My year of living civically

I wonder if Canadian data would be similar?

When your source of employment evaporates, almost overnight,  what would you do?

In August 2010 that choice was put before me.

So I strapped on my boots, printed up a few business cards, and headed out.

Part of my motivation was the ole' networking thing.  Maybe something or someone would turn up that could offer me employment or at least some contract work.  But, to be truthful, a much larger part of myself was excited at the prospect of just getting out there.  Being involved.  Being aware.  Being engaged with the citizens of my community in a way that I was deprived of for most of the past 12 years living in the city.

I moved to Toronto from a community where I was actively involved during most of my adult (post undergraduate) life there.  I was on the board of the community band.  I volunteered at my child's preschool.  I was on the board of the food cooperative.  I started exploring alternative community based groups such as a local bartering system.  I got involved in a fledgling political party.

When I moved to Toronto my life went into a kind of warp drive of frenzied employment search and then the life of teaching seemed to suck the soul right out of me.  Couple that with a diminishing physical ability due to a degenerative illness (undiagnosed for years) and a lack of child care options led to a huge gaping void in my life that I was unaware of until last year when the option to renew this core part of my life was put before me.

My first civic minded involvement came early.  I recall launching a class endeavour in grade 3/4 (I did both grades in one year).  We staged the Wizard of Oz for a performance to the the younger grades with minimal help from our teacher.  Years later, in middle school, our catholic school religion department became infested with hippies and my life as a protestor started in earnest.  I recall signing my first petition and proudly wearing my first protest button in the late 70s (the boycott Nestle movement).  I attended an anti-nuclear protest shortly afterwards. Besides being roped into a pro-life march or two, the civic engagement training provided by my religion (hippie) teachers throughout middle school and high school was most informative and taught me the importance of being civically aware AND involved.

So, after almost 12 years being trapped in my own home due to unavoidable circumstances, my sudden and unplanned state of unemployment was like a gift.  My life literally opened up.  My child, now old enough to feed herself occasionally and also quite active with her own teenage social life, no longer needed me around and my time was like a blank slate.

So I got out there.  I had already been dabbling a bit with the Toronto Food Movement and had spent a year on the board of one of the food co-ops.  I had petitioned my councillor about urban chickens.  I had attended a few local food policy events.  So that was my starting point.  The fall of 2010 also had a municipal election so I became aware of my local issues and joined the only local resident's association (which isn't very local).  I jumped into the spring 2011 federal election by volunteering to be a campaign manager.  I was a founding organizer of a local arts festival.  I volunteered for three different food organizations.

I figure that in one brief year I managed to cram in about 5 years of community involvement.  Not one job offer but a wealth of experience was gained.

I've learned that politicians can be slimey.  Even the ones that purport to be your friends (my local councillor has recently blocked me on facebook and so did his provincially elected father, I have supported both of these men so the blocking is rather puzzling and irritating since I no longer have access to community information).

I've learned that young people make up the backbone of the food movement which startles me (a bit) since they are not the ones actually feeding the next generation, yet.   My own food awareness was basically launched the day I gave birth so perhaps that clouds my judgment.  I do believe there should be more representation from people actually feeding families and perhaps events should be orchestrated to facilitate this.

I've learned that most people are on a payroll of some sort when they are civically engaged which means that there is always an ulterior motive and/or agenda.

I've learned that volunteers might be recognized but they will never be given more than a terse thank-you.  I've also learned that most volunteer jobs should be paid employment - and that especially is applicable to the alarming rate of growth of the Canadian internship industry.  And many perpetual volunteers are unpaid women in my general age range.  Male volunteers/organizers [unpaid] are few and far between.  They tend to get paid for their civically engaged gigs - maybe not directly but in the form of future speaking gigs or book sales which are promoted at the volunteer gig.  I've also learned that stating this fact does not make one very popular.

After my month pseudo-unplugged I decided to reign in my civic involvement.  I've beefed up my resume a bit with these experiences and I have no regrets.  I've met some very interesting people and look forward to watching some of their personal endeavours blossom.  And I suspect that this past year will act as a bit of a reboot for the rest of my life since I don't think I will ever let my civically minded inner champion disappear like that again....at least not without one helluva fight.

Apples and Snakes

I am not religious.  Not anymore.  I had a good long three decade run at it with most of it being a willing and consenting participant (i.e. as an infant/small child I had no choice).  My certificate of annulment from my brief mid-twenties marriage attests to the purity of faith I once had as well as to the success of the brainwashing efforts.  As does the certificate of baptism that my daughter has.  As a teenager I used to go to Saturday evening masses with my best friend when neither of my parents had darkened the church doorstep for months.  My relationship with the church fizzled out before my daughter's recollected memory starts so she has bypassed the brainwashing track and for that I am truly grateful....as is she.

However, I do miss the comfort of the ritual.  I was part of many church choirs and I miss the music.  I went to a catholic funeral a year ago and belting out the hymns was marvelous.  I didn't participate fully in this mass due to knowing that the partaking of the sacraments is a personal witnessing for christ ritual that holds no meaning to me anymore. But I was fascinated to see friends participate even though I knew they hadn't partaken of any sacrament in years and according to the 'rules' as I know them the body of christ portion of the ceremony should have been off limits to them.  All of these friends were in their second or third marriages without annulments and I'm pretty sure their new relationships weren't chaste.  So they are 'living in sin' and not regularly obtaining the sacrament of reconciliation to clear that blemish in order to partake of communion.  In fact, I'm not sure when the last time any of them had been to church (probably a first communion or confirmation service).  Their participation made it clear to me that in today's secular world most people regard church ceremony as more pomp and less - or no - circumstance.

Setting aside the pomp versus circumstances debate, I don't regret for a single minute the time I spent with mother church.  It gave me early insights into the history of humanity that I don't think I would have obtained since I was pigeon holed at an early age into the mathematics/science fields.  My knowledge of humanities subject matter remains an autodidactic journey which is enormously pleasurable albeit a bit frustrating when the next gap is forged open, yet again.

That knowledge of humanities' history becomes handy when seeing clear affronts to morality. Like this kind of shyte.  Knowing that the core of humanity can be boiled down to the Adam and Eve Garden of Eden parable delivered concisely in the first book of the bible helps to frame these affronts.  Let's recap that shall we?  Snakes are tricky. Apples are tasty. Some humans can't resist.  Consequences can be profound and innocent bystanders are affected also. But at least we can blame someone (the starting line of most christ centred religions). 

When I look at that repulsive soft drink ad campaign, or in fact at much of our modern culture,  I see lots and lots of snakes. And just because I can blame someone (or something) doesn't mean that anything will change. And even if I ignore them,  the consequences will affect me and my daughter and her generation and the generations to come.   So basically nothing can be done except to try and ignore the tasty apples cleverly profferred by the snakes and concentrate on the bounty elsewhere. Because, despite being extremely tricky, those snakes haven't figured out how to obliterate the bounty overflowing in each and every human being's mind.

P.S.  Try to imagine what our world would now look like if the starting line of the Adam and Eve religions had been placed at recognition of the abundance of our planet and our need to sustain this for all time despite the appearance of tricky snakes with their tasty apples.

My grade 7 journal: "My favourite class is shop."

There is nothing like getting down and dirty with some power tools.  I literally hear my adolescent self rejoice.  I spent a few weeks this summer stripping the baseboards and refinishing the oak wood floor in the smallest room of my circa 1930 Toronto house.

And now, each and everytime I walk by the room with the 'new floor' I feel such pride in my accomplishment I expect the goddess herself to smite me for indulging so regularly in one of the seven deadlies.

But,what you don't see in the above photo collage is the sweat.  In Toronto, in August, there was quite a bit of it poured onto the floorboards.  And the tears.  

The tears came as proficiently as the sweat some days.

Tears for a life not lived.  Tears for a body caged by a disease that forbids a full time switch to physical labour of any kind.  Tears for lovers lost.  Childhood endings.  Misguided choices.  Abandoned and neglected friendships.

When rubbing in the oil on the floor after nearly 3 weeks of developing a very intimate relationship with it I felt I was anointing it, for in a peculiar way, the old floor has become my sacrificial lamb.  An offering to the universe of myself.  Stripped raw and then polished and buffed.  

So take me as I am universe.  I am ready, willing, and able for service.

LBF: Life Before Facebook

Events in my life have taken many twists and turns in the last couple of years so that by the end of July I thought, I need to unplug from the greatest friend debauchery the world has ever known.  Even if it is only for a wee while.  So I took a month off of facebook this past August.

I can report that after one month exactly 4 of my 661 facebook 'friends' contacted me via phone/email.  I have 3 immediate family members and luckily we maintain regular contact.  So, as a mathematician I have to evaluate this using the cold hard facts.  4/661 people are really my friends.  I interacted with approximately 0.6% of the total publicly declared number of connections that facebook deems friends.

I don't know about you, but that's about the same as LBF.  In my adult life I have found that in a given month I socialize with about 5-10 people and since I actually do know people that don't have a facebook account that number is about correct for my facebook free month.

Facebook clutters my life and I'm not sure I can return to it again.  I've poked around a bit in the few weeks since I 'returned'  (pun intended) and I feel like a lost sheep.  The spell is broken.  The charm has ceased.

I am now officially living LAF:  Life After Facebook.  This 'new' life will include this blog.  Or another blog (I have a  habit of creating new blogs....maybe I will commit to one eventually).