Category: Me

Except maybe Nutchos.

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A lot of things remind me of Christmas, and a lot of them are obvious: wreaths, carols, wrapping paper, and so on. Over the years these things have turned into indicators of the Christmas shopping season, and not particularly pleasing to me. What still makes me smile are memories of past Christmases, especially from my childhood, which were fairly unique to my family. My mom’s chocolate-covered peanut butter balls. The spruce tree we’d get when most people got fir or pine. My Dad’s homemade ice cream. The light-up porcelain decoration, now long gone, that Mom left on the old TV one year, melting a hole through the plastic top of the TV case. And maybe strongest of all…

Toffifee.

I never think about this stuff, and we never have it anymore, but as a kid we’d have it every Christmas, and I loved it. When Esquire wrote about it today it instantly made me want Christmas. It’s not the strongest memory indicator of Christmas I get, but it might be the only one that reminds me only of Christmas and nothing else.

And you? Any plans to reclaim your life in 18 years?

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Attention parents who wink, smile slyly and ask, “So…when are you going to have some little ones?”: stop it. Think, people…given how obsessed you are about your own kids, don’t you think that if we became parents we’d mention it?

Seriously, I think I’ve reached my breaking point. The other day someone at work I barely know asked me if I’d “be giving my mother any grandchildren soon.” I replied that I might, and asked her how much they’re going for these days. I know the import market is pretty wide open, I said, but the shipping charges must be a nightmare.

Granted, it takes a while for people to get used to my sense of humour, and I think I may now be on file with our HR department. But it was worth it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people I like the most are the ones who never ask me. Not because they know better, but because they’re interesting people who can muster a conversation about more than one topic.

"You and me both, man. That thing is lucky I'm not armed."

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Wired published an article last week called “Five Useless Gadgets You Should Throw in the Trash Right Now.” Setting aside the environmentally-unfriendliness of that for a second, I wonder how reasonable it would be for the average person to eschew everything on that list. I’m pretty accepting of technology, but all other things being equal I won’t adopt something — or get rid of it — if doing so constrains me. Their list was:

  1. printers
  2. scanners
  3. built-in optical drives
  4. fax machines
  5. landline phones

There’s only one thing on that list I could entirely live without: fax machines. I don’t own one but I have to occasionally use one for work, but only when there’s no other way. I always put up a fight before resorting to faxing. I rarely use my scanner (usually it’s in an attempt to avoid faxing…I scan and email a signed document) but I wouldn’t even bother to own one unless it was built into my printer. Speaking of which…I don’t use my printer that often (a standard 500-sheet pack of paper will last me a few years) but there are still enough cases where I can’t avoid it, like boarding passes until everyone sorts out the emailed/texted version. Optical drives are something else I barely use…when I got my new computer I installed some software from CD, but only because there’s where I had it. I’m sure I could have downloaded most of it just as easily. In this case it cost me nothing to include a CD writer and would have saved me nothing to take it out, and at least this way I can still make CDs for my dad, so I got one.

The landline phone seems to be the one I can’t get rid of. I suppose this is mainly because I don’t have a mobile. With my Blackberry (which isn’t voice-enabled) I haven’t needed one, and wouldn’t get one just to replace my landline. While I know lots of people who do use a cell instead of a landline, I think Canadian mobile pricing makes it a less attractive option here than elsewhere.

By the way, that title is one of the lines from Office Space, when Samir and Michael want to kill the printer/copier. When I checked imdb to verify I had the line right, I noticed that pretty much every line in the film is listed in the ‘memorable quotes’ section. Here’s my suggestion for how to quantify the ‘cult-ness’ of a movie: (imdb memorable quote page length) ÷ (movie script length).

Graduand –> graduate

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It might be a bit quiet around here the next few days since I’ll be in Halifax — for the third time in as many months — to take part in my MBA convocation. Trying like hell to get everything done, at home and at work, before I leave.

Have a good weekend, y’all.

I am an extraordinary thief

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The new TV On The Radio starts out strong but then fizzles. The new HBO show True Blood is okay but not great, and a far cry from the likes of The Wire, Deadwood or The Sopranos. Federal elections on both sides of the border leave me cold as candidate after candidate spew the safest tripe and make a supreme effort to not say or do anything that might get notices. I adore how Christopher Hitchens explains why God Is Not Great but it ultimately feels hollow because I know only other atheists will read the book. The new Kings of Leon is like a jelly doughnut: tasty around the edges but squishy in the middle. The first episode of Heroes was rubbish, not that I expected otherwise. Fall is setting in and the sky is already turning that shade of gray that sticks around all winter.

Dear world…excitement: please give me it. Or at least inspire me to manufacture some of my own. Maybe have a radioactive spider bite me or have my condo building taken over by Hans Gruber.

[tags]tv on the radio, true blood, christopher hitchens, kings of leon, heroes[/tags]

Everybody…word scramble!

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It’s official: I passed my final exam, which means I passed my final course, which means I have an MBA. I guess technically I wait until my convocation in October, but whatever.

So…now that I have BComm, FICB and MBA trailing after my name, what fun words can I scramble those words into? I suspect it could be difficult, given the paucity of vowels.

[tags]mba[/tags]

Wake

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Another beautiful morning in Halifax, my last on this trip. In an hour I’ll have breakfast with Stanzi (in town temporarily herself), then head to the airport.

Last night I met up with friends at Salty’s for a few drinks on the waterfront. Somehow I ended up with a bottle of Moosehead…tragic. Anyway, some of us left there and had a fantastic dinner at Il Mercato. Knowing I’d have pasta the following night I stuck to seafood (never a bad choice in Halifax) and had shrimp & salmon…both fantastic. We knocked off a couple of bottles of Chianti Rufina (and a glass of white for my fish) and ordered decadent desserts. One of our party may have over-extended himself, but he recovered quickly.

Feeling poetic, we decided to finish off the evening at The Bitter End. It wasn’t a long night for me by any means though. One friend hit the wall and left early. My glasses of Macallan lasted me ’til around 11, but I needed some solo recharge time. I walked back to the hotel alone, suddenly reminded of how quiet Halifax streets (those outside the downtown core, at least) are at night. It felt peaceful. It felt right.

I was done. It was time to go home. Home home. I know I talked about Halifax being my spiritual home, if there is such a thing, but home is ultimately wherever Nellie is, and that’s where I feel like I need to be right now. I feel like a little chunk of me hasn’t lived there for the past four years…it’s lived in a text book or the computer or a hotel room during a week away on course. It’ll be nice to have that chunk back, and for Nellie to have it all there too, since she’s done without it for the last ~1400 days. What’s more, she’s been amazing about it. If she were anyone other than herself I probably wouldn’t have made it to yesterday.

One final, funny note: last night, sitting at The Bitter End, they were playing (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis. Odd choice, since it’s an old album…then I remembered something: after writing the last exam of my undergrad — which happened to be the very same subject as the one I wrote yesterday — I met some friends at the campus pub to celebrate. That day in the pub they played the fairly recent Oasis CD (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? and we discussed the ridiculousness of the lyrics to “Wonderwall” over celebration beer. Twice in my life I’ve had that particular celebration, and each time I had the same soundtrack. The world’s funny, if a little precious.

[tags]halifax, mba, salty’s, il mercato, bitter end, oasis[/tags]

"It's the ciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife!"

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In three days I’ll fly to Halifax (again…I was just there less than two weeks ago) to attend the final intensive week of my MBA and write my final exam. I’m excited about this, for reasons beyond the obvious…the obvious being that I really, really, pretty-please-with-a-cherry-on-top want to be done this fucker.

Ahem…like I said: beyond that. Even though I’ve lived in Toronto for eleven years now, I still very much think of Halifax as another home. A different kind of home than the family farm, which is two hours northwest of Halifax, but home nonetheless. I spent four years at university there, where I met my wife. I visited Halifax with my family several times as a kid and have visited many times since I moved away. I was married in Halifax. I have good friends there. Some of my favourite places are there: the Public Gardens, the Daily Grind, the bottom of a glass of Granite Brewery Special Best Bitter. If there’s such a thing as a spiritual home, I think Halifax is probably it. If I love the farm for feeling familiar and comfortable, I love Halifax equally for being liberating. Not liberating from the farm or my family, but liberating from the nearby town where I went to high school and the life I was afraid I’d slip into there.

I’m glad I’ll get to enjoy next week with new friends, good friends. It’ll be fun to be one of the two people who’ve lived there and show the tourists around and explain what a donair is. It’ll be fun being on campus, even if it’ll be quiet during the summer. I think it’ll feel like closing a circle too, righting a small wrong. I’ve never felt like I wasted my university education; in fact I think I’ve done fairly well by it. However, I look back (as most people probably do) and shudder at the weakness my work ethic in those years, and regret the sloppiness of my first two most especially. I’ve been lucky enough to learn some of the stuff I, quite frankly, probably should have learned (or remembered) from my first go-round at business school. Not many people get a second crack at that.

How lucky, then, that I get to wrap it all up in the city where it started. Where everything started.

[tags]halifax, dalhousie, public gardens, daily grind, granite brewery[/tags]

Still waiting for Quiet Riot revisted

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I’ve tried before to articulate why I don’t tend to like artists who rehash old musical styles. Not that I don’t like a lot of old musical styles, but I’m rarely even impressed by someone who revisits an old style that I loved, let alone one I disliked. Like I said, though, I could never explain clearly when someone would ask me why I didn’t just love The Darkness or The Kaiser Chiefs or whoever.

So today, when I read Carrie Brownstein’s Monitor Mix blog, I found myself nodding along with her explanation for why she feels the same way.

I like new. I like influence drawn from various or, sometimes, obvious genres. I am not averse to updating or reconfiguring the old. But if an artist can’t find a way of making the music feel like it’s been reborn then what is the point? There are plenty of bands that make you feel like you are hearing a genre, a form of music, or a playing style for the first time. In my opinion, The White Stripes are a good example of a band who did more than merely copy the blues, whereas The Bravery exemplify the most benign and pointless regurgitation of new wave and post-punk.

I feel I should point out that I enjoy cover songs. A lot. I quite enjoy established artists taking a crack at an old song, especially if they mess with it a bit. However, artists like the new-wave of female British soul singers that Carrie mentions just seem like poor sequels, the same way that Wolfmother sounds like a local house band trying to be Zeppelin.

Clearly lots of people like Amy Winehouse and The Bravery, etc. I’d have to assume they’re the kind of people who like their music fun instead of interesting, which is fine…different people want different things from music. I’m just glad I found a way to articulate why I don’t want to listen to the retro-act-du-jour. I suppose it was a little inelegant to respond to “Why don’t you like Scissor Sisters?” with “Because I fucking hated disco the first time around, and I wasn’t even there.”

[tags]carrie brownstein, monitor mix[/tags]