Incite Magazine - March 2008

incite

10TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL

10 | 05 m a r c h 2 0 0 8

The minimum wage is going up.

If you're an employer, here's what you need to know.

General Minimum Wage

Students under 18 and working not more than 28 hours per week or during a school holiday

Liquor Server

Hunting & Fishing Guides: for less than five consecutive hours in a day

Hunting & Fishing Guides: for five or more hours in a day whether or not the hours are consecutive

Homeworkers (people doing paid work in their home for an employer)

Current wage rate

$8.00/hour

$7.50/hour__

$6.95/hour

$40.00

$80.00

110% of the minimum wage

Mar. 31, 2008 wage rate

$8.75/hour

$8.20/hour__

$7.60/hour

$43.75

$87.50

110% of the minimum wage

On March 31, 2008, the general minimum wage will increase to $8.75 per hour from the current rate of $8.00 per hour.

To find out more about how the new minimum wage guidelines affect employers and employees, call or visit the Ministry of Labour web site.

Paid for by the Government of Ontario

1-800-531-5551

www.ontario.ca/minimumwage

incite Editing and Production Co–ordinator Rob Lederer Editors Muneeb Ansari Zsuzsi Fodor Katie Huth Layout Co–ordinator Ana Nikolic Graphics Co–ordinator Erin Giroux Poetry Co–ordinator Alexis Motuz

Chris Evans Ben Freeman Kate Mackeracher

Graphics and Layout Boram Ham Yang Lei Josh Rosen Michelle Tian Anne van Koeverden Jenny Zhan

Contributors Matt Beall Nick Davies David Mackenzie Ishani Nath Andrew Prine Tamara Sandor Laurence Scott Eric Tam Siva Vijenthira John Wyeth Assistant Editors Elise McCormick Printing Hamilton Web Printing

Chris Hilbrecht Ishani Nath Simon Routh Brianne Tulk Lisa Xu

Patrick Byrne Ying Ying Li Dan Milisavljevic Hilary Noad Sarah Roger Kerry Scott Jacob Stewart–Ornstein Will van Engen Catherine M.A. Wiebe

Manisha Phadnis

Impact Youth Publications 119 South Oval Hamilton, ON L8S 1R2 incite@mcmaster.ca http://www.incitemagazine.ca Incite is published six times per academic year by Impact Youth Publications. 10,000 copies are distributed in the McMaster University–Westdale area. Entire contents copyright 2007– 2008 Impact Youth Publications. Letters up to 300 words may be sent to the above address; they may be edited for length and clarity and will not be printed unless a name, address, and daytime phone are provided. Opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Incite’s staff or Impact Youth Publications.

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EDITORIAL

erhaps the greatest honour to bestow on a family member—or the weightiest bet to place in a game of poker—is to offer the name of your first–born child. While no one has ever sincerely provided me with this legacy, the greatest compliment I have ever received comes strikingly close: “I love you like my unborn child,” bellowed in ecstasy by a friend after I righted a slide show problem just hours before we presented in first–year Bio, will, I think, forever remain the best, and most creative, flattery I am ever paid.

Second to that compliment is a remark the editor of Incite made to me during my first full year working with the magazine, when she told me that I wrote great opening sentences—this was in response to my introductory confession to loving Kelly Clarkson, specifically the song “Since U Been Gone” (do note that this occurred in 2005, although little has changed). This praise affected me at first because, as a wee second year, I had somehow managed to impress a mighty and wise close–to– graduating student. It has stuck with me, however, because I have begun to recognize the importance yet extreme difficulty of writing an effective opening.

My sister was recently featured in a community theatre production where her character, a struggling writer, thought she had penned an eternally significant opening line: “Happy families are all alike;

every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Her onstage persona really had come up with a great first sentence and one that has stood the test of time; I know this (as did most of the audience), because her character unwittingly borrowed it from the opening of Anna Karenina.

This kind of creative hardship is typical.

What university student is unfamiliar with the disheartening glow of a blank computer screen, McCain pizza pocket in hand, as the sun rises on another essay due date?

All of this goes to show how tough it is to devise a unique and effective introduction; but, despite the frustration that comes with pouring time and effort into just a few lines, being memorable right off the bat is key. Why else would we spend so many slumber parties gossiping (or fantasizing) about our first kiss? Or put such emphasis on drawing first blood in a hockey game?

Without Kafka’s famous opening line, Gregor Samsa wouldn’t have awoken to find that he had become an insect; and what would All Saints’ “Never Ever” be without its “A few questions that I need to know…” spurned–lover opening monologue? Let’s face it—Stacy and Clinton are right; first impressions really do count.

Last March, when I found out I was going to be the new editor of Incite, I was incredibly nervous about my suitability for the position. Sure, I had spent almost two and a half years writing for the magazine, but for the bulk of that time I authored a pop culture column, a topic somewhat atypical

for the publication up until that point. I was worried that my in–depth knowledge of 90s pop and reality TV would no longer be an asset and prepared to educate myself in subjects more characteristic of the pages of Incite, by subscribing to The Economist and The Walrus.

As usual, summertime laziness got the best of me and my political know– how progressed only slightly, mainly thanks to The Daily Show. Over the past months as editor, and in particular during the production of this issue—our 10th anniversary—I have come to realize that my idle tendencies coincide with one of this publication’s great strengths: with every new editorial team comes a different set of experiences and knowledge that leads to the constant redefinition of the magazine.

My inadequacies as a political commentator certainly altered the magazine, but I’m not so sure that’s such a bad thing.

Incite’s mandate is only a vague sketch— to be an alternative, “for the students” voice on–campus that, of course, supports great writing and visual art—and, because of this, it can be refocused by every new editing team. Each group of writers and editors can, working in tandem, without restraint but relying on their own interests and knowledge, pen new first sentences, as tough as that may be, constantly remaking the magazine into what they think it should be, without worry that they will spoil what has already been written. With an ever–evolving team, Incite is constantly in

flux, changing focus, and I think that makes for a fun and dynamic environment and publication.

To ring in Incite’s 10th birthday, writers from the past and present—from founders to first years—have offered a diverse batch of articles. I hope that this sampling can, in some way, celebrate the vast number of voices, the different personalities that have gone into recreating the magazine every year since its inception. It is these Incite alumni who have transformed the publication, who have redefined it, and it is those first–year contributors who will continue to make this magazine their own in the years to come, if they have not already begun to do so.

Sure, coming up with original first sentences can be rough: you can spend days twiddling your thumbs, looking for new YouTube videos to divert your attention, and throwing spontaneous living–room dance parties for your housemates before stumbling upon the right opening words.

I hope that the perhaps stark absence of politically–charged debate in Incite this year hasn’t turned any readers off. And, I hope that next year’s editorial team does not feel pressure to insert multitudinous America’s Next Top Model allusions into every article.

Rather, I would like to see, as I’m sure will happen, Incite continue to change, to evolve into something unexpected, because, unlike all happy families, not every magazine edition can or should be alike.

INSIDE FEATURES

6 Malice in Wonderland 7 I don’t want to sell handicrafts 8 Impostor Syndrome 10 Love in the Digital Age 12 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Incite 16 Letter from San Francisco 18 The Human Conditioner Laurence Scott muses about Sarah Silverman Kerry Scott on looking beyond victimhood The pitfalls of graduate school

Why breaking up is hard to do

Back cover art by Jenny Zhan

The word from two of Incite’s founders Graduate school, West–Coast style

21 Ode 2 Britney 22 Confessions of a TA 24 Womb Raider 26 The River Stynx 29 Tastes like White Things 30 Gray Matter Original Poetry

A TA tells all about how to be manipulated Or, the art of keeping things going The inner workings of the cruise ship world Original Fiction

Confessions of a McMaster graduate

Incite investigates shampoo

DEPARTMENTS

Cover art by Simon Routh Cover design by Ana Nikolic

4 15 20 25

Happenings: News from Near and Far In Search Of: Study space on campus Column: Trappings Column: Myths

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happeninGs

MINUTES FROM LAST MONTH selected news from near and far

Electoral Dysfunction What a debacle these MSU Elections have been. After a whirlwind five–day campaign filled with ridiculous promises of a fall Reading Week and courseware printed by the Underground, over 4000 students voted on 5 and 6 February. It was the highest turnout in recent presidential election history, but the members of the Elections Committee probably weren’t smiling as they sifted through all those pieces of paper during the count, the recount, and the re– recount.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

During the time initially scheduled for that first count, those adorable bureaucratic monkeys managed to stay up all night talking about Joel Leavitt’s campaign misdemeanours instead, eventually disqualifying him for reasons undeclared. What could they possibly have discussed for more than 11 hours? Rumour has it that early campaigning and drunken partisan fights played into his disqualification. Student government: too exciting for words!

Three days later, the postponed count resulted in victory for Jerimi “J” Jones, deep–voiced Christian rapper and self– proclaimed MS–Youuu Soulja Boy, by a margin of eight votes. J Jones exuber-

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inside the bubble

antly strutted through the student centre signing autographs while the Chief Returning Officer of the Elections Committee resigned.

Second–place candidate “Think” Azim Kasmani immediately appealed the decision, resulting in a recount laced with controversy. The new Chief Returning Officer excluded over 70 ballots as having been counted twice. And so, Kasmani, whose written eloquence almost makes up for his on–stage skittishness, was proclaimed the winner by 96 votes. Poor J Jones immediately set up a Facebook group “open forum” about his sudden and stinging loss. How, he asked, could this have happened? Like, was it fair? Constructive discussion only, please! He later “shut down” the group by removing its wall, and roundly scolded its 200–odd members for their rudeness.

The third count happened nearly a month after the original election, to general malaise. This time, Kasmani lost by a single vote. As one Internet poster put it: “Azim Kasmani. Double MSU fail.”

At the time of Incite’s publication, we’re all expecting another vote, and 4000 new pieces of paper to shuffle and lose and double–count. Come now, people.

It’s 2008. When are we going to move online?

What the ESL?

McMaster’s Centre for Student Development (CSD) is discontinuing its daytime English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. Evening sessions elucidating conversational English and culture will continue to be run at McMaster by the Hamilton–Wentworth District School Board, but rigorous courses devoted to reading, writing, and presenting academic English for non–native speakers have been sacrificed by the university due to budget constraints.

The instructors, who had been expecting an expansion of the programme due to overwhelming demand, were startled at the news. One knowledgeable member of McMaster’s administration gave this articulate explanation: “Innovation in leadership networks dynamic corporate partnerships diversity discovery research university of the YEAR!” The strained budget, however, will not affect the CSD’s Mindfulness Meditation Group, much to the relief of McMaster’s rising population of anxious pseudo–Buddhists.

MSU encourages Mac students to SHARE The MSU has launched a website that aims to inform prospective students about off–campus housing. Endowed with a name that collapses into a heart– warming acronym, the McMaster Student Housing and Rental Evaluation (Mac SHARE) allows students to post and peruse reviews of apartments, houses, and rental rooms. MSU President Ryan Moran pointed out that the website was one of his campaign promises, claiming that 21 reviews were submitted in its first day. Aside from a holistic scale that ranges from “poor” to “excellent,” students can rate properties based on their appearance, location, access to parking, maintenance, and even the proficiency of landlords in “communication, competence and professionalism.” Only students with a valid student number can submit reviews, all of which are kept anonymous. This will protect them from the wrath of any computer–savvy but unprofessional landlords that happen to get skewered.

Compiled by Chris Evans, Kate MacKeracher, and Siva Vijenthira

Here come the Men in Red UNITED STATES—Have you ever wondered what would happen in the event of an extraterrestrial visit to Earth? Do military and emergency response units actually have contingency plans in place? Apparently firefighters do. The Fire Officer’s Guide to Disaster Control, a training manual used in firehouses across the United States, contains a chapter specifically geared towards a potential UFO attack. Complete with illustrations, the chapter cites engine malfunction, radio trouble, and electrical shortages among the list of potential dangers when responding to a UFO landing. Strangely absent is the tried, tested, and true Will Smith approach.

when he rammed into the back of Marlon Cantoral’s car. Cantoral fled to a nearby correctional facility, Sullivan in hot pursuit, shouting, “My name is Jack Bowers [Bauer] and I work for the FBI and the Secret Service. My wife and family was kidnapped by the president and terrorist.” Sullivan doesn’t remember much, but said that he has been undergoing treatment for alcohol abuse since the incident.

Take sexy back

BALTIMORE—A college student was put under probation after attacking a man he thought was a terrorist and claiming that he was Jack Bauer, from the TV show 24. Edgar Sullivan, 23, was driving down the interstate

COLUMBUS,OH—A top executive from Victoria’s Secret has said that the lingerie company has become “too sexy” for its own good. “We’ve so much gotten off our heritage... we use the word sexy a lot and really have forgotten the ultra feminine,” said Sharen Turney, CEO of Victoria’s Secret. Concerned by declining profits, Turney wants to increase the line’s level of sophistication, focus on product quality, and get back to the company’s roots. The chain got its start in San Francisco when Roy Raymond, embarrassed by buying lingerie for his wife,

Moral high ground

Death penalty

ISRAEL—A recent study conducted by Benny Shanon of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University suggests an alternate explanation for the biblical story of Mount Sinai and the Ten Commandments. Shanon claims that instead of receiving divine revelation, the Israelites were in fact intoxicated with a narcotic. Two plants in the Sinai desert were found to contain the same psychoactive molecules as those in powerful hallucinogens from the Amazon. Shanon says the events described in the Book of Exodus—the lightning, trumpet, and so on—can all be attributed to the drugs’ effects.

He writes, “in advanced forms of inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings” and “on such occasions, one often feels that in seeing the light, one is encountering the ground of all Being ... many identify this power as God.” How can Shanon claim that the drug has these affects? He says that he’s “partaken of the ... brew about 160 times in various locales and contexts.” No word yet on whether he’s come up with his own set of Commandments.

FRANCE—A village in southwestern France has come up with an interesting solution to a lack of cemetery land. The graveyard currently being used has run out of space, and attempts to acquire adjoining land were struck down in court. The local mayor’s solution? Prohibiting locals from dying, under threat of punishment. In an ordinance posted in council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told residents, “All persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish.” It goes on to add: “Offenders will be severely punished.” The mayor defended his action claiming it was no laughing matter. As the exact nature of punishment was not outlined, we can only wonder what will happen when someone calls the mayor’s bluff.

Driving under the influence… of the Fox Network

in north america...

opened the store in 1977 as a place where men could shop comfortably.

Anti–Bush Idol WASHINGTON,D.C.—Efforts to protest against President Bush and Vice–President Cheney’s policies are becoming increasingly sophisticated and creative, with the hope that they may finally yield results in the long search for justice by international civil society. On 4 March, residents in two Vermont towns voted to instruct police to arrest the two men for “crimes against our Constitution,” and then “extradite them to other authorities that may reasonably contend to prosecute them.” The measure is non–binding and purely symbolic. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan, rights activists are offering up a 1000–dollar reward for the best song to protest the US air force base in the country.

The winner gets to perform it at a protest in front of the US embassy in April. Our vote goes to the sure–to–be–a–hit “Leave on your Jet Planes”.

Il Beats

NEW YORK—In a show of cultural diplomacy, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra played a landmark concert in North Korea earlier this week. The concert included works by Western composers and a popular Korean folk song, “Arirang”. The event marked the largest American presence in the country since the end of the Korean War and has been hailed by some as a diplomatic triumph. Comparisons have been drawn between it and past US orchestral visits to both the Soviet Union and China. It remains to be seen whether it will strengthen diplomatic ties, and whether it will legitimize the present regime domestically.

The reclusive leader Kim Jong– Il did not attend the event.

Compiled by Muneeb Ansari and Will van Engen.

...and around the world

Globamazation JAPAN—In another example of his knack for gaining support in the unlikeliest of constituencies, Barack Obama has made it big in Japan.

More specifically, in the town of Obama. Residents are intrigued by their town’s namesake candidate and have been following his campaign

closely. The city government hopes that a successful run will increase tourism and boost the local economy. Local businesses have designed posters, headbands, and t–shirts with Barack’s face and an “I heart Obama” slogan. Bakeries are designing Japanese–style sweet bean cakes with Obama’s portrait on them. After Hilary Clinton’s wins in Texas and Ohio broke Barack’s 11–state winning streak, many residents sang and danced to cheer the candidate up. All the commotion has not gone unnoticed, and the town can claim one victory: a letter from the candidate thanking Mayor Toshio Murakami for sending him chopsticks and a Japanese good–luck charm.

Barack wrote, “I’m touched by your friendly gesture...We share more than a common name; we share a common planet and common responsibility.” Apparently Barack hasn’t been told that Obama, Japan has no delegates at the Democratic Party convention.

Paint by sound UNITED KINGDOM—Thanks to man’s second best friend, cybernetics, a colour–blind artist in the UK is now able to recognize and paint in 360 different colours. Neil Harbisson, 25, suffers from achromatop-

sia—characterized by a complete lack of cone cell activity—rendering him unable to process colours. A camera fitted to his head picks up the frequency of the colour in focus, converts it by way of a backpack laptop into sound, which is then fed into an earpiece. Harbisson will present his first exhibition this April in London.

Manga Bible UNITED KINGDOM—He’s dark; he’s moody; he’s the Lord Jesus Christ. The Manga Bible, by British artist Ajin–bayo Akinsiku, is sweeping Britain, garnering rave reviews from the Christian community. Drawn in the Japanese manga style, the graphic novel has sold over 30 000 copies in the UK, making it the country’s bestseller in this genre. The novel packs the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, into only 200 pages. Along with the Txt Msg Bible and the 100 Minute Bible, The Manga Bible places itself in a long line of biblical adaptations aimed at making God’s message more palatable to the lazy but salvation–deprived public.

Compiled by Muneeb Ansari and Will van Engen.

incite 5

Poor, angry Giovanni! Both he and rubbery Pete Burns are wary of some dark personality lurking behind the American gush. But what lurks behind?

This transatlantic tension is excitingly embodied in the comedy of Sarah Silverman, who gives one caricatured option of what lurks behind by marrying the upbeat American manner with the world–weary malice of Europe. I was a fan of Silverman from the first YouTube clip I saw of her Jesus is Magic movie, in which she jokes how, to motivate her niece to win at tag, she tells her that every time she loses a beautiful angel gets full–blown AIDS. Sarah Silverman is pertinent here for the way in which her comedy relies upon being taken initially for a gleaming–smiled, cutesy American girl. I say girl because her tendency is to infantilise herself through goofy mannerisms, such as ending a set of ethnic jokes by skipping off–stage swinging her arms. As Alex Renton wrote in England’s Observer magazine in 2006, Silverman’s “teeth work hard for her act: the super–clean smile takes the toxic edge

By Laurence Scott 6 incite

meta–bigotry, censorship—or at least disapproval— occurs from a fear that it could be damaging to literalists.

In fact, the thrilling value of watching Silverman is the sense that you do feel somewhat damaged.

What I find most dangerous and important about her is that she makes me question what it is I am laughing at. Is the joke funny because I’m actually a racist, or is it the irony that I’m enjoying? It is not always comfortable or possible to isolate the source of our laughter, but Silverman makes us aware of this ambiguity. For such bravery alone, I love her, and not in the Traci Bingham way.

About the Author Laurence wrote linguistically flashy, if philosophically gauche, op/ed columns for Incite in his second and fourth years at McMaster. He then studied creative writing at Trinity College Dublin and, after taking an unlikely hiatus in the world of investment management, has returned to comparative literature, his dark mistress, at King’s College London. His PhD is on the aesthetics of terror in the novels of London and Paris.

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PERSPECTIVE

I can see you, many years from now, coming through our village in the ugly, fat American motor car you will surely have by then and looking at me and looking at us and tasting our wine and shitting on us with those empty smiles Americans wear everywhere and which you wear all the time.

off the jokes.” Without employing this wholesome, innocent aesthetic, her dark humour likely would be unpalatable. But at the same time, while allowing the audience to stomach her subject matter, the cutesiness itself becomes a target, and is often exposed as disingenuousness.

In this way it is Sarah who is magic, in that she tricks us into laughing about rape, racism, 9/11. In fact we are not laughing at these horrors, at least not as much as at the fool who is blundering through an understanding of them. By sacrificing her stage persona’s morals, Silverman exposes some of our own hypocrisies: the lip service we sometimes pay to compassion and solemnity, the chill of ego beneath the warmth of our daily faces. If people are offended by her it is because they believe that events such as 9/11 are desecrated by humour. In this sense, Silverman is of the camp tradition, which operates on the grounds that the funniest things in life are also the most tragic, and that laughter does not equal desecration.

As well as camp, Silverman’s treatment of political correctness also groups her in the genre of “meta–bigotry,” the purpose of which is to challenge prejudices through satirising the ways in which people talk about and negotiate issues of race and class.

The problem, as Renton points out, is that meta–bigotry, unless perfectly pitched, can easily be perceived as simply bigotry. A friend of mine asked me the difference between Silverman and Bernard Manning, who was a famous English stand–up comic of the 1970s.

His undoubtedly racist material got him banned from television from the 1980s onwards, though he continued to draw crowds to his stand–up. The difference is primarily that Silverman is not racist, as Manning surely was.

Speaking on The View in 2007, Silverman distinguished her style from the notorious incident with Michael Richards by saying that he had evidently had a “melt–down,” whereas her “racist jokes were carefully thought out and planned.” Even here she is being ironic, and ultimately it is the irony with which she tackles this material that differentiates her from literally racist comics such as Manning. Of course, as is the usual threat for satirists, she is sometimes taken at face value.

Silverman has confessed to being dismayed when an unnamed rock star once approached her and said how much he loved her work, and then displayed precisely the racist attitude that her jokes lampoon.

But I don’t believe, like dear old Plato did, that the arts should have to account for the unsophistication of their viewerships. One of Silverman’s main English influences is Jennifer Saunders, whose Absolutely Fabulous anti–heroine Eddie once shrieked, “just tax the stupid people!” This outcry is a hysterical way of saying that adults should not be censored or nannied for the sake of keeping certain people safe. In the case of

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hen I was studying in Dublin in 2002, Jordan, the full–blooded Canadian in my programme, was affability personified. Sometimes we would exploit his kindnesses, take over his posh studio flat in the centre of town, eat his food, do sexy things in his bed without him. A phrase by which he became known was a loud, generous uttering of “Sure!...I can do that,” which the cluster of smoking, hard–eyed British students found lovable but hilarious. That said, one time I tried to kiss him and he punched me in the nose, which shows that even a Canadian’s affability has its limits.

The Brits’ bemusement seems to be a variation of a long–running cultural clash between “old” and “new” worlds. The validity of national character is not to be assumed flippantly, but is it, let’s say, generally, the case that North Americans are friendlier than the British? Of course, Canadians are not Americans, and Jordan was sincere, while the historical collision between nice and nasty has tended to centre on a European distrust of American squeaky–cleanness.

A good example occurred during the 2006 celebrity version of the English Big Brother. For those unfamiliar with Pete Burns, he is the former lead–man of ‘80s band Dead or Alive, most famous for spinning us right round, baby, right round. Burns has spent a substantial proportion of the royalties from this perennial hit on transforming himself cosmetically into a cross between Renee Russo and Michael Jackson. Fellow housemate Traci Bingham, the busty, well–meaning Baywatch actress, was unlucky enough to stumble into one of Burns’s bad moods. Traci was expressing her admiration for obscure UK singer, Preston. Pete used this moment to begin a rant about Los Angeles hyperbole, telling her that her use of the word “love” was so frequent as to be meaningless.

“Pure fuckin’ insincere Hollywood shite,” he said, adding later, “You’re insincere to the point of nausea.”

Afterwards he joked poolside with Dennis Rodman (talk about going down the rabbit hole) that he had picked the fight with Traci because he was bored.

A more literary example can be found years earlier, in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956).

Giovanni, the Italian tending bars in Paris, is fighting with his American lover, David, telling him what would have happened if he had stayed in Italy with the woman who had borne his child.

Graphic by Boram Ham

“I

PERSPECTIVE

don’t want to sell handicrafts,” the sex worker said; “I can make five dollars just for lying on my back for a few minutes.”

For development workers, hearing statements like these can feel a bit like a punch in the gut.

This woman lives in a squatter settlement on the outskirts of a mining town in South Africa. If she isn’t already HIV–positive, odds are that she will be in a few more years. Other sexually transmitted infections are also rampant, infrastructure is nearly nonexistent, condoms rarely used, and gender–based violence common. She and about 400 other women migrated to the region to sell sex to the mine workers living in all–male barracks miles from village homes.

But she doesn’t want a neat and tidy income generation project. And although probably the most unabashed, she is not alone in her attitude. Many women in the same slum revealed that they had chosen sex work and left the deprivation, conflict, and abuse of village life not simply out of desperation or coercion. Sex work, as health psychologist Catherine Campbell points out in Letting them Die, is a way to abandon claims to conventional respectability. It is a radical break from the drudgery and restriction of conventional womanhood; “Here…I don’t have to answer questions to anybody,”(1) another woman states.

It can be uncomfortable, looking for one–dimensional victims and finding, instead, complex individuals.

I was at a lecture on the war in northern Uganda when I was similarly forced to re– examine my assumptions about Uganda’s armies of child soldiers. My first discovery was that the bulk of those abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army are not, in fact, children.

Young adults compose the vast majority of the LRA’s captive fighters. As the talk continued, the speaker, Dr. Tim Allen, who has spent decades in the war–ravaged North, slowly sketched a picture of what life caught in the war zone was like. In doing so, he added shades of gray to my understanding of these young fighters.

simple, ignorant, or ingenuous I seek to underline how complex and unacceptable their circumstances really are. To have chosen sex work in the mining town, and to reaffirm this decision when offered something else, points out how stark one’s original options were and how insufficient the proposed solution is. For a child to grow up with even a shard of interest in joining the LRA emphasizes the intolerability of government camps— and assigns blame for young guerilla fighters not just to the LRA but also to the Ugandan government and the international community for leaving them there.

There are certainly children and adults who fit into the “victim” category without issue.

And they can benefit from straightforward charity. But they are not the whole story and, I argue, have been used to obscure the deeper problems underlying the larger struggle of those in marginalised groups.

Every time I take the tube in London I see posters about women who have been tricked into prostitution. The women featured on the posters appear eastern European and have quotations such as: “They told me I’d have friends. They told me I’d see the sights. They lied.” And sometimes this is the case. But not as often as we’re led to believe.

A 2000 study by Judith Vocks and Jan Nijboer found that the majority of women trafficked into western Europe from ex–Soviet countries knew that they would be involved in sex work upon migration. They didn’t like it, but they, at some point, chose it.

In (Un)Popular Strangers and Crisis (2003), Jacqueline Berman challenges how readily the West embraces stories of atrocious crimes committed against young, white, inexperienced women. She points out that “irrespective of a myriad of circumstances that might lead women to seek the assistance of these traffickers to migrate—including actual instances of forced trafficking—media accounts collapse the difference to fixate on crime and its victims.” In doing so, the economic deprivation and desperation that cause most of these young women to migrate can be overlooked. Instead of an issue of economic inequality, we are presented with an issue of criminality—a largely constructed problem of tricked, naïve, young women and evil mobsters. Instead of asking questions about Western wealth

I don’t want to sell handicrafts

By Kerry Scott

and the need for poverty reduction, we “solve” the problem with more police and tighter border controls.

In creating agentless, passive, and wholly exploited targets for our assistance we fabricate an incomplete picture of the problem. Solutions are made uncomplicated and trigger responses that obscure reality. Handicraft projects and more police will not end the exploitation of women in sex work. A return to family life in northern Uganda can mean intolerable insecurity and hopelessness.

The complex problems that place sex workers and young soldiers in worlds with devastating choices or terrorist role models require more than the West’s spare change and self–serving statecraft.

The concept of charity tends to flatten human interaction into easily understood and performed roles of giver and receiver, helper and victim. Charity is not performed by the wealthy to correct inequality. It is to satiate the temporary discomfort generated by images of pitiful, exploited victims.

For real change, we must invest in rights–based development, not charitable work. People deserve accountability, security, and respect. They should not be portrayed as convenient victims, eternally grateful for our tokenistic assistance.

Yes, real people can be difficult, shrewd, and violent. But in acknowledging their often uncomfortable complexity we can also see that they are passionate, critical, knowledgeable, loving, and creative. Moreover, we are forced to recognize that they have an inalienable right to choose between more than a series of rocks and hard places.

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(1) Campbell, C. (2001). Letting them Die. Indiana University Press. pp. 77

About the Author

is

Kerry, the co–ordinating editor of Incite in 2006–2007, can be found wandering the streets of London, usually quite lost, listening to CBC podcasts on her imitation iPod. She likes long walks by the Thames and candlelit tofu dinners. Although she denounces the oil economy, her environmental activism has the magical ability to evaporate when a flight to India presents itself.

chr by ic ph

G ra

Around 20 years ago, the Acholi people in the North were relocated to hastily built camps by their non–Acholi government. This criminally negligent government moved the Acholis to protect them from the rebel army, the LRA, and to starve the LRA of resources previously gathered through raiding Acholi villages.

The camp conditions are horrific and the promised security never materialized.

So the young boys coming of age in these camps have a strange relationship with the LRA; the LRA soldiers who come from the bush are cruel and terrifying but also active and free. Being taken is not something boys and men want, but it is a way to do something other than sit around the camps. In the bush they can have “wives” and power. In the bush they are finally released from constant fear and boredom.

While it is indisputable that some of the young soldiers are children who have been stolen from their families, many others are young adults navigating a terrifying space between sameness and adventure, home and away.

It may be easier to pity the completely innocent and naïve 10–year–old abductee but it doesn’t change the fact that thousands of slightly older and significantly wiser people need our concern. These young LRA soldiers may help orchestrate their “abductions” or at least adjust to LRA life with a certain amount of enjoyment. They are, for better or for worse, not passive victims, but real people.

The problem with people is that they can be contradictory, accusatory, angry, fed up, selfish, and difficult. Yet today’s development literature and NGO fundraising material makes it easy to imagine the targets of development without any of these characteristics. We can picture simple, innocent victims of coercion, who passively wait for our assistance. And why not? These images instantly and seamlessly evoke guilt and pity, which can then turn into charitable action, usually in the form of financial pledges.

The problem is that in failing to recognize the uncomfortable reality—that some women choose sex work over basket weaving and that many abducted people are angry adults who enjoy aspects of their experience—we can ignore the thorny depths of the real issues. We can construct superficial solutions that don’t help the vast majority of those in need. It is inevitable that one’s response to a phony situation will be inadequate for reality.

I am emphatically not suggesting that marginalized groups such as sex workers and LRA youths are somehow deserving of their circumstances. Instead, by pointing out that they are not

incite 7

PERSPECTIVE

I mpostor S yndrome

By Sarah Roger

I

am ostensibly hard at work on the next chapter of my doctoral thesis.

Ostensibly, for rather than reading the stack of library books on my desk, I am flicking through a collection of webpages that I have managed to convince myself are of general self–improving academic interest. I catch up on the news, check in on the latest in the Britney Spears custody battle, and read a selection of online comic strips. Off in the corner of one webpage, one of Google’s “targeted” advertisements seems to be either chiding me back to work or suggesting I throw myself from the nearest bridge with the taunt, “Do You Deserve A PhD? Many Grad Students Feel They Don’t. Take A Free Assessment & Find Out!” Immediately, I think to myself, “Who are they to be asking if I deserve my PhD? They don’t even know how to use capital letters, the fools!” My confidence is short–lived, though, and somehow I find my cursor lingering dangerously over the hyperlinked words.

It turns out that the ad links to academicladder.com. Under a graphic confidently announcing “The Academic Ladder: Get help with the climb,” its main page has a lengthy quiz asking me to say whether I agree or disagree with statements such as “It was really luck that got me to this stage in my schooling” and “It is only a matter of time before people figure out I don’t belong here.”

The questionnaire quickly moves on to such leading statements as “I would be interested in a workbook on this subject.” Aha! I have figured them out. Who are they trying to trick?

I’m a PhD student, after all.

My arrogance gives way, yet again, to curiosity, and a bit more poking around (and no, this isn’t just an elaborate ruse enabling me to procrastinate further) leads me to discover that the purpose of academicladder. com is to provide me with help overcoming my

inadequacies by encouraging me to write more, fear my supervisor less, and learn how to deal with the loneliness of being isolated in my very own ivory tower. It’s like a dating service and an essay–selling scheme rolled into one.

But all cynicism aside, websites such as The Academic Ladder are selling legitimate—and sought after—services. I, for one, must confess to having met briefly with a graduate school application coach, and I did, embarrassingly, read How to Get a PhD. Perhaps even more embarrassingly, I will admit that it was sort of helpful. The difference between the “how to” guide and websites like academicladder.com is that the assistance I sought was marketed towards individuals who wanted to capitalise on their success, while services such as The Academic Ladder are trying to take advantage of students’ sense of failure.

the feeling of being an academic charlatan to previously unprecedented levels. For months, I wandered around in fear of being found out: a lecturer would learn that I hadn’t read all of the seemingly endless set texts, my thesis supervisor would discover that I didn’t know everything about the subject, a librarian would realise I didn’t actually know how to read.

Anything could happen, and whatever it was, it was bound to be horrifying.

It turns out that the feeling of not being good enough is more than just a get rich quick scheme for self–help coaches. As I would discover, there is even an (unofficial) psychological disorder called impostor syndrome, which is marked by individuals’ inability to internalise their own accomplishments: they see themselves as failures even when they have indisputably succeeded.

Impostor syndrome has its origins in a study published in a 1978 issue of the journal Psychotherapy Theory, Research and Practice. The syndrome was initially referred to as the impostor phenomenon, and it was identified by Georgia State researchers Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes as afflicting high achieving women. This gender–biased theory has gone the way of hysteria and its wandering uteruses, and impostor syndrome is now believed to afflict both women and men equally.

Individuals who suffer from impostor syndrome believe their accomplishments to be the product of something other than their own intellect and hard work. They attribute their successes to luck, to being at the right place at the right time, or to errors in judgement of others who have recognised their accomplishments.

The reasons for this sense of false achievement are unclear. Some psychologists argue that it stems from legitimate feelings of unworthiness, while others believe it results from parents explaining to their children that sub–standard

After all, I was in grad school, and not just any grad school, but one prestigious enough to play Hogwarts on film.

This sense of failure is a common one. After graduating from McMaster, I was fortunate to land at a prestigious university across the pond for my Master’s and PhD. I had always experienced fleeting moments of feeling like an impostor as an undergrad, and had even been convinced as an honour roll high school student that I wouldn’t get into university at all. But once I was accepted into graduate school, I figured I would finally have left all of that behind. After all, I was in grad school, and not just any grad school, but one prestigious enough to play Hogwarts on film. The academic road mightn’t have an end, per se, but surely, I told myself, this was the closest one could get.

I was wrong. Instead of marking the end of the road for self–doubt, graduate school raised

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham

8 incite

www.phdcomics.com

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham

www.phdcomics.com

performance is acceptable because not every child (including you, sweetheart) is naturally clever.

Recently, studies have started to show that it is not just a question of impostor syndrome: there is also “impostor impostor syndrome.”

Some individuals exhibit symptoms when asked to agree or disagree with statements such as “I have performed at a sub–standard level” after writing a standardised test, knowing that their responses will be discussed with a panel. If they are asked to respond to the same questions without the pressure of having to justify their chosen answers afterwards, they often exhibit a greater degree of confidence.

Rory O’Brian McElwee and Tricia J Yurak published an article in Individual Differences Research (2007) entitled “Feeling Versus Acting Like an Impostor: Real Feelings of Fraudulence or Self–Preservation?”. In the article, they argued that impostor syndrome may function as a self–preservation strategy for individuals, who feign a sense of failure to lower the expectations of those around them. Sufferers of impostor syndrome believe that others think more highly of them than they do of themselves; McElwee and Yurak show that those who suffer from impostor impostor syndrome “report feeling inadequate,” but “do not actually feel fraudulent”—they fake feeling like impostors to paper over their own shortcomings.

In other words, people who appear to suffer from impostor syndrome may actually be downplaying their success so they do not appear arrogant. Either that or they are legitimate sufferers, who think they are failures but know that everyone else recognises this failure too.

For the vast majority of people, the former is true: certainly, it was the case for my high school lab partner in Chemistry class, who steadfastly swore she never studied for any of the tests (even though I was certain she stayed up all night scanning through her notes) and was bound to fail but consistently scored over

98 percent.

I find it hard to believe, though, that this is all that is at play with impostor syndrome.

There is another factor that the studies do not seem to take into account and one which undoubtedly weighs heavily: historical memory. The pressure of past performance is hinted at in the original Clance and Imes study, where they argued that younger siblings sometimes suffer from the impostor phenomenon as a result of being deemed the “sensitive” (read: unintelligent) child in the family. The expectation that she will not live up to the accomplishments of her older sibling causes the child to work extra hard to prove that she is adept, but she subsequently comes to view her accomplishments as the product of hard work rather than inborn intelligence. This is historical memory on the smallest of scales.

Multiply it by the weight of generations’ worth of accomplishments, and it is easy to see why so many people feel like failures.

For years there were Terry Fox posters on the backs of the toilet stall doors in the Arts Quad (and for all I know, they’re still there).

The posters had a picture of Fox on his cross– Canada run, and they read something along the lines of “At the age of twenty–one, Terry Fox had already begun his Marathon of Hope. What have you done today?”

Talk about pressure. Here you are taking a much–needed pit stop between lectures and the library and the back of the stall door is taunting you: “So, you wrote that essay, you read the course pack, you even remembered to put your laundry in the washing machine before leaving for class. You think that’s good enough? Come on! You’re no Terry Fox.” I don’t think I’ll ever live up to Fox’s accomplishments; frankly, few of us will. He is an exceptional case, and perhaps not the best one to explain why the weight of history causes people to feel like failures. After all, I have never aspired to be like him. I’d rather admire

him from a safe distance—not to mention that I can only run five kilometres before I start to feel winded.

At my graduate university, the main library has a frieze painted along the top of the bookshelves, featuring the greatest minds of all time: Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and the likes. I feel them staring at me when I’m bent over my books, their calm Greco– Roman composure and mock–mosaic styling scornfully reminding me I will never live up to their accomplishments, no matter how many library books I wade through. This is historical memory at its worst: the pressure of all of Western civilization’s intellectual achievements bearing down on me.

Historical memory is compounded into institutional memory whenever the university seizes an opportunity to pat itself on the back. Here, the various campus dining halls are adorned with portraits of past students and scholars: John Locke, T.S. Eliot, Bill Clinton. It is impossible to eat lunch without locking eyes with a portrait of Adam Smith, disdainfully reminding me from under his curly powdered wig that his Wealth of Nations is a book unparalleled for over 200 years, let alone since the due date of my last essay. Upon first arriving at university, I was shown by an upper–year student the right place to whack the back of the dining hall chairs so that a panel would pop off, revealing an engraved plaque acknowledging the donation of the chairs by Rowan Atkinson in honour of his birthday.

Even the chairs are more accomplished than I am, and I know it is a bad sign when I start to worry that I won’t live up to the successes of Mr. Bean.

With precursors such as these, it is no wonder that I started to think I have impostor syndrome. About six months into my tenure at grad school, the pressure became too much. I went to talk to my moral tutor (yes, the school actually assigns students with individuals to guide us morally—as though they know we’re bound to go insane). She told me that after being the head of one of the University’s science departments for over a decade, she still wakes up in a panic sometimes, worried that the next time her phone rings, it’ll be the Chancellor calling to let her know that they’ve discovered that she doesn’t actually know anything about Biology. Her confession came to me as both a huge relief and a horrifying realisation: the former because it means that I am not alone and that even the appreciably successful sometimes still feel like impostors; the latter because it means that even if I do become the tenured head of a university department, I’ll still be wrangling with the feeling that I’m a bit of a fraud.

Over the course of the ensuing discussion, my moral tutor and I agreed that neither of us are the problem. It is the fault of the University for placing the pressure on us to live up to the accomplishments of Stephen Hawking and Dr. Seuss and the fault of the Internet for teasing us with sidebar ads implying that we’re failures.

We are successful enough, and that’ll just have to do.

About the Author Sarah Roger was the editor of Incite for the 2003–2004 school year. She now lives in England, where she is the senior editor of The Oxonian Review of Books (everyone’s favourite academic book review). She divides her time between baking muffins, rock climbing, and studiously avoiding work on her PhD in 1940s Argentine literature.

incite 9

U

PERSPECTIVE

sed to be that you came out of a re- dred text messages on it from him that I read when lationship with a few ticket stubs, I am on a long subway ride and without book. It’s a faded picture or two, maybe a not that he wrote poems or commissioned little Xs dried flower if you’re that type of and Os to e–reach me through the day. No, the text girl/boy, and the itch and pang of regret— messages read more like a transcript of our domesthat’s it. You gathered these souvenirs into tic life together. I’m coming home! Do you need a container, a tangible focal point of mourn- anything from the store? Guess what we got from ing for the death of an era. If it was your Netflix today?!!#@! first break–up, you marveled at the forced I cannot erase them. They don’t take up any real binary modes of relationshipping—like fash- space, you know? And sure, every time I send a text ion, one minute you were in, and the next minute, message, the stupid phone sternly reminds me that you were out. my inbox is full and I probably lose a good second You kept the mementos for a while, maybe till waiting for the message window to close out. But, the end of your lease. Eventually, on moving day, look, it’s not that bad. And look at what I get to you threw them away without feeling, shrugged keep! A play–by–play of our life together. Not a life them out of your life with the same nonchalance as that I want back, but one that, with these text mesyou bid farewell to the rushed–purchase placemats sages, I get to revisit, whenever I want to, without that you never really liked. Wiped your hands on being eroded by the haze of time. That’s worth a your pants and that was that. There was no room in couple of seconds a day, isn’t it? your new apartment for physical artifacts of former If my phone is a record of our text life, then my relationships, artifacts that might be discovered by nano is a capsule of our subtext life, the soundtrack new lovers, thrown across the room in a fight— of our time together. He had a Mac, and because he Why do you still have this picture of him? etc. had been in charge of putting music on our iPods, I In the end, everything that anchored you to past cannot add music to mine unless I reformat it to PC loves was in you. In your head, in your heart, in and, in the process, lose all of the songs already on your dreams that one night after you tried absinthe, my iPod. Songs like “I Can’t Stop Loving You”, by in the way your body starts when someone walks Ray Charles. Clearly, I can’t lose those songs. First by wearing his aftershave. of all because I love at least 60 percent of the songs As someone who has changed addresses every on my nano and it would be such a waste to get rid year since I first moved to Mac (Matthews Hall, of them. And I’d feel like a chump for buying them specifically), it made sense to me that former re- again. Second of all, well, you know: it’s too sad to lationships braided into my body, double–helixed delete it all away, and plus, they hardly take up any into my identity. Moreover, it was efficient. Knick space at all. Sure, it’s not costless, because what I knacks were for knitters and knapsacks, not for a ended up doing was getting a new iPod—the “new single young woman on the move in the 21st cen- generation” model, appropriately. And I suppose tury! one can bellyache about how I am cheating myself Here’s the thing. of the full functionality of the nano.

It is June 2007, a Saturday afternoon, and my But you know what? face is smushed into a pillow because I cannot bear It’s hard to delete. to look at him. I can hear plastic tricycle wheels Erasing an ex from your electronic accoutrerolling by on the sidewalk outside, making a distinct grinding sound as they roll over each pebble beneath them. There are birds, too, and green branches arcing and swaying prettily beyond our window. But regardless, everything is coated with sadness, drenched in it. Breaking up gives you a mourner’s eyes: turns everything you see into scenes from a funeral. Somber.

I excuse myself to take a walk. Turn on my iPod nano and Ray Charles is singing about how he can’t stop loving someone, how he’s made up his mind to live in the memory of the lonesome times. I cry–walk past the toddler in his plastic vehicle. My relationship was older than you, I think, but it could not crush the pebbles that got in its way as well as you can.

I move out of our shared apartment and, in the process, chuck a lot of “our” stuff. Bye bye movie tickets to Batman and Robin, bye bye fun twisty straw from the Bronx Zoo. Except it is June 2007, and in addition to ticket stubs and overpriced tourist items, I also have an iPod, a computer, and a cell phone. My electronic entourage.

Let’s start with my laptop. He had put a screensaver on it when I wasn’t looking. A floating image of our favourite line from one of our favourite movies. It is tender and funny and incredibly, incredibly bawdy. It has been floating across my monitor since 2005. I don’t know what to do with it. I can’t bring myself to change it. It’s not just because I am sentimental—I threw away the ticket stubs didn’t I? But rather, it is also because it is costless to keep it there. A screensaver doesn’t take up any space; I don’t need to pack it when I move. And of course, of course, it pains me a little bit, in a mild and dreamy way to be sure, but with some depth of feeling nonetheless, to delete it.

My cell phone is equally laden with the deceased relationship. There are over one, maybe two hun- G RAPHIC BY BRIANNE Tulk

Love in the

ments is not the same as letting that ugly vase they bought linger in your house for a bit until it loses context and becomes simply physical baggage.

Clicking YES to reformatting is a drastic, binary act. It is not gradual. It is guillotineous. I had come close to doing it, particularly to my nano when I got sick of listening to Gwen Stefani, but, with my finger at the ready, I would get stuck in the muck of sentiment, and marvel at the forced binary modes of love in the digital age—one minute you’re Mac, the next minute you’re PC. Not only is it easier, in that electronic–data– takes–up–way–less–room sense, to let past loves live in our digital gadgets, but it is harder for the heart to pull the plug when questions are put forth so bluntly: SAVE NEW? DELETE? REFORMAT? As a result, we archive old emails and jpegs under obscurely named folders in our password–locked computers.

In a sense, we are not much better off than Ray Charles—we may be able to stop loving our exes, but sometimes we just can’t control–alt–delete them.

About the Author In my last year at Mac, someone (aside: was it Laurence?) asked me if I would write a column for the new–ish magazine, Incite. I said yes. Walking up the stairs to my then boyfriend’s apartment, I settled upon the name for the column, Punch and Pull. (It was a short staircase.) I really liked how chill the editors were—I was never told what or how to write, and the editing was done with a light hand, which my fragile ego really appreciated. That was in 2001. After I graduated from the Arts and Science Programme, I got my JD at Yale Law School. I graduated in 2004 and moved to New York, where I currently work as a litigation associate at a shockingly nice mid–town law firm.

I do some other stuff on the side to stay true to my dream of being an entertainer of the masses; I’ve chosen a multi–pronged approach, one of which is performing stand–up comedy.

Digital Age

By Ying Ying Li

10 incite

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FEATURE

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Incite’s Beginnings*

*But Were Afraid to Publish

Editor’s Note: I tracked down Matthew Beall and Eric Tam, two of Incite’s three founding co–ordinators (Sanja Savic being the third, who was too savvy to be convinced by my deferential coos and breathy pleas), and convinced them to have a “conversation” about Incite’s beginnings.

The following is what they gave us.

Matt: Is this going to be one of those boring, patronizing, back–in–the–day reminiscence pieces?

Eric: Maybe.

M: Cool—I’ll start: if you had to compare Incite’s launch to one significant historical event, which one would it be?

E: The Manhattan Project, except Incite didn’t give anyone cancer.

M: For me, it was like signing the Declaration of Independence while flying with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk with Woodstock happening in the background.

E: Dude.

M: What? Too dramatic? How about just the birth of Monica Bellucci, because when something like that comes into the world, it is forever changed.

E: …

M: We can at least agree that Monica is hotness, yes?

E: Yes. M: Good.

E: Maybe we’ll try something more basic.

Why did you decide to do it?

M: For me, I think it really was in large part the challenge. The idea for what was to become Incite was compelling but the execution of it was a very big question mark—that was a good part of the interest for me. But as I recall, you and Sanja were involved with the Silhouette and then… not so much. Did you get into this just to tweak the Sil’s nose?

E: I’d describe it as more of a roundhouse kick to the solar plexus.

M: Nice.

[Ed’s Note: Very Mortal Kombat] E: Seriously, though—when we started Incite, I remember that we felt a bit of a natural rivalry, but we also had both a healthy respect and a connection, too: two of us had worked for and enjoyed the Sil, after all, and one of us was a member of its editorial board.

M: You mean you were on their editorial board.

E: Fine, it was me. Anyway, when we first started, the kind

folks at the Sil even let us borrow their printer and other resources on occasion, and we definitely appreciated that. But we felt that there were things that the Sil wasn’t doing— which is totally fine, because they have their job to do as a weekly that’s devoted to campus news, and it’s historically done it well. We thought that we could do stuff that was a bit deeper, longer— M: —harder, better, faster, stronger.

E: Right—Okay, maybe not faster. But, seriously, the split between the two has always been overblown. Maybe there’s occasionally been some editorial sniping, but I’d guess that most people who have worked at one—or both—of the publications ultimately recognize that Mac is better for having both publications. I am a little jealous of their office, though. [Ed’s Note: Um. Yeah.

My office doubles as Incite’s living room.]

M: Here we go…

E: No, I’ll restrain myself. For now. Let’s go back. What do you remember it being like at the very beginning?

M: Hectic. I remember busting our asses trying to get everything we figured we needed together to actually print this thing we’d

Graphic by Erin Giroux

12 incite

come up with. Teaching myself the basics of typography and graphic design, figuring out how to actually get something printed, gathering an army of volunteer editors, then hounding those editors into getting content and filling pages. I also remember moving my 30–kilogram computer monitor around. A lot.

E: Yeah, it was intense and thrilling, wasn’t it? What we did maybe doesn’t sound like such a big deal these days, now that the affordability and power of technology has made small–scale self–publishing much more accessible. But when we started, we had limited experience with publishing—and the idea that we could put out a solidly edited and designed magazine every month using only volunteers with home computers gathering in living rooms often seemed rather fantastic.

Also, money was tough. Sanja and I personally contributed to it, which made it possible to do this until we managed to get signed on with that ad placement company. And of course the brilliant effort that the crew right after I left put on to get the levy passed was amazing. Oh, and coming up with the name … that took a surprising amount of effort.

Do you still remember any of the rejects?

For example, could you imagine devoting hours of your spare time as an undergrad to a something called Maction?

M: Heh. Maction. That’s gold. I still think we should have gone with it. [Ed’s Note: Wow. Mac and Action. Combined.

Clever.]

E: Uh, yeah. Let’s move on to politics.

What do you think about the accusation that Incite’s always been a little—maybe more like a lot—on the crunchy/lefty side?

M: If by “crunchy/lefty” you mean intelligent, even, and well–informed— not to mention fun, provocative, and generally awesome—then yes, I would say crunchy/lefty.

E: Which is a less diplomatic way of what I usually say to defend the magazine’s editorial slant: Incite was founded to emphasize the arts and social criticism, and when you engage in those interests, especially in a campus setting, you tend to lean toward the underdogs and the dispossessed, and toward exploring why things are

so messed up and how you can make them better.

M: Word, brother!

E: On the other hand, when I was an editor, I felt strongly about choosing questions for the “One–on–one” or “Debate” section where there were arguments on both sides that would be compelling to a broad range of people, like nuclear power, international trade, and the Kosovo intervention. At least, I consider myself a fairly staunch liberal, but my view on each of those questions is either at least somewhat uncertain, or, in the case of Kosovo, would have seriously irritated a lot of lefties.

M: You supported bombing Kosovo and Serbia?

E: Very much. Maddie Albright and Wes Clark are my homies.

M: And Sanja let you live?

E: See, a profile in courage, right? I support the Afghanistan mission too, more or less—I mean, let’s give Obama a chance to sort it out before bailing on it, right?!

M: So you mean, you were the conservative pain in the ass.

E: No, man! I just said I’m an Obama supporter—like big time!

M: Okay, how about the nostalgic, what– would–you–have–done–differently question?

E: Ooh, that’s easy: trusting that 250– pound woman I met at the bus stop in front of Fortinos, who I kept insisting we could trust to help us run local ad sales. She ended up taking our money and never returning our calls. You?

Graphic by erin Giroux

M: I remember getting a traffic ticket from the Mac 5–O with Sanja’s roommate’s car for driving on campus one production weekend. The officer didn’t buy my official campus publication business story. He hadn’t even heard of Incite. [Ed’s Note: So, little has changed.] Let’s just say that I’ve had more gracious moments. Also, I deeply regret

publishing my incomplete, poorly executed short story.

E: If I recall correctly, it was like 4000 words about a guy trying to cross a street and wanting to make out with the flashing pedestrian icon–guy in the “Walk” icon. [Ed’s Note: I prefer the construction sign guy.]

M: You remember that?

E: Like a scar that never fully heals… Oh, here’s one that hovers between a “regret” and “so awful it’s awesome”—when we did a sexuality roundtable discussion with my philosophy prof and he revealed that he was “essentially voluntarily celibate.” Good times.

M: Heh. Yeah, there were a lot of those.

What about things you wish we had done?

E: You mean besides getting an office?

Also, I guess I shouldn’t have whined so much about the disappearance of the crossword—an idea, which I suppose I should be flattered to mention the Sil, um, borrowed from us—but I had always hoped that the back page would be a fun but smart assortment of puzzles, quirky “Facts and Arguments” type bits.

M: Like the Sil’s “Misc.” section, except not for morons.

E: Be nice!

M: I definitely thought we should have had a poetry section.

E: Dude, don’t make me come over there.

M: Whoa, cowboy. How about after—way after—Incite? How did the Incite experience change where you went, what you did?

E: Can I say I resent that you said “way after”?

M: We’re old, man. Get used to it.

E: Incite convinced me not to have children—one experience giving birth was enough, thanks very much!

M: Well for me, Incite was where I started graphic design. I’ve since worked in Web design and as a graphic designer. I’ve even edited another magazine.

E: You mean you’re halfway to becoming an architect! After you graduate, you should design an extension to the University Centre.

M: Eh? E: So we can put our office in it— M: Dude.

E: Okay, as for me, I guess Incite taught me to be pushy, which I’ve heard will be an invaluable skill when I go to work as a lawyer in New York this summer.

M: In our day, we used to call that “selling out.”

E: In our day, we used to think investigative journalism meant going to a rave and taking E. M: That was a great piece. And we expensed our “supplies” to the magazine.

E: I can’t believe I let you do that.

M: For the cause.

E: I know—I’m sad I missed it. I guess I thought I had to write a paper or work or something.

M: See, it’s exactly like they tell you. You never remember spending that extra day doing schoolwork; what you remember is driving to a warehouse somewhere and dancing for 14 hours.

Graphic by erin Giroux

E: I know. And I still haven’t tried E. M: I need a beer. Maybe we should wrap this thing up?

E: Good call. Last question—another classic: Any final nuggets of wisdom you’d like to pass down to the current and future generations of Inciters?

M: Don’t print articles with “nuggets of wisdom.” Especially about producing a magazine.

[Ed’s Note: But it’s so hard not to…]

About the Authors Matthew Beall is an uncertain dogmatist, amateur barrator, and sometimes miscreant. He resides, in general, in Vancouver. He studies architecture at the University of British Columbia.

Eric Tam is a fledgling law school graduate and occasional doctoral student in political theory. He is presently serving as a law clerk at the Court of Appeal for Ontario in Toronto. He will be moving to New York City next year, where he will take his first few footsteps in the US legal world.

incite 13

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TRAVEL & WORK ABROAD VOYAGER ET TRAVAILLER À L’ÉTRANGER

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IN SEARCH OF

It's All About the Nookie

Ben Freeman and Hilary Noad look for the perfect study space

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some armchairs on the side for more relaxed reading.

Bonus points too for having a couple of computers (with printers) and a washroom next door. Unfortunately, the library is only meant for students in philosophy, and it’s only open weekdays until 4 p.m.

Inspired by our success, we decided to look a bit more closely at the Thode and Health Sciences libraries, which, despite being two of the larger buildings on campus, remain unnoticed by many students. We’re not sure what the architects of Thode had in mind when they designed a structure that from the outside resembles a large bunker, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that the entire library is suffused with natural light, even the base-

door, which opens onto a hidden balcony that overlooks much of the campus. The people–watching opportunities from there would be endless. Due to the wintry weather, we couldn’t actually test out this outdoor location, but it looked to us like a potentially great spring, summer, or fall study area.

Another unusual but promising outdoor study area was Mac’s nuclear reactor. It’s there for serious nuclear research, but the pine trees and grass between ABB and the reactor made it seem like a real possibility. Again, the area is currently quite damp, cold, and generally uncomfortable, but it might be pretty nice in warmer weather.

We enjoyed the secluded, woodsy atmosphere, but worried we might get distracted by the campus squirrels if we tried any serious work there. On the other hand, it could be ideal for group projects, and just imagine the sheer awesomeness of being able to say, “I studied in the shadow of a nuclear reactor.” Plus, wasn’t this how the usually dorky Spiderman got to be so cool?

If you’re looking for a different study experience that’s still sheltered from the elements, the little bench alcoves found in the newly renovated areas of BSB would put you firmly on the cutting edge. Sitting there, we could see the strange appeal of watching and hearing the world go by while you work, seeing and observing while feeling invisible yourself. In practical terms, however, these tiny spaces don’t fare so well; the absence of any surface to spread your work out on severely restricts those of us without laptops or God–given manual dexterity. On the plus side, the walls on either side were ideally located for quick study–break naps.

Those who really privilege practicality might find their grail in the lower level of the Life Sciences Building, a place which offers some tables, chairs, power outlets, bathrooms, and even vending machines without any excessive noise or distractions. But for one of us, the aesthetics of the place made any serious work impossible.

The chairs had a thoroughly bizarre 1970s or 80s colour pattern which had somewhat discoloured over time, making it impossible to shake the fact you were entirely surrounded by dark, heavy concrete. Feeling like you were working in a chintzy upgrade of a bomb shelter was decidedly not conducive to studying.

Then again, working there gives you the peace of mind of knowing that your term paper will survive most nuclear catastrophes. And really, how could you be productive without truly feeling secure in your study space?

G RAPHIC BY M ICHELLE TIAN

hen trying to discover good study spaces on campus, it is helpful to know at what times these study spaces will actually be available to students. This was the first insight revealed to us during our search for the perfect study space. Most of our time hitting the books is spent at home and off–campus. The times we do study at Mac are usually restricted to the oft–trodden areas of Mills’ upper levels and the Student Centre. True to form, then, a significant portion of our nighttime research involved attempting to enter totally locked buildings. Who knew that the campus enters into a state of veritable lockdown every night? Earlier another night, we managed to visit Kenneth Taylor Hall; the building was predictably quiet, and many classrooms were left unoccupied. Nevertheless, we had to watch out for sporadic dance music of unidentifiable origin, random creepy people, and rooms with no Internet. So choose your classroom carefully! Some have soft, comfortable chairs, while others have a strange mix of seating from various eras, in equally varied colour schemes and degrees of repair.

We had greater success during daytime searches.

These were ultimately more useful anyway, given that we’re both usually home for good by the evening. But in these explorations we still often relied on tips from friends about potential spots, which points again to our deeply cherished routines as students. Instances of working on campus are often the result of impending deadlines, so we usually wouldn’t want to waste extra time trying to discover a “perfect” study location. Multiply this sort of thinking by a few hundred students and you can see why Mills and the Student Centre get so packed.

Venturing into the unknown, we discovered it was surprisingly difficult to decide what the perfect study space actually amounted to.

Originally, we imagined that we might be able to identify it without being able to describe it perfectly. Turns out we were wrong: neither of us really knew what kind of place we would want to study in. Perhaps we could articulate something to look for, but these criteria depended on things like the studying material, the nearness of the deadline, our mood, or other “intangibles.” What do book–hungry students prefer? People or isolation? Silence or white noise? Couches, desks, or benches? Opting for one or the other ended up being hardly straightforward.

Ignoring for a moment our sometimes conflicting tastes, we did manage to discover some new and promising study spaces. On the third floor of University Hall we found the N.L. Wilson Library, which offered a cozy and relatively quiet place to work, while still giving you the comfort of fellow studiers nearby. The room was spacious enough, bright, with a large table in the middle and

ment. For some reason there are large climbing plants growing up the curved brick wall on the far side of the first floor. The effect is rather jungle–like and strangely calming. Unlike Mills, Thode is generally not crowded; computer or study carrels are available at nearly any time of day. In fact, on our visit, the study area near the jungle was so quiet that the noise from unzipping a knapsack was embarrassingly loud. Unfortunately, Thode is much further from the centre of campus and most food outlets.

Somewhat closer to the action is the Health Sciences complex, offering a variety of study areas. The most visible one is the newly–renovated Health Sciences Library, which is accessible from the second floor. We discovered, however, that if you trod further down the hallway instead of turning left into the library, you’ll find another great study spot. At the end of the hall there’s a glass

About the Authors

Although currently an all–important and nearly omnipotent editor with Incite, Ben Freeman began his career with the publication writing bubbles, fetching coffee, filing TPS reports, and generally obeying the varied whims of past Incite honchos. His meteoric rise is an inspirational tale for all of writers of lower rank, many of whom hope one day to gain enough editorial clout to single–handedly veto a somewhat archaic, yet still grammatically correct turn of phrase. His story is currently in production to be a major motion picture.

Hilary Noad is a first year Arts & Science student who has never written for Incite before. She is excited about having something published in a real magazine!

incite 15

LETTER FROM

LETTER FROM SAN FRANCISCO

In the fall of 2006, as my time at McMaster drew to a close, I knew I was going to graduate school for a PhD in the biological sciences—a five–year commitment at minimum—and was trying to decide where I could see myself living. It was a short list dominated by the West Coast metropolises and first among these was San Francisco. My reasoning was that the Bay Area is home to three excellent universities—UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UC San Francisco (UCSF)— has a balance of mountains and ocean, and is perhaps the most liberal area in the United States. Furthermore, I had spent the summer of 2005 working in Berkeley and had experienced firsthand the laissez– faire lifestyle and immense physical beauty of the West Coast. My decision made, I proceeded to navigate the Kafkaesque American graduate school application process and in early September, after enjoying a Canadian Labour Day, flew to San Francisco to begin my life as a biochemistry PhD student at UCSF. My introduction to graduate school and the other 18 first year PhD students was, appropriately for San Francisco, on the Bay. The entering students met at Fisherman’s Wharf and got on a ferry to Angel Island, which is a rock of approximately a square mile in the middle of the Bay that offers an outstanding view of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley from its peak.

After lunch and welcome speeches by the assembled professors we set off on what we assumed would be a gentle jaunt up the hill. We were most of the way up and knee deep in poison oak when we were informed that the professor leading us had scaled Everest without oxygen and was unlikely to give much credence to our concerns about being scratched, poisoned, bitten, or pretty much anything. We were in graduate school.

Going to school at UCSF is very different from being an undergraduate at McMaster or, for that matter, a graduate student at many other places. The University of California system specializes each of its approximately dozen campuses for a different purpose: Berkeley is physical sciences, Davis agriculture, and

16 incite

San Francisco is focused on biomedical research and medical training and therefore has no undergraduate students. The absence of undergraduates means that campus life is less dynamic—there are fewer student groups, less politics, and fewer speakers—but the compensation is a more informal environment, as everyone on campus is assumed to be an adult. That no one is under 21 also amplifies the work hard and play hard ethic that is common in the sciences. In the ‘80s UCSF was famous for having copious quantities of cocaine at its parties; cocaine is no longer the drug of choice but the attitude is unchanged. The commitment to debauchery is balanced by a work ethic that involves ~60 hour weeks; it is not uncommon to walk into a lab at 10 p.m. and see graduate students and post docs manning half the benches. That said, a solid portion of the students at UCSF are here because San Francisco is a world class city and so make the time to experience some of it.

San Francisco is best understood as a sum of neighbourhoods, many of which feel grounded in different eras—there is no unifying equivalent of the Tim Hortons on every corner to let you know you are in San Francisco. The graduate campus of UCSF is southeast of the downtown core in an area known as Mission Bay that is built entirely on landfill—the assurance that the entire neighbourhood will not sink in the event of an earthquake has been greeted with some scepticism. The campus was founded five years ago and currently resembles a cross between a high– tech park and a construction site—think the McMaster campus with everything not named after Michael DeGroote flattened and the subject of an aggressive construction campaign. Perpetual construction aside, the campus is sleek, modern, and oddly beautiful.

A condition of the establishment of the campus was that a small percentage of the construction costs go to art installations, which has resulted in several interesting pieces and a conference/community centre that is strikingly pink.

Directly west of the campus is the Mission, histori-

cally the poverty–stricken heart of the city’s nightlife, which is now being gentrified by yuppies of all descriptions. The Mission offers the best Mexican food north of the border, a variety of trendy restaurants, perhaps two dozen excellent bars, and housing for an odd mix of students, the aforementioned yuppies, and the genuinely down and out. At the heart of the Mission is the juxtaposition of the classy restaurants and boutiques of Valencia St. with the scruffier burrito places, liquor stores, and dive bars on Mission St. a block away.

The Mission feels rougher than anywhere in Hamilton or Toronto, but south of the campus the aptly named Dogpatch can be downright scary. The Dogpatch and adjoining Bayview is one of the few places in the city that feels absolutely American and reminds me that I am no longer in Kansas. Overall the city is perhaps 35 percent white, 31 percent Asian, 8 percent black, and 15 percent Hispanic. Wedged between the San Francisco hills and the Bay, the Dogpatch is 50 percent black and brings to mind civil rights era LA, making Jane and Finch seem positively cheerful in comparison. Racial polarization is equally evident in the downtown core where the fair–sized homeless population is almost entirely black or Hispanic. The average income of black residents of San Francisco is 40 percent that of white residents—this is less than the US average of 60 percent—and their living standard reflects this. There is much to love about San Francisco, and for the white and tolerably well–off it is an idyllic place to live, but this ghettoization of underprivileged minorities taints it all.

I realized San Francisco can indeed be idyllic when I spent a mid–February morning sitting outside in a short–sleeved shirt at a café in the Castro—the upscale gay district—drinking an excellent cappuccino and reading papers on DNA replication. Being able to walk the city, sit on patios, and generally cavort outside year–round is priceless. Also, after living most of my life in cities built on land that is at most gently sloped, there is something wonderful about

living in a city with topography. Cresting a hill and being rewarded with a panoramic view of the City and Bay is an experience worth the occasional uphill march. The topography of the city extends to the incomparable geography of northern California, with mountains for hiking and skiing and ocean for surfing and sailing.

The local geography has blessed San Francisco with access to locally grown food of all descriptions: Napa’s wine, vegetables from the vast farms of the central valley, and the various fruits of the Pacific.

Unsurprisingly, this has created a food scene in San Francisco beyond reproach. Restaurants range from cheap but delicious Mexican food to mid–range tapas, sushi, and Thai to upper–crust delicacies to suit every palate—including two of the world’s best vegetarian restaurants. The Bay area was the birthplace of the organic and Slow Food movements—Alice Waters, the original guru of all things organic, still maintains her restaurant in Berkeley—and as a consequence has excellent fresh food everywhere, most of all at the farmers’ market.

Deserving a paragraph to itself, the Saturday morning farmers’ market is every foodie’s—and yuppie’s—dream. On any given Saturday you will find perhaps four dozen producers offering up the bounty of northern California: heirloom tomatoes like nothing you have ever tasted, twenty varieties of greens to mix and match as you please, including the highly recommended pepper lettuce, eggplants ranging from fist– to pumpkin–sized, a dozen types of potatoes, interesting varieties of cheese from several small dairies, fruits of all descriptions, artichokes, and mushrooms galore. As a place to cook and meet cooks—roughly two–thirds of my PhD program are cooks or bakers— San Francisco is without peer. Also, for ecologically– minded connoisseurs, the Bay Area is one of the only places in the world where the 100 Mile Diet is viable without a noticeable decline in living standards.

The transition from Hamilton to San Francisco has been remarkably gentle generally, but entering the US in an election year is akin to entering a war zone.

As an academic in California you are at the homefront of the Democratic party, and the forefront of the Clinton–Obama conflict. With a few exceptions, academics support, vote for, and fund the Democratic party, but the internecine conflict between the two “firsts”—women or black—has split labs, destroyed friendships, and driven wedges between minority groups. My own take is that it is a conflict between an extremely smart and experienced, but dynastic Clinton and an energetic and eloquent, but naïve Obama. Either is electable by recent polls—although McCain’s victory in the Republican race has made November’s outcome less certain—which has made the contest more generational and to a degree ideological than political.

Beyond the election, perhaps the most interesting thing about living in the US is what is not seen. The Iraq war is widely considered lost, but there are no protests. The economy is in trouble: the auto industry in a tailspin, the trade and budget deficit at record levels, and the bipartisan solution is tax cuts. The de-

cision in mid–February to seek the death penalty in the much–derided military tribunals for some of the alleged architects of 9/11 is met with sarcastic editorials in the liberal press but no public outcry or challenge from Congress. At times it feels like the nation is paving the road to hell with apathy.

That said, living in San Francisco as a privileged white graduate student, it is easy to see what has made the United States the most powerful state in history. Among US citizens there is an absolute confidence in the rightness of the American way. I hasten to add this is not a criticism per se, as they—by and large—do not believe in America’s legacy of intolerance or fermenting coups in faraway countries, but rather in the laudable goals of dignity, freedom, and wealth for all. It is the self–confidence of a nation that won two world wars, destroyed the old imperial powers, and sought and, to a degree, succeeded in imposing a global Pax Americana.

American success is the result of vast natural resources, timing, and luck but also brings to mind the saying “fortune favours the bold,” and Americans are certainly bold. There are moments when you almost believe that, with the right president, America could bring its still unmatched scientific, industrial, and human resources to bear on global warming, HIV, malaria, and poverty and create a more inclusive new world order. Sadly, reality always intrudes on these flights of fantasy and I remember that not only have the Americans caused many of the problems I would see them fix, but that the current American president is perhaps the most regressive in recent memory and was elected by a majority of Americans—at least the second time around.

The third night after I arrived in San Francisco I was out with a number of first–year graduate students at a Marilyn Monroe–themed bar. After a few drinks we fell to discussing politics. I hinted that perhaps the age of America as the world’s policeperson was over and was met with the—slightly plaintive—question: “who could replace us?” A salient question, but it perhaps misses the point that America’s stint as global arbiter was imposed by force of arms, not pureness of intention, and America’s primacy in arms is fading.

Jacob Stewart–Ornstein

A Saturday in San Francisco 9:00 – Breakfast at the farmer’s market

The Farmer’s Market at the Ferry building is a mecca for anyone who loves food and on a sunny day is a perfect place to sit, snack, and observe the Bay. Grab breakfast at one of the stalls offering various American standards— eggs, meat, and strong coffee—or graze on fruits and baked goods as you wander through.

Also, for those so inclined, the wine bar in the market building opens at 9:00 and seems worrisomely busy when I usually pass by around 9:30.

10:30 – Downtown and the SFMOMA

From the Ferry building walk east on Market into the downtown core. The massive Westfield mall, a Macy’s for each gender, and a Ferrari store are a few of the altars that you may visit in this temple of consumerism. A left on Third St. will lead you to San Francisco’s modern art museum, which has a small but pleasant permanent collection and three to four generally excellent rotating exhibits.

1:00 – Castro and Golden Gate Park

Walk back to Market and get on the Muni—San Francisco’s relatively efficient light–rail system—and take it east to the Castro. Rainbow flags abound in San Francisco’s gay district, as do clothing stores and restaurants; for lunch I would recommend any of several sushi places.

A gentle twenty–minute post–lunch walk will take you through the Haight—the original center of all things hippie—and into Golden Gate Park. The park is two miles long and about half a mile wide and is an incredible place to wander offering the greenery one would expect of California. If you are feeling energetic it is a lovely walk to the ocean; otherwise a good stopping point is the DeYoung museum about a mile in.

6:00 – North Beach for Dinner About the Author Jacob graduated from McMaster in 2007 and is currently a PhD student at UCSF studying yeast genetics, white blood cell migration, and chromatin structure.

As an Incite editor from 2005–2007 Jacob’s factually strict but grammatically loose editing style and focus on politics attracted many admirers. By mid–2006, however, Jacob had become secretive, authoritarian, and obsessed with transforming the magazine into Harper’s. Jacob abruptly left Incite in mid–2007 after an attempted coup and is currently in hiding.

When you begin to tire, turn back east for dinner in Italian North Beach via bus. Get off around Columbus and Sacramento and wander the area for a restaurant that catches your eye; if you head up the hill to the east, you will find less touristy places. Alternatively, if it is still early, grab a cappuccino at a café and make the obligatory pilgrimage to nearby City Lights—perhaps the best bookstore in the world.

9:00 – Night Life

If your energy is low, there are a number of reasonable bars in North Beach—or strip clubs if you prefer—but if you have any self–respect go to the Mission. Those interested in upper– class clubbing or posh wine bars might be directed elsewhere, but for everyone else the Mission offers a pleasant variety of cheerful and busy bars to suit most tastes. Go to 16th and Valencia and pick a bar, any bar, rest and repeat.

incite 17

REVIEW

The Human Human The Conditioner Conditioner

Byy IIshani shani N Nath ath B

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Andrew ndrew P Prine rine A

We all know not to judge books by their covers, but people do it anyway. If you’ve got the look, the style, the smile, or more importantly, the hair, life can get a whole lot easier. It’s no coincidence that Rapunzel, Goldilocks, and Donald Trump are central to our cultural heritage. Recognizing the importance of this hairy issue, the reviewers here at Incite decided to explore the secrets of the human conditioner and learn which shampoos hold the key to luscious locks. Whether you’re a guy or a girl, we’ve got all the bases covered here, so read on to get the dirt on clean hair.

Dove—Cool Moisture: Cucumber and Green Tea Price: 2/5 Ishani’s Rating: 3/5

Clean and natural is the basis of the Dove campaign and at first sight, Dove shampoos seem to follow suit. The shampoo covers the natural basics of cleaning hair; it does not, however, follow through on all of its intentions. Apparently the Cool Moisture formula is based on removing moisture rather than restoring it, as was displayed by my dried–out tresses. Although significantly dehydrated, my hair was softer and emitted an amplified shine. Empty promises aside, the scent was crisp and refreshing, giving new meaning to the phrase “cool as a cucumber.”

Andrew’s Rating: 3.5/5

If you know people who use Dove shampoo, stroke their hair at the next possible opportunity.

Seriously, you won’t regret it. The super–softness it causes, while nice, does come with a price tag hefty enough to make doves cry. This point against it, combined with its pastel, gracefully curved bottle, makes Dove a nice shampoo but not for everyone. It’s a good product, but somehow I have a hard time picturing a Dove bottle falling out of the gym bag of a football player ready to get his swell on. Also, despite its claim to capture moisture, it did seem to leave my hair slightly dry. Again, I’m no expert, but I like it when products do what they’re supposed to do, and this shampoo seemed to fall short of the mark in that regard.

L’Oreal Kids—Burst of Sweet Honeydew Price: 2.5/5 Ishani’s Rating: 2.5/5

True to its promise, L’Oreal Kids will not bring a tear to your eyes; however, it seems that satisfaction is not on the menu either. When feeling nostalgic one might reach for this fun–shaped bottle of childhood memories, but do remember that things have changed since those wondrous days of yesteryear, head size and quantity of hair to name a few.

Although the honeydew scent was delightful, the cleaning power of L’Oreal Kids was simply insufficient to handle adult–sized hanks of hair. Clearly shampoo made for children should be used solely by children.

Andrew’s Rating: 3/5

Since I am a virile and terrifyingly macho dude, it is a rare day when I cry. I do appreciate the effort, but given how few times shampoo has left me blubbering in the past decade, I’m not sure “no

18 incite

Graphic by Josh Rosen

more tears” is really a selling point for the typical university student. The honeydew scent was nice, and the fish–shaped bottle was fun, but the shampoo itself didn’t seem to leave my hair all that thoroughly clean. On the plus side, the semi–grubby state it left me in was a good look for me. Another plus is its 2–in–1 conditioning, which, while potentially a little weak for people with lots of hair, did get rid of my tangles.

Herbal Essences—Body Envy Price: 4/5 Ishani’s Rating: 4.5/5

Herbal Essences Body Envy shampoo gives hair bodacious body worthy of mass envy. The white nectarine aroma is encapsulated in a rich lather that engulfs each hair, rejuvenating your locks and mind alike. Herbal Essences produces healthy–looking hair from head to tip giving you that just–came–from–the–salon appearance. The long–lasting results make their formula essential for those with an excessively busy schedule. The silky smooth results were so impressive that I am a newly converted Herbal Essences fan. Body Envy makes me look forward to lathering, rinsing, and especially repeating.

Andrew’s Rating: 3/5

Despite my best efforts to remain objective, the old commercials where office workers experience showergasms did leave me with high expectations for Herbal Essences. The curvaceous bottle and bright orange colour were a trifle flamboyant for me to want to leave this one on display, but the almost religious experience of lathering up with this ambrosia more than made up for it. It felt great and it smelled nice, but there was one drawback; it gave me Kramer hair. I may not be the king of coiffures, but, as my ex–girlfriends will gladly attest, I know a thing or two about envy, and though this shampoo started off great, the end result just didn’t do it for me.

Garnier Fructis—Body and Volume Price: 4/5 Ishani’s Rating: 4/5

Fructis Body and Volume can easily convince the most damaged of hair to become soft, tame, and lustrous for any occasion. Infused with a delightful fruity aroma, this shampoo gives body to the limpest of locks. The clean shine and bounce gives hair a healthy look and feel worthy of shampoo commercial pirouettes. Fructis transforms hair into touchable tresses which are always a valued accessory and flirtatious commodity. Unfortunately, the Fructis effect fades quickly, and there is a visible decline in follicle vivacity between just–washed radiance and the appearance of the evening updo.

Andrew’s Rating: 4.5/5

This one came highly recommended to me. I don’t know what “Garnier Fructis” translates to, but I feel like the word “awesome” must be involved. The faint citrus smell combined with its viscosity and nice, unisex bottle shape made Fructis my top shampooing choice. It left me feeling clean, refreshed, and ready for a new day, which is important when you shower in the morning. It wasn’t as much fun to lather as Herbal Essences or as hair– softening as Dove, but it was priced competitively, did everything well, and had no real drawbacks.

Head and Shoulders—Citrus Breeze Price: 3/5 Ishani’s Rating: 3/5

Although Head and Shoulders started off as a treatment for dry scalp, it has evolved into a multidimensional shampoo that addresses much more than worrisome flakes. Its creators attempted to broaden their range by including shampoos targeted at both scalp repair and various hair treatments such as volume boosting, shine enhancing, and so

If you’re pragmatic, thrifty, or impoverished, this is the shampoo for you. on and so forth. Citrus Breeze caters specifically to hair prone to oily slicks; unfortunately its results are not always consistent with its promises. After consistent use, I found that Citrus Breeze refreshed my hair, but did not wash away all my oily woes; to my disappointment, this brand certainly is not head and shoulders above the rest.

Andrew:

I’d meant to try out this shampoo, but I spent a little too much time having fun lathering myself with the Body Envy and I missed out on the zesty zephyr that is Head and Shoulders Citrus Breeze.

I like wind and I like lemons, limes, and oranges, but the whole anti–dandruff stigma attached to Head and Shoulders rather soured the brand for me. All that being said, I’ve heard that it’s a good choice if you do have a dry scalp, so don’t let my prejudices stop you. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade; if life gives you dandruff, fly with the Citrus Breeze.

About the Reviewers From the bowl–cut–bang combo that plagued her for the majority of her troubled childhood, Ishani has realized the difference that hair can make.

Her mane of voluminous ebony strands has a maniacal mind of its own and has a split curly–straight personality. Though minimal effort is put into anything post–shower, Ishani has grown to have an inexplicable affection for shampoo. Now living in Hamilton, Ishani’s secret identity as a shampoo connoisseur has been put to good use as she has teamed up with the angelic Andrew Prine to combat the pandemic of oily limp hair facing the youth of tomorrow.

Andrew hails from the unfashionable end of chic and stylish Sarnia, Ontario, which might explain his pragmatic approach to hair care. Biannual trims, daily washing, and a towel are his weapons of choice when getting cleaned up for a day out. Despite a cavalier attitude towards his golden locks, Andrew’s fluffy mop of shaggy hair remains healthy and thick. His wash–and–wear method of hair care is not for everyone, but it saves time and money on maintenance and products.

Exact Shampoo with Aloe and Vitamin E Price: 5 /5 Ishani:

A combination of my easily distracted work habits and the irresistible fun shape of the L’Oreal Kids bottle are to blame for the absence of my opinion on this shampoo. Given that I was not able to try it myself, I am basing my judgment on Andrew Prine’s golden locks. Any shampoo that can make him appear to have a halo of blonde curls deserves recognition. This shampoo does exactly what shampoos are meant to do: wash hair. In place of outrageous claims of hair transformation, Exact remains competitive by offering volumes of its formula for less. Judging by my discussion with Prine himself, I can be nothing but impressed with the shampoo that makes no false promises. It gets the job done, exactly.

Andrew’s Rating: 2.5/5

There isn’t really a whole lot I can say about this shampoo. It doesn’t make your hair Dove–soft or pleasant smelling, but there isn’t anything wrong with it either. It cleans my hair and it leaves it bouncy, shiny, and relatively tidy. It doesn’t promise to increase volume, incite showergasms, or cure world hunger, but it does what a shampoo ought to. If you’re pragmatic, thrifty, or impoverished, this is the shampoo for you. I doubt that you can really call this nice, but at less than half the price per millilitre of the other shampoos, who’s counting?

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incite 19

COLUMN

Trappings

By Siva Vijenthira

Accent Grave

W

hen they were younger, my British cousins took elocution lessons to change their accent to make them seem “better bred” and more highly educated than their slightly cockney cadences might have implied. Accent is incredibly important to Englanders. Most can pinpoint the exact location of a speaker’s upbringing based on her enunciation, rhythm, and tone.

More importantly, and discomfortingly, first impressions of an accent can also automatically incite very specific conclusions about the speaker’s intelligence, morality, and work ethic, regardless of her actual aptitude or dedication. So Essex girls who do not regularly hear and learn to mimic the “Queen’s English” accent may find that certain schools, professions, and opportunities will always remain out of their reach. At the same time, an accent that is too proper is automatically associated with a certain higher echelon of education and wealth that unfortunately precludes easy camaraderie. Apparently when the first Harry Potter film was released in England, the audience laughed at Hermione’s overly precise speech and it was obvious to them why she was friendless. Nobody wants to admit to discriminating based on something so reliant on background rather than character—and maybe most don’t even realize they do so—but it is undeniable that, in many ways, My Fair Lady was based on fact.

Lately I’ve been thinking that, in many ways, grammatical knowledge can be seen under the same light as the English accent. There is a Facebook group called “I judge you when you use poor grammar.”

I itched to join, but then I realized how saddening the implications were. My own grammar has been fortuitously informed by years in good schools surrounded by wealthy and “cultured” peers. Meanwhile, the speech of my neighbours and Canadian cousins is littered with inappropriate sentence structures and incorrect verb tenses. While I picked up the idiolect of upper–class, long–time Canadians, my neighbours heard and learned to speak with the intonations of the inner city. I

20 incite

was ashamed to realize that, for all my talk of equality regardless of background, when I “judged” people when they used poor grammar, I was really judging their education and upbringing.

The problem with the Canadian grammatical education system is that we seem to expect our students to absorb the rules of grammar organically based on what they hear or read. Since childhood is the most apt time to learn language, a childhood filled with bedtime books and long conversations with fluent adults and similarly fortunate peers is more likely to lead to a better understanding of grammar rules. But children with working parents, especially immigrant or impoverished ones, do not experience that childhood.

And then, even when they are older and begin to read books for themselves, the incorrect language has generally cemented itself. There is very little formal grammar instruction in elementary or even middle school; and when it does come it normally centres on comma splices and the elusive semi–colon. What about when to use “I” versus “me”, or “was” versus “were”?

Canadian students of French, German, Russian, and Latin, among others, know about the essential differences between the nominative noun case and the accusative one, the subjunctive verb tense and the past perfect one. But Canadian students of English are never informed about these linguistic labels, despite the fact that even a cursory understanding of them would make decisions like the above exceedingly easy. We learn about these noun cases and verb tenses when we are older because we usually formally learn those languages when we are older; but even a young native English speaker would benefit from casual instruction on the topic, and even an older one would not necessarily be too old to receive a primer.

I am not advocating teaching everyone to speak the same way. I know that grammar choices are also an aspect of cultural or socioeconomic dialect. As a member of an immigrant community, I do feel somewhat odd speaking like a CBC radio host.

A friend of mine who lives in a similar neighbourhood once introduced me to

her boyfriend by asking him to guess my ethnicity. “Can you believe she’s Tamil?” she laughed. “Just listen to her talk!” My education outside of my community has probably effectively cut me out of many aspects of Canadian Tamil culture, for some of the same reasons Hermione was cut off from her schoolmates. So what I am suggesting is not that everyone should speak the same way, but that everyone should be capable of speaking as professionally as possible. Everyone should be given the opportunity to learn standard grammar structures so that they can become, essentially, grammatically bilingual, the way my British cousins learned to twist their mouths around two accents. As much as we’d like to break down the barriers created, consciously or not, by first impressions and bigoted conclusions, it would be far more realistic to enable people to jump those barriers.

Surely grammar used to be taught more extensively in elementary school. Maybe it’s time to go back to that time.

About the Author Siva Vijenthira is a third–year student and self–styled child of the Internet age who nevertheless still uses “whom” and tries not to end her sentences in prepositions. Now she judges herself for judging people who use poor grammar.

POETRY

Ode 2 Britney plucked clean to the gills informidably pregnant hanging belly up thigh high from a hook:

Oh we will eat her for breakfast.

G RAPHIC BY A nne Van KOEVERDEN

By Tamara Sandor Graduate Studies with supporting scholarships

At the University of Ottawa, most graduate students benefit

from unparalleled funding opportunities ranging from $14,000 to $22,000 per year.

Some departments offer even more!

www.uOttawa.ca 4017-8x8.21-v-01-a.indd 1

14/01/08 16:11:27

incite 21

PERSPECTIVE

Confessions of a TA A teaching assistant tells all about how to manipulate

T

his is a confession. More specifically, a professional/emotional release direly needed after seven years of being a teaching assistant (TA). I cannot bear holding back any longer. No matter the consequences, I choose to be the whistleblower.

I offer insight into the minds of the cock– eyed, slightly disturbed, and greatly egomaniacal mock–professors in your life: your teaching assistants. This confessional can help you, O hardworking students, get ahead. Admittedly, my interests are also self–serving, because I hope that disclosure will help me, the TA—and all other TAs around the world—avoid crying over our Bunsen burners. The content in here can act as fodder for future manipulation. Use it wisely.

The Twisted TA Mindset Let me write openly about my colleagues: some are on power trips. Some intentionally seek weaknesses in students to trample on,

By Dan Milisavljevic thereby boosting their own ego. Many are also lazy. We mark thoughtfully, but not always; without bias, but not always. TAs mean well, but unfortunately we can also excel at being mean.

If the TA is a graduate student, he or she has gone through the trenches of the weary battle that is undergraduate life. This means that the TA is fully aware of the hardships faced by undergrads—the late nights, the confusing assignments, and the struggle to keep apace with growing workloads while coping with a roommate’s commitment to abstain from showering until Tibet is free.

For many TAs, however, this experience instills a sense of superiority and sadism. They like to see others go through the very same hardships that they faced not so long ago.

They’ve been there, done that, and want others to do the same. You’ll find this especially in the sciences, which are particularly good at demoralizing its denizens. After going through a slow horrible torture, graduates want to feel like it

wasn’t all for naught. Undergraduate TAs are not that different. Though they haven’t graduated, they feel a sense of seniority having been in the battle longer than their students.

A TA’s gargantuan ego is a student’s first challenge, one that can be managed. The second challenge, however, is one that students have no influence over. Sadly, even before they’ve entered the classroom, a handful of students of previous classes have dirtied the road that others must travel. These students, with little concern for their education and with questions so far off the mark it’s insulting, leave academic sores. Indeed, every time a TA is asked the How–did–you–get–into–university? question (for example, “Is a basketball a hollow sphere?”) it provides fodder for him or her to groan and bemoan the failings of the schooling system to prepare students for post–secondary demands. It also gives reason to cry at length about how “back in their day” students were nowhere near as incompetent—something obviously not true.

This is what undergrads are up against. Large egos and a trail of poor performance left behind by a few bad apples. A challenge, yes, but let’s make some applesauce and sup on these ingredients to find the way to success!

Excuses, excuses: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Graphic by Ishani Nath

22 incite

Students have a plethora of various concerns and plights, and much of a TA’s time is spent sifting through all of the crap to find the clean excuses smelling of truth. It’s a dirty job, but we do it, and fairly well.

Volumes could be written on how best to approach the TA with an excuse, but most advice can be summed up as follows: Excuses before due dates are generally acceptable; excuses afterwards generally are not.

Too often a TA will receive an email asking for an extension the night of or day after a deadline. These entreaties elicit sympathy of varying degrees, but, right away, because of their gross recurrence, a student is at a disadvantage by asking for a pardon with a tardy plea.

Consider the following excuse. It is of the “let me try to make the TA feel bad for me because I have so much work and oh yeah a cold too” garden variety: “I was sick for a few days and I skipped class to sleep to get better and my sister was in town and I had a test in bio to study for and I couldn’t change shifts at work in time.”

A caveat to the above is if you can truly come up with a unique request. The following was so bizarre, I had to grant an extension out of admiration of its creativity even if it did prove to be false: “I was picked up by the police this weekend.

Can I have extra time?”

If you can at all foresee the possibility of a late assignment, inform the TA. Prediction im-

“I was picked up by the police this weekend. Can I have extra time?” plies responsibility, and TAs respect this. Remember, we are willing to give breaks, but only when the circumstances smell well.

On the other hand, if a tardy request for help is unavoidable, and you have no genuine excuse aside from irresponsibility, there is one piece of advice I can offer. Clever and sincere students alike will often describe some dramatic reason why they could not hand in an assignment on time and then conclude with this hook: “I know it’s my fault but anything you can do to help is appreciated…”

This is an admission that the excuse is a lame one. Still, it brings pity, and with pity comes the kind of sympathy that may afford the student some lenience.

How to Win Back Grades It is almost inevitable that students will be disappointed with a TA’s grading. Although we don’t like to admit it, we make mistakes.

And often. Students should check their marks against the answer key and fight for deserved marks. Generally, sincere requests to have tests and assignments re–marked are welcome. The catch is to not come off as confrontational, but rather as a friend highlighting a silly oversight. This is grade mongering of the respectful kind.

Trying to get more grades than you’re entitled to, however, is another story. On the rise are occasions where students attempt to barter for grades. Like the sticker price on a used car, some students see assigned grades as merely starting points for negotiations. This is grade mongering of the disrespectful kind. It will be obvious and TAs have little patience for it.

tantly, it will make any cock–eyed egomaniacal TA feel like a superior.

Remember, these are people whose livelihoods depend on using their brains. Hence, they need encouragement that their brain is better than average. You want play into this ego. The above student could have avoided sighs and attracted a more sympathetic interest had he written something more like the following: Dear Dan, How are you? A short question: Will a lab session be held tonight?

Please forgive me for asking, especially with such late notice, but there has been some confusion as to when the session was going to be conducted.

Thanks so much!

Student The email is exaggerated (but only slightly) to emphasize the following components: The Salutation—In general do not address the TA with “Hey.” This is friendly in person but over email is one step away from “Yo!”, which makes TAs feel like they are at a keg party and being called from across the room.

“Hey Dan” is more acceptable; “Dan,” or “Dear Dan,” is even better. “Lord Dan” if you must.

The Body—A polite greeting is always a good start. Ask the question in a complete sentence making the query clear. Writing in an apologetic tone, though silly, feeds into the ego of the reader.

The Sign–Off—This in general is not crucial, but showing appreciation for using the TA’s time is further reason for lenient consideration. I add the exclamation point to encourage pathetic pity.

Feed an Ego and Inflate a Grade In the end, when the class has come to a conclusion, individual performance will determine the final grade. However, the results are transcribed by humans, and no human is without some bias. Heeding my words may mean small differences: the possibility for an extended deadline; a few marks here and there on a test; a prompt response to your question over email. But they are marks and concessions that students have earned. I wish students the best of luck with future interactions with TAs. Remember: Feed an ego and inflate a grade.

About the Author Dan Milisavljevic worked on Incite from 2000–2005 as a contributing editor overseeing movie reviews and occasional articles lamenting his discontents with society. Dan graduated from McMaster in 2004 where he studied in the Arts and Science programme. He studied philosophy for a year at the London School of Economics in the UK before entering graduate studies in the physical sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, USA. Dan has vacillated tremendously between careers before finding his place in astronomy, where he is now. He couldn’t be happier.

The Art of Crafting Correspondence Writing emails to TAs is one of the most common interactions between student and TA. In some cases, depending on the size of the class, it may be the only form of communication and the only way a TA can associate a name on an assignment with some kind of human being.

Consequently, it is one of the most important things that students too often take for granted: hey, i wuz just wundering when lab wuz … i think there is one tonight but i dunno for sure. sorry to bother i was just wundering. anyway, c u l8r. thx.

Where do I begin? Is this a question to the TA or a post on Facebook? I’ve reluctantly accepted that, in our fast–paced world with one digital knickknack after another occupying our time, many find the physical and mental act of writing to be grueling and unnecessarily time– consuming. Abbreviation is needed (apparently) to keep up. Fine. But do not let convenience get in the way of propriety. Writing to anyone positioned to give grades requires a certain level of formality. It’s polite, and, more impor-

epic Fail! incite 23

PERSPECTIVE

Womb Raider; or, The Art of Keeping Things Going

By David Mackenzie

24 incite

A

ngelina Jolie has things to teach us. On a campus of bright young things, there’s a desperate tendency to try to shine by founding something new, in a misguided effort to showcase “leadership” and “creativity.”

The reality is that most of these ill–conceived creations will be exposed like a Chinese peasant girl–child on the slopes of Faculty Hollow when their teen parents grow up and drift like space junk to the periphery of the suburban solar system, blazing trails to minivans and mortgages. Instead, take Angelina as your example: she teaches us the importance of maintenance, and I don’t mean in the cosmetic sense. Her every move whispers to us the worth of adoption, each photo a reminder of the quiet dignity found in keeping something going.

This is in point of fact rather difficult to do, this business of maintaining an enterprise that’s not your own, sustaining and nourishing someone else’s kid. But most of you will be able to afford your bread and minivans by doing this, so meditate more urgently on her example. Through Angie’s example, we can see the tender beauty in resurrecting a roommate’s houseplant; exult in producing the latest edition of the Brandon yearbook; celebrate another year of PTA minutes completed, filed, and unread.

Leave aside any lingering thoughts of colonialism that you may have about AJ’s quest to collect a child from every continent. The cultural studies seminar that seeded this thought was rubbish, and shame on you for using any of the buzzwords you picked up during those hours lost in writing or conversation. I have it on good authority that the world shits on your head if you do this off campus. Only last week I heard of some grad student dropping “structuralism” in polite company, just blocks from campus and so at the periphery of her academic life; you will not be surprised to hear that a seagull very nearly missed her. Her companion who mumbled something about Butler was not so fortunate.

It’s all too easy to come in, guns blazing, with some nifty idea that seems like it’s going to sweeten your CV. Sure, you can get a couple of crisp twenties, a two litre bottle of Coke, and some soft cookies for your first meeting. You’ll find a few other folks who want to say they were co–founder so they can babble about their singular creativity and leadership in an interview a few years hence. But spare the unsuspecting billboards across campus from whatever posters spam. Fine, if you must, you’ll raise some awareness or do some advocacy, and quite possibly be celebrated with a minor named scholarship or a photo on a website if you play your cards right.

Once in a while, if you actually know something, Google Graphic by Lisa Xu

happens. But the odds are that you are not the Russian or the guy everyone forgets, and you will not make a Google.

So listen to Angie. Suckle someone else’s baby. That’s a cycle of creative destruction we should really put our backs into. Do the day–to–day work of putting out volume 19; resist the lure of being version 1.0. Make something better; don’t just add another suckling to the world. By all means, dress nicely and take pictures of your efforts; feeling a little glam is not such a bad thing, and since we’re being honest, is part of the

Do the day–to–day work of putting out volume 19; resist the lure of being version 1.0. founder halo. So get your camera out, and invite a good–looking friend into the frame with you.

In dark moments, remember that, after all the magazine covers and photo shoots, someone is washing the child’s ass. You will protest that it’s a nanny who does this dirty work, but the kids seem to be accumulating fast enough that even Angie must be wiping bums some of the time. The Cambodian one is about old enough to learn sphincter control, isn’t he? Potty training him is surely a team effort; I don’t think they’d leave that entirely to a star–struck au pair.

Recognize that Angelina’s example is very, very hard to live up to. You will find yourself in some dreadful committee meeting with a merry band of idiots, and someone will need to make sure the usual necessary things are getting done.

It will be you who makes it happen. You will fill the carafe beforehand. You will have the sales figures in. You will take on the annual report as if it were a Malawian pseudo–orphan. This is not leadership or creativity but part of ensuring that society does not disintegrate, that there will be breakfast cereals at Fortinos next Saturday as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow. Imagine you are better looking and that cameras around the world hinge on your every move, step up, look sharp, and, for god’s sake, do your bit to keep things moving forward.

This will be your new mantra. I swear such thoughts will sustain your body and nourish your soul when you’re up late after a grim dinner, flailing at your keyboard with heavy eyes, and more importantly, the Angies of the world will salute you.

About the Author David Mackenzie was Incite’s Angelina from 2001–2003. He deals with emergencies, real and imagined, in Montreal.

In his spare time he assesses creativity, leadership, and the mating habits of celebrities.

COLUMN

MYTHS

The Gate

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM January 7, 2032

Dr. Philip Wells Director, Project Oracle

Colonel Robert Sutton Executive Director Special Projects Division

Re: RIVERSIDE COMMISSION REPORT Dear Colonel Sutton, Please find attached the full report of the Riverside Commission on the disaster which resulted from the inaugural test of Project Oracle on June 15th of last year. The 131–page document, authored by Dr. Caitlin Klein, is slated for public release next week. It concludes that Project Oracle be terminated immediately. I support this conclusion, but for other reasons, which I will make clear after the following summary of the Riverside report.

Dr. Klein begins with an assessment of the damage. Her research suggests that the explosion occurred simultaneously with the activation of the Oracle Gate. Six square kilometres were razed by the explosion or destroyed in the ensuing fires, including the complex which housed Project Oracle. 402 lives were lost, including: the entire research team; all technicians, military personnel, and support workers on base; and 19 civilians from the surrounding farmland. The economic losses, including the cost of subsequent investigations and legal settlements, exceed 14 billion dollars. Indirect economic losses from work stoppages, reduction in tourism, loss of foreign investment, and other sources are estimated at 41 billion dollars to date.

Immaterial damages are more difficult to quantify. The military’s forced disclosure that it was conducting experiments in time travel fostered a great deal of suspicion towards the government. A broad–based media campaign was required to assure the public that the technology was still unproven, and that even if it could be made to work, a time bridge can only be established between two fully–operational Oracle Gates, and as such, the technology could not have been used to alter any events prior to the activation of the first Oracle Gate. Many were unconvinced that the 100–year mandate of Project Oracle— to allow us to reap the benefits of a century of technological research without having to wait for the research to be done—would be used for the betterment of the human condition, and not as part of some scheme to ensure the continued worldwide dominance of our military.

It did not help public perception that I was in the hospital at the time of the disaster, which some commentators have interpreted as evidence that I had foreknowledge of the explosion. I know that I do not need to assure you that this is wholly untrue.

The second section of Dr. Klein’s report considers what may have caused the devastating explosion. Dr. Klein postulates either that the explosion was triggered by a malfunction of the Oracle Gate, that an internal or external saboteur set off a large–scale explosion to halt the research, or that a weapon was sent from the future to detonate as soon as the gate was activated as a means of sabotaging the project.

Equipment malfunction is highlighted as the most likely cause of the explosion. The energy required to activate the device and the extremely delicate nature of the technology suggests that an accident or a small error in manufacturing could have caused a large explosion. Unfortunately, everyone who understood the quantum physics behind the Oracle Gate well enough to comment on this possibility was killed in the disaster. How-

ever, the unusual profile of the explosion, which does not appear to match any well–known explosive weapon, lends further credence to the theory that a malfunction of the Oracle Gate is to blame.

Next, the possibility of sabotage is considered. The technical knowledge required to purposely cause the gate to explode may have been possessed by certain members of the research team, though extensive psychological profiling and background checks were performed on all persons affiliated with the project. It is also possible that a conventional weapon was smuggled into the research complex by one of the affiliated personnel or by some external agent, but the security measures in place at the complex make this unlikely, and this hypothesis does not explain the unusual forensic profile of the explosion.

Dr. Klein also entertains the possibility that a weapon from the future was sent through the Oracle Gate by a hostile military or terrorist organization to detonate at the exact moment when the Oracle Gate was activated, perhaps in order to prevent the use of the device by our military. However, the Riverside Commission rules out this possibility, considering it unlikely that the technology could have actually worked in the first place, a concept which is still hotly contested by physicists. Furthermore, I would argue that the measures taken to ensure the secrecy of Project Oracle make it unclear how a hostile force, even a hundred years in the future, could have found out enough about the project and the associated technology to use it against us without the co–operation of the research team.

Dr. Klein briefly mentions other possibilities, including an interesting hypothesis brought forth by a member of her research team: Dr. Proulx proposed that an explosive weapon could have been sent through the Oracle Gate not by a terrorist group or a hostile foreign military, but by a future member of the research team. He suggests that if the adoption of future technology in the present, “before society was prepared for it,” could have led to some dire situation in the future, a member of the future research team may have concluded that a powerful explosion at the precise instant that the gate was activated could be the only way to ensure that anything sent back from the future to the Oracle Gate would be completely destroyed, and also to inform the public of the experiment and mobilize public sentiment against time travel research. (pg. 89) Dr. Klein dismisses this, among other alternate explanations, endorsing the hypothesis that the explosion was caused by an equipment malfunction, and concludes that the experiment should be shut down due to the unpredictability of the technology.

I mention the hypothesis put forward by Dr. Proulx for a very specific reason. As you know, all top–level members of the Project Oracle team were instructed to leave very detailed policy notes for our successors, given that the project would need to be sustained for many decades. Dr. Proulx’s hypothesis struck me because his theory on the possible necessity of destroying the Oracle Gate from the future is precisely the recommendation I made in a worst– case scenario document I prepared for my own successor.

Sincerely, Dr. Philip Wells

By Nick Davies incite 25

PERSPECTIVE

The River Stynx

By Patrick Byrne

Arriving in NYC at daw n 26 incite

gangway to the ship, my home for the summer. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

After embarkation (as it’s called in “the business”) they promptly confiscated my passport—or, in their words, held onto it for safety purposes—to ensure that I wasn’t hitching a free ride to the Bahamas, and then tried to get me to sign papers without reading the accompanying legal documents. It was then that I learned my monthly pay would be in cash. Sketchy…

The next two days are a hazy blur of emergency training sessions: all I remember is that Codes Alpha, Bravo, Oscar, and Delta all basically mean you’re screwed.

I was also delighted to discover that, according the employee training manual, the kids’ programme is important not because we are caring for and teaching children, but because it “supports other revenue generating functions of the ship: for instance, ‘Mom and Dad can’t go to the casino if there is no one to watch the kids.’” Good to know the children’s well–being is the first priority. One training session was titled “Crew Safety and Security Awareness” (*cough* doublespeak!) with the primary purposes of (1) scaring employees into meek submission to the ship’s crazy hierarchy of power and (2) infusing the foreign staff with a zeal for American patriotism.

The session itself consisted of a half–hour long montage of graphically disturbing scenes from 9/11 with Enya and Sarah McLachlan playing in the background amid clips of George W. Bush extolling the virtues of “freedom and liberty,” accompanied by quotations such as, “the terrorists have now awoken God’s army,” all in front of a backdrop of a lone eagle draped with the Stars and Stripes, a single tear running down its face. Complementing this refreshing slideshow was the ship’s Chief Security Officer, telling us to never trust our roommates because they could potentially be drug dealers, smugglers, or, worst of all, “Ay–rabs,” who, according to him, are all terrorists, obviously.

Aside from the blatant racism and fear–mongering, he did have a point: our ship, carrying a high–density of American passengers (over 2500 people per cruise, mostly from the New York area), is a giant, floating, defenceless target for any act of large–scale violence, regardless of the motivation.

A sobering thought for a guy who just wanted to expose the evils of an industry while getting a sweet tan.

Adding to the cul-

G RAPHIC BY CHRIS H ILBRECHT

H

aving exhausted my chances for other possible “adventure” jobs last summer, I somewhat reluctantly opted to apply for what some might assume to be the holy grail of student summer jobs: camp counsellor on a cruise ship. My aversion, while ultimately trumped by the alternative of spending four months at home in Acton (definitely not worth the drive…), was rooted in my prior knowledge that cruise ships are a decadent, exploitive, environmentally destructive, and generally sketchy place of employment. So, in order to clear my guilty conscience and allow myself to spend the summer cruising between New York, Florida, the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the Virgin Islands, I made myself a deal. I would join the ship’s crew as a mole, merely disguised as a youth counsellor. By day I would masquerade as a mild–mannered employee, singing camp songs and leading wealthy children in arts and crafts, but by night I would assume my true identity of Defender of the Seas (and Workers’ Rights, but it’s not as catchy) heroically uncovering environmental cover–ups and slave labour working conditions. The following is my story.

First, I must set the scene by describing the authoritarian, militaristic atmosphere of hierarchy and fear onboard. My concurrent reading of 1984 only intensified my suspicions, making me mistrust my Big Brother supervisors even more. After a three–month training process during which I was fingerprinted, police–checked, and screened for syphilis (no cruise–goer wants that for a souvenir), I finally found myself in a taxi racing down New York’s 12th Avenue, the 75 000 tonne, quarter– of–a–kilometre long behemoth ocean liner looming in the distance. After pursuing erroneous directions from a rogue dockworker and enduring a full sniff–down by an official Department of Homeland Security German shepherd, I walked up the

ture of fear onboard the ship was the constant reminder from senior officers that one of the 500 cameras would always be watching you. In fact, the ship has its very own surveillance department with 10 undercover officers, whose primary concern is stopping theft from the casino’s one million dollar per day revenue. This apparently does not consume all of their time, however, as crew were routinely busted for chewing gum on duty. Have I mentioned this really good book by George Orwell? Ironically, one of the surveillance officers apparently altered some tapes and was fired the next day.

I was thrilled to discover in my first week as a youth counsellor that the kids‘ programme has a giant fish mascot, affectionately known as Detective Walleye, that they use for Environmental Day. What more could I ask for as Defender of the Seas than a ridiculous, human–sized, silver–sequined fish costume to conceal my true identity? I immediately staked my claim to Detective Walleye and vowed to (a) ensure that I was beat up by the The fear–o–meter children at minimum once per week (don’t pretend to be surprised; I know you’ve thought about beating up a mascot before…they’re just asking for it aren’t they?), (b) teach the children about some environmental issues, and (c) take sexually compromising photos of Detective Walleye to show my friends back home. My first objective was accomplished with little effort on my part (although I did accidentally punch a kid in the

My workpla ce face with my fin as I busted out my patented Walleye Dance). And, while I had to be careful to avoid Big Brother’s cameras, my third goal was achieved with a few precautions. Teaching the campers proved a bit more difficult, however, as the standard environmental program was insufficient at best and corporate propaganda at worst. This rigorous curriculum consisted mainly of telling the kids how good the company was to the environment and rewarding them with temporary tattoos for not throwing garbage into the ocean. I’m embarrassed to say that I went along with this for many weeks. My outlook changed while in St. Thomas one day, taking full advantage of a free, all–you–can–drink catamaran and snorkelling excursion (my advice: snorkel first, then drink). Several drinks into the day, I stumbled into one of the boat’s crewmembers. After speaking for a few minutes he told me that he was in his third year of studying marine biology at the University of the Virgin Islands. We quickly came to the topic of the purported environmentalism of cruise ships and he filled me in on the many abuses of the local marine habitats caused by the massive liners. In just two years, he said, he has noticed a marked decrease in the health of the coral reef, caused in large part by cruise ships. Detective Walleye/Defender of the Seas carefully recorded all of this new information in his trusty spy notebook…

In presentations from senior officers,

Horseshoe Bay, Bermuda

as well as in discussions with the onboard Environmental (sic) Officer (his prior experience, 24 years as an engineer on Royal Navy submarines, is hardly environmental), I was assured repeatedly that the food waste the ship creates and dumps overboard is harmless and, in fact, “helps feed the fishies” and “keeps the food chain going.” Seriously, that is actually what I was told by these grown men and senior officers. Admittedly, I’m not an expert of ocean ecosystems, but from what I do know, the introduction ladies e picking up the y of massive amounts of a foreign e l al W e v ti c te De food source, while perhaps “feeding the fishies” in the short–term, defidecadence and wastefulness of the ship’s nitely is not good for the overall health of vacation culture. While the captain spoke the habitat. My discussion with the soon– of the advanced onboard recycling system, to–be marine biologist backed up my sus- all I could think of was the 11.5 tonnes of picions, that the influence of cruise ships heavy fuel oil used by the ship every hour. on ocean health was not as benevolent as As the Environmental Officer lectured on the Environmental Officer would have you the treatment of sewage before its release believe. into the ocean, what filled my mind was So, in a heroic act befitting a Defender the sickening gluttony of the chocolate of the Seas, I got a kid to do my dirty work. buffet. On a larger scale, this attitude is On the last day of every cruise was our manifested in the tendency to herald tech“Environmental Afternoon,” culminating nological breakthroughs in efficiency as in a visit by the ship’s captain to the kids’ the sole solution to environmental probcentre. Knowing that the captain always lems, whereas the true root of the issue, answered the children’s questions (you over–consumption, is rarely examined. So, wouldn’t believe how many times they as much as I hate cruise ships, I’ve realasked, “If you’re with us…who’s driving the ized that they are really only a small part ship?!”) I selected one of my more eloquent of a much greater problem, while still servcampers and asked for his help. After prac- ing as an apt small–scale example of our ticing with him a few times and writing out culture’s destructive appetite for consumpmy question on a slip of paper for him, the tion. While having no regrets as to my big moment finally came. “Captain, doesn’t choice of summer employment last year, I food waste from the cruise ship increase have resolved that for this year’s job, I will algae growth, which decreases available be long gone at the first sign of a crying oxygen in the water, causing coral reefs to eagle. die?” I don’t like to throw this term around lightly, but, OH SNAP! The About the Author Captain’s response: “No, no, no…that’s all just blah, blah, Patrick is a second–year student who has blah.” That single moment a friends–with–benefits relationship with (captured on video for posIncite—he’ll write an article whenever he terity) made up for a summer feels like a good time. of living in a cramped, greed–driven, environmentally destructive cage (that, coincidentally, took me to some really cool places, for free).

While many of the ship’s environmental policies were sound, and all in accordance with international maritime laws, the underlying issue that bothered me was the sheer scale of consumption, as The Ship well as the general

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FICTION

Tastes like White Things

By Catherine M.A. Wiebe

Birth tastes like white things. Snow and milk and the centre[s] of bread.

New things that are actually old; [refashioned/remade] from rivers and grass and the yeast that lives in the air.

When you are born, and [just] after you are born, the world tastes white. * You were born an old woman and I will die an old woman, my grandmother says. And you will die an old woman, too.

When you are born, everything tastes of white things— milk, and snow, and bread, things that smell new and are actually old, made again from grasses and lakes and the left over parts of the bread from before you were born.

You already told me this, I say, you already told me that birth tastes of white things. Tell me instead what you mean, tell me what is inside [the crust of] your words.

Everything tastes of white things when you are born— you are eating old things, and so you develop a taste for age.

You must be seen to be six when you are five.

You already told me this, I say, you already told me that birth tastes of young things that are actually old. Tell me why you taste of white things, when you are so far [away] from being born.

And then age sickens you and you yearn for the taste of youth and young things (which you think are the same but are not). Youth is before you and then is behind you[, and you are between [your] youth and your memory of it].

Youth is before you and then is behind you, and you are unsure whether it is past or [is] yet to come— You already told me this, I say, though she did not. Tell me why you taste of white things.

You develop a taste for youth (which is not the same as being young). Youth is [the] one glorious [moment/time] when, for a [time/moment], we shed the truth of our eternal, immutable dependence for the illusion that we—we alone among the sad souls of our age—are free, free [from/of] those behind and before us.

This is not what you told me before, I said, tell me what you

mean, why your first words are not the same as your second ones. Why do I have a taste for age, or for youth, or for something I cannot remember?

You yearn for the taste of youth and young things. Youth comes with young age, for most, and so we mistakenly crave our younger years, thinking that we crave our youth. You wish and [you] hope [for what you think is youth], until you are visited, suddenly, by the humiliation of once again being young—fed on bread soaked in milk and the memories of others[,/;] your memory held in trust, to be dispersed once you come of age. [You/ we] open [your/our] hands to grasp the return of youth and receive instead the indignities of childhood.

You already told me this, I say, you already told me that youth and young age will be here and then gone.

This is the way it will go, from old to young to old again, until you are not sure, anymore, (if you ever were) of the space or the difference between them.

There is only childhood and old age, and between them only memory and hope.

About the Author

Catherine M.A. was a lackey, editor, layout–wannabe, editing co–ordinator, columnist, and master of takeout menus at Incite from 2002 ‘til 2006. She is currently at work on her first novel in Hamilton.

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PERSPECTIVE

Graphic by Ishani Nath

Grey Matter

By John Wyeth

I

’m thinking about where I left them, but mostly I’m thinking of the doctor I’d seen about three months earlier.

This is where the movie version of this column would have a dissolve.

I’ve set foot in a McMaster facility for the first time since the last time—not a classroom, mind you, but the waiting room at the Hospital’s emergency department. The walls are spinning slightly, and I’m positive my sinuses are about to explode, spattering the waiting room’s snot– coloured paint with snot–coloured discharge, plus a reddish glaze composed of what used to be my temples.

There’s been plenty of time to contemplate such imagery: the frazzled looking triage nurse on call seems to have interpreted my lack of whining as evidence of a lack of urgency, and has kept me stewing in my seat from evening until dawn while wheezing toddlers and a bleeding teenaged participant in what must have been a staggeringly entertaining bar fight have been called in. I can’t imagine drunken fisticuffs of any sort producing the amount of pain I’m dealing with. This is no wimpy sinus headache. We’re talking Ricardo–Montabalan– sending–a–Ceti–eel–squirming–up–my–nose bad.

At last, I’m face to face with a doctor. I’m also disconcertingly close to being face to face with myself.

It was a graveyard shift, so I suppose I should have expected a resident rather than the sagacious white–haired man listed under the heading “doctor” in my onboard visual dictionary. But this guy’s youthfulness is genuinely jarring. Strip away the stethoscope, a few pounds of muscle, and the designer stubble, and he could have been me.

Me, at least, in a particularly odd parallel universe. A career in medicine has never held tremendous appeal for me personally, but the plan had always been to be a productive, successful, useful contributor to society, just like all my other former classmates. Hearing tell of their graduation from various professional schools had conjured up a lot of the same feelings I got when attending the first couple of my peers’ weddings: that discomforting realization that these people who used to be just like me had gone and become grownups. Going through the motions of medical treatment with a guy I might have played pogs against was doing it again.

He’s good, by the way. He blasts through a standardized web of questions designed to

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rule out meningitis with faux–extemporaneous aplomb. He gets me out of my shirt with a smoothness that must pay dividends for him away from work, and we discover that I’ve been sporting a rather extensive rash all this time. Yup. Got me an infection. He hits me with a pretty substantial barrage of Tylenol 3s with little sign of diffidence. And then we’re back to waiting.

40 minutes later, and the T3s have done jack squat: my head remains as painful as the humour in Garfield. I am apparently a hardy creature that spits in the eye of pharmacological intervention. Out comes the heavier artillery, and in his estimation, that means Percocet.

I have managed to hang on to my wisdom teeth thus far, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t heard tales. There are some odd souls out there that tell of how getting their wisdom teeth out was, on balance, unremarkable, or even pleasant, and—and they inevitably say this next part in a tone of the deepest reverence—all because of the Percocet. No other pharmaceutical seems to enjoy this sort of swooning admiration amongst my generation: Percocet’s powers of mind–altering moxy are the stuff of legend; to its fans, it’s a bona fide miracle drug, a sort of karmic reward for the misery of horrible injury.

The loss of my Percocet virginity reveals much of this to be hype. It ratchets back the pain from ten to two, certainly, but there are no complimentary trips to the strawberry fields.

My youthful new friend sends me on my way with a prescription for a rather large quantity of the stuff, along with one for what turns out to be a ludicrously expensive decongestant.

Time for another dissolve, to bookend that little episode. We’re back. I’m hunting for them.

I’m positive they were in that bag in the corner of the bedroom, but they aren’t. I pause for a second in agitation, and keep rummaging.

My head is a roiling mess again, but this is pain of a different sort. A snotless pain, for one, but it’s more than that: in fact, maybe pain isn’t the right word for it at all; maybe it’s a sensation that deserves a term unto itself.

Whatever it is or isn’t, it’s driving me wild, and I figure the stash of leftover Percocet is the only thing that stands a chance of making it go away.

My hand hits a plastic cylinder at the bottom of the next bag, and a shake brings forth that glorious rattling sound. Success! Within seconds I’ve got my neck craned under the bathroom tap, gulping down water and sweet, sweet

oxycodone–ey goodness.

I’m quite certain I look ridiculous. In fact, thinking now, writing this, I bet it looked like something straight out of Requiem for a Dream.

It’s not a flattering moment. But I suppose that’s only fitting, because this moment comes as a culmination of some less–than–flattering circumstances.

It takes an agonizingly long time to take effect, but eventually I feel my brain dulling.

I’m worried how long this will last—it’s only a stopgap and I know it. The agony will doubtlessly return, twice as bad, when my brain shakes off its opiate haze and once again recalls I’m suffering from acute venlafaxine withdrawal.

I haven’t taken my meds in three days. And, at least this time, it has nothing to do with my habitual forgetfulness, and everything to do with the empty bottle beside my bed. It’s empty because I haven’t refilled it, and I haven’t refilled it because I’m broke, and I’m broke because I’m unemployed, and I’m unemployed for much the same reason that I’m taking the venlafaxine to begin with.

Which is that, in simplest terms, I’m crazy.

Not crazy like Britney Spears’s third single crazy. Crazy like Britney Spears crazy.

Venlafaxine, probably better known by the trade name Effexor, is a serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, or crazy–reducer. My brain happens to have developed a familiarity for the stuff, adjusting the typical chemical gumbo that’s bubbling away up there to take into account the 300 milligrams of synthetic neurotransmitter I dump into my body daily.

Its sudden discontinuation has not gone over too well, and my brain has registered its disapproval most painfully.

In the morning, I’ll have to break down and go to the pharmacy to get that refill. It will set me back 100 dollars for a month’s supply, and push the bank account more deeply into the red, closer to that terrifying overdraft limit.

I’ll have to call home again, and beg mummy and daddy for money like some 16–year–old girl who just totally needs that pair of jeans at the mall. They will explain in great detail exactly how I’m a failure, order me to “catch onto myself,” express continued scepticism as to whether this mental illness thing is just a bunch of crap made up by the drug companies to describe laziness, and come ever closer to ordering me back to the den, tail between legs, to serve out an indefinite sentence of futurelessness in small–town Canada.

They’re mostly right. I’m a 25–year–old white male who’s grown up in relative privilege. I could be that young doctor I met the day I had sinusitis, and throw the prescription on the credit card I was offered on day one of medical school. I could be a graduate student, and despite a growing mountain of tuition debt, at least have an occupation my folks aren’t embarrassed to admit to the relatives and a drug plan to help cover costs. Hell, I could be a bloody fast food cashier, and know that a day and a half’s work, however agonizing, would cover my medication needs for the month.

But I’m none of those things, because even at a dollar–fifty a pill, the venlafaxine is still not exactly doing a bang up job at getting my brain juices in line. Without it, I’m a wreck: severely depressed, and subject to paralyzing obsessive–compulsive procrastination that brings life to an unpleasant standstill. With it, I’m cheerier, and a little more prone to getting things done. Job applications are fired off, for instance, but not five or six a day, like one might expect based on the hours invested in the process, but two or three a week. I’m a tree sloth, and I’m sharing the branches of my tree with a pack of squirrels. The only solace I can take is that it could be worse; I could be a tree sloth with a broken hip.

Perhaps paradoxically, this whole ordeal has made plain to me that, facades aside, I’m a

naïve cockeyed optimist at heart. After all, the decision to get up every morning is premised on the hope that this day could be unlike all of the thousand–plus days that have come before it. That there will be progress. That it will be worth my while. That I will do what I set out to do. That by day’s end, I’ll be able to lay claim to an exciting job offer, or a fresh piece of writing, or, barring either of those, a hot piece of ass.

For those lovely ladies out there with a thing for whiney emo boys who are inclined to open up about their deepest feelings in print, a word of caution: John Wyeth is a pseudonym. I went back and forth on the issue of whether to attach my real name to this piece before realizing that the potential cost was just too high. We live in a world where mental illness remains highly stigmatized, and also one where Google can bring a potential employer to my past writing in seconds.

Those of us who happen to be straight don’t normally get any kind of an equivalent of “coming out.” I don’t know how similar the experiences really are, but admitting to mental illness might just be a fun way, along with hair pomade, that we on our team can pretend we wound up on the other.

Indeed, perhaps crazy is the new gay. There’s the same heritage of stigma and taboo, and the same slow progress towards social acceptability that’s been heralded by openness on the part of

some noteworthy crazies like Roméo Dallaire, James Bartleman, and Mike Wallace. I can even recall feeling a prickle of pride when I noticed that in a promo spot for the Sarah Silverman Program that showed Silverman’s morning routine, she offhandedly included her taking of antidepressants alongside tooth–brushing and going to the bathroom. We’re getting there.

Of course, it’s one thing to be open about suffering from mental illness when you’ve won widespread acclaim for your accomplishments, and evidently “risen beyond it.” It’s another to be honest with the world while halted in life’s doldrums. At best, it comes off as excuse– making for one’s state of disorder; at worst, opening up about the subject appears indistinct from whining or begging for pity.

For me, life after Incite hasn’t been all kittens and Christmas Trees, and to suggest otherwise would be a lie. But by that same measure, I’m looking forward to writing a more upbeat piece in this magazine’s twentieth anniversary issue— maybe even one with a word like “overcome” in the title. Between then and now there’ll probably be a lot more pills, angry phone calls, and wasted days. But running through it all will be that stubborn thread of hope. It’s something we crazies are afflicted with.

University of Ottawa

Graduate studies at the Faculty of Arts and at the Faculty of Social Sciences

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The Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences offer renewable financial support between $15,500 and $18,000 per year.

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