Where I'd Rather Be

Paper writing day!!!!! You're surprised, right? Because I never have to spend time writing papers, so this must be a rare treat. Eugh.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

phucking with photos 

Time to finish my paper. As the long weekend draws to a close, after Cam's birthday and Easter with his family and mine, the last day of the long weekend finds me in front of the computer urgently trying to finish a paper that has to be e-mailed to my prof this afternoon. Well, maybe not quite that urgently, as you can tell. I'm really ready to quit writing essays.

But Easter with my family was lovely as always, and I found out Kat got accepted to creative writing at UVic, which was her first choice, so soon she'll be over there terrorizing the island too. I always get a kick out of comparing mine and Cam's family holiday traditions. This year, his birthday coincided with Easter, and we went out to his mom's and sat around eating Easter eggs and sipping drinks until ham dinner time. mmmHamDinner. With my family, we still do the whole Easter egg hunt thing, complete with clues full of puns and allusions, and we always have crepes for dinner. mmmCrepeDinner. I guess I'm just lucky that I get to do both, only we did forget to dye Easter eggs this year.

What Kind of Desia and Said Anti-Global Capitalism Radical are You?
(or, Sasha finds a cheesy way to make her research seem like fun)

a) isolationist - you oppose all globalization in favour of retreating into a cave and fending for ourselves. People who look different probably scare you; otherwise you think we should isolate ourselves for the good of the world so we can't do any more harm.

b) supporter - not really any kind of radical at all, you think embracing free market capitalism for all its worth is a brilliant idea. In fact, the only reason we don't yet live in Utopia is because we keep insisting on regulating the market, yo.

c) reformist - you believe having a United Nations and World Bank may well be a good idea, the problem is just when you rig the system in favour of lazy-ass first-worlders like us at the expense of, oh say Africa. You probably started swearing you'd always loved Coldplay when front man Chris Martin started writing "MAKE TRADE FAIR .COM" on his hand before every photo shoot, and terms like Grameen banking roll off your tongue like pepper spray off a protester.

d) alternative - pro-people power, you fight for the retention of public and de-marketized space since you think escape from the market is necessary for coming up with alternatives. You already know that Beetle Nebuchadnezzar aka Don Durito, Errant Knight, is the true author of Subcommandante Marcos' Zapatista communiqués and probably have a shattered Starbucks window sign in your bedroom, a trophy from all that smashing you did in Seattle.

Martha Piper, President of UBC, is fianlly stepping down. She made public today her intended resignation, effective June 2006. Waitwait, 2006? Well, at least I'll get a month or two at UBC without her evil presence. This is the woman who we pay almost half a million dollars a year, who talks about her new car and how much she loves it at congregation speeches, has more than doubled my tuition, and who submited in factum during a recent court case that the Musqueam shouldn't get to claim the land that makes up the UBC golf course since they weren't civilized enough to leave their imprint on it. So take note, any of your enviro-friendly camping types, leaving a light footprint of your passage=uncivilized. If you were any sort of civilized camper, you'd chop down trees to build a wall around your site and probably alter the direction of any near by bodies of water with your beer bottle collection. sigh.

And as glad as I am that she's leaving, I'll be even happier when it's finally my turn. Must go write a paper now, on the anti-global capitalism (some call it anti-globalization, but that's a misnomer) movement in global civil society.

I'd like to get off the rollercoaster that has been my life for the past while and spend a few days sleeping. Instead, I'm writing a paper for my Irish lit class on Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey and it's boring me stupid. Too bad that's not sufficient justification for not writing the damned thing... I'm completely sick of writing papers. I can't even count how many I've done in the past four years, let alone how many pages, of which I've got about 50 more to go. Want graduate NOW. Bad school, no doughnut.

My paper writing process today has looked something like this:

1. Shower, grocery shop, do whatever possible to procrastinate.
2. Lunch! Lunch is an excellent way to procrastinate.
3. Check e-mail.
4. Re-read first two pages of paper. Make insignificant revisions.
5. Write another, slightly clearer version of the outline. Realize it's version 5 and I'm probably overdoing to whole outline clarity thing.
6. Put on water for tea.
7. Flip through relevant text to find examples and passages to illustrate first point.
8. Instead of finishing 7, make more unnecessary revisions. Re-word things that don't need it, then change them back to the way they were.
9. Write tedious blog post destined only to be read by those who are also procrastinating on something.
10. Theoretical step: finish post and get serious work done on paper. More likely step: have cigarette and pour tea.
11. Try step 10, the serious work part, all over again.

Repeat until crazy or paper is finished. Complain intermittently to invisible internet audience.

my computer died last night and I've been told it's probably worse than I'd thought. Someone is looking at it today, but it may be awhile before she rises again so I'm running around trying to beg for mercy extensions for papers that are now lost and gone probably forever. Otherwise, my life is pretty much in shambles and I'm trying to figure out how to survive the next little while, so I'll be out of touch (not posting) for awhile.

Wanted: miracle worker
Must be willing to work without pay or thanks. Ability to counteract acts of god, bureaucracy and economics an asset. Apply within.

why I want to graduate: because I'm getting really worn out studying how f**ked up the world is.
why I never have free time: because I'm always doing school work
why haven't I called: I only have depressing things to say anyways
why do I put everything off till the last minute: because I still try and pretend I have a life
why do I bitch about it all online: invisible audience makes me feel self-righteous
why aren't I getting ready to go to class: any minute now...

I actually don't have class until 2pm today, but I'm going up to campus early to drop off my application to the faculty of education, and then I'm being taken for lunch at the faculty club by one of my favorite profs. I sure have it good for someone who winges so much.

but not quite. Four more week until my classes are over (five papers), then two little exams (okay, big snarly ones, whatever, only two of them) then I get to graduate. Finally. The only thing is I still have to take one course this summer as an education prerequisite, and I'll start that about two weeks before my actual grad ceremony.

That summer school is rapidly approaching does mean one good thing: summer is rapidly approaching. Days of reading in the park, picnics at Trout lake, beach trips, camping trips, and watermelon, here I come.

For now, my weekend will consist of housework and paperwriting, with the latter of course being my priority, and the former, my tool of procrastination.

It's getting to the point where, because of the actions of our government, I'm embarrassed to be Canadian. Here's an example of why. Several DECADES ago, Canada and all the other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, aka the Rich Countries' Club) signed an agreement to commit to spending at least 0.7% of their GNPon foreign aid. This, is was estimated, was what would be necessary to even begin to make an effort to eliminate the very worst kinds of suffering in the world. Despite our reputation and the way we conceive of ourselves -- generally as the great do-gooders -- there are only five countries in the world who meet or exceed this 0.7% threshold: Denmark (the only country to actually exceed 1%!!), the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and Luxembourg. In terms of percentage of GNP spent on foreign aid, we rank #17 at 0.27% GNP. We've never even broken 0.5%.

And I haven't even mentioned the problems with our aid policy being basically trade policy, which is what allows China to be among the top five recipients of Canadian aid despite not even being in the bottom HALF of countries in the world in terms of wealth. Their HDI (Human Development Index) rating is only about 0.23 below ours, yet we send tem in excess of $43 million annually to ensure they can afford to buy Canadian products. Oh Canada.

2,460 words, 13,476 characters,8.5 pages, 56 endnotes, only one section to go, but I'm losingmy will to type. Here's a sample, learn to love the UN.

"Fundamentally, the UN carries with it a legitimacy that no other organization can match and for this reason it is within the auspices of the United Nations that Canada should make its contributions to peacekeeping. As has been stated by our government, “there is no better or more appropriate body than the United Nations… to authorize military intervention for humanitarian purposes”.

The Canadian Government identifies peacekeeping as “an important aspect of Canada’s national heritage and a reflection of our fundamental beliefs” as well as “a significant component of Canada’s foreign policy and our contribution to the multilateral security system”.
your government loves helping, just not you.

mrph. Ten page paper to write today. All the research is done, I know exactly what I'm going to say, now I just have to actually do it. I'm writing on improving UN peacekeeping capabilities, which doesn't make for a very intersting policy paper (I recommend that Canada should continue to do the following, except more so...) but it does mean I got to learn about stuff that I know I should know more about while doing paper research.

In other news, I've been sick for the past two days, which is probably why this paper hasn't been progressing as fast as I'd like. When sitting on the couch for too long makes you feel sick, your prospects of getting a ton done aren't great. Thankfully, I seem to be feeling a bunch better today, which is good because my butt is about to spend something like 12 hours in my computer chair.

Onward.

For our past two anniversaries Cam has given me rose bushes I can grow on my windowsill. I like them so much better than already-dead GMO long stem ones, and today the pink one has a bunch of new blooms. The other one has spent the past few months dying, but has now made a rapid recovery and is threatening to bloom any minute. Mmmrosesinmylivingroom. See, I can talk about things that don't make me angry or stressed out, but the result is things like talking about my plants.

The King of Self-Importance (aka my foreign policy prof) gave us all a five day extension on our papers, so guess what I did? Put off starting my paper for another five days. Clever, no?

It's not that I necessarily dislike foreign policy, it's just that Canada only has foreign policy on boring stuff, and if I have to write another paper on Canada-US trade relations, I'm going to do it by chewing off my arm and spelling out the words with splinters of my arm bone. Flesh blobs for punctuation.