In the Morning Before School

In the morning before school, Ruby gets out of bed and comes looking for me.  She climbs up into my lap and curls up into a ball and I wrap myself around her, stroke her hair back from her face, and cuddle her like a dad who knows that kids grow old and that they do not always fit in the laps of their parents and that this, too, will pass.

Just last week, I was trying to sneak in a few more pages of a book in the early hours of the morning when Ruby came tottering out of her bedroom with sleep in her eyes, searching for me.  I put down the book, pulled her into my lap, and rocked her like a baby. “I love you, Ruby,” I said.  She turned her face, looked me in the eyes and, in a perfectly matter of fact manner, said:

“Everybody is going to die.”

Continue reading →

May Reviews

[Pardon the delayed posting, I was in Iceland.  When I have forgotten enough of that experience to think I can speak of it, perhaps I will write something about it.  Until then, there are reviews to be done.]

Discussed in this post: 5 books (Waiting for the Barbarians, The Will to Change, Dying From Improvement, My Struggle: Volume Five, and Child of Woe) and 2 documentaries (Requiem for the American Dream, and The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution).

Continue reading →

April Reviews

Discussed in this post:

5 Books (The History of White People; Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours; Ojibwe Giizhig Anang Masinaa’igan; Austerlitz; and Nostromo);
2 Movie (10 Cloverfield Lane and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night);
3 Documentaries (Crumb; In the Realms of the Unreal; Salesmen).

Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Kims: when you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL

Apparently Kim Kardashian caused a bit of a ruckus by posting this selfie with the line “when you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL”.
.
N2Wa
 .
At first I thought maybe I would replicate the picture, as I’ve done with other pictures of Kim or celebrities like Miley Cyrus.  It’s part of how I question cultural constructs of gender.  I find it amusing to explore how people react to an average-looking man in his mid-thirties posing in ways that are ubiquitous in images we see of women who are in their early twenties (or any age, really, as long as their body matches with cultural constructs of female beauty).  But, as I thought about it all, I ended up getting sad.

Continue reading →

Poverty as Plague: The White Death

Part One: Dirty Water

As of January 1, 2016, there were 135 drinking water advisories in effect in First Nations communities (that is to say, on “Indian Reservations”), across Canada.  This is excluding British Columbia, where another 26 drinking water advisories were in effect as of February 29, 2016.  If you actually read through the advisories, you’ll notice that many have been in effect since the mid-1990s and have no sign of not being in effect any time soon. Altogether, over 109 communities are impacted.  It’s hard to know the exact figures because many communities do not have a population listed but, based upon the information available, we can estimate that this impacts over 75,000 people.  Over 75,000 Indigenous people living in conditions of poverty we tend to associate with some of the poorest nations in the two-thirds world — we are talking about people who lack buildings with heat or insulation (despite living near the arctic), who lack running water, and who cannot drink or bathe in the water that is available to them.

Continue reading →

February Reviews

Discussed in this post:  Two books (Quantum Physics by Humphrey, Pancella, and Berrah; and The Medicalization of Society by Conrad); three or six films, depending how you score it (Andersson’s Living trilogy, Vinterberg’s Hunt, and one disappointing one about David Foster Wallace) and three documentaries (Dreamcatcher, Running From Crazy, and Prophet’s Prey).

Continue reading →

Desire, Contentment, and Dispossession

Part of what makes desire interesting is that it cannot ever be satisfied. Perhaps we can momentarily satisfy certain cravings (for some kind of human contact, for a bigger TV, for a warmer coat), but we inevitably find ourselves wanting something else or something more. This is where the Lacanian notion of the objet petit a comes from. The objet petit a is the unobtainable object-cause of desire. It is that which would ultimately and completely satisfy our desire once and for all — which is why it is unobtainable.
 .
Mostly, we all realize this at some point — that we will continue to want and that nothing will ever be able to completely fill this hole of want inside ourselves. So, despite the eternal discontent of desire, we find ourselves desiring to be content. We desire against desire and imagine if we do not want anything, we will attain happiness.

Continue reading →

Omnimorphic

20140725_153131

I have been thinking about Eduardo Kohn’s book, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human along with Ye-weh-node’s teachings in Language of the Stones and elsewhere.  I have been thinking about what Glen Coulthard says about the connection that the Yellowknives Dene feel with the land — that the land does not belong to them, but they belong to the land — and how this is a common belief amongst the various Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island.  And I have been thinking of the words I heard from a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Elder who said, “We have different languages because we come from different lands.  It is the land that gave us our language.  We speak because the land gave us speech and different lands speak differently.”

Continue reading →