The other day I thought I had a PROFOUND THOUGHT about the meaning of life and the boundaries of my concept of ’self.’ So I wrote it down, and it turned into a list (78 items and still going) of things that, through the years, I have realized about myself usually during periods of ordeal rather than reflection. I have provisionally entitled this document USEFUL AND/OR TRIVIAL THINGS TO REMEMBER ABOUT ME. Maybe in the future I’ll e-mail the list to blind dates so they can call things off before it gets awkward. Anyway, there you have it.

One of the items:
13. I do a lot of my thinking in movie quotes.

Another:
20. I have an awful lot of books about the Third Reich side of things and very few about the Holocaust.

And yet another:
48. I think I might have a parking phobia. Or just a parkade phobia. Or just a CONCRETE POLE PHOBIA OMFG.

For those as yet unaware, I now use my old man’s old ride, which is this:

And I also have one of these, which came with my condo:

So I have to insert a 1998 Honda Accord into a spot in an underground parkade, which sounds pretty simple and millions of people do it every day, and I’ve been doing it every now and then since November, and my nerves are SHOT PEOPLE. ABSOLUTELY SHOT. There’s a concrete pole on the right-hand side of my space that eats about six inches of my available space and I have had nightmares about it. Nightmares! I have woken up screaming apologies to my father after scraping all the paint off the passenger side, which hasn’t happened in real life, but IT’S ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. Somebody please shoot me. Or buy me a Smart Car.

Anyhoodle, the relevance of this anecdote (I’m working up to something here, I promise) is that coming home, contrary to the majority view, is actually the worst part of my day. Also turning left. Or reversing. Or when it’s dark. Or if I have to change lanes, or merge onto the highway, or pull in close enough to the pump to actually get gas. Or if there’s a large truck on any side of me. Or if I see deer on the side of the highway. Um, essentially, the only time I’m not in a cold sweat behind the wheel is when the car is pointed forwards, there’s no other traffic, and it’s broad daylight.

I’m also ridiculously distractible on the road. Like, if a car I like goes by on the other side of a divided highway, I can’t stop my head from whipping around. Same with people walking their dogs, construction sites (I love construction sites), funny-looking clouds, etc, etc. Radio ads can send me straight into the rumble strips. And I don’t even have to answer my celphone for it to nearly kill me; on Friday, it rang and I almost went into the ditch.

My main mitigation strategy is to try to make the car a distraction-free zone so I can better cope with the outside distractions, and a major part of the strategy is listening to CBC Radio. On the way home they play some terrific stuff, Rich Terfry hosts and it’s just awesome, and often very soothing. This is one they’ve had in heavy rotation over the past couple of months and it just calms me instantly. I am pretty sure it has saved my life a couple of times.

I hadn’t seen the video till tonight and I’m so glad I looked it up. Because:
1. I love it when my mental image of an artist matches what they actually look like. Isn’t Vanessa da Mata gorgeous? That’s exactly what I assumed she looked like from her voice.
2. Ben Harper is cool and a lot of his stuff really speaks to me. ‘Glory and Consequence’ is the first song that my mental radio plays whenever I’m in a tight spot.
3. It also makes me happy that the title of the song means ‘good luck.’
4. Because when I first heard the title, I assumed it was spelled ‘Boa Sortie’ and was about a group of villagers going out to hunt boa constrictors.
5. Thereby making what my ancestors did in the old country Anaconda Sorties.

This article just freaked me out y’all, and you know I’ve got a pretty damn high tolerance for this kind of thing.

Now, the whole “Wah, wah, the innertubewebnet is turning us into a race of shut-in Morlocks who never go out and do anything, won’t somebody please think of the children” thing has been done to death. And – with the exception of people who would have been Morlocks even if they had been born in 1792, living in Mom’s basement with a stack of books instead of a laptop – it hasn’t really happened. No, seriously! Look around at the people you know. If they’re not leaving the house, it’s ‘cos they wouldn’t have left the house anyway. (These people have existed in all times, in all places. I should know: I’m one of them. One of my genetic throwbacks was probably listening to his parents harrumph and cluck, “Stupid kid, always got his nose buried in a cave drawing, why isn’t he outside like Urrghh’s boy, you know, the one who discovered fire.” Anyway I bet Urrghh’s boy got eaten by a diatryma while my ancestor lived to a ripe old age. Ha! I digress.)

But the article isn’t about the Morlocks. It’s about the so-evolved Eloi, outside in the sunshine and the fresh air, eating organic produce, and craving constant stimulation, attention, data, and activity… but not with other people. Who needs other people when you’ve got a GADGET?!

That’s when I got the chills.

The article is lighthearted and cute – father playing chess on his phone and absentmindedly hitting the tap while his four year-old floods the bathroom, husband surfing the net during a boink, guys whose iPhones are in their hands ‘from the moment I wake up.’ There was no reason for my reaction to be all “NO! NO! AAAAA!”

These smartphones, these adorable little devices that carry the entire world inside them, that connect their users to everything everywhere all the time, that make life so much more convenient, that let people broadcast their slightest thoughts as fast as their thumbs can go… they are, I think, my greatest enemy.

I’m not talking about the carpool boy steering with his knees while he texts his wife (”Oh, you caught me at that, huh”) or the thoughtless date that whips out his Blackberry mid-sentence without so much as a token mumble of “Hang on, I just gotta update my status,” or the one who turns his back on you in the movie lineup so he can check his favourite news site; I’m not talking about the guy I saw on the train who walked directly into a set of closed doors while writing something (riveting, I’m sure) on his iPhone. I’m talking about the ones who use smartphones as a snail shell. I mean, I can see the appeal. For those of us sufficiently immersed in the cloud as to think of the internet as not merely something to use to send Grandma baby pictures, or pay the gas bill, for those of us who consider it a home of a sort, along comes this device that essentially says “Guess what? You can take your home anywhere you go.” For me, logging into a strange computer and seeing my iGoogle startup page, with my widgets that I picked out and my theme that I’ve had forever and my familiar inbox, yes, it’s reassuring, it’s wonderful in fact, it’s like going to a scary neighbourhood and opening an unfamiliar door and looking into your own house. I’ve been blogging for seven years; I consider Meticulous Vandalism to be more of a home than any of the apartments I’ve spent a year in. There is safety in the stimulation, security in the fun. And you can take it with you and never really be alone. I get that.

But there’s no appeal in them, for me, and I can back that up with an anecdote.

Last spring, on a lark, I bought one of those little game emulators. What can I say? Thinkgeek had a sale, and I had a little cushion in my budget. $100 and two weeks later it arrived, pre-loaded with about thirty retro games and instructions on how to load more. While playing around with it that first week, I discovered that you could also use it to store books, photos, video, and music – so I excitedly crammed it full of media and took it with me on my trip back East.

And all of a sudden the temptation was always there. The temptation was always there, in any moment of downtime – ten minutes in line, two minutes before supper, fifteen seconds mid-conversation, if the train wasn’t arriving immediately – to pull my toy from my purse and listen to some music or watch an episode of ‘The Tick.’ Even when it would be inconvenient. Even when, bluntly, it would be rude. Even when I was having a good time with charming company, there was always this thought, which I had never really had pre-toy, “What else could I be doing?” When I came home, I put it away. I could feel something in me yearning towards it, presumably like your average crackhead wanting just one more hit, “Last one, last one before I go cold turkey, I swear,” and I ruthlessly slammed the drawer shut. I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. And you couldn’t even access the web with it – really, it was like a glorified Gameboy – but it was bad enough.

I’m pretty self-aware. I know that if it’s hard enough to get me away from my books and get me out of the house, I shouldn’t be into anything that makes it easier to stay in. And I know that if I can’t even listen to the radio when I drive, I probably can’t manage to walk and tweet at the same time. And I know, most of all, that I have an easily addictive personality, which is why I don’t even sample most of the things I feel would be an addiction threat. When I dropped my celphone on its head just before Christmas and went to replace it at Londonderry, the guy in the wireless store tried to interest me in a smartphone. I reached for a stupidphone instead, one of those ones you’d buy for your crazy grandfather in the nursing home, the numbers on the keypad as big as Chiclets. “But that costs the same as this one with the data plan,” he whined. “Don’t you want a smartphone?” “Nope.” “But it costs the same!” “Not to me it doesn’t.”

I have to resist this whole ‘There but not really there’ smartphone phenomenon. I just have to. I have enough trouble being fully present in the real world with just my mind to distract me. Can you imagine how distant and rude I’d be if I had a smartphone? Can you imagine how my already-crappy personality would deteriorate? As it is, right now, between e-mail, blogging, Wave, Facebook, and Buzz, I have a zillion ways to jabber about whatever I want anytime I want. Can you imagine how bad I’d be if I could do that anywhere? I would never shut up. There would be no such thing as self restraint. My whole brain would turn itself inside-out like a shark’s stomach and plaster itself all over the web. And frankly, I think I’d rather stay as a Morlock.

(Because I couldn’t think of a title and then I happened to notice the counter.)

1. I just found something very, very horrible that I wrote last year, and it has perturbed me sufficiently that I am going to have to stew and brood and froth about it for a couple of weeks till I have become fully consumed by it, so that I may thereby get it out of my system. It has to do with a hated four-letter word which, till tonight, I had not fully realized I hated.

2. So in the car on the way home, apropos of nothing, the one carpool boy goes, “By the way, do you know of any songs where you heard the cover, then heard the original song and couldn’t stop laughing?” Or maybe it was vice-versa, I wasn’t really listening, because I was thinking of my favourite cover song ever, the ridiculous ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by the Kinks, covered by Def Leppard. I discovered the Def cover in, I don’t know, like 2006 or something, and didn’t till last year know of the original song, so when I cued it up for the first time my instantaneous reaction after the lead-in is just hysterical laughter.

Here’s the cover (which I adore):

And here’s the original (which, uh, enjoy):

And here, apparently, is my favourite artist singing my favourite cover, which I just discovered five minutes ago whilst trying to find the first video. Whaaa?

(The Def Leppard version is still my favourite because, frankly, Dave could not possibly sound more like a bus station letch in this song if he tried, and I’m aware that doesn’t make any sense, I just keep picturing him in a dirty trenchcoat singing under his breath as he watches schoolkids go by. Or maybe I just need more sleep.)

So what’s this about there being a fourth Gormenghast book?!

Is anyone around here as confused as I am?

The ‘Gormenghast’ series is my favourite book series ever, always has been, and OK, I haven’t read that many books published in a serial fashion, I don’t count ‘Discworld’ because fundamentally they aren’t a serial, also, did you guys hear about how Sir Terry is planning on assisted suicide? anyway, I digress, the main thing is that I can’t decide whether this fourth-book thing is SOME KIND OF UNFORGIVABLE HERESY or THE BEST THING EVER. One thing’s for sure: given my obssession, it certainly cannot be something in the middle.

Things that are interfering with my opinion:

1. Did Peake get a chance to illustrate this fourth book before his death? Because his illustrations hold significant appeal for me and if the book has been illustrated by someone else, or if it lacks illustrations, I will judge the new book slightly more harshly than the original three. The article indicates a new edition of the original trilogy will be released with new illustrations, but it doesn’t say whether any of those will be for the fourth book.

Alice in Wonderland illustration by Mervyn Peake

2. The ending of ‘Titus Alone’ doesn’t exactly forestall a fourth book – if anything, it screams ‘What happens next?’ at the top of its papery lungs – but with that said, it was a fucking perfect literary ending, and that does not happen overmuch in my experience. I do not see how another book can improve on a perfect ending.

3. I notice the article says the book was completed by Peake’s wife, Maeve Gilmore, and that she is cited as ‘who was also a writer.’ So I checked Bookfinder.com and all I can find under her name are books she’s written about her husband and anthologies of his stuff. Which begs the question:
- How complete were Peake’s notes? Are we talking back-of-the-napkin stuff or pages of dialogue that she’d be able to write about? Because, and pardon my lack of faith, it does not do to speak ill of the dead, but assembling one’s husband’s poems and drawings in chronological order does not necessarily mean that one is capable of writing a novel.
- Am I really going to buy a book if it’s written by a chick? Maybe I can talk myself into buying it if I hear that he wrote most of it and she just filled in, you know, the apostrophes or something.
- On the other hand, since I used to read Barbra Hambly and CJ Cherryh, I suspect there’s a hole in my mental ‘Do not want’ for female authors if they’re writing fantasy or sci-fi.
- On the other other hand, ‘Gormenghast’ isn’t really fantasy. It’s just a place that isn’t easily locatable on any map. I mean there aren’t any like dragons or unicorns or hobbits or anything.
- Where was I?
- Oh yeah, and how come she died without saying anything about it? Kinda fishy, right?

Anyway, I am quite, quite looking forward to it despite my many misgivings. I’ll just have to go into it with low expectations so I’m not horribly disappointed.

I used to not want kids, then I did, then I didn’t, then I did, then I didn’t, then… you get the idea. Now I’ve settled on ‘do not want.’ Which turns out to be a good thing because hey, in two years, 90% of my eggs will be gone!

Eggs, of course, start to die almost as soon as they’re formed in your ovaries; but that’s a new number to me, that 90%. I wonder if I’ll even have 10% left at 30, what with all the mercury, UV, carcinogens, ammonia, nickel, jet fuel, etc, etc, etc, etc, that I’ve gotten a lungful of or stepped in or had squirted into my face or spilled onto my lap or soaked into my socks.

So, it looks like if I want kids my only choice will probably be to switch my focus from the velociraptor cloning project and start working on a copy of myself instead. Dang.

(Fifteen minutes ago)

Mind: JESUS H. CHRIST ON A CHROME-TRIMMED PENNY-FARTHING. IT IS ALMOST FEBRUARY. TAKE DOWN THE CHRISTMAS TREE.
Body: (goes limp)
Mind: What? What are you doing? Get up!
Body:
Mind: What the hell is this? Is this passive resistance? YOU ARE NOT GANDHI. GANDHI WOULD HAVE TAKEN DOWN THE TREE BY NOW. GET UP.
Body:
Mind: Oh I see. I see. The silent treatment, eh? Eh? Well two can play at that game, me old matey.
Body: (goes even limper)
Mind: If you don’t get up right this minute and take down that tree, I am going to, uh, I am… uh… well, you won’t like it, whatever it is.
Body: (starts munching carpet)
Mind: All right. All right! Take down just the stocking. Just the stocking.
Body: (sits up, evincing a flicker of interest)
Mind: OK! We have movement! We have momentum! Man the torpedos and scuttle the mizzenmast! One! Two! THREE!
Body: (reaches for stocking)
Mind: Oh, and don’t forget to get out the tree box. And the one for the fragile ornaments, and the one for the non-fragile ornaments. And the bag for the tree skirt. And the bubble wrap for the
Body: (crashes to floor again)
Mind: All right, all right. Forget the tree. This is obviously some kind of mental block, probably from our childhood, maybe it had to do with our mother, whatever. Forget the tree. Get up, let’s do a blog post.
Body: (blinks)
Mind: And if you cooperate this one time, we’ll go get some ice cream after tomorrow’s appointment, OK?
Body: (crabwalks to computer)
Mind: Thank you. Honestly, was that so hard?

Looking for a very specific photograph of a tree last night in my Photos folder, came across a million billion squillion forgotten photos. The thing is a treasure trove of weirdness.

Yarrrrr.

Particularly like the Buddhafish.

Things I did for my country.

In my typically poetic fashion I call this one “Uncle Karan and the Atlantic Ocean.”

So I’m at brunch the other day with a friend, LT, and her new boyfriend, BF, and halfway through our omelettes she turns to us and goes, “If you were given the opportunity, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”

OK, go ahead and answer that. Remember your answer? Now we continue the conversation.

Me: “Sure.”
BF: “Yep.”
LT: “Really? You’d eat somebody with their consent?”

Uh.

BF: “Oh, is that what you meant? I thought ethical cannibalism was like… you’re on a desert island, you have to eat somebody to stay alive.”
Me: “I thought ethical cannibalism was when the victim deserves it.”
LT: “No, it’s like… OK, first of all Premee, nobody deserves to be eaten.”
Me: “I can think of a couple of people.”

What we had, essentially, was a semantic discrepancy, which is why you should always clarify these things before you agree. (Not that my answer has changed, but we found it interesting that amongst three people we had three different definitions.)

I asked it again in the car the other day:
Me: (very casually) “So if you had the chance, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”
Carpool Boy: “You mean like… if I had been in a plane crash or something and the only way to survive was to eat someone who had recently died?”
Me: “Oh damn, you actually defined it first. So that’s a yes?”
Him: “Well if I was going to die.”

Then on Saturday I asked yet again, over cocktails and dinner:
Me: “Sooooo…if you had the chance, would you commit ethical cannibalism?”
Guy: “Yup.”
Me: “Didn’t give that one much thought, did you.”
Guy: “No need. In fact – ” And here he reached for a fork, presumably in jest, but I still flailed backwards into my side of the booth just in case.

Notice how he didn’t actually define ‘ethical cannibalism,’ thereby depriving me of the chance to add to my running count of definitions. It’s obviously one of those phrases not in sufficiently common parlance to have a universal definition, but we all know what ‘ethical’ means and we all know what ‘cannibalism’ means, so we make up our own on the spot. (Except for Friend #2 there, who doesn’t seem to have a definition for it inasmuch as he regards eating human as not much different from eating chicken or beef, God help me.)

Funnily enough, the consent thing never occurred to me as ethical cannibalism, even though I clearly remembered reading about that German guy who had eaten people he met online, with their consent. I think his consent was chat logs or something, but still – if it’s in writing, and it’s on the internet, you can’t un-say it.

Which got me thinking about the cannibalism taboo, and forgive me for not having done any background reading, but why are people (almost) always squicked out by it? Was there ever a time when you could say you had ‘long pork’ for dinner and have everyone nod instead of screw up their face in disgust? Was there ever a place?

About a year ago, I got a whole pack of hippy-dippy e-books online; I wanted the one about composting and wasn’t able to get it on its own. So as I was scrolling through the other titles (“Stupid, stupid, boring, stupid, boring, as if…”) I ran across one on butchering animals. And I stopped at that one, because one of my cookbooks has good instructions on taking apart a whole chicken but what if I had to do something bigger, like a deer? So I popped it open and yeah.

Butchering humans.

It’s so detailed that I assume it has to be an elaborate joke, but there are no overt traces of humour anywhere in it, and I really looked. And secondly if it is a joke it isn’t a funny one. Because I was sitting there looking at the different cuts going “Wow!” because I am certainly not taboo-free, I subscribe, in fact, to a whole lot of taboos, including some that no one in their right mind would see as a problem, such as eating chewy bacon. (VERBOTEN.) So yes, I have a problem with cannibalism, but I always had it more in the sense of “Please don’t eat me” (which should tell you something about the company I keep) rather than “It bothers me that you are eating him.” But this book, it was… OK, look.

See? Disgustifying. Repulsotronic. I’ve totally lost my appetite and will never eat another human again.

Readers, thoughts on the cannibalism taboo?

A while back, on a lark, I cut a couple of paragraphs out of a blog post and pasted it into one of those inner-net widgets that purported to analyze it for you; this one was for gender specifically, and it said I wrote like a dude, which, well, whatever. They didn’t explain how they had made the choice but since they had a 50/50 chance of picking the right one, if you believe in the binary theory of gender, then it’s OK that they picked wrong.

Then a friend of mine sent me a link to Typealyzer, which she had done on her blog as well, and she was like, “OMG this is so accurate!”

Yeah, uh… yeah. I put in MV’s address and got ISTP – The Mechanics. So that’s wrong too. Here’s what they said:

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are highly skilled at seeing and fixing what needs to be fixed. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

But unlike the other widget, this one shows you which snippets of blog it used to come to its conclusion. Including:
- Punt a kitten across the street
- Public will be chopped into bitty pieces
- Hello chasing engineers with a soil probe
- Which continues to strengthen my Douchebag Compatibility theory

This isn’t the blog of a mechanic. This is the blog of a mad-dog killer. ESCAPE WHILE YOU CAN PEOPLE.

Being a long-time Plymptoons fan, I went to see Bill Plympton’s ‘Idiots and Angels’ last night at the Metro. This place has a history of showing stuff capable of penetrating my desensitized shell (see: ‘I Vitelloni,’ ‘Ivan the Terrible,’ etc), and y’all, for the first time in years I cried at a movie. Bawled, in fact. I was still snuffling and snorting on the train and a little old lady asked me if I were all right. Woke up this morning with both eyes puffed to slits.

Because… because, you know what, I don’t know.

(To sum up the film in a couple of inadequate sentences: a bad man, not the worst man ever, but a notably bad man, a vicious, alcoholic, arbitrarily violent criminal, the type to hump your wife or punt a kitten across the street because he finds it funny to see others in pain, is suddenly cursed with wings and discovers what it means to be compelled to do good against his will. Plus also a lot of self-mutilation, bullets, blood, grenades, fantasy, crazy doctors, and fat-fendered cars.)

So what I want to know now is the nature of goodness.

I want to know why the antithesis of good is not evil but actually apathy. Why is that? Why are we paralyzed by the prospect of actually doing something in the name of combating evil? Why is this paralysis universal, rather than a vanishingly rare trait?

I want to know whether you can truly restrain someone from obeying and revelling in their base nature, especially given that you cannot – no, cannot - hate someone for their own good. And given the existence of the cliche ‘kill them with kindness.’ And whether self-restraint is an option.

And I want to know whether you should, even if you can.

I want to know why even the prospect of being a good person causes some people to suffer. I saw this video in CNN entitled something like ‘Why Teens Fight.’ And before I even watched it I said, “Uh, because they’re stupid?” But listen, it’s more like, these are kids whose base natures are king. Or not even king. These are kids whose base natures are oxygen, and to try to make them mitigate these violent urges is like holding their heads underwater. It’s what you are. It’s what you are, and how can you change what you are even if it’s good? It’s like lead into gold.

And if an external influence like wings comes along and coerces you against your will to change for the better, forces you to change, with the promise of pain (and then a big bucket of actual pain), is it worth it? If you come to a happy ending by nightmarish means, do you deserve the happy ending? Or should it be taken from you, and should you be forced to do it over again the ‘right’ way?

I’m thinking of ‘The Black Rider,’ remember that play? The besotted (but totally inappropriate) young man deals with the devil for magic bullets to impress his true love’s father and thereby secure marriage rights. You ask: does he deserve his true love if he had to resort to that? And, well, there are a lot of answers.
- “If she wasn’t living in a patriarchal society where her father has to sell her as if she’s property, this wouldn’t be happening!”
- “He should have shown some judgement! Being in love isn’t an excuse.”
- “Of course he doesn’t deserve her! He was so underhanded. Why would you want to marry someone like that?”
- “Well maybe she’s kind of a crappy human being too, since she didn’t stand up for herself and declare her spousal preference.”
- “Well maybe they deserve each other then.”
- “And maybe that horribly tragic ending is deserved too.”

But then you have to look at that last one a little more closely. If they’re both crappy and they deserve each other, do we then extrapolate that to say ‘good’ people only deserve good and ‘bad’ people only deserve bad? If so, then why bother trying to turn bad people into good people? That would be good for them. So they don’t deserve it.

I want to know if I am a monster for wanting a bad person to act contrary to his nature. I want to know if someone’s nature can change. Outside, naturally, of The Grinch. And I want to know why I of all people cried at the ending of ‘Idiots and Angels,’ apart from the shock, and I am not easily shocked to tears.

It seems to me that everyone now wants to think they’re a lost soul. Because it’s hip and trendy to be lost. Wacky! Creative! As if you were on a wild Kerouacky trip to find it, daddy-o, when in fact it’s a lot more boring and no one really has a soul to lose any more. So what are we searching for?

Bah, I’m all mixed up now. Maybe I’ll just write a book about it.