Sunday, March 30, 2008

hemoclysm

Another great run/walk today, which will score me 3.5 glasses of wine, some of which I intend to use. I ran to music -- mostly Lucinda Williams who has now risen to ascendancy as the woman I don't know at all whom I love the most. I had a tiny moment of awakening, much like those that I used to enjoy from time to time when I was meditating regularly, when for a brief instant I felt as though I understood something. I'm not even sure I could put this into words that don't sound like something that you might see as the text logo on a Gap commercial, or a beautiful Apple advertisement on a glossy magazine. It had something to do with the differences between the young people I saw bobbing down the trail all filled with vitality and shiny faced lust for life and someone like me -- a puffing middle-aged out-of-shape old guy running not so much to celebrate life's shiny edge as to try to stave off the inevitable decline of years. We were all out there resisting something, in a way. So I had this moment where I realized the futility of that resistance and as a consequence just a tiny, beautiful little feeling of acquiescence to the moment. Yeah, there's the commercial...the logo moment.

I came home, kept my yap shut about my little epiphany, knowing that it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone not trapped inside this seedy little cranium with me. Instead, I drank water, ate a cookie, fired up the web to see what was new. Coincidentally, I'm a member of a little Buddhist newsgroup that has been absolutely aflame for the past few days over happenings in Tibet. I won't recount the content of the posts, evenly split between those who thought we should all move to Tibet somehow to fend off the Chinese, those who thought that all such conflicts had the same kind of roots and one was just as bad as another, to those who thought the newsgroup should really only be used for discussing the esoterica of various sutta and not for politics. I must say I had some sympathy with all of these points of view. But then one poster offered up an astonishing statistic -- if you laid out all of the people who had died in such conflicts over the course of the 20th century and walked the route of the dead, it would take you 4 years to traverse the whole line if you covered 100 miles per day. That's roughly 150,000,000 people, folks. I don't know enough history, so I did the obvious -- I googled the stats. I found this .

Jeebus but we're a bad species.

Why are some of us struggling so hard to save our species?

Let the earth be rid of us and pass the wine.

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Earth hour day

I have to say, even though I've got darned little to show for it, I liked today. That same Asian wonder child who has worn me ragged all week with her avid attention to everything except what she's supposed to be attending requested, insisted and then finally demanded that she and I go out for a meandering psychogeographic stroll around the neighbourhood. We ended up at a small park about 20 minutes walk from here, where we waited out a couple of kids who were intent on pushing their dog down a little slide (my little Chinese flower doesn't like dogs). After our turn on the swings, we headed towards home, but stumbled across an interesting little family. Dad was practising his fire juggling act in preparation for Earth hour tonight, while his son was up a chestnut tree peeking down at us and his daughter was trying to throw a home made frisbee at her brother. We had no real choice but to camp out on their sidewalk for an hour, do some sidewalk art and flick around some of the rapidly disappearing hunks of dirty old spring snow. When mom came home (wonderfully friendly face beneath a flaming rainbow full of hair) she seemed slightly confused by us, not having a clue who we were, but then quickly decided that she liked us and so suggested that we buy a house a few doors away that had gone up for sale. Instead, we chose to pack up and walk home.

Trip to the grocery store with one of my older kids, who did a marvellous solo PETA act at the meat counter by describing her disgust for raw meat, and pointing out that ground beef looks like "some kind of disgusting red spaghetti." I suggested that we could perhaps opt for veggie burgers for dinner rather than the Dad's Famous Home-Made Cheeseburgers that we'd all primed our taste buds for, and with a classic and charming dissociation she said "oh, I'm fine once it has been cooked, but I don't like to see it like this." I could have taken a moment to argue the ethics and philosophy of this, but she's 12, don't you know. Sometimes you just have to leave stuff like this alone. Especially on a day when you've been lucky enough to befriend a fire juggler.

At 8 pm, the lights went out. There was an immediate and happy change of atmosphere in the house. Even though it wasn't really dark outside, we were all suddenly "camped out". The little ones felt they couldn't even move off of the couch without a flashlight in hand. Mom and the older kids, strangely, decided that the only thing for it was a quick dip in our guilty pleasure -- the backyard hot tub. There was something oddly festive about the darkened street, and a bit of jollity about the discovery that one of our neighbours, apparently pretending to douse the lights, had simply pulled down some opaque blinds we hadn't known they had -- you could see the light creeping around the edges.

At 9 pm, slightly past, the lights slowly crept back on. Computers began to whir again. Snacks were served. It occurred to me that we could do this a lot more often. It also occurred to me that in my kids lifetime, and very possibly my own, there was a good chance that we'd be doing this not out of a symbolic nod to the need to conserve, but because there'd be no choice. It won't be quite as much fun then.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Death by a thousand cuts

It's amazing how a million tiny little annoyances can eventually mount up to be one big nasty stinky day. One ill-behaved student determined to crash a simulation just because she has discovered how to do so. One testosterone-soaked young man almost prepared to endure a head-on collision just to avoid yielding the right of way on a tiny snow-filled avenue. One insane Asian daughter unprepared to focus long enough to put her winter coat and boots on in less than 20 minutes while I'm desperate to get home, hide from the madness, put my feet up for a bit.

My wife saved me (again) by whisking me off to the pub for two cool pints while she listened to all of my rubbish. All wines tallied. I've decided not to count beers. Just this once.

Conclusion at the end of a long day -- I don't handle March well.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Tally ho

Does cognac count? Christ, I guess it has to.

Competition, running, reading

Ok, just to assuage any continuing fears for my cardiac health -- I'm not doing competitive running. I'm a penguin. Always will be. But I do have a little book competition. There's something else out there in the works. My book releases first, so it should be ok. Fun in fact. I hope.

The running. I just went for a 2.6 mile jaunt in a merry little blizzard. I came home early from work to run, the crazy snow started up, the wind whipped around, so I said I'd only go if I could find a hat. I found a hat. Ok, I said, I'll only go if I can find a pair of gloves (two pairs lost to nasty teenage residents of my house who don't understand property law). I found a pair of gloves. So I went. While being pelted with tiny little laser beams of ice (I hadn't thought of wearing goggles) I came up with an idea worth stealing. Somewhere, there used to be a blog called 1000 beers (I think) which started when the author had the idea of counting the number of beers he "earned" in caloric content from his runs. A quick google just drew a blank but I'll look harder and if I find it I'll link. I can't drink much beer. The purines cause me to have gout attacks. For some reason, red wine purines are ok. I don't get it but I'm not complaining. So here goes. According to my little wrist GPS doohickey, I've earned 7 glasses of red wine this week (calculating on 110 calories per glass). If I can figure out how, I'll do a nice little side bar.*

The reading. Yeah, I'm reading a Ken Follett. An Oprah fucking book to boot. I don't know what's happened to me. I'm slumming it. Reading books that actually don't cause me to fall asleep in my soup. But at least it's about architecture. Or I think it is. So far, it's been about a pig. That, and a twelfth century man who has astonishing luck (both good and bad) and a rather consuming libido. I won't even tell you my second choice for a read, other than to say that it's impossible to hold up in bed without breaking your nose and it has a fair number of equations in it.

Like I said. I dunno what's happening.

But I'm going to drink a glass of wine now. Maybe two.

*sidebar done. It's amazing the efficiency.

Monday, March 24, 2008

On the upswing

That's two weekends in a row without a stitch of work. Well, unless you consider gnawing through big hunks of turkey and sneaking little handfuls of my kids' jellybeans to be work. Pretty soon I'll be living on the street at this rate. I ran again on Sunday, once again without suffering anything beyond the normal expected levels of defibrillation. Sunday had a great feel to it -- just like back in the days before all of this career foolishness when I knew I was a deadbeat but I could still run 10 miles and then come home and cook and drink wine all day.

James Lovelock says we've got 20 good years left. I do have my moments when I feel as though I should spend them exactly like this.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Happy Easter

For us, it's just a high chocolate holiday. Others are a little more into the spirit of the thing. Guess we're simple infidels. Mmmm....chocolate.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

The business of writing

So here's what I've recently discovered about the writing life. The average full-time writer spends many thankless years toiling away at a manuscript. The lucky ones eventually catch a break and they are offered publication, which usually involves a nice offer of advance on royalties. This money comes in several sizeable chunks. Then the government (at least in Canada -- I don't know the rules elsewhere) swoops in and scoffs up a good percentage of the take as if it had actually been earned all in one year, rather than averaged over the years in which the work took place. This eventuates in a sizeable windfall for the government.

For me, the worst of this is I may have to see about half of the money I've earned be sucked up and sent to Afghanistan, used to fill potholes in giant roads so that more trucks can belch down them carrying millions of plastic dolls from Asia, and pumped into subsidies for the oil industry so that they can be helped to clean up the giant mess they're making in Western Canada -- we wouldn't want to eat into their profits, after all, or, in accord with the mighty forces of globalization, they might just up and move to....those other tar sands......hang on.....

I'm one of the lucky ones. I have a day job. Even if I had never written a word, I'd be able to feed my kids and get out to the movies once a week as well. But imagine if writing is all you do. You spend ten years crafting a brilliant novel and by some incredible stroke of luck you're not the only one who thinks it is brilliant and it actually earns some money. One big jackpot in one year. And then it's back to macaroni and cheese in your basement apartment for ten more years while the roads keep getting wider and the air keeps getting messed up, all thanks to your kind financial contributions.

I'm actually tempted to take all of my advance and donate it. Well, maybe not all of it. I still need that espresso machine.

What I'm hating this week though is that at a time when there are so many cool and fun things I could be spending my time on, I've had to spend a lot of hours researching corporate tax law and accounting practices so that I can swot up on the same kinds of tax-saving tactics used by great companies like Texaco and Monsanto. At one point I actually wondered about opening a bank account on Grand Cayman, but I think the price of the golden key to open the safe is higher than my advance.

It's made me great fun to live with. In fact, after supper last night (truthfully, more like in the middle of supper), I bolted down to my little basement hole-in-the-wall to brood. This little hole I call a study is tax-deductible by the way. But only the heat (of which there isn't really any) and the light (which is all pumped in because I'm below grade and have no windows).

Is it really spring?

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Climate change

A recent photo from New Brunswick.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Obama talk

Sad that Obama has to distance himself from statements like these. Blacks still mistreated by whites? How preposterous. The actions of the US government contributed to the 9/11 attacks? Ludicrous. I could never be a politician. It's the art of not saying what everyone knows is actually true so that we can prop up this kind of fantasy reality which is perhaps the way we'd like things to be, but not the way they are. Doesn't work. As we're finding out.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Mental refreshment on a bed of anxiety

I guess that title is kind of a recipe for the weekend I just had. I'm more determined than ever to achieve some kind of work/rest-of-life balance, and so in that spirit I banned all work from my mind for the weekend. The only part of this that ended up being not so good was that I awoke this morning with a nasty sinking rueful return to work feeling, which, when you work all the time, you kind of avoid. Also, there was the fact that I realized I hadn't so much prepared a lecture for this morning as thrown together some likely powerpoint slides on Friday afternoon, and most of them contained facts I couldn't really support. Luckily, I had a critical ten minutes by myself following breakfast that let me put together enough to sustain myself through 50 minutes of talking. It seemed to work out ok.

Along with my weekend of blissful family time, planning a nice trip to Barbados in April, going out for my first decent run in almost 2 years (and not having a heart attack --actually enjoying it), some Nordic skiing on what's left of the white stuff (more like Nordic skating really) and then a fun and rare dinner out with all 8 of us at an Irish pub (because we knew our chances of getting into the place, not to mention the kind of welcome we'd get with two 4 year olds in tow) if we tried to do it today, I had this nagging ache in the back of my brain as I watched the financial crisis in the US deepen. This all lended an air of unreality to my family bliss.

It's pretty hard to take things lightly when, reading between the lines of even the more staid and conservative media south of the border, the message seems to be that one wrong move or bit of bad luck right now could lay the US financial system in ruins. Strangely, right now, the Canadian system seems to be ticking along. We're still building houses and making jobs somehow, though I notice that while the value of the US dollar is sinking like a stone against many other markers (and will plunge tomorrow when the interest rates are cut deeply), it's holding steady against the Canadian dollar, which means that our currency must be devaluing as well.

So I'm vacillating between thinking that this is just a slight pothole in the inevitable but so far fairly gradual ratcheting down of a growth economy based on fossil fuels to thinking we might just be staring off the edge of a cliff right now. Take off the blinders and it isn't hard to see oneself in Canada as the neighbour of a lumbering great beast that has just woken up to discover that its credit has run out, it doesn't know how to make anything anymore, it has a long historic feeling of entitlement, and a helluva big stack of weapons ready at hand.

With that kind of subtext, it felt a bit surreal to be thinking about flying to the Caribbean. We looked at the pretty websites and even sent a couple of email questions, but nobody was pushing the "pay" button just yet.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The rut

It's dawned on me over the last couple of days that I'm falling into a work rut. A few pennies have dropped. One is that now, after having been separated from my kids for six days, I've realized that their not being around did not speed up my progress in catching up with a backlog at work. This can only mean that I don't spend much time with them because I'm basically working all the time already. Not good.

Another is that I've been waking up with my fists slightly clenched and with this vague feeling of unease, palpable fear that I'm "not going to" this or that. I'm not going to get my grant renewed (this is possible-- that book ate up a couple of years of my life and, ironically, will probably not "count" when I apply for continued funding even though it is the most positive thing I've done in my work life. Ever. ). I'm not going to be able to find the time to do any book promotion stuff that I will need to do if I hope to sell copies other than the six my mother-in-law is going to buy. I'm not going to be able to prepare decent lectures for my class. I'm not going to be able to give my kids the time they need at their various delicate stages of life (see how far down the list they are?).

Man, these are not pleasant thoughts to be having. So here I am. It's around 7 pm. I've been in this building now for near on 12 hours. Everyone else has left. And if it weren't for the fact that I'm so famished I can't think straight, I'd probably stay for about 5 more.

I've completely lost my balance. I've just spent two fantastic years somewhat belatedly finding myself, revelling in a new set of interests, connections, sources of self-esteem. But now I've turned some kind of corner where it's all starting to seem like work again and where I'm trying too hard to get too much done and none of it is really all that, well, good!

What I need is a walk in the woods.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

Climate change

Here's my street about halfway through the storm. It doesn't really do justice but it does show a firetruck backing down our street (followed by a police car) because it was the only way they could get through the snow. I imagine we have more years like this ahead, with records being smashed. Or perhaps next year we'll have no snow at all. Nobody really knows.

No end in sight

I forgot to mention that I swallowed up 90 minutes watching a documentary on the US invasion of Iraq. I think most of these facts had somehow been on my radar, but seeing them all put together, getting the bigger picture, was quite astonishing. Anyone who thinks that the actions of a few people can't change the world should watch this. They can, and not in a good way.

I can hear myself breathing

I'm alone this weekend. Almost alone. I have two adult daughters who are theoretically living in the house, though I'm not seeing much of them. The rest of my family have gone away for a few days to visit extended family and to give me the space to catch up on things.

Yesterday was supposed to have been spend poring over spreadsheets, trying to beat to death a long technical paper that has been haunting me for a good month now. I got distracted by a few things. For one, I was able to hear myself breathe for the first time in many a month. I also began reading a great book (the Clive Doucet which should be in the sidebar about now). I'll write about this eventually in my book blog, but here I'll say that I think everyone who lives in a city (at least) should take a look at this book. I doubt I'd have found it without the intercession of a good friend (thanks Richard). I also more or less acccidentally fell inside an e-book on evolutionary architecture that took up a lot of my attention. Again, I'll say more about this in the other blog (publisher pays, so I aim all serious space cadet thoughts there). I will say that reading a book about cutting edge advances in computing circa 1995 makes one realize just how far things have come and how quickly they're moving.

And finally, I watched the snow fall. We had a gigantic monster storm yesterday. It's stunningly beautiful, it broke a record, and it will unfortunately generate a huge spate of stupid "global warming" commentaries from people who don't get the simple truth that climate change basically means freak weather and not necessarily constant hotness (also that this winter has actually been warm -- one reason for all the snow). If I ever find that camera cable, I'll stick up a picture later today when I'm avoiding those spreadsheets.

But first, gotta go dig up that shovel. But what to dig it up with?

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Torture of happiness

I have to say I'm not coping well with this "late bloomer" stuff. It's agonizing to find myself in a situation filled with exciting prospects, dreams that are on the brink of fulfillment, stuff coming together that I never actually thought possible while at the same time living in a body and with a brain that try their best to be younger than their years but without complete success. This week has once again brought me incredible intellectual riches -- I've met some dazzlingly smart young people who seem keen to climb aboard at least some part of my freight train. I get so excited that I can't think straight, concentrate, sleep, or pay attention to the long, philosophical monologues of my four year old son on such weighty matters as the colour of his shirt or the roughness of my beard. And then I climb out of bed in the morning onto aching knees, or I find myself standing in front of 200 students who are waiting for an explanation of some subtle aspect of sensory processing with just that tiny nag of uncertainty in the back of my mind that I might come to some key part of an explanation and be just a little bit lost for how to put things. It happens occasionally. I find myself recalling a lecture I heard thirty years ago about aging where it was said that one of the problems with physical aging is not so much the stuff we can't do as the stuff we think we might not be able to do. That little hesitation in your step as you try to run down a flight of stairs is something that I find happens mentally as well. I can't hold as many numbers in my head as before. I can't mentally rotate complicated objects quite as quickly. Or perhaps I just think that I can't. Either way, that little mental stutter can be fatal.

I keep resolving anew to take better care of my body. The food I put into it, the exercise I get, all of it is more important than ever before. I've got important stuff to get done, and it feels a little more like a race than ever before.

And then, at about 10 pm or so, I settle back, pour myself a modest little taste of a great scotch to loosen thoughts and feelings, and I'm momentarily overcome by this need to just relax, let go, stop trying so hard.

My life's more complicated and interesting than it has ever been before. It's a good kind of agony.