Holidays:
- Going to IKEA on Sundays instead of church
- Sunday hockey practice (I have heard many times that ‘hockey is my family’s religion’ – you can replace this with football, cricket or whatever your national sport is if you are not Canadian)
- Santa, has replaced Jesus at Christmas

Being Part of Something:
- Wearing branded merchandise
- Your job and/or profession take on a more important role here than they may have in the past
- Cheering for a sports team

That’s it for now.

I haven’t seen Blind Side yet, and I can’t particularly say that the story immediately appeals to me. But, this does represent a turning point. Whenever I talk about sexist stereotypes in movies, people respond that the reason it is like that is because young white men are the overwhelming majority of movie viewers. With the success of Sex in the City and the Twilight series, finally the men in charge of the movie industry are seeing that there is a large, female audience out there.

Because, while there has been a female revolution going on for the past 40 years, movies have not changed that much. The majority of movies targeted towards women are romantic comedies etc., which are usually centered around getting a man.

I would love to one day see a female-led epic, or even an action movie where the lead is a woman and the side-kick is a man. But, the key is not to simply put a woman in a man’s role. The key is to look at today’s audience as they are, and create characters that appeal to them.

The book description is the following:

Exile and Pride explores the landscape of disability, class, queerness, and child abuse, telling stories which echo with the sounds of an Oregon logging and fishing town and with the lively political debates of crip crusadors and transgender warriors.

Clare, who has Cerebral Palsy, is a lesbian, was abused as a child and comes from a working-class rural background, has a unique on many things. For example, from an environmental point of view, she can see things from both the leftist-urban point of view as being educated with an arts degree in the city, but also from the loggers point of view from her rural roots. In one of her many essays on clear-cutting, she talks about how environmentalists going after loggers is like pitting sister against brother, and suggests looking at the root cause (our consumption and market forces) at the core of the issue instead.

Also, as both being a gay transgender and disabled at the same time, she has a unique view of what it means to be singled out by society, and cleverly compares the slang “queer” to the slang of “crip” (for cripple) or freak. In a very pragmatic way, she discusses how some groups can take ownership of certain words, but some can’t.

She discusses about the medicalization of disability, and compares the pity associated with the sickness model compared to the freak show, where people would flaunt their disabilities, and be stared at, but at least they would be able to make a living.

I guess statistically, it had to happen that someone would eventually have the combination of experiences that Clare has had. It just seems like just one or two of them is enough to write a book about – and in the end, you feel pretty amazed by what she did. I kept asking myself – what is most important in who she is: herself as an individual, her disability, being transgender, being a survivor of child abuse?

A couple of years ago, I would have said individual, because that is what gave her the drive to achieve what she has. But now I think that everything has an effect. Let’s face it – able bodied and disabled people live different experiences on earth. So do straight and gay. So do beautiful and not beautiful. So do rich and poor. So let’s stop pretending that we are all created equal, because we aren’t.

Things have been pretty busy lately. My business grew and grew, then very suddenly it shrank, but I am still doing fine. I moved out of my downtown office and am now working from home. Spending more time on the road visiting clients and making connections.

Matt and I moved out to the beach, and we can see the water from our bedroom window. It is really a dream place, and I feel lucky to live here. I am also taking a Women’s Studies course through Open University. It is the deal of the century – since I got the books used, the whole thing has cost me about $70. With my degrees, I don’t have to worry about credentialism anymore – so who needs teachers! The course is inspiring all kinds of new ideas.

Anyway – off to a film shoot – will write again soon .

TypePad hasn't been a terrible platform, but it has limitations in terms of design, and recently with stability. They have recently upgraded to a new version, and since then I have had problems with instability on both my business and my personal blog. I am moving my business blog to a new domain to match my bigger and better concept and I will soon be moving this one, which means there will be some downtime.

Thanks for your patience, and I hope this is worked out soon!

I wanted to introduce my boyfriend’s new business, Living English. It is an English Language school with a focus on interaction and expression, instead of a focus on passing tests or reading textbooks.

Will back soon – promise .

At the heart of the article, is why racial equality seems to happen quicker than gender equality:

Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race
were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions
of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with
the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

Of course, it is important to note that we want to work towards equality for everyone, but for some reason women who are fighting for their own rights and the rights of others are greeted with more disdain than people fighting for equality among the races.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The
reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still
confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects
males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the
female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly
by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are
regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because
racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some
white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as
there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right”
way to be a woman in public power without being considered a
you-know-what.

The most powerful statement in the article is the first sentence below:

But what worries me is that he  is seen as unifying by his race while she  is seen as divisive by her sex.

What
worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when
citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil
rights confrontations.

Well, hopefully it will take less than a half-century to sort this one out.

Lately I have been taking public transit (the TTC) to my new office and there you see a lot of people struggling with physical and mental health issues. On Friday morning I saw a woman, with a pink shirt and pink pants, coordinates which are worn by women of a certain age, ambling backwards down the stairs of a streetcar. I felt bad for her, but thought it may be insulting to offer help. At that moment, I really appreciated how easy it is for me to simply walk up and down those same stairs without a thought.

When I was four, my dad got diagnosed with Malignant Melanoma or Skin Cancer. Today, this is very treatable if caught early, but this was the 80s and it was not found early. So – there was two long years of illness, standard and experimental treatments for my dad – and I watched this man, who was a giant to little me at 6’3, a PhD and a professor, a passionate man with a warm laugh and the only bread earner in our family slowly fade away and eventually die a few days before my sixth birthday.

Likely because of this, I am deeply grateful for the health that I do have and with a few notable exceptions, have mostly made physical health a big priority for me. There are always the fads, but basically if you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, get enough sleep, exercise and stay out of the sun – in general the bases are covered.

I remember an acquaintance I had once who had spent her life in a wheelchair called people with little or no health problems TAB, or Temporarily Able Bodied. She said that for “TABs” like me, it was just a matter of time before I got sick or somehow disabled – because most of us become so sometime in our lifetime. Just think of your parents or grandparents and you will think of how.

So – while we are all TABs, we might as well appreciate our bodies for what they can do now – like eating, exploring somewhere beautiful, exercising and all of the other physical pleasures to be had .