I spent a good part of the morning listening to idiot SUV drivers scraping their shiny rims on the curb while trying to park outside my apartment. I lead an exciting life, ladies and gentleman. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

I also spent that time thinking about where I am in life and where I’m going. I haven’t really felt like myself this last month. It’s hard to explain, but I just feel unsatisfied or unfulfilled or…bored, really. I think it has something to do with my current stationary state.

I’ve been living and working in the same place now for nearly a year. I know that doesn’t seem like a big deal, and it’s really not, but this is the longest I’ve stayed still in the last five years. While at university, I was moving and starting new jobs every four to eight months. That may sound horrible to some people, but I had grown to really enjoy it. Every move, or new job, felt like a new chapter. Life always felt fresh and progressive. Since finishing my degree, I feel like I’m just drifting motionless. This is the first point in my life where I haven’t had a sketchy six month goal and a neatly-packaged four year goal. It’s a strange feeling.

Don’t get the wrong idea, my life is actually quite good right now. I really enjoy my job. I work in a fantastic, casual office that embraces creative solutions and produces results without much bureaucratic nonsense. I’ve made good friends here and have a decently active social life. I’m in better shape than I was in high school, which, to be truthful, isn’t really saying much. I have a single apartment in a nice part of town, so I have a calm, cozy place to live. All in all, everything is going quite well.

I just don’t have anything to strive for right now. I’ve met most of the goals I’ve been aiming at for the last decade. I still have career ambitions, and I’m learning a lot in my job, but advancement takes time and experience. Apart from working hard and continuing to learn, there’s nothing I can really do to speed up that process.

I’m not really excited about anything right now, nor am I unhappy with anything; I’m just mildly content. I’m medium, warm, neutral, gray. I’m floating in the middle of the pool, constantly out of arm’s reach of any side. Contentment was never one of my goals. It’s just watered-down joy. It halts momentum - a covered pit on the path to real happiness, and it’s easy to fall in and never get out again.

This contentment has left me in a creative slump. I’m uninspired, as you could probably tell from that manuscript introduction I posted. I’m in a position now to focus on personal projects. The path I was on this last decade was a ride. It was like a playground slide. Once I pushed off, I didn’t have to focus on moving myself forward. It was just a matter of stopping myself from falling over the sides. I guess now I just have to find a new slide and start climbing those steps.

I went to a doctor at the beginning of the week for a follow-up appointment about that abscess. I don’t have a regular doctor in this city, so I just use the walk-in clinic. Unfortunately, at these clinics, you never know who you’re going to get, and I tend to to be notoriously unlucky with doctors.

When last I visited, I was given Amoxicillin, had a swab taken, and was told to place a heating pad on the area a few times a day and to keep it wrapped in gauze. I had done that, and the wound was feeling much better, but the follow-up was just to be safe.

After sitting in the waiting room for half an hour, I was brought in to see the doctor, one I hadn’t met before. He asked me what the problem was, and I explained what had happened. Either the last doctor hadn’t written anything down in my file, or this man hadn’t read it. After dealing with him, I’m placing my bet on the latter.

I asked if the test results from the swab had come back, and he said he hadn’t seen anything about a test. I’m fairly sure the swab sample is taken to test for which bacteria caused the infection, allowing them to adjust the medication accordingly if needed. This seems like a fairly important safety check, but apparently he didn’t think so.

He asked to see the area, and immediately after I pulled off the gauze bandage he said, “An abscess can often be a sign of diabetes. That’s fine now, you can stop bandaging it. You’re cured, go home and have a shower.” Without another word, he left the office.

There are a number of reasons why I was dumbstruck by this:

1. He dropped the diabetes bomb and then left without any explanation. After researching it a bit and phoning my parents, who are both in the medical field, I’m not too worried about this. While it is apparently true that people with diabetes get abscesses more often, assuming someone could have diabetes from an abscess is a fairly large leap.
2. He just looked at it. He didn’t put gloves on and poke at it or ask me any questions about it, he just looked.
3. He told me to stop wearing a bandage on it and that I was cured, but the wound was still open. I’m not a doctor, but even I could see that it was most certainly not cured. You also don’t have to be a doctor to know that walking around with an open wound is not really a good thing to do, especially when it’s on an area that will rub up against your pants all day.
4. He left the office so abruptly that I couldn’t tell if the appointment was over or not. I didn’t know what he was doing. I spent the next few minutes standing there awkwardly, smelling myself because of the shower comment, before finding him in his administrative office and asking if we were done. On top of that, I had just showered an hour before seeing him, and I smelled mighty fine, thank you very much.

It occurred to me after leaving the clinic that he might have not even looked at the abscess. It seems like he just looked at the gauze bandage for signs of drainage instead. It’s possible that he assumed I hadn’t changed the bandage in the five days since my last appointment and, since the bandage was still in place, hadn’t showered. Upon seeing that there wasn’t much drainage on the bandage, he declared me cured. In reality, I’ve been showering, although awkwardly, and changing the bandage every morning.

Good thing I took time off work. I might have missed the chance to have a doctor completely brush me off. After leaving, I promptly discarded all of his advice, and I seem to be healing nicely.

I have this magical gift that allows me to find the stupidest doctors imaginable. If there’s a fool with an M.D. in the city, you can be sure I’ll track him down.

It’s been raining all weekend here. I’m quite happy about this, because it kept me from feeling like a lazy bastard for not getting out and being active.

This hasn’t been the best month for me. Near the beginning, I was ill for the first time in ages. Then last week, I had a wee bump on my thigh, which quickly developed into an abscess of pain and misery. It was inconveniently positioned, so it rendered me crippled. After a very slow hobble to the doctor, much pain, and antibiotics, I’m now happily on the road to recovery. Thankfully I can work from home, so I was able to spend the last couple days of the week stewing in my solitary anguish.

I’ve narrowed down the list of any minor changes to my life in the last couple of months to find what could be negatively affecting my physical being this way, which sadly only really amounted to three items: planning to take part of NaNoWriMo, rock climbing, and more actively trying to eat healthier, non-processed, organically-grown food.

I’m either allergic to leading a healthy lifestyle or potential creative endeavours.

My work hours are very flexible. As long as I’m available for meetings, hit my deadlines, and make my monthly hours, I can basically work when I want. This means I don’t have a strict time I need to be at work in the morning.

I love this about my job, and I consider it a big perk to have, but it also means that there are no repercussions for sleeping in. I’ve never been good with early starts, and when I’m laying in bed in the morning, mentally negotiating how much longer I can sleep, it’s hard to drag myself out when I know I can just make up the time that evening. Obviously, working into the early evening is horrible, but try telling my morning brain that. It will not listen. This last month I feel like I’ve regressed into my former high school self, as far as my sleeping schedule is concerned. I’ve been sleeping in later and later, and it really needs to stop. I actually have fairly good will power, but not in my weakened morning state.

I seem to have finally found a technique that works for me, until I get my act together. First, set one alarm by the bed. Then set a second alarm outside of your bedroom door. Finally, set a third alarm next to your computer, with a nasty notice pasted to it.

By the time you read the note, sit down at your computer, and check your e-mail, you’ve been away from the bed for long enough to defend against its siren song.

• Sorry for this mass of text. I’m too tired to write any CSS to add linebreaks, and my CMS dictatorship, commonly known as WordPress, won’t let me add them manually in the HTML. I tried.
• Thanks everyone who left book recommendations on the last post. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve read so many writing books and haven’t written a damn thing. Reading about writing is just so much easier, I suppose.
• My friend, Tanya, sent me a photo the other week of a strange plastic object with a plus and a minus on it. I was really excited for her, because I thought she bought the new hand-grip Wii controllers, but it turns out she’s just pregnant (and I’m very slow). Congratulations Tanya!
• I’ve been exhausted this last week. I must be fighting off the black plague that has afflicted everyone around me. I fall asleep if I stop moving for more than twenty minutes. I slept through Friday night, after getting home from work. The next morning, I went golfing and fell asleep the instant I got home, napping through the entire sunny afternoon. What a waste of a day.
• I’ve been writing plot ideas and character sketches in my wee Moleskine to ready myself for NaNoWriMo. I have the opening of my plot ready to go, and I just need to find a middle and an end somewhere. I’m excited to start writing, but I also have a rising feeling of dread as November creeps closer. I don’t want to fail this challenge, but it’s nearly impossible to imagine writing that much in a single month.
• I’m trying to plan a trip for early next year, but I’m having a hard time deciding where to go. I’ve narrowed it down to:
  • Scotland, to meet relatives and finally visit the motherland. Unfortunately, I’d have to suffer through nasty weather at that time.
  • Various bits of Scandinavia, to visit friends I studied with in Austria. Also terrible weather.
  • Australia, to backpack with my friend Lee-Ann. She might be moving there next year, and I’ll tag along for the first few weeks if she does. Fantastic weather.
  • Backpacking alone somewhere in Africa or Asia. I have traveled alone before, and I actually quite enjoy it, but I’ve only done it in western/central Europe.

  I’m not very good at narrowing, as you can see.

I’ll be in Seattle this weekend for a Java conference, and then off to Vancouver for the Smashing Pumpkins concert on Monday night, so there might not be too much action here in the next few days.

I ordered a new computer this week, and it just arrived today. I wanted to use my existing case, so I decided to just order the parts and put it together myself. I only had enough time tonight to clean out my old computer and mount the new motherboard, so it’s just sitting there in a pile at the moment. I am, however, typing this post on my shiny new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor!

When I ordered the computer, I didn’t know about the conference or the concert. I was originally planning on buying a lot of food on Friday night and playing games straight through until Sunday. I wasn’t even going to put pants on. I feel like there’s a universal conspiracy keeping me from my new toy.

Oh well, off to bed. In order to make it to Seattle in time, I need to get up tomorrow morning at 4:30am. I haven’t gotten up that early for two years, and I’m not really looking forward to it.

An interesting debate has been uploaded to Google Video, which was posted on Digg a while back, between Christopher Hitchens and Al Sharpton. Hitchens is the author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and Sharpton is an American Baptist minister.

When I started to watch this, I was afraid it would just turn into an arrogant shouting match, but both conducted themselves very well. They, for the most part, answered questions with well thought-out answers and took criticism and playful ribbing without becoming defensive.

The debate goes in circles a little at times with Sharpton wanting to focus the discussion on God rather than religion and Hitchens not complying. I haven’t read Hitchens’ book yet, so I can’t vouch for how valid this is, but according to Sharpton he does write about God specifically and wasn’t bringing those points up during the debate. Otherwise, I think it went fairly smoothly.

I’m an atheist, but I’m not very militant about it. I’m not a Hitler Atheist, as I heard someone refer to their coworker as once - an insult that doesn’t make sense on multiple levels. My family is technically Protestant. I say technically because we never attended church, and I believe both of my parents think of themselves as agnostic now.

Religion in my family was always a private topic. We didn’t shy away from it, as I was one of those kids that had to ask a million questions about everything around him, but what you believe and how you decide to follow those beliefs was always something personal. I was never pressured in any which way, and my parents were great at discussing religion objectively.

I definitely agree with Hitchens that religion shouldn’t be preached in schools or forced upon people. I do believe, however, that it would be great if school curriculum included a mandatory course on religion in one of the lower grades. A course that would introduce students to the major religions followed throughout the world and their teachings. So many people’s views seem spoiled by propaganda and biased news reports. Something like this, early on in kids’ lives, could help stop some of the hate brought on by ignorance. Unfortunately, a course like that could so easily be abused by an instructor with a bias.

Anyway, it’s an interested debate. If more people could discuss religion as civilly and intelligently as these two, we’d probably be better off.

I’ve embedded the video for your viewing pleasure.

The Books, Words, and Writing weblog linked to a list of the top 50 books that got people hooked on reading, from a survey of over 100,000 people. It’s an interesting mix of books. I’m surprised to see The Bible on the list. It doesn’t really seem like the type of book that would introduce children to the world of literature.

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe jumped out at me. I remember borrowing The Chronicles of Narnia box set from my sister in grade five or six and loving the series. In fact, I still have that box set sitting on my shelf right now. I’ve always had a natural talent for pilfering books.

Before that, I remember sitting in the library in grade four with my friend Mike, devouring every Hardy Boys book they had on the shelf. We were determined to get through the series, even if every book was essentially the same. At that time I was also reading through the Fear Street series by R.L. Stine, which surprisingly aren’t on the list.

In early elementary school I was reading a mix of children’s books, but I can’t think of any specific titles right now. I remember enjoying the Mr. Men books in the early years. Oh how I loved Mr. Mischief.

But to choose the book, that single book that got me hooked on reading, I have to go back even further than that. Back to those nights before kindergarten, before I even knew how to read my own name, when I’d curl up in bed and listen to my dad read The Hobbit to me. My imagination blossomed within those pages. I could nearly feel the ground under my feet as I traveled beside Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad mimicking Gollum’s voice as he read.

I firmly believe my lifelong reading and writing habits were formed and developed those nights. My dad didn’t inspire me to go out and buy more books or to pick up a pen and start inventing tales; I was far too young for that. He did, however, shape the way I relate to stories, and that’s a gift for which I’m most thankful.