Privileged perspectives

-My response after watching Slumdog Millionaire last year,
it is my opinion, which means it is highly debateable :) -

Truth is, we're all the same.
we all want to survive.
and we all kill and steal and cheat,
find loop holes
to get there.

It's just that,
when you are poor,
what you do is obvious and
can be
obviously incarcible,
often that is the only
choice you're left
with
if its illegal, then illegal it is,
no lawyers to sort you out
what you do is out on the street...
what you do to just survive,
and often what you have to do
to survive
seems so shocking and dirty
to those
who observe it on a screen, a newspaper, from the sidewalk
from behind their gate
from their car window

When you are protected by your privilege,
what you do to survive is subtle,
covered up by policy and cushioned by self-protectionist laws...
and the "ways of the market"...
and when not justified by suitable law...well,
white collar crime seems so inocuous, so clean...so
well hidden under nice and tidy
under "decent family"
under "good people"
under nice clothes and
clean bodies

While we are watching slumdog and think of ourselves
and our culture perhaps,
the developed or developing world
or your caste or class...
as better,
more moral perhaps?
it is because we are blind
by our privilege,
because it is made to seem natural,
a given,
not something earned by colonial greed and massacre,
noooooo
we earned it, we are worth it. we are wise capitalists
we worked hard
sweat of our brow
no?


This is what justifies
our lifestyle pursuits,
makes us feel better
when we want a good deal,
when we buy cheap goods made cheap by cheap labour,
materials and methods.

I do this.

But we are good, no?
yes.
and therefore whatever we the good do,
is not made criminal,
not really,
there are ways...
our market is God, no?
no question...

the priviledged are mostly
tourists in someone else's land?
or tourists in their own land.
as if on holiday
perpetual tourists,
touring around,
consuming the best like kings and queens,
luxury an every-day commodity

our mouths open for more... we are hungry, always hungry...

we are good

as are they,    

as are WE   

we are ONE
when the clothes fall off
when the privilege fades away

flesh and bones
spirit and eyes


but
the God of the market
the God of the privileged

doesn't

see it that way                                             

                                                                          

contain me

i have recently fell in love with tupperware. mmm, i love the colours - the jewel tones, the oranges, the lime greens and fuschias, mmm, the way it makes my life so so so much bettah.

An organized life is a better one, no? I never ever thought i would succumb, never thought i would fall this low. When i was 19, fresh after i broke up with a long-time boyfriend, i swore up and down that i would never ever EVER be the suburban housewife collecting place-settings, going to tupperware parties... the casseroles, the endless detailing of little nothings,the gossip, the fretting over chaos, the upgrading of tiles, the matching sets.
the smoothing down of the apron.

ok. so i have cooked way too many casseroles in my day, i have upgraded tiles (well, from '50s pink, which i regret replacing in a way...) but i have no placesettings, and i still savour what can come of chaos, yet, tupperware? have i gone over the edge?

but i am smitten. i truly am, with the most stereotypical housewife marker of them all.

it might have something to do with the fact that i am no longer taking courses. This past December I finished all the requirements for my undergrad, finally. Grad pending June '09. From having one's time filled with deadlines, research, the reading of primary texts, the schleping from class to class to, well, to nearly nothing is quite an adjustment.

I had a void of time to fill, a lack of projects, a lack of focus and what was staring me in the face, all day long, everyday? the sagging, sad insides of my kitchen cupboards, whenever i reached for that snack, those many snacks i'm afraid...

when i was busy in school, i didn't really notice how i became the poster-child for a tupperware make-over.

my friends took me by the hand, my uber organized, detail-oriented friends who feel a real, palpable guilt when failing in the household department (what does that feel like?) we entered the tupperware lady's room dedicated to perfect, lovely shelves stacked full of glossy, glorious tupperware.

i felt my first twang.

i am trained to be a critical theorist, to critique the signs, the signifiers of imbedded cultural value, the seduction of marketing, the fetishizing of objects. but i could not penetrate this one. i wanted to curl up into a ball and tuck myself inside a servalier bowl set, i wanted to nestle my cheek up against the modular mates , i wanted to caress the silky crystalwave divided dish.

When Annette Tupper Ware took us upstairs to see her tupperware lined cupboards i could have had a stroke. I was swooning. i think even Annette herself thought i had gone too far.

two weeks later i found myself in my kitchen with a very large box full of moulded plastic. you might think this is the moment that the bubble burst. um, no.

I lovingly unwrapped every piece, filled them with oatmeal and flour and pasta and rice and cereal and juice and spices and stacked the servalier bowls into a shining, sparkly jewel of a plastic pyramid. Every morning for at least a week i opened and shut and opened my cupboards, relishing in the tidyness, the containment, the lack of leaking spices, the winking array of smartly stacked colour. i ordered a motely crew of colour, no matching sets - my only deliberate, calculated, dissent in my plastic compliance.

true, things are better organized. true, my oatmeal and rice won't risk getting those mealy bugs any more. true, the cumin is contained and won't leak over the stove whenever i open the cupboard. true, my baking pull-out drawer is shwank. but i can't help but wonder what got over me and why i am still in love, why i had coffee with Annette Tupper Ware last week, why the servalier bowls are still in pyramid form on the counter. Maybe i better go back to school, get that masters, or go to work. maybe i just need some structure, given to me, solid with a lifetime warranty.

Boundaries are cozy, parameters hold you close, and the meal solutions-to-go-pack is on sale come September. Annette? sorry for that time i put my head on your shoulder. but i have to say, you are the queen.

bob, neil and barry

This is a pic of my dear husband, sleeping in, while we are camping in Algonquin Park with our tent trailer. I've already walked to the comfort station and back, pondered the water and looked for loons in the mist, read half a book, drank a pot of coffee and then proceeded to make breakfast -in and out of the trailer, doors slamming, kettles whistling, kids get up, tustle, find their clothes, eat cereal appetizers, neighbor babies are screaming for their bottles, kids are biking past with bells on...

and Robert sleeps.

My husband's delight in naps and sleep is in direct juxtaposition to my inability to do so. I am an insomniac. i have a more difficult time letting go of my brain. it often chatters to itself late into the night. my doc wonders if i am, occasionally, a low-grade manic. I wake up and think...think I'm sleeping then realize that if i am thinking, then, i must be awake, think some more and then, think unconsciously for a bit, awake from my sleep-thinking to realize that i might as well think upright...once my brain is kick-started, it doesn't stop for sleeping in.

This routinely happens to me every morning, especially while at home as I am treated to the background noise of Robert's clock radio playing awful, cheesy, mindless '70's tunes that he sleeps through, sometimes song after song after song, even though it is 3 inches from his head. I cannot sleep or think when Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond are crooning, but Robert can. Why does he insist on this nostalgic cheese station in the first place? probably the nostalgia. Robert, having worked in his parents hardware store for many years and having endured an hour and a half bus ride to and from school with radio privileges for years on end, has heard, even the most obscure songs, several times over. He can sing the tunes to them even while half-asleep, which is the state i think he was in on the bus, no wonder he didn't mind. Oh darn, a long bus ride, what to do? zzz.

Often he ends up with a song in his head when he gets up. Not knowing where he got it from (mystery!) he finds himself singing it in the shower..."I write the songs that make the whole world sing...!" He is usually sadly out of tune despite his full grasp of the lyrics.

Sometimes i wonder what such early and frequent exposure to Barry et al did to the wiring of his brain. we do find his jokes super cheesy.

Needless to say, when the clock radio drones on and on, i want to get out of that bed. I walk on the hardwood floors and hear them creak underfoot, boil water and grind some beans, meditate on the morning fresh and new, write a few lines somewhere upon my laptop, maybe read a few lines in the newspaper. I enjoy the quiet of the sleeping house, but if i listen closely i can often still hear a faint Barry singing, "Copa, Copa Cabaaaaaana..." At this point i call out to him, and he never fails to be freshly baffled every morning: "...i can't believe I slept in".

To be able to turn oneself off like that, when one wants to, is the envy of my life. To be able to sing those songs in the shower, without any self-consciousness, is, i wonder, another form of the same thing? Turn off that incessant, insistent, demanding brain. Enjoy. Repeat.

in the beginning...

Here is my brand new baby blog.
Some might scoff and call it an act of narcissm. I would agree, totally. I am a product of my culture, and western culture thinks the world revolves around the individual. This has been happening since the European renaissance. What am i to do? It is a great gift to think individually, personally, or at least to percieve it that way - a move away from collective uniform thinking. and yet. it is also illusory - we all have a Zeitgeist-feed into our minds...it shapes us, almost uniformly...almost. What I explore here is not just belly button gazing stuff, but I'd say the collective, running through my belly.