I was recently asked for the most private thing I was willing to admit on a web site. I thought about it for a moment, and the exact answer came to me:

I have a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Despite my barely above-average grades in undergrad (where I worked like a cat) and uncomfortable tendency to screw up one graduate course per term, my supervisor offered to take me on for a doctorate based on the strength of my thesis. To this day, I wish I’d published more stuff that he could put his name on, because he was the best supervisor I could imagine having, with a heart to match his considerable brain. On the other hand, I don’t regret turning down the offer for an instant.

I can’t imagine how unhappy I’d be as an engineering academic, a mere 400-metre walk from hundreds of lovely young people doing exactly what I knew even then that I should have done in the first place. And so that degree represents seven years of running from my dreams and beating myself up for it.

It’s really astonishing in retrospect. How did I not see? How did I not act?

My notes were 75% doodles, often lacking critical information in favour of shapes, squiggles and cartoons. I avidly collected obscure old computers, which I admired for their astonishing craftmanship and the ingenious ways they bent the limitations of their technology. I collected strange music, which I admired for their skill with their instruments and their subversion of my expectations. I also listened to a lot of angry and pretentiously sad music, where admiring the skill of its execution was honestly a cover for deeply identifying with its desperate cries for attention, admiration, acceptance, love… whatever.

At the end of undergrad, I had two close friends who were engineers. One sang in choirs and shared my admiration for the brilliant artistry of the deeply arcane guts of our computers and the beauty of well-composed music, though he has always been more willing to accept the beautifully trite as much as the beautifully unexpected, and he’s still one of my dearest friends; the other shared my more obscure and violent tastes in music as a balm for pain he clearly had no idea how to deal with, and renounced me after a crush on my sister went sour. I found one more close friend in grad school, a gifted and pudgy Chinese man who shared my tendency to understand the phenomena of our field intuitively before even looking at the math—a helpful tendency in research, where the math often doesn’t exist yet. I lost track of him in the following years. I hope he’s doing well.

The rest of my friends were misfits, humanities or arts students, musicians, and seekers. I pursued friendships with people in cultural and artistic fields, more often than not pushing them away with an unending barrage of questions and a childish admiration paired with an arrogant assumption that I was one of their peers. I took every opportunity to hang around the opposite end of campus, because arts and humanities clearly had more interesting women, although I had no idea how to relate to them, feeling that they were part of a braver, more sophisticated species than I.

It’s a wonder to me that I could so deeply understand where I wanted to be and still keep myself so very far from it. What forceful self-denial! What savage self-flagellation! Or more accurately, what fear!

And if I’d found any believable solace, I might have kept resisting until the flow of life wore me down to a nub. Even now I regret the loss of parts of my being that surely must have died, and parts of me that might now never grow. Some day, I hope I learn to forgive myself for it.

Ben Bumhertz writes:

I’m a new driver, and I’ve heard that being passed by cyclists can strike you gay.  I’m scared, what should I do?

Well, Ben, you heard correctly.  Being passed by a cyclist while driving can strike you gay.  It’s only natural, as you sit there powerless in your car or truck, to imagine those powerful legs and glutes pounding your fleshy bottom (with prosthetics as required) for hours on end.

Researchers in the field call it queeralysis, and if you drive a large truck or sports car, you may be especially vulnerable.  And we’re sure you are aware of the downsides of being struck queer: constant discrimination, no longer being able to call everyone a fag, possibly dramatic changes in hygiene and style, and an enjoyment of TV shows that are only aired on expensive premium channels.

Fortunately, you can protect yourself. There are several tactics that you can use to delay or even avoid being struck queer.

1) Pass the cyclist as quickly as possible, even if it means speeding. It is very important that you also rev your engine as you pass, to signal to the cyclist that you meant to let them by, and that you could have overtaken them at any time with your powerful machine, and that you didn’t just spend the last thirty seconds imagining them filling every inch of you.

2) Shout at the cyclist. This technique has been used since the time of your ancient, lemur-like ancestors to reclaim dominance and heterosexuality.  ”Get off the road!” is one suggested line, since it gives an impression of authority, wisdom and straightness, but if you feel the strike coming and you can say it without a quaver in your voice, try shouting “Fag!” or “Dyke!”  Since this technique might lead to eye contact with the cyclist, we suggest that you clench your anus before shouting, in case they use witchcraft to teleport inside you.

3) Endanger the cyclist. Remember, the goal here isn’t to kill, only to prove that you’re not queer.  If they don’t survive the encounter, they will never know.  Passing them as closely as possible and then cutting them off is a classic; try stepping on your brake afterwards for a more powerful effect.  Again, we suggest clenching your anus to protect against witchcraft.

So there you go, Ben.  With the appropriate use of these techniques, you will be as well equipped as possible to resist queeralysis.  Good luck, and happy driving!

Well, I’ve now had half a week with my new bike, Aurore Astrid Macaroni, a beautiful Marinoni Sportivo Express.  After some initial shakiness, related to my toe clip technique and slowing down, I’m used to riding non-fixed again.  Last night, after getting home on Aurore, I switched to Carrera, my beautiful fixed-gear Soma Delancey, and went for a spin to directly compare the riding experience.

And it’s a total toss-up.  They’re both amazing.  They’re completely different.

Aurore is fast.  I’d blow past people on Carrera, but this is something else entirely.  Aurore’s top gear is 53/12, four and a half tire revolutions per pedal revolution, and Carerra’s 46/17 is just over two and a half.  While I would hit the limit of my spinning ability on a straightaway with Carerra, I’m not powerful enough to use Aurore’s top gear at a proper cadence unless I’m going slightly downhill.  Apparently this isn’t at all abnormal.  Additionally, having gears means that the thought of going up a big hill is only mildly disgusting.

Aurore is also smooth.  The carbon fork and stays absorb a lot of the (irritatingly frequent and large) bumps that I encounter on Edmonton’s (shitty) roads.  Sections of road that were bone-rattling on Carrera are only uncomfortable on Aurore, and going over them more quickly feels less stupid.

Aurore is an amazing machine.  But she doesn’t win, because Carerra is so much goddamn fun to ride, for almost completely different reasons.

The fixie versus freewheel thing has probably been done to death, and I don’t think it’s fair to compare them¹.  With a freewheel bike, the core mechanic is “pedal means go, brake means stop.”  When you ride one, you’re driving.  Riding a fixie feels more like skating: every motion of your feet has significance, and it feels more like a different interface to the ground than a vehicle.  It’s really no surprise that people who have been riding other kinds of bikes have trouble with fixies, at least at first.  The idea of brakes being only semi-useful is understandably strange, because vehicles have to stop.  It’s the same with the idea of not being able to coast: what’s the point of driving a vehicle if you can’t just sit and let it carry you a bit?  But once you accept this conceptual shift, the reasons for loving your fixie are just too clear.

For me, the biggest one is probably speed control.  I accelerate as hard as I pedal, I slow down as hard as I resist.  Another one is feedback.  Based on what’s coming to me through the pedals, I can feel the ground I’m going over.  I find that these two things combine to make the ride almost meditative, because any time my mind wanders the pedals bring me right back.  I also find that my cycling style changes, because I never want to touch my brakes.  On one hand, I’m more aggressive in taking safe openings that I see; on the other, I’m way more cautious of everything that can move.  It’s a wonderful experience.

So I guess that puts the whole fixie debate to bed for me.  They’re awesome, but so are other bikes.  I’m now bicyclically polyamorous.

1. In my defence, I’m only going to contrast them.

My plan to post every other day has taken its first blow, but I think it’s fairly justifiable.  The last post was the day before I left for a few days in Vancouver, where I was reminded just how beautiful it is, why I didn’t want to leave and what I gave up when I did.  There’s nothing like a straight view into downtown and across to the mountains, framed by rows of blossoming cherry trees.  Or, for that matter, the similar view from Seasons in Queen Elizabeth Park, and that while eating a some excellent duck and drinking BC wine from one of those dozens of awesome vineyards that don’t get their products past the province’s borders.  Late night bus rides down Hastings.  Having pastries and cider in the sun in Grandview Park¹.

Back in Edmonton, spring hasn’t quite started yet.  It’s only mid-April, after all: yesterday was a blizzard.  The desert-carcass tan that’s dominated the ground since the snow melted is only just starting to hint at shifting towards the lime-and-urine green² that will replace it once plants start coming out and the dust is blown into our eyes and out of our lives.  I know it’s tired to bitch about the climate here, but seriously, the temperatures overnight are still dipping below freezing, and they’re going to continue to do it.  My forecasting widget says that even the day a week from now where we’ll hit a tropical 14°C will be -2 overnight.  The five months of non-winter here are usually beautiful, like an abusive partner you were about to leave suddenly being extra-nice to keep you around.  But this year, not so much.  The freezing nights and mornings are like catching that partner watching you with hatred and clenching their fists while you sleep.

Anyway, back on the blogwagon.  I’ll aim for something more interesting by Friday.

1) Hell, even realizing that the Sweet Cherubim bakery that I’d previously overlooked is more than half gluten-free was awesome.

2) I remember that for years I hated the way landscape paintings here always used pastel colours to depict grassy fields, or wheat fields, or patches of trees around fields, or old farm buildings collapsing in grassy fields or wheat fields.  I’d always assumed it was a really lame stylistic choice.  It turns out that when you’ve seen what colour looks like in other places, using pastels when painting landscapes here is more documentary honesty than style.

Tom sit down.  Back on tree.  Tree on hill.  Look at sky.  Sky blue.  Small clouds in.  Look at river.  River blue.  No clouds in.

Tom think about book.  Smart man talk in.  Say words not mean stuff.  Tom no get.

Tom look down.  See flower.  Pretty flower.  Yellow.  Tom pick flower.  Stare at.  Spin in fingers.

Tom think hard.  Make face.  Think what man say.  Dog not mean dog.  Dog mean not cat.  Dog mean not chair.  What mean cat?  Not dog.  Chair not dog too.  That mean cat is chair?  Tom no get.

Tom look at flower.  Dead now.  No make seeds.  Tom feel sad.  Flower not chair too.  Flower is dog?  No.  Flower mean not dog.  Dog no make seeds.  But dog not dead flower.

Tom think about words.  What is words?  Words name stuff.  Oh.  Sun hot.  Tom brain hurt.

Think.  Have word for thing.  World mean thing and not-thing.  Oh.  No not-thing mean no thing.  No not-dog mean no dog.  If world only dog, no dog.  Just dog parts.  What dog parts?  This wrong.  Tom no get.

Tom lean back.  Hit tree with head.  Hit not-Tom with head?  Tree is not-Tom.  Tom look at flower.  Dead yellow not-Tom.

Tom look at feets.  Feets on legs.  Legs with hairs.  Small hairs.  Legs is Tom.  Oh.  Legs is not-Tom?  Tom is not-legs?  Tom is not-tree!  Oh.  Tom get.

Tom look at river.  River has water.  Tom think.  Words like water?  Words move together?  No.  World is water.  Words chop water.  No splash.  Words chop world.  All same.

Tom head hurt.  Want sleep.  Then book.  Tom like smart man.

Alain de Botton’s books have amused me before.  I enjoyed Architecture of Happiness and Status Anxiety, and now, this article happens, and I suspect he’s reaching across the Atlantic to kick me in the nuts.

Jon Henley’s contribution is a pretty straightforward if timid-sounding look at our views and expectations of work and how they change in a recession.  I suppose the timidity is honest, and he seems to express how a lot of people feel.  It feels very superficial and fearmongering to me.

But then the voice changes dramatically, into de Botton’s unmistakable lulling pastel tone, and the article disconnects from reality, dropping into absurdly pastoral descriptions of office life that drip irony so thick and pure that Jonathan Swift would gasp.

Coming off of the tone of the first half, de Botton says the most ludicrous things without setting off many alarm bells. He talks of business cards as convenient definitions of identity, rather than having to discover one through contemplation.  He talks about the reversal of civility at work and at home: “How politely we tend to behave at work, next to the insults we throw at one another at home, where there is no HR department to coax us into being more civilised.”  He talks about employers’ concern for their employees’ well-being, and how they demand contentment from them, instead of simply beating them into line like they used to.  He talks about the bureaucratic passive-aggressive organization, the attempts to obscure the workplace hierarchy… it goes on.  At the climax, he even claims that offices are sexy.  Right. It’s probably the most brilliant piece of satire I’ve read in years.

Reading this makes me remember the feeling of unemployment.  Yes, there was worrying about money and making rent, but more significantly there was a feeling of freedom, that the day was mine to seize or waste as I saw fit.  And it reminds me how many of them I wasted.

Office jobs are a tradeoff: your life for steady money.  Yes, there’s talk of people pursuing their passions in evenings and on their weekends, but how many people actually do that?  You come home from an office, drained, and once you’ve dealt with dinner and cleaned up a bit, you have one or two exhausted hours to attack your passions.  Let’s admit that it’s pretty much impossible.  No non-trivial pursuit can thrive on such slender resources.

It becomes a matter of what you want out of your life, and what you want to do with it.  If you can measure it monitarily, as houses, cars, TVs, vacations, fancy clothes, then an office job might suit you perfectly.  The last few years have taught me that I can’t do this, and they did it in a way that leaves no room for argument.  I’ve worked for jack all, I’ve worked for mad cash.  I’ve had the big TV and leather couch, lived in the posh urban condos and a beautiful house in one of the nicest neighbourhoods in the world, and I’ve lived in a small basement bedroom.  My ceilings have been between 7 and 20 feet.  It turns out that it made very little difference. If I’m not engaged, I won’t be happy. Repetition doesn’t promote engagement.

I think my office days are numbered, and the number is rather small. I don’t know what will come next, but I’ll be stronger, because the memory of office work will motivate me.

Tuesday morning is possibly the worst morning of a standard working week.  Monday mornings slide by relatively painlessly, because we’re too coated in the frost of the weekend to feel them.  It will be nearly noon before we realize what we’ve been suckered into.  Tuesday morning is the first one that requires conscious effort.  By Wednesday we’ll remember how to do it, and on Thursday we’ll be thinking about the weekend.

Of course, this is arbitrary.  I could probably come up with an explanation for every morning of the week that would sound convincing, except Saturday.  Saturday morning is always awesome, even if you have a hangover (you think, “man, I’m glad I can take it easy this morning”).

So why write about it?  I haven’t started any sort of habit that will give me a backlog of topics to attempt, and I want to get myself writing something every day.  I suspect the best way to get the word wheels spinning with torque is to just keep them going.  To this end I plan to start blogging almost every day, and keeping a notebook on hand to keep track of every idea even tangentially worth thinking about writing about.  And in the worst case, I have five mornings left to bitch about.

All around the melting ice forms little oceans with foothills of packed snow blocking their underground escape routes.  Diminutive bergs from broken ice sheets slosh around in the waves of passing cars; footage for a global warming documentary for ants (a big-headed red one in a puffy parka speaks into a pherophone as the ice collides dramatically behind it.  It wins several awards at film festivals).  Everywhere the ground is muddy with the sand and salt built up over the winter, and eventually it will form a coat of dust that will give being outdoors a feeling of finding favourite toys lost in an attic.

Soon spring will come, with dripping wet days of snow banks slinking away from the sun’s renewed assertiveness and finally taking refuge under barriers of gravel, in shadowy corners, and on the steepest slopes of north-facing hills.  For another year their dastardly plot to bury civilization under glaciers will be defeated.  Once again, we will step outside standing straight with giddy smiles, after months of walking hunched like fugitives trying to go unnoticed by the wind.  A few weeks later, seeds and buds will dare the same optimism.

But for now, the forecast keeps talking about cold, and I’m getting impatient.  Hurry up already, you damn season.

Why does anyone live anyplace as crappy as Edmonton, Alberta?

I don’t know too much of the native history for the area, but from what I recall they were at least semi-nomadic large game hunters, so they were here because the things they killed were here.  That’s fine.  That’s sane, there’s a logic to it.  But what about the settlers?  What was up with them?

Just imagine this: you live in Europe, in a “developed country” with “civilization,” and it sucks so hard that getting on a long, uncomfortable boat ride to a different continent so you can trek across thousands of kilometres of wilderness to do some subsistence farming on a few hundred acres of frozen birch forest in the middle of nowhere was a step up.

So the fact that this area is even inhabited is sort of a telling proof of the scale of the inequality European society at the time.  While we had people living in lovely countryside estates exchanging repartée and poncy English poets dying of syphilis and the leisure class enjoying their tea, we had a lot more people thinking, “man, digging into the frozen earth in the middle of nowhere would be such a great opportunity.”

And the big deal was land ownership.  Yup, it might be a chunk of forest.  It might be a hundred miles from the nearest store, where an unbathed man with a raccoon on his head would sell you salt and medium-sized sharp rocks.  But it was your chunk of forest, and if anyone—even raccoon man—tried to take it you’d fuck them up.  And probably eat them, because it’d be a pleasant change from birch bark and turnips.

Strangely, everything around here related to settlers glosses over winter.  The Ukranian village has some stuff like a burdei, and in the summer there are costumed actors living in these places, but that’s only during the summer.  Once fall hits, they’re done, and seriously: look at that photo.  Imagine spending a winter snowed into that.  Yes, this was a step up.  Crazy.

I’ve found a new way to spend my lunch break that I enjoy thoroughly.  I eat my lunch while I work, and when I take my break I go downstairs to the lobby with a book, land on a couch, set the timer on my iPhone and read until the alarm goes off.  The entire southeast wall is a window, and my preferred spot is a couch in the brightest corner of it, so I’m usually reading in the sun, or the best available approximation.

Today, sitting in the sun with long johns under my jeans and my thickest sweater, baking comfortably, my mind started to wander from my book to thoughts of summer: green grass, flowers, beaches, cold alcoholic drinks, swimming pools, the sun setting over the ocean, women in bikinis; one woman in particular who I no longer speak to but whose smile seemed a perfect fit for the scene.

I sat up and took a drink of water.  Out the window two middle-aged women in large fur-collared coats huddled away from the wind and the cold with their cigarettes, and snow swirled on the grey cement, and beyond that the leafless trees across the river valley stood waiting for spring.  On top of that, an enormous frozen sky invited me to take flight and migrate someplace warmer.

Sighing, I stretched out again and went back to my book.  As much as it sucks to have the illusion shattered, it was also wonderful to remember what summer can be like, with the world spread out and welcoming, full of beauty, fun and adventure.