silentblue | Quantified

I have a habit of being rather exact whenever I need to make a big decision. Looking for a new apartment in Toronto was no different.

Being exact means lots of research, such as checking out the local neighbourhoods – obviously descriptors such as “low-income families” or “public housing” can be red flags. Examining crime report statistics from the various police divisions may shed some more light; typically downtown TO and Scarborough get the most crime, and North York gets the least.

And then there’s location, location, location. Is there any nearby malls? How easy would it be to get to work or anywhere else by public transit?

Of course, this was all speculation compared to the real test – actually looking at the apartments themselves.

Candidate #1: Parkdale
Close to downtown core. Spacious, carpeted, and even had special debit cards for the laundry machines. Unfortunately, it was badly maintained. There was a hole the size of my fist in the kitchen. Polyfil splotches lined the walls in the hallway. I’d hate to see what the internals looked like.

Candidate #2: High Park
A quiet residential neighbourhood, hemmed in with a giant park and long parallel streets that don’t intersect. Hence, not very close to the subway or any shopping. My heart sank when the landlady pointed out the only thing available was a basement apartment, but it was only two years old, clean and had a dishwasher. It was also only half buried in the ground, so it had surprisingly large windows.

Candidate #3: Islington Village (of the Damned)
After seeing this apartment, Silverlotus wanted to clean her shoes. It was evidently rented to students, although that doesn’t fully explain the used underwear and pigeon feathers on the floor. There was a scorch mark about a foot in diameter in the middle of the living room floor, the stove and the floor around it was in a dried puddle of reddish-brown grease, and the balcony was covered in pigeon shit. Landlady smiled and said “We’ll fix all of this up!” but that only seems possible if they burn the whole place down and start from scratch.

Oh, the Wanted poster in the front lobby of an elevator rapist was a nice touch.

Candidate #4: Islington Village
A next-door building. Landlady was very friendly, and it had an indoor pool. Unfortunately we were trapped on the 32nd floor due to a busted elevator. The neighbourhood is also a bit skeezy.

Candidate #5: Parkwoods Village
Weird puke-green disco tiling in the washroom. Nicely sponged ceiling, although Silverlotus spotted some patches – possible from past water leakage?

Candidate #6: Don Mills
Too small. It was old, so it had the walls had that weird custardy look when walls get painted over too many times. Cupboards and doors don’t close right because they were caked in too much paint. Why don’t people ever strip paint off?

Candidate #7: York Mills
A basement apartment in a house. We showed up early, no one was home, and we decided to just give up and go home.

Uh, I think we’ll go for #2.

V has a bit of a problem. It appears that someone is entering his apartment…and just moving stuff around. Yesterday, he came back and his computer was off. And his door was unlocked.

The landlord doesn’t know anything about it, and nothing has apparently been taken, but he’s understandably a bit pissed.

So I ICQ’ed him and suggest using a thin piece of scotch tape and tape the door to the door frame. Silverlotus suggested giving a warning shot: getting a glass of water, and arrange it so it’s right behind the door. If someone comes in, then they’ll be a big splash.

Anyway, we wished him luck and went off to see Matrix Revolutions (taking advantage of Rockwater’s Dinner and Movie deal for perhaps the last time).

When we came back, I discovered that V has devised a plan that every geek would be proud of. He installed a keylogger on his PC and bought a cheap webcam. He then rigged the ‘cam to record when it detects motion, and upload images to his FTP server!

He promises he’ll use the glass of water trick too.

“Someone once told me,” my sister told me, “you can tell how a man will treat his wife from how he treats his mother.”

I have a a funny relationship with my parents. It’s not that I hate them, it just seems like we just tolerate each other’s existence. But I have been a bit aloof, and I could always use the advice. Apparently they are, in the end, simply concerned. I have always wanted the best in life, so they just want to make sure that I’m getting it.

“You are probably one of the most financially and emotionally stable of all your peers. Don’t f**k it up.”

In the D Drive: After Furmac bought the Red vs. Blue DVD (essentially the “Office Space” or videogaming) and showed it to me, I was excited to get my hands on Halo PC. If this is the best Xbox game, I feel sorry for people who own an Xbox. Not to say it’s a bad game, but it ain’t no Half-Life. The mentally-challenged AI and poor level design really hurts it. Most of the levels are mindless jaunts into mazes of identical-looking corridors and rooms, and to add insult to injury, the storyline often requires you to turn around and trudge back the way you come. Its saving grace are the great vehicles with great physics.

Another game I’m playing is the freeware side-scrolling RPG called The Spirit Engine. The graphics will remind you for Final Fantasy 1, but the tactics and skillsets are actually very well done. You will definitely have to read the Help to understand the nuances between each character, skill, item, and weapon.

I think that humanity’s propensity for assigning special significance to particular dates or intervals of time is a little silly. After all, they are just numbers, human-made measurements. For example, New Year’s just means we’ve been on a small planet that have just happened to have made yet another trip around some star.

Of course, as we grow older, and our primal needs (food, shelter, safety) are satisfied, it is natural for us to start thinking on a more philosophical bent. I don’t think it is the long lifespan and accompanying mandatory bouts of boredom has anything to do with it; I doubt a homeless person thinks more beyond where his next place to sleep is. It’s easy to be philosophical when your belly is full and your hands are warm.

So what is the point in life? I am not sure. My goal is to be well-liked. Not necessarily famous, just known to be a good person, – helpful, kind, has a sense of humour, the guru, the confidante. In other words, the Fifth Business (ala Robertson Davies). A person with integrity, intelligence and good manners.

I love Silverlotus with all my heart and she loves me too, and it also makes me very happy. I am a resolute believer that things always “work out” simply because, statistically, things have always panned out in the end. (She, btw, believes the point in life is to amass all possible knowledge in this world.)

Perhaps it’s a repressed child trauma thing – an innate desire for people to like me, to not ignore me. Even now, I find concepts such as betrayal and deception unsettling. It doesn’t mean I have an issue getting ahead of the pack; just as long as it was a fair fight.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to do too, as a child. I locked on to computers when I was eight, and decided whatever I did, it should involve them. I don’t think I would ever be a Bill Gates in this way though – I just don’t have that streak of ruthlessness.

I think that with the heightened level of education and information flow, people will be getting their mid-life crises sooner. We are getting rich faster, meeting more people (virtually or physically) and learning about how they and their cultures live. So I believe we get the “grass is greener on the other side” ennui at an earlier age.

(At least some of us. Most people are too busy paying down their car, finding the trendiest bar and checking cellphone voicemail to think beyond the next paycheck or business trip. We would call these people “shallow” I suppose, but they have willed themselves not to think about the tomorrow and thereafter and concentrate on closing that big customer deal or whatever.)

So I dunno. But perhaps what you’re feeling is guilt for running your life how you want it, companies or friends or signficant others or family be damned, and it makes you feel you have to make it up to the world in some way. Personally, I do not feel this way, but being the Fifth Business invariably means being accomodating and compromising. The downside is, it doesn’t do much for the ego.

Kudos to Andrew Ironside – he was a geek voted to be valedictorian by the “popular” classmates as a stupid joke, but he had the last laugh.

Which is probably far more than what I would have done in his place. It’s just as well, since this situation would have never happened in my high school. Sadly, I cannot say it’s because my school was not full of petty, snickering teenagers who congregated in cliques; it was because valedictorian hopefuls had to consciously run as candidates.

I did get placed in my graduating yearbook as “Most Likely to Reach Puberty” by a part-time yearbook staffmember who used to bully a shorter, smaller me in Grade 9. Such creativity and hilarity! Frankly, if you read that sentence carefully, you would agree that he should have spent less time picking on people and more time polishing up on his English semantics.

They say high school are the best years of your life. That’s a total crock. It was only when I entered university that I met people who miraculously didn’t harass you because you thought or looked different from them.

Fortunately, as Andrew so helpfully pointed out, we generally never see any of our high schoolmates ever again.

I don’t believe in luck. “I’m down on my luck”, people would say, as if the forces of the universe had conspired against them and they are helpless in the face of their own destinies. I believe there is the element of chance, however I just don’t believe it controls your life. I believe that with proper planning and time management, the damage from random events can be minimized. For example, to avoid missing an important appointment, get up earlier. To avoid debt, save your money for a rainy day. Life will kick you in the shins sometimes, but if you have a backup plan, there is always a way out.