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.

Multiphasic (Blessings)

The second week of this new year is approaching its end. It is the weekend of Malanka: the Orthodox(Ukrainian) New Year according to the Julian calendar. For me, it marks the official end of all mid-winter holiday feasting, at least those days that I’m familiar with, and not too soon either. There is no crueler and more brutally honest critique about how swinishly gluttonous one has been throughout the end of December/beginning of January than the discovery of how red the skin along the waistline turns, and how crushed one’s gonads feel, after trying to slip on and sport a pair of the tighter jeans that one owns in one’s wardrobe for the first time after the holiday season. It triggered a new motivator (see further below), but I digress. It’s so early, and I’m still trying to fix my bearing. This entry writing exercise has no fixed topic, and is as erratic and multiphasic as my periods of sleep have been. Throughout this second week of the year I was handed a mixed bag of blessings and curses; more of the former than the latter, thankfully.

I won’t get too specific about the curses except that they involved trying to muddle through toxic environments, which included: being almost overcome by fumes, and bracing for what I was suspecting to be a vermin infestation. Thankfully, the latter issue didn’t actually end up manifesting itself, and I could put my paranoia to rest.

My blessings were realizing that the stuff I put effort into learning a whole year ago didn’t just simply evaporate and disappear into the ether. I’ve been daring myself to use the Swedish and German I learned to read correspondence and interact with other new contacts by text. No one has reported to me yet that I’ve been too flawed or incomprehensible (or they’ve been too kind to say so). The fact that I’ve been cogent enough to remember these languages despite the lapse of their usage (and a fume-fogged mind) amazes me. The jeans issue as mentioned above, was my personal Harajuku moment (see The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss, page 38). It forced me to recollect what I did when I first primed myself to begin my journey back in the years when I became the fittest I’ve ever been. I realize that I’m actually in a better state of organization now, than when I started way back then, as I’ve been trying to reconfigure and reclaim some space in my office to set up a sensibly useful home gym. My last medical results shown that my lung tissues are now just about completely regenerated, and so I have no excuse to not get back into a regular exercise regimen. First, I must build up my core strength and joint flexibility, especially in the arm I injured back in 2016. Reclaiming and reconfiguring my space is a source of giving me some clarity of vision and purpose, nothing wrong with that, an extra motivator to reorganize other things beyond just this room.

Another bit of a blessing I guess, albeit a bewildering one for me, is for the fact that the New York Times recently listed the top 52 places in the world to visit in 2018, and strangely enough, my city, Saskatoon, was on that list. It made something like number 18 on it, and weirder still is the fact that it was the only Canadian city to appear on that list. If Saskatoon is considered to be such a gem, how bad off are the other places in Canada really? I won’t complain that it appeared in this card deck full of places on this globe that merit a visit. I guess it’s even more of an impressive accolade considering that the dominant buzzword circulating in the news for this week, to describe other places, even though it isn’t even being said outright, is “shithole” (no thanks to the grand poohbah of all idiot US presidents, Trump). Thankfully with this review, Saskatoon has managed to rise above all that. I’m just befuddled though as to the how and why it became selected. I would reckon that their research team obviously didn’t account for the winter months. They cite the Remai art gallery as an attraction; I have yet to see it myself, because I’m saving that visit for company who would genuinely appreciate it with me, so I can’t yet judge based upon that. But if I were asked now what makes Saskatoon an attractive city, I would suggest that wandering the Meewasin valley trails in the summer is the best thing you can do to figure that out for yourself, or visiting the Farmers Market, or else grabbing a coffee and enjoying it outside around the park by the Bess or by the river, or a pint in one of the pubs downtown or on Broadway. It’s quite festive during summer (to offset our all too brutal winters). It’s a bigger city that still feels like a small town, with enough people around who’ve been raised rurally, or remain connected to each other in a down-to-earth, close-knit folksy manner, who help diffuse away the pretentiousness and snobbery of something more urban and edging towards elitism, sided along with a huge multicultural blending that gets along a lot better with this sort of mix than most other places on Earth. For the most part, the people are generally approachable and friendly. The food scene is very diverse for a smaller urban centre. People from out East who come here for the first time generally express surprise at how seemingly cosmopolitan Saskatoon is, with their beliefs dashed by not finding more of a redneck culture being prominent for this place, as what is typically expected by them about Saskatchewan. One point of infamy about Saskatoon though, is its perceived high rate of crime. The city has been rated in the top ten worst Canadian cities for criminal activity for many consecutive years. I argue that Saskatoon actually isn’t that much more harsh or severe for criminal activity over most other cities in Canada. Sure, it’s higher, but not so much as to make it among the worst per capita. It’s just that with the close-knittedness of the community here, citizens here are far less likely to be complacent or dismissive when dealing with, or witnessing, suspicious activity in their neighbourhoods, and so are far more likely to report it, while people in most other larger centres tend to under report actual criminal activity. This naturally skews the crime stats on a higher rate for Saskatoon, I’d even say drastically. The shithole parts of this city (or of any city) is where people under report crime because of the sectors of the population that are intermingled in gang activity, and thus won’t squeal on each other. The police here are awesome too, both in terms of response times and availability, and dealing with most civic problems very tactfully, responsibly, and professionally no matter how trivial or severe on the spectrum. The city isn’t huge, so they can respond faster than bigger centres, and they give attention to calls that cops in larger centres wouldn’t trouble themselves to expend manpower for (and thus not recorded and accounted for in their  statistics). Naturally then, this extra availability and responsiveness of the peace officers here thus generates and facilitates more stats processed for criminal activity. In reality, I feel quite safe here in this city, as opposed to someplace like East Hastings in Vancouver. The Pareto principle also applies to crime stats where it’s figured 80% of criminal activity is done by 20% of a sector of criminals, except here in Saskatoon I’d say that it’s more like 90% of such crime is committed by 10% of the criminal population.

Throughout this week, the best blessing of all of them all was reuniting and reconnecting with someone from my past on a more soulful level. Thank you, you know who you are.

Hibernation Musings

I was happy and grateful that this Friday was an actual Friday for me: no work this weekend. I'm too stiff and sore, and I just want to be still and heal. I had no initial plan for this weekend except for destination hibernation, since this Saturday morning's temperature has plummeted down to -44 with the wind chill accounted for; it's senseless to wander too far from home. But sleep continues to elude me. Ella has crawled under my covers, curling up beside me and exploiting me for the extra heat in the bed, happily snoring like a buzz saw. I wish I were so comfortable; I just lie here envying her peace of mind to do that. My own mind has been stricken and mass attacked with too many other problems and concerns to think about, as I'm stuck here in bed, now two hours before sunrise. There seems to be no convenient, easy, or safe way to vent the stuff, and I have been letting these negative things fester in me and consume me. Thus comes this exercise of trying rid these demons through writing. As cold as the bloody weather has been as of late, I at least know how to use self-discipline/persuasion, common sense, and logic to adapt to it. It's a whole other matter and issue when dealing with the cold-heartedness of other people.

The last paragraph seemed to serve me well enough to let me throw enough mental baggage on a shelf to allow me to catch another hour of sleep. It's now close to sun up. We only stuck our heads outside long enough for a brief relief constitutional for Ella's sake. To force myself to sit still and convalesce, I continue writing. Part of my soreness comes from something that I've been doing to lead people who have been watching me to question my sanity. I'm getting more mindful to stay in shape. I've been willingly choosing to walk to and from work on these colder days. Why do I do it? Apart from economy, for the following reasons:

• My own body is a far more reliable machine in this kind of frigid cold than any other kind of vehicle I've ever owned
• A longer bout of low impact exercise (walking) on a frigid cold day yields the same result (or greater) rather than running the same distance on a hot day; minus the sweat, and minus the risk of breaking bones if you attempt to run on ice.
• BAT (brown adipose tissue) is activated in cold weather, which in turn activates your metabolism to burn more regular adipose tissue, that your body uses as energy to heat it.
• Somehow my immune system improves; I get sick less. I'm giving my body a break from inhaling virus-laden indoor air, which I'd be sucking air if I was using a public fitness facility. The winter when I never got sick was the one when I walked outside most frequently. 

I might as well admit another weird truth about me as I sit here writing on the subject of the frigid days of winter around here. As much as I've done my fair share of grumbling about the arrival of winter year after year; no matter how cold it becomes, I really don't find myself fantasizing about taking a tropical holiday anywhere. Seriously. If anything, I'd find that after dropping in for a brief two week sojourn at some beach resort like in Mexico or Cuba, only to be whooshed back and plunged into these friggin' freezing environs to endure the remaining couple of months of cold again, it would only serve to make me even more miserable about the season. It doesn't add up to a reasonable sum total for the expense of pursuing pleasure and warmth in my books. I'll be patient and wait for summer to come.* Perhaps I just think of it bitterly now because I have no one to really share such a holiday with. If I ever went anywhere for a winter holiday, it damn well better be for the entire duration of the season (which currently isn't really practical or sustainable for me).

At this time of the year, if I do dream about far away places, I tend to think more about the other peoples and cultures that live around this same latitude, and I wonder what they do differently than us to adapt, endure, and even somehow befriend this season. I think of people like the Norwegians, the Swedes, the Finns, and the Russians: people who actually might have a sense of what it's like to live in a climate like this. They seem to deal with winter more positively than us in comparison. It's almost becoming second nature now for this time of the year to copy some of their habits. For instance, I recently learned some cuisine techniques from a Swedish chef (I said a Swedish chef, not the Swedish Chef)**. I'd be using the sauna downstairs today if I could (like the Finns would) if a Christmas party wasn't being set up in the neighbouring rec room right now. This is my second winter of Nordic skiing, inspired by the Norwegians. I'm getting more open-minded to allow myself to listen and relax to more classical music, like perhaps some Russian would, on cold days like this. My living space tends to shrink and get cozier and condensed with more cerebral activity; I retreat to my four square meter kingdom. This is what I do more now in solitude to gain comfort, rather than hanging around and listening to the negative bitching and complaining other people do about weather that none of us have the power to control.

The social media network throughout this nation has made winter time seem even stranger, as we get less ignorant of our own regions, and peek more into those around other parts of the country. There are a lot of clashing perspectives in a nation as large as ours is of what a relatively cold day is***. My co-worker and I were laughing at her friends in Vancouver who were on Facebook describing the temperature lingering around zero degrees there recently as being something like "soul-crushing". What a bunch of goddamned pussies! People would be dancing out in the street here if the temperature even managed to climb up to minus five during this time of year. Sadly though, as more immigrants come here from warmer climates, and more urbanization happens, it appears that we as Canadians are becoming soft in attitude about adapting to winter. I miss the more rural attitude from my own upbringing that people had during wintertime. You just dealt with having to tramp out there each day to protect your livelihood no matter how cold it got; there was more resilience and a lot less drama about it, and yet we somehow lived through it all. Hell, we used to play outside as kids when it was 30 below, but now it's made to look like some sort of crime for allowing children to do that. With people becoming more urbanized and listening in to the status of the climate on a broader national level, which really hasn't changed much in intensity over the years season after season, the reports seem to be so much more dramatic and apocalyptic now. Now, it's some newscaster reporting on the weather network, who probably has never been out of Toronto their whole life, who's always looking freaked out when they start reporting on the weather conditions in the north, or here in the prairie provinces; making what has always normally happened each year look somehow dangerously unnatural and extreme.

Well, my soup is almost done, and it's time for lunch. Maybe, just for a hoot, I'll tune into a Vancouver stations and feeds to see what kind of havoc the dreadful "zero degree weather" has wrought over there.
 

*- Having lived in the tropics for half a year once, and comparing that to a nicer summer season here in Canada: Canadian summer has more tolerable heat extremes, longer daylight hours, potable tap water, more reliable infrastructure, sanitation, and civic services, less crime and poverty, much fewer people in street traffic leaning on car horns, and no disgusting lizards and cockroaches invading your dwelling, which perhaps have earlier on in the day, frolicked around in humid fermenting piles of garbage containing an abundance of discarded human-excrement-caked toilet tissue.

**- Those watching me operate in a kitchen might easily assume that my cooking inspiration and mentor is the Mr. Börk Börk Börk Swedish chef from The Muppet Show, but the actual person I'm referring to in this case is Magnus Nillson, who authored the book Fäviken. It is about his restaurant lodge somewhere in the Jämtland county in Sweden, which is currently considered one of the top 50 best restaurants in the world. What is incredible about his place is how relatively remote and isolated that this restaurant seems to be, leaning close to the Arctic Circle, and most of the dishes prepared there are made from what is farmed, hunted, and foraged within the immediate vicinity of the establishment. The book is an amazing compendium about self-sufficiency, and how to cook gourmet dishes with even the most rustic natural in-season regional ingredients. If it is an ambition of someone to have a 100 mile diet, eat with environmental consciousness, or eat as much locally produced food as possible, this book is a treasure-trove of ideas for proving that elegant abundance can be found anywhere.

*** - Addendum: My idea of when it gets extremely cold, or my where my personal limit begins when cold weather makes me want give up and scream "Uncle!" and I'm no longer willing to go outdoors, is when the temperature is at -40 or lower. It's a temperature reading that equally spells "BRRRR" on both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales; it becomes troublesome to run anything mechanical outside, and that makes even those tougher folks living north of the 60th parallel start to wish for something warmer.

Second Lives: Part I

I desperately needed to unplug my brain and take a break from brooding about a big messy issue that isn't going to get rectified anytime soon. I escaped into diddling around with, and contemplating the significance of, virtual online worlds during some of my downtime at home as the weather in my real world became cooler. I got into messing around playing Civilization V. I sucked at it enough such that my empire was wiped out and consumed by a virtual Roman civilization by the relative year of 1873 A.D. I set the bar higher by playing at a more advanced level, so I should have expected failure.

I also just recently viewed a TV documentary called Life 2.0. It's a peek into the lives of people who are/were very involved, some to the point of addiction, in dwelling and interacting in the online virtual world of Second Life. I toured that site a few years ago, and I got more insight about this entity from the documentary than I did from actually being in it and testing it. I regard Second Life (SL) as a community, but not a "game world", at least not in a sense according to my definition of gaming. There is no common objective or goal, no set rules, nor are there any other conventional concepts of winning and losing. You create and fashion a character (avatar) as you wish it to appear, and you can make it interact socially in various degrees* in the environments provided; perhaps in that respect it's more complicated than regular typical gaming environment, because so many elements of it are so "open-ended". The documentary interviewed: a couple who met on there and began a romantic tryst¹, another person who used it to escape the real world and found a way to make virtual products² and sell them for real profit, and another who intermingled as an avatar identity that was a complete opposite in terms of appearance and personality of his real-self. His choice of avatar was a little too freaky: one that did reflect deeper psychological issues that he harboured that he was eventually forced to confront.

Basically, my earlier impression and verdict of Second Life was the view that it's just an online dollhouse where people go to play digital dress up; a great big pixilated puppet playground without any fixed objectives, or defined plot or mission. Could it be that I'm being too judgemental and dismissive? Before I rashly critique all this, or unwillingly appear as a fuddy-duddy reactionary, I thought I would explore this ever growing phenomenon more in depth. It can't be avoided because more real life commerce and billions of dollars worth of business is currently being conducted in SL and other virtual world platforms, and as transmission speeds and access bandwidth increase, the presence and influence of such places in virtual/augmented reality will be making an evermore prevalent impact on everyone's life, real and virtual. Knowing how to competently navigate and negotiate, and perhaps even knowing how to avoid litigation with such bizarre virtual realms and media are going to become more valid and valued talents to learn whether we like dabbling with this stuff or not.

I was curious enough to poke around and tour Second Life only once, but that was a few years ago: at a time closer to its infancy, when it was probably going through a lot of growing pains. There was nothing on it that was especially interesting or impressive for me back then, and thus I easily abandoned it. I felt completely stifled when trying to express a clear train of thought that one wants when interacting with someone. I found the controls and interface veering towards being user-hostile. The site had a tendency to crash during high volume periods, and there were numerous other interruptive technical glitches. I maybe spent less than five hours in that place, so in all fairness I know I didn't check something that large and detailed out that thoroughly. I just had a bad first impression with it.

What I initially went on there for was an opportunity to find and chat with people who were at least intellectual equals, who by chance may conveniently be in a time zone which was in synch with my skewed and irregular off hours from work. Since it's a global meeting place, I also hoped for a chance to bone up on and practice speaking some of the other languages I know, instead of letting them rust out, and to be a receptive host to those who wished to practice their English. I naively thought, by creating some anonymity with an avatar, it would help to shield and conceal some embarrassment surrounding the lingual flubs and mistakes that either side would make. I figured that the avatar could also be used as a tool to make gestures and point to things to help clarify and surpass verbal obstacles that can't be done with a simple voice to voice conversation. It's in my interest because programming adaptive technologies for augmented communication is (informally) one of my roles at work. Instead, what I remember encountering on there socially was, for the most part, just unbridled stupidity: I found a lot more crass, rude, and obnoxious people than I would ever find in real life. Most of them were Americans. I suppose with a laissez-faire environment, with no real set social mores or rules of engagement; being effectively in disguise in avatar form, and facing no real threat of repercussions and not having to answer for bad behaviour and attitudes, some people just think that civility, manners, maturity**, and simple kindness can be ditched entirely. Hence, such idiots think that they can carry on around there with being jerks and bullies to strangers with a greater sense of impunity. So cowardly of them really. So, that was another strike and turn off that made it lose its appeal for me. Maybe the better spots were more hidden from me, or perhaps I was just too impatient and discouraged to seek out other realms there with better souls in them.

So now I wondered if, and by how much, either the interface environment or the social vibe had changed or improved on Second Life. The graphics in the documentary showed some rapidly expanded and evolved technical sophistication since I last toured there. My answer came to me as a login failure. I found out that apparently now my video cards on both my desktop PC and laptop are now too slow and underpowered; no longer sufficient enough to handle the technical enhancements and advanced graphics load that Linden Labs, the company that developed Second Life, has updated for the site. So, my curiosity ended there, and there was none left to compel me to dash out and get my own tech updates done just to mess around and explore it.

I still can't be entirely dismissive of the virtual life though. How much of our everyday lives are lived in some form of virtual reality already? Actually, the question should be: how much of an average person's life today isn't "virtual" and artificial? The list of answers would be much shorter than the list of those of the contrary. What the truth is is that we all seem to be driven to seek out some form of virtual reality. You'll realize this when you consider that all reading material, music, art, theatre, games, sports, radio and television programs are forms of virtual and augmented realities; just with more limited degrees of interactivity. Explaining this could be a long treatise. So I'll continue on in another entry.

1.- Both were married to other people, and each split from their spouse as their romance started to heat up. They met each other to continue this affair in real life only to have that relationship fail later once some arguments between them started popping up.
2.- Online, the women who was doing this was making and designing high fashion virtual clothing and had her own high end boutiques. In real life, she was working and living in a messy, dingy, basement. She was actually involved in a real life law suit; suing another SL user for copying and freely distributing her fashions.
*- From casual chat and benign stuff like strolling around, dancing and "shopping", to things that veer toward the kinky and grossly explicit. What you choose to do there is your own business. I don't want to know.
**- Only adults can register on Second Life, so it's even more disappointing in knowing this to find nothing but people on there speaking and behaving with adolescent mindsets.

Zombie Season: Dealing with the Undead

I don't know what sparked me to start writing about such morbid and macabre stuff. Perhaps it's due to me noticing that the approaching Hallowe'en season is becoming as bad as Christmas in terms of ridiculously early marketing of related seasonal goods, and people are playing dress-up already. I noticed a poster advertising a 'Zombie Walk' that was scheduled for September 28th, the rallying point was in one of the local parks. There are more horror stories and gory graphic novels on the shelves and tables at the bookshops. Perhaps it's because these darker, damp-chilled, gloomy days seem to be making the sight of the barricade tape-ensconced, fire-damaged building across the street appear even more ominous and creepy; adding an almost apocalyptic atmosphere in the neighbourhood. Perhaps it was from spending a large part of the day messing around in the kitchen; handling and processing bloody raw dead flesh to create something more utile, convenient, and appetizing*. But most likely though, since it has been so damply cold and gloomy for these first three days of October, it's probably because I've been using my down time at home watching more TV than usual instead of doing more invigorating exercise. The show that I've been hooked into and catching up on is The Walking Dead. It's not the zombies, or the clashes with them, that entertain me. Ultimately, it's thinking of the questions of how resourceful would I be to survive through an apocalypse type disaster involving some sort of serious pandemic that becomes intriguing. I wonder what would I need to sacrifice and abandon, and what I would intentionally seek out and do on my part to re-establish order in a chaotic world.

It's odd because I'm not a usually a viewer of the horror genre of entertainment. Generally, I think it's all cheesy and stupid, thus I'm a party pooper when Hallowe'en rolls around. The sub-genre of zombie fiction may be a growing fascination to me because: I have a role in health care, thus I'm more knowledgeable about communicable disease than the general population, I'm exposed daily in seeing how easy it is for a mind and body to get compromised and subjected to impairment, and I can easily speculate what would happen when a system for tending to emergencies gets overloaded even in a minor degree. I don't believe in zombies per se as the rotting re-animated corpses, as they are portrayed in The Walking Dead. However, I do believe in a potential of a disease capable of mutating itself into the form that infects people as something similar in the movie 28 Days Later as being quite plausible. What makes this type of 'zombie' all the more scarier in the collective consciousness is that, unlike ghosts, vampires and walking corpses, it is the one that can be based in scientific reality and the dynamics (and our under-preparedness) of global epidemics. The victims in 28 Days Later were living people that were rendered and reduced to savagely maniacal and violently aggressive, delirious, non compos mentis beings after a pathogen or virus entered their central nervous system through contact with bodily fluids like blood and saliva. You can give credence to it because we already have a virus like rabies out there that operates the same way. You just have to imagine a more amped up form of it: one that specifically targets and destroys neurological regions for reasoning and inhibition control in the brain's neo-cortex, which as well may cause hyper-stimulation/activation of the motor cortex and amygdala (the brain's centre of anger and emotion) in the paleo-cortex. What if the fight or flight mechanism is compromised, and a contagion does the equivalent of switching it over to 'fight' mode and then snapping off the handle? With the resulting symptoms being: indiscriminate thrashing and biting, undirected somatic hyperactivity, heightened aggression, no sense of self-preservation, no self-control or higher levels of brain function left, you then have yourself something that equates to being a zombie**.

It's even more disturbing for me is to realize just how many seemingly rational people of all ages still believe in ghosts, demons, vampires, or anything else supernatural involving the living dead in body or spirit. When you think about it, whether we are conscious believers in such things or not, most people's lives globally are intertwined with some calendar day, celebration, tradition, or observance devoted to some superstitious belief in the rising/living dead. Even if you don't actively follow such nonsense, it still impacts you: at the very least it gives you an excuse to slack off and party like Hallowe'en does. The world's largest religious denomination has two billion people who are followers in some aspect of a faith centered on Jewish carpenter rising from the dead, yet non-churchgoing people happily accept the statutory holidays, or have to deal with the inconvenience of some shops and services being closed on Good Friday and Easter. A few billion more in Africa and Asia have holidays, customs, and practices that honour and appease spirits and ghosts in some form of animistic or ancestor worship. I couldn't even guess what at what level the impact of superstitious belief, time honored observances, or other memes related and devoted to the 'undead' make economically: in terms of entertainment, festivals, advertising, travel/religious pilgrimages, conventions***; but overall it amounts to something that's ridiculously huge exchanges of goods, time and money. I won't waste more time trying to fathom exactly how huge it is. That is the current and real effect of the walking dead. Even if I had just a penny of every dollar spent by the genuine wackos out there who are seriously planning and prepping for a 'real life' zombie apocalypse, I'd still be a very rich man.

I have to end this by adding that is a shame when we are beginning to find more entertainment watching the fictional dead than we are with dealing with the living in our everyday lives.


* - More specifically, I was making sausages: another culinary experiment..
**- Addendum: actually the person rendered this way with these behaviours could be more accurately termed as a something like a ghoul, or a draugr, like in Viking folklore. Documented cases of traditional Zombie-ism in West Africa and Haiti, involve a witch doctor mixing up a special cocktail of plant and animal based psychoactive drugs and toxins that essentially induce effects ranging from a hypnotic trancelike state to irreversible brain damage. The intent isn't to create a uncontrollable terror, but for the opposite reason: to make a passive mindless docile victim, with no will of his or her own, who can be easily subjected to slavery, or rendered less of a human as an act of vengeance. Canadian ethnobotanist, Wade Davies, explains this process better in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow.
***- For the sake of both fun and games and serious religious ceremony

Slow Healing, Going Shack Wacky, Dry Streak

Thursday, April 11

I definitely have to force myself to use a full rest day today. I'm healing slower than I thought I would be; that's my own damn fault.  Despite the fact that I've been more idle than usual, I've still been using my injured foot more than necessary in the past couple days by looking around at cars and attending to some other appointments for this week. I only have enough tolerance to go one other outing that I have to do today, otherwise the new snow coming down today is pretty much a prompt that I need to keep myself planted in one spot for the remainder of the day to allow the swelling to subside. It's in these moments of sitting still that I become quite grouchy and frustrated; sitting here miserably brooding over the fact that I've rendered myself half-crippled out of my own clumsiness and stupidity.

Thus, I retreat into writing. I've been getting really bored, and it doesn't help that I have the disposition to automatically start pacing when I do become bored: it's like the use of my feet are a critical part of some function to get me mentally unstuck. So now, being stuck on a couch seems to be further driving my mind into limbo. I can think of a thousand things to do, but they most of them require me being able to freely stand and walk. The pain-killers have been dulling my senses so badly: anything I try reading from books, or from online is pointless as it ends up being just lost in brain fog; plus they're ruining my appetite with the side effects of dizziness and nausea. Watching too much TV is rotting my mind as well: I keep flipping through channels, but I can't find anything but depressing news*, and there seems to be nothing else intellectually stimulating, engaging, or entertaining.** However, the cane has been a source of entertainment for Ella. It serves as a makeshift hockey stick, to put a little more speed and action on her toys when she wants to chase them around and pounce on them. At least one of us is easily amused. After a while, the insipid little game apps I've found made me feel reduced to a level of a cat chasing a dot from a laser pointer around the floor.

Friday, April 12

Spirits lowered even more: I learned about a death in the extended family, my cousin and uncle have my sympathies. I'm still useless and hobbling around, and can't follow a bead on anything mentally; so I caught a ride with my folks, and ventured out of town with them to watch my brother perform in a dinner theater play. He did a fabulous job with his role, and the production was very entertaining. The setting was about a small rural Saskatchewan farming community in the 1980's, during those bad drought years. It brought back lots of memories, plus their characters in the play were the perfect representative archetypes of the kinds of people I grew familiar with from that time: the stubborn, conservative old farmer; the younger generation, either willingly or reluctantly, pushed into seeking prospects outside of farm living, the free-thinking outsider with ideas and opinions that clashed with the culture at the time . . . it was a great comical story and a fine snapshot of what people were facing around these parts during those times. The play was called Dry Streak, and I would have gave it an award if I could have. I wish the pictures I tried taking of it turned out. I'm grateful to have seen it, and to have a little reprieve from the pain and negativity.

Saturday, April 13

I've been able to get around little better, relying less on the cane for support. The last of my pain-killers will be used today, so hopefully I'll soon be rid of their wretched side effects. If this rate of recovery continues, I hope to be back running again (within 5 km) by the middle of next week.

*- The Rehteah Parsons case in Halifax (so tragic that it's hard not to dismiss the thought using vigilante justice against those who bullied her), and the craziness happening in North Korea, being the most prevalent stories upsetting me most.
**- Actually, that's not 100% correct. I started watching Hannibal. They did well by casting Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen for the roles of Will Graham and Dr. Lecter respectively.

Getting Media Profiled

I'm somewhat better today. I've halved the cold medication intake, and thus feel rendered a little less dazed and staggering compared to the last couple days.

I caved: in two ways, this weekend. Caved, in the sense that with it being so cold outside; being too bothersome to tour around town, plus being sick, I holed up here at home all weekend.  My vision became too strained and made blurry by cold-medication to track any fine print, plus I lost too much lucidity to allow me to follow and mentally form any literary scenes in my mind from reading, so the other way I caved was re-subscribing to a TV service of sorts. A few days ago, I knocked some dust of my TV screen, and connected to a month long free trial of Netflix®, and I abused this privilege to the max during this weekend.

I had a good long spell of not needing a paid television service to entertain me (ten months), but being under the influence of Neo Citron perhaps weakened my resolve. I could still get some odd bits of programming, news and movies (if I wanted to) on TV through channels via my Sony Blu-Ray player and Wi-Fi network, but nothing was offered that could keep me mindlessly gluing my eyes to a screen for hours during a day (a good thing really). I find that the free movie channels, like Crackle®, have content that's too dated and festering with commercials that can't be skipped through. I just sit down with it to be a tech-geek: to explore and review it intensively around once a month, or so; not to really watch the programming per se, but to study the interactive features and formats of the Sony network system, and to see if there are any useful changes and updates. Through this setup, I get to peer into other foreign news and documentary networks/services, like Deutsche Welle, and some of the Russian programmes through Первый канал (First Channel) out of curiosity to see their perspective of the world, or else I tune into a couple of Latin American channels to see much Spanish I still understand (or be humbled, and see how much I've forgotten). I do also check out snippets from Blinkx, Wired, Epicurious, Livestrong, some video podcasts, and then I'll check and see if the YouTube interface through a TV remote is getting any less user-hostile. That's about as interesting as TV has been for me at home since I discontinued service with my former provider.

So, suffering through my cold trying to rest, I spent an abominable amount of time (for me) with my ass planted on the chesterfield all weekend watching movies and other programs through Netflix. There has been such a huge gap in my media diet with unwatched shows and films, and so with no real mental ability for reckoning of passing time, it was easy to allow myself to get sucked into this black hole. Today, I opted to leave the TV off and use this time to process it all. What is interesting (and kind of creepy) about Netflix, and other similar services, is that I don't even have to actively search that hard for the movies and shows that appeal to me, because from the first few choices that I've opted to watch, the Netflix system starts monitoring my viewing choices through my account, and begins building a profile of my viewing habits, and then narrows down, filters, and limits things to a more concise menu of some suggested shows that it predicts that I'm most likely to watch to some very pinpoint accurate and specific genres. It struck me then that there is something a little insidious about a digital entertainment system that knows what my favoured viewing interests and pleasures are better than I do. I watched the movies Layercake, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, Centurion, The Gods Must be Crazy II, the documentary Walking With Cavemen, and an episode of Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior, and some other junk. I guess what I discovered I'm into, from watching Netflix, which is watching me watch TV, is what it is recommending to me as future choices. It's automatically narrowing them down and forecasting that I'd be into Guy Ritchie British gangster movies, crime thrillers, historical/nature/science documentaries, science fiction, and action cinema (that's unnervingly accurate). The system has somehow also determined that I have enough of a quirky sense of humour, and a taste for foreign/independent films that the Netflix search engine presumes to recommend to me a set of movies centred around starring my "favourite" actors (I'll leave them a mystery), a Norwegian sex comedy, and other documentaries on rather eccentric subject material. It boggles my mind to think of all the specific variable categories, cross-referencing, and correlation of all this data to get this all so customized for me as a viewer.

Profiling of the media consumer has always been going on since mass media has been invented, and evolving rapidly into ever more intrusive ways for gathering some ever more revealing data about those who are the audience/consumers. It then becomes almost a laughable paradox to see so many, who call themselves "private" people, who are so distrustful and not prone to socializing with others in the 'real world'*, who so often opt to stay home and retreat into watching a lot of TV, or using the Internet** because they can find little else to do by themselves that keeps them engaged mentally. Yet, watching television, or using the web, in this present day, are perhaps the least "private" activities that one can do. Someone, or some organized intelligence gathering entity, is always monitoring your choice of media, inter/activity, and usage.

*- Having a flashback now of the movie The Matrix, when Morpheus asks Neo that very profound question: "What is real?"
**- I always kind of wondered why we (as English speakers/readers) find the word 'Internet' consistently capitalized? Is it because it's regarded as proper noun for a place name or something geographical (which it isn't), or is it because we are regarding it now as a proper name for something that's like a living sentient being, like John, or Mary, or Goober the hamster? The lack of use of the indefinite article is suspicious too: I've yet to see a case of  'an internet' in any formal writing. I'll leave these questions of semantics to open for debate for some other time. I'm also having the horrid realization that this thought resembles one like those circulated around the dining table at work . . . I HAVE TO GET OFF THIS WRETCHED MEDICATION!   

The Four Square Meter Kingdom: My Wintertime Happy Place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Black Friday/Buy Nothing Day

Today was payday, and a day off. A typical kind of day where I devote a bit of my morning to tabulate my budget and pay my bills. Just for shits and giggles; just to force myself to think outside the box a bit, I performed the whole operation with one of my desk toys: a Chinese abacus. I sometimes use it for place holding numbers when I don't have a pen handy.* Most of the time though, it's just a fidgeting toy that I use when I'm lost in contemplation, like some sort of more scientific form of rosary beads. I suppose I keep it around as a reminder that sometimes solutions to majorly complicated problems can be found by using and focusing on the simplest of things.

An interesting bit of math trivia: if you used an average of one
 second to move the counters, non-stop, on a 13 column abacus,
like this one, to represent each and all of the total possible counter
 positions, just once, it would take 659,839,939 years to do it.
(. . . and no, I didn't calculate all that using this thing.)

Noting what today was, I couldn't help but to assume that budgeting and bill paying are the complete opposite things of what many of the Americans are doing right now, that is going overboard and getting deeper in debt with manic episodes of shopping. That is, today is also Black Friday, the day when the neighbours to the south go berserk and stampede into shopping malls in a greed driven frenzy. Reading an article about it in a complimentary issue of today's issue of The Globe and Mail prompted me a little more to look into this phenomenon, of how the cross-border shopping is impacting Canadian retailers. To be honest: either probably because I'm that disinterested in shopping, or I'm that indifferent or oblivious to the traditions of American holidays, I never even heard of the phenomenon of Black Friday until relatively recently in my life, probably about five years ago. That seems to be when Canadian news media started to shine more of a spotlight on this insanity. Now, there are even Black Friday sales here in Canada at this week of the year, despite the fact that our Thanksgiving Day is in October.** I notice "Cyber Monday" is becoming a bigger hyped-up deal here each year, to get supposedly big savings, with an adequate window of processing/shipping time before Christmas for online purchases of material items made at some domestic and US vendors. I've included this Wikipedia link about it, which better explains the how and why Canada's burgeoning involvement with this retail world wildness. What floors me about the figures in the table lower on this page, just before the references, is just the ever rising Total Billions Spent after the year of the big American financial crisis. All the news during the years of record high home foreclosures, and personal bankruptcies, and the consequences of being overburdened with debt didn't apparently sink in with the American consumers around holiday time. 

 

It's a ridiculous time of year when I hear the odd story about how many people got trampled to death down there when crowds charge at the doors when the malls and stores open for it. I'm sure I'll hear the other odd report about how many morons died of exposure because they had a tent pitched and camped outside a store two days in advance of its opening. I'm not at all sympathetic to such people. If they are that idiotic to allow themselves to forsake their own safety to get a discount iPad or a cheap pair of designer shoes, and willingly be at the wrong place at the wrong time, I say screw'em. That's just Darwinism doing its thing. I really won't shed any tears about there being a few less idiots, and greedy shitheads walking the face of this Earth. The topic of Black Friday only jolted some interest and concern in me because my parents are on a holiday tour in the United States right now. I'm hoping that they, and their tour group, had some good sense to steer clear of the insanity in their shopping malls down there today. Businesses and corporations control most of the mainstream news of course, so sure there is a lot of media hype about Black Friday on the business perspective to make the year end sound positive, but we sure as hell don't hear much about the following reality of "In-the-Red January" from the consumer end of the deal in the news.

 

My fourth Friday (or whole weekend) of November tradition is coming to be "Buy Nothing Day", an idea promoted by Adbusters magazine, to use it for anything else besides shopping and needless consumption, and to stop business/corporate control of the holidays. I'm also not keen on being part of the hyped up madness of Boxing Day sales: the Canadian equivalent to Black Friday. That leads to the question, what can one do to get into the spirit of the season, without spending money on anything? I thought of these things as answers to give:

 

• Make an appointment to donate blood/platelets: A way to be charitable without giving money. Go to your Canadian Blood Services clinic(or your nation's respective agency clinic for blood donations). If you never have done it before, at least get tested for eligibility. Everyone has it, everyone needs it. The best gift you may be able to provide is to help someone else survive to see another Christmas.***
• Sort through closets/drawers; donate clothing and other articles to good will charities and agencies: The thought of irony that really disgusts me is knowing that there were probably some Americans, perhaps during some moment in prayer with their families, who were stating how thankful they were for whatever type of abundance they have during their Thanksgiving dinner; who now a day later, some of these same people became part of the stampeding hordes of assholes who would trample over someone else to get through a WalMart entrance somewhere to buy more shit to hoard. That seems pretty insincere to me. If you are really that fortunate and secure with your so-called abundance, you wouldn't need to walk over somebody's face to get some cheap piece of crap made in a sweatshop. How greedy can you get? Abundance means you don't have to charge out anywhere to fetch something in near panic mode. Abundance means having more than you actually need. Sort through your crap to know just how much you do really have; if you've outgrown it or neglected it too often, just give it away.
• Turn off your TV, or else make an effort to watch commercials conscientiously: If you choose to watch TV, take a count of exactly how many commercials you viewed, note what the products are, think about how much money you would have to spend that day if you absolutely had to buy each and every one of those products that was pitched to you. Think about how many hours of work and financing that it would really require to both acquire and maintain the product. Ask yourself, "Is this thing really going to make me a better person?", and "What can I do/use instead of that is cheaper, costs nothing?" The outcome of this exercise should hopefully make you angry with allowing yourself to be a tool, and for being dazzled by so much magic in advertising, and this meme-warfare that you are being subjected to every day.
• Walk/Run/Move Your Ass: Start making an effort to take off more pounds during the season than the ones you'll be gaining with all the treats and parties between now and the end of the year. Move around six days a week, binge a bit on the seventh. I didn't say that you can't enjoy the parties, you'd just have to work for them. If you do a well enough job keeping the lard off before New Year's Day, you should have an easier time committing to your resolution after Jan 1st. Don't you think that one reason people are buying clothing so often, is because of exponential weight gains due to inactivity and overeating. Take measures to make it less likely to happen.
• Sit down and make a budget: Make a plan to pay off bills and any other debts you may already have, and live within your means. You don't have get too crazy by using an abacus to do it. Small steps are better than no steps, or totally veering off wildly in the opposite direction.

 “The safe way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket.”- Kim Hubbard

All this stuff that I mentioned could easily keep me occupied throughout the course of Buy Nothing Day. Happy non-shopping everyone!

*- Which is surprisingly often. I use a pen so seldom in my office now that when I do find one, usually while I'm on the phone, more often than not, the ink is dried up in it. An abacus needs no power, and no ink refills.

**- Better now than in October. Out of respect to the veterans, I absolutely refuse to put up Christmas decorations, or even consider holiday shopping before/during Remembrance Day.

***-Another thing that peeves me: hearing a person who talks about, or has actually endured, being poked enough with a needle to be decorated with tattoos and piercings, but admits to me that they would never attempt to donate blood. That's a true sign of a person being shamelessly selfish.

   

 

Running Harder, but Standing Still

I finally did something yesterday that involved straying off to someplace different than work or home within this past week. I bit of browsing at McNally Robinson and enjoyed a light lunch with my friend; sadly it was all the energy I had in me for that day. Browsing wasn't as enjoyable as it usually is for me. As much as I wished to do more reading, my eyes have been too fatigued and sore for it, plus I've been stricken with recurring headaches. It's probably due to too much extra time used staring at screens, processing code and formulae throughout the week, and monitoring the FX charts before the start, and after the end, of each day of a string workdays 10 hours long. I'm sure that typing this is will even become challenging shortly.

The title of this entry is a bit of a misnomer. By running harder, I mean it seems to take more energy and a higher pain threshold to commit to doing it at this time of the year. I didn't run all week: the damp coldness has been giving my knees grief. The lack of doing it is making my metabolism level head south, as indicated by my tightening waistbands on my pants. I resolved to at least get out today, no matter what, but I wonder if the resulting shock and pain to lose an extra couple pounds would make it worth doing. I plodded along at some distance over 5 kilometers this morning: better than nothing I suppose. I went outside, absent-mindedly wearing my running shorts and light jacket. I honestly didn't sense how cold it actually was until near the end of my run when I visually noticed that the shoulders of my black jacket were coated with white frost from my condensed expired breath. My knees didn't suffer that badly thankfully.

There is a treadmill in my building's rec room to use, but I discovered recently that the damn thing is busted. So much for that option for winter training. I can't really stand treadmills anyway. It seems that I need some perception and sensation of moving through physical space and traversing an actual distance to make it feel like running is benefiting me. There is the indoor track at the local Field House, but I'm trying to avoid paying a mint to use it. Walking and cycling, at least for now, are still viable. There have been still good results. I'm noting that yesterday, even during this time of the year, was the first time I used my car in a week. The most heartbreaking thing to see along my trips by the river this week has been the unceremonious demolition of the Victoria Street Bridge.


The hope of getting to use this bridge deck to jog on is officially extinguished.

I'm struggling to figure out where to apply myself today, the second day of a three day weekend. I find I almost dread having unstructured time off, because it seems that I waste half of that precious time, and even more energy, which I don't feel like I have, trying to structure it. Blogging now, in it's own way, serves to help me piece that together.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
-Alvin Toffler

One thing I did do, in keeping with my riding the wave of decluttering and living more frugally, was clearing away some books I found, which someone in the building gave away as freebies as they were moving. So, I took them to my favourite local used bookstore to exchange them for something more meaningful for me*. I was in non-fiction mood, craving something in the realms of finance, math or science: things I definately don't hear sensible conversations about when I'm at work. One cheap book I found that I was willing to re-read was Innumeracy: mathematical illiteracy and its consequences, by John Allen Paulos. This edition I bartered for is from 1990, but the truth in it is as valid now as it was back then. Now that I find myself playing around with numbers more, I thought it would be prudent to detect and extinquish those remaining numerical fallacies and statistical errors I myself still succumb to. The sad and dangerous thing though is that the more educated I get about such stuff by reading this book, the more likely I am to detect just how much more stupid people around me will seem when they are trying to argue opinions around me and are trying to stick in figures they don't understand into the mix. Thus, my respect for them begins to quickly retract (to put it lightly), and I just fear more for the future of humanity in general once such people somehow gain more power.

*- I spent no actual money, I made a tidy little profit in terms of store credit, I gave old books new life, it helps to save a tree or two, plus by buying through this kind of discount I have the satisfaction of sticking it to the man by avoiding the rip off of paying an average 12% higher listed Canadian price for a book (even in e-book format) when the looney is close to parity with the US dollar. I feel it's all good karma for me.

Birthday 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over-Training, The Ex, Cellphones

I shouldn’t be still awake writing this now, but the thought of relaxing outside on the deck by the light of the full moon of this rapidly passing summer appealed to me too much. That, plus some hydrotherapy and stretching of my pelvis and legs perhaps re-invigorated me as well. I’ve been enduring a notably bad training setback. The pain, weakening, and loss of flexibility in my pelvis and left leg appear to be due to a pinched, or irritated, sciatic nerve. Perhaps it’s due to a combination of over-training, and having more lapses of neglecting to use the proper orthotics that I should be wearing. Because it’s been so hot out; I’ve been opting more for cheap sandals instead. My 18 kilometer run last Saturday was followed by me not being able to muster any speed, energy, or endurance for a simple four kilometer run on the next morning. This is not what I need two weeks before my race. I’m now at the mercy of whatever results the chiropractic care I’m scheduled for can provide for me. I hope I have enough resilience and the kind of constitution that would allow me to get fixed up in time.

I’m restricting myself to lighter cross-training for now: like cycling, some core training, and I might even try some swimming, as per a friend’s suggestion. I’m a terrible swimmer; I honestly really don’t know how to do it right. I jokingly tell people that I swim like a drowning cat, but in reality, I’m so bad at it that swimming like a drowning cat would actually be an aspiration for me. I’ll be at a lake for this long weekend, so maybe I’ll be able to try this stunt, if the water out there isn’t too loaded with revolting weeds and algae blooms, or full of hungry leaches. I hope that sleeping on hard ground in a tent won’t irritate the nerve problem more.

Although I haven’t had a chance to do much of the long list of preparation and packing yet, I’m looking forward to this camping trip. I totally need to get out of this town for a while, and have absolutely no commitments. Unfortunately, I return just as the Ex would be getting under way. The extra night time bandstand noise, and throngs of more obnoxious hellraisers and hooligans circulating around the neighbourhood (drawing in the consequential blaring police sirens) get to be a pain in the ass; it’s enough that I have a real literal one to cope with now. It’s also the week of pure terror for Ella whenever the nightly fireworks shows start erupting for the duration of that time. The space underneath my bed becomes her refuge in which to hide, tremble, and whimper for the rest of the week as she is scared silly by the mortars and rockets blasting away, the weird and wild looking sky-born fires and flares, and the resulting percussive shockwaves slamming against the building. In my dog’s mind, this is the end of the world . . . canine Armageddon.

My big advancement is that I purchased an iPhone. I know the newest version of it will be marketed very soon, but I can't see the one I just purchased going instantly obsolete. I chose the iPhone because I already have an iTouch with a familiar interface, also most of my apps that I already see need for are purchased rather than using the extra time and expense of switching over to compatible apps with an Android model. My other cell phone finally calved after more than six years of use, and it's only because it broke down that I was led to replace it. The iPhone is about four generations ahead of my last cellphone. As much as I like technology in general, the cellular phone concept is one that I’ve grown least fond of. It doesn’t even make the top five of my favourite technologies list*. I just don’t want to be available all the time, but just because some people know you have a damn cell phone, some have expectations for you to be so. I call that a leash; not very appealing to someone who prizes independence. In my world, a cell phone (or any phone) is used for getting basic specific details, not for long chats; that’s what social visits, coffee shops and lounges are for. Except for with one close friend, I generally keep phone conversations short, especially on a cell phone. I sure as hell won’t permit a whole detail intensive conversation to be texted to me, nor will I ever allow someone to make me an object of their emotional drama over a phone, or with texts. The nice thing about most LAN line phones is that you can give them a nice hard, authoritative, cathartic slamming down to hang up on an irritating asshole, in the privacy of your own home, and most of these phones can endure it. Do that to your cell and you’ll break the damn expensive thing, adding to the extra embarrassment if you receive and react to such a call within the public eye as one could in this case. I watched some idiot once, freaking out with anger during such a call, after which he then threw down his phone on the sidewalk, smashing it to bits. May God smite me now if there would be ever a time in my life if I’d ever succumb to that degree of impulsive, childish stupidity, and failure of anger management in public. I have a hard time getting over the irony about today’s cell phones being light years ahead in technical superiority over a conventional LAN line phone, yet we expose them to greater risk, bizarre environs and hazards beyond our homes where this thing is more prone to being damaged, or rendered useless by lack of tower coverage, or incidents of losing battery life, or inconvenience of opportunity to recharge them.

Overly-teched out cell phones have made us a lot more socially witless in a lot of ways: the technology outpaces the etiquette to use it. What I hate most about cell phones is that some people think it gives them a free license to be obnoxious, like the example I described earlier. The loudest, most obnoxious people around are the ones with the most annoying blaring and vulgar ringtones, and are the personalities with the least inhibition to take calls in a public setting wherever consideration for silence and attention is demanded.

As much as I've ranted about a my general distaste for cell phones, I do appreciate some of the features I have now that my Wi-Fi enabled iTouch doesn't. Banking, with a visual of my statements, from anywhere now has its appeal. I have a means of GPS navigation should I ever need it, and with all the heightened likelihood of theft, vandalism, and other crimes in the neighbourhood during Ex season, I have a better means and chance of capturing photos and videos for Crimestoppers to collect some reward money. Other than that, the "toy-appeal" of a cell phone is totally lost to me, especially considering that service providers it seems are scheming to find ways to ding you with a charge of some sort for every button you push on them.  

*-In a real emergency though, it might rank number three.