Dr. Google

I did something that no rational human should do. I checked Dr. Google for medical advice.  If you ever want to escalate something as simple as a pimple into a life threatening medical emergency, consult Dr Google.  It's not too surprising that I seem to be in constant touch with different pains and aches, I am getting to that point in my life where body parts are starting to wear out, so it's only natural that my body announces them to me. I am not a hypochondriac and I don't adopt new symptoms as I hear about them.  I am just aging. As I am prone to tell people, aging is a lot better than the only known alternative at this point and I'll take aging hands down over that one.

Anyway, I was feeling one of these new pains and was curious as to what it might be, so I typed in the symptoms I was having and it came back with 42,175 hits in 0.014 seconds. Of course, almost all of them had nothing to do with what I was looking for.  At any rate, I was searching for the most reasonable link to what I was looking for and came across an article that detailed the seven most common symptoms of a serious illness.  Naturally, I wanted to see what these symptoms might be, so I followed the link.  One of the things we always have to keep in mind about these on line articles is that for the most part, they are not written by medical or scientific professionals who are looking to enlighten us, but by wordsmiths trying to crank out as much content filler for websites as possible.

The first symptoms that were listed were fairly generic and really could be applied to anything at all. Among them were rapid weight loss, lack of energy, shortness of breath and anemia, but it was the seventh symptom that really stood out for me. I am sure they were saving the best for last. That of course, was having no symptoms at all.  A short statement that I am sure sent paranoid hypochondriacs into a full blown panic attack. Having no symptoms might indicate you have this very serious illness. Thank you very much, internet.

I guess it is only natural that as one ages, there is a tendency to try to stretch your time out as long as possible. When I was younger, off in the distance I could always see a shape, but it was really just a shape with no discernible features. Now that figure is coming into focus a bit more and I can definitely make out  a hooded figure with a scythe slowly moving my way.  Anything I can do to impede that progress is fair game.

To that end, I have been looking after myself far better than I ever did when I was younger. It would be safe to say that I am far healthier now than I was in my 40's. My diet has improved, I exercise regularly and all those wonderfully enjoyable habits I once had are now as faded as my eye sight.  It is not that all of these efforts don't come with some sort of cost.  Many of the aches and pains that initiated the Dr Google search in the first place are a result of something I pushed too hard to do.  I have been running for many years now, but decided that maybe I should also add some weight training to my regime to firm up my muscle mass and strengthen my core. From what I understand, this would be beneficial to my body as a whole.  I did find a 6 week routine to follow and have been fairly successful keeping up with it.  However, I might have been more successful if I found a program that was titled more like, "A 6 Week Program for 60 Year Old Men, Who Misguidedly Think They Are Still 20".  I say this because in the midst of a mighty push, I heard and felt a "pop" in my chest.  Naturally, the first thing that came into my mind was the movie, "Alien". Anything to do with chest popping can only be related to aliens making a messy chest exit and wreaking havoc. I quickly pulled up my T-shirt, half expecting to see a head sticking out of my chest, but only saw my own sorry chest and stomach. No aliens, just a few weeks of rest and the elimination of this little exercise from my routine.

Did I learn from my trying to self-diagnose on the internet? No, definitely not.  Almost every website is filled with new studies which say butter/sugar/red meat/alcohol/salt is good/bad/indifferent to your overall well-being and to stop/continue/moderate the use of it. I think the only thing we can do is take it all with a grain of salt or is that bad for you too?

 Last week I did stumble upon a paper concerning a thing called the Exploding Head Syndrome. After reading the article, I found out that I am among the 13% of the population who have it.  What really makes this a fun diagnosis to tell people is they have a tendency to stare at you for the rest of the night. Mostly, I am sure, envisioning a real Stephen King kind of outcome. However, as to the nature of the syndrome, I'll leave that to you and Dr Google to find out.

Great Expectations

If you lived your life through expectations, there is no doubt, things would never work out the way you expected it to. Life doesn't follow a path as if guided by the light of inner self determination and predestination, no matter what those late night ads on TV proclaim. Life truly is a road full of potholes, diversions and detours, some good, some wonderful and some very, very bad. It is how we deal with those roadblocks that truly define us.

But as misleading as expectations can be, our lives are inextricably tied to them. How many times have we uttered the phrase, "Well, that was not as bad as I expected.", or heard, "I expected more out of you." (I got that one a lot).  Reaching back to my school days of reading Dickens, we found that Pip was dealt repeated blows to his plans and ultimately realized that the life of a gentleman was really not that great of an expectation.  There is probably a lesson in that for all of us. I have reached out and failed a few times at various things, but as some of those aforementioned late night huskers claim; failing to reach out is failure in itself. Now please send me $24.95 in two easy payments and if you act now I'll send you a free set of steak knives.

As a child your life is seemingly a series of expectations, perhaps because there is nothing in the past to guide you along. Among them are the expectations that you will be loved and cared for, that all adults are tall, serious and old and the year is divided into two important dates; your birthday and Christmas.

Of course the reverse is also very true. As a parent, you don't know what to expect. You and your spouses' life will forever be divided between two periods; life before children and life after children.  Will it be "Married With Children" or "Ozzie and Harriett"? On second thought, "Ozzie and Harriett" is a pretty scary premise as well. "Cosby?" Oops, no. Not a good example either. But, you get my drift, whatever your life was as you knew it, it would be forever changed.

We all have expectations for ourselves and our children. As long as expectations do not devolve into disappointment, life can be, and probably is, a series of unmeet or unfulfilled expectations. There is always the sunny horizon of 'maybe' and what tomorrow might bring. Give me optimism over disappointment any time.

Of course, once you have passed through the firestorm of child rearing, the reality of becoming a grandparent smacks you in the face.  I always thought that the label of Grampa, Grandad or the ever exquisite Grandfather, would make me instantly older, greyer than the white hair I already have and somehow wiser beyond reason. My Dad, in his role as a grandparent, would always be able to string together words that would make even an infant sit back and think, 'Hmm. Now that is an interesting conceptualization of the human condition, especially from the perspective of an infant, such as I am, who cannot verbalize beyond screaming, crying and the odd gurgle or two.'

None of that happened to me, especially the wise part. My bon mots usually take the form of, "Buttons... make sound!"  But yet, it is one of the most unexpected of realities.  It really is true that being a grandparent is wonderful, yielding and bringing forth yet another life changing phase. Not only because you get to hold and gaze into the eyes of another iteration of your own genetic pool. You get see into the eyes of a new soul which reflects wonderment, trust and love.  But perhaps the most precious aspect of being a grandparent is that the child goes home with the parent at the end of the day. All the pleasures and none of the pitfalls. You can have a baby and still have sleep.

Expectations are not only present in family dynamics. They pop up in almost every facet of existence, from work to entertainment. Comedy itself,  creates a narrative that almost always ends with the unexpected. The telling of a joke sets the premise. The punch line, to be good,  has to be what was not expected. The holy trinity of comedy to me as a child were Abbott and Costello, Red Skeleton and Looney Tunes. I now know that basing your outlook on life on the comedic antics of a fat guy, a skinny guy, a clown and some animated anthropomorphic animals provides the basis for a pretty strange sense of humour, let alone what to expect out of life.

When I first heard the famous baseball sketch "Who's On First", it was a series of totally unexpected answers to simple everyday questions.  With every advancing step forward the circle of questioning fell back to the beginning. To this day, a half a century after first hearing it,  I cannot resist cracking a smile when I think about it.

Some of the most memorable movies provided that twist at the end to totally uproot our expectation of what would occur. Psycho, The Sixth Sense, Planet of the Apes and the Usual Suspects are some of the films that caught us all off guard, causing screams of 'whaaaaaat' to be bandied about movie theatres across the world. Upended expectations are the reason why these films still talked about today.

Like pulling a rabbit out of a top hat or a coin out of an ear, it is sometimes magical to watch the faces of people met by the unexpected. Surprise followed by befuddlement followed by wonderment.

Almost like life itself.

IMHO

Opinions and perceptions are the way many people colour the world we live in. How a person perceives events, people or attitudes profoundly affects their lives. Being opinionated, however, only seems to raise hackles in all those around them, but never in themselves. Most people live comfortably in their opinions. When it comes to the dangers of offering up an uninvited opinion, the only parallel I can draw is going for a leisurely stroll in a minefield while blind-folded. 

To borrow a phrase, opinions are like a nose (or fill in your choice of body parts).... everyone has one.  Quite often they have more than one and in general, people are not shy about disseminating them to anyone who wants to hear them. Sadly enough, they are also imparted to those who don't want to hear them. Many a peaceful family get together have been disrupted with a drunken opinionated rant of one kind or another.

Opinions do not have to be fact based; in fact they rarely are. They can be uninformed, uneducated, unbelievable or unwavering, but yet they are still put out on display and held up as a shiny example. On the other hand, opinions can be well thought out, unimpinged by emotional or moral convictions, well balanced and reasonable in logic for all. Of course, these opinions are about as common as fairy dust.

Even the internet has its IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) which finds its way onto newspaper comment boards and newsgroups. It appears to me that by just prefacing their comments with this acronym it allows the poster a carte blanche opportunity to opine about anything at all. If  you have read any of these, there is rarely anything humble about their opinions.

Historically, Kingston certainly has had a fair amount of raging public opinion. When our present day City Hall was constructed in the 1840's, the general opinion of the day was that it was a little too grand and a lot too expensive to build for such a small town. It was felt that the tax burden would be too much for future generations to handle. Does that sound at all familiar?

It was a huge gamble thinking that by erecting such a grandiose building that the government would decide to stay put and keep the capital here. As we all know, it was decided that Kingston was far too small, not cosmopolitan enough and didn't offer enough amenities for those political folks and off the capital went. Still, in hindsight, imagining Kingston without City Hall and its cupola would be like imagining Paris without the Eiffel Tower. If opinion would have ruled the day and the naysayers won out, then that limestone edifice might never have been constructed.

The list of conflicting opinions on past and present local issues goes on and on.... the Teron Project, Block D, the Hendon Hole, the location of the KRock Centre, the merging of high schools KCVI and QECVI, the third crossing,  right down to today's opposing opinions on high-rises in the centre core of Kingston. We never seem to be running short of expressing conflicting opinions in this town.

Worldwide events, specifically the Brexit Referendum is a perfect example of asking for public opinion, getting it and then asking what the hell were they thinking.  There are historic reasons why the general public is often referred to as the "great unwashed".  Referendums are a wonderful way for the elected politicians to be absolved of any controversial subject and declare that, "the public has spoken". Forgive me, but I thought that was the general underlying principle of elections. We elect people to make informed, educated decisions that affect our future. If every time an important decision is needed to be made and the people we elect to make decisions for us throw it back at us (and at considerable expense) then what is the whole purpose of electing these people in the first place? 

Here in Canada, do we really need the public's input by holding a referendum on changing the electoral process? I would bet the majority of Canadians don't understand or care about the entire process of today's system, let alone giving them two or three other options to chose from.  Just getting them to vote in the first place is a big enough challenge. In the case of the United Kingdom, we have to remember this is the same group of people who voted to name the Arctic research ship, "Boaty McBoatyface".  You leave the economic future of your country in these hands?

A glance south of the border only reinforces where public opinion will get you. While the Democrats have followed along on a predictable path where general opinion seems to have fallen in line with expectations of the party, the Republicans have been asking the same question as the Brits. What the hell were they thinking? The right has spoken and it seems to be in a language that the G.O.P. hasn't translated yet.

Where does this all lead? Everyone is entitled to their opinion just as everyone is free to express their opinion. As George H.W. Bush once said, "I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them". Well, if the past leader of the most powerful nation in the world can't agree with his own opinions, then where does that leave the rest of us? 

Of course you must take note, this is only IMHO.