Confessions:

A. STUFF I HAVE DONE

When I went to Wilfrid Laurier University twenty years ago, there was a fairly extensive network of underground tunnels connecting campus buildings. Much of that network has since been closed off. But back then, there was this one light switch. It controlled the lights for a vast section of tunnel, spanning probably fifty or sixty meters, including around a 90-degree angle. You could flick that switch and cause people you couldn't even see or hear to be plunged into pitch blackness. I used to derive great glee in pulling this prank until my roommate/best friend explained to me (a lot more politely than I deserved, but that was Jason for you) that this behaviour was really assholish. It never occurred to me that I might be putting people in actual danger with that stunt (naïve doesn't even begin to describe my teenage self).

I was never a thief--stealing my mother's Valentine's Day chocolates when I was 8, and punishment for same, permanently cured me of that sin--but I certainly wasn't above...exploiting systemic vulnerabilities. Laurier was full of 'em. There was a phone in the basement of my residence, outside the campus Housing Department....an honest-to-goodness rotary-dial phone. It was supposed to be used by students looking for LOCAL housing...except I discovered one night that you could make long distance calls on it. My phone bill was running me $300+ a month at the time...I never realized how many friends I had until they scattered to the four winds, and calling the four winds with the phone in my dorm room  was seriously expensive. So I started using that 'free' phone. Not often, but often enough. One friend of mine was attending school in Winnipeg, which was ideal: that city being an hour behind meant I could call an hour later, when the area was most likely to be deserted...
Surprisingly, that glitch wasn't fixed for three or four months.
There used to be a per-page charge to use the computer lab's printer. I thought this was ridiculous--I was already paying seventeen hundred bucks a year for professors to read textbooks to me, and I had to buy the textbooks, at hideously inflated prices--so I devoted myself to finding a way around it. Found it, too: a little hack in whatever ancient version of WordPerfect I was using that told the printer to let my document pass unnoticed. I probably saved myself close to a hundred dollars with that bit of detective work.
Long after I dropped out (which has a confessional post all to itself), I successfully posed as a student to get at the one thing I actually still valued out of that place: a high-speed Internet connection. I spent many hours learning enough Unix Korn shell programming to graft a second, mostly hidden layer onto my girlfriend's account. The program I wrote topped out at over six thousand lines of code, was activated by pressing K at startup, and was only detectable if you went looking for it. (Cathy knew about it, of course). In hindsight I probably should have taken computer science instead of that silly English degree. I mean, sure, I can say "would you like fries with that?" twenty-seven different ways, but I can't honestly tell you I dropped out of university with any skill I didn't have going in. I'd read a little more widely, is all. A huge waste of money and time and...myself.

I once dumped a girl I cared about a few nights before prom. Not because she wouldn't "put out"...because I was afraid she might.

I've hurt other people, too, in ways too personal to write and too humiliating to recall. I was not a good person in my teens and twenties. Life was all about me. I may have swung a little too far the other way nowadays--it's all about you, now--but I consider that a just penance. Especially since making other people happy is the best, most lasting way I have found to make myself happy. Selfish altruism, it's a gas.

B. STUFF I CAN NOT DO

Well, let's get the big one out of the way first: I can't drive. This is probably the only thing on this cherry-picked list of Ken-deficiencies that I have absolutely no intention of ever correcting. Never mind the phobia, I could maybe overcome that. There seems little point to, though, what with Google driverless cars already on the streets. I've come this far without a license. It impacts my life in countless ways, not all of them bad--for one thing, life in the bike lane is considerably less stressing than life in a traffic jam seems to be.

There is a nearly endless list of machinery I have no experience with--I won't bother with that, it's too embarrassing.

I can't blow bubbles. It doesn't matter how many times people try to show me what to do with my tongue. I can do lots of things with my tongue...but I can't blow bubbles.

I can't dance. I'm the male version of Kate Miller Heidke, here:



My problem here is stiffness: I have no flexibility, and that's an unavoidable consequence of my having been born very premature in 1972. Musically, I'm fine...I've been composing stuff since I was four years old and I have a very good sense of rhythm. I can break down any beat into whatever grouping you want. I can, if I don't think about it, drum out polyrhythms. But if I try to translate that into whole-body movements, I become a slave to that beat, and I look like a rusty robot.
Alcohol cleans that right up. Unfortunately, alcohol has other side effects like removing every inhibition I have, including ones I really kinda need.

I recently discovered I CAN bake simple stuff. This makes me very happy, because I had convinced myself I couldn't.
 There are so many things I can't do simply because I haven't tried. I'm working through some of them lately, at a slow pace because every little accomplishment is really a big one for me. I take it easy because I don't like making it hard. But with each accomplishment my life gets a little richer.

C THINGS I HAVE THOUGHT

I'm told that most people have imagined killing another human being at some point. Not me. Not once. Not ever. There have been people I've viscerally disliked, don't get me wrong. My preferred solution for those people is to avoid them, and if that's not possible, to erect mental walls around myself and avoid them that way.

I have thought about killing myself...but then, I think everybody has had that thought flit through their head  at some point.  It's been about sixteen years since I had that particular thought. When I was a teenager it was a much more powerful thought. I never attempted suicide, though: in my worst depression, I was convinced nobody would notice or care, so there was no point.

(I feel the polar opposite of that now. I have more to live for than I've ever had, and each day brings me such joy...even the bad days have plenty of redeeming qualities to them).

I used to be racist. I still am, at little, but I think everyone's a little bit racist. It was once a pretty pervasive mindset: if you didn't look at least a little like me and didn't talk at least a little like me, then your thoughts were probably different from my thoughts, and that made me uneasy, as if aliens were all around  me. I still feel irrational distaste when people speak in languages I'm not fluent in while looking at me. Is that racist? Maybe a little.

I was once a homophobe, and that's been completely eradicated, so much so that I can't even remember why I felt that way. I can't justify it, I can't even get in the head of someone who is homophobic anymore. It doesn't compute.

I have thought, and often still think, that charities exist mostly to bilk money out of people and there is no real intent to cure cancer, for instance. There's no money in it. I think Big Pharma would be ever so much happier if they could find a way to manage cancer, to keep it just in check but only if you take this here very expensive pill three times a day. Sometimes I'm pretty sure that's what they're really trying to do, that there might even be a cure for cancer already found and what they're doing now is finding a way to make it work only a little bit...
I don't generally believe in conspiracy theories, but I've seen far too many examples of people's basic humanity being shot out the window when vast sums of money show up to discount that one.