: this is austin's blog :

I'm writing this blog post as I take a skytrain tour of down town. My saturday worked out as such that I had 3 hours to kill downtown by myself, between 5 and 8 pm. At first I went to the VPL, only to discover it closed at 6, so I needed to come up with somewhere else to kill time for 2 hours. After doing a bit of wandering, I decided that I would get on the sky train and just ride it for as long as I could/needed too. I left stadium sky train station at 6:30 pm exactly (after a short jump from Granville to stadium without paying... oops) and we'll see where all I've been once I get off. Right now I'm on the expo line to king george.. I'll have to get off at columbia and get on to the VCC-Clark Skytrain so I can keep riding for fun. You may all think I'm being retarded but I'm actually having fun. Ok.. I'll have to switch sky trains now...

Done. As I'm doing this, I'm suddenly becoming reminded of the overwhelming insignificance of my life. There's all these huge apartment buildings everywhere, all of them housing people, whole families even, with their own lives, jobs, worries and joys. I know people that live in some of these. I am nothing more than the "importance" of one body, one person, one piece of man-flesh living in a house in tsawwassen with nothing particularly special about me.

I'm passing lougheed town centre. I've never ridden on this part of the sky train line before.

There's so much I don't know about this area where I live. I'm seeing all these stores and restaurants that I've never been to before. Some of these are probably the favourites of people in the area. Maybe they'd be my favourites if I lived here.

I'm at Brentwood now. What's Brentwood? I've never even heard of it before. Lots of people went to high school here. Lots of people call Brentwood home.

I just started listening to a CD called Progress Reform by a band called iLiKETRAiNS. I saw a random music video of theirs once on much music The Wedge and I was impressed. We'll see how the CD rolls out.

I've switched now at commercial drive and I'm heading back to downtown.. I'll get off at Granville station, thus concluding my little lower mainland tour/adventure. I want to say that I feel more enlightened...no, maybe just a little more socially aware. I'm happy though.

Oops, I wanted to keep writing but the sky train was too fast for me...I stayed on till waterfront and switched to a new one, back to Granville. :P

Man this last seat of mine is rad... it's the very back of one of the newer skytrains and I'm all by myself facing the rear. I like this a lot.

To play with a metaphor of Tracy's, this city is a body and I am a little worker cell being shuttled around from place to place.

I almost read an article today on, of all places, that little msn start page that Internet Explorer automatically links you to. It was making a point of saying essentially how we should be thankful that the super rich exist because they keep our economies stable, the mentality being, since they have super cash, they super spend and thus offset all kinds of greater market discrepancies (on a small scale) because today Mr. Diamonds decided to buy some personal jets and so on. Whereas it takes throngs of blue collar workers to amass 10s of millions of dollars in currency redistribution, but only a few families of the "super rich" to make those kind of purchases every so often. I still don't know how I feel about this premise; however, though at first I scoffed at the article, now I wish I had read it.

Ok, I'm done here now. It's 7:41pm. This has been an enjoyable experience.