Settling into a new city. The old city hall at Bay and Queen. Near here there are lots of hot dog and soft-serve vendors. I had the usual regular twist cone and walked west for a while. It's been warm and as you can see a little bit hazy.

I miss the ocean but when I went back to Nova Scotia for the wedding (which was otherwise great) it was cold, rainy, and typically grey.

I was listening to a George Carlin rant about how Americans started out with Paradise and turned it all into a mall. Sometimes that feels pretty accurate. What is fascinating and a little bit exhausting about the city is the constant promise of reinventing oneself, translated by latter-day capitalism into a demand to buy new things to make oneself new.

"I had a strange dream. In my dream you and I both had to marry someone else. It was a fox. What's the word I'm looking for? The fox was coy. You did not know exactly where you stood with this fox. The fox knew I was insecure about the possibility that you were more attracted to the fox than to me. But the fox was also kind of attractive."

Separation agreements sometimes contain a general explanatory clause to the effect that the parties have separated "in consequence of disputes and unhappy differences." I like "happy differences" as a definition of marriage.

Last night we had a very large snowstorm in Halifax. Sarah and I are both deep in exam mode, which resembles, in its physical characteristics, house arrest. I am still working some nights at the law library but otherwise I avoid it all I can. At this time of year the competitiveness and stress reaches a fever pitch around the law school.

Last year, when I first moved to Halifax to be with Sarah, it rained straight through November and improved only slightly in December. This year has been better in many ways, including the weather. We've had a mild fall and relatively little rain, and what rain we had was mostly vertical. My classes are more interesting this year than last and perhaps more importantly I no longer have that feeling of being new that I hate so much about beginnings anywhere. I think I may dislike it in part because it takes me so long to make friends.

Lately when I talk about Canada I say "we," as in, "we have a federal criminal law, whereas you in the States have fifty different criminal jurisdictions." While not sold on Canada completely, I am applying for permanent residency this year. One interesting thing about being in Canada (at this time in my life) is realizing the extent to which our lives are shaped by forces larger than us. For Canadians, the obvious one is the neighbour to the south.

It makes me very sad to think that history might look back and define our lives in terms of the "war on terror." Sometimes, in more cynical moments, I think that this generation was pining for a war or tragedy, because without one it felt undefined. A while ago, while I was working at the Coop, I read a book by the self-explanatory (and pretty clunky) title of "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." His thesis was that we're no good, as a species, at peace. We don't know what to do with ourselves.

Sarah and I have also been watching the truly excellent new "Battlestar Galactica" series, which usually gives me a lot to think about, especially with respect to the war on terror and whether human beings are any good at peace or not.