Photo: forever silly! Tyler in 2004.
Photo: Vancouver, fall 2004
Photo: Mendhi- symbolism? (October 2005) 
Photo: portrait of an artist with a rats nest (December 2004)
Photo: monks and prayer wheel (Dharamsala, India, Nov 2005)No Bravery: A nation blind to their disgrace
The song by James Blunt is haunting and so very fitting. Some may call the film partisan and cast it off as sensationalism-- a tear jerker. But I think this is the value in it. It is partisan, it is emotional, it unsettles and forces reaction. We should not be comfortable with Iraq or come to terms with so-called collateral damage. We should feel disturbed.
Photo: Smiling in Daultabad, India (Aug 2005)
PHOTO: my mom and Daniel hugging after their wedding (Vancouver, August 2006)
Photo: I stumbled upon this outdoor photo exhibit last October in Brussels (2005)
Photo: SFU geography people atop Whistler Mountain, BC (September, 2006)
Photo: in case you hadn't yet met my dog, Tron. 
PHOTO: no pirates, just some drunken halloweeners- a logger, Captain Highliner of fishstick fame and me, the Amnesty International candle (October 2005).
Photo: me cracking up (summer 2006)
Photo: Brother and sister (India, July 2005)
Photo: Miranda and Me celebrating the Great Bear Rainforest Agreement (March 2006). IS RESISTING GOING AGAINST THE GRAIN? Or is it going with the grain, while conforming is going against the grain? If gender is so absurdly false-- or unnaturally imposed upon people in harmful ways-- —then resistance of gender is finding your more comfortable grain, while conformity requires pushing in a direction that may not suit you entirely.
Just another way of thinking about it all I guess!!
No TV was watched in the riding of this elephant. Stefan and I encounter a friendly pachyderm. 1-2am, New Delhi (June 2005).
Pre-heat oven to 350. Brown the chicken in a pan then place in a backing dish. Mix the ingredients above together into a thick paste using a fork. Coat the chicken with paste and bake. Chicken thighs take about 15-20 mins. Adjust the amounts and chicken to accommodate your diet.
Photo: that's me in the Daintree Rainforest, Northern Queensland (July 2004)
Photo: Ayahuasca ingredients (Jan 2006)
Photo: Daultabad Village, Haryana, India (August 2004)I haven't had a chance to blog in a while as I've been absorbed in writing my thesis (FINALLY!). My thesis title for now is "Using Bodies: Negotiating Reproductive Health in one Village in India."
The following is an excerpt from my DRAFT of Chapter 1:
This thesis explores how the Indian state shapes women’s bodies, how the place and space of the village shapes women’s bodies and where these processes correspond and diverge. For example, women may access an illegal abortion against the wishes of the state and in doing so, be committing female infanticide, conforming to village patriarchal preference for sons. The goal here is not to untangle this messiness and suggest that women are either conformist or resisting, but to highlight the everyday strategies employed by women and in doing so to emphasize the spaces of hope created by and with bodies.
In terms of these performances of resistance and conformity, I refer to what Hynman and de Alwis (2004: 552) call the “calculated presentation of self in everyday life.” While these authors speak in reference to survival techniques of Tamils moving about in a Sinhala-majority Sri Lanka, recognizing intentional performances of people can be applied to understanding the ways in which women negotiate their sexual and reproductive wellbeing. Highlighted in the sociological work of Goffman (1959), this view of individual performances as deliberate mechanisms for adapting to different social settings differs from feminist approaches to performativity presented by Butler in her seminal work, Bodies that Matter (1993). Butler views performances not as calculated and/or premeditated but as reiterative acts based on socially constructed scripts within what call “‘regulatory fictions’” (Butler, as cited in Hyndman & de Alwis, 2004: 550).
Hyndman and de Alwis combine the theories of Goffman (1959) and Butler (1993) by showing how “identity is enacted through regulatory regimes that expect certain performances from specific people” (2004: 551), but these scripts can be subverted. The authors demonstrate the ways in which people’s tactics “sometimes make explicit and at other times disrupt the interpellatory scripts of Butler's regulatory fictions by acknowledging the everyday survival strategies of people…” (2004: 553). With this view of performance, Hyndman and de Alwis illustrate spaces and places of and for individual agency, which are downplayed by Butler. Butler writes that performances cannot “be a human act or expression, a wilful appropriation, and it is certainly not a question of taking on a mask; it is the matrix through which all willing first becomes possible, its enabling cultural condition” (1993, p. 7). Combining Goffman’s humanistic, agency-oriented understanding of performance with Butler’s poststructuralist one enables recognition of people’s individual intentionalities within a socially produced context of regulatory frameworks and scripts. Indeed, feminist research shows that people use their bodies in ways that are simultaneously resisting and conforming.
With this understanding of calculated subversions of governing scripts, it is possible to recognize that women are both produced by and produce their sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing. The concept of choice in the activist claim for reproductive rights is therefore problematic. Dominant discourses on sexual and reproductive choice and rights, which I examine in detail below, make simplistic and often false assumptions that the provision of reproductive rights and choice with a liberal human-rights framework can ‘free’ women from existing, gendered regulatory frameworks (Viswanath, 2001).
Following performative theories presented by Butler (1993), my work shows that while women may act in ways that rearticulate dominant social systems of heterosexual reproduction, dualist gender roles, male dominance, and so on, they also act in ways that subvert these systems in subtle, yet critical and often intentional ways (Goffman, 1959). While an apparent lack of individual options and freedoms for these so-called ‘third world’ and ‘poor’ women could easily be construed as disempowerment, the women I present here demonstrate intentional defiance of laws and norms that do not mesh with their sexual and reproductive intentions. Within sexual and reproductive health regulatory fictions produced by the village and the state, women find alternatives in both discreet and overt ways, using the “geography closest in”, their bodies. In presenting women as actively opposing state and village imperatives, however, I also do not wish to gloss over the overwhelming oppression that most women in India face.
PHOTO: Lemmings, we are all lemmings! Edgewood, BC (Dec 2004)
PHOTO: Women at evening prayer before the free weekly Suffi Qawaal concert. Nizamuddin's Tomb and Shrine are
Left: Tim Harvey and Erden Eruc
Photo: This is me and my dog, Tron. As you can see, Motion is renovating this house. 
PHOTO: ahhh, the sweet smell of progress, New Delhi (2005)
PHOTO: Tsuglag Khang Temple, the Dalai Lama's Temple in Dharamsala, India (2004).
Bird watching can be really cool (okay, I am a geek, I've come to terms with it!). This is the coolest bird in the world! It's Australian of course!
Did I mention that Motion and I are now trained spotter volunteers with the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, or CASARA? That means we get to fly around the Prince George area in little cessna-type planes like the one above and view the endless forests of red, dead pine-beetle kill!!
You'd better start heading for higher ground. According to Al Gore, if the earth continues to warm, ice caps will melt and sea levels will rise by at least 20 feet (that's 6.10 meters). I recommend you all go see his documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." It raises some great questions, provides excellent facts in an accessible format and is generally well-produced. 
My first time scuba diving, Great Barrier Reef. The fash some how created the bizzare reflection above me (2004).
Cape Tribulation Beach, Northern Queensland, reflected in my shades (2004).
