I started doing comedy a couple of months ago. Sure, I've been telling people I'm funny for years, and public speaking never phased me, but I'd never done anything to marry these two thoughts.

Summer, my Dear Montrealers, is here. Sure, on some level you know that, but on another level, people still seem to be waiting. With an impressive heatwave under our belts early, plus rainy days and cool lightning, it's been a roller coaster thus far, and maybe that's had us distracted.

When people say be prepared, they mean prepared for bad things. They say be prepared for disappointment, and stockpile necessities in order to be prepared for “every” eventuality. If you Google “preparation kit”, you find a billion different emergency kits, depending on what catastrophe you feel currently unprepared for.

Everyone moves differently, and we’ve all had different types of moves. I’ve held a mattress to a car roof, and carried random shit on the metro. I've done a walking move, only a few blocks, during which time my cat and guinea pig shared a giant Tupperware.

Back home in southwestern Ontario, it’s a twenty-minute drive to the nearest second-hand bookstore, a place which, for the longest time, I did not know the name of. It’s a long, single-story building with book-patterned posters lining the windows and pictures of the children whom the non-profit benefits placed in the entryway.

St. Louis Square is one of my favorite parks in Montreal. Follow the cobblestone road that is Prince Arthur from St. Laurent, and you hit the small city oasis right before St. Denis. That's how I discovered the park in my teens.

Artists are a weird bunch. A motley crew of various talents (and often specific obsessions and strange habits), usually the only thing we have in common is a passion for the arts, or one corner of them.

The Cité-des-Hospitalières is undergoing a beautiful transformation, as creators bring their art to fill the repurposed space. I’ve attended a few shows at this venue, but until Floreus, I’d yet to have the pleasure of experiencing the chapel itself.

I am now high maintenance. Not the highest maintenance, and not in an annoying way, but I've made my decision, and I'm sticking to it. Allow me to explain…

When we were young, it was easy to celebrate new chapters. Admittedly, that was because everything was new, and it's easy to celebrate firsts. It's easy to be hyped and sentimental about the first day of school, but fast forward to halfway through your master's degree (shoutout Shaina!) and it's just a grind you've grown accustomed to.