Mind the gap

There's a gap in per capita income between rural and urban Canada, and after staring for hours at four census' worth of data on the subject I find I'm able to write everything but the paragraph that explains why I'm writing it. Why am I writing on this topic?

Well, obviously it must be important because otherwise Statcan wouldn't have written so much on it. Other than that, at the moment, I don't really care much. I live in the city so I'll make more money than people that don't live here. Should I be concerned? Maybe. But I'll also pay substantially higher property taxes and I'll live in a shoebox shoved in a pile of other shoeboxes and work a meaningless job where I count beans and push paper all day long. It's a tradeoff.

I know that eventually, somewhere around 4am tomorrow morning I will suck it up and say something about agriculture and resource based industries providing the economic foundation of the country or something, with some sort of added footnote about how a lot of First Nations people live out in said areas where per capita income is very low and that means poverty along with all the other problems that they have and come to some sort of conclusion that we should do something to fix that because up till now we've been doing a pretty crappy job taking care of the people we stole the land and resources and culture from and abused in residential schools and turned into alcoholics and in general pretty much neglect until we find out that they're living on or near a piece of land that is suddenly worth something to us and then we try to cheat them out of that too with pitiful sums of money and tax free cigarettes.

Yay. That's one hell of a run-on sentence, if I might say so myself.

Julie's suddenly all excited that I dance, and she seems to think that after almost 17 years of lessons, I would actually be worth watching. She wants to know if she can go to see me at one of my competitions. While I'm kind of flattered, I also don't know if I really want her to watch me because first of all, our costumes will most certainly be ugly and unflattering and second, I'll most likely be outshined by my sister. Not that that's really a bad thing. She's pretty good.

Who else did I run into today? Oh, Nick and I had a laugh at Heddy Fry's expense, Mina and I had coffee and I ran into Steve, considered breifly telling him that I think he's one of the slimiest, most disgusting pieces of shit I've ever met, but I didn't. What purpose would that possibly serve?

Upon leaving school, I was attacked by a small blizzard and reminded of the fact that I really hadn't bothered to dress for the cold. Apparently it's still winter.

And that, my dears, has been my day. Thank you and good night.