kensmind

My conference finished up today, at least the main part of it. I have a meeting to go to tomorrow morning that will last a couple of hours, and that's it. After that I'm done and have the rest of my Saturday in Vancouver to myself. I will probably do some shopping, though the downtown might be a bit of a shitshow tomorrow as there is some kind of protest planned.



The last speaker at the conference was Joel Bakan, author of The Corporation. During the afternoon break, a colleague of mine, who happens to be a very talented concert pianist, spied a piano and since he loves to play and I love to sing, we commandeered it and he played some Christmas carols. One of the speakers at the conference was a black man who was a professor, who gave a presentation about racism and systemic bias. He had just finished his talk before the break, and when he heard the singing, he came over and joined me and we sang a few duets together. My pianist friend was choosing the songs, and when this professor joined me, he was just beginning to play "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." I didn't say anything (but I did sing) and the professor seemed amused and we sounded wonderful together.

After the conference I went for a long walk from the hotel to Stanley Park and back (about 6 km. in total). My friend and co-worker Lynal came with me. He was going to run it, but he forgot his running shoes in Cranbrook. After the walk he told me that I walk too fast and he was pretty bushed. When we got back to the hotel, we hung around the lobby for a while, when a couple other guys joined us and we went out for supper. On our walk we passed by something called the Vancouver Christmas Market, which was set up in front of the Convention Center. It was mostly fenced off, but inside we could see a carousel. We were going to take a closer look but they wanted twenty bucks just to get in, so we passed on that.



We went for supper at some trendy spot next to the train station called Rogue. There was about a 20 minute wait to get in, and it was very loud inside, but the food was good.



Meanwhile back in Missouri, we had a bit of drama. Last March I ordered a hot tub for our place. The guy selling it (our pool guy) said it would take three months to get there. When I was about to leave for Cranbrook in September, we still didn't have it and I called the guy. He said it had just arrived, but he was busy with pool closings and we wouldn't get it until late October. Until today I still hadn't heard anything from the guy. Today just after 1 p.m. PST (3:00 p.m. CST) he sent me a text saying that he was there with our hot tub. No prior warning, he just showed up. Seth was asleep of course. I texted with the guy. Had this exchange:

Him: This is Curtis, the pool guy at the Missouri house. We have the new hot tub here for delivery. I was just going to drop it in the garage next to the house if we can get in and there is no alarm on.
Me: The garage [actually not a garage, a storage building] is full right now. When were you planning on delivery? I won't be back there until next Friday.
Him: I just left it sitting in front of the big garage door for now. Once you get back we can meet up and pick a spot and get a plan for moving it and setting it up.

And that's what he did.



They must have woke Seth up because he called me and was in a pissy mood, and that put me in a bad mood because I didn't ask them to deliver it now, and there wasn't much I could do about it from 2000 miles away, so why was he getting mad at me? But anyhow, there it sits. I know it's too big for anyone to steal, and it's covered in plastic, so it should be okay from the elements, but I wish they could have called me before delivery so we would have planned for it when I was there.

And now for some reason my text messages aren't going through to Seth.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

That was my day. I hope you had a good day, and I hope all your problems are first world ones like mine. And as for a Christmas song, well why not White Christmas? Here are my two favourite versions of the song. I can't decide which one I like better, the Drifters or Darlene Love. So you decide, if you can spare the time.

Hello to all my Livgerbil friends who stuck around after the mass exodus to DuckWorth (or whatever it's called) and to anyone else reading this. Hopefully this will bring us all closer together, like a bunch of people in the same (hopefully very large) liferaft, forging new friendships that will last for decades to come.

I've never done one of these before, but I'm hopeful that I'll get a chance to meet those of you who are friends of friends, or who just happen upon this and want new friends to replace those who have abandoned ship. Very special thanks to lyssa027 for sending me the code to do this, and thanks to badeperle for helping me to fix a coding error I made. Presuming this works, and if I know you already, I'll add a comment about what a wonderful person you are.

I understand that the way this works is that you cut and paste the text in the first box into your comment, and you cut and paste what is in the second box into a separate entry in your journal if you want to spread the word about this friendzy.

So let's get started!

"

<b>About You</b> <b>Name (Not your LJ name, but what should we call you?):</b> <b>Where's home?:</b> <b>How do you pay the bills? (Be as open or private as you like):</b> <b>How long have you been on Livegerbil (new or old, it's all good):</b> <b>Do you mostly journal for yourself or for others?:</b> <b>Do you expect comments or are you more zen about it?</b> <b>Do you unfriend if people don't pay you attention or do you live and let live?</b> <b>Do you only want friends who think like you or are you open-minded to diversity of thought, even if it doesn't match yours?</b> <b>LJ Life</b> <b>What do you usually write about?:</b> <b>How often do you like to journal?:</b> <b>What do you look for in an LJ friend?:</b> <b>Would you consider yourself a supportive LJ friend?:</b> <b>Yes, we all hate racists, homophobes or those who try to impose their beliefs on others. Any other deal breakers in an LJ friend?</b>: <b>Are you more of an open person, more private, or some mixture of both?</b> <b>Do you have a significant other and will we get to meet them?-there's no wrong answer to this</b> <b>Maybe you answered this above, but what are your major interests?</b> <b>What else would you like us to know about you? (Write as much or as little as you like)</b> <b>Have a fun gif you want to share? It's okay if you don't.</b>

Please cut and paste the portion below and post in your journal, so we can meet some of your LJ friends that the rest of us don't know. Thank you!

<a href="https://kensmind.livejournal.com/1125049.html"><img src="https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/kensmind/1278588/2511193/2511193_800.jpg"></a>

Today was Livegerbil's birthday, and everyone was getting one of those memes or whatever they're called about the year we each began in this community. For me it was 2003 and I still remember where I was, what I was doing, and how I came to be a Livergerbil person. It was a time when Livegerbil was cool, before it became a sort of forgotten joke for many people, like MySpace or AOL.com.



2003 was a pretty pivotal year for me. I had just joined the organization I still work for and took a job in a city in northern British Columbia called Prince George. A decade earlier I had moved from Saskatchewan (just north of North Dakota) to leave the typical Canadian winter climate to get closer to Vancouver where I thought all the action was. Moving to Prince George was like moving to Moscow, but it was also a hell of a raise in pay, with a chance to get back down to the greater Vancouver area in a few years (two years as it turned out), so I was all in. Houses were cheap in Prince George and it wasn't such a terrible place, except in winter when the -30 or colder weather hit.

This was in my pre-Seth days. I was a closeted gay man, but the arrival of the internet had taken me into what I fondly call my male slut phase. I was into looking for hookups with younger guys, known in gay slang as "twinks" because these were safe hook-ups and I felt like I was making up for what I had been cheated out of when I was that age and told that I was going to hell for just even thinking about it. A lot of my time was spent online those days, either waiting for gay porn to download slowly via dial-up internet (remember the noise those modems made?) or going into various chatrooms looking for guys in my area (gay.com, manhunt, or just yahoo message boards and chat rooms.) Remember those guys who would message you with "a/s/l"? (Age, sex, location.) Since they were gay chat sites, the s was kind of redundant.

In August I left the cold north for a vacation in Fort Lauderdale. I remember going to a club where cute boys danced in their birthday suits, some of whom I recognized from the porn sites I used to frequent. One night in my hotel room I spent a couple hours chatting up a guy named David from Calgary. His LJ profile is still up, but hasn't been active since 2009. He walked me through LJ and I created my account that night. Later David and I met. We never hooked up, but he did visit me here in this house (pre-Seth) and did hook up with a former friend of mine named Craig.)

Over the years I matured (far later than I should have), but LJ was always a constant. I met Seth in September of 2007, on what was planned as a possible hook-up, but turned out to be a friendship at first. That led to a correspondence, then a visit, and then when Seth's family ended moving out of their house during the sub-prime mortgage thing, I invited him to live with me, he brought Abby and the rest was history.

Many times I saw people abandon ship on Livegerbil: first when it became uncool and having an online journal here seemed as archaic as having an old brick cell phone. Then when the "Russians" took over, and many people left, pretentiously believing that they were "making a statement". This sounded melodramatic and hypocritical to me. I mean, Zuckerberg and his ilk might not be Russian, but it's not like they're ethical angels either. They're all the same. I had too many memories invested here (and was too technically clueless to know how to save them) to leave here. And I wasn't so egotistical to believe that me leaving Livejournal was going to make some sort of profound statement or teach those Russians a lesson.

So every year I chronicle my life on Livejournal. I meet some very cool people, and try to do my best to be encouraging and supportive, especially when someone is having a rough time. I try to maintain a respect for diversity of all kinds, but especially for diversity of thought. That hasn't been easy lately, when social media has leveled intense pressure of people to think only one way. For example, I'm no Donald Trump fan, but I do want to try to understand why so many people are. And I do try to listen to what they have to say, even if I disagree with it. The way to defeat a bad idea is to expose it's folly to the light of day, not to push it underground. Most people just assume that if someone likes Trump, they instantly deserve to be hated, much like how, when I was a young man sexually attracted to other men, that made me instantly deserving of a place in hell. People are much more complex than that, and it saddens me to see people labelled and hated with so little thought. I love a marketplace of ideas, where all ideas can be examined and rejected only after they have been objectively considered.



So happy birthday Livegerbil. Thank you for providing a space for me to obsess about US Presidential history in potus_geeks, for introducing me to so many cool people, many in person, for keeping a scrapbook of all of my photos from all the cool trips I've taken over the years (and for not holding them for ransom before deleting them like Photobucket or those other ripoff image storing sites), for helping jog my memory (now what year was it again when I snorkelled at Seven Mile Beach and kissed a stingray?) Thank you for allowing me to go back to remember how I fell in love with Seth, or how much I loved Abby, and even how much I cried when she went to puppy heaven. Thank you for letting me remember that time we rented that cabin by the lake and how all the bugs drove Seth crazy. Thank you for keeping an accurate record of my baseball bucket list and for helping me keep track of which stadiums had the best hot dogs.

What Robert Browning wrote in Rabbi Ben Ezra all those years ago, it's my message to Seth, but it's also for you too Livegerbil:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be.

I worked out of town today, in the next city over, about 30 miles from here. I was told that it was going to be a day from hell, at least in terms of the volume of work, and that turned out to be the case. But aside from that, it wasn't that difficult of a day. One thing I did notice was how everyone in that office seemed to be under a lot of stress. Some people who have worked there for years and who seemed to have their shit together most days, seemed to be on edge and seemed to be hating their jobs. My friend Wendy, who has the same management position as me, and who I've known since I moved to BC from Saskatchewan, when we both had different jobs, notices it too. We had a good long chat over lunch, and she told me sad tales of some people in her office who have lost their temper with subordinates. She herself has been feeling down because of confrontations with co-workers. As she put it, "the joy has gone out of the job."

She mentioned how this was a common problem in many other offices in the region, but it made me feel good when she described the office I manage as "the happiest". She asked that she was thinking about asking for a transfer to our office and whether I would support it. I told her that of course I would. Some of the people I work with wouldn't be happy about this, because while Wendy is a sweet person, her work ethic has declined in recent years, and that tends to make more work for her co-workers. She also has a reputation for being high-maintenance for her support staff. But for me, the kindness she has always shown to me trumps all of that. It's not my decision whether or not this happens, it's up to our head office, but if she goes ahead with this, I will do what I can to help her.

The point of all of this is that I wonder how the pandemic has affected people's stress levels, and what ripples it will have on people's lives. Do they carry the stress home with them? Will the stress decrease when the world goes back to normal, or will this all leave some kind of permanent emotional scarring on a lot of people?

I keep thinking that the pandemic has created some kind of figurative time bomb, and that some dire consequence is just waiting to happen. Perhaps it is an economic one - maybe rampant inflation or rising interests will be the result of politicians trying to spend their way out of the problem. Maybe it will be an emotional one - maybe depression and anxiety will be the next pandemic. Maybe children will mimic and inherit the stresses they see in their parents. Or maybe the opposite will happen and people will just become kinder and more resilient. That would be nice.

I remember how, after I had graduated from law school, there seemed to be a mindset that people needed to be toughened up. Senior lawyers seemed to be mean bastards who saw criticism and angry outbursts as the best means to teach things. Sports coaches seemed to think that this was also the way to get the most out of their athletes, with fear motivation. Then, over time, people seemed to get smarter and realize that this was a shitty way to motivate people. Maybe people realized that it didn't motivate them, and when they got the chance, they would be nicer to those who they were mentoring. Now I fear that the pendulum may be shifting back in the other direction. I hope I'm wrong about that.

In other news, on the way home I picked up some Taco Bell for Seth which he loves (we don't have Taco Bell in our city). My tree guy had come and gone and two dead trees in the back yard were removed. It was one more thing off of my "to do" list before moving and his bill was only 75% of what he had quoted me. Getting all this stuff done around the house kind of makes me wish that I was staying here.

The weather had finally warmed up and it was a beautiful night to go for a walk in the neighbourhood. I took my camera along just for the hell of it, not really expecting to see much exciting. I didn't see anything too unusual, but behind the cut are some pictures. I love this time of year when the days are long and the sun is still up at 8:00 p.m. Here's some of what I saw:

( It's a Beautiful Day in the NeighbourhoodCollapse )

Tomorrow and Friday I am working from home, or more accurately, attending a virtual conference from home. It will be a nice break leading into the weekend. I hope you had a good day today and I hope your week is going well.

We usually average about 14 people at my AA home group each week, but last night we had 19 people show up. That was more than I had expected, considering that word may not have spread to people that we're back up and running again, but other people whose home groups have not yet reopened had heard about us being open and so a few of them turned up. For other people, the pandemic has meant the closure of their groups, not just during the pandemic, but for good and so three new people joined our group last night, as a result of their not having home groups and liking what they saw last night.

When I arrived at the hall, one of the people who operates the hall met me and informed me that they had moved us to new space in their downstairs. This had a good news/bad news aspect to it. On the one hand it is a smaller room, making social distancing a little more difficult. On the other hand, they have let us leave the room as is each week, meaning that we don't have to put up chairs at the beginning of the meeting and take them down at the end, so that is easier for us (and for me personally, as I usually end up doing a lot of the setup myself).

I made sure I packed some hand sanitizer and some disinfectant spray because we are what is called a "podium meeting", and since I was chairing the meeting, I appointed myself cleaner and wiped off the podium after each speaker. There were no hugs at any time or hand-holding during our group prayer after the meeting. No one wore a mask, and while many people take offense to that elsewhere, that's not unusual here in BC where the government has never mandated the wearing of a mask, (to this day, our CDC website still remains ambivalent about their use for people who are not sick or caring for the sick). I wore rubber gloves, but was the only one doing so. I was surprised that the people running the hall did not have a list of rules for us, but they seemed more concerned about getting renters back in their hall. That's not to suggest that they were entirely unconcerned, but I guess I expected them to be bigger sticklers. For example, they never asked us to have people do a sign-in sheet with phone numbers of those attending just in case, but one of our members thought of that. Even though it is an anonymous program, no one hesitated or complained about being asked to do so. Everyone was pretty cool that way. It was very good meeting, and everyone just seemed so happy and in such a good mood to be attending an in-person meeting once again.



One of the good things to come out of the pandemic for AA meetings is the ability to attend Zoom meetings in other locations virtually anywhere in the world. It has enabled me to talk to reconnect with people that I met in AA a long time ago, but haven't seen in years. This includes people from the international lawyers group (we normally only see each other once a year - in years we can travel that is). I recently joined a Zoom meeting originating in Victoria, and met a man I had sobered up with in Regina many years ago. At about the time I was moving to BC, he was moving to Switzerland and I assumed our paths would never cross again, but little did I know that he had moved back to Canada, let alone the same province as me. Even in his drinking days he had a good mind for business, and he has gotten wealthy by operating treatment centers for people able to afford to pay for treatment, combining his love of recovery with his wealth-generating talents. It was nice to see him again, and we plan to get together the next time one of us is in the other's town.

Otherwise it's been another lazy day, with crappy weather outside. To all my American friends on your Independence Day weekend, I hope you're having a great time, relaxing, traveling or whatever else you're doing on your time off.



Today's list: 10 poems that I love to read every now and again, with partial quotes and a link to the full poem:

1. The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service:
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

2. Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson:
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race

3. Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!

4. Soul Makes a Path Through Shouting by Cyrus Cassells
Where are you going?
I’m just going to school.
Here we go to meet
The hydra-headed day,
Here we go to meet The maelstrom –

5. Casey at the Bat by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now with Casey at the bat.
But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake.

6. You Are Old Father William by Lewis Carroll
"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

7. If by Rudyard Kipling
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;

8. Absolutely Clear by Shams Al-din Hafiz
Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

9. Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the coming of the light.

10. Look to This Day by Kalidasa
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision;
And today well-lived, makes
Yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!

And then there's dirty limericks. I must know a zillion of those. Another time perhaps. I hope it's been a good day and a great week for you.

Here is the Hawaiian shirt for today and with it comes an end to the 31 day May Hawaiian Shirt Challenge, why not? Each day this month as I've changed my shirt, I've also made a collage (or is it a montage?) of these shirts so I could do a poll of which shirt is the coolest (or least offensive, depending on your tastes.) I've cross posted this poll in polloftheday too. Here's the poll, along with my comments there:

An LJ friend participated in a meme that required her to wear a different dress each day of April and post a picture of it in her journal. I modified this challenge for myself. For May I wore a different Hawaiian shirt each day (I had to count first to make sure that I had at least 30 of them) and posted a picture in my journal each day. The month is now almost over and I've made a collage of pictures of the shirts I wore (which I've placed behind a cut because of its size.) Please humour me and vote on which one you like best (or if you hate Hawaiian shirts, then which one you hate the least).

( The Hawaiian Shirt CollageCollapse )



Thanks for voting. This has to stop now as I think I only have one or possible two shirts left in my closet that didn't make the cut.

To keep me journalling in June, my theme will be "Vicarious Travel" in which I will look back on a trip taken in the past to try to make up for the three scheduled for the month that I have had to cancel. Que sera sera.

I hope you're having a good Sunday.

Behind the cut are pictures from 10 Christmas Movies. See how many you recognize (just because I forgot to journal today, and this was a quick thought).

( Festive FlicksCollapse )

Cut and paste this into a comment below and see how many you get. I know there are a lot of moviephiles out there.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

The answers are contained in the first comment. Happy movie watching. (What's your favourite Christmas or Holiday themed movie?)

So let's do a Christmas poll to see what you're up to this December.



(Cross-posted to polloftheday