Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the occupiers

I am not an American, and I feel that the occupy movement has a lot more meaning there than it did in Canada. When the first protests appeared I was impressed, and thought to myself if I was an American I would join in, I would grab a tent, and camp out. Since junior high I had watched American politics (the Bush years were bad for this) and felt frustrated by the way decisions are made, by the process of decision making, by the lobbying, by the four year billion dollar election cycles, by the enormous wealth gap, but I am not an American so I stayed inside. It was not my battle to fight, or my wall street to occupy.

Occupy sprung up in Canada, and at two separate locations in my home town — they were disparate and often seemed to be at odds with one another. They seemed to be as much about internal politics as about local, provincial, or national politics. I wasn’t sure what we were actually trying to occupy — what was the point here in Canada, what exactly were we protesting. I did not want to protest simply for the sake of protesting, and actually feel pretty good about my political system — it is not perfect but it is responsive and accountable — so I watched from afar and heard occasional rumblings.

The municipal government was annoyed by the occupiers and eventually kicked them out of their main location but I don’t know about the other. They waited until the winter, hoping that the cold would break the spirit of the movement but it didn’t. People stayed in their tents even when it snowed and I admired their hardiness.

Overtime the movements everywhere stopped being new and exciting, they became something constant, and predictable. They camped out, occasionally governments (especially the Americans) got upset and cracked down on it. The most noteworthy incident was when the library at the occupy camp in New York was dismantled by the police. The Internet lashed out. Bloomberg had overstep a sacred boundary: books. The book lovers of the Internet were outraged, and rightly so. I was impressed that the movement had managed to accumulate a library in the first place and by their efforts to rebound.

I am impressed that the movement has continued for so long. I think many Americans are frustrated by their government process and need an outlet. The economy is in chaos, there is an enormous deficit, and the influence of individuals in being progressively eroded by special interest groups and the sheer cost of politics in the U.S. There is an enormous wealth gap and high levels of poverty. I don’t know if occupy has achieved any of its goals, if it really has any, but good for the American movement. Hopefully they continue to stand up and say we will not be ignored.

Weekly writing challenge: Mail it in

The Internet has changed a lot since I was in elementary school. Back then computers were these cool things that we used to play games.

My first computer was a small rectangular Mac that was only in black and white. We used it to play CD-ROMs. My favourite was Treehouse where you got to wander around this tree house and do various games. There were cute animals and cool tasks. We still have the disk somewhere in my basement. I wonder if it would work.

Then there was a bulky Mac that was composed of a large cube on a rectangular base. This brought with it the wonders of colour screens. We played even more advanced games like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego, Math for the Real World (despite the title this one was fun, you did math to make money so your band make a music video and go on tour) and Mario Teaches Typing (this one was not exceedingly fun, but it did pay off later in life). Email was not even a part of the picture yet. The Internet was mostly useful so that I could get cool pictures of bands I liked. I would download them — yes this was what downloading meant to me for a long time — and save them endlessly in folders on my hard drive. This was what teenagers had before Tumblr and Pinterest.

Then there were the colourful and so so cool iMac. I wanted one of these machines so badly. We had them at my elementary school and would play a bug game instead of working on assignments, and on days when it was cold enough to stay inside during lunch. These were the greatest. I think this is about the moment when Apple started to design things that were the epitome of cool, things we didn’t even know we wanted until Apple made them.

My mom eventually bought a laptop. It was post iMac and iBook, and was mostly used for playing various Sim games. Our favourite was Sim Farm until the Sims came out and we played that like crazy until all the expansion packs ate up her hard drive and we had to delete it.

It is somewhere about here that email actually became a part of computer usage, as opposed to this vague term that parents threw around but didn’t really mean a whole lot. As we shifted towards the later years of junior high — about the time when Franz Ferdinand were still making good music — we got our first email accounts with regrettable names. They were childish or ridiculous or contained far too many underscores. Everybody had at least one. I can name at least three (but won’t). These accounts were on Hotmail. Back when we thought that this was the height of communication.

Then Gmail appeared and some of us resisted. I decided to keep my old Hotmail and get a Gmail under a new name. The process of switching from one email to another was a pain even back then. Then Gmail took over. You could archive and search. Overall Hotmail had nothing on it and we moved on.

Now I have two email accounts and I check them every time I go on my computer. They are an integral part of my daily life. I use them for just about everything from communicating with family and friends, applying for jobs, to asks profs questions.

Seasonal floods

There is one name that comes to mind when people ask why I decided to write: George Orwell. I loved reading and spent most of grade eight reading political non-fiction — on American politics (why George Bush is evil) in particular — as well as political philosophy — yes I spent most of the summer break between grade eight and nine reading Machiavelli and Rousseau. My mother was worried that I wasn’t reading real books, by which she meant classic novels and literature — what does that word even mean anyways — over time I’ve created my own personal classics list that diverges significantly from the BBC list.

Everyone kept telling me that I should read George Orwell and near the end of grade nine I tracked down a copy of Animal Farm. It was okay, yes just okay. My problem was I knew what was going to happen. I hate reading books when I know what is going to happen and it was so obvious. I moved on and read Homage to Catalonia and Down and out in Paris and London. I was in love and awe of his writing and his life. I wanted to go on adventures and see the world.

Then I picked up Shooting an elephant a collection of Orwell’s essays, when he is truly at his best. In there is an essay titled Some thoughts on the common toad. In my opinion this is Orwell’s best writing, and potentially the best writing in the English language. As I read I was blown away and caught up. This was it. I wanted to make someone feel the way I had just felt. I wanted to express what Orwell had just expressed. I wanted to be a writer. That was the moment. That is the best thing that I’ve ever read. Ever.

“The toad, unlike the skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other, if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road. There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.”

A story about a toad becomes about the coming of spring and the beauty of nature. Orwell used this simple creature and told a much broader story with it.

For whatever reason I don’t write a lot of essays in the way that Orwell does. I suppose that if I was reading some of his collected works I would likely take on some of his tone in my writing, as often happens with the best writers. Nowadays I identify more with his travel writing and memoir, even though I still count 1984 among my all time favourite books. Homage to Catalonia and Down and out in Paris and London are more similar to my current favourite writers like Karl Taro Greenfeld and Peter Hessler.

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Now for the challenge bit: I will try and write an Orwell inspired take on my favourite element of spring.

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June announces its arrival in Calgary in the usual way. The snow begins to melt, and for one month, and one month only it is going to rain. The snow pack in the mountains begins to thaw, and rivers and creeks swell.

The bow ceases to be covered with a thin layer of ice. The water creeps up along the banks rising to the layers of gravel left behind after the last spring and submerging the more courageous trees that grow in the flood plain.

Then there is the rain. Rain becomes the usual weather. Rain coats are donned and wellies extracted. Umbrellas are brought to work and forgotten on buses.

Occasionally there is the excitement of a heavier than normal rainfall. The creek in the park near my house swells approaching its banks. It becomes marshy and one must be careful where to walk.

Then there is a true flood. The rain pours down and the melt off is fiercer than usual. You can stand and watch as it fills up fields and becomes more of a river. Sometimes ripping up the concrete path along the way. The water is so powerful, visibly powerful.

Then there is average rain. There is the joy of looking out the window at work and watching people flee the rain or just watching it pour down into the back alley way.

Spring brings change with it and this is mostly in terms of weather. In Calgary it marks the time between the melting of snow (a season that is sometimes synonymous with winter) and the heat of the summer. For me it is the rain. The rain that Calgary never gets except for one magical month a year when the snow is gone and plants are starting to bloom.

It is a time of change and possibility. Classes are over and the summer is just beginning. It is a time of summer jobs and having money for a change. The long months of winter are over, and coats can be put away. They are no longer needed. Spring is here.

These are a few of my favourite things

My plane lands in Paris and I collect my bags. It is not until I reach my hostel that the conundrum first hits me: my alarm clock will not wake me up. I bought a flimsy travel alarm clock before leaving without giving a second thought to how heavy of a sleeper I am. The question should not have been how much but will it wake me up.

The first morning I sleep in, which is in part because I was up until 2 a.m.  but mostly because when my alarm went off at preciously fifteen minutes before the end of free breakfast it did not wake me up. This was going to be a problem.

I moved onto Bordeaux and wandered the streets looking for a clock that would be both portable, and loud and annoying to no avail. I also learned that the French word for clock employs various sounds that I struggle with and my attempts to ask for an horloge unsuccessful and frustrating. I left clockless.

I started using my iPod touch as a clock, which was somewhat successful. It woke me up when it needed to until another tragedy struck. I left my charger plugged into the wall at my hostel in Brussels. I have spent vast sums of money replacing chargers that were lost in this manner and decided not to replace only to have it stop working a week later when I went to the U.K. I was left clockless once again.

I adjusted to using my original and highly ineffective clock. I had no early trains and nothing particularly urgent to do in Brugges. Slowly the problem slipped from my mind. One day I turned the opposite way from my usual route out of my hostel and low and behold was a clock store. A shining palace of magnificence that had eluded me for so long. I went in and asked the woman working there if she had a clock that was small and unbelievably annoying and she said why yes she did. I bought the clock and its particular pitch of beep — the beep of an alarm clock is quite possibly the most loathsome sound in the English language — has been waking me up in hostels and hotels ever since.