The Wisdom of Doctor Who

Last night I spent far too much time shopping for Doctor Who t-shirts online. The one I ordered is awesome, and possibly even more cryptic than the two I already own. But I digress. I came across the quotation below, and I quite like it.

It should be noted that the quotation is attributed to Doctor Who the television program, and not the character himself, as it's said by a one-off character, Elton Pope, in the 2006 episode "Love & Monsters". At least, I hope Elton Pope is a one-off character, because he's very annoying, and - SPOILER ALERT - at the end of the episode, he goes off to do presumably nasty things with a piece of concrete, but not in the way you might think.

The image is available at redbubble.com as a poster, a greeting card, an iPhone cover, a t-shirt, and more. So if you like it, go there any buy it.

RIP David Rakoff

One of my favorite storytellers died of cancer a few days ago. I knew him first as the voice of Dr. Seuss from this episode of Wiretap. This year, he told a story on the live This American Life show that has yet to fail to make me cry. Today I found out there's a video of it.

An Open Letter to Facebook.com

Hi guys!

It's been a while. I deleted my account in November. No hard feelings, right? I still have that dummy account that I use to see when Joel Plaskett and Björk are on tour. Not together, because that would be weird! But I digress.

Let me get straight to the point. A few months ago, I was backing up my laptop, and something went all squirrely. A lot of old files got deleted from my external hard drive. It was sad, but I think I was fairly Zen about the whole thing. I lost a lot of photos, old resumes, some writing I'd done, and the scores to some music I'd written. Hey, shit happens, right? I tried to think of all those things I'd done and created as a sort of intangible sand mandala.

That said, I'd obviously like to retrieve as many of those things as possible. I'd feel better about the whole sand mandala thing if I'd actually made the conscious decision to destroy these things. But I didn't; they're just gone. And here's where you come in.

You still have many of these photos. I want copies.

In fact, the primary reason I quit facebook is because I didn't really like the fact that you had equal ownership of anything I uploaded. But now, maybe it's to my advantage. Somewhere on your server, you've got a file with my name on it, and probably about 700 photos associated with that name.

Can you send them to me?

I'll come right out and say it: I'm not going to pay you for them. I'm not one of the "third parties" you sell them to, I'm the original owner. In fact, since I still have the right (if not the ability) to do with them as I please, I'm more of a co-owner. Or I would be, if I owned them. You know what I mean. So from co-owner to co-owner, can you help me out?

I'm not going to give you money, but then, that isn't the currency you deal with. Your currency is information. And you already have mine on file! Enjoy as you see fit.

Please understand that I'm not asking for the photos back, in the sense that you don't get to have them anymore. I'm the one who clicked "agree" on your conditions before uploading, so you have all the same rights to those photos as you always did. I'm just asking for a favor here.

You don't owe me anything. I have no sense of entitlement here. You can send me copies of my photos, or not. All I can do is ask nicely. Please?

Thanks,

R.

ps - I see and understand the following: "If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account permanently deleted with no option for recovery, log in to your account and then submit your request here." (source: http://www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=deactivate) But c'mon. We both know you still have it. Help a brother out.

I Am Not My Jokes

My kid had a shitty day yesterday.

Let's call him J. J had two things happen to him that, eventually, happen to everyone. Things so clichéd, they're barely worthy of a sitcom plot (with apologies to fans of shows like Two and a Half Men, Whitney, or whatever that obnoxious Jim Belushi one was).

In the morning, he was play-fighting with another boy in his class. They were really just playfully swinging their backpacks at each other. Anyway, the other kid turned at the wrong time and got smacked in the face. I make no excuses here: this is why we don't swing backpacks at other people, because shit happens. So of course, when this particular shit happened, J's seen as the aggressor, and he was punished. It's shitty when that happens, and it's especially shitty when there isn't much of a lesson to take away. Maybe something like "think carefully before engaging in an activity where, if something beyond your control goes wrong, the punishment probably won't fit the crime."

After lunch, he's still not in a great mood. He goes to play with his two best friends, and they've decided to exclude him a little bit. Now, I'll be honest here - J tends to lose his shit when he's not the ringleader. By his own admission, the kids he likes best are the kids who do what he wants them to do. This is not good, but he'll grow out of it. I do some course-control, obviously, but I'm not reading him self-help books before bed or anything, nor do I plan to. Anyway these two friends, it sounds like they made a bit of a game out of refusing to do anything J wanted to do, and they'd just sneak off by themselves. Probably giggling at the power rush, because (a) they're kids and (b) they're humans. Humans are jerks a lot of the time, and kid-humans don't have the skills to mask their jerkiness yet.

Later, at the dinner table, J gets to this point in his story, and he's pretty upset. Now, like I said, this scenario has played out a million times before, so it's easy to dismiss. But think back to the last time it happened to you. It hurts. It hurts a lot. It hurts at age 5, it still hurts at 34, and I don't imagine I'll like it any better when I'm 80 and somebody else's grandpa doesn't want me on his canasta team (does canasta have teams? I have no idea. But I have 47 years to learn). So I see J hurting, and I empathize. I tell him it's happened to me, and that it made me really sad. I said I was sure they still liked him, they just wanted to be by themselves for a while. He should try to find out what they want to play, and see if they'll let him join. If not, or if they're not nice about it, he can find out what some other kids might like to play.

"I did that," he tells me. "I went up to Ellie and I made this really loud noise like BRZRZBRBZRBRAP! She used to laugh when I did that, but now she doesn't anymore, and I don't know why." Remembering this made him even more sad.

And here's where I get to the part of the story where I have a point, and some useful thoughts. And what I told my kid was something like what follows, but adapted for five year-olds.

If someone used to laugh at your jokes, and they don't anymore, it can feel like they don't like you anymore. This is because, if you're the kind of person who gets called "clever" and "funny" from a very early age (like I was, and like J is), you start to think your jokes are part of your persona. The jokes become part of your self-image. You start to see your role as that of the entertainer. And if your jokes aren't working, then you're not entertaining, and then you're failing as a person.

It doesn't take a very big step away from the situation to see that this isn't the case, but in the moment, it sure feels like it. If you're a funny guy because you tell funny jokes, well then it follows logically that if you tell a lame joke, you're a lame guy. If the reaction to your joke is that it's obnoxious, you feel like you're obnoxious. But here's the thing: you are not your jokes. If the people who used to like your jokes don't like them anymore, it doesn't mean they don't like you. Maybe they want to hear different things, or maybe they just want you to shut up and listen to them for a while. And if you're a good friend, you'll pay attention to what they want. You don't have to do everything they want, because then you're a sheep. But if a friend, a spouse, a co-worker, or a family member is telling you, through one form of communication or another, that what used to work for them isn't working anymore, you need to respect that. And if you can't control yourself, and you absolutely need to be that character you're locked into, go do it in front of someone else for a while. Maybe a therapist.

Try, just as an experiment, not to be the character you've invented. Get really quiet, observe the usual impulses without acting on them, and see what else comes up. Got a funny joke? Write it down, and maybe publish a joke book someday (or at least start a twitter account). Got something mean and spiteful to say? Write that down, and then throw it away.

See who you are when you're not trying so damn hard to be yourself.

It's February! But you knew that.

Howdy, blogosphere.

So, my laptop died this week. A 2007 Macbook Pro. The trackpad and keyboard stopped responding. The internet told me to press down on the orange cable under the battery, but although that's worked in the past, this time it accomplished nothing.

Luckily, the messiah-geniuses at the Apple store resurrected it for the low low price of $60. So that beats buying a new laptop. Seems to be working pretty well so far.

I dropped the stats course I'd been taking. Too much stress. My mind needs time to absorb heavy math concepts, and it just was not sinking in. Some other time. I have a little bit of anxiety about this, especially in terms of how it delays my scholastic plans. But it had to be done, I was not in a good space!

At the end of next week, my hours at work decrease as a 4-month project comes to an end. I'm looking forward to having more free time. A lot of that time will be put toward our impending move, but at least some of it will go towards making some art, and doing other things that will start to reverse the effects of stress. Like tonight - I finally just went out to a coffee house and read a book. I must be getting old, because it was awesome.

I feel like I don't have anything especially witty to say, and to be honest, I don't really care. I feel calm for the first time in a while. Which doesn't translate to great blog posts, but I'm okay with that. I seriously doubt that's how I'll measure my life when I get to the end... and if that's how we do things by then, well, it might just be the right time to get off the ride anyway.

My kid's new favorite food is kale stems. I've always tried to feed him healthy food, and now that he's 5, his favorite things to eat are raw tofu, cucumber, soy milk, sushi salmon, and now kale stems. There've been times when I've been busy or stressed out, and turned to the "lazy parent" standbys of KD, frozen pizza, and chef boy-ar-dee, but this little guy wants nothing to do with them. And I have to admit that for a long time, until very recently, I had some guilt about not being one of those amazing parents who spend hours (or so I imagine) making healthy food look fun by dressing it in exciting colours and shapes. I don't think I could do that if I tried. But here's the thing: I've been blessed with a kid who doesn't need or even want that shit. He wants a bowl of raw tofu cubes with some soy sauce drizzled on it. He wants me not to throw out the kale stems when I'm frying up the leaves for myself, so that he can chew on 'em like they're twizzlers. So you know what? Okay. Okay! It's taken me a long time to figure out, but back when I was an SAHD, I made an effort to give him a healthy diet, and do you know what I get to do now? I get to claim my reward. So while other parents can beg and plead and bribe their kids into eating just one bite of vegetable ("come on, Timmy, one bite and then you can have this donut while we watch cartoons and I massage your feet"), while they're busting their butts trying to mold vegetables into the image of Dora the Explorer, I can toss my kid the healthiest stuff I can think of, and he'll thank me for it and ask for more. I don't know how long this is going to last, but mark my words: I am going to ride this thing out. I am going to milk this thing for all it's worth, and when, one day, a pretty girl with a pop tart tells him "why do you like that weird stuff?" and it all comes crashing down, Garden of Eden-style, I am going to take it in stride. And maybe send her a 24-pack of Coke so that her teeth rot and she holds less influence over my boy. No, I probably won't do that. Probably.

Oh hey, guess what? The US Census Board classifies dads who look after kids as "child care". So when you see statistics come out of the US referring to the number of kids in child care? Some of those kids are being raised by (shudder) their own fathers. Can you imagine? Anyway, that rant will be the subject of an upcoming blog post. Plan on skipping it if you're a sexist cave-dweller who's recently been unfrozen, unless you enjoy learning about the advances society's supposedly made since you took a nap in a glacier.

Okay, that's it. Here's my traditional promise to post more often, which will probably not be honoured.

In which the blogger is interviewed by his own self

RP: Hi, Ryan.

RP: Hi, great to be here.

RP: Where?

RP: Um, in bed, actually. I have a sore throat, which is not great, but I've taken the day off work and am still in my pajamas at 1:00pm, which is pretty great.

RP: So what's new? You haven't posted anything in a while.

RP: That's true, yes. To be honest, not very much is going on. Since I last posted, I've began taking a statistics course, I've-

RP: And how's that going?

RP: Not very well, frankly. I took a statistics course six years ago and did fairly well, but I don't remember very much of it at all.

RP: I guess calculating probability doesn't come up very much in your day-to-day life.

RP: Well it does, but it's mostly guesses, not mathematical equations. So for instance, I might try to determine whether I can get through an intersection before the light turns red, or whether a certain combonation of - what? combonation? That's not a word, sorry. Combination is what I meant to say. Whether a certain combination of words will entice my son to eat his dinner, and so on. I generally don't spend a lot of time calculating the odds of getting heads three times out of twenty-eight.

RP: Do you think you'll drop the class?

RP: No, probably not, I prefer the work-my-ass-off-to-an-unhealthy-degree approach, but god it's tempting to just quit something I care so little about. At the end of Feburary I'll finish a project at work, and have an extra 10 hours a week to study - the trick is not to get too far behind between now and then. So I might disappear, socially, for a while.

RP: Some people might say that pretending to interview oneself by typing a pretend dialogue/monologue while binge-eating Halls cough drops in one's pajamas is a clear sign that you've taken some steps in the direction of social reclusiveness.

RP: Touché.

RP: Why are you taking statistics, anyway?

RP: It's a required course for the Master's in Speech-Language Pathology at McGill, to which I plan to apply next year.

RP: Right. I think I knew about that. What else is new?

RP: Well, since leaving facebook, I've surprised myself by starting to understand the appeal of twitter.

RP: Oh, you're tweeting?

RP: Yes, under the handle @PooMyKidSays. The kid used to say lots of hilarious and weird stuff, and I would send it out as tweets or facebook statuses. These days, he's still pretty cool and clever and creative, but he doesn't voice quite as many random, absurd thoughts. So now, I tweet mine.

RP: What else?

RP: Well, I'm making slow but steady progress on my improvised piece that I've discussed here before. And yesterday I crossed something off my bucket list: I skated to work.

RP: Oh, that's exciting!

RP: Yeah, it was very nice. Hardly anyone was on the ice, because they've been opening and closing the skateway, and opening it and closing it some more, because of the erratic weather.

RP: Uh-huh.

RP: I think they've closed it again now.

RP: Seen any good movies?

RP: Well, yes, sort of. I saw Tintin, which was good. The animation is spectacular, and while I appreciate that the film wasn't a series of 3D-exploiting action sequences, it really took a while to get to the really visually exciting bits. I'd say the third act really makes the whole thing worthwhile, it's very beautiful. But the story is quite silly.
I also saw "The Artist," which didn't live up to my expectations. I really thought they were going to tell a story in a modern way, but with the constraints of a black & white, non-widescreen silent film. Instead they just made a silent film with clearer picture quality than was possible in the 1920s. The story was dull, and John Goodman just kind of mugs to the camera like a cartoon. There are some clever bits, but clever isn't enough on its own.

RP: Right, it's like that line in Fight Club, where Brad Pitt's on the plane, talking to Edward Norton, and he says "That's clever, you're a clever guy. How's that-"

RP: "How's that workin' out for ya?" Yeah. That line really hit home at a time when I pretty much defined myself by my cleverness. I haven't really loved much I've read of Palahniuk, but that line definitely represents a turning point, a light going off inside my head, you know?

RP: Right. Anything exciting on the horizon?

RP: Yes, there's the Ottawa New Music Creators "60x60" Concert. It's on Monday, January 30th at 7:30pm, at De La Salle school in Ottawa. I'm having two pieces premiered. The idea of the concert is to have 60 sixty-second pieces by 60 composers. I rearranged two pieces I'd submitted to the Vancouver Miniaturists Ensemble a few years back. One is 30 seconds long, and the other is 12.

RP: 12 seconds?

RP: Yes. The idea for the VME was that each piece could contain up to 100 notes. So I wrote a piece for 7 musicians with a lot of disjointed, twitchy, quick little rhythms. It's a very busy little piece. And when I started to approach 100 notes, I found an ending for it, and if played at the correct tempo, it's 12 seconds long.

RP: Interesting.

RP: I hope so!

RP: Anything else?

RP: Well, it looks like The Lithuanian Empire are going to reunite in July to record a second CD. I'm going to write something for it... probably a sirba. And I had a great, very weird sirba idea yesterday while in the shower. I don't think I'm ready to talk about it, though.

RP: Fair enough. Well, is that enough narcissism for today?

RP: I wish it were, but honestly, I'll probably be narcissistic again later.

RP: I look forward to it. Thanks for your time.

Dream Resume

Recently, while looking for information about the art-making technique of décollage, which perhaps most accurately describes the compositional process of my upcoming recording project, I came across something new to me: the surrealist game of making Dream Resumes. In a Dream Resume, you create a resume for yourself based on the things you've done in your dreams. I thought this was very neat, so without further ado...

Ryan Purchase, M.Mus: Curriculum Vitae

Adventure pilot, neglectful father, daredevil chauffeur, bumblebee

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Ottawa, Ontario K1X XXX

613.XXX.XXXX

xxxx.xxxxxxxx@gmail.com

http://ryanpurchase.com

   CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

2011 - Chauffeured several passengers, including small children, on icy highways, at night, with eyes closed

2011 -  Navigated a shrinking automobile on a nonstop voyage through the mountain ranges of British Columbia, Switzerland, and Mordor

2010 - Discovered a plethora of hidden crawlspaces in a 200-year-old home

2009 - Member of all-star band on cruise ship; transformed crew bar area into detachable amphibious vehicle and terrorized civilians while docked in Helsinki, Finland

2004 - Effortlessly seduced female bartender in Akureyri, Iceland

1993 - With my father as co-pilot, I piloted a two-seater plane over a remote island in the Pacific ocean. The island was the cone of one dormant volcano, and a perfectly see-through lake had formed in the bowl. It remains the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Then we went to a Halloween party!

   EDUCATION

2010 - Attended orientation at unidentified Midwestern US College

-campus designed to resemble a very modern mall

2011 - Wrote high school Advanced English Literature final exam without ever attending a lecture or reading the text, pantsless.

1996-2009 - Extensive training in trying to punch B.L. by the lockers, but then suddenly going into slow-motion and completely missing him. This training culminated in waving amicably at B.L. in a sunny park in springtime, 2011.

   WORK EXPERIENCE

Trucking/Crime prevention

Duties: driving 16-wheeler along east coast with my dad. Following a picnic lunch on the beach, my father hijacked the truck and proceeded south at dangerous speeds, while I hung on to the door handle and repeatedly shouted, “this isn’t funny!”

Freelance Brakeman/Childcare

Duties: activated emergency brake on passenger train leaving station, because I’d forgotten my infant son in his stroller near the “Departures” display board.

Retail Management

Duties: overseeing sales team in successful electronics store co-owned by my sister. Also lived in store after hours (kitchenette and king-sized Murphy bed).

Courier

Duties: running back and forth for no discernible reason between a public library and the second floor (requiring extensive repairs to hardwood flooring) of a shop in Chinatown.

   SCHOLARSHIPS, AWARDS, AND GRANTS

1998 -  After turning me into a bumblebee at the waterslide park, Colin Neufeld’s girlfriend said I learned more quickly to fly than anyone else she’d turned into bees.

   OTHER INTERESTS AND ACTIVITIES

Climbing precarious stairs

At considerable personal risk, I often climb poorly-designed, narrow, stone bell-towers.

Falling

1982 (age 4) - confronted Satan on a mountaintop and was pushed off

1997 (age 20) - rode a malfunctioning cable-less magnet-powered green glass elevator, and plummeted to my death


   REFERENCES
Nameless Bartender, Karolina Restaurant - Akureyri, Iceland