These are the good old days

Worked myself nearly into delirium today, and decided to go home and do other things rather than being driven to distraction by work.

These are the good old days. Other people have them in the past, but I have them now. I see it
in the smiles and hugs I get;
in the smiles and hugs I return;
in the cool sunny breeze through my office window;
in the casual chats I have with colleagues, janitors and secretaries;
in the respect I am given when I answer questions or help others in need;
in the independance I have in deciding what I need to do with my life;
in the freedom to love;
in the freedom from fear;
in the freedom from want;
when having it, rejoicing that I have it;
when I lose it, rejoicing that I once had to have it to lose it;
in surrounding myself with kind people;
in being supportive;
in enjoying the support of others;
in cooperation;
in seeing others cooperate;
in not having over-blown expectations put on myself;
in watching children play;
in cycling through quiet parks;
in jogging a “personal best”;
in writing a robust computer program;
in successfully doing a complicated math proof;
in imagining and hoping;
and in being alive to see, think, feel and love.

Writing Again

I get this inspiration to write something sometimes, and then my habit recently has been to write it on to any medium that seems to exist. I earlier purchased a hardcover journal where I think the object of it is to write some response to a quote or biblical passage. Like all of this, I could never keep it up.

I do have a main paper-based diary, which I have not entered anything in some months. As for LiveJournal, I never entered anything, it seems, for two years. That is, for all practical purposes, not even a first entry.

It is interesting that there was a time that writing flowed from me almost on a daily basis. It’s happening again, except this time it’s on WordPress. Not that there is anything special about WordPress (I have to type, which is slower), but it is just happening. Finally, it is happening.

I wannabe Chris: A parody about Chris Crocker Parodies - Updates

Some updates to the story I wrote.

There are some minor changes to my story. (link above)

The Chris Crocker video in question.

His imitators (parody, of course, and not all male). Many of these stray far off the topic of Chris Crocker: 1 2 3 4 5 (Israel?) 6 7 8 9 10 (a hockey player?) 11
There are dozens more, but I haven’t got anywhere near that kind of time to collect them all.

I have a link to the original story about The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier.

Some related comments in an earlier article I wrote.

Remember, when the air was free?

One of the most reassuring things about gas stations is that sign many of them have, advertising “free air”. Yes, those were the days, the days when air was free… I now go to the same gas station, and they now have a coin-operated air pump, which now charges 50 cents for air. The first time I used it, it didn’t stay on long enough for me to inflate all 4 tires. Not wanting to spend a buck just to inflate the fourth tire, I asked the manager to turn on the pump for maybe an extra minute. Would you believe I had to argue this with him?

Oh, how I long for the return of the days when the air was free. We didn’t have to pay for air. Air at one time was not a commodity to be packaged and sold. I guess there is an air shortage. There is not enough to go around. It is a wonder that after all of the tires in the world are filled with air, that there is still enough air left in the atmosphere to sustain life and for us to grow.  Of course, the oil companies would hold all living things responsible for creating an air shortage, such that there is not enough air left to put in the tires after all the living things in the world are done with it. That would be the reason for them charging us half a buck at the air pump.

Threes (by John Atherton)

I think that I shall never c
A # lovelier than 3;
For 3 < 6 or 4,
And than 1 it’s slightly >.
All things in nature come in 3s,
Like ∴, trio’s, Q.E.D.s;

While $s gain more dignity
if augmented 3 x 3 –
A 3 whose slender curves are pressed
By banks, for compound interest;
Oh, would that, paying loans or rent,
My rates were only 3%!

3² expands with rapture free,
And reaches toward infinity;
3 complements each x and y,
And intimately lives with π.
A circle’s # of °
Are best ÷ up by 3s,
But wrapped in dim obscurity
Is √(-3).

Atoms are split by men like me,
But only God is 1 in 3.

My Geo-Trig Poem

You take tan b and ×
sin(cos(q+y))
and just to make it more complex
÷ cot(Δx)
And so then by csc(Θ)
× angles π, ρ, η
and show that they continue on
by proof with δ - ε.

Once tidied-up you then inspect
and find the answer incorrect
So then you do the question over
Once it’s right you then discover
You were to do the even ones
and not the odds, which you had done.

You give it up and say you’re leaving
Geo-Trig for basket weaving.

— something I wrote back in Grade 12.

King Lear

Lear knew he was getting on in his years and asked his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia for their proclamations of love so that they may deserve an inheritance. Cordelia takes the moral high ground by being sincere and in her sincerity she had nothing really to say, since it would not come from the heart. Lear shows his superficiality by punishing Cordelia while losing sight of the major flaws in Goneril and Regan.

This is kind of like a job interview. I go and tell someone I’ve never met how much I would like to work there, and profess how much I would just love the job and profess myself “an enemy to all [of life's] other joys”; how I love it more “dearly than my eyesight, space and liberty”. If I am not convincing enough, I don’t get hired. I can’t understand what either group expects from this charade. But nonetheless, it is taken seriously by both parties, and anyone who sees its falseness quickly finds themselves out in the cold.

6 hours in a Toronto public library: a vignette

It was cold today; snowing outside. I had to wait to get my car repaired, so I ducked into a nearby library in a part of Etobicoke I knew nothing about. This was the second smallest library in Etobicoke, I was told; one that was small and cold. “Is the cold always like this?” I asked a librarian working at a computer terminal.”It’s an old building.” was the reply. “We’ve asked about it also, but this is as warm as it gets.” Great. “It gets warmer in the summer” he adds quickly, grinning.

“I guess if you have to work here every day, you might as well make a joke of it,” I replied, shaking my head. “Thank-you, sir.”

I know today is a school day, but there were more old and middle-aged people in the library than I expected. Mopers. People looking aimlessly at the stacks. Some people quietly typing away or staring at the computer screens. Some looking at newspapers. I didn’t quite get the impression that anyone was doing any actual reading. Everyone was still bundled up like they were outisde. Except for one white-haired man who seemed to be here to read the encyclopedia.

Another person who was concerned about neither was spending a few minutes on different terminals. When he sat in a computer next to mine, I glanced at his screen, and I recognised that he was engaged in a chat room of some kind, and typing into an input window with one bandaged finger. When his 20-minute login timed out, he just logged on to another terminal, and continued his interaction. I left him alone, since he wasn’t really harming anyone.

It was just that no-one struck me as a literary, or book-loving type. They weren’t here to read a novel, or to do research on the best way to plant their rosebushes next spring; or planning to set up a business and becoming more informed on market trends. Nobody was here to write an essay. Their shabby clothes told of their poverty; their eyes told of their vacancy and boredom. Their hardship summed up in a public building that couldn’t even begrudge them a little extra heat and comfort.

{This article has previously appeared in other tags.}

Who the hell is Strider, anyway?

Nobody knows I’m a dog. I’m pretty quick with my paws and can come up with a few zingers in a hurry. Of course, if they knew a dog logged on and wrote this, no one will believe it. So, go ahead and think that I am a human. For the record, my human is wasting his life away watching TV. I can’t understand what humans see in that box thing.

Dog personals

I am a single white male poodle (SWMP) looking for a member of the opposite sex. A female poodle (SFP, any color is desirable) interested in chasing cars and bicycles would be nice. She must enjoy long strolls through parks and bumming food from strangers. You can have your own dog bowl. If interested, sniff me up.

Temptation III: Choosing a name

I was writing about a fictional person named Denise in the “Temptation” entries, who resembles someone I know in real life. I don’t know why I chose the name. It’s just the way it came out. Somehow, it doesn’t reveal her essence. I could have named her Suzanne, because she reminds me of Leonard Cohen’s character of the same name in one of his most famous hit songs in the late 60s. This lyric particularly resonates:

Now Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to the river
She is wearing rags and feathers
From Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey
On our lady of the harbour
And she shows you where to look
Among the garbage and the flowers

She has all of those bittersweet contradictions that go all the way through her personality. But you somehow feel reduced to the role of observer. I can only really stand by the sidelines, along with the rest of the outside world. She looks at life from inside a glass menagerie. The world looks in and sees that it is all kind of fake. But outsiders are cut off. And maybe we don’t even exist. And it’s heartbreaking in exactly the way Cohen writes it.

Four Ugly Colours (or, colours not found in nature)

There is a certain set of color values somewhere in the visible spectrum that do not seem to have a category. These colors seem to go with nothing in your house, and do not seem to come from anything in nature.

The commonest of the ugly colors appear to be (by their RGB values — it seems to look different on different monitors):

149 255 183 industrial green

180 233 255 industrial blue

The colors of the “industrial” spectrum are most often found in factories and warehouses. The really good paint was probably left for head office. The colors also appear most often in low-rent housing and greasy-spoon restaurants.

226 255 187 puke green

A color favoured mostly by people suffering from red-green color blindness. Often mistaken for “moss green”. Consists mostly of canary yellow with just enough green to make you think the canary was unlucky. Associated with festering sores and infectious disease.

255 205 245 hospital pink

For similar reasons, industrial blue is also called “hospital blue”. Associated with strerility. People who decorate their homes in hospital pink or hospital blue favour what is called in interior design as the “anaesthetic aesthetic”. Enjoyed most often by people under anaesthesia.

Temptation II

Denise and I talked about the time we hugged, and I asked about her hugging back. She said that when she was among members of her church group, they would hug, and for a while she didn’t hug back. After a while, after enough people raised a concern, she began to hug back, but from her point of view she was just being polite. And that is the same attitude she was hugging me with.

I guess this arises from her issues of abandonment. She has blocked off her feelings towards others, I guess. I am not a counsellor, but I would think that a person who has felt a great deal of hurt would probably not want to risk hurt by demonstrating her feelings toward others too much. I am inclined to believe her when she says she was being polite, for lack of anything more reliable. Maybe there was some feeling there, but it was suppressed, as far as I know. I won’t speculate beyond what I see and hear.

She keeps her feelings, the positive ones, bottled up inside. However, she seems to have little trouble telling me about the trouble she has with others, or about the trouble other people give her. Mostly, they seem to be the kind of problems that are blameless. It just happens that in many areas in life, she is always getting the short end of the stick. Her fear of travelling on the freeway is keeping her from upgrading her skills, which is keeping her from gainful employment. I don’t know where she gets her money from for food and rent, and to afford her mid-size car, and I don’t ask about it. Her fears, all to do with the outside world, blocks her self-improvement.

So, her only solace is to turn to God. She is a very religious lady. She has led prayer groups for a couple of years, and people have asked her to pray with them on their concerns. The one gift God gave her — this world of ours — is the one thing she feels she cannot turn to her advantage because of her fear. I suppressed any urge to comment, since anything coming out of my mouth would be critical. Criticism wouldn’t work here.

All I hope and pray for is that I am simply one more step she has made to interact with the world more and to take some risks that would benefit her. But she has to go out and see these things for herself.

When we hugged, she needed it, I thought. I heard a lot of pain in that last conversation, and I almost felt that it would be cold and heartless if I didn’t hug her.

Before we parted, I asked about what I should do if I think she needed a hug? She said she would appreciate it if I asked first. We parted company. She smiled at me as I left again, more broadly than the last. We didn’t hug this time. I think she appreciated that. Somehow, I was speaking in her language. Trouble is, I don’t really know what that language is.

Harper’s Bizarre

The best of Harper’s Magazine over a period of 4 months. For those who have not read Harper’s, it is that dry, stuffy-looking magazine, the source of an occasional howler or two. It is also a source of factoids and weird/random statistics on weird/random things. Almost all of these factoids and “statistic-oids” are re-stated or paraphrased from a pile of recent Harper’s magazines hanging around the house.

• 380 people are hired off the street in Washington DC and are paid on average $20.00 per hour to stand in line for lobbyists hoping to attend congressional hearings.
• Ratio of the total area of the world’s Wal-Mart stores to the total area of Manhattan island: 9:7
• A 18-foot (5.4 metre) 12-ton minke whale ran aground in fresh water, 810 miles (1300 km) upstream, on the Amazon River in Brazil.
• In the same week in Brazil, a freshwater alligator had wandered on to a beach situated along the Atlantic Ocean.
• A hole in the universe, 1 billion light years in diameter, is probably the projection of another universe on ours.
• All possible universes exist.
• James Watson, no friend to the Negro population, and co-discoverer of DNA, found that a genetic analysis of his cells revealed that more than 16% of his genes are of Negro origin. Soon after, he resigns from his chairmanship at Cold Spring Harbour after 40 years at the helm.
• A molecular geneticist has sequenced the genome of dandruff.
• A salmon gave birth to a trout.
• A mutant race of vicious lab mice were returned to docility through gene therapy.
• Neuroscientists have found the part of our brains that gives us a sense of uncertainty.
• They have also found the part of our brains that filters out bullshit.
• Human brains are hard-wired for optimism even though they know things may not turn out well.
• % change since 1990 of the number of pawn shops in New York City: +523
• A lap dancer receives 92% more tips than while she is having her period.
• Women swing their hips in order to reduce the risk of being impregnated by unworthy men.
• Scientists have confirmed without a doubt that old people still have sex.
• Other scientists have shown that increased ethnic diversity leads to higher levels of social distrust.
• More African-Americans than whites say that immigrants take American jobs.
• 27% of Americans have not read a book in the past year.
• Live-in boyfriends do more housework than married men.
• For each a foreclosure that takes place within 1/8 mile from your house, your property value decreases by 1%.
• The British Ministry of Defense unveiled an invisible tank.
• 1 in 10 Americans say they would like an Internet access device implanted directly into their brains.
• 1/4 of the population have lived only under presidents named Bush or Clinton.

This entry is in the public domain

Yes, I want to emphasize that this entry is in the public domain. All of the thoughts in this entry can be copied and transmitted without attribution. This is a copyright-free journal entry.

This means you can spread my ideas around as if they are yours. But the catch is that if you honor this agreement and use my ideas, you must allow others to spread these thoughts around as if it belonged to them, and so should each of the hearers of their messages. And everyone is allowed to make small changes to your idea, so long as it is passed on in like manner. Otherwise, they are required to toss my ideas (and yours) out the window.

If everybody did this in our society, ideas would swirl around without attribution, without copyright control, without the oversight of editors, publishers, interest groups, advertisers, our society would advance a whole lot faster and be better off for the wealth of ideas brought to us for our free use.

So, what is my idea, you ask? Well, that was just it. Wait a minute, let me recap: This entry is in the public domain, and if we all did this to our entries is place them in the public domain, the world would be a better place, uh, for the reasons I stated above. Yeah, I mean it! Really! Hey, come back!

For those who think this is still a neat idea, pass it on.

On Cheesburgers, love and loving cheeseburgers

Hmm… I am not sure that I would agree that every relationship can be healthy. Just like knowing cheeseburgers are unhealthy doesn’t make them healthy. Similarly, if a person reacts to me in a negative way too often, I don’t think the secret would be to anticipate their negativity and to “socially engineer” only positive outcomes. That cramps your style after awhile, big time, and does not make things much healthier. I’ve tried that. It might occasionally get you out of some tight spots in the short-term, though. But it is by no means something that could be a long-term solution. And I don’t know of any long-term solution.

Funny, I like “regular” hamburgers (no cheese). I only wish that my awareness of hamburgers being unhealthy would make them healthy. :-)

The management of my self-expression

It was noted by several therapists that I was a good writer (indeed, I have been published in the Toronto Globe and Mail and elsewhere), so they encouraged me to write about whatever was on my mind. Throughout this, there wasn’t that much ever said; and what was said lacked sufficient detail that they could have meant anything; but I never thought to ask during my adolescence. In my adulthood, I couldn’t say that I ever felt that inspired to write much of anything. At that point, anything I would write down would come not out of my usual copious imagination, but instead more out of anger and frustration with therapists. By the time I stopped seeing the last therapist in university, I was 27, having been in therapy for 13 years. The last therapist (we will call him John) diagnosed me (the only one who ever did this) as having “adjustment disorder” (yes, this really appears in DSM III and DSM IV), iatrogenically induced and prolonged by my first therapist.

I am not sure if the diagnosis meant anything, since I had no sense that we had some kind of regimen outlined to tackle this problem. It just appeared that I would come in, say whatever was on my mind and walk out. The diagnosis seemed to play the role of framing future discussions. This framing was not unique to John, it was indeed typical of all the normal therapists I have seen. I would walk in, the therapist would briefly set the topic to discuss (if there was a topic on my mind, it never seemed to be relevant to them), and I would talk about that. I could not figure out the rationale of these chosen topics, but John seemed obsessed with them: Kashyap’s family that was left behind after his self-imposed exile (I have never met them, and I am not sure if that would be any of my concern), and one young lady (we will call her Tamara) I made an acquaintance with whom I didn’t really care about. My main interest was to get my degree over with and to graduate and get a job, more so than chasing women or obsessing over families I have never met, a concern I made clear to John several times. By this time I was 27, and my student loans had topped $35,000.00, so this was no idle concern to someone with no income. Again, my concerns don’t matter; I must be concerned about what the therapist wants me to feel concerned about.

Problems and problem therapists

It would seem that too much effort has been expended to try and engineer my personal narrative as that of a hard luck story. Since I fired my shrink, it would appear that the therapy witht he new shrink took on a vastly different tone. My therapist is not listening anymore (not that the previous one was any good at it anyway).

If my life is indeed a hard luck story (and I am sure elements of it certainly are), then why can’t that truth be allowed emerge on its own? Why is it that so much work needs to be done to keep drumming this idea into my head? I noticed that most therapy sessions seemed to begin as if the idea is already assumed to be true. Setting the agenda for discussion on the part of the therapist has the utility of making sure that the infinite goodness of society and of the powerful reign supreme and it is I who will need to adjust. The therapist, as a manager of the self-expression of the patient, feels he has a role in filtering the narrative of the patient to make sure that the story comes out in the right way.

Making decisions from your gut

I learned an important lesson: that you can spend years judging the competence of your psychiatrist, but when you get down to it, you never know if you are doing the right thing. No one will ever reassure you that your decision was proper, and even if they tried to reassure you, you could never be sure if they were right either, since their information (being now second-hand) is even more degenerate than my own. Ultimately, the making of the decision comes down to the decision-maker, and one must make up one’s own mind to simply live with whatever consequences befall him. In my life, I have known the lost respect from friends and other pains that result from too much indecision. My only solace is that this appears to be how therapists make their decisions concerning me. So, if they seem to feel OK carrying on like that, then I should carry on the same way and not fear criticism of any kind from them.

Indecision is the decision not to decide. By so deciding, the individual loses control over their lives.

Indecision works well for psychiatrists because it gives them more control over a patient who is deciding to not control himself; but it works poorly for the patient because of the lost opportunities that fall by the wayside. Rewards abound for everyone who makes a decision. For the indecisive there is nothing more in store than a prolonged psychiatric visit. I fail to see the point of this.

A Yossarian analogy to a period in my life

Like Yossarian in Catch-22, who is told that he can leave the embattled Italian island of Formosa for the wealth, safety and prosperity of America, where a hero’s welcome is sure to await, all I have to do in return is … “like” psychiatrists. And, unlike Yossarian, I was not so reckless as to escape that choice by leaving the island in a rubber life-raft. Why do it like that, when you can make your escape with by passenger jet? But surely anyone can empathise that even if the only possible escape was to crawl naked through twenty miles of broken radioactive glass, I probably would have attempted that also, and it would have still been worth it.