Siege Curmudgeon

Today, I am grateful for these things:

1.  Parks.  We went to the Del Water Gap park yesterday, and while I nearly huffed a lung climbing one of the shorter trails (only two miles, my ass), it was great to be outside and be part of nature, without necessarily getting bitten, mauled, or otherwise discomfited by it.

2. Chocolate chip cookies.  It was a toss-up between cookies, cashews, and Twizzlers for today’s snack of preference, but I elected to go with the cookies.  Check back later to see other snacks honoured.

3. Shorts.  I was working (sort of) on Saturday at a retail store, where I was compelled to wear pants.  Not that I have a problem with apparel, generally; it’s just that I’ve grown rather used to wearing shorts most of the time, what with working at home.  Having to wear pants left me feeling decidedly overheated and uncomfortable.  I am contemplating poking small holes in all my pants to make them more breathable.

My wife and I went into Manhattan last weekend to see the Broadway Show “Avenue Q“, and both of us enjoyed it immensely.

It is decidedly irreverent, and quite politically incorrect, and because it makes no pretenses about either it remains funny — and thought-provoking — throughout.  I won’t go into a full-blown review, since far more capable people have covered that before me, but I think our enjoyment of the show bears mention.

It took me a few minutes to figure out the puppets, I must confess.  Some of the characters are played by live actors, and some of the characters are played by puppets… who being carried around by clearly visible live people, who are not ventriloquists and are not trying to be.  For the first little while, I was assuming each actor represented a character, but that’s not the case.  The same actor might manage 3 or 4 different puppets (and, therefore, characters) throughout the play.  After a while, though, I learned to look at the puppets as characters, ignoring the actors carrying them about the stage, and sailed through the rest of the show just fine.  The actors did a remarkable job of conveying emotions and expressions through the puppets, which put the comic finishing touches on more than one scene.

The first half, as is often the case, was funniest.  Most of our favourite songs came prior to the intermission – from the opening strains of “What do you doooo…. with a BA… in English?”, to the chipper “Everyone’s a little bit racist”, to the insightful “The internet is for porn”.  Imagine that last one being sung by a puppet with a voice reminiscent of Cookie Monster.

It had been a while since we had been to a Broadway show, and it reminded me of just how enjoyable a well-done play can be.  Next up?  I’d really like to see “The Lion King”.

I was in Calgary this weekend, and must say that I loved the city.  We got the chance to drive out to Banff and ride to the top of Sulphur Mountain, where the view was spectacular.  It was the first time I’d been in the Rockies, and it was mighty impressive.

Driving out toward the foothills, we passed through the suburbs and saw houses perched atop the hills surrounding the city.  You could see for miles, and with the mountains in the distance it was quite a sight.

Those houses, we learned, ran for about $1 million and up, largely because of the view they commanded.

And as we drove by, every single one of them had their blinds closed.

The travel continues.  Following up on my previous post, this past weekend I reached a stage where not only was the novelty gone from travel, but even the faintest interest in it had disappeared.

It was right around the 6-hour mark of the 9-hour drive home that I started to seriously question what the hell I was doing.  We had driven from Canada to New Jersey on the previous Sunday night, arriving home at midnight.  Two hours later, I was getting ready to board a plane to Houston for the week.  Then it was back to Jersey on Thursday night, so that we could drive back to Canada on Friday to attend my cousin’s wedding (and be the photographers, which is a whole separate discussion).

So we drove through the night, arriving in Kleinburg, Ontario around 1AM, and were up 6 hours later to get ready for a 9 AM wedding.

My driving-to-sleep ratio was now getting seriously out of whack.

We spent the day celebrating my cousin’s wedding with her — and, as previously mentioned, taking pictures and sweating profusely.  Sweating, not swearing, though there were times when both occurred simultaneously.

And then we turned around and drove home.

And that’s when it hit me.  This sucks.  It was about 10 PM, and we’d been driving since 4, and still had several hours to go.  And I was getting very, very tired.

I cranked up the radio.  My wife, asleep in the passenger seat beside me, woke up and protested.  Cancel the radio.

I rolled the window down.  It helped, briefly, but then I started listening to the wind whistling by and imagining myself in a cozy lakeside cabin on a clear and windswept night, and then I woke up in another lane and figured I’d better shut the window.

I bounced my legs, but that proved almost completely ineffective.

I tried slapping my face, but it just hurt; it didn’t do anything to wake me up.

I scanned the road signs for a place to get coffee, but apparently nobody buys - or sells - coffee on Highway 17.

That’s when I started hallucinating.  The shadows on the road before me morphed into giant floating bears the stretched out their arms to nestle our Nissan to their bosom.  Rock walls to my right became castles, thousands of years old, reaching far up into the night sky.  I stopped being myself and began watching myself from inside my own head as I drove; awake, but not really all there.

Clearly, since I’m writing this, we eventually made it home where I fell into a deep coma for the next 10 hours.  I awoke, grateful for a day off.

And then began getting ready for my next trip.

It’s bound to happen eventually, with most anything.  Sour cream doughnuts might be a possible exception.  But with nearly everything else, eventually the novelty of something starts to slip and streak and fade.

Take, for example, travel.  I’ve been doing a fair bit of it lately, and by a fair bit I mean I’m on a plane once or twice a week.  Well, two or four times, if you include the return trip, which I’ve made rather a habit of doing.

When I first started my new job, I got a big kick out of the travel.  It was cool being able to say that I had been in three different states in as many days, or was racking up a healthy number of air miles, or what have you.  And, in some ways, I still enjoy the trotting about the country that I get to do.

But sometimes the glee drains out of it.  Such as, oh, just for a hypothetical example, those days when you’ve just spend 14 hours driving back home from Toronto, because the Powers that Build Roads, in their infinite wisdom, decided to rip up asphalt all over hell’s half acre leaving nothing but an old goat path for forty billion returning cottagers to follow when returning home to New York following the long weekend.  Hypothetically, this is a trip that should have taken eight hours, tops.  Hypothetically, I would have been home by the late afternoon, with plenty of time to unkink my legs from having spent a solid workday behind the wheel of our car.

Instead, I got home (hypothetically) just a shade after midnight.  After dragging the hypothetical suitcases into the house, I checked my travel schedule (let’s say), and that’s when the real fun began.  My flight out, which I thought left at 9, actually was leaving at 5.  Factoring in time to pack, shower, gather my work paraphernalia together, and get to the airport, that left me, oh, say, an hour to sleep.

Some people do just fine on an hour’s sleep.

I am not one of those people.

Hypothetically.

It was right around there that the lustre of national travel began to dim a little for me — right around when the alarm went off as I was climbing under the sheets for just a few minute’s sleep.

I’m looking forward to spening a night in my own house.  It’s almost poetic how much I’m looking forward to being back on my home turf (or concrete, such as the case may be).

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Today, I’m grateful for these things.

1. Air conditioning. It is getting decidely toasty, and decidedly humid, in the Jersey City area. Leaving the windows open works to a point, but there’s a combined heat-and-humidity threshold that just causes my mind to come unglued once it’s surpassed. Besides, leaving the window open welcomes in the glowing scents of Newark Bay. Yummm.

2. Family. I’m pretty excited to spend some time with my wife’s and my families in the coming weeks. There are benefits and advantages to living in the US, but one of the drawbacks is how infrequently we get to see our posse from back home.

3. Travel. I’m still at that stage in my job where I like the travel. It also helps that it gets me out of the house and offers a chance for real human contact every once in a while. Through January and Feburary I spent most of my days holed up in the downstairs office. When you spend that much time alone in a hole, a certain amount of caveman type regression is inevitable. It stopped before I took to skinning rabbits for hats or digging roots out of the flower beds outside, but it was just a matter of time.

Image by Christina Snyder.

Today, I am grateful for these things:

1. A memory.  Granted, mine is not photographic, flawless, or even mildly impressive, but I’m glad that my brain still holds on to things well enough for me to function.  This occurred to me as I was preparing to write this post, and was thinking about things I’m grateful for — and couldn’t remember whether or not I’d already posted about some of them.  It just made me appreciate the memory that I have.

2. Ice cream cake.  Honestly, whoever came up with the idea of ice cream cake should be celebrated with a national holiday.

Scratch that.  Make it a global holiday.

3. Tax refunds.  Even though I already earned it, and even though the government prematurely snagged it, it’s nice getting some money back once a year.  It’s sort of like Christmas, only with more paperwork and less goodwill.

On a side note, my gratitude on this one is wavering just a little, as we are still waiting for our money to arrive from the state of New Jersey.  Evidently I failed to include one form or other with my submission, which has buggered up the whole works.

As I was flying into Lubbock, Texas yesterday, I noticed a farmer cutting hay right beside the runway.

There is a whole other discussion that can be had about the charm of a town that has farmer’s fields right up to the airport runway, with oil derricks in the background.  There is also a conversation that can be had about the charm of stepping out of a restaurant and being pummelled with the odour of surrounding farms.

But what got me thinking on the plane was the fact that I grew up on a farm, and so have cut my fair share of hay.  In some ways I miss it, and in some ways I don’t.  But either way, I have knowledge about how to cut hay: how to gauge the speed so the haybine doesn’t plug; how to carve straight across the field so you get even windrows; how to take corners to avoid those little tufts that stick up.

I don’t possess a vast body of knowledge about cutting hay, granted, but it is knowledge nonetheless.  The thing is, it’s highly unlikely that I will ever use that knowledge again.  We all have knowledge like this, gained at some point and left to moulder on the shelf.  That knowledge is part of who I am, and gaining that knowledge is part of what defined my trajectory and life.  But still, given that I will probably never be called on to climb aboard a tractor and cut swaths through alfalfa again — is there value in that knowledge?  Is it possible to have useless knowledge, or is all knowledge useful because of the effort and growth involved in gaining it?

No answers here, just questions.

Today, I am grateful for these things:

1. Deodorant.  Summer is approaching, and… well, ’nuff said.

2. How I Met Your Mother.  I wasn’t that into the show the first time I saw it, but my wife and I have been catching up on past episodes and it’s actually a pretty funny, well-written show.  I had thought the sitcom had more or less run its course, but maybe there’s life in the genre yet.

3. Backups.  I have backup software installed on my work laptop, and for the last 8 months had been merrily watching it fire up and run in the background.  I happened to check some of the settings yesterday and realized that, for the last 8 months, it had been firing up, looking for a server, failing to connect, and then shutting down.  So pretty much everything I’ve done for the last 8 months is completely and utterly at risk of being lost forever if my hard drive crashes.  I spent yesterday afternoon and part of this morning scrabbling around installing an alternative solution (a backup backup?), and am eyeing it closely as it dutifully copies the contents of my drive to some ethereal backup location out in the far reaches of cyberspace.

I just got a tweet from Tony at Zappos, describing something he’d heard recently at a conference.  Apparently, if all the insects on earth were to suddenly disappear, within 50 years almost all life on earth would cease to exist.  Conversely, if all humans were to suddenly disappear, within 50 years most life on earth would flourish dramatically.

Which got me thinking about life and the interconnectedness of things, and I wonder: does life evolve just to preserve itself, or does it evolve to promote life in general?  At what level is life working together, and at what level is it competing?  I, as a human, work to preserve myself, but I also work with and for those around me.  At a macro scale, humanity seeks to continue its existence, but we often try to wipe one another out, and we compete with and often conquer species around us.

From the earth’s perspective, though, are humans just another life form among a mass of life forms?  Or do we stand out?  And if we stand out — is it for good or ill?

And then I wonder about how the rest of the universe feels about all this.  We’re a pretty tiny speck in a pretty remote corner, and all our activities here — even global warming — seem pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

I wonder how long we’ll be around, and whether the universe will remember us when we’re gone.