Author: Milan

Whirling Preparations

These last few days at Staples have been by far the busiest I have ever seen there: a circumstance that made Jessica’s brief visit to Vancouver all the more welcome. It’s always pleasant to have the chance to show somebody the more interesting bits of an unfamiliar city – a role I am certainly hoping to play for more than a few friends at Oxford.

Speaking of Oxford, there is much about it that is causing me distress. Given the clear superiority of numbered lists as a way of conveying information, I shall convey them thusly:

  1. The accommodations manager at Wadham College cannot tell me whether I am to live in the College residence in the centre of town, as it is my strong preference to do, or in the Merifield flats about a mile out.
  2. The admissions officer at Wadham can’t even confirm that I have a place in the college, because they now want proof that I can pay for both years.
  3. The admissions officer has not responded to my repeated and increasingly panicked requests to know just what kind of proof they want.
  4. Finances are looking as though they will be extremely tight, even for just the first year. This makes me want to bring as much as I can along with me, but I am restricted to the amount of physical matter I can carry. This includes a bicycle, since I will be ill-equipped to purchase even a used one there.
  5. I need to open a bank account to transfer money into to pay the first of three installments to the college and university, but cannot do so until I arrive.
  6. Nobody seems able to tell me what kind of internet access, if any, I will be able to get in whichever residence I end up in.

This general collection of nervous facts combines poorly with increasingly nerve-wracking days at Staples – with three sets of customers nipping at my heels as I try to serve the requests of a fourth. Also, with the original version of the NASCA report now distributed, all manner of people are simultaneously getting back to me with suggestions for changes, ideas for how the whole document can be reorganized, and generalized demands that I carry on working on the thing. I’d rather have a few friends over to drink scotch and watch Sin City, but such are the pressing demands of life.

Tonight, I mailed off email invitations to my departure party on September 17th. I hope I managed to send them to everyone in Vancouver who I profoundly hope will attend. Since I won’t have any kind of meaningful or well-attended birthday party this year, this party will serve as a surrogate. It will also be a departure party for anyone else who is leaving soon and able to attend: as I hope will be the case for Kerrie.

Returning to the matter alluded to earlier, of Jessica’s visit: it consisted of getting vegetarian Indian food at Yogi’s, where we got enormously faster service than I did the last time I went there, followed by drinks at Subeez (becoming cliche for me these days, but definitely my favourite place downtown) and generalized wandering in the English Bay area. Aside from the single brief time when I met Frank, this was the only time I’ve met someone in person who I had only known of previously online.

This morning, I remember standing at the end of a stone breakwater at Ambleside Beach in the rain, looking out at the morning city landscape. Like looking at Kits from English Bay last night, it was a sight that filled me with preemptive nostalgia: a sense that this is a known and familiar place that it is now appropriate to leave behind. That calm certainty forms an empowering counterpoint to the specific anxieties raised by the actual mechanisms of leaving.

Anyhow, I need to go over the messages I have received about the NASCA report and determine how long, working on the nights between Staples shifts, it will take to get the urgently desired second major draft into the hands of Allen Sens. Hopefully, most of their objections will be fairly quibbling and the linguistic edit which I am very thankful to Meghan for helping to provide, will go smoothly.

PS. At work, I briefly got extremely excited about the prospect of getting a SkypeIn account. The idea behind them is that you get a phone number in an area code of your choice (for me, Vancouver) and people there can call it and be directed to your Skype account. Then, your computer rings and you answer it like a phone call. Aside from a $30 a year fee, nobody pays anything. Unfortunately, the service isn’t available in Canada; apparently, that’s because you cannot use it to call local 911, or so I was told today by a Vonage representative touting their equivalent service for $40 a month. Hopefully, that will change in the near future.

General musings

Rather than writing all blog entries at 1:00am, hunched over the iBook keyboard, I’ve purchased a very European looking black writing pad to carry around. I suppose it will help me look like the stereotypical poet or a sixteen year old pseudo-goth girl, but it will beat the ever-larger collection of biodegrading scraps in my pockets. Oh, and the heartbreak when they get accidentally laundered!

Luxuriously, my 10:00pm-concluding shift was followed by a ride home from my friend and co-worker Chris. The ride also delivered me to a mercifully empty house, where I can listen to the Great Lake Swimmers, eat bread, and drink tea while allowing the brain to be mowed, to have the weeds pulled, and to have the edges repaired.

A few times here, I’ve made reference to my present functional conception of love. In my view, the word is hopelesly equivocated: linked to so many disparate ideas and personal expectations as to have lost any clear meaning. This framework has therefore been developed to understand and explain how it impacts my life, for purposes of better planning. Within this framework, the focus is on romantic love (of the kind experienced between people who are generally interested in some sort of sexual contact with one another). The components are threefold:

  1. One partner’s assessment of the other. Now, the word ‘assessment’ is obviously open to broad interpretation. What makes this criteria viable is that the opinion cannot be based on any probability of future contact. It must be a determination of a person’s level of appropriate respect – roughly, how good a thing it is that they are in the world. A person’s values and aesthetics naturally do a lot to determine what kind of traits are respected. 

    To begin with, this assessment is often badly coloured by our desires at the time. For me, women who I think might be single and interesting instantly and consistently get more attention than others. Still, from the perspective of a long-term relationship, the level of respect you have for a person is a critical part of the foundation.

  2. The second component is the sensory experience of being with the person, contemplating the person, and such. It seems to me that this is what most people are referring to when they use the term love, though this narrow focus excludes any need for commitment.The sensory experience of love ebbs and flows. Often, the beginning stages of a relationship are a dramatic crescendo of such thoughts: fueled by ever quicker flowing hormones and neurotransmitters. Something similar definitely happens after long seperations. When scientists with functional MRI machines find love, this will probably be most of what they are seeing.
  3. Insofar as a relationship can exist as an entity unto itself, it exists as a cluser of norms, rules, decision making procedures, and expectations – what some IR theorists call a ‘regime.’ These are not restricted to the people involved: if I saw a good (attached) friend having illicit relations with a stranger, it would be a matter of concern for me.I’ve often likened relationships to two islands that are initially driven together by random currents, but which are held together through an ever-more-complex system of bridges, tunnels, power lines, roads, and communication systems. Terms of trade are established and goods flow from one to the other, for mutual benefit. Another crucial part of the relationship regime is multilateral relations between partners, friends, family, and others. Having the respect of my friends is often crucial for retaining my own. Having the less noble attentions of my friends can often count as a point in your favour, both because it provides a reassuring second opinion and the promise of gains within the social structure should such a relationship be concluded.

When relationships end, it often seems to have a lot to do with an undermining of section 2 above. One thing I find interesting is how easily some people seem to be able to transfer the bulk of their section 3 connections to another person once they have found someone who is willing, for whom they have respect under section 1, and with whom they have the kind of pleasantly blinding jubilation which section 2 rests upon. The burst of heat from two inactive second sections re-activating seems as though it can often be more than enough to compensate for the cold and discomfort that creeps in as one set of section three links cracks and are sliced open, then shifted along towards the positions where they will be affixed to a new partner.

Ultimately, I am looking for someone with whom I can travel, raise children, write and edit books with, and generally enrichen life in defiance of a human psyche that I am convinced cannot generally function properly on its own. For me to set out on such a course with a person requires a pretty sturdy assessment that these three areas are well-built and not vulnerable to ordinary schocks. It’s basically a necessity that there be a good collection of reasons why they should be put into an escape pod for 1% of humanity. Also essential is their ability to maintain good relations with my family. The border between my parents and I is long and undefended, crossing rocky terrain. Disasters can move across both ways, and anyone who I could be with for any length of time would need to have the skill to manage that. Of course, as I will be living in Oxford, contact with my parents will be infrequent at best. None of these criteria are things that will never change.

This rough, imperfect, and far from comprehensive framework does nothing to acknowledge the infinite complexities that make love so fascinating. For me, the question of women and how I relate to them as individuals is the most engaging and life-defining one that I can think of. The framework is just a crude tool – a couple of wobbly steps added to a ladder of understanding. For all the joy and revelations we shared, as well as for everything they helped me learn about the world and myself, I am infinitely thankful to Kate, Sarah, and Meghan. Also, for enduring hours of my hypothesizing about these and related ideas, Sarah Pemberton and Sasha Wiley have my thanks as well.

There are 15 days left until my departure party.
I fly to England in 19 days.

Banged out while at work

After going on for a span of days and – at least once – reaching some disastrous low in awareness, all the elements of life become hazy. Walking about, avoiding obstacles with a kind of reckless difficulty, you feel that you are half-way sick: with some node of sickness deep inside you not the mush you expect, but half frozen. Memory becomes faithless as dreams become indistinct from actions.

Conversations within dreams have always been unsettling reminders of how our minds can create our friends, or at least mimic them. It’s double unexected and unsettling to wake from a ten minute dream while at work, in which the other person who had been conversing has long since passed from your life.

While Mica’s party did not run overlate, it caused less ruin within the house than it did between he and I. I am unwilling to abrogate the role of the enforcer of the law.

My frustrations all collapse down to an anger at impunity and those who act on its basis.

Without authority

Mica has about 25 random friends over tonight. Also, I failed to take into account how Viktoria Prokhorova’s request for me to call her between 8:00pm and 11:00pm was based on the Toronto timezone.

Suffice it to say, things are more than a bit shambolic tonight. With my mother away again, I would expect no less.