cheryl santa maria

My fifteen year-old cousin is trying to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life. I had a talk with her a while back and I was astonished, and so proud, of the questions she asked me, questions like:

“Do you like your job?”
(No).

“Do you see yourself doing this job forever?”
(No).

“Do you get any fulfillment out of your job?”
(No).

“Why do you do it, then?”
(Good question, kid. I ask myself the same thing every day).

I asked her what she wanted to do. She said she didn’t know but that her future career would have to meet certain criteria. It would have to be something she enjoys, something meaningful, and something that keeps her learning. I asked her where the hell she got that kind of wisdom. When I was fifteen I spent most of my time locked up in my room being what kids these days would call emo.

She said her teachers had challenged her to think about the future.

Wow.

High school teachers are challenging kids to think?

When did they start doing that?

No offense to any high school staff out there but when I was a teenager my teachers spent half their time on strike and the other half of their time on work to rule. Between their union meetings and their picketing, they didn’t have much time or energy left to challenge us to do anything. We had one course at my school called “college prep” but all we did was cut pictures out of magazines and talk about television shows. There was no talk about the “future” in my high school. When I applied to university at seventeen I chose film, not because I had a career path planned out, but because I wanted to do something in the arts.

Nobody sat me down and told me that a Bachelor of Arts is essentially worthless in the job market. In fact, nobody sat me down and told me anything, which is a bit of a problem because I was a kid and I had a blind trust in academia. I figured that going to university would guarantee me a fulfilling career.

Not so much.

Here I am today, 27 years old, and I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. I’m contemplating going back to school again, for the third time, in an attempt to find something I’ll enjoy.

I know I can’t go around blaming my high school teachers for all the decisions I’ve made. I’m an adult now and I have to take ownership over my (lack) of career and my professional and academic choices.  While things haven’t been bad for me, they definitely haven’t panned out as I had envisioned.

Not by a long shot.

I’m glad they’re teaching kids these days to get informed and ask questions. I’m glad they’re telling them not to settle for a mediocre career, and they’re telling them that university doesn’t guarantee success.

Teaching is the most important job a person can have. Sadly, there are some teachers who doesn’t take their job seriously. I personally know of one who went into the profession because of the summer holidays, and not because she had any interest in the kids.

I’m glad my cousin has some teachers that are willing to mentor her. Maybe she’ll be able to avoid the quarter-life crisis that I currently find myself in.

Ask questions. Think about your future. Don’t settle.

Those are just a few of the things I wish they’d taught me.

A couple of nights ago I had a chat with a friend who had recently finished reading the book Three Cups of Tea, a memoir by mountain climber-turned-humanitarian Greg Mortenson who, after falling ill during a climb, decided to relocate to Pakistan and build schools in rural areas.

My friend said that he’d like to move to Pakistan and do the same thing. This is of course, fantastic, but his remark got me thinking.

People flock to the third world to build houses and schools and to work with children, while others send money through programs like World Vision. This is a wonderful and extremely selfless thing to do but I’ve always wondered why people will help the poor on the other side of the world before they’ll help the poor in their own community.

Here in Toronto nearly 36,000 children go to school hungry every day and thousands more are forced to endure abuse at the hands of alcoholic and/or drug-addicted parents.

They need help, too.

And helping out in your own community puts you at an advantage because you have a better understanding of the society the children have been raised in. It’s not uncommon for a Westerner to go over to the third world without taking the time to understand the culture and the beliefs of the people they are trying to help, which can drastically diminish the positive effect they can have on that community.

Poverty is not just a lack of money. It’s a combination of many things, including cultural beliefs, geography, politics, and religion. You can go into a small, third world village and build schools ’till the cows come home but if you’re doing it in a country where girls are married off as soon as they can bear children and the boys start working in landfills at four because their parents are too poor to feed them, the classrooms will remain empty – regardless of the fancy facilities you’ve donated.

And there’s another (potential) problem with self-righteous Westerners heading over to the third world to spread money and good will:

Third world countries don’t always want to be helped.

We Westerners tend to view poor countries with misinformed, pigeon-holed ideologies that some people find insulting. Take for example, the recent ruling in the Madonna adoption case.

Many of us presume places like Malawi are lacking in resources, but Madonna’s application to adopt her second Malawian child was denied because, according to a statement released by the Human Rights Consultative Committee : “We should not create a picture that the state has failed to care for children and therefore that orphans should be taken away from their communities to other countries.”

Don’t get me wrong, though. If you want to go to another country to help the disadvantaged, more power to you. Just take the time to understand the culture of those people beforehand.

And don’t forget that there are thousands of kids in your neighbourhood that could use your help just as badly.

There are lines everywhere.  They’re all over her face.  There are lines where there repwere no lines before. Things have started to droop. And her period?

Yeah, that’s gone. It’s been replaced by hot flashes.

She stands in front of the mirror pulling and prodding.  They said that sleeping on silk sheets would help, but they didn’t.

They said a diet of antioxidants and wheat grass would take years off of her face.  They were wrong.

She wears sunscreen, she doesn’t smoke, she gave up alcohol, and she’s sworn off caffene. She went to Sephora and bought a $250.00 night cream. She goes for facials twice a month.

And still …

There are lines everywhere. They’re all over her face!!

Nature is a bitch, isn’t it?  it’ll do what it has to do and doesn’t give a damn about you, your fancy night creams or your wheatgrass smoothies.  Even the best cosmetics won’t stop wrinkles completely.

There’s only one way to get rid of ‘em.

You gotta freeze the f*ckers.

Yup.

You have to freeze your face so it doesn’t move anymore. You have to get a needle and inject chemicals into your forehead that will prevent you from physically showing human emotions.

Sure, you won’t look natural – not by a long shot – but that isn’t the trend nowadays. The trend is to fight aging at all costs. The trend is to be 40+ and have skin smoother than a 14 year-old’s.

When I think of overly botoxed women,”beauty” doesn’t pop into my head. “Wax figure” does.

And who do these women think they’re fooling, anyway?

I’ve been told that one of the best things about aging is the confidence that it brings.  Confidence, in my opinion, is incredibly sexy and it isn’t something a needle or a cosmetic cream can give you.  If you were painfully insecure before botox, you’ll be painfully insecure after it, and an immobile forehead reeks of desperation.

I hope that by the time I’ve reached my 40s, I’ll have shed all of my ridiculous insecurities.

Sure, the media is hard on women.  So is society.  It’s sad that most of us will never realize how beautiful we are, au naturel.

Still.

No matter how insecure you get, no matter how badly you want to rid your face of the teeny tiny wrinkles that have begun to develop, remember:

Having a  couple of wrinkles is A LOT better than having a face that looks like this:

Eeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk !!!

If you want to see a real social experiment, just walk into any office building. That’s where the human spirit really gets pushed to its limits.

More often than not, you’ll find poor lighting, bad circulation, no windows, and people packed like sardines, cut off from one another and enclosed in tiny fabric boxes.

Cubicles.

The ultimate social experiment.

And they don’t just demonstrate the drab and under stimulating conditions in which people are willing to work. Cubicles, and corporate culture in general, also reveal quite a bit about social control and censorship.

How?

Well, I’d love elaborate but unfortunately I can’t. As a cubicle drone, I’ve learned that I am contractually bound to say positive things about the corporate world and even if I weren’t, a disparaging review could be held against me in the future.

In this economy, nobody wants their words misconstrued by a would-be employer.

So I’ll end with saying something positive … like…

uh…

I like the way my pink and blue post it notes decorate my cubicle walls. They make me forget about the poor lighting, bad circulation, and lack of windows ….

Yes.

My post it notes make things …

Fun. And cheery.

Yeah. That works.

And now on to bigger, and more important queries, like …

Why the hell do Wednesdays just drag on and on and on and on?

Oh.  Maybe it’s because of this:

[photo source]

Will grew up in Ancaster, Ontario, a sleepy suburb with a wealthy population. Most of the rich kids had been raised by nannies and went about screaming for their parents’ attention.

A classmate once drunkenly totaled his BMW and instead of being disciplined his father patted him on the head – boys will be boys – and bought him a brand new car.

And that was the end of that.

Of course, not all rich people are like this. There are many people that use their gifts for good, but I’m not writing about them. I’m writing about the ones that live to impress others. You know – the ones that walk around thinking they are better than the rest, simply because they have a little bit of money.

I’m also writing about the ones that abuse their power for their own personal gain.

There are many families that employ nannies legally and for legitimate reasons but ignore them for a minute. Focus instead on the families that have one nanny-slave for each child in the household – not because the children have special needs that require additional care, but because the parents are too busy (and have deemed themselves too important) to raise their own children.

A Liberal MP in Toronto is currently under fire for illegally employing two nannies to work in her home and for using her stature to intimidate them. If she’s found guilty of her alleged crime, I’m sure she’ll be sorry (that she got caught).

But even if she is convicted of wrongdoing, things aren’t going to change. The exploitation of the less fortunate will never end because the problem doesn’t lie within the less fortunate.

The problem lies within the “fortunate” ones that have become so intoxicated with their own wealth and power that they’ve lost all sense of humanity. They’re the ones with the teams of lawyers and the friends in high places, and they’re the ones who will continue to exploit those beneath them simply because they can.

Every once in a while someone (like this Liberal MP) will get caught in the act and made into an example, but calling out the odd offender isn’t going to change the fact that our society holds wealth and career status in a higher regard than humanity and compassion.

Slavery, snobbery, bullying, and all round exploitation will never cease to exist because – How does the old saying go? -

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Yup.

Sounds about right to me.