Po(st-)Mo(dern) Waste Case

Every public post-secondary education system is a lot like a junky old car. Not only do we need to spend money on gas to keep the engine operating, the price of which increases year over year, as the car ages we need to spend more and more money on parts and repairs, the price of which also increases every year. Some might just say, “fuck it, walk or take a bike,” but that would mean that one couldn’t travel as far or as quickly and would have to rely on others to get around. By that same token, buying a whole new car wouldn’t really save us any money in the long term, because it is bound to become a junky old car within a few years and any potential savings will be eaten up by financing fees. So realistically, we can either concede that owning a car is expensive or simply drive less in hopes of controlling our costs.

Tuition fees are the money. Save for advertising and the odd “here’s ten bucks for driving me somewhere that you were going to anyways” payment (donations without conditions [which are very rare and very small]) and corporate partnerships [which are huge, but fraught with conditions]), tuition (to which I include the share contributed by the government, because it goes into the same pot) serves as the only sizable cash input that schools have to work with. Sure, they can increase the total amount of money available by enrolling more students, but that would mean having to hire more staff, purchase more resources and spending more on maintaining the ones that already exist, because these new students are going to need them. Schools that have tired this end up getting a bad reputation for inaccessible resources, overcrowded lecture halls, not enough residence rooms and so on. Once word gets around, this prompts students to choose other schools instead, which brings us back to square one or worse.

The engine is teaching staff and the gas is what they’re paid. While the rise of adjuncts and TAs in more active teaching roles has allowed universities to keep salary costs  down, the MBA cokeheads who run universities seem to think that paying people a third of what “real” profs are paid is sustainable. That’s why the contract faculty at my alma mater are so “strike happy!” In the end, while less costly than full-time, tenure-track staff, we can’t keep paying these educators less than the people who process student loans applications. The best of them will follow better paying teaching jobs or even leave the sector all together, and soon it will become hard to attract good people to careers in academia. Want to experience this first hand? Enroll in any program at a Ontario community college and you’ll find instructors who can’t teach, don’t want to teach and who can barely understand what they’re supposed to be teaching. That’s because they can earn much more money in the private sector, because that’s what rationally self-interested people who aren’t complete idiots do instead of teaching.

The mechanical components and other consumables are like the greater school apparatus. Everything from the computers and chairs in the mass labs, to the exceedingly jovial guy at the employment centre, to the board of governors. Whenever some asshole smashes a chair in the library, because he’s raging against the machine or wants to impress a girl, the school is able to buy fewer books that year. Whenever some “mens’ rights” loser blacks out the entire contents of a rare feminist theory textbook, which happens to be the only copy in Canada and one that I needed to check a reference in, that book either doesn’t get replaced or the school has to pay through the nose to replace it. And when students complain about all of the goose shit and ugly art on campus, it’s tuition fees that go towards cleaning up and beautifying the campus.

If you’ve ever owned a junky old car, you’ll be familiar with the mantra of “I’ll put a $1000 into it and then it will be fine for a few months” only to have something else break a few weeks later. Schools are they same way.

Owners of junky old cars tend to adhere a false economy and self-defeating asceticism that sees them trying to use their cars less in order to conserve gas and save on repairs, as well as simply ignoring problems or remedying them with bandage solutions. Tuition fee freezes are something like this wanton ignorance and thrift. Because with less money, schools end up simply not replacing or adding new resources, offering new programs or reviewing the ones that they already have, fearing what they might find. But usually they just cap enrollment at a level that can be sustained with current inputs of cash. Which is like saying, “I’m only going to drive to and from work, and nowhere else.” At that point, why bother owning a car in the first place? And why bother having universities if they’re just going to suck and be no better than on-line only schools.

The student protesters are big on talking up this idea of access to education. If tuition fees are too high, they argue, those who want and are able to pursue post-secondary education but can’t afford it, will be shut out of both school and the potential for socioeconomic mobility. That’s true, but it’s only half of the story. The other half is that, when schools are forced to cap enrollment in order to contain costs, some qualified students are going to be shut out because there aren’t enough seats to offer them. Because the number of applications to post-secondary institutions continues to increase year or year, the number of those without access increases as well. This is exactly what happened when British Columbia experimented with tuition freezes.

In sum, tuition fee increases suck, but they’re necessary if we want to maintain a good and just post-secondary education system. However, the burden shouldn’t be placed entirely on the backs of students. The industries that are served by what schools produce — skilled workers — need to carry their share of the inevitable increases as well.

A well educated workforce is infinitely better than a poorly education one. At the macro level, well educated workers make much better employees than poorly educated ones. They produce more, innovate more, learn better, make for better colleagues and problem solve better and faster, among other benefits, which on the whole makes industry more competitive and more prosperous. However, as they pay ever less in tax and as the price of labour declines because of an increasing supply of educated workers, industry has been getting these better workers for a song for far too long, despite the fact that the cost of producing them continues to increase. Simply put, industry is taking out of our educated workforce, in the form of profit, productivity and innovation, much more than they’re contributing to its creation.

Tuition fee increases are easy for government because the political cost is practically nothing. By contrast, tax increases or levies on businesses that benefit from an educated workforce are politically costly. There isn’t a liberal or a conservative politician holding state power in the liberal world who even entertain raising taxes on business in order to pay for the things that enable the expansion of their profitability. So get used to tuition increases! Because while corporations may be people, no one said that they were anything like adults.

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) — “North Korea” to those of you brainwashed by the wicked Yankee blue jeans imperialist running dog media — is pretty much what my life would look like if it were a country. Like myself, the DPRK is hermetic to the point of total isolation, fallaciously described as being communist or otherwise gives communism a bad name, is desperate for attention, and when not suffering the innumerable embarrassments of its “failure to launch,” channels its scant resources into utterly pointless endeavours aimed at impressing parties who will never give a single fuck, any day.

When I was attending public school in exurban Ontario, every grade eight class had to take a day-long field trip to Toronto to see and do “Toronto things,” like seeing the GAP store in the P.A.T.H subterranean shopping mall, riding on the TTC and visiting the Toronto Stock Exchange back when there was an actual trading floor. The motivation behind this trips was to expose country bumpkins to life in the big smoke, as a matter of culturing us and making us face the fear that all of us supposedly had of the Big City.

I took a pass on this trip, because I found it demeaning and because school trips to Toronto always ended up with my parents forgetting to pick me up from school and me sobbing uncontrollably, cold and alone, in the parking lot until it got dark and they realized that I was missing. Other students were really excited for it, thinking that a day trip to Toronto would be a transformative experience, akin to returning their spirit to its home. The one goth kid came to school the day of the trip with her look turned to eleven, as far as small town goth fashion was concerned (a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, black skirt, fishnet stockings and black nail polish), perhaps imagining that she’d encounter a fellow goth on the street and that they’d become fast friends. Similarly, the group of boys who had just discovered hip hop were jazzed by the prospect of encountering actual urban black men, like the ones from Naughty by Nature videos. While they boarded the bus, I went to spend the day doing mindless busy work in a classroom with students in another homeroom who had gone on the trip the day before. I got to listen to their classroom discussions about how “unique”, “interesting” and “different” Toronto was, and how some couldn’t wait to grow up and move there. I tried not to laugh while I struggled with math problems.

In high school, I was hanging out with the faux-burn-outs (read, white kids who smoke a little pot and came from good upper-middle-class homes and would ultimately do well in life), playing guitar in the smoking area, while they discussed their plans to move to Toronto after graduation. “I have to move there. I’m drawn there,” the girl with maybe fifteen facial piercings said in an impassioned tone. “That’s where my people are.” That’s when the significance of Toronto finally hit me.

Toronto — where small town weirdos go to meet and fawn over the uniqueness of other small town weirdos. Such is the consequence of being a city with a high concentration of colleges and universities and being the long-time hub of a national economy that turns on economic migration. This is why anyone who refers to themselves as a “life-long Torontonian”, or something to take affect, actually grew up in Eastern Mississauga. Actual Torontonians, transplants or not, self-identify by their respective neighbourhoods, perhaps because they want to disassociate themselves from

Having gained this knowledge too early in life really messed me up, because it kept me from envisioning my soul being received in Toronto. I’ve never had that rank Canadian drive to risk it all and relocate to Toronto or, even Vancouver for that matter. It might be symptomatic of my dislike of everything Tim Horton’s.

When I was a teenager, Toronto represented Saturday day trips to “the Big HMV”, Tower Records and Sam the Record Man to buy seven-inches and back catalogue CDs that you couldn’t find in the suburbs and beyond, capped off by Extra Value meals at the Eaton’s Centre McDonald’s and being picked up by a friend’s mom at the Yorkdale TTC station. There isn’t any magic, just shame and regret, in shopping trips. 

As an adult, Toronto is an overpriced, boring and unconvincingly pretentious city. It’s meeting liberal phonies at the Centre for Social Innovation for demeaning “job” interviews — meaning internships disguised as paid work — with their media and tech start-ups. It’s having to pick coins, sticky from stall beer, off of slippery bar tops because bartenders aren’t courteous enough to drop your change into your hand, citing illogical health concerns (you’re already handling dirty money, literally, how does dropping it in my hand constitute poor hygiene?) but really it’s because they expect you to leave it there as a tip. It’s paying $1500 a month to live in a shoebox in Regent Park, where you still have to take a bus to find fresh produce beyond what one might put into an iceberg lettuce and orange dressing salad. Save for gawking at and announcing the make and model of the luxury cars that pass through Yorkville on an early summer Friday night, everything else is totally inaccessible to a person of limited means and zero prospects, such as myself.

Recently a friend, who gently insists that I move out of my parents basement and get on with my shitty life, told me that she could land us a one bedroom, with bunk beds mind you (which only adds to the awesomeness of heterosocial cohabitation), for $1200 in the city’s “Junction” neighbourhood. That’s where people my age who’ve actually made something of themselves and even deliberately created new lives go to sustain, with the benefit of status and wealth afforded them by “Creative” labour, the otherwise encumbering and embarrassing kidult lifestyle for a few more years before moving to the suburbs. The presence of this class has steadily revived this quaint little enclave that used to shutdown at 6pm into something novel. In other words, it’s what those who dreamed about Toronto created when they stopped dreaming and actually started living it. Something like the suburbs, but unlike the suburbs.

While the term has been in use since the 1980s, the union between trash and television was finally consummated with the show Storage Wars, with the power couples’ offspring being the innumerable programs about pawn brokers, “pickers”, used car dealerships and “horders” that have captivated audiences as of late. These shows are literally trash television – boring, formulaic, shows about turning other people’s refuse into profit. Perhaps the next hit series is to be found in the third world, where our toxic tech toys are finally shipped to be chemically striped of their trace precious metals by children, who breathe in the residual toxic vapours. No, I’m just kidding, such a show would be accused of being too edifying for its lack of a cast of mealy-mouthed, lumpen-capitalists. Unless producers can somehow work in a montage of overweight men riding mini-motorcycles that they scored at an auction for five bucks, something like that is better suited to a pedantic public broadcasting forum, like the CBC.

I don’t subscribe to cable. I’ve familiarized myself with these shows by watching them, without audio, in the cardio-theatre at my gym. (Which means that I’m reading and exercising more than the target audience.) I but if I did pay for cable, I would be really upset to find that after paying $50 a month my viewing options where limited to watching the “real” lives of vapid trophy wives, cage fighting, absurd vehicle repossessions, prosaic sports commentary from former sportsmen set to highlight reels, and marginally employable guys who convince themselves that mouldly blankets draped over something bears the form of motorcycles or valuable works of art (could this replace the Rorschach test within psychoanalysis?). Or that instead of original scripted programming that reflects the social zeitgeist, every other channel is airing reruns of Third Rock from the Sun, Mad About You, Seinfeld, Friends and Two and a Half Men. “The good stuff” that TV critics all cream their khakis for – your Flight of the Mad Men smoking Weeds on a Wire, or other programming that I’m too poor to be familiar with — is relegated to the expensive third-tier specialty channels or stopped at the border by a Cold War era cultural embargo meant to keep American influence out, but never really worked because Whitney and TMZ are still on my television. In the US, the latter is legitimately considered a news program and as the great dumb-dumb goes, so does Canada.

When this society finally collapses, (sooner than latter, please), I sincerely hope that future archeologists don’t discover stacks of celebrity gossip magazines and DVRs filled with TLC and OLN programming, which bring them to the conclusion that the Kardashians were our monarchs and that men were employed as either garbage pickers, prize fighters or stylists. But what is to be done in the present? How are people who actually want something to chew on supposed to endure a culture that alienates and malnourishes their intellect? The answer is public broadcasting.

Public broadcasting is a lot like the legal apparatus – we collectively use it to uphold our laws and constitution and to maintain our freedoms. However, most of us never directly access the courts or policing, so we don’t realize the role that the legal apparatus plays why we need to contribute to it. It’s like air. Air that keeps “bad people” in jail and makes damn sure that, if they leave their neighbourhoods or preordained station in society, a cop will be there to stop and ask them for their identification. Public television plays an inverse role. Instead of boxing people in, it lets the many roam free while maintaining a conservancy of cultivation. If it wasn’t for the CBC, eggheads would be barging in on Man Verses Food to ask if there’s not a soy alternative to the 20kg hamburger with seventy-five fried eggs on it, and getting all bristly when the cook can’t verify that those eggs were free range. How about some interpretive dance, modest outfits and contestants from the world of literature on Dancing With the Stars? Nobody wants this.

Why should public media consumers have to pay to gird themselves from the pollution that others pumped into the mental environment? We need a carbon tax, but for media and culture. We could tack it onto the sale of gossip rags, Ed Hardy t-shirts, UFC pay-per-view fees and every time someone pauses to consider enrolling at Everest College. That money would then be put towards making enough public media to keep the granola set occupied while Jeremy Kyle Show viewers add to record levels of consumer debt by taking out payday loans at usury rates.

Having a pulse and sentience means that you must negotiate your way through a world that’s experiencing a turf war between opposing camps of moralisers and oracles of “the way it is” and the way it ought to be. Somewhere along the way, you’re going to offend some or all of them and will need to issue an apology. That doesn’t mean that you can’t still stand your ground.

Even if what you said is proven to be irrefutably false or simply illogical, don’t ever let anyone force you into issuing a full apology. Instead, structure your apology like this.

Above all, never say that you were wrong about what you said or wrong to say it. Instead, diplomatically apologize for what you think you did.

I would like to apologize for making light of the common belief that people who dress a certain way are known for certain behaviours.   

Next, cite anecdotal evidence or endorsements from like minded persons of vague neutrality to support your position, then apologize again.

While many crimes are committed by people who dress this way, just as many victims may also chose to dress the same, as most judges in this country will attest, I never intended to offend anyone by making this fact know.

Finally, blame the other party for taking offense, and then apologize again.

It’s unfortunate that our discussion of this pressing issue and unfortunate incident has been trivialized by those who might use it advance their own political agendas, and I’m sorry that what I said provided them with an opportunity to do so.

There, now you’re really to unlock the mysteries deep within Robert Blagojevich’s Chicago gangster vault!

With beauty being the operative word in “beauty contest,” barring from Jenna Talachova from competing in such a competition, because she was born male, doesn’t make any sense, because it’s clear that she is beautiful. Now, if this was a “nature contest,” in which contestants competed without the advantages of cosmetics and cosmetic procedures, one could argue that Talachova would have no place in such a competition. Neither would any of her competitors.

Talachova is being singled out not because she is a transsexual woman, but because she is closer to the physical ideal that woman are measured against than most “naturally born” woman are. This poses two qualified threats. 

Beauty contests exist to reassert the idea that beautiful persons are a naturally born class apart from the rest of society. Think of Plato’s Myth of the Metals and well as the Randian hero. Liberal and conservative societies are sustained by, if not structured around, this idea that some are naturally far better than the rest. In contrast to this is the communitarian notion of perfectability, that one can better themselves (which is not to be conflated with improving ones material conditions) through effort. The fact that a transgendered or transsexual person can be a serious contestant in a beauty contest nullifies any suggestion that beauty is a gift from nature that is to be worshiped. That isn’t to say that beauty is a construct and that everyone is beautiful, as some opponents of beauty contests argue.

Second-wave feminism has built a whole cottage industry around traveling Powerpoint presentations that inadvertently dehumanize some women for being beautiful by saying that their body’s aren’t “real.” The irony that many of these same people also voice their support of trans persons is lost in their efforts to make women feel good about themselves by bullying others. How can it be that Talachova can be a “real” woman amongst other “unrealistic” women but also a false one amongst the general population of women? She’s subjected to these abuses only because other woman feel bad about failing the normative ideals of beauty. 

Talachova’s appearance challenges the oft repeated notion that “unrealistic” beauty ideals are entirely unattainable. How can they be “unattainable” when people of the opposite sex can and do attain them? This sends many back to the proverbial drawing board to think of some other moralizing way to shame beautiful people.

Another argument against Talachova, common amongst reactionaries who comment in all caps on newspaper websites, is that, by being a beautiful woman who used to be a man, she’s “tricking” people. Listen, as best as you’ve tried to couch what you really mean, you need to understand that Talachova doesn’t want to have sex with you and that no one is forcing you to have sex with her; she just wants to compete on her beauty. Just admit that none of the women you’ll ever bed look even half as good as her, delete your browser history and GTFO.

What follows is mostly a response to Tim Kiladze’s Why I gave up my six-figure salary and quit Bay Street

One of the best aspects of capitalism is that it handsomely remunerates rarified skills and knowledge, and rewards those who are willing to employ their abilities in jobs that might not necessarily be easy, pleasurable or glamourous. This is not be confused with working hard, which is what workers with average, overproduced or zero marketable skills have to do in exchange for paltry wages.

Working the Saturday afternoon shift at No Frills is probably more stressful and puts one in more frequent contact with complete assholes than a tough day in high finance ever would. However, the flunkie at No Frills doesn’t have many options, can be easily replaced by another worker and his union is utterly useless when it comes to ensuring a workplace that isn’t hostile. Conversely, the invest banker has more options on where he can employ his labour, can’t be so easily replaced, especially if he’s good at his good, which makes his employer so eager to reward him and make sure that he’s as happy as one can be without the aid of drugs of any sort. This is why investment bankers who publicly complain about the meaninglessness and stress of their careers need to shut the fuck up before I fucking shut them up.  

When it comes to capitalism, I can’t say that I’m a fan. I fail to see how a system that produces ever more wealth by the hand and brain of workers, yet sees less of it going to them at about the same rate, can be regarded as efficient, “the best” or even just. However, it’s the system that we are currently racked with and we have to make do until its predestined collapse, hopefully into something better and hopefully soon. Contrary to what Marxists often suggest, the managers of capital aren’t immune to the various forms of alienation that capitalism promotes. While they do enjoy a much larger piece of the wealth that they produce, they too suffer from the pangs of feeling like a cog in a machine, they struggle to maintain their interpersonal relationships, suffer the ill effects of mistrust of and tension between their colleagues and they sometimes feel that their efforts are entirely insignificant. But, as one might say, no pressure, no diamonds to lavish upon one’s trophy wife. 

Unlike the guy who has to reason with one irate, morbidly obese women, squeezed into motorized scooters saddled with oxygen tanks, who insist that their “medical condition” exempts them from the three per customer limit on four-dollar frozen pizzas, after another, the investment banker earns a tidy income that keeps from having to worry about the basic junk of life that the No Frills guy has to worry about. While the banker might have to come in a little earlier and stay a bit later to make sure that he can put together a down payment on a summer home, the No Frills guy will have to consider taking out a payday loan in order to make rent that week. The banker might gripe about not having the time to break in his new set of golf clubs, but the No Frills guy has to work every weekend and doesn’t get much leisure time with his friends.

Furthermore, the investment banker  has a prestigious job that people, for some dubious reason I’m sure, still respect and admire. While hippies might put down their djembes to hiss at the banker about whatever hippies find objectionable about the world in general, the No Frills guy has to endure the fact that the majority of people in our society think that every inch of him is completely useless and that he should be honoured to be treated like an animal by just about everyone that he interacts with. Even the genuinely useless bourgeois socialists at the NDP can’t be bothered with his plight. Unless he’s homeless or a homosexual, handicapped, racialized, minority, the NDP can’t trot him out to as exhibit A in a rant about unfair the world is. Contrast that with the fact that banker has innumerable political advocates who would write enflamed editorials in the National Post and shake their fists and slander socialists by referring to the NDP as such in parliament if the banker couldn’t double park his beemer in front of the Starbucks.   

It’s very hard to feel sympathy for these people, so I won’t.

exploreyork:

When I think of tours, I think of people walking around wearing jungle hats and collar shirts pointing to random places yelling “Look here! Look there!” When I think of university campus tours, I think of the same thing – minus the jungle hats. Touring a new place can be exciting, but it can also be a bit uncomfortable. I’ve already written a blog post on the value of campus tours so, even if you’re a bit afraid to get out there, I encourage you to step out.

For those who decide to embark on one individually, with their family and friends at one of York’s scheduled campus tours, during York’s upcoming Spring Open House, or even as a group during orientation, I’ve compiled a list of places that are popular among current students and that you should be sure to check out to get the full “York experience.”

Vari Hall

 It’s big; it’s in the middle of York; everyone knows it. Enough said, I think. 

“Hey, the low drone of that protest in Vari Hall was so deafening that it distracted me from browsing Facebook and texting my friends during a lecture. My rights as a student are being trampled!” And with that, someone had the bright idea of putting a help desk in the middle of Vari Hall, as a means of separating one group of inflexible reactionaries from another group of inflexible reactionaries, both of whom see themselves as total victims. 

Scott Library

 Let’s do the math; school + studying = library.

Let’s check reality here. Most students entering the university Ponzi scheme endeavour to crack open the fewest number of books possible in pursuit of their increasingly valueless degrees. For these students, skimming the first five Google results and the sources cited in a Wikipedia article qualifies as a rigorous review of the key literature on a topic. And if their TA disagrees, they’ll visit them during office hours to turn on the waterworks before spending more time writing a scathing rateyourprofessor review than they did writing their assignment. Because of this, York defers money that would otherwise be spent on growing its collections to other projects. (Check the ratio of books to students the next time MacLean’s prints it annual “U of T and McGill are so great” issue) . That said, Scott Library is only good for a few things. Having sex in the fifth floor stacks, “renting” DVDs from the Sound & Moving Image Library and disrupting people who have yet to learn that York has absolutely nowhere to engage in quiet study.   

Common lecture halls – such as CLH or Stedman

You’ll be listening to lectures here for, uh, how many months? Your turn to do the math.

If you went to university with the misapprehension that you’d be surrounded fellow scholars, sitting close to the front of the lecture hall is probably the only way to sustain this self-delusion. With your back to most of the venue, you won’t notice that the majority of your peers  elect to skip the lecture, preferring to waste scarce common tutorial time on their private sloth and stupidity, and that those who do attend are more engrossed by reading TMZ and their Facebook feed.

Your Home College

If you aren’t sure which college you’re affiliated with, click the link above.

In five years at York, I only went to my home college once, only to find that the class I had in that building had been moved to Vari Hall. So unless you’re staying in residence or if your home college has a good pub in it, you can skip this spot while touring the campus.

Stong Pond

This ain’t your average pond; it’s Stong Pond. You’ll see what I mean when you get there… or you won’t. Either way.

Stong Pond is like Santa Claus at York. Whatever you do, don’t spoil its magical, romantic aura by telling people that this goose shit-filled puddle is actually man-made. 

William Small Centre

You’ll need a computer eventually.

A relic from the days of Myspace and mobile phones with monochrome displays, the ubiquity of cheap laptop computers and wi-fi has reduced this place to a massive printing depot.

Tait McKenzie

For all you sports people. Athletically-challenged people, beware.

Ladies, have you been desensitized to the advances and harassment of lecherous non-students who approach you or shout lewd and hurtful comments about your body? Recapture those feelings of shame, fear and disgust as actual students leer at you and “compliment” you on your workout attire. Non-jock men, did you really are think that leaving high school meant escaping the bullying of jocks? Take a walk down memory lane by visiting our weight room!  

Student Centre

Food, people and food all in one place. Oh, and the usual event or two.

First floor; food court. Ample choice, market prices and nowhere to sit. Every other floor; club meeting halls. Know that you’re part of a large and diverse university community by becoming active in a student club dedicated to your ethnicity!

York Lanes

Why shop at Vaughan Mills when there’s York’s own mini-mall?!

Made famous in the widely read book No Logo, go here to find out why York is the butt of half-jokes all over the world. Oh my god, commerce on campus, make it stop! It’s totally ruining my academic experience with corporate influence! Now let’s grab a Starbucks before heading to lecture to spend the first half texting and Facebooking before skipping out during break. (You’re welcome, Naomi Klein). In the early aughts, there used to be a great record store here. Now it’s a Popeye’s Chicken.

Accolade East

Simply because it’s the most colourful, and coolest, building ever – Don’t worry, I’m not biased at all.

A building that looks like it’s adorned with massive strips of bacon is clearly an act of provocation, perpetrated by radical left-wing terrorists, against the school’s large Jewish student population! Tear it down!

Bennett Centre for Student Services

To describe it in one word: This-is-where-you-pick-up-your-OSAP. It’s also where you can get any queries regarding money matters (tuition fees, scholarships, bursaries, and so on) acknowledged and solved.

This, place, has, every, thing. Mostly relatively wealthy students, in queue, complaining about socialism and bureaucracy, yet who refuse to secure student lines of credit or some other form of private financing, such as a job. Need help with your resume or training for job interviews? You can get that here too, but don’t bother. The economy has gone to such shit and will only get worse, so you’re time is better spent drinking beer to drown your fears about a future of falling standards of living and economic disparity. 

Osgoode Hall Law School and/or Schulich School of Business

They’re considered one of Canada’s best law and business schools, and Osgoode has recently undergone some very hip – did I just say hip? – renovations.

Two bastions of prosperity and liberal enlightenment, on the periphery of campus, surrounded by a red sea of socialist failure and people who just to protest civilization and steal from the wealthy. Everyone else on campus should be honoured that this race of John Galtesq, super-job-creators decided to do some charity work instead of studying at actual universities. So don’t be offended by the fact that they see themselves as separate from the larger university and only grudgingly associate themselves with it.

(If you’re viewing this in your feed, click on the icon above to watch a video.)

Jewelry commercials are scripted in a way that plays on heterosexual ideals and sees romance being made accessible by purchase of the product advertised. If this commercial from People’s Jewelers is serves as an accurate indication of what’s going on these days, women have lowered their romantic expectations much more than I was led to believe from polemics written by women on how contaminated the dating pool has become in recent years with dependent man-boys.

Jewelry advertising works in a turnabout way, in that it sells a product meant for consumption by women, using visuals that appeal to women but copy that directly appellates men in no unspecific terms. Recall, if you will, the long standing slogan that “two months salary” was a small price for a man to pay to demonstrate his love to the woman in his life. The net effect is that men are told that in order to unlock the romance of the visuals, they need to buy otherwise useless rocks and accouterments. A key genre convention is the polished, classic handsomeness of the man and his socioeconomic dominance over the woman, because dropping two months salary on something useless means that you’re so wealthy and powerful that you can make that money back, Glengarry Glenross style. In other words, the men in these commercials are so-called alpha males. However, this recent commercial from People’s Jewelers throws out all of the genre conventions and tells both men and women, “time to settle before you’re old and your prospects narrow even further and fall ever lower; this is as good as it gets.” 

The couple in this commercial isn’t evenly matched, but not in the way that jewelry commercials have trained us to expect. The bunting on the window valence, more so than the matching furniture, is a strong directorial indication that this house/condo is owned by the woman, and that the guy is just living there by her better graces and bank account. She’s rushing out the door, so obviously on her way to a job that pays her enough to own her own home and thus requires that she dress and groom herself impeccably, while he has the time to just sit around and wait. So it’s safe to assume that he doesn’t have anywhere specific to be, like a job.

The guy’s dirty, uncombed hair and stubble indicates to me that this guy hasn’t seen a five o’clock quitting time in a long while. I know this for certain, because as I write this my own appearance is no better than that of the guy in the commercial. My hair is a mess and I have a healthy scruff going on. That’s because I haven’t been to work in four consecutive days and haven’t had a reason to leave the house in that time. “Maybe he plays in a band or works somewhere cool, like in media,” you contest. Yeah, I’ve been to both of those places in my life, and they’re just synonyms for un(der-)employment.

The dress shirt seems amiss. Is he on his way to a job interview at the Apple Store? If that’s case, as long as he can gingerly persuade the interviewer to overlook the gaps in his employment history (backpacking through Europe? internship at an iPhone app start-up perhaps?), the disheveled look might work in his favour. And he’d better hope that it does, because his girlfriend is starting to get pretty sick of his antics and excuses and she’s been stalking her recently divorced, ex-boyfriend from high school on Facebook.

When the girlfriend* character enters the scene, she has an exasperated look on her face, as if to say, “fuck, Brian! (these guys are always named Brian so some reason). I let you move in and I pay for everything, the least that you can do is make me breakfast! Wait, you’re up especially early for someone who doesn’t have a job, what’s the occasion?”  She’s livied, but that’s only temporary. His spending her money to buy a piece of jewelry that she certainly wouldn’t have bought for herself sets everything right. At least until he throws a hissy fit because she won’t “lend” him the money to buy the “fucking sweet” Fender Stratocaster that he “needs.”

* Wait, on another viewing, I just noticed the wedding bands on their fingers. Shit, things must be really rough for women these days.