Archives for May, 2007

“I love your reactions. They’re so -”
Interrupting, correcting: “ – you know it’s all a performance, right?”
“ – yeah, I know,” satisfied and pleased, “but you’re always so flabbergasted.”*

But at heart, I am a basically unresponsive person. When I’m with other people, I’ll catch myself consciously arranging my face into the correct expressions: a lift of the mouth here, a narrowing of the eyes there, and a general tilt of the head – though I don’t do it very well. Too often I think I’ve slipped up somewhere and that the person I’m talking to can see, peering out from between the cracks, the wary, unmoved quiet. I try to be natural, but sometimes I’ll see doubt and offence clouding their eyes. I’ll try to lessen the insult, to let them know it’s not personal, but I’ll get stuck in between opening my mouth and lifting my tongue and I end up looking away.

Yes, largely untouched and fundamentally indifferent.

The other day I nearly got run over.
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You probably already know this, but I design websites. While the aesthetics and functionalities differ from one site to the next, I often end up reusing various snippets of code. But because I don’t have an organised collection of these pieces of code, I inevitably end up wasting time writing code from scratch or scouring the net looking for it. So, until I get around to creating my design notes blog, I’m going to be posting those pieces of code here.

*

Line numbers are integral to deconstructing and understanding any piece of code – they make specific bits and pieces in a block of code easy to pinpoint. So when being explained on the web, code needs to be presented with line numbers. However, there is currently no way to simply and automatically number lines with XHTML/CSS – unless you use <ol>, the numbered list tag, with every every individual line of code enclosed in its own <li> tag.

That awkwardness aside, you can create something that looks like this:

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Just before the lips pull apart, I think, possibly for the first time, of how old this will be, how I know just how all of this is going to unfold. My life not being a perfectly timed episode of Grey’s Anatomy, the elevator remains closed for a few moments after that thought, comforting and discomfiting both, fades away. I don’t think anything else in that pause, but concentrate on that softly edged vertical line.

And it is familiar, disconcertingly familiar.

In the office, where I discover, somehow not to my surprise, that the VISA number that I gave over the phone to a girl in a US call centre has not been used to register me in the class, I am tempted to ask the boy behind the desk if he went to Queen’s, because the sight of his pale face and shockingly orange hair, his large eyes and hyperactive mouth catch me off-guard and for just a moment I am transported to a dimly lit auditorium spotted with people who bewilder me. But I don’t ask him – I sign my cheque, collect my cardboard box of books and hurry back to the elevator and the second floor.

The box, sturdy and deceptively taped, is addressed to someone else. It has his name and his address clearly marked on it, written in shaky, thick handwriting. Short, wavering letters. His name is not on any the flyleaves of the books inside, but he’d written notes beside the first multiple choice exercise. The instructor uses the same phrases, the same words he’s written down when she explains the answers. She’d given us five minutes to read the passage and told us not to answer the questions. But the five minutes stretch into ten and though I feel like I’m cheating, what with his notes there guiding me, I dash the requisite letters. It’s not just cheating, though. It’s a fairly simple exercise and the answers are pretty obvious. But I know, answering the questions while the instructor does paper work, that I am setting myself up for a familiar pattern of dismissing simple instructions. This is all old hat to me: the spelling out of small steps, the pauses at the end of sentences while she waits for someone to fill in the right word, the chairs arranged in neat rows facing her, the podium, the unsatisfied silence. University kindergarten.

So he’d come for the first class, jotted down some notes with a mechanical pencil, and then returned the books. I wonder who he is and whether he decided to forgo not just the classes, but also the exam. I realise later how entirely appropriate it is that I receive these books, these specific, returned books in this box with his name on it.

Late, I take a front-row seat, spill the contents of my bag around me, and settle down to a class on how to write essays for the exam. How many sentences to devote to how many topics in how many paragraphs. What to say, what examples to provide, when to provide them. It’s all here. We’re aiming for a very specific tone of knowledgeableness, a detached sort of objectivity. Coolness and sterility, distance and impersonality – all those stereotypes you will find here in the mind-boggling essay topics and the trite, comfortable responses. I smile, sudden and hard-edged and ugly, when someone on the other end of the room puts his hand up and asks if, given that the exam is American based, whether the examples we provide will have to be of American politics.

The boy who asked that question is the only person in this room who is unfamiliar to me. But even he, eventually, settles down into a type in my mind. He’s the only one in that particular box, but I do manage to find a box for him.

The others I have met before. I know them, these people whose names I have not bothered to remember, whose faces are echoes of faces I saw across cadavers and test tubes. There is the row of six who sit, shoulder to shoulder, giggling and whispering throughout the class. They planned to take this class together, have been to school together, will study and take the subway together and may not pass together. For now they are a casually formidable block of friendly rivalry, a world unto themselves in that grey room.

There are the three girls sitting across from me. They are more obviously studious than the six behind them. They have pointed, exact questions and reserved, determined faces. They don’t realise how similar they are to the giggly six behind them. Or maybe they do. Of the twenty five or so people in these room, those two groups and the boy with the politics are quite clearly the most determined to pass the exam with flying colours, to get into med school and to live the dream.

The rest of us are singles, accidentally arranged by virtue of the spindly furniture into awkward pairs and trios. Over the next few weeks, we’ll reveal ourselves and our types. For now, for me it is like sitting in the past and I don’t try very hard to be different now from what I was then. I stretch out in my paraphernalia of novel and notebooks, camera and limp pencil case, making myself and my bravado at home.

When I was very little, my father would tell me that it was very important that I “come first in class.” I would remember this every morning as I tried my best to hurry around the vast and perfectly square sand field that lay, purpose unknown, by the school. We were none of us allowed to just cross that dusty gold expanse, but had to tramp around its three concrete edges: one right turn and then another before reaching the playground and then the classrooms. And I was small and all the other kids were big and I had not guts or cockiness enough to shoulder my way through those morning crowds. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I took the bus from our quiet compound and there were kids whose fathers drove them to school.

So every morning I would walk into class and see, disappointed, that someone was already there. At best, I was second, never first.

I was still in grade school when I realised that my father couldn’t care less if I was there to wipe the dust off fresh morning desks and write the date on the blank green chalkboard. I was well into university before I stopped caring what marks the other students were getting and focused, with much better results emotionally and academically, on honing my own skills.

But my father’s second pet-phrase, “have some self-respect,” confounded me well past high school. It was only recently that I finally understood. In high school, when he would make this demand almost daily, I would slit my eyes in sulky and uncomprehending anger. It seemed to me then that this concept of self-respect was too closely tied up with the need to maintain a façade of respectability and I resented this shameless intrusion of an entire neighbourhood of various prying eyes of varying ages into my sundry and pathetic tragicomedies.

I was 15 when it first struck me how much I was like my mother and the thought scared me. But I was only 15 and now, over half a decade later, I am very much aware of myself as a composite of my parents. I can hear lacing my scepticism their cynicism, their cynicism that used to irritate and sicken me so much. So I know that if I have children, that I will turn around and tell them too to behave as though they have some self-respect and they will no doubt also have no idea what I mean, until they’ve embarrassed and demeaned themselves in ways they will try very hard to forget.

I thought of this on Sunday, standing in the airy Lennox Contemporary Gallery, which was hosting “A Light unto Nations,” a photography exhibit showcasing four Muslim and four Jewish photographers. It’s a part of the month-long CONTACT photography festival currently happening in Toronto. This particular exhibit is all about “the theme of tolerance and the consequences of intolerance.”

(Those of you who haven’t yet checked out the exhibit (it runs until May 20) might want to leave this post for later reading.)
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I watch my toes streak against the sky. It has been months, maybe a year, since I’ve been on a swing.

There are two people in this quiet playground under the age of twenty. A grandmother is teaching a very small boy the ways of slides. He, supremely unimpressed, busies himself staring at the sand that clings to the slippery metal. Finally, he reaches out tentatively to touch the grains and they stick to his chubby fingers. A girl, about knee high, skirts in front me and my swing. I carefully, quickly tuck in my feet and she, face upturned and eyes open wide, makes it by safely. She pulls herself onto the swing on the other end of the bar.
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I’m still sorry.

I don’t when exactly it happened or why or how. But sometime last week something imploded and I turned tired. I’d sleep and I’d wake up tired. I’d lose myself walking and I’d return tired. Sunday afternoon there was a momentary, unexpected upswing and I put words together and it felt good to see the wide, lowslung spaces between those words. I’d get lost saying whatever it was I was working out in my mind just then, and stop: lost but not tired.

(He said, “Stop, you’re talking about way too many different things.” And I looked at him, blankly surprised at him, surprised at me, because no one has ever sat across from me and called me on the way I cannot/do not properly string together my thoughts.)

It was a familiar, comfortable feeling so when I said, “I’m angry and grateful for my anger,” I was speaking from on top of my usual soapbox: unable, unwilling to stop for the moment. Unable to see how this is possible: to stop. Unwilling to admit that I was in need of something I couldn’t find in sleep or in the city.

But that was a momentary, unexpected upswing. And then I was left again with the aftertaste of this anger that I am grateful for: the tired bitterness, the faded doubts.

I thought last night, “I want to take a vacation.”
I resolved last night to take a vacation.

I am going to stop.