Ha! Get it? Because I’m moving? It’s a double… oh, forget it.

The movers are supposed to be here in about an hour, I’ve packed everything entertaining except my laptop, and I’m bored out of my gourd as well as being totally paranoid and anxious. Will they drop the Gigantic TV of Doom? Will they bash me on the head with a piece of my futon if I don’t leap out of the way? What if a marble comes out of one of the boxes and the movers slip on it and fall down a flight of stairs and DIE, and their families sue my pants off?

A lot to consider.

So far no major mishaps this move, even though I once again did all the packing and dismantling myself. Highlights:
- I can now take my futon frame apart in about six minutes.
- A bottle of perfume I didn’t even know I had came out of a bag of stuff I was throwing out, and smashed on the kitchen floor. Oh. My. God. I retched for almost half an hour after I was done cleaning it up. For the record, does anyone remember giving me a bottle of Bulgari au Femme perfume?
- Stubbed my toe on something (?a porcupine?), said an extremely bad word, looked down to make sure it was OK, and went about my business. An hour later I was packing up the bathroom and looked down again to notice that I was trailing blood everywhere. Said some more bad words. Went around the apartment retracing my bloody footprints with a wet paper towel.
- Couldn’t quite reach my curtain brackets to remove them whilst standing on a stool. Put the stool on top of a plastic storage tub, balanced on that, removed one bracket, turned to get the other one, and fell off the whole stupid thing. Luckily landed on my bed, and bounced.
- Lucky stars: I haz them.
- I haven’t seen my condo since the possession date, which wouldn’t be a big deal except that my dad has been in there painting. “I didn’t like the colour you picked, so I went and got a different one.” None of this asking for permission business, nothing like that. Like, forget the fact that I bought $200 of paint, in his presence and with his approval, on Thursday. :-S

Anyway. Last blog post till I get all settled in at the new Casa del Premee. See you on the other side!

One of the engineers at the plant has recently taken it upon herself to entertain me outside of work (no, really – she seems to have made it some kind of mission). Yesterday’s date was at Holt’s downtown; we checked out discount Burberry, ate ice cream, turned our noses up at shapeless Armani frocks, and had expensive unguents applied at the makeup counter.

As we exited through the shoe department, the engineer turned to me and said, “It felt so weird when she complimented my makeup!”
I said vaguely, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
Then she added, “I feel like I can’t wear makeup at work. I feel like if I look pretty I can’t look smart.”
I laughed reflexively, because not only is my coworker blindingly lovely, she also happens to be very intelligent. And she does in fact, now that I come to think of it, go barefaced at work. (I go as close as I can manage – foundation and lipgloss with sunscreen is all I wear most days).

Now it’s obvious why this should be the case: our workplace is staffed mostly by men, and so of course we shouldn’t look too nice, or we wouldn’t be respected.

But wait. What’s this ‘of course’ business?

Statistically speaking, and I’m not saying it’s morally laudable, I’m just saying it’s the numbers, it’s the stats – she and I have a lot of disadvantages to overcome.

First, we actually had to get interviews at this place. It’s been shown that people with clearly ethnic names get fewer calls back despite having identical education and work experience to people with pleasant WASP-y sort of names.

Second, we’re testicularly challenged. Research abounds showing that females are still less likely to get hired in technical fields than males. Then, we’re less likely to get paid equally for equal work if we do get hired.

Third, we’re on the small side, and I mean height rather than weight for this point. It’s been demonstrated that both men and women are respected and liked less, and paid less, when they’re short.

Fourth, she’s extremely conventionally attractive, which is a disadvantage since she’ll likely be viewed as less intelligent or at least as less competent. I, being far less pleasing to the eye, might be initially perceived as more intelligent, but I will still be respected less and my overall approval rating will be lower than someone more attractive.

Fifth, and this one is for me only since she tops out around 90 pounds, there’s the hurdle of my 20 or so pounds of excess weight to overcome. Both sexes get paid less as their BMI increases.

So between the two of us, we face or have faced racism, sexism, heightism, looksism, and weightism! All of these are prejudices that we cluck our tongues at when we read lawsuits in the newspaper; yet at the same time, these are all prejudices that we hold to be self-evident and even acceptable because they are so common. “Especially at a nickel refinery, ” I hear you saying. “What are you expecting from these guys anyway?”

Hey, just because everybody does it doesn’t mean it’s cool. But why does everybody do it?

The answers are in some of the papers and articles linked above, but what it basically comes down to is that like likes like. (And here I will borrow heavily from Jared Diamond’s excellent ‘The Third Chimpanzee’ and its reading list.)

If you look at it from the strictly ‘nature’ perspective of the ‘nature vs. nuture’ debate, we are fitter when we trust those things that most resemble ourselves. It’s very hard to disobey millions of years of evolution. If I am a sparrow, and my genes are telling me to stay in my group of sparrows, ignore non-sparrows that don’t threaten my food supply or mates, and react with caution to silhouettes of known sparrow-eaters, I reap a great number of benefits. I have improved social ties, more opportunities to mate, fewer wasted resources (in the sense that I conserve my energy when I don’t speed away in panic from a duck, or try to mate with an emu), and a greater likelihood of surviving to reproduce. Other sparrows: they’re awesome. I love ‘em.

From the ‘nurture’ point of view, we like and trust those things to which we have had the most exposure, and the fewest negative experiences, during our formative days. Young rats raised with parents who were dyed pink will seek out pink-dyed individuals when removed from their family group and placed in a container with strange rats. Rabbit does will push away or kill strange-smelling kits, but will nurse strange kits if both her own and the strangers are rubbed with identical scents, such as vanilla extract.

This even applies to human mating, which is – at least in most ‘western’ societies – freely assortative and therefore indicative of both evolutionary and societal decisionmaking. Most people will seek out and permanently commit to partners who align similarly to their class, age, race, religion, and even unconscious parameters such as bone length ratios and degree of anatomical symmetry. You may not be looking for someone whose numbers are the same as yours, but chances are that’s what you’ve found when you tell everybody that you’ve discovered ‘the one.’ (Feel free to tell me I’m wrong, because you know XX number of inter-racial/ inter-religious/ inter whatever couples who found each other and fell madly in love, etc, and are still going strong; I know a lot of couples like that too. I’m just repeating what the numbers have traditionally shown, and also explaining why I’m strictly attracted to white Catholics of middle-European descent: they were the only boys I was exposed to growing up in St. Albert. My first kiss was with a blond Polish seven year-old who couldn’t even spell his last name.)

Therefore we can extrapolate that most of the guys at the plant would really feel a lot more comfortable around me and the gorgeous engineer if we happened to be more or less white, male, middle-aged, tall (but not freakishly tall, we still want to be within one standard deviation of their height), attractive (but not freakishly attractive ditto), raised somewhere in rural Alberta or Saskatchewan, of not-too-distant Ukranian, Polish, or French descent, owner of a domestic car or better yet a truck, and able to drink a flat of beer without pausing for breath.

But here we are all the same! :-p

I did a brief trip out east to see my bestie/his fiance and my aunt/uncle/cousins/Canada Day festivities. It was actually a lot to cram into a week, considering that I caught a wicked cold just before I left and spent the rest of the week with a fever so high it was kind of hilarious, not to mention coughing up twenty yards of intestine on my aunt’s basement steps at one point. (That sure took a while to clean up.)

Anyway, it is photos! With foolish commmentary!

The bridge at the fireworks festival…at which, of course, I wasn’t paying attention. I swung my camera up randomly and got this mildly creepy shot of the underside of the bridge, and some very bright light hanging over the edge of it.

It was raining so. hard. that day. The tower reminded both me and MCD of a ghost ship rising out of the fog.

Remember, folks, all orchids are just fancy bee-attraction machines. (At the Montreal Botanical Gardens.)

I ate poutine and drank a beer! Shut up, it’s a big deal.

Notre Dame is of a fanciness. I felt unusually Catholic for the rest of the afternoon and had to take an extra-long shower that night to wash it off.

Some of the billion, trillion, squillion people on Parliament Hill waiting to sing the national anthem.

At the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (I think. I was pretty out of it that day… please correct me if any of these captions are wrong, BTW.)

The NFB put up a bunch of random stills – this was one of my most favouritest when I was a kid. I’m surprised I made it to adulthood, I would have thought my parents would have strangled me for singing this over and over and over and over in the car and encouraging my little brother to do the same.

Pegasus at the Canadian Museum of Civilization myths and legends special exhibit. I was stunned by how they presented all the creatures in this exhibit, and would have taken more photos if I could have. It was really good.

View on a cloudy day from behind the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

Embarrassingly, I totally loved the tour at the Royal Canadian Mint. And at the end they let you hold a gold bar worth $420,000!

Part of the stained glass ceiling in the House of Commons foyer.

I have such a soft spot for old farm machinery. This was at the Canadian Museum of Agriculture.

If you were wondering, most of the rest of the 279 photos I took were either blurry or underexposed or, frankly, giant bugs at the Insectarium – and as such, all belong safely tucked away in my personal albums.

Merci beaucoup, again, to my absolutely wonderful and accommodating hosts back east! I’m glad I left 2,639 things on my to-do list so I have an excuse to visit again next year. :-)