Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Even Miss Manners approves of not answering your phone!

Yesterday's Cary Tennis column generated huge numbers of comments. Basically, the letter-writer's friend asked if he could come over to her place because he had a power outage in the middle of a blizzard, and she said no because she had her boyfriend over. Mitigating circumstances on both sides - read the column and the comments if you want the whole complex issue.

Now I can see both sides of the argument. I can totally see wanting to go to someone else's place if I had a power outage, and I can totally see want my friend to go elsewhere when I'm having alone time with my boyfriend.

But one very important thing wasn't mentioned in all the 181 (jusqu'à maintenant) comments on the article: why did she answer her phone if she doesn't want to be disturbed?

Am I the only one who has thought of this?

It's a perfectly acceptable practice - even Miss Manners advocates it - and that's precisely what voicemail is for! "But what if it's an emergency?" Then you should be prepared to respond to the emergency. If you aren't prepared to respond to whatever emergency is on the other end of the phone, then don't answer it. Let it go to voicemail. If you really want, you can screen immediately afterwards to see what the problem was and then decide to address it. But if you pick up your phone when you don't want to be disturbed during a weather emergency, it is perfectly reasonable for the person on the other end to expect you to be able to respond to whatever emergency they're having. It's that simple.

Bitter Fruit by Achmat Dangor

This book was very difficult for me to read or enjoy because it was full of what I can best describe as unhappy sex. Woven throughout the story are episodes of rape, inappropriate pairings, infidelity, borderline coercion, and borderline incest. Some of these are essential to the plot and others do help move it along, but they prevented me from enjoying or appreciating the parts of the book that did not involve unhappy sex because I was just too put off. The only reason I finished the book was because of my principle of finishing every book I start unless it gives me panic attacks.

Don't read this book unless you enjoy reading about unhappy sex. And if you do enjoy reading about unhappy sex, please stop reading my blog and go elsewhere, because you creep me out!

Blown away!

I just went out to the store. On the way back, I had to walk directly against the wind. When the wind gusted, I COULD NOT MOVE FORWARD! It simply took more physical strength than I possess to counter the force of the wind! In fact, it took all my physical strength to stand still - if I didn't make the effort, the wind forced me to trip a few steps backwards. I could only walk forward when the gusts let up.

And I'm far from petite and dainty! I wonder how little old ladies and small children managed?

Environment Canada says:

Observed at: Toronto Pearson Int'l Airport 15 March 2006 2:00 PM EST
[...]
Wind: WNW 68 km/h gust 84 km/h

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

The "People Person" Paradox

I am not a "people person". As I may have mentioned one or two times, I'm an introvert, I feel awkward in social situations with people I don't know well, and I suck at small talk.

My doctor is the same way. I can tell she feels a bit socially awkward, so she's very serious and not that good at making small talk. This adds just a tinge of awkwardness to our sessions, because neither of us is able to effectively break the ice, and because the ice is still there. Her receptionist is the same way. As a result, I don't feel particularly welcome or comfortable in her clinic. As an innie myself, I can tell logically that this coldness is not deliberate, but emotionally it's still there. I still have my guard up, there's still that tiny element of middle school left over, where because it doesn't feel warm I feel like I'm going to be harshly judged. Not the best feeling to get from your doctor. I don't look forward to going to see her.

On the other hand, my dentist, and all of his staff, are very much people people. They have the ability to make me feel welcome and comfortable. I feel like I can make a joke if one occurs to me, and I can let my guard down completely. I do realize that this means I have succumbed to "charming" (which is rather frightening to think about), but the result is a comfortable clinical environment.

At first I was thinking that there should be some way for patients to find out if doctors are people people, so the introverted patients who can't break the ice themselves can be paired up with doctors that can break the ice, and the extroverted patients who can break the ice can be paired up with the doctors who can't.

But then i realized that the problem with this idea is that bubbly extroverts who can break ice left and right tend to be seriously creeped out by introverts. They tend to think that we're being deliberately cold as a personal slight to them, and don't seem to realize that we just do not have the ability to be charming, they tend to think instead that we're deliberately holding back, perhaps out of spite. So the extroverts aren't going to want to go to the introvert doctors either.

I don't want to eliminate all introvert doctors or anything, and logically I know I should be accepting of people who have the same shortcomings as I do, but I also want a doctor who makes me feel comfortable.

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Harry doesn't need to be an Auror

Fandom analysis still seems to be assuming that Harry's goal in life is to become an Auror. I don't think this is applicable any more.

Harry decided he wanted to be an Auror in GOF, when Crouch!Moody planted the idea in his head. He brought up the idea again in OOTP, in the specific context of a career planning interview, where he was asked outright what he wanted to be when he grew up, so he answered the only career choice that he has actually considered.

But later in OOTP, Harry found out he was the only person who can destroy Voldemort. That, combined with the fact that he's already independently wealthy, should negate the requirement for any career ambitions, no? Whatever helping people/saving people/being heroic fulfilment Harry could have gotten from becoming an Auror, he could easily get from destroying Voldemort. That's surely enough heroic Gryffindor karma for a lifetime.

While it's true that Harry may well choose to pursue a career of some sort after he destroys Voldemort, it's not a priority at the moment, and will never be absolutely necessary. He does need to destroy Voldemort. He is determined to do it immediately (and we, the readers, know that he has to do so within the next year). He does not need to earn money to support himself financially. A career, even a career as an Auror, is not his goal at the moment, and this is not informing his decision-making.

Harry's eye is on the goal of destroying Voldemort, period. People should stop making fandom theories based on the assumption that his eye is still on the goal of being an Auror.

Things They Should Invent: garbage cans that fit plastic bags perfectly (or vice versa)

I line my garbage cans with ordinary plastic bags that I get when buying things from stores. I don't know how common this practise is, but I do know a number of other people who do it, and I've never had anyone say "Why the hell is there a plastic bag in your garbage can?" so it can't be that unusual.

As it happens, Shoppers Drug Mart bags fit perfectly in my bathroom garbage can, but my other garbage cans are not nearly as compatible with plastic bags. Occasionally a bag from a store I rarely shop in will fit perfectly in one of my other garbage cans (and, before the LCBO cheaped out on their plastic bags, LCBO bags used to fit perfectly in my kitchen garbage), but it isn't at all consistent. Bags from Dominion, where I do the vast majority of my shopping, don't fit perfectly in any of my garbage cans.

I think stores like supermarkets, drug stores, walmart, etc., should sell small, indoor garbage cans that are the perfect size and shape for their bags. Or, if it's more cost-effective, they should make their plastic bags the perfect size and shape for garbage cans that are available in the store. I would totally buy new garbage cans if I knew they would perfectly fit plastic bags I have on hand, and I would totally make a point of going to a specific store for something like soap or shampoo (i.e. something that I could easily and conveniently buy at any one of several stores) just to get plastic bags that would fit perfectly in my garbage cans.

Saturday, March 11, 2006

Red coats and big fuzzy hats

You know those british soldiers with the red coats and big fuzzy hats, who have to stand guard and aren't allowed to move or talk? I wonder what happens to them if they do move or talk?

When I was little, I thought they were executed if they moved. In retrospect, that's not terribly likely. And I suppose that if there is a genuine emergency they should react in some way. (Mental image of a typical cartoon robber being chased down the street by a red coat fuzzy hat guard).

Cool thing in the Sims

In Sims 2, if you click on the wants or fears, you'll get a little blurb telling you how to fulfill/avoid the wants/fears. And if you click on the memories, you'll get a little blurb about that too.

Yes, I just noticed this :)

Friday, March 10, 2006

Things They Should Invent: expect the impossible for our political leaders

This train of discussion usually starts when I let slip one of my unpopular pacifist sentiments. For example:

Me: I don't think it's appropriate to use armed forces to impose or enforce peace.
Interlocutor: How on earth do you expect them to do that?
Me: I don't know exactly how it could be done. I have no specific training in that sort of thing.
Interloctor: See? It's impossible! You can't expect them to do something like that if you have no idea how it should be done.

But that's it exactly - I have no idea how it should be done. But I'm only 25 years old, I have but a single undergraduate degree, and I doubt I have the leadership skills to organize a birthday party. That's why I'm not leading the country. Anyone who claims to be qualified to lead a whole entire country should be able to come up with ideas that are so vastly beyond anything I can possibly think of that, until I learn of the ideas, I would have thought them impossible.

Our expectations of anyone who would dare think themselves worthy of leading us should be far beyond our expectations of ourselves. Accepting anything less is doing us all a disservice.

Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Angst! Drama! Tragedy!

PBS is fundraising with Andrea Bocelli instead of showing my Monty Python! When will they even show Monty Python again????? This ruins my whole day! :(

Helpful hint: if you're selling food, don't make comments that could trigger your customers' food insecurity

This morning I went into my local "Quickie-mart" to buy some food for breakfast and lunch. I had a long day of work ahead of me in which I had to stay at my desk, and hadn't had breakfast, so I bought a bagel with cream cheese, a salad, and a wrap. At the last minute, I impulse purchased some candy. I wanted to make sure I had enough food so I wouldn't get hungry and cranky, as I couldn't leave my desk to go look for more food.

So I take my purchases to the cash register, and the guy behind the counter says "Wow, big lunch!"

Now, this didn't bother me. I just smiled and said "It's breakfast AND lunch." But there are a lot of people out there who would be really uncomfortable with that comment. Some people don't like to be seen eating large quantities of food. Some people, rightfully or not, think that others are judging them for what they eat. Some people have eating disorders that can be triggered at the slightest provocation. I don't fall into any of these categories, but the guy behind the counter had no way of knowing that. There must be a lot of people around who would feel insecure about that comment - the comic strip Cathy is widely syndicated for a reason, after all - and I think a lot of that insecurity would be found in women of my demographics and proportions.

So while I don't care what random people think about the size of my lunch, Mr. Counter Man had no way of knowing that. He should really keep his comments to himself, or one day he's going to lose himself some customers.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Something Positive!

Hee hee hee!

Okay, check out Branwen's comments on Sept. 12, 2004. (Yes, that's Branwen on the left and Davan on the right.

Now check out what happened today.

I couldn't actually see Davan and Kharisma hooking up, but it was just so clearly set up 1.5 years ago!

Sunday, March 05, 2006

The Pants Age Test

Consider the following situation:

You have to wear regular pants (i.e. not shorts, not capris, not those stupid cullotte things).

You have to wear regular socks and shoes with your pants (i.e. no bare feet and sandals, no hose and pumps).

Your day is spent in equal parts sitting down or standing up, visible at all times to people you don't want to look frumpy and gross in front of.

There are only two lengths of pants available. The shorter length looks fine when you stand up, but rides up when you sit down, so that you can see the skin of your legs above your socks. Even if you pull your socks up and the pants down, the interplay of pants and socks and leg shape will always cause the hems of the pants to ride up above the socks in short order. The longer length looks fine when you sit down, but drags on the floor when you stand up. You aren't going to trip on the hems, but you might tread on them occasionally.

Do you choose the shorter pants or the longer pants?

I propose that, regardless of your chronological age, if you choose the shorter pants you are old, and if you choose the longer pants you are young.

The Big Book Catch-up Post of Doom!

Between my persistant cold and my nasty habit of reading several books at once, I finished a bunch of books lately and failed to blog them. So here they all are!

Hell's Corner: An Illustrated History of Canada's Great War, 1914-1918, by JL Granatstein.

This is an excellent book on WWI. It describes the deroulement of the war and the experiences of everyday people (both soldiers and on the homefront) in a way that can easily be understood by a 21st-century readers. It does go into the politics of the time, but, again with the modern-day reader clearly being the target audience. It's very Canaa-centric so you get very little idea of what was going on in the rest of the world, but it's still a good starting point. The mixed blessing is that it's a giant coffee-table sized book. This is good because it has rooms for lots of good pictures, but it's bad because you can't read it on the subway. It's still worth perusing at home though.

The Introvert Advantage: How to Thrive in an Extrovert World, by Marti Olsen Laney

This book is all about me! It explains precisely how my brain works, with diagrams and neurological explanations and everything! It turns out introversion affects my life in more ways than I originally thought, from my Hufflepuff approach to relationships, to my childhood self's feeling insulted that my parents felt the need to bring toys to amuse me on long car rides. It turns out that my low novelty seeking is a direct result of my introversion. Because of the way electrical signals travel through the brain (I'm not quite at the point of fully understanding this, but I'm very close), introverts don't have as much need for dopamine, and can actually feel overstimulated if they get too much dopamine. In practical terms, this means that I'm perfectly happy reading my book and think a big party sounds exhausting - which I already knew, but it's cool that there's an actual neurological reason for it. Introversion can also affect a person's ability to think of stuff to say - their mind might go blank when called upon to speak, but they'll be able to articulate their thoughts perfectly later on. I've never experienced this in English, but I get it all the time when working in other languages, so it was quite reassuring to learn that it's not a flaw in my mastery of other languages, but rather a neurological thing that simply is not as apparent in the English part of my brain. This book is interesting for anyone who is an introvert, but it is an ABSOLUTE MUST READ for anyone who is an extrovert but has an introverted partner or child. My life would have been much easier if my parents had read this book when I was little, but they couldn't because it wasn't published until 2002.

Dark Age Ahead, by Jane Jacobs

I learned so much about so many things from this book! It's so broad ranging, and every part was enlightening. For example, did you know that General Electric was behind most major cities' decision to switch from trolleys to buses? Did you know that pre-industrial agrarian societies had to be inherently conservative for their survival, but once industrialism came aloneg, technology started to grow exponentially, and society changed into a culture that had to be progressive in order to survive. This is an interesting parallel with the fact that modern rural society tends to be more conservative and urban society tends to be more progressive (obvoiusly the cause isn't the same because modern rural society is still highly influenced by industrialism, but it's still interesting). This book also finally managed to explain the whole fiscal imbalance thing to me in a way that the many newspaper articles on the subject could not. I'd always found complaining about fiscal imbalance distasteful, because I thought of it as the same as wealthy people who complain that they have to pay more taxes than poor people. But Jacobs' explanation made me realize that Toronto, for example, is not a single entity that has to pay more taxes because it's wealthy. It's a collection of 2 million individuals living in close proximity in order to take advantage of economies of scale. Each individual is taxed differently depending on their own income, so the taxation itself is still fair, but the whole equalization thing takes away the benefits of economy of scale because provinces are really artificial entities, but certain aspects of federal legislation consider them a lot more important. But I digress. Overall, this book is very interesting, well-researched, and well-written. It falls under the "read this to feel smart" category.

Woman in Bronze, by Antanas Sileika

This book needs to be a movie! It's historical and epic and coming of age and doesn't want to be put down. Plus, the action is actually action, so it would translate perfectly to the screen. Someone make a movie of this!

Souvenir of Canada 2, by Douglas Coupland

I get the impression that Coupland didn't have quite enough material for the a second book. Most of it was just as interesting as the first book, but there were many self-indulgent pages in the middle dealing with Canada House, one of Coupland's own projects, plus some of what felt like filler material. Some of it worked for me, like the adorable pictures of baby goslings, and some of it didn't, like a page containing nothing but a list of all the men who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald. I don't know whether this was all part of the artistic vision or not, but it felt to me like filler, which kind of ruined the effect.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Did they see it coming?

The casualty rate in Afghanistan seems to be higher than I would consider acceptable. What I would really like to know is did the people planning this mission foresee this? Are the blindsided by the quantity of casualties, or is their idea of an "acceptable" casualty rate higher than mine?

Riscal Tempranillo

I should be satisfied with this wine, but I'm not. It's perfectly good and fruity and there's nothing wrong with it that I can articulate, but it feels like something is missing, although I can't tell what. I don't like that I'm dissatisfied with a wine that has nothing actually wrong. It seems rather, I don't know, spoiled? ADD? High novelty-seeking? Not something I want to be. Maybe I should just shut up and drink up.

How feminism affected my life

Today's Star had articles by two women of different generations talking about how feminism affected their lives. For me, born after the influence of second-wave feminism, its effect very simple: "Because I am a woman" does not exist as a reason for any of my decisions or life choices. With the possible exception of stepping into the women's washroom when there are two washroom choices (although I have no problem with unisex or coed washrooms), I have never thought "I must/must not/should/should not/can/cannot/will/will not do X because I am a woman."

Even when I do make choices or decision that, in previous generations, would have been based on the fact that I am a woman, "because I am a woman" is not my motivation. Instead, it's "because I am introverted" or "because I am arachnophobic" or "because I am in love with mi cielito" or "because I live alone" or "because I have an aptitude for languages" or "because it amuses me".

The only time my being a woman even comes into play is in the bedroom, the doctor's office, and the clothing store and even then it isn't about gender roles, but rather about strict physiology. None of this taking modern perceptions of prehistoric human behaviour to be a biological imperative and using that to support one's own concept of morality bullshit. It's strictly about the presence of a cervix, the proximity of labia to the urethra, the ratio of hip circumference to waist circumference. These issues would need to be addressed in the same way if I were FTM. "Because I am a woman" becomes a shorthand for a number of physical realities, parallel to "because my eyesight sucks" or "because my feet are messed up," but it isn't actually a basis of decision-making.

So that's what feminism has done for me in my own personal life - it has made gender completely irrelevant as a basis for life choices.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Open letter to the Mexico tourism authority

In light of recent events, and without any speculation or presumption as to what the real truth is, I give you two important pieces of information.

1. The thought of possibly being murdered for no good reason does not make me less likely to go to Mexico. That could happen here or anywhere.

2. The thought of being falsely accused of a crime and then extradited to a foreign country whose justice system I perceive to be more corrupt and less respectful of human rights than my home justice system is enough to make me never want to go to Mexico, at all, ever.

I don't know what actually happened, but the thought of some random person being arrested to cover various asses rather than bothering to catch the real murderer is far more scary than the fact of the murders themselves.

I should write this in Spanish instead, shouldn't I?

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

More Pythonic censorship standards

Drawings and paintings of nudity are not censored (even though they're very realistic), but photographs are.