today is the twentieth anniversary of the massacre at tiananmen square.
i was only nine years old (and recovering from a car accident) but remember hearing about the tragedy on the news. twenty years later i wonder about the impact of the sacrifice that hundreds of thousands of students made for human rights. what do the younger generations who were not yet born think of the peaceful protests and subsequent extermination of students and workers calling for human rights in china.
i found an interesting short documentary on the state military action in tiananmen square on youtube.
Well, the move is done.
Jen and I are in our new apartment and it is fabulous. The day was great: we had an awesome team of fit young fellas and righteous babes who helped pull the whole thing off in under 5 hours. All that is left for us to do (besides tackle a mountain of boxes) is sit back and enjoy the view.
The sunset from our balcony is something I can really get used to. Too bad the iphone didn’t do it justice.
this morning i woke up to find that my my dsl was disconnected. that’s when the reality of moving struck me. this is actually happening. tomorrow.
it’s good-bye cambie village and hello ubc village. hmm, interesting how vancouver neighbourhoods are chic-ing up their image by adding the word ‘village’. my cousin reminded me that it’s commonly referred to as gentrification.
anywhoo… must not get distracted.
as i sit here in the far reaches of my livingroom, stealing a wifi connection from some poor boob in my building that doesn’t understand how to configure a wireless router, feelings of procrastination must be pushed aside. tomorrow is moving day & i need to get packing.
This morning I read an interesting article in the New York Magazine called “In Defense of Distraction” by Sam Anderson.
The article begins by outlining the horrors of distraction; what technology has done to our attention spans. Anderson says “People who frequently check their e-mail have tested as less intelligent than people who are actually high on marijuana… If Einstein were alive today, he says, he’d probably be forced to multitask so relentlessly in the Swiss patent office that he’d never get a chance to work out the theory of relativity.”
And just when he has you sold on the evils of the internet, Anderson throws a curve ball: maybe the amazing muscle we call a brain will flex its neuroplasticity and morph into a stronger, more adapted super brain that is capable of multi-taking like we have never seen before…
something to think about.
do you ever wake up on a monday morning and wonder where your weekend went? i do.
but not this weekend.
i had a wicked time on salt spring island with my brother and our island friends. i went to the spa, played outside, ate good food, read a book, made some fun purchases and soaked in all the sunshine this beautiful may weekend had to offer.
life is good.
i have finished “part a” of my mini documentary!
for my oral history project, i chose to research the broad topic of gender as it applies to the life histories of women. i wanted to interview various women of differing age ranges in order to analyse and compare the results within the context of feminist theory as it applies to historical realism. i felt that the interviews had a uniqueness to them as I wanted to interview mother daughter pairs at the same time, adding to the dynamic of the story telling.
there were many pitfalls during the whole process, but on the whole i am very enthusiastic about the results. this 9 minute excerpt of the oral histories shows the four final narrators; my paternal grandmother May and her daughter Rosemary (my aunt) along with my maternal grandmother Joyce and her daughter Joni (my mother).
Each mother speaks about her birth, childhood, women’s work and the choices that were available to them. i have called this ‘part a’ as i still have much valuable footage and each woman has expressed a keen interest in continuing to record these oral histories as a family project.
when analysing the histories that were shared by each of the women, i have chosen to take an intersectional theoretical approach rather than a strictly feminist perspective. as you will see, many different socially and culturally constructed categories interact on multiple levels and manifest as inequality in these women’s lives.
