Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Long-time readers will remember that on January 1st of this year, I posted a list of New Year's Intentions. Events blew most of them off-course.

• Start a savings and/or investment account and make regular deposits.

I have a moderately-high-interest savings account, currently with exactly 43 cents in it. After realizing how much money it could make while sleeping, I understood the power of such an account, but could not get into a rhythm of saving regularly. K has shown me the way with regards to tracking spending and earnings. Although my situation is much worse than I imagined, I now know enough to make goals with numeric values involved.

• Fix Urban Vancouver.

Not done.

• Go on a real vacation where I don't check work email.

Done, though the best vacation was a staycation. It enabled me to attend a friend's father's funeral and to attend my girlfriend's graduation ceremony and recharge without the stress of travel. Definitely doing at least one week-long staycation per year for the foreseeable future. I did not go to Portland, Oregon.

• Continue bookshelf sustainability.

So far so good. As the result of a move, I identified a few books to donate, and last night I looked at my bookshelf and set myself a goal of donating about half (let's go with a third for now) of them by the end of 2009.

• Bike to and from work each weekday for a month.

Failed. Living closer to work means it takes an hour to walk, and instead of biking to work taking double the time it does to bus, it takes about the same amount (including walking and the daily morning and evening nightmare that is Cambie St. near Broadway).

• Take a full weekend and get rid of stuff in my closets.

Spring cleaning succeeded, and moving led to getting rid of even more stuff. It's time to spend 2009 removing everything but the most important things, including scanning and discarding photos and documents and buying a multi-tool.

• Write Christmas cards to my friends.

In progress.

• Rediscover my sense of wonder.

The month of August 2008 will go down in history as the month I rediscovered my sense of wonder, in a way I couldn't have possibly imagined.

• More GlobalSat GPS logger tomfoolery.

I bought an iPhone instead, so the GlobalSat sits on a shelf. Want it?

• Dance again.
• Learn to sing.
• "Accidentally" break the kit lens on my camera and replace it with something decent.

No time for dancing, singing or photography lessons this year.

The past year, especially the past six months, have revealed sides of me I didn't necessary want to know about. A slightly fuller range of emotions and a slightly fuller range of experiences up until today, which marks the end of one decade and the start of another. My girlfriend and I will celebrate it quietly by re-watching episodes of a certain science fiction TV thriller she has yet to catch up on.

In the past year of reflection I haven't come up with anything resembling a 5-year plan. Instead of retirement objectives, I've a better sense of who I am. Instead of setting big goals for the rest of my life, I made small changes. Small changes like acknowledging that biking to work is the form of exercise that gives me the most satisfaction, helping solve two problems--weight stagnation and mental sluggishness--that irk more than plague. It's not social like basketball (my true love) or dragon boating or floorball. It gets me somewhere, up and down hills and past soccer pitches and baseball fields and cars and, more dishearteningly, other cyclists whizzing by. No longer do I type two spaces after a sentence. I don't buy fancy coffee anymore, partaking only when it's free and only often enough, not too often. Ice cream only consumed outside the house, that is, no containers of it allowed in the freezer anymore. A smarter routine at work, finding its way into my personal life (why is it hardly ever the other way around?), which means less social media during the day. It works out: I'm looking forward to the era of social media divestiture anyway.

Today, when other thirtysomethings welcomed me to the club, I joked that now I have to spend the next 30 years undoing the damaged caused by the first 30 years. That's a joke at my own expense, among the many bad habits not yet discarded, and really, my life up until this point has been easier than I'd like to admit. If daily urgency at work, as opposed to the weekly urgency of months past, is an unwelcome if necessary change, then I need to assert my right to relaxation to ease the belly stress. More swimming in the pool, going out less, working out with a physical destination rather than a number on a scale in mind, and more Sunday brunches on Commercial Drive are included in the self-prescribed remedy.

It doesn't feel like thirty, yet. Maybe, as one person already suggested today, I just need practice.

Today I celebrate the end of my 28th year and the beginning of my 29th. This is the only time that the day of the month will match my age. Remember last year, when I said by this time I'd try to lost 28 pounds? Didn't quite work out that way. Still about the same, but not feeling as good about things. I need a better relationship with food, which is just a fancy way of saying I need to eat better and exercise smarter.

I do like the attention of birthdays, but have come to think that they're pretty selfish, when one thinks about it. Sure, it's a day of the year where it's okay to be selfish, and that's fine, but the day celebrates something you, as the birthdayee, didn't really have anything to do with. This is really the anniversary my mom became a mother (for the second time) and my father became a birth-father for the first time and my sister became my sister. My brother gets to celebrate his becoming a brother too, though he was born about 2 years after me.

The last week has seen me go to Courtenay for my high school reunion. I saw some old friends and they told me their story. The one that stayed on my mind, still, was that of Bill, the point guard and captain of the basketball team on which I was a forward. He and I attended basketball camps together, and were often roommates in hotels when we went to tournaments. A long-time mountain biker, he broke his back a year or so ago, and came to the reunion in a wheelchair, a permanent condition. He wouldn't let me feel sorry for him, though, and he was the Bill I remember all those years back, a smart, tough as nails loudmouth but not an asshole.

I took my lovely girlfriend to see my hometown, and drove her around the valley, which made me feel like a big man. I must have got sunstroke or something on the way back to Vancouver, though, putting a damper on some of our later plans for the rest of the week, including missing the fireworks on Wednesday. Another sad departure at the airport, with at least two more such departures before the end of the year, and more after that. But I knew what I was getting into, and I have no regrets.

There should be something you can spray yourself with so that you don't hear car alarms after midnight.

Through an article about the proposed new soccer stadium in downtown Vancouver (which will hold not only soccer events but concerts and other sports) and the article's comments—thought-provoking in their own right—I find Stadium NOW! and Friends of Soccer, both of which have weblogs. The URL of the the Stadium NOW! weblog offends my sensibilities as a blogger, and the Friends of Soccer weblog is hosted on blogspot.com (that's not an objection, as I happen to think that blogspot.com is fine as a free weblog hosting provider). The official stadium website does not appear to have a weblog, but at least it looks nice. Darren Barefoot's writing on the Whitecaps' stadium is worth checking out, though it looks like, at least at this writing, that the enemies of soccer have bought ad space on Google for those searching for 'whitecaps stadium'. So they don't get included in Urban Vancouver's aggregator. That's not a political decision—I support a soccer stadium in Gastown—but rather a technological one: I'll happily promote the weblogs and/or RSS feeds of those that oppose the stadium too.

Getting back now from what was supposed to be a night spent on Vancouver Island, I come to the conclusion that as far as weekends go, this has to be one of the most boneheaded I've ever had. It started by misplacing on of the tickets to the two concerts I was planning to go to on Friday night. The part for me that makes that unbelievable is that I remember leaving my apartment looking at the two tickets making sure I was going to the right one first. Luckily I misplaced the ticket for the artist I had already seen, and not the one where a friend recognized me and invited me to sit with, the second concert in a month I've sat during. Saturady I mistook for an inlet what was, on closer inspection, a lagoon. Finally, today, I found out only after buying the ticket that the passenger ferry left at 6:30 and not 4:30, ruining, at least for me, what was supposed to be a nice Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of making it a really late dinner, I decided to come back to the apartment and tell my parents that I'd like to come on a weekend where I plan it better and stay for longer, likely not on a holiday weekend when as many people are travelling.

Ever since I understood the importance of girls, I understood the importance of the telephone, which was thus: the telephone was the way in which girls contacted me. (Isn't it weird how "got in touch with", "contacted", "reached"—all phrases having to do with touching or the attempted touching with hands—are synonyms for "establishing communication between". Or is it just normal?) In high school, and well into university, there would usually be at least one—the number was almost always exactly one—girl who would call me every day or every other day. I never figured out, nor really do I care, why, but conversations would always last longer than 15 minutes, usually with the young attractive female dominating the conversation. That was, as geeks are wont to say, a feature and not a bug, since I generally dislike talking and generally like the sound of the human female's voice, and I'm what people often refer to as a "good listener", meaning frequent usage of "uh huh" or "really?" or "but what about...?".

Since there's no such close female friend in my life, or, rather, no close female friend who's has me at a "local"call—depending on how a company defines "long distance"—away, I spend most of my free time glued to a computer screen. That's probably a bad thing, not least because the time I spent on the bus writing everything you've hopefully just read could probably have been better spent asking the cute girl who kept looking at me (must be the new shirt, jeans, shoes and attitude that came along with the clothes) "do I know you?" following up with, if necessary, "should I?". At least finally the greater part of the time spent glued to a computer is spent doing paid, fun work.

My phone, to return to my original subject, is somewhere in my apartment. I know this because I heard it last night running out of battery power. For every day except one this week, I left my phone at home, treating it as a land-line. That last statement would be a lot closer to the truth if I checked messages regularly, and would be even closer to the truth if I bothered to check messages at all. To misquote one rapper and accurately quote another but in the wrong context since he was talking about girls calling him incessantly, I have 99 problems and life would be more interesting if a girl was one of them, and these days I don't answer my phone. Moving on to That Which Was Not Written While On Public Transit, another (fixable) (technological) problem is that my phone is entirely too quiet, so while it rings and displays a cute blinking red light during and after doing so, I'm usually either not within audible range of my phone or it's in my backpack while I'm on the bus, which is loud. (But cheap!) So that's just a matter of buying a new, louder model phone, which, no doubt, does other stuff to interrupt me like display notifications to events I said publicly that I'd attend. Display of the people or phone numbers calling me has given me the ability to just not answer phone calls from undesirables. Luckily—it's not yet clear for whom—no such people exist.

Today the thought occurred to me—and it's not important where the following occurred to me, just know that it happened—that I should just forward my phone to the office. That way I'm a) required to answer the phone, b) someone will answer if I'm not there, or c) people who don't know where I work will be confused. There's also the possibility that people who do know where I work will leave a humourous message, confusing or amusing my co-workers (or both!) thereby embarrassing me for about 5 minutes. Which is about 5 minutes too long. So I probably need to go with a fifth option, which involves something like getting a good phone that I take everywhere. I would still reserve the right to not answer it, though.

Yesterday, I invited a friend to come with me to see a play that takes place tomorrow. This will be the first play I've attended in years, and hopefully it will be the first of many, seeing how movies are been shown with commercials and by terrible projectionists. Movies are the same experience repeated over and over, while plays will always be slightly different each time, due to the way the actors interact with the audience, a line here and there forgotten or improvised, and so on. I bought two tickets while single—still true—thinking that I needed to start thinking for two in case the opportunity presented itself, and if not, I could invite a like-minded friend to join me. Good theory, but in practice, I wait until the last minute. It's not because I don't like planning. I don't like planning, but that's not the reason I don't do it: rather, it's because nobody else I know seems to want to plan anything, or when I plan something with them, something else comes up.

It's never their fault (I repeat to myself). Just circumstances. There is a certain Icelandic rock band coming to town, and I bought just one ticket to their concert in September, thinking that someone else like-minded will be going, but that it feels weird buying two tickets before finding someone to go with. Maybe someone else wants to go with me to concerts and other events I want to go to in the future, but unless they express an interest beforehand, they're buying their own ticket on their own time.

Going to events "alone" when there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of other attendees sucks. A lot. Before is boring with nobody to talk to to pass the time. During is boring with nobody to dance with or steal a glace to see how they're enjoying it. After is boring because there is nobody to compare notes with. It still beats sitting at home the day after wishing I had gone, but it's not all it could be.

Today is my birthday, turning 27 years old. Starting today—or rather when I get back from a conference, to maximize the bang for the buck when I buy the membership—I'll be heading to the gym at least twice a week to get some exercise, which will be a marked increase from the no exercise during the last 6 months or so. It feels like an admission of defeat, because of my distaste for what a friend calls "gym culture" and that they have that evil worse than Satan himself, cable TV. Also, I need to cut down on the junk, meaning ice cream and so-called fast food. Can anybody hazard a guess what the amount of planning around this I've done other than that?

My new motto is "28 by 28", which stands for losing 28 pounds by the time I turn 28 years old. That feels like a modest goal, though I will measure success more based on my energy and esteem at the end of the term compared to its start than what the cheap scale I bought a couple of weeks ago tells me.

In an effort to increase my already copious free time, I've unsubscribed en masse from about 90 weblogs. It might interest some to know that the majority of them could be classified as "Dark Web". A brief scan to save the 'must-haves', then saving a listing of them for a nebulous future date, then a big purge. In part a step towards a more robust 'offline strategy', in part a step towards reading the materials piling up on what's supposed to be my dinner table (before weblogs came along, I was a mild-mannered bookworm), but mostly to release myself from reading and move towards either writing or quiet contemplation or I dunno, hanging out in cool downtown cafes reading snooty literature—is there any other kind?—in an attempt to impress the international students that gather there. It's not going to work, of course, because it's now almost an hourly basis that cool shit comes out.

This whole Internet thing—be it blogging, online dating, 'hookup' sites—never panned out in terms of meeting potential partners with whom to spend a little 'quality time', so I think I want out. Does it help that I keep in touch with most of my friends via IM or email? Or that I work for a company that collaborates almost exclusively online? Or that pretty much my entire life now revolves around my laptop? Do I have any credibility by, within the last week, signing up for multiple of the aforementioned types of sites? Not really, so the line that 'I'm defecting from geekdom' I've been trying out on some people has been met with more than a little incredulity. In order to try to prove them wrong, I'd like to spend more time books, more time in a swimming pool, more time in trails, more time at the park playing basketball, more time hanging out with friends, more time sleeping, although, really, that's never really been a problem. It might turn out to mean more time blogging too, since although there will be little new to read in the next few weeks, there are still old articles that deserve my—and by extension, your—attention.

More time. That's probably asking for trouble. With more time comes more inability to think of ways to fill it. Maybe I can just become a workaholic, since workaholics get all the girls. It would be nice, though, if I actually believed that.

This weekend was not a particularly good one: surrounded by too many people with not enough sleep or alone time and insubstantial breakfasts. (No complaints about the lunches or dinners, which were both delicious and free.) This is not an apology, because those around me got an accurate reflection on the outside of how I felt on the inside, nor is it a promise to be better about conferences or other large gatherings of people talking loudly in the future. It is, rather, an acknoledgement of a regression from about 9 months ago, when I decided to make a change in outlook to not so much focus on the positive but to avoid dwelling on the negative.

The upcoming conference in Portland looks like it will be more of the same. Those attending the conference over the weekend with me may not know this, but I gave serious consideration to asking to be left out of this upcoming one. That said, an afternoon walk (which came after a late afternoon awakaning) convinced me enjoy it for what it will be, this time instead of a weekend working vacation in Seattle, a city I'm ambivalent about, it will be a week-long working vacation I would move to in a heartbeat if I met the citizenship and/or work-permit requirements. If enough opportunities for escape present themselves at the conference, I have some ideas, if not fully-formed, on how to spend the time "alone".

For now though, work and weekend projects for the next month or so until then should keep me occupied enough not to think too much about how I felt over the weekend. That, and I'll probably be spending a lot more time in my pool now that summer is officially here.

My apartment complex's outdoor pool is open for the summer. You're all invited....My apartment complex's outdoor pool is open for the summer. You're all invited.

I wonder if this not being able to sleep before a long day of travel is going to develop into a habit. I slept about 4 hours before flying to Ottawa, and won't sleep too much before flying from Toronto to Vancouver. Much on the agenda for the next week or so, including but limited to:

• aforementioned crazy travel day, with possible stopover at a work event and possible attendance at some random British rapper's concert
• catching up on the backlog of email (work and personal, but mostly work) and extracurricular reading
• matching a new site design up with templates for the various CMS's that power this site
• attending a blogger meetup, but possibly not (usually too many people in a loud place talking shop anyway)
• spending a weekend doing my taxes
• finishing up some half-written articles, including but not limited to:
• thoughts on online dating and how much it sucks
• how to fix online dating
• life and death
• a recap of a month free of Coca-Cola (the soft drink but not any other of the company's products, such as its forays into the juice beverage market)
• various other emo crap
• dedicating most of what appears on domains I own to the Creative Commons
• some citizen journalist-type stuff
• [insert stuff I forgot here]

My body, when faced with a busy week, sometimes just shuts down in anticipation. That would probably happen if it weren't for all the orange and apple juice I've been drinking this month.

My itinerary for the next 6 days or so: Friday: fly to Ottawa, meet up with family. Saturday, Sunday, part...My itinerary for the next 6 days or s

• Friday: fly to Ottawa, meet up with family.
• Saturday, Sunday, part of Monday: do stuff.
• Monday evening: travel by train to Toronto.
• Monday evening, all of Tuesday, Wednesday morning: do stuff.
• Wednesday evening: fly to Vancouver, maybe attend concert depending on my mood.

Writing, whether it be in email, instant messaging, or weblog format, will therefore be light.