Just dropping in...

Dear Jonathan's parents,

It is with deep regret that I write to inform you that Jonathan is experiencing a nasty bout of J-itis. That is, he's been eating chicken wings and (generic) chocolate, whooping (loudly) over hockey games, shopping ON boxing day, and watching grey satellite movies. This is truly the epitome of the Js's holiday season. It's loud and obnoxious; it's horrifically unhealthy; and it's quite the bargain - today Jonathan and I spent the afternoon (which would otherwise have been for Jonathan a nice relaxing Monday reading books by the fire and listening to CBC) in Caban trying on $12 zip-ups (originally $79), and waiting in 100+ person lineups. $200 later, we participated in the traditional post-boxing day family fashion show (which takes place half-way between the master bedroom and Anika's boudoire), strutting in our 2 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of cords, wool sweater, zip-up shirt, and 3 long-sleeve shirts. It was glorious.

But again, I'm sorry. I've never seen Jonathan so much in his element before. I'd say that significant damage has been done. However I think a week with you guys is just what we'll need for the universe to balance out. We are really looking forward to it.

Sincerely,
Sima

Merry Christmas everyone!!! We hope you all are having warm and relaxing holidays. Thanks for the pictures Lily - we are thinking about you as you experience your first Christmas away from home in Japan. And to Tim and Emma, thanks for making the trip up/down to the big smoke. We know it's not the most desirable locale for a holiday ghettogether (haha) so we really appreciate it and miss you much.

We look forward to returning to our routine blogging in a few weeks but until then, we'll be on hiatus, jumping through piles of snow in Winnipeg, listening to The Edge on our little road trip down to St.Catharines, and generally doing a lot of more what we've been doing this last week: cooking, baking, reading books, eating food, exchanging gifts and relaxing with friends and family.

Peace.

P.S. We bought ourselves a new digital camera for Christmas, which means, many more pictures to post!

Funny how...

Funny how quickly the life of a student can dramatically change. One week I'm pulling out hairs, immersed in books on globalization, policy networks and the World Commission on Dams, eating badly, smelling worse, and disregarding all the telltale signs (the bulging dustbin, the notes of banana peel and soy sauce dancing in the air) that the garbage needs to be taken out.

And the next week, I'm fretting over what Neil and PJ want for Christmas, whether I know Anna-Laure's size, how many naps to take today - one or two, the extent to which the dresser needs to be reorganized and if a second round of baking is in order. My life has gone from papers and paupery to presents and pampery. Just as it should be.

Several exciting things happened this week. Today I did some furniture reorganization while Jonathan marked his student's exams. I think the bedroom looks a lot better, much bigger, open, very zenlike. I'd ask for your thoughts but alas, we haven't decided on a digital camera. Perhaps that will be a boxing day find...My brother studies and scrutinizes all the electronics fliers the morning of - I'll get him on our case for us. He's good at that.

Tonight, Jonathan made pad thai for supper in our new Asian bowls with two little ridges for our chopsticks, but not before he had gotten on the phone with Home Delight Furniture (which I'm now calling Home Dilapidated Furniture) and politely mentioned to them that the $400 table we'd bought in September is peeling like a bad sunburn in Orange Country. I don't know how Jon does it, but in his assertive yet mild mannered way, he always manages to get us what we want. Last time, when our chairs failed to be put on the truck that delivers between stores (in this case, the warehouse and our local one) and Jon complained, Moe's delivered our dining room chairs free to us the following evening straight from the warehouse. And today, our table company has invited us to come visit their showroom and pick out a new table, no questions asked. I don't know what it is... his sexy voice?


In other news, Jonathan and I spent yesterday Christmas shopping. We went to Metrotown (a 470 store mall in Burnaby) and walked around until ours legs felt like jelly, which took approximately 6 hours and 13 minutes. Surprisingly, mine gave out before Jonathan's did. Many a times have I spent hours in the bargain bin at one shoe store with my mother but even that hadn't prepare me for the physical endurance that a Christmas spree with Jonathan requires. But, to be fair, I'm not so sure it was Jonathan's ambitiousness as much as it was the gargantuanness of this shopping mall that had us zipping through stores for the greater part of the day. I mean, this mall is so big that it has 2 Starbuckses which are a good 15 minute hike apart. But given the sensitive nature of the activities that took place and the goods that were purchased during this event, I am limited in what I can share here. Sorry. The important part is that we had fun, sipping gingerbread lattes on our arrival and spicy apple ciders on our departure with a lot of cash register dings, and "Santa Baby" singalongs in between.

And on that note, I bid you goodnight. Thanks Ben for the Calvin strips (More to come).

Naps, hockey, and home cooking

Aren't things looking up.

Don't worry - this one won't get too political - although I do have a few things to say about gun violence in Vancouver clubs. It strikes me as a bit loony to serve liquor to gun-laden young men in a dark, noisy, crowded environment owned by Vancouver's organized crime, and mix this with copious amounts of drugs, and a bunch of rowdy young (but dear-eyed) college students just looking to have a good time.

We'll leave that for another day, but I think it's safe to say, that issue is definitely not looking up.

So this week has been a bit of a bender for Jonathan and I. Over an eight day period, Jonathan (I kid you not) had three 20-page papers, two "take homes" (a whopping 20-pager plus a breezy 12-page final assignment) and one big ugly statistics final to accomplish. I had an equally exhausting week. I cooked, cleaned, baked, and polished up the drafts of papers I'd written weeks ago. Woe was us.

Until today. Jonathan handed in his last 40 pages of work and what a day it has been. Sunny, warm (+5 degrees), I napped for the greater part of the day, and Jonathan actually did a little victory hop-skip-twirl number just a couple hours ago. The house is clean (you should have seen the dust bunnies earlier through), and tonight we plan to feast on Nat's home cooking, apple cider, beer, and Christmas delicacies otherwise known as the procrastinatory baking I did a couple days ago. Currently, Jonathan is watching episodes of The Simpsons on his laptop, and I am taking a break from my second day's nap. With candles lit, Leonard Cohen playing, and not a single paper or intelligent sentence nagging to be written, life is indeed, that good.

Plus, the Sens play the Canucks tonight and that could get exciting, especially since, unlike other nights, we get to watch it! 2nd in the West vs. 1st in the East? All on home turf? Could a better NHL game serve itself up on a shinier silver platter today? I think not.

Naps, hockey, and home cooking

Aren't things looking up.

Don't worry - this one won't get too political - although I do have a few things to say about gun violence in Vancouver clubs. It strikes me as a bit loony to serve liquor to gun-laden young men in a dark, noisy, crowded environment owned by Vancouver's organized crime, and mix this with copious amounts of drugs, and a bunch of rowdy young (but dear-eyed) college students just looking to have a good time.

We'll leave that for another day, but I think it's safe to say, that issue is definitely not looking up.

So this week has been a bit of a bender for Jonathan and I. Over an eight day period, Jonathan (I kid you not) had three 20-page papers, two "take homes" (a whopping 20-pager plus a breezy 12-page final assignment) and one big ugly statistics final to accomplish. I had an equally exhausting week. I cooked, cleaned, baked, and polished up the drafts of papers I'd written weeks ago. Woe was us.

Until today. Jonathan handed in his last 40 pages of work and what a day it has been. Sunny, warm (+5 degrees), I napped for the greater part of the day, and Jonathan actually did a little victory hop-skip-twirl number just a couple hours ago. The house is clean (you should have seen the dust bunnies earlier through), and tonight we plan to feast on Nat's home cooking, apple cider, beer, and Christmas delicacies otherwise known as the procrastinatory baking I did a couple days ago. Currently, Jonathan is watching episodes of The Simpsons on his laptop, and I am taking a break from my second day's nap. With candles lit, Leonard Cohen playing, and not a single paper or intelligent sentence nagging to be written, life is indeed, that good.

Plus, the Sens play the Canucks tonight and that could get exciting, especially since, unlike other nights, we get to watch it! 2nd in the West vs. 1st in the East? All on home turf? Could a better NHL game serve itself up on a shinier silver platter today? I think not.

Getting Serious

Today, I have something important to say. No, it's not about Jonathan's goats, or the digestive magic of corn, or about Harry Potter, blogging etiquette, or the coolness of President's Choice products.

Today, we get political.

It only makes sense, if you think about it. After all, Jon and I, we are scholars (I say "scholars" with an impeccable British accent, so I would advise you to start from the top and make it punchy when you get to the "scholars" part). I said this yesterday with reference to our fights (or rather, lack thereof). Bickering, quite frankly, is for the masses. We prefer to synthesize the underlying institutional structures, tease out the socio-political factors, and deconstruct conceptual paradigms, in order to articulate (and defend) our mutually exclusive positions.

And not only are Jonathan and I scholars, we are political scientists. My brother, Neil, thinks this is funny. He looks down on political scientists. I gave up defending them long ago. I am even more inclined to cut my losses now, given that I will very soon have 5 siblings knowledgeable in the engineering. And so, this just might be my finally opportunity to defend an area of study that I so dearly love. It's not political science, but it's close - it's policy.

First off, I would like to point out, that its not easy being a political scientist. Political scientists have to grapple every day with the fact that they have no idea what they study or how they are studying it. It's true - while economists have their traditional principles (individuals are self-interested, rational, utility-maximizers), and scientists have their methodology, political scientists are no less than a bunch of siblings squabbling with one another. Some like to pretend they are "scientists", others "economists", and even others "artists". The artist types scare me a bit. I don't know where I fit but I'd like to think I'm not playing their game.

But I do play their game; I can't help it. Lately, I've become obsessed with reading the comments the general public posts on the Globe and Mail website in response to specific articles. Some articles garner a whopping 200 comments. I read them. I can't help it - it's fascinating to consider the way normal, non-political science people must think. And quite frankly, it gets to me. Wimpy unrealistic, counter productive sugary naive Jack-Laytonesque comments irritate me. On the other hand, Conservative Christian remarks downright frighten me. And boy are they rampant on the Globe and Mail website.

Take this for example - A 25-year old man was executed in Singapore for drug trafficking. His mother wasn't even allowed to hug him before she watched her son die. Did the comments from the public ever flood in. A lot of them remarked "Good for Singapore - Given the lives destroyed by drug trafficking, the punishment was perhaps not harsh enough". My response? Fine, it's true - drug trafficking destroys lives. An earth-shattering amount of them. But so does AIDS, so does war, so does smoking, and pollution. And so does the growing disparity of income. Who is to blame for all these things? It's impossible to pin-point one individual. As for who is responsible for the deaths due to drugs, prudence, ethics, and pragmatics dictates that it doesn't begin and end with drug dealers.

The lives we all live and luxuries we enjoy are undeniably at the expense of the lives of others. Really. The $1,000 couch Jonathan and I bought in September could have fed and housed the cold and frail homeless man that lives down the street. It could buy anti-viral triple therapy for a child born with AIDS in Swaziland.

It could, but it didn't.

In response to Neil for the uselessness of my discipline, this is what I have to say: You study power - physical power - it's properties, medium, and results with particular embedded systems. I study power in a more difficult, but equally real sense. I study why women contract AIDS more than men; I study why AIDS interventions fail and what are the power structures that allow them to fail - like the denial of a problem by African politicians who believe that such 'Western diseases' won't spread in their countries, or the gender-bias policies that target condom use at women to control men even though women have little power in sexual relations, or the hazardous Christian-Right ideology that perpetuates the problem with abstinence-only approaches.

These are the things that get to me, and I must say, I am growing more and more concerned about the quickness of humanity to judge, to throw the very helpful "treat others as I'd want to be treated" maxism out the window. To some degree, we should all aspire to be good political scientists, to be pragmatic and prudent in what we would think about others.

Consider this actual case: a Canadian boy has been charged with throwing a grenade at an American soldier in Iraq. He is being held in the U.S. and could possibly face the death penalty. Canadians posted on the Globe and Mail article shouting "hooray for the U.S." and "hang him right away". Such haste in condemning a boy to death before even being convicted of the crime. These very individuals would be mortified if one day, they were picked up and convicted arbitrarily for something, while their fellow Canadians waved signs of condemnation and death against them for crimes they had yet to stand trial on.

Another case - a student of mine wrote a paper proposal. Her thesis was "Immigrants in Canada are ruining Canadian culture". To prove this, she said she would argue that minorities are given priority over Canadian in the work force and that immigrants aren't deported when they commit crimes. Again, what haste! First off, minorities aren't the same as immigrants. And second immigrants (who are citizens) aren't deported when they commit crimes because Canada is their country! They are Canadians in the very same sense that this young Caucasian woman was.

I'm not sure where I was going with this but I know it was somewhere very important. As much as political scientists infuriate me for being so vague and wishy washy in their analysis, it's the extreme views of the general public that concern me. As a society we love to blame, to punish, and condemn. We love to paint terrorists as cowardly monsters. My opinion - fine, go ahead and think that, if it makes you sleep better at night and feel good about yourself. But doing so doesn't illuminate the problem in anyway. That is perhaps the saving grace of political science - it means deconstructing problems. The purpose isn't to hang people, or to deem them monsters. The purpose is to understand the reasons for human behaviour and resolve them. The coercive power of an ill-conceived faith, a poor, destitute and impoverished existence, a rage and desire to blame someone for it, as well as the loss of some family member, a wife or child. Together, is it not possible that these things could be power mechanisms at play in the life of any particular suicide bomber? Is it not most important to understand and resolve these issues?

Sima

Holiday Greetings

Greeting Friends & Family,

In the spirit of Rick Mercer's Blog, I've decided to take up my wifely (my mother's going to love this one) duties and write our first ever annual Christmas letter.

Things are well in the Jima household. Eyebrows temporarily raised in class this morning, when Jonathan and I sat two chairs apart. Sherry skirted in just before the professor to steal the seat between us, to then ask "you guys aren't fighting are you?". I would add that all eyes were on us, but that would be unnecessary dramatic.

Jon and I, fight? Nay. We're scholars. We debate. We analyze. We deconstruct. We don't fight.

In this case, it wasn't a disagreement but rather, body temperature that was the culprit.
Allow me to explain, as I did to Sherry in class.

Jon grew up on a farm in Quebec. They had the cutest goats - you should really see the pictures sometime. But follow me on this; I'm really going somewhere. You see, I think this is why he always decides to sits at the back of the classroom as he did this morning - it's far away from the seats informally reserved for keeners, but more importantly, the back of the room is adjacent to the drafty windows, which only a tough I-milk-my-goats-at-6-am-on-frigid-winter-mornings young man could endure.

Frankly, on snowy Thursday mornings, my bones just don't fair well in such drafty conditions. After all, my people are from India...Certainly centuries of biological adaptation can not have been reversed in my first generational exposure at birth to a bit of prairie-frost. But I digress.

Anyways, the point being, Jonathan seems to do well, even thrive in cold climates and so you see the one seat distance between us in class was necessary for us to maintain our respectively ideal body temperatures while enjoying each other's company. After all, one can hardly be expected to engage in intellectual banter with cold ears and frigid feet?

But the morning, like the rest of the day is far behind us. With advent chocolate, left-over quiche, and balsamic greens, gurgling in our stomachs, we've decided to retire for the evening. Jonathan is furiously chipping away at his last two term papers, his final exam on Saturday, and his two take-homes due next week. I however, have spent my evening perusuing the web to avoid that single lingering take-home assign that I have due next Thursday. For me, life is good. For Jon, life will be better in a mere 7 days.

And my, what great things we look forward to. Next Saturday, the Sens play the Canucks - Jon will drink his first beer in a long, long time (followed by others, he says), we'll have some pre-game fish (and chips!) fresh right on the dock in Steveston, a fishing village on the southern tip of Richmond, B.C., and then we watch the game at Nat's humble abode, otherwise known as the final resting spot of the closest television owned by a family member.

In more Christmas-letter speak, looking back on the last year, we have many things to reflect on. An engagement, a wedding, a graduation, two new degrees and tons of scholarship money, a cross-country move, many missed friends and family, and one big blog. We miss you all - and can't wait to see some of you, like Emma in Toronto, Brendan in St.Catherines, and Katie and Ravi in Winnipeg. The rest of you, shame for not spending your hard earned Christmas bonus to be in all the places we plan on visiting this festive holiday season.

Currently playing: Kim Richey's "Reel Me In", a bit of slow and sultry jazz

Well, my good friends, this wasn't really very much of a Christmas letter, but indeed it's my first. And it is bound to get better. So stay tuned. Oak and 12th has yet to have the final word.

Merry Elexmas. (And go Green!)