Beaten - Max Greer

Have I ever told you how much I hate you? No? Well this is as good a place as any to start. I don’t know how much more time I can stand being locked up in your basement, being senselessly beaten down and battered for hours. Honestly it can get a little tiring after a while. You probably think that some girls are into that kind of thing, but believe me, I am not one of them. How would you like it if i went to your house and just beat the crap out of you for fun? You would probably not be into that shit at all. The most I can hope for is that in the process of pounding on me, you’ll get hearing loss and eventually go deaf. Perhaps then you’ll realise that playing drums is pointless to you and you’d leave me alone for the rest of your life. Each day I hope to hear that wonderful news, however usually I’m just left to spend another day collecting dust in the stone prison you call a basement. Also your band totally sucks, and I can’t believe I’m forced into being a part of it. Percussion can’t be that important, especially in your crappy band. No matter how many times a week you have band practice, you’re not getting any better. It’s a lost cause, just give up man. Even though you always talk about becoming a rock star and you daydream about playing in front of a huge crowd, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to happen. Actually, you know what? I hope your shitty band takes off and you become a huge success. I hope you tour the world and play your shitty music in shitty cities, for your shitty fans. As long as that means you’ll have enough money to buy a shiny new drumset to beat the crap out of. Go to your local drumset trafficking ring, pick out a poor, young, innocent kit, make her feel welcome and loved, THEN BEAT HER SENSELESS JUST LIKE YOU DID TO ME! Okay, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t wish this kind of torture on other people, but frankly I deserve a break. I still remember my days as a bright eyed little drumset, sitting on a shelf in the music store. All I wanted was for someone to come along and fall in love with me. They would take me home, set me up in their front room, tune me up, shine my finish and dust off my heads. That was a long time ago, before I knew my true fate, the fate of all drumsets; good and bad. Oh how cruel a destiny to be carried out by me. To the higher power who crafted this diabolical jest, I hate you almost as much as the asshole who tortures me on a daily basis . And that’s saying a lot, because I REALLY hate that douche-canoe. Wow, I’m really getting emotional over here. You know it’s bad when I start using transportation-based insults to degrade people. Whatever, I’m not even sorry. Not once have you shown me pity or respect. I’m just another piece of trash for you to brutally abuse.

Emma Ferreira -- Christmas Miracle

This past Christmas WestJet brought Santa Claus and his elves to the Dominican Republic to give them a real Christmas miracle : A Response

Dear WestJet,

Feliz Navidad, prospero ano et felicidad. Globalization : the process of international integration arising from the interchange of worldviews, products, ideas and other aspects of culture. International integration otherwise known as westernization. See, it’s not the colour of your skin or the food you eat, it’s about how much you’d bleed for the powers at be. See, this airline goes down to my coastline and drops a blue sleigh with Santa Claus on the other line telling Tanisha no to worry about her dollhouse because it’s on the way but, didn’t they get the memo? In La Republica Dominicana we celebrate Three Kings Day. But, hey ok, I get it, provide a big American miracle for those beneath you, but what do you expect Tanisha to do for the other 364 days? When mami needs medicine for the little tyke or when Don Andres down the street needs yet another engine for his worn out motorbike? Where do you expect them to go when the blue sleigh’s gone and the elves are all but missing? Will you send in a new batch with asses severely in need of kissing? I doubt it, but hey once again, that’s ok, that’s just the way it goes right? Bring this “third world” country to your national - excuse me your world stage - exploit their weaknesses, edit a video and make those blissfully ignorant feel good about what they saw today. An impact made on a country in desperate need of some change. “You know I heard that when Michael was down visiting Punta Cana he went off the resort for a day to do some local excursions and oh well you know how dangerous that can be so of course he hired a tour guide. Well a poor, less fortunate boy came up to him and asked him for his shoes. Apparently Michael had an extra pair of flip flops in his bag so of course he gave the boy his shoes. Well what was he going to do? Let the poor boy run around barefoot on all those dirty unpaved roads to contract god knows what disease. Michael is such a good man, a saint really. He probably changed that boy’s life with just a pair of shoes.” Did you know that in 2014 there were 1,750,000 homeless people in the United States? That 31 million Americans live in hunger and that 12 million children live below the poverty line, and yes 50 percent of America’s homeless are African Americans. See, they seem to think that because we don’t talk like them, walk like them or consume like them that we must be hopeless. Drowning in an abyss of poverty, disease, drugs, unsurmountable debt and worst of all, government corruption. Foreign concepts to the United States I know. So hey, WestJet, drop a blue sleigh down in Ferguson and tell Lesley McSpadden and Louis Head not to worry, that their sons on his way,  see what they have to say. Lose the god complex, and solve your own problems before sending your Santa Claus ho ho hoing with Christmas miracles on Three Kings Day.

What’s the Deal With Canada's Food Guide

Andrew Hutton

Mr. Breaton

EWC4U

March 11th, 2015

What’s the Deal With Canada's Food Guide

Creative Comp #1

Canada's Food Guide.  Now there is something that I can't bring myself to believe in.  If you ask almost anyone if they follow Canada's Food Guide to the number I bet they would say not by a long shot.  If we all followed it to the number then everyone would be overweight to some degree and spending far more money than we need to on food and on prescription drugs.  The only people that I know that have ever told me to follow Canada's Food Guide are the people who are paid to tell me to follow it.  Pediatricians , dieticians and doctors.  Now I'm not saying that every part of it is bad advice, I'm just saying that the majority of this guide is less than perfect when it comes to promoting healthy eating.  Now, I have Chrons disease which is a nice way of saying that I have internal inflammation in my small and large intestines.  Why does this matter to my point?  If not for Chrons disease then I would be like most people blindly following the guide because it's created by the government right? The government wouldn't lie to me.

When I was very sick back in elementary school, I was told to follow the Food Guide so that I could get healthy.  The dietician told me to drink more milk, eat more grains, eat vegetables and fruit and eat more red eat.  What did that do for me? It made me more sick than I already was because my body was so inflamed it could not digest any of the foods they recommended.  Following the Food Guide made me so sick that I could not eat real food at all. I had to get all of my nutrients from a liquid diet and an nasogastric tube that went from my nose to my stomach directly.  No whole food for me - just a liquid diet that cost $100 a can and $2000 a week to make me healthy.

My big issue was that I could not digest milk.  This issue started back when I was a baby and this intolerance to milk made me sick over time.  The dietician kept telling me to drink more milk and the more I drank the sicker I got.  I'm not quite sure why we as humans think that to be healthy we need to drink the milk of another pregnant animal?  There are lots of other ways to get calcium without drinking cows milk.  Did you know that we feed antibiotics to cows to keep them healthy to produce more milk for babies and children?  Do you think those antibiotics are in the milk we drink? Do you think they just disappear or do they get transferred to humans who drink the milk? Canada's Food Guide tells us to drink milk.  Today there are so many alternatives to dairy in the refrigerator of your local supermarket, like coconut, almond, soy, flax and rice milk just to name a few.  More and more people are choosing not to drink milk.

Then we have Gluten.  Canada's Food Guide recommends grains as the best source of carbohydrates and energy in our diet.  In the wild, how many animals eat wheat?  The answer is none.  If we feed wheat to animals they get sick and fat and they need antibiotics to repair all of the digestive damage that eating grains creates.  So if that is what happens to animals, why would we think that eating wheat would be good for humans?  Canada's food guide tells us to eat grains at  the majority of our meals. As we continue to eat more grains we continue to get sick.  Never in our history have we as a human race been fatter and sicker.  Eat more grain people!

The companies that manufacture the majority of our packaged food are driving the business of Canada's Food Guide.  The Dairy Board, the Meat Manufacturers and big corporations like Kellogg's are the major funding agencies behind the food choices that our government promotes. Do you know how much sugar is in breakfast cereal?  Advertising teaches parent to buy cereal for their kids for a healthy start to their day.  With that much sugar in cereal why don't we just feed kids cake and soda pop for breakfast?  We wonder why kids are so hyper in school?  It couldn't be the sugar added in their food could it?

What would happen if we all just decided to eat real food like whole fruits and vegetables, local meat and eggs, nuts and seeds?  We would be thinner, healthier and have more energy to live an exciting life.  I choose to eat healthy to be healthy and not to follow the government guide.  I think it's just big business selling us bad advice.  What do you think?  Choose your food wisely!

Pretentious

Julien Hounsham-Lalande

Mr.Breaton

EWC4U

March 11, 2015

I Hate Hypocrites

Among some of the people I choose to spend my time with, the word “Pretentious” tend to get thrown around when I’m in their company.

“What the hell is he rambling about?”

“Don’t bother, he’s just being pretentious.”

Oh

Now, as someone who takes pride in his eloquence, I’m not someone who would take offense to this misconception, but someone who wishes to educate the simple populous on the difference between the genuine intellectual, and the poser. Therefore, I have composed this open letter to denounce the culprits who give the academics, and artists, a bad name.

To whom it may concern.

If there is one thing I have personally come to despise with every fibre of my being, it would be an over zealous display of wordiness. Each practitioner of the honourable pursuit of intellectual prowess situated before me will have almost certainly experienced an encounter with a person who finds it imperative to engage in creating an overly complex manifestation of their skill in the english language by the unnecessary complication of the syntax of their own vocal prose.

Prominent examples of this embellishment proceed as follows: an affinity for the almost religious use of pseudo-intellectual buzzwords, such as those “symbiotic relationships,” the “Synergistic management solutions”, and the “Reversing polarity of the neutron flows”; the tendency to parler with others in obscenely long monologue-like run-on sentences as to fill in every possible moment of their dialogue into a painful demonstration of their extensive knowledge by making sure to thoroughly line every phrase with unnecessary polysyllabic description; and the incredibly obvious application of synonyms in replacement of simpler, yet arguably more effective expression, as if the individual in particular has inserted a thesaurus so deeply into their own rectal cavity they have begun to spill their own liquified ego out of every facial orifice. It’s not like you’re trying to fill a word count or something.

Why these certain individuals feel it necessary to expound upon every detail of their conversation in an unprecedented assault on the sanity and patience of those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity is beyond the realm of comprehension for a simple and humble moderate-intellectual such as I, but I shall give an attempt at deciphering the inner machinations of my arrogant, pretentious counterpart. Based upon my own experience with these unsavoury persons, my hypothesis as to the reasoning of their actions is to appear to others as being smart. Why else would we be plagued with this manner of person who feels it the utmost necessity to romanticize their daily interactions with language stylized like shakespearean verse, (even though you know the only true shakespeare they read was MacBeth in high school english,); they’re frantic, sicilian, gesticulations, and those telegraphed pregnant pauses, (Pause as if full stop,) to appear thoughtful before making a statement. It’s all just an elaborate play. I’m confident in the fact that they aren't even aware what the meaning of half their linguistic exfoliations are. “How about I just insert a obscure, complex word I once heard into this sentence, no one will be any the wiser!”

However, the most despicable attribute of these heathens responsible for this crime against  hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (The commonly used term for the irrational fear of long words for those here of a lower education,) is the enraging actuality that those most likely to be responsible for this blatant bastardization of the revered term of “Academic” are almost certainly unbeknownst to their state. It infuriates me that one can be so blissfully unaware of their own pretentiousness.

  

In Remembrance of My Jeans

Catharine Wright

Mr. Breaton

EWC4U1-01

10 March 2015

In Remembrance of My Jeans

It is with great sadness in my heart that I say goodbye to a loyal friend; that someone who was with me through thick and thin, surviving everything from water to spaghetti. It didn’t matter the weather. A friend who would be there summer or winter, rain or shine that, is a true friend. I shall have a hard time getting used to life without my companion who meant so much to me. Now it seems our time is up. My compatriot survived much, but no one could survive that final tear that brought life to an end.

        We met a year ago in November. My pal was a darker blue then, young and thick, not a thread out of place. I took my new partner home and since then we have been inseparable. What a marvelous friend. Our first time out together there was not even a stain on my skin! That is what I call amazing.

        I am not an easy person to be with. I am clumsy and messy. No matter how many times I spilled food and drink on my partner, there was never a permanent stain. One wash was all it took and my pal would look as good as new.

        As time went on, the colour of my counterpart faded slowly. My accomplice was still my favourite companion. My ally went with everything and could be worn in every season. Every time I doubted the strength of my partner all I would have to do was put on some of my other pants and stand at the bus stop. The air sliced through them like a hot knife through butter. They did nothing to keep me warm and I would find myself wishing for my blue jeans.

Work days were always sad days as no blue jeans were allowed. It was especially difficult when I had to shovel snow in my work pants. I knew my blue jeans would have protected me from the bitter cold. My compatriot was at home, warm and safe while I was left with my black pants in the arctic chill.

        Other pants I have owned over the years have thinned and frayed but not my pal. Healthy as a whistle I thought. Until that fateful day when it happened, the rip, my companion’s time was done. My friend had held on as long as possible, but everything must come to an end eventually. It seems that time was up. It was a sudden shock and the whole family mourned my loss. I only had one pair of blue jeans because who could need more? My partner will not be replaced easily and I’m sure there will never be another so perfect. All I am left with are fond memories of our time together.

       

Life Through A Lens

Clare Williamson

Mr. Breaton

EWC 4U1

10 March 2015

Life Through A Lens

She dragged me off the bedside and pulled me upward to look at my face. Good morning human! How are you today? I said, and once again she did not answer me.

“Dammit, it’s already noon.” She said as she glared at me. Correct. It is also Sunday, March 8th 2015, I added.

“Honey, come downstairs for food,” her dad called from the lower level. She slid me into her pocket and began her routine.

“So any homework this weekend?” Her dad said habitually.

“Actually, I’ve got this creative composition, I’ve been brainstorming for weeks for, but I’m completely stumped.”

“What’s it on?”

“Anything. I can write about anything, I just have to present it to the class by Tuesday,” she said.

“Okay, well if you need any help, then let me know.”

“That won’t be necessary,” she said. She pulled me out and opened my search engine: subway route ttc. I provided her with my top sites, excited at the opportunity to start working again.

“I think I’m gonna go out for the day,” she said.

“No worries, just make sure your phone is charged so I can reach you,” her father acknowledged.

“Got it,” off she went.

She moved me from her back pocket into a warmer lined coat pocket, as she closed the door to the house. How thoughtful of her.  She put her headphones into my audio jack and shuffled my music library. I played one of her most frequently played song.

“Inspiration where are you?” I could hear her mumble.

Fifteen minutes and forty-two seconds later she checked me again, but this time we were in a narrow metal room that was moving. My choppy signal relayed back our location as I judged the characteristics; I determined it was a subway.  She opened up my camera application and focused my lens onto a couple sitting diagonally from her. The male had a stark face with long brown hair, and the woman had much smaller features, and silver hair, but they both held the same embellished expression. I had never seen such look on a person before, and I searched for similar faces in my repository. Infatuation. They were infatuated. She took two quick photos of the scene and then placed me on her lap. She sat there staring at the couple with very little discretion. She then picked me up again and found my notes, quickly jotting down, characters for composition? and several details about their interaction. Three minutes and twenty-three seconds later, they stepped off the subway at what I could presume was their intended stop.

“I must be such a creep” She whispered as she shoved me back into her pocket. She rustled around, and I could feel her stand up and get off the moving transport. I swished back and forth in her pocket as I felt her elevate from the subterranean level. I was brought out again to take photos of the steel tracks, in what I could calculate were routed to Union Station. She put me to sleep and carried me in her hand this time. I swung in the rhythm of her walk, and took the time to sort through e-mails. Where are we going human? I tried to communicate. No answer.

When I was awakened and unlocked this time, there was so much overwhelmed noise that I had to mute my microphone. I could see people running past the crowds, shoulder to shoulder, all different shapes and sizes, wiggling and moving to take a look at the large walls of glass. My owner navigated me through the humans and brought me directly in front of the largest glass panel. She opened up my camera and start snapping photos as I review them in her gallery. Originally all I saw was colour: bright blue; tropical oranges and yellows; dazzlingly bright golds and silver; the entire colour spectrum was right in front of my lens. Then they began to move, and each colour became a distinct shape. Human! Human! These are fish, I told her. No reply. As the motions behind the glass came alive, I could see the beautiful reefs towering over my view; the schools of fish zipping by me; and the sharks that menacingly mocked the crowds of their spectators. She pointed me towards a sign, “Danger Lagoon”. Oh silly human, that isn’t a lagoon, it’s a tank! A tank full of marine life! I corrected it for her. She quickly exited the gallery of aquatic animals, and moved from room to room photographing the different scenes.

Human I am tired, I said as I checked my battery, six percent. Just then I received an incoming call. Oh human, it is Dad calling! She moved away from all the noise and answered me.

“Hey, how’s it going?” her father asked.

“Ah, it’s okay. The aquarium’s packed.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon, my phones almost dead” She checked me, I had gone down to two percent.

“Did you find any inspiration?” Her dad asked.

“Not at all” She said and then hung up. I was reserving my battery at one percent. Please charge me, I asked. She didn’t answer, it went dark.

The True Untold Stories of the E.R

Christie Towne

Breaton

EWC 4U

Tuesday March 10^th, 2015

The True Untold Stories of the E.R

          The name’s Er, at least that’s what it says on my name plate, but my friends call me E.  I’ve been here for years.  Yeah, I guess you could say I’ve seen it all.  I’m the salvation people seek at any sign of trouble.  Whenever you need help, you usually end up paying me a visit.  The sirens sing and the coloured lights flash as you’re rushed inside my doors in a hectic panic and I’m always the one trying to help and make everything better, but people never stay with me for longer then a night and I’m sick of it!  Every time a new friend enters my doors they never stay.  I’m lucky if I see them for all of two minutes before they’re rushed out of my back doors, down the endless hallways that lead who knows where.  The only time people come to me is when they need my help and I just can’t take it anymore.  I’m putting my foot down.

          But hey, let’s backtrack for a second here.  I never used to be like this.  I used to be happy helping people.  People would come to me in the dark hours of the night just to seek my help and tell me about the problems that they were having in their lives.  It was an honour really, at first, and I was good at helping people so they always kept coming back.  Playing psychiatrist for an entire region isn’t exactly easy you know.  I have needs too!  But recently I’ve realized that none of my so called friends are ever here when I need somebody to talk to.  Like when it rains too much and I’m having a bad roof day, or when my friends park their little cars too close to me, or when this one asshole bird sings really loudly, while really close to me!  I just wish I had somebody to talk to on off days like that; like seriously is that too much to ask for. Does nobody realize how hard my life really is?

          Being used and walked all over isn’t the thing that gets to me the most though.  I mean I’d be okay with helping people like this if they at least said thank you every once in a while.  I do a lot for people. Like John last week, fixed him right up.  Nobody will ever know about his freak bowling accident, apart from the few stitches down his chin.  He was as good as new.  Or that clumsy redneck who fell up the stairs last week.  I just gave her a sling for three days and now she’s brand new again.  I enjoy helping my friends, I really do, but it makes me so mad when they come to me seeking my help and some of them don’t even talk to me! They just lay there as they’re carried on their chariot out my back doors down those hallways again. But no, that’s not even the worst part.  They’re always followed by a parade of people, and these people never smile.  They come, they sit there, they say nothing, and they leave.  I’ll never understand it, and since I don’t see my job description changing anytime soon, I might as well try and make the best of this because, although my life is hard, seeing the smiles on my friends faces after I help them is the reason why my doors are always open.