Prompted after a long campaign by MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) and by Tim Mulcahy, whose son was one of three killed in a drunk driving accident on July 3 of this year, the Ontario government is enacting a new law today in which young drivers are subjected to new restrictions on their license:

• A total ban on alcohol consumption (i.e. BAC of 0 while operating a vehicle)
• Restriction on the number of passengers during the first year of holding a G2 license (i.e. no more offering rides home to a multitude of persons under the age of 19 until after a year)
• Zero tolerance for speeding (i.e. thinking of going maybe 10km/hr over? Hope that the cop isn’t grumpy then)

While I sympathize with Mulcahy’s loss, I do feel that we should look at his son’s actions on that July 3. Making his own choices, Mulcahy’s son was aware that he was driving but still made the choice to drink a whopping 31 drinks with his two friends. Considering his BAC (blood alcohol content) alone, he would not have been able to legally operate a vehicle even under the previous Ontario law.

Perhaps instead of introducing new laws that limit a young driver, we should look at the very basic element of learning to drive - driving school. The Ministry of Transportation of Ontario allows persons holding a G1 to proceed to G2 testing within eight months (as opposed to one year) provided that they have gone through an acredited driving school and obtained a certificate. What I fail to understand is that these accredited driving schools seem to be numerous, and many of them seem quite dubious in their teaching style, if you can even call it that. I’ve heard stories from friends who have gone to such driving schools (you know, the ones where you pull the tabs off at the bus stop and give them a call, and if you bring a friend, you receive a 10% discount) and I fail to see that they are learning anything, both in the classroom and in their in-car lessons.

Some persons that I have talked to have told me that they have not gone to their classes but marked present on the attendance sheet, some have told me that they have gone to classes and learned nothing but the life story of the teacher, and some have even told me that they have gone to classes and simply had a group multiple choice test on “car safety”. In-car lessons with some of these schools include picking up the next student or the instructor’s child from day care, or on some days, just a drive around the neighborhood with the occasional left and right.

I assure you that I do not mean to say that all these ~$300 schools are terrible ones, in fact there are some gems in that list. But youths seem to seek the cheapest school as a quick route to getting their license, and fail to seek quality in their education simply because they believe that they will learn how to drive after they get their license. Perhaps we should look more into which schools should be accredited and which ones should be removed from such list. While some schools, such as Young Drivers, cost a significant amount of money, I feel that the education is worth it. Structured in class and full of practice in-car, Young Drivers is by far one of the most highly acclaimed driving schools in Canada. Given that most things that we purchase can be bought a discount price, but should that include our license?

If we are not able to take the responsibility of getting an actual education with regards to driving, how are we going to be able to take up the responsibility of paying for insurance and paying for a vehicle, let alone driving safely. Why yes, it’s been reiterated many times that driving is a privilege, but how much of it is a privilege when anyone can bring in a piece of paper stating that they have completed driving school?

The problem isn’t in teenagers being reckless. The problem is in teenagers not truly understanding that not everything can be bypassed with a discount or with a shortcut. While enacting such a law would hopefully guarantee a decrease in the number of teenage driver accidents, one cannot guarantee that everyone will comply and learn these “good habits” - there will still be dangerous drivers, young and old, on the road. It is up to the individual to learn how to drive safely. This law is by no means a speech act (i.e. a declarative sentence can be used to perform a number of different speech acts) for good conduct on the road, it is merely a solution that skims the surface.

Like anything else you read, you’d expect it to be eye-catching and easy on the eyes, so why not your resume? Mind you, when I say eye-catching, I don’t mean including pretty pictures and printing on scented paper. What I am referring to is the correct use of subheadings, spacing, and font sizing. Having a poorly crafted layout will result your resume being put through the paper shredder.

Separating the highlights of your work experience from your education, and from whatever other miscellaneous information you choose to include, subheadings are meant to be used as dividers. Often, I find that people retain the same font style for their subheadings as they do for their bulleted points. Pressing the enter button is not going to make the divisions any more noticeable. Add a little variation! Increase the font size or change, make your subheadings in all capitals, bold the text, or even change the color of your text to a darker grey. These small changes are the nuances needed to make your resume stand out a bit more.

One of the most important aspects with regards to format is spacing. Learning to leave enough space between sections is one thing, but also learning to leaving enough space between bullet points is another. As much as one thinks that reducing the line spacing is a great way of jamming more information into that one page, it is also a surefire way to make your resume cluttered and impossible to read.Tying in with font size, make sure that your information is readable. No one wants to have to run down to the pharmacy to grab a magnifier or reading glasses to read your qualifications. Make sure that both your spacing and sizing is done well enough so that you are able to read your resume clearly from a fair distance (i.e. you should be able to read what you have written without having to strain your eyes or putting the sheet centimeters away from your eyes).

Usually, most people do not use anything smaller than a size 10pt font. For your header though, where you state your name and contact information, feel free to make that slightly larger so as to make sure that the reader knows how to get a hold of you.

Well, that’s it for the format portion of this series. Tata for now!

The lineup was incredibly long if you weren’t already holding a ticket. In fact, if I were to measure it in football fields, I would say at least one and a half football fields! Even though the lineup for those already holding tickets was considerably shorter, it was still quite a huge mob. Bypassing the huge mob - think good timing and good location - I got into quite a crowded exhibition hall with many free samples calling out to me. Let’s just say that I’ve probably had my fill of chocolate for the year.

Now the highlight for me of this whole show was the fashion show. Considerably different from my experience at the Ethical Fashion Show , this show was one where it was much harder to get a good view, but when you did, you couldn’t help but be amazed. With a raised platform in the center of the exhibition hall, you’d think that this would be a huge attraction, and it was. But without other forms of media to project the fashion show, many people left, continued their chocolate ventures, or scrambled their way into the crowd in hopes of catching a glimpse.

When people said chocolate fashion show, I imagined something much more elaborate than what I saw. I thought of entire dresses being made of chocolate. Of course, I now realize how preposterous that sounds and admire the chocolate elements that were added to the clothing items. The models were excellent in terms of evoking personality on this mini runway. The encore where the chocolate couturiers came out with their creations was highly enjoyable. What kept me on my toes and my camera on was the entertainment between clothing changes.

Now I’m quite torn about one thing, and that’s the amount of music that was cued on the runway. Each strut down the runway required a new song, and while I enjoyed each costume having its own distinct music, I can’t help but wonder if it was really necessary. At other fashion shows that I’ve been to, it’s been minimal with the music changes; usually the song finishes and then another one will play, it isn’t really in sync with the whole runway show.

I can be clear about this: I’m not going to commencement solely for the fact that I want to be on that stage and graduate with everyone. It’s not that at all.

The first two years of my high school career were spent being quiet and shy. After first impressions and everything of that like, teachers already have their ideas about you and very little can be done to change that. I suppose when grade eleven started, I began to change, but it wasn’t incredibly noticeable. There were certain characteristics that became a little more prominent in my personality - I became more goal oriented and I learned to fight for what I wanted. And by fight, I mean the ability to persevere to achieve what it is I want. Senior year was incredibly different. I felt that I could achieve a lot more than what was being given to me (i.e. opportunities). Learning from a textbook isn’t really for me, so when I wanted to learn about something or to try something, I would make a club and get people to interact with me and teach me. Truth be told, I had very little idea what I was doing half the time. And sometimes, I think people knew this.

I had people talk about me saying how I could never achieve all of this, how my ideas would fail, that I was taking on way too much, and that I would just go crazy. In a way, I guess you could say I lacked support and faith from peers, and sometimes, teachers. This lack of faith and belief actually pushed me to do better and to do more. If opportunities did not exist, I learned to make them from whatever resources I had and with what little help I had. Complaining wasn’t an option. There was always a way to achieve what I wanted or a way to achieve something even better than what I had aspired. What wound up happening was that I helped make the business department shine a little, some classes learn a little more about what was going on in the world, the school a little more culturally involved with ethnic foods, and some other things. I’d like to think that I made some sort of impact, even if it was only a couple persons.

I have to admit that high school was never about academics for me. If you asked me where I stood in my graduating class in terms of grades, I could tell you that I was in the top ten percent of my class, but I could also tell you that I never tried incredibly hard to get these grades. I wouldn’t say that they came naturally, but that they came with less effort than my extracurricular activities. One of the greatest lessons that I took away from school was that everyone can have a positive impact on your life, it depends on how you take the criticisms and the praises. And also, remember that opinions can always change, you just have to prove yourself (kind of like the arguments that I am posing and needing to develop in my cultural foundations essay!).

So while I thank those who believed in me, I have to thank those who had a whit of faith in me. And for you all, whether you’ve implicated in your words to me that you don’t believe in me or whether you’ve told me that I have the potential to achieve great things, I will be on that stage to show you what I have done with the opportunities that I have made.

Some of the booths intrigued me. I was more in search of clothing that were using organic materials, but there were young companies making use of other ethical approaches, such as equity, social projects, and the like. Of course, I would’ve been more impressed if they also made use of natural materials, which quite a few of them did. The organic and natural materials though, were lacking a bit in diversity. As an option to be eco-friendly, most of the exhibitors chose the approach of using organic cotton or to use silk for their clothing.

The fashion show for sportswear and urban wear was meant to be the highlight of this exhibition. And it was. For the most part, I thought the models did an excellent job representing the clothing line that they were wearing.

But why get rid of everything?

Well, this past summer I have been working in an office (aside from working my food and beverage jobs) where I first redesigned logos to developing and designing websites. But of course, it’s not all fun and games where I can simply slap some codes together and pray for Google’s bots to crawl onto the webpage. I wound up having to do intensive research on the topic of search engine optimization to hopefully generate more hits for the company. What I wound up realizing was that I was going about my way of SEO (search engine optimization) all wrong - in fact, I hadn’t even heard of the term until this summer!

Scratching my whole webpage, I’ve decided to make this one more efficient and run everything from Wordpress. However, I haven’t scrapped the domain name because age of a domain also plays in as a factor for being searched - I’ll worry about that later. Getting hits isn’t all that important to me, it has just been irking me that I could’ve been doing this (which I can’t even define myself) a more efficient way.

Aside from website related things, I have started university at New York University. I’m on a first year exchange and living in Paris, France. It’s a pretty interesting experience given that there’s incredibly few people in our program - it’s basically gifted program version 2.0 with some quirks. With regards to the city, Paris is incredibly different from Toronto. I can’t pick out one thing at this moment to discuss, but there are plenty of ways in which the cities differ.