Dispatches from a happy Hullian

This started off as a somewhat ranty response to someone trying to tell me that their god was the source of all good things... but I think it's central enough that it shouldn't just be cast off into the ether for one person to reject. It's probably glaringly obvious and been thought of many time before, but here it is.

I find grace among real people in the present, who are gracious not due to their role in the cosmology, prophesy or some covenant made with people long dead or cobbled together into a historical gestalt, but due to effort, inclination and rising above the call of duty. Same goes for love — maybe the love I feel from people and feel for people is not perfect and world-shaping, but it's beyond what people's natures and obligations require, and beyond what I can stick into a little rational-self-interest box, and beyond describing sometimes, so it's special. There are people out there like that, theists, atheists and undecideds, more than any theology of a fallen world would care to admit. Perfect? No. Permanent? Probably not — some of them quite transient, some of them enduring within the bounds of what people can manage. Patient with my boneheadedness, neglect and foibles? Well, not infinitely, but again, often more than I deserve. It may not be infinite bounty out here in atheist-land, but unless you compare it to the infinity attributed to a god of the gaps and asymptotes, it's good and real and sits firmly in my sense of the real rather than the theoretical or faith-based.

Sometimes I can think I feel God — some part of my Nazarene experience was spent interpreting the world that way — but there's a better, more beautiful and simpler/more-complex/more-subtle explanation out there. One time when I was still going to the Church of the Nazarene and in its thrall, I told my mom about all the stuff I felt God was doing for me. She responded by reminding me that I had a part in that (which is all well and good to be humble about, I guess) and that other people — mere, soft, squishy mortals — did too (chalking them up to just being little pawns of some puppet-master god is just plain ungrateful if you believe in free will). What does that leave? The contributions of animals and inanimate objects? Well, I don't know about you, but it's been certain people and the occasional sentient critter that have been supportive and loving over my 24.5 years... these are the influences I can be thankful for because they had a choice, and they had limited strength and time and perspective, and they were still more gracious and loving than some basic sense of civility or mere pleasure in being friends of family might require. I brushed my mom's words off at the time somehow, but they've stayed with me since.

radiator's clanking
downstairs must be fixing stuff
but why at all hours?

Persistent gaps in peace and quiet aside, life is bewildering but good — I like to think I'm learning some things and I'm definitely enjoying the process. There is so much to be thankful to quite a few people for. You know who you are!

…

Now if only I could get to sleep.

I have a tad of a cold which is giving me a voice vaguely reminiscent of the Voice on the Current on Radio One in the morning. If I stick my fingers in my mouth I can approximate Marlon Brando’s Godfather character.

I’ve been feeling massively antisocial the past few days, emerging about once a day -- Anime breakfast at some (Edmonton-derived) friends of tylerpistol on Saturday, geeks’ night in on Monday, Mac setup consulting gig today... been reading, cleaning, mucking about with the computer and sleeping the rest of the time. I think I needed it.

Before then, I went with funny_socks, saw Shrek 2 at the Decarie Square Dollar Cinema and ate at Pushap, both near Namur and both enthusiastically recommended by tylerpistol -- and I can certify he has good taste in bargain cinema and fantastic Indian food on a budget. Puss in Boots and the Fairy Godmother were great in Shrek 2, and the special with three veggie dishes, rice and nan (for under five bucks, tax included) was worth writing home about at Pushap.

I’m looking forward to spending Labour Day weekend in Magog, I’m looking forward to seeing my folks tomorrow and I’m really looking forward to diving back into school as a guy after his second set of letters. I think I may go kinda monastic with Real, Complex and Abstract (courses, not adjectives for math, although they do well as either...) this fall.

Wondering what the fall will bring...

I’m some kinda serene mixed with wired. Made golden coin eggs for supper and loved them, had the last of the day’s coffee with them which seemed like a good idea at the time.

( gettin' all domestic: recipe behind the cut )

The phone repair guy came this morning, so I now have a working phone line (it’s been working up to some part of the internal wiring up ‘til now, now it’s working all the way up!) I thought I had been had after agreeing to wire-care service from Bell, but it turns out it’s already paid for itself (probably for a couple of years now!) Got a lamp over the kitchen table hooked up and ready to go, too... it’s pretty basic, you turn it off by unplugging it, but it is pretty and cheap -- got it and a bunch of necessities at Ikea yesterday with funny_socks... a public transit oddyssey, coming back we travelled with a bunch of tourists heading down to Champ de Mars, pronounced unabashedly in English... it’s festival season!

Tonight I’m going to wander over to the Jazz Fest and see the Funk Brothers with a bunch of Emerge-ers, then come home and sleep early -- I’m still a bit zonked for no specific reason.

London minus one week.

Realizing I’ve come back to some stuff from my early literature search with new eyes -- that I’ve come down a couple of notches on Gips’ list of shape grammar-related programs but that if I keep my nose to the grindstone I may be able to coax a working interpreter of some generality into existence and tackle some part of the subshape problem... if I can do that, it’ll be a good summer. If I can coax something which whittles down a complex pattern by a few discovered rules... it’ll be a good year compressed into a summer :)

The new team environment here is nice, I’m actually the only one in the office who was here last summer -- although in some cases, it’s because a co-worker got his own office. I’ve got more supervision, less felt pressure and feel generally saner than last year... and conference presentations to look forward to...

Home life is pretty good. The roomies are looking for people to fill my and Jinny’s rooms, they’re touring the place from time to time... I’m not sure if we have a roommate for my soon-to-be new place but I think we’ll open it up again soon if we don’t hear from the prospect we’ve been holding it for.

Had supper at the Brotherwoods’ place last night along with funny_socks and a half-dozen other people from Emerge who I now know a bit better. It was a nice, long supper (about four hours of eating, drinking and chatting) with fantastic food (courtesy of Sue and Amélie) and wonderful company and ambience... even if I was about ready to drop from exhaustion (work + showing another Edmontonian around on Monday + miscellaneous activity), I had a good time. And a good sleep after.

Test went really well... easier than expected, and I was over-prepared I think.

Walked over for picnic supper with Fiona (took “shortcut” through Westmount and down the big hill off Summit Circle again), had a nice bite to eat under a tree in the cemetery until a guy in a green van ushered us out. Eep. It was getting cold out there anyway...

Now there is just one more school-thing this semester (a paper of semi-defined due date) and a bunch of summer starting up.

Meeting tomorrow to discuss a draft that is coming along but will require a little more TLC in the morning to make it presentable.

Sleep now.

So it wasn’t three days... but it was one to savour.

Had a nice weekend with some studying, laundry and tinkering tossed in with hanging around, talking, cooking and seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind with funny_socks (yeah, that’s right, she’s now officially one of us!)

Eternal Sunshine is a fantastic, engrossing movie, silly yet not fluff, which shows that Jim Carrey’s rubber face can be used for good as well as evil, and that Kate Winslet does have range! Beware evil escaped hobbits though... The AMC’s gentle but firm guy that kicked Fi and me off the stairs (when the minimum distance between two seats was about thirty feet) and got us replacement passes for a later show was nice, and the furniture designer who made folding armrests in there should win a prize.

Ipsos-Reid has decided I should try out a VoIP phone and let them know how it goes, it took a couple of days of phone tag with the tech support guys to get it up and running, but it works fine now that that’s done. Call quality is a little less good than regular phone lines, but it sounds like the promoters are trying to make it cheaper than a regular old line too... so we’ll see how it goes.

There are details, there are deep issues to deal with, but there is nothing to really dampen my mood. Ah...

Finishing up a take-home midterm in art history this morning, coming down firmly on the side of the semiotician who finds little bits of extra story in paintings and against the narratologist who throws up his hands and declares the verbal narrative to be lossily compressed in the visual.

My shoulder’s acting up again, it got into an uncomfortable twist yesterday afternoon and has been quite sore since. Ugh. I probably have reset those six weeks to two months of being nice to it.

Balancing out work, school and beloved is made a little easier by her similar need to balance... but it’s still so tricky -- I guess it gets easier with practice, and I’m fine with practice!