Self Portrait

Me in Berczy Park in front of half of "Jacob's Ladder": photo by A. Bates.

"Never felt more alive" is what people say at pivotal points.  It's how we find expression for the tremendous thing that has just happened to us. Women who have just squeezed another human from out of their bodies might say this. 

Of course, you don't have to have a baby or climb Everest or win at Wimbledon to be exquisitely aware of the astonishing notion that in the vast empty mass of the infinite universe you have consciousness, agency and senses. 

Feeling more alive than ever can come many ways, for example:

I was at a meeting officially hosted by something we call our internal audit team. It was supposed to be a workshop, but the questions shared just an hour before by the internal audit team were terrible. I knew they were terrible; my team knew they were terrible; the people there from a third party agency knew they were terrible. 

The internal audit people did not know they were terrible. 

It was too late to reschedule. There was no time to revise the questions. I had to save the meeting. Apologizing for my own inexperience in these matters (a very Canadian way to start an open assault), I said I thought the workshop questions were off the mark as drafted; could we use the time we had to collectively develop a better set. Everyone, including the supple internal audit crew, said "yes." 

Then we had, as they say in the business, "a good discussion." And I saved eleven people from wasting two hours (for a total of 22 person hours) on a poorly conceived and worse executed piece of crap of a workshop.

I never felt more alive.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Stay Woke

About 100 people are sitting, six to a table, in a cavernous room. They are participating in a workshop. A man and a woman stand at the front of the room. They are the facilitators.

The workshop is about privilege and power. The crowd is made up entirely of public servants, so the topic is something they know a bit about. This does not keep the facilitators from treating the crowd like they don't know anything.

A black, middle-aged woman in the audience raises her hand to ask a question about the definition of privilege projected on two large screens at the front of the room. The definition says privilege is "unearned and unasked for." She says, "I'm an assistant deputy minister and I am aware my privilege - but I worked to get where I am."

One of the facilitators assures the woman that she should not conflate "privilege" with "status." 

I wonder why not.

I also wonder what the point of the workshop is. Painfully earnest seminars on understanding ones privilege seem a bit out of step with the rest of the world, where privilege is staging its most recent comeback.

These days, the mentally ill are back to being crazy and twenty-six-year olds are appointed to plum positions they are not qualified to hold. After an anomalous period when women were in charge of some of Canada's provinces, the reins of power have been returned to the hands of their rightful owners.

I attended the workshop because I have lots of room in my calendar. - I also thought I might learn something, which I did: a new word, cisgender.

I'd heard the term before. It struck me as one of those words that doesn't connote its own meaning (like quotidian, for example) -- but was too lazy to look it up. Now I don't have to.

A couple of days after the workshop, I got an e-mail from the facilitators inviting me to another workshop, this time on anti-racism. I'm still mulling it over whether I'll go or not.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen


















  

Popular Politics

Detail from a painting by Dana Bhatti, a painter prominent in the 19th Century court of Maharaja Man Singh, part of the Treasures of a Desert Kingdom show at the Royal Ontario Museum 

I made an uncharacteristically substantial commitment to popular culture this past week. For example, I've hand-peeked my way through two seasons of Stranger Things (more about which later) and, because there was nothing else to watch and I could get the tickets for free, Bruce and I went to Late Night with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling.

Late Night's positive reviews helped me overcome my usual misgivings about going to see situation comedy movies. But, having seen the movie, I can say my misgivings were right. Emma Thompson will always be great, but the movie was not. Finding it hard to put my dissatisfaction into words, I took another look at the less positive reviews of Late Night and found one that summed up my feelings about the movie. This is by Louisa Moore writing for Screen Zealots:

...“Late Night,” [is] a disappointing, tepid film... It’s great that Amazon Studios took a chance on a comedy that conveys a minority woman’s point of view in a male-dominated world, but... the scene where Molly is hired on the spot by an older, white male simply because she’s brown-skinned, happens to be in his office, and can fill a diversity quota, is offensive.

The film wants desperately to be more relevant, witty, and meaningful than it actually is....The supposed insights are inauthentic and forced, and the characters are either under-written or outrageous caricatures..... Kaling and Thompson are well cast, but they have little chemistry. Everything about their relationship is off-putting at best and disingenuous at worst.

I went back to the positive reviews, too, and found in them an inclination to praise the film because of the strong female presence in its writing, direction and performances. 

Women are making inroads in the lucrative and culturally influential realm of popular movies. That's amazing. And they will well and truly have arrived when they are called out for their poor efforts as much as praised for their great ones.

Hurry Up and Wait

The Ontario legislature has been recessed until after the federal election.  The reason for this extended vacation has to do with the fact that the government worked through most of last summer. But, the timing is awkward, so assertions abound about how the Ontario conservatives want to free up their schedule to help Andrew Scheer win the federal election in the fall. Either that or stay out of the papers so as to not screw up Scheer's chances for a win, though I doubt the Toronto Star will support them in that plan.

Whatever the reason, there's not a lot going on at Queen's Park right now. Everyone who had been scrambling now has the mixed blessing of more time to actually think about what they are doing. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Earthquake

From the Brian Jungen show at the AGO.
If you haven't been, you gotta go. It's brilliant.

Five weeks after I swore off sleep deprived Fridays, I'm back at another writing class. But this one's on Wednesday nights, so now Thursday will be the day I struggle to stay awake during mid-afternoon meetings (more than I do already). 

The format for this class is completely different from the other. We don't get homework assignments. We (there are 10 of us) get a "prompt" - such as "tell a story where the character hears a deafening noise" - and then we write for fifteen or twenty minutes. When we're done writing, we read, if we want to, what we have written. 

The rules are that those listening can remark on what stood out for them in what was read ... and that's it. No suggestions. No critiques ... which is humane given that the writing is just off the tops of our heads.

I attended the first class this past Wednesday. During the class there were three prompts. So the combined creative effort after two and a half hours was thirty hastily composed pieces, including one poem and a short essay on society and culture. 

The variety is remarkable - for example, the "deafening noise" prompt inspired stories about a lightning strike, an alien invasion, a plane crash, a bear attack, a shattered door, a rock concert and four more I can't remember, but they were all entirely different. Humans are amazing.

Heartbreak

A colleague at work spent Friday afternoon on the Internet, watching the path of a private jet flying from Los Angeles to Toronto. Rumour had it that the plane held the family of Kawhi Leonard, the Raptors MVP. They were coming to Toronto so they could be there when Kawhi announced he was going to sign with the Raptors. My colleague was spellbound by the prospect.

Sadly, the rumours weren't true.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

"Vienna": made from lawn chairs.

Don't Trust Anyone Over 70*

We're not 70 yet, but most of the way there: in Whistler last summer.

I watched some coverage of the Democratic debates this week. That Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris emerged as the clear leaders gives me hope. As for the one actually leading the polls, Joe Biden, nothing I heard changed my first reaction when he declared his candidacy: "Really? Is another old white guy the best we can do?" 

Thinking of Biden made the title of today's post pop into my head. I wondered if the phrase had any currency, so I googled it. Only one solid match came up: the title of an 2013 Foreign Policy article by Gautam Mukunda, written when Trump in the White House was just a joke on The Simpsons.

Here are a few passages: 

Power itself has profound, and usually toxic, effects on those who have it. CEOs are so pampered that comparing them to babies is surprisingly illuminating. What is true for a CEO is, in this case, even more true for the men and women who lead nations and can literally have power over life and death... 

... Even worse, power tends to make those who have it more sociopathic. They become more impulsive, more Machiavellian, and more willing to dehumanize those who lack power....  

... aging can have pronounced effects on personality. Put simply, in general people really don’t mellow with age. Instead... they tend to become exaggerated versions — almost caricatures — of themselves, with their normal tendencies and patterns becoming intensified. This tendency is particularly likely to affect foreign policy. ...

Of course, 'way back in the lost innocence of 2013, I could read stuff like this and think this kind of insight might prevail. 

Maybe it still can. Go Harris. Go Warren.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Canada Day!

Karen

Pat and Cliff: Whistler last summer.

*Excepting, of course, any readers of this blog who are over 70. I trust you guys with my life.

Wreck-It Doug

The march of the fifty-story towers: each new one taller than the last.
The view from the Allan Gardens of the corner of Jarvis and Dundas.

Luck put me in the immediate vicinity of the massive Raptor celebration in Toronto on June 17. I was at something called the Electricity Summit at the Sheraton hotel on Queen Street, right across the street from Nathan Phillips Square. I had to quit the conference early to get back to the office and wondered exactly how I was going to do that.

When I got to Queen and Bay at 8:30 that morning, the crowd was already huge. I could barely get into the hotel. While speakers droned on at the conference about the grid of the future, I watched a live feed of the crowds on my phone like I was checking the weather for updates on a monster storm. The party was supposed to be over by 2:30, when I had to leave, but the NBA champs weren't going to get to Nathan Phillips Square until well past then.  

I gave myself an extra half hour and left at 2:00. I took underground paths leading from the hotel to Queen and Yonge and was forced above ground when I couldn't get past the guards at the Queen subway station. On the surface, on Yonge Street, a full block away from the main madness, there were so many people, I thought I might just have to stay there for the rest of my life.

Fixed as my attention was on getting past the mass of humanity and back to work (which I did finally manage to do), I missed the reports of the shooting and the tales of how the Premier was booed.

It was hard to miss, however, what came mere days later - Doug's Big Shuffle, where half of the provincial cabinet got a new job. 

Loyal supporters in the press accept the Premier's assertion that the problem is he hasn't been getting his message out, and he's moving fresh talent into key files at a critical juncture. Those less loyal, or even those just paying attention, aren't buying that. The unprecedented, panicky move by the Premier is just further proof that Ford has no idea what he is doing.

But then, why would he? He's a former drug dealer who ran a sticker factory. He has managed to fool himself into believing that because he ran a business he knows how to run everything. 

Clearly that ain't the case.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Pride!

Karen

Disinfotainment

I'm six months away from the end of my tenure as a public servant. In the meantime, Bruce and I think up bad business ideas, so that we may have something to do as the grave creeps up behind us.

One idea is "Misleading Toronto Walking Tours," to cash in on the trade of squiring around credulous out-of-towners for twenty bucks a head. We would perform as a squabbling married couple, one telling incorrect stories about Toronto landmarks (the CN tower has a ray gun to ward off meteors) and the other interrupting but still getting it wrong (no, Scotia Place has the ray gun. The CN Tower was built on a plague pit; ghosts ride the elevator). The tour would end only after the last despairing tourist had wandered away, feeling equal measures of exasperation and disgust. 

Put Me In Coach

On the same day that the Raptors became NBA champions, the team I coached through the Leadership Development Program held their graduation ceremony. I've written about these folks before. I helped them with their "Action Learning Plan" - the term applied to an impossible task to be completed by an under-resourced and mismatched team.

None of them know of my impending departure, but they were sweetly appreciative of my small efforts on their behalf. One asked if I would coach another LDP group. I looked him in the eye, smiled and said I had already signed up. Technically I wasn't lying. I have not taken my name off the list. 

Left to right: Mehul, Mark, Corey, Mike, Sandra, me.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Proud accountants, Bloor Street East