Trying to do something

The clock has struck 3, and my celebratory bag of chips-- the culmination of my late-night studying reward system-- has already lost its flavour. At this time of night, the day's thoughts come flooding back, in a predictably haphazard way. I'm recalling an ad I saw in the bus this morning. Above passengers' bobbing heads, I could make out two choices with corresponding empty boxes beside them:

• Do something
  
• Do nothing
  

The rest of the space portrayed a homeless man sleeping on a sidewalk. And then, at the bottom, a smirky enticement to visit dosomething.ca. Or at least that's what I remember. Searching for it now leads me to nothing.

My instinctual reaction at seeing the ad was rage. It seemed as though the homeless man was being portrayed as "doing nothing," himself to blame for his condition. But now that I think about it, the ad could have been encouraging us, the 43 University bus-riding folk, to do something to help this man, and his fellows, out.

Why do ads today have to be so vague? I give no style points for an unclear product, audience, and marketer. Not to mention a dazed kid looking up the URL, and finding out it doesn't exist! That's too much energy spent on a glossy, rectangular piece of cardboard.

Boys will be Girls?

No coffee necessary--my morning Sociology of Gender class definitely kept me awake this morning. We watched a documentary on the oft-studied island of Samoa, located east of Australia. Paradise Bent: Boys will be Girls in Samoa followed numerous Samoan individuals who called themselves Fa’afafines: literally meaning “in the manner of a women,” they are males who are socially female. Many act and dress with feminine characteristics, but the common denominator lies in their performing traditional women’s roles, like cooking, sewing and cleaning the house.
Consider assets in a family, Fa’afafines are accepted in the community and are viewed as women, whether or not they fully look like women. In fact, none of those in the video bothered with a sex change, feeling no need to biologically ‘prove’ themselves as females. Cindy, a Fa’afafine dancer, was happily dating an Australian guy working in Samoa for the Australian High Commission. When the Commission became nervous about his relationship with Cindy, he was transferred back to Australia. The video concluded with a triumphant caption that the man had quit his job and gone back to Samoa to live with Cindy.
Many Fa’afafines maintain they do not fit under “gay,” “transsexual,” or “bisexual” labels that Western society uses. In fact, one Fa’afafine perceived the difference, commenting that Western analysis of exactly “what you are” was a threat to her, and for that reason she would not leave Samoa. In her country, she was a female, and that was that.
The Fa’afafine example is only one among many confirming the limits of our Western conception of two genders, or “opposite sexes.” Arguably, Samoa still only has two genders: male and female. And they don’t have a gay community. But the bottom line remains: compare our society and Samoa’s, and it already becomes clear that there is a wider range of gender conception than our two easy biological categories can account for. Yet the male-female dichotomy continues to be the reality in our society: you are either male or female. You can’t be both; you can’t be in-between; you can’t be neither one nor the other. Of course, challenges to gender categories continue to surface, whether from the LGBT community or from heterosexuals themselves. Not only are these communities redefining gender, but so is the growing Asexual Movement in North America. Self-proclaimed asexuals are people who want meaningful emotional relationships, but they just don’t want sex. In a highly sexualized culture, this is a challenge to our strict biological categorizations: they make biology less relevant. Not surprisingly, psychologists and sexperts consistently dismiss these people as unnatural, and/or as having a disorder.
Artist Andrea Zittel once said that no matter how many options, humans have a tendency to reduce things to two categories. Despite the sweeping redefinitions of gender that have occurred in the last 30 years, our society is still resistant to many cases that don’t fall neatly under the labels ‘male’ or ‘female.’ Today’s reality sees thousands of people feeling uncomfortable with these easy labels, sensing there is something missing in these socially-defining markers. But today’s reality may be tomorrow’s outdated paradigm. If our ideas continue to evolve as quickly as they have in the past few decades, who knows what is to come?

How materialist

Having never owned a blog until a few weeks ago, the task of blogging has yet to become habit. The recommended “blog once a week” suggestion is perfectly reasonable, and a nagging voice to do so has successfully established itself on my backburner. And yet, I find myself leaving this assignment until the last minute. I could cite the easy excuse of procrastination, which is indeed a factor, especially in the midst of a growing pile of homework. But there’s more to it than that. Throughout this week, I’ve had many ideas for a blog entry:

Friday afternoon. A fantastic nap on a moderately rigid couch in the Telus Building was my first real sleep in the university setting. I awoke refreshed and alert, and was rewarded with a great reading by Derek Walcott. A particular poem about buses sent me on a memory trip that made listening to Walcott speak a surreal experience.

Saturday night. Stage-managing a concert by world-renowned Takacs Quartet. I listened to the concert from backstage; not being able to see the performers allows your mind to wander off in unexpected ways. Alternately, seeing the performers backstage is also fascinating. They eat crackers and make bad jokes. During the concert I also had to fight temptations to hit the tympanis that surrounded me (hastily left backstage from the previous night’s concert) and create utter chaos. I followed the concert up with an out-of-body meal experience at the one and only Sam Wok’s.

Sunday night. A going-away party for a friend going to South Africa for two years…

…and on and on. The more I break down my week into small pieces, the more infinite it becomes. So many things have transpired in one week for me, as I’m sure it has for all of you, too. There are thousands of things I could choose from to write about. And yet, tonight, I could not choose any one thing, nor could I write about all of them. Other than the fact that it’s impossible to ‘write about everything,’ it would feel too materialist to try and squeeze something out of each noteworthy thing that happened to me in the last week. I already feel like I’ve given away too much.

Which is why Mark’s link to the eternally streaming pictures from Blog World is slightly alarming. It encourages cheap post-modern thinking that “anything goes” and that all those pictures can and should be presented in any sequence, without relevance to each other. “Anyone can be an artist” is the message, implying that all these shots are equally beautiful, or relevant to today’s world, or interesting, or… whatever. What follows is a slippery slope into a dark abyss, where being selective is relegated to a vestigial skill, one that we humans should have abandoned long ago.

But having to be selective never goes away. It seeps into everything you do, from critically evaluating an issue to deciding what you’re going to eat for dinner. I’ve been avoiding it this whole week because it’s hard to be choosy: picking a topic for a blog entry means sacrificing many others that could have been just as appealing. Creative non-fiction is all about being selective. What are you going to include? What are you going to leave out? Do you dare cut out your favourite sentence for the good of the essay?

I’d much rather pick one or two things from my week and give you something worth reading, than simply vomiting everything I can remember that happened to me onto these hapless keys, and arrogantly assume that you’ll sift through it all and find the essentials. With blogs – and any other form of communication – spewing as much as possible does not beget the brilliant thesis we’re all trying to discover in our own writing. The crucial editing process is all about paring down, adding and discarding, and rewriting. In short, being selective.

No more of this waiting for that ‘one good topic’ to present itself and magically become a blog entry. Monday night at midnight is no more eventful than Wednesday morning after Tuesday’s 498 class. I’ll put my proverbial pen to the paper when I’ve got something to say.