Reasons Why

I was reading Eve's post about the 'Boycott American Women' website. There were some good comments made about it, and even I had something to say. I said that the reason I boycott women is because I am painfully shy. I am an introvert. I've always been an introvert, but the way I lived my life made it a stronger part of my character than perhaps it should have been.
My folks moved around a lot. In the 90's, I bought one of those books where you fill in your family history, and the pages that described where we lived were completely filled in. This was before I went to Korea. I need another book for those.
I had a couple of good friends in elementary school, when we were living in Deadmonton. After I had finished grade 6, we moved back to Calgary, where we moved a coupla more times. In junior high and high school, I was the new kid. A new kid who's shy is not going to be part of a crowd. I had a few friends (never at the same time), but they sort of petered out, and by the time I graduated, I was close to no-one.
And girls?
Forget about it!
In junior high, I was interested, but could not bring myself to let them know it. I was too scared of what might happen. I learned to build a wall around my feelings and bury them deep.
That's been the pattern throughout my life. I can talk to women upon occasion, but any attempt on my part to take it beyond a certain point causes a complete brain freeze and I turn into an incoherently babbling idiot.
I mean, more than usual.
So I've come to a point in my life where I know that it's just not going to happen for me. I'm learning to be comfortable with myself, because I know that that's all I will have.
A posting on Facebook alerted me to a book about the subject, called The Introvert Advantage by Marti Laney, PsyD. It's a pretty good description of what I'm like.
I don't talk until I have something to say.
I need a reason to talk.
I've given up on trying to find something to say, just to be part of the conversation. It has to come naturally.
I like having few friends, because most people aren't worth my time. I'd rather have one Flint as a friend than a hundred of them.
I'm happy in my Batmancave, because mooks can't figure out the entry code.
I can think clearer without their noise.
I'm not interested in what is popular, or hearing about it from other people. I've got my own shit to think about.
Like Popeye says, 'I am what I am.'
My mom is driven to despair sometimes, because I don't perform well (for her) when she introduces me to her friends. She thinks I'm rude. I tried to tell her about this book, and explain why I do the things I do, but she still doesn't get it. Most people won't, but I don't worry about them anymore.
Flint's post about how Korea prepared him goes for me, too. Learning to deal with the stress of living and working in the Land of Morning Calm (and Afternoon Confusion) makes that as easy as pie.

TV

I like watching TV. Perhaps I watch too much, but what else have I got to do? The job search is not going too well, and school doesn't start for another month or so.
So I kill time by watching Flint tease John, writing this blog, and watching TV. There's a lot of good video being offered out there, if you know where to look. The problem is, when you are in a country like Korea, you miss a lot of the really good programs (unless you know how to download), and you're very much behind people who've had access to it all along.
I sort of learned how to download in my third year in Korea, and then I started having problems with my 'puter, so I left off until Flint taught me how to do it properly. After that, I returned my TV to the hagwon and started getting caught up.
I'm still way behind, even after a coupla years of plugging away.
While I was in Korea, I started to get into shows like Dexter, The Shield, Battlestar: Galactica, and Californication. I've only just started the first season of The Wire, Damages, and Life On Mars (UK version).
I've been staying with my folks since I got back from Korea, and they had a pretty good cable package with Shaw. Then they changed it to Telus, and added the PVR function.
Hello!
I am in love with the PVR, which frees the viewer of the networks' tyranny like never before. No longer do you have to sit through boring commercial breaks or (badly) edited-for-TV versions of my favourite movies. With a PVR, you really can watch what you want, when you want it. It's brilliant.
Then, after my mom's accident, we had to stay at a hotel to be near her, and I was shocked, shocked when I saw the kind of TV being offered by the hotel, as well as to patients in the hospital.
Basic cable. (dramatic chord)
50 channels max.
Ew.
I guess hotel guests and hospital patients, being fairly transient in nature, don't need a full-on package of every single channel as well as all the technical add-ons. They just need something to look at for a night or two.
But if you're in for a long haul, the inadequacies of basic cable become more and more apparent as time goes by. Especially if you're looking for quality television, and not the drek offered up by networks and local stations.
Networks are in it for the money, and the commercial break is all important. They gotta get that ad revenue. A good show is just something to attract viewers that can be trapped into watching ads, not an end in itself.
Networks have something they call "standards and practices," which they say they use to censor offensive content like vulgar language (shit, fuck, cunt, piss, cocksucker, mothefucker, tits), excessive violence and gore, as well as sexy things like naked bodies and people making love.
Well, if you're an adult, being told by some faceless corporation that you can't watch something is like being told you can't vote or drink or stay up past eight o'clock. It's just not on.
So I go to a channel like HBO and watch a program like Deadwood, which has more nudity, violence, and people saying "fuck" per square inch than a whorehouse, but is also one of the finest programs ever filmed.
Local stations are even worse. They're always interrupting shows with "news breaks," which don't have any news, just promos for the local news teams. I've mentioned before how my folks are fans of Global Calgary, which I loathe and despise with the white-hot passion of a thousand suns.
Fucking mooks.
Even if they do run a good program, you have a tough time seeing it through all the supers on the screen. The station logo is there (as well as the network logo sometimes), and the station adds on supers that describe what's coming on next and what'll be on Thursday at nine. Talk about distraction.
It shows a fundamental disrespect of the show, as well as the viewer. I decided a long time ago that I would not tolerate it. That's why downloading shows and using the PVR is so important to me.

Old History, Repeating Itself

I used to work in a restaurant in the late seventies/early eighties. It was an interesting time. The guys who owned the restaurant, located in downtown Calgary, were an Englishman and a Catholic schoolteacher. The Englishman, who I'll call "W," was custom made for the business. He could talk, and talk interestingly (and incessantly), about anything. He was the perfect host, who could regale customers with stories, make them feel comfortable, and make them feel like they'd visited the homiest, most welcoming place on earth.
The schoolteacher was more laid back, and offered a quieter presence that tended to soften some of his partner's rougher edges.
But behind closed doors...
W could be a tyrant. His temper was quick to explode if anything was not done just right. If you've ever seen Gordon Ramsay in an episode of "Hell's Kitchen," you will know what I am talking about.
For the most part, he was a good boss, and I enjoyed working for him. The work was pretty easy to do, even when we were busy, because I had been trained well and knew what to do. But everybody makes mistakes, and even I got yelled at every once in a while.
One of the things that used to irritate me was changing the tape in the machine that piped music into the restaurant. Every single goddamned time I was walking toward it, W would come around the corner and ask, "Why's there no music playing?"
He was like Sybil telling Basil to put that picture up.
I worked there until 1982, when the city took all the land in the surrounding area and razed everything on it to the ground in order to build a shiny new City Hall. I was sorry to see it go, even though the area was not what you might call "Park Row."
Eastern downtown Calgary at the time was fairly down-at-heel. In the next block from our restaurant were two hotels, the Queen's Arms and the Monarch. They sat on two corners with an alley between them, and there was only a superficial difference between the two. They were home to the less advantaged of the city, and the bars were usually full of blue-collar types drinking their fill and then some. It wasn't a place I would go to alone, but it was okay if you had backup.
Yeah, they're gone now, too.
Down the other way was the St. Louis Hotel, a favourite haunt of then-reporter Ralph Klein. He used to come to our restaurant when he was running for mayor, and even after he won. I've seen him in his cups after hours a few times.
Further down was (and still is) the King Edward, the King Eddy, which now hosts a blues bar famous all over the city. Good music and thirst-quenching drinks.
W was full of plans for a new restaurant, of course, and it seemed like the natural thing when he asked me to come along and help to say yes.
I was going to Mount Royal College (now University), indifferently studying journalism, and I dropped out to work in the restaurant business full time. I thought I was getting in on the ground floor of something big. W said he was going to open pretty much the same place, only bigger and better. Yeah, he could talk, all right.
He decided before he could open this big glittering palace of an eatery, he needed to build up his bank account by opening a fast food joint. We looked around and then looked around some more for a place to set up shop and settled on an old, abandoned gas station. We rented the place from Shell Oil, whose place it was, and set about turning the service bays into a kitchen and the customer service area into a dining room.
We did quite a good job, and we did it all by ourselves; W, myself, and a kid who used to cook for us in the old place. And what a long, back-and-heart-breaking job it turned out to be. In the old place, there were a lot of targets for W's anger, but now there was only two, and boy did we get it.
It seemed like every day or every hour something would set him off, and we'd have to suffer through a tongue-lashing describing in intimate detail just how stupid we were, and how dense we had to be to make whatever mistake we had just made.
We were all under intense pressure to complete the job, and to drive ourselves as hard as we possibly could in order to finish, and get the restaurant up and running as soon as possible.
It makes me tired now just thinking about it.
Somewhere along the line, I burnt out, and lost all my enthusiasm for the resaurant business in general, and W in particular. We parted ways soon after the burger joint (called "Big Dick's," after Big Dick Turpin. No really) opened.
I've had other bosses with tempers like W's, and I was able to examine them more dispassionately, after my previous experience and a little time to think.
Remember the movie "Full Metal Jacket?" If you haven't seen it, you should. The drill instructor who lashes the recruits into fighting men is a perfect example of what I am talking about. He mercilessly berates the recruits until they are quite literally crying.
But he doesn't do it out of enjoyment. He's trying to break down their resistance to his instruction in the swiftest and most brutal way imaginable. He doesn't want to destroy them completely, merely remake them in the Marine Corps' image, and make them into trained, efficient killers.
He does a pretty good job at it until one of the recruits snaps and shoots him through the chest.
So I can see W's (and other bosses like him) point of view. And once you've seen behind the curtain, it's hard to ignore the little man working the controls of the Great and Powerful Oz. The giant head and the fire and the smoke are just special effects, used by an ordinary guy to fool you into doing what he wants the way he wants it.
I became impatient with superiors who used the rant in an effort to cow me. I started to see them as petty and mean, without the imagination to see that I was an intelligent human being who could follow instructions and do the job without all the pyrotechnics. It was their failing, not mine.
I remember when I was working as a security guard at a large office building. For some reason, it was the night guards' job to stock the washrooms with paper, towels, soap, etc. The super would come in the morning and make a quick check before relieving you.
One day I got quite a dressing down for not refilling one of the soap dispensers. When I went to do that (and I couldn't leave until I did), I saw that it was over half full, but not completely full.
What the fuck?
When I got back from completing my arduous task, the super went on and on, and questioned my dedication to the job, and asked me just what I expected if I tried to get by with such ineptitude.
I quietly agreed with him and told him I would ask HQ to move me to another site.
I didn't see any point in arguing with the mook, who was in a postion of authority, and clinging to his little bit of power like a limpet. Pointing out that he was a fucking idiot might bring some personal satisfaction, but it would be professional suicide.
What was the point? What could I say to this person, who I had just lost all respect for, that would change his thinking that he was right and proper to treat me like shit?
I didn't think it would do any good at all to waste my breath. Over at "What The Kimchi?," Flint and I get comments from all kinds of fucktards. Arguing with them is like banging your head against a brick wall. You can't change their thinking, and all you get is a head covered with bumps and bruises.
My mother is a lot like those bosses. I love her because she's my mother, but I don't like the person she is. At this point in time, she is very disappointed in me, mostly because (like my father) I am a very quiet man. She doesn't like the quiet, and can be very cruel when she makes snide comments about it. I've taken to distancing myself from her, rather than arguing with her. And I try not to think of her as being too similar to those idiots I used to work for.
All of us in our family have had arguments and differences like this with her. My sisters have sometimes gone for months and years before they make up with her. I suppose my mom and I will make it up some day.
But until then, I'll have to stay away from "The Wizard Of Oz" and "Full Metal Jacket."

Sports

I like watching sports, not playing them. Sometimes I wish I had been more active when I was little, but I always had more interest in reading.
In winter, there's hockey. As a Calgarian, I follow the Flames. And now that it's summer I'm cheering for the Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. A lot of my friends follow American football, but I don't care for it. It's almost as boring as soccer.
I'm not much for following each player and knowing their stats, etc. That's more Flint's area of expertise. I've spent many an afternoon listening to him while we sat on the deck at Dunkin' Donuts. I've always thought he should be running the league, if not a team. He'd be a lot better than mooks like Bettman.
Hell, even I'd be better than Bettman.
One of the things I like about watching sports (live or on television) are the fans. I'm a people watcher. When I attended Stampeder games, my friends and I sat above one of the entrances to the stands so we could watch people coming and going. Great for girl watching, too. Whenever an especially pretty one would go by, my friends would call out, "Nice shoes!"
You can sometimes see the fans at televised games behind the players or coaches. I've often thought that the cameramen should concentrate more on the fans than the players. Sometimes it's just a pretty girl, or a fan of an opposing team behind the home team's bench, or it's just a mook doing something silly like texting instead of watching the game.
When you see a player on the bench at a hockey game, you run the risk of watching him spitting or blowing his nose onto the ice.
The cameramen also close in on a football player on the bench, especially after he has made a good play. The player tries to say something into the camera, but he's usually too out of breath to make any sense. And the mooks in the booth doing the commentating (the "commooktaters") are talking at the same time.
Sometimes they have useful things to add to the conversation, but more often than not, it's just drivel. There's nothing more irritating than listening to someone talk endlessly about the game you're watching, especially if your team is losing. It seems like they are cheering for the winners.

Davy Crockett

I just finished "The Gates Of The Alamo," by Stephen Harrigan. I read it when it first came out, and this was the second time. I made a mistake by reading it after The Shaara's Mexican War/Civil War books. I should've read about the Alamo first, to keep the historical storyline straight.
Oh well.
It was a bit different than I remember. The character of Edward McGowan was much more a reclusive person than I had thought. I really identified with this man who had basically closed himself off from society while he pursued his own interests. I wish I had been able to find my joy that way. I think I would be really happy living away from all the mooks and fools that daily plague me, only coming out to share some ribs, rum and cigars with Flint.
Ah, that would be the life.


So after reading about the Alamo, I had to download some movies about Davy Crockett, starting with Walt Disney's version. Not bad, if a little truncated. Three one hour episodes were cut down to a ninety minute film. They got most of the highlights of his life, and the final battle was okay.
A little bloodier than I would've expected from a Disney product, but that was okay, too.
Next up was John Wayne's version of the event. There was a lot of speechifying liberally sprinkled about, as Wayne took the opportunity to wedge in his own views about liberty, America, sacrifice, etc.
The climactic battle is suitably epic. The set was built in Texas, away from the city, and you can see all the money that Wayne lavished on the production up on the screen.


The next film is the 2004 remake, with Billy Bob Thornton playing Crockett. I saw this when it first came out. Thornton did a good job, I thought. I remember the scene where he's been captured (rather than being killed in the battle), and Santa Anna has ordered his immediate execution.
He looks up with a sideways grin and says, 'I'm warning you, I'm a screamer."
I think they kill him off-screen.

I went to see the Alamo in 2002 while I was visiting my brother. They say it's the most popular tourist destination in Texas. I also went to Dealey Plaza, and that was pretty popular, too. But the Alamo is very much a shrine. They make sure you take your hat off and everything.
It's very clean and well-maintained, a far cry from what it must've looked like after the battle. Some historians talk about the savagery that took place. Santa Anna had warned the defenders there would be no quarter, and the Mexican troops used their bayonets to slaughter them all. They even killed a young boy in their frenzy, though they did spare a woman and her child, as well as Travis's slave.
I wonder if the Mexicans thought about opening up a tourist shop there? But of course, they didn't keep it very long, did they?

Tuesday, July 5

I didn't do a whole hell of a lot today, other than follow Flint and AnonyJohn through several blogs.
My mom went to University Hospital in Edmonton to see her surgeon and find out what he had to say. There were a lot of x-rays taken, and an ultrasound to make sure no blood clots were lurking in the shadows.
My nephew and my sister met her there. Dad and I gave the trip a miss. Me because mom and I are still having... differences, and dad because he was ordering new glasses.
It's about a two and a half hour trip from here to there (one way), and we still didn't get answers to some questions we have. About a month ago, he told us that my mom's left shoulder socket had been fractured in three places. He said it needed replacing, and then the surgery got put off. At first, we were told because it was her blood pressure (too low), and then we were told something else, I forget what.
This time no discussion of what might or might not be done at all. He came in, said his piece, and was gone as soon as my sister turned around.
He's very good (we're told) but he's also very busy.
At least my mom got the go ahead to start walking on both legs, and supporting herself with her arms. They told us when this happened two months ago that she would be flat on her back for six months. Shows how much they knew about my mom. She is one determined lady.
So it looks like she'll go to Red Deer hospital for rehabilitation as soon as a bed opens up. They say this Unit 35 that they have there is pretty good, and mom was happy for the couple of weeks that she was there.
My sister is down here visiting her. It's always nice to see her, though she does sometimes act like my mom, especially when she's grilling me about why I don't have a job yet.
Sigh.
The trees are shedding that white fluff this week. Every time I go outside, I can feel a tickle on my nose. Those fluff are attracted to it like bees to nectar. I used to be quite stuffed up in spring, but I have a good nasal spray that keeps my nose clean.
It's been raining a lot, and I was interested to see a yellow residue left behind when the puddles dried up. Ah yes, the dreaded yellow dust. The Communist Chinese plot to poison us all.
I know I'm being selfish by staying away from my mom, but sometimes I need a break. And at least I'm aware I'm being selfish. There was a great scene on "The Big C" last week. The main character, Cathy, finally blurted out to her friend that she has cancer, and the friend's response was to think about how this experience was going to change her.