Daily Archives: October 27, 2013

Another sunny Sunday

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It’s nice and sunny outside the ol’ bedroom window today. I hope that means that it is my ideal Fall day out today : sunny enough to be warm but not so warm as to be hot.

Basically, I like a “sunlamp in the fridge” sort of day. The sunshine keeps your surface area warm, as does radiant heat reflected off the ground, but the actual ambient temperature is still nice and chilly.

For a big sweaty fat guy like me, that is perfect. When everthing is just right, then it’s the best I have ever felt outside, period, and that includes days on the beach.

And from me, that is truly saying something. A hot day at the beach is lovely (I am always happier near the water) and the heat doesn’t bother me as long as I am either a) lying still and soaking up all that wonderful dry heat or b) in the water or still wet from it.

It’s the moving around the beach itself that really sucks.

But those “sunlamp in the fridge” days are all good. As a (very weird) kid, I used to find an out of the day stretch of pavement and lie down on my back. The warmth (more dry heat!) felt heavenly, and yet the ambient temperature kept my poor sensitive noggin from overheating and giving me heat stroke.

If I wasn’t prone to heat stroke, I would probably love the summer. But just like my Dad, if I get too hot, I get a headache, nausea, and dizziness. Sometimes I would even get spots in front of my eyes and a humming sound in my ears like the sound of a vacuum cleaner running in the apartment above you.

So, very not good, this heat thing for me. That’s why even if the rest of me is enjoying the heat, I have to keep my head cool or I will become quite ill.

Things are going OK with me. Nice to have (currently) $415 in my wallet. That’s an unusual feeling. Right now, I am resisting the urge to make plans for the money. It’s all too new to me yet and I have to give myself time to adjust to the new realities of my high income or I will become overcome with option paralysis and end up freaking out when I should be just plain enjoying it.

It’s complicated being me.

One idea I am pondering doing is doing some grocery shopping for myself to get the sort of things that we either can’t get at Costco (they have weird gaps in what they stock and the minute you get used to something, suddenly it is gone) or that would COULD get at Costco but I am the only one who would eat it, so it is not exactly the right thing for a communal purchase.

Mainly, I am thinking of convenience foods. Things like microwave burritos, frozen entrees, maybe a bag of frozen mixed vegetables, and so on.

What I want is to create the conditions for me to eat better. Less junk, more real food. If I have easy to make food at hand, I will be way less tempted to have peanut butter and jam sandwich, a bowl of munchies, and a piece of fruit for every single fucking meal.

I will also investigate canned goods, like some of the soups that I really like, like Scotch Broth and Chicken Noodle. I grew up on Campbell’s soup and while I am sure that I am still at least partially pickled from the high sodium content, otherwise they are quite healthy and sure as hell a lot better for me than chips or cheezies.

And more than just improving my nutrition, I think that having more of what my brain thinks of as “real food” will be good for me emotionally as well. There is a powerful truth to the concept of “comfort food” and if you grew up with a mother who cooked for you like I did, that sort of homey food can do wonders for you sense of well-being and security in this cold and uncaring world.

So I may begin investing some of my newfound wealth in better food for myself. I am still learning to reach out into the world and grab the things that will make me happy, and this would be great practice.

I will have to experiment a little to see what foods give me the biggest comfort bang for my still-precious buck, but it seems like a good investment. Better nutrition plus more comfort seems like a powerful one-two knockout punch against depression.

No rush, though. I will let my mind process all the possibilities and come up with some genuine inspiration on its own schedule. The money isn’t going anywhere.

What else… oh yeah, I had a weird dream the other day. Not as weird as that fascist one, but odd.

In the dream, I went to Tim Horton’s because I decided to use some of my newfound wealth to buy some donuts and TimBits to share with my friends. And somehow, in this universe, Tim’s was right next door to the skyscraper of an apartment building we all lived in.

So I go to Tim’s and order a dozen donuts, no coconut. (I don’t like coconut.) The girl behind the counter seems to understand me, but then starts putting only coconut ones in there and I have to be very firm and clear with her that I wanted NO COCONUT. This happens again with the TimBits.

Then I get home, and somehow, the donut items have transformed into a chicken sandwich and a bottle coffee drink. D’oh! I say to myself. She gave me the wrong order!

Then I remember her telling me that she couldn’t give refund to anyone for any reason. So now I am out fifteen bucks (damn, dreamland donuts are expensive) and I don’t have any donuts to show for it.

So the next day, I go back, determined to use all my charm and persuasiveness to convince her to give me a refund anyhow. No dice. She does agree to store credit though, so I figure, what the hell, and put in my order again.

This time, instead of TimBits, she starts pulling out things that look like skewered meat made out of chocolate. And the coconut thing starts up again too.

I start to get really pissed off, and that’s what trips the circuit breaker and ends the dream.

Sure, it;s not exactly Fellini, but it was such a vivid and particular dream.

And of course, super Canadian.

That’s all for today folks. Oh wait… plus my vid.

Have a great Sunday!

Saturday Linksplosion #2

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Time for another link-gasm, folks! Let’s share together.

First up, one strictly for the ladies, a song that I think every single one of you will enjoy, period.

Trigger warning : it’s done in the style of a song for a musical.

First up, full disclosure, menstruation is the number one reason I am glad to be male.

When I first learned the truth of what ladies have to go through every frigging month, it just seemed so terribly wrong. So unfair. Bleeding from their most intimate area for five days out of every month? That’s sixty days a year of bleeding! That is two whole months out of every fucking year they have to put up with that shit!

And it’s not just bleeding either. That would be bad enough. But they get bloating, cramps, hormonal mood swings they can’t do anything to control, and a host of other nasty shit.

That was pretty upsetting to learn, and I learned it early because I have two older sisters. I can only imagine that it must be catastrophically worse to find out that shit is going to be happening to you.

For that reason alone, I feel a sort of guilt towards women, like we men owe them something for putting up with all that awfulness so we don’t have to.

Being the gender that makes the babies is not easy.

Back to the actual video, I love the upbeat and artfully silly style it uses. Awesome stuff. I think my favorite moment is when she dances across the scene with all the jocks in the locker room.

The timing is perfect and she does it so well!

And then we have this perfectly ordinary little scene.

It's like the sad little playroom in a children's hospital.

It’s like the sad little playroom in a children’s hospital.

But this scene holds a truly amazing secret.

See that unicorn over there?

Holy shit, rainbows!

Holy shit, rainbows!

It’s a freaking CAKE! yes, that entire unicorn is cake. And not just any cake. It’s rainbow cake. Because what else would you find inside a unicorn but rainbows?

The cake is a creation of The Tatooed Bakers, and needless to say, it is their flagship work. An entire life sized unicorn made out of rainbow cake. Un freaking believable.

The things they can do in cake these days! When I was a kid, you were lucky if you could read the writing.

Next, we have this interesting trailer for an upcoming series that may or may not be a comedy.

The trailer certainly doesn’t seem all that funny, but the whole thing seems like it is pregnant with comedic intent and really wants to be a parody of that old fashioned prime time soap opera genre, as well as the classic “blood, lust, greed, and betrayal” type trashy novel. Reminds me of SCTV.

The trailer makes it look like they just basically made something in exactly that style, which I suppose is some sort of technical achievement but I can’t imagine why I would watch it.

But it is loaded with some serious comedic talent, and certainly the tableau they present is extremely ripe for some very funny comedy. The genre takes itself extremely seriously and is laden with repeated tropes.

And it hasn’t been parodied recently. That makes for very fertile ground for comedy.

So color me intrigued, but a little puzzled. I am willing to watch an episode before I make up my mind, of course, but I feel like I am getting mixed signals.

Then we have this amazing story of people finding a way to flip traditional paradigms of what you need to do in order to turn a profit.

What a simple and amazing and absolutely beautiful idea. Buy people’s debts, and then instead of using professional thugs with the souls of sociopathic crocodiles to bully people into paying, you help them get to the point where they CAN pay, and then you get a lot more money because you are no longer trying to get blood from a stone.

If someone doesn’t have the money, all those scumbags can do is make them feel worse about it, and you know what? That leads to depression and depression leads to more poverty.

The genius of CFS2 is that it realizes that if you make people happier and help them find money or work, they will not only pay back the debt, but they will do it gladly because they feel so grateful for your help.

This is a business model that works, and I hope it spreads like mad. If I was a philanthropist looking to get the most public good for my dollar, this would be a great karmic investment.

Make money by improving people’s lives? What could be better than that?

And finally, we have my little vid of the day, which also talks about how to use capitalism to save the world.

Specifically, with a Global Minimum Wage define not in the volatile and simplistic language of currency but a more solid and dependable language of lifestyle.

What we want is for the whole world to live the same sort of life that we, the global One Percent, currently enjoy. To bring every human being in the world up to our level of civilization (but not of consumption) so they can lead the safe, stable, comfortable lives we all take for granted.

The Global Minimum Wage (really, more of a Global Minimum Lifestyle) would not be easy to achieve. It would require massive political reform in countless nations, a very large and detailed set of rules and regulations and an inspection and enforcement mechanism with real teeth in order to make it stick, and a major realignment of how we think about the world and all us crazy naked beach apes living on it.

But it’s a goal to work towards, something for global relief efforts to focus upon making real instead of all these NGO’s tilting at windmills as they all try to fix a massive problem with band-aid solutions.

Many fingers might save the dam, but they don’t fix it.

We need the power of capitalism to do that, and the way to do that is to harness it for the good of the world.

Capitalism is a game, and we control the rules.

We can change them if they stop working for us.