oh Friday! At long last! Where have you been all my life?

Okay, so It's been a wee bit of a long week, but soon it will all be over. One paper to hand in, one lousy french quiz to write, and then I swear to god, I'm going to sit on my couch and do nothing for like 15 whole minutes. I'm really excited.

Nasty paperses!

I am trying to research nothing, so that I can write about nothing. My brain is running in semantic circles and I refuse to care whether or not some hypothetical situation of fairness that leads to a notion of justice is or is not binding. I am sick to death of justice as a mental excercise. I mean, seriously, I've never liked brain teasers to begin with.

Mountain Equipment Co-Op Get into Bed With Nike

"MEC started carrying four models of Nike's ACG shoes in its Halifax store this fall, and a total of ten Nike modles wil now be carried in MEC stores across Canada... what has tongues wagging ios a perceived clash of corporate cultures. Nike is a $10-billion global company; MEC is a $163-million co-op that claims not to be driven by profit. Nike is tha big bad brand, the villan of Michael Moore's 1998 film The Big One and Naomi Klein's 2000 book No Logo. MEC is the "anti-retailer," the little business started in 1971 by a bunch of hippie... Nike is cool, MEC is sensible. Anyone with the slightest social conscience boycotts Nike and buys MEC. So what do they do now?... If you look at it from Nike's point of view, the match couldn't be better. The company has enormous resources to spend on initiatives that could repair its corporate reputation. But it hasn't got an ounce of what Taschereau (a spokesperson for Nike) calls "trust capital." She admits that MEC could be a powerful legitimizer fopr the big label."

Well folk, nothing is sacred. For more info see Vancouver Magazine January/February 2004.

EARTH TONES: A youthful subgroup interested in vegetarianism, tye-dyed outfits, mild recreational drugs, and good steroe equipment. Earnest, frequently lacking in humor.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The strong tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: "You wouldn't understand it there, mother -- they hug where I live now."

- Douglas Coupland, GenerationX

Well, at least I know where I stand.

things that aren't fun:
- exploding ink cartridges
- mid terms and, in a similar vein,
- in class essays
- learning the subjunctive in french
- insomnia
- poli phi -- in fact, my political philosophy class has been so damned dull lately, that I've decided to start writing my novel, paragraph by paragraph, during lecture. I figure, so what if my paragraph montage lacks some coherency, as many gifted authors such as the great Douggie Copeland and Tom Robins are showing us, plot driven novels are so passe.

qualities of light

I come from the long and proud tradition of the poor in denial. We eat goat cheese on fresh basil leaves, see hairdressers with accents in their names, and go to universities with proper old stone libraries and if not ivy, than at least vine-variety credentials (though infrequently suffer from any actual belief that our degrees in art history or social sciences will actually land us jobs of sufficeint stature to someday repay our vast collections of student debt), despite knowing that we will be far more likely to see six figures of student loan than annual income. Pretty much all of my friends lead vitually indistinguishable lives from mine, but have arrived here via the direct opposite path.

They come from the rich in denial, home-owner, professional class families who drive cars with distinctly non-english vowel arrangements in their names and are actually imapcted by the state of the economy. They call themselves middle class, as if that will mask the fact that the actual middle class couldn't even afford to rent the basement suite they slap together in order to profit off asian exchange students who are too naive to question housing costs, and don't have to care since the amount arrives western-union from tkyo tycoons believing their offspring will have access to a better life.

They live like I do, in nice apartments in bad neighbourhoods where we drink cheap wine in big bottles (because anti-chic IS the new chic) and pretend to understand what the World Bank should be doing to improve the state of the world. We are unafraid and have sympathy for the native drunks in the alley because we understand the long-term affects of cultural genocide, or so we think, despite the fact that few of us are actually concerned enough about our own culture and society to vote or watch movies without subtitles.

That's fiction, don't start thinking I'm going insane. Infact, ignore me, and go play in the sunshine. That's what I'd be doing if I weren't me.

lions and tigers and midterms oh my...

grrr, three midterms next week, as well as three assignments due... grrr. But I'm sure y'all understand EXACTLY what I'm going through, and at least reading break is at last starting to loom large on the horizon, and it IS a beautiful sunny saturday, even if the chance of my getting out to enjoy it is pretty slim.

In world news, the defense case for former Serbian president SLobidan Milosovich begins next week, where he will try to claim that he did not commit war crimes since he was never actually a serbian nationalist, he just used the nationalist agenda to sustain his power. oh, well in that case, Mr. Milosovich...

they say
they built a pawn shop
right on the spot where the devil fell
because even when you're broke
you still got something you can sell
hell
the guy at the podium
says he sells truth
but you can smell the politics on his breath
he's been doing too many shots
of taxes and death...

... I'm looking for answers
stumbling around in the dark
curling up like a question mark
because I don't know what to do
but I know
you have to care abou the world

because it doesn't care about you.

Shane Koyczan, from "People Are Getting Better"