The Facts Of Life

Yesterday's blog was not up to par, for which I apologize. Though I haven't succumbed to the allure of Twitter--truth is, I don't even feel it--it seems like I'm having some trouble lately organizing my thoughts into coherent sentences and then organizing the sentences into coherent paragraphs, which is, to my mind anyway, the defining characteristic of a Twit.
I feel random thoughts tugging me in all directions (how exactly did that Blue Jays reference get in there yesterday, anyway?) Distractions, distractions everywhere. And the blog journeys are getting shorter and shorter as my mental fuel economy declines. It's probably time for a mental tune-up.

What I was trying to say yesterday was concisely and elegantly put by Russell Brand in an otherwise very critical eulogy" in The Guatdian
which accuses the deceased of destroying the British idea of community:

"This demonstrates, I suppose, that if you opposed Thatcher's ideas it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one's enemies.

An aside (see: distractions!) English could really use an antonym for eulogy. That word derives from Greek, essentially 'well-speaking', and there are an awful lot of so-called eulogies out there that criticize the deceased rather than praising him or her. Malogy? Maybe.

Anyway, I wanted to delve a little into another comment I found in my web-wide peregrinations yesterday, this on a forum where speaking ill of Maggie Thatcher would get you tarred and feathered and probably banned:

It seems that any politician that asks for any level of personable accountability and responsibility is reduced to a greedy bigot.

Why have conservative principles become so hated by so many?

If "THE FACTS OF LIFE ARE CONSERVATIVE" are we seeing a first world attitude that says - screw the facts, someone is going to be accountable for me and it won't be me?

Facts are difficult things. THE PEOPLE'S MONEY WILL RUN OUT.

--"JMM"

It seems to me that both these contradictory phrases are true, depending of course on how you see the world. Liberals and conservatives routinely accuse each other of being blind, after all.

Are the facts of life conservative? Being a liberal, I find it hard to even parse that sentence,so I'll turn to someone else to articulate the argument for me:

BEHAVIOUR HAS CONSEQUENCES

"Western Chauvinist" assures us here that the plight of black families (to the extent that there are black families in America) is all the fault of liberal "compassion". I've heard this argument my entire political life--that offering a hand up to people simply creates dependency.
To some extent this is true: simply giving money to people tends not to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. But that's not an argument against giving money to people. It's not an either-or system here, it's "both-and". Give money, yes, and give more. Give wisdom. Create esteem. Not just self-esteem but esteem in community. If you want prosperity, you need community--short for 'common unity'. Remove that sense of common unity and you create an every-man-for-himself ethos that makes a very few people fantastically rich and the rest of us dirt-poor.

LIFE IS NOT FAIR

Our blogger here adds that no amount of progressive government will make it so. Again, true as far as it goes. The first part is an important lesson that used to be offered starting in kindergarten; the second part is being put to the test in educational institutions all over the place...as when everyone wins a medal simply for trying and no one is allowed to fail at anything, ever. This is creating a generation of people who can't cope with inevitable failure, and I'd suggest this in and of itself is monstrously unfair.
But two wrongs don't make a right. And the problem again here is that society is not, or ought not to be, a zero-sum game. We have set it up, and conservatives want to keep it, so that for every winner there must be a loser. This need not be the case, and it's a relatively simple fix: rather than examining every scenario and situation with a view to what benefits me, try asking yourself what benefits most people.
This used to be standard operating procedure. It still is, in places that haven't lost themselves in the ethos of extreme capitalism. And it creates a society in which a few rich people are a little poor, and the vast majority of poorer people are substantially richer. You'll never eliminate all the unfairness, but mitigating it is absolutely crucial...especially if you're one of the fat cats. Because the lower class scum will only stand so much enforced inequality before they rise up and come for your head...behaviours have consequences!

COMMON SENSE IS INDISPENSABLE

Indeed it is. When you kill people's families with bombs and drones, common sense suggests those people will hate you, for instance. If you mock people's beliefs and assert your own superiority at every turn, common sense suggests that you'll be ignored at best.
These are not the examples Mr. Western Chauvinist has in mind, of course. I have to admit I particularly love the example he cites, that you can't spend your way out of debt.

FDR's New Deal was an attempt to solve the Great Depression, and it failed. Or perhaps it didn't: there's an argument to be made that without it, the effects would have been considerably worse. However, the New Deal was more than an economic stimulus package. It was an attempt to preserve confidence in American institutions. In that respect, it worked very well.

There is an increasing distrust in America today. Few trust the government; fewer still trust Wall Street; it seems that American citizens increasingly distrust each other. Washington has a moral obligation to reverse this by any means necessary, because the logical outcome of a continued decline of trust is...too hideous to contemplate. That, too, is common sense.

THERE AIN'T NO SUCH THING AS A FREE LUNCH

This maxim was popularized by one of my literary idols, Robert Anson Heinlein. I disagree with a fair bit of this author's politics, but he's one of the people who has profoundly shaped my mind.
TANSTAAFL is central to our current ideas of economics, and it's rigidly true in the context of the zero-sum game we have set up.
Canadians often brag about their 'free' health care. Of course, we understand that our health care system is not free, per se: it's paid for through taxes, distributed amongst the Canadian population as a whole.  This is an example--at least as far as I'm concerned--of a common good: better that everyone pay a little than a few people pay a hell of a lot. The extent to which you agree with that statement is a reliable measure of your compassion.
I find it very interesting that Western Chauvinist cloaks his conservatism in Christian theology, when even a cursory reading of Scripture will convince you beyond doubt that Jesus of Nazareth was anything but conservative, socially or otherwise. Look at the people He hung out with: utter rubbish as human beings, right? He thought otherwise, and that's at the core of His message to the world: we are all one. Why else are we told to love our neighbours as ourselves and even to love our enemies?

HUMAN NATURE IS FALLEN

I disagree. Sure, there is evil aplenty in the world...but less and less of it as time goes by. We think humanity is at the pinnacle of its evolution, that we know it all, that we're invincible. These are adolescent traits. We're an adolescent race, going through the throes of civilizational puberty. We've got a lot of growing up to do. But we also have come a long way, in some cases in a very short period of time. Look at marriage, for example. A generation ago it was unthinkable that two men or two women who love each other could or should get married...and the option is increasingly available to them today. Every poll shows that the younger generation is more tolerant, more compassionate, and more determined to make a better world than received wisdom would have you believe. The oft-cited anger and apathy of the young is a direct result of the magnitude of the task we've set them.

"The trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money"--attributed to Margaret Thatcher

Let me know when Norway runs out of money, okay?

The conservative brainwashers will tell you that socialism has never worked and can never work, because it runs contrary to the greedy and us/them view of the world they mistakenly call "human nature". They're also quick to tell you to look to history: socialism, they say, has failed every time, and liberals, they tell you, think it will work this time because they haven't tried it yet and they know better.

Hogwash.

It's true that pure communism has never worked, and it's certainly arguable that it can't ever work on anything more than a  limited scale. But the same can certainly be said of pure capitalism. The tendency towards extremes is one of the most troubling aspects of today's society, in my view. Each side works assiduously to reject the slightest taint of the other, and blames any perceived injustice on the prevalence of the other's point of view.
The reality is that socialism and society come from the same root for a reason. This was recognized in ancient Rome...Marcus Aurelius tells us that which is not good for the bee-hive can not be good for the bee. I've little doubt this sentiment is much older than a mere nineteen hundred years...because behaviour has consequences and common sense is indispensable.

America fancies itself the most prosperous nation in the world. By most measures, it's not. By some measures, it's not even in the top ten.  (Unfortunately to a certain breed of conservatives, the degree of MURICA FUCK YEAH! is not one the metrics used to measure prosperity...)

There are other measures of prosperity besides material wealth. This is something held as self-evident outside some benighted corners of the United States of America.

The "facts of life are conservative" crowd have no answer for the miracle that is Bhutan. This tiny nation, poor by standard measures, is, as nations ago, deliriously happy. Its quality of life is improving rapidly, no thanks to austere conservative principles designed to impoverish the many for the benefit of the few.

There is nothing sufficient compassion can't solve. I truly believe this, and that's why I'm a liberal.

I'm Resigning From the Human Race

...because I obviously don't belong in it.
The vitriol surrounding the death of Margaret Thatcher is a frightening thing to behold. "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead" is #27 on the British iTunes download chart this morning. It isn't because The Wizard of Oz aired in Britain last week.
In several Internet fora I have posted the following:

You know, folks, it's okay to dislike, or even to hate, Margaret Thatcher's policies from her time in office. It is not okay to hate *her*, and it is *certainly* not okay to cheer at her death.

Some people have agreed with me. Some. But there's been quite a bit of this:

Yes you can, she was innately evil and any hatred is justified. Who cares if someone is a human being if they're utter rubbish as one?



I'm reminded of the death of Jack Layton and Christie Blatchford's nasty anti-elegy penned before the body was cold. You don't have to be liberal or conservative to be rude and unseemly: just human, it seems.

There really is no middle of the road any more, is there? People are either loved or they're hated. The love is eternal and the hate is hellacious. I feel weird every time I have a "meh" reaction--which is pretty often, because let's face it, the majority of the world is kinda meh as far as I'm concerned.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble dealing with the world lately. It's hard to stay on an even keel when everyone's battering you with expectations at every turn. The Blue Jays are 2-5 to start a 162 game baseball season in which, if you believed the hype, the team was supposed to go 324-0. Accordingly, the world is ending: everybody out of the pool and off the wagon, okay?

American politics keeps on keeping on: the country's going to hell in the proverbial handbasket and it's all the fault of the Republocrats.

It comes out most when a politician dies, for some reason. The time to publicly rejoice or lament a politician, in my view, is when he or she passes from elected office, not from life. But in the case of Thatcher, Layton, Chavez...you get the distinct impression that if these people weren't dead, a vast number of people would be more than happy to kill them.

Indeed -- and I don't mean to be alarmist -- I'm getting that distinct impression more and more often of late, that the only thing holding us back from widespread violence is social convention. Which may or may not be fraying.

So I hereby submit my letter of resignation from humanity. It's been an interesting time in the company of humans and I have learned a great deal that will benefit me in future endeavours. I'll still be around to keep an eye on you, though: you humans are simply to unstable for me to be able to afford not to.

On Target?

There is a very interesting (at least if you're me) interview with the head of Target Canada in the most recent issue of Report on Business Magazine.

CEOs are politicians: their party is their corporation. As such, they are verbally slippery. It is very difficult to get yes or no answers out of them. The interviewer here tries several times to get Tony Fisher to commit to saying whether Target Canada prices will be similar to those at Target in the U.S. After some hemming and hawing about being "competitive within the Canadian marketplace", we finally get the truth: no.

And they can't be. As much as I rail against the ridiculous price discrepancies between Canada and American given that our dollars are roughly at par, and as much as I dismiss the stupid 'economies of scale' argument (come on, most of Canada's population is a hop skip and jump from the U.S. border), the fact is I'd rather pay more and know that the employees are getting something marginally closer to a living wage.  (The minimum wage in Ontario is $3/hr higher than the U.S. federal minimum wage).

But the thing in this interview that I most fixated on was the key difference Fisher noted between American and Canadian retail culture:


"What was one of the biggest surprises for you when you moved here in August, 2011?" "I wanted to be a consumer here, so I could say exactly what it is like to shop at Loblaws or Sobeys or Metro or Fortinos on the grocery side, what it’s like to go to Canadian Tire or Home Depot, or to shop at Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart. One of the biggest surprises early on was just how many different places I had to go to get what I wanted. There was a lack of one-stop shopping. Now, Walmart exists, but it’s the consumers’ mentality. It was just kind of part of the norm."

There's no "kind of" about it. I can certainly understand, from a retailing perspective, why Fisher might find this mentality baffling and of course he'd want to change it. All I can say is good luck with that.

Caveat lector: I have not been a Target 'guest' in Canada yet. However, I've heard from many that have been...the hype has been close to insane. This is to be expected in a country with such a pronounced inferiority complex as Canada. Oh, my God, an American store has come to Canada, I simply MUST shop there!
And most of the reaction I've heard has boiled down to meh. Wal-Mart with wider aisles. And empty shelves.
This isn't a surprise. For all we've heard about American just-in-time inventory know how, the truth is that Canadian companies are much better at that than most of their American counterparts. I tell you this: if my store had as many shelves empty on opening day as I've heard the ones in Guelph and Fergus did...opening day would be postponed and heads would roll.

Give me American selection, is all I'd ask. If I want Vanilla Coke, or Minute Maid Pomegranate Lemonade, I should be able to buy it. That said...

I have a deep, deep distrust of any place that sells food and. Take Wal-Mart. Their general merchandise is almost without exception low-quality, low-durability, low-cost, with emphasis of course on the cost. They claim to have a customer service culture. They don't. Just try to find an employee when you need one.
Let's say I want to buy a television. If price is my sole concern, I might look to get it at Wal-Mart: they usually have a few TVs at an intriguing price point. But I'd better have done my research first, because any employee I consult is unlikely to know all that much about televisions. The same holds true for most of what Wal-Mart sells.

What's more, their grocery selection, even in the Supercentres, is pitiful...and compared to the discount grocery banners like No Frills, FreshCo and Food Basics, the prices really aren't anything to get excited about either.
In short, trying to do everything means you do a half-assed job. Pretty much by definition. Target's welcome to that retail model, and I've heard their quality is a step above Wal-Mart's...but  you'll pardon me if I doubt their employee training is comprehensive on the whole of their inventory.  I mean, they do pay their employees minimum wage.

Fisher moves on to discuss Target's extensive customer profiling, and this is where I do believe the company has an edge...even though many people I have spoken to find targeted ads and promotions spooky for some reason.  Let me put it to you this way. You're going to see ads...the world practically runs on them. Would you rather see ads that might have some relevance to you, or those that really, really don't? My eye and ear edits out ads almost automatically, precisely because I ain't buyin' what they're sellin'.
If the reason you're spooked is because you don't like soulless corporations knowing everything there is to know about you...you're reading this on the Internet, aren't you? You're way too late. For that matter, better close out your account at the bank and turn in your credit cards.

I'm in no hurry to shop at Target. It's not out of Canadian patriotism--even if Target bombs, it won't bomb near as badly as Zellers--it's more out of that distrust of generalists that seems to be a uniquely Canadian consumer trait.






I

Vows

I, Ken, do take you, Eva
to be the wife of my days
the companion of my journey
the friend to my life
and the mother of our children
to live with you in joy and
to grow with you in love.
With these words
and all the words of my heart
I marry you and I bind my life to yours.

I'm looking over the booklet that encapsulates our October 2000 wedding ceremony. Twelve and a half years later, I find myself marvelling at how well the late Rev. Janice Aicken crafted this ceremony for a couple she barely knew. From the prayers to the sermon to the poem that punctuated the service midway through--the poem!

MEDICINE

Grandma sleeps with my sick grandpa
so she can get him    during the night
medicine to stop the pain.
In the morning, clumsily I wake them...
Her eyes look at me from underneath his withered arm
The medicine is all
in her long un-braided hair.

--Alice Miller

--everything fit together and resonated strongly in the little Embro church where we bound our lives together.

We married in that litte Embro church because Eva's parents had married there before us. The symbolism, the continuity, mattered to both of us. As I recall, the vows, above, were selected from a passel of possibilities...I certainly couldn't have written any better at the time and doubt I coud now.

I, Ken, do take you, Eva

At first glance, that verb seems a bit harsh: it harkens back to when men raided the cave of their bride's family, 'took' their bride by the hair and dragged her away. I've never felt that way about Eva (or anyone), and I think that's one reason among many that our marriage works as well as it does for us. I don't own Eva and she doesn't own me and that's why marriage is just like single life, except it has security.
No, I hear take in this context and think, what do I take Eva for? I take her for

the wife of my days

The nights go without mention--nobody needs to hear about those anyway, least of all in a church--and yet I think the distinction there is critical. It's the days that make a life, after all.

the companion to my journey

I particularly like this phrase, as clichéd as it is nowadays when everyone has come to view their life as a journey. Hey, we've driven to Florida...twice...in a 2003 Toyota Echo, which is only marginally bigger than a Breadbin. And when I say "we" drove, I lie: "she" did all the driving and I was along for the ride. That would have been a test of our relationship if our relationship required testing...but we accomplished both trips with a minimum of friction and crankiness. I try not to feel boastful pride, but I'm proud of us for that.

the friend to my life

Something about "to" rather than "of" there calls out to me. Again, it seems to indicate an independence: even as our lives are about to be bound, we are retaining our distinct identities.

And, of course, Eva and I are friends first and foremost. From my perspective, there's a great deal to be said for marrying your best friend...

and the mother of our children.

That line was remarked over and deliberately included; at the time we fully intended to have at least one child. I find it odd that so many people consider marriage to be all about children when the standard marital vows make no mention of kids at all.
As it stands, he closest thing to kids we have--and they're remarkably close some days--have four legs and fur. And yes, Eva is often "Mommy" in this house and I'm "Daddy". (Oh, how the Tux loves his Mommy...)

with these words and all the words of my heart

(and there are an awful lot of those, aren't there, love? Sometimes my heart won't shut up!)

I marry you and I bind my life to yours

I really like the declaration here. The usual run of marriage vows simply has the couple exchange "I do"'s or occasionally "I will"'s. I think it means something to actually announce what it is you will do. Thoughts are creative; spoken intentions moreso; and actions more still. A marriage vow is a powerful thought, vocalized: a concrete action in front of witnesses. The echo of that vow rings down the years every day for me.

"Bind" is an interesting choice of words. As a noun, it's the last thing you want your marriage to be in. As a verb, it has two contradictory meanings: stationary, as in tied in place...and going somewhere. Both meanings are richly applicable to us. We have come a long way in our time together and we're just gathering a head of steam....

I love you, Eva....

"There's zero closure"

This one's going to piss some people off. For that I apologize, and I issue a couple of disclaimers right up front:

1. My family has a large number of current and former police officers in it. You will look far and wide before you find someone who respects and admires cops as much as I do. I have no patience for the people -- most of them young, but not all -- who disparage peace officers,  who call them names, and who think they're all jerks.

2. I have a great deal of sympathy for the family of slain Sgt. Ryan Russell. It's not going to sound like it in a minute or two, so I want to get that out right now and underline it: I sympathize with the Russells.  That family could have been mine on occasions beyond counting and it really is horrible to have to explain to a toddler that Daddy is never coming home.

However, the kinds of things Sgt. Russell's widow Christine is saying to the media give me pause. A great deal of pause. "There's zero closure in a verdict of not criminally responsible", she said, after the man who ran down her husband with a stolen snowplow. "I believe Ryan deserved a lot better than this," she said.

No doubt he did. Nobody deserves to die that way, least of all a peace officer who is serving and protecting the rest of us. But with all due respect, Mrs. Russell, you seem to have more of an issue with the verdict than you do with the death of your husband, and I find that unseemly.

What were you looking for? Guilt, I imagine, which would carry an automatic sentence of at least twenty five years in jail. Maybe you've fantasized bringing your husband's service piece to court and gunning the psycho down. Hell, I wouldn't blame you for having that thought. But the psycho who killed your husband was just that, a psycho. A person found to have an actual and acute mental illness. That's the only way that verdict, "not criminally responsible", can be rendered.

What happens to Kachkar, the psycho, now? He undergoes psychiatric assessment and he's placed in a facility until he is deemed not to be a threat to society. That could well be longer than twenty five years. That could well be the rest of his life.

Perhaps you disagree with the assessment that Kachkar was in a psychotic state at the time of the murder. This was argued in court, with psychiatrists testifying for and against. The jury found that the defendant was not "in touch with reality" when he committed the crime.

(Personally, I'm of the opinion that anyone who kills another human being is by definition mentally ill...but there are mental illnesses and mental illnesses. Kachkar was found to be -- what's the correct medical term I'm looking for? oh yeah --batshit insane.)

May I, again respectfully, suggest to Mrs. Russell that a guilty verdict, even one that carried the death penalty if such a thing actually still existed in this country, would not change the fact of your husband's tragic death in any way. No court of law can turn back time and bring the dead to life. I wish one could. I wish I could. But I can't.

And closure? There ain't no such thing. Not because of this verdict...because of the death. Death is all the closure we ever get in this life. It lingers. It lingers longer when there's love involved, as there clearly is here. It never goes away. Nobody is suggesting it should. But as with anything else "good" or "evil" in the world, what matters is not what's past, but what is next. 

You see a man who "got away with murder". I see a sick man who will now, as his defence lawyer says, get the help he needs. He wouldn't get that help in jail. Trust me on this. Jail is not about "help". And while you might not appreciate helping the monster who killed your husband, Mrs. Russell, without that help he might kill again.

Night and Day

Two or three times a year, for the last twelve years, I've had to contend with a grocery inventory.
This is nothing to what the fresh departments deal with: for reasons unknown, deli, bakery, and produce count their stock monthly. What's more, they have to count all their stock, sales floor and backshop included.
Thank goodness we don't have to count the product on the sales floor. A team of inventory specialists comes in to do that, and the speed at which they work is astonishing. It's usually between six and eight people, and it takes them less than four hours to count everything. I have no idea how this is done. Magic, I assume.
The back room stock--which for me means the dairy cooler and the freezer--is the extent of our responsibility. It's responsibility enough, and it seems to get worse, rather than better, with every inventory.
At my old store, it was a relatively simple matter: many times I'd done it in eight hours, cooler and freezer both. Of course, there I simply had to count the stock, not work all of it. Even so, as the store got busier through the years, I eventually found myself taking two shifts to count it all.

This inventory it took four. Four night shifts.

That's because in this store, the scope of my responsibility has increased. It's not just the dairy cooler and freezer any more: it's the rest of the grocery department as well. And in a store as small as this one, wherein often the shelf won't hold a full case of whatever....there's a lot of backstock. And of course it's expected that every case gets worked.

We got done in the nick of time--I was still tallying up milk and eggs when the inventory folks came through the door. Now I'm trying to revert back to my normal schedule, and it's not going well.

I've said before that I am not a night person. University residence forced night shifts upon me. There was simply no possible way to sleep on the west wing of the second floor of MacDonald House. I had arranged most of my classes in that first year for early morning. I can't say I was naïve; no, I was completely oblivious. It quickly was made clear to me, however, that my 8:30 classes were my problem: the truly sensible drunken partiers, i.e., everyone else, had scheduled their classes for afternoons and evenings. Dawn was not a time to get up. Dawn was a time to think about going to bed.

Laying awake listening to the projectile vomiting contests and lacrosse games outside my door, I figured I deserved to be paid for this. What's more, I honestly believe I would have eventually assaulted somebody if I didn't remove myself from the din. And so I started working graveyards at McDonald's.

Those were fairly enjoyable. I had my music--this was long before the iPod, and I didn't own a Walkman, but I did have a ghetto blaster to drag from place to place. The store was closed--this was also long before Mickey Dees realized just how many drunken partiers there were in my town who could really go for a Big Mac at three in the morning. My job was to clean.

My job has always been, at least in part, to clean. It's probably why I'm charitably described as a slob at home. Let's be real here: I'm a guy. That means, as Dave Barry says, I can't see dirt until it can sustain commercial agriculture. Cleaning stuff is annoying to me, because I can spend forever polishing something to a high gloss....and if I miss one speck of dirt, I've wasted that forever. So I don't bother, at home at least, until a critical mass is reached and I go into a cleaning frenzy.

Anyway, circumstances forced a fateful career change on me: I went down the street a block to 7-Eleven....and the rest is bitter, bitter history.
It was five years, give or take, to get to the point where I just couldn't take another person hurling abuse at me because I carded her for smokes, or hurling a can of soup at me because why the fuck not. I went from convenience to discount grocery, and am now in a full service grocery store. Night shifts, thankfully, are at a minimum.

There are advantages to working nights, don't get me wrong. On night shift, the uniform is not required, which means I don't have to wrestle with the top button on a dress shirt for an embarrassingly long period of time and I can wear comfortable clothes. Once the store is closed, an hour into the shift, the iPod can come out and impart energy. At that point there are no customers and no boss and I can simply do my job and go home when it's done.

But it means sleeping during the day.

Even back at 7-Eleven, that was a near impossibility for me. For those five years I don't think I ever got fully to sleep or came fully awake. Sleeping pills help, but even so fortified, I'm apt to wake up in three or four hours. And I don't mean to whine (he whined), but waaaaaaaaah!  I need my sleep!

Today is Friday...the first full day off I've had in very nearly two weeks. I worked a day shift yesterday after having worked a night shift Tuesday into Wednesday. Because I slept pretty well Wednesday night, I thought I had successfully flipped my schedule.

No such luck. I've been awake most of the night. Should have taken more sleeping pills, but to be honest I'm more than a little worried about developing a dependancy on them. There will be a nap today...but you'll excuse me if I don't count sheep.

We don't stock sheep.

Sticking Up For Something I Hated

This is disturbing.

According to this, fewer than half of Ontario's elementary schools have phys. ed. teachers, and the majority of the teachers that do exist are part time. Furthermore, schools are having trouble fitting in the mandated twenty minutes of exercise per day.

Say what?

You can't tell me there's no such thing as recess anymore: I live across the street from an elementary school and I see it (and hear it) morning and afternoon. That's half an hour right there--not counting lunch hour. Nobody I knew ever took the whole period to eat.

Do kids not take physical education any more? I remember it going all the way back to grade one (before that, in junior and senior kindergarten, it was called 'play time'.)
I have to admit that part of me, the part that absolutely loathed  phys. ed., finds itself grateful, if so, that nobody faces humiliation of the sort I endured daily. I sucked at phys. ed. Sucked hard. You wouldn't know it from my evaluations and later letter grades in the subject: I think a succession of teachers took pity on me. I'd usually get a B, occasionally even an A...but let me assure you those As were of the A for effort variety. Then as now, I was about as flexible as your average iron bar. I had the strength of a gnat, the balance of a drunk, and eye-hand co-ordination of a being without eyes or hands.

The one thing I excelled at was endurance. I got an Award of Excellence in the endurance run that was part of the Canada Fitness Test; the rest of my ribbons were purple ParticiPACTION awards that you got just for coming out. I couldn't do forty pushups at that age with a gun to my head; the 'flexed arm hang' was a torture; the crunches made me feel like I was being chewed on and the standing long jump was definitely more standing than jumping. The worst thing was that those who had performed their tests and earned their red ribbons invariably hung back to gather 'round and chortle at little Kenny.

I was forever hurting myself in phys. ed., sometimes semi-seriously. Don't put me in the same room as a trampoline. I never mastered the art of staying in the center of those things and once I went sailing right off the end when the spotter regrettably abdicated--though what else was he supposed to do with a flying Kenny coming in for an unscheduled (read: crash) landing? Or there was the time I tried to do a back somersault, again on a trampoline, and succeeded only in breaking my nose with my knee.

Even when I didn't hurt myself, I hurt myself. Exercise hurts. I don't understand all you gym rats who say you feel great after exercising. I'm sore everywhere, out of breath, possibly lightheaded, certainly heavy-footed...what's to like about that sensation? Isn't that kind of like getting drunk just to experience the puking shakes?

And yet...

As much as I despised every phys. ed. period and wished I was actually handicapped instead of just seeming to be, I really don't like the thought of it being outright mothballed. Kids go to school not just to get their minds sharpened, but also their bodies and spirits--both of which, my experiences notwithstanding, contribute mightily to creating a well-rounded individual. Not to mention that the exercise kids get in phys. ed. is all too often the only exercise they get. Hell, kids don't even walk to school anymore. It's almost as if parents are collectively raising cellulite instead of children.

I'd suggest that mandatory phys. ed. should be, well, mandatory. That school isn't just about the three Rs, two of which don't even start with R. That the heavy price in humiliation I paid was actually worth it in that it kept me from being a total blob.

Ghoulish?

The violin played by bandmaster Wallace Hartley as the Titanic sank has been found.

Despite two large cracks and some corrosion, it's in remarkable shape, all things considered. And it's going on display in Belfast City Hall, less than a mile from where Titanic was built.

A Redditor named 'hootbot' asks,

Isn't it a bit ghoulish to tour bits of the Titanic around, a ship on which 1500 people died? I mean, imagine if there were a 9/11 touring carnival with bits of office furniture and blood stained palm pilots.

This is a common sentiment, and certainly understandable. But I disagree with it.

First and most facile, neither the victims of Titanic nor those of 9/11 care a bit about their personal effects at this point. That's because they're dead.

I object to the use of the word "carnival", with all the jollity and lightness of purpose it implies. Anyone who has spent any time researching Titanic, as I have--let alone those who have seen the ship, or any of its contents--will tell you there are no carnivals on the bottom of the sea. (Or at the bottom of Ground Zero, or in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, for that matter.)

Like many, I saw James Cameron's Titanic when it came out. Previous to that, I'd had a sketchy knowledge of the sinking; after watching the movie, I devoured everything I could find on the subject, until I had bits of the cargo manifest memorized.
The story affected me in a way very few had before or since. Not the grafted-on, oh-so-Hollywood love story--fer Chrissake, Jack, grab your own bit of flotsam and dare to separate from your Rose for a few hours and you'll have a lifetime together!)...the story of the ship itself. In its story is the best and the worst of what makes us human. It's a tragedy that's very much of its time--the very thought of "steerage" on a ship is repugnant to Western ideals a century later--and yet it's timeless. The same hubris that led a publisher to suggest "God Himself could not sink this ship" also led to the slipshod preparations that doomed the space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and will doubtless figure in tragedies to come.
(The parallels between Titanic and Challenger are astonishing and deeply chilling....)

And the chain of errors that led to the deaths of 1517 passengers in the frigid Atlantic would be comical if the end result wasn't so grisly. From the deliberate decision not to clutter up the decks with needless lifeboats, to the bridge binoculars being left behind in Southampton, to the doomed attempt to 'port round' the berg, to the equally foolish closing of the watertight doors...nearly everything that could go wrong did, helped along by an unwavering belief in the superiority of technology right until the bitter end.

(If Titanic had hit the berg head on, she wouldn't have sunk. She'd have sustained heavy damage and been towed ignominiously into port, the butt of jokes for years to come...but most if not all of her passengers and crew would have survived. Likewise, if they'd left the watertight doors open--if, in other words, they ignored their nifty-neato technology--Titanic would have sank on an even keel, taking much longer to do so.)

The atmosphere around displays of historical tragedies is sombre and reflective, as it should be. Personal effects from the victims of such tragedies are what create this atmosphere. It is, in every sense, a memorial. A memorial to family members, for friends, or even strangers who were, nonetheless, human beings. I don't think it's ghoulish to examine the past, even the horrors of the past, so long as we try to learn from them.

Life Lessons

I have had an exceptionally challenging week, with the prospect of (at least) two more to come. I can't elaborate on details, much as I'd like to; the Net has eyes, and they see all. Suffice it to say I have arrived home each day with a steadily increasing understanding of how people just...suddenly...snap.

Being as stability is arguably my most important core value, you can perhaps understand how weeks like this leave me a little seasick.

At times like this, I find myself inhaling positivity wherever I can find it. Which is, of course, everywhere. The love of my wife, a beautiful melody, the smiles of friends...these things are stabilizing and sustaining. 

The bolded quotes below come from the Conversations with God trilogy, by Neale Donald Walsch:

“Know and understand that there will be challenges and difficult times. Don’t try to avoid them. Welcome them. Gratefully. Cultivate the technique of seeing all problems as opportunities. Opportunities to…be, and decide, Who You Really Are.”

This struck me as silly the first few times I read it. Then I started noticing the good things that came out of undeniably bad events. I began to (try, at least, to) take a few steps back and examine the problem in front of me from different angles. Often, the easiest way to defuse a problem situation is to reflect, for just a second, on how many people would love to face the problem I'm facing. There are people, for instance, without jobs. Job stress would probably be welcome in their lives.

“If you want guarantees in life, then you don’t want life. You want rehearsals for a script that’s already been written. Life by its nature cannot have guarantees, or its whole purpose is thwarted.”

This was a hard one for me, because I confess, I do want guarantees in life. I want a guarantee when I get out of bed in the morning that I will face no unpleasant surprises today. The stronger the desire for such a guarantee gets in me, the more unpleasant surprises I tend to face.

The thing is, I am writing my life. You are writing your life...we're all making it up as we go along. It's when we forget we're at cause for the events in our life that we start up the pity party...oh, no, what is happening to me? Life in the passive voice. That's not living, that's dying.

“To live your life without expectation–without the need for specific results–that is freedom. That is Godliness.”

I believe this is a very Buddhist sentiment. The only way I've found to even attempt this is to take whatever's in front of me and (a) accept it; (b) cherish it; and (c) it for what it really is: the next forking point in the road that is my life. How will I react to this challenge? Eventually, I hope that I no longer react at all...at that point I will be proactive, and I won't actually see challenges, only opportunities.

I have a ways to go.

“Never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again. You only plant is more firmly in place. Have I not told you that all thought is creative?”

This is expressed elsewhere more succinctly:

What you resist persists. -- Carl Jung

Stress is created by resistance to life. I need to remember this daily, sometimes hourly. I loathe the phrase 'it is what it is' --what else would it be, what it isn't?-- and yet there's a real truth in that bit of nonsense that I need to accept. 

Life is what you make it, and life is what you make of it.

"Nobody wants to see someone get hurt"

...says every hockey fighting aficionado. after someone inevitably does get hurt in a hockey fight.

Oh, I understand the sentiment. It's that emotion, nameless in English, that would be guilt if it could be admitted to. Instead it comes out as -- or at least I hear it as -- a pitiful, plaintive whine. Yeah, it's fun to watch people bashing each other's skulls, but how was I supposed to predict one of them would get a concussion out of it?

Last night, Frazer McLaren and David Dziurzynski engaged in fisticuffs twenty six seconds into the game between McLaren's Leafs and Dziurzynki's Senators.

There was no reason for the fight. Not that there ever are reasons, only excuses. Tonight's excuse was provided by McLaren, who said he was looking to give his side "a spark". Instead he gave his opponent a concussion. Time will tell if it's one of those fleeting concussions that only sidelines you for a couple of weeks or a career-ending, life-destroying concussion the effects of which never go away. You never know with these things.

The gloating on Maple Leafs fan boards is sickening. "He filled out his face like an application", says one game summary, which goes on to note that "team loyalties and opinions on fighting aside, no one wants to see a body shake so vulnerably like that."

Nah, nobody wants that.



Listen to the crowd. Listen to how much they don't want that.

"But most hockey fights don't end like that," you say. "People don't generally get hurt in hockey fights, beyond a cut or a bruise."

Yeah, and only one out of six people playing Russian roulette actually shoots himself.

And how do you know most hockey fights don't end in injury? How many have you been in? Do you know how many hockey 'enforcers' are addicted to painkillers of one sort or another? Have you not noticed the relatively recent rash of suicides? Nah, nobody gets hurt in hockey fights.

But these guys consent to fighting. It's all consensual.

Except for many of these 'enforcers', fighting is the only reason they're in the game. Lose enough fights, or decline to flight, and there goes your lucrative career. How consensual is a fight, really, when you feel you don't have a choice?

There's a code in hockey. People don't just fight for no reason.

Twenty six seconds into the game. Score tied 0-0. No dirty plays on either side. Just a team in need of "a spark" that, you'd think, should have been there in the first place because they were playing their provincial rivals, in a game that could well have playoff implications. Hell, twenty six seconds isn't even enough time to properly assess if your team is flat or not.

You're a wuss. Hockey is a manly sport that involves periodic beatings. Deal with it.

How many fights do you see in the Stanley Cup finals? In the Olympics? Is that not good hockey?

Imagine Dzuirzynski is your son. No, never mind that. Imagine McLaren is. Are you proud of him?

Flanagan, Whatcott, and Free Speech

There are people out there defending Tom Flanagan.

Incredible.

Only in academia can you say something like "[watching child pornography] does not harm another person"--and that you have "grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures"--and have some people in the audience claim this is defensible.

Defend it then. I dare you.

In  the most technical sense imaginable, the kind of distinction that only makes sense inside ivory towers, Flanagan is right: simply watching child porn does not harm another person.

HOWEVER.

To watch child porn, child porn must first be produced, and that does harm people, many people, most grievously. Furthermore, a sizeable subset of those who do watch child porn will find themselves no longer content with just watching it. This is why merely possessing child pornography is a crime, and I goggle at the thought I'd have to explain this to anyone, much less a formerly respected man who was instrumental in the political ascendancy of Stephen Harper.

I can't help but wonder what I might find on Flanagan's hard drive. I kind of think somebody should take a peek. Where's Anonymous when you need it?

The oddest thing about this is that Flanagan really was highly respected by more than a few people. He's stepped in it before, of course, calling for the assassination of Julian Assange. In hindsight, that's not too surprising: Assange is all for freedom of incriminating information, and the more I read about Flanagan, the more incriminating information I find.

But he was a respected, even feared, political strategist for many years, and I simply can't imagine what moves people like him to commit career and social suicide. Nor what moves anyone to try and defend the man.

Flanagan's illuminating remarks on the essential "harmlessness" of child pornography serve as a useful exercise on freedom of speech. The man said something utterly repugnant; the reaction was swift and decisive. No fewer than seven organizations severed ties with him, pretty much instantly. Anyone still associating with Flanagan will now suffer his taint...and this as as it should be.

Flanagan is a libertarian. Let's look at the views of a different sort of Canadian conservative by the name of Bill Whatcott.

He's that tiresome sort of Christian who gives the rest of them a bad name. It seems as if his God has but two inviolable commandments: thou must not be gay, and thou must not commit abortion.

Proselytizing on behalf of this god has repeatedly landed Whatcott in legal trouble. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal found him guilty of hate speech; he had that conviction overturned, and the tribunal appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada.
More intervenors appeared, both on behalf of and against him, than in any other Supreme Court case in history. (Nice to see some churches taking up legal arms against him--the United Church and the Unitarians.)
The Supreme Court has upheld limits on free speech in Canada, but did so in a very vague and insubstantial way that leaves me wondering just what is okay to say and what isn't.

I can certainly understand the temptation to shut this man up. Unlike, say, Flanagan, Whatcott can hide under the skirts of Religion while making his hateful pamphlets, and he has a relatively large number of well-funded people and groups who agree with him.

But the world is changing. There will come a time, I am convinced, when expressing the kind of opinion Whatcott routinely does will have similar personal consequences to Flanagan's opinion now. I think that short of actually inciting violence, people should be free to say whatever the hell they want. These days, the really hateful stuff will find its way online in short order, and the speaker will find himself wishing he could eat his words. All without a single lawyer being paid.

The Friend Zone

Back to the well. What can I say, it's a deep well.

A friend's recent Facebook status:

Friend zone- a term people use when they have a 'crush', but know that she/he isn't interested..yet will let themselves be in that situation and give it a name so people will feel sorry for them..if it comes to that, grow a pair and move on.

Easier said than done.

I can say this with some authority, having been in the fabled Friend Zone for a very long time, back in the day. The term didn't exist then, but we had an equivalent, if less succinct, term, to wit: "I love you, but not in that way".

Translated from Friendzonish, that means "You're a good friend, but you're ugly as homemade fuck." (It's also expressed as "I love you like a brother", which should be extraordinarily comforting to an only child, but which usually made him think long and hard about incest taboos.)

That status, that zone, was the source of most of my teenage depression and melodrama. It hurt in that way that only teenage rejection does. High school is full of couples coupling. It's not an atmosphere conducive to the self-esteem of people who are ugly as homemade fuck.

I never lost hope that eventually some Object Of My Undying Affection would drop the qualifier and just say she loved me. But I did eventually accept the qualified love -- more properly called like, but whatever--for the comfort that was in it. Better some kind of companionship than none at all.

The funny thing was, once I resigned myself to the situation--to always hearing about that way, and how I wasn't fit for it--things started to change for me.

I concentrated on being the best friend I could be. And I began to see beauty everywhere. I'd always prided myself on being deep enough to look beyond the tarted and dolled up beauty that saturated high school hallways, but it was only after I started to grow up and stop lusting that I really learned what love is.

Love is, as Robert Heinlein wrote, that condition in which the happiness of another is essential to your own.

I'm still learning about love all these years later. It's a lifelong vocation. I've learned that sex has very little, in and of itself, to do with it. That took a long time to internalize, for two reasons. One, I have never been able to have sex for the sake of sex. I've tried the one night stand and couldn't hack it; deprived of emotion, sex is a biological function like defecation, about as enjoyable. Two, sex is often called "making love", which has always perplexed me. How exactly does sex make love? It's the noblest expression of love already made that I can think of, but it doesn't make love at all.

But all that said, it is possible to love people, "but not in that way". How do I know this? Because I'm married to the only woman I do love "in that way",...and it hasn't changed my love for my friends.

Welcome to the Friend Zone. It need not be a prison. And if you find yourself here, you need not move on. It can be a nice place to be.

I Miss Band

I imagine the school band is something like the school football team. Except in band you don't lose, ever. You have the camaraderie that comes from building something together, the satisfying sense that each member has a critical role in what is produced.
I played baritone, an instrument which scarcely exists outside of school bands (on this side of the Atlantic, anyway). Even in schools, baritones are increasingly being replaced with euphoniums, which  have a more mellifluous sound. I've tried, at various times, trumpet, trombone, and French horn. None of them felt very comfortable. Trumpet especially.

I have a friend who's a professional musician. Cornet and trumpet are his native instruments, and his ability, even in grade nine, was exceptional. I've always meant to ask him how he can constrict his throat to pinhole size, which is what (it feels like) you have to do to hit any note above middle C.

I got to be a fairly decent baritonist. Not a great one, by any means, but a pretty good one. That's largely because I was forever challenging myself to increase my range, tonguing technique, and musical agility. Probably the most difficult piece I played outside of band was the first movement of Haydn's trumpet concerto, which I set as a test piece for a recital. I got an A, as I recall, despite flubbing the high concert D-flat, the same note I'd nailed countless times in practice.

But band, though...

The school band I most remember had that trumpeter friend I mentioned in it, along with several other accomplished musicians. We were a very small group, as school bands go. There was one Kiwanis Festival I recall, wherein the adjudicator noted twice in his writeup that he couldn't hear the second and third trumpets. After looking up a few bars later and seeing only Craig, he wrote "I see why". What we lacked in numbers we made up for in overall talent. Good times were had by most. To this day I'm largely immune from sudden loud noises thanks to a couple of years of sitting practically on top of a drum set, the player of which rejoiced in creating sudden loud noises.

I missed out on the exotic band trips. The Oakridge band went to Nairobi, Kenya, two years before I attended; the Ingersoll District C.I. orchestra had trips to New York and Boston just before I arrived there. The extracurricular highlight of my time in band was a trip to Toronto. We performed at an elementary school and I will never forget the odd sensation I had looking out over the audience and realizing I and my bandmates were among very, very few people in that auditorium with white skin. A little of my naivete was lost in that moment as I found myself truly considering, for the first time in my life, what it might mean to be "other".

Most of the memories revolved around the music. There are no recordings out there from my years at Westminster--again, I missed out; the band did make a couple of vinyl albums a few years before I was there.  But YouTube is a virtual treasure trove...nearly every piece I played is on there somewhere. This is probably the piece I most enjoyed performing.

I'm living in the wrong part of the world to truly indulge my love of wind, and especially brass, music. In Britain, there are dozens, scores, perhaps hundreds of local bands, many of which have youth chapters, and the best of those bands can aspire to considerable acclaim and a modest fortune.

Here's one of the world's best euphonists playing 'Brilliante', a fantasy on 'Rule, Britannia' that blows my mind every time I listen to it:



Mead makes the high notes sound so effortless, and his tone is so pure...*sigh*

Just listening to the repertoire is happy-making. I can't imagine what playing it again would do for me.

Phonies?

I'm sorry if you've heard some of this before. Sometimes I feel like I'm writing the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. But the topics that tend to recur in this here Breadbin are important to me. Central to my life, actually. And so one of the first blogs I ever wrote makes a thematic return.


Stumbled across this quote in THE WEEK just now and it made me sad.

We have become a nation of phonies, writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post. We love everyone. We don't merely like them or respect them or hold them in some esteem. We LOVE them. Performers on the stage shout that they love us. Politicians love us. Acquaintances love us. We lack all formality, all distance. I do not want others to kiss me, which is starting to happen. I say goodbye and they pucker up. No! This is reserved for love and by love I mean real love, not the silly xoxo stuff that clutters the Internet with false, saccharine intimacy and emotion. I want to shake hands. I do not want to be hugged. I want degrees of intimacy, gradations, so I know where I stand and so, for that matter, will you.

Mr. Cohen, speak for yourself.

I recently wrote a blog lamenting the decline of hugging. Obviously I'm moving in the wrong social circles...or I'm just not huggable. And kissing? Is he right? Is this really a thing now?

Not that I'd object. Social kissing is common in many European cultures, after all. If you're uncomfortable with the notion, consider: there are kisses and kisses. I can't imagine someone mistaking a social peck for a percursor to intercourse. Can you?

Maybe I'm strange. (Do you THINK?) But I believe myself perfectly capable of hugging and/or kissing someone without ripping a hole in my Levi's. Then again, I'm also a guy who has slept with women--that's plural, incidentally--before so much as kissing them. And "slept with", to allay your filthy minds, means "got into bed together and went to sleep, got up eight hours later and got out of bed." With one girl I did this three nights running, and got a kiss at the end of the third night. Sex, in case you're wondering, came three months later.

Deconstructing Cohen's screed a little further: Of course performers love us (but only when they're playing); we pay them well, after all. Politicians, same deal, though the love is of course quite self-serving. Acquaintances, though? I have many of them. I don't love them. I like some of them, I tolerate others, and a select few I dislike. I'm sure I'm on all three lists of the various people acquainted with me. That's fine; that's normal.

"We lack all formality, all distance," says Cohen, who must really be a hit at parties. I'm picturing Cohen in his office at the Washington Post, about to punch out for the day, saying goodbye to his boss, who leans in for a smooch...

Really, Mr. Cohen? I can tell you there's plenty of formality in my professional life, at least: if I told anyone at work I love them, let alone "puckered up", I'd probably end up fired for sexual harassment. Hell, on social occasions, there are friends I hug and friends I shake hands with. No friends I kiss.

"silly xoxo stuff that clutters the Internet"

Well, now, here he has a bit of a point. I've noticed the proliferation of kisses and hugs in the form of exes and ohs over the past decade or so, and it is getting more casual. Women who've never kissed me in real life think nothing of littering their Facebook messages with xoxoxo, and I've caught myself wondering does she really mean those despite myself. Then I put it out of my mind, because I'm married. I reserve xoxo for Eva...I could put it in notes to other people, but it'd get misinterpreted, sure as hell.

Cohen's problem is linguistic.

I've written before on the English language's noticeable lack of "love" words. It's maddening that we are all but forced to use the same four letter word to express

• the affection we have for a lifemate
• the depth of feeling we have (if we're straight) for our best same-sex friends
• the emotion we have for various members of our family--all those 'loves' subtly different
• our strong enjoyment of our favourite foodstuffs

I had to contort myself just describing these things; L-O-V-E is the only customary term that we use in all four situations. And that's without bring S-E-X in. Somehow sex has also become synonymous with love, which is really just silly. (A runner is one who runs. A watcher watches, a hammer hams, a grocer groces. A lover...)

This in turn means that, especially for many males, the word love is off-limits in various situations to which it actually applies. A guy can't tell his best mate he loves him without stepping out of a closet. A guy can't tell his female friend he loves her, even if he does, because she'll probably think the love is really just lust. 

Cohen wants to know where he stands, and that's a fair question to have. But will he ask it? Will he confront the person proffering the unwanted pucker and peck and say just what the hell do you mean by that, politely or otherwise? I doubt it. And that's the saddest part. A grown man, bothered to the point of polemic, but so obviously unable to ask what is, after all, a simple question.

Sex vs. Violence

You know, people have been asking for over a generation now about our society's predilection for violence and aversion to sex. George Carlin riffed rather memorably about this the year I was born:



In the middle of this 'Seven Words You Can't Say On Television' routine, Carlin says

"People much wiser than I have said 'I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one another'..."

Where are these wise parents, anyway? Forty one years on, they'll still a distinct minority. Or so it seems.

What brought this on? A post by Mark Frauenfelder on BoingBoing.com regarding my favourite television show, Game of Thrones, the third season of which is coming up in a little over a month. Apparently there are multiple censored versions out there for the pirating. One of them has the sex and nudity removed, as well as the "extreme" swearing. No word on whether the occasionally graphic violence has been  nixed as well. Somehow I doubt it.


Fruenfelder says of his nine year old daughter

She begs us to let her watch the show. I wish she could watch it, too, but I don't want her to see the sex and nudity scenes. (I don't really mind her seeing the violent scenes.)

It's the inconsistency here that I don't get. Game of Thrones is inspired by the Wars of the Roses, in the 1400s...not a time you'd want to try and live through. The violence was (and is, in the show, frequent, and often brutal. As for sex, well, we're human beings, right? Sexual creatures. There's this tendency I've noticed: a lot of people seem to believe the Victorian era's prudishness extended back into prehistory. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hell, the Victorians themselves were only prudes in public. And sexuality goes back much further. Much, much further. Don't believe me? Check out the
often filthy graffiti from Pompeii, ca. 79 CE; recall that the Kama Sutra was collated into its present form not much later in a different part of the world; going back even further, here's an ancient Egyptian copy of Playboy (ca. ~1150 BCE); hell, you could find sex all over the place in Paleolithic cave art.
We've been sexual creatures for a long, long time. It is, after all, how we make more of us.

I find it odd that any parent would willingly subject their nine year old to graphic violence, yet get all squirmy as soon as the skin comes out. Is it because I'm not a parent myself? If a stork magically dropped a bundle of joy into our house -- and at this point, that's what it would take -- would I suddenly turn into an overprotective prude?

I'd like to think not. I'd like to think that my mindset is based on reason. Reason has shown us over and over again that if you're looking to audition your teen for 16 and Pregnant, the best way to do it is to withhold as much information about sex as you can.

Now, I'm not suggesting I'd load up some hardcore porn site and let my hypothetical nine-year old, girl or boy, run amok on it. Nor would I necessarily want my kid watching something like Game of Thrones alone. There's bound to be questions, and I'd kind of want to be there to provide levelheaded answers. In the case of the porn site, "no, honey, that's not typical" (where "that" is any number of things). As for Game of Thrones, I'd be there to put the violence -- and the sex, for that matter -- in context.


A comment to that BoingBoing post, by "Ethan Holman", is so good I believe I'm going to steal it:

It's like I always say: Only the most disturbed and broken of children will grow up to participate in acts of a sexual nature, but virtually every well adjusted human being will commit multiple gruesome acts of violence over the course of their lives. So it just makes sense that we protect our children from nipples and moaning.

Lost In Translation

So I'm taking French.

Over the past ten years or so, there have been an endless series of self-betterment ideas that have bubbled up out of my brain, popped out my mouth...and evaporated. How shall I put this? Discipline, to put it mildly, is not my strong suit. I'm great at spouting off about all the things I should do to make myself a more well-rounded person, but not so great at following through. Given the choice to shit or get off the pot, I'll ask you kindly to refrain from such low language. See, to make that cuss word palatable, you need only drop one letter. Thank you: now let me sit in peace.

I'm not getting any younger, though, (he said, in full recognition that the cliché seems to imply that somewhere in the world, there are people who are getting younger...) The realization of my advancing age has stirred up something of a gastrointestinal festival, and I'm thinking I might be putting this here pot to its intended purpose.

Why French? Pourquoi pas? It was one of the school subjects I most enjoyed; I graduated high school quasi-fluent, certainly proficient enough to hold a conversation. Then, of course, I lost almost all of it.

I'm halfway through the first course, a non-credit course in conversational French just to get my feet wet before I sink into it jusqu'au cou,  and I have to say my first exposure to a classroom in twenty years has been a delight. Though I must confess my high school attitude--to wit, school is not a place to learn, school is a place to show what you've learned--has followed me into my forties. Each week, we start off class with a tongue-twister. The first week's was cloaked in an interesting (to me, at least) history lesson, and it goes

Le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant. 
(The wall walling Paris keeps Paris murmuring.)

I've been collecting tongue twisters and otherwise having fun with words forever, so I felt the need to contribute the best tongue twister I know in any language, which goes like this:

La chasseur, sachant chasser, chasse san son chien.
(The hunter, knowing how to hunt, hunts without his dog)--it even makes a kind of sense!

I was interrupted halfway through reciting this and politely shushed: turns out it was on his list to be used seven weeks later.  At the break, I asked if he'd heard  the one about the six saws, and wrote it out for him:

Si ces six scies-ci scient si bien ce cyprès-ci, ces six scies-ci scieront ces six cents cyprès-ci.
(If these six saws saw this here cypress so well, these six saws here will saw these six hundred cypresses.)

I suspect it'll turn up soon...

To make learning French more fun, I bought Stephen King's The Shining en français. The English novel is one I have read so often I've practically memorized it, and so it was an ideal choice to pick up the language quickly. That said, the are some oddities.

The book, en français, is simply called "SHINING", and the mass market paperback I have shows the iconic image of Jack Nicholson being all nutso through half a door. Aside:

In case you're wondering, while I was undeniably creeped out by Kubrick's film, I share Stephen King's disdain for it. Jack Nicholson is horribly miscast, since the horror of King's novel lies in watching a loving, flawed husband and father slowly sink into madness, and Nicholson is insane from the first shot. Oh, and Shelley Duvall is so whiny you almost find yourself cheering for the forces of evil halfway through the bloody movie.

SHINING, so far as I know, is not a word in French. Within the text, Danny Torrance's 'gift' is called just that,  le Don. I was more interested to see how the translator would handle REDRUM.

There's a lovely scene in chapter 17. Danny's been checked out by a psychologist and found sane, if rather imaginative. The doctor draws Jack and Wendy aside and they discuss the child's weird ability to know things he couldn't, as well as his recent nightmares, in which the word REDRUM figures prominently. It seems, says the doctor, to be a reference to Jack's alcoholism, what Danny refers to as doing the Bad Thing. Red rum: it all fits. Nobody thinks to reverse the word, and why would they?

But REDRUM is a null word in French, reversed or otherwise. Behold: TROMAL. Jack hears it as trop mal, "too sick", and so does Dr. Edmonds. Danny is emphatic that it's one word only, and so the doctor decides it must really be trauma. Reversed,  of course, it's LA MORT -- death. Not bad. I wonder how long it took the translator to come up with that.

That said, there are some very strange things about this translation of The Shining. People referred to as Mr. and Mrs. in English are still referred to that way in translation--shouldn't it be M. and Mme.? Odder: Danny tells us some of the signs he can read: STOP, EMERGENCY, PIZZA. The third is the same in French and the second is translated properly, but STOP is still, weirdly, STOP.

Then there's the matter of Mrs. Brant.

Hallorann has just told Danny about his "shine", and the boy asks the chef about Mrs. Brant, whose thought Danny had picked up across the Overlook's lobby. She was thinking about how much she'd like to get into the bellboy's pants. Danny, being five, can't figure this out: she's got pants of her own, after all. Hallorann guffaws and tells Danny he'll know "everything there is to know about the human condition before you make ten".

That episode is completely cut out of my translation. Not a word of it in there. Is it that French doesn't have an idiom like I want to get into your pants? This is not the sort of thing I can ask my French teacher, you understand, but it's bugging me.

The first sentence of the book, in English:
Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.

In French:
Petit con prétentieux, pensa Jack Torrance.

Run that though Google Translate and the 'prick' turns into a 'jerk'. The sentiment's right, but it's missing a certain...je ne sais quoi. It reminds me of the time I saw GHOSTBUSTERS in Venezuela. February 1986, that would have been. The movie was in English with Spanish subtitles. I'd already seen it a couple of times without those subtitles, so again...pretty handy for picking up the language. But I couldn't help noticing the hash they made of this scene:



The subtitles read

¿Es esto cierto? -- Sí, este hombre es un idiota.


Come on, try a little. Maybe Spanish doesn't have an insult like 'dickless...so coin one!

Anyway, the French progresses apace. The tenses are taking the longest to come back to me. It's hard for me to distinguish my future simple from my subjunctive from my pluperfect. The gender of nouns is another thing. Does it end in an e? No? Then it's mascuiline! ...wrong! It's bizarre. Milk, the one liquid you would naturally assume is feminine because how many guys give milk?...is of course masculine. French is just sexist that way...you have a group of girls, you use elles, but as soon as one guy sneaks into that group, it's ils, even if there are still a hundred girls. Chavinism: it's a French word...

Apparently I Can't Buy Me Love

...because, quite simply, I can't afford it.

Good thing I'm not shopping for love, eh? Almost forty four grand just to get to the honeymoon? Thank you, Eva, from the bottom of my bank account heart, for not being the sort of woman who believes that the depth of my love is best measured in dollars and cents.

What exactly is the point of articles like this? I gotta say, this one made me feel like a cheap prick. Was that the intention?

For the record, and I've detailed some of this before, our wedding cost something like six grand. That included the honeymoon. Now, that was thirteen years ago; the handy-dandy Bank of Canada inflation calculator informs me we're looking at about $7520 in today's dollars.

Apparently we were supposed to spend almost four times that. None of our guests mentioned this to us; either they were too tactful or that figure's full of shit.

I've only been married thirteen years, as I say. That's not long, by my lights, anyway: my mom's been married for more than thirty years; Eva's parents were married for 43 years and her grandparents were married for 59. All three marriages, so far as I can see or say, were and are one long honeymoon, incidentally. I like to think I've been married long enough to pose a question to anyone contemplating a wedding in their near future, and here it is: are you getting married for a wedding, or for a marriage?

There's a huge difference. What I'd really like to see is a long-term study attempting to correlate the amount spent on a wedding with the likelihood of future divorce. I suspect--can't prove, obviously, but suspect--there's a strong correlation. Because people willing to blow huge sums of money on a single day...well, forgive me, but have they really thought about what comes after?

I know people who spent substantially less than we did on their weddings. One couple's wedding predates ours and they're still going strong; the other wedding was relatively recent, but I believe they've got what it takes to last as well. Of course, the plural of anecdote is not data. But I can't help wondering. Each time I hear about a marriage on the rocks, I want to blurt out "and how much did you waste on pay for the wedding?"

Heaven forbid I insist to the world that my way is The One Right Way To Be. If you have the money for an extravagant wedding, by all means spend it. But please bear in mind a truth, or at least the truth as I see it: just because you may be financially rich now doesn't mean you will be in the future. And love can't be all about money. It just can't be. When your parents told you the best things in life are free, they may not have mentioned love. But it is the best thing...really the only thing in life.

I said all that to say this.

Budget the luxuries first. And do spoil your love. It needn't cost much, amortized over the years of your life together.

Or beyond.

Happy Valentine's Day, Eva. All the money in the world wouldn't change my love for you; nether would losing every dime I have. With you, I'm rich beyond anything I'd have dared to dream before I met you.

SNOW SNOW SNOW

Well, everybody, we lived through another kyag. And while you may have kissed your ass goodbye at the repeated urgings of the Weather Network, my ass is still here and only slightly winded.

My Weathereye app first flashed red on Tuesday. The white lightning bolt on red used to mean a warning had been issued; now, like as not, it's a warning that some Weather Network minion has penned a story he or she thinks everybody should read. It might not have anything to do with my area at all.
In this case, it did...sort of. An Alberta clipper was forecast to float by on Thursday into Friday. Now, clippers are rarely such of a much, as the link notes. The real problem for us folks living in the Great Lakes tends to be the aftermath, when colder temperatures bring snowsqualls.

Forecasted accumulations varied wildly between 10 and 40 cm (roughly 4 and 16"). Such variance is typical for this area: the Great Lakes are among the most difficult regions on the planet to forecast accurately. A little quiver in the jet stream can radically change the weather overhead. Basically, I went to bed Thursday night knowing some snow was coming, not how much would fall. Nobody else seemed to know with any certainty, either, but that didn't stop the warnings.

SNOWFALL WARNING. Can anything be more comical, in Canada, in February?

I woke up Friday morning to...okay, that's a reasonable amount of snow. Nothing to get excited about, to be certain, but shovelling's required. That's more than I could say for all of last winter, so I guess it's worthy of notice.
The blade of my shovel, a Canadian Tire ergonomic jobby that has performed adequately for years, separated from the shaft about three strokes into my first go-round on the driveway. This meant I had to push the thing with my capacious gut and then hold the two parts together with every lift. Tedious. Very tedious.
(Or I could have remembered the necessary after the last time this happened, three or four years ago, and ran some scalding water through the shovel  melting the snow that had somehow invaded the innards. But no, better to curse the 'broken' shovel: it imparts needed energy.)

I shovelled three times Friday morning before I left for work, mindful once again of my stepfather's long ago lesson that it's better to shovel four inches three times than a foot once. Each time, I had to hold my 'broken' shovel together with each stroke. Le sigh.

680 News out of Toronto had basically abandoned the news in favour of a thirty minute weather and traffic loop. A hundred and sixty five crashes since midnight, we were informed. (So grateful they have finally dropped the word 'accident' from the lexicon. Most collisions aren't accidental at all: they're the inevitable consequence of too much speed and too little control of your vehicle. You can scoff all you want at the fact I don't drive. It doesn't change basic physics. Ice is slippery. Whodathunkit?)

The walk to work was not pleasant. Not that I had expected it to be. Visibility was down to less than twenty meters as swirling snow-demons capered all around me. But I made it to work, unlike quite a few people at quite a few jobs on Friday.
The teachers had an excuse: they'd (predictably) closed the schools. They almost never did this when I was growing up--I can count the snow days of my scholastic career on the fingers of one hand--but they do it at the drop of a flake nowadays and I can't figure out why. It might have something to do with the fact that children are seemingly not allowed to walk to school any more, but whatever.

There was no excuse, as far as I could see, for other people failing to show for work. But absenteeism was epidemic at every job I surveyed on Friday. Doubtless some of this was due to parents being unable to find child care on short notice--I can't be the only one that reacts with incredulity when they shut the schools down because it's freakin' snowing. Other people probably believed the hype and thought if they went outside on Friday they might die.

All in all, we got 40 cms, which is the first time I can remember us coming out on the upper end of a forecasted snow depth in years. It's a lot of snow to fall at once, but it's nothing to get worked up about. Now, New England...many places got a meter of snow. That's  a snowstorm. Maybe even a kyag...

41

"Does it bother you," asked Eva last night, just before bed, "that you're turning 41?"

I thought about it a while. "Yeah, a little," I admitted. "Not for the reason most people would give, though..." and then I stopped dead. "It's hard to articulate," I said. "I'll have to write it out tomorrow."

And now tomorrow is today and I'm seemingly no closer to getting a handle on these alien thoughts.

No worries, folks, I'm not having that midlife crisis.. On the contrary: I'm reasonably happy with most aspects of my life, ecstatically happy with others, and the niggling sense I'm feeling is certainly not overtaking my rational mind.

It's there, though: no denying it.

Oh, the accepted narrative is well known. I'm supposed to be asking myself IS THIS ALL THERE IS?, eventually deciding that no, it isn't/shouldn't be/can't be, and then throwing away all I have in search of some illusion, wrecking my life in the process.

No, thanks.

Even if 'this' isn't 'all there is', I have to say upon reflection that it's the vast majority of all there need be in my life.

"If you have one friend in the world, you're lucky. Two and you're blessed. Three is impossible."
--unknown; one of those Uncle Rog quotes that recurs at intervals

When I first heard those words in grade thirteen, they changed my perception of myself in a profoundly positive way. I've always had trouble making friends. I love people in the abstract, and my history has shown me that I like many people on sight and have grown to love more than a few. But taking that first step to friendship, for me, is fiendishly difficult. It all comes back to that pervasive fear, the one that I have let sabotage my life for far too long in far too many ways: the fear of looking stupid. (Hell, after fourteen years with my wife, I've only recently arrived at the point where my looking stupid in front of her doesn't mortify me. Probably because it happens so bloody often.)

Until I first heard that three friends is impossible, I'd always compared myself to the extroverts who had what seemed like hundreds of friends...and found myself not just wanting, but yearning. With that cranial transplant, I  suddenly understood that I could rejoice in what I had, and let go of what everyone else seemed to have, and that's been at the heart of the hard-won emotional stability I pride myself on.

Fast-forward to 2013 and I'm blessed with friends who make my life a joy. I love one of 'em so much I married her. Best decision I ever made. In that area of my life, I'm not just alright, I'm all  right.

I've been at my job for sixteen months now and for the most part feel about as comfortable as I did at my last job after four or five years. There are people that I willingly hop out of bed to go see. (I'm paid to be in that atmosphere, too: how cool is that?)  No complaints there.

I'm currently enrolled in introductory French, and the language I was almost fluent in after high school is slowly coming back to me. My mind gets a workout every Tuesday and Eva and I are having fun spouting French at each other, and so that's okay, too.

I don't even have the sense of tempus fugit that seems to plague people as they age. I lost that the first time I read the fragment of poetry that gave birth to the phrase:

Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
(But meanwhile it flees: Time flees irretrievably, while we wander around, prisoners of our love of detail.)
--Virgil, Georgics

Love of detail? That doesn't describe me at all. I'm a simple man to please and I can find myself content in almost any surrounding. If anything, I'm the kind of guy who misses the trees for the forest.  So I don't see the point in lamenting 'lost' time: what matters to me is now.

I have the love of my life; I have my mind; I have gainful employment that also happens to have friends embedded in it; I have a house that doesn't leak (though it could do with a good cleaning, and if you think I'm going to do much of that today, you're nuts). I have three pets who love me unconditionally and I've got music and books and enough of everything else.

Nothing missing. So why the niggling?  To what possible purpose would I--

Hmmm.


IF YOUR BIRTHDAY IS TODAY:
Does your life have a purpose? Yes, of course it does, and what that purpose is will become ever clearer as the new year goes on. Listen to what your inner voice tells you. It's the part of you that knows all the answers.
--horoscope as published in The Globe and Mail, February 6, 2013, I shit you not

I don't believe in daily horoscopes and rationally I can't accept the premise that the gravitational fields of planets affect the quotidien doings of  beings here on Earth. This despite being a prototypical Aquarian in nearly every respect; the deep reading I once got out of a computer after supplying it with my natal date, time and location was...uncanny). I only read horoscopes for fun, that that only at the start of a new year...and on my birthday.

Does my life have a purpose? Maybe. What the hell is it?

The trite answer to this, the one I've read in several spiritual tomes including the closest thing I have to a  bible: it boils down to "life is what you make it"...something we all heard from our parents, I suspect, and another of those things, at least for me, that only took on real meaning as I aged. But what do I want to make of my life, when what I've made of my life so far is wonderful?

Are we gonna go round this here bush again?

Until I get to an answer on that, I suspect I'm going to be right here in this place of contentment. I don't want to give the sense that I'm stalled or stagnant. But...niggle niggle.

Hope today's horoscope is accurate.