Sometimes you need to sit at home and read poetry and listen to clangy old blues songs. I have this book of Montreal English poetry of the seventies (eds. Farkas & Norris), which begins with a quote from Louis Dudek:

It is the destiny of Montreal to show the country from time to time what poetry is.

I love this, and every time I open this book I find something new in it. Today it was a poem by David Solway called Trolls, and it made me giggle—It’s so very before its time, for so many reasons! (In its commentary on trolls, for one, and in its commentary on Montreal’s questionable bridge infrastructure, for second). Here it is.

“Trolls live under bridges.
They are most at home there.
They love to eat billy-goats even big ones.
They confute the ending of fairy tales.

Trolls live under bridges
like navies anchored under rainbows.
They are waiting for enemy pilots
to clatter across the sky.

Trolls live under bridges
like the charge beneath your ribs
ready to blow at any time.
You never argue with a troll.

Trolls live under bridges
like homeless toll-collectors.
They are always broke and hungry.
Sometimes they even eat the bridge.

Trolls live under bridges.
You can feel them push and pull
at the pilings, irritable as children.
Engineers say it’s the wind.”

Today I dealt with just the most absurd series of bureaucratic interactions—at the post office, at the university, at the bank. It was massively exhausting (and to top it off I got a flat tire!). After a morning like that, then six hours of an intensive grad class on feminist approaches in CED, I felt pretty exhausted by the time I got to NDG for a meeting.

We had to get together to do a bit of planning for MTL SOUP, and no matter how tired I was, I’m glad I went. The event is going to be amazing: intimate, democratic, thoughtful, nourishing, lightweight community building at its best. 

It’s really energizing to be building a new community project from the ground up with such amazing people. There’s a sense that if the launch is a success, there’s a lot of opportunity for growth, and there’s already so much support from the wider community. We’re trying to do things properly from the very beginning: linking to what’s already good in the city, using the resources that already exist, and building a messy little web of excuses for already great organizations to work more closely (and enjoy a meal) together. It’s why we’re cooking vegan from scratch, using reusable dishes, borrowing from faith organizations, insisting on a democratic process, bringing in local musicians, and hosting in a multidisciplinary student art space.

It’s really liberating to do something so simple and lighthearted right from start to finish. 

A week or two ago, Gonzo and I took turns reading aloud from Dumbing Us Down — a collection of John Taylor Gatto’s speeches. His ideas have been following me around since, and I shared this quote (from “The Psychopathic School”) during my talk at a BCGEU conference this past weekend.

“This great crisis which we witness in our schools is interlinked with a greater social crisis in the community. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent; nobody talks to them anymore, and without children and old people mixing in daily life; a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact the name “community” hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that.”  (Dumbing Us Down)

Fantastically important questions arise from this — as community organizers, how to we build inter-generational strength and collective identity? How do we mitigate the alienating (and profoundly individualizing) affect of institutions on children and adults alike? What is the relationship between loneliness and social change, between loneliness and apathy?

(As I write this I happen to be working from the New York Public Library, where NBC is hosting “Education Nation,” a summit which (at least from the frantic crowds I see going in and out of the conference doors) appears completely devoid of any children whatsoever.)

Last night I was riding my bicycle home from NDG and was feeling a bit sad that it’s getting to be too cold to ride for much longer. I guess I’ve always known how to ride a bike: my mom never knew how but my aunt taught me in parking lots when I was a kid (for which I am eternally grateful). Learning to ride a bike in the city felt like learning all over again though: the traffic, distractions, other cyclists, angry motorists and bike lane politics make it entirely unlike the traffic-calmed residential areas I rode in as a child. There’s an imperative to be a bit fearless and ballsy (especially in a city like Montreal) lest you get door’d or end up in someone’s blind spot at the wrong moment. With some serious patience from my gentleman-friend, I went from being incredibly anxious and timid to being a pretty serious fixie rider with a huge amount of nerve and awesome legs.

I’ve been working on expressing gratitude more lately, and I think learning to bike (properly) in the city is one of the things I feel most grateful for in the past few years. It’s given me such an incredible sense of freedom and autonomy, trust in my body, and certainty in my own judgement. It has changed the way I see and experience my city, and made me feel a huge sense of ownership and belonging in the street that I never had before. More than getting me out of the miserable underground system or giving me a new way to take care of my body, cycling has also given me an excuse to enjoy solitude. TIme that used to feel wasted in transit is all of a sudden mine to spend wondering and daydreaming, as a chance to decompress or to shake off anxiety. It has become an enormously therapeutic, meaningful thing in my life—maybe the way some people feel about yoga—and some of my best ideas lately have happened on two wheels. 

This is my bike, and today I’m feeling really grateful about it.

I just got back from an awesome weekend helping with the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s RightsWatch conference (this year’s theme was Civil Liberties and Democracy in the Digital Age: Privacy, Media and Free Expression). In an attempt to tie in some practical work with the conference’s policy talk, we organized a sort of booth/space using the Cryptoparty model to do some popular education around privacy. It felt good to contribute in a way that made participants feel meaningfully empowered to do something about their own data while being outraged at a political context which threatened their security.

Next time we organize something like this, there a few important things I’ll try to remember:

• set up a QR code for people to scan instead of giving them flyers with URLs.
• provide more visible question prompts (or maybe a wheel they can spin, like a gameshow) for participants who feel shy or put on the spot.
• bring way more cupcakes than you think you need. 

All together, it was really a kickass, intimate, engaging event, so huge props to the organizing team at the CCLA (P.S., you should donate). My head is still swimming with some mix of hope and curiosity and anxious paranoia, and I guess that’s exactly the way a conference on this subject should leave you feeling.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency makes me giggle. From Our Killer Appears to be a Millennial:

“So we start creating content that feels authentically shareable—vines, photos, longreads, whatever. It’s all gotta speak to his interests as an always-on, social-focused doer/maker who might work as a barista during the day but spends his evenings following his true passion of DIY electronics.

Sure, I know, then we have a bunch of content, but how the hell is that gonna nab us the most vicious serial killer seen in our metro area since the 1970s? Simple: we aggregate all of this content in an immersive, media-rich microsite.”

This slideshare called 20 Jobs of the Future is brilliant and thought-provoking.

I’m trying to write an application to an academic program, but am totally unsure about how honest I can be in a “statement of purpose.” Whenever I do something like this, I get the sense that I’m in competition for these spots with a lot of the same people that made me feel uncomfortable during my undergraduate degree. No matter how certain I am in my skill set, the depth of my analysis or my interdisciplinary background, it feels a bit hopeless to be compared to people from privileged families with a long list of bake sales and voluntourist adventures to their names. I also struggle to explain the incredible impact of my experiences in social movements and the community sector without relying on hokey (and untrue) hyperbole about “empowerment” “inspiration” and “saving the world.” A draft to share while I manage the writers’ block:

Today I found a photo collection from Jon Crispin of abandoned suitcases discovered at the Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane. Crispin talks about having to obfuscate the identities of their owners:

“Here’s a weird story: When I do the shooting, my digital photographs are labeled with what’s called IPTC information. It’s all the camera metadata stored with each photo, and you can add whatever you want. I typically add my copyright information, and also the names of the Willard patients for my own records. But when I upload photos to my blog, I strip that out.

For one person’s suitcase, I forgot to delete their name. Two days later, I got a call from someone who’s desperate, saying, “Do you have the objects of —?” and she gave the name of the person. And she said, “That is my grandmother. We didn’t know anything about her.” She had Googled her grandmother’s name and came across the Willard suitcases on my site. But even in this situation, the woman had to prove to the state that she was not only the granddaughter of this person, but that she was legally the recipient of her estate. So, in other words, if the grandmother had willed her estate to the other side of the family, this woman would not have been able to get access to her things.”

[…] I’m still trying to figure out how I can name these people, because I think it dehumanizes them even more not to. People who’ve been in mental institutions themselves have said, “Your project is very moving to me, but I’m very disappointed that you have to obscure names.”

I really love these illustrations — artist Mica Angela Hendricks lets her 4 year old finish her work.

via pleated jeans

There’s this incredible gentleman in my life, and it’s his birthday today. I shipped him a box of homemade cookies, which travelled six hundred kilometres to his door and arrived a day late. They were delayed at the border, and—because they were a surprise—I had to worry in secret about what a disappointment it would be if U.S. Customs ate them all.

They arrived, supposedly, intact. 

He’ll be moving back home here in two and a half months, but I’m still not used to his physical absence in my day-to-day life. We talk constantly, but it’s not quite the same (anyone who has been in a long-distance relationship knows this). In fact it’s a strange and altogether disorienting feeling: some combination of feeling lost and feeling loss.

At the same time, it’s given me a really important chance to reconnect with friends in the free time his absence leaves me, and maybe more importantly, I’ve had the opportunity to practice being alone. I grew up in a big, loud family, constantly surrounded by people and rarely with time for myself. Now I have a little place of my own in St. Henri, quiet and calm and warm and a little bit empty feeling without him.

I guess I have the tendency to try to fill that emptiness with cheaper kinds of interaction: surround myself with people just-because, to talk about the weather, to be out. I’m glad that I’ve resisted the temptation to avoid loneliness; it’s helped me practice solitude. It’s forcing me to figure out what kind of flow and pattern my life has when I’m not sharing someone else’s clock — and to find some comfort in that rhythm, feel whole because of it. I recall that bell hooks was actually writing about seeking community when she said it, but surely it still resonates here:

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. when we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”

And I’ve been thinking about that a lot today. I hope that our time apart isn’t wasted, and that this practice somehow makes me a better person. Maybe more grounded, self-aware, ready to share and be present. Other than the cookies, it’s probably one of the better birthday gifts I can give him.

I love autumn. It feels transitional, full of change and newness, but is still somehow so deeply comforting and familiar. It’s my favourite time of year, and until about two months ago, I thought this would be the first autumn I’d spend since toddlerhood without the experience of going back to school. I had finished my undergrad, was (and still am) working full time, with a half-dozen projects on the go, and thought I wanted to take time away from the classroom.

It didn’t quite work out that way, and some last minute gut feelings coupled with an incredibly kind program coordinator landed me back in a university sooner than I expected.  Luckily, the program is designed with my sector in mind, so I suppose I’m getting the best of both worlds: space and new perspective out of the class, and a pretty rigorous academic program to complement it.

So today was basically my first day as a graduate student. My program is in Community Economic Development (CED) at the School of Community and Public Affairs — it’s a year long intensive focused on social change and the social economy.

Today was also the first time I found myself in a purely French academic setting, and honestly, it was harder than I thought it would be.

I guess I didn’t expect to walk in and have to introduce myself to a room full people right away — particularly not the intimidatingly competent, interesting people there today. I’m not the most extroverted person, but I believe in making others feel welcome and comfortable. Had that class run in English I probably would have been the first to talk to strangers, share some positive thoughts, and open up about my goals. Today though, I found my voice shaking and felt nervous and awkward, for the first time in ages utterly terrified of speaking out loud. It’s not that I don’t understand French — I do, fluently, and it’s a requirement of my program — but my accent is notably anglophone, and I lose words when I need them most. Struggling to introduce myself was an unexpectedly humbling experience, and probably only the first among many over the next twelve months.

Like most people, I pretty intensely prefer to keep my awkward moments and failures private: I’m unfortunately one of those people who is either good at something immediately, or who avoids doing it at all costs. It’s more than a little out of character to put myself in a situation where I feel so vulnerable (even though of course, if I divorce myself from my nerves, I’m quite sure that nobody else in class notices or cares). But you know, sometimes you just have to do things with guts and confidence, even when you suck.

After all, my speech will only get better, my nerves can only get calmer, and I’m sure I’ll feel more comfortable eventually.

So today is full of beginnings: the beginning of speaking better French, the beginning of a new program and a new school year, the beginning of learning to fail and being vulnerable in public… and apparently, the beginning of a new blog.