Because I Said So

Sex Ed

2010-07-19T14:05:00.004-04:00

There was a minor furor back in April when the Ontario Ministry of Education released an updated Health curriculum after consultations with sexual health experts, educators and other provincial education ministries. Church and “family focused” groups freaked out over children as young as 6 learning to use the words penis and vagina to describe, well, a penis and vagina. That wasn’t the worst of it, though, according to the critics: kids as young as 8 were to learn that there are homosexual relationships (what the children of same sex couples did before learning this, I don’t know) and adolescents were to learn the facts about anal and oral sex as well as the old standby of vaginal sex.

Rev. Ekron Malcolm, who is with the Institute for Canadian Values and was a major critic of the original revised curriculum, was quoted in the National Post, saying: “schools don’t need to be teaching my children about sexual orientation or sex education. Those decisions should be left to the family, to the parents, to guide children. These topics can be taught at the high school level, at the university level, when children can make up their minds.”

In terms of homosexuality and gender identity, there are huge problems with ignoring the fact that there are gay relationships and people who don’t adhere to traditional gender standards. (Never mind that fact that teaching homosexuality doesn’t mean teaching homosexual acts; just that boys can like boys and girls can like girls and people can marry someone of the same gender.)

A principal friend of mine had a gender equity assembly at her school which involved many skits dealing with male/female stereotypes and inequities as well as homosexuality. The next day, my friend had an office full of parents complaining that exposing their children to the idea that homosexuality was an acceptable practice contravened their religious and cultural teachings. And isn’t this what is really at the heart of Malcolm’s complaint, that parents should be able to teach that homosexuality is an abomination, contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the document which my principal friend had on hand for her enraged parents meeting).

I knew a boy once who was being “guided” by his parents when he was told he was no longer allowed to dress up in his sister’s clothing. This was a highly intelligent, creative and empathetic boy who was made to feel that his exploration of gender identity was wrong. And believe me, he had a forming gender identity at age 7.

It is the child’s understanding of this identity of which Malcolm can’t conceive: “I can’t imagine a child now has to question their gender, question their identity,” he said. “I think there’s enough confusion among our children in the world, for them now having to question themselves. This is where I would draw the line.”

The confusion in the world is precisely the reason why we should teach sexuality in schools. Sex is way more readily available with the internet nowadays. When I was an adolescent, you’d hear stories of people stealing their parents’ porn tapes and sharing them with their friends or sneaking peaks at the top shelf magazines at the variety store. The exposure was minimal, rare, usually accompanied by a group and required some resourcefulness. Now, you can get all manner of pornography for free from any computer without parental controls and none of it is mediated with a discussion as to what’s going on.

Adolescents need to understand the different types of sex and their risks and how to protect themselves from these risks. Critics argue that grade 7 and 8 is too young to introduce students to the taboo acts of anal and oral sex but the crux of the issue is that a lot of kids that age are already doing it. I remember becoming aware of people participating in oral and vaginal sex in grade 6 – and those were only the stories that made it to my ears. Who knows the number of girls who were convinced that having anal sex would preserve their virginity and prevent pregnancy.

Sexual education is a delicate, sometimes cringe-inducing necessity. Part of it is certainly the nitty-gritty physiology of parts and acts, but another part of it is arming kids with knowledge in order to make their own decisions – it has been widely reported that teenagers who have been sexually educated from a young age often delay having sex. Sex ed class is also the only time you’ll have the attention of every single student.

Unfortunately for Ontario, the outcry over the new curriculum worked and Dalton McGuinty backpedaled on his support for the curriculum two days later. An interim edition of the Health curriculum is now available on the Ministry’s website with all the dirty stuff taken out. Grade ones still learn to “identify the major parts of the body by their proper names” and education around puberty is still in there for the grade fours. However, there is absolutely no mention of homosexuality anywhere in the general and specific curriculum expectations.

In Montana, the state government has come out with a curriculum document that details how to sexually educate children from kindergarten to grade 12 (see specifically pages 36 – 40). It is a fully inclusive document which details a variety of sexual knowledge. The document has attracted some conservative backlash, certainly, but as far as I know, it is still being implemented in schools. Hopefully the Ontario interim curriculum document will have a chance to be reviewed with an eye to inclusion and public health and the final document will take into account “the confusion” of the world and arm our children with the knowledge necessary to meet this confusion.

With This Misogynist Tradition, I Thee Wed

2010-05-02T11:49:00.004-04:00

Ah, Margaret Wente – you never cease to annoy me of a Saturday.

This week it was her column telling us why weddings matter more than ever. Wente writes how as a young adult she thought marriage was a “dusty relic of the patriarchy” and weddings “a silly, conformist ritual full of fake piety, tasteless clothes and ostentatious spending.” But now, of course, as an experienced 50-something, she can see the error of her young adult thinking. (This is a sly arguing technique – because you can’t really argue with an elder who is telling you that essentially your beliefs are wrong because they believed them when they were young, but now they know better.) Wente now sees her decision to seek out “self-actualization and adventure” over the “banality of coupledom and family life” as wrong – huh? But she got both! Dozens of times women who married young have told me to enjoy my single life now – they wished they had. I’ve had conversations with women who I met travelling who were divorced and in their 40s doing the backpacker thing because they wished they had done it in their 20s, but got caught up in marriage and kids.

Marriage is a dusty relic – based on the exchange of property – and few people understand my ire at the father of the bride walking her down the aisle to her husband-to-be. Some couples have chosen to have both the bride’s parents walk her down the aisle, but the symbolic tradition still remains: it is the woman who is being passed from one man (and his wife) to another man. Never mind the fact that my (and most women's) last name is that of my patrilineal heritage only.

Having been through several weddings (the cheapest of which was $15 000), weddings do invite outrageous spending. Part of this, of course, is the fact that everything you spend money on for a wedding is grossly inflated because it’s for a wedding. And our society says that’s okay because we place such importance on this one event.

Let me digress for a moment here and say that I certainly do not judge those people that enjoy the tradition and pomp of a wedding. Some people love the pageantry and the flowers and the centerpieces. But two things remain. One: I urge people to really think about where certain traditions come from. Two: I think it was Salman Rushdie that once said that women want a wedding, not a marriage (I’ll ignore his gender generalization to make my point). And for all the white tulle and roses, that’s the whole point of the day – two people promising to stay in their foxhole together.

Wente argues marriage is “indisputably the best arrangement for raising children.” I totally agree that having two people raise children is better than single parenting and having a male and female role model (although these do not have to be the mom and dad of a heterosexual couple) is ideal. But what is most important is that two people agree to stick it out together in the long run. It doesn’t take a 40K wedding to make that commitment – a simple “you’re stuck with me ‘til I’m old, babe” would suffice.

And finally, I'm not sure Wente can effectively argue that a life with someone else is "infinitely richer" than being single. For her (hopefully), she is happy because she is with a good man, not because she is part of a couple. I'd rather be single than in an unhappy relationship. If I left my partner now, I'd miss him, not having a boyfriend. And because Wente has been in a relationship for the past however many years, she has nothing to compare it to - perhaps she would have been more adventurous as a 40-something, or done things she wouldn't have as a married woman.

As Wente notes, marriage rates are in decline and people are waiting until into their 30s to marry. And there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with getting everything you can out of life and not placing landing a husband as your primary goal. And hopefully when we all look back at our 20s and 30s, we'll say, hey - we were right. And as elders, no one can argue with us.

A Year of Writing Annually

2009-08-30T22:27:00.002-04:00

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.

Facebook & Feminism

2009-07-19T19:33:00.003-04:00

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:

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…

Not Tonight, Honey, I'm... Oh Right - Obliged

2009-04-04T13:13:00.002-04:00

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.

Blame

2009-03-20T15:24:00.002-04:00

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.

The Palin Is Just Not That Into You

2009-03-15T12:38:00.003-04:00

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

The Elf Is Just Not That Into You

2009-03-12T20:38:00.001-04:00

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.

Nurse.Fighter.Boy

2009-02-08T14:12:00.003-05:00

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.

A 9-Year-Old’s Guide to Love

2008-12-26T12:25:00.003-05:00

Could a 9-year-old boy from Colorado have all the answers about how to get a girl? Alec Greven thinks he does.

After watching how boys and girls interacted at recess, he wrote a brochure entitled How To Talk to Girls, aiming to help some of those inexperienced third-graders get some play. His suggestions are much more innocent that a dating manual like The Game, but are they valid in an adult world? Well, let’s just say I’ve field-tested a few in my lifetime.

(All quotes have been taken from Zosia Bielski's article the Globe and Mail.)

“Class clowns: Turn normal. Less jokes, no jokes during class. Then you might get a girl.”

FALSE. This is the best way to get a girl. Make her laugh and you’re 38% cuter. A friend of mine was into this really cute boy, but then she got to know him and her jokes fell flat on him and he had no comebacks. Boring.

“The shy guy? They probably want to copy someone that they think is cool except it can't be a class clown or somebody that's power hungry.”

FALSE. We can spot a fake a mile off. We usually refer to them as “slimy” or “trying too hard.” A friend of mine, who I dated for, like, a minute, is like this. He has an idea of how he wants the world to see him. If he’d just relax into himself, he’d be fabulous.

"You also have to be aware that girls win most of the arguments and have most of the power. If you know that now, things might be easier."

FALSE. I may be alone on this one, but I think the age-old assumption by brow-beaten men that there’s no point in arguing with a woman and cow-towing to whatever she says (“Yes, dear”) is slightly misogynistic. It implies that there is no need to enter into a dialogue and listen to her reasoning. It’s just easier to shut her out and do what she says, because what she actually thinks doesn’t matter. I want my actions and motives questioned and I want to arrive at a mutually desirable conclusion.

"If you like a girl, comb your hair and don't wear sweats. You don't have to try too hard, but just try to look kind of clean."

TRUE and FALSE. You have to look good for the first date or two, true. And you should shower on a daily basis. But then it just doesn’t matter after that if she likes you. One guy I dated spent 90% of his time with me in sweats and once arrived at my house after the gym sans shower.

“[Pretty girls are mean because they] think they're all important and proud and they're worth more than other girls.”

TRUE. Unfortunately. We are a society obsessed with beauty – a society made up of biologically driven individuals out to get the best genes for our offspring. Pretty girls are treated differently by people and some come to act like they’re worth more than other girls.

Sorry, Alec. Despite a publishing deal and a movie deal, it looks like your advice doesn’t quite cross to those of us able to vote. But hey – this kid’s got another 25 – 30 years before he achieves male maturity. We’ll see how well his theories apply then.

A PARLIAMENTARY CAROL

2008-12-07T14:37:00.003-05:00

With thanks to Gary Mason and apologies to Charles Dickens.

STAVE ONE

Parliament was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The prorogation order was signed by Ms. Jean, who was a little put out at being called home early from her European trip, after a lengthy discussion in her oak-panelled study. Stephen’s name was on it, too. Parliament was as dead as a door-nail. Until January 26th.

Stephen was curled up in bed, awaiting Laureen to finish in the ensuite. This was going to be the first night in a very long time that he would be able to sleep without worrying about the economy, about slips of the tongue (addressing someone else as Prime Minister, why? Why’d he do that?), or about that nasty coalition forming like a pay equity case, across the floor from him.

Stephen drifted into sweet slumber, not even noticing Laureen as she crawled in beside him without a thought to possible suspension of her right to legal recourse for pay equity issues.

But alas, his sleep did not last long and he awoke in the middle of the night, thirsty and slightly peckish. Swinging his legs out of bed, he shuffled to his bedroom door. Reaching out his hand for the handle, he immediately pulled back. He no longer saw a door handle, but Stephane Dion’s face.

Closing his eyes and shaking his head, Stephen thought he must be dreaming. He opened his eyes and looked again at the handle. It was just a handle. He trudged downstairs and peered in the fridge, hoping that some of those PC Wild Pacific Salmon Mini Wellingtons that Galen Weston had sent over were still in the fridge.

“Monsieur Har-per.”

Stephen spun around to see Stephane Dion standing before him, clutching the parliamentary mace, completely transparent.

“Mercy!” said Stephen, his hand at his chest. “What are you doing troubling me at this hour?”

“You will be haunted by three spirits,” said M. Dion, without any attempt at anger or passion.

“Oh no!” said Stephen. “You, Layton and Duceppe!”

Dion smiled. “I am on my way out. Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I follow.”

And with that, Dion was gone. Stephen popped a salmon wellington in his mouth and headed for the couch. He was soon fast asleep.

STAVE TWO

Stephen awoke with a start to find Belinda Stronach kneeling beside him on the couch. Her hair was soft and blonde, her skin dewy and glowing in the dark Ottawa night. She wore a blue pantsuit and fire engine red lipstick.

“Hello, Stephen,” she whispered.

“Belinda! What are you doing here?”

“I’m the Ghost of Parliament Past.”

“Long Past? Like back in 1926 when Mackenzie King asked Lord Byng to prorogue Parliament to avoid a motion of censure?”

“No. Your past. Walk with me.”

Belinda offered Stephen her hand and led him out the door of 24 Sussex Dr., down the road and along Wellington towards the Parliament buildings. They climbed the stairs to the public gallery. Stephen looked to his chair in the House, but instead of him sitting there, it was Paul Martin. He looked across the floor to where his party sat and watched a parliamentary session that was all too familiar to Stephen.

“I remember this,” whispered Stephen. “It was right around the time of the Gomery Commission so I knew I had more of the public on my side. I think the Liberals were presenting the federal budget?”

“That’s right,” purred Belinda.

“We were going to vote against an amendment the Liberals had made in order to….” Stephen’s voice trailed off.

“…bring down the government.” Belinda finished his thought.

“Didn’t you…”

“..cross the floor? I did. I didn’t agree with you forcing an early election. And I’d come to my senses about that Peter MacKay fellow. Come. We have a press conference to see.”

Belinda led Stephen out of the public gallery and down to where a woman had cameras and microphones surrounding her. She was talking about national unity and how it was being jeopardized by an alliance between “him” and the Bloc Quebecois, only because “he” wanted to bring down the current government.

“Is that you?” asked Stephen.

“Yes,” replied Belinda. “And do you know who I’m talking about?”

Stephen hung his head as he remembered how fervently had had railed against the coalition for courting Bloc Quebecois support.

“But it’s just politics,” he said.

“I must go now,” said Belinda. “Sweet dreams.”

Stephen watched as Belinda melted into the background of the press conference that was still going on. He sat down on the stairs and leant his head against the banister. Soon, he was fast asleep again.

STAVE THREE

Stephen awoke in an uncomfortable position inside the parliament buildings. Still feeling quite peckish, he headed down to the cafeteria to see if it was open. Arriving at the entrance, he was shocked to find Jean Chretien lounging in an easy chair, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand.

“Bonsoir,” he said smiling.

“What are you doing here?” asked Stephen.

Jean leaned forward in his chair, cupping the whiskey glass in both his hands. “I am the Ghost of Parliament Present, “ he smiled, arching an eyebrow.

“But you left office five years ago!” exclaimed Stephen.

“I’m back consulting,” said Jean, rising and heading into the cafeteria. “Follow me.”

They entered the cafeteria and stopped beside a table of men and women, their faces downcast.

“I can’t believe it’s finally happened,” said one of the women, swirling around the coffee in her mug. “I always knew AbitibiBowater was in a bit of trouble, but I didn’t think it would actually close its doors. I guess my kids are getting a helluva lot less from Santa this year.”

“Keep moving,” said Jean, guiding Stephen towards another table of people.

“They’re temporary only because they think the government’s going to step in,” said one of the men, a GM baseball cap atop his head.

“At least we’ll get through Christmas,” said a woman, eyes downcast.

“Yeah, but all the bills from Christmas come in early January, right when we’re scheduled to be temporarily laid off!” chimed in a grey-haired man with a chubby face.

“You think the government will give us a bailout?” asked the woman.

“What government?” answered another woman. “They’ve taken a seven week holiday during the economic crisis, leaving us with no stimulus package. All the other countries are busy trying to figure out how to get their citizens out of financial trouble and ours is on holiday!”

“Bloody Conservatives,” mumbled the man with the GM hat.

“Bloody Harper,” mumbled the first woman.

“But…I…” Stephen stumbled over his words, “It’s just politics.”

“I must go,” said Jean, swigging the last of his whiskey.

Stephen followed Jean out of the cafeteria and watched him fade into the background. He sat down on the chair that Jean had been sitting on and let his head fall to the side.

“I wanted to cut the political party subsidies,” he said to himself, “That would have saved some money.” And with that, he fell into a deep sleep.

STAVE FOUR

Stephen was awoken by the sound of wind. He opened one eye and saw a phantom approaching him. It was shrouded in a dark robe and did not speak as it stood before him.

“Am I in the presence of the Ghost of Parliament Yet To Come?” he asked.

The spectre did not answer, but beckoned with its hand. Stephen rose and followed the ghost through the halls of parliament.

They came upon a scene of Brent Butt, cellphone in hand.

“Yeah. Yeah. No – we just don’t think he’s topical right now,” he paused. “Yeah, I know he did a great job last time he was on. Well, I wouldn’t say natural ability, but he got a few laughs. Yeah, no – I think I’m going to pass.”

The ghost beckoned again for Stephen to follow him to another scene, this time of Rick Mercer on a cellphone.

“No, he says he won’t do the skinny-dipping again. He says his new post is much too serious to resort to humourous nudity. Yeah, I told him that, but the man’s got quite a bit on his plate, undoing all the damage, you know. Maybe we can get Harper to do the Polar Bear swim. Make a joke about losing his cahones. I don’t know – we’ll give it to the writers. Yeah – let me know. Okay. Okay. Bye.”

“Spirit! What is he talking about?”

The ghost did not answer, but pointed to the Office of the Prime Minister, a place with which Stephen was very familiar. The ghost gestured for Stephen to enter. Slowly, Stephen pushed the heavy door open. The room was empty. He turned to look at the Ghost of Parliament Yet To Come. The ghost floated across the floor, behind the desk and took a seat in the Prime Minister’s chair.

“What are you doing?” whispered Stephen.

Again, the phantom was silent, but slowly moved its hands to its hood and began to draw back the cloak.

Stephen’s eyes filled with terror as the ghost in the chair removed the hood. There he was, smiling with his grey wispy hair slightly askew: Bob Rae.

“No!” shouted Stephen. “No! This cannot happen! I must do something! Something to stop this horrible future! I won’t be vindictive with political party subsidies! I’ll give civil servants back the right to strike! I’ll work with the opposition! I’ll act like I’m in a minority government! Anything!”

STAVE FIVE

Two men sat in an Ottawa pub, enjoying an early February beer. One sported a graying mustache, the other, dark heavy eyebrows. The mood was sombre.

“Well,” said Jack, “the guy’s a weasel, that’s for sure. I can’t believe Canadians were okay with his backtracking. That fiscal update was a huge mistake, but everyone seems to have forgiven him.”

“I can’t believe the political ads over the Christmas season!” said Michael. “I mean, I thought those Galen Weston salmon wellington ads were annoying, but come on!”

“If only Michaelle had denied him, we could have taken over back in December and sorted out this economic mess,” said Jack.

“If only we’d had a better leader back in October, we could have avoided this mess in the first place, “ said Michael.

“I guess he’s got a lot more than just his platform under his sweater,” said Jack.

Michael raised his glass in the air and Jack followed suit.

“Stephen Harper remains as Prime Minister,” said Michael with a sigh. “God help us, everyone.”

Steph’s Guide to the Coalition

2008-12-03T20:20:00.003-05:00

You know, my Canada used to include Quebec. But now I’m thinking, let them separate.

Tonight, Stephen Harper (has he coloured his hair in an attempt to avoid the stuffy-sweater-wearing image that hounded him during this past election?) was pretty heavy handed about the Bloc Quebecois’s support of the coalition, trying to scare Canadians with the prospect of Gilles Duceppe and his nefarious plans to separate. I say, who cares? Let them go. Quebec could be like Lesotho, but without the absolute monarch and annual virgin marriages. Or like Azerbaijan, with its little property on the other side of Armenia. We could travel abroad on a 5 hour train ride from Toronto without the hassle of an American boder – how fabulously European.

But to the matter at hand: the coalition (of the willing; ‘cos there’s a hell of a lot of people out west who are certainly not willing – isn’t it fabulous to watch them squirm and shout the word “undemocratic” as they claw to keep their beloved Conservatives in power?). Does Stephane Dion have the cahones? He’s got to have a hell of a lot of politicians propping him up and telling him everything is going to be alright as he steps back into the political limelight he thought he’d left back in October. He’s trying: his speech tonight was an attempt at an impassioned address. And ideologically, I’m with him (as is the constitution – take that, you wimpering righties!) But really, I think Jack Layton and his porn mustache would certainly make a better candidate for prime minister (his desire for that post is palpable, especially in recent months, I've found).

So it is all up to Michaelle Jean, who was probably having a lovely European time in Prague before she was yanked back to this Canadian reality. She meets with Stephen Harper tomorrow when he will request a prorogation of parliament. Will she suspend parliament, or refuse Harper’s request and allow a vote of non-confidence on Monday? Will she allow for an historical change in Canada’s history? Will she comment on Harper’s dye-job?

To quote my brother, who knew Canadian politics could be so sexy?

Steph’s Guide to Surviving the Current Financial Crisis

2008-11-30T13:30:00.002-05:00

1. Get a job in the public sector.

I find it laughable that all those business types have their knickers in a knot over the tabled 12% over 4 years salary increase for elementary teachers. They complain that those of us getting paid by the government shouldn’t expect such an increase during an economic downturn. In the booming years when my Bay Street counterparts were making six figures and charging their entertainment expenses to the company, I never expected bonuses at the end of the year for any professional successes with students and I have no expense account to entertain the parents of my students. Public servants take the middle road: job security, but never making a huge amount of money. That’s the gamble of business – you stand to make a ridiculous amount of money in the fat years, but you have to accept that lean years are always a possibility.

2. Five months prior to collapse, buy property.

This will allow you to practise a more modest way of spending. All of a sudden your monthly expenses go up, so your disposable income goes down and you have to make cuts in spending. It also serves as a good excuse when turning down offers of a weekend in New York or a night on the tiles.

3. Vote in a left-leaning government.

Oh…shit… Well, we may be solving that one right now.

4. Dispense with any significant others before Christmas.

Just make sure it’s far enough ahead that you can’t be accused of ruining the holiday for them. Without a romantic partner to buy for and to attend a whole other set of parties with, your spending will plummet. It also cuts down on incidental expenses like the extra groceries you had to buy to feed them and restocking beer supplies.

5. Suggest a more modest family Christmas.

Out with materialism and in with environmentalism and altruism. Instead of buying heaps of things that no one needs or wants, suggest donating money to charities instead. Or buy consumables like, say…enough bottles of alcohol to replenish drying up liquor cabinets (hint, hint - ed.).

6. Break your foot. (This is key.)

You are now housebound and can’t go out. All little expenditures like that four dollar latte and those cute bowls at Pier 1 that hop into your shopping bag unexpectedly have been cut out. So have those last minute, unnecessary purchases in the checkout line of places like Shopper's Drug Mart, IKEA and Roots.

You also can’t pop up the road for a pint – way too tiring on crutches (and slightly dangerous to the healing process should that one pint turn into four, interfering with balance and judgment). Getting to and from any kind of social engagement must be elaborately planned, therefore many will have to be declined. Never mind the fact that any kind of holiday outfit will have to be accessorized by a big, grey aircast and crutches, immediately downgrading your attractiveness by at least 30%. This should also help to maintain your single (and therefore parsimonious) status into the new year.

And people feel sorry for you, so they’ll go out and buy you a four-dollar latte and refuse reimbursement. They'll also drive you places, so you save on gas (you can't drive your stick-shift car, anyway).

Spend you days at home, reading stories on the internet about how people are dealing with the credit crunch by having dinner parties at home, recycling key pieces in their closet and having martinis on their couches.

Now only if I could somehow get that liquor cabinet restocked...

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood...

2008-09-29T16:59:00.005-04:00

I must say, I have been surprised at the people chosen to lead political parties of late. I really think the Liberals have shot themselves in the foot with Dion – and I thought that before all these election polls pointing towards a majority government. The dude has zero charisma. When he tries to make fired-up speeches about his plans for Canada, he just ends up resembling a Quebecois version of the Swedish chef on the Muppets. I don’t feel his fire. And neither do a lot of other Canadians.

But it’s Sarah Palin upon which I wish to parley. I was a little surprised when John McCain chose a woman as his running partner, but then I thought I obviously don’t have my finger on the pulse of Republican America, so there must be other reasons (her anti-abortion stance or deftness at hunting moose, perhaps). But then Heather Mallick said what I had been thinking: “It's possible that Republican men, sexual inadequates that they are, really believe that women will vote for a woman just because she's a woman.”

Did the Republicans see the tight race for the Democratic nomination between a black man and a woman and figure they’d get all those lady-votes because of Sarah? Are we that much of a tabula rasa that we blindly vote based on gender and not politics (even saying it sounds so stupid)?

Mallick thinks we woman are too resentful of each other to vote for a woman because she’s a woman. I don't know if it's resentment or just a refusal to look past a female's looks: a large amount of the media attention on Palin has centred around her appearance. And they’re not resentful of her dimpled Miss America beauty or her practical Alaskan physique. They make fun of her piled-on-top hair and take-me-seriously glasses. Forget about voting for her – they can’t even get past their male gaze to give a good analysis of her politics and suitability to run the country.

I wrote about this emphasis on women’s outward appearance when Barbara Walters caught herself about to compliment Barack Obama on his attractiveness. She did compliment him, but it was probably one of the few times Obama’s appearance has been discussed.

And over in Afghanistan, where under the Taleban the appearance of a woman was not discussed because it was hidden under swathes of cloth, the head of Kandahar's department of crimes against women, Lt-Col Malalai Kakar, was shot by Taleban rebels. She wasn’t criticized for her hair style or her dress sense or because one of her six children had screwed up. She was shot because she was a woman and women shouldn’t work.

Okay, next time I promise to write about Canadian politics.

Gas Is Not Food, People

2008-09-13T10:33:00.003-04:00

I loved watching all the outraged drivers on the news last night react to the 13 cent jump in gas prices. There were accusations of price-gouging and calls for the government to cut taxes to help out the drivers of Toronto who, generally unaccompanied, negotiate over-sized, gas-guzzling vehicles through the plodding lanes of our city. Maybe I don’t fully understand their plight, as my car (a small, fuel-efficient Tercel) spends most of its time parked behind my building: I walk to work, bike for groceries and take public transport downtown the majority of the time.

But come on – these drivers are relying on a finite resource, the burning of which has contributed to the climate change of our earth. You should be paying more.

In Britain, the price of gas is approximately twice what it is here (and has been for the last ten years I’ve been keeping track). And most Britons drive small, fuel-efficient cars. And way more of them rely on public transport (I know – Britain is better serviced by trains and such, but it is because there is demand for it). Europeans seem much more willing to change their habits if something is expensive.

North Americans don’t want to consider any alternative to sitting alone in a comfortable car for 2 hours a day to get to and from work.

Sometimes driving makes more sense than other forms of transport. I get that. I drive if it’s raining or to a friend’s house if it's not well serviced by the TTC. But each time I get in that car, it is a conscious decision where I have weighed the other transport options.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon commuted to work in a solar-powered taxi this past week to raise awareness about alternatives to fossil fuels. That’s all I’m asking. Think about alternatives. The old vehicular standby is not our only option.

Blue Box Blues

2008-08-12T09:46:00.000-04:00

Is the city of Toronto really this stingy?

City officials are planning to crack down on people scavenging recyclables from blue bins. According to Toronto's Solid Waste Department, once the blue bin and its contents are curbside, the whole kit and caboodle is city property and they don't want anyone sorting through it.

You see, the city makes quite a bit of money off our aluminum cans ($2000 per tonne). Fair enough, but are these scavengers nicking empty pop cans? Anecdotal evidence (in the form of a couple of neighbourhood characters armed with shopping carts of varying constructions) shows that the scavengers are looking for wine and beer bottles. A cartful of finished Merlots and Tempranillos can net a tidy sum, especially in affluent neighbourhoods like mine where homeowners spend a lot on alcohol and can’t be bothered to make the trip to the Beer Store to return bottles.

(In the Beach, where I live, there are two LCBOs within walking distance of a large number of residents, including myself; however the Beer Store is a farther trek and therefore requires a bit more forethought than my usual, “Am I out of rosé? I think I’m out of rosé… I’ll just duck in for a bottle of rosé.” If the Liquor Store took back bottles, I could employ the empty one in, full one out method, based on the cold beer out, warm beer in method of university bar fridge drinking. But of course, the rosé bottles add up and require a large, strong bag in which to carry them, and a vehicle in which to transport them when there are too many in my kitchen cupboard not to be ashamed about.)

Why shouldn’t we let the enterprising unemployed continue with the sifting? Clifford Orwin compares it to the “biblical practice of gleaning”:

Leviticus 19.9 commands leaving the corners of one's fields unreaped so the poor can harvest them: One should never enjoy one's abundance to their exclusion. Similarly, I leave for the poor 20 cents of the value of every bottle of wine I buy. Collecting the bottle is their form of gleaning, and like gleaning in biblical days, it takes considerable labour.

There was a time when a city councillor wanted to ban panhandling: they found it somehow offensive, the homeless and unemployed sitting and begging for money. It annoyed people to be asked for money, to be reminded that we live in a many-tiered society, despite our many social nets. Why can't they get a job, asked some rather unempathetic citizens of our city.

Well, some have found jobs – jobs that don’t bother anyone (someone complained about the noise of scavengers, but give me a break – the industrial lawnmowers that rage at 8 o’clock in the morning outside my window are way worse) and help to support the province’s bottle return programme.

The City needs to stop worrying about who is returning my empty bottles of rosé and start worrying about more pressing issues.

Dangerous Trend Alert

2008-08-07T14:47:00.002-04:00

What's going on with Katie Holmes?

I know there's the whole being married to a wingnut thing, and she's trying to keep up with her new friend, Posh Spice, but these jeans have got to be the final indication that signals a team of mental health professionals to swoop in and save her denimed ass.

There are trends that we try for the sake of the trends (I have a black fedora sitting on my hall table). There are trends we avoid, because there's no way it can look good (those short, high-waisted shorts were all over London while I was there this summer and like, two girls could actually rock them). And then some people seem to make an attempt to start a trend - is this what Katie is doing? Baggy jeans cinched just above the ankle that accentuates a heaviness in the hips, extending into the upper thighs?

I remember when Katie was the cute girl from Dawson's Creek that my brother had a crush on...

Battle of the Single Broads: Elaine vs. Carrie vs. Bridget

2008-08-05T20:51:00.005-04:00

Three iconic singletons have emerged in popular culture over the past 15 years: Elaine Benes from the sitcom Seinfeld was the first. She kept up with her male friends, dating as many men as Jerry dated women; never placed too much importance on whatever man she was with; and entered (and lost) The Contest. She was intelligent, self-sufficient and witty. When Seinfeld ended in 1998, it paved the way for Carrie Bradshaw, the fictional sex columnist (based on real sex columnist Candice Bushnell) in the HBO series Sex and the City. Carrie dated far and wide, placing importance on finding a good man, but even more importance on a great pair of shoes. And across the pond in Britain, Helen Fielding was creating her heroine (and coining the term “singleton”), Bridget Jones, through a series of columns appearing in The Independent, which were fictionalized into the 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary. Bridget Jones was a fumbling London thirtysomething trying to navigate her way through the dating scene, avoiding all "fuckwittage" and losing a few pounds along the way.

But how do these three women compare when lined up against each other? How do the major arenas of their lives measure up?

JOB:

Elaine: Writer for J. Peterman catalogue (after a turn at Pendant Publishing and personal assistant to Mr. Pitt), which she clinched just after meeting Peterman in the rain and describing her shirt: “This innocent looking shirt has something which isn't innocent at all. Touchability. Heavy, silky Italian cotton, with a fine almost terrycloth like feeling. Five button placket, relaxed fit, innocence and mayhem at once.”

Carrie: Sex columnist for New York Times, sometime freelancer at Vogue; lives her fabulous life and gets paid to write about it.

Bridget: In the first book, Bridget has an office job at a publishing house where she sends flirty emails to her boss, Daniel Cleaver (see Significant Relationships, below). In the second book, Bridget Jones The Edge of Reason, she becomes an on-air personality who attempts such stunts as parachuting into a pig sty and sliding down a firehouse pole, ass-to-camera.

FRIENDS:

Elaine: Apart from the obvious Jerry, George and Kramer, Elaine has some girlfriends out in Long Island who keep entreating her to “come and see the baaayyy-bee”.

Carrie: Solid as a set of Manolo wedges in bright summer colours; Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte have been by Carrie’s side since the beginning.

Bridget: Sharon (Shazzer), Jude and Tom are always happy to drop everything and meet Bridget in the pub for more than 14 units of alcohol and several cigarettes, despite any New Year’s resolutions.

SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIPS:

Elaine: Puddy, the face-painting, eightball-jacket wearing lug who Elaine is constantly breaking up and getting back together with – one time, both events happened on a single plane trip; another time Elaine got back together because she needed a bureau moved.

Carrie: Mr. Big is the one man that Carrie keeps coming back to, even when she’s committed to a live-in relationship with Aidan (who we all know is just too simple and too easy for Carrie). At the end of the series, Carrie ends up with Mr. Big. In the big screen version, after two painful hours of breaking up, she ends up with him. (Seriously, in real life, girlfriends would never let their friends go back this many times to such a waffle-weave man.)

Bridget: The first book starts out with Mark Darcy, in a cheesy Christmas jumper, being a bit rude to old Bridget. Then she gets caught up in the romance of bad boy Daniel Cleaver (who also happens to be her boss). As is to be expected, Bridget makes nice with the dashing Mark Darcy by the time he’s ready to wear his cheesy Christmas jumper again.

LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION:

Elaine: She is always in search of the perfect apartment in Manhattan, even considering Jerry’s apartment.

Carrie: She rented her apartment in New York for years, choosing to spend 40 grand on shoes instead of a down payment. She eventually buys her place, with a little help from her friends, after breaking up with Aidan.

Bridget: Lives by herself in a small flat in London, well-stocked with granny-pants and by the end of it, Mark Darcy.

CATCHPHRASE:

Elaine: “Get out!” (followed by a voracious push)

Carrie: Any age old question that attempts to understand men.

Bridget: “Fuckwit.”

Pretty Things

2008-08-04T20:08:00.003-04:00

It was a repeat episode of The View today (I could tell by the mugs) and Barack Obama was the guest. As would be expected, conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck grilled the Democrat candidate about his relationship with his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, who once made “incendiary” (Obama’s word) comments about the September 11th attacks:

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. (For a clip, click here)

These comments, which I completely agree with, were seen as unpatriotic and therefore Obama, whom I suspect secretly agrees with Wright, had to distance himself from Wright or face irrevocably damaging his campaign. The problem with American politics is that they place patriotism above all else: above rational thought, historical mistakes and personal freedoms. It’s that mentality of you are either with us or against us; there is no in between and certainly no room for debate. Obama, who represents (or at least, at one time represented) so much hope for the future of American foreign policy, cannot publicly agree with the idea that Americans can commit whatever atrocities they see fit in other countries, but absolutely can’t understand why others would want (and indeed plan and execute) to do the same.

But I digress. What struck me was that one of the women (I think it was Barbara Walters) stumbled a bit over paying Obama a compliment: she wasn’t sure if she should say how attractive he was. But she did, he accepted it with laughter, and the discussion moved to politics, which was Obama’s reason for being there.

Feminism has made some impact on separating women’s looks from what makes up their personality in that the women of The View were afraid to comment on Obama’s attractiveness (surely this is good, showing that there is no double standard?). Making any kind of comment on Hillary Clinton’s appearance would be seen as offside – but is that because she is not an overly attractive individual, therefore we can easily concentrate on her areas of expertise?

Julie Couillard, whom Heather Mallick describes as “the beautiful woman who had the bad judgment to date the ex-foreign affairs minister Maxime Bernier,” spent a lot of time in the news - not just for exposing Monsieur Bernier, but for exposing the top swell of one of her breasts. The Canadian press couldn’t get past it, as Mallick points out later in her column: “a trio of female Globe and Mail columnists…attacked Couillard for her breasts, her fragrant beauty and her insistence on defending her dignity as a woman.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is this: someone’s attractiveness is a big part of who they are. Sometimes it's what they're known for (models come to mind), sometimes it's part of what they're known for (Belinda Stronach, some might say). It's easy to see attractiveness as part of a man: Obama is a great orator, he seems to be quite good at the political game and he’ll already have a passport if he makes it to the White House (Georgie Boy did not. In fact, only something like 10% of Americans have a valid passport). But Obama is also pretty good-looking. The women of The View could pay him the compliment and then move on to what he was there for.

But when it comes to women, it’s a bit sketchier. Couillard (and indeed, other attractive women who have other things going for them) was not given the same courtesy that the women of The View gave Obama. Her beauty and sexuality were what was focused on in the media, instead of her reason for making headlines. It's silly to assume we do not notice (or judge) a person by their attractiveness: many psychological studies have proven otherwise and at the end of the day, we just want to procreate with genetically superior people. But someone's attractiveness is only a part of what they have to offer.

A Few Things

2008-08-03T12:48:00.002-04:00

I’ve been away – both literally and figuratively. And this step back into bloggery may be brief, and for that I apologize – I just can’t seem to kick my writer’s arse these days…

Cheese, Please

Last week, Quebec announced it will allow its fromagers to produce raw-milk cheese, aged under 60 days, breaking from a continent-wide ban on unpasteurized cheese. It's something to do with harmful bacteria that the New World sees as a health risk in cheese ripened in under two months, even though many gastronomes maintain some cheeses reach their peak within a month, those pesky bacteria actually contributing to the taste and texture of the cheese.

The French (and other Europeans) have been enjoying these unpasteurized cheeses for centuries with no ill effects. In fact, pregnant French women have no restrictions on these types of cheeses, unlike us hyper-sensitive North Americans who ban brie and other foodstuffs like sushi from expectant mothers (despite the identical argument that Japanese mums-to-be have eaten raw fish for centuries). North Americans freak out during pregnancy (just recently I witnessed a pregnant woman hiding the fact she was drinking Coke from her husband), yet once these precious packages are born, they allow them to ride in big yellow school buses on the highway with no seatbelts (another WTF?!?! of mine, but that’s another post).

And A Four-Day Work Week, Too

In a bid to save energy, Nova Scotia Energy Minister Richard Hurlburt has suggested that government employees work only four days a week. Employees would work four 10-hour days and have a three day weekend, reducing the number of vehicles on the road and possibly the amount of power used in government buildings. The set up is about to be test-driven in Utah, starting on Monday. Although this seems like a good idea to a holiday-loving, easily-adaptable singleton like yours truly, there are issues arising in Utah around childcare, second jobs and night school.

All of this is untroubling to me, as I sit in the middle of my zero-day work week, annoyed that the Liquor Store will be closed tomorrow and the beach will be overrun with hard-bodied and flabby tanners alike. I also await the second round of my long-weekend-pot-smoking neighbour whose fumes waft through my flat only when the rest of the world has Monday off. While the workaday world looks forward to these summer long weekends, us teachers just wish they'd be over. Thank god those Americans will be starting their four day work week tomorrow and there will be a new episode of The View.

Street Meat, Diversified

2008-04-06T13:58:00.004-04:00

Saying street food vendor to any Torontonian will conjure images of drunk and hungry club-goers, huddled over their hot dog at 3 in the morning; or Bay Street types grabbing a quick lunch between meetings. Say it to a New Yorker and the smells of pretzels and roasted peanuts fill their olfactory memory, the confluence of the foods' aromas contributing to that signature New York scent. Say street food vendor to a Parisian, and they will tell you about crepes, frites, tartiflette, baguettes - the list goes on - all available should you find yourself peckish on the banks of the Seine one sunny apres-midi.

But in Toronto, we're stuck with hot dogs, the only variability being offered through the vinegary toppings at the side of the cart.

Even England, once famous for its lack of imagination (and taste in general) when it came to food, is home to one of the best little creperies I've ever been to. Located in Hampstead Heath, I twice waited over half and hour in line for a chocolate and banana crepe, and each collation was well worth every minute in that queue.

Now the city of Toronto is considering allowing a greater variety of food to be sold from street vendors, so we can compete on the world stage of street meat. Cleverly titled Toronto A La Cart, the city is asking you what you'd like to be able to buy whilst eating on the run.

Take the survey and vote for everything from crepes and corn on the cob to roti and samosas.

And when this all goes through city council, I'll see you on the corner of Adelaide and John at 3 in the morning, bleary-eyed, but happily eating a chocolate and banana crepe.

Single Self-Importance

2008-03-31T21:52:00.001-04:00

I am often asked why I don’t have a husband/boyfriend and, when my answer is not satisfactory, the asker subsequently makes a list of possible men with whom to set me up. Of the few set ups I have actually agreed to, they have only served to illustrate the very reasons why these men are still on the market.

My singleness makes people slightly nervous, worried that they are missing something truly horrific about me, not immediately visible, that precludes my settling down with anyone (something they have obviously missed in their single male friends). They figure there must be something wrong for me not to be attached by this point – perhaps a deep-seated psychological neurosis that I have never dealt with, or an innate bitchiness and inflexibility that only comes out behind closed relationship doors. I obviously have some serious self-help to undertake before I am able to enter into a healthy partnership.

Years of Oprah, self-help books and popular psychology have taught us single women that we cannot find love until we really love ourselves. We won’t be able to be with someone else until we are happy with being by ourselves. And we should expect and demand a person who is up to the high standards that we set for ourselves.

But is it possible that some of us have gone too far? Do we think so highly of ourselves that no one can measure up to the inflated vision we have of ourselves? Do we love ourselves so much that there is just not enough love to go around another person? In the immortal words of Elaine Benes: “Is it possible I’m not as attractive as I think I am?”

We don’t want to share ourselves with just one guy – who would be worth it? We have so much to offer, with our superior intellect, preternatural beauty, and mastery of sports, cooking and carpentry. All of this greatness would be wasted on a guy that probably is not even capable of fathoming the extent of our amazingness. Only Leonardo da Vinci would start to figure out that there was something unbelievable about us, and he’s been dead for ages; plus we would probably get annoyed with his backwards notes scribbled on the back of invention blueprints: klim teg ot enog.

So where does this leave us narcissistic, over-confident girls in search of a free-loving polyandrous society? It leaves us with friends who scratch their heads as they try and think of a suitable match for us, trying to figure out what exactly it is that is wrong, all the while never realizing that the fatal flaw is our refusal to settle for anyone that isn’t as goddamn wonderful as we are.

(Thank you to Sarah, the inspiration for this piece, who suggested that perhaps we lean toward arrogance in our dealings with the mere mortal males in today’s dating scene.)

Roll On, Spring...

2008-03-24T10:48:00.008-04:00

To celebrate the arrival of spring last Thursday, I donned my winter parka, had a drink at Allen’s, then promptly got my car stuck in a snowbank which necessitated a call to my parents to come and help push me out (helpful strangers are apparently somewhat of a rarity around the Danforth). Whilst waiting for them, my feet actually began to freeze.

Now I know Easter is early this year (so early that those wily Irish priests changed St. Patrick’s Day to the Saturday before under the pretense that there shouldn’t be carousing on the Monday before Good Friday – drunken revelry was conveniently relocated to a day of the week followed by one that provided a lie-in), but I avoided the annual Beaches Easter Parade yesterday because the forecast was for a temperature below zero.

I know we live in Canada, and we should be used to snow and cold; but it’s bloody southern Canada, almost the southernmost point of Canada – so where the hell is spring?

I didn’t believe old Wiarton Willy on that cloudy day, 7 weeks ago.

However, around the world, others are celebrating the coming of spring; a time of rebirth, new beginnings and awakening from the sleep of winter. Here are a few highlights:

Hanami

In Japan, many cherry blossom viewing parties and festivals are held around this time of year. The Japanese watch the Cherry Blossom Forecast on television stations to know when the blooms are expected to come out in different parts of the country.

Holi

Known as the festival of colour, Holi marks the victory of good over evil. Hindus around the world light bonfires on the first night and throw coloured powder and water at each other the following day.

Vernal Equinox

Thousands of people celebrate the spring equinox by climbing to the top of the Sun Pyramid in Teotihuacan, Mexico, built by the Aztecs. It is thought that the first day of spring brings a special energy to the place.

Easter

Easter is based on the story of Jesus being resurrected from the dead. Non-religious symbols of the holiday, eggs and bunnies, denote symbols of rebirth and fecundity, both markers of spring.

Nowruz

Translated from Farsi, Nowruz means “new day” and is an ancient Persian festival celebrating the new solar year and the beginning of Iran’s calendar year. This year, Iran’s government has given its citizens a special Nowruz gift: strict gas rations have been loosened over the holiday period.

My own personal celebration comes with that first day that you can smell mud in the air - when the last bits of snow are trickling away in rivulets, revealing the dormant earth that lay hidden for so long. When the air is heavier and scented with growth. However you choose to celebrate... happy spring!

Baby, You Can Drive (in) My Car

2008-03-23T19:21:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago on CBC’s Metro Morning, Andy Barrie interviewed Rajat Suri, a university student who came up with an application for the social networking site Facebook which matched people up into carpools. Suri said he got the idea while driving in Toronto and looking at the thousands of cars carrying only one person.

Barrie noted that despite government funding, public awareness campaigns and carpool lanes, “I nevertheless find it difficult to get people – maybe your generation is changing – to give up the private space the car represents to them.”

I'm not sure that generation is changing, and the value of that private space is only increasing, especially as our cars become more and more like our living rooms, traditionally spaces for relaxation and socializing.

It started with cup holders – cars began to double as kitchen counters where we could multitask by eating and travelling at once. Then the suspension had to be improved so the drinks in the cup holders wouldn’t spill as you sailed over potholes and rumble strips. Vehicles got bigger: SUVs, their size marketed as essential for transporting all your sports equipment, were never really used for ferrying about surfboards and crampons over rough terrain. So all that cargo space was replaced with more heated, captain’s chair-style seats (no doubt with cup holders in the armrests) throughout the vehicle.

Then came the TV/DVD player to complete the transformation from means of transport to space of complete comfort. Who needs a living room now? Just transplant the family into the car, stick in Over The Hedge and set the car’s climate control to whatever temperature suits you.

And how often do you invite random strangers into your actual living room in the name of traffic reduction and environmentalism?

Maybe it’s time to start. There are still a few wrinkles to iron out with carpooling – timing can be an issue for some people – they may leave the house at a specific time in the morning, but can’t commit to a set time for the way home. Women especially will incorporate errands into their drive home (one stat has women making 4 stops to men’s one while out in the car), so some people may not want to sit in the car outside while their driver pops into the grocery store, post office, daycare and LCBO.

Despite many people’s misgivings and lack of flexibility around their cars, Suri’s idea seems to be working. His Facebook application has been used by over 300 000 people, whether they want to get downtown to work every morning, or travel to Montreal for the weekend.

Yet Another Reason Not To Pick Your Nose In Public

2008-03-12T10:49:00.004-04:00

Big Brother is watching, and he's watching from a panoramic camera positioned atop a VW Beetle, driving around the big cities of America, filming the quotidian goings-on: this according to an piece in the Times Online about Google's latest map feature, Street View.

Not only will Google show you a map of where you're searching for, directions how to get there, and an aerial view; they'll now give you a snapshot at street level (providing the punchbuggy has driven past), displaying scenes like the one below, taken in San Francisco.

Has the human race always been so interested in what other people are doing? Is this Street View feature just another way to satisfy our voyeuristic urges (which somehow are not being satisfied by the myriad reality shows out there)?

Or are we surprised (and charmed) by the unexpected scenes that greet us on otherwise nondescript American streets, playing to the human brain's desire for novelty?

Either way, just think twice about sticking a finger up your nose anywhere outside your own home...

Fringe Benefits or, Bangs Away!

2008-03-11T09:52:00.007-04:00

Being on holiday, I have a chance to practise my tabloid headline writing skills as well as comment on some less weightier topics (than, like, daytime television).

Here's a trend you can trace on the foreheads of fashionistas: the fringe. Kate Moss started it last fall, chopping her post-Pete Doherty locks into a 70s-inspired cut.

Model Heidi Klum soon followed suit, keeping up with the trends she might see on her show Project Runway.

After a few months, we see the trend trickle down from models to mere celebrities - Kate Hudson has been sporting some cute bangs while cavorting around Miami with Owen Wilson (who I was convinced tried to kill himself over her, but there you go).

And finally, our Friend next door, Jennifer Aniston was spotted sporting the shaggy bangs on the set of her latest movie.

Kate Moss started the skinny jean phase ages ago, and it took that style a good two years to hit the streets of North America (they were a bit quicker in London). My prediction? Fall 2010, we're all going to look suspiciously like our grade 3 bowl-cut bangs school photo...

Daytime TV

2008-03-10T15:07:00.007-04:00

And so begins the March Break, that week approaching spring that sees Pearson’s passenger numbers rise dramatically, parents scrambling to find childcare for a week and those lazy teachers claiming one week is just not enough. (It isn’t.)

For those of us who were lucky enough not to be sitting on the floor of Terminal 3 on Saturday, watching the snow fall and the flights fail to leave, we get the sinful indulgence of daytime TV.

Back in the day, daytime TV used to mean soap operas and game shows (I remember many a March Break spent as a student in my parents’ basement, shouting “Big Money!” at contestants on the Price Is Right as they spun that massive wheel just before Showcase Showdown). Later on, audiences saw an endless string of trashy talkshows with similar themes (My sister is pregnant with my transvestite husband’s baby etc.) and different straight-talking hosts (Montel, Sally Jesse, Maury etc.).

Nowadays our channel lineup has increased and so has the spectrum of daytime television. It seems that home-based shows have been all over the place for a while now: everything from home renovations to selling property to managing debt are the foci of shows.

And it seems we’re following Britain's lead, a country which, if the daytime lineup of BBC Canada is to be taken as a representation of television interest, is really into buying, renovating, decorating and selling property (and then rummaging through the attic to find things to sell).

Canada is even seeing the import of a few Brits to host Canadian-produced shows. Colin and Justin’s Home Heist premiered on HGTV back in October, transplanting the flamboyant duo from a variety of “flipping” shows in the UK (including Colin and Justin On The Estate, where they attempted to revitalize a dire council housing estate) to a show focusing on our national crisis of ugly basements.

The latest British import is Kim Woodburn who presented How Clean Is Your House?, a show revealing the grimy state of some UK households. This past Tuesday, Woodburn hosted the first episode of Kim’s Rude Awakenings, where she gets down to the dirty in Toronto homes.

How do homes get to this state, one wonders? Especially homes of those lazy teachers who have an entire week off to spring clean (which happens to be my goal for this week)?

Well, we get so drawn into the soap operas, game shows, talkshows and home and design shows that we can’t possibly find the time to do any work on our own houses.

(I should have left the dust, braved the airport, and gone to Cuba.)

Remember Los Alamos

2008-02-16T10:47:00.003-05:00

I just have to share with you a couple bits of ridiculousness that I learned the other day while listening to Harvey Daniels, an American educator who was speaking at a Reading conference I attended. It builds onto my argument in Notions of the Nano, a recent post on this blog where I compared Europe's and North America's outraged reaction to a company targeting India with an affordable car. I compared it to America's desire to hold all the cards in the nuclear weapons game of Texas Hold 'Em.

Well, it ain't Texas that's holding them, it's New Mexico, where Harvey Daniels now resides.

Mr. Daniels lives close to Los Alamos, a government facility that spends - get this - $100 million per day on maintaining US nuclear weapons. Los Alamos also features the only museum in the world celebrating the atomic bomb.

Flowers in February

2008-02-14T18:19:00.004-05:00

A boy displaced by recent violence in Kenya smells a rose at a refugee camp in Nairobi's Mathare slum (from news.bbc.co.uk)

Around this time two years ago, I listened to David Suzuki speak about the state of our world. To make a point about the massive carbon footprint that humans make, he deconstructed the act of ordering pizza from room service in a North American hotel room: where the anchovies came from and how they got there; where the cheese and flour were made and how they were transported to the hotel; where the copper in the telephone wires used in placing the room service call was mined and how it was transported; where the electricity came from to power the elevator that the room service waiter used to deliver the pizza. He forced his listeners to think about the massive global impact of a simple action that we do without thinking about.

I often think about where food comes from and what its environmental impact has been. Last year I read The 100 Mile Diet, a book about a couple who ate food from within 100 miles of their home for a year. Reading that book caused me to stand in the grocery store one day, for a good 5 minutes looking quite lost, trying to decide between a pint of organic New Zealand blueberries and a pint of regular Nova Scotian blueberries. (I went with the maritime variety.)

I wonder where the wood from the Ikea bedframe I like comes from. I wonder where the materials in the new mattress I should buy soon come from. I wonder where my futon mattress will go when I finally retire it.

And on today, Valentine’s Day, I'll add another product for us to think about. Where did the flowers you bought for your valentine come from? How did they get to you? One-quarter of the flowers that Europe* imports come from Kenya, a country mired in violence ever since the disputed elections in December. This year, roadblocks and street barricades have made it much more difficult to transport flowers throughout the country. I wonder where that bloom got stopped, perhaps at gunpoint, on its way to someone’s paramour.

*Canada gets over half of its flower imports from Colombia, which is quite the carbon emissions when you consider the plane ride from Bogota to Toronto.

The Africentric School Debate

2008-02-03T21:11:00.000-05:00

This past Tuesday, I tuned into the Toronto District School Board’s meeting where Trustees and the public debated four strategies that a TDSB committee had come up with to address to needs of black students, 40% of whom are dropping out of Toronto schools. Of the four strategies, the one that stirred up the most debate (and passed by a much smaller margin than the others) was the one recommending a Program Area Review Team be formed to propose the program and operational model for an Africentric Alternative school, slated to open in September 2009.

One argument against an Africentric school is that it harkens back to segregation: the separation of blacks and whites in American society between 1876 and 1965, after the abolition of slavery and introduction of Jim Crow laws. The argument is invalid in our current context since the separation of the races in antebellum Dixie was legally enforced, whereas an Africentric school in Toronto is non-mandatory and open to all.

The fundamental idea behind this school is diametrically opposed to black schools in the Southern States during the Jim Crow era: African-Americans were put in their own schools so whites wouldn’t have to interact with them. There was an overt value put on a person based on the colour of their skin: Rosa Parks had to sit at the back of the bus, moving further back if a white needed a seat. The Toronto Africentric school is focused on a disadvantaged group whom the TDSB is somehow failing and through curriculum, culture and African-Canadian role models, the school hopes to improve the success of this group.

In his article in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Jeffrey Simpson questions how well Ontarians will receive a black-focused school when the Conservatives campaigned on their platform of funding for religious-based schools and fell flat on their faces:

Ontarians did not favour the Conservatives’ arguments because most voters instinctively or explicitly believed that in an increasingly multicultural and pluralistic society, schools should be one of those places for community, or what has become known as “inclusiveness.”

Yes, that is what schools should be, but not necessarily what they are. And while faith-based schools would focus on the teachings of a specific religion, there is no evidence to indicate that the educational needs of Jewish or Islamic or Buddhist students are not being met. We do, however, have a glaring statistic of 40% that points to a need in the black community, a need that members of that community have asked for.

But is it fair, you ask? I refer you to a quote from Richard Lavoie, a famous American Learning Disabilities expert: “Fair does not mean that everyone gets the same thing; it means that everyone gets what they need.” Is it fair that my brother gets to wear glasses and I don’t? Of course it is – he gets what he needs to be a productive member of society (who doesn’t bump into chairs and walk into walls).

It may sound radical, but why not give this demographic what they need in order to be successful at school, regardless of whether or not it is “fair” to other groups. Black students do not see themselves reflected in the curriculum or in the people that stand at the front of the classroom. The Toronto District School Board already has other Alternative Schools aimed at students who cannot function in the regular school system. There is also the First Nations School of Toronto, serving a perhaps the most disadvantaged group in Canada.

Trustee Sheila Ward got quite uppity at criticisms of the First Nations School, saying it was wonderful and they were making great gains, when in reality this is not quite the case. (I speak from experience, having shared a building with the school). The school has some dedicated people working really hard to make positive change for students, but it is also working against so many social and institutional factors that are constantly getting in the way.

And this is where we have to see an Africentric school as only part of the solution. Trustee Stephnie Payne made the salient point that schools are only part of a student’s life and that good parenting is what is really needed (she, incidentally, voted against the Africentric school). Jeffrey Simpson makes the same point in his piece:

The much more frequent explanations for poor student achievement, for blacks or any other group, have much less to do with curriculum than factors over which schools have little control: dysfunctional families, troubled neighbourhoods, few roles models (absent fathers), poverty, gangs or, in a few immigrant communities, attitudes toward education (especially for females) that are not easily reconciled with mainstream Canadian ones.

With only six hours in a schoolday to remedy social inequities, teach empathy and respect of others, fix general societal problems, tend to the pastoral care of our students, and - oh yeah - teach them stuff, schools can’t offer the only solution.

But we can offer part of the solution, so why not try it? The status quo is not working. Schools need to do whatever they can to foster the success of all students. Let’s see what happens with this Africentric school. Let’s hope it helps someone in that 40%.

Notions of the Nano

2008-01-30T20:51:00.000-05:00

Much has been made recently over the Tata Nano: a car which is compact, cheap (costing only $2500), and available to citizens of the developing world. Although it’s size and horsepower must make it quite fuel efficient, the mere fact that cars are now available to vast swaths of the world’s non-vehicle owning population means a huge output in carbon emissions during a time in history when the need for reduction is so prevalent (perhaps only to the general population, though – the politicians don’t seem to be worried about signing on to any kind of agreement to reduce our carbon emissions as nations, shame on you Stephen Harper and George Bush).

We affluent North Americans and Europeans tsk at the car manufacturers for providing this option for the working poor of our world, discussing with our friends the environmental catastrophe this will herald from the comfort of our over-sized cars, idling outside Starbucks.

Why shouldn’t Indians be given a chance to drive to their outsourced jobs at call-centres, spending their American dollars on the mighty (yet mini) car?

This is an issue at which my social and environmental beliefs clash. We are so haughty in our dismissal of the underclasses of the world trying to reach our standard of living. It’s like the Americans freaking out over Pakistan and Iran manufacturing nuclear weapons, all the while cataloguing their own stash, cozy in their self-appointed position of global protector, independently making decisions on who gets invaded or ousted. But with all that we know about carbon emissions, are we not insane to put millions more cars on the roads? That huge spike at the end of Al Gore’s climate graph is about to be blown off his Powerpoint screen.

So what do you do? You live by the smallest carbon footprint as you can. You use reusable containers and recycle what you can (even the annoying things like batteries). You drive less, live and shop closer to work, use less electricity. You buy local produce when you can, and find products with little or no packaging.

And you can think about what it must be like for a family of four, living in a 2 room apartment on the east side of Delhi, to finally be able to own a thing that to us represents freedom, convenience and status.

Backpacking Blues

2008-01-28T18:31:00.000-05:00

This past Friday morning, I loaded up my backpack with a few essentials in preparation for my trip to Montreal to visit a friend who has recently moved there. Putting the backpack on my back and fastening the waist and chest bands around my parka gave me an unexpected sense of exhilaration on the unusually bright January morning.

(It’s been a particularly hard slog this January, hasn’t it? I am reminded of a line in The Cowboy Junkies’ song Seven Years: “Haven’t see the sun for seven days, November’s got her nails dug in deep.” Well January has meat hooks and they have settled gangreneously into my flesh.)

Where had this emotional thrill come from? I theorize it was the rucksack on my back and the train ticket in my hand.

I spent a few years in my twenties overseas with a backpack as my only baggage and a train as my mode of transport. I deciphered the 24-hour clock (18:20 translates slowly when your train is leaving in mere minutes) and squinted at train destinations in foreign languages in a variety of European countries (I spent 3 days in Paris trying to figure out this place called Benelux). That beat-up red backpack and my Eurail pass represented a freedom of will and a richness of learning.

I knew the weight of a real Munich beer stein. I felt the heat of a Roman noon outside the Coliseum, with its bored Italian youths dressed up as Gladiators. I saw the light that Cezanne saw in the south of France, blanching the rock and Cyprus trees over the Mediterranean. I felt an incomparable peace while drifting through the glowworm caves in Te Anau, the dark space above me lit up with tiny specks of eerie light. I swam just above the proliferation of sea creatures on the Great Barrier Reef, avoiding the grey and deadened coral nearby, killed by an increase of a single degree in sea temperature. I hiked the foothills of the Himalayas, and spun prayer wheels of the Dalai Lama.

But I also lost my nerve at the sharp end of a knife, wielded by four boys in Cape Town who were insistent at taking my purse. It was there, after only four hours on South African soil, that I lost my nerve.

Perhaps symbolically, I bought one of those wheelie suitcases, stopped staying in youth hostels and rarely travelled longer than a few days by myself. My world adventures were confined to friends and relatives in the U.K. and, more recently, the North American-friendly Cayman Islands .

But the weight of my backpack that Friday morning brought back the thrill I get of going somewhere new. Of getting on a train at one end and getting off in a totally different life. So I started with Montreal – somewhere I have been before, albeit 17 years ago. Where next? Somewhere new, somewhere different. Somewhere that will give me that familiar sense of exhilaration on a bright January morning.

I hear Brazil calling my name…

Some Things

2008-01-13T15:02:00.000-05:00

I have just finished reading Heather Mallick’s Pearls in Vinegar, written in the style of a Japanese Pillow Book, a form which appears to be a few paragraphs on a variety of sometimes-connected topics. Inspired by the short, non-committal bursts of writing commenting on everyday life, I thought I might take another stab at blogging. I was getting quite sick of seeing that tomato zombie guy every time I forlornly returned to my blog, only to remain witless and wordless.

On Reading

At school these days, we teach children when to abandon books (as part of a larger plan of teaching reading behaviours). While reviewing the reasons we might not finish a book (words are too hard, topic is not interesting, you don’t like the author’s style of writing), I realized that I rarely abandoned books. I would plough through novels, intent on finishing them, but missing large sections as I read the words on the page, but really didn’t take in what was going on.

And so I abandoned several books: Sister Crazy by Emma Richler, On Beauty by Zadie Smith (however I do plan to come back to this one), Snow Falling on Cedars by Joseph Guterson (okay, I abandoned this one awhile ago) and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (although this was a forced abandon, as it was due back at the library and unrenewable). I was beginning to worry that I had lost my taste for fiction (and that non-fiction was just a repetition of the same facts and ideas about teapots in space, extended to 400-odd pages) and that being drawn into a good book was out of reach.

Luckily good old Ian McEwan stepped up in the form of a phone call from the library saying that it was my turn to read On Chesil Beach, which I’d put a hold on back in July. Wanting to keep up a run of good books, I went out and bought Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, an author I can always rely on to bring a density of thoughts, images and meaning to a single sentence. The ending, which I read on a terrace in the Cayman Islands, had me gazing out to sea for a good ten minutes after I closed the book.

Cayman Americanization

I spent the week after Christmas in the Cayman Islands with my cousin and his girlfriend who now live out there. Having visited several Caribbean Islands in the past (and having not been out of the province for a year and a half), I was looking forward to a change of scenery, some fried plantains with rice and peas, and a whole lot of sun.

And while I got these wishes, I also got a lesson in Americanization. Though a British territory (and populated by many ex-pat Brits), the main port of George Town is set up for foreign workers as well as the daily onslaught of Cruise Shippers, who must line up like cattle to get on and off their ships. There are several Burger King and Wendy’s outlets as well as higher end restaurants (with higher end pricing) offering middle of the road Italian and seafood options. It took a trip into West Bay, where many locals live, to find a place that would actually serve me rice and peas.

And the bars along the main drag, though frequented by some Caymanians and some Jamaicans (who make up about 20% of the island’s population), were staffed and patronized by Australians, Kiwis, Canadians Americans and Brits, all playing the likes of Bon Jovi and Prince, with an NFL game on TV in the background. It felt like my undergrad years, with the heat turned up.

Getting asked out via email

I’m trying to figure out if this is a new low or high in my dating career. The uncle of a kid in my class asked me out via email. His sister-in-law (the kid's mom) suggested it, saying I was a lovely person (possible high); however, going on just this recommendation, I wonder about his standards (possible low). A fellow teacher did some detective work (by asking the sister of the kid in my class) and determined that the uncle is getting a bit chubby and lives in a messy house. I declined politely. He could have been that tomato zombie guy.

Guess the Sport

2007-08-29T10:21:00.000-04:00

This young man is taking a break from what annual sport in Spain?

Water, Water Everywhere...

2007-08-25T15:33:00.000-04:00

I’ve written before about being brought up in an environmental household where conservation of energy was a priority. As a family, we did (and still do) all of David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge suggestions before they were identified as “necessary”. I try to live my life as greenly as possible.

I cannot, however, ride my own locally sourced organic cotton coattails. There is always room for improvement in terms of lessening my environmental footprint. Moving schools so that I can now walk to work and imposing an air travel ban for the past year are two ways I have made change. My next step is something that is all over the media right now: bottled water.

Suzuki spoke out against bottled water earlier this year, some religious groups have labelled bottled water “immoral” and Justin Trudeau refused a proffered bottle after coughing during a speech at McGill with the words: “I try not to.”

There has also been much written on the topic of bottled water, its true benefits and environmental impact. The Trudeau anecdote was taken from Judith Timson’s column in today’s Globe and Mail. In it, Timson argues that the omnipresent water bottle is about hydration and oral fixation: it’s a socially acceptable thing to have in our hands (and mouths) at just about any event (Timson relates an anecdote of water bottle swilling at a funeral).

Certainly hydration, and all the beautiful benefits that come with it was the main impetus for the explosion of bottled water sales. Back in the early 90s, in the era of the Supermodel, gorgeous, fresh-faced girls with large bottles of Evian were the first to be seen with portable water. And just as that spring water you’re imbibing trickles down the mountain side, so did the trend trickle down into the hoi polloi. Having water available in bottles is now de rigueur in homes, offices and public places around the world.

But that’s another issue with this whole bottled water thing (and a point that Timson briefly makes in her piece) – in the Western world, we pay more per litre for water (a resource, I don’t need to point out, that is basically free in this country) than gas, yet there are more than a billion people around the world who do not have access to safe drinking water. And to really put this Western life in perspective, the previous link informs us that “[a] person living in Sub-Saharan Africa uses 10-20 litres a day; on average, a Canadian uses 326 litres a day.”

Water, which accounts for the make up of over two-thirds of our bodies and our earth, is an important environmental and world issue. So what to do?

I am giving up water in plastic bottles. I originally began buying spring water because I could easily stick it in the fridge. I grew accustomed to the taste as well as the ease with which you could take water with you. And even though I was reusing the same plastic water bottle for a week or so at a time (filling it up from another plastic bottle I kept in the fridge), I was still creating quite the mountain of recyclable waste, while ignoring the first (and most important) of the 3 Rs: reduce.

And so I have bought one of those aluminum water bottles (not the plastic kind, which have suffered the same criticism as regular water bottles: chemicals leaching into their contents), a trend that Timson doesn’t see as “catching on”. On this point, I whole-heartedly disagree. Many of my friends carry this type of water bottle (it was in discussion with two of them that I decided on this course of action) and I am seeing them more and more in the hands of the young and funky (and well-informed) around the city.

I even thought about buying my parents aluminum water bottles. But they're already ahead of me. They drink tap water out of a glass - something they've done even before David Suzuki suggested it.

We’re Goin’ Str--king!

2007-08-24T19:46:00.003-04:00

Earlier this month, police in Britain sought an order prohibiting serial str--ker M--k Rob--ts from taking his clothes off during public events. Roberts, who has an impressive 380 str--ks under his unnecessary belt, has run naked across the playing fields at most major sporting events: the FA Cup final, Wimbledon, Royal Ascot and the Superbowl in 2004, which already had its share of exposed bodies (thank you, Janet & Justin). Funny that the nipple slip was much more scandalous than the starkers Brit taking to the field for the second half.

The judge in the case denied the order, saying "What Mr Roberts does may be annoying but, in my opinion, it does not amount to antisocial behaviour." Writing in the Guardian, Zoe Williams earlier this month asked whether or not the very definition of antisocial behaviour is being annoying. But is the brief diversion of a str--ker running across your view any more annoying than a rain delay at Wimbledon? And really, you’re there for a show – a str--ker is just an unbilled act.

Williams also wondered if str--king was an act of male aggression or “as taste-free but innocuous as a cucumber sandwich”?

Male nudity can harbour aggression when the nakedness is sexualized and imbued with power – I’ve been on the unintentional viewing end of several public masturbators (mostly in Italy, though some in France) and certainly felt quite uncomfortable and intimidated in those situations. But when it comes to running naked in front of thousands, pursued by beefy security guards, I’m not sure Roberts’s display was about male aggression. By being naked, he was stripped bare, defenseless. Many prisoners throughout the shady human rights parts of history were kept naked for this reason.

When you watch the reactions of the spectators during a str--k, they don’t seem to be offended or disgusted, a point that Williams indicates in her piece. Someone running naked before thousands is humourous, light-hearted. People (the American public, specifically) seemed to be more shocked at Janet Jackson’s nipple being exposed than Roberts’s half-time show. Is there a difference between male and female public nudity?

Er-ca R-e famously str--ked at Twickenham in 1982 during an England vs. Australia rugby match. She was only topless, but her spectacle made her £8000 in modeling and television appearances afterward. Was this because she was female and her sexuality was commodified, or was it because she was female and str--kers are generally male, making her an oddity?

I've never seen a real live str--ker, but I've watched with great captivation the people who rushed the field after Toronto FC's first win at BMO Field. It was at the end of the match and provided a tempered end to a tense and exciting game. I watched the rushers, probably about 8 in all, run onto the field and dodge the security guards who tackled them like linebackers, the crowd cheering the more agile of the runners. And I have to say, that brief and unexpected spectacle was better than any nipple-slip half time show the Superbowl could provide...

Reducing Plastics

2007-08-21T21:35:00.001-04:00

On the inevitable back-to-school shop (it is NOT the most wonderful time of the year, Staples Business Depot), I found myself thinking very carefully about what products I would buy. I ignored plastic expandable file jackets in favour of paper ones – I figure those paper ones will biodegrade eventually, whereas the plastic ones have a long life ahead of them. I did, however, balk at the thin plastic the file folders were wrapped in.

The over-packaging of products has always been frowned upon by environmentalists and many people have avoided purchasing some over-packaged products in favour of more meagerly wrapped items. But with hygiene and what have you, product packaging is sometimes unavoidable, but still an area that needs to be addressed by companies.

The drug store was my next port of call; the purchase of a toothbrush, my objective. Which is when I thought of another way we could greatly reduce the amount of plastic we throw away every day. Why not have toothbrushes with reusable handles, but changeable heads? Instead of throwing out the entire shaft of the toothbrush along with the withered bristles, why not just pick up a new head? You could somehow attach it to the handle, just like you do with razors.

This could also work for dish brushes, toilet bowl brushes and any number of other household items.

I posted a picture of the garbage the sea was spitting back to Mumbai several weeks ago. I recently found the photo above of children wading through more marine refuse that washed ashore beneath their stilt houses in Papua New Guinea. Both photographs made me sad at the state of this world. People are starting to wake up to the idea of global warming and change their way of living to a greener way of life, but those of us in the Western world don't have the same immediate evidence of the toll we are taking on this earth. We have a long way to go.

Sunnybrook, August 10th

2007-08-15T21:47:00.000-04:00

Lyla enters from the back, walking past nurses in scrubs and administrators in suits, their identification tags clipped to the bottom of their jackets. They sit on picnic tables scattered about the criss-cross of roadways used by off-duty ambulances and delivery trucks. There is the low buzz of a place that is always open, which quickly becomes background noise as Lyla enters the hospital.

She’s never liked hospitals, with their shiny floors and light-coloured walls. Sometimes you can be lulled into a sense of normalcy with doctors striding by, people in suits on official business; only to be pulled back by someone in a wheelchair, covered only by a gown, leaning against the armrest, with a dangling IV bag in tow.

Lyla finds the elevator and takes it to the sixth floor, just above the tree tops of the valley that surrounds the hospital. She walks quietly down the hallway, feeling somewhat like an intruder, ready to be stopped at any point and asked what her business here is. The most she gets is a raised head from the nurses’s station, eyes that don’t linger long enough to assess her motives.

Entering the room, Lyla smiles briefly at the couple at the first bed: the woman lies completely back, looking up toward the ceiling, unmoving. The man sits on a chair beside her, a magazine in his hands. The man smiles briefly back, but it is a smile full of warmth that spreads to his eyes and chin. Turning, she moves towards her grandmother’s bed, which is propped up, although her grandma’s eyes are closed.

Lyla stands for a moment, unsure of where to place herself, and her grandmother’s eyes open. They take a second to focus on Lyla, but when they do, a smile breaks across the old woman’s face.

“Hello, dear!” she says in her soft Dublin accent. “How are you?”

“I’m fine, Granny,” says Lyla, leaning in to kiss her grandmother on the cheek. “How are they treating you here?”

“Very well, very well,” says her grandmother, still beaming.

Lyla pulls up a chair next to the hospital bed and answers all the questions her grandmother can think of. As they talk, there are stirrings from across the room.

“Hello, Alice,” calls out Lyla’s grandmother from behind the half-drawn curtain that obscures her view of Alice.

“Hello, Eileen,” comes the response from the bed.

“My granddaughter’s come to visit me.” The man with the magazine is beaming at Lyla, perhaps providing the visual part to the conversation.

“Oh, lovely,” says Alice.

“This is Lyla,” says Lyla’s grandmother.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Gerald,” The man rises and comes quickly over, hand extended in greeting. “That’s my wife, Alice over there.” He turns and nods toward the bed, still grasping Lyla’s hand.

“Nice to meet you,” calls Alice, head still unmoving on the pillow.

“It’s nice to meet you both,” says Lyla, releasing Gerald’s hand and craning her neck slightly to see Alice.

Gerald stands for a moment, just smiling, his eyes flitting from Lyla to the curtain, then back to Lyla. He turns to look at his wife, who still lies still, eyes looking up to the ceiling.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to your visit,” he says after a brief moment, “lovely to meet you.”

“And you,” smiles Lyla, watching him move back to his wife’s bed and sit back down in his chair. He picks up his magazine and begins to read it.

Lyla turns back to her grandmother who is reaching for a brush on her table tray.

“Lyla, would you be a love and just brush the back of my hair?” she asks.

“Sure!”

As Lyla brushes the thin grey hair, pressed against her head from hours against a pillow, she listens to the quiet murmurings from across the room.

“Do you want to hear an elephant joke?” asks Gerald, his voice slightly muted.

Lyla can barely hear Alice’s reply and can’t make out the components of the joke as her grandmother thanks her for the minor grooming. What she does make out is the eruption of laughter that comes from Alice when Gerald finishes: whole-hearted and from the belly. Lyla’s eyes dart across the room: she can see Alice’s body heaving, Gerald’s hand resting on her arm beneath the covers, his face lit up while watching hers.

Lyla and her grandmother lock eyes, their mouths breaking into smiles simultaneously.

On Woodbine Beach, Things Left Behind

2007-08-14T12:36:00.000-04:00

(Or, another reason I should always bring my camera with me to say these thousand words that I can only put into a few.)

Two abandoned shoes: one sandal, one running shoe lodged in the green lakeweed that collects amid the stones and pebbles at the shoreline. Further down is a scuba mask, perhaps abandoned after a day of searching for curiosities that exist below the surface.

A waterbottle, condensation on the outside, water still cold on the inside, turned into the sand. Beside it, an overturned piece of note paper, held down with pebbles on either side, obscuring the words I'm sure are there. Uncharacteristically, I ignore this piece of mysterious communication because there is a couple moving toward the assemblage: it is their found item.

Three girls sitting on the edge of the large rocks by the edge of the lake, looking down into the water, the wind flapping their long hair at the sides of their faces. I wonder if they are talking, figuring out how to be women, just a little further back on the journey than I am.

Harry Potter and the Pre-order of the Deathly Hallows

2007-08-12T17:10:00.000-04:00

Now that Harry Potter mania has died down (presumably because everyone has finished the last book and seen the latest movie), and I am on page 350 of the 600-odd pages of the penultimate book (I’m always behind in most areas of my life), perhaps now I can comment on the insanity.

Why is it that everyone goes so crazy over Harry Potter? Why are there midnight release times, pre-order options on a myriad of websites and newsworthy reports of security breaches of the manuscript?

J.K. Rowling, who conceived of Harry Potter on a train ride between Manchester and London, combines a set of factors that have worked together to make the series as popular as it is.

Escapism, Pure & Simple

The first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in 1997, so I can’t link its creation to any post 9/11 desire for escapism. But there was certainly the interim after the first invasion of Iraq and some gruesome stuff going on in Kosovo. But regardless of world politics, the Harry Potter series provided a magical other-world full of spells, fantastical creatures and mysterious secrets. As any good book should take you into another reality, Harry Potter’s world of wizards and witches took readers into an entirely different realm of magic with its characters and curiosities. A realm that although it functioned differently from ours, still maintained…

Relatable Characters & Experiences

I’m seeing this more and more as the series progresses. Especially in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which I’m reading now. Although Harry is imbued with exceptional powers (even when measured against those in the wizarding world), he still falls victim to such teenage afflictions as jealously, most notably when he catches Ginny Weasley kissing Dean in the corridor and we read Harry’s internal monologue, mulling over whether or not it is brotherly love, or something else, that makes him want to smash poor Dean in the face. The love played out as anger and bitterness between Hermione and Ron is another example of real-life situations that readers can relate to. And the character Luna is a wonderful sketch of those awkward, slightly-removed-from-reality-type kids we had in our classes growing up – and how lovely is Harry’s empathy and acceptance of her.

Wicked Wordsmithery

This is one of J.K. Rowling’s greatest talents: making up new words and interesting names: Dumbledore evokes quiet power and sagacity. Voldemort sounds like menacing thunder booming. Harry’s Herbology class is filled with such onomatopoeic plants as Snargaluff (requiring protective gloves to handle), Whomping Willows (requiring speed, agility and perhaps a helmut to avoid injury) and Bubotubers (decidedly less dangerous than the previous flora, but its pus can still cause painful boils, nonetheless). Some other fabulous locutional concoctions: Ambrosius Flume (a businessman), Budleigh Babberton (a charming village), Barnabas Cuffe (editor of The Daily Prophet), Mundungus Fletcher (a shady member of the Order of the Phoenix) and St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries (self-explanatory, no?).

Classic Narrative Devices

And of course, as many critics have pointed out, J.K. Rowling employs all those plots and characters we’ve seen before: good vs. evil and their inherent connection (hello Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader), orphans unraveling their pasts, the journey from boy to man, and political allegory. (I hear that there is more than a hint that the political climate in Deathly Hallows mirrors what was happening during World War II. And having just seen the most recent movie, the Ministry taking over Hogwarts and instituting curricular change and teacher evaluations rings true of educational reforms of the past.)

So there are several factors that contribute to the wild success of Rowling’s magical narratives. Put together, these provided a series of books that saw ridiculous security over the official release date of the latest publication (imagine suing people over the release of On Chesil Beach, an excerpt of which I’m sure I read prior to publication – isn’t it in keeping with protocol to release an excerpt?) and saw the book in people’s hands across this city and around the world during the last week of July. And all these factors will keep me going for the next 250 pages of The Half-Blood Prince. After that, I'll need a serious Potter break before attempting the final 700+ page installment that may toll the end of Potter Mania.

1989

2007-07-23T15:18:00.000-04:00

1989, the number, another summer (get down)
Sound of a funky drummer…
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We gotta fight the powers that be.

- Public Enemy

I’ve been thinking a lot about 1989 recently. It is the picture of the lone protester in Tiananmen Square that started it, brought up in conversation with a friend of mine. The Unknown Rebel, unmoving in front of a column of angry tanks, sidestepping into their path each time they tried to go around him. A single man representative of a huge fight that was happening around the world at that time.

1989 was a year of struggle, as evidenced in the lyrics of Fight the Power by Public Enemy. While Public Enemy continued to document and sustain the struggle for black equality started in 1960s, a decade synonymous with mass social change, elsewhere around the world was seeing tremendous change in human rights and freedoms.

The 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, a revolution based on basic human freedoms - Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort! (Freedom, equality, brotherhood, or death!) - saw the fall of several repressive regimes in eastern Europe. Poland saw its first free parliamentary elections since the war; Ceausescu’s dictatorship was ended in Romania (he was later executed); the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia saw the overthrow of the Marxist/Leninist government; the Republic of Hungary was declared; and in August, 2 million people across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania joined hands across 600 km to demand freedom and independence from the Soviet Union.

1989 was also the year that the Berlin Wall came down – physically and symbolically. I can remember watching the event on television – hundreds of people climbing over the wall, yelling and celebrating, and battering it down with decades’ worth of suppressed anger and frustration at their lack of freedom, fractured families and silenced voices.

The silenced voices of South Africa experienced an administrative shift in 1989 (and this is not to say that black South Africans allowed their voices to be silenced: many raged against apartheid since its inception after the National Party’s win in the 1948 elections). Newly elected president F.W. de Klerk scrapped the Separate Amenities Act (an act which segregated the races in all areas of life – from white beaches to black universities) and in early 1990, released Nelson Mandela from his 27 years in prison for his determined refusal to allow his voice to be silenced. I am still amazed to this day at the winds of change that persisted so, allowing a political prisoner to become South Africa’s first black president just 4 years later.

South America also experienced its share of newfound freedoms: Chile held its first free elections in 16 years, ultimately ousting Augusto Pinochet who was later tried for human rights abuses, from his protracted presidency. Brazil also saw its first free elections after 25 years of a ruling military regime.

1989 witnessed the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; the release of the Guilford Four (a group of people wrongfully convicted of blowing up an English pub during the Troubles – their case was one of police manipulation and disinformation – see the film In The Name Of The Father); the Exxon Valdez spill (perhaps a key event in the raising of our environmental awareness); and of course, the series of protests from April to June in Tiananmen Square.

There is no real answer as to what happened to the Unknown Rebel, the man that stood alone in front of the tanks bearing down on him and his country’s freedom. There are some claims he was executed – a brutal ending to such an inspirational action. I prefer to believe what Jan Wong writes in her book Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now: he is still alive and in hiding in China. And I have to believe that if I am to still hold onto the hope that the winds of change in 1989 have not died. We came a long way that year, but the fact that the man in front of the tanks has to be in hiding (or indeed, was executed) tells us that we have a long way to go still.

Epilogue

Perhaps at some point I will further explore the fact that Seinfeld and The Simpsons, two popular, long-running and highly-acclaimed comedy shows, made their debuts in 1989. Interesting that these two shows broke away from the happy family comedies of the 80s, so content with the status quo.

Homer, Boners and a Pagan Rain Dance

2007-07-21T13:07:00.000-04:00

In Dorset, in the southwest of England, there lies the outline of a sexually aroused Celtic warrior, carved out in chalk. Known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, it is thought to be an ancient symbol of spirituality and fertility. And now the promoters of the new Simpsons film have gone and painted a similarly-sized impression of Homer Simpson, naked but for his Y-fronts, offering a doughnut to the club-bearing giant (no really - he's actually holding a club).

Members of The Pagan Federation were not impressed with the depiction of the much loved cartoon character, daubed on the hill with water-based biodegradable paint: "We'll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away," said Ann Bryn-Evans, joint Wessex district manager for The Pagan Federation. And judging from the torrential downpour that swept across the UK yesterday, the Pagan Rain Dance worked...

Posh: Reality Living in America

2007-07-20T13:58:00.001-04:00

Along with the rest of the closeted Spice Girls fans across the land, I watched Victoria Beckham: Coming to America last Monday. I will fully admit to an odd fascination with the lives of a few celebrities: I followed Kate Moss’s torrid love affair with Pete Doherty, I’m still intrigued by Suri Cruise (along with Katie Holmes’s outfits) and I love seeing pictures of Victoria Beckham in impossibly high heels and tiny get-ups, carting around her three boys – how does she do it?

The special, originally planned to be a series of six episodes, was shortened when producers were left with little material after Victoria flew back to the UK early to see her football start husband, David Beckham. Producers scrambled and made it into a one-hour special, attracting a mediocre 4 million viewers in the U.S. on Monday.

Like most reality TV shows centred around celebrities, the show was about publicity – and warming Americans up to Victoria, who consistently wears a scowl (and those sky-high heels) in paparazzi shots in papers and on the internet. The show is carefully crafted to show Victoria, though always gorgeous and flawlessly dressed, as a down-to-earth mum who misses her kids, incurs traffic violations, and sometimes drinks too much at afternoon socialite parties.

As with other shows that document the lives of celebrities like The Osbournes and Nick & Jessica: Newlyweds, the editing is deft, frequently poking fun at the show’s subjects. From Ozzy’s exasperated interjections during his children’s squabbles to prolonged shots of Jessica as she tries to figure out if chicken really do live in the sea, we are made to laugh at the follies of the rich and famous.

And this is why we like these shows: they bring celebrities down from their airbrushed spot on a Louis Vuitton pedestal and show us that yes, they are just like us: Ozzy and Sharon have to deal with clearing up dog poop in the house, Nick has to deal with the olfactory aftermath of Jessica’s visit to the bathroom. And while Victoria Beckham is never brought down to this basest of human functions, we are shocked to see her having to step out of her car in [gasp] flats!

Bringing celebrities down to the layperson’s level is a trend of the past decade or so. Remember back in the 80s when Robin Leach took us through the lavish and serviced homes and lives of celebrities in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? That programme was deftly edited, too – but it was all the boring, diurnal bits that were left out. Now, we want to see those bits. Celebrity magazines - a niche once left to the National Enquirer and News of the World, but now expanding faster than Nicole Richie’s pregnant belly - frequently run stories about celebrity cellulite and other body flaws the magic of Hollywood manages to hide. (And I use the term "stories" loosely, since much of the story is told through glaring graphics and little text.)

While Victoria Beckham does remain quite flawless throughout the special, we do see that she is followed around by her own makeup artist and hairdresser, and refuses to consume a proffered cookie from the bitchy celebrity blogger, Perez Hilton. But we also see her sweet side: stumbling over what she wants to be a polite description of a chubby, plastic, dolphin-calling socialite and dressing up a sex doll to act as a decoy so she can buy her husband a watch.

And though I never did figure out how she manages three boys whilst wearing skinny jeans and Louboutin heels, perhaps we will discover more in the near future: David Beckham has just signed on to star in his own reality series. Now, if only someone would convince Kate Moss to open up her model lifestyle to the scrutiny of the layperson…

At Capacity

2007-07-16T15:41:00.000-04:00

It would seem that the ocean has had its fill of our frivolous trash cast thoughtlessly into its seemingly inexhaustible repository. Last week, the currents in the sea around Mumbai, India changed and spat back over 300 tonnes of garbage per day.

In Praise of the Absurd

2007-07-13T12:33:00.000-04:00

On my way to the gym the other day, I passed a flyer stapled to a telephone pole - one of those little posters with the tear-off phone number fringe on the bottom. Ever-curious, I stopped briefly to see if I should tear off a phone number and put it in my wallet alongside all the other tear-off numbers that if I would just call, would allow me to begin my Buddhist meditation practice, continue with my yoga postures and stop smoking through hypnosis (okay, not the last one).

This poster was offering classes in levitation. I looked again, sure I must have misread it. Nope, levitation. Call the number and you, too can be well on your way to floating serenely, cross-legged, just a few inches off the ground.

This levitation poster was the first in a string of stories I have noticed lately that are wonderfully absurd. Elizabeth Renzetti wrote in Saturday’s Globe and Mail last week about her new favourite headline, courtesy of The Scottish Daily Record that reported on civilians who tried to subdue the man who drove a burning car into Glasgow’s airport: Hero Cabbie: I Kicked Burning Terrorist So Hard In Balls That I Tore a Tendon.

Today’s Globe and Mail provided two offbeat stories. The first transcribing a 911 phonecall at 3am in Newmarket:

Caller: "Hi. Umm ... We've found an elephant walking down the street near the community centre, the Ray Twinney."

Operator: "Sorry?"

Caller: "We've found an elephant walking down the street. Like the ones from, like, the circus at the Ray Twinney centre. One of them got loose and it's walking down the street."

For the next few minutes, the caller explains that there are, in fact, at least two fully grown, trainer-less elephants milling about.

The second affirms what I’ve been saying for decades: the fashion of wearing underwear increases literacy rates.

The Author Stirs...

2007-06-28T18:03:00.000-04:00

Apologies, Blogfans.

Apologies to all my faithful readers who, day after day, logged in over the past 6 weeks to the same picture filler, the calming green background devoid of inspirational and thought-provoking words. Sorry to all of you who came to this web address, and wondered what weighty topic would finally put my fingers back on my iBook and draw me out of my blogging slump.

Well, it's the Spice Girls, ladies and gentlemen... and they're reuniting!

Oh, glory be to this 1998 revival! Bring back girl power and sparkly micro-shorts and hit factory tunes that are played in between Madonna and Kylie at gay clubs across the land! (Okay, maybe just in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver!) Bring back Christmas singles and Spice Girls chocolate bars and drunken arguments over the feminist principles of the world's most successful girl band!

But most of all, bring back my blogging already!

Can You Hear Me Now?

2007-05-15T20:19:00.000-04:00

"Hello? No, I'm on the boat. The boat. I'm crossing the river. The river. You're breaking up..."

A man chats on his cellphone while crossing the river in Dhaka, Bangladesh. (photo from bbc.co.uk)

Cuckoo Clocks, Neutrality and the World's Most Popular Font

2007-05-09T21:48:00.000-04:00

Who knew there could be so much buzz about a typeface?

Helvetica, the typeface used in the corporate logos of Gap, Panasonic and Tupperware, turns 50 this year. Lars Mueller has managed to write an entire book about the Swiss font and a documentary devoted to the typeface was screened back in March at the SXSW Film Festival in Texas.

According to Neville Brody, a graphic designer and typographer interviewed for an article on the BBC website:

"Typefaces control the message. Choice of font dictates what you think about something before you even read the first word. Imagine Shakespeare in large capital drop shadow. Our response would be quite different towards the content."

Perhaps this is why teachers around the world use Comic Sans as the default worksheet font (my English cousin pointed this out, rolling her eyes): it says, “Hey kids! Do this worksheet that I’ve made to look super-fun, but is actually quite boring and serves only to allow me a few minutes of quiet time at my desk.”

There is actually a Ban Comic Sans website where you can buy merchandise, sign a petition and post photos.

So what is YOUR favourite font? Is it the Helvetica rip-off, Arial? Do you like the old school typewriter feel of Courier? Do you like the impact of, um, Impact? Or do you exist in the world of Zapf Dingbats?

Or do you have better things to do than care about types of typeface?

Are You There, Allah? It's Me, Margaret...

2007-04-22T20:04:00.000-04:00

Dear Margaret Wente

I am not a huge fan of yours on a good day. I find you oppressively right-wing, with no empathy for anyone other than white, middle class newspaper columnists.

Your column this Saturday (which, to be honest, I rarely read because of the reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph) was a loosely veiled attack on Islam, the veil being the completely inappropriate one of the killings at Virginia Tech.

Yes, I know you mentioned nothing of Islam, just jihadists. I’m sure you meant the fundamental jihadists, not the everyday Muslims who follow this pillar of Islam through non-violent interpretations. And I’m sure those Muslims would be horrified at the comparison of Cho Seung-Hui, a young man with serious mental illness, to fundamental jihadists. As am I.

How can you possibly use the commonalities of a “martyr video” and “military garb and guns” to compare the two? What you see in Cho Seung-Hui’s video is his pent up anger at a society in which he felt powerless and invisible. His “manifesto” and posturing finally gave him the power he must have felt he lacked much of his life.

The “insane regime with an army of young men to do its bidding” is about poverty and lack of education. Cho Seung-Hui’s cold-blooded killing was about depression and a sense of alienation. Young, fundamental jihadists kill because they feel part of a larger group; Cho Seung-Hui killed because he felt a complete disconnection with any kind of group.

The killings at Virginia Tech were a horrifying and upsetting event. Do not use the tragedy as a platform for criticism of a religion that you (and I) know very little about.

Sincerely,
Steph

Don't Panic, But A Husky's Head Was Trapped in a Wall Yesterday...

2007-04-21T11:54:00.000-04:00

Either there's not much going on in the world right now, or the employees of the BBC news website are off enjoying the nice weather (London is experiencing similar conditions to Toronto this weekend). This article about a six-month-old Husky getting his head stuck in a wall in Hampshire was posted yesterday, and when I was on the BBC website this morning, the piece was in the top most read list (which begs the question, why aren't the readers of the website out enjoying the lovely weather?).

On that note, I'm off for some heliotherapy...

April Showers, April Shootings

2007-04-17T19:33:00.000-04:00

Leah McLaren, who I love to hate (and who fully stole the first seasonal reference of April being the cruellest month from me), wrote about her negative physiological and psychological reactions to spring in her column this past Saturday.

While the rest of us are coming out of hibernation and experiencing a lift in spirits, it appears that those with mental illnesses like manic depression and psychosis experience an increase in symptoms in the spring. McLaren interviewed Tatyana Barankin, a clinical psychiatrist affiliated with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health:

"April and May are not easy months for psychiatrists," she told me over the phone between patients. "Manic behaviour and psychosis are often exacerbated by the weather. Our moods are very affected by the amount of light we get and while very often depression lifts, that does not apply to anxiety or manic behaviour."

Interesting, I thought, and continued reading the Style section.

But then yesterday, the shooting at Virginia Tech occurred. And it reminded me of Columbine, which also happened in April during my first year of university.

Of the 19 shootings in the past 10 years that have occurred in US schools, nearly half (42%) have happened in March, April or May. Compare that to 26% of the shootings occurring in September, October or November. February, June and December each have one shooting occurrence whereas January, July and August have seen no mass killings at US schools.

McLaren’s reaction was diagnosed as “anniversary reaction” brought on by the memories of exam stress. One would expect that Cho Seung-hui, the man named as the shooter at Virginia Tech, and who had been referred for counselling because of work produced in his creative writing course, perhaps had more going on.

Maybe he would have identified with the awkward and painful reawakening that Eliot writes about in the first few lines of his oft-quoted poem, The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

New Format, Odd Title

2007-04-14T12:47:00.000-04:00

It’s spring and it’s time for a new look. I thought a nice soothing green would be appropriate.

And in honour of this new look, I would like to draw your attention to The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, a book that has won for Oddest Title of the Year a prize offered by The Bookseller.

Second place was awarded to Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Dagestan and Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence came in third.

The winners were chosen by internet votes.

link to BBC story

Guess the Sports Equipment

2007-04-13T19:12:00.000-04:00

I would have been impressed if anyone could actually guess this sport being played in Kyrgyzstan. It is the national game of Kok-Boru, and seems to be a take on polo (or, to avoid Euro-centrism, perhaps polo is a take on Kok-Boru). Can anyone guess what the players have to pick up and throw at a target?

Hodges Has His Day

2007-04-12T22:28:00.000-04:00

Did you catch CSI tonight? Had I more faith in the North American viewing public I would venture to say that the show’s popularity is gleaned from the inventive plotlines and characterization.

Tonight’s episode did something that I don’t think has ever been done on a television drama (in my television viewing lifetime). The peripheral characters (Simms & Hodges etc.) and their plotline were brought to the forefront while the main characters (Grissom & Greg etc.) and their crime scenes were relegated to the briefest of glimpses.

The episode was akin to the brilliant Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard, a play which thrusts Hamlet’s bumbling D-list friends into the protagonistic spotlight (fully made up that word). We follow the trifling (but not inconsequential) movements of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that occur when they are not “onstage” with Hamlet. Scenes from the actual Shakespeare play that feature Hamlet’s friends are interwoven into Stoppard’s play. Tonight, CSI followed the secondary characters as they tried to solve the Miniature Killer case. The main characters’ cases, usually the focal point of each episode, served as background annoyances, slipping in and out of Hodges’s quest to find a common link between each miniature.

Brilliant.

Didn’t like the lucky day montage, though.

Stop Interrupting!

2007-04-06T14:05:00.000-04:00

I had a conversation with a friend of mine last night about the drastic change in the amount of time I spend on the internet these days as compared to just two years ago. I can’t even think what I did pre-2003 when I didn’t have either a computer or an internet connection at home.

It is widely accepted that we’re living our lives online more and more (my previous post about web communities discusses this), from banking to information retrieval to social networking. I have a daily roster of websites and e-mail addresses I absolutely must check to feel that I am up-to-date in my life. My three e-mail addresses make three different sounds to alert me of any incoming mail, which I check promptly. And my cellphone makes a pleasing little bling-bling sound with every incoming text message, the tone filling me with joyful anticipation (Oooo! Who could this be?!) every time it goes off.

In this month’s The Walrus magazine, John Lorinc writes an article about how all the technological distractions in our society are actually making it difficult for our brains to function effectively.

To illustrate the main idea of the article: as I (try to) focus on writing this blog post, I have already had two email alerts and one phone call. For the two links above, I navigated away from my Word document and onto the internet to search for the links. Lorinc asserts that these interruptions, though minor, actually have a complex process in our brains:

“When multi-tasking, the brain’s executive processor performs a two-stage operation: the first is ‘goal shifting’ (e.g., shifting from editing a text file to checking e-mail), and the second is ‘rule activation’ (turning off the learned rules for editing on a word processing program and turning on the rules for managing the email program that’s being used).”

These shifts of focus in our brains take a significant amount of time, and when added up over weeks and months, can affect productivity. Joshua Rubinstein, a psychologist interviewed for the article, notes: “Multi-tasking may seem more efficient on the surface, but may actually take more time in the end.”

So slow and steady does win the race, it would seem. Then how do we slow down and ignore distractions in an interruption-dense, fast-paced world?

I think learning to ignore alerts, be they ringing phones or e-mail beeps, until a more appropriate time is one way. The phonecall I ignored while writing this blog post came just as I was in the middle of a thought and I knew if I stopped to answer, I’d lose it. (I did, however, jump up to check the call display, to see who it was.) I have really only realized recently that one doesn’t have to answer a ringing phone (especially if one is in the middle of a particularly intriguing plot point while viewing Lost).

I am also learning that I live a life where very few emails are so pressing and time-sensitive that I need to read and respond to them immediately (unless maybe if it’s someone offering Toronto FC v. LA Galaxy tickets). In fact, I’ve become so good at not RSVPing to invitations over email, that I’ve acquired a bit of a reputation among some of my friends.

And on MSN Messenger, an instant chat programme which allows you to type instant messages back and forth with your contacts online, I have permanently set my status to “offline”. I found if I was listed as “online” I would get several people messaging me with non-essential chat – yet another interruption when working at my computer. (Both the email and Messenger examples lead on to the question of online etiquette – how do you politely decline a Messenger conversation and how long is it appropriate to take to reply to an email?)

The ability to prioritize tasks is a hallmark of a good multi-tasker. So perhaps now the multi-tasker needs to slightly hone that skill to prioritizing their attention to communication input – do I really need to read that email right now? Is that text message going to be vital to my task at hand?

And as for me and my mild internet addiction, maybe sometimes I will sleep my computer, switch off my cellphone and float back to those pre-2003 halcyon days when the only alerts I would hear would be the slap of the newspaper at my doorstep or a soft knock on my door.

Laundromatto Al Fresco

2007-03-31T14:34:00.000-04:00

I come from a family that has always air-dried clothing throughout the year. In the summer, sheets and dresses flap in the wind on a spinning clothesline in the sunny part of the garden. In the winter, they hang from lines erected in the basement and drying racks in the spare room. I was often envious of the Downy-scented sweatshirts of my friends and couldn’t understand my mother’s love of “that fresh scent” that clothes dried outdoors get.

My dad told me that driers use 25% of a household energy bill. According to Project Laundry List, the figure is 5-10%. And although my father and I share the trait of sometimes forgetting to cite the sources of our statistics (which always seem to support our arguments), I would guess that 25% is a good estimate for his household, which has been eco-friendly and energy efficient for decades – so adding the use of a drier regularly probably would constitute about a quarter of his household's energy use.

Project Laundry List is a website dedicated to educating “people about how simple lifestyle modifications, including air-drying one’s clothes, reduce our dependence on environmentally and culturally costly energy sources” (quote taken from Mission Statement). It showcases artists’ interpretations of the beauty of clotheslines, offers links to environmentally friendly products and offers support for communities banned from using clotheslines. I didn’t know this actually was a problem, but Cecily Ross addresses it in her article in the Style section of the Globe and Mail today, where I found the link to the website.

Ross interviews the website’s founder, Alexander Lee, who believes that “a lot of people see laundry on a line as a flag of poverty.” That was certainly one of my reasons for wanting my mother to buy fabric softener and use a drier: all my other friends had slick machines that offered up soft and fluffy, scented clothes, whereas I had to do a couple of squats to get my jeans to lose the stiff consistency of an indoor-dried garment. I felt the odd one out, not keeping up with the laundering practises of the Joneses. When I went away to university, I mechanically dried all of my clothes with abandon; fading colour and losing elasticity in the process.

Fifteen years ago, the environmentally-friendly lifestyle with its patchouli-scented products were the domain of hippies and David Suzuki followers. And people who kept their houses at a lower temperature in winter and used lights only when necessary were considered misers. Now it has become de rigueur to wear organic cotton, use unbleached tampons and clean your house with green products. There had been a huge push for LCD lightbulbs and EnergyStar appliances that use less electricity. I am hoping that this trend will spread to how we clean our laundry: a clothesline of brightly coloured attire flapping in the wind will no longer represent the home of a poor family, but the home of an environmentally aware family.

And everyone, including me, will crave “that fresh scent” that my mother so loves.

Oh, My Sweet Jesus…

2007-03-30T17:10:00.000-04:00

A New York gallery’s inclusion of a sculpture by Canadian-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro has riled a Catholic group in the United States (link to BBC story).

The sculpture, entitled “My Sweet Lord,” is of a naked and crucified Jesus Christ.

But it is not the nudity that has got the Catholic League all worked up (Christ is usually depicted with a loincloth). Nor is it the timing of the piece’s exposition, so close to Easter where Christians around the world mark the death of Jesus and his resurrection. It is the material that Cavallaro chose to use.

The sculpture is made entirely out of chocolate.

I’m never quite sure why religious groups get all worked up over religious subjects being portrayed in non-traditional ways: In 1975, Edwina Sandys created a bronze sculpture entitled “Christa” which portrays Christ on the cross as a woman. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which won an award sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, is a photograph of a crucifix under an amalgam of urine and cow’s blood. And there was much controversy over the “Sensation” exhibit back in 1999 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where the piece “Holy Virgin Mary,” a rendering of Mary as a black woman splattered with real elephant dung, was displayed.

If I was to try my inexperienced hand at deconstructing Cavallaro’s symbolic intentions, I might say that he was making a comment on the commodification of Christian holidays: most of us secularists associate Easter with chocolate eggs and the Easter Bunny, not death and resurrection. Cavallaro portrays the preeminent figure in Christianity with the medium that has supplanted all others as the substance with which Easter symbols are made. And I would venture to make the assertion that many Christian groups would agree with his thesis, if they could actually make sense of my last sentence there.

How do you think the Catholic League would react to a performance art piece where people broke off bits of the chocolate Jesus, thus actually eating the body of Christ in a Alterna-Eucharist?!

Keep On Bloggin'

2007-03-26T21:13:00.000-04:00

Following along from yesterday’s post, this blog post in the Guardian is interesting: it seems that the creation of new blogs peaked back in October, but people are not keeping up with their wordsmithery (shut up, it’s a word in my mind). There are currently a whole bunch of untended blogs floating about in the cyber-nebula, receiving hits by loyal readers, but to no reward (I’m talking to you, mxi).

When I first entered into the blogosphere, all I could find were boring posts about what people did on a daily basis (see The Banal Blogosphere from February 2006), but soon I built up a tidy catalogue of blogs that went beyond the silly antics of the author’s cat or a blow-by-blow recount of a fight the author had with her ex-boyfriend.

So maybe this is the next stage in the evolution of the blog. Once considered a pastime or self-indulgent endeavour, blogging has been taken up by politicians, TV personalities and struggling writers exercising their wordsmithery. (I said, shut up.)

My Internet Boyfriend in Michigan

2007-03-25T22:58:00.000-04:00

There was a time when if you mentioned you’d met someone on the internet, it was laughable (remember Napoleon Dynamite’s brother meeting his wife online?) and often questionable (it’s easy to have a perfect boyfriend if no one’s actually met him). But these days, almost all forms of internet socializing are acceptable.

I came to this realization when a friend of mine told me that she lived in the same neighbourhood as a guy we used to go to high school with and she saw him quite often. In real life, she had never stopped to say hello, but within the medium of Facebook, she added him as a friend and made contact.

Over the past few weeks that I have been signed up with Facebook, I have “added friends”* who were people I went to grade school with, people I’ve worked with, boys I’ve gone on a few dates with, friends of friends and one guy who I think I’ve said 3 words to in my life. All contact has been over the website, although I’ve had two suggestions of getting the “web communities” together at an event.

Which slightly scares me. And I don’t really know why. Maybe because you hear of all the cyber-stalking that goes on (a benign form of which I myself have indulged in on occasion – my brother likes to refer to looking at people’s Facebook profiles without their knowledge as “passive stalking”) or maybe I still harbour some Napoleon Dynamite bias, if that is the right word.

I have been reading and commenting on the insightful and perspicacious blog That Shakespeherian Rag over the past couple of months, a blog which I found through a series of serendipitous six-degrees-of-separation-esque events (okay, I dated his friend), and recently found myself in the same room with the author. Due to my aversion to meeting blog buddies in real life, I chickened out at the offer to meet face-to-face (see my comment on the Quiz Night post). I felt like my web community should be separate from my real-life community.

Which brings me to internet dating. I haven’t tried it, and I’m still not at a point in my life where I’m willing to try it. But really, being on Lavalife if you’re single is a totally normal thing. Many relationships have started on dating websites and I personally know of two marriages that have happened as a result of hooking up online.

Our lives are lived online more and more. Instead of going to the bank to pay bills, you do it on EasyWeb. Why bother buying an actual newspaper when you can read most of the articles on the online version. Memos have long been a thing of the past because information is now disseminated via e-mail. I don’t even check the weather on TV anymore: the Weather Network is bookmarked as one of my daily sites. And now, instead of wasting time and money at the bar, you can sort through hundreds of potential suitors and not end up kissing the wrong one at 3am just as the ugly lights are coming on.

But ay, here’s the rub: my real-life friends have become my online friends. So why can’t my online friends become my real-life friends?

Ignoring the choplogic, I think the answer lies in our innate sociability as humans. Sure, the internet acts as a conduit for social introductions, but it doesn’t replace the day-to-day interactions with people you know. And just as you may smile and wave at your letter carrier and leave it at that, you may poke or write a wall message to one of your Facebook friends and never really go beyond that.

And although using Lavalife as a forum to meet your partner is completely reasonable nowadays, conducting an entire courtship over the internet, without ever meeting, is still considered just plain weird.

Now I wonder if my friend will stop next time she runs into her Facebook friend in her neighbourhood and make their virtual socialization into a tangible interaction…

* For those of you not on Facebook, a) what’s the delay? and b) adding a friend is when you find someone, or someone finds you, and you add them to your visual list of friends on your profile page, for everyone to see how popular you are.

Don't Wanna Be an American Idiot

2007-03-20T21:38:00.000-04:00

I am guilty of falling prey to the beguiling allure of absolutely shit TV. I watched the first season of Canada’s Next Top Model. I got caught in the roadwreck that was the beginning of American Idol this year. I even caught myself lingering on a Best of Jerry Springer special, watching in horrified fascination the multiple bust-ups that broke out over numerous bleeped-out screaming arguments. And that was in 2006.

But I couldn’t watch Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? beyond the first show. Neither could Heather Mallick, it seems.

The show pits tertiary-educated individuals against a “class” of 5 grade five students. The aim of the well-mediated and incisively edited show is to make fun of the adults, who have great difficulty with America’s 5th grade curriculum. But this is nothing new – we make fun of the stupid and their sage comments regularly: the character Vicky Pollard on Little Britain and the show Talking to Americans with Rick Mercer are two examples. The documentary Stupidity looks at a culture with access to education and knowledge, but chooses ignorance.

Mallick asserts that the show has taken a new turn in the bankability of stupid: there is lots of money to be made off stupid people (she cites the London Sun, a British tabloid, as a moneymaking example), and there are lots of stupid people to make fun of, but Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? makes money off making fun of stupid people. Follow?

This is where I disagree with Mallick. The show is so carefully mediated that you would think the contestants are reading from a script. They um and ah, and talk through what little they remember of the subject from grade school. The external monologues build up the dramatic tension to maddening heights while we sit on the edges of our armchairs, wondering if the Harvard grad is going to know how to find the area of a triangle with a height of 6 inches and a base of 2. And just when they settle on answer c, the host takes us to a commercial break and we throw our arms in the air along with the well-educated plonker who really isn’t sure if the answer is 6, but man, winning fifty grand would be good…

Mallick worries that we will be caught in this stupidity cycle: “It's a circle of government and industry working in tandem: the Bush Administration guts the American education system, which makes Fox programming attractive to larger numbers of people, who are then ridiculed by people like me, but now also by Fox itself.”

But can the American education system be that bad if every single one of the kids on the episode I watched got every single answer right? Perhaps it is a case of the kiddies being immersed in the curriculum and remembering what they’d learned a few weeks prior, whereas the adults have not used the formula to calculate the area of a triangle since grade 10 math class.

Or maybe this interminable stream of reality shows is our culture sluicing out the last of a stupid generation, wiping the slate clean for the next generation of kids (not one of them left behind).

I’ll end with an anecdote from Rick Mercer’s Talking to Americans to illustrate my point: when asking an American woman her thoughts about grade 7 students not being able to find their home state on an unmarked map of Canada, she answers without a beat, while her son, aged 8 or 9, holds a quizzical look on his face for several seconds before announcing, “Hang on - Canada has provinces!”*

* the clip is right at the end, but the video is worth the 7 and a half minutes...

Just Because...

2007-03-18T23:00:00.000-04:00

...it's Sunday night and I'm trying everything possible to put off the impending doom that is Monday morning. Goddamn Newfies with their St. Patrick's day holiday...

Good Beer, Good Craic

2007-03-17T13:00:00.000-04:00

Today is St. Patrick’s Day, a day where the non-Irish among us like to dress up in silly leprechaun hats, drink green beer and dance to the Pogues. Those of us with true Celtic heritage turn our noses up at these gaudy commercialized traditions (only because we’re draining the last of our pint glass, in anticipation of the next one being poured). So in honour of this most hallowed of holidays, I present you, dear reader, with 13 facts you may not have known about Ireland:

1. St. Patrick’s Day is a public holiday on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean, as well as in Newfoundland and Labrador. (Why? Why are we not getting Monday off here in the anti-Irish totalitarian state of Ontario?)

2. The Guinness Brewery in Dublin pays 45 Irish pounds a year as part of its 9000 year lease. (Not sure what happened when the euro became currency.)

3. Ireland is the most successful country in the Eurovision Song Contest, winning it seven times.

4. Donegal Bay has some of the biggest waves in Europe and Bundoran, a town on the bay, has recently hosted European Championship surfing competitions.

5. It is thought that the word “quiz” was invented by Richard Daly in the 1830s. The Dublin theatre owner bet that he could make a nonsense word familiar in 48 hours. Daly told his employees to write the word on walls all over Dublin. (There is some murkiness here: some etymologists maintain the word was already in use at the time. Most agree that “quiz” did not hold its current definition until later on that century.)

6. The Irish scientist John Tyndall was the first person to explain why the sky is blue. (answer here)

7. The tune of “The Star Spangled Banner” was written by the (blind) Irish harpist Turlough O’Carolan.

8. Muhammad Ali’s great grandfather was born in Ennis, County Clare.

9. Aran Island sweaters (those woolly, off-white pullovers) have distinctive “family weaves,” developed so if a fisherman drowned, his washed-up sweater would confirm him as dead and not missing.

10. The 15 main railway stations of Ireland are named after the leaders of the 1916 uprising.

11. A Eurobarometer survey has listed Ireland as the nation with the highest rates of binge-drinking in the EU.

12. Muckanaghederdauhaulia in County Galway holds the title of Longest place name in Ireland.

13. Residents of isolated areas in Ireland will soon be able to take advantage of free shuttle buses to take them to and from the local pub, paid for by the Irish government. (This sounds too good to be true, but I guess we should never underestimate the luck of the Irish, or their resolve to go for a couple rounds of drinks.)

Slainte!

Sources:
www.ireland-fun-facts.com
www.wikipedia.com
blogs.guardian.co.uk
www.bbc.co.uk

Categorizing the Quiz

2007-03-16T11:22:00.000-04:00

So, I’m a bit of a trivia aficionado. Maybe it comes from my competitive nature, maybe my slight bent toward intellectual snobbery, but wherever it stems from, I do enjoy a good quiz night.

As you’ll find in a previous post, I cut my teeth in the quizzes of East Sussex, honing my craft in the suburbs of Sydney and am now at the top of my game at the Duke of York in Toronto.

Or so I thought. After a brief hiatus from season 5 of Pubstumpers (because I, like other mammals, go into hibernation mode in the snow and cold), I was back to parade my prowess with a slightly shuffled team.

We quickly realized that this was not to be the night of domination I had expected. But happy to enjoy a few drinks and the quizmaster’s repartee, I settled back and did a little social analyzing of the crowd. I have categorized trivia participants into the following groups:

GRAD STUDENTS

And Grad student types. These are people whose lives are based around knowledge, albeit quite specific knowledge. But people who enjoy being in school for a good percentage of their lives probably have a fairly good general knowledge base, too.

EX-PATS

I have no history on the pub quiz, but I’m pretty sure it started in Britain. So any Brits that are far from home probably find comfort in the basement of a pub, beer served by the pint, and a couple of geography questions. I counted 3 English accents this past Tuesday.

TWENTYSOMETHING GIRLS

I do not mean to dismiss or denigrate this trivia demographic – I’m sure some of these women are here for the intellectual stimulation. But I have it on good (bartender) authority that a lot of the ladies present come for the aesthetics of the quizmaster.

RANDOM FRIENDS OF STEPH

I’m always trying to add new people to my team. I have a core group of friends who refuse because they don’t think they’re any good at general knowledge, to which I say: the last time you were called on to produce random facts was when you played Trivial Pursuit at age 14, and of course you weren’t going to do as well as your 30-year-old self who has taken Modern Western Civilization, watched a few more National Geographic shows and dated a guy with an unusual interest in comic books and/or an extensive record collection.

Next week. Next week I will break 80.

Cricket and Politics

2007-03-15T15:05:00.000-04:00

As I write this, Zimbabwe is playing Ireland in the World Cup of Cricket, a nice little connection between this post and my last post about sports and politics. While the Ireland v. England game at Croke Park in Dublin invoked memories of political strife, this cricket match today is steeped not in memory, but in current events.

It is not the teams that make this match significant, it is the fact that Zimbabwe is competing in a world sporting event (and in the only sport in which they have any kind of international ranking) while the governments of many of its opposing teams are discussing further sanctions against Mugabe and his government.

Zimbabwe has been on a downward spiral for a while now: President Mugabe has ruled the country since 1980, maintaining office throughout several shady elections. He imposed land redistribution in 2000 in order to make owning farms more equitable after British colonialism (most farms were owned by whites), which the opposition believes destroyed what was once one of the more developed economies in Africa. Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate is the highest in the world at 1700% and there are constant food and fuel shortages. In 2004, it was officially reported that a third of the adult population was HIV positive and there was almost no access to anti-retroviral drugs for those stricken with the disease.

The day before the opening ceremony of the Cricket World Cup, a “Save Zimbabwe” prayer meeting was broken up by police enforcing a ban on political gatherings imposed by Mugabe. One protester was killed and Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was arrested and beaten. The photos of Tsvangirai leaving the hospital have sparked international criticism and talk of extended sanctions.

And all the while, the sporting community tallies runs and critiques bowlers. Andy Bull pointed this out in his sport blog in the Guardian today. Bull notes that a register of talented, top-of-their-game players have refused to play for their country because of its political situation and we should be asking why.

I watched my first international game of cricket in Sydney in 2001 (Australia vs. Zimbabwe), with Buck, a white Zimbabwean who had fought in the Second Chimurenga. Buck supported his team with passion, despite the fact that several of his friends were losing their farms and livelihoods with every man out. Buck said he would never live in Zim again, but he would never lose his fervour for the national cricket team.

So yes, we should be asking why. We should be keeping a close eye on Zimbabwe's human rights abuses and act accordingly as a global community. But we should also see Zimbabwe's cricket games for what they are: a uniting of countrymen within a team, and a meeting of countries within a sport; all for the love of the game. And it would be a shame to lose one of the world's best national cricket teams because players cannot play for a team whose country has forsaken them.

Paris Hilton and Other Clutter

2007-03-11T20:21:00.000-04:00

Back in January, some enterprising individuals bought the contents of Paris Hilton’s storage unit (after she failed to settle the bill) and posted the pictures, videos and other itemsthey found inside on a website (parisexposed.com) that has since been taken down.

Now, I know that Paris Hilton is not the most appropriate of barometers with which to measure trends in our society, but an article in the Globe this weekend by Suzanne Gannon noted that the number of self-storage units in the U.S. are up by 90% since 1995.

Ninety percent.

One could argue that this is a space issue: more of us are moving to cities, city real estate is expensive, we’re buying smaller places, therefore we don’t have enough space in our dwellings to store all of our belongings.

But surely this logic doesn’t apply to Ms. Hilton, whose family owns a series of temporary storage units around the world (albeit, for human storage).

I think the more feasible answer is that we just have (and covet) more things. A simple trip through IKEA (which I made today) overwhelms you with a profusion of items you didn’t know you needed, but now you can’t live without. I picked up and put down a glass pitcher (for what? my homemade lemonade I make on sweltering March afternoons?). I mulled the possibility of bamboo shoots in a glass vase (because unlike the other plants in my apartment that are hanging on for dear life, bamboo would proliferate under my care). And yes, I even considered a collapsible storage unit to help contain my accumulating effects.

I guess humans just like to have “things”. They may represent status, memories, or, heaven forbid, actually have a function.

Maybe the guys at parisexposed.com are onto something. They've helped Ms. Hilton by taking her possessions and storing them virtually on the internet. And now she doesn't have to worry about paying that pesky bill each month - she can log in and enjoy her digital memories, along with the rest of the world...

The Sacred Art of Avoidance

2007-03-04T11:11:00.000-05:00

So, I’m spending my weekend writing report cards (the pointlessness of which I could discuss at length with you, dear reader, should you elect to join me in sharing the pricier bottle of tempranillo at that tapas place in Kensington). Yes, it is an exercise in composition (which is supposed to be my bag), but if asked, I might compare it to repeatedly jabbing a sharpened pencil into my eye: that is, quite unpleasant.

Back in the day, when I had to complete such writing assignments as essays and lab reports (and the odd poem, god bless those Creative Writing courses), my living space would be at its cleanest because I felt I couldn’t work unless every last piece of dust and debris had been seen to. The more metacognitive individual might have referred to this process as procrastination.

Well, as I look around my apartment maintenant, it remains in a bit of a state: clothes strewn on chairs (not on the floor – yet), dirty dishes awaiting lavation, diaphanous clusters of dust bunnies secretly growing under chairs and behind electronic devices…

And my report cards, nowhere close to completion.

Why am I forsaking this oft-tested method of house cleaning?

The answer, my friends, is the internet. When I am trying to decide the repercussions of assigning little Johnny a D rather than a C in Science, all of a sudden the need to know the movements of Kate Moss and Posh Spice become of the utmost importance. So does checking to see how many people have read my blog in the 15 minutes since I last checked (oh… none). And maybe I’ll just check the BBC website to see if anything important has happened in the world since checking that news feed 20 minutes ago.

The internet, especially this high speed “always connected” form, has proven to be quite the distraction. One wonders if having the dial-up version might limit my need for the immediate gratification of answers to random questions that pop into my head (I wonder if I can find that Swiss guy I met in Alice Springs in 2000. I know, I’ll check facebook again).

The internet, generally, and facebook , specifically. I have eschewed the popular mySpace and ignored invitations to join facebook in the past, because I thought it was very high school, with its visual list of “friends” and shameless self-centredness of a webpage devoted entirely to oneself. But hell, that is essentially what this blog is, and I am my own biggest fan, so I signed up.

And so, let the addiction begin. You could spend hours getting lost in the web of friends of friends’ friends, occasionally stumbling upon a boy you liked in grade 5 (oh, Adam Purcell) or used to go out with your roommate but is now married to a girl who is friends with your friend’s little sister (yes, you, Carey Avery). There’s also the distraction of messages, friend requests, wall posts and pokes, a feature which remains unexplained, even in the FAQ section of the website.

At this moment, not only are my report cards unfinished, the demands of my household are not being attended to (nice use of the passive voice, eh?). But my knowledge of the whereabouts and associates of a number of people who I used to know has increased tenfold. And yes, I do see that in composing this post about the art of procrastination, I am actually indulging in it.

Now if only I could explain why Johnny’s knowledge of the inner workings of animal habitats and communities has actually decreased tenfold, I’d be on my way…

Caption Contest! Caption Contest!

2007-03-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

What, praytell, is the heir to the throne saying on his trip to Qatar with his new missus?

How cool is this?

2007-03-02T23:44:00.000-05:00

Cargo has just released a lipstick line called PlantLove, the tubes of which are made from a corn derivative that is completely biodegradeable. The actual lipstick does not contain any nasty petroleum (or mineral oil, for that matter).

But I haven't told you the best part yet...

The lipstick comes in a biodegradeable package that is suffused with wildflower seeds, so if you soak and then plant the package, you get lovely flowers!

What Book's It Going to Be Then, eh?

2007-02-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

Several blogs have posted this test that matches your personality with a great novel.

I was A Clockwork Orange (57% Great Book – whatever that means, no one seems to know). Interesting that the novel follows the protagonist through his hedonistic, unsympathetic youth to his jail time and then his integration back into society. He looks back at his youth, and although he knows what he did was wrong, he believes it is part of growing up.

Interesting because, I took the test after I witnessed several adolescents at lunchtime the other day, not doing anything untoward, but just being adolescents. And I thought, as I often have, what a horrible age, but also necessary. I had to go through being 14 to learn those lessons. I wish the 30 year old me could have imparted wisdom on the 14 year old me, but I know that she never would have listened…

Oh, and I won't take it personally that the book I was aligned with has one screwed up main character...

Running in Tokyo

2007-02-27T21:06:00.000-05:00

My friend Mikael is in Tokyo, having just run the marathon there. He and his boyfriend have kept a blog and I’ve provided links to the posts that made me laugh out loud at Mikael’s clever writing:

"...both of us feel like shiny neon magic this morning!"

”Under different circumstances this might have been strange.”

Photo used without permission. (Is that okay, Mark? I just love it!)

Rugby vs. Politics

2007-02-25T10:01:00.000-05:00

Ireland have beat England 43-13 in a Six Nations rugby match played at Croke Park, a setting steeped in the history of Irish-British relations.

It was here, in November 1920, that British forces fired into the crowd during a Gaelic football match in what was thought to be a retaliation for the killing of several members of the Cairo gang (a group of British Intelligence agents) by the IRA. These deaths, along with several shootings in Dublin later that evening and the death of some Irish prisoners at the hands of British guards, is why November 21st became known as Bloody Sunday.

The recently refurbished Croke Park, home of the Gaelic Athletic Association, has only hosted national sporting events (Gaelic football and hurling) up until this year. The Irish rugby union and soccer teams have been granted permission to use Croke Park while their sporting ground, Landsdowne Road, undergoes construction. The first international game was against France two weeks ago, and unfortunately for the Irish, France won by 3 points.

The historic Ireland-England game follows several key events in the Northern Ireland Peace process in the last 18 months. In September 2005, the IRA decommissioned all of its weapons; this past January, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, voted to support the Police Service of Northern Ireland ; and on March 7th we will see elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly which has been suspended since October 2002 following allegations of Republican spying. This is all leading up to the March 26th deadline for devolution (Irish home rule).

Just as in the political sphere, the rugby game was not without tension. There was much discussion as to whether or not England’s national anthem, God Save the Queen, should be sung before the match. The expression of English pride was perhaps not appropriate in light of the former Croke Park events, however the anthem was sung and the Irish fans were respectful. It was, though, an emotionally charged game for the Irish team and some players had tears in their eyes as they lined up at the beginning of the match.

Victorious, perhaps on several levels, the Irish team shook hands with the English players at the end of the match. And so sport reflects the political climate. It has been a long and slow move toward peace in Northern Ireland, but if politicians can take inspiration from the Croke Park match, perhaps the different sides can meet, debate, and then shake hands at the end of it.

For more on Irish history, read my post on Ireland's Many Histories.

You Might As Well Skip Lavalife When...

2007-02-24T13:16:00.000-05:00

There was a Seinfeld episode where Elaine breaks up with a man she's dating because he failed to use an exclamation mark in a note relaying a phone message about the birth of her friend's baby. I, myself am prone to overreactions at the flagrant misuse of grammar and have been known to apologize for a date's inability to spell common words before apologizing for his inability to be respectful and caring. However, I have never actually broken up with someone over punctuation.

I have, though, been guilty of breaking up with people over ridiculous reasons. Purely for your enjoyment (and not your psychoanalysis, thank you very much), here is a list of five boys (names have been changed) and the arbitrary reasons why I elected to discontinue the "relationship" (using a variety of break up strategies about which I have previously written).

1. Chet, from Ottawa, was driving us downtown and failed to stop behind a streetcar that was letting passengers off, eliciting a loud streetcar honk and several angry faces as we whizzed by. I know, I know - he was from Ottawa, but we're not talking rational explanations here. Someone could have died.

2. Another time, when I was gesturing to the lake with my arm (we were romantically strolling along the beach), Pablo reached up and took my hand so that we were posed in an awkward hand-holding arrangement. I brought our linked hands down, casually extricated myself, and promptly implemented the phone-call fade away strategy.

3. Boris's bald head would not stop sweating for the entirety of the date and he actually had to go and wash it twice.

4. Bobby thought it appropriate to stick his finger in my mouth whilst I was mid-yawn for a second time, even after I had previously requested that he not place his digits in that vicinity (in quite a nasty manner, I might add).

5. Randy, a recycled high school boy, showed potential until he asked for change (and I'm talking the silver kind) after we split the bill at dinner.

And one wonders why I'm still single...

You Know It’s Time To Join Lavalife When…

2007-02-22T21:21:00.000-05:00

Have you heard of this SIMS video game? It simulates the day-to-day life of virtual characters that you programme into your community. You get to make decisions about when they eat, sleep, read, exercise and brush their teeth. You also have to take time to have fun - there is a fun level bar that goes up and down on the game screen.

So here’s the thing. A little over a year ago, two of the girls in my class asked me who I had a crush on. At the time, I was smitten with a boy called Ben, so named him. Unbeknownst to me, they had inputted him as my boyfriend into their SIMS world. Well, yesterday they announced that in the SIMS world, I had just had a baby with Ben (to whom I had been married for a year). I asked them what my job was and they told me that I didn’t have to work because Ben paid for everything. I just read and did fun things like go on vacations.

How bad has it gotten when your virtual self is doing better in life than your actual self?

Dartmouth Chicks?

2007-02-21T19:45:00.000-05:00

I hadn’t realized the full impact of Dixie Chick Natalie Maines’s off-the-cuff comment about being embarrassed to come from the same state as President Bush that she made to London audience back in 2003 until I saw the documentary “Shut up and Sing.” The film details the incredible fallout from Maines’s comment, showing fans’ desertion and aggression toward the band, mainly in the southern Jesusland states. The film flip-flops between the 2003 tour and the band’s resolve to make a new album, two years later, and to restructure their musical identity.

The documentary, ads for which were not run on several American networks, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and had a modest run in theatres this past autumn. (Interestingly enough, when sales for their 2003 tour dropped off in the southern states, they remained strong in Canada and several dates were added – Moosejaw was a possible gig mentioned in the film.) But their five wins at the Grammys last week was a quiet vindication for the band. They left behind their country roots and fans and were embraced by the arts community and a whole new rock fanbase.

Welcome to the United States of Canada, ladies. We’re happy to have you.

The Sony Reader

2007-02-19T19:26:00.000-05:00

This is interesting: Sony has come out with kind of an iBook (wait a minute, where have I heard that before?) where you store digital files of books and then read them off a small computer screen (“smaller than many paperbacks”!). It even comes with an iTunes-esque managing system you load onto your computer.

This could just be one of those new-fangled things that scholarly types decry at first (“But I need to feel the well-worn pages in my hands!” "How can I make notes in the margins?”), but then eventually get used to. We store our music on devices the size of a package of gum, so why not books?

Well, I must agree with those elbow-patched intellectuals – it IS nice to feel the pages beneath your calloused hands (don’t you love the mismatched widths of the pages of some hardcovers, jutting out from between the smooth book jacket?). Folding over the top of a page to mark a particularly good piece of prose is an archaic practice, yes; but has not met with any innovations in the last 600 years, save for the hallowed bookmark, which would be rendered obsolete by the Sony Reader. And though I have browsed extensive CD collections in people’s homes, it is not the same as browsing the shelves of tightly packed books, head cocked to the side, scanning spines.

And, somewhat tellingly, the sample text displayed on the Sony Reader is from The Da Vinci Code. This is a device for the masses. And though I have read (and enjoyed) The Da Vinci Code, I do understand Stephen W. Beattie when he says “if my girlfriend ever chose The Da Vinci Code over me, it would be her way of telling me that we were done.”

Compare and Contrast: Sinead vs Britney

2007-02-17T14:04:00.000-05:00

After checking herself into rehab and then checking out the very next day, Britney Spears has gone and shaved her head (and got a few more tattoos it would seem). Emily Wynne-Hughes, a woman who was present for the tattooing part of the identity crisis, said Britney was “tired of having things plugged into [her hair] and she didn’t want anybody to touch her…”

This coiffure overhaul harkens back to Sinead O’Connor, another troubled songstress, who shaved her head in reaction to her record company telling her to grow her locks to appear more feminine. Could this mean a dalliance into the priesthood for Ms. Spears? Let us compare and contrast...

SINEAD O’CONNOR

Born: December 8th, 1966 in Dublin, Ireland

Children: Jake, Roisin, Shane and Yeshua, by a variety of fathers

Famous ex-boyfriend: BloodSugarSexMagik singer, Anthony Kiedis

High point: covering Prince's song, "Nothing Compares 2 U"

Publicity stunt: tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, sans lament

Insightful Lyrics:

How could I possibly know what I want
When I was only twenty-one?
And there's millions of people
To offer advice and say how I should be
But they're twisted
And they will never be any influence on me

- from The Emperor’s New Clothes

BRITNEY SPEARS

Born: December 2nd, 1981 in McComb, Mississippi

Children: Sean Preston and Jayden James, by a father to a variety of kids

Famous ex-boyfriend: SexyBack singer, Justin Timberlake

High point: covering (barely) her backside with a Catholic schoolgirl-inspired kilt

Publicity stunt: tore up the town on a Saturday night, sans lingerie

Insightful Lyrics:

There is no need to protect me
It’s time that I
Learned to face up to this on my own
I’ve seen so much more than you know now
So don’t tell me to shut my eyes

- from I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

So Tense and a Whip

2007-02-16T18:00:00.000-05:00

The Wordsmith website says that "all the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie," then offers to find the thousands of anagrams your name (or any other word or combination of words) can produce.

The website speaks the truth. Anagrams of my name include:

we step on a danish
a poet had new sins
one pint, sew a dish
nee a hand, piss two

And perhaps the most worrying:

a hand, two penises

(Thanks to Sarah for the link.)

Conjuring the Cold

2007-02-13T21:24:00.000-05:00

So the debate continues: can a writer be trusted to properly evoke a setting where she or he has never been? Marcel Berlins doesn’t think so. Writing in the Guardian, he wonders if an author can “be trusted to deliver the crucial human and emotional elements” if they “can't get the geographical and social background right.” Berlins says he would have been "more satisfied [with Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves if she] had absorbed the atmosphere, the cold and the scenery at first hand." But could he really tell? He even states in his column that perhaps only some Canadian readers will notice minor discrepancies in Penney's descriptions.

My goodness, this issue is getting a lot of press. Note to self: when publishing first novel, admit to some affliction that has some sort of bearing on the creation of the novel, sit back and count the column inches.

Creates, Sweats and Publishes

2007-02-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

I’m always pleased when I hear of authors who set their stories in places they haven’t been. Most of my fictional writing is set in places I have been, and I even embarked on a trip to parts of Africa, as my current writing project is set in Zimbabwe. I never made it to Zimbabwe (due to a mugging incident in Cape Town which occurred within four hours of our arrival there), and this has always remained as an uneasy disconnect in my writing process (as well as in my life in general). I have continued the piece, but with much more research into the landscapes, botany and customs of the region.

So I was gratified to hear that the winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, Stef Penney, set her novel The Tenderness of Wolves in the wilderness of Canada; a place she had never been. Her writing was based on research she had done in the British Library (partly due to her agoraphobia, as was widely reported).

But then along comes Lynn Truss, she of Eats, Shoots and Leaves fame, with this article in which she scoffs at the idea that writers must “write what they know” (a concept that was first taught to me by Natalie on the Facts of Life back in ’86, just as I was finishing my first short story, Sandy Runs Away, a bittersweet tale of a mongrel dog who runs away from a mean family into the arms of an 11 year-old girl with striking similarities to the tenderfoot author, who, coincidently, wouldn’t stop asking her parents for a dog).

Truss writes: “The thing is, we fiction writers are quite touchy when people fail to appreciate the supreme importance of imagination in our work. I love the idea of Penney constructing the landscape of her book from maps and records in the British Library. That was a true creative act. Any fool with a Visa card can buy a ticket and go to look at an expanse of snow.”

I do see her point: a good author relies on their imagination and abilities as a wordsmith to present a scene and transport their reader to a different place and time. And granted, novels have been set in the past (and future) by authors who haven’t actually lived during those times, so why can’t space be as negotiable as time?

But still, there lingers within me that troubled disassociation from my setting that leaves me lacking literary confidence: I can’t properly describe the msasa trees or the sounds of the dark nights, even when people show me pictures or try to evoke a scene for me. No matter how often I re-read Alexandra Fuller, I still don't have a complete sense of Zimbabwe. The smell of wet cedar leaves that lie browning over lichen-covered rocks in Algonquin is easy. So is the gentle slope of Church Lane, Tooting, with its orange-bricked Victorian row houses, windows framed by lace curtains. It takes little effort to picture the brilliant sun bouncing off waves in Sydney Harbour, the unexpected smell of Chinese jasmine wafting by. But I lose all creative confidence when writing scenes in locales I haven’t been to.

But maybe this is the old adage that writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. When you “write what you know,” there's a little less sweating. When you must describe a place you are unfamiliar with, you have to do a bit of research to write with familiarity. Stef Penney chose to sweat it out in the British Library for her book – perhaps my apprehension to write about Zimbabwe comes not from a fear of unknown places (and repeat muggings), but from a fear of Truss's proclaimed "true creative act": constructing a time and place through a combination of some imagination (say, 10%) and a whole lot of sweating.

Better Blogs

2007-02-11T13:10:00.000-05:00

This week marks the one year anniversary of the inception of my blog [applause]. The purpose of starting Because I Said So was to get myself to write more often – I so often avoid working on longer pieces of writing because I’m tired, I don’t have enough time to get into it, I’m uninspired, blah, blah blah. My goal was to post something at least once a week, which I’ve pretty much done, although some of the posts contain barely any writing (but are interesting, nonetheless, no?).

With my blog, came the “Next Blog” button at the top of the screen. It allowed me to randomly peruse other people’s blogs from around the world, which tended to be self-indulgent and generally quite boring (for more on this, read my post about the Banal Blogosphere).

There is certainly a grand proliferation of banal blogs out there – websites that are perhaps only read by a handful of people known to the author (including this one – hi Mum!). Because of the unstimulating subject matter and limited audience, the blog form was first thought trivial. However, many blogs have caught on and log thousands of readers a day. Popular media types have started blogs (Rick Mercer, Kevin Frankish from BT, and George Stroumboulopoulos are a sample of some that I’ve read). The blog is now a valid media form and several “blogging communities” have cropped up – friends with blogs who link to each other.

My friend Lee, who used to write the now defunct See The Donkey blog, linked my blog to his when I first started (and I linked his to mine). We talked romantically about starting the new Toronto Literati – we were both in the process of writing novels and trying to make money off this creative writing lark. But what we talked idealistically about, I think is happening amongst the bloggers of the world.

I have found several intelligent, well-written blogs which I check semi-regularly – and I often find more by following the links on the good blogs. Bloggers comment on each other’s posts, thus providing me with links to a variety of appealing blogs. That Shakespeherian Rag has turned me onto Bookninja and Moonlight Ambulette (not only does this girl have a Virginia Woolf doll on her website, she also writes a piece about reading Flannery O'Connor, ending the post with a photo from a Sunday Times article about O'Connor and her own caption expressing her desire for a bag in the photo). I have all but abandoned the “Next Blog” button in favour of my own personal blog web in which I am often lost on a Sunday morning.

So happy anniversary to me, and here’s to another year of forcing myself to write, and a new year of finding more clever, engaging and readable blogs.

Acceptable Bullying

2007-02-08T20:12:00.000-05:00

I watched the documentary Spellbound with my grade 4/5 class the other week, a movie about several kids competing in a spelling bee. One of the boys profiled in the film elicited quite a reaction from several of the older boys in my class. They laughed at the boy’s mannerisms, mocked the way he laughed and called him “the geeky kid.” These are students who have participated in various anti-bullying programmes and workshops throughout their school careers, as well as being in classrooms that promote empathy and community.

But they still found it socially acceptable to denigrate and belittle someone they considered weaker than themselves (in status and in physicality) in front of their classmates and teachers. My colleague quickly stepped in and took the opportunity to analyze and criticize their behaviour, but it made me think about the acceptable forms of bullying that seem to cropping up in the popular media these days.

Take American Idol, and the caustic condemnations that Simon and Randy so flippantly cast upon the hopeful contenders, too cockeyed and tone deaf to realize they’re being slammed until half-way through the tirade. The three judges consistently dissolve into fits of derisive laughter, to the exclusion of the befuddled cantor, who just stands, the unfinished lyrics hanging heavy in the air. People are made fun of for their looks (“you look like one of those creatures that live in the jungle with those massive eyes”), their voices (“I’m not being rude, but…that was appalling”), and their exit strategies (“other door”).

The recent furor over bullying on the British reality show Celebrity Big Brother shocked audiences, spurred discussion in British parliament and peppered the newspapers of India. The collusion of Jade (a previous Big Brother contestant) and other housemates against Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty had more than a whiff of racism, Shetty being referred to as “the Indian” and “Shilpa Poppadom”.

And the public mudslinging that has gone on between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump in the papers and on television is yet another example of adults reducing themselves to schoolyard name-calling, the nadir for me being when Trump used O’Donnell’s sexuality as an insult.

So, why are the people who make media decisions sanctioning these public displays of harassment? Why are well-adjusted adults reducing themselves to petty smear tactics, trotted out for all the world to see?

I think this is another trough in the sea of reality TV shows that push the envelope. Just as the full-on brawls on Jerry Springer were a draw, the viewing public enjoy a bit of nasty verbal repartee at the expense of those somehow deemed less than us.

The good thing in all of this is that a lot of television viewers don’t seem to be standing for it. Channel 4, who broadcast Celebrity Big Brother in Britain, received over 30 000 complaints to the British broadcasting watchdog Ofcom. Carphone Warehouse, a major sponsor of Celebrity Big Brother, withdrew their sponsorship of the show after the offensive footage was aired. And there has been public condemnation of the over-the-top insults on American Idol.

These shows and public figures are presenting bullying as an acceptable way to gain and display power. They make it easy for us to dismiss "the geeky kid" or the bad singer or the person that is culturally different from us. How can we expect our children to operate in a civilized, empathetic manner, when all around them are examples of adults bullying each other?

Screw The SUV...

2007-02-03T19:25:00.000-05:00

...we're loading up our bikes!

Hotter Than I Should Be

2007-02-01T23:14:00.000-05:00

It seems that the world may be slowly waking up to the reality of climate change…

In an effort to draw attention to energy consumption, the whole of France participated in a five minute power switch-off, during which the power grid operator reported a decrease in consumption that was equal to 1% of the national consumption. The Eiffel Tower, normally ablaze with 20 000 bulbs, joined in the national campaign by switching off power at 7:55pm. Several other European cities followed suit, participating in country-wide blackouts.

Our own Stephen Harper, who, five years ago, wrote a letter “downplaying climate change”* and then concluded that the greenhouse gas reduction targets outlined in the Kyoto Protocol were unattainable, is now acknowledging what a pressing issue climate change is becoming. George Bush even mentioned the environment in his State of the Union Address by introducing the Clear Skies legislation.

I saw David Suzuki (see his website under Websites That Might Just Change Your Life to your right) speak this time last year about the state of our earth. He spoke of a document that was signed by 100 scientists “greater than [him]” that was submitted to world leaders 10 years ago (I may have some of those numbers wrong – we’re going on my memory here) that outlined the urgent need for the world’s energy consumption to be decelerated. And if we did not do something about the amount of greenhouse gases we were putting into the atmosphere, it was only a matter of a decade or two before most of the earth was uninhabitable. The document was largely ignored at the time.

So why the attention now?

I think it started with An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s documentary about our planet’s shaky future. It was a film by an American for Americans (some of the largest energy consumers in the world) – it was one of their own telling his country where they were going wrong.

And then much of eastern North America experienced a mild December and beginning of January. They were playing golf in P.E.I. Blossoms came out on the trees in Central Park. Meanwhile, the west coast, normally accustomed to mild, rainy winters, experienced some of the worst snowstorms in living memory. And everyone got a little bit uneasy, Al Gore’s warning still echoing in their heads.

What will be interesting to see is if people begin to make changes – even small ones as are listed on David Suzuki’s Nature Challenge – changing lightbulbs, getting out of the car, turning down the heat by 2 degrees. Will people begin to think about alternate forms of transportation, moving closer to their work, eating meat-free meals with locally grown produce more often?

Or will we allow our cars lots of idle time to warm up in this colder-than-usual week in January, all the while mumbling, “Climate change? What climate change?”

*Toronto Star, January 31st, 2007

Pavlov, Nickelback and Me

2007-01-28T14:11:00.001-05:00

I used to detest Nickelback. They were one of the few bands that I would actually turn off if they came on the radio. And as a rule, I do not participate in music snobbery, but Nickelback songs, I eschewed.

Then something weird occurred. I happened to hear a Nickelback song during a happy event in my life. And all of a sudden, Nickelback was okay. I bought a couple of tracks from iTunes. I even developed a weird, Neanderthal-crush on Chad Kroeger, who has since been voted the ugliest person in rock in an online poll.

The funny thing is, I can’t actually remember that happy event that made me start to like what I had so abhorred before. It is a perfect illustration of Pavlov’s classical conditioning. The happy event was the unconditioned stimulus, my feelings of joy being the unconditioned response. Nickelback became the conditioned stimulus – I’ve now forgotten that event, but am left with feelings of jocundity at the first few bars of Photograph…

Revenge is a Dish Best Served (Icy) Cold

2007-01-22T16:53:00.000-05:00

During a Korean Mountain Trout Festival, Sook Yin exacts vengeance on her kindergarten playmate who stole her crayons last Tuesday:

“Yeah, if you just look a little closer you’ll see the magic singing ice fish…

Closer, closer…”

The Ordinary in the Extraordinary

2007-01-03T11:39:00.000-05:00

How many times have you watched a movie or television show with a far-fetched plot, rolling your eyes and mumbling, “that so would not have happened in real life,” or words to that effect? But then you settle into your seat, sigh at the piece’s grandiosity, and get taken it, eager for an hour of escapism…

For many, television is escapist entertainment. Sure, we want to be able to relate to the people we see on TV, but really we are happy to live vicariously through the exciting lives of the characters on our favourite TV shows.

In an article published in the December 9th edition of the Globe and Mail, Gayle McDonald interviewed Abi Morgan, who wrote the HBO miniseries Tsunami: The Aftermath. Of the subject matter, Morgan said, “I’m always interested in extraordinary events that happen to ordinary people. Because that is the real world.”

Although not exactly the real world, Lost is an example of a current trend in television: the dramatization of extraordinary events happening to ordinary people. Lost is based on the premise that a plane full of strangers crash-landed on a desert island that seems to have a mind (and magnetic force field) of its own. Not only must the survivors deal with finding food and building shelter, but with vicious, inapposite animals and mysterious residents with perplexing intentions.

This is, perhaps, an extreme example. So let’s look at Ugly Betty: a normal, bespectacled girl from Queens is crash-landed in the fake, appearance-oriented world of a fashion magazine, where not only must she deal with fulfilling the responsibilities of her job, she must navigate vicious co-workers and perplexing office politics. Everyone likes a good underdog story and we collectively cheer when the normal Betty uses her smarts to triumph over the obstacles of working in the world of haute couture.

The extraordinary happening to the ordinary is a trend in television that may have found its inspiration in the popularity of the myriad reality shows: normal people thrown into exceptional situations. On Survivor we see regular people from Middle America living in very abnormal circumstances – they must fend for themselves and complete tasks requiring athleticism and smarts. And from this premise comes the dramatic structure of Lost; the only differences being the polar bears and production costs. (Seriously. The producers are like The Others, constantly watching and analyzing the every move of the characters, then shaping the story line through clever editing.)

Reality shows such as American Idol or, more appropriately, America’s Next Top Model, have likewise set the stage for Ugly Betty. They take inexperienced contenders and throw them into the exclusive worlds of music and fashion and then watch them flounder. Just like Betty. (Granted, though, Ugly Betty must have gleaned some inspiration from the book The Devil Wears Prada one would guess.)

There has been a shift in the basis of hit TV shows from the 90s to the first decade of the 21st century. Ten years ago, one of the most popular shows was based around four characters poring over "the excruciating minutiae of every single daily event!" Seinfeld fans know that the decade’s defining show was really about nothing – four regular people going about their daily lives. Even Friends and Home Improvement were sitcoms about normal people living regular lives.

So where will TV go next? Well, there seems to be a few shows that appear to feature the opposite: extraordinary people living in ordinary situations. Medium sees a mom who works for the district attorney’s office and solves crimes by having psychic premonitions. Ghost Whisperer is about a woman with supernatural powers that allow her to talk to ghosts. And the recent Heroes is based around characters that discover they have superhuman powers whilst living their regular human lives, struggling to cope with this duality. As cheerleader Claire Bennet (who is gifted with the ability to regrow tissue) says in one episode: “Maybe being different isn't the end of the world. It's just who I am.”

Just who she is? I’m sorry, but Claire’s whole “spontaneous regeneration” power thing so would not have happened in real life.

Abandoned Bicycle, J. Peterman Style

2006-12-28T17:48:00.000-05:00

The relentless Sumatran sun blazed mercilessly in the cloudless sky, the shade of the fig trees the only reprieve for stray dogs, too hot to even raise their heads at my presence. I abandoned my bicycle under a tree and wiped the sweat from the back of my neck. The sun was searing, but I had my Javan Trilby to protect me – medium width brim, gently contoured at the top for easy tipping. Made of unbleached, fair trade coconut fibre, sourced from the Balinese palm farmers. Perfect for unwinding with cocktails on the terrace or exciting adventures through the rainforest on the back of an elephant. Sizes 6-8.

Yeah, I got Seinfeld Season 7 for Christmas…

Meaningless Update

2006-12-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

I'm getting kind of sick of seeing that tangled up deer every time I go to this page.

You, too?

So I've updated my blog so you can see Romanian children instead.

(photo from news.bbc.co.uk)

Tangled Up in... Purple

2006-12-10T10:39:00.000-05:00

There was an article this Friday in the Globe and Mail about deer encroaching on our habitat to look for food and potential mates. It also looked at the different ways humans are looking at to control the exploding deer population (including contraception, which involves catching, injecting and tagging unsuspecting does). I'm too tired and disheartened to explore the obvious option of containing our never-ending expansion and living in harmony with nature.

Any guesses as to this poor buck's antler entanglement?

Chick Lit, Revisited

2006-11-28T20:30:00.000-05:00

In the November 4th edition of the Globe and Mail, before the Giller prize was awarded to Vincent Lam for Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, there was a “Giller Debate” between Andrew Gorham, Sandra Martin and James Adams. They discussed the merits of the shortlisted books and debated which one might win the largest annual prize awarded for fiction in Canada.

Out of all the books on the shortlist (De Niro’s Game, The Immaculate Conception, Home Schooling and The Perfect Circle all lost out), The Perfect Circle appealed to me the most (see "I'm Reading..." in the sidebar of this blog). What was interesting in the Globe article though, was the fact that the two men didn’t see the book as a contender:

“Andrew: Now, let’s talk about Quiviger’s The Perfect Circle. First off, and maybe this is sexist, I feel that half the reading population is removed because it’s very much a female love story.

James: You mean, it’s chick lit.

Sandra: It’s not chick lit.

Andrew: It’s great chick lit.

Sandra: It is definitely not chick lit. It’s not chick lit.

Andrew: It’s a love story and, as a man, I prefer something with a little bit more…

Sandra: Action.

Andrew: Contention.”

Mr. Gorham implies that a book dealing with relationships does not have enough substance to qualify for literary recognition.

Really?

In a previous post, I tried to delineate the dismissive term “chick lit” and decide why Sophie Kinsella is stamped with the label but Margaret Atwood is not. The difference, I found, was the inclusion of “weightier” topics within the female experience of love.

But can we really discount love as a trifling subject? Women and men have written about it through the ages – it is the most popular topic in poetry and song. Humans make their living arrangements and reproductive choices (usually) based on love. And when love is taken away, we plumb the depths of emotion.

Michael Ondaatje, widely considered a “serious” author and also the winner of the 2000 Giller Prize (for Anil’s Ghost), writes the most unbelievably amazing prose describing romantic love in the chapter entitled “Katherine” in his novel The English Patient – which won him the Booker Prize. (If you haven’t read it, go read it right now. If you have, re-read it.) The English Patient is thick with the nuances of demarcation and national identity, but it would have won on the merits of its prose alone. So why does Gorham discount The Perfect Circle based only on its subject matter?

The truth is, it is only one man’s opinion. The Perfect Circle made it to the shortlist for the Giller on its literary merits, regardless of subject matter. Quiviger’s words are evocative; her style both languorous and obsessive, like those first heady weeks of a love affair. And what is great literature, but the containing of human experience into a few well-chosen words that make the reader think, ah yes; that IS how it feels…

Proof That Someone Other Than My Mother Reads This Blog...

2006-11-22T19:18:00.000-05:00

I have acheived the first step in my quest for Web (and eventually Literary) domination thanks to PubStumpers, who have posted my Pub Quiz post.

Guess the Occupation

2006-11-18T18:06:00.001-05:00

For those of you who made guesses for the Surreal Sea Nymphs, they were actually a bunch of Australian school girls celebrating the end of exams. Now put your brains to this test: what is the man in the picture's occupation?

Ward’s Island, November 3rd

2006-11-14T20:20:00.000-05:00

Lyla snuggles her face into her scarf as she puts her mittens back on after taking a picture of Max. His body is still, sturdy legs planted among the browning leaves, watching birds through his binoculars. His coat is undone and Lyla hasn’t seen his mittens on his hands yet. Amazing, thinks Lyla. Children never seem to feel the cold like adults. Her hands took only a few seconds to become cold and stiff on this unseasonably cold day in November.

“Aren’t you cold, love?” she asks Max.

Max twists his body, led by the over-sized black apparatus he holds at his eyes, following something aloft that she can’t see. He then brings the binoculars down and looks at her.

“Nope,” he says, then steps out of his stance and heads for the trail.

“Ironman,” says Justin, smiling. “Must be a Palmer.”

Lyla smiles and falls in line behind her brother, following the well-worn path through the trees.

When they get to the clearing, Max stops and turns around.

“Here, Dad?” he says, eyebrows raised.

Justin reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a plastic bag of birdseed. He empties a small amount into Max’s outstretched palm, then offers Lyla some. Justin takes some for himself, then replaces the plastic bag.

“Now remember, stand by a tree and be very still,” he instructs Max.

The three of them stand in a haphazard line just off the clearing, arms outstretched with the proffered gift. Within a few seconds, the first chickadee, small and grey with its little black head, lands on a branch close to Justin. It hesitates momentarily, then swoops into his palm, nabs a seed, and flies away.

“Awww!” says Max. “How come it won’t come to me?”

“You have to be very still and very quiet,” says Justin.

We stand in silence for several seconds until another chickadee lands on a branch near Justin.

“Here we go,” he murmurs, moving his palm slowly toward Max’s.

The bird hops from branch to branch, trying to determine the best approach. As he gets closer and closer to the outstretched hands, Justin curls up his fingers, making a fist around the birdseed. The chickadee darts closer to Max, swoops down, and lands on Max’s hand.

Max’s eyelids flutter in surprise, but he remains still. Lyla watches a smile break across his face as he feels the light tickle of the chickadee’s feet on his fingers.

After it pecks at a few seeds, the chickadee zooms away, becoming camouflaged in the grey branches of the surrounding trees.

“Did you see that, Auntie Lyla?” asks Max. “The chickadee came to me!”

Surreal Sea Nymphs

2006-11-11T11:19:00.000-05:00

Any guesses about what's going on here?

57 Channels and Nothing On

2006-11-09T19:29:00.000-05:00

I lived for the first 12 years of my life without cable (on a black and white television). When my family finally got hooked up (we were cable subscribers in the generation after the tan box with the push buttons), I developed a nasty habit of starting at channel 2 and clicking upwards to the last channel that the cable provider would allow. Finding nothing interesting on (as in the words of the Bruce Springsteen song, referenced in the title of this post), I keyed in channel 2 again and repeated the whole process. I could easily spend an hour with the TV on, but not actually watching anything.

When I moved in by myself, I brought with me my grandparents’ 13-inch TV and accompanying bunny ears, partly out of impecuniousness, but partly out of a desire to not spend hours not actually watching television.

But the other week, my old TV blew a picture tube and it was time to buy a new TV. Which did not come equipped with bunny ears attachments. So I buckled and signed up for Rogers Digital Cable.

I don’t think I could even estimate how many channels I get with the basic cable package – partly because I haven’t found them all. I’ve only made it up to the hundreds. And in those hundreds are a lot of Simpsons, Friends and Seinfeld reruns. Often the same episode running on several different channels. And then an hour later, you can watch the same episode again, but from a Manitoba channel.

And the home renovation and decorating shows – my god, is there no end to them? I thought we’d been oversaturated with reality shows. Obviously I hadn’t been watching daytime television. Soap operas and talk shows have been taken over by a plethora of shows hosted by women in overalls and men toting around swaths of fabric to make into curtains.

So those are the drawbacks. What about the positives?

Well, I can watch Oprah now (on a Manitoba channel). I have a vast selection of sitcom reruns to watch as I make dinner. The TV doesn’t go fuzzy on rainy days.

And my knowledge of home renovations has never been better…

Who I Love and Must Attend To

2006-11-06T21:01:00.000-05:00

I wrote a previous post about Who I Hate But Must Attend To. Upon reflection, I feel that I need to balance my disapproval and criticism with some glowing praise and support of some people in the radio and print industries who I love:

Doug Saunders

I don’t know how this man keeps all his knowledge of current world politics and the histories of what seems like three-quarters of the countries in the world in his head and available for easy retrieval. His weekly column “Reckoning” in the Focus section of Saturday’s Globe and Mail dissects the current political climate of various countries, his writing infused or contrasted with the histories of various nations. Saunders takes current events from around the world and analyses them with a critical, and often Canadian, eye (despite the fact he has been transplanted in London, England). His writing often makes me think and always causes me to learn. Saunders’s column this week asks the question if the well-intentioned architecture and design of the suburbs of cities such as Paris contributed in some way to the unrest among its young, foreign-born inhabitants.

Barry Taylor

My favourite thing to do on the weekend (after sleeping in, of course) is to have a coffee, read the paper, and listen to Barry Taylor on 102.1 from noon onwards. Taylor has a relaxed attitude and a keen understanding of the brevity of wit. His show entails a series of spots, including the Barry Funny Joke and the 4:20 Thought, along with the music that the Edge is known for. He also has all sorts of random sound bites that follow the spots, which fans come to anticipate. On the Edge website, Taylor lists his hobbies as video games, drinking and making out.

And so my obsession with photographs of abandoned bicycles continues...

2006-11-03T18:03:00.000-05:00

This one was taken on one of the Toronto Islands.

Other pictures of abandoned bicycles I have found: Amsterdam Bicycle * Une Autre Bicyclette * Bicyclette Quebecois

Comics on the Fridge

2006-10-30T19:45:00.000-05:00

What makes people seek out the kitchen scissors (why are they not in the drawer where they should be?) and cut out a comic from the newspaper (oops, forgot to check what was on the other side and now there’s a swath cut through the article on rebuilding Israel that I had good intentions of reading)?

I had this thought as I cut out the above comic from the Toronto Star today. Why this one? And why did the comics below make it to my fridge, displayed in perpetuity, garnering smirks as I reach for the milk, and not fade from my memory as I curse the 4 flights of stairs I must negotiate while taking the comics, along with the rest of the unending piles of newspapers that seem to pile up at an astonishing rate, out to the recycling bin?

Well, first of all, they're clever in a cerebral way. Not in a "oh, isn't that cute?!" Family Circus kind of way. They require the merging of several areas of knowledge: Stonehenge and its celestial precision and Daylight Savings; the story of Robinson Crusoe and the pop culture phrase shepherding the weekend; laws of probability and songs by The Clash.

Second, by residing on my fridge, they represent me as intelligent and clever - I was sage enough to understand, appreciate and subsequently cut out the comic. So anyone that casts their eyes across the disarray that is the front of my fridge, immediately reads me as insightful and canny.

Well, either that or I know where to find the scissors...

Avoiding the Gaze - update

2006-10-21T19:16:00.000-04:00

I just picked up the November issue of The Walrus and there's a photo essay of women wearing "safe" and "sexy" outfits, explaining the reasons for their choices. No photos of burqas, though...

Avoiding the Gaze

2006-10-21T13:27:00.000-04:00

I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who was entreating me to take the subway downtown so that we could have a proper night out. I was stuck between the decision of driving, therefore cutting down the travel time by half, but limiting my alcohol intake (and thus the severity of a subsequent hangover); or taking the TTC so I could quaff indiscriminately (after a later arrival, of course).

But the time and the drinking did not factor into the decision making process. My major concern was the feminist idea of the male gaze, identified in movies and magazines, but also observable in any public area.

In general, I find that I can blend into the masses of people on a streetcar or on the subway in the day. People are reading or chatting or listening to music. I am often doing the same. But taking public transit at night as a single female is a slightly different experience. One becomes very aware of the male gaze and all the complex power realationships that it involves.

In her Saturday column in the Globe, Karen von Hahn touches on the male gaze and its relation to the niqab (a type of veil worn by Muslim women), after British Cabinet minister Jack Straw stated that the veil is a "visible statement of separation and of difference" and asked women visiting his doctor’s office to consider removing it. Von Hahn asserts that the niqab makes a “fashion statement” beyond its original religious purpose based on its colour and the degree to which it conceals the body.

However, Straw’s comment about "visual statements of separation and difference" can be applied to myriad styles of dressing, and not just religiously based ones. Goth-style dressing is the first statement of separation and difference that comes to mind; so does the punk style or any kind of anti-establishment fashion movement based in politics. And more often than not, these styles are mainly worn by teenagers who are going through a stage in life where they are questioning authority and attempting to find their place in society.

I’m a little less political in my dress. When I “blend in” on the TTC, it is often because of several “fashion” factors: I wear jeans, a ubiquitous dress item; I usually wear sunglasses, concealing my eyes from any chance of eye contact with others; and I often listen to my iPod, the earphones making the loudest (ironically) statement that I do not want to engage in any social contact. I send out strong signals that I don’t want to be looked at or participate in any kind of interaction.

This becomes more difficult when my demeanour says something different when on my way out to a social event. I have no sunglasses (usually it is nighttime), no iPod (don’t want to risk losing it) and the jeans have been traded in for a slightly more “polished” outfit (this is when the H&M impulse buys make their debuts). While this style of dressing is completely appropriate for a social event with my peers, it facilitates the unwanted male gaze on the transit system. Hence my reluctance in the aforementioned conversation with my friend.

So can we blame the Muslim women that von Hahn references in her column who “claim relief from the oppression of the male gaze”? Do the various Muslim headdresses allow women to “blend in” as my daytime uniform on the TTC does? Or do we see any piece of clothing as a “continual manifestation of intimate thoughts, a language, a symbol” as von Hahn quotes Balzac in her piece?

You can’t escape where symbols originate from or the process of how they come to mean something. But this is where knowledge and freewill come into play. If Muslim women are given the choice to wear a headdress, and they choose to do so, that is their prerogative. If wearing a niqab or burqa makes them feel less conspicuous and more comfortable, then why shouldn’t they wear it? I see a problem arising when women are not given the choice, or when a politician interprets a "fashion statement" with limited knowledge of the full symbolism and function.

So what was my travel decision for my social engagement that night? I made a "visible statement of separation and of difference" by driving my car, my entire body hidden inside my car and my face somewhat obscured by the reflection of streetlights on the dashboard. I felt comfortable, I felt safe. And I felt a hell of a lot better the next morning for the modest amount of alcohol I drank.