Approaching Solstice

I've been getting better throughout the past couple weeks. I would estimate that I've now recovered to some point between 65 and 75 percent of my pre-embolism self. Now however, it feels like I'm in a bit of a stall phase. I probably reached that point where the clots may have subsided, but the scar tissue that's left behind is slower to get through. Being able to get out during the brief thaw phase of this month to at least get some good fresh air and away from my own walls from time to time has been a relief. I still have to be wary and mindful about exposure to people with colds and the flu. I was warned that contracting anything with symptoms of respiratory impairment, even to a relatively mild degree, would put me several steps backward from recovery if I'm not careful. Thus, running out to a crowded mall to do Christmas shopping hasn't been on my to-do list. I did go out during a couple less busy days and times of the week, more so to meet up and visit with some friends and familiars than to do anything else. Otherwise, the only real physically active and sometimes social thing I've been doing is taking Ella out to the dog park.

So, now with it being payday, and the realization that Christmas is only six days away*, I now have a fire lit under my ass to finish my Christmas shopping. Being amongst the teeming hordes of shoppers is now unavoidable. Inspiration and ideas have been so far alluding me.
 
After being shut in for so long, and finally getting some more of my stamina and energy back, I strongly felt the need to explore: to get out and tour new places, see new things. I've become desperate for novelty. I also received a bit of a settlement recently; as tempting as it is to book a trip somewhere, I won't be medically fit for air travel for some while (Boo!). All the places I want to travel to are markedly more expensive than most vacation packages to Vegas or Mexico anyway, and will need more time to save for these locales. I hope the falling fuel prices help with achieving such a goal sooner.
 
In a past entry I talked about finding a substitute pastime for running, cycling and skiing. Well, recently I thought I should make good on not just making that lip service. I was inspired by a figure of a gargoyle in a bar recently and got to perusing some magazines in Indigo to consider taking up wood-carving. As cheap as carving sets can be though, I notice now that even when handling knives in doing my own kitchen prep that my hand-eye coordination is getting more crude. I just didn't want this to be another pastime that I'd be rashly taking up, only to drop later out of frustration. It would be my luck that I would be destined of somehow slashing open my hand or fingers by accident while on Warfarin as I chip away at some piece of wood and then bleeding out really badly. I later found a place in this town, one of the hobby shops, that is an outlet that sells the MakerBot series of 3D printers, and I got to finally witness a demonstration of one's capability for the first time. I just about bought one right there on the spot. It's a beautiful and marvelous thing: an entire workshop condensed into less than one cubic meter of space, easily fitting into the office space of my condo. I'm looking into really getting one, but the rest of my computer systems are so antiquated now, and I require a lot of upscaling in the basics of technology before I'd be able to get and use one practically.

The first few weeks of being out of the hospital have been worrisome for me, in regards to wondering if I'll really ever recover to 100% of my old self, and get enough of my strength, energy, and stamina back to endure the rigours of a typical 11 – 13 hour workday**. The recovery has been going well, but the path through it all is still riddled with potential landmines. It has been unsettling being left to wonder what options I'd have left to do vocationally if all I'd be doing is torturing myself and suffering more after going back. As miserable as office jobs make me, I do have to consider the real options for getting one for the long-term out of necessity in the near future. Creating options in a career in design/development and fostering them with an applicable interest or hobby is probably the way to go to avoid outrageous education expenses. Who knows really? Vocational counsellors seem to be getting further and further out of touch with the world for me to rely on anything on what they have to say. Finding/creating a job/career at this time that both pays well enough, and that I'd love to do (or can at least tolerate doing) while in this state is a huge challenge.

I'll hopefully know more about a route to take as I sort out things from next medical appointment coming next week.
 
*- Of that time, only three days are available for me to use for shopping, the pressure's on . . .
** - Commuting time included.

Starting 2013

I found a very appropriate movie I just watched recently which I'd recommend to everyone during this season, the transitioning of years. It is called In Time, starring Amanda Seyfried and Justin Timberlake. It's a science fiction movie with a unique, yet morbidly fascinating, premise: humans have been genetically altered/evolved to exist in a completely time-based social economy, making the saying "time is money" much less abstract. People in this society stop physiologically aging at the age of twenty-five, however there is a catch. Monetary currency has been entirely eliminated, and people are biochemically programmed with a countdown clock, where the time of their chronological lifespan can be increased or decreased, giving one a variable "expiry date". When the countdown has timed down to all zeros in a person, all of their metabolic functions cease entirely, and they simply die (time out). All transactions for goods, services, and living essentials are then made by directly exchanging units of time on and off one's lifespan. Time zones in this story don't mean global hourly differences, but rather they're gated communities where the elite classes (those who have banked centuries/millennia of longevity) are segregated away from those living in the time impoverished ghettos (those who literally live day to day on borrowed time). It makes one think a little more seriously about how we are exchanging, or wasting, our time in our life, and perhaps it prompted me greatly to give more thought about what I want to see happen for this new year.

What are my resolutions and ambitions? I haven't really thought them through with any great exacting detail, but the starting outline of them is as such:

• This year's general theme: Skills diversification, and daring to be different.
• Muses/Hacks/Motivators/Mnemonics/Reminders/Rationales:
• This is the first time since 1987, that all of the digits in the year number have been all different from each other
• "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

• Method: Do many new and exciting things throughout the year that challenge and build on all my "intelligences"
• The intelligences are:
• Linguistic
• Mathematical
• Visual
• Physical
• Musical
• Emotional
• Social
• Environmental
• Spiritual
• Practical
• Mnemonic Affirmation: (L)et (M)y (V)arious (P)ositive (M)indful (E)ndeavors (S)erve (E)veryone (S)ensibly and (P)ractically

 

• The 13 books I want to read (re-read*) for 2013
1. The Four Hour Work Week* - Timothy Ferriss
2. The $100 Start Up - Chris Guillebeau
3. What the Dog Saw - Malcolm Gladwell
4. Guns, Germs, and Steel* - Jared Diamond
5. Changeology - John C. Norcross
6. Eat to Live - Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
7. People Are Idiots, and I Can Prove It* - Larry Winget
8. The Writer's Idea Book - Jack Heffron
9. The Art of Nonconformity - Chris Guillebeau
10. The Manual of the Warrior of Light - Paulo Coelho
11. The Screwtape Letters - C.S. Lewis
12. Hyperspace - Michio Kaku
13. Embracing the Wide Sky - Daniel Tammet

• Starting Date to Commit to a Plan: January 6th, 2013
• Rationale/Reminder:
• Majorly ambitious changes for a whole year can't be organized within a single day, and doing so turns out to be just a rash and empty effort. It's probably why so many people fail at committing to their resolutions in the first place. I've tried planning some within one day before; it just doesn't work. I'll need more than just today for plan and orchestrate things, and to make feasible timelines for the year. Hopefully five planning days will be enough.
• These first five days should be sufficient to start cleaning and organizing my space, and for ridding some of the impediments out of my place without it turning into a wasteful purge. e.g. enough time to eat the foods out of my fridge that are contra to my diet plan (instead of just throwing them out).
• I'll have this coming weekend off to do a last proper binge before things get serious
• January 6th starts on a Sunday, which makes it easier to formulate a week by week training plan
• On January 6th, there will be 360 days remaining of 2013. A good time to affect things to watch them come full circle.

• The 13 things I want to do on this first day of 2013:
• Go skiing with my friend
• Make a new batch of beer
• Nap
• Watch a Blu-Ray (Prometheus)
• Take Ella to the dog park
• Try a new recipe
• Call my family
• Start a new budget for my projects
• Clean out and organize office closet (and fitness equipment)
• Re-tune my guitar, and learn a few new chords
• Collect some books to sell
• Purge old files on hard drive
• Begin brainstorming stuff and collecting ideas for the next four days

The 2012 Wrap Up, The Year Ahead

The Christmas holiday is ending with this Boxing Day evening with a frigidly cold, -40 degree windchill outside. I've cocooned myself inside since I returned from visiting my family. The flickering flames in my fireplace tonight have kept me in a hypnotic trance for too long now it seems, and I had to reboot my mind again with some writing. I'm actually glad that it is this cold: all the more to dissuade me from getting involved in the Boxing Day sales hype and madness happening earlier today. I had only enough energy to drive back from visiting my folks, and that was it. All the excess feasting has rendered me a bit sluggish. I don't just feel like I ate like a pig; I feel like some python that just swallowed a whole pig that ate like a pig.

I'm realizing that the year is quickly winding down; I'm opting not to waste too much time reflecting on it as I did like last year. Successes were achieved, but not really significantly glorious ones; there weren't any hugely glaring, abysmal failures though either (on my part of the grand scheme of things). My highlights were generally pretty much the personal bests I have recorded already in previous entries regarding my fitness goals. My low points were my failure to find the right mix of time/energy and dedication to follow through with my learning/career enhancement challenges, and not getting to build a better network of more positive and like-minded people. For the past couple of beginnings of the new year, I've been stricken with bad luck in the realm of health problems. I hope the lack of them now will be a signal for a better year for me coming ahead.

For the year ahead, the focus will be on continuing to implement efficiency, and to pick up on those things that I started learning, but lost track of midway through last fall. The key elements are:

• trying to limiting it more to things that accord with the 80/20 principle (learning/mastering the 20% of the things that control 80% of the whole system I'm learning, or operating with)
• being more mindful to formulate things as a recipe: finding and stationing the right set of tools, establish the variables, and then commit to procedure(s)
• using creative shortcuts with mnemonics
• meta-learning (un-learning, and then re-learning how to learn), and a low-info diet (there is too much useless stuff in the junk drawer of my brain as it is): to break bad habits and acquire better ones
• having sounder worse case scenario strategies/contingency plans when it comes to taking bigger risks

The things I want to accomplish in 2013* are:

• Completing a full-marathon distance (either through training or racing)
• Keeping on top of staying fit for it
• Getting away for an actual vacation for once
• To implement the stuff I've been studying into a major career shift
• Catching up on those things I didn't get to do/complete last year

Special thanks to authors Tim Ferriss, and David Allen, and especially my friend MJ who has been so supportive so far in with my current life improvements and ambitions. I'll be sticking close to all of you for your advice, tips and suggestions to help guide me through 2013.

Cheers to all of you!

*-Sorry. Ambitions in regards to matters of money, love/sex/relationships, and spirituality are matters too private for me to mention here.

Progressive Apps

I have no clue as to why I feel jazzed up today, except for the fact that I've been really nerdish and anal about getting a few more applications and organizational tools working for me in a good way, and having a few more 'Eureka!' moments and breakthroughs as I continue to pursue re-establishing some sort of order to my personal domain.

I'm still struggling to bend my brain around some of the more abstract portions of my learning modules in the programming manual. I suppose after comparing programming to all else which I construe as a bothersome problem to deal with, I've given these things a new perspective, and they now appear a lot less difficult to manage. Whether it's done formally or informally, I'd highly recommend it to everyone to learn some kind of programming. It's not just about sorting out variables and configuring data to be processed. It's also about understanding the flow of information, and having that flow and following it's momentum is what is needed to get out of a rut when blocked by a problem.

With gaining more knowledge and skill at programming and flow of information, one becomes more attune to the concept that any common problems are just forms of information that need re-processing. Circumstances never arise with any label of "good" or 'bad' attached to them. Circumstances only become problems whenever they conflict, clash, and interfere with whatever ambitions, goals, missions, or ideals of progress we've set for ourselves, and then get wrapped up in our own dramas that we build around them. Most of the challenge in dealing with them is just breaking up things into manageable sets and putting them in a much simpler framework. Keeping motivated, monitoring , and applying action is the rest of the job.

My iPhone is armed with these apps that I find especially useful. If anyone knows of one that creates good flowcharts and fish bone graphs, I'd love to hear about then. Here are a few productivity apps that I find especially useful when I'm mobile, and when I want to capture, analyze, compare, and chart ideas that strike me from out of the blue:

Simple Minds - What this app is for is mind mapping: taking a central theme and creating related offshoots to build upon the idea to provide options and enhancements. It allows one to follow through with some open-opened creativity. It's relatively simple to use, and the variable colours can be helpful for coding categories.

MindTools - A nice little compendium of productivity strategies, for helping me to get out of ruts for planning complicated things. The problem solving and the exercises to challenge assumptions are some of my favourite ones in this app.

PDF Reader - Generally OK to transfer PDF files to, but on the iPhone screen, even with expanding the view, details of the fine print on a letter-sized paper formatted document are a little hard to read.

Graphio (Lite) - A cool little piece of productivity software that makes diagrams and graphs for flowcharts and more. The only flaw it has is the difficulty in bringing up the keyboard to label the chart objects. This prevents me from bothering to upgrade to the full version.

OneNote - This Microsoft app is a very dumbed down version of the full MS Office OneNote program. There is a checkbox function for to do lists, a point form outline maker, and photo capture button, but nothing else really. The only saving grace it has is for collecting rudimentary material, which can then be uploaded to a desktop/laptop for more detail with colour coding and graph making.

Dropbox - This provides instantaneous picture sharing with all cloud connected devices from your pics and other files. Simply splendid for faster processing of shared photographs, and posting them on blog entries. The process of having to email them to myself first was very cumbersome in comparison.

Evernote - A very good note app for collecting tags and sharing with other wi-fi connected devices. Unlike OneNote, it will record voice and index your tags and categories for you.

Lift  - The newest one I collected so far. It is what can be termed as a positive habit recorder and monitor. You can pick from a shared list of, or create your own, habits that you want to include in your life and stick with. It's a checkmark diary of sorts, to monitor your progress and account for all the little things that will amount to greater goals. It will also link one with a support community, some of whom are monitoring the same things they wish to include in their lives as you, who can even give you props to encourage you.

One Quarter Left: of the Year ... and of Me

October began yesterday, so now we're into the beginning of the final quarter of the year. It opened with me making a platelet donation at Canadian Blood Services, and then going through the futile process of trying to rest before doing my stupid night shift.

I gave up in frustration with trying to rest through the day to prepare for it by trying to bore myself to sleep with studying. I ended up starting and processing a bunch of other household stuff. I hoped that the later sunrise would allow me more wind down time, but it wasn't so. I have three more of them to do before year's end. I do my best to push myself through when I do work them, but I've resolved to not put myself through any future hell of doing anymore of them. I have enough vacation hours and banked stat time to allow me to do so. It's better for both me and the people I serve if I avoid them. I don't want to go to any job, or do any task, or sign up for anything else where I'm reduced to being only 25% (or less), of the kind of person that I want to be; when it becomes such that it reflects both mentally and physically in my performance, which is what is effectively happening when I commit to doing these shifts.

So, I've been awake for more than 36 hours now. Here are a few more peculiarities that I'm noting and learning about me while I'm stricken with this degree of insomnia, with my senses working overtime, and depleted of a few less discretionary mental faculties:

• I try to chill out with music, giving eighties alternative/indy artists a good play over (The Cure, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, David Bowie, The Jesus & Mary Chain, XTC, Joy Division, old school R.E.M., et al.).
• Anything I tried studying the previous day is just not in memory, thus wasted time and a total write off. I have to redo the last unit from my programming manual.
• I get strange and ridiculous surges of hunger that interrupt sleep, and for very carb-loaded foods too. This time I did something out of character and made pancakes ... for myself , after I came home, a true sign that I'm having some sort of a mental breakdown from exhaustion.
• I purposely isolate myself at home to prevent myself from making impulsive purchases while having less than adequate decision-making ability.  
• I get really geared to do something to fix myself better, despite the fatigue, with problem solving strategies by exploring productivity improvement sites, like Mind Tools™ (only after when my eyes aren't hurting too much to read).
• Gobbling up any pain-relieve pill that will sooth the headaches and muscle/eye-soreness, (I usually avoid anything in pill form if I can).
• I try to vent my general edginess and frustration through blogging, hoping that sleep will strike me down soon afterward.

If I'm still not able to sleep after this, my next manoeuvre is to review my stack of scans, sketches, and scribblings to see what of these non-ongoing things are most likely achievable within the next three months. Part of my problem with the lack of headway in some things is the degree of interest diversity I have, and trying to do eight or nine things at a time, rather than just narrowing the focus down to one or two items. My To-Do list really needs to be abbreviated.

Java Programming, Turkey Sex, Perceptions from Martians

Now that my office environment has been de-cluttered and re-arranged, I feel supercharged to establish a new world order for myself. I feel a lot more capable now of studying and executing some stuff that is very abstract, and demands an extra heightened and sharpened degree of focus.

I just completed the first learning module from a Java programming manual today. My ultimate ambition is to get some sort certification for it, and pad up my resume a bit. It was the cheapest hobby/interest, skill building exercise that I could think of doing to keep me out of trouble from now until the end of winter. I do reasonably well at translating languages, solving decryption and logic puzzles, so I thought the natural and practical thing to build on from these talents is programming. Right now, I thought that the creative side of this writing exercise would help me wind down and decompress after this lesson of processing nebulous terminology, and blowing out the cobwebs, and knocking the rust off of some long unused mental faculties. I'm hoping that nothing in there seized up too much. I blame too much over-interfacing, and having to constantly dig into the heads of people who are so illogical, void of common sense, who regularly obfuscate information, and just are lacking in normal language skills, for any weakness I'm having in being any more proficient at this new project. Dealing so directly and purely with matters of logic and the accuracy involved in programming is a welcome change, but it's also almost a shock to the system as I sit down and get fully engaged in it, compared to what I regularly deal with. It is, however, just the kind of exercise that I need to do to achieve some sort of balance.

In part of the first exercise there was some examples about how the programming language could be used for guiding a exploration probe on Mars, or something, using OOP (Object Oriented Programming) through creating instance and class attributes and methods within a single inheritance hierarchy. Sounds like Martian, doesn't it? If you have no programming experience, it surely would. This mode of empirical experimentation I'm in, thoughts of Martians, and the coming of Thanksgiving (October 8th here in Canada), and the consequently discounted turkeys in grocery stores, all coalesce to remind me of a story about pornography that still makes me laugh.

I forget the name and date of the documentary that was aired about this subject, but the scenario was this. The blurb I saw on it was about the mating habits of turkeys, and how easily tom turkeys could be brought to sexual arousal with the simplest of stimuli.* Scientists were testing turkeys in a lab with cardboard cutout pictures of hen turkeys. The subject male turkey would fluff out his chest and tail feathers, gobbling up a storm, strutting and circling the photo, and then he would actually try to mount it! Apparently, it's not even necessary to have  the whole picture of the female turkey to get the tom turkeys excited. The experiments showed that even when just a picture of the hen turkey's head was pasted on a stick, is enough for the males to still willingly resume trying to court the thing and screw it silly. Oh sure, we could sit here and laugh about how friggin' stupid a creature like a turkey is for doing this. However, the researcher chimed in with a bizarre, yet insightful observation. He stated it as something like: suppose the Martians landed somewhere at night, and then went around peeking through windows to get a first hand account about the behaviours of humans, and chanced upon watching some guy getting freaky with his junk while staring at some pictures in a glossy magazine, or at pixelated lights on a screen. People in this case, aren't that much bloody brighter than turkeys. I would assume that the same kind of conclusion could be arrived at by the Martians if they caught sight of some guys using a laser pointer to tease their cat into chasing a dot of light around the house, laughing like crazy at this simple-minded reaction of this animal, and then sitting down on a couch afterward . . . to play video games**. Not a real difference between the two cases. Therefore, we are far from being a species that should be ridiculing or judging the entertainment behaviours of other animals, especially when it comes to sex. All higher animals use some means of artificial sensory stimulation. It's called play.


Then again, if the abduction stories are true, the Martians shouldn't get a too sanctimonious either if they are still continuing with all that alleged anal probing business.

*- Why they were conducting this research is beyond me, since for the most part, commercially raised turkeys today are the result of artificial insemination. The damn things are being selectively bred to be so big that they seriously risk injuring or crushing a hen turkey if they mounted her, hence this option. There is actually a job out there, as I discovered on Dirty Jobs, on the Discovery Channel. If you ever thought that your job sucked (snicker), just think of these poor bastards.
** - Sorry, but using a controller to chase or shoot at what amounts to points of light on a screen amounts to something not much different than a cat chasing a red laser dot around. We just have a more sophisticated means of doing it. Relax gamesters, I do this too, but I fail to see the appeal of using a whole day of doing it like people do.

Approaching Equinox, English Speaker Peeves

Autumnal equinox is arriving today: when number of daylight hours will balance out with the number of night time hours. As always, it seems to be a natural time of the year for me to pensively re-evaluate what sorts of progressions throughout the course of it are working out, and which ones are not, with equal attention. My big personal, bringing-things-to-balance, project for this weekend is re-organizing my home office. The task is so daunting that I decided to procrastinate a little by writing a blog entry instead.

I reviewed the goal list I made for myself from back in July. I accomplished most of those things, with the exception of achieving a full marathon distance run. I'm reminded of this because the Rush concert is in town next Friday. It was the reward I promised myself if I achieved this goal. The injury messed up my training schedule so badly.

My running activity is becoming more and more infrequent and abbreviated, mostly due to the fact that the city has turned off all the fountains along the trails since the month began, so my range is limited to going as far as the amount of water I can carry with me will allow me to. I feel about 90% healed now; it still hurts to touch my toes. My training sessions ordinarily are done in the morning, but I'll be switching over to using my free afternoons, or early evenings instead. My count is 451 runs that are registered with Nike Plus since I began recording them. I made it a goal to complete 500 before the end of the year. I'm curious as to how far toward the end of the year it will be until I'd find it intolerable to wear running shorts outside. Biking season will be winding down within the next one to two months as well, unless we are lucky enough to have a freakishly late-coming winter like we did last year. I'm not a winter cyclist. It's risky enough that I bike home from work in pitch dark, never mind adding icy streets to skid on in the middle of traffic into the mix. This new bike is great: my best purchase of the year so far, and it pleases me even more knowing that it has been paid off already within five months of riding it with the savings from my gasoline bill.

I've been doing more crazy experiments in self-sufficiency, and had another successful and delicious exercise in frugality for this week: Watermelon Rind Pickles. I purchased one of the last well-ripened watermelons at my local store for $1.98, and made six pint jars of worth of sweet and savory pickles out of the rinds, which would have ordinarily been destined for the garbage. Adding another dollar and a half worth of vinegar, sugar, spices, and sealing lids, reusing the jars I already have, and I made them for about 58 cents a pint. I couldn't make cucumber pickles that cheaply, even if I grew them from seed: if I ever somehow found enough growing space for them on my deck.

Recently, I applied to a casual ESL teaching position at one of the community centres. I was reminiscing about my last English teaching experience, and factoring in who my students would be if I'm hired, and thinking about how I'd do things differently this time around. I'm reasonably forgiving and patient with people who are just learning the language, but I'm also easily sickened when it comes listening to some people who allegedly have spoken this language all their lives, and who still speak it very poorly. Here are some (unfortunately all too common) ways that "English speakers" abuse the language that make me want to cast some biting ridicule at them for being so linguistically stupid:

1. Using the first person object pronoun in the nominative case: I really hate it when people say "Me and <blank> {verb} {predicate}.". Our built-in moron detectors would quickly signal alert status red when we hear fellow anglophones around us say things like, "Us will go to the store.", "Her went to the bathroom.",or "Them have tickets to the movies." So, why is it so bloody hard for some people to understand that "Me and Joe Blow are eating cookies" is just as totally stupid and wrong? Use 'Joe Blow and I', or simply 'We', instead. Hearing some adults constantly speaking this way makes me suspect that they flunked grade six grammar, perhaps more than just once.
2. Failing to notice the difference of usage between 'there', 'their', and 'they're' in their written forms: when people dare argue with me in writing, stating that, "Their is nothing wrong with my message because the spell checker on my computer says that they're are no mistakes. So their!" I'm very certain that I won't be hiring this person for anything very detail oriented. Similar peeves bug me too which relate to the incorrect usage of 'your' and 'you're', 'it's' and 'its', and 'to', 'two', and 'too'.
3. Improper verbal conjugations: English verbs only have two variations of present tense conjugations (the exception is three for the verb "to be": am, are, is), a simple addition of a single form of modal verb to the infinitive to make conditional or future tenses, a single past tense form (two for the verb "to be": was, were), a single participle form, and a single gerund form. It's so much simpler to learn verbs in English than it is to learn the verbs from most other languages*, and yet people are still so stupid to say things like, "I gots really good grammar", or "My child write like Shakespeare". Such things strike me as straddling the line between being grossly comical, and horrifically ignorant and tragic.
4. The word "like", or excessive profanity, splattered liberally and repeatedly throughout the body of a single sentence, stated as mindlessly and casually as if one were chewing gum: e.g. "I was like, going to the mall to like buy these cute shoes, and they were like a hundred dollars, but I only had like forty, so like I phoned my mom and said like, "I really like these shoes mom". . . Jesus Christ kid, SHUT UP! Six likes and only one was valid. On the same token, the substitution of the word "like" with the more foul word "fucking", or any other profanity, used as a filler with the same degree of frequency and thoughtlessness, is even more bothersome to me. Psychologically, people who do this constantly just to throw in this extra shock value, do so because they are they are insecure and yet childishly attention seeking (as with teenagers), and they lack the maturity and/or confidence to dare themselves to think that they might have or develop some other amiable intellectual aspect or personality dimension for themselves that can be used to maintain rapport with another person. If you are 'like' this still as a full grown adult, do the rest of us a favour, and actively learn to broaden your vocabulary, read about some topical interests, and tame your attitude with some civil and mannerly speech, or else just shut up. I'd rather listen to a troop of jabbering monkeys than to people such as these.

I fully realize that my own writing is festered with errors, and in need of frequent proofreading and editing. I also acknowledge that speech wise I've found myself doing the aforementioned peeves and mistakes before, but mostly because people aren't tuning into what I'm trying to say in my normal manner of speaking, and as much as it makes me cringe to do it, sometimes I have to compromise and lower myself to using their parlance to snap some sense into them. I like the statement, "Language is the means through which our thoughts are served to others." Sadly, I believe more and more people are becoming estranged from this idea. If the spoken and written thoughts I serve were food, I'd like it to be a banquet of things that have a simple and whimsical; yet elegant presentation, that are easy to digest; yet stun the senses in a good way, with familiar flavours made exotic with unique signature twists, even when the morsel tested is slightly sour or bitter. I would hope it would draw the diner (listener) into a realm that they've never before experienced. I'd rather not be caught verbally exposing and delivering my thought process in the same manner as doling out the gustatory equivalent of the slop that they serve in a prison chow line.

* - Count yourself lucky if English is your mother tongue, and you're using verbs. Languages like French, Russian, and Spanish have as many as six, present tense conjugation forms. Due to it's gender subdivided singular and plural person forms, Arabic has even more than that. This is why I shake my head in shame at people, whose first language is 'English', who can't even figure out which one of two given forms to use correctly.

Birthday 2012

It started as a cloudy day. I could never remember a time when my birthday was ever so cloudy, or showing any aspect of possible rain. There were cooler days, yes, but I’ve never noted it starting out with such a gloomy, somber looking sky until now. Thankfully, it ended up getting warmer and brighter for the afternoon.

I woke up this morning feeling like I’ve finally shaken off the last vestiges of the insomnia and spells of mental malaise/fogginess, and headaches that I get after doing a night shift. I feel reasonably re-energized; the problem is though that I don’t know where to direct such energy. I have a couple days off. As uneventful and unceremonious as my birthday has usually been, I try to make a point to not work through it. Conveniently for me, it usually falls on the week of the Labour Day holiday, and I use the stat time in lieu of a work day, or else the following day after. It has never been a big deal for anyone else to note while I was growing up, as the day falls in a time when folks usually are too involved with other business that occurs at this part of the year. It always coincided with the full swing of harvest season when I lived rurally, and during the beginning of the back to school season when the return to regular affairs becomes more of a priority.

With my energy renewed; I had no desire to spend the day cooped up indoors, despite the dullness outside. So, I packed up my laptop and went mobile. Since there was no coffee left in my kitchen, I scurried over to the Broadway Roastery where there’s Wi-Fi, to at least plot out something meaningful to do, if not to just simply reflect on things. The only gifts I’ve received so far through the day were a few pennies I found on the ground*, and some lotto tickets that were sent to me by mail, which were unfortunately losers. However, I did tie into a book that a friend of mine gifted to me much earlier in the year during the process of her move. It’s called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. It’s a book that I wish was available to me years ago. Even through a cursory perusal of it, I scribbled out and generated at least fifty questions afterward that I thought were relevant to me for which I thought I needed to have answered. It’s a massive project in itself to take time to find these answers. It was a significant book for me to read for today because of its heavy emphasis on a sense of mission and vision.

To turn another year older without any sense to become a better sort of person than what one currently is, in my mind, is absolutely foolish. I’ve already started taking some steps to accord with a personal advancement yesterday. I decided to do away entirely with services that I just find to be too wasteful, like my LAN line and cable TV. My LAN line number gets more telemarketer calls (despite being registered with the GOC do-not-call list) than personal ones. Why then should I pay for this hassle? As for my digital cable TV, I never find time to watch it, and when I do, even with an extra two hundred channels, I never find anything worthwhile to watch, or follow, in terms of a series. I have better things to do for myself than to squander away my time this way, even with the coming of winter. I did not miss it at all throughout the summer months, and I’m confident that I could do without it through this winter as well. I can select and catch up on news and programming on the web, and filter through the video of stories that may be of interest to me better, at a time of my convenience.

In general, I find myself to be over-inundated with media. I’m tired and sickened of all the bad news I hear. When that happens, we aren’t allowed to think for ourselves, nor do we become more genuine, authentic personalities when we are only given news stories that strike fear and loathing in us. The worst culprit is television, because it involves all your basic audio-visual senses: I can easily skip over the commercial advertizing in a newspaper, but I can’t with TV, not without having to peck at buttons on a PVR. I figured if I took the more of the visual stimuli away, more of my attention would be freed to focus on other tasks.

I’m on the search for meaningful interests, and things to set into skills and habits to use to substitute for that wasted time. I toured the SPL (Saskatoon Public Library) to do such a thing. I dragged home a huge pile of these primitive things called magazines**, some audiobooks to listen to at bedtime, and other non-fiction books of related to subjects of my curiosity. I can putter around home doing more validating work, or to craft other things, while listening to educational and informative podcasts as well.

So far, my work schedule still confines me to doing more solitary, introverted activities (God willing, that will soon change too). Along with continuing to heal myself, and finding more efficient ways to maintain a runner’s conditioning over winter without slipping and wiping out on ice (weight-training and treadmill running), the things I’d like to devote more attention to learning and improving on throughout the course of fall and winter are: programming, writing, woodcrafts, DIY home improvements, culinary skills, investment/fiscal management, advanced mathematics, language acquisition, playing guitar, and perhaps do some formal course work with SIAST.

The greatest gift I’m giving to myself for this birthday is the courage to gain some clarity of mind to attain my own standard of personal rectitude.

*- Gifts from God I suppose. I always pick up coins, even pennies, I find on the street. Not out of superstition, certainly not because I believe the few cents I find this way will make me wealthy, nor is it done out of desperation, but to keep me mindful that abundance is potentially everywhere, and to keep me hopeful that opportunities will appear someday to help serve me better.

**- Ebooks, web sites, and epub files are almost bringing proper paper magazine publications to the brink of extinction. My choices are health, science, and tech mags (Wired, PC World, Men’s Health, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science

Blue Moon, Blasting Skies, Alchemy of Being

I'm chilling outside, under the glow of the second full moon of this month: a blue moon. It's one of the last few evenings of the year that it will be nice enough to sit out here and close a day with sipping a glass of wine under the stars. I always find the tastiest watermelons around the end of August, and tonight I'm snacking on some that has been enhanced with a sprinkling of Tajin, a Mexican spice blend I found, concocted specifically to be added to slices of fruit. It gives it a wonderful sharp, zippy bite of citrus and chili, balanced by a slightly salty tang that contrasts nicely with the juicy sweetness. It was the perfect bedtime snack to have after I came back from the fireworks festival down by the river. A fireworks festival is the perfect event to have to symbolize the fading away of a Canadian summer: lively, animate, a burst of hot fiery glorious beauty within the year that feels like it comes and goes way too quickly and fleetingly. The flash of colours lead to the expectation of the changing leaves as autumn approaches.

That excursion, my book, plus sitting out here, were my first real breaks of the day. Before and after work, most of it was spent charging around and frantically writing up some correspondence to get some things prepared before deadlines today.

As I said, I read a bit after all that stuff was over with. If I was ever so diligent enough to create and upkeep a blog or numeric list article about a manly man's guide to literature*, the novel The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho, would definitely be on it. It has been perhaps effecting me more deeply than I thought it would, now that I sit back and meditate on all the actions I took today to work some things out for the better. It seems like a recent entry into the book market, but in actuality, the work is twenty some odd years old. It's one of those universal and timeless stories, with lots of interplay using archetypes. It's sort of an adventure story; not one with a high level of action or drama in the content of the story, but if you have a real soul in you, it triggers you to recollect and probe into any part of some aspect of the adventure of your own life, in terms of both successes and regrets, where you found yourself chasing after a dream. Paradoxically, it's loaded with a setting and themes of things exotic and mysterious, yet is not as riddle laden as one may initially think: it gets very direct and revealing about some of life's deeper wisdom and truths. I wonder if this writing style is just a unique facet related to literary Portuguese, from which this story was translated, or more of a direct characteristic of the author.

Be warned, this book might make you want to approach your desires in life with a little more passion, as well as tuning into using your present moment to do something more pleasantly constructive. It's a Zen book.


*- Such a blog would probably be called something like, Books for Guys Who Like All Things Related to Beer, Boobies, Action Movies, Dirty Jokes, and Things with Loud Throbbing Engines, and Are yet Still Worldly and Securely Masculine Enough to Not Be Ashamed to Admit to Themselves and Others That They Have an Intellectual and Emotionally Sensitive Side That Needs to Be Nurtured and Stimulated With Deeply Awe-Inspiring, Philosophically  Engaging, Life-Enriching, Soulful, and Thought Provoking Literature. . . Ok, ok . . . I'll work on shortening that title.

As You Like It (More Education; No More Mewling and Puking)

I came home after my last evening shift of the work week; just too sore and restless to wind down enough to get to sleep. The soreness is undoubtedly due to overtraining, and I always seem to get weirdly restless after touring hospitals (work-related visit); I can’t explain why*. My first free evening of the week was yesterday, in which after all these years, I finally went to see a production by the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan festival. The play was the comedy As You Like It, and the setting and characters’ costuming were adapted into a “steampunk” art design motif. It was one of Shakespeare’s plays that I never read through yet, so it was great to see a performance that I had no preconceptions about. The “All the world’s a stage. . .” speech was well delivered, and made me pause for thought about which part in life I’m playing now, along with remembering an earlier discussion in the week. I’m thinking more about returning to being the “whining school boy with his satchel”.

One of the more meaningful discussions I had at work before this week ended was with someone who had convocated from university recently, and we chatted about the challenges of the dilemma of buying into getting more future education versus trying to balance life in trying to make a living from what there is around now: we shared our thoughts and stories from her and my perspective, given our respective current living statuses and situations. As happy as I am to see more of a paradigm shift in the way that education is heading with the evolution of the resources available via the Internet, the critical element still remains to have self-initiative, and making learning cool and fun for yourself. What I'm most bitter about through all the years of classroom learning that I had was the emphasis on what to study (much of it now archaic and obsolete) and none on how to study (there was just rote-learning, no effort to teach mnemonic devices, lack of creativity in presenting abstract concepts by fusing them with concrete examples). 

I’m always open to educating myself, but for the most part the I’m constantly in an exploratory mode: I pick the most random of subjects to read about and study, and I haven’t yet sorted them all out to condense them down into a curriculum for a portable and meaningfully applicable skill set for anything radically different and from what I do now that would be more life enhancing. I still have a habit of actively trying to keep what I studied academically alive in mind. I have books about higher mathematics, statistics, and social/natural sciences, and critical essay compilations scattered throughout my place; I know don’t read them for entertainment. I’m not really proficient in many other languages besides English, but I still find myself trying to read, or intuitively translate, the odd web articles and news captions in French, Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and Russian** to keep my limited vocabulary and grammar of each of them from being entirely extinguished. I honestly don’t know why I’m compelled to do this. I learned some bits and phrases of these languages for some reason; I just lost, or have not yet found, any practical use for them. For the hell of it, I create spreadsheet projects for myself; some are practical, most are not, which later become easy victims to disuse and obsolescence. I do it mostly to not lose my basic knowledge in how to program, process, and organize data, even though my current job doesn’t really demand such talents. Money and time to sit in a class, or study with correspondence material, to get formal certification for valid credentials seems harder and harder to come by, and it gets more and more expensive each year I delay such making such a commitment.

Maybe what I really need now is something that can’t be taught in a class.*** Just meeting new people with such interests and intellect would be a good start.

*- Don’t bother trying to pry at me about it, client confidentiality comes first.

**- The only one of these that is meaningful (and yet have least knowledge of) to me is Ukrainian, and only because it’s the language of half of my ancestry. I figure that given the current global statistics, knowing these languages would allow me to communicate directly, or by means of a secondary protocol standard, with 52% of the world’s population. If I knew some Mandarin, Japanese, Portuguese, and Arabic, it would be more like being able to speak with 84% of the world.

***- Even if there were such classes for these alternate things, they would most likely be evening classes, which my work schedule would overlap.

Heatwave/Other New Goals/Practicing Mind

It's early evening, and I finally dared to sit outside, as the sun has swung around to the northwestern side of my building; allotting me some much needed sweat-free relaxation time in the shade. The humidex reading climbed to 41 degrees today, and luckily I managed to get the settings to work right on my ancient, ailing air-conditioner. I had it on long enough to at least make it comfortable to operate my stove to finally cook a meal in here after five days. As nice of an option it is to have and use, I only run it intermittently: because I notice now how badly any radical and damp artificial cooling makes my semi-arthritic knees ache, plus the thought of catching a summertime cold by exposing myself to such drastic temperature fluctuations doesn't appeal to me either. The lesser evil seems to be indulging in a lot of cool drinks. An icy cold half and half blend of kombucha tea and water with a generous squeeze of lemon is both quenching and invigorating; or at least not so dulling to the senses as beer is at this temperature. My poor little black-haired dog is performing her usual summertime ritual in the futile exercise of instinctively trying to find 'shade' by staggering and waddling around, hiding under any furniture she can fit under, discovering with restless discontent that there is no satisfying spot she tests out in which to take refuge from the sticky heat. I expected a thunderstorm to roll around soon after such a day, but neither the forecasts nor the view of the sky is promising anything of it for either now or later tonight.

It's a lazy summer day, occurring on a day when I'd rather not be lazy: the simplest of chores seem to take five times the effort and energy to do. I had a mind/body conflict happening all day. I've reached that point of fitness now where sitting still seems like too much of an abnormal thing, and yet it's hard to cope through such a hot day,where expending energy needlessly is an unwise thing to do if one wants to keep enough stamina and strength for training throughout the rest of the week.

I have a couple more running goals to add to my list. Firstly, to reach 3000 kms of recorded mileage before the end of July (coming close to doing that). Secondly, to lower my average pace time down from 7' 00"/km, to 6' 55"/km by the end of August. With the hotter weeks ahead and the tougher measuring adjustment created by the enhanced accuracy of my new metering tools, the latter goal is definitely the greater challenge.

I borrowed a book today from the SPL called The Practicing Mind. It seems interesting, maybe something to help me keep motivated in the learning of the new things I'm checking out now; to stay enthralled with the process. Even now at this age, I'm still searching for at least one unique thing that I really excel at doing, and really using it for my prosperity. Exploring some more new interests is one thing that I hope could help bring that about. At the very least, if the findings from current studies are at all credible, the effort will make me less likely at risk for acquiring dementia or Alzheimer's disease in my senior years.

Obscureness

"One inch ahead and the world is pitch darkness" 

- Japanese Proverb

It's been cold, gloomy, and rainy all weekend so far. I've confined physical activity to the indoor track; dismayed that the progress I thought I was making was a bit of a deception. I used the indoor track to re-calibrate my tracking sensor. I thought since I switched shoes, my gait may have a variation which could effect the true reading. It turns out that that was the case, and my pace was being monitored quicker than actuality, by about twenty meters per kilometer. I thought that was so, and probably the reason why I've been instinctively pushing myself ahead a little bit beyond the recommended marathon training presets in Nike +. With the correction, the runs now seem endless and grueling, as time has been in general with the coming of this wet and windy weather. Today's run seemed brutal, and I was forced to gear down. My heart was racing way too hard, like it belonged to a wild bronco. I hope I'm not getting sick: I have been feeling feverish. Perhaps the physical drain is just a manifestation or reflection of the bit of mental stress I've been feeling lately.

I confess that I've been feeling less than centred; demoralized is a more accurate word. I've worked hard to try to elevate my mood and energy for the past few months, and now I'm beset with news that seemed to demolish anything in me that's been positive and progressive. I'm trying my hardest to not be reactive to the issue outwardly, but the brooding of it still is a strain to me emotionally. I've been catching myself doing the useless thing of worrying, wondering about the future and it's innumerable variables, or creating some fantasies of dramatic possible consequences. I'll deal with it as I do with everything else: one day at a time. It won't serve me well to explain everything about it here as it's happening. I think it would just make things more complicated than they need to be. It's one of those wait and see how things pass sort of deals.

As the proverb suggests, the future is always something in obscurity. I just hope I have the wherewithal to cope with whatever change comes ahead, and that it won't make those who are along with me for this ride suffer as well. What is more intimidating than the situation itself is the overwhelming paths of action I'm left to choose from in an attempt to correct or better things, and feeling paralyzed in trying to choose the right one. That's the real disadvantage in having an over-analytical brain like mine.

I was hoping that this brief mention of it would clear my head a bit better. At with least putting it into comparison with some other things in my mind that were a lot worse to deal with in my life, I think I'll clear this hurdle one way or other successfully. It just demands my patience, diligence, focus, and foresight for opportunity.

Discipline and Habit Building

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become your character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”

 - Buddha

My weekend was used to give my final respects to my grandmother. On Saturday, I was given the honour of placing her ashes in her grave, alongside the plot of my deceased grandfather. Not the way one wants to reunite with one’s family, but it was good to see everyone again. I toured around territory that I haven’t seen in ages, through some parts I’ve not been to since I was in my mid-twenties.

Sunday was very energy draining, but in good ways for the most part. I ran my best time for ten kilometres; breaking my old record from last September by a full minute. I wish I had a better gap of time between traveling back home and starting work in the afternoon.

I’m supposed to use this day to rest from marathon training, and it’s hard not to be seduced into running on a day like this: by the finest weather I’ve seen since this year began. It was so beautiful outside during the day, and so perfect to do so, but using discipline not to run and to rest and allow one’s legs and body to mend and build muscle tissue is just as important as using discipline to drive oneself ahead. I only risk injury while I have the remaining stiffness after yesterday’s feat. So this morning, I directed my energy instead to cleaning house, ledgering expenses, and doing so some mechanical tinkering with my bike and car before I went to work this afternoon. The bonus about this day was that at long last I got to move my “office” outside on my set-up deck space: working out there with my laptop. Sunshine and fresh oxygen seems to make caffeine work optimally, and so my brain felt like it ticked along harder. I stayed out there until sun’s glare reflecting off the screen got too intense.

My excursion this afternoon involved providing assistance for someone in making contact with a certain volunteer agency for a function in the near future. The formality was such that I had to fill out an application as well. It was the “skills and interests” field that really started my mind spinning. Perhaps it was some afterthoughts from Saturday’s service that made me wonder what I’m really doing with my life. It saddened me to think that there are so many things that I used to do, but now I feel so estranged from them all, and it’s like they’ve rusted away from disuse due to me being so engaged with my current job. Some of the tech stuff I knew has been obsolete for a long time. I’m dissatisfied with this feeling of being left in the dust, and found some kind of renewed eagerness to re-apply the practical knowledge I still have, and to learn more new and modern skill applications. I dived into websites, and my collection of e-books and PDF files for such stuff once I arrived back home. I arrived at nothing conclusive. All the course of living is just a complicated series of habits. Some progressive; others counterproductive. The trick for change is to simplify things and to maintain focus. Lack of focus, direction and motivation are the real culprits for me in not adopting something better as a good habit. The only thing that I got curious about and found to experiment with was a site called Habit Forge. I just have to create the list of habits that I want to build to be prompted into changing through reminders sent to me by e-mail. I wonder how useful this would be since one of my bad habits is not checking my e-mail on a regular basis. It better be damned interesting to make me want to bother sticking with the process. The real trick is to find things in my life that could be changed in 21 days.

I end my day indulging in whipped cream on chopped frozen bananas, chatting with a friend on Skype, and listening to some trance music. I was trying to build some new playlists for running, but all this was doing for me was making me imagine blissful thoughts of all the women I’d like to see dancing to this stuff. At least that’s something motivating to keep me in the habit of fitness.

Five Questions, Five Answers: Awoken by Paper Dragons

1.       Q: This has been the fifth night in a row of poor sleep for you. Why?

A: I’ve had some really taxing days of facing a new form of psychological challenge that I really don’t feel at all well-equipped to deal with. Despite the fact that I’ve been congratulated on the “good work” I’ve done, it has been prompting me even harder to think about where to go to next in terms of career building and education. What has followed is that I’ve become stressed and stricken with insomnia as I’m building castles in the air, and finding dragons in every room. Generally, the dragons to slay are the issues of where to find the time to study, and funding. It falls within the course correction motive I mentioned in an entry some while ago. It’s time to stop giving lip service to the idea, and start acting on it.

2.       Q: What kind of armour and weapons do you feel you need to slay these dragons?

A: Coalescence, a means with which to pool all my ‘special powers’ into one driving force to spearhead myself into a new spot. Forging, aiming, and propelling the spear is the big challenge. Another part of my weakness that’s been getting me so down and slowing me up is that any talents that I do have are so diffuse and varied that they leave no lasting impact on anything. Burnout, having no extra money, or time in the day, and depriving myself of opportunities to improve on any of them is making me worse. It’s like I’m now forced to use a Swiss Army knife to build a super-computer from scratch. One other major flaw I recognize in myself is that I seem to have no filter for processing massive onslaughts of information; it all just remains in my head as useless trivia. I have to find some systemized form of ‘armour’ for dealing with that.  

3.       Q: How is the great purge project going?

A: It is about 67% complete. I think I made about ten bushels worth of rats’ nest filler, and pretty much burned out my paper shredder.  The last third of this project will involve finishing rummaging and sorting through the remaining stuff in my filing cabinet drawers, scanning essentials, hardcopy destruction, copying digital backups, and systemizing things for future upkeep. The next big deal after that will be sorting and archiving my photos, which could last until the end of this coming spring . . . if I remain so ambitious. 

4.       Q: You have a three day weekend, what is going to happen?

A: The routine things would be: jogging, strength training, coffee with my friend, tidying up the place, reading some novels, writing, and cooking/stocking the fridge. The non-routine things will be finding the ways and means of attacking the problems I just mentioned above. Spending Friday afternoon in the SPL (Saskatoon Public Library) will happen for certain; avoiding dragging home any trivial and irrelevant materials of transitional interest from there that will just clutter up my brain will be a challenge as always.

5.       Q: Will you need more time off?

A: I’m sure I will, but when I’ll need it is still as of yet an uncertainty. It depends on some news I hear after two weeks from now. I could explain more, but I don’t want to jinx things.

Things I Need To Know How To Do Better

Twelve things to improve on for the New Year. Generally making it such that there is one focused challenge per month:

1. Attracting More Wealth and Managing It
2. Being More Social and Finding New Friends with My Interests
3. Making Time To Be a Disciplined Lifelong Learner
4. Discovering My Passions
5. Getting the Most Out of My Relaxation Time (Learning to Sit Still, and Accept Serenity)
6. Improving My Health with Fitness and Preventative Actions
7. Attracting My Ideal Significant Other
8. Confronting Conflicts and Handling Problems Mindfully, Confidently, Tactfully, Practically, and Effectively
9. Communicating with Kindness, Assertiveness, and with Good Intent
10. Getting Out More
11. Adding More Fun In My Life, Taking a Real Interest in the Lives of the People I Am Genuinely Fond of
12. Being More Spontaneous . . . TAKING MORE RISKS!