Humans of Western

“One of my favourite quotes that I shared with my students on their last day of class was: “don't pretend like you hit a home run if you were born on third base.””

What is a story that gave this phrase significance for you?

“A number of years ago I met a woman on the streets of London asking for groceries. I took her to a store, and in the matter of a 20 minute conversation I lost many of my preconceived notions of why people are in the position they are. I remember her quoting her mother saying: “We complain about not having a shoe when there are others who do not even have a leg.” And for her to say that in her position was a humbling experience because she did not have much.The lady even felt guilty asking me to buy her cheese because to her it felt like luxury. She just wanted bread and milk to feed her two school-aged children. She was grateful despite her circumstances. The lady also had a strong desire and passion to do what she loved. Once her kids got older, she planned to go to school for a degree in mechanics because she grew up working in the garage with her dad and she loves working with her hands…”

"I took women’s studies as a random elective first year – it wasn’t my program. It challenged me more than anything – it made me mad. That first year, I was a die-hard romantic, into Barbies and Disney movies and here was this course telling me that some of those things are problematic and I held them dear but by the end of first year, I decided that I was going to do a minor in it.”

Are there some parts of feminism that you still need to understand?

Creativity is putting yourself out into the world through various mediums that aren’t exactly yourself. Like – being able to put yourself out there in a piece of art or music or even your dedication to math says a lot about your creative nature and your ability to convey things without having to flat out say them.  Creativity doesn’t have to be in the form of a sculpture or a painting, it can be in the way that you engage with your friends or with politics.

I think I express myself creatively through being angry.  You can’t ignore someone that is being angry.  You can discredit what they’re saying but they’re still saying it. A person who is angry is talking over you, they’re out there, and they’re not ashamed of their anger if they’re expressing it.  Audre Lorde said something about angry being productive and that’s something I agree with.  

“Each bead represents a single day. And every day, I take one bead from the jar that contains the remaining days of my life into the jar that contains the days I have lived. By physically removing my beads, I am being reminded that my life counts: the beads I take out never go back into the jar that contains my remaining life. This is why I try to make the most out of each day. It does not have to be extraordinary--it can be just another day at work--but I am going to enjoy it as much as I can.” 

“My career has been a series of left turns but I think it got me to a more interesting place. I had one humanities course in my six years of undergrad and medical school. Then I went back to school because I was left with a lingering sense of a gap in my education; I didn’t know anything about philosophy or history. To me, that speaks to the importance of having a broad undergraduate education with some substantive level of the humanities. Wherever you go to pursue your goals, I think the humanities help us to both understand and address the deeper questions that arise in all fields.”

 “Who has been in influential figure in your life?”

 “In the last 10 years, I have had the pleasure to work with and learning from Dr. Joseph Rotman, who was the Chancellor of Western and the benefactor of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy since 2008. One of the most impressive things about Joe was his steadfast commitment to the importance of the humanities. He himself did his first university degree in Philosophy here at Western, and credited his success in business in part to doing philosophy.

 “When thinking of donors it is natural to focus on the money donated, but Joe taught me about how to work with people and critically how to lead with vision. At the end of the day, the most effective way to get people to go somewhere is to lead with idea, not with money. For Joe, the money was always secondary and he understood the value of leadership very deeply.

“I’m curious. I’m curious about people and I’m curious about how things work. There’s personal satisfaction in anthropological research. I enjoy people and I think that anthropology has a lot to contribute. When I was your age, in university we had a sense, maybe it was too optimistic, that basically all the technical problems were manageable – the real problems weren’t problems of physics or chemistry. The big problems were problems between people – political problems and social problems. We didn’t know enough about them. It struck me that anthropology is one of the best ways to find out about that stuff. If we had any chance of coming up with some understanding of how things work that might be helpful in a way that makes a difference, anthropology would be a good way to do it. It’s a little optimistic but knowing a little or knowing a lot is better than knowing nothing. Everybody who passes through university ought to learn something about the rest of the people on the planet.”

“How has your work impacted you?“

“I’ve actually played Dance Dance Revolution before but a long time ago – about three years ago. I used to be really, really good and I used to compete against other people but I left that tradition. It’s a good workout – I can’t complain. To play the game, you can’t go hard on the mat because you’d get too tired. You have to be more soft and natural. My method is to listen to how the music is going and to clap with it.”

“Usually for me, I play DDR to get my cardio workout since I don’t do sports. When I play, a lot of people look at me funny and they say ‘What are you doing?’ and they see me wipe my forehead because I get sweaty and they’ll be like ‘You can’t get a workout out of this’ but I say, ‘You try’.  If they’re beginners, sometimes they quit after five seconds and that’s then I say, ‘Now you see how hard it is’.”

“I’m not much into DDR anymore – you can’t really do much with the game other than flaunt how good you are.  With the Jumping Jackpot game that I play now, at least I win tickets at the arcade. What I try to do now is help other people who need help getting their prizes with redemption tickets.”

“I like to play because I get to play with other people like my friends – I really enjoy playing with the rhythm and dancing and it’s sad nowadays because you don’t find many DDR machines in arcades because arcades are dying but it’s one way that I get to be active and a way for me to stay off the computer all day long.”

How do you feel about DDR being in the UCC atrium today?

“When I was growing up, I was going the athletic route. I like sports and I like being very active but there’s something about the competitive nature that didn’t sit well with me for some reason. I didn’t resonate with it. I like hip-hop for the most part and I like words so I started being a lame white rapper kid. I was doing that and sports at the same time.  They had this recording course at my school that I took. Around the same time, I got a concussion so I had to stop playing sports.  I ended up just doing music and then I couldn’t do anything else but music. It was something that I could just do by myself.  Partly, it was because I want to surprise people – to be the person that doesn’t look like he’s anything but to actually be good at music – that’s surprising.”  

“We’re working on our first year design project. The objective is to combat a form of disaster and we’re concerned with climate change. Our device allows you to take carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into useable resources using algae biomass. That’s converting carbon dioxide into food, medicine, and even bio-oils.”

“The issue with climate change is that we have a lot of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and it’s no use just cutting emissions. We want to reverse the cycle, in a sense.  We’re taking the CO2 from the atmosphere and using it for something.”  

“We’re at the point right now where climate change has a runaway effect. You have many forces acting at once. If the temperature increases, methane deposits in arctic bogs begin thawing out, methane contributes to further heating which leads to evaporation, water, also a greenhouse gas, which means it’s a cycle once you break a certain threshold.”  

"Currently I am struggling with confidence – which is interesting for me because I am a full-time performer so I am in front of people all the time.  I think my transition to being a full-time performer has put a lot of pressure on myself to perform, to write well, and to create things that people are moved by and so moving from poetic hobby to job is a lot of pressure. I think that people, a lot of times, feel that their confidence dwindles a little bit because of the pressure that we put on ourselves rather than the pressure that other people put on us."

"What pushed you to become a full-time artist from teaching?"

"The push came from seeing the impact it can have when I do workshops, particularly with youth but with people of all ages, seeing people take the chance and the opportunity to write, to write openly and freely and to really discuss their own lives or things that are happening in the world around them, to use poetry in a way they might not have before and to see the impact that it has when people start to share those poems and those experiences. That’s where the push came from.  I don’t necessarily think that I’m not a teacher, I definitely still do teach and am especially doing a lot of work in schools but I think that I teach in a very different way than I ever imagined when I went to teacher’s college, before I found spoken word poetry."

"I’m very anxious about everything. Anxious about the future, the past, some personal stuff. I think it’s worse and it’s becoming a big problem within society. It’s becoming regular.  I don’t want anyone to feel anxious because it’s horrible."

"I was taught a technique called grounding. It’s also called five things – when I get really anxious, like if I’m writing a paper and I get overwhelmed with everything, I stop and say out loud that I’m touching my camera, my desk, my computer – I say five things then I say five things that I can hear then five things that I can smell – it really just clears your mind and you feel a lot more calm. That’s how I get by – I do them in little increments, then I do breathing exercises and I eat well.  It takes a lot but grounding exercises are what gets results the quickest."

"Do you think that our campus has enough services and resources to deal with issues like anxiety?"

“I have always loved teachingand being active. So in first year, after being inspired by an instructor of a skipping class, I decided to go through the training and certifying process to become a fitness instructor. I can’t imagine myself not going to the gym now.