The past two months have been a hell of a wave to ride. I juggled four paying jobs with a full course load of school at one point, to earn enough for spring semester's tuition. I was at my behavioral intervention job, did babysitting for the two most adorable, precocious kids in the world, am assisting on a library research project, and I work for the Students' Union, still. To be honest, even with all that, I still managed to do pretty decently in uni. I got into a fellowship scheme for spring, which gives me a tiny stipend for books, and is actually a cross-faculty book club I have to be part of for the semester, so it's going to be even more work on my plate, but hell, if I have to be paid for something, it might as well be for reading books. I also won the Alexandro Malaspina Award for interdisciplinary excellence, which is easy for me, as someone taking a Political Studies Major and a Liberal Studies Minor. The latter award came with $500 cash, so now I have $7000 saved, of my $12,000 spring semester's tuition. And yes that's twelve grand for the next four months, half of which I don't have. People here/domestic students don't seem to really wrap their head around the number until I show them the invoice on the school's website. But you know, we'll see how things go, I guess. So anyway, despite doing decently well in school and work, the issue of the Palestinian genocide weighs heavily on my mind, possibly even more so, because both the country I come from, Singapore, as well as the country I reside in, Canada, are allied much more closely to Israel than they ever should be. I've been to pro-Palestine marches here in Nanaimo, but it's a very small community that attends, and it's disproportionately people of color as opposed to the majority white people who live here. It gives me a constant headache and perpetual existential crisis. I have a Palestine story highlights on my Instagram, if you should need it to be aware of why you should be pro-Palestine. If you're here, reading this, I assume you're already aligned somewhat to most of my beliefs, so I don't think you'd need them, but they're there. They're also resources for you to have conversations with the greater public if you ever wanted to do so.
