[NON BLOG] Flu Shot

After much delay, I got my flu shot when I was passing through the Bay this afternoon. It was an intramuscular injection, so accordingly, my right arm's deltoid muscle hurts. A 70 to 90 percent success rate, though.

[BRIEF NOTE] Identity Confirmed

Two weeks ago, someone tagged some glass surfaces around the Drake Hotel--a map of the TTC in a passenger's shelter, the fronts of newspaper vending machines--with the word "SAMO," done in red spray paint. I had no idea what that meant, and felt rather annoyed by the obscurity of the tag as much as by the act of vandalism itself.

Only just now, as I was browsing Phoebe Hogan's biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, did I learn that "SAMO" was Basquiat's tag, standing in for "same old shit."

I'm still annoyed with the graffitist, though.

[NON BLOG] Psychotherapy

I don't think that I've mentioned that for the past five weeks, I've been attending psychotherapy session at the 519 Community Centre. There's weren't outstanding issues, or at least no urgent outstanding issues. I simply wanted external feedback, inasmuch as I don't exactly have a good track record re: unaided self-consideration. Sentience in human beings, I've been convinced by the past three years and then some, is something best measured in degrees.

This evening was the final session. I found the whole experience to be revelatory, really, in revealing the underpinnings of my thought and behavioural patterns. I hadn't realized, for instance, that I unconsciously translated "physically relax" as "pose as someone physically relaxed." This might not be a surprise to anyone who's given me a massage or reiki therapy, and who has seen my hands at rest tightly clenched in fists. It's a symptomatic revelation nonetheless.

What can I say? Psychotherapy works.

[BRIEF NOTE] Margaret Hassan, in Memorium

Margaret Hassan was a familiar and immensely popular figure on the streets of Baghdad. Felicity Arbuthnot, who filmed a documentary about her work, has described Margaret Hassan being mobbed during a visit to a water sanitation plant. "A crowd gathered and tiny children rushed up and threw their arms round her knees, saying, `Madam Margaret, Madam Margaret', and everywhere she went, people just beamed."

Right now, in Iraq, there are some incredibly nihilistic murderers running about.