I had a client verbally assault me yesterday. What happened wasn't nearly as important as what I learned from it: I practiced focus and centering in the face of adversity, and the fact that I could simply choose not to receive the negative energy someone was throwing at me, thereby throwing it right back in their face with no effort. It was metaphysical Aikido and Zen. An interesting lesson, definitely.

My friends Chris and Tammy are having their newborn daughter baptized next weekend. Good for them, except that Tammy is Pagan and has explicitly told us that she's only doing this to placate her dad, who's a born-again Christian.

Therefore, this bothers me. It's exactly the same as last January.

Am I making too much of this? I'm not sure what the right thing to do is anymore.

A long day. Too many clients coming in, making me feel rushed all the time to finish transactions because there's a big lineup. I don't like that. And we're really understaffed at our branch, which only compounds the problem. I like my job, but it's pretty stressful and tiring at times.

Gonna go in a virtual world and kill things to blow off some steam.

"Kangeiko" means "winter season training" in Japanese, and is used in the Japanese martial arts to designate a period of intensive training at some point during the winter months. This can take on many variations depending on the school or the individual teacher, but the point is always to give the students an extra challenge by adding practices to their schedule, at a time in the year when many people would rather curl up with a good book in front of the fireplace. In my own school, the Yoseikan Aikido Academy of Montreal, it works like this: for a whole week (Sunday to Saturday) we sleep at the dojo and get up at 5:00 AM. Practice starts at 5:30 and lasts until 7:00, at which point we go about our normal daily routine: school, work, whatever. We gather again at the dojo in the evening, with lights-out at 11:00. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I've wondered sometimes why I put myself through this, because it's really not easy. Not enough sleep, complicated logistics (I've barely been home at all this week) and the need to not only perform during the morning practices but also be in shape for my usual evening practices, make for a pretty grueling week. But you know what? I wouldn't give it up. It's this kind of training that brings me outside of my comfort zone and really lets me test, and push back, my limits. It's a sacrifice of material comfort in order to gain willpower and self-confidence. The added proficiency I get due to the extra practices is a pleasant bonus. Yes, it's hard: that's the point. If it were easy, I wouldn't learn anything.

All this was made easier by my new job, though: I work as a teller for Bank of Montreal, one of the major banking institutions in Canada. I deal with clients all day long, and I was actually worried that fatigue would interfere with my job. Not to worry: I was far more awake, all day long, than I expected to be. Good thing I have an interesting job that keeps me energized.

Sorry for the long hiatus in posting. I'll be better from now on.

Has it been that long? Crikey. I should've posted a while ago, because there's actually been a fair amount happening in my life. My sincerest apologies to mousme; I promised her weeks ago I'd have a new entry up in the next few days. Sorry, hun, I guess I lied.

In a nutshell: decided to leave Primerica (that was a long time in coming), my car died (my fault, I really wasn't taking care of it properly), found a new job (today was my first day).

Will post more soon.

Saw the North American premiere yesterday at the end of the Fantasia Film Festival, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. A video game translated to a movie? That doesn't usually work well, and Mr. Boll himself has a rather... shall we say... spotty record to his name when it comes to this sort of thing. I fully expected an entirely predictable sword-and-sorcery epic with cardboard characters and cookie-cutter plot twists... and yes, it is that, but it still delivers thanks to great actors and impressive special effects. Jason Statham (you know, the guy from "The Transporter") is competent as the Strong And Stalwart Commoner Thrust Into a Heroic Role. Ron Perlman is entirely believable as the Crusty Old Mentor with a Mysterious Past, and of course Ray Liotta is delightfully over-the-top as the Megalomaniacal Evil Sorcerer. Other roles, such as the Scheming and Treacherous Royal Heir, the Wise Old Court Wizard, the Naive Princess Who Eventually Redeems Herself and the Loyal And Courageous General, are also filled with strong talent. Kudos.

The plot... well, it goes by the numbers. I have no idea how closely it follows the plot of the video game, but there are no surprises here. The noble hero, the evil villain, the king on his throne, all the players are there; the fact that they're pretty much empty archetypes works in their favor: it doesn't get in the way of the unfolding storyline. Great evil threatens the land, Farmer is unwillingly drawn into an unfolding war but eventually battles to save the day with the help of the companions he found along the way. Anyone who's read epic fantasy a la "Lord of the Rings" already has a pretty good idea of what it'll be like. It's not "Dead Poets Society", but it is an enjoyable popcorn-muncher. Don't miss it when it comes to theaters in January.

Meme copied from pdaughter

1a) Open up your musical program of choice on the computer and load the contents of your entire music folder.
1b) If you have an MP3 player, turn on the MP3 player.
2) Press Shuffle (and, if it doesn't go automatically, Play.)
3) Write down the first ten to twenty songs it picks. NO CHEATING. You are not allowed to pretend you are less geeky than you really are. You can skip over the instrumentals, though. It's up to you whether or not you include songs not in English.
4) Google up some lyrics for the songs and post them in your LJ. Have people guess which songs they come from. At some point of time you should probably post the answers.

Opening up iTunes now...

1) "I'm under your spell, God how can this be, playing with my memory..." (okay, this one's a gimme)

2) "I'm on the side that's always lost against the side of Heaven, I'm on the side of snake-eyes tossed against the side of Seven."

3) "We arrived in December and London was cold, we stayed in the bars along Charing Cross Road"

4) "For the sword and the stone, bad to the bone; battle is not over even when it's won."

5) "Humidity is rising - barometer's getting low; according to all sources, the street's the place to go."

6) "I can see it's not too good to me to be afloat in the sea of glory."

7) "As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free."

8) "He says 'Baby, don't listen to what they say, there comes a time when you have to break away.'"

9) "Sometimes the world begins to set you up on your feet again."

10) "Oh, I see a man at the back, as a matter of fact his eyes are red as the sun."

Good luck!

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1 a : the use of means (as charms or spells) believed to have supernatural power over natural forces b : magic rites or incantations
2 a : an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source b : something that seems to cast a spell
3 : the art of producing illusions by sleight of hand

Stop me if you've heard this one: a guy was walking down the streets of suburban Montreal, and happens to come across a gentleman busy planting dozens of little red flags in his front lawn. Understandably curious, he asked the man what he was doing. "Well, I'm planting these red flags to keep the African buffalo away from my house." "But," replied the first guy, "there aren't any African buffalo anywhere in North America." "Exactly!" said the second gentleman. "It's working!"

I was reminded of that old joke this past weekend. My friend PG had recently gone through a bad breakup with her idiot of an ex-boyfriend, and he'd moved out of town. Well, I won't bore you with the details, but to make a long story short he said he was going to sue for custody of their child. I personally think it's only bluff and bluster, but some members of our gang decided to forestall him; so, with Kynrowan writing the ritual, three people did a binding spell on the little weasel, to prevent him from doing any harm to PG. I was asked to participate (since it was done in our house) but politely declined. Later, (after being told the spell went well) I asked Sylverwynde how she knew it had worked, and she replied something to the effect of "How do we know if anything works?"

I wasn't sure if she referred to just knowing if this particular spell worked, or knowing if any spell works, but it really stuck to my mind.

Last year, just before I left the local Pagan email list, I was part of a rather heated discussion on whether or not it was possible to know if a magical spell actually worked or not. I maintained that it was perfectly possible to use the old-fashioned scientific method on the subject; others asserted that belief in magic was a spiritual belief and therefore impossible to test with the scientific method... while still talking how this or that spell had this or that effect on their lives. They saw no contradiction in this. They maintained that you had to believe in magic in order to perceive the effects of a spell, and were unwilling (or unable) to explain how and why, if that were really the case, one can allegedly use magic to influence total strangers who may or may not believe in magic in the first place. They were perfectly happy to not know for certain, content to have possibly influenced the outcome of events. Several of the participants in the discussion also stated that belief in magic is no different than belief in physics or other areas of science, because of course we have to take it on faith that things like electrons and Mars actually exist, since we have no way of seeing them directly. The sense of magic as a religious belief was so strong that one individual took personal offense at my attempts to bring the concept of magic under the scientific method and left in a huff. The debate got nowhere, and eventually got shut down by the list owner. By that time, I was mightily fed up with it all, and fed up with the generally anti-intellectual and anti-scientific tone of the group, and left the list for good.

Looking back on the whole incident, and on my conversation with Sylverwynde, I think I see why the debate got nowhere, and why I was so frustrated. The problem is that we were approaching the problem from radically different perspectives; the vast majority of people on that list (and, from what I can gather, the majority of people involved in neo-Paganism) already assumed that magic exists, however nebulously or ambiguously that term is defined. Stating that the belief in magic is part of their religion, they cannot prove or justify it any further than that because at this point they are using an epistemological method usually called Rationalism, with a healthy dose of Intuition thrown into the mix. That is, magic is known or apprehended by introspection, by contemplation, by cogitation, not by direct sensory experience or Empiricism. Magic, according to them, is not an objective phenomenon; it is a state of mind, the result of belief.

And this was most curious, because that whole discussion started after the list owner commented on the (possible) real-life effect of (possibly) a spell cast by someone to catch some criminals who were operating in the Montreal area. He congratulated us in general for having a positive magical influence in helping the police. Was anything done? Did someone have a positive influence? How? To what extent? No-one could tell.

There were many on that list who stated the belief that, someday, science might explain exactly what magic is and give it a sound technical basis. They invoked the case of alchemy, a mostly spiritual-magical discipline that became the foundation for the science of chemistry. Now, I don't believe that will ever be the case, but I might be mistaken. (As Bertrand Russell wrote: “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”). However, let's get something straight: alchemy, for all its mystical trappings, dealt with very real physical phenomena; the alchemists therefore had plenty of concrete experimental data to work with, which greatly facilitated the switch between magical thinking and scientific thinking. Magic (or, at least, the magic that's popularized in the New Age) does not have that luxury, as it deals with probabilities and may-have-beens and fuzzy results; and the careful, objective study of this kind of phenomenon will have to overcome a whole slew of informational fallacies that's been plaguing the New Age community since it began.

Can magic become a science? Perhaps. But if that is to be the case, it'll be essential to stop thinking magically about magic.

My Aikido teacher, Christian Patenaude will be heading off to Vietnam along with his wife this weekend to finalize their international adoption process. This has been in the works for a long time and they've both had a number of sleepless nights because of it. And now, for the next 3 weeks, they'll be at the mercy of the Vietnamese bureaucracy. I wish them luck and Godspeed to bring back their little daughter safe and sound. If you can read French, you can check out his blog here.

Don't worry, Sensei, we'll hold the fort while you're gone.

Well, it was a fun movie. Some glaring plot holes, inconsistencies and sloppy writing, but at least it was chock-full of pretty pretty special effects.

Yeah, I know Galactus wasn't anywhere near canon; but I already knew that, and I was already hardened to that by the first movie (you know, Victor Von Doom as a cosmic-ray-altered mutant instead of a megalomaniacal sorcery-wielding engineer) and by "X-Men 3" (Juggernaut is NOT a mutant),

A good movie if you're not offended by radical departures from established Marvel history, and enjoy big-budget visual effects.

I've created a Facebook account. May God have mercy on my soul.

I occurred to me that some of you would want to know how Sylverwynde is doing these days.

She came home from the hospital a little while ago, and she's feeling fine. The doctor is making her stay home until the end of August, and she's enjoying the time away from work (she'd been neglecting her World of Warcraft lately). Her condition is under control: she needs to take medication daily, and I need to give her daily injections of anticoagulant for... I forget exactly why. That took a little while to get used to, the injecting her; but she can't do it herself, and rather than having a nurse come every day I decided to take a shot at it. Doing okay so far, but she REALLY wishes she could take that particular medication in pill form. She'll ask the doctor during her checkup tomorrow.

So, things are doing okay, she's stable and in good spirits. The leukemia monster has been neutralized.

And now that that distraction is gone, I need to get back to work. I've been slacking off far too much lately.

firelion wrote about Paris Hilton the other day. Well, it seems that her experiences in jail have been so horrific that she's found God and will now dedicate her life to charity.

I'd like to believe it's not an act, but I just can't. This is just another misguided attempt at milking sympathy from an increasingly disinterested public. Paris, just grow up, accept the consequences of your general dumbassness and get on with your life. If you're really interested in helping sick children or something, great; but don't do it because it'll be a cool publicity stunt.

I'm a guy. And, as a guy, if I wanted to go for a drink one afternoon, chances are I would not choose a lesbian bar to buy refreshments. Nothing wrong with lesbians (I count a few lovely dykes among my circle of friends), but I don't think I'd be welcome there.

So I was really surprised to hear that a Montreal woman is bringing a human rights complaint against a gay bar for refusing service.

Honey, two things: first, Le Stud is a private establishment. That means going in there is a privilege, not a right; they can deny access to their premises to whoever they wish, and there's not a lot you can do about it. Whether or not that's a good business practice is another question entirely.

Second... a human rights complaint? Let's get a grip here. It's true that the Canada Human Rights Commission recognizes sex as a prohibited grounds for discrimination for the provision of services, but this applies specifically to federally regulated employers and service providers. I seriously doubt if Le Stud is a federally regulated establishment.

If Ms. Vachon was being systematically refused service everywhere in town, she'd have a problem. But this was just one bar, and there was nothing to stop her from going just a few blocks away for a drink. This isn't a human rights issue; at best, it's a snit.

Great, so another season of American Idol is over. Congratulations to Whatshername. Can we talk about something else now?

Sylverwynde is being released from the hospital today. Joy! I don't know how many times she's asked me to smuggle her out in my briefcase, or under my jacket... she's been wanting to get out of there for so long. Not that it was uncomfortable: the staff at Maisonneuve-Rosemont is super-friendly, the food was pretty good, the place is nice and clean, but she's been stuck in that room for the last two weeks, only allowed to come out for tests. At least she had Internet access, and television, and all the books we could bring her... but it doesn't beat being able to actually walk outside whenever she feels like it, or holding my hand without me having to wear a surgical glove.

Whew.

Seems that U.S. Defense contractors working in Canada thought our Poppy Quarter, designed to commemorate the sacrifices of WWI soldiers, had espionage-related nanotechnology.

I can just imagine the conversation... "Hey, Joe, I've never seen this kind of coin before. What is it? Think we should ask our Canadian colleagues since, after all, it's their country and their currency?"

"Nah. Let's let our paranoia run wild and think of an outrageously improbable scheme to report to our supervisors."

"Sounds good. What do you want to do with the rest of the morning?"

Sheesh.

1 : The quality or state of being mortal
2 : The death of large numbers (as of people or animals)
3 (archaic) : Death
4 : The human race

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

I'm in a somber mood these days. Sylverwynde's been in the hospital for the last few days; she's been diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia, and right now she's stuck there while they clean up her system. Since the disease affects her immune system, she has to be kept pretty much in isolation, and you can only go into the room after having washed your hands and put on a kind of cheap surgical smock, a mask and rubber gloves. And, just to add to the fun, the mask makes it a pain in the ass to even breathe.

Before you get alarmed about the word "leukemia", I should add that it's 99% certain the disease is in the "chronic" stage, which means it's totally treatable. Perhaps not curable, but manageable in the long term much like diabetes. And I have full confidence in the hospital and its staff; a friend of ours got treated for cervical cancer there last year, and she's doing just fine today, thank you very much.

But this is still hard on poor Sylverwynde. She's afraid for her life, and this is made even worse because she's a proud lady; she doesn't like asking for help for anything, and now she's basically helpless. So... yeah, this isn't fun for anyone.

It's an odd feeling coming face-to-face with the possibility of death. I've been sick in the past, gotten injured a few times in Aikido and elsewhere, but it was never any big deal. I gritted my teeth, took some Advil, and moved on. But now... this is serious. I've had to ask myself what would happen if Sylverwynde were to pass away. Or if I were to pass away. How will people remember me? What kind of mark will I leave on this world?

I don't know. I've never had to deal with something like that before; I'm being pretty calm through all this, because I know Sylverwynde's in good hands and I really shouldn't torture myself with all sorts of what-ifs, but I can't help but be rattled by the impermanence of it all. Of life. Of her. Of me. Time goes by far too fast.

As a sort of follow-up to my posts on xenophobia, I present Rudyard Kipling's "In The Neolithic Age" as an apology for tolerance of all sorts.

"In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt;
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival, of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré—
’Neath a tomahawk of diorite he fell.
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart
Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,
And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,
For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night:—
“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!”

. . . . .

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;
And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer
And a minor poet certified by Traill.

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,
When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the half-dressed hide—
To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large,—seven seas from marge to marge,—
And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,
And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:—
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!"

"Take me down to the Paradox City/ Where the Heroes dwell and causality's screwy/ Take me hoooooooome..."

Heroes is back after a long hiatus, and boy have I missed the show. Hiro meeting Hiro! Priceless! I should have seen that one coming a long time ago, but it still caught me by surprise.

Superhero fight between Peter and Sylar!

And Mr. Linderman is Ozymandias! Well, in a manner of speaking; his actions and motivations are very clearly inspired by the character. I can't wait to see if Linderman's plan will turn out as well (or some would say as disastrously) as in Watchmen.

This has been a heck of a show since the beginning, and it's only becoming better.