Category: General

Last week, I performed some minor work on my website. About the only visible change is to the formatting of the Date and Title of each weblog entry. The Date is now grey in colour, and the Title gets underlined with a green bar. Thus, multiple entries on a single day will be clearly delimited. (Okay, I admit I don’t make multiple entries very often, but it does happen!) I have been aware of the need to distinguish between the Date and Title for a while now, but I didn’t have the idea of how to do it (design-wise). I ended up borrowing the design from Chris Dunphy’s nerdsyndrome.com.

In addition to the above, I fixed the titles for each of the sub-pages under my website. This involved tweaking the Python script that I use to compile the pages. And each time I make a new weblog entry, the appropriate archive page gets updated too. So basically, I revised a lot of the glue that I use to put this site together.

And finally, as a minor detail of major importance, I replaced all link references to tea.math.ualberta.ca so they point to the current site www.madphilosopher.ca. The former doesn’t exist anymore, and this was necessary so that any graphics in my past entries will display properly.

With that, I’m hoping that the warts are mostly gone and that it all works now.

I’ve been sitting in KFC for about an hour working on some new pages for my website. This particular KFC in my neighbourhood is nice because they sometimes play interesting music beyond the typical canned music that fast food places play. But not today. I’m hearing “Lady in Red” for about the third or fourth time. Maybe it’s time I leave…

Anyway, I got some good work done, including a Websites I Read page that should be up by the time you read this entry. Check it out.

Sometimes things from your past can come back to haunt you. A story from my brother-in-law Wayne:

Remember our old car, the Oldsmobile that mom used to drive? I inherited it when mom was no longer driving it. When we bought our Camry, we looked for someone to give it to—since it was a gift to me, we passed it on.

Heather, a girl across the hallway in our apartment in Calgary, needed a car. She had mental illness problems, was on low income, and certainly couldn’t afford to buy a car. Originally she asked if she could buy it, and was impressed when we were willing to give it to her. Great solution!

We moved back to Edmonton 6 months later. At that point she hadn’t registered it yet, so we double-checked to see if she still wanted it, and if she needed help getting it registered, etc. She still wanted it, and she didn’t want help getting things arranged. She was capable.

So we moved, and forgot all about the car. We were clean of it.

Until . . .

A week ago Sunday (July 25) we received a phone call from the city impound lot in Calgary. They had a burgundy Oldsmobile of which we were the last registered owners. Great! Our car was returning from the dead! It had never been registered in three years. So we debated what to do: Claim it wasn’t ours and forget about it? Or go back, pay the impound fee and claim the car? We called Heather and asked her about it. Initially she said she didn’t want it, but wanted to think about it for day. The next day she claimed she sold it to a friend last November. Right. Obviously she was in over her head. So we decided to reclaim the car, sell it, and try to make about $1000. Instead of mucking with ownership questions, we didn’t tell Heather, in case she (or her idiot boyfriend) wanted to make things ugly.

I made a bunch of phone calls to figure things out, but that was Tuesday, when we were supposed to be leaving on holidays. We left it in the impound lot in the mean time ($10/day storage fee). On Tuesday (yesterday) I would go to Calgary, buy insurance and registration and pay to get the car out of the impound lot. Then drive it to Edmonton and put it in the Auto Trader. It seemed a simple solution, and we couldn’t think of any hiccups along the way, short of tires being flat or needing a boost to get going (I took tools just in case). I even pre-arranged to have a locksmith cut a new key, since Heather had the only ignition key.

I caught a ride to Calgary Tuesday, and by 9:30 had picked up my insurance. Picked up a new license plate and registered the car by 10:30. Off to the impound lot! I paid the $240 to get it out of the lot. The locksmith was just finishing my new key when the security guard escorted me to my new car.

That’s when the wheels fell off my fool-proof plan. Actually, that’s when I noticed that there were no wheels. As we drove up, the car was sitting on the ground with no wheels. From the back I could see that the windshield was smashed. The trunk was open a little bit.

The orange stickers on each window read “Biohazard.” The car was full of junk. A few old clothes, garbage, and mess. The seats were askew. The steering wheel had been removed and was on the floor. And needles. Needles everywhere, There were probably 20 or 30 needles inside. Congratulations! My new car! It had become a tireless, garbage-filled, biohazard nightmare. Lucky me. And a new set of keys to boot.

I’ve never been so shocked in my life. Never in a thousand years would we have guessed the car was stripped and full of drug paraphernalia. I poked around, tried not to touch too much for fear of being poked with needles, and stared in astonishment.

The car didn’t start (I got a $15 discount on the new key, considering it all). We popped the hood (my new locksmith friend and I), and the motor seemed in tack, though the battery cable was disconnected. At that point, who cared? We tried to get into the trunk, but couldn’t pry it open. So what.

So what do you do with a wheel-less, syringe-filled car? Auto recyclers wouldn’t take it, since it was too old. After a few phone calls and a couple of hours of disbelief/debriefing to get over the shock, I decided to make a generous donation to the Children’s Foundation, who will give you a $50 tax receipt and take care of towing. It seemed appropriate; maybe they could find a use for the needles.

Unfortunately, I didn’t think to find a camera and take pictures of it all. It was quite a sight, and now I wish I could have shared it with a few close friends. It was amazing.

The total cost of it all: Insurance (hopefully free with same-day cancellation); Registration ($28); Impound Fee ($240); New Key! ($60); Bus Tickets around Calgary ($8—and lots of frustration getting loonies from a bank machine). My ride to Calgary was free, but he didn’t go back to Edmonton until Wednesday morning (today). I got to stay with friends in Calgary, and they took pity and BBQd steak. Total cost of my priceless experience is about $350.

So my car is once again gone. And my lesson? I would do it all again. Except next time the impound lot calls, ask them if my car comes complete with Biohazard stickers.

Wayne

Depression Sucks. I know I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. Depression Sucks. I’ve been wanting to get over these feelings I’ve been having for quite some time now. I’ve upped my dose of Prozac to 40 mg daily from 20 mg daily, but it doesn’t seem to be any better than when I was taking 30 mg. I’ve been really searching for alternatives to taking this medication. I don’t like being on it. I’ve been on it since 2000. That’s four years of not being able to cry.

Of course, the reason I am on it is that the alternative situation is worse: sinking into severe depression. Typically, I just sleep a lot. That’s probably the major symptom for me. And it is related to another symptom: lack of motivation. At my worst, I feel so unmotivated and heavy in my chest that it seems that if I were to stop moving, I’d fall over and just lie on the ground till I expired. Happy thought, no?

But lately, over this last winter, I’ve been noticing other things about my state of mind. And these clue me in to the fact that the medication isn’t really helping, or at least it isn’t bringing me to the level of normal emotional functioning. Currently, I’m suffering from anhedonia—the inability to experience pleasure. Nothing excites me. And nothing looks appealing enough to pursue, either. In fact, I feel like an old person just waiting to die, like I’ve experienced all that life has to offer and that I, at some point, stumbled upon what I was supposed to do in this life, and now there’s nothing left to do or work towards. It’s not that I’ve lost hope. Life does seem like it’s worth living. I’ve just lost vision—there’s nothing to work towards.

It’s this last self-revelation that told me that I might not be normal. It’s hard to know what normal is, even for the healthy, but I can’t imagine that most people are walking around out there just waiting to die. So I must be an anomaly.

Yet, I’m not totally sick. I know this because I can still concentrate enough to read (and apparently write), I get my work done every week (editing research papers), and I manage (most of the time) to drag myself to Swing Dancing three times a week (which is where my friends are). But beyond that, my life is quite empty. I long for some happiness or passion.

Neither my mentor nor my girlfriend understand why I am taking this medication, perhaps because there is no concept of clinical depression in the Chinese mindspace, or perhaps because medicine isn’t something you take forever. I hope that this blog entry will at least help them to see that my depression is real and that (perhaps) the medication is keeping me afloat. I don’t really want to see how far I would sink if I were to stop taking it. But I do long for an alternative. In any case, I need to find something better.

I went to look up the Chinese word for “metre” in my electronic dictionary the other day. To my horror, I had sought out and entered the American spelling, “meter”. Being the Oxford dictionary, there was no such entry, only a pointer to its entry for “metre”.

This sad state of personal affairs is a consequence of my job. I work for an English-language science journal here in China, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, and the editorial standard of the journal is to use American spellings. So after two years of editing for this journal, I guess I’ve developed the nasty habit. I hope it’s reversible!

I’ve been duplicated. Well, at least sort of. My good friend Chris, whom everyone knows as Edmonton’s biggest sports fan, has begun his own blog, The Mad Sports Man, partially inspired by my blog here. Way to go Chris! It’s great to read about your adventures. I’ve even learned something: you follow basketball. I didn’t know that, or at least I wasn’t paying attention before. I guess basketball is a sport, so it must fall under your radar, right? Personally, I hate basketball, but hey, if it’s cool for you then that’s cool. Good luck to you with your new web log. You know what they say… web log today, funny papers tomorrow.

I seem to be in a weird psychic space today. Aside from not feeling too hot, and being really sensitive to the darkness of the sky, the sickly light shining in my office, and the sundry noises and voices coming from my office mates, I think I became a bit psychically sensitive today too. At about 17h00, a strange man came into the editorial office today, and I immediately felt sick and had the desire to flee. I didn’t recognize him because he was wearing very large, very dark sunglasses. He may have been my friend’s father. I don’t know. But he said “hi” to me and “ni hao” to the others, and then roamed around the office talking to different people. I decided that I needed to leave—immediately. While I didn’t feel anything physically, intuitively it felt like a great evil had entered the room. Whether or not this was the case, I do not know. But I didn’t like the feeling, so I left the office as fast as I could and headed for home. Then I needed to spend the next hour listening to some quiet, healing music at home. Very strange. I’ve never experienced feeling this way about a person before. I’ll have to pay more attention to such feelings the next time it happens and see if I can learn something. I hope he doesn’t come back again.