I'm An Adult Now...

I've all my wisdom teeth
Two up top, two beneath
And yet, I'll recognize
My mouth says things that aren't so wise...
The Crash Test Dummies, "Comin' Back Soon" (The Bereft Man's Song)


Well, actually, all I ever had was the one wisdom tooth, on the lower right. And it came out yesterday. Which is when I meant to do this blog, but between the aftermath of the knockout drugs they pumped in and (ahem) the pain, all I felt like doing was sleeping.

I'll spare you the details, since odds are near certain you've either had it done yourself--up to four times--or at least know someone who's been through it. I will say this, however: we need to bring back capital punishment. Not just for cop-killers, mass murdering scumbags and telemarketers, but for those people who, upon hearing you're going in for an operation no matter how comparatively trivial, proceed to shout out every horror story they've ever heard, or God forbid experienced.

My sister had her wisdom teeth out and her jaw got infected. She missed work for a week and a half.

I was wondering why my jaw was so damn sore...turns out the teeth crumbled and they had to hammer 'em out. Split the gums and everything.

My cousin--Gregor Samsa, have you heard of him?--had his wisdom teeth out. The next morning, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

I had to run the same gauntlet when I had my vasectomy. At least this time the effing anaesthetic took.

I could also do without the people who go the other way. Yeah, I had my wisdom teeth out at ten and was back to work by eleven. Of course, I only realized at noon they'd also removed all my insides and replaced them with cybernetic components. Pain? We doan NEED no steekin' pain, seenhor.

Hey, they told me take two days off. What was I supposed to do, say no? Besides, I've been required to be at work every Saturday since the start of the year (and every fourth Sunday, to boot). Getting a weekend off...it's like pulling tooth.

So now I'm sitting here wisdomless, having just finished gumming some scrambled eggs to death, and coping with the pain of it all. Oh, I won't lie and say it's agony. But put it this way: I'm glad there was only one of those things to come out. I don't know how I'd cope with four.

I used to think that if my wisdom teeth were still around in my mid-to-late twenties, they weren't coming out at all. That was until Eva had hers out last year...and she was older then than I am now. Regardless, I long looked upon that operation as the final gateway between the land of children and grownups. And now, I'm through it: three days after my 36th birthday.

Birthdays--they're like straws on a camel's back, you know? I've never felt their accumulating weight until the last couple of years. This year, I must confess to having gone through a wee funk ahead of time, a mini-depressive episode that lasted about a week and, in hindsight, surprised the hell out of me. I mean, for many years I've been lambasting the culture of youth that pervades the world, and insisting I'm not afraid of growing old. It beats the alternative, right?

So it was something of a shock to have found myself obsessively examining my mental age-markers. These things didn't just suddenly appear...even as a young child I always felt much more comfortable with adults, and easily twenty years older than my calendar age. My musical tastes (some of them, anyway) mirror those of your grandfather and like a true old fogey, I've cultivated an ignorance of popular culture that has served me well.

But over the past ten years or so, it's not just that I'm getting older: it's that the world around me seems to be getting younger. I honestly believe my generation was the last (at least for some time) that was in a hurry to grow up. These days, it seems as if more and more people are living with their parents into their twenties (or even longer); hopping from job to job and relationship to relationship, lacking direction, lacking commitment. Indeed, commitment and its twin term responsibility are now baaaaad words.

"Kidults" or "adultescents" rationalize their behaviour (and have it rationalized for them by parent-enablers and social workers). They say I've got to find myself and marriage is a trap and it takes money, lots of money, to start a family. Also what's the hurry? Maybe...someday...

Of course, they'll rarely acknowledge the truth and say things like I'm afraid. Or I'm gonna live for me as long as possible before I start living for someone else.

Oh, I'm not putting myself on any kind of pedestal: I was incredibly immature when I was a teenager and I still exhibit traces of that immaturity even today. The difference is, I'm ashamed of it. "Kidults" revel in it.

I should add here that I know many teens who are more adult than most adults--the cult of "kidult" doesn't look like it will claim everyone. But still, I find it a tad worrisome that so many people run from the very things my generation used to run towards.

Anyway, I kind of digressed there...I imagine there's a blog post, or a whole series of them, that I could write on "Peter Pan Syndrome" if I didn't find it so depressing.

You know when I first realized how old I really am? When the Paris Hilton sex video was suddenly all over the Internet. 2003, that would have been. Suddenly, seemingly overnight, practically everybody I know had seen it or was at least very interested in seeing it and knew where to find it. Me, I wouldn't have known Paris Hilton from the Hilton in Paris. (I still wouldn't, by the way, and consider this to be but one emblem of my sanity.) Furthermore, the idea of watching some bootleg sex tape held zero interest for me.

This phenomenon has repeated itself countless times in the ensuing years. It seems there's a new Internet craze every day, and despite being on the Internet every day, I never hear about any of them until six or eight months have passed. It makes me wonder what sites people are trolling. Am I missing something on my Google homepage, perhaps? Some line at the bottom that says "click here for today's pointless excrescence of pop culture"?

Back in the long ago 80s, before most of the people I work with were born (yike, there's an ageist thought), I used to listen to American Top 40 with Casey Kasem every week without fail. (Now it's the Vinyl Cafe with Stewart McLean on CBC Radio: like the Pursuit of Happiness says, I'm an adult now). These days, I look at the music charts in the newspapers and find I don't know at least three quarters of the artists and have never heard, oh, ninety percent of the songs. I remember the first time I saw "f." in front of some artist's name on the charts, as in

#6. Kill All Tha Muhfuhs M.C. Gangsta Baggypantz f. Lil' Skank

It took me weeks to figure out the "f." stood for "featuring", and when that revelation burst upon me, I reacted with contempt. Christ, I thought. Not only do these songs have no melody whatsoever, they're laced with profanity and they degrade women first and the rest of humanity second, women are lining up to be "featured" in them. And, Lil' Skank, I thought, if you're trying to abbreviate "little", the apostrophe goes after the first l.

It all makes me think Pink...

I still look in the mirror now and again and wonder what I'm going to do when I grow up. Then I reflect that I haven't been growing up for some time now; I've been growing out instead. By which I mean my perspectives have been broadening. (Yeah, so has my gut, smartass.) Still a long ways to go, of course: I intend to keep living until I'm dead, and who knows, maybe even after that.

What does it mean to be Canadian?

We Canadians live in a blind spot about our identity. We have very strong feelings about who we aren't but only weak ones about who we are. We're passionate about what we don't want to become but oddly passive about what we should be.--John Cruickshank

This question's been vexing me a little more than usual of late. It's always in the back of my mind; one of the stock definitions of a Canadian is someone who frets about his national identity. When's the last time you heard a resident of Spain musing on what it means to be Spanish?

Complicating matters, I belong to that tribe of people known as "proud Canadians". Many people, including many Canadians, believe my tribe doesn't exist...or if it does, it shouldn't. National pride is seen as a quintessentially American, and therefore distasteful, trait. Meanwhile, my tribe numbers in the millions. I'd suspect most people who hold Canadian citizenship are, on some level, proud to. Our pride is a quiet, measured thing. It lacks Yankee exuberance; it need not be shown publically to be deeply felt.

This bout of navel-gazing was first triggered by this weekend's NHL All-Star Game, or more specifically, the "SuperSkills" competition the night before. Eva, who doesn't particularly enjoy hockey, likes to watch this competition, and I've tuned in every year it's been held. This year, for the first time, they concluded the night with a "Breakaway Challenge": a quasi-shootout in which each attempt at a goal was judged for style and creativity. Basically, it was a license to show off.

I say "quasi-shootout" because, while hockey players are certainly encouraged to be creative, one thing they are never encouraged to do is show off, or show up other players. In this as in much else, hockey perfectly mirrors the Canadian character: we are an exceptionally tolerant nation, but something about showboating rubs us the wrong way.
And so we saw player after player break down the ice, most of them staying within the bounds of accepted shootout protocol. It finally dawned on the final two players that the whole point of this exercise was to hot-dog, and so they tried it. You could read their discomfort just below the goofy smile on their faces. It got me to thinking: the Canadian character isn't as modest as it appears to an outsider. We consider ourselves damned special, thank you very much. What makes us virtually unique in terms of national character is that we don't think ourselves any more special than anyone else.
As proof, we invite the world to come share the Canadian experience. Your colour, class or creed means nothing: all that matters is your willingness to accept that basic tenet: you're special, damned special...but no more special than anyone else.
We judge our celebrities harshly if they act like celebrities, if they bask in their fame and good fortune. We hated Brian Mulroney in no small part because of his perceived arrogance; most of us accepted or even adored Jean Chretien because he was so successful at keeping his arrogance (of which he had at least a Mulroneyful) so thoroughly masked, so utterly submerged beneath the facade of le p'tit gars de Shawinigan.
There's a Crown Royal commercial extolling "the noble spirit": long live the player who knows that an assist is worth as much as a goal. That's as Canadian as it gets.

As I write, the Toronto public school board is considering the establishment of an "Afrocentric" high school. This initiative has been dogged by controversy at every turn. Proponents note that fully half of black students in Toronto either fail or drop out, and surveys show they would be more engaged with an Afrocentric curriculum. Those against say that this is exactly the sort of thing Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, among many others, fought long and hard to abolish.

I see both sides of this...sort of. Actually, after a great deal of thought, I see one side and credit good intentions on the other.
What exactly is an Afrocentric curriculum? I can see how that term would apply in history class and in the literature component of an English course...and that's about it. How "Afrocentric science" differs from "Eurocentric science" mystifies me. Is phys. ed. any different if the students have more melatonin in their skin? How about mathematics? Does 2+2 equal something else in certain parts of the world?
Okay, history and literature. I'd be the first to admit both were whiter than sour cream when I went to high school. By the logic of those surveys, the overwhelmingly white students in my classes should have been fully engaged.
They weren't. Not unless they found the material intrinsically interesting. And when they did, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with the race of the people under discussion. (In fact, one of the few novels I can remember many of my fellow students really enjoying was To Kill a Mockingbird.)

I understand the objective here: to get more black students succeeding in school. I'm just not sure an Afrocentric curriculum would achieve that goal. Certainly having more black teachers to serve as role models would help. But an all-black student body? Isn't the whole idea to get the kid out of the ghetto?

A particularly Canadian compromise I'd suggest would be to broaden the curriculum for everyone. Certainly our geography and history courses could do with a little reality injection: the world is, after all, round. As for literature, I know of no better way to get into someone's head than through a well-written book. Interesting plots and characters have universal appeal.

Bringing people together. That's what education is about. And that's what being Canadian is about, too.

Naivete

I'm naive, sometimes. Actually, a lot of the time. On matters big and small.

Matters small: the Writers' Guild strike still all but paralyzing television. It's hardly affected my viewing habits (the Leafs still lose two or three times a week, and news still happens), but many people are missing their favourite shows. Including, until recently, all those late-night shows airing long after I've retired: Letterman, Leno, and the like.
That surprised me. These people have writers?
The Sunday edition of the Toronto SUN prints what purports to be the funniest excepts of the week from each of these shows. They rarely elicit more than a chuckle (if that) from me, and I think my wife has laughed once in seven years of Sundays. Now I find out that Letterman, Leno, Colbert et al can't even claim this dreck as their own intellectual property; it rightly belongs to writers the names of which you never hear. What I want to know is: if none of these late-night hosts are smart enough to write their own material, why are they being paid millions of dollars?
(Because they're actors, Ken. Just actors.) Yeah, but people are actually tuning in to these shows to find out what's going on in the world. I find it actually rather frightening that at some point, somebody had a brainwave. "You know what newscasts need? More cynicism!" And that other people agreed.

Naive. I have this naive belief that honesty is the best policy. Having been a chronic liar in my childhood and having had every last lie of mine found out eventually, I've come around to thinking that the truth shall set you free.
Except when it doesn't. I naively put all my cards on the table when we went to adopt kids and the table collapsed. I watch in election after election as people do everything possible to avoid telling the truth, even if it means telling blatant lies. And these people get elected. It's the people who speak straight that get punished for it.
Why is that? Because people don't want to hear the truth if it's bad. See, I don't think like that, myself. I'd rather hear the worst possible news than no news at all, and I certainly don't want it sugar-coated. It doesn't take long for the underlying bitter taste to register, all the more bitter for the ersatz sweetness.

Honesty may make the best policy, but it makes the worst politics.

Matters large: At work the other day, I got into a rather heated three-sided debate on privacy issues specifically RFID microchipping. I found it hard to keep an even keel. On one side, I was facing a man who seems to believe in every last conspiracy theory out there ("The Illuminati caused 9/11! I saw it on the Web!") On the other side was a person whom until that point, had never revealed her fundamentalist Christian beliefs. (At one point, she blurted out "oh, why should we listen to you? You don't even believe in the Bible!")
Anyone who's read more than, say, ten posts of this blog can just guess my internal reaction to that.
My position is quite simple, really. Some would probably call it naive. It's this: we microchip our pets because we care about them. We don't microchip our kids because...why, exactly?
("Because our kids have souls!" shouted the fundamentalist. "It's in Revelations! It's the Mark of the Beast!")
("Because the government can track your kids everywhere they go!" shouted the Conspiracy Theorist.)
Knee jerk reaction: It's Revelation, no "s", and why should I believe anyone who doesn't get that simple fact right? And...if there is such a thing as a "soul" (something I personally do believe, but I can argue both sides at will), who says animals don't have 'em? You? Oh, then it must be true.

Ken, beset on both sides, really needed a few extra hours and a captive audience. Because I have read Revelation, and researched it extensively. As I said not too long ago, the Christian people I hung around with when I professed that faith were obsessed with three things: Genesis, Revelation, and sex, especially gay sex. (And no, smartass: I didn't research all three of those things, only what the Bible said about them.)
A quick and dirty summary of theories about the Mark of the Beast can be found here, for those who are interested. You'll note that a RFID chip is merely one theory of a great many, and one of the more recent theories to boot. The fact is nobody really knows for sure what's being referred to here...which puts it on a par with much of the rest of Scripture, incidentally. I wouldn't put my money on the interpretation of the Left Behind folks, myself.
As for the government tracking my kids, if I had any: well, yeah, that's kind of the point. Should they become lost or kidnapped, it would certainly be nice if agents of the government (also known as "police officers") could track them down. As I said, we do it to our pets without a second thought.

"But what gives somebody the right to spy on you?" said the Conspiracy Theorist the next day, after tempers had cooled.
Now this I had (naively) never considered, and I told him so. I've thought hard about it since, though, and now see the source of my blind spot: I've never framed this as a "rights" issue--perhaps because I've never recognized "privacy" as a right...didn't your parents ever barge into your bedroom when you were a kid? "Privacy", to me, is merely a courtesy...and courtesies are not obligatory, particularly when there is a larger issue (such as safety) at stake.

"But the media work hard to engender a culture of fear, so that people can be controlled!"

On this you'll get no argument from me. (Man, do people in a debate ever hate it when you agree with them. It throws them right off stride.) I have no doubt that people are living in fear, and most of their fears are practically baseless. But not all of them. You can't possibly tell me pedophiles are a media invention, for example. If there's a pedophile living in your neighbourhood (and I'm sad to say it: no matter where you live, there probably is), does that mean you shouldn't leave the house? Of course not. But it does mean you should be aware of your surroundings, you should be streetproofed...and, should the unthinkable happen, you should be protected, say by means of a simple RFID chip.

If that makes me naive, I'm glad to be.

Well, this is a first.

Lately--over the past couple of years or so--I increasingly find myself starting books and not finishing them.
I used to think this was heresy, only slightly more defensible than the grave sin of skipping to the back of the book to see how it ends. But I'm older now. There comes a point in any novel where I lift myself out of the story and ask myself, "Do I care?" And quite often now, I don't.
A slow-moving plot doesn't faze me; in fact, some of my favourite books meander along at a snail's pace. All I need is one character whose fate concerns me, one way or another.

But in all my reading life, I've never been confronted with a situation where I identify more with the villains than the heroes. Such is the case with The Fourth Realm, by John Twelve Hawks.

The first installment of the trilogy, The Traveller, was quite entertaining in a Matrix-meets-1984 kind of way. In the novel, governments are portrayed as unwitting puppets of a vast, shadowy organization called "The Tabula" or "The Brethren", whose goal is Jeremy Bentham's Virtual Panopticon on a worldwide scale: constant surveillance of every citizen on earth. Our heroes, the "Travellers", seek to subvert the Tabula by peaceful means; their allies and protectors, the "Harlequins", are considerably more violent.

John Twelve Hawks is quite the enigma: publically, very little is known about him--in fact, nobody seems to know if that's his real name. He claims to live "off the Grid", by which he means his existence is as untraceable as he can make it. Supposedly he communicates via satellite phone, doesn't own a television...and yet he has a website, a rather spectacular website. I smell a publicity stunt.

Amidst the quasi-Buddhist cosmology and mysticism in this series, there is plenty of meat about the "culture of fear" (so necessary for control), and the free and easy way so many people hand over aspects of their freedom to government and corporations. If you believe the novel, or the material on Twelve Hawks' website, the technology necessary for total survellance is not very far off. The more you read into this series, the more disquieted you are supposed to become.

And yet I found myself, more and more, welcoming the idea of a virtual Panopticon. This is not a new sentiment with me. I once mounted a spirited defense of Big Brother in front of my Grade Ten English class. People thought me nuts then; people still think I'm nuts now.

I hasten to add that even then, I conceded that "Big Brother" was a grossly perverted version of a fundamentally sound (to my mind) philosophy. And I was eventually wrestled to the intellectual mat by the repeated assertion that, given Big Brother technology, Orwell's dystopian vision is all but inevitable. It's much like Communism that way. From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs is a beautiful precept that always seems to be distorted to evil ends. Here's another: What would Jesus Do? That one almost always magically morphs into What Would I Do If I Were Jesus?

Robert J. Sawyer, in his excellent Neanderthal Parallax, presents a society in which each citizen wears what's called a Companion. Your Companion implant records everything you see, say and do, sending it all to a vast, ultrasecure database called an alibi archive. Your alibi archive records are accessible to you at any time, and to the authorities only when you have been accused of a crime. Of course, there are those who choose to leave their Companions wide open to public viewing 24/7: called Exhibitionists, each of them wears silver at all times (so you know who they are) and each has a devoted cult following...the ultimate reality show. But these people aside, your Companion/alibi archive link is yours alone.
The benefits of such an approach ought to be self-evident. Crime is virtually unheard of (serious crime, in this society, is punished by sterilization of the offender and anyone sharing fifty percent of his or her genes). Any crime that is committed is easily solved; framing someone for a crime is almost impossible. After a few generations, the very idea of criminality is almost expunged--what would be the point, when you know you're going to be found out? No one ever goes missing; your Companion functions as something like an ultra-deluxe Blackberry device to help you solve problems and instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere.

This is sort of an anti-Fourth Realm kind of series, positing the idea that "total information awareness" is not necessarily a bad thing. It's also one of probably very few novels ever written that takes this view...which happens to be mine.

I have always believed that the desire for privacy is, on some level, kind of bizarre. I mean, what are you doing that you're afraid somebody might see? The only non-criminal acts I can think of that people want total privacy for tend to be sexual. Masturbation, for instance. While I'm not arguing for giant public masturbation sessions, let's get real: anyone who claims to have never masturbated is lying. Where's the shame in something so common? In a sane world, catching somebody masturbating would induce no awkwardness...it wouldn't even rate mentioning.

Freedom? We're all prisoners in some way, not of government or some organization acting behind the scenes, but of ourselves. We're slaves to convention, to time, to the almighty dollar sign. Freedom is a state of mind: like all states of mind, it exists independant of external surroundings. This is a lesson most of the human race has yet to learn. Once we do learn this lesson, it will be understood that freedom can not be bought and sold, taken or given away.

This is where I think John Twelve Hawks has it wrong. He's crafted a world where there's lots of freedom from, and imbued every "right-thinking" person in it with the desire for loads more "freedom to". Given the choice, I'll take freedom from every time. Maybe that makes me an odd duck, a traitor to the human race. It also makes it very difficult to finish this book.

"First, you give a guy oral sex..."

So I'm reading an article in the National Post the other day--for which there does not seem to be an online link, so you're going to have to trust me on this--detailing youth culture today, specifically the widespread practice of "hooking up". This article scared the bejesus out of me and made me so very glad I'm not a parent, especially of a young woman.
The quote that stayed with me, as much as I tried to will it away, was from a girl in grade six. She was interviewed in the presence of her mother (I need to stress that, her mother was in the room) and asked about how girls at her school meet boys. "First you give a guy oral sex," she answered breezily, "and then you decide if you like him or not."
Her mom then offered to serve cookies.

I like to think I'm somewhat hard to shock. I also like to think I'm nobody's prude. But in the name of the nothing that's holy any more, that revelation shook me up a great deal.

The New York Times published a rather ambiguous article a couple of years ago regarding "rainbow parties". These are supposedly oral sex parties where each girl attending wears a different shade of lipstick. Both the Times and Wikipedia seem to assert these "parties" are not exactly common, while acknowledging that yes, they do occur. The research I've done into the matter has suggested that while there has undoubtedly been some media hype at work, oral sex is increasingly part and parcel of being a teenager...and the concept of "dating" is either unknown or seen as hopelessly antiquated.
One of the sad ironies (to my adult mind, at least) of this pervasive "hook-up" culture is that it seems to be perfectly fine, indeed expected, to engage in all manner of intercourse...but holding hands in public is seen as taboo.

How did feminism lead women to this, I wonder? Is this simply women imitating the worst behaviours of men, having sex without commitment? Do young women relish or even recognize the undoubtable power they do have over young men, even from what appears to be a subservient position? I'd suggest most of them don't. Most of them, I'd imagine--if they're not drunk--are trying to deal with a maelstrom of emotions..."do I like this guy? does he like me? what will my friends say in the morning? what will his friends say in the morning?"
And I'd also suggest something similar is probably going through the minds of most of the guys, thought you'd never get any of them to admit it. Contrary to popular belief, us men have feelings too. We're taught to suppress them, disown them, but you can't eliminate them.

You'd think there's entirely too much sexual education going on, for this sort of thing to become normal. Renowned feminist Naomi Wolf suggests here that, in fact, there is too little. Or rather, the wrong kind: "

Women learn almost nothing about female arousal and orgasm," while the male side of pleasure is covered...If you're a woman, did you learn about pregnancy, chlymydia, AIDS, gonorrhea, herpes, separating sores and leprosy? (laughter) So you learned about all the disgusting and scary things that could happen to you if you had sex, right? But did learn anything about pleasure?

From here she makes the leap that women end up feeling ashamed of the sexual feelings they have:

What makes it possible to find some sort of release is to get drunk and have sex with someone you don't know, because if you are conscious and not drunk then you have to be thinking things like -- Do I like this guy?, Is this the right guy?" Wolf added, "If you're conscious and taught to feel so ashamed about your sexuality, all of this anxiety will kick in when you're in a sexual situation, which is so overwhelming that it's easier to get sex with alcohol, is pretty much what it comes down to for a lot of women.

While I can follow the logic chain here, I suspect most parents--if they accept sexual education at all--would rather it didn't mention much about pleasure, female or male. I tend to think women had a great deal more power even a decade ago, when sex was withheld until the guy met several preliminary standards.

Wolf also links the "hookup to my personal bugaboo, everyone's supposed lack of time. You're too busy, she says, for romance, for cuddling under a blanket and looking up at the stars, for reading and writing love poetry...but you're not too busy to go out and get drunk Saturday night and see what happens.

Ask any group of teenagers about dating, and you're bound to get a host of derogatory comments in return. "Dating's for geeks." "If he gets all couply, I'm outta here." "I'm not looking for needy chicks". So you've got your hookups, your friends "with benefits", and maybe a relationship as your parents would have recognized the term--but that's unlikely, and probably a long way off. Dating's so restrictive. Increasingly you hear teens and tweens talking about dating the way single comedians dismiss marriage. (Russell Peters: "I love women too much... If you love women, and then you get married, you just love woman.")

Hell, I used to think like that myself...until I got married.

Believe it or not, this kind of pseudo-dating behaviour is nothing new. The sexual component has been ramped up considerably--not a surprise in a culture as sex-saturated as ours--but social promiscuity was all the rage in the 1930s and 40s, when dancing with the same boy all evening marked you as a loser. Today, of course, each member of the Facebook generation has literally hundreds of "friends" and is in constant connection with any number of people at any given time. Couple that with the dramatic loosening of sexual constraints and "hooking up" is the inevitable result.

When you talk about teens and sex, morals come into play. Social conservatives reject outright the idea that each individual charts his or her own moral course, that Britney's views on what's acceptable might differ from her mother's. I don't question hookup culture on moral grounds--I try never to do that sort of thing. I merely observe that, from the girls' point of view, this doesn't resemble in any way the ideal that women have worked so hard to achieve. And I question whether it's possible for teenagers and young adults to move seamlessly into monogamous marriage--which is still seen as the goal to which many aspire--after years of no-strings-attached sex.
What of the future? The implications of hookup culture suggest term marriages, a rampant divorce rate, and further fragmentation of society...but we could just as easily see the girdle snap back, if it's collectively decided the present culture is ill. In the meantime, parents of young girls, you might want to sit your offspring down and have a heart-to-heart about hooking up. I wouldn't mention the health aspect if I were you (that never sinks in with teenagers, who can't seem to think past Friday night). Better to dwell on the emotional hurt that is almost certain to result from hooking up with a guy, wanting more...and not getting it.

On this long weekend that isn't...

I hope all you people out there are enjoying your long weekend. If you can find it in your heart, please spare a thought for those less privileged...those of us in the retail industry, by and large.

As I wrote a couple of years ago, this one doesn't count. Pretty much every store is open this Monday, for reasons that escape me.
For the most part I love living in Canada and consider this country to be one of the world's finest. But that doesn't mean it's perfect, and one of the ways it falls woefully short of perfection is its paucity of paid holidays. We just don't get enough of 'em. Not only do we have to go all the way from New Year's Day to Easter without a break, we only get two real holiday weekends in calendar summer.
Business types fret about our declining productivity vis-a-vis the United States, and occasionally you hear about our deficient standard of living (everywhere but in the Calgary-Fort McMurray corridor, where the average income is ten percent higher than America's average). I just want to slap these people senseless. So what if people here in Canada are much more likely to buy a Civic or a Corolla over an Accord or a Camry? Our smaller cars are better for the environment, especially given the distances many of us drive. (I know, I know, commuting is evil...but we have counties in Ontario the size of some U.S. states, and our country is so vast we usually measure distance in driving time.)
And it's not as if compacts and subcompacts have tramp chairs or something. Our Echo is quite comfortable, even over long drives.
There is an unhealthy emphasis, in my opinion, on materials over experience and environment when we rank standards of living. I could easily live in a double-wide trailer, so long as the view out its window included water. Most of the "stuff" I have I don't need and wouldn't miss overmuch if suddenly I didn't have it. This attitude is utterly foreign in many areas of the U.S., where, let's not forget, the first order of business post 9/11 was to spend! spend! spend! "or the terrorists win".
Debt is now a status symbol, not just in the United States but increasingly here in Canada, too. When did this happen, exactly, this going out in public with your financial fly down and bragging about how well you're hung? Let me tell you something, when the interest rates start to go up a lot of people will find themselves well and truly hung.

...And they will go up, trust me. The recent volatility in the stock market is a precursor of things to come: indeed some economists are forecasting that recession is not just possible but imminent. Granted, the same economists have been forecasting imminent recession for years now, and that wolf hasn't shown. But they keep on about it not out of some perverse desire to frighten, but because much of the economy, particularly in the U.S., is built on sand. Don't think them insane just because they natter on about insanity.

It may appear that I've wandered far away from where I started this post. Not so much. I work in retail, an industry that's inextricably tied to the wider economy. When food prices soar, disposable income (already at a premium) is reduced even further, an ill economic wind. But I'd argue that we could all do with a little less spending and a hell of a lot more saving. I won't mind: I work in a discount grocery store...my job is fairly recession-proof.

No, I'll go further: I'd like to see us redefine the economy. I'd like to see a decline in productivity (within reason) as cause for celebration, not alarm. In France, all workers are guaranteed 30(!) paid holidays a year. How many days are guaranteed in the United States? Zero. And in Canada, while at least we get some paid vacation, it's nowhere near what France enjoys.

Why? The article linked above makes a convincing case that it's because of rampant consumerism. People may claim to highly value their time off, but their actions show they're more concerned with one-upping their neighbours: bigger house, bigger SUV, bigger wide-screen TV...For that, they need money, and to get money they need to work. A lot. The average American male works 100 hours more a year than his father did; the average female, 200 hours more a year than her mother. The entire culture is geared around spending ever-increasing sums of money: it is widely reported, for instance, that it costs over a quarter of a million dollars to raise a single child from birth to age 18. There are families that barely make that much money in eighteen years, yet they manage.

If we really valued our time as we claim to, we'd have no problem, for instance, taking a 20% cut in pay in return for a three-day weekend every week. Nearly all of us could save 20% of our monthly expenses if we were honest with ourselves.

The coming market correction will restore some sanity to the economy. How's about we restore some sanity to our lives?

Hey, Revolution! Wait Up!

I have this perverse streak in me that prevents me from enjoying popular things, simply on the grounds that they are popular. The more popular they get, the more I'm likely to dig in my heels. This usually means you'll find heel marks in the technology sand as I'm dragged into the future. Where Tomorrow Beach intersects with the Ocean of Popular Culture, that's where those heel marks are most pronounced. Oh, I'll do things, buy things, in my own good time, for my own good reasons. I don't consider the fact that millions of other humans are doing something to be sufficient reason unto itself for me to join in. Commit suicide, goes the old saying. Ten billion lemmings can't be wrong.
Examples? Well, J.K. Rowling had published three books about a certain boy wizard before I'd deigned to read even one. I haven't seen so much as a single episode of--well, you name the popular show. House, say. Survivor. (Although I heard somewhere the ratings on that are starting to tank, and I'm fiercely grateful for the increase in humanity's collective IQ that portends). American (Canadian, British, Uzbekistani) Idol . Grey's Anatomy. And so on.
I only recently got an mp3 player, having poo-pooed them in the past. I'm still kind of iffy on cell phones, even though we have one of those now, too.
Of course, I'm as big a Harry Potter fan as the next man, now...although I still kind of wish I'd held off until, say, this July before I dove headfirst into that particular pool, if only so I could have read all the books in succession without these annoying year or more gaps. Television? I might watch House, after the masses have moved on to something else--I've nothing against the show itself other than its absurd popularity. But you'll never catch me in front of Survivor, not until it has something to do with actual survival. Nor any of the Idols. You'd think I'd enjoy those shows, as I'm a pretty musical kind of guy, but no. Not as long as they employ people to eviscerate contestants on stage for daring to get up and sing for an audience of six and a half squillion. And not so long as they rely on those six and half squillion people to act as judges of talent. The mere existence of websites like http://www.votefortheworst.com/ pretty much confirms my low opinion of this practice, don't you think?

MP3 players, now. I'm a convert.

Eva bought me a little 1 GB Ipod knockoff (something called an ERi) for the commute to work. I held off on using it much through the winter, not sure how to comfortably wear headphones under a toque, but once I started in on these night shifts the thing has been a godsend.
Of course, the god involved turned capricious pretty quickly. Just my second night in, the player suddenly died out mid-song on me. Battery's dead, I thought. Two hours later, weary of the satellite radio, I checked it again. This is a quirk of mine, a quirk that works, more often than not. I keep pens that run dry, because in half an hour they'll work again. I turn off the television in disgust if the Maple Leafs are losing badly, and if I turn it on again ten minutes later, sometimes they've clawed their way back into a game.
Worked fine. For about 45 minutes. Then it happened again.
Undaunted, I came home that morning and changed the battery for one freshly charged. Left the house that night, bopping along to our wedding recessional...and before I'd even made it to work the bloody thing died again. I kept trying it through the night, and it worked every time, but for progressively shorter and shorter intervals. I'm sure my night crew-mates appreciated my singing along...

Once I was the King of Spain (now I eat humble pie)
Oh, my unspeakable wife, Queen Lisa (now I eat humble pie)
I'm telling you, I was the King of Spain (now I eat--) zzzut!
SHIT!!!

"Hey, Ken, quit eating shit over there!"
"Sorry. Damn mp3 player died on me AGAIN!"
"I had one did that. Here, let me look at it...yeah. This baby's overheated."
"So...what? Should I start spending the whole night in the freezer?"
"No offense, Ken, but this thing's kind of cheap."
"Well, I know that," I said. "My wife wanted to make sure I'd actually use the thing before she laid out tons of cash. Besides, it's not that cheap. Throw in the rechargeable batteries and it costs quite a bit, actually."
"Yeah, but those headphones cost more than the player, right?"
"Well...yeah. I'm hard on headphones. No matter how much money I spend on them, sooner or later one side or the other will short out. I'd just rather that happen next year instead of tomorrow."
"Y'oughta get an iPod."
I nodded my head at that and went back to work. Of course I oughta get an iPod, I thought darkly. Everybody else has one!
I got home from work Friday morning and went out on the Net seeking opinions. What I wanted, ideally, was a durable mp3 player with an FM tuner in case I got tired of my own music. I wasn't, actually, too keen on iPods, because I'd be a slave to iTunes--and I'd just mastered Windows Media Player; I had no real urge to learn yet another program.
Further research started to overturn my objections. It turns out iPods are popular for good reason. Several surveys have ranked the nano the most durable player out there. Also among the most easy to use. As for iTunes, it seems to be fairly intuitive. I was under the impression that you had to, gasp, buy all your content from the iTunes store. I don't know why I thought this. Maybe because Apple uses its own music format...the retailer web sites state that mp3s aren't supported. That's odd, I thought. The very definition of an mp3 player, and yet it doesn't play mp3s.

Turns out that iTunes automatically converts files from mp3 to whatever Apple calls their standard, compressing them in the process. Most importantly, I can import songs I got off SHAREZ or Limewire into iTunes and thence onto the iPod.

Another problem: iPods don't run on the same kind of batteries my ERi player uses. Cursory research seemed to indicate there are two ways to charge an iPod: through the USB port on the computer (like our computer desk isn't crowded enough) or by shelling out an obscene amount of money for something called an iPod station. Wow, I thought, Apple's really got you by the short and curlies there. That one costs $170!
Once again I was wrong. The iPod "station" is actually a full-fledged stereo system that just happens to dock an iPod. You can buy a wall adapter for a fraction of the cost.
No FM tuner, which is annoying but not a dealbreaker. I Googled "mp3 player FM tuner reviews" and kept running across durability concerns on site after site.

An iPod was looking more and more likely.

Long story slightly shorter, I am now the proud owner of an 8 GB Ipod nano. A nice black one, razor thin. It's charged but not loaded as of yet. We'll see tomorrow night how it performs.

In all shapes and sizes...

I like fat women.

Yes, I've alluded to this in passing, but in truth I feel so strongly about it that I need to say it baldly, right there so you can't misinterpret me. Just in case, I'll say it again:

I like fat women.

Nearly everyone I have dated through my life would fall into the obese or morbidly obese category. There have been three people dear to me who have astounded doctors with their level of physical health despite their obesity. Ask a really fat person about the last time their blood pressure was taken. Chances are the doctor left bruises and obtained a normal reading.

And yet...

What's your first reaction upon seeing somebody that weighs, say, 300 pounds? Pity? Anger? Disgust? All of the above? And while you're thinking about that, does your attitude towards that tub of guts change if said tub of guts is a male?
It's funny, you know...I have no studies to support my belief, but I'm willing to bet only women would find a 300 pound man intrinsically disgusting--and maybe not even a majority of women. But I'd be willing to FURTHER bet that 90% of both sexes find a 300 pound women gross in more than a literal sense.

Think what that woman feels like.

Especially if she is, like many, many overweight people, eating "right", exercising "right", doing everything "right", and watching the pounds stubbornly refuse to melt off. Yeah, just imagine what that feels like.

I bet there's a few of you out there looking at that last paragraph and questioning it, poo-pooing it...'well, obviously, she must be doing something wrong if she's not losing weight.' That attitude is maddeningly pervasive. Okay, we've got our diets, let's line them up from Atkins to the Zone and everything in between...surely one of them's got to be "right", eh? And since everyone our hypothetical tubbo meets just swears by a pet diet, and they're every last one of them different, well, then she should just try all of them in succession until the weight magically disappears, never to return? Is that how it works?

Well, guess what. Diets don't work. That's been proven in countless studies, too many to begin to cite here, and yet there's still this multi-billion dollar industry out there pushing the next cure-all, capitalizing ruthlessly on people's (largely women's) shoddy view of themselves.

My gut feeling, pardon the pun, is that people should be loved for who they are. For me, a 300 pound woman just has twice the body to love, nothing more and nothing less. But chances are she doesn't feel that way. I've met countless fat women--I'm drawn to them, somehow--and the first one to fool me, to successfully fake total self confidence, was the one I married. Oh, Eva had a good deal of self-esteem, much more than your average obese woman, but she'd managed to create a very convincing 'holograph' that amplified and projected her sense of self-worth. It was a bit of a shock meeting the woman behind the curtain. I think she'd say it was a bit of a shock for her, meeting a man who wanted to look behind the curtain. In any event, I've done my best to tear down the curtains, open her blinds, and then open the window and let some fresh air in on Eva's perception of herself.

And it occurs to me that this is what I was put on earth to do: to go around uncovering angels.

There are an awful lot of angels out there who happen to be overweight. An awful lot. And the living hell of it is, they think they're nothing but husks. Large, empty husks.

We've heard stories of virgins approaching 30 years old, who've never so much as had a date. The first thing they'd think to look for when asked out by a man would undoubtedly be a bucket of pig's blood. (For those of you who have not read or seen Carrie, just let that reference slide, okay?)

I think this is a sad state of affairs.

I think it's time something was done about it.

And so, Eva and I are in the preliminary stages of starting up a support group for overweight people. NOT a diet group. NOT an exercise group. If our clients should choose to exercise and/or lose weight, good for them. But this group--very tentatively called P.A.L. (Plump And Loveable)--won't focus on weight loss. It will treat fat people as fat people ought to be treated. Like people, in other words. There's a hell of a lot more going through the mind of your average overweight person than the next fad diet. Or at least there should be.

Stay tuned as this develops.

Cheap rugs

So Martha Stewart was convicted.
I'm not a Martha apologist, not even close, but I have to wonder about this whole business. Forgive me if I am missing something, because this is just the sort of celebrity circus I tend to deliberately overlook, but...
Didn't somebody give her a hush-hush tip that her stocks were about to tank? And so she sold them off, right? And then lied about it.
Okay, well, let's take the actual selling of the stocks first. I ask you, WHAT THE HELL WAS SHE SUPPOSED TO DO? If the president of Acme Inc. gives me a call and says, hey, Ken, keep this on the down low, but as of Monday morning you might as well wipe your ass with Acme shares, am I supposed to actually hang on to the damned things and lose my pants?
And then she lied about it. Well, duh.  Isn't that what you're supposed to do when you're in trouble? Lie? Of course it is. After all, us normal non-billionaire people do it all the time...sixteen times a day, on average, according to one study. And we teach our children to lie, too.
Maybe it's a matter of who she lied to. You're not supposed to fib to the authorities, are you?
Well, why not? It's not like the authorities never lie to us. At best, you can trust three out of every ten things George W. Bush says. The percentage is even lower for our esteemed (?) Premier, Dalton McGuinty. The authorities make a living out of lying, and it's a pretty good living, too. But they expect the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from us mere peons? So help me, God!
James Halperin wrote a novel entitled The Truth Machine that ought to be required reading  for everyone. It's the story of a supergenius who creates a 100% effective lie-detector, and said device's subsequent effects on society, nearly all of which are profoundly positive. Imagine knowing for certain if someone is guilty of a crime, merely by asking him. Imagine Big Business forced to run in total transparency. Imagine foreign policy being subject to a Truth Machine.
I try not to lie. I'm not always successful--I've told some whoppers in my time. I usually lie for one simple reason: because the truth would get me in trouble. And never mind that the lie, when discovered, always yields considerably more trouble than the truth would have in the first place. I tend to conveniently forget that little nugget.
I used to lie in order to tell people what they wanted to hear, in an effort to avoid an argument. I don't do that near as often any more, because it's quite literally not me. It's better, I have found, to be yourself.
As far as Martha goes, I bet she'll be out in time to prepare her world-famous egg nog (about nine-tenths of which is pure, unadulterated booze), but you know what? I doubt her sentence means she'll never lie again.
 
 

The Proud Canadian:

Ten great things I find quintessentially Canadian:

1) Sunset over water in the Canadian Shield. Do yourself a favour and drive anywhere north of Barrie in Ontario. Stop at a lake, turn to the west, and wait. You'll come away believing in God a little more than you did before.
2) Tim Horton's double-doubles. I assume these are laced with low-grade narcotics: how else to explain why I, an avowed coffee hater, have become ever-so-slightly hooked.
3) Hockey played hard but fair. For every Todd Bertuzzi in this country there's a dozen Gary Robertses and Doug Gilmours.
4) Poutine. It's a heart attack waiting to happen, but you'll go with a smile on your face and a song in your heart.
5) "Peace, order and good government". I'll take that over "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" every day of the week and twice on Tuesdays. Granted, "good government" is at a premium in this country of late, but we're Canadians. We keep hoping in the face of impossible odds.
6) Vancouver's Stanley Park. I don't have to travel anywhere else in the world to tell you authoritatively this is the single greatest municipal park on the planet.
7) Butter tarts. Pardon me while I wipe this drool off my screen.
8) The High Arctic. This vast region, never seen by most Canadians, has insinuated itself into the collective subconscious nevertheless.
9) Winter: the High Arctic brought special delivery to us. I love winter. I love that crisp, rosy-cheeked, hot-chocolate-is-waiting feeling you get when it's thirty below. I love blizzards in all their fierce glory, and if I'm at Dairy Queen, make mine a chocolate-covered cherry, okay?
10) Our national anthem. Not a bomb or a rocket anywhere in sight, just 'the true North, strong and free'. Calixa Lavallee, thank you for an inspiring composition.

Happy Canada Day to one and all.