Places to Go

Clever.

On their way through Saskatchewan, some good friends texted this hilarious t-shirt design, lol. Well done Tourism Saskatchewan. 

These friends are currently moving home to Nova Scotia after 30 years employed in Alberta. Working for decades in the Canadian West is a familiar story for those of us born out of the province, but especially those from the stunning Maritime provinces: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. I'm sad to see them go, but we will visit them someday soon. I'm also a bit jealous of their cross-Canada travels, a dream many of us Canadians possess although the east west trip alone is about 8000 kilometers. (This reminds me dear Canadian friends, did you know you can now buy Terry Fox's shoes?!!)

Their trip is more necessity than tourism, but like many Canadians choosing not to travel to the US this year, it's an opportunity and the right time to explore a corner or two of Canada's 10 million square kilometers. This summer, our new federal government initiated the Canada Strong Pass, so Canadians (especially young Canadians) can experience our country by rail. There's so much to marvel at here at home. 

For US friends interested in visiting "The [Forever] True North Strong and Free" this summer, there are many wonderful places to see and experience. And if you find yourself in Saskatchewan, you must get the t-shirt, AND if you want a unique, some-say-weird, one-of-a-kind experience, visit my favourite Saskatchewan oddity. If you dare. ;)

Wordfuse (shut-eye edition)

 (noun): slept + skeptic = those who doubt they'll sleep through the entire night, or whose history has shown proper uninterrupted shut-eye to be elusive aka more four winks than forty winks. Sigh.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Tree Gazing

As my oldest granddaughter once said, "Happy New Day, Pops." It is indeed. The saskatoons are ripening— my favourite sign of Canadian summer. Happy Canada Day, friends.  

Science says even looking at trees boosts your mental health. What's your favourite tree? Or berry? 

Welcome interruption?

Thanks, M. 

The world is (extra) a lot right now, so here's a smiling dragon my toddler granddaughter drew for me. 

You're welcome. And may this interrupt your doomscrolling. 

(Ever think about how our phones are kind of like our refrigerators? The fridge pictures displayed tell about the best goings-on in our lives: first ultrasounds, wedding invites, Christmas family pics, travel photos, love notes...but the pictures in our phones often mirror the worst goings-on in the world. Dear friends, don't forget to spend a little time reflecting on your fridge "algorithm" too.) 

Things that deserve the stink-eye:

Dopamine Party? Not so much.

whatever this is aka cottage cheese (high-protein) no-flour pumpkin loaf, lol. 

I believe it was Homer Simpson who said, "the first step to failing is trying." ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Constructing

iron wheels waiting in
my son's yard for something more

My son works in the trades. He builds things, always has. It's about math and physics for him. First he obsessed about Lego, then wood, then technology, then guitar, then sheet metal, then iron. My favourite of his creations? He welded an iron bird house, lol. The humour's mine, but the skill? It's genetic, thanks to my Dad. 

I've welded exactly zero projects, so I guess that means it skipped a generation? Not really, I build things with words (and sometimes other ingredients too). The grandfather, this father, the son—our default mode is creative but preferred mediums are personal.

Why this craving? It's a problem-solving fixation. Like my Dad, my son applies this skill to things, then enjoys that accomplished feeling. Similarly, I like to apply problem-solving to ideas and behaviours. If you read this blog, my (over) thinking obsession with comprehending this confusing world might be obvious. So...if you're still reading this, I applaud you. 🤣

I mention this because I just finished reading The Molecule of More. The molecule in question? Dopamine. The book clarifies the difference between dopamine and those other handy brain chemicals/hormones: serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins. In a nutshell, the latter three are here-and-now orientated whereas dopamine is future orientated. Hence the first three react to novelty and affect daily mood. They are released when we experience those so-called little things in life: walking in the sunshine, petting a purring cat, and a spicy chai latte. But dopamine? It's about anticipation.

Dopamine motivates us to leverage resources to achieve/complete something pleasurable, something not yet attained, something more. Dopamine is all those coins Mario collects BUT especially leveling up. It drives addiction and creativity and it is both taxing and gratifying. Furthermore, some brains are apparently wired to be more here-and-now while others are dopamine forward: my father, me, my son. That's why completing this paragraph—after much drafting, re-reading, redrafting, and revising—provided the dopamine hit I sought. I hope that makes sense. 

A final detail about the book: there's a chapter on harmony and what we should know about dopamine and mental health. Not surprisingly, we need a balance between here-and-now needs and future-orientated wants. Guess what occupation most helps us humans achieve that? Construction. Essentially, although our brains default to dwell in immediate rest, relaxation, and delight, it's being productive that promises more durable happiness. 

Dear blogger friends/creatives, it seems to me that this is why we blog. As we react/write/sort/tell about the (chaotic) here and now, it helps us construct a hoped-for future. 

What are you constructing?

A Real Slice?

When life gives you melons, maybe you're dyslexic?

Sorry.

It's a remarkably large watermelon though, isn't it? Some might even say, uh, one-in-a-melon. 

Sorry. 

Gotta go eat watermelon; no more melondrama. 😜

Thursdays

Recently, thanks to another blogger, I experienced the "psychological relief" of learning the oh-so-apt name for what we're all experiencing in the 20s: hypernormalization. This is that feeling of dread and powerlessness that permeates our modern lives as we endure daily chaos written off by those in power as uh, I don't know, Thursday, so we square our shoulders, endure, and continue our daily lives amidst the pervasive instability, because uh, what the hell can we really do about it anyway? Sigh. 

So I'm taking a break, sort of a psychological relief break. Let me explain. 

While watering the front garden yesterday, a butterfly landed on me. Oddly, I gasped. I think I reacted this way because it's very 2025 to deem this incident as the ominous opening "butterfly effect" to yet another shitshow. But no. Just what I needed, it took me out of my head. I love it when nature taps me on the shoulder. Delightful. 

Despite everything, what else is delightful? Let's go there. 

Words. Words are delightful. So is corn-on-the-cob and trees and the northern lights and ice cream and garden spaces and when women wear kilts in curling competitions and wedding vows and music and art and the human eye (each so startlingly unique and beautiful) and history class and movies and hilarious one-liners and Lego and librarians and architects and artists and writers and ee cummings and books so moving they shouldn’t end and deep-fried fish and chips and Scotland and Ireland and the Maritimes and Montreal and the wide Saskatchewan horizon line and waving grain and frogs and northern Alberta’s long, long summer days and a freshly painted room and golden hour and watching people open presents and (controversial) tuna casserole and The Swedish Chef and bork bork bork and making cupcakes and cookies and giving them away and haircuts and sleeping in and lavender and poppies and rabbits and snowmobiling and skiing and long walks and picking saskatoons and wood furniture and my bed and my house and my flat-cap and CBC radio and sudden rain and sticky-note pads and my grandkids and the countless ways my spouse, my children, and their children enrich and fortify my ordinary (extraordinary) life, and friends too, playing dice or Ticket-to-Ride or texting memes and when human facades fade and when we admit our stupidity and interdependence and people who don’t condemn others and don't complain just for the sake of complaining and people who understand being neighbourly and Dolly Parton and nurses and people who care for the elderly and my past and present teachers and every teacher my kids ever had and grandmothers and people who snowplow or can fix your AC and people committed to improving the world peacefully and self-deprecating people and comedians and unifiers and people who volunteer and people who are honest, people who encourage without ulterior motives and especially how sometimes the world seems to conspire to make me butterfly happy and oh ya, run-on sentences—I love run-on sentences too.

Dear friends, there is also psychological relief in naming what you delightfully love. Even on Thursdays. Sigh, it's often impossible to love what's going on in the world, but we can love our way through it. Right? 

Help Yourself.

Thanks, Grandma. 

My life-long relationship with food? Dysfunctional. Someday we may delve into that topic. 

Anyway, current status? Complicated, and healthy-ish, but perhaps not in the (caloric) way you might be thinking. Let me explain.

A Gen X kid (aka 8/10 times without parents), I taught myself how to "cook" all the 70s-80s savory classics: mostly fish sticks, oven fries, KD, tuna casserole, chili, and other box/ package/ can-opener inspired meals. (I still firmly believe that most meals should be cooked in one pot and eaten as leftovers for days.) Except for rice-Krispie squares—marshmallows are fun to melt—childhood me never learned to cook anything sweet.

 

After years of attempting to feed my kids (no comparison to my wife's abilities), cut to becoming an empty-nester (about a decade ago). Equipped with more time, knowledge, and skills than childhood me, I decided to join that elusive club of people who made food others actually enjoyed. In most cases, people ate my culinary concoctions with more resignation than reverie. So, always a creative, I began to experiment. I failed. I succeeded. I learned how to make chocolate-chip cookies that are infinitely more popular than I am. 

And that's it. Insert record-scratch sound here. I perfected these cookies and that's all I made for years; it's still my go-to. I call my recipe, 'Small Cookies are Stupid,' because they are. 

But this taught me something more meaningful than recipes. Cooking sweets for others boosts my mental health. My cookies make people happy; happy is not my default mode, but making people happy? Pure dopamine. 

Cut to the pandemic. Remember those tragic and trying 24 months when most humans became more we-orientated than I-orientated? But then thanks to politics and social media 30% of humans went batshit? Sigh. Who didn't need extra dopamine during those days? So I mastered my Grandma's cupcake recipe. And gave them away again and again and again; I made them for my own birthday party this week. Why? Gifting cupcakes boosts my personal growth, and increases my life's purpose and meaning. It bolsters my self-acceptance. It lifts my heart too. In short, everyone is rewarded; IT'S A DOPAMINE PARTY!

Dear friends, happiness is fleeting. But mastering something simple and sharing it with others? Help yourself. 

Imagine a hammer.

Imagine a hammer. Now think history. What were the very first hammers like? What were they used for? To build up or to tear down? To bust or to beat? Although the modern hammer’s design is much improved, its function remains mostly the same. We can use a hammer two ways:

• constructively or
• destructively. 

I was quite young the first time I used a hammer. And despite my youth, immediately I knew the hammer's power: I could smash anything! Especially my fingers. I knew the frustration when I missed the nail yet again. After dropping the hammer on my toes, and off the side of a building under construction, I knew the true weight of a hammer. I know the exhaustion of using a sledge hammer and the satisfying way it cements things together. I know the power I wield swinging a hammer. But I was in my late 20s when a tradesman taught me precision: where to place my hand on the hammer's hand and to position my thumb on the back of the hammer to improve my aim; he essentially made the hammer and extension of my arm. There is always more to learn. 

It seems to me that there are plenty of lessons in a hammer. Perhaps the best is Abraham Maslow’s lesson. In his ground-breaking book about positive human psychology, he quite famously wrote, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Everything in this complex world is not necessarily a nail. And we need not always choose the same tools. 

Maybe there’s a different way to think about things? Maybe ______ is not so simple? Maybe ______ is not so black and white? Maybe you haven't completely figured out ______? Maybe your toolbox is missing something? Think about history again. Our firmly held beliefs were false: the world was flat, doctors need not wash their hands, women should not have the right to vote, left-handedness should be "corrected." All these were once "common sense."  

Some people claim to have all the answers (and they often refer to it as common sense). I have always been wary of these people. No one knows all the answers. No one. Not you, nor I. Especially if all you have is a hammer. 

One more thing: this is not about hammers.