The Nose Does Know

Excuse me for being interested in anything and then sharing everything, but I just learned what to me is a fascinating fact.

While riding the beautiful blue-with-white-stripe metro in Montreal, have you ever come to a sudden stop in a station because of some suspected mechanical malfunction, been evacuated, and while biding your time on the platform before re-boarding smelled what you could have sworn was a strange fire, even though none could be seen?

That smell always struck me as strange, and not just because I couldn't see the source of it. The smell itself seemed awfully out of place. Now I know why: Bombardier, makers of our rubber-wheeled trains, saw fit to give them WOODEN brake pads. The smell after a sudden stop was so weird because in that very urban indoor environment with almost nothing but hard gleaming stone, plastic, and metal everywhere, I wasn't expecting the sweet smell of burnt wood. I expected something more metallic or acrid.

The engineer who passed on this info said that wood was chosen for the brake pads because it does the job of stopping the trains without causing any undue wear to the wheels (or could it possibly be the rails?), it is relatively inexpensive to replace, and it is a safer material to be under the carriages near the electric power sources because of its poor capacity for conducting electricity and heat.

Neat, hunh?

Walk A Mile In Another's Panties

No one had ever sent me a chain letter I was happy to receive til my buddy Brandy did in the dark days of January. It included a friendly explanation (with no evil threat of unending bad luck if I didn't comply--I hate those, and never send them on) and invited me to take part in a 'panty exchange' by sending a pair of new ones, tag attached, to a stranger whose specifictions were handwritten below: "hipster or thong, X-Large." If I did that, I would be rewarded in a few weeks with 36 new pairs for myself.

Here's how it works:

[WARNING: Only read the next tedious technical paragraph if you want to start up your own inspired exchange scheme. I cannot be responsible for any dizziness, vomiting, or unending bad luck you may experience after you read the following.]

Everyone in the chain receives two copies of the same letter of invitation and instructions. The first is addressed to you and includes at the bottom-left the name, address, and specs of the person you are to mail panties to; at the bottom-right the name, address, and specs of the person who has sent you the letter. The other enclosed copy is identical to the first but without any blanks filled in. You are to make 11 copies of the latter, personalize and fill them and your generic in, then send these along with one generic copy apiece to six of your friends. You mail your gift panties to the person noted at the bottom-left of the personalized letter you recieved (to the person who sent the letter to the person who sent it to you), then transfer the name, address, and specs of the person who sent you the letter into the left bottom corners of your form letter copies, and write your own name, address and specs into the right-bottom spaces. Then you personally address these before sending them and their generics off.

If everyone invited does what is asked of them, the person who sent you the letter will receive 36 panties from your friends and others, and you will receive the same number from all the friends of your friends, in ever-advancing loops of lingerie.

So far I've received five surprise thongs, and now have a reason to run for the mail instead of run from my bills. Need I say this is really fun? I hardly ever bother wearing underwear, but this flags not my enthusiasm for receiving these tiny bundles of suspense. Every pair and package is different. One woman even enclosed a tiny handmade well-wishing card with the black mesh lace-edged lowriders she'd chosen. A couple of other pairs were quite psychedelic and interesting. I've worn all of them for a day, except for the tasteful basic black cotton pair like I already had.

Besides getting lots of new underpants you might never think of for yourself, you also get a little social insight with this exchange. The panty choices make me wonder about the personalities and tastes of the women who've sent them to me. It's interesting to note that all my new panties so far have come to me through the friends and co-workers of only one of the six women I sent the letter to: Karina. (I can tell from the sender names and return addresses.) I suspected as much already, but this empirically confirms that Karina has a lot of creative and fun ladies in her life to whom she could send this letter. (She's a filmmaker and a programmer for the Rendez-Vous du Cinema Quebecois festival, go figure.) Perhaps the fact these women so quickly procured the panties and got them in the mail indicates that, like their pal Karina, they are organized go-getters, too.

Wherever you are, if you get this letter, I urge you to get off your ass and help cover someone else's. Even if only a few respond down the line, trust me, it's totally worth it.

If I'm lucky a few more of these presents will trickle in and spike up my spirits here and there until spring finally arrives. If I'm luckier still, by spring there will be someone I feel like showing these panties to.

Gardeners and Heros

I have had a lot of deep and enduring love from friends and family. I've had a lot of sexy romance in my life, too. I am extremely lucky. As a friend said to me the other day, "There are so many people in this world who wait in vain to be noticed, who have craved sex and love for years, even lifetimes, with only memories of a kiss or two to sustain them. Some without even that. You and I are lucky because someone, some time, chose us." He is right.

Even if after age 34 there isn't any more for me, I know this won't be one of my top five deathbed lamentations: "I wish I had made crazy intense sex more of a priority in my life." I have gone very far out of my way already to have this kind of excitement. At the expense of many other things I have missed few occasions to pursue loves that involved major obstacles, distances of various kinds--owing to geography, age difference, emotional unavailability, deception, inconsistency, addictions--that regularly inflamed my emotions to a very high and exhilarating, if often excruciating, pitch. A lot of incredible sex can come out of this. But many quieter, more modest, more essential and healthy elements have too often been missing from my relationships.

These are some of the things I have been thinking about as I feel my loneliness, my broken heart, and as I wonder about future love.

I have been thinking about something an artist and dear love of mine, Mariko, wrote. She painted for me a birthday card with a dead cow lying on its back, a bird flying overhead, and two bleeding horses eating grass side by side out in a field under a very bright sun. Everywhere in the picture there is both life and death. Above these creatures are the words: "Love feels like a Sunday afternoon spent grazing, doesn't it?"

Yes it does. Except when our own or a beloved's survival is imminently threatened, true love doesn't feel fierce and grasping. It is calm. It doesn't need to shove or rush. It is not temporal. It is comfortable to give and recieve this love.

In contrast, romantic love, the most exciting but most shallow and fleeting of loves, is about flattering narratives and racing pulses. It is heady and capricious. Above all it is about the thrill of egos feeding each other. It is about for a time seeing the best of what you wish to be reflected in the eyes of another. It is about editing out the messy straggly edges of yourself and your beloved so you can shoehorn your complicated and sometimes ugly lives and selves into a perfect vignette that is at once extremely personal and banal. A romantic lover asks of his object, "What can I do for you that will make me a hero in my own eyes?"

True love--the love of friends, brothers, mothers, and couples that are to last--doesn't often ask egoistic questions. Because more strong and stable, this love need not be so preening, anxious, and self-conscious. It tends to call for practical things that will, over time, serve each of the beloveds in equal measure. If one person bends for their beloved it is with the confidence and understanding that, naturally, this kindness will be returned at a later time; that when one in a pair helps and makes room for the other this enhances and deepens the relationship which will then be robust enough to provide support to both people further into the future. You know you are feeling this kind of love when you are moved to do something useful or comforting for someone without keeping score, without craving recognition. When, without thought of when you will next be served or humiliated, you want to go out of your way to let someone know, "I am with you in this life."

School Maze

Taking three night courses in different kinds of technical writing is too much for me. I've moved from slackerville to a 50 to 55 hour week of paid work, class attendance, and homework. This isn't as bad as it would be coming from someone else; it's not like I also have a child to raise or like my 30 hours/wk of brainless money-making taxes me. It's just that I'm finding it difficult to manage the other things of my life in the time left over, and it pains me to say to several inquiring loved ones, "I'll tell you what's going on in two weeks--if I possibly can." I have until now enjoyed the luxury of being able to have substantial conversations with most comers without nearly such long delays.

Until this session is over March 10, I basically cannot communicate with anyone for more than about ten minutes between Sunday afternoon and Thursday morning. Another unhappy concession is not being able to write in this blog nearly as often as I'd like.

On the up side, I'm not finding Cont Ed to be bobo at all. I'm learning new skills quickly since everything I learn in class is immediately applied. There are at least three items for reading or research and three to four writing assignments to be done each week.

My introductory Medical Writing course is a killer. It's tougher than anything I ever did in my Communication Studies BA. I had to dance all over the place to get into my university program so I was kind of shocked that anyone can just plunk down their money, walk into this class, and get slammed so hard. I think it's a challenging course for most, but it's especially difficult for people like me with no science background. I had to get an extension on an HIV drug clinical study results summary last week because it took me nine hours of reading, research, and analysis just to get ready to begin writing anything. It took seven internet searches and a conversation with an HIV-savvy nuclear engineer just to figure out what most of the study's abbreviations meant!

I am also learning by facing a teacher again rather than being one, for a change. Beyond having extensive experience in their respective fields (newspaper journalism, medical writing, and software manual production) my instructors are talented teachers as well. I am retrospectively critiquing my own teacherly performances in observing them and making mental notes as to how to emulate them when I teach or group-facilitate again.

My medical writing instructor I believe is making a mistake common to new teachers--one I've definitely made myself--of, in the interest of imparting as much useful information as is possible in a short course, throwing way too much at the students at one time. I'm really excited to be called upon to make lots of inferences and to do lots of self-directed research in order to complete my assignments (in contrast to the spoonfeeding of so many other courses I've taken in my life), but I am also so stressed out with how much homework there is that I worry I may have to drop this brain-tickling class or settle for a barely passing grade.

I definitely will have to if I don't stop here and get back to preparing my first study abstract for tomorrow night!