A Year of Living Biblically

The day I started to note how often I broke the Ten Commandments was also the day that I spent $80 to get my hair chemically straightened. Probably not a good start. We aren't covering the Seven Deadly Sins, granted, but they do come into play a bit. It wasn't a good move to follow that up with chai tea and writing the beginning of this while watching the first season of Sex and the City.

You see, my bookclub is reading A Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs. I'm only 100 pages into it, though for once it's not my own laziness combined with a (somewhat faked) excuse that if I read it right before book club, I'll remember it better. That works until instead of reading the book on the last three or so days I go out instead and it doesn't get read. In fact, I seem to finish the book and not attend book club (hangover) or don't read the book and show up. Anyway, I finally got the book from Nami on Friday night, along with some fascinating chat, cake and a glass of red wine, and stated reading it tonight, while undergoing the three hour process that is Magic Straight. Three hours is more time than I spent on my hair in the past month, but it will be well worth it because now it will look more fabulous with the same amount of non-effort. Plus, I needed to have the uber-short hairs at the back buzzed again - I am a bit of a novice in the arena of short hair styles and I'm wondering when it has to be cut again. Now that it's straight (which was a necessity - that 50's flip was starting to flip in on itself) I'm wondering when I have to cut it, I'm thinking soon. Next pay cheque, I suppose.

(Samantha hit on Mr. Big! I had forgotten that!)

Right, back to the Ten Commandments. Nami emailed us the project over the weekend (right after we'd been discussing it Friday night, actually), so I didn't get it until Monday. Since the book club meeting is Sunday, I figured I should probably contemplate yesterday, what with one of the commandments involving the Sabbath.

So, yesterday. I did very, very little. There was lying around in bed. I read an Anita Blake novel, I ate a bagel and cream cheese and some tofu green curry, I watched a lot of movies while doing some writing, and I masturbated. Does writing about stuff count as a graven image? I certainly adored the food, the reading, the laziness, the masturbating, and since I am an atheist, I guess I did adore them above god. So, #1 broken. I don't recall taking the name of the Lord in vain (this is something I do rather often for someone who doesn't even believe in religion - though I picked up the most offensive of sayings from a Catholic). I'm pretty sure my idea of keeping the Sabbath, while a lovely way to celebrate not working, isn't holy in the slightest, so there goes #3. Honour thy mother and father - well, I didn't do anything, parent-wise. I suppose that is a broken commandment there - I didn't dishonour them in any way, though considering that I call home maybe four times a year and email generally on holidays, birthdays, or when I need something, I'm not doing this commandment very well. Since all my DVDs are $3 or less off the street, I've broken #7. And while I have no idea if the actress that plays Kate on NCIS is married or not, I was certainly coveting her. I'm trying to remember if I was coveting in a non-lustful way - yep. I was having one of those days where I totally coveted the idea of being in a stage of my life where friendships and relationships would have a chance of lasting longer than a year or two at most. I can't imagine I'm going to do well with this one. Six out of ten broken on the first day.

(The cell phones are soooooo big on SATC in the first season!)

Then there was today. I slept in (thank Maude sloth is a deadly sin, rather than a commandment). We'll take #1 as read for the rest of the week - when you don't believe in god, it's not hard to adore something more than him/her/it (I don't like that use of the male pronoun, but where do you go with that?) and I'm pretty sure the lack of capitalization and the thank Maude comment constitutes breaking #2. I felt guilty about my lack of mom and dad communication, but I'm pretty sure guilt is not equal to honour, so I buggered that one too. I'm watching more street DVDs. False witness - lying, right? I've done that one. I got off work early tonight, so I popped into a hair place near Noksapyeong. When they couldn't do my hair tonight, I made an appointment for the next day, knowing I'd be seeing if any of the places in HBC could do it right away. And I didn't get the number so I could call and cancel tomorrow. And when the woman who did my hair asked me how long I had lived here, moments asking if I spoke Korean, I totally told her I'd only been here seven months, to make up for the embarrassing fact that I speak virtually no Korean. And as for coveting - well, I coveted straight hair enough to purchase the chemical version of it. It also looked for a moment like there was a joint being smoked on SATC and I certainly coveted that. And the lustful coveting of commandment nine, I thought that A.J. Jacobs looks pretty hot on the back of the book. Seven broken out of ten.

Veggie Korean Cooking Class

Last Friday morning, Shawn and I went to a class to learn veggie Korean cooking. In spite of the fact that we were late and missed the first demo and giggled through the second, our food was quite delicious. Granted, we did cheat off our neighbours - we peeked at what they were doing and followed along the entire time. In spite of having to cut things very fine, I kept all my finger tips (and that hasn't always been the case in my adventures in cooking), so I'm going to consider it a success.

She's Doralee Rhodes, After All

Churchy Cathloic types still don't support gay marriage, but Dolly Parton does and I'd rather hang out with her anyway.

movies recently

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

The Ugly Truth

The Women

Confessions of a Shopaholic


The Watchmen

Push

Inkheart

Away We Go

Australia

Inglorious Basterds

Passchendaele

Angels & Demons

Suburban Girl

The US vs. John Lennon

Mini-Ponytail

Finally! Now to get it straightened...

Remember

On Dec. 6 1989, 14 women were killed at École Polytechnique. They were killed because they were women, because they were students in an engineering program. What has come to be called the Montreal Massacre is an event we are all called upon to remember: violence against women continues to be part of our present.

The year after it happened, I was part of a group that organized a memorial at my high school. That day and the snowbanks I walked through on my way to school is one of my strongest memories of my high school years.

Dec. 6 is again to be commemorated as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. As we mourn the 14 deaths in 1989, as well as the too many women and girls murdered or abused since then, we need to continue to work for women’s equality, for policies that lead to equity among women, and to an end to structural and individual violence against women and girls.

Canada is still not a safe country for all the women who live here, with more than 50 per cent likely to experience violence sometime in their lives, usually before they are 25. Societal and structural policies and programs continue especially to harm single mothers, women with disabilities, and indigenous and immigrant women. These, as well as increasing limits on women’s access to justice and to continuing inequities, may explain why Canada is only at 25th place in the 2009 Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum.



So, while we remember the women who have died and re-commit to taking action because Canada is not yet a safe country for women, we need to recall that violence against women comes from social policies and political decisions, as well as the acts of individuals.

The Fourteen Not Forgotten are:

Geneviève Bergeron, 21, was a second year scholarship student in civil engineering.
Hélène Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her Master’s degree.
Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
Maud Haviernick, 29, was a second year student in engineering materials, a branch of metallurgy, and a graduate in environmental design.
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a second year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
Maryse Laganière, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
Maryse Leclair, 23, was a fourth year student in engineering materials.
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a fourth year student in mechanical engineering.
Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
Michèle Richard, 21, was a second year student in engineering materials.
Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte, 21, was a materials engineering student.

Of Course I Slipped in a Mud Puddle

Packing in Togo is hot and sweaty, so it's wise to shower after. For the three days we'd been in Lome, each day Ortencia would ask for Quaker Oats for breakfast at the stand. This is notable because in Togolese French, oatmeal is said as, "kakawatts." I have to admit that I snickered like a little girl each time she tried to order it. Before we left Lome, we stocked up - we picked up some vegetables to take to Ortencia's host family. We had a taxi drop us off in a taxi at the station for Kpalime and then I walked over to pick up my passport, complete with a second visa for Ghana.



While we waited for the trou-trou to fill up with passengers (and that took a wee while), the tiniest little boy went across the station by himself to buy ice cream. It was super cute. There was a great deal of confusion with change and then we bought some bread through the window of the van. It was not a bad ride to Kpalime, hot and a bit cramped, but with a soldier and a nun in the car, we were travelling in safety, no matter how you measure these things.



We were on our way to visit Ortencia's host family- Maman, Victoire, and Achu. When we hoped off the bus at the side of road and started walking down a path - where I promptly slipped and fell on my ass in the mud. Ever tried to wipe mud off your feet and legs with wet wipes while wearing a backpack? No? I don't advise it.



Victoire, Ortencia's petite seour, was the first to greet us. She led us to the kitchen, which was in a long, rectangular building that ran along one side of the compound, to the left of the house. Achu, Ortencia's host brother, is named because he is a twin, though we didn't have the opportunity to meet his twin sister. After rice and lemon & grapefruit juice, we were sent off to walk around the village. After a Coke, we walked around through incredibly lush, green mountains and were given some oranges by some children as a gift. I was surprised that they were green; they looked more like limes. In Togo, whenever you greet someone, you say Bien arrive, or if you are talking to children, bon soir/bon jour. It's an incredibly friendly country - everyone greets everyone else.



By the time we returned from our walk, dinner was ready. We had deep fried plantains (so, so good)with spicy sauce, yam chips, and salad with courgettes, which we had brought up from Lome because Maman had never had them. Maman is really good at cooking. I have to say, drinking out of a bag at the dinner table brings up a whole new set of etiquette rules. And then, as dinner ended, it rained. Rain in Togo is loud - those metal roofs make a lot of noise during a rain that hard.



Victoire was doing Ortencia's hair as we sat on the porch and we debated our plans for the next day and how we should get to the waterfall we wanted to go see and if we should hire a taxi for the day, up until Victoire demanded that we go inside. We watched Brazilian telenovas and a travel program about China until the electricity went out twice and that's when we got out the secret chocolate. You see, since Togo doesn't sell chocolate, before we left Ghana, Ortencia had bought two boxes of chocolate bars. When we arrived at Maman's, Ortencia gave her a bar of chocolate for everyone - herself, Achu, Victoire, a visiting niece. But Maman decided that the two girls could just share one bar, so Ortencia snuck her another during the blackout. We could smell the chocolate in the air and there was a momentary panic when we weren't sure where the wrapper had gone.



Even though it was only 8 p.m., it was incredibly dark. Victoire started using the flash on my camera as a light source and just after the lights came back on, Ortencia and I decided to go to bed - before the seven year old! For awhile, Oretencia was chasing a bug around our bedroom, finally killing it with a broom, and we fell asleep, only to be woken up again by the loudest rain ever heard in complete and utter darkness.

Update

Every once in awhile, I look at the right side of my blog and freak the fuck out. 602 days 5 hours and 46 minutes left in the 101 in 1001 challenge?!? Ahhh!

Reinstated
6. Fail! Maintain the book ban (no books without trade-in credit) with 5 slips. (15/5)
So, this kept me in check a short while, but if I was to take pictures of my bookcases (yes, there are two) you'd all be right to mock me endlessly. I do read a lot but I also own a lot of books. Perhaps more than I can read in the next year. Granted, many of them, maybe even most, were bought secondhand for about $5, but still.

Done!
2. Read 101 books. (124/101)
Obviously I set this goal waaaaay too low. I'm going to add another 101 to it.

Subject to Debate, Normal, Payback, From Dead to Worse, All Together Dead, My Side of the Story, Definitely Dead, Dead as a Doornail, Dead to the World, Devil Bones, Dork Whore, The Great Influenza, Playing with Fire, the Last of the Red Hot Vampires, Fire Me Up, You Slay Me, Crouching Vampire Hidden Fang, The End of Faith, Travels in West Africa, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The Awakening, Holidays on Ice, Bait and Switch, Nickle and Dimed, Guns Germs and Steel, Renegade Hunter, American Nerd

3. Read 50 children's books. (57/50)
And this one! I'm going to throw on another 25.

The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo, Strawberry Girl, Ginger Pye, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Polar Bear Polar Bear What do You Hear?, Gorilla, Piggybook, The Case of Hermie the Missing Hamster, Midnight Magic, The Secret Birthday Message, Drummer Hoff

5. Spend 30 days reading out of the house for at least one hour. (36/30)
7. Go to a book club meeting.
12. Complete a month of posts each year (NaBloPoMo or other month.) (7/3)
15. Complete Postcrossings.
19. Be able to label a map of Africa.
23. Win at any of the quiz nights.
24. Participate in a scavenger hunt.
26. Learn to play a new game (Backgammon, Bridge, etc.)
27. Play 5 board games. (5/5)
28. Learn how to do Suduku. And how to spell it.
32. Do something creative - paint a picture, throw a pot, etc.
51. Try a new kind of alcohol. chuck and sodja in Togo (spellings are complete guesses!
53. Eat chicken wings in a bar for the first time.
57. Eat at 25 new restaurants. (29/25) Ghana: Chinese, White ***, Cape Coast Castle, the one at our hotel, Elmina Castle Restaurant, Green Turtle, Paloma; Togo: Le Festival des Glaces; Toronto: Old York, Italian with Jas; Vancouver: Californian Mexican, all you can eat sushi.
58. Make that chocolate/whip cream dessert from when I was a kid.
59. Make popcorn on the stove.
60. Visit a new continent (South America, Australia, Antarctica, Africa.)
62. Dip my toes into two oceans/seas. (2/2) The Atlantic!
64. Visit a country from the Axis of Evil.
68. Go to a sporting event, a play/opera/ballet, a museum, and an art gallery. (4/4)
69. Take an odd form of trasportation (dog sledding, etc.) Trou-trous are odd.
76. Take the subway to or from work once a week. (44/38) Should add to this one, since I renewed the contrac for a year.
78. Buy a round for the bar.
79. Let Shawn talk me into Hashing once.
89. Buy a bathing suit.
92. Buy purple underwear.
95. Make one day a month internet and TV free. (37/30) I'm going to add to this one too, because it's been unintentional so far and that wasn't really the point.
97. Buy a new iPod.
99. Find a charity I believe in and donate/join a protest for a cause I believe in.
101. Wash Martha's dishes.

To Do!

4. Finish reading War and Peace.
8. Read all the magazines in my place. This is impossible, as I keep buying more.
9. Read Man Booker Prize and Pulizter Prize winning book from the year of my birth. (0/2)
10. Write a haiku.
11. Finish up all draft blog posts.
13. Learn to write my name in 5 scripts. (0/5)
14. Send 60 handwritten letters or postcards. (24/60)
16. Send Christmas cards. (1/2)
17. Send flowers at random.
18. Do something to put knowledge in, rather than spouting it out.
20. Be able to name 20 foreign leaders and their countries. (0/20)
21. Memorize a poem.
22. Stop saying THAT word (the one Martha doesn't like.)
25. Play croquet or bocce.
29. Complete a jigsaw puzzle.
30. Watch Gone With the Wind.
31. Only use candlelight for one full evening.
33. Take pictures at one of those weird photo places in Hongdae.
34. Take a photo every day for a month. (0/31)
35. Take the good camera out once a month. (26/30)
36. Complete 26 Things.
37. Send a postcard to Postsecret.
38. Color an entire coloring book.
39. Climb a tree.
40. Play with PlayDoh.
41. Rewatch the Princess Bride and reread A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (0/2)
42. Do a cartwheel in the sun.
43. Make a snowman.
44. Go on a picnic.
45. Try making lasagna in a toaster oven.
46. Try 10 new foods. (7/10) plantains, fufu, Togolese cheese, soja (Togolese tofu)
47. Make pancakes with my nieces twice. (0/2) Not doing this when I was home was a big mistake. But then, I hope I'm home again in the next 600 days...
48. Bake a cake from scratch.
49. Make a curry dish from scratch.
50. Learn to make good cream sauce.
52. And a new kind of tea.
54. Make and decorate cupcakes.
55. Make banana bread and once again make my poor mother mail me the recipe.
56. Have a banana split party.
61. Visit 5 countries I've never been to. (2/5)
63. Visit 5 UNESCO Heritage Sites. (2/5) Cape Coast Castle, Elmina Castle
65. Go canoeing or kayaking again.
66. Participate in a winter sport that is not sledding.
67. Go zorbing/hot air ballooning/skydive or something along those lines.
70. Control one vehicle.
71. Encounter an interesting animal in its natural habitat.
72. Sleep in a tent.
73. Watch the sun set and rise. (1/2) Nearly had camera confiscated for taking a photo of a sunset in Lome.
74. Take a series of pictures of the neighbourhood I live in.
75. Finally go to the National Museum, which I pass every day, and Seoul Tower, which I can see from my window. (0/2)
77. Walk into Itaewon to get coffee at least 15 times. (7/15)
80. Explore 12 new places in Seoul - one for each month. (3/12)
81. Get a tattoo or a piercing.
82. Go to the dentist.
83. Buy a frickin' toothbrush.
84. Finish all my multivitamins.
85. Be a vegetarian for a month.
86. Be a vegan for a week.
87. Buy new glasses.
88. And sunglasses.
90. Go to bed by midnight thirty times. (25/30)
91. Start and stick to an exercise routine.
93. Pay off half my credit card.
94. Then pay off the rest.
96. Clean up iTunes.
98. Buy another external harddrive and have old harddrive fixed.
100. Get my damn hair straightened already.

More Passport Photos?!?

Once again I managed to wake up before Ortencia - though only because the guy cleaning the bathroom at 5 am was rather noisy - but I just lay around until 7 a.m. We had another round of omellettes, baguettes, and incredibly sweet cafe au lait. According to my journal the first thing we did was "aller a l'embassy du Ghana." Once again, I needed more passport photos and spent a great deal of time sitting and waiting with no explanation. We walked to the trou-trou station to get a cab to the Grande Marche. It was hot, sunny, noisy, and the sellers were very enthusiastic. We found out when we were sitting around drinking the giant glass bottles of Coke waiting to see if Saki would call, someone told us that a man was shot in the Marche coming out of a bank that morning.

The next stop was ice cream - Le Festival Des Glace. Togo doesn't have ice cream outside of the capital, apparently, but it was a damn fine restaurant. It was tres cher, however Maas had his first ever pizza, we all shared a banana split, and I was intensely curious about some game tiles that the people at the next table were using (though I never did get around to asking them what they were playing.) In the women's room, the first time we went in, the toilet only had half a seat. Ortencia later came back and told me it was fixed, though when I went in, the seat was broken again. Eventually we figured out that she must have gone into the gents the second time.

Since I had written some postcards, we went on a search for envelopes. The Peace Corps advises that they send postcards in envelopes, as otherwise the post office might not deliver the cards. I think those stamps might have been my second biggest expense in Togo, after the cost of a new Ghanaian visa. We used the Internet at the post office and once again, my inability to be patient with technology proved to be a bit problematic. We went for chicken and then Maas took a moto home and we went to the supermarket to pick up Fanmilk and water, and headed home. Two things to note about our hotel is that the fans were very loud and they had fake display fruit, but it wasn't on display.

This could perhaps have been a more interesting entry, but I can't read the rest of my notes. There was something about nail clippers and Roseanne, which was undoubtedly funny, but I can't make it out. And apparently I didn't take a single photo!

I Blogged Elsewhere Last Month

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Feminist Trappings

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Coming of Age

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Blast From the... Present

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Jennifer's Feminism?

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: The Bane of Korean Women's Existence?

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Oh No You Don't

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Geeks and Nerds

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Lest We Forget

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Barbara Ehnreich

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Queer Canada Bloggers

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: The Kids Are Alright

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: I Didn't Buy a Souvenir

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: Hashing in the ROK

Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!: And So It Begins...

Book Review Club - Payback by Margaret Atwood

Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt. A story is a string of actions occurring over time-one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes-and debt happens as a result of actoins occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then-depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad-how you got out of debt, or else who you got further and further into it until you cebame overwhelmed by it, and sank from view."

Margaret Atwood is the kind of writer who makes me want to read more - not just more of her own writing, though certainly I intend to eventually read all she's written, but she also makes me want to read everything there is out there. Her breadth of knowledge and aquaintance with other texts is always astounding. In addition to writting incredible books, I'll never forget her wonderful sense of humour and fascinating talks - living in Edinburgh was a treat for a bookworm like me.

""He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a -year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twety pounds one he would be miserable." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

"Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" is one of the CBC Massey Lectures. Inagerated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time, Atwood's series of lectures are from 2008. People often tell me I'm impossible to buy books for because I've read or bought so many of the ones I want that they can't determine what I wouldn't have. For future reference (mom), since the local English bookstores don't carry the Massey Lectures series and I've only read three (the other two were "The Truth About Stories" by Thomas King and "Race Against Time" by Stephen Lewis), so they are always a safe bet. All three have been incredibly fascinating books.

""In my part of the world we have a ritual interchange that goes like this:
First person: "Lovely weather we're having."
Second person: "We'll pay for it later."
My part of the world being Canada, where there is a great deal of weather, we always do pay for it later. One person has commented, "That's not Canadian, it's just Presbyterian." Nevertheless, it's a widespread saying among us."

In the first chapter, Atwood talks about the origins of a sense of fairness, balance, and justice - concepts that may go back beyond humanity - apparently monkeys also get upset if when they have been taught that they can trade pebbles for cucumber slices and then one of them gets a far more covetted grape. She goes on to examine, in Chapter Two, the connection between debt and sin and between debtor and creditor, both of whom have been considered sinful at different times in history. The third chapter looks at the use of debt in plots and the symbolisms of mills and millers, who were thought of as cheats and Devil-like characters as the Industiral Revolution and capitalism marched on through the nineteenth century. She concludes the chapter with an old Greek saying, that the mills of the Gods grind slowly but they grind very small (thouroughly). Chapter Five looks at what happens when it comes time to payup: debtor's prisons, loan-sharks, liquidating creditors, rebelling against unfair taxes, and blood-soaked revenge. The final chapter is a rewrite of the Scrooge story, reframing it to look at the debt we owe to the environment, which we destroy, and those in the developing world, whose labor we profit off of.

"By making amends then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dicken's view, he owes it to his fellow man: he's been on the take from other people all his life-that's where his fortune has come from-but he's never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he himslef has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it's this realization that's at the core of his transformation. Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circule-just as they do among chimpanzees-for any social system to remain in balance."

Trivia

Can You Remember 20 Years Ago?

1. Which Spike Lee film ends when Mookie throws a garbage can through a window?

Do the Right Thing

2. In 1989, foreign troops finally left Cambodia. What country were the troops from?

Vietnam

3. What book was at the center of a huge controversy in 1989?

The Satanic Verses, Salmon Rushdie

4. What country is the CERN laboratory, where Tim Berners-Lee began work developing HTML and HTTP in 1989?

Switzerland

5. What happened on June 4th, 1989?

Tiananmen massacre

6. The Tuynhouse meetings in South Africa led eventually to the end of apartheid. Which two South African presidents did Nelson Mandela meet with? (one point each)

PW Botha, FW de Klerk

7. On April 15, 1989 95 English football fans were killed, virtually all by asphyxia, in what stadium?

Hillsborough

8. What scientific discovery by B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann was billed as "right up there with fire, the cultivation of plants, and with electricity" but turned out to be a bust?

cold fusion

9. On Oct. 1, 1989 Axel and Eigil Axgil became the first gay couple to legalize their marriage. What country did that occur in? Bonus point if you can state what is special about their last name, Axgil.

Denmark; it is a combination of their surnames

10. In 1989, an art show called "The Perfect Moment" toured the United States and set off one of the fiercest episodes of America's culture wars. Because it included images of gay S&M, one museum in DC cancelled the show and the director of another was charged with obscenity. The artist had died of complications due to AIDS before the show even started. Who was the artist?

Robert Mapplethorpe

The Stories We Tell

"We not only like our plots, we need our plots, and to some extent we are our plots. A story-of-my-life without a story is not a life."

Atwood, Payback

"A great multitude of people are continually talking of the Law of Nature; and then they go on giving you their sentiments about what is right and what is wrong: and these sentiments, you are to understand, are so many chapters and sections of the Law of Nature... [Such and such an act, they say,] is unnatural, that is, repugnant to nature: for I do not like to practice it: and, consequently, do not practice it. It is therefore repugnant to what ought to be the nature of everybody else." Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789



"And although he himself borders on the terminally polite, he tells me funny, sad, outrageous stories, the kind we all use to entertain company, deflect sympathy, and connect without too much feeling."

Normal, Amy Bloom

Margaret Atwood is the kind of writer who makes me want to read more - not just more of her own writing, though certainly I intend to eventually read all she's written, but she also makes me want to read everything there is out there. Her breadth of knowledge and acquaintance with other texts is always astounding. In addition to writing incredible books, I'll never forget her wonderful sense of humour and fascinating talks - living in Edinburgh was a treat for a bookworm like me.

"Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth" is one of the CBC Massey Lectures. Inaugurated in 1961 to provide a forum on radio where major contemporary thinkers could address important issues of our time, Atwood's series of lectures are from 2008. People often tell me I'm impossible to buy books for because I've read or bought so many of the ones I want that they can't determine what I wouldn't have. For future reference (mom), since the local English bookstores don't carry the Massey Lectures series and I've only read three (the other two were "The Truth About Stories" by Thomas King and _____________________ by Stephen Lewis), so they are always a safe bet. All three have been incredibly fascinating books.

In the first chapter, Atwood talks about the origins of a sense of fairness, balance, and justice - concepts that may go back beyond humanity - apparently monkeys also get upset if when they have been taught that they can trade pebbles for cucumber slices and then one of them gets a far more coveted grape. She goes on to examine, in Chapter Two, the connection between debt and sin and between debtor and creditor, both of whom have been considered sinful at different times in history. The third chapter looks at the use of debt in plots and the symbolisms of mills and millers, who were thought of as cheats and Devil-like characters as the Industrial Revolution and capitalism marched on through the nineteenth century. She concludes the chapter with an old Greek saying, that the mills of the Gods grind slowly but they grind very small (thoroughly). Chapter Five looks at what happens when it comes time to pay up: debtor's prisons, loan-sharks, liquidating creditors, rebelling against unfair taxes, and blood-soaked revenge. The final chapter is a rewrite of the Scrooge story, reframing it to look at the debt we owe to the environment, which we destroy, and those in the developing world, whose labor we profit off of.

"Saint Nicolas is the patron saint of pawnbrokers-there's a touching legend whereby he provides dowries for three poor girls who can't get married without them... There's nothing whatsoever to the other legend about Saint Nicolas-that he comes down the chimney every December 25 with a sack full of stuff he's nicked from the pawnshop. It is however true that the nineteenth-century colloquial expression "Old Nick"-meaning the Devil-is directly connected with Saint Nicolas. There are other clues. Note the red suit in the case of each; note the hairiness, and the association with burning and soot. We get the slang term "to nick," meaning "to steal," from.. But I digress, pausing simply to add that Saint Nicolas, as well as being the patron saint of young children, those sticky-fingered elfin creatures with scant sense of other people's property rights, is also the patron saint of thieves. Saint Nicholas is always found in the vicinity of a big heap of loot, and when asked where he got it he'll tell an implausible yarn involving some non-human labourers hammering away in a place he euphemistically calls his "workshop." A likely story, say I."

"Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt. A story is a string of actions occurring over time-one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes-and debt happens as a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said, and thought while you were in there, and then-depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad-how you got out of debt, or else who you got further and further into it until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view."

"In my part of the world we have a ritual interchange that goes like this:
First person: "Lovely weather we're having."
Second person: "We'll pay for it later."
My part of the world being Canada, where there is a great deal of weather, we always do pay for it later. One person has commented, "That's not Canadian, it's just Presbyterian." Nevertheless, it's a widespread saying among us."

"By making amends then, Scrooge is paying a moral debt. To whom does he owe this debt, and why? In Dicken's view, he owes it to his fellow man: he's been on the take from other people all his life-that's where his fortune has come from-but he's never given anything back. By being a creditor of such magnitude in the financial sense, he himself has become a debtor in the moral sense, and it's this realization that's at the core of his transformation. Money isn't the only thing that must flow and circulate in order to have value: good turns and gifts must also flow and circle-just as they do among chimpanzees-for any social system to remain in balance."

"People who reveal, or announce, that their gender is variegated, rather than momchromatic or plainly colored in the current custom, have always presented difficulties. Not only is our society distressed by masculine women, feminine men, and the androgynous; even the big man who embroiders, or the wife and mother of three who has a black belt in tae kwon do, a buzz cut, and no makeup in her gym bag, stirs a frisson of discomfort... I sometimes think that our culture is like the Church in the days of Galileo. We will not see, and we will silence and mock, even banish and punish, those who say that wat is, is."

"Normal" by Amy Bloom is subtitled "Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude." I found it an interesting account of her interviews and experiences. The book didn't really change my beliefs regarding transsexuals or the intersex, however I hadn't really spent any time contemplating hetersexual crossdressers; I'm far more familiar with drag queens and kings. I have to say, by the end of the book, I wasn't feeling especially interested in making the aquaintance of most of the characters she describes: they all come across in her narrative as narcassistic, mysognistic, conservative Republicans. Not my kind of people. In her interviews with experts, there is a suggestion that the crossdressing is both a compulsion and sexual in nature; the groups that the men and their wives have formed instead stress that the men are expressing their feminine side. However, Bloom describes the wives as being very unhappy, going so far as to say that their husbands' crossdressing is painful for them. She reports one wife say, "For twenty years he couldn't help with the dishes because he was watching football. Now he can't help because he's doing his nails. Is that different?" I wonder what support and accomodation these men are giving their wives, considering their wives seem to be giving an extraordinary amount of both. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be curious to read more about the subject and see if Bloom's findings are common.

"Not monsters, nor marvels, nor battering rams for gender theory, people born intersexed have given the rest of the world an opporunity to think more about the odd significance we give to gender, about the elusive nature of truth, about the understandalbe, sometimes dangerous human yearning for simplicity-and we might, in return, offer them medical care only when they need it, and a little common sense and civilized embrace when they don't."

Primum non nocere

Household Debt & Economy

"He solemnly conjured me, I remember, to take warning by his fate; to observe that if a man had twenty pounds a -year for his income, and spent nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he would be happy, but that if he spent twenty pounds one he would be miserable." Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Macleans
consumers were over-leveraged, borrowing on credit cards and against their mortgages, buying homes they couldn't afford with zero per cent mortgages and cars with money they didn't have, driven by interests rates that were kept too low for too long.

In Canada, debt levels are still rising. Bankruptcies were up 36% in July.. More than half of Canadians say they are living pay cheque to pay cheque.

The unfortunate reality is that until households get their finances in order and are capable of spending again, the corporate sector won't rebound and neither will jobs. That's a healing process that could take years.

Time

Tim Geitherner, Us Treasury Secretary: "Remember, this is a crisis born in part of the fact that households around the world in particular took on too much debt. So debt as a share of our economy rose to extraordinary high levels, and we're having a recession that is deeper in part because people are having to go back to living within their means. It means probably that you're going to see a slower recovery than we would normally see."

Assa!

Well, aside from the drunken 6 am weeknights making it problematic for my posts to be interesting, I made it. I can't deny that there was some fluffy filler, but looking back, the posting wasn't too bad.

I'm almost finished posting about my September vacation - we're already in Togo, so there isn't too much to go, as I didn't keep much of a journal in Toronto and Vancouver. And I bitched a lot about the extreme cold, which turned out to be silly, as it's back to hoodie-over-a-sweater weather - that makes me very, very happy. There were lots of trivia wins and cheap wine and I survived my second month of post-trip poverty; with yesterday's paycheque, things are back to normal again.

One thing I didn't get to do this year was discover more cool blogs - this is what comes of doing NaBloPoMo when you haven't got internet access at home. Time to post at work, but no time to read. I'll hopefully (with my lovely, lovely paycheque) be solving that problem this month, so I can catch up and hopefully visit some new blogs too.

The theme for December is MITZVAH and it comes with a challenge: to give something, to someone, every day of the month, and then blog about it. The goal is to act with kindness, obviously. I'm considering following the theme for once, though I'm not entirely sure I'm that kind.

J'ai une arme chargée et je peux l'employer.

I seldom woke up (unassisted) before Ortencia, but for once, I did. Handy, as it allowed me to lay around reading, get ready at my usual snail's pace, and still be ready on time. Breakfast was an omellette on a baguette and cafe au lait - which was made with sweetened condensed milk and instant coffee, all served in a metallic bowl as we sat on stools nailed to the stand.

Our first goal was the post office, but that was mysteriously closed, in spite of the fact that Ortencia said it was usually open on a Saturday (the more serious errand, getting me yet another Ghanaian visa, had to wait for Monday.) After that we were waiting for Maas, a friend of Ortencia's, so that he could come with us to the Grande Marche. As we were waiting, I ordered carbonated pamplemous and ice cream - however, we had to wait for the ice cream until they could call a man to come and make it. Maas and his friend Pascal arrived on a moto and ordered beer and a Togolese palm wine which was very, very strong. Pascal mentioned having come from church but it still didn't occur to either of us that we had lost a day somewhere and that it wasn't Saturday at all.



Our plans to go to the Grande Marche now postponed (it's not open on Sunday), we instead took a walk around Lome. I must say, it's a much more pleasant city to walk around that Accra - no holes in the ground to dodge and considerably less traffic. Our first destination was the 2 Fevrier Hotel, which is the biggest building in Togo and presently being renovated by Libya. Our next stop was the Place to Congress - most of our time was spent inside (Maas asked the guards if we could go in) doing a very, very odd photo shoot.



Next we walked to the beach, which was not as dirty as I anticipated, though with horses galloping around, it was wise to look down regularly. There was a wharf, which according to our local guides is the home of drug dealers, and aside from the horse rides, the main entertainment seemed to be shell sandcastles and roped off areas to buy food and drinks. After Ortencia and I waded in the water a bit - the boys didn't want to get their feet wet - and discovered an odd fish, we ended up in one of the beach bars. The cokes in Togo are amazing - the standard bottle is 0.6L! If you want the smaller bottle, you have to specify that. I also tried Guinea fowl (too bony) and some beef.



And then the shit hit the fan. As we were leaving the beach, I took two pictures of the sunset. Immediately after that, a gendarme in a booth guarding some sort of building yelled at us to come over. He immediately confiscated my camera because apparently you aren't allowed to take pictures of the president's house and that was what was in the direction of my sunset. After a 45 minute conversation, during which it was stressed that he was a man with a loaded weapon and the ability to use it, I finally got my camera back, sunset pictures completely deleted. The most hilarious part of the entire thing, minus perhaps my slow uptake of all the threats because of my slow French translation abilities, was that at the end, the soldier suggested that now that were all friends (!!!), if he was ever in Canada, perhaps I could show him around!



We walked back to the restaurant we had started out with so that the boys could get their moto and then we went to a Lebanese place that Ortencia likes. We went to bed relatively early, but were woken up in the middle of the night by an arguing couple. The bits that I could actually hear seemed to suggest that the woman was very angry about the hotel reservation, or lack thereof, and something to do with wedding planning and the man's response was a concern that if she was so angry over such a thing, maybe they'd end up divorced.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture."

Gut Symmetries Winterson

"Forgive me if I digress. I cannot tell you who I am unless I tell you why I am. I cannot help you to take a measurement until we both know where we stand.

This is the difficulty. Now that physics is proving the intelligence of the universe what are we to do about the stupidity of humankind? I include myself. I know that the earth is not flat but my feet are. I know that space is curved but my brain has been cordoned by habit to grow in a straight line. What I call a view is my hand-painted trompe-l'oeil. I run after knowledge like a ferret down a ferret hole. My limitations, I call the boundaries of what can be known. I interpret the world by confusing other people's psychology with my own. I say I am open-minded but what I think is."

"All children stumble over what Einstein discovered; that Time is relative. In mother-time the days had a chthonic quality, we ate, slept, drew, played, world without end, waiting without knowing we were waiting for my father to come home and snap his fingers and whisk us into the gold hour. We became aware, though I can't say how, that he was giving us four whole quarters of an hour."

"I know I am a fool, trying to make connections out of scraps but how else is there to proceed? The fragmentariness of life makes coherence suspect but to babble is a different kind of treachery. Perhaps it is a vanity. Am I vain enough to assume you will understand me? No. So I go on puzzling over new joints for words, hoping that this time, one piece will slide smooth against the next.

Walk with me. Hand in hand through the nightmare of narrative, the neat sentences secret-nailed over meaning. Meaning mewed up like an anchorite, its vision in broken pieces behind the wall. And if we pull away the panelling, then what? Without the surface, what hope of contact, of conversation? How will I come to read the rawness inside?

The story of my day, the story of my life, the story of how we met, of what happened before we met. And every story I begin to tell talks across a story I cannot tell. And if I were not telling this story to you but to someone else, would it be the same story?"

"Poor baby, passed from hand to hand like a pouch of tobacco, a fresh-faced narcotic promising hope, change, at lease for now. My family are addicted to sentimentality. If that sounds cruel it is only the cruelty of too close observation for too long. Unable to express their feelings in the normal course of days and hours they need every legitimate excuse to do so. They cannot say 'I love you' so they say 'Isn't she lovely?' 'Well done.' They can seem like bon viveurs, always a party in the offing, my mother planning a new recipe for canapes even in the act of stuffing my relatives with the ones she has just made."

"I think I was happy, in the maddening determined way that children have of being happy, and it was that happiness that worked as a magnet on both of my parents."

"My grandmother loved me because she recognised the same stubbornness that she had gened in her son. The difficulty and the dream were not separate. To pan the living clay that you are is to stand in the freezing waters and break yourself on a riddle of your own making. No one can force you to do it. No one can force you away."

"Defect of vision. Do I mean affect of vision? At the beginning of the twentieth century when Picasso, Matisse, and Cezanne were turning their faces towards a new manner of light, there was a theory spawned by science and tadpoled by certain art critics that frog-marched the picture towards the view that this new art was an optical confusion. nothing but a defect of vision. The painters were astigmatic; an abnormality of the retina that unfocuses ray s of light. That was why they could not paint realistically. They could not see that a cat is a cat is a cat.

Recently I heard the same argument advanced against El Creco. his elongations and few shortenings had nothing to do with genius, they were an eye problem.

Perhaps art is an eye problem; world apparent, world perceived.

Signs, shadows, wonders.

What you see is not what you think you see."

"Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of travelled light, single year's journey of illumination, ship miles under the glowing keel. In the long frost the sky brightens and the rim of the earth is pierced by sharp stars. After the leaf-fall the star fall, the winter shedding of too much light. Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot."

"Stell turned towards me and crumpled my heart in her hand.
'Do you fall in love often?'

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all. There are children who grow up as I did, with the love clamped down in them, who cannot afterwards love at all. There are others who make fools of themselves, loving widely, indiscreetly, forgetting it is themselves they are trying to love back to a better place."

"My mother drinks. My grandmother reads the Bible, my sisters numb themselves in excess family life. To each his own epidural. It does ease the pain but the pain persists, the dull ache, low down as though my back had been broken and not properly healed."

"Grandmother and I sat face to face over the sepulchral plastic of the breakfast bar. Common and rare, to sit face to face like this. Common that people do, rare that they understand each other. Each speaks a private language and assumes it to be the lingua franca. sometimes words dock and there is a cheer at port and cargo to unload and such relief that the voyage was worth it. 'You understand me then?'

I wanted her to understand me. I wanted to find a word, even one, that would have the same meaning for each of us. A word not bound and sealed in dictionaries of our own. 'Though I speak with tongues of men and angles but have not love...'