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Archive for the ‘humor’ Category

Hens and eggs

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Parrots, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »

A story told to me this afternoon at the local parrot and exotic birds supply shop:

A customer comes into the store. She’s about fifty, well-dressed, and articulate enough that she’s probably well-educated.

She wants to buy a Moloccan cockatoo, so the woman who owns the store starts talking about the pros and cons of buying male and female birds.

“Of course you’ll need to know what to do when she starts laying eggs,” the owner says.

“I’m not going to buy a male,” the customer says. “So I won’t have that worry.”

“Umm – hens can lay eggs without a cock.”

“Nooo! No way!”

“Where do you think the eggs that you buy in a store comes from?”

“The hens need a rooster to lay eggs.”

“No they don’t.”

“Are you lying to me?” The woman seems to be trying to come to terms with a difficult concept.

The store owner tries to speak quietly. “You release eggs every month, or used to, depending on how old you are. Why would you assume that birds are any different?”

“I didn’t. You must think I’m stupid.”

Aware that several other customers are laughing in the background and not wanting to humiliate the woman, the owner tries to disengage from the conversation. But, convinced that she is right, the woman persists until the owner turns to help another customer. After a moment, the woman leaves, shaking her head and every bit as ignorant as when she entered.

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When I get to the border

Posted in American border, Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, travel, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on February 3, 2009| Leave a Comment »

“A dusty road that smells so sweet
Paved with gold beneath my feet
And I’ll be dancing down the street
When I get to the border.”
– Richard Thompson

Hugh MacLennan once said that Canada had the same relationship to the United States that Scotland did to England: we’re to the north, we like to think of ourselves as morally superior, and we go south to be successful. I’m not so sure about the last part, but I do know that the American border looms large in the minds of many Canadians. Most of us live within a hundred miles of it, and it is far more of a psychological barrier than a physical one. Although the people and the streets look much the same, they’re brasher south of the border, and more conservative. Because of such differences, for many Canadians, to cross the border is a major step, no matter how often we do it, and many of us have stories of our misadventures when crossing.

I remember that, as a child, I took many holidays south in a trailer. Whenever we crossed back in Canada, I would always feel a relief. Now, I would tell myself, if anything happens, we are not so far from home. Or, if we were, breaking down would seem less of a disaster, simply because we were in Canada.

When I was a young adult and newly married, we had a succession of rust bucket cars. It was exactly the sort of car that raised suspicion in the eyes of American border guards, who are often ex-Service types. Never mind that drug mules were most likely driving late model cars to divert suspicion; we were always grilled closely about our reasons for polluting America with our junkmobile. Often, we would have our trunk open, and, although we never had the car ripped apart, we were often given to understand that could easily happen.

The only time we were spared such ordeals was when we were on our way to visit a friend in the veteran’s home in Bremerton, Washington. As soon as we said where we were going, the border guard stopped glaring at us with suspicion, and waved us through. He didn’t give us a salute, but I thought he was considering doing so.

Another time, we were heading south for a Society for Creative Anachronism event in a car driven by a young, not very bright hothead. After pulling up to the American customs both, our driver seemed inclined to argue with the customs guard. Mindful of all the swords and other medieval weaponry in the back, the rest of us in the car cringed and silently prayed we wouldn’t have to explain what we were doing with all the metalwork crammed into our packs.

But the worst crossing we had was on our way back into Canada. I was in the front passenger seat, and, just before we pulled up to the customs booth, the driver stuffed a brown bag under my seat.

As we were pulling away from the booth, I asked the driver what was in the bag.

“My stash,” he said.

We felt strangely silent until we were dropped off. Afterwards, we stopped hanging out with the driver, and to this day, I doubt he knows why. Very few of my generation worry much about marijuana, even if we don’t use it, but, had the car been searched, the customs agent would probably have assumed that the bag beneath my seat was mine – and, given that I had to be bonded for the work I was doing then, I could have ended up unemployable.

Right about then, we stopped taking rides with people we didn’t know very well.

Strangely, all these episodes took place before the September 11th attacks, when Americans wanted tighter controls at the border (that is, measures whose main result was to make the lineups longer and those waiting unhappier). In fact, the last time we crossed in the United States, when we realized we had forgot our birth certificates, the American guard let us by. No doubt he thought that anyone so hapless couldn’t possibly be a danger to his country.

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The Twelfth Night Horror

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, Society for Creative Anachronism, Twelfth Night, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on January 14, 2009| 2 Comments »

Last week, as I took the last of the Christmas decorations down, I found myself singing a mummer’s song I learned long ago from a Steeleye Span record:

“Christmas is past
Twelfth Night is the last,
And I bid you adieu
Pray joy to the new.”

I also found myself thinking of the one and only major Twelfth Night celebration I attended while in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), and how it turned into one of those trips from hell.

At that time, the local SCA was part of a much larger group centered in Seattle. That year, a local had won the tourney to become the next prince of the region, so more people than usual were determined to attend the coronation ceremony at Twelfth Night in Seattle. Personally, I didn’t care who was prince, but rumor made the celebrations worth attending, so we decided to go.

When carpools were organized, our driver turned out to be a new member we didn’t know very well: A hulking teenager who towered over me, and carried at least fifty extra pounds around his middle.

The first omens should have tipped us off: He proposed riding down to Seattle in his jeep. There was barely enough room for everyone, and, while Trish got the front passenger seat, our friend Niall and I had to perch on our gear in the back. And did I mention that the jeep was unheated, and only a thin plastic top separated us from the elements? Still, we wanted to go, and this was our only transport.

Except our driver (whose name I no longer recall through the dim mists of time) didn’t seem to want to get started. He delayed for trivial reason after trivial reason, and we started three hours later than we had planned.

By the time we drove the ten miles or so to the border, regret was already hanging around us like a cloud of smoke. Our driver was a self-centered, non-stop talker, with nothing to say that a bunch of medievalists might want to hear. Like sandpaper, he was coarse and abrasive – and proved it by arguing at the border, so that the US customs guard almost had us haul our bags out and open them on the pavement.

Somehow, we missed that, but the journey was just beginning. Despite our protests that we were already late, our driver insisted on stopping to eat in Bellingham, a few minutes south of the border. That was bad enough, but he insisted on strapping an outsized replica of a horse pistol to his hip when we walked in. Alarmed patrons called the police, and our driver lost us more time as he demonstrated to a local law officer that the gun was incapable of firing. Our driver seemed puzzled that anyone might be made nervous by the sight of it.

For the rest of the trip, the driver monopolized the conversation. The rest of us soon went numb, partly from the cold, but also from the utter banality of his conversation. He had the hoarse intonations you sometimes hear in Canadian taverns, the one that echoes generations of hockey commentators while making the “eh” at the end of every sentence an assumption of agreement. Before long, Niall was visibly cringing when our driver spoke. I spent a lot of time rolling my eyes. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was feeling vaguely complicit because I was too polite to tell our driver to shut up.

We had hoped to drop our luggage at the house where we were staying, but we arrived much too late for that. We went directly to the event, which was held at some church hall. We had to drag our luggage in with us, and find a corner to stow it, the neighborhood not being of the best and the jeep providing no security. When the three of us had a chance to confer, we all agreed that we would find another driver for the trip home. Almost anyone would do.

After all our expectations, we were too busy trying to find another driver to enjoy the event – or, for me, to remember it after all the intervening years. But, at 3AM, we headed out to the house where we were going to crash. The drive was enlivened by him asking me to take the wheel so he could do something unnecessary – a request that almost caused us to go into the ditch, because I was so focused on the sketch map of directions that I took a moment to respond.

We knew our driver was going to be an embarrassment to our friends who owned the house – and he was, from the moment we arrived. I wanted to cringe, and to apologize for bringing the driver into the house, which was new and our friends’ pride.
Before we slept, we pleaded desperately with another guest to let us drive home with him. We would wake early, and leave our driver to find his own way back. The way he talked, we figured he wouldn’t miss having an audience.

Satisfied with the promise of escape, we slept soundly – awaking to find that our new ride had left without us. So had Niall.

With only two of us to bear the brunt of our driver’s conversation, the return trip was far worse than the outbound one. Besides, we knew what to expect.

The mileage signs were starting to show the distance to the border, and we were anticipating finally being free of our driver when he insisted on stopping at a smorgasbord. Why? Because he always stopped there. For ten miles before and after, he kept explaining what a good deal the place was.

Somehow, neither of us screamed, and we finally came to the parting of ways. We never saw our driver again, and never quite forgave our alternative driver or Niall for cutting and running, either. We’ve had our share of nightmarish trips – driving down to Portland in a gray Maverick with one rear light and repeatedly just missing being run over by truckers trying to make up time in the middle of the night comes to mind – but none came close to this Twelfth Night trip for mind-numbing boredom and banality. And now, every time I hear mention of Twelfth Night, I remember our ordeal and wonder whether to laugh or shake uncontrollably.

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The long march

Posted in Bruce Byfield, buses, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, Vancouver airport, tagged , , , , , , on November 14, 2008| Leave a Comment »

When the gallery owner in Terrace told me he could have a friend deliver my purchase to the South Terminal of the Vancouver airport, it sounded like an adventure. I imagined a scene out of Casablanca, with me standing on a fog-ridden runway as a single-prop plane descended out of the gloom. Or maybe I would sidle up to the bar in the terminal, wearing my trench coat and saying, “Got the bird, sweetheart?” out of the side of my mouth as a mysterious woman handed me the parcel under the table. So, naturally, I agreed. I’d never been to the South Terminal, and it sounded like a mild adventure, or at least a change of pace.

My first hint that my expedition would be more surreal than adventurous came when I board the airport bus at the 22nd Street Skytrain station. The shuttle from the main terminal didn’t run except in peak hours, I was told, but I could easily walk from the last bus stop.

Feeling concerned but already committed, I walked to the back of the bus and endured the long and winding fifty minutes of the ride – to say nothing of the fat woman who boarded on Granville Street and sat beside me devouring a Big Mac and fries, letting me hear every oversize mouthful she chewed and making me almost gag with the rancid smell.

The things we do to avoid passing through three transit zones and spending a little more money.

Eventually, just as reading one more page would have sent me nodding off to sleep, I reached the end of the line. Just to be sure, I consulted the driver again. “You can easily walk the distance,” he assured me. “It’s about a kilometer.”

For some reason, I forgot that no middle-aged North American except me had any clear idea of how far a kilometer was. Instead of taking a taxi, I started walking. I wasn’t wearing the shoes for serious walking, but I figured I didn’t need them for such a short stroll.

The better part of a kilometer down the road, I came across the BCIT Aerospace center. Aha, I told myself – the terminal must be on the other side of the embankment on the far side. It must be great for the students to be so close to the runway. I decided to cut through the school and maybe ask some likely looking official if I were on track. But I didn’t see anyone to ask, and by the time I blundered out into the back lot behind the school’s hangar, I realized that the South Terminal was nowhere in site.

I continued plodding down the road another half kilometer. I saw a sign and a traffic light that would allow me to cross to a turnoff. I did, glad to get away from the highway whose shoulder I had been traversing and arrive at my destination.

Only, it wasn’t my destination. The signs – so far as I could make out (and, frankly, I had to guess the direction) – seemed to indicate that the South Terminal was 1.5 kilometers to my right.

At this point, my spirits and my calf muscles were starting to sag, but I noticed that the signs seemed to point to a curve that went along two sides of a large grass field. I thought I’d save time and cut across the grass.

Unfortunately, I forgot that the shoes I was wearing had low, half-open panels on each side. Before I had gone thirty paces, my socks were soaked from the puddles concealed in the grass.

This must be how the knights on the Grail Quest must have felt after wandering around for months in the wilderness, I told myself. I grimly plodded on, feeling ridiculous and half-convinced that someone must be watching me from one of the distant hangars and doubling over in laughter. But I had gone too far to turn back now, I told myself.

The road turned into a smaller one, lined with two-story buildings that looked like they were put up in the early 1960s. That road wound around to a smaller one, and suddenly, beyond all hope, I had reached the terminal, nearly three kilometers from the bus stop from which I had started.

My shoes squelching, my shirt sweaty and me feeling more than a little dishevelled, I staggered into the terminal.

I regret to confess that there was no sultry dame to greet me – only a bored clerk at the airline’s desk, who interrupted her conversation about the weekend with another employee long enough to pass me the parcel and look on disinterestedly as I checked to see if it was intact. Much to my surprise after my long walk, it was.

Only then did I take the time to look around. The terminal was drab, almost empty, and as romantic as a turnip. I quickly downed a scone and a bottle of juice, and started back. I could have taken a cab, but I was determined to play my folly through to the end. After all, I might not otherwise have time to exercise today,

This time, though, I took the long way around the grass.

Knowing what to expect, I found the return trip less traumatic. It was, however, deadly dull. The side of a highway isn’t the place to walk while reading a book, and the only way I could amuse myself was by singing, secure in the knowledge that no one had the faintest chance of hearing me over the cars.

I arrived at the bus stop limping and cursing my choice of shoes. When the bus finally came, all I wanted to do was get home, so I splurged and travelled through three zones to get there. Suddenly, my usual day at the keyboard didn’t seem so bad after all.

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On hearing that a former employer has closed

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, corporatelife, employment, humor, officework, Personal, Uncategorized, work, tagged , , , , , , , , on September 9, 2008| 1 Comment »

The other week, I heard that a former employer had gone out of business. I reacted with the same pleasure that an octogenarian might feel on reading the name of an unpleasant former colleague in the obituaries. I was glad to see the company go, and my only surprise was that it had crawled along as long as it had. I had been expecting to see it go under for years.

As you might guess, I was not particularly happy there. I used to take long walks at lunch, regardless of the weather, just to get away from the place, and would amuse myself by composing words to a parody of “Chantilly Lace” that I called “Genteelly Bored.”

Part of my unhappiness was the circumstances. It was my first full-time position since the dot-com crash. After being one of the powers at two different companies, I felt demoted to be working as a technical writer again, no matter how often I told myself that no honest living was shameful. But I felt massively under-challenged, and chafed at having to take directions, although I remained polite.

But a larger part of the problem was that, having been a leader (of what quality I’m not sure), I knew that the company officers and executives were border-line competence at best. The CEO was not only fond of purges, which inevitably included people with key knowledge, but also of inflicting the latest management fads on the company. He was fond of regular, excruciating company meetings at which he kept showing the same slides over and over. When I left, he was trying retreats at which select members of the company would discuss a book on the management best-seller lists – a move which instantly divided the company into the privileged and the under-appreciated. He never did seem to understand that he was sending mixed signals, and, when I briefly shared an office with him due to overcrowding, he used to wonder why no one was passionate about the company.

The other executives were no better. The vice-president of toadyism, as I called the CEO’s right hand man, was infamous for making decisions without bothering to gather necessary information.

Another executive, a fundamentalist Christian, tried to take me to task for using, “Does anal-retentive have a hyphen?” on my screen saver. He thought it obscene, and was put out when I suggested that he had better things to do than chastise me over trivia and I refused to apologize on the grounds that I had done nothing wrong.

Then there was the testing manager, a little man who decorated his office in unread books and inspirational posters, and would spend hours designing spreadsheets with the largest color palette that I have ever seen. He worked long hours, and like to call meetings with me just before I was leaving for home. But at least he didn’t last as long as his probation.

“Blind leading the blind” was the phrase that kept occurring to me when I had to deal with any of these characters. But although interacting with them was bad enough, what was especially hard to handle was the fact that I had enough experience (and enough memories of my own incompetence) to know that they were mismanaging the company, and making what could only be a marginal business at best a loser. I discovered that to see incompetence that you know how to correct, yet to be able to do or say nothing is one of the most uncomfortable mental states possible.

Still, I shouldn’t complain. If I hadn’t been so uncomfortable, I wouldn’t have started trying to write a book on OpenOffice.org. The book was never published, but my efforts over the fifteen months I was at the company have since repaid my effort many times over as I cannibalized the chapters for articles. I also started doing a couple of other articles per month, and I still remember the pleasure when I had earned enough from articles to buy my new computer. There was another short contract between my work at this company and my transition to full-time journalist, but if I hadn’t been so bored, I might never have done the ground work for a career change. So I can’t say that the company didn’t do me an unintentional favor.

Still, I wish there had been a wake. I would have attended, if only to dance on the coffin.

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Indoor squirrel hunting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, humor, Personal, squirrels, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2008| Leave a Comment »

The other day, I was just finishing breakfast when I heard something crash to the floor in the bedroom. I didn’t think much of it at first, supposing that the curtain blowing in the wind had swept something from a counter.

But,when it was repeated again, I found a gray squirrel sitting on top of an armoire. Somehow, it had freed the screen on the window enough to slip through.

I wasn’t very surprised, even though the bedroom window is on the equivalent of the third story. I’d seen squirrels scrambling vertically on the building’s stucco, and heard them at the screen more than once.

However, like most people, I don’t take appreciate disturbances to my morning routine. Nor did I want the little B& E artist getting into the rest of the townhouse, where it would be more difficult to catch and might upset our parrots. All this went through my mind in a second or two, and I quietly stepped into the bedroom and closed the door.

Just then, I remembered hearing that squirrels often carry rabies, and I wondered if I had done a smart thing. Visions of the rabbit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail flashed through my head, and I wondered if I’d be found with my throat torn out and the little gray monster chittering a song of triumph on my chest.

If there were any hunters in my immediate line of descent, I decided, they were a long way back. Probably, I was more a gathering type.

Moving slowly and steadily, I drew the curtain and took the screen from the window. I decided I was going to give the intruder every chance to exit on his own. The alternative would be to try and catch him in a bucket.

Again, my imagination sprang into action, imagining me trying to find something to cover the bucket with and racing to get to the door before the squirrel chewed through the bucket.

What happened instead was that the squirrel was panicked by my motions. It leaped down on to the headboard and across to the other armoire.
I decided that the screen would keep me a good ways from the squirrel and waved it in the squirrel’s general direction.

It responded by leaping down on to the bed – closer to me, then to the floor.

I waved the screen, and it leapt back to the bed. I was envisioning spending hours trying to deal with the squirrel, but this time it caught site of the open window and made a leap for it – apparently forgetting that it was high up.

For a moment, I swear, it hung in mid-air, its feet scrambling for purchase as though it was in a cartoon, then plummeted.

Horrified, I rushed to the window, expecting to see a dead or badly wounded squirrel below, but there was nothing to be seen, then or a few minutes later after I had replaced the screen and gone out for my morning run.

In retrospect, considering my imagination and lack of heroism, I think I’ll tackle a few more squirrels before contemplating a career wrestling crocodiles.

Better yet, I think I’ll practice with something smaller, like field mice or lady bugs – but, first I’m going to dig out my old Society for Creative Anachronism armor from the bottom of the closet.

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Self-elevators of exercise

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, gym, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2008| 2 Comments »

When I was running cross-country in high school, my coach was blunt and unpretentious. One boy who briefly tried out of the team kept talking to him about getting his second wind (whether because he hoped to reach that mythical state or for some other reason, I could never figure out). But I used to be embarrassed for him, because I knew the coach was to straightforward to talk in such elevated terms. In his view, you just ran – you didn’t talk about it. I must have absorbed some of the coach’s matter-of-factness, because when I see how some people at the gym try to elevate the simple act of exercise, the same feeling of embarrassment on their behalf floods over me.

The self-aggrandizement starts with their clothing. Naturally, exercisers need a pair of shoes that will give them support, and at least a sweat suit for warmth and dryness. However, these needs are simply met. For all the exercise most people do, they can probably find an adequate pair of shoes for under $100. If they find a sale, they might get away with as little as $50. But, to hear people at the gym talk, anything less than a $200 pair of shoes, and they’re risking crippling themselves for life.

The same goes for shorts, T-shirts, and everything else that they’re wearing. Never mind that they are lifting weights, or only spending twenty minutes on the treadmill. They talk as though they’re planning an Arctic expedition, and one false economy will leave them to suffer the fate of Franklin.

In the same way, I notice that nobody can undertake a workout nowadays without a water bottle. I even hear the trainers who give personal sessions at the gym solemnly warn people never to exercise without their water bottles nearby, and to take a sip every ten minutes or so. You’d think they were planning to run a marathon across Death Valley in the middle of a summer afternoon.

All of which leaves me, whose workout lasts an hour and ends with a few sips of water before I jog home, more than a little amused.

But the worst are the grunters. You know the ones I mean: The ones who are unable to lift the lightest weights without providing their own soundtracks of agonies. Typically, they stand in front of the mirror, motionless for a minute, then heave their weights towards the ceiling, contorting their faces and grunting or moaning as if they just pulled a leg muscle. Apparently, they claim that their noises are the equivalent of a war-cry, and helping them to focus their energies.

Maybe. But I’d be far less skeptical if they were lifting a hundred kilograms rather than twenty.

What all these behaviors have in common is that they take the very simple act of exercise and try to make it more dramatic. In the process, the people who indulge in these behaviors make themselves and their actions feel more significant.

Personally, I always wonder: Why can’t they just get on with their exercise? They won’t have a better workout for any of these behaviors, and they probably won’t impress anyone who overhears them, either.

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The joys of amateur blogging

Posted in Blogging, Bruce Byfield, creativity, humor, journalism, Personal, tazzu, tazzuwordpresscamp, Uncategorized, wordpress, writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on May 1, 2008| 3 Comments »

(The following is a recreation and expansion of the talk – or maybe “rant” is a better word – that I gave at the Tazzu WordPress Camp on April 30. The talk was titled by Rastin Mehr, but I decided to keep it for the sake of irony.)

I’m a little surprised to be here tonight. Two years ago, the last thing I thought I’d be doing was blogging.

Back then, I thought that bloggers were self-important amateurs. When I looked at the topics for blogging conferences, I was reminded of academic seminars, and it all looked so serious and earnest that I wanted to shake the nearest blogger and say, “For God’s sake, well you get over yourself? Why don’t you just shut up and write?”

For me, blogging was like vanity publishing, or playing tennis with the net down: You could do it, but wouldn’t you always wonder if you were good enough to make it on your own?

Yes, I know there are a handful of bloggers who are respected for their in-depth coverage of a subject and who have essentially become professional journalists. Pamela Jones of Groklaw springs to mind. But these bloggers probably would have been well-known anyway, and had they gone the traditional routes to recognition, on the way they might have shed some of the amateur self-indulgence that often still mars their work.

As for the majority of bloggers, they’re never going to be recognized and they’re never going to monetize their blog in anyway. In fact, even most of those who succeed in living off their blog are probably only going to do so by focusing on the marketing to the expense of content – if not their integrity.

Yet here I am today, a blogging addict. I still haven’t changed my opinions of most blogs, yet despite my reservations, I still believe that the worst of them has value.

Why I blog

My own reasons for blogging are probably peculiar. I started because, while I am a professional journalist who covers free and open source software, there are other subjects that I want to write about. Mostly, I stay away from free software subjects, although I know that I can get thousands of hits a day if I discuss them. But I can do the same and get paid for it, so I have no great interest in increasing my audience.

Still, for a professional (which really is just a name for an exhibitionist with respectable outlets for their proclivities), writing implies an audience, no matter how small. In fact, philosophically speaking, a writer without an audience can hardly be said to be a writer at all. Even Samuel Pepys, the famous secret diarist, seems to have developed the idea of a future readership as he went on. So, if I’m going to write, I do want a few people to react to it, if only a handful.

For me, writing a blog entry is a warmup for my paid work, or a way to bleed off excess energy when I’m done for the day. It’s a place where I can experiment with structure and subject matter, and learn about the short personal essay as an art form. Sometimes, I even use it as a sandbox for subjects that I later write a paid article for, its content enriched by the feedback from commenters.

But all these are idiosyncratic reasons. Why do I think blogging holds value for anyone?

Reasons for blogging

My answer begins with my past occupation as a university composition instructor. I used to ask students to keep a journal during the semester with a minimal number of entries, to be graded simply on whether it was done or not done. Early on in my thinking, I realized that, if I were still teaching, I would have graduated to asking students to keep blogs. The trendiness of blogging would encourage them in a way that private journals never could.

The reasons I assigned a journal also applies to blogs. Unless you are doing an entry level manual job, the ability to write clearly is always going to give you an edge in your profession. The medium of your writing, whether it’s paper or a computer file doesn’t matter. And if you want to write well, the only way to do it is to keep in practice. You wouldn’t expect to play a guitar well or run ten kilometers easily if you only tried once every three weeks, so why would you imagine that writing is any different?

More importantly, writing is an ideal way to explore your thoughts. I think it was the American writer William Faulkner who said he wrote to learn what he thought on a particular subject, and that idea is in tune with my own experience. It’s only after I stop researching a subject and start thinking how to structure an article that I know my opinion on most of what I write about. When an interviewee asks me what the point of an article will be, most of the time, my only honest answer would be, “I don’t know. I haven’t written it yet.” So, if my own experience holds true for others, writing is a way to self-knowledge. Through the act of writing, you can under both your subject and yourself better.

Even more importantly, writing is one of the lowest-entry creative tasks that you can do. Admittedly, blogging requires access to some relatively expensive hardware, but a computer is relatively cheap compared to say, a painter’s supplies or a dancer’s outfits. If you have to, you can even do blog from a public library terminal, reducing your costs to next to nothing. And if you believe with Abraham Maslow, that everyone has a basic need for creativity – well, how can you argue with a trend that gives everyone who wants it a means of self-expression?

All this, and blogging is fun, too. For some, it’s a way to keep in touch with their friends. And for those who, in the words of Ray Wylie Hubbard, “are condemned by the gods to write,” doing so becomes nothing short of addictive. And if you are an addict (“Hello, my name is Bruce, and I’m a writing junkie”), then you know that nothing quite compares. Personally, I’ve always appreciated the response that science fiction writer Isaac Asimov made when asked if he would rather make love or write: “I can write for twelve hours a day.”

In this commercial, supposedly hard-headed days, these reasons for valuing something may be slight. And it’s true – blogging has more to do with a liberal education than going to law school or getting your MBA. For most of those who blog, the activity is not going to pay off, definitely not in the short term and almost certainly not in the long term. Get used to it.

Yet contrary to the conventional wisdom, choosing to do something without the potential for a return can be neither stupid nor naive. When you’re talking about something like blogging, it means you have your priorities straight, and you know the intrinsic worth of what you’re doing.

I have no claim to wisdom or influence, but, if I did, I’d urge bloggers to stop taking themselves so seriously and just enjoy what they are doing. If you’re blogging, you’re helping yourself to think better and can have fun while you do so. I mean, what more joy do you need? In my experience, money come and goes, but personal growth stays with you forever.

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First room mates

Posted in Bruce Byfield, childhood, humor, moving out, Personal, room mate, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 22, 2008| 1 Comment »

Right after I moved out of my parents’ house, I shared a basement suite with a high school friend. He had always seemed quiet and responsible – exactly the type of room mate you want when you’re a university student and studying fills your days. But the arrangement wasn’t a success. Inspired by the example of a girl for whom I’d nursed a crush, I was ready for adult responsibilities like cooking and doing the washing. My room mate wasn’t.

In a sense, the arrangement wasn’t too bad for me. He was paying half the rent, but he was at his parents’ on the weekends and two or three nights a week. I had the suite to myself so often that I had to remind myself that he had every right to stay over. I rarely had to cook for the both of us, and I could usually use the washer and the dryer without tossing a coin with him to see who got to do the first load.

However, it was a strain, sometimes, trying to deal with someone who was not only gone more often than not, but wasn’t ready to take care of himself. I quickly tired of taking messages for him, to say nothing of hearing him complain that I hadn’t bought exactly what he wanted for breakfast; he might have been providing half the grocery money, but he was never around when I had to haul groceries from the store – and we weren’t exactly on the bus routes.

Still, the experience had its comic moments. I remember sitting in our kitchen one night while he tried to cook himself a midnight snack, and his sudden yelp of pain as he put his oven-mitted hand on the hot burner. It was the sort of event you couldn’t put in a story or script, because nobody would believe it.

Another time, he showed up unexpectedly while I was entertaining my girl friend. We were sitting on the couch preparing our costumes for the university medieval club, but from his reaction you would have thought he had caught us in a moment of tumultuous and kinky passion. His face and ears turned a bright red as he passed from the bedroom to the bathroom, fully clad in pajamas and a thick housecoat. From a man with sisters, it seemed an extreme reaction.

About a month into the semester, my room mate found his own girlfriend, which meant he spent even less time in the suite. However, I did notice eleven red roses on his desk before a desk, and a card reading – wait for it — “11 American Beauties, and the 12th is you.” I’m not sure whether the cliche, or the fact that we were living in Canada made the sentiment funnier.

He planned an ultra-romantic evening for his girlfriend, which would culminate in a canoe trip on a lake in a heavily-forested local park that he didn’t know very well. He arrived back at the suite at about 5AM, soaking wet. Not only had they been caught in the rain, but they had carried a rented canoe several kilometers along the unlit cedar trails of the park and, with him in his best suit and her in high heels and nylons. They never did find the lake, but they had got very lost, and very, very damp.

Somehow, I managed not to throw back my head and laugh when I heard the tale. I’d been assuming that the date had ended steamily, and had gone to bed muttering, “Bless you, my children,” so the contrast between my imagination and the reality only made his tale of woe more comical.

Still, perhaps he sensed my impulse to laughter, because he started spending even more time at home. By the time he told me that he was moving back home a few weeks later, I had already been making plans for my next semesters’ accommodation in the campus dorms. Come our final exams, we packed and returned, each to his own parents’ house – me until I could move to the dorm in the New Year, my roommate – I believe – until he married the American beauty.

We had never quarreled, but somehow we never saw anything of each other after that. About a year later, I had heard that he had married his girlfriend and – suburban kid that he was – dropped out of university to help with the dairy farm run by his wife’s family. I can only hope that he knew more about taking care of cows than he did of taking care of himself, but I suspect not — the marriage ended in divorce.

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The great abs obsession

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, humor, Personal, Uncategorized, weight room, workouts, tagged , , , , , , on February 28, 2008| Leave a Comment »

If there’s one set of muscles that people obsess over at the exercise room that I frequent, it’s their abdominal muscles. At least that’s the one that they always talk about, regardless of gender or age. If everyone were to stop talking at once (which would never happen), I swear that the room would still echo for the next thirty seconds with “Abs, abs, abs . . .” in a dying fall.

The common attitude is summed up neatly in a cartoon over the water fountain captioned “Yoga Then and Now.” The first panel shows an expressionless Indian fakir in a loincloth with his thoughts focused squarely on the lotus. The second panel shows a woman who is probably wearing Lululemon workout gear with a vacant smile on her face and her limbs in a desperate tangle. She’s thinking, “This is so good for my abs!”

You have to frequent an exercise room to full appreciate the cartoon. However, take it from me: most of the people who use the gym would happily leave their cardio-vascular system in ruins and their legs and arms flapping with flab, if only they could have a washboard stomach – or at least a flatter one.

Given this widespread obsession, the reaction to the new abs machine is predictable. At one point or the other, almost everyone has tried it in the last couple of months. But they don’t simply read the instructions and try it out. Instead, they circle it for a week or two, like a parrot faced with something new and possibly dangerous. When someone else sits down to use it, they watch out of the corner of their eyes, as though they expect him or her to be consumed by the machine.

And, on the unconscious level, you can see the reason for their worry: with the pads for your arms and the metal frame behind you that you pull forward, the machine does look like something that might be used to interrogate prisoners at Abu Ghraib or Guantanmo Bay.

After witnessing a few people using the machine and emerging unscathed, eventually everyone braves the machine for themselves. Sitting in the saddle, they adjust it gingerly to their height. They shuffle, trying to find a comfortable position on an innately uncomfortable seat. They adjust the weight load. They shuffle again.

Then they have a moment of Nietzschean self-contemplation. No doubt they are muttering something about how that which does not kill them makes them stronger, or some other phrase they picked up while watching a Conan movie. Then they lean forward, pulling the metal frame with them, their heads up so that they can watch themselves in the mirror.

Five, ten repetitions, and most of them are done, rising to join the crowd around the wall-mounted television, or the one arguing about the latest hockey game.

So far, only a handful have returned, or started using the ab machine regularly. Having tried it myself, I’m not surprised . Put any sort of weight on the machine, and you can feel the reps straining muscles you never knew you had.

Of course, enduring the unusual strain for several months is how you get that six pack (and I do mean you; I never look like I’m fit no matter what exercises I do, not without taking off my clothes, and, while you can do that in public when you’re two, bystanders are considerably less tolerant of such behavior when you’re an adult).

But such a regime doesn’t fit in well with our cultural cult of instant gratification, or the widespread genteel belief that getting and staying fit is a social occasion that sweat shouldn’t enter into. Not detecting any significant increase in their sex appeal after their ordeal, most people are content to leave it alone. They don’t quite circle around it, but something in their walk suggests that they would like to.

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