For a few short minutes yesterday, I watched footage of a silver spaceship-shaped balloon twirl in the air far above the earth somewhere in Colorado. You probably did, too.

I had just heard on the radio that there was a 6-year-old boy on board a helium balloon contraption and found live footage of the ordeal online. As I watched, I wondered if it was real (someone had commented on the video that it looked like a publicity stunt by Disney/Pixar) but I also wondered if the boy was cold or dizzy, if he was aware of how far above the ground he was, if he was crying or praying or unconscious. And I know I’m not alone. It was wild and strangely inspiring. Haunting, yes, but also thrilling. The quiet spinning and lofting and the hope that if he was in there, he would have a soft landing and live to tell the tale.

I pictured him on Oprah – the audience beaming – the Mighty Opes gently asking him if he would ever ride in an air balloon again. I pictured a shy kid – an ordinary kid – who just had an amazing experience. Once the excitement had passed, he would go to school and play baseball and work part-time as a grocery clerk. As a Freshman in college, his friends would introduce him to girls as ‘The Balloon Boy’ and he would accept it good-naturedly. Maybe one of his parents would be on As It Happens, with Carol Off and Barbara Budd, later in the week.

And then I thought of the news I received only moments before hearing about Balloon Boy – that my sister-in-law had just had her first baby. I was an aunt! And I thought of the future and how I would tell Manuel Antonio that on the day he was born, a boy had climbed into an airship and flown 50 miles across Colorado. That as he arrived, another boy had left. Suspended in the ether of the unknown.

I wish that my story was the real story.

–

Today I found news of another ‘Balloon Boy’ in Buckinghamshire, England. Five-year-old Charlie Castle’s balloon was found by the Queen while she was walking her dogs at Windsor Castle. She sent him a note – and the balloon – to tell him she had found it.

I’m reading ‘Lee Miller: A Life‘ by Carolyn Burke. In it, Burke tells the story of Lee Miller and Man Ray – how they met, their lives as lovers and colleagues – and how it inevitably ended. It ended quite badly for Man Ray and he was so distraught on the day it was over that he took a now famous self-portrait of himself with a gun and a noose. I can’t find it on Google Images, but it exists, apparently. Here’s a good one of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub instead:

So, ‘long story short’: Lee Miller left Man Ray in Paris and went back to America and set up her own photography studio in New York City. She was relatively successful there but eventually tired of the scene and suddenly married a man named Aziz Eloui Bey and planned to move to Egypt with him. She felt bad about leaving her brother alone with the business they had built and reached out to her old lover and mentor – Man Ray – to see if he would be interested in returning to America to run the studio.

Man replied, in a telegram: PULL YOUR OWN CHESTNUTS OUT OF THE FIRE.

In 39 characters, Man was able to communicate everything he needed to say. Limiting his message not only saved himself the anguish of writing the whole of his feelings out on paper but also spared Lee a long-winded guilt trip. Whether or not it was warranted – it made his reaction to her suggestion clear.

I think there is something exquisite about condensed language. Like Haiku. I can’t tell if Robert Lanham agrees or not – I bet he can write a mean Tweet.

Here is a snippet of a new piece he wrote for McSweeney’s:

INTERNET-AGE WRITING SYLLABUS

AND COURSE OVERVIEW

- – - -

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

Course Description

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!

…

HFACTDEWARIUCSMNUWKIASLAMB! Or: “holy flipping animal crackers, that doesn’t even warrant a response; if you could see me now, you would know that I am shrugging like a mofu, biotch!”

Last week, I bought Pete a new book called ‘The Secret History of Dreaming‘ by Robert Moss. He had recently had a dream that prompted him to paint a graphic depiction of the annual seal hunt and explained that he had been unable to get the image out of his head. When we heard an interview with the author of the book, we decided that it was a must-read. What to make of this oddly disturbing dream and painting?

The book explores the lost art of dreaming in human history and maintains that dreaming is “essential to our survival and evolution, to creative endeavors in every field, and, quite simply, to getting us through our daily lives.” Moss says that people through the ages (not just creative types) have used dreams to guide them and unearth solutions to their problems. He looks at the relationship between the dreaming and waking lives of people such as Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Tubman, John Lennon and Mark Twain. One of the most fascinating chapters is on Sigmund Freud and his inability to decipher a famous dream of his own called the ‘Irma Dream’ – the one that led him to invent psychoanalysis. You can read this chapter (and I highly recommend that you do) here. The book also acts as a guide to understanding your own dreams and it encourages us to pay attention to the dream language of our own inner worlds.

Earlier this year, I had been feeling that I hadn’t been able to tap into the space of deep creativity and contemplation that I used to find easy to access. I read excerpts of David Lynch’s book ‘Catching the Big Fish‘ (hat tip to Saul Colt) and tried to let go into some of the deeper spaces of my subconscious. I would meditate briefly or contemplate a decision that I had to make before I went to sleep and sometimes I woke up with a good idea but most of the time I got up and made coffee and started reading email. My commitment to this practice was spotty at best, so I took to reading about meditation. Then I learned that one of the worst things you can do when you’re being lazy about actually meditating is to read about meditation and believe that it is just as useful. It’s not. And it doesn’t help when you have several volumes of fascinating material to choose from.

But I digress.

Many artists and storytellers use meditation in different forms to explore inner worlds. David Lynch uses Transcendental Meditation. Werner Herzog has his ‘walking oracles’ … and so maybe it is fitting that I had an experience this week that hints at these mysteries with a dream visit from Werner himself.

Werner Herzog

I dreamt that I was standing beneath a steep and looming snow-covered mountain beside a Tibetan man. Werner was giving us instructions. Snow and wind was whipping around his face and his hair was blowing wildly. Because of this, he had to yell. He shouted, “You must take ze boat to the top of the mountain. It is in ze box and you must take it to the door of paradise.” Behind him, people were unloading a giant box that supposedly contained a boat. My dream state was quite lucid at this point so I was aware that the reference to the boat and the mountain was probably from his famous film, “Fitzcarraldo”. But his emphasis was on the mountaintop and the journey to paradise and implied some danger. Nevertheless, it was an order.

Immediately, I awoke – moving from dream to waking state in an instant. It was early dawn. Pete stirred beside me and got up. I collected my dream thoughts and told him what I had just seen. I added, “I think that the mountain was Mount Kailash.” He said, “That’s weird.” The night before he had been checking the selection at our local video store online to see if they had Herzog’s film ‘Wheel of Time’. In the film, he documents the Kalachakra initiation – to be conducted by the Dalai Lama – that was supposed to take place in Bodhgaya, India, in 2002. It did not take place due to the Dalai Lama’s ill health. Also in the film – which we didn’t know until we read the liner notes – was Herzog’s journey to Mount Kailash in Western Tibet where he insisted on filming on the sacred mountain himself, without a cinematographer.

In an interview, he speaks of Mount Kailash’s place in the film:

At Mount Kailash I added to the film even though it doesn’t fully belong in there and yet it’s somehow the pivotal element in the film. This we have to believe is not just a sacred, symbolic cosmography like the mandala but it has to do with a landscape that is felt to be sacred for the Buddhists and the Hindus and others as well. It was a deep curiosity to show a truly sacred landscape. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to shoot Mount Kailash by myself. I was my own cinematographer for these sequences.

No climbers have attempted an ascent of the stunning peak due to its sacred status (and perhaps the legend that anyone who touches its slopes will inevitably die a horrible death).

Mount Kailash

Does this mean that I will take my dream to indicate that I should somehow try it anyway? Of course not. But it did convince Peter and I to go out and immediately rent and watch the film. We were both deeply moved by it – perhaps even more so than if I had not had the dream. I think that ultimately it was a reminder for me to pay attention to my night-life, so to speak, and to keep a closer watch of the deep waters that are in all of us.

Here is the Dalai Lama from the film, answering Herzog’s question about whether or not Mount Kailash is the centre of the universe:

Having grown up in rural southwestern Ontario, I am familiar with religious ‘advertising’. Quotes from the bible can be found in front of churches and along the roads that lead to my hometown. Though not exactly like the one pictured below, there is a sign that reads: Prepare to meet thy God that I pass every time I go home. In snow conditions it can scare the bejeesus out of me.

As spooky as this message can be while driving, I don’t mind it. I have my own interpretation of its meaning and consider it a fine example of free speech in Canada.

For the past couple of weeks, there has been a lot of talk about the Freethought Association of Canada’s new subway ads. I think they are a good starting point for discussion (their stated intention) and don’t understand how they could be construed as hate speech or attack ads.

Charles McVety, president of the Canada Family Action Coalition and the Canada Christian College in Toronto, does not feel the same:

“These ads are not saying what the atheists believe, they are attacking what other people believe,” he said. “And if you look at the dictionary definition for … bigot, that’s exactly what it is, to be intolerant of someone else’s belief system.”

- Globe and Mail, January 29, 2009

You might remember Charles McVety … he was a proponent of Bill C-10 and did this interview with George Stromboulopoulos:

McVety’s opinion is that the ad implies that people of faith worry too much and do not enjoy their life. He thinks that this indicates intolerance and a way for atheists to ‘attack’ people of faith. For some reason, he does not look at the implications of some Christian messages from a non-believer’s point of view. Atheists are told that if they do not believe in the Christian version of God that they will spend eternity in hell. I don’t know, I think I’d rather be indirectly ‘accused’ of worrying too much.

For some reason, I’ve been reading the atheist message with a streak of sarcasm that implies something much different. My reading of the billboard is this: There may or may not be a God. Whether you believe in God or do not believe in God, you should try to stop worrying and enjoy your life (the message also targets atheists, no?). Believers and non-believers are still left with the business of living their lives … and no matter what you believe, it’s just as difficult, exciting and challenging as it’s always been.

Is it just me or can anyone else think of a few responses to the Royal Caribbean’s Nation of Why Not? It’s worth taking a look at if you haven’t seen it.

I mean, I’m sure that the ad creative was well in the works before the economic meltdown and the paradigm shift that is Barack Obama … right? There’s really no other explanation for it. I know it’s cruising season but come on.

I don’t watch a whole lot of TV but when I saw this last week I was truly taken aback. Just days after President Obama was sworn in, this commercial comes along and talks about how great it is to ‘ICE SKATE ON THE EQUATOR’ and if all else fails: Just do nothing. Why not?

This seems like anathema to the current spirit of ‘why not get involved’? You might actually make a difference!

Poor timing or not, what is Royal Caribbean really asking their customers to do? Give up on the planet’s future? Ice skate on the equator? Sunbathe past the glaciers? I’m all for living the dream and I’m definitely all for taking vacations but how inappropriate is this?

Am I being too sensitive here?

In a week’s time, I will be venturing to Nashville, TN to see one of my favourite bands of all time: The Silver Jews. They are playing in a cave (Bluegrass Underground at Cumberland Caverns) and today the rumour is that it will be their last show. This has not been 100% confirmed but if it is the case, then I will bid them a fond farewell and wish them the best for the future.

I am eternally grateful that I have had the joy of seeing them play twice before and to my friends Marc and Marisa for gifting this trip to Peter and I as a wedding gift (wow, crazy). With the news that another opportunity to see them play is unlikely, I am even more thankful to have such generous and psychic pals.

David Berman (pictured), the lead singer and writer for The Silver Jews, writes: I always said we would stop before we got bad. If I continue to record I might accidentally write the answer song to Shiny Happy People.

For lovers of poetry everywhere, please enjoy ‘Snow’ – one of my favourites from his book Actual Air:

Snow, by David Berman

Walking through a field with my little brother Seth

I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.

He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.

Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.

Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.

I didn’t know where I was going with this.

They were on his property, I said.

When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.

Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.

We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.

But why were they on his property, he asked.

A new year and fresh beginnings for America, Obama and the rest of us.

An auspicious year is upon us all and I hope that the astrologers of India and China are correct when they predict that Obama’s qualities of ‘leadership, happiness and success’ will extend to the people of the world.

I’m with Paul Sullivan on this one: “They had me at Aretha.” I was glued to my TV screen with a sense of wonder and amazement that kept my cynicism at bay. Yesterday’s news that transparency would be one of the touchstones of Obama’s presidency helped me hold onto the helium of hope and I fell into a sort of daydream about the future of media and communications … I call it:

I Have a Daydream

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a daydream. It is a daydream deeply rooted in my impossible hope for the future of humanity.

I have a daydream that one day the people of the world will rise up and demand to be spoken to with sincerity, in plain language, about things that matter to them.

I have a daydream that one day people will refuse to be spoken to as though they were a faceless mass and that people in positions of power and authority will not underestimate the intelligence of their publics.

I have a daydream that one day on the grey streets of Toronto the daughters of former journalists and the daughters of former communications professionals will be able to sit down together at the kitchen table of sisterhood.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Making transparency a national and global concern is about as good as it gets. I can’t ignore my impulse to imagine a world where we – governments and citizens, journalists and flacks – value dialogue and communication above dogma and the status quo.

It’s too bad for the Chinese people that their government doesn’t share my vision of the future. (You knew that was coming, right?)

Note: A daydream, according to Jeff Warren’s book The Head Trip is something that psychologists prefer to call ‘Task Unrelated Thought’ – “defined by one recent researcher as a state in which ‘conscious awareness is to some extent decoupled from the current situation.’”

The fate of the Canadian government rests in the hands of one of these people.

Gary Ackersviller was my boss for a long time. No, this is not a post-mortem retrospective. It’s just a meditation on good management penned before my ‘muy tranquilo’ Mexican holiday. Hopefully he is quite alive and well somewhere in Germany.

Gary ran the Red Pump Restaurant in Bayfield, Ontario and I worked there seasonally from 1990 to 2004, non-consecutively. Meaning, I worked there for about 8-10 summers total in between forays into school, self-employment, travel and other gigs. I started as a busser the summer I was sixteen years old and kept coming back for more over the years. I left a couple of times – found work in other restaurants – but I always came back. I’m going to try to explain why.

Working in a restaurant is intense. I don’t care if you’re in the kitchen or on the floor – every night is a production and every minute counts. I have never been in the army, but for me these times represent a sort of bootcamp. I felt like a foot soldier – marching willingly into battle in the name of fine food and drink.

It takes a special person to keep you in good form in these situations and a certain natural aptitude for leadership. Gary Ackersviller was the captain I never minded reporting to and these are some of the reasons why:

1. Gary always worked harder than his staff (or at least made it seem that way).

Gary didn’t just run the restaurant – he took care of the gardens, supervised the cleaning staff and managed the exclusive suites that we had upstairs. If we encountered a problem customer, he was the one who gracefully threw them out. He was up at the crack of dawn and worked all day and night until we had all tipped out and he made sure we got home safely. If we were short, or people were slacking – he was there – with the steak knives you’d forgotten or pepper for your table of eight. He set an example that was impossible to imitate, but his example was consistent and admirable and it benefitted everyone equally.

2. Gary didn’t delegate anything to anyone that he wouldn’t do himself.

Sure, sometimes Gary would ask me to do the silverware when I was happily cleaning up the bar and swilling Sauvignon Blanc – but I couldn’t refuse because I knew he would do it if no one else was there and that there was no clean-up task that he hadn’t done a million times himself. He never gave the impression that he thought anything was beneath him and made it clear that having clean windows was every bit as important as the $300 bottle of wine you just sold, and that it was, in small part, the reason why a person would spend that kind of money at our establishment. He could often be found repeating, “Fear not the paper towel!” as we polished the French doors.

3. Gary was always fair (and he didn’t reward greed).

Over the 14 years that I worked for Gary, the rules never changed. If you showed up first for your shift in the morning, you got the first table or, if it was going to be a busy day, you got your choice of section. Those were the rules – they were always the rules – and the rules worked. He had his favourites but the rules remained. If someone started thinking that they were somehow entitled to only the best shifts and the best tables, he reminded them of the rules by giving them tables of lunching European ladies who looked like they were going to order tap water and salad and ask for separate bills.

4. Gary was generous.

When I first started as a busser, it was easy for the wait staff to shortchange me. Every single night Gary would ask me how much ‘the cheap bastards’ had tipped me and gave me cash from his own earnings to reward my hard work. Over the years, other small rewards made all the difference to me. A nice glass of wine or a couple of oysters at the end of the night – a midnight lunch of gourmet tidbits, maybe – but these little things meant the world to me. The littlest gestures reminded me that I was appreciated and that we were all in this together.

5. If Gary couldn’t be nice and funny and charming at the same time, he got someone else to manage his business.

Being a superstar manager isn’t all fun and games. Even Gary had his days. When these days came (usually mid-week when the village wasn’t overrun by tourists) he relinquished the reins and gave the power to one of us. Honestly, though, this didn’t happen very often. It was as though he was born to manage a restaurant. This kind of inherent chaos isn’t for everyone but I think the following applies to anything any of us do for a living: If you don’t have fun on the job then you’re in trouble. If you can’t charm your staff and your clients then you should, at the very least, get out of the way. I worked, obviously, for money. But if it wasn’t for Gary’s daily antics and stupid songs and charming way of saying, “It’s your turn to clean the crapper,” then I would have found another way to pay my rent and fund my trips overseas.

Now, I don’t recommend becoming some sort of quasi-gay misogynistic arsehole if that’s not really your bag. But if you can’t find your true hilarious self on the job, then try to imagine where you could find that self … and go there.

So, Gary. Wherever you are … I’d like to thank you for giving me something to strive towards. And if I can’t live up to your example, then I’ll join a nunnery and sing: “Get your hands off my woman! You dirty pig farmer!” Or something to that effect.

I just heard Nora Young filling in for Jian Ghomeshi on Q. I had some catching up do on my favorite shows via podcast and listened again to a program that I heard in the summer where she interviews Michael Erard on the future of Chinglish. His Wired article can be found here.

My experience with Chinglish in China and Taiwan has brought me to a similar conclusion (that Chinglish may one day become a bona fide creole) and here are a couple of thoughts I had on the matter:

1) Nora and Michael talked a bit about how Chinglish is affected by the hyper-connected world we now live in due to technology. The web and our increasingly osmotic behaviour encourages the blending of language in ways that human beings have always been fond of. One thing that was not discussed explicitly, however, was that non-connective technologies have played a part in the development of Chinglish as we know it.

When I first arrived in China about six years ago, I was in awe of the fantastic linguistic combinations I saw on a daily basis.

I was perplexed at how these translations might have happened but I didn’t think too much of it. In general, I was already overwhelmed beyond belief.

When I started teaching, I realized that many strange and beautiful sentences were the product of keen students looking for ‘interesting’ vocabulary in their electronic dictionaries. If you’ve ever taught English in Asia, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Students, especially teenaged and adult students, will inevitably come to class with an e-dictionary. These don’t prove very useful in conversation classes, but writing classes usually inspire students to find flowery alternatives for their basic prose. I know that many teachers forbade students to use these tools in their classes, but I taught at one school that realized the futility of trying to ban the devices. They didn’t help poor students, really, and only the very dedicated could use the words effectively. I always encouraged students to use the words that they already knew (insisting that my grades were not based on their acrobatic word choice as much as their familiarity with the structure and coherence of what they were talking about). However, I have to admit that my students’ word choice made marking papers all the more enjoyable. Without their papers in front of me I can’t even think of examples because the beauty of the incongruity is almost impossible to make up as a native English speaker.

2) Another aspect of Chinglish and the phenomenon of native Chinese speakers learning English en masse that I find fascinating is just how incongruent the two languages are. The English language has roughly 1 million words. That’s a lot of words and most of us don’t use that many but there it is – a 1 million word potential. English has more words than any other language on Earth. The language with the next highest number of words is German, with roughly 500,000 words in its lexicon. Wordy people. Chinese consists of about 8,000 words at the top end, with most of the population needing about 3,000-5,000 to get by.

When you want to say something is Chinese, there is generally a ‘right’ way to say it and to avoid confusion, people stick with the program. Now, before I’m accused of generalizing or making assumptions, I’m going to note that my sources were our Taiwanese friends from Tainan. As Peter and I learned more and more Chinese, we would try to blend the languages as native English speakers like to do. Our friends would laugh, be puzzled and then tell us quite seriously that what we just said didn’t make any sense. We asked, “What? Does it sound funny?” And without exception they would shake their heads and make it clear that it just didn’t make any sense. At all. It was nonsensical. Idiot wind.

We weren’t trying to make especially complicated sentences. We were just coming up with our own ways of saying, “It’s a windy day.” So. Even on this basic level, the language seemed to be inflexible. My guess is that Chinese speakers who are learning English feel excited and free to learn such an inexhaustible language. And then they go nuts and come up with amazing translations.

In conclusion, the best sign I saw in China was on a steep and somewhat treacherous walk up to see the world’s largest Buddha in Leshan:

Yes, it is. It is nice to live.

Here are some of my favourite Chinglish links:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-497544/Chinglish-Hilarious-examples-signs-lost-translation.html

http://www.flickr.com/groups/chinglish/pool/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinglish

And one of my favourite sites on Asian identity:

http://www.alllooksame.com/