This arrived at the perfect time! I was discussing pagers with my friend a few days back, after he expressed annoyance at me always being offline :. unavailable, unless I made the active choice to check my notifications (something I do not enjoy at all).
(I reached out to you through email, but received a 'Message Blocked' email, so I'm posting my message here)
I'm Pakistani-Canadian; 22 years old. I got stuck in Pakistan during covid and had to attend university here because I didn't have enough support to return to Canada.
Unfortunately, things aren't safe here for me because I'm a queer person undergoing HRT. I've experienced harassment and want to leave as soon as possible, but my parents' monetary support re: airplane fare is contingent upon me getting accepted into a Canadian pharmacy school (I'm a P2 PharmD Candidate currently).
Whilst I can organise tuition loans and such, I can't afford application fees because I have no disposable income and the currency conversion from PKR is not in my favour. I tried, but could not find any application fee waiver either. We are also highly discouraged from holding jobs while attending school over here. There's no policy against it, but life can be made difficult in other ways.
I am applying to three universities, which are the University of Saskatchewan ($125CAD or $88USD), University of Waterloo ($215CAD), and University of Toronto ($250CAD).
I would appreciate any help I can get. My intention is to get into USask, as that seems my best bet at the moment. I'm willing to provide any verification required, as well.
Yes (n=1), although I actively go out of my way to find more long-form blogs.
To be fair, I've found a lot these through social media (ref: TikTok, X, Reddit, Fediverse, [HN?]...) after curating my algorithm since just searching for blogs I like doesn't yield much relevant results.
I used to make planner templates and similar things of that sort for myself in high school. It wasn't anything special but I enjoyed making them.
I had this guy contact me on Reddit about whether I could customize a daily planner for his kids and gave me a general idea of what he wanted. I delivered the design and he loved it, and commissioned three more.
I charged him $2 USD per planner (didn't know how to price it + it took me an hour tops, but he insisted on paying more which was nice). Ended up earning $15/planner.
Most of us are using (usually free) VPN to circumvent the current ban like we do every single time the PTA bans some other website for whatever they've deemed as blasphemous content du jour.
It's just another day in this country at this point. Tumblr's been banned for awhile so I have to use VPN for that, TikTok kept getting banned and unbanned multiple times, YouTube was banned for a few years, and many people use VPN/proxies to access nsfw/porn sites regardless of how illegal they are. Haven't seen anyone in my cohort worry about the stance taken against Wikipedia, they'll probably unban it eventually.
You can check out the noise cancelling headphones from Bose, or search up Ear Defenders on Amazon. I've heard good things about Bose headphones, and am looking into them myself because of my own sensory issues.
I used to be really anxious and nervous until sophomore year of high school, when I had to take a marketing elective aimed towards juniors. We had to present our products via PowerPoint each week in a group. My first two presentations were terrible, so I racked up enough courage to ask my teacher on whether I could present alone next week, which he allowed.
Every week or so, I'd ask him to present my products as a single-person group in front of the class and every week I got pretty good feedback which led to getting better grades. That increased my confidence, and also became the pipeline towards learning how to reduce the amount of (pardon my language) fucks I gave about unnecessary things. (Also, trying to convince your classmates and teacher to buy a fake product every week or two works wonders for your anxiety.)
I did know how to be a team player and collaborate with other people, but the group I was usually assigned to sucked and I refused to let them affect my grade average.
I also started going to the gym that year, did nothing too serious though. I'd go after school and would either use the treadmill or pretend that I knew how to lift weights, haha. It made me feel better, and I was diagnosed with ADHD later on, so the exercise bit checks out even more.
Tl;dr: find something that you feel strongly enough for, and use that to take-off into the anxiety to less anxiety pipeline. Also, exercise. It doesn't have to be working out intensely, but even a walk around the neighborhood can make you feel better.
In S. Asia, I'd get to school by 7:45AM and we'd go to daily assembly for prayers, general announcements, etc. 'til sixth grade.
After moving to Canada:
In junior high school, we'd get to school at 9AM and class would start by 9:15AM after the national anthem and daily announcements.
High school: Got to school by 7:50AM, music played on the PA system until 8AM, after which the Pirates of the Caribbean theme would start to play to urge us to get to class faster. Then the national anthem, daily announcements, and classes would start by 8:20AM.