I have become an accidental pho cononisseur.

Watching my boyfriend experience new cuisines is one of the small joys in my life. Together we’ve eaten our way through Korea, China, Japan, all unknown food frontiers to him when we first met. I like explaining dishes and ingredients to him (even though I’m no foodie myself) and watching his reaction to unfamiliar flavours and textures.

About a year ago, we stumbled upon Pho Vistro on Queen West. Vietnam was a country we had yet to cross off our culinary map. Two enormous bowls of noodle-filled broth later, and we inadvertently began a year of seeking out new pho places nearly every week. He loves the clean, healthy feeling he gets from eating pho, and I crave the slippery noodles and umami broth that’s slightly different wherever we go.

After trying eight different pho spots between us, I’m confident we can offer a quasi-authoritative take on the best and worst Vietnamese noodle bowls in Toronto. Our review can be somewhat objective since we always order the same thing wherever we go: rare beef with rice vermicelli noodles.

The Best

Cafe Pho Nho

Our favourite. We return to this cozy cafe more often than any other spot on this list. The broth is what sets this pho apart – it’s immensely flavourful without being overpowering. The rare beef is always buttery and the noodles perfectly cooked. I’m salivating as I write this.

Golden Turtle/Pho Tien Than

I count these two together because to us they have become interchangeable – when one is closed (or we can’t get a seat, as both are usually quite busy), we simply walk down the street to the other. Both have delicately flavoured broth and perfectly cooked noodles. Both are also popular with local families, so there’s a chance you’ll get to look at cute babies while you eat.

Pho 88

The one spot on this list I’ve visited without my boyfriend. Maybe it was because I fasted that day, but the pho here is like a warm hug – flavourful and filling.

Pho Phuong Vietnamese Restaurant

Affectionately known as our backup place when Cafe Pho Nho is closed, Pho Phuong holds its own as a respectable, dependable bowl of pho. What sets this place apart is its 3-scoop ice cream dessert – 1 each of coconut, mango and green tea. Yum.

The Worst

Pho Vistro

Nostalgia just wasn’t enough to save this spot from the bottom of the list. While the pho was tasty enough to get us hooked on the dish, after trying several other phos in Toronto this bowl just doesn’t hold its own.  The broth simply leaves a strange aftertaste in the mouth. Not totally unpalatable, but not one of the city’s best.

Pho Asia 21

Broth is once again the killer at this joint, though it is far worse than Pho Vistro’s. It seems to be tomato-based, which gives the pho an unpleasant ketchupy taste.

Pho Pasteur

Avoid. Tasteless broth and stale noodles. Pho Pasteur holds the honour of being the only place where I could not stomach finishing my meal. The excellent reviews of this spot online makes me worry for the people who like it. There are far better places to enjoy pho in Toronto. Just look above.

The first U of T alumni event I attended since graduating two years ago was a seminar tantalizingly titled “Writers on Writing.” It quickly revealed itself to be a plug for works created by university alums and a creative writing master’s degree offered through its department of English Literature. However, the afternoon was redeemed by cookies and the following words of writing wisdom offered by Canadian novelist Susan Swan.

On Writing

1. Choose a narrator who is like you and not like you so you have room to invent.
2. Write the first draft without worrying about language problems or clichés. Being critical too soon is like inviting the food critic to the feast when you’re still chopping the onions.
3. Writing fiction that is fairly autobiographical is fine. It’s not fine when you feel obligated to duplicate true experience instead of asking the writer’s question: what does the story need? All stories go through a transformation whether they are inspired by actual events that happened to the writer or come out of pure invention. Play around with your history to make it authentic to your story.
4. It’s a cliché to say ‘write what you know.’ Write about what most deeply obsesses you and what you know will come into play organically.
5. Keep the reader in the moment of the story as it unfolds so the reader and the story’s characters go through the same experiences together. Too much explaining or summarizing will deaden the story and insult the reader’s intelligence.
6. Try role-playing your dialogue with a friend to see if you captured the way people actually talk to each other. Dialogue between characters without the author’s interference is the easiest way of ‘showing, not telling.’
7. Carol Shields says writers write sketch scenes when they need to ‘thicken’ their plot and introduce the next scene naturally. This can be done by using the immediacy of dialogue or by adding sensory details of setting, facial expressions, gestures, clothes and more. Letting the reader know what the character is thinking also helps thicken a scene. This can be done through free, indirect style which removes tag phrases such as ‘she thought’ and simply puts the thought on the page without attributing it to a character.
8. “A short story is a piece of writing under 60 pages” – Alice Munro

Questions for Revising

1. Is the opening the best possible opening? Or is it a fish-head, something the writer writes to get started?
2. Does the structure of your story make sense? Are there missing scenes or information?
3. Are the words fresh and vital? Is the language clichéd? Or is the story burdened by vague, general phrases that don’t let us see the world of the story? Sensory details must be specific and characteristic as opposed to a laundry list of items. Describing how the intestines of a whale smell in a story about Jonah would tell the reader far more about the size of the whale’s stomach than using vague, general adjectives like ‘big’ or ‘large’.
4. Does the ending provide a sense of closure? Does it feel both inevitable and surprising?

Where you live and how you live is not a logistical factor or point on a map. It touches every aspect of your life, from career to mental health to, as I’ve discovered, personal relationships.

I lived at home during my first year of university, but the commute from Oakville to Toronto and my need for independence led me to move for the next two years with two friends into a 3-bedroom bungalow in East York. Unforeseen issues with the house meant our relationship soon became strained. Shortly after we settled in, the landlady’s daughter moved into the basement unit with a wailing newborn and abusive boyfriend. He was ultimately arrested when I woke one morning to the sound of the girl screaming for help and called the police. Another issue was the furnace, which broke in the dead of our second winter at the house. My roommates, afraid of “rocking the boat” by telling the landlady to fix it, instead told her things were fine and not to worry. Finding myself paying $700 a month to sleep in my winter coat, I had enough and called her to demand she fix the furnace immediately. My good relationship with my roommates ended when I found out they had gone behind my back and told the landlady to ignore me. I grew mean, critical, angry, tormenting them in the misguided belief that I could control and change them – I made sure we were all miserable. The moment our lease was up, we scattered and never spoke again.

My final year of university I moved into a room with three other acquaintances I knew from school in a row house on Bathurst Street. We were friendly, but not good friends, which meant I was okay with spending most of my time in my room. They lived their lives and I lived mine, and I came to realize where I had failed with my previous roommates: I had treated them like my family. I wanted my roommates to sweep the way my family did, clean the bathroom the way my family did, wash the dishes the way my family did – I was convinced the way my family did things was the right way. My behaviour led to resentment, which blew up our relationship when housing issues drew them to a head. So in this new apartment, I stopped caring. Grease and food left on the pans and plates that had just been washed? I cleaned the ones I used and didn’t say anything. A roommate who set off the fire alarm every time she cooked? I put on headphones. I went on vacation for 3 weeks to return to a bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned since I left? I cleaned it from top to bottom then went to my room to read. It was liberating. They did their thing, I did mine, and if these two paths crossed I took care of what only concerned me.

I carried this live-and-let-live mentality into my next place. My year at the Bathurst apartment was tainted by party ragers in the basement who would blast music from their surround-sound system like a weapon at all hours. I chose my next space to be closer to the college (with its ungodly 8 a.m. classes) I was attending that year for a post-grad certificate program. I had only one criterion for a home: that it be quiet. I found this in a room in a house I shared with my landlady, a woman who was clean and kind with a peaceful place close to school. I watched her cats while she was away, we chatted in the mornings, she saved my butt when she fished out an important reference letter of mine that had ended up in the recycling bin. Overall, it was a pleasant experience between two women going their own way with their own lives.

My post-grad required an internship to graduate, and when I managed to secure one that was four months long I was certain it would turn into a  full-time job. My family and I decided it would be best for me to move back home in the interim before I moved out for good armed with a salary to pay my rent. Yet instead of the first steps of a career path, the internship turned into an exercise in the life I didn’t want to lead and the person I didn’t want to become. In August I found myself looking for another internship. I found one, also four months long, which this time did turn into a permanent gig. After my internship was extended by two months to navigate the hiring red tape of our newly-acquired company, on March 1 of this year I signed my first-ever full-time salaried contract. My original plan seemed back on track – with my new salary, I could move out on my own. Sticker shock at the truly dire extent of Toronto’s affordable housing crisis soon quashed that dream.

At this time my relationship with my parents was fraying – I was surly and resented my dependence on them for meals, transportation and shelter. I didn’t talk except to lash out and spent most of my time in my room feeling that I was regressing into an angry teenager. One day after I was particularly critical of my father my mother told me to shape up or move out. At that moment my nerves shattered and I realized how long I had been inwardly raging against what felt like my entrapment in Oakville. I came to realize my problem was I didn’t know how to act towards my parents outside of the relationship between child and caregiver. I was an adult now, and this old way of relating to them was stifling me. I had mental shift the moment I watched this gem of a video, which articulated eloquently the struggles I was experiencing:

Ever since, I’ve made the conscious effort to treat my parents as equals rather than, well, parents, and our relationship has considerably improved.

While things have become easier at home, I still don’t want to live here much longer. When I’m on the GO train I think of all the hours of my life I waste commuting, and how much more I could see my boyfriend if I lived closer to him. He and I, while we’ve been together for over a year, recognize it’s still too soon to move in together. I stay over with him on the weekends, or rather, I used to. Recently, we discovered his Parkdale apartment is infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. Until he finds a new place we’ve kept in touch through texting and 3-hour phone calls, but this quasi-long distance solution isn’t ideal for either of us.

Astronomical rent, impossible condo prices, unfathomable home rates, the necessity of roommates and pests – this is what it’s like to live in Toronto (or in my case, not.) A 1-bedroom or studio apartment that’s affordable, clean and close to work no longer exists in this city, and it places a strain on the mostly young people (and their family, friends and significant others) who want to live independently for the first time. Instead, we are told to wait until we make six-figure salaries before this dream – a place of one’s own – can be realized. Until then, the decision most of us face is whether to live our lives for now or save up for later. I don’t know yet which way I’ll land (three to six years without travelling while living with my parents is unbearable to me), but I find small consolation in the reassurance that most people my age are struggling with this decision, too.

It took me a long time to realize I had eczema. I thought the rough, round patches the size of quarters dotting my forearms were a reaction to bug bites, itchy clothing, changes in weather. When an unbearably itchy bloom that made my skin tight and flaky began to spread around my eyes, down my cheeks, neck and along my jawline, I realized outside irritants were not the source of my condition. It was my poor lifestyle, which was physically forcing me to face how much damage to my health I was doing with how I was living.

My eczema began in the summer, when I was completing an internship for a credit as part of my post-graduate college certificate program. The growing conviction that a career in agency, this position a foothold into it which I had gained after expending a huge effort, turned out to be a disastrous fit. A toxic stress poisoned my body – I wasn’t sleeping, I cried easily, I dreaded the office and the work I came to each morning and worried, after years of study, that I had chosen the wrong profession. I took long, hot showers each night to strip away the day from my skin. I would wake myself up at night to find I had been grating my neck in my sleep. When I awoke one morning towards the end of my contract to a face I barely recognized I knew I needed to drastically change how I lived and took care of my body. So began my journey to clear skin, which four months later I can say seems to at last be reaching its conclusion.

The biggest factor in clearing my eczema was my complete change in lifestyle. I began a new job with 9-5 hours which allowed me to leave work at work and get a good night’s sleep regularly. I looked forward to what I did each day, I was surrounded by laid-back, friendly coworkers and worked in a corporate environment that was the opposite of cutthroat. I relaxed, I let myself be happy, and felt my insides uncoiling like an overly taut spring. I had time for friends, for my boyfriend, for writing. My life was becoming more of a priority than my work, a balance foolishly abandoned during my internship. I ate three meals a day rather than starving myself, I drank more water. I walked to and from work, 20 minutes each way, compared to the little exercise I had done in the four months previous. In short, my body was returning to its pre-agency equilibrium, and my face reflected this reversal.

During this time, to help speed up my healing process I tried multiple topical hydrocortisone creams prescribed to me by my doctor. I found none of them did much besides relieving immediate itching. The regimen I found worked best for me to heal my calloused skin instead was to moisturize, moisturize, moisturize. The products I found worked best were all from La Roche Posay; specifically, LIPIKAR BAUME AP+, TOLERIANE RICHE and PHYSIOLOGICAL CLEANSING MILK. I applied the baume to my face at night to let its anti-itch formula sink in and keep me from scratching as I slept. I also applied the baume to my arms before bed and again in the morning to stop the daily itching. I applied the Toleraine cream to my face in the morning after cleansing to keep my face hydrated all day. When I got home from work, I used the cleansing milk to remove my makeup without stripping my skin of moisture. I washed my face once in the morning and again at night in the shower, both with lukewarm water and using Cetaphil’s Gentle Skin Cleanser. As a final protection against itching, I took one extra strength Reactine every 24 hours. Thanks to this routine, my skin is getting softer and clearer every day.

I’m not a doctor, and I don’t claim to be prescribing medical advice. But I hope this article might help comfort any itchers and scratchers who are desperately seeking an eczema success story. If you’ve found yourself here, I can only say that listening to your body and being kind to it  – while basting yourself in lotions, potions and creams daily – are the habits that have personally led me into the clear (skin, that is.)

I was waiting in a cafe for a woman I was to have an informational interview with, reading over her LinkedIn profile and sipping a hot chocolate, when two women sat down at the table beside mine. It didn’t take long for me realize they were journalists.

The woman I was waiting for worked at a PR agency and I was an aspiring PR practitioner, so I couldn’t resist jotting down notes as the journos beside me began listing their grievances with the industry I was attempting to break into. Below are the learnings I took from my eavesdropping.

1. Don’t pester journalists. Take a hint. If you’re getting one-word responses (or no response at all) to your emails, she’s just not that into you. Be respectful. Also, don’t send “thanks anyway” emails. To journalists, they’re just one more message clogging up their already jam-packed inbox.
2. Don’t “spray and pray” your pitches. PR agencies are notorious for this practice, writing generic pitches they blast out to dozens of journalists. Take the time to read the journalist’s work you’re reaching out to and demonstrate in your pitch how your news is worth their writing about.
3. They don’t really want to talk to you. Journalists don’t want to talk to PR people – they want to talk to decision-makers. Journos often see PR practitioners as barring their access to power. Media train your C-suite and make journalist access to them easy.
4. They can’t predict the future. Journalists usually prepare stories up to one week in advance, so don’t reach out inquiring about placement opportunities in two weeks’ time. The onus is on you to keep up with current events and pitch your news to coincide accordingly.
5. Journalists think we just sell stuff. PR practitioners can change this perception of our industry by making more of an effort to cater to journalist needs. Whenever you contact a journo, ask yourself – why does my pitch matter to them? Journalists care about their publication, not your client. Always serve their interests before yours.

It was at this point that the woman I was waiting for arrived and we began to talk about PR. The journalists beside us overheard our conversation as I had overheard theirs, and promptly left.

“I hate the fact that I live in a Republican state.”

Clinton supporter Heather McKinnon Karzmer found out Donald Trump was her president the same way many Democratic party voters did: sleep-deprived and in denial at 2 a.m. on November 9.

“I thought I was going to celebrate the first woman president. I remember when Obama won the first time and how proud I felt. My immediate reaction to Trump was mortification. Then disappointment and embarrassment.”

Like many Blue voters in Florida, she did not anticipate that their Democratic stronghold under two terms of president Obama would swing so decidedly right in the 2016 election.

“All my news sources picked her winning in a landslide. I just didn’t think people were so stupid as to vote for a man so unbelievably dumb, vain and unqualified. Who so clearly didn’t have their interests in mind. People who voted for him were ashamed to say they were doing so. How sad is that?”

She blames the growing white nationalist movement and the American news media as reasons for the Trump presidency. “A lot goes back to how many angry white men despised having a black man as president.  Those people only got angrier. The other reason is Hillary was not a very strong candidate.  People I know that voted for Trump, who I like as people and friends, strongly disliked her. Now understand, these could only be their opinions since they got their information from Fox News. Fox eviscerated her on a regular basis. Make no mistake, the media is deeply dividing our country.”

Asked what she and her community of Democrats in Florida were doing in the face of President Trump, she said “I have friends actively resisting.  I consider myself a resistor.  None of us accept it. We are all sure people smarter than us will catch him doing something illegal and impeachable. If anything, him winning mobilized a lot of people to be more active in contacting their elected officials and demanding they push back on him. I’ve even contacted my Senators for the first time ever.” It is clear that what Democratic Floridians are not planning to do is accept their new reality without protest, as many Republicans have demanded of them.

“I just wanted to be a soccer mom. Now I have to get involved to fight for the rights we have grown used to having. And many of my fellow Americans are doing the same.”

Honest Ed’s was the reason I moved to downtown Toronto.

As a sophomore at U of T, my goal was to explore one new neighbourhood beyond campus each week. This task I set myself was the reason one day after morning classes I decided to take the streetcar from Bathurst station, not ride the subway, to have lunch with my father at the St. Lawrence Market.

Emerging from the bakery-scented air of the station I waited for the 511 streetcar. It trundled to a stop and I took a seat by the window. Honest Ed’s appeared on my right, bold, brazen and strikingly out of place against the clear March sky. It passed in an instant, the scene outside shifting to weathered rowhouses and students.

Youthful College turned to trendy Queen to sophisticated King. I had only seen Honest Ed’s for a moment, but its image was as clear in my mind as if I’d seen its neon lights blazing at midnight. It was then that I knew I wanted to move to the Annex.

Weeks passed and my East York apartment’s lease was set to end. I posted on Facebook asking if anyone I knew needed a roommate. A friend replied five minutes later, saying she had an empty room in her rowhouse on Bathurst street. I saw the place once and made an offer on the spot. I signed the rental agreement that afternoon.

I lived in that apartment for a year. I quickly got used to my bed shaking from the passing  511 streetcar outside the house as I slept at night, and looked forward each morning to eating breakfasts at the kitchen table looking out onto the street I had discovered first by streetcar. I walked past Honest Ed’s on Saturdays on my way to the Annex Metro for groceries each week.

I live in Etobicoke now, but still miss living downtown so close to Honest Ed’s, the institution many say is the city’s heart. I hope to move back one day soon. Until then, I visit as often as I can.

PR is meant to be the bridge of open, honest communications between a client and the media. However, the new reality of “alternative facts” presented by Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway has frayed PR’s relationship with the press and branded us as spin doctors.

“Spin isn’t and shouldn’t be a public relations tactic,” said PRSA chairwoman Jane Dvorak in a statement on “alternative facts.” “By being truthful, we build and maintain trust with the media.”

In his first press conference Spicer denounced the media with open hostility, arguing the White House “can sometimes disagree with the facts.” While PR and journalism may clash over how facts are represented, the facts themselves should never be a point of contention. Our effectiveness as communicators depends on our profession’s credibility. “Alternative facts” – spin – ruins it. A trusting relationship with the press is one communicators cannot afford to squander. Spicer himself acknowledged this truth in January, saying “If you lose the respect and trust of the press corps, you’ve got nothing.”

The view of journalists as enemies promoted by Spicer’s rhetoric arises from President Trump’s ongoing “war with the media.” Ezra Klein of Vox writes “Trump’s need to delegitimize … the institutions that might report damaging facts about the president” is a strategy meant to train his base to only trust information from the White House as truth. Yet as former GE CCO Gary Sheffer said, PR practitioners “aren’t reporters’ only source of information. Journalists are going to write … about you with or without your participation.” Rather than refusing to communicate, it is our job as PR professionals to convince clients that offering a perspective on an issue is always preferable to leaving its interpretation to conjecture.  A closed or untruthful relationship with the media always hurts the organization more than the journalist. We must persuade our clients that the press is our partner, not our enemy.

Repeated enough in the echo chambers of social media, unfounded claims can become “alternative facts” without appropriate attribution. PR Council president Anne Green said “There is a danger to our society becoming disengaged from the high stakes of defending actual, provable reality.” The work of journalists is becoming increasingly difficult in a time where the press secretary himself is working to distort facts. PR professionals have an ethical obligation to provide the press with accurate information. We must collaborate with, not undermine, journalists in their cause of providing the publics we communicate to with the truth.

The IABC Code of Ethics begins with “I am honest—my actions bring respect for and trust in the communications profession.” Spicer and Conway’s concept of “alternative facts” directly contradicts their ethical obligations to the practice they represent. PR practitioners should condemn their behaviour for portraying a version of our profession as false as their facts. PR and journalism are both purveyors of information, and natural partners in safeguarding the truth. In these times of state-sponsored falsehoods, the fight against “alternative facts” does not belong to journalists alone.