Yay debating

One of my favourite profs made a desperate plea for more facebook friends in class today, and via his facebook page comes this video of a Japanese girl at a piano recital. Everything about it is awesome, especially the boa and the fact that she's pretty much recreated all the parts of the song.

For reference:



Whatever happened to all that hair?

Our debate on the merits of a Mondragon style model for cooperatively run businesses was today. I don't really like the formal black and whiteness of debates. On the one hand I like the idea of worker control and ownership of production and a more equitable distribution of wealth, as well as collectively owned and run healthcare, education and other services. It works especially well in communities where the market fails to provide basic necessities and services for people.

On the other hand, there's a problem of scale which occurs with any sort of democratic institution. The more people you have, the more distanced any one person becomes from the decision making, and for a cooperative that has tens of thousands of worker-owners on three continents there just isn't a mechanism to allow everyone the feeling as if their input is meaningful and valued.

I have other stuff to say but I have to go to bed.

Mail

I have all manner of not-nice things to write in my blog but screw that. I got mail. Mail is fun, no?



Pretty yarn and penguins that I immediately pressed into use, courtesy of SeeJayneKnit.



Oh, and a duck.

29/365: Tyler

Tyler lived in the housing complex behind the Dairy Queen. You know the one. It has those light-up plastic ice cream cones that get stolen on a weekly basis.

His family was obsessed with karaoke. They had their own machine and tons of discs for it, and another friend who lived just above them often complained that it seemed as if every night was karaoke night. Every once in a while his mom would bring the karaoke machine in to school for music class, which provided a welcome change from playing Beatles songs on the guitar and Elvis sing-along with piano accompaniment.

The only song we knew on the karaoke machine was the Flintstones theme song, so we'd sing it over and over and watch the accompanying images of women dancing in bikinis.

At one point in time I became convinced that Tyler was colourblind, but he always denied it. I don't know, maybe he just liked drawing people with olive green hair.

28/365: Mrs. S

She had a name that made all the Romanian kids giggle because it meant something like small furry rodent. Before she was a history teacher she had been a radio personality, reading the news on a country music station. She told us she stopped because she was tired of having to read sensationalized stories that didn't have much real news value like women being forced to have sex with dogs. When she really wanted to get our attention she'd switch on the radio voice.

Snow

The snow's started again. This has been by far the snowiest winter we've had here during my lifetime. I remember it snowing a lot one or two years in the 90's but it's really not supposed to snow this much. Not here, not now and not when I have work in the morning. I really prefer the rain.

Meeting with a project group for one of my classes tonight. We're supposed to be debating about whether cooperative structures like Mondragon in Spain could be successfully replicated in Canada. We've been assigned the negative side, which means we're kind of arguing an unpopular position, but meh. Canada's really different from Spain. It's as simple as that. I can smell victory already.

We eventually wandered down to Nuba, one of the few places near SFU Harbour Centre that is open in the evenings. My mom goes there a lot for soup. As I've said before, it's a little cubbyhole of a restaurant off Hastings Street, staffed by a bunch of skateboarder looking types.

The story behind the restaurant is that the owner's grandmother cooked food and represented Lebanon at the 1893 World's Fair, and these are the same recipes they use for their food, which is excellent. Everything's always fresh, organic, delicious and cheap.

Other than that, today has been so uneventful as to almost not merit a post. I guess that's why I've just been posting about people lately.

27/365: Chris

He's the neighbour I mentioned in this post.

When my parents bought their house, he was the friendly neighbour next door. He and his wife Gwen did a lot of backyard gardening - huge pots of basil, raised beds of onions, carrots, potatoes, beans and peas, trees full of plums and apples and five gallon buckets with tomatoes. He kept bees to pollinate it all. They didn't have enough money to buy much food so they grew and canned it all. I'm convinced that his dog is absolutely insane, but they were nice enough people.

Then, suddenly tragedy struck. Gwen died suddenly as a result of a brain aneurism and things started to go downhill. The yard started to look unkempt and he dropped a lot of their routines. He began to lose an unhealthy amount of weight.

A couple months after that, his AA partner also died, and almost instantly he was back on the bottle, as well as other more ilicit substances.

Last month he had a stroke and he's too paralyzed to leave the hospital. The doctors say he'll be able to leave in about six months, but noone who has been to see him actually believes that.

26/365: Mr. Toupe

On January first, 1998 Mr. Toupe made his debut. He shuffled once around the park, lapped multiple times by the new year's resolution crowd, who were frantically trying to get in shape before they lost the drive to actually carry it out in their brand new sports equipment.

That first day Mr. Toupe didn't have the right kind of clothing. Seems to me he was wearing a pair of slacks and a checkered shirt with a windbreaker. His heavy gut jiggled uncomfortably and he looked miserable. No one really thought he'd last all that long.

But he soon became a daily fixture in the park. He invested in a decent pair of shoes and he gradually worked up from a painful shuffle to a jog. The pounds melted off as the sweat poured from underneath his artificial hairpiece. And in the end, Mr. Toupe was a good thirty pounds lighter.

Congratulations, Mr. Toupe, for a job well done.

25/365: Sarah

To my twelve year old self everything about her was just so damn cool in a kind of geeky sort of way. She knew the Lord of the Rings inside out and absolutely everything there was to know about the Rolling Stones and bike riding. At one point in time there were sleepovers and Rowan Atkinson Live and bike rides on ferries to sleep under the stars on Mayne Island with friends, and then at some point we fell abruptly out of touch. In my mind she's still super cool.

24/365: the Anna girl

Through some sort of horrible misfortune or injustice, she had a bad case of psoriasis or some other unpleasant looking scabby skin rash all over her face, so I was nice to her. But in time I came to find her quite annoying. She was sticky, and once she'd found you, she wouldn't let you out of her sight. She whined a lot. She called me Anna, and at first I tried to correct her but after about four months I gave up. She just couldn't get it right so I started answering to the name because it was easier. In time, I found that this dual name provided an easy out on days when I didn't have the patience to deal with her.

Office space

The problem with short project contracts is that I don't have my own desk. In the evening I have to gather everything I've been working on into files and stash them somewhere in someone else's work space. Sometimes that screws me up

The interesting thing though is the difference between all the different work spaces. The rule is always don't touch or move things you don't need to. Leave everything as close to as you found it as possible.

I find it fascinating, though, the little bits of ephemera that people surround themselves with, how certain aspects of their personal lives are brought in, and others, undoubtedly are left out.

On Friday it was fridge magnets and post-it notes with important information like REMEMBER the Dinner fixings in the Fridge!!! Today it's mountains of paper that I dare not touch. The hand cream sitting beside my computer monitor is not just any kind of hand cream, it's "efficacious" in its description. Must be good, because I've never heard of hand cream described in that way before. Beside it sits a dog's breakfast of telephone cable leading towards the phone. I like the randomness of it.

It has always been a hobby of mine to take these little things and see what I can reconstruct from them. As far back as I could remember I've always had this sense that I don't fit in anywhere and I've never known what to do about it. At some point or other we've learned the majority of our behaviour through watching and mimicing others. Eventually you're supposed to learn how to act and it becomes second nature, but I never got to that point, so I watch people. I really come by my love of sociology naturally.