Wow.

I've had so many emails and phone calls and lovely congratulations from friends and family over the past few days that I'm positively aglow with warm-fuzziness. If I really were a rabbit (which I often think I'd quite like to be) my ears would be standing tall and my tail all nice and fluffy.
I sometimes wonder if everybody feels like this or if I am just exceptionally exceptionally lucky in the friends I have made along the way in the past thirty years. I believe (perhaps more than anything else) that life is a journey and the people I have run into and travelled alongside on my own particular journey are really just the bestest. I have incredible friends at home in Ireland and, though we usually see eachother once or twice a year if we're lucky, I always fall right back into step one those infrequent visits. My last trip home was just before we moved from the UK to Canada and happened to fall (not entirely coincidentally) right when one of my oldest friends was getting married to the guy she met when we were out in Australia. Leaving the wedding party I looked at the faces of the friends I was saying goodbye to (again). I cried a bit too (some of which I put down to the booze) but it was really a very nice feeling to know that, wherever I get away to and for however long, these people are doing wonderful things at home and still care about their absent friend. In Taiwan I think I was in a place at a time with people who made the very best of that particular confluence. Since I've left, both in England and now in Canada, I've emailed, talked to, and seen several of the (particularly the women) folks I first met out in the Republic of China. There is a particular connection that we share, and which my friend L-win brought up in a conversation we had last week. She said that seeing me again was important for her, that it meant a lot to hang out again with someone who had shared some of those (cheesy, but really) halcyon days. And the hard times too.
It seems that everywhere I've lived, even if only for a year as I did in York, I've left with friendships that have continued after my physical departure. I'm really happy that we will be staying in Calgary for a while because, to be honest, it does get tiring constantly being the new kid, picking up and moving, starting over, over and over again. But, it is really great to see the threads of an old life weaving themselves back into the new one - and to recognise the beginnings of new friendships and patterns. Ah - I'm such a sap!

And the new season of the Apprentice begins tonight!

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

... is the very high pitched sound I made when I read the following:

The Graduate Admissions Comittee of the Faculty of Communications and Culture met to review your application to the PhD program in Culture and Society.
I am pleased to inform you that the committee has decided to recommend your admission to the program.

I AM SO HAPPY! Really! I had originally applied for the Communications Studies program because the Culture and Society program hadn't been formally set up when I initially met with the dean of graduate admissions. So this is even better than I ever thought it could be!
Anyway, when I was tired of jumping up and down and punching the air and squealing, I went out to the supermarket to get some food for dinner. I really don't like our local supermarket at all and usually I'm in a fouler when I'm there, grumbling at the racks of junk food and the overpriced vegetables. This time I was smiling at everyone, didn't get frustrated by the slow queue, and walked home in the lovely fluffy snow (about a foot today) with a definite spring in my step. I'm just SO excited!

In an ideal world...

...we would be using this on our bathroom window. Isn't it so pretty?!! Via not martha.
Unfortunately funds do not permit such fancies. One day though!

Good Enough

Aspazia at Mad Melancholic Feminista addresses the futility of the battle that I, for one, wage for/against myself far too regularly. Read this!

Vagina Monologues in Taiwan

Just saw this on Feministing - apparantly the Vagina Monologues will be performed in Taipei in both English and Chinese! Friends in Taiwan - go see it!

When I had a look around online to see what more I could find out about it, I found this piece which was published in the Taipei Times (my newspaper of choice when I lived in Taiwan) following the first performance of the VMs in Taiwan last year:

Lee Kuang-hui (李光輝), director of the psychiatry department at Peitou Armed Forces Hospital, lauded the play for examining issues of sexuality from the female perspective and called on all men to respect women's bodies.

"The most important work that can be done to prevent violence and sexual abuse is to educate women what to do in order to prevent rape or harassment," Lee said.

"We also need to raise men's awareness and break some deep-seated myths about rape. When women say no to sex, it means no, and men need to learn to control their sexual impulses and instead choose to respect women and their bodies," he said.

While I applaud Mr Kuang-hui's support of the play, and having seen the play myself, I'm not sure how it really educates women on what to do to prevent rape and harassment or how preventing rape and harassment is at all in the hands of the women who experience it. I know that encouraging women to speak up about what we do and don't want, and about our sexual experiences (negative as well as positive) is both valid and valuable, but I get frustrated with assumptions that preventing rape and harassment is our responsibility rather than that of its perpetrators. That Kuang-hui focuses on this first, and tags on the responsibility of men as an "also", is a good example of this. I think his message to men is pretty interesting too - because we all know that it is men and not women who have "sexual impulses" and that it's these pesky impulses getting all out of control that results in rape and harassment. Nothing at all to do with power and control and violence. Nope.

But...I digress. Go see the Vagina Monologues!

This is just...

...wrong on so many levels. Check the comments for further details of the 'game'.

Betty Friedan

Betty Friedan died at the weekend, on her 85th birthday. I've been meaning to read the Feminine Mystique for some time now - especially given my recently taken on stay-at-home role. This poem, posted in tribute to Friedan, is a must-read, especially for anyone who's afraid to call themselves a feminist.

Semi Gloss with Acidophilus

My life at the moment...yogurt pots full of paint and cling-wrapped brushes.
I submitted my PhD application yesterday. I should know at the end of the month. Until then - no wall, door, or item of furniture is safe.

Pants on Fire

I should say upfront that I haven't read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces but this won't be the first time I've had an opinion about something I haven't read/seen/done so I'm not going to let it stop me. I've been ruminating on this one for a while, since the 'scandal' broke and especially since the Oprah show where Frey received a pretty thorough dressing down at the hands of our favourite day-time TV host (actually Ellen is my fave but Oprah is undoubtedly the 'queen') as well as a number of other folk keen to join in the verbal flogging.
I think that it's an interesting case and I'm very much not on the bandwagon of disapproval.
Although the big deal that is being made of Frey's book and its 'lies' would suggest otherwise, this is not the first time an autobiographical text has been found to contain elements of fiction or exaggeration. One of the texts I read last year at Uni was Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks on a Road - a wonderful book, and one where the writer meddles with what might be described as the 'truths' of her life. She lies about her age, shuffles around the chronology of particular events and generally stretches the boundaries of what is expected (desired?) from the audience that would seek to know her. I'm not necessarily comparing the two texts, but certainly my experience with Hurston's influences the way I see what has been happening with James Frey.
I think what really frustrates me is this obsession with 'the truth' and how the audience, the readers, Oprah, are so vehement that this book was such a huge betrayal, a crime, because it strayed from this 'truth' that the categorisation of memoir or non-fiction apparantly demands. For a start, a memoir, is always going to rely a lot on memory which is subject to not only the perspective of the time of the event(s) recalled, but also the perspective of the time of the recalling of those events. A particular description of events that might best describe the essence of the situation/emotion at that particular time, might not actually correspond with how those events actually unfolded from a third-party point of view. If a writer feels that describing things a particular way to convey something more than just a series of events, actually translates that moment/time better, isn't that a kind of 'truth' also? Is it less valid?
Then there's the label/category that the book was published under: Non-fiction, and the hoo-ha surrounding Frey's breaking of its rules. I really really don't like these kinds of rules - you know, the ones that say a text is or isn't some particular category because of something it does or doesn't do. I'm not (yet) convinced that a complete dissolution of these categories is the answer, but I certainly find them problematic and that their conventions lead to hierarchies that privilege particular kinds of writing/writers and discriminate against 'others'. I'm really glad Frey did what he did because it highlights our obsession and need to categorise things and our shock and betrayal when these boundaries are challenged.
It annoyed me, as I watched Oprah, that James Frey sat and took their tongue lashing so quietly. I really wanted him to sit up and say 'Look, I'm a writer, an artist, and if I want to fabricate elements of my life then I will. I wasn't fabricating anyone elses' life, I wasn't lying to my country about economic factors that affect them or about the justification for a war that should not be happening, I embellished elements of my life-story. Get over it.' Instead of being so bloody pompous (you lied to me, ME, how could you...you embarassed me!) Oprah should understand the value of this event, what it might mean for the development (and yes, that does include change) of how we perceive and define life-writing.
Any thoughts?