Monday, December 31, 2018

Books read in December 2018

New:

1. The Legend of Lightning & Thunder by Paula Ikuutaq Rumbolt
2. Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent by Liz Howard
3. Slash by Jeannette Armstrong
4. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging

Reread:

1. Secrets in Death

Thursday, December 27, 2018

Metropasses

May 2002 Metropass (source: Colnect)
I got my first Metropass in May 2002, when I was doing my internship.  I felt so glamorously adult, going into an office each morning and swiping my pass like a proper grownup who does this all the time!

I went back to tokens when I was back in school, but once again turned to Metropasses once I graduated and started working full-time. I'm not sure if they ended up being cheaper than tokens every single month, but I loved the convenience - hopping on and off the TTC whenever I wanted, swiping my way into turnstiles.  It made me feel like a real urbanite, a true part of my city.
March 2013 Metropass (source: Woodsworth College Students Association)

I stopped using Metropasses when I started working from home in 2013.  But even though I haven't needed them in over five years, I'm still sad that they're being discontinued in favour of the Presto card. My Metropasses have been symbols of and tools of adulthood, independence, urbanity...all the things I never dreamed I was even allowed to aspire to. And so I mourn their loss.  My Presto card, while it has the same functions, doesn't have the same emotional weight.

Sunday, December 23, 2018

System reboot status: December 2018

As part of my resolution to reboot my system, I'm posting each month the top three things in my system that don't serve me well.

This is for personal accountability only, it's not a request for help or feedback.  (There isn't enough information to provide help or feedback. If you're thinking "There totally is!", that's because you don't have all the information.)

So, for December 2018, the top three things that aren't serving me well:

1. My system for getting myself out the door on time and unrushed just...doesn't.  I can't pinpoint the problem and have no ideas for how to improve it.
2. The time/pattern allocated in my system for recreational internet use doesn't meet my needs, and I end up "wasting time" with additional recreational internet use. I have some ideas for how to adjust this, and I'm going to try them and see what happens.
3. My system disincentivizes going to bed as soon as I'm tired if I get tired before finishing my evening routine.  I also keep staying up later if I finish my evening routine well early of my bedtime, even though I should probably be going to bed.  I have some ideas for how to adjust this and I'm going to try them, but I think there's more that I haven't figured out yet.

Let's see what happens...

Saturday, December 22, 2018

Horoscopes

Last year was the first year when my birthday horoscopes couldn't be interpreted as reflecting reality, possibly because the head injury came and disrupted everything. (Is that statement going to be true for the rest of my life???)

But here's this year's, just to see what happens:

Toronto Star:
This year you will learn to handle your temper. You might be feistier than others realize. You also can be spontaneous at times. Try to curb unexpected actions or words. You might find that you often see both sides of a problem. If you are single, you could attract a strong group of admirers. Your temper and volatile style could be a problem when dating, though. If you are attached, the two of you experience more closeness than in the recent past. Perhaps you will pursue a mutually enjoyed hobby together. CANCER can be quite nurturing.
My mother's sign is Cancer and she's always quite nurturing, so nothing new there.

They say the same sort of thing about "if you're single/if you're attached" every year, and it never comes to pass.  Someone more ambitious than I could look into whether they say that for every birthday.

Globe and Mail:
A full moon on your birthday suggests you will need to make a decision that not everyone will be happy with. What really matters, of course, is that you are happy with it. It’s time to let go of the past and to embrace your glorious future.
I've never in my life made a decision that absolutely everyone was happy with, so that's basic reality.  However, I have already decided to throw away my system and start over, so hopefully that will give me a glorious future.

Friday, December 21, 2018

The first swimming

I wonder which came first: humans learning they can swim, or humans learning they can't swim?

By which I mean: did some random prehistoric human boldly go charging into the water (to what end? to catch a fish? to escape from something? to get to the other side?), never suspecting anything could go wrong, and end up dying?  Or did some random prehistoric human end up in the water (how? by accident? murder attempt?) fully expecting that this would be the death of them, and survive?

I'm told that you put a human baby in the water they'll swim intuitively, but older kids still need swimming lessons.

Some land animals seem to swim intuitively.  Did humans originally have that intuition?  Or did they figure it out from copying the water?

Is the fact that we can't breathe underwater instinctive, or hard-earned knowledge passed down through generations since time immemorial?

If it isn't instinctive, did it take several drownings to figure out that the reason people keep dying in the water is because they try to breathe underwater, and they should hold their breath to survive?

(Did humans ever hold their breath for any other reason before they started swimming?)

At some point, humanity (or, at least, the precursors the predominant culture in which I grew up) must have internalized and normalized the idea that humans can't swim naturally, because swimming lessons became a thing. 

Also, someone at some point came up with the idea of standardizing and naming different swimming strokes, some of which are weird. (Butterfly? WTF?)

And some other swimming strokes may well have existed but are lost to history. (And still others probably exist within other cultures and haven't reached me.)

You could also follow this same line of thought for diving.  Why did someone first think they even could do it?  Or did people never think they couldn't do it, until several people broke their necks.

Do other land animals dive?

Is figuring out how high you can safely dive from (and how deep the water needs to be) instinctive or learned? (I dove off a three metre board once - into an Olympic-sized pool, properly supervised - and it felt unsafe. It felt like a fluke that I didn't die, not like a safely reproducible thrill.)

And, again, enough people dove enough times that it became a normal thing to be able to do, a normal thing to learn in swimming lessons, normal enough that nobody even thought I was weird or reckless for wanting to try the three metre board.

I wonder if there are other, similar things related to swimming that were once (or are elsewhere) considered culturally standard, but are now lost to history (or haven't reached me).

I'm sure that sometime, somewhere, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought swimming was a possibility.

And I'm sure that some other time, somewhere else, within the full scope of human history, there have been people who never once thought that swimming was difficult.

But I do wonder which came first.

Monday, December 17, 2018

Default couple genders in sketch comedy

I'm late to the game on this, but I just started watching the Baroness Von Sketch show this season, and I'm really enjoying it.

One little thing I appreciate is when a sketch involves a couple but the gender of the couple is irrelevant to the sketch, they most often make it a same-sex couple played by two of the (all-female) leads.

Here's an example:



That sketch is entirely gender-irrelevant. It would have worked out the same way regardless of the genders of the characters.  So they simply cast two of the leads as characters who are the same demographic as the actors - two women played by two women.

If you think back to older sketch comedies like Monty Python or Kids in the Hall, they wouldn't do that.  If the genders of the couple were irrelevant to the sketch, they'd make it an opposite-sex couple.  They'd only use same-sex couples if there was a specific reason why a same-sex couple was needed.

But another thing that Monty Python and Kids in the Hall often did was have female characters portrayed by the all-male leads rather than using a female supporting actress to play a female character.  They did use female supporting actresses as well (just as Baroness Von Sketch uses male supporting actors), but the default seemed to be a male lead dressed as a woman.

If you think about it, it's kind of bizarre that in a sketch comedy environment that couldn't perceive a same-sex couple neutrally, a sketch comedy couple consisting of one male actor dressed as a man and one male actor dressed as a woman was seen as neutral and unmarked (in the linguistic sense).

Someday in the future, probably sooner than we expect, people are going to watch those sketches and think all the Monty Python pepperpots are meant to be trans or genderqueer, and they'll need a historical explainer to understand what the Pythons are doing. And they're going to think this post, noticing that gender-irrelevant couples are portrayed as same-sex couples by the all-female cast, is going to come across as having homophobic undertones, like how someone's grandmother who gratuitously mentions the race of everyone she brings up in conversation comes across as having racist undertones.

Tuesday, December 04, 2018

New Rules: Natural Consequences Edition XIII

18. Some people have trouble coping with certain distressing possibilities, so, to get through the day, they delude themselves into thinking that the distressing possibilities can't possibly happen to them, because of their circumstances or because they're sufficiently diligent.

Examples: "I won't get sick because I eat all the right superfoods and do all the right asanas!"  "I won't be raped because I dress modestly!" "I won't ever be a refugee because I'm a regular person living in a developed country!"

This part I don't take issue with.  Life is hard and the world sucks, do what you have to do to get through the day as long as it doesn't do any harm

The problem is when it starts doing harm.  Some people feel the need to reinforce their self-delusion by inflicting it on others assholicly, and sometimes even by advocating for assholic policy.

Examples: "Your mother died? She should have eaten more superfoods!" Which later escalates to "My taxes shouldn't have to pay for health care because people wouldn't need health care if they were responsible enough to just eat the right foods!"  Or "Those people say they're refugees but they have smartphones! They must be frauds - deport them!"

So I propose a natural consequence: if the self-delusion you resort to because you can't cope with distressing possibilities leads you to behave assholicly, you are sentenced to the very distressing possibility you fear.

I do realize this is a very severe sentence, so it's a three strikes rule.  The first two times you do it, you get a very stern warning that makes the offending actions and the future consequences quite clear to you.  (Q: How? A: Through the same omnipotent magic that enforces all of my natural consequences, of course!)  Then, the third time, you're sentenced to the very horror you dread.

Saturday, December 01, 2018

People who are reluctant to call landlines

As I've blogged about before, I prefer having a landline to using a cell phone for everything.

However, in recent years, I've noticed that people (including business relationships) are reluctant to call my landline, even when I explicitly tell them to.

For example, I will say "Please put in my file that my landline is the preferred number. I work from home so I'm at that number 23 hours a day, and I live alone so it is a private number. If I'm not at home, I'm not equipped to check my calendar or schedule an appointment or anything, so if you call my cell phone I'll just have to call you back anyway." 

And they still call the cellphone.

I do try to disincentivize calling the cellphone.  I don't answer the cellphone when I'm at home, sometimes even turning it off when I'm home (depending on whether I'm open to receiving texts at that moment). I don't answer it when I'm out and about for calls that aren't going to be immediately relevant (for example, I'll answer if it's the person I'm meeting or someone who might be trying to get in touch with me for emergency reasons, but I won't answer a call confirming a dentist appointment or wanting to discuss renewing my mortgage.)  If I do answer and it's something that would better go to the landline, I'll say "I'm not at home right now and not able to address this at the moment.  I'll call you back when I'm at home."  (And then, when I do call back, I tell them to call my landline next time.)  If they leave a message, I don't call them back until I'm at home.  (If they call the cellphone while I'm at home and leave a message, but don't subsequently try the landline, I don't even check the messages until I've gone out and returned back home.)

And I do try to incentivize calling the landline by always answering immediately when the call display shows a number that does have business calling me, and always returning calls immediately.

But people still call the cellphone.

I've even stopped giving out my cellphone number unless strictly relevant, but some people still have it in their records from back when I would blithely fill out every field of a contact form without regard for consequences, and some people do have a reason to be able to contact me by cell in emergencies. (For example, work needs to be able to reach me in case I disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes I give people my phone number if we have an appointment in an place I'm not familiar with, in case I get lost or delayed or something.) And when I do give it out, I tell them "You can use this if I don't show up at my appointment, but normally it's the worst possible way to reach me."

And they still call the cellphone.

I totally understand why some individuals might find not having a landline more convenient for their own purposes, but I'm rather baffled by the fact that they avoid calling someone else's landline even when explicitly instructed to do so.

Somehow, their baggage about calling a landline seems to outweigh my explicitly stated instructions about which number to call, plus all the cumulative empirical evidence about which number I'll answer first and which voicemail I'll respond to most quickly.

And what makes it especially weird is I get the vibe that people who are reluctant to call landlines seem to feel that doing so is rude.  Even though calling my cell increases the likelihood of interrupting me at a bad time. If I'm not at home, I am almost certainly in the middle of something and almost certainly do not have privacy.  If I am at home, I may or may not be in the middle of doing something and almost certainly do have privacy.

Again, I understand why some individuals might feel that calling in general might be rude - society as a whole certain seems to have moved towards texting or emailing to confirm it's a good time to call rather than calling cold - but this isn't what's happening here.  What's happening here is I'm getting a call without warning that requires thought or action or decision-making or scheduling on my part, and callers are deliberately choosing the number that's most likely to reach me at a bad time, despite my clear instructions to use the other number.

Baffling.