AMEX is Phishing

Just the other day I received a letter (the one you see below) from American Express (AMEX).

In it, AMEX points out that I have not used my credit card in the past 12 months. That is correct.

They go on to say, if I wish to keep my account open I should use my credit card within 35 days of the letter's mail date (April 8, 2011), and "benefit from the experience of being an American Express Cardmember."

In the past, when I've used my AMEX credit card, I've found the experience to be remarkably similar to that of other credit cards; anxiety over whether or not I should really be buying an item I can't pay cash for; indifference when I get my monthly statement. But I digress.

AMEX goes on to say that if I do not use my card with 35 days, they will "for [my] own security," close my account.

Sounds like one of 'those' email scams doesn't it?!

The kind that looks like it's from a reputable organization, such as a bank or credit card company, and whose message is designed to make recipients think their accounts are in danger if they don't act quickly and submit their password or other personal information.

How can my credit card account be in danger if I'm not using it?

I get it, I'm a lousy customer. AMEX hasn't made dime one from me in the past year and they're trying to scare me into using my card by going shopping. "I better go buy something or else they're going to cut me off!" is the reaction they're hoping for.

It's a shameful tactic, if they don't want to keep my account they should have said so.

In the meantime, I'll be looking for my scissors, adios AMEX. 

The cost of doing yoga

The mainstreaming of yoga would have you think - with the right accessories - it is the way to calmness and serenity. Yet, what it fails to admit is this state of being comes at a price.

Forget the cost of classes, mats and fashionable outfits. Yoga is hard and messy work. In fact, I would say it is even violent.

For the past decade I’ve been practicing yoga in Toronto. I don’t need to prove “I am into yoga.” I see the lululemon manifesto as the marketing device it is and I don’t have an OM symbol tattoo.

It was during a Sunday morning yoga class when I discovered the yoga experience doesn’t add up to the propaganda.

The instructor was leading the class through a sun salutation series. The first round was over and I found myself back at the front of my mat in mountain pose – Tadasana – when I heard a quiet voice whisper, “I hate yoga.”

It took a moment before I realized the voice was my own.
At first, I kept the experience to myself. However, a few weeks later I decided to mention it to Catherine another instructor at the studio.

Catherine explained, as she made chattering motions with her hand, the voice I heard was a wise voice that emerged from the gut, not the usual interior voice of discursive thinking. I shouldn’t try to analyze it, just let it go.

Yoga challenges the mind’s hypnotic version of reality and has the power to lead us through some serious self-reflection. Sometimes a practitioner becomes pissed off by yoga because it introduces her to aspects of herself she would prefer to deny. Yet, although negativity arises as part of a yoga practice it is seldom mentioned.

There is the illusion that there might be an extraordinary guru or expert out there who lives in a constant state of bliss and that this should be our goal too. But this isn’t a real person with everyday demands to contend with.

This is also why I hate yoga.

Most people who seek out a practice like yoga are trying to find a way to better cope with life. To make it seem that balance and harmony are possible without the hard and messy part is deceiving.  

“ABANDON  ALL  HOPE  YE  WHO  ENTER  HERE,” reads the ominous warning above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno. I think yoga studios should consider posting a similar warning over their doors.

What is employment?

Recent events in my life have caused me to ponder the question, "what is employment?"

On a basic level, it's a contract for labour between the 'employee' and the 'employer.' In exchange for labour, the employee receives payment, which usually goes toward personal sustainability - food, shelter, etc.

In other words, in exchange for my labour, I receive payment, which I then use to pay rent, buy food, pay bills, purchase goods and entertainment. I'm told I should also be saving some of this payment, but that's a whole other conversation.

In my case, payment not only includes my wages, it also includes healthcare benefits, pension contributions and a variety of other perks.

However, should it be something else? Should this exchange provide more?

Should my employment, i.e., my job, offer any sort of satisfaction beyond sustainability? Is it merely an exchange of labour for money?

What does job satisfaction entail? I imagine this question can only be measured on a personal basis. So, what is job satisfaction for me?

Now, I'd like to think I'm not naive enough to think there is a perfect job out there somewhere. However, I think a great job entails a creative, dynamic environment, where ideas are shared, discussed - sometimes argued - and decided upon.

Work should be a forward motion - dealing with itself in the context of the world. The world is constantly evolving, so why shouldn't work? Unfortunately, people and organizations often get comfortable and settle into a pattern of complacency.

When you hear a phrase like, "This is the way we've always done it," you can be assured that the organization you're in is pretty much stagnant. However, this statement can also be used for good.

If taken as a warning signal, the statement can be used to draw our attention to our complacency - forcing us to ask, "What needs to be different?" Instead, it is used to block out new, and possibly regenerative, ideas that threaten the status quo.

The world of the job thus becomes entangled within itself because it is viewed from within a vacuum. It is lost and cut-off from its relevance to the world within which it lives.

It's not easy or always comfortable, but acting when the sign appears will keep an organization - and the people it employs - fresh and relevant.

This is the sort of place where I want to work.

Championing the good

As someone whose university years were spent pouring over Plato’s dialogues, I cannot overcome the urge to ask this question.

When is something good? Who decides? There are many things that people think of as being good, and many who would think the same thing is bad. For example, I think ice cream is good, some might claim - because of its sugar and high fat content - it is bad.

Are so-called binary pairs; good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, right and wrong, just and unjust, so easily differentiated?

I think capital punishment is bad, but others would disagree. Socrates would further the debate by asking something like, If someone is justly put to death, then who is harmed more, the executioner or the executed?

But, back to the original question, what is good?

When I think about ‘good,’ words like quiet, spontaneous and fleeting come to mind. Good often happens in small ways and is easily forgotten. It’s not uncommon for a person to recall every detail of some slight committed against them 20 years ago, but have difficulty in remembering something good that happened to them more recently.

We seldom acknowledge how good we have it, especially when we think we don’t. Imagine criticizing your government publicly - and who doesn’t - and then being arrested for doing so.

Unfortunately, for writers like Canadian-Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan - currently serving a 19-and-a-half year prison sentence in Iran – freedom of expression is a luxury. However, for organizations like PEN Canada, exiled and imprisoned writers are not forgotten and their causes are pursued until justice is served. This is good.

So is the idealism of U of T students; Brigid Burke, a fourth-year undergrad studying anthropology and sociology, and third-year undergrad Nymisha Chilukuri, studying developmental biology and religious studies. I had the pleasure of interviewing them for a story about World AIDS Day events taking place on U of T’s St George campus.

Burke and Chilukuri, and the rest of the U of T’s Millennium Project committee, have organized a People’s Ribbon Campaign, and are asking the university community to wear something red and meet them at King’s College Circle on Dec. 1st at 3 p.m. to help create the largest human-made red ribbon.

The purpose of this event is to bring awareness to the Canadian government’s lack of progress in reaching United Nations Millennium development goal number 6; to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases.

They also want to inspire people to act and be less complacent when it comes to solving these problems.

For Burke and Chilukuri, giving money or buying something ‘Red’ at the Gap, are acts designed to make us feel like we’re contributing to the solution, without engaging us critically. Who among us knows how this money is spent? Me neither.

By shopping or giving money we get to feel good because we are doing something. And, of course we are, because let’s face it money is important to this fight. However, it also absolves us of any responsibility. Do you know the details of goal number 6 and why only Scandinavian countries are meeting their obligations?

What these students see are citizens, and their governments, all too willing to let corporations handle the problem. Do we know how corporations plan to halt HIV/AIDS or malaria by 2015? What are their policies, and how much will the bottom line determine their actions?  

In 1994, Bill Gates established what would become the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help improve people’s health in developing nations and to provide opportunities for education to citizens of the United States.

The foundation employs over 800 people, manages a $36.4 billion trust endowment and has given $23.91 billion in research grants for things like improving soil conditions in Africa, or developing malaria vaccines. How can this be anything but good?

It can’t, unless of course the world becomes Gates’ world. But that’ll never happen. Right?

I think this is Burke and Chilukuri’s point. What will the world look like when major corporations are allowed to take-up the world’s problems without input or questioning from its citizens?

Is it wrong to question the motives of companies who establish foundations or actively support charities all in the name of doing something good?

A history professor of mine once said, “Thinking critically does not necessarily entail a rejection.”

So, the next time you’re about to do something labeled ‘good,’ think about it.

One | one | eleven

I don't have much to say except, Happy New Year!

Truthfully, I didn't want to miss posting something on the first day of the first month of the (two thousand and) eleventh year - all those 'ones'!

I'm not one for resolutions - it's just a set-up for failure. However, if I could change one thing this year it would be to keep a more open mind. Never mind getting caught up in the daily grind, or investing too much emotionally in things that are simple problems, easily solved.

 

I recently returned from my vacation in Costa Rica. I think the vastness of the beach depicted above is a good metaphor for an open and clear mind. I'll have to remind myself of this when the discursiveness takes over. 

Hope it's a good year for everyone!

Kelly

'Twas the night of Halloween

Continuing with the Christmas theme, here is a little poem I wrote for a writing class I'm taking with Patricia Pearson.

'Twas the Night of Halloween

‘Twas the night of Halloween, and all through the house,
Costumes were strewn and trick-or-treaters tuckered-out.
When all of sudden, 12:01 flashed the clock,
It gave us a fright; it was quite a shock.

The eerie howls of ghosts and goblins smothered by a scarier call,
The jingle of sleigh bells and that ho-ho-ho known by all.

Cobwebs and jack-o-lanterns disappeared into space,
Twinkling lights and tinsel appearing in their place.

As visions of Karl Marx danced in my head,
I asked myself, “Isn’t Christmas dead?”

What to get Stephen Harper for Christmas?

Worried about what to get the Prime Minister for Christmas this year? Me neither, but bear with me.

On Oct. 29th I attended a reading at the Toronto International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront Centre.

Four fabulous writers read from recent work that evening; Lynda Barry (Picture This), Nadine Bismuth (Are You Married to a Psychopath?), Dany Laferrière (I am a Japanese Writer) and Yann Martel (Beatrice and Virgil).

Martel also read letters #64 and #93 from his ongoing project, What is Stephen Harper Reading?

In April 2007 Martel launched, What is Stephen Harper Reading? as a response to the federal government’s flaccid acknowledgement of the 50 artists sitting in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Commons on March 28, 2007 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council of the Arts.

Bev Oda, Minister for Canadian Heritage made a brief speech, but the Prime Minister neither addressed the group nor looked up at the gallery as Oda spoke. Martel began to wonder what kind of man Stephen Harper was, and concluded there probably wasn’t enough stillness in his life – the kind of stillness brought about by reading books.

Martel vowed to send Stephen Harper a book every two weeks until the end of his term. Each book is inscribed and accompanied by a letter, and is chosen for its ability to expand stillness.

Letters #64, Carole Mortimer’s The Virgin Secretary’s Impossible Boss, and #93, Selected Poems, by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi, make for great reading in themselves. 

Each letter describes why Martel recommends the accompanying book and neatly draws parallels to the Prime Minister’s leadership. The letters usually end with a suggestion or question for the PM to reflect on - should he decide to read Martel’s correspondence. 

For instance, Mortimer’s novel is published by Harlequin Romance – a Canadian publishing company that has sold billions of books worldwide. “The function of genre fiction is to relax and confirm, not to stress and challenge. Genre fiction seeks to deliver one thing: emotional satisfaction,” wrote Martel. “Is that such a bad thing? I don’t think so,” he added.

Clearly, as Martel points out in the letter, Harlequin knows what their readers want and they deliver it. The implication, perhaps Harper could do something similar for Canadians?

As Martel began to read the first letter I realized that although I’d heard of the project, I had forgotten all about it. It also occurred to me that I was probably not alone. Immediately I knew what to do, I’d send Stephen Harper a letter and book for Christmas, and I’d invite others to do the same.

But, which book?

Perhaps one of the four titles read that evening? Maybe, I could arrange to have one of the authors read it to the PM personally? You know, there is nothing like having someone read to you.

I think I’ll send him a copy of my favourite book, Dante’s Inferno. But not for the reasons you’re thinking. Remember, the Inferno is an allegory about redemption, emerging into the light after exploring one’s soul.

Can’t afford to send a book? Then send a card and include a reading list, to:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Last year, Martel published the first 55 letters in the book, What Is Stephen Harper Reading?: Yann Martel's Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes, and maintains a blog about the project, http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca.