Blah

Well, I'm sick with a disgusting cold, so the rundown on my last few days in Dublin will have to wait, I'm afraid.  I got home last night at 20h, after about 17 hours of travelling, and went pretty well right to bed.  I did not have any NyQuil-induced hallucinations this time, but I did have the very strange experience of waking up with my body totally numb.  I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes when I take cold medication at night, when I wake up in the morning it's like my body has somehow been totally frozen by the drug.  Even my teeth are numb!  It's a totally weird phenomenon.

I have a ton of work to do today (including approx. 10 billion pages of readings, plus preparation for my absolutely epic upcoming week) but so far I've only been able to move from bed to couch.  And shower, I guess, and do laundry, so the day's not a total loss.

Being sick makes me extremely grumpy, though, so everything I've done has been tinged with this kind of petulant floppiness.  Schlepping the laundry basket down the stairs to the laundry room would, I'm sure, have been hilarious for a casual observer to watch, and I've developed this sudden inability to sit on any surface without dramatically flopping down on it with a loud sigh.  This is apparently just my natural reaction to illness, since there's no one around to see it; evidently, my immune system is somehow harnessing the power of sulkiness to denature the viruses running rampant through my body.

I was planning to go to the grocery store to get some food, of which I have next-to-none.  But petulant stomping for the 20-minute walk each way didn't appeal, so instead I improvised.  Which led to the creation of this monstrosity:

Ladies and gentlemen, that is a green pea quesadilla.  You would think that this would be completely disgusting to eat - or, at least, maybe you wouldn't, but I certainly did - but it actually tasted pretty good.  The sweetness of the peas was an interesting match for the sharp Irish cheddar I used (which I had a hell of a time getting into Canada, thanks to a very grumpy U.S. Customs official!) and the vinegary kick of the Tabasco sauce.  I don't think I'd make this every day, but it was shockingly edible.

Sometime this week, I'll post pictures from the Dublin trip, along with an update.  But, for now, duty calls.

Takeover

I've taken the opportunity, while Liz is relaxing, unsuspectingly in Dublin, to take over the blog.

What follows are reposts some of blog entries I've recently written and posted on my working blog which, as you can see, doesn't yet contain a whole lot to do with actual work.

The Great Problems of the World

In this world we live in, many people have many problems.

There are children starving in Africa.

Tampa Bay Lightning goaltender, Dan Ellis, continues to lose sleep over his measly 3 million dollar contract.

The president of the United States has to deal with, on top of everything else, accusations that he was born outside of the Milky Way galaxy.

Even contemporary philosopher, Jay-Z, claims to have ninety-nine of them.

Everyone on Earth has problems, and many share the same problems. But for all the overlap, there are relatively few people complaining about my new problem: being a white male.

Yeah I know, boo hoo.

And for every way that it will be a problem, I'm sure there will be a hundred embarrassing benefits. But I don't like to stand out. I want to blend into new environments, like a tall, inept ninja. In the Netherlands, I could just keep my mouth shut and/or express a dry sense of humour and I fit right in. In fact, I've never been somewhere where I could be identified as “foreign” on sight.

It makes me uncomfortable. So sure, it's not as bad a problem as starving in Africa, but it may perhaps be on par with at least a few of Jay-Z's troubles.

San Fernando is small enough (100 000 people, give or take) that I'm likely to gain some degree of recognition after some spent wandering about town. I'm given to understand that there are few white people there, excepting the current interns and an endemic problem of old, white sex tourists.

Or perhaps these are the predictable fears of a nervous narcissist. Perhaps no one will notice me at all. Here on the very edge of my departure, the uncertainty is such that I'm not sure which eventuality would be worse.

So the only solution, for now, is to contextualize the problem.

At least I don't make 3 million dollars.

Languages: Lots and Lots of Languages

The usual binary language choice I face while travelling is the following:

A) Learn the local language.

Or,

B) Fail to learn the local language, thus resigning myself to weeks or monthly of bumbling indelicately and obliviously through a foreign culture, like a delirious sea lion performing Swan Lake.

But the Philippines is – to understate things slightly – an interesting place. Depending on who you ask, there are between 110 and 175 separate languages spoken in the Philippines. I am perhaps fortunate that my choice here is limited to two of them.

It's going to be a difficult decision to make. Ilokano is the local language here in San Fernando, and is spoken by perhaps 8 million people in the world. Tagalog, on the other hand, is one of two national languages, and claims 22 million native speakers, while being understood by 55% of the population.

It's simple enough on the surface: according to the current interns, Tagalog is the language spoken in meetings, and the resources to learn it are plentiful. If I learn Tagalog, I'll stand a decent chance of being understood anywhere in the Philippines (whether you agree that that would be a good thing or not).

It might be a bit strong to suggest that Ilocano is dying, but the vultures are already circling. One of the previous interns here has become extremely invested in language preservation. He shares an anecdote in which he addressed a young child in Ilocano, only to find that his parents had made the decision not to teach the child the local language; he spoke English and Tagalog instead. Increasingly, upper class families in the region are making this decision, opening up the first cracks in the stability of Ilocano as a vibrant language.

So, sigh, I'm left to make a philosophical decision, and I already know that I couldn't make any other choice.

My insightful partner recently quoted Wittgenstein on the subject of language: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world". A lost language represents a lost way of knowing, thinking and understanding the world; all items for which I believe in increased, rather than reduced diversity.

None of this is to say that I will actually succeed in learning Ilocano, but fueled by my residual guilt over having failed to properly master Dutch, I'm going to give it my best shot.

Vegas would give the sea lion better odds.

The Mayor and Me (Or: How White Privilege Taught Me the Art of the Left Hook)

I've had the tremendous fortune of arriving in San Fernando during the annual city fiesta – a two-week long party and all-around good time.

Friday was boxing night.

I hadn't really gone into the city, at that point, except in a work-related capacity. I was standing outside the central plaza where the event was to take place, when a security guard from inside pushed through the crowd, pointed at me through an even larger crowd and offered me a seat in the (still empty) VIP section.

Surprised, I told him I was waiting for friends (the truth). Friends arrived an we tried to sit in the corner somewhere, but were quickly accosted by a gentleman whom I was later able to identify as the mayor's personal bodyguard.

In Canada, one is usually able to determine which offers it would be rude to decline, and which it is not really expected that one will accept. The offer of a beer is probably genuine, but the offer of one's house (after several beers) may not be. I still struggle with this distinction here, but it was clear in this instance that the request fell under the former category, so off we went to sit front and centre next to the mayor, the vice-mayor and Manny Pacquiao's trainer.¹

Then there was the boxing. I'd never seen a live boxing match before, but the conceit of unearned privilege had me discussing the finer points of the left hook with the vice-mayor, as if I could possibly have done more in the ring than just bleed. Maybe whimper a little.

The following night, another Canadian and I were whisked around a crowd into an event without so much as a cursory glance at our tickets (which were free to begin with). On the rare occasions I've been given VIP treatment at home, I've lived it up like I were the Prince of Monaco, because I know that my limousine will turn back into an oversized gourd at midnight, and I'll be back in the cheap seats with the rest of the suckers.

The problem is that the cost of the cheap seats at home can pay for a whole heck of a lot over here. I don't want to be given the key to the city, for several reasons:

1) I haven't done anything to deserve it.

2) The people in San Fernando's cheap seats don't live in nice suburban houses. They're hungry.

3) The specter of neo-colonialism follows me around like an over-protective parent; escorting me through the poorest parts of town and ushering me into VIP seating.

4) Part of my purpose here is to encourage the participation of marginalized groups in environmental activities, thus decreasing their relative marginalization. I see some pretty easy conflicts of interest on this count.

No problem: I'll just implement a solid waste management plan in a couple of communities, and the entire city, if not the better part of the country, will surely be immediately hoisted out of poverty.

In the interim, a quick bout with Manny Pacquiao should be enough to keep me (permanently) grounded.

1Possibly the most famous person I've ever met, now that I think about it.

The Post Where I Indelicately Use an Analogy to Compare a Minority Group to a Tropical Lizard

Like a 3D painting, San Fernando shows more of its depth everytime I look at it. I was shocked when Friday's boxing event featured two designated “gay boxing” cards. Dressed in full drag, the combatants clearly had no formal training, but easily had the best time of the night. The crowd loved it.

A Lady Gaga impersonator came into the ring and did a dance during the intermission. The crowd loved that too. I was enjoying it as well, all the more so after the vice-mayor leaned over and asked me “Have you met him? He works for the city library”.

These are the outer layers of San Fernando's attitude toward its LGBTQ population.

Further down presents increasing shades of grey.

Locally known as “the gays,” the mayor refers to them as the “third sex”. Locals will casually remark “look, a gay!” in the same tone that one might exclaim, “look, an iguana!”

And just as everyone likes iguanas, enjoys having them around and goes to see them in zoos, so “gays” are generally liked, and 5000 people showed up to see them at the Miss Gay San Fernando Universe pageant.

But you wouldn't want to bring an iguana home to meet your parents, and you certainly wouldn't want to be one, no matter how much fun it is to watch them crawl around on stage. The “third sex” implies an equality which is not, in reality, more than a thin layer deep.

The crowd at the Miss Gay pageant seemed to feel that it's okay to enjoy such events, but only to a point; there was something in the volume of laughter that suggested a cautious distancing and perhaps an element of derision. It would appear that, for all of the superficial acceptance, gays, like iguanas, remain spectacle.

Which is too bad, because neither gays nor greys deserve to be lumped together.

Dublin!

It would be very difficult to sum up four days of Dublin time in a single post, so I'm not going to try to do it.  I've been paying back the principal on my sleep debt, anyway, so many of my adventures have actually been dreams.

I will tell you two things about Dublin in general: first, it's spring in Dublin.  Trees are flowering, the air is warm (if damp), the sun even occasionally shines (damply), winter is a distant (Even damper) memory.  It's actually quite lovely to smell spring in the air as I take my parents' special-needs dog for a walk.

 Not only leaves on the trees, but blossoms!

Second, if you are ever in Dublin and have the opportunity to visit the National Leprechaun Museum, you should take that chance.  I have a photo from that experience which I'll post when I get around to unloading my camera, of me sitting on some giant furniture (leprechauns, as we all know, are one-third the size of humans, and humans are one-third the size of giants, so giant furniture shows us what it would feel like to be a leprechaun, you see).  edit: Here it is!

The photo doesn't actually make it at all clear that I'm sitting on a kitchen chair higher than my head, because the room is quite dark and so the flash was used; it's mainly of me laughing hysterically.  I originally struck kind of a "whoa, this is a big chair" pose, but my mum and I went through this little routine about six million times:

Liz: [strikes pose]
Mum: [takes picture]
Liz: Well?
Mum: Oh...it cut your head off again.

After six million repetitions, this became nothing short of hilarious, so the picture she finally managed to take of my face is sort of mid-snort.  Leprechauns!

Last night, we went to see a fantastic film called Sound of Noise at the Dublin International Film Festival.  We were very nearly not able to go, because the ticket agent explained that, as Syd is underage and the festival is sponsored by Jameson, a whiskey company, she couldn't go in.  We solved that problem through some slight subterfuge, and all was well, which is a good thing, since I wouldn't have wanted to miss this film.  The acting is stellar, the timing is very good, and there are a lot of funny moments, but what really makes it amazing is a sense of surrealism that never overwhelms the plot or distracts from it.  Instead, it elevates a comedy about guerilla performance to an exploration of transformation through art, without ever losing its sense of humour about itself.  Really terrific.

This afternoon, I'm meeting Mum for lunch and then we're going off to see some relics, which absolutely fascinate me, and then tonight I'm meeting a friend from undergrad, who's apparently enlisted me to join her quiz night team!  We'll see how that goes.

In transit

I'm on my way to Dublin tomorrow, to spend my reading week relaxing with my parents, my sister, and their extremely stupid dog, so updates may / probably will be sporadic.  Wish me luck navigating both U.S.  and Irish customs, and keep your fingers crossed that I don't make any inappropriate jokes waiting in line at airport security!  (It's happened.)

Neighbours

So, I realised I haven't told the story of the neighbours upstairs on this blog yet, which is a shame, because it's pretty entertaining.

When we moved in, the apartment above ours was occupied by someone I called "the piano guy" to myself - because, predictably enough, he played the piano a lot.  I heard him every night, but, you know, I didn't really mind, because he was great at it and always stopped after about a half-hour or so.  Then, after about two months, Piano Guy moved out, and the Upstairs Neighbours moved in.

Some good stuff

One of the nicest things in life, I think, is having someone you respect tell you they respect you, too.

I often feel like a gigantic moron speaking up in my classes, for two reasons.  First, although I have thoughts quickly, and want to express them as soon as I have them, it actually takes a long time for me to distill my thoughts into an accessible form.  At King's, this process was made easier both by the fact that I felt very comfortable expressing myself, and by the willingness of my colleagues to meet me halfway and try to figure out what the heck I was talking about.  That...isn't the case here, I think mostly because that's not really what we're in school to do.  Philosophy education is about discourse, and learning to participate in it, and that's really not emphasized here.  Which is OK; a huge part of what I'm really learning in this program is how to navigate that new set of academic values and the new challenges that brings.

Second, as mentioned at least eight billion times on this blog, I often have an outlier opinion.  And I do feel that (probably mostly as a result of my first point) that opinion is dismissed as somehow irrelevant, which makes me feel like, to many of my colleagues, the world in which I live - which is often quite distinct from their own in many ways - is irrelevant.  This isn't a terribly comfortable way to think about myself, or about my relationships with them.

However, something happened the other day that made it all seem worth it.

I have a colleague, whom I've mentioned in passing before.  She's quite brilliant, and very mentally flexible, which makes her a lot of fun to talk to.  She really seems to take genuine pleasure in considering things from another perspective with a true openness that I really love.  She's also pretty opinionated, and unafraid to put her thoughts and herself out there in a way that's endearingly both bold and shy.  I have a great deal of time for this woman and I respect her opinion a lot.

So it was great when, a couple of days ago, she told me that she considers me one of her top ten feminist influences.

It's wonderful to feel that all the stuff I've been saying, instead of just making me sound like some kind of rambly kook, has actually had a positive impact on someone - and someone for whom I have so much respect, on top of that.  I do get quite a few positive messages from the people around me, and I feel like I may be too quick to let them get swallowed up by what I perceive as the negatives.  I'm trying to take this as a lesson to keep an eye out for the good, and let it bolster me up through the bad.

That's it; just a little buoying-up moment in this week of seemingly infinite studying.  A nice thought with which to end a 14-hour two-midterm day.

Balance

As you all know, one of the things I've been struggling with recently is finding balance in my life and in my relationship to myself.  I am, by nature, a person of extremes (which I come by honestly, as evidenced by the Markman motto: "Often wrong, never uncertain!"), and finding a way to negotiate between two polar positions is a constant struggle for me.  This is compounded by the fact that I often see and agree simultaneously with two apparently contradictory positions, but am very bad at expressing that, which means that I think the people around me see me as much more dogmatic than I actually am, with all the conversational consequences that follow from that.  But that's neither here nor there.

I especially struggle with this in the arena of opinion and perceptions.  In my sullen goth teen years (yes, this happened), I dealt with the fact that I was quite obviously oriented differently to a lot of things  than my peers were by adopting the uncompromising position of "I am right, you are all wrong and no one understands me."  A big part of turning into something resembling a human being was training myself out of that response.  Unfortunately, since I tend to commit to all of my initiatives 100% (see: a person of extremes), in recent years I've been leaning too far in the other direction, putting myself in the uncomfortable position of truly believing things that I thought, by comparing them to the views of others around me, were wrong.  That's a very awkward way to live: simultaneously believing and not believing in your own worldview.

So I'm trying to come to a place of balance between these two extremes, and having pretty limited success so far.  Turns out that negotiating the complexities of being a self-determining human being is a little tricky.

What I find entertaining (and the real reason behind this post) is how obviously this struggle plays itself out in my choice of dishwashing music.

Valentines

On this day, as we observe the 455th anniversary of Thomas Cranmer being declared a heretic, we hold our loved ones close, remembering that we too could at any time be subject to the whims of an impatient Catholic monarch and have our extensive Protestant reforms undone.  Life is unstable; love while you can.

Just kidding.  We all know what this holiday is really about: half-price chocolate tomorrow!

No, really, I received some beautiful messages from the loves in my life today, and I feel so privileged to live in the midst of such wonderful people - one talented haiku-writer in particular.

I hope all of you are as lucky as I am today.

Ek stasis

I've recently been rediscovering my interest in fun.

That sounds like a ridiculous thing to say. But, as the philosopher Seuss famously wrote, "It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how."  I've spent the last two years or so developing my abilities to work hard, to be responsible, and to meet the expectations of others, which didn't leave me much time to work on the important business of enjoying myself.

Not to say that I haven't had any fun for two years.  That would be an outright and absolutely outrageous lie.  But I've come to the conclusion that there's something very positive about having active fun - organizing your life in such a way as to make sure there's fun in it.  My attitude for as long as I can remember is that fun is kind of a nice bonus that you can have if you happen to have some free time after you get all your work done, and I'm slowly realising that that's just not going to fly in a satisfying life.

So I've decided to start prioritizing fun, and I would say that it's been a rip-roaring success so far.

Of course, when I say 'so far,' I mean 'since I decided to do this last Tuesday,' but you know what?  I'm just going to go ahead and call this initiative successful anyway.

As with most things I do, I decided to start my fun-rediscovery with an extreme condition.  I have two midterms on Tuesday: one at 8h30 and one at 17h30, which functionally means a whole day of midterms.  I've been trying very hard to study for the past two weeks, but with fairly limited success, which leaves me in the unenviable position of feeling pretty unprepared to be evaluated.  So, this weekend, I decided to go to Toronto.

You would think that this would be a bad idea.  You'd be wrong, of course.

On love

The couple down the hall are breaking up.

Or maybe they're not.  Maybe they're just going through a rough time; I can't know.  What I do know is that the walls in this building are very thin, and the hallways echo, and everyone on my floor hears the heartbreak.

She's the one leaving.  When she talks, I hear the indifference in her voice loud and clear, and I hear the gut-punched sound in his responses.

"Don't leave," he keeps saying.  "You promised me you wouldn't."  The list of the promises she broke is long and petty (I've heard it repeated many times): today, she was going to spend tonight there instead of going to work, but she's going in instead.

"If you loved me, you wouldn't do this to me."  It's a classic manipulative tactic; ordinarily, hearing a man tell a woman this would raise the little 'danger' hairs at the back of my neck, but this is such a naked act of desperation that I don't feel anything but sadness.

"I have to go," she keeps saying.  "[His name], stop.  Stop.  I have to go."

The door slams.  Their dog starts to whine.

Stu and I are on opposite sides of this big moving rock, but I feel like he's here at these moments, when my heart breaks for this sad man and his sad dog.

I'm grateful.

Breakfast

So, I want to take a break from talking about all this frivolous stuff (science, self-discovery, blah blah blah) and address something serious: breakfast.

As many of you know, I've been professing some serious smoothie love recently, and that hasn't changed (not even when I remembered that blueberries have an awful lot of pectin in them too late to save my all-blueberry smoothie from turning into something that looked like that cranberry sauce that comes in a can and plops out all in one wiggly cylinder).  But recently, I've been feeling like it's time for a change.

Then I remembered that I have a whole container full of gluten-free oats in the cupboard!  The last time I lived alone, my breakfast every morning for a good six months was a bowl of oatmeal, and one egg scrambled with tofu and Cajun seasoning.  This was when I was working on the Harbour Hopper, so I needed a big, protein-y breakfast to get me going, and that definitely did the trick.  As school picked up, oatmeal became a treat for when I had the luxury of cooking breakfast, to be brought back to bed and savoured, all cuddled up with a book.

Of course, when I moved into the White Hart with Stu, I definitely didn't have the time or kitchen space to be cooking breakfast every morning, and I kind of forgot about it.  But today, just smelling it bubbling away on the stove made me feel instantly cosy, and every bite of warm, creamy, brown-sugary goodness is just making me so happy right now.

Full disclosure: I put more brown sugar on after I took this picture.

Simultaneous breakfast rediscovery: eggs cooked in butter.

Mmmmmm.  Cholesterol consumed today: a lot.  Vegetables and/or fruits: none. Must be exam season!

I love trying new things, but what I love even more is revisiting old things and loving them all over again.

Acceptable risk

One of my favourite things (perhaps my most favourite thing) about moving to Upper Canada has been proximity. I'm now really close to a bunch of lovely family and friends, which is fabulous. I'm trying to make sure that I take advantage of that and see as many of those fantastic people as often as I can.

I sent an email (Facebookmail, actually) to one of my dear friends about maybe seeing if we could get together. She was my very first friend when I arrived at King's, and I just adore her. She's one of the most restful people I've ever met; meeting her for tea is an invitation to let your troubles disappear, and she's also one of the most interesting and talented people I know. So, I realised I hadn't seen her since before the Christmas holiday and it was high time that I fixed that. I sent her a quick message asking if she had any time in the next two weeks. Her reply indicated that, although she'd love to see me, she felt she had to disclose that she, her partner, and their gigantic cat had been displaced from their apartment because of bedbugs. Though she was now 99% sure that they were all bug-free, a lot of people had expressed to her that they were uncomfortable seeing her until the apartment (which, I stress, they are not living in at the moment) was given the all-clear.

...what? I wrote her back that I'm pretty sure bedbugs aren't an airborne condition, so unless she was planning on us spending our date inside the same set of clothing and rolling around in her potentially still bedbuggish apartment, I'd be fine with that, but I was genuinely stunned that people weren't willing to sit across a table in a diner from this woman because she's currently subletting her apartment to some undesirable creatures.

The news media have been going hog-wild with the bedbugs-in-Toronto story, and, to be fair, having had several friends who've dealt with the arthropod menace, I understand that bedbugs are an uncomfortable, embarassing, and expensive ordeal. But the idea that you would totally shun someone because they had bedbugs a month ago or whatever, and that there's a tiny little chance that they might still, is mind-boggling to me.

This exchange of emails really brought home to me something I've been thinking about for awhile: the idea of acceptable risk.

On being a 'radical'

I am hesitant to post this, for two reasons.

First, I feel like there's a lot of me complaining about how different I feel on this blog, and not enough of me taking pleasure in the ways in which I find common ground with other people. I think partly this is a function of how much easier it is to write about difference versus sameness; it's much easier to write about conflict. This is something I've filed away and am working on.

Second, I know that some of my colleagues read this blog. So I'm going to preface this post with the following statement: I know I'm not 'in the right.' There is no right, especially around issues like these. And I know that, often, there is a lot more middle ground than I immediately perceive. I do recognize and acknowledge that, although we often seem to be coming from different places, we share a lot in common. But the areas where we are different are emotional and significant for me, and I think part of authentically exploring my relationship to my surroundings (which is part of what I'm trying to do in this blog) is highlighting, working through, and talking about those areas.

With that disclaimer, here goes.

I sometimes have the exhausting feeling that being a midwife - or learning to be one - is about living and working in reference to others, rather than celebrating what it is midwifery is and does.

Enstranging the familiar

One of the weirdest things about Stu being gone is living alone in our communal space. There's something so bizarre about living my way in our place, and I can't quite put my finger on it. The subtle change in routines is enough to make things just feel overall weird, like in one of those dreams where familiar surroundings suddenly seem foreign. It's a little disorienting, and a little liberating, too.

I've thought about whether I want to resist this or go with it, and I haven't come up with an answer yet. Some elements - like the ability to sleep in the exact centre of the bed between tightly tucked-in and freshly ironed sheets, for example - I am definitely embracing. (To be fair, I'm sure that Stu, who very capably handles most of our shared household tasks, spoiling me dreadfully, would cheerfully iron the sheets if I asked him to. I'm just not prepared to take advantage of his good nature to that extent.) The bed's made the way I like it, the freezer is full of neatly portioned leftovers all ready to be taken for school lunch, the closet door's always closed when I go to sleep (I am convinced that the closet is where spiders live and irrationally believe that they won't come crawl on my face at night if the door's closed), and the deadbolt's always locked on the front door.

So I finally have everything in the house just how I like it; all those little domestic inconveniences have just sort of evaporated. Which makes me realise that one of my most beloved things about being in this relationship, much to my surprise, is that little bit of friction. Not that I enjoy having a thousand discussions over whether I'm being completely neurotic to insist on the shower curtain always being closed after one gets out of the shower (conclusion every time: yes, I absolutely am. It may prevent mildew but a cursory observation of my household practices would suggest that it also fosters insanity). But those tiny clashes are really just another way of brushing up against the best things about being with someone you love. To discuss the appropriate method of ice cube storage is fundamentally to be confronted with the prospect of sharing a life with someone, of the delicate and intricate processes involved in knitting two lives together and reconciling the needs of two different people.

In the past, I confess I've been pretty inflexible in these discussions. Oh, sure, I've never come right out and said that a person who prefers to place the clean knives in the dish drainer blade-side-up is worse than Attila the Hun, but I may have subtly communicated something along those lines. Living alone has made me realise that the most important part in all of these little contretemps isn't finding the best, the most efficient, or the least pointy method of doing the task itself; it's doing something much more difficult. Running a household is fundamentally about finding a way to share, to grow, and to live equitably with your partner.

Stu, when you come home, wash the dishes any way you want to.

I staggered on through darkness / There was a hazy sky, a few stars / Which I followed as best I could

Sometimes I hesitate over how personal I want to be on this blog. In this time and place (as my professor for Please Don't Be Racist class loves to say) we have real trouble with the distinction between public and private in our culture. On the one hand, I feel like I want to be able to preserve the private and treat this like a public communication: opinions, not emotions with the line drawn between the domains they define. But then, on the other, there's something really alluring about grappling frankly with the issue of authenticity, flirting with blurring that line, and where that might take me. And I think there's something valuable, and maybe in some way courageous, in being able to talk frankly about emotional experience in a culture that doesn't often foreground those kinds of discussions. (Plus I like to fantasize about the internet as this huge archive of human experience, kind of taking on a life of its own, and the idea of injecting myself into that is pretty cool.)

I think I do a little of both here. There's some commentary, a little bit of blah blah blah about feminism or scientism or any of the various isms I'm confronted with on any given day, and there's some personal stuff about how I feel and where I'm at with my evolution as a person.

This is all kind of the lead-up to a very personal post, I think.

New Blog

Operating on the old premise that one can never have too many blogs, I've decided to begin an additional blog to document my adventures in environmental (mis)management in the Philippines.

It can be found here: http://environmentalmismanagement.blogspot.com/

I'll continue to update this blog as well. I'm still toying with ways of separating work from real life.

Warm regards,

Stu

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

What I love about snow is how it seems to make the world smaller. As soon as it starts to fall, all the sounds of the city are dampened, and rushing, roaring metropolitan noise is transformed into the quiet, contented hum of busy people. There's something about living in a large (or largeish) city that gives people permission to become both blind and invisible; they wrap themselves up in a kind of urban mantle that insulates them from being in the presence of strangers all day long. But snow somehow seems to collapse those barriers. There's a universal recognition that a snow day is an extraordinary day in the most literal sense: everything somehow transcends the usual when nothing's working quite as it should. And with that comes a kind of a we're-all-in-this-together attitude that makes colleagues out of strangers.

The snowy view from my living room window right now.

We got a very heavy snowfall last night, and I woke up today to find the world whited out. Today being Wednesday, I'm supposed to be running errands. I had two big ones on my list: go to the bank, and get groceries. Normally, this would take 75 minutes, total (15 minutes for the bank, a 20-minute walk to the grocery store either way, and I'm a very slow grocery shopper). Today it was about two and a half hours! My walk to the grocery store was like a mini-mountain-climbing expedition through sometimes knee-deep drifts! I had a big grin on my face the whole time, though, since every block or so, I'd get a joke, a rueful smile, or a "Good morning" from someone out shovelling the white stuff. One guy shook his fist at me in mock outrage as I walked by.

"Don't you feel guilty for walking by all these people with no shovel?" he asked.

"Not at all!" I answered back, which he seemed to enjoy.

The trek back from the grocery store with ten million pounds of groceries slung over my shoulders (why do you buy so many canned goods, Liz, why?) was definitely my workout for the day, and now I'm home with a pot of homemade chicken stew cooking up on the stove, feeling relaxed and light-hearted and warm.

Perfect.

The flip side

I don't think it would be overstating the situation to say that the last five months have been a major emotional upheaval for me (and I think readers of this blog are likely to agree). This program was absolutely not what I expected, and in fact was often the exact opposite of what I expected, and I didn't deal with that particularly well.

I have a tendency, when things take a turn for the unexpected and/or unpleasant, to do two things, neither of which is particularly productive. First, I assume that things have gone wrong because of some personal deficiency on my part. I'm not getting it, I'm not doing it right, I'm somehow just completely horrible at everything I need to be doing. Then, once I've firmly established my incompetence in my own mind, I make sure to blame everyone else for what's gone wrong and take none of the responsibility for myself. Then I notice that I'm in the middle of a huge conflict or three, that the world seems to be a terribly confrontational and unwelcoming place, and end up feeling even more alienated. This is a terrific system, which has worked exactly zero times to achieve my desired ends in the past, which is, of course, why I keep employing it whenever times get tough.

So that's the bad news. The good news is, at least I figured my little game out quickly enough to beat myself at it. (I hope.)

There are few occasions on which Shakespeare doesn't have something pithy to say, and "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" is one of his all-time greats. Hamlet was, in many respects, not your most emotionally intelligent guy, but I think he got this one bang-on. There are a finite number of possible events in the world, but there are an infinite number of ways of living those events, and the experiences we choose shape the world in which we choose them.

Or, if you prefer 20th-century gay Austro-Hungarian logical-positivist linguistic philosophers (and who doesn't?!), I think Wittgenstein's "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" can be very neatly misapplied in this context. Wittgenstein really meant something very profound (if a little oversimplified) about intersubjectivity and the possibility of understanding truth, but I enjoy thinking about this quotation (and quite a lot of his work, actually) as a way of understanding optimism. (He would be absolutely horrified to see his work bastardized like this, which is kind of part of the fun for me.) To understand that the limits of language, of what can be expressed and understood to oneself, describe the limits of the world in which one can live, is to understand one's own fundamental power for world-creation, which is in itself to take that power in hand. And if I have the choice to live in a pleasant world just by being optimistic, well, I'm not actually an idiot so I'm going to do that.

I've been struck lately by how inordinately happy I've been to be in the company of people who know, respect, and accept me as I am, and I realised that that's because being in their company creates an alternate worldview for me. In the world of the MEP, I'm a kind of a misfit who keeps getting herself into social trouble and seems to keep falling into the trap of being pessimistic. But outside of it, I get to experience an alternate reality - my previous reality, in fact, in which I'm competent, confident, and accepted in spite of or maybe because of my little quirks.

I prefer this reality by a fairly substantial margin.

Once this thought occurred to me, it seemed completely obvious. Even more obvious was what to do about it. Why wait for other people to legitimize who I am? Why not just...do it myself? When my views (values, beliefs) come into conflict with someone else's, I realised, I don't need to believe I'm totally wrong (while acting totally right). I can acknowledge that the 'real' truth, if it even exists, is somewhere between their view and mine, reassert my reasons for believing what I believe and just go about my life. If this program is telling me I'm a misfit, they're probably right - I may well be a bad fit for the way things are done here. But that's all that means.

This doesn't mean I'm going to suddenly stop caring what other people think of me or how I am in the world - if I want to accomplish what I think I need to accomplish (which includes living as harmoniously as possible with all kinds of other people), tailoring my expressions is, obviously, extremely important. But what I am going to stop doing is assuming that they know me better than I know myself, that their perceptions of me and my beliefs should carry more weight than my own view and the views of the people I respect and care about. I am who I am, and if I'm not OK with that, how can I expect others to be?

I haven't felt this peaceful about myself or my life in such a long time.

The optimist's back, baby, and my glass is full.