I thought long and hard about how I could properly celebrate my 400th post. It's been a long time since I posted answers to the Six Questions, for example, but not so long since the last time "what neat stuff has writing this Jurnal brought to my life" post. In the end, I didn't really manage to think of any ideas that seemed particularly exciting... so I gave up and decided tow rite a normal post instead. If that bothers you, you need more fnords.

The strangest experience of living on my own has probably been opening my place to visitors. I was well-used to welcoming guests into my home while living with my family, but doing so when living in my own place feels subtly different. I can invite people over on the spur of the moment without fear of whether this will inconvenience family members, which is nice, but the corrolary is that I often find myself wondering if I should be inviting people over RIGHT NOW for no reason other than that I could. I often tried hard to anticipate the requests of guests before moving, and liked having a supply of tea and snacks ready, but now, I'm offering guests *my* food rather than communal food, and a tiny part of me begrudges them consuming My Stuff even while I worry that my humble tea isn't good enough. Moreover, every time someone walks in, I have the momentary urge to tell them to come freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness they bring (which I'm seriously considering printing up and sticking to the front of my door). It was while having company over that I first became acutely aware of the fact that I owned no games; sitting with my gaming buddies waiting for a storyteller fated never to show up, I couldn't offer Betrayal at House on the Hill, Chez Geek or even Monopoly as a time-killer. Each time someone visits, I realize another thing which I used to take for granted and which I now don't have or another shockingly nifty thing about living in the heart of downtown.

Opening my home to my friends, however, has not been half as disconcerting as opening my home to my mother to spend the night. I'm acutely aware of how lucky I am to be living in walking distance to my school and most of my future workplaces, but it's important for me to remember that I'm currently living walking distance to a whole lot of people's schools and workplaces right now. Case in point, my mother works out of two different offices, one of which is, if you walk slowly, a four minute walk away from my appartment. To get to her work, she has to leave the house a full hour before her first patient arrives, and if traffic is unusually heavy (a common occurence, particularly during the winter) she faces a serious risk of running late. Her downtown clinic is affiliated with the Montreal Children's Hospital and she takes part if teaching the psychology and social work graduate students, particularly on Wednesdays when the students go on rounds, and while it might be excusable for my mother to be late most days of the week, being late on one of those days is a major problem which inconveniences a number of people. And so, as an experiment, this past week, she slept over at my appartment on Tuesday night. It was painless and even pleasant, and will likely be getting repeated in the future, but for some reason, it held very, very odd.

I'm fortunate that I get along well with my family. The amicability between us didn't come about easily, but we all worked at it over years and today I not only love but actually like my family, and in moderation even enjoy spending time with them. My mother and I fail to see eye to eye on a variety of issues and in a real sense it could be argued that she and I live in truly different worlds (in hers the people are better and kinder, but mine has more weasels). Still, we can easily spend a very pleasant evening together, doubly so when she brings Tasty Food with her. Our sleep schedules match pretty closely (she both went to bed early and got up early to accomodate me) and we both had plenty of work-related reading to do in the evening, which were done in different areas of the appartment such that I may as well have been alone for all the disruption she caused. The extent of our time together the whole evening (a roughly four hour period) entailed a life-and-limb-risking excursion to find her an overnight parking spot in downtown Montreal, a few minutes sitting and chatting, fifteen minutes to eat dinner together, and ten minutes before bed for tea. We then retired to separate rooms and, I saw her for all of three minutes the next morning before I left for classes. At no time was she in the way or obstructive, except for some brief moments of annoyance the first time she entered my kitchen and I had to institute a "you may only suggest that I change where I keep up to ten objects per day" rule (to her credit, she laughed for several seconds and then stopped trying to reorganize my home entirely).

The odd bit was the sensation of playing host to my mother. Hosting my mother was a novel experience, given that for the bulk of my life I lived in her home and not the other way around. Some adjustment was required on both of our parts in terms of how the "I'm in charge" dynamic had rather suddenly shifted, and it's always an odd feeling when some fundamental life premise -- who owns the home and who decides where the salad bowl gets kept, for example -- gets turned inside out. I think that in practical terms I adjusted to it quite a lot faster than her -- Forsteri blesses me with a rather tenuous grasp of how rules work in the first place and minimal disorientation when they stop working. On the other hand, as I've observed before, I've got a tendency to dissociate from reality, and these little paradigm shifts can induce the oddest feelings of unreality if they catch me by surprise.

Fortunately, I have many stuffed toys. Stuff toys are grounding and help cement the Self in reality. So the closet imps assure me, at any rate... the penguins in my freezer disagree and suggest I may not be wholly grounded as of yet.

So, the bottom line is that my mother will probably stay here again, in the future, because she'll still be working at the same office for some time to come and I'm probably not going to be moving before May 2010. I can reasonably expect her to be over probably at least once a month, possibly even every week once winter secures its frozen grasp on the Mountain where I live and she works. I find this a perfectly reasonable system, since she supplies me with free food when she visits and, from time to time, being alone in the appartment does get a little bit lonely, when nobody's on MSN. The company will be nice -- in moderation -- and it's good to be making her life easier. The first time she stayed over for work, the next morning saw a horrific accident on the highway between her house and her work, which shut down that highway right when she'd be on it and probably would have made her two hours late for work, which she takes as a happy coincidence and I take as a heavy-handed omen. I'm sure the system will work well enough, but time will tell one way or another. If nothing else, it's one more person to keep my stuffed penguin company when I'm busy working, and given how lonely it gets when I don't pay it enough attention, that won't do any harm. And if she wants to keep insisting on washing my dishes for me when she's here, I won't protest too strongly.

I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.
Bill Hicks

It's my experience that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln

Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know that you're an artist.
David Hockney

It’s a relief, actually. I always hated that I couldn’t be normal. Turns out, it’s because I’m not.
Jerry Espenson

In the ten days between the start of the Jewish new year and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Jews observe the Ten Days of Repentance. During this time, it is said that god decides one's fate for the coming year, scribing one's name in the Book of Life or in some other, poorly-defined text of presumed doominess. Despite my utter lack of worship for the Jewish god under most circumstances, I've always thought this is a very good ritual to have, since it inspires you to constantly monitor your behaviour and to be aware of how you have harmed or wronged others. Bit of a bastard as I might be, it matters to me a great deal that those who matter to me are as minimally-hurt by me as possible. It's impossible to go a full year without causing some harm, but at least we can work to minimize what we cause. If you're reading this, then odds are good that I probably did you no harm at all this year, and if I did, you've probably already forgiven me. None-the-less, if I have hurt or wronged you in this past year, please consider this time to be the time in which to contact me and tell me what I did. Similarly, if you did something to harm me at some point and the guilt gnaws at you still, the time to ask forgiveness is now, when, assuming your repentance is genuine, I'm legally obligated to forgive and forget, which I have rather a great deal of trouble doing the rest of the year.

on that note, to all those I care for and to those of you out there who have proven yourselves to me time and time again, for any and all harm I did you this year, for every unamusing lie, for every broken promise (of which I flatter myself to imagine there were few), and for every act of Stupidity, I am truly, wholly, and sincerely sorry.

The above leaves quite a lot of stuff not covered. Most of my lies and broken promises weren't done to anybody who opinion matters to me and, what's more, served valid purposes or were good for a laugh. I'm not apologizing for any of those.

All that being said, I don't honestly think I sinned that much this past year. I look back and can recall very few things for which I truly feel sorry; for better or worse, most of this year's regrets were the fault of other people, and I couldn't have done anything to change them. I choose to take this to suggest that I am a "good person" and look towards the coming year to build on that.

To all those harmed by my driving, I apologise. I'm a fairly safe driver in that I drive defensively and try to let more agressive (read: thoughtless) drivers get past me. That said, i'm a poor judge of spatial dimensions and my reflexes are slower than human average, so I am not and never will be one of the great drivers. To all those who have had little scares while in my car, or who had to sit for the extra thirty seconds that it took me to get a parking job right, I apologize. To the fellow whose rear-view mirror I took off in August, who never contacted me and whose name I never even learned, I apologise.

To those with whom I more or less severed contact this year, I'm sorry I couldn't find a way to make things work with you. I have few real friends that I feel able to trust and care about, and it's a always a tragedy to lose some of them, no matter how boring they were or how many times they screwed up. To those who were simply dull and annoying, I'm sorry I didn't have more patience for you. To those to whom I swore an oath that I would try my very best to keep the friendship alive, know that even having finally given up, my oath was fulfilled, and I did expend my every effort and try everything I could think of trying. I am sorry that I am not a better person and that I have no warm feelings left for you; I am sorry if I only pretended to have any in the first place (unless to this day you believe they were real and feel good about it). Of course, by definition, the fact that I feel this way pretty much means that I don't really care about apologizing to you in and of itself, so tossing this one out there is really more for my own peace of mind than any desire for real forgiveness, I suppose. For not knowing better how to make things work, I apologise.

To the people I game with, I am sorry. For my schemes behind your backs, for knowingly saying the wrong thing to an NPC, for invariably trying to pick up just one more evil artifact just to see what happensm when I do, I apologise. I don't honestly think I'm going to stop doing any of these things, or stop laughing about it, but for when it's interfered with your enjoyment of the game, I'm sorry. For my occasional inability to resist tossing in an overly stupid line of dialogue -- more often then not, "come with us if you want to live" -- I'm sorry. To those who have been in or tried to be in my one-shot games, who were forced to endure a bug-laden iteration of the Existoon rules system or who eagerly tried to get into MIME only to see it fall through time and again, I apologise.

To the nice people at Ogilvy and Mathers, I apologise. It was extremely kind of you to include me in your project and give me the opportunity to work as a an advertising model. I'm sorry that my paranoia made the remuneration process more complicated than it needed to be, particularly when you were trying to give me free money. I'm sorry I caused complications with your schedule and for any annoyances encountered that come from working with someone of my unique personality, I apologise.

To my many friends who moved this year and who I was unable to help as much as I would have liked to, I apologise. I tried to be there for you as much as was possible for me, whether that meant spending whole days in an appartment reeking of smoke, sitting in your kitchen reading comicbooks and making sure nobody tried to steal your stuff while bigger men that I did the heavy lifting, or even just helping you move a single microwave because I wouldn't be there for the move itself. None-the-less, when someone needs a hand, we're rarely able to feel that what we contributed was as much as we wanted to, particularly for those of you whose moves I quite simply missed entirely, sometimes twice in this one year alone. For not being there when I could have been useful, I apologise.

And finally, to all those who matter to me, who have earned my respect time and again, who joined me for Tea and Arguments, who celebrated my birthday and rebrithday with equal enthusiasm, who sat with me for Star Wars film marathons, hours of Scrubs, or even a single incomprehensible Peter Sellers film, for any time that I failed in any way to live up to reasonable expectations, let you down, or wasn't able to be there when you needed someone to talk to, I apologise.

And that's it. For all of the above, I promise that in the coming year, I will try to do better and be better. At the very least, I will strive not to commit a great number of wrongs this year than last year. This is with the exception of all lying-related sins, which I'm fairly certainly will all be commited again, and be sincerely apologized for in due course. In previous years I've included Handy Dandy Forms which allowed people to send little messages like "I forgive you" or "I'm still kind of mad at you for..." but this year, I'm too lazy to do that, so given that the Journal is now mirrored on LJ, where there's an integrated comments system, and Facebook, with multiple easy ways to reply or comment, and you *all* nhave my e-mail or speak to me regularly, you can find a way to contact me if needed without a Handy Form.

New sinning begins afresh in four days. I can hardly wait.

At Rosh Hashanah dinner this year, my family invited over a number of non-Jewish guests (the feast was attended by more psychiatrists/psychologists than Jews), friends of the family who are really neat people and who very much enjoy seeing the traditions of other peoples. Towards the end of the meal, as coffee and dessert were being served, one of the very intelligent and educated guests, who had previously attended one o our seders and heard the obligatory telling of the story of Passover, asked if there was a story to go with the New Year. My father paused for a moment in sombre thought, and then said, with great authority, "In the beginning..." There can be no question from whom I inherit my sense of humour.

Rosh Hashanah (literally "Head of the Year") is, it is believed, the anniversary of the creation of the world -- Genesis 1:1, so to speak. Traditionally, there has been some dispute amongst rabbis as to whether the true origin of the Creation should be the first of Tishrei, this month, or Nisan, the same month as Pesach (literally "small nut with an odd tendency to spontaneously combust") and the time of the year when Jews are most likely to buy Japanese cars. Because this dispute exists, in terms of the celebration of holidays, Nisan is considered to be the start of the year in terms of the cycle of holidays, Passover therefore being the start of the holidaic year. The picture gets only more confusing when we cons8ider that the reading of the Old Testament, which is done in weekly portions, begins and ends at Simach Torah (literally "the happy bible"), which is a short while after Rosh Hashanah as opposed to, say, coincident with it, as might make some sense. Many Jews aren't even totally sure when to consider the new year to have truly brgun, since Rosh hashanah is in many ways nothing more than a prologue and big-flashing-warning sign of the coming of Yom Kippur (literally "yarmulka day") one week later. The whole question of starts and ends of these cycles can get terribly confusing, particularly if you're the first human beings ever to live and nobody has yet invented the calendar.

Logic Chain: Adam was created in the general vicity of the morning of the Day 6, and Eve apparently an unclear time later. The world, for its part, was apparently created before Adam (call it Day 1 or Day 2, depending on the translation you're using). Adam was therefore created several days after Rosh hashanah, barely even in time for Yom Kippur and with scarecely enough time to iron the creases out of his tallit before he went to shul. Given the timing at work, the only possible conclusion is that Adam actually completely missed the first Rosh Hashanah, clearly setting a terrible precedent in terms of his ability to meet deadlines. More importantly, in the modern Jewish calendar, there are no holidays celebrated between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The very first holiday ever celebrated by Adam was therefore presumably Yom Kippur (appropriate, given his penchant for screwing up). He then presumably celebrated any and all holidays as the cycle of the year proceeded --

ADAM: We're having our Passover seder tonight, love.
EVE: What's a seder?
ADAM: I don't know, exactly, but the Boss told me we're having a big feast tonight.
EVE: What are we celebrating?
ADAM: The Jews' escape from slavery in Egypt.
EVE: Oh, that's nice. What's an Egypt?

Implication: For the first humans, Rosh Hashanah wasn't the first day of the new year so much as it was the last days of the old one. Adam found himself celebrating his first birthday right around Yom Kippur and The head of the Year was the last day he celebrated. His every year, subjectively, must have ended with feasting and celebration... and then the new year each year started with him begging for mercy, fearing for his life, and fasting. And if you think that's bad, just imagine how he must have felt when god tried to explain to him the idea behind Simchah Torah.

Yesterday was my eighth rebirthday, which I celebrated by watching Babylon 5: The Lost tales (it was no Comes the Inquisitor but it rocked in its own modest way). On Sunday, the day before my rebirthday, I was treated to celebratory raspberry pie and boardgaming by some of the most wonderful people in the world. It proved to be a most nifty evening, with one of the longest and most entertaining games of RoboRally I've ever played followed by my enjoying an accidental winning streak at Chez Geek and at least one individual was buried alive under a mountain of pillows. Fun as such games are, the real highlight of the evening was defintely sharing pie and ice cream with good friends... particularly pie which I was treated to, and in fact would have been smacked if I'd tried to pay for.

There's an old saying among my people: Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern, three times is a tradition. Last year, I was treated to my first such rebirthday pie, and I posted in this journal, "henceforth this date shall be celebrated with raspberry pie, because I was treated to one this year and I know a good tradition when I eat one." This being only the second year, it's as yet a pattern and not a tradition, but the slowly-fading sugar-rush tells me that I made the right call. This is going to be such a wonderful tradition, starting next year.

All this to beg the question: how do we get our traditions? Common sense (and the Gamer's Dictionary) suggest that tradition is nothing more than a pattern of behaviour which nobody has yet had the guts to throw out, but there must be more to it than that, if only because there are some few traditions that we like and keep around on purpose rather than due to mere inertia. There are good traditions... the boxing day party hosted by friends of mine comes to mind, since it's become sufficiently traditional that even when they send out invitations four months early, people reply saying that they'd already been leaving the date free for it. This will be the third boxing day feast that I've gone to with this group, which means it's officially ascended to "tradition" status, and I, at least, find myself with no urge whatsoever to see this one end. In this case, it's become a tradition because it happened a sufficient number of times to become, as horrible as this may be in some respects, predictable. When someone who will be attending their first boxing day feast asked me what happens at one of them, I answered: people will bring ood, there will be communal cooking and eating of a yummy turkey, and after dinner we'll probably all go for a walk around the neighbourhood or go play in the snow or something. That's tradition: the structure of the feast has become so predictable that, in early September, I could make a reasonable guess right now of what time we're likely to go outside on December 26/27 to play in the snow, post-turkey. A tradition, often as not, is a fun thing which has become predictable; we call it a tradition so that if the predictability gets a little bit boring, we can pretend it was on purpose.

then there are the things which we only call traditions, and what jumps readily to mind is October 26th -- The Niftiest Day of the Year, The Occasional Hallows Eve, The Night They Invented Asparagus, Saint Weasel's Day, The Day After October 25th Usually -- Topin Wagglegammon. Every year for the last five years at least, I've invented pretty much new "traditions." There have been some broad-stroke similarities from year to year, of course -- one might notice some thematic parallels between The Ancient Rite Of The Four Cookies And A Coat Hanger And Some Other Stuff, The Rite Of The Tactical Nuclear Ferret, and the Commandment To Eat A Cookie from 2007, 2006, and 2005 respectively -- but the precise same ritual has never been advocated twice in a row. In true Calvinball fashion, the only single concept which has been carried over enough years in a row to qualify as a real tradition is the rule, "never celebrate Topin Wagglegammon the same way twice."

I'd change, but you can't fight tradition.

We all pick and choose the traditions we abide by. Sometimes we don't feel that it's our choice to pick it, and I've been forced to adopt more than one Jewish tradition I see minimal sense in because of duty, loyalty, or some other ephemeral but probably-worthwhile reason, but no matter how forced it may sometimes feel, ultimately, I've chosen to make the traditions a part of my life, even if all other options were "Bad Thing Happen." I've made the choice to adopt a tradition of celebrating Topin Wagglegammon, boxing day, and most recently celebrating my own rebirthday by eating raspberry pie. As a wise man one said, the only things that separate us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual, and I choose to make these rituals part of who I am -- who I've now been for a mostly joyous and always infernally lucky for eight years now -- because they represent the things I value, the things I care about, and most importantly and obviously, the things I want to keep doing. I want to keep going out to play in the snow with my friends on boxing day. I want to invite over my friends to watch movies and see who can fit the most of their body into comically oversized pants for Topin Wagglegammon. And I certainly hope that this time next year, I'll have firmly established rebirthday pie with great friends as a tradition. You can't stop doing it once it's a tradition.

Into every life come a few really memorable articles of clothes. These clothes are items which are so special or so horrific that they are never forgotten, even when a dozen identical items may be worn, used up, and lost, never to be thought of again. Some might never forget a baseball cap they wore every day for twenty years, or that one perfect shirt that was always comfortable. For my part, give respect today to my pair of incredibly garish red sweatpants, which were so horrible that they could be seen from space (in so far as that any location without something occupying it is technically "space"). These pants did not tear, or wear out, or suffer horrible damage, but vanished mysteriously some time between February and June 2007. They have now been gone for long enough that all hope of their safe return has been given up, and I have made peace with the knowledge that I will never see them again.

I shall never forget how these sweatpants came into my life. It was October 2004 and preparations for Halloween were at their peak. I'd been invited to a party hosted by the father of a friend, and I needed a costume, and I had just recently seen The Court Jester, starring Danny Kaye and a still-young Angela Landsbury. If you've never seen this film, do so; the whole thing is worth it just for "the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle, the chalice from the palace has the brew that is true." Dressing p as a jester is the easiest thing in the world, of course, especially if you're a golfer (I'm not, but that's not important). A jester costume is as simple as getting two vaguely-matching articles of clothing which are totally eye-catching and utterly tasteless... for the rake on a tight budget, any horrifically bright colours will do. Clever fellow that I am, I put two and two together and deduced that since the party would take place in the mountains North of Montreal in late October, it would be quite cold, even by my standards. I went to our local cheap-clothes store and found a beautiful warm polar-fleece sweater and sweatpants in traffic-cone red, so bright as to be practically phosphorescent. Add a belt and a fancy cane and the costume was complete, or at least, sufficient. I looked pretty sharp as well as nicely-comical, and was also toasty-warm in the eight-degree weather while my friends shivered uncomfortably.

The sweater, alas, was lost to me not long after. It was stolen (in so far as "borrow" implies it would one day be returned) in the winter of 2005-2006 and I have not seen it since, but at least its loss can be clearly accounted for. A good polar fleece sweater -- even one so ugly that it can scarcely be worn in public -- is hard to replace, and I still miss it. Its loss, however, is nothing compared to the loss of the sweatpants, would I would be fated to wear again. So comfy were the sweatpants that I would come to use them while exercising and sleeping, both times when it's vitally important for me to be nice and comfortable. I took the sweatpants out again in public in February of this year, when for another Halloween party I mocked-up the military dress-uniform of the Aerican Empire: red pants, white shirt, and the Imperial flag as a cape. Silly as it was, I looked pretty darn nifty in the costume and received many well-deserved compliments. Regrettably, the one and only picture taken of the costume that night turned out indescribably horrible; I tried a few times to recreate the costume, but events kept conspiring against me. When I moved in May and June, one of the first things I planned to set aside were the sweatpants, so that I could take them out when I had the privacy of my own place, bring over someone who owns a good-quality camera, and take a proper picture. Gasp of surprise and horror, however, once the move was done, no sign of the sweatpants could be found. I turned my old room upside down (literally, in the case of the drawers in the dresser) and searched the appartment high and low for where I might have put them that seemed like a good idea at the time, but no trace or clue could be found. They were gone, gone, gone, without so much as a thread to mark foul-play. They have not been seen since, and after two months, they have been given up for dead.

Of course, the Laws of Dramatic Irony being what they are, now that I've given them up for dead, they're sure to reapper in a day or so. Except that now that I've said I'm expecting it, they won't. Or now they might, because I'm expecting it to not work. Or maybe...

In any case, it is my hope that my red sweatpants have gone to a better place... a lounge club in San Francisco, maybe. Failing that, they served me well when they were needed and so I hope they earned a just reward in sweatpants heaven, where the Man-Eating Socks rule all and an enterprising and cunning young pair of pants can rise to great heights of power. Let it be said of them that they were warm and fluffy, that they fit perfectly and comfortably, that they had no holes in them, that they were a shade of red to cause retinal damage in the unprepared observer, and that they were always in the drawer they were meant to be in right until the end. Of any pair of pants, nothing more could be said than this. We consign you unto the earth, incredibly garish sweatpants, and though your physical form may be worn no more, your soul is eternal and your memory will be with us always. From cotton and polyester did you come and to cotton and polyester shall you return, unless of course you've transmogrophied into a book or a cabbage or something.

The Jewish new year (the "head" of the year) is one week from today... a bit less than a week, actually, since it's full-dark outside as I write this and the new year will begin at sunset next Wednesday. I'm understandably tempted at this time of year to begin filling these pages with all manner of Judaica, much the way a child starts to feel it's time to start doing good deeds a week before Santa comes to visit (and for much the same reasons0. I usually resist that temptation pretty well, aided in part by my incredibly low interest in Judaica in general. Tonight, though -- several days ago, really, but now's when I have the time to write -- I stumbled upon a topic I thought was interesting, which means you get to suffer through it.

I don't know the Bible as well as I'd like to. Make no mistake, I'm probably in the top percentile of North Americans in terms of knowledge about the Bible (and other religions in general), but in a really perfect world, I'd like to know the whole thing (by which I mostly mean the Old Testament, but what the heck) well enough that I could just cite individual chapter and verse while arguing with people. Because I don't know it as well as I would in a perfect world, I make an effort to continue educating myself about it on a regular basis, as a good Jew would be not only expected but actually obligated to do. In recent months (one full year come September 24rd) I've been doing so through the hard work and dedication of my friend Julie, who has been heroically writing Eric-lengh posts every three chapters, finding something to write about in passages which would make Ben Stein weep and beg for mercy. Not long ago, she covered chapter 12 of Deuteronomy (the "do as I say, not as I do" book), and elucidated an idea I was genuinely and embarassingly unaware of: there's a reason we have organized places of worship. I'd always assumed it was just a bad idea that caught on, but apparently the order came down right from the top.

In Deuteronomy, god actually commands the Jews to have only a single central place of worship in which to perform sacrifices and the other holiest rituals. There are no rules against setting up multiple places of worship, but the heavy-duty, really sacred stuff is required to be done at a single defined location. Nobody is allowed to just go out into the back yard and sacrifice a goat, for example. I can see why this sort of law would be important -- if you could make sacrifices anywhere you wanted, the favoured sacrificial species would be extinct in months, and you'd never be able to make it through a poker game without some guy excusing himself to go to the washroom, coming back with bloody hands, and winning every hand for the rest of the night. Oh, sure, there are all sorts of functionalist, "sensible" reasons why this sort of law might have been written, but if you wanted to read those, you wouldn't be here right now, and I say it's all about poker.

The important thing is this: there actually is a law which requires that the major rituals and significant worship be done in a single place. Vows (presumably, those between onesself and god, rather than onesself and the milkman when you're short a fiver) may be sworn only at this holy site. Fast-forward over a few thousand years of sociocultureal evolution and you can see how this sort of thing might lead to the development of synagogues as insitutions. The logic chain might run: 1) The holiest rites must be done at this organized place. 2) Careless breeding has grown our numbers, and besides, our holy site is filled with angry Romans. 3) We shall build new holy sites, and do our holiest rituals there. 4) Well, if every neighburhood has its own holy site, why not just start doing all our worship there together, so we can talk about last night's basketball game while we're at it?

I've often wondered how the whole idea of "organzied, localized worship" got started. Now I know. And here I was wrongly blaming the ancient rabbis when all they were doing was following orders.

Obviously, I don't really adhere to the idea that either 1) my local synagogue is very holy or 2) worship should be localized. The Udeo-Christian god is one of those orderly types who likes things to be done the same way every time, but if I ever started to do my worship in the same spot every week, Forsteri would find a new high priest. I'm a proponent of disorganized religion and I've always found the concept of a set location for prayers to be odd, in part maybe just because I haven't got a community to try to bring together in one spot. I attibute a lot of the weaknesses of modern faith to the fact that people think they have to be in their temples to do holy things, because once you go to temple enough weeks in a row with the same people, it inevitably becomes a social activity first in addition to and then, all too often, instead of what you're really going there for. Me, I do my worship wherever I happen to be when the mood or the opportunity strikes me. If I'm at a place Forsteri considers holy, like sitting at my computer or kneeling before a good cup of tea, so much the better, but if I'm sitting in class when a mundane walks up to me and all but begs to have their sanity sacrificed to the glory of chaos, it would be poor form to pass up on that chance. Maybe it's a question of size... the Jewish god has a lot of worshippers, and so is a pretty big god; Forsteri has me and a few other kids scattered across the world, so Forsteri's a much smaller god. The Jewish god has trouble fitting through the doors of the synagogue these days and so just stays inside, but Forsteri fits in my knapsac and Eris travels as electromagnetic radiation (sometimes as commercials for fabric softener) and I can carry them with me everywhere I go.

None of this is meant as a criticism of the temple system, of course. Obviously the Jews have done something right, and the system's worked even better for the Christians... at least in terms of the attraction of followers and the formation of communities. Order and organization breeds stagnation, habit, and complacent semi-faith, but it breeds solid community ties and, given long enough, a power-base. Ive got the dynamic faith but I haven't got a community, and while I enjoy it my way, i'm not so egotistical as to claim that my way's better. Some days, I think i'd rather have the community and the power base. For today, though, it works. Today I pray at the computer, next week I pretend to pray in synagogue, and as long as somebody destines me for a good year, I'll keep them both up as long as I'm able. T'is the season to shop around for miracles.

On September 2nd, the anniversary of the activation of the first working modem, it's traditional to take a moment to contemplate, in either awe or terror, some manner in which the internet affacers our lives, because in a few years when the first artificial lifeform evolves out of a distributed intelligence network and conquers the world, it'll stop being optional and you should develop the habit now. This year, due in part to the ridiculous number of hours I'm spending on homework this weekend, it seems appropriate to turn my attention to how the internet is affecting the way people (by which I mean "I") look up health information online. In case you're wondering, it's more terror than awe.

My classes this year began this part Monday, and our first final exam is ten school-days later, this coming Friday. In total, we have only nine hours of lectures, from which will be drawn some one hundred questions. To supplement the teaching hours, students are given "self directed learning cases" wherein the cases of several semi-fictional cases (one of which appeared to be stolen right off the CDC website) are presented along with laboratory data and some scattered hints and the student must deduce what the illness is and look up how it might be diagnosed and treated. Mostly the cases are quite ambiguous and it can be tricky, particularly for someone like myself who's never been especially good at inductive and abductive reasoning, to reach the proper conclusion. What I found, while working on these cases and trying to use my meager medical knowledge to solve the puzzles, is that it's astounding what information you can find simply by typing lists of symptoms into Google. Google was never able to simply hand me a diagnosis, but it was generally able to provide a differential diagnosis of, say, three probable diseases, one of which invariably proved to be the one I was looking for. This is impressive in so far as that there are equivalent medical databases which cost thousands of dollars to access which wouldn't have provided me these answers as easily or efficiently. When I had no clue what a patent was sick with, Google knew the answer, or could at least put me on the right track.

Of course, this wasn't quite as easy as it might sound. For one thing, because the answers one might need are usually on medical websites rather than mass-market pages, you can't simply write any old symptoms you want. The word "itchy" will never find the correct solution, while "prurient" will. A picture of a bumpy, inflamed tongue is useless unless you happen to know that the proper medical term (I wish I was joking) is "strawberry tongue." Even to locate this information via Google, you still need a certain minimum understanding of the science and pathology -- doubly so if you want to actually do something with the information once you've found it -- so it's not necessarily of as much utility to the common human as it is to a doctor or medical student. Still, someone who wants to look up the annual death rates associated with chicken pox (which, by the way, are much higher than you might think) doesn't have to know to use search terms like "varicella zoster" to find the same information that I would.

What's the gross significance of this wealth of data being available? Well, there's good news and bad news. The good news is that thanks to the internet, hopeless tranget-thinkers like me who just might be the only thing standing between you and death one day have the ability to analyze, identify, and eventually even learn about all sorts of diseases. If I had to look these diseases up in a textbook, I'd probably never be able to do it, but since I've always had a gift for finding just the right search terms to find all manner of obscure data online, I can take a picture of a rash and work out the virus causing it. The downside is that using that same picture, anybody else could potntially do the exact same thing. They difference between me and someone with no biological background at all is that if my search takes me to a website which advocates streptomycin to treat a rhinovirus or associates a generalized pruritic maculopapular rash as shingles, I can tell that I'm getting bad data and try another page, but an arts-trained parent who's already half-swirly with panic over a sick child might not be able to tell that. I've got so little actual medical knowledge that it's really kind of pathetic, but that little bit is enough to go three rounds of Spot The Moron and not call a broken finger meningitis. It hasn't yet happened to most doctors you ask, but in another few years, most of the people who go to a doctor's office will have already looked up what they're feeling and a certain percentage of them will already have decided 1) what they're suffering from and 2) what kind of treatment they want. Many of them, to their credit, will be right, because Google is pretty damn amazing, but a large percentage of them will be horribly, terribly, hilariously wrong and will assume that their doctor is incompetent when the doctor disagrees. Many will leave. Several will stay sick. Some of them will die. Most of them will be subscribed to AOL.

That's the power of the internet: it brings us knowledge. That's old news, of course... I've been learning obscure knowledge online since 1998 and my neighbour was reading about the secret lives of celebrities on BBS's years before that. It's only relatively recently -- the last four to five years -- that the internet's become an effective way of looking up medical knowledge and it's really only in the last two years tops that the methods of finding this data have become accessible to the general public. When I was in my first first year of medicine, Wikipedia was a useless source of data, and today it's the first and often only website I need to check (though I always double-check what I find there against an academic source, just in case). It's very useful and kind of scary what I can dig up with a few keystrokes... I read things today that would make the average individual nauseous and terrified, and that's speaking with the assurance of someone who tested several unwitting research subjects. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, what makes the internet so absolutely darn nifty.

Now with tonight's post written and done with, I can go read webcomics. I hope to learn nothing while doing so.

Today I learned that the word "telepathy" comes up more times in respected medical journals than one might think. This has nothing to do with anything, but I think I'd be remiss if I didn't announce it to the world.

A curious thing has happened to me in the last two months or so, which is that I've begun to play videogames. Obviously, this doesn't mean that I started playing videogames for the first time in my life, since I was playing my first game of Atari practically before I could walk and over the years I've tried, if not extensivley explored and beaten, at a modest estimate, between two hundred and six hundred different games during my lifetime (and if that number sounds unrealistically high to you, sit down and do some of the math yourself to figure out how many games some could sample every year over a twenty year period). That said, I've never been much of a videogamer, despite my obsession with tabletop. I lost my interest in videogames during my CEGEP years; I never picked sides when the consoles/PC debates grew violent and I never once felt a major urge to go out and buy the new game system. Sure, there have been a handful of games over the years which I've truly loved playing and spent many hours in front of, notably Starcraft, Civilization III, and Soul Calibur 2, but by and large in the last seven years I've developed emotional attachments to fewer games than most of my peers (which doesn't say much) and fewer even than the average for my age group and social stratum (which does). Since midsummer, though, I've somehow found myself getting deeply into one game after another.

Obviously, this isn't a complaint, but still, it's not my typical behaviour pattern.

The trend started about halfway through the summer, when I started getting ready to move my computer. Going through all our old CDs and diskettes looking for software I knew I'd want to take with me, I rediscovered five minutes worth of half-formed memories related to a game I never even owned but only played once at a friend's house. The game in question, Star Control II, was a space opera unique among such games (of the time) in that the entire political climate across the whole galaxy changes and evolves as you play and entire stellar empires move their power bases, territory, and allegiances all over the galactic map. I was able to track down the game using the few tiny memories I had of it (it truly is amazing the details which can stick with you for more than ten years, when under normal circumstances you can't remember where you put your glasses from one hour to the next) and play it through myself on account of the games modern incarnation, The Ur-Quan Masters, being free open-source software. The game took me all of, perhaps, four hours to play from start to finish (thanks to the miracle of walkthroughs), about half of which was spent reading a novel while my flagship navigated hyperspace under autopilot. The game wasn't thrilling, but it had a nifty story, amusing music, and an elegantly designed universe, and as the end-credits rolled I was left with a little happy feeling of accomplishment the likes of which few games (or real world events) prompt. After I beat it, I somehow found myself installing another game, and another, and so on. Shandalar, Freedom Force and its sequel, and most recently Codemasters' Overlord followed, and here we are six to eight weeks later (and me without my propeller beanie). I had the time in my schedule to play a bit without missing anything important (and still do, for another week and a half) so there hasn't been any compelling reason why I shouldn't play, but somehow, as I play, it seems odd that this is what I'm doing. Why, I have to ask, am I sitting here, doing this utterly unproductive thing, when I could be, say, reading comic books instead?

Ironically, I almost forgot to write tonight's post because I was distracted playing Overlord. It's not addictive so much as hypnotic. Obviously, I snapped out of it on my own, but the siren's call is strong.

I'v never been one to get addicted to videogames, due in part to my low tolerance for repetitive tasks. I was never drawn into World fo Warcraft, possibly the single most addictive videogame ever devised without involving gambling real money, because I refuse to spend two hours point-and-click killing the way you have to for most of the quests in the game. The trouble with playing a sequence of videogames rather than just one is that it's constantly a new source of stimulation, and my low boredom threshold can't protect me from getting drawn in if the story keeps changing. What does ssave me from addiction, though, is the same thing that's kept me from becoming a videogamer over the years: I'm incredibly picky about my games. I enjoy playing games for their stories and not for their gameplay, which is why I give thanks every day to the gods for sending me one of the surest signs of their existence: cheat codes. Unless a game's story grabs my interest right off the bat, or umless the game itself is somehow revolutionary or exiting enough to interest me in the absence of story (which one game will on average every three years) I'll never even bother to install it, let alone play it at length, and I certainly won't feel motivated to pay for it. And, because I'm picky, very few games grab my interest like that. This is good, in that once the school year gets busy again week after next, there probably won't be videogames pulling my attention away from my studies. In the meantime... well, there are worse curses to bear than having an overabundance of entertaining games waiting for you, and those comicbooks will still be there waiting for me in a few days when my Minions have slain the wizard.

Classes resumed today for the second-year medical students -- one week later than the first year students, one week earlier than the undergraduates, and, of course, quite a bit behind schedule for me. We began what is no doubt the shortest unit in our studies -- parasitology and medical informatics, two weeks containing nine hours of lectures, after which we're already writing yet another final exam. That said, the resumption of class was not the most trying, most unpleasant, or most repetitive and boring thing to occur today. Rather, the resumption of classes is highly (though not perfectly) correlated with people resuming attendence of classes, and by and large, this means seeing people who I haven't seen in about two months. Understandably, anyone I see chooses to ask the exact same question: what did you do on your summer break. It's a fair question, and I can't fault it... and it's a question I'm guilty of asking people in turn. That said, the thing of it is that people don't stop to ponder that when you ask someone how they spent their break, that's the exact same thing everyone else is going to ask. I'm probably one of the least sociable people in my class, and at a conservative estimate, I was asked to answer that question some thirty times today, and expected each time to have the same enthusiasm.

The problem here is not foolish or boring classmates, but rather a tragic deficiency of telepaths. If everybody just knew the answer (or, more desirable, if I could just inform them all quickly and efficiently) then everything would be so much more efficient.

Unprovoked Tangent of the Day: Following a brief and productive visit to a police station the other day, I have officially now met a police officer whose last names is pronounced "big ones." My life is now incomplete on a whole new level.

What I really need is to write up a basic "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" document -- which I won't be doing here, so don't panic -- and print out, say, fifty copies. Then, each time someone asks me, I can just hand them the paper and tell them to read it later. Then, of course, since they lack my cunning and forethought, I'll have to ask them how they spent their braks, and then they still have to recite the same speech they gave everyone else, but at least I've been saved the sore throat I get whenever I string together more than five or ten sentences at once. Sure, it's a bit of a bother to carry about all that paper, and it can be a bit time-consuming trying to get out a page for someone if my hands are all shaky and my dexterity is low that day, but if it saves five, sometimes ten minutes of talking to someone, I can squeeze that many more social interactions into my day, as can the person I'm speaking to, and given a limited amount of time to chat with other students on a given day, cutting five minutes off the communication time of each frees up an astonishing amount of time in the day and allows social contact with a large number of extra people. If we suppose it takes each person five minutes to talk about their summer, and I talk to thirty people in a day, then I cut 150 minutes off of my time and double the number of people I can say hello to... heck, with only fifty print-outs of my How I Spent My Summer Vacation, I'd run out of copies! Sure, you might say, handing someone a paper and telling them to just read it later is "impersonal" and "cold" and "inhuman." but on the other hand, I'm only pretending to care about talking to most of these people in the first place.

Unless you're reading this. If you're reading this, you're obviously an extra special and double-plus-nifty individual who it's my great pleasure to talk to, and I hope to spend much more time doing so. Another reason why I need to free up extra time which would otherwise get wasted on other classmates.

The real tragedy is that probably, most of the people I'd find myself speaking to had really interesting summers, myself included. Of course, I moved, held and attended parties, worked on interesting research projects, hosted a modest international convention, and fulfilled one of the very purposes of my existence, as anyone who reads this regularly already knows... shouldn't I assume that other peoples' lives are equally exciting? The answer is that no, I probably shouldn't, because most people lead rather dull lives and the only reason my life is exciting is that I work to actively make small things in my life more gripping and world-shaking and then, on top of that, two gods are regularly going out of their ways to keep me on my toes. The average person doesn't shape their subjective reality quite to the degree that I do, and quite possibly for related reasons, isn't the chosen agent of any divine entities, so I can only assume that exciting, terrible things don't happen to them as often.That said, a lot of the people in my class traveled during the break, or went to work in Peru or South Africa, or moved like me, or got abducted by aliens or what have you, and if I dug deep enough (and cared) I would probably find that a lot of people had fascianting stories to share. You never hear these stories if you don't ask, and you probably also don't hear the stories if everybody is instead just saying "fine, I traveled a bit, relaxed, and got ready for classes to resume" two hundred times. It's just another reason why everybody needs to have fifty copies of their answer ready to distribute.

Gods forgive me, I may have just justified the existence of facebook.

Still four words short of 1000. Fnords for everyone! There we go.

Due to circumstances partially out of my control, I have not had time to write any original material for today's post. Here's more marvelous material from my archives.

Unfinished Entries: Animist

From time to time, people have questioned my assertion that I'm a weasel. When I say I'm a weasel, of course, I'm speaking metaphorically, or sometimes simile-y, and yet the occasional person will none-the-less point of that I don't look much like a weasel and then, feeling very clever, will proceed to list ways in which this is so. I am not, for example, particularly furry, even if I go a week without shaving, and my finger-nails, though often a bit long, are rarely sharpened to deadly points. Obviously, when I associate myself with weasels, I'm not being literal, but if I were, I'd say that I do share more than a few physical traits with them. My nose has more than once been described as cute and rodent-like (and, only twice, Prince Kheldar-like). I reluctantly admit, however, that by and large, I do not physically resemble a weasel to any great degree. In contrast: I often stand slightly hunched. I subsist on a diet primarily of meat. My teeth are big and pointy and can tear through all manner of obstacles. I have middling eyesight but orient rapidly towards moving objects. And I have puny little arms and strong, mighty legs. Obviously, I'm a Tyrannosaurus.

Inconveniently, I'm not actually going anywhere with that paragraph, which is rather a shame because I've become quite fond of it in the time it took me to write it.

Never-Before Posted Essays: Perfection

Plato wrote that, to everything, there is one perfect form, such that, when you see, for example, a rock, you are seeing something that is merely a pale reflection of that one perfect rock. This is, of course, a translation of the original idea, but without an understanding of the subtleties of Ancient Greek philosophy, in which many things which we take for granted, such as nature and life, are seen radically differently, it will do. According to this interpretation of the philosophy, there is no single way of seeing perfection. A thing attains perfection when, in the eyes of any given observer, it cannot logically be imporved in any meaningful way by making changes to it. Some might argue that anything can be improved by, say, adding large piles of money next to it, or that any film can be improved by the addition of giant robots and weasels, but this is the sort of person who probably won’t take much out of philosophy in the first place. The changes in question need to be realistic enough to be plausibly included in a situation to be considered a factor in perfection.

To the Path of Forsteri, this philosophical concept can be most effectivly applied to entertainment, such as books and films. A film, for example, is perfect when the viewer leaves feeling that, while any number of changes could be made to the film, none of them could really be said to be a major improvement. Similarly, a book which leaves the reader feeling that not a single line of dialogue would need to be changed to the book is a perfect book. The relative degrees of perfection of various creative works can be judged in this way; one would siimply compare the number of obvious imperfections to them or, on a grander level, simply compare which works left the viewer/reader with less of a sense of fulfillment or amusement. The perfect work would not even have to be one that a person enjoyed, merely one which they do not feel could have been made any better. A perfect form of a flawed or unamusing design may be perfect and yet still be unamusing.

There are two primary flaws to the theory as is presented here. The first flaw is that it is not easily applied to non-creative works as the system of judging perfection uses such factors as amusement or fulfillment. The perfect college textbook, for example, would almost certainly not be either amusing or fulfilling, but might only be informative and easily read. While the perfection of a creative work is easily judged, other things are much less easily judged. Can one could the imperfections in a relationship seperating it from being the perfect one, or the imperfections in a piece of food which keep it from being a perfect meal? The theory loses utility rapidly; this does not imply it is a bad theory when it is applied to the concepts which it is meant to judge, of course. This problem leads to the second flaw in the theory, which is subjectivity. The definition of perfection described here would be, by definition, subjective perfection, but logically, something which is perfect only in the minds of certain people is, in general, imperfect. This may or may not be a paradox depending on the point of view taken by an individual thinker. If perfection must be objective, then the theory’s ability to judge perfection is utterly useless and is, in fact, misleading. If, on the other hand, perfection can be subjective, then the theory provides an excellent measure, not only of the item being judged for its level of perfection, but also of the observer who is judging something, as a third party can then determine the criteria which any given observer considers to be necessary (or absent) to achieve perfection.

One interesting corrolary to this theory is that any given item has the potential for perfection if observed by the correct observer and thus, all things are inherently both perfect and imperfect at the same time. The potential to which this theory could be used to confuse people or, with luck, even cause their heads to explode, cannot be overestimated.