So, like, I was in Toronto last week on a business trip. Two divisions of the company I work for are aligning their software, a process that will have taken over a year and a half by the time it’s completed, a very aggressive timeline (really, it is, I’m not being ironic), and I am a SME, a Subject Matter Expert. Hence the visit to the head office to attend a week of meetings.

Ok, so here I was, waking up in a downtown hotel, putting on a suit, asking the doorman to get me a cab, asking the taxi driver to write me a receipt so I could put the trip on my expense account, then walking into a tall glass tower with a laptop gripped firmly in one hand.

This is not how I envisioned my future when I was in college. Not that it’s bad or anything. But… bemusement.

[originally transmitted by e-mail July 16, 2006]

Mark attends a monthly social gathering of Montreal bloggers. (For those new to the Internet, a blog is a sort of public diary. You have a website and every so often you write something new, a “post,” and other people can read your new post and all your previous posts and they can also publish comments of their own in the “comment” section. Mark’s blog is at http://loglog.peghole.com/mt/ and it has both text and pictures.)

Last week I went with him for the first time. I generated much suspicion when I admitted I didn’t have a blog of my own, rather like a banker at a Communist Party meeting, but people kindly agreed to talk to me anyway. I think it’s something to do with people not being able to know who you are if you haven’t laid it out for them in diary form. They need to be able to know your politics and private obsessions to be able to start a conversation with you. Rather like the usual social awkwardness of not knowing the gender of a person you are communicating with, or the need in some places to know someone’s social position. Among geeks and nerds, you need to read someone’s blog before being able to take things any further.

This idea that you need to know someone before communicating with them - rather than using conversation or shared activities as fun and useful ways of getting to know them - was borne out by a conversation I had with a young man who was a great fan of the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory. (For those new to the Internet, this is a psychological test that assigns you ratings along four scales, including introverted/extroverted and intuitive/analytical.) He claimed it was the greatest advance in psychology ever, because if you knew your and other people’s profiles you would know what you and other people were like and what they were good at. I suggested that this could also be accomplished by doing things oneself and by paying attention to other people. He was stymied for a minute and then admitted, “Well, that way wasn’t accessible to me.” Meaning that he was so socially isolated he didn’t know other people well enough to understand what they cared about, and the Meyers-Briggs personality inventory was able to explain to him in a logical way that people were different. So now we have two ways to know people before communicating with them that are deemed extremely useful: the blog and the Meyers-Briggs profile. Without which a certain group of people find social interaction almost unbearable.

Anyway, I met some very nice people there. Mostly men, mostly expatriates, mostly thoughtful. I was having a very interesting conversation with an architect from Chicago (about architecture and about the crossovers between the french and english communities in the Montreal area and how they have changed over time) when a group of young people insisted we join them. Excellent, I thought. I will expand my horizons and converse with Young People. It turned out that they were drunk, but that’s not always a bad thing.

Well, we talked about Meyers-Briggs for a long time, and about whether one posted naked pictures of oneself on one’s blog, and whether gay marriage was going to save the institution of marriage itself. (I didn’t follow that last one except to make a mental note that this topic was *so* Dan Savage ca 2002. Young people are clearly not as hip as they seem.) Two of the young people I initially took to be a gay man and his fag-hag, but it turned out they were a straight couple except that she was bi. One of those annoying kinds of bis who think that being into women means that you have a threesome with your boyfriend. Whatever. Young people these days… just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s wrong I reminded myself. Keep an open mind.

And then the conversation turned to their friend Kevin, who was a man-whore. This expression puzzled me. Kevin is by default a man, so that doesn’t need to be specified. And a whore’s customers are almost always men, so that doesn’t need to be specified either. So I asked. “What’s a man-whore?” They had a lot of trouble explaining since they didn’t understand my puzzlement. It turns out that a man-whore is a man who has sex (for free) with lots of women. A slut, I would call him. Or a cruiser. Or a player. Or a seducer. “Man-whore” seems to me to be both ambiguous and inaccurate and thus not a useful term. I couldn’t get this point across. Neither could they get across the point that the meaning of “man-whore” was self-evident.

It was at this point that I gave up on the young people and turned back to the grown-ups, who by this time were discussing computer hardware and peripherals. Not much better. We left soon afterwards.

But now I’m thinking, maybe I *should* have a blog. That way my friends and family can post their comments for my family and friends to read, and the social meaning of the word “man-whore’ could be elucidated. (And everyone could say what breed of dog they are and could see that everyone was a Siberian Husky except for one person’s roommate who was a golden retriever.)

For now, however, I’m going to go do some taxes.

Happy spring!

[originally transmitted by e-mail May 5, 2006]

We saw “Why We Fight.”

After the credits, hot tears. I sat in my seat, a hand pressed into my face, until the guy who comes to clean up the spilled popcorn turned on the lights and came in. He saw me and came to check on me. “Are you ok?” I just saw a very sad movie. “It’s just a movie!” No, that’s the problem, it’s a documentary! (Wan smile.) “Oh, but even documentaries only show partial truths.” It’s okay, I said, and waved him away. Urgently.

I didn’t say, Even partial truths can be something to be sad about. I didn’t say, Loss of idealism is something to be sad about. I didn’t say, You’re too young yet to have lost yours, you’ll understand when you’re older.

Mark took me home and put me to bed. We didn’t say much.

***
I don’t watch television news. I have waged losing wars - rather, burbled ineffectual protests - against the presence of televisions in my home. They have been imposed on me by everyone who has lived with me except for my very first roommate, a master’s student from Tanzania, who I believe kept a little set in his bedroom. But at the very least I can refuse to watch the news.

I can handle CBC radio news. The headlines and brief explanatory paragraphs of the hourly updates don’t have the time to reach into my soul. The longer discussions of the evening and afternoon shows, no matter how horrifying, at least reassure me that thoughtful people care about these issues and are analysing them complexly. Presumably something is also being done, to the extent possible.

I didn’t see the Twin Towers burning and falling, over and over again, the way it seems everyone else did. (Except for Betsy, who was busy giving birth (to twins) that day.) On September 11 I heard the news, saw bits of streaming video on colleague’s computers and called my mother, shakily, and talked imaginatively for an hour about American foreign policy. That was enough. I didn’t need to sit transfixed in front of a screen while images of falling bodies burned themselves into my brain all day.

Back in November or December 1985 when I was living with my considerate Tanzanian roommate I stopped in to visit a friend when the evening news was on. The topic of the day was the famine in Ethiopia. Turn that thing off! I shrieked. My friend was perplexed. “It’s the news, aren’t you interested in the news?” Why on earth would I be interested in bringing a child into my home to starve to death in front of me while I did nothing, didn’t lift a finger to help? No. I’m not interested.

I’ve watched the local news on television a couple of times since 1985, but I always walk out before they get to the international news. It’s always bad, and I’m always helpless.

[originally transmitted by e-mail March 29, 2006]

Mark is off on a weekend-long workshop on wilderness safety. This is right up his alley - possibly a little too much so. I have visions of being required to carry an avalanche pack next time we go for a stroll on Mont-Royal.

But for today I am enjoying wearing a PEASANT BLOUSE and COMFORTABLE UNDERWEAR.

Hugs to all, and a happy new year!

[originally transmitted by e-mail January 14, 2006]

We had a big ‘un this week: total over 30 cm of snow Thursday night and Friday with still more to come. When I got to work Friday morning half our team had taken a snow day. Good thing we’re in brownout, which means a slow work period for us: we have a moratorium on touching the network until the beginning of January, because any time you touch the network you introduce the possibility of error, and just think what Toys R Us would be saying to us if their phone or debit card lines went down for four hours on a Thursday afternoon before Christmas… Anyway, we *don’t* like to think about that sort of thing so we just don’t touch the network during the holiday season (or on Mothers’ Day). Meaning that for us network engineers, nothing we are doing right now is terribly urgent.

Oh, and it seems I’m a major Centraide / United Way donor. Those of you who’ve known me for a while are aware that I’ve been through some hard times. I was never on welfare, though there were times that would have been a step up in income, and I never used a food bank, though I did compromise in other difficult ways. So when I started getting regular paycheques from Evil Corporations I was truly grateful for the stability and food and control over my life I was now able to secure for myself. And as soon as I found out that I was able to have Centraide donations taken out of said paycheques I immediately signed up, thrilled to be able to contribute towards someone’s relief if not in my own direct labour, then at least in cash.

So every year Centraide invites me to attend some sort of philanthropic activity. I envisioned them as schmoozing opportunities for people who liked to think well of themselves, or perhaps as disguised trips to the zoo where rich people could meet tame poor people in a safe and controlled environment, and I always firmly declined with a little moue of distaste. But then I got an invitation to visit the Montreal Diet Dispensary, and accepted that one because I’d studied their protocol in detail at university and was interested in seeing what it actually looked like. And yes, it was exactly what I had feared it would be, and I was very impressed with the abilities of the MDD administration who clearly felt completely at ease both with their clientele and the philanthropists. Because while it was very interesting and educational, I just felt uneasy all over.

This year I got an invitation to volunteer at a Magasin de Partage (Sharing Store) in my neighbourhood, and I accepted that one too because I wanted to meet my neighbours in a way I don’t usually get to. So yesterday afternoon I left work early and headed over to the Maison de la Culture (a combination local library, museum, concert hall, teen centre and other stuff that I don’t know) to do my two hours of volunteering.

Karine, the volunteer organiser, was busy orienting someone else so I waited in the volunteer’s refreshment corner, enjoyed a coffee and muffin and talked to Gilbert, a guy in his sixties “with Centraide” who looked like a defrocked priest. He explained the principle of the Magasin de Partage. It replaces the traditional Christmas baskets that food banks used to give out. There were two main problems with the Christmas baskets: one is that people don’t get to choose their basket, which is both disempowering and means they are likely get something inappropriate for them. Another is that each organisation would do its own baskets, which meant that people could go from organisation to organisation and collect several. (Actually, I never really thought this was a problem: it rewards the entrepreneurial spirit, which is supposed to be a good thing - right?) Anyway, now we do the MdP which are like a grocery store laid out in a gym (in this case). People get a pushcart and a budget and load up what they want (though most items are rationed) and at the end they pay 10% of the value. So for instance, a single person is assigned a budget of $50. They get to choose $50 worth of groceries and they pay $5 at the cash. Then they get to choose a free present for everyone in the household and they get a lift home. There’s a driver and also a livreur (deliverer) who actually carries their groceries up to the apartment for them (the clientele of the MdP are all in walk-ups) and gets a quick look around. If there is clearly a serious problem with the household then social services can be alerted.

Allowing people to choose is important. Which means allowing people to criticise and reject: that’s what we’re there for. The entrepreneurial tendency is controlled by having a central registry across the island, so that people can only sign up for one grocery basket.

When Karine was ready for me she explained that I would be an accompagnatrice and accompany people through the aisles counting up what they spent, helping them budget and explaining the rationing. Very important to smile and relieve people’s embarassment about being there. Ok, sounds fun. But there were no shopping baskets. I waited around for a while and finally got fed up and found one that was full of Christmas decorations that hadn’t been put up yet, unloaded it onto a chair and got the next bénéficiaire (client) on the list.

I got a little tag like they staple onto your bags at the grocery store when they deliver your groceries and a budget sheet to fill out. People’s budgets were assigned when they applied: $50 for a single person plus $10 for every other person in the household. So a couple with four children would have a budget of $100 - but that had already been calculated for me. I always filled out my paperwork before picking up my clients, fully expecting that I’d have to redo half of it because people hadn’t shown up for their appointments. My stereotype of poor people is that they have very complicated lives because they can’t just pay for services they need, they have to trade services with other people who may or may not be reliable. So for instance if they need babysitting to come get their grocery basket, they might or might not be able to make it. I was astounded to realise that *everyone* made their appointment. On time. “Of course,” observed one of my clients. “We’re hungry.” Because of the snowstorm, however, there was a volunteer shortage and the organisation was behind schedule.

Anyway, my first customer was Carole, and I learned a lot from her. We went through the aisles of canned / rationed goods, and I explained what she was entitled to. (”You have a child, so you can take two big cans of soup.”) She took everything she was entitled to and argued with me about the rationing. By the time we’d finished that section she’d used up her budget and she had nothing left for bread, fruits and vegetables or milk and eggs. She had a nice big grocery basket and her canned / rationed goods lined the bottom of it forlornly. Someone else passed by with a small grocery basket overflowing with a couple of nice high-volume bags of bread, a big bag of chips and a big bag of potatoes. Carole was livid comparing her measly take with the other woman’s cornucopia. She accused me of shortchanging her and the other woman of abusing the system. I could see her point, so I went and got Karine and handed her over, saying maybe I had miscalculated or misunderstood the system, but there was a problem with Carole’s basket.

Karine came back to me later and said I had calculated just fine, but that Carole was simply a difficult person. It had taken three volunteers twenty minutes to calm her down and she had been demanding to talk to the manager. (Seems to me that she should have been entitled to talk to the manager, but whatever.) That’s what I thought, and that was pretty much what I had been prepared for: poverty damages people and I expected the people I was accompanying to show the damage. Second surprise of the evening: Carole was the only person I met who was needy in that way. The damage other people showed was more in the form of passivity. They were extremely compliant and cooperative.

The rest of the afternoon/evening was uneventful. I had signed up to work from three to five, but I ended up staying until eight-thirty. I was having a good time, I felt useful, and they were short of volunteers. I developed a routine, learning from Carole’s experience. I would take the smallest available grocery basket. I would greet my customer with a smile and a “vous” and explain what we were going to do. If they ate meat, we would place an order for meat first. Starting the aisles of canned / rationed goods, I would suggest an amount they should be spending per aisle in order to have money left over for bread, fruits and vegetables, and milk and eggs. I made a point of saying that I would tell them what they were allowed to take, but they didn’t have to take it. Once we’d finished those aisles I would ask them if they wanted milk and eggs and tell them how much they had left to spend on bread, fruits and vegetables and the unrationed table. Budgeting in manageable bits, one section at a time.

When I started the clientele was mostly single canadiens-français in their sixties and up. After five it started to be more families from “les communautés culturelles,” mostly haitian.

I particularly enjoyed:

Waiting in line with the old people. I would ask them if they were born in Montreal (nope) and ask a little about their history.

Accompanying a young couple, she newly pregnant, and watching him fuss over her and instruct her to get vegetables and whole-wheat bread while she looked longingly at the chips and chocolate cake.

Accompanying a muslim woman with a $100 budget who was having trouble making her full $100 because she wasn’t taking meat. I helped her decide whether there were animal products in the canned goods and went and found some shampoo that had been hidden away. She said merci when I dropped her off at the cash and seemed to mean it.

Accompanying families, showing the kids how to reject dented cans, look for expiry dates and inspect eggs for breaks.

Intervening on behalf of Paule who needed to call her brother-in-law for a lift from a pay phone: ‘Paule, do you have the quarter for the pay phone?’ so that she didn’t have to ask the cashier for the quarter herself.

But then I came to Marie-Annaes and her teenaged son. It was after eight, and they’d been waiting since 5:15. When I called her name she didn’t respond; Gilbert knew her though, and looked her in the face and said “Is there anyone here named Marie-Annaes?” and she got up with a start. When she got to me she was clearly exhausted; I realised that she hadn’t had supper and might not have eaten all day. She was kind of out of it, so her son did most of the shopping. Because he was a teenager I provided a little more “encadrement” than I did for other people, suggesting particular choices: ‘If you take the box of cereal you won’t be able to take both loaves of bread you’re entitled to. Which would you rather have?’ And Marie-Annaes would murmer little things to him from time to time.

When it was time to stand in line for the cash I went and got a little snack bar for Marie-Annaes so that she wouldn’t collapse. And then there was the problem of how to get the groceries home. They weren’t going to get delivery until very late, what with the combination of the lack of volunteers and the snowy roads, and they weren’t going to be able to carry it all. Hm. Ok, I suggested: maybe you could separate what you need for supper tonight and walk home with that, and then it doesn’t matter if they deliver the rest at two in the morning? We thought about that while we waited, the line being exceptionally slow. Marie-Annaes’ son and another teenager with his mother waved at each other a couple of times without actually talking or hanging out. The second time I asked if it was a kid from his school (no, from his old school) and said ‘Isn’t it nice when you see someone you know here, you feel less alone. Anybody can come through here.’ And Marie-Annaes touched my arm and said Merci in a way that made me think she meant it, not that she wanted me to shut up already.

So we got to the cash and I explained that Marie-Annaes might want to separate out what she wanted to take home for supper and have the rest delivered. Hm, said the cashier. One of them will still have to wait here to go home with the driver.

I was stunned. Ok, so giving people a lift home is a nice thing to do, but grocery stores routinely deliver groceries to people who have left the store. What’s going on here? They aren’t going to get their lift before 10:30 at the earliest. And they haven’t eaten.

And I looked around: in the waiting area were families waiting for food because they were hungry. The parents had been working all day, had picked up their kids from daycare and shown up on time for their appointments. We were three hours behind in getting them their grocery carts, and we were now going to make them wait here until all hours for delivery? Gilbert was still in a relaxed, upbeat temper doing tricks with plastic bags to amuse the kids. This was unreal. Perverse. I was tired, my blood sugar was dropping despite the regular snacks I had access to in the volunteer corner, and I was all of a sudden not having a good time any more.

Marie-Annaes said it was ok, they would wait and go home with the lift. I warmly wished her a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, she went off to wait in another line to choose a gift for herself, and I got my coat and went home. I didn’t even say goodbye or alert anyone.

*** *** ***
That was the end of the story the first times I told it. Then I told it to Anne, who sternly reframed my experience for me: “Alison, you’re a major donor. That’s why you’re there. You are in a position to write a letter to a director and be paid attention to. And if you choose to become involved with that organisation, you are in a position to ask to be listened to.”

Oh. She’s right, you know. Oh dear. Now I have choices. Empowering but scary.

[originally transmitted by e-mail December 17, 2005]

Yet another Tuesday night movie review.

Usually the Cinéma du Parc is relatively empty. Tonight it was full of old people.

Mark left the theatre with tears on his cheeks; I left unmoved but full of questions. My grasp of history is decidedly vague, and while I know the names of some of the major personalities I’ve never taken a modern history course of any description and have generally avoided war movies. So what I little I know about WWII is from sidebars in books and articles about other things.

Mark’s take: the movie was about the protestation of innocence, “Ich habe es nicht gewußt,” “I didn’t know.” What does that claim mean, when even Hitler’s personal secretary could make it - apparently believing herself? Mark is angry about Holland’s role in the war and particularly about the way the Netherlands like to portray themselves as good guys who helped Jews, when in fact they were as bad as Canada and refused to let Jews in. (No, no, those bits weren’t in the movie.) And he fully understands the German phenomenon of an older generation who say it wasn’t them, or who point out their own sufferings and demand to know who feels sorry for them? contrasted with a younger (our) generation fully prepared to take on the guilt and responsibility for all the horrors committed before they (we) were even conceived.

My first reaction was to wonder whether the war movies coming out these days that appear to have a certain resonance with current events is deliberate or my own projection.

Other musings: to the extent that the portrayal of the personalities was accurate, a point was made that you can’t really tell who’s on the wrong track by looking at them up close. You need to step back and take a broader look. For instance, Hitler was portrayed as a charismatic but lonely nutcase (looked like bipolar disorder to me, but so does a lot of stuff) who valued his friends. Which may have been true, but even so was not the most important thing about him. And this is how it makes sense that his secretary didn’t grasp what he was doing though Churchill did. (This I *think* was one of the points of the movie: I don’t think we were really supposed to feel sorry for him.) (But maybe we were? I did find that too many of the top brass were treated a little too sympathetically. Not that I expect all people who are a force for evil to be marked with large neon horns - but for someone supporting or actively waging war in a nationalist cause to appear uniformly kind and thoughtful seems just a little odd. Especially when you are not this person’s child but a cinema viewer with magic wall-fly powers.)

Anyway. Something I found quite delightful was libertarian-speak in the mouths of the Nazi generals. Ha! One quote I particularly enjoyed went something like this: “I have no compassion [for the young untrained German recruits who are being sent to fight against much greater numbers with no ammunition and who will die within hours or days in battles that the generals know perfectly well to be unwinnable]. They gave us the mandate to fight this war and now their little throats are being cut.” Among various speeches condemning weakness and promoting responsibility for consequences and protecting honour with guns.

I was also quite struck by the desperate busyness of the last days - issuing medals, hanging traitors - they knew they had lost so this was their last chance to take care of business before the Russians arrived - paralleling the stepped-up activity at the crematoria (not shown in the movie). It says something I recognise too well about human psychology that I should probably dwell on at length but frankly, I’d rather not.

Technically it was very well-acted and I think the sets were well done, but there wasn’t much else special about it. It was long and slow, paralleling the experience of Berliners waiting for the end. But that’s ok, not a reason not to go.

[originally transmtted by e-mail March 23, 2005]