Rationalisation

As an irrational and impulsive man I'm always amused when people list all the great reasons and justifications for their actions. People seem obsessed with being able to list all the logical arguments that explain why they've done whatever they did. The fact is that most of us just do whatever feels right and then work out the justifications after the fact. Or, we spend ages trying to find ways to justify our plans and intentions even though they're based on whatever wierd feelings or inuitions are directing our decision making.

This is all a bit comical, because the only reason why people think it's important to have a set of rational explanations for their behaviour is because everyone else does it. Basically we're all just a bunch of meat robots bumping our way down the dark, furniture-filled corridor of life. And as we stumble past the antique dressing table and whack our shins on the minimalist ottoman we deseperately try to work out good reasons for what we're doing.

I find my life works best when I can ignore the compulsion to rationalise my behaviour. It's not that I'm recommending acting irrationally. We're already acting irrationally, I'm just saying we should be comfortable with it. So I'm going to go out there and admit it. I have developed an irrational dislike for the town of Revelstoke. Although it doesn't make sense, I can explain where it comes from:

First off, it rains all the time. If I were rational, I'd be excited about how all that rain was going to fall as snow in a few weeks. Well I'm not. I'm pissed off about how it's grey and miserable all the time and it makes hitchhiking a grim prospect.

Secondly, when I last arrived in Revelstoke I got turfed out of the house I was supposed to move into in Rossland and got offered an impossible job interview by an employer who wouldn't return calls or emails to reschedule. Admittedly, both the bad things actually happened in Rossland, but I was in Revelstoke, so it goes on the list.

Thirdly, the people in Revelstoke talk up their skiing. This might sound weird, but people who talk up the skiing at their ski field annoy me like watching two terrible ultimate frisbee teams play a game wearing capes. If your skiing is so good, why are you standing here telling me about it instead of skiing there? Oh, there's no snow yet, you say? Well that's pretty weak. Where I come from, we don't need snow to go skiing. Wimp.

Fourthly, someone told me that I would probably need to switch to alpine ski gear to ski at Revelstoke. This is like the two ultimate terrible ultimate teams with capes forcing me to hold their pants while they play a no-pants scoobers only point. For those who don't know anything about ultimate, think about a bunch of annoying retards forcing you to be peripherally involved in them doing something retarded in a way specially conceived to be extra annoying and retarded. I resisted the urge to tell the guy that I had probably skied steeper terrain on my teles with no problems, or that I was easily strong and fit enough to ski their terrain (partly because I'm a gentleman, and partly because neither claim is true). I also resisted the urge to throw him into the nearby fire. That's three from three for me, which makes that a gold star day.

Fifthly, Revelstoke is flat. The town is on a flat area near a river. I'm innately suspicious of flat places.

So, there you have it. Revelstoke is a terrible place for no good reason. Now, if I was a rational person, I would stay in Revelstoke and force myself to somehow enjoy it. But I'm not, so I drove to Rossland (yes, I bought a van - more irrational decision making, I'll get to that some other time) where it first snowed (at night - yay!) and now it's sunny (yay!) and the grocery store sells chorizo (yay!). If I was a rational person I'd be cooped up in Revy swearing at the rain. Here in Rossland I'm about to go into town and buy a towel. Which just goes to show that being rational only screws your life up. And that I should stop leaving my towel behind when I go places.

Limbo

Theologians assure me that the hilarious party game "The Limbo" is based on an old christian myth. Souls that weren't chummy enough with Jesus to get into heaven but were just too well dressed to go to hell ended up in a halfway state called Limbo. Unlike heaven, Limbo doesn't have a theme park and waterslides, but unlike hell, it doesn't have office work (oh SNAP!) . Since everyone in Limbo is well dressed, no one wants to get down on hands and knees when they want to walk under a stick, so they developed the style of bendy walking that we see in the modern Limbo today.

It turns out that I, like a well dressed atheist, am also in a sort of limbo. And not the fun kind that's easier on roller skates. Currently I'm stuck oscillating between two towns (Rossland and Revelstoke), with nowhere to live and no job. That on its own would be no problem, because I'm not about to run out of money and there's still time to find work and housing and all that stuff. The problem is that I seem to take one step forward on each of these fronts, and then just as I'm about to write a blog post celebrating my successes, quickly take a step back of identical size. As you can see, this situation would be much harder on roller skates.

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook (or as I like to call them, my REAL friends) may have seen a status update claiming that I'd found a house in Rossland, and the only thing that would draw me away from this house to Revelstoke was if I got a job doing admin stuff for a heliskiing company. Well, now that house has fallen through. Which wouldn't be so bad if I hadn't cancelled all the other house enquiries I was making, but I had. So now I'm starting from scratch. And before you get all excited and claim that this is God trying to get me to go in The Sound of Music, I haven't heard back from them either. Maybe they're just getting delayed finding enough wimples to fit all their nuns, but it seems more likely that they ditched me in favor of Beard Guy.

So, back to square one on housing. The job search is also back to square one, but to be honest it never really left square one so much as getting really close to the edge of square one and looking hopefully at square two. In a devious catch 22, I met a guy while hitching from Rossland to Revelstoke who told me that the Rossland pizza joint needed someone to fill a vacancy. After arriving in Revelstoke I sent the pizza shop an email with my resume etc. Lo and behold, my aggressive self-marketing campaign paid off, and the next day they asked me to come in for an interview. OK, sounds good so far. The catch was that the email came in on Saturday morning, asking me to come in at 3:00 on Saturday afternoon. But I was in Revelstoke, and had no way of getting to Rossland in time (they're 300ish kms apart and my primary mode of transport is being moderately shaven and waving my thumb). So I emailed them (no response) and tried calling them a few times, but couldn't get through.

The diabolical thing is that I wouldn't have found out about the job unless I went to Revelstoke (and thus met the informative fellow hitchhiker), but by going to Revelstoke I prevented myself from going to the interview. I hope that anybody out there who believes in intelligent design reads this and realises that either it's wrong or God is a bit perverse.

Hopefully this week will bring some progress. I'll keep you posted.

The Craigieburn Valley: A photo essay

During my time at Broken River (yes, this is another old post I've found on my laptop) I was looking at a lot of National Geographics. Not only are they a fine source of educational material which is in short supply in White Star Chalet, but if you're lucky they'll contain photos of boobs, which is almost like meeting a real woman.

One of the things that most impressed me about these magazines were their photo essays. I quite like the idea that by putting the word "photo" in front of the word "essay" you can take all of the difficulties of essay writing (like using words) and replace them with the even more baffling difficulties of photography. Having struggled with words on many occaisions while writing essays, the though of struggling to take and use good photos was quite refreshing.

And so, this is my homage to the photo essay genre. Of course, I suck at taking photos so it's going to be terrible, but hopefully you'll recognise the form that I'm working towards even if the content leaves something to be desired...

Craigieburn: A Photo Essay

In late September, I was commissioned by staff at the Broken River Ski Field to ski over Hamilton Peak and into the wilds of the Craigieburn Valley Ski Area. Renowned for it's intimidating terrain and even more intimidating staff, this area bears little resemblance to its friendly and laid-back neighbour, even though the two fields are so close together.

At White Star, every day starts by opening this red door. Unless you go out the fire escape, which no one does because it’s a weird trap-door. And that doesn’t include days where you don’t leave the hut. Such days leave one feeling particularly sordid, but then I guess you could also say that such days don’t start in an important sense, so the point still stands (except for the fire escape).

Many tourists have been cruelly lured to the top of these stairs by the empty promise of groomed runs and chairlifts.

At Palmer Lodge, Barratt (far right) explains the finer points of using zinc cream in the same quantities and manner as regular sunscreen. Dan (centre) wonders whether any day trippers will come up at all if word gets out that there is no chairlift.

On the other side of Hamilton Peak (the highest point on the horizon) lies the Craigieburn Valley, my destination for today. A group of skiers from Craigieburn has already arrived at Broken River seeking friendly staff and fashionable merchandise.

Substituting zinc cream for sunscreen not only provides SPF1000 sun protection that won’t come off without a belt sander, it also acts as a convenient disguise. And as you sweat and it runs into your mouth, you get 4500% of your RDI of zinc.

I change shirt on the Broken River side of Hamilton Peak before heading into unfamiliar and hostile terrain. Wearing BR merchandise in the Craigieburn Valley combines great skiing with annoying other people and should be considered one of life’s treasures.

The view from the sun deck at Craigieburn with the famous Middle Basin chutes behind me on the left. The rope tows will stop soon and the locals are becoming increasingly agitated about my shirt. I decide to beat a hasty retreat before the mood deteriorates and the snow hardens back up in the shade.

These footprints mark my return to Broken River, where people wait to hear whether anyone got irritated by my shirt. They also mark the change from spring skiing to fresh powder turns.

The last run of the day is to the BR car park, a few hundred metres past the last line of visible snow on the left side of the valley. Although it snowed several days ago, this is BR in September, so no one has bothered to come out here to ski this line. The top half of this run will be fresh turns.

My gift to the internet

OK, I admit that this is probably the wrong way to put a video on the internets. Unfortunately for you I don't really care.

This is from an 18th party at Broken River. And to answer your question, yes, I am wearing a sports coat.

"When the going gets wierd..." and "The inverse law of head size"

Today I hitchhiked from Revelstoke to Rossland. Rossland is smaller than Revy and is about 300kms due south down a pretty stunning valley. Unfortunately there's not a whole heap of traffic going between the two towns so hitching was a bit sketchy. I got some great rides though, including one really long trip with a local guy named Greg who made me exceptionally jealous by telling me about his hang-gliding trips up and down the valley.

But you don't want to know what I've been doing, do you? Surely no one who intentionally reads this blog has any expectation of hearing about the mundane details of my day to day life. Let's not kid ourselves, you want to laugh at my expense and discover whether I've had any important insights into the human condition while travelling the globe.

Fortunately, today I am in a position to fill you in on both topics.

When the going gets wierd, the recipients of said wierdness get going:

First off, the stupid thing that's dominating my life lately was my audition for The Sound of Music. What seemed like a hilarious coincidence, and an easy, no-strings-attached funny story is looking ever more like being a freight train of impending doom, rushing ever onwards towards my prone form tied to the tracks. Yesterday, after a turbulent night spent dreaming that I was escaping from Austria over the Swiss Alps pursued by the Von Trapp family, I half-heartedly pretended to apply for jobs and look for houses. While I was avoiding personal growth or acheivement in the hostel one of the ladies from the audition panel turned up out of the blue and said she'd found me a job and somewhere to live. This was both a lovely gesture and a 4.5 out of 10 on the scale of terrifyingness. She suggested we go immediately to this place to find out the situation. I agreed and on the way over she hinted very strongly that I had been assigned "the part". The needle on the terrifyingness scale immediately bumped up to a cool 6.5.

The job opportunity was (thankfully) pretty hand-wavy. It turns out that (in small-town fashion) some friend of a friend had a WWOOFer working for her who's gone back to Australia till early December and she needs someone to fill in. Since I've just come from Australia, there seemed to be some kind of karmic balance in getting me to fill the other guy's place. The friend of the friend also needed someone to stay in her house and entertain her cat while she was out of town, so I've signed up for cat entertaining duties for the end of this week. As for the WWOOFing job, we'll see what happens - it probably doesn't actually pay any actual money, and that's not ideal.

So, the next day, I quickly packed up my stuff and got out of town. Not only is this a good chance to check out Rossland before I'm due to chase someone else's cat around a kitchen with no less than seven entrances, it means that if anyone tries to find me another job I'll be safely hidden down here. Plus, a potentially neat job that is actually related to my previous employment has opened up at Red Mountain, so it's handy to actually have some idea of what the place is like as a sort out the applications.

OK, and now to the first in what will no doubt be a series of hard hitting cultural examinations,

The Inverse Law of Head Size:

The first thing you notice about Canadian vehicles is that there seems to be a range of sizes of regular passenger vehicles that extends beyond those found in Australia. It's like you normally shop in a clothes store where the sizes from XS to XL, and you've just wandering into a larger shop that has those euphemistically named "Plus" sizes. In Australia, if you would like a dual cab ute, you can expect the extra space in the passenger part of the vehicle to be taken out from what would normally be the tray. In Canada, you would expect the tray of the vehicle to also expand proportionally to the expansion of the passenger cab, resulting in a truck that looks like the automotive equivalent of a sausage dog. There are also vehicles which are identical in style to cars or trucks found in Australia, but which have simply been expanded or magnified to significantly larger proportions.

This is, of course, nothing new. North America is renowned for being full of gigantic fuel guzzling cars that run on engine oil made entirely from the tears of baby seals that suffered cruelly as they died. "Great work John," you're saying, "you have noticed the obvious."

Indeed I have, but I have also noticed the subtle. Because I have seen that there is a strong, but inverse, correlation between the size of these uber-cars and the size of their driver's heads. Of course, this is not to say that all drivers of such large vehicles have small heads, but rather that the distribution of head sizes among drivers of large vehicles is strongly skewed towards lower volume heads.

This effect is common to both male and female drivers. Indeed, the effect is made more pronounced by the unusually high number of female drivers with small heads driving these extra large cars. Not only are there more female drivers driving big trucks than small cars, but those drivers tend to have quite small heads. All this suggests that if Michelle Phillips (who is known to sport an exceptionally small head) were to drive in Canada, she might feel strongly drawn towards an exceptionally large car.

In fact, the distribution of vehicle size by gender seems to be reversed in Canada relative to Australia. Here, just about all the small cars I see on the road are driven by men, and most of the female drivers I see are in very large cars.

I should note that I am not trying to imply that the drivers of large vehicles are stupid. In fact, the big trucks must be pretty practical in winter and I rather wish I had one (although my head is probably a bit large). It should also be pointed out that although objective measurements are not yet available (if funding is found I would like to pursue this phenomenon in more detail) I don't think the effect is just one of perspective - regular sized people in unusually large cars. It really does look like these people have genuinely small heads.

I came, I saw, I auditioned

Well, it's been 13,000kms, 27 hours of international transit, one 11 hour overnight bus trip and almost two hours of waiting in a gym corridor, but I have finally auditioned for the part of Captain Von Trapp in Revelstoke's production of The Sound of Music.

Sadly, I did not get video. This is because I went to the toilet (nerves) and when I came back I was called straight in. Plus, the people there were taking it all pretty seriously, so it would have been a bit awkward. And besides, I'd already had to point out that I have no fixed address, no telephone number, and that ideally I'd like to play the Mother Superior. Setting up the camera would have been pushing my luck. And besides, I took the whole thing pretty damn seriously, so it would have just been uncomfortable to watch, rather than funny as such.

OK, so the details you're all dying for. The song was Edelweiss. They played the piano in some funny key which meant I had to sing really low, which was fine, because having succesfully completed puberty I can sing low about as well as I can sing anything, for whatever that's worth. So then they made me sing it again in a more normal range. Believe it or not they seemed vaguely happy with the results.

So then they made me read some lines from a script. The whole time they asked questions like "How well do you know the film" and I tried to convey, without seeming like there was anything measurably wrong with me, that I knew it inappropriately well.

And then they made me dance.

I had to waltz with one of the audition judge people while singing Edelweiss. Years of frisbee coaching have enabled me to completely disconnect what I say from what the rest of me does, with the result that apparently my singing improved while waltzing. And for those of you who are wondering, I can, in a very loose and vague sense of the word, waltz. It's considered an essential part of a well rounded philosophy degree.

One tricky thing about the whole experience is that I've got no idea of the context of this whole event. People seemed suprisingly serious about the production - one guy even had one of those radio headsets you see in movies about Broadway. I'm not sure whether there was anyone to talk to on that radio, but if there had been he was all set up for hands free convenience. I don't know if Revelstoke is the traditional retiring place of profession musicians from the Canadian Musical Theatre Symphony Orchestra or the place that gets left out when the judges from "Canada's Got Talent" roam the country looking for new stars.

The biggest risks so far are (yep, it feels about time for a dot-point list):

• They don't seem to have many male applicants. In fact the phrase they used was something like "Any breathing male is in."
• They seemed disturbingly happy with my audition. Much happier than my last audience, which was when I sang in a barbershop trio at a Canberra Chinese Community Mother's Day Concert (as the only member of the room not in the Canberra Chinese Community, this was awkward).
• I put down on my application form-type-thing that I was willing to cut my hair and grow/shave/change my facial hair because I was briefly feeling competitive and I wanted to beat an old guy with a beard who'd just wandered in and was making me feel threatened. Now I suspect that the old guy may have been a mole that the producers called in to hustle me.

On the other hand, there are a few things in my favour:

• I told them I would need to find work and somewhere to live. They were a bit concerned about the risk that I wouldn't be able to take on any role because of this. With any luck this could be the crack of doubt that bring my chances crumbling down.
• Surely, when a community theatre group puts on a show like this, they have someone in mind for this kind of role. You wouldn't rely on some random guy travelling across the world to fill your major role. You'd think "Well, we've got a strong male lead and a strong female lead and a thousand kids - we can do The Sound of Music!". And if you didn't have someone in mind for the major male roles you'd probably do something androgenous like Cats! or that musical about the women's football team that gets stranded on a life-raft with no men within 1000 nautical miles.
• Beard guy could be a total gun. In fact, to beat me he would only have to be half a gun, or even a well maintained club. Come on beard guy.
  

Anyway, they'll let me know in a few days. Which means I've got just a few days to be kicked out of Revelstoke by the police and to find somewhere else to go. After all, it's better to be safe than to be entangled in musical theatre.

Before I go I'd like all of the dorks out there who said this would be a good idea to know that I'm quite possibly going to suffer amateur musical theatre for your amusement. I hope you're positively soiling yourselves with joy because we all know that if the worst comes to the worst I'll have to follow this through to the bitter end.

First impressions

Apparently, it takes on average about 3.5 seconds for people to form a first impression. Once that impression is formed, if it’s positive it takes about the same amount of time for someone to change that to a negative impression if new evidence comes up. If instead the first impression is negative it takes on average 7 times more evidence to change the impression to a positive one than it did to form the original impression (so I would have to be nice to people for something like 70 years before ultimate players will begin to think I'm a decent person). Some people will never change a negative impression – once you’re in the bad books you stay there forever.

With this in mind, you have to feel sorry for the people who try to market cities. Some poor bugger in the local government of each town will have (among the jillion other jobs they don’t have time or qualifications for) the task of trying to make the city feel welcoming to new guests. For international travellers, this must be a tough gig.

First, the people you’re trying to schmooze have just got off a plane. This isn’t all bad. The fact that they can wave their arms and legs around or the absence of a fat person squeezing them into the plane window will probably cheer them up a lot. On the other hand, they’ve just spent hours sitting down in a noisy plane that they probably had to get up at an ungodly hour to get on. On top of that, international flights have been carefully calibrated to ensure that the flight time and change in time zone always ensure that you ought to do the exact opposite of what your body clock wants. If you get on the plane tired you’ll inevitably spend the flight trying to stay awake so that you don’t end up bouncing around your ho(s)tel bedroom all night. If you’d normally be awake, then you’re probably going to land in your destination just as you would normally fall into bed, but the sun will be rising and the day will await.

Secondly, the people will just have come through customs. I’m going to make one of those statements you later regret and invite certain anal probing by saying that customs is not as bad as people make it out to be. If you’re sensible and careful about your paperwork and you don’t try to bring 80 kilos of your favourite live shellfish with you when you travel it probably won’t be that bad. Despite extensive planning to ensure I was wearing good undies today, I went through LAX without getting interrogated by immigration, cavity searched by customs or having my junk handled by security. In fact, the worst thing was the muzak, which is pretty good when you think about it.

However, people hate queuing, filling in forms, and seeing other travellers who are obviously wealthier than they are, so customs and immigration tend to be something that helps put people into a sour mood.

Finally, our travellers, temporally ransacked and feeling a deep sense of violation that no shower will make clean, spill out of arrivals into an airport terminal that has cleverly been designed so that the signs and directions only make sense if you already know where everything is. They will cheerfully follow the signs to the shuttle buses only to find that these are buses to a nearby space shuttle exhibit, and that the only way into town is via a donkey train on the other side of the complex that has just departed but will conveniently return in 35 minutes.

And so it was that I tumbled out of Vancouver International Airport today. I’ll admit that the city has clearly done a lot to please people like me. The airport was quick and easy to get through, the staff were nice, the train to the city cost a pretty reasonable $7.50. I suspect that my time spent in Australian and New Zealand customs has made me accustomed to pretty rigorous quarantine procedures. The customs people here just took my piece of paper then left me to decide whether I would go through the line where people searched my bag and asked why I needed all the shellfish or the line where I walked straight outside.

Once in the city I was immediately adopted by some dodgy guy who kindly gave me some directions then asked for money. Since he played the game pretty well (certainly much better than I did) I figured he’d earned his due, so hopefully he’s off his face by now. His directions did help me find a backpackers hostel, which like every backpackers in the world is full of Australians and not really my scene. In fact, as I type this, people next to me are playing Cranium. I clearly have some kind of innocent doe eyed look that attracts expensive new "friends", and my sense of fair play means I’m a good target for good natured scams. Perhaps it’s time to ditch the corduroy pants and get another Neo-Nazi haircut, although that might just attract an even more problematic set of new friends.

I’ve softened my attitude to the city and the backpackers now that I’ve worked out the clock on my computer. It’s still on Australian time. At first I thought it said 1:51AM, which would mean I’d been up for 20 hours. That’s not all that long, which means my disgust for all things Vancouver might have been real. However, it turns out that right next to the numbers that say the time there are some letters that say PM, not AM, which would normally be pretty obvious, so I’m clearly pretty spaced out. That means I’ve been up for 32 hours, which is more respectable and means that any angst I feel should fade by the time I wake up tomorrow.

I did get some sleep on the plane, but I’m increasingly finding that sleeping on planes isn’t very restful and just makes my extremities go numb. In LA I had pins and needles in one foot several hours after getting off the plane, and here in Vancouver the ends of two of my fingers are still tingly.

Is it Fate?

First, to clear the air - lots of things have happened and I'm behind in my posts. I'll get some stuff up ASAP, but I need to do real life things like sort flights and get insurance and fix my poor poor skis. However, this is too significant to sit around on my laptop for weeks.

Most young boys grow up wanting to be firemen, or cowboys, or merchant bankers. I always wanted to be a 19th century German nihilist. While other lads were playing racist shoot-em-up games or conducting risky imaginary financial transactions, I was trimming my imaginary moustache, puffing on my imaginary pipe and keeping a keen eye out for the ubermensch.

And so, in later life, when I discovered The Sound of Music, it was natural that I would form a deep and lasting bond with this exceptional piece of musical theatre. Admittedly, the main characters are Austrians, and the whole point of the thing is that they're explicitly not Germans, but it's still great. How could you not fall in love with characters like Captain Von Trapp, the strong but secretly sensitive submarine captain, or Maria, who casts off the shackles of Christian pity to embrace the shackles of married life.

And so, it was with much excitement that I saw this entry in the Revelstoke Classifieds. Surely it can't be mere chance that one of the ski towns I'm thinking of heading to is performing The Sound of Music. And auditions are this Thursday! And the audition song is "Edelweiss"!

I suspect that when Nietzsche commanded us to embrace fate he wasn't thinking of travelling 13000kms to audition for a community musical. However, The Sound of Music hadn't even been written in Nietzsche's day, and I reckon he would have loved it.

As the Mother Superior would have said, "What is it Maria you can't face?"