Focus Dude!

LAST WEEK I stumbled upon the most shocking piece of self-revelation. I’m normally too busy and shallow for this sort of introspection, but this one slapped me in the face so I had to take notice.

I was looking for my voter registration card. Actually, I wasn’t just looking, I was ransacking the house trying to find the stupid thing. I wanted it as backup on election day. I couldn’t stand the thought of being deprived my right to vote if I couldn’t produce it. And for the record, I never vote for, I vote against, to quote W.C. Fields.

What really got my goat was that I’d delilerately put the card in a safe place but couldn’t remember which safe place.

It’s bad enough to lose something important, but to lose it after making a special effort not to, well, this is a recipe for frustration and some fairly fruity language.
And this leads me to the shocking piece of self-revelation: I am actually a highly organized individual. The problem is that I appear to be a highly organized individual trapped in the body of a scatterbrain.

At my very core, I like order. When confronted by important bits of paper that arrive in the mail or from school, my organized inner self will always guide me to file them away in a coveted safe place.

My organized inner self has gone so far as to create a proper filing system, fully alphabetized and complete with a things-to-be-filed basket on top. This organized self even has designated special shelves and drawers for certain things.

For example, there is one drawer dedicated exclusively to the storage of vitamin bottles. That would be the organized inner self at work. But the scatterbrain conspires against this organizational inner self by causing me to forget to take the silly vitamins!

Likewise the alphabetized filing system. The organized inner self tells me to file things immediately and alphabetically. And I do. But the scatterbrain can’t remember into which slot I put the important item.

It’s like a civil war going on in my head. The two sides are constantly sniping and barking. "Don’t be so neurotic!" shouts the scatterbrain. "Don’t be such an airhead," retorts the organized inner self.

And there I am in the middle of this mess just trying to exercise my democratic right to vote. What gives? How can an organized person manage to lose things so predictably?

The answer arrived a few days after the voter registration card incident. It was a newspaper article that questioned the wisdom of multi-tasking. According to Wallace Immen in the Globe and Mail, people who do more than one thing at a time are less productive at work.

Immen quotes a study by Hewlett-Packard that suggested workers who check e-mail while doing something else suffer a temporary IQ drop of five to 15 per cent. Apparently, multi-tasking is bad for concentration and mental ability. Multi-tasking, in other words, is the enemy of the organized inner self.

So, if you’re filing your voter registration card at the same time as you’re feeding cats, wiping a dollop of ketchup off your shirt, ordering a kid to brush her teeth again, answering the phone, folding the laundry and listening to the 5 o’clock news, OK, point taken.

As my six-year-old Thing 2 says, Focus, Dude!

(glethbridge@herald.ca)

Melancholia: old word, new affliction

First published 20 March 2006

I don’t know when we retired the word melancholia, but I’m thinking it’s time we drafted the old girl back into active service. I don’t mean melancholia at its severest “woe is me” moment. That’s clinical depression.

What I’m talking about is a melancholia of kinder, gentler persuasion, that “oh dear” type of malaise that visits us all at one time or another.

In this sense, melancholia is a nice compromise between the extremes of happiness, which we’re all supposed to be in pursuit of, and medical depression, which sometimes seems the only alternative.

I wouldn’t mind having melancholia. It’s melodramatic enough to be interesting without being threatening. Melancholia isn’t terminal, contagious or really serious at all, and it’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t mind telling people about.

“My doctor says I have touch of the melancholia,” you might announce at a dinner party. “She’s prescribed a cure of two months in Italy or Greece with plenty of rest and fresh air.” Now, there is a cure I wouldn’t mind taking.

Melancholia would be that place just below normal. It’s not a condition, syndrome or illness. It’s just an umbrella under which to park those feelings we sometimes get in winter when the days are short, the nights long and everything is frozen solid.

Melancholia seems more natural than, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. OK yes, Seasonal and Affective make sense, but disorder? Since when is it “disordered” to feel a little weary and despondent in the middle of winter?

Hint: Since they started marketing SAD lamps? And, for the record I do have one of these SAD lamps. Does it work? Well, I don’t know if it does what it’s meant to do, but I will say that it’s worth the price if for no other reason than the fifteen minutes you get to sit under it and do nothing.

But back to melancholia. I like the word because sounds nicer than “the blahs.” You don’t need drugs or treatment for melancholia because it’s a perfectly normal part of the human condition.

Melancholia is a handy term for that thing you get when politicians decide to drag you through a Christmas and January election. Thanks guys. It was a real blast.

It’s also a good description for the general feeling you get when you hear experts issuing warnings of a global flu pandemic without telling you what you’re supposed to do about it.

I mean, should we be building underground bunkers and stocking them with a year’s supply of food and water? Or should we be coaching our local bird populations to stay away from feathered foreigners and cover their beaks when they sneeze? Any information would be appreciated.

Melancholia also strikes when you hear about the looming catastrophe of global warming. Depending on the expert, we’re either “done like dinner” now, or we’ll be “done like dinner” in 50 to 100 years if we don’t do something – and do something big - this very minute.

The trouble is that I believe these folks. I really do.

But back to melancholia. Melancholia is what you get when you’ve just had a trans-Atlantic phone call with news that a brief acquaintance from another time and place, about same age as you, with kids around the same age as yours, and a lovely, lovely wife, when you hear in the phone call that this brief acquaintance has just passed away.

That’s melancholia. It’s not SAD or clinical depression. It’s just something that happens occasionally. I think we need melancholia back in circulation again. It’s a good word.

glethbridge@herald.ca

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Nature abhores a vacuum; I abhore it more

First published 3 November 2006

I’ve recently discovered that I will have to amend the epitaph I’ve planned for my tombstone.

It used to read: “Nature abhors a vacuum, but here lies a woman who abhorred it more.”

Now, it will have to read: “Nature abhors a vacuum, but here lies a woman who’s realized that a vacuum can be a beautiful thing.”

I know that re-branding your tombstone seems a radical thing to do, and believe me, I don’t take my epitaph changes lightly.

But you want to get these things right in the “proofing” stages because sending an engraved tombstone back for re-chiseling at the last minute is not going to be cheap. And if it gets lost in the shuffle, well you know, eternity is a long time to be laid out under the wrong epitaph.

I guess you could say I’m getting all my edits out of the way ahead well in advance.

So, what’s up with this change, anyway? Should the dust bunnies start quaking in their little dust bunny boots? Have I been struck by lightning and had my inner-slob fried to bits? Has hell frozen over?

Well, not exactly.

What’s happened is that I’ve discovered an exciting new application for the vacuum cleaner. And get this: It doesn’t involve hoovering up around the house!

Now you’re sitting up and listening, aren’t you?

What I’ve found is these bags for storing clothes. What you do is stuff all your clothes into one of these bags and then seal it up with a Ziploc-like tab.

Now you have a big monster bag that may as well be a dead body when you try to move it or store it. But it’s not the bag itself solves the problem. It’s the vacuum cleaner.

You see, the monster bag is air-tight so when you put the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner on the specially-designed insert on the bag, something magical begins to happen.

Your clothes shrink before your eyes. It’s true. I sat there and watched that monster bag-o-clothes compress and compress and compress until it was a quarter of its original size.

By the time it was finished the bag-o-clothes looked like a shrink-wrapped slab-o-frozen meat.

And as the bag shrank, my smile expanded. The possibilities are endless for things you may wish to shrink and store away: guest linens and pillows, towels, sleeping bags, beastly felines, children who behave badly. (Kidding about shrink-wrapping kids and cats, although there are moments when you’d like to.)

When you’re finished shrinking your stuff, you simply slide it under the bed or into the trunk. You can stand it up at the back of the closet or stuff it in a drawer.

Yes, a vacuum can be a beautiful thing, but shrink-wrappers beware because vacuums are not always your friend. Remember Newton what said? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

We can put this another way: for every vacuum, there is an equal and opposite leak waiting to happen.

I learned this lesson after retiring one of these shrink-wrapped bags to a drawer which was the correct size for the shrink-wrapped bag. Three days later, well, let’s just say there was skirmish involving a woman, a re-inflated shrink-wrapped bag-o-clothes and a drawer no longer big enough to accommodate its contents.

I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

glethbridge@herald.ca

Bertha bites the dust

First published 29 September 2006

It was sunny and warm the day the men in uniform came to take Big Bertha away. You couldn’t have asked for better weather to see the old girl off after such a long and faithful tour of duty.

Big Bertha was our furnace or, if you want to use the correct home-heating terminology, our boiler. And this was her retirement day.

First installed in 1946, she had a sixty-year career of keeping people warm and comfortable through chilly springs and falls, brutal winters and damp, foggy Halifax summers.

She was an impressive sight, our Big Bertha, and every time you looked at her you couldn’t help but imagine what a high-stepper she must have been in her day.

Constructed of sturdy cast iron walls – her clothes, as the men in uniform called them – Big Bertha was a furnace not to be reckoned with. She went about her job with a professionalism and work ethic you’d expect from a furnace of her generation. There was never any whining or complaining with Bertha. She just got down to business.

True, at times, she could be a little louder than you liked but the noise was more than made up for by her reliability. Big Bertha never let you down. And when she was all fired up, she radiated the most lovely warmth which was hard to resist in a basement with no radiators.

Her design was simple, no bells and whistles, but that was a good thing because it meant fewer things to go wrong. And year in, year out our Big Bertha earned an efficiency score that would have made a boiler half her age proud.

Back in ’46 Bertha burned coal. She had little hinged door on the front that opened for manual re-fueling with a small shovel. It was probably some time in the mid-fifties that she was converted to oil. And Bertha adjusted well.

When I first moved in, I must admit to feeling a little intimidated by this scary looking old frump in the basement. Would she rise to the challenge of my young family?

The man in uniform certainly thought so. He showed me her sterling service history and assured me that while Bertha may not have been the prettiest boiler you ever saw, she was certainly dependable, hard working and in good form.

The only thing to watch, he warned, was the ceramic chamber which would eventually crack and collapse. And when this happened it would be game over for old Bertha.

Well, it was in August when we had the bad news. It was just an annual check-up and there was no indication of anything wrong. Bertha was having a nice summer break.

The man in uniform opened the little hinged door and took one look, and I knew by the expression on his face there was nothing he could do. Bertha’s chamber was cracked. If we left it, it would collapse and we’d be without heat.

And if that happened to happen during a cold snap in January, well, you know, frozen pipes and all that. Big Bertha’s time had come.

Retirement day crept up sooner than expected. That morning I went down to look at Big Bertha for one last time and realized just how much I was going to miss her steady presence in my house. It was the end of an era.

The men in uniform got to work straight away, loosening her bolts, stripping her of her cast-iron clothes and carrying her out in pieces small enough to fit through the doorframes. It wasn’t the dignified end I would have wanted for Bertha, but I guess endings are often undignified and unpleasant. It’s a fact of life.

It didn’t take long, not much more than an hour, to take apart sixty years of faithful, dutiful service.

Her replacement is one of these bright young things, half the size and probably a quarter the weight. She’s sexy, insulated and with an efficiency rating of 85%, as good as it gets, I’m told.

I’m sure we’ll have long and happy relationship with the new girl, but something tells me she’s not going to outlive Bertha’s sixty years. They don’t make ‘em like Big Bertha any more.


glethbridge@herald.ca