My grandmother dropped this heavy wisdom on me when I was very young. Too young to affect my smile, too young to believe her. It wouldn't be until my pre-teens that I started to realize that cool kids don't smile.

This week, Dear Readers, I am writing you a permission slip. I'm giving you permission to step away, to step up, to cancel plans, to make better plans. Of course, you don't need permission, but sometimes it feels like we do, doesn't it?

Montreal loves festivals. Montreal loves comedy. In fact, it feels like we should have some sort of comedy festival, like a week long, featuring different comedians doing their unique thing. It feels like that would be super successful, the kind of thing you’d have to try really hard to fuck up.

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.