Colloquial All Sorts

On 2009, in 2010

2010-08-05T23:26:00.013-06:00

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.

On Half-Full, In Half-Empty

2009-10-23T17:20:00.007-06:00

I have often been labeled as a pessimist and even though that's probably a fair label, it carries unfair connotations about what pessimism really is. The common misconception about pessimists is that they are typically negative people who predict negative outcomes in most situations that they encounter and by doing so, they prevent or inhibit positive things from happening. The last part is important because it is a widely-accepted fallacy that divides people and we need to eliminate it from our social protocol.

For example, any dilligent and responsible worker, regardless of their stance on optimism or pessimism, will take precautions to account for both positive and negative outcomes in the work they are doing. If the individual in question happens to be some guy doing electrical work on power lines, he already knows that there have been enough safety precautions taken that the likelihood of an accident is very low. He may have disconnected and re-connected hundreds of power lines without incident. All signs point to a positive outcome, but because he is responsible, he will still follow every standard safety procedure that he knows to be tried and true.

An optimist and a pessimist in this position will likely do everything in exactly the same way up to this point. However, when he goes to re-connect the line and finds that there is no electricity flowing, then you begin to see who's the pessimist. The problem he has encountered is not a safety issue, it is a technical one related to the repair itself and an optimist who has succeeded in completing this repair hundreds of times before in exactly the same way will not be prepared for this. He will likely review his steps and make sure he did it all correctly, maybe eventually concluding that the problem isn't on his end, but for a period of time, the optimist is confused because he predicted a positive outcome based on experience and received a negative one.

A pessimist in this position who repairs the line and finds that there is still no power reacts differently. Someone who has successfully repaired hundreds of lines but also happens to be a pessimist will always anticipate a negative outcome, regardless of the variables. The optimist dismissed negative outcomes early in the repair, citing the many safety precautions employed and the rational fact that every other identical situation had resulted in a positive outcome. This allows an optimist to maintain a positive outlook and simultaneously be comfortable with the knowledge that he has already accounted for the possibility of failure--when really, he hasn't. When the pessimist repairs the line and finds that it's still broken, there is certainly a moment of confusion, but before questioning himself, he has already snapped to reality and concluded that there is something wrong and that he doesn't yet understand what it is. An optimist who expects the positive outcome unfailingly will spend more time confused about it than a pessimist because the unexpected outcome just doesn't sit right with them. A pessimist expecting a positive outcome who doesn't get it is almost immediately assessing the problem with a clear head. After all, the power line should be working--but it's not, so deal with it. In the end, the problem still needs to be fixed and it will regardless, but I'll betcha that pessimists are more efficient at completing the job and optimists are more likely to electrocute themselves while scratching their head in a state of confusion.

You may not agree and maybe as a pessimist, I'm not qualified to talk about how an optimist behaves--but I'm not totally uninformed either because although we can generalize, nobody is optimistic or pessimistic 100% of the time and we constantly interact with a healthy mixture of both in our day-to-day lives. In my scenario above, the job still gets done and ultimately, optimists and pessimists aren't all that different after all in terms of what they can and cannot achieve in the world.

The trouble is, pessimists piss people off. And some people have money. When people with money get pissed off, they tend to exchange some of their money for power and then use that power to effect a change that will theoretically make them less pissed off. This can be both noble and selfish, but in either case, it is a reality. Pessimism is a product of misfortune and hardship that is frowned upon in today's world because we are in a world controlled by money--people with money like optimistic thinking because they can identify with it. They dislike pessimistic thinking because they worked hard to build and keep their fortune and anyone who is not as successful as they are should just work harder instead of complaining.

At a higher level, it is the people with the money that control our jobs, our government and a significant portion of the media. As a result, "positive thinking" is something that you want to put on your resumé, and "I am a pessimist" is not. As a result, we elect people who promise impossible dreams from the government instead of someone who talks only about the real problems and ways to solve them. As a result, television commercials, public banner advertisements, workshops and exhibits are all blanketed in positivity--everything's about looking on the bright side, filtering out bad thoughts and smiling for no reason. If you still think that these things are actually good for you, that's okay, it's not your fault--like I said, the people with the money control so much that their wishes quite often come true. That's why smiling for no reason actually really does makes a lot of people feel better. That's why thinking positively makes people feel better--we are conditioned to believe that it works. And that's great. But something that makes you feel good isn't always good for you.

Pessimism should not be confused with complaining. More accurately, pessimism is about expecting a negative outcome so as to surrender yourself to the fact that the world is larger than you understand. It is the firm belief that you cannot control everything in your life, but it is not the same as believing that you control nothing at all. It is knowing that you can change some things to find a solution, but also knowing that if it weren't for the elements outside of your control, the solution could not exist in the first place. It is not a defeatist attitude, but a realistic and pro-active one, and that's the hardest part to convince anyone of. It seems like every time I sit down to write anything, I find myself in an ideological war with the world comprised entirely of fighting losing battles and this attempt to clarify that pessimists are just as valuable as optimists is no different. Trying to put together a convincing argument to separate negativity from pessimism is like trying to separate wet from water and I wouldn't even bother thinking about it if I didn't think it was important. Then to come out and say that pessimists are actually better workers, more efficient thinkers and exactly the type of people you want in your life is an even tougher argument but I'd better give it a whirl.

Optimists believe in things like a majority vote. "If the majority of people agree, then it must be right." They are the people who will tell you that you should "make your own luck" or "if you believe in yourself, you can accomplish all your goals." They believe that thinking positively is the best way to think constructively and that their positive thinking is directly related to the positive outcomes that they achieve. What they fail to do is consider attributing a negative outcome to a positive initiative. Usually, the negative outcomes are attributed to the inherent random nature of life itself and most optimists have no problem admitting that nothing's perfect and that "shit happens." This is what I don't like--the selfishness of some optimists. They are keen to take credit for thinking positively when something goes right, but when something goes wrong, they attribute it to chance and then use those incidents to identify with other hard luck people.

It's difficult to prove, but a critical thinker should be able to see that too much optimism can result in poor planning, unrealistic expectations and naive perspectives on the world at large. But still, it's the pessimists who get the shaft in the social world--besides, nobody likes a party pooper, right? It's the pessimists who are the pricks and always end up on the receiving end of sarcastic remarks like "would it kill you smile once in awhile?" or worse, their personality traits are criticized and lambasted behind their backs--always in a negative context. Nobody talks positively about pessimistic traits and that's just not fair.

There are so many variables in the world that it is almost guaranteed that fewer things are going to go your way in life than those that do and thus, pessimism both pre-dates optimism and is the very reason positive thinking exists at all. People had to confront the fact that shit happens and to make themselves feel better, began wishing for the opposite. The luckiest ones had most of their wishes come true, became successful and began to purport that positive thinking is the whole secret of life. The majority of the people who tried positive thinking did not have their wishes come true; the optimists of the bunch chose to cling to the belief that if you just think positively like all the successful people, you too will one day succeed. The pessimists of the bunch become disenfranchised with how little their positive thinking has gotten them and through experience, they learn to expect negative outcomes.

Over time, the division between these two types of people has grown to downright religious levels of misguided belief--the pessimists believe that the optimists are naive for thinking optimistically and the optimists think the pessimists are naive for thinking pessimistically. It becomes a conflict of ideology where people are judged based on their belief without the judge understanding exactly what they believe in. If you were to meet ten people that all had a nametag that said either "Optimist" or "Pessimist", you would be wrong to read them any differently from each other. A pessimist is likely to assume that all the Optimists are naive and out of touch with reality. This is not the case. An optimist is likely to assume that all the Pessimists are cynical people who brings themselves down and others down with them. That is also not the case. Listen, we're all the same here. Optimistic thinking does not make people naive--it makes them "hopeful," I would say, but not necessarily naive. Pessimistic thinking does not make the pessimist unhappy--but it forces them to think harder about solving problems and better prepares them for a crisis. Nobody wants bad things to happen to them and nobody intentionally brings it on themselves--that should never be assumed about someone who is pessimistic and nobody should want bad things to happen to other people anyway. Ironically, pessimists are about the only thing that optimists are pessimistic about!!

I don't know where the hell I'm going with this. But the point is, don't discriminate against pessimists, positive thinking is over-rated and no matter what we do in life, we're all DOOMED!(?)

On Success, In Scruples

2009-07-22T11:20:00.004-06:00

One of the biggest challenges I face with advancing my career is the fact that I gave a lot more effort to my early menial jobs than was ever necessary. If you try as hard as you possibly can to be the best damn burger-flipper around, you're still only makin' six bucks an hour. When I was a teenager, I may have delivered those flyers ten times better than the other kid on the block, but we still made the same number of pennies per page. Plus, all my early jobs lasted quite while, too--often in excess of 1 year, which is a lot for someone just breaking into the work force. I was tricked into believing that giving more effort than my employees was actually valuable.

I was fooled by all of my role models into believing that if you stay at a job for a long time, the longevity and loyalty will look good on your resumé for future employers--only to ultimately grow up in a world where employment is so transient that job "diversity" is sought over the more traditional values. Eventually, it became clear that the people who told me to have a good work ethic and strong seniority in trivial work weren't the same people who were writing the cheques. It took longer than I would've liked to figure that out and although I obviously need the money to live, all I seem to have gotten out of my jobs otherwise are the friends that I make there--but even those seem to disappear in transition, no matter how valuable they seemed at the time.

So now, I have a "real job". I guess. Maybe I've had a few "real" jobs, by now and my work ethic has never really changed in spite of how little I've gained from over-exerting myself. I'm tired of it, but it's ingrained into who I am and I really have a hard time giving the bare minimum. I build spreadsheets with pretty pictures and pretty colours that take twice as long as equally-functional bare bones spreadsheets--but I can't make them that simple because I'm just fundamentally programmed to create things the way I think they should be created. I think it's because I happened to believe that colours and pictures and all that decorative formatting jazz are legitimately important to running an administrative office. Soon enough, I may have enough information to prove that--but that's neither here nor there. What's on the plate right now is my own exhaustion with operating this way. How long do I continue giving too much effort without getting anything back before I realize that it's fruitless? Hell, I already know it's fruitless! Snap out of it, Self!

Of course, it's not that easy because in addition to learning what you don't get for your troubles, I've also learned a lot of other things and it's an irrational and insatiable fear that keeps me doing what I do. Throughout all of this "work force" business there is one thing I'm sure has nothing to do with your effort (or even your tangible contribution), and that is your chances of getting fired. I worked pretty damn hard at all of my jobs, subconsciously trying to make an impression in the world, and when I first got fired, I was mortified. It was like...the first thing in my life that didn't make sense--it didn't even compute. I had come to terms with the other mistakes that I'd made and blamed the wrong people for--I thought them out, came to a rational conclusion, saw the other person's point of view, took the lesson and moved on. But when I got fired, it was a clash of ideas and behaviours that I didn't know existed in the world at the time. Kinda like being told there's no Santa Claus for the first time when you're old enough to know it's true, but way too young to be happy about it.

Since then, I've been fired from more jobs than I care to count and for more reasons than I care to think about anymore. Some of my notices of dismissal had some truth in them, some made offensive bold-faced lies about me, some were deadpan thirty-second phone calls and some were issued by my own co-workers instead of the cowardly management. But ALL of them were different and NONE of them mentioned anything about what I gave while I worked there and what positive influence I had had. I mean sure, you don't expect a glowing review when you're being fired, but I was in A Helping Hand Staffing Services about a year ago and to this day, they still use one of the crappiest old spreadsheets I ever made for their scheduling when I worked there for six weeks in 2004. They STILL haven't done any thing to recognize the difference between punching the clock and the actual impact of the hours their employees work, and that shows a glaring lack of knowledge and confidence on the subject of your own business.

But what do you do as an employee? This plague exists in almost all businesses and only gets more contagious the larger a company grows. That's why the world is so screwed up and we have public industry that loses money by being affordable, extremely clean and well-maintained, while simultaneously a private industry offers the same service with better features and enhancements that cost more and are filthy. Somebody's making money, and it's not me. I'm too busy running around the bottom of the barrel of job stability at full speed trying to figure out how NOT to get fired, how could I possibly start thinking about how to better my career? In a sensible world, the things you do to get hired, avoid getting fired and better your career are all exactly the same and I think it's a bloody shame that our overtly convoluted society has made people forget that.

My aspirations have never been that high and the more I learn, the less enthusiastic I am about being successful. The more you know, the less it matters--sometimes to the point of feeling bad for others who give so much of themselves for so little gain. So my life isn't really about making a revolutionary and noticeable impact on the world at large because I don't think that's possible without a tremendous amount of luck. Malcom Gladwell wrote a book called "Outliers" recently that does an interesting exploration of worldly successful celebrities and public figures, focusing expressly on how the events leading up to their success can largely be attributed to good luck. Obviously, you have to want to succeed and there is a certain level of hard work involved, but Gladwell was trying to express that just because someone is successful, doesn't mean that they possess the formula for becoming so. For every high achiever who speaks strongly about the hard work, determination and perseverance that got them where there are today, there are a hundred other people who worked just as hard and got nowhere. There are way too many variables in life that are completely out of your control to justify walking around as though you can just will yourself to live the life that you choose. "Believe in yourself and you can achieve anything"--with a little luck. Without luck, though, it's just a gamble and you're trading your hardest efforts every day for something intangible and uncertain. It's naive and it works for some people--I won't hold it against you, but my case for it being a waste is empirically stronger than your case for boundless self-empowerment.

So I'm just gonna let this play itself out naturally. I can't re-create my entire work ethic overnight, but I think it's improving--and when I say "improving," I mean "conforming to the best possible fit for my own selfish needs without jeopardizing the outfit I work for and the role I play within it." I mean, I still have no idea what it takes to avoid getting fired but I don't think there's a formula for that. My work ethic is kind of a sub-conscious entity that behaves independently of my actual brain and doesn't evolve at the same pace. As I learn things, my conscious self feeds all that information slowly into my instincts and behaviours, so recognizing a needlessly strong work ethic is a good first step towards finding a way to do less than 12 hours worth of work in an 8 hour day for no reason.

The same thing happened over the last year or so where I went through a period of ridiculous self-loathing and took my own trivial failures so harshly that I'd hardly be able to function. My brain recognized the problem well before my instinct did and even as I stood there in a confused panic recklessly destroying things in my room just to let off some steam, my conscious self kept whispering the voice of reason in my ear. Louder and louder until eventually it drowned out the sounds of my panic. Now I'm fine--and that sounds pretty easy, but it took a long time and even though something like that doesn't totally disappear from your psyche overnight, I am now consciously aware of the way I was and the ways that I am better today. Back then, I was consciously aware of the way I was, I knew that it was wrong and I knew that I wasn't better yet--remember, don't overcomplicate your happiness. If you feel better, you're basically...well, better.

It's trait-based natural selection. Those features about you that serve you best in your own social environment will flourish over time and anything that has a negative impact will eventually fade from your character if you allow yourself the opportunity to change. The challenge is not in trying to become a different or better person, because who we are is defined by the people and settings we surround ourselves with. The buffet of life offers many different dishes for many different tastes and you can learn to love any one of them--the real challenge is not in selecting from the menu, but deciding where in the restaurant you want to sit.

On Love, In Sadness

2009-04-16T14:17:00.004-06:00

Let me tell you about this world we live in. We live in a world so unabashedly complex that it dillutes our concept of what is important. It infects us with a mental sickness so pervasive and so potent that we become lost in the spectrum of our own emotions to the point that we are somehow completely unable to identify what makes us happy. We become fooled, tricked into believing that there are things more important than happiness and forget completely the simple notion that feeling happy in any given moment makes the moment a bright one. We overcomplicate the emotion, overthinking what it really is without realizing that happiness is far and away one of the easiest sensations to identify. It is easy to be happy in the short-term, and most people haven’t forgotten that, but the moment someone began to purport the unrealistic assertion that such a thing could be perpetuated forever—or for any extended length of time, really—the once-simple emotion took on two very different definitions and the human psyche has never recovered.

This is because the world is populated by cowards. People who are afraid to take a chance. People who don’t know what is good for them because they’re confused about what happiness is. They get so lost trying to “figure out” life as though it’s possible and would rather waste their years in the familiarity of their own solitary emotional disarray than take a chance, intimidated by the fact that it just might work. I know what it’s like to live that way, and you can do it, but you’ll end up learning the same simple lesson I did in a needlessly difficult way: happiness feeds off of happiness.

If you, as an unhappy person, find yourself surrounded by other unhappy people all the time, you will be fighting a losing battle and getting more and more confused about what it takes to be happy every single day. It is a miserable climb full of rose-coloured deception and trickery—peaks and valleys like you wouldn’t believe. Like nobody would believe, until it happens to you. This isn’t the fault of the people you hang around with, mind you—they are your friends and they are your friends for a reason. If they all happened to be unhappy, it’s not your fault, but it won’t do you any good either. Which is generally why people make new friends, I guess.

You have to take responsibility for what makes you happy and recognize what an important role the other people in your life play in understanding that. You have to recognize that you make friends with people because they make you happy and you make them happy—that’s the unwritten rule that all friends understand. Most importantly, though, you have to recognize that when the friends that you care about are hurt, you must remember that you have the power to make them happier and that in doing so, you too will feel better and your lives as friends will carry on.

Love is the simplest form of happiness because you are free to exchange any obligations or responsibilities for a sincere conversation. It provides you with an emotional safety cushion unlike any other and is priceless in value because it does not waver in the torrential winds of the rest of your life. Always, you have someone who will hold you when you’re broken down and tired. Always, you have someone who wants to be with you when it seems like nobody else is. Always, you have someone who actually cares about you, will hold your hand, not be afraid to touch your face and will tell you that everything is going to be okay, even when it’s not. The only people who seem to understand how much that’s worth never have anything to say about it. I guess that’s because you don’t realize it until you really are broken down and you really are hurt, but when you reach out for the hand you need to hold, it’s not there.

In conversation, it’s easy to explain how important “the little things” in life are. All you have to do is make a vague reference to something everyone enjoys, like popping bubble wrap, and then follow it up with a question like, “are these and other little quirks about life important to you?” No doubt, when you frame it that way, they sound pretty important and most people are likely to agree. Rarely though do we really consider what life would be like when some of those things are actually gone until they finally disappear. A cliché that has been beaten to death by its sheer durability—its absolute unwillingness to die. A cliché about appreciating what you have whose lesson we never learn despite widespread acknowledgment of it as truth.

In love, a million clichés all come true at once and require no explanation. Out of love, a million different clichés all come true at once, but we reject them because we believe our own circumstance to be unique and somehow exempt from universal rationale. Well, you’re not special. Don’t think you can justify your actions based on your circumstance. You can’t fool me, happy couple—you can tell me that you’ve found your true love all you want, but I’ll know it’s bullshit. I’ll know that it’s not your “true” love because no such thing exists—I’ll know that what you found was love and good for you, but I know that love exists everywhere for those brave enough to grab it. So, you’re not special—you’re just wildly disconnected from the millions of embittered single cowards in the real world where love is a scavenger hunt and not a lifestyle. And I envy you.

I envy you, but I’m not fooled by you and for that reason, I wish that you would see cause to envy me and what I’ve learned. Then maybe you, happy couple, would understand what you have and how hard some people will fight to get it. Then maybe you’ll stop and think before making a big problem out of a trivial one. Maybe you’d think a little harder and remember why you love them when you look into their eyes. And maybe every time that you’d hold them, you’d do it as though you may never hold them again. As everyone should.

Finding love should radically change your life expectations. It should be a trump card that feeds the other forces in your life, not a byproduct thereof. Obviously, it doesn’t change your life instantly, but it definitely changes your plans and goals and inspires you to fulfill them at any cost. Because you know it will be worth it. If you do not understand this about love, you do not know what it is. If you reject the chance to find love, you are a fool.
However, if you lived lonely, confused and unhappy, but then found love, understood it, understood what it means to be happy, lived happily for so long that it becomes natural, then have it taken away suddenly, without explanation, spent years mortified as to what and why this happened, finally getting the chance to resolve it, coming to terms with what happened, then finding out that the “resolution” was really just another unexplained “fuck you”, dwindling into a pathetic lifestyle of perpetual loneliness, finding no one to blame including oneself, but punishing oneself anyway for lack of any other reasonable conclusion, then walking around every day for years feeling so alone that every step is a heavy, sluggish waste of time, nobody wants to hang out with you, not a girl in the world will so much as bat an eye at you, nobody wants to hear your story and by then, you’ve told it so many times that it’s meaningless, and then suddenly, a glimmer of hope appears and you meet someone who enjoys spending time with you, actually phones you to make social calls after years of virtually nothing like it, then the friendship grows and the taste of love dances across the tip of your tongue, but it’s not love, it’s actually a demon in disguise that represents not love, but deception, and so you become bitterly familiar with the game as the players have chosen to play it, fucking around with heavy emotions and pleading ignorance to get away with it while you sit on the roller coaster and get driven to the top just to be thrown back down without a seatbelt, the ups and downs leave you exhausted, frustrated that the world could be so cruelly unpredictable, then you descend into the familiar state of solitary loneliness, joining all the other cowards, becoming resigned to the fact that the world is full of cowards and coming to terms with how much pain such cowardice causes, idly drawing your attention away from the insurmountable mountain that love has become in your mind, subtly dividing your efforts between an increasingly fruitless quest and the responsibilities of everyday life until love seems almost meaningless, a dream that I once had perhaps, long-forgotten, but then hurriedly brought back into focus by meeting someone that not only wanted to spent time with you, but even shares your frustration with love and the ridiculous and immature way the people in the world handle it, bypassing the social hurdles that put road blocks in the way of love for countless people, defying every bitter truth you’ve come to believe throughout the journey, clearing up the confusion that clouded your thoughts for so long, challenging you to open up, and finally you don’t have to worry about what happened in the past and you don’t have to worry about the hopelessness of the future, because finally everything seems to make sense, and finally you’ve found love, it has found you, and in doing so, it has made the most confusing and challenging thing in the world shockingly simple and hugely rewarding, and you settle down, and its effect on how you plan to live your life begins to set in, then you too are a fool. All the sincerity in the world won’t prevent it from collapsing on you. All the trust, all the times you’ve had—even those great specific moments that seemed so amazing at the time—will not matter and you will be fucked over for doing nothing wrong. It will not make sense to you, it cannot be explained to you, but it will happen and you will be helpless and confused and once again, a fool. A fool for not seeing it sooner, a fool for believing “I love you” when you hear it, a fool for saying it and meaning it, a fool for trusting anyone at all and a fool for thinking that your story is special and that this time it wouldn’t be like all the others.

You won’t fool me again, world. Not by your watery eyes, not by your cheeky promises and not by the artificial lights shining brightly along the corridor of this endless black tunnel.

On 2008, In 2009

2009-01-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

The beginning of a new year sets forth an immovable procession of mental triggers and casual crises that disguise themselves as pragmatic resolutions to do greater things for no other reason than the passage of time and its cycle as it appears on the calendar. You become reflective about the challenges of the year past--the mistakes you have made, the things you have learned and the things you have achieved. Rarely though, do we recall our own resolutions from last year and rarely do we check to see just how well we did compared to what we intended to achieve when this feeling bore down on us the last time the clock struck midnight on New Year's Eve. Sure, we may have been particularly resolute and even scrawled the resolutions of 2008 on a napkin somewhere, lest ye forget, but as the year wears on, the trials and tribulations of everyday life become more important than your prospects for the future as they appeared in the past. Then, before you know it, you're using that napkin to wipe up a coffee spill on a crappy February morning and your goals for the year get pitched into the trash alongside a sopping wet newspaper and a box of dollar store Valentine's Day cards. But that's okay, because really, even if you had written them down and kept them somewhere safe, you didn't count on all these other things happening to you throughout the year when you first made those resolutions. How could you? Life proves to grow exponentially more complicated every year and if you can't learn and adapt rapidly enough to keep up with it, you'll be caught in the undertow with the ever-expanding pool of stragglers already lost.

To conquer this, I identified the problem early and in 2008, I made no resolutions; I began with a clean slate and instead used the time of reflection to gather a picture of myself. I wanted to know who I had become and instead of thinking about what happened in 2007, I looked well past that and remembered the last time that I really knew who I was. Then, I compared it to who I had become and realized that I had never quite done that before. I had been so caught up in the veritable hurricane of my psychological environment that I didn't realize how much I had changed or in what way, if any, it was happening.

I've found that the person I was has been beaten out of me--against my will at first, but by the end, embracing the change proved to be the only way to keep myself together. But I retained a lot of the personal strength I earned earlier in my life and to my own surprise, I find that I want to be a different person now. Maybe it was the time I spent in virtual solitude, maybe it's because of how much I've learned about the sheer overwhelming size of the planet and the people in it, but whatever it is, I am oddly content.

2008 began with a lot of new things for me. Maybe not "new" so much as things that I just hadn't had in a long time. It began in a new house on Bowness Road with a nice little garage and a simple but charming interior decor. Mitchell and I moved there in December and I still had what I considered a relatively new job at the City. Typically, as long as I consider my job to have little to no security, it's still new to me. I also began the year with a sense of having actually achieved something, after years of doing almost nothing. I didn't get my CD done like I intended to, but I pretty much single-handedly ran At Melee's End, which is the kind of event that performs a real public service to a degree that I'd never truly realized in my own life. And finally, I began the year with new friends--real friends, not just a bunch of people that you meet, which happens every year. In a way, I didn't even remember what it felt like to be socially accepted and it has helped to inspire other feelings of tranquility and contentment that I thought I may never feel again.

With everything going so well, it was difficult not to make resolutions at its outset. But I guess that's what I learned by climbing the steep staircase so many times only to get kicked right back down--I know how this depression game works, I've conquered it. But I didn't know all of its moves until 2008 came to a close; I still had a few weak spots that I knew to be well-guarded, but weak nonetheless. So, about halfway through the year, just as I was reaching for the mezzanine level of happiness, I was kicked back down to the basement again and I remember the tumble vividly. Thankfully, I was ready to be kicked and the inevitability of psychological duress didn't factor in, but I didn't count on burning up those weak spots on the way down. Oh and burn, did they ever--cauterized the wound, frankly. I don't know of anything that "heals all wounds" the way time is supposed to, but I do know that you can burn the fuck out of them until all that remains is a scabby, carbonized patch of scar tissue.

And I know this all sounds kinda negative, but it's really not; I guess that's part of what's changed about me. I've always considered myself a realistic person, but I used to be able to spin it into writing however I would choose. Now, even my optimism comes off as pessimistic to the ears of most. Although I seem to be reflecting on the year negatively, I prefer to think of it as a strength exercise and the perceived negativity is only representative of a greater challenge overcome, which yields a greater reward.

Speaking of rewards, I was also granted actual vacation time in 2008--something that I didn't really have a concept of. I didn't really understand why people at work seemed to live for their vacation time as though they hated their jobs so much that a day at work was infinitely more debilitating than a day off. Back then, I still defined happiness with a bar that I had set far too high at far too early an age, wherein every day was a great day and it didn't matter if you had to work or not because you had so much to live for. Well, when I went on vacation, I guess the main thing that I learned was that it's okay to bring the bar down a little. It's okay to want less than what you once had--sometimes, you have to. It's better for you.

Additionally, it allowed me to live solely for myself for a change. After making so many deposits for so long, I decided to make a withdrawal from the karma bank and spent it ruthlessly on self-gratification. Although, I am a fundamentally selfless person (i.e. it is gratifying to me personally to do things for other people), so I did spend some of it on others where I could, but it was mostly my vacation and nobody else's. I drove out to Vancouver for a week to see Jodi and basically kill some leisure time and burn up vacation days on nothing as planned. Then I spent the most important two days in Victoria completely by myself; it still felt like home to me and I never used a map once even though I hadn't set foot on the island in many years. I also confirmed what I had known to be true for a long time but others had often doubted: Victoria is a special place for me for more reasons than the base association with Lindsey and that's not why I went back there. It represents a conquest for individual strength and independence that I won against all odds and the things that happened to me there form the foundation for who I have become, even though the frame may have changed.

The visit to Victoria wasn't nearly as heavy or emotional as I expected it to be and I'm glad for it. A lot of that can be attributed to being kicked down the stairs again shortly before leaving and rather than the vacation time just coming around as planned, it left me in a state where I needed one so badly that it couldn't have come at a better time. The trip to Victoria reaffirms my own position as to how I feel about the relationship I lost and the hundreds of unanswered questions about it. It hardens me to the reality of it all and convinces me that the rough mental challenges I've had to endure to cope with it have not been in vain, if a little on the time-consuming side. And above all, it leaves me comfortable with the knowledge that the next time I visit Victoria, there will only be one reason: because I want to.

I burned up the last of my vacation time in Peachland with Jon which also helped to answer a lot of unanswered questions about him and just why he's been so difficult to get ahold of. He remains a very strong friend who I am able to talk to, but he is very disconnected and I'm not sure he'll ever be as involved with the lives of me and my friends as he once was. However, just being able to see him was enough to bring that issue to rest and I now have a clearer picture of his role in my life--a role I had often overemphasized in the past few years.

Returning from my vacation, I really did feel empowered. I knew that I was returning to a landscape of my life that was far from perfect--and in some areas, hostile even. But I was ready for anything. And by anything, I mean I was ready to climb the staircase again with the full expectation of being kicked back down yet again. I still remembered that that's how the game is played, but this time I knew that falling down the stairs wasn't going to hurt one bit. I had no intention of sitting in a curled up heap at the bottom, no sir--I was just gonna stand up and start climbin' again! So I began, one foot after another. Left, right, left, right. By September, I was practically running and seemed to have climbed quite a bit higher than I had in a long while.

I'm still wary of the boot that could be coming around every corner, but as 2008 came to a close, I began to reflect on the truths that I had learned over the year. For instance, unhappy people don't know how to make other unhappy people better. It doesn't work, and I had been trying it for years. I live for other people, and so to be crippled of my ability to help others had a devastating effect on me and I didn't even know it was happening. Now, I've given myself some time and came full circle on a lot of my own issues that had been swimming around wildly for years and finally, I feel confident that I can make the lives of those that I care about that much better. In doing so, it fuels my own happiness and empowers me to do that much more.

At least that's what it looks like at the beginning, here, now, in 2009.

2008-05-07T17:08:00.002-06:00

The taste of love is like the smell of coffee. Yes, it smells better than it tastes, but the scent is so infectious that you want nothing more than to place it upon your tongue at the slightest whiff, oblivious to the inevitable disappointment.

However, that disappointment alone is not enough to push us away; no, we will be back for a second cup, because coffee gives you energy, it gives you life! As people do, in love. A kind of life that makes you forget about your initial disappointment.

But, when the energy fades away, the only memory that keeps you coming back for another coffee is the smell floating through the shop the next day—it is revitalizing and once again your lips beg to taste it.

One should cherish those moments in which you can enjoy the scent but can’t afford another cup, for nothing quite poisons the smell of coffee like its bitter, bitter taste.

while inefficient, vitality saves our ship

2008-04-16T11:11:00.002-06:00

Life happens in chapters. You don't always know how long the chapter is going to be, but you read on because it is the best book you own and you can never tell for certain what's going to happen in the next few pages.

Everyone has a story that would play out splendidly in fiction--full of the realest of the real. Drama, comedy, conflict, resolution, tears, laughter, friendship, enmity, love and hate. Some people believe that there are stories from their lives that should never be told, usually to protect themselves or those they care about from those who may potentially read it. However, I think so few of these stories actually get told that it would be a privilege to be able to regale one in its entirety to someone who would listen, regardless of the kind of dirt contained within. Of course, as in the re-telling of any tale, the words are never as complete and as true as they were on the pages from whence they came--the pages that comprise the story of your life.

But is it even reasonable to draw comparisons between a paperback work of fiction and the real world? Does life really happen in chapters, or am I deluding myself in an effort to help better define my perpetually undefined life? I'm not sure the real world should be presented in vague riddles and analogous metaphors. I'm not sure people take it seriously. Some can (I know I can, at least), but more and more I get the impression that if you tried to explain a splitting headache to someone by referencing, oh say, the sensation of being a beer bottle when someone tries to open it with the hard end of a lighter instead of a proper bottle opener....well, I just think that most people would find that confusing and miss the point. When really, all you wanted was a sincere, "I know what you mean."

For a long time, I've been the only one in charge of defining things in my own head. This means that nobody but me can question whether or not what I am thinking and how I am operating is right or wrong. My friends that once played a big part in influencing the conclusions I would come to are not as disenchanted and cynical as I have become and I suppose that's a big part of the reason that they don't offer much support in trying to fix that anymore. It's hard to help someone if you've already gotten over the problems that they are having, especially if you've already given them the advice that worked for you and it ended up having no effect whatsoever (or leaving them even more depressed)--people are different, imagine that. At that point, your friend's problem is now their problem, not yours and that's when you begin to drift out of close contact on the level of emotional support.

That's what happened to me: my friends got better, I didn't and now they don't know to help me because I've been so fucked up for so long. It probably sounds like I'm coming off a little steamed about this, but I really don't hold it against anyone. Above all things, I am glad that my friends are mostly okay
and that the people I care about are NOT in my position. Sacrificing the emotional support of my friends for their emotional well-being seems like a fair trade-off to me. The bane of an altruist. A long time ago, when we were somewhat dependent on one another to find happiness, only one of us would have to succeed for me to reap the rewards. To see my friends happy was enough to make me happy and achieving that was my primary goal in life back then. Make it so that the people whom you care for find happiness, and ye shall find nirvana.

I don't know what happened then. I suppose love mucked it all up. My simple plan for finding perpetual bliss got its ass kicked by a more powerful emotion and it all became about making one person happy, even if it meant making the people you had cared for most suffer a little. The rewards of love are grand--worth more than I ever could've dreamed of achieving as hormonal roller coaster of a teenager amongst my friends. And worth the sacrifice, however selfish it may seem to devote all your care to someone else over your friends and family. I don't believe everyone finds that, but I don't want to pretend to be the expert either. I think that it is widely understood what love "is" and what it's like to be in love, but if you don't understand what a fool you would be to turn it away in favour of some personal ambition, then it has never truly been yours to behold. If you've had it and then lost it, the prospect of finding it again becomes all that you live for and the waiting becomes difficult and emotionally erosive over time. The only question that remains is how long you can survive empty and how long you can endure the burden of loneliness before you become too embittered to be loved, no matter how much you want it. Need it.

"What nourishes me also destroys me."

wars in vanity, sweet or sour

2008-03-31T17:54:00.000-06:00

It seems like the “post-modern” world, such that it is, spends a great deal of time trying to define things that are well beyond the scope of definition. In fact, the post-modernist movement in its purist form is nothing more than bureaucracy from a philosophical point of view, as it is founded on the principle of studying the effects of an intellectual movement while simultaneously purporting to be one. I’m all for the pursuit of knowledge and clarity, but like many deconstructivist architects, I don’t really understand why you can’t build a weird-looking building without being labeled a deconstructivist by some pompous scholar of postmodern thought. Similarly, you should be able to have your opinions heard by others as your opinions and not the opinions of a postmodernist movement or some other body of nameless speakers; or to put it simply: just because you’re a grain of sand doesn’t mean you came from the beach.

As a realist, I have a hard time seeing any advantages or disadvantages to picking apart the human brain for the purposes of being able to explain it to someone else on paper down the road. This is because I’m about people and the effect that our work has on people. There’s no reason to invest more effort into something than you will gain in the end, but quite often, the end objective is either ambiguously defined or abstract in nature. You see this a lot in community services and public opinion when a large group of people will band together with some absurd goal in mind like “cleaning up the streets” or “cracking down on homelessness.” With goals that cover such a broad spectrum of variables, you inevitably require more people to administer them and the more people that get involved with any one project, the more you end up losing sight of the original goal. Of course, if the goal is unattainable from the git-go, losing sight of it isn’t really the issue and we’ve engaged in the ultimate futile exercise of keeping masses of people extremely busy for little to no gain except the satisfaction and pride they get from their own work. This applies to the study of philosophical movements quite readily too, but it is rarely studied (probably to avoid perpetuating the bureaucracy; the last thing we need is some guy writing an analysis of the effects of the effects of a movement on another movement).

Like I said, I’m a realist, so with everything in life, I like to see how it affects people on a personal level. I’m not about to sit back and write about how “people” behave and how they change as a group because I know very well that we are all individuals and although there are noticeable behavioural trends to be seen in numbers, announcing them and discussing them doesn’t really have any bearing on how we behave as individuals. I could draw up a pretty little line graph illustrating the decline in religious participation around the world over the last hundred years, but that doesn’t mean that a religious individual is any less faithful than he would have been otherwise.

For instance, there are legions of people devoted to studying postmodernism and debating its cultural applications, definitions and related concepts. When any one of those people wakes up in the morning, odds are they still brush their teeth, still tie their shoelaces, still lock their doors when they leave home and have generic introspective thoughts about all of these activities that all the postmodernist study in the world can’t get rid of. In fact, to refer back to the bureaucratic process, it may very well slow down tangible productivity in your day by spending a lot of time and energy on virtually nothing, overthinking the behaviour of others in a postmodern context and making decisions based on vague trends in thought process that other parties are not even privy to and quite frankly, don’t want to be.

The problem is that I am also an altruist, and to be altruistic and realistic at the same time is thankless work; whoever said that you only get what you give probably ended up getting a lot more than they actually deserved and didn’t realize how lucky they really were. Worse yet, I’m an altruist and a realist who works within the framework of a bureaucracy every day and it forces me to de-value nearly all of my work-related input and ride above the job, focusing instead on how the end result benefits me in my personal life. Don’t get me wrong, I do get a certain sense of job satisfaction out of completing the occasional project but it’s my nature as a realist that makes me feel a little bit deflated every time because I know for certain that there is little to no effect on individual people despite all the time I’ve put into it. Those that I work with seem to have been a little washed out by the red tape and they’ll see the completion of the project as the goal, whereas I’m stuck thinking that the “goal” is really to improve something for people—to make something better in the lives of those I work with, ya know.

So sure, you can draft a huge blueprint to renovate your kitchen and the presentation will be on beautiful new reams of paper with bulletproof organizational plans and reference material galore; but until you get to make a sandwich on your new countertop space some summer afternoon, I don’t believe the project is done. For me, my portion of the work is finished long before you even slice the bread and without actually seeing an end result (or more often than not having good reason to believe that there is no end result), the effect is erosive—it does something to you and I can’t exactly explain what it is, but this nameless sensation is really the feature subject of this article.

I was talking to my grandmother a little while back and she explained the same sensation to me in a different context, but I understood right away. She explained that while she was still in the work force, she paid into the federal unemployment insurance fund for 35 years, had a lot of hard times, moved to a province that had considerably fewer jobs available with the intent of collecting unemployment for some time, but was told that she was not eligible. There are reasons for this on paper and rules in place governing who can and cannot collect unemployment based on where you live, but whether what she was doing was right or wrong is not the issue; it’s the principle of the thing, and she said exactly what I said: “It does something to you.” When you’re so honest for so long and spend 35 years paying into an unemployment fund, never ever collecting from it and then being told that you’re not allowed because you moved to a have-not province, it just leaves you with a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. Meanwhile, there are people who are self-employed or who have “arrangements” with their paying authority who will work for 10 months and then collect unemployment for the other 2 every single year. So who’s the real winner here?

She also cited another experience from a welfare office several decades ago after her husband had transformed into an alcoholic of home-breaking proportions but she didn’t nearly have the means to leave him with four kids in tow. One day, presumably when she realized she had no other choice, my grandmother walked her four kids down to a welfare office and stood in line armed with a resolve to be completely honest about the situation. She basically told the person behind the counter: “Look I’m sorry, we have no food, no money, my husband’s not working and if this doesn’t work, I don’t even know what I’m going to do.” They gave her nothing and she walked her four kids back home, but that’s not the part that is debilitating in the same thankless way that I’ve been describing. The thing is, the very next day, she went back to that very same welfare office, talked to a different clerk and lied: “My husband left me…four kids to take care of…no income…” And they gave her some money.

It just does something to you.

It shattered my grandmother’s reality, I think. When everything that you have been brought up to believe is right and ethically sound just gets mercilessly pissed on in a very real situation, I don’t believe you ever recover completely. She described her stunned and bemused disbelief at getting money for telling a direct lie and being turned away with four kids for telling the truth with a kind of resignation that makes me sad that she has, and maybe never will, live the life that such an incredible person deserves.

I guess this is why I’m an altruist but as the world becomes much more self-involved and independent, it gets harder and harder to convince people of this. Everyone is so suspicious of everyone else’s intentions that it seems like there’s not a soul around who would possibly do something that only benefits someone other than themselves. Is it really so hard to believe that you can gain some personal satisfaction out of helping other people? Is that not selfish enough to be true? What do I have to do to convince the average person that my intentions are sincere?

It’s an uphill climb that my grandmother has been trekking all her life, and I’m right on her heels wearing rollerskates without the foggiest idea of how to make it easier.

walking in very saggy old shoes

2008-02-18T11:00:00.011-07:00

What am I doing?

I've always described myself as someone who lives "in the moment" and readily proclaim myself as such without hesitation. I think it carries good logic because most of the people that I meet who are significantly older than I am seem to have a lot of regrets from their youth and a thinly-veiled yearning to be young again whenever I talk to them. By living in the moment, I don't anticipate having this problem. Countless people frown on the notion of "living in the past," but it clearly happens as the future you look forward to steadily shrinks away with time; you simply have less to look at in that direction. For this reason, and others, I support neither living in the past, nor living in the future (oft-considered good and bad advice, respectively), but living in the present.

I don't have a whole lot of experience living in the past so it makes me uneasy to be envied by older people for no reason other than my age. Nevertheless, it happens all the time and I really don't know what to say to them. What I want to say is, "Deal with it, it's the passage of time--it's not my fault I was born on the cusp of Generation Y--it's not my fault that you don't know how to program your cell phone and I do."

But I don't say that because they're not listening. It's easy for me to fall under the false impression that "envy" is the same as "respect" in this situation when they are really two completely different animals. Envy is a self-absorbed niche and when older people who seem to have some underlying issues about being old, their envy of me or people my age seems to blind them to the fact that we are people who have developed individual personalities. Instead, we are overcome by repeat exclamations as to how beautiful we are and glassy-eyed stares that make you feel like the centre of attention, when really, their own memories and their own distant life in the past is the true focus.

Sometimes, I am able to say other things that break this trance. Sometimes, people are listening just enough that they actually process what I'm saying and when that happens, I find I'm much better off at establishing some sort of working relationship with them. I operate much better with words than making impressions and my physical strengths are largely overshadowed by my mental ones. To have that recognized by a total stranger who spent the bulk of the conversation mesmerized by my age rather than my input shows a strength in their character--an ability to read between the lines a little and see that although there is beauty in youth, it doesn't mean that beautiful young people get that beauty from their age alone.

Lately though, I've been questioning my approach. Or rather, I'm questioning the angle at which I am approaching things. This applies to both the traits I consider valuable in others (i.e. that ability to read between the lines) and my mantra of living in the moment. I have to make a run at both of these daily philosophical challenges because they define my conduct but I've hit an interesting road block in my life. Before now (at least in adulthood, for what that's worth), I was pretty convinced that my values were the right ones, my ethical framework was respectable and I was sufficiently kind, caring and generous enough to be considered a great person in the eyes of others. I believed this and stuck to it in spite of the fact that my own personal life seemed to ultimately collapse around me and I was destroying myself from the inside out. When that collapse happened, I retained the values and state of mind that I had established as a happy person because I was so convinced that it was the right approach. It's easy to draw a dotted line between these two items now and say, "Well duh, Randall, you gotta change your approach--look what's happening to you," but even now, I'm not sure they are related.

I first established this confidence in my conduct while overcoming great hardship in the interest of reaping an even greater reward. The effect of actually accomplishing that, defeating the odds and claiming the prize was so potent that the idea of changing my "approach" seemed completely insane. It took a lot of years of frustration to drum up some sort of personal mode of thought that actually works--why waste that when it has proven potential to be so right?

Then again, it hasn't yielded a great deal of good times for many years now, so I begin to question why I'm attached to my approach and whether or not it is indeed the right one after all. It's hard to go from being so very certain of something to having your sense of reality questioned by your own mind. Like discovering that there's no Santa Claus by accident when you're five years old--it's just unsettling. In any case, I have yet to hit this extreme anyway and am only feeling slightly detached from my own behaviour, meticulously picking it apart as an overhead observer. Looking for faults. Finding a few, even.

But what keeps those happy people going? That's what I wonder. Am I doing something wrong by just fluctuating between indifference and malcontent all the time? I thought I had this shit figured out! So, I'm forced to question what it is exactly that I need to change to be happy, without sacrificing what it is that already makes me a good person (...or what I...think? makes me a good person??).

Once again, I tend to live a life of casual spontaneity, cherishing the moment and spending less of my time working to build a brighter future, especially if it makes for a darker present. Like I always say, the present is all you'll ever get to experience; why not make the most of it?

Even so, I've been weighing the pros and cons of living in the future, a concept I readily abandoned without much consideration after having been so thoroughly convinced of the practicality of living in the moment. One might reason that if the present in which you live becomes too dark to live in, you can achieve a happier outlook by dreaming of a better future and spending all of your time and effort trying to build it. Whereas my point of view dictates that most of your time and effort should be spent on building the best out of what you have, with respect to building for the future well enough that you can maintain that routine until death, I guess. Maybe I just never considered it worthwhile to spend 5 or 10 years in complete misery just to achieve a wonderful 40 years afterwards. It seems like it's ridiculous that you can't be happy every year and that somehow there's no way of achieving that. In fact, I know it's ridiculous. I've gone entire years where I was happy every day. If you can do it for consecutive years, I don't see why a whole lifetime is out of the question--you know, scatter in a few bad days every third Autumn or something just to make it real and voila! Bury me a happy man.

Knowing that it's possible makes it harder to achieve happiness by default. It sets the bar. I'm not sure how high I can jump anymore--maybe not high enough. I think maybe instead of leaping for the bar, I'll do some training instead--build some leg strength, some agility--think about the future.

Who wants to live in this moment anyway?