Category: Uncategorized

In an effort to subvert my daily dependence on the things I do not need, I came up with the idea to go a full day and two nights without a screen in my face. Out of no other motivation but my own, out of no other realization but the fact that we rely on things we don’t need, all too often, all too much. I plan to try to institute such a day once a week and I hope it to become an integral part of my weekly life.

Although I accidentally stumbled briefly and used the computer for five minutes to remind myself how to teach quadratic equations without realizing that I was using a computer, the rest of the day was devoted to reading, studying, walking, grocery shopping, laying under a blanket in the corner of my room trying to keep warm, sitting, breathing and doing nothing. Doing nothing is something I don’t do enough of. Since buying a MacBook, when I have nothing to do, I am still doing something, whether it is mindless surfing or reading way too many articles on hockey or pretending to be doing something productive but actually only scribbling pathetically on here. Doing nothing by is one of the greatest things to do.

Slowly I plan to wean myself off of any technology for my one day a week, no lights, no toaster, no bus ride, no stove, nothing that plugs in, no ballpoint pen, no clothes made with sewing machines, no recirculated air. Can’t be that hard, fifty years ago they didn’t have the choice, and fifty years from now we probably won’t have a choice either.

But now I am back, prepared to spend an entire 24 hours in front of my computer screen, watching movies and playing Scrabble and writing and looking at pictures and checking my bank account and buying hockey tickets. Just to make up for my one day off.

I woke up with a gnarly headache. I wonder if they are related.
Try this. I recommend it.

Words: I’m exhausted of words. Every time I post something I either think it is brilliant or hate it, either way fulling knowing that I basically just stole the words from someone greater than myself. Finishing my book I realize that all my ideas have been used and overused by myself as well as millions of others and that there is no use. Photos are easy but I can’t take them worth a damn. Music is effective but again, not for me. I am left with nothing but angry, repetitive, and discouraging writing. Not much is new.

vs.

Photos: 

Winner: It’s a draw. Both were out of focus. The fan favourite might have been ‘Photo’ because it was less of a waste of time.

Fish cakes. Street food. Seoul. Wow.

Formal education. I think I still hate it. Maybe I’ll become a teacher.

While most of the young adult population of the world hunkers down for the two dreadful weeks of exams that will dictate their futures, I do the same, kinda, for once. I have exams every two months, with shorter holidays, but I don’t complain. I also get paid for it. In order to get paid for learning French I lied to my guide and said I was doing it so I could find a good job when I was done. Maybe I was lying to myself too. I’ve met dozens of bilingual homeless people, and everyone that works at A&W is bilingual, so I’ve got a promising work future ahead of me. Just like I did before.

I tutor math sometimes at a centre downtown. I met a kid yesterday, I forget his name because I’m a good tutor like that, and he asked me a lot of great questions about university, silently wondering why someone without a degree would be tutoring him.
He asked:
‘So if you don’t pay your fees they kick you out?’
‘It costs how much to go to university?’
‘So, all your friends are finishing university and you should be too?’
‘How much would Harvard cost?’
I told him about getting degrees that prepare you for the workforce and working in restaurants and wise advice about the job market. Then I tried to help him with his grade eight math homework and could barely pull it off. Word problems were always the worst for me. Problem solving in the math textbook was always my weakest point, and maybe it carried over into real life. My tutoring abilities are a real encouraging thought considering I’ve been thinking of getting a math degree. Better stick with English, Education and/or minimum wage.

During class yesterday, when things got dry as usual, I began to draw. I drew a classroom, with a chalkboard and recycling bin and the alphabet. It took me several minutes to come up with another cynical tagline for the drawing, but once I remembered the words of the ever wise SchoolHouse Rocky I knew I had it, and I re-understood the basic undertone of schools everywhere. Education for knowledge. Knowledge for power. Power for wealth.

I can do things I love, impact people, learn things (maybe to a lesser degree, pretty big maybe though), be a human, without school, and although right now school seems like the ultimate sell out, I will continually admit that I will likely end up there, maybe just so my parents keep talking to me. A few friends, promoters of education, ‘sat me down’ with a few beers and told me of its merits and the value of feeding off of other people’s knowledge, people smarter than yourself. The idea rang nicely, but I’ve understood that that my idea is no better than theirs, and theirs no better than mine, and it still all works out.

Education isn’t a commodity to be sold like oil or Gucci purses. Knowledge can be gained without the assistance of semester schedules and final exams. When knowledge is gained for the purpose of power, money, or fear, it becomes disadvantageous. You can’t go to school expecting to become a better person, or a completely changed person. You usually come out feeling the same, a bit tired, and much older.

Maybe no one agrees with me, and I’m just a stubborn moron. I like it that way. The more uneducated you are, the more stubborn you are. I guess you pay high dollar for the softening too. The opinions of a full time student, and a part time student differ from my own and I appreciate that fact.

I understand there to be four ways to go about it all.
Two good ways, and two bad ways.
The good ways, one including formal education and one which doesn’t, both include a a desire for personal knowledge and refinement, although one way is not better than the other.
The two bad ways, one including formal education and the other which doesn’t, are rooted in personal gain, possibly even with knowledge gained, but for reasons that demean the process itself, i.e. power, money, fame, title, nice underwear, etc.

I was nominated top four in my French class. The teacher put our four names in a hat, and the two names she picked got a $20 pen and a certificate from the school. I didn’t win. But that’s going on my resume for sure. ‘Almost picked out of a hat for top four in Level 4 French class.’ I should be able to use such a resume to prove the knowledge I gained so that I can get a position of power within a company, and we all know what happens from there. Teach in a university.

It arrives when you least expect it. Babies, STDs, large cash settlements, snow. It has snowed finally.

Running home I found a four foot snowbank in my neighbourhood. I just dove into it ass-first anticipating cloudy landings and great bodily imprints. My tailbone cut through the snow straight to the sidewalk. I can’t stand up straight. It was worth it.

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man without a Country

There are several ‘How to Build a Community’ posters around my neighbourhood. All the cheap and poor Anglophones move into a French part of town and want to start a community in English. Real great. I wouldn’t call it a community quite yet because I don’t even know my roommates. One has shingles on his face and the other is from Ontario, or B.C, or Newfoundland…
The apartment below me has a dog that they abuse. It whines and barks all day long, then they come home and yell at it for shitting on the floor and the bed. Great parenting.
The homeless man that asks for change at the highway intersection stands at the depanneur throughout the evenings.
The apartment at the end of the block in the middle of renovations have been very neighbourly however, donating pieces of insulation and brand new bricks for shelving. Donating may be a liberal way of putting it.

I watched a French video today in school about how people are addicted to the internet, and how in the year 2030 we will all work in Iran but from the comfort of our homes on Simulated Reality machines and how all of this will cause schizophrenia. The lady on the metro billboards with god-awful glasses said so. She is undoubtedly a genius.

I just finished a chapter today trying to explain, mostly to myself, why we are on Earth. I did so with uncomfortable ease, being that it is a question that philosophers have been asking themselves for thousands of years. But I got it. I’m twenty-two years old but I’ve got it down pretty well. You’ll have to wait and buy my book to see what I think it is. But Vonnegut disagrees. Not directly, but indirectly. They could go hand in hand. I would love to walk hand in hand with him and his moustache.

Community isn’t as easy as saying hello to your neighbour. I smile at nearly everyone I walk beside on the sidewalk, but I have not once got a smile in return in this city, until today, when there was a foot of snow on the ground. I got a wave, a smile, and some positive curse words from a man shovelling his car out of his parking spot. Community could stem from this but not entirely. Community is comfort. Community isn’t cold, and I couldn’t feel my toes when sitting and eating supper today. Community isn’t electronic. Just ask Vonnegut. Community is support for someone jumping ass-first into your neighbourhood snow drift. It didn’t support me, and my lower lumbar is paying for it.

I watch several movies a week. There are some amazing websites that have revolutionized how movies are distributed, and I plan to take full advantage of them so that millionaire filmmakers and actors get only my minimal amount of tax dollars that is inevitably filtered unto them because we should know by now that the difference between any sort of media and the government and companies that produce your daily ‘essentials’ like toothbrushes and deodorant, is none.

I watched ‘Antichrist‘ last night. If you are into semi-pornographic obscure-as-hell horror movies, and Willem Dafoe, I would recommend it highly.

I watched ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop‘ tonight. If you are into documentaries, street art, mystery and weird people, I would recommend it highly. If you don’t like British men with concealed faces and altered voices, or huge mutton chops on men with French accents, I would not recommend it at all.

I watched ‘Curling‘ last week, but I paid for this one in theatres. If you are into Quebecois men with moustaches in the winter who work at bowling alleys and motels, I would recommend it highly.

I didn’t understand these movies, two of them at least, and the other I understood to be a story of art, which I also don’t understand.

In French class today I had to express the devastation of half a million Riders fans, in a language I suck at more than this one. No one understood, and it wasn’t my French that was the cause.

A friend was telling me how he missed his family, and how he moved here from really far away for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. I said, like anyone would say when someone is pining, that I understood. He assured me that I didn’t.

I will likely never understand art, all the forms of it, the inspirations behind it, and the business side of it, and who decides what is good.
I will never understand economics or markets, nor will I ever want to.
My classmates will never understand a real football team, no matter how hard I try to explain in broken French.
I will never understand human beings, and their nature, and the things they do, and the reasons behind the things they do.

Rule. The things we don’t understand are not stupid, and nor are we for not understanding them. We are stupid when we hate the things we don’t understand. Enjoying things we don’t understand makes us better, less ignorant people. And we should do it more often.

It is possible to enjoy something you don’t understand. All it takes is patience, tolerance and open eyes. I enjoyed writing this, for example.