Refraining and Abstaining: A New Order for the Year

“One half of knowing what you want is knowing what you must give up before you get it.” - Sidney Howard

It finally looks like a more common winter scene that I’m familiar with, and I’m grateful for it. There’s at least 15 centimetres of new snow that arrived since the night before last. I can finally get set to go skiing soon, and it may also help stave off the conditions for drought for next summer as well as my physical sloth during this season.

But rather than looking that far ahead, I sit here doing some review of my recent past to see what to implement for this year in terms of what could be done as measures for betterment. I’ve been so tuned into what prospects I want to invite to do such things as personal resolutions, that I often fail to account for what I should or must give up to gain them. I don’t really view myself as a person loaded with any huge quantity or frequency of bad habits that I need to drop entirely or immediately, or life-crushing deficits that I at least must correct temporarily. It’s not like I’m a person fraught with things as extreme as addictions. However, after doing some introspection after writing my first two entries of this new year, I see that there is plenty of room for improvement; for proactive efforts for better self-care. I thought I would now try things from the opposite end of the spectrum and deploy a more stoic and spartan approach through some successive eliminations of things, even if they may just be temporary.

I noted that the simple word “enough” was one thing that I was going to be mindful about. The questions to follow naturally came as: “What things do I have enough of?" (as in a adequate/great abundance of), and then contrasting that with what is really lacking around here for me, and the question “What things have I had enough of?" (as in setbacks, annoyances, and inconveniences), and gauging that along side with any potential I have to change with any material or behavioural substitutions. I also noted how tired and de-energized I’ve been since the year started. Not a good place to start off from when the general mission is to be somehow happier. A lot of that is mostly due to interference from environmental and health related issues for sure. So, it would probably do me good to make some more conscious efforts to detox in some ways. I need to organize and handle stuff like this in a rigidly hard-core and structured way.

Thus, I compiled a list of things that I’m going to actively challenge myself with abstaining from throughout the course of the year. I won’t be doing them all at the same time, just periodically for a month at a time: some at specially and specifically selected months (as with during this month of January); others at placements I randomly picked for along the course of the year. There are thus twelve such things on my list as personal prohibition trials, each will be approached and committed to with a month-long duration of refrainment. It's kind of like the same exploration/learning model I used last year for my language learning modules.

Prohibition, self-denial, acts of nonparticipation, interludes of deprivations, and measures of austerity are not the only things happening though. I’ll also be including alternate substitute material and behavioural practices in lieu of the other junk to hopefully serve as stuff to fill those voids with positive reinforcements and some manner of redemption. Maybe I'll actually glean some good habits out of this process. I will do my best to record the progress, and to see if there are any actual beneficial changes throughout. At the very least, I'll try and find some humour in it all, even when the challenges get hard and demanding.

The first round of these twelve trials will be finishing soon. I'll try to get it posted soon after month's end.

Bibliography and Resource Material:  The Big Book of 30-Day Challenges, by Rosanna Casper (2017)

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.

Winter Solstice Eve 2015 (Chance Rolls)

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

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

bed on these dim and dark winter mornings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hacking German/Deutsch Sprachehackung

 It's the first day of August. I can't believe how quickly summer is drifting by. This morning is calm and cool, but I expect 33 degree heat later today, and a thunderstorm by the late afternoon or evening. I hope I'm wrong about that. I have been learning some more German vocabulary and grammar for about 12 consecutive days now, using around 10 to 15 minutes per lesson.

Es ist der erste Tag des August. Ich kann glauben nicht wie schell der Sommer vorbei. An diesem Morgen, die Wetter ist sehr ruhig und stille, aber ich erwarte 33 Grad für Hitze später Heute im Nachmittag oder Abend, mit ein Sturm möglich. Hoffentlich, wird das nicht so sein. Für über zwölf Tagen, ich hatte mehr Deutsch Sprache gelernt. Ich arbeite für nur 10 oder 15 Minuten jede Lektion für mehr Vokabular und Grammatik zu lernen. Das ist genug jetzt. Zu schreiben mehr in Deutsch, muss ich mehr Kaffee (oder Bier) zu trinken.

So, why another language, specifically German? My outlined answers are as follows:

1. The obvious mission – I still want to travel to Europe someday, and it only makes sense to learn that which is most commonly spoken there as the primary and secondary language. Putting that together with my English and the French and Spanish I know, and I should be able navigate around most of Western, Northern, and Central parts of that continent well enough. One could be a hopeless dork and be confined to traveling around with a tour group full of complainers who can't think outside the box (my idea of hell) who wouldn't dare to speak a word of any other language of the visited nation, and not discover anything really different from what could already be found in a guidebook. I prefer doing the total opposite and going rogue: being like a Jason Bourne and heading off the beaten path; operating independently. To do this, knowing at least the bare essentials of more than one locally spoken language is a must.
2. To make learning the "cousin" languages easier – There are the other languages of the other nations I want to visit along Northern Europe (Dutch, Frisian, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian) in the same Germanic linguistic family that share a lot of the same cognates found in either English or German. Having this other German dataset should (in theory) make learning these additional regional languages easier just as knowing French, a Latin born language, made it easier for me to pick up on Spanish. Learning the complex forms of case articles, three forms of grammatical gender, and different word order would temper me up better if I really wanted to learn something even more complicated in depth like Russian or Ukrainian.
3. Cognitive Improvement – Studies are showing more and more that learning new creative skills, adapting to novelty, and solving puzzles (without too much stress) and testing the working memory are the best things that can be done for stimulating the brain enough to ward off things like dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Learning a foreign language covers all these bases. It's a cheap form of prevention that I can do now that may keep me from suffering hard later. I take the issue of preventing geriatric mental illness a little more seriously than most. It's because I currently don't (and possibly wouldn't) have a trusted life-partner around to take care of me if ever I should become chronically ill, or ever need help to guide me along if ever my mental gears started slipping due to anything age-related in the future. I've worked long enough in health care to see what the real personal and social costs of cognitive impairment are, and how I don't ever want to be rendered into some zombie-like, dementia-stricken elder with no grasp on reality, or left at that the mercy of a system whose only answer to deal with you in such a state is to over-medicate you and shut you away. My inspiration came from hearing about a lady who was in her nineties who was still learning other languages, and she was still very cogent and bright during her interview.
4. It ultimately helps me to speak my own language better (or at least makes me recognize the ways I use it poorly) – when I stepped outside my box to learn Spanish years ago, it struck me as to how badly I use the subjunctive tense in English when I compared the two languages. Learning German now helps me to clearly see the functional difference between accusative and dative cases as it is so much more necessary to be aware of using them precisely when speaking German, which I wouldn't have learned as readily or adequately if it was explained to me in an English lesson.
5. To fit my idea of personal betterment – when I take into account the most interesting people that I've ever met in my life that I had the pleasure to engage in amazing conversations with, they had mostly these characteristics: they were bright, but in a way that had nothing to do with the number of years they spent in University, they were "richer" people, but it had nothing to do with the measure of the material wealth that they had, some were less well off than me. The one overlapping element they all had in common, which I believe made them bright and "rich" with experience, was the fact that they all could speak more than two languages, which effectively made them wiser with a grander world view of things. To learn another language automatically puts you in the place of having to find another way of thinking or perceiving things. I find myself envying those who are able to think and dream in more than one language, I think that's a fantastic mental talent to have. I'm hopelessly inconvenienced with only being able to think and dream in English. To be able to speak another language or two fluently really is hard to do without a reasonable amount of social intelligence: another enviable quality to have, which is probably what made those other people's company so enjoyable. German's distinction in the role of human betterment, despite having a relatively small number of worldwide speakers compared to Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, and English, is that it's the second most used language for scientific publications. Using time to learn another language is the only time when I feel like my brain is actually growing, unlike other times when I'm just passively absorbing and then regurgitating other trivial stuff.
6. It forces me to become a better listener – something that I wish all people could learn how to do better (myself included).
7. Because learning another language is becoming cheaper and easier to do than ever – thanks to cross-comparing my ability with apps like Google Translate, and Duolingo, I can drill and test myself at my own pace.
8. A 30 day program project - It also all part of a 30 day program to see how much I'm able to learn, and to test my ability to commit to it that long. Learning German is challenging enough to force me to re-think things and to be transformational, and yet harmless enough that if I fail at it the consequences won't be too harsh.
9. I'll learn something that won't go obsolete – the only things that I feel I learned in school that have never escaped me and served me most practically were basic mathematics and the ability to tactfully and correctly use language, which is useful in a highly technical world for. . .
10. Building programming competence and confidence – making an effort to understand something which would ordinarily look and sound like garble to you and then putting into some functional and logical order to get something done is the very essence of computer programming. I strongly believe that you have to have some proficiency with practicing this with human languages first before you can even apply it into controlling something as stupid as a box full of silicon chips.

I'm doubtful that I'll ever learn enough German to be fluent enough to understand the great intellects like Goethe, Thomas Mann, or Einstein; to read their actual thoughts in their own words. That's not my ultimate mission. I just hope to know enough to be understood when I need to make requests, or ask for directions. If I re-translated my little composition above, I'm sure I'll find glaring mistakes. The case articles and genders are the hardest things for me to understand as an Anglophone learning German, but I'm trying. I'll see if and how I'll improve after the 30 days has past. 

Re-Motivating for More Clicks

For myself, guilt was the prompt to make me examine the subject of psychological motivators for running more closely. It follows from last night after making the mistake of having my first, last, and I'm sure to be my only experience of dining on poutine. The spell of a sluggish indigestion is still haunting me. It seems funny to admit this now, especially being that I'm Canadian and that it's this late in my life for doing so, but I have never actually sampled poutine before (for which I'm now grateful). I either need the constitution of a much younger man, or I'd have to be completely wasted to dare myself to eat this kind of crap again. For those Non-Canadian readers who have never heard of this stuff before, let me explain to you what poutine is (pronounced "pooh-TEEN", not like the current Russian president's last name). I'm ashamed to say that it was invented here in Canada. Some while ago in Quebec, some bozo of a chef took a look at a plate of ordinary and already greasy fries and gravy, and thought to himself: "Hmm, let's see, what else does this need . . . Aha, I know, MORE ANIMAL FAT WITH THE ADDED POTENTIAL TO OBSTRUCT ONE'S BOWELS!" (Perhaps that idea sounded better when it was said in the original French). And he thence and thusly proceeded to plop on some nice gooey cheese curds onto this warm greasy mass, and TAH-DAH, poutine was born. In summary, poutine is the one of the most perverse ways to introduce the greatest possible number of calories in a single mouthful whilst instantaneously elevating your body's blood triglyceride index to levels of lethality. It's like the "fugu"* of the world of French fries. Consuming this stuff falls just slightly short on the spectrum of calorie ingestion depravity as drinking an entire litre of melted butter followed by another litre of whipping cream; or just taking a short cut to bypass digestion altogether, and getting a liposuction done in reverse, with the cannula inserted directly into your aorta and filling it in with 100% pure whale blubber. I sheepishly admit that the curd and gravy component of the mix was rather tasty, and that is what halts me from completely branding this stuff as downright obscene. I could only finish a third of the portion I was offered. I'm not really a fan of French fries to begin with, and yet I stupidly chose this avenue of having a dish which should best be served with a side of nitroglycerine tablets.

 
But I'm digressing. Back to the subject of running. I finally returned (after a whole flippin' week!) to a pattern of recuperative sleep again after this past cycle of insomnia; enough such that I thought I could finally get back into the swing of running again without risking some serious injury to my already stiff legs, back, and neck. My physical conditions for it are improving, but I also realize that I've been rather lax in setting the right tone for the mental ones. Any real honest runner will tell you that the activity is more mental than physical. So, what I thought I would do is slap down some reminders in print to keep me focused on why I should continue to keep up with it. Some are carrots; others are sticks. I hope to be listing more of the former than the latter. They are as follows:

1. A Pound of Butter (stick) – It was brought into mind after what I wrote about the poutine. For accuracy, I should be using a pound of pork lard for an example, but I don't handily have any around the place to serve me with a visual. The grams per litre density of butter is roughly more or less equal to that of human body fat. Butter is about 911 g/L, while human fat is generally about 918 g/L: that's about two of these 1 lb bricks of butter in a litre. Now, having a concrete visual of what this actual volume is like, and imagining having 14 more of these things being pressed, packed, and tucked into me subcutaneously gives me more of a disturbing and disgusting picture of what would result if I just let myself go for half a year, because knowing from past experience, 15 pounds of extra weight is what I can easily acquire through an entire winter of idleness. It's also a disturbing picture when I imagine how much of a substantial proportion of matter with this consistency and density might be actually be coating my arteries and heart. The seven kilometer run I did today used about 685 calories, and that can be computed as to how much volume of fat which that run potentially shredded away, assuming there is approximately 3,500 calories in a pound of adipose tissue (again, roughly the same as butter), amounts to cutting away about a fifth of that pound of butter you see there. This is perhaps the most depressing calculation to make for this entry: knowing that I'd have to run 35 kilometres to make that entire block of butter, representing the same volume of body fat, completely disappear given my age, mass, height, and metabolism.
2. The Views (carrot) – I'm fortunate to have a lot of great vistas around this town that can only be seen from the running trails, like this one on the pedestrian deck of the North CPR Bridge with the view of towering over the weir of the river. The torture of running to there from my place and then scrambling up the stairways to get up there is sometimes really worth it just to feel the breeze. The Bessborough is also a nice feature that is omnipresent from most views along the trails between the University and Broadway bridges.
   
   
   
3. Encountering Random Spontaneous Social Events (carrot) – I occasionally spot free public events, like this one I found in Rotary Park while on my way home. I participated with this group for a little bit, practicing some outdoor yoga long enough to discover just how seized up and inflexible I really am.
   
4. Sleep (carrot) – We generally tend to underrate sleep too much. When you sleep, you aren't spending money you don't have, nor are you mindlessly cramming your face full of excess food, you're not stuck listening/arguing with annoying people and being in toxic relationships, and generally not finding and creating more reckless ways of sinning and hurting yourself and others (unless you fall asleep while operating machinery or a vehicle). It heals both body and mind. The Dalai Lama says that it's the best form of meditation. If we all thought this way, we would all try to nap/sleep more. Running is a great way to snap you back into a pattern of a more relaxing sleep. Soreness usually (inevitably) finds you the next morning, but believe me, it's a hell of a lot better than getting no sleep at all and then waking up repeatedly to the same kind of pain knowing that you've done really nothing to acquire it other than just staying awake too long.
5. Beer (carrot and stick) – I try to avoid drinking my calories as much as possible, but when I do this is my favourite way to do it**. I like beer too much to stop drinking it, but I can't drink it as liberally as I used to without some bad physical consequences if I don't exercise. So long as I continue to like beer, I'll have to run more to keep it off of me. There is an entire site devoted to people like me who are geeks who can brew beer, and are around this certain age/maturity where they have this cyclical carrot-stick relationship with their beer consumption and appreciation/need for running so they can drink more beer. The site is called Brew/Drink/Run http://brewdrinkrun.com/ , in which the title itself is a pretty obvious and brief mission statement. In a fitness perspective, I'm lucky that my favourite pub is in a Goldilocks Zone, not too conveniently close; yet not so far away that I can't walk or bike there. I can leave my car at home, and still not have to trouble myself with calling cabs. The walk there and back usually amounts to the exercise I'd need to burn off the couple pints I had. Thus things balance out.
   
    

*- In Japanese cuisine, fugu is slices of sashimi trimmed from a pufferfish, which contains a highly reactive nerve poison called tetradotoxin, concentrated in some parts of its skin, flesh, and organs. Even small residual trace amounts of it can be lethal. The supposed thrill for diners eating such fare is knowing that if it wasn't cleaned and prepared by the chef properly, the next bite could be your last, sort of like a sushi Russian roulette.
**- I just realized I said that sentence in the same way the "Most Interesting Man in the World" would in the Dos Equis beer commercials.

Crash Habits

I realized that it has been some while since I wrote here. Nothing eventful has happened between now and my last entry that is really notable except for the fact that I've decided to take a sabbatical from the long-distance running to let my bones and joints heal up properly. I'm substituting in more cycling for fitness. I opted out of the Saskatchewan Marathon this year, as well as the Bridge City Boogie that is scheduled for today. I'm stuck in the midst of the second day of trying to resolve computer problems, and today I took the radical step of doing a total overhaul of my operating system.
My Sunday so far has gone as follows:
Stage 1: Start reinstalling Windows 8.0 operation system, since all my free time yesterday was used in vain and wasted effort desperately using whatever help advice and fixes I tried to deploy.
0% installed . . .
Showering, hygiene and grooming . . .
10% installed . . .
Prepared and had breakfast (scrambled eggs with onions and jalapeños and salsa, hashbrowns and coffee; loaded and turned on dishwasher
25% installed . . .
Go for another walk with dog to kill time between software loading, get rained on, return home quickly. I'm kind of thankful for the rain to make me feel less regretful and having an excuse for being cooped up inside to attend to the configuring . . .
33% installed . . .
Cleaned kitchen and sweep floors . . .
54% installed . . .
Folding laundry, changed bedding, and cleaned/dusted/vacuumed bedroom, groom the pooch . . .
67% installed . . .
Made more coffee, chatted with my Mom for a bit on the phone . . .
89% installed  . . .
Start praying to Jesus, Buddha, and whatever other patron saints and deities there are for restoring system crashes who'd care to listen to my plight. Twelve minutes later, a successful installation occurs. On to Stage 2 of this soul-crushing operation. Ella pokes me with her paw to get my attention, and then jumps up on my lap to try to comfort me from my noticeable unrest from this irritating fiasco.
Stage 2: Begin downloading and installing the layer of Windows 8.0 updates necessary before I can ever tack on the latest Windows 8.1 upgrade (92 needed).
Start a new blog entry on desktop (this one) . . .
0 of 92 downloaded . . .
I unload my dishwasher and started preparing stuff for lunch. I then begin reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by the late Douglas Adams, feeling about as useless, surreal, and absurd as the Electric Monk introduced in chapter 2 of the book through the flow of this process. A half hour has passed by, then I see . . .
0 of 92 downloaded!!! . . . <a myriad of expletives at this point> . . . oh wait, holy crap it finally took some action to install updates. Loading and configuration seems like trying to escape a Black Hole at this point knowing that I'm not even half way finished of what I need to do to correct all this.
I think the point of how aggravating I find post-crash massive scale installations has been made, and this is probably the main reason why I would hate having an IT career as a tech support worker. I couldn't handle dealing with the levels of livid pent-up frustration while talking myself through a task, I'm sure my impatience would only get worse when dealing with someone else. If I were tied to a desk incapable of hastening the process, and couldn't make the busywork, or anything else constructive or productive for things like what I just described to curb this aggravation, I'd be totally at my wits end.
It's my own damn fault that this has happened. A complete refreshing install once a year is what I would recommend for anyone who uses their system at my degree of usage, but I follow my own advice rather poorly. I haven't performed any maintenance like this since I purchased my laptop a few years ago.
Being that we are now so interlinked with technology, this all leads me to wonder if there could be an entirely new psychological profile inventory made solely based on a person's ability to organize, attend, adapt, and using time-passing habits through the tedious process of recovering from a computer system crash and other monotonous first world problems: much like the formal stages of dealing with the news of hearing that one is approaching their mortality in a short given time (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It's being affronted by the irony of taking so much lagging time is used to set up things that are supposed to process all the other things in our lives in nanoseconds.
I forgot how long and agonizing this process is, and if I were more prudent I should be given myself more substantial things to multitask at while this was happening, like planning a manned mission to Pluto or something . . .

. . .It's now 3 days later, with one night shift, one migraine, two excruciatingly sore eyeballs, and cruddy weather within that time. I have my system up and running again. I plugged in the old apps I had (actually used), leaving the rest in the digital oblivion to prevent them from cluttering up my hard drive; one of them was probably responsible for this trouble to begin with. I also took advantage of rigging this baby up with the newest version of MS Office: to crawl out of the primordial ooze of what was Office 2007, and start crawling on solid ground with more cloud-capable features provided with Office 365. It's a hell of a jump, and I'm ashamed I waited this long to come to this point to do this enhancement, and I'm thinking more that my crash that forced me in this direction was a blessing in disguise.

I'm so far impressed with the new features. I'm testing Word's capability of uploading my entry directly to my blog, right now. Office 2007 had the same feature, but it calved on me for some reason ages ago, and I just didn't bother coming back to it. I like the fact that I have more formatting options and better correction utilities at my disposal now. Maybe someday I'll manage to actually get creative with them.

That Kind of Day

Today is a long dreary rainy day. It's coming down in sheets now. It's hard to believe that the summer solstice is only a week away. It's the kind of day where one feels obligated to settle down and relax. What it could be is:

1. a homemade soup and bread making while listening to tunes kind of day
2. a blog some crazy ideas kind of day
3. a browse the bookstore kind of day
4. a start reading a new novel kind of day
5. a pencil and puzzle book/sketch pad day
6. a blow the dust off the Wii console and play video games day
7. a cheesy sci-fi/cult comedy movie from Netflix watching afternoon kind of day
8. a read Make, and other such magazines, and dream up of a project kind of day
9. a rewire my sound/home entertainment system kind of day
10. a watch TED talks kind of day
11. a reorganize my playlists and iTunes library kind of day
12. a nap with the dog on the chesterfield kind of day
13. a get my ass to the gym and do some back/core/strength training kind of day
14. a cocktail experimentation/formulation kind of day
15. an embracing one's inner nerd kind of day
16. a learn some more programming kind of day

But that's not the kind of damn day it's going to be. I've only managed to do (a half-assed job of) points 1 and 2. The reality is that this is day eight of a 14 day stretch of work days; I'm feeling so burnt out already, and it's like there has been no way to find any solace. There has been only one night during this time that I haven't slept like crap.

The list I produced is the stuff that I feel like I only have enough energy for. Running usually is a remedy, but for some reason, it has become a greater challenge than usual. I'm trying it today, despite the heavy rain. Lately, on even short distances, I feel like I'm slowly being smothered, with my breathing becoming badly arrested. I'm hoping it's not some kind of seasonal pollen allergy or something. I hope the heavy rain will settle it down if it is, but I'm not optimistic. If it occurs again next time, I think I'll need to see a doctor. The only sort of social leisure I have lined up ahead is a supper after a convention I'm attending next week, but I honestly don't think I'll be up for it if I'm even more drained than I am feeling now.

I found an app to try to deal with this failure in my resilience. It's called SuperBetter. However, I've been slacking in using some time to commit to interface with it. The concept of it is really quite interesting. It will make more sense after watching the TED talk by its developer, Jane McGonigal.

I touched on www.codeacademy.com for a bit. The format of the site is great for anyone wanting to learn some programming. I think I found my substitute for TV, now that I discontinued my cable service.

Viva La Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mother Tongue, Other Tongues

It has not been a very restful weekend. Friday was my only day off, and I used most of it to catch up in doing a lot of neglected little chores and DIY household tasks, which included an emergency plumbing fix. I still don't feel anywhere near being at the better/best state of my physical health yet. My stamina isn't lasting; getting exhausted too easily, and I'm still not getting any refreshing sleep. For this past week, after depressing and angering myself thoroughly with watching too much negative TV news, and other documentaries about some weighty issues, and whenever other frivolous game playing and diversions became too frustrating and boring, I've felt like I've come close to snapping.

Lately, because sickness and uncooperative weather has rendered me so physically inactive, I've been desperate to learn some new skills and tricks to at least keep my brain ticking and exercised by processing some kind of positive novelty. When self-improvement isn't coming quickly enough on the physical level, there are still realms in the mind to work on.

So then, my chosen method of healthful mental stimulation for the week was language acquisition*. I've been testing and drilling myself with an app on my iPhone called Duolingo. It is great for introductory learning of a new language. I've been concentrating on a couple of languages: German and Portuguese. Why German? Because I already know some basic vocabulary of it, and I'd like to progress beyond a beginner's comprehension level (and I know some Germans). Why Portuguese? Because it's just entirely new to me; plus it has enough noticeable cognates in it similar to French and Spanish (which I already know on intermediate levels) to help me grasp it, and feel around it, and intuitively test with it for creating phrases and sentences. Duolingo is great for Western European languages, but I'd like to see something equally compatible for learning non-Latin alphabet languages as easily, like Cyrillic alphabet languages (Russian, Ukrainian), and Kanji (Mandarin, Japanese).

Curiosity and novelty are not the only motivators. Logically, by learning a bit of these extra two languages, a door is a opened a crack to speak with about another additional 300 million people on this globe. For instance, with learning Portuguese, plus coupled with my Spanish, just about 93% of the continent of South America is then a bit more accessible linguistically to me. English, French, and Portuguese are the main colonial protocol languages used for much of Africa**. Learning more German would allow me to be more capable of living in a few of those 20 other countries that are compatible with my idea of progressive, civilized societies if, for some wild reason, I should ever somehow become uprooted, and have to move away from Canada.

I notice, and have to admit, that through my mistakes I'm seeing just how anchored my brain is in the English language, and how much more inflexible it seems to be at learning new ones as I age. Like perhaps for most Anglophones, it is a challenge for me to automatically assign grammatical gender on things. Also, I neither readily think of using accent marks, nor can I instantly twist my mind around figuring out which of all the extra verbal conjugations of these other languages to use correctly. Two articles, one definite and one indefinite (a/n, the) are sufficient for me, versus the five articles in French, six in both Spanish and Portuguese. There are yet comparatively more and complex article forms in the case of German, which are really staggering my mind as I study them.

Online translators have a purpose and place. I have used them to learn more words and grammar, but they are not perfect. Although it's increasingly convenient for me and other Anglophones, that the rest of the world is becoming so much more accommodating and interested/willing to learn and practice English, I also think that it's a bit of a loss as well in terms of finding equal ground in communicating with people. I generally think it's a mark of arrogance, and an attitude of superiority, to expect other people to learn and speak my language when I'm touring, or living as a guest, in their country.

I don't have great expectations about how proficient or fluent I'll be with these two, but gaining a little confidence in having at least some more literacy in getting around in nations with these languages is a bit more comforting. I only wish I had more of the means and opportunity to do so.

*- For me, the true reflection of "intelligence" is the ability to: think systematically and strategically; maintain, retain, and relate a lot of detail from memory; do creative improvisation, and organize. All of these abilities are enhanced and exercised when learning another language.

**- I'm not saying that I'm making a future big plan to ever go back to Latin America, or I'll be stricken with some urge to head to a continent as volatile as Africa is, but never say never.

Entering the Longest Month: Examining Wellness

I'm both disturbed and perturbed greatly about just how much these past few long weeks of idleness and illness have seemed to weaken me. I went running yesterday, the first time since the new year began. Through doing that, I discovered that I'm not 100% recovered from this stupid respiratory bug. My lungs and legs were totally trashed; even the steam bath afterward felt like it was killing me, and I'm still smarting from it all today. It's a shame too, because the nicer weather today would have made for a great day of skiing. As it is though, my current condition dictates that I need to use more time yet to sit still, rest, and heal. I may trek out to visit a bookstore, or the library, or stop for a tall pint somewhere later. But for now, being planted on my chesterfield, with my laptop and the remote control, a pile of books/other reading, some language learning apps, is about as exciting as this lazy Sunday morning is becoming so far. Ella has burrowed herself under my comforter and is snoozing beside me as I write. It's like she already knows that we're not going to be destined for a lot of activity today.

The 2013 Health and Wellness Expo is at Prairieland Park this afternoon. It's close and easily accessible; I could explore that. However, I don't feel like it's worth paying the high admission price for the short amount of time that I would be spending there though because, ironically, I don't feel well/energetic enough to hang around there all day. Noting this paradox pretty much sums up how depressed and under the weather I feel.

"We all believe silly things. What matters is how silly and how many." - Guy P. Harrison, author of the book, 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True.

I also reminded myself that, just like any other trade show, it was more of a nucleus for marketing than for the vendors having real interest for actual "wellness", which made me all the more willing to avoid it. There are some honest, innovative, and practical prevention health oriented vendors and promoters set up there; but I think they are few amongst a whole lot of charlatans there as well trying to pitch their equivalent of snake oil, and other stuff that fits into the realm of pseudo-science and medical quackery. I was in no mood today to be further jaded; overtaxing my already highly skeptical attitude, or wasting any time being on alert status red for exercising caveat emptor in determining which of them were legit.

If I had the time and liberty to throw myself back into the role of a researcher, one thing that might be interesting to do with the people who come to such an event is to present a survey question for everyone to answer. The question would be: "What is your idea/definition of "wellness?" I'm sure the responses would be really varied, but also interesting. Wellness, for me, is a really vague term that I can't assign any one meaning to. All I know is that I seem to have a hell of a hard time trying to find it during the month of February: another reason that some of the answers might shock me seeing that this event is held at this time of the year, during the month that should be designated as National Depression Awareness month here in Canada.

I'd still love to hear answers to that topic question, I welcome listening/reading any that people have to offer.

My Two Cents about Currency

I'm cold-stricken again. I feel totally feeble and deflated of energy. Normally, I'd be trying to combat it with an aggressive treatment of Neo-Citron, but the problem is that its side effects* may be an interference for my procedure with my upcoming ophthalmic appointment. It's bad enough that I'm risking bursting blood vessels in my eyes now with all these violent fits of sneezing, which has happened to me in the past. For now, I'm just restricting myself to using patience, common sense, and the old-fashioned way to rid myself of this bug: rest, wholesome doses of vitamin C, and hot, steamy fluids (soup and tea). There was only enough vigor in me to run out briefly to fetch some of these basic remedies and necessities, and to walk the dog.


My last couple of pennies. I'll probably see if there is any
luck in them and use them for rubbing my scratch lotto tickets.

Today was also my first day of having to get used to making hard currency purchases rounded to the nearest nickel at the shops. I'm actually glad that the federal government and the Royal Canadian Mint saw fit to use the sensible measure to eliminate the circulation of the penny, but I confess that I will miss having them around. I don't have a simple explanation as to why. This has forced me to generally think about the psychology involved in exchanging hard currency.

I'm a consummate debit/credit card user now with most of my transactions. I walk home from work at night a lot, sometimes through and around a dodgy stretch of the neighbourhood. Perhaps mistakenly, I believe that having little or no cash on my person makes me feel like I'd be less of a victim, or I'd have a less severe violation if, God forbid, I ever was held up and robbed. The only reward someone might get if they ever did try to do it is maybe a free coffee from my Starbucks card: the only transaction card in my wallet that isn't PIN protected.

When I'm put in a spot of handling actual legal tender bills and coinage, it makes the acts of earning and spending, buying and selling a lot more visceral and less abstract**, like some real energy is being exchanged. Whenever I gift myself with buying something special, I weirdly feel even more appreciative of it, and even more thrilled and entertained when I spend actual cash for the sake of including something positive and enjoyable in my life. Being more estranged from that actual presence of physical currency now is undoubtedly changing my perception and attitude of it. Whenever actual cash is exchanged, I sometimes get a twinge of a feeling that there's some freedom to haggle a bit, and perhaps a little bit of a thrill of a delinquent hustle is involved somewhere. I believe more people than just myself have this same attitude. That may sound crazy, but OK, let's really test your own thoughts about a given scenario. What would be more of a thrill for you to do if you walked into a place to buy a big ticket item, let's say a car, that you were able to outright afford and pay for in full? Which of these options would you say would be more wildly fun and interesting to do?

Option A: (electronic transfer of funds from your bank)

1. Go to a dealership, respectably dressed, and refreshingly clean, as if to beg them to treat you with respect and dignity
2. Checking out your preferred model, with a polite, yet ho-hum discussion with a salesman about options,
3. You go back to his office, sitting there afterward flipping through page after page of gobble-de-gook of a sales agreement, getting perhaps further suckered into paying for more options before signing it.
4. You're feeling overwhelmed and confused by all the details in the paperwork you are processing, a.k.a. dazzled/blinded with bullshit
5. Ending the day there with an electronic transfer from your bank account and a handshake to close the deal.
6. If you do get the car, with so many clauses and stipulations in the paperwork and payment authorization, the control, power, and leverage in the negotiations seems to be in their hands, not yours.
7. If you don't end up buying anything, the whole event ends up feeling like a frustrating waste of your time.

Option B: (a whack load of cold, hard cash)

1. Go to a dealership, dressed like a total slob, disheveled, and unshaven, and see just much of a schmuck-loser the salesman is going to treat you like in the beginning. Take notice if and how much he is making it look like you are the incarnation of the biggest waste of time that he has ever had.
2. Check out your preferred model you saw advertised, and respectfully ask questions about the options you want. Be polite, and give him no cause to treat you with any further disrespect, but at the same time notice if he is actually listening to you. If he just disregards what you say, or just rolls his eyes in your presence, it's game on baby! Move to the next phase of the experiment.
3. When finished with this initial bit of the spiel, you then back go to his office with him, and as he starts, automatically, trying to check your credit rating, or assumes to start preparing a file for you for financing, then say: "I think I'll just pay cash for this." Then pull out a greasy looking brown paper bag from under your jacket, and start dumping out of it bundles of hundred dollar bills on his desk. Notice especially the radical and immediate shift into behaviour that reflects and denotes acceptance, approval and respect, despite the fact that you look like you slept in a dumpster. It's time to teach this fickle, shallow bastard a lesson. 
4. Count out an amount that's at least three grand less than the amount advertised (or what he's trying to press you for). Put that money back in the bag, close it and keep it on top of his desk. At this time, after a few moments of bewildered staring, he'll no doubt excuse himself, telling you to wait there while he "talks to his manager".
5. After he leaves the office, in secret, remove a sizable bundle from that bag, put the money bag back under your jacket. Pull out from your jacket another identical looking greasy looking brown paper bag filled with the same size and mass of old newspaper. Put that bundle of cash on top of it and close the bag, placing it on the same spot on his desk.
6. The salesman then returns, either to agree with or decline your offer. In either case, you tell him that you've reconsidered: you open the [newspaper] bag (in such a way that only you can see in it) and remove the wad of money and put it in your pocket, close it up, and then make it plain and clear to him that you'll now pay original offer minus whatever the amount was you just removed from the bag. Hell, make it even more interesting and tell him that you want him to throw in another extra couple of mid-scale additional options as well. If he starts blubbering in declining protest, that's when you get crazy on his ass and interrupt him, and boldly (and honestly) assert: "I don't care if you are willing to accept that as a deal or not! I'm planning to leave here without a bag! Whatever is left in that bag is all you are going to get . . .Work on it!"
7. He may stall a bit to call your bluff, or [pretend to] confab with his manager, but if he agrees, be gracious, well-mannered, and thankful (just switch and put the money bag back surreptitiously if that happens***). You sign your ownership papers, and you drive away in your new car as you watch him waving at you; grinning like a cat with a cream flavoured arsehole.
8. If he declines, you just throw up your hands and say: "Well, like I said, I'm leaving here without a bag, and whatever is left in that bag is yours." You then take (the newspaper filled) bag and place in on the showroom floor, dowse the bag with a vile of lighter fluid, set it on fire, and then say "There you go!", and start walking away; laughing and yelling "DANCE, MONKEY!", as you watch him trying to vigorously and desperately stamp out the flames in front of all his peers and co-workers, trying to rescue this fortune.****

So then, honestly, which car buying experience would you find more thrilling and interesting? I don't think you could even be human, or have a pulse, if you chose Option A. My point is that the critical element for making Option B so much more entertaining, and even conducive to getting a better price yourself with more options, is having actual hard currency at play, and the freedom to use a little creativity that electronic transfers and excessively worded sales contracts don't allow. You either got satisfied with a better car for cheaper, or had the pleasure of watching a greedy shithead walk on fire with Option B; so I bet you'd feel like a winner either way. A large amount of actual physical cash never loses its shock value either. Option B is the experiment that the eccentric and devious side of myself would love to make happen if I were rich enough, and knew I could manage to get away with such a stunt with impunity. Security cameras, and more stringent accounting regulations (to curb money laundering) around large cash transactions will probably keep Option B from ever becoming anything implementable, but it was fun as a thought experiment to pass a low-energy kind of day.

I wonder just how much wilder the scene could have been if I actually used Neo-Citron . . .


*- Increased fluid pressure in the eyeball, and blurred vision.
**- The lack of handling actual currency notes and coins, I think, is a big part of why many people are so oblivious about their spending habits, and becoming more prone to getting into serious debt.
***- I bring to your attention that this is strictly mind games, and putting up defense strategy against people who are already trying to dry-hole ream you the minute you walk through their door. . . I am not endorsing theft.
****- Not all car salesmen are pricks, I'd only save and use these tactics for one who evidently is. You aren't even being deceitful. You stated clearly that you are leaving without a bag (you either either leave without a bag of money, or you leave behind a bag of burning newspaper). It could be a useful technicality that could get you off the hook if you ever went to court after this ordeal.  

Entry 100

I'm surprised that this will be the one hundredth entry in this space, so I thought I had better make this one especially meaningful.

In light of what recently happened through this past week, I've been struggling hard trying to figure out and focus on what good is left in this world. I need not add extra commentary about the recent events in Connecticut. The news services are over-broadcasting the story and surrounding issues of it enough as it is, and consequently overwhelming us with more fear and sorrow during a season when we are trying to seek comfort and joy.

Above is a picture of a little baby boy; he's not just any baby boy. Currently, he is one that I have the greatest responsibility of caring for, and the one I am trying hardest to not get any further estranged from. I keep this picture of him with the rest of my family photos on a table in my bedroom, so he is amongst one of the first things I see when I wake up, and one of the last things I see when I go to sleep: as a reminder to stay strong enough to keep on nurturing him.

There were/are a lot of challenges in raising this particular human being for his particular needs, but I generally summarize them all to the following matters:

1. Not doing anything stupid that would lead to injury, or the death of this human being.
2. Not letting him waste his time being too long exposed around senseless, shallow, spiteful, obnoxious, ignorant, arrogant, negative, deluded, destructive people.
3. Trying even harder to not allow him to become like the aforementioned types of people when confronted by such beings.
4. Doing whatever gives him a sense of wonder and value about life, and making allowances to educate him, and allow him to grow for the better.
5. Making sure he wakes up each day with some sense of purpose, or at the very least a productive/mind-stimulating interest.
6. Helping him find valuable moments to laugh, be creative, relax, explore, and play.
7. Making sure he intends and acts in such ways that (ultimately) do more good than harm for himself and others.
8. Keeping him aware that it is ultimately he himself who is responsible for his own happiness and welfare.*
9. Reminding him to be thankful and appreciative when he finds people nice enough to provide acts of kindness for him and the sake of his happiness and welfare.

Those are the basic elements that I would say are essential to keep an individual within the realm of  sanity and mindful of personal responsibility. I'm not saying that I'm terrifically successful, in word or deed, at providing/teaching any one of those things to this fellow. I'm especially bad at teaching him points 2, 3, 6, and 8. However, I haven't found a day yet when all these things were absent from the board.

I suppose most of you who know me are wondering now who that child is, so let me introduce him to you. His name is Brian. That is a photo of me taken when I was 10 weeks old. The point I'm trying to make here is that we all have at least one child, no matter who we are, in our life to take care of. The skill sets that I mentioned apply not only to looking after a newborn life; they apply to taking care of our own grown adult selves as well. It all comes down to the question(s), "How could you ever even dare to harm this (little) person?", or "How do I want to help make this little guy or girl grow up right?" Once we do that, and then realize that we all were once that small, weak, innocent, and vulnerable, we (perhaps) empathize more, become a lot more mindful to do more things to nurture ourselves and others better, and to protect ourselves and others from our own craziness and stupidity, and be less prone to developing into some sort of soulless monster. All homes should have at least one baby picture in them, and they should be meditated on frequently: especially if the baby in the picture is all grown up, living alone and independently, and responsible for (and having some unique stressors for) being one's own sole provider of one's household and livelihood.

Some of you may roll your eyes and laugh and scoff at what I just wrote, but I can't help but to wonder if rampage killers of the likes of Marc Lépine (the Dec 6th, 1989, Montreal École Polytechnique shooter), the teenage psychos who shot up Columbine High School in 1999, James Eagen Holmes (the 2012 Aurora Theatre shootings), Anders Behring Breivik (2011 Oslo bombings/Utøya Island shootings, Norway), and most recently, Adam Lanza (the Sandy Hill Elementary School shooter) could have done what they did had they looked at themselves as children in a photo a little more often and asked themselves those same questions.

*- I have more than enough examples for this child of how a woman/girlfriend/wife isn't a static solution, the pretentiousness involved with success/status/fame aren't solutions, and of how money can't buy your way out of some problems. You will be doomed if you are constantly and desperately relying on any or all of these things for your happiness and welfare.

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.