25 things about me

1. when I was six, after swimming during gym class I forgot to bring a pair of underwear. subsequently I met Roy Romanow, who served as the NDP leader of the opposition at the time, at a hall in Wadena without wearing underwear. All future political encounters I have made sure to wear underwear.

2. I rarely drink my own coffee, which is fair trade, organic, usually shade-grown and blissfully delicious. I have three coffee makers. I am drinking some now from a Bialetti moka express. The steam coming off the coffee is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen this morning. It looks like waves of smoke, it’s so intense.

3. I got bored with my ethnicity and fought with the guilt of a settler identity at a young age. I pretended to really be Italian in my head, because I figured the Romans had conquered most of Great Britain. I gave that up when I got to Italy.

4. There is a Spanish dictionary next to a copy of “2001: A Space Odyssey” on my shelf. I’ve read through the Spanish dictionary plenty of times. I’ve never opened 2001, nor about 10 other books on that shelf. I’m sure they’re great.

5. I have a fascination with neon green that I have never had explained to me why it is so. I am consciously happiest when I have a neon green mug, bowl, coaster, blanket, clothing or some other item. I have, of course, all of these things in my apartment. And more. many, many more.

6. I know how to program C++ at a basic level, HTML and CSS at a high level, and use a lot of intense software commands at the terminal / command prompt level. Perhaps there is a future career that melds my desire to implement socialist public policies with computer programming and graphics design.

7. I have written over 800 poems in the last 11 or so years. I doubt more than one has ever been read outside of my immediate friends and family. At a very strange twist in a party I once hosted in my basement, friends of friends decided they wanted to read my poetry and I gave away 10 copies of a book I had self-published. It feels right to give away poetry, for I doubt I’ll ever be a waged poet. I find the writing process to be the best of clichés: releasing, therapeutic, self-indulgent, reflective, documentary and passionate.

8. I love music dearly. I have a keyboard and three flutes (simple Peruvian ocarina, Colorado Native American flute, and a cheap neon green hand-carved flute from a fair trade shop) and I never – never – play any of them. But I could.

9. There is a 1/4 bottle of wine sitting next to my stove with a lovely green cork. I imagine that wine is rancid. I should probably drink more wine more frequently.

10. The notion of friendship has been something I have struggled with for a long time, in both over-analysis and the commitments it takes to solidify good friends. I feel very blessed (is that a secular word?) to have the friends I do have, but I always crave more intense friendships. I feel so very fortunate to have notched my belt with the incredible conversations and moments of sheer excellence in humanity that the people I have already known have given me.

11. I, like most working people, worry about money. I seem to have enough of it, and I seem to be ‘following the rules’ pretty closely about saving for retirement. I still find travel to be my most excessive spending, and I’ve rapidly changed my expectations for travel from ‘exotic’ to simply ‘the unknown.’ I have discovered the west coast of North America to be a beautiful territory of Earth, and am jealous for all the years I never was able to explore here. That said, I really love Saskatchewan’s geography, perhaps too much. If it weren’t for travel and eating out, I’d be saving thousands more every year.

12. I’m not really much for competition. I invented ‘socialist basketball’ to go as follows: one team gets a point, and then another team gets a point. It’s pretty fair. I would like to launch a worldwide league of sports that aren’t about competition, and see what comes of the world. I would just (off the top of my head) assume a lot of war would end. I still do compete with myself for academic achievement, however, and occasionally feel jealous at others’ accomplishments in any aspect of life. I’m trying to mesh my anti-competitive nature with that.

13. If I was to have lived prior lives, here are the lives I figure I would have lived: carpenter, shoe maker, merchant, tailor, bookkeeper. I romanticize the employment prospects of the Enlightenment era. Note I did not write “philosopher” or “teacher.” Definitely not “farm labourer”.

14. My favourite video game when I was really young was this DOS game called “Castle.” You had to type in commands to pick up things and use them in this castle. I don’t really think there was more of a story than that. I really miss it, as I think we re-wrote over the 5 1/4 floppy disk that had that game. I remember some vampire character in the game was really difficult and I never figured out how to beat it.

15. The only ultra-competitive thing I ever found myself wishing to be involved in was Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I used to wish I lived in the USA just to be eligible for that show, and I hoped I would get either Africa or South America as my continents for the final geography puzzle. I was a master at South America. Likely it implanted my current fascination with all things colonial Spanish. I hearted geography like no one’s business. I even read the monthly National Geographic magazines that arrived at my house.

16. My first career was going to be a magician. The worst part was my brain always only wanted to know the solution to a trick before I would give up on interest in it. Thus, the career faltered around my last public performance of magic tricks at the Wadena Public Library. I have a photo of it and I’m fucking cute as a button.

17.I found traveling alone in Sicily to be the best thing I had ever done for myself. I wrote excessively an entire book full of poems, and listened to music until my ipod discharged. I stared at the ocean every day, wandered streets with no particular end goal, and ate a lot of simple basic food like cheese pizza. I gained an immense appreciation for a life that celebrates the simple and livable and real, a relaxation ability I can still tap into, and a heartfelt appreciation for the serenity of slowing down and enjoying the moments as they tick by. I met a strange girl from southern Ontario who had just seen Tori Amos in Rome, a New Yorker longing to connect to his home town in Palermo, a Hostel owner who wrote Italian poetry, collected African musical instruments and who drove me to the home of the mafia, a wonderful Spaniard who taught Spanish and ran every day by the sea in Catania, and an island archipelago that gave me an intense moment of truthseeking and a new perspective on what my life’s purpose is. I will never, ever forget my time in Sicily. Oh, and I learned some basic Italian, too.

18. Wikipedia is pretty much my only trusted source of information. I like the open source component, the chance the article could be biased or wrong, and the notion that information collected from thousands of random people could somehow be our collective education system.

19.I’ve met Sarah Slean so many times I’ve actually forgotten how many it is. Something about the notion of meeting a celebrity, about going to shows I really enjoy, and about a connection with her writing made me do it. She now recognizes me and knows my name, which I hope is not a sign of becoming a stalker. Meeting Tori Amos was a much grander affair, probably akin, in some way, to how Muslims feel when they reach Mecca. I swear I said out loud I could have died after that. I know now I was only kidding, right? Thank goodness I only mumbled something about how I came from Saskatchewan and how she needed to always remember there are boys out there, not just girls, who need mentoring. It was likely one of the lesser philosophical rants she’s ever received in the meet-n-greet line.

20. I can’t watch, think about or fathom animals being injured. I feel a visceral stomach-quenching pain that has been there since childhood, likely since a spring moment when I was four or five where our kittens went out to play and one got hit by a falling pot on the deck, only to have the vet put it down a few days later. Her name was Lady Lovely Locks and yes I named her. It’s probably a good idea I went veg, not to be a pretentious and platitudinous white lefty but because it honestly allows me a cleaner conscience. If there is a scene in a movie where an animal might get hurt I can’t handle even the faked audio tracks where the dog yelps in pain. I’d prefer to scratch my skin until it bleeds, frankly.

21. I wonder if the great Russian writers ever imagined our world as it is today, with a homogeneous dominant political and economic ideology paralleled with radical social reformation and dogmatic religion. I wonder what their books would have read if, say, communism was really capitalism as it is today. I wonder these things mostly because I haven’t read the great Russian writers and I am pretty ignorant about what they might have said.

22. If there is one thing on my bucket list, and I mean *if* there is, it’s probably to be elected to political office. There. I’ve said it. I know many others think it might be a good idea, and sometimes I think it might be a good idea too. I just happen to know, from years of first hand experience, that the life, the job, and the stress are seldom seen as worth it. Thus, it’s an irrational desire that makes me appreciate very much the personal sacrifice it takes for people to get themselves elected.

23. Because I feel very disciplined and conformist to the law, I always find myself ranting about the breaking of conformity, especially when I have a drink with friends. I apologize if this continual repetitive rant is offensive. Just that we should stop walking on sidewalks and combing our hair, waiting for traffic lights to turn where there isn’t any car there, or board the bus even when we have no fare. And stop thinking rhymes are acceptable. They’re not.

24. I worry a lot about the little boys and girls out there who, upon realising what their sexuality is, don’t know how to deal with it. I really despise organised religion for imposing cultural and social rules that restrict people from simply being their nerdy, geeky, boring queer selves if that’s who they are. The film “Be Like Others” from Iran was one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, if only because it was so evident that the boys in the film are so lost and feeling so helpless. I strive to pave some political paths for social acceptance of all peoples in every place I go from now on.

25. I would have loved to have even a tinge of aboriginal blood in my body, as I imagine that might have prevented the extensive self-loathing I’ve experienced in my adult years towards the way in which we North Americans ignore the peoples who simply lived here before us. I hope to someday write a PhD about melding First Nations’ peoples economic self liberation with progressive financial measures, such as pension systems, labour sponsored venture capital, or micro-credit financing. I hope writing such a PhD dissertation partially frees me of this burden of my settler identity.