Around The Unsound

I've been trying to think through a few things over the last couple weeks since Exile's been home.  Not that the conversations I have with my cat are particularly useful, but there's a certain perspective one gets from having a small predator in the house.  Having gone through an ordeal to repatriate her, those memories linger with me every time she demands food in the morning.  For her, I'm not sure if it even registers, though she does realize small differences.  We're not going to be moving back into the basement until early August, but she still goes to the basement door expectantly as if to declare "This is wrong, I know where I live."  Of course, like I'm sure most pet owners think, animals have a way of letting us know.  I'm not going into language here, but I would like to ask her what she thinks about having been transformed so many times. To me, every transition in this story makes her into something else based on the people involved. 

There are some stories that feel too strange for reality.  As you live through them, you may find yourself wondering at the veracity of your own recollections.  At moments, in the thickness of uncertainty, you question your own senses to the point that you might be tempted to modify certain aspects to fit with some measure of comfortable sense.  However much I appreciate such a sentiment, this ill founded  impulse has roots in our need for order that can never account for the chaos that is life. This story begins almost exactly one year ago when I took my chatty torti cat - Exile - to get her rabies vaccination.  As an indoor cat, adopted from the Edmonton Humane Society, there was never really any need for this procedure, but having a pet is a lifetime responsibility.  When your circumstances as 'the human' change, that is never an excuse to abandon a pet.  Such is my opinion, and I realize many people who don't have pets or a basic understanding of empathy will struggle

I got the idea for this blog by tossing around ideas in my head. Which, if you've never met me, you know that I don't always make sense when I'm in this process. Heck, you might be able to tell that from my two earlier posts. In any case, I was trying to think through the way I was considering my target population. The common labels are: Climate Change Deniers Climate Skeptics Climate Realists Attached to these words are other problematic associations that I view as a threat to the validity of my research. This speaks more to the way language is used colloquially and the manner by which these assumptions become stereotype which can become prejudice. We put work into the labels that I mentioned, but there is also the brain to consider. Heuristics, in the sense that I mean them, are a short cut to cognitive processing that is in line with evolutionary theory. Imagine you’re in the body of your great great great great great great…great great…super great grandparent

As a white female Canadian that grew up in rural Alberta, in a place that I unfondly call the home of conservatives and cow tippers, to say that I was blind to systemic issues in society is very kind.  It took moving to Edmonton and a further six years later for me to have any meaningful interaction with the type of problems that visible minorities face.  The illusion I had of Canada being the multicultural place with the nice people who are 'sorry for being sorry' was blown up thanks to the Anthropology department at MacEwan. The professor I had for Race and Racism took issue with Canada featuring in none of the course material, so the final exam was a ten page research paper on any topic we liked provided that it was about Canada.  I was kept up for days reading about residential schools and harrowed by how we treated and justified treating children recently - often forcibly - stripped from their homes.  I wrote a compelling paper about mental health (historic trauma) in th

After a number of years, I decided to go back and get my BA.  Since I was working a full time job during the day, I took night classes, and one of the available ones was Philosophy 110 Morals and Ethics.  For content, it was a pretty basic introduction to the broad forms of logical thought with key sections featuring big names like Socrates, Plato, Rousseau, and ... the no name associate professor recently furnished with a Ph.D. and an inflated view of self.  Let's say that we didn't get along very well.  I barely passed the class, because I decided to challenge her abortion arguments by sidestepping the premise entirely.  That is a story for a different day though, because I did very well on exactly one paper about the moral underpinnings of female genital mutilation and circumcision which is problematic. We can quibble about the physical changes to genitalia having differences, but they both involve a ceremonial removal or modification of a person's body part with a va