There's a world outside your window

For my last blog post for this course I wanted to write about Christmas but when we started talking about hair last week I thought I might want to write about that too.  Amazingly, I have found the perfect intersection of the two subjects!

You all must know my all-time favorite Christmas song Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid.  But are you familiar with the context in which it was written?

It is 1984.  Internet does not exist yet.  Although CDs are becoming popular, most teenagers still buy vinyl records of their favorite bands and those who are really fanatic about their records protect the record covers in plastic sleeves and arrange them on shelves in alphabetical order.  Sony is king and all youth walk around with Sony Walkmans and earphones stuck to their ears.  Producing and taping customized cassettes is a popular past time.  In basements everywhere, adolescents are discovering Atari and playing Pac Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong.

On the international front, the Berlin wall still separates East and West and Tiananmen Square is 5 years away.  The term genocide is mostly applied to WWII and Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia are horrors that cannot  be imagined.  No one has heard of CNN, RDS, or other 24-hour news channels.  In Ethiopia, famine threatens to decimate the population.

The images from Ethiopia were shocking and, in evolution of the role of the media in ending the Vietnam War in the 70s, the mass media had a large role to play in influencing public opinion on the fmaine issue.  In England, Bob Geldof of the Boomtown Rats decided to mobilize his musician colleagues to create a song and dedicate all proceeds to ending the famine.  In a flury of urgency, the song was written and recorded within a week and released just in time for Christmas.

I love this song and this video.  Although there are elements that merit criticism--the naive,Western-centric, imperialist view of Africa, the conflating of Ethiopia into "Africa" and the claim that it`s "where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow"--it still represents a turning point for me who was 15 at the time.  The line "there`s a world outside your window" sums it up and it represents the beginning of my awareness of international issues that continues to this day.

Watch the video at least twice.  First, savour the complicated, edgy, choppy, gel and hairspray overloaded, dyed, shaved and bobbed  80s hairstyles!  My own hair look was definitely of the times: a choppy style, long in the front, dyed blond with lots of Sun-In, hairsprayed and underneath the long hair on the right side, a shaved strip that followed the contours of my ear from front to back. Can you spot Sting, George Michael, Phil Collins, Boy George, Simon Lebon and Bono?  I love how all of the members of Band Aid look like they just got out of bed!  So far from our plastic artificial world in which we live.

Then, enjoy the video for the message, delivered by all of that extraordinary artistic talent.  I still get shivers when I hear it for the first time of the season every December.

Merry Christmas gang and all the best for 2011!



One way ticket to here

It's amazing how a seemingly insignificant action can become the catalyst for a life-changing event. 

In my case, the action was the first and only time I ever dropped out of a course.  It was my first year of my four-year undergraduate degree at the University of Western Ontario.  I was majoring in English and had registered for a French course because a second language credit was obligatory for  my program.  I went to my first class, took an instant dislike to the arrogant, condescending professor, dropped the course and signed up for course on Ancient Greece instead.

Fast forward two more years.  I was finishing my third year with one more to go and that French course was still looming in the background.  I had one more year to take the course if I wanted to graduate.  It so happened that Western is part of the Explore program and has its French Immersion School in Trois-Pistoles.  I realized that I could get the credit I needed from Western without having to set foot in the French Department and the government would pay for it too.

So one day in May I hopped on a train with 200 other students and headed east.   I got off that train expecting to earn a badly needed credit in French.  Little did I know that my life would be transformed too.

How ironic that I live at least half of my life in French now when I had stubbornly resisted that French course throughout my undergraduate years!  I graduated with a B.A from Western, went on to travel to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia,  enrolled in a graduate program  and completed M.A. in literature at McGill .  And  here I am now at the Cegep de Rimouski, teaching English to an amazing group of language students!

 I never did have a career plan.  My plan was just to continue what I loved doing: reading and studying. But life has a way of creating opportunites that you seize because you recognize fateful moments of your destiny.  Although I have travelled on many buses, trains and planes since that fateful train ride to Trois-Pistoles, I never did use the return portion of my ticket.

This week we will examine the Maclean's annual university rankings issue.  You have already made an important decision when you decided to study Languages at Cégep de Rimouski.  In the spring you must make another life decision:  do you apply to university?  what program?  where? do you travel? when? where? with whom?  do you work? where? doing what?   We will take a close look at what Maclean's has to say about universities but at the same time, I can attest to the fact no matter what road you choose you will meet with twists and turns,  obstacles andmost importantly, uncharted surprises.