Fox Creek

When I was thirteen I lived in a northern Alberta oil town called Fox Creek. The population is about 2000. The average person has no real reason to know the town even exists, so I get a little excited when it gets any kind of mention in the media.

The Edmonton Journal has a story today about a spree of break-ins happening in the town, about 35 in two weeks. To the rescue: the Fox Creek Citizens on Patrol Association! They drive around town in their cars, quads and pick-ups looking for no-good activities.

There' no doubting the commitment of these Fox Creekers. According to the Journal, "there have been so many eyes on the street that RCMP on Friday responded to several false alarms where a slow-moving citizen patrol group has called the RCMP about another slow-moving citizen patrol group perceived as acting suspiciously."

There was also concern, with the number of hunters and golfers in the town, that things could get ugly. Nine iron to the side of the head!

Corn Maze

I was without sufficient distraction on Saturday afternoon so I phoned my friend to see what was up. "It's my cousin's birthday," she said. "Want to go to a corn maze?" So we jumped on a rented short bus (fully stocked with beer) and drove southeast of the city to the Calgary Corn Maze. The maze is apparently the size of ten football fields and shaped like a t-rex.























How do they do that? Do they have to hire professional engineers and a helicopter, because that seems really complex. Maybe they have a secret deal with the crop circle aliens.

The maze had two phases. The goal was to locate a bunch of numbered posts in the correct order. There were farm animal-related trivia questions to tell us what direction to take from each post, but it didn't seem to help because we only found a couple of the posts and not in order. Mostly we just wandered around drinking beer and making random decisions (there's some sort of analogy there, I think...). We eventually stumbled upon the exit. There were signs telling us not to eat the corn. I gave in at the end and tore off the leaves and tassels until I got too the tiny yellow ear at the centre. Fresh baby corn is like candy.

Lovable

This came out last month but I just recently read about it.

A study done by researchers from the Universities of Waterloo and New Brunswick demonstrated that "trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are."

In the study, participants with both low and high self-esteem were asked to write down how they were feeling over the course of four minutes. One group was asked to think the thought "I am lovable" when prompted to at 15-second intervals. The results were that the "I am lovable" low self-esteemers felt worse after the four minutes than those who weren't instructed to think that thought.

I can't think of anything that would make me feel more pathetic than forcing myself to think "I am lovable". Talk about a Jennifer Aniston complex.

Thinking happy thoughts when I am anything but doesn't help me. I remember having a particularly bad day a couple of years ago: I had a headache and I was tired and had been feeling crappy for months. I had my head down on my desk, trying to get through the day. My co-worker offered the advice: "You just need to think positively!" I could have throttled her.

Hutterite hair

I was looking at a photo essay of the Rocky View Hutterite Colony and it's got me breaking the tenth commandment. Hutterite girls have the best hair and I'm totally coveting it! (The women might have nice hair too but it's hidden under a scarf.) They have these beautiful, tight, elaborate braids, starting at the front centre of the hairline and moving down and back. The girls have their hair washed and braided one a week. This would suit me since hair-washing is a taxing activity that I do only when necessary (when I start to resemble Ethan Hawke in "Reality Bites".) But whenever I try to French-braid my hair it ends up looking all loose and messy. I don't suppose I would be tolerated on the colony.

DeSiCiTi

My friend Jon Joffe directed a TV series pilot and it got screened at GlobalFest Friday night. The show was "DeSiCiTi", the story of four women and their dating exploits in NYC. Sounds familiar? The twist is, these women are desi. I had to ask Jon after the screening what that meant. Desi are the South Asian diaspora. Indo-Americans. So these women had some old-world traditions to deal with in carrying out their new-world sexploits.

The character stereotypes were all there: the ambitious, cynical lawyer (who gets passed over at work for a blonde woman); the naive good girl (who carefully puts her headscarf back on each evening when returning home to her parents); the somewhat older, sexually adventurous woman; and the girl next door (who wears a fake moustache on dates to weed out the men who don't look for deeper beauty).

My favourite part was when the older woman goes on a blind date with a Sikh man at the insistence of her parents. The man turns out to be very young, serious and intensely sexy in his black turban. They hit it off and end up going back to her place. When she starts to put the moves on, the man gets up to leave. "I want to get married," he explain. "To a woman with good morals!" The woman is taken aback but is quick-witted. "It was a test. To see if you had good morals. You passed!" They end up playing Scrabble all night.

DeSiCiTi's producers are shopping it around right now, trying to get it picked up for broadcast so that they can make it into a full-fledged TV series. I hope they do it soon. I want to see what happens next.

Wangta

I thought that getting a cell phone would give me a social life. It hasn't worked out that way so far.

I grew up in this city, but I don't have any best buddies or a posse to tool around with. The best friend I had in university has moved to the States. I still have friends here, but they all either have their own main crew or they have a girlfriend/boyfriend that takes precedence.

True, I haven't been a proper resident of Calgary in six years and I've only been back for a few months, so I guess I should give myself a break. And try to stop being such a hermit.

So...I'm going to the Globalfest Filmfest by myself tonight! Maybe I'll bring along my imaginary friend.

Faces

According to researchers at Glasgow University, Asians and Westerners "decode" facial expressions differently. Westerners pay equal attention to mouth and eyes, while Easterners focus on the eyes.

26 college students (British, Japanese and Chinese) looked at photographs of faces and identified the emotional expressions they observed. The East Asian volunteers were more likely to mistake expressions of fear and disgust for surprise and anger, respectively. These expressions are mostly differentiated by the muscles around the mouth.

In another study a few years back, a Japanese researcher showed some Photoshopped faces to Japanese and American volunteers. The Americans were more likely to get it wrong when a happy mouth was grafted onto a sad face.

When I studied Chinese last November I had to learn the adjectives "happy", "hungry", "busy" and "tired", then match them up with these pictures:










Tired I got, but I really didn't know what to do with the other three. My Taiwanese tutor maintained that 1 was hungry, 2 was happy and 4 was busy. I remain unconvinced.

Rafting

Went rafting on the Bow. First we rode the bus to my old stomping grounds in Bowness. We were discussing where to pick up beer and some teenagers on the bus told us where to get off and how to get to the liquor store. God bless 'em. Once we were there, my friend recognized one of the multimillion dollar riverfront houses. He'd done some concrete flooring in it a few times for work. So we took the liberty of blowing up our raft in the back yard.

On the river we sang John Prine songs. We were singing "Christmas in Prison" and my friend pointed out that the song is about a guy in jail whacking off to thoughts of his absent sweetheart. I then observed that another Prine song, "Donald & Lydia", is also about masturbation. I have my tickets to see John Prine play at the Jack Singer in October. It's gonna be a gooder!

We brought our life jackets but they stayed on the floor of the raft. Fortunately the river patrol has a very loud boat so we heard them coming before they got close. When we stopped at Edworthy park for a toilet break, we heard some drumming and shouting coming from behind the trees. Sounded like hippies. I investigated and they weren't hippies at all, but Africans. Back in the boat we discussed young hippies. It seems like young people these days (twentyish) are bright and optimistic and lack the cynicism and slackerdom of people my age (thirtyish). Or maybe that's just me. Anyways...I grew up in the shadow of Gen X, grunge, the painfully ironic postmodern age. But today's young people were babies when Kurt Cobain offed himself. They're the Obama generation. They want to learn everything and love everyone and save the world while they do it.

Here's to nouveau hippies, trespassing and flouting city bylaws.

Hippies

Friday night I asked my brother-in-law if I could borrow the car. "I'm going to a hippie drumming circle." He didn't say anything. I promised to park around the corner so no one would recognize his car. I got the keys.

I drove way over to Forest Lawn to the Circles of Rhythm Community Drum Circle. I was there on the invitation of my classmate from massage school. I got there late, and the room was filled. There was a handful of people my age and a couple of kids, but the demographic was predominantly baby boomer. Aging hippies. A smiley lady in yellow pants stood in the middle giving enthusiastic instruction.

A few people on the big drums started first, with everyone else joining in once the rhythm was established. The first time we did it the beat kept getting progressively faster and faster. Yellow Pants said this was the "sound of technology", the modern habit of doing things faster and faster. A positive feedback system. After that we were able to maintain a consistent tempo.

I started banging on my drum with my hands, but they got really sore. I switched to drum sticks. There was a guy who played a whistle and a woman on a didgeridoo. In the center were some giant drums. People went up to circle around and beat on them. One woman passed the drum sticks on to me so I was obliged to take my turn in the middle. It wasn't that bad.

I try to do meditation and qigong at home, alone, in my room. I'm usually uncomfortable in group religious or new-age activities. I feel like a a fraud amidst the true believers. And I get irritated by any group pressure to act the same as everyone else. So I was surprised at my level of comfort at the drum circle. Even at the end when we had to stand and hold hands, each person sending one positive word out into the city. My word was "aware".

So that was my evening with old hippies. What I want to know is, where are all the young hippies?

Needles

I went to the student clinic for acupuncture today. I lay face down, stripped to the waist, while the student doctor placed needles up and down my back, near my knees and in the soles of my feet. She left them in for ten minutes, then came back and twisted each one. This twisting is more painful that the initial insertion. The sensation is that of an electrical shock and a feeling of spasm in the surrounding muscle. Certain acupoints cause faraway parts of the body to tingle. Some people can't stand needles, but as for me, I love the feeling.

It started a couple of winters ago. I was getting sick all the time, so my doctor suggested twice weekly vitamin C IV drips to try to get my immune system working properly. I'd lie on the bed and the Korean nurse would come along and insert a long needle into my arm. It wasn't a quick procedure; it took a few seconds for the needle to get in to the proper depth. Sometimes also the nurse had trouble finding the vein. At first it freaked me out, but the more I got it done, the less uncomfortable it felt. And then one day as the nurse approached, I realized I was looking forward to the prick of the needle and its slow insertion. It is strangely satisfying.

My friend gets electric acupuncture in Hanoi:

Egg Tarts

Another rainy day in a week of blustery weather. In the last few days hail and wind have wrecked buildings and ravaged farmer's crops. The wind has blown down the mainstage at the Big Valley Jamboree and blown some building material from the eighteenth story of a construction site near the Calgary Tower. Two people have died. No flooding though, I think. We get that some years.

Calgary gets it hard and wet and windy, but the rain doesn't visit for long. It doesn't get a season of its own like it does in other countries. One rainy night when I lived in Korea, I went downtown to a bar where lots of expats hung out. There was a Filipino guy on the karaoke mic, singing loudly while putting back a beer. My friend at the bar told me that he'd received the news that day that his family's home in the Philippines had been destroyed by a typhoon. He was trying to get it out of his mind for a while.

I got stranded by a typhoon once. I was in Macau on the south coast of China. Like Hong Kong, Macau is its own "Special Administrative Region" and requires going through customs and immigration to get to and from the mainland. I was there for a few days en route to Hong Kong when the typhoon hit. The city shut down: the buses stopped, the shops and restaurants closed, planes were grounded, boats stayed in dock, even the China border closed. I was inconvenienced on two counts: I was supposed to leave for Hong Kong that day; and, I'd developed a Portuguese egg tart habit. The eggs tarts of Macau have the most delicate flaked crusts and the savouriest egg fillings. I've since had egg tarts in Hong Kong and in Canadian Chinatowns, but they've never lived up to the Macanese tarts. So here I was, unable to leave for Hong Kong, faced with shuttered bakeries. Fortunately, the casinos were open. Deep in the gilded bowels of the Casino Lisboa I found a bakery. I spent the day sitting in my tiny hostel with the other stuck travellers, watching the rain and eating egg tarts.

Opera

I went with my mom to the Jack Singer today to see some free lunch hour opera put on by the Cantos Music Foundation. Three singers, a pianist and an organist squeezed out eleven songs in 50 minutes, which is about my limit for sitting and actually enjoying any kind of classical music. I saw Aida a few years back, and with its four acts it was a real marathon for me.

Speaking of opera, I got to see Beijing opera when I was in China three years ago. That also lasted a few hours, but it was interesting because it was so weird and alien sounding. As in it sounded like music space aliens would listen to. There was lots of shrieking and mewling and clanging cymbals. And a midget.

Fish Sauce

We'd hooked up before in Vietnamese restaurants, but last week was the first time I took fish sauce home with me. And fish sauce stuck around the morning after!

The affair started when I went to Chinatown to have dim sum with my friend at Harbour City restaurant. Afterwards we stopped in the Chinese grocery. In the coconut milk aisle my eye was drawn to the Mama Sita brand Filipino spices. As a mama sita herself, my friend advised me on what meals to try out, and I bought the Adobo and Sinigang mixes. We made a dinner date for Tuesday.

Day of, I needed more ingredients. Safeway is boring so I went to Filipino Market on 37th st SW. The shelves were stocked with all kinds of sauces and spices and strange confections. I almost bought a bag of Egg Nog cookies, but instead was won over by the ingredient list on the Ube candies (condensed milk, purple yam, gelatinous mutant coconut, sugar and margarine).

In the sauce aisle I quickly found a neat little bottle of chili sauce, and looked for fish sauce in the same dimensions. I asked the lady working there for help, but there was only one size available: 750 ml. Now, I've eaten stinky tofu (smells like feet) on the streets of Taiwan, and liked it, but that's where it stayed--on the street. So I was wary of buying close to a liter of fish sauce, with its notes of ear wax and old shoes, and bringing it into my home. It was a commitment. But a cheap one ($3), so I took a chance.

Our relationship so far has been good. The Sinigang went over well with my friend. It's a distinctly sour and salty soup. My friend said her mother would be pleased to know I'd made it. Fish sauce and I got together later in the week for a red hot Thai curry. When we're not cooking something up together, fish sauce keeps to itself (I haven't caught any errant whiffs of it when walking through the kitchen). In its big bottle, fish sauce towers above all the other sauces in the cupboard: the hoisin, the Worchester, the Korean red pepper sauce, the soya. My friends like it, my mother does not approve. We haven't set any future dates, but I always know this tall, dark foreigner will be around whenever I have the urge.

Running

One of the many things that marred my childhood school days was PE class. As the tallest, skinniest and most athletically inept student in the class, it was all trauma for me: basketball, volleyball, gymnastics, swimming (bathing suit?!), soccer.... But the one I always found the most brutal came up first thing at the beginning of the school year: cross-country running. My classmates would leave me behind right at the start, and so I'd drag myself along, alone in the woods or on the field, crampy, tired, humiliated, but forced to finish. It was drudgery. At least with volley ball I could stand uselessly by as the ball hit the floor in front of me. It required very little physical effort. In running I had to do the full, interminable course, no matter how long it took. So after my last mandatory PE class in grade 10 I swore off running for the rest of my existence.

But that was years ago, and now any physical activity I do is of my own volition. My parents have been running for a few years, and they are pushing seventy, so I decided to give it a try. Running is free, and I don't have to go to a special place to do it, and I can look around at different stuff.

Today was my third run, in over a month, which is somewhat less that the three time a week I set out for. My initial three runs have been very, very beginner-level: I run for one minute, then walk to two, for a total of fifteen minutes. By the end of which I am very happy to be finished. The first two times I did It I got a pain in my right foot that lasted for a few days. If my foot starts to hurt after today's run, I may have to quit. I am allowed to after all. I'm not in PE class.

Maybe I'll take up swimming.

Back to the Blogstone

I'm back to blogging again. This site serves two purposes: A, to get myself writing and exercising the lazy, creative part of my brain; and B, to chronicle my attempts to integrate my cynical, pessimistic hermit tendencies with the inner idealist that wants to live in the moment, spread some lovin' and bust out dance moves in the middle of the street. Hopefully my posts a year from now will show some progress.

Good luck, me!