proba tive org archives

The Laws of Ducks by Ken Fussichen

Duck Law No. 1 - If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, looks like a duck and cooks like a duck, it's a duck. Restatement: All things are known by their attributes.

Duck Law No. 2 - Even under ideal circumstances, no duck, no matter how noble or well-intentioned, can be an eagle. Restatement: All things must be what they are.

Duck Law No. 3 - A duck can pretend to be an eagle except in times of adversity. Restatement: Pretense and adversity are inversely proportional; adversity reveals the true nature of all things.

Duck Law No 4 - No duck may be an eagle until it abandons its webbed feet and bill for talons and a beak. Restatement: All things remain as they are until the attributes that define them are abandoned. Then, and only then, can they evolve.

Duck Law No. 5 - Ducks are noble creatures. They shall not be penalized in the eyes of other creatures because they are not eagles. Restatement: All things are honorable if they are what they are honestly, even if they are different from you.

Duck Law No. 6 - The greatest duck that ever was cannot cannot fly as high as even a modest eagle. Restatement: If one would soar with eagles, do not swim with ducks.

Duck Law No. 7 - Ducks flock. Eagles fly alone. Ducks and eagles never mingle. Restatement: Choose company wisely.

Duck Law No. 8 - A duck's quack doesn't echo. No one knows why. Restatement: Sometimes there is no answer.

During my university career some good friends gave me the nickname Duck. Not because I hung out with ducks but because I had an unconscious habit of making a quacking noise while doing little things that required less of my brain cells than usual. Things like standing in line or wandering around a store waiting for someone else to purchase what they were after. I often didn't notice I was quacking until glancing up to find people looking quizzically in my direction. If I was with someone I'd ask them if I'd been doing it again. Either way, I'd usually smile and say "Oops."

Media stories to the contrary, small unappreciated acts of strength and grace are taking place everywhere. Watch closely and you will witness them in the most unexpected places. Encourage those engaged in these labours of love when you get a chance. It really is the little things that matter. And the little ones.

The other night I was on a late evening bus from the Ottawa Folk Festival venue to the transitway. A young woman sat across from me, holding the stroller her youngest child was no longer riding in front of her. She had three youngsters with her, the younger two choosing to explore the seat belts on the bench next to me while the oldest sat next to the young woman, exploring the back of that bench, talking with his mother about what he saw out the window.

Though I don't understand Spanish well enough to know what any of them said to one another, I understand mothering enough to appreciate what was taking place. The children were active, moving from the bench I sat on to the one she was on and back a few times, chattering to each other but not being a nuisance - just being children. She commanded respect by her way with the little ones. Their behaviour was a credit to her character and patience. Her tone was never angry or intimidating. She spoke calmly and clearly without repetition but with a pleasant and understanding authority. Rather than catering to the children's desire to have the window where they sat opened, she instructed and demonstrated without leaving her seat how they might accomplish this. They were unable to achieve what they were after but even at that late hour there was no whining or pleading; no cries of frustration.

I watched and listened without letting the children know I was paying attention to them. She was paying attention to her little ones and no doubt knew I was as well. When the youngest had not picked up his sandals from the floor of the bus she left them there until it appeared they may be in the way of boarding passengers.

As their stop approached they lined up in anticipation, the youngest hopping back into the stroller and putting on his shoes. The little one had been given the privilege of making the bell ring for their stop, but didn't respond to her instruction - the only one in English thus far. She took his hand and together they pushed the button. Finally, standing facing the rest of the bus and waiting for the shoe putter onner to finish, she looked toward the ceiling of the bus, sighed, shook her head and smiled as only a patient mother can. As it turned out, the ring had been premature, so she apologized to the driver and thanked him as they were leaving.

Just before her stop, she glanced at me and we shared a moment of understanding. I smiled to tell her I knew exactly how she felt and nodded that she was doing a good job. Her smile told me she appreciated my noticing. As she walked along the length of the bus after getting her brood safely outside, she looked in, smiled and nodded once in my direction: Goodbye.

Well behaved parents all over the world are raising well behaved children. Count on it. Encourage them if you get a chance. It's for our own good.

Gas prices are getting to be a news item in Canada. And not just because they fluctuate for no good reason. That was the old news. On my trip back to Ottawa I stopped for gas in Perth. It was $0.99/litre and the cashier told me it was going up the next day. No kidding... it was $1.26 the next morning here in Ottawa.

The Ottawa Classic Rock radio station is staging a Suck My Gas Day in a few days. I was looking forward to trying to get the exact amount squeezed out of the pump, too. I've been staging my own protest by getting $5.00 worth at a time when it went through the roof. $6.21 is pretty close. And I do like the thought behind it! Sticking it to the government is not a hard sell for me. (Don't get all bent out of shape now - if you drive, you're probably thinking it would be fun, too :-)

I'd love to be part of the fun, really. But I won't need gas on the day they are staging this hippie like protest. And I'm not sure I want to buy gas when I don't need it even to stick it to those silly buggers everyone is pissed off with over this. You know, those guys who managed to give all that tax money to their buddies... yeah, they're the ones who are now saying they need the taxes from gas -- 44% of what you're paying goes to them -- so no, they aren't listening to talk of capping the price. Surprise. Maybe they'll change their minds when the cost of perishables trucked into our grocery stores doubles or triples or -- there aren't any because the trucking companies can't afford fuel either.

In my not so humble opinion it would be fair to expect the guilty parties to repay double or triple what they misappropriated. Some civilized places do that, you know, make the guilty party repay several times more than the actual amount of the damages sued for. Oh, wait - we're in Canada, the chances of us sueing our elected officials for underhanded swindling of the public are virtually nil. Anyway, the penalty "fund" could be used to discount gas to a reasonable number while they pick up the ball on alternative energy development.

But life's not fair it turns out. Check out the range of Ottawa gas prices here. Shameful. The link is good for more than just today I think, so you can play the Ottawa Gas Lottery if you wish.

Comparison shopping is a thing of the past since, shades of Y2K, the large display signs were only good for prices under a buck. Yep, only three spots for cards with digits on them and one of them is after the decimal point. There's another great reason for a cap on prices: you can't tell from the street how much the station is charging anymore. The pumps, of course, have no problem with four digit prices. Figures.

What you see on the display signs is something like this "[blank][blank].[6] /L" Hey, maybe they can be held to that? He he. That'd be a fun one, wouldn't it? There's already a (voluntary) Scanner Price Accuracy Code here in Canada.

Remind me to tell you how I came to have a shiny (well, the parts that have finish still are shiny!) Jeep with a full tank of gas next time we're here together.

I found myself making a list on my whiteboard a few days ago. This is what I do when I have lots of things I want to do, any one of which may distract me from remembering other possibly more presssing items and some of which can wait or not and, especially, when some of these are so much more fun than the others.

Some of the ways I prioritize these wouldn't make sense to most people, but the crossing off of items when they are finished (half-crossed if started :-) is objective evidence of progress in the face of subjective feelings of drowning in still "undone" things. Hint: you have to leave the crossed off things up or this doesn't work so well.

One of the fun, but sort of pressing things was getting a webcam and setting it up to provide surveillance of my apartment for some good reasons that will be explained to those who wish to know such things. (Honestly -- that's on the list too -- under migrating this blog space to Nucleus) It's a landlord thing and no, I'm not being silly about this.

I'm pleased to announce that I've gotten this working under Windows XP. I'll be working on getting it operational on RedHat but the software the camera came with was for XP. At $30 it was way too reasonable to be passed up because of religious differences. So, first was seeing if I could get it up and running and it would do what I wanted - activate on motion detection. I haven't quite got that far because I also wanted to know if I could figure out how to get the images on the web in real time. The useless instructions in the webcam package (Labtec's Webcam) told me to find a streaming video hosting service and follow their instructions. Already have a web space so I found a free application called Yawcam. It's cool enough even with some confusing documentation about setting up the streaming web part.

Got it all figured out yesterday. At least it works for me and Steph (my beta test group). Right now there are two views: updated stills and streaming live. The streaming view is limited by time per viewer session (5 min max) and number of viewers (3) for the time being. I need to figure out if this is going to blow through the ceiling of my upload quota on my ISP before I go any further.

Don't get all excited - the view right now is of Dixie's dining area.

If you go there, I'd appreciate your letting me know of any problems and what OS and browser you were using. It does require java enabled browsers so don't complain if you don't have that - okay?

Cool.

Post the price of gas as $100.x a litre.

That's what it is at the little gas bar at Wellington and Parkdale just two blocks from me. And yes, it is wreaking havoc with the light evening traffic at that intersection.

Anyway, come and get it, while it lasts. One set of pumps has pilons blocking entry. I presume this is because they are dry.

For those who are interested, the comment made by "L" to an earlier post went undetected by myself until today. It took a couple of days for me to drive to London to speak with "L" personally. I had no access to the internet during that time and for some reason no email reached me about a new comment.

I trust that the people who know me know that my character has not changed and will not change regardless with whom I am relating. For this reason I am having difficulty with my initial thoughts of deleting the comment. I did say I welcomed public and private communications after all. I abhor inconsistency (read: hypocrisy) in myself as much as others.

Leaving it there without mounting a defense will hopefully not be interpreted as any sort of agreement with the assessments made. I may be a bit naive in this respect, but I will go with that for the moment. Much of the comment consists of speculation about my motivations and feelings followed by arguments against the "rightness" of attributed thought processes. Where would a rational response possibly begin?

In any case, the point continues to be missed and may forever be. I will make this last attempt at clarification: My reactions, including waiting to speak to "L" in person as soon as I could, were triggered by, but were definitely not the result of, one recent incident. All communications I have received privately and publicly - save those from one other who knows more than most about the "rest of the story" - seem to focus on this one visible sequence of reaction and action or non-action, in the case of my choice to communicate in person.

On to other things.

[Updated Sunday, September 11, 2005] [[update moved to comments below]]

[Updated Wednesday, September 14, 2005] Comments to this entry include all explantions I have to offer at this time regarding my changing and changing back my comment policy. Comments remain closed on this blog for obvious reasons. Sorry.

Before this blog came into being, I had things to say about my reactions to the attacks that surprised the Western world four years ago and the reactions of those around me.

I was changed that day. I had to speak my mind. What I emailed to my friends and family garnered a whole spectrum of reactions, but it mattered not. I had said what I needed to say. Agreement or disagreement with my point of view did not invalidate it, neither did my point of view invalidate others.

But I had the right to speak my thoughts and they had theirs -- an aspect of democracy I cherish and a freedom denied to many on this planet. What I understood in the global perspective was that while anyone in this world is denied safety, justice and the right to dissenting voices, none of us would be safe.

Denying our individual responsibility of ensuring such basic rights by claiming governments, elected or not, or religious factions to which we, of course, did not belong, or cultural differences of which we claimed innocent ignorance were to blame was the window those bent on self-destruction with the intent of inflicting harm on those they viewed with understandable distaste used to their advantage.

The institutions so handily scapegoated were simply different groupings of individuals. Individuals had to act differently if things were to change. Shining light in the places that human rights and dignity were being violated was no longer optional. It became essential for our collective survival.

So it is with individual survival. In particular with this individual's survival. What I said those many years ago was that terrorism begins at home. I urged others to treat each other with respect, whether they were related or not.

That Christmas the county in which I lived at the time held a vigil over the space of several hours. At regular intervals, the last 5 minutes of the life of a child who died that year in that county at the hands of his or her parent was described. They numbered in the double digits. I found this to be more chilling than the larger conflict going on so visibly. Adults in declared combat with other armed adults is at least a fair enough match. Adults terrorizing the most vulnerable members of our community behind closed doors puts the lie to our claims of moral superiority.

And so I went about reminding those I came in contact with who voiced the opinion that the terrorists were nothing like us that in my opinion we were all the same. They thought they were right and we thought we were right. Which necessitated that each group thinks the "other" is wrong. Focusing on the relatively few real differences supported continued belief in the lie that there is one "right" way to think or be. After all, how could we both be the same if one of us was "wrong". Logically that would allow for the possibility that we were wrong. If we were wrong, we couldn't justify our own attacks. What a dilemma.

I call the thinking and behaviour that creates this kind of dilemma bullshit. Mainly because we all say we can't stand bullshit. Half the problem is identifying bullshit. We know it when we see it in others, but it's hard to see your own, isn't it. Which is where the rest of the world comes in. Other people help us identify our own bullshit, whether either of us know it or not.

Bullshit begets bullshit and makes everyone in the vicinity uncomfortable. Eventually we get uncomfortable enough that we start to recognize in ourselves bullshit that we thought was brought to the party by other people. What an opportunity for change.

Here's the rub: change makes people uncomfortable; reformed bullshitters make unreformed bullshitters even more uncomfortable. If a reforming bullshitter is dissuaded by a barrage of heavier bullshit they have shown their true colours and are full of more of it than the rest of the group put together. You can't get rid of bullshit by covering it up with more. Shovels and hoses and the like are required.

I don't like to think of myself as full of bullshit. I'm starting to think I may be at least smellng like it right now. And I'm sitting here looking at a quote I've had posted on my wall for several years now. It gives me pause and makes me examine my handling of recent events in a different light. I'm still debating things but I'd like to share it with you on this significant day.

Oh, something else you should know, before you read it. This blog got rolling (sorry for the pun) the year I became determined to re-invent myself. Little did I know then what life had in store for me. I am not sure I have re-invented a self so much as discovered and awakened a part of myself that was always there. I'd just been ignoring and discounting that part because what it was feeling and telling me wasn't what I wanted to hear. Shades of my childhood experience now that I come to think of that.

Careful what you learn and all that... Right. Once this part of me had the floor, my dreams became a therapeutic battleground -- literally. What is happening right now in my family relationships was played out in the one that scared me the most. I wrote it in my journal and told many people, including my therapist, about it because I was shocked at the uncharacteristic behaviour *I* had exhibited in the dream. The reforming bullshitter, remember? I'd made a resolution a couple of years before that I was going to eliminate bullshit from all levels of my life. Maybe the resolution was the start of all of that has followed? Or maybe what followed was made possible (or necessary) by the resolution?

What I discovered was some of the bullshit was in my own head. The changes I am undergoing today are the result of my identifying the bullshit and refusing to play along with it any longer.

Okay, you've read this far, I'll deliver the quotation. It's attributed to T. S. Eliot but I've read similar things worded differently. Maybe this was the original:

In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not.

Okay, so what's that got to do with the title of this post? I'm trying to figure out which of the ways I wasn't is the way I need to go through. Well, that's not true, I know which way it is -- it's the one that feels least comfortable, right? Indeed.

Still, I need some time to chew on this before I do or say anything more. While I'm doing that, I'll be redesigning and porting this blog to another application.