Every once in a while I have an idea for something that I think would be fun on a t-shirt or on your iPhone wallpaper. This one is not original. It’s something of a running joke in my family.
A few years ago, listening to CBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, my older sister asked, “What’s the luge?”
She had never heard of it before.
Not missing a beat, my mother answered her, “It’s when you don’t winge!”
My sister was not impressed. As far as I know, she still hates that joke. My mother, on the other hand, thinks it’s hysterical, and she will explain in detail why it is such a good joke to you if you don’t laugh the first time you hear it.
Last week I went to Stratford, Ontario to celebrate Canada Day with my family in my hometown. The weather was beautiful and I got to see a bunch of old friends.
Behind City Hall, there were food vendors, booths from various organisations around Stratford, and live music and dancing. Some were done by actors from the Festival, and other acts were done by fiddlers and tap-dancers from around Perth County. I understand that they were recruited from a festival that was going on nearby.
Partway through the event, one of the groups of dancers came on stage, and there were two boys in the dancing troupe. After they finished, the person who was emceeing the dancers made a comment that still bothers me. She said in a very tongue-in-cheek way, “Look at that—those two boys are pretty smart, aren’t they? Learning to dance with all those girls.”
The audience laughed, while I looked around in horror.
What’s offensive about this comment is the suggestion that it’s not okay for boys to learn to dance because they like dancing. That would be beneath a man’s pride. That would be womanly. There are some things that men don’t do, and dancing is one of them, and if a boy enjoys that, he should be ashamed of himself.
But learning to dance in order to pursue sexual congress—that’s another story. You can still be a man if you’re dancing in order to get in a woman’s pants. It just means you’re really shrewd about it, that’s all.
Two things immediately come to mind that are really problematic about this:
This sort of thinking is fantastically demeaning to women. It puts women in the place of being a sexual object to be pursued by men. Not only that, but these girls were about ten years old! Why on earth is this even being hinted at?
Having attitudes like the one I outlined puts boys in a position where they have to rationalise all their actions, preferences and their own identity through the lens of manhood. Not only that, but it emphasises how fragile someone’s manhood actually is: If just the act of dancing publicly is enough to threaten it so much that it needs to be rationalised by appeal to the subjugation of women, then you are sending the message that a person’s manhood is a very fragile thing indeed, and that it’s okay to turn a few ten-year-old girls into sex objects in order to preserve it.
I would actually be interested in knowing if there’s a way to quantify how much violence can be shown to be directly causally related in a non-controversial way to some guy trying to defend his own manhood. These comments are not benign.
While I was in Ontario, I thought I might drop by my parents’ for lunch. I remember saying on the way to Stratford that it was in a part of Ontario known as the “snow belt.” Boy was I right.
It snowed. In April.
Not just a little bit either. There were big fluffy white flakes. I have video evidence.
For months, I have had a television programme called The Big Bang Theory recommended to me a number of times by both family and friends. Earlier this week, I watched the pilot episode, and I was not very impressed. First of all, the whole premiss of the show wasn’t very interesting. How many TV shows do we really need about young adult friends living together in an apartment building?
Worse than that, the acting was bad. Even more damning for a sitcom, the comedic timing was lacking and I didn’t find the actual jokes to be funny.
My question for those of you out there who have watched more than the pilot: Does the show get better after the pilot? I’m thinking I might skip over this programme, like I did with Seinfeld.
My favourite part of the holidays is, and has been for years, our New Year’s Day dinner. We buy the fanciest foods we can think of—ones that we couldn’t afford to eat regularly, eat them and enjoy each other’s company. There’s no presents to worry about, and there’s never anything happening on the evening of the 1st of January (it all happened on the previous evening).
This year, we had steak and crab’s legs. We tried having lobsters one year, but Caitlin empathises too much with any food that has a face.
I used to have the phone number for my little sister’s landlord programmed into my phone. I forget why, exactly, but one day, a couple years ago, I accidentally sent the following text to the landlord’s number rather than my little sister’s:
“I am about to die a bacon-related death.”
My little sister’s landlord replied, “I don’t know who you are, but whoever you are, stop eating bacon!”
I am on my way home for Thanksgiving. I’m testing out an experimental way of getting home: the Kijiji rideshare. Basically, the way it works is that someone who’s making a trip, say from Montréal to Toronto, would post an offer on Kijiji, and people who also need to make the same trip will reply and agree to pay a certain sum of money to come along.
I worked out two rideshares. One from Montréal to Toronto and one from Toronto to London, which is pretty close to Stratford. The major appeal is the price. It’s way cheaper than taking the train. You just have to be a bit flexible with your travel schedule, that’s all.
At the moment, I’m at the place where the two connect, the Scarborough City Centre, where I’ll be for a few hours yet. If anyone is in the area, give me a call! :P
Here is my little sister pointing out a sign at the Mr. Optician in Stratford. Thirty-seven is a prime number. Maybe that’s why they were so excited about it. Anyone else think they have a good explanation for it?
