Calgary Hotel Break-In

I arrived in Calgary on Tuesday night and I am thrilled that it is a balmy -10c! Now, business travel is typical bland and boring. More often than not, nothing overly exciting happens when I travel for work. Sometimes, I will go to dinner with my counterparts at the other office or have a business dinner with counterparts at competing firms. It’s mostly shop talk with the occasional polite questions about how your family is doing and the like.

Well during my visit to Calgary, I decided not to have such dinners. I was looking forward to spending some down time on my own. One night I wanted to find a few new books to read so I headed up to 8^th Avenue to a quaint bookstore called McNally Robinson Booksellers. The store is nice with a café upstairs. I was delighted that I could leaf through a few books while having a nice, quiet dinner. After my enjoyable meal of sun dried tomato and pesto tortellini, I purchase my books and start walking back to the hotel about 8 or 9 blocks away.

Accompanying me on my walk is my trusty Blackberry mp3 player. I love listening to music while I wander around. Good tunes always make things much more pleasant and enjoyable for me. As I strolled through the streets of downtown Calgary I was completely and elatedly enthralled with the music that I am certain I was singing out loud, and likely singing badly. I didn’t care… I was enjoying myself and I didn’t care who knew it.

I continued to trot along until I arrived at my hotel. Needless to say, I was still in a great mood and listening to music very loudly on my headphones. At this point the music has been so stimulating that I am pretty much strutting! I strut into the hotel and gleefully dance to the elevator heading back to my room. I am looking forward to delving into my newly purchased books. I will tell you more about my book selection in my next blog because I am truly disgusted and disappointed with myself. Anyway, I get off the elevator and skip down the long hallway still entrenched in the music playing between my ears. I pull out my keycard to open the room door. Nothing happens. I try the keycard again and the door does not open. I quickly wipe the magnetic strip on the back of the card onto my jeans in hopes that it was a bit a dust or something. But no, the key doesn’t seem to be working. Of course, I am still enjoying the music playing loudly from my mp3 player and I’m not at all frustrated by the fact that I can’t get the door open to my room. Like a fool, I must have been standing the for a good 30 seconds cramming the keycard into the keyslot and wrenching on the door handle while pushing on the door.

All of a sudden, the door swings open and there is sweaty man standing in my room wearing a bathrobe looking somewhat tired and perturbed! I was so startled that I let out a little scream! I think my scream scared him. My first thought was “who the hell are you and why are in my room?!?” Well, it turned out this was NOT my room. The man said to me in an annoyed tone “I kept asking who was at the door and you didn’t answer.” Of course I didn’t answer, music from my mp3 player was playing way to loudly for me to hear anything! At this point all I could do was laugh. I literally laughed out loud and apologized profusely to him. Even though I had a huge grin on my face as I walk to my room giggling to myself, I was truly sorry I had interrupt his Thursday evening. My room was at the opposite end of the hallway. I turned the wrong way when I got of the elevator. How embarrassing.

Wrapping up Yellowknife and Off to Calgary

On my last day in Yellowknife I had the pleasure of experiencing -42c weather and seeing snow actually blowing upwards! It was great! In the morning, the walk to the office is a mere 5 or 6 blocks but in this kind of weather it has it’s challenges; especially for a mild weather dwelling Vancouverite like me. As usual, I bundled up in wool long johns, layered myself in thermal sweaters and such. This particular morning, I had decided to wear my glasses instead of cramming my contact lenses into my dryballs… err I mean eyeballs. This was my first mistake. It’s a mistake because I forgot about my need to breathe. Let me explain further…

As we walked out into the cold to trek to the office, I pulled up my neck dickie up to cover my face from the wind and cold. Of course, need to do this thing called breathing. Apparently, it’s the thing that separates the living from the dead. Anywhooo… because I have this need to breathe, each breath I took steamed up my glasses. I tried to breathe less intensely taking short breaths. That did not help. My glasses continued to steam both on the inside and the outside of the lens. Of course, it being -42c with the windchill the steam freezes and a thick layer of ice start to form on my lenses.

My second mistake, my glasses are metal framed. So as the steam formed into ice on my glasses, it is also caused them to literally stick to my face! I don’t think it helps that my nose bridge is pretty much non-existent. I am Asian after all and I accept that I have flat face and a flat nose. But in this kind unbearable, extreme cold, metal framed glasses that sit snug against a flat face instead of resting nicely on a nose bridge is just a bad idea!

Now remember, this is only a 5 to 6 block walk and all of this managed to happen within block number 2 of the walk! Needless to say, by the time we arrived at block 3, where Dean felt the need to stop and take a photo of us in front of a sign that displayed the temperature, I could not see anything! I could not see through my glasses nor could I see peering over the lenses because my vision is so crappy. I’m literally as blind as a bat! Good thing Dean was around to be my seeing-eye-person!

NOTE TO SELF: when in temperatures below -20c, wear contact lenses as glasses will freeze to your face.

Dancing Aurora in Yellowknife

My co-worker Dean and I arrived in Yellowknife mid-afternoon and so far I have to say that I like this town. I know I have been here for less than 24 hrs and I am probably jumping the gun a bit in saying that. It was sunny and warm for this time of year at a mere -18c. I could be singing a different tune if it had been -40c. It's likely to get colder tomorrow so I guess I'll see how I feel tomorrow. But nonetheless, -18c is still somewhat cold with the windchill (maybe -23c or so today) if you aren't dressed appropriately. Your tongue would definitely stick to metal in this sort of weather as I quickly discovered. No, I did not purposely stick my tongue to a metal parking meter or anything like that! But rather, I have these special mitts that have a zipper along the side so you can slide your hand in-and-out just in case you need to use your fingers... you know for things like taking photos and such. Anyhow, I forgot that the zipper on my mitts are made of metal and when I attempted to use my mouth to open the zipper, my tongue froze to the zipper latch! I tore a small part of my tongue onto the zipper of my mitt! Ouch! *Note to self: do not use mouth on metal zippers!*

The trees here are short and watching from the plane during our descent, Yellowknife looked like snow and ice covered by fuzzy moss. Apparently as you head north toward the tree line, most of the trees are about 3 feet small. I would look like a giant at a staggering 4'9 1/2" next to those trees!

A Sunday night in Yellowknife seems to be fairly quiet. Dean and I decided to have dinner at a Vietnamese noodle joint and I'd have to say that it was the most expensive bowl of Pho I have ever had! When I was in Vietnam in June I paid the equivalent of $1-2 CND for a bowl of Pho with all the fixings - mint leaves, basil, bean sprouts, etc. Here in Yellowknife fresh herbs are hard to get and they are very expensive. So I ordered a bowl of Pho with beef balls and rare beef and it was $9.95 just for the noodles and beef! No fixings. Just a few chopped green onions and that was it. I couldn't even get beef flank or tendons as I would normally! Oh well.

After our less than exciting but very pricey bowls of Pho, we decide that we should walk around town and see if we can see the Aurora Borealis a.k.a. the Northern Lights. So we wander around the parking lot of the hotel and wander down the highway and low and behold we see a light stream of green light bending and curving in the sky. At first it was very faint but gets brighter from time to time. Nothing too spectacular because there was too much light pollution in the city. So we decide to head out on to a frozen lake to get a bit further away from the city lights. We tread through a foot or so of powdery snow on the lake and the Aurora Borealis look brighter. But still, I was not satisfied. Dean suggests we look for a cab to take us outside the city limits so we head back to the highway in hopes of finding a cab.


Within about 5 minutes from when we get to the highway, a cab drives by and I wave it down. The cabby is a Francophone named Gilles from Quebec City and he drives us out about 10-15 minutes outside of town. We pull off the side of the highway where it is dark and as we get out of the cab I see one of the most spectacular things of my life..... dancing ribbons of light across the night sky! Strings of green and some with hints of pink and red! And they do dance! They danced in waves and ripples, flashing red and green marching in and around the starlit sky. It was absolutely stunning and literally took my breath away for a moment. But after that brief breathless moment (most of you know that I can be quite chatty), I was overwhelmed with glee and felt deeply fortunate to have the opportunity see such a wonder of nature. All I kept saying was "This is beautiful! I can't believe how spectacular this is! This is fucking beautiful!"


Well, I'm off to bed as work awaits me in the morning. I hope the weather is nice tomorrow night as well. I want to see more of this amazing phenomenon and will take every chance I get to do it!

Psychological Immunity and the Price of Freedom

For the past several months, I have been a reading machine. Ok, that is a slight exaggeration. Let's just say I have been reading a lot more than I usually do. And when I say "more than usual" that would be more than one book a year. In all seriousness, I have read maybe 5 - 6 books this year so that's a 500 - 600% increase in book reading! I pat myself on the back.

One of the books that kicked off my read-o-rama was "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert. It is non-fiction and discusses a series of studies about predictors of happiness. Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss. Essentially, he says that our assumptions about what will make us happy are often wrong.

Psychological Immunity

In Gilbert's study, people demonstrate they are not good at forecasting their responses to emotional incidents and tend to overestimate how long they will be unhappy following negative events. An interesting notion Gilbert writes about is premise of a "psychological immune system" which shelters people from the worst effect of their misfortune.

Most of us are not conscious of our psychological immune system for a couple of reasons. First, positive events can buffer the emotional impact of painful circumstances. And second, while under duress, people have an extraordinary ability to reflect on negative circumstances that happen to them in a positive manner. In a sense, it's a psychological defense mechanism that helps us cope.

Let's say you know about your imminent death. You will die in 30 days. How do you think you would handle such devastating news?

For me, I would feel absolutely destroyed. There are so many things I life I have yet to experience, people I have yet to meet and places I have yet to go to. After getting over the initial feeling of crushing devastation, I would think that I would not waste my precious 30 days wallowing in my own despair about the fact that I am going to die. This would be the ultimate opportunity to live. Not just live in the "breathing" sense but rather really LIVE. I would take the time to do all the things I have been to scared to do. Say the things I have been too afraid to say. And spend time with the people in my life that I truly love and care about. Why spend the last moments of your life a miserable bastard? So even though I would be facing death, I would try and make the experience as positive as possible.

I am not dying. Well, let me rephrase that seeing that we are all "technically" dying as we age. I do not have a terminal illness that I am aware of. What is holding me back from doing the things that I am afraid of right NOW? Why not live in the moment? "Carpe Diem" so they say?

The Price of Freedom

According to Gilbert, it is not only intense suffering that can trigger our psychological immune system but other triggers such as inescapability. Gilbert says, "When the experience we are having is not the experience we want to be having, our first reaction is to go out and have a different one, which is why we return unsatisfactory rental cars, check out of bad hotels, and stop hanging out with people who pick their noses in public. It is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience, which is why we love the clunker in the drive way, the shabby cabin that's been in the family for years, and Uncle Sheldon despite his predilection for nasal spelunking."

In today's day and age we have an unbelievable amount of choice. Globalization and technology has enabled and expanded our ability to choose. But is the freedom of choice necessarily a good thing?

In order to explore happiness in relation to choice, Gilbert conducted a photography course where the participants shot and developed photos and given the opportunity to take one home. Half of the participants were told they would be allowed to later change their minds about which photo to keep, the "escapable" group, and the other half were told that their choices would be final, the "inescapable" group.

Which group do you think were happier with their choice of photo, the "escapable" group or the "inescapable" group?

The results suggest the "escapable" group was more likely to regret their decisions and like their photographs less than those in the "inescapable" group. Even more interesting is that when a new group of participants were asked to predict if their contentment with their choice of photograph would be influenced by whether or not their choice was irrevocable or not, these participants predicted that escapability would not influence their satisfaction. Even though the study shows that inescapable and irrevocable circumstances trigger our psychological defenses to have a more positive view on those circumstances, we are not able to foresee that this will happen. And because we fail to recognize that inescapability will trigger our psychological defenses, we can end up making painful mistakes that jeopardize our happiness.

Now let's take this notion of choice one step further. A new group of photography participants were asked whether they would prefer to have or not to have the choice to change their minds about which photograph to keep and the majority preferred to have the opportunity to choose. Thus, the vast majority preferred to take a class where they would ultimately be unhappy with the outcome; a photograph they would be dissatisfied with.

"These results show how our penchant for freedom, opportunity, choice and leaving our bridges unburned can backfire," says Gilbert. "None of us likes the feeling of being trapped, so when given the opportunity to escape our commitments, we shrug and say, 'Sure, why not? How could it hurt to have a little extra freedom?' This study shows how it can hurt."

There is such a thing as too much choice. People believe choice is going to be good for them, when in fact it's not always. So the moral of the story... once you choose something, commit to it and don't look back otherwise you may end up with buyers remorse.

The Anti-Christ: SATAN CLAUS HIMSELF

Well it’s Christmas Day and it’s that time of year you spend with family and friends. Now, I personally have not been a fan of Christmas. You can call me the Anti-Christ really. Now before all of your Christmas soldiers and elves get on my case about the “meaning of Christmas”, let me explain myself. Here are the reasons I dislike Christmas:

1. 
   I truly despise the premise that you MUST buy gifts. Yes, gifts are nice and I hear that it is better to give than to receive. Personally, I will give a gift to someone if I happen to see something that I know a friend or family member would like. It doesn’t necessarily have to be at Christmas or at a birthday or any special occasion really. It’s a gift just because. I saw it and I thought they should have it.


2. 
   I hate Christmas stress. As people bustle around getting ready for the holidays things get frantic and people are CRAZY. It’s like going through an entire month feeling like it’s a full moon. And everyone who is anyone knows that all the crazies come out of the woodwork during a full moon. The shopping malls and grocery stores are mayhem and there’s gridlock in parking lots. You’d think that there would be more Christmas “cheer” but from what I have experienced, people are frazzled and stressed. I can be certain to say that there have been more altercations at the mall in December that at any other time of year.


3. 
   I despise formal seating at Christmas dinner. Once again I don’t mean to offend those who do this but I think having formal seating at a family Christmas dinner is completely ridiculous. Adding any sort of formality to an occasion that is supposed to be joyous and festive takes all of the fun out of it. Ok, I do understand that someone has to sit next to crazy Aunt May who takes her dentures out and neatly places in on her napkin after pumpkin pie or the bozo drunk Uncle Martin who brings a new and younger girlfriend each year I hopes that the family doesn’t suspect he’s a homo despite the fact that we are all just begging for him to come out of the closet already!! I’m sure the seating can work itself out without the table place tags!

The number one reason I’m bitter about Christmas probably stems from my own childhood. I honestly believe that Christmas, as known by North Americans, was ruined because my parents are ESL and didn’t fully understand the “Christmas Culture” and the importance of Santa to a young child. You see, as my parents were still learning to speak, read and write in English and naturally they made mistakes. I would have to say that their most crucial mistake ruined Christmas for me forever. How would you feel getting up early Christmas morning only to find that you have received gifts from SATAN? That’s right around the age of 6 or so I think our gifts were wrapped and left by the fire place with tags that said “Marry Cristmus From Satan”. Obviously, there was no Santa or Satan for that matter… it was just my ESL parents who didn’t have spell check in 1981. So at the innocent age of 6, my Christmas spirit was shattered and all faith in the holiday disappeared that day when I found out Santa was a fake.

Life Explained on Film

As usual it's after 2 am and I cannot sleep. What is one to do when one has insomnia??? Me, I either read, watch a movie or surf the net. Tonight, I decided to surf the net and I came across a completely ridiculous website call videojug - life explained on film. This site provides video instructions on life with footage on issues such as "How to avoid trapped arm whilst cuddling in bed", "Be the perfect boyfriend", "Be the perfect girlfriend" and "How to break up the right way". This site provides instructions on life but not only about relationships but other topics such as "How To Do A Backhand Drive In Table Tennis", "A Girl's Guide To Looking Good Naked" and "How to Prepare For a trip into the Wild". Anyhow visit http://www.videojug.com/ and see the various things explained in life. Leave it to the Brits to come up with this.....

Radical Honesty "I Think You're Fat"

I mentioned that I would continue with my blog in July.... it is now December and I have posted nothing. Evidently, I am completely unreliable and have an excuse for everything. What can I say, my pursuit of life has been all consuming. Enough said, I'm back from my five month hiatus.

I know there are many bloggers out there that have much more interesting things to say and some that are much stronger writers than I. I don't really care that they are better than me; that is to be expected. Their is always a smarter, better, beautiful, more reliable version of ourselves being born every second of the day. I blog to express my thoughts and ideas.... and of course to share them with those who care enough to read my on going droning. Hopefully I won't drone on too much. I am sure that there will be times where my perspective is completely ludicrous and you will find yourself saying “what the f*** is this nut job talking about? She’s a complete ass”. And that is fine with me. But I hope that there will be times where you will think, “Hah, I never really thought of it that way” or “wow, that is SO very true”. And I am fine with that too. OK enough about me... I sound like a narcissist.

Idioms

I may sound like a complete and utter skeptic but I have come to the realization that life is not about the pursuit of happiness (happiness is overrated anyhow) but rather the pursuit is life itself. I know, this makes no sense. Well not yet anyway.

This thought came to me when I came across a few idioms. One of which is "Happy as a clam." In it's full form the idiom is "Happy as a clam in mud at high tide" meaning a clam is happy because it cannot be dug up and eaten.

If happiness is that simple we'd all be clams. I understand happiness as segments and moments in our lives. Events and experiences that evoke the feeling of happiness. If that is the context of happiness, then happiness is essentially not sustainable. We can pursue moments of happiness but life as happiness cannot truly exist. If life is the pursuit of happiness then I believe we'd be chasing a red herring. Also another idiom! (Just in case it's not obvious - a red herring is something that takes people's attention away from the main subject being talked or written about). In the pursuit of life we will experience happiness but we will also experience sorrow, anger, rage, guilt, love, regret and a whole gamut of human emotion. For me, life is about experiences, how we handle and react to our experiences and how we continue on to the next experience. Hence the pursuit of life.

Here's another idiom, "Honesty is the best policy" which obviously means that it is best to be honest. We all know that is NOT true. The truth hurts sometimes so we censor that truth to spare each other unnecessary pain. I recently read an entertaining article about a movement called "Radical Honesty". Here's a link to the article "I Think You're Fat" by AJ Jacobs. The Radical Honesty movement was founded by Brad Blanton, a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist who believes that everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. Have a read... it's an interesting concept... ludicrous in many ways but interesting.