An Ethiopian Birthday
1. The First Day is Brilliant
I don’t know exactly what specific combination of thoughts, ideas and events I experienced to make me feel this way, but I’ve been an emotional basket case all day. Without deigning to go into the corrupt details of my suspicions about what melded my emotional state together today, partly because to a certain degree it’s an introspective exercise I fear knowing the answers to, it’s fair to say simply that the last 36 hours or so (I write this at midnight on Saturday - who knows when or if it will be posted) have been a complete sensory overload that I was nearly completely unequipped to deal with.
If there’s one strand I can disentangle from the basket case I found myself in today, it’s the one that deals with a question of law. In fact, this question of law is so significant that to call it a mere strand is misleading. Truth be told, it’s a massive macramé project all its own.
Every year, around my birthday, I decide how big a celebration I want to have. Some years, it’s rather large. In others, it’s very subdued. My preference is to extend the ‘celebration’, usually for about a week or so. This doesn’t mean drinking and drugs for seven days straight, but taking time for myself, to do things I want to do, and hopefully things that are either complete departures from the regular routine, or the best parts of the routine, the ones I wish I could do more often.
Originally, I was to go to Zambia for a week. For a variety of reasons, some completely out of my control, and some that I’m probably not yet fully informed of, that plan - for a safari, a visit to Victoria Falls, and the chance to see the Zambian soccer team up close and personal - couldn’t quite come together. Instead, Taribba and Katie left for Lusaka on Monday, and Allison left this morning.
Since Allison would be gone on my actual birthday and most of the weekends that bookend it, we decided to have the big party yesterday (Friday the 23rd). Friday was spectacularly brilliant. It involved a thoroughly surreal visit to an amusement park, numerous incidents with water guns, and the usual night at Memo. Before we went out for dinner and then drinks, Allison gave me my birthday box, which contained presents both hilarious and thoughtful, including a pirate belt. She deserves a proper thank you.
In any event, that was Friday, and while I think I would have preferred to have done it all on Saturday instead, it worked out brilliantly. It was easily among the top five birthday days ever (see the complete Top Ten List at the bottom of the page).
2. Day Two Starts Off Mediocre
Saturday morning, however, I was as far from a good mood as I’ve been since coming to Addis. Being home would have been perfect. Actually, Bahrain would have been better. Unfortunately, I was stuck in Addis, and, as I said at the very beginning, quite rudderless.
Two things were my salvation. At Allison’s behest, I had started reading Kafka on the Shore, which is full of subtle grace and a strangely beautiful diorama of the myths of human existence. The other was that Robyn read out the headlines from Canada, chief among them a Supreme Court ruling on a case I worked on last year. It knocked me for a loop.
3. Security Certificates
The case dealt with the question of whether or not it was permissible for Canada to indefinitely detain non-citizens that the government claimed were security threats to Canada. The legal method by which this is done is known as the security certificate process. In a nutshell, persons detained under this process are not allowed full access to the information against them, are not criminally charged, are subject to deportation (often to places where they will likely be tortured or killed, by the reckoning of both the government and the courts), and have limited appeal rights and virtually no ability - due to the lack of information provided - to challenge their detention. Of the six men who are subject to these certificates, five are Muslim men who have been detained for up to five or six years without charge or any change in their status. (The sixth is a Sri Lankan man who cannot be removed to Sri Lanka because of the risk of torture. He reports weekly to the government, and, unofficially, is under close and near-constant law enforcement supervision).
I spent nearly three months working on the case. I wasn’t allowed to take on any other work, and couldn’t talk about what was going on in the case. My office was filled to overflowing with boxes and boxes of material. I was working virtually round the clock, answering emails and assignments from department heads across the country right up until the deadline to file material with the Supreme Court. Having said that, I didn’t work nearly as many hours as my senior colleagues, with more important tasks and issues. Their dedication, even it was to something I disagreed with, was overwhelming and impressive, and pushed me to work my best as well. It was inspired all around.
Finally, the Supreme Court heard the case over three days last June. The squad of government lawyers I was with vigorously defended the law against a host of opposition. They were thorough, smart and persuasive, and overall, seemed more powerful than those arguing for the detainees. Everyone agreed the court would split, but it appeared as though they would err on the side of conservatism. As it turned out, we were hopelessly, terribly, completely wrong.
On Friday afternoon, the court released its judgment. I didn’t see it until Saturday morning. In a stunning, comprehensive, and sublimely elegant decision, all nine judges of the court voted against to government. It is an overwhelming judgment, an incredibly powerful statement, a devastating pronouncement on terror policy in the post-9/11 world, and as complete a refutation of the government’s position as one could have hoped for. We were skunked. Smashed to bits. Nine - nothing. Not one judge agreed with us - not one! It was, and is, to a certain extent, unfathomable. Lifetimes are spent on cases like this. People’s careers are defined, their sense of purpose and self-worth confirmed or denied. And here we are, eight months later, dozens of lawyers across Canada, completely slapped in the face by every single member of the highest court in the country.
4. We Lost.
I love it. I love it. I adore the decision. I soak up every paragraph, every pronouncement, every time it says “Held: Appeal allowed”. For 89 pages there is nothing but joy of the purest kind, uncontrollable pleasure so irresistible it’s virtually unrecognizable. You forget you were confused or angry or so emotionally peculiar. How could you ever have felt any another way except this way, except flooded with bliss and success and vitality, except burgeoning with the constant surge of the energy of being alive? Joy so complete there’s nothing else knowable in life, so complete you can only see it in the tears streaming down your face.
Yes, I worked on the losing side of the case wholeheartedly, with the utmost dedication, doing my best to answer the demands made of me as promptly and completely as possible, neglecting at times other aspects of my life - diet, exercise, girlfriend - to make sure nothing was left to chance. Yes, I poured myself into the government’s case, as far and as deep as they would allow the youngest, newest, most unknown lawyer on the team. Yes, it was three months where all that was asked was that I commit myself to this case, and yes, that was all that I did, but yes, yes also, yes most of all I exalted in defeat.
Ever since 9/11, ever since the Afghan war, ever since Guantanamo and Iraq and ever since I read of Rocco Galati, Mahmoud Jaballah and his Kafka-inspired odyssey through the courts and jail, security certificates have lodged themselves in my consciousness. I learned them inside and out. I argued with classmates and teachers and lawyers about them. I wrote papers on them for school that no one who wasn’t working on the case, let alone the poor civil litigators forced to mark them, could understand. Always, always, always, I argued against the certificates. Always, with everyone, everywhere. Friends’ boyfriends I had just met were hammered if they dared disagree. Lawyers with passing comments were taken aside and spoken softly to. Fellow students at the Department of Justice were inundated every time there was a hearing. Always, until last spring.
When I was pulled into the Supreme Court team, I rationalized it to myself. I wasn’t doing anything more than background research, and preparation of supplementary material. I wasn’t writing arguments, just creating platforms for possible positions we might take. It wasn’t a contradiction, even though I was choking myself quiet to avoid confrontations, suffocating in a windowless, airless office by myself to avoid running into anyone I might have to explain myself to or, worse yet, silently endure as they nattered on about the rightness of our cause. It wasn’t a contradiction, I told myself, to ensure the court has the best possible information before it on which to base it’s decision. It wasn’t a contradiction to disagree in principle with the position, but to work as diligently and honestly as I ever worked on anything in my life, worried that someone - a colleague, another lawyer, a friend or professor - might point out that, hey, Kiyani actually thinks this is an outrageous law and it gnaws at him nightly, it eats away at him while he sits on the 90A Vaughan Road bus, it burrows time bombs of frustration and devastation in the most remote corners of his brain, and that’s before he even started working on the case! And that if this was too public a piece of knowledge, my competence would be called into question, even though they asked for the best I had, I gave the best I had, and, frankly, they told me what I gave them was the best they could have had. If I hadn’t been so addicted to the law for the years before then, if I hadn’t done what I had done before then, if I had refused to work on the case, they never would have gotten what they did. It wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference, but they wouldn’t have gotten what they wanted.
In the eight months since we flew to Ottawa, I put the case out of my head. It was done, and I had poor hopes, and Ethiopia beckoned. A lid was put on the cauldron of anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, hope and desperation. No one talks about it here, and I liked that. I liked not having to deal with it, being able to forget about it, put my feelings aside, to pretend the only problems for me to be concerned with are what I see here in Ethiopia.
Its been five years since everything - the daily struggle with being identified as Muslim at a law school in Toronto, the constant battle with conservative media, students, professors and strangers, the unending public reminders of second-class citizenry, the images of war, murder, desperation blazing across screens and haunting dreams, Kandahar, Iraq in Fragments, the constellation of problematic identities and intersections that defined me - started to conflate inside. It became an abscess, a pool of diseased, unmanageable emotions silently corrosive, leaving everything inside raw and frayed.
Until yesterday, when the judgment made its way here, when the bottle of emotions exploded and I couldn’t stop anything. I was sobbing so hard I nearly fell over in the shower. In the past 24 hours, I’ve only managed to make it through half of the judgment because I well up at the plainest statements of law. I walk down the stairs, or I sit on my bed, or I make a sandwich and the smile comes and the tears come and I have to shut my eyes for a moment and stop and wait and bask in the poetry of justice. There’s no feeling like it, and I want to take the vats of poison that wracked me and so many others for so long and fill them up again and again with the ecstasy of this and just seal it all away. I’m afraid to enjoy it, to revel in it, to use it all, to lose it, to run out or worse yet, worst of all, to find out that this is it, this is all we get, this is the one time in our lives something so powerful and momentous works out the way it should.
I adore it, and I don’t want to bleed it dry. I want it to be like this now and tomorrow and everyday. I want it this way and I want it so much because this is the first time, as a lawyer, that its been as good, as useful, as awesome as I hoped it might be. There may never be another moment like this, but so far it’s the purest vindication of my choice to go to law school, of the patchwork of social constructions, experience and ideas that make up my identity, of my being alive and impassioned and active. My choices, my body, my existence feels justified, not in some ethereal sense, but in the most pointed, meaningful way possible.
Everything else here right now may be shredding me, but it doesn’t matter because I have this and I adore it. I adore it.
5. TOP TEN BIRTHDAY DAYS EVER
I can’t actually remember any birthday before 19, but how could they be any better than what’s already on the list? In no particular order…
1. Friday Programme (Special Needs “Teen Out & About”) participants sing me Happy Birthday at dinner. Best song ever. [2003 - age 24]
2. Party at Fez Batik, with Kam et al., all the Cordies, Parkdale colleagues, and Ashley coming in from Waterloo. The fact that Annie wasn’t there only made me more determined to rectify that absence in my life, which then dovetailed nicely with what became the best year of my life. [2004 - age 25]
3. Anthony and I go to see Goldie, kids ask me if I can supply them with drugs, and it makes me feel young again. Plus he gives me a shitload of music that took me three years to listen to. [2004 - age 25]
4. The night I was both interviewed and hired as Cord Editor-in-Chief, prelude to the best job I ever had, best learning experience I ever had, and, at that point, best year of my life. Also, at the birthday/congratulations party we hosted the same night (yes, we were arrogant), I met Anthony. This is probably No. 1. [2000 - age 21]
5. Ethiopian Birthday Friday: On way home the night before, Allison and I laugh until crying (frankly, I was near death) about smell of bread. Next day, we go to Bora Children’s Amusement Park, water guns are bought, laugh until crying repeatedly, birthday box, good dinner, great company, Klaus is Claus, water guns are used to hilarious effect repeatedly, and Memo. Even getting on the mini-bus was a brilliant adventure. [2007 - age 28]
6. Fish & chips and the pinata smash with a frying pan and other kitchen implements, outside Nicole’s house, on top of a electric power box. Later teach Kyra to drive on the right side of the road. Brilliant photo with head of piñata is taken. [2005 - age 26]
7. First birthday at university, entire floor celebrating, gum down her shirt, and The Muppet Movie at sunrise. [1998 - age 19]
8. Go see The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil (?) downtown. See old Chinese lady with crunched spine scavenging for bottles like a crab hustling across a beach. Later that night, Danielle gives me a giant bowl, ladle and four pounds of soup (see below). [2004 - age 25]
9. Mother and brother take me to Silver Tower’s Korean restaurant. I order my favourite food, chicken noodle soup. Waiter warns it’s a big bowl. I say, damn the torpedos, bring me the noodles. It’s massive. I could swim across it. All the wait staff gather to watch me eat. Laughter ensues. I barely manage to make a dent. At the time, I was slightly embarrassed, but let’s be honest, I loved the attention and it’s hilarious to look back on now. [circa mid-1980s - age 8?]
10. Ethiopian Birthday Saturday/2007 SCC 9. Wake up feeling lousy, see Supreme Court decision on security certificate cases. Am sobbing with tears of joy for the next hour. When I get out of the shower, my eyes are redder than when I went to bed. Doni wants to go to Changes. Rahim wants to go Black Rose. I stay home and read the judgment instead, laughing as I cry uncontrollably. Brilliant. [2007 - age 28]
I don’t know exactly what specific combination of thoughts, ideas and events I experienced to make me feel this way, but I’ve been an emotional basket case all day. Without deigning to go into the corrupt details of my suspicions about what melded my emotional state together today, partly because to a certain degree it’s an introspective exercise I fear knowing the answers to, it’s fair to say simply that the last 36 hours or so (I write this at midnight on Saturday - who knows when or if it will be posted) have been a complete sensory overload that I was nearly completely unequipped to deal with.
If there’s one strand I can disentangle from the basket case I found myself in today, it’s the one that deals with a question of law. In fact, this question of law is so significant that to call it a mere strand is misleading. Truth be told, it’s a massive macramé project all its own.
Every year, around my birthday, I decide how big a celebration I want to have. Some years, it’s rather large. In others, it’s very subdued. My preference is to extend the ‘celebration’, usually for about a week or so. This doesn’t mean drinking and drugs for seven days straight, but taking time for myself, to do things I want to do, and hopefully things that are either complete departures from the regular routine, or the best parts of the routine, the ones I wish I could do more often.
Originally, I was to go to Zambia for a week. For a variety of reasons, some completely out of my control, and some that I’m probably not yet fully informed of, that plan - for a safari, a visit to Victoria Falls, and the chance to see the Zambian soccer team up close and personal - couldn’t quite come together. Instead, Taribba and Katie left for Lusaka on Monday, and Allison left this morning.
Since Allison would be gone on my actual birthday and most of the weekends that bookend it, we decided to have the big party yesterday (Friday the 23rd). Friday was spectacularly brilliant. It involved a thoroughly surreal visit to an amusement park, numerous incidents with water guns, and the usual night at Memo. Before we went out for dinner and then drinks, Allison gave me my birthday box, which contained presents both hilarious and thoughtful, including a pirate belt. She deserves a proper thank you.
In any event, that was Friday, and while I think I would have preferred to have done it all on Saturday instead, it worked out brilliantly. It was easily among the top five birthday days ever (see the complete Top Ten List at the bottom of the page).
2. Day Two Starts Off Mediocre
Saturday morning, however, I was as far from a good mood as I’ve been since coming to Addis. Being home would have been perfect. Actually, Bahrain would have been better. Unfortunately, I was stuck in Addis, and, as I said at the very beginning, quite rudderless.
Two things were my salvation. At Allison’s behest, I had started reading Kafka on the Shore, which is full of subtle grace and a strangely beautiful diorama of the myths of human existence. The other was that Robyn read out the headlines from Canada, chief among them a Supreme Court ruling on a case I worked on last year. It knocked me for a loop.
3. Security Certificates
The case dealt with the question of whether or not it was permissible for Canada to indefinitely detain non-citizens that the government claimed were security threats to Canada. The legal method by which this is done is known as the security certificate process. In a nutshell, persons detained under this process are not allowed full access to the information against them, are not criminally charged, are subject to deportation (often to places where they will likely be tortured or killed, by the reckoning of both the government and the courts), and have limited appeal rights and virtually no ability - due to the lack of information provided - to challenge their detention. Of the six men who are subject to these certificates, five are Muslim men who have been detained for up to five or six years without charge or any change in their status. (The sixth is a Sri Lankan man who cannot be removed to Sri Lanka because of the risk of torture. He reports weekly to the government, and, unofficially, is under close and near-constant law enforcement supervision).
I spent nearly three months working on the case. I wasn’t allowed to take on any other work, and couldn’t talk about what was going on in the case. My office was filled to overflowing with boxes and boxes of material. I was working virtually round the clock, answering emails and assignments from department heads across the country right up until the deadline to file material with the Supreme Court. Having said that, I didn’t work nearly as many hours as my senior colleagues, with more important tasks and issues. Their dedication, even it was to something I disagreed with, was overwhelming and impressive, and pushed me to work my best as well. It was inspired all around.
Finally, the Supreme Court heard the case over three days last June. The squad of government lawyers I was with vigorously defended the law against a host of opposition. They were thorough, smart and persuasive, and overall, seemed more powerful than those arguing for the detainees. Everyone agreed the court would split, but it appeared as though they would err on the side of conservatism. As it turned out, we were hopelessly, terribly, completely wrong.
On Friday afternoon, the court released its judgment. I didn’t see it until Saturday morning. In a stunning, comprehensive, and sublimely elegant decision, all nine judges of the court voted against to government. It is an overwhelming judgment, an incredibly powerful statement, a devastating pronouncement on terror policy in the post-9/11 world, and as complete a refutation of the government’s position as one could have hoped for. We were skunked. Smashed to bits. Nine - nothing. Not one judge agreed with us - not one! It was, and is, to a certain extent, unfathomable. Lifetimes are spent on cases like this. People’s careers are defined, their sense of purpose and self-worth confirmed or denied. And here we are, eight months later, dozens of lawyers across Canada, completely slapped in the face by every single member of the highest court in the country.
4. We Lost.
I love it. I love it. I adore the decision. I soak up every paragraph, every pronouncement, every time it says “Held: Appeal allowed”. For 89 pages there is nothing but joy of the purest kind, uncontrollable pleasure so irresistible it’s virtually unrecognizable. You forget you were confused or angry or so emotionally peculiar. How could you ever have felt any another way except this way, except flooded with bliss and success and vitality, except burgeoning with the constant surge of the energy of being alive? Joy so complete there’s nothing else knowable in life, so complete you can only see it in the tears streaming down your face.
Yes, I worked on the losing side of the case wholeheartedly, with the utmost dedication, doing my best to answer the demands made of me as promptly and completely as possible, neglecting at times other aspects of my life - diet, exercise, girlfriend - to make sure nothing was left to chance. Yes, I poured myself into the government’s case, as far and as deep as they would allow the youngest, newest, most unknown lawyer on the team. Yes, it was three months where all that was asked was that I commit myself to this case, and yes, that was all that I did, but yes, yes also, yes most of all I exalted in defeat.
Ever since 9/11, ever since the Afghan war, ever since Guantanamo and Iraq and ever since I read of Rocco Galati, Mahmoud Jaballah and his Kafka-inspired odyssey through the courts and jail, security certificates have lodged themselves in my consciousness. I learned them inside and out. I argued with classmates and teachers and lawyers about them. I wrote papers on them for school that no one who wasn’t working on the case, let alone the poor civil litigators forced to mark them, could understand. Always, always, always, I argued against the certificates. Always, with everyone, everywhere. Friends’ boyfriends I had just met were hammered if they dared disagree. Lawyers with passing comments were taken aside and spoken softly to. Fellow students at the Department of Justice were inundated every time there was a hearing. Always, until last spring.
When I was pulled into the Supreme Court team, I rationalized it to myself. I wasn’t doing anything more than background research, and preparation of supplementary material. I wasn’t writing arguments, just creating platforms for possible positions we might take. It wasn’t a contradiction, even though I was choking myself quiet to avoid confrontations, suffocating in a windowless, airless office by myself to avoid running into anyone I might have to explain myself to or, worse yet, silently endure as they nattered on about the rightness of our cause. It wasn’t a contradiction, I told myself, to ensure the court has the best possible information before it on which to base it’s decision. It wasn’t a contradiction to disagree in principle with the position, but to work as diligently and honestly as I ever worked on anything in my life, worried that someone - a colleague, another lawyer, a friend or professor - might point out that, hey, Kiyani actually thinks this is an outrageous law and it gnaws at him nightly, it eats away at him while he sits on the 90A Vaughan Road bus, it burrows time bombs of frustration and devastation in the most remote corners of his brain, and that’s before he even started working on the case! And that if this was too public a piece of knowledge, my competence would be called into question, even though they asked for the best I had, I gave the best I had, and, frankly, they told me what I gave them was the best they could have had. If I hadn’t been so addicted to the law for the years before then, if I hadn’t done what I had done before then, if I had refused to work on the case, they never would have gotten what they did. It wouldn’t have made an ounce of difference, but they wouldn’t have gotten what they wanted.
In the eight months since we flew to Ottawa, I put the case out of my head. It was done, and I had poor hopes, and Ethiopia beckoned. A lid was put on the cauldron of anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, hope and desperation. No one talks about it here, and I liked that. I liked not having to deal with it, being able to forget about it, put my feelings aside, to pretend the only problems for me to be concerned with are what I see here in Ethiopia.
Its been five years since everything - the daily struggle with being identified as Muslim at a law school in Toronto, the constant battle with conservative media, students, professors and strangers, the unending public reminders of second-class citizenry, the images of war, murder, desperation blazing across screens and haunting dreams, Kandahar, Iraq in Fragments, the constellation of problematic identities and intersections that defined me - started to conflate inside. It became an abscess, a pool of diseased, unmanageable emotions silently corrosive, leaving everything inside raw and frayed.
Until yesterday, when the judgment made its way here, when the bottle of emotions exploded and I couldn’t stop anything. I was sobbing so hard I nearly fell over in the shower. In the past 24 hours, I’ve only managed to make it through half of the judgment because I well up at the plainest statements of law. I walk down the stairs, or I sit on my bed, or I make a sandwich and the smile comes and the tears come and I have to shut my eyes for a moment and stop and wait and bask in the poetry of justice. There’s no feeling like it, and I want to take the vats of poison that wracked me and so many others for so long and fill them up again and again with the ecstasy of this and just seal it all away. I’m afraid to enjoy it, to revel in it, to use it all, to lose it, to run out or worse yet, worst of all, to find out that this is it, this is all we get, this is the one time in our lives something so powerful and momentous works out the way it should.
I adore it, and I don’t want to bleed it dry. I want it to be like this now and tomorrow and everyday. I want it this way and I want it so much because this is the first time, as a lawyer, that its been as good, as useful, as awesome as I hoped it might be. There may never be another moment like this, but so far it’s the purest vindication of my choice to go to law school, of the patchwork of social constructions, experience and ideas that make up my identity, of my being alive and impassioned and active. My choices, my body, my existence feels justified, not in some ethereal sense, but in the most pointed, meaningful way possible.
Everything else here right now may be shredding me, but it doesn’t matter because I have this and I adore it. I adore it.
5. TOP TEN BIRTHDAY DAYS EVER
I can’t actually remember any birthday before 19, but how could they be any better than what’s already on the list? In no particular order…
1. Friday Programme (Special Needs “Teen Out & About”) participants sing me Happy Birthday at dinner. Best song ever. [2003 - age 24]
2. Party at Fez Batik, with Kam et al., all the Cordies, Parkdale colleagues, and Ashley coming in from Waterloo. The fact that Annie wasn’t there only made me more determined to rectify that absence in my life, which then dovetailed nicely with what became the best year of my life. [2004 - age 25]
3. Anthony and I go to see Goldie, kids ask me if I can supply them with drugs, and it makes me feel young again. Plus he gives me a shitload of music that took me three years to listen to. [2004 - age 25]
4. The night I was both interviewed and hired as Cord Editor-in-Chief, prelude to the best job I ever had, best learning experience I ever had, and, at that point, best year of my life. Also, at the birthday/congratulations party we hosted the same night (yes, we were arrogant), I met Anthony. This is probably No. 1. [2000 - age 21]
5. Ethiopian Birthday Friday: On way home the night before, Allison and I laugh until crying (frankly, I was near death) about smell of bread. Next day, we go to Bora Children’s Amusement Park, water guns are bought, laugh until crying repeatedly, birthday box, good dinner, great company, Klaus is Claus, water guns are used to hilarious effect repeatedly, and Memo. Even getting on the mini-bus was a brilliant adventure. [2007 - age 28]
6. Fish & chips and the pinata smash with a frying pan and other kitchen implements, outside Nicole’s house, on top of a electric power box. Later teach Kyra to drive on the right side of the road. Brilliant photo with head of piñata is taken. [2005 - age 26]
7. First birthday at university, entire floor celebrating, gum down her shirt, and The Muppet Movie at sunrise. [1998 - age 19]
8. Go see The Adventures of Ali & Ali and the Axes of Evil (?) downtown. See old Chinese lady with crunched spine scavenging for bottles like a crab hustling across a beach. Later that night, Danielle gives me a giant bowl, ladle and four pounds of soup (see below). [2004 - age 25]
9. Mother and brother take me to Silver Tower’s Korean restaurant. I order my favourite food, chicken noodle soup. Waiter warns it’s a big bowl. I say, damn the torpedos, bring me the noodles. It’s massive. I could swim across it. All the wait staff gather to watch me eat. Laughter ensues. I barely manage to make a dent. At the time, I was slightly embarrassed, but let’s be honest, I loved the attention and it’s hilarious to look back on now. [circa mid-1980s - age 8?]
10. Ethiopian Birthday Saturday/2007 SCC 9. Wake up feeling lousy, see Supreme Court decision on security certificate cases. Am sobbing with tears of joy for the next hour. When I get out of the shower, my eyes are redder than when I went to bed. Doni wants to go to Changes. Rahim wants to go Black Rose. I stay home and read the judgment instead, laughing as I cry uncontrollably. Brilliant. [2007 - age 28]