I wrote a really lame Haiku and it was on the fridge and so when I took a photo of it I included my Congratulations You’re an Asshole card.  When I was in the United States Aughra gave one of these to Jenn and I and although we wanted to hand out the cards who really wants to give up a card this cool?  As IF I’m not an asshole deserving of this card at times anyway.

If only I had a double sided photo copier I’d be the most loved bandit in the West End saving our neighborhood from gay bashing fuckers. [must read posts on this local travesty Miss604 & Raul]  I think I’d put my first card on West End BIA Executive Director Lynn Hellyar’s car checking the other box and demand she stop blaming Surrey for the appalling assault that took place the other day in the West End.  Aside from the inexcusable act itself, even if the attackers were from Surrey WHO CARES, it is NOT the root of the problem so stop being an ignorant asshole and take responsibility for the issues we face in the West End WITH OR WITHOUT SURREY! If memory serves the last brutal attack against a homosexual citizen took place in Stanly Park.  If anyone knows where that attacker was from please feel free to leave it in the comments to help prove IT DOESN’T MATTER.

This will likely be an unpopular statement but the ignorant dialogue surrounding this most recent attack is reminiscent to me of constantly hearing for lack of better example American news media personalities blaming Canada and Mexico for drug and terrorist related problems.  I am so sorry but how about the government spend some of that money going to the war on border control before you just automatically spout off some ridiculous excuse as to how Canada and or Mexico has gotten America into various fixes.  Most recently the Heroin epidemic plaguing a large majority of U.S. rural areas is NOT Mexico’s fault.  Please, I just want to barf all over the TV when I hear these excuses.

On that note, because I was asked what the back options were, here is my Asshole card.

*click on photos to enlarge*

I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini last Friday and then I read Douglas Coupland’s, Eleanor Rigby and now I have started The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger but when I really think about it this is not a lot of reading I have only completed eleven books so far this year and I blame this low number on Guitar Hero which will get its own post for all you gamers out there, I think what five maybe ten gamers read my blog and you don’t even all comment, correct me if I am wrong, but that is ok because I KNOW you wanna know how good I am at Guitar Hero I KNOW. But this post is about books.

I had been looking forward to reading A Thousand Splendid Suns being that Khaled Hosseini’s first book The Kite Runner was a superb read. I literally flew through it and I have never been a particularly fast reader. A Thousand Splendid Suns took me longer to read for various reasons but was so good I relayed almost the entire book to Adam as I went. I love that The Kite Runner set in Afghanistan and America is centered around men mainly father and son relationships but then A Thousand Splendid Suns is the complete opposite and concentrates on the woman of Afghanistan. The book made me cry, which almost never happens, I can’t even remember the last book that did so. Even though you get a happy ending when you read Hosseini’s books it doesn’t come without some pretty extreme sacrifices, and I get seriously tired of fictional happy endings. A Thousand Splendid Suns takes you right from the Soviet invasion in 1979 straight up to a few years shy of present day. Reading fictional books set in war torn countries are sometimes not very far off the actual, from what I gather, to be the realities that the persons in these novels face. I think because I read both non fiction and fiction war novels I can safely say it is much easier to separate from the horrors of the fictional novels than it is from the non fiction, although the violence, the lost innocence, the torture, the deaths and the setting are all but the same. I love the way this man weaves his heart-wrenching tales with characters who stay with you long after their stories have been told.

Eleanor Rigby was better than I thought it would be but not one of Coupland’s strongest efforts by a long shot. I found that I was able to bond with the main character over her struggles with loneliness but not on the same level just the word, loneliness. She is essentially a middle aged single woman who thinks that she leads and has lead an extraordinarily boring life and her family would agree until one day something astonishing happens and you guessed it she discovers she and her life are not so boring after all. The book contains many good one liners that had me laughing out loud and I regret not marking the pages. This is one of Coupland’s many books set in Vancouver, he is not the only local author whose books I have read but he is in my opinion likely the best in making me feel like I am really in Vancouver. Although in the book Stanley Park, Timothy Taylor gives an absolutely uncanny depiction of Vancouver’s West End [where I live] and of the our Province’s largely known Stanley Park.

The Time Traveler’s Wife was supposed to be a family book club pick but that meeting got canceled although we are having a meeting at Christmas! Adam started reading it and couldn’t stop laughing and because the first rule of family book club is NO TALKING ABOUT THE BOOK UNTIL THE MEETING I viewed this laugher as obvious and vulgar RULE BREAKAGE. When the meeting was canceled Adam practically rejoiced and the book has been collecting dust on the shelf ever since. The thing is, the bloody book is EVERY WHERE right now I have had A LOT of people telling me to read it and *basically* everyone I know who has read it EXCEPT for Adam has loved it. So out of pure curiosity I am reading it now. I would have read it eventually but I am reading it much sooner than expected but I need to know what all this bloody fuss is about and if it sucks I can’t wait to smash the crap out of it via review.

A while back a fellow blogger did a post that mentioned the episode of Oprah where she discussed open marriages NOT the Mormon religion or polygamy and how it is depicted on HBO’s Big Love [that I am aware of because I didn’t watch it] but ‘open marriage’ was a topic.

I myself am not down with open marriages I think most fail over time and if you or your spouse want to be fucking each other and other people I’d venture a guess there is something deeper happening there and that something pretty big is missing from the relationship but I’m not a shrink just observant and I don’t know I guess I just think ahead.

But my problem is not with ‘open marriages’ to each their own I don’t really care. My problem is I read the comments on this post and someone who can choose to identify themselves in the comments or ask to be linked back to or what have you basically set my blood on fire by writing:

“The true commitment in life is having children with another person.
The marriage is/can be an important precursor, but it is definately not bound by forever the way having children is”.

[I’ve intentionally left the spelling error and want to say here NOTHING has EVER pissed me off this bad in my almost three years of blogging that I now feel the need to do a whole post on it]

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? Why don’t you just say I’m not a fucking woman while you are at it because I have NEVER wanted kids and my husband doesn’t want children either? In fact I can’t stand most children and if you pay ANY attention to the census taken in this country you’ll know that THANKS to people like me our population is starting to settle out. I would MUCH rather have a form of population control in the country I live in based on EDUCATED decisions by people to or not to have babies, not assholes who can’t even afford them or some stupid slut who gets knocked up because she thinks it’ll be fun to have a baby but is seriously unfit to even have a child. I’m thankful I live in a country where there is a CHOICE, not in a third world or over populated country where war, AIDS and genocide which can result from war, or having to murder baby girls that are maybe not openly admitted to but ARE forms of population control. That comment is also more than disrespectful to women who can not have children, one of those being a very close friend of mine.

Our marriage is a ‘precursor’ to our life together a life that will include a shit load of SUPER cool adventures that people with kids just can’t go on or do without pissing their kids off they have to wait until their kids have moved out of the house and then *a lot* of marriages fall apart finding out you have nothing in common anymore anyway so you get divorced. Funny how that works.

I am SO sick of the comments the looks the EVERYTHING when people find out you’re married and not having kids. Whatever we get to sleep. I pity people who make ignorant comments like that to my face.

I started reading books of a more macabre nature when I was pretty young. Christopher Pike wasn’t cutting it and I found myself, aside from Carrie, not a Stephen King fan and even less of a Clive Barker, Dean Koontz fan so I turned to true crime, mostly serial killers and non fiction war novels.

All of the war novels I have read have been from the perspective of either the journalists risking their lives to be there, the experiences of UN, UNICEF, Red Cross [etc.] representatives or are straight up first person victim survival stories and I have one pretty interesting book written by an Anonymous spy for the Americans on the War on Terror.

So often in choosing to read literature of this nature it becomes too much, too real, too scary. During the years that I lived alone I stopped reading true crime. I remember thinking when I started reading various novels on Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka that it was too much because I’m from Ontario and relatives lived in the areas where they took their victims from and it was Canada and just too close to home, although that never stopped me from reading the books but Robert Pickton has pretty much blown every serial killer in decades off the map and he resides in a prison on the outskirts of the city I live in, he has pretty much taken the too close to home crown, I don’t know if I will read any books written on him and if I do whether I’ll admit it or not.

When I find myself affected while reading these novels, I will often lower the book between my legs and throw my head back, utter various oh gods and oh shits under my breath, groan and sigh heavily, shift uncomfortably in my seat, there are many tells aside from the obvious tears that some books, mostly the war ones, evoke in me.

I recently finished reading Ishmael Beah’s, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Solider. To say it was anything less than horrifying would be an understatement. Written in the first person by the now twenty-six year old author, he tells his toe curling story starting from the age of twelve when he first flees attacking rebels in Sierra Leone and is left wandering the country until at thirteen he’s picked up by the government army where he becomes a trained killer and remains one until rescued by UNICEF at sixteen. The rehabilitation that he faced and how he learns to heal and forgive himself follows.

It was impossible not to be taken in by this kid’s story, it was completely different from anything in relation to any war novel I had ever read before. I have read more than a few books on different countries in Africa and did not think that what has come across those pages could get much worse. But to read straight from the mind of a child killer in great detail what he did to his victims at the time with no remorse so hopped up on drugs and brain washed he had no idea what he was even doing or capable of was intense.

I brought the book up in session with Dr. B yesterday we discussed how it does put a lot into perspective I think back to what I was doing between 1993 and 1996 - graduating from high school and moving to Vancouver. At that time I didn’t think about Africa at all. Now I fill my head with literature on the continent but sit back and do pretty much nothing, the odd donation here and there, quite pathetic really. If only the amount of time I spent thinking of Africa meant anything. I have another book written by a journalist on Sierra Leone set in the capital of Freetown to be exact, I’ve had the book for years and never read it and now am literally dying to, it takes place in and around the same time period that Ishmael finds himself living in Freetown before the war forces him to flee to the United States.

I read so many non fiction novels that I plan books around them because the writing styles of non fiction are so much more obvious to me on a level of how fast I can read through them that I generally throw in at least two fiction novels for every one non fiction I read. At present I am right at the beginning of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns and have already let out an involuntary OH GOD NO and cried once, I have a feeling I will be through it fast, some say it is better than The Kite Runner, I guess I will soon have my very own opinion on that, right now I’d say pick up a copy of Ishmael Beah’s novel and let the kid completly steal your heart and find a place in your soul.

When I moved out to Vancouver in 1996 I was nineteen years old, naive, unaware, unaffected and completely oblivious to what was really going on in the world outside of my ignorant bubble.

I moved here with a man of Yugoslavian decent, the majority of his family resided in Belgrade, Serbia. I knew there had been a war but at the time I was too self-centred and un-educated to have realized much more.

Shortly after settling into big city life a request came from *Jeff’s mother to go visit a family that had recently escaped from Serbia and were living in the lower mainland.

Jeff had told me countless stories. Before we left Terrace he had spent a month in Belgrade. This was after Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia had signed the Dayton Peace Accord to end the war in Bosnia- but us all, as fellow beings know- well before there was any actual resolve in the regions.

We went to visit the family, two parents living in a tiny two bedroom apartment with two kids. They had almost nothing, I remember they were so happy and thankful to merely see us I had an instant anxiety attack, I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t in truth understand why we were there and what his mother expected from us. Why would these people want to visit with a nineteen and twenty year old?

I knew that it was Jeff’s grandparents that had done whatever was necessary to get this family out and although it was very painful for Jeff’s mother, his relatives had decided to stay, despite their daughters endless pleas for them to leave.

We only visited this family once. Mine and Jeff’s relationship ended, he returned to Terrace and I went on to surviving with my own version of nothing.

A few years a go I took an interest in Africa. I feel very strongly that no matter what your financial situation we should all support causes and organizations that mean something to us. The Terry Fox Foundation, The WWF and the continent of Africa are the places where I concentrate any support I can offer.

It wasn’t until I took an interest in Africa, reading about Somalia, Rwanda, learning about what was really happening over in these countries, that I realized right in front of my face a family, a man I loved at the time had been and was dealing with a massacre of their own people, members of his family had been forced to toss bodies into mass graves and I somehow had no idea just how severe the situation was.

The realizations came in a flood, he had shown me books made to document the massacres, stuff you don’t see on the news, and I held stories in the back of my head but nothing that I wanted to think about. When the cloud of ignorance cleared I felt like I had missed an amazing opportunity to have learned from this family and to have done a fuck lot more than visiting them ONCE. I know I did learn from them but I realized the lessons years too late.
—
There is a genocide taking place right now as I type these words in the African country Sudan if you don’t already know the main area is called Darfur.
I’m no preacher, I’m no expert. But this is not America’s problem, it is not Canada’s problem it is the world’s problem. After WW II, after Yugoslavia, after Rwanda how in the 21st century can we allow this to continue to happen? Over 400,000 women, children and men have already been slaughtered. This is a genocide we can stop.
Every single one of us has the power to do something no matter how big no matter how small.
This weekend ALL OVER THE WORLD there are groups getting together in support of stopping the war in Sudan.
Here is how I’m participating: End A War [this is just one of many organizations with plans for this weekeknd]

*name changed

i started reading the stand the other day by Stephen King. it is about a million pages long and may take me till 2020 to finish. i am determined to read it even though i find big books big which can induce laziness which leads to abandonment and that could then lead to guilt.
basically david told me that my new favourite can’t miss, want to know everything there is to know about show LOST is loosely based, pays homage to, has similar themes, characters and what have you to the stand. being the kick ass friend he is he dropped it off for me on the same day the conversation came up. reading borrowed books is hard for me. i am a book snob. i HAVE to own my books. i know it sounds stupid but i just have to. so if i borrow one and i like it, i then have to buy it or put it on the list for other jerks to buy me and/or buy it used if i find one on the list and it passes my inspection.

until recently one thing i have never been into is reading more than one book at a time. but while reading shake hands with the devil i branched out and read a couple of books at the same time. shake hands with the devil was heavy, not just because it chronicles the failure of the world to come to the aid of the Rwandans while they hacked each other to death, which evoked feelings of anger, disgust and helplessness while reading but because it is written with military and political lingo and i am no expert on politics in general and especially Rwandan politics. i learned a fuck load reading that book. i can’t stop talking about it. i have read a lot of books on war, the holocaust, terrorism, the UN but nothing as touching as Dallaire�s novel. maybe it�s because he isn’t a writer and parts are painfully repetitive but this man although still living gave himself to that country and you can just feel him all the way through the book. we rented the documentary of the same name that was filmed during Romeo Dallaire’s return to Rwanda for the ten year anniversary of the genocide. it was awe inspiring.

(recently Canada had this greatest Canadian contest thing and i just can not for the life of me figure out how this guy did not win, granted i don’t even know if he was nominated, but regardless i call for a re-vote)

adam said thank you to me for renting it saying he would never have seen it otherwise. which was awesome because i felt like i got to share the book with him, so he understood why while i was reading i would get mad, scoff constantly and eventually put the book down and did not touch it again until i had read another book and then returned to it.

the only other Stephen King book i have read is Carrie. i really loved it but for some reason i have just never been a horror/scary novel reader. ture crime and non fiction induced fear are more my game. it is definitely a branch out of sorts but LOST it just such a fucking kick ass show i have to read it. normally i watch tv for the escape, for the mindlessness of it i sure as hell don�t take it seriously. LOST is different it is deep but still totally far fetched and WAY out there, not in a 24 - Jack Bauer kind of way though.

anyway this book better be good. i don’t know why but i have always wanted to be one of those readers who can read more than one at a time, so with this book being just short of a million pages maybe i will try reading a couple at a time again.

I got this super cool comment on my, I so AM a Ninja post (totally unrelated) that basically deserves a post of its own.

petrow SAYS:
Very cool of you to be reading shake hands with the devil, I met mr dallaire at a conference in Winnipeg a couple years ago, the man is one of the most beautiful human beings i have ever had the chance to meet, men like him should be presidents.

This book has been sitting under my ‘currently reading’ for a while now. It is taking me a lot longer to get through than most books. The paranoia in me is totally like ‘fuck I hope my readers don’t think I am trying to be all cool leaving my hard core book in the side bar’. It’s simply a heavy read. I have always - since I was young teenager been a reader of ‘heavy’ material. I also spent the majority of my adolescence grounded for ridiculous amounts of time for doing pretty much nothing. Nothing that warranted the lengths of time I was grounded for anyway. When grounded the ONLY thing I was allowed to do was read. It could have gone the other way and I could have ended up hating books, I am so glad I just plain fell in love with them. This post is not about my love of books though it is about Shake Hands with the Devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda, written by Canadian UN Force Commander Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire.

Books on war have always been pretty close to the top of my favorites behind serial killers and true crime. One of the two reasons I was turned on to Shake Hands with the Devil was the book Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures : a true story from hell on earth. This book is also incredible; it follows three Americans with very different perspectives on UN missions throughout the 90’s to Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Liberia and also Rwanda. When I finished it I read Bergdorf Blondes. I love a good chick read in between my heavy non fiction reads.

Yes, I have seen Hotel Rwanda. Although Mr. Dallaire is not called by name in the movie I am fairly certain Nick Nolte’s character is that of Mr. Dallaire. Correct me if I am wrong. But reading it is entirely different. This man is beyond incredible. He fought so hard with NOTHING. And I mean nothing. He is an inspiration. When I am having bad weeks (like this week was) I look at this book and think how can I ever be sad about anything, I don’t know real pain, real loss.

I wasn’t going to post anything on this book until I had finished it but seeing as I got the kick ass comment I thought I’d mention it. Books will be a huge part of this blog because books are a huge part of my life. To the point where I consider myself a book snob, I rarely borrow books, will not use the library and if I can own it in it’s original, first edition hard cover release I will!!

This book is as the cover says: A book of Astonishing Power. This man makes me even more proud to be a Canadian because he stayed when the rest of the entire world turned a blind eye and today most are still seeing these horrific crimes through blinders.