North after work

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Weekend at home...

Ferry rates have gone down significantly... so much so that I might be expected to want to travel more often to the mainland.... but I really don't want to go anywhere anymore. I just don't want to leave. I had been thinking of going to Hawaii for some warm surf this winter... but I've now decided against it. It seems like such an ordeal, having to pack and go through airport security (and customs and immigration... blargh... can't stand customs and immigration... and mostly on the way back).

So I'll be here all winter. Surfing, diving, reading Schopenhauer, playing guitar, baking brioches, translating poetry, playing Dance Dance Revolution, and maybe, if I get around to it, work on updating my website which should have been updated last month. Maybe put in a new floor in one of the rooms? Maybe repaint a few walls (or paint for the first time, even... I've had this "new" wall for over a year now... it's only got primer on it... but no one seems to have noticed that it's a different colour than all the other walls)...

I started implementing my new plan this past weekend.

I went for a surf on Saturday. It was rainy and windy but turned out to be an awesome day. I hadn't surfed in so long that I wasn't even sure I'd make it out past the break... it was looking pretty big... and I had my little board (which yes, we all agree, is huge, but it's _my_ little board, so there). Anyway, I got out without difficulty... twice! (definitely too tired by the third try though... and too too too tired to go again on Sunday... hadn't surfed in a month and ouch... I felt it in my arms)

I wanted to tell you all about how amazing a surf day it was, but the thing is... I'm just not that good a writer. I don't even know whether it's possible to write that well, that is, to be able to convey any of what surfing is about with words. In _Wild Geese Flying Backwards_ (or whatever the title was), Tom Robbins had a piece on kissing. And what stuck with me about that particular piece of writing was how disappointing it was. I had been looking forward to hearing what Robbins had to say about kissing, he who can make me care about a can of beans and a dirty sock... I remember understanding from the piece that Tom Robbins likes kissing... but it wasn't so much a piece about kissing as it was a piece that says "kissing is awesome" over and over again... but I guess kissing is one of those things that you can't really write about, even if you are Tom Robbins. Surfing is like that... you can't really describe what it's about... you can't really get into why it's so wonderful... you can't explain why you want to spend huge chunks of your life doing it. Surfing is as inexplicably great as kissing. (no, I don't think they're comparable... but, I think we might be mostly able to agree that a good surf is better than a bad kiss, and a good kiss is better than a bad surf... but maybe not)

Sunday was all about reading and playing guitar... tried to re-teach myself songs that I had forgotten (and now cannot really believe I was ever able to play, even poorly, never mind passably). I had my gigantic dictionaries out with my Rilke and Desnos and Eliot and Pound and Seidel... and, I decided that if I make my way through the tough books (recently got an out of print _On The Fourthfold Root..._ from MacLeods), I would reward myself with the rather expensive two volume _Parerga & Paralipomena_. I will not allow myself to read (or buy!) P&P until I'm done FRPSR and WWR 1&2. Will not. Will not! WILL NOT!

Monday was for diving. We went over what looked like a crab killing field... everywhere were broken crab bits (carapace of crab). As I was thinking about all the death and destruction in the sea, we came upon a starfish, draped over an overturned dungeness crab twice its size, obviously in the process of killing and eating it. I was reminded:

"The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other."

Ouch. Okay. No more P&P until I finish FFR and WWR. Not even the free bits of P&P on the internet.

Apparently I haven't been using nearly enough data transfer for my Blackberry plan...

Walking the dog after work. South.

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Heartbreak

It seems true that a little heartbreak every now and then does one some measure of good, making one feel more alive &c... but tearing one's heart out and dashing it repeatedly against the same brick wall to the point where one ends up feeling sorry for the wall for having to suffer the repeated impact of a flung bloody internal organ doesn't appear to be at all constructive. Why do it? Especially since after not too long, you are forced to recognize that the sucker is unbreakable anyway (the heart, not the wall)...
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I hope to get the colours right, professor Fenollosa.

I started teaching myself a language recently. It wasn't my first choice, the teaching myself part... but there are no universities or colleges (or highschools, even) in Tofino... so all available courses would have been by correspondence or online, most of which are the "learn to speak whatever in however short a time! you'll be conversing with confidence and ease! woohoo!" type. I wasn't interested in speaking another language-- I speak enough of them-- I want to KNOW it. So I found a super reputable institution (known as _the_ authority on the language, sanctioned by the government, &c) and paid 525 euros for a correspondence course. After the first day, I had to (HAD to) refund it because it was TOTAL GARBAGE... worse than the "Teach Yourself" series available off the shelf at Chapters for $25.

SO as soon as I could, I went to the UBC bookstore (a six hour trip, each way) and bought the first year textbook package for the course that I could not take. I also picked up a couple of intermediate grammar books. Since I'm cocky and full of myself, I started with the intermediate grammar books instead of the introductory textbook package. I finished the first half of one book, and felt that I had made great progress with the language. I had learnt so much! Tense, aspect, mood, voice, conjugation, word order, separable verbs, inseparable verbs... all off it! Yay!

Then I realized that I knew nothing about nouns.

Ooops.

Well, such things are bound to happen when learning in a vacuum.

The knowability of the Ding... picking up where facebook notes left off...

Or rather, where I left off.

Facebook notes were fun. Facebook was not. It did, however, get me over the I-have-nothing-to-say-so-I-should-say-nothing thing. I've learnt that people love wasting time... and that I really was just providing a much sought after time-wasting tool. Being quite done with facebook... I now welcome you to my new blog: Ding-In-Itself... may this make your post-afternoon-coffee-break period of unproductivity a little less intolerable.

Since I've spent the entire afternoon congratulating myself for coming up with so clever a name as "Ding-In-Itself"... I'm going to make this the subject of my first post. (Yes, I totally admit it... since I thought of "Ding-In-Itself" this afternoon, I have been insufferably self-satisfied.)
I actually have very little to say about "Ding-In-Itself" aside from... ain't it clever? Wooohoo! I came up with that... ain't it clever?!?!

Okay. That's all I have for you today... silliness and self-congratulation. Mostly self-congratulation.

Imported Facebook Note

Just about close enough to get eaten...

So I went to Long Beach for an after-work surf today... and caught a super awesome left that went on forever. Then I sat and waited a long while for the next one... and then, I noticed two whale watching boats... they were close enough for me to see whose boats they were... I could probably count exactly how many people were on Wasco (which is super easy to recognize because it's this huge aluminum thing with a huge orange section)... but I couldn't see what they were looking at. I looked at them for a while and kept doing my thing. For a while it looked like they were looking at me, but while I could sometimes be mistaken for a bearded man, I would be really offended if someone mistook me for a whale, even if I happen to be really far away.

When I got back to the parking lot, a friend came up to me and told me that he saw me catch the super awesome left that went on forever... it was a really cool ride even if no one had seen it... but it's just that much cooler that someone did... and better yet, it's someone who knows me and could recognize me in the surf, and who once gave me a surf lesson. Then he said "So... you saw the whale!" And I said "What whale?"... "The orcas that were right in front of you!"... "What orcas? In front of me? When?"... "You didn't see them???"... "Uh... no."... "They were *right* in front of you, breaching and everything!"... "Right in front of me how?"... "You were there, the orcas were there... they were right in front of you and coming right up out of the water!"... "Really?"... "yeah!"... "Oh..." (well, what could you say to that?)

I have yet to see an orca... and I have had so many guests this year telling me they saw orcas...

On the other hand, it's not like I got out whale watching...

Or that I'd notice one breach right in front of me as I sit on a surfboard...