Category: Me

I'm off the case

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Tonight I began the long, onerous task of removing my roughly 250 movies from their cases and jamming them into a giant CD wallet. This is the second phase of the great media pack-up. Back in February I finally ditched all my CD cases, though they and the original CDs had been boxed up and sitting in a closet for four years. Now it’s the DVDs.

The plastic DVD cases will be…I dunno, thrown out, I guess. While I’m entirely used to seeing them out and occupying yards of shelf space, Nellie thought they were ugly. I suppose she’s right. They’re just hunks of plastic. I don’t know though, I’m worried that without the ability to scan a shelf and see something that jumps out at me, I’ll just stop watching these. For the most part I own only movies that I’d want to see over and over again; how will my viewing habits change now that they’re out of sight? I grew up in a place where books, movies and music occupied every inch of the (rather formidable) shelf space in our living room, not to mention the books covering pretty much every other flat horizontal piece of wood in the house, so it feels weird for me to put them away.

I suppose at some point when I get around to procuring a media server I’ll buy myself a giant hard drive and start ripping these films and TV series, and watch them that way. I’m not quite there yet; not that I don’t like the technology, just that I haven’t felt a strong need to do so. Nor have I just seen it as a logical extension I’d already taken, as I did by streaming the music files I’d already made the ‘master copy’ of my music.

The books, I suppose, will be the last to go. Again, I have nothing against eBooks, I just haven’t had any incentive to switch so far. Besides, I think Nellie’s soft spot for having books on the shelves is almost as big as mine.

On an unrelated note: anybody need a couple hundred empty DVD cases?

Balancing the scales of my life. And the ones under my fat ass.

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Another 3 mile run this morning. Two 3-mile runs in less than 12 hours, after an absence of god knows how many weeks, has made my legs a little sore, but nothing I can’t handle. I don’t need to do much for the rest of the night, aside from walk to The Phoenix to see Mogwai. That’s tonight; tomorrow is another Hot Docs screening, followed by yet another on Thursday. Busy week, and I don’t think I’ll be seeing much of home.

It should  be a good test for me, actually. Clearly I need to try a new pattern since the current one is leaving me, well, fat. I am now 45 pounds overweight, and the heaviest I’ve been since…let’s see, since the 23rd of forever. The pattern’s a familar one, harking back to my Delano days when my weight last peaked: work crazy hours, go home, eat something terrible, get up early the next day, repeat. The increase in working hours gets the better of me, as I lose both the energy for exercise and the patience to eat something healthy. If it were happening for one or two days at a time, that would be one thing, but I’ve just accepted the fact that a 12-hour work day is now the norm.

So what happens to the rest of that day? If you take away boring crap like getting ready for work, commuting, taking out recycling, blah blah blah that still leaves about 9.5 hours. I sleep about 6.5 hours per night, so I have 3 left to play with. So that becomes the crucial eighth of a day in which to get shit done, and therein lies my conundrum. Here’s what’s left to do in the day:

  1. Eat
  2. Watch TV
  3. Read
  4. Blog
  5. Exercise

Those things are in approximate order of priority. Now, before you accuse me of being a shit husband, I do spend time with my wife, but Nellie’s hours are just as bad as mine (if not worse) so it’s not as if she’s sitting at home on the couch at 5:15, sighing and lonely. The first two items on the list are spent together. They are usually also combined into one exercise, sadly.

Why that priority? Well, eating is obvious, though my eating habits aren’t the best when time gets tight. But one thing at a time. Watching TV isn’t a real priority, except that it’s one of the few things I get to share with my wife, and the few shows that I watch I really like and if I don’t watch them that night it’s unlikely I’ll be able to catch up later. The PVR helps, but I still watch the same amount of TV in a given week, so it’s moot. Anyway, I watch maybe 2-3 hours a week, so TV’s only eating into about 30 minutes a day.

The next three are the root of the problem. See, I have this obsessive need to keep up to date with my interests. And I have a lot of them. According to Google Reader I scan about 500 news items each day from my 200+ news feeds. Throw in a few daily-read sites, the 85 people I follow on Twitter, and the omnipresent books and magazines, I spend a lot of time consuming information. I like to do this. I feel compelled to do this. I have news feed categories for books, economics, entertainment, friends, humour, movies, music, news, politics, opinion, photoblogs, sports, tech, toronto, travel and TV, and I like knowing about all of those things. But you can imagine what happens: by the time I finish reading this stuff, and then blogging about something…that’s it. I’m done.

So I’m faced with a trade-off: exercise for an hour a day, but read less or stop blogging. Alternatively I could find a job that requires less hours, but I don’t see that happening. I like my job and don’t think I’d be happy unless I was in a job like this one, so…here I am. I’m back to eating into the obvious time sink: information consumption. If it means spending as much time exercising my body as I do exercising my mind, that’s probably not a bad thing. But feeling like I’m getting dumber…that’s not going to be a good feeling for me.

So back to why this week is a good test: if I make sure to run each morning, my commitments during the week (which I usually keep free due to the afore-mentioned compulsion) will keep me away from the computer at night and I’ll see whether hitting the ‘Mark All Read’ button on thousands of news items makes me break into a steady twitch.

Now if somebody could rig up a way for me to attach a netbook to the front of a treadmill and let me click my way through my feeds, then I’d have somethin’…

Why I don't have favourite books

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Do you have a favourite book?

I don’t think I do. I have favourite films. I have favourite songs. But I don’t have favourite books.

That’s not to say there aren’t tons of great books that I was really in love with. I just wouldn’t describe them as favourites. I’m not sure exactly how I define that word, or how my definition might differ from the standard interpretation, but I would loosely describe it this way: a favourite is something I will go back to again and again. I have watched the 13 films referenced in the above link countless times, just as I’ve listened to the songs in the other link so many times I have them all memorized down to the quarter note. On the other hand, I don’t think I’ve read any book twice.

So why is that? Well, I think I’m looking for something different in books than I get from films or music. I want to be challenged, I want to learn something, I want to have my mind changed. I suppose this is why I also don’t have a ‘favourite’ documentary, even though I usually prefer them to feature films. I expect from a documentary the same thing I expect from a book: to get my brain going.

Maybe that’s the difference. It’s hard to label something a ‘favourite’ when it might push me, challenge me, make me work. None of my favourite movies or music qualify as terribly difficult or avant-garde, but they all impressed me with their artistry or nuance (yes, even Hoosiers) while still being entertaining. A great book or documentary will teach me something, or disturb me, or change my mind about something…but none of those impacts will make me want to go back to it. The moment is passed, the effect has been felt.

But that documentary vs. feature film distinction tells me something about my books: that I prefer non-fiction to fiction. Truth be told, I buy and read much more non-fiction than fiction; were I to consume as many novels as I do films or albums I would almost certainly have a list of favourite books, but as it is the books I remember having a real impact on me were all non-fiction. Much as I distinctly remember them, I can’t say I feel the need to read any of them again.

What I do crave, and what I’ve missed recently when reading A Fine Balance, enjoyable as it was, is the engagement I get from non-fiction books. Reading a book the likes of The Coming Of The Third Reich or The Shock Doctrine makes my mind race about in all directions, to the point where I have to re-read paragraphs because I’ve wandered off on this tangent or that, formulating questions or testing hypotheses. I don’t get that same engagement from fiction — which is often a testament to the writer’s pacing or narrative skill, but also reflects the nature of fiction. It’s a story, not a study.

When I finished the MBA last year, I figured that my brain was starved for fiction after reading textbooks for so many months, but it turns out I’m still hungry for non-fiction. I’m easing back into it with Almost Home by Damien Echols (the member of the West Memphis 3 on death row), and plan to read Dave Cullen‘s Columbine (which I blogged about last week) next. After that I may take up Niall Ferguson‘s The Ascent Of Money or The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby. Or I may finally pick up Don Tapscott‘s Wikinomics or resume my study of the buildup to WWII with The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon. All of those appeal to me more than the copies of Absalom, Absalom or American Pastoral sitting on my shelf.

For now, anyway.

The man in the back must've smoked a million packs and a half by now

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Many years ago, as a teenager, I played drums in a rock band. An awful, awful rock band. There was much covering of Kiss and April Wine and Metallica and Steve Miller. Every song written by one of the the guitarists was…well, exactly the same. There were shows at fire halls and weddings and high school gyms. It was an equal mix of painful and hilarious. It was like a tragic hoot.

The band went through multiple names and lineups (including me…I left/was replaced near the end of high school) but the one constant was my friend Adam. I’ve known Adam for as long as I’ve known anybody, and we were good friends growing up. He was the one with talent…good songwriter, good guitarist, great singer. But he was also the one who believed in it the most.I liked playing the drums and hanging out with Adam, but I never believed it would go anywhere and knew I’d be going off to university. Others, like Adam’s friends Bruce or Jason or Mike, or his brother Justin, seemed to be in it mainly to have a blast or get girls.

But Adam wanted to make music. Always. In the summers he worked with me on my dad’s farm he carried around a little hand-held tape recorder so he could capture all the little songs he’d make up or piano tinkling he’d do if he was in our house. The music was one of the fun things about being in his orbit. He had determination and a nice voice and a friendly laugh and, most of all, a good heart, and so he managed to charm a beautiful girl named Sonya (in spite of himself…I was there that night…it wasn’t the smoothest) who he would eventually marry. After high school he moved to Ontario and recorded an album with a whole other set of guys, but didn’t stay long. Back home, there were more bands, more albums. Nothing really stuck.

Adam and I didn’t see each other much after high school. We kept in touch every now and then on email and Facebook. But he’s living there and I’m living here and I don’t see him much when I get home. We always kind of moved in different circles anyway, apart from when we played together. But I’ve kept up with how his music’s gone. He always managed to get me a copy of whatever CD he’d just put out with whatever band. It was hard to keep track sometimes, honestly.

But in the last few years his band Big Deal has done well locally. They were playing bigger shows…big bars in other towns, ECMA satellite shows. I watched them on Halifax’s Breakfast Television morning show. Despite Adam’s massively fucked back (I’ve lost count of the surgeries that my mother recounts on the phone…I think maybe Adam has too) they were getting attention and selling records and winning fans. A song he wrote about Sonya became a pretty big local hit.

So earlier this week, when I read this story by our mutual friend (and reporter) Andrew Wagstaff in my old hometown newspaper, I couldn’t stop smiling. Big Deal, consisting of the three guys I’d played with and known since childhood, and the drummer who (I think) replaced me all those years ago, had been signed to a record deal with Attack and a distribution deal with EMI. I know there are four guys in the band, and I’m sure there’ll all pretty happy about it, but the guy I’m truly happy for is Adam. My good friend, after all those years of shit bars and back spasms and teachers telling him he’d never amount to anything…he just willed his band into a record deal. He just got the letters E, M and I attached to his music.

Today, as I write this, I probably miss Adam more than I ever have. I feel sad that I couldn’t be there last night when Big Deal played a for-old-time’s-sake show at the local community hall, just like we did as kids. I feel a little bit envious that he’s chased something for so long and just gutted it out. But mostly, I’m proud of my friend.

Kick ass, brother. Just don’t hurt your back when you do it.

Sinuses > self-actualization, apparently

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Sorry. I know it’s been drab and boring here lately. It’s just taking forever to get out from under this goddamn cold. Maslow was right, it’s hard to be spontaneous and creative when your body just wants to lie down and ingest unholy medicines. It’ll get better — I’ll get better — soon, I promise.

In the meantime, I want to draw your attention to a widget you might not have seen, especially if you only read this blog by RSS feed: the bottom widget on the right side of the page shows which book I’m reading right now. Clicking on it takes you to the excellent Shelfari, which you should use if you’re at all into books.

Insatiable?

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I picked up three new albums yesterday when my eMusic subscription reset:

  • And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead . The Century Of Self
  • Heartless Bastards . The Mountain
  • LCD Soundsystem . 45:33

I already know the Heartless Bastards album is awesome, and the LCD Soundsystem was a no-brainer (eMusic allows a certain number of downloaded songs, and that single LCDSS song that clocks in at 45 minutes…one download). The big question is the …Trail Of Dead album. Despite their last few not-great releases, they still have enough cred built up from Madonna and Source Tags And Codes that I’ll check them out. It’s running a 72 on Metacritic right now, so I gave it a shot. One or two songs in as I write this, it seems ok so far.

I also watched some movies lately — Quantum of Solace, I’m Not There and Poor Boy’s Game — but I don’t feel like writing about them. Not sure what that means…this blog is basically 50% me writing about movies and 50% me bloviating about politics or hockey or some such. Could it be that I’m all movie-d out? For your sake, I hope not; I don’t imagine you can take much more hockeytics.

La Princesse

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I’ll admit it, I’m not fond of spiders. I’m not scared of them, and would never squish one (I was often reminded by my farmer father that spiders kill all the ‘bad’ bugs, so I was conditioned not to kill them as a kid) but they make me uncomfortable. I prefer that they don’t crawl on me, and the big hairy ones like bird spiders freak me out a little.

However, this is pretty goddamn awesome:

Click on the link above to see all the pictures, and read the story of La Princesse arriving in Liverpool.

Hooray for good genes

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Visited my (hot) doctor yesterday. She’s very speedy — walks quickly, talks quickly, moves quickly — and my physical was over just as I was starting to process the idea of sitting around in a little paper gown. Turns out my bloodwork revealed that I’m in very good health…she sounded a tiny but surprised as she said it, but then I suppose I don’t really project the picture of peak physical fitness. Good genes, I explained. She agreed. Quickly.

She also commented, when taking my history last time, that it’s not often she encounters someone who has never smoked, and grew up in a house where no one else smoked either. Even in my extended family on both sides, there were no smokers except for the odd one here and there, and those quit by the time I was old enough to remember it. No heavy drinkers either. Two grandparents who lived into their 90s, another who lived into his 80s. That’s a pretty good starting point, and not being gassed in my childhood years helped.

So, uh…thanks ancestry. Good work.