95% of the World is 3rd World!

Ch. 30

Whether you believe it or not, 95% of the world is 3rd world. That's about 6.3 out of the 6.6 Billion people living on this earth. Maybe you are one of the lucky 300 Million. If 300 Million people live in America alone, then you certainly know that some of them will be having a hard time. I guess, like in anything, it just gets a little hard as to know where to draw the line. Especially when it comes to the various kinds of being poor. But I am telling you: out of all of the various forms of inequality of the world: race, gender, environmental (water, sanitation, sustenance farming through drought/deforestation), political, religious, educational, those with disabilities, those with no access to health care, animal rights...about 95% of us will be affected in a pretty significant way. It's just a matter of how we react to the things that we know that will determine one of two things:

1. whether you will be openly welcomed into the pearly gates of heaven, or


2. whether you will be sent directly to the fire depths of hell to burn for all of eternity.

Okay, maybe it's not quite like that. (maybe it is!) But this I know for sure. There is a growing number of people that actually DO give a damn' about the world! And they aren't necessarily all senior citizens or students either. Lifelong commitment of people wanting to leave behind a better world is becoming more and more popular. I am currently reading a book called "How to Change the World - Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas". It is a hopeful and inspiring book that provides specific cases of the projects that people are having success with in a world that sometimes seems very impossible.

In my life, I have seen some people take on some pretty amazing things. Thanks to Engineers Without Borders, I have seen thousands of school-aged kids get informed about water scarcity and the difficulties of governments in securing access to this precious resource. Letters to MPs and MLAs alike are being sent for issues ranging from untying Canada's Foreign Aid Dollars to quashing Stelmach's unconstitutional Bill 19 to asking the City for better access to public transit. I have seen benefit shows and bottle drives, bike rides for cancer and church groups doing development work abroad. A blog called http://attemptsatabetterworld.blogspot.com/ is probably one of my new favorite things to follow, where a man is trying to just make life better one step at a time. But with incredible inspirational people like Senator Romeo Dallaire, Doctor David Suzuki, AIDS advocate Stephen Lewis, and even grade school teacher, Mike Engel, it is not difficult to see how generations are now in fact changing the world.

I know just as much as anyone how easy it is to get very depressed, apathetic, and busy & carried away with your own life in such a fast-pace world. Especially if you are having a hard time making the rent or you recently find out that you are pregnant. Especially if you are worried about job security in the worst recession in 80 years. We have all watched the rich get richer and the poor faint away to nothing. We watch the pirates of the world continue to pillage and plunder the remaining few unhabituated areas or exploit the perpetually developing areas, slashing down trees, cutting into the earth all in order for their insatiable gluttony and greed. We watch as civil war rages on in Sudan and are sickened by the ideas of Child Soldiers or Slumdogs or for-profit companies going into countries for drug testing. We watch our own native people get displaced to the city streets as their water and land is polluted and destroyed. But we carry on. At the very least, we get informed. The hardest decision I think is deciding when you are informed enough to start contributing, or maybe when you can afford to start contributing because you aren't all busy with just surviving. From what I've seen though, a person doesn't need very much to survive.

So with sooo many inspirational and motivated people around me, I vow from this Earth Day 2009 forward, to start surviving more realistically and start contributing more appropriately. This is going to begin with writing a letter to my MLA Carl Benito and his boss Eddie, and the opposition parties too, about reversing their plans on cutting funding to the Wild Rose Foundation - a voluntary organization that offers support to a huge array of Alberta non-profits like the Sexual Abuse Center of Edmonton. After that, I am going to write out a plan of action that will help me to active goals within a certain time frame. Wish me luck.

http://www.wildrosefoundation.ca/about.aspx

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2009/04/21/cgy-wild-rose-foundation-alberta.html

Testosterone Makes the World Go 'Round: Chapter 7A - Jock O Rama, Part 2 - My Dear Edmonton Oilers

Haha, what a title. but fuck it - it's MY blog, I'll do what i want with it. Including making this ridiculously long, and a little less focused than I wanted it to be.



Now that the unnecessary swearing is out of the way, here goes...

There were a lot of problems with the Oilers this year. So much so, that they finally decided to fire the coach. We needed a scapegoat after all!

As I have made it known, the salaries for these "heroes" are unfathomable --- HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. And that's for the shitty players like Gilbert. Get Real. The ultimate reason of Edmonton not making it into the playoffs for the 3rd straight year is the lack of motivation of the players. Having million dollar careers isn't motive enough apparently. The team lacks the leadership, spirit, urgency, guts, determination and commitment to build confidence to get better. The last remaining shreds of these qualities left on my 24th birthday when Ryan Smyth got sent to New York for Nilsson. Yeah, who? (Sure, Nilsson is a pretty good Oiler - but certainly not a leader like Smyth). The Oiler's needed a Ryan Smyth player - a player with grit, emotion...even Michael Peca didn't have Smyth's intensity when he was here... But he's gone, and we're left with Souray, Hemsky, Horcoff, Staios, and Moreau to pick up the slack. Moreau was great as a non-captain: he represented the hardest working oiler that struggled for every inch. But because of his lack of natural ability (Think Weight vs. Marchant in the 90s), he should never have become anything more than an alternate captain. Jason Smith was a defencemen, so that's a little different, since he had a more solid support network of players around him (like Smyth) with the required passion and skill to make them an exciting hockey club, at the very least.

The problems surrounding Oilers hockey, though, aren't embedded in the coaching or the management or even the young unmotivated, leaderless players. I think it's actually entrenched into the Edmonton culture. The city actually shapes itself on having NHL hockey as its #1 focal point, with everything else less important. Way up here on latitude 53, we convince ourselves that we have a culture & class that is simply incommensurable in relation to our Calgarian neighbors. After all, the socioeconomic base in Edmonton is made up of hard-working roughnecks - as opposed to those lazy good for nothing rednecks that live 300km south of us. We don't even attempt comparing ourselves to other major North American or World cities because we are just already so far removed any of them! We are about as significant of a city to some random Russian city, as that same random Russian city is to us!

But despite our best efforts, we still can't retain (or build) our hockey talent. UFAs sell out for the beachtowns or the big cities and the "talent" that we do get will have "difficult" seasons (Lupul, Peca, Stoll...). Edmonton is a stepping-stone, a boot camp, a place for players to get better so that they could peak by the time they can actually get out. A league conspiracy, perhaps? Maybe.

As mentioned, Edmonton goes nuts on trying to promote itself as a city that is absolutely crazy for hockey above anything else, where the players are loved and admired more than Bono or Madonna or Elisha Cuthbert, depending on who you are. But despite all the "oil money" allowing near-sell-outs for 17 thousand seats for 41 games a season, there are some other absolutely ridiculous things associated with our game that the Oilers of the Eighties wouldn't even begin to recognize (i mean, if they weren't all still involved with the organization). Perhaps this new NHL has just made it that much more difficult for players to focus on just loving the game with incredible passion and desire - to just go out there - night after night - and win games.

This blog is called Testosterone Makes the World Go 'Round. And hockey is a very macho, very testosterone-driven game. We cheer when men smash fists into eachother faces (Oh, women's boxing was @ Shaw Convention Center tonight - there's another re-enforcement of some of Edmonton's culture). When we get scored on, we curse and throw things and shake our fists in the air, and when we score, we drink $7.75 Molson Canadian as the foghorn blares and that horrible Kid Rock song gets blared through the PA system (good thing the oilers dont score that much, hey?) When an ex-oiler comes to town, we BOO and heckle mercilessly, regardless of how much that player invested into the city when he was here.

The beer is kind of a big deal. Despite the insane cost of it, it is uncommon to see a fan without 2 glasses in their hands. That's $15.50 of liquid-idiot maker. Per period. True, they stop selling beer after the 2nd, but more often than not, this rule gets flexxed to accommodate the fans - and more sales get made. By the end of it, you will be walking by stacks upon stacks of empty plastic glasses that will make their way into hundreds of plastic bags and eventually into our landfills. You will be walking amongst the most densely packed room of half-intoxicated "people who call themselves fans". The social problems might even outweigh the environmental problems when it comes to alcohol consumption at hockey games. Over the years, I have seen people be thrown out for drunken belligerence - fighting, throwing, screaming - just being plain disruptive. These young males are always incredibly incapacitated at games that I can't help but think what else they could be doing with their money outside of the public arena. I mean, have you no shame??? With a little bit of temperance and maybe a tad bit of reason, this kind of beer money could go a long ways to tackling any of the world's more pressing matters. We're talking serious money here after all!

SO yes, hockey's expensive. That greasy german sausage that will give you a heart attack, the keychains and jerseys that are all made in China, the 5th and 6th glasses of Canadian, The tickets... They charge the prices they do because of the propaganda about how wonderful it is to be able to go & watch hockey games. They say to get your tickets now because later, it will be too late and they'll be sold out. Yet nearly all games will have some 1/2 price singles available, at the very least. Usually you can track a pair of at-cost tickets down if you look hard enough. But when I was @ the San Jose game in March, I was especially frustrated when I found an empty pair of seats to help myself to at the top of the lower bowl (~$100 tickets), and the kids in the row behind me were playing their PSPs!!! Hell, these kids should be in my standing room square! In front of me were two women who were more "into" eachother than anything remotely related to hockey. Hair twirling, shoulder rubbing, and thigh touching continued for half the 1st and all of the 3rd periods. (They were downstairs in the club area, purportedly drinking, through the entire 2nd.) So frivolous spending and drunken ignorance and utter lack of appreciation for where you are. This is Oilerfan culture. It is driven by the monetary system of having the cash available to oneself that will get you the attention or admiration of the people around you. The exorbitant prices are paid by companies and handed out to the spoiled "fans" that go to these games probably won't even know anything about hockey. When this happens, the "team support" is nothing more than ignorant drunken loud retardedness of the people that spent just as much on alcohol as they could since they didn't have to buy the ticket. It really all amounts to a class thing, where those of you snobby or rich enough to drink ridiculous amounts and make asses of yourselves, and getting awkwardly laughed at by the few relatively sober people there about how inappropriate you are. But at least you are getting that attention.

Oh but there's more. Thanks to CISN Country 103.9fm, getting that attention is made into even a bigger deal! "Smooch-cams" have been in place for many years now, where the camera man scans the fans during stoppages of play and puts only cute-looking couples on the jumbotron screen. A sex-craving coliseum of seventeen thousand will CHEER!!!! when the couple finally kisses, since they are after all totally smashed on all the overpriced beer. The wetter the kiss, the louder the cheers. Testosterone makes the world go 'round.

One Last Curious Thing About The NHL that I Wanted to Bring to Your Attention

With a pressing emergence of global warming and ghg emissions, I wonder why pro-hockey is never criticized for its immense carbon footprint. I have never seen a game delayed on account of a late flight either. They always make gametime. They always get paid. I don't know if it was The Amazing Race that made me first think about how hockey teams charter flights to cruise around North America, or if it was all of the flying that is involved with hockey that made me think how ridiculous the Amazing Race really is. Either way, I feel confident that I could still lead a comfortable life knowing that the Oilers would have only 60 regular season games and The Amazing Race was cancelled forever.

I love hockey though. Go Ducks Go!

The Age of Desensitization, Part 2

Ch. 20.2: Who IsTaking It Too Far Now?

Last spring, it was announced that Gunther von Hagens' BodyWorlds was coming to Edmonton. It was going to be showcased for 4 or 5 months at the Telus World of Science, and it was promoted in such a way that all people from Edmonton were required to attend, if they were not totally helpless, clueless, or penniless.

From the start, I had my mind pretty much made up about this sort of public display of the human body. I was reluctant to go to this show altogether. I just didn't understand why people (living people, that is) would be interested in pointing at, gawking at, and yes, even touching human body parts! Maybe it's because I do enough of that to living bodies? I don't know... (that is a joke, by the way). But towards early Fall, I went down and picked up my $28 timed-entry ticket so that I couldn't be criticized as one of those closed-minded ignorant fools that doesn't appreciate art, and (more importantly) to see if my reasons for not being thrilled about this idea of exhibit were the least bit justified.

It was a bloodbath. Torsos everywhere! Human flesh detached from its muscle detached from its skeleton detached from its organs. Some were intermingling with each other, others playing sports, and one even riding a horse?! I haven't seen much worse in some of the goriest of thrasher movies.

Okay, I'm full of shit. As usual. Why does he even write this crap? Actually, from an artistic point of view, this "exhibit" was very tastefully done. It was clean, informative, thorough, and just a little bit spooky. But like the Cormac McArthur's, "The Road", I just don't totally understand why it had to be done at all.

I am going to argue that the Human Race is already desensitized enough from anatomics. We see the human body in every way shape and form either from television, the internet, or if we are exceptionally unfortunate, the hospital. BodyWorlds was/is nothing more than a perverse way of using dead people to make a quick buck. Or a quick 28 bucks. Fine. The high ticket price for me to walk (not run) through a museum is probably necessary to ensure that quality of the exposition maintains very high standards - from the polished display cases holding the slices of brain, tumored lungs, and swollen hearts to the informational video on the plasticizing of a human body to the amount of energy & work it must take to pack up and travel around with hundreds of rubbery fragments of corpse-statues all around the world...I know that I would want my staff to be well compensated for, and my surroundings kept with a certain amount of cleanliness and respect if that was in fact my body/body parts they were lugging around!

It is my unpopular opinion that when it comes to the human body, we foolish ignorant commoners are on a need-to-know basis. As we can learn from Charlie Harper, it is a good idea to not skip out on our Grade 8 Health class. But besides that? Who cares. Sure, some of us will become LPNs, RNs, medics, doctors, and dentists. But this will forever be the minority of the population. Most of us will work in sales and just won't need to know about the goings-ons of the many bodily functions. We don't really need to know what part goes where, or how long or short some things are, or what kinds of things are generated or processed in different compartments of the body. I can say this now because I have been mostly healthy for all of my life, and therefore cannot easily empathize with the many people that have gone through some form of ailment or another. Even so. If I had been diagnosed with morbid obesity, for example, I could benefit from simply taking my doctor's advice to start leading a healthier lifestyle, without having to go to BodyWorlds to see what slices of human fat looks like around the muscle and nervous systems.

Today's kids grow fast enough as it is. They want to be all grown up and be independent, free from parental oppression. They want to be exposed to as much and as often as possible so that they can get a feel for what may or may not be good for them. This includes exposure to and comprehension of the human body. But there is a fundamental lack of understanding for these children who don't see this artwork as a previous functioning contributing human member of society. There is that definite disconnect. But it is the adults (teachers - since it will be mostly schools who will be taking hoards of immature groups of teenagers, and younger, to experience the BodyWorlds, without direct parental guidance) that will teach that free will has allowed these individuals to give up their bodies to art/science (I don't know which it is) just as they may do so for medical research. These two things are not the same. Sure, the soul may leave the body upon death (did I mention no BodyWorld statues were formally politicians?) But that doesn't mean that the body shouldn't be prepared in a more ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust sort of way. Different cultures deal with their dead in tons of different ways - none of which include preserving the corpse for public display. So what makes Von Hagen so special?

On my 3.5 hour tour of BodyWorlds (trust me, that's thorough), I had watched scores of children randomly bump around from display case to statue to other display case, tugging on mommy's arm, saying "What's that brown spot" and "Where is that guy's nose". The majority of people were well-behaved, but after a while you begin to understand that this should be an at least 14A rated exhibit. I wouldn't say that there are proportionately more immature mannerless children out there who don't know how to behave in public, but rather, there is just more numbers of them as populations grow. Some degree of maturity and knowledge about life, death, and respect is required to not ruin the display for everyone else. Never was this so more obvious then when I had reached the "baby" display.

This especially delegated room was fully equipped with warning signs saying "contents within this display may be sensitive to some to view". In it, the development of a fertilized egg into a fetus into a near-term baby were displayed in glassware, ranging in sizes of a pickle jar to something that would hold a ~10 lb baby. It contained over 30 deceased and preserved human beings from a few weeks, up to thirty some weeks old, complete with a mother who had died with child prior to birth.

I didn't last in that room for very long. It was somewhat emotional.

But it was art! It was science?! I forget...But as glad I am for being able to see it, I still do not think it is necessary to be seen. Not unless you are a training medical staff, or you can prove a certain level of maturity that shows that you will in fact benefit from seeing something as ludicrous as a muscle-less gymnast hoisting himself up on the ropes.

I also want to leave with you with the thought of where we might go from here, with respect to de-humanizing ourselves --- de-sensitizing us from the unnatural things in the world --- rap song after webpage after lizard-man at a time. A lot of progress made in the medical field will ask for us to hold onto our stomachs as we enter an age of stem cell harvesting and transplants. The ethical dilemmas and criticisms are numerous, but certainly we will benefit from that kind of technology! How could we not?! I remember back in 2001, we talked about the ethical debates of stem cell research, as I was such a good product of Edmonton Catholic Schools. All I really remember though, was thinking how cloning would be okay if they used it on Scarlett Johanneson. Or wait! That was David Letterman's joke just last week. But seriously. I wish I did know what was next! We all seem so ready to cave in and try anything, without sufficient benefit/cost analysis. I think maybe we should spend a little bit more time at least thinking about how we are going to re-sensitize our kids as our society seems so hell-bent on desensitizing them in so many ways, without even realizing it!

Time for dinner. Cow tongue tonight.

You're So Lame!

chapter 56.

A friend of mine that has somewhat similar interests (and a somewhat rockin' hot bod) came out to party with me a few nights back. We were off to a concert. We had a bit of time before it started so we got to talkin' about things. She's usually pretty candid, and I think that's another reason why I like her (besides her rockin' hot bod, that is). The #1 topic of conversation for that night though was how some people are just really lame. Well, it was mostly her telling me about how she finds a lot of guys she meets just sooooo incredibly lame! And here I'm trying to not be all on the defensive, seeing how in truth, I can be particularly lame in a lot of circumstances. Her case included her motivation and ability to stay out til 4, for 2 or 3 nights in a row, dancing, drinking, having a good time, and still getting to class the next day. She would say how "Peter" would come out to party one night, then sleep in all day the next day, missing his classes, and not do anything again for at least a couple nights. She would say about how when Peter comes out, he would be more or less a drag and not really have much to bring to the party (ohhh get your mind out of the gutter). But nevertheless, he was her friend & would continue to come out to party at least from time to time.

So I got to thinkin'. Why are some people perceived as being so insufferably lame? There must be a legitimate reason. What fundamental changes could a guy make in his life/lifestyle such that he would: A) Have the energy to do more, B) Be perceived by women as being less lame, C) Generate the self-esteem to be comfortable in knowing that he is in fact not lame, by his own standards, at the very least, and D) Use this lack of feeling of insufficiency to do good for the world, including his own.

Why We're Lame
(Or perceived as, anyways)

Lack of sleep can be attributed to 19th, 20th & 21st Century technology, as well as capitalism. (It's just a fun thing to do, to blame every problem in the world on capitalism, when you are in your twenties.) Thomas Edison had the light bulb lighting up our homes as early as the 1880s, resulting in our ability to stay up later, finishing that last few pages of that good book, without fear of knocking over the tealight and burning our houses down. Mass industrialization and supply & demand from the war years onward resulted in men staying @ work later, then continuing their work well into the night, from desktops to laptops to blackberries. And most recently, in the year 2009, we are seeing kids up all night, playing with their video games, doing their "homework", and writing their blogs. In addition, capitalism has created this demand from us in which we are required to work harder & staying up later, which will benefit the company, and its employees by monetary compensation. So then we can afford that new mattress that we use for 6, maybe 7, hours a night.

So lethargy/tiredness is a large contributing factor in how people can be perceived as being lame. They will likely simply be too tired to do anything fun ever. Especially when one of the only things they end up doing with their "free time" is working. But if a guy is able to get a decent night's sleep, then all the more likely will it be for him to want to...exercise.

It doesn't matter if it's a walk with the dog around the block, push-ups in the bedroom before bed, going to the gym 3 nights a week, or dancing around in punk show mosh pits. All are easier to do when you aren't totally exhausted. And when this person is well rested, and is feeling fit and good about their body, the more likely will they feel they have the right to talk to that 1 special girl, or that any random girl.

Another reason that a person may be perceived as one lame motha f*#$a is that he actually holds a set of morals and values. Perhaps a god or a religion inhibits him from enjoying the finer things of life (use your own imagination). Maybe a sense of guilt, manners, respect, appreciation-for-health-studies, etc. has made him act in this "lame" way. Maybe he just can't handle his booze, and therefore refuses to let it cloud his judgement, in fear of becoming a father, or even worse: taking home a really ugly chick. I am going to get in trouble from sooo many feminists who read this blog...

I am almost convinced that my friend (with the rockin' hot bod) that was talking about "Peter" being lame, may very well actually been referring to me. As a result, I am now going to turn off this blog machine, the lights, and go get me a good night's sleep. Maybe then - at the next concert - I will have the courage to take her in my arms, stroke my hand through her long brown hair, look into her pacific blue eyes, and say to her: "It's waaayy past my bedtime".

Do something.

Another Significant Coincidence

Weird Things Happen. This we know. I mean, the second that I started writing this blog a second ago, a song called Is She Weird by the Pixies started playing. Weird. The spelling of the word weird is in fact weird. Or is it just because I am using a different kind of font. Why would I even do that? Just to be weird? I'm not really all that weird. Seriously.

One day a couple of months ago, I was heading to a thermodynamics class while listening to one of 8300 songs on my iPod. Upon entering the classroom @ 8am that morning a Bad Religion song came on called "Entropy". Weird. How so? The second I sat down in the classroom, the weird Dutch prof turns on his mic and says that today we will be starting our lectures on ... entropy - the natural tendency of things to drive towards disorder or chaos.

If you only knew the half of it.

But let's move on. Back in October, I was beginning my pursuit of trying to get a date with a very nice girl. She was around from time to time but hard to meet up with seeing how we are all so busy all the time. But we would meet when we could and when we did it was fun. One of our first "dates" was actually just one of those extremely random occurrences where I was heading from the bus to my car on my way back home. I thought to myself, only for a split second "gee, wouldn't it be nice if I could see her here now waiting for the bus so I could just drive her home, (so to speak). So I was sitting on a bus for my short ride to my car then decided to jump on the other bus instead that was going to leave 2 whole minutes earlier. I get on. And there she was. I drove her home. Weird.

Oiler game. March 2009. My friend got handed a pair of tickets and asked me to come with. We get there, the puck drops, I get a text message. Apparently a friend of mine was at the same game. I didn't even know who it was cuz I didn't end up getting the person's number back when my phone finally broke a month prior. But after a few texts back and forth, she decides that she would come and say hi to me --- until she realized that I was there with my friend. Her ex. And that's not even where it stops. She was there with her new boyfriend. A mutual friend of all of us. Weird. So yeah. I didn't end up seeing her that night.

Months ago. Or years? I dunno. But a friend of mine from high school had a little sister. Uhh ohhh. Yeah, maybe I should just stop here. Fuck it. Let's be candid. Well, we got to be pretty decent "online pals" thanks to the atrocity called facebook. We would bullshit about trivial nonsense and worse. In one of those undirected and random conversations, I even got this girl's phone number. Weird. We met up once. Weirder? You betcha. But nevertheless I thought "hell, I can wait a while longer for her to maybe try being mmmm... less weird? - I've waited this longafterall". Now for the weird part: I don't play around a lot with music on facebook cuz I've got 14000 songs on my iTunes. But the very same day that I happen to be listening to Death Cab for Cutie on facebook music, I find out that this very same girl will be going to see that same band play live in Halifax (fucking terrific city) cuz of a trip her friend won. We don't talk much on facebook these days...maybe because she's dating some guy...

In February 2008 I got shit-faced. It was my 24th birthday after all. It was also just around a year since I had a pretty bad break-up. So my friends were heading to the bar. The same bar where me & my ex hung out sometimes. A bar I liked. Guess who we saw on our way to the bar? Yep. Her. Yikes. I think it probably did help matters that I was already half-shitfaced thanks to drinks @ RATT. Oh wellll. I survived it.

Let's go on. Or back. Say, 1995.
1995: I learn about social justice from a top-notch teacher who adopts a child named Tab from Chad on behalf of the classroom. Enter: Tom L, parents: engineers. Maggie, conceited, popular girl.
1997: I pick up the french horn. I am captain of my hockey team and take pride in showing off mad skillz in games against millwoods.
1999: Meet marni. Probably one of the most significant women in my life even to this day.
2002: 6th year of french horn, last year of hockey. myspace reconnects myself and tom L. He's in socal now, where pennywise etc. comes from.
2003: GMCC- I see a friend from 1995. Our lockers are next to eachother. Same birthdays.
I end up sitting beside maggie from grade school in Soc 100. We are the 2 most interested people in a class of 50 soc students. My passion for development issues swells a little more.
I discover the amazingness of Fractal Pattern: A social-justice oriented instrumental band from edmonton featuring a french horn.
2004: Meet an engineer who lived in mdot & played the french horn. I join Engineers Without Borders - the best run social justice student group on campus.
2005: Propagandhi releases best record to date: social-justice music at its best. I apply to go overseas with EWB, but get beat out by a one & only liberal arts major, Maggie, from grade school.
2006: Fractal Pattern goes on hiatus.
2009: Fractal Pattern plays McDougall united, not 2 days after releasing a statement saying how they will no longer be featuring a horn. This happens on the same day that my engineer friend buys a horn wanting to see if she can still play, without knowing this about the band. She liked fractal pattern but not until after the hiatus. FP drummer wears Propagandhi shirt, as usual.

Also this year: When not listening to propagandhi (etc.) I am expanding my horizons by going to real canadian folk shows - talented musicians with songs that don't require you to be swinging fists when listening to it. On one such occasion, I messaged my friend to meet me in SUB for coffee where she can get her luke doucet tickets from me. She doesn't get the message, but shows up on time at the exact same place in SUB that I suggest we meet. She agrees to come to the show, which is a good thing, since I had already bought 2 tickets. She gets the message about meeting for coffee a day later. That same night, the most popular girl from highschool sees me at RATT (yes, i drink a lot), but we don't talk. But after going to the Luke Doucet concert, i follow my "date" to starlight room where the same popular/pretty girl from my highschool is there too. She admits to seeing me @ RATT just the other day, but not saying hello (for whatever reason). She knows my "date" from a really weird connection between their families. A pal of mine admits to infrequently spotting this girl's facebook page, saying: "God, Ryan knows a lot of pretty cute girls". But really, who cares when there's only ever really been one that you've been interested in. It must be said: The Luke Doucet concert was way better than the after-party. Wool on Wolves is a good local band though.

Lastly, and most recently: Social and environmental justice becomes a stronger focus in my life than ever before. All of the past significant coincidences with respect to people, relationships, events, music, movies... everything...It all seems to be amalgamating into one huge juggernaut of who I have become thus far, and more importantly, what I know I have yet to become. I wonder what tomorrow will bring...

It would be much too structured to insert a quote from entropy here, but please take solace in the fact that Perfect People by Pennywise came on randomly just now, one of my 13,964 songs.

"I BET YOU THINK THAT I'M INSANE! "

This is chapter 58.

Sterilized & Sanitized: Clean Me More, I'm Dirty.

Chapter 14.

Clean Me More, I'm Dirty

Actually, I am a pretty clean guy. I shower and brush my teeth. I Wash my hands before eating maybe 8 times out of 10. And I bring my own cutlery to restaurants.

"what?"

Okay, may be not that last one. But that's my point. Soooo much emphasis is always put on how everyone is so damn' concerned for cleanliness that it is actually sort of turning into this crazy paranoia where you can't go anywhere without fearing what might have been there first...and what was left behind.

It reminds me of that little guy from Wall-E (Mo) that rolls around everywhere bleeping the words: "foreign contaminant, foreign contaminant". I wonder how much of this will come to be true once we get to the year 2743...

So I suppose a lot of this - like many of my postings - has to do with knowing when/where to draw the line. Sure, some public washrooms are just plain gross. Sometimes you might open the door, walk in 2 steps, then spin on your heal and walk right back out. It's just that bad. Other times, you might be just driven to the limit! and can't put things off any longer and before you know it, you're lining the toilet seat with the same TP that a total stranger was acquiring only minutes earlier from that same dispenser hanging on the wall, engraved with catchy phrases and phone numbers. Then again, if the bathroom isn't the one in a West Edmonton Mall food court or on the main floor of the ETLC or the McDonald's restaurant on 111th Ave, then you might actually even have to use a paper towel to work the soap dispenser, turn on a faucet, and openin' the door on your way back out.

Ketchup in restaurants used to be set on tables, ready and waiting for you to use as much or as little as you wanted to on your fries, eggs, steak. Nowadays, ketchup is prepared in the kitchen, and your little 30 gram ration is brought out alongside your meal in a little paper cup. And how awkward is that when you order ketchup with your steak!!

Keeping with the restaurant/food theme, I remember back in the day when plastic drinking straws weren't individually wrapped with paper sleeves. Are people really that much more dirty NOW then they were a decade ago that we can't even take from the same straw machine? Maybe so. I suppose it has more to do with (like everything else in the world) proportions of populations. More people total = more people dirty. Urbanization and population growth are once again the real culprits. Even with the better meds, sanitary products & services, advanced treatments, and various diagnostic tests, we are still getting dirty. So despite being told how nowadays we are a healthier species with higher longevities than ever before in human history, we still can't be trusted with our ketchup and we need paper sleeves on our straws. And no more pee-mints.

There is also this large wave of nu-hippies out there who are taking on this holistic approach. No whacky meds and everything au naturale. Dooood. Thaaaaat sooounnnnds revooooLUUUUUUtionarrrrrry! Stick it to the man, dude! Fuck the system!!! My yoga mat is actually made out of hemp! My kids won't ever have a immunization shot, because I believe in feeding them organic oranges and no caffeine! or Kraft products. Or beef. Or meat products at all, really. They will build strong immune systems and will become world leaders.

Buses. Specifically Edmonton Transit. A second home of mine between the years 1996 and 2008. They can be pretty unsanitary. I've seen everything from half-eaten sandwiches to half-drank beers to gum anywhere imaginable to vomit, spit, and worse. And that's just the driver! jk. But if this is the respect that patrons of Edmonton Transit are paying for the 2 dollar and 75 cent service that the cityis providing, it says a lot about (some of) the patrons themselves. My recommendation when taking Edmonton Transit: Full sleeves, jeans, knee socks, closed-toe shoes, gloves, and a hoodie with the hood up. and drawn tight. Not all bus-riders are overwhelmingly disgusting, but some of them you may prefer to not have coughing on, or rubbing up against you. Trust me, I was one of those very people.

So sanitation (on buses or anywhere) is directly related to health, and despite my criticisms of how a lot of the sterilization techniques seem overkill, they probably necessary (with no one to blame but ourselves).

But I guess as Canadians, we are really pretty damn' fortunate when it comes to our over all health. In comparison with our neighbors to the south, anyways. Michael Moore's Sicko pointed this out pretty explicitly. Also, we suck doctors out of places like South Africa, Bangladesh, Indonesia with pretty terrific promises of salaries and standards of life so that we have enough physicians to go around for our 33M people. We hope that "proportional populations" won't leave those countries with a healthcare deficit. Even if we already know that 95% of the World Is 3rd World. And thanks to Ralph Klein, the 3rd Reich errr what? Okay, the Third Way Health Care programme, you can be rest assured that all of your Big Oil money will get you into the doctor's office FIRST to scan for that tumour resulting from you sucking back all those petro/diesel fumes. Let's just hope that the doctor that you DO get (whether you pay your way, or wait and wait til your final moments here on earth) is actually a A- doctor instead of a C+ doctor!

My lungs right now are pretty clear. Other than actually being sicker than I have been for longer than I have ever been (~10 days now). But I had been exposed to second-hand smoke semi-regularly for 15 years until my Grandma passed away in '99 from lung cancer. Since then, I have been in virtually smoke free atmospheres for 10 years now. It was about 2003 when the No Smoking In Bars bylaw came into effect, so I only had 1 good year of going out to smoke-filled pubs n' clubs before that breath of death was taken out of the equation too. I enjoy my health. I think that bylaws like not smoking within 5 metres of a business entrance way is retarded since it is pretty damn' impossible to enforce. But we are making progress. Thank You For Smoking with Aaron Eckhart did a decent job of showing us all how tobacco lobbyists are in fact The Devil. I think that we've seen smoking being eliminated from airplanes, malls, restaurants, bars, and now: cars with children (law in Ontario) all within my lifetime (mid-late 80s for planes). We are getting cleaner, healthier, and maybe even happier? With this new found health, and our hemp yoga mats and untainted beverage straws for our diet coca-colas, maybe we will find some more time (more years in our life) to be doing more positive things with it. Finding cures for AIDS or MS or Lung Cancer, for example!!

So yes. Drawing that line. Always a challenge. I believe that being overkill really is necessary in this day & age (like, calculate a HUGE factor of safety), because there are just too many of those "100% Pure Contaminants" out there, who likely won't have the opportunity to sanitize or sterilize anything ever. It's a cryin' shame that even if a peanut shot is created for kids so that PB&J sandwiches might actually be allowed back into schools one day, one parent will likely be that "holistic hippie" and wreck it for everyone else anyways!

But safety first, eh?!

Good health to you.

To The Fans of Sociology, Political Science, and the Arts In General, I Suppose

Chapter 43

Coming from engineering, it is easy to (biasedly) say that the set of skills developed throughout the program are much more practical than many other programs. First, you have to have exceptional grades in order to get into the program, and then you are required to persist through a rigorous set of technical courses that enable you to think about problem solving methods for anything from design to planning to mitigation.

However, I am convinced that the people that are most concerned for the state of the world are not necessarily the engineers, albeit, they can certainly have a lot to offer to the betterment of the world when given the authority to do so. Instead, I think that proportionately, students of Sociology especially, (and to some extent Political Science and maybe even other Arts students). These students are trained to be the great communicators of our time, and it is only through communication to all the different powers (and non-powers) of the world, will we be able to make the change that we need to see. In addition, the students who are dedicated to their education will likely be the ones who want to have a thorough understanding of the greatest inequalities in the world, and the reasons behind them.

My biggest concern for us engineers is that even the most hard-working committed engineer may not fully realize the full extent of the impact of what it is they might be doing. Ethics is a large part of how we are trained to conduct ourselves, but to me it is really more just a matter of learning where to draw the line is. Engineers can go and implement solutions and systems for anything anywhere, but to really understand what the greatest good for the greatest number is, is something very challenging, even for the smartest engineers in the world. A lot of this comes from a book I read a few years ago called "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by Perkins who detailed what was involved for engineering firms to go into third world countries, under the guise of developing the country's services and henceforth, economy. It went on to explain how a lot of the financial investment by American firms would ensure that the country getting the investment would be forever in debt to the World Bank and IMF, and have to compensate these two major players in any way they can, as a result.

I want to see this change. Not now, but RIGHT now.

Surely, I am not the lone engineer who feels this way, but it is a matter of binding these engineers together who can conceive of the idea that there might be a better way. This brings us back to the communicators. These people have a broader understanding of some of the things in this world that matter, with respect to having a sustainable planet earth for decades, centuries? to come.

Before I go on though, I want to make things crystal clear. Just because a person studying the Arts might have some comprehension of social constructs (like marriage or family), or globalizatioin & environmental degradation (like Greenpeace Tar Sands campaigns or FTAA/NAFTA policies), or of the reinforced hierarchical systems within government that are designed to hide us from the corruption that exists within (Harper's Tories), it does not mean that these people are some unique elite brand of altruistic idealists that think their open-mindedness & higher moral standards make them better than you or I.

Rather, these people (irrespective of amount of formal education), are simply one of our last remaining hopes that we have to try & communicate the economic and political power-men of the world as to what it is that they must do in order to manage, maintain, if not meliorate our planet. This includes everything from social issues like crime, eldercare, and family planning (think "Octo-mom"), to environmental issues (climate change, solid waste management, air/water quality protection), to resource depletion (water, oil), to the major economic issues and the legislation currently in place that will maintain our focus on the protection of the "corporation", rather than making allowances for promoting subsistence living (think small-scale farming).

It is up to these Arts Majors, especially, to be fully functional on every level; starting with working as/with teachers in our schools, and working as/with Ministers of Education in government. They must act on local levels to get councils to understand more fully the issues of sprawl, the root causes of crime, and importance of an exceptional public transit system. They must act on a provincial/state level so that these areas can understand how their decisions, when amalgamated, can effect the entire country (and how it is perceived around the world) (think tar sands). On a national level, they can almost be viewed as a nonprofit lobbyist group looking to hold their MPs in check, such that they will be acting on the behalf of their constituents. It is soooo important for a country to be seen as a leader, and by not recognizing water as a human right, for example, extreme counter-production occurs and the country as a whole is seen as a setback to progression towards living on a sustainable planet.

- The Role of the Engineer -

It is both a privilege and an honour to be recognized as a professional engineer. Even with the hundreds of graduating students that the U of A pumps out every year, these kids will only make up a very small fraction of the world's population, and with such a skillset, they are usually pretty well appreciated and compensated for their abilities to solve problems. But in these times, I think we must ask more from our engineers. We must encourage them to work more effectively with the "communicators" who could benefit from their technical expertise in realizing what types of systems will be sustainable to implement, with as minimal negative impact on everything as possible. It's a matter of priorities. An understanding that many things may be have some detrimental effect as the result of implementing some system or technology or structure for some people some place. The "ethical" dilemma must be taken to a much further extent such that we engineers will strive to understand "who really wins" and at what costs. It's a matter of the communicators understanding what possible solutions engineers might have to offer, and then, delivering that information and convincing the WORLD what must be done, and the critical path in order to get it done... before it's too late.

PROGRESS

And progress is not intelligently planned
It's the facade of our heritage, the odor of our land.

They speak of progress, in red, white and blue.
It's the structure of the future as demise comes see things through.

It's progress --- 'til there's nothing left to gain
As the death of new ideas makes us wallow in our shame.
So before you go contribute more to the destruction of this world you adore
Remember life on earth is but a flash of dawn and we're all part of it as the day rolls on.

And progress --- it's the message that we send.
One step closer to the future, one inch closer to the end.
I say that progress is a synonym of time.
We are all aware of it, but it's nothing we refine.
And progress is a debt we all must pay.
Its convenience we all cherish, its pollution we disdain

And the cutting edge is dulling, too many folks to plow through.
Just keep your fucking distance, and it can't include you.

It's progress! 'til there's nothing left to gain!

It's progress! it's a message that we send!

And progress is a debt we all must pay!

-bad religion, 1989

My Favorite Movies

Ch. 32: The Necessity of Escapism, Part 2

Last time I dwelled on how people need to "escape this misery called life" and some of the ways that they can go about doing so. Mostly, this included basking in the niceties of going on vacation and consuming alcohol (to numb the effects of the stress of travelling).

This time though, I want to suggest one of the best alternatives to those two, and why these choices are soooo much incredibly better than drinking or vacationing.

Watch movies. Not just any movies. Happy movies. Not slapstick ridiculous "off the cuff" movies. Goofy movies. Not sexually provocative sleazy "get your hard-on with Angelina Jolie" movies. Romantic movies. Not chick flicks like the Notebook and most certainly not Brokeback Mountain. But heart-wrenching surreal movies that allow you to sympathize with, but not become overcome with emotion by the characters in the plot, kind of movies. If these "happy" movies that I have tried to screen out still leave you with thrasher/bloodbath flicks on your list, then I suppose I should just give up already. But what I am actually trying to get at here is that some of the best movies that a person could ever go and see arrrreee:

CARTOONS!

For a long time now, I have maintained that cartoon movies can be some of the best medication for a person in need of reprieve from the stresses of life. Nothing quite says "so long psychopathic horror-style murder by beheading" like watching Roger Rabbit getting dipped ears first into, well, the Dip. Alright, maybe that's a bad example seeing how inhumane that was for poor Roger, but not all cartoons were like that - growing up - or now.

Growing up, us kids had the privilege of watching a lot of Classic Disney movies play in theaters. I still remember watching Aladdin @ Gateway Cinemas when I was about 8. Movies like that appealed to kids' imaginations and dreams and also gave parents a sense of gratitude in that sexual undertones would be left out completely, simply for the benefit of us kids. Lion King: probably still one of the best movies made for kids ever, was the same way. Minus the word "sex" that was apparently written in the stars at some point or another...The success & popularity of Disney's movies through the 80s and 90s allowed for Edmonton weatherman Mike Sobel to run a very entertaining 2 hour Saturday Special on ITV called the Disney Afternoon for a couple of years! This is back when times were simple, and kids weren't all hopped up on sugar and crack. Outside of Disney, The Land Before Time (one), All Dogs Go To Heaven, and An American Tale were some real classics that enabled children to... be kids! These movies offered great entertainment value for children & parents alike and didn't require any sex or violence to do so.

When Pixar got humongous thanks to Toy Story, kids had the opportunity to reclaim their youth yet again. This ridiculous story of friendship and never giving up was a great break from some of the other movies I was watching at the time: Cape Fear and Primal Fear are the two that come to mind. Plus the new Toy Story ride in Disneyland, CA is pretty much the funnest thing ever. Finding Nemo - the movie & the ride - certainly didn't surmount to what Toy Story (1 or 2) offered. Cars was a good Pixar production, but mostly because of the Brad Paisley song "Find Yourself".

But then we kids got brains, apparently. The movie industry thought that us kids had to become more responsible for the lives we were living, and that simply understanding the importance of "The Circle of Life" or that "Beauty is Only Skin Deep" was not enough. Chicken Run made us all think twice about the repressed lives of chickens. Fern Gully was the first to bring awareness to some of the atrocities of deforestation of rain forest in 1992. The Bee Movie let Jerry Seinfeld show us how bees are just another dying species that we should beeee concerned for, as we continue to destroy their habitat. Happy Feet - Same thing. Madagascar showed us how inhuman and lonely zoo animals might be and how the animals vie to be "home". And most recently Wall-E projected what we might be in for as a human race, given the amount of waste we produce and resources we exploit. Thinking Movies. No sex, gore, or violence included.

I saw Kung Fu Panda with some friends and tried to convince them that it was The Lion King reincarnate, with its whole premise of having a reject overcome all odds to make things right. Little did I know at the time that Madagascar 2: Return To Africa was even more of a ripoff of The Lion King, where the lion in the movie had to "go back to challenge his uncle to take his place as king". Direct copy. Oh well. Still a great movie. I liked the penguins.

I have yet to see a number of cartoon movies - on the top of the list are Ice Age, A Bug's Life, and Ratatouille. Well, those are the important ones anyways!

So there you have it: A whole blog about how (non-violent, non-sexcrazed, non-gore) movies can be used to help you escape from some of the heart burning stomach churning realities of every day life, where enough violence, sex, and gore exist as it is! Cartoons. Oi. Sure, some of these cartoons might be "thinking" movies, but I would rather have my kids thinking than watching crap like "Jackass", "Harold & Kumar" (soo good), "Earnest Goes to Camp" or worse...

Also, "how is this better than drinking or vacationing" you might ask? Well, it's not, but how else would have I got you to read this far. God damn' my liver when it's thirsty! Time for a DRINK!!! (too sober to sleep).

The Top 6 Non-Cartoon Movies of My Youth: TMNT, Ghost Busters, E.T. Home Alone, The Goonies, and Short Circuit.

This Is Hockey!

Ch 54.

It was an amazing end to the season. Since the trade deadline at the end of February, the Edmonton Oilers have gone from being one of the most volatile inconsistent depressing teams in the NHL to watch, to being something reminiscent from a team from about 2 decades ago.

Nobody would have ever seen this one coming. All seemed so hopeless. Injuries plaguing the entire defence, aging veterans feeling the strain of over-exertion & endless expectations of fans & coaches, a forward line that has combined for only 161 goals (the 6th lowest in the Western Conference) so far, and a goaltender that faces about 30% more shots than his team is able to deliver to their opponent on any given night. Nobody would have seen this coming.

But it happened. It was party due to the economy, partly due to the players' changing attitudes, partly due to Daryl Kaatz taking charge, partly due to Bettman being bought out & finally leaving the league.

League-wide salary reduction was the one key factor in which made Edmonton Oilers transform from a farm-team that only ever develops players' skills to the point that they are good enough to be traded away for more affordable draft picks, into the 2009 Stanley Cup Champions. The dissolution of 12 teams and re-invention of the Winnipeg Jets & Quebec Nordiques made the league incredibly more competitive. The season was shortened by 10 games, and it was made sure that from this point forward, every team would play every other team in the league at least twice each season. No-Trade clauses were enforced (even if Chris Pronger was having a hard time not sleeping with his teammates' wives), but not until this happened:

Ryan Smyth came home.

That's right. The heart & soul of the Edmonton Oilers resumed his leadership role as Captain, sending Ethan Moreau back to being the (appropriate) position of fourth liner. The grit & dedication & determination of Smyth to make his home team thrive in this New League was incredibly appreciated and noticed all around the league, such that other former Oiler greats cued up to join him in Kaatz's organization. Amoung these were Doug Weight, Todd Marchant, Michael Peca, and Eric Brewer. Scott Niedermayer couldn't wait to get away from Mickey Mouse & Chris Pronger: One being a an over-sized smelly rodent that goes around smelling like cheese & living in Fantasyland, and the other being Mickey Mouse. This rebuilt Edmonton team allowed them to annihilate every other team in the league for the last 25 games of the 2009 season. Sheldon Souray was the team's points leader, with 32 assists to Horcoff and 26 to Hemsky at the end of the season.

By having the total team salary cap halved to $25M, players realized that in addition to their materialistic and over-consumeristic ways, their "hollywood days" were finally over. They were going to start to have to playing for the love of the game, just as the Oilers of the 80s did so well. All other pro-sports have yet to understand the implications of this unbelievable over-compensation of our favorite jocks, especially since none other are so physically tolling as hockey is! Yet, despite any abuse on the body, hockey players still understood that these were the necessary steps to take in order to promote the game & make it better. They would only have to get used to having their wives buying the no-name BBQ sauce for a change.

Gretzky cried. Again. Not because he knew his wife was going to be bored commuting between her mansion in that new Windermere development in Edmonton, WEM, and the River Cree Casino, and not because he was about to leave +30°C year round temperatures where there was nothing to do but coach & golf, but because he couldn't make hockey - the only real game - a go of it in the middle of a desert. It was really kind of sad, but after him hearing that Winnipeg was going to become the home of the Coyotes, he was absolutely gleeful & could only offer up the suggestion that the team be renamed "The Prairie Wolves". (since the desert isn't really the prairies)

You see, Wayne Gretzky was incredibly happy to be asked by Daryl Kaatz to become head coach of the Edmonton Oilers and couldn't wait to return with his boys in the Blue & Bronze/(orange) and destroy those desert dogs back in Winnipeg who played with about the same amount of intensity as they did when they were on the golf course.

Todd Bertuzzi & Sean Avery have been spending their spring/summer together in some of Toronto's finest private golf clubs aswell, since Toronto was the only team that would have them; and the players had to donate a large portion of their salaries to local sports charities for kids.For whatever reason, noone wanted to ever play golf with either of them! oh wellll...

But it was playoffs that was the most fun. The Oilers crushed Vancouver in 4 games the first round, Winnipeg Prairie Wolves were swept too, and the Calgary flames were not only swept, but shut out the entire series. In the end, the Edmonton Oilers won the Stanley Cup in 5 games over the Montreal Canadiens, only because in 1 game, Roloson played Left Wing.

- The Changed Rules -

In order to make the NHL better, these rules were incorporated into the league:

- No Touch Icing
- No more Delay of Game penalties for simply clearing the puck from your own end over the boards
- Smaller elbow pads
- Mandatory visors
- Less stick infraction penalties --- let the players skate through hooks, trips
- Goalies can make contact anywhere.
- 16oz glass of Molson Canadian : $5.

Chapter 53. People...

PEOPLE, as Social Beings

That word looks funny. It's like the more you look at it & think about it, the stranger it looks. Maybe that makes sense, since PEOPLE are in fact such a funny species. "Haha" Funny? No, more like odd funny. Their habits, routines, expected behaviours and responses. All whack. Those of you who know me well know that I am horrible for constantly generalizing groups of people - it doesn't necessarily have to be any one race, sex, age, class...it's just something that I have been called out on more than a few times. And I accept that as I, myself, am filled with these stereotypes of the whiteboy engineer from a middle-class family still living at home reaping the benefits and privileges that come along with being born and raised in a relatively healthy suburban neighborhood in one of the richest places in the world. (insert witty NOFX quote here). But beyond these cultural stereotypes, I think that I am also ready to generalize the entire human race.

People are overt. They are needy. They are nosey. And for some reason, people just can't seem to help but to seek praise & attention. This is what is natural to them. I suppose it's because they have a soul. A soul is what makes a person different than a machine. This is the premise of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1920s dystopian novel "We": the human population only ever gets into any of its predicaments because they lack the clarity to see that their soul, imagination, and feelings are getting in the way of realizing the critical path to eternal happiness. By having souls, people (before having any hopeful perspectives about their world around them utterly obliterated thanks to media-induced apathy) have hope in seeing a better world through each other. So by putting oneself out there & allowing his or herself to become vulnerable to other people, that person is conceding to the fact that they have hope in that another person might be able to fill that hole in their soul.

There are a few people out there who have always refused this social aspect of the human experience. Trust me, I did engineering for ever so I know. But even besides my unique group, there are friends who have always been accepted by the masses, yet for whatever reason, felt it was within their own best interests to avoid contact with most other people at all costs. These anti-socials are still very good people and highly respected, and I believe, would be optimistic about the future - despite not "putting themselves out there" for others to poke into their lives and complete them. (yuck - he didn't just use a Jerry Maguire Quote, did he?!)

Poke. Okay sure. Let's go there. People are constantly poking their noses into other people's lives on facebook. One of facebook's trademark's is in fact the "poking" feature itself. It's a way to say to someone, "Hey, I'm checking you out! What is it in your life that's going on that makes you seem so happy! And if you're not, what is it that I can bring to the table to make your life more fulfilling?" This is what facebook exists for. For people's necessity in putting themselves out there and seeking feedback from other people that will either make you feel good about yourself, or your realization of the utter power you have in being able to delete someone from your life with a click of the button. (and also finding out that the Great Lake Swimmers are coming soon to a venue near you!)

Mobile devices work in just the same way: it's putting yourself out there so that other people can invest their time into you.

People are also affected by degrees of separation because of these souls that exist. Compassion and sensitivity allow people to empathize to the hardships of other people. If your sister is sick, you respond. If your sister's husband father is sick, you respond. If your sister's husband's father's healthcare worker is sick, you respond. This is what's natural. It extends farther than you would believe - as far as you allow yourself to open your eyes to the world around you. Poverty and War. It can affect you. You might even react (and do something, or not) if you let it affect you enough. This is what people do.

I am trying to convince myself that I have more to write on this matter, but I think that really all that is left to say is that I don't think this social aspect of people is a bad thing. And I am not offended that most people will not be reading this blog. Take this blog as a simple additive to some of that BS that I have posted in the About Me section on facebook. Take it as an excuse for me to reach out only so far to some of the people I care about, but not enough to actually go out of my way to hang out with them, for example. I am not saying that I am overly anti-social, but rather, if you agree with this stuff I just wrote, you would let me know about so we can continue the conversation. I tend to at least make some attempt in keeping in touch with some of the most magnificent people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. But since it takes two to sustain a relationship of any sort, please let me know what you think as I am a social person too.

Even if you can't stand me.