With summer quickly approaching, thoughts of tanning, days at the beach, and nights spent on patios are on our minds. If you’re like me and love a good drink on the patio, here are six of the top Toronto patios to try in 2016. Get a group of friends together and head out on the town in the liveliest city in Canada!
1) Mascot Brewery
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Designed like a backyard barbecue, this rooftop patio boasts yellow umbrellas, picnic tables, and white picket fences. The patio seats 200 of your closest friends and features made-from-scratch munchies served through the window of a food cart.
With the summer fast approaching, our minds are filled with exams and the looming idea of what to do over the summer. If you are anything like me, you are constantly debating a summer job, an internship, or just putting your feet up and regaining some of my sanity before next fall rolls around. Part of me wants to get a job in my field, get some experience under my belt, while the other part just wants to relax, whatever that means.
If we really want to be successful, the truth is that we need to get ahead. The world is becoming increasingly competitive and our peers will soon become our competition for a job in the real world. Hopefully, this list of options can help both you and I decide what to do over the most glorious four months of the year.
Fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine was reported missing on August 9, 2014. Fontaine, who was originally from the Sagkeeng First Nations in Manitoba, was living with Child and Family Services at the time of her disappearance. Five days later, her corpse was uncovered in a bag in Winnipeg’s Red River by police officers. Her body was found unexpectedly when officers were looking for another man who had been seen struggling in the water earlier in the day. Her death has been ruled a homicide, and on December 11, 2015, Winnipeg police announced that Raymond Cormier was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in her death. Her family is still without answers.
Sonya Cywink:
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Sonya Cywink, a 31-year-old Ojibwa woman from Birch Island, Ontario, was last seen August 25, 1994 in London, Ontario. Five days later, her body was discovered in a wooded area at Southwold Earthworks, a historic park 50 km south of London. She had been beaten to death. The identity of the killer and their motive remains unknown. Her family is still without answers.
As a student more than halfway through my degree, I’ve often had to face this question: what do you want to do with your life? My parents ask me with a caring concern, wanting me to have a plan for success. My friends ask me so we can rant and stress about our impending futures. And I ask myself, because in all honesty, I have absolutely no clue.
In my second year at UTM, I took Children’s Literature. One of our assignments was to pick and analyze a fairy tale, so I wrote a short paper on Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid. To this day, it’s my favourite assignment that I’ve had for any class in my four years of undergrad. I make every excuse to bring Disney into my daily life because when it comes to Disney, I’m a complete nerd.
Exam season can be kind of chaotic and often times the end of finals can be a great time to reorganize the study space. Here are five great ways to clean up that desk area:
1) Less is more.
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I know you bought the 100-pack of blue pens from Costco because you figured you’d need them, but that doesn’t mean you should cram all 100 pens into your pen holder. Things don’t need to get complicated. Grab a fun mug and fill it with no more than five pens. On that note, as soon as you notice that a pen is dying, toss it out. I guarantee that if you were to go through the pens on your desk right now, at least a third of them wouldn’t work. Save yourself the time and frustration and only keep what works.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably elated that all the dilemmas and decisions you faced during your senior year of high school are now behind you. You’ve picked your university (great choice by the way), you’ve picked a general stream of study, and that all-too-stressful decision of what to wear to prom is now a distant memory. When I was in your position last year, I thought the tough decisions were behind me. I’m sure you’ve realized by now that that isn’t the case. Since beginning university, I’ve had to face more tough decisions that involve asking questions with answers that aren’t so clear.
I’ve always had a deep fascination with the themes of childhood, the shattering of innocence, growing up, and even death. When I was younger, it was hard for me to name or even shape my thoughts about any of these concepts, but I knew one thing very clearly back then—that I enjoyed seeing art that tackled these very subjects.
It came to me as a surprise when I discovered Studio Ghibli and their films. What was amazing about their work was that everything I ever wanted to express had already been done in these films and in the most beautiful ways. And even more surprising than that was I did not feel the slightest bit of disappointment or sadness that someone had managed to do, long before I was born (in the ’70s, to be precise), something I always wanted to do.
YouTube, one of the world’s best procrastination tools! I can’t even count the number of hours I’ve spent on YouTube, either watching funny videos or self-learning through educational videos.
These are some of the channels that I absolutely love:
1) CrashCourse
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This one is similar to Khan Academy, as they have educational content in 15-minute videos. They cover an array of subjects, from history to chemistry, in a fun and quirky manner. John Green, author of our beloved The Fault in our Stars, is a cohost of the channel alongside his brother. I would especially recommend their psychology video course. Even if you’re not a psych major, the content is pretty easy to understand and is mind-blowing!
2) Jus Reign.
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I’m positive that all of you know of Jus Reign, one of the most famous desi comedians! I remember watching his first skits and pranks, and now he makes music videos! These videos are meant to be a small study break, to take your mind off school for a bit. One of his newer videos that I found hilarious was “If DJ Khaled Was Punjabi”. He also touches on issues of race and discrimination. He recently talked about his unfair treatment at airport security.
This one sentence in itself gives me anxiety. It’s the question you get at every interview, during an awkward silence in a conversation, and family dinner. As if people expect you to have it all together. Well, I can tell you that I personally have no idea. Heck, I started in forensic science and I’m now in digital enterprise management. I am the definition of lost in life.
So what does it mean to know what you want, to search for a dream job? Is it about finding your “passion”, that deep-rooted desire that everyone supposedly has? Or is it about doing something just for the money? How does one decide what they, in fact, want to do with their life?
