12:30 a.m. - 2003-10-23
Limitations
Two deliveries arrived by courier today. Early in the morning an unexpected one. Three boxes and two tubes of maps from Elections Canada. I just found places to stow all of the last round of work, but whatever. The kittens loved the packing paper. They made tunnels, did the walking on rice paper routine - "you must learn balance, Grasshopper" (Kung Fu)- and played tag and hide and seek in amongst the piles it made on the floor. The second delivery was the documents for my son's flight to Vancouver on Friday. One of the couriers caught sight of the kittens and asked if they were up for adoption. They said they had one eight month old kitten who was lonely. I hemmed and hawed, but gave them my phone number anyway. They needed to discuss it with their partner first, so it may not come to pass that I have to make a decision anyway.
So in the boxes was another binder full of instructions, CDs with more instructions, and diskettes - with more instructions. Add in the paper tools and two complete sets of maps as working material. This assignment even looks doable in the time I'm given, but I'll have to have a good look at what they want us to do with the voters' list. Can't do that until I wipe all the old software out of the computer and reload it with the new suite of software and data they've provided. Last time I had to go line by line through about 2000 pages of voters - 85,000 names - and addresses to clean up the database. Now that the boundaries have been changed it will depend how many problems arose when their IT did the table dumping, whether I will have to redo a lot of it or not. I'm actually looking forward to the work and the pay will keep me going for a while.
Watched a lot of movies the past few days and all of them have been entertaining in their own way. First up was "Bend It Like Beckham". It was funny and I think it did address a lot of the dilemmas families face when they try to move to a new country - I don't think any cultural group finds it an easy task. I know in this community that it people from the British Isles who sometimes find it the most difficult at first. The problem is that there is an assumption that since we were the colonies we still kept everything the same as in the old home. In a lot of cases that is true, but there are major shocks around issues of education and social status - social class if you will. There it's still all about family ties and the peerage system - here that's replaced by cash as the the social determiner. Personally I think both systems are wrong, but the idea of valuing each person as they are (or the almighty made them, if you will) isn't likely to catch on any time soon. Too bad. I was pleased to find that my little bit of punjabi was almost enough to catch all the jokes made in that language - bonus. Sat Sri Akal.
The second movie left me feeling a bit disoriented, because I wasn't prepared for it. For anyone who has experienced flash backs because of a trauma, or for someone like me who has gone through a near death experience, this movie can retrigger those sessions. The movie is called "Jacob's Ladder" with Tim Robbins starring. It was very well done and explores the phenomenon quite well. I didn't see anything demonic in my NDE but then I was only 19 and the event was very sudden and unexpected. I had few psychological fears of death then and even less now. My number two son had recommended it when he and P came to discuss her father's death. The topic at the time actually had to do with the concept of time and whether there really was a separation of past, present and future if there was no materiality. The movie reflected my temporal experiences during the NDE quite well even though the flow of the movie was linear.
The third movie was "Bullet Proof Monk" with Chow Yun Fat. It was very much an action picture - which I don't usually like, but the philosophy and observations about international terrorism and how it works were enough to keep me engaged in the process. There was a very thoughtful theme about looking past or beneath the surface of a person to find their value. Lots of sly comments about western physicists' attachment to some of their current theories too that made it quite entertaining. For about 3000 years Buddhism has described and understood more about quantum mechanics and synchronicity/chaos theory than current scientists have even thought about yet. I have every confidence, though, that they'll get it - in time.
The final movie was "Rabbit Proof Fence" about the apprehension of Aboriginie children in Australia and their placement in residential schools run by different faith groups in an attempt to reculture them to fit the dominant society. Very close to what was done here in Canada and with the same destruction to those children and their families. This must have been written with the help of an anthropologist because it took a very difficult and inflammatory issue and treated it with some balance. In a lot of ways it examines the issue of one person or one group deciding that they know better what's best for someone than the person or people themselves. Ask anyone who has a serious illness or a disability gained as an adult, what that feels like. It is incredibly damaging psychologically to have the right to control one's own destiny completely removed against your will, because of a societal norm that designates you as of lesser stature or intelligence based on that one defining characterisitic without regard to everything else you are. I'm starting to feel a rant coming on so I think I'll go to bed now dear diary. I have too much to do tomorrow to not get any sleep. Good Night.
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