So connected yet so disconnected

Two very different news stories caught my eye yesterday. The first story was about Candy Spelling's Los Angeles mansion, which sold for a mind-blowing $85 million.


The second story was about the food crisis in Somalia, which is now a full-blown famine.


The two stories seem unrelated. But they're not. They are both fundamentally about greed and stupidity.

A society that not only allows but glorifies the use of 4.7 acres of land to build a 56,500-square-foot house that contains 123 rooms, 27 bathrooms, and five kitchens for one family is a symbol of all that is wrong with the world.

Candy Spelling's mansion is an extreme example of wasteful excess but it drives home the point that our economic system is built on a foundation of limitless consumption.

We've created this myth that growth is progress and that progress is accumulation. So we accumulate obscene amounts of wealth and build obscenely big houses and call it "progress" but what we're really doing is digging our own graves (and taking everyone else with us) by consuming resources faster than they can regenerate and pumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the climate is changing.

And this is where Somalia comes in. The famine is being blamed on the combination of a severe drought and the ongoing conflict. A New York Times article reports that many scientists point to climate change as the cause of the current drought. And if we are changing the climate with our growth and our technology and our addiction to cheap oil, then we are partly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Somalis.

Of course, there is also the greed and stupidity of the Islamic militants who control the famine zone in Somalia. The militants forced Western aid groups out of Somalia last year when the drought was looming and now they are asking the aid groups to return. But few want to return due to the danger of dealing with the militants. Making the whole emergency relief effort even more complicated is that American government rules prohibit material support to the militants. The scale of the disaster and all of its complexities boggles the mind.

I don't know what's worse: the insanity of America's excess or the insanity of Al Shabab's extremism? An economic system that is directly responsible for climate change or a bunch of militants who chop off hands, stone people to death and ban TV, music and bras in the hope of turning Somalia into a seventh-century-style Islamic state?

Either way, multi-million-dollar mansions in America and Islamic militants in Somalia are connected. It's not difficult to imagine some Somali kid growing up in a poor neighbourhood in Los Angeles seeing these McMansions and the obscene wealth and the big cars and feeling excluded and angry. And it's not hard to imagine some Islamic extremist group exploiting that teenager's frustration by giving him a sense of community and a feeling of brotherhood while radicalizing the young man's anger into something more sinister.

And so when I read those two very different stories yesterday -- the sale of Candy Spelling's mansion and the food crisis in Somalia -- it wasn't their differences that struck me, it was their connections.

Academic writing ain't my thing

Can someone please explain why so many scholars and scientists feel compelled to obscure, confuse and bore their audiences?

These are brilliant people with brilliant ideas and yet they can't tell a story to save their lives. Just open any academic journal and you'll see what I mean. The language is impenetrable to outsiders. The sentences are clunky, heavy, and awkwardly constructed. Each article contains a wealth of information – some of it interesting and important – but the writing is so bad as to render the whole thing unreadable.

It pisses me off for three reasons: one, because I have to read this shit as part of my master's degree; two, because of the inherent disrespect to the general reader embedded in this kind of writing; and three, because it doesn't have to be this way.

I think part of the reason academics write the way they do is because they write for other academics. They're after the approval of their peers, not the public. As a result, there's a certain snobbery and elitism in academic writing. Academic writing must have weight and gravity, and the easiest way to add weight and gravity is to fill a paper with technical terms and sentences that are so scientifically precise that they obscure, rather than illuminate, what it is the author is trying to say.

Accuracy is the aim but obfuscation is the result.

Let me give you an example from one of my least-enjoyable reading assignments of the past year. The article, published in Functional Ecology in 2005, was titled "Neutral theory in community ecology and the hypothesis of functional equivalence." Here is a brief excerpt:

"The theory for community assembly based on the competitive niche paradigm became highly developed, first with multispecies community matrix theory (Levins, 1968), which was developed on the foundation of the Lotka-Volterra equations, and then with more mechanistic theory, which explicitly incorporated the dynamics of resource supply and consumption along with the dynamics of the resource-dependent consumer species (Tilman 1982, 1987)."

It goes on and on like this for seven pages. I had to read it three times before I started to understand it. And then I had to read it a few more times before I was able to translate the author's abominable sentences into something more digestible. Line by painful line.

You could argue that someone without a background in ecology is not the intended audience for this paper. It was written for specialists in the field who could quickly and easily grasp its context and significance. So there is no need to simplify it for a general audience. It's all well and good to contribute to the general body of knowledge in a particular field. But why are so many scholars and scientists content to just please their small circles of peers?

If you as an environmental scientist have no desire to communicate your findings to the public or to policy makers then what the hell is the point? Why spend years of your life on research that ends up collecting dust in an obscure journal in a remote part of some distant library?

It goes back to the snobbery and elitism unnecessarily embedded in academic writing. The problem is that plain English and simple storytelling is disparaged as not scientific. I have one professor who constantly dismisses non-academic writing as mere journalism.

And while I agree that journalistic research doesn't carry the same weight and rigor as academic research, I disagree that a more journalistic style of writing is somehow less serious than an academic style of writing. If academics want their research to resonate with the public or policy makers, they could benefit from a more narrative style of writing.

I'm not saying you have to spoon-feed the reader but at least open it up a bit. Tell us why your research is important. Put some effort into making the significance of your research clear and compelling. Strip down the sentences a bit. Why use five words when one will suffice? Push the academic journals to change their stuffy conventions.

There are many scientists who are excellent communicators. People like E.O. Wilson, David Suzuki, Jane Goodall, Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan come to mind. They understand the importance of explaining their work to the public and they do it well.

Scientific research is important but it is meaningless if there is no attempt to communicate that knowledge in a way the public and the people in power can understand. Information locked away inside impenetrable jargon and technical terms is not helping anyone.

Weekend wildlife sighting

A snake munching on some tadpoles in a rice field. Kyoto, Japan.

Welcome to the jungle and my secular spiritual awakening

This is a tally of all the wild creatures I have run into during the past three weeks. One poisonous centipede. Two dozen monkeys. A handful of mosquitoes. Several hundred frogs. A dozen fireflies. One slug. Two hawks. Half a dozen spiders. A whole bunch of salamanders. Countless butterflies. Two lizards. Three snakes. Four deer. And one leech. (Being attacked by a leech was actually kind of exciting.)

The amazing thing is that I spotted all of these creatures within the Kyoto city limits, either in the mountain behind my apartment or by the river across the street or in the rice fields down the road.

That there can be so much wildlife in such an urban area is a juxtaposition that makes me happy. I mean, happy in the sense that so much wildlife exists outside my door. I'd be much less happy if the centipedes and snakes decided to move into my apartment.

Sometimes Kyoto feels more like a jungle than a city.

Let me give you an example. Two weeks ago, I hiked up the mountain behind my apartment. I was alone on a quiet trail when a stampede of more than 30 monkeys came running through the forest, crossing the path in front of me. Some of the adult monkeys were carrying baby monkeys on their backs and they stopped and looked right at me. It was just me and a bunch of wild monkeys. No fence. No barrier. Just me and my distant relatives hanging out in the forest. The monkeys didn't seem threatened by my presence. Instead, they seemed indifferent to it. They just sat down in front of me and starting picking the bugs off each other's backs. It was an incredibly moving experience. And I don't even like monkeys.

Watching the monkeys watching me, I couldn't help but feel that we were equals. Both of us nothing more than primates living on the land. I felt no greater or less than the monkeys in front of me. I felt no better than the ants underfoot or the leaves overhead. Rather, I just felt that we were equal and connected -- all of us small parts of a greater whole. All of us nothing more than species among other species, the product of billions of years of evolution. I couldn't help but feel a sense of awe and wonder about the beauty of nature and the magnitude of the universe.

I love the way the main character in White Noise describes the way he feels when he watches children sleep ("Watching children sleep makes me feel devout, part of a spiritual system. It is the closest I can come to God. If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be children in their little bedrooms fast asleep"). It's the same way I feel when I spend time in nature. It makes me feel connected to something bigger than myself.

And, dammit, the more time I spend in nature, the more I can feel myself turning into a hardcore tree-hugging hippie. Well, maybe not that hardcore. I still like having stylish clothes, shiny hair and a sense of humor. I'm a hippie on the inside only.

I feel like I'm having some sort of spiritual awakening and I hate that I'm having some sort of spiritual awakening because I hate the word "spiritual" and all of the flaky, new-age shit (crystals and space music and astrology) that goes along with it because that's not what spirituality is for me. It's a word that has no religious meaning. It's simply about feeling a deep connection with nature. It's about feeling a sense of awe and wonder at knowing we live on a tiny planet, in the middle of the Milky Way, surrounded by billions of stars and billions of planets and billions of galaxies in a vast, yawning universe.

Never have I felt this more profoundly than in Kyoto. In the mountains, by the river and in the forest. I am constantly reminded about how small and insignificant we really are. And how, at the same time, we are connected to everything and everyone. It all makes sense in the mountains.




Note: I broke my camera at the end of April (it turns out taking pictures on top of a mountain in typhoon-strength rain wasn't such a good idea) so I've missed out on capturing most of the aforementioned wildlife encounters. My cellphone camera takes crappy pictures. That's a leech on my leg in the last photo. I let it eat until it was full. And then it eventually dropped off on its own. It was kind of exciting to walk around with a leech on my leg. And I kind of missed him when he was gone. (See what I mean? I'm totally turning into some sort of nature freak.)

The cute, the not-so-cute and the ugly

It all began when a cat named Tama was appointed stationmaster of a railway station in rural Japan. And then the wheels came off the cute wagon.

Eager to cash in on what turned out to be a money-making bonanza, other railway stations jumped on the animal-as-stationmaster bandwagon. They appointed cats, dogs, goats and rabbits as honorary employees at railway stations across the country.

But what started out as a cute copycat move has corkscrewed down into a lazy and unimaginative gimmick now that railway officials are appointing lobsters as stationmasters. Seriously. Lobsters. The animal-as-stationmaster craze has officially jumped the shark.

Who knew that such a heart-warming tale would end on such a dark note?

It all began innocently enough. Five years ago, several Japanese railway lines went from being manned to unmanned in an effort to cut costs. Railway officials selected local businesspeople to serve as honorary stationmasters.

At Kishi station in the Japanese town of Kinokawa, a local grocer was appointed stationmaster. A stray cat took up residence outside the empty ticket booth and the grocer would feed her while going about his stationmaster duties. Tama the cat became a regular fixture at the station. Her friendly personality made her a hit with the locals, who would stop and pet her on their way to work.

The cat's popularity caught the eye of the railway officials. For fun, they decided to name her honorary stationmaster in 2007. The cat was given an office (a ticket booth containing a litter box), a uniform (a cute little hat and collar), a salary (free cat food), and a job (greet passengers as they come in and out of the station). The story made headlines across the country and Tama the cat became an overnight celebrity in cute-crazed Japan.

Japanese tourists flocked to the tiny train station to pose for photos with Tama. The cat became so famous that the railway had to hire a human employee to assist her. A shop at the station started to sell a variety of Tama-branded souvenir goods, including buttons, snacks, and a special photo book. According to the Japan Times, the cat has attracted tourists from across the country and boosted the local economy by 1.1 billion yen.

Last year, Tama was promoted to corporate executive of the Wakayama Electric Railway Co. (making her the company's highest-ranking female executive).

It's the stuff American dreams are made of: one day you're nobody, the next day you're somebody. Or, in this case, one day you're a stray cat, the next day you're at the top of the transportation industry.


In an attempt to cash in on the success of Tama, other unmanned railway stations in Japan jumped on the animal-as-stationmaster bandwagon. There are now several cat stationmasters and at least two dog stationmasters, with the latest being a fluffy Akita named Wasao.


Wasao reports for duty at Ajigasawa station in Aomori Prefecture. His job is to help boost the local tourism industry, which has been suffering since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

The other dog stationmaster was a Yorkshire terrier named Maron, who worked at a small railway station in northern Japan. Unfortunately, Maron passed away from bronchitis in 2009 -- you can view pictures of his funeral here.


This is where the story starts to get weird. Because it was no longer novel to appoint a cat or a dog as stationmaster, other stations had to get creative in order to generate both headlines and revenues of their own. So in an attempt to one-up the kitties, the next animal to be appointed to the role of stationmaster was a goat called Koma.


Koma reports for duty at Uzen-Komatsu station in Yamagata Prefecture. The goat stationmaster worked out so well that a station thousands of kilometres to the south stole the idea and appointed a goat named Taro to greet passengers in Fukuoka.


But the novelty of goat stationmasters was starting to wear off so the next animal to work the railroad was a rabbit. At Unomachi station in Ehime prefecture, railway officials chose a rabbit named Tsubasa to fill the position of honorary stationmaster. According to a news report, the railway station is the only one in Japan that contains the Chinese character for "rabbit" in its name. So a rabbit was the obvious choice.


It didn't take long for another Shikoku railway to rip off the rabbit idea. Yamagata Railway also named a rabbit as stationmaster and lined its gift-shop shelves with a stuffed bunny so cute your brain will melt just looking at it.



This is when things started to go horribly wrong. With all of the cute, domesticated animals spoken for, other railways took the animal-stationmaster trend one step too far. It stopped being cute with the appointment of two baby monkeys.


Nehime and Rakan were named stationmasters at Hojo-cho station in Hyoto prefecture. The monkeys were donated by a local resident, who was concerned about the railway's decreasing ridership and poor finances. The railway hoped the monkey stationmasters would help attract publicity and riders to the line's first biodiesel-fueled train.

It gets worse. Officials at JR Ibusuki Station in Kagoshima prefecture appointed a tortoise as stationmaster. Kotaro is a 25-year-old African Spurred tortoise who weighs 41kg. He has a custom-made stationmaster hat and it wears it on the job.



The prize for the least-cute stationmaster goes to a pair of lobsters at Shishikui station in Tokushima Prefecture. Yes, stationmaster lobsters. The local railway set up an aquarium in the station's foyer and placed a stationmaster's hat above the tank, after attaching little hats to the lobsters' heads proved to be too difficult.


Let's throw a lobster in a tank and call it a stationmaster. How uninspired can you get? What's next? A cockroach stationmaster? This is a trend that has gone one step too far. Monkeys are not cute. Tortoises belong in the wild. And lobsters are just plain ugly. The animal-as-stationmaster craze has officially jumped the shark.

Poisonous centipedes + flying cockroaches = summer in Japan

I found this monster terrorizing the neighbourhood yesterday. I told him in no uncertain terms is he to enter my apartment this summer.

I am still slightly traumatized from the time one of these guys crawled into bed with me while I was sleeping, and then bit me on the arm when I rolled on top of him. My arm swelled up like a football and the bite was painful and itchy for a good two weeks. The wound healed but the terror of waking up in bed with one of these things will never go away.

Welcome to summer in Japan.

The call of the mountain

There's a mountain behind my home. It's not particularly big or beautiful, as far as mountains go. But it forms a pretty backdrop against the crowded tangle of apartment buildings, utility poles and power lines in my north-eastern Kyoto neighbourhood.

From a distance, the mountain's cedar-covered flanks appear smooth and symmetrical, rising up to meet each other in the shape of a slightly lopsided volcano. At almost 900 metres tall, the mountain stands high above the rolling hills that form a coiled border around the ancient capital's edges.

I am magnetically drawn to the mountain, my eyes pulled toward it by some uncontrollable force. Maybe it's because the mountain is a paradox: always the same and constantly changing. It is electric green and sharp in the morning. It is purplish and soft in the evening. It hides under layers of fog in the rain. It hibernates in the winter and bursts with life in the summer.

But it's not enough to just look at a mountain. You need to climb it. To breathe its forest-filtered air. To hear its birds sing overhead. To sink into its mud underfoot. To reach its summit and to see nothing but mountains beyond mountains all the way to the horizon.

The reward for all that effort is not to feel as though you have conquered the thing but to feel humbled by it -- to surrender yourself to the realization that you are nothing more than an insignificant speck on a tiny planet in a vast universe whose mysteries we know very little about. But to also feel, with unwavering certainty, that we are connected to everything and everyone. This is the gift the mountain gives us.

Mountaineer and philosopher Arne Naess calls the view from the top of a mountain "philosophically important." He says the smaller you are in relation to the mountain, the more intensely you feel that you are part of it. "You get greater. You get on par with it. You get to feel good with it. So, the tinier you are, the more in some sense you are together with something great and, therefore, get something of this greatness" (from The Call of the Mountain).

This feeling of greatness, of feeling an intense oneness with nature, is what drives me to climb the mountain behind my home. I suppose it's the same feeling that has been driving people into mountains for centuries. My mountain, Mount Hiei, has long been considered the home of demons and gods. It has been the subject of poems and books. It has sheltered warrior monks and inspired marathon monks -- monks who run the steep mountain trails for seven years straight in search of spiritual enlightenment.

Many scientists have studied this human connection to nature but few have explained its importance as eloquently as biologist E.O. Wilson: "Wilderness settles peace on the soul because it needs no help; it is beyond human contrivance" (from The Diversity of Life). He argues there is a human need to have a deep connection with the natural world. It's a hypothesis that feels intuitively true. It also feels increasingly important as our urbanized, globalized and industrialized world continues to view nature as something to tame, conquer and exploit in the name of unlimited economic growth.

Somewhere along the way we deluded ourselves into thinking of nature as something disconnected from us. But nothing could be further from the truth. We are nature. We are the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink.

"We did not arrive on this planet as aliens," writes Wilson. "Humanity is a part of nature, a species that evolved among other species."

Being in the mountains reminds us of that irrefutable truth.

The less we identify with nature, the more quickly we will allow the crowded tangle of apartment buildings, utility poles and power lines to creep up and swallow the mountain whole.

Early Spring in Rural Ontario

I stand amid a cluster of trees on my grandparents’ farm,
a 10-year-old girl pretending not to hear
the voice of my mother as she calls to me
about dishes in the sink that need to be washed.

I hide in the trees that border the garden,
desperate to stay outside a little longer.
The ground is wet and I’m drowning
in a pair of black rubber boots that belong to my grandfather.

The trees stand in uneven rows,
their veins dripping sap into aluminum buckets
that hang on metal taps bored into their trunks.
(A few days from now my grandmother will boil the sap on the stove,
and I will sit transfixed at the kitchen table,
watching maple syrup being made.)

I stick my tongue in the spout
and am surprised to discover
the sap tastes slightly sweet.
I unhook the bucket from the tree, wrap my lips around the rim,
tilt my head back and drink the whole thing,
a 10-year-old girl pretending not to hear
the voice of my mother as she calls to me
about dishes in the sink that need to be washed.

-- Sarah Marchildon

In defense of Jersey Shore

I watched George Stroumboulopoulos interview Rex Murphy the other night. At the end of the interview, George asked Rex what his guilty TV pleasure was. To my surprise, Rex said he wholeheartedly and unabashedly loved Jersey Shore.

I was floored. Here was one of Canada's sharpest and most accomplished political commentators coming out of the closest to confess his fond feelings for the debauchery of the Shore. A man known for his love of literature was publicly admitting that he also enjoys watching a bunch of gorilla juiceheads getting jacked, dodging grenades and creeping in the club.

All I could think was: I'm not alone!

Embracing high art does not mean you have to snub low art. I love books and I love Jersey Shore. Rex Murphy proves it is possible to appreciate both Shakespeare and Snooki. So why is this such a difficult concept for some people to wrap their heads around?

I once told a friend I was a fan of the Shore and she acted as if I had slapped her in the face.

"But, but, but," she stammered. "Your lifestyle is the complete opposite of their lifestyle! They're so stupid. How can you watch that garbage?"

Because it's funny. Because it's fascinating. Because it's dark. Because you don't have to be stupid to enjoy the stupidity of it all.

We all know a triple-fudge brownie is bad for us but that doesn't make it taste any less sweet. It's the same with Jersey Shore. It's junk but it's delicious junk.

To be fair to my friend, my lifestyle really is the complete opposite of the one enjoyed by the Shore cast mates. I don't tan. I don't club. I don't creep. I don't drink to the point of inebriation every night of the week. I don't have fake hair, fake boobs, fake nails and fake eyelashes. I am not attracted to guys with big muscles and small brains. And I most definitely would not be DTF with Vinny, Mike or Pauly D (and even if I was DTF, they'd probably think I was a grenade so it's out of the question on all counts).

Rex Murphy defends the Shore much better than I ever could. He explains that the environment of our common consciousness is television and the Internet. And, like it or loathe it, Jersey Shore is part of our collective consciousness.

"I mean, you don't have to want to marry Snooki to watch it," he said. "But as long as you're aware of it, at least you know the world you're in. But this idea that you seal yourself off in some purist castle and read Descartes and Kant and snub the world, it's idiocy! And as I often say in this kind of context, Moby Dick really is a great book and you really should read it more than once but you shouldn't read it every day. It's a bad habit." (Source: George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, interview with Rex Murphy, May 3, 2011)

In other words, it's all about balance. A little bit of Shakespeare, a little bit of Snooki. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

Thoughts on a bittersweet election

Let's get one thing straight: Stephen Harper may have won a majority government but the majority of Canadians did not vote for Stephen Harper.

The majority of Canadians (more than 60 percent of us) voted against Stephen Harper. The Conservative Party did not win a majority government because the majority of Canadians support the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party won a majority government because the majority of Canadians split their vote on the left.

The numbers in this election tell a very important story: 39.7 percent of Canadians voted Conservative; 30.9 percent voted NDP; 18.8 percent voted Liberal; 6.1 percent voted Bloc Quebecois; and 4.5 percent voted for something else. That means more than 60 percent of us voted against Stephen Harper. The majority of us voted for change.

But we shot ourselves in the foot. We split our votes between the NDP and the Liberals. And, in turn, the NDP and Liberals canceled each other out and sent votes to the Conservatives. In the riding of Scarborough Centre, for example, the Conservative candidate won with about 13,400 votes. But if you combined the votes that were evenly split between the Liberal and NDP candidates in that same riding you'd end up with more than 23,000 votes against the Conservative Party. In the end, this vote splitting is how the Conservatives built their majority.

Still, it was a momentous night for both the NDP and the Green Party. The NDP made a huge leap to second place, winning more than 100 seats and forming the Official Opposition. The Green Party now has a seat in the House of Commons for the first time in Canadian history. This is huge. And it is very exciting. I'm elated to know the NDP will hold Harper accountable on social justice issues. I'm overjoyed to know the Green Party will be in the House of Commons to speak up on environmental issues. I feel like shaking a bottle of champagne and spraying it all over the room.

Watching the election results come in was quite the wild ride. I was shocked to see Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff lose his seat to the Conservatives (I was sure he'd win by a comfortable margin). I was also shocked to see the destruction of the Liberal Party and the collapse of the Bloc Quebecois. Of course, you can't write either party off entirely. Parties crash and burn and rise again. In the 1993 election, the Conservative Party dropped from a 154-seat majority to just two seats. But they managed to claw their way back into power. There's no reason the Liberals can't do the same thing.

So where do we go from here? I think the main challenge is for Jack Layton to be an effective Opposition leader. He has to make sure the "orange wave" keeps surging forward, especially in Quebec. He has to make sure the party's popularity stays high.

Because we now have a majority government, we won't have another election until 2015 (election law dictates that a majority government has a four-year mandate to govern). So we're stuck with a Conservative majority for the next four years.

In the meantime, I think we need to talk seriously about merging the left. A recast NDP that includes Liberals is probably the surest way to defeat Stephen Harper in the next election. I don't want to head toward a polarized two-party system like they have in America but we have to do something about all of this vote splitting.

The next four years will be a critical test for the NDP. If the NDP and the Liberals decide not to merge, then Jack Layton is going to have to do a bang-up job as Opposition leader. He is going to have to convince Canadians that he'd be a better prime minister than Stephen Harper.

Stephen Harper just has to continue governing the same way he's been governing all along -- disrespecting the democratic process, tightly controlling the message, restricting journalists' access to information, ignoring the environment, trashing our international reputation, freezing foreign aid to Africa, cutting corporate taxes, buying fighter jets, beefing up prisons, loosening environmental regulations, and generally just putting competition ahead of compassion.

The deeper Stephen Harper corkscrews us down into this cesspool, the better Jack Layton is going to look. Maybe we'll be ready to elect an NDP prime minister four years from now.

The election may have ended tonight but the real work begins tomorrow.

Not voting is not an option

My special ballot finally arrived in the mail this week. Never before has voting felt so unsatisfying. Never before have I had to choose from a more lackluster list of candidates.

I voted in the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore, in the middle-class Toronto neighbourhood where I grew up and where my parents still live. The strange thing about voting from abroad is that you get to choose the riding you want to vote in. You can either vote in the riding where you last lived or where a spouse or family member currently lives.

You can even choose the dubious option of registering an address of "a person with whom you would live if you were not residing outside of Canada." This seems highly subjective. I mean, I would totally live with my friend Annelle in Vancouver. She has a nice house and a cute cat. The fact that she probably wouldn't want me to move in with her is irrelevant. I could register her address anyway. Which means that those of us living overseas can pretty much vote in any riding we want.

But I decided to keep it simple and cast my ballot in the place where my emotional roots run deepest. I may have lived in Vancouver for seven years but Toronto is home.

Like any good civically minded citizen, I did a little bit of research before I voted. This is what I found out about the five candidates running in Etobicoke-Lakeshore:

Bernard Trottier, Conservative: His key issues are (surprise, surprise) lower taxes and continued economic growth. If he had a slogan, it would be Business as Usual. The environment and social justice are nowhere to be found on his website. He's a senior consulting manager, "working with Canadian and international companies to improve their competitiveness and profitability" (words that deaden the soul). He claims to regularly mix with the immigrant community by attending religious celebrations at Polish and Ukrainian churches. The guy is a shortsighted, out-of-touch relic from the last century. Next!

Michael Erickson, New Democrat: His two big issues are increased funding for public transit and the environment. He has solid community-activist credentials (works as a high school teacher, takes teens on social justice trips to Ghana, served on the LGBT Youth Line Board of Directors, worked with the Metro Network for Social Justice, and volunteered as a poverty and disability activist). Of all the candidates, he is the kind of politician I'd most like to clone. Ottawa needs more compassionate and socially progressive people in power. But he's running in the wrong riding. He doesn't have a hope in hell in Etobicoke-Lakeshore. No one here votes NDP. The first and last time Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected an NDP Member of Parliament was in 1972.

David Corail, Green: He wants increased federal funding for public transit. He wants to build a community centre for young people. But he's too inexperienced. According to his website, he's lived in the area for almost 20 years and is raising his family there. And that seems to be all he has done. Also, his website contains horribly worded and utterly meaningless phrases like, "We must also invest in peace. And we must shockproof our society against unforeseeable events by building in resilience." Huh? He's probably a nice guy but he's not a serious contender.

Janice Murray, Marxist-Leninist: She is "calling on the women, workers and youth in the riding to join her in organizing to empower themselves and elect an anti-war government." Workers of Etobicoke-Lakeshore unite! The only problem is that the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada is supportive of North Korea and batshit crazy Kim Jong-il. Next!

Michael Ignatieff, Liberal: The incumbent. The leader of the Liberal Party. The potential prime minister. Ignatieff is the heavyweight in this riding and he casts a long shadow over all of the other candidates. His intelligence borders on brilliance (he's an award-winning writer and deep thinker who has held senior academic posts at Cambridge, Oxford and Harvard). His background is extraordinarily, intimidatingly impressive (check out his wiki page for all of the eye-popping details). But his campaign has been safe, inoffensive and banal. He talks about the importance of families, jobs, health care and seniors. But there's no substance behind the spin. No fresh ideas. The Liberal Party is just so middle-of-the-road. Not quite left wing. Not quite right wing. I'm sure Ignatieff would be a competent and strong prime minister, just not an inspiring one.

So there you have it. The lackluster list of candidates I had to choose from. Not that my vote is going to make much of a difference. The Liberals consistently win this riding and they win it by a large margin. According to unscientific research conducted by my mom, Ignatieff's lawn signs currently outnumber all others by about 99 to one.

I voted with a sense of resignation, not feeling particularly inspired by any of the Parties. The Liberals are too dated, the Conservatives too out-of-touch, the Greens too amateurish, the NDP too idealistic. I say this in the most non-partisan way possible. I always vote based on the merit of the individual candidates, not based on an allegiance to a particular Party. And that's why I decided to vote for Michael Ignatieff this time around. I don't particularly like the Liberal Party. I do, however, like Michael Ignatieff. Or, rather, I like the gravitas of his experience. He is ready to govern.

Having said that, I think Jack Layton would make the best prime minister of the bunch. Of all the leaders, he is the most appealing. I like his focus on social justice and the environment. I like his sincerity. I like his emphasis on hope. I think he would be the one to best steer Canada back to its compassionate roots, both at home and abroad. Stephen Harper has steered us so far in the opposite direction that we need to take a hard left to bring us back on track.

But I'm not telling you who to vote for. The most important thing is to vote. Just vote! If every single one of us voted, then we'd have a truly democratic government -- one that actually represents the majority of Canadians. Not voting is not an option.

A post in which I compare the Canadian federal election to high-school calculus (or, two things that make me cringe and want to vomit)

The Canadian federal election is about as painful, as uninspired, and as humourless (unless you count the unintentional hilarity of watching wooden politicians try to deliver barn-burner speeches as if said speeches were on par with Martin Luther King-inspired greatness when they're nothing more than pandering, partisan gibberish devoid of any real meaning or substance) as high-school calculus.

It occurred to me to make the connection between the campaign and calculus a couple of weeks ago. It was the first day of the spring semester at Kyoto University and I decided to take a graduate-level class on economics. The class started with a pop quiz. We were asked to answer a bunch of questions. Stuff like "calculate dy/dx where y = f[x, z(x)]" and "solve the following optimization problem where max z = -x squared + 2x."

Two full pages of math problems. I left the whole thing blank. Those of us who failed the quiz were advised to brush up on high-school calculus. But how do you "brush up" on calculus when you never learned it in the first place? I dropped the class immediately.

I'm just not wired for math. I love words. I hate numbers. I love stories. I hate formulas. I love ideas. I hate details. I love improvisation. I hate memorization.

I was thinking about all of this as I made my way out of the classroom when it hit me. I suddenly understood why I was so turned off by the Canadian election and by each of the federal leaders. This campaign is too much like calculus.

A formula calculated to win votes

Just like numbers on a page, the federal leaders' words are cold and calculated. Their messages don't come from the heart. They come from the head. Each message is carefully crafted and controlled. Each message is brought to life not by inspiration but by polls and focus groups. Each message is shaped and massaged by campaign strategists and communications experts. It's a formula calculated to win votes.

The end result is messages devoid of meaning but full of partisanship and pandering. All spin, no substance. Do they think we're idiots? To speak of "family values" is to insult our collective intelligence. What does "family values" mean anyway? I'm pretty sure that Stephen Harper, who voted against gay marriage, has a very different concept of "family values" than Jack Layton, who makes a point of marching in Toronto's Gay Pride Parade every summer.

But it's too easy to just pick on Stephen Harper. All of the leaders are aiming low. They're all trying to woo us with talk of families and health care and jobs and money for seniors. I mean, how can anyone be opposed to any of that? I suppose that's the point. It's banal and safe and inoffensive. It's how you win votes in Canada.

Ordinary Canadians

I can't stand the way they call us "ordinary Canadians" as if we are some sort of homogeneous blob that thinks and acts the same way. When the leaders want to get in touch with us ordinary Canadians, they go to Tim Hortons and hockey rinks and churches and mosques and synagogues. They loosen their ties, undo a button or two, roll up their sleeves, maybe even wear a baseball cap.

It's an image contrived to make us think, "They're just like us!" Except it's an "us" I don't identify with. I'm not religious, I don't watch hockey, and I don't think anyone over the age of 10 should wear a baseball cap unless they are actually playing baseball. You can't generalize about the tastes and habits and hobbies of average Canadians. We're all different. (Although, I will admit to a fondness for the occasional double-double and chocolate dip donut from Tim Hortons).

I'm starting to think our political leaders have a low opinion of us "ordinary Canadians." It seems they think the only thing we care about is protecting our jobs, our high standard of living and our families. Could they be any more insulting? Oh, yes, they could. They bombard us with attack ads that are so amateurish and silly that it feels less like an attack on the other parties and more like an attack on our intelligence. I don't care about how much of a loser you think your opponent is. Drop the ads and spend the time and money on something else, like a well-designed website with detailed information on your policies and your long-term vision for Canada.

This what I would tell the leaders

Be bold. Be brave. Say something you really mean. Say something off-message and unscripted. Say something controversial and original. Say something that touches our hearts. And say it in plain English. Answer journalists' questions honestly and directly. Tell us about your policies. Tell us about your dreams. Stop pandering. We're not stupid.

I'm tired of only hearing about the safe stuff. Let's talk about corporate tax hikes. Let's talk about ending government subsidies to the Alberta oil sands. Let's talk about public transit. Let's talk about bullet trains. Let's talk about a carbon tax. Let's talk about the shameful living conditions on First Nations reserves. Let's talk about compulsory voting legislation. Let's talk about universal daycare. Let's talk about poverty. Let's talk about secularism. Let's talk about art and books and poetry.

I'm not naive. I know that if the federal leaders talk about this stuff their opponents would tear them to pieces. And they would lose credibility and votes. I think this is why they play it so safe during the election campaign. Better to offend as few people as possible in order to get as many seats as possible. Then, once you're in Parliament, you'll have real power to push your real agenda forward.

I just wish it didn't have to be this way. I wish we could elect sincere, honest politicians who don't stick to a script when they talk. Campaigning needs to be less like math and more like life. Stop calculating every move, every word. Make your speeches messy, emotional, moving. Touch our hearts and stir our emotions. Inspire us to follow you. Create a vision for Canada that leaves no one behind and makes our hearts soar with hope and possibility.

But what do I know? I'm just an ordinary Canadian.

Stories for Japan

Write for Tohoku is a collection of stories about Japan, with 100% of the proceeds going directly to the Red Cross to help the earthquake and tsunami survivors rebuild their lives.

The project's website describes the book's content and goals in a concise and lovely way.

"The ebook contains stories of Japan from over sixty writers, both Japanese and foreign. We share our memories of adjusting to Japanese culture, experiencing the kindness of strangers, forming close friendships, discovering the country’s natural beauty, challenging ourselves through new experiences, and coming to feel at home in whatever corner of Japan we find ourselves.

We have two goals for this project: to raise funds for disaster relief, and to share with overseas readers the beauty and warmth of Japan."

The book costs $9.99. You can buy it here.

Global anxiety and the disaster in Japan

This morning, for the first time in more than a week, my in-box was eerily devoid of panicky messages urging me to get out of Japan. The melodramatic media coverage of the Fukushima nuclear crisis seems to have cooled. In turn, my parents are no longer pressuring me to come home. I feel like I can breathe again.

There's a discrepancy between the way people inside Japan are reacting to the disaster and the way people from outside Japan are reacting to the disaster. Most of the panic is being generated by people from other countries. My Canadian friends are more freaked out about the possibility of a nuclear meltdown than I am. People in Vancouver are stocking up on potassium iodide tablets, afraid of a toxic cloud of radiation blowing west across the Pacific Ocean.

I can't blame the rest of the world for thinking the apocalypse is upon us. A nuclear crisis on top of a tsunami on top of an earthquake -- just one of these things would have been horrible enough. But to deal with all three at the same time? The aftermath has been overwhelming (8,100 people dead, 12,000 people missing, half a million people homeless, entire towns wiped off the map, nuclear reactors exploding, radiation escaping, electricity failing, shortages of food, water, fuel and medicine, aftershock after aftershock).

But through it all, life went on elsewhere in Japan. People went to work. Kids went to school. The trains ran on time. The buildings remained standing. This ordinariness was nowhere to be seen in the media coverage coming out of Japan. And why would it be? It's not news. Journalists rightly focused all of their attention on the unfolding tragedy. There wasn't room for subtlety and nuance, which maybe partly explains why the foreign reaction seemed to verge on panic while the Japanese reaction was comparatively calm. Maybe it's because people from outside the country were looking at Japan through a very narrow lens. And what they saw looked terrifying.

Even though I am in Kyoto, hundreds of kilometres away from the Fukushima nuclear power plant, people back home worried about my safety. I've spent a good part of the past week trying to convince family and friends that I'm okay. Not that I'm complaining. I'm extremely touched by all of the concern. I received emails from friends I haven't heard from or seen in years. It's nice to know that so many people are thinking of me. It has been the best part of a very long week.

Other people are frustrated with all of the fear-mongering from the foreign media. There's a sense that the media focus on the nuclear crisis is overshadowing the devastation of the earthquake and tsunami. They complain that it's taking attention and aid away from the earthquake survivors up north. It's also causing people outside the country to panic needlessly. Their panic feeds our panic.

I don't think it's fair to blame the foreign media. Yes, there has been some sensationalism but I can live with a bit of sensationalism if it helps draw attention to the disaster. I'm far more comfortable with a few inaccuracies than I am with media outlets that serve as propaganda tools for the government. Most people in Japan don't trust the Japanese media to look for government cover-ups and half-truths when it comes to nuclear safety. The Japanese media simply reprints what the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company are saying verbatim. The foreign media is working much harder to find out what's really going on.

I'm no longer worried but I'm still not taking what the Japanese government and the Tokyo Electric Power Company are saying at face value. There has been too much confusing and contradictory information. At first, the Japanese government said people living outside a 20-kilometre radius of the power plant were safe. Then they changed that to 30 kilometres. And then the Americans stepped in and said that the evacuation zone should actually be more like 80 kilometres. (I don't know what distance is truly safe. Personally, I'd take their best-case scenario and double it. Just to be sure.)

The Japanese government is desperate to avoid mass panic and they've done a good job of keeping people relatively calm so far. In a country of 127 million people, mass panic would only lead to mass chaos.

We've already seen small pockets of panic, as some people in the Tokyo area started hoarding supplies -- buying rice, noodles, bottled water and toilet paper in bulk. Imagine if everyone tried to flee the country at the same time or ran to the supermarket and stripped all the shelves of food. It would make things much, much worse, especially for the hundreds of thousands of people in the evacuation centres who are already running short of food, water, fuel and medicine.

A handful of friends have flown home. The rest of us are staying put. The nuclear situation seems to be somewhat under control -- for now, at least. The media is starting to shift its attention away from Japan and toward Libya and Syria. For the first time in a week, Japan is no longer the top story. By this time next week, most of the foreign journalists will have left Japan. The country will start to recover and rebuild, without much attention or fanfare.

How you can help:

Japanese Red Cross

Canadian Red Cross

Doctors Without Borders

SEEDS Asia

Second Harvest Japan

Nuclear meltdown: To panic or not to panic?

I am still in Japan and I am still safe. But the very real possibility of a nuclear meltdown is making me increasingly nervous. I'm not panicking but maybe I should be.

I don't know what to do. The news changes hourly and it's often full of contradictory and confusing information. There was an explosion. There wasn't an explosion. Radiation is leaking. Radiation isn't leaking. Radiation levels have risen. Radiation levels have fallen. There's a risk to human health. There's no risk to human health. I don't know what to believe.

My Japanese isn't good enough to follow local media reports so I'm relying on western media outlets to keep me informed. It's an incredibly strange feeling to be sitting inside my Kyoto apartment watching Canadian, American and British journalists report on the disaster in Japan. I'm counting on people from outside the country to tell me what's happening inside the country. Life is still so unremarkably normal in Kyoto that it feels like I'm watching the disaster unfold half a world away.

The disconnect -- between the unfathomable devastation in the northern half of Japan and the absolute normality in the southern half of Japan -- is huge.

But I'm starting to wonder if this disconnect, and its accompanying feeling of safety, is just an illusion. The mask of calmness across Japan is starting to crack. For the first time since the earthquake and tsunami hit, Japanese people are starting to get angry. A lot of people don't trust what the government is saying and have chosen to get as far away from the nuclear power plant as possible. It's difficult to gauge the real level of panic because people communicate in an indirect way here. What is unsaid is often more important than what is said. You never take a sentence at face value. You have to read the subtext and decipher its unspoken meanings. So when a government minister appears on TV to tell people the risk of a nuclear meltdown is low, it's difficult for people to accept that as the whole truth.

Not only am I getting nervous but I'm also getting frustrated. There is no information about what a nuclear meltdown would mean for those of us in other parts of the country. Kyoto University has not contacted its students. City Hall is not publishing any information in English. The Canadian Embassy is telling us to stay away from the disaster zone but offers no advice to anyone anywhere else. No one is telling us whether or not we need to take potassium iodide tablets. If you were to trust what the Japanese government is saying, then only people living within a 30-kilometre radius of the Fukushima nuclear plant need to be concerned. Everyone else can remain calm.

But some people aren't buying it. A friend of mine left Tokyo and came to Kyoto a few days ago because she was worried the city would become chaotic if things got worse. She decided it was better to leave while there was an easy way out before becoming stuck if millions of people decided to flee at the same time. Another friend and his wife decided the radiation risk just wasn't worth it (they have a baby) and they're flying out of Japan tonight. My mom, who booked a flight to Japan several months ago, is debating whether or not to cancel the trip. She was supposed to fly into Tokyo two weeks from today. But that's looking more and more unlikely.

My friends and family back in Canada are becoming increasingly worried and it's starting to make me anxious. I'm getting emails on a daily basis urging me to leave the country. I don't blame them. Life north of here is a nightmare. The earthquake and tsunami have killed more than 10,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of people are now homeless. Food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity are in short supply. And as if all that wasn't bad enough, we're dealing with a nuclear crisis at the same time.

But I'm not panicking yet. No one has given me any reason to believe Kyoto is not safe. People here are still going about their daily lives. Everything is so remakably ordinary you wouldn't know there was a disaster to the north of us.

Any suggestions?