it's f-f-frickin' f-freezing

It's so cold that my car windows were frosted on the inside this morning. I drove to work with about 65-84% windshield visibility during the course of the commute. The brakes were stiff, the door sensors were registering false positives, and everything looks like a metaphor for obscured vision.

What gets your engine going?

So this guy gets carjacked over the weekend by gun toting youth, losing his BMW, cash and cellphone. While commiserating over beverages, one clever friend sends the stolen cellphone a text message promising attractive women and recreational drugs to lure the thieves out into the open. Needless to say, instead of attractive women and recreational drugs, the witless thieves rendezvous-ed with Columbus, Ohio's finest.

Let's sidestep the commentary on the state of today's world and go straight to the personal questions: What would the text message have to say for you to come out and play?


I'd fall for any of the following:
"Yo, I just trained up a Lucario. Want to battle?"
"OMG this is the best burger ever!"
"BSG marathon tonight."
"I got hockey tickets!"
"Three words: Jeopardy! in. HD."

Happy 2009

For posterity, I will record what I did in the first few hours of this new year.

Cheers with friends and faux champagne

I Swear

Pop Goes My Heart

Poker winning

A fox crossed the road

Fog

It was nearly 2 AM, so I decided to take the back roads home in order to avoid the RIDE police (or else it would be revealed how much pie I had eaten). For a winter night, it was balmy; where there is balm there is fog.

I've driven through fog before, but not like this. It was so thick I couldn't see more than 3 metres ahead of me. The suspended droplets of moisture refracted and reflected most of my headlights into a halo of diffuse light against a backdrop of pitch black. Good thing I decided to take the roads with no streetlights and sparse residences, eh?

During driving lessons, I would pretty much zone out about situational driving. It was boring, irrelevant and not applicable at the time. Fast forward to the present and even snippets of those memories become lifelines to grasp and clutch when just such a situation arises.

For the briefest moment, I felt a twinge of fear. It was dark out there (you know how Canadians are afraid of the dark). In that briefest moment, my fear took hold of my imagination and all the what-ifs bubbled into my consciousness. What if someone crashed in front of me? What if an axe-murderer jumped out from the ditch? What if the fog was actually a poisonous, sentient cloud of gas hellbent on destroying human life?


We fear the dark for the same reason we fear change: it is unknown. Not knowing what comes next bogs us down with possibilities. For whatever reason, most of the possibilities that spring to mind first are the bad things.

I'm in a big foggy patch of change at the moment. I don't feel well-equipped to handle this uncertainty, or the possibilities. There are days that I am scared into inaction. Driving home on a foggy winter night is a walk in the park by comparison; I have taken that road many times before, be it under bright skies or heavy rains. Did I zone out earlier during this particular life lesson?

I drove slowly, making sure I did not outpace the visibility my headlights afforded, careful to watch out for things on the road so that I wouldn't hit anything, or anyone. Driving through the fog, I hung on to the certainty that I knew my way home and that the fog would not last forever. The sun will rise and the road will become clear.

I wake up every morning cautious of what the day might bring, careful to not push too far forward too fast, dreading the possibility that I might get hurt -- or worse, hurt someone else. But even in the midst of this uncertainty, I know my way home and this uncertainty will not last forever. The Son has risen and the road is clear.

Porcelain Philosophy 14: Tears

Let tears flow of their own accord: their flowing is not inconsistent with inward peace and harmony.

Seneca

When we were wee, whiny, and wonderful, what were our reasons for crying?

If my memory serves correctly -- and though it shames me slightly to admit it -- I was a crier. Scraped elbows and knees, getting caught in misdeeds, losing a game, and getting lost were some of the reasons I would cry. As I got older, tears still sprung forth unbidden from my eyes, once in awhile, whenever I didn't get my way.

Somewhere along the way, the masculine gender identity was determined to be exclusive of the act of crying; as emotion manifest, crying was seen to be of the feminine sphere. It was (and still is) considered unmanly to shed tears. To that end, boys were whipped into bottling up their feelings and distilling it into potent potions of masculine ambition, agression and angst. In my (not-so-humble) point of view, this is bollocks. Male or female, the human head is more or less crafted from the same mold; the ductwork, fixtures and apertures are all the same. To associate crying, a natural physiological response that everyone is capable of, to one sex is chauvinism.


Matters of gender discrimination aside, crying was, for most intents and purposes, a selfish reaction. Waah, I scraped my knee and you need to help fix me. Waah, she took my toy and wouldn't give it back. Waah, I am being pushed around by brutish boors. As a child, those moments happened often, and so crying happened fairly often.

Our tears betray our motivations. What we care about most deeply in our hearts run like underground streams within us. When our barriers are broken and our foundations are shaken, we will spring leaks where it matters most.

I'm not sure when it all changed, but the tears do not come so easily now. When they do, the reason is not because I didn't get my way, nor is it because I am damaged, but because of the pain suffered by others. Maybe it's all part of growing up, or maybe it's just the physical maturation of my prefrontal cortex, but I think I know what I care most about now.