A Proposed Amendment to the New Year’s Resolution

“The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

Most days,  we don’t wake up thinking “Oh! I’m going to do something really stupid today!”  The one glaring exception to this morning routine is January 1^st, when millions, perhaps even billions, of us wake up,  firmly resolved to do things we don’t want to do - because if we wanted to, we’d be doing them already.

The first problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they are all about self-improvement. Let’s use my list as an example. I have it memorized, because it’s the same every year.

·         Lose weight.  

·         Exercise more.  

·         Clean house at least once a week.  

·         Quit smoking.  

On the surface, this looks like a pretty good list, right? But let’s examine the subtext here. I’m a

·         fat

·         flabby

·         lazy

·         nicotine-addicted

·         loser.

New Year’s resolutions focus awareness on my imperfections. This is depressing.

The second problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they require behavior modification. Behavior doesn’t magically modify itself. Breaking bad habits involves self-denial and discomfort. So let’s add hunger, aching muscles, exhaustion and withdrawal symptoms to my depression.

Finally, New Year’s resolutions never succeed. Year after year, I pull out this list, make self-improvement plans, and give myself New Year’s Eve pep talks. Year after year I find myself, usually in less than a week, sprawled in my recliner, smoking, and munching on cheese puffs while dirty dishes grow new life forms in my kitchen sink. This alleviates the hunger, exhaustion and withdrawal, but  leaves me with depression caused by failure and adds stupidity to my list of imperfections.  

   

Well not this year. This year I intend to learn from past mistakes by implementing a tradition I’m calling Old Year’s Resolutions.  Here’s how they work: I look back on the year and make a list of everything I tried that didn’t work, then I stop doing it.  

There is only one item on my Old Year’s resolutions list so far:

·         Don’t make any New Year’s resolutions.

This won’t make me thin or toned or industrious or nicotine-free. But I expect to feel much happier and smarter in 2011.

*

In honor of the season, and because I'll be sleeping off a turkey-coma somewhere in the wilds of southern Ontario, there will be no post next week. We return to our regularly scheduled blogging on January 2nd.

Meanwhile, may your holidays be happy and safe.

Waiting for January

Christmas breaks my heart.

For one thing, the hype and hypocrisy (which now start in October,  how surreal to see cobwebs and tinsel sharing the same store windows) are pathetic. Peace On Earth would be more than just a soggy seasonal sentiment if even half as much money and effort went into ending poverty as goes into buying presents and putting up twinkly lights.

For another thing, Christmas is a holiday that discriminates against dysfunctional families. The propaganda, cozy images of loving relatives clustering around present-laden trees and turkey-laden tables, does not match the increasingly common reality of fractured families shuffling between parents and grandparents, reliving the tensions of failed relationships and bitter custody battles. It’s especially hard on people who have no relatives, or perhaps just none that will talk to them. For these folks, Christmas is a time of yearning for connection and belonging in a world that has none to offer.   

Two of these unfortunates came into the library one morning last week.

The first was a seedy, little man with a hygiene handicap. He’d obviously slept in his clothes, and equally obviously, had taken a hair-of-the-dog hangover cure. He wanted to use the Internet but didn’t have a library card, so I offered to sign him in as a guest and asked to see some identification. He produced three pieces of an expired health insurance card. I put them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. About a third of the card was missing, but there was enough for me to see his name and most of his picture, taken at a time when he had fewer wrinkles, less hair and more access to things like toothbrushes and shampoo.

Breathing as shallowly as possibe, I signed him on to an internet session and gave him the spiel about time limits.  

He squinted at the screen and said, “Where does the name go?”

“What name?”

“My father’s name. I put in his name and it shows my family tree.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The man at the next station leaned over and said, “He probably means Ancestry.com.”

I showed my odiferous client how to navigate to the search page for Ancestry.com. With remarkable coordination for a man who'd had beer for breakfast, he typed the equivalent of John Smith into the name field and clicked on the search button, producing a predictably long list of John Smiths. “What’s this?”

I held my breath as I leaned down beside him to see the screen. “It’s a list of all the people named John Smith recorded in Ancestry.com. We can enter more information to narrow it down. Do you know when he was born?”

“Probably around 1930.”

“Is he still alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about where he was born.”

“Maybe in Welland.”

Unfortunately, Ancestry.com did not have probably and maybe fields. I figured his best chance was to search birth records for the province of Ontario. I tried to explain this to him, but he wasn’t in the mood.

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to work,” he whined. “I’m supposed to type in the name and it’s supposed to show my family tree.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because that’s how my kid said he found me.” I had a vision of this sad, sorry little man, abandoned and abandoning, whose Christmas wish was to find his roots and give meaning to a chaotic life. It died instantly with his next complaint. “Why are all these guys,” he waved at the list of John Smiths, “in the States? He’s Canadian.”

“Because we’re looking at non-specific list. We don’t have enough information to be more specific.”

“But we’re in Canada.”  

He was an Internet volunteer’s worst nightmare, one of those deluded people who thinks computers are omniscient, capable of instantly gratifying their slightest whim. I looked around for rescue. A young man waved at me hopefully from behind a terminal at the back. “Just give me a minute to help someone else and I’ll be right back.”

Judging by the frayed shirt cuffs peeping out from the sleeves of his scruffy grey sweatshirt, the young man also came from the lower end of the economic spectrum, but at least he’d made recent contact with soap and water.  He had a sweet smile and an aura of peaceful patience normally associated with people like the Dalai Lama.

“Can you please help me find someone?” he asked.

“I can try, who are you looking for?”

He said a name that was the equivalent of Mary Smith. My inner good Samaritan cringed as I asked him what else he knew about Mary.

“She went to Camp Wanameemee twelve years ago.”

“Birth date?”

He shook his head in response and continued to shake it as I asked about where she lived, what she did and if he knew any of her friends or relatives. All he knew was that they went to camp together when they were kids and she lived in a town he’d forgotten the name of. Googling for pictures of Mary Smith was all I could think of to help him, but his inability to remember if she spelled her name with a “y” or an “ie” complicated the process.

We tried it with a “y” first. He clicked on some pictures to get a better view, allowing me to deduce that Mary, or at least the Mary of his memory, had blonde hair, a very tiny nose, and a deep dimple in her chin. He searched through the pictures with methodical, focused intensity, as though searching for a long-lost love. I wanted to stay and help him, but an increase in the noise level from the front Internet stations told me I’d left Mr. Cranky alone for too long.  

One of the benefits of volunteering is the sense of satisfaction that comes from helping people. But there are some people who refuse to be helped, people who are more interested in avoiding their problems than they are in fixing them. My ripe client with the missing father was just such a person.

“I haven’t got time to look through all this crap,” he informed me after I’d tried, and failed, to shorten the list of John Smiths. “Where are the computer games?”

I refrained from pointing out how stupid this request sounded following so closely on the heels of his previous statement, and pulled up a games website, then retreated to my desk, where I watched him attempt to play Bejeweled for a few minutes before giving up and leaving the library, presumably to refill his Labatt’s prescription.

A while later, the young man came up to my desk to thank me for my help.

“Did you find her?” I asked.

“Not today. But I can come back for another hour tomorrow, right?”

I don’t know which of these two people made me feel more hopeless: the whiney old alcoholic who has adapted to an unjust and uncaring universe, or the naive young man who hopes for miracles and may still believe in Santa Claus. Either way, I’ll be relieved when Christmas is over and I can get back to problems I know how to fix, like how to upload blurry holiday pictures from i-phones to Facebook.   

Remeber These Guys?

I met a couple of dinosaurs last week at the library; two people who seemed to have stepped out of a time-warp from the mid-twentieth century. They made me wonder about how much we, as a society, have lost by worshipping mass production, planned obsolescence and the bottom-line.

I watched them approach the internet stations; two large, broad-shouldered men moving with the easy rhythm of the physically fit. The older one wore his hair long and combed back, steel-gray curls caressing the collar of his plaid jacket.  The younger man was slightly taller, his black hair tightly curled as a lamb’s pelt. They had the same true-blue eyes and  the ruddy, weathered faces of men who spend their days outdoors doing stuff like chopping firewood and fly-fishing.  Although they shared no other facial similarities, for some reason I felt they were father and son.  

Taking a terminal directly in front of where I was sitting at the volunteer’s desk, they looked at the screen, then at the keyboard, then at the mouse, then at each other.  The older man reached out and delicately picked up the mouse between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The younger man pointed to another internet station, where a teenager was zooming around Farmville. The older man placed the mouse back on the table and slid it around experimentally.

I was rather glad to see this. It had been a slow morning, and even teaching someone how to use a mouse, a task I normally dread, was a welcome event in a dull shift. I bookmarked my place in the novel I was reading and crossed over to where they were sitting.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“We want to use the Internet,” the older man said in a mellow baritone, obviously using his inside voice.

“Have you used a computer before?”  

Unsurprisingly, they both shook their heads.

“Do you have a library card?”

I hoped they’d shake their heads again, so I could ask for ID and find out more about them, but the older man pulled a scuffed leather wallet out of his back pocket, extracted an ancient library card and handed it to me.  I gave them the Mousing 101 lecture and was surprised by how quickly and confidently the older man adapted to  this new, for him, technology. Fortunately, they were sitting at a station with one of the newer keyboards that hadn’t had the letters worn off the keys yet, so it was fairly easy to get them logged on and fire up a browser.

For most first time users, the next hurdle on the path to e-lightenment is understanding how the Internet works. I have learned it is generally easier to start this lesson with a specific goal in mind, so I asked them what they wanted to do.

The younger man dipped his oh-so-pat-able head and reached into the breast pocket of his green duffle coat to take out an envelope with a carefully printed URL on the back.  “We want to see this.” He was also a baritone and also using his inside voice.

I showed them how to use the address bar and we landed on the website of a company that made specialty plastics. After helping them find the product list, I left them scrolling through a photo gallery of bizarre-looking widgets. They hunched over the screen, occasionally stopping to discuss one of the objects in rumble-y whispers, while I pretended to read my book and speculated on possible uses for the oddly shaped objects that caught their attention. They seemed particularly interested in loopy things with asymmetrical edges.  Chastity belts for chickens?

After half an hour or so, the older man turned around and said to me, “We want to buy this.” He pointed to a loopy thing on the screen that looked, to me, just like all the other loopy things they’d discussed. This one must have been very special though, because it was just under ten inches long and cost sixty dollars.

“What is it?” I asked, foolishly assuming there would be a simple answer.

As near as I could figure out, after  the young man helpfully drew several sketches on the back of the envelope for me, they wanted to buy a liner for the chrome surround of a taillight. It was the last piece they needed to complete the restoration of the 1968 Pontiac GTO they’d been working on for five years. After a summer spent scouring scrap yards for a hundred miles around with no success, they’d been experimenting with making their own from an old bleach bottle when they learned about the specialty plastics website at a swap meet.  

Although I was impressed by this dedication, I couldn’t see the point of spending one hundred and twenty dollars, because they needed two of them, for something that could be made with an old plastic bottle and a pair of scissors. “Wouldn’t the bleach bottle thing work just as well?” I asked. “You can’t even see it when the light’s assembled. No one would know.”

They both looked at me with pity. The older man put me in my place with gentle simplicity. “We’d know.”

Properly chastened, I helped them maneuver the widget into their shopping cart, which took so long that I decided to take over the keyboard, since they only had a few minutes left on their session. I typed their address into the shipping information screen and hit a wall on the payment screen, which only accepted PayPal.  I raced over to the PayPal website and hit another wall when it insisted on being given an e-mail address, something they obviously did not have.

Now most new internet users would have given up in frustration at this point. These guys were made of sterner stuff. I fired up a hotmail screen, then realized I’d never get an e-mail account set up in time and flipped back to the order screen, hitting the print button, with seconds to spare, to ensure they at least had the part number. As the older man thanked me for my help and asked when they could come back to finish buying the part, the younger man carefully folded the print out, placed it in the envelope and tucked the envelope back into his breast pocket.

I watched them walk out of the library, as calmly as they walked in, and admired the patience required to invest five years in rebuilding a car, not to mention the dedication represented by an entire summer of searching for a ten inch loop of plastic that no one would ever know about except them.  I also wondered what kind of cave they lived in, if the Internet, and all the frantic hype it delivers, had no more impact on their lives than the waft of a butterfly’s wing.  I remember that cave, in a distant, nostalgic way.

I’m keeping an eye out for a cherry red, 1968 Pontiac GTO, hoping to catch another glimpse of those magnificent dinosaurs.       

Nothing Butt

When I made a commitment to post once a week, I assumed seven days would be long enough to accumulate blog fodder. Surely, in that enormous stretch of days, something worthy of reporting would occur. Turns out I was wrong. In the life I live now, it is possible for me to go a very long time without encountering one blog worthy situation. This week, I am reduced to writing a post about nothing.

My life wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, I lived a frantic corporate life, teetering on the edge of disaster like a juggling unicyclist.  It was exciting, in a twisty way. I was important. Civilization as I knew it depended on the overtime I worked. The entire financial structure of the western world, according to my boss, relied on the programs I de-bugged and the code changes I installed. For weeks at a time, I lived on stale nachos, burnt coffee and wine gums from the vending machines in the break room.

One day, my boss told me the company had decided to replace my life’s work with third-party software. I would have to re-educate myself, or I’d be out of a job.  He didn’t actually tell me to my face; he sent me an e-mail. I looked at the hundreds of unread e-mails still in my inbox, probably from people who were unaware the systems they were complaining about had been consigned to the trash can, and stepped away from the keyboard. It was time to rethink my life.

There is no better way to explore one’s horizons than travel. I threw some clothes into a couple of suitcases – okay I threw in a lot of clothes  – and took off, with no real idea of where I was going. Within two months I was down to one, half-full suitcase and a credit card. I took trains and ships and buses to places I’d never heard of and met the most interesting people under the oddest circumstances. One afternoon I’d be playing cowbell with a street percussion band. The next night I’d be sitting in the plush velvet, balcony seat of a famous theatre catching a performance of Riverdance. Two weeks later, I’d be sipping white Zinfandel at the topside bar on a cruise ship, listening to live jazz and watching the Panama Canal glide by.

Civilization, amazingly, did not collapse without me, and my life was now thrilling, a kaleidoscope of places and faces and fabulous adventures. Stops became shorter and journeys became longer, until one day, I woke up and found myself in India with a bank account the size of a peanut and a travel addiction that made crack cocaine look like herbal tea.  

There are no twelve step programs for travel addiction. Unlike alcohol or crystal meth, travel is generally considered to be a good thing. For a time, I went back to work and fed my habit with a Eurorail pass, but there is only one real step on the road to recovery for a travel addict: off the precipice of bottoming-out. And so it was for me. I woke up one morning, in India again, with half my hair and most of my bank account gone. It was time to re-invent myself once more.

So now I live a small-town life in rural Ontario. Between bouts of writing, I fill my days with nature (saw a fox chasing a rabbit through a snow field yesterday) and volunteer hours at the library (had a wobbly moment on Tuesday when I helped a woman print out her e-ticket to Cuba) and knitting (anyone need a fuzzy hat?).  In many, many ways, this is the best life I’ve lived so far. It’s certainly the healthiest, in the sense that my stress levels are way down and there’s no danger of malaria or dengue fever.  I have the time, if I so desire, to flatten my butt in an easy chair for hours on end,  doing absolutely nothing. Which is what I did this week, and why you are reading this totally uninformative post. I have nothing butt.

Admit it. You thought I wouldn’t be able to work that in, didn’t you?

Please Insult My Intelligence

A while ago I received an email from my cell service provider asking me to support National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day on November 17^th. It was a lovely e-mail, filled with heart-stirring sentiments and eye-catching graphics.  It spoke of a petition to sign, volunteering opportunities to explore, and, best of all, gave instructions on how to send a text message that would donate five dollars to the cause, thereby soothing guilt without actually inconveniencing the giver in any way.

Having volunteered for a non-profit organization, I am aware of how carelessly donated funds can be channeled to causes and beneficiaries the donator had no desire to support, and as a result, I am a giver who doesn’t mind being inconvenienced. Before I dumped any of my hard-earned into National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day, I intended to find out what, exactly, I’d be getting for my five dollars.

I clicked on the link in the email and it sent me to a website containing the same graphics, an expanded version of the inspirational text and several links. Curious about the petition, I clicked on the big red button encouraging me to SIGN NOW! A drop down box appeared, telling me the petition was in support of Motion 504 and giving me another big red button that said SIGN NOW! Most people are annoyed by this kind of nuisance clicking, and I’m no exception, but I persevered because I wanted to find out what Motion 504 was about.  A pop-up box appeared giving me the opportunity to enter my name, city and e-mail address, request that I be kept informed on something called Re*generation, and, at the very bottom, the words:

 “I support the RE*Generation and believe we all need to work together to raise awareness for the issue of …”

The last line of the sentence was obscured by a poorly coded <div> on the home page that floated on top of the pop up window.  There was no indication of what Motion 504 or Re*generation were, nor any hint about who the petition would be addressed to. 

Now, I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I’m going to sign something if I don’t know what it says or who will read it. I couldn’t close the petition window and ended up having to shut down my browser.  When I restarted it, I did some research on Motion 504. It turned out to be a bill presented to the House of Commons, “based on an in-depth investigation into youth homelessness in Canada”, for the creation of “an official National Youth Homelessness Awareness Day” to “raise awareness of the youth homelessness issue in Canada and help get Canadians more involved in making a difference”.

Seriously? This is the best recommendation that came out of an “in-depth”, and probably ludicrously expensive, investigation? The government got ripped off.  And why only homeless youth? Is our government practicing age discrimination?  I happen to know, because I go outside occasionally, that homeless people come in all ages. A person would have to be blind not to see them hanging around the entrances of shelters, panhandling in doorways, pushing their purloined shopping carts along the sidewalk and digging in trash cans for empty beer bottles. Unless Canadians never go downtown, they’re well aware there’s a homelessness issue.

Grateful that I hadn’t signed the petition, I returned to the cell provider’s website to find out what, hopefully more useful, plans they had for my five dollar donation.

First, there was a commitment to supplement the first fifty thousand donated dollars with a matching amount from the company. Excellent! One hundred thousand dollars for the cause! This would certainly help a few hundred homeless people.  

Then, there was an invitation for Torontonians and Vancouverites to attend rallies on November 17^th. Torontonians would have the opportunity to donate hygiene kits in exchange for a delicious hot chocolate. Vancouverites would have the opportunity to make a donation so homeless youth could get the delicious hot chocolate. I preferred to see my five dollars used to create something a little more permanent than a tube of tooth paste or a non-nutritious drink and moved on down the webpage.

There, I learned that the cell phone company supports two organizations:

1)      A Toronto based bicycle courier firm who hire homeless youth couriers. In 2008, they reported an average of ten ‘targeted employees’ on staff. It’s a worthy effort, and I’d be happy to contribute to its continuation – except they don’t need any money. They are a profitable business and employ homeless people the same way they employ rest of their minimum wage couriers.

2)      Another Toronto based training facility that teaches printing skills to homeless youth. They are funded by donations and by the sale of special order greeting cards. Their website is colorful and upbeat, with many, surprisingly erudite, testimonials from former students, a conspicuous DONATE button on every page and a few endearingly broken links, notably the one to the Training for Youth page. It’s another worthy effort, but given that it’s been open since 2002, and reports only 100 students trained in its three month courses, an approximate average of four student’s per semester,  I get the sense they are more committed to collecting donations than they are to the actual training.  

Further down the page, I came to a humongous list showing the names and locations of people who have texted in their five dollar contributions.  Some of them were from Toronto and Vancouver, more from other places in Canada, where the residents, presumably living in communities too small to discard enough beer bottles to support a homeless population, are unaware of the issue. A surprising number of Americans contributed, and an even more surprising number of contributors  - as in surprising that there’s even one – texted in from places like Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Sinagpore, the Netherlands, and  New South Wales (which, for my geographically challenged readers, is in Australia). Who knew the plight of 65,000 homeless teenagers in Canada was a matter of international concern? Canada may be a small country, but we’re really giving those millions of pavement dwellers in India some serious competition.

At the end of all this research,  as near as I could tell, my five dollars would have:

1)      bought hot chocolate to encourage further donations in Toronto or Vancouver

2)       funded a seriously inefficient training facility in Toronto

I looked at the list of contributors published on the website and realized they had, considering the matching donations provision, already given more than enough to cover those expenses.  

The Real Benefit of Cross-Cultural Experience

Warning - this post contains scatological language and a truly dreadful pun. Reader discretion is advised.

I did not step in shit this morning. I didn’t win the lottery or get struck by lightning, either, but what separates the first non-event from the other two is that I had the opportunity to do so.

I was moseying along the river path, watching a small flock of Canada geese as they stocked up on riverbank grass before continuing their migration, when a familiar tingling raised the hair on the back of my neck. I hadn’t felt this sensation for a long time, but I knew, instantly, what I had to do. I froze mid-stride, right foot hanging in the air, and looked down. There, mere millimeters below the scuffed toe of my sneaker, was the most amazing sight - a dog turd!

You may be thinking dog turds are a fairly common occurrence.  This is probably because you are one of my friends who lives in The Netherlands, where canine hygiene is given the same laissez-faire treatment as prostitution and recreational drugs.  When I lived there, I had that attitude as well. It’s yucky, but inevitable given the national love of dogs, and not really a big problem because everyone who lives in the Netherlands for more than a couple of months has the same highly developed radar that prevented  an encounter of the stinky kind for me this morning.

However, if you are one of my North American readers, you are likely to be appalled. This kind of thing just does not happen in North America, certainly not in Canada. I doubt there’s a governing body in the entire country that hasn’t passed a stoop-and-scoop law. Dog walkers would rather be seen naked than without a conspicuously dangling poo-baggie, and anyone observed furtively pulling a pet away from a steaming pile is in for a serious ear-bending from passers-by.  This national aversion to canine fecal matter is not limited to those of refined sensibilities, either.

Not long ago, I needed to replenish my stock of single malt, which had been seriously depleted by  the recent revival of an interest in hot whiskey I acquired several years ago on a trip to the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland.  On my way into the liquor store, I passed a panhandler sitting the sidewalk. I’ve talked to him a few times. He’s a cheerful, easy-going young man who greets and blesses everyone that passes, whether they toss him change or not.  The panhandler was carrying on an animated and friendly conversation with a local busker, while the busker’s dog, a mongrel whose genetic blend obviously included a liberal infusion of Great Dane, sat patiently beside his master.  

Coming out from the liquor store, I was shocked to find the panhandler and the busker engaged in a violent shouting match.  Now I promised you this post would contain only scatological language, so I will edit the following conversation to exclude all other forms of profanity.

Panhandler: That’s (expletive deleted) gross, man!

Busker: (expletive deleted) off!

Panhandler: Pick it up, you (expletive deleted)!

Busker: (expletive deleted) that! Pick it up yourself, (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted)!

Panhandler: It’s not my (expletive deleted) dog!

Busker: I don’t have an (expletive deleted) baggie!

Panhandler: Well, shit, man. Why didn’t you say so?

The panhandler rooted through his backpack and extricated a plastic bag, which the busker took and used to remove a large brown turd from the curb, while the dog disassociated himself from the process by staring loftily into the distance.

Now, I’ve done a bit of traveling in my time and some pretty strange stuff has squooshed up between my toes. I consider myself to be quite a woman-of-the-world when it comes to stepping in crap. But at heart, I’m still a Canadian, and of all the stuff I’ve stepped in, nothing triggers my gag reflex faster that dog shit, although an incident involving bear droppings outside my tent in Algonquin Provincial Park scores a close second.  So, this morning, when my Dutch super-sense kicked in, I stepped around the dog turd and realized, with groan, that travel didn’t just broaden my mind, it literally saved my sole.  

Oh, stop whinging. I told  you it was a bad pun.

Retail Rush

I went shopping yesterday.

There was a time when I enjoyed shopping. Back in the days when I believed perfecting my body was the same thing as perfecting myself, whole weekends were devoted to the acquisition of clothes, shoes, jewelry and cosmetics. Gourmet foods and high end wines, available only from specialty stores, once dominated my shopping lists. I will not embarrass myself by telling you how many years I spent wandering through malls buying things like scented candles and throw pillows. What was the point of having disposable income if I didn’t dispose of it - right?  

Over the years, my mind became more important than my body and my taste buds finally figured out they couldn’t tell the difference between cheap red plonk and fifteen year old Baron Philippe. The ‘hit’ of retail therapy got buried under progressively thick layers of consumer guilt as the hole in the ozone layer expanded and the plastic stew in the middle of the Pacific Ocean spread. Shopping gradually lost its appeal and received its death blow in 2008, when the recession decimated my foolishly-invested life savings. Nowadays, the wilting lily of my body is gilded by semiannual trips to the local charity shop and groceries are handled in a once-a-month binge through the superstore, supplemented by random forays into a local grocery for perishables like apples, milk and butter tarts.

Yesterday’s shopping was a milk and butter tart run. Normally, I’d just dash out to the little shop down the road and scurry home to continue writing. Yesterday, in the grip of a short but intense bout of writer’s block, I decided to take a break from the keyboard and rode the bus out to the new grocery store at the mall. This was a big mistake. With less than two months to Christmas, the mall had been transformed. Styrofoam snow-people and plastic reindeer hobnobbed in store windows. Garish booths took up nearly half the floor space of the mall to ensure I wouldn’t get caught short without a commemorative tree decoration or a Hickory Farms gift basket on C-day.

At first I resisted, stomping stoically past all temptation toward the grocery store, squinting against the glare of twinkly lights on tinsel, breathing shallowly to reduce the aroma of cinnamon-apple potpourri. As I passed the calendar booth, I caught a glimpse of the 2011 Chippendale’s calendar. I slowed my pace, just a fraction, and turned my head to get a better look.

Instantly, a woman whose jauntily tipped Santa hat and rigid smile did nothing to alleviate the boredom in her eyes, leapt out in front of me from behind the booth. “Calendars make wonderful gifts,” she chirped, “and we have a super selection this year!”

I shifted my focus away from the politically incorrect display of rippling abs toward some less embarrassing kittens and took a sideways step, with the intention of walking around her. “I’m just looking, thanks.”

 “Well, be sure to look at the page-a-days.”  She pointed to the next rack over.

When someone points at something, it’s almost impossible not to look. I looked, and there, squeezed between the Harley Lover’s page-a-day and the Sudoku Addict’s page-a-day, sat my nemesis - the Little Zen Calendar. In a former life I must have been a Zen Buddhist monk because I just can’t resist a good koan. My hand stretched out toward the calendar. Just before my fingers touched the pristine plastic wrapping, I jerked my arm back. “Maybe later,” I mumbled and stumbled past the saleswoman.

A similar scene played out in front of a shoe store, where a display of thigh boots activated the vestigial remains of an ancient shoe-fetish. Before I arrived at the grocery store, I’d come perilously close to becoming the proud owner of a spiffy new Blackberry phone, a coffee table book on the ruins at Petra, a pot of miracle face cream guaranteed to eradicate wrinkles, and a two gallon pail of caramel corn. All this self-denial took its toll. I meandered through the grocery store in a haze and nursed an ache of unrequited longing on the bus trip home. Once back inside my house, safe from the retail demon, I made myself a cup of tea and unpacked my shopping bag to get the milk. But there was no milk. No butter tarts either.

What I’d actually bought, for twenty-seven dollars and fifty-three cents, was: two pounds of fruitcake decorated with marzipan holly leaves, a bag of beetroot and sweet-potato chips, and, presumably still under the influence of the Chippendale’s calendar, an obscenely shaped salami festively wrapped in red and green ribbons.

I should have bought the damn Zen calendar.

Recidivist's Lament

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

I’m not against progress. I like my house, for example, much better than a cave. But I’m not what you’d call an early adopter. From microwave ovens to cell phones, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. Of all my reactionary battles, none has been more traumatic, more dramatic, and more humiliating than my thirty year battle with personal computers and the Internet. 

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.  - George Orwell (1903-1950)

In the early 1980s, second husband took me to Georgia to meet the out-laws. His father had just bought a TRS-80, affectionately known as the Trash-80. I hooked it up to the old black and white television in the basement and spent a frustrating week teaching myself BASIC and writing a program to play the first five bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. At the end of the week, on the trip home, I told second husband that personal computing would never catch on.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. - Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)

Twelve years later, my forty-year-old Remington manual typewriter gave up the ghost. This was not entirely a bad thing, since the keys were so worn down it was impossible to distinguish between the letters a, e and s. Second husband wanted a home computer and talked me into buying an IBM desktop to replace my beloved Remington. Home computing, it seemed, had greatly improved. Aside from the wonders of word processing, the CPU made an excellent footrest. After much technological sturm und drang, we managed to get connected to the internet. I spent five minutes surfing and fifty five minutes waiting for screens to load over the phone line. I told second husband that the Internet would never catch on.

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?  - Stanislaw Lec (1909 - 1996)

Just before the turn of the century, second husband and I parted ways and I moved to the Netherlands. I’m mostly an instant gratification type, too impatient to wait out the turnaround time of snail mail. Staying in touch with friends back in North America soon resulted in crippling telephone bills. I decided it would be economically wiser to get email. I bought a cheap laptop computer, ordered DSL service, and learned that the Internet had greatly improved its speed of delivery. What it delivered, however, left much to be desired. Security software handled the viruses. I learned not to open any email offering watches, pharmaceuticals or guaranteed techniques for enlarging my organ. The few personal emails I did get were frequently garbled to the edge of legibility. I told myself (since I was living alone now) that email would never catch on.

Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. - Thor Heyerdahl ( 1914 - 2002)

Over the next eight years, the laptop became my financial life, and things got worse by leaps and bounds. My bank discontinued teller service, forcing me to use internet banking. My credit card issuers and pension fund providers had apparently hired exclusively deaf mutes, since the only way they could be contacted was via email or chat. I had accounts with Amazon, Microsoft, Symantec and every major airline in the world. Logon id’s and passwords proliferated to the point where they took up half my address book. Shit happened and I found myself wading through swamps of moronic FAQ’s trying to find out how to contact a REAL person; then punched my way through computerized menus to find the elusive REAL person; then spent hours, at ten cents a minute, listening to crappy hold music while waiting for REAL person to pick up the phone; then had to ask REAL person to repeat everything at least five times because I couldn’t understand their accent. It seemed obvious that no one in their right mind would choose to do business over the internet. I told myself (still living alone) that internet commerce would never catch on.

New roads; new ruts. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

In 2007, when I quit my job and moved to India, one of my co-workers suggested that I write a blog to keep people informed of my adventures. Given the number of people I knew, this seemed like a much more efficient method of staying in touch than handcrafting individual emails. I got myself a blogspot account and started up BrIndia. But efficiency did not ensue. I blogged. People commented. I answered comments, generating long explanatory email exchanges. I soon found myself tied to the laptop for two hours every day, blogging and emailing. This is insane, I told myself. No one with a real job has the time to hang out on the Internet all day. 

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long. - Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)

Earlier this year, my first novel was bought by NAL. Any aspiring novelist will tell you that a publishing contract is the Holy Grail of writing, because it greatly improves the odds that someone, other than your mother or your best friend, will read your book. Publishers have editors to improve the quality of your book, artists to wrap an eye-catching cover around it, and sales forces to ensure  bookstore buyers know it exists. For months I stumbled around in an ecstatic fog, convinced I’d surmounted the final hurdle on the path to literary fame and fortune.

Then I received the Penguin Author’s Guide to Online Marketing, sixty-four pages of advice for authors in the age of the Internet, and realized how much further the path stretched ahead of me.

I needed a blog. To this I assigned a daunt-factor of two. It would have been a zero, because I blogged in India, but now I’m writing about myself and there’s not much material to work with here.

I needed a website. I assigned this a daunt-factor of four: two because I had to learn enough HTML and CSS to write it, and two because I have all the artistic ability of a rock. Not one of those cool, igneous rocks with sparkly quartz bits either; I’m more of a dull gray sedimentary rock. 

With the blog and website under my belt, I am now at the part of the guide that deals social-networking: Facebook, Myspace, Amazon Connect, YouTube, iTunes, Flickr, and , most terrifying of all, Twitter.  Obviously I can’t do all this or I’ll never have time to write another book, or even brush my teeth. So the question is: where do I spend my social-networking hours? 

Five of these options are easy to discard. I’m a writer, not a photographer, or a musician, or whatever it is they call people who make videos. Scratch Flickr and  iTunes and  YouTube.  MySpace insists I tell them my year of birth. Hah! Like that's ever going to happen. The “learn more” link for Amazon Connect is broken, so I can’t learn enough to find out how to sign-up with them.

This leaves me with Facebook and the dreaded Twitter. On a scale of one to ten, these have a combined daunt-factor of at least thirteen, maybe twenty.

Let’s start with Facebook. I actually have a facebook account, and with all due respect to the millions of people who are “tagged” in photos, “like” other people’s status, and have sheep to trade in Farmville, I can’t quite see how any of this is going to encourage people to read my book.  Who cares what I have for breakfast or how many pairs of shoes I own? (For the record, it’s toast and peanut butter most days and two pairs.) As for political opinions, favorite recipes, and interesting pets - I don’t have any.  Which leaves me with posts like: “Hey! I just woke up!” and “Six pm and still sober! Yay me!” 

On to Twitter. Seriously? Twitter? What, that is interesting, can possibly be said in 140 characters? Perhaps, if I had a cranky father prone to pithy sayings, Twitter would work for me. Sadly, my father died shortly after I was born, apparently unaware that by falling out a third floor window he was severely stunting my future social networking opportunities.

I’d like to tell myself (still living alone) that social networking will never catch on, but obviously it has. I suppose, like every other battle I’ve fought on the Internet, I’ll find a way to insinuate myself into the social network eventually. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to make do with a website and a blog.

A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)