it was good, people enjoyed making fun of his pink tie

it feels much later than 5pm. i've been outside once today to get some lunch. other than that, class this morning followed by not one, but TWO additional seminars with guest speakers. the first was a more low key, in class discussion with environics president michael adams who was a very eloquent speaker and immediately impressed with his humour and desire to use opinion polling to advance social causes and not just to bolster political parties. while the poll in Afghanistan was brought up, it wasnt the sole focus of the discussion, which i thought was cool. got his card, so i'll definitely be emailing him about a potential coop position.

the second was a presentation from both CIDA and Foreign Affairs about the Afghan mission. The dude from FA didnt really impress anyone i think, at least our prof who set it up doesnt think so too. He had a dark dark dark black suit with a bright pink shirt and an even brighter pink tie. and he spoke with an inflection in his voice that made it sound like he was giving a briefing to an army squad. The guy from CIDA didnt get as much time to speak, which i thought was unfortunate, because he actually provided years worth of data showing the actual progress that has been made through Canadian humanitarian aid in the country. The third guy there was actually from Afghanistan and worked with CIDA, and he only got to speak during the Q&A, but at least he could easily supplerment the CIDA information.

i asked how come, if all these examples of actual progress are being shown to us, why the two departments (leaning more on FA cause he was cocky) arent doing more to educate Canadians on it and to show that it's not only a military mission. FA Man sort of coughed and said "that's actually a really good question" but it sounded more like "*cough* fuck, i was hoping no one would ask this because now i have to save face..."

also got the card from the guy from CIDA and spent a few minutes talking to him about how one would go about becoming involved with the department. it was pretty much a fluke that our Issues prof who knows people in CIDA and got people coop placements with them last year was standing right there when i asked and told CIDA guy that it would be more appreciated if our program had more contact with CIDA because "look, there's now three major policy schools being set up in Canada with this being at the top" and we should be able to have better access to it.

methinks it's aboot time to start pressing the issue to certain people about certain job placements for the summer....

on thursday we have a high profile someone from the UN coming to speak to us. i was thinking about this earlier how most people never get this kind of access to people in these positions, and here we are, a group of thirty, who get to listen to them and question the crap out of them on a pretty regualr basis, and have the option to start networking with them, even if only preliminary for now.

i think watching the CIDA part of the presentation, with all the pictures of the progress being made, whether infrastructure, or education or socially, part of my brain was like "dude, how amazing does that look? even ignorning the "let's bring them democracy thing" just the fact that those guys are directly involved with bettering the quality of life for people who have trouble finding a regular source of water and power." i think this is something im definitely going to start pushing my profs about, because that would frankly be an incredible job to get out of this degree.

anyway...back to the grind...still in the lab reworking a brief for friday. im listening to Black Sabbath cause some chick on the seabus was listening to it the other day and that made me want to listen to it. it feels like it's 8pm.

it was good, people enjoyed making fun of his pink tie