Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
union politics and stompy boots
despite my overall good mood of the last couple of weeks, i’m a bit grumpy today – mostly caused by the unfairness of the world in general and the ongoing dishonesty of some officials in my union specifically.
in one of my textbooks, there is some discussion about how high school can have negative effects because things such as popularity and athletics are rewarded while academia is not — which of course i wholeheartedly agree with, but it’s pretty obvious that this just sets the stage for every other arena in the hyper-capitalist world we are living in. our society continually rewards those who lie and cheat, and those who do the honourable thing are lucky to get a pat on the head at the end of the day…. this is something i can accept as just part of the system, but i am always disappointed when it shows up in organizations that are supposedly there for the good of all. bleah. i should know better. how come i always have to play the role of idealist whose hopes are dashed by the “real world”?
i have it in my head that as part of my birthday gift to myself i am going to see if i can locate a decent pair of boots today after work… something doc martenish – it’s been such a long time since i indulged myself in stompy boots, and they seem necessary for the trip i am taking at the end of the month. if i am successful in this mission, i am sure that will lift my spirits considerably, for at heart i am no different than all the other little consumer-dolls parading around this city – and shiny things do make me smile.
after that is dinner with a bunch of great folks – so if the boots don’t pick my spirits up, i’m pretty sure a bowl full of gluten-meats and veggies shared with rad people will.
grade-grubbing
so – i didn’t do as well as i thought on my counselling methods final – and ended up 1 point short of an A – lame – i am just not very good at memorizing things and i resent the fact that any 3rd year university class would rely on close-book tests to measure anything, especially in conceptual classes!– (now there is an example of external locus of control working through me at the moment)
but (time to reconsider) – i totaled all my other grades for the class and i am still in the A range – with everything coming down to how well i do on my final paper which i am still writing (yes, i’ve been writing it since christmas but i’ve really only spent about 5 hours in total on it).
way back in university – when i still had a significant working-class opposition to doing graduate work – i never used to care how well i did, since i wasn’t really aiming for anything beyond the undergrad. i pulled in grades that would get me into a fair-to-middling grad school (and had offers from profs at the time), but hey – i had a job, so what did i need further education for? now that i’m thinking of a master’s (and who knows if i’ll ever do it) i’ve become one of those grade-obsessed freaks i hated back then – you know, the ones who challeneged their tas and professors over every last mark? the ones who grade-grubbed in class? the goody-two-shoes of academia?
okay – i’m not quite that bad – but an 84 on a final just doesn’t seem fair.
i'm not in the us – but this is still important
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people do love me after all
it’s true – my friends really do want to spend time with me – as evidenced by all the replies i got to my birthday invite. hooray! we will have a fine dinner at the buddhist vegetarian restaurant – i haven’t been there since i moved out of the city.
why should this be such a surprise? why is it that every time i throw a party i’m afraid no one will show up? here i am (almost) 32 years old, fiddle-player in a folk band, with a large social network, a track record of community involvement, and a good professional history and career – and i still feel like the outcast i was during my public school years. this is something i have been thinking about the last few days as i have been working on my child development course and finally got to the sections about adolescent identity and the development of self-concept.
(this is why i shouldn’t take psych courses, i already have a tendency to over-analyze and this just give me more fuel to do it with).
in any case, i won’t bore you with the inner-details i have been working out, but when i think about the little girl in school who one day had friends and the next day had none (due to some little-girl meanness in my former best friend christy emery, the fickleness of little girls in general, and probably some outcast tendencies on my part), i feel really sad for her. i feel pretty badly for the girl who got picked on throughout all those school years and some of the places she ended up as a result.
terrible things our society does to young people who don’t fit in….
the thing is, i’m still a bit of an outcast – being an anarchist who works for the government and does union involvement, wilderness travel and music (and thinks that we are on the brink of social collapse) – there isn’t one place where i am entirely comfortable, and there never has been…. but this doesn’t mean i am unloved, or unliked… it doesn’t mean the work i do professionally and politically doesn’t have an impact…
i guess what i am saying (thinking) is that fact – i still carry this little girl grief around in me, and i have managed to build up a fiction around that which says – “you aren’t good enough and no one loves you”….
and that is simply not true.
take 2 steps to the right and get out of the neighbourhood
grrr – i want so badly to write about the whole ward churchill controversy brewing in the united states over the last couple of days – you know, the one where right-wingers dredge up an article he wrote way back in 2001 and then scream about it? – but everytime i think about it, i falter in my ability to put together something that isn’t loaded with invective.
the part getting me most is not that people disagree with ward – diversity of opinion and all that – but the out and out hypocrisy of the american “free speech” right demanding that ward be silenced (either by being disallowed from speaking in new york, or fired from his teaching post at the university of colorado). it seems to me (from reading many articles and blog posts on this subject) that any semblance of “moderate” thought (and by this i don’t mean left-wing, but just centre) has fled from public life in the united states. from reading through the blogosphere, it also seems there is a growing trend of meanness that has entered into public dialogue in the us that wasn’t there before (or maybe these opinionated americans were always mean, but the internet allows them to share that with the world).
even stranger is that, although the rest of the world has noticed this dramatic shift to the right in the opinions of everyday us citizens and public officials alike – people in the us are completely unself-conscious about the fact that something has changed. (i know, i can hear my good lefty state-side friends reminding me that only half the people voted for bush – but really…… you don’t know how it looks from out here.. on the other side of the glass.)
this is not to say we don’t have right-wing voices here in canada – of course we do (witness the recent anti-gay marriage campaign by stephen harper for proof) – but i do feel that those voices are tempered by both a centre and a left on all the issues that are put out for debate. even when sunera thobani was under attack back in october 2001 for essentially the same reasons ward churchill is right now, there were at least some editorials and articles supporting her right to speak freely of her opinion.
i dunno – i don’t even know how to wrap this up except to say that i am frightened for where things are going, not just because the leaders of the us are up to no good, but because something nasty seems to have infected a big chunk of the population too – they revel in the deaths of people they have never met, and sue their closest friends out of some misguided notion of rights – i often wish we didn’t live right next door.
Red Cedar 