First of all, thank you SO much to everyone who agreed to guest-post on my blog. Coming up with content is always hard, and I am really, really grateful that you agreed to do so. The following individuals contributed guest posts (all of them are acknowledged in each post, but here is a list – so please join me in thanking them for doing this for me!)

I would also like to thank my friends and fellow bloggers who participated in the Blogathon 2008, for their commendable efforts.

Finally, in a more important note, thanks to my good friend Rebecca Bollwitt for organizing Blogathon Vancouver 2008, in a completely self-less manner, and investing countless hours of her own time. You are a role model, an example and a great friend. Thank you.

Related posts:

1. Blogathon 2008: Preparing to launch!
2. Blogathon 2009: Raul’s fundraising efforts for the BC Cancer Foundation
3. Blogging for charity

Super quick updates -

- Yes, you CAN still donate to the BC Cancer Foundation (my cause for Blogathon 2008) by clicking HERE.

- Today is the July 2008 Vancouver Bloggers Meetup at the Blackwater Cafe (Cordova and Carrall in Gastown) at 7:00pm. There’s wi-fi, beautiful art in the walls and about 35 or so bloggers confirmed. If you haven’t RSVP’d yet, I’d appreciate it if you did as I have to talk to Shane about numbers (for tables, etc.). You may not know this, but my good friend Isabella Mori has now bestowed the Organizer role for future VBMs on to me, so now it will be up to me to keep tabs on all of you Vancouver bloggers

- This coming weekend is Pride Weekend. There will be LOTS of stuff happening, and if there is a city that should be proud is Vancouver, where you can, without a doubt, have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, or both and nobody will say anything. How cool is that? I will, of course, be attending several of the Pride events and will potentially drag several of my online and offline friends. Pride Day (Sunday) I will NOT be blogging at all.

- My 1000th post is coming up. Technically, I’m at 1005 but several of those were guest-posts, so I’ll let you know when the post is going to be published. And there will, indeed be a celebration. Either a RaulCamp or an Imbib-o-Camp, as Derek called it (Airdrie and I had been talking about a MargaritaCamp, Ryan suggested a GinCamp and Kerry-Anne said that she’d bring wine (oh speaking of wine – check out VinoCamp!) Alas, I won’t be able to check VinoCamp unless it is in the role of a volunteer, because wine (in all its forms) gives me headaches.

That’s all for now. It’s 2 am and I need to sleep.

Related posts:

1. Really quick update :)
2. Quick general update
3. Quick update on The Whip and The Main

Dear everyone,

It’s 2008. One year after my first Blogathon. One year that has seen me grow as a person, as a blogger, as a scholar and researcher, but more importantly, as a human being. I’ve established new friendships, sever others, and make peace with my (previously) broken heart.

THANK YOU GUEST POSTERS

- Anya – Structured Moments
- Dr. Beth Snow – Not to be Trusted with Knives
- Dr. Melanie A. – Three Bears and a Cat
- Monica Hamburg – Me Like the Interwebs
- Maktaaq – Maktaaq.com
- Jodi Hamilton – Jodiferous.com
- J. Karen Parker – J. Karen Parker.ca
- Pat Zaph – Sh!thawks on Parade
- Airdrie Miller – Talking to Air and Lipgloss and Laptops
- Nancy Zimmerman – A Canadian Money Coach
- Derek K. Miller – Penmachine.com and Inside Home Recording
- Cecily Walker – Cecily.info
- Dr. Hisham Zerriffi – Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC
- Karen Quinn Fung – Countably Infinite
- L.E. – The Lotus Effect
- Kate Milberry – Geeks and Global Justice
- Jeffery Simpson – Vancouver MetBlogs, Jeffery Simpson’s personal blog [EDITOR'S NOTE - Thanks for guest posting twice, you rock!]

You all are great writers, and great friends. I am REALLY grateful. Thanks for your support.

THANK YOU – SPONSORS

So far, I’ve raised about $ 280
- Fresh Start Recycling Ltd.
- Airdrie & Derek Miller
- Barbara Doduk in loving memory of Max Bruce
- Anonymous
- LF
- Anonymous
- Angela Crimeni & family
- Other donors – need to be processed

Your donations kept me going even though I was exhausted. Thanks for supporting the BC Cancer Agency!

THANK YOU – FELLOW BLOGATHONERS

Duane Storey, Rebecca Bollwitt, Shane Gibson, Karen Hamilton, Ayeza Garcia, Isabella Mori, Danny Dang, Mehnaz Thawer, INVOKE, Barbara Doduk, TAGGA, and Colleen Vince.

Your grit, effort and awesomeness inspired me.

THANK YOU – FOR ORGANIZING

Rebecca Bollwitt – Simply said, you are a role model, a friend and an inspiration.

THANK YOU – OUR READERS AND TWITTER FOLLOWERS

Your comments kept fuelling me, you made this a great conversation and a wonderful experience.

This is my last Blogathon Vancouver 2008 post. Thank you everyone.

Related posts:

1. Thank you all for your efforts
2. Blogathon 2009 for BC Cancer Foundation (registration open)
3. Blogathon 2008: Preparing to launch!

I’ve mentioned in previous posts how much it irks me when people forget about pressing environmental problems such as solid waste. In case you didn’t know, the Vancouver Landfill is filling up (geez, I wonder why?).

People are SO intent on working on issues of climate change, that they forget that solid waste is a priority issue. It’s funny, though. If people implemented the 3 R concept (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle), I am pretty sure it would be much easier to deal with the problem of solid waste.

However, the cycle is not closed completely by applying the 3R. That’s also why I enjoy the idea that Fresh Start offers – give the recycled stuff to charity. By giving back to the local community, Fresh Start atempts to close the gap between actual closed cycles and open cycles. I really enjoy this business model, and I am sure that they will be able to implement new fresh ideas (hence Fresh Start!) in the near future.

[EDITOR'S NOTE - And here is a link to Fresh Start's blog!] Mosey over and check them out!

Related posts:

1. Fresh Start Recycling and Disposal Ltd.
2. Earth Weekend Vancouver Aquarium and Fresh Start Recycling
3. Waste Reduction Week Canada – Oct 19-25th, 2008

I’m going to be honest here, and this might lose me my guest blogging indie cred, but I do love myself some comic books. Yes, they’re comic books and not graphic novels. If your coffee drinking Watchmen reading friends keep insisting that they’re “graphic novels” then please slap them for me. Hard. They’re comic books or comics and they have been since Superman lifted that car on the cover of Action Comics #1 and even before that. If we want to start calling them graphic novels let’s start calling movies “motion books” and the radio “audio newspapers”.

“But Jeffery,” you say to your computer misunderstanding the blog technology and assuming that I can hear you, “I don’t want to read abot Spider-Man. I want a comic book that isn’t just a male power fantasy in spandex.”

I hear you. Well literally I don’t, because you know… technology, but I understand where you’re coming from. That’s why it’s good that I’ve got a list here of books you really should be reading. It does sort of dip into the caped crime fighting area a few times, but only when the work is really good. Very little of what follows is something to give to kids.

• Title: Powers
• By: Brian Michael Bendis (author), Michael Oeming (artist)
• Publisher: Image / Icon

I could just start by saying monkey sex, but let’s get the premise out of the way; superheroes are real, and this book is about the cops who have to clean up after them. Whether murdered by their arch-villains or killed during rough sex they die like the rest of us though they’re damn hard to autopsy.

The first volume hard cover is a good place to start for this title, and beware it’s adult.

• Title: Y: The Last Man
• By: Brian K. Vaughn (author), Pia Guerra (artist)
• Publisher: Vertigo

Yorick and his pet monkey Ampersand are the only male survivors of a plague that leaves females unaffected. With his girlfriend on the other-side of the world Yorick starts a journey to find her, while the governments of the world have their own plans for the last sperm donor on the planet. While it sometimes gets a bit heavy handed on the gender issues, the book is exciting, fun and packs an emotional wallop. I’ve never cried over a monkey like I cried over Ampersand.

The entire run of Y: The Last Man is available in trade paperbacks. It’s less mature than Powers, but still not something for kids.

• Title: Astonishing X-Men
• By:Joss Whedon (author), John Cassaday (artist)
• Publisher: Marvel

I wanted to pick one God damn straight forward superhero book and I went to the biggest best selling superhero team on the planet, the X-Men to do it. Known far more for his work creating shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and FireflyJoss Whedon turned his attention to comic books writing Marvel Comics’ merry mutants for two great story arcs. Even if you only have a passing interest in the X-Men held over from the first two movies, you will enjoy this book. It’s accessible for anyone, and has that patented Whedon dialogue to keep things moving along at a brisk pace.

All of Whedon’s work on Astonishing X-Menis available either in hardcover or trade paperback form.

Related posts:

1. My favorite job – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson
2. The Environmental Movement Needs You – Homer Simpson Has Already Joined – Guest post by Lotus Effect
3. ComicVine – A superhero database

Today was a busy day. After entertaining last night, the whole clan cycled (puppy in the side pouch; one kid on the back, one in the trailer, one on his own bike) from East Van to Stanley Park for the Summer Dream Literary Arts Festival . Evelyn Lau was the starring attraction but she went on at noon and we didn’t leave the hood till 12:35pm. Whaddya gonna do? I remember Evelyn Lau from back in The Varsity days; she was all hot and cool because she was a teenage street kid/prostitute and wrote a book about it or whatever. Anyhow, I never read the book but I guess she wowed the CanLit scene and is still kickin’ around today.

The day was restful and because of a six-year-old in tow, our bike caravan went pretty slow, wending our way along the water and deking out pedestrians, baby strollers, old people and other meanderers. The litfest itself was sorta lame, but the kids area was enough for the kids and they were happy to listen to spoken word and the odd song from the shade and comfort of the craft tent. I found the mental break refreshing; I’m in the midst of writing an academic chapter for an edited collection about alternative media in Canada. I’m doing the Internet + activism chapter. Exactly. So I’ve spent most of the month agonizing about the damn thing. It’s going a bit better now – I’m about a third of the way through and have a clearer idea of how it’s going to unfold. But the angst and stomach-in-knots I could do without. Never mind I’m supposed to be writing my dissertation. I feel the knots tighten as I think of my upcoming trip “home” for a couple weeks and then preparing to teach in the fall. The dissertation will write itself, perhaps?

Related posts:

1. Dedicated lane for bikes on the Burrard Bridge (trial)
2. Transportation as a life – Guest post by Karen Quinn Fung
3. Being a superhero/comic nerd :) – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson

I love the way Raul phrases his environmental passions: “Being a student of the Environment”. I’ve found myself amongst the dozens of people I know that have put their previous career paths aside and pursued environmentally-related position in hopes of making a difference (and I’ve abandoned any inclination to feel the least bit hesitant to say that making a difference bit regardless of how trite it may be perceived by some).

So I’m confronted with it everyday – people wanting to do something, and we constantly hear.. “Just start anywhere.. it doesn’t’ matter where – the first step will introduce you to a plethora of options, and before you know it, you’ll come across something you’re really exited about.” Well, what if you don’t know where to take that first step? This is where this post comes in, I hope to offer some options of first steps that might lead you to your green passions. So here they go.

1) GREEN DRINKS The perfect combination – environmental geekery and sophisticated discussions with all kinds of people working in, or interested in the environment. I’ve only attended the Vancouver version twice, but it’s been a lot of fun – there is always a mix of veterans and solo flyers that show up without knowing a soul (but that is of course changed after the first beer).

2a) STORY OF STUFF This is a great little description of how the world currently works, some of the problems our actions are causing, and how to get involved in changing these patterns. The point with this one is.. simply reach out and learn more about how the world works, and how we can minimize our impact on the environment

2b) CRADLE TO CRADLE Similar to Option 2), this is a monumental piece of work that redefines the way we approach how we go about building stuff and creating the everyday objects we use. This novel concepts presented in cannot be called short of anything but a paradigm shift in the positive direction of what it means to be human. It’s simple, and beautiful…

If you’re interested in learning more without diving into the book, I’d recommend having a look at the TED talk featuring one of the authors (TED has numerous amazing talks on many other subjects including psychology, art, music, and technology. The one other talk that seems to be somewhat related would a brain scientist experiencing life a stroke in her left hemisphere, leaving her exposed to the raw experience of living life through her right – creative, loving, unified hemisphere – the experience’s lesson – if we use both of our brain real estate (Left AND right hemisphere), then we are much more in tune with others, and the environment around us – have a look).

2c) INCONVENIENT TRUTH If you haven’t seen it yet.. The only thing i gotta say about this one – i think any movie that helps someone win the Nobel Peace Prize might – just might be worth watching.

3) TAKE A HIKE I’m not kidding. Go get outside. Listen to the silence of the air and the stillness of your thoughts. There are many accessible parks in the Metro Vancouver area. Some of my favorites include Lighthouse Park (which is easily accessible by public transit, but surprisingly beautiful and secluded), the Grouse Grind if you’re adventurous, Shannon Falls or Bridal Veil Falls (if you prefer a light walk in the woods), or the Chief if you’re fit and would like a bit of a challenge.

4) LEARN ABOUT WATER Why on earth am i writing about water? An excellent recent film “Flow: For the Love of Water” about water illustrates this resource’s incredible importance. For one second care to entertain the thought of considering how essential water is to our survival, health (as in, the lack of clean water leading to health and survival problems). Climate change is melting glaciers and snowpacks around the world meaning that rivers worldwide are or will be facing water shortages. In 1999, 26 percent of Canadian municipalities reported problems with water availability, including seemingly wet locals such as Vancouver and Victoria (Environment Canada 2001; Boyd 2003). To illustrate the importance of this issue a bit further: 440 of 669 major cities in China face moderate to severe water shortages, and data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization suggest that 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050 (Lagod 2007).

5) FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE SIDE Learning more about the state of the world can be difficult at times, but one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about environmental issues is the absolute necessity to stay positive, and not let things get to you personally – I’ve just started a blog about this and highlighting the importance of something known as the Lotus Effect (the real definition). Using all the energy generated by anger of learning about humanity breaking environmental laws and transforming it into something positive – action on improving things or leading by example. And last, and most importantly, keeping a sense of humour about it all, and not taking things, and ourselves too seriously.

A great example would be a well-known (and very witty) standup comedian talking about energy and world politics in Robert Newman’s History of Oil (I love it). Another PERFECT example of this would be the words of wisdom by a writer on the Simpsons - Welcoming Homer, the Tree Hugger! I’d like to end on that note, if you don’t visit any other links, visit the last two – I’m particularly fond of always looking at the bright side of things. With Love, L.E.

Related posts:

1. My favorite job – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson
2. Being a superhero/comic nerd :) – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson
3. Environmental groups mobilization and protests: More than meets the eye

Karen Parker, Karen Hamilton (who is also Blogathoning), Isabella Mori (who is also Blogathoning), Al Pasternak, Gus Fosarolli and Nancy Zimmerman all have kindly offered to either drop by and help keep me awake or help me in other ways, like offering yummy healthy treats and caffeine, but I am stuck to my computer for a while because my laptop is having major, major issues. But I want to thank them all. I also want to thank everyone who has dropped a comment on my blog, and everyone who in one way or another has offered encouragement.

Anyway, since I do love engaging in interactive conversations, I am going to borrow a page from Tanya’s Mid-Week Socializing Game. If you need an explanation, here is one of her most recent posts. Let’s apply Tanya’s MWSG. So I’ll ask a question and the first person to respond, answers it and then poses a question in the same comment. And so on and so forth.

I’ll start – What are you MOST passionate about?

Related posts:

1. Interview Me – 5 Questions
2. Seven questions with The Hush Now (@thehushnow)
3. 7 Questions with Mojave

“A man makes a picture
A moving picture
Through the light projected
He can see himself up close
A man captures colour
A man likes to stare
He turns his money into light to look for her”

- “Lemon”, U2

My favorite job has always been the Paramount Theatre in Kelowna. I had just gotten back from a disastrous four months spent as an exchange student in France and needed to find something that kept me from returning to the grill at McDonald’s. McDonald’s had been a job that I had never been good at, always a few beats too slow and always a little too mindful of the tragic accidents depicted in the safety videos. A Big Mac never seemed worth the chance of losing a limb.

I started really enjoying my job there once I became an usher/projectionist. I liked the moderate amount of authority that the role provided, and the responsibility of having to not destroy a film print worth a few thousand of dollars. After I got it down I loved threading up a projector, because it’s not often in life I’ve had the chance to learn how to do something that such a small percentage of other people know how to do. I was good at it, though I did once melt about six minutes of Babe 2, and eventually I was even splicing the films together.

I started doing projection work at the tail end of the life of the union projectionist. With larger film platters the complicated task of seamlessly switching between reels on the fly turned into pushing one button and then sitting around for two hours. Theatre owners, which increasingly were large corporations, realized that they could pay a minimum wage idiot like me to do the same job as they had been paying a well paid union employee to do for years. When the union projectionists went on strike, I felt for them but the writing was already on the wall. My theatre was not unionized, but people who had been expecting to raise families on their careers were soon out of work.

It taught me that the job market was shifting, one day you’re a highly skilled employee and the next you’re being replaced by someone whose last job was mixing slivered onions with water for hamburgers. It’s a process I’m seeing repeated in my job at one of Canada’s largest cellular providers, as the job keeps shifting from a career in sales that was an actual career to a stop gap job for the people who couldn’t get jobs at Future Shop.

I don’t know if I’ll ever enjoy a job more than the Paramount. I loved staff shows, where we’d run a new movie on Thursday night in a staff only party. I loved movies, and for years saw pretty much every film that showed in Kelowna.

I have to say, I hope the Paramount won’t always be my favorite job. I hope to find something that I love to do, but each year that I get older it seems less and less likely. Maybe work isn’t supposed to be fun, maybe it’s supposed to be hard and annoying.

Jeffery Simpson is a freelance writer, and has written for IGN.com, the Kelowna Daily Courier, eVent! magazine, agent magazine and blogs at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] as well as his own personal site That Ring of Confidence [jks].

Related posts:

1. Being a superhero/comic nerd :) – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson
2. The Environmental Movement Needs You – Homer Simpson Has Already Joined – Guest post by Lotus Effect
3. All you need? Guest post by Pat Zaph

This post was contributed by Karen Quinn Fung, who blogs at Countably Infinite. Karen recently completed her Honors Thesis and is considered an expert in transportation. She single-handedly organized TransitCamp in Vancouver and was included in Raincity Studio’s 2008 Women in Tech to Watch. She also happens to be a friend of mine

Raul and I were talking today when I told him I couldn’t think of something to write about for his blogathon, and he called me an expert in transportation. I, of course, now feel obligated to repay his generous compliment…however, I will do this with a blog post about why I am not an expert in transportation – at least, not the way that most people think of experts, and not in the way that most people think of transportation. (Much of this post is indebted to a book by Fiona Rajé called Negotiating the Transport System. I am currently crafting a blog post for my site with more on this book.)

When people think of transportation, they think of traffic engineers, people designing lane markings and curbs, thinking about where to put stop signs, bike lanes and pedestrian crossings, the headways (i.e. amount of time between buses) on bus routes and the logistics of a complicated transit system like the SkyTrain. Alternately, they may think of transportation planners, who study the number of people going where at what times of day, weighing land use with development goals, who make forecasts in the future about what people will be doing 30 years from now to get around.

In almost all of the above activities, I am, at best, a casual observer. My degree was in Communication, so I am ill-suited to comment on urban growth or community development. Instead, I am much more interested in the intricacies of how the act of getting around shapes what you can do, who you are, and who you can be; and, conversely, how not being able to get you are also keeps you from certain things. And finally, what people or organizations can do quickly and cheaply to overcome those obstacles and do what they want to, in the absence of solutions that might take a long time to implement. Funny enough, a lot of those tools tend to involve providing information to people – hence my hanging-on with the web and mobile communities in Vancouver.

Along this vein, one of the neatest concepts I’ve learned about recently is that of the “forced car.” It is exactly what it sounds like, and everyone knows what it is: it is when public transport is so lacking that people on low incomes have to put their money towards owning and running a car, which diverts valuable resources away from other parts of their lives. I have a friend living this very reality in Winnipeg. Yet as a society, do we collectively – through our representative in municipal or regional governments – take responsibility for precipitating these situations through the design of our cities? It’s hard to take responsibility for something that’s not directly someone’s fault, yet all too often it seems that the forethought that would enable these situations to be avoided is bypassed completely.

I’m certainly not the only one thinking about this sort of thing in Vancouver, either – the Vancouver Public Space Network is doing some great work, and Toronto’s Spacing Magazine is very prolific in bringing these issues to a human and emotional scale. If we think of cities as living, breathing organisms, then our transportation system is like our circulatory system, moving things around to where they are needed. That experience of moving around, perhaps not for the majority but for no small minority of people, is traumatic, wrought with difficulty and frustration, leading to (again with a loosely-defined academic term) social exclusion, that prevents them from taking full advantage of their potential or living their dreams. It’s this human element that I work towards…and I’m feeling
up to the challenge!

Now, does anyone know a Master’s Program where I can study this *and* hang out with bloggers and web geeks?

Related posts:

1. Sustainable transportation in Vancouver
2. Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget – Guest post by J. Karen Parker
3. Guest post: Lust for life, by Terra Atrill (aka ZoeyJane)

What is the ‘blogstar effect’. Basically, it’s that kind of awe you get from knowing someone who is popular and famous online. I started reading Tanya‘s, Rebecca‘s, Duane’s, John‘s and Derek‘s blogs (just to give a few examples of local blogstars) long ago, but they always seemed very down-to-earth to me, so I never got that kind of “awe”.

I then started hanging out with them and with other local blogging stars (including the lovely Monica Hamburg, Jonathon Narvey, Corinna and Adam Carlson, and still, the whole image of the blogstars never really came to me – these are friends of mine who happen to blog, and who happen to be in social media. But they are also good friends of mine and very down-to-earth people.

However, I giggle quite often when I think of other bloggers in the social media scene and I realize that yes, sometimes I still did get the “blogstar” effect. While with some the blogstar effect never came to exist, with others, I was just like I had met Brad Pitt or Jessica Alba (or Michael Weatherly for that matter, whom I met recently in Yaletown). Examples? I loved Maktaaq‘s blog for a long time, and when I met her, Matt, Ryan and TLO, I was giggling like a high school kid “OMG I can’t believe I’m finally meeting you!“.

I think I get the blogstar effect on a very random basis. But then, when the blogstars and I become friends, I realize that they are just human beings like me with blogging super powers. So, we become part of a siblinghood. I am proud of my blogger friends, and I am honored to be in their company in this Blogathon 2008.

Related posts:

1. Video as a tool to effect social change – An example from Giant Ant Media
2. No Motrin Moms effect on CRTC’s decision on net neutrality
3. The Environmental Movement Needs You – Homer Simpson Has Already Joined – Guest post by Lotus Effect

The Objective Activist Academic?

Note: While this post is about academics and specifically some issues that we have, I think it is relevant to a more general audience. Next time you see an academic advocating a certain position, you might want to keep this post in mind in order to figure out how to evaluate what they are saying.

As an academic I work on subjects that I also care quite deeply and passionately about, as do my students. I teach in an environmental sustainability program and everyone involved from faculty to students is there because they are concerned about the state of the world and want to create some positive change. I actually came from the NGO world before moving into academia. One of the things I have struggled with and which many of the students in the program struggle with is how to engage in the issues you care passionately about when you are supposed to be this objective academic observer. That’s what this post is about. First of all, I should say that not all of my colleagues face this problem. Some of them disengage from the whole issue of advocacy, public education or policy advice. They do their work and if someone else picks it up and runs with it, great. Others, however, see the need to try to be more proactive in creating change. The students often face this dilemma when thinking about signing on to a petition (e.g. save X rainforest) or writing an op-ed or engaging in any other type of activity that could be seen as advocacy. Second, I should also note that these are my views. My colleagues may very well disagree with me.

So, what is my approach to this problem? It is to keep the following in mind:

1) When I became a scientist and then an academic, I did not give up my rights as a citizen. I have every right to engage in public debate on issues I care about, just like everyone else.

2) Recognize that there is no such thing as total objectivity. There is good research and bad research. But even the decision on what to research is not an objective one. I do the work I do because I see problems in the world that need solutions. Within that, I try to do the best research I can, but I’ve already made a judgment that this topic is an important one. You also have to recognize that the question you ask will affect how you view the data. Asking the question a different way may make you parse the data one way versus another and come up with different conclusions. Here’s an example. Back in my NGO days, I got data from a government program regarding the safety and reliability of a particular technology. The government’s analysis of the data lumped both safety and reliability together and came up with a set of conclusions. I thought that it was better to separate them and when I analyzed the disaggregated data, the picture was quite different. Both analysis were “correct” based on the question asked, but the conclusions were different.

3) Don’t let yourself be labeled or put in a box. This can be a tough one to fight, but it is necessary. I used to work on nuclear issues at my NGO. We used our analytical skills to try to reduce the risks from nuclear weapons production and to argue for a move away from nuclear weapons. Our money often came from foundations. Of course, those in the industry tried to dismiss some of our work on the basis that it was biased because it was funded by foundations that had clear objectives in this regard. Interestingly, they never questioned their research skills because they were funded by the nuclear industry or by the federal government to work on nuclear weapons. You have to try to puncture this illusion that one side of an issue is “objective” while the other is not.

4) Distinguish values from facts (my thanks to a colleague at the university for emphasizing this in recent discussions). As an academic, I am also allowed to have values and make moral judgments. If I am going to support some cause based on my moral values rather than some piece of research or evidence, that is fine. However, I have to be clear about that. You can’t make people think that Dr. So-and-So thinks this is good so therefore there must be evidence to back it up when you are basing your decision on your values. This, however, is a tricky one. People may have a problem with this, either still thinking you are basing this on your expertise or now being dismissive of you because you have lost your “objectivity.” Don’t forget, in some cases you don’t have to sign on to something as an academic. You are a person outside your academic life (though I know it can be hard to believe that sometimes, especially when in the final leg of your Ph.D.). (also see point 1).

5) Get your facts right and communicate them well. This is critically important if you want to maintain credibility. The challenge is that sometimes what you are writing has to be a brief overview of the facts without all the nuance and caveats. That’s okay as long as you don’t twist the facts or be selective about the facts in a way that skews the overall picture. You also shouldn’t ignore inconvenient facts if they are *critical* to the problem. This doesn’t mean you have to take into account every piece of evidence, no matter how minor, when writing a short piece for the public. What is important is the balance of evidence.

6) Do good research. Be careful in your work, examine alternative hypotheses, ask the questions that need to be asked and then back it up with solid analysis. If you come under attack for your views and your research is strong, you will be in a much better place to defend yourself and explain why your position is valid.

7) Do good research. See above.

7) Don’t forget to do good research. Sorry, I know it’s a tired and cliched writing device to repeat yourself in a list, but seriously, I can’t emphasize this enough. And if you are outside the research community but really interested in a topic, do your research. Both on the topic and on the researchers.

So, when you see that scientist talking about climate change or that political scientist talking about the middle east, try to bear some of this in mind. Are they making an argument based on facts or values? Are they presenting the facts truthfully and honestly? Perhaps just as importantly, bear this in mind when you see pundits and commentators discussing the research of others. Climate change “skeptics” get a lot of press despite the overwhelming evidence and number of scientists that form the consensus on this issue.

Related posts:

1. Mom, PhD – Guest post by Melanie A.
2. The Environmental Movement Needs You – Homer Simpson Has Already Joined – Guest post by Lotus Effect
3. Immersing myself back in the academic sphere

A few months back, I commented that of course I would be very happy if I had the kind of traffic that Rebecca Bollwitt, Stephen Rees or Darren Barefoot command. I consider all three of them, friends of mine to varying extents (obviously I consider Rebecca a very close friend) and therefore, I have not the slightest amount of envy for their stats.

Through my restaurant reviews on UrbanSpoon, my own traffic is quite good when it comes to restaurant reviews. I figure that if I didn’t write about anything else other than restaurant reviews, I’d probably have really high number of unique views.

Currently, my stats (while I think they’re ok) are nowhere in the vicinity of what the mommy blogger Dooce (whom I have never read in my life, by the way) commands. Colleen wrote a really interesting post on the Return on Investment (ROI) for Nintendo Wii’s campaign with Dooce. (SIDE NOTE – Frankly, I don’t feel bad at all for not reading Dooce – I didn’t even understand why so many people made a big fuss that she came to talk at VIDFEST 2008- but I’d definitely love to have the kind of traffic she commands).

However, I always wondered whose blogger’s traffic would I prefer. For example, danah boyd (who is nearing the completion of her PhD at Berkeley) is someone who got a hell of a lot of traffic for a post she wrote on class division and the Facebook/MySpace divide. Would I prefer to have Dooce’s traffic or danah’s? I’m going to go with probably danah’s, simply because I am an academic and I kind of have that lens to the world. HOWEVER, is my readership the kind of readership danah has, or the readership that Dooce has? Who are my readers, anyway?

I have to admit that I have never bothered to categorize my readers, and I don’t want to cajole them in neat little boxes with labels. But this is an interesting question to me, because I think that if I were to really get something out of my blog, I would need to really understand very well my readership and do a much more thorough analysis of my traffic (Rebecca has a really neat post about this on her blog).

But along the line of higher stats, and given my current (and potentially soon-to-cease-to-exist) status as the top-ranked UrbanSpoon restaurant review blogger, I would figure that more and more restaurants would be coming down and knocking on my doors to get me to review their restaurants. It has happened already with a few, which I am grateful for (particularly because those are really good restaurants!) and I’ve already gotten some nice swag.

But since my blog is so personal, I guess I could not blame any businesses for not choosing to send me stuff. I’m not an iPhone expert (as John Biehler is), nor do I write specific, detailed, restaurant reviews (as Karen Hamilton does – though she also has a personal site), nor am I a really geeky blogger. Nevertheless, I’m happy with what many people have told me about my blog – that they like reading it because it has one theme = Raul (that is, ME).

But back to the blogger relations issue. In the past few months, I’ve been pitched to write about several campaigns, and I am not sure (and would shudder to think) that part of the reason why I am being pitched may be the higher traffic I have now (and let’s face it, I only switched to WordPress in March 2008 so I have NO reason to complain, my stats have skyrocketed).

So, really – I am just saying – if you’re going to talk to bloggers with high traffic, you should keep good relations – whatever the definition of “high” or “good” traffic is. I am really not concerned about my stats, but if you are a business looking to pitch me on the basis of my stats, you better know that my readership is nowhere near the realm of other local blogging powerhouses!

And yeah I recognize that by being honest I might be closing some doors down, but I prefer honesty over fakeness. I am not fake nor will I ever be. I am me and this is my story.

[EDITORS NOTE - Darren, Rebecca and others have written about bloggers relations, it was the topic of a Third Tuesday, but I'm exhausted and my brain isn't working properly so I'll update this post when Blogathon is over to reflect all these discussions - and maybe this post isn't all that well thought out!]

Related posts:

1. Blogger Relations – Cossette Convergence – VIDFEST 2008 – Barefoot, Trgovac and Bollwitt
2. The elephant in the room: Disclosure and transparency in blogger relations
3. Mangano on “The Business Case to End Homelessness”, @boardoftrade event

The easiest way to crank out this blogathon post is to tell a story about oneself, especially as a point of introduction to a new audience or passage into a new community. I’ve lived in Vancouver for seven and a half years, and although I’ve been a Canadian citizen for two of those years, but despite that I still feel very much like an outsider. I’ve started and restarted this post several times in an attempt to keep it as light as possible, but as a person who is on a personal journey toward the real, I think it’s best if I’m as honest as I can be, even at the risk of alienating people.

This rather long winded introduction is my way of dancing around an issue that I don’t often like to bring up in public. You see, I’m one of those rare people who really doesn’t like living in Vancouver. Oh, let me not sugar coat it — I hate living here. There, I’ve said it. This Paradise on the Pacific Rim leaves me cold,and it has little to do with the dreary chill that descends nine months of the year. Although I’ve lived here long enough to develop enough of a relationship with the city that I can (begrudgingly) call it home, my homelife, so to speak, is deeply unsatisfying.

When I arrived here in 2001, newly married and filled with expectation and promise, I imagined Vancouver as a place where I could be free to reinvent myself. I was free to jettison all the psychic baggage that I managed to accumulate in 32 years of living in Atlanta, GA (where I was born and raised).

Two weeks after I moved to Vancouver, I experienced my first earthquake. Looking back, I should’ve taken that for the omen it was. The earth was trying to tell me that my relationship with this place
was on shaky ground, but I was too dense (and too scared) to pay attention.

As an immigrant, I wasn’t able to work when I first moved here. That meant I had ample time to explore the city and to develop a feel for its physical and emotional geography. People often comment on Vancouver’s mountains that tumble gently toward the ocean, but I look at that landscape and I feel hemmed in on all sides. I don’t climb mountains or ski, and I can’t swim, so I feel stifled by the landscape. Then the bus strike of 2001 started just as I was feeling brave enough to venture forth, and my view of Vancouver was whittled down even further.

Back then, I wrote an open letter to Vancouver (which appeared on the now-defunct Vancouver Stories website). In the letter I told Vancouver that I felt she brought me here under false pretenses, that her gentle whispers of openness, acceptance, and opportunity were far beyond my reach, and that I was feeling betrayed by her. Almost eight years later, I feel like a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with no prospects, but with no other option to stay in a relationship that soured long ago.

Now, I have had experiences since moving here that I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d stayed back in Atlanta. If I’d stayed in Atlanta, I’d have never become a librarian. If I hadn’t moved here, I wouldn’t have been able to adopt certain lifestyle changes that made it possible for me to lose a drastic amount of weight in a relatively short period of time. Vancouver’s a hard city to be a fat girl in, but one only need look around to see evidence of that.

Vancouver is also a hard city to be a black woman in. I wear my hair in dreadlocks not as some political or spiritual statement, but because when I first moved here, there was only one hairdresser who had experience with the arduous task of chemically straightening a black person’s hair, and the salon was a-l-l the way up Kingsway at Rupert. I live in Fairview. There was a bus strike, and at the time, my husband and I didn’t own a car. Growing dreads was an act of pure survival.

It’s not only the hair that’s an issue. The only cosmetics line that carries shades that are dark enough – and properly tinted for darker skins – is M.A.C., so needless to say my bathroom looks like a satellite M.A.C. location. I once had a clerk at Shoppers Drug Mart tell me that because there weren’t too many of “you people” here that they just didn’t make the shades available in Canada. I later found out that was a lie on my first trip to Toronto.

I could go on and on about how I feel invisible because I’m ethnic but not Asian or South Asian, or because I’m Black but not Jamaican or African. I could talk about how I was frequently maligned when people ranted non-stop about Americans, and how few people wanted to make a distinction between American individuals and the Bush Administration. I could talk about how I came to hate Rick Mercer with a passion, because I got asked so many times if I’d seen his “Talking to Americans” special, and how Canadians expected me to stand in and defend an entire nation of people — or even the small cross-section that Mercer mocked on the show.

I could talk about all of those things — and I have, quite extensively on my own blog — but this piece is long enough already.

So you might ask what’s keeping me here? My husband’s desire to be close to his elderly mother is a factor, but the real reason is I’m a native Southerner, and despite the extra padding and insulation I’m carrying around, I’m just not built for Canadian winters.

So here I am, disgruntled, disillusioned, and dispirited. I’d just about given up on Vancouver and making any inroads into a community here at all, but then Raul popped up on my radar. Even though we’ve never met, Raul has extended his hand in friendship quicker and more freely than anyone else I’ve ever met in this town, and not that it’s fair to hinge my opinion of an entire city on one person, he’s given me faith that maybe my opinion of Vancouver need not be as bleak as it is.

EDITOR’S NOTE – I found Cecily’s writing compelling but even more so, her photography is extraordinary. And I can totally relate to how cold Vancouver can be. I am very honored that Cecily thinks I’m friendly because that’s exactly who I am. As I mentioned in a recent post, this blog is my story and I am proud of it. And I am proud of being able to bring people who have a lot to give, like Cecily, into my own life. Thanks for the contribution, Cecily!

Related posts:

1. A personal story on experiencing bullying first-hand (Guest post by Lois)
2. Guest post: Sharing content online and the Creative Commons License by Steve Anderson
3. All you need? Guest post by Pat Zaph

Podcasting and cancer go together for me. I wish they didn’t, but it’s been a year and half since my tumours first prevented me from working at my day job—and podcasting is something I’ve been able to keep doing.

After getting the news that I had stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer in January 2007, it’s been a rollercoaster of chemotherapy, radiation, multiple surgeries, more chemotherapy, CT scans left and right, innumerable blood tests, still more chemotherapy, and side effects ranging from nausea and hair loss to a new, really nasty acne-like rash. It’s been most unpleasant, but I’m still alive.

You might expect me to podcast about having cancer, and I have done a
little of that, but the shows I work on most have nothing to do with it: I engineer my wife’s podcast Lip Gloss and Laptops, and co-host and run the website for Inside Home Recording. So, over the past two or three years, I’ve gained some expertise in this audio realm (as well as some video too). Which is why Raul asked me to blog some advice about recording a basic podcast on a Windows PC.

Now, for Mac users like me, GarageBand is almost an all-in-one toolkit for putting together a podcast. It’s not perfect (nor is any software), and it makes many Apple-centric assumptions about how a podcast should work, but it will certainly do the job.

However, there’s no simple and inexpensive GarageBand equivalent for PC users like Raul. There are a few programs that do similar things, like Sony’s
ACID and M-Audio’s Session, and there are certainly higher-end options like Adobe Audition, Cubase, Pro Tools, and so on. Some do too little, some too much, and the higher-end programs cost hundreds of dollars.

But if you’re getting started with audio podcasting on a PC (or if you use Linux, for that matter), a solid software option is the free, open source audio recording and editing program Audacity. Simply combine it with a decent microphone (whether a basic tabletop dynamic mic, a USB headset, or a tieclip lavalier), and with some way to get the signal into your computer (via an adapter cable, audio interface, or mixer), then you’re ready to go.

Audacity isn’t dead simple, but once you get the essential metaphor of how it’s put together—that is, multiple audio tracks, stacked vertically on top of one another, each of which displays the waveform of the sounds it contains, with time moving from left to right—you can record, edit, mix, and export a complete podcast that sounds pretty decent.

Some tips: Work with your Windows audio control panel, any drivers or settings for your sound card, and Audacity’s preferences to make sure you can get quality sound into the software from your microphone. Unless you need stereo sound for music or other reasons, work in mono as much as possible, since it’s less complicated, and you can also create final podcast files that are only half the size of identical stereo versions. And make sure to download the free LAME encoder to enable Audacity to export MP3 files directly.

Oh, and there’s no harm in downloading Apple’s free iTunes for applying a final polish to your podcast files. You can use it to add extra information (copyright, artwork, etc.): just drag your MP3 file onto iTunes, then choose File > Get Info and make your edits. Using the Preferences > Advanced > Importing options, you can also use iTunes to convert your audio into other formats.

Finally, you’ll need somewhere online to store and link up your files using blogging software that makes it possible for people to subscribe to your show. I’m sure Raul would recommend WordPress.com, and I wouldn’t disagree. But that would also be another blog post.

EDITOR’S NOTE – Derek is also the co-host of Inside Home Recording, and a musician. IHR offers many suggestions of pod-safe music (e.g. music you can actually use without worrying about copyright infringement. You can check both his personal blog and IHR for suggestions on podsafe music.

Related posts:

1. Guest post: Making stories, showing off, by Derek K. Miller
2. Innovative podcasting interviews – CBC Radio’s interview with Derek K. Miller
3. Guest post: Disco Stick by Airdrie Miller

I’m a money coach, and obviously have had hundreds of conversations about how people handle their money. We talk about values and about how their spending aligns – or doesn’t – with their values.
We talk about objectives, and whether their spending habits will support – or not – those objectives.

In short, we work together to increase the client’s ability to be strategic and intentional with money.

I had a thought the other day. In our culture, we don’t often do the same for friendship. A lot of the time, we are friends in a happy, but haphazard, way. If the relationship is pleasurable (things in common, personality mix works) and convenient (geography and time works) the odds of the friendship sustaining over time are reasonably good.

In short, if things fall in place naturally and easily, we have friends.

But what about if there is a price to be paid, for the friendship?

What if the person has an aspect of their personality that deeply bothers us, or even hurts us?
What if the person’s schedule or geography makes it difficult to connect, in our own busy lives?

Our response is often to pull away from the friendship.

I wonder what the opportunity/cost is here, to use economic terms again.

Much has been written about commitment and romance, but we don’t here a lot about commitment and friendship. I wonder: if we got better at the latter as a culture, we we get better at the former?

What about our friendships? If another person has opened him or herself to me or you – by sharing their personhood, by letting us “in” on areas of their life, by connecting to us in some way: what price are we willing to pay? What value do we place on the friendship?

Often, a price we need to pay is forgiveness. As the intimacy increases with a friend, so does the likelihood that something will not work: That some aspects of us will not respond well to an aspect of the other.

In my own life, one of my most valued friends has an issue with lateness. Time and again, I am left stranded – and livid – waiting an hour or longer past the agreed time. I feel insulted and furious. Yet this friend is loyal, would come to the hospital at 3am if needed, and time and time again offers her wise insights after listening to me go on (and on) about something I am grappling with. The late issue very nearly cost us our friendship. It’s still an ongoing frustration.
And yet, this friend is worthy of my love and ongoing offer of friendship (and really, which human life isn’t?) despite this one crazy-making aspect.

As in romantic relationships, the only solution is the price of forgiveness. And not just once, but every.single.time it happens. Christ was once approached by one of his apostles, who was thoroughly pissed off by his brother. “How often,” the offended brother asked, “must I forgive that dude? Seven times?” (note, he was clearly keeping track!) Christ’s answer: 70 times 7. In other words, as often as it takes to keep the relationship going.

A very high standard, indeed. Would we pay that price?

Another price we often need to pay is inconvenience. I’m not sure where the balance is between setting our own boundaries, and self-care v. inconveniencing our life to sustain a friendship, but I suspect we frequently opt out of acts of friendship that are inconvenient. I know I do. My life is full, I have responsibilities, and gave away my car a few years ago. So for example, if the friend moves out of Vancouver proper, odds are not strong that I will continue to invest in the relationship. And yet, again, this human is priceless. Why then, will I not pay the price of an extra hour of commute time, as required to sustain the friendship? Or what if the best times to connect by phone require me to get up earlier or stay of later?

I don’t have answers for this. But I wonder what the effect would be both on individual character growth and the way in which we experience life, if we adopted a much deeper sense of intention and commitment with our friendships?

And resolved to pay a higher price than easy & convenient for all of our friendships? And I wonder what the effect would be on our culture as a whole?

Some thoughts at 4:33 am from a money coach

Nancy happens also to be a good friend of mine who lives in the Strathcona area, and therefore, is very passionate about issues related to homelessness and the Downtown East Side. Kudos to her!

Related posts:

1. Guest post: A passion for being in love, by Nancy Zimmerman
2. Happy belated birthday, @moneycoach (aka Nancy Zimmerman)
3. Friendship in the context of social networking sites

When I woke up this morning my husband was already in the kitchen feeding the kids. I noticed some small spots of blood on his pillow. My stomach sank — the sight of his blood always makes me queasy and worried. I’m guessing some of the pus-filled pimples on his face must have broken last night, and perhaps started bleeding.

My husband was diagnosed with stage IV metastatic colorectal cancer 19 months ago. Since then he has spent over a month in the hospital, had several operations, and endured months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy. You can follow his story over at his blog, penmachine.com.

The pimples on his face and torso are the side effects of an experimental drug treatment he is currently receiving through a clinical trial at the BC Cancer Agency. He has “used up” all his government-approved treatments, but there are still small tumors growing in his lungs. If this does not work, then I don’t know what is next – nobody talks about it. The future is uncertain. The only thing that is certain in my life is uncertainty. Thankfully, I have a great therapist who helps me, but that is another story.

When Raul asked me to guest post on his Blogathon, I had no idea what to blog about. Then I noticed that his charity of choice is the BC Cancer Foundation and I immediately knew that I wanted to write about: my experience as the wife of a cancer patient.

Let’s start with the good. They say every cloud has a silver lining. I have learned to enjoy each day with Derek. I now know what it means to live “one day at a time.” Each day is a gift, as they say. I have also realized that I am a strong person. I have inner strength. I take on the role of caregiver begrudgingly. But in the end, I am here for the long ride, through sickness and health.

I’ve learned that I need to ask for help, and that it really does take a “village” to raise a child, in this case, an adult child. My parents and his parents have played important roles in keeping him well, and keeping me sane. My children are flourishing, as kids do, despite the fact that their dad is sick. I have a huge support network, and it took Derek’s illness for me to see it, as though it was invisible before. For that I am grateful.

Now the bad. Cancer is not very sexy. Ileostomy bags, chronic pain, midnight runs to the Emergency room, multiple surgeries, medications and vomiting do not exactly fit into what I had pictured for our future together. There is a lot we can no longer do. He can’t get medical insurance to cover him for travels out of Canada. So I had to leave him at home during our family vacation to California earlier this month.

I was happy to leave him at home, close to his doctors. The truth is, I worry about him way more than I ever did before. It is almost at the point that I feel better when he is in the hospital, because when he is at home, I am always asking him, “how do you feel?” Not only is this very draining, but allowing myself to imagine a reprieve at some point in the future makes me think the unthinkable: only in his death will this pain, this cancer, stop controlling our lives. So I don’t think about it. But repressed feelings tend to build up and spurt out at inopportune times. And rather than keep it all to myself, I’m writing about it here for the world to see.

Truth time. It is most likely that my husband will die from this cancer. Even worse, nobody wants to talk about it. Everyone keeps saying to me that I need to stay positive. But what they are really saying is, “it is not helpful to think about the worst-case scenario.” Well, let me tell you right now, it is necessary for a wife and mother to think about the worst-case scenario.

Derek does not talk about it with me. His parents do not talk about it with us. But I have to think about it. I have two little girls to look after. So if I seem suddenly hard or selfish, I am. But it is not Derek’s fault. It is the cancer’s fault: the cancer that was not supposed to strike a young father at age 37.

Even the doctors don’t like to talk about it. I finally asked his oncologist the big question that everyone asks in the movies: “How long does he have to live?” The doctor said his cancer has a 30% five-year survival rate, with an average survival rate of two years.

So here I am, 19 months in to this role as wife of a cancer patient, and my husband is still alive. I am grateful for that. I honestly think I might fall apart if he were to die. But I am strong. I am realistic. We have put our “affairs in order.” I am drinking more margaritas than usual. I worry about blood stains.

I don’t understand what it means that patients only get 12-16 chemo treatments covered under the BC Medical Services Plan (what about Universal Health Care?). Who can answer that one?

I’m living life one day at a time. It seems some days to be getting worse, and other days to be getting better. I’ve never run a marathon, but I’m guessing it has to be easier than this.

Airdrie blogs at TalkingToAir.com and co-hosts the Lip Gloss and Laptops podcast.

Related posts:

1. Guest post: @HenryJue’s Ride to Conquer Cancer
2. Guest post: Blogging for a cause and the BC Cancer Foundation by Nick Locke
3. My experience at @LIVEatSquamish – guest post by @AndreaLoewen

In addition, I was wearing:
- Sunglasses
- Watch
- Wallet

By the end of it, I took everything off, simply because I can’t stand having things attached to me. I’ve never been one for carrying stuff around (that’s why I always try to get a nice backpack) and in addition to the stuff you see in the photo, I also was carrying my digital camera and my Flip camera. URGH. I hate carrying stuff around, I hate it!

Related posts:

1. It’s all about the equipment! – Weekend Edition
2. It’s all about the equipment – Winter edition
3. It’s all about the equipment – Entertaining guests

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are apt to annoy some people. If so, suck it up. The views expressed in this post are also apt to appeal to hippies. If you are a hippie, go take a shower.

In the most basic sense, all you really need to be happy is food, shelter and clothing. Over and above that, in the most realistic sense, anything else is a bonus. The problem with these bonuses is that far too often we treat them as being essentials. The idea that we are entitled to these extra essentials has become so ingrained in our heads that questioning them is often met with harsh criticism or deference. If I asked you to list three things off the top of your head without stopping to think that you would count as essential to your life above and beyond the basic necessities of food, clothing and shelter, I doubt that most people would be able to. Not because they can’t think of any, but because once you take something for granted as essential to your life, you stop being able to disconnect it from what you think is necessary.

The only real way to break this habit, I think, is to be put in the middle of a situation where you’re forced to recognize this. I’ve been living through one of these situations for the last three months. I can step out onto the roof of the building I’m staying in, look out over a suburb of Dhaka and realize that complaining about the annoyances we face in life at home are pithy and pointless. You go to a restaurant, and your order isn’t as hot as it should be. This annoys you and you send it back demanding a decrease in the price. Don’t act as though you’ve never done something that callous, it’s a trait we have as Westerners. Few people actually stop to think that the amount of food on that plate amounts to three weeks of food for some people. I explained to my students here how much I pay for lunch at A&W in Harbour Center and they asked me if I was buying food for a feast. A $6 Teen Burger combo could buy a week’s worth of food for some people here. So the next time you pick up that Big Mac, or Subway, think about how many people there are in the world that don’t make enough money in over a month to even buy the fries in your combo.

Maybe you have thought that before. Good on you. But until you walk through the shanty towns and see with your own eyes what the living conditions are, there still too much of a disconnect between you and them to make much of a difference in your perspectives. I doubt that most people could conceive the duress people live in, even if they like to think they can. Reading about it online, watching a humanitarian story on the news, or listening to it on the radio seems to give people a sense of satisfaction that they know what’s wrong with the world, and that since they are aware of its problems, this makes them a better person. People might toss a can in the food donation bin and smugly feel that they’ve just made a difference in someone’s life. I’ve come to decide that if you do this, you’re an asshole.

You’re making shit all of a difference because you’ve done it without thinking of the context of people who are really in need. Being able to throw food in a donation bin still lets you keep a large disconnect between you and the people you think you’re helping. If you don’t have to see who’s getting it, you feel better. This is the same thing as donating money to an NGO to send it to developing countries. You feel happy that you’ve helped without even wondering about the end result. You think that your money will go to help people in need but don’t question how it’s used to do this. Keeping that disconnect between you and the people you want to help means you don’t know that the money was used to help build storm and flood shelters for poor farmers in monsoon threatened areas. Keeping this disconnect means that you don’t know that your money has been spent on these shelters without any regard to cultural context. Keeping this disconnect means that you have no idea that the shelter you kindly donated your money to with a grin on your face did little to help because this is a Muslim country and there were no separations between the men and women so many women were forced to stay outside and drown. Keeping this disconnect means that your happily donated money didn’t build shelters for the animals that the farmers need for their livelihood, so more people died trying to save their animals from drowning instead of staying in the shelters. But you sit in your air conditioned home or office with a big, self-satisfied grin on your face because you know that you made a personal contribution to help those people and since you did that, they must be happier now.

We take it for granted that our contributions make some large difference to society on a grand scale. We assume that our donations or monetary contributions will make a huge difference to people in need. But no one ever really takes much time to see who these people in need are. They’re just People in Need, and they need our help. Somehow, we also think that if only people followed our values, that they’d be much farther along in life. I’ve seen a string of volunteers come through here in the last few months, and even being here that comes out. And I’m not ashamed at all to say that the biggest culprits of this have been the American volunteers. It’s almost beyond a lot of them to accept the fact that not everyone in the world can live life with a smile on it without western values and what we (they) think of as organization.

This might just be the basis for the every problem dealing with helping people. Those of use fortunate enough to be comfortable in life too often assume that if only people Lived Like Us, that they would be far happier and be able to live a much better life. This frame of thought easily ignores the fact that this takes far greater amounts of money than most of the world will hope to see, and that maybe living like us isn’t necessarily the best thing for a large portion of the population of the world. We need food, clothing and shelter to be happy. I can look out my window, I can walk down the flooded streets, I can talk to the people living in a shanty built up on stilts, and all of them will have a smile on their face because they have a basic roof, a basic meal, and basic clothing. They might not be the happiest person every day of their lives, but I’d much rather see a smile on a persons face knowing that they have all they need to be happy rather than the smile on the face of a person who thinks it essential to know which movie star is fucking which movie star and who wore what to whatever awards show. If our attitude is that people in need should learn to live like us, I hope that they slam the door in our face and tell us to please fuck off. If you really want to live your life happy and know that you’ve made a real difference with some contribution, then go see how your help is making a difference. Don’t sit in a room and assume that you’ve made one, go see for yourself.

Credit: Pat Zaph (all photos in this post)

Maybe that way, you might learn that some of those things you thought were so important to your life aren’t so necessary anymore.

All photos in this post (c) Pat Zaph

This post has been brought to you buy the malnourished construction workers breaking bricks by hand outside my window.

EDITOR’S NOTE – All photos in this post are (c) of Pat Zaph

Related posts:

1. My favorite job – Guest post by Jeffery Simpson
2. Sharing a personal story – Guest post by Cecily Walker
3. Bikes + outdoor poetry = Saturday – Guest post by Kate Milberry

Michael Kwan is a freelance writer himself, and he always maintains a good, streaming flow of blog posts in addition to his own freelance writing gigs. How does he do it? I always have wondered. I guess it comes with the responsibility of knowing that you NEED to be ready, and he often also writes about self-discipline. I hope I can be THAT disciplined should I ever go the freelance route!

Have you had any experiences in freelancing? What would be the best freelance tips you could provide? Thanks!

Related posts:

1. My #wcyyj10 #yyjWordCamp slides on Blogging for Professional and Personal Goals
2. On being a professional blogger
3. What would my professional life be without a smartphone?

Duane Storey,Tania Morrison (Ottawa), Rebecca Bollwitt, Shane Gibson, Karen Hamilton, Ayeza Garcia, Isabella Mori, Danny Dang, Mehnaz Thawer, Jenn Lowther/Nadia Nascimento, Barbara Doduk, Chris Richardson, and Colleen Vince.

I’m going to try and keep commenting on everyone’s blogs, but I am not sure if I can keep doing it with the frequency I’d like as I still have to write my own posts! Again, thanks to Rebecca for organizing, for everyone who is pledging and funding our efforts (shout out to Fresh Start Recycling who were my very first sponsors for a post!) and to all my fellow Blogathoners, let’s keep going!

Related posts:

1. Thank you Blogathoners! You helped me do it!
2. Launching my Blogathon 2008
3. Quick update post

Why I Wish I Was More Like Raul

You know, I wish I was more like Raul. Hear me out. First of all, he’s wicked smart. He’s got a PhD in stuff I cannot even begin to explain. If I had a PhD, I would make EVERYONE call me Dr. Hamilton. Even my husband. But Raul isn’t crazy like me, with all those brains, he still acts like he’s no better than the rest of us.

Number two, have you heard of Twitter? Raul has. And he can make friends with nothing more than a twitter account. Myself, I am actually quite shy. I would need, most likely, a several shots of vodka and some herbal assistance to be as social and friendly as Raul. Everywhere he goes he MEETS people and has EXPERIENCES. In all caps. To a wallflower such as myself, this is an enviable trait. I recently accompanied my spouse to a work function, a bbq. And how did I handle it? I befriended the family dog and played a marathon game of fetch with him. It’s all good, though. I think the dog and I are going to try to meet for coffee sometime next week.

And now, to top it off, he is spending 24 hours writing and raising money for the BC Cancer Society. I don’t mean this to sound trite, but he is a giver in the best and most noble sense of the word. I lost my stepfather last year to metastatic melanoma, last year, so, to me, Raul is a hero.

However, I can eat cheese with no adverse effects. So I have that going for me. Which is nice.

Jodi Hamilton is the proud owner of Jodiferous.com, which [despite Raul's best intentions] is still written using a Movable Type 4 platform. Raul recently lost a bet to Jodi and had to pay a Dr. Pepper, and there is photographic proof on Raul’s Flickr! And she’s also an awesome writer!

Related posts:

1. Heritage houses on Hamilton Street (Yaletown)
2. Guest post: What is Raul passionate about? by Gus Fosarolli
3. Mom, PhD – Guest post by Melanie A.

Hello to Raul’s readers! My name is Maktaaq. I am guest blogging for my friend Raul this Blogathon 2008. However, because of my usual choice of subject matter, I am asking Raul to slot me in somewhere around 4 am. Nobody really reads the 4 am posts except the slackers who sleep through it and just read their rss feeds. By then, with 47 other posts clogging their feed, no one will notice.

Someone sent me a link to the Chinese angel cat, an animal that is quickly becoming my favourite animal freak. This cat isn’t just cute and fluffy, it’s got wings. Useless wings that won’t get this cat airborne, but still, it’s a cat with wing-like appendages!

The cat belongs to a certain Granny Feng of Xianyang in Sha’anxi, a province in Mainland China. The stumps that became the wings appeared a month ago, right around the time that the cat was apparently raped by some troublesome female cats. Granny Feng is convinced her cat was sexually harassed: “A month ago, many female cats in heat came to harass him, and then the wings started to grow,” she said in Huashang News exclusive interview.

Heh. The cat grows “two hairy 4-inch long wings” after a run-in with some horny girl cats. The wings have bones. Me sees what’s the deal here.

Related posts:

1. Happy anniversary, Matt and Maktaaq!
2. Guest post: What’s so great about bloggers? by Simon Ogden
3. Guest post: Passionate about literacy by Catherine Novak

The truth is, if it weren’t for my blogging, I am pretty sure my writing wouldn’t be as sharp. Remember, I write ALL the time, and I write in a language that isn’t my native tongue. Furthermore, I keep the words flowing and thus I am able to maintain a writing pace that most people envy. Yeah, I could be more focused in my research, and I swear I’d publish more papers and journal articles if I didn’t have a social life. But my life would be definitely much worse off.

But wait a minute, there are other bloggers who are also academics and geeks. Dr. Beth Snow, for example, and my friend Melanie A. And Karen Parker. And the list goes on. Therefore, while the academic model is still one that I think is important for me, it is no longer the only one. I now write for two different audiences, and I write under two different models, but the mind that produces the content is still the same: MINE, and only mine.

Related posts:

1. On furthering my academic writing
2. The painful process of writing academic book chapters/articles
3. On writing, storytelling and my academic work

The summer of 2002 was a rough one. I had always prided myself on being someone who could hold it together no matter how I felt. Put a good face, on, be perky and. all. that. jazz. No matter what.

But finally, it all hit me. My insomnia was worse than ever before. And I knew why: I was working a go nowhere job, not being able to make my acting career work – I felt like a tremendous failure. I had recently gotten out of a relationship, still had no enduring friendships and I felt very, very alone.

And lonely. Awfully lonely.

It wasn’t fun to realize I wasn’t holding it together. I needed to get out of town and fast. My best friend was living in LA at the time. Vancouver to LA is a quick plane ride, but I was broke and so a Greyhound would do.

By my splendid math/geography calculations the bus ride would be about 6 hrs. Yeah 8pm to 2.

‘Course it was really 8pm one day to like 2pm 2 days later, but ya know, by the time I realized that I really really wanted to go (oh, this was the 2nd time I had made this kind of error – the first being a Greyhound from New York to Minneapolis that lasted way longer than a human being need suffer).

I got on the bus, burnt, almost so tired of it all that I couldn’t feel the excitement that came with the anticipation of being somewhere different. The first hint that I had made the wrong choice with my method of transportation was the scruffy guy who sat next to me and promptly told me he had been dumped by his girlfriend. Then he said how he thought about killing everyone around him and then himself.

Yeah, this was going to be fun.

I had never taken the school bus as a child, but from TV & films I got a pretty good sense of what the horror was like.

This. Was. Worse.

Shouting, freaked out, pissed off people were the norm.

To make things extra fun, the bus stopped in every single small town, to refuel, pick up passengers, or generally make up a reason to turn on the bus lights and create some sort of sleep-deprivation exercise.

6hrs in: My homicidal/suicidal seatmate gets off. Happy trails.

He is replaced by a big biker guy who just got on. Perfect, I think, this’ll suck.

The Biker offers me some Nutter Butters. Awww. We’re friends now & life is good again.

10hrs in:
The man behind me begins to bark. Then laugh manically. Then bark, bark, bark. Finally the Biker turns around and tells him he’ll cut his balls off if he doesn’t stop. A blissful silence ensues.

20hrs in:
We stop at a “terminal” somewhere in California. I go to the public bathroom. There is the very obvious sound of a person “evacuating their bowels”. A woman walks in and says (excitedly, I swear!) “Oh yeah! Go for it, baby! It’s nice to have that good morning shit!”

Please please please can I be in LA, already?!!!

26 hrs in:
We have a new bus driver. Telling jokes. Wonderful. Unfortunately there is also a clued-out Eastern European woman responding to the rhetorical questions:

Bus Driver: Why do men always have the remote control? Woman: Because it is usually near them on the table.
Or
Bus Driver: What’s the difference between a woman and LA? Woman: Well, one is a person and the other a city.

Something like 42hrs later, the bus arrives in LA.

I feel dirty, gritty and more like a cockroach than I have ever felt before.

But I’m here. Finally.

Let the games begin.

Monica Hamburg is a social media evangelist and blogs, amongst others, at Me Like The Interwebs.

1. Happy birthday Monica Hamburg!
2. Belated Happy Birthday, Monica Hamburg!
3. What I learned from Monica Hamburg about Crowd Sourcing – A Third Tuesday recap

The sandwiches are affordable (although the big, big sammich is about $ 14 bucks, which I find slightly overpriced). I went with a $ 6.00 (small-ish) sandwich with turkey breast, but I saw that Rebecca’s roast beef sandwich was HUGE (next time I’m buying that one!)

Here is another picture of their prices and menu

Overall, I enjoyed it but I wonder if I had a good time there because of the sandwich or because it was a fun opportunity to hang out with Rebecca outside of the blogosphere and just before she liveblogged NetTuesday. The sandwich was good, but I think I’m going to stand by my La Grotta del Formaggio sandwiches!

Related posts:

1. Eatery review – La Grotta Del Fromaggio
2. Quantum Deli Bistro (New Westminster)
3. The Black Frog Eatery (Gastown)

Querida tia: Hable hace unas semanas con mi mama, y me comento sobre el estado de tu salud, y que te escuchabas contenta y motivada y de alguna manera, te ibas mejorando y la qumio te estaba cayendo bien. Luego recientemente me comento que andabas medio afectada de la garganta y que no sentias tan de maravilla, por lo que pense en que mi participacion en Blogathon. podria de alguna manera motivarte. Espero que ese sea el caso.

Un Blogathon es como un maraton. Estamos escribiendo 49 posts cortitos (o bueno, de cualquier tamaNo), un post cada 30 minutos por 24 horas, con la idea de recaudar fondos para una organizacion caritativa (charity). La agencia que estoy tratando de patrocinar es la Agencia de Columbia Britanica contra el Cancer (BC Cancer Agency).

Espero realmente que el hecho de que estoy dedicandote este Blogathon te motive a echarle ganas, siempre has sido una persona muy positiva y de mente muy abierta y con la voluntad de salir adelante. No te detuvieron otros problemas en el pasado, echale todas las ganas del mundo que aca en Canada yo te estoy echando porras (y mis hermanos tambien, ya que con todos he hablado acerca de nuestros deseos de que pronto se restablezca tu salud).

Muchos besos de tu sobrino que te quiere, Raul.

Related posts:

1. Guest post: FFR’s Wiley Weekly Word: Blogathon
2. Blogathon 2009 for BC Cancer Foundation (registration open)
3. My Blogathon 2009 will be for BC Cancer Foundation again

I have a button which states, plainly, “PhD Mom”. My own mother gave it to me just before my son’s first birthday. I also have a T-shirt that has a print that resembles those cliché “Hello, my name is” stickers; in this case, printed in pink, it says, “Hello, my name is Mommy“; I received it as a Mother’s Day gift this year.

I am a PhD and a Mama. My PhD is five years old, and at the time I (finally) defended my thesis, I was convinced it would be my only offspring.

And then I fell in love. The rest, as they say, is history.

My son will be two this fall. My husband is also an academic, so although I haven’t worked in the ivory tower (or, for that matter, anywhere else for a paycheque) since just before I became pregnant, and because most of our friends have multiple degrees, I still float in research-oriented circles. In fact, I know Raul through grad school.

I spent 12 years in university, and have four degrees to show for it, yet most of the time I feel dumb. Preggie brain has never really gone away, and that’s surely part of the problem, but the main thing is that I’m out of the loop. To be an effective researcher, one must stay on top of the literature (not to mention gossip in the discipline). I zoom through chick-lit novels at an expensive pace, but don’t remember the last time I managed to read an entire copy (or even more than a single section) of the Globe and Mail. So forget about reading anything scholarly; even if I found the time and summoned the energy, I no longer feel smart enough to make sense of it, even if I actually do still have the capacity.

I have managed to get a bunch of papers published since becoming a Mama, but truthfully I’d done all the hard work some time before and it was just because of editorial delays that all these papers suddenly entered the public domain. (Vexingly, the referee report on one of those manuscripts – submitted even before I was married – arrived in my inbox when my son’s age was best counted in days.) I’ve refereed one paper, and just a couple of days ago received a follow-up request regarding the revised manuscript. I still show some signs of academic life.

When I’m most self-conscious, though, is when I’m interacting with other PhDs. You know, the ones who are actually using their degrees. I feel as though I have nothing to contribute to conversations with other PhDs (but just ask me about the price of diapers, or better yet the pros and cons of myriad baby strollers, and I can go on and on and on!).

Possibly the most jarring (if not downright painful) experience, though, was while living abroad during my husband’s recent sabbatical. In Europe, our upstairs neighbour was another Canuck. When we met her, she showed interest only in my husband’s research and teaching. For all intents and purposes, she ignored me. I don’t remember her even asking my name. And, although it was probably just my own hyper-sensitivity about my credentials and lack thereof, I felt dismissed when she said that her “husband’s job was too important” for him to leave and so, rather than join her (and their toddler) in Europe, he stayed behind in Canada. She never once asked me what I did, whether I’d left a job behind to accompany my husband or to enter motherhood. We were there for six months. I always felt that she’d assumed I was nothing but a dim housewife. I should’ve made more of an effort to flash my PhD Mom button.

I do label myself as an “Overeducated Hausfrau”, but at the same time I don’t believe that my education has wasted. I have always felt that education is intrinsically good, and I feel very privileged that I had the opportunities to study as I have. However, I still remember with shocking clarity a moment when my son was just a few weeks old: I was dealing with what I will politely describe as a diaper containment failure. I had baby poop on my hand, and I started to cry as I thought, “I did a doctorate for this??” And I had to answer yes: I met my husband in the ivory tower. I had just completed my degree and begun my post-doc, and he was already a faculty member. So yes, if I hadn’t done a doctorate, I probably wouldn’t have met him, and therefore wouldn’t have had my delightful son, and therefore, at that very moment, would not have had baby poop on my hand.

With time, I have come to terms with my new role. I have a bunch of degrees that I do not currently use in my daily life (although perhaps that will change as my son grows up), but those are mine and mine alone and nobody can take them away from me. (Even though I do have the occasional nightmare that my PhD has be revoked for one reason or another…) On the other hand, I have a little boy whose giggle lights up my day, whose smile makes me swoon, and peaceful sleep reminds me what a treasure I’ve been given to protect and to shepherd through life. I can’t say that every day is easy, but I can say with utter truth that I feel so fortunate to have witnessed his first steps and heard his first words. While my research was unique, I am not so vain as to think nobody else could pursue the same stream; but who else could be Mama to my little boy?

When we first talked about marriage and eventually starting a family, I realised that I wanted to be the kind of mother who had freshly-baked homemade cookies waiting at the end of the school day. A bit retro, perhaps, but I also assumed my husband’s surname when we married. I suppose, for all my efforts at being an independent (and independently-minded) woman, I’m kind of traditional at heart. It was a conscious decision to be a stay-at-home-mom, and I know that we are extraordinarily fortunate as a family to be able to make that choice. I know many mothers do work in the ivory tower, and I admire them, but I decided early on that I’d rather do one thing well than two things poorly, as I feared would be the case with me. So, for now at least, it is motherhood alone which is my priority; a paid career may follow later on.

Mommyhood isn’t all rose-coloured glasses, and some days I crave contact and conversation with taller, more verbally-developed humans who don’t need me to wipe their bottoms, but on a macro scale (see, I do still have some sort of scholar trapped inside!) I cherish the privilege and joy of having time with our son when, too soon, once he makes friends of his own choosing and starts school and maybe even gets a crush on a teacher, his Mama and Papa will become the backdrops of his life.

I am privileged to have had so many educational opportunities, and I am blessed to have been entrusted with this little being and to have the gift to watch him grow into his own person.

[EDITOR'S NOTE - MelanieA's research, as a matter of fact, is very unique and I'm proud to call her a friend and a colleague. But I have to agree (somewhat painfully) that yeah, unfortunately, sometimes when women with PhDs became Moms, people forget that they are actually also scholars! GRRRR]

Related posts:

1. Why I wish I was more like Raul – Guest post by Jodi Hamilton
2. Guest post: Lust for life, by Terra Atrill (aka ZoeyJane)
3. The summer of 2002 – Guest post by Monica Hamburg

Recently, I have become more aware of the fact that my blogging will probably be a factor in the job decision-making process. If I get a job with the government, will I be able to blog? Will I be able to express the opinions that I have in the same manner? Or should I be subject to a specific standard/code of conduct?

I have been saying that I want Web 2.0 and my blogging to help me get my next job, and I am quite appreciative of the things I have managed to achieve, and the neat things I have been able to do (and all of this, thanks to some very kind people who are in my life now).

Anyhow, not sure where exactly this reflection is going, but figured I should just throw it out there. Particularly since it’s late at night and I’m not 100% sure what I can blog about. But basically, I just want to remind you to donate to the BC Cancer Agency through my page, it’s a very worthy cause.

Furthermore, I would also like to remind my readers that people whom I care for a lot (an Aunt and a friend of mine) are currently afflicted by the illness, and it is to their battle that I dedicate this Blogathon.

Related posts:

1. Random acts of kindness in Vancouver
2. Some more random facts about me
3. MostlyLisa’s viral video and the rights of online content providers

Well, apparently this guest blog posting thing is catching. Last week I was the official BlogHer 2008 correspondent for Miss604.com, and now here I am on Hummingbird604.com. Now I feel out of sorts because I’m not a 604¹.But I digress.

First, I’d like to give props to Dr. Raul for supporting the BC Cancer Agency through this 24 hr Blogathon. It’s a really great cause, so it would be wicked awesome if you could donate to the BCCA.

Now, what to blog about, what to blog about. Hmmm…. Ah, yes. I know. I’m going to blog about why you should give me & Raul MacBook Pros. No, really. You should.

As regular readers of HB604 know, Raul’s dream is to own a MacBook Pro. And this is something that R and I share in common, along with our tech geek neophyte status, the fact that we are bloggers, our lengthy time in grad school and resultant crushing student debts², and our respective ownership of crappy, crappy PC latops.³. And these commonalities are, in fact, all related to why you should give us MacBook Pros. Our geek neophyte (a.k.a. techy geeks-in-training) status means that we like to hang around with grade A geeks. All of whom have Macs. And who look at our sad little PCs and shake their heads. Who answer our questions of “Why won’t my laptop connect to the wifi/run this cool program/stop giving me the blue screen of death?” with a shrug and a “Well, it’s not a Mac, is it?” We really do need each need a Mac if we ever wish to transcend the rank of geek neophyte. So why don’t we just buy ourselves ones, you ask? Well, the answer to that starts with a “c” and ends with a “-rushing student debt.” And since we both have blogs we would totally blog about how awesome you are if you gave us MacBook Pros. And then it would be written on the Internets that you are awesome. Which would make it doubly true, given that, as everyone knows, everything on the Internets is true⁴.

So, as I see it, there’s no reason not to give us MacBook Pros.

¹As I don’t have a 604 number anymore, ever since I ditched my landline and went solely mobile. All the cool kids have 604s.
²I actually have no idea if R has a crushing level of student loan debt, or even if R has student debt at all, but I like to tell myself that I can’t be the only one. Editor’s note – YES, I DO have a crushing level of student debt!
³And before you say it, I know that saying both “crappy” and “PC” is redundant.
⁴The fact that everything on the Internets is true must be true because you just read it on the Internets and, as you may recall from earlier in this sentence, everything written on the Internets is true.^a Q.E.D.
^aThis joke was stolen from was adapted from is an homage to the great Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A. And he’s a doctor and I’m a doctor and Raul’s a doctor, so it’s totally legit. No, really.

Related posts:

1. Congratulations on your new eyes, Dr. Beth Snow!
2. The laptop is pretty much dead – I need a MacBook Pro!
3. Guest post: You Will Do Foolish Things, But Do Them With Enthusiasm by Ryan Cousineau

I might swing by Duane‘s or by Rebecca‘s and John Bollwitt‘s for some wi-fi and energy drink to keep me going, depending on how I am feeling. [EDIT - I just received a tweet from John that he's got fuel for Duane and myself to keep us going, so I'm quite excited. GOOD TIMES. I'm not supposed to be still at the stage when I start having tears flow from my eyes, but they are flowing already... oops]

I had a chance to go to the Backstage Lounge to celebrate CS’s PhD defense (I know, poor HZ, two PhD theses and defenses in a year!). Our usual crowd (minus AF and DM, BB and JN) showed up, ML, JH, BS and myself. We had drinks and yam fries, but I have to say – the prices were steep and the service was pretty lacking. So I am quite unimpressed. I am NOT going to write a nice review of the Backstage Lounge, for sure.

Ok, back to the grind of writing more blog posts. Keep the donations coming! If you need directions towards my donation page, you can click here.

Related posts:

1. Twitter as an online social space to hang out virtually and enable offline interaction
2. The offline life of an online geek
3. Snow in Vancouver can make you happy… or not

Ahh yes, some people bike across Canada, some run for insane distances, and others… blog. YEP. Welcome me to Blogathon. My name is Anya (or Anna, if you like to be formal) and you probably don’t know who I am. I’m actually quite surprised that Raul offered me to guest blog (thanks! -EDITOR’S NOTE – I like your writing, Anya, that’s why I invited you!) and I’m not too sure how long or thought-out these things are supposed to be. If this is anything like the entries on my own blog, it will be neither long nor thought-out. That’s partly because in about 4 hours I am supposed to be in a car (perhaps driving that car) and on my way to the Pemberton Music Festival.

I’m pretending to be excited about it, but to be honest I am thinking about all the atrocities we’ll have to go through to a) drive there b) get into the venue c) set up our tents and d) somehow get out on Sunday night. 40,000 people are expected to attend. I don’t like Vancouverites enough to spend three days in close proximity with that many of them. But I digress… the other reason why my blog entries aren’t generally accessible is that when I blog for pleasure, it’s really a stream-of-consciousness kind of deal, where I just let my thoughts roam in the jungle (or more like the attic that’s stacked with old creepy dolls) that is my brain.

Oh god. I just did it. I promised that I wouldn’t talk about my blog here because, as numerous people have articulated, talking about your blog is kind of like talking about your dog or your kids. Blah, blah, it’s great, but nobody cares.

So here we go, I’ll talk about something I’ve been meaning to write about myself but haven’t gotten around to. Recently, I saw this ad for BMW on ffffound (have you seen ffffound? It’s like crack cocaine), and it got me thinking a lot about advertising.

Here’s the deal: I am on my way to getting a liberal arts degree, and I’ve loved the little bit of Women’s Studies I have taken. I’m critical, supposedly socially aware, cynical, all that good stuff. But at the same time, I currently work in marketing and I really like my job. Marketing is fascinating and it can be a lot of fun. So when I saw this ad, two parts of me reacted. The feminist me is angry at the use of women’s sexuality in a blatantly demeaning way to sell used cars. USED CARS.

Hold on there a minute, partner, BWM would say: not just any used cars (women, whatever), used BMWs. Which means quality and sexiness and beauty and everything that that girl represents. Anyways, it’s pretty despicable that BMW is recycling the same stereotypes of male sexual dominance and experience in its campaign, and perpetuating the idea that a man is the judge of a woman’s value, which he bases on her level of sexual experience. All that draws me away from this ad, and pisses me off. But the marketer in me keeps going back to this ad because it’s good. It sticks in your mind, and it works. It’s simple and effective, especially for straight men, I would imagine. So, since my readership is a lot smaller than Raul’s, I thought it might be a good place to ask for reactions about the ad over here. What do you think? Are you enraged or do you love it? Are you running to a BWM dealership with cash or with a protest sign? Let me know, I’d love to hear reactions.

That’s it for me! Happy blogging and reading, Blogathon folk! If you’d like to read more of what I have to say, you can do so at Structured Moments or over at Beyond Robson. Or follow me on Twitter or something. The great thing about Web 2.0 is that it gives you myriad stalking options!

Related posts:

1. My experience as the wife of a cancer patient – Guest post by Air
2. Transportation as a life – Guest post by Karen Quinn Fung
3. Mom, PhD – Guest post by Melanie A.

I might head into the West End or simply go home, depending on how long my laptop decides to behave. In the mean time, keep the donations coming!

Related posts:

1. The laptop versus desktop debate
2. My laptop is dying
3. On working from home and office setup

I invited a bunch of really great bloggers to contribute with guest blog posts, so you won’t be totally bored with only my content. Again, please remember that you can contribute to my fundraising efforts for the BC Cancer Agency by clicking here and donating online. The site is supposed to track the donations in real time, so I’ll know who has donated.

Thanks again so much to sponsors, fellow Blogathoners – good luck and we’ll see you soon!

Related posts:

1. Blogathon 2008: Preparing to launch!
2. Blogathon 2008 – Donations, posts, feeds, etc.
3. My motivation to Blogathon – A post dedicated to my Aunt (In Spanish)