Self Inflicted Joy

Reader beware: in the interests of accurate reporting, this post contains strong language.

The first real snowfall of winter came yesterday: a three-inch deposit of fat, soggy flakes that turned my street into a Norman Rockwell Christmas card.

We Canadians, at least those of us who don’t live around Vancouver, have to cope with a great deal of winter. As a result, we tend to classify things like snow and ice. When I was a kid, I would have described the white blanket covering my lawn as snowman snow. Yesterday, as I trudged to the back shed for the snow shovel, I thought of it as heart-attack snow. Pace yourself, Bren, I told myself as I inserted the edge of the shovel into the blank white expanse where the front walk used to be. Beneath the snow, lurked a thin treacherous layer of hip-breaking ice. Be careful, Bren, I told myself and added rock salt to my mental shopping list. This turned out to be a mistake, but that’s further on in the story.

Since reading Buddha’s biography, I’ve been thinking about the philosophy of the middle way. Not as a path to enlightenment, I have no ambitions in that arena, but as way of coping with life in general. Snow shoveling, for example, has always seemed like a cold, thankless chore, one to be pushed through as quickly as possible. Yesterday, unwilling to push too quickly and risk cardiac arrest, I tried an experiment. Every time I stopped shoveling, I tucked my hands into the sleeves of my ski jacket and looked around for something to appreciate about the situation.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. The snow on the crabapple tree looks pretty.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Great. The snowplows are out.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Are those deer tracks on the front lawn? Cool.

Shovel, shovel, tuck.  I love the smell of snow. It’s so clean and empty.

Shovel, shovel, tuck. Why is that bird hanging upside down? Oh. It’s a chickadee.

Shovel, shov… Hey! I’m done!

The experiment worked so well, I continued it during the day.

It was a slow morning at the library. I get sleepy when I’m bored and rely on a quart of kick-your-butt coffee from the library café to maintain consciousness. Yesterday, the café was closed. I felt pretty grumpy and hard-done-by until Barb came around taking orders for a coffee run to the McDonalds two blocks up the street. To break the monotony, I bundled up and joined her in what turned out to be a coffee slip-and-slide, since the downtown sidewalks were coated in more of that hip-breaking ice. We came back, distributed cooling paper cups of coffee to the other library employees, and I spent the rest of my shift in the warm, caffeinated glow of their appreciation.

I got off at one and went food shopping because I had a hankering for corn fritters, which require corn. Entering a supermarket with an empty stomach is never a good idea, and especially not when Christmas goodies are on sale at fifty percent off. I finished shopping and slip-slid to the bus stop with forty pounds of groceries pulling my shoulders out of their sockets, wishing that my mittens weren’t in the pockets of my other coat and that I had remembered put on an extra pair of socks.

When I arrived at the bus stop, I stood in line behind an attractive young woman and listened to her converse with someone on her cell phone. (It’s not eavesdropping when the person standing three feet away from you is practically shouting.)

 “I mean, you’re all like ‘I love you,’ and ‘I want you to have my babies,’ but when you see Amanda’s profile picture on Facebook, you’re like, ‘Wow, your friend is hot.’ Like how am I supposed to take that?” On the other end of the phone, her boyfriend must have dug himself a deeper hole, because she replied, “You’re an asshole, you know that?” and snapped the phone shut.

Now there were two things I really liked about this slice-of-life conversation:

1)   It wasn’t me having it. I’ve had my share of conversations like that one, the forks in the road of every romantic journey, when the myth of being the one-and-only crosses the grass-is-greener attraction of unconquered territory. One of the many advantages of reduced estrogen levels is that I no longer feel the need to be a one-and-only. Which is just as well, given the esthetic side-effects of estrogen deficiency.

2)   It made me forget about my shoulders, fingers and toes.

The bus came. I climbed aboard, gratefully slung my shopping bags onto the seat beside me, and blocked out the discomfort of returning circulation by listening to the young woman, who sat behind me and called a girlfriend to discuss whether or not she should dump the asshole. When the bus pulled up at my street, I slipped-and-slid to my front walk, where I realized that in my frenzied need to acquire corn and cookies and liverwurst and fruitcake and eggnog, I’d forgotten about the rock salt.  

An image of myself—lying on my front walk, pelvis shattered, writhing in agony—rose up in my mind. You should have written it down, Bren, I castigated myself. You can’t rely on your memory any more. Then it occurred to me, I’d been slipping and sliding around town all day without giving a moment’s consideration to the integrity of my pelvic bones. Now was not the time to start. Giggling, I slipped-and-slid the last twenty feet to my front door.

By any realistic assessment, most of what actually happened to me yesterday would fall under the headings of inconvenient, annoying or uncomfortable. Yet that evening, when I poured a shot of whiskey into my eggnog, sank into my easy chair, and picked up my knitting, I felt really, really happy. I can’t be sure about this, but I think it’s because I made an effort to notice good stuff, and there was enough of it to balance out the crappy stuff.  

So here’s what I’m wondering. If suffering can be self-inflicted, why not joy?

Smart Until Proven Stupid

One morning last week, I opened an email from my publisher, requesting I put a link to iBookstore on my website. There were two attachments. The one labeled Marketing Guide turned out to be instructions and restrictions for placing the oversized iBook logo on my website. The other attachment, Affiliate Program Overview, was a one paragraph sales pitch for something called Linkshare and a bunch of frequently asked questions that seemed to assume I already knew what Linkshare was.

I didn't, so I followed the link in the document and discovered I’d actually have to sign up before I found out what I’d signed up for. Now I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, and normally, when I encounter this sort of vague teaser and a request for membership, I blow it off as a scam. But it came from my publisher, so I worked my way through the signup process, until I hit the terms and conditions, screens and screens of legalese so dense it would take a team of IP lawyers to detangle it. Overwhelmed and confused, I closed the browser window without signing up.

Later that day, a well-groomed woman, just past a-certain-age and wearing a seasonally appropriate sweater featuring jingle bells, approached the internet stations at the library, with the timid, apologetic smile I’ve come to associate with the compu-phobic.

“Can I help you?” I asked, although I was almost certain I couldn’t. Most of my technology-challenged clients give up long before we’ve mastered Mousing 101.

“It’s my Excel homework. I just don’t get it.”

Excel homework! Well, I might be able to help her after all. “I’ll be happy to help if I can. Tell me about your homework.”

She plopped a large, embroidered canvas bag on my desk and extracted a folded piece of paper. The page had been crumpled, then smoothed out again before being folded. Clearly, this assignment had caused considerable frustration. Hoping her homework didn’t require the beta probability density function, or some equally obscure feature of Excel I’m clueless about, I smoothed out the paper to look it over while she chattered on nervously about how she’d never been good at math in school and this was her first Excel assignment and it was due tomorrow… I held up my hand to stop her talking so I could read the assignment, which turned out to be a standard beginners “budget” problem, listing amounts for rent, utilities and food over January and February. The instructions said to find the average cost per month for each item without using any functions.

“It seems straightforward,” I told her when I finish reading. “I can help you, but it would probably be better to discuss this with your instructor.”

She looked down at her lap, her expression halfway between mutinous and embarrassed. “I don’t want to talk to him.” Given her age and proportions, it seemed unlikely her instructor had hit on her. Still, I’d never met the man, and you never know what jingles someone’s bells even when you have met them.

I turned over the paper and handed her a pen. ““Okay, let’s take a look at this. What have you figured out so far?”

She drew a three column table, wrote the months across the top, the item names in the leftmost column and filled in the amounts. She sighed heavily. “I just can’t figure out where to put the equal sign.”

At this point, I realized we were embarking on a steeper learning curve than I’d originally anticipated. It was a slow day at the library, the book I’d picked up to read was boring, and although I probably couldn’t get her to the end of the assignment, I might be able to put her feet on the path. “Let’s break it down,” I said and began her initiation into the mysteries of Excel.

We got as far as referencing a cell by its coordinates before I had to break off for a few minutes to help someone change their profile picture on Facebook. When I came back to my desk, I was surprised to see she had not only figured out where to put the equal sign, she had finished the assignment. She’d used ‘x’ to indicate multiplication instead of an asterisk, and an old fashioned division sign “÷” instead of a forward slash, but she was obviously quite clear on the concept.

After showing her the correct symbols for multiplication and division, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked her why she didn’t want to talk to her instructor. Without uttering one even remotely derogatory word, she left me with the impression her class was being taught by one of those nasty teachers who make themselves feel smart by making their students feel stupid. He basically treated her as though she was stupid, and if she bought into it, her reluctance to be denigrated was going to make it a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The world is a complex place. No one can be an expert at everything. That doesn’t make us stupid, and it doesn’t give anyone else the right to treat us as though we are because they know something we don’t. It just means we have to choose what’s important for us to understand and what isn’t worth the effort.

I went home after my shift and took another look at the Linkshare documents and contract. With its pompous assumption I’d love to affiliate myself with something it hadn’t bothered to explain and its obscure technical language, Linkshare failed the worth-the-effort test. I binned it.

Did I foolishly throw away the opportunity of a lifetime? Time will tell. Until then, I prefer to think of myself as smart until proven stupid.

Mrs. Buddha

Of all the spiritual philosophies I have explored, I always liked the gentle, moderate teachings of Buddhism the best. Wow, I thought the first time I encountered the eightfold path, that Buddha must have been a really nice guy. Wish I could find a boyfriend like him.

So last week at the library, when I ran across a biography of Siddhartha Guatama, the most recent incarnation of the Buddha, I picked it up. I didn’t expect much in terms of factual detail, since the biography was a modern interpretation of a 500 year-old text based on a 2,400 year-old text written 100 years after Siddhartha Guatama died by a committee of religious fanatics in a language that hasn’t existed for over 1,000 years. I just hoped for a glimpse of my perfect man.

Boy, were my eyes opened! Turns out the Buddha wasn’t very nice at all. Actually, he was the kind of guy you’d cross the street to avoid.

Sid was born into a wealthy family and lived his first three decades in what passed for the lap of luxury 2,500 years ago in what is now northern India.  But he wasn’t the kind of person who could enjoy good fortune. He complained about his “petty” and “pointless” domestic responsibilities (he named his son “Fetter”)  and yearned for a simpler way of being as “complete and pure as a polished shell”.

Well, who hasn’t been there? I estimate over two-thirds of my waking life has been devoted to the mundane drudgery of earning a living and maintaining personal and domestic hygiene. But I can’t really sympathize with Sid on this one, because he had servants who did most of this stuff for him, which makes him seem more like a spoiled brat than a great spiritual teacher.

Sid’s overprotective dad certainly deserved some of the blame for his whiney son. Not wishing the boy to experience ugliness, he hired a troop of guardians to ensure Sid lived in constantly beautiful surroundings. As a result, Sid was twenty-nine before he saw his first old person. It was a terrible shock to him.

Now this one I can sympathize with. I see an old person every morning and I still flinch when she appears in the bathroom mirror.

Sid went home, looked at his wife and newborn son, and experienced unbearable suffering when he realized that one day they too would grow old, get sick, and die. To avoid the pain brought on by this existential epiphany, he abandoned his family to become an itinerant monk. Or, to put it another way, he gave up his luxurious home, beautiful wife, and healthy child to wear inadequate clothing, sleep in ditches and beg for food, thereby adding whole new layers of discomfort and guilt to his suffering.

Big mistake, Sid, I muttered as I stopped reading to nuke dinner. I began to question his intelligence and nearly skipped a few chapters, since I had already figured out what would happen next, and clearly Nirvana was not imminent. But it was like watching a train wreck, I just couldn’t stop reading.

He wandered homeless for many years, hooking up with various spiritual gurus who taught him yoga and told him his suffering was the result of being too attached to the material world. To prove them wrong, Sid fled to the forest, where he abstained from human companionship, clothing, personal hygiene, food, and water. (He did some other strange stuff, but I’m not going to tell you about it, because this is the holiday season, and I don’t want you tossing your Christmas cookies.) Naturally, he became desperately ill, which resulted in even more suffering. Apparently, he tried to give up breathing as well, but failed.

Well that’s too bad, Sid, I said as I tossed the book into my tote bag to take back to the library, because your death by asphyxiation would have ended the suffering for both of us. But the next day, I realized I hadn’t got to the part of the story where Sid attained enlightenment yet. Certain there had to be a happy ending, I started reading again.

As Sid’s earthly feet took their last wobbly steps towards death’s door, a glimmer of reason finally penetrated the fog of misery he’d been lost in for his entire life. He realized suffering was unavoidable.

Seriously Sid?!? I shouted as I threw the book at the wall. Because the way I see it, 99% of your suffering was self-inflicted and absolutely avoidable. A couple of days later, as I was tidying the living room, I picked up the book, which happened to be lying open on a page with the words “rice pudding” at the beginning of the first line. Feeling foolish for getting suckered in once more, I sat down and finished the book.

Sid ate some rice pudding, then developed the principles of morality, moderation and wisdom that allowed him to embrace suffering and led him to Nirvana under the bodhi tree. He spent the rest of his life spreading the word. Eventually, he returned home and converted everyone except his wife to Buddhism.

Finally! I crowed, snapping the book shut with satisfaction at having found my happy ending. Someone in this story had a functional cortex! I totally empathized with Sid’s wife’s reluctance to take him back. She was probably still mad at him for deserting her and their week-old baby. Also, by that time, even if Sid had re-embraced personal hygiene along with suffering, he couldn’t have been winning any beauty contests.

I wonder if Mrs. Buddha is the real author of the Zen koan: If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

Two Flimsy Excuses

I don’t own an e-reader—yet. Truth be told, I’m a bit intimidated by them. Not the technology itself (although I haven’t got a clue what goes on inside a computer chip anymore) but the hassle of learning to use it and the additional strain it places on my budget.

I already know how to read a paper book. I learned when I was five years old. Although content has varied over the years, the basic process of scanning marks on a page remains unchanged. Books still exist. Why add an additional layer of complication to a simple process that’s been working perfectly well for over half a century?

Then there is the cost to be considered. Sure, it’s not a big investment at first; perhaps a few hundred dollars for the equipment and a few days to figure out how to work the thing. But in a couple of years, my e-reader will be obsolete and I’ll have to go through the buying, the learning and the downloading all over again. In a few more years, the whole concept of e-readers may have gone the way of the dial telephone and eight track tapes. Landfills around the world are already littered with my discarded typewriters, record players, transistor radios, cassette players, VHS players, Walkmans, under-powered PC’s, DVD players, and stupid (as opposed to smart) cell phones.

Of course my great-grandmother probably said something similar about telephones. I clearly remember my grandmother once stating she had no use for a television. My mother would have frowned on internet surfing as a ridiculous waste of time. What all these things have in common is that they were introduced to the public as toys, then ultimately became so interwoven into the fabric of our lives that it is impossible to imagine living without a telephone, difficult to imagine living without a television, and increasingly hard to accomplish the basic tasks of modern life without the internet.

So, what’s the point in getting an e-reader? Well, I have recently discovered, not one, but two reasons to justify getting myself a new toy.

Reason One

It’s no secret technology drives change, and after a period of disoriented grumbling, most of us adapt to our new more complex environments. But I wonder if we are rapidly approaching the technology/brain barrier, where the speed of progress outstrips the human ability to cope with it.

Some nursing association in Ontario has decided to accept only online renewals from its members. So, recently, much of my internet volunteering has been spent helping internet-phobic nurses renew their memberships. Sometimes I can’t help them, because they’ve forgotten their password and the password reset routine is sending a new password to the email address someone set up for them when they registered, which they’ve also forgotten.

Now these nurses are not senile or stupid. They are qualified medical professionals, reduced to quivering mental jelly by a mouse and a screen full of flash graphics.  They are people who have not kept up and are now stranded on the slope of an insurmountable learning curve. Keeping abreast of technology requires constant scrambling. By not embracing e-readers now, I’m just setting myself up for a desert of boredom when dead tree publishing goes the way of vinyl records and I have nothing to read.

Reason Two

 A while ago, I attended a book launch, where I bought a copy of the novel to support the author. I read about thirty pages on the bus into town a few days later and realized I had no desire to finish the book. No slight intended toward the author; it was a very well written book; I just didn’t resonate to any of the characters.

I got off the bus in front of a local second hand bookshop, hoping to trade the unwanted book for credit on a book I did want to read. Just in time, I remembered my book had been signed by the author. I stood outside the store, debating the etiquette of signed book disposal and finally decided it would be tacky to trade in a signed first edition. The author might frequent this bookshop and be upset to find her magnum opus on the BUCK A BOOK table less than a month after publication. I threw the book into a paper recycling bin before entering the store. On a display rack just inside the door I found a copy of my book. Resisting the urge to see if it was a signed copy, I scurried to the science fiction racks at the back of the store and picked up a China Mieville steampunk for the bus ride home.

The biggest advantage of e-books is that they can’t be signed. If everyone had e-readers, authors would spared these embarrassing dilemmas.

So there you have them, two flimsy justifications for buying an e-reader. Now if I could just figure out which is the best kind to buy. Do I need 3G? A micro-SD expansion slot? A camera?  And what’s all this DRM/mobi nonsense?

The Tyranny of THEM

This morning, as I was vacuuming the bathtub, I had a sudden, vivid memory from thirty years ago.

Wen and I were sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee and yakking about something that must have been vitally important to me then (although I’ve completely forgotten what it was, so I doubt it was all that important) when Wen’s three-year-old daughter, Tina, came into the kitchen and tearfully announced she’d hurt her eye.

“Do you want me to look at it?” Wen asked.

Tina shook her head and held out a Band-Aid printed in rainbow colors.

“Oh. You want me to put a Band-Aid on it,” Wen deduced.

Even back then, despite the reduced cranial capacity that afflicts all children at that age, Tina thought outside the box, sometimes so far outside it was impossible to tell what problem her ingenious solutions were solving. After a moment’s consideration, she stuck out her right forefinger.

Wen wrapped the bandage around it and asked, “All better now?”

Tina held up her bandaged finger to be kissed, then thanked her mother and ran out into the backyard to continue playing.

I turned off the vacuum cleaner, sat back on my heels and looked at the few remaining dust bunnies cowering by the drain. My bathroom has a shower stall. I’ve never used the bathtub. Cleaning it made about as much sense as bandaging my finger after hurting my eye. What problem was I solving by cleaning the bathtub?

It took me a while, but I finally came to the conclusion I was solving the problem of THEM, those judgmental ghosts who tell me I’m a worthless, lazy slut if I don’t have a sparkly clean bathtub. While the worthless descriptive is an exaggeration, and the slut accusation is totally uncalled for, the lazy epithet is quite true. And it’s not like I can hide if from THEM. THEY live inside my head.

So who are THEY exactly? And why are THEY making me kill innocent dust bunnies?

We’ll begin with Socrates (c. 469 BC – 399 BC) who proposed the Theory of Forms. According to Plato, Socrates argued for the existence of ideal forms which are the true reality. The material world we experience is just a shadow of that reality. You may think you own a couch, but what you actually own is a shadow of the perfect COUCH that exists on a plane inaccessible to your senses. Socrates labeled these perfect objects archetypes, and if he was correct, THEY could be manifestations of archetypes, one of which is obviously a sparkly clean BATHTUB. The problem with this theory is that I can’t experience the BATHTUB, so there is no point in cleaning it’s unreal shadow.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) turned this around when he theorized that archetypes were manifestations of the collective unconscious. We don’t know a lot about the unconscious, for obvious reasons, and it seems perfectly feasible that along with the standard archetypes of HERO, MAIDEN, CRONE etc, the collective unconscious holds an archetype for INDUSTRIOUS HOUSEWIFE, symbolized by sparkly clean bathtubs, which I am channeling. But here’s the problem with Carl’s theory: whatever my unconscious wants, my conscious thinks INDUSTRIOUS HOUSEWIFE is an out-dated, pre-liberation ideal from a male-dominated society that I refuse to measure myself by.

Finally, there is Transactional Analysis proposed by Eric Berne (1910-1970). The foundation for Transactional Analysis is that we operate from one of three psychic states: Parent, Child, or Adult. Child and Adult we develop ourselves. Parent is mostly just a miniature copy of our developmental influences.  Obviously my Child is unconcerned with the state of my bathtub. As a rational Adult, I’m perfectly well aware there is no benefit to cleaning an unused bathtub. This leaves the Parent, which actually makes a certain amount of sense, since I was raised in an era when ring-around-the-bathtub carried a stigma equivalent to heroin addiction today. However times have changed and harboring dust bunnies is no longer a domestic crime.

So there is no reason, logical or psychological, to listen to THEM any longer. Today, I take my first, wobbly step in a one woman battle against imaginary people. It won't be easy. THEY are loud and insulting. But I will devote every molecule of my being, every last scrap of determination in my possession, to resisting the tryanny of THEM.

As God is my witness, I will never vacuum the bathtub again!

Of course, it’s perfectly possible real people might think I am lazy if they see my bathtub. I only know one person brave enough to tell me this to my face, and I’m so accustomed to taking abuse from Wen, I probably won't even notice. On the off chance a rude and opinionated stranger uses my bathroom one day, I’ll stick a sign in my bathtub:

Psychology experiment in progress. Do NOT remove dust bunnies from this tub.

Imagination: Curse or Blessing?

I’m back!

Revisions—the ego-deflating, soul-searing exercise of ruthlessly re-writing huge chunks of a book to make it even vaguely comprehensible to readers—have been completed for the second novel and my scotch-induced victory celebration hangover has subsided. Blogging resumes.

Hypothesis: Imagination is a good thing.

As a novelist, I make my living, such as it is, with my imagination. In this sense, it’s a case of the more the better, as it allows me to send my feisty heroine tip-toeing down creaky stairs to investigate the peculiar thumping noise coming from the cellar where her great-uncle Thaddeus stored the sarcophagi he brought home from his last trip to Egypt.

In real life, the combination of an overactive imagination and peculiar thumping noises has serious drawbacks, especially in the middle of the night.

I don’t have a great-uncle Thaddeus, and no one in my family has ever been to Egypt, so when I heard thumping, my first thought was SERIAL-KILLER!  But what self-respecting  serial-killer would waste time banging on the wall when there was a juicy victim cowering in terror in the bedroom, just waiting to be disemboweled? Then it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be cowering in terror if the serial-killer had just crept up on me. The thumping was a form of psychic tenderizing, intended to increase the fun of offing me.  The noises stopped suddenly, leaving me with something much worse, eerie silence. Unlike my heroine, I am not in the least bit feisty. I just lay there—heart pounding so wildly I wondered if I would stroke out before the serial-killer found me—and  prepared myself for a gruesome death.

I will never know what caused the thumping sounds.  I’m sure it was quite prosaic, since I’m still alive. Maybe a blown over garbage can hitting the side of the house or my neighbor  indulging in a spot of midnight carpet beating? However the experience, horrible as it was, has given me a fabulous  idea for a chapter in the next novel.

Conclusion 1: Yes. Imagination is a good thing.

Conclusion 2: Wear earplugs while sleeping.

Free Stuff Is Expensive

I was lying on a plastic-covered table at the free medical clinic the other day, stoically enduring an uncomfortable examination that would be too much information to elaborate on here, thinking about how useless money is as a measure of value.

In Canada, in theory, basic medical services are free. In practice, we pay for our health care indirectly via tax dollars, after the government has taken their cut to pay for the extra layer of paperwork required to administer the programs. For those of us whose tax dollars wouldn’t buy a Starbuck’s pumpkin latte, this still looks like a pretty good deal on the surface.

But let’s take a peek beneath the surface.

I don’t have a primary care physician, because there aren’t enough of them to go around where I live, so when I get sick, I can either go to the emergency room at the hospital, or make an appointment at the free medical clinic. In this case, my problem although painful, didn’t seem life-threatening, so I started calling the free medical clinic at 8:30AM on Friday morning. I got a busy signal on my first twenty tries, but I kept re-dialing every two minutes because the clinic only makes appointments for the current business day and the first hour of the next business day. On most days, all available appointment slots are filled by 9:30AM. I finally connected with the receptionist at 9:15AM, sat on hold for ten minutes and got the last appointment at 8:40AM the following Monday, by which time my symptoms had entirely disappeared.

I felt bad about this. Somewhere in this town, people who were even sicker that I was connected with the receptionist later than I did on Friday, and at the very moment I was being inconclusively examined on Monday morning, those who survived the weekend were once again playing the clinic re-dial lottery, some of them probably still in pain. A person with really bad luck might have played for days before getting an appointment.

After determining there was nothing obviously wrong with me, the doctor sent me downstairs to the lab for a generic CBC panel and another test I won’t offend your delicate sensibilities by naming. I have to call the clinic again next month to find out if my symptoms were the precursors of a life-threatening disease or just another flair up of my chronic hypochondria.

So how free is this system?

When I lived in the States, I paid exorbitant health insurance premiums. Like most hypochondriacs, I’m a pretty healthy person overall, so I was grossly overcharged when I did avail myself of medical services, some of which I had to pay for myself anyway. Specialists and diagnostic technicians tripped over each other in their scramble to ding my insurance company for every procedure that could be even remotely justified by my symptoms. I never endured the anxiety of being unable to obtain medical assistance when I was in pain, and test results came back in hours, or at most a couple of days.

I’m getting older. Things don’t work as well as they once did and given my hypochondria, unless I win a real lottery, I’ll be losing the clinic phone lottery more frequently. In retrospect, those exorbitant insurance premiums were an incredible bargain.  

This blog has received a critique. (That’s the politically correct term writers use when we really mean criticism.) Apparently, it doesn’t have enough pictures.
I’m a pretty thick-skinned person - you have to be in this business - and normally, I’d do what I always do on such occasions: shower the critiquer in profuse expressions of gratitude and wait until they are out of earshot before blowing a raspberry.  In this case, though, the accusation may have merit.

Now, I could explain about how writers are supposed to paint pictures with words and actual pictures are cheating. Or, I could subject you to a lengthy diatribe that boils down to: my blog, my rules.  However, I am in the middle of revisions, on a fairly tight deadline, and there are only so many letters my fingers can type in a day. So, instead, I’m going to publish a little photo journal of my journey to the library three mornings a week, which is the only thing I do that is even remotely photogenic.

First stop after leaving the house is my neighbors’ front walk, where Maggie must be allowed to sniff my knees, otherwise she howls at me, which I don’t mind, but some of my neighbors might.

Then, I take a dirt path through a scrubby little meadow

that becomes a scrubby little forest

to the footbridge where I cross the river.

and pick up the bicycle path

which  I follow to the park where the railway embankment path starts. Most of the railway embankment path looks the same so just imagine twenty minutes of walking along this:

At the end of the railway embankment, the path runs behind back yards, where some interesting graffiti can be seen.  There’s this intriguingly unfinished observation. (Nose twitch? World go round?)

  and this completely unintelligible message that would not look out of place in the Netherlands, where graffiti has been raised to a fine art. (If you can read it, please enlighten me.)

Forty minutes after Maggie sniffs my knees, I arrive at the library

where I rule my little internet kingdom

with an iron fist.

 Is that enough pictures for you? Okay then. Don’t let me hear this critique again

Righty and Lefty

I’m standing at the corner of Queen and Yonge Streets in Toronto, wondering what the hell happened to the subway station? I know there’s one here. Thirty years ago, I used it twice a day on my way to and from work, and while many things about this city have changed, I’m fairly confident the subway still exists, since the trip planner I printed from the Toronto Transit Commission website advises me to board the northbound train at Queen and Yonge.

At five PM on Thursday evening, the sidewalk is a heaving mass of homeward bound refugees from the office towers surrounding the intersection. I press my back against the building behind me and watch the faces flowing past. They are big-city faces, vaguely scowling and compensating for the jostling of the crowd by avoiding eye-contact. I am reluctant to ask for help.

Further along the street, the commuter river divides; half if it continues along the street, the other half seems to be walking into the glass wall of an unfamiliar building. In the hope they are heading for the subway, I put on my grumpy face (to avoid looking like the country hick I am now) and jump into the river, which carries me to the top of an escalator. Everyone else is getting on, so I do as well. The escalator decants us into the familiar grey and navy tiles of the Queen Street subway station.

Like riding a bicycle, subway commuting is an unforgettable skill. I don’t need to look at signs; my feet automatically shuffle toward the transfer machine. By the time I remember I don’t need a transfer, I’m already holding one and standing on the northbound platform. I step back, along with everyone else, when the familiar whoosh of hot air preceding the arrival of a train blows through the station. Onboard, I shuffle to the centre of the car and inhale the subway smell, a dusty blend of personal grooming products with underlying hints of garlic and sweat and urine. When we arrive at Bloor and Yonge, I navigate my way to the westbound platform on autopilot, feeling like a time traveler.

I’m sitting there on the train, basking in the sensation of being thirty years younger, when the woman seated across from me takes a book out of her purse and starts to read. Immediately, an argument between my shoulder imps erupts.

Righty: Look! She’s reading my book! I should go over and ask her if she’s enjoying it.

Lefty: Fool! Don’t do that! What if she hates it?

Righty: She’s over halfway through. She doesn’t hate it.

Lefty: Maybe she has nothing else to read.

Righty: I can just ask. I don’t have to tell her I’m the author.

Lefty: What if she’s seen my picture at the back? She might recognize me. How embarrassing would that be?

Righty: Okay. How about this? If she smiles while she’s reading, I’ll go over and ask.

Lefty: Fine. But if she frowns…

At which point the train pulls into a station and the woman, still reading, gets up and exits the car.

Righty: See? She likes it.

Lefty: Well, let’s hope they like it tonight.

Which is when I suddenly remember why I’m on the subway in the first place. I’m on my way to be the “conversation” at a Cocktails and Conversation event being hosted at the Kingsway LCBO. (For my international friends, LCBO stands for Liquor Control Board of Ontario. In Canada, alcohol is a controlled substance only available at government outlets.)

Lefty: Wish I hadn’t forgotten to bring the speech.

Righty: I’ll wing it – just answer questions.

Lefty: What if they don’t ask any questions?

Stumped by this one, Righty shuts up. Lefty snuggles in under my ear and chants “I’m doomed, I’m doomed…”  for the rest of the trip.

But Righty’s strategy proves sound. The twenty or so ladies who show up for conversation - well lubricated with pumpkin pie cocktails, two kinds of wine and an nicely hoppy beer - ask lots of questions, some of which I can actually answer. We yak away like old friends while I brush samosa crumbs off my sweater and try not to be too obvious about refilling my wine glass.

The next morning, I have some time to kill before catching the bus home. The restaurant where I have breakfast happens to be across the street from Maple Leaf Gardens, where I attended a Beatles concert when I was sixteen. Inspired by this and the previous day’s transit regression, I decide to take the Carlton street car out to High Park, where I shared a three room flat with five other Beatlemaniacs forty years ago.

Streetcars, it turns out, still smell like chlorine and gas fumes and sweat. I take a seat by the window, already halfway down memory lane. A woman sits across the aisle from me and starts looking for something in her purse. I catch a glimpse of a pink book. Without hesitation, I leap up and scramble off the streetcar.

Righty: I’ll bet that was my book.

Lefty: It was probably someone else’s book.

Me: Oh shut-up!

Law Abiding Citizen

You know how, in TV crime dramas, the cops (FBI, CIA, whoever) always find some big, important clue by hacking into a suspect’s computer?  Ever wondered what incriminating details they’d find if they hacked yours? I did, and discovered writers may be more at risk than the average computer owner. As a result, I am making full, pre-emptive disclosure here, in this blog post, in the event the authorities ever feel the need to go through my computer.

I am not a panty thief.

While looking through one of those stranger-than-fiction websites for a plot device, I ran across a news story about 1,700 pairs of panties, mostly women’s, some brand new and some used, found strewn along a stretch of country road in Ohio. A hook like this cannot be wasted. The “panty” documents are just story ideas, not plans. 

I do not have anything against chickens.

If you pay close attention, you’ll see that all those bookmarked Youtube videos showing chickens being shot from a cannon are about aircraft engine testing. I saved them in the event I ever need to crash a plane in a novel using nothing but a seagull. Anyway, the chickens are already dead.

I don’t have anything against donkeys, either.

I was trying to find out if there’s any truth to the urban myth that more people are killed by donkeys than die in airplane accidents. Apparently, no one collects statistics on donkey related deaths.

I have never committed, and am not planning to commit, bigamy.

It was just research for the next novel. Same goes for the spreadsheet outlining the penalty differences for class C felonies in the states of Washington and Oregon and the folder containing pictures of big-breasted cartoon women.

Speaking of big-breasted cartoon women - I am not kinky.

I was trying to figure out what sort physical damage would result from a dozen lashes with a cat-o-nine-tails, an important plot point in a novel I read recently. It’s basically hamburger and I think the writer should have done more research, since there’s no way the victim could have stood up three hours later, let alone lead the crew in a mutiny.

I do not Worship the Devil.

It just so happens that most of the internet discussion on crones and psychic powers exists on Wiccan websites. All of which may (or may not) come in handy for the novel I’m writing now. Which reminds me, I have to look up famous arsonists.

So there it is. Full disclosure - except for the folder on fish tongue parasites. That research really is just for my own amusement. I got interested in Cymothoa Exigua when Michael, my fact-obsessed, library technician buddy, told me about them.  (Now there’s a guy who should never get caught on the wrong side of the law. Michael’s interests are both broad and odd.)

See? All fully explainable and totally harmless.

What mis-interpretable interests does your computer expose? If you’re a writer, or Michael, I’d advise you to check it out before embarking on a life of crime.

Masterclass: Procrastination

This will be a very short post. Here’s a little multiple choice test that explains why:

I spend so much time surfing the internet with my morning coffee I’m still in my pajamas at:

1.    7:00 AM

2.    9:00 AM

3.    12:00 PM

4.    Well, no point getting dressed now.

My highest score in Bejeweled is:

1.    0

2.    27,900

3.    211,031

4.    898,922 – but I know I can do better.

The last time I tidied the house was:

1.       Yesterday.

2.       A couple of days ago.

3.       Sometime last week.

4.       I’m pretty sure it was last month because I had houseguests.

I pay my bills:

1.    As soon as I get them.

2.    Once a week.

3.    On the last possible day.

4.    Why isn’t my phone working?

The brown things in the kitchen sink are:

1.       Potatoes I bought at the market today.

2.       Coffee grounds I spilled this morning.

3.       Last night’s tandoori chicken bones.

4.       Oh look! I’ve created life!