Vanier Wildlife

Posted on 14 November 2007 | 4 comments

I was hurrying along outside Vanier yesterday evening when I saw what I thought at first was a dog-sized squirrel in the middle of the pavement. A split-second thought reminded me that squirrels are not that big, so perhaps it really was a stray dog — and then I saw its stripy tail.

Raccoon.

It was turning around in circles on the pavement and I couldn’t walk around it. Having never seen a raccoon in person before, I side-stepped behind a giant rock and watched it from a short distance. I didn’t want to provoke it by accident. (One of the scenarios we got during first-aid training this weekend was, funnily enough, a raccoon bite.) From the safety of my rock, it was very easy to admire the raccoon — and then another one emerged from the bushes beside it. Two raccoons! I didn’t know there was a nest of raccoons right here on Vanier.

A car passed by, they hid inside the bushes again and I continued to walk on. Unless you knew, you would think that rustling was just another squirrel (or a rat — I’ve seen one of those at Vanier too), or even the wind. But no one else saw them. I never knew they could be so big.

4 Comments

Posted in Residence Life

Project Poppy

Posted on 9 November 2007 | 1 comment

It’s a new concept to me that many young people actually care about Remembrance Day and aren’t jaded, cynical individuals. So with that background, I’m torn between thinking that this is just another example of how different things are in Canada and the rest of the Western world, or if it’s partially a whole lot of teenagers jumping onto the bandwagon and turning this into a trend. Would it be too good to be true that every person who is joining this Facebook group is doing it out of a sincere belief in the importance of remembering and not because it’s a short-term, fun thing to be a part of?

Anyway, giving the benefit of the doubt, I wanted to talk about Project Poppy for another reason. (Facebook search the group to see it if this link doesn’t work for you.) Its aim is really extremely simple: they want 9 720 453 members on Facebook to change their display picture to one featuring a poppy by November 11th. Presumably this is as many people who died in WWI, although I’m not sure where they got such an exact figure.

Currently, with less than two days left, they have 38 384 members at the time of posting. They began on November 2nd, so the rate of joining is extremely high. They still need more than 9 million people to join to reach their goal, though. I’m doubtful that it will happen — are there even that many people on Facebook?

But you know what? I don’t think it matters if they don’t get their nearly 10 million strong members. It would be an incredible achievement and I hope that they will continue to grow (and faster) than they already have. But already they are making their point — does anyone not have at least one friend who has joined or heard of this group yet? (My friends, by reading this, are predestined to fall into the category of having heard of it.) Splashes of poppies can be seen everywhere if you crawl around Facebook for a while. And that is one of the greatest points that is being made: you begin to see the soldiers as individuals instead of figures.

Here is an individual with a poppy, representing one of the dead.

Here is another.

And another.

And another and another and another.

You know some of these people with poppies in their pictures. You know something about what makes them tick, about their family, their friends (definitely their friends with that useful button on Facebook), maybe something of their past, present, and dreams and aspirations. And though you may not personally know that stranger with a poppy in their picture too, they are a person regardless.

And that was only six people. The more people you see, the more you comprehend that the people — not just soldiers, but doctors, nurses, and others who worked at the front lines — who died were once living human beings. For this, I think the project will make an extremely worthwhile point.

1 Comment

Posted in International, Recreation

Book love

Posted on 5 November 2007 | 2 comments

I went to a training session for a children’s literacy programme last Saturday. One of the questions posed was: How did you learn to read?

TV, some people said. The alphabet. Bedtime stories. Music lessons. The list went on and on.

I didn’t add anything to the list because I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t able to read. I remember being three — and that’s as far back as I can go — and reading the alphabet. U is for Umbrella. I pronounced it “Umbwella” and couldn’t understand why my mother kept making me repeat it. But even then I was reading it on my own.

If we follow the family story, I learned to read when I was a baby. I’d copy my brother and hold books exactly the way he was holding them, and then throw them down later to play with a new one. I’d “read” them upside-down, sideways, and mutter gabbledy-gook. My baby language was fluent enough. But then at some point, random words made their way into my baby talk. “Aghoody ablooby kuu kuu and the oooas oochoo awroo. Gah gah goo doo.”

On one level, I think I would make a terrible English major, because I just don’t analyse most of my books. The first time I read any fictional book or poem is always for pleasure. The conscious analysis, if I do it, comes afterwards. You would think I would want to analyse more if I want to major in English…

The only reason I would ever want to be as famous as J.K. Rowling is because someone asked her what her favourite book as a child was, and then The Little White Horse came back into print. I would love to be able to bring a book back into print.

Sun Horse, Moon Horse by Rosemary Sutcliff made a huge impression on me when I was ten. After reading it, I wrote a story in class. They didn’t have anything to do with each other except for the feeling I had when I read the book and wrote my story. For the first time, teachers stopped telling me, “You don’t know what you want to say”, and said, “This is really good.” Did you ever have that experience of doing something — all on your own — and being told sincerely that it was good? It’s quite not the same as being praised for being able to regurgitate.

I probably read it again before I left my primary school. My secondary school turned out to not have the book at all, and it was out-of-print. I didn’t get my hands on it for another eight years — and yesterday, I found it in the Education library. That library is my newest joy; it’s where all the “juvenile” fiction is. I’ll happily categorise myself as juvenile if I can borrow from there. And I can.

The first time I finished the book, I was sitting on the edge of my bed before I slept, unable to not devour the whole thing in one go. Today I finished it again curled up in one of the comfy chairs in the Meekison Arts Students Space in Buchanan D. Despite the long gap in between, and despite my fear that my love for the book was based on something imaginary that I might not find again this time around, the last line gave me the same chill and unwarranted tears that it did when I encountered it the first time.

So even though I’ve been walking around looking miserable all day, according to other people, I’m not miserable because I’m sad. I’m looking miserable because I’m so happy. Doesn’t it sound ridiculous? But I feel like I’ve been walking on another plane.

2 Comments

Posted in Recreation, Spirituality

Poppies

Posted on 4 November 2007 | 2 comments

I feel like I am treading a very thin line.

Poppies are worn during November until the 11th to remember those who fell in wars, as a token of remembrance, said the person who gave me a poppy. To remember those who fought for freedom.

It’s always the last part that gets me. The part where you ask what it stands for.

I had a teacher in high school — one who had a great deal of compassion and humanity for others — who didn’t like how people often spoke about and wore poppies in a way that glorifies war. I’m afraid of this being a touchy point with many people who will disagree about it. I am not saying that people who disagree lack compassion; my point is, he didn’t. I remember at the time that I didn’t agree entirely with what he thought. You can wear a poppy with entire respect and regard for those who fell, while at the same time not agreeing that wars were fought in the name of freedom.  That’s the part I couldn’t always accept — that people fell for freedom.

Individuals, I think, often fought for freedom. A lot of people went to war and fought thinking of what was important to them, wanting to go back to a normal life where the things they care about can live in peace.

But I find it hard to believe that any war is fought for purely ideological reasons. Wars are fought for economic and political reasons. The three things are all linked together, but I honestly don’t believe that the ideology plays as big a part as the economics part, or the power part, for the politicians who declared war on each other in the first place. But publicly talking about economics and politics as reasons for going to war just doesn’t make as good propaganda as ideology.

It’s always the winners who get to write history. If anyone else had won any other war, we wouldn’t be the ones remembering the fallen now. This is why I get so uncomfortable when people even verge on the “us” against “them”, which is often what I feel when people start talking about freedom. “We” fought for freedom. “They” fought against it. The individuals in those other countries quite probably didn’t want to go to war either, but they were fighting for what they perhaps thought was right. It’s easy to say they’re wrong when you’re the victor, but the Allies — talking specifically about WWI now — were not as all-round good as I thought when I was little. The first time I learned that they went back on their word to another party (China, in this case, and later on, countries in the Middle East), and made compromises that created trouble and oppression for other people — I think I stopped believing in the winners being the right ones from then on.

What about the people in the other countries who died as well? I used to ask. Why aren’t we remembering them as well? I don’t want to wear a poppy to remember only the dead of one side, but to remember all the dead who had to die. The ones who didn’t like war, who didn’t want to go, who did it anyway for whatever reason partly because they had to, and for whatever reasons they found to keep them going. And a lot of people don’t differentiate. A lot of people wear a poppy for everyone. But a lot of people don’t, and don’t agree with me.

War is war is war and every side commits atrocities. No one is clean, not even the ones who claim they had no other option. Sometimes, there isn’t any other option, but that doesn’t make it the “good” one. Everyone loses in war. Every single one. Countries winning or losing doesn’t bring the dead back. It doesn’t stop people from crying. It doesn’t matter where the dead came from. They died before they needed to and we are the ones who did it. The loss of lives in war is our collective loss, for the whole of humanity, and to think otherwise — to think that it doesn’t matter if someone in another country is dead because they’re the enemy and somehow less human — is to lose something of our own humanity.

2 Comments

Posted in International

A life in a day

Posted on 31 October 2007 | 5 comments

So we’re now a quarter of the way into the academic year, with three more to go. It’s also application season for high school senior students, so I thought it would be a good idea to write about what a typical day is like for me.

My day actually began yesterday. I stayed up until 1:30 am to write an essay that is, ironically, due on Friday. Academic staff recommend students to write their essays ahead of time so there is time to revise and make a good job of them. I don’t think they meant for us to lose sleep over them ahead of time as well, though… However, I really enjoyed writing it and couldn’t stop once I got started. It’s so much more fun to choose your own titles on a subject you actually care about.

It’s quite hard to sleep early when living in rez. There is always something going on — tonight is obviously Hallowe’en. I went to the Haunted House at Hamber with some friends, and had a great time. I’m impressed by how much they managed to do in such a small space. I wish I’d screamed, but I was laughing too hard. It’s the first time in ages since I’ve got out of my room properly. Even though I’m exhausted tonight, I’m still not going to be able to go to bed for another hour. I hope we don’t have a fire alarm tonight — we had one two Fridays ago, and we all had to troop out to the commonsblock at two in the morning. The alarms here are piercingly high and painful, so you have to get out just to save your eardrums, even if you don’t want to leave your bed. Unfortunately, the alarm at the commonsblock went off too, so we got chucked out into the field, and then it began to drizzle while the firemen sauntered around. We all went back twenty to thirty minutes later, but not before one of the RAs yelled, “Who was watching porn on the big screen?” Our new big screen TV in the house lounge has obviously been put to use…

These many late nights, coupled with the later sunrises, mean that I get up late as well and don’t have time to eat breakfast before I go to class. I almost wish that someone would take my milk from our floor’s fridge, just so it won’t be wasted. (I buy giant jugs of them each time.) Our floor is pretty good about not taking other people’s food. But I don’t really wish it. In fact, I’d be pretty peeved if anyone took my milk, so please don’t take it. It’s mine. Hiss.

My meals have been rather atypical today. Some friends told me that there is a caf in Buchanan A. I was astounded. We have food in Buchanan? And I didn’t know about this? What is the world coming to? I’ve been hunting out feeding-grounds to satisfy my appetite, which has been increasing exponentially ever since I came to UBC and had to start walking around. Oh, for hyper-convenient public transport again! Vancouver’s transport system isn’t actually too bad, and Translink is a great trip planner for the newcomer — it did, however, once get me stranded in the middle of nowhere, so I don’t entirely trust it anymore. The best part of it all, of course, is that we have our UPasses, transport tickets that basically give us free reign of the public transport system, covered for in our school fees. Yay, free transport! Especially wonderful for commuters.

Returning to the topic of food, though, Vanier’s caf food is not too bad. Totem tent people might say something different about theirs. I actually still quite like the food here — everything except the Asian food. Those are just all wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. (People tell me the quesadillas here are fake and disgusting, but I’ve never known otherwise, so I’m able to continue eating them in perfect bliss.) And there are other yummy places to get food — Suga Sushi down in the Village is my best suggestion for sushi on campus, if you insist on it. I’m heartbroken that Cafe Crepe isn’t open anymore, though. I love their crepes beyond anything else containing an egg.

For someone who almost fell asleep swing dancing — I feel so sorry for my partners for my completely slow reactions; I can’t even remember how to do that new dance we learned today, and that was basically just walking in a straight line — I am horrendously verbose. Actually, that is probably why I am rambling away in the first place.

Goodnight!

5 Comments

Posted in Academic, Commuting, Orientation, Residence Life, Wellness