Today, I contracted...dum dum, dum...lice. My booger of a little sister possessed a colony of those pesky parasites all over her head. She crawled into my bed looking all innocent and bulbous-like as most eight years olds are, trouble in disguise. Who would have thought I would regret letting my little sister snuggle up with me the night before (usually that's a coyote ugly experience); however, I can hardly ignore those chubby cheeks of hers. The next morning at O'nine hundred hours--the infestation began.

After tying her hair into pigtails my mother noticed what looked like a crazed ravaging of ant-like fiends squirming Alyson's head. In an instant, my mother's crazy Asian woman erupted. She began screaming and cleaning the whole house like a Wall-E on an Eva mission. Directive: to get rid of that shit! Naturally my mother found a way to make my little sister's lice manifestation about herself and of coarse tearing down her daughter's self esteem in her always bellowing self righteous way of doing things. She bickers with me about bringing her to the hair dressers, but there is no negotiating with an Asian woman. Crazy is crazy, thus, let the hair chopping begin!

As my mother rushes to the hair dresser to nearly bald my little sister, I take it upon myself to assume the directive: destroy creepy, crawlies on my head. I make my way to the pharmacist, who I will call, Sargent Immigrant smarter than Everyone Else, whom lectures me about the lice wars. See, in contrast to misconceptions, lice breeds in clean places. Like a hotel, you will stay there if it's clean, but you're going to go somewhere else if it's dirty. He told me that it was necessary to handle it like a war. The lice are like the Persians in 300 with big numbers and they are a resilient bunch, with their fornication and laying eggs everywhere. So it is necessary to irradicate them all, any potential threats at any potential place. All sheets and all players would have to engage.

I go back home with permethrin bombs at hand. After trying a pansy herbal remedy, my mother is still picking out lice she finds in my sister's hair, decapitating them and shattering their babies. Popping casualties never seemed so easy--my mother is a natural. I inform the gang of the plan and rush up to shower. God forbid I let my mother chop off my locks.

Let the chemical warfare begin...

As I unleash the poisonous liquids onto the parasites I can hear them scream for mercy. Hah! There is no mercy in war. One by one they die. Behind the ears--they die. On my neck--they die. On my scalp--they die. My sister was the most devastating battle of them all. You could see their armies fall in great numbers down the drain. Today was the first battle. Tomorrow, clothes and equipment sanitation. A week from now, the war will hopefully be over. Who will prevail? Let's hope Sophie.

Additional lice tip: when combing lice away, you need to scrape opposite of how you would normally brush because of their growing direction.

Beauty. What is it? And why am I concerned? As you may know, I'm up in Waterloo studying at WLU. The school is great and one thing I notice is how beautiful everyone is. Every girl I meet is tall, Caucasian, mostly blond and gorgeous; and well, it sometimes makes one feel very inadequate. I mean WLU is notorious for having some of the most hottest girls in North America. I know this because a list was made ranking the hottest schools in North America, which was published in some macho rag, of which WLU fell within the top ten. But this has me begging the question as to why? When in my eyes, and through several other eyes, most of these beauties look very much indistinctive. What makes beauty and is there a standard? I think there is--an enculturated one that is to say.

This notion of beauty being enculturated (taught and naturalized into our culture) thus creating a standard--how does this tie into "Cici n'est pas une pipe."? For those who know art or have studied art history, may be able to tell you that this famous line is from Rene Magritte's painting depicting a pipe which, oddly enough, is explicitly stating, "This is not a pipe." Margritte is connotating that the painting of the pipe is not a pipe at all but instead a representation of a pipe. She is also implying that we conceive this representation as a pipe because we accept the conventions that make the concept true--we see it as a pipe because we have in our mind rules that tie the physical attributes of a real pipe to the arbitrary shape/word "pipe".

If I haven't lost you yet please continue to bare with me.

This process of tying concepts and reality together, is a system that we must consent to enable for it to work; therefore, as Marx would say--a "false conscience" is created. We make natural these ambiguous concepts which in turn makes them conventions. This concept of "false conscience" in relation to beauty suggests that beauty, or what is beautiful, in itself is not beautiful at all. It is only seen as beautiful because we allow it to be that way. This consenting of specific, alienating conventions will then translate into ideology for society; furthermore, suggesting that these particular conventions of beauty are the norm standard. We know that this is an arbitrary concept because the perception of beauty is always changing, and particularly in the entertainment industry--manipulated. So why care if it's made up?

If beauty is just a concept in itself, then as individuals of a society we need to be more aware of why we perceive certain things a certain way. Why do we prefer a certain "type" of physical attribution in our partner? Why is this narrow idea of typing and beauty seem so natural? Why is it okay to distort the female figure in toys, video games and advertisements? Why set such a high standard of beauty? I think it's horrible for someone to feel inadequate because they don't fall in the hedgemony. I think it's wrong that some women fell you have to be a light skinned (mixed) coloured girl with white features to be a successful ethno-american in Hollywood. (I'm being blunt but I'm only reiterating the thoughts of other people I've spoken too.) Why is it that Harvard did a study on racial preference where everyone, both white and non-white people, claimed to be completely equal in racial outlook; when, as a matter of fact, it became evident that Caucasian people were sub-consciously selected as being more superior or having more socially accepted traits. Why is it okay for a skinny girl to show more skin than a bigger girl? We revolt, we applaud, we pay for and swoon over--but why? But even more revolting, why the fuck do us non-beautiful girls have to tell ourselves everyday,"I am beautiful," just to keep our self esteems going?

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." I think not. "Beauty is in the creation of the mind." So my friends, don't hold back on challenging these fenced notions of beauty. So remember, when you are looking on that magazine cover or think that you need some surgical cure to look good--thats not beauty it's just a representation of some unachievable ideal that we don't have to consent to.