Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for April, 2007

Physical fitness is an altered state of consciousness

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, running, Uncategorized on April 29, 2007| 2 Comments »

Sometimes, I seem to have spent most of my adult life getting back in shape. Starting with my recovery from having my knee smack into a steeplechase hurdle – an injury that sidelined me for six months when I was 19 and ended my slim prospects of running in the Olympics – I must have got back into shape at least a dozen times. This time, I am recovering after a year of chronic knee problems that left me bloated and feeling out of sorts. I’m being especially careful this time, going slowly, and doing more cross-training than ever before, so I’m more aware of the process than usual. I’ve decided, half-seriously, that being in shape is an altered state of consciousness.

For me, it takes about six to eight weeks of heavy exercise before I get the first tentative sense of fitness. The first couple of weeks are pure will, full of endurance and aches. This is a time that I can only stagger through, driven by a hazy conviction that I need to keep going and that, if I do, things will get easier. My appetite increases, too, and I have to remind myself constantly not to give into it very much.

After a couple of weeks, I realize that I am no longer hurting. I seem to metabolize food quicker and more efficiently, so I no longer crave extra calories. My face looks thinner when I risk a glance in the mirror. Deep in my veins, I can feel my blood pressure subsiding. I no longer have to be so careful about getting eight hours of sleep every day. Continued life seems possible, at least in theory.

Suddenly, somewhere around the forty-fifth day of daily exercise, I burst into a new level of existence. My center of balance seems to subtly shift, and I find myself moving more lightly, with more of a bounce to my stride – the results, no doubt, of losing a few pounds, or of converting fat into muscle.

Mentally, I find myself noticing more. I become more inventive, coming up with projects and solutions almost effortlessly. I become more intense, more focused. I’m sure that, were I to test myself during the process, I’d find my intelligence increasing with my fitness, possibly because of an increased blood supply to the brain, or because of the adrenalin and endorphins swimming through me.

My biggest problem is making sure that I evaluate the soundness of my thoughts in this phase, because, at this point, I become so full of optimism – so downright cocky – that I could believe in my ability to do anything if I didn’t rein myself in. I could easily over-commit myself to projects, or do something unwise like trying to take on a mugger when walking at night. More directly, I could abruptly increase my exercise until I hurt myself and have to start the whole process of getting in shape all over again.

In many ways, the first awareness of being fit is like being drunk; it gives me what, logically-speaking, must be an exaggerated sense of my physical and mental capacities. Some of that feeling may be justified, since I do become more productive, but most is probably illusion. Yet the elevation of spirit and capacity seems very real when I experience it, even surmounting — to a certain extent — serious events in my personal life.

So far, no visions or spirit guides, though – although, the way that sweat pours off me that I might as well be spending my time in a sweat lodge.

This is the stage I am at now. This time, it seems especially intense because it’s happening in the middle of spring, so that my external and internal landscapes seem in sync. Fortunately, I know that the euphoria will diminish as I learn to take fitness for granted again. But, until then, I know from experience not to take myself too seriously (not that I ever do).

Read Full Post »

Playing tag with death

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, Personal, Uncategorized on April 28, 2007| Leave a Comment »

My mother-in-law died last night, three days after her sister. Unlike with her sister, at least I remember the last time I saw her. However, since we had planned on visiting today, I am keenly aware that this is yet another death of someone close to me that I didn’t witness.

In fact, so far, every person I’ve known who was dying has finally died when I wasn’t there. In 1992, Trish and I spent several days of our holidays at the hospital beside Fritz Leiber’s bed, along wiht a strange collection of people who included Margo Skinner, a movie critic and poet whom Fritz had recently married; his son Justin, a philosophy professor; a descendant of Rebecca Nurss, one of the Salem witches; a former dominatrix, and a punk-rocker poet. However, it was only after we returned home so I could take up a sessional appointment as an English instructor that Fritz died.

Similarly, when my father-in-law died, I was on the bus from downtown Vancouver to Peace Arch Hospital, cursing the slowness of traffic, while his respirator was removed and he said goodbye to everyone else in the family. At other times, as with my father, people have died the day before we were going to visit them again.

Mind you, I’m not particuarly eager to be present when someone dies. Fantasy writer Diana Paxson says that, when she was at the death-bed of a Greyhaven resident, she could feel his spirit let go when she told him it was all right to do so, and that sounds like a moving, if grim experience, but I don’t know that such an experience is something that I could sanely seek out for myself. At the same time, I feel curious, and often feel that I should be there sometime – and that, until I do, I won’t have reached the next stage of adulthood by coming to some sort of acceptance of death.

Sooner or later, my luck will change, and I will have to stare squarely at death. But I can’t help wondering if my current run of luck is good or bad.

Read Full Post »

The generation gap on the Internet

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, Business, Personal, Uncategorized on April 26, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I was already an adult in the first days of the Internet, but I clamped on to it like a lamprey hungry for its next meal. For a letter writing, research addict like me, it was the tool I had always wanted. More recently, working in high-tech journalism and interacting with people from fourteen to eighty, I’ve been kept fully submerged in the latest trends. I don’t always participate in them (for instance, I was late to blog), but I have generally poked around and experimented. In fact, that’s my job. Yet it’s only been in the last few months that I realized that most of my middle-aged contemporaries view the Internet, Web 2.0, and related trends very differently. Some of them hope to exploit the trends, but few understand them and many are not-so secretly suspicious and hostile towards them.

On the Internet, the generation gap is not only alive, but stronger than it has been any time since the 1960s. Take email, for instance. Many middle-aged business experts suggest that email should only be a few lines long at the most. What would they say of the 2600 word email I received yesterday as part of my research for a story? And while these same experts talk about email overload, I routinely deal with several hundred emails a day. Naturally, I don’t read all those emails; but I deal with them. It’s a rare day, too, that I write less than a couple of dozen myself. No big deal – just part of my routine.

The difference, I think, is that, like people younger with me, I treat email casually. For me, email is useful when I’m not concerned about the speed of the response, or when I and my correspondents want to plan what we say more carefully than is possible on IRC. By contrast, most of my contemporaries still treat each email like a letter. Their attitude makes any given email a much more significant event to them than it is for me.

Unfortunately, accustomed to treating any given email as a minor event, I didn’t realize this difference until it cost me a friend whom I might have valued. While I was treating the person like I would any colleague, to the potential friend I was coming across as demanding and needy.

But at least email is something that my generation has reluctantly embraced because of its usefulness. When you get to various forms of social networking, the gap is even greater. A column in The Globe and Mail this morning that was supposed to be about Facebook quickly turned into a rant about the fecklessness of the young. Russell Smith, a writer in his mid-forties, wrote:

I kept asking young people, what is it, exactly, what is it for, what is the point? You keep in constant touch with your friends for why, exactly? . . . . Why on earth would anyone want to increase their e-mail workload? Why would anyone want to deliberately eliminate any remnants of their privacy?

Instead of exploring social networking as an interesting phenomenon, the column amounted to a rant because “young people” didn’t share Smith’s values. In the end, he came off as sneering and intolerant – attitudes very much against the prevailing spirit of the Internet. Generally, in my sixteen years of connectivity, I’ve found the Web extremely tolerant, almost too much so, considering some of its darker corners. Flame wars do erupt, but the Internet is a big place: If you don’t like the people in the parts you hang out, you can always find somewhere else to go.

All too often, though, the middle-aged make no distinctions. They persist in talking about the Internet as a homogeneous whole. Recently, for example, I read another middle-aged man’s comment that the Internet was responsible for a rise in “ludicrous” professions — not exactly the most tolerant view of change. And if you believe the average traditional media outlets, nothing exists on the Internet except viruses and pornography. This attitude may be due to the jealousy of traditional journalists who find their audiences shrinking and their relevance reduced by online hacks like me, but there’s a more general hostility and distrust there, too. Too many of my contemporaries sound like octogenarians whining about the young and their crazy ways because their bad backs are giving them trouble.

I’m no trendoid. I pick and choose the parts of the Internet in which I participate, in the same way that I pick and choose whether to carry a cell phone or own a microwave or credit cards (three commonplaces for which I have no use). Nor do I go overboard trying to use every acronym in the IRC lexicon. Nothing, after all, is more pathetic — or, at times, creepy — than the middle-aged trying to pretend they’re young. But just because I choose not to participate in something doesn’t mean it has no right to exist. And, more importantly, I prefer to be open-minded, and to base my conclusions on knowledge rather than prejudice.

If acting my age means being stodgy and irritable about everything new that comes along, then I plan to prolong my first childhood until my second one kicks in.

Read Full Post »

The last time you see someone

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, Personal, Uncategorized on April 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday afternoon, my aunt-in-law died. She had been in and out of the hospital since Christmas with congestive heart failure, so it wasn’t unexpected, except in the sense that all deaths are unexpected because you don’t believe in them until they happen. My mourning is private, at least so far as this blog goes, so all I’ll say about Mildred is that I respected and admired her for being tough without being callous, and observant without being indiscrete. But I will mention that what disturbs me most is that, as with too many other deaths, I don’t remember the last time I saw her before she died.

This loss of memory doesn’t always happen. I know that the last time I saw my father-in-law, he had just been transferred to intensive care and a machine was doing the breathing for him. Similarly, I remember seeing Fritz Leiber unconscious in a bed at California Pacific in San Francisco when we arrived on holiday to learn from his second wife Margo that he had collapsed. And in one or two cases, such as my grandfather, my lack of memory isn’t surprising because we had lost touch a couple of years before the death.

But, in other cases, the reason I don’t remember is that our last encounter was so routine. In each case, I can imaginatively reconstruct what the last visit must have been like in broad outlines, but I have no immediate memory of the details. I can, for example, imagine wheeling my father around the nursing home and pretending to understand his aphasic conversation, or discussing poetry with Paul Edwin Zimmer or Avram Davidson jokingly flirting with Trish from his wheelchair. Such incidents always happened when I saw these people in the last few years before they died.

In the same way, I can imagine Mildred inviting Trish and I in and sitting on one of her two chairs near the window. I can imagine her insisting on offering us tea, and leaving so she could get dress for dinner at the assisted living complex where she lived. These things always happened because of the personalities involved, and the time we usually dropped by for a visit.

But, as with other cases, these are logical assumptions, not memories. They lack emotional intensity, I’m ashamed to say. And that seems disrespectful. You should have strong emotional memories of the last time you saw someone close to you. Lacking any, part of me accuses the rest of being distant and uncaring. Perhaps, too, I want the comfort of such memories as I attempt to deal with a world diminished by their absence.

The trouble is, of course, you never know when the last time will actually be until after it’s past.

Maybe knowing that an encounter is the last would give the illusion that life is structured like a novel, and isn’t just a series of random events. But I didn’t get much closure the few times that I knew I was seeing friends or lovers for the last time, so my concern probably isn’t just a wish for structure. Maybe it’s more the case that, had I known that an encounter was the last, I could have said or done more to show my affection.

It would be easy to end this commentary with a cliché, such as a promise to act as though each encounter was the last. But that would be false and forced, and too intense for everybody.

All I really know is this: it hurts that I don’t remember those last times more clearly.

Read Full Post »

The artificial excitement of watching sports

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, sports, Uncategorized on April 24, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Years ago, when an interviewer visited science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer in Peoria, Illinois, he saw a band marching down the main street. It wasn’t a holiday, so he asked Farmer what was happening, and received a shrug in reply. “They do things like that in Peoria,” Farmer said simply. That’s how I feel in the middle of the hysteria about the Stanley Cup playoffs. Seeing every tenth car sporting a Canucks flag or finding the stores deserted because everyone is clustered around a TV set, I can only shrug in amiable incomprehension.

Exercise has always been a part of my daily routine. Considering that I spend ten or more hours a day in front of the computer, it has to be. I’ve run since I was eight, and more recently I’ve taken up walking, swimming, and using exercise machines. And when I was growing up, I played rugby and soccer and skied. So I understand the appeal of playing sports. In fact, I’m thoroughly addicted to my daily adrenalin rush. But what I don’t understand is the obsession with watching sports.

True, if I’ve played a sport, I have an abstract appreciation for a display of skill and tactics. But that appreciation lasts about five minutes before I get bored and look around for better amusement. Usually, I don’t have far to look, even if it’s just watching the crowd.

I know: every red-blooded man is supposed to have an overwhelming interest in sports. Fortunately for my mental health, I’ve never cared much about living up to stereotypes.

Besides, even by the standards of macho, how does watching sports qualify? Playing sports is a chance to display traditional male virtues like strength, endurance, and competitiveness – all of which I can appreciate, especially the first two, which I like to imagine that I possess to a degree. But watching? That has always seemed a strangely passive activity to qualify for machismo.

Nor does watching sports have much to do with any sense of identity. Professional sports teams and players rarely have any ties to the city where they’re based, and will re-locate whenever convenient. The Olympics evoke patriotism, but, considering that other world championships are virtually ignored and national athletes are largely ignored at other times, that patriotism seems tepid to me.

A clue to the appeal of watching sports may be their history. In the middle ages, tournaments were popular, but largely among the nobility. For long stretches of history, even the idea of watching sports hardly seems to exist except at the level of a local fair, where it was a special treat. It isn’t until the industrial revolution led to an enlarged middle-class that watching sports became widespread. The last time it had become so popular was in the comfortable urban environments of Rome and Byzantium, where the sports of choice were gladiator matches and chariot races.

Increasing urbanization, I think, is the key. When you spend your time wondering if you’re going to get your crop in before the first frost, or about whether Napoleon’s troops are going to use your back yard as a battlefield, you have all the excitement you need in your life.

But, once a majority of people are living a relatively comfortable life that is sheltered from basic concerns, it’s a different story. You’re still hardwired for crisis, so you need some ersatz excitement.

In modern times, this need has been met by any number of outlets: consumerism, celebrity-watching, or mass reactions to national disasters like the September 11th attacks, the ongoing crises in Afghanistan or Iraq, or watching sports.

What all these outlets have in common is they come with a prepackaged set of responses, so you can participate vicariously in them with a minimal effort and a lack of intrusion into your real emotional life. Has a teenager crashed his car? Then everyone knows to use the nearest telephone pole as a shrine for flowers, plush toys, and notes.

Is your local hockey team in the playoffs? Then start huddling around the TV and screaming and honking if the team wins. It’s all very satisfying, and the next day you can go back to the rest of your life feeling refreshed because you’ve momentarily filled your need for excitement.

Maybe I have no need for this synthetic excitement because I get my kick from having endorphins coursing through my body. Or maybe I have too many real challenges and crises to need pretend ones. Possibly, too, I have an adventurous world view, so that I find reasons for excitement in daily life. Not that I begrudge anyone else their ersatz excitement — I just don’t feel the need for it myself.

All I know for sure is that watching sports leaves me cold. When the playoffs start, I find myself keeping quiet, and detouring around TV sets in public. And if I can’t completely evade talk about sports, I find that a poker-faced question like, “Oh, does Vancouver have a hockey team?” usually creates a fan-free zone around me. If the alternative is solitude, that’s still preferable to watching something so boring that I want to chew off both legs to escape.

Read Full Post »

Rescuing parrots

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Parrots, Personal, pets, Uncategorized on April 22, 2007| 2 Comments »

I never planned to be a rescuer of parrots. Yet, in a small way, that’s what Ive been for much of my adult life.

I first became fascinated by parrots when I met Coquette, a yellow nape dwarf macaw owned by a couple in Seattle. What intrigued me about Coquette was her sentience. It was obviously so much greater than even the most intelligent dogs and cats I’d kept or met throughout my life. Years later, I read Irene Pepperberg’s papers on Alex and African Greys, which prove that at least some parrots have problem-solving abilities comparable to a six year old child’s, but, even on first meeting Coquette, I knew that I wasn’t just being anthropomorphic. She had a sense of self, and of humor, too.

Both were a revelation. I’d always thought that a parrot just sat in a cage and squawked. I didn’t know that they romped, and preened, or purred when happy.

Besides, a dog or cat seemed impractical in our townhouse. After a few visits with Coquette, whom we grew to like better than her owners, we started looking for our own parrot, deciding early on that,while we couldn’t afford a macaw, a conure would have much the same personality, and need less space as well. We contemplated a blue-crown conure, of the sort seen in the movie Paulie, then found a young nanday in another pet store. He was completely wild, but, within two weeks, he was marching back and forth between us on the couch so that he could preen us. We called him Ningauble, after a wizard in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series.

In those days, before the CITES treaty prevent the importation of wild birds, hundreds of birds were being dumped on the North American pet market every year. Many of these birds had been seized from the nest when young and malnourished and maltreated. Many had died before arriving in North America. Ning, we realized to our horror, was one of the lucky ones, having permanently lost a claw on each foot, but being otherwise healthy. We felt we owed him a life as close as possible to the one he would have lived in the wild.

Part of that life, we decided, would be a mate. However, we were also growing increasingly reluctant to deal with pet shops, so we had to wait a couple of years for the right opportunity. Our bird sitter told us of a nanday that she thought was a hen, who needed rescuing, and we went to see her.

If anything, the birdsitter had understated the case. The hen had been in a tiny, ramshackle cage, and overpreened herself badly. She had plucked her entire front bald, and her eye rings were black instead of white – a sure sign of malnutrition in nandays, we had discovered. When we took her from the cage for a closer look, she fluttered to the floor, and her tail feathers fell out at the gentlest of touches. The only sound she knew had to make was an outraged squawk, although parrots are among the most expressive of birds, with a wide range of sounds. We almost had to take the fact that she was a nanday on faith, she was in such poor condition. We later learned that she had been fed exclusively on a diet of sunflower seeds, and had had shoes thrown on her cage when she made a noise.

We took her home on trial, putting her in the spare room. But Ning made such excited attempts to communicate that after a couple of days, we decided to make introductions. Nng instantly started regurgitating to her, and she looked surprised and pleased. Within moments, they had become a couple.

The hen’s name was Sophie, which seemed not at all a parrot’s name – something more grandiloquent and silly seemed more appropriate. But she responded to the name, so we tarted it up by dubbing her Sophie J. Bandersnatch (the “J” being for Jabberwock).

Following this name choice, when Sophie and Ning started producing chicks, naturally their firstborn was named Frumious and the secondborn Jabberwock. The third in the clutch was Rambunctious Honorious Blunderbuss (“Ram” for short). In other clutches, Rogue and Rapscallion and Madigral followed.

Having parrots hatch in our living room was exciting, but also heartbreaking. Despite our best efforts to select caring buyers and give them advice, we didn’t always find good homes for Ning and Sophie’s offspring. Many people don’t realize the commitment of time and attention that having a parrot represents, and we soon hear that several of the offspring had been already passed to their second owners before they were a year old. We tried to help, but the only thing that would have worked for sure was to keep them all at home, and we had neither the room nor time for that.

One of the offspring we could help directly was Jabberwock. Somehow, he was let loose in the wild – we think deliberately. But he was recaptured and we heard about it, knowing him by his two albino claws. When we found he was in a home of heavy smokers who didn’t know what to do with him, what could we do except buy him back? But he was no longer the affectionate bird who had left our house. He remained a timid bird for the rest of his life, and died young of a lung tumor that was almost certainly caused by the smoke he had been forced to breath in his temporary owners’ home.

Another of Sophie and Ning’s chicks had problems, too. Ram had a leg injury in the nest, so we pulled him from the nest to hand-feed him. For a few weeks, the effort was harrowing, since he needed feeding every few hours, but he grew into a sturdy cripple and a strong flier. After all that effort, of course there was no way we would sell him. He started hanging out with Jabberwock, and, in the last years before Jabberwock’s death, became his preening partner.

After Jabberwock died, we started looking for another companion for Ram. Through the Greyhaven Exotic Bird Sanctuary, we heard of Beaudin, a nanday who had been confined for several years to a laundry room and who had recently lost his mate and a cockatiel companion. Last year, after an adoption process that included a home visit by Greyhaven officials, we brought him home, and he has thrived wonderfully, proving the smartest of our birds by far, especially in the matter of lifting the latch on his cage and finding other ways to escape.

We don’t have room for more than four birds, so future rescues are unlikely, but we continue to contribute to Greyhaven and other parrot rescue societies. Humans have power over animals, and, the fact that many people abuse that power is one of the distressing facts of our species. And parrots feel that abuse even worse than dogs or cats, because human ignorance adds to their distress. So we feel we have to do something.

Of course, had we known then what we know now about the pet bird industry, we would never have bought Ning. However, had we never bought Ning, we never would have been in the position to help other birds, so I can only hope that our karma balances.

Read Full Post »

The interviewer between the mirrors

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, Free Software, Personal, technical writing, Uncategorized, writing on April 18, 2007| 2 Comments »

I’m a journalist, so in an interview I’m usually the one asking the questions. Today, I experienced a role reversal when Samartha Vashishtha published an interview with me in Indus, the online magazine for the India Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. I’ve been interviewed several times before, a couple of times for pod casts and a few more for mainstream publications needing some quick expertise about free software, but for some reason, this time I felt queasier than most.

It’s not that Vashishtha misrepresented me, or anything like that. He doesn’t make say anything I wouldn’t have said. He conducted the interview via email, and, so far as I can see without going to the trouble of a detailed comparison,his largest change was to add exclamations marks. I don’t use many exclamation marks myself – nor many initial capitals, being a lower case sort of person – but no great matter if he did.

On the whole, he did a very professional job, The sense is there, and I even got a plug in for free software, explaining how it would help the developing world in general and India in particular to meet the industrialized world on an equal footing.

I also mentioned that free software projects are also a great place for technical writers to gain experience, since most developers have little interest in documentation and generally welcome anyone willing to undertake the task.

Still, I was a little reluctant to do the interview at first. It’s been three years since I last did a technical writing assignment. In fact, it was the monotony of my last major contract that made me desperate enough to take the leap into journalism.

Besides, how could I be sure that anything I was saying was relevant? I occasionally drop by the Techwr-l mailing list to see what old acquaintances are saying, but I can’t pretend to know the trends in the industry anymore.

Even more importantly, I’ve moved a long way down my road since my last technical writing contract. A large part of the time I was a technical writer, I was facing some of the worst times of life, so on the whole it’s an era of my life that I’m not eager to revisit.

Maybe this uncertainty explains why I sound so stuffy and so full of opinions in the interview. I don’t normally sound that way. (or, if I do, my family and friends are polite enough to pretend otherwise) But, even talking in generalities, perhaps I was circling too close to the bad years, and knew it.

Most importantly, the whole time I was writing my responses, I kept feeling distinctly unsettled. Being a journalist yet being the one interviewed was disorienting, like standing between two mirrors and seeing one of the infinite reflections starting to move independently. I don’t feel important or proud to be interviewed — just dazed at the role reversal involved.

Read Full Post »

The cherry trees of Vancouver

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, gardening, Personal, Uncategorized on April 17, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Vancouver region has more trees than any other North American city. This fact is never more obvious than in early spring, when thousands of ornamental cherry trees start to blossom.

Younger, white blossoms come first. Some years, they come as early as mid-February, but mid-March to early April is more common. Whenever they come, after the winter’s dark days and constant rain, they are a shock to the eye, an extravagant explosion of life, all so unexpected and so seemingly symmetrical in their thousands that they leave me breathless with admiration and surprise. It’s hard talking about them without sounding trite, but they always seem such a revelation that finding suitable words to describe them is as difficult as it is urgent.

This first wave brings people out by the dozens. One of the most popular spots is the the Burrard Street Skytrain station, where the trees arch over about a walkway of about sixty yards. There, especially on weekends, you can always find a couple of dozen people, often in couples, often Japanese in origin, strolling back and forth and snapping dozens of pictures.

Then, gradually the other trees come out, the west side of the city up to a week ahead of the east: next the younger magenta ones, then, just as the blossom season seems over for the year, the gnarled old trees of both colors. In dozens of streets, the ramshackle houses of the east end are suddenly obscured for a couple of weeks by the trees that line their sidewalks. In Centennial Park on Burnaby Mountain, people amble the tree-lined walkways that line the cliffs overlooking the Deep Cove and Belcarra. For a couple of weeks — maybe a month in good years — everywhere you go in the area, your eyes are ambushed by a profusion of color that has stood dormant and forgotten for most of the year. You’ve need the brain-damaged soul of a hockey enforcer not to notice and feel blessed.

Then, as suddenly as they came, the blossoms are gone, replaced by leaves as the year goes deeper into spring. Sometimes, a high wind sweeps them away in a day, and we are left on with a carpet of blossoms half an inch thick in the streets and gutters, looking around in amazed dismay at a brief display made even briefer by a freak in the weather.

Nobody seems to know why Vancouver and the surrounding cities are so full of cherry trees. I think it’s become the region was settled by three garden-mad cultures: the Chinese, the English, and the Japanese. In the last few years, a Cherry Blossom Festival has started up in minor imitation of the famous Japanese festival. And a few years ago, David Lam, the former lieutenant-governor of the province, was talking of donating another thirty thousand cherry trees to the city of Vancouver.

I don’t know what happened to Lam’s offer, but it met with almost universal approval on the streets. In recent years, the existing cherry trees are part of what makes us locals so smug when we talk to less fortunate friends in the wilds of Calgary and Ottawa.While they’re still trudging through dirty-gray snow and nursing a thousand yard stare that is the first sign of cabin fever, we’re shuffling along kicking up blossoms, having shoved our winter coats to the back of the closet for the next eight months.

Read Full Post »

The shared interests of couples

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, friendship, Personal, relationships, Uncategorized on April 15, 2007| 3 Comments »

You can’t know what somebody else’s relationship is like. Lately, though, I am starting to believe you can tell the state of a relationship by how the couple share – or don’t share — interests.

A few months ago, I read an ex-friend’s comment that, when he and his wife went to the cinema, they didn’t always go to the same movie. Admittedly, they worked together, but this comment horrified me. Why get married if you don’t want to spend time with the other person? Because you’re in love with the idea of marriage, rather than a particular person? After such an admission, I wasn’t surprised to hear from another source that this couple had come close to divorce at least once.

An equally unhealthy interaction is common among the weight-lifters in the exercise room half a mile from our townhouse. Every once in a while one of the younger male weight-lifters will bring a girl friend with him. Inevitably, the young woman will do a couple of slow minutes on the treadmill, pedal the cycling machine half-heartedly while reading People, and pull unenthusiastically on a few weights while the young man struts with the other weight-lifters.

Except for one, who has taken up serious training, none of the young women return. However, a couple of the men have brought other women a week or two later. My guess is that the women wouldn’t have come once, except that they felt they should try to share their lovers’ interests. But they did so as a duty, making no effort to get into the spirit of what they were doing. Having one person feeling martyred and the other feeling humored isn’t exactly the best recipe for a relationship, so I’m not surprised at the apparent failure of these relationships, either.

In contrast to these two situations, I interviewed a free software advocate in a local pub a couple of weeks ago. When he sat down, he immediately pulled out a complicated-looking piece of knitting involving three needles and a couple of balls of wool. He explained that he and his wife had made a pact that they would at least try each other’s interests. His wife had learned enough to install FreeBSD for herself, and he had learned enough knitting to design a couple of patterns, and soon hoped to do more.

“How does that work out?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” he said shyly. “We’ve been married fifteen years so far.”

Well, no wonder, I thought. Admittedly, his wife might never learn to enjoy installing a computer operating system, and he might never learn to love knitting. But at the very least, they could both learn something about the other’s passions –and that has to be good for any relationship.

Read Full Post »

Corporate Don Quixote

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized on April 13, 2007| 1 Comment »

Without ever intending to, I’ve been a contractor or consultant for most of my adult life (What’s the difference? About $40 an hour, I like to reply). I’m frequently asked to become a full-timer, but I’ve developed a superstitious dread of accepting; the few times I have, the unsuspecting company has gone bankrupt within a year. Gradually, I’ve taken this karmic hint, and accepted that a Rolex for fifty years of faithful service isn’t in my future.

I might feel differently if I were an entrepreneur. People in business for themselves, I’ve noticed, will put up with boredom and worse. But my parents had the bad taste not to allow me to be born rich, and the few times I’ve contemplated a business more complicated than hiring a subcontractor, I’ve never had the collateral for a loan.

Anyway, quite apart from never being able to take business seriously (in the back of my mind, much of it seems a foolish way to spend your time compared to, say, excavating an ancient Roman villa or brainstorming a thought-experiment in cutting edge physics) I suspect that I don’t have the temperament for the human resources side of business. I mean, I could hardly bring myself to fail a term paper when I was an English instructor. So how could I fire or even reprimand an employee?

No, freelancing suits me better. I arrive as the person who will solve problems, with the promise of bringing order out of chaos. Usually, nobody knows what I do (if they did, they wouldn’t have to hire me), so I’m left alone to get on with my work and can be as friendly or unfriendly as I care to be. I get a chance to satisfy my curiosity about some new aspect of high-tech and, if a particular job threatens to leave my EEG flatlined, I can restrain myself from chewing off my arm to escape by reminding myself that it won’t last forever. And come the boring bits like maintenance and revision, I’ve already galloped off in all directions like a corporate Don Quixote in quest of new adventure and new managers in distress.

One of the major advantanges of consulting is that unfamiliarity breeds respect. When you come in as an consultant, company officers treat you with more respect that if you were on staff. Maybe it’s the hourly rate. But, whatever the reason, the same CEOs who would never learn your name if you were a lackey will respectfully ask your opinion and confide in you if you are brought in as an outside expert. After all, to treat you like you didn’t know what you were doing would be an admission that the contract with you was a mistake. The result is, you’re treated more as an equal — which suits me just fine, I don’t claim superiority over anyone, but I’ve never been one to give others respect because of their job titles, either. For one thing, moving from company to company, I’ve seen too much to defer automatically.

(Politeness, of course, is another matter. Everyone gets that, even the clerical staff. Or maybe I should say, especially the clerical staff. They’re the ones who really run most offices, so even if I didn’t respect them, I’d stay polite to them out of basic self-preservation. As an outsider, I need them on my side. As for executives, they’re not smarter than me, just more single-minded and less adventurous.)

Another satisfying part of consulting is that you get to the good parts sooner. When I was a technical writer, I was managing project and hiring a sub-contractors six months after I started in the business. If I’d hired on as a junior writer in a mega-corporation, after six months I’d have been lucky to be trusted with changing the toner cartridge in the laser printer. In the same way, moving from company to company, I’ve had more hands-on experience of high-tech than anyone staying at a single company could ever hope to get.

All of this explains why my dominant gig these days as a journalist is ideal for me. My interest in any one subject only has to last for the duration of researching a story, and I can question executives without any nervousness. Also, my knowledge of the business has provided dozens of stories, ranging from advice articles that are a summary of my experience to leads brought my way by ex-colleagues. It’s the ultimate work for a freelancer, so much so, that last month, for the first time, I made as much as a journalist as I ever had as a marketing and communications consultant. If I have my way, I won’t be back in an office except as a guest.

That’s not to say that my family hasn’t given up the wistful thought that I might one day settle down to a salaried mid-level position. But that’s not about to happen. When people ask me how I stand the uncertainty of being a consultant, I reply, “The main difference between my position and yours is that I know when my contract ends.” And it’s true — these days, consultants are more secure than a so-called permanent employer, if only because they have a contract and, in the worst scenario, a kill fee.

That’s the secret that all consultants share: the knowledge that all employment is temporary, and that there’s always a next contract. We’ve seen the worst, and it’s not nearly as bad as the full-timers fear. In fact, in every way, it’s more interesting than a 9-5 with unpaid overtime. It’s also a hell of a lot more engaging.

That’s why I’m better off without that Rolex. Why would I need it? My time’s my own already — and if I really wanted one, I could buy one.

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »