politics

Ya. Seriously.

It's now 10:00pm on a Saturday night, and after enjoying the first truly sunny day of 2011 outside, in my favorite locale, 'The Junction/High Park'. I just spent the last few hours poking around my various bank accounts and freaking out. Optimistic people call what I was doing, "financial planning".

This is the kitchen. The bulldog does not belong to me. Yes, I forgot to photograph the front of the house. I'll get to that.

That got me to remembering that there have been requests for pictures, and also a lot of "WTF?! Why?" questions. So this post should answer both the public's need to know the square footage of the debt I will be plowing money into for the next 30 years, and the reason I decided to yoke myself to the beautiful city of Toronto and it's divisive property tax rate.

One side of the living dining room. I am not a good photographer. You don't have to tell me.

First a hilarious little story:

Today I went for drinks at Axis, up the street from my apartment. My friend and I were sitting on the patio and struck up a conversation with the couple next to us. Turns out the lady owned a house not far from my new place, so I told her I had just purchased nearby. She asked where and I began describing the main intersection.

After a minute her boyfriend cuts in and says you didn't just buy 42 P..? (I am not listing my address for obvious internet safety reasons, and also because I don't yet own the property.) I replied: "Oh my god yes. Why? What's wrong with it? Is it bed bugged? Oh shit, tell me, tell me please..!" Because owning property makes you crazy like that. He replied: "No, no nothing like that." Then he whispered, "I used to date the woman who owns the house."

That's right. I had the pleasure of meeting a random stranger who has performed coitus in my new house.

Those are some heavy categories I just picked.

Which is funny because I really want to lie down and watch Anchorman right now, but instead I am about to embark on the fastest post in the world about ethics, politics, spirituality, psychology etc...

Oh well, carpe the next 20 minutes right?

So a colleague at work shared this video with me, and I think it's pretty fabulous.

I had to borrow my room-mates coffee this morning and I gotta say his 'fair trade', 'organic', 'fancy-packaged' stuff is much better then my vacuum packed old-man playing chess outside espresso.

Uh, you know which serves as a kind of introduction to the following links. Since it can be demonstrated that my room-mate is kinna a 'hipster' (though more like a hippie-ster? He plays bike polo and likes charcuteries, and believes in local agriculture and has designer dirty jeans instead of just plain dirty jeans). And I am a cheap Jew, who likes to pay less then 4 dollars for espresso.

But both of us, even if we try to deny it, are somewhere in the universe of hipster, not skinny-jean wearing but certainly downtown-living irony embracing, Flight of the Conchord watching etc...

Which is why this article on Hipster Racism hurts. I have noticed in myself a lot of the tropes that the author suggests are a mask for racism. As in "I am so funny, and so *aware* that I cannot possibly be a racist as I make this hilarious racist joke."

Doug Saunders spends a little too much time dwelling on the North in this interesting op ed piece that explores what parts of the Canadian identity myth are due for a re-evaluation. Otherwise it's a fascinating read.

The fact that I am uninterested in the north brings my vision of Canada a bit more in alignment with the historial reality. Apparently the myth that Canada is a country pre-occupied by 'northernity'? is only true insofar as we have a lot of land up there. Development-wise the whole landmass could sink into the ocean north of North Bay and not that many people would truly be the wiser. ;) I'd notice one of my besties live in Whitehorse, but compared to the amount of growth and effort that goes into supporting our version of the sunbelt. It's almost as if the North is only needed as a source of myth.

Also interesting is that fact that as a third generation (on one side) Canadian, who's ancestors arrived from Eastern Europe, my family did more to develop the nascent idea of a Canadian identity during the depression and into the 50's then the multi-culti Trudeau generation.