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”)).

Winter-ruption

Some people have the habit of immersing themselves into their Sunday morning with their coffee, and leisurely reading the weekend paper. I’m noticing that since the year began that I seem to be immersing myself into my Sunday morning with my coffee in hand, and pretending as if I were writing for a newspaper.

There were unwelcome strange things going on throughout the week since last entry, mostly confined to my personal life for me to deal with beginning the moments I came home after work on more than one occasion, but thankfully these tricky things didn’t mushroom into anything more wild or intensely serious. They included: my building almost catching on fire, another threat of infestation, and my poor little pooch getting injured. Of all those, my dog’s health was/is my greatest concern. She is healing: slower than I want, of course, but at least she’s not deteriorating for the worse. I’m happy that the week ended better with new interesting experiences, and overall soothing transitions. It has been a good weekend to shake off some of the mid-winter blues, which included crawling out of my hermit hovel for a change, and being a little more social. I got myself a ticket for sporting event, which I deemed to be a kosher purchase despite some new project ambitions, which I’ll cover more about sometime in my next entry.

I checked out my first lacrosse game on Friday evening. The Sasktel Centre arena was packed. The Saskatchewan Rush played the Buffalo Bandits. Unfortunately, the Bandits earned their team name too well, first stealing away what was an initially impressive and massive lead by the Rush, coming hard and overtaking them to come to a tie, and then stealing the game away in overtime, 16-15. An epic comeback for them (uncelebrated here, of course), and an embarrassing downturn for us. It was only the Rush’s first loss of the season though - small potatoes. It was still worth the effort to go, and I’d check out at least one more game for the season. Again, I write this next part for the benefit of my non-Canadian audience. The game originated in this nation (actually long before we became a nation) centuries ago by the Iroquois tribal first nations out east. Anthropologically speaking, it was evidence that the development of such a game was an indication of less reliance on nomadic hunting and gathering, and the preference to adopt permanent settlement and the deployment of agriculture. Leisure time appears more with the fixation of working around seasons in one place, and acting out non-lethal ways to practice martial tactics through team sports also evolves*. However, despite it being our official national sport, it fell into obscurity in our cultural scene for a long while. It lost out somehow to hockey and to curling, in terms of popularity as a spectator team sport in these modern times, or at least there has never been a Lacrosse Night in Canada televised on CBC during our nation's formative sports media years. The more novel and esoteric team sport of broomball** (another rink sport invented here, because we have way too much fucking winter to deal with) even became a more popular community sport around here during my early years than Canada’s official national sport, lacrosse. Lacrosse still has been around, but it just hasn’t really been popular as a big-time league field sport until it had been recently re-hyped somehow, and has been making a grand resurgence, thankfully avoiding a sort of extinction from our identity.

I don’t know, or couldn’t guess, as to how or why lacrosse became so diminished in popularity, and a lesser meme of the field/arena/rink team sports played in this nation to begin with. Perhaps it lacked the display of brute strength of football, or the more extreme speed and sometimes pugilistic action that ice hockey has, or perhaps it wasn’t as cerebral, or loaded with enough focused and refined, single-pointed calculated target finesse that curling has in satisfying the other end of the spectrum of stimulation through spectatorship. Sadly, I believe that it wasn’t more strongly popularized throughout our history really because white guys originally from Britain or France didn’t come up with the idea first. It looks like something that Dr. Seuss may have invented. It sometimes gets tricky to follow the plays, as the ball isn’t out as much in the open as a hockey puck is, hidden in racket netting as players are trying to deek each other out, so it can be definitely harder to track. Maybe that's why it got harder to promote and sell through radio and then television, when these media forms were in their infancy: the technical issue of reporting and recording where this elusive ball was throughout a game. The extra dimensional axis along the field of play makes it as interesting, if not more so, than ice hockey. More hand-eye coordination is involved with it perhaps than hockey in that respect. Even if I were younger, I know that I’d have a real challenge playing it. I wish success not only for our team, but also to the league as a whole.

Another newly hyped outdoor game/sport for this winter-ruption season in the city that I’m checking out this weekend is Crokicurl. You can’t get much more Canadian in a game than this: taking a table game that originated in this country, something I’ve played a few times in some dingy, up-in-the-sticks barrooms (Crokinole); a game, as with darts, where one’s prowess is tested and tempered by making it even more challenging yet for one’s fine motor skills with heavy alcohol consumption, and then making an augmented version of it to play on a post-studded ice surface using curling stones for counters. What a concept! No doubt, some form of inebriation or intoxication had to be in progress as the heads came together to create this fusion of these two games. It’s so simple, and perfect! I also can’t really believe that we’ve been so stupid as to not come up with this idea a lot sooner for around these parts. Oh well, better late than never for this heroic flash of innovation. Sponsorship for this bar game come outdoor spectacle, especially from the local brewers and distilleries, i.e., those who could have some sway in allowing drinking in public, could really help it to take off in popularity during this most wretched of the yearly seasons. Hey, and why not just loosen up a bit more about drinking outside in public in the middle of bloody winter as well for special events like this? Especially considering that things are getting lax enough around here where weed is going to become legal by next summer. Hell, I bet the newly forming cannabis corporations here may also want a piece of this sponsorship action. It might be even more entertaining watching these “athletes” trying to play this while they are completely high***. It could potentially be the new stoner outdoor winter sport (not unlike snowboarding, which already holds such a distinction), that can get more involvement and appeal from the lesser-than athletic types. It will be interesting to see how this thing evolves as another one of our national wintertime leisure activities.

It's all hype folks: a sport doesn't become a sport nowadays without it. Pulling a new one out of obscurity and making it fly off the ground with popularity seems now to be impossible to do without commercial sponsorship. 

*- Non-lethal is not always the case. The Aztecs had fully adopted agriculture and civilization too, and consequently developed their own basketball-like team sport called ullamaliztli, a game that died out right along with them. Maybe it’s popularity didn’t take off so well because the losers of the game were offered as human sacrifices to their pantheon of gods. Hard to the develop teams if they are constantly being physically eliminated by getting their hearts torn out. Let's just say that their PR folks kind of didn't give this a serious think through for promotional purposes.

**- Broomball: an ice rink sport believed to have been invented right here in Saskatchewan (first official recording of it being played is in the community of Perdue). Played sort of like hockey, except with using an implement resembling a broom to whack a ball around (hence the name, like, duh!). Comparing it to hockey is like comparing (American/Canadian) football to rugby. There’s no special padding like hockey, and specially soled shoes are worn instead of skates. You need some sure footing as you run along the ice, but you may get the advantage of some added extra traction by occasionally trotting over someone's missing teeth. It can be even more pugilistic than hockey, as I’ve seen in some goonfest matches of it in the past. Maybe it's because there’s less a lot padding to punch around, and there is a decided advantage in being able to base and balance a striking posture more easily to scrap, drift, and coldcock a guy on ice while wearing shoes rather than skates. It's what makes one who is being a broomball goon even distinctively more of a lowdown dirty psycho bastard than as such in hockey in comparison. It would be great, if not miraculous, if this actually got recognized as a sport fit for the Winter Olympics, other than seen as the lowbrow hybrid spawn of hockey/rugby that it could be. 

***- I’m sure at this point of reading this composition of crazy ramblings, that some may think that I do marijuana myself. I honestly do not. My limited alcohol consumption (because of medical reasons) is enough of a vice as it is; I don’t need anything else beyond that. Personally, my life wouldn’t change when cannabis becomes legal here, except probably dealing with issues as a steward about the grey areas when it comes to interfering with work performance in others on the job. I would treat it as a medicine (one that I probably can’t take anyway due to contraindications with my other treatments), and nothing more than that. I am, however, pro-legalization; more so for the reasons that I believe a strengthened hemp-production economy and industry makes for an inroad toward more sustainable ways of environmental and ecological preservation, and will ultimately lead to less taxed and stressed healthcare, law-enforcement, and corrections systems.

Christmas 2017 Lists

The 5 things I’m grateful for:

·      The safe return of my brother and sister-in-law from the zone in Asia getting stricken with typhoons currently

·       Another birthday for my Dad

·       That the last Monday of the year is Christmas, making the year end at least with one less dreadful form of Monday. An added bonus is that New Year's Day is on Monday, and I'll start the year off with one less bad one.

·       Taking time to visit with an old friend from my past

·       Finding sleep, and shaking off a long, bad, stretch of insomnia, even though I’m still waking up at ridiculously early hours.

The 5 gifts I gave myself:

·      To the kid/history geek in me, a game console with two games: Wolfenstein II, The New Colossus, and Call of Duty, WWII. Deck the Halls with shooting Nazis, Fa La La La La  . . . La La La . . . Blam! I’m trying not to let this become some addiction. This was bought back during a Black Friday sale. I’m still a fumbling newbie. I promised myself to make more moments for fun this coming year, so I’m loosening up a little and granting myself this little indulgence. For the anthropologically curious side of me, I have Civilization VI lined up (whenever it becomes reasonably discounted) in PC format. If I indeed have a limit as to how smart I’ll really be, then I at least must find some way to apply my current intellect for some sort of interactive entertainment. I’ve had too many bitter lessons lately as to how short and fragile life really is. Too much reading is boring me (and probably making me boring). Television, as it is now, is doing nothing but rotting my mind, given all the horrid news to watch and the banality of the influx of “reality TV”. As much as I’d like to divert myself and be more engaged with getting into playing some good old-fashioned traditional board/analogue/parlour games (cards, backgammon, darts, billiards, Scrabble®, etc.) the reality is that I have no readily available company for them in my free time. This is the next best thing.

·      To the history/science geek in me, a discounted offer for a DNA test (Ancestry.com). Why? Because genetics are cool, that's why. If I’m not going to have some sort of spawn or clone of me being left on this earth after I’m gone, I’d like to at least know how far back, and from which regions my particular genome came from, and what it is comprised of whilst I’m alive. I reason and conclude that collecting my DNA and doing a simple test like this for the sake of uncovering my heritage is far less costly than perpetuating those genes by siring a child. Maybe I'll find out through the results that I wasn't fit enough to beget one to begin with. However, it might spark stupid ideas of how I can use these kits to replicate those significant other people who I totally want to have cloned (a possible next sequel of Bladerunner happening, or something).

·      To the travel geek in me, my passport application.

·      To the booze connoisseur geek in me, my traditional bottle of Scotch for year’s end.

·      The couple hours taken to reunite with someone from my past after long lapse amounting to decades, and seeing that she’s doing OK. That satisfied all the geeks in me.

The 5 Favourite foods of this Christmas (presently having and anticipating):

·         Butter tarts

·         Oysters

·         The Swedish meatballs and rice pudding I had on Christmas eve*

·         Rullepolse* (from the largely Icelandic community of Wynyard)

·         Stuffing and gravy

Concerns and condolences (thankfully, a shorter list):

·       As I come here to celebrate the birthday of my own Dad along with Christmas, I learned of the passing of the father of one of my Union siblings just before the holidays. This person has brought me nothing but fun and cheerfulness since the time we’ve been acquainted, and it’s not fair that someone like her gets to endure this now. Thinking of you HJ.

·       The passing of the wife of my sister-in-law’s brother, again, something that doesn’t make the season better for them. Thoughts and prayers for them.

·       My dog seems to be stricken with a new health problem, hopefully it can be rectified without too much stress to her or myself.

*-This stuff is traditionally fare served at a Scandinavian table around Christmas, and seems to be stuff we as a family are adopting and enjoying. Perhaps another reason for me to question our true heritage and to do the DNA test.

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.

The Swedish Project/Svenska Projekt: 50 Days/Dagar, 15 % Fluency/Flyt

Jag har varit lärande mig några svenska för sju veckor nu, och jag har använde mellan tjugo till trettio minuter per dag sedan starten av den ny år att lära det. Det var en speciell utmaning: eftersom jag ville se om jag kunde lära mig och använda de elementära delarna av ett ny språk inom två månader.

That's enough of that. Hunting for the Alt characters to make these accented letters is becoming bothersome. The translation of what I typed beforehand is this . . .

I have been learning some Swedish for seven weeks now, using 20 to 30 minutes each day* since the start of the new year to learn it. It was a special challenge: because I wanted to see if I could learn and use the elemental parts of a new language within two months.

This is my progress with the first of my self-imposed two month language programs. I have six of them lined up for the year. I tried a 100 day program before, but I was learning slightly skimmed modules of 10 languages at a time, to get a feel for both what I was most proficient at, and what was most challenging for me to understand in terms of grammar and other difficulties. There's not much that can be retained that way. So this time, I'll be diving into one language at a time, for two months at a time, with more intensified focus. Some of you are asking, "Why Swedish exactly?"

I present for you the following reasons:

1. It's one of the closer sibling languages to English -  The real test of this project, before I even selected a language to learn, was to see how competently I could master learning a new language with minimal effort. It's been a while since I made an effort to really learn something new. I'm taking the road to ground zero of language acquisition, since it has been a long time that I practiced any language. I don't want to start with, or have anything to do with, the messiness of extensive verbal conjugations. To sort of gain a sense of my maximum range of my potential, I thought I would put some effort into learning a language that's more similar to English than not. That is, something new (for me), yet loaded with enough common cognates to make it look a bit familiar in certain ways. According to one index I found, Swedish ranks as one of the top nine languages that are easiest for English speakers to acquire. It might not look like it when you compare the two languages from the sample I gave from what I learned to process so far, but English and Swedish are more similar to each other than French is to English, or Spanish compared to English, or even German to English. Even for those who are linguistically challenged people, who are completely talentless at using foreign languages, they might possibly read a Swedish phrase like, "Dessa män här är hungrig." and may be able to deduce correctly that it does indeed mean "These men here are hungry."  Many common words exist between English and Swedish, and the other Nordic/Germanic languages like Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, due to the historical fact that the Vikings invaded the British Isles, and along with the raping and pillaging they did to that land, they impregnated the forming English language itself with a lot of common loan words. English words like they, them, their, egg, shirt, skull, stick, whole, wake, break, sky, skirt, law, and even the word earth, for example, are actually Scandinavian in origin. There are also lots of common words between Swedish and German. For the record, I've found Swedish a lot easier to learn than German. So, Swedish is also going to be helpful in bridging some vocabulary with that other language I already know a bit about, and would like to learn more of in the future.
2. It's multinational - There are only about 10 million speakers of Swedish in the world, but if I wanted to learn one of the languages that's closer to English, I would want to be able to use it in more than just one country when traveling. Norwegian is spoken by a smaller population, plus it's restricted to Norway, and as I understand it, there are so many dialectic deviations and differences even between communities that there are multiple dictionaries in that country for translating one form of Norwegian to another. That sounds too cumbersome and impractical to me. Danish is restricted to Denmark (and some of Greenland: a miserable looking island I wouldn't bother to ever visit anyway). More about Danish later. Icelandic is more archaic, more complex, and limited further still to just having a few hundred thousand native speakers of that language. Then there is also Frisian, which is said to be the living language that's most similar to English (although I can't see it), but it is also almost moving rapidly towards extinction. However though, Swedish is not only used in Sweden; it is also used in Finland (another place I'd visit) by a few hundred thousand more people. Therefore, it's perhaps the more practical of the Scandinavian languages to learn of the languages most closely related to English that I narrowed the choice down to.
3. The several easy things about it - Speaking as an Anglophone, along with the many common words and similar cognates, there are greatly simplified things in the Swedish language that are wonderful. The verbs are great; only one conjugation per tense form across the personal pronouns, quite unlike something as dreadful as a Latin language like Spanish, which has eight different conjugations to memorize for each person form [I, you (singular, informal), you (singular, formal), he/she/it, we, you (plural informal), you (plural, formal), they]. The syntax and grammar are more similar to English than German is. When using numbers, the Swedish ones accord to the way the English ones are used; not like the crazy way the French say quatre-vingt or "four-twenty" to say eighty, or the weird way German places the ones before the tens, as in einundzwanzig or fierundsechszig [one and twenty (21), and four and sixty (64), respectively]. It was one of the factors that eliminated Danish out of the picture also (for now), as I found out that Danish has number counting oddities like those of the other languages I mentioned. There is also in Swedish, different rules for grammatical gender to deal with. In fact, in modern Swedish, there is a movement to introduce a gender pronoun that denotes a person with no specifically known gender. There is the word man (meaning either "man" or more generally "one"), but for some Swedes that word seems to be too biased for the masculine side, and not entirely gender neutral. There is han (he), hon (she), and now hen simply to mean any one man or woman, or to refer to someone whose specific gender isn't known, or for the transgendered. I couldn't say how eagerly that word is being adopted there, perhaps it's even controversial. It would be useful in those awkward "Pat" situations where you can't figure out what the hell someone is supposed to be gender-wise. It's strange, yet true, and perhaps somewhat progressive in some way.
4. More Orthographic Spelling/Pronunciation- Like the blissful thing about German, Spanish, and Ukrainian (once you learn the Cyrillic alphabet), there are relatively fewer anomalies when comparing how the language is spelled and how the words are pronounced in Swedish than in English. Both of Canada's two official languages, English and French, are terrible ones to learn because of too many instances of the lack of concordance between pronunciation and spelling. I also eliminated learning Danish when singling out a language for this project as well because of this same issue in their language: just like English and French, it's polluted with so/too many words with silent letters. There are fewer stupidities in spelling/pronunciation in Swedish than in English, which has crazy things like the eight different pronunciations of words with "-ough" in it. So, I ended up with Swedish as my choice Nordic language to learn.
5. The accent is interesting and beautiful - Forget about the garble you hear from the Swedish Chef on the Muppet Show, and the "bork bork bork" stuff. The actual rhythm and cadence of the language is quite pleasing to me, plus it's that rhythm that is very helpful in audibly differentiating each of the words, quite unlike for me listening to the horrendous rapid fire staccato output of languages like Spanish or Tagalog, where the sentence sounds like one long word. Plus, Swedish sounds far less guttural (to me) than the other Germanic/Nordic languages, like Dutch**. Perhaps because Swedes seem like a more relatively introverted cultural group, the lack of guttural sounds comes from sounding more low-key, and not being so bold, loud, and boisterous. It sounds like a more intellectual language to me in that respect.  
6. The relatively very few hard things about it - The only trouble I have with its pronunciation is the one unique sound that Swedish has, denoted with the diphthong "sj" which sounds nothing like an s, or a j, or anything else in English, or any other language I heard. The other thing, as I complained about earlier, is the multitude of accented vowels, which unlike the French ones, actually do function 100% of the time, thus they become important to include in correct spelling. Swedish seems to have more vowel sounds than English and necessitates being more of a stickler to correctly pronounce them more so than in English. It makes typing Swedish a pain in the ass with my English keyboard, leaving me to use a hunt and peck method of typing using the Alt key characters. The other thing that throws me off, that's even trickier than the use of other languages' gender specific indefinite articles, is the more arbitrary use of "en" and "ett" (the so-called common gender, and neuter respectively), of which both are more gender non-specific (e.g. both "man", "woman", "boy", and "girl" use the same common "en" gender indefinite article). There is no distinct pattern or system in how to use them that I can recognize, although fluids (water, coffee, tea, beer, oil) seem to favour the neuter "ett" indefinite article. The other tricky thing is changing the noun itself to represent a definite case, in singular and plural form, (e.g. dog = hund, a dog = en hund, dogs = hundar, the dog = hunden, the dogs = hundarna). Along with using some prepositions correctly, those are about the only issues I find really grammatically challenging about the Swedish language.
7. It will serve as a useful cognate database for learning the other tricky Nordic languages - Maybe, if I do travel around someday, I'll get to use Swedish as a bridge language for learning German and those other tricky Nordic languages*** that are supposedly mutually intelligible to each other.   
8. Because I genuinely want to travel to Sweden one day - Therefore, it isn't impractical to learn it. I always feel a certain shame for North Americans in general (less so for Canadians, some of whom are bilingual; more so for Americans) who have so little interest in trying to be bilingual, or multilingual, compared to the Europeans. I hate the lack of consideration by such people failing to learn at least some basic greetings, manners, and polite request phrases, coupled along with this absurd and arrogant expectation by some to automatically be served and accommodated in English when traveling to someone else's nation. I find such behaviour burgeoning on being disrespectful and disgraceful. If you have a capacity to learn and express yourself in at least a few words of a foreign language, by all means, do it!
9. Possible Sanctuary - Sadly, it's also coming to a point where I'm also seriously thinking of places to exile myself to if the political situation on this continent really goes to shit. If Americans are trying to get into Canada because of the Trump situation, where would a Canadian go to if a Trump-like political catastrophe happens here? Certainly not to the US; not for me! The worst case scenario I can think of is Trump somehow getting a second term in the US presidency, and then one of the worst possible candidates for conservative party, up here in Canada, becoming the Prime Minister in 2019 (i.e. Kelly Leitch, or Kevin O'Leary). I sure as hell wouldn't want to live in a nation that is becoming more like how America currently is now politically, and if the remaining English speaking nations of the British Commonwealth or Ireland wouldn't have me, or become just as deplorably divided politically and socially as America is now, I would opt to live in a place like Sweden, a country that tops a lot of the social wellness indices and scales, along with the other Nordic nations***.

So far, throughout my study of the language, my list of favourite/interesting Swedish words I discovered through my linguistic tour of it is as thus:

1. Lagom - the Goldielocks word which concisely means "not too much; not too little, but just enough. It is a unique word to Swedish. I already mentioned it in a past post.
2. Orkar - A verb (present tense here) that means roughly "to have enough energy to do something". Example: Jag orkar inte jobba i dag. Jag känns sjuk! Translation: I don't have the energy to work today. I feel sick! I myself personally would be applying this verb in the negative to mostly housecleaning, anticipating encounters with drama queens, doing my taxes, and, of course, hangovers.****
3. Samboskap - With so many Swedes opting not to live as married couples, this word summarizes a common-law household living arrangement.
4. Fika - a nice little word that's used as both a noun and a verb for "to break for coffee and snacks"
5. Dog - It simply means "died" in Swedish. It leaves me to wonder if the Swedes listening to the song Hound Dog are perplexed as to why Elvis is singing so merrily about his dog dying.
6. På - Sort of pronounced like "paw". It's like the Swiss Army knife of prepositions, mostly meaning "on", but I notice in some cases that it can be substituted for the English equivalents of "in", "at", "with", and  "by". When I get confused while running through the online test quizzes about which preposition to use, I can whip out på and have about a 63% chance of having it be correct or acceptable.
7. Klockan - it literally means "the clock", but it's also a conveniently simple way to express hourly time. Just as we say "It's six o'clock.", to say the same thing in Swedish you'd say "Det är klockan sex." Incidentally, sex is both the word for six and sex in Swedish, and it leads me to wonder if Swedes habitually have sex at six o'clock. Man kan alltid hoppas att hitta det för sig själv (One can always hope to find that out for oneself).
8. Sjuk - If you didn't figure it out already from the example in point 2, it means "sick". However, with the ghastly, God-awful sounding, unique phoneme this language has for the "sj-" pairing, combined with the "Ook" sound from the "-uk", this word becomes a perfect piece of disgusting onomatopoeia for sounding like you are genuinely becoming sick: like you're trying to stifle yourself from puking on your shoes.
9. Varandra - A much more lovely word than "sjuk", that's for sure. It's a nice, concise, almost poetic, word that means "each other". It flows so smoothly and nicely in a sentence like Vi älskar varandra (We love each other). Awwwwww . . .
10. Jävla Jävel! - I was going to reserve spot number ten to include the foulest, rankest piece of profanity I could dig up from this language, but honestly I think I failed. When I sound out these two words together, they sound too lyrical and musical in my English thinking mind to be even considered nasty and offensive words. If someone yelled this at me, I wouldn't even flinch at all. However, read or said together, they roughly mean "fucking son of a bitch!"  

Exercising the mental task of acquiring another language is one of the most beneficial, enriching, practical, and not to mention cheaper things one can do to improve the brain's physiological health, and to prevent it from aging too rapidly and harshly. The injury I had last year, plus the trauma my lungs and heart took the time before that has made me wary that my work life has to probably veer away from physical labour to doing more cerebral stuff, so it's even more important to keep my wiring in check. It's to retest my mentally ability to adopt and adapt to things. It's also one of those great and cool Jason Bourne type skills to add to one's repertoire. Most other foreign languages intrigue me, and I am very envious of people who are genuinely talented polyglots. It's not just learning another language to me, it's gaining another world perspective and seeing what is enhanced or diminished with the addition and boundaries of another foreign vocabulary. Combining this, with more math skills and logic exercises gives me more of a clearer avenue to test out machine language programming and coding later on. I'll see and hope that my interest in this doesn't wane. As for now, I've applied it to playing against native Swedish speakers in Trivia Crack (. . . and beating some of them to at 6-0, hehehehe).

*-Finding 20 to 30 minutes a day to commit to a project like this is easy once you consciously start breaking the negative habits of watching junk TV and avoiding depressing news, avoiding toxic people, and dropping using other apps that aren't productive.

**- Dutch has some similarities to English, at least that I can see in written form, but it sure isn't pleasing to listen to with my ears. No offense intended to the Dutch; I'm sure there are some practicalities and nice and sensible inherent qualities about the language, but for me, it's like listening to someone talk while they are struggling to swallow a mouthful of live cockroaches. Afrikaans, being closely related to both Dutch and English, sounds just about as weird, and is further impractical for me to learn because South Africa isn't a place where I'd care to visit. Please note that I'm not touting English as a superior language. I get that it has lots of flaws and deficits.

***- I have Danish friends, and I don't want to demean their mother tongue, but I'm simply working at this project empirically. I simply find that between listening to and reading samples of both languages, Swedish is the one that is more comprehensible to me. It's so strange how a phrase translated into both languages, which in my eye have close to identical spellings in some cases, can yet sound so radically unlike each other. Sorry Danes; it's not you, it's me. I've even committed to trying to follow episodes of Dicte on Netflix, to study spoken Danish a bit, and I find your language far less inferable or intelligible than Swedish is (otherwise, it is a good show once you slap in the subtitles). It sounds more mumbled or slurred than Swedish does to my Anglo-Canadian brain/ears. Both are probably loaded equally with their own unique idiosyncrasies that I have yet to learn more about. I'm certainly not perfect linguistically, and I'd probably butcher the pronunciation badly of either of them, no matter which one of the two I dare myself to speak. Regarding point 9, I'd eagerly move to Denmark too were it not for the fact that the language is much more challenging.

****- I thought I should add an example reply (past participle): Med än, du hade orkat att dricka en hela flask av Absolut vodka i kväll går! Så, hur kan jag vara ledsen för dig? Komma, låt oss gå fika. Translation: But yet, you had managed to have the energy to drink a whole bottle of Absolut vodka last night! How can I feel sorry for you? Come on, let's go grab some coffee.

The 12 Month Random Resolution Game

There has been a long lapse between entries, mostly because there has been so little that has been good or positive, or of any importance to comment on. Four months of this year that I wished to make better have been stolen from me, and I've simply been trying to make moves toward getting back to some sort of normalcy: if there ever was such a thing for me. People who know me know that I've just been trying to work and move towards a full recovery, which has been progressive, but going so slowly in my mind that it has been a real test of my patience. Physiotherapy can be refreshing and relieving on one day, and then torturous on another, as micro-traumas are being worked out of the joints and muscle tissues in my arm. There is some noticeable nerve damage, but thankfully it's only slight. Given what I had going on during the initial days after the accident, things could have easily turned into something much worse. On top of that, I've been depressed and disappointed about the elections down south, and the state of the media coverage used to be corruptive for such an affair already laden with controversy and conspiracy. It was a shameful display all around. The latter third of this year can be summarized in three words - it sucked balls. There's nothing at all about it that I really want to recollect or recount.

Year's End is just 20 days away, and I'm already making plans for trying to have a better go in 2017 even before I attempt any Christmas shopping. I invented a sort game for myself: something that has meaningful projects and acquisition targets set up for me to try and gain for each month of the coming new year. Perhaps it's a flaky idea: one that evolved out of the combined urges of defeating some boredom, wanting to play cards (but no company for it), to play with odds and sort gamble a bit (without staking any of my Christmas shopping funds), and inventing a game of chance where I'll somehow always win*. I found a way to deck my halls with a deck of cards. I am sharing it for those who are also wanting to use it to make a more hopeful and prosperous coming new year.

Materials:

• pen and paper (enough to create up to about 144 slips, plus to write a category list)
• scissors (for cutting such slips)
• 12 sealable envelopes
• a deck of cards, OR alternatively, if you aren't a card player . . .
• a pair of dice, or a 12 sided gaming die (if you are a Dungeons and Dragons geek)

Method:

1. Make a list of 12 categories of 12 things or deeds that you what to have or do during the new year. They can be of anything you want: charitable or selfish, serious intellectual pursuits or something fun and foolish, skill building or talent oriented, material possessions or intangibles, whatever, so long as each category involves things that genuinely go towards your sense of well-being, happiness and life satisfaction. Have them be all affordable within a month's budget, and overall achievable within a month's time, and such that they can be available to have or do at any time of the year. Here's about 12 things as examples that may or may not interest you. (Some of) these categories below aren't necessarily reflective of mine. It's deeply personal thing, so make up your own 12 categories of 12 things to list in each. Strive for 12 things to list in each category, but if you can't, you can repeat some items to make up twelve if practical, or stick to some number under twelve. Some examples here are: 
• 12 career skills you want to build on
• 12 tools/implements you want for your workshop/space
• 12 items you want as home decorum, or things you want to change in your home
• 12 thing-a-ma-bobs you want to collect
• 12 subjects you want to study intensively
• 12 people/places you want to visit
• 12 books you want to read/memorize 
• 12 songs you want to learn to play on your[whatever musical instrument you have]
• 12 charities you want to donate time/money to 
• 12 exotic ingredients you want to sample/experiment with
• 12 restaurants you've never eaten at yet, but wanted to try
• 12 novel liquor ingredients you want in your cocktail bar**
2. Take one category, and write each of the 12 items you listed from that category on a seperate slip of paper. You'll have 12 slips of paper if you've listed 12 items in the category. Put them face down on the table and mix them up.
3. Lay out all the 12 envelopes on a flat surface with the open side up.
4. If using playing cards, take a full red suit out of the deck to use, discarding the king. Shuffle the 12 red cards and place one card, face up, on each envelope. Then, take a full black suit out of the deck, discarding the king. Shuffle the black cards and put them face down on the table. Draw a card from the top of the black card stack. Take one of the face down slips of paper, not looking at it, and tuck it into the envelope with the red card with the matching face value as the black card (i.e., if you draw a black 3, put one slip of paper in the envelope with the red 3 on it.). Turn the red card over, or remove it to indicate that this envelope has been loaded. Repeat the same steps for each draw of the black cards in the rest of the stack. Once all the slips of the category have been put in each of their respective envelopes, re-shuffle each stack of the red cards and the black cards, shuffle and lay out the envelopes again, open , side up, and repeat for the 12 item slips of the next category. Repeat until all remaining category list slips are packed in the envelopes. Alternately, if you prefer handling dice . . .
5. If using a 12 sided die***, arrange the envelopes such that you can visually mark them as 1 to 12 (like the face of a clock, for example). Roll the die and place the slip into the corresponding envelope that matches the number on the die. Turn the envelope over once it gets its one slip. Remember, no peeking at the slips! Reroll the die if the number is repeated, and continue rolling, and filling the corresponding envelopes with their single slip of paper until the slips are gone. Shuffle and redistribute the envelopes again, turning the envelopes open-side up again, and repeat for the slips of the next 12 items in the next category. Repeat this process until all categories are done.
6. Once all the envelopes are filled, seal them and shuffle them. Select one and write "January" on it, select the next and write "February" on it, and so on until each envelope is labelled with one of the months of the year from, January to December****, inclusive.
7. Keep these envelopes in a safe and secure place. On the first day of each month, open the envelope labelled for that corresponding month. Set an alert on your smartphone calendar if you need to be reminded.
8. Start, do, or get the stuff listed on the 12 slips of paper that you find in there. You have the entire month to plan and/or try to commit to whatever is listed on those 12 slips of paper throughout it all when you start on day one, be it starting page one of that book, or collecting materials for a month long project. It would be a good idea to journal your progress, or monitor your interest while you do it. If you failing at it, or if your interest is waning, you get to ask yourself "Why?"

I rationalize things with this betterment/resolution "game" this way. The road to hell is usually paved with good intentions. Resolutions are usually broken because people pile up all their ambitions at the start of the year, which only serves to overwhelm them. Some then drop them within 12 hours of New Year's Day. It's not a good way to practice kaizen - that is small and continuous progressive steps toward improvement. The lesson, if any, that I'm drawing from doing physiotherapy, is that small and continuous steps eventually build up to some more powerful things. Committing to major resolutions, more likely than not, involves throwing one's life out of balance which one is rarely prepared for. I've had enough of life out of balance happening since August - thank you very much; yet I still seek structured improvement for my welfare. The novelty and excitement withers away quickly too when things are over-planned, and there is no chance for surprise and spontaneity.  I hope this strategy is one way to improve upon that. Twelve things per month, be they leisurely or ambitious, amounts to about three things a week with which to reward or better oneself. That's as many times per week as I do PT, and I'm getting results for the better. That sounds enriching and progressive enough for me.

This is also a very deliberate way to exploit stuff that I already have, it's just the element of pacing and time that really is the thing that needs to be adjusted. For example, lots of people have books on their shelves that they haven't touched yet, so list them and use them. The same goes with other stuff that they may be hoarding. This then becomes a practical measure to prevent thoughtless and impulsive spending. I hope calling this a game will perchance draw some kind of fun into the whole process, despite the fact that it does involve some discipline. The cards/dice aspect of it brings in a bit of a mysterious element of divination of sorts. I just like the math and probability calculation of it. It is making a personal lottery where you can (choose to) win every time. All in all, after dealing with the spells of bad luck I've had, my true ambition is just to be somehow happier. We'll see by the end of next December.

Since I have nothing else to reflect on, or share for the rest of this year, I'll only bid everyone happy holidays. I hope that I'll have better things to share for 2017.

*- Because I was playing a video game, and became too frustrated at being stuck at one level with monster robots constantly blowing my head off. A not so productive way to use my recovery time.

**- Unless you are already in a 12 step program with AA, disregard this idea.

***- If using a pair of six sided dice, the last slip of paper left of the 12 in the category automatically goes into the envelope designated as #1.

****- If you would rather devote your time, money, and energy for preparing for Christmas (or other primary holiday month), just simply play this game with 11 envelopes, 132 paper slips, and pull out the red and black queens (if using cards), disqualify the 12 roll if using a die/dice. The parameters are thus adjustable.

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.  

Winter Solstice Eve 2015 (Chance Rolls)

I have been doing my usual annual round of avoidance of the insanity of shopping the weekend before Christmas routine, and tried to keep this a low-key weekend at home.  It is the Eve of Winter Solstice*, and it seemed like a fine enough reason as any to relax by the fireplace and reflect. Finding it in me to make entries for the past couple months since the election hasn’t been there. There has only been drama-laden news and negativity charging at me from all sides since all the tragic happenings in Paris and San Bernardino, the ongoing debate about the refugee crisis, plus the fear-mongering stupidity abound stemming from creeps on social media to the campaigning in the States. Adding my input or other comments about these salient things one way or another doesn’t make for a course of relief from it all, nor changes the hateful idiocy of others who are making such crises worse.

Someone else who is just as unwilling as I am to get out of

bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.

I’ve been reflecting on the other 354 days of this year that have passed. I suppose 2015 for me will be known as “The Year of the Great Weakening”. I’ve come to face to face with working through a lot of denial about how much of a toll last year’s suffering really took on me, and what kind of impact it has left, and how it still affects me today. I didn’t think it would have amounted to affecting me so chronically. I’m sick of realizing how much it all has physically aged me in such a (relatively) short while: a notable and pronounced loss of resilience. I re-entered work this year with not only lots of upheavals regarding my personal health, but also wading hip deep into problems and challenges affecting not only me, but my co-workers and people I serve, and with my role in the Union. Holiday plans were ruined by fires throughout the summer, more injuries through late summer and fall, and then the other tragedies pouring through the news from late October onward. It hasn’t been what I would call a fun year to say the least.

Sure, there were lots of hard lessons to learn, but I didn’t need the pain, stress, and anguish; I’d benefit more from them if some element of fun or a lighter side was present. That didn’t happen. Life became too serious for my liking; nothing I’d want write about. It has been bad enough that I decided to suspend my more analytical and logical modality of problem solving thinking recently. It has been helpful in guiding out of problems, or at least taming down sparks to prevent bonfires, but there has been nothing that I would call feeling better with a sense of satisfaction or interest in doing so. So, just on a whim while Christmas shopping for others, I thought I would seek out a small inexpensive something that I would identify with as a “lucky charm”** for a more acceptably benign form of exercising superstitious thinking for myself: by consulting some form of oracle. I realized that the perfect sort of rosary objects or gris-gris for me is a set of dice. My threads of “logic” for making them significant totem objects are as follows:

• I like simple and symmetrical geometric shapes; dice have that going for them. It’s a reminder to seek out the most fundamental and simplest solution to a problem first and to take a balanced approach to tackling it.
• Dice are linked to gaming (my favourite dice games are Backgammon and Yahtzee, which I’m becoming addicted to playing online); a reminder to try to find some way to approach a difficult situation by making it entertaining enough to keep it at least interesting to follow through with dealing with it.
• Often my biggest problem is analyzing too much, and slapping down too many options and approaches in my own private sessions of brainstorming. Paralysis by analysis happens too frequently. Dice would be practical tools to help me speed up decision making and to settle on single options.
• Dice are mathematical instruments, which appeals to me when I want to entertain that geeky side of myself. I mentally retreat sometimes into thinking about the world weighed and measured in numbers to help myself be less bored or depressed.

Most importantly, a six sided die is a mnemonic representation of all the dimensions and elements of what depression or boredom is, or their flipside. Boredom = (energy) – (interest) – (attitude) – (knowledge) – (imagination) – (focus). By default of existing, one has a physical mass that works and interacts within the dimension of time. That is Energy (remember E=mc²). Unless you are in a freaking coma, or sick to a point close to dying, the powers that be gifted your conscious self with some physical/mental abilities to use for the waking hours of your day, and the choice of how, or whether or not, to use them for your and/or others’ benefit. How present or absent the other five factors are that play on your energy will dictate how bored you will or will not become. It’s even hard talk about, or write out what boredom is and to somehow make it a subject of serious interest. That is until you see what happens when you add plus signs to all of those variables following energy. Then what you have is its complete opposite: creativity. If you have little or none of those things in that set, you simply have to get real and honestly ask yourself why those variables are depleted, or outright absent, for each or every one of them; that keep you shackled to a mindset of boredom, and impedes your approach to something more creative.

If I were to create an official national holiday marking winter solstice in this land, the celebrations would include a lot of dice based games, candles/lights/fire to brighten things up, and of course drinking. There would be no obligation to exchange gifts; just share good company. Sounds like a good start anyway. Who knows, if Trudeau the Younger ends up legalizing marijuana, the trend might naturally flow to there being a reversion to some more hippie neopagan-esque celebrations that would mirror things like this anyway.

An addendum paragraph to this entry the day after. The question about what my plan for 2016 was brought up to me by a friend over lunch hour. I was lacking in speculation and answers. It may involve more of what rolls of the dice have to tell me. If they break horrid spells of indecision and, if I gain a course of action and commitment from using them, it is all fair game.

*- I always wondered why we haven’t made more generic holidays and celebrations here in this nation for both solstice dates of the year, like they do at least for the Summer Solstice in Scandinavia. We are multicultural society in Canada, and we all live under the same sun. It wouldn't then matter who you were racially, ethnically, culturally, spiritually (or not). It would be somewhat uniting I’d think. I’ll always welcome another statutory holiday.

**- If you want to get judgemental and think that this is all very silly, let me remind you readers that people use such symbols, charms, and trinkets all the time, and it is more common than you wish to acknowledge. It usually comes and is possessed in the form of jewelry. Think about the multibillion dollar industry happening alone just for the sake of procuring an outrageously expensive shiny rock affixed to a ring just to show off and symbolize engagement or marriage. Others get more and extreme and tap ink into their skin permanently to express their totem symbols in tattoo form on impulsive whims (which they may regret later). Surely, my choice is no weirder or more extreme than any of those things.