Ramblings

2009-03-26T14:43:00.002-05:00

I agree with this cartoon. Pope Benedict XVI should have his mouth taped shut. Yes, abstinence is the the only way to prevent sexually transmitting the HIV virus. But how likely are people going to remain abstinent? But to tell people that condoms aren't the answer!! Which part of that message are the people of Africa going to listen to?

He then does this.

The Catholic church wasn't happy with the forcing people

to give up majority of their beliefs, now they want all

beliefs banished. Forcing what you believe on other people is not

right. If you think you are helping people by forcing your religious

beliefs on them, you are definitely out of your tree. What is right for one person doesn't make it

right for all. If you want to help people then do it on their terms not yours. Education is the key

but in secular terms only. Religious conversion should never play a part.

I am not a religious person but I do miss Pope John Paul. He lived in the world not above it.

He knew what was going on and he brought the Catholic religion into the present. Now, Pope

Benedict has taken it back into the Dark Ages again. It is very sad indeed.

This book is a must read!

2009-03-16T09:53:00.003-05:00

I have just finished reading this book yesterday. It was an amazing read. Everyone should read this book but especially people who believe that all Muslims are terrorists. For me it is amazing that one man could do so much for people with so much respect for their culture and religion. It is an cultural anthropologists dream. Helping people the way the people see they need help, not going in and deciding for them what they need (the typical Western way). I can`t do it justice with a description of what it is about, you just have to read it! I avoided reading it for the longest time because I thought it would be a `look how wonderful I am I helped people in poverty` book. It is far from that. It is a man who is willing to humble himself and learn about the Muslim faith and through many mistakes find out what way to help the people of Northern Pakistan (and eventually Afghanistan as well): To fight ignorance through education, especially girls. If you haven`t already read this book go read it!

25 things I want to do before I die

2009-03-14T12:37:00.003-05:00

Not that I am planning on dying anytime soon but here it is:

1. drive a race car

2. participate in a rally car race

3. travel to Australia, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, Greece and Paris (been to the South of France so I can't say France)

4. retire somewhere warm all year long (hell just retire would be nice!)

5. bungee jump

6. learn to play piano

7. own my own home

8. learn to pole dance (yes, pole dancing as in strippers)

9. learn a language other than English

10. write a book

11. drive from winnipeg to Vancouver (since I have driven from Charlottetown to Winnipeg and vice versa many times)

12. visit a desert

13. climb a mountain

14. have a real library where I can display all my books instead of storing them in boxes

15. a solo parachute jump (already done a tandem one)

16. white water rafting

17. scuba dive

18. learn the trapeze

19. participate in storm-tracking/chasing (i like lightening)

20. travel around Asia

21 fall in love with a decent guy (no more "bad" boys)

22. hang glide

23. fly a plane

24. learn latin dancing

25. kayak

I read 25/100

2008-12-17T19:15:00.000-06:00

This is a list of the 100 Greatest Novels Of All Time.

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal (or Facebook), including these instructions.
2) Bold all the books you've read.
3) Pat yourself on the back for your pretention and perspicacity.

1. “The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger
3. “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
4. “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee (this is one of my favourite books EVER)
5. “The Color Purple,” Alice Walker
6. “Ulysses,” James Joyce
7. “Beloved,” Toni Morrison
8. “The Lord of the Flies,” William Golding (Gr. 10 English; I despise this book)
9. “1984,” George Orwell
10. “The Sound and the Fury,” William Faulkner
11. “Lolita,” Vladmir Nabokov
12. “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck
13. “Charlotte’s Web,” E.B. White
14. “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce
15. “Catch-22,” Joseph Heller
16. “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley
17. “Animal Farm,” George Orwell
18. “The Sun Also Rises,” Ernest Hemingway
19. “As I Lay Dying,” William Faulkner
20. “A Farewell to Arms,” Ernest Hemingway
21. “Heart of Darkness,” Joseph Conrad
22. “Winnie-the-Pooh,” A.A. Milne (only gets better as I get older)
23. “Their Eyes are Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston
24. “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison
25. “Song of Solomon,” Toni Morrison
26. “Gone with the Wind,” Margaret Mitchell
27. “Native Son,” Richard Wright
28. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey
29. “Slaughterhouse Five,” Kurt Vonnegut
30. “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” Ernest Hemingway
31. “On the Road,” Jack Kerouac
32. “The Old Man and the Sea,” Ernest Hemingway
33. “The Call of the Wild,” Jack London
34. “To the Lighthouse,” Virginia Woolf
35. “Portrait of a Lady,” Henry James
36. “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” James Baldwin
37. “The World According to Garp,” John Irving
38. “All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren
39. “A Room with a View,” E.M. Forster
40. “The Lord of the Rings,” J.R.R. Tolkien
41. “Schindler’s List,” Thomas Keneally
42. “The Age of Innocence,” Edith Wharton
43. “The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand
44. “Finnegans Wake,” James Joyce
45. “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair
46. “Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf
47. “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” Frank L. Baum
48. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” D.H. Lawrence
49. “A Clockwork Orange,” Anthony Burgess
50. “The Awakening,” Kate Chopin
51. “My Antonia,” Willa Cather
52. “Howard’s End,” E.M. Forster
53. “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote
54. “Franny and Zooey,” J.D. Salinger
55. “Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie
56. “Jazz,” Toni Morrison
57. “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron
58. “Absalom, Absalom!” William Faulkner
59. “Passage to India,” E.M. Forster
60. “Ethan Frome,” Edith Wharton
61. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
62. “Tender is the Night,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. “Orlando,” Virginia Woolf
64. “Sons and Lovers,” D.H. Lawrence
65. “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Thomas Wolfe
66. “Cat’s Cradle,” Kurt Vonnegut
67. “A Separate Peace,” John Knowles
68. “Light in August,” William Faulkner
69. “The Wings of the Dove,” Henry James
70. “Things Fall Apart,” Chinua Achebe
71. “Rebecca,” Daphne du Maurier
72. “A Hithchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Douglas Adams
73. “Naked Lunch,” William S. Burroughs
74. “Brideshead Revisited,” Evelyn Waugh (thank Liam for that one)
75. “Women in Love,” D.H. Lawrence
76. “Look Homeward, Angel,” Thomas Wolfe
77. “In Our Time,” Ernest Hemingway
78. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias,” Gertrude Stein
79. “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett
80. “The Naked and the Dead,” Norman Mailer
81. “The Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys
82. “White Noise,” Don DeLillo
83. “O Pioneers!” Willa Cather
84. “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller
85. “The War of the Worlds,” HG Wells
86. “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad
87. “The Bostonians,” James Henry
88. “An American Tragedy,” Theodore Dreiser
89. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather
90. “The Wind in the Willows,” Kenneth Grahame
91. “This Side of Paradise,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand
93. “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” John Fowles
94. “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis
95. “Kim,” Rudyard Kipling
96. “The Beautiful and the Damned,” F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. “Rabbit, Run,” John Updike
98. “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” EM Forster
99. “Main Street,” Sinclair Lewis
100. “Midnight’s Children,” Salman Rushdie

Mornings are my Nemesis

2008-10-29T12:36:00.003-05:00

I don't do well in the mornings. I am not a coffee person so I don't do stimulants to wake me up. I am not a friendly, happy person in the morning. I function on a very low level. If you ask me a direct question I will answer it but I will not "chat" or engage in any sort of social bonding type behaviour. I will do things that NEED to be done but I will not be happy or upbeat about it.

Apparently I have never been a morning person even as a child, I wasn't very happy to get out of bed to go to school even at 6 years old. I could blame it on my insomnia but the weird thing is I am more cheerful if I have to get up extremely early (say 4-4:30 in the morning) than I am getting up anytime after 6 am.

As I said earlier I don't do chatting or such things when I get up in the morning. Some people don't seem to get that. Even if I don't answer or give short curt answers. I guess you have to live with me to get that. Let me amend that last statement ...live with me and be an aware person. Most of my exes know this and my family know I am a grump in the morning. The more you force yourself on me (unless it is truly necessary) the more owly I will get.

So unless it is something important (like a death or some such event) or a simple question (like do you know if...) I may not answer you.

I also do not believe in the statement, GOOD Morning (morning will suffice) or the question How are you this morning? (It is morning how do you think I feel).

That is my rant for now...I suck at mornings!! LOL!

Self-Esteem

2008-10-09T12:38:00.003-05:00

One thing I have learned is not to ever judge your self-worth on what other people think of you. I don't want to ever hear one of my female friends say 'I must be a good person because all these people want to date me'. That is no way to judge your self-worth. The only person who can do that is yourself. If you like/love yourself that is all that matters. If you are being the best person you can be that is all that matters. The problem comes is when we judge ourselves by how many people who want to date us or how many friends we have on Facebook/MySpace or any number of social networking pages. That doesn't matter. So what if you have 400 acquaintances that doesn't mean squat, what do you think of yourself? What do you think of the type of person you are? If you like/love (I hesitate using love because it sounds like being vain but I am not talking about people "who love themselves" I am talking of true self-love and acceptance of who you are) then who cares about what others think. And if you feel that you don't love yourself then work on changing those things that you don't like. Self-reflection is what is needed here, you really need to understand what makes you tick to actually accept yourself and can say 'I like me".

It has taken me many years to come to a place of self-acceptance and self-love. I used to judge my self-worth on how many guys I could sleep with. But the the funny thing is I never kept them in my life because I was engaged in self-damaging behaviour. I was letting other people (guys mainly) dictate how I felt about myself. This led to a 4 year emotionally abusive relationship. I had to hit rock bottom before I could bounce back. I spent a lot of time self reflecting on why do I that and learning to like me again.

Please do not judge yourself by what other people say it only leads to problems in the end. I you feel you are the best person you can be that is all that counts!

Sleep

2008-10-06T12:20:00.003-05:00

Sleep is a precious commodity and I don't ever seem to get enough. I have that dreaded thing called insomnia. If a I get 4 straight hours of sleep, I consider that a good night. I swear I have had sleep problems since I was about 6 years old. That is when we moved into a creaky old Victorian house. At this time I became a big fan of ghost stories. Now you can see how a very impressionable 6 year old mind would react living in a big creaky old house (isn't that where all ghost stories take place-- old houses or cemeteries?). This started me on the road to being a light sleeper/big worrier when it came to falling asleep and staying asleep. Nowadays it's not the the scary ghosts keeping me awake it is the usual worries: school, fieldwork and money ( aren't they all related?)

I really am envious of people who practically fall asleep when their heads hit the pillow and proceed to stay asleep all night. When my head hits the pillow it is still whirling and even though I have ways of relaxing my mind, it still takes me 25-45 mins. to fall asleep (normally). Apparently the average time to fall asleep is 15 mins. max. I guess I am far from normal. Once asleep, as I said before, 4 hours is the maximum for me to stay asleep, most nights it is 2 1/2 to 3 hours then I doze until morning (waking up often). I avoid caffeine and eating after 7pm but none of this helps. Unfortunately, insomnia my mother and my brother so it is a family 'thing'.

I am afeared that all my bad sleeping habits and strange work schedules have done some damage after all these years.

Oh, to be able to sleep like a baby!

Let's go for a walk

2008-09-24T14:28:00.013-05:00

I have a new camera for my birthday so I thought I would take you for a walk around my neighbourhood.

Let's turn left as we head out my buiding. This is the view up the street.

The houses in my neighbourhood are large and older. Trees are plentiful so that means so are the leaves.

This is a house that I like. You can see my finger in the upper left hand corner...I am still getting used to my camera!

This is another house that I like. It is unkept in a natural sort of way.

The leaves are changing. Testing out my macro!

The United Church just down the street is blessing pets on my birthday. So tempted to go because I miss animals!

In the next block all the trees are wrapped with these tapes. I believe they are looking for a certain type of bug.

I pass by this house when I walk to and from my bus stop and most afternoons there is a man sitting in the enclosed veranda listening to music and reading.

The election campaigning is on in my neighbourhood. While the majority in my neighbourhood are displaying Liberal signs, this house seems to be a tad confused on who they are supporting.

I discovered this sign at 1:30 am on my walk from the bus after the Sloan concert. I love it!

These are condos that are near my bus stop. I love wrought iron!

Let's head back down the street towards my apartment building.

Where we see my car. It has been sitting in the same spot since Sept. 7th. I am not moving it until I get my parking spot on Oct. 1st. It is extremely hard to get a parking space near my buiding when you want one. You always end up parking way up the street.

Book recommendation

2008-09-18T16:24:00.003-05:00

This book has been this most interesting grammar guide I have ever read. It truly has quick and dirty tips and is so easy to understand. I recommend it to anyone, even someone who is good at grammar. Get to know Squiggly, Aardvark, and Grammar Girl-- you will be glad you did!

Thought I'd try to use this

2008-09-05T05:48:00.002-05:00

Here I am not being able to sleep. I have been awake since 1:30 am. I am worried about moving into my new apartment. There is no place to park a large truck on my street. Should be an adventure... I cannot wait until this evening when the "moving in" is done and the unpacking can slowly be done.
Tonight is our first MASA (Manitoba Anthropology Student Association) pub gathering so Iwill get to finally see some people. It is also just down the street from my new place.
The drive here was pretty uneventful. The first day we saw a dead moose and a dead deer. A couple days later saw some live deer and yesterday we saw a coyote. But wee also saw a tanker off the road rolled over and leaking some sort of gaseous substance. As we were coming into Winnipeg we saw another transport truck off the road. So making it here safely was a lucky thing I guess.
I will be posting pics of my new aartment later after I am unpacked.

I forgot that I started this

2008-03-27T14:18:00.002-05:00

Well it's more than a year later and i made it in one piece to grad school. Not sure how or why I'm her but I am. I am close to finishing my course work and then onto to research and thesis.
I do have a new obsession I want to make art...I have no idea why, I guess I miss my creative side which I used to fulfill in photography. But since I was traumatised I really don't take photos anymore...not for pleasure anyway.

First blog

2007-02-24T14:02:00.000-06:00

I thought I would join the crowd and have a real blog. Ok...yes I am procrastinating--again!! This will get better once I have something to wirte about. Now it is just about getting to the finish line and graduating with my honours. Then I will worry about grad school, which I did get into University of Manitoba...so now I really have to graduate. Too much to think about now. Then there is grad photos...oh how I hate having my picture taken!! Anyhoo must go back and work on my honours...yippee!!