Bounded in a Nutshell

Since I'm back on campus, I'm cleaning out my auxiliary inboxen. One of the mailing lists I'm sucsribed to has accumulated about 700 messages over the past month; it's not as bad as it sounds, though, since there's a weird bug in the mail server handling the list that's creating many, many duplicates of randomly chosen messages.

Anyhow, one post I've seen three or four times now concerns Adult Attention Defecit Disorder. (It's a little off-topic, since the mailing list in question is about the works of a certain author, but let that be.) This is a mental disorder with symptoms like: you have trouble focusing. You tend to start multiple projects at the same time, but have trouble finishing them. You have trouble sitting still in meetings, you fidget. You tend to be late to work, due to a generally poor sense of time.

Well, here's the thing: I know many, many people with variations on some or all of these symptoms. In fact, from a Myers-Briggs point of view, most if not all of these symptoms are character traits associated with P (for Perceiving) type personalities... which make up something like half the population.

I'm not claiming that there's no such thing as (A)ADD; I'm not a psychologist nor a mental health professional, and don't really have the data to make an informed decision. I am questioning whether the complex of symptoms that are being described as characteristic of AADD automatically qualify as a disorder. I wonder whether this is really only a disorder in the sense that people who evince these symptoms don't fit into the boxes that society provides for us. So why is it the problem of the individuals and not a problem with the greater society?

My dear sister uberviolet has been twitting me about not adding her wonderful little blog to my links. Being somewhat sensitive to twitting, I have corrected the situation and given Sputnik pride of place.

In other news, I'm back in the Urban Industrial Hub that I try not to call home, even though I sort of live there. This is really just a hiatus in my vacation, since Friday has me driving off to the Big City to meet up with a couple of old classmates, and following that I'll be back in Canada for some little time.

Today's discovery: one of the local coffeeshops that I frequent serves what they call Good Morning Chai: it's a chai latte with some variable number of espresso shots added in. Oddly, the result is a liquid which tastes surprisingly like a hot chocolate, with the added effect that it sets one's head bones to buzzing within a couple of sips.

I have many head bones.

At the suggestion of the Salesman in Spite of Himself, I recently picked up a Coloretto deck. I'm enjoying about as much as possible when you consider that I've not yet managed to play a game with it.

Capsule summary of the game: there's a bunch of lizard cards in various colours, a bunch of +2 cards, and a few chameleon cards. You're trying to collect as many lizards in as few colours as possible, if you follow me; your best three colours count positively, and succeeding colours are negative. You score n points (plus or minus) for the nth lizard in any given colour, with chameleons counting in whatever colour you choose.

(Looking at the cards, I guess all the lizards are really chameleons. Good thing I'm neither a herpetologist nor a Turtle Tamer.)

Anyhow, so idleness has left my mind free to imagine. Specifically, I'm working on the rules for Coloretto Poker in its various permutations. I'll post a page about it in a day or three, once I've had some time to work out the probabilities.

Here's a cute little article about hybrid cars and the people who hate them.

It's perhaps a little embarassing to admit it, but there's a milestone in the development of my social conscience that was placed by Dennis Leary. Everyone in my generation is familiar, I think, with his song Asshole:

You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac El Dorado Convertible. Hot pink! With whale-skin hub caps, an all leather cow interior, and big brown baby seal eyes for headlights. YEAH! And I'm gonna drive around in that baby, at 115 miles per hour, getting one mile per gallon, sucking down quarter pounder cheeseburgers from McDonalds in the old-fasioned non-biodegradable styrafoam containers. And when I'm done sucking down those grease ball burgers, I'm gonna wipe my mouth in the American flag, and then I'm gonna toss the styrafoam containers right out the side, and there ain't a God damn thing anybody can do about it, you know why? 'Cause we got the bombs, that's why.

Satire, of course, but satire that's to the point. Our culture takes a certain pride in wastefulness: not always -- indeed, not generally -- as an end in itself, but as a byproduct of making things bigger, having more. Bucking this trend -- acting and shopping locally, refusing to own a car, living with simplicity -- is looked at as being just a bit odd by many of one's fellows. Why would one sacrifice the convenience of going to the Super Wal-Mart in favour of doing one's shopping at half a dozen locally-owned shops? Particularly is one's going to be walking or cycling around town to do it? It doesn't make any sense if one's conception of economic utility relates only to one's own finances and convenience.

While I can hardly claim to live waste-free -- I've got a ways to go before I've recaptured the simple life -- I do try to be conscious of the choices I'm making about such things. My own decision to buy a hybrid vehicle (two years ago, which I guess makes me an early adopter on this continent) was influenced by that consciousness. If that makes me a do-gooder, then fine. I think the world could use a little more good being done.

It seems that my sister Uberviolet has joined the blogging universe.

If you're looking for some sort of family resemblance in our blogging, look no further than her post about careless searches on eBay and my own on the same subject. Since I'm not entirely sure that u/v is aware of my blog's existence, the coincidence of this pleases me.

The residence room that I'm working out of this month has air conditioning. It's not under my conscious control; apparently, the AC is on during the daytime and off at nights.

I can see the logic here: the sun's out in the daytime, and the sun is known for its ability to make things hotter. Hence, the AC is really only needed when it's countering the evil thermal force of sunlight. Or something.

Unfortunately, this is more or less the opposite of what I personally would like to happen. I can deal with elevated room temperatures during the day, but at night I really prefer to have the air around me be cool if not cold. (I remember one apartment I lived in where the heater worked very well indeed, to the point that I would open my window in February and let my room's temperature drop to near zero (Centigrade) so that I could get comfortable.)

I've been back in the Home Town for the past few days, fulfilling my filial obligations and occasionally catching up with friends from high school. To this latter end, yesterday I found myself hanging around a campsite at a nearby provincial park visiting with folks.

Now, it seems that different people have different ideas about exactly what constitutes camping. Some of the folks I was with had tents, and did a substantial amount of cooking over a campfire. Another couple were apparently sleeping in their van and doing their cooking on some sort of propane-powered thingummy. And then there were the strangers across the way, who drove up their Mercedes convertible and had a TV sattelite set up at their campsite.

My question is: if you're going to go camping -- you know, get away from it all, the great outdoors, all that crap -- why are you bringing a television at all, let alone ensuring that your television has access to several hundred channels? I admit that I'm a little biased on this issue myself -- I've never actaully paid for cable service, and it's been over five years since I've lived in a house/apt. where anyone was paying for it -- but still, I don't think I'm entirely out of line here.

Or flip it around: if having your MTV is really that important to you, then why aren't you just camping in your backyard? Can't you just set fire to things in the privacy of your own neighbourhood?