I took OAC calculus (grade 13 in canada, which they got rid of a few years ago) and needless to say, i sucked at math.  on one test, which i got 21/37 my teacher wrote “even though your calculations are wrong, your sketch is accurate based on your findings.  Good work!”  i think he was being ironic.  my head nearly exploded just looking at all the things i had to study:  conavity, asymptotes, functions, limits.  i think i got 50% at the end.  being the dissillusioned soul that i was back then, i wanted to study science in uni so i took calculus in summer school and bumped my mark up to an 80%.  Luckily i didn’t end up applying to any science majors in uni, or that would’ve been a very unhappy four years for me. 

People always told me i was a good writer, but looking back my writing wreaked of cliches and disorganization.  my high school essays sucked.  A good portion of my university ones as well.  The fact i did well in these courses attests more to the mediocrity of my classmates than any personal merit.  one thing i think i was truly good at was creative writing.  my god, some old scripts and poems i wrote were brilliant!  here’s a poem i wrote for my high school writer’s craft course.

Da Man

I went to a bar just to sit and relax
I order a beer along with some snacks
I always come here when i just want to think
i reach for a coaster as i’m handed my drink
when i glance down i see three flies on the rim
one looks at me cross-eyed, he looks rather dim
the others wave to me and then say hello
forget him they say, he’s drunk as a wino
this drunk barfly burps and turns to his friends
“Who da Man?” he asks shaking his rear end
“You da Man!” the two others shout with glee
“I’m da Man” the rowdy barfly agrees
For a moment i think i’m losing my mind
and i vow to never again drink moonshine
i see the drunk barfly buzz by my face
he lands on my nose with drunk barfly grace
staring into my yes he asks in determination
“You da Man!” I finally shout in resignation

i dont think the barfly was the only one drunk when this was written…

anyways, i won’t divulge details because who knows if she’ll ever see this blog one day.  just for me personally, i don’t think relationships should be complicated.  i mean, it works or it doesn’t.  this doesn’t mean you don’t work at it through hard times, but at the same time, if it always feels like you have to be the one to push it forward – something’s wrong! 

i’m at the age where all my friends are in relationships, or want to be.  i have a friend who has it all – her own condo, a career, happy family and social life – all that’s missing is that one special guy to share it with.  so she went on e-harmony where she went on a blitz of dates over 6 months.  not surprisingly, most of her dates were duds, but she did get a few consession prizes.  one lawyer who she’s still seeing, even though she worries about practical issues – he’s too short, he works too much, etc. 

another friend, we’ll call her beth, has been dating this guy for two years, and they recently bought a condo together.  she’s lively, bubbly and a social butterfly.  he’s possibly the most inert passive person i could ever imagine her being with.  talking to him is like pulling out teeth. 

me:  so you have siblings? 
him:  yup. 
me:  umm…a brother, a sister? 
him:  a sister. 
me:  okay, i’m just going to talk to that wall over there now

i have issues with people who don’t make effort to befriend their partner’s friends and family.  i mean, fine, it’s not like he’s dating me, but it should be important for him to want to know the people in her life.  i remember a discussion me and my friends had about beth’s bf, and whether or not he was a “good catch.”  we all decided that beth considered him a good catch, because he was attractive, steady career, and although lacking certain personality, had enough other characteristics to make her work hard to keep the relationship going.    he’s not boyfriend material, he’s husband material. 

my point is…i don’t really have a point.  i’m just building on tangents at this point.  okay, here’s my point.  all of my friends are searching for love, and making more consessions than i think i would.  there’s nothing wrong with being proactive, and…i dunno…making sacrifices.  but all of it seems kinda unnatural to me.  i don’t know anyone with a great love story.  love it seems has become entirely too practical.  among my circle of friends at least.  

i was helping out a friend at an art camp last week, and she was showing the kids a picture of the LOVE sculpture by robert indiana.  she asked them why do you think the “o” is skewed like that.  i expected the kids to say something like for visual interest or watever.  then this 10 year old boy named harrison said, in a profound way that only kids can do, “because love is imperfect.”

sculpture by robert indiana, new york

i understand how hard it can be to find love, as imperfect as it may be.  so i’m not going to judge my friends for their choices.  sometimes, you just figure this is as close as i’m going to get.

song:  electric ghosts    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u1vbbpzn4c

all in a day's hard work

what an amazing weekend of sailing.  i just got back from my first regatta, and i’m actually a bit tipsy right now (i’m such a light weight) so forgiveness if this post is a bit all over the place.  alcohol + dehydrated + sunburn = spinny room!  before this weekend, i’d been out maybe 6 or 7 times.  i normally sail tuesdays, which is only one race.  this weekend, i got in 5 races over two days, which increased my understanding by like 100%.  i’m so much more confident being in the pit now, and working the sheets (which in sail speak means ropes).  we did good this weekend.  one 1st, three 2nd’s and one 3rd. 

my legs are super bruised, from having to climb under the boom so often.  and we had a few close calls with other boats over right of way, and i thought we were going to crash into them for sure.  lots of yelling.  but apparently, it’s all about not letting the other boat intimidate you and standing your course.  omg, sail boats are amazing things.   the physicality, the physics, and weather – you have to understand it all.  there’s so much nuance to teh sport.  moving one rope like one inch makes such a difference. 

it’s only 6:30 pm, and i am exhausted.  i’m going to lie down for a bit.

on atoms…

if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would only be about the size of a fly – but a fly many times heavier than the cathedral.  it was this spaciousness that had Rutherford scratching his head in 1910. 

it is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion.  when two objects come together in the real world – billiard balls are most often used for illustration – they don’t actually strike each other.  rather the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other.  were it not for their electircal charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.  when you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy. 

on the ocean depths…

there are still no submersibles that can go anywhere near the depth of the Mariana Trench and only five, including the Alvin, that can reach the depths of the “abyssal plain” – the deep ocen floor that covers more than half the planet’s surface.  in 1977, Alvin found teeming colonies of large organisms living on  and around deep-sea vents off the coast of the Galapagos Islands – tube worms over ten feet long, clams a foot wide, shrimps and mussels in profusion, wriggling like spaghetti worms.  they all owed their existence to vast colonies of bacteria that were deriving their energy and sustenance from hydrogen sulfides – compounds profoundly toxic to surface creatures – that were pouring steadily from the vents.  this was a world independent of sunlight, oxygen or anything else normally associated with life.  this was a living system based not on photosynthesis, but on chemosynthesis.

tubeworms

huge amounts of heat and energy flow from these vents.  two dozen of them together will produce as much energy as a large power station, and teh range of temperatures around them is enormous.  the temperature at the point of outflow can be as much as 760 degrees Fahrenheit, while a few feet a way the water may be only 2-3 degrees above freezing.  a type of worm called an alvinellid was found living right on the margins, with the water temperatures 140 degrees warmer at its head than at its tail. 

it also answered one of the great puzzles of oceanography – why oceans don’t grow saliter with time.  millions of gallons of fresh water evaporate from teh ocean daily, leaving behind their salts.  deep sea vents act as filters.  as water is taken down into the crust, salts are stripped from it, and eventually clean water is blown out agian.  the process can take up to ten million years to clean an ocean. 

on genetics…

for the most part our fate and comfort – and even our eye colour – are determined not by individual genes but by complexes of genes working in alliance.  that’s why it is so hard to work out how it all fits together. 

how fast a man’s beard grows, for instance, is partly a funciton of how much he thinks about sex (because thinking about sex produces a testosterone surge). 

dunno what kind of sex this guy's thinking about!

on human evolution…

one of teh hardest ideas for humans to accept is that we are not the culmination of anything.  there is nothing inevitable about our being here.  it is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that was programmed to produce us. 

in late 2000 Nature and other publications reported on a Swedish study of the mitochondrial DNA of 53 people, which suggested all modern humans emerged from Afica within the past 100,000 years and came from a breeding stock of no more than 10,000 people.  Modern europeans, and perhaps people farther afield, are descended from no more than a few hundred Africans who left their homeland as recently as 25,000 years ago.

(Here’s the reply the teacher received the following day)

Mrs. Stelman

so i’m finally moving out of my parent’s basement…into my sister’s old room upstairs!  ah ha!   did u see what i did there?  i mislead you guys into thinking i was actually progressing into adulthood by moving out, but no, i am merely tired of living in a darkened underbelly of my parent’s house.  i need sunlight or else i get sleepy, and althogether unproductive with my time.  i’m like a bird in that sense.  like when you put a cloth over their cage, they think it’s night and fall asleep.   that’s me in a nutshell

anyways, i’ve spent the past week moving all the stuff from my sister’s room into my old bedroom upstairs (not to be mistaken with my bedroom in the basement).  holy crap, she has a lot of crap.  the girl collects EVERYTHING.  i found bags of those knick knacks they give away at business conventions (my sister is in HR).  she has stacks of old newspaper clippings.  shelves of stuffed animals and other memorabilia (including a coke can commemorating the blue jays back to back world series wins).  i swear, the pack rat mentality is genetic!  and then i had to haul my stuff from the basement up, not one, but TWO flights of stairs!   the move isn’t over yet, but i’m quite impressed with the transformation. 

in fact i was standing back admiring my handiwork, when my dad wanders into the room.  he told me close the windows when i go to bed.  and i’m like why?  and can you guess what he told me? 

IN CASE SOMEONE CLIMBS IN THROUGH MY WINDOW AT NIGHT

me: whaaa?  Why would anyone climb in through my window at night?! 
dad:  it’s dangerous out there.  Don’t you hear the news?  it happens all the time!   
me:  we live in mississauga, not new york city.  you’re so paranoid!  do you know what that means?  
dad:  no
me:  it means you think something bad is always going to happen
dad:  yeah, i always think the bad thing first.

and then he laughs and leaves the room.  i have no idea where he gets this paranoia from.  the only time police drive through our neighborhood is to ticket someone for not coming to a full stop at stop signs!  (which happened to my sister.  for realz.  they pulled her over right in front of our house!)  my dad even installed metal bars across all the basement windows.  so if there was ever a fire in the basement, i woulda been screwed.  i so need to get my own place.  my house is a death trap!  fire hazards, killers climbing in through windows, that jar of salt i used to season my food with for years until i discovered it was MSG.  the fact that i am still alive today is a testament to my keen survival skills.  im like a ninja wrapped in an assasin, covered in mafia, double dipped in xena warrior princess!  except i never could carry off the metal boustier, leather pleated skirt and circle boomerang look… 

eat frisbee dirtbags!