It stopped being cute, Canada. Get your metric act together.

During my childhood, Canada decided to go metric.  It seemed like a good idea.  After all, just about every country on the planet had embraced a system that actually made sense.  Metric, being a system that was actually designed rather than being based, for example, on the distance between some lucky guy's thumb and pinky or the length of some other guy's foot, had a simple logic to it.  As long as you could multiply or divide by ten, you could understand the underlying principle of the whole thing.  If you couldn't multiply or divide by ten, well you could just remember to move that decimal point.

1 metre = 100 centimetres
1.78 metres = 178 centimetres
1 kilometre = 1000 metres
400 metres = .4 kilometres

Canada adopted the metric system in 1970.  To be more accurate, Canada started to adopt the metric system in 1970.  The problem is that we haven't really finished.  Look at this absurd photo from Grouse Mountain in Vancouver.  It's comical in a lot of ways, but the most comical thing about it is that most Canadians don't notice anything odd about it.

After living overseas for a long time (where everything is metric, because, well...duh!), I often ended up explaining our odd relationship to metric by describing a typical Canadian giving directions: "The hockey rink, eh?  No problem.  Drive north 3 kilometres and make a right.  Then the rink will about about 400 feet down on the right side."

Sure, it's cute, but forty five years after we allegedly went metric, it's also kind of annoying.  And to be honest, I have no idea anymore how far 400 feet is anymore.  400 metres, sure, but 400 feet, what the hell is that?

Now that I am living in Canada again, I am happy to see that we have made some more progress to metric.  When I went to get my new driver's licence, I gave my height in centimetres, and the woman at ICBC didn't bat an eye.  My licence includes both my height and weight in metric units.  Still, though, tons of Canadians cling to the habit of describing their body size in units that 6.95 billion people wouldn't understand.  Fruit and vegetables are sold in 100 gram increments.  Even building codes seem to have changed to metric.  [I say 'seem to have changed' because, for some bizarre reason, all the jurisdictions I looked up won't actually let you look at their building codes online. Instead, you have to pay a lot of money to buy them.]

For temperature, I think Canadians only use Fahrenheit when they want to make it seem really hot. Being a nation of people obsessed with making weather sound extreme, I guess it's more impressive to say, "It was 90 degrees!" (instead of 32).  If you're from Europe or Asia and you come looking for an apartment or house, don't expect square metres.  For some reason, real estate persists in using square feet.  Similar to talking about how hot it is, maybe it's because things sound so much bigger.

But, as the Grouse Mountain ad shows, we still have a way to go.  Or  maybe it's just a cultural trait to be confused.

Canadians talk about the bible

Lawyer from office upstairs: Hi. You don’t happen to have a bible in the office do you?

Me: Laughing.  No…I don’t think we would.

Lawyer from office upstairs:  Yeah, that’s pretty much how everyone reacts around here.  We have a client who wants to swear an oath on a bible.  

Me:  Sorry.  No bibles.

Lawyer from upstairs:  I thought maybe when the past tenants did a smudge ceremony, maybe someone left one lying around (laughing).

Jessica Jones (the show) - A giant leap forward

I just finished binge-watching Jessica Jones, the latest Marvel show from Netflix.  As soon as they announced the show, I was excited to see it.  This was due in large part to the character's relatively minor role in the Marvel universe.  For the last while, she has been pretty resolutely retired and focusing on being a mother (and is also married to Luke Cage).  The beauty of a more minor character as the protagonist for a series like this is that you can do more with her (or him).  There isn't so much lore weighing the character down that the creators would feel compelled to repeat history.

And Jessica Jones is one of the most refreshing female characters on television.  She is almost resolutely crabby, smiling perhaps twice in the whole series.  She is almost drab in her attire throughout the show - jeans, t-shirt, boots, and a jacket.  No spandex hugging her hips, cropped shirt showing off her abdomen, or thigh high boots for this Jessica Jones.  There is a funny reference to the possibility of wearing a costume (a nod to when she did wear (a bad) one in the comic books), but she deflected the idea with a terrific reference to giant camel toes.  Well done, JJ.  To be honest, Daredevil was more of a physical object that Jessica Jones through most of the show.

But most important is that this show has offered us one of the best women on tv.  If the Bechdel Test were graded, Jessica Jones would have aced it.  She has a love interest (Luke Cage) and a nemesis (Kilgrave the Purple Man), but she has friends and relatively real relationships.  Those friends are themselves powerful, independent women.  Trish (who might become Hellcat?) is haunted by her own demons, but she fights through them and refuses to be a victim again.  They talk about their relationship, their lives, and their problems.

A little side note about the show's most interesting (and weird) female character - Robin, the neighbour with a twin.  Whoever created her character and wrote her lines, good for you.  She is a nut who stole every scene she was in.  I kept wondering what future plans there are for her character because her set-up was just too funny.

Anyway, back to Jessica Jones.  I did, of course, hate the Kilgrave conflict.  If it didn't have roots in the comic books themselves, I would have said they should have made Kilgrave an archenemy for a male lead instead.  The whole mind control thing in a sexual relationship essentially creates the dynamic of a perpetual state of sex slavery, but it was symbolically of great value that Jessica triumphs over that power.

It was also a pretty courageous choice on the part of the show's creators to have another of his victims choose to have an abortion (and go through with it) rather than have the child conceived while she was forced to be with him.  When was the last time a character on television actually went through with an abortion, anyway.  The only one I remember is Maude, and that was in 1972.

1972!!!!!

Jessica Jones isn't brilliant television, but it was not a binge that I feel guilty about.  To the creators, congratulations on doing some great things.  You did way more as artists and explored way more of the social issues of our times than any of those stupid Marvel movies did. They had all the money in the world and they had absolutely nothing to say.  You said a lot, and my viewing partner and I really appreciated it.

The East Side Culture Crawl - An arts weekend

I have talked before about things I love in my new city, but today brought an unprecedented level of admiration.  The East Side Culture Crawl is an incredible opportunity to see over 400 artists and designers in person with their work.  They have thrown open their studios (which is fantastic in and of itself), but in this city that I now call home, the neighbourhood was full of people walking around and visiting all the incredibly creative spaces.

Thanks, Vancouver, for being a city of people who care about such things..  Thanks, East Side Culture Crawl, for organising the event.  Thank you, artists, for making our city a better place to be.

Button Pushers - A rant

You know those big round buttons near doors?  They usually have a wheelchair on them and 'push' written on them.  They seem to have proliferated in my years outside of Canada so that now they are on doors of all types.  They are, I'm sure, a huge boon to people with any kind of physical impediment to entering and exiting through heavy doors.  These impediments might range from a disability to carrying heavy bags of groceries.  Parents with strollers, I am sure, love them.

Okay, benefits of the buttons is now established.

So why is everyone else using them?  Seriously.  Why does the guy exiting the building in front of me push the button and wait for the door to open for him?  He's probably 30 (at most), fit and heading off to work.  But he still pushes that button.  Why does the young woman use her fob to unlock the door and then push the button and stand there waiting for it to open?

The other day I finished working out and was in a bit of a rush, and the guy ahead of me (who had also just finished working out) pushed the button and we both had to stand there waiting for the door to open.  I almost ran into him because I was walking fast behind him.  I almost wish I had run into him so that I could have said, "Ooops, sorry, I thought you were going THROUGH the door."

The only reason I can think of (and I could be completely wrong) for so many people to be pushing the buttons is the generalized germophobia we all seem to be feeling.  When I asked a friend recently why she chose to push the button, that was her answer - "Germs!"  But that doesn't make any sense when you think about it.  Door or button, they have both been pawed by countless numbers of hands.  I usually open doors either with the back of my hand or my sleeve, but the big round buttons seem like they would be harder to do that with because of their placement height.  That is, they would be harder to avoid 'germy' contact with.

So what gives?  What's driving people unencumbered by injury, disability, children, or packages to stop opening doors under their own power?  Is it the feeling of control (though we are far more in control if we are actually opening the doors themselves)?  Is it laziness?  What gives???

Jess Row's Your Face in Mine - Remarkable in several ways

Your Face in Mine is a good novel.  It's the first novel I have read since starting life on #theBside here in Vancouver - which is an unusually long interval for me to go without reading a novel.  It was good to resume my reading life with a book that gives so much to think about.

Perhaps what strikes me the most about the book is that a quick scan of my search results for the title only gives the usual - a New York Times review (linked above), goodreads, amazon, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, etc.  Given the the theme and content of Jess Row's book, it seems amazing that the book didn't make the news.  Not just the news of book reviews and book clubs, but the news-news, the talking head and panel shows.

The book was published in 2014, and the Rachel Dolezal story broke in June 2015.  Remember her?  She was the white woman who 'became' an African American woman, even going so far as to be a leader for the NAACP.  Her professional life fell apart when her parents spoke out to say that, yes, their daughter was white.  As details emerged, it became clear that Dolezal had 'revised and edited' just about every aspect of her personal story.  Some elements were deleted, others added, and a host of others were like Jack's magic beans.  They became seeds for something much larger than life.

When the story broke, it consumed the mainstream media for a brief period.  There were those who were simply fascinated, and then there were those who truly found the issues raised to be both intellectually and emotionally important.  What is identity?  If race is basically a social construct, are genetics really that important?  Is it racist to appropriate someone's culture?

With all the attention her story garnered, I still can't believe that Jess Row and his novel Your Face in Mine didn't somehow leap to the fore of the media storm.  Why?  Okay, I deliberately postponed making the connection.  Row wrote a novel that one would think would have been written immediately after the Dolezal 'scandal'.  Instead, he wrote a novel about a white, Jewish man who, after a childhood and adolescence of 'racial dysphoria' seeks out the medical treatments necessary to become an African American man.

Now this book could have been nothing but a story revolving around the gimmick of adopting another racial identity.  But there really isn't anything gimmicky about the book.  Row's novel is serious, just as his character, Martin, is serious about the idea that he was basically born in the wrong body.  It's a serious literary look at identity, at who we are and what we choose to be.

Martin, a stalwart capitalist, sees choice as the new frontier of identity.  Now that medicine (in the novel) has unlocked the process by which we can become what we believe we are, a huge new market awaits.  As part of his marketing strategy, Martin hires Kelly, the one connection to his past identity, to be his putative biographer and tell his story of disconnection, discovery, and transformation.

Kelly, weighed down by his own personal story of loss, is himself a man of complicated identity.  A fluent Mandarin speaker with a now dead Chinese wife and child, he is adrift and alone.  It's partly testament to Row's writing, that I didn't connect Kelly's experience to the idea of identity at all for at least half the novel.  He is, at first, just a very sad man trying to create some kind of forward momentum for his life.  As things unfold, however, Row begins to show how a sense of belonging is as much a part of identity (racial or otherwise) as anything else.

Like I said, it's a good book.  I'm glad it didn't become popular because of Rachel Dolezal, but I am surprised that it didn't get more attention.  After all, Row actually took the time to write a thoughtful novel that examines not only the concept of racial identity but what it means to all of us to be part of something larger than us.  And he did it all before Rachel Dolezal's story broke.

I can't help but wonder if she has read it.

Do not let adults steal this generation from you: Seeing both sides

On tumblr, I follow a bunch of different blogs.  I try to primarily follow people who are posting their own original content, but I also follow some people (primarily young people, or at least people younger than me) who reblog tons of things relating to life as a teen or young adult. Working with people that age every day makes me particularly interested in and appreciative of their world view.  I won't pretend that I always share it, but I do often enough that I reblog or favourite their posts fairly regularly.

Recently, the post below captured my attention; for some reason I couldn't stop thinking about it.

xcxcxbx:

fleurbot:

Do not let adults steal this generation from you. Relish in selfies. Snapchat pictures of coffee to your friends, huddle around an iphone to watch Vines. Shamelessly love this generations commodities, like how your parents loved THEIR commodities, like disco or Hammer Pants or whatever else. Do not let angry adults take away your chance to experience the uniqueness of right now.

Just ignore any typos and the misuse of 'relish' and focus on the idea here because there are some really important things going on.

In my school, which until recently was very open to technology, there has been a profound shift in attitude.  Technology is being demonized as the cause of attention issues, lack of sleep, behaviour problems, inappropriate peer relationships...you name the problem and a parent, teacher, or administrator will bring up the pernicious effects of technology use.  This has been filtering down to students in many different forms.  In various classes, teachers present articles and lead discussions about the damaging effects of tech use.  Concerned parents pressure the school to present parent workshops about digital dangers.  Whole wellness class sessions are directed towards eliminating or 'managing' the digital distractions in young people's lives.  

Perhaps most noticeable is the general tone of disdain directed towards the way young people use digital media.  Selfies, status updates, ask.fm, snapchats...they are all fair game as topics of wry humour.  Though many - if not most - of the adults I know use similar media on a regular basis, they speak disparagingly amongst themselves and with a deprecating humour in class about things like the narcissistic qualities they perceive in the way young people use digital media.  If a statistic comes out about how many selfies are taken by the average teenager in a given day, odds are it will gain traction among some teachers and be mentioned in class.  

It was inevitable that young people would get fed up with this constant onslaught of criticism of the ways in which they express themselves.  If I were a 14 year old selfie-poster, I'd be pretty sick of the delight some adults seem to take in disparaging the media I use and consume on a regular basis.  

That's not to say I agree with fleurbot and xcxcxbx about 'adults stealing their generation', but I do understand the sentiment.  As educators we (some of us?) have realized that the tactic of telling kids how bad drugs are for them isn't likely to get all of them to just say no. The whole 'this is your brain on drugs' thing is kind of a joke these days.  Nevertheless today we trot out images of MRIs and tell kids that these little light patches show that your brain is getting some kind of dopamine hit from checking your facebook status.  As if that little light patch symbolized a future of deranged social media obsession.  

There is another side, of course.  I see people (friends and students, not just students) who view every place - from a work of art to the Anne Frank house - as the perfect backdrop for a picture of themselves.  Forget the issue of ego, it takes people out of the moment.  If you're figuring out the right pose for the right photo with the right caption, how do you appreciate the place/time?  How do you look around you and fully immerse yourself in whatever it is that prompted you to stop and capture the image in the first place?  

I see the death of conversation and laughter as people (young, old, and in between) compulsively checking social media feeds for updates on where, what, who, and when.  People who chose to go out together,  allegedly for fun, who don't engage with each other because they are keeping an eye on what's going on elsewhere.  

I see parents (some of whom are also teachers) ignoring their families in order to 'check one more thing'.

I'll stop there because what I'm talking about is not new.  

What I'll come back to, however, is that the media aren't going away because, really, almost no one wants them to.  Mocking them to our students is going to lead, at best, to deaf ears and at worst to a giant 'SHUT UP, ALREADY' from the people who we want to use media better.  Better than we do if we're being honest.

Instead of preaching and harping on what's wrong with digital media usage, maybe it's time we started a conversation about using it better.  Maybe the first step is seeing both sides.  

It took me a while to figure out why Mr Porter's video on denim made me so angry

But now I know.

Before I begin my rant, however, check out the video from the Mr. Porter youtube channel for yourself.

Okay, full disclosure, I have a pair of raw Japanese denim jeans.  I appreciate quality, craftsmanship, and all those other hallmarks of beautiful simplicity - also known as overpriced simple stuff.  

The video features Michael Williams, the founder of A Continuous Lean, a blog about men's clothes. Actually, it's a very successful blog about stuff.  It's all really nice stuff - paper products, clothes, leather goods - but it's basically about stuff and how to find and get good stuff.  Michael Williams, not surprisingly has a beard.  

From the first few seconds of the video, I feel both fascination and budding irritation.  I like the aesthetic - clean lines, nice font, basic colours.  The topic is of interest to me as well.  I myself invested in a pair of raw denim jeans (made here in Bangkok from Japanese denim) because I like the way they are made and who made them.  I could have bought at least two pairs of regular jeans for what I paid for my _________ jeans (though I never would have paid the prices I have seen for raw denim jeans in North America).  I also want to take care of my jeans, my initial reason for watching the video.

My irritation builds so quietly that I am not even aware of it until Mr. Williams shows how to wash his raw denim jeans.  As soon as I see the clear soap bottle and elegant font on the label, I start to realize what the problem is.  A little pop-up shows that this isn't just soap, it's The Laundress Denim Wash.  I groan softly and make a silent guess as to the price.  Later, when I look it up, it turns out I was low by about 50% as a 16 oz. bottle goes for USD 19 and the classic duo of wash and freshener goes for the unbelievably low price of USD 33.25.

I have to detour here to acknowledge my own contradictions.  I know that jeans and denim are originally an 'everyone' item.  And I know that I went out and bought a pair of jeans for a 'not for everyone' price.  I did it because I believe in locally made products that are made well.  I also did it because I think that my SINGLE pair of jeans is going to last me a very, very long time.  I didn't buy my jeans because I am curating a wardrobe.  I did it because they match my values, AND I hope that this pair of jeans will last as long as two regular pairs.

Back to the video (and my irritation)...

About midway through the video, Williams urges us all to wait as long as possible to wash the jeans (which I was also told when I bought mine).  To do this, he urges us to use anti-bacterial spray to remove odours.  The spray is, of course, from The Laundress and costs USD 16 for an 8 ounce bottle.  Umm, buying a pair of jeans has somehow taken on the properties of having dreadlocks; it's a lifestyle decision.

It was at Step 5 in the video that my irritation turns to anger.  I find myself angry enough to actually exclaim, "Awww, come on!" at my computer at 5:50 a.m.  At 2:51 in, Mr. Williams urges us to 'know when to retire our jeans.'  He says, and I quote, "At any one time, you will probably have several pairs of jeans in rotation at varying stages of wear and tear."  He then proceeds to show us (two pairs of) jeans that are quite torn (good for 'DIY or the garbage'), the 'weekend casual jeans', the 'everyday jeans', and finally the 'Friday night jeans smart enough to go with tailoring and dress shoes.' 

Five pairs!!!  Of raw denim?  We're talking USD 500-1000 worth of jeans.  Over the jaunty whistling of the video's soundtrack my indignation boils over.  The implications around class and environment of spending that much money on JEANS are monstrous.  How anyone could justify choices like that is a mystery I can't begin to fathom.

Don't even get me started on the mystery of wearing denim and dress shoes at the same time.