There is something I haven’t told any of you blog visitors before - I have a chronically bad problem with making a website and then losing interest and abandonning it before it gets anywhere. Over the years I have had countless re-incarnations of old sites I have once build, and even a new one thrown in here and there, but they all end up the same - dead in the water.

To stop that from happening I have decided that I need to put in place a schedule to follow! Without a schedule then I’m just going to continually forget to keep up with this and this’ll die to. I would really rather it not, personally. So yes, back to the schedule. I will start posting a minimum of three times a week, and the posts will show up at least every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I might throw in an extra one or two here and there, but don’t get too excited because I am very busy being tired after commuting for an hour and a half every night to get home from the city!

So yes, make sure you mark those days on your calendar and come back to read all of the new posts!

Well yesterday was the day - half a million people lined the streets of Toronto to see the annual Santa Claus Parade. There were children everywhere sitting on the pavement excited, yelling and screaming, asking their parents when Santa was coming… Everyone was excited! That was until the 2-hours of waiting and 40-minutes of freezing rain came along.

The parade was set to start on the North end of the city to head South at 12:30pm, but already by 12:00pm at the end of the route the streets were being lined with camping chairs and blankets on the sidewalk. Sure, at this point 90% of these chairs were empty, being guarded by a lonely parent, but the streets were filling up. By 1:00pm everyone assumed that Santa wouldn’t be too far away and so the streets were suddenly flooded with children pushing to the front of the crowds and parents trying to make sure they get there. I personally found this whole thing to be sheer insanity - why would anyone want to come out into the streets on a day like that!? Now, I have no idea what the temperature was on Sunday, but I can tell you it was insanely cold! (From my Australian perspective) Within a matter of about 10-minutes once everyone had taken their spot and stopped running around the chill started to seep in. The children slowly became more and more recluded into the folds of their blankets and the parents started hopping from foot-to-foot behind them. Apparently winter had arrived to see Santa too. During the 2-hour wait we had in store for us (Santa was apparently slow getting going) we experienced 40-minutes of freezing rain, followed by a few minutes of snow. We also suffered through winds shuffling between the buildings and the sheer lack of movement that let all this go straight through the skin, and of course the rain had formed puddles along the pavement. Now all the children’s blankets were soaked and unusable. No one could move, otherwise they would lose their spot! What fun it was.

Suddenly, as if the children all caught a fever with the picking-up winds that made them delerious - I started to hear more and more children tell their parents that they wanted to go home. I was surrounded by a group of about 5, 3 of which asked this exact question. One of the children I was standing near pleaded to go home, saying that she’d watch it on TV later. But no, not a single parent gave in. We all stood patiently, waiting for Santa. About an hour into this long wait a thunder of marching band trumpets and drums echoed through the streets. Hundreds of clowns, followed by postal workers collecting letters to Santa and the band marching through passed us. The children were showered with candy. Then they were gone. It was a glimmer of hope, taunting us as we stood in the cold for another hour after that. A little cruel, don’t you think?

But, in the end the parade started. Float after float, all clever tools of advertising for companies like McDonald’s and WalMart, and all surrounded by countless filler - people dressed in costumes for close to no reason, with no relation to the float they’re walking with. The parade went on for another hour at least, with huge gaps in between the floats sometimes lasting 10-minutes at a time. But in the end it happened. In the end… Santa came!

And then he left…

As he approached you could hear the roar of the shivering crowd, screaming out to their idol, the one they had come all this way to see. His voice boomed, “HO! HO! HO!”, over a loud speaker and walking christmas trees circled his float. And then about 30-seconds later he was gone… After all that waiting someone had clearly stepped on the gas pedal. He went past faster than any other float, most of which passed at a crawl. Maybe Santa was cold? Either way, Santa quickly past and with him the crowds went into a frenzy. New friends that had met each other in the two hours of waiting suddenly said goodbye and charged off. Another 40-seconds after he was gone there wasn’t a single person standing still on the pavement anymore, and about 75% of people were just walking in the middle of the street to get away from the cold and to get home to a heater.

It’s amazing what alure a fat man in a red suit can have. All of us, all half a million, stood in freezing rain for the man… and all we got was 40-seconds!  Ah well, at least the children were happy. Either that or they were too cold to complain. All I can say is that Starbucks must have made a killing that day…

Wouldn’t it be nice to sit down, watch some TV, maybe read a book - and when it’s time to go to bed actually be able to fall asleep without waiting for hours?? The “Tired Button” simply isn’t enough anymore…

Lately I have once again started to contribute to society, and to do that I have gotten a job! Naturally it comes with all the perks, like a salary and something to do during the day. So it’s a pretty good deal if you ask me! Unfortunately, it comes along with a strange need to get there. For some reason the people at CIBC didn’t consider that when they started up their company! Well to put it simply, I need to catch the GO Train every morning to commute with countless others into the city, all the way from Whitby, Ontario. The train ride takes about 40-minutes (since I get an express) but in order to get to the train on time I have to be awake by 5:30am. Now THAT is a serious issue. Before getting this job I became accustomed to sleeping in until 10am, 9am at the absolute least. That means I am getting up 3 and a half hours earlier, every morning! Let’s just say that translates into me being very tired at particular times of the day. However, no matter how tired I am, I can never get to sleep.

My tiredness seems to operate like this - I wake up early in the morning, and am incredible tired to the point of having to struggle to get out of bed. I am then fine after breakfast and a shower, and then I head off to work. I then start to feel a little groggy mid afternoon, especially when there’s no work to be done. Once I leave work I am fine again. Then I don’t get tired until around 10pm. So, naturally I occasionally choose to go to bed around that time! The logical thought process behind this would be, since I am feeling tired at 10pm, maybe I should go to bed at 10pm. It never works. Generally, by the time I am ready to go to bed, I am awake again, and then I spend a good hour lying in bed thinking, “this sucks”, or, “what a waste of time…” EVENTUALLY I get to sleep, but it is incredibly inconvenient to not be able to fall asleep instantly. Especially when I wake up tired in the morning! It doesn’t make sense. Throughout the day, suddenly out of no where I have an overwhelming urge to close my eyes and sleep - as if someone had hit a button, a tired button. But at night, that person is on a coffee break!! In the end, though, I think it has something to do with the getting ready for bed process. When I start to think that I am tired, I am generally sitting around doing nothing. But when I get ready for bed, I am up and moving. Hence, I have come to the conclusion that it must be the activity - my body has realised that something is happening and has decided that it should send some energy my way, to get me through. That energy doesn’t get used, and hence I stay awake.

This becomes especially evident when the following occurs:

I am ready for bed, all the preparation is done. I am lying in bed watching TV, all rugged up and ready to go to sleep. I decide that what I’m watching sucks and I’m extremely tired anyway, so I reach over, pick up the remote and turn the TV off………… And I’m perfectly awake.

I have had enough of the tired button, it gets pushed throughout the day. I want more. I am sorry but it is simply infuriating! When, oh Mr/Mrs/Miss/Ms Scientist… (have to be all inclusive there to be politically correct) … when will you invent the sleep button that’s not on a computer!?

You may have spent the past 4-weeks saving every last penny you own, skimping on the bare essentials just to get buy. You may have JUST enough money to get you through to your next paycheck - and then your boss goes and starts spending. Soon enough, you’re well into the red and you don’t know what you’re going to do. There’s not even enough money to buy a train ticket to get into town for work, those train tickets are expensive you know… What are you going to do?!

I’m sure the majority of you are thinking that: 1) You would never let yourself get that low in funds, and 2) If you WERE you wouldn’t let the boss spend it!! Well that’s all well and good to say that now, but just listen to what I have to say and we’ll see how you feel afterwards.

Ok - so here’s one of my scenario’s to get the ball rolling: Imagine you have fallen onto tough times financially. Your finances are quickly sinking into the red and your future is starting to look a little bleak - no more fancy restaurant dinners, no gas in your car, not even a DVD rental. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. You have a new job lined up to start very shortly, and after two weeks you will get your first paycheck. You study your finances into the early hours of the morning and figure out exactly how to afford three weeks of transport into work, once that’s done you’re home free. The first paycheck is more than you have all together at the moment, and once you’ve reached that you’re saved. But, with this plan to work to be able to stretch the money through to three weeks, that means you’ll be packing a lunch (and not a very extravagant one) and hauling it into work every day, no exceptions. On your first day you meet your new boss once again (clearly you met them in the interview process) and start to meet your new co-workers. Everyone else has better lunch than you, but that’s ok, you’ll have lunch like theirs soon enough. All seems to be going well when it happens…………. Your boss asks you out for lunch two days later.

What are you going to do?

There’s no way that you can tell your brand new boss that your finances are so bad at the moment that you can’t even afford a simple food-court lunch from downstairs - if they knew that, there’s no way that they’d trust you to work for them! I mean, if you can’t figure out how to save your money, what hope is there for you working for THEM? You think about the alternative - tell them the truth, bosses appreciate that. They might even feel sorry for you and offer you an advance on your paycheck or a raise, or, even better, they’ll pay for lunch! All of these questions race through your head in an instant, and when you notice that your boss is looking at you with that, “why is it taking them so long to answer?” look on their face, and you instinctively accept. It’s like a survival reflex - when someone comes up to you with a knife and asks you if you have a gun timidly, you don’t say no… it’s just common sense. So within that instant you have added a $10 minimum to your budget for lunch with the new boss. Normally this wouldn’t be a major issue, but with your finances the way they are now, that $10 means you will have to sacrifice your last train ticket, which means you can’t get into work for the third week of your employment. You’ll have to call in sick for the three days it takes for payroll to be processed. Once you’ve gotten your pay on Wednesday you’ll be back in the office. I mean, it wont look great to take three days off in your first three weeks, but anyone can get an easy gastro-related doctor’s certificate… It’s better than admitting that you’re broke to your boss!

So now I address you skeptics who latched on to my 2) before - what would you do in this situation?

We can go through all the planning in the world, financially down to the cent if we have to. But it only takes one person to completely throw off the whole plan, in this case, your boss to throw out your whole financial life-life, leaving you faking gastro for three days… I guess the moral of the story is: if you’re desperate when it comes to finances but starting a new job, make sure you budget in that lunch with the boss. It may never happen - that’s an easy $10 added to your budget for leeway - but you never know when it will…

Inevitably when I meet someone new here in Canada we start discussing exactly why it is that I have an Australian (or is it English?) accent, and through that conversation the topic eventually turns to why I have come to Canada. When I am asked this question I revert to the same speech:

“… Well I graduated from high school at the end of last year and I wanted to take a break before moving on to university, because honestly I think I’d go insane if I went straight into a couple more years of school. So basically I had family to mooch off of in a foreign country, and so it was a done deal!”

Normally this conversation leads into questions like, “What are you studying at university?”, or “When are you going back?”… But a few times I have been asked a very perplexing question - “What school did you go to?” Now this usually immediately makes me wonder if they have ever been to Australia, or more specifically, Adelaide. I consider how else they could possibly know what the names of the schools are in the area, and in the end I come to the conclusion that no matter how they do, they must know SOMETHING about the names of the schools in at least the Australian country - one or two even! Well I tell them that I went to Westminster in South Australia and the blank look generally follows. It is at this point that I realise that they have no clue what the hell Westminster is, apart from the fact that it’s a school. Through further investigation, I often find that these people have never been to Australia, have no ties to Australia, and don’t even have any plans to visit Australia. This makes me wonder, why would someone ask that question if they knew that they would have no clue when it comes time to answering?

Firstly I would like to point out that this is not a common occurance. The whole time I have been outside Australia I have been asked this three, maybe four times at most. However, that doesn’t lessen the confusion. So how can I go about answering this question? Let’s start with what I have observed when this has happened to me:

I’ve noticed that the people that ask these questions are usually the older, more highly educated ones in the group. They’re usually either a high-ranking manager in a company, or someone who holds various degrees in some sort of important field. So could it simply be an attempt at intellectual small-talk… On top of this I have noticed that conversations involving this question are often brief and awkward. They usually occur when I am being introduced to the person who asks the question - during the introduction, the introducer steps back to see if conversation will ensue, and it generally just stops awkwardly and flails around on the floor like a fish. This is usually after the, “what school”, question. So based on this observation, could it simply be the person clutching at straws to keep the overly-awkward conversation running as smoothly as possible? I am the one who introduces the topic of school, is it only natural for someone in this situation to take what they can, in this case school, and do their best to run with it? What other questions would come to mind on the topic? This could very well be the reason.

Whatever the overall reason for asking this question is for these people, all I have to say about it is that it’s just plain wierd! … and it’s never helpful to the conversation either, it always ends awkwardly when I answer and they have no idea what it is …

This is the simple story of what happened to a friend and I when we were travelling on an overnight train from Munich to Venice - and it serves as a good warning to anyone doing the same! So if you plan on being in the area anytime soon, listen up and you just might avoid an argument.

So to give you some background, when you travel by train through Europe you have close to unlimited options. One particular option is a night train, which is preferred by many because it saves time - you’re moving while you sleep and hence you don’t have to waste a day travelling! On a night train you are presented with even more options! The train is divided into classes, and you can usually choose from one of three: sleeper class, couchette class or seated class. In sleeper class each compartment in a car has two or three beds in it. In couchette class each compartment in a car has six beds in in. In seated class each compartment in a car has six seats in it. Which you choose depends entirely on how much you have to spend and what your preferences are, I personally prefer couchette class, otherwise you could end up sitting in a small room with six people, close to no room to move. It’s not fun.

Now back to the story - on the way to Venice we had chosen our night train, which was a direct train. However, we could not get a couchette and hence we were forced to resort to seated class. In the past we have done this and on one occasion we even got the compartment to ourselves, so it wasn’t too bad. That was not the case this time. When my friend and I boarded the train we met two American girls that we would be sharing the compartment with, and soon after a South African couple joined us too - it was a full house, and we quickly realised that this might not be the most comfortable ride of our lives. Just after the train set off from the station we realised something, the compartment we were in could clearly be used as a couchette class compartment if need be, because there were beds folded up against the wall above the seats! Being the opportunists we are, we chose to fold down the beds and each took one, thus making us perfectly comfortable for the long ride to Venice!

It would be perfect if the story ended there, but seeing as the title is “The Fight for Better Seats”, I somehow think there might be some conflict hidden in this story somewhere. During the night, possibly around 1am, one of the conductors came through the car to check tickets and passports, as is pretty routine even on night trains. During this visit the conductor (a very unpleasant Italian woman) realised that we were currently living beyond our means - we had only paid for a seat and yet we were enjoying the luxury of a bed. Now what most of us figured is that we weren’t hurting anyone and the beds were there to be used anyway. What is the point of having the beds there if they aren’t going to be used!? Well, as soon as the woman realised what we were doing she demanded that we get down off the beds, fold them back up and sit in the seats we were assigned - “You paid for a seat, and that is what you will get”. So with all of us still half asleep we slowly mustered out strength to do as we were told. We slowly managed to get everyone down and the beds folded away, with the exception of one which we were using to hold luggage. The woman was satisfied and went on her way without a word. At this point we were all tired, grumpy and uncomfortable and there was much complaining about the situation. By the sounds of it we weren’t the other ones either - from down the car we heard someone screaming, “Yeah!? I paid for water too, where the hell is THAT!?” Apparently the conductor had used the same line on them, but the passengers were fighting back. Apparently the conductor also didn’t care that the car bathrooms lacked any and all water, just as long as we were all seated. In fact, we were later offered bottle water for the price of €3 - the water was complimentary to the sleeper class passengers.

Within an hour another conductor (an equally unpleasant man) made the rounds, and then the fighting began again. As I mentioned, one of the beds was still being used to hold our luggage, which we had decided could not fit comfortably anywhere else. We figured that we were USING the beds per-sey, and hence there wouldn’t be a problem. We were wrong. The man immediately demanded that we take the luggage down and put it on the floor. When asked (pointedly) if he wanted us to be crammed in with it on the floor, he replied, “Is no problem for me”, and stood and watched as I and the other guy in our car struggled to pull down the insanely heavy bags (those American’s bags must have been LOADED) and pretty much either dumped them on the floor, trying to force them under the seats… or into the small area above the door for storage! Once the bed was folded and the conductor was satisfied, he nodded satisfaction to himself and continued on. So what happened to us from this point onwards? Well everyone took up places sitting very uncomfortably, trying to get to sleep. The American girls had sleeping pills so they had no problem, but the rest of us suffered. I, for one, was not going to sit up the whole night - I have never been able to sleep in that position well before and not be grumpy the next morning (well, grumpier than I usually would be) and so I took to what little space was left on the floor.

In the end we got to Venice alive, although tired. I guess the moral of the story is to have someone look out for the conductor if you’re paying for a seat, but getting a bed…

This morning when I was sitting downstairs after just having gotten dressed to go to work, I was faced with a problem. The shirt I was wearing today has three buttons down the side of each wrist cuff, and hence that means that there were a total of six buttons in reasonably hard to reach places to do up - to do these particular buttons up I was forced to use one hand to maneuver the button (the action hand), while the other one just sits there having the button jammed into it so it will stay still (the useless hand). It’s not like this was my first day wearing a shirt with difficult buttons on the cuffs, and so I just did it and got the job done… eventually.

Now I am right handed. Hence, my right hand is considered my stronger, dominant hand. It is the hand that I do everything with. If I need to write a note to my boss explaining exactly why I felt it neccessary to throw a computer out of a 24th story window, my right hand is the one to do it. If I need to throw a tennis ball at anyone in particular for some undisclosed reason, my right hand is the one to do it. Simply put, my right hand is my go-to-guy for anything and everything that can be done one-handed. However, after today that may very well change. In fact, I may start considering my left hand, my non-dominant hand, the one I go to when the right isn’t available, for certain task.

You may be wondering just what triggered this immense policy change on the subject of dominant hands, and how this has to do with buttons on my shirt sleeve… So I will tell you. Well I started to do up these buttons, starting with the right-hand side, of course. That means that I was using my left hand as the action hand, and the right was playing the role of useless. Overall there were no issues in my hand performing this task. Sure, it took a little longer than I would have wanted to spend on doing up a couple of buttons, but it got done in the end without any harm and so I was happy. Then it came to doing up the buttons on my left arm and the whole thing started to unravel. My right hand was, as usual, my action hand in this case, and my left was useless. Actually, to be honest both hands were completely useless. For some reason I couldn’t seem to grasp the concept of holding the button and feeding it through the hole in the shirt. That meant that my right hand would have to hold the button with my index and middle finger, while holding the shirt in place with the others. My right hand couldn’t manage this. It took my right hand over twice the time it took my left to do up these three buttons, and in the process from having my fingers digging into the side of a button for a little while there was mild pain involved. I was not impressed in any sense of the word.

During this ordeal I stopped for a moment to think - “if my right hand is so bloody dominant, then why the hell can’t it do up these damn buttons!?” I would like to apologise to anyone who thinks that it swearing and hence is not Australian, but I would prefer to retell this story honestly and that requires this language. Anyway, so I started to rethink the whole dominance situation of my two hands. I realised that while, yes, my right hand is indeed much stronger than my left (I’d say because it gets used a lot more) it is dominant in situations where strength is needed - say when I need a jar open, or when I need to top someone in strength of a hand shake (believe me, it is a very important topic) - it is no where near as helpful in delicate situations that require more maneuverability and dexterity to achieve the task - such as doing up a button (we can’t all use stripper-clasps). In the end it came down to the same argument that has plagued mankind for centuries, the argument of brain versus brawn. So simply put, my right hand is the ripped guy at the beach wearing not much and for some reason disturbingly shiny, while my left hand is the one sitting in his mother’s basement reading nuclear physics textbooks and destroying his “friends” in internet chess.

But that still begs the question - which is dominant? If we continue with the brain versus brawn argument, which is more dominant in the world today? Well, there is no answer to that question. In every situation it generally takes a combination of the two to overcome the opposition. It took brainy scientists to develop the bomb, but it took brawny soldiers to deliver it. It took brainy scientists to develop protien shakes, but it took brawny body-builders to overdose the stuff and end up to the point where they look like if you jab them with a pin that they would literally pop… But, if we take the argument down to its basest level, the lowest possible denominator - if the chess-playing mammas-boy and the strangely-shiny body-builder were about to “throw down” in a dark alley behind a bar somewhere because the chess-playing mammas-boy was stupid enough (he should know better) to calculate the mathematical possibility of the strangely-shiny body-builder realising that he’s chatting up a guy in drag… I would have to side with brawn.

So what is the overall conclusion of this peversely-sidetracked article? While I have recently come to recognise that my left hand can be extremely useful in several situations, I am still going to rely on my right hand as my dominant hand when I get into a bar fight… It can hit harder…

NOTE:
Now while I know this is probably going to be ignored, please don’t be offended if you believe you fit into any of the stereotypes I’ve mentioned in this article. I promise I did not mean you. I do not even know you, so for you “brainy” ones, think about how I could possibly refer to you if I don’t even KNOW you, and you “brawny” ones… Look! There’s something shiny behind you!!

As strange as this may sound to some people (especially people in the North American area, like Canada and the US who have grown up with it - I don’t know if they do in Europe or anywhere else) I have never experienced a Halloween before. Back home in Australia it is literally a non-event. It is printed on every calendar sold in the country, perhaps with the exception of the small-time charity calendars, who knows? However, even though everyone knows about it, about when it is and what people in some countries do - it is not celebrated at all in Australia. In fact, in my entire eighteen-years of life I can only remember two instances of it having any significance what so ever:

Once trick or treaters came to our door, and when I say once I mean only one group on only one year of my entire life. It was a pair of young boys in their school uniforms with plastic masks on, and a plastic bag. Luckily I had been to a birthday party recently and hence had candy to give out, but that’s all. A few years after, my friends and I decided to try out this Halloween trick or treating thing, just to see what we could get - between us all we got a packet of 2-minute noodles, an apple, some mints and $2 to share between the five of us… Let’s just say that it wasn’t a very bountiful harvest!

That was all my Halloween experience right there for you. However, this year was different. Because I am living in Canada at the moment, I got to see how the Canadians do their Halloweens, and trust me it was pretty exciting for me!! I wont go into details to explain exactly what I did, but I will point out a few of the interesting things that I noticed along the way, although I personally think that most people MUST have thought about all this at one point or another themselves.

During Halloween parents encourage their children to approach complete strangers and accept candy from them. Now I realise that this is the whole fun of the night for young children, some even make it their nights ambition to get as much candy as physically possible, but it does seem rather odd to me. Throughout my entire childhood I was bombarded with the “Stranger Danger” philosiphy, and one of the main points of this is do not talk to strange adults and do not accept candy from them!! When I was at primary school we actually watched a video that showed us a child (an actor, obviously) be approached by an adult, offered candy and then kidnapped - it is just not something you do, and everyone knows it! However, on Halloween children are taught to run up to a complete stranger’s door and practically beg for candy, and to continue doing this for a few hours, and what’s more, they’re often encouraged to approach strangers in costume, who are thus normally scary to the child and hence they wouldn’t approach them! Children are being told to approach people they’re naturally scared of here!! In fact, I even saw some parents speaking to their children who had had enough and wanted to go home, forcing them to keep going to get more candy - “Just one more house”. Now I realise they do this because they want their children to have the best possible experience with Halloween, which, of course, equals seventeen bags full of candy, but it just seems rather odd, and I would assume that a few children get left with mixed ideas from their parents. I even heard some children talking about coming out and doing it again tomorrow night - might be a little more dangerous on a night without so many people on the streets.

Another thing that seems rather counter-productive about the whole Halloween tradition is the mountains of candy that are amassed by each child over the course of the night. Parents all over the world have a huge fight on their hands when they want their children to put down the chocolate and move away from the lollypops, and to come and sit down and eat their vegetables. Candy is generally given as a sometimes treat, often for good behaviour, but on Halloween the children are given piles and piles of candy that, I would assume, would just make it all that much more difficult for parents to try to keep their children away from the stuff!

With all that said, though, I went trick or treating with my three-year-old cousin Shannon and I had an absolute blast. Both while I was walking Shannon up to the door to ask these strangers for candy, and when I was hanging back with the other adults watching their children from a distance (although many children were set out through the neighbourhood alone - natural with age, though, I suppose)… I had a great time and I want to know why we don’t celebrate it back home!