I'm not afraid of flying, so I seem like a bit of dink when I see someone else who is nervous during a flight. I'm one of those guys who sits in the airplane seat and immediately starts falling asleep. (I admit, I would make a lousy pilot.) In the unlikely event that the airplane ever hits a bit of turbulence, I just fall even deeper into sleep. If you ever read about some horrible plane crash and find out that I was on it, chances are I was very, very asleep. (Unless of course people start yelling and screaming, in which case I would be very, very annoyed.)
In any event, I picked up a copy of a book about anxiety, panic disorders, phobias and other mental disorders and read it on my vacation. Nothing says rest and relaxation like reading a chapter about pooping your pants, sweating and vomiting uncontrollably when public speaking! The book is My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel.
Scott Stossel is first and foremost a journalist, and he's also the editor of the Atlantic magazine. He is also a great writer. The book is a strange (but effective) combination of a history of medicine, psychiatry and disorders, both real and imagined, throughout the last few hundred years. This would otherwise be a clinical look at such things as panic attacks, separation anxiety and the fear of almost everything, except that there is a twist—Stossel confesses that he has been diagnosed, or has suffered from almost every type of anxiety that there is. He is admittedly anxious, takes perscription medicine and alcohol in order to publicly speak, and has undergone therapy for over thirty years, with varying degrees of success. And he also soiled a bathroom once during a weekend retreat and bumped into John F. Kennedy junior while wearing minimal clothing. The book is weird, hilarious, and extremely interesting.
What I really liked about the book is that the author knows logically that having phobias is kind of stupid, but he cannot control his body's reaction when his brain triggers the "flight or flight" response. For example, we all logically know that it is not logical to be deathly afraid of cheese, or walking outside of the house, for example. So why do people like Stossel get queasy stomachs, uncontrollable sweating, and occasionally throw up? I'm not the bravest person on the planet, but I did jump out of an airplane, and I was no where near the level of anxiety that Stossel goes through on a daily basis. Imagine going on vacation, and your entire time is spent locating and not venturing from the public bathrooms. The personal stories from Stossel's life are fascinating, disturbing, and Stossel's self-depreciating sense of humour gives an otherwise sad and depressing look on life an ultimately uplifting sense that anyone, even he, can at least live with (if not overcome) these debilitating disorders. If you are wondering why you are anxious, depressed, or have phobias, or if you are like me and want to gain a greater understanding of why some people behave really strange, I recommend this book.
I get that the rotation of the Earth plays a major role in a lot of what goes on—tides, the sun rising, etc etc. That's fine. But it is extremely annoying having the Winter Olympics over in Russia. I mean, the games are on during the workday. This is just another example of my career getting in the way of me sitting around watching TV all day.
I like watching hockey. The interesting thing is that during the Olympics, people who have never watched hockey, ever, are suddenly tuning in and screaming at the television. Okay, said the judge, I will allow it—you are patriotic. You can either sign up for the military, venture over to Khandahar and risk life and limb as a member of our proud Canadian military, or you can wear an oversized Team Canada hockey jersey and high five me as I'm coming out of the bathroom at work. Either way.
The women's Canadian hockey team played in the gold medal game against the U.S. on Thursday. The game was on at around noon my time zone (which is definitely not Russia) and so I was at my desk while the game was on. "No big deal," I quietly mumbled to myself. "I am PVRing the game just like I PVR the FA Cup soccer final, the World Cup soccer final, and the occasional Sunday Night Football game. No one cares and I will quietly slink home and watch it." As long as I stay off Facebook, Twitter, Teaker, Tweaker, Reddit, Donnit, Seenit, and RedDogSeenIt Mobile App, I should be fine. Plus don't look a the elevator TV that shows all the news while I get down to the ground floor or listen to the radio on your way home work. And don't look anyone in the eye—if they have a happy expression, that could be a hot tip on the final score.
Well, spoiler alert: everyone loves blabbing. The score was emailed out to everyone at my office. It was also on television in some office buildings, horns were honking by passing cars, and anyone wearing red was hoisted up onto strangers shoulders and paraded down the main streets in towns and cities all across Canada. So I figured out that Team Canada won.
Hey, no big deal! I will just go home and watch the game anyway. Except that the stupid PVR decided to be stupid and didn't tape the game. Watching an hour of the People's Court and a cooking show just wasn't the same.
Hey, no big deal! I own an iPad and I figured I could watch the replay of the game, somewhere online. It's the internet, right? I googled "Women's Olympic Hockey". No matter what you search for, Myley Cyrus comes up. Does she own the internet now? Only 20 minutes later was able to locate CBC's replay of the game. I clicked on it. Here we go! Only that I had to download an app for the CBC Olympics.
Hey, no big deal! I downloaded the app. It only took 20 minutes. (My internet might be a bit slow—an iPad has no moving parts but I swear I heard gears creaking.) I finally clicked "play" and got ready for the big game! First, however, there is 5 minutes of advertising. "The All-New GMC Whatever Truck."
Hey, no big deal! The first period started. I clicked through to the third period. Wow, what a game! I got all the way to overtime—it was tied! Then the app decided it didn't want to play "video" anymore. It was frozen on the goalie making a save. So I could hear the announcer screaming like someone was poking him in the going with a pool cue, but I couldn't see anything—just the statue of the goalie.
I didn't want to hear the goal, I was feeling like a diva and wanted to actually see it as well. I know... picky picky! I closed the app and relaunched it. It went back to the first period again. Oh well.
Hey, no big deal! I pressed "overtime" and suddenly I was watching overtime again. Yes! Only the app decided it needed to play 5 minutes of commercials again. So I am listening to the announcer yelling and save after save is being made, and all the while I can hear "The All-New GMC Whatever Truck." Okay, okay, I get it—trucks are cool. Can I watch the game and listen to it at the same time? Is this allowed? Can I talk to the boss? Is Miley Cyrus around?
I finally saw Team Canada score the big goal and it was a crazy, awesome game. So the app did work and hey I didn't pay a penny for it so I can't really complain.
Although I do have an overwhelming desire to buy a GMC Truck.
Biographies of NFL players are nothing new. Almost every great NFL legend has cranked out a memoir after their playing days are over. We love to hear about how they overcame obstacles, fought through adversity and ultimately stood at the podium to claim the Super Bowl. We love winners!
What about the rest of the players? Most of us only ever hear about the Brett Favre's and Peyton Manning's of the NFL world—long, hall-of-fame careers. Finally a book has been written about the "other guys"—Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile by Nate Jackson.
What do you mean you've never heard of Nate Jackson? Most people haven't, and that's the whole point of the book. This biography shines the light on an undrafted free agent who was signed by the San Fransisco 49ers in 2002. He went on to play for six seasons in the NFL with the Denver Broncos, changing position to tight end.
If you are a hard-core fan of football and want to know what it really feels like preparing for a game, fighting through injuries and tackling a ball returner during a kickoff, this book has it. But what I really enjoyed was the descriptions of the rest of an average NFL journeyman's life—the boring stretches between games, the strange balance between danger and monotony during training camp practices, and life on the road. It also has some really funny, absurd moments—in one scene, a fellow inactive player gets drunk on the sideline while one of the coaches fights a noseblood that gets so bad, he is literally leaking blood through his eye sockets. (Well, maybe it was funny looking back on it.) Jackson is a talented writer and does an excellent job of walking the reader through what the average Joe in the NFL sees, hears and feels—physically, mentally and emotionally.
The book also extensively chronicles Jackson's injuries: tearing muscle from bone, going for an MRI, watching the blood separate in a centrifuge, and non-stop painkiller injections, tape jobs and physio appointments. The body can only last so long despite (or in some cases, because of) these treatments. Many readers will no doubt skip over the long, wordy doctor reports, but Jackson includes them—they weren't my cup of tea but maybe someone with a medical degree could do a better job of deciphering the complicated medical reports.
I recommend this book if you are looking for a different style of biography—it is definitely an unpredictable, realistic look of the life of a grinder in the brutal world of the NFL.
I got a great Christmas gift this year—a co-worker of mine figured out that I knew how to read, and I was pleasantly surprised to get a book for the holiday season.
Books make tough Christmas gifts: they are risky. With something like lipstick, or soap, or a towel, you know that they are going to use it eventually. But a book? Hmm. People go long stretches without ever cracking the spine of some books. I have been over to people's houses, and they have entire shelves of books. "Wow," I exclaim, "you are pretty well-read!" Well, not so fast. They are well-bought. They proudly proclaim that they own over 100 books, but when I go to pull one off of the shelf, they break down and tearfully admit that they haven't actually read any of them. I'm still not convinced that Stephen Hawking has even made it to the end of A Brief History of Time—and he wrote the damn thing.
The book that I received at Christmas is called Spy Rock Memories, and is written by Larry Livermore. My eyes lit up when I unwrapped the book and flipped it over—Larry Livermore is the guy. More specifically, "The Guy". My sheer stroke of luck, my co-worker grabbed me a book written by The Guy who distributed Green Days' first couple of albums on Lookout! Records back in the early 1990s.
I am a huge Green Day fan. I have every album, including their alter-ego Foxboro Hot Tubs album. I hunkered down in the cold evenings in January and cracked open the first page of Spy Rock Memories, which is Larry Livermore's Memoir of his days living in a desolate, strange backwoods area known as Spy Rock.
Larry also produced and ran a small newspaper called the Lookout, which angered some of the colourful neighbours on the mountain. So it was no surprise that the book is tight, well-written, and funny. I was a little disappointed at first that I was ten page in and there was no Green Day. After all, Billie Joe Armstrong himself was quoted on the back cover! However, I quickly began to realize that there was enough drama on Spy Rock—snow drifts that could kill an unprepared resident, stray animals, shotgun-wielding neighbours and all sorts of marijuana growing. It is a thoroughly entertaining read. (A very young Tre Cool does make an appearance, although he is more scrawny twelve-year-old than world-class drummer.)
Overall, the book is a great read. Too often in memoirs, the day-to-day details of people's lives are glossed over. Punk bands go from unknown kids in a basement to global superstars, and we never get to see any of the actual details about how this transformation happened. In Spy Rock Memories, we get a first-hand account of the producer and co-founder of Lookout! Records, who signed some successful (and some not-so-successful) punk rock acts. It's a well-written look at the punk music scene in the late 1980s and 1990s. But even if that doesn't interest you—well, there's people living on a mountain running generators, shooting bears and growing weed. So there is definitely something for everyone.
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