Over the past several years, there has been a trend in publishing where people live differently for a year and then write about it: they give up something or follow a certain set of rules. Finlo Rohrer details this in his piece for the BBC’s online magazine. He points to Kath Kelly's How I Lived A Year On Just A Pound A Day; Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands, “in which the protagonist burned all his branded goods and then lived for a year without them”; and Hephzibah Anderson’s book entitled Chastened: No More Sex in the City, in which the writer gives up sexual activity for a full 12 months.
Other examples that come to mind: The Hundred Mile Diet by British Columbians Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon who, for a year, lived on food procured from within a hundred mile radius of where they lived (I’d have trouble with the no coffee rule and the lean months of winter). Or The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, who follows the Bible so literally that he can’t shave his beard and has to stone adulterers.
There are other projects that fall outside the annual period: Rohrer mentions to Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me that has Spurlock subsisting on food from McDonald’s for a month. And there is also Chris Jeavans’s blog in which she details her 31 days without buying anything plastic.
Stunts? Yes. But they all make a point about their subject: plastic is pervasive, McDonald’s is not good for you, the Bible shouldn’t be used to incite hatred, our world is comestibly globalized and sometimes casual sex interferes with women’s quest for “the one”.
Lazy as I am, I wouldn’t give up much that I like doing and I feel no need to follow a novel set of rules. But, as I’m sure everyone can acknowledge, there are several things I do as a matter of course that might be interesting to the reading public. But again, the laziness – so I will write in the spirit of John Crace’s Digested Read in which he takes books and distills them down to a few pithy paragraphs. (He even digests Chastened: No More Sex in the City – check it out at the link above!)
7 Months Without a Car
Back in January, I discovered that my muffler was completely rusted through. That, accompanied with the fact that the highbeams came on whenever I signaled left or right, the gas tank could only be filled halfway due to a hole at its top, the radio and parking brake didn’t work and the hood was held down with a flimsy contraption my dad had fashioned with the warning not to go faster than 60 or he couldn’t guarantee another hood-fly-up (which had happened several months before). So I sent my car to Car Heaven. Even got $300 out of the deal.
Considering it takes me 37 seconds to commute to work by foot, that part of being carless was easy. So was the fact that I live in an area where you can very easily walk to several grocery stores and specialty food shops to pick up anything I could want. I cheated a few times and “babysat” my parents’ car while they were away so I could purchase difficult-to-carry items like the economy pack of toilet paper or the large box of laundry powder.
Social engagements were arrived at by bike or public transit – the time commitment was definitely more, but there was never any waffling over whether to drive and remain sober or have a few drinks and cab it home.
The one drawback was missing out on those quick trips across town to visit people for just a few hours. Taking public transit sometimes was just not worth it. I also found I just did not frequent those stores that were out in Scarborough and I have yet to go back to Ikea.
25 Years Without Meat
When I was nine, my dad told me how they killed animals for food. I swore I would never eat meat again, and being the stubborn firstborn that I am, for the most part I didn’t. When I say “for the most part” I mean that there were a couple McDonald’s burgers in the first few years of my vegetarianism and then a few times when I ate meat without knowing it.
It’s become more of a routine now – I only know how to make two meat dishes and when I have tried bits of meat recently, I’ve found it takes a long time to chew. Besides, restaurants are much better now than they were in the 80s about offering vegetarian options. I also can claim environmental superiority by only taking up one field for food production instead of that field, plus a few more for the animals, plus a few more to feed the animals.
12 Days Without Sugar
A few years ago, I went on the Wild Rose Herbal D-Tox Cleanse (highly recommended) on the advice of my naturopath. For 12 days I was allowed no alcohol, no dairy products, no wheat or yeast and no sugar. I found the sugar the hardest, partly because I have quite the sweet tooth, but also because there is sugar in almost all prepared foods. I began reading labels much more carefully and ended up making all my meals from scratch – just fresh fruit and vegetables, beans, eggs and rice. I lost 8 pounds and felt so much better when it was finished. I also found my blood sugar levels evened out and I didn’t have that drop at 4pm when you crave cookies and other starchy, sugary snacks.
It wasn’t easy, though – I was craving things like pizza and cake like crazy. And when the cleanse was over, I went out and had poutine and immediately felt wretched. It taught me how much extra crap goes into prepared foods and how much what I put in my body affects me.
A Week Without Cell Phones or Internet Access
This summer I spent a week at a cottage where my cell phone didn't work and there was no internet. How did I cope? I went swimming, I read books and I lay in the sun. Hmm - this one seems to be the easiest - but also the shortest.
2 Months of No Work
At the end of the past 7 Junes, I have become unemployed. Weeks stretch out before me to be filled with sleep-ins, daytime television and meeting up with other unemployed friends. Some people ask how someone could possibly fill all those empty days without some kind of project or focus. Well, as I’m currently approaching the end of my unemployment once again, I can safely say that the days were filled and they slipped by easily.
On that note, I still have part of a week to continue my lazy unemployment. Maybe I'll try for a year of living like a responsible citizen. A year of getting up when my alarm goes off. Or a year without heroin.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Facebook & Feminism
Betty Freidan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique asserts that society requires women to define themselves by their husbands and family. During this Second Wave of feminism, many women broke out of the domestic sphere, both literally (by getting jobs, sharing housework) and symbolically (not taking their husband’s name). Despite this progress it appears, according to Katie Roiphe writing on doublex.com, that social networking sites may be causing women to revert back to being defined by their family.
“You click on a friend's name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted baby running on the beach...Where have all of these women gone?” writes Roiphe, describing the majority of profile pictures of mothers in my friends list. I did a little Facebook statistical analysis and found that almost two-thirds of my friends who are mothers, have a picture of their child in their profile picture. Compare that to a little over a third of fathers who include a photo of their child in their profile photo. And this analysis did not involve the number of banal status updates some of my friends write about toilet training, eating habits and first steps.
Now before I am branded anti-child, let me say this: I understand that we tend to talk about what is important to us and what we deal with on a daily basis. If I was dealing with spitting up babies and squealing toddlers, kids would probably be an oft-visited topic of conversation for me. And of course, if I had a kid, they would be pretty close to the centre of my world, just like I was for my mother (Right? Right, Mum?). But just like my mother, I think I would have other interests outside the sphere of family, and my child and husband would not define who I was. According to Roiphe: “One’s children are of course an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are who you are.”
But here’s the difficult dichotomy within feminism: we strive for equal rights and the freedom to define ourselves how we see fit. So if a woman wants to take a great interest in the domestic sphere, free of societal pressures and expectations, what does it matter? If she just birthed a child of her loins and she wants to put a photo of him or her on her Facebook page, who cares?
Roiphe:
It might be a bit difficult to project what book you’re reading or what cause you’re involved in through a profile photo. It is a small part of the whole Facebook page. And certainly the mothers in my friends list have other dynamic aspects of their personalities that are evident in their Facebook activities.
We need to validate archetypically female spheres: because of the whole uterus set up, women give birth to babies and due to their functioning mammary glands, tend to be the primary caregiver, especially in the first few months of infancy. Having and caring for babies does not mean women are sacrificing gains made during feminism’s heyday. However, being aware of what has gone before is essential. The Feminine Mystique illustrates a cultural shift in America where women were defined by marriage and family, yet many yearned for more. Nowadays, marriage and family may play a large part in women’s lives, but it doesn’t define them the way Friedan observed in housewives of the 1950s.
And here’s the proof: to the best of my knowledge, every single mother on my Facebook friend list is educated and employed. Thanks to feminists before them, they broke out of the domestic sphere with aspirations to higher education and careers. Some have kept their last names. I bet a few of them even let their husbands do the laundry.
Now if we could get some photos of that on Facebook…
“You click on a friend's name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted baby running on the beach...Where have all of these women gone?” writes Roiphe, describing the majority of profile pictures of mothers in my friends list. I did a little Facebook statistical analysis and found that almost two-thirds of my friends who are mothers, have a picture of their child in their profile picture. Compare that to a little over a third of fathers who include a photo of their child in their profile photo. And this analysis did not involve the number of banal status updates some of my friends write about toilet training, eating habits and first steps.
Now before I am branded anti-child, let me say this: I understand that we tend to talk about what is important to us and what we deal with on a daily basis. If I was dealing with spitting up babies and squealing toddlers, kids would probably be an oft-visited topic of conversation for me. And of course, if I had a kid, they would be pretty close to the centre of my world, just like I was for my mother (Right? Right, Mum?). But just like my mother, I think I would have other interests outside the sphere of family, and my child and husband would not define who I was. According to Roiphe: “One’s children are of course an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are who you are.”
But here’s the difficult dichotomy within feminism: we strive for equal rights and the freedom to define ourselves how we see fit. So if a woman wants to take a great interest in the domestic sphere, free of societal pressures and expectations, what does it matter? If she just birthed a child of her loins and she wants to put a photo of him or her on her Facebook page, who cares?
Roiphe:
Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes. But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafes and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith…
It might be a bit difficult to project what book you’re reading or what cause you’re involved in through a profile photo. It is a small part of the whole Facebook page. And certainly the mothers in my friends list have other dynamic aspects of their personalities that are evident in their Facebook activities.
We need to validate archetypically female spheres: because of the whole uterus set up, women give birth to babies and due to their functioning mammary glands, tend to be the primary caregiver, especially in the first few months of infancy. Having and caring for babies does not mean women are sacrificing gains made during feminism’s heyday. However, being aware of what has gone before is essential. The Feminine Mystique illustrates a cultural shift in America where women were defined by marriage and family, yet many yearned for more. Nowadays, marriage and family may play a large part in women’s lives, but it doesn’t define them the way Friedan observed in housewives of the 1950s.
And here’s the proof: to the best of my knowledge, every single mother on my Facebook friend list is educated and employed. Thanks to feminists before them, they broke out of the domestic sphere with aspirations to higher education and careers. Some have kept their last names. I bet a few of them even let their husbands do the laundry.
Now if we could get some photos of that on Facebook…
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Not Tonight, Honey, I'm... Oh Right - Obliged
Maybe it’s my unpredictable female hormones or the fact that I was almost convinced of the benefits of this UN-sanctioned war in Afghanistan; but I am now completely deflated by the news that president Hamid Karzai has signed a law that puts severe limits on the rights of Shia women. True, Karzai has backpeddaled after an intense international response, but it still brings up many uncomfortable questions.
The first has to do with the international response. Many critics used this opportunity to decry this step back in the UN’s quest to better the rights of women in Afghanistan. While certainly a bonus, this was not the reason the UN approved the forced removal of the Taleban. They went in because the Taleban were harbouring and funding terrorists who were loosely linked to the September 11th attacks.
Sally Armstrong, speaking on CBC’s The Current yesterday, pointed out that countries have never gone to war over women’s rights. I remember an article in Glamour magazine, of all places, detailing the oppression of women under the Taleban back in the early 90s. Western leaders cooled their heels for almost a decade before addressing the problems with the regime, their impetus certainly not being women’s rights.
So the UN is now in Afghanistan, nation-building and setting up democracy: essentially forcing Western ideals on a culture that has just proved they don’t hold. And this is where my deflation comes from: change like this can’t be imposed, it has to come from within and it’s going to take a really long time. Hell – when both my grandmothers were born, they were born into Western societies where being female precluded their right to vote. (By the time both reached the age of majority, they were afforded these rights. It is a right that I take for granted every time I enter a voting booth, despite only holding this right for a couple generations.)
The second question that arises is the fact that the law applies only to the Shia minority – a branch of Islam practised by the ethnic Hazaras, who, if you’ve read The Kite Runner you’ll know, are the social underclass to the majority Pashtuns (who are mainly Sunni). Not only is this law a gender issue, it is also a social one: Hazara women have been pushed to the lowest rung. Critics say that Karzai signed the law in order to get votes from the Shia population – but why is there a separate law for Shia women? (Although there is talk of a set of family laws being drawn up for the Sunni population - we'll see how these affect women's rights.)
Although the UN may have put in place a government that is supposed to share its democratic ideals, there is still a long road ahead until those ideals are accepted in everyday practice.
The first has to do with the international response. Many critics used this opportunity to decry this step back in the UN’s quest to better the rights of women in Afghanistan. While certainly a bonus, this was not the reason the UN approved the forced removal of the Taleban. They went in because the Taleban were harbouring and funding terrorists who were loosely linked to the September 11th attacks.
Sally Armstrong, speaking on CBC’s The Current yesterday, pointed out that countries have never gone to war over women’s rights. I remember an article in Glamour magazine, of all places, detailing the oppression of women under the Taleban back in the early 90s. Western leaders cooled their heels for almost a decade before addressing the problems with the regime, their impetus certainly not being women’s rights.
So the UN is now in Afghanistan, nation-building and setting up democracy: essentially forcing Western ideals on a culture that has just proved they don’t hold. And this is where my deflation comes from: change like this can’t be imposed, it has to come from within and it’s going to take a really long time. Hell – when both my grandmothers were born, they were born into Western societies where being female precluded their right to vote. (By the time both reached the age of majority, they were afforded these rights. It is a right that I take for granted every time I enter a voting booth, despite only holding this right for a couple generations.)
The second question that arises is the fact that the law applies only to the Shia minority – a branch of Islam practised by the ethnic Hazaras, who, if you’ve read The Kite Runner you’ll know, are the social underclass to the majority Pashtuns (who are mainly Sunni). Not only is this law a gender issue, it is also a social one: Hazara women have been pushed to the lowest rung. Critics say that Karzai signed the law in order to get votes from the Shia population – but why is there a separate law for Shia women? (Although there is talk of a set of family laws being drawn up for the Sunni population - we'll see how these affect women's rights.)
Although the UN may have put in place a government that is supposed to share its democratic ideals, there is still a long road ahead until those ideals are accepted in everyday practice.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Blame
In the Globe today, there is an article by Ingrid Peritz questioning whether a faster response to Natasha Richardson’s head injury would have saved her life. A second article by Jessica Leeder talks about “talk and die syndrome” where patients are lucid and coherent right after the injury, but by the time they display worrying symptoms, it is too late. I hope this is not an attempt to lay blame in order to make sense of a random and tragic accident.
After severe headaches and signs of “instability,” Richardson was taken to a hospital nearby Mont Tremblant, where the accident occurred, and was then driven to Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal for specialized treatment. The hours in between the accident and her arrival at Sacre-Coeur could have made all the difference to Richardson’s recovery, according to Peritz. But I’m not sure this situation would have gone any differently.
Richardson refused medical treatment immediately after the fall – as I’m sure do thousands of people who take a tumble during ski season. Though I’ve never hit my head, I’ve certainly had several falls on the ski slopes, off my bike and on ice. As long as you feel okay, as Richardson did at first, you brush yourself off and are on your way. Like many people, I err on the side of cavalier as opposed to hypochondria when experiencing a wide variety of symptoms and accidents. According to Doug Firby, a spokesman for Sunshine Village Ski and Snowboard Resort in Banff and quoted in Leeder’s piece: “Some of [the skiers] bang their heads. I can’t imagine a scenario in which you could actually force all those people to go to hospital.” The one thing I guess you could force them to do is wear a ski helmet, legislation that is sure to come down the pipeline soon.
But there are some accidents just happen and no amount of safety procedures and equipment can change that. It is unfortunate and utterly devastating to the loved ones of the victim who must spend an awful lot of time running through alternate “what if” scenarios in their heads. And sometimes people make glaring mistakes or are willfully negligent to safety and of course I believe these people should not be let off the hook. But sometimes accidents are just that: accidents. They are a confluence of unpreventable events.
I am reminded of Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, based on a book by Russell Banks. In it, lawyer Mitchell Stephens comes to the town of Sam Dent after a school bus crash that has killed several of the town’s children. Stephens is intent on somehow laying blame for the accident – on the driver, the bus company – someone must pay for the deaths of these children.
But the conclusion of the book does not see anyone held accountable for the accident: it shows a community coming together only to mourn the deaths of the children. They see no need to find fault in order to assuage their pain – the people involved are already hurting enough.
Perhaps Richardson’s death will see calls for mandatory helmets on ski hills or better air ambulance service in the area. But it certainly should not be used to find fault where there isn’t any.
After severe headaches and signs of “instability,” Richardson was taken to a hospital nearby Mont Tremblant, where the accident occurred, and was then driven to Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal for specialized treatment. The hours in between the accident and her arrival at Sacre-Coeur could have made all the difference to Richardson’s recovery, according to Peritz. But I’m not sure this situation would have gone any differently.
Richardson refused medical treatment immediately after the fall – as I’m sure do thousands of people who take a tumble during ski season. Though I’ve never hit my head, I’ve certainly had several falls on the ski slopes, off my bike and on ice. As long as you feel okay, as Richardson did at first, you brush yourself off and are on your way. Like many people, I err on the side of cavalier as opposed to hypochondria when experiencing a wide variety of symptoms and accidents. According to Doug Firby, a spokesman for Sunshine Village Ski and Snowboard Resort in Banff and quoted in Leeder’s piece: “Some of [the skiers] bang their heads. I can’t imagine a scenario in which you could actually force all those people to go to hospital.” The one thing I guess you could force them to do is wear a ski helmet, legislation that is sure to come down the pipeline soon.
But there are some accidents just happen and no amount of safety procedures and equipment can change that. It is unfortunate and utterly devastating to the loved ones of the victim who must spend an awful lot of time running through alternate “what if” scenarios in their heads. And sometimes people make glaring mistakes or are willfully negligent to safety and of course I believe these people should not be let off the hook. But sometimes accidents are just that: accidents. They are a confluence of unpreventable events.
I am reminded of Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, based on a book by Russell Banks. In it, lawyer Mitchell Stephens comes to the town of Sam Dent after a school bus crash that has killed several of the town’s children. Stephens is intent on somehow laying blame for the accident – on the driver, the bus company – someone must pay for the deaths of these children.
But the conclusion of the book does not see anyone held accountable for the accident: it shows a community coming together only to mourn the deaths of the children. They see no need to find fault in order to assuage their pain – the people involved are already hurting enough.
Perhaps Richardson’s death will see calls for mandatory helmets on ski hills or better air ambulance service in the area. But it certainly should not be used to find fault where there isn’t any.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The Palin Is Just Not That Into You
First comes love, then comes… No, wait – first comes marriage, then… Oh shit, it was the baby first, then a forced engagement, then – what am I missing in Bristol Palin’s romantic history? Oh yeah – a little thing called freewill and a woman’s right to choose not to be the posterchild for Republican reproductive control. (Which is a bit difficult in the bedrooms and backseats of the nation as Bristol has demonstrated.)
It’s official: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, who were once "committed to accomplish what millions of other young parents have accomplished: to provide a loving and secure environment for their child,"* have broken up.
So now little Tripp will grow up, cared for by a single mother – an archetype so despised by the vile Ann Coulter who believes "Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts”. Oh how I love the way conservatives unwittingly screw each other with their black-and-white statements.
Bristol recently stated in an interview with Greta Van Susteren that abstincence is “not realistic” and that “[sex] is more and more accepted among kids [her] age” (really?), something Mama Palin and Coulter seem to ignore. So instead of making the hard choice to terminate the pregnancy, Bristol had the kid and is now setting up her own little future criminal.
But the thing is, little Tripp will probably be okay. Like all sweeping, black-and-white statements, they leave out the little grey nuances. Coulter claims 70% of inmates, teenage runaways and delinquents, and drug users (amazing how this percentage is constant throughout) come from single parent homes. Regardless of the accuracy of Coulter’s stats, she is only looking at one variable – how many parents raise you – and completely discounting all the other factors that go with criminal activity, drug abuse etc. like socio-economic status, mental illness and abuse, to name a few.
The fact that Tripp will be raised by a single mother who has a set of support systems in place (ie. money and Mama Palin) already puts him ahead of the criminals that fall into Coulter’s 70%. It’s not Bristol’s marital status that affects her kid’s success, it’s her socio-economic status.
Hopefully Sarah Palin has learned that to support abstinence-only sex education is one of these sweeping statements. It completely discounts a pretty intense factor: teenage lust; something which Bristol spelled out for her mom in her interview with Greta Van Susteren.
It is a grand thing that America chose wisely last November and voted in a president who understands that sweeping statements (hello, War on Terror) are always riddled with shades of that truth.
______________________________
*Mama Sarah, December 2008
It’s official: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, who were once "committed to accomplish what millions of other young parents have accomplished: to provide a loving and secure environment for their child,"* have broken up.So now little Tripp will grow up, cared for by a single mother – an archetype so despised by the vile Ann Coulter who believes "Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts”. Oh how I love the way conservatives unwittingly screw each other with their black-and-white statements.
Bristol recently stated in an interview with Greta Van Susteren that abstincence is “not realistic” and that “[sex] is more and more accepted among kids [her] age” (really?), something Mama Palin and Coulter seem to ignore. So instead of making the hard choice to terminate the pregnancy, Bristol had the kid and is now setting up her own little future criminal.
But the thing is, little Tripp will probably be okay. Like all sweeping, black-and-white statements, they leave out the little grey nuances. Coulter claims 70% of inmates, teenage runaways and delinquents, and drug users (amazing how this percentage is constant throughout) come from single parent homes. Regardless of the accuracy of Coulter’s stats, she is only looking at one variable – how many parents raise you – and completely discounting all the other factors that go with criminal activity, drug abuse etc. like socio-economic status, mental illness and abuse, to name a few.
The fact that Tripp will be raised by a single mother who has a set of support systems in place (ie. money and Mama Palin) already puts him ahead of the criminals that fall into Coulter’s 70%. It’s not Bristol’s marital status that affects her kid’s success, it’s her socio-economic status.
Hopefully Sarah Palin has learned that to support abstinence-only sex education is one of these sweeping statements. It completely discounts a pretty intense factor: teenage lust; something which Bristol spelled out for her mom in her interview with Greta Van Susteren.
It is a grand thing that America chose wisely last November and voted in a president who understands that sweeping statements (hello, War on Terror) are always riddled with shades of that truth.
______________________________
*Mama Sarah, December 2008
Thursday, March 12, 2009
The Elf Is Just Not That Into You
So, I avoided the cliché of going to see He’s Just Not That Into You with a huge group of girls by going with my happily married friend Michelle. Two things:
1. At the end of He’s Just Not That Into You, the adulterers are punished by being alone. This seems a simple solution to a complex set of feelings. I am certainly not excusing adultery: I’ve had the chance to be the other woman handed to me on a two-timing plate on a few occasions and have declined each time because of my respect of this institution I’m not entirely sure I buy into. But I cannot accept this simple-minded answer that humans must fit this monogamous model and should be punished for any aberrant behaviour.
2. The conversation that Jennifer Anniston had at the wedding with the Wiccan? Yeah, I’ve basically had that exact conversation. With a guy wearing a feather in his hair. We talked fairies and elves and sprites (he was into Celtic mysticism). When I asked what category I fell into, he asked what I felt I was. I said I felt like an elf. And so he said I was an elf.
1. At the end of He’s Just Not That Into You, the adulterers are punished by being alone. This seems a simple solution to a complex set of feelings. I am certainly not excusing adultery: I’ve had the chance to be the other woman handed to me on a two-timing plate on a few occasions and have declined each time because of my respect of this institution I’m not entirely sure I buy into. But I cannot accept this simple-minded answer that humans must fit this monogamous model and should be punished for any aberrant behaviour.
2. The conversation that Jennifer Anniston had at the wedding with the Wiccan? Yeah, I’ve basically had that exact conversation. With a guy wearing a feather in his hair. We talked fairies and elves and sprites (he was into Celtic mysticism). When I asked what category I fell into, he asked what I felt I was. I said I felt like an elf. And so he said I was an elf.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Nurse.Fighter.Boy
They are my favourite kind of stories: simple ones told beautifully.
So often stories are told with complicated subplots and twist endings; writers trying to stay two steps ahead of their audience. But those stories rarely stay with me. The ones that do are the tales of an average person who lets you into their patch of life. Gavin Hood’s movie Tsotsi is one of them. Yann Martel’s Man Booker-winning novel Life of Pi is another. And now Nurse.Fighter.Boy, a film by Toronto filmmaker Charles Officer, is another simple story told beautifully.
Filmed in and around the visually lush alleyways of the east end of Toronto, Nurse.Fighter.Boy follows Jude (the nurse) and her son, Ciel (the boy) as their pathways intersect with Silence (the fighter). Jude suffers from sickle cell anemia, an inherited blood disease that shortens life expectancy, a fact of which Ciel is keenly aware.
The opening scene is of Ciel playing the magician in his Narnia-like playspace, a role he inhabits throughout the film, reciting incantations and performing rituals to keep his mother well. He extends his protective talents to Silence in the film, a character also in need of healing. And at the film’s climax, a wonderfully crafted and acted duo of scenes, we see this healing, told in silence.
This is the reward of telling simple stories: you can infuse them with so much more, as Officer does. His visual images of the moon, the role of magic, the presence of Jamaica (a place, I was told by a friend who grew up there, that is full of ghosts and magic) and that tenuous space between childhood and adulthood, all suffuse Officer’s film. And this beauty is why the simple story of Nurse.Fighter.Boy stays with me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)