Trolley’s Moving Out

Trolley’s moving out, and taking most of the living room with him. I’ve been pre-occupied with matching two-piece sectionals, clever hidden storage coffee tables, other things that are completely unnecessary in the hunter-gatherer sense of life. Pat’s taking me furniture shopping this Monday, from morning to night. I’ll be in debt soon, going into my line of credit off my house for the first time, but it’ll be oh so worth it.

Father’s Day Without a Dad

Father’s day came and went. I waited until the 3rd Sunday of June to see if my dad would call me first, but he never did, not since the divorce. Not ever actually. It was always my mom who called, and passed the phone to him. We’d make small talk for roughly 30–60 seconds, and he’d pass the phone back to mom. The last time I spoke to him was when I went back home in April. At least my mom called to make sure I was okay after she broke the news. Even she told me to call him, but I don’t feel like it. If anything, he owes me.

A New Paddle

Table tennis at the club ended, as the venue is shutting down until the fall. The only physical activity left for me is the occasional match with Pat at his new place. I bought a new penhold blade, a Mazunov OFF+, and two Sriver 2.1mm rubbers, marking the first time that I started using speed glue with a custom paddle. I’ve only had the chance to try them out a few times, but I can tell that the setup has been perfect for my offensive style. I was apprehensive of getting rubbers that were too thick (2.4mm) and fast, for fear that my footwork wouldn’t be able to keep up, but I’ll definitely consider it once these ones wear out.

Getting Slashdotted

I met one of my life’s goals when I was Slashdotted for my HomeStar Planetarium review. The visits for the first 12 hours nearly jumped to 15,000, but the server handled the load, albeit a little slowly. Something I can cross off my list.

I Quit

Another thing to cross off is quitting the weed. Not for John this time, but for myself. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with marijuana. It’s not the same addiction as other drugs. Dr. Andrew Weil, who’s not a pot critic by any means, describes the problem perfectly in his 2004 book, From Chocolate to Morphine.

Marijuana dependence can be sneaky in its development. It doesn’t appear overnight like cigarette addiction…but rather builds up over a long time. The main danger of smoking marijuana is simply that it will get away from you, becoming more and more of a repetitive habit and less and less of a useful way of changing consciousness.

When I tried to quit before, I’d always tell myself “this is the last day”, but I’d say the same thing every day for months at a time. I’d always need an excuse to stop, but none of the excuses I could come up with would ever work. This time it’s official. I’ve learned all that I can from it, and lost all desire to get burned again. Darren tells me that he’s done too, and when he visits soon it’ll mark the first time that we’ve hung out sober in three years. I’m curious if we’ll have anything in common now.

New Business

There’s been an upturn of business. Through Pat, I got a small website contract for my personal company, and I recently joined a stock photography site to make some extra money off my pictures. I take my camera with me everywhere, and I don’t have to do anything for the royalties if other people purchase them anyway. All that’s left to do now is getting some model release forms signed from people of various parties that I’ve taken. I also bought a book about real estate investments in Canada, in hopes that I’ll soon be able to make my money work for me, instead of vice versa.

A Few Events

Aaron’s Canada Day barbecue is on Saturday. Darren’s coming the next weekend. I’m also supposed to see Shirley at some point, since I haven’t seen her in half a year. I gave her a call two weeks ago, in hopes that I could take her family out for some dim sum, but she hasn’t returned. I’m a little hurt. We barely get to see each other anyway, but it’s hard to blame a mother of three for being too busy.

Not that I have much time myself lately.

An hour before arriving, he calls me, excited, to let me know that he’s running late. He explains that he got caught up in the calculations for my natal chart. Out of the hundreds of readings he’s done, both personally and professionally, he hasn’t seen a chart like mine. It’s described as a bundle, where all ten planets are contained within 1/3 of the 360° chart. This means that my energy is concentrated, focused, self-driven.

The reading takes four hours of calculations and preparation, with an hour-and-a-half session of thorough explanation. After helping him with his new computer last month, a trivial favour for me but a big one to him and his family, he offered a reading in return. I happily accepted, never being one to dismiss such a unique offer. He swore me to secrecy because he’s retired, and will only do this service as a special favour.

Before he begins explaining though, he tells me that I can take the information he gives me for what it’s worth. He doesn’t tell fortunes, he simply sees patterns in the numbers. It’s up to us, our personality, our decisions, to determine our fate. “Character is destiny”, he says.

There’s too much to him. Too many facets, too deep a personality. He’s a book unto himself. I could explain as much as I could about him, and one would still have no idea what to expect when meeting him. Even today, he surprises me every time I see him. I tell people that he’s a stay-at-home dad, an athlete, a writer, an astrologist, but I haven’t really described him at all.

The chart offers a subtle glimpse. The stokes are wide, large, and deep with conviction. It’s a mix of cursive and printing, a general insighting into his flexibility. His notes are messy, corrected. He prides himself on being accurate, not vague like the farcical daily horoscopes, and it’s for this reason that I start to believe him. There are things that he describes to me — my penchent for revenge, my philosophical pursuits, my affinity for certain sports — that slowly bring my ever-present, skeptical guard down. He says that I have a natural creativity, that I’m visually artistic, that I see colours differently from other people. Because of this, he encourages me to start making money off my art within the next 15 years, or I’ll have missed a good opportunity. Sometimes it goes over my head; the positions of my planets, my houses, my sagittarius ascendant. He goes into so much detail about my career, romance, sports, travel, and friends that I can’t begin to list it all.

Although there are a few points of inaccuracy, I have trust in what he tells me. Ceasar said “men willingly believe what they wish”, and perhaps I’m simply one of these men. So will this change me? Will I act on these new insights and become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Will I discard them, and end up with the same fate? Maybe it’s wrong altogether, some soothing snake-oil, although I don’t think this is true for reasons I can’t explain. It’s too soon for me to tell just yet.

All I know is that I’d like to be like this man. I’d like to be as complex, as indescribable as he is.

Maybe one day, if destiny is character.

Introduction

Pat once told me that he harbours an inexplicable compulsion to be in space. His belief is that when he’s finally there, he’ll have all the answers. Life. God. 42. The metaphysical implications don’t make sense, yet this is what he truly thinks. It’s a strange hole in the logical being I know as Pat, and only the enigmatic curiosity of the night sky can do this to someone.

I’m no exception. Something borne in us from childhood is a fascination that stems from the unknown. The stars provide enough for us to wonder about for a lifetime.

Unfortunately, for those who live in the city, there’s little chance to see the sky without “sky glow”, the annoying phenomenon that drowns out a large number of stars visible to the naked eye and telescope alike. As a by-product of industrialization, light pollution has taken the sparkle out of the stars, and this is where the HomeStar comes in.

What Is A HomeStar?

According to the official Homestar website, (translated through Babelfish):
“It is the planetarium for worldwide first optical type home. It is possible to exceed several thousand numbers of stars that to project approximately ten thousand thing stars it can see generally with naked eye of the human.”

Continue reading

Last Friday, my mom called me at work.

“Do you want the piano?”, she asked.

“Sure”. She must have detected the curious hesitation in my voice.

“We’re going to be moving soon”, she furthered. There was never even a hint of moving before, so I had to ask.

“Separately?”

“Yup.”

This is how I find out my parents are getting divorced.

My immediate feeling was that of resigned sadness, and a growing resentment as a result of this sadness. I wished that they couldn’t affect me like this, that they meant nothing to me, but in the pit of my stomach, I know that they do.

Until it happens.

I should have seen it coming. A few weeks ago, she called to inform me that she was putting funds in my investment account, so that she would have an accessible cache of emergency funds in case my dad ever left her. Like insurance, it’s another thing to have just in case, hoping never to need it. Even in my early childhood, there were memories I’ve tried to block out. Bloody gashes, divorce scares, pleading for us to stay together. All I ever wanted from them was a normal family.

Lately, even in the last few years, everything seemed to be going well. The last time I visited, they were doing things together. Dancing. Eating. There was even talk of buying a new car. Now the realization is setting in. That was the last time I’ll have seen them together. Married. As husband and wife. I took a picture of them that weekend, when we went out for dim sum. My dad was ordering food from the menu, and my mom was pouring him tea, arms crossed over his. It’s the last time I’ll see them together like this, and the only picture I have of them.

I don’t even want to think of what the annual family gatherings are going to be like, or how I’m going to visit them, individually, during the holidays. How I’m going to react if I find out they’re dating again.

All I can say now is that I’m disappointed.

A tribute to Nick and Alison, my old laid-back roommate (who taught me how to make a mean grilled cheese, offered a significant challenge in Counter Strike, and introduced me to Lamb) and his new bride.

I would say something about the wedding, but the video says it all.

At one point in the night I was running around with my Karachi Outpost strapped on my back, and my camcorder bag around my shoulder, feeling like a one-man documentary team, even though my focus was on video instead of stills. There are a couple of camera issues, such as focus and zoom speed that still bug me when I watch the footage, but until I can afford a Canon XL2 my cheap Hitachi DVD-cam will have to do.

Surprisingly, the easiest part was picking the song, something that can take days itself. I needed a single track that would work through landscapes, kissing, and drinking, three things that evoke vastly different emotions, and Tulips by Bloc Party was perfect. Even the timing of the lyrics worked out. I wish I could say that I was able to obtain a score for the music, analyze it, and symetrically break down the scenes according to the development. To be honest I just didn’t have enough footage, so I just put what I could in the parts that would fit, without interrupting the flow of the story.

The entire clip took about three solid days to complete, half of which was just getting the scenes in the right format to work with in Adobe Premier 2.0. I was plagued by video format problems and asynchronous audio issues. It was also the first time I was able to try this latest version of Premier since I was running 1.5 for a while. The process really pushed the capabilities of my system; loading only Premier with the whole sequence took up 1.6 gigs of RAM. Render time was about 20 minutes on a dual-core AMD 4400+. Uncompressed video size is almost 2 gigs.

Influences were Michele Gondry from the Hardest Button To Button video, as well as the smart and witty stylings of Spike Jonze.