A Cheap Ploy For More Views, or...?

This is a picture of my mom when she was very young, having just graduated from nursing school.

Yes, that's the Cheap Ploy, a Mother's Day post.  I'm not even sure yet whether that's as low as I'll go. You and everyone you ever knew or cared about and everyone you ever talked to will have to read avidly on to find out. I know I will.

When that picture was taken, my mom was finally about to escape what sounds like a pretty tough go in early life in Ontario. Her father was an illiterate farmer with I think a drinking problem, and I know even less about her mother. When the Olive family could not make a go of life, the children of the family were "taken in" by the good people of their parish, which in more concrete terms means the family was separated and the children became more or less indentured servants at various peoples' farms in the area. They were expected to work hard in support of the families they were living with and they were expected to be grateful for the chance to do so. Their educations or futures weren't really something the host families looked to.

My mom's eldest sister managed to get into nursing school, I don't know how, and eventually got a job and then got my mom in, too. Who knows how she managed it.

When she got out of nursing school, she went "overseas" (a kind of vague and romantic-sounding term we don't hear much anymore) to be part of the war effort. She became engaged to a man in the RAF who was shot down over Libya or somewhere in North Africa and didn't survive. It's hard for me to imagine her dealing with stuff like this having come from where she came from. She renewed her acquaintance with my dad in England, and they eventually became engaged and married.

After all that, they came to western Canada and settled down to the business of having a family and all the rest.

I never heard a word about all the stuff above from my mom. She was told to never complain and to always look on the bright side and be grateful, to only say good things about people or nothing at all, that hard work was its own reward...and so that's exactly what she did. Really. We found most of it out after she died, going through medical records put together as the local doctor tried to figure out whether what happened to her was Alzheimer's or some other kind or dementia or severe depression or what.

If you know me or have read a few of these posts you'll recognize that in spite of setting as good an example as anyone ever had, my mom failed to really instil most of those core beliefs too deeply in me. Probably something to do with not having threatened to let me starve to death on the streets in winter if I didn't toe the line...because what she didn't take from that Dickensian early life was a lot of anger or bitterness or entitlement, at least not that anyone noticed.  How does that happen?

Here's a picture of her while she was still partly herself, about 10 years before her good strong body finally got the message that there was no one at the helm and stopped.

So that was it, my Mother's Day post, to a person who made the best of things (even an obnoxious, obtuse, hockey-playing son). I never got to know her as a person, really, and wonder whether that would have ever happened, anyway. I just know she was a good mom, tried her best every day, and that I think of her often.

Happy Mother's Day!

Dr. Seuss's Wild Ride

For months I had posted, fair acres of text
And some of the faithful were asking "What next?"

I hemmed and I hawed and I said "I don't know,
But the world is our oyster, so where should this go?"

"More photos!" they squawked and "More photos!" they screamed
But..posts done with pictures? It's more than it seems.

So I got out my road bike and put on my gear
Set off to get pictures and post them on here.

I took pictures of beaches

I took pictures of boats

I made titanic efforts and took copious notes.

I paused for reflection (to rest my fat butt)

I pondered my future, the where and the what

And when all was over, my ride was all done
I thought "I'll just post this, and say 'I had fun!'"

But there was one thing to say here, just ere we part:
Yesterday's doggerel is today's high, pure Art.

...thanks Hayley for the tip, and apologies to all for the text...

The "blow it out" theory

Today's theory is one that I've been bouncing back on forth on (from "this is among the stupidest concepts I've ever entertained" (and let me just say, I've entertained some whoppers) to "I'm sure The Lancet is going to love my scholarly contribution on this").

The subject is present for me today because I've had a cold or some kind of similar viral affliction for the past week, and I'm getting near the end of it. Like many people, I'm a very impatient patient, not to mention one who feels that every little thing is an affront, something that should happen to someone else, regardless of a long list of behaviours that my mother told me 50 years ago would expose me to getting sick. "If you let yourself get run down, you'll get sick." The trouble with this very good information was that at the time, as an eight year old, "get run down" was not even a vague concept.

The theory is that if you're just coming down with a cold, or just at the tail end of one, you can either avoid it or speed up its finish by elevating your respiration with exercise. You'll blow it out, cook the virus by raising your body temperature and clear out all your respiratory passages by breathing really hard. 

The counter theory is that you will deprive your body of precious disease-fighting energy and either come down with a more severe cold than you would otherwise have had or prolong the recovery you're trying to get through.

My oldest brother just last night declared his allegiance to the theory. He might be the source of this idea for me, I'm not sure. I'm reserving judgment (and blame...credit seems unlikely no matter what happens) pending outcome of my upcoming experiment. My sister, without having been specifically asked, sounds like she's on the side of the counter theory, and feels that it's foolish to not just rest. There's probably yet another study in here about whether the theory you support predicts anything about your general makeup and approach to problems (and I'm thinking about the dominance of the inner 15 year old here).

The beauty part of the theory is it's probably impossible to prove or disprove, because outcomes depend on each individual set of circumstances: where was each person in a virus-fighting process whose outcome might have been no different regardless of exercise, how exhausted did each person become with exercise, how susceptible to extinction by heat is every different virus, does your body temperature even rise when you exercise, how is the body's energy deployed (ie., would your body always make disease fighting a higher priority than casual exercise? If you got all excited about your exercise, would that suppress the immune activity temporarily?  Is all you're accomplishing with this theory a temporary suppression of symptoms with really no change to viral status?), etc.

So cast your votes.  I'm going out for a run today and if that seems to have been okay, spin tomorrow. Will I relapse and continue to schnorgel and hack for days longer than necessary, or will I emerge a new man, fresh and minty, on Wednesday?  Will exercise have made any difference at all?  And as thy used to say on Sesame Street, What about Naomi?

Stay tuned....

The Inner 15-Year-Old

So right now it's a Tuesday night at 10:45, I've played hockey and had a beer and two slices of pizza after the game. I played hurt again, because it's the playoffs, but we lost anyway. I played because it's poor sportsmanship to just not show up, and besides the doctor told me I can't really do any damage to my ankle, just prolong the healing process. I did a spin class this morning even though I knew I would still be tired for the game tonight. I just wanted to. I had to think long and hard before deciding to skip a short run with my still-working friends after spin, because I wanted to do that, too.

My 62-year-old defence partner, who does no exercise other than hockey, was still tired from having done the Sun Run last Sunday. It's the only running he does all year, and his goal is to always run less than his age. He made it in 61 minutes and is still tired two days later.

Somebody was handing out chocolate covered almonds in the room after the game. I ate a whole box on the 10-minute drive home. Did I mention the beer and pizza? Last night, after buying the beer I had tonight, I also bought two boxes of Girl Guide cookies from a mother and daughter selling them at the liquor store. I ate a whole box between midnight and 1 o'clock in the morning while playing a video game.

That's probably enough to introduce today's topic, although I didn't even talk about the state of my living space.

Basically, do you or does someone you love dance to the tune being played by an Inner 15-Year-Old? I'm willing to bet you do. You may only do a few furtive steps in the garage when no one is looking, or you may be spending great whacks of time and money and energy doing all manner of foolish things, but I bet every one of you over the age of 30 are having a pretty regular loud dialogue with your silly, churlish, narrow-minded, shrill, mischievous, self-centred, self-indulgent, and usually fairly joyful 15-year-old self.

 The theory is that all the foolish impractical decisions we make are the result of having the development of our critical thinking and decision making processes more or less arrest at about age 15.

Not that I am supposed to argue both sides of this, but the problem with this theory is that it's lopsided; that is, this whole thing would hold more water if I felt that the quality of whatever "grownup" decisions I ever do make exceeds what I'd pretty much expect from a 15-year-old. Now the theory becomes that the last time we experienced actual growth and development in our decision making and analytical abilities was when we were teenagers.

This doesn't seem like it can be right. It means that a 15-year-old has the launch codes for the world's nuclear arsenals, is making the decisions about things like pipeline development and climate change legislation, developing law and social and political policy...all the while craving pizza and a higher cool factor. Uh-oh. Suddenly one of my hare-brained theories is sounding terribly plausible. I think I'm going to allow Google to keep its secrets in this case.

Borderline Thinking

I haven't crossed the border to the U.S. for about a month now, just because I haven't had any cause to. I've been thinking a bit about that process, and I have a few questions for what the old Word Magazine podcast would have called "the Xoghead massive" (editor's note: the iPad autocorrect dislikes the nom de plume - wants it to be Coghead, which doesn't work for me at all).

First: are border guards by and large wildly overqualified for what they do? Do they do things like go home and continue to close in on making cold fusion a reality when they get off work, or submit scholarly articles to The Lancet or National Geographic? Have basement rooms whose walls are covered with satellite images of major shipping lanes that they pore over and constantly update as they seek to develop algorithms for predicting the presence of ships participating in drug trafficking?

I ask because so many of them seem so angry so much of the time, like they all have deeply personal reasons to want to pull each and every driver out of their cars and smack them around, like their dog got run over at a border crossing or something. I think it must be just exhausting to run that hot all the time (honestly, one of these days I'm going to just not correct any of the autocorrects this iPad does ...we'll have a little contest among the 5 or 6 of us to see who can spot them all, beer to the winner), and so I wonder about what's driving it. I don't think it's compensation-related; if the cameras were taking our pictures as we came OUT of our little Interview With Satan, I could imagine them being given a bonus based on how many faces in the pictures looked like they were heading directly to a bar or a therapist.

I suppose it's probably just their training, that the realization has been that acting hostile towards people keeps them off balance or something. I hope they don't go home and complain about why people in cars act like the guards are Nazis, is all.

Another question: Why are so many of us so rattled by the experience of going past a person in a little booth who wants to ask a couple of basic questions and see some papers? I don't think that many of us think of ourselves as secretly evil, and go through our days just praying no one ever sees into our demented inner lives. Okay, maybe some of you, but not that many. What is it that we're afraid they're going to find out?  I don't think WE even know, but for some reason a lot of people seem to just be afraid that they're going to be found to be committing some crime they didn't even know about themselves, and that there's a dank windowless room equipped with rubber hoses and running water that we're heading for when that crime is discovered.

I can't tell whether it's the crossing guards' (oh, I bet they hate being referred to as crossing guards) surly demeanour that does it, or whether they get like that when they smell the guilt baking off some driver, hunched down and gripping the wheel with both hands. Some kind of sick symbiosis?

The last time I crossed I had my youngest daughter with me, and after a kind of testy exchange about my marital status, the guy snapped off a "What do you do for work?". I immediately told him the truth, that I was not working, had been laid off in February...which my youngest daughter did not yet know. She said "You got laid off!?" and I could pretty much hear the creaking iron door of the cell in the room under that little booth opening to admit me, the guy is going to think I kidnapped my kid oh my god oh my god...but he didn't blink an eye. I think he was still disgusted by my uncertainty as to whether whatever system he looks at would report "separated" rather than "single" if he looked me up; oh my god oh my god I have to get this right I can hear the door opening...so he waved us through with a "good luck" spoken in a tone that allowed to me clearly hear the unspoken "you moron" at the end (and yes, over the course of all the years I have in fact become quite familiar with that tone, if you must know).

Like I said, if they were paying those guys some kind of bonus based on civilian discomfort, I'm pretty sure my picture pulling into the glorious US of A would have upped his income. I also wonder how many people feel angry after their border experience, and whether anyone in the Keeping the Sheep Guessing border guard training school have given that any thought...like whether there's a certain self-fulfilling quality to the practice of treating people like they're contemptible criminals. I suppose, if I were a very cynical person (which by now you all know is far from true), I'd wonder about whether it's also good for the border guard business to keep up a certain level of danger and confrontation between the guards and the rest of the world, the people paying their salaries...

Okay, this isn't fun enough any more...if anyone knows the answers to I think just two (rather than "a few") questions, let me know...and when I disappear, thrown in jail because I may be a civil disruptor based on the contents of this post, don't forget me.

U-turns....yeah, I said it, u-turns

...or "What Happens When No One Suggests a Better Topic".

My friend Michael took me up on a request for blog topics by raling against careless and inconsiderate drivers, how they're on the rise and essentially signalling the end of western civilization. He is especially exercised about the rise in U-turns. I imagined those guys from the original Road Warrior, with blue Mohawks and skulls mounted on the front of their hyper-powered dune buggies, tearing through Coquitlam but getting disoriented on their way to the post-apocalypse and executing in-your-face u-turns on the Lougheed. I mean, Michael seemed a little worked up.

I answered his note with about a half a post's worth of my theories about how our perception of the value of social rules, never mind legal ones, changes over time. When I found myself sliding into a discourse on the outrage that is the misuse of the word "it's", I thought I better rethink this as a post topic. I have precious few readers, I can't afford to carelessly alienate whole swaths of you at one fell post. Besides, there are no movies featuring post-apocalyptic copy editors deliberately flaunting the old rules, daring aged readers like me into combat. I would just look like a crank, not someone with a legitimate movie-based concern about the future of western civilization. (And as an aside, does it still make any sense to refer to "western civilization"?  Isn't it just "civilization" now?)

So, once again, as I do in any situation where I feel a little lost, a little unsure of who I am and where I fit in the big picture, I did what I have done so many times in the past - I decided to Google it. Are u-turns on the rise? Are they ever legal? Is bad driving behaviour in general on the increase, on a per capita basis? Once again, as it has so many times in the past, Google returned a Babel of conflicting and irrelevant information offering no clear answer to my very unclear question (I really have to make a note to myself: stop trying to Google existential questions).

Easier stuff: on u-turns, Section 168 of the BC Motor Vehicle Act, sections A and B, describes when it's not legal to make u-turn. To me the most salient line was 168(b)(iv), which says you can't make a u turn "at an intersection where a traffic control signal has been erected", which includes stop signs, and which means there doesn't have to be a sign that says NO U TURNS for there to be no u turns. This tells me that the vast majority of u-turns I've seen executed in the 35 years I've lived in the Lower Mainland have been straight up, pull 'em out of the car and cuff 'em illegal. There was also a surprisingly offside piece from an old Globe and Mail on when to make or not make u-turns:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/culture/commuting/u-turn-or-not-u-turn-that-is-the-question/article4314515/

...but after that, chaos. Well, okay, after that it was clear that getting real answers to those more general questions was going to take more than 30 seconds, so I gave up. I have coffee to drink, I can't be wasting time doing research when I could be just making stuff up. I mean, really, if you're reading this in hopes of finding reference material for your doctoral thesis, you've probably come to the wrong place anyway.

That leaves me apologizing to Michael, who's already had to read it, and copying chunks of my email to him in here. The fun of just ranting about careless drivers and the end of civilization was offset by the very high I'm-just-an-old-fogey-complaining-about-how-man-was-never-meant-to-fly index, so I tried for a more balanced-sounding completely made up theory.

First - there are just more cars on more roads doing more driving, so our chance of witnessing bad behaviour has gone up. Whether that means the per capita rate of foolishness has gone up is questionable. It seems possible, based on some studies I vaguely recall reading about, where they put gentle little bunny rabbits into increasingly crowded conditions and watched them get progressively less gentle and more like, say, rats in horror movies or something (again, let's be clear: movie-based perceptions are only a half step down the Ladder of Credibility from Stuff I Saw on the Internet). It would be great if there was a way to publish some kind of on-the-fly scale for this kind of stress-generated bad driving: "We've just had a caller let us know about a crash in the tunnel, and we're seeing traffic backed for miles on both sides. As a result, on the feeder routes, right now traffic is moving at about 250 a-holes an hour...."

It's a certainty that age makes us intolerant of those who don't put the same emphasis on certain rules that we were taught are very important and which we've run our lives by. My theory is that by virtue of simply surviving this long, we've become foolishly confident that all the little strategies we've used are the reason we've survived this long...which is totally wrong, of course. I mean, just look at all those of us who followed the same rules slavishly and yet did NOT survive. It's that groundless certainty that we're right and everyone who doesn't follow rules we understand is wrong that's the problem. It seems like a long time since I've seen marketing based on the idea that "rules are made to be broken", and maybe that's because the target audience for most marketing is still people like me, who are no longer enamoured of the possibility that chaos is good.

As far as "it's" goes....all I have to do is try and remember that all the rules of language arose from usage. If enough people decide that "it's" can be possessive, it will be. Driving behaviour might not be something that's best settled by consensus and general usage, but recognizing that appetites for change vary might help keep the "old-fogey-etc-etc" thing down. But really, the next time the guy in front of me doesn't have the wit to move up to the stop bar and thus activate the light before we all die of old age waiting for it, I'm going to ram him...

Cuba

....or, "Why You Should Vacation In Socialist Countries".

Just after Christmas 2014, I went on my first ever vacation to a tropical country. Ostensibly I was going to a friend's wedding, but just as much I was going because for a brief happy window in about mid-October, when the invitation came out, I had the money and the inclination.

In case anyone looking at this has NOT been to a tropical country, I have to say this: the water actually looks like it does on the pictures, that incredible clear blue, and the beaches in Varadero really are like white sugar, and it's almost as warm in the ocean as people will tell you. It's incredible, really.

Years and years of waiting for those three weeks in late July and early August where you DON'T need a permission slip from your cardiologist to swim in Kootenay Lake, and where there's a stony beach just to GET to that cold water, made the idea that a whole ocean could be as warm as a Holiday Inn swimming pool seem pretty far-fetched. Not only that, but if you're on the beach in Cuba and the wind blows, you don't immediately find yourself thinking about how cruelly short summer, life itself in fact, is. It's just windy, but not cold. Another kind of stunning concept. I always thought people were just making it up to cover their own disappointment at having spent all that money, but no, it really is like that.

See?  Well, take my word for it...

This post isn't supposed to be about the beach and the ocean, I just wanted you to know they're really as good as people say. Look up "How to Avoid Sand Fleas", though.

Everyone knows Cuba is about to blessed with an avalanche of American tourists carrying American money. The Cubans I asked about this seemed to feel like this development is akin to a desperate man making a deal with the devil, hoping blindly that this time the devil will just cut him a break. They REALLY need the money, and they seem a little sad about what they're going to have to do to get it.

But here's the point: they REALLY like their country and the progress they feel they've made in spite of the opposition of what must feel like the whole world. They don't want to be owned or bossed around by anybody, and you get that sense from every person you meet. The room maid wants a tip, and will be jovial with you, but try an attitude on her and see how long it is till you see another fresh towel. The taxi guy wants a tip, but I bet more than a few drunks have found themselves facing long walks back to somewhere after getting a little too rowdy in the cab. All of them, they're working and they know the deal with stupid gringos and their money, but if you are very disrespectful all the money in the world isn't going to fix it. I liked that a lot.

I figured out the "costs a peso" part AFTER the picture...

They're still big on Che and Fidel, although they're pretty clear that Fidel is done. "Va bien, Fidel"

They wanted us to get out of the all inclusive resort and see the country. This was from the guy whose job it is to line people up with his company's excursions: "Take a cab, take one of our excursions because they are excellent, or take a bus to the city, even just take a walk, but GET OUT and see the country and the people!  See the REAL Cuba! This resort is very nice and the food is good and you can always get a drink, but what are you going to see here?  Lots of other people just like you. Get out, try the food, see how real Cubans live, see the country...because it's going to change, and it's never going to be like it is now again."

Not sure this was work or pleasure - dancing

This is Rich taking 8 bars with Los Guys.  They don't
seem too concerned.

So we went out and saw a little of the country. We took a little walk, saw a big giant cactus tree and a very bored, very friendly young guy whose job was to take 2 pesos from everyone and tell us about El Patriarcho...but really he just wanted to chat, wanted some company. I guess not too many tourist buses go there. We saw resort workers waiting for their bus, who laughed and corrected our terrible Spanish greeting. We went to Havana by cab and spent a couple of days wandering around there. We saw a lot of people doing a lot of things, many of which involved trying to sell a good or service to a passing tourist. What we did not see was anything threatening or scary. What we did not hear was anyone cursing us under their breath for not purchasing he good or service they were offering. Everything had a cost, but nobody resented you not spending the money.

So, what does any of this have to do with Socialism, at least in my rather wavy and possibly distorted world view? My theory is that in that country for 57 years everyone has had a job and everyone has been told, more or less convincingly, that their job matters. For this whole time they seem to have regarded each other as peers, with way less of the celebrity or hero worship that other dictatorships seem to end up demanding. So they seem to have a lot of self respect, and that seems to make them resilient and pretty upbeat and easy to get along with. That's the theory. I suppose one big question is whether that theory works in any other socialist regime in power in the world - I don't know. Probably has way more to do with the climate and the people than with the form of government they're operating under, but this blog is all about hare-brained theories, so I say Go vacation in a Socialist country!