Fallen Angel

The demise of my childbearing potential has come with some inconvenient side effects. During the office renos this month, I happened on a conversation between two colleagues about plugging a computer directly into a wall socket. “Is that allowed?” one was asking, “or do we have to use a power bar for surge protection?”

“You can plug it in directly,” the other replied, “but I’m all about surge protection.”

I almost chipped in with a fervent, “So am I!” because the oscillating fan in my office has four settings and I could really use one that has a fifth.

The other hormonal hiccup is dry skin all over and itchy skin in patches. A particularly persistent spot has developed on the inner edge of my left shoulder blade. The other day I was pretzel-twisting to reach it and thought, “Why is it so itchy here?”

The answer immediately followed:

“It’s where your wings used to be.”

You Scream for Extreme

Then there is slacklining—the latest death defying “sport” to make the list of “Ways to Prove Darwin Right”. It’s walking a tightrope with some give in the tension … at an altitude of twenty metres … without a net.

I caught a clip on the news the other night: a beautiful young girl from California who’s come to compete with her peers in BC this weekend. She talked about how the practice is about finding your calm centre, overcoming fear and controlling the adrenaline “because too much adrenaline makes you shaky.”

Gee, you think???

Adrenaline is a natural response to potentially mortal peril; I’d say that tiptoeing along a clothesline strung across a chasm would justify a tremor or twelve, but not necessarily the cost of a body recovery.

I’ll seek my calm centre with green tea and yoga, thank you.

I Scream

So now we have “extreme” scratch ʼnʼ win lottery tickets. Bigger prizes in greater number, and it’s no longer enough to use a butter knife to reveal that “you’re not a winner”. Now you use a shark’s tooth—from a live shark.

Geez. Almost everything has been jacked to the max. Action movies. Contact sports. Rock concerts. Potato chip flavours. Even Mother Nature is getting in on the act with extreme weather. No wonder we’re prone to road rage and anxiety attacks. Man cannot live on adrenaline alone—but he’s making it nearly impossible not to.

Even online customer surveys are pushing it. Last summer (motivated, I admit, by the chance to win a $500 shopping spree), I filled one out after a visit to Pier 1 Imports. It was the most hyper-anxious set of questions I have ever encountered. “Good” was not an option. Neither was “satisfied”, or the fact that Pier 1 is third on my list of home décor retailers. My shopping experience had to be orgasmic or they weren’t doing their job.

How can we make Pier 1 your first choice for home shopping?

You can’t, I replied. I come here to buy candles.

It’s taken me a year to bother with a second of their surveys, and they’ll like my responses even less this time. The seasonal scented tealights I bought in June came in a pack of thirty for ten dollars. The seasonal scented tealights available for the fall come in a pack of twelve for eleven dollars—less than half the product for ten percent more money! An extreme ripoff if you ask me—and I am mightily vexed about it.


One might even say vexed “to the extreme”.

The King of Pop

Watching This Is It inspires me to renewed awe for the late Michael Jackson’s genius.

He was a Virgo, you know. *beams*

But seriously, folks, when he died, a halogen spotlight died with him. He had such ferocious talent and relentless instinct for music and movement—watching him rehearse for the tour that never happened is a mesmerizing glimpse at the inner working of a savant.

The tragedy: knowing it was filmed during the final weeks of his life.

The miracle: that he had decades of material from which to choose. 1987’s Bad is my favourite album except on days when the posthumous CD Xscape surpasses it, and even then, naming my top five favourite MJ tracks is like picking my top five Beatles songs. It absolutely depends on the day.

In all honesty, Ter made his work a fixture in my life; she was the greater fan. She mapped out the moves to Thriller when choreographing her own performance in her dancing days (we still laugh about the stick figures bent this way and that across the foolscap). His death immobilized her; she couldn’t listen to any of his albums until well after his funeral.

Six years later, he remains a vibrant presence in our music library. Prompted to revisit This Is It the other night, I became acutely aware of his effect on the world and on me. Whenever I need reminding of creativity’s power in action, I look to his legacy.

I suppose there are people who will always mourn the music he never made. I am more inclined to gratitude for the music he left behind.

Artificial Intelligence

For most of my life, I have been irrationally (really?) freaked out about robots. I can’t say when or how it started, but I am so anti-droid that:

I refuse to entertain the notion of investing in a robotic vacuum cleaner to make my former house elf’s life easier.

On meeting the new photocopier, I was immediately reminded of Star Trek’s M5 and vehemently warned our office’s tech advisor against unplugging it at source because “it’ll fry you where you stand!”

My favourite Alan Parsons Project album, I, Robot, tells the sorry tale of machines becoming our masters and, gee, who saw that coming?

Any Hollywood attempt to make androids our friends is less believable than any Hollywood attempt to make androids our enemies.

I don’t understand our obsession with making machines smarter than we are, with giving them personalities, or with trusting them to remember their place and to stay in it.

Ironically, a robot may have changed my mind about the inherent evil code-named “artificial intelligence”.

Type “Hitchbot” into any search engine and a plethora of pictures pops up, each of a funky little compilation of parts parked roadside in any number of locations. Developed in Canada and set loose to test the nature of humans when interacting with machines, Hitch travelled across the country, spent time in Europe, and started a journey across the USA which, sadly, ended last week in Philadelphia. In a thicker twist of irony, the amiable little droid was vandalized beyond hope of repair in the city of brotherly love.

Robophobia notwithstanding, I have problems with vandalism against any inanimate object—without the psychoanalysis, it’s a show of disrespect and does nothing to further the argument that humans are a superior species. Programmed though its personality was, Hitchbot was also harmless. Beating it to death was a show of bullying cowardice as much as it was an act of vandalism. Unfortunately, a violent end has—for the moment, at least—eclipsed all those good folks who drove it from town to town, pausing for photo ops with their kids in front of national landmarks. It’s kinda sad that I only learned about the ʼbot’s adventure when it was over, and sadder still that it was only news because it ended with an act of mindless savagery.

Intelligence? I’m pretty sure we’re the ones who are faking it.

Painting and Revolution

Ter and I recently watched a 4-part documentary about the Impressionist movement of the late 19^th century. The presenter—a quirky character with a droll sense of humour—did more than discourse about the painters themselves. He expanded the subject to include the changing times that inspired their work. It was awesome!

I love Paris and I love Impressionist art—the light and colour and motion are dazzling and, as is the case with most artistic endeavours, they reflect the world in which the artists lived. Sometimes the painter’s inner world is revealed—Goya, Van Gogh and early Degas come to mind—but it’s the external world that lends life and colour to our history. Without the painters, poets and playwrights, we’d only have the media spin on what went before. In the days of kings and cardinals, artists were funded by the powers that be, hence the abundant regal and religious works … and you can’t tell me that Holbein and Van Dyck weren’t the masters of Photoshop in their time. When royalty is your bread and butter, you’d better make those recessive traits look good.

Patronage aside, art is critical in capturing the essence of a time and place. Artists are both historians and scientists, experimenting with light and colour in ways that “real” science might ignore. Even now, in the 21^st century, our society is revealed through its art , and not to its best advantage when one considers that terrorists and serial killers are the heroes on TV and the world can only be saved in the movies by people with superpowers.

Isn’t that why arts programs are the first to suffer funding cuts in times of fiscal restraint? Creativity is considered a luxury by those who fear it. To everyone else, it’s a link to something greater than ourselves, and a perspective on life that reveals too much for intellectual comfort.

I digress.

Like the Dutch masters before them, the Impressionists were free to paint what they saw: ordinary people living everyday life. Better yet, they spawned a revolution in tools as well as technique. The invention of tubed pigments and portable easels made painting outdoors as convenient as working in one’s studio. And, man, did they have a myriad of subjects from which to choose. I have yet to see myself in any of the café tableaux, but I’m sure I was there in a past life; I’m too in love with music and the lifestyle, naughty girl that I must have been.

The documentary also prompted me to revisit the story of François and Odette, not to amend it in any way, but to look at them a few months after he rescued her from the life of a disenchanted muse. As with any revolution, some will benefit, some will suffer, and the artist will record it for posterity.

Serenity Now

Yesterday was the Leppard King’s birthday. Ter and I set out to celebrate accordingly, but despite our good intentions, everything seemed to go against the grain. By 8 p.m., we were forced to admit, “Well, that was a bust.” We then spent a half-hour listening to The Lost Fingers online—a gypsy jazz band out of Quebec; their version of Sunglasses at Night has made me a fan—after which Ter suggested we go ahead with our plan and finish up the day with a few Leppard videos.

Perhaps, appropriately, that turned out to be the best part of the day.

I woke this morning wondering what had gone wrong. We had looked forward to a pub lunch in His Royal Leppardness’ honour, followed by a stroll through Oak Bay village, shopping and maybe stopping for sorbetto, then preparing a carnivorous dinner at home. We went through the motions, yet nothing worked.

I think it’s because we’re exhausted.

I know I am.

You can attribute some energy malfunctions to a full moon—I’ve lived and worked among people long enough to defy the naysayers who pooh-pooh scheduled lunacy as New Age nonsense—but there are times when the spirit simply cannot overcome the flesh. Nor should it. Sometimes rest is the best medicine, and my compostable container is going through the mill with intense treatments on its bum ankle. Mental rest is as important, given the continuous strain of functioning as an introvert in an extroverted world. Ter and I are both fried at the end of a workweek; the last thing we needed yesterday was a trip through Tourism Central during a heat wave, even on the august occasion of Joe Elliott’s birthday. Consequently, our energy was misaligned and things did not work out until the day was practically done. Only when we were sequestered in our lovely peaceful home, curled in place before the Leps’ greatest hits, did we actually relax.

Today, we have retired to our respective happy places. I’m in my room and Ter is puttering in the kitchen. It’s a long weekend, for which I am immensely grateful. It’s also a mere three weeks from our summer vacation, for which I am deliriously grateful. I work from January to September with one measly week off in between, then I wonder why I’m knackered by mid-summer. I’m not saying that yesterday bombed with spectacular gusto. It just didn’t run as smoothly as it might have had we taken time to recover from the previous week. On the other hand, had we stayed home, we would have missed a photo op that suited the occasion to a tee:

Happy birthday, Joe.