Monkeys know

Recently I learned that I've been peeling bananas from the wrong end. For too many years now, I've been wrestling with the stem end of bananas, slicing, ripping, biting and generally mauling my hapless bananas open. No doubt, for you banana aficionados out there, these loutish attempts are likely akin to watching your brothers’ latest date slurp happily from her finger bowl at a family dinner; ridiculously funny in the retelling, but somewhat embarrassing in the moment.

As it turns out, bananas are damn easy to peel, just ask a monkey. All it takes is a little pinch at the opposite end from the stem and voilà ... you’ve split your peel revealing the banana’s delectable pasty white flesh to your hungry gaze. Now some of you, especially those who are in the know, may be thinking ... this man is an idiot. Harsh words ..., though understandable, if you are one of those people who routinely confuse knowledge and intellect. I simply did not know what every two month old monkey does. Apparently this little banana fact had been kept from me, perhaps purposefully by some shady government entity. After all, no one specifically imparted this knowledge to me; rather I stumbled upon it quite by accident. My friends, if you can call them that in the light of this discovery, never told me. No teacher paid by the state has ever revealed this truth, and my family has been virtually mum on the subject.

Yes, it’s clear to me now that this little edible fact was purposefully kept from my menu. God knows what could have happened differently in my life, if only I had known how to properly peel a banana. How many times has some promotion or opportunity been lost, when some snobbish bastard noted my clumsy banana handling and dropped me from the short list? I can almost hear him exclaiming to his cronies, “MK ... are you mad? We can’t send him to London; the man can’t even peel a banana!” 

Whether shared or withheld, knowledge is truly powerful stuff.

Standing about in lines ...

We spend a considerable amount of our allotted time here on the blue planet standing in lines of one type or another, some sources state as much as three to four years. Compare that to the average amount of time spent having sex; six months ... geez, I wonder if those are guy months or girl months? Anyway, I think I must be hitting well above the national average ... for standing in lines that is. I seem to be forever in a line, and to make matters worse, it's always the slowest one. I have this uncanny ability to pick the slowest moving line from any number of possibilities. I even try to trick myself; I pick a line and then randomly walk to another. But it doesn't seem to matter, if it was clipping along the next person up to bat asks a hard question like, “How much is this?” or worse they can't figure out how to use their debit card causing the whole frigg’in process to grind to a halt.

My average line day includes; waiting to use the bathroom (four women, three bathrooms on two levels and yet one or more of them is always in the one bathroom I need), I line up for my coffee, then there’s the traffic, the elevator at work, the lunch line up, the boss's “I’ll just be a minute ...” - line up, and on it goes, the bank, the restaurant, the car wash, the grocery store, yadda, yadda. It’s a seemingly endless series of lines.

Apparently lining up or more accurately "queueing” has a whole body of academic and applied work around it. People study queueing, there’s even an academic journal called "Queueing Systems". “Queueing”, by the way that is the correct spelling, apparently it is the only word in the English language with five consecutive vowels. I guess even consonants have to wait.

All this queueing has forced me into the disagreeable position of having to listen, really listen, to my inner dialogue. Its fine to have an inner dialogue tripping along with you while you’re interacting with the world; but it’s another thing to be actually doing nothing while your mind is chattering away. Now I have to actually hear the inane things I think – my thinking has a voice, actually a number of voices and one of them has this real annoying English accent that I think got stuck in my head from watching too many Monty Python skits. But I digress. Standing about in a line means that I’m not distracted by “activity”, activities which normally break up the whole dialogue thing, leaving me with the false impression that there’s actually some purpose to all my inner blabbing, but standing in a line with virtually nothing to do, leaves me vulnerable to the drivel that makes up my conscious thoughts. I’m like the poster boy for attention deficit disorder. I’m all over the place.... one minute I’m solving world hunger and the next I’m trying to figure out if that’s a popcorn bit jamming up my bottom teeth. Then there are the haphazard visions that pop up for no particular reason from R to PG. It’s a mess of slapdash stuff. Yet I seem to function more or less normally when not standing still, at least no one has recommended pharmaceutical remedies to this point.

I can only assume similar goo is going on all around me with some of my fellow line prisoners. Of course you would know better than me ... I only know for sure the goofy stuff that clangs around in my head. Although I can pretty much guess that the woman in front of me sighing heavily, rolling her eyes and muttering to herself is probably thinking about something that involves firearms.

Squirrel!

Aliens

When I was growing up, there was a time when girls were either moms or aliens. There wasn’t a lot of ground in between. Moms I got, they looked after you, they made sure you were fed and watered and they were generally nice to you. They spent a lot of time talking to other moms and doing stuff around the house. Oh yes and they hugged you when you needed a hug and sometimes even when you really didn’t need one. The only real downside of moms was they made you take a bath more often than you really wanted to and they insisted that you come home when the street lights came on.

The aliens on the other hand, were mostly annoying. I had two of them living in my house. One was allegedly a year younger, although she always acted like she was older, and the other was three years younger. I was never really sure what she did, the younger, besides suck up to Dad 24/7. Some friends of mine had aliens at their houses too, and there were other aliens at school. With a few exceptions they seemed to spend a lot of time whispering and giggling or playing dumb games. Mostly I didn’t pay much attention to them. My friend Steve was luckier than me; he only had brothers, no aliens. It was cool hanging out a Steve’s house there was always something to do and his mom loved feeding us. When we weren’t at Steve’s, or playing road hockey, we were catching dew worms, fishing, swimming or just exploring. It was great.

Then ... I met the red headed alien.

She just sort of showed up one day. Her father, like my father, was Air Force. Friends came and went in the Air Force, every year kids moved and new kids arrived, sometimes it was you coming or going. It wasn’t great but that was part of our world then. Anyway she just showed up and started talking to me.

I’m not sure what it was about the red headed alien, but she seemed different than the rest of the aliens, maybe it was the hair. It turned out she had a name and liked doing stuff, like playing tag, building forts and watching movies. I sort of liked being around her, she made me laugh and didn’t seem to care about stuff the aliens at my house cared about. Steve thought she was okay too, for an alien, and tolerated her hanging around with us.

One day she and I were together, alone, goofing around outside her house. During a little rough housing I gave her a push knocking her to the ground hard. She cried out once and then lay motionless. I called her name but she didn’t respond... I knelt down by her side thinking I might have really hurt her. I never saw it coming. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back and she was on top of me, pinning me down. I remember thinking that this wasn’t good, but on the other hand it seemed ... then, without any warning, she kissed me. On the mouth! Before I even had time to react, she was up and gone. I wasn't sure what to think, or do, but something happened, something changed.

That was the end of the aliens for me.

Failing

We don’t generally celebrate failure; we don’t salute its arrival, at least not in a military way. Neither do we cheer when somebody we like or respect messes up. We don’t slap them on the back and say, “Hey man that was a spectacular screw up!” And people don’t wake up in the morning looking forward to failing at something during the day. Overall it’s probably safe to say that for most people, failing at something is a negative experience.

Now many of you have probably had someone tell you that failure is a part of life and that we should learn from our mistakes and move on, and that it is okay to fail. I have certainly heard it … heck, I’ve even said it. But it always sounds to me just a little, well … forced. Saying it is okay to fail doesn’t flow off the tongue like an enthusiastic “atta boy”. I mean do we really believe in our hearts that it’s okay to fail … if it is; it certainly never feels okay to me. Mostly it makes me feel crappy. So the walk here doesn’t live up to the talk … and there’s a reason for that, me thinks.

Somewhere, on the trip from womb to grave, we learned that failing should feel bad, not just be bad, and that success should feel downright euphoric. Given the apparent strength of these feelings, I suspect the notion that failure = bad and success = good was reinforced sufficiently in every aspect of our lives, young and old, to become a truism. So for most of us, no amount of cheery talk and theorizing around the appropriateness and acceptability of failure is going to have us wrestling for the bragging rights.

Of course the paradox of failure isn't anything new, we have known forever the value of experience, of trial and error and the its power to teach us everything from tying our shoes to finding cures for diseases. But we are conditioned as humans to seek approval and to belong and that seems to come more readily to those who have “succeeded” than it does to those who have failed. So we have stigmatized failure and those who have failed, seeing “failure” as something definitely less desirable than success. Admittedly the consequences of failure can be high, even fatal and irreversible so it is easy to see why failure and its authors have gotten such a bad rap. But as unpleasant as failure is ascribed to be, it’s an essential ingredient of the human condition and it’s only through failing, that we can be properly positioned to learn, grow, and develop as individuals and as a collective.

So we need to fail, and we need to allow ourselves and others to fail and embrace those failures as opportunities to learn. Now I’m not suggesting that we start letting people fly or drive without licenses, clearly people need to be competent before independently doing a host of activities. But true competency is gained through effort and by implication, serial failure. What I am suggesting is that the stigma associated with failure needs to be shelved along with the emotional negativity that makes failing a bad thing, instead of an important step towards improvement.

When we fear failure we limit ourselves, we become timid and unsure of new experiences. But embracing the inevitability of failure, like we did when we were learning to tie our shoes, will lead us to doing things better. The way I see it, always being successful means you've never really tested yourself.

Living with Baba

When I tell people that I live with my sweetie, her two teenage daughters and Baba, I get a real range of reactions ... my personal favourite is the head tilt with furrowing brow and questioning eyes (the puzzled dog look). A look that usually emanates from other munga-cakes like me who have no idea what "Baba" means ... when I say grandma aka mother-in-law ... their less than gracious expressions only deepen. It seems for many the idea of sharing close quarters with your significant other's mother is, well, not ideal. “Isn’t that a little difficult"? Some hazard to suggest, to which I usually counter, "Which part? Living with Baba or being the only one who stands to pee?"

Truth is, you’re actually not encouraged to stand and pee when you live with four women, apparently checking to see if the toilet seat is down is not a reflexive behaviour for women. There are a number of other challenges but that is truly the stuff for a separate post . . . back to Baba.

Baba, at least this Baba, is a pretty cool lady. The woman is a Trojan; she can do more in a day than I can do in a week and she’s eighty! She has lived a full and good life by her own account, and has every intention of continuing to do so. She’s truly a hyphenated Canadian, happily living in her two worlds, one of tradition and expectations (the ethnic factor) and the other fast paced and ever changing (the new age). Baba seems to have struck a workable balance between these two places. Roger Martin, the educator and innovation writer would describe her as practicing integrative thinking; the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models. Of course if I told Baba that, she would smile at me, shake her head knowingly and ask me if I was hungry. Such hypothesising and categorizing is mildly interesting to Baba but the obituaries get first read at our house. Not because Baba is morbid, but because she wants to be sure she doesn't miss anyone, that she gets an opportunity to pay respects to those she has known and to tell their stories. For Baba, their world has infinitely more meaning and interest to her than some academic musing (no offense Roger).

As you may be able to imagine the most important world for Baba is the world of family. To her family is everything, it is the beginning and the end, it is the omega purpose. She is steadfast in this, both in word and action. Baba continues, despite her years, to be an active participant in her life and the life of her family. She is at the center of every family get together, every family meal, she is there to listen to all, provide an opinion if you want it - sometimes even if you don’t - hold a hand, brush away a tear, hug a kid, be a mom and be a friend.

The Force is strong in Baba.

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned from Baba is the value of the extended family. In my old world, moms and dads didn’t usually live with their grown kids. Now I know that historically they often did, I even knew a few people who had grandparents living with them when I was younger. But I could never imagine what that might be like ... it certainly wasn’t something that was going to happen in my world.

But it did, and now I feel a little sorry for all those people with the puzzled dog look ...