High Arched Brows

I realize I have not posted in a month. I also realize I have not posted this short story yet, so in an effort to appease my guilt and as an excuse to take another month's hiatus, here it is.

-

It was the two of clubs that led to my tragic demise. Not the disdainful Queen of Hearts, flourishing the yellow daisy she grips between pallid fingers; not the sly Jack of Spades, with his twirled moustache and golden locks. It was the meagre two of clubs.

I stand here, rigid and resilient. With my stony gaze and high arched brows, I scan across the garden square. Past the slender grape vines that twist their way around gold-wrought fences, past the ivory fountains and their glittering jets of water. I send my regards toward the horizon, where the sky and land converge.

Beneath my feet there is a glass bench where a middle-aged woman sits by herself, right on the edge. Her cheeks flake powdered rouge and her lashes are damp with mascara. In her hands she clasps a tartan purse over knotted legs. Why she doesn’t make herself comfortable I don’t know. But my job is not to understand. It is to contemplate the horizon with heavily-lidded eyes and parted lips.

I sat on that same bench centuries ago, when it was still a bitter set of plastic panels. There were no grape vines or rhodium pathways, no fountain. All I could see was a single-lane road: cracked and dusty tarmac stretching from east to west under the kindling summer sun. I sat alone on that bench in rugged jeans, arms and legs sprawled wide, head tossed back. I didn’t care how profusely I was sweating, didn’t care for the angry burn blooming across my neck. I’d come to a point in my life where all that mattered was the food on my table and the god I struggled to hold in my mind.

If I hadn’t been dreaming up in the clouds, I might have seen her coming, walking down the road with her bleached denim shorts and broken heart tattoo.

She asked me what I was doing.

I didn’t know, so I told her she had on too much mascara.

She laughed and sat next to me. I didn’t need to pull the classic move. My arm was already by her shoulder.

We talked for a long while, about deep things and shallow things. Our shadows ebbed away into darkness.  Finally, she nodded at me and reached out her hand.

We wed the next day. I was so grateful, so alive. I said my prayers for a whole month and a half. I thought I’d be able to start over again with her by my side, pick up the pieces of me that I’d casted away.

She smiled for a couple of years. Made the bed when we got up in the afternoons. Then she disappeared. I didn’t know where to look, so I went back to the bench, lay flat, and dragged myself a little higher into the clouds. I don’t know how long I spent out there, but it wouldn’t have made a difference whether I stayed an hour or a millennium.

There is a marble sundial just visible from the corner of my eye. I have watched the shadows wax and wane exactly three hundred sixty-five thousand times, and not once have they brought remarkable news. Eight-thirty means the tourists are gone for the day, but they will simply return again tomorrow. Five to eleven signals the gathering clouds, but within hours they will clear. I watch the world cycle through endless seasons of laughter, tears and conflict, each as insignificant as the last, and I begin to wonder if I am any different.

At night, when the last of the delicate starflowers has closed, I can smell the dust beneath the soil. I can smell the heated breeze and the odd musk that settled on my last visit.

I caught him before he came. I wasn’t dreaming that day. I saw him through the dust storm, walking my way. He was a travelling magician, I think. Thin, with a silver blazer and wide, grey eyes. I remember those eyes. They were the kind that never seemed to focus. He nodded at me, walked a few steps, and halted with his back turned.

“Gone, is she?”

I got up off the bench and stood to face the wind. “Aye. She disappeared the day I promised myself a new beginning.”

“A different life? Is that what you seek?”

I don’t understand how we came to that agreement, him and me. I was a starved and sore hound and he had a fresh, raw pound of meat. I thought it over until I couldn’t think anymore.

“Deal.”

He carried no paper on him, so he handed me a playing card, and I signed my life away on a miserable two of clubs. I saw the sparkle, the reflection in his eyes. His pupils faced mine in earnest now, and finally, I understood that for me, nothing would ever change.

I saw the world with these lifeless eyes of mine. Living legend I was, crowned with the stature of Judas and Brutus. My name rolled off every tongue, yet none ever suspected my master. He took the cash and I kept the blame. Teamwork, he called it. Whether they erected my statue in honour or in horror, I do not know. Then again, knowing was never my job: gazing at the horizon with my high arched brows is.

The woman below my pedestal has left. The sundial has completed another revolution. The sky is once again blue. Another day has gone by. What is new? A thousand years I have asked myself this question. A thousand times I have arrived upon the same answer. The flowers still bloom and wilt with the seasons. The women still wear too much make-up. The magician’s descendants will continue playing their clever little game. A thousand years from that fated meeting, absolutely nothing has changed.

Much Ado About Calculus

School has started, yet again, and the reason I'm writing this beginning-of-the-year post now, when we're already a couple of weeks into the semester, is actually quite simple. And pathetic. 

It's because I'm spending, on average, three or four hours each day doing math homework. I've probably written enough pages to fill a standard sized workbook, and we've only had two weeks of class. I don't really have anything to complain about; it's an interesting course, and I'm not losing (that much) sleep over it. But it does mean that I have next to no free time. Because what time I have left over after slogging through thirty, forty, or occasionally seventy-one math questions is spent chipping away at a list of literature. This wouldn't be so terrible if I didn't have to take notes on them. 

Enough whining. There are children in developing countries desperately wishing for an education like this. And I'm going to have to learn to manage my time properly sooner or later. What better time to do it than now? 

The thing is that I don't feel like I have interests anymore. No, that isn't quite right. I still have things I'm interested in: I want to read things and write and draw and experience all sorts of new things. They've just taken a backseat to proving why arccot(x) = π + arctan(1/x), if x < 0. (Which, by the way, I figured out while mulling it over on the bus. I don't know why it took such a long time to puzzle out, because the solution was pretty obvious after doing the other questions.) I'm always thinking about finishing up so I can start doing something enjoyable when I'm working, and it never seems to happen. All these productive things are sitting on my plate, waiting for me to eat them, but I'm already full after the three other courses. 

It's going to be 11:30 soon, (which I would have considered very late a year ago) so I'm going to wrap this up quick. With all of these busy things going on and not much room for much in the way of personal pursuits, I'm really hoping that all these opportunities in my way will not walk right past me because I was in too much of a disarray to notice. In the meantime, I'll try to clear my thoughts, prioritize, and bide my time for an afternoon to use at my own discretion. 

L'éducation

A man walks into a thrift store. He points to the desk in the front display and asks for the price. The cashier sends an employee over to examine the price, which turns out to be $100 dollars.

But the man wants to know how much it will cost after tax. The cashier hesitates. She tells him the tax is fifteen percent.

The man asks again for the cost after tax, clearly unable to do the math. The cashier hesitates. The tax is fifteen percent. The desk costs one hundred dollars. Fifteen percent of one hundred dollars is...

She pulls out a calculator and punches some numbers in. "It costs a hundred and fifteen, sir," she tells the man, who nods and buys the desk.

Meanwhile, the fresh faced employee hailing from Toronto who just happened to catch the exchange is oscillating between excusing herself to the bathroom to laugh wildly and excusing herself to go to the bathroom to cry profusely at the appalling state of arithmetics her coworkers and clients seem to possess.

---

This is not a joke. There is no punchline. This actually happened to me on Tuesday.

Someone wanted to know the final price with 15% tax on a $100 dollar item and the cashier had to pull out a calculator in order to find it. It's not even a weird number like 13%, not that this should matter when it's $100 dollars, but it takes a little longer on, say, $8,00 versus 15% on the same amount.

Was it just an unfortunate turn of circumstances that I caught this butchering of elementary-school mathematics? Perhaps it was something I should just forget. These people were old, and, uh, old people forget things. Sometimes.

---

This is also an incredibly old post that I'd started up sometime when I was still in Québec and didn't have time to finish. I was going somewhere in that last paragraph, but I've completely lost the train of thought by now, so I'll just post it up for the sake of not throwing away. I don't really like throwing things away, even if this is technically just an arrangement of electrons.

By the way, can someone teach me how to put things under a cut? (Is that what they're called?) When it only displays the first few paragraphs of the post, and the reader can choose whether or not to click the link to the rest. I'm sure I can search it up, but I'd rather have a teacher.

And I promise to write an actual blog post relevant to current events, as soon as these old half-finished skeletons are out of my closet and I have time that's not borrowed from the next day (a line which I'm toeing right now. It's already 11:59 as I type, and it'll probably be past 12:00 when I go to sleep.) I've actually had ideas, for once, I just haven't had time. But more on this later.

Dans les arbres

"Arbre en arbre," I say, slowly and with careful attention to roll the r's as best as I can. "On a monté sur les parcours entre les arbres. Il était, um, trés haute," wincing at the misused auxiliary verb. Lucie doesn't, so I conclude by snapping the end off a baby carrot.

"Oh, oüais, à Québec?" she asks. Lucie is my mentor for the duration of my six weeks here. She eats a grape, processing the seed carefully. It goes into a small plastic container. She has grapes everyday for la pause, as far as I'm aware. For the first few days I stuck by her side and learned the ropes. Now I occasionally prowl the floor and sort donated items by myself.

I nod yes. There's more that I want to explain about our trip last Saturday to Arbre en Arbre, a winter ski resort turned tree-trekking attraction in the summer, but I can't even organize my thoughts in English, and so I give up on the French. In any case, la pause is over, and I have to remonter en haute to surveiller la plancher.

Arbre en Arbre was the very first weekend activity of my stint in Québec, and even now, six plus weeks's worth of rumination and several forsaken blog posts later, it's still my favourite.

The activity involves, obviously, trees. A lot of trees. Obstacle courses made from rope, wires, nets, planks of wood, and a variety of other possibilities are constructed between the trees, about two or three storeys up from the ground. The most common types of connection between trees were les passerelles, which translates as bridges, but are more like tightropes. There were also hanging planks of wood that you could skip across, as well as a number of ziplines.


In order to add some variety, things like nets and, oddly enough, a skateboard on a wire trajectory, also feature in some of the courses. Not only was the view spectacular, the courses themselves were both fun and challenging. I especially liked the tightrope bridges and the ones with wooden planks spaced so far apart you have to jump for them.

There were, of course, stringent safety procedures. Everyone wore harnesses, each with two carabiners and a clip-on pulley attached. The carabiners were attached by rope to the front of the harness, near the waist, and had to be very carefully used. This could get a little annoying. First of all, the two carabiners had to always either be clipped into an appropriate line, or in your hands. At least one carabiner had to be attached to a safety line or hook at all times, so they had to be transferred over one at a time. Second of all, they had to face opposite directions once they were both clipped in, to avoid any panicky actions accidentally releasing both clips at the same time. And lastly, they were not to fall below the waist. This was particularly annoying while ascending ladders, because the carabiners had to be moved one at a time in small increments of a step or two. But, like most thing, I got used to it, and I appreciate that they stressed the safety so much. There's no way I would have been jumping around on wobbly logs and shaky ropes twenty metres off the ground if I didn't trust the harness system to hold me up.

I must say, I almost gave up on this post. It's been more than two months since I went to Arbre en arbre, and it seemed kind of silly to post about something that had happened so long ago. I was busy, school has started, and I'm even busier now. But this one post has been sitting here this entire time, waiting for me to stop being so lazy and get it finished, already. How was I going to manage my time better this year if I couldn't even finish one measly blog post in the span of two and a half months? So, here you go, it's finally here, and hopefully I'll be able to draw breath long enough from treading in math-infested waters to write another one soon.

Time and Time Again

There are 31 536 000 seconds in a year.

Yet here's the catch: it isn't as if I have those 31 536 000 seconds and you do too. If that were the case, we'd be able to pool it all together, wouldn't we? We'd be able to ultimately cheat time, and obviously that's not possible. But you and I, we both knew that already.

So why is it that we let time slip away, all the while knowing that it is the most precious entity in the world? Is it because we think we have all the time in the world to do whatever we want? Is life ultimately procrastination stretched to its limit? Perhaps we're not even entirely conscious of how much time we waste - all the time. We talk about how we spend time doing this and that... as if, like money, we can earn it all back in the end. Yet the truth of course is, we can't. We can't earn it, gift it, do anything with it except watch it slowly ebb away.

What can we do, except hope that we'll have enough time to live our lives to its maximum capacity?

Let's live those 31 536 000 seconds to the max this upcoming 2013 year, or even this school year, and strive to achieve something, anything, say, once a week. Something worthwhile enough that we'll be able to say we used our time wisely. Because really, we'll never know how much time we have left.

***

Okay, so, it's been ages since I've written anything at all, and this one in itself was a bit iffy, but it's just a thought that came up in Physics today, when part of a question asked us to calculate the number number of seconds in a year. Sorry if the ending seems... a bit depressing and abrupt? There may be a followup post to this one, if I ever feel up to it.

Also, the Alaska post has yet to be written... Hopefully it will also be coming soon, although I bet most of you have long forgotten about it by now.

But anyways, I hope this post has given you something interesting to think about.