another sam chan: the student blogger

In my little group of friends, we constantly run into the same problem: we can never decide what to do. I’m not talking about homework, projects, work, or anything remotely stressful, we can’t even decide what we want to do for fun.

First, we decide on what we want to do. It takes us about an hour or so, because we have to factor in things like cost, distance, time, and how much ‘work’ our fun activity is. For example, let’s take swimming:

- Swimming involves us all going home to get our respective Speedos and wet suits.
- Swimming requires all of us to shower and change (hopefully individually) before and after the activity.
- Swimming requires all of us to take off our faces and reapply afterwards.
- Swimming is basically an array of moves in a large volume of water either back and forth or around in a close ended shape (usually a rectangle or circle). It appears more like exercise which is more correlated with work than fun.
- All of us are now about 18 and must pay the adult fare. Even though it is still cheaper than many other activities, it doesn’t feel good knowing that some pimply kid gets to pay 2 dollars less than us to do the exact same thing we’re doing just because he was born later. It’s a psychology thing.

As a result, we have never gone swimming together. Ever. A common activity we do choose is watching movies. When we finally make the decision to watch a movie, we then go into what type of movie we want to watch. Action, comedy, or chick flick? Yes, I do, do the occasional chick flick. After that, we decide if we want to watch big screen style, or in the comfort of one of our homes – usually mine because I’m the laziest. I never knew having fun was so much work. I used to think it was just my personality, or perhaps the personality of my friends. But then, the other Friday when we were finishing up our weekly movie search at Rogers Video, I heard one guy say:

” [screw] it, come on! Why do we always take forever to pick a movie? We’ve been here for 25 minutes! Just pick one already!”

I laughed. Hard.

Then yesterday, we took another couple hours to figure out what we wanted to do on a nice Saturday evening. We finally settled on another movie (maybe we should just set that as our default). As the weather was gorgeous and it was the Celebration of Lights fireworks finale, we figured that most people would head out there and so we decided we would take a pass this year and have yet another relaxing night at an air-conditioned movie. However, when we got there, it was packed. Like the inside of a macbook air packed. Top it off, the movie we wanted to watch was sold out (It was Step Brothers, by no means a grammy winner) and the line up for 3 week champion Dark Knight was as long as the wingspan of 20 Yao Mings. I guess everybody thought that everybody else would be at the fireworks and hence went for the more “relaxing” evening. So to sum it up, what I’ve learned this summer vacation is:

1. People are indecisive.
2. People are lazy.

I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or bad thing. I guess I’ll worry about it later.

I stayed up a little late (or early, depending on how you look at it) working on a submission for the Canucks.com blog contest. I realize I forgot to mention how amped I am about Steve Bernier. Well, if anybody from the Canucks is looking right now, STEVE BERNIER STEVE BERNIER STEVE BERNIER STEVE BERNIER . Check out the video of his first game in Buffalo. Wow, this guy has great hands. Check out that backhand pass. Let’s hope his first game back in the West will be even better. I really do believe he’s the second coming of Bertuzzi, minus the sucker punch. Just waiting on the ‘next Naslund’ now.

Sigh. Like most, I’m getting tired of the whole Mats Sundin thing, even to the point where I don’t really care anymore. I mean, sure he’s good, but he seriously is holding up the entire league. That, and that’s all Ek ever talks about anymore. I need some new stuff to read. The “soft deadline” is a sweet idea though. Next semester I’m gonna ask every prof if the due dates they give are soft deadlines.Anyways, here’s my submission:

There has been a wrenching feeling in my stomach the last few months. After a season which ended in a 7-1 loss to our playoff bound arch rivals, we lost our top two all time leading scorers and any remains of our West Coast Express line. Even though I’m overcome by grief, I still can’t help but feel excited for the upcoming season. Why? it’s actually quite simple:

Loss
Nobody likes the way we ended last season. The ones who were there last season have a sour taste in their mouth, I know I do. Sometimes, one has to fall to the bottom in order to rise to the top. I took some time off reading Canucks rumors to watch the Dark Knight the other night, The movie captured the humane side of Batman really well. Despite having all the money in the world, he felt pain, loss, and sometimes, he failed. However, that made him that much stronger. The same can be applied to our beloved Canucks. We felt lots of pain on our blueline. We suffered the tragic loss of Luc Bourdon. And, let’s not doubt ourselves; last year we failed, miserably. Ironically, that gives us more reason than ever to pay attention as we ice our most determined team yet.

Change
Any regular sports fan will tell you that one of the most exciting aspects of professional sports are trades. Trades provide a breath of fresh air and new hope. Like many others, I grew up following Trevor Linden and Markus Naslund religiously. Their class was always second to none and I always respected their attitudes on and off the ice. However, with the recent transactions like Darcy Hordichuk and Ryan Johnson, it is evident that we’ve decided to go with a different route: a team based on grit. As a longtime fan, this is new. Imagine a whole team of Burrows.

Youth
Youngsters like Mason Raymond, Ryan Shannon,, and Alex Edner have shown that they can be regulars on the team and Ryan Kesler and Kevin Bieska are going to take larger roles in the dressing room. Remember all those times we were told to be patient and wait? This is what we were waiting for.

And there you go. Hey look, I haven’t even talked about that #13 guy! I will end off with one more reason though, but this reason warrants no further explanation:

we have Luongo.

Feel free to drop me a comment on how I did, and what I shoulda, coulda, woulda done. If you like what you’re reading, go ahead and share it with others! I also apologize for any random changes to the layout and look of this blog through out the next bit. I’m still in constant beta while I find something that is pleasing to your eyes.

I noticed that my last post regarding coffee caught more attention than normal, with more people dropping their 2 cents than usual so I guess there are a lot of coffee lovers out there…as well as a lot of coffee haters. Actually, I didn’t have a coffee today…and most days I don’t have coffee. As hard as it is to believe (even to myself, since I stereotypically ‘look’ the type of an coffee addict), I do not live on that brown liquid, as much as I like to talk about it. In fact, it usually takes 5 packs of sugar (not spenda, which tastes like sugar, because it’s made from sugar, so why not just get real sugar) for me before it starts tasting good. The ‘real’ coffee drinkers sipping on their cup of tar in the back row would disapprove.

So besides not having coffee today, I also had very little of something else, something I do live on: food. It was just one of those days where you want to lie around and do nothing (unfortunately this happens more often than the days I do have something to do) Unemployed college drop outs who live in their mother’s basements will agree – doing nothing does not involve cooking. I was all set to order delivery, when I realized that all I could order was pizza. Where the burgers at? Chow mein? Chicken wings? Okay fine, you can order chicken wings at Pizza joints. But has it never occurred to anybody but Italian guys named Mario that people could want food delivered to them? Yes, I’m sure they’re out there, but why don’t I know about it? I was stuck between paying 15 bucks for a pizza to be delivered to me, or chips. I chose the latter.

However, this brings forth a new idea. Why doesn’t Starbucks do delivery? With the Statue of Liberty not doing too well lately, this could be their out-clause. I went ahead and did some research on coffee being delivered and it turns out it does exist. If Starbucks or Timmys were to do it though, I’m sure I wouldn’t be the only one who would use it. The delivery boy might demand a tip for this guy though. Using that train of thought, imagine if Starbucks were to use Pizza marketing strategies in general! Step back a few years, and check out the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – drinking Coffee instead of eating pizza. Radical!