General

Big enough to be big, small enough to be small

There, I just gave you the secret advice recipe of probably a billion people on the internet, which is:

  • Be [this kind of thing]
  • But also be [the opposite of the above]

So you get things like:

  • Learn to be patient/Never wait too long
  • Take action without deliberation/Think carefully before acting
  • Go for red!/Go for blue!
  • Up is down/Down is up

Thank you and subscribe to my newsletter.

–James, Clear

Why am I listening to The Go-Go’s so much?

I don’t know, but I am, and I’m not sorry!

I recently grabbed their third album, Talk Show, which I never got back on its original release in 1984. Sorry, Go-Go’s, I’m one of those people who helped contribute to the album’s relative unpopularity. I enjoyed the (hit) single “Head Over Heels” but for whatever reason the album as a whole didn’t appeal to me. I think the cover actually was a negative. Not only is it incredibly 80s (which offers a certain amount of kitsch value now), but it demonstrates a serious lack of imagination–unlike the album, which is actually their most sophisticated. Let’s compare covers:

  • Beauty and the Beat: Not only is the title great all on its own, the cover features the band members pseudo-anonymously dressed in towels with beauty cream covering their faces. It’s fun and clever.
  • Vacation: This one looks like a postcard from the 1950s, with retro typefaces and colors, and the band water skiing in formation in puffy pink and white outfits. Once again, it conveys a tremendous sense of fun.
  • Talk Show: This one is simply the five members of the band all photographed straight-on, the photos cropped and lined up to span the cover. There’s a multicolor border. That’s it. Even leaving aside the fabulous 80s hair and fashions, this cover is just boring. It also turned out to be prescient, because it was the first cover to not actually have all the band members posing together, hinting at the split to come after the album was released. Also, I still don’t know what the asterisk after the words “talk show” refer to.

There’s only one more studio album to go, 2001’s God Bless The Go-Go’s, which is allegedly a fine but not outstanding addition to their sun-dappled oeuvre. This means I’ll soon probably put these albums aside for a while. For now, though, I got the beat.

A new chapter in my book begins

Hey hey I guess it hasn’t hit me yet
—Blue Rodeo

The book that is my life, that is.

Yesterday (Friday the 13th–dun dun dun) was the last day of work at the place I’ve been working since November 2012. I chose to leave to start doing my own thing, to be my own boss, set my own schedule, meet my own goals.

It’s a leap into the unknown, and I know I could fall on my face.

But it’s also exciting, and I’m looking forward to taking on challenges I’ve set for myself.

First, though, two weeks of vacation. Woo!

More to come…

A case of the blahs

Hard to explain. Could it be…

  • Uncertainty about the future
  • Global warming (sort of related to the above)
  • General sense of flabbiness
  • Something intangible and unknowable
  • The fact that the Styx album Kilroy Was Here really got made

I’m listening to “Mr. Roboto” right now, and I’m leaning toward the last one. I loved this album when it came out in 1983. I was 19 years old at the time. I present this as my only defense. Well, that and being a sucker for concept albums, apparently even bad ones.

July 2021 was hot

See title. July saw no measurable precipitation, started with record-breaking temperatures in the 40s and is ending with temperatures in the 30s (for reference, today’s average high is normally 25C, though 30C doesn’t seem as hot anymore after experiencing what 42C feels like).

I know talking about the weather seems kind of dull, but it really has been remarkable. Up to mid-June people were still making “Juneuary” jokes. Now the bush outside the office window is withered and sad in a way it’s never been before, but still green, for the time being.

Wildfire smoke is expected to roll in today, and indeed it looks cloudy out. With a province-wide fire ban in effect, we get quotes like these from this CBC News story on enforcement of the ban because people gonna people:

Hunter said there have been instances in the South Coast region where they have discovered campfires within metres of campfire ban signs in provincial parks. 

I’m going out to take photos today, so I don’t necessarily want it to rain today, but I wouldn’t object to some nice showers overnight. I love summer (unlike a lot of people), but it’s making it tough to love this year.

The state of wearing masks and the pandemic, late July 2021

Sometimes I’ll read an article that nearly perfectly matches what I’m thinking, and this Atlantic article on wearing masks is one of them. It’s free to read, as is all of their COVID-19 coverage, so the link below should keep working. And yes, I did feel a bit weird reading at the end that the free coverage is in part due to sponsorship from the Chan Zuckerberg (re: Facebook) Initiative.

Case numbers in BC have doubled over the last two weeks, and are back into daily triple-digit territory. For me, it’s really simple, with Reason #1 being dominant–I don’t want to catch COVID-19. We simply don’t know enough about long term effects for me to be comfortable lowering my risk for the (admittedly welcome, but ultimately minor) benefit of going mask-free in public indoor spaces, especially transit.

4 Reasons I’m Wearing a Mask Again by Katherine Wu, The Atlantic

A second trip back in time, to Tuesday, January 27, 1987

This is another entry from the handwritten journal I kept back in 1987. I had been living in Vancouver for five months at the time and was 22 years old.

My handwriting was extremely neat back then.

You can read one other journal entry that I posted to this blog, way back in 2012: Travel with me back in time to Saturday, January 24th, 1987

Tuesday, January 27, 1987. 10:53 p.m. When worlds collide, headaches follow.

Sorry, nothing even slightly, vaguely, infinitesimally exciting happened today.

Goodnight.

No, really. Work was uninteresting, after work was uninteresting, sleep was uninteresting.1Alright, I’m just guessing that sleep will be uninteresting. We’re talking boring here.

Briefly, for the sake of posterity, here are the lowlights:

  • I got up
  • I dressed, ate breakfast and left for work
  • I worked
  • I came home
  • I talked to Mike on the phone
  • I washed dishes and cleaned up
  • Brook came over and worked on his play
  • I watched (with brook) Moonlighting (a rerun, strangely).
  • I went to bed

And now, goodnight for real.

Log off: 11:20 p.m.

Supplementary note, 12:09 a.m.:

Okay, seeing Tiny Tim being pelted by snowballs during the New York Giants Superbowl Celebration was kinda fun. Those fans, ya gotta love ’em!

This is, as you can see, not a particularly memorable entry, but it is short, which is why I’ve included it until I can see if there’s any kind of text recognition software that can convert my stunningly neat handwriting into electronic form. Also note that the footnote was originally presented with an asterisk and was written in all caps vertically on the left side of the page. I’m going to re-read more of this journal, to possibly gain insights, but mostly to see how funny I was as a young adult. I hope I don’t disappoint myself.

Facebook thoughts, 2021 edition

It’s time to metaphorically step back and take a look at Facebook again, that lovable scamp of the internet accused of everything from destroying democracy to poisoning all public discourse.

I do not make any effort to post on Facebook at present. In fact, the only posts that appear there are auto-generated from Instagram, and these consist entirely of photographs I take of flowers, birds, scenery and objects I find interesting or weird. I don’t post pictures of food or myself, though the occasional exception is made.

My time actually spent on Facebook consists of a few things:

  • Looking at the photos posted by a friend
  • Looking over the posts of other friends and family
  • Otherwise, getting out as quickly as possible

The friend’s photos I also see on Instagram (which is a surprisingly terrible site for posting photos, given that its origin was for doing exactly that), so it’s more a review of what I’ve seen, and FB does an admittedly better job at displaying them.

The friends and family list consists of a majority of people who never or rarely post, a few who post semi-often and a couple who post pretty much constantly. All of these groups overlap in that they post little original content—photos they’ve taken, thoughts that have popped into their heads, interesting milestones in their lives, funny things they’ve personally witnessed and so on. Most just re-post stuff they’ve found elsewhere or on FB itself. The whole “share and like” thing. Several of them often share the exact same “funny” story or “interesting” quiz.

It’s all basically a bunch of garbage and I ponder ignoring their posts (which is to say changing the settings to stop showing their posts but not actually blocking the people themselves), but there’s always the niggling thought that they might post something genuinely interesting and would I want to risk missing it?

So FB is pretty much now just a waste of time. It’s not a huge waste of time because I’m typically only looking at it for a few minutes, but I toy with the idea of just taking a good, long break from it and seeing what the consequences, if any, are. I wouldn’t flounce off dramatically or make a big deal out of it, I’d just stop checking it for a few months or something. Treat it as a kind of junk social media detox.

Now that I’ve written this out, the idea sounds more appealing. Maybe I’ll try it and see how it goes.

In the meantime, I really wish there was another social media site that was really just about people posting interesting photos, but I suspect there’s no viable market for that or it would exist already. Alas.