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.

The Night Shift

Picture Credit

Rode past Second Cup one night at around 2 am on my way home. Looked in the window to see who was working and I had a vision of myself in there working away, completely unaware of what was going on outside the store. As temporary a workplace as I keep telling myself that this is, the minute details of this corner of Guy and Ste Catherine have become part of my life. Milk temperature, rags, 7 scoops sugar shake for a minute, asbc, for here, to go, skinny, pesto, $3.21, grab'n'go, portion sirop, single double short long, copie de votre facture. I'm really good at measuring 6, 8 or 10 ounces of liquid, pouring a full carton of milk into a canister quickly and moving full cups of coffee from one counter to another. I'm amazing at opening packets of tea, putting sleeves on cups and directing people towards the washroom and the key it requires. Also decent at sweeping and mopping and being patient. The sum of it all is worth absolutely nothing in any other circumstance and even in this specific circumstance still no more than a slice of strawberry cheesecake and a medium chai latte per hour of grovel. Our stuff is overpriced.

I'm here now, lap top next to the blenders. Baritones and esses over the steady hum of whirling electronics. Ten minutes ago, cop cars swarmed the corner in a burst of red a blue flashing lights, guns pulled out at arms length aimed at a car of teenagers driving the wrong way down St Cat's. It looked like a sting operation. Their guns look bigger and thicker than I thought they would, kind of fake and plastic. But now it's completely quiet as snow falls silently onto the sidewalk, undisturbed but for a few tracks of meandering footprints highlighted by yellow streetlights. The night shift is a different world and though everyone normal might be asleep, the hours still need to pass until morning.

I humour one old guy for a half hour as he tells me grand stories of how he has a penthouse at the Fairmont and how his sons both just died, one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq and how he is going to the south side tomorrow to finish up a quarter million dollar deal and how his great grandfather owned the first construction company in Montreal. And can he get a free coffee.

A hurried man rushes in to buy 200 grams of coffee ground at number 3 and I wonder what his rush is. It occurs to me later that since I'm the only one working, maybe he wanted to get me away from the cookie or tip jar so that while I was grinding the coffee he could steal something.

The big fat late night security guard glides into the store like a hovercraft, slow steady and disdainfully. He's never happy about being awake at night. In the heaviest joual accent he exhales while mumbling "gran noir siltplai." I try conversing with him every night and catch no more than 4 to 5 words.

Two students refill their coffees.


The store is dead quiet for an hour and the curly haired homeless guy sleeps undisturbed in his usual chair with his usual little spiderman bag. One time he took it personally when I told him he couldn't sleep in the store because the boss said so and he asked me who my boss is and told me he knows my boss and that I should go back to my own country and that tomorrow he's going to talk to my boss and I'll never work in this store again.

A well dressed and good-looking young man keeps on coming in and out, ordering a small coffee, sitting around and waiting and checking his phone then popping out for 20-30 minutes and coming back and ordering another small coffee. This is between 1am and 5am in downtown Montreal. He avoids my attempts to engage him in conversation. I imagine what shady things he is up to.

A patchily balding man orders a large dark coffee at around 4 am and sits with an Alcoholics Anonymous book for over an hour, orders a second large dark coffee and is still reading when I finish my shift. He brings me a copy of the book a week later because I asked to see what he was reading.

The same loud cab driver repeats his nightly routine, asks for a coffee and a glass of water for his alka seltzer, promises to me like I'm his doctor that he'll soon switch to tea cause he knows the coffee rots his stomache, offers to trade jobs for a night while adding honey and milk to his coffee then shouts bye across the store as he rushes out the door. The two students refill their coffees again.

A drunk teenager probably pockets some change from the tip jar.

People finishing work late at bars come in for a muffin and a glass of milk or a hot tea to go while they wait for the bus.

People starting work really early start to come in, hot coffee and a croissant for here and the newspaper, yesterday's if today's hasn't arrived yet. La Presse or The Gazette.

People waiting for the metro to open just sit and wait.

And so eventually the sky begins to glow hints of pink and light blue. The morning paper and fresh bagels arrive. Traffic picks up. The digital clock digitally creeps to 07:00 and the next shift comes in and I'm relieved of my duties, extricating the last of the overnight vagabonds on my way out. I walk home downhill as the morning rush starts; cars and buses swim by and the commuter train pulls carriages full of people into the station. The city stirs, wipes her bleary eyes, oblivious to the fact that though nothing really happened last night, it still happened.

Under the Moon On a Sand Dune

Wake up and go to bed and look to the next day and the next until before you know it, 4 months have past and it's almost winter and grand plans have fallen by the way side and the convictions brought home don't mean so much anymore and South America is just a continent coloured yellow on the map on the shower curtain.

If you don't get out from the shadows of the skyscrapers you can forget about the moon until one clear night you look up and there she is, a big onion face suspended over the metropolis and her sharp white light slaps you like a faceful of crisp winter air and you remember that the earth isn't flat and is actually so big that its mass alone keeps the moon in orbit and so you remember that the world is big, made up of more than De La Montagne and second cups.

And even just 10 kilometres that way is somewhere you have never been and thousands of kilometres westward maybe the drip of an air-conditioner hits a Mong Kok sidewalk just narrowly missing a Chinese man on his way to work on a street that hasn't known silence in 150 years while the scent of roast pork and exhaust mingle. And thousands of kilometres to the south maybe the very same moon hangs over the Andes and cold night air and darkness envelopes the valley where a mother sings a lullaby in Quechua to a little boy who still cries when his feelings are hurt.

Who knows? Maybe somewhere out there someone is under the moon kissing a dog on a sand dune. Maybe somebody is wondering what you're doing right now.






I guess they could just check Facebook if they really wanted to know.

Little Things

I've started a job at Second Cup for a few weeks now. It's min wage and I am subservient to everyone when I wear that uniform but it's satisfying in that I'm making money and I feel like I can use my free time to do what I want. For example:

I adopted an ant. My initial intention was to catch, cook and eat some because I wanted to explore the possibility of ants being a viable source of protein for our new green world. I read on the Always Credible and Magnificent Internet that they are delicious, full of protein and much more environmentally viable than meat. Probably more humane too.

So yeah, maybe that sounds weird but maybe not if you think about it for a while. Something else I realized after thinking about it for awhile:

Taking care of the little ant was a little bit like taking care of the baby. There are mental if not physical changes that result from being held responsible for something, for an ant just as to a baby. It's like responsibility is a chemical emotion just like happiness is tied endorphins and fear with adrenaline. I can feel responsibility in my core; a mix of pride and prudence, energising, producing an attitude that is mindful of danger, the future, consequences and security. I find myself taking bigger breaths, expanding lungs and shoulders with a little more purpose as priorities re-categorize. When you are depended on, you think of how best to be strong and to protect.

****

So anyway, with this ant, I brought her (worker ants are female I just found out and had to change "he" and "him" to "she" and "her" a million times) home in a tupperware with some leaves. I only found one ant, after spending 2 hours biking around Mount Royal, lifting logs and leaves and digging in the dirt. I even put out some apples but to no avail. Maybe the cold weather had them hiding. She was the only one out, and she was a big fatty, healthy, thick and black. A formidable ant if ever there was one.

I put a maple brown sugar cereal thing in her box and softened it up with some water thinking it'd be gourmet. Every day while I went to work and class, the little missus would stay in her box until I came home to let her out to play. She'd climb everything and I'd watch and marvel at her tiny-ness. If you think hard about anything, it eventually becomes mind-bogglingly amazing as questions overwhelm.

How such a tiny body can be capable of decisions? She's so small and she's choosing her trajectory, but where is the decision-center for these decisions? Where is she storing information about where she went and how does she know not to re-trace her path? What would she do if there was another ant? She probably has never been in a house before. This could be the moon. What does she think my laptop is? Where is she getting all this energy? She definitely doesn't realize who or what I am but what does she realize? What does she make of the fact that forces keep putting her back in a plastic tupperware despite all her efforts?

I took a bunch of pictures and cross-referenced with that peer-reviewed and infallible online academic journal, The Internet. Found out she's a carpenter ant, that they have "elbow jointed antennas" and that all 6 legs are attached to their thorax and that they don't breathe but have little holes where air passes through, like air gills. And you can see their eyes if you look closely, which are capable of seeing light and movement but nothing too detailed since they rely mainly on the antennas. Check out the mandibles and her overall hairyness.



After a few days, everytime I opened the tupperware after class, a stench of rotting sugar burst out. The maple sugar thing wasn't looking so appetitizing anymore. I took it out, changed her water and let her out to play but she had lost a step. She definitely looked skinnier and though she would still explore, after a while she would just sit and vibrate her legs. I knew that this wasn't going to end well. I felt a little guilty and I could have probably let her go.

5 or 6 days after our first introduction, I came home from class to find her dead. Don't know what exactly caused her death her but it was definitely my fault. I felt a tiny pang of emotion as I lifted her body out of her plastic cage. Had her last few hours been lonely? Painful? I don't know. I thought about it for a second but even after all that schpiel about responsibility, she's still just an ant in my mind. Too small, too un-human, too insignificant, too easily forgettable. A little cold-hearted maybe?

So I ate her as per my initial intention and concluded that eating one raw ant is not a great way to get your nutrition. The taste wasn't bad and there was some texture but there was an unpleasant tingling on my tongue afterward, perhaps from the hairs on her body or the sting of betrayal. Maybe cooked would be better.

Discovery as a Daily Staple

Well this isn't going to become a blog just about a baby but when you live with one, it's cool to see how one develops from a little mush into something increasingly competent.

Simple things are really fun.

She learns peekaboo. She discovers entropy, apples. She investigates splashing, dropping rocks into the fountain and begins expecting things, like the splash. She is introduced to floating. She imitates, sniffing tree bark. She's discovering rhythm, causality, self expression. Exercising demands.


She's got a long way to go but she's already come a long way.