Getting in tune

Calgary, Alberta

I’m usually pretty skeptical about New Age healing and complementary medicine -- I've always thought astrology is hooey and the couple of times I’ve gone to a naturopath seemed like a waste of time (I wouldn’t even go to a chiropractor). I prefer to stick with remedies that have been subjected to scientific research. I’m not a spiritual person, I don’t believe in a higher power, and I think I’m basically a big sack of chemicals and electrical impulses.

But it makes sense to me that such a sack is profoundly affected on a physical level by the emotions experienced in the brain that controls it. And if thinking about Paul Gross's butt can cause a physical reaction in my body, or thinking about her baby can cause a mother to produce more breast milk, or grief can cause somebody to curl up and die, then the idea that our thoughts affect our bodies and vice versa is hardly farfetched. The studies on stress hormones and the immune system are hard to ignore. Is it completely wacky to suggest, then, that our bodies might be affected by the physical properties of our surroundings? The forces of gravity teach us that they are. It wouldn’t surprise me that there are inexplicable physical ways in which we are connected to the planet and to one another.

Having gone through a bout of severe depression and anxiety a few years ago, which seemed to cause all kinds of mysterious ailments culminating in breast cancer that I persist in believing would not have grown so rapidly had my immune system not been compromised by stress, I’ve learned to understand the concept of the mind-body connection. “It’s all in your head” is no longer an excuse to me, since I think at some level most things are all in our heads, which in turn affects the rest of our bodies, which in turn affects our heads. (You wouldn’t say to a person who has broken her leg, “Oh, it’s all in your leg!”)

In any case, I’ve looked with mild interest from afar at the increasing popularity of Chinese medicine, in particular the acceptance of acupuncture by many mainstream physicians. I hear of more and more people who’ve found acupuncture effective in curing migraines, back pain, etc. I've never purposely tried it, although more than 20 years ago an osteopath in England shoved a few needles in my back without warning, which I simply found upsetting.

As it happens, I am currently renting a room in Calgary from an acupuncturist. She’s a lovely person, very generous, but her talk about chakras and meridians and chi energy was meaningless to me. When she mentioned a New Age video she wanted to watch about a healer who predicts the world is facing a physical calamity of huge proportions and that we could forestall it with positive thoughts and energy, I, uncharitably perhaps, suggested that turning off lights when you leave a room and driving your car less might be more useful than positive thoughts in preventing the impending calamity (also wacky science in the eyes of some, I know).

Last night I walked home from school. It is unusually humid in Calgary, and so my plan to be released from my hot flash nightmare here has been foiled. As usual after exerting myself in hot, humid weather, I felt dizzy, weak and a little nauseated, and was drenched with sweat. This usually passes in a few minutes (I had my heart checked out last fall -- supposedly it's fine -- and the cardiologist told me the cause of my weak spells in hot weather might be low blood pressure). But an hour later I still felt lousy. I began to wonder if it was the accumulated stress of some family pressures, taking these intensive master’s degree courses and being away from home -- my stomach was nervous and jumpy and I felt vaguely depressed.

But I’d agreed to go out to a club with some friends, so after getting ready I sat in the kitchen waiting to be picked up, wondering if I should just stay home. My landlady could tell I wasn’t feeling well; she asked to see my tongue. I showed her. She suggested that she could do some quick acupuncture on the “stomach” points on my legs. I politely declined; my friend would be showing up at any minute. Besides, I didn’t want to make myself more nervous and jumpy by subjecting myself to invasive needles when I wasn’t accustomed to such treatment.

Then she suggested something called tuning-fork therapy. Not an ancient Chinese practice, she told me, but something developed in the U.S. that would tap into vibrations or something, and could boost energy. It would only take a few minutes and was not invasive. Sure, I shrugged, completely skeptical and somewhat amused. So she got out a set of large tuning forks, explaining that the brown one was for the earth, the green one for the trees, the white for the moon. Yeah, right. She banged them on a rubber pad she had strapped around her knee for that purpose, caused them to vibrate and placed the ends of the forks at various points around my knees. I could feel the vibrations locally, but a mild feeling of well-being seemed to spread throughout my body, and in a matter of minutes I felt much better. By the time I got into my friend’s car I felt completely normal, and very calm. I had a great evening listening to a honky-tonk band in a funky little club, and stayed out till 12:30 (I rarely stay out that late, and often feel antsy and cross when I’m in a strange place till all hours with people I don’t know very well).

Placebo effect? A positive response to somebody paying attention to me? Maybe.

Mistakes and Safety

In keeping with the all-over-the-map quality of this blog (to its detriment, probably, but, hey, it's my blog and I'll be electic if I want to), I'm probably going to post a few things on adult education since that's where my head is right now.

One of the courses I just finished here at the University of Calgary is called Adults as Learners. Another student and I gave a presentation on the theories of Carl Rogers, whose client-centered form of therapy grew into his theory of student-centered learning. Because he was one of the founders of the "encounter group," my partner and I dressed in Sixties gear (headbands, love beads, my first pair of flared pants since 1977) and played the opening strains of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" to introduce our topic. To illustrate Rogers's ideas, we tried to model his style of teaching by giving the class the choice to pursue a storytelling task any way they wanted to or to not pursue it at all, which led me to write this (partially edited) critical reflection paper:

I was struck by something a fellow student said during her presentation on Mezirow: she was surprised at how many of her colleagues had concluded that a research study they were conducting had gone wrong because the method and findings had not worked as predicted. “If our study had gone perfectly,” she insisted, “we would have learned nothing.”

This made me reflect on my own role as an adult learner and how much I learn from making mistakes. I admit I’m a perfectionist and I don’t like taking courses in anything I’m not already fairly good at. I suppose Adults as Learners has not been a huge stretch for me — not like learning to drive (I can’t) or swim (nope) or speak Mandarin (not a chance) would be. But still I had a lot to learn, and some of it came from being forced to do things I wasn’t good at and observing the gap between my performance and where I’d like to be.

[During our attempt to model a student-centered class on storytelling] I decided to provide the students with some suggestions (because I felt Rogers might have done that, based on what I read in his Freedom to Learn) for students who don’t like having the freedom to choose — they could tell stories to one another, either in pairs or in small groups, or they could write stories on their own, and I included the option to do nothing at all if anybody so wished. I am embarrassed to say it never occurred to me that the class would not be interested in any of my suggestions!...

But if my experiment with the task had gone perfectly, I wouldn’t have learned anything about what Rogers’ theory was really all about, or how it felt to practise it. I knew — or thought I knew — it was going to be unplanned but I hadn’t predicted how unplanned. It’s hard to prepare for the plan of no plan.

Earlier in my teaching career, I learned that making mistakes in order to learn has an impact on the maintenance of a safe learning space. When I was teaching at a community college, my students were 17 and 18, not very academically inclined and from very diverse backgrounds. One day a young man announced loudly to the class that he hated “queers.” My first instinct was to shut him down, but instead I asked him why. So he told the class how he had been hit on by gay men a lot, because, he thought, he was very boyish-looking. I commiserated with him on how uncomfortable it is to fend off unwanted advances. I hoped my comments would accomplish two things — I wanted to show the class that inappropriate sexual behaviour can be exhibited by people of every gender and sexual orientation; and I wanted to validate the young man’s experience.

But I was nervous as the discussion progressed: I was not going to let the subject pass without showing the students in no uncertain terms that I support gay rights; I felt strongly that my students should not be exposed to hatred or abusive speech in my classroom. Still, my support of free speech, particularly in an academic setting, is always stronger than my desire to be politically correct, mostly because I know that when we verbalize our opinions and find them hanging out there in the air for all to hear, that’s when learning occurs. People who keep their inchoate thoughts to themselves sometimes never change them because they’re never forced to fully form them. It’s in the expression of our thoughts that we are sometimes transformed, when we observe the gap between what we’ve just said and the evidence around us. I don’t usually even know what I think about something until I’m forced to put my thoughts into words, and often I don’t realize how ill-informed or silly or illogical my thoughts are until I hear them or read them (which is one reason I've edited this reflection before posting it on my blog). The learning doesn’t always happen immediately. Sometimes it takes days or weeks or years for me to respond to what I said.

On that day in my class, I clung to my desire to make my student feel safe enough to explore his opinions — even at the risk of creating an unsafe space for his classmates. I don't know if my students learned anything from that discussion, but I know I did. The boy's homophobia came from a place that was very real to him, a place that I could understand; we had more in common than I'd thought. (I confess I wasn't so supportive to the student who announced in class one day that "fags should be boiled in their own blood...")

Hiatus

For anyone who's paying attention, I've been too busy to post for the past couple of weeks -- I'm in Calgary taking graduate courses toward my master's degree in workplace and adult education (here's the program), and the workload is intense. I'm exhausted. But I'm having fun -- just finished two courses, Adult as Learners and Theory of Groups, that were interesting and challenging in ways I didn't expect, and my fellow students were a mature, intelligent, experienced, friendly, easy-going group. The entire program can be pursued online, but I decided to do my first three courses in what they call "face-to-face" mode, and I'm glad I did. I hope that, as I pursue the rest of the courses from my basement, I'll encounter students online whom I've already met in the flesh. Profs, too. In my Theory of Groups class, my group has to do a study proposal on whether a sense of community can be formed in virtual courses, where people aren't in the same room and never meet except through email and maybe audio software. It's pretty clear from the research that having some face-to-face contact at some point in the program helps that happen.

One of my classmates is from Kosovo. CIDA (the Canadian International Development Agency) is active in helping rebuild the education system in Kosovo (some University of Calgary academics are involved), and is paying the tuition of a group of Kosovars who are pursuing their M.Ed. online. A worthwhile investment, I'm sure, and apart from the benefit to the people of Kosovo, our class gained a lot from her cultural perspective.

As for Calgary, though it's a lovely city, it's awfully spread out, the traffic is terrible and without a car I'm not able to get groceries very easily. But the room I'm renting is convenient to the university. The best thing is the climate. It's been unusually hot -- 31 degrees in the afternoon -- but it's not humid, and at night it goes down to 12 degrees. A big shift from Toronto, where a 31-degree day leads to a 29-degree night, and you feel like you're moving through mouldy soup.

Yesterday I turned 49. When I woke up the first thing I heard on the radio was that Israel's bombing of Lebanon had killed 300 civilians including 100 children. So I started my 50th year in tears.

Really Fake

More fuss today in The Globe and Mail (think you may need a subscription for that link) about the veracity, or lack thereof, in Prairie Giant, the CBC docudrama about Tommy Douglas that aired a few months back. People have taken the creators to task for not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, in particular the descendants of the late Saskatchewan Liberal politician Jimmy Gardiner, who object to his portrayal as a redneck drinker. Shirley Douglas (mom of Kiefer Sutherland, daughter of Tommy) also apparently withdrew her support from the project after finding the script played fast and loose with facts. The CBC has withdrawn the mini-series from repeats and DVD sales. The director and screenwriter, as well as the Directors' Guild on their behalf, are trotting out the usual argument that because it's a drama, it doesn't have to be accurate. They're crying censorship.

While I see their point, I admit I'm getting tired of the degree to which history is knowingly distorted in the service of dramatic exigencies. I know it's hard to create a script that sticks to the facts while at the same time making the film easy to follow, entertaining, and affordable. And no one's version of the "truth" is ever the truth. But I think deliberately changing verifiable facts about real people is dangerous, at least when you sell your product as docudrama. A novel that speculates about the inner life of a real person is one thing, and so is a theatrical film based on such a novel. But a CBC miniseries about a politician whose story is intricately tied up with that of the nation raises certain expectations in the viewer that, if not met, will come back to bite the producer in the ass.

Perhaps there's nowhere to draw the line with drama. But I did watch Prairie Giant, and was much more bothered by the anachronistic details that I find so common to these productions, where people in a historical context exhibit the social behaviours of today rather than of the period. For example, there's a scene where a boy, perhaps in his early teens, accompanies Tommy Douglas, then a Baptist minister on the Depression-racked prairie, to bring a box of old clothes to a poor farm family. As they approach the house, the boy says to Douglas that Mrs. So-and-So "must be pregnant."

When I was growing up in small-town Canada in the 1960s, no boy would ever have used the word pregnant when speaking to an adult, much less the Baptist minister. He'd have died of embarrassment first. In fact, no adult I knew ever used that word in front of children. Possibly boys might have used it when speaking to each other, but I can count on one hand the number of times I heard that word from an adult in the first 18 years of my life. A woman was "expecting," in the parlance of the day. Saying "pregnant" was a little bit like saying "toilet," an awkward word for Canadians. And adults avoided pointing out a woman's condition at all to children if they could possibly help it. Am I mistaken in believing that the 1920s and '30s would have been even more conservative than the '60s? (When Demi Moore appeared pregnant and naked on the cover of Vanity Fair in the early 1990s, it marked the first time I'd ever seen a pregnant woman's body, and I was in my mid-30s at the time. Today women's bared, pregnant midriffs are everywhere in the celebrity mags -- I think they're quite beautiful -- and famous women's "bumps" are magnified on tabloid covers. That's a whole other topic.)

There were a number of other gaffes of that nature in Prairie Giant that didn't jibe with my experience of how people used to behave, especially church-going people. Part of the series was dull, and part was rather exciting. Realistic? I don't know. I voted for Tommy in the CBC's Greatest Canadian competition (and he won). He deserves better.

The pink, the pink, the pink

In the mid-90s, when I was working at George Brown College, I was also a volunteer at the AIDS Committee of Toronto, writing and copy-editing their volunteer newsletter. When the AIDS Walk for Life came around, I organized a walk team for George Brown. It was (and remains) a very important cause for me; I lost many friends and acquaintances to the disease. While I was running around the campus putting up posters and soliciting pledges, one of my coworkers, a woman who was probably 10 or more years my senior, said to me wistfully -- and possibly with a bit of resentment in her tone, in fact -- "You know, many more people die of breast cancer every year than die of AIDS, yet the AIDS cause has all this media coverage and and all these fundraisers. I wish people would pay as much attention to the fight against breast cancer."

I nodded, not knowing what to say. I probably wondered if her comment was a bit homophobic. I knew she had survived breast cancer, but at the time, that disease was very distant from my radar screen. Almost nobody in my fairly large family had ever had cancer of any kind; I was in my mid-30s and planning, as people in their mid-30s do, to live forever, and, moreover, to be healthy forever. Breast cancer was something that happened to a handful of other women, not to me.

Fast-forward a little over a decade. I am now a two-year breast cancer survivor (and I'm happy to say my former colleague is still with us, as well). And you cannot walk a block in my city, or watch TV for more than an hour, or surf the Internet, without running into the ubiquitous pink ribbon. Breast cancer is the cause du jour, and it seems to know no bounds. The other day I saw a billboard for a brand of chewing gum that featured the familiar ribbon loop carved into a piece of pink gum. Professional sports players wore pink jerseys during games to raise breast cancer awareness. Not long ago the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation sent me a survey that involved evaluating different stylized pink-ribbon logos, and asked me to be part of a focus group. Breast cancer has to be one of the most successful brands ever invented.

Of course, I'm grateful. But leaving aside the argument that too much effort and money is spent by the breast cancer charity machine on a cure and not enough on prevention, I'm also a little embarrassed by the saturation of the marketplace by the ailment that, I admit, may kill me yet. I know there are people who, like my former colleague, must look wistfully and resentfully at the pink juggernaut and wonder why their disease -- whether it be colitis or ALS or prostate cancer -- doesn't get the same attention. I think of Cheryl Hawkes, the widow of journalist Bill Cameron, who died of esophageal cancer. She is trying to leverage Bill's fame to bring a little attention to that disease, which she says is on the rise (and which claimed my dad's youngest brother this year), but has found there's very little infrastructure in place for fundraising and awareness.

Women's ailments were ignored for years, it's true. I admire the women and men who mobilized so much clout for the breast cancer cause -- the squeaky wheel, and all that. If you want help, you have to go out and find a way to get it -- you can't wait for the government to find the money to cure everything. And it's typical of marketing that some causes get more time in the sun than others. The public has only so much attention span, and we can't focus on everything at once. But the situation is hardly equitable. The breast cancer bandwagon, like the AIDS bandwagon, smacks more than a little of political correctness and fashion now. Thus does the pendulum swing.

UPDATE: A former student of mine sends a link to www.thinkbeforeyoupink.org, a little cartoon from the anti-establishment Breast Cancer Action group that criticizes companies' use of the breast cancer cause to sell more stuff.

Guilt & Pleasure

I've been working on an interesting project recently, as temporary copy editor of Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly, whose tag line is "Making Jews Talk More." The magazine sprang from the salon on Jewish culture that Mireille Silcoff (whom I met when we were working at Saturday Night magazine) set up when she moved from Montreal to Toronto. Her goal was to bring together young Jews, not necessarily affiliated with religious organizations, to talk about what it means to be Jewish today. She hooked up with a group called Reboot to launch salons all over North America and is editor in chief of G&P (I think their backing comes from the Bronfman family philanthropical funds). The quarterly is great fun; it's a literary magazine of ideas, with lots of historical and archival stuff on Jewish traditions of the past, but the tone is often edgy, comical, and hip/serious, never politically correct, much like Mireille herself. She's the epitome of cool while being painfully bright, and what I thought was simply cleverness has turned out, as seen in this magazine, to be a keen intelligence and concern about community.

G&P is also highly visual (designed in Toronto by illustrator Marco Cibola of Nove Studio). Beautiful layouts of old "Hebrew Comedy" sheet music, striking photos of young casualties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and excerpts from graphic novels make it great to look at. Articles are by prominent Jewish writers from around the globe, many of them academics, playwrights, comics. The upcoming third issue, whose theme is magic, contains everything from an examination of the figure of the golem by Nathaniel Deutsch, to a memoir about the near-conversion of the writer Lisa Crystal Carver (formerly sexually outrageous punk rocker Lisa Suckdog), to a hilarious excerpt from a play in progress by David Auburn (Proof, The Lake House) about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle, to a piece on Hitler's Jewish psychic.

I'm just filling in as copy editor because of a maternity leave, so I won't be doing it after this issue, but it's been a pleasure to work on a magazine of ideas again. (Interestingly, G&P is published out of New York, but Mireille lives mainly in Montreal, and the editors and art director are in Toronto -- and mainly, like me, aren't Jewish.) You can read G&P online, too, at www.guiltandpleasure.com, and here's a link to an article in New York's The Jewish Week about its founding.

Little things...

The weather this week has been so astoundingly wonderful, I am trying to savour every moment to remember when the swamp returns. For a week, it's been sunny, cool and dry. My house is on the chilly side, in fact. I've been bicycling to the Beach as often as possible. I feel wonderful.

Yesterday I walked across a local elementary schoolyard while the kids were out playing at recess. Three little boys, about six or seven, were playing hopscotch on the pavement. I hear so much today about the fact that kids don't play the schoolyard games we played when we were kids -- Ordinary Solitary, marbles, etc. Teachers who've been trying to revive those games blame their disappearance on the diverse ethnic backgrounds found in your average Toronto school -- but I don't get that. We learned those games from the kids who were just a little older than us, and we taught them to those who were younger. The only time games stopped being transmitted to the next group of kids was when the school outlawed them for some reason (I recall marbles disappeared that way when I was in Grade 4 or so, I can't recall why -- too much unscrupulous marble-trading, I think). I would have thought that no amount of ethnic diversity could stop that knowledge transmittal on the schoolyard.

In any case, when I was young, no self-respecting boy would ever have been caught playing hopscotch, which was decidedly a girls' game. It was refreshing to see the little boys at my local school playing the game. Perhaps it's just as well the traditions of my childhood didn't all get passed along...

This afternoon on the radio a Trinidadian man was interviewed at a bar about the soccer World Cup -- he exuberantly touted the Trinidad and Tobago soccer team, ending his little speech by saying, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it!" The announcers seemed to get a huge kick out of this exhortation, presumably thinking it a feature of Caribbean speech. I laughed out loud -- my mother used to say that all the time when I was a little girl, and she's a Canadian of German descent. I wonder where it comes from.

Woman, thy name is...confusing

On CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition this morning, Michael Enright talked about a female friend's dismay that her niece is taking her husband's family name when she gets married.

I’ve never married, so I’ve never had to face the decision of whether or not to take a man’s family name – but I was intrigued by Enright's characterization of the dilemma women face as a choice between cutting oneself off from either one’s history or one’s future. I don't think that's an easy choice. I sent The Sunday Edition an e-mail saying:

Though I'm pretty sure I'd keep my father's name, no system seems to satisfy -- how about men and women keeping their surnames, but giving male children the father's surname and female children the mother's? It can't be any stupider than what we do at present.

At least we don’t often see the old practice of calling a woman by her husband’s first AND last names, save when we’re trying to be a tad sarcastic. I got a glimpse of the way this custom not only erased women’s identities but led to some confusion when I happened to read a booklet that outlined the history of the Lutheran church congregation to which my grandparents and their relatives belonged many years ago, in the tiny town of Alice, Ontario, which is outside of Pembroke. In a chapter called “The Role of Women in the Church Life of St. Peter’s 1866-1940” we read that “It can be conjectured that most of the church organists were women. The first factual evidence of this can be found however only in the minute book of January 3, 1934, when Miss Grace Born was asked to fill this position. Mrs. Wilbert Stencill followed her in 1936 and received for her labours not a salary but a gift of $10.” No need to worry that Miss Grace Born might have envied the generous stipend given to her successor, Mrs. Wilbert Stencill, since Miss Born and Mrs. Stencill were one and the same person. But how could the writer of this history have known from reading the old minute books that the organist had remained unchanged between 1934 and 1936 -- except that my Great-Aunt Grace had, in fact, married my Great-Uncle Wilbert?

Meanwhile, I discovered when I was teaching business writing to college students that the younger generation (God, it feels weird to use that phrase) hasn't a clue what the honorific title "Ms." means. Of course, Ms. was intended as a substitute for both Miss and Mrs., conflating the two, in keeping with the sensible notion that there is no reason a woman's title should reveal her marital status if a man's title doesn't. The idea was to have two parallel titles: Ms. and Mr. But when I asked class after class of students what Ms. meant, I always got the same answer: "It means a divorced woman, doesn't it?" I can only assume this misconception comes from the fact that because Ms. never completely caught on, since it became current in the 1970s, the designers of forms have attempted to please everyone and offend no one by giving us four boxes to check off: Mr., Mrs., Miss and Ms. Why would it occur to young people that one of those titles is meant to subsume two of the others? Logic tells them that Ms. must stand for something that is mutually exclusive of the other two female titles -- and if it isn't "married" or "single," it must mean "divorced"! Makes perfect sense, sadly.

Perhaps we should have adopted the system used in French and German, whereby a young woman is called "Miss" until she is "mature," at which time she becomes "Mrs." (i.e., Madame, Frau) regardless of whether she's married or single. That is, provided we used a similar system for men...

You call it an ad; we call it a lie

Friends have responded to the previous post about An Inconvenient Truth pointing to the ad campaign launched by the oil industry-backed Competitive Enterprise Institute to counter the movie's claim that we ignore global warming at our peril. One of the slogans: "Carbon dioxide -- They call it pollution. We call it life."

You can read a New Republic story here (free; registration required) that describes and debunks the anti-Gore campaign.

I have a link to the ads. Unlike many liberals, I support strongly the right of any idiot to buy advertising making whatever claims they like (on the theory that suspicious-sounding ads should make us suspicious of ALL ads -- the notion that we can divide ads into those that are true and those that aren't is preposterous).

However, I also have no intention of linking to the ads here -- it's my personal choice not to reproduce and disseminate the CEI's ads for them. (That's why blogging is not journalism, I suppose.)

An Inconvenient Truth

When I was a teenager, I was invited to go to a double bill at the Espanola movie theatre by some friends in Espanola. Coming from an even smaller town, I had rarely gone to a movie theatre and it was an exciting invitation. One of the movies was a horror flick whose name and plot I had entirely forgotten within 24 hours, and during it the girls screamed satisfyingly while the boys took advantage of their fear. I thought it was boring. The other movie was called No Blade of Grass, an apocalyptic tale whose tag line, imdb.com tells me, was "A virus of doom envelops Earth! No room to run! No place to hide!" I think it was a horrible movie, but its violent portrayal of people confronting hordes that coveted their food and shelter was far more terrifying to me than the slasher flick.

Last night I went to see the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, and came away feeling much the way I felt when I saw that awful movie in the mid-70s, but worse. It's hard to find words for how scary this documentary is. It's essentially a film of "the former next president of the United States" Al Gore giving a slide presentation on the climate crisis, as he insists on calling it, using a lot of charts and graphs. You wouldn't think such a film could keep you awake, let alone be riveting, but it does and it is. I never thought I'd hear a movie audience gasp at the sight of a line on a graph, but I did.

I also don't know where Gore's reputation for being wooden, geeky and pedantic comes from, because he comes across as engaging, funny and articulate. Quite apart from the despair one feels at the thought of losing our planet, one comes away from the movie thinking that but for those U.S. Supreme Court judges in 2000, this smart, thoughtful guy could have been the leader of the free world for the past six years instead of Bozo Bush. It's demoralizing to speculate, "what if."

And yet, one review criticizes Gore's record as Bill Clinton's vice-president, and claims he wasn't nearly as vigilant as he could have been on the environmental front during his tenure. Which may simply prove that ex-politicians are the only people who get to speak the truth.

Is this film the truth? Even the negative reviews I've read don't suggest his science isn't solid; RealClimate.org takes him to task on a few points, but agrees with most of what he says. And though the presentation is slick, the film is not nearly as manipulative as anything from the Michael Moore oeuvre. Of course, it can be seen as an attempt to get people to vote for Gore should he decide to run for president again (a Time.com reviewer said the film should be titled, "Elect me, or we'll all die"). (Oh, and then there's the fact that Gore's Apple Powerbook is on display in every other shot -- apparently he's on Apple's board.)

But the data is organized and displayed so that anybody can understand it, the photos of glaciers today and 20 years ago are starkly telling, and the story they tell is nothing short of devastating. Interspersed with the data are some clips designed to make us trust Gore and fear for the planet, like the computer-animated polar bear who can't find an ice floe to crawl onto in a warm sea.

Margaret Wente recently wrote in her Globe and Mail column, in her usual contrarian way, that the "polar bears are drowning" theory is a myth. She quoted a single biologist who said so, and nobody else. (This not long after she took Wendy Mesley to task, fairly enough, for calling on too few scientists and using too much anecdotal journalism in her "the environment is causing cancer" documentary on CBC TV.)

Is Gore trustworthy? David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, A.O. Scott in The New York Times, and David Edelstein in New York magazine seem to think so. After the graphs that show carbon dioxide levels going literally off the charts, and temperatures climbing with them (not, as many skeptics claim, simply moving up and down as they have done since the earth was born), and the increasing number of violent storms, etc. etc., the most arresting figure Gore presents is that out of almost 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific articles that were surveyed in a meta-study, not a single one denied the existence of a global warming crisis. But a similar study of articles in the popular press revealed more than half suggested it might be just a theory, not a real crisis. Of course, I don't know how the 1,000 academic articles were chosen.

But if he's right, we're in seriously big trouble. As he did in his Vanity Fair article, Gore tries hard to point out that if we move from disbelief straight to despair, and are too paralyzed to act, we're toast -- he says it is within our power to do something, in his opinion. His faith in democracy is touching, given his career in politics. But his conclusion is stark: if we don't do something right now, within a very few years (perhaps 10) there will be catastrophic storms and flooding and drought that will change life on the planet in terrible ways and cause the deaths of millions.

Liam Lacey writes in The Globe and Mail:

Here is a man who was almost the American president, who declares that global warming is here and, unless checked, will lead to catastrophic results. If Al Gore is wrong, the argument demands a responsible and thorough refutation; if, on the whole, he is right, then we need to make changes, fast.

The problem is, how much longer can we go on saying "If he's right"? At what point do we say, we can't wait any longer? Who leads us to make the decision? We can only make it for ourselves, as individuals.

You can see a trailer of An Inconvenient Truth -- and learn more about what we can do (including a quiz to determine what your carbon-emissions impact is) -- here.

I'm melting...

There are so many things I want to write about in this space, but apart from the fact that I'm juggling several clients and deadlines, misery started for me as of the weekend. The Rainbow Voices concert went very well, the audience had fun, and I felt the sense of accomplishment and excitement that buoyed me after the last concert. But because the humidity had risen considerably during the day, I sang with rivulets of sweat pouring into my mouth. My hot flashes have returned to their summer frequency of every 45 minutes -- you can set your watch by them -- and the air feels like syrup to me. Most of May was actually lovely -- cool and sunny, in fact spring-like, which is odd for Toronto. We usually don't get spring. I've had a very happy May -- a happy winter, in fact. But now spring is over, in my book. And the Toronto summer is increasingly unbearable to me.

On top of everything else, I wrecked my back by standing through the whole concert and helping clean up afterward, so I'm feeling like a cross beached whale.

I'm counting the minutes before I leave for my summer in Calgary, where I expect the air to be dry. I remember the morning my friend Michel drove me to the airport in Edmonton after my 10-day vacation in Alberta last summer, when I felt almost frantic that I was leaving that wonderful air to return to what feels like a swamp to me. Thank God I don't live in New Orleans. I'm genetically a Teutonic type, but it's not so much the heat that bothers me. People laugh derisively about phrases like "But it's a dry cold!", but the truth is my life is dictated to a great extent by the amount of moisture in the air. I was even miserable when I lived in London, England. As soon as the humidity exceeds 45 percent on my little barometer, I turn into a dishrag.

How a dishrag resembles a beached whale, I'm not sure, but never mind. It's not just the hot flashes, but I become tired and lethargic in the summer, I get dizzy spells when I exert myself (low blood pressure, the doctor says) and I sweat like a longshoreman. (Well, I imagine longshoremen sweat as much as they supposedly swear. Can I blame the weather for my poor use of metaphor? I can try...) This condition runs in my family. We all hate hot weather. And my mother still gets hot flashes in the summertime at the age of 69! When people tell me, "Oh, they'll pass," I just laugh ruefully. (I asked the surgeon at the breast clinic a year and a half ago if the hot flashes, which were brought on in full force by chemotherapy, would pass eventually and he said, "Oh, yes." Standing in the corner of the examining room was a clinic volunteer, who locked eyes with me and slowly shook her head from side to side. "How old are you?" I asked. "Seventy-three," was her reply.)

Of course, I don't have air-conditioning in my house -- boiler heating precludes that, as I have no duct-work, and not enough exterior wall to support the no-duct kind of A/C. Last night I slept in my basement, which isn't a very cool basement, but it beats the second storey.

(The funny thing is, my hair loves humidity. I'm the type of irritating woman whose whole life seems to be one long quest for the right hairstyle, whose mood is substantially affected by the condition of my coiff. So when the rest of my body is happy -- when it's nice and dry outside -- my hair is flat and brittle and flyaway. But when I'm feeling like I want to die, my hair is full of body and curl. How many women do you know who travel with a barometer? I'm always meaning to call CBC Radio's morning show and beg them to include a humidity reading with the temperature on the weather forecast. It determines whether I should air-dry or blow-dry my hair, what kind of styling product to use -- and whether I'll have the energy to do any of it.)

Poor me. I could be living in an earthquake or hurricane or war zone. There are far worse things than heat and sweat and smog and the mouldy smell that hangs over our neighbourhood at this time of year. But hot flashes are only funny until you've experienced this level of temperature disturbance. I used to laugh when I saw the Shoppers Drug Mart ad where a woman runs into her backyard wearing shorts and a T-shirt in the dead of winter, and uncovers the air-conditioning unit. Now when I see that ad I want to cry. One thing they don't warn you about (well, nobody warns you about menopause at all, actually) is that when I'm not having a hot flash, I'm often so cold I can barely work. Hot flashes every 45 minutes means I'm freezing more than I'm hot. The effect of this seesaw on my sleep patterns is devastating, which is why I'm so tired all the time. I used to sleep eight hours a night easily. Now I wake up every half hour or so, when a hot flash comes, and when a cold "trough" comes.

There. Selfish rant over. Life is really pretty good otherwise!

Testing, testing...

While I was in the middle of breast-cancer treatment a couple of years ago at St. Michael's Hospital, I was also seeking advice from various orthopedic surgeons at Toronto Western Hospital about my back, foot and leg -- my regular guy was retiring, and I was making overlapping visits to a new one. One day I found myself, clad in a skimpy gown, being summoned from the waiting room by an X-ray technician who seemed awfully familiar. My chemo-addled brain made some grinding noises and with difficulty I managed to recall that she had taken an X-ray of me just a few weeks before -- the same back X-ray she was about to give me, again, it turned out. I asked her to check, and, sure enough, we were about to do a completely unnecessary test. After some consultation with the doctor, the X-ray was cancelled and the recent films were dug up. Had I not recognized the technician, I would have been exposed to yet more radiation (my lifetime total is approaching the scary), and charged the taxpayer for it needlessly.

Last week I booked a physical with my family doctor (what made it a physical, I'm not sure -- he did very little) and mentioned that I'd recently had a bone-density test -- I couldn't recall exactly when, or exactly who had ordered it, but concluded it had been my oncologist. The GP had no note about it, let alone any results, because he hadn't ordered the test, and I still don't know how it turned out. And if anybody at St. Mike's wants to compare it to my earlier bone-density tests, they're out of luck, since those were done at Toronto Western. The GP then ordered some bloodwork -- quite possibly the same bloodwork that the oncologist did just a month ago (except I couldn't remember the date), but unless he'd been sitting at a computer in St. Michael's Hospital, he couldn't know that.

"Aren't you supposed to be Cynthia Central -- the clearing house for my medical care?" I asked my GP. He gave me a look that made me realize that only I can be Cynthia Central. I resolved to start my own medical journal, in which I'll keep track of doctor visits, recommendations, prescriptions and diagnostic tests. But I was thrilled to hear on the radio yesterday that the city of Edmonton, Alberta (wouldn't you know it), is proposing to create a central database in which all medical diagnostic tests will be recorded, so that patients don't keep having the same tests over and over again, ordered by different doctors in different locations. Not only does duplication of testing cost the taxpayer a fortune, but there are risks involved in many lab tests -- a CT scan apparently exposes me to hundreds of times more radiation than a simple X-ray, and my doctors order CT scans at the drop of a hat, it seems to me. Once you've had cancer, every little bump and twinge gets checked out automatically. By every doctor you go to. And the lack of a central database can cause some major slip-ups: My original breast-cancer diagnosis was delayed by a month because the breast centre lost my mammogram and ultrasound, which had been done at an outside lab, and wouldn't do new ones without the old ones.

One more reason to move to Edmonton...

Weird Weather

This afternoon I sat out in my back garden in a comfy chair, reading a textbook and soaking up some sunshine along with the heavenly scent of lilacs and lily-of-the-valley. Suddenly it started to thunder, so I went inside. Within minutes the sky opened up, the garden was covered with hail and our street was turned into a river. It didn't let up for 30 minutes -- I've never seen so much hail in my life (which may just mean I've led a fairly sheltered life), and I've certainly never seen that much water running down our street. It appeared to be pretty local -- friends I called said it wasn't even raining downtown, let alone hailing.

Green energy

While searching on the Net for a better natural gas rate last fall, I stumbled on Bullfrog Power, Ontario's first 100% green electricity retailer. The idea is that the money one pays to Bullfrog goes to purchase only wind power or low-impact hydro power, which in turn should help create a larger market for those types of power. I signed up without realizing how new this option was -- turns out I was one of the first 100 customers; the list includes people like Margaret Atwood, The Tragically Hip's Gord Downie, Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies, photographer Edward Burtynsky, and U of T prof Thomas Homer-Dixon. Adding to its trendiness is the cute Bruce Mau-designed logo. I ended up writing an article about Bullfrog for the issue of Green Living magazine that was just distributed with the current Toronto Life.

Bullfrog charges about a third more than Toronto Hydro, and I blanched when I got the first bill. But I do find I'm more conscious now of how much electricity I'm using, and I'm developing better habits of turning lights off, using the dryer less, etc., proving that a hit in the pocketbook is the best motivator -- and that our deregulated electricity market can foster environmentally friendly practices by encouraging eco-entrepreneurs.

And now I hear that Walmart has signed up some of its Ontario stores for Bullfrog Power, in keeping with its move toward selling organic foods (a seeming contradiction on one level -- "organic" would seem to mean not just pesticide- and drug-free but also local and small-scale -- but surely fostering a healthy world is not only for the Margaret Atwoods and Steven Pages of the world).

Is it all just pissing into the wind (pun not intended)? I hope not. I have to believe that putting my money where my mouth is does more than just make me feel self-righteous and poorer.

Donate points

Interesting item in today's Globe and Mail: Air Canada's frequent-flyer program, Aeroplan, is partnering with charities such as the Stephen Lewis Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontières and others to motivate people to donate unused frequent-flyer miles, which can help transport volunteers to farflung countries in need of help. The item (subscription required) says that "to make it easy to donate, Aeroplan's website is being revamped to allow the program's members to click and deposit miles directly to one of the charities listed." They're urging people to comb through their papers in case they or somebody in their family have points they won't use -- evidently if you don't use or acquire Aeroplan points for three years, they get cancelled.

Rainbow Voices of Toronto

I seem to have run low on steam -- no postings in the past few days. Aside from regular work, gardening, preparing for my parents' 50th-anniversary party, registering with the University of Calgary and trying to find a place to stay while I'm studying there this summer, I'm also busy rehearsing for the concert I'll be singing in on May 27, with Rainbow Voices of Toronto. It's a non-auditioned choir composed of a colourful mixture of what I fondly refer to as semi-misfits (I fit right in) with the mission statement "Building bridges between the straight and gay communities through the power of song." We sing some semi-serious choral music and a lot of pop tunes, with a predictably campy flavour. There's a fairly strong group of men, but we always seem to have trouble filling out the soprano and alto sections (I'm an alto). If you're a shower singer looking for a bigger venue, take note. There's no test to determine whether you're gay or straight...

Our director, Michael Bouzane, is a stout, entertaining imp who manages to coax something worth listening to from a group whose talent varies wildly. The concerts are always a lot of fun (I went to several before I joined at the behest of my cousin Lynne and next-door neighbour Tom, who were both members); they're vigorously unhip events, by the standards of my media pals, which makes me love them all the more.

Our spring concert will feature Sixties music, among other things -- if you like Franki Valli, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and (yikes) John Denver, come on down. You can find the details here.

Same or Other?

Got an email from Egale Canada, "the national organization which advances equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-identified people in Canada," pointing out that the Canadian census form now being filled out "instructs same-sex couples who are married to check the 'Other' category at the bottom of the list of relationships, rather than checking the top box marked 'Husband or wife.' "

I took a look, and it's true. What's the point of that? Here's the rest of the email:

Egale Canada...is recommending that same-sex married couples list their relationship as 'Husband or wife' rather than 'Other.' According to Statistics Canada, either response will be captured correctly as a married same-sex couple. In addition, Egale is calling on all concerned Canadians to add a comment on Page 6 of the questionnaire, such as 'Same-Sex couples deserve equal treatment.'

Please take further action to make express your support for same-sex
couples. Please visit http://www.egale.ca/census2006, and see how easy it is to make your voice heard.

Out of energy

I'm glad I took advantage of Canada's Energuide program last year -- the new Conservative government has apparently just slashed it. At a cost of about $150, I had an energy auditor go over my old, leaky house, and he gave me a score of 55 out of 100 for energy efficiency. After replacing my ancient boiler, insulating an upstairs ceiling, putting down miles of caulking and a few other things, the rating went up to 68. I received a government grant of over $800, which really helped, because the boiler alone cost me at least $6,000.

Evidently the feds are telling us they'll soon bring out their "own environmental plan" -- this I want to see.

The nutty thing is that replacing my boiler has been a mixed blessing. I hate hot water radiant heating -- because I have no ductwork, I can't get central air conditioning -- and there is no radiator in my basement. I've been told that I can't have one on the same level as the boiler. But the old boiler, a cast-iron affair that was as old as the house (about a century) and used to burn coal before it was converted to gas, was so inefficient that it handily heated the basement just by throwing off its own heat. So a radiator wasn't necessary. My new, efficient boiler is completely cool to the touch, so now my basement is freezing. I've put in a couple of electric baseboard heaters, and they ship the heat up the stairwell, leaving the basement as cold as ever. (And I'm now paying a premium for green electricity from Bullfrog Power -- at least my gas consumption seems to have dropped, though I think I was overpaying for a while because of an administrative foul-up. More on Bullfrog Power another day).

The other nutty thing is that my old boiler had no electrical parts. The water was pushed through the system by gravity. In a power outage, I would have had heat. Now I have an electric pump (which makes the system no more responsive than before, to my surprise). So -- no power, no heat.

Skype: a new kind of pick-pocket?

I've just been reading about Skype, e-Bay's Internet phone service, and "Skypecasts." Whoever came up with a name like Skype? It sounds more than vaguely illicit -- no, illicit would probably be a good thing. It sounds sneaky and shifty -- perhaps because it rhymes with swipe. More than anything, it sounds like a name Dickens might have come up with. I picture an unshaven Mr. Skype with fingerless gloves and a greasy top hat -- maybe the name reminds me of Bill Sikes? Somebody I know used to say (jokingly) that she wanted to name her kids Pucky and Smike, and that rings in my head, too. And then there's the British slang term "skive," which means to slack off or shirk a duty.

I wonder how long it will be before Skype is part of my daily vocabulary.

Speaking (writing?) of names, I was flabbergasted when the daily free newspaper called DOSE debuted last year -- to someone of my generation, a "dose" was a case of venereal disease. If you were unlucky, you might get a "dose of the clap" or just "the dose." When I mentioned this to some of my students, they of course looked at me like I was Methuselah. To them, the word has only drug connotations. Of course, the execrable DOSE is not aiming at me.

Clothesline Part II

There's a poster in the women's washroom at Ryerson University that shows a closeup photo of a lot of laundry hanging on a line in front of an older building. The slogan is something like: "This could be your summer home." [CORRECTION MAY 17: IT ACTUALLY SAYS "THIS COULD BE YOUR LAUNDROMAT"] It's intended to sell some kind of work-abroad program for students, I think (I can never remember what ads are selling). I guess it's meant to represent Europe, though I often wonder, when I see it, what impression all that laundry makes on Toronto university students. Is that image appealing? Exotic?

When I first heard that some suburbs and neighbourhoods don't permit laundry lines (I guess it's a bylaw, or maybe in some cases a condo ruling), I was shocked. My small-town upbringing still leaves me naive about what's considered proper in some urban settings -- I laughed out loud when a student of mine told me that in his neighbourhood every house was required to have the same colour of window blinds. But both small towns and cities include citizens who would regulate what other people's houses and yards look like, and I've never understood that. I might not like the fact that my neighbour's porch looks like it's going to fall off, or is so packed with junk it's a fire hazard or is painted bright purple or is ringed by old refrigerator racks. I'm a fairly house-proud person, and people say my home is attractive and neat. But I've never felt I had the right to impose my standards on anyone else. Occasionally I try to include adjacent neighbours in decisions that will improve our properties, but if they aren't interested, I certainly don't call the city or stop talking to them.

My laundry line gives me a great deal of pleasure (see previous post), and the sight of a line of clothes is, to me, a comforting and often charming sight, though I admit that a former neighbour's practice of hanging dirty rags on his line for days did put a tiny blight on some of my patio parties. Our narrow adjacent yards are divided only by low wire fences, and what we lose in privacy we gain in social contact and an expansive, almost forest-like haven of trees and perennials. A couple of houses away, a family of five dries all of their laundry on their backyard line. When an American friend of mine was visiting, she asked, "Why don't they use their dryer?" It didn't occur to her that dryers waste electricity, and she was stunned to learn this family has no dryer.

I admit that the dryer does a better job on a lot of clothes -- T-shirts and towels, in particular, which lack shape and softness when they're line-dried. I'm trying to get in the habit of putting a a limit of 20 minutes on any given dryer load, and finishing the job by hanging stuff either in the basement or on the line. And I'm trying to learn to live with rougher towels.

Clothesline Part I

Today is what my mother would call a good wash day -- sunny, dry, breezy and perfect for drying laundry on the clothesline. I've put out several loads of bedding on mine.

When I bought my house almost 11 years ago, the clothesline was the deal-clincher. Apart from the savings on electricity, and the opportunity to stand out in the garden chatting with the neighbours about how great air-dried sheets smell when you go to bed on them, I gradually became semi-conscious that hanging clothes on the clothesline is a role-playing exercise for me, where I get to pretend I'm a real grownup woman with a family to take care of -- in other words, I get to play at domesticity without having any of the responsibilities. As a childless single woman, there's still a part of me that doesn't feel entirely grown-up, and using my clothesline feels like playing dressup with my mom's old taffeta gowns and satin pumps used to. I guess I've never felt as though I measure up to the standards for what a woman is "supposed" to be (meaning, I suppose, that I could never match my mother's femininity) and while I think I've come to terms with the gap between society's expectations of me and the kind of woman I turned out to be, clearly there's a part of me that still pays attention to that imprint.

But -- surprise, surprise -- my self-image mirror reflects infinite layers. "I feel like I'm pretending to be you when I hang clothes on the line," I said to my mother recently.

"That's funny," she replied. "I feel like I'm pretending to be my mother when I hang clothes on the line."

(Here's what being a woman who puts out the wash means in reality: I hung up a cream-coloured fitted sheet from my bed and was horrified to see a large, rusty-looking stained patch. It was dye from a cheap nightshirt I bought at Zeller's, transferred to the sheets with my menopausal night sweats. I'm now worried my neighbours will think I'm incontinent...)

Favorville.com

My brother Paul, who's in website management, keeps saying he'd like to see the Internet used to connect people who are close to one another geographically, rather than only forming communities of people who live far apart. He sees it as a perfect tool to bridge the gaps within neighbourhoods. We were both intrigued by a new website that's been getting some media coverage lately, called favorville.com. Two young men in Toronto put it together with the idea that people could share advice and expertise, sell items, give things away -- much like Craigslist -- with an emphasis on connecting people who live near one another.

In memory of Jane Jacobs, who died a couple of days ago, I signed on to favorville.com, admittedly mostly looking for favours (I spell it the Canadian way, but I can understand why they don't), though I have given away my dehumidifier to somebody who needs it more than I do. I tried a wacky idea -- I've posted a request for a gardener, somebody who lives in an apartment who misses gardening and can help take care of mine. We'll see what happens. Jacobs believed that urban neighbourhoods work when they are constructed in such a way that (among other things) people are physically close to each other -- aware of and acquainted with one another but not necessarily intimately involved in one another's lives. Perhaps my request will end in disaster.

Virtual classroom

I'm about to begin a master's program in adult education at the University of Calgary that can be pursued entirely online. I think I've got over the association of distance learning with acquiring your education through the back of a matchbook -- it's a sensible option for mid-career teachers who can't pick up and move or study full-time. And, since distance delivery is becoming so popular, especially for adults, the program gives me an opportunity to learn more about a method I'll undoubtedly be called upon to use in the future. I've always been skeptical of the whole online-learning thing, but I'm prepared to have my bias toward sitting in a classroom challenged, I guess.

In any case, tonight I "attended" a virtual orientation session -- my first experience using software called Elluminate, which allows a class to take place in which people who are physically in farflung places view stuff onscreen and hear each other using a mic and headset. Little icons on the screen allow you to put your "hand" up, mutely applaud, boo and text message.

When I asked a young man in my local Apple computer reseller for a headset with a microphone, he sold me one that I think is intended for kids on PlayStation -- it's sized for a 12-year-old boy's head. It was singularly uncomfortable and now I have a headache. As I expected, I found communicating this way a bit intimidating (it reminded me a little of talking on the CB radio when I was growing up in the north -- I wanted to say "10-4," or do my best Jack Bauer imitation: "Copy that.") The absence of people's body language, facial expressions, etc., made me feel self-conscious. And it also made me bored and sleepy. I'm not one of those students who needs to be doing "hands-on" stuff all the time. I like being lectured to. But at least when you listen to a prof drone on in a classroom, there's something to look at. I found it hard to focus in the virtual setting. I hope a real class will be more interesting. Too bad we can't use web cams.

What was interesting, though, was listening to everybody in the session sign in. There were people in B.C., Saskatchewan, Abu Dhabi and Russia (where it was 4 a.m.). One guy was an officer at a Canadian Forces Base. There was somebody who trains air traffic controllers in Newfoundland. The variety of participants will be the program's great strength, I'm sure -- that's what I always tell my adult students.

Uh...peaches? asparagus?...

Though there have been a variety of opinions over the years on what age a woman should stop taking birth control pills (notwithstanding a CBC Radio interview I heard today with a doctor who says nobody should be taking them at all), I figured nature had its own rule: I stopped taking them when my my eyesight was so bad I couldn't see the little letters on the package indicating the days of the week, and my memory was so bad I couldn't remember to take them anyway.

I recently concluded that I also had too few brain cells to ensure I bought healthy foods -- I had read that some fruits and vegetables tend (for various reasons) to carry more pesticides than others, and tried to commit to memory which ones were which, but damned if I could call to mind that list when I was in Loblaws.

But I found a handy wallet card at the Environmental Working Group website that will do the job for me.

Now I just have to create a filing system for my handy wallet cards. And make sure I have my reading glasses with me at Loblaws.

True Blue?

Is it just me, or did President's Choice redesign many of its prepared food packages to incorporate a blue background at the same time that it introduced (more than a year ago, I guess) its Blue Menu line of low-fat, healthier packaged foods? I do now associate that colour with the healthier stuff, but a lot of the time I pick up a blue PC package and later realize it's not actually Blue Menu, it's just blue. Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky.

Toronto Life catches on

The cover story of the May issue of Toronto Life is about dating and being single. The cover itself features the usual bland-looking woman, which it apparently must do to sell on newsstands, but the inside is a pleasant surprise. There's a trenchant, brave essay on being single by Anne Kingston, which is surrounded by first-person mini-profiles of various single people in the city, with good-sized black-and-white photos. What's so surprising is that in addition to white male and female 30-somethings, the people profiled include a lesbian, a Muslim woman in traditional garb, another young woman whose last name is Singh, and a white man of 79. Not one of the women is skinny; two are reasonably hefty-looking. (Kudos to Denise Balkissoon for these choices).

Contrast this with the cover story of the February issue, "The Condo Generation: Living Large in 700 Square Feet," which featured only condo owners in their 30s, all of them in media-related fields. A friend of mine who's in her 50s and is thinking of buying a condo downtown said she was initially intrigued by the article but upon reading it felt that it displayed a world she didn't belong in. I know a couple who are 71 and 75, who lived in a non-descript (not to say bleak) suburban neighbourhood in Scarborough, with an enormous yard and beautiful garden, and gave it all up to move to a tiny condo at Bloor and Church a couple of years ago. Both lively jazz fanatics and amateur musicians, they're ecstatic about the change, the easy access to theatre and concerts, the ability to walk wherever they want to go, the fact that they don't have to garden anymore. Are seniors and empty-nesters presumed not to be readers of Toronto Life? Is that a demographic editorial choice the magazine makes (not in keeping, incidentally, with their sometime contributor David Hayes's article last year, I can't recall where, that suggested marketers ignore the spending power of boomers at their peril).

The editorial staff members at Toronto Life are mainly under 40 (I know most of them, and respect their intelligence and skill). But as a former employee there myself, a longtime reader and occasional contributor, I often despair of the isolated, youth-centred, too-cool-for-school tone that creeps in, not to mention the WASP-ishness. They've redeemed themselves with this issue.

Post-modern and green

Further to environmental tipping point: How do you preach to people about the importance of saving the planet while remaining hip, ironic and cynical, the required characteristics of any self-respecting media person today? How do you attract an audience with a scary message they'd rather tune out?

CBC Radio One's hip Saturday program Go! made a clever attempt to address what they called "Earth Day apathy" yesterday, which was Earth Day. In between various segments in which the audience did things like compete to see who could identify which items didn't belong in a blue box (on the theory that kids would do a better job at this than geezers, although the geezer won), they ran taped clips that sounded like public service announcements. Each began with lugubrious music, leading to a man intoning glumly that this was your "Earth Day Downer." The announcer stated a couple of examples of impending global doom. "If that's depressing," he'd say, "Think of this," and he'd list another one. Finally, he'd end saying something like "That was your Earth Day Downer," and the sombre music would close out the clip.

At one and the same time, the items succeeded in making fun of environmentalism and still getting across some arresting and important facts. I thought it worked, although I believe media theorists have suggested that this kind of subversiveness in the entertainment media ultimately does nothing to effect social change.

Climate warrior

Tim Flannery, Australian author of The Weathermakers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change, has been promoting his book in Canada and conferring with policy makers in Ottawa. The book has been touted by British prime minister Tony Blair -- at the anti-Portlands energy plant rally I went to recently, NDP leader Jack Layton said he'd pressed a copy on our prime minister, and keeps bugging him to read it.

This morning on CBC Radio Flannery said that his generation asked their dads, "What did you do in the war?" and honoured their contributions in the fight against a clear enemy in the '40s. But our kids, Flannery says, will ask us, "What did you do in the war against global warming?"

That's it. I'm giving up ironing. Well, at least I'm going to read Flannery's book. And I think I'm going to see if I can rouse folks at Ryerson, my only workplace besides my house, to turn off their computers at night and on weekends. The Green Tips book by Gillian Deacon says that "a single computer, left on nights and weekends, can cost $95 a year in wasted energy" (typically we frame threats in dollars, as if our pocketbooks were all that mattered, but, sadly, that's the most effective motivator).

Kids on Stage

Last night I attended a production of Cole Porter's Anything Goes at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, formerly Castle Frank high school. My young friend My Anh Tran was in it; she's been acting professionally and training as a dancer since she was about 8. Despite the sometimes dated (read: racist) details, which bothered My Anh, it was entertaining and well done. Not only am I always impressed by what the school does with these kids (because so many of the students are involved in drama, music and dance, the productions have huge casts), but I'm excited by the support the students show for one another -- the cheering sections in the audience, the shouts of "good show" in the hallway, the acceptance of different sexual orientations. When I was in high school, it often seemed that calling attention to oneself in any way invited only disdain.

My Anh is heading off to theatre or dance school in the fall (I can't believe she's 18; sigh). Although she didn't have a big role in Anything Goes, she was the best dancer in the bunch, and the stage presence she displayed as a little girl is still remarkable.

All the kids were great; a standout was A.J. Stewart as Billy Crocker, who has a tremendous voice, and Jessica Willis as Reno Sweeney; and Zebedee Serranilla played Moonface Martin with an understated comic touch that was lovely. I especially liked the opening, in which two hip-hop dancers did their moves to loud contemporary music, but then deferred to an old lady with a Victrola, who led a segue into the world of the '30s musical. It was a bit Titanic-ish, but sweet. Later there were pop culture allusions, including to Titanic, that were tongue-in-cheek and cleverly done.

The school's upcoming concerts include: Music Night, May 10, 11 and 12; Circo della Vita (with over 300 students dancing), May 24, 25 and 26; and the Fringe Festival, a collection of 16 student-written, -directed and -produced plays, June 6, 7, 8 and 9 (My Anh is one of the directors and performers).

Some of my best friends are...

Twice today I've heard/read somebody in the mainstream media use the phrase, "You don't have to be a tree-hugger to [attend Earth Day celebrations, buy a hybrid car, whatever]." Further to my "tipping point" point three posts ago.

And Brian Mulroney was honoured as Canada's greenest prime minister yesterday!

Hearing guys like him, and George W. Bush, make even the most grudging concession to concern about global warming makes me feel both relieved and terrified. Finally...but...yikes.

The Real and the Fake

Yesterday on CBC Radio One's "The Current," there was an item on Stephen Harper's new plan for giving $1,200 a year to parents for child care (in place of the former Canadian government's plan to put money into public daycare spaces). Anna-Maria Tremonti interviewed a spokesperson from Real Women of Canada, Diane Watts, about the topic. A lot of what Watts said sounded sensible. She mentioned polls that found a majority of women state that they'd rather stay home with their kids than work, which doesn't surprise me, though the numbers don't go very deep in explaining why. But she even mentioned what to me is the important part -- that many other women polled would rather stay home with their kids part-time and work part-time.

I don't know anybody, no matter how much they love their work, who wouldn't prefer to do less of it. Personally, I think couples who can raise families and sustain two careers (not necessarily jobs) and not buckle under the strain are unusual (that means you, Bonnie Fuller). But they do exist, and more to the point, there are many more families who would like to work out some combination of work, career and child-rearing (not to mention extended family and community lives) that allows both mother and father to lead a balanced life and not go broke. Watts even conceded that men might want to stay home with their kids. She tossed around that Conservative word "choice," which always sounds great.

But how can you trust an organization called "Real Women"? Right up front, the name implies that there are "fake women" out there. (Which reminds me of the offensive name the online magazine Salon used to give to one if its opinion sections: "Mothers Who Think." Implying that most mothers don't?)

And who would the fake women be? Those of us who choose careers and don't have children at all? Those who do manage the admittedly difficult feat of raising a family and having a career without wrecking their kids' lives or their own? Those who want a combination of work/career and child-rearing but can't manage it in a society that's so materialistic we've priced life right out of our range -- or who do manage it by opting out of the consumerist treadmill that fuels capitalism? Those who have husbands who are willing to take on child-rearing tasks previously thought to be unmanly? (Are they fake men?) Those who have no choice but to work? Choice may be a Conservative buzzword when it comes to daycare, but a Manichaean phrase like Real Women doesn't allow for any choice at all, it seems to me.

Ryerson Review of Journalism

Tonight I dropped by the launch party for the new issues of the Ryerson Review of Journalism at the Hotel Boutique Lounge -- always a pleasant little do that's well-attended by the usual suspects in the Toronto magazine biz. The newly minted School of Journalism grads, who produce the magazines in their final year at Ryerson University, get to hobnob with the Ken Alexanders, Ian Browns, Antonia Zerbisiases and Allan Fotheringhams, and the journalists who've been profiled scurry off with the fresh-off-the-press copies to read about themselves in the dim corners of the room.

Aside from numerous Canadian National Magazine Awards, the Ryerson Review of Journalism has also won quite a few awards from the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication in the United States (competing successfully with the likes of the Columbia Journalism Review), as well as a couple of Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Awards and a glowing citation in Utne Reader. It's always an interesting read, and one of the only places you can find long-form articles on the state of journalism in Canada. The students also produce regular coverage of the scene on the RRJ website (and a blog) throughout the school year.

I taught most of this year's crop of students in my Magazine Fundamentals course last year, and they were an exceptionally great group. I've read most of the "spring" issue (two issues come out about 10 days apart), and I especially recommend Joe Castaldo's piece on Ken Whyte's takeover of Maclean's. I was also impressed by Barry Hertz's profile of Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson in the "summer" issue, and I look forward to reading the rest.

The summer issue's cover line is "Is Journalism Dead?" Hmmm...a number of the grads told me tonight that they were going into public relations...

You can subscribe to the RRJ online, and it is available on some newsstands (Ryerson's bookstore being one of them).

God bless Graydon Carter and his SUV

Media types are snotty about Vanity Fair's special green issue (May, "A Threat Graver Than Terrorism: Global Warming") -- evidently editor Graydon Carter doesn't drive an environmentally friendly car despite his call to eco-arms, and I must admit that Julia Roberts dressed like a wood nymph on the cover alongside Al Gore, George Clooney and Robert F. Kennedy seems a bit of a stretch. "Making the environment glamorous," sniffed an editor of my acquaintance. But she agreed that the issue is extremely well executed, and after reading it from cover to cover on a long bus trip yesterday, I was ready to run out and join the Sierra Club, or at least buy a solar-powered battery charger for my curling iron.

Yes, perhaps caring about climate change (or climate crisis, says one scientist in an attempt to subvert the customary understatement) is just fashionable at the moment, but it's equally possible that the topic's appearance in the forefront of the mainstream media in recent months means we are starting to take the situation seriously. The first time I saw headlines like "Ozone hole over Antarctica twice as big," or "Polar bears drowning by the dozens," it astounded me that they were buried inside the newspaper instead of being splashed above the fold in huge type. The lassitude of the frog-in-boiling-water analogy seemed trite, but apt.

Now another phrase that's become trite comes to mind: the VF issue feels like a tipping point, because the frogs who buy the magazine have a measure of control over the boiling water. True to its mandate, VF profiles some eco-celebs and, through photo manipulation, shows the wealthy what their homes in the Hamptons will look like under several feet of water. Carter and his team have managed to strike just the right balance of doomsaying and hope to keep readers' attention, particularly in Al Gore's carefully crafted essay (can you imagine George W. Bush writing an essay, carefully crafted or otherwise?). Gore tries not to preach to the converted; he appeals to the bottom-line interests of the non-tree-hugger, invoking Scripture ("Where there is no vision, the people perish") and Abraham Lincoln ("We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country") as well as the new jobs and profits that could result from finding ways to halt the crisis.

Michael Hertsgaard explores how politics and money succeeded in perpetrating the idea in the U.S. that global warming is "a liberal hoax." Of course, Michael Moore-like, he applauds Canada for ratifying the Kyoto Accord -- in contrast to the impression left by Canadian media during the climate change conference in Montreal last year, which was basically that the U.S. has actually been more successful in cutting emissions than Canada despite not getting on board with Kyoto. Hertsgaard pokes holes in that argument. Although he castigates the U.S. media for insisting on presenting "balanced" stories by giving equal credence to the arguments for and against the existence of global warming, he sits on that knife edge himself for parts of the article. Still, his conclusions are arresting. And Michael Shnayerson's piece about the rape of the Appalachian mountains, which he lays in the lap of one coal tycoon, is utterly depressing.

Like many, I'm sure, I've been confounded by the conflicting opinions of scientists, and probably hoodwinked by various media reports. Whom to believe? Steve Maich writing in Maclean's during the Montreal climate change conference insisted that Kyoto is not practicable, ignores toxic pollutants other than carbon dioxide and focuses too much on immediate emission cuts and not enough on long-term alternative-energy plans. But you get the feeling that Maich just really, really wants to find something to write that's contrary to the opinions of David Suzuki and his ilk. If Maich has to admit that global warming is real, he'll be damned if he'll concede anything further. (This is the new Maclean's, after all.)

Somehow Vanity Fair manages to seem well-researched and reasoned without insisting that the jury is still out. As an example of magazine editing, the issue is masterful. They hooked me. Still, most of the frogs-in-boiling-water don't read VF.

Restore Reason Project

A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from an organization called United Families Canada, containing an appeal for the “Restore Marriage Canada Project.” Among its claims: “You are receiving this invitation to join in this effort because you have participated on the marriage issue in one or more of the projects or activities that United Families Canada has sponsored in recent years.” There followed a lot of nonsense about same-sex marriage being a threat to democracy, blah, blah, and the hope that Prime Minister Stephen Harper will, as promised, revisit what should now be a closed issue.

My reply to them (forgive the overuse of exclamation points) attempts to appeal to reason (perhaps a fruitless tack):

First of all, I most certainly have not participated in any of your activities. Yes, I do believe in strong families. But since you are so worried (as I am) about the disintegration of families and communities in today’s world, I can’t for the life of me understand why you would not want to *strengthen* these institutions by encouraging previously marginalized populations to form families and communities! Your goal is simply not logical (apart from the fact that it violates the human rights of your fellow citizens and shows little compassion for adults and children who are not very different from you). Can you explain to me why you want fewer people to form loving, solid, supported and (culturally and legally) acknowledged families? I would think you’d want to see more families, not fewer! When you force homosexuals to live their lives unconnected to family or the larger community — perhaps (though not always) lonely, childless, and unable to benefit from the sense of belonging and support that straight people are granted as a birthright — how can that do anything but harm not only the individuals, but also families and communities?

I am not married, nor do I have children, but I am a daughter, sister, aunt and neighbour, and I take my family and community connections very seriously. I do not believe that single or gay people have nothing to contribute, and I do not believe that their lifestyles necessarily weaken the fabric of society because they are selfish, sexually promiscuous, and drifting around outside of the “normal” world. However, if they were such anti-social beings (and I’m guessing that’s what you believe), wouldn’t you achieve your goal of creating strong families by bringing them inside the tent and encouraging them to be like you?

Puzzled,
--
Cynthia Brouse

So how did I get on their mailing list? As it happens, I have probably replied to e-mails from Egale Canada in support of same-sex marriage (which I am so proud of Canada for permitting). Who’s poaching whose e-mail list?

Clueless

I recently discovered Sudoku puzzles, and they have me stumped. I'm no genius at puzzles, but I was attracted to Sudoku because it seemed orderly and logical, easily (though not necessarily quickly) solved by the process of elimination. But I can't get any further than the obvious eliminations. While doing a puzzle in the newspaper, it seemed sensible to jot down little numbers in pencil to indicate which numbers COULD go in each square, and erase them later, and I was delighted to find that the online Sudoku puzzles actually allow you to do the same thing electronically. Still, once I've settled on a few numbers that display only one possibility, I can't get past the many others that seem to have multiple possibilities. Surely one is not intended to fill out the rest using mainly guesswork? It seems to me that it must be a more orderly puzzle than that, and I'm just not getting it.

Young life

This morning I was standing in my backyard admiring the miniature red tulips that have so far escaped the jaws of the squirrels (I spread blood meal liberally around the plants, making a mental note to buy a bag of cayenne pepper instead -- blood meal gives me the creeps, though it seems to work). Suddenly I realized I could almost see the house in which the child who will always be known as little Jeffrey Baldwin died four years ago. The trial of his grandparents concluded last week with their conviction of second-degree murder, and the case has been much in the news, especially the revelation that the Catholic Children's Aid Society managed to place this child with a convicted child abuser. (Does this feel like dejà vu?)

I was shocked some weeks into the trial news not only to realize that Jeffrey had lived on the street just behind me, but also to learn that he'd been starved and neglected to death four years ago and I'd never heard the story in all that time. Neighbours didn't even know he existed, let alone that he was being abused, locked in a filthy room, sleeping in his own excrement. Staff at the local school didn't know his older siblings had a little brother.

I'm known to crow about the community-mindedness of our working-class neighbourhood, and to denigrate the aloofness of suburban and upper-class districts. But we have nothing to be proud of in this case. A woman who doesn't even live in Toronto and never knew Jeffrey arranged for a memorial to be dedicated to his memory in a nearby playground. I didn't make it to the ceremony.

CBC's The Fifth Estate is broadcasting a program on the case tonight.

Further to the power plant post

I did pick up a flyer at that anti-Portlands power plant rally (it was lying on a table, not widely circulated or announced, that I noticed anyway) about a St. Lawrence Centre forum on the issue, which takes place Wednesday, April 12, 7:30 to 9:30. For more info, go to stoptheplant.ca. Unfortunately, I have choir practice that night and can't attend.

McProfs

Ryerson profs are talking about Marusya Bociurkiw’s article “Toiling at Sweatshop U," which appeared last week in NOW magazine, with the cover line “Your Part-Time Prof Makes Less Than You Do.” (I'd provide a web link, but I can't seem to log onto the NOW site.) As a part-time teacher at Ryerson I, too, was asked by my union to keep a log of my hours, but I regret that I was too busy trying to make a living to fill out the forms. Perhaps I was afraid of finding out what Bociurkiw discovered -- that I make less per hour than my students do in their part-time jobs. Describing the reliance on part-time teachers in the university system (which is remarkably heavy) as a threat to academic freedom, Bociurkiw quoted a Ryerson spokesperson who said that part-timers censoring themselves isn't an issue because they “don’t as a rule do research.” In the next breath she said that the university hires part-timers “to expose students to [teachers with] real-world experience.” In other words, they get our research for nothing. (And without disrespect to my colleagues on the full-time faculty, at a career-oriented university like Ryerson, a teacher's real-world experience is a big draw for students, as it was when I was in the Radio and TV Arts program at Ryerson 30 years ago. When a teacher breezes into class a couple minutes late, muttering about having just had to solve a real-world problem in the field her students aspire to work in, they sit up and take notice).

This Ryerson spokesperson may assume that part-time teachers have full-time salaries somewhere else, but many of us are self-employed and must spend our own money on computers, office supplies, books, periodicals, conference fees. These expenses cannot be written off against our earnings from the university. Some benefits are available to those who surpass a certain threshold of teaching hours. However, I’m not the only instructor who teaches (pretty much the same subjects) in both an undergrad program and a continuing education program; both jobs fall under CUPE, but because they’re completely separate bargaining units, I cannot combine the hours to be eligible for benefits.

I’m grateful that Ryerson provides me with some office space--the folks there are really pretty good to me--and I recently received some much-needed professional development funds from CUPE (20 applicants receive $500 each semester). Ryerson’s part-time teaching rates are higher than those at most other local post-secondary institutions, particularly in Continuing Education. But they still don’t cover the amount of work that goes into delivering a university course, in my opinion.

While writing this -- on a sunny Saturday afternoon, taking a break from grading papers -- I received an e-mail from a student I taught two years ago containing a long list of questions on how to find freelance work in our field. I get about one of these a week, and I’m happy to help out, as people have helped me out when I needed advice. Full-time professors get e-mails like this, too, and they also work on Saturdays. But while their salaries don’t go up if they decide to take a half an hour to help out a former student (or read professional journal articles, or attend a faculty meeting), if I do those things, mine goes down.

Fight the Power?

Today I went with my neighbour Diane and her son, Jupe, to the rally to protest the power plant that the McGuinty government wants to put up in the Portlands, not far from where I live. The ratio of politicians to community members was sadly a bit lopsided at times; though the fire academy hall on Eastern Avenue was fairly full at one point, there should have been a lot more residents there, especially on such a lovely spring day (maybe that’s why they weren’t there). It was a cheery event, with local musicians (Robert Priest and the like) and the CBC’s Jian Gomeshi (a Riverdale homeowner), who introduced federal NDP leader Jack Layton, entertainment for the kids by the firefighters and the Zero Gravity Circus guys, etc. All the pols (Layton, local councillors Sandra Bussin and Paula Fletcher, MPPs Michael Prue and our recently elected NDPer Peter Tabuns) gave rousing speeches about the east end’s successful past efforts to shut down the various noxious stacks that have belched out enough pollutants over the years that we east-enders evidently harbour higher levels of toxic elements in our bodies than people in other parts of the city.

BUT…none of the speeches followed the golden rule of persuasive communication: end with a call to action. There was a lot of talk about banding together and holding hands, and the hard work that will be required to convince energy minister Donna Cansfield to look at conservation and non-renewable energy sources instead of this mega-plant. But nobody told us precisely what we could do to help. Though there were some clipboards with sign-up sheets, it wasn’t clear what they were advocating, and some of them seemed to be at cross-purposes (no plant? a smaller plant?). None of the speakers provided us with the addresses of politicians to write to, websites to go to – the flyer being handed around said nothing more than Stop the Plant. Peter Tabuns did finally say something vague about petitions.

I’m on their side, and I will check out the website that one speaker mentioned, where I hope I can find out more. John Barber in The Globe and Mail suggests that there may still be some life in the proposed alternatives to the plant. The letters that came to my door in the recent byelection from the Liberal hopeful, Ben Chin, were written in that exasperated “the NDP doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about” tone that indicates either Chin is arrogant…or he’s right that a new gas-fired power plant on the waterfront is the only thing that’s going to ensure we can still turn the lights on in a few years.

But that choice seems so short-sighted. Especially, if, as Paula Fletcher mentioned today, Toronto wants to host the World's Fair down at the Portlands in 2015 (a prospect I dread, but that’s another matter).

By the way, Paula sang a mean version of Ride Sally Ride with the band (Mike Tanner and the Circumstantialists). As an exercise in feel-good community organizing, the rally certainly made me feel good. I’d feel even better if I knew how to help.

Virgin post

I'm still trying to figure out how this works, so this is an experimental post. Perhaps I'll begin by explaining the name I chose. Everything else I tried was taken, more or less. Thought I was pretty clever when I came up with Canadian Idle, My Back Pages and Wordier Than Thou. I wasn't. Toyed with Massey Lassie (Massey is my hometown), Shaking Off Futility (I'm a Joni Mitchell fan) and Idiot Wind. In keeping with the Bob Dylan theme, I chose his song title (with The Band) "The Clothesline Saga" because it's the funniest song I've ever heard, and because I love my clothesline.

Why a blog? I read very few of them, and find most of the personal sort to be remarkably boring and self-indulgent; perhaps this one will be no different. But the intention is to record observations I think are interesting, to pose questions about the things that puzzle me and to impose some discipline on my daily writing practice. I don't kid myself that this is real journalism or writing, though I believe it can be the groundwork for it; but neither will it be a catalogue of the boring details of my day or a spew about my personal life (which won't be a hard promise to keep, since I don't have one) or my emotional ups and downs. Mainly this blog will be about my take on the world around me, both the momentous and the minuscule. If you want thorough and well-researched analysis, you should be reading elsewhere, of course, but I hope to include in my blog recommendations for magazine articles, etc., that inform my thinking.

If a blog seems more akin to talking than to writing, I expect mostly to be talking to myself, but the blog may help me keep in touch, in an admittedly impersonal and one-sided way, with the many people I don't see or talk to nearly as often as I'd like.

If nobody reads it, it will still be a useful tool for me in working out ideas. If anybody wants to add to the discussion (or answer some of my questions), I'll be delighted. I hope to explore "Why a blog?" further in the blog.

What am I likely to write about? The environment (why can I put tampons in my green bin but not makeup pads?), health (why do I Run for the Cure, instead of running to prevent the damn disease in the first place?), language (I do correct spelling and punctuation for a living, and my educational background is in linguistics), education (I'm about to start an M.Ed. in workplace and adult education -- completely online), community (I try to live by the Gospel according to Jane Jacobs) and what's so funny about peace, love and understanding.