Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Roller Monologues

Women are supposed to shop together. We’re encouraged to go to the bathroom en masse. We’re expected to group-quilt, and clamour in hordes around Tupperware. In times gone by, women could be found chasing after small animals (or small humans) together, and chanting to the moon. Last weekend, the women of my tribe engaged in a long-standing ritual. We painted.

By painted, I don’t mean in any artistic sense (I’m a weak link where visual talent is concerned). Our gathering was not marked by circles of easels, bowls of shiny fruit and smears of vermillion and burnt umber. There was an apartment to be tamed, an unruly set of grey walls, and we came together to make it feel like home. In a ballet of grubby clothes and latex-acrylic, we danced, a trio of weird sisters. My mother governed the heavens, standing tip-toed on a chair and occasionally chiming “Shit, I dripped again.” My sister muscled the middle, wielding her roller pole like a javelin. Plumbing the depths behind furniture, I crawled along the trim on the floor.

All the while, we called to each other from opposite corners of each room:

“Damn, this colour looks good!”

“Did you watch John Stewart the other night?”

“Who do you have to kill to get a raise these days?”

And at some point, my mother made an astute observation. This is what we do. Some kinswomen knit, or have brunch, or watch the latest movie. We paint. Even when we don’t do it together, we still eagerly share battle stories. The shade of green that made my sister nauseated. My sponge-paint job that looked like blood spatters at a crime scene. My mother’s discovery that magic marker bleeds through every layer of paint that’s slopped on top of it. The rooms that do turn out are shown off as badges of honour, and garner appreciative “ooohs” and “aaaahs”.

One could blame this long-standing tradition on our fickle decorating tastes, or our collective need to move things around our dens. Maybe it’s our waspish need to avoid idle hands (the work of the devil), or our genetic predisposition to organize. Maybe all three of us were chameleons in a former life. Not one of us expected to wake up the next day without dried, crusty paint between her fingers, or without sore muscles. We did, however, leave my sister’s apartment confident that there would be a future call to arms, and we would follow the brush-shaped signal back to the coven. Probably as soon as my sister decided what colour the kitchen should be.

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Somewhere in Paris, a short existentialist rolls over in his grave.

Last week, the Toronto Star published an article entitled “A Nation of Cheaters”, outlining our general refusal to prioritize honest, hard work over the Darwinian drive to “get ahead”. Reporter David Graham gives example after example of what Jean Paul Sartre would term bad faith, the cowardly and metaphysically unfounded practice of saddling anything and anyone else with the burden of one’s own actions. Point by point, the article describes our communal allergy to personal responsibility.

Coincidentally, I was having a week riddled with bad faith. A customer service rep on the phone followed the phrase “The part you need for your stove won’t be in until April” with “What do you expect us to do about it?” A drycleaner who made a perfectly good shirt vanish into the ether substituted a twenty-dollar bill for an apology. I was dealing with my regular onslaught of students claiming I was ruining their academic and professional future by not accepting their work three weeks late. In my head, I could picture Sartre, with his bad eye and his ever-present halo of cigarette smoke, shaking his head. There are weeks when I feel like an incredible sap for assuming that I’m responsible for my own actions, and an even bigger sap for hoping that others will share my views.

Graham’s article proposes that while outbreaks of irresponsibility are recurrent, they’re generally short-lived. I’m hopeful, but not all that optimistic. It’s really very comforting to put our responsibilities in a cute little bubble, float it away, and wait for it to explode (messily) over someone else’s head. Moreover, rewards for self-determination aren’t very tempting. Being willing to accept responsibility puts us at the bottom of the hill, the same steep climb down which the proverbial brown stuff rolls. Being at the receiving end of bad faith, having all of the non-believers taking numbers and lining up to pin their woes on you makes it difficult to avoid the temptation to utter “It’s not my fault either”.