" i was going to get, as i still somehow got out of that class with an A. 

the rest of my instructors were fantastic, except for my mentor for the internship.

2. the "internship" 

i started this program based solely on the internship component. i have limited experience (see: none) in my field of study, besides shitty summers on clifton hill with tourism and i'd rather be on the environment side of things. what i, and most of the people in my program who were having the exact same problem, were hoping was that the we would gain some valuable experience and skills from this internship.

now, when i think of an internship, i think of literally being in a workplace setting with other people who work there and y'know... doing work. like, hell, if i was just the intern who took notes at a meeting or was in charge of getting coffee or making photocopies or just.. anything in the workplace that needed to be done (hell, i would have cleaned bathrooms if it meant i'd be doing SOMETHING). but this was not the case.

instead, i met with my project sponsor once. the first time, i was sick and wasn't able to meet him. he gave us a project -- to develop an environmental audit checklist and methodology to measure the effectiveness of their environmental performance. cool? i figured maybe as part of the project, we would have to conduct the audit ourselves. wrong. maybe we would have to go in and actually survey employees for our checklist questions. wrong. at the very least, i thought we would be in constant communication with the sponsor and maybe have a few days where we would be on-site, checking things out and gaining that real world experience. nope, wrong again.

so what did we do? well, we created the checklist and methodology. essentially, a 40 page project. it included the actual project plus various project management tools and techniques that we used. also, there were 3 people in my group, and the one guy basically did next to nothing the entire semester. my mentor was a bit of a dick and rarely helpful -- because we didn't really need him for much, but he was always extremely nosy and into our business which didn't help a lot of things. after that already 8 hour day before seeing him, and staying close to another 3 hours with him once a week for no reason, i just couldn't take him any more. it's a good thing i know how to be a dick back.. i can thank my thesis advisor for that.

3. program friends 

despite all odds, the people i met in my program were amazing and i'm glad we all got through it together. these are definitely some people i won't soon forget. and i hope we can hang out and do things all summer -- and that my next year program of green business management will have just as great people. i made some life-long friendships and i'm happy for that!

i like to think of us as community.. kinda.

4. recommendations

i'm pretty sure we were the dawning age of this program. it's only been around 2 or 3 years and yet, supposedly, we have changed it so much. we were supposed to have that one awful professor for a course in the second semester. after we (see: the entire program) took the course coordinator aside and bitched about the professor to the coordinator, he made some changes and hired a wonderful professor to teach us the course in the second semester.

they'll be making changes to the curriculum for next year and not allowing an elective course. i found the elective for us to choose the most frustrating as almost nothing that interested me (or others) was available. about ten students chose a project scheduling class at a different campus in the evening. that class didn't interest me and i wasn't sure how to get to the other campus, nor did i want to have a day that started at 8am and ended at 10pm, so i didn't take it. originally, i started off the semester in an energy course that i went to 3 classes and immediately dropped for a different class -- with the third 'bad' professor. but the elective sort of tore the group apart; some were in the scheduling class, others took online or correspondence courses, some took other random classes. it was just extremely screwed up. our family was not as close as it should have been in the second semester as much as we were in the first semester when we had a fantastic schedule and no 14 hour days.

but, it's over. i graduate and get handed my ontario graduate certificate at the end of june. i would probably recommend this program more with the better curriculum -- and if the internship ever turned into an actual internship. it was a somewhat okay way to utilize the project management skills we gained from the first semester and the risk management skills in the second semester. however, the program and the courses need better organization and a focus with each class relating to each other through projects, assignments, presentations, and lectures. connectivity between courses is key to higher education and learning, and i at least felt that tourism and environment at brock had that down a lot of the time.

onto bigger things in september: green business management. because i've yet to land a job so i may as well dive deeper into my student debt!