Winter Solstice/Yuletide 2018: The Inaugural Yule Bookfest

I’ve been writing this in a piecemeal fashion, starting around the winter solstice, Dec 21^st.

It has been a long while since I’ve posted an entry; for all good reasons. For the last while, with being in a new relationship, I’ve been more attuned into living intentionally and sharing my life privately with someone instead of being a passive commentator about life and sharing random observations about it with a general audience in written form. With the approach of our first yuletide season together, there also comes this excited eagerness and willingness in both of us to adopt some special thing to make as our own unique holiday tradition as a couple. So, we agreed to include a new observance for ourselves during this season. I feel like it is one worth sharing. Personally, I would hope it catches on with others as well if anyone so chooses to copy it.

The new custom we decided to observe isn’t really a specific local one, or even a Canadian one, but it serves our introverted selves very well. It’s one that we kind of appropriated from Icelandic tradition. By virtue of having relatives in Wynyard SK, a community that was largely founded by Icelandic settlers, I’ve already had some exposure to some traditional Icelandic Christmas (Jól) feast fare (like Rullapylse and Vinarterta) from my past holiday visits there. And now, strangely enough, we’re setting out to sample another custom similar to the one from that island, as a Canadianized form of it to suit us.

Temperature-wise, winters for that island nation seem relatively mild and less miserably frigid when compared to those here in Saskatoon, but given their proximity to the Arctic Circle, their winter nights are a lot longer during the approach to solstice*. The long cold darker nights around either side of winter solstice naturally stage an environment for which to retreat into coziness and stimulating one’s brain with a good story. Despite inhabiting one of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and being quite good at exercising frugality, folks in Iceland seem to spare no expense when it comes to buying and reading books. The result is that they have become one of the most culturally literate societies on Earth. Thus, books of all kinds are the most frequently gifted items around the Christmas season there: so much so that there is a word in their language defining this tradition of exchanging reading material as presents during the winter holidays. This annual tradition of buying and gifting books is called Jólabókaflóð, or “Christmas time book flood” roughly translated into English. It sparked some appeal in both of us when we heard about this custom because we do both like to read and would find this exchange quite endearing. We thought it best to anglicize the name to Yule Bookfest*, (see further below as to why). She suggested having this exchange on the last Advent Sunday before Christmas Day, and I thought that plan was perfect: a day of rest, dedicated to fully relishing the blessing of being able to read in peace with a fresh new story. As much as we love our families and friends; and having a chance to gather with them for feasting, gaming, and drinking, for introverted people this extra onslaught of social activity during the holidays, even with it being awesomely joyful and fun, can be a bit overwhelming and draining at times for our mental lives. Yule Bookfest is thus a way to have a day to simmer down the nerves; to take a breather from excessive social overload from the holidays, and to gain a sort of calmer private celebration; balancing the yuletide joy with some peace.

Most people around here refer to the “Christmas season” as the general period covering the latter half of December; I think this term is too vague, and a little thoughtless and sloppy for my liking. I’m a little more demanding of accuracy. I grew up in a family that, at least for a while during my childhood, observed both the Gregorian and Julian Christmases (December 25^th and January 7^th, respectively), as some other kids did in mixed Anglo-Ukrainian families in the community where I was raised, where these holiday traditions mixed and merged. In my formative childhood years, I remember that I was sometimes insistent in having others specify which Christmas they were referring to when they were trying to talk to me about the holidays. When I refer to Christmas, I mean specifically Christmas day (Dec 25^th) or I get even more specific in defining it in mentioning Julian/Ukrainian/Orthodox Christmas on Jan 7^th, and don’t usually use it so vaguely to refer to any other time within the period of December and early January. For that, I‘ve been reverting to the word “yuletide”, for referring to the greater span of days of celebrating between and during Advent and mid-January. Yuletide may sound a little more pretentious and a bit archaic, but it is a word I’m noticing that I’m becoming fond of and favoring (at least in my writing) of its use instead of using “Christmas” all the time ubiquitously over the whole season. Partially because it is a better term that can extend to generally include all days from the first Advent Sunday to Orthodox New Year’s Day (Jan 14^th) and all days in between, and covering all holidays during that time from many other cultures, including newer bizarrely contrived ones (as perhaps ours is), with the celestial event of winter solstice roughly being the tethering post in the middle of it all. As for our new celebration, I’d like to start off doing this special day right, at the very least linguistically*. I see calling it “Yule Bookfest” instead of the original “Jólabókaflóð”, or “Christmas Bookflood”, as necessarily suitable because:

·         As I said, it leaves the word Yule to indicate an extended period of winter days; not just the singular day, of Christmas. After all, one usually needs more than just one day to completely finish and enjoy a book

·         Yule is a shorter word to type than Christmas. I get lazy at typing sometimes, and brevity is sweet and efficient for modernistic purposes. Plus, there are no accented characters, or funny letters (like eth -“Đ,ð”) to mess around with while typing, unlike the original Icelandic word.  This form does respect at least some part of the cognate** from which it was translated.

·         It better denotes that it’s not a serious religious observance; it’s open for anyone to enjoy, no matter what creed/faith, or lack thereof. One has only to appreciate the gift of a book, so we can just leave the term Christmas alone.

·         Rather than a flood, it’s just a single book to gift each other, for indulging in deeply. So, the word fest is best.

·         From the Wikipedia definition below,*** yule is a word originally derived from something rooted in a concept of playing, feasting, merrymaking, and joking around; not being seriously contemplative or solemnly meditative. There’s plenty of time left to do that latter stuff for the goddamned miserable other part, from January onward, of a Saskatchewan winter.

What else does this special day perhaps entail besides exchanging books? I think being costumed in ultra-comfortable loungewear (e.g. housecoat, sweatpants, and/or pyjamas), finger snacks (preferably drier ones to avoid smudging your pages: perhaps cheese, crackers and various other chacuterie), a warm(ing) beverage, perhaps by a crackling fireplace, and not moving too far beyond one’s armchair, or chesterfield. Snuggling and napping between chapters is permissible and encouraged.

My girlfriend picked out a perfect book for me: both in terms as theme material for this day, and the reflection of the kind of person I am, and the strange characters I’m interested in relating to. The book I was gifted for this inaugural celebration of pages was a piece of fiction written by Robin Sloan titled Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. A cool story that involves a bright, but somewhat hapless young fellow who falls into unfolding some strange secrets centered around this bookstore and its gentleman proprietor, Mr. Penumbra. It's kind of book that will inspire you to recommit to being a more avid reader, and to perhaps try to write in more than just some unidimensional prose. It has re-affirmed ambitions that I should follow up on in the coming new year.

This is a bit of a digression . . . but the nerdy part of me usually likes to reflect on the anthropological stuff as to how and why certain traditions have originated over the holidays. This year, it’s kind of nice to be an active force in it all. Speaking of new and modern Canadian yuletide traditions, it leads me to wonder what will be unveiled in this special inaugural year of the legalization of cannabis in this country. I’m going to guess (perhaps correctly) that several folks around the country are probably going to embellish the theme having a “green Christmas” to the max. Perhaps this is the year where there will be started some grand tradition of some kind of Yuletide Bongfest which will become adopted by the potheads of this country: exchanging weed and the means for which to smoke and consume it. I presume it could be on December 20^th (to correspond with the “20” in 4/20). Who knows.

If there was one thing I wish people would tune into more of as an addiction, I wish it was the substance of reading and literature. Long winters here in Canada would set us up for making a few more scholars if Yule Bookfest was taken seriously as a celebration.

*- Sunrise on Dec 21^st in Reykjavik, 11:21 am; sunset, 3:29 pm. In Saskatoon, Sunrise, 9:12 am; sunset 4:56 pm.

**- Given that this is a bilingual nation, I would suppose that we could possibly call this “Fête d’Hiver des Livres” for the Francophones, but I’ll leave that to be properly translated by someone with a better command of French than I have.

***- Yule (from Middle English yole, from Old English ġeōl, ġeōla (“Christmastide, midwinter”), either cognate from Old Norse jól (“midwinter season, yule”),^[2] from Proto-Germanic *jehwlą (“celebration, festivity; yule”), perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *yekə- (“joke, play”)) +‎ -tide (“period around a holiday”) (from Old English tīd (“period, season, time; feast-day, festal-tide”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dī-(“time”)).

Restless Browsing

This is not good. It's only 11 days into winter and I'm already climbing the walls. The good news is that I managed to cram and jam my skis in this new car despite it's smaller interior space. The bad news was that after doing that, and cruising to the ski trails, I found out that they were still lacking enough snow depth to be groomed properly. I went home disappointed, forcing myself to do responsible adult stuff when I returned there.

As much as I abhor giving patronage to any shop on Remembrance Day, I cracked - after being penned up inside, constraining myself to focusing on household tasks for the entire day, seeing that I couldn't go skiing. By the time evening came, I needed to flee from here.

The problem is that there's nowhere to really retreat to at night when lots of businesses and restaurants are closed, even when a statutory holiday falls on a Saturday. My appetite was sated and I was full and had no need to eat anywhere, but I found out that Indigo was open, and my restless mind was hungry; so I stepped into there. I just purged my place of a huge whack load of books, but I couldn't resist seeing what I would alternatively collect for my shelves. Touring the bookstores and libraries isn't just a quest for good material to read; it's an effort to discover the kind of book I'd like to write. This entry is a visual collection and reflection of what my literary tastes and other entertainment modality was shifting to as I browsed the store.

The book best suited for me

on this kind of evening.

A cookbook that I should be

learning from

The kind of cookbook I should

be writing - Sample 1

Another sample of the kind of 

cookbook I should be writing.
There is more profanity in this
one book than what I think I
used in my entire lifetime.
It gets the point across though.

Three books I'd want for a prolonged

trip to my desired European destinations.

The Joy of Less appeals to my philosophy of minimalism.

Another alternate form of porn
of stuff I'd lust for, besides for
whatever's in the Best Buy flyers.

The poetry I might be able

to appreciate.

A comical journaling

exercise book  in a format

that I wish I dreamt up of first.

The magazine I should be reading

A preformatted checklist that I

should have. However, the items on it

aren't 'weird' enough for my place.

There were also games I noticed that I'd be interested in collecting too . . . from old school to ancient school.

Ultimately though,  I ended up shaking off the urge to do any mindless consumption, realizing that what I probably most needed to do was retreat into re-reading and reviewing my own journal notes: ones loaded full of half-cocked plans, semi-mapped ideas, hair-brained schemes, and other lists that I wouldn't share here and the beginning of solutions to other challenges I may have ahead.

Old Dead Drunken Authors and on Writing while (somewhat) Impaired

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with fools. -- For Whom the Bell Tolls  

What the hell do adults do alone in Saskatoon after 10:00 PM on a showery May evening: something that's somewhat stimulating outside of the regular home life, yet not too abnormal? If one isn't into the NHL playoffs and generally dissatisfied with all other television programming, plus no appetite to speak of, with the bookshops being closed (not that I'm really in the mood to read anyway); when one doesn't care to waste coin visiting bars, or a cacophonous casino; when the cinemas have nothing special to show, and when it seems too late and unsettling to abuse caffeine and sugar at donut and dessert shops, there really isn't much else to do by oneself at this hour enduring sleeplessness*. So, one tours around cyberspace, while at the same time retreating inside one's own head; it's doing me no favours. It seems to be too busy in there as it is. I only have more insomnia to contend with later it seems: if I don't do something about it. It's times like these when I reflect and speculate on what notable people did in the past: those who didn't have such options for entertainment and yet were creating it for others, and who have suffered relatively more than I have. The topic is also spurred by a strange fact in a posting thread I read earlier, and stunning myself with noticing strange connections.**

I couldn't think of much else to do for now but to remain at home; propping myself in front of my computer keyboard, with a tumbler glass full of whiskey, starting this entry, and perhaps pretending for a while that I can pull off a Hemingway, i.e. having something profound exit my mind and onto a page whilst I'm half lit, that is if I am not made sleepy first by my libation. Whatever gets crafted as a result afterward, for better or worse, I'll credit to the liquid inspiration. As much as I choose to avoid drunken outlandish storytellers in bars, I am however intrigued by some of them when they end up committing their words to paper

Ernest Hemingway could at least verbally draw something fantastically vivid out of a scene that others would ordinarily find trivial. The copious amounts of alcohol he used for fuelling his process was his gimmick modus operandi. The question about whether he was a writer with a drinking issue, or a drunkard with a writing issue, still remains debatable amongst his critics. One can't fault Hemingway much for becoming a drunk though. After all, he did witness the worst of the resulting suffering from the savagery along the frontlines during the first World War as an ambulance driver, until he was wounded himself. Booze was probably the most convenient tool around for dealing with what was called "shell shock" at the time. I suppose he made the best with it as he could.

Edgar Allen Poe is another example who comes to mind, who has my respect as being another writer, who was a hopeless sot, yet who was still able slap together sentences well enough to make them stir one's senses with eloquent, yet macabre, diction relating to things intriguingly mysterious. He was a sickly and melancholy fellow for most of his forty odd years of an odd life. Drinking lots surely didn't help him, except only to be probably more disinhibited to find the right words for him to express with ink and pen. To write literature well, I suppose some sorts need to reach a certain degree of pathos. There's no shortage of that stirred up from excess imbibing of liquor. There's a fine line as to when it turns from a help to a hindrance.

It's interesting, and yet kind of sad, to know just how many of the best critically acclaimed literary works out there are products of someone's neurons being basted in ethanol, or other narcotics and psychedelics. Perhaps, when it comes to writing on a level that's appealing and impactful to all sectors of society, it's just proof that if you are intelligent and keen enough to use grammar effectively, one has to contort the mind such chemically to observe how weird, warped, and surreal the rest of society is as to give it a fair and accurate commentary as well. Probably that's what Hemingway was alluding to in the quote above. He also said that he drank for the sake of making other people look better. That definitely doesn't work for me. It's not the kind of writer I'd want to be. Again, using the examples of Poe and Hemingway: Poe ultimately died alone and penniless, wearing someone else's clothing under mysterious circumstances, and Papa Hemingway sank to such a low that he cancelled himself off with shotgun blast to the head. There's no glamour there I must say.

My whiskey is finished . . . enough about that. I'm not so seasoned as either a hardcore boozer or a writer, so I'll choose to stick with just this one glass. After reviewing what I just wrote, I still seem to be rather lucid.

This reminds me that the Top of the Hops season approaches, and I'm debating if I should go this year. For now, I see no reason to this time.

*- My only other feasible entertainment options for the evening were non-adult things: like videogames. We laugh at our house pets and think how kooky it is when we pull out a laser pointer and make them chase a projected dot, but isn't that what we ourselves are essentially doing when we try to chase and maneuver around sets of pixels on a screen with some control interface? In that perspective, playing videogames isn't exactly very creative or intellectual either. Contraband things could then be listed after this I'm sure.

**- An article about E.A. Poe, and about how he sort of predicted a shipwreck with the name of one of his characters in one of his stories (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) being identical to one of the victims who suffered the same fate under the same circumstances in real life (cannibalized on a lifeboat) occurring several years later. The name of the character was Richard Parker. It struck me then that it was also the same name given to the tiger on the lifeboat in Yann Martel's book Life of Pi. This wasn't coincidental. I found out that Yann Martel purposely chose that name for the tiger in his story based on these uncannily identical, yet temporally separate literary/actual events. It's like Poe time travelled.

5Q5A: Lit Trek

It is cool to see that even professional bloggers and authors are using the five-point format now for current and topical stuff: like for instance, Tim Ferriss with his 5 Bullet Friday posts. After last night, and the past week, I need to make things simple.  Here it goes with my version . . .

Q1. You were in McNally Robinson last night. What was there that piqued some interest?

A1. It wasn’t so much about any one book, or even one genre. It was formats of some books that caught my attention and fascinated me (I swear, sometimes I have moments where I have bloody Asperger syndrome). More specifically, I was roaming around the foreign book section, and catching sight of books that were in dual language format, One language on one page, and the translated English text on the side on the opposing page. I thought that this would accelerate my learning and retention of the bits of grammar and vocabulary of my other learned languages. There was Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis there in the original German and in English in the same book, another collection of Russian short stories formatted the same way. I’m not so keen as to learn more Russian, but if I had to that would help (I’d still be kind of hopeless speaking it though). I also wanted to collect the French translation of 1984. I can recite lines and passages from that work from memory, and having that copy would probably be helpful in improving my comprehension of at least written French. I also looked around for the title in Spanish, El Señor de las Moscas, for a likewise translation of The Lord of the Flies, but I couldn’t find one.

Q2. Did you end up buying anything?

A2. No, I resorted to my dirty little Jason Bourne-esque espionage sort of trick of mnemonically processing the ISBN numbers of other books, and walking out of there to plug into library searches later for free. If that doesn’t work, I’ll tour around and hopefully find the same things in the used book stores at a better discount.

Q3. Last favourite read?

A3. It was The Bat, by Jo Nesbø, a Norwegian author. The first book in a series about the exploits of a Norwegian police detective, Harry Hole (and yes, I know some of you are snickering right now). I’ve been impressed by both the quantity and quality of the crime and detective friction that has been coming out of Scandinavia lately. That’s both interesting and puzzling, because it’s inspired and created in such an idyllic place to live in this world.

Q4. Next Canadian fiction read?

A4. After thinking about it, I should maybe hope to get my hands on The Mountains of Portugal, by Yann Martel. I would collect that one . . . and by honest means.

Q5. What are your greatest negative/positive issues or experiences at a bookstore?

A5. Firstly, I have no mental filter for handling all the interesting titles and subjects. Not many subjects are boring or off-limits. It gets to be too much for my brain after even a short while, because it is like it is trying to download and absorb everything I see on the shelves. That gives me option paralysis too easily. The titles and subjects too often get burned into my neurons, only to be stored as useless information. That might be OK for a trivia contest, but it doesn’t serve me well when I’m trying to focus on a finding a practical reference or interest. I often get headaches when I walk out of such stores like that. The positive I guess is perhaps being around follow customers with perhaps similar interests, or at least interests . . . period. At least I know most of them won’t be boorish hellraisers. However, it’s typically a 95% population of introverts in a book shop, and thus those there usually have neither the courage nor the social intelligence in knowing how to get to some point of trying to even greet each other as strangers.  

Closing another Year of Age

I'm trying to get out of the habit of writing and thought-charting during certain conditions. I'm trying to avoid it while I'm under immense clouds of negativity and frustration, or at times when I'm trying to solve big predicaments, or whenever I've taken ill or have been afflicted by some sort of pain; but lately it has been getting harder and harder to find those gaps within my free time when I'm not cursed by any or all of such things. Generally, I've been trying to limit my assertion of vibes involving complaint (admittedly, I'm still doing a poor job of it). Thus, the lack of input into this blog has been a sign that things haven't been going as well as I want them to.
 
Still nonetheless, it's time for a due assessment. Today is the last day of the year of this particular age number I have right now. Tomorrow is my birthday. I'm noting that it has been a cycle where it's ending with a few personal deprivations. Some brought on by my own volition, which I'm trying to ride out for a better outcome in the end; others are quite unwelcome and affecting me negatively.

I did manage to find some reprieve with some levity yesterday. By some weird impulse, I chose to collect a fiction book that captured my attention with its rather strange and lengthy title. It's a Swedish novel, and like many other titles of books that seem to come from that country, it didn't conveniently have a more concise title in English: perhaps due to some quirk of directly translating from Swedish, or maybe due to some cultural need on the part of their publishers for using long-winded bluntness and accuracy. The book is called The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson. It's about an elderly gentleman who, on his hundredth birthday, becomes cantankerous and impulsive enough as to escape from his seniors' care home and his own birthday party and gets led into a pretty strange and madcap adventure. There are also some flashbacks along the storyline about his involvement in a Forrest Gump-like series of events that influenced history throughout his personal life leading to his centennial. This book was a real serendipitous find. I couldn't help to notice that it seemed like a sign for me to make it a point to take a radical break from mediocrity for my own birthday, and to be a lot more spontaneous, impulsive, and daring, and to not let some prescribed age number stop me from doing so.

The repeated message in the book is: "Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be." It's the kind of book that I would recommend for everyone read just before whatever birthday they are celebrating, as a reminder to make the time count. Who knows, maybe by doing so you'll discover the elements in you that would change this world's history.

Seeking Answers for the 13th Game

I did a night shift last night, the first time after many months. I should have made a date with a whiskey bottle when I got home, or used some other means of hardcore sedation. Instead, I rode along with the momentum of residual anxious restlessness doing all sorts oddly random household chores: from fixing furniture, to troubleshooting tech components, to laundering non-clothing items, to making perogies and meatballs.*

The only good thing I can say about the night shift is that I endured it, but as always, there followed bad physiological effects, and a mind that gets warped into making strangely random observations and weird connections, especially when I start touring around town. My impulse control gets drastically lowered. For some strange reason, when I wandered by some place, and with my insomnia-addled brain, I somehow was triggered to remember that it was the same spot a while ago where I saw Yann Martel . . . If you recognize the name, yes, it's the same Yann Martel who is the author of Life of Pi. He resides here in Saskatoon, and I see him around from time to time; as much as I admire his work as an author I chose not to bother him, or impose upon his time.** After that day of seeing him at this one particular place, I was compelled to read another book he wrote: Beatrice and Virgil.*** Like  Life of Pi, animals are used to add an allegorical element about the human condition in the story, this one is centred around the Holocaust. I don't wish to spoil the story for anyone, but I will say that at the end of the book, there is a set of "games": really a series of questions related to deeper themes of morality centered on stuff people actually faced in the Holocaust. The last question, Game 13, is simply a blank page for you to fill in after you've deliberated all the dilemmas and ethical issues from the previous twelve, and you are left trying to figure out what your consequential place is in the scope of this most horrendous human tragedy. So now I'm sitting here blowing off the dust of some of the junk in the attic that is my insomniac mind by means of writing, re-examining the 13th game.

I only came up with a single word as a broad query for Game 13: a name of a place, Drohobych. Attached to it are a lot of "what if" questions. I found myself getting hung up on this particular word when I thought of the history of World War II, the Holocaust and the stuff dredged up in that book Yann wrote. Drohobych is the name of town in what is now western Ukraine. Historically, throughout the time since its founding sometime in the fourteenth century, it has been claimed and conquered numerous times by various Eastern European empires and nation states. According to my findings in Wikipedia, in 1939, the census showed that almost 40% that town's population was Jewish. During Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, this town was seized by the Nazi troops, and the Jewish ghetto there was liquidated. Thousands of these citizens were rounded up and shipped off to the Bełzec extermination camp in Poland. The census information of that place afterward in the 1950s then had only 2% of its population listed as being Jewish.

Why is this of significance to me? On a formal level, I studied some of the broader historical patterns of force from that country when I used to work in one of the Ukrainian cultural centres here. On a personal level, it was out of genealogical research. This is the community where my grandparents came from before they immigrated to Canada. Originally, they didn't leave there with the intent to escape anything they foresaw as a prelude to war or oppression, they simply left to try to prosper and garner a new life in Canada. Luckily and thankfully, they managed to get out of Drohobych before the Soviets/Nazis set foot in there. If they hadn't done so, of course, I wouldn't now exist. Had they remained there though, in what would become such a volatile and hostile place, they could have been damned to subjugation or slaughter by tyranny under either fascists or communists. They themselves weren't Jewish, and may not have been overtly targeted for extermination, but it is just as awful of a thought that if they had remained there, that they could have lost their humanity from being swept up in the insanity of that time and place, and could have been pressed into being servants who either actively or indirectly took part in some role the purging of the Jews in that region.

It was a doomed place, where higher ideals of justice and right and wrong were erased by the more immediate need for self-preservation. There seemed to be no right side to be on during those times as a Ukrainian, and it was worse if you were Jewish. Before the Nazis came, Ukraine already suffered a man-made famine under the Stalin regime, known there as the Holodomor (it roughly translates to murder by hunger), where the land, grain, and food was confiscated.  Millions died, and the living got starved into submitting to the Stalinist authority. When the Nazis came a few years later, many Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators from this regime. However, to avoid being slaughtered off by these new invading overlords, people were forced to comply with measures which meant that maybe only a few of the surrounding neighbours they knew got shipped off someplace on a train, never to return. Being put in that dilemma, it was comparatively better than watching you and all your family and neighbours being executed, or starved to death, for non-compliance. It was a shameful tragedy all around.

I have no contact with those who are blood relatives who still live in Ukraine; who may possibly still inhabit Drohobych. The decades of political and social isolationism through the communist years effectively severed such ties with our families. I have been ignorant of their histories and accounts of who they were as people living through such an ordeal and how it made them what they are today. If I could speak with any of them who witnessed such stuff during that phase of history, for the sake of gleaning answers to Game 13, I would be asking them things like:

• What happened with the family during the years of the Holodomor?
• Was anybody in the family in the military during WWII? If so, which side were they on? (Red Army, Nazi collaborators, independent partisans?) 
• What did you do when they came to round up the Jewish citizens in the village?
• How did you reconcile with all these things afterward?

I'm sure a lot of the answers would be disquieting and unnerving. I'd probably be better off not knowing some of them.

I don't know why these reflections of such morbid things strike me now. Perhaps it's a consequence of the stress of the series of negotiations I'm involved in, which seems to be wearing at me as we'll. Perhaps it's because I'm going through something like what they did in Drohobych during the war years, minus the matter of life and death urgency: having the back against the wall and the only options given seem to be just different entrances into hell; dealing with powers of authority who are indifferent about anyone's welfare. Maybe the thoughts of my grandparents' courageous choice to get out of the old country is a prompt for me to think more seriously of making some sort of exodus of my own: before seeing things taking a turn for the worse.

*- Two foods commonly found in the community Fall suppers that happen in October and November in the rural towns of Saskatchewan. Perhaps I was getting nostalgic.
** - I'm not divulging when, where, and what circumstances it happened, I see no need to violate any aspect of his privacy. Sure, it was tempting to gush, and accost him with praise, platitudes, comments and questions about his work, but acting like a star-struck groupie isn't respectful, nor does it make for a good first impression to someone whom you regard, even indirectly, as a mentor. I'll leave my appreciation for his brilliance as a writer to be reflected here while still respecting his peace. It was enough that we just exchanged good mornings with each other as civilized men, as we each went about our separate ways to attend to our own affairs.
***- Stretching leather while fixing my furniture today made me think of taxidermy, which was probably another prompt to remember the book. You'll have to read it to get it.

Hunkering Down between Covers

For me, the most unwelcome sign that marks the first day of when Old Man Winter comes to stay is not the actual sight of the snow, nor any characteristic of the chill in the air. It's from something like being awoken in the morning, like I was this morning, to the wretched sound coming from outside of ice being chipped, and scraped off from encrusted windshields in the parking lot or from the sidewalks, especially when the snow follows a soaking rain, like it did last night. I can detect other's frustration, loathing, and negativity surrounding the ordeal by the force and rhythm used with their scraping tools along these slick and pebbly surfaces as they are smacked with the disappointing reality of having to chisel and rasp away at their ice-encased vehicles just to get into them. It is a sound representing things grinding down to a bleak despair for most, in knowing just how much extra effort and energy it takes to just move around and do even simple tasks for the next few months.

From that noise alone, even while my eyes are closed in the dark of my room, with my curtains drawn, I can readily form a perfectly vivid and exact picture in my mind as to what the actual scene outside looks like as to: how much snow fell, where it blew in and accumulated, what its exact texture and moisture composition is, and just how bad the conditions of the roads and streets are, all before I even try to move out of bed . . . which by then, I don't want to do. I wish I could impress you with some intricate and elegant Sherlock Holmes-ian style and manner of deduction for determining how all this happens precognitively, but it really doesn't involve anything that intellectually sophisticated. It's an instinct that one eventually gets after living here in this particular region, as a Canadian; enduring too many years of long harsh miserable winters. One innately develops an instinct for sensing accurately how inclement the weather gets out there without even making direct contact with it; with even the most minimal of sensory input. It becomes a feature of the mind that one doesn't want to admit or appreciate having: since once this instinct is triggered, a long depression tends to follow.


A small sample of some of the other covers that I like slip
 between other than the ones on my bed. If the books in my
entire collection of digital editions were physical hardcopies,
they would make every shelf in this place buckle and break. 

After getting up and glancing outside out the window to discover how accurate and correct my suspicions were, I sadly stowed my bike away, and started rummaging around my storage spaces for my woollies, skiing equipment, and block heater cords. I also uncovered and sorted out all the remaining physical bits of reading material I own. It reminds me that I've been going into a slump with that too: acquiring and reading the "right" books for my personal hardcopy library. There are books that can be read over and left hidden away as digital copies, and others that somehow merit some distinction of what I'd like to incorporate as concrete physical features in my dominion: ones that are true representations and summations of my personal character and identity. E-reader apps and tablets are wonderful things, which I will always use, but they lack the ability to project an air of your true passions and interests in an organic fashion and fusion into your living space that books with actual physical covers do. It's kind of the same way for people who collect album covers/sleeves to reflect their musical/artistic tastes, even though current digital audio technology has left analog LP records in the dust in terms of sound fidelity ages ago. It's sentimentality: something in people who need, or long for, a physical object or icon to make abstract things of thought and memory coalesce together.

Here is a small list of some of the hardcopies of fiction and non-fiction I'd proudly have in my home library that I have yet to collect:

• The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Complete Works of H.G. Wells
• Moonwalking with Einstein - Joshua Foer
• A Clockwork Orange - Antony Burgess
• Gulliver's Travels - Johnathan Swift
• Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
• The Alchemist - Paulo Coello
• Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I had one, but Ella chewed it to pieces as a puppy. . . BAD GIRL!)*
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson
• Seeing Farther - Bill Bryson
• Physics of the Future - Michio Kaku
• Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
• The Origin of the Species - Charles Darwin

*- Perhaps another advantage to having an e-reader. . . unless your dog starts to chew on that too.

My Summer Reading

The sun is out, it's bright and the temperature is perfect. . . and yet I'm becoming disappointed. This is the first time it has felt really summer-like since this round of time-off began. The people I want to see this weekend are all out of town; given the lovely weather and dwindling days left of this summer, they would be crazy not to 'seize the day'. My time alone was spent just touring the neighbourhood on my bike, snooping around some of the yard and garage sales of this beginning of the end of the season for them. I'm using the remainder of today resting up from yesterday's excursion (and for tomorrow), and sticking my nose in a few magazines and books. Playing around with more puzzles and mathematics is making me veer towards subjects in science and tech. The material I'm reading is making me ache for having my own workshop or garage to use here.

Some of my light summer reading.

The lack of tranquility around the neighbourhood has been affecting me also. Today is the first day since my holidays began earlier this week that I've felt at ease and liberated, and with a clear enough mind to engage, challenge myself, and get immersed in some really cool projects - and now there is only today and tomorrow left of this stint of freedom. Another part of the disappointment comes from realizing that there is hardly enough time to completely follow through with any of the bigger plans and ideas I want to see manifested. I could try and rush to complete them, but all that does is add extra pressure, and defeats the purpose of setting the stage to focus on something intently to get into the zone of doing some really beneficial learning. When it comes to recreation, no one should have to feel rushed for anything. I really have to make it a point to take an entire month off for the next go around to accommodate for this.

The books I've been mentally chewing through with interest are:

Bicycle Diaries, by David Byrne - It's a bit surprising to learn that the former front man of the very successful 80's rock group, The Talking Heads, used, and continues to use a bicycle as his primary means of urban transportation, even in a city that's relatively hostile to cyclists like New York, where he currently resides. He shares some wonderful accounts and perspectives of the histories and cultural vibe he has experienced while cycling through various cities on this globe like Berlin, London, San Francisco, Istanbul, et al.

Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts - It's a book that lies between motivational reading, and practical survival guide for exploring the world abroad. It's a book for opening your mind to possibilities while on the road. It was interesting to peruse the biography, and to note that his beginnings were just as humble as mine were, and he turned his traveling experiences into his trade. It's a full of pointers about how to reach financial goals to allow yourself this freedom. It's not so delusional as to suggest how to escape work, but emphasizes having the kind of work that's meaningful to allow you to do this, and using to tie up lose ends. I currently have this book as a loan from the library, but I believe it's one that I'll end up buying.

Radical Abundance, by K. Eric Drexler - Don't let the title fool you. It's not one of those tomes about the Law of Attraction, Secret of the Universe, or other such airy-fairy material. The book is about the science and upcoming revolution of nanotechnology, and how it would radically change the world. I read Drexler's book, Engines of Creation, back in the early 90's, and noted his theories about what could be possible when we begin designing and building things from the atom and moving upward. Reading this book serves as a follow up to learn about what is actually happening in the field of nanotechnological R & D. The manipulation and fabrication of things on the atomic level, is akin to the development of the creative use and manipulation of bits and bytes in the digital information age, except there would be even more radical advancements if/when these ideas come into fruition. Be forewarned, it would help to brush up on some basic chemistry before you read this one.

This Round of Vacation Time

I was hoping to make the beginning of next few days off something more eventful and less dutiful and tedious than dusting, cleaning floors, reorganizing cabinets and closets, and scrubbing porcelain and tiles, but that's all it has been mostly so far. Vacationing is about doing what you can to bring about some peace of mind and a sense of satisfaction. Clearing and cleaning my space, and seeing things put into order satisfies me and brings more peace of mind: therefore it wasn't wasted time. I felt it had to be done first before I could move on with anything else. I correlate a clean and well-ordered home as a reflection of, or a least an attempt to allow for, a more focused mind.

The other meaningful thing I did was daring myself to seek company outside my regular social sphere. I used Meetup.com to find groups in my area with common interests. I wish I could find the right words to use to express my elation and satisfaction about finally finding and interacting with an actual group of people in this town who:

1. have many similar interests and values as I do
2. have higher ideals about well-being, and life-balance
3. actually deploy reason and common sense
4. understand what I'm saying
5. are people with whom I can speak to without having to dumb myself down 
6. actually read contemporary literature
7. aren't constantly stewing in/spewing out negativity and drama
8. aren't deluded and sanctimonious idiots, who act as if their shit doesn't stink
9. take ownership of their problems, and share successes and failures about dealing with them
10. who are actually supportive, cooperative and encouraging in another person's attempt at betterment

It's remarkably rare these days for me to meet an average person who can exhibit all of these qualities. My only regrets are: not finding these people sooner, and knowing that once I go back to my regular work schedule, my chances for meeting up with them will be rare.

I had my cable TV service re-installed a couple days ago. My HD receiver/PVR was upgraded; although there's now super-sized interface, with some features and options that add a bit more razzle-dazzle to viewing/recording, I still find that the channel selection is still limited and uninteresting. It made me seek refuge in the bookstores and library. I shouldn't be re-visiting such places, because I constantly overwhelm myself. I already have a personal mega-super-syllabus of reading materials of interest to me that I want to absorb, which I would already need several lifetimes to do. When I explore those bookshelves, I add to the inventory exponentially. I really need to have a more effective method of speed-reading.

Reading, napping, cycling, running, healthy cooking/eating, strength training, playing Jeopardy; watching PBS, TED, movies; drinking coffee/tea/beer, solving puzzles, meditating, language acquisition, painting, CAD and web designing, programming spreadsheets, list making, testing mnemonics, math problems, blogging, and avoiding the bullshit of the EX pretty much summarizes the remaining hours of leisure time I'll use for my next few days off.

Viva La Home

I did this very deliberately and purposely. I am using one of those cushioned laptop desks, which is propped up on top of my legs, that are raised and perched on an ottoman, while I'm seated in the bunny chair*, which I'm realizing I rarely ever use. I only have one ass, and it regularly prefers the chesterfield for comfort, but my habitual way of slopping my body into it isn't doing much good for a supportive healing posture right now, nor is it doing a lot to settle down my soreness and aching. This new spot is sort of a therapy: with this position, and the computer on my legs; it's a method of effectively pinning myself down so to force to me to stop walking/squirming around, and to just sit still, for at least an hour at a time. The chair is really on the smaller side as far as armchairs go, and it doesn't recline much, so it keeps me seated reasonably upright and in a more relatively confined, restrictive position without sacrificing too much comfort and support. Otherwise, I've either been too restless, or too distracted by pain, to simply use the moments to just meditate. Who in the hell can, or wants to, focus on the here and now if all that's there is real bodily discomfort? Thus, I'm not being very Zen. My mind is straying into realms of what I would, should, must, ought to, want to, need to, or have to, be doing instead of accepting the present moment. A time like this has been a harsh glimpse into how I'd be (un)able to cope if, God forbid, I ever had to go on long-term disability that impairs senses or mobility, or I had to manage through a similar such retirement.

I wrote an entry a while ago about having simple comforts and entertainment at home, titled The Four Square Meter Kingdom, I just reviewed it. Comparing my attitude back then with my sense of suffering and inconvenience now, is like touring two different worlds. Sure, having a chance to seek solace at home during a most brutal winter season was a welcome thought**, but it's "warmer" now, and it is so counter-intuitive for me to just sit around. The thing I'm realizing, sitting in a chair that I haven't actually used in months, is just how alienated I have become in trying to rest and relax within my own walls, and I'm questioning now about exactly how much time I actually do use to consciously live in my own home. Most of my workdays are 10-11 hours long, and then there's the time used commuting, shopping, running/fitness, walking the dog, and attending other appointments (mostly medical now): all outside of home. Days off, or free weekends, are just catch up time for other projects. My remaining waking hours used in here are used mostly being busy in the utility spaces: my kitchen and office, trying to research/plan/economize on things, then there is the time used for cleaning and maintenance, not relaxing or interesting stuff. The actual typical leisure time I have left is two to three hours for generally reading/writing, Internet, or TV between work and sleep. So, I now wonder, is this really living? Is this really as thrilling and adventurous as I've been allowing life to get? It's totally weird to be finding myself off on a stretch of days like this with more empty hours. As time goes on, I'm feeling more and more estranged from anything that involves engaging in social recreation***. I reflect and realize now about whenever I do have actual "vacation" time: just how poorly I use it. I know I'm not alone in feeling and thinking this way.

I brought home a stack of magazines and books from the library after my last appointment, more so to keep the passing of this time on the cheap side, to budget for more impending chiropractic and massage treatment bills. Amongst them is one fittingly called At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson. Initially, I never gave much thought about the prospective content of the book; I just really like Bryson as a non-fiction writer, and I haven't read this particular book of his that he wrote yet. He can take the most ordinary of things that most people take for granted, and he'll explain them as amazing topics embellished with detail, with a profound and interesting commentary on their placement and effect in our social history. He definitely is not a textbook writer. Dull things look extraordinarily meaningful, which I thought would be a welcome type of diversion to practice for around here right now. This book, wonderfully, adds a new and fresh  perspective about the development of housing throughout the course history, and the forces and cultural events that determined our very social evolution of lodging ourselves and way we design, assign, and utilize the space inside what we designate as our home. It should be required reading for architects, cultural anthropologists, interior designers, sociologists, psychologists, history teachers, engineers, economists, or people who just want to market home and furniture supplies, like with RONA, IKEA, or Home Depot.

Addendum: Today it officially is six months of winter for this region: snow coverage since Oct 22, 2012. If we still have snow around here by May, I think we'll be seeing a few people around here going postal.

*- It's called the bunny chair, not because it looks like a kiddie chair with pictures of bunnies on it, but because its former owner claimed that it was mostly used by their family pet: a rabbit. I found through local online buy and sell ads, and got it for free. An effort to reduce, reuse, recycle. There are marks around the base of the chair of evidence where the rabbit gnawed and scratched at it. Ella was sniffing at it suspiciously for a few weeks before she felt comfortable enough to use it. She, of course, is the most frequent user of this piece of furniture, it's the perfect size for her to curl up on.

**- Despite the weather and having moments of opportunity to do so, I rarely ever used them to just to dwell in those 4 square meters for any prolonged amount of time, like I have now.

***- Mostly due to the fact that my hours of work are skewed into the zone of when everyone else has their evening/weekend social entertainment hours.

Immobile Again, Spectating The Police Marathon

I've been rendered immobile and useless again, with more physical injury and pain. I won't go into any more specifics: the instances of irony are so complicated, and just too ridiculous to relate, and if I did write the whole story out this entire entry would just turn into a great big whine-fest. I'm forced to sit still again for another stretch of recovery time, back on pain medication, and now including muscle relaxants for this time around (so I feel especially feeble). I'm going absolutely crazy with having all this time off, without being able to do anything useful, or be fit enough in body or the senses to do anything else productive or enjoyable.


I wish this picture showed it better, but the river ice in the
background is still at least 30 cm at it's thickest.

I'm tired of analyzing and cramming my head full of details of vehicle consumer reports, engine specs, and car adverts. It's all pointless since I'm now too groggy to do any objective test driving. I switched over to reading science journals and technology magazines for a bit of change: stuff that normally interests and impresses me, but it's just not sticking in my head right now, and I'm only giving myself eye strain. I'm alright and better in the mornings, and today I've had enough lucidity to check out the Saskatoon Police Marathon 2013. It's a shame that I am this way, or else I would have registered. However, given the weather conditions today, I'm glad I didn't. It was minus four Celsius, but with the wind chill and the humidity blowing off from the river, it felt more like -18; I was very underdressed for it. It has been the coldest beginning of the third week of April that I ever experienced in my life. Ella was with me, and she was almost putting crawl marks into the sidewalk, as she tried to drag me back to the car after fifteen minutes of being around the unsheltered part of the landing along the north bank. Despite her small size, given my current state, it was really painful to restrain her. She would make a good midget sled-dog: if she could tolerate cold better.



My friend, Marilyn, was a real trooper to endure
the five km stretch of this race.

I went to be inspired, so as to not lose hope for myself. If things don't get any worse, and if I just learn to have enough patience to sit still long enough to heal right, and endure a few chiropractic and massage treatments, I hope to be back training again by this coming Wednesday.

I don't know what I'm going to be supplementing my time with to prevent me from snapping into to doing something rash to quell my boredom. On these meds, my brain feels the same way now as it does after being tossed around after a night shift, so I feel especially vulnerable to being stupid and allowing myself to be a victim of my own poor choices. Shopping for cars should thus be definitely out of the question.




The Four Square Meter Kingdom: My Wintertime Happy Place

I spent more time than I wanted to with kitchen work and cleaning my place up this weekend, which follows with trying a little bit to make it more festive looking for Christmas whilst I had the momentum. I don’t know how it gets in such disarray when it feels like I’m rarely here anymore. It made me pause for thought about how much of my space, or the things in it, that I’m honestly satisfied with having.

With the rate at which technology is shrinking, and access and interface with it is getting more and more user-friendly, I’m coming to realize that the actual physical space we need to make ourselves feel physically comfortable should be reduced as well; or I’m getting more puzzled, or failing more to understand, as to why we think that we should have more expensive real estate than is necessary to claim as “living” space given this trend.*  Perhaps this belief comes out of ignorance, since it seems like I’m rarely home enough to actually “live” in my own place anymore. Maybe it’s because I’ve just lived independently alone for so long, and I’m the one solely responsible for my home’s upkeep; I would find the prospect of living in a large spacious house a kind of hell. Having the mindset of a single occupant, it doesn’t appeal to me at all knowing that there would be even more precious time and utility cost wasted keeping such a place tidy, functional, and in order.
 

Author Tim Ferriss likes to promote life enhancements that can be done in four hours ( The 4 Hour Workweek, The 4 Hour Body, The 4 Hour Chef). I'd like to promote what can be life-enhancing that can be kept within 4 square meters. I figured out all the necessary space, and things in it, that I’d need to satisfy the conditions that could easily keep me comfortably entertained for an entire cold winter's day**. It all can be compacted into an area of about 4.2 m².  If I eliminated the books and papers, it would shrink further still. I took some time to map out my snuggery in the following photo (sorry if you have to squint to see the number labels).

1. Fireplace
2. Firewood (preferably birch)
3. An absolutely hideous, yet super-cozy comforter, which also doubles as a makeshift bed for Ella for her fireside napping
4. Backgammon board (for the odd non-solitude moments)
5. Free weekend newspaper (for reading a couple of articles, perusing want ads, doing the crossword/sudoku puzzle, and the rest is used for starting fire in 1.
6. Non-fiction book(s)
7. Fiction book(s)
8. E-reader for everything else of random reading interest and trivia
9. Wii Controller
10. Deck of cards (used more for mnemonic testing than playing games)
11. Puzzle books (sudoku and logic problems)
12. Tea (or beer/wine/spirit later in the evening)
13. Snacky things (in this case, it just literally happens to be soup to nuts)
14. Laptop computer
15. iTouch (music, podcasts, news, calculator)
16. Earphones (to share peace with my neighbours)
17. Blu-Ray remote
18. Firm floor cushion (meditation, sitting closer to fire)
19. TV (not-visible, but would still fit in the four square meter zone)
20. Blu-ray player (also not visible, I don't even actually need disks, I can use it to tune into You  Tube and Sony's free channels)
21. Wii Consule (not visible, used more for news clips than gaming)  

Missing from the picture is a pen and notebook/sketchpad (22), my currently rather uncooperative and unphotogenic dog (23), and another opponent to play games with me (24). It all at first glance looks quite ordinary and boring. However, if I ever found myself getting extremely bored given any of this, I would think that there would be something really very wrong with me if I couldn't occupy myself with any of these 24 options during 16 waking hours of a day of inclement weather being stranded at home. I actually look forward to the night during some really bad coldsnap, to really keep it simple: by throwing number 2 in number 1, perching on 18, wrapped up in 3, scratching number 23's head while she sleeps by my feet, while drinking the wine option of 12. Having a 24 join me is about as complicated as I'd allow the scene to get.

I write and post this for the benefit of some people I've been watching lately, who have more space than this to use (who are cluttering up their precious space with more junk they aren't really using), with more access to more toys, gadgets, and other material than presented in my picture, who yet don't use it to get any smarter or to feel or gain any deeper sense of solace; who have lately been driving their other cohorts, and those who assist them, bonkers: getting up each others' asses for no reason with their own spells of being stir crazy. Winter has only really just begun, and it hasn't even gotten that cold yet! What are they going to be like when it does start getting more bitter outside? It's really time to reassess yourselves people (you know who you are).

*- Stereos and CD collections are being reduced to MP3 format and their respective players. Entire shelves of hundreds of bulky, physical books can be eliminated by using a single e-reader. Interactive video screens and game consoles are attracting more sensory attention than the remaining ambience of a room. I would term this trend of relating with digital media more than using physical space, while avoiding the outside world as “micro-cocooning”.

**- When it becomes cold enough to result in having to warm up my car’s engine for longer than the actual time it will spend on the road, or when the dog has the sense to not want to walk two steps outside booted and fully bundled: that’s the kind of day I’m talking about around here. That point is usually around, or below, -30 Celsius (not including some horrific wind chill factor). It's not worth the trouble trying to get around, and it's a day when I want to expend as little energy as possible on unnecessary movement, inside or outside.