The Mothership

When I think back, it’s interesting to note just how much luck has played a part of my life. Things could have been quite different…

I grew up in tiny mining towns, where there wasn’t really much to do but play outside and in the woods. By chance I happened upon a discarded smashed TV set and was curious about just what all these bits inside were. Luckily enough there was an electronics magazine available at the store, and although at 8 years old I didn’t understand 99% of it, there was still an aura of ‘coolness’ to it. It was through this magazine that I learned about these newfangled ‘computer’ thingies…

It wouldn’t have mattered much if we’d remained trapped in these little mining towns; there wouldn’t have been much of a choice in future careers besides continuing on in the same types of construction and mining jobs. As luck would have it though, the mines were running dry and jobs were harder to come by at that time, so once the town shut down we were forced to look elsewhere. We wound up staying with relatives all the way over in the big city, Edmonton, with all its greater opportunities.

In high school I barely knew anyone, and was kind of adrift socially. I thought a club might be interesting, but wasn’t sure which one was really appropriate. I took a chance on the Games Club, since I liked games of various kinds, and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met most of the people I now know best.

As high school was wrapping up, it was clear what I wanted to do: head to University and get a computer-related degree. It wasn’t clear just how I was going to do so, though. I had absolutely no money and the family wasn’t exactly loaded with cash either, so a student loan looked like the only option, and even that was questionable. One day though, my chemistry teacher mentioned a scholarship that she thought some of us might be interested in. I’d never heard of it before, but I applied and, miraculously enough, won one. The scholarship alone almost entirely covered tuition fees for all four years. I was able to get the degree without having to get a loan, and entered the workforce completely debt-free.

Any minor change in any of these events, just one small decision made differently, and my life could have turned out completely different. Thankfully I’m not stuck back in the mines of B.C. hauling rocks around all day…

Damn I must be getting old. My alarm almost never goes off by itself anymore — I’m usually lying there awake already. Although it’s nowhere near Paul’s insomnia, my body just doesn’t want to rest as much as it did before. Heck, I used to have to worry about sleeping past noon on weekends; now I can’t even force myself to sleep in any later than 9am.

I’d better hurry up and get that house so I can start complaining about kids on my lawn…

As part of the process of cleaning up my life, it’s about time I did something about my weight.

It’s partly vanity of course, as I don’t exactly have women throwing themselves at me all day long. It’s partly over health concerns, as I’d rather not get diabetes or keel over from a heart attack anytime soon. And it’s partly practical, as I’m tired of jeans lasting less than a year, getting winded just going up a hill, damaging furniture, etc.

So, I’m trying to eat better. I found a nutrition program for Linux and with it I can cross-reference the food’s Omega-6/3 balance ratio against the distribution of fat types as a subset of the breakdown of calories versus the source type among protein and fiber and oh screw this… I’m a lazy, lazy man, which is what got me here in the first place.

For now I’m just going to try to limit intake to around 1200 calories a day, a number often bandied about in diet circles, and see where that takes me. I don’t want to give up too many of the foods I already enjoy now since that will just make it harder to stick with this, so the plan is to have one meal of the day act as a counterbalance against the other. For example, I intend to have my usual teriyaki chicken and chocolate milk for lunch today. I don’t have exact stats on it, but it’s probably around the same as a similar meal available at Edo Japan, so I’ll just round it up to around 600 calories. The chocolate milk will probably be another 160, and I had a cereal bar for 140 earlier, for a total of 900 so far. Thus, to counterbalance this, I’ll choose something for dinner that’s around 300. Tomorrow I might want something fairly belt-busting from BP’s for dinner, so I’d have a light lunch to compensate. My problem before was that I’d all too often have both in the same day…

I don’t put much stock in exercise, as it seems easier to just cut the extraneous calories out of my intake to begin with than spending two hours every day burning them off, but I do already walk at least 3km a day getting to and from work, to keep the muscles going and stave off atrophy.

And, since public humiliation might work as a motivator, I’ll try and keep an ongoing update of my status in the right hand section as soon as I pick up a scale.

If I ever move to another apartment, I’m going to have to make sure it’s on at least the third floor. Having to lock up all of the windows most of the day and night makes it way too hot and stuffy in here during the summers. On a couple of occasions the landlord had reported people suspiciously snooping around my windows, too.

Oddly enough, I’m still hoping for a house one day, which would have these problems even worse…

I need to reorganize.

Specifically, reorganize my living space. You see, I may as well just come right out and admit it — I’m a packrat. I hate to throw anything out just in case I might want it later, so over the years I’ve amassed a fair amount of old junk. I’ve got handouts from high school, class notes from university, exams, completed projects, and even scraps of paper with scribbles on them. I found my 1992 tax return. I’ve got mail piled up on top of the fridge. I’ve got parts for my old Atari 8-bit which hasn’t worked for 10 years, manuals for every game I’ve ever bought, bits of electronics scavenged from old equipment, and enough 5.25″ floppies to tile the walls. Do they even make them anymore?

Eventually though, all this stuff starts to take up a fair bit of space. It never really bothered me before. If I’ve got the space, why not, for all I know I really *will* need something in there one day. In the back of my mind though, I knew it still wasn’t ‘normal.’ The landlord and previous building manager had expressed concern, my mother wondered what I was eventually going to do with them, and I was hesitant to let people even see my apartment lest they think it too weird or creepy. There are enough other reasons for them to think that without giving them more. :-P

So, it *has* begun to bother me, more and more. Maybe I’m just caving in to peer pressure, but I worry that my collected stuff is some symptom of emotional immaturity, or that I’m stuck in the past, or they really are just a nuisance that drives people away, or…well, a lot of things. I sat down and looked through a few of the older papers, and when I found one that got rather mediocre marks, I got angry. Genuinely angry, even more so than when I first got it back since at the time I was just happy it was over and done with. Angry first at the unknown marker who dared to disparage my work so casually, and then at myself, for not having been good enough to have done better in the first place.

But it’s irrelevant. This is all old stuff that nobody cares about on topics I’ll never discuss again from people I barely knew. There’s no reason to get worked up over it, but as long as it’s here I will. So, out it goes, and hopefully I’ll be better off for it.

I have the same problem at the office too, and that’s sort of what prompted this in the first place. I’m moving to a different office and even though it’s just around the corner, I was amazed by just how much crap I’d collected in such a small space. Of course there I’m dealing with trade secrets and internal documentation and such so I’d better be a bit more careful about what I throw away…

Supposedly we all have dreams every night but, like a lot of people, I rarely remember them. Either I’m only left with a vague impression that quickly vanishes upon waking, or I just don’t recall anything at all. My head hits the pillow and the only thing that happens next is the alarm going off.

The few I do occasionally remember though, have been, well, boring. Last night, for example, I dreamed about moving the contents of my office to a different office (and in fact we do have an office move coming up). There wasn’t even some strange twist to it; I was just packing up the few remaining books and cables and such left over in the old office.

What a ripoff! Where are the aliens, the talking furniture, the nubile young women, the non-sequiturs, the historical figures, the odd locales, and all the other weirdness I should be getting? I demand more bizarreness from my subconscious, dammit!

Psychologists would probably claim it’s just a reflection of how boring my real life is, in which case…well, I can’t exactly dispute that… :-)