Creepy Rogers Guy.

I should be studying for my Optics midterm, but I have to write a really quick post about the creepy Rogers tech that visited my apartment today.
So starting yesterday, the Internet service in my apartment went down. I called Rogers last night to set up an appointment for a technician to come in. It was decided that he would come today from 2-5 pm. I told my address to the lady on the phone and she asked if there was a buzzer in the apartment building. I told her there wasn't, so she said not to worry because they would call before they arrive.
Today I came home from class around 1 to make lunch. Paul also came to visit me around 1:30. He called me from downstairs and I went to open the door for him and showed him my apartment. We were hanging out in the kitchen and I was cooking when a knock came at the door. The Rogers guy!
"Did you have a service order in here?" he asked when I opened the door.
"Yes," I replied, ecstatic that he was showing up so early. Then I stopped to think. "How did you get in?"
"Rogers has keys to any building it needs," he replied as he entered. I didn't really think much about it until Paul mentioned that it was sketchy, and how then a tech guy could just take keys to enter a building, and then use the premise of being a Rogers guy as an excuse to enter people's apartments. And nobody would really think twice because... it's a Rogers service technician! Anyway I thought it was a very creepy idea, in light of some of the recent dorm attacks at York and such.
The tech said that there was a problem that might be solved by going into a panel in the boiler room, and asked if there was a superintendent or keyholder in the building. I said I didn't think so, so he said he'd go check... on something. I don't know, he just left.
Minutes later, he came back. I asked if he found the key, and he replied, "I used my master key," as he held up his screwdriver. As he crossed the living room, Paul and I exchanged wide-eyed stares.
The Internet is all fine now, but I certainly hope nothing goes wrong with it again. Having to wait around for Rogers technicians is definitely inconvenient, but is also starting to be a little creepy.

My vacuum cleaner's gone.

This past Sunday at church, we started a series called Twisted. The topic was about Twisted Truth, and how the world will lie to us about who we are. The reason I bring this up is that I recently encountered a situation in my building that made me realize just how much I do hate it when people lie to me.
Basically what happened is that I moved some furniture into my new apartment on August 31, and then went back to Toronto for a week. When I came back to move in for good, I found that a vacuum cleaner I'd left in a hall closet was missing. I told the landlady and the former superintendent, and both claimed to not have seen it. However, as I did more nagging about the situation, the superintendent said she saw the landlady using it in one of the apartments; the landlady insisted that she superintendent must have taken it. They have their own little feud, so there's a lot of he-said-she-said stuff going on. But where we end up is that I have lost a vacuum cleaner.
I can't figure out in this situation whether I am more upset about the loss of my actual property, or that someone is clearly lying to me about what happened. Of course I am mad that I lost something that was in my apartment, but it is plausible that a miscommunication occurred in which my vacuum cleaner was assumed to be the property of previous tenants, and got thrown out. I would totally buy that story. In this situation, though, nobody will own up what happened. Personally, I am siding with the superintendents; they tried really hard to help me, and said they saw her using it, and even called her on my behalf. My landlady gets her story mixed up all the time though - first she said she never even knew anything about it, and then that she had seen it, but doesn't know what happened to it. Her latest update is that she had been looking for it all day yesterday and still couldn't find it, so she will pay me some money for it, and she is sorry and very upset about it.
I have a hard time believing anything she says. First of all, how can she have spent all day looking for it? Students who have class wouldn't even be home during the day.
So, now for the moral, because I suppose every trying situation ought to have one. This whole ordeal has been on my mind basically for the whole week. I've been calling the landlady, talking to the superintendents, wanting to knock on random units to ask about it... But I realized how easy it is to let these situations consume you. I found myself coming up with possible scenarios of how and when she may have moved my vacuum cleaner... or if she was or is just hiding it somewhere so she can keep it for herself...
I noticed that I was starting to drive myself crazy. What it boils down to is that... my vacuum cleaner is gone. I have to grieve it, accept it, and handle the consequences with my landlady (like receiving another vacuum to use and/or receiving payment for the lost one). But the vacuum cleaner is just an object, something replaceable by money. I have to remember that my landlady is a person, someone inherently valuable and created by the same Maker. It's hard to not be fixated on money when student lifestyle has trained me to pinch every penny, but people should always come before money. Loving them, treating them with dignity, empowering them.
Hopefully I can put this situation behind me soon and improve my relationship with the landlady.

Optical Prime

Today was the second day of Optometry orientation. We had to show up at 9:30 to take pictures and get lockers... which literally took about 10 minutes, and then we were all stuck with nothing to do until lunch at 12:30. A bunch of us went to Bomber for breakfast, where more socializing occurred. At lunch, we all got paired up with a Big Brother/Sister who is supposed to be our helper/guide for the year. Mine is a guy named Ernest, a nice sort of fellow who said he has lots to give me. Yay!
After lunch we did a short scavenger hunt. It was mostly for fun and time-killing; they didn't even collect the sheets after. Then we went off on our Essilor-sponsored evening. It started out with five-pin bowling (which I found out I suck at). We made it silly though with antics like bowling backwards or lying down and stuff. Afterwards we took a tour of the KW lab, and then had some dinner. It was decent too - a roll, salad, lasagna, and dessert!
We ended the night there unless people wanted to go to McMullin's for drinks (not on Essilor; maybe that's why nobody wanted to go). So I came back home to get notes and prepare for tomorrow, the first day of real class! I probably shouldn't be late, so off to bed I go!
Ohyeah, Optical Prime is the name of our class (probably). I love nerdy science jokes - optometry jokes are even better.

Einmal ist keinmal.

In one scene early on in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tomas is trying to decide what to do about Tereza, the waitress he met three weeks earlier in a small town, and with whom he had inexplicably fallen in love. Part of him wants to invite her back to Prague for good to be with him, but another part of him is holding him back. He spends some time recalling how he felt when he watched her, ill, sleeping on his bed, and wondering whether what he had felt was truly love, or merely hysteria.

And he was distressed that in a situation where a real man would instantly have known how to act, he was vacillating and therefore depriving the most beautiful moments he had ever experienced (kneeling at her bed and thinking he would not survive her death) of their meaning.
He remained annoyed with himself until he realized that not knowing what he wanted was actually quite natural.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
Was it better to be with Tereza or to remain alone?
There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No, "sketch" is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
- page 8

The expression "Einmal ist keinmal" means literally "Once is never". Its sister in the English language is "One swallow doesn't make a spring". I thought it was interesting because I had never taken that expression to have a meaning the way Kundera describes it. I take it to mean something along the lines of "Don't jump to conclusions".
An interesting expression...
Why does something not count if it happens only once? Doesn't it make that event all the more special?
However, I do identify with Tomas' over-analytical and indecisive nature. For me, life is like one big choose-your-own-adventure novel, and depending on what you choose, you might end up in an entirely different situation. (I suppose I may now find myself in a heady conversation with somebody about predestination versus free will. That is for another day.)
And though I do believe in the afterlife, I have never once considered this life to be a dress rehearsal for the one to follow. My thoughts on the afterlife are not as yet very well thought out, but I think it may suffice to say that I believe life after death to be more of a continuation of our life on earth, rather than a second go-through.
Anyway, I liked this passage because the way Kundera described Tomas' indecision and then his frustration with his own indecision reflects the way I sometimes feel. But I do not then conclude that a life lived only once is not worth living at all - no, quite the contrary. Because we have only one chance to live this life, we need to pick the grandest adventure of all, making the best of every situation, making the most of what we have. Sometimes things that happen just once are more than enough.

Lightness/weight.

I've started reading a book by Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, under Caroline's recommendation. She described it vaguely as a philosophy book, and told me that it was originally written in Czech, so the style of writing is really quite beautiful and different. She read me a few quotes from it that she had written in a notebook of hers, and I was intrigued so I decided to take her up on it.
Now just over 50 pages in, I can see why it was such a difficult novel to describe. There are two main characters in the book so far: a womanizer named Tomas and his wife Tereza. (Tomas also has a mistress named Sabina - one of many.) Not very much 'happens' in the book, but the author delves deeply into the significance of the things that do. The question that the author seeks to answer in this work is described as such:

"If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?
"The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
"Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
"Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/nonbeing. One half of the opposite he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness?
"Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative.
"Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all."

So I hope that helps to set the tone for this novel. As people I think we're all somewhere in the middle of the scale between wanting to be carefree and weightless, but also wanting to make a difference in the world and have some pull in our respective situations. For us to assign a label such as positive or negative to either side seems a daunting task.
For the record, I believe weight to be the positive pole.