The Case of the Missing Toothbrush

For Sun Chee

Roommates. Most of us have lived with them at some point in our lives. They are strangers with whom we must coexist, whose bizarre habits and foibles we must cope with and who must cope with ours in return. I am currently living with three such creatures. My roommates are an unemployed dancer who unintentionally ate hash brownies from our freezer, a busking musician who likes to rant about politics with me, and (my personal favourite) an out-of-work actress who has taken over the apartment since she moved in a month ago.

We’ve had the usual roommate issues: dirty dishes left everywhere, garbage that doesn’t get taken out, bills not paid, doors left unlocked and shoes being worn in the house. But my ultimate favourite so far has been the case of my missing toothbrush.

I came home late one night and it was just gone.

My initial reaction was to mutter “stupid f***ing roommates” under my breath – an increasingly common curse these days. All I kept thinking was WHY would anyone take a used toothbrush?! I told myself that there had to be a rational explanation. I searched the trashcans, thinking it might have fallen in the toilet or been used to clean shoes, and then discarded. Nothing.

Then my imagination started to wander. Maybe the two annoying cats had learned acrobatics while we were out and taught themselves how to open the perilously high medicine cabinet. I laughed at the mental picture of the two cats standing one on top of the other, stealing my toothbrush as revenge for all the times I sprayed them with water to get them out of my room.

When I was a kid and my mum had lost something, she used to say, “Things don’t just sprout legs and walk off.” But if my roommates were telling the truth, they didn’t touch my toothbrush.

Maybe my Indian-made toothbrush was homesick and just couldn’t take it anymore.

Imagining Peace and Public Engagement

I recently went to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibit about John Lennon and Yoko Ono, entitled “Imagine: The Peace Ballad of John & Yoko”. Mixing the couple’s music and artwork, the exhibit gave a detailed chronology of John and Yoko’s relationship while encouraging the public to interact with the ideas and values they embodied. There was the nail painting in which members of the public were encouraged to hammer a nail and tie a piece of their hair around it, an all-white chess set, and a room with maps of the world on which people could stamp the words “Imagine Peace”. My favourite was the last room where we wrote our hopes for peace on cards and hung them from one of the dozen trees fluttering with well wishes of thousands of people.

Great exhibits such as this one always reignite my interest in museum curation. “Imagine” was also inspiring in its content. Despite having grown up listening to the Beatles, I was surprised how little I knew about John and Yoko, other than the couple’s famous bed-in at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel and the claim that Yoko broke up the Beatles. I was impressed by the couple’s commitment to issues of social justice and the creative ideas they came up with, from their acorn campaign and the “War is Over! (if you want it)” billboard Christmas present, to the announcement of the country Nutopia and the album “Some Time in New York City”. However, John and Yoko’s impassioned campaigns made me realize that in today’s music and art world, we don’t have the same principled actions. Artists write political lyrics and promote different causes, but I can’t think of a single one who is doing anything nearly as creative or engaging as John and Yoko did.

Standing in a room surrounded by “War is Over!” posters and video footage of protests all over the world, I was saddened by the seeming lack of political awareness or engagement today in comparison to the 60’s and 70’s when John and Yoko were at the height of their activism. I guess it didn’t help that my excitement about activism in the 60’s and 70’s was being fed by “My Revolutions”, a novel by Hari Kunzru that I was reading at the time.

And yet in the last room, thousands of people had taken the time to write messages of hope for peace and tie them onto the branches of trees. I read a lot of the messages. People obviously care about peace and making the world a better place; I think they just need to be inspired to take action. Yoko Ono and this exhibit inspired people to take this small symbolic action.

But we need more.