Saturday...

Another protracted Saturday. It’s cool here in Calgary. It feels more like fall today than spring. The rain has stopped for now, but you can tell it’s still threatening to give us a little more. Hopefully Mother Nature will be gentle this year. We could really live without the floods we had last year.

Everything here seems so slow today. Too slow, with the added feeling of metal being ground against metal, but at a glacial pace. Everyone around me seems to be moving just as slow. There are a couple of people in the office that you’d have to put a peg in front of, just to make sure they’re moving.

I’m tired. Once again, I’ve managed to burn myself out. You’d figure I might have learned something by now. No such luck though. I seem to live with the candle furiously burning at both ends. More to the point, it seems that its only way I know.

My vacation is coming soon, but it seems not soon enough right now. It’s only a week away, and it might as well be a year. I have too much to do between now and then. I wish I could just sleep for a month. That would be truly glorious.

In the movie 2010, there was a scene where Roy Scheider and his fellow astronauts were placed in “suspended animation” for the long trip to Mars. As if that wouldn’t be awesome. 18 months of nothing but sleep. That’s the closest thing to a wet dream I’ve had in years.

But I digress…

I’ve been thinking of other stuff about me. Information that helps with the character sketch this blog has been slowly building. I think too often I come off as smug and sarcastic. (With more than a dash of vitriol…) I have shared little that exposes my hopes and dreams, or fears and desires. So with that in mind, I decided to try and shed a little more light. Hopefully it doesn’t come off as too flakey or misty eyed.

I’ve chosen point form for simplicity. There is no real order to any of this.

1)I miss my home. I long for the lingering salt air and the sea. I want to live there again one day. I feel that I belong there. The longer I stay in Calgary, the harder it gets.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to leave Newfoundland, and now I can think of nothing but being there. Sometimes the grass really is greener on the other side.

2)For as much as I bitch about religion. I have faith, but I generally keep it to myself. The things that I believe are as much about comfort as they are about justice. I lack the ability to believe in the hocus pocus, but the message has meaning for me.

I used to think I didn’t believe, and then I discovered I believe differently. I started life as a Roman Catholic, and somewhere along the way I became something else. I have no definition for it, and yet even without some sort of classification, I have found a comfort.

3)My fears motivate me. That shouldn’t be too surprising I suppose. I perform now because I was afraid. Along the way I managed to assuage the fear, but had I not been afraid, I would have wound up being an accountant. (Or whatever…) It was the fear that coaxed me out, and my sheer force of will that tempered it.

4)I believe in compassion. I reject those who do not. More is accomplished with an open hand than with a closed fist. (Although that closed fist feels really good sometimes.) I will not ever condemn a person because of their place in society. It is not up to me to be their judge. I will however extend a hand when I am able to.

5)I have a near unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I love to read, visit museums and absorb whatever I can. I am a willing student of history.

6)I am able to retain most of the information i read, and am able to recall it years later, with it still being clear as a bell. For instance, I can give you reams of information from memory about the pharaonic dynasties of Egypt, or the roots of Pauline Christianity, or even a discography of a zillion musicians.

I think I come by this honestly. My father is also a veritable fountain of information. He can give you a two hour lecture about Irish silver maker’s marks. WOW.

7)I however have a totally terrible sense of psychical spatialization. I could never be an animator, because I just can’t wrap my head around the physics. (I failed Physics in high school… They might as well have put me in a sand box for the entire year. It likely would have done me just as good.)

8)Geology fascinates me. I like rocks and mountains and the like. Plate tectonics and earthquakes are cool too.

9)I like Star Trek. I think it’s because it offers an uncompromising belief that humanity will better itself. (But I won’t lie, space ships are cool too…)

10)I’m about three inches and a “compound” away from being one of those “Mulder” type conspiracy kooks. I really believe that we are constantly being lied to, but I also think that most conspiracies are constructed to distract us from the real truth. (Sort of a double bluff kinda thing…)

One day I’ll spew my thoughts about everything from the Kennedy assassination to the Space Shuttle explosions. (People will likely think I need to be locked up…)

11)I was born with the gift of being able to smell bullshit a mile away. I can also read people really well. I see something in them. I get a kind of mental sketch. It’s weird, but it’s almost always right. Sometimes it’s so clear that I can tell what a person’s favorite food is, what kinda of car they drive, where they buy their clothes etc. It’s generally been a blessing, but occasionally it’s been a bit of a curse too.

12)Lastly, I really hate the TV show “Sex and The City.” It's a horrible piece of shit that makes me grind my teeth. (But I hate it in a different way than most men…) I had a woman tell me once that in order to understand women I “NEEDED” to watch this show. What a croc! I told her if that was the case men and women should always live apart, and only meet to propagate the species. She looked confused… So I continued with this argument.

“Saying Sex and the City will help you understand women, is like saying that playing Super Mario Brothers will help you with your plumbing, or that by watching ER, you’ll understand medicine.” (Imagine that…)

At that point she started to catch on.

The characters on that show are so vain, shallow, mentally bankrupt, empty, bitchy, hateful, vacant, selfish, and childish. (Not to mention there appears to be nary a lick of common sense.) But truthfully, that’s not a judgment, just a signature of poor character development.

The characters are way too over the top. Every human being on earth has those traits; (And I am certainly no exception…). They are most assuredly not gender specific. There is nothing unique or clever about these traits. Not by any stretch of the imagination. They are human, and primal in root. Nothing more, and nothing less.

More importantly, the characters lack depth, humility, and humanity. There is very little in the way of sincere character exploration. It just scratches the surface. In the rare moments when it tried to tackle something heady, it abandoned the message quickly, or conjured it in a way that defeated it’s own substantive weight.

I would argue that Sex and The City does more to set back gender relations that it will ever do to “Help men understand women.” I’m willing to bet that the best way for men to understand is to just listen. That seems pretty simple. Doesn’t it.

Anyway… I wound up off on a tangent (again…) More to come later.