edwards block

As many of you know, I have little time for christmas. For one thing, I’m not a christian. For another, the stampede of consumer frenzy that takes place all around me – starting in October these days – leaves me feeling considerably less than spiritual. I choose to honour the spirit of the solstice that was long ago kidnapped by those promoting the birth of J. Christ, despite the alleged saviour’s birth having taken place sometime in the summer, by some accounts. Anti-pagan politics, or simply a calendar error? Only one historical virgin with stretch marks (excluding the possibility of immaculate gestation) knew for sure, and she’s not around to ask.

Compounding the problem is that my birthday happens also to be December 25th, but I’m never very enthusiastic about birthdays, either (“what is he enthusiastic about?”, you might wonder. The answer is here.). I haven’t had any interest in a party of any kind since I was about twelve. Who’d want to go to a party on or near Christmas anyway? I probably wouldn’t even show up for my own. Over the years I have developed my own birthday ritual, however. I like to spend the morning of December 25th somewere surrounded in nature, preferably alone. My first choice is to travel somewhere, but that’s often not the optimum time of year for flying. Usually, I spend the morning hiking somewhere in the woods. It’s often inconvenient to get out of town for the day, since I ride a bike and often have to be somewhere or other in the afternoon. Thus, my ritual is usually exercised either in Stanley Park, or at the Reifel bird refuge. This year it was Reifel.

When I arrived at the refuge at 9:00 (opening time), there was only one other person there, but the crowd grew quickly, since it’s Snow Goose season, but mercifully it was not a particularly vocal crowd. It was my last opportunity for birdwatching before I leave town, so I brought my camera along. There has occasionally been a Black-crowned Night Heron near the first blind, but it is usually well hidden, since it is generally nocturnal. On this morning, however, there were at least four of them, and all in relatively plain view. I also managed to get some great shots of a Red-tailed hawk that was particularly bold and flew quite close to me. There were also a number of juvenile eagles around. See the Recent Photos page for some of the pictures.

And that was it for another year. Perhaps next year I will spend Christmas in the Galapagos.

Since it doesn’t snow much in Vancouver, half the city is out taking pictures: 1,000,000 icicles will probably be photographed this week.

I didn’t even have to leave the house to take my icicle picture. It’s orange because the sunset is behind it. I scaled down the size of the image, but otherwise it is, er… uncut:

Perhaps it’s simply because I’m in possession of a plane ticket to the tropics, but I am feeling a little more sensitive to the cold this year than usual. Actually, I think it has more to do with the fact that I’m living in a house for the first time in many years. Most houses, it seems to me, are very energy-inefficient compared with solid buildings with a central boiler, but this one seems particularly ill-equipped to keep the cold air out, or to warm the cold air effectively. When I was in my apartment I was always warm, so jumping on my bike and riding somewhere was actually quite refreshing; but here, I’m chilled through before I’m even contemplating going outside. It’s very easy to just stay in the house – in bed even.

Now that there’s a foot of snow outside and it’s down to -7 celsius (feels like -18 with the wind, they say), I’m even less enthusiastic. It’s not just the cold, though. I can’t cycle, so I’d have to take public transit, also an annoying inefficiency. I don’t think that there’s anything inherently wrong with transit, but our local governments seem to try to discourage its use. Instead of fifteen minutes to get to school on my bike, it will probably take at least an hour, if not more. Fortunately, my school has been closed for the past two days due to the snow. You easterners (definition: anyone living east of Hope) will laugh at that, as a foot of snow and -7 sounds balmy to someone from, say, Winnipeg, but you have to understand that the snow here is much wetter than the dry stuff you’re used to, and the air’s much more moist. Also, many people here either don’t own snow tires, or they have used them as landscaping material and are now in their backyards with winter pansies springing from beneath their mossy rims.

This doesn’t stop people from driving anyway, mainly of those who would never lower themselves to share a bus with “smelly foreign poor people”, or who have completely forgotten that feet were originally invented for walking on. The first night it snowed, I watched from my bedroom window as a young man up the alley tried to take his BMW out for a spin at midnight. He has those really thin tires everyone is using now that I just don’t understand, and one of those “scoops” under his front fender that almost touch the ground and that I also don’t understand. Perhaps they have a purpose, but when there’s snow on the ground, they aren’t much good. That piece of plastic is getting ripped off by the first piece of ice it finds. Anyway, this guy actually shovelled the alley all the way down to the road so that his plastic thingy wouldn’t hit the snow. Trouble is, once he got to the road his front wheel drive Barbie tires just slid on the hard-packed snow and wouldn’t go anywhere, so he ended up leaving his car in the middle of the road all night.

Anyway, that’s Vancouver when it snows. Why did I bring this up? Oh yeah, I’m cold and that Caribbean beach is looking pretty enticing right now. This is only making it harder for me to concentrate on school, of course. I only have a week left before the exams, so… whatever. Here’s an interesting, though unrelated detail: when I got up this morning, I had a huge knot in my hair. In the back, about two inches from my scalp. I mean, huge. How it happened, I don’t know – it wasn’t there yesterday, and I can’t get it untangled, even after soaking it in conditioner for a while. I’m starting to wonder if my hair isn’t doing some sort of spontaneous dredlocking thing in anticipation of my soon-to-be adjacency to everything reggae. I may have to shave my head. I can’t just cut out the knot, or I’ll look like more of an accident victim than usual, and I can’t let it go dred. “Pale, middle-aged white guy in the Caribbean with dredlocks” just sounds pathetic.

Enough with the mental wandering. With all this time in house, I have had plenty of time to study Milton in anticipation of my coming exams, so naturally I have been doing lots of work on wesbites. Two are new, destined to become my Costa Rican projects (details later), but also this site. Besides the subscription thing that I added recently, you may notice some other new features. In the right side column, I have condensed the long list of ‘Archive’ links into a single pull-down menu; I’ve re-organised the blog categories for easier reading of specific topics; I’ve finally recompiled all my old blog entries from my last bike trip; I’ve started updating my ‘Travels’ page; I’ve added a Where’s Edward Now box so you can see where I am or what I’m up to at any given time; and I’ve added a weather indicator so that you can see at a glance what the weather is like in the area of Costa Rica in which I will be residing. Best of all (I think), I have opened a Flickr account and built a link to it, so that you can view my photos without leaving this site. I’ve recently upgraded my Nikon SLR to a digital SLR, so I hope to be doing lots of photography in Costa Rica, and uploading the pictures for you to see (expect lots of birds and bugs). The “Photos” link is in the top menu bar. You can also get directly to my Flickr page when you are vewing a particular image.

I’m shocked that it’s mid-November already – it seems like just last week it was 1987. How the time does accelerate as we age. Where’s the justice in this? It just reinforces my opinion that intelligent design was at best an ability of Le Corbusier and that the Darwin-deniers in Arkansas (or Red Deer?) have misappropriated the phrase to avoid facing their own existential insecurities. What sort of omnipotent intellect, especially one alleged to be loving, would create a world in which a man doesn’t begin to understand the pleasures of life until his body begins to forget them? There’s never any time to waste. As Guy Lombardo once sang, “It’s later than you think”.

With only three weeks of school remaining in this semester, and a more immediate decision to be made about the following semester, I am once again contemplating my own existence. This is not foreign – I have done so with compulsive regularity for as long as I remember. It’s only been in recent years, however, that I’ve managed to put the analysis to much in the form of practical application. Clearly, I am a slow learner when it comes to lessons of life. I’m a bit better in the classroom, but not by a wide margin. I manage to get good grades in my classes, but I don’t get the sense that my progress is destined to be cumulative, at least not in a manner that suits the conventions of academe.

For whatever reason you prefer to derive from the preceding text, I have decided not to register for classes in January. Recently, while sitting in the frigid college library (on a chair that provides all the comfort of an upholstered cinder block), I put Shakespeare aside and contemplated my options. Despite my admiration for all the dead white guys I have been studying, and the many revelatory moments I have had in the past year as I absorb information that I value, the classroom experience is just not turning me on with sufficient satisfaction to justify the time and money I’m investing in it. Therefore, I think it is time to move along to a new adventure.

Naturally, when I say “new adventure” I don’t mean go back to my little tan cubicle. Now that I’m off the treadmill, I’m not keen on jumping back on. I don’t mean to sound as if I’m soiling the old nest, but to resume being a cog in this hyper-efficient but frighteningly inefficient economy is just not an immediate option for me. Of course, there’s no escaping it completely unless one emigrates to North Korea, but I’m not so good with authority and bowing down to Kim Jong Il statues every third block is not in the cards for this cadre either.

No, instead, I am once again departing for Costa Rica. For how long? Until it’s time to move on, whenever that turns out to be. Three weeks? Three months? Three years? ‘Que sera sera’, as we like to say our cliches in Spanish. (Unfortunately, besides a few menu options, that’s largely the extent of my Spanish. I’m trusting that immersion is going to improve on that). Exciting, no? And aren’t you lucky? You’ll get to read all about it, right here!

I will be located in Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean coast, where I spent most of my time in August, 2005. If you’re reaching for your atlas, you’ll want to know that there are three towns in Costa Rica named Puerto Viejo, which means “Old Port”, so you want to find the right one. (As far as I know, there are no towns named “Puerto Nuevo”). See the location on this map. The yellow line is the highway from San Jose, the capital city:

What will I do in Puerto Viejo, you might ask? Well, there’s swimming. The eating of fruit. Swinging in the hammock. Yoga on the beach. Learning about the Spanish and indigenos cultures. Some of the best bird watching anywhere. Meeting lots of new and interesting people (as Colin likes to say, Puerto Viejo is a town for the ‘most wanted’ and the ‘least wanted’. My role is yet to be determined). Oh, I suppose I’ll have to do something to support myself, too. I have a few ideas on the go related to the tourism industry, as well as a couple of potential internet applications. Of course, none of this precludes my taking online courses while I’m in Costa Rica, either, and I hope to find time for that as well.

In the meantime, I have some preparations to look after, and some tangible assets to dispose of. If you’re looking for anything, let me know.

In yet another clever technique to avoid homework, I found a website – The Happy Planet Index – that calculates happiness as a co-relative of environmental footprint. In other words: which country’s citizens derive the highest amount of satisfaction at the lowest environmental cost. Canada, it seems, is ranked 111. The United States is 150. Pretty bad when you consider that they were ranked out of 178. Maybe the meaning of life isn’t designer fashion and plasma television after all?

This site also has an online survey with which idividuals can calculate their own personal index. Naturally, I gave it a shot. I know myself well enough to know that I would probably fall a bit short of the Canadian average, but I was still surprised at the result:

“Your personal Happy Planet Index (HPI) is 20.5, which is similar to that of Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

Well. Congo is ranked 175 (third from last). But at least I am ahead of Burundi, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. But it gets worse! Not only am I miserable, but according to the results I have a higher than average life expectancy – I’ll be miserable, longer!

It may be time for another midlife crisis. Perhaps I should start by relocating to a higher ranked country. Interestingly, Costa Rica is ranked third in the index. Hmmm.