Hello everyone. It's been quite an eventful time since my last blog posting. Eventful in the digital sense at any rate. My netbook bit the dust a little while ago. Thankfully, it did so gracefully enough to allow me to rescue files and clear off personal info. I'm now the happy owner of a new Acer Aspire 3947Z laptop. That would have put a sizeable dent in my prospects for an exciting Summer and completely wiped out my savings. However, my parents came to the rescue there and purchased it as a very welcome and much appreciated birthday present. I did all the research and found what I believed to be the best bang for my buck knowing that it would have to be something I was satisfied with for years to come. It's on the cheeper end of laptops but Acer has packed an extraordinary amount of power in a package that is far more thin than I would have thought possible. You'd think it would overheet but it doesn't. It was the best bang for what I thought would be my bucks right up until the moment of purchase at the counter. I've always appreciated my father's philosophy of ownership. It's not the spending of money. It's the choices you make and care you take to make them with the best possible information. It's your willingness to live with those choices.
Settling into this new digital home away from home has absorbed quite a bit of time over the past while. The data transfer amounted to around 151 gb of mainly my audio file collections, books, dramas, music etc. I'm still gradually installing the odd bit of software but the main stuff is pretty much in place now. The first writing project undertaken on this new laptop is going to be a review of three separate laptop speaker systems. I spent a fraction of the money originally earmarked for the laptop on two of these sets. Another somewhat larger portion was spent on an extended battery. I haven't done anything really techish in a good while. Also, it seems like a good sensible way to reach out a little to the sighted community. My articles in the newsletter published by my church to its members do that a little. However, I haven't produced anything specifically for the non-religious crowd. I consider my blog to be for everyone but am humble enough to realise that my ramblings about life only become possibly interesting when they intersect the lives of others. That certainly has happenned. One fellow found my blog due to a posting on bedbugs. My x-wife and I had to deal with those while living in Oakville and it was a royal pain and stressor on every level. My hope is to have the reviews posted to The Gadgeteer, a site I've grown quite fond of. Check it out at:
http://the-gadgeteer.com/
It's one of those great stops on the internet for lovers of new creative techno stuff or simply those in battle with boredom. I've often thought that God invisioned gadgets and technology as a salve for the unwillingly single. I find the chance to put them through their paces very interesting. Even more fascinating to me is reading about the ideas and descriptions of small inventions meant to accessorise our lives. I'm very selective when it comes to actual purchases but far less so when it comes to my curiocity.
Rose succeeded in her gole of one hundred consecutive days of at least one and often two yoga classes. In celebration of that remarkable achievement, I hosted a gathering of friends at my apartment. It worked out quite well. Everyone did more work than I had planned on including Rose herself who cooked a delicious turkey. However, everyone nevertheless seemed to enjoy the experience and got to know each other better. It felt wonderful to have my apartment full of such thoughtful and friendly people. Wendy had some great news. She's been hired by a private tutoring agency to teach Math, a subject she's frequently left me flabbergasted with her ability in. I hope the youngsters will appreciate the wonderful talented lady headed into their little lives. Can't wait to hear about how things go when next we visit. There were abundant leftovers. I had around three days nearly free of cooking after that gathering.
Another major event was the Mushroom FM virtual cruise they put on for the station's second birthday weekend. These online events continue to surprise me with how much meaningful interaction can take place digitally. It brought a lot of the separate audiences together who only tend to listen to certain shows and kept them tuned in together for fifty-three hours. The chance to win one of two $222 prizes or snag a totebag certainly proved enough incentive for me to go well outside my usual musical preferences. I did, as things turned out, win a totebag pretty much right off the bat. I did so by instigating the condemnation of a fellow Canadian, one Bruce Toews. I was surprised by how much universal agreement there was that he should walk the virtual plank. What delightful fun... for me. He got accidental revenge upon me later on by playing a truly dreadful version of \Michael Row Your Boat Ashore. I can't stand that song no matter who sings it. It's right down there with that other hated song about how I have a radient and recently minted nickel. Can't stand that one either. All in all, the event was absolutely perfect for those of us who suffer insomnia. I've certainly come away with a good friendly intelligent bunch of new followers on Twitter.
I'm sitting here at the Dam again. Had a brief conversation with one of the young fellows. That'll doubtless be the high point of the whole two hour drop in period. It's been unusually quiet today. Nothing special is happenning that I'm aware of. Seems a tad early for exam-related panic crunching on their part. It's an extremely nice day out there though. It was damned annoying being confused by that section of the route near the playground and basketball court but I can't say I mind the extra time outdoors.
This week has ben pleasant on the whole. After twenty years, I've at last gotten around to seeing how the book Hunt For Red October actually ends. The final tapes in the old copy I once had from the CNIB were worn to the point of uselessness and I never got round to asking for a working copy. Now, it's all digital and I was able to download the book from the online library. At last, I know the actual end of the story as well as the extent of liberty taken by the film.
Ava's sixth birthday went quite well indeed. The family enjoyed a splendid dinner at the Keg and our serving lady Linda went well above and beyond the call of duty to make Ava feel like the little princess we all know her to be. She seems far happier about being six than she was when she turned five. Doubtless, they're in for a Summer of camping and other wild and crazy fun besides. Dan and Allison put a great deal of soul and effort into raising their children as well as their jobs. They must often wind up exhausted. Mom and dad have taken up the role of grandparents with real heart. I can't say I regrette the decision made during my marriage to have that operation to remove the possibility of having kids. As much as I enjoy being an uncle, my creative work and the friendships I'm fortunate enough to have are my worldly immortality. I don't know that I'd make a good father despite often finding myself in the role of a sort of father figure to people. I stil very much hope I get another better crack at being a husband. Absolutely no luck on that score lately. All the ladies in my life are uninterested or already spoken for. It's a frustration that just doesn't ever completely go away.
I took my first shot at doing audio reviews of these speakers I've got. I'm woefully rusty at it and a saturday's worth of efforts came to nothing. I figure I'll try and do the written reviews ffirst over the next while. Perhaps, with my thinking more solidly laid out, the audio creation will go better. I can hope. At least everything's here now including the extended battery. I expected something a lot less slim and more awkward to attach which would perhaps adversely effect the balance of the laptop. What I have is a surprisingly light battery which neatly fits onto the bottom of the back of the laptop and actually changes the keyboard angle for the better. It extends out like a small steep ridge from the bottom. I don't anticipate it snagging on anything.
It's thursday now. Yesterday was a good day. The only real snag was the construction noise outside preventing me from making use of the balcony. The rain and thunder would have kept me in for only part of the afternoon. Today feels too chilly to do the balcony thing. There's a cool wind. Tomorrow is supposed to be an absolutely splendid day. Looks like the new batch of weekly specials have just become active on Grocery Gateway. I'll spend this afternoon working on my order and take advantage of them. I have another two coupons in my spring coupon book and can't quite remember which of them I've already used. One of them saves ten dollars and I'll try to use that one up next presuming I haven't already. Otherwise, I'll save five dollars in addition to any savings on specials.
I guess that pretty much covers it for now. As usual, there's the sense of having missed documenting a great deal of good listenning and interesting thought. Not certain whether I shouldn't just go with the flow and drop the whole blogger's guilt thing about that. I'll keep trying to capture more thoughts as I have them at least on Audioboo. Think it's time I put this post up and got to my shopping on Grocery Gateway.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
The Stuff of Life
Hello everyone.It's been longer than I thought it would be between blog entries. The new normal has settled in. Easter has come and gone once again leaving a legacy of love, forgiveness, family and food. Things have been quite peaceful and placid this past while. I've enjoyed good health and there's been plenty to keep me busy.
Easter was quite good this year. Unlike Christmas where I attended church on neither Christmas Eve or day due to family activities, I caught both services at Easter. There could well come a point in my life when I no longer have any family in easy reach. I therefore take most if not quite every opportunity to be a part of things. Increasingly, more occasions are coming up when I could actually do otherwise. That's still a relatively new phenomenon for me. I got to hear my nieces go on a very fast egg hunt. It was all in one room of my parents' house and the action was caught wonderfully on Audioboo. They found everything in well under the five minute time span I can capture at once with the service. The microphone in the iPHONE is really quite good. I just wish there was more control over the noise cancellation for when you want to capture more of the background noises. I'm glad I managed to record that little slice of life. Things seem to be going well for Dan and his part of the family. They had a great trip to the US recently and the kids seem to be enjoying their days in school. Here's hoping that lasts. I guess it'll be Ava's birthday soon again. Haven't really come across anything superspecial to get for her but I guess there's still a little time.
The new CNIB digital library has at last been unveiled. I've been able to circumnavigate the odd bug thanks to my multiple screen-readers, two browsers and some patience. Firefox seems to work best so far. I certainly appreciate the increased number of books available for download. This includes some long-time cherished favourites like Larry Niven's Footfall and Michael Crichton's Congo. I also enjoyed Jay Ingram's The Burning house, a non-fiction book about what is known about the human brain.
It's been nice catching up with friends lately. I've also started getting to know some additional people over a new app for the iPHONE called Zello. There's also a version for the PC. It works pretty well. Earle and a few other old friends use the app also. It works a lot like a walkie talkie with the addition of channels both public and private. Like most other such apps, I don't tend to have it open unless and until I actually want to chat. I've touched base with a few old friends, Earle included. I've also had some good conversation with Jessica, a lady in the states living in one of these house-trailers I've read about but have yet to actually feel. They apparently shake quite a bit when the wind picks up. Hannah, a listener of Mushroom FM who lives in the Philippines,told me quite a bit about what it's like for blind people there. They don't have any sort of social services or benefits. I was curious whether this provided any greater incentive for people to actually hire the disabled. Sadly, this is yet another of these idiotic theories that business-supportive idiots love to toss out there. Her experience has been pretty dismal. She's supported entirely by her family and can't easily travel around. There's all sorts of pressure to get a job that nobody wants to give her. A degree in computer science could very easily just go to waste and nobody over there would think twice about it. Although not very lucrative, my education has, I feel, been a substantial benefit to me and those who have come to know me in life here. She briefly had a job as an online language translator and conversational tutor but the experience left her feeling very exploited and drained with no money to show for it. I hope she catches a lucky break and wins through somehow. I wish I could help in some way. As it is with many people, I help her by having and taking the time to be an understanding listener who can, at least a little, relate to what she's going through.
I tend to like using gwconnect for Skype communications. Mainly these days, I've been talking with Rose. We make good sounding boards for each other but still run into patches where I tend to run out of patience. I get a strong sense of being productive, of doing something useful when I can be available for her. With all the crap she's gone through, she needs someone to vent to. If I can be even a small part of her journey to truly settle in and become a healthy part of the church community, then I've done a good thing. She has so much sheer knowledge and thought to offer that it takes your breath away. She seems to think some woman's going to find me soon and I won't have nearly as much time for her. As much as I'd dearly loved to believe her, I just can't. Similar to the whole god-guided versus reality-governed universe, all the signs in my experience point to a long stretch of single life ahead of me in a world of increasingly fragile fragmented busy people who don't truly value what I do. I've done everything I can within reason to increase my chances. Certainly, God could pull some long convoluted strings in the fabric of reality and bring a suitable woman into my proximity. While I hope that happens, I won't hold my breath while waiting nor spend any more time moping if it doesn't. I'll do my best to keep positive, to do what I believe God wants me to do, look for any places in life where what I know or discover can be of help to people, and continue to count my life's many blessings.
In around ten days, I'll be hosting a gathering at my apartment for Rose. She has nearly completed her hundred days in a row of Yoga. A damned remarkable feat considering the chronic pain and sleep deprivation she has experienced. Things are at last looking up for her. It helps to finally have a diagnosis. People are less likely to dismiss her concerns and will hopefully appreciate her efforts more in that light.
Work on Enchantment's Twilight continues. Just now, it's entering a somewhat dull patch that I can't say I relish overly. I'm trying to find the proper size for the board to be, a balance between speed of travel and there still being room for special locations and journey-related character development and events to occur to the characters. It would help tremendously if I could settle on a good travel system which felt experientially satisfying. It has to serve the purposes of getting characters from A to B, making travel fun, and adding to the overall atmosphere of the game. Pure random dice rolls don't quite give me what I'm after but neither does a completely predictable deterministic system. I believe I may be inching closer to an acceptable midpoint between the two but won't count my chickens before they hatch in this instance. A whole lot of old preconceptions have been tossed away and for now, a lot of balls are hanging in the air. The whole magic system breakthrough has opened quite a sizeable can of worms. It'll make for a very interesting Summer creatively. Another catalyst for all this change was another excellent game design book I just read. The Art of Game Design; A book of Lenses by Jesse Schell easily ranks among the top three game design books I've ever read. It makes for an excellent counterpoint to Ernest Adams's Fundamentals of Game Design. Thanks to Mr. Schell's more artistic sense of what it takes to achieve a game which gives the experience of fun, I feel much more properly directed as I set about nailing down the core aspects of Enchantment's Twilight. Mr. Adams has given me the order in which to try to accomplish things while Mr. Shell has given me tools to examine that work in a new light. Strange that one of the first results of reading the book is to be faced with the necessity of changing the board length and system of travel. But there's just no getting around it. The results are that critical, a bedrock on which to build the more creative castles in the air. Even in this important work, dealing with numbers continuously for this extended period has tinted life with the gloom that complicated numeric reality beyond the very basics always has. I've just never found mathematics enjoyable. Thankfully, they'll be behind the scenes when the player experiences them.
Looking ahead to the Summer, I'm actually quite confident it'll be interesting in other more social ways also this year. I've got my annual trip to Lake Jo scheduled for the start of July. I hope I can have as good a vacation as I did last year and come back without then getting sick as has happened a couple of times now. Hoping for the start of a steady love relationship on top of that stroke of good fortune is, I think, too optimistic even for me. There'll be the occasional trip to Canada's Wonderland with Carine and Kevin. I'm also hopeful of one or more excursions downtown to see Steve, Earle, Meko and the rest of that gang of good people. Slowly, more zest seems to be coming into life. May that process long continue.
No real action is happening on the relationship front. This past year has already seen two false starts. Not even a nibble from Plenty of Fish even after I finally figured out how to un hide my profile. Figured that might help a tad but experience isn't backing that assumption up so far. Meanwhile, my projects, online chats, visits with friends and a whole raft of podcasts and even TV are coming to my rescue. I'm certainly not wallowing through the muck of time anymore. Still, there's that void in life which just won't seem to go away. Too many thoughts, experiences and moments that I keenly wish were building blocks of a steady love. Thanks to this reserve of cheerfulness and an increasing sense of community connection, the square pegs I try to force into that round void work somewhat better than they once did. And yet, all too often, that emptiness makes itself felt. Is there truly no woman out there unspoken for who would either find my life interesting enough to share or, failing that, actually offer me a stable alternative? I wish I were one of those people who truly believed that God had pre-destined everything. Being patient is a whole lot easier when one has faith that God has picked out someone special just for you. I just can't subscribe to belief in a universe that really works that way. Well-wishers have offered that old platitude that "someone will come along at the right time.", or that whole notion that "the right person" simply hasn't appeared yet but will eventually. Both notions simply ring hollow to me. God need not control everything, solve every problem, and work miracles to a point where they're too common to be called such. Randomness and coincidence are plain facts of life to me. Virtue, compassion and prayer don't always lead to the positive outcomes we strive for. People far more faithful and devout than I have been left to suffer far worse fates than unwilling unemployment and singledom. Compared to getting nailed to a cross, I have the perspective to think I have it pretty easy in the grand scheme of things. That perspective helps in the same way that being thankful your leg wasn't blown off by a landmine lessens one's itch while suffering bites from black flies. I'm still in for countless days alone, conversations with people too distant to ever be more than friendly voices, counting and enjoying my many blessings in life in solitude when I'd be ecstatic to be able to share them.
The weather has been somewhat unseasonably warm lately with a few brutal reminders that we're not quite through with cold just yet. I've begun walking to the Dam on my own again. So far, things are working quite well. There's still a sense of uncertainty. I can't really let my guard down and just casually walk the route. However, it has stuck with me more solidly over the Winter break than any route has before. That area with the three gates and Basketball court is still all too easy to get badly turned around in. However, I'm getting better at recovering when this happens provided the GPS is locked in. The Trekker Breeze is doing quite well these days. I just wish there were more places within walking distance worth getting to often enough so the routes would at last stick semi coherently in my head.
I mentioned square pegs earlier. One of the latest I've tried out is a little audio game called Swamp. It's basically a first-person shooter for the blind pitting players against a zombie apocalypse. I finally remembered that I did indeed still have an old optical mouse and thought I'd give the game a spin. It's actually surprisingly addictive. I've always wondered if I'd actually enjoy such games provided they were accessible. Friends would talk about spending hours playing Doom, Quake and such and I just couldn't fathom how they sustained their focus. What kept them coming back? Now, I have an idea of how that works. If your character dies before reaching the safe zone with his or her loot, everything is lost but one's reputation and experience points. You can be walking around with advanced weapons and loads of ammo, get chewed up before making it back to the safe zone, and be forced to start yet again with nothing but an axe and pistol. It's keenly frustrating but you just keep hoping that luck will at last favour the bold and you'll come back with something impressive to donate for increased reputation. It's the old "Next time, things will work out better" pernicious pull that I guess hard-core gamblers must feel even as they sink into inescapable debt. Added to this pull is the very cathartic act of confronting a purely evil threat with the inability to even accidentally harm one's fellow players. It's a game with no real moral complications. You can blast those zombies to bits without any repercussions other than positive ones. Very unrealistic and therefore, most appealing. A clean safe way to blow off stress or anxt provided one has the discipline to stop. That is, in essence, the moral catch.
Complicating things for me is my poor orientation skill. I'm dead serious here. The game takes place in a map of a town with stores, houses, etc to go on scavenging missions in. I find it extremely difficult to keep a good sense of direction even with all the sonic aids. I've been killed numerous times right by the safe zone because I couldn't find the small entrance to it. Even when I remember in my panic that it's on the west side, it's still just a small gap in a solid wall. Buildings are pretty much deathtraps. It's so easy to get hopelessly turned around in them. I have yet to succeed in recovering an item needed for a quest. I keep getting lost and subsequently killed in the narrow confines of building corridors and other tight areas. This game could and should be used by orientation and mobility instructors. Finding my way around is nearly as time-consuming and frustrating as it is for me in real life. The only consolation is that you can just stop and do something else without actually being lost hours away from home. If you could actually hoof it around as quickly as your character with such impunity to muscles and energy, you really would be damned far away when you discovered how woefully lost you had become. And of course, being able to run at full tilt even while packing a minnigun is another power trip in and of itself. While wielding it, you actually have to crouch and brace the gun before firing it. Walking while wielding it does slow you down to a crawl. However, just pull out your axe or some other weapon and you can quickly carry that minnigun to where it needs to be.
Offsetting the navigation frustration is the pull of participating in a community of sorts. You can hear someone getting chewed to bits by a zombie and come to their rescue. Some of the expert players will actually carry on text conversations while on missions. The mouse really does help you move and shoot with more fluidity and precision. I keep hoping that I'll come up lucky and get enough reputation points to get me out of this starting grind and into the larger parts of the game like missions. Alternatively, I keep wondering when the painfully slow progress plus the annoyance of finding my way around will dissuade me from continuing to play at all. I've already seen the better part of two days pretty much vanish on me. Were it not for the fact that I've rearranged cords and items on my desk so that the long-neglected mouse has a home, I'd have to pinch myself to be certain I hadn't dreamed it and that today is, in fact, Thursday already! I haven't spent anywhere near that much time playing King of Dragon Pass yet and it offers far more substance and sense of meaningful accomplishment. How has Swamp just sucked away so much time? Even though I can barely get around, I think it's that sense of there being a community of real people not unlike myself who are engaged in an unreal but nonetheless epic quest for survival. I'm fitting yet another square peg into a round hole and just now coming to grips with what an imperfect fit it is. I dearly wish I could get lost in a real experience, even the relatively ordinary experiences of daily life, with real people on a more regular basis. Most of all though, I wish I could find love with a woman who shared most of my values and at least some of my interests.
Looking at the larger picture, a few news items have caught my interest over the past while. This being the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic's doomed voyage, all sorts of things are happening to commemorate it. An actual ship with passengers has set sail and will follow the Titanic's exact route across the Atlantic. At least one of the people I follow on Twitter is interested enough to have tuned into a feed reenacting the voyage with tweets about events at the times they occurred. There's a kind of creepy fascination that makes me pause for thought whenever I come across one of those. I've been meaning to find out more about how the modern reenacted journey is doing but have yet to get around to that. There's also a large collection of recovered artefacts which may go up for auction. That's sparking quite a controversy over the prospect of profiting from what some see as a grave site. Personally, I'm rather inclined to hope that the stuff of my life, understanding my circumstances and thoughts, etc, is worth bothering with enough so that the stuff of my life doesn't end up lying untouched and unwanted somewhere slowly disintegrating. The mind boggles at the risk and ingenuity needed to recover anything from that depth. Surely, those who have risked everything to recover historically valuable items deserve something for their troubles. Archaeology has rid us of many false conceptions and improved our understanding about where we've all come from.
Apparently, this is also the active season for the large hadron collider so there could be some interesting news coming from that quarter over the next while. Thanks largely to Rose, I'm now far more likely to hear about scientific developments via Twitter than I am anywhere else. I've begun to follow @bigthink, a fountain of large-scale thoughts scientific and otherwise. It's another square peg in a round hole making me feel more connected than I actually am. There have been some wonderful podcasts lately. From Our Own Correspondents is up to its usual quality. Everything from a meeting with a Japanese travelling poet and a Buddhist monk who drives fast and loves progressive rock to reporter's reflections on what it was like to cover the war in Sarajevo twenty years ago. I have vague memories of hearing news about that. It was certainly felt on the erindale Campus where I got my degree. Tapestry has let loose some excellent food for thought. I enjoyed hearing the perspective of an agnostic who, much as I had, made peace with his position of not knowing for certain whether there was a God. There was also an excellent episode which looked at the collision of religion and comedy. Am I forever doomed to hear so much excellent food for stimulating conversation while completely alone? It damned well feels like that's the case.
In order to balance the books, the government is making cuts all over the place. We're going to lose all sorts of people from health workers to food inspectors to border guards and people from the CBC. There's no real stopping this. We voted for this majority government and it can now pretty much do what it pleases. We're going to experience as a country what less of pretty much everything one would really want from a government feels like. I worry that these cuts will go too far and we'll end up with completely preventable tragedy as a consequence. Dad, on the other hand, thinks there's sufficient excess bureaucracy built up everywhere so that there really won't be much impact other than actually better balanced books. Back on election day, I was completely disenchanted with the continual wobbling about our government seemed to be stuck in. Elections kept being called before anything really substantial could get done. I was absolutely disgusted with the degree to which our leaders just couldn't work with each other instead of trying to grab power. Well we're now most definitely headed solidly in the direction of a smaller civil service and government. I hope those who now wield the axes in Ottawa are a heaping lot better at precision waste reduction and job cutting than I am at killing zombies with my digital axe in Swamp. I would have felt a whole lot better had the Liberals carried the day instead of being utterly decimated. Still, it could all work out for the best. the new NDP leader at least sounds good when he talks. We'll see what he can accomplish while leading the official opposition.
Tomorrow, I'll be heading over to Michelle and Gerry's. It's been a little while. Only one computer problem known about in advance effecting Michelle's ability to hear audioboos. At least I've already supplied the material for testing. I don't expect it'll be a very hard nut to crack but I've been wrong before. She's had some interesting and different problems with her computer. Nothing beets that one where the bloody clock wasn't set and therefore, nothing would work since it reported a date around 2005 or so. Her version of Jaws had yet to be written so its security wouldn't let her computer actually talk. Unbelievably simple presuming one can see and read the clock. Utterly insoluble without sighted help/knowledge. I would have suspected everything else first including the sound card. It's always fun to expose both of them to new thoughts and ideas. I always come away feeling like I've done something worth-while. They appreciate my efforts whether or not they're successful and are just all-around good simple folk caught in the interweb age.
I guess that pretty much covers what sticks in the mind from the past while. I've doubtless forgotten to write about some stuff I discussed in my far more frequent boos at:
www.audioboo.fm
I find it a whole lot more natural to just let those loose but will keep trying to update this blog a tad more regularly than I have of late. Until next time, faithful readers.
Easter was quite good this year. Unlike Christmas where I attended church on neither Christmas Eve or day due to family activities, I caught both services at Easter. There could well come a point in my life when I no longer have any family in easy reach. I therefore take most if not quite every opportunity to be a part of things. Increasingly, more occasions are coming up when I could actually do otherwise. That's still a relatively new phenomenon for me. I got to hear my nieces go on a very fast egg hunt. It was all in one room of my parents' house and the action was caught wonderfully on Audioboo. They found everything in well under the five minute time span I can capture at once with the service. The microphone in the iPHONE is really quite good. I just wish there was more control over the noise cancellation for when you want to capture more of the background noises. I'm glad I managed to record that little slice of life. Things seem to be going well for Dan and his part of the family. They had a great trip to the US recently and the kids seem to be enjoying their days in school. Here's hoping that lasts. I guess it'll be Ava's birthday soon again. Haven't really come across anything superspecial to get for her but I guess there's still a little time.
The new CNIB digital library has at last been unveiled. I've been able to circumnavigate the odd bug thanks to my multiple screen-readers, two browsers and some patience. Firefox seems to work best so far. I certainly appreciate the increased number of books available for download. This includes some long-time cherished favourites like Larry Niven's Footfall and Michael Crichton's Congo. I also enjoyed Jay Ingram's The Burning house, a non-fiction book about what is known about the human brain.
It's been nice catching up with friends lately. I've also started getting to know some additional people over a new app for the iPHONE called Zello. There's also a version for the PC. It works pretty well. Earle and a few other old friends use the app also. It works a lot like a walkie talkie with the addition of channels both public and private. Like most other such apps, I don't tend to have it open unless and until I actually want to chat. I've touched base with a few old friends, Earle included. I've also had some good conversation with Jessica, a lady in the states living in one of these house-trailers I've read about but have yet to actually feel. They apparently shake quite a bit when the wind picks up. Hannah, a listener of Mushroom FM who lives in the Philippines,told me quite a bit about what it's like for blind people there. They don't have any sort of social services or benefits. I was curious whether this provided any greater incentive for people to actually hire the disabled. Sadly, this is yet another of these idiotic theories that business-supportive idiots love to toss out there. Her experience has been pretty dismal. She's supported entirely by her family and can't easily travel around. There's all sorts of pressure to get a job that nobody wants to give her. A degree in computer science could very easily just go to waste and nobody over there would think twice about it. Although not very lucrative, my education has, I feel, been a substantial benefit to me and those who have come to know me in life here. She briefly had a job as an online language translator and conversational tutor but the experience left her feeling very exploited and drained with no money to show for it. I hope she catches a lucky break and wins through somehow. I wish I could help in some way. As it is with many people, I help her by having and taking the time to be an understanding listener who can, at least a little, relate to what she's going through.
I tend to like using gwconnect for Skype communications. Mainly these days, I've been talking with Rose. We make good sounding boards for each other but still run into patches where I tend to run out of patience. I get a strong sense of being productive, of doing something useful when I can be available for her. With all the crap she's gone through, she needs someone to vent to. If I can be even a small part of her journey to truly settle in and become a healthy part of the church community, then I've done a good thing. She has so much sheer knowledge and thought to offer that it takes your breath away. She seems to think some woman's going to find me soon and I won't have nearly as much time for her. As much as I'd dearly loved to believe her, I just can't. Similar to the whole god-guided versus reality-governed universe, all the signs in my experience point to a long stretch of single life ahead of me in a world of increasingly fragile fragmented busy people who don't truly value what I do. I've done everything I can within reason to increase my chances. Certainly, God could pull some long convoluted strings in the fabric of reality and bring a suitable woman into my proximity. While I hope that happens, I won't hold my breath while waiting nor spend any more time moping if it doesn't. I'll do my best to keep positive, to do what I believe God wants me to do, look for any places in life where what I know or discover can be of help to people, and continue to count my life's many blessings.
In around ten days, I'll be hosting a gathering at my apartment for Rose. She has nearly completed her hundred days in a row of Yoga. A damned remarkable feat considering the chronic pain and sleep deprivation she has experienced. Things are at last looking up for her. It helps to finally have a diagnosis. People are less likely to dismiss her concerns and will hopefully appreciate her efforts more in that light.
Work on Enchantment's Twilight continues. Just now, it's entering a somewhat dull patch that I can't say I relish overly. I'm trying to find the proper size for the board to be, a balance between speed of travel and there still being room for special locations and journey-related character development and events to occur to the characters. It would help tremendously if I could settle on a good travel system which felt experientially satisfying. It has to serve the purposes of getting characters from A to B, making travel fun, and adding to the overall atmosphere of the game. Pure random dice rolls don't quite give me what I'm after but neither does a completely predictable deterministic system. I believe I may be inching closer to an acceptable midpoint between the two but won't count my chickens before they hatch in this instance. A whole lot of old preconceptions have been tossed away and for now, a lot of balls are hanging in the air. The whole magic system breakthrough has opened quite a sizeable can of worms. It'll make for a very interesting Summer creatively. Another catalyst for all this change was another excellent game design book I just read. The Art of Game Design; A book of Lenses by Jesse Schell easily ranks among the top three game design books I've ever read. It makes for an excellent counterpoint to Ernest Adams's Fundamentals of Game Design. Thanks to Mr. Schell's more artistic sense of what it takes to achieve a game which gives the experience of fun, I feel much more properly directed as I set about nailing down the core aspects of Enchantment's Twilight. Mr. Adams has given me the order in which to try to accomplish things while Mr. Shell has given me tools to examine that work in a new light. Strange that one of the first results of reading the book is to be faced with the necessity of changing the board length and system of travel. But there's just no getting around it. The results are that critical, a bedrock on which to build the more creative castles in the air. Even in this important work, dealing with numbers continuously for this extended period has tinted life with the gloom that complicated numeric reality beyond the very basics always has. I've just never found mathematics enjoyable. Thankfully, they'll be behind the scenes when the player experiences them.
Looking ahead to the Summer, I'm actually quite confident it'll be interesting in other more social ways also this year. I've got my annual trip to Lake Jo scheduled for the start of July. I hope I can have as good a vacation as I did last year and come back without then getting sick as has happened a couple of times now. Hoping for the start of a steady love relationship on top of that stroke of good fortune is, I think, too optimistic even for me. There'll be the occasional trip to Canada's Wonderland with Carine and Kevin. I'm also hopeful of one or more excursions downtown to see Steve, Earle, Meko and the rest of that gang of good people. Slowly, more zest seems to be coming into life. May that process long continue.
No real action is happening on the relationship front. This past year has already seen two false starts. Not even a nibble from Plenty of Fish even after I finally figured out how to un hide my profile. Figured that might help a tad but experience isn't backing that assumption up so far. Meanwhile, my projects, online chats, visits with friends and a whole raft of podcasts and even TV are coming to my rescue. I'm certainly not wallowing through the muck of time anymore. Still, there's that void in life which just won't seem to go away. Too many thoughts, experiences and moments that I keenly wish were building blocks of a steady love. Thanks to this reserve of cheerfulness and an increasing sense of community connection, the square pegs I try to force into that round void work somewhat better than they once did. And yet, all too often, that emptiness makes itself felt. Is there truly no woman out there unspoken for who would either find my life interesting enough to share or, failing that, actually offer me a stable alternative? I wish I were one of those people who truly believed that God had pre-destined everything. Being patient is a whole lot easier when one has faith that God has picked out someone special just for you. I just can't subscribe to belief in a universe that really works that way. Well-wishers have offered that old platitude that "someone will come along at the right time.", or that whole notion that "the right person" simply hasn't appeared yet but will eventually. Both notions simply ring hollow to me. God need not control everything, solve every problem, and work miracles to a point where they're too common to be called such. Randomness and coincidence are plain facts of life to me. Virtue, compassion and prayer don't always lead to the positive outcomes we strive for. People far more faithful and devout than I have been left to suffer far worse fates than unwilling unemployment and singledom. Compared to getting nailed to a cross, I have the perspective to think I have it pretty easy in the grand scheme of things. That perspective helps in the same way that being thankful your leg wasn't blown off by a landmine lessens one's itch while suffering bites from black flies. I'm still in for countless days alone, conversations with people too distant to ever be more than friendly voices, counting and enjoying my many blessings in life in solitude when I'd be ecstatic to be able to share them.
The weather has been somewhat unseasonably warm lately with a few brutal reminders that we're not quite through with cold just yet. I've begun walking to the Dam on my own again. So far, things are working quite well. There's still a sense of uncertainty. I can't really let my guard down and just casually walk the route. However, it has stuck with me more solidly over the Winter break than any route has before. That area with the three gates and Basketball court is still all too easy to get badly turned around in. However, I'm getting better at recovering when this happens provided the GPS is locked in. The Trekker Breeze is doing quite well these days. I just wish there were more places within walking distance worth getting to often enough so the routes would at last stick semi coherently in my head.
I mentioned square pegs earlier. One of the latest I've tried out is a little audio game called Swamp. It's basically a first-person shooter for the blind pitting players against a zombie apocalypse. I finally remembered that I did indeed still have an old optical mouse and thought I'd give the game a spin. It's actually surprisingly addictive. I've always wondered if I'd actually enjoy such games provided they were accessible. Friends would talk about spending hours playing Doom, Quake and such and I just couldn't fathom how they sustained their focus. What kept them coming back? Now, I have an idea of how that works. If your character dies before reaching the safe zone with his or her loot, everything is lost but one's reputation and experience points. You can be walking around with advanced weapons and loads of ammo, get chewed up before making it back to the safe zone, and be forced to start yet again with nothing but an axe and pistol. It's keenly frustrating but you just keep hoping that luck will at last favour the bold and you'll come back with something impressive to donate for increased reputation. It's the old "Next time, things will work out better" pernicious pull that I guess hard-core gamblers must feel even as they sink into inescapable debt. Added to this pull is the very cathartic act of confronting a purely evil threat with the inability to even accidentally harm one's fellow players. It's a game with no real moral complications. You can blast those zombies to bits without any repercussions other than positive ones. Very unrealistic and therefore, most appealing. A clean safe way to blow off stress or anxt provided one has the discipline to stop. That is, in essence, the moral catch.
Complicating things for me is my poor orientation skill. I'm dead serious here. The game takes place in a map of a town with stores, houses, etc to go on scavenging missions in. I find it extremely difficult to keep a good sense of direction even with all the sonic aids. I've been killed numerous times right by the safe zone because I couldn't find the small entrance to it. Even when I remember in my panic that it's on the west side, it's still just a small gap in a solid wall. Buildings are pretty much deathtraps. It's so easy to get hopelessly turned around in them. I have yet to succeed in recovering an item needed for a quest. I keep getting lost and subsequently killed in the narrow confines of building corridors and other tight areas. This game could and should be used by orientation and mobility instructors. Finding my way around is nearly as time-consuming and frustrating as it is for me in real life. The only consolation is that you can just stop and do something else without actually being lost hours away from home. If you could actually hoof it around as quickly as your character with such impunity to muscles and energy, you really would be damned far away when you discovered how woefully lost you had become. And of course, being able to run at full tilt even while packing a minnigun is another power trip in and of itself. While wielding it, you actually have to crouch and brace the gun before firing it. Walking while wielding it does slow you down to a crawl. However, just pull out your axe or some other weapon and you can quickly carry that minnigun to where it needs to be.
Offsetting the navigation frustration is the pull of participating in a community of sorts. You can hear someone getting chewed to bits by a zombie and come to their rescue. Some of the expert players will actually carry on text conversations while on missions. The mouse really does help you move and shoot with more fluidity and precision. I keep hoping that I'll come up lucky and get enough reputation points to get me out of this starting grind and into the larger parts of the game like missions. Alternatively, I keep wondering when the painfully slow progress plus the annoyance of finding my way around will dissuade me from continuing to play at all. I've already seen the better part of two days pretty much vanish on me. Were it not for the fact that I've rearranged cords and items on my desk so that the long-neglected mouse has a home, I'd have to pinch myself to be certain I hadn't dreamed it and that today is, in fact, Thursday already! I haven't spent anywhere near that much time playing King of Dragon Pass yet and it offers far more substance and sense of meaningful accomplishment. How has Swamp just sucked away so much time? Even though I can barely get around, I think it's that sense of there being a community of real people not unlike myself who are engaged in an unreal but nonetheless epic quest for survival. I'm fitting yet another square peg into a round hole and just now coming to grips with what an imperfect fit it is. I dearly wish I could get lost in a real experience, even the relatively ordinary experiences of daily life, with real people on a more regular basis. Most of all though, I wish I could find love with a woman who shared most of my values and at least some of my interests.
Looking at the larger picture, a few news items have caught my interest over the past while. This being the hundredth anniversary of the Titanic's doomed voyage, all sorts of things are happening to commemorate it. An actual ship with passengers has set sail and will follow the Titanic's exact route across the Atlantic. At least one of the people I follow on Twitter is interested enough to have tuned into a feed reenacting the voyage with tweets about events at the times they occurred. There's a kind of creepy fascination that makes me pause for thought whenever I come across one of those. I've been meaning to find out more about how the modern reenacted journey is doing but have yet to get around to that. There's also a large collection of recovered artefacts which may go up for auction. That's sparking quite a controversy over the prospect of profiting from what some see as a grave site. Personally, I'm rather inclined to hope that the stuff of my life, understanding my circumstances and thoughts, etc, is worth bothering with enough so that the stuff of my life doesn't end up lying untouched and unwanted somewhere slowly disintegrating. The mind boggles at the risk and ingenuity needed to recover anything from that depth. Surely, those who have risked everything to recover historically valuable items deserve something for their troubles. Archaeology has rid us of many false conceptions and improved our understanding about where we've all come from.
Apparently, this is also the active season for the large hadron collider so there could be some interesting news coming from that quarter over the next while. Thanks largely to Rose, I'm now far more likely to hear about scientific developments via Twitter than I am anywhere else. I've begun to follow @bigthink, a fountain of large-scale thoughts scientific and otherwise. It's another square peg in a round hole making me feel more connected than I actually am. There have been some wonderful podcasts lately. From Our Own Correspondents is up to its usual quality. Everything from a meeting with a Japanese travelling poet and a Buddhist monk who drives fast and loves progressive rock to reporter's reflections on what it was like to cover the war in Sarajevo twenty years ago. I have vague memories of hearing news about that. It was certainly felt on the erindale Campus where I got my degree. Tapestry has let loose some excellent food for thought. I enjoyed hearing the perspective of an agnostic who, much as I had, made peace with his position of not knowing for certain whether there was a God. There was also an excellent episode which looked at the collision of religion and comedy. Am I forever doomed to hear so much excellent food for stimulating conversation while completely alone? It damned well feels like that's the case.
In order to balance the books, the government is making cuts all over the place. We're going to lose all sorts of people from health workers to food inspectors to border guards and people from the CBC. There's no real stopping this. We voted for this majority government and it can now pretty much do what it pleases. We're going to experience as a country what less of pretty much everything one would really want from a government feels like. I worry that these cuts will go too far and we'll end up with completely preventable tragedy as a consequence. Dad, on the other hand, thinks there's sufficient excess bureaucracy built up everywhere so that there really won't be much impact other than actually better balanced books. Back on election day, I was completely disenchanted with the continual wobbling about our government seemed to be stuck in. Elections kept being called before anything really substantial could get done. I was absolutely disgusted with the degree to which our leaders just couldn't work with each other instead of trying to grab power. Well we're now most definitely headed solidly in the direction of a smaller civil service and government. I hope those who now wield the axes in Ottawa are a heaping lot better at precision waste reduction and job cutting than I am at killing zombies with my digital axe in Swamp. I would have felt a whole lot better had the Liberals carried the day instead of being utterly decimated. Still, it could all work out for the best. the new NDP leader at least sounds good when he talks. We'll see what he can accomplish while leading the official opposition.
Tomorrow, I'll be heading over to Michelle and Gerry's. It's been a little while. Only one computer problem known about in advance effecting Michelle's ability to hear audioboos. At least I've already supplied the material for testing. I don't expect it'll be a very hard nut to crack but I've been wrong before. She's had some interesting and different problems with her computer. Nothing beets that one where the bloody clock wasn't set and therefore, nothing would work since it reported a date around 2005 or so. Her version of Jaws had yet to be written so its security wouldn't let her computer actually talk. Unbelievably simple presuming one can see and read the clock. Utterly insoluble without sighted help/knowledge. I would have suspected everything else first including the sound card. It's always fun to expose both of them to new thoughts and ideas. I always come away feeling like I've done something worth-while. They appreciate my efforts whether or not they're successful and are just all-around good simple folk caught in the interweb age.
I guess that pretty much covers what sticks in the mind from the past while. I've doubtless forgotten to write about some stuff I discussed in my far more frequent boos at:
www.audioboo.fm
I find it a whole lot more natural to just let those loose but will keep trying to update this blog a tad more regularly than I have of late. Until next time, faithful readers.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
A Busy Eventful Winter
Hello everyone. It's been too damned long since I've written one of these. Quite an interesting month in terms of thoughts and actions. Over the past couple of weeks, I experienced a slight illness and dealing with its aftereffects on my sleep. Nothing too serious compared to what I had last year. Just tiredness combined with a slight head ache and stuffed nose. Everything has returned to normal now with the exception of my sleep schedule. There have been some interesting food discoveries lately. In the realm of tea, I've become a staunch supporter and fan of the Stash brand. Stash Chai Spice Black Tea is remarkably good stuff. While contending with my insomnia, I came across a sealed box in the back of my tea shelf and thought I'd see what offered. As soon as I ripped open one of the packages, I knew I had struck gold. This stuff tastes absolutely splendid. The bags are very well stored in packets. I'll definitely be ordering more of this stuff.
Things have gone very well so far this year. The only real fly in the ointment is the lack of any real progress at the Dam. I've sat my hours having hardly said a word to the youths I'm supposed to be relating to. I've just got to keep showing up and hope for opportunities. It's just a very slow business.
A few Sundays ago, I attended both a former neighbour's 40th birthday celebration and my youngest niece's first birthday bash. Each event was excellent in its own way. Danni is someone I've known since my family first moved to Mississauga just before I began secondary school. She's a very interesting lady who just seemed to always move in different circles. We've probably exchanged more words on Twitter than in person. I tend to only see her at family gatherings. Once in a while, we've done stuff together with her friend Jacqui. They wanted to try a restaurant where you eat in the dark. That was certainly an interesting meal as they experienced something perfectly natural for me. Clearly, Danni had no idea what she was in for and was very moved by everyone in attendance of her celebration. We didn't get to chat much but it was still nice to be there, a part of the cast of people whose lives are somehow connected with her. She's certainly a terrific Twitter companion. It gave me cause to reflect on the impact I've had on people and how many are, in one way or another, an ongoing part of the life I lead. My own 40th birthday could very well occasion a similarly diverse gathering of family, friends, believers and non-believers who've been a part of my own journey. Despite all the time I've spent alone over the years, I've really got a lot to be proud of. Still more to be thankful for. I seem to have reached a kind of turning point which could mean that the next three years will see an abundance of new memories made from adventures with others.
Alleah thoroughly enjoyed her first birthday party. This included Felix the Fish, a stuffed toy I was rewarded from Bigfish Games after being a member for a continuous year. Mom has really enjoyed their games over the past few years I've been getting them for her as gifts. I wasn't really certain which of my nieces the fish would prove suitable for until I felt its sise. Apparently, the big mouth on the fish looks friendly enough for her. That was the only slight concern I had as I passed it to her. She seems to really like it though. By far, the biggest highlight was a toy car that she can sit in and beep the horn of. She just loved that thing. Ava and Amia were a tad under the weather but still full of beans. They love dad's iPAD. He's been getting some games for them to play on it. Even Amia's doing quite well because of how intuitive the interface is.
I don't have any memories at all from that early in life. Once in a while, as my old baby and toddler toys have been passed on, I've felt some that have seemed extra familiar to me. I remember some squeezable rubber dice I used to have. I also distinctly remember a ball of shapes where you put the shapes into the correct holes. However, I can't actually remember playing with these objects. Just what they felt like. It's hard to really sort out where in early life that curtain falls away and actual ordered memories commence. I remember my first day at W. Ross McDonald School for the Blind. Further back, I remember a day in kinder garden when a bulletin board fell on me. I don't remember anything else surrounding that point in time, just the instant of the board hitting me unexpectedly. I remember getting my toncels out and being in the hospital with a damnably sore throat. It seems like very soon after that came our family's trip to Disney World. I can't remember anything about the time in between those events. I wonder what Alleah will remember when she's my age. Does sight provide enough of an additional layer of experience that memory of the distant past remains less fragmented? I can't help but wonder how much of this time will remain coherent in my memory thirty years or so from now. This past year and a half in particular has been a very formative time. And then there's the sweep of exhilaration, of the canvasses of relationship and of work on Enchantment's Twilight. There's suddenly so much scope for meaningful exploration. Add to that the church community and the interesting places, both mental and physical, that it has taken me to. Without the aid of my blog and audio recordings, how much of what I feel now will I be able to recall later?
I've had a major breakthrough with Enchantment's Twilight thanks to my friend Rose who attends the same church as I do. I was telling her about one of the better ideas for a special location on the island that I had come up with. That lead to a discussion which resulted in her giving me a foundational idea for a nifty magic system I can use in my game. Been stuck without such an idea for ages. It combines neatly with the geography of the island so I'm now working on both areas of the game simultaneously. There's a massive amount to be worked out and detailed. It's going to take months if not the rest of the year. This opens up a whole ton. My original thinking was that as the geography and other pieces like the magic system developed, they in turn would generate story, character and other ideas. As place and resource details emerged, they would give rise to thoughts on characters, cultures, how items both magic and mundane were crafted or found, etc. Eventually, a kind of creative critical mass would be reached and it would no longer be the losing battle it has previously been to make real progress. Over the past while of no real progress, I had begun to lose faith that this would ever happen. Thanks to what was essentially a five minute conversation, the way forward has been at least partially revealed to me. More importantly, my morale and faith in what fragments of my original thinking I can still lay hands on has been restored to me. No more writer's block for a good while. That's for certain. No sooner had I written an article for my church newsletter in which I entertained the suspicion that my friends would prove the salvation of Enchantment's Twilight when it has actually started to happen. All my reading, studying other game conceptions of magic, etc, and it's a five minute conversation that finally undoes the roadblock. Who'd have thunk? What a profound start to the year.
I've been helping Rose explore the online world with her new iPAD. So far, things have gone quite well. She's currently enjoying Twitter and has started following people including some of my friends and I. Quite quickly, she's finding her online voice and learning how conversation happens. I've no doubt that she'll soon have lots more followers as more of her interests are put forth online. Skype has been especially useful to Rose since she can't afford a good phone plan. Using it, she can make unlimited calls anywhere in North America for a flat rate of around $3.95 per month. I subscribe to this myself so as not to use up minutes during the days or in case I neat to make a long distance call. It's certainly a convenience and peace of mind for me. For her, it's been a lot more life-changing. It's very exciting to see how the same sort of connectivity society has afforded me is now at last benefiting her. She's very much enjoying Twitter and digs up all sorts of interesting science links among many others.
I'm very happy to be finding some female friends who'll always be just friends. It gives a greater balance and depth to one's life and perspective. Also, if I want to have a hope in hell of creating convincing female characters, I'd better have some actual examples in real life to work with. Age aside, there are a number of reasons why Rose and I just wouldn't make a good couple. We're on two different tracks in many ways. However, I think our lengthy conversations have certainly added to the richness of my life. She seems to feel the same way about me. Haven't gotten around to putting up my dating profiles again yet. As life continues here, I find that the kind of woman I'm after has somewhat narrowed down given recent experience and time to reflect. Therefore, I'm still working out precisely what I want my profile to focus on in greater and lesser detail. It feels like I've reached a point where further drastic change is unlikely over the short term so it's worth doing all the updating. Cut once and measure twice as they say. I always get a painfully self-conscious feeling when I work on my dating profiles. The longer I can leave them unchanged, the better I like it.
Cheerfulness, mental stability, and good conversational ability are things that I really can't compromise on. Increasingly, I'm coming to the conclusion that spirituality and faith similarity is another vital thing to have in common. Some people say that opposites are good for each other since they tend to balance each other's extremes. I agree entirely with this on the level of friendship. If you go beyond that, what happens is that the constant exposure grinds at both of you and wrecks even the friendship you've achieved. It's an endless power struggle. There's no just backing off and getting it done the way you think it ought to be when you've made the commitment to be a couple. If you're just friends, each of you still has sole control of your lives and convincing each other that you're right about things doesn't come with the same level of threat to one's identity. You still want to convince friends that you're right, or at least that your approach has merit. However, the stakes aren't nearly as high.
My faith is emphatically not just the equivalent of a hobby. It's a profound life journey whose implications reach deeper than I'm probably even aware of. It forces me to face truths which aren't always very flattering about myself and wrestle with hard questions. I've been fortunate enough to find a community church of people who understand that journey since they're on their own similarly directed ones. As a non-believer, I really couldn't understand why there was this prejudicial barrier up between romantic involvement of Christians with non-Christians. As I've settled into this community and grown in my faith, the reasons for such cautions have become less antagonistic and more clear. I understand where it comes from now. If you've never seriously looked into what being a Christian is all about, you just can't grasp the depth of interplay between belief and community belonging which takes place over time. It goes so much farther beyond whether one attends church regularly. One's relationship with God reaches into all other relationships and spheres of life. It has given my life purpose and meaning where no other community or part of secular society has. I'm respected and encouraged to be who I am. There's room for a great deal of diversity and difference in God's kingdom and communities provided that one agrees with some basic pennants.
It's not that I think Christians are better than other people. We act poorly towards others, don't always practice what we preach, and have some horrific chapters in our history which rival those of any other societal group I've come across. However, I honestly believe that Christianity presents us with a life path which compels us to grow into better people if the bible is actively thought about and not just flatly accepted. It's not a one-sise-fits-all thing. Although I feel very comfortable within the denomination and church I've adopted, that doesn't mean that they're the only ones who really understand God's truth and sincerely try to follow what the bible teaches as they see it. My particular focus and interpretations seem very right to me. Right enough that I'll conduct my life in accordance with it and face whatever consequences there are for that both here and in the afterlife. In the here and now, one result is a limitation of scope when it comes to romantic possibilities. Church has become a real pillar of my life. It's something I never would have believed was possible in my agnostic days. That pillar ought not to be a wall between the life experiences of my hoped-for partner and I. It should be a major shared aspect of life. Not having this be the case is simply bound to lead to friction and a lessening of potential for both me and a would-be partner who didn't share my core beliefs. To be at my best, I need a high degree of overall stability at the core of my life. I'm after maximum depth with minimal needless drama. It behoves me to really be certain that we're enough on the same page that disagreements won't wreck how we live as a couple.
Last Saturday was terrific. I felt absolutely fantabulous and basically chose to enjoy the day rather than write. I had a couple of great chats on Skype, some excellent Twitter time with my followers, and also listened to a couple of great shows from CBC Radio1. I caught DNTO live. It was all about enemies and was, in my judgement, one of the more profound episodes they've ever done. There are some truly incredible people out there. I heard from a black author who decided he had to try and understand the Ku Klux Clan and ended up befriending some of its members. That took incredible guts. There were other people who've really looked out from their entrenched positions and found commonality. The big thing was to let things actually get personal and know each other as actual people. That's certainly in keeping with my own experience. I also heard Under the Influence. It was the first of a two-part look at Steve Jobs. Very fascinating. I can't wait for the second part to become available. Dinner with mom and dad was great as always.
Spending a day with Carine and Kevin recently was a very welcome break from the norm. It was good to catch up with them again. We had a splendid breakfast at Kora's and panzerotis for dinner. They had a very hi per but friendly guest dog with them in addition to Breeze, Carine's dog. We watched a show called The Voice. Can't say that one was a favourite but it was probably the most interesting choice on by that point. Prior to that, we all enjoyed a few episodes of Cash Cab on Discovery Channel. That makes for a nifty show to appreciate with others of a more intellectual bent. You see how the group in the cab handle the questions and choices available. I wish Myth busters had been on after that. Can't go wrong with that show.
At last, I've moved beyond my contract with Rogers and have modified the TV part to be more in line with what I actually enjoy. The extra channels have been nice to have over the past couple of years. However, I simply don't need all that. As long as I get my Discovery and History channels along with news and the occasional show of interest, I'm quite contented. I don't know that I'd be willing to ditch TV entirely. However, I have far better use for the $20 or so per month that this change frees up. Would have done it as much as a year ago had my contract permitted me to.
It's Saturday morning now. I've just heard the second episode of the Under the Influence look at Steve Jobs. Terry did an excellent job although I was hoping for more in site into the Apple re tale stores. It's a reasonable time in the morning for once. A little before eight versus the more lately typical well before five. I think I'm finally coming out of this round of illness-triggered insomnia. I hope to get together with Adam later today for a nice gaming cession. Would have gone yesterday had I been at all confident of not conking out. We've been playing more of Dokupon Kingdom which is a very intriguing combination rpg and board game. Thankfully, I took advantage of my voicememmo app on the iPHONE to record a brief outline of what we were up to so we can continue previously laid plans. It's yet another game I wish were fully accessible. As honest a guy as Adam is, there's just something unnatural about having an opponent handle the controls and describe one's options. There's so much randomness in the game that it rarely becomes at all an issue. It's something both of us can actually enjoy together.
I've really got to change my blogging style and try to make more timely shorter entries about specific events. Too much is starting to slip through the cracks now that more is actually happening to me on a continuous basis. I've tried to sign up to the new music service offered by CBC at
www.cbcmusic.ca
However, the audio captia isn't accepting what I type in as correct. Very frustrating. I've therefore fallen back to Radio Rivendell which makes for excellent accompaniment to my blogging. You can check them out at
www.radiorivendell.com
One thing that went very well was a visit from my church youth group. I had them over to my apartment and things went quite well. I showed them Super Egg Hunt which a number of them tried. They did fairly well once they closed their eyes. We also had some very good discussion and I showed them the Amazing Drive through Singer video which they enjoyed. It was nice to feel like I contributed to the evening. The circumstances simply lent themselves to that so much more than at the Dam during drop in time.
We're celebrating mom's birthday on Sunday with friends and family. That'll certainly make for a nice full day when combined with church. Just finished acquiring her present this year. I think she'll enjoy what I've picked out. Looking ahead into March, I'm in for another interesting month. My grandmother is coming for a visit. I've also got a visit with Michelle and Gerry where I'll also meet Liz Lawson, a presenter on Mushroom FM whose musical selections I've found enjoyable for the most part. I would predict that things will slow down come mid March if I hadn't just lived through such a very active last couple of months. I have no reason to doubt that things will just keep popping up to make life interesting. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Things have gone very well so far this year. The only real fly in the ointment is the lack of any real progress at the Dam. I've sat my hours having hardly said a word to the youths I'm supposed to be relating to. I've just got to keep showing up and hope for opportunities. It's just a very slow business.
A few Sundays ago, I attended both a former neighbour's 40th birthday celebration and my youngest niece's first birthday bash. Each event was excellent in its own way. Danni is someone I've known since my family first moved to Mississauga just before I began secondary school. She's a very interesting lady who just seemed to always move in different circles. We've probably exchanged more words on Twitter than in person. I tend to only see her at family gatherings. Once in a while, we've done stuff together with her friend Jacqui. They wanted to try a restaurant where you eat in the dark. That was certainly an interesting meal as they experienced something perfectly natural for me. Clearly, Danni had no idea what she was in for and was very moved by everyone in attendance of her celebration. We didn't get to chat much but it was still nice to be there, a part of the cast of people whose lives are somehow connected with her. She's certainly a terrific Twitter companion. It gave me cause to reflect on the impact I've had on people and how many are, in one way or another, an ongoing part of the life I lead. My own 40th birthday could very well occasion a similarly diverse gathering of family, friends, believers and non-believers who've been a part of my own journey. Despite all the time I've spent alone over the years, I've really got a lot to be proud of. Still more to be thankful for. I seem to have reached a kind of turning point which could mean that the next three years will see an abundance of new memories made from adventures with others.
Alleah thoroughly enjoyed her first birthday party. This included Felix the Fish, a stuffed toy I was rewarded from Bigfish Games after being a member for a continuous year. Mom has really enjoyed their games over the past few years I've been getting them for her as gifts. I wasn't really certain which of my nieces the fish would prove suitable for until I felt its sise. Apparently, the big mouth on the fish looks friendly enough for her. That was the only slight concern I had as I passed it to her. She seems to really like it though. By far, the biggest highlight was a toy car that she can sit in and beep the horn of. She just loved that thing. Ava and Amia were a tad under the weather but still full of beans. They love dad's iPAD. He's been getting some games for them to play on it. Even Amia's doing quite well because of how intuitive the interface is.
I don't have any memories at all from that early in life. Once in a while, as my old baby and toddler toys have been passed on, I've felt some that have seemed extra familiar to me. I remember some squeezable rubber dice I used to have. I also distinctly remember a ball of shapes where you put the shapes into the correct holes. However, I can't actually remember playing with these objects. Just what they felt like. It's hard to really sort out where in early life that curtain falls away and actual ordered memories commence. I remember my first day at W. Ross McDonald School for the Blind. Further back, I remember a day in kinder garden when a bulletin board fell on me. I don't remember anything else surrounding that point in time, just the instant of the board hitting me unexpectedly. I remember getting my toncels out and being in the hospital with a damnably sore throat. It seems like very soon after that came our family's trip to Disney World. I can't remember anything about the time in between those events. I wonder what Alleah will remember when she's my age. Does sight provide enough of an additional layer of experience that memory of the distant past remains less fragmented? I can't help but wonder how much of this time will remain coherent in my memory thirty years or so from now. This past year and a half in particular has been a very formative time. And then there's the sweep of exhilaration, of the canvasses of relationship and of work on Enchantment's Twilight. There's suddenly so much scope for meaningful exploration. Add to that the church community and the interesting places, both mental and physical, that it has taken me to. Without the aid of my blog and audio recordings, how much of what I feel now will I be able to recall later?
I've had a major breakthrough with Enchantment's Twilight thanks to my friend Rose who attends the same church as I do. I was telling her about one of the better ideas for a special location on the island that I had come up with. That lead to a discussion which resulted in her giving me a foundational idea for a nifty magic system I can use in my game. Been stuck without such an idea for ages. It combines neatly with the geography of the island so I'm now working on both areas of the game simultaneously. There's a massive amount to be worked out and detailed. It's going to take months if not the rest of the year. This opens up a whole ton. My original thinking was that as the geography and other pieces like the magic system developed, they in turn would generate story, character and other ideas. As place and resource details emerged, they would give rise to thoughts on characters, cultures, how items both magic and mundane were crafted or found, etc. Eventually, a kind of creative critical mass would be reached and it would no longer be the losing battle it has previously been to make real progress. Over the past while of no real progress, I had begun to lose faith that this would ever happen. Thanks to what was essentially a five minute conversation, the way forward has been at least partially revealed to me. More importantly, my morale and faith in what fragments of my original thinking I can still lay hands on has been restored to me. No more writer's block for a good while. That's for certain. No sooner had I written an article for my church newsletter in which I entertained the suspicion that my friends would prove the salvation of Enchantment's Twilight when it has actually started to happen. All my reading, studying other game conceptions of magic, etc, and it's a five minute conversation that finally undoes the roadblock. Who'd have thunk? What a profound start to the year.
I've been helping Rose explore the online world with her new iPAD. So far, things have gone quite well. She's currently enjoying Twitter and has started following people including some of my friends and I. Quite quickly, she's finding her online voice and learning how conversation happens. I've no doubt that she'll soon have lots more followers as more of her interests are put forth online. Skype has been especially useful to Rose since she can't afford a good phone plan. Using it, she can make unlimited calls anywhere in North America for a flat rate of around $3.95 per month. I subscribe to this myself so as not to use up minutes during the days or in case I neat to make a long distance call. It's certainly a convenience and peace of mind for me. For her, it's been a lot more life-changing. It's very exciting to see how the same sort of connectivity society has afforded me is now at last benefiting her. She's very much enjoying Twitter and digs up all sorts of interesting science links among many others.
I'm very happy to be finding some female friends who'll always be just friends. It gives a greater balance and depth to one's life and perspective. Also, if I want to have a hope in hell of creating convincing female characters, I'd better have some actual examples in real life to work with. Age aside, there are a number of reasons why Rose and I just wouldn't make a good couple. We're on two different tracks in many ways. However, I think our lengthy conversations have certainly added to the richness of my life. She seems to feel the same way about me. Haven't gotten around to putting up my dating profiles again yet. As life continues here, I find that the kind of woman I'm after has somewhat narrowed down given recent experience and time to reflect. Therefore, I'm still working out precisely what I want my profile to focus on in greater and lesser detail. It feels like I've reached a point where further drastic change is unlikely over the short term so it's worth doing all the updating. Cut once and measure twice as they say. I always get a painfully self-conscious feeling when I work on my dating profiles. The longer I can leave them unchanged, the better I like it.
Cheerfulness, mental stability, and good conversational ability are things that I really can't compromise on. Increasingly, I'm coming to the conclusion that spirituality and faith similarity is another vital thing to have in common. Some people say that opposites are good for each other since they tend to balance each other's extremes. I agree entirely with this on the level of friendship. If you go beyond that, what happens is that the constant exposure grinds at both of you and wrecks even the friendship you've achieved. It's an endless power struggle. There's no just backing off and getting it done the way you think it ought to be when you've made the commitment to be a couple. If you're just friends, each of you still has sole control of your lives and convincing each other that you're right about things doesn't come with the same level of threat to one's identity. You still want to convince friends that you're right, or at least that your approach has merit. However, the stakes aren't nearly as high.
My faith is emphatically not just the equivalent of a hobby. It's a profound life journey whose implications reach deeper than I'm probably even aware of. It forces me to face truths which aren't always very flattering about myself and wrestle with hard questions. I've been fortunate enough to find a community church of people who understand that journey since they're on their own similarly directed ones. As a non-believer, I really couldn't understand why there was this prejudicial barrier up between romantic involvement of Christians with non-Christians. As I've settled into this community and grown in my faith, the reasons for such cautions have become less antagonistic and more clear. I understand where it comes from now. If you've never seriously looked into what being a Christian is all about, you just can't grasp the depth of interplay between belief and community belonging which takes place over time. It goes so much farther beyond whether one attends church regularly. One's relationship with God reaches into all other relationships and spheres of life. It has given my life purpose and meaning where no other community or part of secular society has. I'm respected and encouraged to be who I am. There's room for a great deal of diversity and difference in God's kingdom and communities provided that one agrees with some basic pennants.
It's not that I think Christians are better than other people. We act poorly towards others, don't always practice what we preach, and have some horrific chapters in our history which rival those of any other societal group I've come across. However, I honestly believe that Christianity presents us with a life path which compels us to grow into better people if the bible is actively thought about and not just flatly accepted. It's not a one-sise-fits-all thing. Although I feel very comfortable within the denomination and church I've adopted, that doesn't mean that they're the only ones who really understand God's truth and sincerely try to follow what the bible teaches as they see it. My particular focus and interpretations seem very right to me. Right enough that I'll conduct my life in accordance with it and face whatever consequences there are for that both here and in the afterlife. In the here and now, one result is a limitation of scope when it comes to romantic possibilities. Church has become a real pillar of my life. It's something I never would have believed was possible in my agnostic days. That pillar ought not to be a wall between the life experiences of my hoped-for partner and I. It should be a major shared aspect of life. Not having this be the case is simply bound to lead to friction and a lessening of potential for both me and a would-be partner who didn't share my core beliefs. To be at my best, I need a high degree of overall stability at the core of my life. I'm after maximum depth with minimal needless drama. It behoves me to really be certain that we're enough on the same page that disagreements won't wreck how we live as a couple.
Last Saturday was terrific. I felt absolutely fantabulous and basically chose to enjoy the day rather than write. I had a couple of great chats on Skype, some excellent Twitter time with my followers, and also listened to a couple of great shows from CBC Radio1. I caught DNTO live. It was all about enemies and was, in my judgement, one of the more profound episodes they've ever done. There are some truly incredible people out there. I heard from a black author who decided he had to try and understand the Ku Klux Clan and ended up befriending some of its members. That took incredible guts. There were other people who've really looked out from their entrenched positions and found commonality. The big thing was to let things actually get personal and know each other as actual people. That's certainly in keeping with my own experience. I also heard Under the Influence. It was the first of a two-part look at Steve Jobs. Very fascinating. I can't wait for the second part to become available. Dinner with mom and dad was great as always.
Spending a day with Carine and Kevin recently was a very welcome break from the norm. It was good to catch up with them again. We had a splendid breakfast at Kora's and panzerotis for dinner. They had a very hi per but friendly guest dog with them in addition to Breeze, Carine's dog. We watched a show called The Voice. Can't say that one was a favourite but it was probably the most interesting choice on by that point. Prior to that, we all enjoyed a few episodes of Cash Cab on Discovery Channel. That makes for a nifty show to appreciate with others of a more intellectual bent. You see how the group in the cab handle the questions and choices available. I wish Myth busters had been on after that. Can't go wrong with that show.
At last, I've moved beyond my contract with Rogers and have modified the TV part to be more in line with what I actually enjoy. The extra channels have been nice to have over the past couple of years. However, I simply don't need all that. As long as I get my Discovery and History channels along with news and the occasional show of interest, I'm quite contented. I don't know that I'd be willing to ditch TV entirely. However, I have far better use for the $20 or so per month that this change frees up. Would have done it as much as a year ago had my contract permitted me to.
It's Saturday morning now. I've just heard the second episode of the Under the Influence look at Steve Jobs. Terry did an excellent job although I was hoping for more in site into the Apple re tale stores. It's a reasonable time in the morning for once. A little before eight versus the more lately typical well before five. I think I'm finally coming out of this round of illness-triggered insomnia. I hope to get together with Adam later today for a nice gaming cession. Would have gone yesterday had I been at all confident of not conking out. We've been playing more of Dokupon Kingdom which is a very intriguing combination rpg and board game. Thankfully, I took advantage of my voicememmo app on the iPHONE to record a brief outline of what we were up to so we can continue previously laid plans. It's yet another game I wish were fully accessible. As honest a guy as Adam is, there's just something unnatural about having an opponent handle the controls and describe one's options. There's so much randomness in the game that it rarely becomes at all an issue. It's something both of us can actually enjoy together.
I've really got to change my blogging style and try to make more timely shorter entries about specific events. Too much is starting to slip through the cracks now that more is actually happening to me on a continuous basis. I've tried to sign up to the new music service offered by CBC at
www.cbcmusic.ca
However, the audio captia isn't accepting what I type in as correct. Very frustrating. I've therefore fallen back to Radio Rivendell which makes for excellent accompaniment to my blogging. You can check them out at
www.radiorivendell.com
One thing that went very well was a visit from my church youth group. I had them over to my apartment and things went quite well. I showed them Super Egg Hunt which a number of them tried. They did fairly well once they closed their eyes. We also had some very good discussion and I showed them the Amazing Drive through Singer video which they enjoyed. It was nice to feel like I contributed to the evening. The circumstances simply lent themselves to that so much more than at the Dam during drop in time.
We're celebrating mom's birthday on Sunday with friends and family. That'll certainly make for a nice full day when combined with church. Just finished acquiring her present this year. I think she'll enjoy what I've picked out. Looking ahead into March, I'm in for another interesting month. My grandmother is coming for a visit. I've also got a visit with Michelle and Gerry where I'll also meet Liz Lawson, a presenter on Mushroom FM whose musical selections I've found enjoyable for the most part. I would predict that things will slow down come mid March if I hadn't just lived through such a very active last couple of months. I have no reason to doubt that things will just keep popping up to make life interesting. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Monday, January 9, 2012
Amazing Meaningful Holidays
Hello everyone. A blog entry is again well past due. It's been a very eventful couple of weeks. So eventful that I'm not going to even attempt to put things in chronological order. You'll just have to follow my stream of consciousness as it meanders through the tail end of 2011 and start of 2012. It's been a tremendously restorative good time. It's very early on Saturday morning as I begin writing this. I'm awake after an early begun five hours of solid sleep. Hopefully, I'll grab a bit more later. A cup of herbal tea, Calm Infusion, sits beside me at my desk. My computer is also in the process of converting The Passage by Justin Chronen. Hope I got the spelling right. I waited two months so I had two credits to spend. As a result, a book which could have cost $70 has cost me $28. Not bad. It's a long five-parter.
Christmas was an absolute joy this year. So was Christmas eve. usually, I would go to church on one of those two days. However, unlike every other year, my family had events on both those days and then nothing on Boxing day. I doubt that'll happen again in the next decade. I don't feel at all convicted about not attending church over the holidays. God knows my heart and where it's at. Looking back over the past couple of weeks, I've actually spent quite some time thinking about and discussing faith with my friends. Christmas day was spent in Hamilton in my brother's house. That seems to be the best thing to do with three little ones who can open and play with all their stuff. They had a terrific day and seemed to appreciate all their gifts. Ava wrote her name right away in the notebook I gave her. The flashlight from Mountain Equipment Co-op went over very well. Dad now has some money to spend on iTUNES. Mom has six games from Bigfish Games plus credits for a couple more thanks to one small mistake and the generosity of Bigfish Games making it right. After all the hustle and bustle, it was good to have nothing planned on Boxing day. I needed it to recover. I was given a pair of gloves with conductive material in the fingertips which let me use my iPHONE while wearing gloves. That was a very thoughtful idea which really stood out for me this year.
The space between Christmas and New Year's was a tad empty in places. I had family visits and also found that catching up with people online somewhat softened the solitary days. I also found myself re-reading Stephen King's The Stand. Every once in a while, that book pulls me in for another dark journey. The time passed surprisingly quickly as I made preparations for my upcoming gathering. Another pastime was Pontes Backgammon. It's a terrific polished implementation of accessible Backgammon on the computer. I bought it for 13 Euros and will be enjoying it for years. It allows for single play against the computer or two-player games on the same computer or over the Internet. You can chat with your human opponents via text message. Check out what this Romanian charity group has pulled off at:
www.backgammon.pontes.ro
I'd still love to see how Spoonbill Software would do Backgammon. That would be nifty. However, it's hard to imagine a better piece of software. I guess the doubling cube is a missing feature. Mr. Humfreys would doubtless find other neat things to ad were he to attempt it.
New Year's Eve was interesting. The day began early as I caught the very tail end of Jonathan Mosen's new year's show from New Zealand. I later heard and enjoyed the podcast when more fully awake. The morning took a decidedly crappy turn when I discovered that the drain in my sink was plugged. Not wanting to bother anybody on New Year's Eve, I tried everything including plunging the drain and putting vinegar and baking soda into it. Nothing worked though and I had to call the superintend ant. They called the contractors who came out and ended up replacing my old pipe with a very smooth new one. They used a blowtorch to cut out the old one and/or put the new pipe in. Given all the wood and other combustibles in the vicinity of my kitchen cupboards, that was the last thing I was expecting to hear. I've never actually felt one of those contraptions but must conclude that they offer an amazingly focused level of precision. They also must be far smaller than I previously conjectured. I then had to clean up the place and counter area quite thoroughly before I felt I could continue with my day. Thank God they straightened that mess out so promptly. My drain now sucks down water like it never has before.
Half the potential guests I had invited failed to show up for my New Year's party. There were six of us for a brief while. Joseph and Rose wanted to also be a part of the church's New Year's activities. Adam, Jeanette, Stephen and I stayed up until around four AM. I'm very glad Joseph and Rose were able to make it for a good chunk of the festivities and got to know my other three guests. It says a lot that I still had such a good time even though so many friends failed to appear. I very much hope I can get more friends at some future gathering. It's always so fascinating to hear friends who have never met each other and how they interact. A smaller group trades that pleasure for a more intimate level of conversation that I find equally enjoyable. There was some disappointment but this was far outweighed by a strong sense of just how blessed I am by the friendship of others.
That sense was further strengthened by a journey I went on at Stephen's invitation after we had recovered from the New Year's celebration. We spent another couple of days at my place. Shirley came for a visit that I believe was much longer than she had originally intended. Good conversation just kept it going for something around four hours. Originally, I think she intended to stay perhaps half an hour. I hope she makes it to a New Year's gathering one of these years. She'd fit right in and enjoy herself despite the age gap. On Monday, Stephen and I set off for down town Toronto. I ended up spending four days in his company as we travelled around visiting friends. I got to meet Judy and reconnect with Jevan, a young lady I once encountered while at the SCORE camp run by the CNIB. She certainly seems to have found her stride in life. I was surprised she remembered me especially from that long ago. It was a very pleasant bit of travel and visiting.
I also got to visit Michelle McQuigge along with Steve. We showed her how our iPHONES worked and let her take them for a spin. She loves her old Nokia phone with its tiny keyboard. Given her amazing facility to text rapidly versus my agonized snail's pace tortured texting, I can't exactly blame her. Texting is far less a priority for me than for her. The benefits of having an iPHONE far outweigh the annoyance that I find typing on it to be. Not so for Michelle. Our discussion was pretty far-ranging and she seemed full of energy. She certainly handles a knife well when chopping vegetables. Steve and she seemed to hit it off well right away as I suspected they would. Sadly, during that first day, I lost the speaker for my Trekkor Breeze. They cost $25 each. It's the second one of those which I've had to purchase as the first one broke. While I was at it, I also bought a new battery for the Breeze. Add the expense of a set of Urban Ear headphones for my iPHONE as well as renewing my Apple Care plan for my iPHONE and you've got a pretty expensive start to 2012. We never checked the kind of cab someone found for us at the subway station so there was no way to inquire about the speaker. The driver was convinced that the noise was the seatbelt dangling and that's what I thought until we were well away from the cab. A mistake I don't plan on making again any time soon. From now on, the speaker goes into my pocket even during short cab rides or whenever it's not in use. An easily avoidable stupid absent-minded mistake on my part.
I was able to attend Meko's birthday celebration due to weather completely changing initial plans for Tuesday. Tuesday was just too cold to think of travelling. Stephen and I had a pleasant relaxed day at the Murgaski house. I got to show Steve a bit of Backgammon and we caught up with what had captured our interests over the past while. As always, the food was great and the conversation stimulating. I've always felt very comfortable and open around the Murgaski's and hope Steve has felt the same around my parents as has seemed to be the case over the many years of our friendship.
Wednesday was a chance to reconnect with Earle, Meko, and others I haven't seen in quite a while. I guess the last time I saw a lot of them was at Steve's going away party before he headed off to India. What an awesome adventure that turned out to be. Earle has a very spacious sounding apartment. He seems pretty happy with it over all. After hearing about that incredible fire in 200 Wellesley, I guess I had expected to find him in a far smaller more cramped space with the added presumption that most units in the building would be similarly small cramped affairs. The reality is of course quite different. It's too bad he had to lose some irreplaceable stuff as a result of the fire but I'm glad he wasn't anywhere near it when it happened. I remember the newscasters remarking how people would just go out on their balconies when they could have left the building. 2011 really seems to have been an eventful year for a lot of us. It's as if time just reached out and caught us in its fast-moving currents for a while.
While Earle, Steve and I sat together in his place, talk naturally turned to others from our grade school days when we first became acquainted. Apparently, Daniel still thinks rather uncharitably of both Earle and I. He apparently thinks we're Radio Shack quality people, whatever that means, and that we should be eliminated. I couldn't help but observe that when dealing with such remarks, one should always consider The Source. They got it. I'm amazed that he's still thinking about me at all after such a long time. I really must have struck one heck of a nerve with my last letter to him all those years ago. Hopefully, it'll ultimately work to his good and help him become a better person. That was, after all, the spirit in which I wrote it. I don't wish him any misfortune at all but believe he'll bring that upon himself unless he's changed or will change substantially from the man I once knew.
Steve and Earle both have superb mobility skills combined with a sense of location and geographical context that I can only dream of. The ease with which Steve guided me around the city was nothing short of profound. Even after extensive lessons in an area, I don't enjoy anywhere near that level of sense of location. I'm always waiting and hoping that next landmark will appear and dreading that it won't because I can't keep a larger mental map in my head for any length of time. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if I actually move around a little more safely. Steve remarked that he thinks my place was nicely set up. It certainly is and I guess I do tend to keep it fairly neat. Still, I'd think his place would turn out somewhat similar if and when he obtains one. He still sees advantages living with his parents. They're very nice folks much like my own. Also, he has more freedom of action due to his navigation skills than I do. Even so, I would still conjecture that it would do Steve's sense of self and family good to have his own apartment. This is especially true when you start to connect with the community. I couldn't put into words how much that has helped me deal with everything.
Last week's trip has certainly opened things up in a pretty deep way. I keenly look forward to similar adventures in the future as ODSP economics permits. As much as my old friends help me get around, I believe I can help them in other ways as we all navigate life in this strange place society has put us. Earle wants to come out to my place for a weekend to show me more of the Mac operating system and feels I didn't give it enough of a chance. I would welcome such a tour from someone so accomplished and experienced as he is. However, I simply don't see myself just abandoning Windows even for a month as has been suggested to me. Simply put, I have other things on the go than mastering a whole other operating system. If I find that it can really do things better for me, that's great. I'll certainly make use of what I have. However, after my initial experience, I need a higher degree of proof that it's really worth my time mastering it. I just haven't been swept along with all the hipe. For me, the main blessing here is simply having reconnected with Earle, Meko, and others and not feeling like it's just a one-time thing. I absolutely welcome this new doorway which has opened even as I continue to hope for greater community involvement here in Meadowvale.
Some of that will happen fairly shortly. I've been invited out for drinks with people from my church who I never got a chance to connect with over the holidays. Doug and Nan are always a blast to be with. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting with John Morgan. Haven't seen him in quite some time. I'll be showing him some of what my iPHONE can do.
It's now very early Monday morning. I just had the most disgusting disturbing dream that has graced my subconscious in at least a year. I had a great time with everyone last night and don't think I deserved this nasty mental nugget at all. In the dream, I had to chop off the head of a deserter or face the prospect of him still being decapitated and my being drawn and quartered for good measure. He was such a nice man too. I felt absolutely rotten but there was no way out of the situation. My sword stroke wasn't strong enough to do the job neatly so I ended up lying the guy down and sawing through the rest of his neck. I don't believe I've ever felt so utterly disgusted and bad about what I was doing in my sleep before. You can appreciate why the thought of just lying down for more sleep seems quite absurd at the moment.
The one major event that I haven't written about at all is that I've broken up with Emily. There were a number of pretty big differences right from the start. My compassion can lead me into situations that I just don't have the resources to handle. I've got to be honest and acknowledge that my strong desire to find a life partner played a part in this misadventure also. Emily just completely shut down on me over the holidays being afraid that telling me her problems would have lead to the result which has now happened. Too much special meaningful time passed without her being a part of it at all. It made me see clearly how a whole lot of circumstances are going to have to come together for her to achieve any sort of real stability. As a friend, I believe I can be of real help to her in this journey. However, I just don't have the ego anymore to think that I have what it takes to deal with someone who just shuts off communication and disappears on someone she loves. She did the wrong thing for the best of reasons. I feel bad about how things went and wish I could turn back the emotional clock somehow. However, whatever spark of love I felt has simply disappeared. It's as simple as it is messy and un fare.
given all that's happened, I find myself in a place where that need for love has taken somewhat more of a back seat. Life has at last reached a point where I can see myself really being content as a single man from here on out. I would still very much hope to find someone stable, cheerful and intelligent to partner with. Having had two ladies show interest in me over this past year, I find that I have a great deal more hope that I will eventually come across a more suitable match for me. I fervently hope that Emily too will eventually find comfort with someone who shares more of her interests, likes Stevie Wonder's music, and doesn't mind the prospect of owning cats among other things. I very much want her to find happiness in life. Sadly, I've simply come to the conclusion that I'm not the one who can give it to her. It looks like we'll be able to stay friends once she's had some time to adjust her feelings toward me. Having that happen with someone who is actually near enough and has the time to come and see me would certainly be a refreshing welcome turn of events. Of course, there's still the question of whether or not to put up my dating profiles. I guess I probably will despite how ineffective they've been. Increasingly, I'm of the opinion that the next one will be someone who I either meet locally, at Lake Joe, or who finds and takes an interest in my blog. I guess the dating profiles can help lead people to that. If nothing else, it'll help me move on a little having left out my welcome cards so to speak. Meanwhile, I have a sense that there's now enough opportunity, meaningful connection and activity in life so that it doesn't feel like there are major pieces missing. I no longer feel so incomplete like a puzzle piece that can't quite slot in anywhere.
At last, it's approaching seven in the morning. That's a far more reasonable hour to shave, shower and prepare for the day. I'm feeling a tad tired but otherwise quite good about things. Writing things down always tends to help me work through stuff. I feel like this blog entry hasn't done these holidays justice. I've had such a wonderful and profoundly meaningful time. What I've captured here seems so inadequate but will simply have to serve. This year has already started off so full of surprises. I've never had a Winter like this which hasn't slowed to a painful crawl of days so similar and devoid of events that they blend into each other. Life really seems to have changed fundamentally for me. I'm very grateful for such changes and the challenge they bring. I know that God has blessed me with the friends and family to see me safely through them one way or another.
Christmas was an absolute joy this year. So was Christmas eve. usually, I would go to church on one of those two days. However, unlike every other year, my family had events on both those days and then nothing on Boxing day. I doubt that'll happen again in the next decade. I don't feel at all convicted about not attending church over the holidays. God knows my heart and where it's at. Looking back over the past couple of weeks, I've actually spent quite some time thinking about and discussing faith with my friends. Christmas day was spent in Hamilton in my brother's house. That seems to be the best thing to do with three little ones who can open and play with all their stuff. They had a terrific day and seemed to appreciate all their gifts. Ava wrote her name right away in the notebook I gave her. The flashlight from Mountain Equipment Co-op went over very well. Dad now has some money to spend on iTUNES. Mom has six games from Bigfish Games plus credits for a couple more thanks to one small mistake and the generosity of Bigfish Games making it right. After all the hustle and bustle, it was good to have nothing planned on Boxing day. I needed it to recover. I was given a pair of gloves with conductive material in the fingertips which let me use my iPHONE while wearing gloves. That was a very thoughtful idea which really stood out for me this year.
The space between Christmas and New Year's was a tad empty in places. I had family visits and also found that catching up with people online somewhat softened the solitary days. I also found myself re-reading Stephen King's The Stand. Every once in a while, that book pulls me in for another dark journey. The time passed surprisingly quickly as I made preparations for my upcoming gathering. Another pastime was Pontes Backgammon. It's a terrific polished implementation of accessible Backgammon on the computer. I bought it for 13 Euros and will be enjoying it for years. It allows for single play against the computer or two-player games on the same computer or over the Internet. You can chat with your human opponents via text message. Check out what this Romanian charity group has pulled off at:
www.backgammon.pontes.ro
I'd still love to see how Spoonbill Software would do Backgammon. That would be nifty. However, it's hard to imagine a better piece of software. I guess the doubling cube is a missing feature. Mr. Humfreys would doubtless find other neat things to ad were he to attempt it.
New Year's Eve was interesting. The day began early as I caught the very tail end of Jonathan Mosen's new year's show from New Zealand. I later heard and enjoyed the podcast when more fully awake. The morning took a decidedly crappy turn when I discovered that the drain in my sink was plugged. Not wanting to bother anybody on New Year's Eve, I tried everything including plunging the drain and putting vinegar and baking soda into it. Nothing worked though and I had to call the superintend ant. They called the contractors who came out and ended up replacing my old pipe with a very smooth new one. They used a blowtorch to cut out the old one and/or put the new pipe in. Given all the wood and other combustibles in the vicinity of my kitchen cupboards, that was the last thing I was expecting to hear. I've never actually felt one of those contraptions but must conclude that they offer an amazingly focused level of precision. They also must be far smaller than I previously conjectured. I then had to clean up the place and counter area quite thoroughly before I felt I could continue with my day. Thank God they straightened that mess out so promptly. My drain now sucks down water like it never has before.
Half the potential guests I had invited failed to show up for my New Year's party. There were six of us for a brief while. Joseph and Rose wanted to also be a part of the church's New Year's activities. Adam, Jeanette, Stephen and I stayed up until around four AM. I'm very glad Joseph and Rose were able to make it for a good chunk of the festivities and got to know my other three guests. It says a lot that I still had such a good time even though so many friends failed to appear. I very much hope I can get more friends at some future gathering. It's always so fascinating to hear friends who have never met each other and how they interact. A smaller group trades that pleasure for a more intimate level of conversation that I find equally enjoyable. There was some disappointment but this was far outweighed by a strong sense of just how blessed I am by the friendship of others.
That sense was further strengthened by a journey I went on at Stephen's invitation after we had recovered from the New Year's celebration. We spent another couple of days at my place. Shirley came for a visit that I believe was much longer than she had originally intended. Good conversation just kept it going for something around four hours. Originally, I think she intended to stay perhaps half an hour. I hope she makes it to a New Year's gathering one of these years. She'd fit right in and enjoy herself despite the age gap. On Monday, Stephen and I set off for down town Toronto. I ended up spending four days in his company as we travelled around visiting friends. I got to meet Judy and reconnect with Jevan, a young lady I once encountered while at the SCORE camp run by the CNIB. She certainly seems to have found her stride in life. I was surprised she remembered me especially from that long ago. It was a very pleasant bit of travel and visiting.
I also got to visit Michelle McQuigge along with Steve. We showed her how our iPHONES worked and let her take them for a spin. She loves her old Nokia phone with its tiny keyboard. Given her amazing facility to text rapidly versus my agonized snail's pace tortured texting, I can't exactly blame her. Texting is far less a priority for me than for her. The benefits of having an iPHONE far outweigh the annoyance that I find typing on it to be. Not so for Michelle. Our discussion was pretty far-ranging and she seemed full of energy. She certainly handles a knife well when chopping vegetables. Steve and she seemed to hit it off well right away as I suspected they would. Sadly, during that first day, I lost the speaker for my Trekkor Breeze. They cost $25 each. It's the second one of those which I've had to purchase as the first one broke. While I was at it, I also bought a new battery for the Breeze. Add the expense of a set of Urban Ear headphones for my iPHONE as well as renewing my Apple Care plan for my iPHONE and you've got a pretty expensive start to 2012. We never checked the kind of cab someone found for us at the subway station so there was no way to inquire about the speaker. The driver was convinced that the noise was the seatbelt dangling and that's what I thought until we were well away from the cab. A mistake I don't plan on making again any time soon. From now on, the speaker goes into my pocket even during short cab rides or whenever it's not in use. An easily avoidable stupid absent-minded mistake on my part.
I was able to attend Meko's birthday celebration due to weather completely changing initial plans for Tuesday. Tuesday was just too cold to think of travelling. Stephen and I had a pleasant relaxed day at the Murgaski house. I got to show Steve a bit of Backgammon and we caught up with what had captured our interests over the past while. As always, the food was great and the conversation stimulating. I've always felt very comfortable and open around the Murgaski's and hope Steve has felt the same around my parents as has seemed to be the case over the many years of our friendship.
Wednesday was a chance to reconnect with Earle, Meko, and others I haven't seen in quite a while. I guess the last time I saw a lot of them was at Steve's going away party before he headed off to India. What an awesome adventure that turned out to be. Earle has a very spacious sounding apartment. He seems pretty happy with it over all. After hearing about that incredible fire in 200 Wellesley, I guess I had expected to find him in a far smaller more cramped space with the added presumption that most units in the building would be similarly small cramped affairs. The reality is of course quite different. It's too bad he had to lose some irreplaceable stuff as a result of the fire but I'm glad he wasn't anywhere near it when it happened. I remember the newscasters remarking how people would just go out on their balconies when they could have left the building. 2011 really seems to have been an eventful year for a lot of us. It's as if time just reached out and caught us in its fast-moving currents for a while.
While Earle, Steve and I sat together in his place, talk naturally turned to others from our grade school days when we first became acquainted. Apparently, Daniel still thinks rather uncharitably of both Earle and I. He apparently thinks we're Radio Shack quality people, whatever that means, and that we should be eliminated. I couldn't help but observe that when dealing with such remarks, one should always consider The Source. They got it. I'm amazed that he's still thinking about me at all after such a long time. I really must have struck one heck of a nerve with my last letter to him all those years ago. Hopefully, it'll ultimately work to his good and help him become a better person. That was, after all, the spirit in which I wrote it. I don't wish him any misfortune at all but believe he'll bring that upon himself unless he's changed or will change substantially from the man I once knew.
Steve and Earle both have superb mobility skills combined with a sense of location and geographical context that I can only dream of. The ease with which Steve guided me around the city was nothing short of profound. Even after extensive lessons in an area, I don't enjoy anywhere near that level of sense of location. I'm always waiting and hoping that next landmark will appear and dreading that it won't because I can't keep a larger mental map in my head for any length of time. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if I actually move around a little more safely. Steve remarked that he thinks my place was nicely set up. It certainly is and I guess I do tend to keep it fairly neat. Still, I'd think his place would turn out somewhat similar if and when he obtains one. He still sees advantages living with his parents. They're very nice folks much like my own. Also, he has more freedom of action due to his navigation skills than I do. Even so, I would still conjecture that it would do Steve's sense of self and family good to have his own apartment. This is especially true when you start to connect with the community. I couldn't put into words how much that has helped me deal with everything.
Last week's trip has certainly opened things up in a pretty deep way. I keenly look forward to similar adventures in the future as ODSP economics permits. As much as my old friends help me get around, I believe I can help them in other ways as we all navigate life in this strange place society has put us. Earle wants to come out to my place for a weekend to show me more of the Mac operating system and feels I didn't give it enough of a chance. I would welcome such a tour from someone so accomplished and experienced as he is. However, I simply don't see myself just abandoning Windows even for a month as has been suggested to me. Simply put, I have other things on the go than mastering a whole other operating system. If I find that it can really do things better for me, that's great. I'll certainly make use of what I have. However, after my initial experience, I need a higher degree of proof that it's really worth my time mastering it. I just haven't been swept along with all the hipe. For me, the main blessing here is simply having reconnected with Earle, Meko, and others and not feeling like it's just a one-time thing. I absolutely welcome this new doorway which has opened even as I continue to hope for greater community involvement here in Meadowvale.
Some of that will happen fairly shortly. I've been invited out for drinks with people from my church who I never got a chance to connect with over the holidays. Doug and Nan are always a blast to be with. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting with John Morgan. Haven't seen him in quite some time. I'll be showing him some of what my iPHONE can do.
It's now very early Monday morning. I just had the most disgusting disturbing dream that has graced my subconscious in at least a year. I had a great time with everyone last night and don't think I deserved this nasty mental nugget at all. In the dream, I had to chop off the head of a deserter or face the prospect of him still being decapitated and my being drawn and quartered for good measure. He was such a nice man too. I felt absolutely rotten but there was no way out of the situation. My sword stroke wasn't strong enough to do the job neatly so I ended up lying the guy down and sawing through the rest of his neck. I don't believe I've ever felt so utterly disgusted and bad about what I was doing in my sleep before. You can appreciate why the thought of just lying down for more sleep seems quite absurd at the moment.
The one major event that I haven't written about at all is that I've broken up with Emily. There were a number of pretty big differences right from the start. My compassion can lead me into situations that I just don't have the resources to handle. I've got to be honest and acknowledge that my strong desire to find a life partner played a part in this misadventure also. Emily just completely shut down on me over the holidays being afraid that telling me her problems would have lead to the result which has now happened. Too much special meaningful time passed without her being a part of it at all. It made me see clearly how a whole lot of circumstances are going to have to come together for her to achieve any sort of real stability. As a friend, I believe I can be of real help to her in this journey. However, I just don't have the ego anymore to think that I have what it takes to deal with someone who just shuts off communication and disappears on someone she loves. She did the wrong thing for the best of reasons. I feel bad about how things went and wish I could turn back the emotional clock somehow. However, whatever spark of love I felt has simply disappeared. It's as simple as it is messy and un fare.
given all that's happened, I find myself in a place where that need for love has taken somewhat more of a back seat. Life has at last reached a point where I can see myself really being content as a single man from here on out. I would still very much hope to find someone stable, cheerful and intelligent to partner with. Having had two ladies show interest in me over this past year, I find that I have a great deal more hope that I will eventually come across a more suitable match for me. I fervently hope that Emily too will eventually find comfort with someone who shares more of her interests, likes Stevie Wonder's music, and doesn't mind the prospect of owning cats among other things. I very much want her to find happiness in life. Sadly, I've simply come to the conclusion that I'm not the one who can give it to her. It looks like we'll be able to stay friends once she's had some time to adjust her feelings toward me. Having that happen with someone who is actually near enough and has the time to come and see me would certainly be a refreshing welcome turn of events. Of course, there's still the question of whether or not to put up my dating profiles. I guess I probably will despite how ineffective they've been. Increasingly, I'm of the opinion that the next one will be someone who I either meet locally, at Lake Joe, or who finds and takes an interest in my blog. I guess the dating profiles can help lead people to that. If nothing else, it'll help me move on a little having left out my welcome cards so to speak. Meanwhile, I have a sense that there's now enough opportunity, meaningful connection and activity in life so that it doesn't feel like there are major pieces missing. I no longer feel so incomplete like a puzzle piece that can't quite slot in anywhere.
At last, it's approaching seven in the morning. That's a far more reasonable hour to shave, shower and prepare for the day. I'm feeling a tad tired but otherwise quite good about things. Writing things down always tends to help me work through stuff. I feel like this blog entry hasn't done these holidays justice. I've had such a wonderful and profoundly meaningful time. What I've captured here seems so inadequate but will simply have to serve. This year has already started off so full of surprises. I've never had a Winter like this which hasn't slowed to a painful crawl of days so similar and devoid of events that they blend into each other. Life really seems to have changed fundamentally for me. I'm very grateful for such changes and the challenge they bring. I know that God has blessed me with the friends and family to see me safely through them one way or another.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Good Times Ahead and Behind
Hello everyone. Figured it was time to put another blog posting up there so readers could move on from the darker heavier last posting. It's been a pretty interesting couple of weeks. Insomnia has struck again rather hard lately. I think perhaps the change of seasons as winter weather starts to arrive may have set it off. Thankfully, I've avoided hitting absolute bottom this time and may even be on the way back upward. Getting my darkest moments written down and out there in the open has been wonderfully cathartic. I hadn't realized how much it had been weighing upon me all this time. I guess it's my way of truly turning the page on things. This year has really been one huge page turner for me.
The forum at the Dam last week went exceedingly well and we had a great discussion on societal expectations and self-worth. Every so often, that kind of thing happens to remind me what hopes I had when I originally volunteered and keep them alive. There won't be any more forums until after the holidays. However, there are a couple more drop ins before Christmas. There's also a Christmas party this week which I'll be attending. It'll be interesting to see how the teens react to that. I haven't gotten the sense that any of them are religious.
Last week, I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-op store in Burlington. I've been thinking of purchasing a travel pack for quite a while now. As it turned out, my parents purchased the pack as my Christmas present for which I'm very grateful. For the record, I ended up with the Sojourn travel pack. There was some confusion about which pack I preferred. I got the one I liked better but didn't realize that due to some mix-up possibly about which racks they were placed on, this pack was the Sojourn rather than the Walkabout. What finally twigged me to this was being completely unable to find any sleeping bag compartment as was mentioned in the Walkabout description. The Sojourn lacks such a compartment. It has internal compression straps which I could use to hold a sleeping bag neatly in the main pack. I've never been great at rolling those so that's going to be helpful. The main pack has plenty of room for stuff. The day pack is roomy enough for my computer gear, water bottle, and other items. I'll use it when I go to the Dam.
It's Tuesday afternoon now. Just had a delicious brunch of bacon and eggs. The week is going pretty well so far. My Christmas shopping is as done as it'll get. I have to get mom and Emily's gifts somewhat closer to the day. This time of year really shows how very different things are for Emily than for me. She wasn't in a very cheerful mood last time I talked with her. That's very understandable given her circumstances. I'm glad she's found somewhere to go on Christmas day. We've just begun the process of getting to know each other and it feels far too early to bring her into a family Christmas. I'm hoping she can join me for my second New Year's party here. That ought to be something special. I can't help but think about and sympathize with her. I'd love to be able to snap my fingers and fix everything for her but that's a process which takes time, love and care. We've decided to keep carefully exploring the possibility of being more than just friends. I'm glad she had a change of heart there. That took courage finding the strength to hope. Things should begin to improve for her in the new year. This is, I hope, the bottom of the painful valley life has forced her into. I very much look forward to trying to help her find a more stable plateau in the months ahead. I've reached a point in life where I'll be alright if a relationship beyond friends doesn't ultimately prove to be in the cards. Here, there's enough to keep me going in life either way. It's a very good position of stability from which to seek companionship even if it somewhat limits prospective partners. If things don't work out for us as more than friends, it'll certainly be painful but nowhere near as devastating as losing Janene was. That has far more to do with the circumstances in which I now find myself than with Emily. She isn't used to seeing herself as of much value or as very intelligent. She is though. I've just begun to scratch the surface there in our conversations. She doesn't have formal educational credentials but she has absorbed an awesome amount of practical street wisdom.
Over the past while, I've gotten to see a number of friends including Adam and his girlfriend Jeanette. It was great spending the day with them despite my insomnia-induced nodding off at one point. They'll likely be at my new year's party. So will Mark and Wendy who I also got to have dinner with here at the apartment. Plans to try a new chicken place fell apart so we ended up cooking dinner and eating here. It's always a treat having them over. A friend from Meadowvale Secondary School has contacted me via Facebook. Patrick and I used to have the odd class together and had some wonderful talks back then. A few of us including Adam and I will hopefully be able to get together with him here in Meadowvale for a small fun reunion. Facebook just keeps proving its worth despite all its hastles.
Today has been very pleasant and busy. It has more than made up for the frustratingly slow and unproductive cession at the Dam yesterday. None of the kids did more than say a quick hi. It was still nice chatting with the staff and volunteers. I got precisely nowhere on the article I'm working on for a future church newsletter. I'm far from giving up on it but it's proving a damnably tough nut to crack. Today started out with the yearly Christmas breakfast in our building. I chatted with a couple of building management staff I had never come across before. Shirley also showed up for a good chunk of it later on. People were very relaxed and things went quite splendidly. A bunch of them recognized me this time. Yet another positive sign that I'm starting to really belong here in this community.
Dad picked me up and we went to a few places. He treats me to beer and I stocked up on Paddock Wood Czech Mate and Sleeman Fine Porter. The Paddock Wood beer is my favourite discovery of the year in that department. It has a different fruity taste that I find very refreshing. One of those things which you'd think wouldn't work but really does. I believe I'll wait until tomorrow or Friday to see how the Sleeman Fine Porter stacks up. Dad and I each had two martinis with lunch. That's plenty of alcohol for one day. Thought I had tried pretty much every Sleeman beer there was but didn't know they made a porter. I'm expecting an excellent and interesting flavour. Sleeman's is about as mainstream as I tend to get with my beer selections but they're not above putting out some nicely unique beers from time to time. I enjoy different beers. All the more when I get to share them with guests.
We had a look around the Dollar store where I came across a gift for little Amia. That was my only remaining missing gift to obtain. Last weekend, I ended up seeing Carine and Kevin for the first time in a while. They had to do some Christmas shopping and I chose to go along. That gave me a chance to grab a few small gifts for certain people who shall remain nameless lest they happen to read my blog. I've been very blessed over this past year and I always enjoy sharing as much of that as is practical with others. Carine has a treadmill which may suit my needs and spacious bedroom admirably. Something to investigate over the next while. Thanks to my grandmother's recent generosity, I can actually afford to pay a little for it. I've wanted one of those in here for quite some time now. I've never felt comfortable listening to headphones in more public environments. This way, I can listen to whatever's on my netbook while exercising and not disturb anybody else. A while ago, I started a savings account which automatically took ten dollars per month from my checking account. I've put around $200 in there from my grandmother's timely gift. That would have taken around two years to save up myself. I'm still not quite at the point where I could purchase a new laptop or something like that if I had to but I'm a ton closer to it than I thought I'd be. My little jewel of a netbook is still holding up wonderfully so I should be there well before it kicks the bucket.
For brunch at the Symposium Cafe, I decided to try their barbecued chicken dinner. It didn't disappoint. The chicken was delicious and they do very enjoyable vegetables and roasted potatoes to go with it. Definitely something I'll have again. Dad's still got a bit of his cold but it seems like he's getting better. He's thrilled with his iPAD and has picked up some games for my nieces to play on it when he visits them.
The groceries arrived in good time this afternoon. One new experiment I'm trying is fair trade chocolate. Ken's lecture on how most of the world's chocolate gets its coco struck a nerve with more than just me. Don't know how effective it was for the teens but it got me thinking twice about buying my usual Mars bars. I decided to try Coco Camino chocolate bars and bought two hundred-gram ones. Thankfully, they're divided into small squares making rationing easier. It makes chocolate more of an expense and reduces how much I eat at once. We'll see how that goes over the next while. It's a small gesture in the grand scheme of things but I feel better for trying. I got almost everything I ordered. There were four substitutions which were perfectly fine with me. I am, however, disappointed that they didn't have Kind Bars this time. I've come to very much enjoy those as a healthy if somewhat pricey snack once in a while. I especially like the almond coconut ones. Despite that tiny disappointment, I'm very well stocked for the holiday period ahead. Far more so than a number of people I know. It's certainly an interesting place full of many oddities that society has seen fit to stick me in. I very much hope that history remembers me as a man who counted and shared his blessings. ODSP only works as well as it does for me because of a number of fortunate circumstances which attend my life and not others on the system. Chief among those circumstances are a stable supportive family and a wonderful cast of friends new and old. Also, I really lucked out beyond my wildest hopes with subsidized housing after ten years of life in limbo. I can't imagine a more perfect place for me to live short of Heaven itself. In many ways, I'm a profoundly lucky man.
I've been re-reading Robert J. Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment over the past few days. It's neat to read a book about a year you've lived through that was written around a decade earlier. That book is just as profound as his WWW trilogy which I've just finished at last. That guy has so much hope for the future. I'd love to meet him some day. His books seem to pass that optimistic perspective on to their readers. He sets me a very fine example as I write this blog, work on other creative projects, and conduct my extraordinary life.
Tomorrow, I'll be attending the Dam's annual Christmas party during the evening. The fire alarm tests will make the next couple of days very un conducive to lengthy writing of any sort. I'll use them as an opportunity to catch up with news and also with my favourite podcasts which have been very neglected this past half year or so. Perhaps, this trove of countless unheard hours of listening material is one of the largest testaments of just how much life has changed for me over the past year. Like good friends, I know they're waiting and ready if I should need them again. In particular, I feel a tad guilty for missing episodes of Spark and From Our Own Correspondents. How appropriate. Winamp, in its infinite random wisdom, has just picked out Step By Step sung by Huey Lewis & The News. A perfect song for my reflections. Life is going great right now. Not perfect. I don't live in some sort of faerie tale. There are plenty of limitations, thwarted desires and frustrations. When you get right down to it though, they're the friction that keeps everything real. As 2011 comes to a close, I find myself in a wonderful groove. My efforts have paid off in splendid fashion and there's plenty of scope for action. Lots to learn, enjoy, and do. How appropriate. Winamp has now picked out Vanessa Williams Oh How the Years go By. Inspiring music, both pop and instrumental, is certainly one of the many blessings I count. This song once caused me to painfully dwell on not finding a soul mate with whom I could face life's ups and downs. Now, it gives me hope of doing so while causing me to reflect on the many friends I've found to share my adventures with. Hope, effort and patience really do pay off. I keenly look forward to what 2012 brings.
The forum at the Dam last week went exceedingly well and we had a great discussion on societal expectations and self-worth. Every so often, that kind of thing happens to remind me what hopes I had when I originally volunteered and keep them alive. There won't be any more forums until after the holidays. However, there are a couple more drop ins before Christmas. There's also a Christmas party this week which I'll be attending. It'll be interesting to see how the teens react to that. I haven't gotten the sense that any of them are religious.
Last week, I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-op store in Burlington. I've been thinking of purchasing a travel pack for quite a while now. As it turned out, my parents purchased the pack as my Christmas present for which I'm very grateful. For the record, I ended up with the Sojourn travel pack. There was some confusion about which pack I preferred. I got the one I liked better but didn't realize that due to some mix-up possibly about which racks they were placed on, this pack was the Sojourn rather than the Walkabout. What finally twigged me to this was being completely unable to find any sleeping bag compartment as was mentioned in the Walkabout description. The Sojourn lacks such a compartment. It has internal compression straps which I could use to hold a sleeping bag neatly in the main pack. I've never been great at rolling those so that's going to be helpful. The main pack has plenty of room for stuff. The day pack is roomy enough for my computer gear, water bottle, and other items. I'll use it when I go to the Dam.
It's Tuesday afternoon now. Just had a delicious brunch of bacon and eggs. The week is going pretty well so far. My Christmas shopping is as done as it'll get. I have to get mom and Emily's gifts somewhat closer to the day. This time of year really shows how very different things are for Emily than for me. She wasn't in a very cheerful mood last time I talked with her. That's very understandable given her circumstances. I'm glad she's found somewhere to go on Christmas day. We've just begun the process of getting to know each other and it feels far too early to bring her into a family Christmas. I'm hoping she can join me for my second New Year's party here. That ought to be something special. I can't help but think about and sympathize with her. I'd love to be able to snap my fingers and fix everything for her but that's a process which takes time, love and care. We've decided to keep carefully exploring the possibility of being more than just friends. I'm glad she had a change of heart there. That took courage finding the strength to hope. Things should begin to improve for her in the new year. This is, I hope, the bottom of the painful valley life has forced her into. I very much look forward to trying to help her find a more stable plateau in the months ahead. I've reached a point in life where I'll be alright if a relationship beyond friends doesn't ultimately prove to be in the cards. Here, there's enough to keep me going in life either way. It's a very good position of stability from which to seek companionship even if it somewhat limits prospective partners. If things don't work out for us as more than friends, it'll certainly be painful but nowhere near as devastating as losing Janene was. That has far more to do with the circumstances in which I now find myself than with Emily. She isn't used to seeing herself as of much value or as very intelligent. She is though. I've just begun to scratch the surface there in our conversations. She doesn't have formal educational credentials but she has absorbed an awesome amount of practical street wisdom.
Over the past while, I've gotten to see a number of friends including Adam and his girlfriend Jeanette. It was great spending the day with them despite my insomnia-induced nodding off at one point. They'll likely be at my new year's party. So will Mark and Wendy who I also got to have dinner with here at the apartment. Plans to try a new chicken place fell apart so we ended up cooking dinner and eating here. It's always a treat having them over. A friend from Meadowvale Secondary School has contacted me via Facebook. Patrick and I used to have the odd class together and had some wonderful talks back then. A few of us including Adam and I will hopefully be able to get together with him here in Meadowvale for a small fun reunion. Facebook just keeps proving its worth despite all its hastles.
Today has been very pleasant and busy. It has more than made up for the frustratingly slow and unproductive cession at the Dam yesterday. None of the kids did more than say a quick hi. It was still nice chatting with the staff and volunteers. I got precisely nowhere on the article I'm working on for a future church newsletter. I'm far from giving up on it but it's proving a damnably tough nut to crack. Today started out with the yearly Christmas breakfast in our building. I chatted with a couple of building management staff I had never come across before. Shirley also showed up for a good chunk of it later on. People were very relaxed and things went quite splendidly. A bunch of them recognized me this time. Yet another positive sign that I'm starting to really belong here in this community.
Dad picked me up and we went to a few places. He treats me to beer and I stocked up on Paddock Wood Czech Mate and Sleeman Fine Porter. The Paddock Wood beer is my favourite discovery of the year in that department. It has a different fruity taste that I find very refreshing. One of those things which you'd think wouldn't work but really does. I believe I'll wait until tomorrow or Friday to see how the Sleeman Fine Porter stacks up. Dad and I each had two martinis with lunch. That's plenty of alcohol for one day. Thought I had tried pretty much every Sleeman beer there was but didn't know they made a porter. I'm expecting an excellent and interesting flavour. Sleeman's is about as mainstream as I tend to get with my beer selections but they're not above putting out some nicely unique beers from time to time. I enjoy different beers. All the more when I get to share them with guests.
We had a look around the Dollar store where I came across a gift for little Amia. That was my only remaining missing gift to obtain. Last weekend, I ended up seeing Carine and Kevin for the first time in a while. They had to do some Christmas shopping and I chose to go along. That gave me a chance to grab a few small gifts for certain people who shall remain nameless lest they happen to read my blog. I've been very blessed over this past year and I always enjoy sharing as much of that as is practical with others. Carine has a treadmill which may suit my needs and spacious bedroom admirably. Something to investigate over the next while. Thanks to my grandmother's recent generosity, I can actually afford to pay a little for it. I've wanted one of those in here for quite some time now. I've never felt comfortable listening to headphones in more public environments. This way, I can listen to whatever's on my netbook while exercising and not disturb anybody else. A while ago, I started a savings account which automatically took ten dollars per month from my checking account. I've put around $200 in there from my grandmother's timely gift. That would have taken around two years to save up myself. I'm still not quite at the point where I could purchase a new laptop or something like that if I had to but I'm a ton closer to it than I thought I'd be. My little jewel of a netbook is still holding up wonderfully so I should be there well before it kicks the bucket.
For brunch at the Symposium Cafe, I decided to try their barbecued chicken dinner. It didn't disappoint. The chicken was delicious and they do very enjoyable vegetables and roasted potatoes to go with it. Definitely something I'll have again. Dad's still got a bit of his cold but it seems like he's getting better. He's thrilled with his iPAD and has picked up some games for my nieces to play on it when he visits them.
The groceries arrived in good time this afternoon. One new experiment I'm trying is fair trade chocolate. Ken's lecture on how most of the world's chocolate gets its coco struck a nerve with more than just me. Don't know how effective it was for the teens but it got me thinking twice about buying my usual Mars bars. I decided to try Coco Camino chocolate bars and bought two hundred-gram ones. Thankfully, they're divided into small squares making rationing easier. It makes chocolate more of an expense and reduces how much I eat at once. We'll see how that goes over the next while. It's a small gesture in the grand scheme of things but I feel better for trying. I got almost everything I ordered. There were four substitutions which were perfectly fine with me. I am, however, disappointed that they didn't have Kind Bars this time. I've come to very much enjoy those as a healthy if somewhat pricey snack once in a while. I especially like the almond coconut ones. Despite that tiny disappointment, I'm very well stocked for the holiday period ahead. Far more so than a number of people I know. It's certainly an interesting place full of many oddities that society has seen fit to stick me in. I very much hope that history remembers me as a man who counted and shared his blessings. ODSP only works as well as it does for me because of a number of fortunate circumstances which attend my life and not others on the system. Chief among those circumstances are a stable supportive family and a wonderful cast of friends new and old. Also, I really lucked out beyond my wildest hopes with subsidized housing after ten years of life in limbo. I can't imagine a more perfect place for me to live short of Heaven itself. In many ways, I'm a profoundly lucky man.
I've been re-reading Robert J. Sawyer's The Terminal Experiment over the past few days. It's neat to read a book about a year you've lived through that was written around a decade earlier. That book is just as profound as his WWW trilogy which I've just finished at last. That guy has so much hope for the future. I'd love to meet him some day. His books seem to pass that optimistic perspective on to their readers. He sets me a very fine example as I write this blog, work on other creative projects, and conduct my extraordinary life.
Tomorrow, I'll be attending the Dam's annual Christmas party during the evening. The fire alarm tests will make the next couple of days very un conducive to lengthy writing of any sort. I'll use them as an opportunity to catch up with news and also with my favourite podcasts which have been very neglected this past half year or so. Perhaps, this trove of countless unheard hours of listening material is one of the largest testaments of just how much life has changed for me over the past year. Like good friends, I know they're waiting and ready if I should need them again. In particular, I feel a tad guilty for missing episodes of Spark and From Our Own Correspondents. How appropriate. Winamp, in its infinite random wisdom, has just picked out Step By Step sung by Huey Lewis & The News. A perfect song for my reflections. Life is going great right now. Not perfect. I don't live in some sort of faerie tale. There are plenty of limitations, thwarted desires and frustrations. When you get right down to it though, they're the friction that keeps everything real. As 2011 comes to a close, I find myself in a wonderful groove. My efforts have paid off in splendid fashion and there's plenty of scope for action. Lots to learn, enjoy, and do. How appropriate. Winamp has now picked out Vanessa Williams Oh How the Years go By. Inspiring music, both pop and instrumental, is certainly one of the many blessings I count. This song once caused me to painfully dwell on not finding a soul mate with whom I could face life's ups and downs. Now, it gives me hope of doing so while causing me to reflect on the many friends I've found to share my adventures with. Hope, effort and patience really do pay off. I keenly look forward to what 2012 brings.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Ending it All
Ending It All
In general, people seem to think of me as a patient, cheerful, easy-going guy who usually finds the bright side in situations. Some see me as in fact too optimistic and patient. There was a brief time, however, when these qualities had utterly failed in me. A short time when I was so miserable and devoid of hope that I seriously contemplated ending my life. I never wrote about it afterwards for many reasons. Chief among them was the wish not to cause my friends and family any more pain than was necessary. The period of which I write lasted only a couple of days. Not long at all unless you happen to be seriously contemplating causing your own death.
One of the ways I try to contribute something meaningful and be productive is to share my life story. Such an account would be incomplete if I chose, as most people likely wood, to leave this darkest and most shameful of mental journeys buried in a dingy forgotten corner of my memory. Writing all this down hasn't been fun. It has already led to some hard conversations with people including my father who, naturally enough, had to examine things in detail and try to understand what had brought me to this point. We always want to close the barn door after the horse has left. It's human nature. I know I'm in for more such awkward discussions once this gets out there. I felt compelled to write about this darkest of times in my life for a few reasons. First of all, I sincerely hope that my own brush with thoughts of suicide might in some way serve to help others avoid actually going through with it. If I could find a way up from the bottom of despair, perhaps you will also find the strength to keep hoping , working, and waiting for change. At the time I contemplated ending my life, there seemed absolutely no prospect of meaningful change at all. Finding a way to restore my sense of contentment, purpose and direction just didn't seem at all possible. And yet, despite no job, tight money and no marriage, I'm reasonably content and happy these days. I also hope that my journey to rock bottom serves to illustrate just how important healthy communities actually are. There have to be more ways for marginalized people like me to find meaningful contributive places within communities which allow us to earn both self-respect and that of others. It can't be all about how much money you make. That's incredibly un fare when you're denied the opportunity to make any. There's also a lesson here about how dangerous it can be to put all of one's eggs in a basket which could be kicked away. That's a mistake I never intend to make again for anyone.
Janene had been the light of my life for over two years. For a large portion of that time, we had been engaged. At last it seemed like all my values and efforts had truly counted for something beyond family and friendship. I may not have been able to find a job, but I had at last found a woman who truly loved and valued me enough to want to make a commitment that would change my life. This was what I had longed for even more than I wanted someone to let me into the job market. To at last escape the confines of a society and disability support system which had essentially locked me into an extended isolated childhood. To finally get into a commitment where I could really have a positive impact on someone very dear to me and live something akin to a "normal" Canadian life as I saw it. I wasn't looking for a free ride. Precisely the opposite in fact. I fully expected to cook, clean, and do whatever else I could to make life better for both of us. I didn't want to be pitied. I wanted to actually matter to someone other than my family. I wanted to live life with someone around my age who actually enjoyed going places with me and experiencing new things together. Someone to really build a lifetime of memories with and share all the ups and downs. Marriage is one of the few vocations with wiggle-room enough for insomnia, writer's block and a propensity to disorientation particularly when travelling outdoors. I've always had a sense that I could give more to others in the realm of friendship and relationship.
That seemed finally to be on the verge of happening. We had discussed all the major issues, been completely up front with each other about everything. My friends and family were fully behind us. Unlike my previous marriage which was, in hindsight, entered into on very shaky grounds, things would be different this time. We had done quite a lot together, shared a lot of fun and even some tougher times. We built enough love and trust to become engaged and start seriously planning for a future together. And then, on an Easter Monday, all that was decisively ripped away from me in the space of around an hour as she broke the news to me over our last coffee together. She no longer wanted to marry me. It was like someone had come along with a perverse sort of chainsaw and cut away my future. My recollections of that last evening together are still somewhat fragmented. I was so hurt I could barely think.
The pain of losing a love built up over time with care is indescribable. It devastated me beyond words. Life had suddenly gone from seeming full of hope and possibility to being utterly empty. Looking ahead, I saw years and years passing with agonizing slowness leading absolutely nowhere. What creativity I had would dry up in the face of continued stagnation. There would simply be nothing worth writing about anymore. I needed to somehow find a way to start relating to wider society despite my major difficulties in actually getting anywhere on my own. All I had to offer; my patience, thoughtfulness, ability to see more than one point of view, my compassion, my skills, my honesty.. Everything I was just wouldn't get me connected with others in a permanent, constructive and meaningful way. I'd never get an opportunity to show anybody who could really change things for the better what I could do. My willingness to work or even volunteer my time hadn't mattered a damn to anybody. Now, I saw that neither had my willingness to love. It didn't matter how hard I tried. It simply wasn't ever going to be enough for anybody to give me more than a casual friendship or the odd thank you email.
While waiting for subsidized housing, you're in no position to be making long-term commitments unless it's to a full time job or living arrangement which gets you right off the system and eliminates your need for it. They can't tell you where you are on the list since you may be bumped down by people in greater need. For example, priority is understandably given to people in abusive or otherwise dangerous situations. There's no way to know whether you'll be waiting for years or that something won't come up tomorrow. Being stuck in this limbo living like a child with my parents was very frustrating but thankfully not at all physically or mentally dangerous. Finding out that you don't have the skills to get hired, have tremendous difficulty navigating and are pretty much housebound unassisted, can't even find anywhere in the community to volunteer your time let alone socialize; That's downright soul-destroying. People who look at us and say things like "He should get a job." or "They're so lucky. They can sleep in as late as they want and we pay for it." have no idea at all what they're talking about. Had there been door-to-door transportation, I would have cheerfully volunteered at a distress centre or helping newcomers learn English. Presuming it was moral and reasonably safe, I would have done damned near anything just for a sense of belonging and productivity whether you paid me or not. Had it been possible to flip burgers, deliver pizza or clean out sewage pipes, I would have done it. There just aren't any starting jobs that I could find. That's how an honest intelligent man can end up in his mid thirties with around six months work experience. Everywhere seemed to either want long-term commitments I couldn't make in good conscience or be impractical to get to for me. Everyone passed the buck to someone else. Since I had no problem physically walking, I couldn't qualify for any sort of door to door transportation. People expected the Canadian National Institute for the Blind to do everything for us. That was never their mandate at all. They tried to fill in the incredible gap left by a community unwilling to take the time to understand what slight accommodations they might have made to unleash our potential as participative citizens. Cutbacks and changes have stripped a lot of the more social community-building aspects away over the years. Everything is becoming more centralized and volunteer positions once held by blind people have been replaced by paid sighted people. For an organization who reportedly help the blind, they certainly don't hire a lot of us. The result was a vicious social and employment Catch22 there now seemed no way out of. Getting married had pretty much been my only remaining real hope of breaking out of it. There seemed no chance at all that the painful lessons I had learned during my first attempt at married life would ever be put to good use.
Time after time, I would get just enough experience with an element of adult life to appreciate its meaning and then, it would be snatched away from me. Graduating with my degree from university had been a golden moment. I had earned my BA and still kept my head on well enough to have made a lot of friends. Only then did I discover just how situational all those friendships were. There wasn't even a graduation celebration of any kind. We all just went our separate ways and never looked back. The only full time job I ever had ended due to the company going bankrupt after a mere five months. Once again, the new life and friends just melted away. My marriage had lasted five years failing due to many circumstances including the endless wait for affordable housing. And yet, they contained enough good times for me to understand just how much difference to one's sense of self esteem and place in the world that a steady job and a stable, lasting, healthy relationship makes. Love and companionship were things that were truly worth taking risks for. Janene and I seemed to be heading for a far more stable and healthy marriage full of possibilities. I had come to feel fantastic about being her faience and looked forward to being her husband. I had started making real inroads with her circle of friends and looked ahead to getting to know them further. Now, all of that was torn away from me. I was so damned tired of finding myself with nothing but pain to show for all my troubles. By walking away after saying so often that she wouldn't, she had brought all of my anguish and sense of worthlessness to society to the surf ice.
I felt absolutely powerless. There was no individual upon whom I could justifiably unleash my anger. Even Janene wasn't deserving of any sort of vengeance. Society should have been able to offer me more in life to participate in and hold on to than it had. Intelligence, honesty, cheerfulness, loyalty; all these things damned well should have counted for more. I should have had some sense that my efforts in life were of value to people and leading somewhere, but there were no such indications at all outside the relationship with Janene. That situation wasn't her fault. It was due to a whole host of circumstances, attitudes towards disabled people and societal decisions stretching back for ages. These decisions and attitudes plus my disabilities had conspired to place me in a kind of cage. From this physically comfortable cage, I could hear everyone else going about their lives full of meaning and social substance. More than that, I could hear them complain about how tired, over-worked, and busy they all were. I would have cheerfully walked away from just about anything I owned and done pretty much anything morally acceptable in order to get a real honest crack at living that kind of life. I couldn't break out of the cage on my own. No one was willing to make the kind of commitment necessary to actually open the cage for me. Not even someone who had been deeply in love with me. If she had been ultimately unwilling to, was there realistically any hope of anybody else doing so? I thought not.
The cognitive dissonance I faced through most of my adult life after graduating university was bad enough to deal with. Now, after a wonderful reprieve, it was back for business and magnified tremendously. Cognitive dissonance happens when events in life don't match one's expectations or when one holds opposing beliefs. For instance, a police officer thinks of himself as a good man, but he has had to kill someone in the line of duty. That can really psychologically tare some of them up. My sudden reversal of fortune thrust me into a very dark and different place beyond any mental upheaval I had previously known. All my disappointment and anger had nowhere to go. The glass had gone from brimming full to not only half empty but cracked near the bottom. It's a very dismal spot to occupy emotionally. There should have been more to life, but there wasn't. There should have been places to go, things to do, and people to see, but there simply weren't. Suicide is by nature one of the most selfish acts one can contemplate. You reach a point where you just want the pain to stop and you almost can't care about those you leave behind past a certain point. Now, I struggled with the horrid cognitive dissonance of very much caring about friends and family but still considering committing an action that I knew would cause tremendous pain to them. It seemed like the only possible way to escape the pain I was feeling. I dimly knew that there were people in the world in far worse circumstances than I was. However, my sense of overall perspective which had been marvelled at and remarked upon by many people was almost completely subsumed by grief at what I had lost and anger at the world. It was flat out impossible to concentrate on reading, writing or anything. Nothing would give me any relief. There was no getting away from the situation.
Short of offering absolute incontrovertible proof that life would be less solitary and very different from that point on, I don't think anyone else could have made me pause and reconsider. In an attempt to show that they care, people will say all sorts of things like "Someone else will come along." or "Things will get better." I had heard all that utter bullshit before a great many times. I knew people meant well by saying things like that, but frankly, they just gave me an increased sense that everyone was passing the buck and would continue to do so. You hear that stuff so much that you find yourself wishing you could inflict what you're facing upon them and give the whole world a taste so that you might at last truly be understood. Unless someone was prepared to actually volunteer to be a girlfriend who would keep her word and marry me or an employer who saw enough worth in me to offer me an honest shot at life, there was simply nothing they could do to actually be of meaningful assistance. Perhaps, a cool couple of million dollars would have been enough to get me to think that life could change drastically enough. Then again, I had heard Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. That film illustrates pretty clearly that being incredibly wealthy tends to have some substantial drawbacks when you want people to appreciate you for who you are rather than what you have. I needed something major to change. There was simply no prospect that anybody I knew could or would make that happen. It didn't seem very likely that I would get to know anybody new either. The only change I could at all reasonably hope for was a change in my own frame of mind. Barring stupendously unlikely intervention, I had painted myself into a hopeless mess that only I could get myself out of.
God would certainly not approve of me killing myself. I knew that but at that point, I didn't care what he thought. I was furious beyond words with him for creating a fucked up society where people like me could just be tossed aside, our compassion and potential simply left to slowly rot away like surplus fruit. The bible couldn't help me out of this one. I wasn't anywhere near a state where anything from that book could reach me. My faith seemed entirely unjustified. If I was going to back off from this and stick around, God would have to reach me in a more worldly way. I also didn't turn to family or friends with these suicidal thoughts. I didn't want to find myself in some sort of institution or anything like that. I knew inside myself that I had to find my own way out of this somehow. Also, it wasn't my friends and family's fault that things had turned out this way. If there had been anything they could have done to make such concrete positive differences in my life, they would have done so years ago. They couldn't understand the pain I was in now and saw no end to. My parents had worked most of their lives and had been able to find what community and social outlets they needed. How could they possibly grasp the sense of utter futility and heartbreak I now faced? My reality simply differed too drastically from what they had known. Laying my suicidal thoughts on their plates would only make things harder for them since there wasn't anything they could do to put me in a better overall position.
My thoughts turned to how to go about the inevitably painful business of suicide in as ethical, dignified and non-painful a way as possible. As angry with society as I was, I had no wish to cause friends or family any more pain than I would when they realized that their efforts weren't enough to prevent me from such a drastic step. Anger and bitter disappointment have a way of short-circuiting one's rational thinking about the consequences of one's actions on others. One tends to focus on the immediate details and situation almost exclusively. I had some vague notion that everyone would get over my leaving them eventually. I would only become more of a burden as continued stagnation made me more bitter, angry and depressed. Far better that I punch out now before things took such a dive as to completely rob me of any self-control at all. I was doing everyone a kind of horrid favour. That was how I rationalized it.
I knew of no high buildings or cliffs I could get to on my own so that method was out of the question. Truth to tell, smashing onto the ground from a great height has always struck me as a somewhat messy and ignominious way of departing from the land of the living. You never knew who might be at the wrong place at the wrong time. It could be some kid who finds you and is traumatized for life at the sight of what gravity can do to a body. I didn't want that. There was also no way to obtain a gun with which to shoot myself. Even had there been, Stephen King had written a short story in which the narrator had eloquently outlined what a chancy method of killing oneself a shot to the head actually was. I had gotten to know a mentally challenged fellow in secondary school who had been in a car accident. He remembered clearly what it was like to be able to think normally but could do so no longer. The thought of permanent but survivable brain damage creeped me out. Apparently, chances of this sort of outcome are pretty high presuming you actually survived the shot. In any case, obtaining a gun was pretty much out of the question. I couldn't get one legally as a blind man in Canada. The criminal world had never been a part of my life either so that route was out. Getting run over by a vehicle was out too. I had no wish to traumatize some poor driver despite what a tremendous hindrance a lack of affordable door-to-door transportation had been and still is in my life. Thinking about my rib cage being crushed also repelled me from that notion. While a little disorder can be downright comforting and make a place feel lived in, I've never gone in for serious extraneous mess. Poison was also out of the question. I had read and heard a lot about how chancy a process that actually is. I doubtless could have found something around the house but had visions of finding myself in some hospital getting my stomach pumped and having suffered some sort of permanent damage or other. I didn't like the idea of my parents finding my body. That thought bothered me quite a bit but I couldn't think of a process short of complete disintegration which would get them around that. One couldn't just disappear very easily.
There were only two methods which seemed both likely enough to work and at all tidy or dignified. The first was cutting myself with a sharp knife to the point where I bled to death. I figured that if I did that in a bathtub and thought through the blood flow enough, things would hopefully remain somewhat contained. The second method which seemed preferable almost from the start was to put a plastic bag over my head tightly and lay down in the tub with my head under water. I had read of some famous writer or other who had done this. It seemed perfect in the sense that it was tidy and as ethical as one could get with the whole idea of premature self-inflicted death. The spec tor of what horrid sensations and thoughts I might experience while asphyxiating certainly gave me pause but not nearly so much as the other methods above. There was no chance of a terrible un contained mess resulting. I also liked the fact that it left me firmly in control for as long in the process as my mind was capable of exercising such. I could always rip the bag off my head or failing that, claw a hole in it with teeth or fingernails if I changed my mind. Hopeless as I was, I didn't like the idea of finding that I actually didn't ultimately want to die but having no way to save myself. If I was going to make a final exit, I wanted it to be clearly my choice and on my own terms unlike so much of my life had been. Visions of bleeding out uncontrollably were therefore none too appealing in more ways than one.
The other major objection to using a knife was more a problem of ethics. The sharpest knives in the house had been sold to my parents by my good friend Adam during a brief stint as a knife salesman. I was very surprised when he actually managed to convince my father that they'd be a good addition to the house. He's not a very easy sell even when it comes to far less costly items than Cut co knives. I had no doubt whatsoever that one of those knives would be sharp enough to do the job. However, if I used one, what would it do to Adam if he ever found out that his successful sale was so intimately connected with the death of his friend? He certainly had enough on his plate without throwing that nasty curve at him in addition to dealing with my death. He had been a very good friend to me for well over a decade and been best man at my wedding. It would have been cruel and selfish of me. Even in my hopeless despair, I saw that clearly. The direct connection was so simple that it cut right through my own suffering unlike other equally valid but more complex objections. If I did X, a good man who had befriended me would suffer for it.
Coming to that conclusion was what started me thinking back on all the ethics and philosophy classes I had taken while obtaining my BA degree. The professors I had were all very thoughtful and interesting. I have a lot of fond memories of those lectures. Wistfully, I thought back to those days when life hadn't yet showed me so very plainly how isolated and apart from my peers I would find myself. I remembered one professor presenting a situation where you were in a dark theatre seeing a movie after just picking up a new switchblade knife. Becoming bored, you decide to see how sharp your new knife is and plunge it into the back of the chair ahead of you. It kills the person sitting in that chair who happens to be your best friend. That's the last thing you would have wanted to happen. Are you as culpable for the murder as someone who actually planned to kill your best friend? How do we know what we know? Given that all of our senses are fallible as are our minds, is anything we take to be reality actually certain? There had been so many interesting lectures and discussions. Suddenly, vapid as the ghost I had contemplated becoming, there he stood in my memory.
Tourist Jim is on a vacation in South America. Walking along one day, he comes upon a village. This place has clearly been the sight of unrest. Curiosity gets the better of caution and he proceeds into the village. There, he comes across the dictator of the small country and a large contingent of soldiers. A line of twenty men are up against a wall. The dictator is about to order his soldiers to shoot all of them when Jim comes into view. The dictator decides to make Jim an offer. If Jim takes a gun and kills one of the prisoners, the dictator will spare the remaining nineteen. What should Jim do?
My professor gave us this problem at the start of the class and let us wrestle with it for the entire hour. As one might expect, we all tried to find a way not to have to make the choice presented. Shooting the dictator was suggested right off the bat. The professor had a ready answer for every suggestion the class could come up with. He could have run a splendid Dungeons and Dragons campaign. If Jim shoots the dictator, the dictator's loyal soldiers will carry out his last orders shooting all twenty prisoners in addition to Jim. If Jim refuses or walks away, all twenty prisoners will die. If Jim shoots himself, all twenty prisoners will die. The prof never missed a beet as the class pulled out all the stops desperate to find an ethical way out of the box.
Once any possibility of avoiding making the choice had been ruled out, the discussion then turned to who Jim would choose. Not one member of the class felt at peace with simply killing one person to save the rest. Neither did we feel easy about doing nothing and thereby condemning everyone to die. The professor next started dangling possible answers in front of us. What if a very old man stepped forward to volunteer to be shot? Surely, it would be acceptable to shoot him so that those with longer left to live would be spared. The class seemed as alright with this as it was possible to be with the prospect of killing any innocent person until the professor asked: What if that old man, had he been spared, inspired his grandchild to do something extraordinary? Hadn't any of us been inspired by older members of society to straighten out our lives, be better citizens, etc? Was it at all proper for us to attempt to make a judgement about the value of the lives of complete strangers based solely on such things as the length of time one had left to live? What about our own lives? Even with our intimate knowledge of ourselves, could we ever really say that our lives were of no further value before they had run their natural span?
I remember leaving that class with a new appreciation of just how precious each life was and what a rotten job it must be to have to make decisions which you knew would or even might result in the deaths of others. I don't think I was the only one who left in a very contemplative sombre mood. Every now and then, I would remember Tourist Jim and his dilemma as I went about my business. Unlike a lot else which has long since drifted out of mind, that problem and others like it continue to inform how I choose to live. Facing that dilemma was a far more formative moment for me than I realized at the time. Looking back, I can see now how it changed me increasing my tendency to advocate for those who the world deems forgettable or expendable.
Tourist Jim made me ask some new questions of myself. How could I be so certain that I might not be that old man who inspired greatness or made a critical difference to people in some other way years later? Certainly, I had every likely hood of having any semblance of real adult life as I saw it delayed further probably by years. However, if nothing else happened first, my turn for affordable housing would eventually come up. I would then be somewhere that I could think of as my own place in a community where I could set down roots without fear of being swept off somewhere else. At some point, the un fare stalemate I found myself in would be broken at least a little. I just had to hang on somehow until that happened. Things would indeed get at least a little better in time.
Thus it was that my life was first put in danger by a woman who loved me but walked away, and then quite possibly saved by a dilemma faced by a completely fictitious character. Thanks to Tourist Jim, I stopped asking whether I should end my life. Right then and there, it became obvious to me that I had to stick around for the full duration. I would never again seriously consider an early exit no matter how bad things got. Having looked once down that dark passage, I knew that it wasn't really an escape at all. Even in my deep despair, I saw that I simply cared too much about others and the pain it would cause them to go through with any sort of early exit. There's also the issue of instinctive self-preservation. Did you notice how I turned away from methods which were too messy or uncontrolled? Strangely, I didn't think I had any real wish to keep on living; Didn't realize how even in those dark moments, part of me was looking for a reason not to go ahead at all. Had I actually attempted to kill myself, I don't think I could have overcome that. When push really comes to shove, I'm not the suicidal type. It just took being smashed against rock bottom for me to know that for certain.
The journey back upwards from rock bottom has been pretty uneven. Until last November, I don't think it would have been wise for me to attempt to write all this down. Things had certainly gotten more enjoyable long before then but there were bleak relapses when there was just too much time with nothing in it. Before some pretty substantial changes had taken place, looking back at that dark time may well have set me up for serious depression. How have I gotten from that horrible frame of mind to the happy and mainly contented emotional space I now occupy? The full scoop is in my blog for the really curious. Here's the short version for the rest of you.
Things started out slowly with two phone calls. One was to my orientation and mobility instructor. If I was going to be stuck at my parents' house for much longer, I needed to take a stab at learning to get somewhere. As things turned out, the first objective I focused on was getting to Symposium Cafe, the very place where Janene and I had broken up. It took months of training, but going there on my own for the first time with the help of my Trekker Breeze was a very big if lonely milestone. I reclaimed that place from the ashes of a once promising future and made it part of the one I still actually had. I never have met any new friends there as I once hoped I would. However, it continues to be a place where I like to bring the ones I've found elsewhere. I don't go there alone much at all anymore. The staff are great and so is the food, but there's that empty space near me which simply ought not to be. I save my money for when there are one or more other people to go out with.
The other call I made was to the Meadowvale Christian Reformed Church. Somehow, I needed to reconnect with God and have the ghost of a chance of connecting meaningfully with other people. I had to turn a new page and become involved even if it would all be taken away at some future date when housing finally became available. The church proved to be a very welcoming place right from day one. The pastor was very wise, compassionate and thoughtful. I soon found myself getting to know some very good and friendly people who had room in their lives for the different and extraordinary.
Family and friends stuck with me through my dip into despair and did whatever they could to keep my spirits up. It took a bit for me to discover that they had always valued me as a single man even if I myself had briefly lost that capacity. Not only was the glass undamaged, but it still actually had a good deal of water in it. The Summer after Janene left was a pretty long and empty one but contained some interesting excursions including a trip to Chicago. There were other smaller milestones. The songs that had been too painful to hear for months after Janene left became enjoyable once again and were re-introduced to my hard drive. There were over a hundred of them which could stop me in my tracks and bring all the frustration and memories back. Those songs were once again mine to enjoy with the hope of better times ahead. A small thing, but an important step. As my nieces got older, my relationship with them, my brother and his wife grew stronger. Being a good uncle became more of a cornerstone of life. So too did helping my mother and father deal with technology and computers.
Eventually, after a ten year wait which helped destroy my marriage, I was given a subsidized apartment in the same area where I had lived with my parents. The steps I had taken to become less isolated weren't just going to disappear on me after all. I could build on them. Having a proper home is so much more than having one's own place. That in itself proved to be a somewhat bitter discovery. I had somewhere to invite people to, but getting them to actually come and form friendships proved a more difficult process than I had expected. Particularly for extroverts like me, it's critical that we find people around us to get to know. That took far longer than it should have. I still found myself going through the major part of many weeks where there was no face to face interaction with anybody. Over time though, meaningful friendships started forming. There was Shirley, an English lady around my parents' age who liked going for walks around the lake with me. Joseph, a cheerful if conflicted gay pun-loving Scrabble player who gave me rides to and from church quickly moved from being an acquaintance to a friend. So two did Doug and his mischievous wife Nan who wrote "If you can read this, then God has performed a miracle" on a notepad stuck to my fridge. The message was discovered the next day when my friends Mark and Wendy came over to visit and saw it. To date, other than through the wondering laughter of occasional guests, I never have.
My first New Year's party in this apartment was another very meaningful milestone. We all had a good time despite their being no corkscrew. It brought some of my old friends together with a few new ones for a long evening and night of good discussion and happiness. There was Stephen, a blind friend of mine since grade school who now looked forward to a trip of a lifetime. he would soon be off to India to volunteer at a school for the blind. Joseph was there having fun with the first audio arcade game he had ever experienced and meeting some of my other friends. So were Adam and his girlfriend, a very welcome thoughtful new acquaintance. Shirley even dropped in after returning from another New Year's celebration elsewhere. She came to her blind friend's apartment hoping to borrow, of all things, a flashlight. I have every reason to hope that the next New Year's gathering I have here will be even more memorable. If nothing else, we won't find ourselves short of a corkscrew.
Gradually, I had become more familiar with the local area. Now that I had a permanent place of residence, it became worth the high investment in time and effort to do so. This finally made it possible for me to volunteer at the Dam, a place where troubled youth can hang out and hopefully be influenced to make good choices in their lives. Circumstances had at last permitted me to make a two-year commitment in good conscience and get to the place on my own for most of the year. My parents and new friends like Shirley were willing to help when it became too dangerous in the Winter for me to walk there and back. Connecting with the teens has been pretty slow going. I've sat through a lot of hours where I might as well have been on the moon as there. However, I've gotten to know the staff and other volunteers. Once in a while, I think I've even managed to do some good for the teens I'm supposed to be there to help. Not the most productive use of my skills and talents, but it at least gets me out of the apartment once a week to a place where there are possibilities.
The online world also began to regain its place and value in life. A friend I hadn't seen since secondary school tweeted that the Chilean miners were about to be rescued. Thanks to Twitter, for once in my life, I was able to tune in and watch the drama unfold with the rest of the world. Sad that it took a near fatal disaster to get me in tune with everyone else, but there you are. Listening to Internet radio and becoming involved with the communities which grew up around the various shows brought me further back from the edge. There was the May long worldend experience which saw me up at two A.M. participating in Jonathan Mosen's doomsday celebration. At that virtual shindig, I discovered that it didn't matter that we were all so physically far away from each other. It still felt damned good to be a part of something special with people I had come to know if only at a distance. Another couple who I had lost touch with around a decade ago found me on Facebook. Hard as I find that site to use with my screen-reader, it does have a way of allowing people from the past to come into your present. I've enjoyed some wonderful hours getting reacquainted with them and helping them with computer issues. It helps them get more out of life and helps me feel valued.
I had lost my sense of progress and motivation for quite some time without realizing it. I had become so disconnected that thoughts of working on my book or creating Enchantment's Twilight seemed almost silly. What good could they possibly do anybody in a world which seemed so hell-bent on ridding itself of permanent relationships and cohesive communities where people felt like they mattered? Over this past Summer, my sense of community engagement and optimism was increased by a number of events. It was easily the best Summer I've ever had. From a great vacation at Lake Joseph to a multiethnic church conference in the US to a trip to Canada's Wonderland with two friends I had chanced upon while out for a walk, it seemed like everything that should have been happening while I was in my twenties was at last starting to happen now in my mid thirties. On Canada Day, I was even able to go out on my own with the help of my Trekker Breeze GPS device and enjoy fireworks in a park near my building. I can't begin to describe just how liberating that experience was. Things had really changed for the better in a fundamental way. More importantly, so had I.
No longer was I willing to head off anywhere. I had managed to find a home worth keeping, sharing and adding to. A place built of people who saw past no job and no marriage and tight money I couldn't earn. People who saw my true value as a person even when I had lost sight of it myself. That's not something I'll walk away from lightly if ever. My purpose is now very clear. The autobiographical book and game are worthy goals but are really just means to a larger end. Above and beyond everything else, that end is to help disillusioned people to see the intrinsic value within themselves and in each other. It's to try and live out an example of why it's important to be included and to include others in a greater community. I do have a kind and just boss. His name is God. I'm on his payroll for life. First and foremost, he cares about the relationships I have with others. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
There's still plenty of stuff on my bucket list. I hope to be married one day to someone who appreciates me and adds to my life here. More than likely, it'll be to somebody else facing one or more disabilities. I haven't given up on sighted women entirely. There are certainly some out there who look for inner strengths rather than external assets. However, they do seem to be quite rare. At my age, I find that most who find me interesting at all have already been spoken for. It's one area where I've left things in God's hands. Having a positive impact on a community is something I'm at last in a position to actually be doing. It feels damned good. I still hope to eventually find ways of doing more in the local community and less online if possible. However, if that proves unfeasible, I believe I'll still manage to give a good account of myself productively speaking. I seem to have reached a point of critical mass where I can find enough ways to help friends who I can actually get together with so that I don't feel quite so damned disconnected anymore. Regarding travel, things are starting to look somewhat more positive. This is definitely the case when it comes to local travel. I've met some friends who are interested to take me along with them to various places. I'll have to watch my spending but am likely to get around a lot more than I have previously. Perhaps, either with family or through the church, more distant travel may even prove possible.
Things have most definitely turned a corner for me. A corner of changed expectations and newfound contentment with who I am as a person. People will say that not having others see your value is their loss rather than your problem. I know what they're getting at, but can't fully agree. We all come to a point where we need to discover our own intrinsic value. My sense of intrinsic value had certainly been lost and I had to rediscover it. However, consider Sherlock Holmes. He knew himself to be a very gifted and talented man. He wasn't at all humble or bashful about his abilities. Despite that, he had to resort to drugs when things weren't interesting enough for him. He once asked of Watson what good having powers of detection were if there was no field on which to exercise them. Minus any desire for drugs, I found myself very much in the same situation. I knew I could give a whole lot to people given the right circumstances. There was simply no way to connect the dots and bring them about. That's an ongoing problem that I may face for the rest of my life. A problem not so much solved as reduced to a dull roar I can live with. I've found enough to enjoy life with what I have and hope for better things to come.
A big part of maturing as a person is learning to maximize the hand you're dealt making the best of what is within one's reach. It's about adjusting expectations as much as it is about trying to better one's prospects. My life certainly isn't anywhere even close to the template for successful that society sets out and that I had once fully subscribed to. Barring any big changes, I'll be giving away my life's work rather than selling it. In current circumstances, it would be crazy of me to try. A steady, stable and secure job would be the only sensible move that would give enough stability. Those seem like things belonging increasingly more to the past than to even the present let alone tomorrow. I'm as secure and well off here as I'm ever likely to be. There are a lot of restrictions the absurdity of which would horrify people if they took the trouble to educate themselves. On the other side of the coin though, I've been blessed in many ways. There are a lot of reasons for me to be profoundly thankful. I have absolute freedom regarding my time and where to direct my effort. I have a close family and some very good friends. Once in a while, being different does expose you to unusual opportunities. Over the years, I've been on television a number of times, met some famous people, touched exhibits you're normally not allowed to, had time enough to write a fifty-thousand-word guide to help blind people who own accessible computers, and published an online magazine. Increasingly, as I release more of my writing and interact with the online and offline community, I'm becoming more known and less feared. There's a real hesitation among the fully able-bodied to take the time to get to know disabled people. That can take quite a while to even begin to dissipate. It takes more than casual encounters although they play an important part. If you're on the lookout for ways to be of help to people, opportunities will eventually present themselves. Things will eventually open up and get better. When you live an extraordinary life, finding one's own stride and balance can also take longer. Extraordinary tends to lead to lonely and excluded far more than it ought to. Despite that, such a life as I've found is most emphatically worth the living.
In general, people seem to think of me as a patient, cheerful, easy-going guy who usually finds the bright side in situations. Some see me as in fact too optimistic and patient. There was a brief time, however, when these qualities had utterly failed in me. A short time when I was so miserable and devoid of hope that I seriously contemplated ending my life. I never wrote about it afterwards for many reasons. Chief among them was the wish not to cause my friends and family any more pain than was necessary. The period of which I write lasted only a couple of days. Not long at all unless you happen to be seriously contemplating causing your own death.
One of the ways I try to contribute something meaningful and be productive is to share my life story. Such an account would be incomplete if I chose, as most people likely wood, to leave this darkest and most shameful of mental journeys buried in a dingy forgotten corner of my memory. Writing all this down hasn't been fun. It has already led to some hard conversations with people including my father who, naturally enough, had to examine things in detail and try to understand what had brought me to this point. We always want to close the barn door after the horse has left. It's human nature. I know I'm in for more such awkward discussions once this gets out there. I felt compelled to write about this darkest of times in my life for a few reasons. First of all, I sincerely hope that my own brush with thoughts of suicide might in some way serve to help others avoid actually going through with it. If I could find a way up from the bottom of despair, perhaps you will also find the strength to keep hoping , working, and waiting for change. At the time I contemplated ending my life, there seemed absolutely no prospect of meaningful change at all. Finding a way to restore my sense of contentment, purpose and direction just didn't seem at all possible. And yet, despite no job, tight money and no marriage, I'm reasonably content and happy these days. I also hope that my journey to rock bottom serves to illustrate just how important healthy communities actually are. There have to be more ways for marginalized people like me to find meaningful contributive places within communities which allow us to earn both self-respect and that of others. It can't be all about how much money you make. That's incredibly un fare when you're denied the opportunity to make any. There's also a lesson here about how dangerous it can be to put all of one's eggs in a basket which could be kicked away. That's a mistake I never intend to make again for anyone.
Janene had been the light of my life for over two years. For a large portion of that time, we had been engaged. At last it seemed like all my values and efforts had truly counted for something beyond family and friendship. I may not have been able to find a job, but I had at last found a woman who truly loved and valued me enough to want to make a commitment that would change my life. This was what I had longed for even more than I wanted someone to let me into the job market. To at last escape the confines of a society and disability support system which had essentially locked me into an extended isolated childhood. To finally get into a commitment where I could really have a positive impact on someone very dear to me and live something akin to a "normal" Canadian life as I saw it. I wasn't looking for a free ride. Precisely the opposite in fact. I fully expected to cook, clean, and do whatever else I could to make life better for both of us. I didn't want to be pitied. I wanted to actually matter to someone other than my family. I wanted to live life with someone around my age who actually enjoyed going places with me and experiencing new things together. Someone to really build a lifetime of memories with and share all the ups and downs. Marriage is one of the few vocations with wiggle-room enough for insomnia, writer's block and a propensity to disorientation particularly when travelling outdoors. I've always had a sense that I could give more to others in the realm of friendship and relationship.
That seemed finally to be on the verge of happening. We had discussed all the major issues, been completely up front with each other about everything. My friends and family were fully behind us. Unlike my previous marriage which was, in hindsight, entered into on very shaky grounds, things would be different this time. We had done quite a lot together, shared a lot of fun and even some tougher times. We built enough love and trust to become engaged and start seriously planning for a future together. And then, on an Easter Monday, all that was decisively ripped away from me in the space of around an hour as she broke the news to me over our last coffee together. She no longer wanted to marry me. It was like someone had come along with a perverse sort of chainsaw and cut away my future. My recollections of that last evening together are still somewhat fragmented. I was so hurt I could barely think.
The pain of losing a love built up over time with care is indescribable. It devastated me beyond words. Life had suddenly gone from seeming full of hope and possibility to being utterly empty. Looking ahead, I saw years and years passing with agonizing slowness leading absolutely nowhere. What creativity I had would dry up in the face of continued stagnation. There would simply be nothing worth writing about anymore. I needed to somehow find a way to start relating to wider society despite my major difficulties in actually getting anywhere on my own. All I had to offer; my patience, thoughtfulness, ability to see more than one point of view, my compassion, my skills, my honesty.. Everything I was just wouldn't get me connected with others in a permanent, constructive and meaningful way. I'd never get an opportunity to show anybody who could really change things for the better what I could do. My willingness to work or even volunteer my time hadn't mattered a damn to anybody. Now, I saw that neither had my willingness to love. It didn't matter how hard I tried. It simply wasn't ever going to be enough for anybody to give me more than a casual friendship or the odd thank you email.
While waiting for subsidized housing, you're in no position to be making long-term commitments unless it's to a full time job or living arrangement which gets you right off the system and eliminates your need for it. They can't tell you where you are on the list since you may be bumped down by people in greater need. For example, priority is understandably given to people in abusive or otherwise dangerous situations. There's no way to know whether you'll be waiting for years or that something won't come up tomorrow. Being stuck in this limbo living like a child with my parents was very frustrating but thankfully not at all physically or mentally dangerous. Finding out that you don't have the skills to get hired, have tremendous difficulty navigating and are pretty much housebound unassisted, can't even find anywhere in the community to volunteer your time let alone socialize; That's downright soul-destroying. People who look at us and say things like "He should get a job." or "They're so lucky. They can sleep in as late as they want and we pay for it." have no idea at all what they're talking about. Had there been door-to-door transportation, I would have cheerfully volunteered at a distress centre or helping newcomers learn English. Presuming it was moral and reasonably safe, I would have done damned near anything just for a sense of belonging and productivity whether you paid me or not. Had it been possible to flip burgers, deliver pizza or clean out sewage pipes, I would have done it. There just aren't any starting jobs that I could find. That's how an honest intelligent man can end up in his mid thirties with around six months work experience. Everywhere seemed to either want long-term commitments I couldn't make in good conscience or be impractical to get to for me. Everyone passed the buck to someone else. Since I had no problem physically walking, I couldn't qualify for any sort of door to door transportation. People expected the Canadian National Institute for the Blind to do everything for us. That was never their mandate at all. They tried to fill in the incredible gap left by a community unwilling to take the time to understand what slight accommodations they might have made to unleash our potential as participative citizens. Cutbacks and changes have stripped a lot of the more social community-building aspects away over the years. Everything is becoming more centralized and volunteer positions once held by blind people have been replaced by paid sighted people. For an organization who reportedly help the blind, they certainly don't hire a lot of us. The result was a vicious social and employment Catch22 there now seemed no way out of. Getting married had pretty much been my only remaining real hope of breaking out of it. There seemed no chance at all that the painful lessons I had learned during my first attempt at married life would ever be put to good use.
Time after time, I would get just enough experience with an element of adult life to appreciate its meaning and then, it would be snatched away from me. Graduating with my degree from university had been a golden moment. I had earned my BA and still kept my head on well enough to have made a lot of friends. Only then did I discover just how situational all those friendships were. There wasn't even a graduation celebration of any kind. We all just went our separate ways and never looked back. The only full time job I ever had ended due to the company going bankrupt after a mere five months. Once again, the new life and friends just melted away. My marriage had lasted five years failing due to many circumstances including the endless wait for affordable housing. And yet, they contained enough good times for me to understand just how much difference to one's sense of self esteem and place in the world that a steady job and a stable, lasting, healthy relationship makes. Love and companionship were things that were truly worth taking risks for. Janene and I seemed to be heading for a far more stable and healthy marriage full of possibilities. I had come to feel fantastic about being her faience and looked forward to being her husband. I had started making real inroads with her circle of friends and looked ahead to getting to know them further. Now, all of that was torn away from me. I was so damned tired of finding myself with nothing but pain to show for all my troubles. By walking away after saying so often that she wouldn't, she had brought all of my anguish and sense of worthlessness to society to the surf ice.
I felt absolutely powerless. There was no individual upon whom I could justifiably unleash my anger. Even Janene wasn't deserving of any sort of vengeance. Society should have been able to offer me more in life to participate in and hold on to than it had. Intelligence, honesty, cheerfulness, loyalty; all these things damned well should have counted for more. I should have had some sense that my efforts in life were of value to people and leading somewhere, but there were no such indications at all outside the relationship with Janene. That situation wasn't her fault. It was due to a whole host of circumstances, attitudes towards disabled people and societal decisions stretching back for ages. These decisions and attitudes plus my disabilities had conspired to place me in a kind of cage. From this physically comfortable cage, I could hear everyone else going about their lives full of meaning and social substance. More than that, I could hear them complain about how tired, over-worked, and busy they all were. I would have cheerfully walked away from just about anything I owned and done pretty much anything morally acceptable in order to get a real honest crack at living that kind of life. I couldn't break out of the cage on my own. No one was willing to make the kind of commitment necessary to actually open the cage for me. Not even someone who had been deeply in love with me. If she had been ultimately unwilling to, was there realistically any hope of anybody else doing so? I thought not.
The cognitive dissonance I faced through most of my adult life after graduating university was bad enough to deal with. Now, after a wonderful reprieve, it was back for business and magnified tremendously. Cognitive dissonance happens when events in life don't match one's expectations or when one holds opposing beliefs. For instance, a police officer thinks of himself as a good man, but he has had to kill someone in the line of duty. That can really psychologically tare some of them up. My sudden reversal of fortune thrust me into a very dark and different place beyond any mental upheaval I had previously known. All my disappointment and anger had nowhere to go. The glass had gone from brimming full to not only half empty but cracked near the bottom. It's a very dismal spot to occupy emotionally. There should have been more to life, but there wasn't. There should have been places to go, things to do, and people to see, but there simply weren't. Suicide is by nature one of the most selfish acts one can contemplate. You reach a point where you just want the pain to stop and you almost can't care about those you leave behind past a certain point. Now, I struggled with the horrid cognitive dissonance of very much caring about friends and family but still considering committing an action that I knew would cause tremendous pain to them. It seemed like the only possible way to escape the pain I was feeling. I dimly knew that there were people in the world in far worse circumstances than I was. However, my sense of overall perspective which had been marvelled at and remarked upon by many people was almost completely subsumed by grief at what I had lost and anger at the world. It was flat out impossible to concentrate on reading, writing or anything. Nothing would give me any relief. There was no getting away from the situation.
Short of offering absolute incontrovertible proof that life would be less solitary and very different from that point on, I don't think anyone else could have made me pause and reconsider. In an attempt to show that they care, people will say all sorts of things like "Someone else will come along." or "Things will get better." I had heard all that utter bullshit before a great many times. I knew people meant well by saying things like that, but frankly, they just gave me an increased sense that everyone was passing the buck and would continue to do so. You hear that stuff so much that you find yourself wishing you could inflict what you're facing upon them and give the whole world a taste so that you might at last truly be understood. Unless someone was prepared to actually volunteer to be a girlfriend who would keep her word and marry me or an employer who saw enough worth in me to offer me an honest shot at life, there was simply nothing they could do to actually be of meaningful assistance. Perhaps, a cool couple of million dollars would have been enough to get me to think that life could change drastically enough. Then again, I had heard Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in The Edge. That film illustrates pretty clearly that being incredibly wealthy tends to have some substantial drawbacks when you want people to appreciate you for who you are rather than what you have. I needed something major to change. There was simply no prospect that anybody I knew could or would make that happen. It didn't seem very likely that I would get to know anybody new either. The only change I could at all reasonably hope for was a change in my own frame of mind. Barring stupendously unlikely intervention, I had painted myself into a hopeless mess that only I could get myself out of.
God would certainly not approve of me killing myself. I knew that but at that point, I didn't care what he thought. I was furious beyond words with him for creating a fucked up society where people like me could just be tossed aside, our compassion and potential simply left to slowly rot away like surplus fruit. The bible couldn't help me out of this one. I wasn't anywhere near a state where anything from that book could reach me. My faith seemed entirely unjustified. If I was going to back off from this and stick around, God would have to reach me in a more worldly way. I also didn't turn to family or friends with these suicidal thoughts. I didn't want to find myself in some sort of institution or anything like that. I knew inside myself that I had to find my own way out of this somehow. Also, it wasn't my friends and family's fault that things had turned out this way. If there had been anything they could have done to make such concrete positive differences in my life, they would have done so years ago. They couldn't understand the pain I was in now and saw no end to. My parents had worked most of their lives and had been able to find what community and social outlets they needed. How could they possibly grasp the sense of utter futility and heartbreak I now faced? My reality simply differed too drastically from what they had known. Laying my suicidal thoughts on their plates would only make things harder for them since there wasn't anything they could do to put me in a better overall position.
My thoughts turned to how to go about the inevitably painful business of suicide in as ethical, dignified and non-painful a way as possible. As angry with society as I was, I had no wish to cause friends or family any more pain than I would when they realized that their efforts weren't enough to prevent me from such a drastic step. Anger and bitter disappointment have a way of short-circuiting one's rational thinking about the consequences of one's actions on others. One tends to focus on the immediate details and situation almost exclusively. I had some vague notion that everyone would get over my leaving them eventually. I would only become more of a burden as continued stagnation made me more bitter, angry and depressed. Far better that I punch out now before things took such a dive as to completely rob me of any self-control at all. I was doing everyone a kind of horrid favour. That was how I rationalized it.
I knew of no high buildings or cliffs I could get to on my own so that method was out of the question. Truth to tell, smashing onto the ground from a great height has always struck me as a somewhat messy and ignominious way of departing from the land of the living. You never knew who might be at the wrong place at the wrong time. It could be some kid who finds you and is traumatized for life at the sight of what gravity can do to a body. I didn't want that. There was also no way to obtain a gun with which to shoot myself. Even had there been, Stephen King had written a short story in which the narrator had eloquently outlined what a chancy method of killing oneself a shot to the head actually was. I had gotten to know a mentally challenged fellow in secondary school who had been in a car accident. He remembered clearly what it was like to be able to think normally but could do so no longer. The thought of permanent but survivable brain damage creeped me out. Apparently, chances of this sort of outcome are pretty high presuming you actually survived the shot. In any case, obtaining a gun was pretty much out of the question. I couldn't get one legally as a blind man in Canada. The criminal world had never been a part of my life either so that route was out. Getting run over by a vehicle was out too. I had no wish to traumatize some poor driver despite what a tremendous hindrance a lack of affordable door-to-door transportation had been and still is in my life. Thinking about my rib cage being crushed also repelled me from that notion. While a little disorder can be downright comforting and make a place feel lived in, I've never gone in for serious extraneous mess. Poison was also out of the question. I had read and heard a lot about how chancy a process that actually is. I doubtless could have found something around the house but had visions of finding myself in some hospital getting my stomach pumped and having suffered some sort of permanent damage or other. I didn't like the idea of my parents finding my body. That thought bothered me quite a bit but I couldn't think of a process short of complete disintegration which would get them around that. One couldn't just disappear very easily.
There were only two methods which seemed both likely enough to work and at all tidy or dignified. The first was cutting myself with a sharp knife to the point where I bled to death. I figured that if I did that in a bathtub and thought through the blood flow enough, things would hopefully remain somewhat contained. The second method which seemed preferable almost from the start was to put a plastic bag over my head tightly and lay down in the tub with my head under water. I had read of some famous writer or other who had done this. It seemed perfect in the sense that it was tidy and as ethical as one could get with the whole idea of premature self-inflicted death. The spec tor of what horrid sensations and thoughts I might experience while asphyxiating certainly gave me pause but not nearly so much as the other methods above. There was no chance of a terrible un contained mess resulting. I also liked the fact that it left me firmly in control for as long in the process as my mind was capable of exercising such. I could always rip the bag off my head or failing that, claw a hole in it with teeth or fingernails if I changed my mind. Hopeless as I was, I didn't like the idea of finding that I actually didn't ultimately want to die but having no way to save myself. If I was going to make a final exit, I wanted it to be clearly my choice and on my own terms unlike so much of my life had been. Visions of bleeding out uncontrollably were therefore none too appealing in more ways than one.
The other major objection to using a knife was more a problem of ethics. The sharpest knives in the house had been sold to my parents by my good friend Adam during a brief stint as a knife salesman. I was very surprised when he actually managed to convince my father that they'd be a good addition to the house. He's not a very easy sell even when it comes to far less costly items than Cut co knives. I had no doubt whatsoever that one of those knives would be sharp enough to do the job. However, if I used one, what would it do to Adam if he ever found out that his successful sale was so intimately connected with the death of his friend? He certainly had enough on his plate without throwing that nasty curve at him in addition to dealing with my death. He had been a very good friend to me for well over a decade and been best man at my wedding. It would have been cruel and selfish of me. Even in my hopeless despair, I saw that clearly. The direct connection was so simple that it cut right through my own suffering unlike other equally valid but more complex objections. If I did X, a good man who had befriended me would suffer for it.
Coming to that conclusion was what started me thinking back on all the ethics and philosophy classes I had taken while obtaining my BA degree. The professors I had were all very thoughtful and interesting. I have a lot of fond memories of those lectures. Wistfully, I thought back to those days when life hadn't yet showed me so very plainly how isolated and apart from my peers I would find myself. I remembered one professor presenting a situation where you were in a dark theatre seeing a movie after just picking up a new switchblade knife. Becoming bored, you decide to see how sharp your new knife is and plunge it into the back of the chair ahead of you. It kills the person sitting in that chair who happens to be your best friend. That's the last thing you would have wanted to happen. Are you as culpable for the murder as someone who actually planned to kill your best friend? How do we know what we know? Given that all of our senses are fallible as are our minds, is anything we take to be reality actually certain? There had been so many interesting lectures and discussions. Suddenly, vapid as the ghost I had contemplated becoming, there he stood in my memory.
Tourist Jim is on a vacation in South America. Walking along one day, he comes upon a village. This place has clearly been the sight of unrest. Curiosity gets the better of caution and he proceeds into the village. There, he comes across the dictator of the small country and a large contingent of soldiers. A line of twenty men are up against a wall. The dictator is about to order his soldiers to shoot all of them when Jim comes into view. The dictator decides to make Jim an offer. If Jim takes a gun and kills one of the prisoners, the dictator will spare the remaining nineteen. What should Jim do?
My professor gave us this problem at the start of the class and let us wrestle with it for the entire hour. As one might expect, we all tried to find a way not to have to make the choice presented. Shooting the dictator was suggested right off the bat. The professor had a ready answer for every suggestion the class could come up with. He could have run a splendid Dungeons and Dragons campaign. If Jim shoots the dictator, the dictator's loyal soldiers will carry out his last orders shooting all twenty prisoners in addition to Jim. If Jim refuses or walks away, all twenty prisoners will die. If Jim shoots himself, all twenty prisoners will die. The prof never missed a beet as the class pulled out all the stops desperate to find an ethical way out of the box.
Once any possibility of avoiding making the choice had been ruled out, the discussion then turned to who Jim would choose. Not one member of the class felt at peace with simply killing one person to save the rest. Neither did we feel easy about doing nothing and thereby condemning everyone to die. The professor next started dangling possible answers in front of us. What if a very old man stepped forward to volunteer to be shot? Surely, it would be acceptable to shoot him so that those with longer left to live would be spared. The class seemed as alright with this as it was possible to be with the prospect of killing any innocent person until the professor asked: What if that old man, had he been spared, inspired his grandchild to do something extraordinary? Hadn't any of us been inspired by older members of society to straighten out our lives, be better citizens, etc? Was it at all proper for us to attempt to make a judgement about the value of the lives of complete strangers based solely on such things as the length of time one had left to live? What about our own lives? Even with our intimate knowledge of ourselves, could we ever really say that our lives were of no further value before they had run their natural span?
I remember leaving that class with a new appreciation of just how precious each life was and what a rotten job it must be to have to make decisions which you knew would or even might result in the deaths of others. I don't think I was the only one who left in a very contemplative sombre mood. Every now and then, I would remember Tourist Jim and his dilemma as I went about my business. Unlike a lot else which has long since drifted out of mind, that problem and others like it continue to inform how I choose to live. Facing that dilemma was a far more formative moment for me than I realized at the time. Looking back, I can see now how it changed me increasing my tendency to advocate for those who the world deems forgettable or expendable.
Tourist Jim made me ask some new questions of myself. How could I be so certain that I might not be that old man who inspired greatness or made a critical difference to people in some other way years later? Certainly, I had every likely hood of having any semblance of real adult life as I saw it delayed further probably by years. However, if nothing else happened first, my turn for affordable housing would eventually come up. I would then be somewhere that I could think of as my own place in a community where I could set down roots without fear of being swept off somewhere else. At some point, the un fare stalemate I found myself in would be broken at least a little. I just had to hang on somehow until that happened. Things would indeed get at least a little better in time.
Thus it was that my life was first put in danger by a woman who loved me but walked away, and then quite possibly saved by a dilemma faced by a completely fictitious character. Thanks to Tourist Jim, I stopped asking whether I should end my life. Right then and there, it became obvious to me that I had to stick around for the full duration. I would never again seriously consider an early exit no matter how bad things got. Having looked once down that dark passage, I knew that it wasn't really an escape at all. Even in my deep despair, I saw that I simply cared too much about others and the pain it would cause them to go through with any sort of early exit. There's also the issue of instinctive self-preservation. Did you notice how I turned away from methods which were too messy or uncontrolled? Strangely, I didn't think I had any real wish to keep on living; Didn't realize how even in those dark moments, part of me was looking for a reason not to go ahead at all. Had I actually attempted to kill myself, I don't think I could have overcome that. When push really comes to shove, I'm not the suicidal type. It just took being smashed against rock bottom for me to know that for certain.
The journey back upwards from rock bottom has been pretty uneven. Until last November, I don't think it would have been wise for me to attempt to write all this down. Things had certainly gotten more enjoyable long before then but there were bleak relapses when there was just too much time with nothing in it. Before some pretty substantial changes had taken place, looking back at that dark time may well have set me up for serious depression. How have I gotten from that horrible frame of mind to the happy and mainly contented emotional space I now occupy? The full scoop is in my blog for the really curious. Here's the short version for the rest of you.
Things started out slowly with two phone calls. One was to my orientation and mobility instructor. If I was going to be stuck at my parents' house for much longer, I needed to take a stab at learning to get somewhere. As things turned out, the first objective I focused on was getting to Symposium Cafe, the very place where Janene and I had broken up. It took months of training, but going there on my own for the first time with the help of my Trekker Breeze was a very big if lonely milestone. I reclaimed that place from the ashes of a once promising future and made it part of the one I still actually had. I never have met any new friends there as I once hoped I would. However, it continues to be a place where I like to bring the ones I've found elsewhere. I don't go there alone much at all anymore. The staff are great and so is the food, but there's that empty space near me which simply ought not to be. I save my money for when there are one or more other people to go out with.
The other call I made was to the Meadowvale Christian Reformed Church. Somehow, I needed to reconnect with God and have the ghost of a chance of connecting meaningfully with other people. I had to turn a new page and become involved even if it would all be taken away at some future date when housing finally became available. The church proved to be a very welcoming place right from day one. The pastor was very wise, compassionate and thoughtful. I soon found myself getting to know some very good and friendly people who had room in their lives for the different and extraordinary.
Family and friends stuck with me through my dip into despair and did whatever they could to keep my spirits up. It took a bit for me to discover that they had always valued me as a single man even if I myself had briefly lost that capacity. Not only was the glass undamaged, but it still actually had a good deal of water in it. The Summer after Janene left was a pretty long and empty one but contained some interesting excursions including a trip to Chicago. There were other smaller milestones. The songs that had been too painful to hear for months after Janene left became enjoyable once again and were re-introduced to my hard drive. There were over a hundred of them which could stop me in my tracks and bring all the frustration and memories back. Those songs were once again mine to enjoy with the hope of better times ahead. A small thing, but an important step. As my nieces got older, my relationship with them, my brother and his wife grew stronger. Being a good uncle became more of a cornerstone of life. So too did helping my mother and father deal with technology and computers.
Eventually, after a ten year wait which helped destroy my marriage, I was given a subsidized apartment in the same area where I had lived with my parents. The steps I had taken to become less isolated weren't just going to disappear on me after all. I could build on them. Having a proper home is so much more than having one's own place. That in itself proved to be a somewhat bitter discovery. I had somewhere to invite people to, but getting them to actually come and form friendships proved a more difficult process than I had expected. Particularly for extroverts like me, it's critical that we find people around us to get to know. That took far longer than it should have. I still found myself going through the major part of many weeks where there was no face to face interaction with anybody. Over time though, meaningful friendships started forming. There was Shirley, an English lady around my parents' age who liked going for walks around the lake with me. Joseph, a cheerful if conflicted gay pun-loving Scrabble player who gave me rides to and from church quickly moved from being an acquaintance to a friend. So two did Doug and his mischievous wife Nan who wrote "If you can read this, then God has performed a miracle" on a notepad stuck to my fridge. The message was discovered the next day when my friends Mark and Wendy came over to visit and saw it. To date, other than through the wondering laughter of occasional guests, I never have.
My first New Year's party in this apartment was another very meaningful milestone. We all had a good time despite their being no corkscrew. It brought some of my old friends together with a few new ones for a long evening and night of good discussion and happiness. There was Stephen, a blind friend of mine since grade school who now looked forward to a trip of a lifetime. he would soon be off to India to volunteer at a school for the blind. Joseph was there having fun with the first audio arcade game he had ever experienced and meeting some of my other friends. So were Adam and his girlfriend, a very welcome thoughtful new acquaintance. Shirley even dropped in after returning from another New Year's celebration elsewhere. She came to her blind friend's apartment hoping to borrow, of all things, a flashlight. I have every reason to hope that the next New Year's gathering I have here will be even more memorable. If nothing else, we won't find ourselves short of a corkscrew.
Gradually, I had become more familiar with the local area. Now that I had a permanent place of residence, it became worth the high investment in time and effort to do so. This finally made it possible for me to volunteer at the Dam, a place where troubled youth can hang out and hopefully be influenced to make good choices in their lives. Circumstances had at last permitted me to make a two-year commitment in good conscience and get to the place on my own for most of the year. My parents and new friends like Shirley were willing to help when it became too dangerous in the Winter for me to walk there and back. Connecting with the teens has been pretty slow going. I've sat through a lot of hours where I might as well have been on the moon as there. However, I've gotten to know the staff and other volunteers. Once in a while, I think I've even managed to do some good for the teens I'm supposed to be there to help. Not the most productive use of my skills and talents, but it at least gets me out of the apartment once a week to a place where there are possibilities.
The online world also began to regain its place and value in life. A friend I hadn't seen since secondary school tweeted that the Chilean miners were about to be rescued. Thanks to Twitter, for once in my life, I was able to tune in and watch the drama unfold with the rest of the world. Sad that it took a near fatal disaster to get me in tune with everyone else, but there you are. Listening to Internet radio and becoming involved with the communities which grew up around the various shows brought me further back from the edge. There was the May long worldend experience which saw me up at two A.M. participating in Jonathan Mosen's doomsday celebration. At that virtual shindig, I discovered that it didn't matter that we were all so physically far away from each other. It still felt damned good to be a part of something special with people I had come to know if only at a distance. Another couple who I had lost touch with around a decade ago found me on Facebook. Hard as I find that site to use with my screen-reader, it does have a way of allowing people from the past to come into your present. I've enjoyed some wonderful hours getting reacquainted with them and helping them with computer issues. It helps them get more out of life and helps me feel valued.
I had lost my sense of progress and motivation for quite some time without realizing it. I had become so disconnected that thoughts of working on my book or creating Enchantment's Twilight seemed almost silly. What good could they possibly do anybody in a world which seemed so hell-bent on ridding itself of permanent relationships and cohesive communities where people felt like they mattered? Over this past Summer, my sense of community engagement and optimism was increased by a number of events. It was easily the best Summer I've ever had. From a great vacation at Lake Joseph to a multiethnic church conference in the US to a trip to Canada's Wonderland with two friends I had chanced upon while out for a walk, it seemed like everything that should have been happening while I was in my twenties was at last starting to happen now in my mid thirties. On Canada Day, I was even able to go out on my own with the help of my Trekker Breeze GPS device and enjoy fireworks in a park near my building. I can't begin to describe just how liberating that experience was. Things had really changed for the better in a fundamental way. More importantly, so had I.
No longer was I willing to head off anywhere. I had managed to find a home worth keeping, sharing and adding to. A place built of people who saw past no job and no marriage and tight money I couldn't earn. People who saw my true value as a person even when I had lost sight of it myself. That's not something I'll walk away from lightly if ever. My purpose is now very clear. The autobiographical book and game are worthy goals but are really just means to a larger end. Above and beyond everything else, that end is to help disillusioned people to see the intrinsic value within themselves and in each other. It's to try and live out an example of why it's important to be included and to include others in a greater community. I do have a kind and just boss. His name is God. I'm on his payroll for life. First and foremost, he cares about the relationships I have with others. Everything else is just icing on the cake.
There's still plenty of stuff on my bucket list. I hope to be married one day to someone who appreciates me and adds to my life here. More than likely, it'll be to somebody else facing one or more disabilities. I haven't given up on sighted women entirely. There are certainly some out there who look for inner strengths rather than external assets. However, they do seem to be quite rare. At my age, I find that most who find me interesting at all have already been spoken for. It's one area where I've left things in God's hands. Having a positive impact on a community is something I'm at last in a position to actually be doing. It feels damned good. I still hope to eventually find ways of doing more in the local community and less online if possible. However, if that proves unfeasible, I believe I'll still manage to give a good account of myself productively speaking. I seem to have reached a point of critical mass where I can find enough ways to help friends who I can actually get together with so that I don't feel quite so damned disconnected anymore. Regarding travel, things are starting to look somewhat more positive. This is definitely the case when it comes to local travel. I've met some friends who are interested to take me along with them to various places. I'll have to watch my spending but am likely to get around a lot more than I have previously. Perhaps, either with family or through the church, more distant travel may even prove possible.
Things have most definitely turned a corner for me. A corner of changed expectations and newfound contentment with who I am as a person. People will say that not having others see your value is their loss rather than your problem. I know what they're getting at, but can't fully agree. We all come to a point where we need to discover our own intrinsic value. My sense of intrinsic value had certainly been lost and I had to rediscover it. However, consider Sherlock Holmes. He knew himself to be a very gifted and talented man. He wasn't at all humble or bashful about his abilities. Despite that, he had to resort to drugs when things weren't interesting enough for him. He once asked of Watson what good having powers of detection were if there was no field on which to exercise them. Minus any desire for drugs, I found myself very much in the same situation. I knew I could give a whole lot to people given the right circumstances. There was simply no way to connect the dots and bring them about. That's an ongoing problem that I may face for the rest of my life. A problem not so much solved as reduced to a dull roar I can live with. I've found enough to enjoy life with what I have and hope for better things to come.
A big part of maturing as a person is learning to maximize the hand you're dealt making the best of what is within one's reach. It's about adjusting expectations as much as it is about trying to better one's prospects. My life certainly isn't anywhere even close to the template for successful that society sets out and that I had once fully subscribed to. Barring any big changes, I'll be giving away my life's work rather than selling it. In current circumstances, it would be crazy of me to try. A steady, stable and secure job would be the only sensible move that would give enough stability. Those seem like things belonging increasingly more to the past than to even the present let alone tomorrow. I'm as secure and well off here as I'm ever likely to be. There are a lot of restrictions the absurdity of which would horrify people if they took the trouble to educate themselves. On the other side of the coin though, I've been blessed in many ways. There are a lot of reasons for me to be profoundly thankful. I have absolute freedom regarding my time and where to direct my effort. I have a close family and some very good friends. Once in a while, being different does expose you to unusual opportunities. Over the years, I've been on television a number of times, met some famous people, touched exhibits you're normally not allowed to, had time enough to write a fifty-thousand-word guide to help blind people who own accessible computers, and published an online magazine. Increasingly, as I release more of my writing and interact with the online and offline community, I'm becoming more known and less feared. There's a real hesitation among the fully able-bodied to take the time to get to know disabled people. That can take quite a while to even begin to dissipate. It takes more than casual encounters although they play an important part. If you're on the lookout for ways to be of help to people, opportunities will eventually present themselves. Things will eventually open up and get better. When you live an extraordinary life, finding one's own stride and balance can also take longer. Extraordinary tends to lead to lonely and excluded far more than it ought to. Despite that, such a life as I've found is most emphatically worth the living.
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