Archives for August, 2005

One link took me to another and I was reading about Kevin Carter who took a picture of a dying child, a picture that won a Pulitzer Prize, a Kevin Carter who committed suicide months later.
I could easily say that the picture was before my time, but nothing deserves to be relegated to the past.
I have profoundly little to say on the subjects of human evil, human horror, or survival.
Instead, this is what I read:

• The Life and Death of Kevin Carter by Cali Ruchala (July 5, 2003)

  On my ugliest days, the people have no faces and I try to hide my own. Taking that away from them is what happened in Tskhinvali, probably in Rwanda and other better-known and easier-to-pronounce killings. It happened to Kevin Carter, too. A man was overshadowed and eventually dehumanized by those who tried to give his life – and probably their own – additional meaning. For perhaps a second time, he was torn apart. This time he had no part in it.

• The Life and Death of Kevin Carter by Scott MacLeod
• Beyond words from the Guardian Unlimited
• The Bang Bang Club
• The Life of Kevin Carter

With the other the other two away, we are down to three children at home, including myself. Since Hamzah left last month, I’ve noticed a drastic change in the way family and family friends treat Abdullah, aged 11.

I know first hand how important it is that the adults in a child’s life be both disciplinary forces and friends, and how easy it is to be one to the exclusion of the other. So it irritates me no end when people refer to Abdullah as “the man of the house.” Firstly, it immediately puts Aishah at a disadvantage and secondly, it gives the appearance that Abdullah has special powers that allow him to make choices that at his age he cannot make. To be more specific, my fear is that continually hearing comments like that will have Abdullah eventually believing them. The issue isn’t so much that I maintain a zero-tolerance policy with my youngest siblings (which I don’t), but that comments like those affects how Abdullah perceives himself and his rights, and how he treats the women in his life, including those who are responsible for his well-being.

The remarkable thing is that it’s only ever women who refer to him as “the man of the house.” It seems to make no sense, and then you realise that it is women who are most sensitive to and aware of differentiation based on gender. Why it is women who are most adamant in promoting those stereotypes is beyond me. How they could have been so brainwashed that they consistently put down their own is hard to understand, and it makes me bitter thinking about it.

Most times I’m able to keep my mouth shut, if painfully. There’s little to be gained from ranting about unfair treatment when attending a gathering of family and family friends, most of whom I dislike, anyway. The only thing I can be sure of is that, should I start raving, everyone will leave having mentally labelled me a capital-F Feminist. Oh, the dreaded F word.
And then they will tell everyone and their relatives “back home” how very capital-W Westernised I am.
So I limit myself to strategically placed sarcasm and leave as quickly as is decently possible.

But once, when I was in a particularly sour mood and struggling to remain polite, I told Abdullah off for something. Abdullah glowered a bit, and the incident would have merited no comment, except that an aunt, who had witnessed the exchange, chose that particular moment to say, “Aw, Abdullah’s the man of the house, now. You can’t tell him what to do.”
Now I realise that she was joking and that I am not my brother’s parent, but I sure as hell am his keeper, and I intend to look after him. So I do not appreciate having someone tell him that he doesn’t have to listen to me and then only because he was born with a Y chromosome. Keep in mind that this kid is practically half my age.
Without thinking I snapped, much to her surprise, “Man of the house or not, when I tell him to do something, he does it.”
I realise I’m coming off as militant here, but it’s not usually like that and I don’t usually order the kids around. I ask them to do things, they usually do them, and if we disagree we either discuss it civilly, if with voices a tad louder than usual, or argue it out.
That day, however, I was having none of it. Too much had happened within the space of 24 hours for me to be additionally dealing with inane rebellions and utterly idiotic comments.
But immediately after snapping at Abdullah, I regretted it. After all, I couldn’t hold him responsible for how the world treats him. More importantly, Abdullah had consistently shown a calmness and maturity that proved he wasn’t affected by comments like that.
So ten minutes later I apologised to him. And then added, with unnecessary sharpness and emphasis, “But no matter what stupid things anyone says, I am still the eldest and you still have to listen to me.”
“I know,” he replied.
And that was that.

Now, when he’s called the “man of the house,” he looks at me ruefully and in private, admits that he hates the phrase.

Like I said, he’s a remarkably mature kid. He possesses a graciousness and coolness that I can’t quite emulate. I have a lot to learn from him – if he doesn’t take others seriously, then surely I have no reason to.

But still. If you ever visit my home, please refrain from calling any of my little brothers “men of the house,” especially when their voices haven’t even begun to break yet.
Unless you want me to blog about it and you.

I despise the Kingston Whig-Standard for a number of reasons, most of which stem from its consistently lazy reporting.
Today, it relegated the following paragraph in its “In Brief” column in the National/World part of the paper to Toronto councillor Michael Thompson’s recent comments.

Idea to stop blacks rejected in Toronto

A controversial idea to curb gun violence by allowing Toronto police to randomly stop young black men was quickly rules (sic) by city and police officials. City councillor Michael Thompson said yesterday the recent flurry of shootings that has plagued the city demands a drastic response. “I’d like to see that support be provided to police where they would pull over young black men in their problem communities to ask questions to determine whether or not those young black men are armed, carrying weapons, said Thompson, who is black. Mayor David Miller was unavailable for comment, but his office was quick to dismiss Thompson’s proposal. “The mayor rejects and condemns this idea outright,” said Brad Ross, a spokesman for Miller. Deputy Police Chief Keith Forde, who is black, said Chief Bill Blair would “never, ever agree to go along with Thompson’s proposal.” There have been 30 gun-related deaths in Toronto among the 44 homicides in the city so far this year.

Continue reading this entry »

I am tired, too tired to learn new things now, write old things down and formalise vague impressions months old. And always there is the stadium crush of voices in my head, threatening to overcome what little shakey silence I am able to maintain within my skull.

If my subconscious was causing me to have these dreams, then I detested myself for having such a subconscious. But quite apart from the dream itself, I was overcome with self-hatred, which made me repeatedly shudder.

- A Quiet Life by Kenzaburo Oe.

I don’t trust myself to wake up on time, not even with the laptop alarm clock on. Too often I wake up to its mangled trilling, put the computer on mute, and resume sleeping.
So I tinker away at the .htacess file on ltw, trying to get the mod_rewrite to remove extensions from my files. Finally, when everyone else, even the kids, are sound asleep, I decide to let it go for the night.
By 5:00 AM my head is nodding, Will Smith’s antics in I, Robot notwithstanding. I can hear people stirring upstairs. I get myself to the kitchen and through the open doors behind the people, I can see the Jeep.
Everyone leaves; he hugs me and I stand there limp, not knowing how to respond. I wait inside, watch through the open doors, wait for the Jeep to leave. But it just idles there, with the doors closed and the tinted windows up. I can just make out the figures of the two in the front seat. The rear windows are tinted more darkly.
I turn and return to sleep before the Jeep has rolled away.

The surgery is over by 2. I lumber up to the living room, slump in a chair and listen to what they’re saying. I go back to sleep.

At 6, we’re allowed to visit him.

Walking from the Jeep to the hopsital, we pass Etherington Hall and I point it out to my uncle.
“I used to have lectures there,” I say.
“Really?” My uncle sounds genuinely surprised. “There?”
“Yes.” I pause, not feeling like explaining that campus and the hospital overlap. “I had Anatomy lectures there. Last year.” I remember how the 250 of us second year Life Science students had crammed in there.
I am surprised at myself, at how easily I am now able to relegate those horrible hours to trivia. I am pleased at the distance I am now able to maintain between his dreams and mine.

The first elevator we go to doesn’t go past the 8th floor. At the Information Desk, the receptionist doesn’t know of room 973. I stumble over the spelling of his name, need to close my eyes to see the letters. I’ve only been in here once before, trying to visit a girl I didn’t know who’d been in an accident, but I didn’t know her last name and had no money to buy the overpriced gaudy bouquets in the gift shop; I never saw her: Stacey. It turns out the 3 was his bed number. Afterwards, I wonder at her confusion: the room was clearly labelled 973.

We make our way to another elevator, one that goes to the 10th floor. We go past the visitor’s lounge and I am momentarily struck by the wide-eyed gaze of one grey-haired man sitting there with clasped hands.
In the usual way, there are wheelchair-bound spectres in blue backless robes and wide eyes roaming the halls. I am not prepared for the sickly sweet smell that assualts us when we enter the ward. The smell seems to have dissipated by the time we reach 973. Or maybe I stopped noticing.

It is a semi-private room, but we never see the man on the other side of the pink curtain. We only see the brown excrement that is pumped out of his intestines, through a clear plastic tube, into a plastic cylinder already a quarter full of the murky, cloudy liquid.

He is not diminished in size under the pink sheets. There is a mask over his face and nose and I remember being once in the same position, breathing oxygen through a plastic tube. This is a clear tube except for its orange end, to show that it is 50% oxygen.
He drifts in and out of sleep. I wonder at the topic of conversation, at the words that swirl sluggishly, but apparently comfortably, around the pink-enclosed space. I play with the tiny TV’s extendable arms, my legs hurting from standing so long.
There is a familiar pain in my lower jaw, like I’ve been clencing it for too long, and I haven’t. I’ve been mostly silent. This pain usually preambles tears, always regretted with gritted teeth. But today I don’t cry.

It took this many words for this one day, and I have a whole summer to get through, to pinpoint, restrict to so many words, to note the patterns in.

Besides being entranced by the photographs on Couloir, I’ve been trying to figure out how it works, mostly because I want to use a PHP-driven method to display the Sri Lanka gallery (coming soon to a site near you). As Scott explains in his portfolio, the system should be one that “makes updates as simple as cropping the photos and uploading them to the server.” Continue reading this entry »

I used to look at the faces of the survivors and search for the marks that life-changing events must surely leave: wrinkling, drooping, discolouration. I expected lips more easily pursed, eyes more heavily bagged, hands limper than every other day.

I hadn’t banked on the essential changelessness of life – I didn’t know, then, that this is the essence of survival. The sun still goes through its daily routine, there will still be unpredictable bursts of rain and light. Most strange, there will still be the old angers, still the familiar bitterness.

I didn’t know this, then.

Now I know that the mourning face is as mundane as every other face. Its eyes are as carefully lined, its mouth as easily curved. The cheekbones are as rounded, the nose as snubbed as it was every other day.
There is something frightening in this: the doubt, the wondering if any of this is real. And there is comfort: the knowledge that there is something to bounce back to, something that stays constant despite the unreliability of our own lives.

Now, secure in the knowledge that nothing changes, that earths do not shatter, I watch as eyes rake over our own faces, looking for the things I used to look for.
Now, I look right back, through the lens of my non-tear streaked glasses, my lips as straight as ever. Placidly, I watch them search, not begrudging them their unspoken questions.

There is nothing to be found here.

Or perhaps my time has not yet come, and when it does, I will be as broken-down a tragic heorine as any. And then the sympathy will come, will flood me in exultant triumph, in a world made sense of. A world that seems softer for appearing malleable to our own griefs.

Better that than the suspicion that I am incapable of grieving.

I was reading Oblivio archives when I decided that I’m going to keep my blogging about web design to the ltw site. After all, that makes the most sense – my web design portfolio and my web design techniques would be in one place.

What this means is that I’ll have to create a second blog for ltw. Thing is, WordPress has poor support for multiple blogs. Each blog requires its own installation, and I find that ridiculous.
I still think MovableType is the better CMS, but now that MT is no longer free (though I am allowed to have up to three blogs), I’m hesitant to use it. But I might; it’s still installed.

The portfolio is up, and mostly done. I only need to add the rotating stylesheet now.

It was Shaun Inman’s site that started me on the redesign. (That and the cringing everytime I glanced at the old version of the site.) His influence isn’t at all apparent in the site now, which is just as well. I’ve worried with some of the more recent sites that rather than just being “influenced,” I’m cribbing.
It was the lull in the freelance work that prompted the portfolio. For some time now, I’ve considered opening my own design company, and I guess this is it. It only went up today, so there’s still time to figure out how I’d get paid by prospective clients. Paypal is not an option. Mailed cheques seem unreliable. I dunno; I’ll figure it all out later when the site actually starts to bring in some work.

I still have to check the colour contrasts. Also, not all the sites I’ve done in the last two years are in the portfolio. After a while, I figured I had enough thumbnails up to justify going live. I didn’t want to spend another fortnight taking screenshots.
Speaking of which, I began the redesign on June 16th, and only ended it at dawn today. That’s uncharacteristically long for me, but there were long gaps in between. Justified gaps.