Posts tagged with "interesting people"

New Hampshire: Conclusion

Thumbnail: Live free or die license plate

What an overwhelming experience.

There was barely any time to explore; we took one walk and pretty much stayed within a 10km radius. Too much reading, testing, and meeting to do anything else. It felt like the time went flying by, yet dragged on, the longer I was from home.

There’s something about being away. Being isolated from your routine and everything that’s familiar. It’s a different set of stimuli.

As an introvert, you fall back on memories and past experiences, and it drives reflection and re-evaluation.

I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t affect me. I learned more about myself in the last two weeks than I did in the last year, and I’ll be writing about it for weeks, if not months.

Continue reading “New Hampshire: Conclusion”…

Meeting Tina

What can I say about Tina?

Fulcrum editor. Dom lover. Farsi speaker. Cadence Weapon listener. Naughty girl dancer.

She’s cool. Certainly cooler than me.

So when she asked if I wanted to meet, it made me nervous. I’m not comfortable around cool people. I never know how to act around them.

Tina has this laugh though, this girly, ebullient-but-not-annoying laugh, that put me at ease. The way she expresses herself betrays a subtle maturity for her age. One of those people who knows what they want and where they’re going. Even with this maturity, she retains a youthful fashionability. She’s four years my junior but I never felt like we lost each other in conversation, something I find especially common when talking to people my age.

On the outside we’re very different. At our core, we have very similar personalities. Maybe this is why we got along so well.

She obliged me a few photos so I could see if I could capture her playful personality.

It’s obvious that she likes cats, and Dolly was no exception. Normally, I take upwards of 200 snaps when I’m doing portraits, but she was too distracted by the cat rolling around on the floor between us for me to get more than 50.

Tina was the first person I’ve met through blogging from the Ottawa area. The next blogger I have to meet is Sikander. I think I saw him with Lunato walking down Rideau once, but I was too shy at the time to introduce myself.

Character Is Destiny

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.

I cannot describe this man.

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.

Thanks, And No Thanks

I’ve officially switched from Movable Type to WordPress, the latter of which I’ve decided is a far superior platform. This involved manually copying content from the old database, including every entry, comment, timestamp, and ip address logged. Even though it took me nearly a month, I was able to go through my old entries and make the thumbnails, links, quotes, and formatting consistent.

Thanks to the experiences of every day life, for the people I hate, the people I love, the ones I respect, and the ones who inspire me to do more. It’s these that make sure I never run out of things to say.

Thanks to Trolley, who reminds me with his comments that I always have at least one reader.

Thanks to Aaron and Pat, for showing me that they care when they tell me that they keep up-to-date with my life through this.

Thanks to Bronwen, with whom I’m the person I’ve always wanted to be.

Thanks to Number18, for giving me hope with her daily life, and her über cool input jacks.

Thanks to Tina and Aurora, for their enigmatic entries that inspire me to write better.

Thanks to Winston and Barb, for letting me know that I, in turn, could inspire someone to start writing for themselves.

Thanks to Sikander for being the guy who shares music with me, even though we’ve never met in real life.

Thanks to Sophia, for introducing me to music like CocoRosie, and quoting my own old archived entries back to me.

Thanks to Dru, a design artist I’ve admired for years, for unofficially stealing from me, an unspoken compliment I hold dear to my heart.

No thanks to the stalkers, who say they’ll never visit, yet continue to read on a daily basis. The ones who hide behind services like Anonymouse, naively believing that all their http requests are masked. The self proclaimed hypocrites, who have the FUCKING AUDACITY to tell me about the vices of blogging, yet blog themselves. The exact reason why I never answer my phone anymore.

No thanks to the sequacious commentors who say stuff but don’t say anything, or those who comment for the sake of personal advertisement.

No thanks to the hotlinkers, who continue to steal my images, and in turn, my bandwidth and money.

When I was converting my database and going through the old entries, I could recall each and every emotion that drove them. My writing has become less rambling, less depressing, less cryptic since I started back in 2002. As time goes on and the entries become more recent, there seems to be a subtle, burgeoning hope, a reflection of the experiences I’ve gone through and a changing worldview.

And from the beginning of this blog to the entries I write now, the most important thing is that I always have more people to thank.

My Average Life

You ever read any Nietzsche?

Nietzsche says there are two kinds of people in the world. People who are destined for greatness, like Walt Disney, and Hitler. And then there’s the rest of us. He called us “The bungled and the botched”.

We get teased. We sometimes get close to greatness, but we never get there.

We’re the expendable masses.

—Jack Lucas, The Fisher King

When I listen to this song, a post-hardcore blend of catchy, melodic guitar lines and technical screaming, a feeling washes over me. I recognize it immediately.

Envy.

It’s the other, other, Jeff’s band, and he fits the eccentric rockstar persona to a tee. His clothes are all tight-fitting, thrift-store finds and Sally Ann recyclables. Even his frames are a modernized version of the old-school bad-boy sunglasses. An unassuming type until you talk to him about his music, and then he’s a galvanized, animated person. He spends his money on studio hours, and his free-time laying down tracks, mixing songs, jam sessions. I don’t even know the name of his band.

I do know that this song is a huge improvement over the material he gave me a month ago. The structure is less experimental, the sound is more polished. The result of a new drummer, and redone vocals. Jeff’s goal is to get his name out there, win a recording contract, and spend the rest of his life making music. I can already tell that he’ll catch the attention of the right person at the right time.

The envy burns a hole in my chest.

Knowing that this young man, in his mid-20s, is going somewhere, is what fuels it. He has the ambition, the ability, the mindset to achieve greatness, while I remain one of the many.

If I had the time, the money, the ambition, I’d do the same. I’d be a director. A photographer. Things I think I’d be great at. Instead, I simply use video and photography to document my life, as an extra form of expression over the written word. As a result, my desire to improve is solely driven by my perfectionist attitude, not a desire to be great or to make money. I understand that to become one of the few is an investment of one’s entire life, and the risks of doing so are severe. Too severe.

It’s my choice to live like this: risk-free and secure. It’s a part of my personality. I invest in government bonds over stock. I’m a 9‑to‑5 guy, who doesn’t like going out on weekdays, whose primary goal is to pay off the mortgage before I retire. My greatness is a steady paycheque, a cat who jumps on my lap, and eight full hours of sleep. I enjoy the simple things, and satisfaction with what I have.

And I realize that not knowing the name of Jeff’s band is a subconscious choice I make. That way, there’s less chance I’ll learn of his success when I’m reading the paper.

Less chance I’ll be reminded of how average my life is.