How to stop the fighting

So last week, myself and some friends were thinking of taking a trip somewhere. But the problem was each of us has already seen different places, and the weather still isn't warm enough to fully enjoy places like Sardinia or Croatia. The only place we could think of that none of us had visited, which would still be fun at this time of year was Istanbul.

We started to do some research, look for possible travel dates and prices. It all seemed to be going quite well, until one of our Cypriot friends (there are a lot of Greeks and Cypriots in Leicester) was telling us about his absolute hate of Turkey and all things Turkish. What history tells us is that Turkey invaded the Northern half of Cyprus, forcing all of the inhabitants to relocate. There was a war, many people lost their lives, others became refugees in their own country - are we seeing any parallels to Palestine yet? Our friend's father had to leave his home, his city, and move to the south of Cyprus...all because of the Turks. There's still a lot of resentment because of that - and he made that quite clear when he said "Just remember, when you go to Turkey, you are essentially helping to fund the guns that kill Cypriots". Great.

Now I know he was exaggerating a bit to make a point. It's not like there's still a war going on between the Cypriots and Turks. But what he's trying to say is that by spending money in Turkey, we are helping to fuel their economy, and sustain their occupation of Cypriot land. I mean it's the same thing when we go to the US, right? We buy all the really cheap stuff and feel so good about the savings we made, but what is that achieving on a bigger scale? Well, it's helping to maintain their economy, their "war on terror" and the over 655,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. There's a lot of people who refuse to travel to the States for this very reason. Technically, you could find issues like this in every country. The fact that I am living in a country that has colonized the 3 countries that make up my heritage says something. But I guess what I'm wondering is, when you KNOW the consequences of your actions, does it become more of a responsibility to act accordingly? Whenever we get in trouble for doing something wrong, what's the first excuse we use? "I didn't know!" We see lack of awareness as a good defense for wrong-doings. In this case though, I can't use that defense. I guess technically it doesn't really matter anymore because plans fell through due to scheduling conflicts, but hypothetically speaking, what's the solution?

On a small-scale level, the best I can come up with is to make sure when I travel to these places, I make some kind of charitable donation to the other side worth the same amount as what I spent in the country. So if I were to go to Turkey, I'd try to find some NGO (non-government organization) that has peace-keeping efforts between Cyprus and Turkey and donate my time, money or other goods to them. Or just make sure I visit Cyprus in my lifetime as well and spend a good amount of coin there too! That way I haven't contributed anything more to one side versus the other.

On a large-scale level, I would say we need to start keeping the peace more. We all think these wars are about oil, money, power or religion. What I truly think it stems from more than any of those things is narrow-mindedness. The inability to accept belief-systems or values that are different from your own. Why do we always do that? We are so focused on trying to be unique, to stand out in a crowd, we see that as the mark of a successful person. But what is wrong with recognizing that we are all the same? We are all divine beings. My soul isn't any lighter than yours - it's all the same. And I understand that not everyone is a religious or spiritual person. My best friend is Agnostic and if we were any closer we'd be the same person. That's cool to have that perspective (see how easy it was to be open-minded?). But even on a scientific level, we can see how slight our DNA changes to result in different races, features, etc. I believe it's less than 7 % of genetic differences can be explained by belonging to one race or another. Whether you're comparing our divine source or our genetic source, you have to reach the conclusion that we are more similar than different. And I personally believe that it's dangerous territory to start aiming to be individual, separate from everyone else. Because that's where you develop these notions of superiority. I'm right, you're wrong, and that's it. That time you spent trying to separate yourself from the world could've been used to unite yourself with the world. We become so wrapped up in developing our individuality, that we are completely blind to our equality. We come into this world with nothing, and we leave this world with nothing. That is the ultimate truth.

And it's easy to look at bigger examples like imperialism and say "that's not right for one country to impose its values on another" but much harder to put into practice in the everyday. Try next time you're talking to someone not to judge them. Not to think that they've got it all wrong and you've got it all right. Making these tiny changes in the way we treat one another is what will have the greatest impact, collectively. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive for excellence in school (for example) because we're all the same and we should all follow the same pattern and just be average. That's dumb. Strive for excellence in everything you do - but don't do it so that you can be better or distinguish yourself from everyone else. Do it because you aspire for greatness, regardless of what everyone else is doing. And the best way to figure that out is to ask yourself: "if everyone was doing what I was doing, would I still be happy, would I still want to do it?". When you earn a certain salary every year, are you happy with what you make because it's more than what most make? Or are you happy because you feel like you deserved that much money for the effort you put in? It's a simple question, with a very profound answer.

Sure, we might speak different languages, or eat different foods or have different income levels, but these are all social constructions of man to make us feel separate from one another. We need to stop focusing on all these little things that appear to distinguish us from one another and start looking at the more important factors that unite us from within. There's a very popular Sanskrit greeting we hear and say all the time, and some of us use it without realizing it's true meaning. One of my favorite authors, Wayne Dyer, ends every book he writes, every lecture he gives, with this word. I feel like it's probably fitting to end this post with it, because of the topic, so:

Namaste. (I honor the place in you, where we are all one)

Another uneventful week in Lesta...

I know, I'm a tad behind schedule with this week's blog. I blame it entirely on the trifle. See, I had this craving for trifle today, so I decided to make some (which by the way on my first attempt came out pretty darn good)...and where there's trifle, there's company! But now I have a few moments (finally) to give you all a quick update on what's been going on this week.

Thursday I finally got around to attending the Sai centre for their weekly bhajans (prayers/devotional singing). The people were all so friendly and welcoming. One lady told me to just think of them as family, and all the youth girls brought me to sit with them and talked to me. It was nice to see the differences and similarities with how a non-Canadian Sai centre operates. This centre spends a great deal of time at the beginning providing updates on Swami and what activities took place at Prashanti Nilayam over Christmas and New Years - along with a slideshow of pictures taken at each event. They really try to maintain that connection between Prashanti and Sai devotees in other parts of the world.

I don't know how many of you will remember this but several summers ago in Toronto, when the SARS epidemic hit, many musicians came together to perform at what we unofficially called SARS-stock or SARSapalooza - a benefit concert to improve tourism in Toronto. Some of my favourite bands were playing: AC/DC, the Rolling Stones, the Guess Who, Sam Roberts - it was the biggest concert in Canadian history. All of my friends bought tickets, and made sure to get me one as well. Unfortunately, due to certain parties exercising their parental discretion, I was not allowed to go at the last minute. In their defense though, as parents they were just looking out for my well-being. I mean, the all-knowing media was predicting deaths, heat-strokes, trampling and massive hysteria - an overall disaster (ahh, gotta love the media). Sure, nobody actually ended up dying, and sure, the whole thing went off like clockwork...but I can't really speak (or write) from experience. My ticket sits with its stub intact in my 'memories box' while my only memories of that day are from the clips I caught on Much Music.

I don't believe in having regrets because I try to remind myself that every choice, every act, every consequence bears some kind of important meaning to your life. BUT, if there was ever a moment that I could say I regretted something, it would probably have been never going to that concert (sad but true). Anyways, there is a point to this story which I'm getting to right now. On Friday, Z reminded me that one of our favourite bands, Radiohead, will be touring the UK and other parts of Europe in the summer. So we immediately checked the tour dates and ticket prices and decided to purchase tickets for their show in Manchester at the end of June! We are so excited to go see them. British rock in general is probably what I listen to the most. Everything from the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Coldplay, I love it all. And Radiohead is one of the most revolutionary bands to ever hit the scene (in my opinion at least). It may not be SARS-stock, but I'm healing...one concert ticket at a time...

Oh and one final bit of news: I'm going to Paris next month! Turns out February is a pretty slow time of year for travel. Especially right after Valentine's Day. So my girlfriend Nilufa and I decided to book a trip to Paris. Neither of us have ever been before - so we're both really excited to see the Louvre (which our Hotel is steps away from!), the Eiffel Tower, les champs d'elysees, etc etc. I also can't wait to go and practice my French - all these years of classes and finally I get to go to the land where it all started! I've seen the Paris of the East (Budapest) and now I get to see the real deal.

Last term there was this poster sale on campus. Z and I thought it would be a great idea to get a world map and hang it in our living room - so that we could see all the countries in Europe and check off all the places we visit throughout the year. Sometimes I just look at it though, and I am in complete awe of how vast and at the same time, how insignificant this world is. There's so many places I've never seen before, so many things I haven't experienced. My ignorance makes me feel anxious sometimes - I want to travel ceaselessly until that hunger for worldly knowledge has been completely satiated. And yet we're all so connected these days, through technology, globalization and modernity - we've become this little 'global village' as McLuhan would say. Reduced to a tiny spec within the entire universe.

Anyways, no good can come out of all this philosophical thought at 2 in the morning. Hope everything on that side of the pond is going alright for you! Until next week!

She's baaaaack!

Sometimes I truly believe there's no better feeling then after perfectly crafting your original piece of writing, you print it off, staple the pages, and shove it into the submission box! Even when you get back your mark, and you do really well - it's too instantaneous a joy. There's something much more exciting about prolonged happiness. Anyways, the important thing is that I never have to write another 3000-4000 word paper for this program again! It's two 2500 word papers and a 15,000 word dissertation...come to think of it, my current completion 'high' will be very short-lived.

Oh and don't worry, I won't go on talking about the content of this paper - I think there's been enough patriarch-bashing for one blog...but I will share the title with you (just because I was so proud of myself for coming up with such a creative heading): Mommies, Mall-Rats and Mistresses: Miss. Representation in the Media. Isn't it great? Alliteration, double-entendres...gotta love those literary devices. Hope it goes over well with my professors. Sometimes academia gets this awful reputation of being elitist, needing to sound so formal and complicated all the time. It's only a good theory if it's a complex one is the idea. But I've always thought that academics needs to be more accessible to the public. To me, it shows more skill and intelligence if you're able to explain your ideas simply. I mean think about it logically, the theories that scholars develop and write about are meant for society to adapt. Well if you're offering solutions to people's problems, why are you coding it in language that nobody will understand (except for your colleagues of course)? It's like there's this gap between the academic world and the real world. It's too bad really, because there's a lot of great ideas out there that never get implemented because they're too theoretical and no one understands them.

Which is why I've always preferred writing in a more casual, un-pretentious tone. Sometimes you have the unfortunate experience of a very traditional professor marking your paper - who believes that the harder it is to understand, the smarter the writer. Luckily that trend is nearly out-dated, and once you become a post-graduate student, people are much more accepting of creating your own writing style. So it's been a very liberating experience to finally have the freedom to express myself without compromising my grades.

I just wanted to take a moment to say how appreciative I am to have spent time with all my friends and family at home over the past break. I know there were a few of you I didn't get to see, and I’ll have to make that upto you next time I’m in town (sorry!). It was especially encouraging to know that so many of you actually follow up on my weekly posts, and are interested in what I have to say. Sometimes I'm not sure if my writing is falling on deaf ears (or blind eyes in this case) so it truly motivates me to maintain my blog when I know that someone's reading (besides my mom :p ).

So in my last entry, I posted a link to a youtube clip about the creation of a North American Union (similar to the European Union) that would be part of a goal by a group of elite men to have a one world government, where every citizen is chipped with an RFID implant (that's Radio-Frequency IDentification) which will control every aspect of life. All new American passports already have these tags embedded in them, and families have already volunteered to be inseminated with these tags as a safety precaution. So if it sounds like it could never happen: it already is. Eventually the entire world could run on an entirely electronic system. Paying for groceries, using the subway, all possible with a simple scan of your arm. So what would happen if you fell out of line with the government's laws? They could simply turn your chip off. Or in other words, disconnect you from the world.

What I discovered more recently about this clip, is that it's actually from a documentary called Zeitgeist (click to watch). The film is divided into three parts, each attempting to prove a theory:
1) Christianity and all world religions, are false myths based on pagan worship of the sun, and other astrological signs.
2) The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre were actually planned, funded, and executed by the American government.
3) Since WWI, the rich have been secretly manufacturing wars and other financial collapses to control the populace and become even richer and more powerful.

I know. It sounds like just another wonky conspiracy theory, right? Wrong. The truth is, that as radical as these ideas sound, for the most part, other people have been talking and writing about them for a long time. The difference is that this film neatly packages all three into a 2 hour documentary, leaving the viewer to make her/his own judgment call on whether there is a relationship between Christian ideology, International Bankers, and 9/11. The other big difference is that the website where you watch this movie (for free) has a separate references page, containing all the sources used to compile the film. From what I can tell, it all seems highly credible and logical.

I thought you would need some convincing to even watch the film let alone believe it's content. So below is a tiny snippet of what you can expect:

The biblical reference to the star in the East is in fact known as Sirius (the brightest star in the sky), which on the 24^th of December aligns with the 3 brightest stars in Orion’s Belt: also known today and in ancient times as the ‘three kings'. These stars all point to the rise of the sun on December 25^th, which is why the three kings are said to follow the star in the East, in order to locate the sunrise, the "birth of the sun" (aka God's Son). In ancient times, the sun was worshiped as the provider of life, the ultimate God. It makes perfect sense in these terms, that the sun would be anthropomorphised or personified by other religions as spiritual leaders.

The Virgin Mary comes from the sign Virgo (which means Virgin in Latin). The ancient glyph for Virgo is an altered M – explaining why the names of many religious figures’ mothers begin with an M (such as Adonus’ mother Myrra and Buddha’s mother Maya, and of course, Christ's mother Mary).

Although Zeitgeist makes a solid case to prove the myths of religion and unveil the truth behind 9/11 and international bankers, the greater point of the film, is to stop believing everything you hear. Don't blindly take what is written in newspapers and broadcasted on television for face value. Learn to do your own research - even with regards to the claims made in Zeitgeist. If you do a thorough enough job, the director believes you will reach the same conclusion he has. I know it's a lot to ask, to take the 2 hours to sit and watch this film on your computer. But after seeing it, I can tell you that it was an eye-opening experience (Sidenote: you may want to skip past the first 20 or so minutes, as it’s a continuous flash of war-related images). I've never been the most knowledgeable when it comes to History and Politics, and so for me, I learned a lot from watching this movie, and I think it's message is one we should all aim to practice:

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace" (Jimi Hendrix).

Some final thoughts of 2007

So I realize since I've been back in Canada, I haven't updated my blog at all - my apologies...I was rather busy spending time with all of you in person! The Christmas dinners, movie nights and dessert outings with all my friends and family have been a perfect refresher of home. Coincidentally, New Year's Eve happens to be the mid-point of my visit. I can't believe the time has passed so quickly.

There are a few things I wanted to share with everyone. First of all, if I wasn't able to tell you in person, my belated Christmas greetings to you! I hope you spent your holidays with the ones you love most. Check out our family e-greeting for a laugh!

Second, I know you're all probably tired of reading my bra-burning, feminist rants, but I just couldn't let Benazir Bhutto's assassination pass without making any type of commentary. It was truly a sad day for womankind. It was such an exciting time with Hilary Clinton's campaign and Bhutto's return to Pakistan...so much potential for both of them to win their respective elections. I think the most dis-heartening part of all this, is to know that in this day and age, people are still uncomfortable or threatened by the idea of women running for head of state positions. There's always a lot of talk about feminism being 'over'; women have achieved an equal status in society so what's there left to fight for. Clearly, a lot. Bhutto was definitely a fighter till the very end, refusing to allow threats to prevent her from doing her job. I hope that's how she is remembered.

And lastly, I recently came across this video from a friend's post and found it quite interesting...any thoughts on this North American Union? Is it real? Are you concerned?

I didn't think I could really top this year, what with graduating from university and getting into graduate school and moving away from home. There's been so many positive changes and I've always felt like I was guided in the right direction. But I'm actually looking forward to 2008. I get to finish what I started, graduate again, and begin a new search (read: career). I hope you all have equally exciting opportunities coming your way in the new year.

Peace.

The (supposed) cost of delaying marriage

So in about another 4 days I will be back on Canadian soil…and although I should probably make my last post in Leicester for 2007 about how excited I am to come home for Christmas, I’d rather leave you with this excerpt below. My friend Kathy had this posted on her facebook profile today, and I was entranced by every word. These days between Christmas shopping and packing, I’m working on my next paper, which deals with how the media shapes our social construction of gender, specifically femininity. Anyone who knows me well enough will realize that what I've posted below is a concept that I disagree with wholeheartedly. Nevertheless, as a fellow writer, I can appreciate the quality and style of her prose. I’ve included some of my thoughts at the end too. And I realize it’s a very long excerpt (sorry) but I honestly think it’s worth the time to read: men and women.

By Danielle Crittenden

Our grandmothers, we are told, took husbands the way we might choose our first apartment. There was a scheduled viewing, a quick turn about the interior, a glance inside the closets, a nervous intake of breath as one read the terms of the lease, and then the signing – or not. You either felt a man’s charms right away or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you entertained a few more prospects until you found one who better suited you. If you love him, really loved him, all the better. But you also expected to make compromises. The view may not be great, but it’s sunny and spacious (translation: he’s not that handsome, but he’s sweet-natured and will be a good provider). Whether you accepted or rejected him, however, you didn’t dawdle. My late mother-in-law, who married at twenty, told me that in her college circles in the mid-1950s, a man who took a woman out for more than three dates without intending marriage was considered a cad. Today, the man who considered marriage so rashly would be thought a fool. Likewise, a woman.

Instead, like lords or sailors of yore, a young woman is encouraged to embark upon the world, seek her fortune and sow her oats, and only much later – closer to 30 than 20 – consider the possibility of settling down. Even religious conservatives, who disapprove of sex outside of marriage, accept the now- common wisdom that it is better to put off marriage than do it too early. The popular radio host, Laura Schlessinger, traditional in so many of her views, constantly tells her listeners not to consider going to the altar much before thirty. In 1965, nearly 90 percent of women aged 25 to 29 were married; by 1996, only 56 percent of women in this age group were. Indeed, the more educated and ambitious a woman is the more likely she is to delay marriage and children, the Census Bureau reports. And if she doesn’t – if such a young woman decides to get married, say, before she is 25 – she risks being regarded by her friends as a tragic figure, spoken of the way wartime generations once mourned the young man killed in battle: "How unfortunate, with all that promise, to be cut down so early in life!"

I remember congratulating a young woman upon her recent marriage to a friend of mine and commenting perfunctorily that both of them must be very happy. She was 24 at the time. She grabbed my hand, held it, and said with emotion, "Thank you!" As it turned out, I’d been the only woman to offer her congratulations without immediately expressing worry that she’d done the wrong thing. Her single female friends had greeted her wedding announcement as a kind of betrayal. A few had managed to stammer some grudging best wishes. Her best friend nearly refused to be a bridesmaid. They simply couldn’t fathom why she’d tossed away her freedom when she was barely out of college. And she, in turn, couldn’t convince them that she really had met the man she wanted to marry, that she didn’t want to keep going out to bars in the evenings and clubs on the weekends, postponing her marriage for half a decade until she reached an age that her friends would consider more suitable.

In this sense, we lead lives that are exactly the inverse of our grandmothers’. If previous generations of women were raised to believe that they could only realize themselves within the roles of wife and mother, now the opposite is thought true: It’s only outside these roles that we are able to realize our full potential and worth as human beings. A 20-year-old bride is considered as pitiable as a 30-year-old spinster used to be. Once a husband and children were thought to be essential to a woman’s identity, the source of purpose in her life; today, they are seen as peripherals, accessories that we attach only after our full identities are up and running.

And how are we supposed to create these identities? They are to be forged by ourselves, through experience and work and "trial" relationships. The more experience we have, the more we accomplish independently, the stronger we expect our character to grow. Not until we’ve reached full maturity – toward the close of our third decade of life – is it considered safe for a woman to take on the added responsibilities of marriage and family without having to pay the price her grandmother did for domestic security, by surrendering her dreams to soap powders, screaming infants, and frying pans. But here is a price to be paid for postponing commitment, too. It is a price that is rarely stated honestly, not the least because the women who are paying it don’t realize how onerous it will be until it’s too late.

I remember having, in my early 20s, long and passionate conversations with my female friends about our need to be strong, to stand alone, to retain our independence and never compromise our souls by succumbing to domesticity. And yet at the same time, we constantly felt the need to shore each other up. We’d come across passages in books – paeans to the autonomy of the individual, replete with metaphors of lighthouses, mountains, the sea, etc. – copy them out carefully (in purple ink, on arty cards), and mail them to each other. It was as if despite our passion for independence, despite our confidence in ourselves as independent women, we somehow feared that even a gentle gust of wind blowing from the opposite direction would send us spiraling back into the 1950s, a decade none of us had experienced first-hand but one that could induce shudders all the same. Our skittishness was all the more surprising given that most of my friends’ mothers, as well as my own, worked at interesting jobs and had absorbed as deeply as we had the cultural messages of the time. When I look back upon it, I think our youthful yearning to fall in love must have been enormously strong and at war with our equally fierce determination to stay free. We were fighting as much a battle against ourselves as against the snares of domesticity. And if one of us were to give way, the rest would feel weakened in our own inner struggles, betrayed by our friend’s abandonment of the supposedly happy, autonomous life. For the truth is, once you have ceased being single, you suddenly discover that all that energy you spent propelling yourself toward an independent existence was only going to be useful if you were planning to spend the rest of your life as a nun or a philosopher on a mountaintop or maybe a Hollywood-style adventuress who winds up staring into her empty bourbon glass four years later wondering if it was all d--- worth it. In preparation for a life spent with someone else, it wasn’t going to be helpful.

And this is the revelation that greets the woman who has made almost a religion out of her personal autonomy. She finds out, on the cusp of 30, that independence is not all it’s cracked up to be. "Seen from the outside, my life is the model of modern female independence," wrote Katie Roiphe in a 1997 article for Esquire entitled "The Independent Woman (and Other Lies)." "I live alone, pay my own bills, and fix my stereo when it breaks down. But it sometimes seems like my independence is in part an elaborately constructed façade that hides a more traditional feminine desire to be protected and provided for: I admitted this once to my mother, an ardent 70s feminist … and she was shocked …. I rushed to reassure her that I wouldn’t dream of giving up my career, and it’s true that I wouldn’t."

Roiphe then goes on to puzzle over how a modern woman like herself could wish for a man upon whom she could depend. "It may be one of the bad jokes that history occasionally plays on us," she concluded, "that the independence my mother’s generation wanted so much for their daughters was something we could not entirely appreciate or want."

Unfortunately, this is a bit of wisdom that almost always arrives too late. The drawbacks of the independent life, which dawned upon Roiphe in her late 20s, are not so readily apparent to a woman in her early 20s. And how can they be? When a woman is young and reasonably attractive, men will pass through her life with the regularity of subway trains; even when the platform is empty, she’ll expect another to be coming along soon. No woman in her right mind would want to commit herself to marriage so early. Time stretches luxuriously out before her. Her body is still silent on the question of children. She’ll be aware, too, of the risk of divorce today, and may tell herself how important it is to be exposed to a wide variety of men before deciding upon just one. When dating a man, she’ll be constantly alert to the possibilities of others. Even if she falls in love with someone, she may ultimately put him off because she feels just "too young" for anything "serious." Mentally, she has postponed all these critical questions to some arbitrary, older age.

But if a woman remains single until her age creeps up past 30, she may find herself tapping at her watch and staring down the now mysteriously empty tunnel, wondering if there hasn’t been a derailment or accident somewhere along the line. When a train does finally pull in, it is filled with misfits and crazy men – like a New York City subway car after hours; immature, elusive Peter Pans who won’t commit themselves to a second cup of coffee, let along a second date; neurotic bachelors with strange habits; sexual predators who hit on every woman they meet; newly divorced men taking pleasure wherever they can; embittered, scorned men who still feel vengeful toward their last girlfriend; men who are too preoccupied with their careers to think about anyone else from one week to the next; men who are simply too weak, or odd, to have attracted any other woman’s interest. The sensible, decent, not-bad-looking men a woman rejected at twenty-four because she wasn’t ready to settle down all seem to have gotten off at other stations.

Or, as it may be, a woman might find herself caught in a relationship that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere or living with a man she doesn’t want to marry. Whatever her circumstances, the single woman will suddenly feel trapped – trapped by her own past words and actions – at the same moment other desires begin to thrust themselves upon her.

So much has been written about a woman’s "biological clock" that it has become a joke of television sitcoms: career women who, without warning, wake up one morning after thirty with alarm bells ringing in their wombs. Actually, the urge for children and everything that goes with them – not just a husband, but also a home and family life – often comes on so gradually that it’s at first easily brushed away. What a woman is aware of, at around the age of 26 or 27, is a growing, inchoate dissatisfaction, a yearning for more, even if her life is already quite full. Her apartment feels too quiet, her work, no matter how exciting or interesting, is less absorbing, and her spare time, unless packed with frenetic activities, almost echoes with loneliness: Think of an endless wintry Sunday afternoon unbroken by the sound of another voice.

She starts noticing the mothers all around her – especially young, attractive mothers – pushing strollers down the street, cooing at their babies in supermarkets, and loading up their shopping carts with enormous quantities of meat, vegetables, cans, jars, boxes of detergent, and packages of diapers, as she purchases a few meager items for her own dinner. All the horrors she once connected with babies – their noise and messiness, their garish plastic toys, their constant crying and demands that wear down and dull even the most strong-minded of women – are eclipsed by their previously underestimated virtues; their cuteness, their tiny shoes and mittens, their love and wonder, and, perhaps most enviable of all, the change of life they cause, pulling a woman out of herself and distracting her from her own familiar problems.

Alas, it’s usually at precisely this moment – when a single woman looks up from her work and realizes she’s ready to take on family life – that men make themselves most absent. This is when the cruelty of her singleness really sets in, when she becomes aware of the fine print in the unwritten bargain she has cut with the opposite sex. Men will outlast her. Men, particularly successful men, will be attractive and virile into their 50s. They can start families whenever they feel like it. So long as a woman was willing to play a man’s game at dating – playing the field, holding men to no expectations of permanent commitment – men would be around, they would even live with her! But the moment she began exuding that desire for something more permanent, they’d vanish. I suspect that few things are more off-putting to a man eating dinner than to notice that the woman across the table is looking at him more hungrily than at the food on her plate – and she is not hungry for his body but for his whole life.

So the single woman is reduced to performing the romantic equivalent of a dance over hot coals. She must pretend that she is totally unaware of the burning rocks beneath her feet and behave in a way that will convince a man that the one thing she really wants is the furthest thing from her mind. She might feign indifference to his phone calls and insist she’s busy when she’s not. When visiting friends who have small children, she might smile at them or politely bat them away or ask questions about them as if they’re a species of plant and she’s not someone particularly interested in botany. Whatever she does, though, she cannot be blamed for believing, at this point in her life, that it is men who have benefited most from women’s determination to remain independent. I often think that moderately attractive bachelors in their 30s now possess the sexual power that once belonged only to models and millionaires. They have their pick of companions, and may callously disregard the increasingly desperate 30-ish single women around them, or move on when their current love becomes to cloying. As for the single woman over thirty, she may be in every other aspect of her life a paragon of female achievement; but in her romantic life, she must force herself to be as eager to please and accommodate male desire as any 1920s cotillion debutante.

A woman’s decision to delay marriage and children has other consequences–less obvious than the biological ones and therefore harder to foresee. It is not simply the pressure of wanting a baby that turns those confident 25-year-old single career women you see striding through busy intersections at lunch hour, wearing sleek suits and carrying take-out salads to eat at their desks, into the morose, white-wine-drinking 35- year-old executives huddled around restaurant tables, frantically analyzing every quality about themselves that might be contributing to their stubbornly unsuccessful romantic lives.

By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age. The woman who avoids permanent commitment because she fears it will stunt her development as an individual may be surprised to realize in her 30s that having essentially the same life as she did at 18 – the same dating problems, the same solitary habits, the same anxieties about her future, and the same sense that her life has not yet fully begun – is stunting too.

For when a woman postpones marriage and motherhood, she does not end up thinking about love less as she gets older but more and more, sometimes to the point of obsession. Why am I still alone? she wonders. Why can’t I find someone? What is wrong with me? Her friends who have married are getting on with their lives – they are putting down payments on cars and homes; babies are arriving. She may not like some of their marriages – she may think her best friend’s husband is a bit of a jerk or that another one of her friends has changed for the worse since her marriage – but nonetheless, she will think that at least their lives are going forward while her gearshift remains stuck in neutral. The more time that passes, the more the gearshift rattles, the more preoccupied the woman becomes with herself and all her possible shortcomings in the eyes of men until she can think about little else.

This may be the joke that history has actually played upon us – and a nasty one it is. The disparity in sexual staying power is something feminists rather recklessly overlooked when they urged women to abandon marriage and domesticity in favor of autonomy and self-fulfillment outside the home. The generation of women that embraced the feminist idealization of independence may have caused havoc by walking away from their marriages and families, but they could do so having established in their own minds that these were not the lives they wanted to lead: Those women at least had marriages and families from which to walk away. The 33-year-old single woman who decides she wants more from life than her career cannot so readily walk into marriage and children; by postponing them, all she has done is to push them ahead to a point in her life when she has less sexual power to attain them.

Instead, she must confront the sad possibility that she might never have what was the birthright of every previous generation of women: children, a family life and a husband who – however dull or oppressive he might have appeared to feminist eyes – at least was there. As this older single woman’s life stretches out before her, she’ll wonder if she’ll ever meet someone she could plausibly love and who will love her in return or whether she’s condemned to making the rest of her journey on the train alone. She might have to forgo her hope of youthful marriage and the pleasure of starting out fresh in life with a husband at the same stage of the journey as herself. She may have to consider looking at men who are much older than she is, men on their second and third marriages who arrive with an assortment of heavy baggage and former traveling companions. These men may already have children and be uninterested in having more, or she’ll have to patch together a new family out of broken ones. Or, as time passes and still no one comes along, this woman might join the other older single women in the waiting rooms of fertility clinics, the ones who hope science will provide them with the babies that the pursuit of independence did not.

From a feminist view, it would be nice, I suppose – or at the very least handy – if we were able to derive total satisfaction from our solitude, to be entirely self-contained organisms, like earthworms or amoebas, having relations with the opposite sex whenever we felt a need for it but otherwise being entirely contented with our own company. Every woman’s apartment could be her Walden Pond. She’d be free of the romantic fuss and interaction that has defined, and given meaning to, human existence since its creation. She could spend her evenings happily ensconced with a book or a rented video, not having to deal with some bozo’s desire to watch football or play mindless video games. How children would fit into this vision of autonomy, I’m not sure, but surely they would infringe upon it; perhaps she could simply farm them out.

If this seems a rather chilling outcome to the quest for independence, well, it is. If no man is an island, then no woman can be, either. And it’s why most human beings fall in love, and continue to take on all the commitments and responsibilities of family life. We want the noise and embrace of family around us; we want, at the end of our lives, to look back and see that what we have done amounts to more than a pile of pay stubs, that we have loved and been loved, and brought into this world life that will outlast us.

We strengthen a muscle by using it, and that is true of the heart and mind, too. By waiting and waiting and waiting to commit to someone, our capacity for love shrinks and withers. This doesn’t mean that women or men should marry the first reasonable person to come along, or someone with whom they are not in love. But we should, at a much earlier age than we do now, take a serious attitude toward dating and begin preparing ourselves to settle down. For it’s in the act of taking up the roles we’ve been taught to avoid or postpone – wife, husband, mother, father – that we build our identities, expand our lives, and achieve the fullness of character we desire.

Still, critics may argue that the old way was no better; that the risk of loss women assume by delaying marriage and motherhood overbalances the certain loss we’d suffer by marrying to early. The habit of viewing marriage as a raw deal for women is now so entrenched, even among women who don’t call themselves feminists, that I’ve seen brides who otherwise appear completely happy apologize to their wedding guests for their surrender to convention, as if a part of them still feels there is something embarrassing and weak about an intelligent and ambitious woman consenting to marry. But is this true? Or is it just an alibi we’ve been handed by the previous generation of women in order to justify the sad, lonely outcomes of so many lives?

What we rarely hear – or perhaps are too fearful to admit – is how liberating marriage can actually be. As nerve-wracking as making the decision can be, it is also an enormous relief once it is made. The moment we say, "I do," we have answered one of the great crucial questions of our lives: We now know with whom we’ll be spending the rest of our years, who will be the father of our children, who will be our family. That our marriages may not work, that we will have to accommodate ourselves to the habits and personality of someone else–these are, and always have been, the risks of commitment, of love itself.

What is important is that our lives have been thrust forward. The negative – that we are no longer able to live entirely for ourselves – is also the positive: We no longer have to live entirely for ourselves! We may go on to do any number of interesting things, but we are free of the growing wonder of with whom we will do them. We have ceased to look down the tunnel, waiting for a train.

The pull between the desire to love and be loved and the desire to be free is an old, fierce one. If the error our grandmothers made was to have surrendered too much of themselves for others, this was perhaps better than not being prepared to surrender anything at all. The fear of losing oneself can, in the end, simply become an excuse for not giving any of oneself away. Generations of women may have had no choice but to commit themselves to marriage early and then to feel imprisoned by their lifelong domesticity. So many of our generation have decided to put it off until it is too late, not foreseeing that lifelong independence can be its own kind of prison, too.

From What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden. © 1999 by Danielle Crittenden. Published by Simon and Schuster. Reprinted by permission

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have never been one to tell others what they should do with their life or how they should do it. Crittenden on the other hand, paints a pessimistic portrait of what life looks like for the single 'older' woman, who decides to maintain her independence and develop autonomy instead of marrying and having children at a younger age. I guess it's her attempt at convincing young women to 'settle down' (God I hate that expression...really, who settles on a person?!) through the employment of fear tactics.

I've never understood why it always has to be either one or the other. All women should either return to their pre-WWII roles as mothers and wives OR they all should be working and rejecting traditional female roles. I always thought the whole point was for women to have the same freedom as men to choose how they want to live their life. Instead we have radical feminists arguing with the liberal feminists on the correct definition of 'woman' when we should all be encouraged to decide what our own path is and follow it, without judgement.

We never hear about how men need to take greater responsibility as fathers and husbands to create a more cohesive environment in the household. And yet, it's a social pandemic that women are putting off marriage and kids by a few years - even though our life expectancy has increased anyways to compensate for it. Although Crittenden includes many statistics, what she omits is that couples who marry later in life greatly reduce their risk of divorce. Instead, she wants women to get married before the age of 25 (and notice how she puts no expiry date on men). Do you realize that your brain doesn't finish growing until the age of 25? I have trouble picking vegetables at the store, and you want me to choose a husband? No thanks. And as for having children at a young age, if you're ready to have them then by all means you should. But seeing as how it's more likely that I will raise puppies or some other species of baby animals before a human one, I'm going to need all the time I can get to prepare for the greatest responsibility of my life. And whatever experience, knowledge and wisdom I gain in the time I use to develop my autonomy will become a great asset if/when I decide to raise children/a child.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I know of several young married couples. They are fortunate enough to find that person who compliments them perfectly and the search is over. That's great for them. And my mom once told me that you're only ready to have kids when you've found the right person to have them with, so maybe marriage and children are a package deal. But for those of us who are pursuing higher education or who wish to travel or who would like to earn a career and hope that one day, women will be paid the same amount as men and not 30% less, we should not be frowned upon for chasing other dreams.

A few years ago, I remember an uncle of mine telling me that he thought women should marry young, that they shouldn't be educated too much because knowledge is power and when women are educated they gain too much control. I think that was the defining moment I decided I wanted to do my phD. It's that type of mentality that scares me when I read excerpts like the one posted above. Because if women start returning to these social 'rules' out of fear, and planning their life according to the availability of men, where does it end? If we as women, look at ourselves as viable only for a certain period of time (and only for certain types of roles such as wife and mother), how can we expect men to see us any differently? Along with sexism, will we also have to deal with ageism? Will older women be considered worthless? Don't get me wrong. I think that being a wife and/or mother is even more of a full-time career than most occupations. It requires a lot of skill and intelligence, which I don't think every person possesses naturally. In fact there are many people who would be better off contributing to society in other ways than increasing the global population. I was reading an American survey not too long ago, in which the majority of men said the reason they want to get married is for companionship. Not for love, not for an exchange of intellect or emotion - they just want someone to appease their boredom. Are we giving them any reason to think otherwise by scrambling about in our early 20's to latch onto them? You get a roommate or a dog for companionship, not a wife. But that’s what we are comparable to now, man’s ‘playmate’. I refuse to just be someone's playmate.

By the way...

I've been putting off uploading these pictures of town...so here they are! It actually looks a lot better in person but, you can get an idea from these quick shots I took:

Oh and before I forget - my best bud Mel sent me this link to an article from the Globe and Mail about 'push presents'. Essentially, they're expensive gifts, usually jewelry, that new dads give to their partners for all their hard work in the delivery room. Oh yes, nothing says "I appreciate the nine months of carrying our child and the 8 hours it took to get her/him out" like a Tiffany's stackable diamond celebration ring. I'll bite my tongue from saying anymore about this phenomenon, but Mel and I thought it was just too fitting after last week's entry on commodification.

My brain is depleted...

Forgive me if I don't make any sense this week...I've just submitted my essay and I'm running low on brain power at this point.

The problem with academia sometimes is that it makes you feel so negative about everything. You're constantly problematizing life - journalism is bad because of commercialisation and they don't really report on truth anymore, just whatever sells. Images in media are really just creating a false reality, which in turn creates false needs that are resolved through capitalism. We're all living in a hyperreality, where our consciousness is duped into wanting stimuli and nothing more so we never pursue true fulfillment because we choose fantasy over reality. Monsieur Jean Baudrillard, theoretical genius, gives the example of a casino. You go inside a casino and everything is bright lights, constant supply of booze, happy people, games galore, you never know what time of day it is and the room is being pumped full of additional oxygen (betchya' didn't know that one!)...and you feel like you're in a fantasy land, where everything is a dream. They do that on purpose so that you think your money is also a part of the dream and spend it senselessly. Going to a casino becomes not about winning anymore, but just about experiencing the stimuli all at once and escaping reality.

You begin to question a lot of the choices you've made in the past. Like, are my desires really genuine, or have I just been brainwashed by what I see on tv and in movies to want those things? Especially with regards to the portrayal of women in media. I think it's something I'm so passionate about because I'm trying to find the answer myself. A lot of people don't realize it, but every day we're bombarded with such a limited view of women's roles in society and what femininity actually means. If we see ads of women at work, they're constantly in these fitted power suits with red lipstick and perfectly coiffed hair. If they're pregnant they're smiling and glowing and serene. We're constantly being defined by these roles of daughter, wife, mother, sex-object...have we come to regard women only through this small lens? And more importantly, have women come to only desire these 'accomplishments'?

Look at something as silly as cellulite. We see the ads all the time, the creams and the procedures to get rid of it. We've come to see cellulite as yet another unsightly imperfection of the female body. Do you know what feminists have to say about that? They see thinking of cellulite as an undesirable condition that needs to be treated harmful to women. Cellulite is a natural occurence in the body of post-pubescent women, and treating it would be no different than treating enlarged breasts or menstruation. It's yet another example of the pressure for women to maintain a more pre-pubescent appearance. And I'm sure at this point a lot of people reading this just felt really uncomfortable or awkward. What does that tell you about how we've been conditioned to regard the female form and its functions?

I just don't think it's realistic to look at life that way...we've created such unattainable expectations for ourselves. Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked marriage, work and having children were no walk in the park - let alone trying to do them AND looking fabulous all the time! And what's worse, is I think that we get disappointed with ourselves when we don't achieve these high expectations, and then commodities are there to make us feel better. Buy yourself a new pair of shoes and you'll temporarily cure that emptiness inside (and fuel the capitalist agenda that the economy thrives off of). That is until the shoes lose their novelty and you need to buy something else.

We all do it. We live in a consumer culture. After Z and I submitted our papers today you know what we did? Went to town to do our Christmas shopping. I finished writing a paper on how images in the media drive consumerism and I decided to celebrate by making a few purchases! Oh the irony...mind you, they were mainly purchases for other people - but I'm just trying to make a point here. We satiate our true needs with fleeting material desires.

But on the other hand, we kind of need media to keep everything together. On Friday our lecture was about globalization, and media's role in the nation-state and how countries depend on a national form of media to propagate patriotism and national identity. Everything from a national newspaper to reality shows that get the country involved (read: American Idol) help to build the nation-state. I don't know how many of you know this but I found it really interesting to learn that Belgium is actually divided into two parts: the French-speaking Wallonia and the Dutch-speaking Flanders. The country has apparently been having a lot of difficulty electing government officials and maintaining national identity because of this divide. One of the things we're going to discuss next week though is whether part of the reason they can't unify as one community has to do with the lack of a national news/media outlet. There is no single governing news forum for the entire country. Maybe if they had things like reality shows or a nation-wide news channel the two regions could bond more. Of course there's an obvious language barrier that would need to be resolved first. I guess everything would have to be issued in French and Dutch (and then the 10% German-speaking Belgians would feel left out no doubt).

And I guess in a nutshell, that's why media studies is so interesting. Because there's this constant dichotomy between good and bad. In some ways the media can be seen as having such a negative impact on people - shaping our minds with propaganda, masking reality. And in other ways, it's the glue that binds us together. This blog, for instance, would not be possible without media. I wouldn't even be able to share my thoughts with you on media without this medium. Interesting, isn't it? Or maybe it's not and I'm just a big media nerd.

So my last essay for the term is officially done. I still have a week left of classes and a total of ten days here before I come home for Christmas break. And now, I'm going to sit back, put my feet up, and watch the rest of A Very Merry Muppet Christmas while I indulge in my other love-hate relationship: brownie.