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Disappearing Ink: Thoughts On a Dying Art Form…

“The bundles of paper are bound by brittle elastics, stuffed into broken-down shoeboxes and shoved under the bed.

Flowered notepaper displays the familiar swirls and curls of a childhood best friend who moved away. One glimpse and I am 12 again, ripping open envelopes and fretting over who has replaced me.

A teenage boy’s first declaration of love is hidden in a page of scrawl, the three brave words less daunting to put on paper than utter aloud.

My father’s quirky upright script is as distinctive as his blue eyes peering from a family photo. As a kid, finally managing to decipher it was as exhilarating as winning the 25-yard dash on track and field day.

There are a colleague’s reflections in fountain pen, so handsome they could have been written by a medieval scribe. Camp letters scribbled in haste by a son who couldn’t wait to get back to his canoe. Words that slump with the homesickness of a sister living half a world away.”

– Andrea Gordon

I read this article about “The Death of Handwriting” (excerpt above) earlier today and man, did it hit me like a ton of bricks! I know it sounds silly but I was actually fighting back tears as I was reading it. As a (hand)writer myself, losing this art is like losing a loved one. Growing up, handwriting was something I tried hard to master…yet something I always detested because it was forced upon us to learn in school. “Cursive?”, our class would moan, “…why learn it when printing is sooooo much easier”. It was hard and it was ugly. But as the years went on, we had no choice but to embrace it and I remember a time in junior high when my girlfriends and I would compare our handwriting with one another. “Ohhhh I like your ‘G’…let me see if I can copy it!” And so we would try to imitate each other…picking and choosing the letters and styles that we thought were ‘pretty’…each one of us trying to find our identity through penmanship. I remember distinctly, at one point, all of our writings actually looked oddly similar. Until those days of imitation stopped and comparing with one another was no longer a priority…

Human Rights Day

Considering today is the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, thought this would be more than appropriate…

procrastination

As I struggle to write that one last essay for this academic semester…

cry me a river

Enough said.

solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and (thankfully) short

Damn Hobbes and his Leviathan. Clearly he and other related political thinkers have been pervading my mind.

Yup, it’s that time of the year my friends. And nope, I’m not talking about holidays. I’m talking about the dreaded time that comes right before then…exam season. Dun, dun, dun! The past week has been absolute madness and this week will be even worse with two papers and three finals to write. So right now, I’ve been in my own little bubble dealing with matters of sovereignty, NGOs, IOs, MNCs, inequality, globalization, Hobbes, Locke, Marx, Veblen, Nietzsche, Weber, ICTs, dadadada the list never seems to end. I’ve been living in cafes all week and I’ve seriously considered moving into one and living there for the time being. It’s been brutal, I tell you. So brutal that in the past week I’ve had to line up to get into a library. A library. That’s when you know you’ve reached the peak of your cool. And I know that this struggle of mine is a plight shared by many others. Makes me question whether Hobbes was actually talking more about studentkind than all of mankind when he said that life was solitary, poor (oh so very, very poor!), nasty, brutish, and (thankfully!) short.

So for all of my fellow students out there finding themselves sleep-deprived, overly-caffeinated, and losing your mind, I feel your pain. Just gotta keep on keepin’ on and I’ll see you all on the flip side!

#Tweetsgiving: Social Media for Social Good

Last week my fellow blogUT writer, Julia, wrote a great piece dispelling the alleged evils of social media. This week, I’m continuing that thought.

As Julia mentioned, social media has given us all the opportunity to keep in touch with our friends, reconnect with lost ones, and even share relevant (and well, sometimes not so relevant) information with each other with a simple 140 character tweet. More than anything else, Twitter and other social media tools lets us “learn about and interact with the world in real time, and in a way we never imagined”.

I’d like to take this one step further. Not only has social media given us this chance to connect with each other on a one-on-one basis, but it has also opened the way for a much more far-reaching and collective purpose. Case in point? Tweetsgiving. Never heard of it? Let me give you the low down.

Read more on blogUT.

20 jahre mauerfall

As the world celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that momentous event in history that spurred the collapse of communism and the demise of the Cold War, I can’t help but reminisce on the few days that I spent in Berlin during this summer. I’ve been staring at my photos all day…

Walking around the Brandenburg Gate, the East Side Gallery, or Checkpoint Charlie, I remember trying to imagine what it must have felt like to live during those times. Picturing this massive wall just running all throughout the city…it was surreal and as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t fathom it.

A couple of my friends and I took a trip down to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum and we spent half the day just reading all these clippings and staring at these old artifacts and photos depicting the times and how people tried so hard to escape. I’ll never forget this one plan where a West German man attached two or three suitcases together in which his East German girlfriend would hide as he tried to smuggle her across the border. I remember standing there thinking, “are you for real?!”…to think that someone would even have to think of something like that  is just beyond me.

Then there was the time we were walking on the East German side of the Brandenburg Gate and there was this little area.. I forget what it’s called now, but it was a little kind of memorial for the many people who tried to cross the borders but failed. A bunch of white crosses lined up one after another with the names of so many ill-fated young East Germans.

At the East Side Gallery, Sylwia (who you see below) and I walked the 1.3 km strip of the remaining wall staring at the artwork of the many artists who painted it after it had fallen. So many symbols of peace and hope and change. So much color and life and optimism…I couldn’t help but think, “how many people died here?..at this very spot where a rosy painting of the world lies? Who was shot here? What guard stood in the way of his fellow man?”. I remember being overtaken by this overwhelming  feeling of disbelief that I was standing in front of the Iron Curtain…unable to fully know or even understand what went on during that time but still incredibly moved by it all…

I was born in October 1989, a month before the fall. I grew up in Canada for the majority of my life, the True North strong and free. I’ve never known communism or division or oppression. I’ve never had to go through the struggles and sufferings of that day. I’ve never known fear…never had so great a longing to escape something or somewhere. And so I look at these photos of the people who have lived through it all and I listen to their stories, and I’m just filled with so much awe and I am simply moved by all that they have endured…

Brandenburg Gate

Berlin Wall's East Side Gallery

bdizzle

Can I just say that I had the absolute greatest time on Friday with the absolute greatest people? Just so happy that everyone who means anything to me was able to come out and celebrate with me. A reminder of how ridiculously lucky I am to have such amazing friends in my life! What have I done to deserve you all?

<3

good intentions are not enough

So unless you’ve been living under a rock or have been busy helping NASA bomb the moon today, you should know that the Obamster has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Isn’t it amazing how the world seems to just be going down that downward spiral faster and faster these days? Personally, I’m loving all the commentary I’m hearing online, offline, on screen, on everywhere…nothing better than controversy that’s powerful enough to rile up the masses!

But seriously now, what’s going on here? Last time I checked, to win the Peace Prize, a person had to a) do the best work to encourage fraternity between nations b) abolish or reduce standing armies and c) hold and promote peace congresses. And so, Obama won the Peace Prize because? Because he’s the commander-in-chief of three wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and two other lower-scale ones in Africa and the Philippines? Because he’s given plenty of lofty speeches full of equally lofty promises? Because he’s apologized for America around the world? Because it is his fervent hope that peace will be achieved one day? Oh right! How could I have overlooked that?

But now there’s talk that he was awarded the prize not because of his actual accomplishments or achievements but rather to spur on and motivate his determination for peace. So now we’re awarding prizes to individuals who might do something in the future? Roiiight then…like my title says, good intentions are not enough. If it were, I could write a whole list of people who would be eligible for the prize (myself included). Everyone hopes for peace, everyone has good intentions, but the mere intention does not merit an award. All words and no action is undeserving of an award of such calibre (well, I guess that calibre is questionable now…)

And if this is a means by which to encourage him and motivate him, does the Nobel Committee actually think that it’s helping his cause? If anything, it’s hurt him…there’s backlash everywhere. And a lot of that backlash is and will be toward him, not to the people who awarded it to him. If anything, it merely highlights and reminds everyone just how little he’s done during his time as president.

But hey, I gotta give props where props are due! Obama has once again shown the world that you can do anything if you have the ‘audacity of hope’! Heck, he didn’t even hope to win the prize, and he still got it!…so for all us aspiring Nobel Peace Prize winners, can we do it? Yes We Can!