Features

One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, fail!

Drinking at university is socially accepted. Studies indicate more than 90 per cent of students drank over the last year, notably, Caucasians, athletes and first-year students.

People drink too much, it happens. With good times and good friends, it’s easy to lose count of how much booze was chugged back. Before you know it, you might become unintentionally intimate with a toilet.

Pregnancy is perhaps the most life altering experience a woman can go through in a lifetime. Not only will her body temporarily house a growing human for the next nine months or so, but she will also be expanding her family permanently.

For most women this can be a time of discomfort (gotta love morning sickness) and a build-up of excitement towards the big day. But for women who have eating disorders before conception, this can mean a whole new set of worries and concerns once the test comes back positive.

In my final year as an undergraduate at McGill University, I took an English course called “Contemporary Women’s Fiction.” For the final assignment, the professor called on our creative resources and told us we could submit a piece of creative work that reflected the course content; it could be a collection of poems, a short story, a song, or even visual art.

When people hear the word eating disorder, they often conjure up ideas of women suffering from either anorexia or bulimia. However, men can also suffer from eating disorders.

One type of eating disorder that typically affects more men than women is called muscle dysmorphia, or “reverse anorexia nervosa.”

Ten years ago, the Billings Bridge Santa remembers a man coming in with his daughter who had just arrived from Poland and didn’t speak English. The only Polish Santa could think of was “moja droga jacie kocham,” which means, “I love you so.”

That was enough to convince the little girl that he was the real Santa, and she returned the following year just to see him.

For the past 21 years, Santa has been spending his free time away from the North Pole talking to children and their families at Billings Bridge Mall.