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.
