Archive for Flashback
December 6, 2007 at 12:53 pm · Filed under Flashback
I was just looking up at my ceiling, wondering why nothing is showing up in my outline of my newly imported into Eclipse jython project and I noticed the faint outlines of six stars in a row. Are those for me? Stars for finally installing the JyDT plug-in for Eclipse and getting something to run? The stars are all over my ceiling. Those glow-in-the-dark ones but I would not have noticed them at night because they have been painted over.
Question: if a glow-in-the-dark sticker is painted over, does it still glow?
I’m guessing no because the phosphors cannot be energized by anything.
Today is a day of discovery and realization. Before reading this BoingBoing post, it had never occurred to me that skill testing questions are not normal and that they do not exist outside of Canada. I thought it was just the thing to do when you win a contest. Just one last hurdle to the prize.
Why do we really have them? From wikipedia:
The combined effect of Sections 197 to 206 of the Canadian Criminal Code bans for-profit gaming or betting, with exceptions made for provincial lotteries, licensed casinos, and charity events. (…) These organizations take advantage of the fact that the law does allow prizes to be given for games of skill, or mixed games of skill and chance. In order to make the chance-based contests legal, such games generally have mathematical skill-testing questions incorporated.
I think I remember having an argument with my older brother when I was really really young. We were using the skill-testing-question as as measure of our intelligence and I claimed that my answer, different from his, was right thus I must be more intelligent.
My dad had to break the news that I was wrong and I just couldn’t figure out why. The question was so simple. But this was before learning about the use of parenthesis and order of operations. Actually, after writing that, I got this vague memory of a 5-10 minute period where dad said my answer was right, even though it was not.
I also remember feeling anxiety answering skill-testing questions. Like, everything to win could fall into place but if I got this wrong (shakes fist at self)…
October 4, 2007 at 11:11 pm · Filed under Flashback, In the Kitchen and Foodstuff, Reflection
Ingredients are bought for a recipe made once every 10 years. One to two teaspoons are drawn from a hand sized bottle leaving ounces left behind to wait for the next time you decide to experiment. Will it still be good the next time? How can you tell? These products are good at maintaining their look, smell, and one assumes, flavour.
It is interesting to note how a product’s packaging changes over time, and how it doesn’t. And why don’t they use this font anymore? The spacing of the letters reminds me of laying in the sun at my cabin, reading my father’s and his brother’s old comic books and wondering if the mail order ads for novelty items, the magic manual to get that beach bod, and a set of 1001 tiny little green soldiers were still applicable.
The above bottle was bought sometime in the late 70s. Below, before that. There is no UPC on the bottle. Could it have been on a box? I somehow doubt that. This bottle has history. It has the number ‘23′ which at sometime meant something to someone. Now it means nothing and the life of this bottle that has existed all my life will soon end. Should the toss happened on the 23rd at 23:23? Then the story of Brandy could be that it spent the majority of its life time marked with a symbol of its own fate.
Then the peppermint extract. This was a toy. Not a toy but an essential ingredient to many potions crafted in yogurt containers. If only I could have figured out the right combination of flour, shampoo, corn syrup and the green stuff…
This is produced or distributed by Nabob Foods Limited, Vancouver, Canada (according to back of bottle). That is the same Nabob as Nabob Coffee, before they changed their name to Nabob Coffee and long before the company was acquired by Kraft. I wonder when Nabob Foods Limited stopped existing. Could the UPC on the back help? It is only 6 digits long: 600162. Googling is fruitless.
I came back to Regina yesterday. Here over the weekend. It is good to see family and friends again, though confronting the remnants of myself in this city is hard. This time, more so than last Christmas, I feel like I’ve changed so much and I am wondering what parts of my past identities, if any, should I hold onto.
January 29, 2007 at 5:47 pm · Filed under Flashback, I'm a Nerd
Lately I have been thinking about my senses become duller and duller as I age. Sight, hearing, smell, touch, recollection, taste – not losing them but they are not as intense as they used to be. Actually sorry, I am using my conclusion as an introduction to something I will tell. I was not really thinking about the above in a highly conscious way at all. I just told myself the other day that I wanted to shower blindfolded and see (or hear, smell, taste, touch) what happens. In the shower I normally first wash my face with my eyes closed. Today, once I reached the point of feeling no soap security, I still did not open them again. I kept them closed until I was out, dried, back in a housecoat (it is Saturday) and sitting in front of open waffles to write about the experience. Below are observations/thoughts of note in mostly chronological order:
For most of the shower I found that I was replacing my vision with mental images of the shower around me. Not necessarily the important things like where the shampoo and conditioner are and don’t knock over that can of shaving cream but things like the colour of the shower curtain and the fact that a vent is above my head.
At moments the urge to open my eyes was very strong. Maybe dehydration from last night’s drinking had something to do with it. Right now my eyes feel dried up and tired. I want to exercise them, stretch them, open-shut, and open-shut, and wide.
I had thoughts of falling asleep. My mind was being tricked into thinking it was bedtime because the go to sleep signal (shut eyes) was given. My breathing also became a lot slower, sometimes stopping and I had to remind myself to take bigger breaths.
Most things in the shower I could do with ease because I have memorized the body movements. I got thrown off trying to find my sponge hanging from part of the shower fixture. I was looking for the fixture first and got lost on the wall. I always get lost on walls…lose my perception of distance up/down/left/right.
(Side story: when I was younger we visited some family friends and stayed overnight. I stayed on the top bunk in a room with a girl the same age as me. During the night I slept-walked off the bunk and ended up on the floor by the closed door, next to a dresser. I woke up and could feel the door, feel a wall, feel something wooden beside me, but everything was dark and I could not remember where I was. I was trying to find the doorknob…maybe there would be light outside the door. But I was lost on the wall and the door – could not remember how high a typical doorknob would be placed. Pawing at the wall I panicked and resorted to screaming for help. My mother came. The next morning I came to breakfast with a very very very red face.)
I faced my first real challenge after the shower. It was time to put on face cream and I use a type that requires application of two liquids from two bottles of identical form and one should go on before the other. How do I tell the difference? It took me a couple of moments, holding the hard bottles in my hands, to realize that I could shake the bottles and distinguish them by the density of liquid inside – one was more watery than the other. This made me think a lot about the details that we store in our minds that are not so frequently accessed.
Actually, another problem that I faced before coming out of the shower was the issue of product quantity. How can I tell the amount of shampoo or conditioner being dispensed? It was complete guesswork. In my head there was no information on how long I should squeeze the bottle, what a certain amount might feel like in my hand…I have always calculated this using only visual information.
Movement out of the shower and into my room was harder. In the shower I was in a confined place and could easily make mental images of the space around me. I was comforted by constant walls. Coming out of the bathroom, there was uncertainty in space beyond my arm’s reach. To compensate, my mind made walls around me. Moving in a wide space I was still mentally in an area similar to that of the shower – perhaps even smaller.
The room smelled sweeter than before. I finished drying, put on my housecoat and sat down at my desk. Reaching for waffles, I found its coldness right away. Something was on top – one of my Japanese books. I moved it over thinking about how I was using it prior to having a shower. This made me think about relying on recollecting past actions/events when you cannot use visual information. We see the states of things with little processing in the conscious mind…the eyes guide. Is this blindness good for exercising 思い出すこと? (=omoidasu-ing… I like the Japanese word because 思う is to think and 出す is to take/send out…it creates a better image of recollecting, remembering, collecting thoughts, bringing thoughts up.)
Now I have the window open. A cool breeze is coming in. I can feel it intensely on my bare feet. The air is sweet with the aroma of my shower products and the sun makes things glow.
My mind feels refreshed. There are still brain cramps from drinking last night but it is refreshed in terms of thought generation. I am not thinking the same thoughts that cycled over and over before my shower and I feel as though I have a quickly reflex to act on ideas. Heh - this can be a good OR bad thing but in my case I think it is currently good. I tend to get ideas, think yeah that would be interesting, but then not act on them and instead occupy myself with the useless chatter in my head (ex. my teeth are too crooked, I need to buy more milk, etc).
Two thoughts that came and were acted on immediately:
(1) I looked around me and thought about photographing junk piles and signs of usage around the home to capture activities and experiences in spans of mundane time. The pictures below are this morning:
(laptop
a Halls that will never get eaten because my cough is gone
folders with papers to read for thesis
FANCL receipt for face cleansing products I spent too much money on
an empty pack of のど candies that I have recently become addicted to (remainder from my cough experience)
a box that the vase from my glass blowing experience was shipped in - it seems like such a good box I can’t part with it so it is now the base of my FANCL calendar - reward for spending so much money on their products in hopes of virgin-like skin
a red plastic bag that feels too good to throw away
the USB cord for my camera
mail concerning the 10k race in 3 weeks
a catalogue that was subscribed to by former resident of my room….I’ll have to write about its contents another time)
(when I look at this picture I can remember the dreams that I had before the bed obtained this state. it was a really deep comfortable sleep. in the morning I did not want to get out of bed.)
(2) I started to write this in my usual manner – going straight through from beginning to end – then remembered that I would forget all my thoughts a third of the way through and stop writing. So I quickly made points of everything I thought about. I always think I should do this when I write but still, usually I don’t and then I get writer’s block and then I stop. The above was successfully constructed using the first-make-points method
I don’t know if this end bit is related to my 15 minutes of blindness but I think I will continue to incorporate periods of blindness into my routines in order to sharpen my dulling senses and refresh the lesser used functions of my brain.
August 8, 2006 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Experiences, Flashback
August is fireworks (hanabi) month in Japan, direct translation of hanabi being “flower fire”, and they are certainly serious about it. Last Saturday the show was at Umikaze-Koen, a park just a few blocks from my apartment. My morning jog takes me through this piece of seaside and already two days before the fireworks, I saw that some people had taped down their nylon sheets (bashotoru…hope I got that right…could be tori or toro…”place taking”).
I don’t know - I am one to think that place saving involves staying in that place but, considering the hot hot hot weather on Saturday, I guess we were lucky that the tarp is an adequate substitute for physical presence. We still went at 9am, got an awesome spot and toughed it out for a while. The ice cream and frequent trips to an air conditioned department store helped too.
At 3pm we changed into our yukatas (sorry…no picture yet) and oh gee…I put mine on the wrong way. It should always be wrapped with the left side on top. I guess only dying and dead people wear it with the right side on top. Fitting though (for reasons to follow).
We came back to our place around 6pm, drank some beer and then the fireworks started at 7:30. (Kind of weird…I am used to the after 9pm fireworks in Canada.) The show was incredible. Totally (maybe rude to say but fitting) ballsy and full out. The pace and variety were great.
(emotional speak to follow…if you are not up to the mush then feel free to stop reading)
It was weird though, about half way through this flood of memories of my father taking us to see fireworks came. They were all really vague because they were from my early days in Saskatoon (before age 6) but I remembered having to nap in the afternoon, looking for a good parking spot, looking for a good watching spot, and lawnchairs, and this blue plaid blanket in the family. Older family members…feel free to question the historical accuracy of that. So, I had these memories and I started thinking about the things my dad did to try to get the best for us (example being finding good parking spots) and I contemplated whether or not (and if so how much) he was aware of where I was at that particular moment. K so don’t mind the lame reflection on the dead speak but I felt really present to my memories of him and I couldn’t help but cry a little. It was weird because I have not cried in a long time and there I was, around thousands of people and I am smiling but I can’t stop the tears coming down my cheeks. Luckily, I think most eyes were on the sky.
A few weekends ago, someone said to me “I think your father will cry at your wedding” and I was like…”umm…yeah maybe…” (me thinking: he physically can’t and even if he could, I possibly might never get married). The comment stuck with me throughout the week and after that and my fireworks choke-up, I spent most Sunday thinking about all these events that I might have in my life and how I will likely cry at them because I will think about dad. I had band practice that day and I thought about how I might cry a wee little at our performance (in two weeks) because my wish to be in a band has always been backed with “and I think I can do it because my dad was in a band”.
Hmm…I wish there was some point that I was making with this but there is not much really. Just me and reflections on how my father was a wonderful person and how I contemplate how much presence he has among me and my family.
Half of me hesitated writing about this because I fear sounding like I am fishing for sympathy…but I have been like that since he died and I think in the process, have repressed and ignored a lot of emotion that I should have naturally gone through. Not that I need to “re-grieve” (heh…that sounds funny and kind of makes me want to regrieve), but if it’s on my mind I should at least tal- …..blog about it.
And now I have, it is getting late and it is time for me to catch a bus and hopefully this writing will have put some of my thoughts in place.
PS. If you have a yukata and you are really tired by the time you get home so you don’t want to fold it up…don’t hang it by a hanger in a place directly in the the line of your usual wake-up-sight because you might have bad dreams and wake up with a start and then wake-wake-up with more of a start when you see what looks like an 8-foot tall witch hovering over you but is really your 8 foot long yukata.
December 13, 2005 at 12:24 pm · Filed under Flashback
the setting:
Tuesday morning, 11:30 am
I am in the washroom applying mascara
The radio is on, tuned to CBC, playing music from post-war 40s era
I have a chickpea, green peas, and mushroom curry simmering on the stove
Incense is burning to mask the smell of fried shallots
The window is open and I hear the echo of cars driving by
what’s on my mind:
I am thinking about what I need to do once I get to the lab, I feel weird that I am not there. We have meetings at 1pm on Tuesdays so I’m normally there in the morning. The meeting was moved to 3pm. I’m thinking about my todo list, and about going to Regina. Thinking that I can’t completely remember what home is like, family home or having a family in a building. It has become foreign.
the trigger:
It suddenly smells like boiling hotdogs. The aromas of fried shallots, simmering curry, incense, and fresh air mingle together and in my head and it smells like boiling hotdogs. Possibly some kraft dinner cooking in there too.
the flashback:
I am in grade school. For some reason I am at home but it is not the weekend and I am not sick and it’s not the summer. Perhaps it’s during the Christmas holidays. One of those days during the holidays where it wouldn’t have made a difference if you got to stay home or had to go to school. An unremarkable day. Lunch is cooking and we will eat at precisely noon while we watch the Flintstones on CKCK-TV. I can smell the hotdogs and I am getting excited because soon I will have lunch and the Flintstones to watch.
the results:
I’m eating my curry with some tofu. Someone also happened to sneak some ketchup on my plate.
