Daffnee

I found someone's carton of SlimFast powder while trying not to knock over my roommate's piles of diced vegetables today -- ugh! And enough about that.

I was trying to revamp a handout for people with friends who want/have come out of the closet, and came across a nifty little pronoun the LGBQTT (that's Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Queer/Questioning, Trans and Two-Spirited) community came up with: hir (pronounced like "here"). I remember in Grade 7, when we tried to write using a male/female symbol instead of him/her for a day -- I found out later my English teacher majored in English language, not English lit -- and what a nightmare that was. These little bits of gendered language have been catching my attention lately, and in the stranges places. For example, why is it that in French, 'husband' is 'mari', but 'wife' is 'femme'? So a woman is married to a man, but a man 'has' a woman? Intriguing.

There was this girl that wanted to use the treadmill after me at the gym today. She wasn't quite tab, though she had the build: tiny, maybe just five feet, feathered (but not dyed) hair, rimless glasses, and toothpick arms and legs. She hopped on a Stairmaster while I finished my self-invented strained-knee recouperation session, and started intervals on the treadmill -- speed-walking, then running, then back to a quick walk -- after I got off.

She was still at it almost an hour later when I decided to leave, going strong, and only stopping once to tie a shoelace. I read in the Globe this morning about a study done on the health of Amish people, who are essentially the most hard-core farmers you can find on this continent, and unsurprisingly these guys can have their pie (and gravy, meat, potatoes, etc.) and eat it too. They just work that hard, and so did that girl in the gym. I could hear her panting, but also something else -- there was fear and grim determination, and the crushing weight of societal expectation.

The girls (and they are mostly girls, I've noticed) that go to the gym religiously don't think of it that way, of course. I didn't either. It offered power over everything, all for the low price of a bit of pain and some time invested; you could sell this mindset as a great mutual fund, if you packaged it just right. I find it funny now when I think about how we used to complain guys never had to worry about what to wear, because I've realised women may not have a clothing standard, but they sure do have a bodily one.

In the end, the body becomes just another bit of language, or something that tries to say a bit about who you are but always gets screwed up thanks to dialects or slang or poorly-placed profanity. Language seems so sticky to me now, and words suction onto bits of my brain as I read, and read, and read. I can do a bit with them, of course; I can push them a little bit, and always grab more, but the more there is the more (surprise!) they press down. More, less, neither helps make some space where we can take a little vacation away from everything expected of us, and social history's most effective enforcer: ourselves.

She pushed herself to the blinking of an odometer, just as I used to measure success by how numb a run made my feet. I say used to with a bit of irony, of course; I had to be there to see all this, after all.

The last page of the Globe and Mail 'A' section -- "Facts and Arguments" -- usually has half a page of random trivia ("Social Studies") paired with a literary attempt by one of my fellow Canadian citizens. The editors in Toronto leave the topic pretty wide open, so the essay today was entitled, "The manly man at the hardware store."

In short, it's the tribulations of a "57-year-old, joyfully (perhaps even rampantly) heterosexual male" who goes to the local Home Depot to buy an ironing board cover (flowered, of course) and has a crisis of masculinity when confronted by his snowblower-buying peers. Don't worry, I'm not going to go on a feminist rant, even though I'm starting to eat feminist theory for breakfast with my oatmeal these days. The point I'll be trying to make for the next few paragraphs has more to do with what (I think) men are good for, not power relations or "sites of resistance".

To make a not-so-obvious leap, I also need to note that the house I live in essentially gutted itself over the last four months: two out of three of our faucets dripped (despite my post-it notes exhorting roommates to put their strength to work when turning off the taps), we stumble in and out of the house because the hallway light died in November, and most of our food prep was done in the cover of darkness. But thanks to Maintenance Man, who was even good enough to run back to the Commonsblock to get spare parts for us, we now live in a watertight, well-lit house. I told Dan yesterday that clean floors make me inexplicably happy -- now that I can see how clean the floor is, I'm actually even happier.

Maintenance Man changed life for us as we know it. I'm finding it hard to begrudge him for embodying masculinity with his huge tool belt, scruffy jeans and big boots while reading in our glowing living room, and a thought struck me: Marta was right all along. She's the former roommate who planned on getting married so she could have kids and have "someone to fix things" -- I laughed then, but I'm not laughing now. Hongerboys can shag their hair, jocks can pump iron, and quiet, funny, literary types can master astrophysics and postmodern theory to their hearts' content, but the guy that can repair anything I throw at him has a pretty darn good wild card.

Good thing the one I have now already proved himself by gamely repairing my desk drawer in second year. Too bad I had to show him how to use a thermostat three months later.

I saw the Canadian premiere of this last night:



The little I knew from Kafka came from references I caught while doing mandatory readings for my Modern Critical Theories class (which means I needed to read them to write an essay, because we all know that the only mandatory readings are the ones that you'll be marked for knowing), in a Deleuze and Guattari essay -- probably the worst way to get to know someone, akin to waking up in a mountain range and trying to figure out what year it is with only an existentialist hermit for company. Bad things happen when existentialists talk about other existentialists.

With a tidy, minimalist title like "K.", I expected a whole lot of angst and a monochromatic colour scheme. I wasn't far off. I just finished 1984, and nearly chuckled with glee (can you imagine me chuckling with glee?) with the opening Matrix-esque speed-up slow-down scene of pacing businesspeople. The rest of the play involved a guy dressing and undressing repeatedly, a nifty backdrop of 20-foot filing cabinets, a whole lot of yelling about paternal alienation, and an actual Lilith character in crushed red velvet.

My own question of the evening asked something a bit more selfish, though: what does being "cultured" even mean these days? I went to "K." with a friend from English class who has a birthday this weekend, and had coffee with some other English-types after the talk-back session at the end of the play -- a stereotypically highbrow (or 'fauxbrow'?) ending to a highbrow evening. We chatted about grad school, the play, city life, travel, work, and all that. We even stuck out the questions about how actors "got into character" and the "difficulties of translating Danish drama" asked by the audience. I gulped a ridiculously huge mug of hot chocolate, and took advantage of complementary coffee. And though I hadn't done this kind of theatregoing in a very long time, somehow all this felt like old hat.

At the end of 1984, Winston Smith realises that even in rebelling against the Party, the Party groomed every step of his resistance, making a strong case for how unescapable our surrounding contexts can be. Was this kind of evening what my fourteen years of education and life in middle-class Canada set me up for? Someone should probably stop me and ask why I'm picking apart a genuinely fun time, and I can only answer that it's a personal trait. Socrates insisted "the unexamined life is not worth living," but I've managed to turn great events in my life into navel-gazing exercises. So much for Mooch's advice! (see below)

Maybe what matters most at the end of the day -- to me, at least -- are those things I can't be questioned, those things that resist prodding like Jell-o Jigglers and persist even after a few swipes on the critical theory grindstone. I had tea with M. (to carry on with the Kafkian trope here) on Friday, for a recent example. We talked for a good hour about the compatibility of Christian and Buddhist philosophy, and she cleared up a few muddy areas for me. What caught me, though, was how easily she believed that at our core, humanity has an inherent evil.

I can't believe that. Say it for me, Samwise: there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for. Hugs. Tea. Smiles. Kids. Family. Friends. Peanut butter. Tangible, inexplicable things that even theory can't accuse of being deceitful abstracts. If humanity built the frame of our lives, through our history and politics and social upheavals, humanity also left room for these things that bring us joy.

And what the hey: 104.9 FM is now "Clear FM"?

Back when I was a young 'un, the playground team sport of the day was always soccer. For the older kids (around 12 or 14), this seems to hold, but an interesting new trend has taken hold of the younger generation.

Cricket! The little six- and seven-year-olds in Acadia are playing cricket!

Given my infatuation with all things British, it seems that I was born two decades too late.

After reading Susan Bordo (American feminist) for two hours, I took her old-school feminist message to heart, went home, and cleaned house. Delving through my recycling means reading Globe and Mail front pages backwards, broken up with housing notices, junk mail, and cereal boxes. We hadn't made a dent in that pile for awhile; I was tempted to keep the full-page mug of Saddam Hussein in the hopes of showing my future kids an actual yellowed newspaper, but I've never been a packrat. I expect my future offspring to be techno-savvy enough to find quality online archives of the evil man in 2024, anyway.

Either I have a very bad leadership style, or I scare guys. All the guys on my former volleyball team, the Spiked Cranberries -- all of whom I consider decent friends, at the very least -- have managed to hemm and haw their way out of a second-season reincarnation as the Cherry Bombs. (Our shirts are red, if in case you think I've seen one too many Fruitopia commercials.)

On a more progressive note, I've decided to focus my honours thesis on the maturing female body of Alice in Wonderland.



Life's too short to focus on serious stuff, right? My original idea had to do with how public policies prioritize different parts of the body -- like how some injuries deserve more compensation than others, for example -- but in all honesty, who wants to read about that? Beneath the egoism, low self-esteem, and exhortations of wanting "to help people", there's still that little kernel of a kid that desperately wants to be anything but boring. I want to be one of those people whose obituaries are featured on the back page of the Globe and Mail under "Lives Lived", with less rhetoric and more fact; I may not be a Belle de Jour (at least not yet -- I get the feeling she and I have the same undergraduate qualifications, though) but I'll write my graduating essay on the Mad Hatter and painted roses if I want to.

A guy in a bright blue plaid shirt, poorboy cap and bald head caught me off-guard in my Chaucer class today before I realised that it was Basil, Martha Piper's event coordinator. I had met him at one of those monthly "breakfast with the President" events (advice: eat before you go, unless greasy sausage really adds that special something to the beginning of your day), and we chatted about the merits of an English degree before finding out we had this class in second term. I never expected him to remember me. What is it, the mole on my forehead?

Another belt-popping dinner, and another resignation that despite two weeks of intensive gorging at home, Wendy (as I have christened my tummy) has grown no bigger. Yes, I broke my no-scales rule, but at least I now have a healthy respect for Eric and Nicole (of thespark.com's infamous Fat Project).

As for things actually accomplished today, I'm happy to say I've come up with another timely (and thus top-secret) idea that probably has a flaw you could drop a (mad) cow through, but which seems like the next big thing in wireless telecommunications. Now if I had only gotten that Engineering Physics degree instead of a BA in Honours English, I'd be set for life.

*sigh* I'm 20 years old, still in the same city that I was born, and miss my mum badly. And it's not even time for me to do laundry yet.