OH, and one more thing...

The Critic had the utter audacity to send me a Valentine's Day Card, extolling the virtues and wonders of our friendship -- a relationship which, for all intents and purposes, is completely at the whim of whatever position she's at in her emotional cycle. Just the other month or so she blasted me for being melodramatic, over an offhand remark, never mind the fact that her excessive melodrama was the exact reason why I stopped talking to her in the first place.

Physician, heal thyself.

A comedy of errors

So where do I begin?

1.) Anna was a no-show. Can't fault her for that though, since she forgot where I live, which is only fair, since I keep on forgetting her apartment number. Anna kept on calling, but by that time Bell had disconnected our phone. Isadora couldn't make it.

2.) Ikea and Rogers made it on Saturday morning -- at 9 am. And of course there was no one there, since everyone was busy moving. Mom and her brother got a UHAUL van which was woefully too small, making us rely jointly on Clint's Explorer and Chuck's Windstar. So they left, and aren't going to come back until Monday.

3.) A certain friend of mom's husband (who I shall refer to as "Nancy") came to pick up our bedroom dresser set -- I didn't know what to do when he showed up, so I decided to start bringing that out too. And right then mom showed up completely hysterical and melodramatic, yelling at us (well, me), asking what on earth we were doing. We left Nancy's husband to finish up, and as soon as he was done he left, with nothing so much as a thank-you or an offer to help.

4.) I still have to sleep on the fucking floor. Again.

5.) I have had practically zero time to properly study for my Botany test tomorrow.

6.) And of course, The Relative insists on exerting Her influence, taking over my life, sucking away what little control I've had on my life. I'm little more than a pawn now. For now anyway, until I free myself from this prison.

7.) I fucked up while trying to assemble my desk; I now have drill holes on my tabletop, and drill holes in the floor. I now have to try to figure out some way that I can cover up my mistake; it's going to look a little kludgy, which is far from what I originally had in mind for my table. At least mom isn't going to go "OMFG!!!oneone1" on me, which is what she normally does.

8.) Mom refuses to let me assemble my own furniture. Just like how she thought I was too stupid to disconnect and dismantle my own computer setup, or too stupid to know what's wrong with our stero system, which dad and I had spent years trying to fix.

The only solution I have is to #8; out of spite I plan on dismantling my furniture pieces and reassembling them myself, if I can't *gently* persuade my own mother tomorrow morning than I am neither too stupid or too weak to know how to take care of myself -- which time and time again she seems to delude herself into thinking. I've got some ideas as to how I can fix my table, but like I said it's going to look a little less...shall we say, elegant than I originally thought.

This is depression.

I'm feeling a lot more drained and unmotivated than I was before, and as a result, more grumpy and more angry. Misty says its the weather, or my lack of vitamin D. I suppose so. It's been overcast a lot lately. The sky is blue today, and the sun is shining. Though it's not making me feel any better.

The office emailed me today and said that I'd been rejected for the summer undergraduate NSERC award. Dan said that he'd pay me out of his own pocket, which is unbelievably kind of him, and yet I still feel deeply guilty and grieved over having to rely on him -- the way you kind of feel sorry for yourself when people decide to pay for your lunch when you go out with them. It makes me realize more just how much Anna's friend was a prick for harping on him when we were at her house celebrating Chinese New Year.

That same night, Anna made a jab at me over having to leave home early to be with mom, the same way that Amy and Jordan used to do. And fuck me, it hurt...and it didn't make sense to me. She knows my dad died, and she knew just how much it broke up mom. I wonder if she would have said the same thing if it were her father that died in his sleep in his bedroom. Not that I'd ever want that, naturally.

And of course, I feel like I'm bashing my head against a brick wall with my 498. I see the islands and the brackets, and the nodes, but my mind can't piece them together in my head. All I see is a jumble of lines and letters. So much for getting anything done today.

I've gathered up a list of names of people I'd like to get in touch with at LiveJournal: I looked at it and just said "Fuck It" and decided to finally do what I'd been putting off for so long.

It's going to be sort of cathartic, seeing my username crossed out on all of those people's pages.

Activist Thoughts

The latest issue of Five Minutes to Midnight reminded me of the big (?) CFS/"Freeze Tuition Fees" Student Rally that was held on Thursday. The crowd was decently sized, though nothing to write home about. It was at least a lot more substantial than the rather pathetic turn out to the rally held the other year, where a few brave (foolhardy?) souls set about trapsing about campus holding up blue and yellow CFS placards in the middle of a fierce blizzard with temperatures in excess of -20 degrees. At least it looked a lot more credible than the silly "Car Free U of T" band of kids who screamed "The planet is dying/Why are the fuck are you still driving!?" at me and a few hundred others waiting outside SAC to get our metropasses.

Yeah, because naturally of course, TTC riders are the most egregious offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions from driving cars around.

I passed by the parade with an aire of indifference, or rather embarassment, actually. In the space of four years I've run the gamut of activist emotions from "enthusiastic world-changer" to "angry, pissed-off right-wing hater", to "oppressed, secretive freedom fighter". I look back at the voluminous Land Mines/Unexploded Ordinance project I did for Students of Science for Peace or the twenty-page paper I did on Global Warming and Extinctions for IIP and I can't believe that I could have put so much effort and and time into something that had no appreciable and immediate impact on my academic future. It's like some sort of dream, like being in the middle of the anti-war protests and just soaking up the incredible vibe that was in the air...I feel like I'm stuck in the middle of the opening sequence to Fahrenheit 9/11.

I wish that I could have had some kind of motivation to join that parade that day, but for all of the screaming and chanting and slogans being uttered, I had to wonder if there was something more. Yes, I'm sure everyone and their mother would love lower tuition fees, but where will the rest of the money come from? It would be great to have a model like Ireland, where taxation is high but social programs are relatively intact, and free - including university - but such change isn't going to happen overnight, and there are serious issues that need to be considered. Like what about research? Hiring professors and staff? Facilities like Joker's Hill and UTIAS don't come cheap, and the world-class cutting edge research (and yes, it is world-class cutting-edge research, marketing drone BS aside) being done at the unversity certainly carries a heavy price tag.

I don't pretend to know anything about the university's funding model, but what I do know for sure is that screaming out "Reduce Tuition Fees!" is a hollow statement unless you really sit down and understand just what it is you're fighting for. The Federal and Provincial Government surely must step in and increase funding for our universities, but what about social programs? What about addressing issues of the environment? What about global and international aid?

And then of course, there's the question of where we get the money in the first place? Tax the rich, right? Maybe I'm just too jaded and cynical now, especially after what happened with SSfP last year, but unless we have something along the lines of the French Revolution, it's unlikely that we're going to have the rich dump out their coffers to help us poor struggling, university students.

Which brings me to another point. As I said before, the government will most likely if not begrudginly step in to increase university funding if these people get what they want. This will lead to two possible consequences. First, money that could have gone into other projects and programs, like say, environmental protection/remediation and affordable housing will most likely be diverted to make up for the loss in funding. I don't know about those guys, but I'd feel pretty awful if I knew that funding that could have helped keep the homeless people off the streets was instead used to fund my education.

The second is that the government won't step up to the plate, and private industry will. I can imagine that the elements at SAC trying to remove or minimize corporate influence on campus is going to have a blast when Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Eli Lilly, MacMillan-Blodel, Union Carbide, and just about every other evil multinational corporation you can imagine under the sun is going to start knocking on the doors of the Office of the President with truckloads of cash in tow. Maybe I've read too many issues of Adbusters, but I don't want to even think of what's going to happen if that happened.

Oh, and I forgot the third possibility, actually. That Dalton McGuinty isn't going to give a damn about any of this. Neither will the university Governing Council, and the status quo will remain just that.

:(

"Dr. Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the 20th century, died on Thursday in Bedford, Mass. He was 100.

Dr. Mayr's death, in a retirement community where he had lived since 1997, was announced by his family and Harvard, where he was a faculty member for many years.

He was known as an architect of the evolutionary or modern synthesis, an intellectual watershed when modern evolutionary biology was born. The synthesis, which has been described by Dr. Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard as "one of the half-dozen major scientific achievements in our century," revived Darwin's theories of evolution and reconciled them with new findings in laboratory genetics and in field work on animal populations and diversity.

One of Dr. Mayr's most significant contributions was his persuasive argument for the role of geography in the origin of new species, an idea that has won virtually universal acceptance among evolutionary theorists. He also established a philosophy of biology and founded the field of the history of biology."

Quoted from the NY Times article published on Feb. 4th.

More details here [ny times] and here [panda's thumb].