Die Mauer

“The Wall.”

About 20 years ago, on what must have been the 9th or 10th of November, 1989, I got a call from my then-boyfriend Timm who asked if I was watching the news. Because, he said, “The Berlin Wall looks like Swiss cheese!” I’m pretty sure I had a TV at the time and must have paid some attention to this world-historical happening, but for some reason I didn’t feel all that moved by it. I’m curious when I reflect on this reaction, because in the last couple of years I’ve become an inveterate Berlinophile, but in 1989 I don’t recall wanting to jump on a plane or contact my friends in Germany about what was going on. I remember seeing pieces of the wall for sale in magazines and thinking that it would be amazing to get that tiny bit of the wall I’d written on, with a plain ink pen and probably covered over many times since, in the summer of 1981. But as I say, I don’t remember being particularly emotional on or around November 9, 2009. I can think of three explanations for this. First, what was happening in Berlin and Germany seemed inevitable after what had happened earlier at the Austrian-Hungarian border and with the “opening” effects of Glasnost and all that in the late ’80s. So maybe this just felt like an event in line with other changes happening in eastern Europe at that time; it’s sort of like asking if I’m shocked to hear about a new terrorist attack in Iraq, or some technological discovery. I was, I think, expecting that the Wall wouldn’t be around much longer.

Second, I had always despised Reagan and somewhat despised GHW Bush, and so I think that I was blocked, psychologically, from really being happy to celebrate a victory that, their supporters would argue, these Republican presidents helped orchestrate. Nowadays I’m still partisan (most people are) but I’d be happy to give credit where it’s due. Or to determine where the credit really belongs. Back then, maybe I wasn’t was forgiving, generous, or sophisticated. If this is Reagan’s legacy, even if his contribution was really a small one, then I’ll accept that. If it wasn’t his legacy, then that’s fine too, but I have to celebrate retrospectively, as I’m doing now.

Finally, I think I was unwilling to get too joyful about what was going on in Germany in 1989 because I was unbearably poor as a grad student and couldn’t fathom ever going back. I wasn’t, of course, thinking hard enough on those matters, but I think I accepted Europe as just too far away to waste much time thinking about.

Today things are different and I’m completely fascinated by and even absorbed in the Berlin (and German) post-1989 phenomenon and I am getting a lot of joy out of looking at pictures and videos about it and even researching The Wall per se. Amazing story, and I mean the WHOLE story, from the mid-1940s onwards. I entered that story in my 1981 Sommer in Deutschland, and thank goodness I have some visuals to share.

This is me at 17, with my perfectly-coiffed butt-front 1981 ‘do, snapped by Kim Hulsman-Wagner, of our group of 32 Indiana high school seniors-to-be. We spent a week in West Berlin (and so got to experience a bus ride via East Germany to get there from Krefeld) and one day in East Berlin. This shot is of the Brandenburg Gate from the east and it’s stark and very effective.

We crossed through the REAL Checkpoint Charlie to get from East to West Berlin:

And here’s my passport stamps, both at CC and at the East German border itself:

I took lots of pics of the wall as well, these all from the west side (for some reason I think these shots were taken near what’s now, and was prior to partition, Potsdamer Platz). This bit says “STOP: Freedom ends here”:

I have quite a few of these, all very much graffiti-marred (which was 100% permitted from the western side) and sombre.

We weren’t allowed to take many shots from the east side, but I’ll add this one, the Berliner Dom (cathedral) under renovation, a renovation that would likely have never been completed in the DDR:

Now, fast forward 26 years later (October of 2007) and consider this perspective on the Brandenburg Gate:

And the Berlin Cathedral:

I had really gorgeous weather for that trip, so part of what makes the newer shots so much nicer is the blue sky and of course the better image quality. But a huge thing is the PEOPLE. I had much worse weather on my more recent trip in February 2009, and even so, there is a great amount human activity and joy in these places. I have never felt so free as when I walked through the Brandenburg Gate on that 2007 visit, and that feeling brought home to me, finally, why I should have always cared about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Happy Halloween- here’s an H1N1-related treat

Brian and I just wrapped up a nice afternoon, following an absolutely delicious lunch at Han’s in Chinatown (we had our usual, which was braised cabbage with chilis and green onions, and the “kung pao” chili chicken. Also ordered an “egg roll,” which is a flour pancake rolled around an omelet- a real egg roll). Unappetizing cam phone pics of each do neither justice but still look tasty:

Afterwards we strolled down to 1st St SW, south of the tracks, to check out some of the salubrious changes that have transformed this once-scary strip, and we had some lovely Intelligentsia coffees (Americano for Brian, macchiato for me) at DeVille Luxury Coffee. The weather is more than perfect today (14c and nothing but sun as I write this, just gorgeous), so it was a great day.

As we headed home we decided to take a chance at getting our vaccinations for H1N1 today. As everybody who lives here knows, Alberta Health Services has taken the unpopular route for this vaccination campaign of setting up centralized inoculation facilities, and there are only five to serve this entire city. The one closest to our home is at the site of the former Children’s Hospital, now “Richmond Road Diagnostic and Treatment Centre,” and I’d witnessed the queues there earlier this week with my own eyes. Mind-bogglingly long lines, and the waits have been epic. Some people have waited for six hours! But I got a hopeful tweet yesterday to the effect that, even though the lines were closed at 10am, somebody waltzed into Richmond Road at 2, 90 minutes before Friday’s closure, and got in and out in 20 minutes. I was skeptical but Brian convinced me to give it a try today, so we headed over at 2:45. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, the clinics close at 3:30, so the worst that might happen (I guessed) was that we’d stand for 45 minutes and then be told to try again another day. So I went along with this plan.

We got to the clinic, parking a bit east on 20th Avenue SW, and were greeted by a security guard handing out numbers at the door. Hmmm. We entered, walked by the flu clinic (this is set up to assess people with symptoms, to take pressure off emergency rooms) and headed to the front of what I’d observed had been a lineup with, oh, 1000 people on Tuesday, Wednesday AND Thursday. There were FOUR people in the queue. We filled out our forms and because we did ours more quickly than did those folks ahead of us (with little kids), we were ushered into the vaccination hall. I was IMMEDIATELY directed to an empty nurse’s station and that was that. We waited as per normal for 15 minutes as a safety measure with any inoculation, and my arm hurts, but we’re done.

I naturally tweeted our little (well, big, actually) victory and posted it as my facebook status update, and am posting it here. I can’t know if this strategy will work for everyone, but it sure as hell did work for us.

Happy Halloween!

Chagrined update: as of this evening, all H1N1 clinics in the province (Alberta, for which this only applies) are suspended until early next week, when they’ll start vaccinating only high risk groups: kids 6 months to 5 years, pregnant women, and people under 65 with chronic health conditions, which I assume would include my asthmatic self. So I’m extra happy to have got my shot today even if I’d been able to go to the front of the line next week, because who knows what might really happen next week.

Auf wiedersehen, Geocities.

I started a website (not a “blog” as I almost unintentionally wrote just now) on Geocities back in 1998, and kept it modestly updated until, the site says, 2004, though I can’t see any evidence of updates for it after around 2001 when I posted pictures of our then-new-to-us condo. I might have updated the link on it to my CV, but that’s not working now, so as far as I know I basically abandoned the thing in 2001.

The site as here, but it won’t be for long since Geocities will disappear into the ether tomorrow (26 October 2009). Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! in 1999 for–wait for it–$2.9 billion. That’s $290 million a year for a site that, I can only assume, didn’t generate much revenue. I considered paying extra for an ad-free site, for a few minutes maybe, but aside from that brief thinking, I just reveled in the free-ness of it. Now, the whole idea of having any mostly-static “website” is archaic and silly. Geocities was generally a pain to update (not impossible but not straightforward either), and compared to the inherent dynamism that the blog format encourages, something like what Geocities offered is not only old-fashioned but also boring. You visit once, and then, what, a year later? It’s amazing to reflect on how much things have changed in terms of our potential web presences and how much easier it is for people to interact with the web and one another. Still, I loved the idea of having that presence and advertised it to family and friends as much as I could. Now, I have this blog, twitter, facebook and picasa, all dynamic and all enable the sort of conversations (using the term broadly) that Geocities couldn’t anticipate. So adieu, Geocities, and thanks.

Going over my site, there is some good stuff, and God knows I spent a lot of time teaching myself how to resize thumbnails (now done automatically at photo hosting sites and by facebook) and how to program frames (now something I’d avoid, for reasons among which is the fact that I’d want any site I ran to be smartphone friendly) and other things related to customizing my site. It was fun and diverting. Now, I have all (I think) of the picture files, rendered there in low-res as that was all I could manage with the scanners at Kinko’s, and if there is any text I’d want to save for posterity, it’s what follows: my narrative about my journey to Canada, updated through the day I got my citizenship.I even had a background of a Canadian flag that I created in MS Paint or whatever the Win 98 drawing program was.

HOW I BECAME CANADIAN

Moving to Canada had been a deferred dream for me long before I actually emigrated. My first visit was to Vancouver over US Memorial Day weekend, May 1985. Despite the striking beauty of the city, the impression that really overwhelmed me on that trip was that the people there were conspicuously civil and, well, quiet. Civility is, for me, a virtue greater than charity. I wanted more.

On learning that one of my classmates at Reed was Canadian (from Mississauga, Ontario), I gushed to him about my epiphany in Vancouver and how struck I was with its general niceness. He said that Toronto was the greatest city in Canada. I wasn’t aware, at the time, of the competitiveness between Toronto and Vancouver, and for the matter between Montreal and Toronto and further between Toronto and the rest of the country, but I suspected that Toronto was a city I would have to visit. Four years later, I got my chance; my ex, Timm, and I spent a week there in June 1989. It was a good time. Toronto astonished us with its diversity. It lacked the gentility of Vancouver (although now I know one can find a fair amount, by Canadian standards, of roughness in Vancouver and a great deal of refinement in Toronto) and Vancouver’s spectacular beauty, but Toronto had an assortment of peoples that I had never seen anywhere, living cheek-by-jowl in beautiful diversity. Toronto also had an amazingly open gay scene. I took another vacation in Toronto in August 1993, my graduation present to myself (after the PhD), and again in June 1995, an extra week while attending the Law and Society Association conference there.

But on that last trip I had more than a vacation. In May 1995 I was finishing a two-year post-doc at the University of Kentucky. I had been having a pleasant e-mail correspondence with a guy named Brian Singh, whom I had met via a gay men’s mailing list on the internet. Our communication was pleasantly distracting, and was looking forward to meeting this smart, cute-sounding Trinidadian (he calls himself “Indo-Caribbean Canadian”). We met on the evening of my first day there, and the rest is (our) history. Throwing all caution and reason to the wind–I’d just accepted a tenure-track job 600 miles further south, at the University of South Alabama in Mobile–we embarked on a long-distance relationship. After a year, and a mutual desire to make this work 24-7, we decided (given the outrageously better position for same-sex couples in Canada) that I would try to emigrate to Canada. But the process was stressful, to put it mildly. In calendar terms it looks pretty simple, and in retrospect things did indeed go remarkably smoothly:

August 1996: I spent June 15-september 6 in Toronto, and so we could (and did) both work there on preparing my immigration application. This included all the standard forms, a letter full of legalese requesting “humane and compassionate consideration” if I didn’t make it on “points” (standardized evaluation of education, occupation, “cultural fit,” and so forth) since we were a same-sex couple whose inability to marry “presented us an undue and disproportionate hardship.” We included pictures, copies of phone bills, airline ticket receipts, all the evidence for the durability of our relationship that we could find. Heterosexual couples could be strangers to one another and yet they qualify easily with only that marriage licence. It’s an unfair double standard that we had to verify our “love” as well, but compared to what our treatment by the US INS would have been… so anyway…

September 1996: I got a receipt for fees (it was about $1450!) and a hopeful note that said that my application could be processed without interview. The package included medical forms and required that I see a Canada-approved physician, so on October 8 I had to drive the 170 miles to Montgomery for my physical. Brian chided me that they would draw “seven or eight” vials of blood, God bless ‘im. It was actually only one vial and thus was the best part of the trip. Montgomery was hideous, the parts that I saw anyway, which were overflowing with prolifers protesting the women’s clinics near my medical exam site.

And then waiting and panic and waiting and a stressed-out Christmas and waiting and waiting and panic. And waiting. And panic. A month on Xanax (really!) and in that time not a word, not a whisper, from the folks in Buffalo (where the immigration processing centre is) during these four months. I now know, based on the timelines of other immigrants, that I was outrageously lucky to have such a short processing time.

And then…

February 6, 1997: MY LANDING PAPERS ARRIVE! Just before Brian’s Febuary visit to Mobile. Perfect timing, oh happy day, oh happy, happy day. We then had a lovely trip to Destin, Florida to celebrate. Note this smiling shot of me in Destin. Now you know why I was smiling!

March 15, 1997: I “land” at Pearson Airport, Toronto: I am as of this date a landed immigrant (actually the new term is “permanent resident” but everybody still uses the old terminology), can apply for a SIN card (Canuck version of SSN card), get an Ontario driver’s licence, look forward to applying for OHIP (that’s universal health care, American friends), walk around on the clouds and feel very Canadian…. until March 30 when I have to return to Mobile to polish off my contract there. I had resigned from my position just before my landing.

June 15, 1997: With U-Haul in tow, Brian and I arrive after the 1300 miles from deepest Alabama to the border, at Sarnia, Ontario, I import my goods and my car (it wasn’t cheap). I return to earth as a full-time resident of Canada.

As I write this, in January of 2001, I have applied for Canadian citizenship. I sent the application last summer (June 2000); the application has been processed and I have now to wait to write my exam. I trust this won’t be in the too distant future- in fact my test has now been scheduled twice, but in the Toronto office… not where I live anymore. I can only sit and wait, and let you know when the next stage happens.

Update- on January 26, my file was finally transferred to the Calgary office (after a test was scheduled twice, on December 11 and then January 7, in Toronto). Not long now!

FINAL UPDATE! I wrote my citizenship test on March 8, passed it (it’s an easy test), and on June 1, 2001 I was sworn in as a Canadian citizen. I AM CANADIAN!

Email posting

I haven’t been geeking out very much lately with my Nokia E71 smartphone, in part because it’s become a more mundane (but still incredible useful- I have no idea how I’ve survived this long without a proper calendar) thing and I will admit to having, yes already, upgrade-itis as I’d really love a N97 or, if it ever becomes available in North America, a GSM Palm Pre. But there are still cool new discoveries to be made, and one is that wordpress allows users to post full-fledged blog posts, with thumbnails and even audio plugs, as regular emails. I enabled “post by email” in my wordpress dashboard, it spat out a convoluted email address, and here we are.

So how about some media? Well seeing as winter has already dealt us our first blow of the season, let me share one of our last flowers, and less sombrely, the EPIC coconut cream pie that Brian made for a little dinner party the other day.

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Street View

It had been a long wait, but finally, we have Google Street View in Canada. Not all of Canada, of course, but if you’re among those who live in the Vancouver area, in Calgary and west all the way to Lake Louise, in most of the major cities of southern Ontario (including Toronto of course), in Montreal, or in Halifax, then you’re covered. Here’s one view of our house:

Our car is parked across the street and you can see the Stampede parking permit stuck to the driver’s side of the windshield, so I think this was taken in early July during Stampede. Cruising down 17th Avenue suggests the same for that street, because the horrible Stampede fake wooden fences and Jack Daniels banners are all over the place. I don’t hate Stampede (especially when Brian does visitor research for them- ergo the parking permit) but am not happy that Street View is only going to confirm the cowboy stereotype about Calgary. But it will dispel the “always covered in snow” stereotype too, so I really should not complain. I should note that we had an inordinately dry June and that’s why the grass looks so brown- in comparison, by late September, it was very green. We also had the warmest day of the entire year on September 23. Very odd summer and early fall. But warts and all- this is our home, welcome, have a look around on Street View.

I’m very happy about this, about getting Street View, because I live far–thousand and thousands of kilometres far–from many (most) of the people who matter most to me in my life, and this is, as anybody who’s been following this blog already knows, one of my curses. The vast majority of these people will never set foot in my home or my city (or province). Streetview is a way to make us closer, sort of, and it’s a blessing. I feel the same way, for the same reason, about facebook, and so while I understand the complaints that many people have about “privacy” and the unwillingness too many of you have about joining facebook, I think that these complaints also are from a position of luxury. What I mean is that I have the choice (for practical purposes) of getting online and “out there” or I have the choice of being almost completely disconnected. I don’t have family here; I don’t have many of what I consider really good friends here. My being “out there” on the net and having the presence that I do is not only or primarily a matter of “narcissism,” as I’ve read so often and as I’ve been accused of suffering from. What I am is keen to the point of desperation to use these resources (facebook, blogging, twitter, heck even email and skype) to reconnect in ways and using means that used to be nonexistent, or that used to be available to the few. I’m narcisstic. You don’t get to be a self-made first-generation academic and a voluntary American ex-pat with my scholarly pedigree by NOT being very, very good at addressing your own needs and having a certain elevated view of yourself.  But I’m not a disordered narcissist. I CARE about the people I love, LOVE to hear from them, LOVE to host them, LOVE to see them, and LOVE when they reciprocate in sharing some of that nice self-centred focus that you have to give in to if you’re going to play online as I do.  A lot of my motivation in doing what I do online isn’t narcissistic at all but rather reflects my desire to have others join in. And that’s because you’re all so damn far away.