Hurricane!

    I've been spending a lot of time lately blogging away on "Strides" and enjoying the fresh taste of it quite a bit. It feels as though I've been a little neglectful of "Neanderings", however,  so I've sort been on the lookout for a good blog topic for here.
   I've been wandering around, going what to write about, what to write about, what is there that's kind of new and different? And then a hurricane hits, Hurricane Sandy actually, like from God, or something!


 

   Well, at least it's supposed to hit here pretty soon. It's just before six o'clock in the evening and the wind's getting pretty strong. The main part of whatever is left of the hurricane is supposed to rear its head here late this evening. It's also supposed to stick around for awhile, which I guess is a little unusual and a little more concerning as well.


...carry the groceries in a hurricane!

You should really help your wife...

   We feel we're at least a little prepared which means, to us, that we ran the dishwasher, so that we would have something clean to eat our uncooked food off of, in the event of a lengthy power failure. Hopefully, this will get us through...
   Right now it's just a little after eight o'clock in the evening, it's dark and the wind has picked up tremendously. On Facebook, friends of friends on the eastern seaboard are already without power. A friend of mine earlier on had his patio umbrella fly out of its base, smashing the glass table top. I can only imagine that, in this area, there will be many, many more stories like this. Of course, I'm hoping this is as serious as it gets, lots of destruction is nothing to make light of.
   At this point, Hurricane Sandy is no longer a hurricane and has been downgraded to a bad storm. A real bad storm, from looking at the video. I went out a little while ago to try and get some pics or video but nothing doing, just too dark. Maybe in the morning, if I'm not looking for my car...
  
     

Jocks: Part Two

   In the previous post, I began to describe to you how I was initiated into the world of jocks. I purposely attempted to keep the tone light and hopefully somewhat amusing. The longer I wrote, however, the more there seemed to be to write about and I realized that not much about it was light and amusing. So I saved it for today.
   If you have spent any appreciable amount of time being around jocks for whatever reason then you've probably seen something ugly. This has probably happened on a team you've played for, on another team you played against, as a spectator or perhaps as a friend or relative of someone on a team somewhere.
   The ugly thing you saw was an athlete or possibly even a fan who simply forgot who, what or where they were and acted reprehensibly. They shouted an insult, they made an obscene gesture, they physically assaulted someone. Subconsciously, they reasoned that their mere presence at a sporting event gave them licence to act in a manner that, if it had occurred almost anywhere else in public, would have gotten them totally ostracized, fired or thrown in jail. If you have been lucky enough to have avoided any of this personally then it is still more than likely that you've seen an example of it on t.v., in the newspapers, or on the internet.

   I have spent about fifty years being involved in sports one way or another, as a parent, as a viewer or as an active participant. It is clearly the jock mentality occasionally rearing its ugly head that is my least favourite aspect of having been involved for so long.
   It is probably unnecessary to spend a lot of time here analyzing why the jock/violence mentality exists. It is a very multi-faceted issue involving, I believe, psychology, sociology, economics, and even sexuality. Regardless of the reasons for their existence, it still bugs me that I run into these knobs or am assailed in other ways by their mindless antics.
   In the blog previous to this, I talked about my trials and tribulations with the jocks at Oakridge, my high school. In a blog I posted back in early May, entitled "Bullies", I described an experience I had as a hockey parent many years ago. I had been with my sons in a dressing room after a game and one of the mothers was frantically trying not to be the last parent left in the dressing room. The reason for her fear was that her estranged and physically abusive husband was in the arena and she was terrified at the prospect of possibly ending up being alone with him at some point. What I didn't mention was that the abusive husband had also been on the Oakridge high school hockey team during my tenure there. He wasn't someone I knew personally but, at the same time, it was disturbing to think that a high school contemporary of mine had gone on to this kind of a relationship with the mother of his children. It was also hard to disassociate this man from the sports environment, the only environment in which I was familiar with him.
   Obviously, sports is not the reason why people abuse. Just as often, I suspect, sports plays a role in stopping abuse. It`s just that I have personally seen some of the nicest, most mild-mannered people go all gonzo once you get them into a sports setting.
   I play a lot of ball hockey. We pay to play, there are no salaries involved, and there is no fame resting on the results of games. And yet there is still belligerence and ugliness. There are players out there who will berate you for every little mistake. There are also players who have invested way too much of their manhood into the outcomes of even small little battles, let alone the outcomes of games or seasons. I was involved in a game once and one of our players and one of their players got into a minor altercation in the corner. The rest of the play headed towards the other end but these two guys walked back, jawing at each other. In a classic prelude to a hockey fight, one guy`s glove "facewashes" the other guy and this is reciprocated. Before you know it, fists are flying. Their guy is about three inches taller and forty pounds (all muscle) heavier and the fight is over very quickly, with their guy on the floor on top of our guy. At this point, the ref jumps in and basically grabs their guy. While being grabbed by the ref, their guy still manages to haul our guy up of the floor and then starts kneeing him in the head! To our league's credit, their guy was suspended for about a year and a half for this. This is better than time in jail, which is really what should have happened.
   I tell my wife, Doralyn, about stuff like this and she then needs me to explain it to her. She wants to know why it happens. It is hard to come up with a plausible explanation. As close as I can come is that I think sports is sometimes an arena wherein you can revisit your lost hopes and dreams. In an effort to live up to those lost hopes and dreams some over-compensation occurs. If, as growing up, you never won a game,  you never were able to play your best or make it to the big leagues, then making a mark for yourself in a municipal hockey league or recreational baseball or some other amateur sporting endeavour is really all you have left. Unfortunately, sometimes the easiest way to do this is by picking a fight, shouting out a slur or putting your fist through a window.

   I occasionally wonder what happened to the other jocks at high school. I do know that they are not all still alive. I also know that the vast majority of them probably ended up with decent jobs, raised great families, and suffered their own triumphs and the usual amount of tragedies. If somehow or other they provided roadblocks to me or anyone else over forty years ago I'm pretty sure they were unaware of it. I'm also pretty sure they had their own insecurities, high school is like that. It is sometimes difficult, however, not to lump all of them in together. I myself played on a handful of sports teams, perhaps someone out there thinks I'm a jock, perhaps I impacted some one's life in a way I'll never know about or understand. In the previous blog I talked about having a crush on the same cheerleader who was the girlfriend of the captain of the football team. Well, maybe that cheerleader liked me...
      
  
  

Jocks

My least favourite kind of jock...

   I encountered jocks for the first time back in high school. I'm guessing that this is where most of us begin our relationships with jocks. Actually, before I continue, I should clarify that when I say "jock" I am not referring to the article of athletic apparel but more directly to the athlete himself. I have never had a problem with the jock you wear, in fact it is one of my favourite pieces of athletic clothing. Unfortunately, it was a different story with the human variety.

My favourite kind of jock...

   Generally, you run into your first jocks in gym class. They're the kids who, although only in Grade 9, already seem to have known the phys ed teacher their whole lives. They joke with him, talk sports with him and are physically able to do almost whatever he asks them to do.
   That was never me. In the first place, I've pretty well always been more comfortable around women and, secondly, for a variety of reasons there were many aspects of phys ed I either didn't get or simply couldn't perform. For the life of me. Rope climbing was one, but that's probably a blog unto itself.
   I began to inhabit that middle ground between the land of the jocks and the land of the nerds. With my friends in the neighbourhood, I was always playing one sport or another and was actually quite adept. This never translated too well in school, however. The little bit of athletic ability I did have managed to elevate me a touch above nerdism but never even came close to making me a jock. Which was fine. I flirted enough around the edges of jockism to find myself on the junior football team, the senior basketball team and the senior volleyball team at Oakridge. These associations had me rubbing shoulders with jocks on a regular basis (what was I thinking?) and they and I very quickly realized just how out-of-place I actually was. More than anything, I guess, I got in their way. They'd go in for a lay-up and, when they came down, I, for some reason, would be right underneath them. This apparently made made me a dip-stick once when it happened to the star of the team, right from the star's mouth. It was hard to run plays in practice because I, knowing where the ball was going, always got in the way of it. This did not elicit a positive response from a couple of the jocks on the team. They'd pass around orange slices at half time of a football game and give me a hard time if I took one because I hadn't played much, if at all.

   I actually got cut from both the football team and the basketball team but ended back on both of them, for different reasons and miraculously. Apparently I didn't get the hint. For whatever reason, this enabled me to continue my square-peg-in-a-round-hole experience with high school sports and the world of jocks.
   Fortunately, this experience never actually included any form of physical confrontation with any of the jocks I ran across, I always tried pretty hard to stay under the radar. At the same time, they had other ways of making my life miserable.
   Round about Grade 10, I fell in love with a cheerleader. I didn't fall in love with her because she was a cheerleader, I just fell in love with her. She, however, was relegated to the category of all-time-stereotypical-jock-gets-what-he-doesn't-deserve-just-like-in-a-teen-movie as she, of course, was the girlfriend of the captain of the senior football team. So, due to this jock I didn't even know, my life was ruined, at least for a month or so.

   About the same time I was in love with the cheerleader, I was also in love with my Spanish teacher (yes, I really had enough love to spread around back in those days) and I truly felt there was something special between us. I felt this way right up to the Xmas break. Upon returning from the break, we were all informed that she had, in the meantime, gotten married. Not only had she been stolen from me, she had been stolen from me by.....my gym teacher! This made a low moment even that much lower.
   Eventually, I continued to fall in love with a different girl every couple of months or so and the pain of these two losses slowly diminished. In Grades 12 and 13, I ended up on the volleyball team. The Oakridge volleyball team is much storied and has a history of being one of the top volleyball powers in the province. And all this started just after I played for them. In my day with the team, we were pretty well a bunch of nerds dressed up as athletes. We did not win a game in the year previous to my starting to play and we did not win a game in the two years I was on the team. There was absolutely no jockism on the team, we stole no one's girlfriend, we intimidated no one and I'm pretty sure no one looked up to us. We did have some fun and actually came close to winning once or twice in my final year. I spent my last year on the team as captain and MVP and at the year-end awards banquet found myself up there with all the other jocks, accepting my award. The irony was not lost on me!

     
  
  
  

I Am Invisible

There I am....

   Yes, I surely am. Invisible, that is. I am that person whose name you can't remember five minutes after you meet me. I am "the old guy" on the team. I am the guy you spent five hours with at the same table at last year's Xmas party that you don't remember this year. I am the person you don't say goodbye to when you say goodbye to the only other person in the room you're leaving. I am the person who didn't get invited to any of the New Year's Eve parties, not because I wasn't popular but because no-one remembered about me. I am also the person who occasionally doesn't get invited on the family vacation.
   My car has been hit from behind three times in a row, while it was stopped, simply because I am apparently invisible.
   I don't stand out in a crowd, my personality is so low-key that I can't initiate conversations and I never have enough self-confidence to simply introduce myself to strangers and then carry on talking with them. If something truly remarkable happens right in front of us then sometimes I will have something to say. If I am in a meeting I will let everyone voice an opinion and will only venture mine if it doesn't get voiced by someone else first.
   I don't scream and yell (even when I likely should sometimes) and I don't take charge unless there is some dire emergency. I have a sense of humour but I certainly don't tell jokes. I will never ever be the life of the party.

Perhaps I just need to do THIS...

   Just today I was in a staff meeting and the person sitting beside me started talking about me like I wasn't even there and then realized I was sitting right there beside her, being invisible, I guess.
   I will never be bombastic enough that I become instantly engraved on anyone's memory and, really, that's fine with me. For the most part, I don't have a problem wearing my cloak of invisibility. My anonymity is almost like a shield and it is sometimes preferable to not have a bright light shining in my direction.
   So be careful wherever you are, you may think you are alone but there's every possibility that I am only five feet away, quietly passing through your space. If you notice your coffee somewhere different then where you left it a couple of minutes ago, that might have been me.
  

Perceptions

   Quite a few years ago, I received a very excellent lesson in perception. At the time, I was working in a supervisory capacity with the agency which currently employs me. I was sharing an office with another person who held essentially the same position as myself.
   One afternoon, one of the employees appeared at our door with a concern which he stated to both of us. We gave him as much feedback as we could at the time. After he left, we compared notes and realized that we had diametrically opposed views on what had, only seconds before, gone on in our office.
   She thought the employee had stated his views in an angry and frustrated kind of way whereas I thought he had been calm and collected. I remember looking at her and not being quite sure what to say. I had the distinct impression she was looking at me the same way.
   This was a seminal moment in my somewhat limited understanding of human nature. What it meant was that I couldn't believe what I saw and heard. It was as simple as that. And it wasn't just that I couldn't believe my fellow co-worker. I had been given some reason to not believe myself.
   I am not so self-centered that I believe my perception of things is flawless. My perception of anything is simply that--my perception and not too likely the same as anyone else's.

   I think of that day in our office on a pretty regular basis. As I listen to people give me their observations on things going on around them I remind myself that these are only their perceptions and that mine could very well be totally different. I have also become very suspicious of gossip, particularly as it applies to myself. In the past, I have occasionally been told negative things that other people have said about me. As tempted as I might be to take things like that to heart, I always stop and remember that day in the office. I have vowed since then that I will form no second-hand negative opinion about other people within my sphere of influence. Until they actually do me me wrong right to my face, I will continue to relate to them as I would any other.
   The problem of different people's perception of things is mind-boggling when you think about it. I imagine a boardroom with maybe twelve people sitting around a large desk, working on a venture. What hope would there be in this with twelve different perceptions of the same issue? For that matter, how the hell does someone get an education?!
   Best to double-check, I guess. Or triple- or quadruple-check. Don't take anything on face value if it is at all important to you. Feel free to ask other people for input and then weigh it carefully. Find someone who generally sees things the same way you do and run stuff past them. Then find someone who never sees things the same way you do and run it past them as well. It might be an eye-opener.
  

Givingthanks Day

   I am generally a thankful kind of guy. I am thankful for many of the bigger things such as a great family, good job and good health.
   I am, however, pretty constantly thankful for some of the everyday things most of us take for granted.
   Walking and running for an example. I know several people who, through either accident or illness, have lost the use of their legs. Sometimes, even when I am just walking across a parking lot, I know what those people would give up just to be able to do that again. They could have just lost their homes and jobs five minutes previous but if, all of the sudden, they were able to walk again the pain of those losses would miraculously disappear. So it takes very little for me to be thankful for the ability to walk.

   I know people who cannot hear and people who cannot speak and I am thankful that I am able to do both of those things. I know people who have lost children, people who have cancer, and people who are brain-injured and I am thankful that none of these things have befallen me.
   Here is the problem I am having, though. I am deeply and profoundly thankful but I am not sure to who or what. I don't believe in God or gods so it doesn't make sense that I should be thankful to them. I tend to think that misfortune and good luck are in some ways just pure chance. So why be thankful to a simple spin of the wheel?
   Thanks needs to be directed at someone or something. I think this is somewhat part of its definition. If there is nothing, no-one or nowhere to direct your thanks then perhaps you cannot, by definition, be thankful. Perhaps the most you can be is happy, rather than thankful, with whatever your good fortune is.
   So I guess I am happy. Somehow or other, though, notwithstanding the atheist in me, I still feel thankful...

Mugs

   Off to the right is a pic of my favourite mug. It's my favourite for a variety of reasons. It was given to me by Doralyn back near the start of our relationship when our lives were awash in turmoil and the sentiment on the cup was what we were living by at the time. Apart from that, it just feels right, both in my hand and when I'm drinking from it. It seems to hold the right amount of coffee, as well.
   My job takes me into many different people's houses and apartments and they all have a shelf where they keep their coffee and tea mugs. Generally, taking a gander at someone's collection of mugs is somewhat akin to peeking through their medicine cabinets--in an unspoken way you absorb information about them. Sometimes it's what's on the mugs, sometimes it's whether they're stacked or not, are they placed on the shelf bottom-up or bottom-down, or are they even on a shelf, maybe they're hanging from hooks or on a mug tree. Just from looking at a person's mug collection you can get some ideas of where they've been in the world, where they've worked or gone to school, how old they are, what their favourite colour is, what their sex is (if you weren't sure already), what their religious and political orientations might be, what their sense of humour is like, and so on. Often, you get an idea of what their sensibilities are, how they feel about things.
   From my observations over the years, here is a composite of how many mug collections are constituted:

   a Tim's mug (almost a given, for coffee-drinkers anyway...)
   a humourous birthday mug, denoting the drinker's advanced age
   a set of mugs from a previous life, one's missing, one's chipped
   one or two mugs with inspirational sayings (see above)
   a sports team mug
   a super-hero mug
   a pet mug
   one stolen mug
   a souvenir mug from a trip abroad
   a "novelty" mug, almost unusable as an actual mug
   one or two travel mugs, often used as just regular mugs
   one or two "holiday" mugs eg. Christmas, Father's Day, Easter,...
   a "John Deere" or a "Nascar" mug (man's, usually)
   a "work" mug, with some kind of business logo on it
   please feel free to add to the list...

The "obligatory" Tim's mug

   Just the number of mugs tells you something about a person; how important coffee or tea is to them and how it fits into their lives, perhaps how sociable they are. How a person feels about the bottom-up, bottom-down issue is probably relevant. I know some people who store their mugs right side up so that the rims don't touch the dirty shelf and some that store them upside-down so they don't collect dust inside them. I imagine this will tell you something elemental about the mugs' owner, if you extrapolate just a touch.
   I think each mug sits you down into a slightly different zone when you use it, depending on your mutual history. This is definitely what happens with me and my favourite mug--it gets me to my coffee with a sense of rightness, for lack of a better word. Necessarily, it will sit in the dishwasher for a day or two at a time, but I'm always somewhat relieved when it is back in the fold again!


Handle broke but couldn't bear to part with it!

   Hopefully none of you have suddenly become paranoid about your mug collection and what it says about you. I think that if you have reached the point where you are visiting with someone at your house for tea, coffee or maybe even hot chocolate then they have likely already formed some sort of lasting impression about you that will not be affected by your choice of mugs over the years. Be proud of yourself, be proud of your mugs!
  
  
  
  
  

Yearn-to-Run: Part Two

   Well, I have finished my first road race! This morning I ran in my running group's target race, the Gobbler Gallop. I ran the 3K distance, as did most of us, and came in with a time of 23:33. I am told this is not bad but, at the same time, I was pretty near the back of the pack. More or less, this was kind of what I was expecting.


Our Learn-to-Run group. L-R Kathryn(fearless leader), little Nick, Mary, big Nick, Catherine, Kelcey, Peter, Pauline and myself

   It was a good day for running, dry and cool, and a great place to run, through Springbank Park. Springbank is such a popular place for runners that, unless you were wearing a race bib, it was hard to tell who was racing and who was just out for their regular run.
   Nothing much about the course surprised me, the first half is essentially flat but the second half has a couple of hills, one going down and one coming back up. Fortunately the longer and steeper of the two was the one going down but the second one, going back up, was a demoralizer. I walked it, only because I knew by the time I got to the top of it I would be near the homestretch and I really wanted to have enough left to kick it up a notch. I was able to kick it up a little and passed three or four people in the process. What I wasn't expecting however was the slight little incline up to the castle at Storybook Gardens. This began only about a hundred yards away from the finish line and I almost had to walk it as well, right in front of family and friends. Did manage to finish it, running, but Doralyn managed to get a picture of me as I was crossing the finish line and it wasn't pretty.


The "unpretty" picture I was telling you about...

   So the Learn-to-Run clinic and the target race is done and under my belt. I've more or less decided to keep on running on some kind of regular basis but likely will not join the 5K clinic, although I am under some pressure to do so by the people in the rest of my group.
   I must admit that running in a group has its advantages, there were a few Saturday mornings when, if I'd been all by my lonesome, that I might have just packed it in early. There's something to be said for peer pressure and I hope I don't miss it by running on my own.

   My main motivation at this point is that I feel better since I started running three times a week and I wouldn't want to miss that feeling. I will try and keep this up and perhaps even increase it.

   Tomorrow they're calling for an extensive frost. Winter is around the corner so I guess it's time to bring out the layers and the long johns and the toques. I've never run in the winter before and I'm thinking I might just try and find an indoor track somewhere...