Canadian girl out and aboot

This weekend, I got stuck in a little patch of melancholy. I'm not sure why this happened. It hasn't happened since May, so that's definitely a positive thing. I think that a lot of it had to do with a little too much isolation over the weekend. I was supposed to go out with friends on Sunday, but one friend was sick and there was a severe storm warning, so I didn't want to leave the house.

There was a severe thunderstorm in a city about 1.5 hours away from here (Camrose) on Saturday. An outdoor country music festival was going on. About 75 people were injured and one person was killed during the storm. This was terribly sad news, and definitely influenced my decision to stay in when there are storm warnings.

I did do a few fun things this weekend- went to a dance party held to raise money for a film. Danced my butt off for the first time in ages. I also went to see "The Hurt Locker" which I highly recommend. It's hard to watch and emotionally draining, but it's bound to get a lot of attention in Oscar time.

I didn't take the weekend off and did a bit of work each day. This afternoon, I'm all caught up on work and am working on the second draft of some poems for the new manuscript. When I initially wrote my first book, I did a lot of things unintentionally and over a period of time. This time, I'm trying to link themes and images through various sections, and I'm trying to do it on purpose. It's been fascinating.

Some creative neighbours down the street created a snow house in celebration of inauguration day. When I first saw the house, it was graced with a paper American flag, and cut outs of Barack and Michelle. I'm not sure if the house was vandalized, or if the people decided to take Barack and Michelle and put them away until that fateful day.

You can see pictures of the flickr set here

Look for Sasha and Malia.

Coincidentally, my mom is having an inauguration party at her house in Saskatoon. She's serving hot dogs as a quintessentially American food ;)

A friend from University Days has been charged with killing a suspected Taliban member

So I'm back in Edmonton. I decided to drive back this morning and my brother decided to tag along at the last minute. He has some stuff to do, and likes to stay with me in E-town when he has a chance. Since we drove through a small snowstorm, it was nice to have him in the car to do the driving.

When I got home, I checked my email and my phone messages. My mom was the first to tell me, but a reporter from my hometown newspaper, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, had also contacted me.

A friend from my university days has been charged with murdering a member of the Taliban. The reporter wanted me to comment on what I knew about Rob, and what he was like as a person. I know that many people would be completely hesitant to talk to the media, but as I am a journalist, I wanted to try to help the reporter.

I told him that I didn't want to say anything incriminating, but that I could tell him a bit about Rob and my friendship with him.

Rob was a very special person to me. We lost touch over 10 years ago, but he affected my life in many positive ways, and taught me a lot about friendship and bravery. I can still remember some of the things that he taught me about making people laugh, and about friendship. He was a good person, he had strong beliefs and opinions, and he was intelligent and in love with the military and the life of a soldier.

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Personally, I am a bit floored by the whole thing. I feel a little discombobulated and out of it. I got a chance to talk to my mom, and [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] about it, and I feel a bit better now that I'm relaxing with a bowl of soup in my own kitchen. Still, it's shocking and unsettling.

Apparently my old home in Grande Prairie has been demolished. There was an accident, and a truck plunged through the kitchen. No one was home when it happened, but the house is destroyed. It is likely that the driver of the truck had a seizure. The photographer was living in the place, but wasn't home when it happened. I don't think anyone was injured, thank god.

My friends at the paper are going to send me photos, or link me to the article.

This week, The Globe and Mail is running a really fantastic series on mental health and mental health problems. I started reading the series yesterday and feel compelled to rave about it. There's are a lot of good information and the reporters are really working to put human faces to mental health.

One of the quotes really struck me, "There's no one, no family in Canada, that can say that they don't have mental illness in some form in their family....

Other quotes that struck me..... "you see so many obits that mention cancer, but few that mention mental illness, while mental illness kills a large number of people...."

Read the series here this week.

I found out today that I knew one of the Canadian soldiers who was killed by the suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

Full story here

I first met Shane Keating in my drama class, probably when I was about 14 years old. Shane, his younger brother Ken nd their sister Erin, all came to take a Saturday afternoon drama class taught by Rosemary Hunt, and held in a school in Victoria gym. They were all living in Dalmeny at the time, and would get driven in each week.

All three of them were friendly and funny and genuinely nice people. Eventually, the family moved to Saskatoon and ended up living at the end of our street. Shane and Ken attended my high school. I wasn't super close to either of them, but they did end up spending time hanging out with my group of friends. Shane was the subject of many a girl's high school crush, because he was pretty cute, and really nice. Ken dated a girl that I danced with, and I later became better friends with him because I was friends with some of his group of friends.

I knew that Shane had joined the military and I had run into him a few times out and about in Saskatoon. The last time I'd seen him was in December 2002, when I'd just come home from Indonesia. I was out walking McGregor one day and ran into him when he was out for a run. Whenever I ran into either Shane, Ken or even their little sister Megan, we'd always take a few minutes to chat and catch up. They were always interested in what you were doing, and were always ready to update you on what they and their siblings were doing.

I found out about Shane's death because my mom emailed and asked "Did you know Shane Keating?" Immediately, I googled his name and found the news, but I saw it again when I finally got around to reading the paper at work.

The whole thing makes me very sad in a way that I'm having a hard time describing. I feel very bad for the whole Keating family. I'm also thinking a lot about people I used to be friends with, and I'm wondering where they are and what they're doing. I felt a strange sort of shock when I saw the pictures and read that Shane had been killed. It was surreal to know that someone I went to high school with died in such a way. I was pretty quiet for the rest of my time at work, and have spent most of my time today alone.

The whole thing just seems stupid and senseless and sad, and I can hear people saying, "Well, that's what you should expect if you're a soldier," but that's not really the point or the way I feel. It's just very sad. That's all I have to say.

Fire breaks out at Mendel art gallery

This is the major art gallery in Saskatoon. Fortunately, no art was damaged and no one was hurt.

Dose is/was a free publication handed out in various cities across Canada. However, it's been axed.

Trees everywhere rejoice

I won't miss it either. I was never in support of so many free daily newspapers.

I just read that one of the books that I loved last year The Earth, my butt and other big round things by Carolyn Mackler, was banned in some schools in Maryland. After investigation and protest by several students, the book was returned to shelves in high schools . I think it's really cool that some of the students started petitions and collected over 200 signatures.

I must admit that I don't understand the paranoia and fear in the United States. I don't understand the banning of Carolyn Mackler's book. I was reading about Tommy Chong's arrest as research for my article, and it just seems bizarre to me. Same with the Terri Schiavo case. I guess these are examples of the differences between some (not all, gentle readers) ways of American thinking and Canadian thinking.

Yesterday I read an article in the Globe and Mail about some AIDS research happening in Nairobi. Canadian researchers from the University of Manitoba have been researching a group of Nairobian prostitutes who seem to be immune to HIV. They have been taking blood samples from some of the women for around 20 years. Now I realize that this is important research, but the reporter, Stephanie Nolen, raised the very important issue that the Canadian researchers have done nothing to help these women retire from prostitution. One woman is still sleeping with several men a day and may have slept with almost 50,000 men since the start of the study. She thinks that the Canadians could do something to help her get out of prostitution. Frankly, so do I.

I can't access the Globe article, but here's another article on these HIV resistant women .

I must admit that I love Stephanie Nolen's writing. I'm glad that the Globe has devoted so much attention to Africa and covering African issues. I must admit that I do have some of my own guilt towards Africa and AIDS issues. Due to my skin, I know that I can never work with AIDS infected people. I am constantly battling open sores, which means that unless I was to wear a body glove, I couldn't work on the frontline of the AIDS battle.

Also, I have felt guilty because I don't feel the same connection of level of interest in Africa that I do towards other regions of the world. My first area of interest is Asia; I love the continent, the people, everything. I feel alive when I'm there. After that, I'd go for Latin America and the Caribbean, then the Middle East, then Africa. In some ways, I feel like my own interests are prejudiced, and I feel guilty about this. I know that I would love Africa if I visited it. I'd love to see Ghana and Uganda because I've heard so much about them. Yet I'm freaked out by the parasites, because of my open sores.

Where are Europe, the United States and Australia in this equation? Far behind.

I am much more fascinated by the developing world. I think the contrasts make me understand Canada and what it means to be Canadian more. Sometimes I feel like I haven't even seen enough of my own country. I didn't study it in university because I was taking International Studies, and I find as I age, I want to learn more about Canada's history, our regionalisms and our culture.