Sunday, December 31, 2006

Things They Should Invent: dog stroller

I don't have a car, which is fine considering where I live. I want a dog, which would normally be fine without a car, considering where I live. Everything I or a dog could want is within walking distance. Even going to the vet shouldn't be a problem, since a walk to the park would involve walking right past the vet's office, so if I take the dog to the park frequently, it won't realize we're going to the vet until we actually walk in the door.

But what if the dog needs to go to the vet because it's sick or hurt in a way that makes it painful or impossible for the dog to walk to the vet? If it's a very small dog, I can carry it. But I'm not particularly strong and the vet is a few blocks away, so I may well not be able to carry the dog all the way to the vet in a way that's safe and comfortable for both of us. I could call a taxi or a pet taxi, but it seems a ridiculously short distance to be driven. I would walk it myself if I were in pain, it's just that I wouldn't make my dog walk if it were in pain.

I was pondering this in the shower today, and the best solution I could think of is making some modifications to a granny cart. However, this doesn't seem a particularly pleasant environment for a dog, especially since the easiest way to move a granny cart is to tilt it and pull it backwards - pushing it flat and forwards is harder.

So what I want is a stroller-type device specially designed to safely and comfortably transport a dog, just for those situations where the dog can't walk but I can.

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Vacations are better when you're a grownup

I'm taking the next week off work. This is the first time I've taken any serious amount of time off since I started my job 3.5 years ago. I've taken lots of long weekends, but never a whole week before.

I just realized something incredibly cool: I can actually take this time off! There isn't anything else I "should" be doing! Ever since I started high school, vacations have come with a sense that I should be having a job or doing something productive. All time off school was spent either working, looking for work, or feeling guilty for not working. (Plus practicing music, getting ahead on schoolwork, etc.) And there was no such thing as time off work, because if I didn't go to work I didn't get paid.

But now I have paid vacation time, and since I still have a job and am still getting paid (unless something diastrous happens in the interim), I can legitimately and without any guilt whatsoever do whatever the hell I want. I can sleep until noon, eat ice cream, and play videogames all day if I want, and anyone who would tell me that I should use my time more productively would be way out of line! This is so cool!

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Doggie disaster near-miss

There's an adoptable dog on Dogster that I had my eye on. Her size, breed, and temperament seem a good fit, and she even has floppy ears! But, after some thought, I decided to postpone getting a dog until I've got the new apartment. A few more dogless months seemed a reasonable sacrifice to give me a the best possible chance of getting a dishwasher and in-suite laundry in a brand-new building. So I stopped checking Dogster on a regular basis.

But today I did decide to look at Dogster, just because I was in a doggie sort of mood. To my surprise, the dog I was thinking of adopting was still there. To my greater surprise, she had a litter of puppies! I googled up canine gestation periods, and it looks like she was newly pregnant when I was first considering adopting her!

But her profile never said she was pregnant when I first looked! It's quite likely that her humans didn't know yet, but imagine if I'd accidentally adopted a pregnant dog! I mean, puppies rock, but I'm far too novice a dog owner to have a whole litter of brand new puppies! I don't even know how to go about rehoming dogs, and my apartment is way too small for six dogs!

So, lessons learned: Make sure that any dog I adopt is spayed/neutered. Maybe even have a vet look them over before I commit (is that socially acceptable?)

Another lesson learned: I had to look up a dog gestation period, I didn't know it offhand. This means that I should get a book on basic dog medical stuff. I never thought of that before - I've been focusing on psychology and training - but obviously I don't know enough if I had to look up the gestation period. Can anyone recommend a doggie medical book that can be understood by someone who never even took biology in high school?

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Slow news day?

The following pieces of advice were found in the Boxing Day edition of the Hamilton Spectator:

1. Feed your children whole-grain food whenever possible.
2. Buy fresh, locally-grown produce when in season.
3. You might want to put some lotion on your hands so they don't get dry or cracked.
4. Strictly speaking, your belt should match your shoes.
5. Down bedcovers are very warm.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Back

Got back this afternoon, in time to do my laundry and enjoy most of the Enterprise marathon. Things were okay, but being chez les parents reinforced my desire for an urban, carfree life completely separate from them. I'd forgotten how much friendlier Toronto dog owners are though. I saw the most adorable beagle ever and said "Hi puppy!" and its people looked at me all suspicious, like "Why are you talking to my dog?" (In Toronto, people tend to either engage me and allow me to engage the dog, or just smile at me, or heel the dog if they're trying to train it, which I take as a sign to stop attempting to engage the dog. I never get negative reactions about talking to other people's dogs here.)

I was staying at my parents' overnight but my sister wasn't (b/c she lives much closer), so I got to be an only child, which I haven't been able to do since I was two. Unfortunately, sleeping in my childhood bed makes me dream that I'm in high school again.

I got to see my cousins and aunts and uncles and grandmothers, got to laugh at assorted fathers being all squicked out that my one (female) cousin now lives in the gaybourhood (why are people allowed to have daughters when they can't even empathize with a female perspective?), got to enjoy lots of good mommy-food and babcia-food and take leftovers home with me. I am a bit tired though from all the constant people, and I have to work all the rest of this week, so I'll be back with more later once I decompress some. Luckily I get the first week of January off so I can recover properly from xmas.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Better than using it an an audition piece...

Whoever can translate the introduction to Everything Is Illuminated should get a prize! Whoever can effectively translate it into Ukrainian, while retaining a reasonable amount of the humour, gets to be god (until a more difficult translation challenge comes along.)

New Rule

Taken in a vacuum, I don't mind if people don't send me a birthday card. I tend not to notice the absence of something anyway.

Taken in a vacuum, I guess I don't mind if people send me xmas cards. I'm not religious or anything, but I can accept that some people have this bizarre need to send a generic greeting to everyone they know for some weird reason.

The problem is when people - like family and friends, real people with whom I have a greeting card relationship - send me a xmas card from their generic "OMG must send a card to everyone I know!" list, and pretend that's suitable acknowledgement of my birthday. I'm not even xian! Just because you sent me a generic card for some holiday near my birthday doesn't mean you've acknowledged my birthday! It makes me feel like you don't care at all about me as an individual, and instead value me simple because I make your list of "People I know" one name longer. I'd rather get nothing at all than a xmas card but no birthday card. If you choose not to acknowledge me at all, that's fine, but I'm sick of being given greetings for a religious thing I don't even celebrate and expected to take that as greetings for my birthday!

Therefore, I am introducing a new rule: If you send me a xmas card and expect it to count as birthday greetings, for your birthday you are getting a greeting card for some religious holiday in a religion to which you don't subscribe, with nary a Happy Birthday comment added.

Friday, December 22, 2006

Happy birthday to:

Happy birthday to:

1. L.S. from high school. I can't seem to track you down online because of a quasi-celebrity with the same name as you, mais je te souhaite mes meilleurs voeux et j'espère que tout aille bien pour toi.

2. Musey. I don't think you still use that name (I no longer use the name I used when we met) but you know who you are.

3. Vidman, who I don't know at all, but has the exact same birthday as me (year and everything) AND hosts the French baguette commercial on his website, so he gets a free link from me.

The REAL problem with all this xmas shit. For real this time.

I know, I said I've found the real problem like 12 zillion times. But I've got it for real this time:

The real problem is that people:

1. Go out of their way to do something xmassy in the public sphere. Decorations, parties, special meals, school assemblies. THEN...
2. Because they're supposed to be neutral, they take this xmassy thing that they're exceptionally going out of their way to do, and give it a "politically correct" name. Oftentimes they give it an overly excessive "politically correct name, like those people who use the word humankind when the perfectly good word humanity exists. E.g. "Happy Merry non-denominational winter holiday thingy!" THEN...
3. Declare this ridiculous excessive political correctness to be a War on Christmas and declare anyone who just...doesn't want to be all xmas all the time 24/7 to be oppressive and anti-xian and whatnot.

The real problem is not that things are labelled more inclusively. The real problem is that everyone is going to great, big, exceptional trouble to saturate everything with a xmas theme in the first place! All they have to do is not decorate public space and smother it with carols, not make special xmas events when you're supposed to be inclusive and simply change the nomenclature. If labelling something "Christmas" would be politically incorrect, just don't do something xmassy under another name. Let people do it in their own homes, in their own families and religions, where it has meaning.

FBORFW theory

Just because I haven't seen it postulated yet:

I theorize that the Kelpfroths are going to die in the fire, Lovey's going to die in the fire, and Lovey's going to will the house to Mike and Deanna.

Spam motivation

A lot of the spam I get is trying to sell me stocks. Thing is, I'm not worldly enough to know how to go about buying stocks (sure I could find out, but I don't know offhand), but I am worldly enough to know not to buy stocks just because a piece of spam told me so. So that must mean that there are some people out there who know how to buy stocks, but don't know enough not to buy stocks recommended by spammers. I wonder who these people are?

Sometimes I google innocuous words and end up with results that are trying to trick me into clicking on what will likely end up being a porn website. This I also find odd. Why do you want to trick me into viewing porn? Aren't there enough people out there actively looking for porn? Do they really think I'm so distractable that I'm going to drop my line of research and subscribe to their porn?

Audition piece, anyone?

If you can do a decent Slavic accent (ideally Ukrainian, but anything Slavic would do (but don't tell them I said that)), the "Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey" (i.e. the introduction) to Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated would be the best audition piece ever.

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Things They Should Invent: basic palliative care training

I was reading about a family where an elderly grandmother was dying and needed hospice care, and the hospice people taught the family all this stuff: ways to adapt the house and the daily routine to make it easier for the grandmother, how exactly to help her with personal care, etc. etc.

As I was reading, I thought those would be really useful things to know - not just for if someone's dying, but for if someone's more generically sick. But they don't teach it to people until their family member has reached the palliative care stage. Why not have classes available for the general public to learn the basics, just like they have first aid classes available for just anyone to take?

Happy birthday to me!

Last year for my birthday, I got the release date for the 6th Harry Potter book.

This year for my birthday (well, birthday eve) I got the title of the 7th Harry Potter book.

But I'm a little bit sad that this is probably the last time I'll get Harry Potter news for my birthday.

Dear J.K. Rowling: Please make the release date for Book 7 December 22, 2007, just so I can have some Harry Potter for my birthday one last time.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

The non-decorating brain

Of all the things in my life that people keep requiring that I justify, the weirdest one that keeps coming up is the fact that I don't decorate. I don't just mean xmas decorations (although I don't do those either), I mean any interior decoration whatsoever. The walls of my apartment are the same standard-issue colour that they were when I moved in. My furniture is almost all yoinked from my parents' house. My curtains are red because that's my favourite colour and my mother asked me what colour curtains I want. I don't have any art, apart from a few kiddie-drawings and a few mi-cielito drawings, all pinned to a bulletin board. (Why a bulletin board? Because I've always had one.)

People take this as a sign of not being grownup - still living like a poor student. But really it's a sign that my brain just doesn't do decorating. Really. I am aware that, in theory, this is not the optimal colour for the walls, but I am quite simply incapable of thinking of a better colour. If you showed me a swatch and asked me if I want that colour on my walls, the best-informed answer I could come up with is "dunno." I know that my rugs are fugly, but I can't go to the store and look at rugs and figure out which one would be better. Yes, I probably should have new furniture, but my eyes just glaze over when I go into a furniture store. I've picked up a few pieces of design theory along the way, but my brain simply does not process colour and texture and coordination. I read the condo section of the Toronto Star every week and it always has all kinds of "decorating ideas," but I am congenitally incapable of extrapolating from "decorating ideas" to "something I can do to make my apartment look better." Everything just scans as "not applicable." This is also why, apart from the occasional attempt to make a vase of flowers not die, I don't decorate seasonally. The part of the brain that sees a decoration and thinks "This would look good in such-and-such a place" just isn't functional in me. Despite the protests of the annoying contingent who say "Of course you can decorate! You just have to put your mind to it! Be creative! Decorating is fun!" my brain simply does not work in that direction. It's too busy inventing stuff and thinking of analogies and automatically tracking the etymological roots of the made-up alien languages that Hoshi Sato speaks.

The problem with school for introverts

Literature and websites talk about most of the reasons why introverted children find school difficult, but there's one I've never seen mentioned: for most of your school years, it is socially unacceptable to be alone or to not have any friends in whatever context you're in.

There were some times at school when I didn't have any friends whatsoever, and many others when I didn't have any friends in my particular class or activity. Personally and in a vacuum, this wasn't that much of a problem. I would have been quite happy to spend recess and lunch alone in my head, or to do any group projects single-handedly. The problem was that my classmates would actively torment me for not having friends, or even for merely being spotted walking around alone. This made everything into an ordeal. I had to find some friends who I could spend recess with so that I wouldn't have to be seen alone. I had to find some friends in each class so I wouldn't be left adrift for group work and so I'd have someone to sit with at lunch. I had to come up with something to do (or at least to say I had done) each weekend other than finish my homework and chores and recover from school, because that one teacher started each week by asking everyone what they did on the weekend, and it was more than my life was worth than to be caught saying "Nothing."

The thing of it was, in childhood there is no concept of acquaintanceship. Kids don't (or, at least, my peers didn't) grasp the concept of working with someone just because they're in your class and the project has to be done, or eating lunch at the same table as someone just because they needed a place to sit. No no no, you can only work or eat lunch with people who are your friends - and like real friends, come-over-to-my-house-and-play friends. And even if you have dozens of friends elsewhere, it was still a matter of shame to not have a friend in this room right now.

And, of course, the grownups didn't help. "So have you made any friends in your class?" they'd ask, as though this were expected and necessary. As though we should be able to find people we'd like to invite over to our house and play with our stuff in any randomly generated collection of peers. (Aside: some of my older relatives still say this to me - "So, have you made any friends at work?" - and in the exact same tone of voice.) We were simply never exposed to the idea that you can get along decently with someone at school without being friends with them, that people have private lives outside of school, and that there's no shame in not having a friend right by your side this exact minute.

All of which is downright exhausting when you really don't need a friend by your side for personal reasons, but you still have to constantly hustle to make sure you're never seen alone just to avoid torture.

Meaningless greeting cards

Once upon a time, I was shopping for a greeting card. A friend, who shall remain anonymous so as not to reflect poorly on them, was also shopping for a greeting card. For various reasons, we didn't really want to be getting greeting cards for our intended recipients. We didn't particularly like them and would have preferred to give them no attention whatsoever, but unfortunately it was one of those situations where to not give a card would have been actively insulting, and we didn't exactly want to be actively insulting.

We went about this different ways. I looked through a lot of cards, trying to find one that wasn't too enthusiastic or affectionate, and didn't express any sentiments that I didn't actually feel.

My friend unceremoniously grabbed the first card they found from the cheap section.

That made me realize that I really was putting a lot of thought and effort into a card for someone I didn't care about. But still, I can't bring myself to do that - not out of any deep hidden affection for people I don't like, but because I'd feel dirty signing and sending off a card that contained a stronger sentiment than I feel. I'm not sure what that means.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Karma police

I lost my debit card. I've called to have it cancelled and replaced, but I'm probably going to be without one for the rest of the month, which hinders my ability to acquire cash. I'm okay for money, (and I can get a temporary debit card with much more limited powers) but actual cash is at a bit more of a premium, probably for the rest of the month.

Thing is, Friday is my birthday. Traditionally on my birthday, I do my annual karma boost. It's a very personal thing so I don't want to share the details, but the important thing for the purpose of this post is that it involves, entre autres, the ritual dissemination of cash in accordance with a certain formula. It has to be cash, it has to be on my birthday, and the nature of the ritual is that I don't have the cash any more when it's finished.

If I do my ritual normally, this will put a significant dent in my supply of cash. I'm not worried about its effect on my finances - that's part of the point of this exercise - but I will probably end up short on actual pieces of paper. I have credit cards, but I'm not entirely comfortable with wandering around without actual cash.

But the purpose of the ritual is to boost my karma, and losing my debit card is probably a sign that my karma is running low. I could perhaps convince myself that the inconvenience of working with limited cash is a good sacrifice to make for boosting my karma - giving until it hurts etc. - but if I'm honest with myself, the point of my karma boost was never to inconvenience myself, it was simply to share the wealth, to post a net loss for the day rather than making a profit. I would withdraw the amount of cash in question from the bank the morning of or the night before, and the actual physical contents of my wallet would be unaffected.

I know, I know, at this point you're probably thinking "Awwww, poor baby! She has all the money she needs in her bank account but just can't get at it 24/7!" Believe me, I'm well aware that some people don't even have enough to have a bank account. I've been there myself, that's why I started this ritual in the first place. It's just that if I short myself on cash, I'll really be stuck if the power goes out or the credit card network goes down, and that isn't my intention. Having cash is part of my emergency survival plan, and I don't know if a simple misplacement is worth jeopardizing my emergency survival plan. But neither do I feel justified in holding back generosity towards others because I had a minor misfortune, to say nothing of the risks of leaving my karma down where it is.

The real problem with all this xmas nonsense

Here's the problem, right here.