my bad.. figured it out.
by the way.. and fyi: I have about 8 pages on my site and I wanted the left sidebar to appear only on one of them.
To have done thiis the provided way i would have had to type in the page id's of all 7 pages i don't want the sidebar on into the sidebar "do not include" config box.
i found an easier way .. i simply copied index.php and created a template for the page which would have the sidebar on. I went to the portion of code which figures out whether to enable the sidebars and commented it out.. (right after global $cols; global left_col; global $right_col
and simply typed in
$cols++; $left_col = "on";
$cols++; $right_col = "on";
turning on both sidebars.
i'm guessing this would make the page a little bit faster as well since it bypasses all the conditional logic.