On Monday morning,
since I’d gone to bed so early I woke up at around 3:30. I tried to stay in bed
but when it became uncomfortable I got up at 3:45. I worked on my essay for
fifteen minutes and felt tired again and so I went back to bed at 4:00. I still
couldn't sleep and so I got up at 4:15. I worked for another fifteen minutes
but then went to bed again and this time slept until the alarm went off at
5:00.
After yoga I went into the final
stretch of my refection paper. I was pretty sure from the start that I wasn't
going to be able to make it to my Indigenous Studies lecture at 13:00. At
around noon I started doing the citations for a twelve-page essay that only
needed to be three pages long. I had time for few edits and I wasn't really
satisfied with the final product but I really had to wrap it up since I had to
hand it in at the end of tutorial and I was scheduled to be the first one up
for our media presentations.
I made a copy of the essay to use
for the presentation and began chopping it down to its basic points. I only had
time to reduce it to eight pages and the rest I would have to edit on the fly
during my presentation. I printed both versions and got ready to go.
It was raining, as it seems to every
time I have an essay deadline. I thought for sure I was going to be a few
minutes late for tutorial but it only took me twenty minutes to get there and
there was only one student ahead of me who obviously hadn't gone to lecture
either.
Even though I was scheduled to
present first the young woman ahead of me had asked Safia to let her go ahead
and so I went second. Safia had a screen set up connected to her laptop so
people could use it for their own media. I just brought a flash drive with two
photographs. One was of the hereditary chiefs of Wet'suwet'en and the other was
of the young Elizabeth Windsor just a few years before she became the
hereditary chief of Canada.
The title of my presentation was
“Heredity Versus Democracy in the Chiefdom of Wet'suwet'en”. My reading was a
bit clumsy because I hadn't had a chance to practice. I left out my main
conclusion and ended with an earlier part that also worked well as a conclusion
because we were only supposed to take five minutes, although no one was
watching the clock. Safia said, “Good stuff!” when I was done but I don't know
if she was just being polite.
The student who presented fifth is
someone I've seen in every class since September but had never noticed what an
amazingly gorgeous ass she has. She also presented on Wet'suwet'en comparing
right of centre mainstream media with an Indigenous news source called Real
People's Media. She said something about genocide that threw me off. I assume she meant cultural genocide but the
only accusations of genocide in this case have come in response to the
bulldozing of the Kweese War Trail. But genocide, whether cultural or
otherwise, by definition needs to be deliberate. As soon as the bulldozing
crews saw arrowheads they shut down the machines and called the government.
Work stopped in that area while an archaeological assessment could be done. The
archaeologists that took the artefacts have promised to give them back. It’s
not even close to the same thing as deliberately suppressing language and
making traditional ceremonies against the law.
Our next tutorial will be taken up
with the remaining presentations but I’m guessing even at least some of the
tutorial after that might also be occupied.
On my way home I stopped at Freshco
where I bought three large bags of black grapes, a bag of barbecue flavour
sunflower seeds, two cartons of coconut milk, a bottle of olive oil and a can
of dark roast coffee.
I had a late lunch of potato chips
and salsa along with some soymilk for dessert.
I was feeling very tired but I
forced myself to stay awake because it was too late in the afternoon.
I worked on getting caught up on my
journal, which had fallen behind while I worked on my essay.
I had two potatoes and gravy for
dinner. I watched the 2013 Doctor Who short “The Night of the Doctor” starring
the Eighth Doctor played by Paul McGann and ending with the transition into the
Ninth Doctor played by John Hurt. It takes place during the time war between
the Time Lords and the Daleks. The Doctor is killed in a spaceship crash but
brought temporarily back to life by witches that offer him a potion that would
allow him to regenerate into any type of being he chooses. In order to end the
war he chooses to become a warrior. The story doesn’t really fit snugly into
the Doctor’s continuity. I liked Paul McGann as the Doctor but I’ll always
remember him most fondly for his part along with Richard E Grant in one of my
favourite films, Withnail and I. I think they were one of the best pairings of
characters in cinematic history. Better than “Thelma and Louise” and better
than Joe Buck and Ratso in “Midnight Cowboy”.
I also watched the documentary on
the making of the film “Dancer in the Dark”. Instead of having precisely
choreographed scenes in set places with cameramen shooting them, hundreds of
video cameras were taped all over the place allowing the characters to
improvise their movements and lines.
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