Everyday I make my way along the subway into downtown Toronto for work, a commute of nearly an hour and a half. I have never disliked the commute, it gives me a blessedly peaceful opportunity to sit in one place, read a little and think to myself. Sometimes I listen to music, most of the time I watch the people around me. Some of the most interesting conversations and situations that I have witnessed have occurred on the subway cars of this city. Lately though, the commute has become more tedious for me and it's only this week that I started thinking about why that might be.

The first leg of my trip ends on my arrival at Sheppard-Yonge station, a hub through which I transfer onto the Yonge southbound line. The daily stampede of frazzled commuters crossing through Sheppard-Yonge is one I can barely describe, and something that is really understood only after witnessing it for yourself. The doors to the subway, crammed to capacity, inch open and immediately hundreds of commuters run, jog and push their way down the escalators onto the north-south platform. They acknowledge each other only to the extent that they try to go around each other. I'm no stranger to public transportation or to subway hubs, but there is nowhere in Toronto where I have seen anything like this. One day last week, I stepped aside from the platform as the rush was getting under way, and bought a cup of coffee at the Cinnabon. There was another lady next to me and together we watched the throngs descend. The young girl behind the counter shook her head, and the three of us started chatting about the absurdity of this situation. A few minutes later, when calm had more or less been reinstated, the lady and I began walking down to the next platform. Before we left, the girl behind the counter thanked us for stopping by to chat. From what I understood, she doesn't get a lot of business because to the commuters, she is really just a part of the scenery. To acknowledge her would be to recognize an obstacle in their way. How incredibly lonely.

As frustrating as this experience is for me, for one aspect I am grateful: at least in those brief moments when everyone is chasing down a position on the elusive southbound train, there is some passion, however reticent, to their motion. There is also some interaction between them, even if it only comprises trying to take everyone else down. The rest of the time, the commuter society I witness daily is a beige mass of reclusive automatons, head down/eyes closed/ipods in ears. People don't talk to each other or even look at each other for the most part. They channel their personal soundtracks into their ears and surround themselves with their own world, increasingly disengaging from the public society. I won't go so far as to blame this increasing disconnect on the ipod (that bane of interpersonal culture!) but it is an interesting phenomenon for me. As I write this, in a downtown Starbucks over my morning coffee, the barista prepares to take her 10-minute break and quickly puts on her ipod earphones before walking down to the bathroom. She can't even relate to the environment around her in the moments it takes to go the bathroom!

In social anthropology we discussed last year the ascent of individualism and how it gave rise to more personal and romantic relationships since we involve ourselves more now in those relationships that fulfill us emotionally and appeal to our personalities. I wonder though if that individualism, extended, will eventually compromise those same relationships? The ipod is a unique manifestation of that individualism and its potential consequences. I think it's popularity in great part has to do with control - we control what we listen to, and therefore in part our surroundings, in so far as our "surroundings" include that peculiar environment created by what we are listening to at any given time. If sitting on a subway car I listen to the voices and conversations of those around me, I interact with them. The ipod-listeners on the other hand have no such interaction; it is entirely a self-created and self-serving environment, a contained bubble removed from the external society. The more we sink into such a separate existence, the more unexpected interruptions bother us. A couple of weeks ago I was listening to my ipod walking on the street when someone stopped me to ask me for directions. As I pulled the earplugs out to hear what they were trying to say, I remember looking around me at the several ipod-less individuals around me and wondering why she stopped when I clearly had something better to do. The second that thought reached me, I began considering my, for lack of a better word, "ipodacity".

I can just imagine a future where everyone walks around completely oblivious to the unique identities and personalities around them, where fullfilling relationships disappear because we can't lose control enough even to let someone else into our spheres. My commute this morning was entirely ipodless, I didn't even bring it with me. I missed a little bit listening to my music on the way in, but on the other hand I did overhear a 5 year old tell his mother he hoped he would marry someone who would cut his sandwiches like she does... and that I think will add more enrichment and amusement to my day overall.

The Merrium-Webster Online Dictionary has several different definitions listed for the word "value". The very first defines it as a "fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money for something exchanged"; the following definitions also refer to relative worth of something compared to others. It isn't until the fourth definition that the dictionary defines "value" as something that is assigned by humans, and its arbitrariness is revealed.

A relative recently gave me a sizeable gift certificate to Holt Renfrew. For those who may not know Holt's is a luxury retailer with high-end designer fashion. The gift card I received, which would buy me many nice things in any ordinary store. would not go very far in this store. To that end, my mother and I went to their "last call" outlet store where I succeeded in finding a cute blazer that after 80- 90% discount, fit almost entirely into the budget I had. I won't tell you the original price of the blazer but that if I had that kind of money, I could keep myself in groceries and rent for two months.

Someone out there is, in fact many people out there are walking around paying my rent and grocery money's worth for one single article of clothing, some fragments of cloth stitched together, when that money could be put to so much better use. People are good, and I have no doubt that they do, and would continue to do good things with the resources they have. But, here at least, we are constantly surrounded by voices telling us what we need to be ourselves, make ourselves, and aspire to improve ourselves. That, in fact, is the additional importance of "value": it is not just about the items to which you assign it. Value tends to be attached to something that fulfills you, and has a positive affect on your life. Where are you, who are you, what are you made of when all it takes to complete you is empty luxury? I hope there is no one who is genuinely fulfilled by such things; I sincerely hope it is just another disguise behind which we hide. It makes me sad that any society could have so many different players all aiming to assign significance to such meaningless things, and so many more people ready to accept it.

My breakup this year with my Canadian ex-boyfriend left me in an emotional upheaval of sorts, understandably. I was upset and frustrated, and the timing could not have been worse. I had just returned (hours earlier, in fact) from a moderate in length trip to Iran, my first back home in nearly 12 years. This trip highlighted a very important fact about my relationship with my ex, that eventually it seems he could not deal with: I had other priorities. Everyone has their priorities in a sense of course - work, school, different friends, etc. I also had the weight of Iranian cultural expectations on my shoulders and the pressure started taking it's toll, however imperceptibly at first.

I grew up in quite a liberal family, a veritable contrast to what is stereotypically seen as an Iranian tradition of conservative values and stifling lifestyle expectations. That doesn't mean however that some sort of cultural expectation wasn't present, and one thing I was always made to understand implicitly was the importance of marrying an Iranian, preferably one whose family was known to mine. Of course, my parents never went so far as to forbid me to marry outside my culture; their influence only extended to subtle reminders as to how much certain things (like culture, background, family, etc.) help a relationship, and to the extent that I understood how comparatively successful endogamous marriages are, I agree with them. It helps of course that I'm certain I would never have to explain my anger at certain political events, the importance of attending Iranian community functions, my interest in the continuing improvement of Iranian-Canadian relations, or my need on occasion to spontaneously erupt into singing "Ey Iran", to a Persian boyfriend (but that could be because my ex was rather oblivious to things that were't about, well... him). However, I'm also quite prodigiously proud of my Iranian heritage and love the idea, for myself and my future children, of continuing in that tradition.

It's funny - I don't really know why I am thinking about this so much these days. It could be any number of things. I recently turned 22 and all around me, marginally older cousins and friends are getting engaged and I feel my relatives subliminal questions as to the occasion of my own future marriage (or not so subliminal really: leaving a family gathering last night, my uncle expressed his wish that we would next meet at my wedding); having recently come out of a long relationship I am thinking hard about the kind of relationship I want to get into next. I picked up the book "Marriage: A History" this week by Stephanie Coontz, and she talks a lot about the changing face of marriage, one in which cultural background doesn't mean as much. I remember thinking "it does to me". So, on that note, I suppose all that's left to say is if there are any eligible Iranian men in Toronto...

n.b. That last bit was a joke. Thanks.