newspaper nonsense

My morning ritual is not to be messed with. Beans are ground. The coffee goes on. Into the shower and make uped and blown dry and dressed preferrably before I sit down for my first meal of the day. I like my coffee strong, unadultered. I prefer quiet, but don't mind the radio from my alarm. It repeatedly tells me the time and the weather, keeping me on track both satorically and time wise. I go get my newspaper, and sit down and enjoy that time, getting ready for the day- some calm before the storm.

This morning, pursuing my usual peruse of the newspaper, an opinion article caught my eye and made me mad. 'Fictional drivel'. My response to this appropriately titled article could only be remedied in writing, so I got to work, and got to work:

Letter to the Editor

Re: Fictional drivel- Barbara Kay, Opinions, Wednesday February 25, 2009

Ms. Kay's opinion that Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is "merely a tale told by a feminist" takes an important and well-written piece of Canadian literature and reduces it to "signify nothing" in her one-sided interpretation of the oeuvre. Kay posits that dystopian fiction only deserves critical respect when its premises are grounded in psychological or historical reality. But Kay seems to miss the point that Atwood's tale is fictional and therefore should not need to be grounded in any reality, and must not parallel any guidelines that Kay's perspective demands.

Kay takes her own interpretation of the work as an ideologically, self indulgent nightmare and magnifies it, using examples of the Nazis and Lebensborn to give her perspective credence. Fair enough. Everyone has their own interpretation of the work, and that's the point: To incite discussion and to create a forum for competing perspectives. But publishing such a one-sided un-balanced perspective on the work seems more than irresponsible, rendering Kay's column an overblown piece of propaganda designed to influence the reading of this work and its use in public schools. The Handmaid's tale is a text that may or may not have a feminist angle, depending on your reading of it. Atwood's work deserves more from the Post than the hysterical fear mongering that Kay's article incites.

Pleased and intellectually satiated, I continued my day.

Three things I'm grateful for since the last time I did three things I'm grateful for:
1. Major restraint shown on my shopping excursion/walk around the mall with 3 inch heels excercise last week.
2. Confirmation that we're going to Saskatchewan to write an article for a magazine!
3. A good workout/crying on the tredmill/getting frustrations out at the gym with my Dad on monday.

ignorance intolerance

I have a low tolerance for stupidity. I understand it can be construed as difficult to muddle through our modern world, but I have a feeling that it's the modern world that's producing and environment where it's easy to be ignorant. Information doesn't have to be learned, it can be found. With one key word in google, we have information on pet psychatrists at our fingertips. We don't have to learn where things are, we can just gps them or google map them. So if information is so easy to get at, why the prevalence of stupidity? I think it's exactly that. Information is so easy to get, we don't have to retain it, we have the security of knowing we can find whatever we want whenever we want. More and more common sense is becoming a scarce commodity because we don't need it- we just need google.

Why the rant regarding my ignorance intolerance? I've been victim to it several times today and it's still early. The starbucks girl- a long winded debacle that I will confine to my complaint letter. The email from some employee assuming I am the contact for parking concerns because I am listed as the webauthor for the whole hospital website. And to those, who, because email seems so much more modern than a letter, have lost all sense of any type of polite, business-like letter which is clear and concise but contains all of the information needed to reply or act with efficiency.

Our modern tools have most certainly contributed to the downfall of common sense and the diminshed valuation of the traditional learned individual. Back in the day, men and women were trained with a broad but deep knowledge of all subjects and even languages. They didn't have modern conveniences to enable a lazy passivity in honing their common sense and only viewing knowlege for it's usefulness rather than its intellecutal stimulus. Woe to the modern man, who most often loses a sense of poetry in a world filled with need-to-know.

To cap it off on a positive note, here are three things I'm grateful for since my last post:
1. Went to one of my favorite cocktail bars for a girlfriends birthday, and the third member of our childhood trio was there! It was great catching up with an old friend, and the three of us have plans for this weekend.
2. I finally vaccumed my house. Yay for no more super sized dust bunnies!
3. Today is Thursday, and I have a date......as to wheather I'm looking forward to it or not is still in the ambiguous stage.