A girl friend of mine just offered to help me bake tonight. (I’m baking Ina Garten’s peanut butter chocolate chunk cookies and a honey cake with vanilla frosting). How do I say this…she is an awful baker. Baking is about precision, and she is too laid-back for that precision stuff. One year, we did some Christmas baking together. Not only did she not check ahead of time to see what she didn’t have, but right in the middle of mixing something, we left her apartment to go buy sugar.

Anyway, my kitchen is too small to have two people baking. How do people bake together anyway? I still haven’t quite figured that out.

One of our local daily papers had on their front page noting it was the 10 year anniversary of the APEC conference being held here. The conference was one affect that changed my life somewhat – or at least my outlook on life. There was a big protest that day at my university, and it got messy. They say this was a landmark protest…I don’t know about that. But there were two to three thousand students peacefully protesting. The protest pretty much ended when the police came in and pepper sprayed everyone. Lots of the protesters were manhandled.

Anyway, I was near the action the day of the protest. For some reason, I didn’t stick around. I probably went to class and missed out on the pepper spraying action. I felt kind of guilty that I didn’t see first hand what happened because I fully supported the protesters. I remember going to class (Sociology of Education) the day after, and my professor who was/is also the Dean of Arts looked so shaken up and sad. He apologized.

Up to the day of the conference, there were lots of lectures and presentations going on, a lot about APEC, big business, and globalization. I was very passionate about these issues at that point in my life. I think I lost my youthful optimism after the protest.

Before the protest, I asked my parents what they’d do if I got arrested. They couldn’t even imagine that ever happening. “Why would you get arrested?!” I tired to explain to my dad about big business and all that. He didn’t get it. He didn’t think of any of it was a big deal. “Who cares?”

I remember the big stink about Mr. Tube Steak (a hot dog cart) getting kicked off campus, but the guy had to go. And then there was another big stink on campus because Coke was to become our only soft drink provider. Before the contract was signed, we could choose between Coke or Pepsi, but Coke gave the University of BC $10 million. It blows my mind these days with these corporate sponsorships. The Vancouver Canucks play at “GM Place.” I go watch movies at the “Scotiabank Theatre.” I hate that corporations’ names have to be attached to anything.