Two randoms

On Saturday morning, I had to go to the medical clinic near where I live to get some blood work done. The drill is that you have to go at least 12 hours without eating before they can test your blood, so I hadn’t eaten breakfast when I got there. The clinic was crowded, as it was full of people like me who didn’t want to or couldn’t take time off work to get their tests done.

I had to wait a little over an hour to get everything done. As I was sitting there, reading, I realized that I was in a room full of people who hadn’t had breakfast or morning coffee. The room gave off a distinct low-energy aura. I then realized that the lab technicians who worked there had to spend day after day dealing with hungry, grumpy people. Over and over again. All their working life, unless they got promoted into another medical task or gave it up to become computer programmers or something.

In the basement of my laundry room, there’s a table that, by tradition, is the place where people leave things that they don’t want any more. (Once, there was a giant plush cow left behind, about the size of a small dishwasher. It was unclaimed for over a week – I nicknamed it Laundry Cow.) Last week, someone left behind a copy of Cosmpolitan magazine, with this headline:

Guys Rate 125 Sex Moves

My thought when I read this: women don’t really need to learn 125 sex moves. Most guys are perfectly happy with the following three (3) moves: (1) Show up. (2) Remove some or all of clothing. (3) Do what comes naturally. The other 122 aren’t really necessary.

Fire alarm

Last night, the fire alarm went off in my building at about 1:00 or so. I’m never sure what to do in these situations – should I wait in my apartment for instructions? Take the stairs as quickly as possible? Ignore it and carry on with what I was doing?

When I first moved into the building, one of the superintendents told me that residents should wait to be notified what to do: if there was a real fire, fire or smoke could be spreading up one of the stairs, so trying to get out of the building might be the wrong move. On the other hand, the instructions posted in each hallway instruct residents to leave as quickly as possible. My own opinion is that it would take a while for the people in charge to figure out exactly what has gone wrong. If there is a real fire, I figure it’s better to get outside right away before things get worse.

However, when it’s the middle of the night and it’s cold out, “right away”, for me, meant “after I put clothes on over my pajamas, put on my shoes, and grabbed my winter coat, my wallet and my keys”. So I would probably be doomed if there was a flash fire. Hopefully – because the building isn’t made of wood – a flash fire is a very unlikely occurrence.

As usual when there is a fire alarm, only about a couple of dozen people actually went out of the building. Most of the building’s residents are used to the fire alarm going off regularly, and automatically assume that it’s a false alarm (as this one was). While nobody was happy to hear the alarm go off, one guy living on the south side was especially unhappy. When I made it outside, I heard him opening his balcony door and yelling “Fuck! Fucking false alarm! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”, and then hitting something very hard in frustration. I wonder what he was doing when the alarm interrupted him.

As it turned out, the interruption actually seemed to readjust my sleep cycle – I’ve been having problems with insomnia lately, but I managed to sleep well last night. Hurray.

Hierarchy of needs

Today, one of my Facebook friends mentioned Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which I have always found interesting. Here’s a diagram of the hierarchy, lifted from Wikipedia:

Hierarchy of Needs

The basic idea is that the needs at the bottom of the pyramid are higher priority than the ones above it. If you can’t breathe, or are desperately hungry or tired, you have to deal with that first. Then come safety, health and security needs, and so on.

What struck me about this hierarchy is that some people won’t – or can’t – prioritize their needs in this order. Some intensely creative people prefer self-actualization over love and belonging, and will sometimes risk their safety or even their health to bring their work into the world. And there are some people who are forced to place love and belonging lower on the hierarchy – these are people who want to fit in but can’t. I’m fascinated by people who want to belong, who want to be loved, but for some reason or other can’t be. I see them on the subway all the time. What are their lives like?

Arthur Murray Dance Studio in LIFE magazine, 1936

Google Books has scanned every issue of LIFE magazine for free online viewing, and I’m enraptured, basically. I’ve been reading old LIFEs for years, ever since I first discovered them in the University of Waterloo book stacks as an undergrad.

This afternoon, when not napping (colds are fun), I’ve been reading one of the first issues, especially the photo series on the Arthur Murray Dance Studio (which, by 1936, had instructed 60,000 wannabe dancers, and a total of 700,000 by mail order). The captions for this article are interesting all by themselves. First, there’s a four-part series of photos of a new Arthur Murray student:

• A Murray pupil, after signing up, first learns correct posture with the help of an instructor and a mirror.
• On his way to ballroom success, he now dances with his expert, tactful teacher.
• Back before the mirror, he tries the new swing step which is applicable both to the waltz and the fox-trot.
• In a few weeks he is good enough to appear in a hotel ballroom with a friend. A strict Murray rule prevents his taking his teacher out alone unless she wishes to retire permanently from the Murray faculty.

You could write a Ph.D. on just that last caption alone. Other photo captions in this article (all grammatical errors theirs):

• A regular twice-a-week pupil at Arthur Murray’s is Mrs. Roy Howard, wife of the publisher. Here she is shown brushing up on her rumba.
• Mrs. Roy Howard fox-trots happily with Murray Instructor Anthony De Ghillany, onetime shot-put champion of Hungary.
• In the Murray building, 128 studios occupy eight floors. Curtains are drawn for individual lessons. A loudspeaker phonograph system provides a constant choice of four kinds of dance melodies.
• Mr. Murray likes to dance with his wife, but gives personal lessons only in exceptional cases to very special people.
• His coat-tails flying authoritatively, the man on this page is Arthur Murray himself, at right with one of his instructors, above with Mrs. Murray. Chic, petite, competent, the latter edits the house-organ Murray-Go-Round, is the mother of twin 10-year-old daughters. The instructor at right is from Virginia. Southern girls, says Mr. Murray, make the best teachers, are forceful, gracious, properly extraverted.
• The Murray faculty must attend a weekly one-hour meeting at which the dancing master discusses new methods of teaching and handling pupils. Here he demonstrates a difficult new step while making a wisecrack which spreads smiles all around.
• Between lessons busy Murray teachers relax informally in restrooms like this one, play cards, discuss their pupils, briefly remove shoes from hard-working feet.
• Montclair, N.J. Country Clubbers get weekly instruction from a Murray expert.

If you want to see this issue, you can go here. The Arthur Murray pictures start on page 32.

According to Wikipedia, Arthur Murray, who was born in 1895, died in 1991, just short of his 96th birthday. I guess all that dancing is good for you.

Stories from the big city, #207

I was at the corner of Broadview and Danforth at lunchtime today, as I was out buying various supplies to help me get through this cold that I have. I was waiting at the corner for the light to change as a streetcar was about to head south on Broadview. Then, a man rushed up to try to catch the streetcar. The driver didn’t notice him gesturing wildly to open the door, and started to pull out. Frustrated, the man pounded, hard, on the door.

The streetcar stopped, and the driver started ringing the streetcar bell loudly. This caught the attention of a nearby police car – probably coming from the speed trap at the City Adult Learning Centre just west of the intersection. The police officer got out, and listened to the streetcar driver describe what happened. The officer then took the disgruntled passenger off for an interview, and the streetcar left.

When I came back, the police car was gone, and the wannabe passenger was having a conversation with three of the people hanging out outside the co-op housing building at Broadview and Danforth. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I would guess that he was complaining about how unfair all of this was. I went back home and went to sleep as I continued to recover from my cold.

Colds are strange things; while you have one, you don’t really realize how much energy they take from you, as the feeling of tiredness and unhealthiness becomes the new normal. Only when you start to get better do you realize: oh, that’s what healthy feels like – I’d forgotten.

New York trip

I was originally going to try to write a travelogue to describe my weekend in New York, but it wasn’t really an exciting enough narrative. So I will use the convenient list format instead.

Things I learned in, or about, New York:

• It can get hot and humid there. When I landed, the city was in the middle of a heat wave: the temperatures were in the upper 80s, and there was lots and lots of humidity. I drank a lot of water – I mean a lot, about a lake or two’s worth. (Those of you complaining about a lack of hot weather in Toronto this year might not know when you’re well off.)
• The best way to see the Museum of Modern Art is to get there early. The museum opens at 10:30, but the lineup for tickets starts forming before 10. By the time the doors are open, the lineup extends well out the door, and is at least several hundred people long. There are few better feelings than knowing that you are near the front of a very long line.
• If you like Picasso, the MoMA is the place for you. There are all kinds of Picassos there. I’ve never been a gushing fan of his work, but boy could he draw. Some of his pieces look like he sat down, took out a giant hunk of some drawing implement, and whoosh! drew a perfect shape in one go without trying hard.
• The MoMA has a wall-size Jackson Pollock that is really impressive. When you see reproductions of his work, they don’t seem to be all that much – what’s the big deal about paint splatters? But, in person, the splatters are so large and aggressive that they get right in your face. You cannot ignore his paintings – they’re too intense.

Sidebar about modern and postmodern art, and why it’s not a waste of time and/or money: The way an artist friend explained it to me is this – modern artists are experimenting with what makes something art versus not art. What does colour mean or shape mean? How does the human eye actually perceive things? This is why, for example, a giant painting of various shades of red (Barnett Newman did this) is art, and not just some dweeb flinging paint on a canvas and charging $4.7 million for it. What exactly is red, anyway? Sure, you think you know what it is – but what is it that you think you know about it?

Of course, some of these experiments might not be interesting to people who don’t know a lot about art, just like some of the more esoteric forms of jazz aren’t interesting to people who aren’t musicians. But if people are willing to spend large sums of money on things like investigating sub-atomic particles or trying to figure out what happened mere seconds after the Big Bang, there’s no reason not to spend money on trying to figure out what art is. End sidebar.

• I was really impressed by the New York subway system. Clearly, they’ve put money into it since the days of clattering old graffiti-filled cars – every train I rode in looked relatively new and was clean and air-conditioned. The subway stations are sometimes less attractive, though – they clearly haven’t been renovated as much, and they sure hold the heat well. Some of them would make great sets for a movie that is set in a dysfunctional future and is featuring lots of ninjas.
• Express subway trains rule. My hotel was right near an express stop on the 2 and 3 lines, which meant that I could get to Times Square in three subway stops, and to Penn Station in four.
• Local trains, not so much. Instead of taking the 1 train downtown, I found that it was better to take the 2 or 3 train to the express stop that was closest to my destination, then switch to the 1 train from there. The one time I tried to take the 1 train downtown, there was a delay and it wasn’t running.
• Times Square is like Dundas Square x 10000. Times Square is much larger, but the ambience is similar: large ads, chairs and tables to sit around, a certain quantity of bewildered tourists, and lots of shopping nearby. (Interestingly enough, both Times Square and the Yonge-Dundas area of Toronto used to be full of sex shows, body-rub parlours and the like.)
• When you are flying over them, the forests of upstate New York look like a giant field of wild broccoli.
• Flying into Newark is definitely the way to go. For only $15, the NJ Transit AirTrain whisks you from the airport to Penn Station in New York. You save a lot on cab fare this way. The only limiting factor is the amount of time you have to wait for an AirTrain – in off hours, it can be up to an hour.
• Bryant Park is cool. It’s a small park in the middle of Manhattan, with plenty of chairs to sit on and a rectangular square of lawn to sit on too. There is the occasional homeless person, but not many – far fewer than in Allan Gardens, for example. (I was only asked for spare change about three times in my day and a half in New York. I get more requests than that when travelling a few blocks from my apartment to where I go to get takeout souvlaki.)
• In New York, pedestrians and bicyclists pretty much ignore traffic lights. When I was walking along Broadway in the Upper West Side, pedestrians only stopped when they absolutely had to – i.e., when a car was coming. And I nearly got hit by bicycles twice in less than five minutes when I was crossing on a green light – it didn’t occur to me to look in all directions for traffic when I had the right of way.
• Being able to buy beer at your local variety store and take it home to your hotel late at night when it’s humid out is way cool.
• In New York, the dominant brand of bottled water is Poland Spring.
• The TD Bank has a significant presence in New York. There was a branch right near my hotel, and one near 42nd Street and Madison. I had enough spending money with me, so I didn’t check to see whether my TD Canada Trust bank card would work in their ATMs; people tell me that, yes, it does work, and with no withdrawal fee!
• I relearned that I’m not really a foodie. My guidebook recommended a bagel place and a pizza place near my hotel; I tried both. They were good, but not worth travelling anywhere for. If I go back to New York, it will likely be for the museums and attractions and general ambience of a big, big city, not for the food. Of course, I’m dealing with a very small sample size – there are probably some awesome places to eat in the city, especially in the boroughs. If I knew where to go, I could probably make my tummy very happy.
• An exception can be granted for Katz’s Delicatessen, which was universally acclaimed as the best deli in the city. There’s always a lineup, though it was moving fairly quickly when I was there. Your carver gives you a plate with a few strips of meat to sample while he makes your sandwich; the thing to do, apparently, is to tip him while he does this. I did this, and the woman in front of me didn’t; I’m pretty sure my sandwich was bigger than hers. The sandwiches are very very pricey, and the restaurant is crowded, so I’ll never go back. But, my God, the pastrami was yummy. Like manna from heaven. And I don’t normally like pastrami, especially considering I can feel my arteries clogging as I eat it.
• I am grateful that the streets and avenues in Manhattan are numbered, not named. I don’t think I would have been able to find anything if that wasn’t the case. As it was, I always seemed to go the wrong way when leaving a subway stop: for a newbie tourist like me, there’s no obvious way to orient myself, as there are tall buildings in all directions.
• By chance, I happened to make it to Ground Zero – the site of the World Trade Center – at twilight. You can’t really see anything there – it’s all fenced off, and they’re planning on building something there eventually. (Of course, there may still be good reasons why everything is fenced off there.) I didn’t realize how far downtown the World Trade Center was until I got there – the site isn’t that far away from the various bodies of water that surround Manhattan.

Dumb tourist things I did:

• When riding the monorail from the Newark airport terminal to the AirTrain station, I didn’t realize where the last stop was, and wound up having to go back one stop before I figured it out.
• My digital camera fell out of my pocket. If it weren’t for a friendly passerby, who spotted it and gave it back to me, I wouldn’t have any pictures of the trip.
• When I walked the Brooklyn Bridge, my original plan was to take the subway back from High Street, which is marked as the first subway stop on the Brooklyn side. It took me forever to find High Street, and then I couldn’t find the entrance to the subway – I found out later that it was inside a building. I’m not sure that the building was open on Saturday. I wound up having to walk down Jay Street to the subway entrance there; I almost missed seeing that. I spent more time in Brooklyn than I intended to.
• The dumbest thing I did: when leaving a subway station, I wasn’t paying attention, and wound up going through an automatic exit that led to a door that was closed. Fortunately, all automatic exits are also automatic entrances; I just turned around and let myself back into the subway. If this hadn’t been the case, I would have been trapped there until somebody let me out. I probably would have made the evening news as the Dumbest Tourist Ever. Fortunately, nobody saw me do this.

I’m glad I went. I had never been to New York, and now I have. It feels like mission accomplished. I’ll go back some day, but it’s very expensive to stay there (even when you find a reasonable flight rate and a reasonable hotel rate, as I did). And I now need to save some money for a while!

That might work

Saw this in my Twitter feed tonight:

MLBastian RT @QuestionMarkP: The dome’s roof is opening. Either the storm has passed or the plan is to have Wells and his contract taken to Oz.

Tornado warning

So we had a tornado warning in Toronto tonight. The radio advised people to seek shelter in their basement, or in a central room of their house, or in the bathtub. I live in a high-rise, so I wasn’t sure whether to go to the basement or not. I decided better safe than sorry, so I took the stairs down to the garage level. I was the only person who did.

After a few minutes down there, I figured that if a tornado hit my building, I’d be fucked anyway. And I couldn’t get radio reception from there even if I had remembered to bring a radio, so I had no idea what was happening. So I went back up to my unit. The worst of it passed over while I was gone – including, apparently, a funnel cloud that passed over the city. That’s never happened in my lifetime, as far as I know. I’m happy enough to have missed it.

By the time I got back, the rain was coming down rather impressively. After about 15 minutes, the sky turned a weird shade of yellow, and I could see a spectacular rainbow south of me. As I type this now, the sky to the west of me is a range of coloured clouds like out of a naturalistic painting. The sky to the south and east of me still looks seriously unpleasant, the power is out in Whitby, and there are reports of damage in Vaughan.

Determination

There is an outdoor pool next to my highrise building, and I love to swim in it at sunset (it’s open until 10:00). It’s very peaceful there.

This year, somebody in the building has decided to take fitness very seriously, and is in the pool every night, doing lengths. He wears a black Speedo cap and swim goggles, and nothing will prevent him from getting his workout in.

Tonight, I went into the pool at 8:30. He was there, swimming away. Then, seven people showed up and started playing around in the pool and splashing each other. This did not deter the swimmer doing lengths: no matter what was going on around him, he kept obsessively making his way through the pool. He stopped, only briefly, when he noticed that one of the women in the group was making fun of him: he turned, glared at her for a second, then resumed swimming.

It was dangerous at times for him to keep going – there were seven of them, they were moving around a lot, and they could easily have collided into him or dived on top of him. But he kept going, regardless. He seemed compelled to keep going.

I left the pool at about 9:10. I felt very relaxed. The man was still going. As I type this, at 9:25, he is probably still swimming his lengths.

My day out

I haven’t travelled much lately. I have an excuse: I don’t have a car or a passport (the latter arrives later this month!), and I was short of money for a while. But I took a week off work this week, and decided that I wanted to go somewhere, if only for a day, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re on vacation. So I decided to rent a car on Wednesday and drive around bits of Ontario.

At 9:00, when I got going, I wasn’t in the best of shape. My body was still doing a system flush from having consumed too much dark beer the night before last, and I had tweaked a back muscle that morning while brushing my teeth. And it was cloudy and miserable out. I was feeling my age, and then some, as I headed to the rent-a-car place.

I had picked this particular rent-a-car place at random because it was only a few subway stops away from me, and because their website allowed me to reserve a car online. While the man in charge was processing the paperwork, I tried to make a joke about how today was a good day to be inside a motor vehicle, as it was crappy out. But then I realized that he would have to pretend to laugh at anything I said, as I was a Customer. I am grateful that my job doesn’t require me to be nice to people.

The car that I was given – a Toyota Yaris – looked to be in good shape on the outside, but the car company hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning it, if indeed they had cleaned it at all. There was something spilled near the right-side cupholder, and the car smelled as if people had recently done some serious fucking in it, or had transported a dead pet to its final resting place, or perhaps both. I had to roll down the windows to be able to sit in it, which proved to be a problem, as the rain started to come down in buckets. I solved the problem by keeping the driver’s side window closed as much as possible, the front passenger window open a little bit, and the back seat windows open as much as possible to scatter the smell. This meant that the back seat was going to get wet, but it wasn’t as if anyone was sitting there.

The smelly car.

It took me a bit to acclimatize myself to driving again – it had been two years since I had driven a car – so I drove up Bayview Avenue until I got out of Toronto. On the way out of town, I wound up behind a Porsche Carrera that had EIEIO as its license plate. My guess is that the owner is a gentleman named McDonald who is involved in something related to agriculture, but that’s only a guess.

When I got into Markham, I realized, not for the first time, how much I dislike the outer suburbs. All the houses look the same, and the people who live there are totally dependent on the internal combustion engine for the necessities of life. The newer subdivisions don’t even have door-to-door mail delivery – the mail is dropped off in centrally located mailboxes, and residents have to go get it themselves. Presumably, they drive there.

Eventually, I felt confident enough behind the wheel to drive to the 404, which I joined at 16th Avenue. (Markham is easy to navigate: all the main east-west streets are numbered, and the north-south streets are just extensions of the main north-south streets in north Toronto.) I drove north as far as you can go on the 404, which is to Green Lane East, on which I went west. Yes, this seemed confusing to me too.

The end of Highway 404.

I had a good map and a cellphone with good coverage, so I decided to stay on the side roads whenever possible and see where they took me. I passed through Bradford and eventually wound up on Airport Road, which runs north and west out of Toronto for quite some distance. By the time I got onto it, the street numbers were something like 968627.

Not sure what this building used to be, but it now holds a car restoration shop. Bradford.

Abandoned restaurant, Bradford.

Bumper sticker on a car in front of me: “The meek shall inherit the earth, if it’s okay with you.”

I drifted north for a bit, then realized that the sun was actually out this far north, so I headed off to Wasaga Beach. On a weekday, it is possible to walk away from the crowded bits of the beach and the tackier touristy shops and find a place to sit and look out at the beach, the water, and the Niagara Escarpment off in the distance, so this is what I did.

Tacky touristy shops.

You can rent a deck chair, if you don’t have one. (At first, I thought that you had to sit right there.) You can buy these chairs at Canadian Tire – I have one just like them on my balcony.

The view from the far end of Wasaga Beach.

I also watched the seabirds flying about looking for fishy things in the water that they could eat. Their approach was to fly slowly over their potential target and then suddenly drop like a rock into the water. Presumably, the startled prey would only have time to think the fish equivalent of “What the…?” before being eaten.

This shelter is for vendors only. Hmph.

Picnic bench.

Before heading back to my car, I walked along the beach for a bit. I noticed a small boy attempting to zap birds with his high-powered water pistol, and despaired for our future as a species.

Abandoned mini-golf course, Wasaga Beach.

On my way out of town, I stopped for a snack at McDogfoods. I had to wait a bit, as one of the cars going through the drive-through had ordered seven bacon double cheeseburgers and seven bacon single cheeseburgers. (That’s a total of 21 processed meat patties, if you’re keeping score.) It was fascinating to watch the resulting assembly line at work. McDonald’s doesn’t produce great food, but they sure are efficient at making it.

After this, I travelled west through Collingwood, and therefore learned something: Collingwood is a sister city of Katano, Japan and Zihataneujo, Mexico (which is mentioned in a Stephen King story). I also learned that, in Collingwood, Loblaws is called “Loblaw”. I wonder what legal convolutions led to that corporate decision?

The road out of Collingwood was frustrating – it was posted at 50 km/h for what seemed like an absurdly long time. My car and the road were begging me to go faster, but I figured that this stretch of road served as a fundraiser for the district, thanks to innumerable speeding tickets, so I held the line. At the point at which the speed limit finally went up, I passed a young man on a bicycle who was wearing a New Jersey Nets Vince Carter T-shirt. I resisted the temptation to run him over, which, as a Raptors fan, I was fully entitled to do.

The Niagara Escarpment near Collingwood.

Later on, I passed through Craigleith, which apparently is now a 9-11 community – what does that mean? – and then stopped at a store which was a combination Mac’s Milk, LCBO and Beer Store. Hurray for one-stop shopping! From here, I travelled south on Grey County Road 13. It was a perfect driving road: good pavement, no traffic, wonderful scenery. The Niagara Escarpment is really startlingly beautiful at times, especially to an urban person like me who has just spent a month living in a city that was undergoing a garbage strike. Two stretches of this road were under construction, and signs announced that these improvements were part of the government’s stimulus spending program – your grandchildren’s tax dollars at work!

Many towns along the way had signs posted that begged doctors to please, please move into town. There was even a hotline you could call, if you were someone medical who happened to be passing through and wanted to change your life. I guess it must be tough: most people who spend years putting themselves through medical school prefer to relocate in a bigger city, so there aren’t any small-town doctors any more. No wonder the rest of the province hates Toronto.

By now, I had been driving for several hours – more than I had driven in the last six years put together – and my right foot was beginning to cramp up from pressing down on the accelerator. It was time to go home. So I headed over to Highway 10, which was a straight shot southeast in the direction of Toronto. The posted speed limit here was 80 km/h, but this bore little relationship to the consensus speed limit; I was travelling at 90 km/h, but was easily the slowest driver on the road. How does the consensus speed limit evolve over time, I wonder?

On Highway 10, between Flesherton and Shelburne, you can see a lot of wind turbines. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of them. These suckers are huge.

Esso Fish, Shelburne.

From here, my journey wasn’t that interesting. I ate dinner at a Swiss Chalet in Orangeville – I’m not a very adventurous diner – and then drove from Highway 10 to Highway 9 and then to Highway 404 and home, thus avoiding most of Toronto’s exurban sprawl. I dropped the car and the keys off, and was finally free of the horrible smell inside the car. I won’t rent from this rent-a-car company again; in future, I’ll choose something less thrifty, if you get my drift.

Mind you, they still haven’t processed my Visa transaction from last Wednesday. Maybe they just forgot, or perhaps they are feeling guilty about renting me an improperly cleaned car. I’ll just have to wait and see. Despite this, it was a good day out. Thanks for reading, if you got this far.