Karmic Conniption

 Back four or five years ago, there was a little TV show called My Name is Earl.  It was a sitcom starring Jason Lee, and it had a simple premise: the lead character, Earl Hickey, was a pretty bad person, and one bad thing after another kept happening to him.  After one particular devastation, he vows to do good, specifically by making a list of everything he's ever done bad to someone, and making it up to the person, one by one.  The faith behind his actions is karma--for every good deed he does, he claims, something good will happen to him.  It was a good (or at least decent) show, but the pseudo-mysticism aspect of it never really worked for me.  A morally edifying show is fine at all, and as far as ethical systems or religious institutions go, "do good" is a fairly innocuous manifesto,  but the idea that you should do good because you'll be rewarded for it very soon--that bugged me.  It seemed to be a sort of sitcom logic, where everything needs to wrap up in 30 minutes, one way or the other, and "they all lived happily ever after because they're nice people" is a good a wrap up as any.

But there's another side to the temptation of such karma.  It's not just being rewarded for doing good--it means you've got certainty.  Life's full of choices, and it's not always clear if you've made the right one.  A system that rewards and punishes quickly is a nice source of feedback.  Case in point: I'm in line at the self-checkout.  It's a peak time and there's a bit of a wait, and so I spend every minute of it castigating the people in front of me for being so clearly poor with the self-checkout system.  I get up there, and, in my desire to show them how it's done, immediately screw up, keying in the wrong number and charging myself an extra 3 dollars.  Now, normally, I'd call a cashier over to cancel the item, but I've got a long line behind me yet, and there's only one cashier to manage the four tills, and she's already busy.  So, making a split decision, I take the hit.  I pay for my groceries, and I amscray.  And at the moment, I remember thinking, "This is karma.  You deserved to have this happen."  Well, yes and no.  I felt impatient, I keyed in items in a hurry, I screwed up, and I felt too embarrassed to fix my mistake.  That's only karma if karma is another word for cause and effect.  If I hadn't felt socially conditioned to refuse to hold up the people behind me any longer, I would have gotten my money back (or rather, never spent it at all).  Is that karma? And if the self-checkout system allowed cancellation, I could have avoided the whole thing.  Is that karma?

Karma.  An attempt to understand the way the world works when forces are beyond our control.  A justification for condemning someone for their misdeeds and bad consequences.  And a neat mcguffin for a Jason Lee vehicle.

Later Days.

Another Fine Moment

My life is a series of ridiculous and somewhat disgusting events.  Case in point:
 I went to the doctor today, to get a test performed.  The test required that I have a full bladder, so I was given very precise instructions: drink a litre of water of between 2 to 1 hours before the test, and don't drink anything for a full hour before the test.  Naturally, I forget to drink at all until it's 5 minutes before the 1 hour mark.  Desperate to make up for lost time, I guzzle the full litre in the time allowed.  How well did that plan work out? Poorly.  Hilarity and probable kidney damage soon ensue.  To make a long story short, it ends the way every trip to the doctor's does for me:

...And I could never look the nurse practitioner in the eye again.

Later Days.

Bees. Bees....

Well, one bee, specifically.  I just walked down to the library to pick up a book, then came back to the office.  I sit down, cross my legs, and prepare to work.  That's when I notice, due to my knee now being closer than usual to my head, that I picked up a passenger while outside: there is now a bee crawling slowly up my leg.  I get up, very, very carefully.  The bee seems undisturbed.  Encouraged, I leave my office and start down the hallway to the outdoors.  It had never seemed quite so long.  I imagine I presented an interesting picture for passerbys, as I was trying very, very hard to move quickly, yet do so with the minimal amount of leg movement.  I assume this is how the Monty Python "Ministry of Silly Walks" sketch came into being.

I got outside, and took inventory.  One me, check.  And one bee, check.  The latter item, however, had shifted considerably.  While I was busy fleeing, the bee had been occupied with moving to a more advantageous part on Mount PoC.  It had moved upward from my knee, to behind my thigh, and was now taking up position directly on my left buttock.  I had a bee on my ass.  You can imagine the relative sangfroid I employed in learning this fact.  And if I looked ridiculous before when I was walking, you can also imagine the figure I cut when trying to dislodge a bee from my butt without agitating it or putting my naked hands anywhere near the region in question.  I'm guessing it looked something between inventing a poorly thought out dance move, and having a seizure.

The bee eventually decided that there was, in fact, no pollen in my posterior, and flew away.  I breathed a sigh of relief, and offered a silent prayer to any deities with apiarist inclinations that may be in the vicinity.  I trudged back to the office.  It was a pointless gesture; there was clearly no way I was going to do any work today.  I was far too traumatized.


Later Days.

And when you flip the light switch, a toilet flushes.

A few hours ago, I started coughing. As a man allergic to just about everything, this is not an unusual event in and of itself. This cough, though, was rather persistent. After a few minutes of hacking, I decided to take steps. This measure was not so much for myself, understand. When it comes to my personal health, I generally fall somewhere between stoic and almost suicidally stubborn. If my body wants to spend a few hours hacking, fine. I'm not going to let it change my course of affairs one jot; it's not the boss of me! In this particular instance, though, I had other considerations to think about. It had just turned midnight, and I had roommates trying to sleep. As a matter of etiquette, then, something had to be done. I put on a heavier shirt. Still coughing. No worries; that was just a preliminary sally forth anyway. I blow my nose. Still coughing. I take a double puff on the inhaler. Still coughing. Then I pull out my hail mary--it's directly against my pointless stoic beliefs, but I swallowed my pride and my medicine, and helped myself to my sole bottle of brand name cough syrup. Alas, it was all for naught, for the cough persisted.
Then I got an idea. And this wasn't a long shot type of idea. No, this was the sort of idea where it comes to you, and you simultaneously think "that'll do it" and "I should have thought of this from the start." I go into my bag of winter gear, got out a toque, and put it on. The coughing stopped almost instantly.

I was coughing because my ears were cold.

This body, man. The stories I could tell you. Still, it gets me to work in the morning.

Later Days.

Insert Anecdote Here

About 3 weeks ago, circumstances conspired against me to create a defacto suspension of my library card.

Allow me to explain.

I couldn't find my card, and I really wanted the book that had arrived (Robin Hobb's Dragon Keeper, matter of fact), so I instead used a piece of ID--which is fine at the library, they just put a little flag on your file that says you need to present a card next time. However, since we went the ID route, they also took the time to confirm my address. No, I said, not thinking, I've moved since then. Okay then, said the librarian, we'll just need something with your name and address on it for your next check-out.

Problem. See, my current living situation is... complicated. I pay rent to my friends, who pay rent to the person they're subletting from, who pays rent to the landlord. So I'm three steps removed from anything with my actual address. And since I move again at the end of August, that meant it would be at least that long until I could prove I had an actual address, and was not, say, a vagrant homeless person. Thus, a defacto suspension.

Until today. Today, my reimbursement check for the contact lenses I bought in July came. And my first thought on looking at the check was--hey! Something with my address on it! Now I can get my library card. Followed by: oh, hey, 100 bucks. Cool.

It's all a matter of priorities.

(See, they're not ALL 3500 words.)

Later Days.