5Q5A: Summer Vacation 2019

I’ve been fortunate to have booked time off for holidays for this part of summer that coincide with those of my girlfriend. We spent this past Fathers’ Day Sunday at my parents’ place; having a good visit with them. On the way back home, we talked about this and that in terms of how we were going to use the rest of the days during the time off: for things and events both together as a couple, and for each others’ personal time separately. She asked me if I did any blogging lately, and it struck me that I didn’t write or post anything for the longest while. I have no answer as to why such a lapse happened, except for the fact that sharing the delightful company with such a lovely, intelligent, and talented person occupies more of my thoughts and time now; I’ve been finding more solace in that now than I do in any writing. To keep myself focused, I resume the rest of this entry in 5Q5A format.


Q1. What whammies am I having to deal with this time around for this summer holiday?


A1. It never fails. I always seem to get some curve ball pitched at me that serves to be some obstacle to contend with, impeding me from having a completely blissful summer holiday; mostly in the form of unwelcome and unexpected expenses needed to rectify something requiring immediate attention. It has been becoming a repeated and inevitable cycle annually: a regular expectation that some freakish issue or series of unfortunate events will manifest themselves to make this happen. Last year, it was emergency surgery for my dog. This year, the (sometimes excruciating) state of my own knees and hips demanded that I replace some orthotics immediately (it greatly also affects how active I can be). Add to that, there is a malfunctioning dishwasher (drainage issues) to fix now. Instead of freely frolicking around elsewhere, I’m now relegated to take a crash course in how to be an appliance technician, or someone who may need to call a certified one if I can’t fix the problem myself. No functioning dishwasher means no way to properly sanitize bottles and equipment for beermaking: the other project I wanted to do this week. Added to that are repercussions of work-related issues that I choose not to explain here. It’s most definitely an unsatisfactory use of part of my holiday time. However, I do keep myself grounded by reminding myself that whatever problems I have during this time, they are pretty darn minimal compared to most those of the people I work for.


Q2. What cerebral things are becoming entertaining this time around (things in the mind that one can do that don’t need a specific or physical time and place)?


A2. Lately, I’ve been becoming intrigued with learning more of the nuances of poker: Texas Hold’em poker specifically. Aside from playing the actual game itself, it’s also a playful challenge in mastering being able to mentally wrangle things like the hole card rankings, pot odds, and putting other charts, tables, and other statistics into some mnemonic order. The technical side of playing the game (playing a tighter game) has improved a lot for me; the psychological (mastering effective bluffing) part of the game will always be a work in progress. I’m giving it a break for now; not allowing it to become an unhealthy, addictive, obsession.


Q3. If expense and travel time weren’t factors, what would have the plans otherwise been?

A3. Probably going on a road trip to Waterton Lakes National Park – getting away from this drought zone and enjoying the Rocky Mountain air may do us both some good.


Q4. If instead then resorting to cheap(er) thrills, what are they?


A4. Checking out and exploring the yet unvisited and unknown local shops in and out of town that cater to our eclectic and esoteric interests; and fashioning the odd little feast for us to indulge in throughout the week is also in the works. Using my moments of solitude, like this one, in my mornings and afternoons just be content to sit outside and chill out, playing my favourite music, with either coffee/beer/strong badass cocktails, with my laptop or notebooks, plotting my own little schemes of world domination for new world order (at least for my own little singular point of this world anyway).


Q5. What is the happiness being enjoyed in the here and now?
  

A5. At this moment, making a pleasant discovery about my dishwasher and being able to announce and exclaim, “Yay! The <bleep>ing thing drained completely!!!”, to my girlfriend in a text message. It’s like I successfully passed some sort of adulting test through appliance repair. Now I’m relieved and freer to enjoy the rest of this week in peace.


Addendum: I found and started reading a book later in the day about happiness; which itself seems like a fitting thing to do on a holiday. The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha was my chosen non-fiction read of the week. One of the better lessons in it is that you should never make yourself too busy for the dear people who matter to you.

The Very Non-Christmasy Christmas of 2018

The past weekend delighted me very much, in that I got to see my entire immediate family. However, this year I did not book off Christmas from work, so technically, unless I somehow get the Julian Christmas off, I have this season without an official Christmas Day holiday. When Christmas falls on Tuesday or Wednesday, I’m not so thrilled about its arrival either, and it’s the case where that is happening for this year. It doesn’t feel like it should be Christmas day. It just makes for a split-up workweek with really no recovery time for sobering up and digesting properly after a gluttonous binge, so I thought that I should just work it, whereas I would prefer some continuity of having a good long go of it where it phases into a weekend. The years with Christmas on a Thursday, flowing into a Boxing Day on Friday, with the weekend to recover are the best of the cycle. Second best is Saturday, Sunday, Christmas Day Monday, then Boxing Day Tuesday.

For today, I’m not getting bitter, nor lonely, nor depressed really, but I am also actively doing stuff during the day to avoid going into a darker place. I’m making concerted efforts to avoid all forms of news media. I don’t need to know what disasters occurred, nor hear what new stupid thing the Chinese government is pulling off to harass and persecute our diplomats and citizens in that country out of spiteful retaliation.  I have no cares as to what Justin Trudeau* is going to announce in his address to the nation (also his birthday today), nor do I need to hear the holiday greeting from her majesty the Queen, and I sure as hell am not wasting any time listening to whatever is sprouting from the actions, or spouting from the big mouth of the orange-tinted crook downstairs*, or the status, impact, and repercussions of his shutting down of the U.S. government. But, it’s a day of doing one’s best of wishing others well, and to keep it a peaceful occasion. So, I shan’t dwell, or digress anymore, on political stuff.

I don’t want to watch any TV either: with the over-abundance of Christmas programming to distract and rob one of any genuine spiritual or soulful moments of the day. So, I choose to lose myself in writing again, and I began entertaining myself with my own curiosity of factual demographics, statistics, and other trivia, about the rest of this world that isn’t really partaking in the holiday today either, with some surprises about who does observe it. I like such moments to gain perspective.

Countries that don’t officially have Christmas (December 25^th or Jan 7^th) as a public or statutory holiday*:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Comoros, Iran, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Laos, Libya, Maldives, Mauritania, Mongolia, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Sahrawi Arab Republic, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Uzbekistan, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, and Yemen.

Largest Country in the World (by population) with Christmas as a public holiday:

India – There are 28 million Christians in India, according to their 2011 census. Surprisingly, Christianity is listed as the third most practiced religion there (after Hinduism and Islam). That is even larger, by about 4 million people, than the number of cultural/religious Christians living here in Canada.

Number of Christians in the largest country (by population) that doesn’t have Christmas as a national holiday:

China, despite being a communist nation that endorses atheism, has 67 million people who identify as being Christian. That's 4.75% of their population. That’s like a full quarter of the Christian population of the United States, and more than double of that of Canada’s. I can't help but to think that this would be a huge number of dissidents to process for them if the government there decided to get even more repressive to religious groups.

Largest Primarily Muslim country (by population) with Christmas as a public holiday:

Indonesia – The largest Muslim country in the world also has Christmas as a public holiday. Given that this region was once a colonial possession of the Netherlands, Christmas became an institution there, and it surprisingly remained as a public holiday. Ten percent of Indonesia is Christian, so of that nation’s population, that still makes for 20 million people possibly celebrating Christmas there.

Country with Christmas as a national holiday; with also the greatest percentage of irreligious people:

Sweden – 73% of people there describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, spiritual-but-not-religious, anti-theist, and all other flavours of non-religious philosophical moral-ethical thinking amidst all that. A close second is Czechia (Czech Republic) at 72%.

Country with the most Public Holidays (but not one of them being Christmas):

Cambodia (28 days) – If you’d like to surround yourself with citizens with lots of time-off, while at the same time watching them living in abject poverty, maybe Cambodia is the vacation spot for you.

I’ll be more forthright next year with booking time off, now that I have a greater sphere to visit with. So, as the final hours of Gregorian Christmas Day fade, and as first hour of Boxing Day approaches, I wish everyone the best from me to you for the season, whether you opt to celebrate or not, even if you are stuck someplace where you are forbidden*** to do so. Take care, everyone.  

*- Spoken with neither any liking nor any hating for our current Prime Minister, as I see a balance of both virtues and deficits in him. Trump, however, is a different matter. I pity the Americans living under his bigot-empowering, demented, hateful, wrathful rule.

**- Surprisingly less than I thought, i.e. I expected to see more African countries counted to be in this list of nations. Christmas is celebrated from here to Timbuktu, literally: e.g. despite the nation of Mali being a majorly Muslim country and only 1% Christian, Christmas still a national holiday for them there.

***- Like in the Sultanate of Brunei, where any public display of celebrating Christmas can get you up to five years in jail.  

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”)).

A Full 360

I’ve been up since 4:00 AM . . .  again, like five hours before sunrise. Doing upgrades and fixes to my laptop was is the only activity I could think of doing that seemed half-assed productive, and yet not loud enough to disturb any of my neighbours at this hour. While waiting for the scans and optimizations to finish, I’m filling the gap of the period used to all this with some writing to clear my head as well. My phases of insomnia have been getting progressively worse now for the past few weeks. There’s still another month yet to pass after the recent solstice until maybe things normalize themselves with the wonky sleep issues as the extra darkness recedes after then. Being exposed to fumes, dust, and debris containing noxious chemical compounds in both fresh and old deteriorating forms of adhesives (NOT WILLINGLY!) from the past three days probably hasn’t been doing me any good physically or mentally either. I’ve came home from work feeling a bit sickly and even more de-energized, and I have been falling into a cycle of collapsing on my chesterfield napping, and ruining the phases and timing of more appropriate sleep hygiene. The closest geographical place right now that suits my phases of wakefulness of normal diurnal activity where I won’t be disturbed by jet lag is probably Iceland. Also, for some reason as of late, unknown to even me, I’ve been gazing up skyward to note the positions of planets and constellations as well when I walk the dog in the early morning and mid-evening. Perhaps, it’s something that’s becoming instinctual:  to tune into and immerse myself deeper into nature’s flow of rhythms and cycles, in the middle of a winter season which never seems to budge from either coldness or lack of daylight around here. In any case, a more intensified consciousness of timelines indeed occupies my mind around this part of the year. I tend to think and process time in shapes along with numbers: another weird way my brain works.

The first five days of this year involve my usual messing about with planning and scheduling for the whole calendar year ahead, which inadvertently leads to me playing around with the trivialities of time equations*. January 6^th isn’t just where Christmas eve falls on the Julian/Orthodox Christian calendar, or Epiphany on the Gregorian calendar; it is also Day 1 of the remaining 360 days left of this year, signifying in a sense the first degree of a full circle. I’d like to suggest that making New Year’s resolutions just prior to, or after, New Year’s Day is really an exercise in futility. One should never use just a couple spontaneous (usually guilt-spurred) moments to make a full commitment that’s supposed to take you the rest of the year or beyond to achieve. I’d say avoid that impulsivity, and plan for something within the first five days (not just five minutes, or something blurted out in five seconds) of the New Year, doing such things as:

·         Setting a timeline for steps

·         Writing the goals down (I won’t be doing that here though, it’s too personal)***

·         Prioritizing the things that are important

·         Reviewing what resources and materials you have, and what you still need

·         Looking through an actual calendar to establish dates for milestones for setting reasonable goals

·         Setting a budget for this stuff

Today is the first degree of a small step on a journey of coming to full circle. Check your progress throughout. Be a real geek about it. Check the first 15 degrees of this special circle (on date January 20^th), check on Pi (π) day, a day devoted to circles (March 14, 2018), check on the first full quadrant (April 5^th), check on your birthday after this point**, check the midway point from here to year’s end (July 4^th), and three quarters of the way through (Oct 2^nd). Take time to cull out whatever isn’t working and replace it with something that does along the way.

But, what do I know . . . typing stuff like this on an insomnia-addled and chemical-fogged brain doesn’t necessarily qualify as sage advice for myself and others for movements toward betterment for the year ahead, but it’s better than no real plan of movement at all, which 95% of the time is wasted efforts by people who use impulsive and rash resolution making on New Year’s Eve or Day.

So, Happy Epiphany, and Merry Christmas to the orthodox celebrants. Do realize that three hundred and sixty days is a quicker cycle than one usually expects, try to do the best with it.

Addendum: My friend introduced me to an app that is very fitting for this endeavor: HabitBull. I'll give it an exploration and test through.

*-Like the statistical frequency or rate of goal scoring needed for how one team to tie or surpass another in some IIHF Word Junior hockey games, for example.

**- January 6^th is special to me because it is exactly a full 9 months from here until my birthday (an entire human gestation period). Thus, I would guess being conceived on Epiphany (derived from the Greek, meaning “manifestation”) is as significant as an extra holy day for me, as being born on Christmas day is for my Dad.

***- The one thing that I will note here that was a success from last year’s go around was learning some elements of other languages, with better fluency than I thought I’d have.

La Loche

I tried to have a good as a weekend as I could, given the horrible events in this province that happened recently. It’s not an incident I want to make a special effort to remember; yet it is one that simply can’t be ignored . . .

This province is a place that’s normally so obscure to most of the rest this globe: except to those who were part of the diaspora of leaving here for grander opportunities, or who still have family settled and rooted here. Lately, there has been a terrible light that has been shone upon us. For those of us who live in this province, which few people on this globe can pronounce, or would care to otherwise bother to find on a map, it’s a spotlight shining most unfavourably, on a remote place with little of anything redeeming to offset its reputation of being a rough spot to live in this province. We are (were) an ordinarily peaceful region in comparison to the rest of the world. Now however, we are no longer exempt from the list of places where violent shooting rampages can possibly occur. Now, a signal of further collapse towards the dark side of humanity in the northern communities and the first nations’ reserve lands is beckoning. This recent result: four dead, several others seriously injured. It’s a harsh glimpse into a community where society is already close-knit yet fragile, where families are already shattered with higher than average rates of poverty, unemployment, addictions, and suicides. Its isolation and lack of basic amenities and services don’t help either, nor does the clash of cultures, or having a provincial government who is largely dismissive of having mental healthcare, or even healthcare in general, accessible to its citizens; doing what it is doing to dissolve more of what little there is available already. It occurred at a time of year when the trough of wintertime depression is the deepest for most. There simply was less chance and resources for adequate intervention and prevention for things like what happened in La Loche recently. Most people are shocked, saddened, and angered about what happened there. As for me, after considering all the factors at play, it was no longer a question of if things like this could happen there, but a question of when and how severely the outcome would be.

Whether this all stemmed from long term recurring generational community strife and social problems, or simply is a punctuation of this script as a volatile short term mental derangement of one individual is debatable. There are not enough things yet released in the news suggesting how this storm of rampant untamed violence ultimately erupted. All we know for now is that it was a male young offender who did this, meaning under the Young Offenders Act of Canadian law, his name won’t be released to the public. The exact factors, precursors, and triggers of the events in this town will remain in question, as will the more detailed psychiatric profile of the perpetrator. There was some suggestion of bullying going on. As much as I can empathize with that young man given his age for struggling to deal with such an issue, I certainly don’t condone his chosen course of action to deal with it.

Mass shootings were once thought be limited mostly to the domain of that crazy nation downstairs*, with their psychotic fascination and promotion of gun culture, the ridiculous interpretations of their constitution’s second amendment, and the more relaxed regulations for firearm ownership and types of weapons one can own. Now, this insidious trend is appearing in other normally peaceful and civilized nations and societies, albeit (thankfully) in a less frequent degree. Norway, Sweden, Finland have suffered such tragedies in the past decade. Paris France, of course, is still a salient memory. Australia had the Port Arthur incident in the 90’s. Quebec (like École Polytechnique) and Alberta (Taber) are the other provinces in this nation to have had gunmen charging into schools and opening fire.

I can only imagine the sorrow and mood in such a community that has been unwillingly thrust by these circumstances into the view and focus of the whole nation, and to the rest of the world with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s announcement of the tragedy in such an international forum like Davos, Switzerland. It’s moment of infamy that won’t ever be erased from the hearts and memories of those who were families and neighbours to the slain and wounded victims. Two teachers were lost, in a place with already precious few positive engaging role models who could have benefited that community. I hope the survivors get the support they need somehow; no simple bandage of financial support is going to make this nightmare go away for them, or reform an already shattered community.

*- To date, the first 25 days of this year of 2016, at this moment, the United States alone has had 786 recorded deaths by guns. That already amounts to more than half of all the gun deaths that occur in Canada for an entire year (an average of roughly 1300 for the past 25 years, according to Statistics Canada). Statistically, you are more likely to be shot to death in the United States than you are to die in a car accident in Canada.

Holiday Planning (Plan B)

Well, any plans to go up North for a brief sabbatical have gone up in smoke, quite literally. The last entry I made about the fire risk situation was purely speculative. The reality of it happened the day after I posted it. I hate that I'm not only right in seeing the chain of cause and effect of disaster scenarios a little too vividly, but the severity of the situation is hitting too close to home, even though the real action is happening 400 kilometres away. The next day, I woke up that morning to find this whole city enshrouded with smoke that drifted in from forest fires around Lac La Ronge and area. Weather maps are showing the smoke extending and drifting right down to the US border. The air quality is bad here, and undoubtedly gets worse as one heads northward. This is the worst I’ve ever seen it around here for smoke accumulation from northern wildfires in all the years I've lived in the province. It’s so thick that I can’t even see the river valley from my place anymore; which is only a block and a half away. The weird, mad scientist, side of me was wondering and curious to know how long it would take for a slab of pork belly to cure and turn into a side of bacon if I hung one on my balcony. I better just keep writing before I start following up on an impulse to experiment with such crazy ideas.

The rain that was supposed to come today to help settle this didn’t come. I suppose I just have to comfort and placate myself with thoughts that align with “it could be worse”. As in: it could be worse . . . I could have reserved and made a financial commitment for a campsite up there earlier this year, and not be able to use it, or went up there earlier before this happened only to be forced back with an immediate evacuation, or it could be worse . . . I could be like the poor devils who are stranded up there losing their homes or property. As much as I’m complaining and agonizing about making a decision as whether or not to get away from here for my leisure, I’m at least not in a place where I have no choice but to evacuate, and forced to leave my home and all my possessions behind, with the sense of dread and uncertainty as to whether or not I’ll ever see them again. I would suppose that’s naturally what’s happening to the people in any one of the communities located near where any one of the hundreds of wildfires have been burning now in this province during this season.

So, my holiday plans have changed again; it’s not like any were set in stone anyway. Every place within all the corners of the “land of the living skies” is now fully immersed in a gagging, sun-blocking, dull, grey, haze. So, now it is pointless to go anywhere for a driving daytrip if this doesn’t clear up soon, because it is now all encompassing and there is just no way to escape it. After all this enduring and working through it, I’ve just nicely started regaining the full use of my lungs after struggling for six and a half months. I’m not going to now start sabotaging myself or foolishly sacrificing all that time of my progress by spending extra time outside camping and downscaling my shelter by tenting around and inhaling unbreathable air, alone at a place far away from medical aid. The risk versus the reward scenario kind of sours onto the side of the negative. It looks like it might be a staycation after all*. The onus is on me to try to somehow find those moments, make them count, and make things fun and interesting.

I almost forgot that I keep other lists and notes of ideas for times like these, and dug through stuff I wrote out on paper and digitally. My bit of recreational therapy theory is this: to get the most out of the time off, one has to directly substitute one’s typical work shift hours during the course of a day with only leisure activity, no exceptions! Since I work evenings, that relegates me to maximize my leisure time between 3:00 PM and 11:00 PM. I suppose it’s an opportunity to have some sort of social life like everyone else. That alone is both enough of a novelty and culture shock for me nowadays. Like being air dropped into the middle of some country where you don't speak the language, naked and without any money, and being expected to make something of yourself. 

It might be a good time too to try out something that I’ve never really adjusted well to: being pampered. Living alone, training with a soldier’s discipline and a monk’s patience with running, enduring and dealing with afflictions and injuries alone, constantly working to achieve self-sufficiency and independence, and being the sole provider for oneself with a sort of hunter-gatherer/survivalist mentality: it kind of sways and steers one far and clear away from that opposite end of the spectrum where anything involving “getting pampered” is found**. I’m sure it would be like a weird and alien experience for me.  I don’t know yet what that would even specifically entail the context of a vacation or holiday (which I could speak candidly about).

After reviewing, here’s what I’m thinking to do for myself thus far:

·         Continue with following my running and cross training program in the mornings

·         Do absolutely nothing that looks like work or chores after 3:00 PM

·         Book a massage, just for the sake of preventive measures (as opposed to opting to get one after getting physically buggered up)

·         Make a theme with an objective, for example, trying out the craft beers in all the brewpubs in this town

·         Take some kind of daytrip once the smoke clears, and hightail it out of town like I was on a jailbreak

·         Make no further effort to blog or post about the experiences along the way. Be less concerned about using precious time for writing, recording, and composing, and try just living for a change. This stuff will be just for me.

*- It does seem a little clearer now, and I smell less smoke; I wonder though if it’s because it is actually dissipating, or if my olfactory nerves have just become so saturated than I can’t detect it anymore.

**- There is about a 7% chance that Ella might fetch me one of my socks for me while I’m dressing if I ask her to. That’s about as good as pampering gets for me in my place.

Pacing, But Doing It Very Slowly

It has been an especially harrowing and significant week for me. I got to learn the hard way that I'm not Superman. Some of my readers and familiars may already know about what happened to me. This entry is for those who didn't, or were left behind in the dust as to the state of my condition throughout the chaos. I'm trying not to bog you down with too many details, but writing this out thoroughly just once spares me from having to explain it numerous times verbally on a person to person level and repeating the same conversations, which I have been finding very physically exhausting to do right now. It's the long-winded explanation that I literally don't have the wind for.

For the last couple of weeks or so, I was beginning to notice a gradual and progressive impairment to my breathing, and was getting interrupted sleep; sometimes drenched with intense night sweats. I started to notice things, like for instance, that while I was cycling to work, it felt like I was dragging an anchor behind me: using three times as much energy, yet going two times slower. I dismissed it as perhaps a cold coming on, yet I wasn't coughing or sneezing; just panting and wheezing. My energy seemed to decline dramatically and fizzle out earlier and earlier each day throughout the course of a week. When this past Monday came around, my breathing seemed even more stifled, my heart was pounding uncomfortably and uncontrollably, and the strange pressure I was feeling in my chest seemed to intensify exponentially after just a short stint of walking the dog, and a climb up the flight of stairs to my home.
 
It was a strange and unique form of pressure in my chest that registered in my mind, but not anything that I would have immediately identified or compared with in my own personal mental inventory of sensations of what I already knew of as "pain". Because it was more like simple discomfort and less like "pain" to me, I dissuaded myself from seeing a doctor earlier on, thinking that I would probably just be turned away, and then have "paranoid hypochondriac" stamped into my medical file.* After all, I reasoned, I just had a physical six weeks earlier and was given a reasonably clean bill of health. This time though, the discomfort prevailed a little too long and was really strong in magnitude at that time. There was even more breathing impairment along with the beginning of shakiness and feeling like my legs were going to buckle out from under me. It was a definite sign that things were taking a turn for the worse. I was prompted then to follow up on my friend's advice to see my family doctor to at least get a referral to see an allergist, or a respiration specialist to see if I acquired something like asthma. I just learned recently through a first aid class about what the signs for a heart attack were, and I didn't sense any of what I thought were the supposed internal symptoms of one. What I experienced accorded more with what I learned about as the symptoms associated with asthma. I drove nine kilometres to my doctor's clinic. It was a foolish thing to do in retrospect, because I could have passed out at any moment. I staggered from the parking lot, through their front door, to the reception. I was breathing as fully and deeply as I could, feeling my lungs fill to full capacity, and yet I felt like I was totally suffocating. I saw my doctor, who then rigged me up to an electrocardiogram to read my heart rhythms. Then, before I knew it, an ambulance was being dispatched for me to take me to a hospital emergency ward.

After several hours of waiting for a CT scan, I used much of that time watching my heartrate readout on the monitor being unable to sink below 110 beats per minute, despite the fact that I was lying down still and immobile. Any movement I made caused it to spike even higher yet. It lowered once they hooked up a blood-thinner IV and oxygen line on me. I finally received my CT scan results, and the good news was that they concluded that I did not actually have a heart attack (although I came close to it). The bad news however was that they discovered that I had pulmonary embolisms in, not just one, but both of my lungs. They can be as deadly as a heart attack if they aren't caught in time and treated. I suppose I managed to get some sense to get to the doctor just in the nick of time. I am lucky that my heart has had a bit of seasoning and conditioning through my running days, or else I really think that if it was just even a little bit weaker and unable to handle all this extra stress and punishment, I'm sure that I would have died that day.

It's fairly straight forward to understand what pulmonary embolisms are and what they can do. I'm not wasting time and energy to explain any further details about it. Use a search engine if you are curious and want to know about such things; you'll get a better explanation. What I don't understand yet however is the how and why of my particular case. I'm still struggling to process all of this onslaught of information now nearly a week after all this happened. The medical team working with me is just as mystified as I am as to how a person with my particular health and history could even ever have acquired such a condition in the first place. It would be something in which the people who I serve would be statistically far more likely to get rather than myself. I'm still slotted for a series of additional tests on an outpatient basis to figure out what's going on, and thus I have nothing more to say about my progress: except that for now I've been deemed well enough to be home, and recovery is going too slow far my liking. I'm pacing around indoors now, albeit very slowly, as my only exercise to promote better circulation in my limbs and body to prevent blood from pooling and creating more clots, even though the doctors currently seem to think that this wasn't a factor for me.

The most unnerving things for me about all of this are as follows:

• Even though I'm set on taking the right path in treatment for them and trying to not let them grow more, the clots still have a potential to shift, dislodge, and migrate as they began to shrink and loosen up. They then may potentially move to block vessels that feed blood in the lung tissue itself, causing pulmonary infarction and subsequent necrosis (death of tissues) in the lung, or else cause blockage and damage to other more vital bodily organs. It comes to my realization that it's like I've had a time bomb wired into my chest, and the only means I have to defuse it are anticoagulant medications, extra vigilance, and having a constantly charged cell phone nearby for a 911 call. I have no idea yet as to how long that it will take to clear this up, if it is clearing that is. It angers and disappoints me somewhat that I have been proactive in trying to stay healthy, and this still ends up being the result of it.
• The extreme limitations put on the amount of physical activity I can do within a day. My life has been turned upside down. Simply taking a small bag of garbage out thoroughly exhausted me yesterday. I caught myself on a couple more times being too light-headed after doing what seemed to be very little, and had to sit down immediately before I got so dizzy and could have passed out. It's frustrating to have all this time off, yet so little energy and ability to make what I would call good use of it. I'm still overwhelmed with uncertainty as to what this will mean for me in terms of future travel, energy, and time needed to deal with this problem alone. I'm also bothered by what this will mean for me in terms of possible future loss of work and income.
• A new routine of having to be dependent on medication. It's not just some simple pills either, but stuff that needs constant dosage correction and regular sessions of blood work to do it, and using other junk that I have to give myself through daily injections.
• What bothers me most now is the loss of some of my independence. Perhaps one reason that I'm not a good candidate for marriage, co-habiting with someone, or having a lasting romantic relationship is because I don't seem to respond or react well to being pampered, coddled, or asking and getting help for stuff that I should damn well know how to do myself. I really don't have the right words to describe the reasons, it's complicated. I'm just not used to asking for favours from anyone. Now, I'm put in a spot where I'm left to impose upon and trouble people to do chores with heavy lifting/exertion, or other errands for me. Worse yet is getting people involved in fixing up my stupid mistakes I have made and should be responsible for, like fetching a pair of my glasses for me that I had forgotten back at the hospital. I'm finding this role reversal of going from a helper to helpee a very difficult one to adjust to.

As much as this week really sucked, I'm at least thankful that I got out of this alive, I managed to avoid a full out progression toward a heart attack, and I didn't need to be treated with something as invasive as a surgery (at least not yet for now). For those of whom were involved with my particular incident throughout this week, I'm thankful to you who were there and helped as you did when you could. I'm sorry if I have been too grouchy and stricken with worry to express this gratitude appropriately. I'm sorry also to the concerned others who were worried about me, but never got any accurate information about what was going on. I declined some visitors at times, not because I didn't want to see them, but because with this condition and three days and nights in a noisy emergency ward unable to get sleep, I just didn't have any energy left to give them good company. It's a pain in the ass to park at RUH anyway. I was sparing some of you the trouble. I tried keeping quiet about all this at first, but all that seems to do is ignite a whole other bunch of panic and strange rumours. I hope you are satisfied hearing it directly from the source. I also wish to extend my thanks on behalf of Ella to those persons who have showed up and have been so kind as to volunteer to take her out for walks for me.

Today, my mission and ambition is to start walking the dog again for one time outside today. I have been given instructions by my medical team to limit my range within my surrounding block. It's sort of a place where I'm picking up from last Monday to work towards some normalcy. We'll see how life goes on from there.

*- A doctor, in my mind, is someone I see once or twice every year for a physical for taking preventative measures, or else for any other time when I feel real "pain" . . . that's it. As nice a guy as he is to see and chat with, I don't make it a habit to run to my clinic every time I feel "discomfort", or else I'd be there once or twice every bloody week.

Closing another Year of Age

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

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

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

Sabbatical Ending/National Holidays/Luggage Flags

Canada Day came and passed rather uneventfully. I worked that day, and I didn't partake in any of the local festivities. I arrived home in time in the evening to watch the dog dash under the furniture with fright once the fireworks stared blasting from close by Diefenbacher Park. The park bustled with a lot more noise and people than usual for the occasion due to the fact that the holiday fell midweek this year, limiting time for most folks to head up to cabin country or camp at the northern lakes. Travel out of town to places south and east of here was made difficult and limited due to the flooding disaster there, so more people were compelled to stay in town and gathered around here. It's Friday today, and I've noticed people packing up their picnic coolers and camping gear to escape the city for the weekend. Since Canada Day is also the official start of the next six months of the year, it's also a day where some reflection and reckoning is done, and a mark to use as a reset point whenever I feel I veered too far away from some ambitions and other things that I had resolved to do back in January.

Fitness climbs back into place as the number one priority. I've been noting that I'm probably at least seven kilograms* heavier than I was at this same time in the season last year. I was also noticing from glancing in the mirror how sickly I'm looking. The rainy month of June has left my legs and torso, which are usually fully tanned by late April or early May, looking too freakishly white, like I was rolling around in flour. The lack of vitamin D for so long would also explain why it has been so hard to bounce back from my lack of resilience lately. So, I decided to end my sabbatical from running. It has been five weeks since I last ran. I probably would have ended it sooner had it not been for the fact that I gibbled up my knee a while ago. Maybe it's still a bit premature to get back into it considering that, but I'm desperate. I picked the wrong day, and time of the day, to hit the trails too. It reached up to a 36 degree humidex reading by the time I got back in from doing it today. I somehow survived the almost 6 km trot. Today's sweaty spell in the heat and humidity maybe did a lot to finally reset my metabolism closer to its normal summertime mode. Today was the first time I actually used the air conditioner in my suite for the year. I'm now indulging in the long lost simple pleasures of listening to music, and of course, writing. I don't have any energy left for much else.
I've also been dwelling on the East Coast weather for the whole continent, as I have a couple of cousins who live in the path of Hurricane Arthur in their respective regions. Between that, and the recent flooding southeast of here, any complaint I have about the humidity earlier today here is trivial in comparison. After following a thread from the one living in North Carolina, who is experiencing the American Fourth of July holiday, her comments about it made me pause for thought about how different each of the cultures are about celebrating nationhood. It's a bit helpful for giving me a base for an explanation to my foreign reader(s) who put forth the question to me as to what I thought were the differences between Americans and Canadians. Since our respective national holidays are so close together, I thought I would entertain the question. I still don't know if I could comment fairly, but I'll try. 

Of all my wishes to travel, the curiosity to go to the states and see what was involved in a Fourth of July celebration has never really been there. I'm very uncomfortable being around and amid rallies where brazen displays of patriotism are everywhere, like the way the Americans seem to prefer to do it. It seems like there is more noise and spectacle involved to try to sell the idea to people that America is such a great place to live in. It's just not done the same way here in Canada, or it is at least not done here to the same degree. Here, you are permitted to just quiet down and be more reflective and appreciative of what you have and who you are for living in this nation. More people here tend to opt for being around someplace peaceful, like a park or around nature for that; not marching around in a noisy parade down Main Street. It's just a general opinion of mine, without an intent to stereotype. There are probably a lot of Americans who do prefer a quieter and more low-key holiday.

Just because I'm not appreciative of the American manner of celebrating nationhood doesn't automatically mean that I'm completely spiteful toward Americans, but it brings to light the whole issue regarding national pride that makes me mindful of the kinds of Americans that I really do dislike, and how they offend me as a Canadian. One example is in regards to "flag abuse". It's when those "proud Americans" who travel abroad**, the kind of really overly-patriotic ones who aggressively and obnoxiously tout how great and wonderful their country is while belittling the other cultures they are visiting, the ones who even go out of their way to do their own bit of Canada-bashing, but yet have no qualms about usurping the Canadian flag to sew and tag on their luggage in hopes to avoid getting swindled, assaulted, insulted, and ignored for service. Goddamned hypocrites! One minute, such people are ready to verbally piss on our heads, and then the next they are willing to use our flag like some sort a get-out-of-jail-free card in Monopoly when shit hits the fan. Sadly, such people usually do inevitably attract a lot of negative attention. When they use our flag, and yet continue to behave boorishly, arrogantly, and ignorantly to other people of other nations, that is a problem for me. It's like a less-criminal, but just as disrespectful, form of identity theft; it's because they actively misrepresent what Canada really is, all because of our flag being on some stupid and rude American's backpack. I'll admit that we as Canadians aren't all 100% polite and worldly people, but we certainly don't need to be giving the rest of the world the impression that we are actively adopting more of these sorts as our own, as if we have some sort of commitment or obligation to fill our national "asshole per capita" quota for the tourism industry. If I ever get on with pursuing any future dreams of traveling abroad, I really hope that I'll arrive at places serving North American tourists that have enough savvy for distinguishing the difference between the real Canadian tourists and the posers. I really wish and hope that I won't need to play the game of having to wear my nation's flag on my gear just to be treated respectfully. It shouldn't have to come down to all of that when you make an effort to behave with civility to begin with.

*- I'm noticing that when I gain weight I tend to use metric, and then switch to pounds when I start shedding it. Probably because the number for the gain is then smaller than that of the pounds lost. One of the more creative ways I choose to delude myself.
** - Again, not to generalize. Not all Americans are "bad" tourists. I feel sorry for the "good" ones who are automatically cast into this stereotype and preyed upon.

Post Funeral Reckonings

I just returned home from a funeral. I don't believe in publishing the name of any deceased person within my circle of acquaintanceship, nor the details of their passing away, without formal permission from their family to do so first, so I've withheld those details. But what I will remember and say of this person is that it was someone who believed in living honestly, dutifully and working toward virtues, and seeing that this person was so welcoming and respectful to me and my family, and always treated me kindly when I visited her, it made me feel assured that she perhaps saw some of the same qualities in me as well. I am also grateful that it was someone who was a supportive and dear friend to my own Mom; who sadly was a witness to the critical incident that eventually claimed this person's life. Looking aside from the death itself, I am comforted a bit in knowing that she was spared from suffering for very long, and mostly good things seem to be going on in the lives of her surviving children and grandchildren, and that they seem to be prospering well enough. I wish better for all of them in the times ahead.

My mind has been thrown on a bit of an emotional roller coaster as I sit here and reflect about not only the passing of this person, and with all who I spoke to and saw during course of the day, the most salient things being:

• memories that were tagged to some of the guests there who were indirectly a link to the past bad memories from my old home town I grew up in. The case today was that I met the sibling*  of someone else who put a lot of effort into attacking my self-esteem and psychologically bullying me through any opportunity they had throughout my school years. Through our discussion, I gained a clearer picture today as to why that person had used so much energy in directing this abuse at me: it stemmed from their own selfishness and insecurity; nothing really to do with any flaw I had (something I wished I had the sense to learn and accept a few decades ago). I should feel more secure in myself after knowing this, but I only feel despair and regret. After all these years, I'm still angry to depth of my core about how I allowed the antics of a pathologically hyper-competitive, sanctimonious, spiteful, asshole who thrived on schadenfreude, to scar my self-confidence/esteem so deeply, which has affected more than one aspect of my life for so long. I'm ashamed to admit this, but it is true.
• in the scope of things, I'm realizing just how I've been limiting myself and treating myself badly. Worse than even being enslaved by some sort of addiction, is failing to reach one's real potential, and failing to see that one deserves better and to live with dignity, and to not waste any more time suffering fools.
• it's overwhelming and incredibly hard to meet people after not seeing them for five years or more, and being pressed to try to share a summary of my own life details, or to get a concise precis of theirs. Part of my failure for this is not being available socially anymore, and seeing how much time has past in between is a hard way to be struck back into reality.
• the general overall reminder about how life is too short, and how it can vanish away in a blink of an eye; and I'm forced to think of the ways that I'm squandering away my own talents, resources, and energies . . . maybe now more than ever I must stop and wonder, and ask myself at this stage of it, the question: "Is it really meaningful for me anymore?

When arriving home and checked messages, it was almost as if it was a sign from above, given the course of this day, that I found this link sent to my Facebook feed. I am sharing it here as well: On The Shortness of Life: An Introduction to Seneca. Thanks again, Tim!

*- He's an honestly decent and good person, with whom I never had any qualms with. I regard the same of the parents of them, which makes me wonder what the hell went wrong with this other person.

Closing 2013

Summary:

All 2013 was for me was the year in which I'm going to welcome the chance to burn all the calendars of it in the fireplace tonight. It was one in which there was a lack-luster summer sandwiched in between the end of one miserably long winter, and another that's becoming ridiculously and unrelentingly frigid. I really have nothing significant to list as "best of's" coming to mind for this year, except for: my father's recent 80th birthday party, Saskatchewan hosting and winning in the Grey Cup, and a couple of cousins getting married. I can't say that there were really any new blessings in it for me directly, nor can I account for anything as being progressive, no matter how much I tried to rectify things. It was a year cursed with unwanted setbacks and opting for lesser evils made under duress of necessity to solve avoidance-avoidance dilemmas. I don't wish to recount specifics, but it was a year fraught with accidents, illness, losses, and injuries to me and others I know. At the risk of being crass for me saying so after this reflection, the only other thing I can be thankful for during the year 2013 is that I suffered less than some of them.

Status and Activity for this Last Day of the Year

Weather: it's -32 Celsius, with a -41 wind chill.

Last social outing of the year: No real appetite to speak of, but I had a soup lunch my dear friend. Sadly though, both of us were too physically sore to even give each other a proper New Year's hug when we parted.

Last meal of the year: My celebratory supper was simply snacking on cheese, olives/pickles, deli sausage.

Last purchase of the year: A lottery ticket for tomorrow's draw, with the faint hope for the new year to begin with taking a 180 degree turn from what this last year was.

Last moments spent of the year: Reviewed past blog entries of the year, finished reading a book between commercial breaks of TV programme marathons. Things are staying cozy and quiet for the rest of the evening. I just want peace, and to think of what to do better for the coming year, now just a couple hours away.

My 13 Counted Christmas Blessings for 2013

Considering what is going on nationally and worldwide right now as I watch the news, for this Christmas I'm happy and grateful for:

1. Having more wits and lucidity after this past night shift than I thought I would have had
2. The weather changing and taming down from something viciously Arctic, into something in which I can walk around outside without gloves, wearing just a bunnyhug* for outerwear 
3. Light, power, and heat: things that tens of thousands of people in Ontario, Quebec, and now the Maritimes are still struggling without
4. Clean fresh air; unlike some of the idiots out east who are killing themselves with carbon monoxide poisoning from using generators and barbeques inside their homes to warm themselves.
5. A clear travel corridor, something that a lot of people using the airlines in some cities in this nation didn't have during the storms
6. Dry feet: something that people in England and northern Europe don't have right now as they wade through their homes and streets due to all the flooding occurring there
7. A schedule which flowed such that I actually had the holidays off
8. Getting a bit fatter - it means that I've been eating well, even learning how to bake some dainties. It beats starving and missing out on the abundance.
9. Drinking and playing cards and backgammon with the 80 year old, baby Jesus (Happy Birthday Dad!)
10. Peace: something that ain't happening in places like South Sudan at this very moment
11. The diversity of people that I work for/with, and learn from
12. Being lucky enough to not be so desperate as to need to rely on others' charity and generosity, like from a food bank or crisis shelter.
13. Knowing that if it came to pass that I was forced not to travel due to inclement weather, and had a power outage, I'd still feel comfortable at home with my fireplace and candles, and be resourceful enough to make it a comfortable Christmas with even just warm thoughts of my friends and family.

Merry Christmas everyone . . . Take Care!

*- That's an unlined hooded jersey to you non-Saskatchewan people

In Remembrance (추억의)

For this time of the year, I felt a need to share this memory from an experience I had last August. I was riding home one weekend afternoon. I spotted a young Asian woman trying to wave down motor traffic from the side of the street. When she saw me approaching, she dashed out onto the road in the path of my bike; forcing me to stop. She was a bit flustered and anxious, trying to explain to me in broken English that she was lost and trying to find a local address. Once she calmed down, and was more readily able to understand me, I managed to draw her a crude map on the back of an envelope to show her where to go. I asked her where she was from. In her reply, it wasn't what she said, but how she said it that struck me to the bone. She told me that she was from South Korea, drawing out extra emphasis on the word "south". She said it very deliberately and adamantly, like she had to make it clearly known to me that she wasn't one of them, as if to completely disassociate herself from something very vile and evil. I came to realizing on that late summer day that this year would be the 60th anniversary of the end of hostilities of the Korean War*.

It's a bloody shame that there is still this despicable geopolitical abomination on this planet called North Korea, with its six decade long dynasty of wicked totalitarianism. The notable tone in that young lady's response was a mixture of both pride and gratitude of who she was, and of a sorrow laden shame that there are these people who are ethnically identical to her, but have been perverted and corrupted culturally and politically; rendered into some sort of sub-species without rights or freedoms. These same people could be directly related to her, but at the same time conditioned such that on a simple order, they may be turned against her to kill her and her loved ones without any second thought. As bad as that all sounds, it could be so much worse. That entire peninsula could have been overrun by the Communist forces, and there would be about another 50 million more Koreans today being starved, oppressed and subjected to the depraved indoctrination by the Kim legacy. That would be 50 million more Koreans under this type of dictatorship: a number 10 million greater than the current population of Canada; and we have our veterans to thank for not allowing that to happen. Had the political entities on the side of South Korea, with any real interest in democracy and human rights, during that time had foresight into what North Korea would eventually be devolving into, there probably would still have been fighting going on until that peninsula was entirely liberated.

We have failed for a long time to take a better reckoning of this fact. We have been more dismissive of this time, and undervaluing our veterans' role during that point of history, somehow putting it behind our nation's victories and sacrifices in the European theatres of battle in scale, scope and significance. The media and political forces have stooped to calling our military presence on the Korean peninsula a "police action", or simply terming it the "Korean Conflict"** That has made us ignorant of the not only the real historical impact it had, but also in terms of the suffering and horror soldiers and civilians alike endured. Sadly, our perception of that period only gets viewed most commonly through dark comedy reruns of M*A*S*H. I would never insult or disrespect our veterans who were involved there by diminishing it with lesser labels; by calling it something other than what it was. It was indeed a war.

This is my special thanks to those men and women, to the Canadians and other UN force veterans, who served for that critical time in history. I'm sure the same appreciation comes from that young lady I helped in August, and the remaining 50 million free Koreans, who are prosperous today in comparison to their subjugated northern neighbours. Peace be with you all.

I see the greeting of "Have a Happy Remembrance Day" being shared on signs and posts on Facebook. I know people mean it as a good intention, or are at least grateful for a statutory holiday, but I think the more correct and appropriate greeting we should share is: "Have an Appreciative Remembrance Day". War, or memory of it, shouldn't exactly incite the feeling of "happiness", except for its ending. We have to be wary of the fact that the rights and freedoms we have today didn't come to us cheaply. Let us rightly honour those who gave some sacrifice, either in deed or in blood, in order that our generations in peace time have rights and freedom.

*Technically, the war between those nations hasn't ended: no official peace treaty has been signed between the two nations; it has been just been a prolonged cease-fire.
**- When you have a nation as large as Communist China, backed with a million man Red Army, involved as an oppositional force, there is no way in hell you can trivialize that situation as a "police action" or a simple "conflict".