Physical fitness is an altered state of consciousness

Sometimes, I seem to have spent most of my adult life getting back in shape. Starting with my recovery from having my knee smack into a steeplechase hurdle – an injury that sidelined me for six months when I was 19 and ended my slim prospects of running in the Olympics – I must have [...]

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Playing tag with death

My mother-in-law died last night, three days after her sister. Unlike with her sister, at least I remember the last time I saw her. However, since we had planned on visiting today, I am keenly aware that this is yet another death of someone close to me that I didn’t witness.
In fact, so far, every [...]

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The generation gap on the Internet

I was already an adult in the first days of the Internet, but I clamped on to it like a lamprey hungry for its next meal. For a letter writing, research addict like me, it was the tool I had always wanted. More recently, working in high-tech journalism and interacting with people from fourteen [...]

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The last time you see someone

Yesterday afternoon, my aunt-in-law died. She had been in and out of the hospital since Christmas with congestive heart failure, so it wasn’t unexpected, except in the sense that all deaths are unexpected because you don’t believe in them until they happen. My mourning is private, at least so far as this blog goes, [...]

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The artificial excitement of watching sports

Years ago, when an interviewer visited science-fiction writer Philip José Farmer in Peoria, Illinois, he saw a band marching down the main street. It wasn’t a holiday, so he asked Farmer what was happening, and received a shrug in reply. “They do things like that in Peoria,” Farmer said simply. That’s how I feel [...]

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Rescuing parrots

I never planned to be a rescuer of parrots. Yet, in a small way, that’s what Ive been for much of my adult life.
I first became fascinated by parrots when I met Coquette, a yellow nape dwarf macaw owned by a couple in Seattle. What intrigued me about Coquette was her sentience. It was [...]

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The interviewer between the mirrors

I’m a journalist, so in an interview I’m usually the one asking the questions. Today, I experienced a role reversal when Samartha Vashishtha published an interview with me in Indus, the online magazine for the India Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. I’ve been interviewed several times before, a couple of times for pod [...]

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The cherry trees of Vancouver

The Vancouver region has more trees than any other North American city. This fact is never more obvious than in early spring, when thousands of ornamental cherry trees start to blossom.
Younger, white blossoms come first. Some years, they come as early as mid-February, but mid-March to early April is more common. Whenever they come, after [...]

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The shared interests of couples

You can’t know what somebody else’s relationship is like. Lately, though, I am starting to believe you can tell the state of a relationship by how the couple share – or don’t share — interests.
A few months ago, I read an ex-friend’s comment that, when he and his wife went to the cinema, they didn’t [...]

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Corporate Don Quixote

Without ever intending to, I’ve been a contractor or consultant for most of my adult life (What’s the difference? About $40 an hour, I like to reply). I’m frequently asked to become a full-timer, but I’ve developed a superstitious dread of accepting; the few times I have, the unsuspecting company has gone bankrupt within a [...]

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