i can attest that i've never chosen to come here. neither did my parents or even the few generations before that. my mother's ancestors crossed the atlantic on the same boat that carried jeanne-mance before she founded schools and hospitals and a street eventually was named after her. my irish ancestors, god knows really when they came.

there was a story this morning in the newspaper, a 16 year old girl born in ivory coast who came here at the age of 6. her father had met a quebecois woman who later married and sponsored him and his daughter. only, he was already married in ivory coast - which respected the traditional polygamous values of the land he comes from. the marriage with his quebecois wife was broken off a couple of years later and the woman reported her ex-husband saying he should not have been granted citizenship because he was married more than once at a time (polygamy is illegal in canada). now, i really don't want to argue whether or not it is fair for him to be deported on that sole basis, that is another story and i'm not entirely sure where i stand on that issue.

so, bring it back to the daughter. there was an error in handling her case and it was eventually written in her file that she had been sponsored by her father. it is wrong. since her father came on false pretenses (he had not told anyone he was already married in his home country) she should also be denied entry. she was granted citizenship years ago, has no relatives in ivory coast, goes to a private school where she's involved in choir, drama, improv. her life is here.

her father's case is still pending and she'll most likely be deported before he is.

i have not chosen to live in this country, yet i enjoy everything it has to offer and i never question the fact that i deserve all of this. i am most often cynical and critical about government policies, yet no one ever thinks of looking up my file and proposing to ship me off back to france or ireland. it would be ludicrous to do so.

what i find shocking, however, is that citizenship can be granted and revoked because of omissions and errors from people who *chose* to come here. people who made a conscious decision about wanting a better life for themselves and also about wanting to countribute to our society.

again, i can't help but think of martha nussbaum's argument about the 'luck' that allowed us all to be born here. we are simply, to some extent, luckier than others. and, if that wasn't enough, we use these trivial circumstances as a way to exert power over less fortunate peoples.

we're sitting in the locker room after chasing a basketball for an hour and a half. ju has her coat on and a little feather escapes from it as she sighs. of course, i get overly excited about catching the feather and i got into a 'hey, look here everyone, a feather!' it is of the industrial kind, the massively manufactured kind, the kind that is blown into your average coat or pillow.

y. walks over, 'let me see.' she takes it and carefully places it on the inside of her collar, neatly tucked in. she smiles and walks back to her locker. i stay there, suspended in thought, wondering how long it will take before the winter wind blows it away. i realize afterwards that i could not care less. i am charmed by the fact that she will wear on her collar anything i give her, as if it was precious jade.

it is the absurdity that makes this city a place worth living in.

st-patrick's day parade, thousands of people gather downtown to drinking, make noise and get sick in public. lots of students. lots of old white irish men. a couple of people from different cultural communities. the parade is essentially not commercial, which paves the way for the most absurd floats to appear. one said: "i had breakfast with st-paddy's", other were ads about diving schools, or high school football programs. not to forget the kiwanis, the lions and, you know, belinda stronach. oh! i had forgotten how much i disliked bag pipes.

there were also a lot of cops around, as there should be whenever public drinking is on the bill. they were mostly going around asking people "what have you got there? beer? alright, just make sure you put it in a plastic cup. enjoy!" now, i've never seen a cop actually tell someone to enjoy their beer in public. it was quite priceless!

we hung out for more than two hours and the floats kept coming, so we opted to ditch old st-pat's and head for the closest dumpling place to warm up.

this is j. - the culturally confused - celebrating st-patrick's day with her friend from mexico by eating dumpling in a manchurian restaurant. i guess that probably explains why i fit in, but mostly why i never quite do.

night out with the girls. ran into this random guy on the subway, he was asking us for directions.

j.: do you know where ste-catherine is?
random guy: no, i'm from america.

i'm not sure whether he meant to imply that we were not from america or that he was one of those who supported the current president and was therefore just plain dumb... teehee!

---

it's funny how some americans have a very narrow and exclusive conception of the americas in general. thankfully, we don't run into many of those.

interesting discussion with s. this morning. one topic in particular came up that requires further thinking, but i'm still putting it out there. it's not like it's anything either one of us has invented, but i'm sure it can generate a lively debate.

so, open to discussion:

how much do you think a person's (or a people's) language shape their way of thinking?

for instance, in japanese and mandarin there are two different words used to signify love:

恋 (pronounced lian)
爱 (pronounced ai)

now the translations differ a little bit, as far as i understand, in these two languages, but what remains essentially is that one refers to a romantic (or passionate) attachment. whereas the other one refers to, you know, after the honeymoon phase where the relationship becomes more of an everyday thing. not necessarly less passionate, just maybe more commonplace. falling in love as opposed to staying in love, maybe?

now, french does not exactly have two words that convey similar meanings which leaves me to wonder whether that affects the way we love. whether when we're done falling, we're also done loving. and if so, what makes the fall worthwhile?

on the same level, the expression 'i miss you' does not existe in mandarin or japanese. in mandarin, you'd most likely say something like 'i'm thinking about you' which, if you ask me, you could say to a lot of people that you don't necessarily miss.

so, well, it seems like need to think about this further.

oh ivan, darling, if i did not know you, i think i'd have to invent you.

we went for dinner last saturday, i have only seen the guy 3 times since we came back from our trip together. last year, we would see each other 3 times a week at the least, which was fine by me because we truly get along. anyhow, i think i overdosed a bit after our 24/7 stretch this summer and it was a bit hard for me to do things with him afterwards. so we had our beijing duck and spoke our little invented language, a mix of french-english-mandarin. that's what happens when two geeks spend a bit too much time together.

we're about to leave the restaurant and the waitress brings us fortune cookies. of course, they give the cookies to foreigners and the chinese get oranges to balance their Qi. they understand foreigners enough to know that we want something sweet after our meal. we break open our cookies and read the messages. mine says i'll have a wonderful life, which is both a great and insipid wish.

ivan opens his and says: soon a great friendship will evolve into true love. he looks at me and i look away.

this morning in my email box, i get a strange email from a random company that informs me that a 'secret admirer' is sending me a virtual kiss... or some shit like that. i think of ivan and his fortune cookie.

later, i get an email from him where he apologizes for sending me such silliness. he was tricked, he said, into beliving this thing would work.

i am amused by his clumsiness. it is almost charming.

---

open for debate:

do you think technology facilitates or impedes in our ability to develop open communications with other people?

it seems like merely days ago i was marveling at the first layer of powdery whiteness covering my front steps. three months and two lost tuques later, i'm looking out the window at what may well be our last encounter with snow for a great couple of months... and our city will go back to looking dirty again.

---

someone threw a half-eaten poutine dish in a snow bank earlier in the winter. i remember seeing it, like an impromptu meal discarded for pinguins, otters or polar bears, precariously balanced atop a small iceberg. "brilliant! i thought, i have to take a picture." a new layer of snow quickly covered it and i forgot all about it, until last week when the last little icebergs quickly collapsed into puddles and the thawed poutine was still there for everyone to see.

the scary part: it still looked just about the same as when you order a freshly made poutine.

---

the apartment buildings on my street look like little gingerbread houses with icing on top.

gosh, i've been taking this flu medication that makes me, umm, giddy. one of the workers i met told me that he was taking these same cough drops before and that he had an incredible amount of fun at a poker party without having to drink alcohol. at 3$ a box, it's a pretty awesome deal.

i, on the otherhand, have been trying to get my colleagues (and my boss) to repeat the words: "chiffons j givenchi" three times in a row. thankfully, they are quite amused by the situation.

hmm... gotta go back and me our new computer tech. need time to change back into my "super geek" costume. wonder what i will make him say.

the road to lesbian drama is apparently long, treacherous and unforgiving.

oh oh! this is too much.

just found a guitar tab site for chinese music. i'm this |-----| much closer to becoming a chinese pop star. oh yeah baby.

i will still remember you when i am famous :)

i saw these statistics about the percentage of protected land in different countries and provinces on the electronic billboard at the berri-uqam station. granted, this is probably not the most valid source of information, but there is probably a good part of truth to it.

anyways, basically quite a few european countries count more than 20% of their territory as protected land, gosh even the gold 'ole us of a has a little over 10%, canada on it's hole was somewhere around 8% (i'm not too sure about this one)... quebec, well quebec is in a whole different league with a mere 3,5%.

as gilles vigneault would say mon pays ce n'est pas un pays.

i was talking to this man at work who used to live up in chicoutimi and then moved to chibougamau. he was working in aeronatics and thus frequently flew over the northern lands of quebec. what we urbanites tend to think of as the virgin lands, what saves us from all the pollution that the city emits. it told me with a stern face that it was almost all clear-cut up there. apparently richars desjardin's movie l'erreur boreale was no exaggeration.

so, anyways, topic of the day. elected officials decided to put the land around mont orford for sale. that patch of land, with the 3 mountains on it, is part of the aforementioned 3,5%. in the paper this morning, the regional deputy of estrie told environmentalist groups: 'well, if you are opposed to the sale, why don't you just buy it?'

oh, and do you know what will go on that land? condos, i kid you not.

my country 'tis of thee...

for my 7th birthday, i asked my parents for a fishing rod. god knows where i had gotten the idea from, but i remember quite clearly how what i wanted to do the most was to fish. my parents had already given up on the fact that i'd be content with staying inside playing with dolls, so they obliged. i think they were secretly hoping i'd toss the hook from one side of my bedroom to the other fishing using papers clips to retrieve crayons and pencils. alas, i had greater aspirations in mind.

i was absolutely ecstatic when i opened my present to find a plastic fisherprice fishing rod with its own little red box where i could keep my bait and the fish i dreamt of catching. granted, the box was barely bigger than a large pencil case, which somehow betrayed my parents' intentions.

i knew that i would only get my way through dad. i mean, it was pretty easy to tell because my mother is scared of anything that looks like a snake, worms included. i remember her shrieking when we'd watch nature documentaries and weird bugs crawled accross our television screen. so i used all the persuasion skills a 7 year old can muster up, i convinced him to take me fishing during one of our weekly outings to the hardware store.

i'm not sure how exactly this happened, but i think a friend of my dad's told him you needed a fishing licence in order to be allowed to fish in quebec. now, this totally makes sense on a large-scale, because it'd be harzardous to let everyone fish as they please. but, really, all i had was a clunky fisher price fishing rod. completly plastic. regardless, my father who is one to abide by the rules, had me fill out a fishing license form at our local canadian tire. i must have been one of the youngest license holder in the whole province. i remember that it came in a little plastic pouch so that it wouldn't get wet. i immediately secured it in my box.

before our big weekend, my father took me yet another time to the hardware store, this time to get the proper hooks for my rod. my father proudly announced to the middle-aged sales clerk that he was taking me fishing and that we needed proper hooks. of course, neither my dad and i knew anything about fishing, so we were a bit puzzled by all the questions: 'what kind of fish do you plan to catch?' (i mean, really, i was not at all sure we would know even after we caught it) 'what kind of bait were we going to use?' (you mean i have to tie something to the end of the hook? that's not how tom and jerry do it!) so, in our confusion we got a hook that was actually made of three hooks glued together. it was golden with a pink feather on it. (that's where my femme-side came out i guess!)

we made it to this creek, not far from the country house we had up north. the stream of water was barely wider than my bunk bed… regardless i was fishing. the three-hook-thingy was definitely scaring the small fish away. i mean, hello? a pink feather, what was i thinking? after a few tosses, it got stuck to the bottom and we could no longer retrieve the line. my dad cut the string and tied a normal hook at the end of it, absolutely saving the day.

i can't quite remember how it is that i caught a fish. i know i was the one who caught it simply because we had only brought the fisherprice rod. lets just say mom was not waiting for us to bring back dinner. i caught this tiny little fish. it was greyish, very non-descript, but i absolutely adored it. somehow, despite having a hook caught - and promptly dislodged - from its mouth it was doing really well. we brought it home and i put it in this flat yellow bucket we had. we had dinner outside on the patio and i kept the fish next to the table so i could watch it from where i was sitting. i was still wearing my fisherwoman's boots (or just your average simple galoshes) and decided to take them off, dropping them next to me on the wooden patio. i heard 'thump' as my boots fell down and the fish that was swiming peacefully until then went flying in the air and fell between two wooden planks. right in the crack. i was hysterical. i ran to get my dad who brought a flashlight and tried to crawl underneath our patio to retrieve the poor thing. i was getting late and the sun had come down. we could hardly see a thing. my father looked long enough to make me feel like we had done all we could to save the fish, though he knew that things were pretty hopeless from the start.

after that, i became quite content with tossing a simple string with a paperclip attached to the end of it from the edge of my bed. when they sent me a letter to renew my license several months later, i simply did not answer.

i made her lose face. i should have known better, maybe.

if i ever hope to make it in china i have to
- speak less
- listen less
- think less

in that order.

aya! wo zhen zhen de kuai le!

ok, baidu.com rocks! seriously, where else can you listen to chinese R&B songs about the war (which one, would be a good question) and get access to lyrics？ there are even songs from the recent winners of chinese idol! it's too good to be true. click on baidu to get access to the Top 100! hours and hours of endless pleasure and cringing!