Wanderings

Wandering is what we do; restlessness, part of our nature or at least it's part of mine. And in that hubris sweeping statement, I have found one of my more primary truths, that for me, contentment is impossible.

I used to believe that contentment and complacency, while hanging out in different subtleties of the same semantic neighbourhood, amounted to the same thing. Then I had a heated argument with my then girlfriend's mother about it. Though I hated to lose an argument to her, in that case, it seemed she was right and I did have an erroneous view of the two concepts. Contentment didn't mean an end to striving, just an end to neediness, a satisfaction of one's status anxiety. Complacency, on the other hand, the abdication of active participation in maintaining or growing one's life situation. Two very different ideas. I'm sure if I'd bothered to look it up in a dictionary, her point of view would have been there, writ plain as day with all the weighty authority an Oxford could muster. But I've never been one to play things the easy way. I value self-discovered knowledge above that passed on to me via reading etc, which makes my style of thinking rather intuitive. Regardless, Contentment, it was argued, was a noble thing to strive for in life and completely attainable for those posessing enough humility, industry and self-awareness. It was what she hoped for her daughter and the family her daughter would eventually create. Contentment was part of happiness and completely natural.

Now, however, I find myself having dug and searched and considered for months on end, trying to discover my truer self, looking for happiness and, yes, contentment. Yet I find I remain plagued by all the failings I have ever been afflicted with. I am often late, I remain messy, I fail to communicate regularly with people I care about, and more telling than any of it, I have failed to repeatedly and regularly do the things I've decided would be good for me, things that I know make me happy or that I think would make me happy. Slipping out of my grasp as often as we have cloudy days, consistency remains my greatest bugbear. I just don't seem to be able to do anything consistently besides breath, but that's autonomic (and a good thing too!), so it doesn't really count...

Anyway, the contentment issue is, for me at least, really an extension of this inconsistency in my behaviour. With anything requiring a sustained, repeated activity to come to anything largely not getting done, I find the only things that I can reliably do to make myself happy are things that are one off kinds of things, immediate, instant gratification things. No plan survives contact with the real world, but it would be nice if something resembling some kind of directed activity could be installed in my life. It's not as if I don't want to do the things that I'm not managing to do consistently. I think I do want to do these things, but there is some monkey wrench, a cosmic simian tool getting tossed back and forth in my ambitions like a cat in a cartoon street fight.

This is what is leading me to believe that contentment is impossible, that I'll always be wandering from one idea to the next, unable to create a plan of action that extends beyond three or four days. I suspect that if I was actually able to maintain a schedule of practice with ANYTHING, that I could get really good at it and find it really rewarding. I might even find some kind of contentment. But it's not going to happen. I'm no longer a kid, I'm not even a young adult anymore, and yet consistency still eludes me. I think I'll always strive after it, exploring different possibilities, tracking it like an elusive forest beast, but I don't think I'll ever find it. And I guess the trick with that is I just have to accept what is, live in the here and now and get over not having an ability to relentlessly, pursue a goal over an extended period of time. I've just got to get over not being consistent.

I wonder if I'll manage even that consistently...

Just another holiday

Today I woke up early. I don't know what time, but it was earlier than I wanted to be awake. I meant to go climb a mountain today, but yesterday's tennis had left me sore and unmotivated. It became a down day.

I made coffee, the kettle building to a plastic clatter before the clack of the mechanism killed the boil, the steam creeping up the old wooden stairs to the bedroom. Shaking out the kernels of freeze dried joe, I pondered my choice, a poor man's pinch hitter, instant coffee, brought to a dark chocolate brown life by the hot water. It filled the need for a hot drink, leaving a galling lack where regular coffee would have filled my nostrils with a rich roast, my mouth with a deep, complex symphony of tastes. As I took my first scalding sip, I remembered something important: I hate being poor.

Well, nothing to do for it at the moment. I quickly peeled and devoured a smallish banana from the baskets hanging by the kitchen window and my coffee mug clutched in both cold hands, climbed back up the stairs to our bedroom, where M lay still in dreamland. She talked for a long time on the phone last night, with a good friend from her university days whom she hadn't talked with for ages. I figured they were up until 2, so I didn't wake her, didn't even make her coffee.

I plunked myself down on the hard little steel stool that currently serves as my computer desk chair and got to work on my spaced repetition software (SRS), going through repetitions of French, German and Japanese sentences, just bringing them up into memory at just the right time to trigger their storage into long term memory. Lately, though, I've been prevaricating about which SRS to settle on.

There are three that I'm puzzling over. The first, Supermemo, isn't even written for Mac, so I'm running it on a windows emulator. However, it's a beauty in terms of life-style learning. It has a feature called incremental reading which I just love. The only thing about it is it seems to be rather buggy and the Japanese interface is sort of awkward. The second is based, apparently, on a Supermemo algorithm, but is open source, which I like, and is a much more vital piece of software. It has a good, active community working on it's development. The only kicker for me is that it doesn't have incremental reading. The third is called Anki. It's also opensource, which, as I mentioned, I like. It also has a funky furigana feature which automatically gives readings for kanji inputed onto cards. Cool feature. I found it kind of awkward to get into though. The start-up is just a little to fast. Once you've opened the SRS, it just starts right into whatever library you had open at the last session. There's no opportunity to chose what to study etc. I find it just a bit abrupt, and there's no incremental reading.
So I really do love supermemo, but it really is buggy, and not for Mac, or Linux, and do I really want to run windows just so I can run supermemo? Hmmm...

Anyway, time passed, as it does, and M woke up, we had breakfast, she hurt from tennis too, so we really didn't get up to much today. We went for a walk, climbed up the local hill and enjoyed the view, looked at some stuff at the stationary shop nearby, made supper, argued about food, and watched some TV. I found myself back in the kitchen, washing up the dishes and making lunches for tomorrow. M got a call from a friend in Tokyo and is still chatting away. All in all, a low energy day, designed to recoup for tomorrow.

Bachelor Party

"You're going to a strip club, right?"  M asked as I was getting ready to go off to Toronto for my little brothers' bachelor party.  There would be no peelers, there would be none of that stuff as my future sister-in-law had, fairly, in my opinion, noted that there was a certain lack of respect in that kind of bachelor party, both for her and their relationship.  M figured her idea of a bachelor party, constructed mostly from North American movies, perhaps didn't cover the whole picture.  I was actually surprised she was cool with the idea of me going to one!
   So M dropped me off at the bus station and I rode it into Toronto for probably the first evening of shared drinking with my little brother ever.  I don't think I'd ever actually gone drinking with him.  There was poker, there was music, a lot of booze, more for some than others, and a vinyl set of boobies that made the evening.  We went to the Madison, a giant conglomeration of two big old 19th century houses cobbled together in a cozy, warren-like arrangement with patios and lounges and pool tables.  An amazing place like something out of an opium dream.  Heaps of fun, it was.  Little brother has an amazing manner about him in the bar, he's friendly and just brattish enough to give him that air of unpredictability that women find so attractive and guys love to feed off.  He had so many girls signing the vinyl get up, it was unbelievable.  At least for reserved old me.  My personal favourite was "Call me when you get a divorce..." which was followed by a number.  A real number.  Amazing.  I'm sure his fiance will love it. 
   So, the evening wound up and LB & I grabbed a couple of gluten free pizzas from Pizza Pizza & called it a night.  Good times with the LB.