Sunday, October 29, 2006

Sitting and reading

I'm sure that a catchy, action-packed header like mine will grab lots of new readers....but that's mostly what I've had to do this weekend.

My foray into locomotor life has been brought to something of a halt by a strange new pedal affliction. My feet hurt like stink! And I'm not talking about the normal sore feet of the unaccustomed walker. Even before my little experiment, I did a lot of walking and never had foot problems. My wife thinks it's gout. This would be so unfair as I know I can drink far more red wine than I have been, especially as one of the ten biggest liquor stores in the province has just opened within a five minute walk of my house! I have a different theory. I think that I was cocky enough to believe that my regular old worn out sneakers, riddled with gaping holes in the uppers and flattened and crooked on the soles, would be fine to support my corpulence through 10-15K of walking a day. In short, I have buggered up my feet for a bit by acting as though I'm 20 years younger and weigh 40 pounds less than I do. Either way, my feet are sore, red, swollen, barely able to bear my weight, barely able, even with the assistance of nice doses of anti-inflammatories, to calm down enough for me to sleep, let alone walk.

Rather than take to the car, though, I did what I could. I shuffled Uptown yesterday to visit aforesaid liquor store for a nice bottle of Irish whiskey -- a good treat for a cold, windy, snowy, rainy weekend. I shuffled a few steps further to unleash many children in our fantastic independent bookstore. The store is small, but they organize killer reading series every year, push the best books (one of the managers won a 'handseller' award last year, in part for convincing vast legions of buyers to buy a wonderful book instead of (or at least in addition to) the book that shall not be named but which includes part of the name of an artist influential in developing the rules of perspective and ends with a word important to cryptographers). Having let my children run the staff ragged, especially after they unexpectedly met up with two of their neighbourhood friends and so staged an impromptu book eating competition, I felt duty bound to put an enormous ding in the credit line by purchasing a wonderful assortment of new books. Ok, I was probably a bit jealous of Janeen as well, on her wonderful bookbuying spree of a weekend -- what a fantastic present and special friend to have thought to give it to her.

So, on the locomotor front, I've been thinking much about walking, transportation, illness, money, power, resources, and the like. I had choices. I had the family support and the economic clout to allow my life, if I wanted it to, to click on as normal this weekend, even though I could barely walk. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to imagine a world where I wouldn't have had those kinds of choices. If I had to rely on nothing more than my feet and legs to carry me wherever I needed to go, and if I didn't have ready access to all kinds of help from family and, failing that, from the resources of my wallet, I would want to pay an enormous premium to preserve those bits of my body. I'd take better care of myself than I do. So another part of the puzzle falls into place. If I need to rely on my physiological motor for more of my mobility, it'll need some regular tune-ups and I might want to consider some of that high octane gasoline. The changes I'll need to make run quite a bit deeper than merely hanging the carkeys on the hook, it seems.

Just to recap the week before the fall of my golden arches, I should say in all honesty that it was unavoidable that I use the car on a few occasions this week. One day I needed to get two of my kids to school -- they don't both fit on my bike, especially as the older one is 19. On another day, I had to get a big bunch of family to a high school graduation. The suburban spread is going so wonderfully well in this area that the new high school has been built somewhere about halfway between here and Minnesota. It's a half hour drive from our house. Walking, even if feasible for me (if I'd skipped an afternoon of work and paid a babysitter about an extra 40 bucks -- again, we trade money for mobility, we pay for an enlarged footprint with the paper in our back pockets, though it isn't always clear how that paper gets in there in the first place) was out of the question for the group of us. Interesting to reflect on what choices would have to be made if my children were not finishing with this school instead of starting with it. Home schooling? Is there room for a horse in our yard?

But the weekend has been mostly about books. We all bought some and we all spent time reading. My wife commented that there had not been such peace in our house since before we left Nova Scotia. She's a perceptive woman.

Ending on the bookish theme, the more perceptive of my vast legions (what's the definition of a legion? If it's the size of the crowd at the old Canadian Legion Hall down the road from us, then I think I've got it right) of readers will notice a new widget on the blog. I'm a bit obsessed with keeping track of what I read. This all started when somebody once told me that the average North American reads 500 books in their lifetime. I became so worried about this that I raised my threshold for quality immediately and also began keeping track of what I read. My score will be considerably more than 500, but at my current rate (25-35/year) it won't go over an additional 1000 unless I live to a very ripe old age. This, given that I could probably name close to 1000 books already that I'd like to read but haven't, is a depressing little thought. But it does make sense to keep track. Librarything is a wonderful tool for doing so. Anyone who loves books should take a peek. I'll add books as I read them. It's fun.

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Locomotor weekend

The transition to the pedestrian world is going to be bumpy.

On Saturday, my 16 year old daughter arose from bed at a healthy hour, somewhat just past noon, stretched a limb or two and asked me if I would drive her to a nearby (2 km) city park so that she could participate in a walkathon to support the people of northern Uganda. A lovely cause and a lovely way for her to spend her day, but the idea of driving to the site seemed a bit odd, especially given my reflections on Friday. I quizzed her about the exact meeting up point and, convinced that we could walk to it in about 15 minutes, I suggested that she and I do just that. We arrived at the park expecting that once we got close enough, we'd see some signs directing us. This was not to be. Daughter's cell phone rang. It was her friend and walking companion, wondering where she was (we were a minute or two late). It turned out that we were on entirely the wrong side of the park. Now, it's not Central Park or anything, but it is big enough that this would mean an extra ten minutes or so. We asked phone-a-friend to tell us where she was. "Sure. Just drive past the gas station on the west entrance to the park and you'll see a sign." We explained that we were on foot. Long pause. "Oh." We asked her to describe her surroundings. She was completely unable to help us. Luckily, after hanging up, we stumbled across another group of walkers looking for the same thing as us. Together, we narrowed down the likely possibilities and found the crowd of walkers in less than five minutes. The whole enterprise ended up taking about 30 minutes longer than I had expected and involving me in about a 5 km round trip instead of a 4 km trip. The inconvenience was no big deal compared to the lessons learned. What for a driver might mean nothing more than a few seconds of searching might mean substantial chunks of hours for someone on foot. More interestingly, two travelers on two different spatial scales had a very difficult time communicating with one another. This mixing of scales is new and interesting.

Today, I've just walked to my office. I only have about 3 hours of work time today, and I decided to use about 35% of that time in the walking to and from my office, rather than the total of about12% that it would have cost me to have jumped into the car. But here's what happened on the walk here:

1. I managed to think some rational thoughts about a fear that had gripped me at 5 am this morning -- the realization that I have published far too few empirical papers in the last 3 years to have any optimism at all that my grant will be renewed in 2009. The rational thoughts being that with some prudent and systematic expenditure of time now, I can probably salvage my self-respect and, if not, what it really means is that I'm ready to ditch that particular funding source -- if someone like me with stable, long-term funding loses it, it usually either means they've gone crazy or that they aren't willing to put in the moderate amount of time required to look after it because their interests have migrated elsewhere. I know the first isn't true, and so if the second is then so be it -- it has to be faced.

2. I came upon a tall, leafless tree that was filled with about a hundred young blackbirds making a wonderful cacophonous sound. I entered the sound, let it wrap itself around my mind, and noticed that it rose and fell in regular fashion, almost like some kind of resonance. I wondered whether it was resonance or whether it was being brought out by some kind of external stimulus (like a cat prowling around at the base of the tree). Then I stopped wondering and just listened, especially when I noticed how the sound combined with the chatter of water in a small creek I crossed.

3. I became disoriented momentarily when I decided to diverge from my usual path to see whether I could find one that allowed me to use less road and more trail on the way to my office. There was a point when I realized that I was not where I had expected to be and I had to re-orient myself my remembering my route, peering around the horizon for landmarks, listening to the traffic for clues, and making a guess based on a sense of direction. All of this came together to send me in a direction that ended up being an even better pinpoint shortcut from woods and fields to my office door than the one I had been looking for. I felt connected....as though for once I knew where I was.

4. As I entered the building, I noticed that I was unusually tired, perspiring, breathless and that I had a funny metallic taste in my mouth. This led me to realize that I must be on the brink of the same nasty cold that my dear wife has suffered with this weekend.

That's a lot of experience that would have been missed if I'd jumped in the car, done the usual 12 minute drive, peering out the window at red lights to wonder what it was like out, how the air felt, how the rain felt, what sounds I was missing.

Now I've just spent a few more precious minutes writing about all of this rather than preparing my class tomorrow, which means there will be no time left over to begin organizing those empirical findings that I will need to publish soon to avoid having my funding cut. I think I see what's going on here.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Making time

Last August, I purchased a toddler seat for my bicycle and, to save a bit of stress, I asked the bike shop to install it for me. It took them several weeks to order, receive and install the bike seat and there wasn't a day that went by that was completely free of a bit of blue air as I grumbled about having to drive my daughter to her daycare centre rather than biking her there.

Now, in possession of the seat, I've used it about three times. It's pathetic. It's embarrassing. Every day, when I pick her up and pile her into the wagon, she looks around the parking lot, nonplussed, and asks "where's the bike?" She loved those rides, the wind blowing through her hair, the panoramic views of the park we pass through, the quick pitstop to feed the llamas (yes! llamas at the park!), the waves and smiles from passengers in passing cars. I have to mumble something to her about the lack of time - the distance from my house to the daycare centre and from there to my office means we'd have to be a bit more organized in the mornings. I'd have to get out of bed even earlier, which would mean getting to bed a little earlier, which would mean doing less of those few things I can manage to get done by myself, in my 'grown-up time' after all children are in bed. In short, I've got too much going on, too little time for everything, so I have to compensate by chewing up space. We pay for time by contracting space and we do that by consuming energy. It's all pretty basic physics.

What if I refused to make those kinds of bargains with space and time? Much would change. It isn't so much that I would do less (though by the standard of measure I'm using currently, I would certainly be 'doing' less) as that the structure of my days would change. With the increase in time and effort involved in each change of location, I would reflect more deeply on each such movement. The movements themselves would change in character as well, becoming less like finely edited camera transitions in a movie, and more like the most substantial elements of my day. By tying physical space back into a proper rhythm with the passage of time, perhaps I could find a way to relinquish my grip on both of these things. Rather than skittering along the surface of life, scrabbling from one appointment to the next, I could try to ride a natural wave of time, nestled in the wide arms of a space centred on real Earth, rather than the made up space of my mind. In the unfolding narrative of my life, my movements would become verbs rather than punctuation marks.

Can I do this? Given who I am, what I believe, and what I'm trying to do, how can I not try?

As these thoughts pass through my head, the strangest thing has happened. For reasons unknown, I've just opened my desk drawer and I've pulled out an old silver device. It's a Minerva map measuring instrument. It belonged to my father. A few days after he died, my family gathered around boxes of his possessions, taking turns pulling one surprising object after another out into the open, joining together the lines of song, story and object that defined his fantastic trajectory through life. When I saw the map measure, I remembered many long Sunday afternoons spent watching my father work at an enormous table he had set up in our basement, poring over construction blueprints, using the measure to estimate costs of building materials. I remembered seeing him doing the same thing in his office, standing in front of a large window, bent over a table, brow crinkled with concentration, white shirt sleeves held in place with the flexible stainless steel straps that kept the work surface free of dangling cuffs. The worth of his work was measured in his ability to estimate distance and cost with accuracy. I grabbed the map measure from that box and I held on to it because I wanted to keep that connection, those memories, close at hand.

At the time, it never occurred to me that the tool, its meaning, and, indeed, my father's life work, might one day have such monumental signficance in my own life and work. It's a connection to him that I never expected. I feel his hand inside mine as I hold the tool, roll it along the surface of my desk, push the reset button to feel the reassuring resistance of precision parts, my thumb making the same movement that his made, hundreds of times a day. When he was alive, he told me that he never really understood what I did. I'm not surprised. Neither did I. I think if I could have him back for just a few minutes I could offer him a better explanation than I ever did in life. But maybe it took his passing on, my moving ahead without him, and all of the self-reflection that ensued before I was able to get to that place. Until my parents were both gone, I discovered, it had been difficult to see myself through my own eyes rather than through theirs. When I no longer lived among the caresses of their forgiving glances, I had some surprising and unpleasant truths to swallow about what I was and where I was (or was not) going.

I'm going to work a little harder to wrap myself up in real space and fold my movements back into real time. Step 1. Go park the car somewhere.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

My aching head

I don't usually wade into this stuff because I always feel so overwhelmed by conflicting views that I fear I have no hope of understanding how international relations work, especially when they involve Asia. I've spent a sum total of something like 23 days in Asia, most of them in Beijing and all of them in PRC. Astonishing as it might seem to say so, I feel as though I've only visited a part of the continent that is most accessible to the Western mind (though, for the life of me, I still can't wrap my mind around the massive crowds of people in the Beijing KFC, wolfing down fare that looked even worse than what we serve up in North America, while being regaled with a 110 dB version of the song "Happy Birthday" blasting out of the muzak system to the monosyllabic chant of 'la la LA la LA LA'. ).

Anyway.

Like much of the rest of the world, I've been trying to understand what's happening in North Korea. I spent a couple of hours reading this morning, fully aware that this was a luxury that can be afforded by only the smallest fraction of the 300 million Americans who stand to be the most affected Westerners by whatever decisions are made eventually.

I really haven't a clue what's going on in this part of the world, but some near certainties shine through all the media muck.

1. Kim Jong Il is not a good man.
2. North Korea has a legitimate fear of invasion.
3. North Korea poses essentially no offensive threat to anyone.
4. The UN is being used as a tool to divest North Korea of sovereign independence and the nuclear test, though it may have been seen locally as a last ditch defensive effort (to raise uncertainty about how N Korea might respond to invasion) was exactly what was needed to help this process along.
5. If you really don't want a state to develop nukes, it's generally a bad idea to point nuclear weapons at them (which the US has been doing to North Korea since the 1950s it seems and has done more intensely over the last 10-20 years). This seems like a no-brainer. It's really the same principle that underpins my belief that the way to teach my children non-violence is probably not to beat them into submission.

I'm not sure what conclusions to make from all of this. It's a horrible situation that, like so many others, seems to have gotten nicely underway when, at the end of WWII, Western powers tinkered with cultures and civilizations that they didn't understand. Thanks to a good dose of insane totalitarian leadership, things have moved relatively swiftly to what will certainly be a brutal, bloody and tragic ending. Some nukes may explode at some point, but you can bet they won't be in California. Many more millions of people will die, but the fraction of white faces among them will be infinitesimally small.

My shame is that when I understood how pitifully weak the North Korean threat was (a small handful of fissionable material with no way to deliver it and a million starving 'soldiers' with no weapons), I breathed a small sigh of relief, even though I had already heard about the big fence that China had erected to stem the flood of refugees when the inevitable collapse takes place.

My confusion is this: not too long ago, South Korea paid handsomely for a beautiful satellite that could take high resolution pictures of the Korean peninsula. Even though North Korea announced an impending test on October 3, that satellite collected no images in North Korea over the period from October 3 to October 9. Would I be crazy to wonder about this? Was that so that nobody would know what a pathetic failure this test was? Or is there something else the world is not supposed to know about?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

First snow

It's been a crazy weather day today. I'm just cracking open my 11th straight hour in my office, so I've only been able to enjoy this weather at a distance, through a big picture window, looking out on a sky filled with crazy banks of clouds and white sparks of cold snow. At around this time last year, if the snow flew then I'd be outside underneath it, tongue out to catch the flakes, feeling the tiny burning kisses on my eyelids. Those freedoms are a bit further from reach at the moment.

It's funny that the snow flew today. I spent a long chunk of an afternoon seminar talking about stereopsis with my class. Because of an abnormality of development, I don't have it. Some students were intensely interested in knowing how my world looked. How could I explain it to them? I'm told that one of the most useful things about stereopsis is that it allows you to fully appreciate the appearance of a cloud of snow. I see snow fall in flat sheets. You (if you have stereo) see it fall in three dimensions. I'll never really know the difference. You can get some idea of how my world looks by closing one eye (but it's not quite the same -- both of my eyes work, but they argue about what they see like a tetchy old married couple). In some ways, my world is flat. Does that account for my obsession with space? My predilection for becoming lost in the simplest of settings?

In a way, I'm looking forward to the turn of the seasons. I like walking on rock hard ground, feeling the cold air freeze my nostrils. Outside sounds are denser and more real when they travel through air cooled to minus 20 degrees. It might also push away some of those sad global warming thoughts for a few months. It's a pretend reprieve, really, but I'll take it nevertheless.

A student today asked me why I don't talk more about time. Time and space he argued, correctly of course, are inextricably linked. I've been thinking about that. And about the problems caused by mixing spatial scales in lived environments. And about traffic flow, both vehicular and pedestrian. Lots of muddled thoughts are rumbling through my head. I'll need to get my head out there into that snow to see if I can make anything clarify.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

battlestar galactica

Ok, ok, I know. You'd expect better from me for a title. But I've been bemoaning the fact that I seem to have absolutely no time these days to read fiction, despite the fact that both the Giller and the Booker shortlists have just come out and I usually plow my way through at least one of the lists. So, to satisfy my appetite for makebelieve, I purchased season 1 of Battlestar Galactica. Many of our friends seem to love it and have tried to push pirated copies on us from time to time (why is it that the loveliest people think nothing of pirating film and music? Why do I feel some kind of holier-than-thou guilt when I tell them that we like to pay for what we watch and listen to. Am I missing something here?).

I 've watched about the first 3 hours of the series now, partially goaded on by my stunning and brilliant wife, who seems to like the series even more than I do. I'm quite taken by the conflict between the politician who wants to concede that the war is lost (it certainly seems to be) and the military commander who wants to keep fighting. It's an interesting conundrum. When do we give up a fight and find a way to live with a new normal? So now you can see where this is all going.

Stephen Hawking has already given up, apparently. He thinks we should really be packing up our bags and trying to find some way off this solar system that we've fucked up. I've said before that I think a better course might be to try to unfuck our planet. But what if it is too late?

I've noticed more and more media attention is being paid to adapting to climate change rather than reversing it. We can't stop this force we've unleashed, so we'd better figure out how to better heat and cool interior spaces, how to build structures that can withstand huge mega-storms, how to shore up our coasts as water levels rise, how to adapt agriculture to climate changes. When I first noticed this sea change, I was even a little bit happy about it. It seemed that at least there was evidence that we were getting over our denial phase, even if the result of that was a concession that the war was over and the only course left was to find a way to live with defeat. I'm less happy about it now because I worry that every second we spend trying to figure out how to adapt to changing climate will be one second less spent on finding a way to reverse it. In other words, it seems as though we're just putting off the inevitable.

But maybe that's inevitable in itself. I think it was E.O. Wilson who said that a part of the problem is that we can't come to mental grips with a problem that will kill our great-grandchildren but we can grapple with a problem that will kill our grandchildren. If we can change the slope of the curve that connects today with environmental armageddon, then perhaps we're pushing the job off of our shoulders and onto those of the next generation. My two year old, who was just happily bobbing around in my office screaming "Bob the Builder" songs will somehow have to grow into a superhuman being who can face down an even bigger set of problems than the ones we've got now. I look at his big whorl of chestnut hair, untouched by flame, and the perfect white skin of his neck, unblemished by the sweat and strain of engagement with problems bigger than our planet and I just don't see it. How can I decide for this little boy that it will be the fight of his life to clean up my mess?

Rona Ambrose, our environment minister, stood before a committee today and told them that "Canadians don't care about global warming as much as they care about cleaner air." Hm.. I'm not sure that's true or, if true, relevant. We can't exactly beat Mother Nature using opinion polls anymore than we can beat her with anything else. This is the same dear Rona who argues that the spotted owl is not endangered because, after all, there are 17 of them left. The same Rona who put a gag order on a meteorologist who worked for the government because he had published a novel about global warming. She seems as though she should be an intelligent woman. She's got good credentials. So how can she say such idiotic things? Can it be because of the things that she can't say? Is it because she, too, thinks we're too late to stop what we've started and so should put our time and energy into trying to adapt? It's too late to save the spotted owl, so let's move on. It's going to get hot, so let's take that as a given and see if we can figure out some way to breath. Maybe we're starting to turn our backs on a battle we think we've lost so that we can engage in a new fight. Human beings find it much easier to start things than to stop things. Don't tell me to stop killing the planet. Tell me to start planning the bubble I'm going to live in when the planet is gone.