View from a Wolf

Yesterday’s blog was such a resounding success it seems the only way to celebrate is to write another one.

I’m at a three-day conference this week, all IT-related (that’s Information Technology for those of you scratching your heads), and much of it is boring.

The food is good though.  Not that Jenny Craig (the filthy-rich bitch) will allow anyone on her program to indulge themselves.  Not that I listen to the harpy, mind you – not when there’s some well-dressed chocolate just sitting there batting its romantic eyes at me in a clearly indulgent invitation.  It’s not the chocolate’s fault that I dove in, head first and salivating like the mangiest slop-jowled dog.  No, I had a choice.

I just made the wrong one.

Oh well.  There’s always tomorrow.   (Come to think of it, that’s what I said yesterday, after making a startlingly similar choice.)  But there’s *just* tomorrow.  After that it’s the weekend.

Years ago, I would have obediently sat through a large number of boring lectures, because it was the expected thing to do.  Looking at those past days with new eyes leaves me a little amazed, really.  How can anyone stand to waste time, spending those minutes accommodating predictable speeches?   Yet, in looking at one of the audience at one spectacularly death-enhancing lecture yesterday, it is clear that many people do.  You have to think that perhaps it’s expected of them, and that’s why they do it.

During that speech, I finally realized the speaker wasn’t going to get any better.  After the 150th time he uttered the word “um” as he tried in vain to find a word he was looking for “THE WORD IS BLACKBERRY, YOU STUMBLEBUM!!”, I finally had enough, and so I got up and left.

How refreshing, this freedom. Oh, there was still some residual feelings of guilt.  The younger guy would have stayed ’till the bitter end, enduring the torment of an ADD brain.  It was that same younger guy who put up with an awful lot of shit that no one should really stand for.

Accommodation and tolerance for boredom are for losers.

(Hmm.  Now there’s a broad-based statement.  Feel free to rip it apart if you like.)

I’ll concede that sometimes accommodation is merely a sign of respect.  Instead of getting up and leaving the conference, misplaced respect kept many delegate asses in their seats yesterday.  Accommodation also demands that you sit and listen to Aunt Mildred’s 945th retelling of her lumbago ordeal.

Intolerance for intolerable situations and people is a sign of respect for yourself.    Also known as “selfish”.  Whatever. One of my friends from Facebook put it so eloquently yesterday:   “life is short …. We are here for a blink. A BLINK! and we’re done.”    Way too short to put up with accommodating others in their self-indulgent behaviour.

Uh oh.  Potential irony alert.    If you’re indulging yourself by not accommodating others, that makes you self-indulgent.  Maybe.   Here’s the thing (which reminds me, in a different context entirely about ignorance and apathy):  I don’t know and I don’t care.

Sorry (he said, exercising his God-given Canadian right to apologize his face off), I didn’t mean for this to be a preachy blog.  But what the hell.  It’s on my mind and so now, maybe, if you’ve read this far, it’s on yours as well.

So, rather than sit through another humdrum speech, I took a decidedly anti-Canadian stance and avoided them altogether, just so that I could sit in my hotel room and write this blog.  Just before I head out into the unbelievably hot Ottawa sun, for a 10-block walk to the downtown section of the city.

Got my shades, and my iPhone music, and my awesome green shorts and running shoes and I’m outta here.

Hope your day is just as pleasing to you as mine will be, starting……..NOW.