Evil banks

In solidarity with c-bizzkit, I'm posting an article I wrote for the McGill Tribune when I was a columnist for them many years ago. I would also like to mention that this article helped me score chicks; my woman read this years before she met me and decided that whoever wrote it must be a real hot shit. And so when we met and she found out that I was the person who wrote it, we broke out the champagne then and there, toasted eternal love borne of anti-corporate bitterness, and we've never looked back. Or something like that.

Take the Money and Run

I offer today’s words not as a radically original worldview, nor as especially
insightful economic commentary, but rather as a well-deserved reiteration of something that has frequently been observed, and which is quite apparent after even a moment’s reflection: In this country, a few big banks run the world, and their power comes at the expense of their customers.
Once upon a time, when I was a lad, I had a paper route. I would put the money I earned (less what I spent on hookers) into my savings account at the local savings bank. This was a great arrangement. I kept my money there, and the bank said, “Thank you for entrusting us with your hard-earned money. We shall reward you by paying you a small percentage of the amount you have in our bank. We shall call this “interest”.” It was a wonderful thing. And get a load of this – when I needed money, I actually went to the bank and withdrew cash from my account. Service with a smile, everyone was happy.
What the hell happened?
Today, there are about four banks in the whole country. No one uses cash; the
banks have convinced us there’s no need. Instead, they’ve fostered a blind dependency on bank and Interac cards. All banking is done through machines: withdrawals, deposits, transfers between accounts. The people running the show would rather have a sharp stick in the eye than a customer actually physically present at their bank. And the real kick in the ass is that, after forcing these bank cards on you in the name of convenience, they turn around and charge you for using them!
I have tried to fight the system, but it is an uphill battle. In Montreal, I have an account at a large downtown bank, whose name I will not divulge, except to say that it rhymes with “Stotia Bank”, its address is 1002 Sherbrooke West, and its phone number is 499-5432. I opened the account for one purpose alone: so I could have a place to cash my paychecks. The problem is, however, that whenever I go to the bank to perform this seemingly simple task, turmoil ensues, because I refuse to get a (rhymes with) “StotiaCard”. Every month, when I go to cash a check, a scene like the following occurs:
I head to the back of the line-up, which stretches virtually to Nova Scotia, because this bank, which occupies an entire skyscraper, apparently never has more than one teller working. When it finally is my turn, I tell them I’d like to cash a check, and present them with my savings account passbook. It is looked at with scorn.
Them: “Can I see your card?”
Me: “ I don’t have one.”
Looks of disbelief and contempt. It is announced that they will “need to see some identification”. After producing several pieces of photo ID, a copy of my birth certificate, a wedding picture of my parents, and my junior high locker combination, it is determined that this is still not sufficient “identification”. The teller nods to the nurse on duty. She springs onto action. Blood is drawn and centrifuged. They check for minor antigens and cross-reference the results with my Hema-Quebec blood donor file. I’m asked to pee in a cup right there in front of all the other customers. I’m just zipping up when Nurse Hathoway’s evil twin jabs a syringe into the base of my skull and fills it up with nerve cells from my brain stem. They are sent off to be carbon dated to see if they match the information on my birth certificate.
Eventually it is verified that I am who I say I am, my check is cashed and I am
released, begrudgingly. I stumble out onto the street, more shaken up than Bond’s martini. But I raise my fist to the sun, clutching a $20 bill and shouting victory. The war is not over, but I have won another battle. Think of me the next time you use your Interac card to pay for a candy bar at the dep…

Walk-by trashing

I was watching "The A-Team" on the boob tube last night when I heard what sounded like someone punching my front door. I dismissed this possibility almost immediately, though, thinking: a) I hadn't heard anyone walking up the front steps, which I can usually hear and b) why would someone deliver a solitary punch to my front door, and just leave it at that?

I decided that it was probably the neighbour acting up. She is known in the neighbourhood as a dog torturer, because she has two big black labs that stay cooped up in her small apartment for days at a time, barking like crazy and tearing the place apart, because she tends to go MIA. At any rate, I figured she was probably throwing things or doing something crazy. So I decided to step out onto the front porch to see if I could see any activity in her apartment. Upon opening the front door, however, I solved the mystery (or rather, the mystery solved itself). Lying on the porch directly in front of the door was a busted open garbage bag. Someone had taken a bag of trash from the street (it being garbage day the next day, there were plenty available) and chucked it at my front door!

The contents had spilled onto the porch and included an ice-cream scooper, an empty carton of ice-cream, cigarette butts, dessicated tea bags and ripped-up lottery tickets. I picked up the bag, spilling as little as I could, and put it in a garbage can out on the curb in front of the crazy neighbour's house. Then I used a snow shovel to scoop up the cigarette butts and tea bags.

In the park at the end of the street, there were some teenagers that had a miscreant air about them. I immediately blamed them in my head, but realized this was wild speculation. I had to be realistic: it's not like I haven't made enemies.

Son of Man

Found an old notebook of mine from my first year of university (1997-1998), which contained the beginning of story called "Son of Man". Here's the first paragraph:

Jesus of Nazareth stood watering the flowers in front of his house in Franklin, Oregon, on a lovely June day in the year of our Lord 1998. His neighbours, the Labazy's (Ted and Ann, with their twins Michael and Julia, and new baby, Peter) had just pulled into their driveway next door and they all flashed him a neighbourly wave and a toothy smile as they piled out of the car and into the house. Jesus, who was wearing a bathrobe and Birkenstocks and humming "If I had a Hammer" under his breath, waved back and with a wry grin pondered about how the shit would hit the fan if he was ever found out, alive and well, living in a little house all alone in the Pacific Northwest.

Now, I find some of the actual prose a bit clichéd and amateurish (for example, now I would never write phrases like "toothy smile" and "wry grin" - I think I'm much more adverse to adjectives in general, but maybe at the time I was going for a populist, mainstream fiction tone). However, I like the premise. Maybe in another seven years I'll re-read this post and actually do some work on the story.

I took a job

A few years ago, I had been laid off from a fairly low-stress, cushy job. More even than money, I needed to get another job so I could stay in Canada (at that point I hadn't yet officially immigrated as a permanent resident). So after a couple of months of unemployment, I took a job in an awful suburb north of Montreal. The commute was brutal. I didn't have a car, so I took the metro to the end of the line, then took a bus for a long time. It took an hour and a half each way. The office was in a short, square office building. In front of it there was a highway. On the other side of the highway was a shopping mall. Behind the mall was another highway. To the left of the office: a road with more offices. To the right: A bus terminal. My desk was in a crowded, windowless room.

It was the end of winter. Elsewhere this would be spring. Not in an awful suburb north of Montreal.

I made friends with a co-worker who had also just started there. He was from eastern Europe. We had the same middle name. Sometimes at lunch or breaks, he and I would go outside, just to get out of the office. We'd walk around the parking lot, making laps around the building. He'd smoke. Pretty soon, we were deep into April, and we'd go outside for our walks with high expectations. But we were always disappointed. It just never stopped snowing or sleeting and it was always windy and cold. (Of course it was windy, it was an industrial wasteland, no trees to get in the way of wind.) But we were desperate for escape from dark office drudgery. We started making bigger laps. We walked to the far ends of the parking lot. And then one day, we just decided to start walking down one of the highways, until we found something. I mean, we didn't say, "Let's walk until we find something", but that's what was in our minds. And so we took a long walk and eventually we came to a break in the buildings and roads. It was a little patch of land that had been cleared. They were going to build something there. The ground was all muddy and there was a hole filled with muddy water. But there was some vegetation growing around the muddy pit! It was great. We stopped there and talked about why they would dig such a hole.

Then we went back to work and had to stay late because we had taken such a long walk at lunch.
Eventually that company moved its office to downtown Montreal and I liked the job much better. They laid me off in the fall.

For all of our native tongues, we're all natives here

As you may or may not know, my ultimate plan is to retire to the country and live off the phat of the land. But as a lover of language and languages, while I'm at this stage in my life where city-dwelling is convenient, I have to say that Montreal is the place to be. Earlier this week, I was at a panel discussion on cochlear implants. On the panel were two Deaf individuals who spoke American Sign Language. As a result, there was an ASL/English interpreter. This sounds (relatively) straightforward. But of course in reality it was more interesting than that. Neither of the Deaf panelists had learned ASL as a first signed language; one was from Quebec and had learned LSQ (langue de signes québecoise), the other was from Israel and was a native speaker of Israeli Sign Language. Furthermore, the ASL interpreter was a French speaker who wasn't great in English. So, the situation was as follows: Two L2 ASL signers (with different L1s) signed in ASL through a hearing interpreter, who did her best to translate into English (her L3). When she didn't know the correct way to say something in English, she said it in French, at which point the audience (which consisted of mainly English-French bilinguals) would call out the correct translation, and the interpreter would say "thank you" (or sometimes "merci").

I love it!

Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?

At the risk of mimicking Kai von Fintel's Geek Notes, I want to tout Google's (beta version of an) academic search tool, Google Scholar. I have to say, the results are excellent, and there is no need for Boolean query operators, mapping search terms to pre-chosen keywords, inclusion/exclusion of subheadings, etc., as is the case with most commercial academic databases. There are a few features that I'm not nuts about (e.g. the results consist of both actual documents that match your keywords, as well as documents that cite documents that are relevant to your keywords, and there is no way to ask for just one or the other), but overall, I'm sold. Especially in light of my latest discovery: Years ago, I read about a study at the University of Georgia where they got a bunch of subjects, administered a questionnaire to determine the subjects' level of homophobia, showed them all sexually explicit material which included homosexual images, and then measured the degree of penile engorgement (i.e. whether they get hard while watching the gay porn). The interesting result was that the homophobes stiffened up much more often than their tolerant counterparts.

Anyway, I always thought this was a brilliant study with a perfect result, providing an interesting explanation of some of the psychological underpinnings of anti-gay sentiment (i.e. suppression of a shame-inducing element of the self). But I always wondered if this study was real - I mean, the results seem almost too neat and tidy.

So, this morning, I typed "homophobia arousal" into Google Scholar and immediately found the study! And guess what? The summary I had read was dead on. So there you go: The next time some jackass homophobe is yammering on, take pity - he's really a frustrated closet case, jealous of all the hot gay love his prejudices are making him miss out on.

Here's the abstract of the study:

The authors investigated the role of homosexual arousal in exclusively heterosexual men who admitted negative affect toward homosexual individuals. Participants consisted of a group of homophobic men (n = 35) and a group of nonhomophobic men (n = 29); they were assigned to groups on the basis of their scores on the Index of Homophobia (W. W. Hudson & W. A. Ricketts, 1980). The men were exposed to sexually explicit erotic stimuli consisting of heterosexual, male homosexual, and lesbian videotapes, and changes in penile circumference were monitored. They also completed an Aggression Questionnaire (A. H. Buss & M. Perry, 1992). Both groups exhibited increases in penile circumference to the heterosexual and female homosexual videos. Only the homophobic men showed an increase in penile erection to male homosexual stimuli. The groups did not differ in aggression. Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.

The drive

I've lived in Montreal for 7.5 years but am originally from Scituate, Massachusetts, a town about 45 minutes south of Boston. During these years, I have made the drive between my two homes so many times, in owned, borrowed, rented cars, and I never tire of it. I especially love the long stretch of empty highway in Vermont (I was going to write "rural Vermont", but that's like writing "died fatally"). This stretch of road is totally desolate at night - few other cars, total darkness, only the occasional dim light of a distant house or farm. This same bit of country -it runs through a sort of valley in the Green Mountains - is prone to extreme weather. I have driven through some of the most intense rain and snow I have ever experienced on that road. Totally dangerous - if you went off the road into the ditch, it could be the next day before someone notices you - but also thrilling; driving through storms, I usually turn off the radio and talk to myself out loud, encouraging, advising, commenting, heckling.

Doing the Montreal-Boston drive in winter and summer evoke different memories and associations. Like, for winter:

Driving down to visit my family for Christmas one year in my 1990 Grand Am that had no heat. The temperature outside was absolutely glacial. The windshielf kept icing up from my frozen breath but I had no way to defrost it. Sometimes I would crank the fan, even though there was no heat, hoping that a bit of the warmth generated by the engine would blow into the car. I don't think this worked. When I got out of the car at the end of the drive, I was virtually paralyzed from the waist down; the cold had driven the blood into the (relatively) warmer climes of deep tissue and my leg muscles were sort of useless.

In summer:

The best summer drive is going from Boston back to Montreal, leaving in the evening, with the Red Sox on the radio. I listen to the game on AM radio through Massachusetts and New Hampshire, the signal fading slowly along with the daylight. Somewhere in Vermont, both are gone. Baseball on the radio. That's old school. I never knew either of my grandfathers, but that's what I picture grandfathers doing. Sitting around, drinking beer, wearing just white t-shirts, listening to baseball on the radio.

Hey Grandpa, what are you doing this weekend? Want to rent a car and drive down to Boston, then turn right back around?