Ottawa’s such a terrific city. There are always interesting things to do. And now that I’m unemployed, I can do some of the daytime things too. There’s a whole other world of opportunities out there once you reclaim the weekdays!
Yesterday I went to a free conference at City Hall: Rethinking Poverty 2 – An Immigrant Perspective. It was organized by the Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres of Ottawa. Not only was it free, but they fed me and gave me bus tickets too.
Uzma Shakir, a Torontonian from Pakistan, was the keynote speaker. She’s part advocate, part activist, part stand-up comic. (She reminded me of Jim Stanford, who has the same kind of spontaneous quick wit on stage. They’re both worth checking out if you get the chance.)
Here’s an example:
“My husband doesn’t make as much money as I think he should.” Shakir said, ‘But of course he’s a Muslim man – between oppressing me and throwing bombs, he doesn’t have much time for making money. Oppressing me is a full-time job.”
Shakir commended Canada on how we always acknowledge that certain groups within our population are vulnerable to poverty: racialized groups, Aboriginals, single mothers, people with disabilities, newcomers, immigrants, etc. We don’t actually do anything about it, she says wryly, but at least we name them, which is more than many other countries do.
But, she adds, Canadians are too polite to talk about race. It makes us uncomfortable. Everybody heaved a big old sigh of relief when Obama got elected, because having a Black family in the White House somehow signified that we’re now living in a post-racist society, which meant we wouldn’t have to talk about race anymore.
But of course we do have to talk about it, because it’s unacceptable that skin colour is so closely correlated with income levels, and this problem is not going to go away by itself. Our collective failure to deal with racism has resulted in it becoming more entrenched over time.
Some things I learned:
There’s a gradient of income that matches the gradient of skin colour in this country. The darker you are, the greater your risk of poverty.
Between 1980 and 2000 (a period of economic prosperity), the skills and education levels of immigrants were above the national average, yet the poverty rate of families from racial minorities went up by 361%. During the same period, the poverty rate for white families decreased by 28%.
The skills, education and credentials that immigrants bring to Canada are largely wasted here, because Canada discredits them. For the first six years that Shakir lived in Scarborough, she could not find a family physician. Yet every time she called a taxi, it was driven by an immigrant who had been a physician or an engineer in their country of origin. Apparently there’s no doctor shortage here, just a waste of doctors. (The last cab she took was driven by a Somali man with a masters degree in French Literature. “What can I say?” she said, “He drove the cab quite well.”)
Shakir suggested that what Canada needs is fewer “settlement workers” and more organizers. Settlement workers help newcomers settle into life in Canada. Organizers, on the other hand, would help them speak out against policies that fail them, and help them unite to change, rather than adapt to, our dysfunctional status quo.
In other news, GC and I are heading for the hills tonight. It’ll be our first road trip together! We’ve planted three-day crops on our Facebook farms, and one of the band members is looking after Duncan. By the way, we’ve changed the name of the band again. It’s now called The Blue-Eyed Hermits, One Black Guy and Jesus.
I hope you all enjoy the unseasonably warm weekend weather. See you in a couple of days!
Good news – my back is almost back to normal! It doesn’t hurt and I can bend and lift again. I think the anti-inflammatory – Arthrotec – is what fixed it. It’s a huge relief, because frankly I was getting worried.
More good news – my camera resurfaced! It was at the physiotherapist’s office. Phew. That’s the fourth time I’ve lost it (or its predecessor), and the fourth time it has found its way back home to me. (I know that makes it sound like I lose my camera all the time, but I take it everywhere I go and I go lots of places, so in the grand scheme of things I hardly ever lose it.)
Eyebrow-raising news: I decided to resist my resistance. I read Getting Things Done and began implementing the System. I know, I know, you’re probably rolling your eyes here. It’s no secret I have a tendency to throw myself into things like this, only to abandon them after a couple of weeks. But this time I swear it’s going to be different. I’ll either stick with it or else I’ll get so much accomplished in a couple of weeks that it will have been worth it even though I didn’t stick with it.
Normally when I feel this way I just go to Staples and buy some coloured file folders and index cards and toss them into the mess. For some inexplicable reason, this doesn’t work. That’s why I’ve given myself over completely to Getting Things Done.
The author, David Allen, even provides a shopping list of GTD supplies. At Staples I bought:
an automatic labeler
label tape
file folders
stapler and staples
binder clips
3 inboxes
paper clips
pens
a big stack of paper
rubber bands
scotch tape and dispenser
Zoom's Command Centre
First Things Second: I needed a Command Centre. An Organizing Epicenter. An Eye of the Storm. An Oasis of Calm. A place from which chaos could be effortlessly processed and converted into order and useful results.
So I ordered two 2-drawer filing cabinets, and GC and I went to Home Depot and for $4 I got a damaged 60″x30″ piece of wood which we laid on top of the filing cabinets, and voila! It’s a desk!
The next step: Collection. In accordance with the system, I collected all the to-do’s and shoulds and musts from around my house and my computer and my calendar and my brain, and dumped them all into my inbox. (If something’s not an actual physical thing – like ‘organize art supplies’ – you write it on a piece of paper and put it in your inbox.)
That’s as far as I’ve gotten. The next step involves going through the Inbox and making decisions about each item. I’ll keep you posted. (Note to self: keep blog posted.)
Two head-hanging-in-shame items in the inbox that might be of interest to some blog readers:
1) Tofu Challenge – make good on lost bet
2) Name That Picture Contest – send prize to Stephanie
These things are definitely going to get done! Because I’m all about Getting Things Done!
Bad news for all you Jewish vegetarians: Smarties are neither vegetarian nor kosher!
Purple Smarties are dyed with cochineal (carminic acid), which is made from ground-up pregnant Cochineal insects. Because of this, Smarties cannot be considered either vegetarian or kosher, or, for that matter, particularly appetizing.
In 2004, The Vegetarian Society declared Smarties the winner of its Imperfect World Award at a ceremony in London.
Smarties have been around since 1882. There used to be a light brown Smartie, which was coffee-flavoured and which was my favourite member of the Smarties family, but which was discontinued and replaced with the blue Smartie in 1988. Even though blue is my favourite colour in general, I never really accepted the blue Smartie.
The new edition of Smarties, launched just last month, contains no blue or green Smarties. The reason for this is that Nestle has switched to all-natural dyes and is having trouble finding a natural blue dye. (And, because green is made from blue and yellow, green had to be eliminated too.) Many of the remaining six colours are muted versions of their former selves. I’ve seen them and I’m disappointed.
My favourite Smartie is the Pink one, but I’ve long suspected that Nestle skimps on the Pinks. After months of painstaking research, I finally have enough evidence to confront Nestle.
GC and I have been tracking Smarties colours in a spreadsheet for the past couple of months. We’ve eaten over 2,000 of the old Smarties in the name of science. Every single one of those Smarties has been entered into our database.
Our results might astound you.
Chart: Percentage Distribution of Smarties by Colour, 2009
An even distribution would have resulted in each colour of Smarties claiming 12.5% of the total. In our study, the percentages ranged from a low of 10.1% (Pink) to a high of 16.2% (Purple). There are 60% more Purple Smarties than Pink Smarties!
We believe this to be a statistically significant finding, and we’re going to be contacting Nestle for an explanation. We’ll keep you posted.
I advanced to the final round of the F-Word (Feminist) Blogging Awards! This means I’m going to ask you to vote one last time.
They’ve tightened up security for the final round of voting because of suspected freeping. Knitnut is a finalist in the Best Personal Blog category, but I think you have to start from the voting booth. Thank you!
The Volunteer Appreciation Dinner for Shepherds of Good Hope was a lot of fun. I’d show you pictures, but I lost my camera. I think I left it either at the dinner or at the physiotherapist’s office the next morning.
I’ve been seeing the physiotherapist for a few weeks now because I threw my back out in February and it never really got better. I found myself stuck in a holding pattern. I could function for the most part, but I couldn’t bend or lift anything.
Yesterday afternoon, after my physio appointment, I sneezed myself into a whole new reality. It felt like my back had exploded into a million jagged pieces of pain.
My doctor saw me right away and prescribed three things: an anti-inflammatory, a muscle relaxant, and a painkiller.
This morning I experienced severe pain in one leg when I tried to get out of bed. It took me a couple of minutes to realize it was just muscle cramps, but oh my god, they were intense muscle cramps! Screaming-out-loud muscle cramps! Biting-my-own-arm muscle cramps! If-I-had-an-axe-I’d-hack-off-my-leg muscle cramps!
Duncan watched with interest as I writhed around the bed in agony.
“Duncan,” I cried between clenched teeth, “Nine-one-one! Hurry!”
He yawned and stretched and snuggled back up against me and purred in my ear.
Eventually I managed to get out of bed and drag myself to the bottle of painkillers.
This painkiller, Percocet, is pretty damned good. I can still feel where the pain is, but it’s more of an abstract concept than a problem now. I like it. A lot.
Blogging might be a little slow around here for the next couple of days though. For one thing, I’m pretty high, and for another thing I’m not supposed to sit down for a few days.
Even though the sun is shining and it’s springtime and things are generally good in my life, I’m having a grumbly sort of day today. I think it’s just some emotional debris left behind by the layoff.
Back in February, when I saw the layoff on the horizon as a real but indefinite possibility, I imagined myself rising above it all. If and when my time came, I would be the model laid-off worker. I would not be a disgruntled former employee. I would not wallow. I would have a healthy and positive approach to change. I’d be resilient and creative and I’d make the most of it. Challenge, change, opportunity, lemons, lemonade, blah blah blah.
Maybe I was wrong. Oh sure, I’m counting my blessings. I’m very happy I have a decent severance package. I’m relieved I have no debt other than my mortgage. But I’m not feeling as optimistic as I had hoped to feel. And I’m feeling a little disgruntled, in spite of myself.
Maybe disgruntledness is a natural and universal reaction to being laid off. Maybe it’s like being dumped, and you have to go through all the stages in order to achieve that lofty state of indifference. In the meantime, I keep having these weird dreams that they’re laying me off and giving me weird parting gifts, like a horseradish. Whatever that means.
Anyway. Enough wallowing. I’m going to watch this Israel Kamakawiwo’Ole video again, because I love it and it might make me feel better. And then I’m going to go outside in the sunshine. And after that I’m going to City Hall to get appreciated by the Shepherds of Good Hope, because it’s Volunteer Appreciation Day.
Just for the record, I no longer express myself politically by not sewing. I’m pleased to report that last night GC and I finished sewing our sock monkeys. (They’re not actually joined at the hip, they just look that way.)
GC fixing my sock
Mending’s another matter though. I don’t mend and I don’t mind not mending. But for some idiosyncratic reason, all my socks get holes in the toes almost immediately after I buy them. It doesn’t matter whether I buy cheap socks or expensive socks, they all get holes in the toes. I just keep wearing a sock until three or more toes are sticking out of the hole, and then I throw it out. I’ve learned to live with it, but I was touched when GC pulled out his sewing kit and fixed a sock for me.
Me and my cow
Speaking of sewing, we’re both sowing seeds over at FarmTown on Facebook. It’s an interactive farm simulation game, and you play it with your friends. Everybody gets a farm, and you can buy seeds and grow tomatoes and potatoes and sunflowers and other crops. Then you harvest and sell the yield and plant more fields. As you move up through the levels you can buy silos and barns and more land.
After posting about the feminist blog awards the other day, I found myself wondering if there was a defining moment when I became a feminist.
I think it was more of a process than a moment, which was kick-started when my mother re-married and moved us from the city to the country. But the process had its moments.
I was ten years old. My life in Ottawa had revolved largely around swimming. There was nowhere to swim in Kinburn. There was not much of anything to do there.
There was so little to do, in fact, that my mother, an atheist, signed us up for confirmation lessons at the local United church.
Debbie took to it and progressed through the religious hierarchy to eventually become a Sunday School teacher.
I balked. It was boring. It was stupid. I hated it. I railed against it. But no amount of whining or complaining would persuade my mother to let me drop out. She said it was character-building to complete the things you started, even if you hated them and even if they weren’t even your idea in the first place. (Personally, I’ve always believed she just wanted some alone-time with her new husband.)
When the lessons were complete and it was time to get confirmed, I informed the young red-headed minister that I would not be participating in the ceremony. He looked at me like I had sprouted horns.
“Of course you will,” he said.
“No,” I replied, “I won’t.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because I don’t believe in God,” I replied.
He looked shocked and horrified, but what could he do? He couldn’t possibly insist I get confirmed after that. He had no choice but to let it go.
And that, mercifully, was the end of my days as a church-goer. It was also pretty much the end of my interactions with the young red-headed minister, much to his relief and mine.
Except for the time he knocked on my door a couple of years later and asked me to sign his anti-abortion petition. I was about 12 or 13. There were no adults home. I refused to sign it. He argued with me. I argued back. Finally he pulled out photographs.
“This,” he said, thrusting a photo in my face, “is a photograph of a green garbage bag full of murdered babies.”
He then told me that these poor babies screamed and cried as their limbs were pulled off during the barbaric procedure.
That’s when I asked him to leave. He turned an angry shade of red and left.
I don’t think I understood the political implications of reproductive choice at the time, so this probably wasn’t a defining feminist-making moment. I just didn’t like the guy, that’s all.
Actually, you know what? This wasn’t even the story I set out to tell you. I got sidetracked.
The story I was going to tell you was about the other thing my mother signed us up for when we moved to Kinburn. It was 4-H. I was quite excited about 4-H. I couldn’t wait to meet my calf and raise it up to be a cow. A calf was worth giving up my friends, city life and swimming for.
So imagine my confusion when I arrived at my first 4H club meeting to discover a table set up with scissors, tape measures, pins, needles, and other sewing supplies.
The leader instructed us all to take a seat, and then she introduced herself and said we were all going to be making pretty dresses over the next 8 weeks.
“Excuse me,” I said, “But I’m here to raise a calf.”
Everybody laughed and laughed.
Well it turned out that girls didn’t raise calves in 4-H, they sewed dresses. Only boys raised calves. There could be absolutely no exceptions to this rule, nor any discussion of it.
And that, I believe, was my first defining moment. It was followed by eight weeks of relentless arguments about discrimination to anybody who would listen and even to those who wouldn’t. My mother had to make the dress because even though I was not permitted to drop out of 4-H, I absolutely refused to sew. Not sewing was my very first political action.
My blog got nominated for an F-word award! The F stand for feminist. Now I know I don’t talk a lot about feminism here, but I’m tickled pink by this nomination because I’ve been a feminist even longer than I’ve been a woman.
If you’d like to vote for Knitnut.net in the Best Personal Feminist Blog category, you can do so now on this page.
Visit the mothership too for all the categories and a rich source of links to other blogs written by Canadian women.
(Warm thanks to Chrystal Ocean and Naci for nominating me.)
I was in Chapters a month ago, killing a bit of time before my art class.
I’d been resisting a particular book for a couple of months, despite its powerful magnetic properties. It was on my Amazon.ca wish list, but I’d been refusing to move it into my shopping cart.
Why? Because it wasn’t my kind of book, and I didn’t want to become the kind of person it promised to turn me into.
Getting Things Done
The book is called Getting Things Done. It’s one of those productivity-enhancing books. I think it’s really aimed at ambitious and hyper-organized workaholics so they can get even more done.
Me, I have a more organic approach to getting things done. Ahem.
But still, the lure was undeniable. When I saw the book in real life, at Chapter’s, I couldn’t help but pick it up and read its back cover.
What followed was a passionate little debate between the book and me.
“Buy me, buy me, buy me,” the book whispered seductively.
“I will never buy the likes of you,” I said firmly. “You’re not my type.”
“I will change your life,” it promised.
“You will enslave me,” I said.
“I will free up your time so you can spend more time doing the things you love,” it said.
One thing was for sure: this book knew my buttons.
“Well,” I said, “Do you come in an audiobook format? Because I don’t have time to actually read you.”
I didn’t find it in Chapter’s audiobook section, but a few minutes later I found myself drawn back to the book, and I stood there stroking its spine.
“I don’t cost very much,” the book pointed out.
“Hmph,” I said.
“I’m not very big.” the book purred, “You could devour me in no time at all.”
In the end I bought the book. But you probably already knew that.
The thing is, there are so many things I want to get done. There are books to read and write and a job to find and gardens to plan and recipes to try and a body to maintain and art to create and yarn to knit and floors to wash and things to learn and email and friends and finances and on and on and on. And now there’s a book called Getting Things Done sitting on my coffee table snickering at me. It’s been at the top of my to-do list for a month now. The irony is not lost on me.
However, having lived with the book this long, I think I can safely say the book and I both overestimated ourselves. It’s probably not going to change my life, and I’m probably not in any danger of becoming a slave to productivity.
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