Digimon!

I just stumbled on Digimon on Netflix. I'm super excited! It's like reliving a part of my childhood. I just finished watching the first episode and I found myself smiling and grinning while it played. The nostalgia of watching this after school on YTV is hitting me big time. And it's actually really good!

Being teleported to another dimension and trying to find your way home while being accompanied by these loyal companions... how cool is that? I'm giddy!

But now it is time for bed, so this nerdy excitement will have to continue another time.

Dutiful cleaning of my computer and phone

I'm using my good ol' desktop computer right now. I haven't touched it in months, mostly because I haven't been playing computer games and because it's getting really sluggish. Sluggish yet still going strong. I've had this beast since mid-2009 and aside from the yearly cleaning and some software tinkering, I've never updated any of the components. When I have a bit of extra cash, I might soup it up a little bit, but there are more important priorities in my life right now.

Right now, I'm busy uninstalling a bunch of software (again, mostly games) to try and free up some space and hopefully speed it up a little bit. One thing I'm noticing while I'm doing this is that it feels good to have a program clear up space on a computer. It's almost akin to vacuuming a dusty room and although I'm not going to be able to breathe better, I feel as if I'm liberating some space, somewhere.

I'm also taking this time spent on the computer to clean up my phone's music folder. There's a bunch of music I don't anticipate listening to any time in the near future. Getting rid of some Eminem - that shit's angry. Getting rid of some pop-electro stuff, like Far East Movement. Too much autotune. And I think I'm going to remove some of the heavier metal stuff, too. It's just not light enough for the summer.

I think I'll add some Beatles. There's a lot of joy in their music. Some Sting & The Police, because he does yoga. And let's see what kind of good dance music I can find... well, there's this song from Skins, the British version. It's pretty catchy, and not too well known, so that kind of makes me feel cool. Wait, nevermind, over one million views on one of the videos! I am so off. Regardless, it's kind of dancey.

And now I've extended past the amount of time I wanted to spend on the computer so it's time to sign off.

Wasting time on Netflix?

The ease of opening a new blog post and writing words appeals to me. It's easy to open that new tab and start typing away. It's slightly less easy to go fetch my journal and a pen and then start writing.
I blur the line between what should go in a personal journal and what should go in a personal blog. I blur it, but I don't erase it.

-

Netflix. It's everywhere. And it's dangerous. Well okay, no, not dangerous... More like tempting, charming, captivating, engrossing. You get the picture. It's very tempting to watch multiple episodes of a TV show in a row. Especially when you have to exert a greater effort to STOP watching than to continue, thanks to the 15-second countdown timer that automatically starts the next episode for you.

Case in point: two days ago, I was on season 1 of a British sitcom called The IT Crowd, which is a show that kind of reminds me of The Office minus the mockumentary style and with fewer characters. Today, I'm in the middle of season 4. I'm not setting any records or anything (especially since each season only has six episodes), but it's still a little scary to see how much time I've spent glued to the screen in such short a time-span.

It's entertainment, and it's pretty good. Enough to make me laugh out loud at least once per episode, and that's a good thing. If I'm just laughing on the inside, I'm probably not producing endorphins and I want those. Diverting attention from a somewhat monotonous life is also a goal. So it's not like I'm completely wasting my time.

Other recent TV Netflix binges: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (7/10), Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (5/10), and a documentary called Web Junkie (7.5/10).

If you're interested in how Netflix can be both good and bad for you, this article sums it up pretty well.

That's it for today!

Kaleidoughscope #2

Some free writing on a hot spring day

Hey it's Friday! Hey I'm feeling ambivalent about this long weekend. I have something planned on Monday, and that something is a nature expedition. Into the wild. It's not actually that wild because it's in the middle of the city but my guidebook with a personalized note in it says that it will take me two hours and fifty minutes to complete the circuit. I'm going with a friend and I wanna invite this third person but I've never hung out with her aside from her official duties and it's a little scary to send an invitation to someone because they might say no and then you feel rejected.

Scary scary things. I'm not scared, I felt like this on my way home. I'm not scared, I felt like this on my way home. Inspired by music and music is playing while I write on my blog which I used to do all the time, like that one time I was listening to Guns n' Roses and I ended up quoting some lyrics at the end of my post in 2008.

I went back to try and find that post that mentions GnR but I can't seem to remember what song or what post I was talking about and it's too bad because I read online recently that it's a good thing to link back to previous posts on your blog when you mention them. It allows for better continuity or something like that.

I love November Rain. I was singing along to it while I was cooking breakfast for my sister and I this morning and at first I thought I was singing well but then my throat started to hurt the tiniest bit and I thought "if my throat hurts then I'm not using my diaphragm which means I'm not singing well".

I ran into Kate on St. Clair today. Well, not literally because she was sitting eating dinner on a patio and I was just slowly walking by on my way home after badminton and she was in a conversation with some older folk and I wasn't sure if I should interrupt or not. So I said "Hey" and she coolly said "hey", but not cool as in distant, more cool as in that cool way of being nonchalant. And she asked if I was still at UofT and I hesitated because I don't really know.

Whoa! It's pretty cool that when I started writing I was feeling kind of sad and lonely like that kind of loneliness you feel when you've missed your shot at going on a road trip with your best friends and now I don't feel nearly as bad because I've written a kaleidoughscope of writings. That's what a KoW is. A kaleidoughscope of writings, or little fragments here and there of what's going on in my head.

I'm feeling more unsure about how the kaleidoughscope fits since I don't eat dough at all anymore. Not even cookie dough ice cream. Because that stuff is not good for my brain. Like, did you know that for gluten sensitive people like me, gluten stops blood flow to the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex? You can scroll to just below the picture with the frowning toast for that citation if you'd like.

It's getting late and I am tired. I'm listening to Lights again, but mostly her earlier songs because I find they're more positive and less sexual than the later stuff. Okay, maybe her later stuff isn't sexual at all and I'm just imagining things and yet... the cover art on Siberia has a bit more cleavage than I'd like but who am I to judge. Regardless, I'm listening to this one song called Face Up and it's the last song I'll listen to tonight. It starts 46 seconds or so if you want to skip her intro but she talks about her cat a bit before and I like cats so I start it at the beginning.

Goodnight.

Extra-special

Pen on paper; inverted

A list of things I've witnessed recently

I don't write enough lists. They make a lot of things simpler - things like recipes, invoices, and yes, even blog posts. Too many of them is probably not that great a thing though. Can you imagine your life being filled with a series of checklists? A list of checklists, turning into a list of lists of checklists ad nauseam. It's actually pretty scary to think about, because if you fill out the lists you eventually turn into a robot. But there's something to be said about having just the right amount of lists in your life, so here's one I want to share.

A list of things I've seen in the past couple weeks or so:

• A car followed by a small truck zooming past me on the segregated streetcar-only tracks on St. Clair. The truck driver quickly realized his mistake and practically jumped off the tracks back onto the road. The car just kept going, at least till the next intersection
• 2 dead rats in the backyard. Suspected killer: Winnie the fat orange cat
• White petals blowing off from the cherry tree and coating the ground
• A badminton birdie twisting on the top of a net and barely making it over to the other side of the court
• Hundreds of little purple flowers dispersed on a hill in High Park
• Two wood ducks, one male and one female, surrounded by four male mallard ducks who were quacking at the lone female in Grenadier Pond
• The Weeknd catch fire on Youtube
• A sketch painting in the subway of a middle-aged Asian woman looking at her phone with headphones on
• A woman in her late twenties nonchalantly twirling her black hair while speaking about her sister-in-law to a male friend on the bus
• A plastic box containing a couple dozen homemade ginger snap cookies
• A full moon partially obscured by clouds in the late night sky

Paraphase over

I think my Paramore phase is finally over. Actually, it's probably been over for a while now, as I haven't been listening to them much. Not at all during the winter (or not much other music for that matter).

The official realization came today while cooking myself breakfast. I had decided to plop in their self-titled CD in the music player and I found myself skipping to the next track halfway through a song. And during some favourites like "Ain't it Fun" and "Part 2" - songs that I was sure I would love forever -, I realized that although the guitar riffs and drum solos were pretty great, the lyrics were making me feel isolated, sad, and even angry at times.

I don't like feeling depressed. Nor do I like feeling angry. And I've written enough about loneliness to know that anything that contributes to that loneliness is not something that I want in my life. So it's time to move on to music that makes me feel happy, and there's plenty of that out there.

-

Oh, looks like I'll be going to a Blink-182 concert this summer! Maybe not the happiest music in the world, but I'll be going with good people so that's pretty great.

Kaleidoughscope #1

Bluegreen

I've started to journal again. I find it quite therapeutic. The physical feedback of the pen scratching the paper and the semi-permanent ink on the page is nice. I can't go back and erase complete sentences like I do so often here. I mean, I could, but then I'd start feeling like I'm wasting ink. And I don't like wasting.

I tend to journal in french. I find it difficult to type in french, but writing with a pen on paper is different. I know exactly where to put the accents, and I don't have to fiddle around with keyboard settings to find them.

-

The mac I'm using is making weird sounds. It's because it's importing a CD - a drumming CD. At first, it sounded like a bulldozer trying to climb over a giant ant hill; now, it's a more regular sort of scanning sound. Regular and persistent. More like a colony of ants exploring the surface of a bulldozer.

-

I had an idea for my blog yesterday.

So I've stuck with this whole kaleidoughscope theme for years now, and up until yesterday I had never really tried to draw one. But then I found my old set of colour pencils from art class and decided to fill in a circle with different colours. And I thought "okay, great, I can finish this kaleidoughscope and then scan it and upload it to my blog".

But then I got fed up that I was drawing my kaleidoughscope in my writing journal and stopped.

-

I've been pretty good about treating this nature deficit disorder for the past few days. Stopping and noticing greenery in the city whenever possible. Spending time in the sun, or doing breathwork after the rain, when negative ions are aplenty.

Natural deficit

Nature Deficit Disorder. Now that's a label I can get behind. I'm inspired by it. It's a label unlike any other that does not seek to put a fault on the human being or one's brain chemistry.

It's been a rough few months. I think I underestimated the winter season. I was looking forward to snow and the calmness that it usually brings and instead got swept up by fire and chaos.

I hope to revisit this theme of lack of nature or, more positively, the efforts that I make to include more nature in my life.

Snippets of semi-controlled energy

Stream of consciousness writing is really cool. Or free writing; it's a similar thing I guess. I do want to edit what I write so it's not too difficult to read. But not having to worry about a particular writing style is calming.

Calmness. Serenity. Peacefulness. They're nice words. They're nice because they represent nice things. Actually, I prefer the first two over the last. I think the first two are just nicer looking words, and "peacefulness" just lacks the right letters.

Why am I writing again? Because I wanted to share how I'm feeling. And I also wanted to calm myself down a bit. I'm not overly excited or anything... no, I just feel anxious. And although I don't often turn to my blog as a therapy tool, there's no reason why I shouldn't.

I feel like I should turn to it more often. Part of it is a sort of obligation to be genuine. See, I've sometimes told people that I have a blog, and that I use it as a way for me to cope with my spiritual emergencies. But to be honest, I haven't used it all that much. It's not like I ever really had a daily ritual of writing something down here. On the other hand, I don't need to look up my old posts to know that I've often written about my feelings and thoughts on things, and it would be difficult for me to say that this blog has not helped me at all. So if I never used it, then yeah, I couldn't really tell people that I'm a blogger. But I do, so I guess I am genuine after all and I shouldn't worry about that.

Wow, tonight it seems like I have more to share. Maybe one of my theories is true. What is my theory? Well, I think that anxiety can also be thought of as uncontrolled creative energy that does not have an outlet. Without an outlet, creative energy has nowhere to go so it sort of stays bundled up in the body and it just makes you feel like crap. But if you could direct that energy outside, out of your system, then maybe the anxiety symptoms would lessen. Well, I still feel anxious up till now. Doesn't mean my hypothesis is invalid, though.

What sorts of thoughts do I have while I'm feeling this anxiety? (I wanted to say "Why am I anxious?", but the answer to that, according to what I just explained, would have been "because my uncontrolled creative energy isn't flowing").

It's a combination of a lot of little things and some big things. Like for example, I've had my phone for a while, but the screen is cracked and chipping away in some places, and every time I look at it I remember that I caused this damage to it, and repairing is not an option. More importantly, the camera is kinda broken and although I can still take pictures, they almost always come out really blurry. I think the internal focus sensor is broken. And I'm not going to repair that either. It really sucks because my phone is more appropriately called a "camera phone", since the camera normally shoots in really high resolution and it has all these settings to shoot with that make it similar to a DSLR camera or something of the sort. And now I can't use it to take pictures. So I have this pretty expensive phone that is now mostly used as a mobile browser, for calling, and for texting. I guess the anxiety stems from knowing that hundreds of dollars (and some slave labour) went into the phone and now it's sort of sitting there, not able to perform.

Okay, enough about the phone. I also feel anxious because I realize that a lot of my days are spent sitting in front of the computer, surfing the internet, reading comments on Reddit, watching streamers play Hearthstone on Twitch and sometimes also playing some games here and there. It's sort of depressing. But I just don't know what else to do. My djembe drum is sitting beside a brown bookcase, staring at me, silently asking me why I haven't struck it in months.

Come to think of it, I actually feel like playing it for the first time in a long time. That's really weird, and I should look at it as a positive thing. Unfortunately, I can't play it because it's late and it would wake up not only my housemates, but probably also the 100 year-old lady next door who suffers from migraines. And I'm not an inconsiderate bastard.

If there was a drum circle, right now, in the ravine or something, I would be there. How cool would that be? Disregarding the fact that it's below freezing outside, going to a drum circle right now (with maybe a bonfire and some dancers) would be absolutely amazing.

That makes me think of my friend K. She's in Australia right now, but she's the kinda person who goes to these kinds of things all the time. ALL the time. She does something called buugeng, which from what I gather is sort of like fire spanning. And she's been to Burning Man. So -that- kind of cool person (sorry to put you in a box!).

I have an extended network of friends, I realize. I rarely see any of them them nowadays. Some, like K, are in far away lands. Others are busy working. I just... feel sad that I don't spend time with these people. I want to spend time with them, it's just I don't know what to do with them anymore. That felt weird to type... What I mean is, I don't seem to know what sorts of activities we could do. That's just an excuse, I admit. But I sometimes think in my head that I'm not really capable of fulfilling that "friend" role anymore, so I just don't bother trying.

I get anxious about the fact that I have no clear direction in life, career wise. Even job wise. Like, is the point of living to make money to afford being able to live somewhere and being able to buy food to live? I guess it sort of is in a capitalistic society. And now I think of my friend S, who, last I heard, is working on a paper about how capitalism is stripping away things that make us human. Okay, that's probably not right at all, but I know his paper is critical of capitalism.

AHHH. Thinking about S, it freaks me out that there are people that I could potentially hang out with, but I don't take the steps to do so. What is wrong with me?! I feel like something is wrong with me because I think that I can't handle conversation well anymore. It's so much easier to write this stuff than to talk about it with someone face to face.

I'm going to go make myself a tisane now. To soothe (another nice word) my all-over-the-place mind. And maybe I'll log on to Skype for the first time in months and maybe I can at least have an online conversation with someone. Some of my Skype contacts are actually acquaintances I've only met online. And with my creative energy somehow channeling through me at the moment, maybe I'll be able to spur conversation my way. For some reason, it's something I crave at the moment.

My last anxiety to share is that I feel like I haven't completed some of my thoughts in what I've just written. Oh well. There's always another blank blog box to write in if I want to.

-Gabriel

Two months far gone

Hey. I don't really know who I'm writing to. I guess I have to say I'm writing to myself in a public way, on this blog. This blog which has been in my life for many, many years now.

I usually try and write at least one thing a month, so that on the sidebar of my blog it at least looks like every month is filled in. Not so for the past two months, but I guess for February 2016 there will be a post.

I guess I'll write down how I feel just now. I mean, I do that a lot on here and a lot of the time I write that I feel alone. Well, today is no exception. I feel alone. I want to be social. I want to be happy! I want to be social because I think it means I will be happier? I think it's probably true. But isn't happiness something that can be kind of addictive? I mean, being happy sure feels good! So why don't I make more efforts to be social? Is it because it doesn't actually make me happy? I really hope not! I recall reading that having a good network of friends is a good teller of many important things, like psychological health and happiness. So in the darker part of my brain I think "Oh, what's the point of being around people, I don't really have much to offer to them anyway". I don't like thinking that.

A lot of the time I will think "Okay, I will text so and so. Maybe we can do something". I never do. Or at least, I haven't in a long while. It's kind of scary to think about, so I ignore this behaviour. I talk about these things with a therapist sometimes. And I get good feedback.

Channeling some Lyra again would be great. I kinda am, again. I want to rely on this mystical conception of an angel that is there only to help me. Because otherwise the darkness is overwhelming and impossible to handle.

The darkness includes such ideas as:

• I'm going to be alone forever
• I'm never going to be able to build a life for myself
• I'm losing all my friends
• I am not a functional member of society

On the positive side of things, I know I made a new friend in the last year. Sadly, she moved back to England. But it was actually cool discovering that new friendships can happen.

I'm not sure when the next update will be. But my blog is not dead! So that's another positive.

-Gabriel

Stalling moments

I have moments in my life where I seem to not want to do anything. Wasting time. Stalling moments, I call them. I fear I may end up regretting theses moments when I'm older & wiser. I hope not. Really, these moments are easy to see: time spent mindlessly surfing the web, absorbing information I can't seem to recall in great detail anyway.

I wonder where I can draw more energy from. Vital energy that allows me to laugh with friends and go on adventures with them. Or energy that I use to buckle down and study harder - my study habits have definitely taken a turn for the worse as the coming winter approaches.

I guess I'm pretty disinterested in what I'm studying. Old philosophical writings from the early medieval era. I can't really even fully grasp what these old geezers are talking about. I should probably try harder to dig into it, but I feel like I'm studying philosophy because I somehow find it worthwhile. And yet, I can hardly explain what it is I'm studying. The nature of reality? There's some ethics here and there when I was reading some Abelard, but it seemed so far removed from what I experience in my own life (i.e. who ever considered the ethics of a servant killing his master in self-defence? why does this matter?) that I just feel apathetic toward it all.

I'm dreading the next essay that's coming for this course. It's almost 3x the length of an essay I just had returned to me (which, thankfully, fetched a mark that I'm content with) and I found this essay-writing experience not as intellectually fulfilling as I had hoped.

I'm so glad I can still write here. And it is strange that I feel like writing at this moment, for I have had a hard time finding the motivation to write anything lately. I'm glad I can write because I'm finding it difficult to talk to people. To relate to them, especially. I don't have much going on in my life right now, but I have had many moments that defy explanation in the past.

Speaking of these moments, I was talking to my therapist the other day about some pretty terrible experiences I've been through. And it felt good to really dig deeper into the kind of things that stress me out and keep me up at night, sometimes. That's one form of talk I do okay with; I'm talking about feelings more and more. Maybe not so much with friends, but at least with a professional. And I get along great with him, especially now that a lot of the anger and resentment I was feeling over some bad experiences is gone.

Stalling moments. Moments in eternity in a finite(?) universe.

I hope to see some northern lights someday.

 

Edit 2022/09/13 i.e. to i.e.

Simplify the dawn

Maybe I can write less. I feel like I have to commit when I write in this white box.

I am playing a game called Grim Dawn.It's kinda lonely to play a single player game all the time.

I wrote a philosophy essay last week. I think I'll do well on it.

I miss my friends. I miss my carefree times.

I'm thinking of getting my yoga more active again. Once a week isn't really doing much.

I've lost a lot of weight. Of course, I gained a ton of weight before I lost it.

I need to go to bed. I have a lot to do tomorrow (Class + Laughing Like Crazy Info Session + Mad Stories).

I cooked breakfast for the week. Egg muffins, no flour of course.

I am going to bed. And I'm reading The Worlds Within Her by Neil Bissoondath.

I am going to bed. And my dreams are once more part of my life.

The careful and the sluggish

Oh no, I'm not sinking again. I look at it as a vacation.
Yesterday, I played badminton again and then I came home and just... crashed. All day. I took care of one school thing (read: e-mailing my TA) and then decided to binge watch on Netflix.

Yeah, binge watching Netflix. I hear it's a rite of passage for uni students these days. Now that we have access to practically unlimited amounts of entertainment through the internet, it's become so easy to just... let the episodes fly by and forget about time for a while.

Ugh. It makes me feel dirty. Usually, the commercials would make me want to stop watching TV after a while, but now that they're gone... I just think to myself: "Oh, I'll just watch one more episode of Arrested Development and then I'll buckle down and get some work done". Yeah... well, that's not going too well. At least a part of my philo essay is done and I haven't left it to the last minute, which actually feels REALLY good. But if I keep down this Netflix path of instantly gratifying stimulating entertainment, I know that I could let myself go.

Luckily, I foresaw this cycle happening again and so I decided to enroll in a couple workshops/classes at Hart House early this September. One of them is a yoga class I've been going to (beginner's, but still challenging in so many ways!) and now I'm starting a class on training your voice & speech to boost self confidence. It's happening tonight, and for the next 8 weeks or so. I'm curious what it's all going to be about. I think it will help me get out of this mini rut I've been in since this weekend's late night gaming party.

My old yoga studio (that I quit this summer b/c I wasn't going and I felt too self-conscious to go to because of my weight which is now, amazingly, lower than I've been in years!) has been closed for a few weeks. And now I'm thinking of enrolling again - but instead of an unlimited per-month fee dealio, I'm thinking of buying a punch card that I simply have to use up. 50 classes. There's a challenge. I know that undertaking this challenge will make me feel great. And that's what I want to feel.

Great.

I am not going back to Netflix. I am not going back to Netflix. I am not going back to Netflix... at least not for the rest of the day.

Booze, cars, and... e-mail?

When I was a kid, I used to go to these Salon du livre events which are basically french book fairs. I used to love going to those things because I've always loved books. Of course, there have been times in my life where I haven't particularly liked books - especially in my early twenties - but I've generally liked having them around ever since I could read.

I remember picking up a book at one of these book fairs. A small and thin collection of short stories written by a franco-ontarien (french speaker from Ontario). The stories were mostly small excerpts of true memories from this author's mind, and out of all the stories in the book, the one I remember the most was one titled "Non, je ne bois pas" (no, I do not drink).

This particular story had, I believe, a profound effect on my world view. It was illustrated with pictures of an adult who felt insecure that he chose not to drink. This adult sometimes felt awkward when refusing alcohol at dinner parties, and he sometimes needed to make up excuses as to why he did not want to drink.

See, I like to think that I don't like to drink. And generally, it's true. I rarely seek out alcohol, and while I do enjoy having wine once in a while when I'm eating dinner with the fam, alcohol is not something that's on my mind often. I don't like/I can't drink beer, so I don't have much an issue when I go on my rare pub nights with friends.

I don't understand why alcohol is so ingrained in our society, and I don't want to talk about that here. I know there are many historical reasons why, and I just don't care. I guess I sometimes feel bitter about it. Now that I'm doing well, and living without substance abuse, I sometimes see alcohol as my enemy. I know it's not good to antagonize something like that; what if I start drinking more? Won't I feel awful about myself? And what about all the times where I had a great time being drunk - am I just supposed to ignore the fun times and think that alcohol is a terrible thing?

That's not a healthy attitude. But you know what else isn't healthy? Driving around everywhere. And it's the same thing, really. I enjoy being in a car, or a truck, or whatever thing has a motor. I doubt very many people can confidently say "Nah, I never like being in  car". It is like a body armour that goes very fast. But I just don't like that our society is so... dependent on these things. Didn't we do just fine before the horse and carriage? Haven't we always done just fine without these convenience tools that now dictate how cities are being built?

I guess this absurdity that I remark on is quite influenced by the fact that I grew up in a family that never owned a car. Once in a while, we'd have access to one, and we enjoyed the hell out of it. For example, I have fond memories of being driven to Quebec for Christmas and playing games in the car to pass the time. Or watching the changing landscapes as we transitioned to city, to suburbs, to country in the blink of an eye. One of the things I remember doing is watching the power lines dip up and down like one dimensional rope swings and wondering if they'd ever end.

And yet, I don't like cars. I like being in them. But I don't like them. They scare me. They scare me so much, and I've had to grow accustomed to this fear otherwise I'd never have been able to live 20+ years in the city. I've never been in a major car accident, so this fear does not stem from trauma. Curiously, I think it stems from the link I see between cars and environmental degradation.

I miss nature so often, I forget that I even miss it. And it makes tears well up in my eyes that I can't seem to live separate from the concrete and plastic, when I realize I'm so separated from the wild. But I remind myself that I am lucky. I remind myself that I live in the most beautiful country in the world and even though I've never left it, I know that one day I will find my place on Earth, possibly in Canada, where I belong.

Until then, I weep at the sight of my inbox. And I find comfort in the fact that I don't need to shop online to feel happy.

I wish my writing was magically more lucid. I never feel like editing for clarity. This is definitely one of those times.

-Kalyrascope

Blue and red, white c sharp

I sense beings that exist across the pond
I talk to them
They write back to me
And all is well
... Until the ringing of the alarm bell

Neon green coleslaw with bacon

I feel sad.
Not depressed mind you; just plain ol' sad.

I figure I'm going to try and feel the sadness and get through it by writing about it as purely as possible. It's not easy.

For starters, I'm already incredibly worried about paragraph and, to a lesser extent, sentence structure. I think that's what university does to people; it makes them worry about how things should be instead of what you want them to be.

I'm sad because I'm lonely. I'm lonely because I have a difficult time around people sometimes.

It wasn't always this way. I think it has something to do with mary jane. I don't think she harmed me in any significant, permanent way, but I do feel like she's hurt me one too many times. It's been months since I hung out with her. At the moment, there's really no reason for me to hang out with her. And I see no reason that I would be ever alone in a room with her again.

Of course, there's no certainty in this; after all, Lyra knows I've failed to avoid mary jane numerous times when I said-promised I would.

I could so easily go and let her into my life again. Right now. But I won't, because Lyra is stronger. Tears don't lie: they are the non-sanguine flows of the soul.

Sentence.
Structure.

Failure.

I feel sad because I'm lonely, this I've said.
I wonder if I can find some real companionship that isn't in the realm of the spiritual or intoxical.

 I'm just an animal in a strange place with strange thoughts that have the potential to terrify. Not horrify; terrify.

That's one thing I've learned last summer: the difference between terror and horror. Supposedly, a good anthropol- no. no schooltalk no more.

i always thought I'd meet the girl of my dreams sometime during university.
without booze. without mj.
without fear. with love.

I'm getting better. Every day I get better.
I hope that I can hypnotize myself into the passionate Kalyrascope once again; and maybe then I'll find another brightly coloured soul just like me.

Nuit Blanche 2015 and chinese food

Another year, another Nuit Blanche.
Another Nuit Blanche, another set of adventures.
Another set of adventures; a time to remember... and forget about proper sleep schedules.

I still haven't fully recovered from this year's white night. After spending a few weeks readjusting my sleep schedule, I now find that it is scrambled once again.
Sleep, insomnia, dreams; they've always been recurring themes on this blog, have they not? And so I find that, once again, I must make every effort to normalize after the unavoidable sleep disruption that Nuit Blanche inherently causes.

What I've taken to doing is a cold shower. Every. Morning. Okay, so I can't really call it a cold shower because it's not entirely all cold. But I make sure to have at least 10 seconds of icy cold water flow down so that I can zap the slumber (or lack thereof) out of me. It works quite well at changing my mindset. All the anxious and depressive thoughts that stay captive in my bedroom seem to trickle away when the water hits my skin.

My feelings of inadequacy, of a creative mind burned off by the toils of daily life also seem to momentarily disappear. Just thinking about today's cold shower helps me with the writing I'm doing here as well.

So Nuit Blanche was actually fantastic. I went with a rather large group (for once) and I managed to stick to the group all night. The lot of us ate a delicious but incredibly frustrating meal (and not because of the food, because it was awesome) at a Chinese restaurant downtown. My sister, her roommate, three québécois folk, a British psychologist and her local Torontonian friend, and finally, myself. The reason for the frustration was not what I anticipated: the issue was that two people in the group ordered just like everyone else, and one of them did not get what they ordered and the second just... didn't get anything at all. It took 30 min (we had to run the clock eventually; it was getting ridiculous!) after we were all served for the last guy to get his food, by which time we were all done. So it sucked for him. As for me, my hot pot chicken/ginger/onion dish was really amazing. And quite paleo. And although I can't be 100% sure that there was no gluten in the food, being with newfound friends was enough to make me forget all the trouble of eating like a hunter-gatherer in a modern world.

Not many pictures to share (my beautiful camera-phone is now but a broken remnant of its former self), but some highlights include:

• A white bubble not unlike the ROM's/Science Centre's planetarium projecting natural disasters and a scrolling marquee counting the dead. Very powerful, very intense, very unforgiving.
• A trade-in centre where I traded in one of the lanterns hanging around my neck for a handmade candlestick holder. I think the idea was to make a meaningful connection between denizens of the Western world and denizens of more (economically) impoverished countries such as Colombia.
• A voting both where you had to choose between YES for abolishing borders or NO for keeping borders. It was a really ambiguous question... and I voted no. I still wonder why I voted no. So it was a great exhibit, because it stimulated discussion in our group.
• My personal favourite: A rickety-floating-metal-monkey-dome-cage contraption that was shaped like a doughnut and which made ominous sounds as it was buoyed up on the edge of Lake Ontario

I will make a last commentary here. I don't understand why people feel the need to get absolutely trashed during Nuit Blanche. It's such a shame. There's so much to do! But I get it. It's a pretty special night and I admit that I smiled a couple times at some of the shenanigans that the drinkers were up to.
But the fight I witnessed on the Yonge line at 3 am was NOT cool, and it got to me that a crowd was encouraging two young men to fight in the middle of a subway.

Still, I am looking forward to next year. Maybe my phone will magically fix itself and I'll have a couple o' cool pictures to share. For now, my words will have to do.

A nightmare on wheat street

UGH. I'm feeling exasperated.

See, I've been trying to eat healthy for about 5 years now. While I'm at home, it's relatively easy to cook healthy: I know exactly what ingredients to avoid, I know the staple foods that nourish me, and I know how to build meals from the ground up (I use recipes as a guideline). For example, curries have always been easy for me to make and I find they almost always end up very flavourful regardless of how much time is spent toiling over them. I rarely mess them up.

Tonight is Nuit Blanche. And I'm going with a bunch of strangers; really, I only know 1 person, whom I only met for a couple hours at a peer support group this week. For some folk, this could be a stressful experience, and I would be lying if I didn't say I felt a little apprehensive at the thought of hanging out with total strangers. But I have a pretty good sense of what kind of strangers I can trust, and my instincts say to go out and HAVE FUN! And a Chinese astrologer would say: "Well, you're born on the year of the Horse. You have an innate ability to steer clear out of trouble. Trust your instincts, and go with the flow."

Speaking of the Chinese... the plan is to go eat some Chinese food to warm ourselves up during what is sure to be a brisk October night. Sounds great, right? Well, it is! Minus the fact that just about every dish on a Chinese restaurant's menu either has soy sauce, or other gluten-containing ingredients. So, I'm taking a bit of time to look at the online menu of the Chinese place we're slated to go to. On the one hand, everything looks incredibly tasty! On the other, I'm basically trying to get a meal that has a good portion of meat & veggies with a bunch of spices added in (or mixed into a sauce that's not filled with processed junk/gluten).

The difficult part isn't knowing what I can and cannot (or rather, do not want to) eat. It's how to effectively communicate my dietary restrictions to the server or, more importantly, the chef that I find troublesome. And, no, eating gluten will not kill me. But I know from experience that I won't feel all that great after the meal if it's loaded with these things that my body does not react well to. There's MSG, and rancid oils that I definitely want to avoid; and to people who don't eat paleo, I know it seems kinda crazy to be so obsessed with all the ingredients that go into a meal, but it's an important thing and I wish it wasn't so damned difficult to just... eat natural foods. The kind of foods that humans have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years.

So I wrote down a few dishes that are likely to be safe or at least, much safer than things like... oh, I don't know... General Tso's chicken with super-sugary-gluteny sauce.

How the hell do you tell a Chinese chef NOT to use soy sauce because it contains wheat? It'd be like someone telling me NOT to add curry powder to my curries.

Yeah, I don't eat out much. Good on the wallet, though.

Starless

No stars in the night
Bright light in the sky
Pleiades unseen; blue red green white
                  Flares shine bright 

I sat alone in my fright
In a brisk summer's flight
              of fancy eve's delight

And I listened to to stories of commoners
despite
the green around me; surrounding me, arousing me

Stirred to action I awoke
the wind stirred and stroked
while the laughter around me
faded away to obscurity

Now I leave my seat
And my story is complete

Subtly staying true to nature's queue

"I really should work on my creative projects".
That's the thought that popped into my head while wondering what to do with my day. I don't have any classes at school on Wednesdays, so I have no rush to get up in the morning and scarf down some grok grub before I get going.

I mean, at least I get up now; earlier than 9 am, which is absolutely fantastic for me. I know I could get up even earlier if I found the right time: if I wake up too late, I feel tired. If I wake up too early, I feel exhausted. So it's about slowly pushing the clock backward and pushing against my urge to stay up late at night.

I don't know if I'm a night owl or not. Supposedly, some folk are more adept at getting up in the mornings and going about their day while others are more programmed for late night sessions and waking up later instead. The way I see it, if you live and breathe through electronics (like many of us do now), there's a good chance you'll go to bed later anyway and lose sleep in the process. Who hasn't wanted to keep binge watching one more tv show, or do just play one more round of Hearthstone before - WOOPS! - it's past midnight, and a new day has begun.

The fact that I'm relatively easy to talk to in the mornings, and that I don't need caffeine to get me going makes me think that I'm a morning bird. I definitely wasn't always great in the mornings. I think my Katimafriends can attest to that. But now that I'm older, I realize that mornings are when things get DONE. On the other hand, I have never had any problems staying up late into the early hours and going about, well, projects such as this blog. More often, it's playing video games or, preferably, having conversations with friends online who make me forget how long I've been up. Those friends are the best. Love you gaiz!

I think I'm probably somewhere in between being a night owl and being an early bird, to be honest. And that's an average place to be.

On average, I dislike averages more than twice a year.

Kalyra(scope)

See? Didn't I tell you I was perfecting my pen name?

I can see her again!

There was a time not long ago
where visions of singers in my head rowed
I jog my memory; singing in my ears
through headphones is all I could ever hear

I was doing some power walking back home from Keele and St. Clair. I had just gotten off the Keele bus after an evening spent with survivors of the unjust society in which we live in when suddenly... nothing happened. And that was the best part of my day.

With Iron Maiden starting my walk to my demeure, I knew I was in for a treat. Little did I know that I would be greeted by a still-powerful moon the size of a beach-ball in the heavens; and little did I know that she would be as bright as she was yesterday. Without cloud cover, the only thing that could have made my night even more satisfying was to have one of my favourite female vocalists start singing.

And so this song came on:

And I made it home safe and sound.

Signed by: Kalyrascope

Yeah, I am loving my new nom de plume.It's not quite perfect, but it'll get there.

Busy bees buzz blaringly

Wow, what a week it's been!

Maybe I could try a bulleted list.
What do you think, Lyra, my dearest muse? I'm just kind of exhausted here.
Go for it, obviously.

• I went to office hours for the third time ever in my post-secondary educational career. The two other profs that I've seen thus far (one last year, one the year before that), I've seen during times when I haven't felt too great. But in all three cases, I came out feeling more confident in my academic skills and intelligence.
• Joined the UofT badminton club! I'm officially a member again. Last I went there was... oh, two years ago. I'm definitely looking to improve my game this time around, especially since there are some really good players.
• Made... two new friends, and two new potential badminton partners! Let's see... the first one of four studies comp sci, the second one is a philosophy undergrad, the third studies physics, and the fourth is a philosophy grad student! And, it just so happens that I'm pursuing a minor in philosophy!
• Went to the Queer Orientiation meet n' greet! I wasn't feeling too well, so I didn't actually socialize or anything... but I did do some journaling and listen to music. And I came out feeling much better.
• Did some sprints, biking, yoga, and wore my five-toe shoes numerous times! Walking on grass was heavenly.
• Went to go see a movie! Here, I'll add a picture for once:

  

  It's a comedy, and it was really, really good! Highly recommended. Femme lead role(s).

  
  

I'm planning some great things in the coming weeks. And they will happen. As things already have. :)

Keep your dreams alive,
Lyra & Gabe

Whispers of the forsaken

I hear their whispers more than once a fortnight;
whispers of fright
whispers of angels delight

sorry... sorry... sorry... .. .
for what, I want to ask
for whom, I want to say
for what reason did you need to go away?

it's all hearsay
it's all they ever say
and it's all they ever made

echoes of the mire
threaten to overtake me
and painful jealousies
never fail to consume me

Oh, hey
it's you again
the demon from my dream
the nightmare from the beam
the ceaseless memories from my dream

Kal & Lyra 2015