ottawa epitome of incomprehensibility Ottawa is not Montreal. I forget things like that when I'm in a vehicle that other people are driving. Passing Pierrefonds on Sunday, I misread a street name sign and thought, dreamily, "So this must be Agincourt. Silly people calling it Asiancourt. Asian is a big category. You do have some Indian businesses and restaurants in the northwest part of the island as well as in the northeast... WAIT A SECOND. THIS ISLAND IS MONTREAL. AGINCOURT IS IN OTTAWA AND OTTAWA IS A DIFFERENT PLACE." People at my last summer job (hardly my last job, but my last job that was specifically for a summer) were mostly from Ottawa, the camp being near there. I've heard about it secondhand more than I've actually been there. One memory stands out, though. I was searching downtown for a bathroom at about ten at night. Not much was open, and I didn't want to sneak in a bar without paying for something. Walking past a block of store-type things, I noticed a corridor right into the building leading to the inside of a MacDonald's, or maybe a Tim's... and I went inside, hoping there was a public bathroom there. Sure enough, there it was, and apart from the food places too, so I wasn't required or pressured to buy anything. What was surreal, apart from the bright lights in the hall, was the classical music surrounding me. I couldn't identify it, but it sounded like well-played Mozart, piped through on a good sound system. I'd read about stores wanting to deter delinquent teenagers by playing classical music (teenagers are delinquent, it seems, when they do horrible things like wearing unconventional clothes and, gasp, hanging around in groups without buying stuff) but I'd never heard it in action. It was incongruously pretty, actually. (Of course, I was one of those evil teens who LIKED classical music. What do you do with them?) 140929 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Oh oh oh! An opportunity for a literary allusion and I didn't make it! A_Clockwork_Orange, then. I don't know who's my favourite evil narrator, Alex or Rosa Achmetowna. Both make me look good in comparison. When I was fifteen, for example, I never defaced library books. Wrote graffiti, typically, but was usually a "good girl" and hardly even swore. Just hit my brother and parents when I got mad at them. One example does little to destabilize the classic evilness gender divide: man violent, woman manipulative... if you're both, are you a robot? That's it. At fifteen I was a robot. Now I'm a cyborg bicycle. (I just need a chance to allude to Ulysses and I'll be textbook old-e_o_i.) I'm still paying for my mistakes, but currently my main regret is that my parents never bought a dishwasher. I wasted a lot of time washing dishes and I doubt it significantly improved my character. Oh Ottawa, how could we go off topic without you? You are the Canadian capital O, not for surprise or orgasm, but just for Oh, that's okay. O Canada. O Ghana. Everywhere is partly everywhere else? 140929 ... past the city's colours are changing. crisp leaves litter the streets, not all emptied by the day's terrible events. we can't let this change us. 141022 ... nr i was going to post something about this but i didn't know what to say. i'm glad the leaves are still changing. and i'm proud of cbc's coverage. 141022 ... nr i'm glad i know the name of the soldier. 141022 ... nr i mean, the colours are still changing. (which i assume is at least in part because of the leaves.) 141022 ... past no two trees are the same colour on my street. 141022 ... past this evening i went out to get some things for dinner, colour was everywhere. i had been inside most of the day. first working, then not, then helping a family member who was almost caught up in the still-on-going lock down who needed somewhere to go (and to be distracted). the streets in my neighbourhood shone in reds, yellows, golds, greens, purples. all of them. and were full of people of all ages doing their thing. that's the victory, the one mulclair just spoke of. and it's a victory despite the pm's battle cry, which is very much a statement of defeat. the colours and the ever-more-naked trees, those are changes that always happens and that renews us. the other, that's the one we have to fight. 141022 ... e_o_i I see in the ramble above I mixed up Toronto and Ottawa, since I'd mixed up which people in summer camp came from where. But never mind. The radio was left on when I came downstairs at ten to one, head aching, and the news about the shooting didn't make me feel better. One of the reasons for all the security red flags (besides the uncertainty about other aggressors) was that another soldier was targeted in Quebec. To be honest, the military people I've met personally I haven't liked and I'm a bit prejudiced against the profession, but soldiers deserve to guard boring old monuments without getting gunned down. It's not a war here. It shouldn't be a war. 141022 ... e_o_i "Another soldier targeted in Quebec" - hit deliberately by a car a couple of days ago, and also killed. But guns are more of a panic button. Noisier. 141022 ... past the language of terrorism is a blunt, lazy tool that destroys thought. i'm disappointed. 141023 ... e_o_i I agree. It's not just destructive but childish, trying to get people to panic. In that analogy the state apparatus would be like a parent, who can dish out punishments that hurt the "good" kids as well as the "bad" ones... and soon no one's playing fair. (As if they were in the first place? Well, sometimes.) But this case is complicated by the war with I.S. - these so-called homegrown terrorists, unorganized as they are, probably feel justified thinking they're carrying out acts of war. Thankfully they're a small minority out of any group. I'm relieved that the attack wasn't more widespread, but at the same time it's a shock having something like that happen in the centre of government, a place where the worst violence is usually people yelling at each other. And a shock having so many things shut down and on alert. And of course to the murdered guard's friends and family. So I'm glad you're all right and I'm sorry for how self-centred and childish my own post sounded yesterday - "boring old" indeed. 141023 ... past this morning, the politicians hugged. 141023 ... past (I didn't read it that way, so I'm sure the city's not offended--despite my thing about speaking for cities in blue) 141023 ... past I didn't understand the praise CBC received in the immediate aftermath. Their contextless talking heads were not helping. No notes that the videos being shown were hours-old recordings added to the ongoing hysteria (and I hope I'm using the word correctly and not in the 'shutting down conversation way,' though I'm trying to do that a bit, just not in a gendered way. I wish a better word was coming to mind). I don't watch much US news, but what I've seen out of places like CNN makes the praise make some sense. But CBC has sunk into the cesspool in the last few days. Enough talking heads. Enough giving a former minister air time to spew his idle speculations which feed the fear that the government, in a moment of pure partisan crass, is using to take a tragedy and turn it into a rah-rah-rah chant for war and an attack on civil liberties, as understated as those moves are they are happening. what is known about the shooter: a homeless, addicted (possibly mentally ill) devotedly muslim man with a history of petty crime (note: he wasn't denied a passport, he applied for one but homeless addicted petty criminal are a string of red flags which make getting one more difficult) shot a soldier with a hunting rifle (dear authorities: where did he get the gun and how? wouldn't that gun registry be useful about now?) and ran into parliament where he himself was shot dead (which is unfortunate: any story can be placed on a dead body. in Canada a distraught immigrant can be tased to death in an airport, I'm troubled by the praise the sergeant-at-arms is getting. we should be concerned about deadly force whenever and wherever it's used by authorities). media and the government focusing on the "muslim" to the exclusion of the other adjectives racializes the religion in many ways--it's serving as a container for the fears that many feel towards it. it is not helpful. it is not helpful. it is not helpful. stephen harper's delayed speech made me more sad and angry than hopeful. cbc's decent into fear mongering is not helpful. people from outside my city raging about how we are too lax is not helpful. closing parliament to the public yesterday was not helpful. any law regarding the curtailment of civil rights, increase of police powers, are immediately suspect right now. they should be held that way in the media. don't give me a special in every news program about the terror in the city. fuck that. you're being lazy and condoning the ongoing assualt on the institutions and principles of democracy in this country that recent governments (and, from my view, especially the current one) have been making. our democracy is under threat by political opportune prorogations, omnibus bills, deep cuts to all knowledge producing sectors, abandonment of veterans by claiming there's no social contract between the state and it's (especially wounded) soldiers, and vile attack ads than anything else. and guess who's attacking those institutions? not an addicted homeless man. I guess my point is this: we need less security theatre. We need to commit more sociology, more psychology, more historiography. we need more mental health services, more addiction services, more social support and services and less tax cuts. I'm angry and afraid. It's true. But I'm angry at and afraid of those who are being praised right now and that doesn't help me much. 141024 ... past and so begins the reign of the thought police. we're losing. 141025 ... n o m harper is the terrorist 141026 ... n o m it's sickening that people seem almost excited by this whole thing and 'let's show them how canada can do it', always looking to define ourselves as nobler or different than the states, 'look what a good job we did canada, patpat'. i'm not proud of anything, not the coverage, not the neglect of mental health care or support for the homeless in vancouver and elsewhere. not proud that people died because of this. or that the majority focuses on a dead soldier's dogs instead of talking more about the actual issue here which is mental health and social/healthcare issues. and fuck the immediate racialization. fuck playing on fears to pass bill while people are all scared. fuck more laws, more spying, more of the same harper bullshit. fuck the labelling of everyone as terrorists, including environmentalists in canada or supporters of indigenous rights. fuck the war on drugs and the devastation it has caused. 141026 ... past the parodies that have come out are particularly devastating. 'stephen harper tells islamic community they won't be treated like aboriginals.' the rcmp looks as incompetent as ever. and of course the prime minister's narrative is being slowly found to be complete and utter bullshit. he lies and gets away with it. 141026 ... e_o_i I was slated to go there today with my parents - they've got the borrowed Buick again and are picking up my brother from his job at summer camp. But I had to go to the library here to get access to the McGill databases to check sources for a grant proposal I'm editing. I should have done that earlier this week but I was sidetracked, and now they've gone without me and I'm left here and I'm avoiding work. I'm realizing I won't have much more time to see my brother before he leaves. He'll be here for a week and a half and then he's going off to Nova Scotia for university. I wanted to go and have dinner with them at the Swiss Chalet. Why am I even complaining, though? Why am I not working? I'm such a baby. 150821 what's it to you? who go blather from