So, again, another update that should have been done sooner. maybe I should just suck it up and get that gold membership. I want it, it's just I keep forgetting to do it/or think better of running up my credit card debt even more.

So I went to see Aengus Finnan Monday night at the White Water Gallery here in town, and it was pretty effing cool. I dragged the Mathman along with me, and he really enjoyed himself too. I highly recommend checking out the website and downloading some of the mp3s he has up, especially "North Wind" and "Fly Away". But really, they're all good.

We also went out with the band afterwards to the Moose for wings and drinks. THe waitress made me surprise drinks, all of which were made with milk, all of which were more interesting than good. But our interview went really well, as neither Greg nor myself was exceptionally goofy or creepy, and Aengus himself was very open and talkative. He's a pretty interesting character, as well as a Nip grad.

I also went to one of the films being shown for International Women's Week up at the school last night. Ladybird, Ladybird is about a British woman whose four children are taken away form her by social services and how she struggles to hang on to the one she's currently pregnant with. It's 'based on a true story'. It was painful to watch, but well done. I found myself getting really frustrated with Maggie, the mother, because she never took any responsibility for her actions (locking her children in their room at the safe house--unfortunately there was a fire that ngiht and at least one of the children was burnt very badly; we never saw her make any effort to get a job of any kind; she smoked while pregnant). Everytime the social workers came to see her, she would fight against them, verbally and physically, and to be honest, I would be hard pressed to return her children to her, if I was one of the judges she'd faced.

The discussion afterwards was interesting. I was really uncomfortable and didn't want to say anything (I probably would have been lynched). There was a lot of talk about the 'feminization' and 'criminalization' of poverty, and how if Maggie had had money her story would have been very different (see my note on how she never actually tried to get a job of any kind) and how the Mike Harris government was responsible for all of these cuts to social services in Ontario and blahblahblah why does no one ever realize that Mike Harris retired, like, almost a year ago, and that the government is headed by Ernie Eves now?

One of the comments that really bothered me was a man who said the problem was that every time elections came up, people were more likely to concentrate on money and the economy than on social issues, and that people had to 'forget about money' and concentrate entirely on social change. I love how everyone wants us to forget about money but at the same time totally ignore the fact that it does cost a lot of money to fund all these social programs that they want, to say nothing of the part where, without a stable economy, where (and how) are people expected to find jobs, thereby entrenching poverty even more.

Don't get me wrong. I definitely support a socialist government mandate where the government is responsible for social programs, but I cannot fathom the idea of 'forgetting about the economy'. You can't spend your country or province into oblivion (on anything, being it social programs or the military or whatever) without worsening the pre-existing conditions of poverty. Money still doesn't grow on trees. I also don't necessarily support the current Progressive Conservative government, but they are the best of a very sorry lot, and they have balanced the budget, which is the first step towards getting this province back on its feet and eventually being able to afford the kind of social programs that the people who live here deserve.

*ahem* anyhow. It was a neat experience on the whole and I'm glad that I have the opportunity to take part in these things while I'm at school; even if my student activist days are three years behind me at this point. That said, I'm still more of an egalitarian than a feminist. Sometimes I worry that I'm a bit of a 'limousine liberal' like Virginia Woolf was.

I've had some odd dreams lately, but those can wait for another entry.

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