a day in the life of the toronto reference library

whenever i am at a library i like to find little nooks to sit in, surrounded by stacks of books/books left on random shelves by previous readers and a comfortable chair and a thin layer of musty, literary, secret nook dust. i especially like it when there is a small, awkward window near it so i can peek out into the world when i am looking for a moment of cranny release.

but today i was drawn to the openness of the main lobby, to the communal sharage of space. also, i was digging the bright red carpet by the west-facing window, a colour i conventionally, obsessively shy away from. so i compromised my nookness with the main lobby pull and sat by the first floor window that looks out over yonge street. i was uneasy at first, my OCD rattling and viciously gnawing at the bars inside the temporary cage i had designed in my brain. but i was comfortable and i was enjoying watching all the interesting people on the street in front of me. and there was a heater to my right and a potted tree behind me, which made it feel... homey. or something.

and then there was yelling. in the main lobby. and then someone threw a chair. at another person. then everyone was yelling. and the police came. everyone in the communal section around me started moving and swearing and voyeuring. most of them left.

my cage crashed.

i moved.

stupid red carpet.

my cause braclet is better than your cause bracelet...

a post that never made it...

just over a year ago i had a bit of a 'falling out' with a community of women that had been my inspiration, my family, my passion, and my nourishment since the first year i identified as a "post-secondary student". i cringed as i watched it deteriorate into an institutional, bureaucratic 'vagina club' disguised as a progressive social movement. i listened to vacant, neo-liberal vomit tacitly invade the 'campaign' rhetoric and watched in disgust as many self-worshipping ladies ooh'ed and ahh'ed over their own photos posted in our community space; a beautiful, safe space that was increasingly becoming sexualized and exploitative and unwelcoming. it felt like each day they became more and more divorced from their herstory, less interested in cultural education, and covertly estranged from their democratic principles and grassroots philosophies. they began to obsess over policy and hierarchy. they began to criticize the people they were advocating for. they began to villainize dissident voices. and it made us want to speak and cry and rage more.

so we did.

i read an article recently called "the problem with youth activism" that has challenged me to think: where the fuck are the days when being a student activist meant risking your body and your academic future in the cry for a genuine revolution? not squabbling over which colour bracelet you are going to sell or where you can order the cheapest campaign t-shirts oblivious to whether or not they are drenched in a sweatshop, chemical-cotton history. where are the outraged, the self-critical, the resisters, the radical fucking actions of our young people? the author is right: contemporary academia has subdued our storm, trained us to procedurize and fluff our political energy and determination. she laments that our post-secondary institutions have become sites for "weekly club meetings" and self-congratulatory, ideologically-safe "gen y'ers" on cheap, anti-whatever cocaine.

it is a trendy argument about trendy activism, i know. i can accept the self-irony.

on the way down to a recent protest, i got into a discussion with the people i was travelling with regarding the "greening" of corporate america/canada. and it fuelled a growing discomfort i am developing with my personal philosophies about avenues for/of social change. i went through a phase awhile back where i adopted a certain distaste for the self-righteous "perfect activist". what the fuck is a "perfect activist" right? the other side of the double-edged sword. i mean, how can you preach inclusivity and democracy and accountability if you are only willing to listen to the granola labia-pierced birkenstock subculture of the radical left? (again, i recognize the self-irony here, trust me.) why isn't it enough that people in the infant stages of their global mindfulness are at least STARTING to recognize the rape of our earth and our women and our southern neighbours? can we accept that it is manifesting in organic wal-mart food? celebrity hybrid-drivers? lululemon sweaty yoga? vegetarian-turned teenagers who think that meat is, like, sooo bad? polite, administration-approved campus campaigning?

i don't fucking know.

all i know is that it is time for me to heal my relationship to the community of women that once inspired and deserted me. because i can't change this human-forsaken planet on my own...

post-work ranting sessions in an overstimulating penis bar

goodgoddamn i love wine. ESPECIALLY served in a lame fishbowlish glass, with greasy deep dish pizza and a cheap-ass game of texas on every one of the 37 televisions within distracting after distracting view.

i am so fucking classy.

we could have chatted about our failure of a non-proportional, disasterish electoral system and subsequent harpernomics landslide into arts cuts and corporate blowjobbing and 3 more years of an intrusive bullshit war in afghanistan...

we could have chatted about our imploding global economic instability, poetically aggravated by our november contract end date. This possibly could have lead to a provocatively rampant display of anti-capitalist "damn the man" broohaha-ing and the paralyzing acknowledgment of our looming financial crises...

we could even have chatted about canadian activist maude barlow's appointment as the UN's first senior advisor on water issues. or the recent syrian-canadian "terrorist" cases. or the first ever queer film festival deliciously gracing the progressive parts of the uwo campus this weekend...

but no.

we end up bitching about our self-prescribed, psycho-social dysfunctions and my PTSD-inducing gynecological visit.

i just love that twenty-something angst.