Descending Order

For a long time, I’ve been hoping and somewhat expecting to live to the age of 100—which is a lofty goal and depends heavily on a combination of luck and self-care as I grow older. Life expectancy in this part of the world has been increasing broadly for a long time and while I feel like we’re getting close to the limit of what we can do with medicine to prolong life, people do continue to live longer and when I meet someone who’s 98 and still has a personality, I want to be that person some day.

However, more and more, I feel I’ve reached the halfway point approaching 38, and it feels like maybe I only have 38 years to go, give or take. Whether you live to be 76 or 100, life is short and it throws you these paralyzing and confusing challenges that make you question your own identity and whether or not you can really sustain any joy for that length of time. No matter how bad things get, it’s always better to be alive than to close the door on it with the crushing finality of death, so I’ve never been in such a dark place that I had considered ending it all.

But it’s hard to be alive—and I know, there’s millions of people that have it worse off than me, but happiness is relative and it has been really difficult for me to understand why I’ve been unable to meet my own expectations in life. I know I have a great deal of potential, but it seems like the circumstances I’ve encountered in my adult life have been unassailable barriers to fulfilling that potential. I try to be self-aware and own the mistakes I’ve made, rationalizing how my own actions have contributed to my various downfalls. And there’s a lot of those mistakes, especially in my early adult life—I’ve come to terms with them and I’ve learned a lot of lessons from that. However, in trying to apply those lessons going forward, it has ultimately only hurt me and I’m running out of ways to place the blame on myself.

I am very much an introvert and I’m quite content to spend a lot of time by myself. However, there’s a big difference between an introvert and a complete “loner” who doesn’t really want to make any meaningful connection with another person ever. An introvert like me tends to have a small number of close friends and those friendships are cherished because although we don’t say much in public, we usually have quite a lot to say and not many people to say those things to. And it’s important to have those kinds of friendships, because if you spend too much time in your own head, your ideas can be corrupted and poisoned by your own thought process without anyone to check you.

The scary part of that poison is when you begin to reject the feedback of your friends, knowing that they don’t really understand the situation. You lose sight of their good intentions and their inability to understand leaves a bitter emptiness in your stomach that cripples your ability to see what steps you should take next. It’s a nice idea to think that you can get on a progressive track early in life and then things just get better and better as you age, but the reality is that it’s a roller coaster of ups and downs for a long time before you find any sustained period of peace. And some people never find it, and I just refuse to accept that I will be one of those people.

I feel like I’m good at all the things that are supposed to matter in life. I am kind, I am generous, I am smart, I am honest and I have a lot of useful skills that often dwarf the skills of nearly everyone I’ve worked with in almost any job. But I have absolutely no ego about any of these things because they seem to work against me.

As it turns out, being kind and generous typically results in doing a lot more for others and less for yourself with the only return being a solid reputation as a “nice guy.” As for being “smart,” well, it was never an advantage socially throughout school, but I had assumed intelligence would eventually be a coveted trait in people as I became an adult. I was wrong. Intelligence only seems to be valued when someone needs something done that they can’t figure out for themselves. Otherwise, people seem to find it off-putting, as if it’s an attack on their own self-esteem to be interacting with someone who is smarter than they are. I’ve never been able to understand it, because I feel like I’ve matured to the point that I want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than me. I want to have my ideas challenged by other people and if they can convince me of something I hadn’t thought of before in a way that makes sense to me, I consider that growth.

Then there’s honesty. The “best policy,” they say. Well, it’s not. We live in a world that is steeped in lies and half-truths—social interactions between most people are heavily sanitized to meet the unwritten rules of what is and is not “appropriate” civilized conversation. So people are scared to actually be honest, and I get that, because real honesty is buried under these societal norms. But at the same time, people will claim that they don’t want to be lied to and they just want the straight truth. However, if you actually deliver the honest truth, people are not ready for it. They are fragile and have been conditioned to expect the sanitized version of the truth and if you really try and be honest, you run the risk of causing extreme social discomfort and damaging relations with them forever.

Then there’s this matter of having “skills” that are ostensibly valuable but ultimately have worked against me as well. I’ve worked a ton of different jobs and some of them were definitely not suited to my skill set, but most of the time, regardless of whether I’m passionate about it or not, I can out-perform almost anyone in even the simplest lines of work. Nobody in the kitchen made a better Teen Burger than I did at A&W when I was in high school, nobody made better lattes for minimum wage than I did at a coffee shop for several months, nobody could produce the stuff I could produce in a whole host of office jobs over the years and today, working in a hospital transporting patients around, you couldn’t ask for a better employee. I’m pretty much the best in the field. I know this is true.

But in all of these areas in life, I just seem to lose. There is no reward for hard work, there is no reward for intelligence and there is no reward for honesty. Nobody actually values those traits unless it benefits them directly. My reward for being intelligent is other people being intimidated by who I am. My reward for having objectively valuable skills is making enemies with jealous people who have more power and continuously try to push me down. And my reward for being honest, is losing my friends.

So, if I have at least another 38 years to go, it’s not clear to me how I’m supposed to navigate the rest of my life, but it sure seems confusing right now. I know I do have to descend into my own head for awhile and make some music just in order to complete something associated with one of the three pillars of contentment I’ve been struggling to sustain, because the other two pillars are all messed up right now and creativity is all I’ve got left.

I’m a little scared about getting too deep in my own head and losing my sense of identity that way, but the main thing is to keep on going. A beat is pulsating in my head and it won’t stop, and that’s how I know I’m still alive.

Emotional Solitaire: Lessons From the Brink

Humanity glorifies itself through art, a window to the past in which the beauties and horrors of the world are accentuated and the banality of common existence remains subdued against the rich backdrop of life’s most-celebrated settings. Without it, we lack the pervasive accessibility of artistic appreciation that is common to all forms of art—a feature I hold to be responsible for forging many of the intangible bonds between strangers. A shared artistic or creative interest among individuals

who have never met can build an instant and automatic safeguard between them that eliminates a substantial host of social tensions based on an unspoken and mutual understanding about what is funny, or beautiful, or important in the world. An understanding that is entrenched in the art itself, for it was created by people, for people, driven by the human experience.

In the past, I have found great emotional refuge in creative pursuits, finding a unique kind of healing in merely assuming the task of producing something from nothing, accepting no input from anyone but myself. My life experiences have varied wildly since adulthood kicked into full gear and those pursuits that I find therapeutic have fluctuated more or less in tandem with the company I keep. Or perhaps not the company I keep, but the time I spend in the company of others.

It is common amongst introverts to be socially conscientious, particularly in busy public settings. They are known more for observing than for participating, but they are very much present in these scenarios, and often have a greater sense of awareness for what is around them. Their contributions tend to be well thought-out and catered very specifically to the situation in ways that are not always apparent to everyone in the room. These contributions are not easy to make--it's quite exhausting to be so observant with so much going on, and to feel as though you have to properly think your way through each social scene you encounter. More than anything, this is why introverts need their alone time in order to recharge. 

It's a good formula and it works well in most situations. Although our society still has a bias towards the more boisterous, outgoing extrovert, it is well-understood now that a lot of people simply aren't like that. If I am burnt out and want to leave the party early, no one questions my reasoning. However, this emotional "recharge" is not a one-way street in the sense that the more time spent alone equates to more social energy the next time you venture out into the world. 

In electronics, if you overcharge a rechargeable battery, they lose a little bit of their holding capacity each time it happens. This somewhat parallels what can happen to an introvert (or to anyone, really) from spending too much time alone. At a certain point, time spent "alone" turns into loneliness--and there are many different kinds of loneliness. Some are characterized by episodes of abandonment or betrayal, some are internalized and self-inflicted and some carry the weight of a tragic loss of life. Common to all though, of course, is the feeling of being alone when you don't want to be. 

For nearly two years, I have felt largely alone, though I cannot wholly justify it. I have never lost the support of my family or the friends closest to me but surely without them, I would have felt entirely outcast by the world around me. Despite retaining that support, I have endured a considerable number of losses in this time that I have been helpless to forestall and could not have anticipated. I feel I've lost control of my identity to some extent and that is probably why I have felt so alone. Self-reflection is no longer a remedy for me because each time I turn it over in my mind, I keep concluding that I am flagrantly unique in nearly every setting I find myself in--yet I crave normality. 

It can be wearisome to be me. I am revered by the generations above and below me, but people my own age often seem intimidated and don't know what to think. I have skills in a variety of fields that outperform most of the workforce in those fields, yet it's exceedingly difficult to get my foot in the door in the places that really need that. My friends and acquaintances who have found romantic relationships are always encouraging and confident I'll end up with a nice girl one of these days and whenever one does come along, they're always interested to meet them and find out who they are. In reality though, it doesn't really happen and I've spent the majority of the time single, perpetually searching for that person and trying to ignore the looming hands of time that suggest I'd better hurry up and meet her so she knows I'm the right one before someone else does. 

My brand of loneliness has been self-destructive and I've overcharged my battery too many times. The empty hole I need to fill has grown too large to be filled by my family and friends alone, and so some sort of change is needed. When solitary thinking is your sole emotional remedy and the self-diagnosis consistently reveals that you are spending too much time alone, it's difficult to know which doctor to call. In spite of this, I do not feel weak. It is as though I have reached the plateau at the tail-end of an emotional bell curve and my resolve, although not strengthened, remains intact. In the past, I might have been tempted to take no action and set up camp right here on the brink of emotional security, deathly afraid that any move could only make things worse. This time though, from where I'm standing, I cannot see what the future looks like, but I am not afraid of it and I will continue to press forward. 

Time takes no breaks; it moves inexorably on at a steady and undeterred pace. It doesn't care whether you want this moment to last forever or that moment to just be over with already. It will victimize you if you do not move with it. You have become that victim when you spend your emotional energy in the past, desperately seeking justification for the state of the present in the memories of times gone by--hoping to find someone or something to blame. You have missed the boat, you are behind the times. 

Run. Catch up. 

In Defense of Not Voting

These days, I've become something of a peacenik. The overwhelming emotional exhaustion of everyday life that once turned me into a constant nervous wreck has now revealed itself as the perfect catalyst for realizing how underwhelming it can all be in light of the fact that each day offers more reasons to live than not, no matter what happens. There are always other people smiling, even when you are not, and I am at my happiest when I'm around others because it's a lot easier to make light of the heaviest happenings when someone else is there to laugh with you. A good sense of humour is an important ingredient in the recipe for a sense of peace and contentment that I inch towards more and more as time goes on. 

But I don't like fighting, and you run a great risk of finding yourself in a fight you never intended to start just by arguing with people. Not everyone thinks the way I do and not everyone thinks you can have a cool, calculated argument on a controversial topic without emotions getting in the way and when that's the case, the person you are arguing with can very easily take any opinion that is contrary to their own as a personal attack. I still want to talk to these people and I make a concerted effort to make them understand that there is a difference between "I disagree" and "I hate you and your opinions make me angry." 

I've always been a people person, despite not being nearly as socially active as some of my other friends, but as my philosophy becomes more resigned and passive with the elimination of stress from my life, I've begun to value people in a whole new way. I am much more receptive to ideas that clash with my own--in fact, I welcome them. I've become studiously interested in the way other people think and my respect for the intelligence of people that I used to think were stupid has seen a huge increase.

I love talking to different people and my preoccupation with how and why other people disagree with me allows me to make my arguments in a calm and unbiased manner, no matter how passionate I might feel about the subject. There are some subjects where I used to get frustrated with the brick wall I would run into when arguing with others, but now it's as though there is no subject that is more deeply important to me than talking to other people and listening to whatever ideas they bring to the table.

Most people are fundamentally good, which is why I try to show as much respect for every stranger I come in contact with as possible. Most people just want to live long, happy lives with freedom and well-being for themselves and those they care about. We all share this basic philosophy, but have different ideas about how to go about making it work and it rather makes it look like we all have different goals and personal agendas that couldn't possibly be aligned towards a common purpose across a world so vast. The destination is the same but everyone has chosen to take a different path and I suppose that's what life is--a mapmaking journey to a place you'll never quite reach.

If we could reach that place though, he who penned the best route would certainly share that route with friends and family, who would in turn share it with theirs, because it only stands to reason that if we all want the world to be the best it can be, we need as many people fighting for that purpose as we can. The only thing that stands in our way is our hesitation to share, our empire-building--our perverse belief that some humans deserve to benefit from human achievement more than others. Slowly, we are starting to see unity in the world as more people are realizing that we all really do share the same goals. As advances in medical science begin to have an impact in third world countries and as the internet spreads across the globe to remind everyone that they are all part of a worldwide network of people, we are closer to being one world than ever before. 

Douglas Adams once said:

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."

The portability of the internet in the modern era has allowed the technology to spread remarkably fast compared to a lot of other industrialized innovations from the wealthier parts of the world. Poor children in South American villages who live in mud houses and play outside with rocks and sticks now have mobile phones. WiFi access can be found in parts of Africa that you never would've guessed--and I know you're probably thinking they don't have computers. But they do--they come with a handcrank on the side that can be rotated for about sixty seconds to generate just enough watts of power to connect to the wireless network for a few hours. (see here for more info) 

Now, Africa needs food more than it needs computers, but the cost of getting the internet to Africa is pennies by comparison and yields arguably more prosperous benefits in the long term. How? Because it's a brochure for the world--it tells you and it shows you exactly what the world can be, its tremendous diversity, its vast scale and gives a vision of hope to many who had never seen a brochure for the world and life's potential, and wouldn't have been able to for many generations if someone hadn't seen the value in sharing instead of keeping it for themselves.

That's a roundabout way of trying to say that it's worth respecting each and every person, and when we all occasionally come together to realize that we're on the same team despite our differences, great things can happen. Throughout history, only our mistrust of one another, our belief that we are somehow different and the drive to act on those notions has stood in the way. 

Many would argue that we are different and that happiness, freedom and good health are not common goals, but I don't really see any evidence of this. Anyone who holds that opinion has probably already passed judgment based on the wrong idea, because these are very basic ingredients for life--everyone wants to be happy because happiness is what it is to live feeling mostly good, most of the time. Everyone wants to be healthy because you're less likely to die that way, which leaves more time to live feeling mostly good. And everyone wants to be free, because freedom is your right to choose what is best for your happiness and for your health.

Even people who are caught up in wacky fundamentalist religions that heavily restrict freedom, happiness AND health want all three of those things; you can tell because they are inevitably offered up as posthumous gifts once you ascend to the heavens after a hard life of faithful obedience.

For those who believe in eternal prosperity in the afterlife, their behaviour here in the real world doesn't often frame itself in a way that is easily relatable to your own goals. In fact, I think it makes people uncomfortable to think that they might have something in common with, say, someone who kills their own child on suspicions of being possessed by a demon (see here)--even if they are doing it to supposedly protect the health, happiness and freedoms of the family and friends they love. Any good parent believes in those things, it's just that not all parents believe in black magic that could turn their own child into a barbaric demon from the underworld.

The only thing missing is the right knowledge, the right education to make them understand that they need to retain their care and compassion for who they love in life, not death, and that love needs to be stronger than any witch doctor diagnosis or religious code. Humans are very good at figuring out the difference between right and wrong when there's billions of them working together naturally--we get better all the time. The moment you decide to hurt other people or try and tell them what they can and cannot do by taking away their freedoms, you are standing in the way of our natural path to happiness.

Many of you are probably wondering what this has to do with voting. Totally a fair question. The reason I've chosen to preface my stance on voting with this babble about global human values, respect for all people and the importance of freedom is to make it clear that I am optimistic about the future of an intelligent civilization and the ability that all people have to learn from one another. People give me shit for being negative so often that I'm getting tired of mentioning how often it occurs and the more I hear it, the more I begin to think that I'm not the one being negative. Dismissing another person's opinion without even acknowledging their point seems to reek of negativity, yet the instigator gets the label just for bringing it up.

I prefer to think that optimism is an important tool for cooperation and to drive the initiative of other people to accomplish something worthwhile. And I think it best manifests itself in people who are willing to have the discussion instead of those who refuse to thoroughly talk through anything that has even the slightest chance of failure.  

I yammer on about open discussion, the power of cooperation in numbers and the value of freedom because I believe these things are all very real and I believe that not many places in the world do a better job of bringing them to fruition than we do in Canada, a democracy. It would be easy for me to draw an imaginary line between the success of democracy and my idea that "people + freedom = happiness", but I don't really believe that and I do not normally vote in any election. Some people are vehemently passionate about voting, some don't care one way or the other and some refuse to vote as though they're really making a stand against the establishment. I am neither of these, and I'll go into a bit more detail after putting this into some context.

Here in Calgary, the municipal election is the hot topic of the moment. Without an incumbent mayor, all kinds of people have tossed their hat into the pool and the result, although now decided, isn't really important to my point. In keeping with the times, the final candidates included one dude with a lot of degrees and ties to community groups, one local TV personality and one actual politician. When something like this happens in a city of this size, the entire outdoor landscape is decorated with flyers, billboards and signposts telling you to vote for EVERYONE for EVERYTHING (often on the same lawn).

There's also usually two or three smear campaigns going on at once in the media as well, telling you why whoever's winning the most recent polls will surely poison our city's future. The media outlets themselves are often guilty of presenting the poll numbers in such a way as to make the race for mayor look a lot closer than it is (not exactly the case this year, but certainly demonstrated in the past) and the combination of all of these things fuels the hungry stomachs of passionate voters who have been chomping at the bit to show what responsible citizens they are and are keen to drag everyone they know along with it. 

Like I said, some people are intensely passionate about voting and I'm here to say that that's okay. It's okay to be passionate about something--it's okay to make it your entire life's work, if you want. However, like any good cause, when a large number of passionate people pool their resources to do something positive in the world, they are filled with a sense of self-importance that can quickly turn a well-intentioned philosophy into a crusade against those who aren't in their circle--and once again, the pavement on the road to global cooperation suffers another crack.

When you're surrounded by people who agree with you, it's easy to start to think that your group is right and whoever's not in it is probably wrong. That's how these activist crusades get started: "Hey guys, you know, if everyone did things this way, the world would be a better place!" And so, they put together a posse and storm the castle, implement a new government and draw up a plan to deal with the inevitable hoards of people who will disagree that the world is a better place and try and bring the new institution down themselves. It is a cycle, yes, but we learn a little bit each time--so now instead of fighting by hiring secret medieval assassins to lace the king's wine goblet with poison talc, we now do it by showing black-and-white images of the incumbent on television and overlaying bold red text on the screen showing how many millions have been wasted during their tenure, all while ambient doomsday music looms over the ad in the hopes of scaring you into voting the other way. It beats poisoning the people in charge, sure, but I still don't think it's particularly civilized and that's part of the reason I'm not much of a voter. 

Now, this part is aimed particularly at those of you who think that it's everyone's undisputed responsibility to vote. This is for anyone who has ever told me that "you have to vote" and meant it, as well as anyone who has ever said to me, "if you don't vote, you don't have the right to complain." And most importantly, this is for anyone who thinks less of someone else when they choose not to vote--often, these are the same people:

We live in Canada. A free country whose citizens' lives and behaviours are governed under a Charter of Rights & Freedoms drafted to protect an individual's civil liberties, including their right to speak freely, their right to say nothing, their freedom to create and express ideas, their right to keep their ideas to themselves, and their right to vote in a democratic society, as well as their right to choose not to. 

That's right, Canada is a free country--whether you think I should be able to or not, I can live here forever, watch all the elections and write a book attacking the candidates and complaining about all the things they're doing wrong each and every time without voting ONCE. It would be kinda stupid, but when you're living in an increasingly intelligent and civilized world, it's easy to forget what freedom is.

"Freedom" is your right to do something that everyone else thinks is stupid.

For example, the consensus is that driving 200 kilometres an hour through a playground zone is stupid. The government agrees that this is stupid and is detrimental to the safety and well-being of our people, therefore a law was made restricting the speed in playground zones. On the other hand, if you are sitting in traffic and the car in front of you has a diesel engine but you think diesel engines are stupid, you cannot--in a free country--walk up to the driver and tell him that he doesn't have the right to drive around in one of those and expect compliance.

Where you draw the line is an extremely contentious issue and in a democracy, that issue is theoretically left up to the voters. The challenge with protecting freedoms and acting in the best interest of the people is finding a balance between the rights and freedoms that they have been granted and the best means of protecting the society from the flaws those freedoms create to allow for continued prosperity. It's a complicated equation and far from a perfect system, but the government has, by and large, done a very good job at creating a "safe" society for free living.

However, the protective bubble in which free societies rest is so thick that the citizens who are now used to living "free" have begun to take notice of all the freedoms they've had to give up in order to create said bubble. That's why we still fight for change and impassioned voters have decided that voting is the best way to affect that change. I don't think it is, and I'm not alone. 

And please, for those of you who like to bring out the heavy artillery on these issues, I must politely ask that you don't give me that "you have to vote because soldiers are dying overseas to fight for those rights" jive--you try and make me out to sound like a criminal if I don't vote in a country where the right to vote and the right to choose not to are both equally valid principles in a world that is truly free. If the outcome of a military operation hoping to spread freedom and democracy includes the caveat that all citizens in the newly free country must have to vote by law, you're not fighting for freedom at all.

This should not be confused with voter apathy, either. It's not as though I don't care who influences our tax dollars and how that position comes to be decided--I'm just not the right person to do the deciding, and I don't think you are either. Which is the problem I have with the relentless encouragement of the democratic process: it applies arbitrary value to uninformed opinions and then pressures people into using their uninformed opinions to make important decisions about the society at large. What do you know about running a city or a country, really? What makes us as individuals think that we know so much about leading the public into a brighter future? 

I'm not saying you're stupid and I'm not saying that you shouldn't have the right to vote and have a say in what happens in the world around you--I'm all for protecting that right. But the reality is, you don't have to poke your head in the door of too many offices of elected officials to realize that a lot of voters don't know what they are voting for. They are encouraged to vote and those who are doing the encouraging are usually trying really hard to make the individual feel like they can make a difference and that their opinion has real value in a political setting. That's not realistic even with only a few layers of administration cluttering up the political process, but that's not always clear when the importance of your one vote gets artificially inflated like that.

We just can't be abusing our right to vote by making uninformed choices, that's all. Politicians in democratic societies are regularly ridiculed by their own electors for not being able to do their job but the voters never share in any of the blame.

I work for the City of Calgary. Right in the middle of it all--one of the 13,000 or so minions that fall under the mayor's umbrella of employment. I don't pretend to know everything, but I know a more about how the City council and administration is run than the average voter. I know the incredible amount of time, money and work that goes into making a change that would even subtlely impact the day-to-day lives of citizens around town. And I know how little the winner of the mayoral race truly impacts an average citizen's life--getting worked up about local politics is largely much ado about nothing for almost everyone, but the way some people get their teeth into this, you'd think we were voting on whether or not to bring in the Nazi's . 

I have some basic idea about how the city works now that I've been working for them for a few years, but I don't know nearly enough to say that I'm qualified to choose who should be running it at the top. Everyone who gets involved in these debates suddenly acts like an expert on city management as a result of the overinflated importance of their vote and it can be a little infuriating. In a democratic system with a consistently low voter turnout, nobody will ever try to discourage uninformed voters from placing their ballots, but that is what I'd like to see.

I believe that if you don't understand what a mayor really does and have no knowledge of the workings of municipal politics, you should not vote--out of good conscience. If you really want the best out of your democracy, the key to weeding out the crap is not to get more people voting, it's to get all the right people who are both interested and qualified to vote. Otherwise, it's a little bit like letting a stadium of football fans to choose their team's final play of the game instead of the coaching staff--sure, the fans may think they know a lot about football, but do you really want the whole Super Bowl riding on their drunken yelling?? 

Well, maybe we do, maybe we don't. In the end, it doesn't matter whether the fans or the coaches are calling the plays, it's the guys on the field who have to execute them. In Calgary, it appears Mr. Naheed Nenshi has come out of the shadows to lead the next offensive rush towards the endzone. It's big news now and will continue to be for a few days, but things will be back to normal for most people soon enough--after all, it's just another ball game.  

On 2009, in 2010

Last year, when the calendar turned over to 2009, I had a lot to say about 2008 and made a point to write about it. Usually these reflective and introspective passages that I drawl on about seem to be buried in negativity to other readers and I was careful to point out that there is a difference between reflecting on the trials and tribulations of the year past and being pissed off at the world. I talked about why we make resolutions and why we become reflective about the past and optimistic about the future each time a new year comes around. I went into a lot of detail about the way that reflection forced me into a better a understanding of who I am and who I want to be, but the most important piece of it all was probably the very first sentence and now, with 2009 well behind me, I can see that. It goes like this:

"The beginning of a new year sets forth an immovable procession of mental triggers and casual crises that disguise themselves as practical resolutions to do greater things for no other reason than the passage of time as it appears on the calendar."

The sentence looks a little codgy and overembellished to me nowadays, but the point stands: the only reason we make New Year's resolutions is because it's a new year. We are slaves to the calendar in terms of finding our resolve to become better people. I went on to mention the futility and temporal nature of these resolutions without realizing that I was in the process of writing my own. I certainly believed that even the best New Year's resolution only has a shelf life that'll last until about February, but I didn't understand that choosing to reflect on the past year in writing was equally fleeting and the error was electing to do it in January.

Not that there's anything wrong with January--it's just that I wasn't really ready for it. For me, writing has a history of being very therapeutic because it allows me to speak without being interrupted and without a target audience to skew the context of the words and tone away from my ideas. Sure, I had plenty to say about 2008, but I was treating it as though I already knew what 2009 was like. I was blinded by the fact that our time is divided into these careful segments without acknowledging that the development of the human psyche has no calendar and certainly doesn't care whether or not you make a resolution each time a new year strikes. I expected the writing to be therapeutic, told from "within" 2009 as though that were some sort of marker--but it ended up being little more than a cursory review of '08, followed by a big, longwinded version of, "I'm ready for whatever's next." I said it with a lot of conviction because I really meant it, but by the time February came around, I had already lost track of what "ready" means and effectively verified all that I had said about making these pointless resolutions in the first place.

I don't think you'll find a lot of people that talk down a New Year's resolution (especially in the middle of August), but I'm prepared to do it if there's anyone around to defend them. Making a lofty resolution to be better at this or quit that or do something x number of times before the year is over are all plastic. They are little more than neural impulses that you generate in your brain that make you feel good and optimistic about things to come. Which is nice, don't get me wrong--there's nothing bad about feeling good and there's nothing bad about optimism; however, there are better ways of achieving it that can directly improve your life and you can do them every day, not just when the new year comes around. The trouble with the New Year's resolution is that the calendar tricks us into thinking these resolutions will be more effective and the reason they make you feel good about yourself and things to come is because they don't consider the pressure that a year's worth of everyday life puts on someone--real-life pressure is completely absent from New Year's resolutions. After all, you've got a whole YEAR to get that shit done, right?

Due to the catastrophic failure rates I witness every day, I have never attempted to quit smoking--but, if you've ever set that as a New Year's resolution and felt pretty good about it on January 1st only to find yourself lighting a cigarette two weeks before February, I think you can understand what I mean. I'm not attacking resolutions in general--I think it's critically important to want and resolve to be a better, happier and healthier person, and what better source of inspiration than from within? What I'm suggesting is, ignore the calendar--never resolve to do something just because it's a new year, never resolve to make some sort of personal achievement by a certain date and never assume that putting a time limit on developing yourself is an effective way of accomplishing anything. You cannot change who you are until you want to change who you are.

Change isn't easy and abolishing a calendar-based resolution system isn't going to eliminate the pressure that making that change can have on you. That pressure, though, is not based on something fake like a calendar or a stopwatch--it is based on your own personal will to change and since you had already resolved to change because it is what you really want, you can bet that it will be much easier to deal with. Smoking is an easy example (and probably the most popular and most widely-unresolved New Year's resolution of all time) so I'll use it again: suppose you are a smoker who, over time, found himself amongst a community of non-smokers whom you admire greatly for reasons independent of smoking (I don't know, maybe you all play in a string quartet or something). By hanging out with these non-smokers on a more regular basis, you slowly learn that smoking no longer has the same meaning as it once did in your life--it no longer has as much value in terms of social status, half the places you're in all the time don't even allow it, etc. So, in conjunction with the deadly health effects of smoking, you decide that you don't really want to do it anymore. So you try and give it up and you find that it's a lot harder than you thought it would be, even though you don't even like it all that much anymore. Then it's no longer a battle of will to quit smoking, it's strictly a chemical one and the war on the addictive properties of nicotine rages on.

Then, in another situation, suppose you are a smoker who really likes smoking. You like it's cultural distinction, you enjoy learning the distinctions between different brands, you're working outside all the time with a bunch of other smokers and you genuinely enjoy the whole damn thing. However, you also know about those deadly health effects I mentioned and so you decide that it's about time to quit. But you still have a half-pack left and you're not just going to throw it out--so you set a date. You stand up proud and say: "I'm gonna quit smoking by the end of this month!" You light one of your cigarettes and triumphantly proclaim: "THIS SHALL BE MY TENTH-LAST CIGARETTE!"

Which of these two specimens is most likely to succeed, hm? The one who wants to quit or the one who decided to set a date to quit? Non-smokers may not understand the extent of the addictive chemical bond that nicotine plants in your head, but if you still think that setting a date is the right approach, the calendar has done a better job of brainwashing you than nicotine could ever do.

Why do we do this? Why set a date? Part of the problem is that we have the tendency to bow down to authoritative figures and all of the "authorities" on addiction counseling tend to set dates and attempt to chart the progress of their "patients." There are heaps of books and audio tapes and videos and brochures that will tell you that one of the most important things is setting an end date and sticking to it. Bullshit. The most important thing in trying to make any change in yourself is wanting that change to happen just a little bit more than you want things to stay the same.

Now it is 2009. We're right in the heart of it, and what of my changes? Well I didn't really bother to resolve much of anything last year, I just resolved to be "ready." Did I succeed? I suppose so--the events of 2009 were very emotional events, reaching some of the highest extremes of both ends of the spectrum that I have ever witnessed--but I hardly blinked. I was ready for it all and more or less numb to the potential of things getting worse. In fact, I rather doubt that I would've been prepared for the crappier second half of '09 if the brighter, more hopeful first half hadn't been suddenly cut short--a harsh reversal of emotions from good to bad is a remarkably effective tool if you're looking to prepare for something much worse, and I expect that it probably works the other way around, too.

I've learned a lot and that's something that I've been happy to be able to say every year of my life. I've stopped thinking about living in quasi-linear terms of happiness, success or anything else that could potentially be measured on a bar graph. I used to think an awful lot about emotional extremes and the effect that the relative distance between the opposite ends of those experiences in a person will have on them. For a long time, I've believed that happiness is relative and that if anyone has the best experience of their life, the impact it has on them is inversely proportional to the worst experience in their life. Or to put it another way: an objectively terrible experience will make happier people much unhappier than unhappy people. That's why so many celebrities seem to destroy their lives under the weight of their own success, and that's also why a starving Ethiopian woman isn't traumatized and sent running out of the house at the sight of a spider in their bed like some wealthier Western households. It's not the same as saying, "the worse you've had it, the worse you can take" because positive and negative experiences have opposite effects. The negative builds up the body armour and the positive slowly peels it away when you're not looking.

You want to be able to live life wearing as little body armour as possible--it's heavy! But unfortunately, we live in a world that's just has a few too many stray bullets in public to be walking around with nothing on all the time and very few people (probably none) have the luxury of living in an incubated life where they experience so little malcontent that they are never even forced to face an adverse challenge. But each time you have the best experience of your life, you become more comfortable with wearing a little less--and conversely, each time you have the worst experience in your life, you become strong enough to wear another layer that you didn't think you had the strength to wear before. The distance between the maximum amount of psychological body armour you can put on and the maximum amount that you are comfortable shedding is the spectrum I'm yammering on about here. I always reasoned that the longer that specrum is, the less of an impact any given experience--good or bad--will have on you.

It's a nice theory and one that I believed almost to the point of absolute truth because it all just clicks together so well for me--there are no loose ends in my life that cannot be explained by this kind of emotional spectrum. When I was in grade school, I was ridiculued socially and not very happy about that, but I excelled in academics and I remember feeling good about the future before the future actually came. My emotional spectrum was small, but I certainly knew the difference between happy and unhappy. All at once, my family moved out of the only home I knew and after having little-to-no exposure to religion in my home life, I was put into the Catholic school system at the outset of junior high school. The spectrum was struck pretty hard then--I had never been so devastated and although it's easy to call it childlike shortsightedness to react that way, the impact still resonates with me and explains a lot of the best and worst of who I have become today.

It was the first time I had any notion of that spectrum for one thing--the first time I can really recall feeling worse than I had ever felt before. Three years prior to this, I had a distinct memory of feeling the happiest I had ever felt and how far away that seemed all of a sudden was very pronounced. You can't feel the worst you've ever felt without remembering the best time of your life.

I'm not one to sit around talking about how things might be different today if the things that actually happened to me never did, but I do like to think about how they have contributed to shaping my personality and the way I process my own thoughts. The changes in my life in seventh grade turned my optimism for what I called the "second half of school" into a cantankerous disillusionment with the school system and authoritative figures in general. I was in absolute awe of what was happening--granted, I was already pretty steamed about having to leave my old stomping grounds for some school I didn't want to go to, but I didn't realize that we started every morning with a prayer.

It might be hard for some people to understand the situation I was in, but I was completely unfamiliar with prayers at church, never mind before every school day. My exposure to any kind of religious material was mostly relegated to a few wayward hand-me-down children's books that I didn't quite understand and the enormous tome in my house called the Holy Bible. I think my parents must've taken my brother and I to a church maybe once or twice of their own accord, but otherwise, religion wasn't really discussed and I was never interested enough to ask more about it. Not that I was completely naive--I vaguely understood that people seemed to believe in the always-capitalized 'God' who apparently lived in heaven and apparently that's we were all slated to go when death comes calling and something or other about angels with golden halos--but it always had an air of myth and mysticism to me that made it indistinguishable from the story of Santa Claus. Prayer? What's a prayer? Prayers were things I shouted to this vacant God "thing" when I was in a crying panic alone in my room after a bad day at school. Prayers were things that some people said in storybooks! Or at large assemblies of popes! (I just assumed all religious people were called popes back then.) Prayers were things that other people did and things that I didn't do very much because I felt that if there was a God, I wouldn't want to impose unless I really needed to--he'd just be way too busy (apparently, the concept of "all-powerful" didn't resonate much with me either).

But a prayer in school? Nah, I had never "participated" in a prayer and didn't know how--frankly, I didn't even know what was going on! Here I am, in my first class, in my first new school, surrounded by kids about my age that I didn't know and it seemed okay at first because the only weird thing about this Catholic school compared to my public elementary was some of the religious decor. Then, all at once, never having witnessed it before, the teacher welcomes everyone to the new year and says something that I didn't quite hear--suddenly, everyone I am surrounded by stands up and so I thought I'd better do so too. When I did, all these kids that I thought were so normal began to recite, in perfect unity and with perfect accuracy, a prayer I had never, ever heard. I remember letting my gaze pan around the room slowly--maybe there was a projector or some sort of poster on the wall they're reading! But no, they knew it front-to-back and I, having never heard 'The Lord's Prayer,' Billboard Top 500's best-selling prayer of all time, felt like I was standing in the middle of a cultish seance.

I was used to not fitting in, but as I gradually learned what these prayers implied and what religion really meant at the institutional level, I found it uniquely uncomfortable around to be around so many people who were on a totally different wavelength. Nothing about religion ever made sense to me and the more that the material was fed to me by the school, the more difficult it became for me to take education seriously. By the time I was in high school, I was openly critical of religion in school and with teachers and other religious people trying to defend their faith. I didn't understand why some people reacted with a sense of concern and worry for me when they learned I didn't believe in anything and I sometimes wondered if they just knew something that I didn't. But save for the situations where it was clearly the other way around, it turns out that neither believers or non-believers know much of anything on the grand scale. At least not compared to the amount of knowledge we've collectively accumulated--and knowing that now, I guess I was right to not take the education system too seriously. And that's a relief--but for a long time, I wasn't sure about that and it made life throughout high school a little uneasy.

By the time I finished the inaugural junior high school year, my grades in school had dropped in every single class by anywhere from 20-80% (except Religious Studies, where I went from a "N/A" to a 49% or something). In eigth grade, I had developed something of a reputation and teachers who knew about my position on religion were either very ignorant of my presence in their class or overly concerned, but never a happy medium. I was actually brought into a school counsellor's office one afternoon where she attempted to convert me as best as she could and have weird existential discussions that I wasn't used to having with adults (it probably still stands as the first religious debate that I ever won). In any case, it was the first time where I had been clearly singled out and treated differently than everyone else in an institution that routinely educated their pupils on the priceless value of employing principles of equality, freedom of expression and belief in oneself.

Growing up is weird like that. The whole time, the people who care about you say "believe in yourself--it doesn't matter everyone else thinks", but then as you become an adult, you realize that there's all these caveats the grown-ups didn't tell you about:

"Believe in yourself...except when talking to police."

"Always do the right thing...unless you're trying to point out a clerical error in your favour on your tax return."

"Stay true to your heart...except when your employer tells you not to."

"It doesn't matter what they think...unless they are potential customers."

"Honesty is the best policy...if you want to fuck up your social life nice and early."

The trouble with this realization that my school has been lying to me was that it was quickly followed up by the realization that school took up a significant percentage of my life. I stopped thinking about school as an opportunity to learn and better my life at large and began to think of it critically, probing for what other untruths they could be feeding me and perplexing over the possible motive. Only then was I forced to really take my position on religion seriously--I realized I had little grounds on which to actually defend my point and I was surrounded by people who had made a career out of defending religion...at least by association. I ran with it and came up with enough of an argument to silence most of my religious classmates on the subject, but some of the more experienced debaters would try and get the last word in by suggesting that you just have to "have faith". The more I began to hear that from actual adults, the more disenfranchised with religion I became and as the internet slowly became a larger and larger hub of human communication and knowledge, I quickly learned that I was not alone after all.

Well before I had graduated high school, I had a genuine disrespect for authority and authority had a genuine disrespect for me. Individual teachers can be different, of course--there were quite a few that were happy to have me in their class (or at least didn't share their discontent openly), but there's definitely more than a handful who treated me with a kind of subtle vindictiveness that I hadn't even been looking for in earlier years. If I hadn't been open and honest about my beliefs with these teachers, we might've gotten along fine, but hey, believe in yourself, right? Unless you want to make the honour roll.

Critical thinking and the pursuit for truth, honesty and realism in my day-to-day life and the relationships I make are traits I admire in other people a lot because employing them myself has been extremely difficult and trying to get the same position from others is sometimes impossible. You can't be completely truthful with someone without first defining what truth and honesty really means, and quite often, any two given people won't even be able to agree on that. I respect that some people really need their privacy and I respect that you don't always want to tell everyone EVERYTHING. It's okay to keep private information from others if you want to, but I'll tell you what I don't respect: deception. If you don't want to tell me something, fine, but don't make stuff up. Don't obscure the truth to try and make yourself look better or more knowledgable. Don't give me an answer to a question that you don't actually know the answer to. You ever meet someone who has an answer to absolutely everything and won't shut the fuck up? Sure, everyone has, but the reality is, nobody knows everything and anyone who never has to say "I don't know" in a conversation is probably lying to you at least half the time. It becomes a habit for people to lie; some people have rehearsed dishonest answers to questions they get asked often.

I think it's usually a matter of social status and a lot of the lies and even the motives behind them are not even consciously realized because it becomes such a habit. People cloud the truth and exaggerate certain things hoping to become a star in their own right of whatever social circle they operate in, but it doesn't make them bad people. It's not restricted to any one particular type of social group either, it happens in professional situations, formal meetings, concerts, in school, at parties, everywhere. Dishonesty has been one of the most effective tools at accelerating one's social status amongst others--there are even a few studies showing some pretty convincing evidence that liars get better jobs, live longer lives, make more friends and are overall more successful. How did this happen? How is it that we've created a society that rewards dishonesty in adulthood? Why do we lie to make ourselves look better in the first place? When did we decide that being dishonest is a good way to become more attractive to other people? Do grown adults honestly believe that they can lie about something and continue to lie about it for the rest of your life to others? Life is long, yo! I just can't sustain something like that.

Other times, a liar will lie only about little things and just assume that these "white lies" will have no bearing on what happens to them in the future, which is usually true, but then why bother lying in the first place if it's such a non-issue? Who are you trying to protect? Why would you go out of your way to be dishonest for absolutely no reason? I don't really believe that even little white lies are done without a motive and a lot of the time I think (and hope) that it's just a mechanism they're using to obscure a slightly more-incriminating reality. You can hear a lot of those kinds of white lies in pretty much any game of Truth or Dare, which, when it actually gets played, is a perfect example of how uncomfortable most people are with honesty. You can probably learn more about who's honest from the questions they are brave enough to ask moreso than the answers--if the questions are particularly brave, it's probably an indication that these are questions that the asker themselves would like to answer if only someone else would do it first. Mark my words, if people around the world were all very honest in games of Truth or Dare, the societal stigma on polygamy would be gone in a single generation. But as it stands, even the closest of friends quiver and squirm at the thought of discussing their deepest, dirtiest secrets with other people and it usually turns these games into nothing but a small anxiety attack for most everyone involved.

Can't we just talk to each other? Do we have to collectively and subconsciously agree to put ourselves through so much unnecessary rigour just to communicate? Maybe we do. Sometimes the inefficiency of the mind is dumbfounding--we have a thought that we want to communicate instantly, but the brain takes it sweet time getting it out of our mouths as it surveys the environment, checks who's around, adjusts the sentence structure accordingly and debates whether or not Person A is going to hear it the same way that Person B will. The different stresses we put into our voice, the body language we use and the words that we choose are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ways in which we have control our communication and so it stands to reason that it gives both our conscious and unconscious mind a lot of acting and reacting to do when talking to others. Albert Mehrabian's famous study on communication talks about how only about 7% of what you're communicating is words and the rest is non-verbal but I don't really know how you're supposed to measure effective communication in a percentage when so much of it depends on the interpretation of the listener. Nevertheless, the principle is sound: the words you say are not as important as how you say them.

The perfect example is literally at my fingertips and when I write about the principles of communication, it inevitably springs to mind that I could just be wasting my time trying to get a point across in words--especially when the whole crux of the argument is the futility of using words to communicate! I've considered turning this note into a video epic that gives me the opportunity to throw in a visual aid and more importantly, the chance to read it aloud to you as I know it should sound. Despite all the writing I've done over the years, I have never been able to know whether or not it's being read the way it should be read and I suspect that most times, it's at least a little off. A million different people could read a sentence of mine a million different ways and still be wrong because only the author knows what he really meant and although words are a descriptive and helpful clue, they're not complex enough to contain meaning--you need a brain for that.

When people have words in front of them, as you do now, it's their brain that does most of the work in understanding them, not the words themselves. I first realized this while listening to my classmates read aloud in school when the teacher would go around from desk to desk and get everyone to read five or six pages. Public speaking is something I was very averse to all throughout school and that was the main fear I had going into that exercise, but I quickly learned that although I don't like reading aloud to the class, at least I can fucking read. I mean, I don't wanna grill my classmates for something snobby like that because everyone learns in different ways and at different rates, but I wonder if some of these people ever bothered to learn to read any better. Because if they struggled that much just getting the words out, I have a hard time believing that everyone in that class was doing a bang-up job of interpreting what those words mean simultaneously.

I thought about communication a lot in 2009 because it was littered with things that challenged my ability to communicate and quite a few situations where better communication would have made it orders of magnitude easier to handle. This note isn't really about what happened so much as it is the conclusion I came to in light of those events, but there was four key things that I had no experience with and they went something like this:

In February, I enjoyed Valentine's Day for the first time in a long time and met a lovely girl named Miranda who was intelligent and quirky and a real surprise to find in what I had come to learn was a desolate and difficult dating world for someone like me. In March, we drove to Peachland for her birthday and I met some of her family in Kelowna and although I was taken aback at how easy it all seemed, I was still much happier than I had been in a long time and didn't feel vulnerable to the collapse of anything else in my life.

We had planned to go to the Sasquatch Music Festival in the summer and managed to get tickets nice and early. But in the middle of April, I stopped by her house after work and she began a nervous conversation by asking "how do you feel about...stuff?" and by the time it was over, so was the relationship. She spent a great deal of time talking in circles about how she had tried to force it to work and more or less spent the entire time lying in the hopes that she would trick herself into wanting it, I don't know. It was very difficult to get a straight answer and I'll probably never really understand what happened, but I came into that relationship very jaded about how manipulative women can be and Miranda and I even discussed that. She effectively built up my trust and healed a lot of psychological wounds I'd had for some time, but in the end, the stitches were ripped out and in went the salt. To be fair, she didn't really know what she was getting into, but I don't think that excuses pretending to be in a relationship for three months.

I had to forget about it because I've spent too much of my life being confused and so instead, I was just angry and became some sort of crusader for the truth. I spent most of my time reading science books, watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos and then I discovered Penn & Teller's Bullshit, a Showtime television program that is devoted to uncovering fraudulent behaviour and exposing liars and fakes for what they are in the face of empirical evidence. It was the first time I had ever seen anything in the media that would attack ideas and practices that I had always disagreed with but never been able to cite a reference for my claims. It pointed me to other interesting reading and studies that I certainly wouldn't have taken in otherwise. It changed my opinion on some issues and reinforced it on others. To have anything on television that was so openly in support of critical thinking and forming your own opinion instead of feeding only one to you was really refreshing and just to know that other people would be seeing it for the first time made me feel more connected with the rest of the world.

It went all through the summer and in another funny twist, the episode that exposed the bullshit on marijuana criminalization and the war on drugs aired right about the same time that my employers decided to send me to drug re-hab. Oh yes, that's right, everyone--I hadn't had a great deal of enthusiasm at work since the Miranda incident and my boss decided that he needed to do something to help me out. I don't know where they came to the conclusion that I was a drug addict, but either way, I was sent to talk to some sort of counsellor who asked me a whole bunch of personal questions that had nothing to do with work and when her report came back to my manager, I was slated to go see a doctor downtown a week after my birthday. The intentions were supposedly good, but the delivery was incredibly off-target and I have never been so offended in my life.

I didn't have the energy to pick a fight this time, though and I ran with it, considered it a free day off and was genuinely interested in what sort of bullshit goes on in these drug addiction counselling offices anyway. I went downtown and met with a nurse who gave me a 50-question survey asking me crazy things about syringes and how many times I do cocaine in a week, etc.--it was so inappropriate, it was like getting Donald Trump to fill out a McDonald's application.

I talked to the nurse in great detail about my drug use, explained the medicinal and psychoactive benefits of marijuana and emphasized that it is the only "drug" I'm involved with. I cited a lot of legitimate research, brought a few printed studies along and by the end of it, she knew that I smoked it every single day and had absolutely no rebuttal whatsoever. The addiction nurse was speechless and it was easy, but next up was "Dr. Raju Hajela" whose business card actually lists a hotmail address as his primary point of contact. Plus, "Dr. Raju Hajela" was followed by a series of letters something like: MD, CCD, CM, BL, BM, BCC, SD, AC, AMD, BA, COS, NDD--I don't know how many courses he completed over the internet to get this many credentials, but I've never seen even the most-esteemed intellects in the world who need a whole extra line just for their bullshit diplomas.

Raju Hajela was incorrigible and wouldn't listen to a word I had to say--it was very clear that he was the doctor and I was the patient, therefore he was right and I was wrong. But he also brought nothing to the table and had no answer for my arguments other than making reference to his past patients and the way drugs had ruined their lives. This doctor's office was contracted out by the city to provide this sort of service as a part of the "Employee & Family Assistance Program" and as a part of their plan, they had also scheduled me to actually get blood tests done. I patently refused and explained what a waste of their time and resources it would be and in the end, they couldn't make me do it so I didn't. I felt so out of place for the entire day as it was, there was no way I was letting that happen.

I was disappointed with the level of misunderstanding between management and myself on how to best handle my fractured mental state. I wasn't even consciously aware of any serious degradation to my performance at work and it's possible that it didn't even happen when I consider what's happened lately. Nevertheless, I went back to work and by August, my vacation time had come around again. I used my vacation time to finally complete my third CD of music and I found it harder than any music I had done before, but I was glad I was still able to put together the will to finish something creative like that again. I had been worried I would never be able to go back to music and in some ways, I know I never will go back to some of the music I used to make, but the challenge of translating the changes in my life into music will always be appealing and the final product, good or bad, will at least be interesting to me.

I went back to work in September, the hockey season got underway and I got to see the Jason Mraz concert tour swoop into Calgary for the first time. As the weather began to turn cold, things at work seemed to be looking up and I was ready for all this 2009 business to be over with so I could kick off a new year with another false sense of cleansing my experience palette and starting anew. I stopped thinking about the really difficult things like the overarching mistrust at work and the could-have-beens of Miranda or any other girl, really. Instead, I thought it was best to focus on myself and use my newfound raise at work to fund my own interests instead of pissing it away getting manipulated by women. I bought myself a dart board and began setting aside some cash to replace my long-lost pool cue. I always wanted some nice darts and I had been meaning to call up Mike Moffatt for a game of pool for a long time--we hadn't played since I saw him in 2007 in Toronto and I was surprised to learn that he was now living in Calgary again. It was all the more reason to get my shit together and I was pretty disappointed with how my social life had degraded to the point that I didn't even take the time to get out for a round of billiards anymore.

In November, Mitchell and I moved out of the house we were living in in Montgomery and moved to Huntington Hills for the second time. The new place is a stone's throw away from where we used to live in Huntington and even though it's not as nice as the Montgomery house, it sure is cheaper and that's really all I was looking for. I put some of my spreadsheet skillz to work and built a nice personal budget tool to help me keep track of my dollars and it gave me the ability to forecast how long it will be until I'm totally out of debt and things like that. It was a way to cultivate optimism using math, I guess.

But just a few days after I had moved in, I was sitting at work on Thursday when I received a call from Joel Slobogian, someone I hadn't talked to since high school and a good friend of Mike Moffatt's. He had called to tell me that Mike was no longer with us, and in fact, he had taken his own life.

The aftermath brought a lot of friends together and left me with new things to care about. I arranged a small little house party on the 19th of December that ended up being a nice reunion under ugly circumstances with Christmas just around the corner. I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a long time and that could probably be said for a lot of the guests. Not everyone drinks Guinness, but I made sure to raise at least one pint for Mike. When everyone had finally gone home, I remember a huge weight lifting off of my shoulders that had been there for awhile trying to tell me that my friends didn't care about each other as I cared about them--I finally knew that it wasn't true and I knew it for certain.

Two days later, my mom got very sick with a terrible headache at home and had to be taken to the hospital where tests revealed a tumor on her brain. She was scheduled for an MRI on December 23rd and the incident left the family in a state of anxiety I had only ever seen in movies while awaiting the result. I don't know what I was feeling exactly, but I had been through too much to let it get the better of me and regardless of how I reacted on the inside, I couldn't muster the energy to show any of those emotions. When it was revealed that the tumor was benign, I was obviously relieved like everyone else, but I didn't treat it like good news because it wasn't really over. The tumor was still there and it was still going to require an invasive surgery to remove.

My mom says it's the hardest thing she's ever done and I believe it. A neurosurgeon removed a third of her skull and stapled it back into place a few days after Christmas leaving a scar unchallenged by any other I've seen in my lifetime. She is fully recovered today and they suspect that the tumor had been there for many years which explains a lot of the chronic headaches that she had for a long time until the surgery. In this particular case, things seem to have all worked out in the end, but the trials and tribulations of 2009 will stay vivid in my memory forever.

So now it's 2010 and it begins with the best six months I've had in a very long time. Sure, no girlfriend to speak of and really not much a social life still, but for the first time, I was okay with that and given my situation, I was feeling more optimistic about what the future holds than ever before. I had a dedicated project at work that allowed me to learn so much everyday and was constantly enriching both my skill set and my working environment. We even had a dartboard for lunchtime stress relief in the office and for me, that's pretty much the holy grail of perks. Tossin' darts is good for me--it helps me focus and keeps me in touch with who I actually am--which is something you can lose if you get too bogged down by your job in any given day. Can you imagine having six months in a row of good days at your work? Probably not, and even I know that that sort of luxury is rare and sometimes a greater cause for suspicion than celebration.

In the space of two weeks this July, the dartboard suddenly disappeared, my co-workers began to curiously change their attitude around me, my internet access was taken away from me as though I were a child, every responsibility and duty I've ever been granted has been either abolished or given to someone else in the office, my company credit card has been suspended because it is apparently being audited for suspicious transactions and my manager, in violation of my Union agreement, handed me a two-day suspension from work with about 12 hours notice for being no more than ten minutes late on the first Wednesday of the month.

I've never been suspended from anything in my life.

Maybe the changes in the office were coming before I really noticed them and part of me was in denial that those people I had worked for over the years would actually make moves to have me eliminated by hiding cowardly behind a union rulebook. See, a "union" of employees is supposed to be there to protect fellow employees, but if a company is large enough (like the City), they often put together their own infrastructure of policies related to union proceedings that less than half of the employees have ever read full of grey areas and several outright contradictions. In union terms, the City's acceptable use policy for internet use actually prevents a whole host of Communications and Marketing staff from being able to do their job without violating City rules. In my division, we regularly use software and hardware tools that the I.T. department never approved in order to do our job. People send heaps of "funny" and occasionally lewd junk mail and then gather around a cubicle for twenty-five minutes to watch a video of a drunken golfer injuring himself on the course.

The point is, a lot of policies are in place that are so easy to violate (sometimes impossible in your line of work) that it allows management to isolate these incidents and build a case against you over time. They attack you on individual issues even in the presence of union representatives because you are not allowed to defend multiple incidents at one time. This is what's happening to me and it sounds like my life is going to change dramatically once again.

In some ways I'm glad that I have the chance to do something different and maybe use what skills I have more effectively in some other job, but on the other hand, I'm disappointed that the people I've worked with for so many years have consistently failed to embrace the ideas I bring to the table that would allow everyone to do their job a whole lot better. I see now that the changes around the office are revealing the true nature of what a pointless administrative City job is--and that is, doing as little as possible to get a job done regardless of how hard it makes it on everyone else. It's not about doing a good job, it's not about due diligence and you are not rewarded for quality but for completion. The list of responsibilities and liabilities that fall under the umbrella of the division I work with is long and complex and requires an elaborate system to make good on, but that's not what happens. Instead, the veteran employees who are set in their ways are blind to innovation and do everything in a slow, half-assed manner which leaves the newer employees with the incredibly daunting task of filling in the blanks and cleaning up the outdated mess that could've been fixed at the outset. We have failed to do things we're supposed to do for many years and the only problem is that no one's looking. If someone decides to check up on what we're doing, I expect the entire division will get a serious reality check with respect to how badly things have degraded while they try and retain the simplicity that they're used to, but is no longer good enough for what is required today.

I swallowed everything I was fed in 2009 and didn't make a fuss. Everything I have to say about it is written right here and I have nothing more to add. The future is unpredictable, the past is history and all that's worth worrying about is in the here and now--and lucky for me, that's where I live. Here and now.