Incite Magazine - November 2011

Incite Magazine Volume 14, Issue 2 · McMaster University, Hamilton ▪ November 2011

SPACE: Social norms governing the personal bubble WHERE DOES GOD LIVE?: Conceptions of how our universe is organized plus TRAPPED INSIDE: A struggle with bipolar disorder

Editorial Here and now

Sam Colbert & Anna Kulikov, Editors-in-Chief

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n Woody Allen’s recent film, Midnight in Paris, Ernest Hemingway shares his thoughts with an aspiring author, played by Owen Wilson, on what it means to truly live in the moment.

“Death no longer lingers in the mind,” he says. “Fear no longer clouds your heart. Only passion for living, and loving, become your sole reality.”

While Hemingway was speaking specifically about “sharing your body and heart with a great woman,” his sentiment echoes the more general Buddhist principle of mindfulness. To achieve enlightenment, it says, one must be alive and aware in the present moment. The present is, after all, the only point in time that we may ever inhabit.

Mindfulness provides some consolation to those of us who struggle with the notion of death, for, because we will never be dead, our existence can be infinite. Yet, we don’t tend to think in this way. We see ourselves bound between our first and last moments of consciousness as though between two walls. The nonphysical space that is our life seems just as real to us.

In “Next to Normal”, Lily Hastings recalls how the confines of a mental ward resemble those of her own mind. Aaron Jacobs provides a technical explanation of how time and space really aren’t so different in “Let’s Get Physical”. Michael Teichman explores the spacing of conversation in “Pause”, and Nolan Matthews tells us what’s really happening during the mental gaps of daydreams in “Spacing Out”.

In as loose and metaphorical a sense as we could take it, the theme of Incite’s November issue is space. I hope you take the time to enjoy it.

-SC 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

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photography by Matthew Paulson (flickr)

room of our own.

That is what this magazine has come to mean to those of us who dream and create inside its pages. It is comforting to know that there is a small corner of the university that belongs wholly to our thoughts and our ideas, a corner that we are creatively licensed to renovate monthly.

In this issue, our writers have braved all sorts of unfamiliar spaces and situations for the noble cause of narrative. Amongst the most courageous is Stephanie Wan, who relinquished the comforts and privacy of her single room in order to stay in a triplebunk loft with complete strangers. She writes about her experience in “Trading Spaces”.

For his adventures in “Too Close for Comfort”, Dylan Hickson may have been better prepared had he first consulted Incite’s manifest on social norms: “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”, compiled

by Anthony D’Ambrosio, Devra Charney, and Julia Redmond. Dayna Taylor, meanwhile, on her journey of people-watching, naturally begins to wonder, who is watching her?

Just in time for midterms, Meg Peters reviews McMaster’s unconventional study spaces in “Where Not to Work”, while our resident Freudians Alisha Sunderji and Jen Squibb wonder “If Rooms Could Talk”, just what kind of secrets they would reveal about their inhabitants. And as for myself, I take advantage of the Rainy Days of autumn to visit the “Home of the Gods”, gladly leaving behind numbing November realities.

So, without further ado I welcome you, dear reader, into our space!

Won’t you stay awhile?

-AK

incitemagazine.ca Features

photography by janine wong

Departments

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Happenings Selected news from near and far Rainy Days Anna Kulikov Art Spread Livia Tsang, Nicki Varkevisser, Ianitza Vassileva, Janine Wong Brief New World Shawn Fazel

Corrections from the October 2011 issue: The centrefold art spread was by Livia Tsang, though it was wrongly credited to Livia Hopper.

In Philosophical Pragmatism, some of the ideas by co-author Devin Ridley were misrepresented due to errors made in the editing process.

Incite Magazine is published six times per academic year by Impact Youth Publications, founded in 1997.

Entire contents copyright 2011-2012 Impact Youth Publications. Opinons expressed in Incite Magazine are those of the author(s), and do not necessarily reflect the views of Incite Magazine’s staff or Impact Youth Publications.

Letters of up to 300 words may be sent to incite@ mcmaster.ca; they may be edited for length and clarity and will not be printed unless a name, address, and daytime phone are provided.

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Next to Normal Stay in a mental ward Lily Hastings Spacing Out Daydreaming explained Nolan Matthews Connecting the Dots Scanning the night sky Melissa Ricci

Editors-in-Chief Sam Colbert Anna Kulikov Managing Editors Irena Papst, Layout Ianitza Vassileva, Graphics Content Editors Jeremy Henderson Matt Ing Kate Sinclair Jane van Koeverden

Let’s Get Physical An exploration of space-time Aaron Jacobs Shagood Life on a sailboat Steve Clare The Gore-y Details A downtown Hamilton gem Charlotte Mussells, Kaila Radan Away from the Pack The lone wolf effect Kathryn Morrison Too Close for Comfort Crossing social boundaries Dylan Hickson Phobia Fiction Stories of spacial fears Julie-Anne Mendoza If Rooms Could Talk What your room says about you Jen Squibb, Alisha Sunderji Trading Spaces A res-room swap Stephanie Wan Breathing Room Distance in relationships Alison Greco

Contributors Zane Andres, Asha Behdinan, Mark Belan, David Burns, Devra Charney, Steve Clare, Anthony D’Ambrosio, Shawn Fazel, Mallory Fitz-Ritson, Sam Godfrey, Alison Greco, Dylan Hickson, Lily Hastings, Aaron Jacobs, JiNa Kim, Layla Mashkoor, Nolan Matthews, Victoria McKinnon, Julie-Anne Mendoza, Kathryn Morrison, Charlotte Mussells, Lisa Perlman, Meg Peters, Kaila Radan, Julia Redmond, Melissa Ricci, Abdullahi Sheikh, Brianna Smrke, Jen Squibb, Alisha Sunderji, Dayna Tayor, Michael Teichman, Livia Tsang, Nicki Varkevisser, Stephanie Wan, Karen Wang, Adira Winegust, Janine Wong, Afrisa Yeung

Pause Rhythm of conversation Michael Teichman Nature Calls Personal space Devra Charney, Anthony D’Ambrosio, Julia Redmond Milling About Story of a space Abdullahi Sheikh Who Watches the Watchers?

A people-watching adventure Dayna Taylor Pedagogy at its Best The university in society Zane Andres

Covers Joshua Lewis Printing Underground Media & Design Contact incite@mcmaster.ca

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Where To Work Campus study spaces Meg Peters Sorry, it’s Taken Occupy Bay Street Layla Mashkoor Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 3

Happenings caution: flippery when wet

Photography by MARK LEE (FLICkr)

IN CANADA...

Beaver vs. Polar Bear OTTAWA, ON - Senator Nicole Eaton has recently proposed that Canada’s official emblem be changed from the beaver to the polar bear. Initially chosen to reflect the significant contribution of its pelts to the fur trade, the senator refers to the beaver as a “19th century has-been,” believing that the polar bear better represents our country’s present values. Those in favour of the change argue that the polar bear symbolizes Canada’s new vision for the Canadian North, the home of two-thirds of the world’s polar bears. Those opposing the change argue that because of the beaver’s connection to the fur trade, it is an important part of our country’s ethos and a symbol of pride. Too bad the Tim Horton’s logo isn’t an option.

Baby Bieber’s Baby TORONTO, ON - A twenty year-old Californian woman claims to have taken teen pop star Justin Bieber’s virginity and conceived his love child in a bathroom on his tour. The accuser, Mariah Yeater, is suing the teen sensation, demanding that he take a paternity test. Yeater claims that the pair met backstage of the Los Angeles Staples Centre, where they engaged in sexual relations. Yeater was 19 when she allegedly had sex with Bieber, who would have been 16 and a minor. The timeline of the tour fits with the birth of the three month old baby boy, but Bieber denies the allegations, declaring “I’ve never met the woman.”

Did you know?

In a modern version of Snow White’s entourage, brides in El Salvador arrive to church accompanied by seven white cars driven by seven dwarfs, erm – men. Also, in white.

-Adira Winegust 4 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

...AND AROUND THE WORLD Tokidoki LOS ANGELES, CA - Mattel’s new limited edition Barbie Doll is a rebel, with bright pink hair and tattoos covering her neck, back, and shoulders. Although this collectible “Tokidoki” doll has sold out online, questions have been raised as to whether it promotes a healthy image for young children.

Some believe that it does, by introducing a previously unrepresented cohort of popular culture into the line-up of uniformly preppy stereotypes. But the Tokidoki isnt the first tattooed Barbie, having been preceded by the Stylin’ Tattoos and the Harley Davidson models.

Zero Gravity Contraceptive LAWRENCE, KS - Ever consider an exotic honeymoon in outer space? Well if you plan to conceive, it not might be for you. According to biologists at the University of Kansas, the absence of gravitation may decrease sperm counts and deactivate ovarian cells.

While the effect of prolonged exposure to microgravity on human fertility remains unclear, Joe Tash’s experiment with space-travelling rodents indicates that long-term space flight may render people “reproductively challenged.” At the end of his six-week experiment, during which the rats flew on the space shuttle Discovery, the male rats’ testes shrank and their sperm counts dropped so low that they became infertile, while the females’ ovaries completely shut down. An effective method of birth control, I suppose.

All Hallows Party RIVERSIDE, CA - As October drew to a close, we all saw fairly imaginative decorations, but Kevin Judd of Riverside, California has definitely raised the bar. He created a masterpiece light-show, lining his house with hand crafted singing Jack-o’-lanterns, illuminated tombstones, and strobe lights which were synchronized to LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem.” A YouTube video of this spectacle instantly went viral, even appearing on evening news networks. But this light show wasn’t put together overnight; Kevin had been programming it since March. Unfortunately it probably won’t win him Neighbour of the Month.

A Beer a Day Keeps the Doctor Away CAMBRIDGE, MA - A recent Harvard study suggests that a drink a day can actually prolong a woman’s lifespan.

The study is claiming that alcohol, whether it is beer, wine, or liquor, actually improves heart health. The study found that the likelihood of death following a heart attack was lower by more than 30 percent for those who regularly drank alcohol.

This is good news for women suffering from heart disease, as moderate drinking could be part of the treatment.

But don’t think you were helping your heart with those ten tequila shots you took on Saturday night. The researchers are very clear that only one drink a day provides these benefits.

Compiled by JiNa Kim, Victoria McKinnon, and Asha Behdinan

Next To Normal Lily Hastings

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his story is not about hope.

This story is about the time I lost my sanity and my freedom.

For years I had teetered on the edge of mental stability until, in my first year at McMaster, I fell into a deep depression.

At first I just felt miserable. I didn’t sleep much, I didn’t eat much, and I seemed to cry all the time. As the weeks and then months passed, the situation got worse. My mind became a hostile place in which I no longer wanted to be. I was depressed, delusional, and suicidal. The world no longer seemed real. It existed as a caricature of itself that I viewed from the wrong end of a telescope.

One day during a routine appointment, the psychiatrist decided I was a danger to myself and committed me to the Acute Mental Health Ward at St. Joseph’s Hospital. By signing a piece of paper, she signed away my freedom. Two burly paramedics and a campus security guard escorted me through the student centre, into an ambulance, to the hospital, and directly up to the mental ward.

The Acute Mental Health Ward only has the one door, which is kept under lock and key by the adjacent nurses’ station.

The nurses were simultaneously our carers and jailers. They attended to us, but, from their station, kept us locked inside. There were large windows that did not open. The ceiling was white, the floor tiled, and the walls an institutional grey. There was one long, square hallway. I wandered through the hall trapped in the ward and in my mind. I got lost in that hall.

Locked in that mental ward I lost all sense of freedom and privacy. The only air to breathe was stale and laced with disinfectant. There was a small porch – you had to get a guard to unlock the door out to it – but it was so recessed into the side of the building that little air blew through the heavy wire grating. The windows, which seemed like a blessing when I first came to the ward, taunted the patients locked inside. There were people everywhere. Patients wandered the halls, sat catatonically in the common room, or stayed in their rooms crying out in either pain or ecstasy. Nurses were constantly

monitoring behaviour, eating habits, and sleeping patterns. Everything was prescribed; we were told when to wake up, when to eat, and when to take pills.

When I was in the ward, I felt less human at first. The people around me, just as un-human as myself, were shocking portraits of the chaos and darkness the mind can hold. My roommate, for example, was a nice woman when I met her, but she changed at night. She laughed in her sleep. All night I heard wild howls from the other side of the room. Every so often she would get out of bed to wander around, making threatening comments about me as if I wasn’t there. It was terrifying. I was afraid of a lot of people initially, but the more time I spent there, the less scary they became. We were all the same, really, stuck together in the ward with nothing in common except our madness.

The worst part about being there was the boredom.

Time slipped by ever so slowly.

Some of the time I did nothing but lie on the bed, staring at the ceiling, at the walls, at my pillow. There were a few patients my age, and to pass the time we coloured polystyrene cups with chewed-up crayons.

One day, I happened upon a small piano locked away and was allowed to play. The only song I could remember, despite years of memorizing conservatory pieces, was Angels We Have Heard on High. For hours I played that one Christmas carol. It staved off the boredom and was much better than what was happening in my head.

My best memory was of a conversation with another patient. We each knew that there was something wrong with the other, but it didn’t matter. It went unsaid that we didn’t want to be friends, didn’t even necessarily want to remember the other.

Our conversation was honest and stark.

It drifted from suicide to medication to school and to life in general. Whenever I saw him after that, he smiled at me, but we are not friends and will never see each other again. I don’t even know his name.

Being locked up did have its benefits. I was saved from my own destructive power, and eventually from the overwhelming darkness in my head. I wasn’t cured, but I felt more capable of living when I was finally released.

Since leaving, I have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. There have been a few emergency room visits, a few close calls, and a flirtation with psychosis, but I’m still alive. Manic depression is a lifelong illness. It is both unbearable and unbelievably brilliant, and though I have to live with it for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

artwork by livia tsang

Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 5

SPACING OUT Nolan Matthews

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e’ve all been there: you’re sitting in class, and the back of some person’s head has become more interesting than learning about derivatives or chemical reactions or whatever. All of a sudden, your thoughts turn to the type of political system that meerkats would institute if they were to stage an uprising.

Okay, so maybe not that thought exactly, but even the best of us occasionally engage in ”spacing out” or ”daydreaming,” or, as the neuroscientists like to call it, “mind wandering.”

Though there isn’t a complete consensus on what’s going on when the brain decides to wander, it is generally accepted that there is an increase in the activity of the brain’s “default network.” The default network seems to be activated by thoughts about the past, future, or generally matters unrelated to one’s environment.

Along with the increased default activity, there’s probably also something else going on in our brains when we space out. A 2009 study published in the United States National Academy of Sciences Periodical found strong evidence in support of activity in the executive network of the brain. The executive areas are associated with rigorous cognitive processes, such as complex problem solving, and are

thought to usually work alternately with the default network. In other words, when the executive network becomes more activated, the default network is suppressed, and vice-versa.

Daydreaming involves a combination of the seemingly opposed default and executive brain networks; a possible explanation for this unlikely pairing is that in thinking about future events while daydreaming, we encounter a problem that requires our executive functions to solve.

The type of brain activity observed during daydreaming is similar to how the brain appears when engaging in creative thought. Perhaps daydreamers could use their time productively, imagining innovative solutions to complex problems.

The problem is that brain activity during daydreams is strongest when our brains are unaware that they are wandering, so any conscious attempt to daydream in the hopes of solving global warming may be in vain. Perhaps this explains why Newton’s “eureka” moment about gravity struck him in an orchard and not a laboratory.

But even if a wandering mind reveals some great truths, it may not be a journey we are happy to take. A 2010 study done by a couple of Harvard psychologists, entitled “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy

Mind,” found that people spend almost half of their waking hours daydreaming, and that this unfocussed thinking makes them unhappy. The study used an iPhone app to contact a group of 5000 people at various times to collect information about what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy they felt.

The results of the study showed that people are unhappier when spacing out than when their thoughts are focused on what they are doing, regardless of what the activity actually is. It’s possible this is a case of mistaking correlation for causation, as unhappy people could just be more likely to daydream. But the Harvard psychologists are fairly certain that it is daydreaming that leads to unhappiness, and not the other way around.

So must a world that is full of creative discovery be a sad one? In daydreams, we often imagine how things could be, and maybe the more time we spend in fantasy, the more dissatisfied we become with the way things actually are. And maybe this dissatisfaction is the motivation to understand how to change things, or how to bring them closer to our imagined and potentially happier reality. A wandering mind may actually be dissatisfied instead of unhappy, although I’m not sure if there’s a difference. Either way, a wandering mind is definitely not an empty one.

Artwork by brianna Smrke 6 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

Connecting the dots Melissa Ricci

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remember the first time I ever looked at a constellation. It was during the big blackout in 2003. My dad drove me around in our family’s minivan to show me the night sky. Our neighbourhood is normally quite noisy, but on this night it was surreally quiet. It was like my dad and I were the only people awake in the entire world; even the streetlights had gone to sleep. I live at the top of the Hamilton escarpment, and normally the light pollution obscures every star in the sky. But because of the city-wide power outage, you could see every star in the sky. We drove around the neighbourhood aimlessly, and I stared out of the sunroof for hours. When we eventually got back to my house, we stood on the end of our driveway and looked up at the sky. Dad tried to show me the Big Dipper, but I had no idea what I was looking for in the jumble of stars. I was worried I would never really see it. But when I finally did, the Big Dipper became something I could never fail to notice. I became obsessed with the sky. My dad went inside, but I stayed lying on the ground for hours, gazing at the stars and feeling blissfully lost.

This enchantment never left me; I will always love the sky. I love to stare into its expanse, and think of all the people who

Artwork by Mark Belan

have done the exact same thing. Maybe they had lost a love, or were waiting for someone to come home. Maybe they were sad, maybe they were happy, or maybe they felt connected to the universe. It’s beautiful to think that the stars have seen everything humanity has known. Stars live for billions of years and have witnessed every war, famine, triumph, and birth in our meagre history.

I like to believe that generations of people have stared at the stars and sat around fires, talking to each other and feeling the same magic that I now feel, decades and centuries later. What stories did they tell?

How did they account for the stars without knowledge of space and galaxies? Would they have seen in stars the eyes of the gods?

Or alternatively, spectres of departed souls?

How many stories have been told about the sky? How many ways have we come to understand the sheer vastness of it all? Have we ever really understood it at all?

When I first saw the Big Dipper, I remember thinking that stars were very close together. I was deeply saddened when I was told that the stars are, in fact, light-years away from each other. For me, it ruined some of the magic. Instead of feeling that I was shrouded in a shining, safe, warm blan-

ket of beauty, I now felt that the earth was almost completely alone with the nearest star being four light-years (or forty quadrillion kilometers) away.

Even though I was upset at first, thinking about this a little more makes the universe even more beautiful. It may seem like we’re alone, floating through a vast emptiness, but you can think about this as a place to explore. And if that upsets you, think about the fact that we are floating through the sky together. Regardless of whatever problems there are on Earth, we’re all floating together. And isn’t this more beautiful than being smothered under a blanket of sky?

Did you know?

Our dream of one day traversing the vastness of space is being threatened by the practice of space littering. A banana peel idly tossed out of the airlock can reach orbital speeds greater than several kilometres per second and impact future star-ships with more kinetic energy than 18th-century cannon fire. Even paint flecks can be deadly.

NASA reports that the situation is critical: there is now enough space debris and satellite mass to create a chain reaction of orbital destruction – threataning all hope of future generations going boldly where no one has gone before.

-David Burns Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 7

let’s get physical Aaron Jacobs

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he world is full of spaces. Public spaces, private spaces, large spaces, small spaces. Spaces for cooking dinner. Spaces for building rocket ships. But what, exactly, is space? What can science tell us about it?

Space is getting bigger Almost 2500 years ago, Archytas of Tarentum wondered, if you were to stand at the edge of the universe, could you extend your hand into what is beyond? He thought that the problems we encountered when trying to resolve this dilemma indicated that there would always be more space outside. Nowadays, armed with a much better understanding of topology (read: geometry’s more complicated cousin) and some very expensive radio telescopes, we may posit that the universe is finite, extending about 14 billion light-years from Earth.

Yet these very tools have revealed further complications. The universe is expanding at an increasing rate. But rather than the edge receding from us, it seems as if all the pieces of the universe are pushing away from each other. It is as if space, the thing in which everything subsists, is expanding like the surface of a balloon. To top it all off, this expansion is occurring faster than the speed of light. Archytas

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Photography by adam Evans (flickr)

would have been surprised to learn that in the time it takes to extend your hand, the universe will have expanded by more than enough to accommodate it.

Space is mostly empty... no, wait— mostly full In 1909, Ernest Rutherford famously discovered the nucleus, and showed that atoms were mostly empty space. This complemented the demonstration a few decades earlier that interplanetary space must be empty, and suggested there was very little of anything at all to matter.

However, over the last century we’ve discovered plenty of strange and exciting things to fill up all this “empty” space.

Space is full of dark matter, which doesn’t interact with light (making it “dark”), but provides enough mass to modify gravitational fields. Solar reactions constantly bombard the Earth with neutrinos, particles so fast and so small it would take a lead wall thicker than a light year to stop them. It also turns out that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the idea that you can’t measure both the instantaneous position and velocity of a particle accurately, permits virtual particles of any kind to pop in and out of existence anytime they’d like, so long as they do it fast enough to avoid

detection.

The question of why the universe’s expansion is speeding up might be solved by the concept of vacuum energy, a kind of baseline energy for empty space. Notwithstanding the headaches this poses for quantum mechanics, it would also mean that by Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence (E = mc2), empty space would have mass.

Space and time are one and the same We tend to think about space and time quite separately. Further, we see time as being divided into past, present, and future. But Einstein’s relativity dissolves this distinction. Time behaves very much like another dimension of space, incorporated into a four-dimensional space-time. In this view, you and yourself at an earlier time are distinct entities, like two people standing apart.

The fact that light travels at a constant speed in all reference frames has even more bizarre implications. Depending on where you happen to be standing, events can appear to occupy the same space or occur at the same time. Say goodbye to past, present, and future – whether Achilles or the tortoise wins the race depends on where you are in the stadium.

Shagoon Stephen Clare

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umans have developed a sense of mastery over the earth. This single species has spread to every continent, and by dint of its technological prowess, has adapted to the most extreme climates. In the last century, we have even ventured into outer space.

Now, we’ve even got this inhospitable void rigged with countless satellites.

But sometimes, we need a reality check. Despite our accomplishments, we are nothing when the raw force of nature exerts itself. And never has that been highlighted for me more than during the week I spent aboard Shagoon, a forty-foot sailboat, with three friends on the Pacific Ocean.

We set off from Prince Rupert, a coastal town in northern B.C. It took just two hours of sailing to cross the Hecate Strait, a body of water that separates the mainland from the first group of small islands. After that, we were practically cut off from civilization, both physically and spiritually. A GPS unit was our one loose tether to the modern, digital world.

On the second day, we emerged from the gentle embrace of land and manoeuvred Shagoon into the open expanse of the Pacific. Water enveloped us on all sides as the safety of our island harbour faded into the horizon behind us. We were stranded in infinity; as the ocean stretched out into the distance, it melted into the cloudy sky.

The incessant rumbling of the Pacific crashed upon our ears. Our skipper and host for the week, an experienced sailor, took no notice of the transformation, but I was transfixed, struck by the sheer

enormity of an untainted, natural place.

I had seen the ocean before, but I only became aware of its immensity when it stretched off endlessly around me.

In contrast with the water’s majesty was life on a small boat. Forty feet sounds reasonably big, but the space quickly dwindles when you add the engine, table, kitchen, navigation equipment, and food and water storage. There was barely room for the four of us to sit, and manoeuvring from one end of the boat

artwork by afrisa yeung

to the other while holding charts, food, water, or books was always a challenge.

We all tired of the cramped quarters and took whatever opportunities we could to get off the boat, whether it be kayaking around the natural harbours we docked in or exploring the islands we occasionally spotted.

Away from the pressure and anxiety of everyday life, I became aware of humanity’s frailty in the face of the sheer vastness of Earth. Shagoon

was a marvel of human ingenuity, a complex amalgamation of centuries of technological advancement, culminating in this, the ability of four people to skip across the surface of the great ocean while guided and tracked by satellites.

Yet, we still felt puny compared to nature.

At any moment, a storm could whip up and possibly capsize us. We could run aground on hidden rocks. The wind could die down and delay our journey by days.

Despite all our safety nets, nature still held power over us.

That feeling persisted after I disembarked Shagoon and returned home. For centuries, humans have fought to tame nature. In the age of technology, our controlled environments largely separate us from the elements. Yet natural forces can still wreak massive disruption with barely any notice, despite our sophisticated advanced warning systems. Last April, a single Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, crippled European air traffic for a full week. Hurricanes, tornados, and monsoons kill thousands of people and destroy many buildings each year.

Perhaps we are fast approaching a time when the environment will be under our complete control.

But aboard Shagoon, I sensed that nature is more important and powerful than we know. The human species is infinitesimal. Nature is infinite. Long after the last human dies, the planet will still exist, although it may be radically changed. Nature is ever-changing and fluid. Before we try to curb its might, we should remember that it could easily slip between our fingers.

Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 9

the gore-y details Charlotte Mussells & Kaila Radan

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s you walk east along King Street into downtown Hamilton, you pass office buildings, bus stops, and construction sites. But when you cross James Street opposite Jackson Square, everything suddenly turns from grey to green.

Gore Park, a narrow strip of nature that runs down King from James to John, is nestled in the heart of Hamilton. Closed off from the world around it, the park offers relief from everyday stresses.

Originally known as “concession two, lot fourteen,” the property was part of a Crown Grant to John Askin before it was sold to George Hamilton in 1816. He used the land as a dump, and it stayed vacant for twenty years until Hamilton’s death, when it was passed to his son Robert. The City of Hamilton purchased the land from Robert in order to develop it into a subdivision.

But when an article in the Hamilton Gazette outlined the City’s plans, a group of seventy-four Hamilton residents protested the subdivision. As a result, the proposal failed, and the lot remained undeveloped for another ten years.

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Artwork by wayne macphail (Flickr)

Though it was, at the time, considered an eyesore by City Council, the park has improved significantly. It is now a walkway decorated with landscaped gardens and impressive monuments.

A fountain marks the center of Gore Park. It was originally erected in honour of the Royal Family’s first official visit to Hamilton in 1860. Overseen by the “Special Committee on Ornamenting the Gore on King Street,” its construction was part of a larger effort to beautify the empty space. Funding for the fountain was provided by the City Council and by donations. It brought new respect to the once dilapidated area.

On the way to becoming a hospitable green space, though, there was one outstanding problem: pigeons. By 1953, the hordes of roosting birds had become so bad that a “Pigeon Elimination Committee” was formed. The City called in 122 hunters to exterminate the birds. In the end, 1200 pigeons and 2500 starlings were killed. Today, the birds are no longer a problem, and are in fact welcomed in the park.

Now that it is more hospitable, the

area has new purpose. Imagine yourself sitting on the edge of the fountain, beneath the trees. A cool breeze blows by, stirring the vegetation. To your left, a young girl with her mother is feeding a flock of birds. A jogger passes by.

Across from you, two bicyclists stop for a quick break. This is Gore Park at its finest.

You look farther and notice a group of about thirty people gathered nearby.

This is not the first time that the park has been chosen as a protest site. It is strategically located: two busy streets flank the park, allowing for maximum publicity. Today’s protest is part of Occupy Hamilton, a movement for greater social justice. People with signs line the street, soliciting support from passing traffic. While some stop to observe the demonstration taking place, for others it is just another Saturday afternoon.

Busses rumble by and cars honk. The smell of diesel fuel mingles with that of fast food restaurants.

What truly makes Gore Park special is that it belongs to the people of Hamilton. It is their place of peace, safe and untouched by the whirl of commotion that surrounds it.

away from the pack Kathryn Morrison

The lone wolf effect creeps up on those who spend time away from society. Personally, I am no stranger kjto this effect. After my ten day trip to Killarney Provincial Park, I became something of a ‘lone wolf’ myself. Camping on an island in the middle of O.S.A. Lake, well within the interior of the park, I was surrounded only by nature, totally severed from the hustle and bustle of society. Even after such a short trip, I could feel the culture shock as soon as I returned to civilization. The noise, the sheer number of people, the stress - all were incredibly foreign to me. I couldn’t help but wonder: what makes us so attached to society, and why does our removal from it so profoundly affect us?

Initially, one might argue that humans are social creatures and that the “lone wolf” way of life is unnatural. This fits with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which lists, in order of priority, the basic needs of humankind: physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. According to this model, after health and safety, social interaction is the most important attribute of human life.

Why is it, then, that when most of us leave society for a while, we experience relief and not loathing? This might be explained by the need for self-actualization in Maslow’s Hierarchy. All the other needs are “deficit needs:” we notice them when they are absent, but once we have them, we take them for granted. Self- actualization is different. It is known as a “being need.”

We only notice its absence when all our other needs have been met.

Once the other requirements for a healthy life have been met, we notice this more profound need to “be all that we can be.” Consider this: without the pressure and demands of others we feel as though we have more time to enrich our own lives. We can discuss and contemplate our joys and problems, pursue all that we desire, and escape the judgement of others. We also get the self-satisfaction of subsistence living. We build shelter, scavenge food, and build fires. The creativity and innovation with which we provide for ourselves is very empowering and gives us a sense of accomplishment.

You might be wondering how we can pursue self-actualization without interacting extensively with others in a society. After all, the need for belonging trumps the need for self-actualization. Well, Maslow evaluated the characteristics of the self-actualized and uncovered some intriguing results. He found that selfactualizers have a comprehensive grasp of reality, are problem solvers, live with humility and respect, and, moreover, that they deeply enjoy solitude. It seems that a sense of belonging does not necessarily require social interaction. It is possible to feel attuned to the earth without engaging excessively with others.

Our need for society stems from our desire for belonging. For this reason, we tend to have a negative perception of the “lone wolf effect.” But maybe the truth is that we are just scared of it. Could it be that lone wolves have the best sight?

Graphics by Dayna Talyor PHOTOGRAPHY by SJOERd van oosten (FLICKR)

Volume 14, Issue 1 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 11

too close for comfort Dylan Hickson

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s a species with a recently confirmed seven billion members it’s nearly impossible to make it through one day without interacting with strangers. Whether it’s on the bus to work, in the elevator to your floor, or on a plane to a tropical destination where you will, inevitably, stay in a hotel with hundreds of other strangers, we interact with people in confined spaces every day. Many of us zone out during these encounters; we turn on our iPods, immerse ourselves in our cell phones and generally shut out the world. So what happens when someone forces us out of our personal bubble? How do people react when they have no choice but to interact with strangers? I recently made a trip from Hamilton to Toronto and conducted a relatively harmless experiment to see how people would react in these situations.

I caught a bus leaving McMaster University that took me to Union Station.

While in line, I struck up a conversation with a girl in front of me who was listening to music and looked pretty spaced out. When she realized that I was trying

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to talk to her, she took her earphones out, turned around, and replied to my question about when the bus was supposed to arrive. We continued to talk right up until the bus pulled up and she even did me the utmost honour of putting away her iPod. I was thoroughly surprised to see someone so ready to make small-talk and began my journey with a renewed sense of optimism.

On the bus I sat next to someone who was sleeping, but most passengers had earphones in or were talking to a friend.

This time I decided to take advantage of the enclosed space and took my experiment to a whole new... smelly level.

For anyone with delicate sensibilities, I strongly recommend skipping to the next paragraph, but for those who like to cause trouble, I invite you to read further. Sitting in the middle of the bus I reached up to turn on my light and let loose a muffled, smelly, creeping fart. Satisfied, I settled back into my seat, and casually looked around to inspect the aftermath of my actions. A couple of people close to me gave a quick, subtle glare but everyone else ig-

nored the entire escapade. Conversations stopped mid-sentence for a moment, as people looked at each other awkwardly, before quickly picking up where they left off. But really, what could anyone do? Tell me I was rude? Ask me to stop? I realized just how reliant we are on the social norms to keep things bearable, and the air smelling nice.

The final stage of my trip took me several stops on a crowded TTC car. I was standing in the middle hanging onto the handrail above, amidst a throng of forcibly confined commuters. Two feet in front of me, a headphone-free woman was reading a book. I leaned over and told her the book she was reading was really great and that I, having previously read it, enjoyed it.

She just kept reading while others looked over, stared at me, and then at her; all the while the metallic screech of the car continued. The train stopped and I pushed my way to the exit. As I left, I noticed her peek at me over the brim of her book, and then quickly return to her bubble.

We live in a society of people concerned with themselves, most of whom don’t really care about people they don’t know. On a large scale, we’re all living in the limited space of the planet Earth, forced to interact on an international level. Just think if disputes between people in an elevator were handled the same way disputes between countries are settled. My experiment proved to me that people generally aren’t eager to open up to strangers. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing for us to treat each other as individuals, taking every face as a potential friend, a potential love; or at the very least, a Artwork by afrisa yeung person.

PHOBIA fiction Julie-Anne Mendoza

Everyone is scared of something. Mostly, our fear are perfectly reasonable: death, aging, pain, dismemberment, loss… These are all fairly universal – but when does a fear become a phobia? Better yet: when does a phobia become a problem? Here are some case studies of the zaniest phobias I’ve come across. Check it out:

Bathophobia: Fear of Depth Most kids are usually excited when we tell them they’re graduating to the deep end. Sure, there’s the occasional nervous one, but that doesn’t usually last too long. Getting to the deep end has always been a rite of passage.

But not for Jack.

Jack had absolutely no problem with the kiddie pool.

He had no problem with the shallow end of the big pool.

But when we tried putting Jack in the deep end, he went wild. He kicked a lifeguard in the crotch and punched another one before we decided it wasn’t worth the effort. And of course his parents are sending him back next week, so we have to go through the whole ordeal all over again.

I’m telling them to bring along some water wings… just in case.

Ecclesiophobia - Fear of Churches Dragging sixty kids around Montreal for a walking tour was a nightmare. Dragging them into the NotreDame Basilica was supposed to be our reward for putting up with their madness. And I didn’t even get the chance to go in.

We were on our way through the main doors when one kid just froze inside the entrance. He stopped talking, stopped walking, and by all appearances, stopped breathing. He didn’t respond until we pulled him away from the church and let him sit on the edge of the pavement. He just sat there, breathing heavily, until it was time to leave.

He refused to talk to me about the incident. The very mention of it seemed to nearly set him off again. According to his parents, he suffers ecclesiophobia, a paralyzing fear of churches and religious spaces. The origin of his fear is unclear. It may seem wacky, but this phobia definitely real, affecting 0.1% of the population.

Agoraphobia - Fear of Crowds or Enclosed Public Spaces I don’t know why I signed up to help with the doorto-door canvassing for this charity. It’s been cold and rainy and I’ve keep meeting some really freaky people.

Yesterday, this one lady opened the door to a house.

It seemed like she hadn’t left the place in years. The entire front hallway was filled with boxes from Grocery Gateway, online order companies, and door-to-door laundry services. She would only talk to me through the screen door. When I told her about the fundraising walk we were doing, she just shook her head, backed up into the house, and shut the door in my face.

Amaxophobia - Fear of Riding in a Car My birthday party was supposed to be super awesome, and it was super well-planned out, and I was super excited. My parents were supposed to drive two cars full of my friends to the movie theatre. This was going to be a way better birthday party than Alexa Demazio’s.

Unfortunately, things did not go down as I had planned. As soon as we got on the highway, Emily totally freaked out. She went into hysterics and demanded that we turn back. I could barely understand what she was saying. She was getting pretty frantic. We ended up giving in and going back home. Her parents came to pick her up, and the rest of us got to the movies much too late to get good seats. We ended up going to McDonald’s instead.

It was super annoying, and she is SO not invited to my birthday party next year.

Acrophobia - Fear of Heights I was so thrilled when he asked me out. I just kept nodding my head as he spoke, smiling like a moron, and I didn’t realize until later that agreeing to a trip up the CN tower probably wasn’t the best of ideas…at least not for me.

I made it to the top of the elevator. Then I made it to a garbage can…and threw up. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t ask me out on a second date.

So there you have it. Those are some of the wildest and weirdest phobias I came across. Believe it or not, these are only the tip of the iceberg. I could have also mentioned geliophobia (fear of laughter), geniophobia (fear of chins), omphalophobia (fear of belly buttons), phobophobia (fear of phobias), and, of course, papyrophobia (fear of newspaper and magazines).

Photography by Nicki Varkevisser Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 13

Rainy days Home of the Gods Anna Kulikov, Columnist

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have always found it unbearably sad to watch the elves of Tolkien’s Middle Earth sail away from the Grey Havens and leave behind a fragile Age of Men. Yes, I will admit to being both a romantic and a nerd.

My consolation, however, lies in the very mythology from which the master of fantasy himself drew inspiration. I have of late developed a special love for the tales, characters, and places of Norse mythology, finding it to be an organic, imaginative, and refreshing escape from the Greek paradigms I have been caged in. But what I find most intriguing is the unique construction of the Norse universe and its implications for the interrelations of its inhabitants.

The pagan Norse envisioned the structure of the world quite differently from their Christian successors. For one, the Norse mapped their existence within the rest of the universe in a more colourful way than by simply referencing the human world with respect to astronomical phenomena. The Eddas – poetic and prosaic sources of Norse mythology – speak of a tree which grows at the heart of the universe, dipping its roots in the wells of three worlds; one inhabited by the gods, another by the frost giants, and the third by the primordial ice. The branches of the tree are sprinkled with white mud, and they rise above heaven,

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supporting in the middle of the tree’s tall trunk Midgard – the world of man. Elves and dwarfs too have their own worlds about the tree, while some colossal animals make the tree itself their home. Cosmological dramas play out across its surface, including the duel of words between the eagle and the dragon, the wars of the gods, and eventually Ragnarok, the apocalyptic demise and rebirth of the cosmos and its inhabitants.

While the Norse canon is hardly internally consistent where the geography of its universe is concerned, some of the early Icelandic Christian scholars reinterpreted details of their pagan mythology in line with new Christian ideologies. One of the most significant changes was the remapping of the vertical positions of the Norse worlds along the cosmic tree. Asgard, the home of the gods, was said to rest on Yggdrasil’s crown, while Midgar was transposed to its trunk, and the underworld spread to encompass the entire underside of its roots. In this way, scholars of the medieval ages imposed a morally hierarchical order on the inhabitants of the Norse universe, altering the functions of its axes.

Traditional readings of the canon hold that wisdom is the most important variable along the vertical axis of the universe. This is primarily inferred by the juxtaposition of Odin

– the all-seeing father god who resides at the tops of the tree – against the primitive worlds of ice and fire under its roots. Meanwhile, the horizontal axis of this universe serves to distinguish between the densely populated human realm and the empty, inimical vastness of the surrounding sea. The Norse perceived the world as existing in the middle of a watery expanse, reflecting the geography of their native Iceland.

In general, Norse mythology also proves a better source for understanding Scandinavian tribal life than the Christian one could offer.

This is most evident in etymological and historical evidence for the theory that the Aesir and the Vanir, the two families of Norse gods, are in fact representations of foreign continental tribes. The word Aesir has been suggested to stem from “men of Asia”; while, the ancient war and eventual victory of the Aesir over the Vanir has been explained as the gradual overrunning of early fertility cults by more warlike tribes, perhaps of Indo-European origin. However, the scholars who have explored these historical origins have not all done so with purely academic intentions. Some may have hoped to nullify the mythology’s status as a religion by exposing its factual inconsistencies and thereby promote Christianity as not simply an alternative, but the true door into ultimate truth

about the universe. Today, scholars prefer to view Norse mythology not from a historical paradigm, but as a religious system containing many deities with different functions, all interacting within a rich lore and vivid universe.

The proselytism of the Scandinavian people however, had other, less obvious implications for their beliefs. While the home of the gods in the pagan tradition had a precise geographical and topographical location on the world tree, the Christian tradition introduced a deity who had no home, so to speak. The Christian God dwells in nebulous places, neither here nor there. Some theologians explain that he exists inside humans, others believe that he resides in “heaven”, and yet others argue that he exists in all of creation. Regardless of the variation, none of God’s locations can be mapped in relation to our own.

In fact, these opposing conceptions of divine space run parallel to other aspects present in the two religions. For one, when Midgar was being built by the gods, special care was taken to surround the world with walls made from the eyebrows of Ymir, the giant whose dismembered body was used to create the Norse universe. This was done to protect humans from the giant races who sought to destroy them. In Christianity, the greatest threat to humans was not seen as being external to them, but rather internal – the temptation to sin.

Likewise, the Christian God equipped humans with protection against this threat in the form of his love and presence, as well as the free will to protect themselves.

Moreover, “Where does God live?” is a question that is often asked by children, for they lack the ability to understand abstract or non-physical space. In this way, Christianity could be regarded as a more mature religious system than the Norse one, focusing on morality and abstraction rather than tribal interactions and concreteness.

I cannot pretend not to favour the Norse construction over the abstract one. To be connected by the flesh of the world tree to the abode of the gods is such an empowering belief, especially to us, inhabitants of the twenty first century who are faced with the lonely prospect of an expanding universe, full of galaxies that we could never traverse or planets that we will never visit. There is spatial unity in the Norse world that we simply cannot fathom in the monotheistic religions, a unity that allows the elves of Middle Earth to depart it, yet remain structurally and spiritually connected. Despite the defined structure, though, the unexplained white mud and the unmentioned expanse beyond the world tree still leaves enough creative space for us to dream unfettered.

“To be connected by the flesh of the world tree to the abode of the gods is such an empowering belief, especially to us, inhabitants of the twenty first century who are faced with the lonely prospect of an expanding universe, full of galaxies that we could never traverse or planets that we will never visit.”

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BRIEF NEW WORLD Get Real Shawn Fazel, Columnist

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thick cloud of incense smoke fills the room as we enter and take off our shoes. While we relax and prepare our bodies and minds for the next session, ambient music fills my mind and I let go.

These yoga studios are not your traditional gyms; there is a spiritual element here that is often either overlooked or dismissed. In an age where “enlightenment” is strictly an intellectual affair, the notion of developing your “soul” has fallen out of style. That is, if you believe it exists.

Similar to the question of the soul, comes the mind-body connection. While there have been significant advances in the fields of neuropsychology and neurophysiology, the connection is still a heavily debated topic. And while we have a good understanding of the senses and their physiology, it is the mental interpretation of these inputs, combined with the mystery of the mind, that creates our sense of consciousness. This is our awareness of the reality surrounding us, and our relationship to that reality.

Many spiritual traditions have explained it as a filtration of reality, like clouds covering the sun. Our subcon18 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

scious, built throughout our life, projects itself onto our perception. Essentially, we perceive reality through our distinct personality, and therefore live in a unique mental space that we create for ourselves. This projection distorts our reality, and most cultures have found ways to deconstruct this projection and reconnect with the “ultimate reality.”

This spiritual dimension is important in all cultures; it is the responsibility of our spiritual guides, from shamans to priests and everyone in between.

Many will acknowledge that they filter reality but they do little to understand or access its true nature. It is in the hidden crevasses of our unconscious mind – do you dare to travel there? Do you dare to uncover long-repressed memories and see deeper truths? It isn’t a voyage everyone is willing to take; it requires determination, courage, and insight. Your subconscious might have you confront difficult truths of your past or uncertainties about your future. It isn’t easy to see the world differently. However, the benefits can outweigh the costs. While we can rationalize the human condition, we cannot understand or rationalize our meaning, only find peace within.

Attaining a higher state of awareness and exploring beyond the limits of our mental space is not as important today as it once was. Philosophers of the Age of Reason stressed a rational basis for enlightenment, delegitimizing organized religious institutions and emphasizing the individual nature of the spiritual relationship with reality. This framework marked the rise of Luther and the Protestant Reformation. The translation of the Bible, which conveniently coincided with the invention of the printing press, allowed for anyone to read the Bible and develop an understanding of Christianity for his or herself outside of the Church’s authority. Enlightenment came to reflect that individual nature of understanding – the development of individual thinking and understanding. Therefore, freedom of speech and the freedom to individually believe and share in a perspective gained utmost importance. This gives everyone the means to enlighten his or herself.

Kant’s enlightenment is “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity…the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another…where the cause of self-imposition

lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” Kant denounces all guidance to enlightenment – because it must be free of bias. When one can pay for a doctor to take care of the body, a plumber to unclog the toilet and a priest to heal the soul, where is the incentive to learn these things for oneself?

Capitalism, Kant argues, shadows the incentive to gain spiritual enlightenment.

But overthrowing a thought system will only make room for another. Kant puts it more elegantly: “Perhaps a revolution can overthrow autocratic despotism and profiteering or power-grabbing oppression, but it can never truly reform a manner of thinking; instead, new prejudices, just like the old ones they replace, will serve as a leash for the great unthinking mass.”

This is universal. Put this into the context of the Arab Spring for instance, and you see that the revolution is still taking place inside the hearts and minds of the oppressed. Without personal enlightenment, individual thought and the doubting of the propositions around us, we can be made to believe anything.

Look at Hermain Cain, advocating a 9-9-9 tax plan that has no basis in any sound economic policy. George W. Bush convinced us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and justified the bombing of Baghdad with American safety. The appeal to our conditioned perception of reality only strengthens its position and distances you further from ultimate truth.

There are many means of escaping the influence of others and searching for personal enlightenment on one’s own.

Without guidance though, it is difficult to know where to begin. Atheists looking for meaning in the world find only randomness and emptiness, which isn’t all that comforting. Dabbling in different

religions and spiritualities is common, but stereotypes and strict rules discourage many. Where can we turn?

Voltaire advocates deism, where the rationality of the universe is both the subject of admiration and of careful study. Like “mice on a ship to Egypt,” Voltaire postulates that God does not meddle with human affairs but only sets the stage for them. Some Indian spiritual traditions frame karma as the accumulations of past actions that form kilesa, which distort our perception of reality, sanskara. There are many, many different schools of thought on the matter, and equally as many means of escaping the boring mental space we occupy every day. These include meditation, yoga, fasting, sleep deprivation, isolation, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and prayer.

Some indigenous cultures relied on psychedelic drugs such as cannabis, psilocybin, peyote, salvia, ayahuasca, opiates, and tobacco among others. Many of these drugs are illegal and I would argue that the government has enough incentive to keep us from enlightenment. But that’s for another time.

Ultimately, it is important to take time to explore our consciousness and our relationship with reality. Whatever means we choose, it will take determination, strength and resolve to change our prejudices and expand our minds. It is a worthwhile endeavour and must not be taken lightly, so explore different techniques like tai chi or meditation. Maybe join that yoga studio nearby with the funky name and shoeless hipsters, and get back to reality.

Did you know?

The next time that your grandparents comment on you young whippersnappers being into all sorts of foolish fads, you have to say but three words: Telephone Booth Stuffing.

Originating in South Africa, the fad peaked in 1959 and spread to England and North America. The object of the fad was to simultaneously cram as many people as possible into a phone booth. A group of South Africans hold the record at 25, even though British booths were wider. No word on how Superman feels about this.

-Sam Godfrey Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 19

If rooms could talk Jen Squibb & Alisha Sunderji

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e all occupy personal spaces – areas that belong only to us. It could include a single bedroom, a shelf in the bathroom cabinet, or even the inside of a locker. But have you ever thought about what your personal space says about who you are? How much would a quick glimpse into your space tell a stranger about you?

The answer, as it turns out, is a surprising amount.

Popular non-fiction author and journalist, Malcolm Gladwell, tackles this question in his book Blink. He proposes that a person’s space reveals far more about their personality than one might expect.

He cites a psychological study done by an American university which showed that strangers did a good job of predicting a student’s personality traits and behaviours based solely on seeing and walking around that student’s residence room. The strangers in the study were able to very accurately predict the student’s conscientiousness, work ethic, emotional stability, and receptiveness to new experiences. In fact, on average, the strangers actually performed better than the student’s friends in measuring these particular variables!

How is this possible? How could a simple glance around a room be more helpful in judging an individual’s personality than a lot of direct, personal interaction? It turns out that, though you might not realize it, your space can give away many clues about your behaviour to an objective onlooker. Carefully folded up laundry, objects arranged just so, and a neatly made bed reveal much how you typically behave in spheres beyond your space. Other things, like framed pictures of family and friends, sports trophies, or a heaping bookshelf, can tell a lot about how you perceive your own identity. As well, decorations like scented candles or artwork, can indicate how you want to feel in your space.

On paper, it seems like it is possible to

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get to know someone from their space, but does this idea actually work out in practice?

Putting our intrepid investigative skills to the test, we arranged to meet at the house of a friend whose accommodating housemates had offered to be guinea pigs for our experiment. After some awkward banter – “Nice to meet you. Umm, we’re here to analyze you and your room” – we jumped right to our task.

One room was noticeably neat and or-

PHOTOGRAPHY by ianitza vassileva

ganized, with attractive but functional furniture and an orderly arrangement of belongings. Everything was in its proper place, indicating, we thought, a structured, puttogether, and meticulous person. Another room displayed a variety of paintings and prints, contained an eccentric looking red desk, and several plants. To us, this room immediately suggested a more whimsical, artistic temperament. Our impressions of the inhabitants were confirmed by themselves and by their friends.

The accuracy of this experiment made us wonder about our own personal experi-

ences moving into a student house in September. During the move-in and in the weeks that followed, we began gradually to unearth objects left behind by the previous tenants and, like archaeologists, we attempted to piece together their story.

In the days of the previous tenants, a large androgynous-looking doll with dark, beady eyes and wild orange hair would sit in a customized swing in the corner of the living room. Covering the walls were calendar clippings with scenic backgrounds, accompanied by motivational quotes.

There was something unnerving about this scene: the doll’s menacing leer, the porcelain cherub perched on the table, scented candles littering the room, and a strong smell of potpourri. In the basement we found other relics: a metal staff covered with balloons, symbols scrawled on to their brightly coloured latex shells, and copious amounts of glitter under a bathroom sink.

A few theories bounced around our living room where the eerie doll, now affectionately referred to as Jae, resides comfortably on our couch.

Could our house have once served as a contemporary shrine? Or a Cabbage Patch Kids cult? Perhaps the previous tenants financed their university education through a birthday clowns enterprise?

We may never fully understand the eccentric personalities of the previous tenants of our house, but with all of these experiences behind us, we have both come to realize that the spaces people create are fascinating and revealing . They are powerful personal testaments that can live on even after the individual has departed. Spaces cannot mislead or put on a facade like their inhabitants can. The class president may seem put together but their laundry-strewn, malodorous shoebox of a room tells a different story.

Likewise, an apparent slob could be a Lysolloving neat freak at home. A glimpse into someone’s space, their little personal corner of the world, can tell you more than their words or appearances might.

TRADING SPACES Stephanie Wan

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’ve always thought that having a roommate would be like playing a role in Gilmore Girls, that sharing a space with someone would also mean sharing moments of ultimate bonding. I always thought that sharing a space as sacred as your bedroom would mean partaking in epic Rory-Lorelei rituals like PJ-clad Friday night takeouts and late hour boy-problem banter. Roommates share a space, but do they then share an existence, or simply coexist? To test my notso scientific hypothesis, I decided to trade spaces with someone living in a bunk loft triple.

To be honest, going directly from living in a single room to sharing a bunk loft triple for two days was overwhelming. As expected, there was a lot more clutter and a lot less space to walk in. I was also forced to quickly learn some roommate etiquette.

Coming back on late nights couldn’t involve carelessly swinging doors or dropping keys on the table. Rather, roommate etiquette dictates that you act like a bandit: pry doors open quietly and tip toe across to your bed.

I don’t know if I can be that considerate every night, but I certainly did try to learn some manners. One was telling my new roommates where I was going and when I was coming back. Maybe this isn’t so much a rule as it is just regular conversation, but having lived in a single room, I have grown to like being able to exit a space without having to justify myself. Then again, maybe roommate etiquette is nothing but common courtesy, not necessarily something that comes from living in a shared space.

If I were to describe my experience with one word, I would use “awkward.” This word is certainly fraught with negative connotations, but I don’t mean it in a creepy, uncomfortable, Keanu Reaves kind of way. The word was always there, in every moment inside a small space together when you can do nothing but laugh at the unfathomable

idea of living an entire year with complete strangers and their habits. We all fill out the roommate questionnaire: do you sleep early? Do you listen to music loudly in your room? Yet none of these questions prepare you for the truly awkward: knowing when to disturb the unbearable silence in the room, knowing that there is always another person there. Probably the most awkward moment of my stay was having to trim my nails in front of another person. Other awkward moments included being told to cut down on my tone-deaf humming and hearing my new roommate shuffling on the top bunk and mumbling neurotic nonsense in their sleep. I’m not sure that filling out any questionnaire can make these moments of awkwardness disappear.

During my stay, I realized that my RoryLorelei complex may have been farfetched but not wholly the workings of a crazy lonedweller. I noticed that sharing the same space also meant bonding over trivialities.

It may not be as extravagant as sharing life stories over a tub of ice-cream, but neither should these small moments be taken for granted – you just can’t get them when

you’re all alone. It is bonding with your roommate over successfully killing a spider together or finding out the source of an awful stench and getting rid of it, together. It’s the silences that are broken by your roommate meandering over to your side of the room to share with you the newest Smosh video. Or the, “how was your day?” and the, “how was your calculus test?” of late night weekdays. Though they aren’t long or deep conversations over hair braiding or sugar binges, these small exchanges can be just as valuable when faced with the alternative: being alone.

But if you were to ask me to choose between a bunk loft triple and my current room, I would probably still keep to the lonely confines of a single. When you live in a space together, you must accept your roommate for everything that they are, and everything that they are not. In sharing a room, you enter the zone of perpetual awkwardness, even if at times these moments lead to more meaningful conversations.

Living in a single room isn’t for everyone. I know that for now, it isn’t for me. I’d rather stick to clipping my nails in private.

PHOTOgraphy by CALLEE MACaulay (FLICKR) Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 21

Breathing room Alison Greco

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Artwork by Lisa Perlman 22 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

ou and your man, who have been dating for quite some time, sit back and enjoy another cozy night together. Everything seems perfect and just right - nothing could be better than this. Suddenly, he turns to you and says, “You know, I think I need some space.” Immediately, the world stops. Your heart races and your head spins. What have I done? Are we breaking up? Has he met someone else? I thought we were happy. What the hell does he mean he wants “space”? “Space” is not a word you want to hear when you’re happy and in love. What do you do when you hear that dreaded word?

After discussing this topic with a handful of students, I discovered that “I need space” usually translates to “I’m not happy in this relationship”. It doesn’t matter who in the relationship wants space – their reasons for wanting it are generally the same.

No one ever just “wants space”. There is always a reason and it is important to know what that reason is as soon as those heartbreaking words are uttered to you. Typically, there are three reasons why someone would claim to want “space” from their partner: the relationship has lost its spark, there’s someone else, or they genuinely need more breathing room. “I want space” is just a more reassuring way of putting it.

Unfortunately, if the reason is too hurtful, your partner is most likely going to lie. If they ask for space, give it to them. Only then will you know for sure the true reason behind the request. If they want you back after the break then you know there might still be hope for the relationship. If they never call you back then I think it’s pretty obvious that by wanting space, they really just wanted freedom. Overall, every relationship is different, sometimes seeking more space in a relationship can be a healthy choice. For the most part, however, people believe that when someone asks for space, the relationship is doomed. Even if the two get back together, the relationship will be changed for the worse.

You will always be in a state of paranoia and your relationship will lack trust. This can be quite emotionally damaging for you and your significant other.

As a word of advice, never go chasing after your partner after they ask for space. Let them come back to you. Don’t force it. You cannot force someone to love you back if they are just not feeling it anymore.

Trying to make things work could only push them further away if you do. In the end, you just have to be prepared to accept the worst and move on, no matter how tough this might seem.

pause

Michael Teichman Sunday. 11:38 PM. Some Random Bar. Single.

Right. Now stay cool boy. No stumbling this time. You are going to have a smooth, conversation with her. Control yourself. She is standing there looking casually over her shoulder, oh so coolly. Wait, what was that?

Direct eye contact? No, no, this is not supposed to happen – not this early! My pal told me not to make eye contact until step three.

I am only at step one! Shoot, what do I do, what do I do? Okay. Stop. Focus. Remember the manual. Remember the steps. It will be fine. Wait, what’s supposed to come next? Shoot, is she starting to walk over here? Maybe she is heading the other way? Maybe, hopefully, with any luck and…

Wait, back to her question. She seems suspicious, almost accusing. Not so good, huh?

Still, she is talking to me, isn’t that a good sign? Should I keep this conversation going as long as I can even though it will probably go nowhere, or somewhere not in my favor?

Wait, what am I even saying? That cranberry concoction must be hitting me harder than I thought. Well, there is only one thing left to do now: I am going to pull out the most secretive, most sacred of all techniques to try to turn this around and salvage what is left of my dig-

“Hi, how are you?” she says. Dammit.

Oh God. I have been warned about this. This is what they call the first impression. I have been warned about this exact moment. It is is crucial.

Ace it and I will never have to worry again. Blow this, and I might as well kiss my chances goodbye.

She’s waiting for a response.

Crap, what do I do? The awkward silence is growing bigger by the second.

Come on Michael, say something, something, anything…

“Uhhh…. argh… blueberries?” Uh oh.

Seriously? The one chance I cannot screw up and I say – blueberries? I mean granted, fruits do not make the most glamorous of topics, but come on, blueberries? Surely there are more interesting fruits to talk about, like pomegranates, or even apples for crying out loud! But not blueberries! Okay, you need to save yourself before this becomes fatal…

“Sorry, what did you just say to me?”

Shoot, she just spoke. This is so strange.

Normally, no member of the female species speaks to me… this is exhilarating, actually.

still have chance! Alright, now to amp up the awkwardness: The Llama.

“So what else do you have hotshot?”

“Well, how about a nice llama? Everyone likes llamas.” I try the llama signal.

“Wait, what the hell was that? Are you trying to flip me off? I’m not that type of girl buddy. You can just forget it about it!”

Too soon for the llama, too soon for the llama.

I though that the llama was the next logical step, it’s on the middle of the scale for Christ’s sake! What do I do now? This awkward pause is growing bigger by the second. This is longer than Bernie Madoff’s prison sentence! What do I do? Come on Michael, think, think! Surely you can come up with something! Umm… Shit. I am drawing a blank.

Is it hot in here? Or is it just me? Or is it actually? Damn, I can’t tell but I’m shvitzing like a sauna!

God the suspense is killing me! And what is up with this silence? Seriously, But wait…

“So what? You’re not going to talk to me now? Okay, I see how it is; clearly I am not interesting enough for you! Well, if you ever change your mind, I’ll be over here, sipping on my cocktail…. waiting for you….” she winks.

graphic by sam godfrey

nity. I mean, the only way to diffuse the awkwardness is to pile on more awkwardness, right?

“Ah, yeah, about that…” I start, motioning the awkward turtle.

“Wait, was that just the awkward turtle? Omigod!

Do it again!” she says.

Wait, what’s going on? It seems that she is entranced by my awkward hand signals. This is so unexpected, and surprising and... AWESOME! That pause between our dialogues could not have been more than three seconds, and everyone knows that a pause between one and five seconds is not considered awkward at all: this is going so well! I may

Holy Toledo, did you just see that? She thinks I am playing cool and hard to get! But I am not. I just met her, but I think I love her. No Michael, focus now. What now? She thinks you are silent and collected, and therefore attractive. Let’s use this.

Several minutes pass in silence.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that she is becoming fidgety and shooting furtive glances over her shoulder. This is great, I have her exactly where I have her! Now, for the finishing move: “SALMON!” Monday. 10:34 AM. My apartment. In a relationship?

Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 23

Nature calls

Devra Charney, Anthony D’Ambrosio & Julia Redmond

S

o you’re sitting in class daydreaming, when all of a sudden you realize that nature calls. You begin fidgeting in your seat as you count down the seconds until class ends. It finally does, and you rush to the nearest washroom.

Because you are a man (ladies, use your imagination), you take advantage of your gift and use a urinal. Nobody else is in the washroom, so you begin your business without a care in the world.

The door opens. Another man enters.

Thankfully, there are many free urinals for him to choose from that are not adjacent to you. But wait! You hear the man’s footsteps approaching closer and closer.

He occupies the urinal right beside you, makes eye contact, and gives a casual head nod. Your manly intuition reminds you that this act is in clear defiance of the Bro Code Item #41, which mandates that a one urinal buffer exist at all times.

It is simply unacceptable for him to occupy this urinal when other spots are available. It is also unacceptable to make eye contact with another man while answering nature’s call. You do not need to prove your alpha male status by being “confident” enough to look at another man during his most private moment.

24 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

artwork by mark belan

Should we abide be these unofficial rules of conduct? Common courtesy says yes. You should never go out of your way to invade the personal space of others.

Generally, if you can avoid making somebody else feel uncomfortable, you should do so. What if you don’t really have an option? Let’s say there is only one more urinal available – what do you do? There is no way to avoid it. The other man will just have to be sympathetic to your dilemma.

An unruly bladder is perhaps one of few situations that justify breaking Bro Code.

After your awkward encounter in the washroom, you step outside to wait for the bus. When it finally pulls up, you walk up the steps, flash your student card, and head directly to a row of three empty seats. Knowing that it would be ridiculous to sit in the middle seat because this might split up two people who enter the bus together, you occupy the leftmost seat and wait as other passengers file on.

It turns out that not very many people are heading to Westdale at 10:05 PM today, so you get to keep all three seats to yourself. At the next stop, however, a woman walks on and decides to sit down right beside you. Aside from the fact that the bus is virtually empty, with many spots

still available, the rightmost seat in your row remains unoccupied. Why would she choose to sit in the seat directly beside?

You roll your eyes and shift over as the lady proceeds to put her bag between the two of you, cutting your personal space in half.

Similar to urinal etiquette, public transit etiquette dictates that the two outside seats in a row of three should fill up before someone can justify taking the middle seat. It is socially unacceptable to sit directly beside another person when it is possible for both parties to maintain some part of their personal space. This same unspoken rule applies to couches, benches, and any other form of seating that can fit more than two people. Sitting in closer proximity to someone than necessary can make them feel uncomfortable, and common courtesy dictates that this is something we should avoid.

While the social norms of personal space exist everywhere, their parameters are not universally consistent. In The Hidden Dimension, Edward T. Hall develops a theory of proxemics, which states that people will uphold differing degrees of personal distance depending on their social setting and cultural backgrounds. He

defines the personal, or informal, spaces that surround individuals by outlining their degrees of intimacy. Public space is the region of space beyond which people will recognize interactions as fairly impersonal and anonymous. In social and consultative spaces, people feel comfortable carrying out regular social interactions with both acquaintances and strangers. The closest “bubble” of space around a person is called their intimate space, and only the closest friends and intimates of a person are allowed to enter it.

Expectations for how these three levels of space should be filled differ from culture to culture. He asserts that conflicting cultural ideas for characterizing space, which are unconsciously internalized by everyone, can result in the breakdown of communication between cultures. In the United States, for example, it is customary to maintain about 1.2 - 2.1 meters of space between yourself and your conversation partner. In many parts of Europe, the social distance is reduced to about half of that. Due to this culture gap, American tourists in Europe commonly find themselves at uncomfortable degrees of intimacy during conversations with locals and feel the need to step back.

Some experts claim that social norms are essential to our lives. Nineteenth century French sociologist Émile Durkheim popularized the term “anomie,” which means “without law.” He describes a hypothetical state in which social norms have been abolished. He proposes that the “normlessness” of such a state would result in the destruction of the individual. In his 1877 book Suicide, he introduces the idea of “anomic suicide.” His theory is grounded in the belief humans have evolved with a “capacity for feeling that is an insatiable and bottomless abyss.”

The individual relies on society to impose limits on human feeling and desire. Without social norms, society would fall into anomie, and people would have no way of keeping their passions in check. He proposes that the individual in anomic society “aspires to everything and is satisfied with nothing.” As a result, people lose purpose, become lost in emotional emptiness and despair and subsequently take their own lives. He concludes that society needs social norms: order simply cannot exist without them. Most other sociologists agree, as it seems that norms arise out of a need for rules and standards.

Spaces do not only specify social Did you know? norms, they also have the power to influMeal time can be stressful, but not in Morocco, where you need not worry about telling ence the way people behave and feel in the dessert fork from the salad fork, from certain environments. Spaces can make the relish fork, from the dinner fork, or even you feel more comfortable or they can from the cold cuts fork. You just need to tell set you on edge. Everyone has a particuapart your right hand from your left, and dig into the communal bowl. lar environment in which they feel most -Adira Winegust confident and are able to act more like themselves. Usually, this is more likely to happen in a familiar environment. In mics and wait for a sincere apology before previously uncharted environments you letting them off the hook. Or, if you cantend to be more guarded, timid, insecure, not quite bring yourself to break the soand self-conscious. Spaces change the cial norm of avoiding conversation with way people act without them even real- strangers, remember that this situation is only temporary and will soon be over. izing it.

So, next time a man tries to creep And remember, always do your part to into the urinal directly beside you, or a maintain common courtesy by respecting woman sits right next to you on an empty the personal space of those around you bus – look them right in the eye, calmly and understanding that where we are im40Crk_5x6.5_b&w_Sept11_fin_College b&w 14/09/11 AM Page 1 the way11:34 we act. remind them of Hall’s theory ofPapers proxe-ad - pacts

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Fo rtyCreekWhisky.com Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 25

Milling about Abdullahi Sheikh

H

PHOTOGRAPHY by Anca Mosoiu (FLICKR)

ave you ever thought about how many people pass by this school every day? A few thousand people flood in and out hourly, every one of them bringing in their own unique smells and sounds. Some are loud while others prefer quiet. Some reek of last night’s egg salad while others drown in the stench of their own cologne. It’s a mosaic of people, all inhabiting the same space. Have you ever thought about their effects on that space? Houses and rooms may have character, but it is the people who use those spaces that give it to them.

Did you know?

Though nature abhors a vacuum, physicists love them. A vacuum is an area of space completely devoid of particles. This is impossible in practice, but the theoretical implications are useful and fascinating. A vacuum allows for frictionless movement, optimizing calculations to their ideal. Unfortunately, it is impossible for humans to survive unequipped in this state because our blood flow is largely dependant on external pressure. Though, contrary to what Sci-Fi may tell you, your blood will not boil. We’re onto you, Star Trek…

-Sam Godfrey 26 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

In the morning, all is quiet. Nobody’s arrived in the lounge just yet.

I’ve got some time to myself. It’s nice to engage in a little bit of introspection now and then – it lets you clear your head a little. I’m not sure how I’ll handle the rest of the day. The sheer volume of people coming to the lounge can be taxing at times, but it’s always rewarding. Rousing myself because I have to, I prepare for the day.

Before you know it, it’s lunch time.

That’s when they all come flocking.

The lounge is getting crowded by now and people have already started moving to the outer fringes, clinging to whatever space they can find. Their voices reach a fever pitch as multitudes conversations dominate the space. Everyone gets a fair shake here and if they haven’t got any friends they make them. It’s a nice feeling I get, watching them all mingle and chat. Chat about their classes, their tests, the daily grind - anything! I’m a people-watcher of sorts and this is the time of day I get all of my people watching in.

Unfortunately, noon passes by and the afternoon slowly crawls into the room. People have already begun leav-

ing, the day is nearing its end. I decide to take a quick rest, stopping my inspection of the room’s inhabitants to do a little thinking myself. It’d be nice to follow these people around, to explore the rest of their lives outside of this room. Alas, I find my surveillance of these people to be limited to this room. What can I say? I make the most of what I’ve got.

Time passes and night rolls on by.

In its gloomy darkness a handful of people find their way to the lounge one final time. Some visit to do some last minute studying, others to see their friends right before they head home. I take one last forlorn look at them before I head off myself. Although others may be able to leave this room, I don’t see it as a prison. Whenever I want I can take a look, and lo! People are here doing...whatever they feel like! Knowing that my simple presence is appreciated is all I need to go on. So remember, the next time you’re simply wasting time in a room somewhere, or in a class or even at home, remember that someone’s watching and that they’re glad you’re there.

Who Watches the Watchers?

Dayna Taylor

I

’m pretty sure that everyone has people-watched at one point or another, and I guess I find that realization to be simultaneously reassuring and unnerving. On one hand, it’s nice to know I’m not the only weirdo who likes watching strangers do boring things. On the other hand, I’ve become increasingly paranoid about who is watching me. I’ve always found comfort in the knowledge that I can roll right out of bed and show up to class with my hair in a ponytail and no makeup on, and nobody will notice. Now I’ve realized that if I’m making quick snap judgments about the strangers around me, they’re probably doing exactly the same thing about me. Last week I accidentally walked around with my shirt inside out all day. Now I wonder how many people noticed.

At first, stuff like this tends to embarrass me. Then I realize that people probably forget within the day; I know I usually do. Another source of comfort I have is in knowing that this information about other people doesn’t last very long.

The majority of my people-watching tends to be nothing more than a quick glance – often an accidental one – and then I move on without giving it another

Photography by livia tsang

second thought. It’s rare that anybody makes enough of an impression for me to remember them later. I mean, everybody seems to have a story about that one time they were on the subway or the bus or at the mall and something really wild happened – but the majority of the time, people are pretty darn boring, and never more so than in public spaces.

So why do we get a thrill from people watching, when it’s rarely actually exciting? I think we like to judge each other. People tend to catch our attention when they’re falling apart, and if I’m alert enough to notice, then there’s a good chance I’m doing better than they are. A few weeks ago I rode the Toronto Subway end to end, people-watching the whole time, and waiting for something to happen. The most interesting thing I saw was a girl who ate a doughnut and looked miserable the entire ride. There must have been a reason she caught my attention over everyone else – more so than the mother who struggled to dress her child, and the teens who were obviously exaggerating the stories of their weekend. I don’t remember anyone’s face but the girl’s with the doughnut. Why do I get a little thrill catching a stranger

picking his nose in a coffee shop? Or listening to the woman beside you on the bus ordering Mexican food and thinking, “My Spanish accent is better than yours.”

I don’t know the number of times I’ve judged a stranger sitting in front of me in lecture playing a game instead of writing notes, when I must admit, I’ve done the same.

The main appeal of people-watching is imagining the life stories off the strangers around you. But I think it’s easier to be a detective when you are behind a reassuring one-way mirror. I think I like people-watching because, in that precise moment, it provides me with a fleeting feeling of superiority. I guess sometimes, no matter how stressful things are or how melidramatic life is, if I’m tired or if I have a zit, it’s comforting to look at a stranger and think, “Well, at least I didn’t spill coffee on my coat this morning.”

Did you know?

In Korea, it is common for wedding celebrations to conclude with the groom’s friends tying his feet together with his socks in order to slap his soles with a fish. Why? To ensure that he is strong on the wedding night.

Bow chicka wow wow.

-Adira Winegust Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 27

pedagogy at its best Zane Andres

A

s a Humanities student, I’m well aware of the rivalry between McMaster’s engineers-to-be and the arts majors. Among students, the rivalry is light-hearted. They mock us for not being able to “do anything” with our degree once we’re finished, and we respond in kind from a sense of pseudo-intellectual superiority. But this mock feud is symptomatic of an actual problem; what is the role of the university? Is it a training ground for a career or a place for education in general?

In my time at McMaster, I’ve witnessed a transition toward a more careerfocused education. In the Humanities, the Women’s Studies program has been reduced, the Art History program threatened with extinction, and Comparative Literature discontinued as a major. Our Theatre and Film program has changed focus to “devised theatre” because this is viewed as the only field in which graduates can find careers.

There’s even been a suggestion that the Humanities should be merged with the Social Sciences, just because the Social Science budget would benefit from it. This is a phenomenon happening all over North America. The University is concerned more with maximizing profits than with education. It is becoming more like a corporation. The Humanities are slowly being left behind because they do not produce money for the University and because investors demand that their money generates direct “results”.

But really, the university is the last public sphere that can develop intellectuals who have that capacity to critically appraise the problems of society and chal-

28 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

lenge moribund institutions. But in the conservative media, the university comes under attack for being a pool of radical leftwing extremists, and there are outcries for more regulation. The criticisms are more noticeable in the United States, where the anti-corporate or anti-Republican is seen as an anti-American. Comedian Jon Stew-

artwork by LISA PERLMAN

art came under attack by Fox News’ Chris Wallace for his criticism that Fox News viewers are constantly misinformed. Wallace accused Stewart of a liberal bias. During the exchange, Stewart noted that Fox News’ stance seemed to be that “any editorial judgment in news, or schools, or movies that doesn’t favour the conservative view is elitism and is evidence of liberal bias...

while any editorial judgment that favours the conservative view is evidence, merely, of fairness – and done to protect them from liberal bias.”

The attack on Stewart is a prime example of how the conservative media cannot tolerate criticism or anything that strays from their ideology, like the university.

Professors are accused of trying to indoctrinate students. The conservative influence manifests in less professor control over curricula. The students who emerge are less likely to offend Curtis Wallace and his colleagues.

I need to stress that I am not against departments that aren’t the Humanities – everyone has the right to study whatever they want in University, from the Humanities to the Sciences. I only focus on the arts because their primary goal is to give students an education, not a career.

What I’m against is the university becoming a corporate training ground. That should not be the role of the university’s role in society. McMaster’s Henry Giroux summarized it best in his article “The New Right Wing Assault on Higher Education”: “Pedagogy at its best is about neither training nor political indoctrination; instead it is about a political and moral practice that provides the knowledge, skills, and social relation that enable students to expand the possibilities of what it means to be critical citizens”.

That is the role the University needs to play. It needs to be a place where we can learn, where we have academic freedom, where we can hope to change the world. It cannot be a place where we are regulated and trained.

where not to work Meg Peters

S

o you’re sitting in your living room, fully aware that the week from hell is fast approaching. You have three labs, ten midterms, and fourteen papers to complete. There is no room for kidding around – you need to study, hard. Only your brainless housemates decide it’s the perfect time to invite their Uruguayan family to visit. Within minutes of entering your student house, these strangers have already broken glasses, turned up the volume of the stereo three notches, and have laughed loudly in eerily choreographed tandem. You could ask them to leave, beg them to take their boisterous ways elsewhere, and leave the mess for them to clean later… or you could pack your massive backpack with 534 textbooks and head to a public study space. Not sure where the best locations are on campus? Worry not! Meg Peters has traveled to the far reaches of campus in search of the best place to study.

Learning Commons Mills Library Noisy. That is the best adjective to describe Mills Learning Commons. Not spacious like a public space should be.

Not quiet like a study space should be… just noisy. I walked in at 1:00 PM on a Thursday to discover the learning commons just as loud as the student centre, with less space. There were Macs there for student use, but I wasn’t willing to wait my turn to try them. I say if you need the background buzz to get stuff done, head to MUSC first. At least there might be a seat available. Besides, MUSC is opened 24/7, while the Learning Commons is only open until 2:00 AM on weekends (Friday and Saturday).

Meg’s Rating: 1 popped ear drum out of 5 CaFFeINe: the elements First Floor, BSB Surprisingly quiet for its location, this café is open Monday through Thursday between 8:00 AM and 7:30 PM and Fridays between 8:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Unfortunately, it is difficult to connect

to Wi-Fi from within the café, but it is otherwise comfortable and productive.

There are tables, available power outlets, as well as comfortable leather seating for long and boring readings. In the middle of a weekday there might be a seat or two empty for you, especially if you head there between classes.

Meg’s Rating: 2 Wi-Fi reception bars out of 5 E-Café ETB McMaster’s best kept secret, or maybe that’s just my own ignorance. This café is furnished with couches, tables, and has a wide variety of coffee, smoothies, and sandwiches. Open Monday through Thursday between 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM and until 6:00 PM on Fridays, the café is open a little later than most places. Even better are the benches directly to the right of the café entrance.

Meg’s Rating: 4 tit-birds out of 5 Atrium MDCL Quiet fills this three-story tall, near meditative

green space. It is serene – a perfect place to get things done. Unfortunately, there are no desks for doing scribble work, but it is definitely the best place on campus to crack open a new novel. There is always a bench empty for you to sit and the sound of the waterfall is a pleasant backdrop, drowning out conversations so that you can focus on your work. Although only open on weekdays with standard 9 to 5 hours and lacking much needed desks, the nature room is one stretch away from being the perfect public study space.

Meg’s Rating: 3 livings walls out of 5 There are many other great public study spaces on campus that I did not review. Honorable mention must go to the following places: Healthsci Library, Math Café, and Bridges Café. I recommend taking a walk around campus a few times when you have the chance, you’ll be surprised at the number of studyappropriate locations you’ll find.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY Rachel Lyra Hospodar (flickr) Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 29

sorry, it’s taken Layla Mashkoor

A

bout two thousand Canadians gathered for the first day of Occupy Bay Street - dubbed the Occupy Toronto Market Exchange - to show governments, banks and corporations that they are not happy with the injustices plaguing the political and financial systems. They assembled at 10 AM in front of the TD Bank Plaza in the Financial District, and by 11 AM, they were well into their march down Bay Street towards St.

Photography by elvert barners (Flickr) 30 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ November 2011

James Park.

Although the event was borne out of anger, the protesters were content in just interacting with one other. Activity centred on live music and dancing. To quote Bob Dylan, “There was revolution in the air.”

The movement has been criticized for its lack of a defined leader to act as its public representative.

Instead of one person at a podium, St. James was filled with loudspeakers. Anybody was free to address the crowd.

People raised many issues. Listening in on one loudspeaker I heard about capitalism, greed, fluoride in water, aboriginal rights, sanitation, the environment, and many other causes. Significantly, all the speakers spoke first of corporate greed and financial inequality before moving on to their particular issue. This strong sense of shared purpose belies the media’s emphasis on the confused and unguided nature of the protests.

Some of the signs I encountered read, “Neo-Liberalism 1979-2011,” “You Can’t Arrest An Idea,” “Due to

Recent Budget Cuts, the Light at the End of the Tunnel Has Been Turned Off,” and “This Country was Built by Men in Denim but Will be Destroyed by Men in Suits.”

Russ Ford, who runs the Lamp Community Health Centre, explained, “We have to demonstrate that the system is not working for the vast majority of people and we’re being continually ignored by all levels of government. It’s a failure of our state really, that people have to come out and do this kind of thing.”

Many dedicated protestors have set up tents in St. James Park and plan to stay there indefinitely. They are braving a cold and wet fall to make a statement: not all Canadians are okay with the current system. Organizer Nadim Fetaih, filmmaker and student, believes the occupation will last throughout the winter.

“We’re saying, listen there is something wrong here,” said organizer Farshad Azadian, “It’s hard for me to make ends meet but these guys on Bay Street, the big banks and the big corporations are making a killing - record profits - and they have the gall to reach into my pockets to get corporate tax breaks and bailouts?

We say no, we’re not going to take it anymore.”

St. James Park has transformed into a well-organized occupation station. The volunteer organizers have divided themselves into various groups, all of which are actively seeking more volunteers.

Each group has its own tent and serves a specific purpose: medical, information, legal, media, outreach, logistics, and food.

In addition, there is a female-only sleeping tent, a kids’ tent, a free school tent, a health and wellness tent, and a library tent where occupiers can choose from books

by Karl Marx, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jack Kerouac, and many others.

Despite the supportive community, there was a sense of unease in the air that this protest may be a repeat of Toronto’s violent G20 opposition. A legal team circulated the park handing out a phone number to an arrest-help hotline, where a team of lawyers was standing by.

Throughout my day, Jack Layton’s

name kept popping up. Many protesters, such as Derek Soberal, who created the Occupy Canada Facebook group and produced the documentary G20 Exposed, said they were there to express his vision.

“The 99 per cent are sick, just sick and tired of it all, and there is a four-point mission we need to keep in mind,” said Sheila Banks, a mother, social worker, and writer. “We are about changing the inequitable distribution of wealth, environmental degradation, the war machine, and the human rights abuses in our system.

Photography by nicki varkevisser Volume 14, Issue 2 ▪ Incite Magazine ▪ 31

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