A Minute for Gratitude

So I've decided to leave on April 1st. Things are winding down as things are starting up. I was talking to Breanne on the way home from French class on a mild spring night and she was saying that I'm leaving just as everything is starting flower and blossom and I agreed that things were just starting to go well here in Montreal. This place is sweet, a brew pot of people and ideas and communities. She said that it passed by so quickly, why didn't we make the most of it? and I said cause I wasn't leaving while I was here.

And then I was talking to Thom as he came in for my last shift at Second Cup and he asked me if I was feeling nostalgic yet and I kind of scoffed because it seemed so ridiculous that I would have any nostalgia about this ridiculous min wage job that produces inordinate amounts of waste and doesn't recycle and where my boss has gotten mad at me for refilling peoples' cups with hot water or giving change for bills. This is a place where we are taught to push extra sales by asking what kind of muffin you would like with that? to make customers think it's free and then charge them for it fully knowing it's stale fatty sugary food. And one time a girl found a tooth in her sandwich. If there's one thing I've learned from Second Cup and maybe corporations in general it's to not trust them because they just care about money. If there's a way to cut costs to the detriment of others, it's likely they'll do it. And then you'll eat it up.

But so then later on in the night as I was cleaning up, picking soggy napkins out of half chewed cups of leftover dregs of coffee and chocolate grinds and coagulated milk solids, cleaning up plates sticky and plasticized with processed shriveled blueberry, an odd moment happened. The Rock'n'Roll Oldies station was playing and Leaving on a Jet Plane came on. Something about that song pulls me viscerally from inside, turns my stomach into a vacuum and generates nostalgia in my whole body. So I started missing my terrible job even while I was doing it. And it was such a ridiculous sequence of events that I felt the need to re-evaluate what I have had and I realized there are elements of this job that are unique, mainly the chance to connect with dozens of people every night. Between midnight and 7AM I have tons of conversations, some good, some uninspired, some fantastic.

I talked with a student recently moved from Taiwan on his own and we talk about how being far from family affects you. In french, I discussed with a man from Iran doing his pH.D and Masters respectively at UQAM and U of Montreal studying Environment and Religion how much time is left before we see some serious consequences of our system and what sustainable development should mean. This cute couple came in, a little tipsy from a few drinks, from Florida and Calgary respectively and couldn't stop smiling at each other and danced and sang a little to the upbeat oldies playing while ordering a coffee and moka. And then Marc came in and talked for a while and drew me a linguistic chart of logic of how piquer un sainte crise doesn't mean sting a holy crisis.


Then a great conversation with a real estate developer about the workings of the real estate market in the past few years and how it's all inflated. And then this grumpy lady got very impatient when I made her a double short instead of a double long.

And so I thought that if I can even feel fortunate towards Second Cup, perhaps the key is the lens through which you look at things, to remember how short-lived this is all going to be so as to make the most of it. If I can even feel good about Second Cup, I should take a minute and take stock of what else I can feel fortunate about. I've heard it's a good exercise for happiness.


Let me just take a minute and count 'em, those things you take for granted until they are gone:

1. Health. This body housing the me. The millions of cells performing a myriad of functions, oxidizing, respiring, repairing, synthesizing, digesting. Whatever you call that sensation when you're moving fast enough that air is blowing throw your hair and across your face and you're breathing deep and fatigue is building slowly in your muscles as they pump hard, your lungs expanding fuller and fuller, trying to compensate for the oxygen deficit and your body is just coursing with life. And to sleep soundly at night.

2. This island city that you forget is an island until you cross a bridge or mount a royal and then you see it from afar or above how it really all fits together, the bagels, the french/english uncertainty, the boroughs, street corners and winter settling in and icing all the cracks and crevices in the city, my first winter in 3 years! and icing over of rinks and the festivals to get you out always out and into le foule, the holes in the walls, the anti-capitalist sentiment, the university and its classes, the practically free french classes, all of us outsiders struggling together to get a handle on french and the french.

3. To be alive in this era, with these all-new challenges and joys and modes of communication and issues being tackled for otherwise I wouldn't know what to do with myself not that I really do anyway.

4. Peeps. The people around me near and far. Thom and Xiang threw me the most epic surprise party on Saturday. I rushed home in the afternoon thinking I was "babysitting" and instead found a house full to the brim with good, good, honest people. They were hiding in the kitchen and gave me the biggest surprise of my life. And they kept pouring out of the kitchen, people I've met from work, from class, from life, all such good people, so human and honest and loving, all doing their best the best they know how. And then we all hung out for the afternoon and everyone got along with everyone cause it's so easy to make friends and be friends, it just requires honesty and a smile. It buoys the spirit. People are so good, they're there to confide in, the laugh with, to share with, to lessen the burden and increase the joy.

5. And my God little Noa is just something else. We go through our phases of friendship, on and off and of course her parents are doing all the legwork here but she's a constant reminder that life is simple and real and beautiful.

6. There's more to this list. You could go on forever.

More Green

I've been learning lately that everything is connected. You, me, them. Social justice and environmental justice cannot be considered apart. The rich and the poor are in it together. A healthy environment has rebounding effects in every direction whereas a degraded environment has the opposite effect in every direction. To oversimplify; green things, be it trees on your street or a forest near your school or plants in your room have subtle effects on everything from air quality, human behavior, water drainage, humidity, health, aesthetics and even greenhouse gases I suppose.

The world is currently looking for ways to encourage more green. Examples include carbon credit trading, ecosystem valuation, urban agriculture and "green" everything, from dish soap to toilet paper to bullets. Yes, like for a gun. Some of these schemes are disingenuous but this one is not:

The school where I volunteered in Ecuador ("All Smiles, Snotty Noses and Eager Eyes") is trying to raise some money to save the stand of forest next to the school, valued more as timbre than as green.

If you have you ever been asked to donate to a cause and have been unsure whether to do it or not because you don't know how much of the money is going to the cause and how much is going into "administrative costs?" here's your chance to donate directly without doubt to good people for a good cause. Take a minute out of your busy schedule and click below even just to read about the school and project. And give a dollar, five dollars, ten dollars, if you have it. Donating online through paypal is safe and easy and immensely effective in a world where the internet cuts through boundaries and barriers of communication so incisively. Click this goddamn link:

http://katitawa.blogspot.com/2010/02/blog-post.html

Though it is likely that you will breathe some of the good clean oxygen produced by those trees, you will probably never see Kimberley, Marcia and Alex except in the picture below. You may never even be in the same country let alone meet Robert, the 78 year old American man, dedicated founder of the school or the community of Ecuadorians young and old that will see these trees everyday. But you can rest assured they exist nonetheless and that everything is connected.

Unpolished Dream/Nightmare

I feel like I'm bearing the weight of the world and all I want is for it to get off my back. I know damn well that it's time for action, in fact it's almost all I can think about unless I'm purposefully distracting myself. I think about all the time; that we have to start acting and it still might not be enough but I don't know what to do, I can't find anything decent to do and the pressure is hard so I resort to escapes like everyone sane person does. It's why sometimes you find yourself trying to wake yourself from a nightmare because you want to escape a scary effing thought. But there's no escaping this one beyond denial.

I can barely open my mouth, barely write on this blog without wanting to talk about declining biodiversity, declining forest cover, declining ocean ecosystems. It's a goddamn nightmare.

We need a dream to aspire to instead of a nightmare to run away from. What is that just yonder, right over the horizon, glowing so bright that it's throwing off the darkness?

Martin Luther King uttered "I have a dream" and it captured a generation.

We know what the future has to look like, at least fuzzily. It has to have less clutter, less useless things that make us miserable. We have to take better care of our land, eat better and healthier, realer and plantier food. We have to waste less that's for sure, we'll have to sacrifice a few things too. That's the simplest start I think and I don't think it's much to ask for. The world probably has to be more equal too. I'm going to grab one of those things and run in that direction. Farming, this summer, organic farm internship or WWOOFing. Done. Get off my back you big black cloud.