99th post! On election day. Talk about Canadian pride! Get it? Gretzky!

They're all attempts. Attempts at being a man, attempts at being successful, attempts at finding happiness, at getting in shape, at being responsible, at finding a balance between dreaming and living. Everything I do is just an attempt, a trial, a run-through!

'Keep moving, keep trying,' the voices tell me, some of them my own voices. Try again doesn't seem any more convincing in situations that matter than it does on the bottom of a bottle cap or the underside of a coffee cup rim.

Seems like an epistemic gap. Am I punching a wall or cutting down a tree? Here's the process. Try, fail, try again, fail, try again, fail, but is there progress? Am i simply mashing my flesh against brick? I haven't trained my flesh for long enough, the brick will surely withstand the test of my wrath. Or, am I chopping away at the tree with my axe, and every failure is a small victory; soon the tree will topple over and I will dance! Inspiration suggests it's the latter, but Inspiration is biased, I don't trust him much. I guess I'll never know. The gap increases until my fist breaks.

Then the sun shines down on me and says to me, 'Don't worry fella, there are bigger problems out there, like the fact that you're not a man.' I lack the guts to hurt a man. I shoulda fucking punched that bouncer in his face and broke my glass over his skull. Then, when he would proceed to lay it on me with his superior expertise in offering an ass-kicking, then my crew who was right behind me could gang up on him and lay into him swiftly. A man would've done it. A man would've ruined his friend's birthday on account of having been challenged. A man would have the guts to tell someone off to their face when the news might crush them too. I'm not a man. The real question is, 'What will I do when it doesn't make sense not to fight?'

I lack conviction. Today's election day. I don't care. I wish I had the courage to be wrong about my choice. It must be nice sometimes to go to sleep thinking, 'I don't care, abortion is wrong and should be illegal,' or to say, 'Every women deserves the right to choose, even if she's misguided and using the clinic as a contraceptive.' People who can say either must get more sleep than me. For every conclusion a man with conviction comes to, I come to three; that he's right sometimes, that he's wrong sometimes, and that there must exist a balance between the preceding conclusions.

I hope all three major parties get exactly 30% of the votes, and the others share the remaining 10. That would be my choice. Three parties, three conclusions, that's my idea of a fair Canada.

We elect a party for the same reason we appoint a dictator - it's faster that way. Decisions are made faster, and the country moves forward in one direction, not three. We have 4 years to decide whether we enjoyed the majority of the leading party's past decisions, and then decide to be ruled again, either by them or the next best thing. Every now and then, they make a major screw-up and we speed up this process. That's what we're doing tomorrow, or today rather.

I've never liked multiple choice tests; it never really seems like you get to display your true knowledge in a course that way, what you've learned, what you believe. I've never liked multiple choice ballots; it never really seems like you get to display your true voice on a topic, what you agree with, what you believe in. Either way, you mark an X in the box, give the sheet to whoever's in charge, and then get a result you're probably not going to like. I wish we used our supercomputers to process the feelings and opinions of eligible voters by scanning through 30 million essays. Wouldn't that be better? Or wait, here's my timely third conclusion, what if we at least just had a choice? That would make everybody happy, those who prefer multiple choice exams and those who prefer courses with essays could stand together and hold hands in unity.

There's more, so much more on my mind and on my chest. Sadly, there's even more on my desk. So I ought to get to work at clearing that off.

It's 2006

There will be no retrospective look at 2005 from me. I spent most of 2005 reflecting on 2004 and the years preceding. 2006 will be mostly about focusing on the present. 2007 will be mostly about looking towards the future. To all my readers (both of you) and to all those randomly searching through blogs, I hope you all had a happy holiday season.