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Last night, [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] and I went to Metric. The opening band was a local band named Elizabeth and they were less than stellar. I'll just tell you that [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] was napping through them, and that should give you an understanding of their caliber.

Metric was okay, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see them again. Their banter and crowd interactions were pretty lame, and they played a short set. We were surrounded by very made up girls who had dipped themselves in vats of perfume before attending the gig. I actually felt sick at some points during the show because of the sickly sweet smell.

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Other things have happened this week. I've arranged to do a story on the tunnels of Moose Jaw, which are a tourist attraction/historical attraction in the town of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. On April 14, Dad and I will be driving to Moose Jaw from Saskatoon. We'll take a tour of the tunnel, I'll do my interview and then Dad and I will hang out in the mineral spa in Moose Jaw. I'm looking forward to it.

I started dance class again. I'm taking the intro class again because the school that I'm with wants you to take intro twice before you move to intermediate. Because I've taken belly dance a few times, I could probably move to intermediate, but I settled for intro since I will miss two classes because I'm going to be away. However, my new teacher wants us to use dance shoes, so I went and bought black ballet shoes yesterday. I'm in love with them because I love dance gear. At some point I want to get myself a new leotard top too, but I'll wait until I've been taking more dance classes at Harbour Dance.

I watched "The Weather Underground". It's a documentary about an American activist group called "The Weathermen." Their schtick was to bomb buildings in protest to American foreign policy. I found the documentary to be fairly objective which was nice. I myself was not really in support of the Weathermen since I don't really support violent means of activism, but it was definitely an interesting film.

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If you're a feminist living in Canada, you should start reading Judy Rebick's blog .

Mmm books

1. Sunwing- The sequel to Silverwing- another good read- Based on an actual experiment done on bats during World War 2. Apparently, bats were fitted with exploding metal discs that that they would create explosions in enemy camp. Freaky stuff. I love this series.

2. The Rebel Sell- by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter- I started off disagreeing with the book, but eventually came around. I won't talk a lot about it, as B* and others are reading it now in prep for a discussion, but it really did make me think about my own life, and the things I do to "market" myself. At times I felt the book was overly negative, but it caused me to examine things, which was probably it's point.

3. Girls in pants- Ann Brashares- the 3rd in the series- cute, but not a lot going on. Neither of the sequels have lived up to the first one, which is pretty typical. I'm glad the series ended, it could have really gone downhill. I like this series though.

4. Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum- Tatum is a psychologist who teaches courses about race and racism. The first start of the book is about the development of racial identity. I found that I could relate this idea to my brother. My brother, who is Cree, was adopted into our family when he was 2. While my parents did their best to teach us about different cultures, my brother didn't have a lot of exposure to native people growing up. We lived in a white neighbourhood. My brother's best friends in high school were Hispanic and Asian. In later years, he developed a large group of Native friends, and now he has friends of all ethnic backgrounds. I see that these friendship groupings were important to the development of his identity and self knowledge.

Personally, I can see the idea of coming together in a grouping as important to my development as a feminist. In high school, I always hung out with guys. In the middle of university, I started to want to learn more about women and women's values and developed more, and closer female friendships as I continued to explore the different aspects of my gender and my identity as a feminist.

The book also discusses the history of various ethnic groups in the United States, as well as the idea of White privilege, the development of a racial conscience for White people, and how to talk about racism both in interracial and monoracial ethnic groups.

Sometimes I really think that I would like to continue to study race relations in an academic context, or teach race relations courses in schools so that I could dialogue with people about these issues since I feel they are important and they continue to fascinate me.