I don't know exactly how to describe this. I feel like I'm living the dream. No obligations beyond the ones I choose to impose. Goals of autodidacticism, learning only what entices my mind. Most of my days have been spent in my sun room with a fresh brewed coffee and a book on typography, wrestling my mind around m's, axis and white space. A life of leisure, always keeping myself busy enough to keep it turning into lethargy. It can not nor will not last forever, but I'm keeping the wolf from the door by taking on a job every once in a while. This is already a memorable summer. It feels like the best version of summer break from childhood, but with the freedoms of adulthood.

Tomorrow I let the wind blow me where it will in a very different sense. Tomorrow I start on an adventure. I will be helping to film a documentary on the U of M storm chasers program. Even on the night before departure I'm unsure if we are heading to Kansas or Oz. I am excited about the unknown of this adventure, a feeling I don't often get. I'm giddy. Let's see where the wind carries us.

-OO-

My very first eye exam is one of the most vivid childhood memories I have. I guess terror has a way of making an impression on a young mind.

The exact year is a little hazy, very early elementary years for certain. It wasn't the first year my family lived in Ottawa, so at least grade 2. So then imagine small chubby cheeked grade 2 Joel, honest to and trusting of the adults around me. I'd just finished having my yearly doctors check up (the reason why I'm sure it was at least my 2nd grade as we moved to Ottawa mid grade 1 and I'm a sept baby). The doctor wanted to talk to my mom about something, so the nurse decided to give me an eye exam while I waited. She had me stand up with my back against the wall in the dimly lit waiting room, and had me look at the eye chart of various sized letters she had on the opposite wall over her desk. I have no honest recollection of what she looked like, but I always imagine her as some large grizzled menace of a woman who sneers at children and has a healthy past time of ruining their lives. She wanted to ruin mine. She points her knobby finger at the chart and says, "Tell me what words these are." Now 2nd grade Joel was a quick and perceptive thinker, but a litteral one. "Words,"I thought, "these are no words I know. They don't even follow any patterns or rules of the english language." I could have inferred letters instead of words, but I was too trusting and obedient. I could compose no answer for this troll of a woman. Yes, a troll, for that is what she was. She was the troll that blocked my path on the bridge to the green pastures of no glasses. No child wants glasses. Glasses make you different, glasses get you made fun of. I was neither cool nor uncool, but glasses could tip that scale. The thicker the glasses the further that scale tipped. The more I stared bewildered at the strange dialect of words scrawled upon the trolls riddle on the wall, the larger my fear grew, and with it the image of my imaginary glasses. Theseglasses were coke bottles of grotesque proportions, their size so immense that they crushed my windpipe so the only sound that would escape little grade 2 Joel's mouth was a small stammer of sound. Ffffp? L-Lp-Lped? Nothing made sense. Time stretches and twists for a child in terror, so I'm not sure how long it was before my mom came back. I'm sure the nurse grinned and hunched over with her fingertips tented as she approached my mother. "He's as blind as a mole with cataracts," she said, "he'll need thick thick glasses indeed. Mwa ha! Mwa ha ha ha ha haa...." There may not have actually been evil laughter. There were however tearfully blubbered words out of wet chubby 2nd grade cheeks to my mom on the drive home. "She said words! Not letters. They didn't spell anything. I don't need glasses! I can see! She said words!" My mom knew I didn't need them, and did her motherly best to consol me, letting me know she understood.

But about a year ago I was trying to focus a camera, and I couldn't. It didn't matter how much I tried, it was always just a little soft. And then I switched eyes, and it hit me. I needed glasses. But by now my view on glasses had changed. In fact, I was rather excited for the opportunity to have an excuse for an accessory.

3 pairs from Zenni optical arrived in my hand this weekend, and I began to wear them right away. I have yet to get fully used to them. I feel smaller, or bigger, I'm not entirely sure which. The perspective has been thrown out of whack. If things are this clear they must be closer, but it still feels further. And then I take them off and the slightest of fogs cloaks the world. It takes about 3 minutes for me to get used to unassisted vision. The one thing that instantly struck me when I first put them on was how detailed peoples eyes were. I couldn't get over it. It was like they had gone from an impressionist painting to stained glass with stark black lines of definition. Lauren told me excitedly that I should go look at blades of grass, but I don't think it would enthral me as much as peoples eyes did that first day. Perhaps everyone has their blade of grass/detailed eyes fixation when they get their first glasses. (added the day after) I'm sure these glasses have not ruined my life. I'm still cool, right?

I got a call this evening that the last of my pairs has arrived for pick up tomorrow.

So now I guess I have 8 eyes.

Oh Dear...

I've become one of those people, haven't I.

One of those people that have a blog and never update it.

Maybe even worse, one of those people who update it once ever year or so, teasing themselves and others that they will update more frequently.

Ya, I think that's it. I think I'm one of those.

It's not that I haven't been intending to post for some time. I have.

I have written many posts in my head, planning out what and how to say it. But that only benefits my mind.

It's like seeing a beautiful scene and thinking you should take a picture of it, but you don't. A beautiful picture that only exists as a concept.

Well lets try this again. Let's bring this Frankenstein's monster back to life.

ZAP!

Let's see if it worked.

As a side note, today is supposedly the rapture according to certain American organizations.

I'll post something tomorrow.

The labor of self-love is a heavy one indeed. Think for yourself whether much of your sorrow has not arisen from someone speaking slightingly of you. As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol. How then can you hope to have inward peace? The heart's fierce effort to protect itself from every slight, to shield its touchy honor from the bad opinion of friend and enemy, will never let the mind have rest....

There is hardly a man or woman who dares to be just what he or she is without doctoring up the impression. The fear of being found out gnaws like rodents within their hearts. The man of culture is haunted by the fear that he will some day come upon a man more cultured than himself. The learned man fears to meet a man more learned than he. The rich man sweats under the fear that his clothes or his car or his house will sometime be made to look cheap by comparison with those of another rich man.

-AW Tozer

This has been running through my head since I read it a month ago. It's very ecclesiastical. Like a mantra returning again to calm the damaged ego.

Since the new year began I've been listening through all the albums I picked up in 2010. Reviewing them and often gaining a first appreciation. For some reason it seems to be a year of music that's taken a long time to endear itself to me.

I got on the wrong bus a week ago. I stepped off green grass onto the bus, and in the 20 odd pages that my attentions were away from the window, the scenery changed. It wasn't until I got near my stop that I looked up and realized there was snow everywhere. Not just little bits here and there, but blankets enough to leave footprints. I had taken the bus to winter. Step on in one world, step off into another.

I must say it was one of the best ways to move into winter. No slow crawl into the frozen months. It was more like a magic trick. A dark cloth was spread over the world, a little misdirection here and then ABRACADABRA. The cloth is removed and everything is magically and drastically change.

I'm not the biggest fan of winter. Yes there are good things about it, but I feel the cold generally out ways the benefits. But I do make peace with it. I accept the things that it does have to offer and pay winter's exorbitant price for them. So today I performed the peace ceremony. It involves baking the seasons first batch of ginger snaps while drinking something warm and listening to my new winter album. This year is the The Wilderness of Manitoba's newest LP (ironically a band from Ontario). I am ready to face off against the winter months with a gingersnap in my mouth, a cup of tea in my hands and sweet voices in my ear.

She

I bought it for the beautiful cover, but I didn't expect to enjoy it this much. I love when potent poetry and philosophy surface in an adventure/philosophy story. What better way to dissect life than to look at it's exaggeration.

"Though the face before me was that of a young woman of certainly not more than thirty years, in perfect health, and the first flush of ripened beauty, yet it had stamped upon it a look of unutterable experience, and of deep acquaintance with grief and passion. Not even the lovely smile that crept about the dimples of her mouth could hide this shadow of sin and sorrow. It shone even in the light of the glorious eyes, it was present in the air of majesty, and it seemed to say: 'Behold me, lovely as no woman was or is, undying and half-divine; memory haunts me from age to age, and passion leads me by the hand - evil have I done, and with sorrow have I made acquaintance from age to age, and from age to age evil I shall do, and sorrow shall I know till my redemption comes.'"

A portrait of She-who-must-be-obeyed. The best and most lovely description of the book. The explanation on the back cover was almost wrong and captured none of the books appeal.

"So I lay and watched the stars come out by thousands, till all the immense arch of heaven was sewn with glittering points, and every point a world! Here was a glorious sight by which man might well measure his own insignificance! Soon I gave up thinking about it, for the mind wearies easily when it strives to grapple with the Infinite, and to trace the footsteps of the Almighty as he strides from sphere to sphere, or deduce His purpose from His works. Such things are not for us to know. Knowledge is to the strong, and we are weak. Too much wisdom would perchance blind our imperfect sight, and too much strength would make us drunk, and overweight our feeble reason till it fell, and we were drowned in depths of our own vanity. for what is the first result of man's increased knowledge interpreted from Nature's book by the persistent effort of his purblind observation? Is it not but too often to make him question the existence of his Maker, or indeed of any intelligent purpose beyond his own? The truth is veiled, because we could no more look upon her glory than we can upon the sun. It would destroy us. Full knowledge is not for man as man is here, for his capacities, which he is apt to think so great, are indeed but small. The vessel is soon filled, and, were one-thousandth part of the unutterable and silent wisdom that directs the rolling of those shining spheres, and the force which makes them roll, pressed into it, it would be shattered into fragments. Perhaps in some other place and time it may be otherwise, who can tell? Here the lot of man born of the flesh is but to endure midst toil and tribulation, to catch at the bubbles blown by Fate, which he calls pleasures, thankful if before they burst they rest a moment in his hand, and when the tragedy is played out, and his hour comes to perish, to pass humbly whither he knows not."

"If a lamp be in his reach to light him through the darkness, he must needs cast it down because it is no star."

Regarding man's endless ambition and its insatiable nature. My favorite line plucked from a multiple page discussion (much too large to post, though one of the best parts of the book) on the benefits and disadvantages of mortality and immortality.

Lady Grey

It's official. My bike gets check out way more than I do. Stopped at a light, compliment given, conversation on the awesomeness of my bike ensues. Locking up my bike at the bank, compliment given, conversation on the awesomeness of my bike ensues. Passing someone on the street, compliment given, conversation on the awesomeness of my bike ensues. Waiting for the canon salute at the legislature on Remembrance Day, compliment given, conversation on the awesomeness of my bike ensues. Locking up my bike at work, expletive compliment given ("f***ing killer bike" from a cute girl no less), no conversation on awesomeness of the bike though. Sitting in Stella's eating breakfast and I see outside a group of 3 men looking over and touching her. Spinning her wheels, examining her 1950s leather seat. Etc, etc.

At least I am meeting and becoming the envy of the cyclists of Winnipeg. I have decided to name her Lady Grey.