January 25, 2007

On Why I Hate Old People . . .

I've given this blog a provocative title in honour of my older brother, who bluntly informs my grandmother that he doesn't like old people (whenever she laments that he doesn't visit her at least seven times a week). In truth, I do like the elderly, and I love one in particular.

My last remaining grandparent is a character. She can be trying at times: she is obsessed with how much money I have in my bank account (my answer is now the standard "ten dollars"); she is obsessed with every bite I injest (my response now to her incessant, "Eat. Eat. Eat," is that I am so full that another bite will result in an illness of the violent sort, and wouldn't that be a waste of food?); she cannot waste food (she will pick up any scraps, be they on the table or floor, and even served the leftovers of a meal that left 13 guests incapacitated).

However, my grandmother's faults pale in comparison to her virtues. She is generous to a fault: she has recently acquired a vague (albeit incessant) compulsion to aid the "poor lepers" and will write a check to any charitable organization that mails a fundraising letter. Somehow, she is convinced that she has been singled out in a very personal way to support these worthy causes--for why else would organizations send a letter with her name specifically printed on the envelope? Her heart aches at the thought that the staff at the United Way will be disappointed should she fail to respond.

Despite the years that weigh her down physically, my grandmother has the energy of a toddler and the social appetite of a 16-year-old. While staying there one night, I awoke at 4:30 a.m., heart pounding, to a loud banging noise upstairs in the kitchen and my grandfather's angry shouts. Dearest Grandmother had decided to hammer some bones into a soup pot, and the dead of night was as good a time as any to complete this task.

She is much like a teenager in other matters, especially when engaged in the dramas unfolding around her: the elderly lady so fastidious that she empties the toilet water by hand when cleaning the bathroom; the things the "Speckdame" has said and done; the homosexual neighbour who is a 'good' man despite his sexual proclivities (he does like her strudel kucken, after all). She has even been known to follow prostitutes to better understand their mysterious business practices.

My grandmother has an endearing way of confusing English words. "Grand Marnier" is called "Grand Manure." The word "faculty" is pronounced much like a common swear word. And when a lawyer friend of hers introduced her to a "prosecutor," my grandmother could not understand how such a dignified lady could sell her body.

I like old people. Whenever I receive junkmail, I think of my grandmother. Whenever I am tempted to listen in on other patrons' conversations in a restaurant, I thank her for her genetic contribution. And whenever I see a leper, I refuse to turn a blind eye out of respect for this soft-hearted, compulsively generous lady who is old only in body.

January 24, 2007

Dismal Ponderings

While searching the Vancouver Sun for the obituary of a colleague recently departed, I came across a new article on Nina Coutepatte, the thirteen-year-old Edmonton teen whose unidentifiable remains were discovered on a golf course almost two years ago. The random victim of a group of young thugs seeking someone to kill, Nina was repeatedly raped before being torn to shreds with various weapons. She apparently begged to die by knife rather than wrench.

Unable to shrug her death off with a mere, "I'm glad it wasn't me," I was left with a disconcerting unease that has lingered all day. The audacity of five young people to select another human being to kill--a human being with every right to live the one life she was given, a human being who did not deserve to spend her last moments on earth with an all-too-clear understanding of human depravity. How five people could be so cold-blooded, agreeing to a plan to inflict suffering, and then, when the gruesome reality of their actions set in, participating rather than interceding, is beyond me. They lacked even the slightest inkling of creativity--an ability to emphathize with another's suffering for even a moment, or to the see the bigger picture. What is most disturbing, though, is the personal nature of the attack: the way one child was chosen from many, selected for whatever reason to be the recipient of torture and death, and briefed on what she would experience over the course of her final night.

There are times when I wish that I wasn't a member of this odious race . . .

January 16, 2007

A Reluctant Blogger is Born

Much has changed since my elementary school days in the mid-80s (not long after I understood--albeit in a hazy, confused way--the horror of birth and the lengths to which a husband and wife must go to create a baby). My classmates and I boarded a bus and were ferried to a computer lab. There, in tidy rows and under the watchful eye of our teacher, we spent hours commanding a turtle to move about on the computer screen. It did not resemble a real turtle--of that I was certain, being a budding biologist--but when you asked the turtle to go forward 1000, could it ever move! I was awash with a strange feeling of power over that ever-obedient turtle that would move however impossible or unreasonable my expectations. However, I had, too, the disconcerting sense that the tasks demanded of us students would grow even more complicated than rt 90 and fd 10.

Flash forward to the 1990s and to Castle Master, a game that kept my brother Brent occupied for hours. Brent was indeed 'Master' of that castle. Indeed, both of my brothers easily mastered Conan, Karateka, and Joust. The only game I dominated was DigDug, but only because my brothers considered it beneath them. However, I did develop an uncanny knack for squashing the little people I was meant to rescue in Choplifter, as my friend Caroline can attest to; even now I can feel the simultaneous guilt and pleasure in hearing them squeak for the last time.

The university computer class required for my undergraduate degree proved daunting indeed. The computer program that I created in the computer lab went so wrong that the baffled computer TA awarded me a 'pass' on the assignment due to his naive belief that no one could foul up something so simple. It was only through diligent study and effort that I earned my A.

Other mishaps or near-mishaps have occurred since then. It was sheer luck that my entire Master's thesis did not disappear until after my defence; such was my faith in my computer that it did not occur to me to save it on disk. And I still remember the disgust on my brother's face when he explained to me that assigning random names to files would make locating an individual file a gruelling endeavour.

But today will be different. Today, I will become a blogger. Today, I will arrive--without any ugly mishap that might forever prove me computer illiterate. Share with me now, computer saavy friends, this momentous occasion. A blogger is born . . .