My Two Cents

I figure its about time I lay down my thoughts on the student protests/ public response going on in Montreal. Just as a preface, two cents might be about all my opinion is worth here. I am not a native of Quebec, I am not involved in the protests, and I'm not an avid follower of the news. However, because so many friends back home have asked about it, I figured what the hell, I might as well throw down my thoughts and impressions as a quasi "outside observer" to the whole thing.

First of all, I do not agree with the way the student protests started out. Crowding the streets during the day and banging pots and pans at night does nothing but inconvenience and piss off the taxpayers--who the students should be trying to get on-side, rather than annoy, if they want to keep tuition at least partially subsidized by the government. Also, the notion of "striking" from university seems about as effective as boycotting Walmart, which is to say, not very effective at all. (Yes, I did just compare McGill to Walmart -- here's your McEducation, would you like fries with that? But that's another rant in and of itself).

Secondly, I think the entire reason these protests are taking place (namely the dramatic hike in tuition fees and the increased student debt that will cause) is perhaps a poorly thought out cause. We live in a debt based economy, on a global scale, and no amount of shouting, waving signs, or pinning red squares onto our lapels is going to change that. The provincial government is able to do about as much to remedy this international situation as we ourselves are, and the feds can't do much more. It would take worldwide economic cooperation in order to erase the culture of debt in which we now live, and honestly, I think we'll be able to genetically engineer pigs that fly before international cooperation of that sort comes about.

So, that for that. The whole thing is an exercise in futility.

However, that is not to say that I agree with the ways in which the situation has been handled by the media, the police, and the government. For starts, the media has blown the whole thing out of proportion, making the protests into "riots", and generally giving the students a lot of bad press that they don't necessarily deserve. Its not like I have to walk the streets in fear of being firebombed and gang-raped by money-hungry students frothing at the mouth. The worst you can accuse this movement of is of choosing to fight a fight that no one has the power to win.

The police are likewise overreacting. I have seen a couple of these protests in action. While the noise can be overwhelming, the disruption to traffic patterns annoying, and the presence of human bodies nigh on awe-inspiring, its not exactly something that needs an entire police force armed with Tasers and pepper spray and batons and goddam horses to control.

And finally, perhaps the most drama-queen-ish of the entire lot is the provincial government itself. The passing of Bill 78, which you can read about here, was a completely overblown response to the unrest, and has, as most overblown responses do, just made things worse, actually turning the tide for the protesters, transforming them from annoyances into near-martyrs. National support for the movement has grown since the passing of Bill 78, as the plight of the Quebec students comes to symbolize a wider struggle for basic rights and freedoms across Canada. Which is a real shame, when there are so many other, more significant, and more damaging affronts to basic human rights and freedoms that occur just beyond our blinders every day in this country.

S.J. Perelman, Pt. 3

"Alaunia Alaunovna dropped a small curtsy. The young man, a pitying expression on his face, picked it up and quickly returned it to her. She gave him a grateful glance named Joe."

"For years I have let dentests ride rough-shod over my teeth; I have been sawed, hacked, chopped, whittled, bewitched,, bewildered, tattooed, and signed on again; but this is cuspid's last stand"

"We became good friends and it came as something of a blow when I heard the next morning that he had fallen of the train during the night. The fireman said that we had circled about for an hour trying to find him, but that it had been impossible to lower a boat because we did not carry a boat."

"My brokers, Whitelipped & Trembling were beside themselves"

"The basket of slave bracelets and marzipan awaiting me on my return home made me realize to what lengths Diana would go."

"Diana turned on her radio. With a savage snarl, the radio turned on her."

Things I've Learned This Week

* Jogging can be fun!
* I don't actually know how to jog. I run. Like a cross country runner. Or a demented gazelle. CURSE YOU MR. BUSWELL!!!
*Bon Cop Bad Cop is an awesome movie. An English/French/100% Canadian hybrid, that perfectly combines comedy with the macabre, with some damn fine acting-- Watch it!
* Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within is an awesome animated movie, which makes you think about science vs. magic vs. faith (without intending to). All star voice cast. Watch it!
* Lords of Dogtown is an awesome (and unflinching)  movie about the early days of the skateboarding culture in California. Watch it!
* Red State is an awesome Kevin Smith Movie, that manages to be horror, and tense cop film and tongue-in-cheek social-commentary all rolled into one. Watch it! 
*You can never watch too many good movies in one weekend.
* Robert Downey Jr. can't always save a film (Due Date)
* My boyfriend can fly.
* (My boyfriend can fly when he's not falling down and breaking things)
* Wet weather is depressing.
* The student clinic here is super fast during the summer.
* The most difficult part of the day is remembering to take the garbage out.
* I am sad that I was born too late for Christian Slater. 
* I have an arch nemesis in the form of an Asian dude in a black leather jacket, black leather pants, with a utility pouch on his thigh, who glares at me, making direct eye contact through the bus window as I travel past him. . .
* Too much candy is a beautiful thing. 

Trifles

Who doesn't have these problems?

S.J. Perelman, Pt. 2 : Some things never change

Some recent giggles from "The Best of S.J. Perelman", to do with advertising and lifestyle magazines. It seems like the nature of the advertising business hasn't changed much since the forties. Perelman has an uncanny gift for pointing out the ridiculous in the everyday, which is so obvious it often goes entirely unobserved.

"God knows how the convention ever got started, but if it is true that the camera never lies, a foundation garment or a girdle stimulates the fair sex to a point just this side of madness. The little ladies are always represented with their heads thrown back in an attitude of fierce desire, arms upflung to an unseen deity as though swept along in some Dionysian revel."

"Perhaps the most curious mutation of the corset advertisement is the transformation, or clinical type, consisting of two photographs. The first shows a rather bedraggled young matron in a gaping, misshapen girdle at least half a dozen sizes too large for her, cringing under the cool inspection of a trained nurse and several friends. Judging from the flowers and tea service, the hostess has invited her neighbors in to deride her physique, for they are exclaiming in unison, "Ugh, my dear--you've got lordosis [unlovely bulge and sagging backline]!" The second photograph, naturally, depicts the miracles wrought by the proper girdle, which, in addition to the benefits promised in the text, seems to have removed the crow's feet from under the subject's eyes, marcelled her hair, reupholstered the divan, and papered the walls."

"If a perfectly strange lady came up to you on the street and demanded, "Why don't you travel with a little raspberry colored cashmere blanket to throw over yourself in hotels and trains?" the chances are that you would turn on your heel with dignity and hit her with a bottle. Yet that is exactly what has been happening for the past twenty months in the pages of a little raspberry-colored magazine called Harper's Bazaar."


"Don't think it does any good to pretend there is no magazine called Harper's Bazaar. I've tried that, too, and all I get is something called "circular insanity." Imagine having both circular insanity, and Harper's Bazaar!"

"Without any preamble came the stinging query, "Why don't you rinse your blonde child's hair in dead champagne, as they do in France? Or pat her face gently with cream before she goes to bed, as they do in England?" After a quick look into the nursery, I decided to let my blonde child go to hell her own way, as they do in America"

"'Why don't you,' continued the author, spitting on her hands, "twist her pigtails around her ears like macaroons?" . . . I slept across the foot of the crib with a loaded horse pistol until the next issue appeared"

"Why don't you try the effect of diamond roses and ribbons flat on your head?" . . . and, as it happened to be my day to go to the post office (ordinarily the post office comes to me), I welcomed this chance to vary the monotony. Piling my head high with diamond roses and ribbons, I pulled on a pair of my stoutest espadrilles and set off, my cat frisking ahead of me with many a warning cry of "Here comes my master, the Marquis of Carabas!" When I walked in [the postmaster] was in process of spitting into the top drawer, where he keeps the money-order blanks. One look at Boxholder 14 and he went out the window without bothering to raise the sash. A second later, I heard a frightened voice directing a small boy to run for the hex doctor next door to the Riegels'. I spent the night behind some willows near the Delaware, and managed to work my way back to the farm without being detected, but it was a matter of months before I was able to convince the countryside that I had a twin brother, enormously wealthy but quite mad, who had eluded his guards and paid me a visit ."

" "Why Don't you build beside the sea, or in the center of your garden, a white summer dining room shaped like a tent, raped with wooden swags, with walls of screen and Venetian blinds, so you will be safe from bugs and drafts?" I recoiled, clawing the air. "No, no!" I screamed "I won't! I can't!"

Do you ever get this feeling leafing through a lifestyle magazine? Or more recently, Pinterest? My God, the more things change.  . .

Unsettled

I've felt a little unsettled all week. Whether its due to a lack of sleep, a recovery from illness, or just the general miserably rainy weather, I've had this constant tingling feeling of something being "wrong". Not terribly wrong like someone died or something, just like there's a discordant note in what has been, of late, an incredibly harmonic existence.

I've been through this before. It doesn't signal a need for a drastic life change or anything like that, but does signify an excess of mental energy, and is accompanied by an insane amount of insecurity and anxiety (which makes me hard to deal with.). It used to be that I would burn through this extra energy by writing, or painting, spilling out all of that mental bile on paper. Now that I'm older, I prefer to drink it away, and relish in the oppressive calm of a hungover morning the next day (what can I say, I got lazy.)

However, being cashless and thereby boozeless, and suffering through a six year bout of creative constipation, none of these options were available to me to rid myself of that oddly anxious, unsettled feeling. So I've grappled with it, and grappled with it, and grappled with it all week, and now I feel like I may finally be in the clear.

Its odd, how, when everything is going right in my world: amazing boyfriend, loving family, good friends, and enough money to get by on, my body has to fabricate a false sense of un-right-ness, just to keep things interesting. Darwin would have a field day.

But, thinking about it, its not just me. Look at celebrities, as a bad and probably unfair example, and their kaleidoscope of frequently self-induced problems. When things go right (money, fame, good looks, lots of work, and a creative outlet)  it seems to be a human trait to generate something wrong to balance it out (addiction, affairs, abuse).

We are a self-flagellating race. Whenever we have something good, we consciously or unconsciously seek something ill to balance it. It is some of the appeal of Christianity, I think. To have an outside force that can grant us forgiveness, thereby ending our own cycles of self-punishment. To have a God who can forgive us, where we ourselves can't.

But when you get down to it, self forgiveness is really what we are looking for. A capacity to accept what is good in our lives, without guilt. Frequently, we are reminded to accept that which we cannot change, usually in reference to what is bad in our lives. But it applies equally to the good. Fully embracing what is good in life, overriding that instinctive sense of unease or malaise that we get when everything is going right is possibly one of those elusive missing puzzle pieces on the (mixed metaphor!) road to happiness.

Or maybe it really is just me, and I should shut up and go take my meds. Either way, feeling better \o/.
Cheers!

S. J. Perelman, Part 1

S. J. Perelman was an American humourist, author, and screenwriter, whose works most frequently appeared in The New Yorker, and who was most famous for his scripts for the Marx Brother films. I just discovered this dude today, and intrigued, I took "The Best of S. J. Perelman" out of the library to read.

Omg, this guy is too funny. Rather than wax literary about *why* exactly he's funny, I think I am just going to throw down a few of the insanely random quotes that really make me giggle as I go along.

"She had the rippling muscles of a panther, the stolidity of a water buffalo, the lazy insolence of a shoe salesman. . ..as she bent down to lift her suitcase, she picked up the car by mistake and had it halfway down the slope before I pointed out her mistake."

"That Philomene was a manic-depressive in the downhill phase was, of course, instantly apparent to a boy of five Several boys of five, who happened to be standing aroud and were by way of being students of psychopathology, stated their belief to me in just those words"

"She was as dead as a stuffed mongoose"

" 'Soda?' offered Snubbers. I took it to please him, for Gabriel's cellar was reputedly excellent. A second later, I wished that I had drunk the cellar instead. Baking soda is hardly the thing after a three-hour bicycle trip"

"The outcome of the necking bee was as follows: Canadians 12, Visitors 6."

"Living almost entirely on cameo brooches and the few ptarmigan which fell to the ptrigger of his pfowlingpiece."

"If I ever see a postman trudging toward my house with a copy of the American Bee Journal, I'm going to lodge myself in the dead-air space between the walls, and no amount of small boys smeared with honey will ever get me out."