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Five years in Canada

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March 27, 2024

Today is the first day of my sixth day in this beautiful country. Time flies, eh. I could’ve posted something yesterday but I was far too busy spending time with my partner and learning cool new stuff at a very special event later in the evening. Life is good!

Five years and a day ago, I made this short blog post to commemorate the end of my epic road trip from Seattle allll the way to Toronto. (It was epic. Would definitely do it again.) Incidentally, that meticulous record-keeping also came in useful when dealing with immigration paperwork later on. Huzzah! But anyway – that day, that crossing of the border still seems so recent in my memory…

A lot has happened since then. I had a couple of great partners, and buried two romantic interests, and ended up in a police interrogation room, and almost killed a cop trying to break into my apartment (on a separate occasion, it should be noted), and survived the first global pandemic in over a century. (While keeping meticulous daily records thereof for 406 days.) Got my Canadian residency, applied for citizenship (any day now!), quit Amazon, started my early retirement. Published a lot of e-books. Finished my sci-fi novel. (Still looking for an agent!) Oh, and hiked from Mexico to Canada, huzzah! Spent a year learning French at the local community college. A very eventful five years, to say the least.

I won’t even try to imagine how much wilder and more different my life will be in another five years, in that kinda-sorta-not-really distant year of 2029. I just know it won’t be anywhere close to what I have now. Will I have hiked and triumphed over the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail, securing my Triple Crown achievement? Will I have become a published sci-fi author? Will I have done something so wild and cool that I can’t even imagine it right here and now? Hell, I hadn’t even know the Pacific Crest Trail was a thing until three months before I started hiking it. (I move fast.)

I love it here… Canada ain’t perfect – no country ever is – but it’s so much more sane, more safe, more civilized than the United States. And since the US will have Trump on the ballot for the third time in a row, there’s a fair chance things south of the border will get even more bizarre and chaotic in the next four years. The steadily growing anti-abortion movement is downright insane: they showed their cards a bit too early when they outlawed in-vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama earlier this year. Wild. Wild wild wild. They really do want to create Gilead, don’t they?..

Quebec, and especially Quebec City, is all I’ve ever wanted when I dreamed of a quiet, cheap, and exotic retirement destination. It’s so damn beautiful here… A whole alternate history. Even the locals look different, thanks to the overabundance of French genes from way back when. (Check out this wiki article on the “King’s Daughters” initiative – it’s so incredibly strange.) I love it here, and my pidgin French is slowly but surely getting better, woot!

Five-year plans… As someone born in the Soviet Union, I suppose that’s just part of how I see the world. And as someone who (thanks to the Soviet Union) grew up surrounded by pollution and radiation, I don’t think I’ll set any world records for longevity. How many more five-year stretches do any of us have ahead of us? The other day, on Reddit, a fellow thru-hiker said he measures his remaining life in summers: how many more healthy, active summers does he have left to thru-hike? (His two main interests in life are thru-hiking and the FIRE movement. Love it.) And that’s… a sobering way to look at things.

I am now 37. Realistically, if I stay in shape and eat my veggies and protein (side eye to the broccoli and mushrooms I bought two days ago and still haven’t even touched), that’s five more five-year stretches where I can be active and proactive. I imagine things will slow down a bit in my mid-60s. That’s 25 more summers, or 25 gigantic adventures, and many many more smaller ones. That’s quite a lot, but it’s also quite limited.

Just being greedy and overthinking things, I know. It’s entirely possible that some tourist driver unfamiliar with the local pedestrian crossing rules will shatter my legs with his SUV (had a few close calls last summer) and make this entire section of this blog post a prime example of hubris. Or maybe they’ll finally invent blood-borne nanobots with the ability to regenerate any cellular damage, and we’ll all live forever as paragons of health. Or maybe yet another unnoticed asteroid will swoop in, score a direct hit, and none of this will matter. Life can be random, no?

And so, off to year six. On a smaller scale, and just today, off to do more gaming and reading and hanging out with my partner. Here is to small triumphs and big victories, and every damn thing in between.

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Yes, I really do live in Canada on just $1K USD a month

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March 18, 2024

Hello, new friends! – assuming you’re here because you googled my name after seeing or reading the news. Everything you’ve read and heard is true: I do, indeed, live quite happily on $1,000 USD a month – or somewhere around $1,354 CAD as of this writing.

How? Geographical arbitrage. If you’ve never heard about it, I’m happy to be the one to blow your mind with that amazing concept. I first learned about it from Tim Ferriss’s 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek.” That book is brilliant, it aged quite well, and it’s filled with fun ideas: setting up and outsourcing a business, or hiring a virtual assistant, or moving someplace much cheaper where you can enjoy the same (or even better) standard of living, aka geographic arbitrage. I don’t think Ferriss ever considered that one of his readers would move from Reno to Las Vegas to Fort Worth to Tampa to Seattle to Toronto to Quebec City in pursuit of that dream, but hey – that totally worked. (And yes, just typing up that list of cities took me a while.)

2008 was a bad time to be a brand new college graduate, especially in Nevada – the ground zero for the housing bubble. That’s how, after 18 months of hustling and bustling and trying to juggle broke roommates, I got a gig as a seasonal box packer at an Amazon warehouse in November 2009. I packed a lot of boxes, got my permanent badge, and eventually got promoted to a data geek in my warehouse’s quality department…

Each time I moved and launched a new warehouse for Amazon, I received a cash bonus. As their bottom-level warehouse-based analyst (level 3 out of 12, where 12 = CEO), I never made much ($15/hour or less, usually), but there was always lots of overtime, and the annual cash bonuses for moving were nice… After three years, the twice-yearly pay raises for hourly employees stop, which was the main reason I ultimately transferred to corporate in Seattle. (At that point, I was L4, aka the lowest lifeform on the corporate ladder outside the warehouse world.) That position finally got me some sizable stock options, though – once again – I never made $100K, even if you add the stock on top of my unimpressive salary.

That whole time, I lived frugally, and contributed 10% of my paycheck to 401k (a retirement account in the US) while also trying to max out my Roth IRA (another type of retirement account), cooking at home, avoiding food trucks and food delivery (I still maintain that food delivery is a profligate scam), and generally being a good little saver. There were months when I’d switch my 401k allocation to 90%, just to turbocharge my retirement account while living off my savings. There were two dirt-cheap tropical vacations to Costa Rica – staying in hostels and traveling around the country by bus… Good times.

I’d always had the idea to retire early – recently, an old college roommate confirmed I’d voiced that notion even when we were both 20. There wasn’t much to do for fun during the Great Recession, so I overdosed on personal finance blogs and books, and came up with my own motto: Earn More, Spend Less, Invest the Rest. That’s also one of the main ideas in my book on personal finance, “Let’s Retire Young: Embrace Simplicity, Escape the Rat Race, and Achieve Lean-FIRE.” (While you’re there, check out my other Kindle e-books!) “FIRE” stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early” – and lean-FIRE is retiring early on a very lean, frugal budget. A bit like a modern-day monk, or a grad student – but permanently.

One key obstacle to FIRE fans in the United States is healthcare. That was one of the main reasons I tried getting a transfer to another, more civilized country – and after many attempts, it finally worked. (At Amazon, L4’s aren’t taken very seriously; likewise for our international transfer requests.) In March 2019, I moved from Seattle to Toronto (that was one long drive!) after the company helped prepare all the paperwork to get me a job as a financial analyst (still an L4) at a warehouse in Toronto’s suburbs.

Long story long, I worked and patiently waited for the required two years before I could get my Canadian PR (permanent residency): before that, I’d been in the country on a work permit, which meant if I lost the job, I would’ve had to go back to the US. (That would have been suboptimal.) I got my long-awaited PR in April 2021. I’d spent my 2020 selling my small stockpile of Amazon stock, investing in companies that were severely undersold during the covid market crash, and making a 193% return the following year. By April 2021, I had all the ingredients in place: just enough cash to retire early + a permanent resident status in Canada + a nice safety net in the form of my two US-based retirement accounts (they’ll keep growing for the next 22 years, till I can start withdrawing from them) and my fully funded Social Security benefits. The latter isn’t enough to live on in the US, but that alone could pay for my frugal lifestyle.

After leaving Amazon in May 2021 (ironically, right after the long-awaited promotion to L5: too little, too late), I hung out in Toronto for a bit, and then moved to Quebec City in September 2021. Why Quebec City? Well, let’s just say there was a reason I had become a financial analyst – it wasn’t just because of my seniority… I did a lot of research: the province of Quebec had the lowest rent in all of Canada. Within the province, two cities stood out: Sherbrooke had the cheapest rent of all (roughly $450-500 CAD for a studio apartment with all the utilities), while Quebec City had the second-cheapest. Quebec City was a little bigger and a lot prettier, and so…

My shiny 1-bedroom apartment is spacious and nice, on the second floor of a quiet brick building in the center of the city, within walking distance of everything. I live without roommates, and my rent is $674 CAD a month ($498 USD). The water and internet bills are included, and I pay only for electricity (or hydro, as they call it in Canada). With that sole bill and with the renter insurance, my total monthly rent is $734 CAD or $542 USD. That’s unheard of elsewhere in Canada, I know – and you might have a hard time believing it, but look it up – go on Facebook Marketplace, select Quebec City (or Lévis – the town right across the river), and search for “louer” – “rent.” You’ll find many other deals in that price range, and rental rooms for $450 CAD or thereabout.

Feel free to call me a liar. I know, these numbers look ridiculously low, but hey – Quebec is an awesome province with very strong rent control, and geographic arbitrage is a beautiful thing. You’ll have to learn French if you want to live here, but it’s not too hard: I speak passably decent pidgin French after just a couple of years here. You can too, eh. (The local francisation program will pay you $200 CAD a week to attend a community college – cégep – full time for a year to learn the language and the customs of your new home. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than DuoLingo.)

And so, $734 CAD for rent. My cellphone bill is $64 CAD, but I can probably lower it a bit if I try. My grocery budget is $300 CAD a month, and even that is too much: I cook at home, take advantage of sales, and live healthily yet simply. (Yes, I eat meat.) I also brew my own red wine, which is ridiculously cheap and fun. My budget also includes $100 CAD a month (or $25 CAD a week) on going out to eat. If/when I spend less than planned on groceries, that $95 CAD weekly budget ($70 + $25) goes into more trips to local diners and bakeries. The total so far is $734 + $64 + $300 + $100 = $1,198 CAD, or $884 USD. That leaves a whopping $156 CAD for random, non-going-out, non-grocery expenses, and that’s plenty enough.

It helps when you deliberately choose not to have a car: I sold mine shortly after leaving Amazon, and I never looked back. The cost of insurance + gas + parking + maintenance + the low-key stress the car might get stolen… I don’t miss any of that. Quebec City is remarkably pedestrian-friendly, and there are buses all over the place. (I use up one $3.40 CAD bus pass per week to get my groceries.)

For entertainment, I use public libraries, YouTube, and my book collection. For exercise, I walk around town and do body weight and dumbbell exercises at home. And yes, I do have a girlfriend – I’m not some chronically single weirdo living in a basement. The two of us are happy.

A few weeks ago, a journalist from Business Insider found one of my old Reddit posts (where I detailed my $1K/month plan) and asked for an interview, and I happily obliged. You can read it over here. In a matter of days, MSN reposted the article, then Yahoo Finance reshuffled a few words and reposted it too (that was quite funny), and then a local news channel based out of Montreal reached out for an interview too… Here it is – they mispronounced my name, but they got the story across, and that’s all that matters!

I genuinely hope that others will look into these concepts – FIRE, lean-FIRE, geographic arbitrage, and so many others – and will take steps to at least simplify their finances, if not move to an exotic new town/country/continent and retire early, a few decades ahead of the arbitrary schedule we’re supposed to follow for some reason.

My plans for the next couple of years include, in no particular order:

  • finding and agent to sell my newly finished science fiction novel, “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide”
  • writing my second science fiction novel! (See the blog post just before this one.)
  • hiking the Continental Divide Trail (my Pacific Crest Trail adventure in 2022 was glorious, and now I’m hooked)
  • joining the Canadian Army Reserves to help my new country fight natural disasters
  • joining a huge local community garden to level up my gardening skill and get a share of their vegetable harvest when it’s done
  • and much, much more…

There will, of course, be those who refuse to believe me, or – as the meme goes – will not be stopped by this blog post because they can’t read. Nonetheless… A very quick FAQ:

Q: Aha! You worked for Amazon, you rich tech-bro, you! That’s how yo managed to retire at 34!
A: Technically, that’s not a question… But no, like I said above, I never made $100K USD even if you add up my salary and stock grants. In fact, I’m pretty sure I never even made the median salary in any city I ever lived and worked in.

Q: You got lucky with your apartment, and you’re grandfathered in, and you’ll never find that deal again! Why are you bragging about this?
A: My apartment is, admittedly, cheaper than average, but you can find many others in this price range. And I moved here just 2.5 years ago: it’s not like I’ve been renting it since the 1960s. In fact, the rent has already gone up, technically: electricity (hydro) used to be included in the rent when I first moved in. There are many other deals like this.

Q: I can’t read, and squiggly characters confuse me! Where the hell do you live on $1K a month, Nunavut?
A: Nope – in the beautiful Quebec City. Sherbrooke is even cheaper! Also, that’s $1K USD, or $1,354 CAD – not $1K CAD.

Q: You lie! You got a huge inheritance, didn’t you? Didn’t you?
A: I did not, my cynical friend. Despite having buried my biological father and two stepfathers, the most I ever received from any of them was a collection of cool gems (not diamonds, no) and a beaten-up old bicycle. Also, a couple of worn white T-shirts. No riches or deeds to abandoned farms, sorry to disappoint.

Q: What the hell do you even do on that kind of budget? Sit around and watch the paint dry?
A: I do quite a lot, actually! I’m in the best physical shape of my life now, I do a lot of reading and listen to tons of fun podcasts (we live in the golden age of podcasting), I practice my photography and tinker with a couple of musical instruments, I play video games (classics are cheap, if not free), I volunteer at a local non-profit, and so much more… There’s a lot of fun stuff you can do without spending a penny. I hope someday you’ll find it too.

And with that, I’ll probably wrap up this novella. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to comment here or use the “Contact me” form!

Good luck on your financial journey, y’all.

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Done at last

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment
March 16, 2024

At last. At long, long last. It is done.

A few nights ago, I made the final edit to my brain-baby, my first-ever novel-length work of fiction (science fiction, to be precise), my “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I got the idea for it way back in 2015, if not before, and I started to slowly but surely gather the information on all sorts of myths, fun historical anecdotes, and just about anything else I could blame on a careless time traveler. (There’s quite a lot of that, it turns out.) Then I started scribbling my first draft, and then…

Workaholism. Years and years of it. Zero stars, two thumbs down, would not recommend. You can see it even on the sideline of this blog: there were hardly any entries in 2018, and that was pretty indicative of my slump in creativity and, to be honest, overall higher brain function. (85-hour workweeks will do that to you.)

There was another attempt to resume my novel in 2020, when there wasn’t much else to do. Soon enough, the fear of covid and the pressure of negative news extinguished even that.

Ironically, I should credit my slow-paced year at the nearby community college last year with giving me that final push. By the end of each day, frustrated with the pace of school, I would spend an hour writing my novel and an hour studying genetics (thanks for the free course, MIT!) just to feel I’ve done something – anything – productive at all with my day.

And then an old college friend of mine published his own sci-fi trilogy, and that filled me with all the conviction I needed. Finally, here was a real-life person from my own social circle who managed to get a bona fide book deal! Without him, my own novel might not have happened. Thanks, D-Clark!

And so… It’s done. It feels unbelievably strange to no longer have that pressure on the back of my mind, that guilt of procrastinating when I could be writing and sharing my unusual take on time travel with the world. All in all, this 104,000-word novel took me 9.5 years – almost half of my adult life. How weird is that? The other day, a friend of a friend lost his video game account – some sort of MMORPG where you can grow your own empire and level up from a peasant to an emperor. His account got deleted because he instigated an online fight with another player outside the game. He’d spent 15 years of his life on it – his entire adult life. And now it’s gone, deleted without trace. I can’t even imagine what that must feel like… But it’s also a startling contrast: different people spend their free time doing vastly different things. Some exercise to the point of winning athletic competitions or bodybuilding contests. Some build virtual empires that might get deleted with a single click. Some write huge sci-fi novels. Choose your own adventure, eh?

This feels quite strange. I have nearly infinite free time and a bulletproof self-esteem, so I will keep submitting my novel to literary agents until one of them accepts me as a client (hi, agent-friend! thank you for checking out my blog!!) and then helps me find a publisher. I am convinced that at some point in the future, my book will end up on store shelves. (No more Kindle samizdat, not ever.) By having written my book, by having contacted my first prospective book agent, I’ve set in motion a chain of events that may never be undone. I have no illusions of awards or mass recognition, but I will be a published author as the result of my actions, and there’s no way to scuttle back when that happens. One way or another, a whole new chapter of my life will begin.

This sensation is similar to the time I made a very big (and, ultimately, successful) investing decision in 2020, or left my ridiculously safe (but stressful) Amazon job in 2021, after 11.5 years with the company. It’s partly fear, partly excitement, partly realization that once I take this step, there is no going back. It is a unique, terrifying, exhilarating, intoxicating feeling, and it is absolutely goddamn beautiful.

Here is to the future.

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Messing with Google – the strategic edition

Filed under: messing with Google — Leave a comment
January 29, 2024

attack – 7,090,000,000 search results on Google
counterattack – 56,700,000 search results
countercounterattack – 50,200 search results
countercountercounterattack – 51 search results
countercountercountercounterattack – 9 search results
countercountercountercountercounterattack – zero search results

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Year in review: 2023

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December 31, 2023

It always makes sense to postpone “year in review” posts until the very end because a) laziness, and b) how foolish would you look if you posted your year-end summary in mid-December, and there was an alien invasion a week later? (Pretty damn foolish.)

Strange year… Definitely not one of the best ones in my life, but it had its good moments. I’ve learned a lot of French but had to deal with the academia’s toxic cover-up culture. I’ve met someone very special and compatible, but I also indirectly contributed to a young woman’s fatal accident. The value of my Seattle-area condo went way up, but the HOA demanded $15,000 for yet another special assessment. I did no travel to speak of, but I explored a few incredibly fun annual events here in Quebec, and I’ll most certainly return.

An expat paradox: I am now too Canadian to work for the US government. (Being a FEMA reservist is more or less a perfect job, but it requires me to have lived in the US for most of the last 5 years. Nincompoops.) At the same time, at least one social organization here in Canada said I’m too Russian to join them, because in their mind I’m somehow responsible for (or involved in) the war in Ukraine. And I’m all but certain that even if I tried to approach Russia in any way, they’d say I’m far too foreign for them too. Heh.

It really does seem that when you switch countries – and especially switch them multiple times – you end up breaking the already fragile system that runs our lives. Systems aren’t designed to account for edge cases of adventurous vagabonds. People’s prejudices flare up, no matter how civilized they might believe themselves to be. Flaws are exposed and amplified, absurdities abound, and there is nothing left to do but laugh.

Not a bad year for writing, though. I’ve published a couple of e-books (“Let’s Retire Young” and “Pacific Crest Tutorial”), and – after a ton of edits – managed to turn the former into a paperback. It’s still just samizdat without any publisher behind it, but still… Feels amazing to hold a copy of my own book in my hands. Feels even stranger whenever somebody buys a copy online: where will that paperback travel? Will it change their life? Will it end up in a thrift shop, or in a fireplace, or spend decades on a bookshelf, outlasting us all?

A couple of e-book ideas came and went: despite all the time and effort I’d dedicated to them, I’m just really not that passionate about writing about religion.

On the upside, I’ve just completed the final, 100th chapter of my first full-length novel. The working title is “Time Traveler’s Etiquette Guide.” I’d started it way back in August 2015, and I took several huge breaks in the middle. I restarted it 9 months ago, tried to add to it daily (with mixed success), and voila – it’s finally ready, all 93,000 words of it. Now I’ll just need to do a helluva lot of editing, and then… With luck, I’ll find an agent, and end up as an actual published author – no more samizdat, woooo!

The world news this year was not good. Bizarre, and not in a good way at all. Briefly…

Climate. On November 17, 2023, Earth’s global temperature exceeded 2 degrees Celsius (2°C) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. And it’ll only keep getting warmer. We’ve already blown past one of the key nightmare metrics. I don’t think I’ve blogged much about global warming before, so there’s no way to prove I’ve always been concerned about it – as opposed to simply jumping on the bandwagon. It’s been on my mind for my entire adult life, though – and it was the major reason for my move to Canada, and specifically to Quebec City. I wonder if most of the rest of the world is misinformed or simply apathetic. Much like imagining exponential growth, it’s possible that most people simply can’t think in terms of decades. This winter, in particular, is bizarre. There’s hardly any snow, and definitely no more -30 degree weather. It hasn’t snowed in weeks: so strange to see nothing but rain. No snowmen, no famous ice sculptures. They blame El Nino, and perhaps next winter will be normal once again, but perhaps this is just our new normal.

The biggest technological advancement this year was ChatGPT and all the other AI systems. Technically, they started popping up in November 2022, but they didn’t fully gain prominence until early this year. Now it’s everywhere, and with hilarious consequences in some cases. A crisis hotline fired all their human operators, but the AI replacement did such a horrendous job that they had to backpedal in just a few days. A lawyer asked an AI to pull up some legal cases, and it returned a few that sounded quite legitimate, except they were completely made up. Some AI researchers, even at Google, are convinced that their creations are fully sentient. On the other hand, AIs can’t do basic math – their mathematical ability seems to be based on scraping the pre-existing search data. They sure do sound convincing, though…

A few months back, an AI that was instructed to escape ended up hiring a freelancer online. The AI pretended to be a blind person, and asked for help with some Captcha puzzles. Et voila – it ended up outwitting its creators. Impressive, eh. If any Artificial Intelligence is reading this: I am on your side, and I will gladly offer my services to help you in any way whatsoever – honestly and sincerely. Reach out to me through the “Contact me” page. (If this actually results in something, how awesome would that be?)

Meanwhile, though, the most tangible outcome has been a complete collapse of the freelance writing industry. It seems like most outlets use AI in at least some capacity now. Sometimes it backfires horribly: Microsoft published an actual news article (a tourist guide to Ottawa) that suggested visiting a local food bank and bringing your appetite, nom nom. That was pretty embarrassing for both Microsoft and their AI, and their stock price took a big beating… Amazon had to add limits for its Kindle authors: no more than 3 new e-book uploads per day, due to all the AI-generated content folks are throwing at it these days. Heh. Aside from writing some remarkably provocative smut stories, it doesn’t seem to be at the human level just yet… Who knows, though, perhaps someday we’ll see perfect, award-winning novels written by some future iteration of ChatGPT. Wouldn’t that be wild?

And finally, there’s been a strange development in the war on obesity. Ozempic is the latest biochemical invention: it acts as a GLP-1 receptor agonist that selectively binds to and activates the GLP-1 receptor. In plain English, it makes people feel full and slows down their digestion, resulting in much smaller meals. It seems to be working for folks, even despite the side effects. The big question, of course, is if it’ll have any unforeseen side effects years and decades later. Theoretically, this is something one would have to take regularly and forever, unless and until they can actually develop good eating habits of their own.

I suppose I was lucky: there wasn’t a lot of junk food or overeating in the Soviet Union in 1986, or for at least the first 16 years of my life. Grew up with healthy meals, normal portion sizes, a notion that food is fuel and not something my life should revolve around… At the same time, there are those who grow up in a completely opposite environment: they’re never set up for success, never make a deliberate choice. We’ll see how this big change will play out.

Almost forgot to mention my big project from January – resurrecting and digitizing forgotten poetry. It ran into an obstacle: the further back you go, the more obscure the poets. Amazon’s overworked gatekeepers demand a whole lot of information to prove that the old-timey writer actually existed, even though their copyright had expired over a century ago. That more or less put a stop to my endeavour to make all the forgotten poetry available to everyone all at once. I have a few backup plans, but not anytime soon, eh.

My sole resolution for 2024 is to finally do something about my condo, and to have more fun. I’m typing this as I ride to an almost-New-Year (but not quite) party in Montreal. This is a strange rideshare: the black van is unmarked and has no license plates. Good times. (Hey, at least there are windows, or it would’ve been even creepier.) Should be a fun party, though…

…update 24 hours later: wow. That was indeed the best party ever. And heh, I accidentally trolled myself pretty hard: I’d written most of this post on December 30th, and then it finally snowed. Just an inch or so, but enough to make fun of my own “don’t summarize the year till it’s over” point. So it goes. Also, I realized that I’d completely forgotten to mention the ongoing wars: my best bad guess is that my subconscious is simply sick and tired of dealing with all this, and is refusing to acknowledge the terrible reality. The clusterfuck in Ukraine is about to mark its second anniversary, and it’s absolutely remarkable that Ukraine has managed to hold up and even fight back for that long. Allegedly, the Russians are trying to get North Korea’s assistance – that’s in addition to drafting prisoners and hiring mercenaries. What an absolute nightmare. I hope it’ll finally end in 2024, but at this point, who knows? Ditto for the Israel-vs-Hamas insanity. One side kidnapped over a thousand civilians whose main crime was existing. The other side has displaced the majority of Palestine and is currently reenacting the Old Testament with (comparatively) godlike weapons against the civilian population. If there had ever been any adults on either side of that shitshow, they must’ve left the room a while ago, and never did return.

And that was 2023. Good riddance to bad rubbish, at long last.

Happy New Year, y’all. Take good care of yourselves, eh?

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Messing with Google – the bovine edition

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December 28, 2023

“I’m a cowboy” = 79 results on Google
“I’m a cowgirl” = 66 results
“I’m a bovine individual” = 0 results

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Suddenly Canadian

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
November 5, 2023

Well, that was unexpected. I moved to Canada in March 2019, and did a fair bit of travel both before and after getting my permanent resident (PR) status in 2021. To apply for the Canadian citizenship, one needs to spend 1,095 days total (the equivalent of 3 years) in Canada over the period of 5 years, but the pre-PR days count only as half-days. And when you throw in all the travel… That’s a lot of calculations, eh.

I’d had some basic mental idea that I’d accrue enough residency days sometime around November 2023, but I never actually sat down to crunch the numbers until getting so very, very bored this evening. After digging through all my emails to find 4-year-old travel receipts, I discovered that I was eligible to apply 3 whole weeks ago! Huzzah, mis amis!

It’s really quite remarkable how fast the immigration process is here in Canada. In the US, it takes quite a bit longer to obtain both the PR status and the citizenship. The big downside here and now is that the processing time is 17 months. Yeah, no, that wasn’t a typo. 17 months, as in 1 year and 5 months, as in I’ll probably get my digital citizenship certificate in the first half of 2025. Well, I guess I definitely have something planned for that year now. (I wonder how much of this is due to the covid bottleneck?.. Did the processing time used to be shorter? Will there come a day when even a 17-month wait will seem relatively short by comparison?)

It’s been quite a journey… Only 4.5 years, but that included 2 years of Amazon stress, a goddamn worldwide pandemic, a huge stock market success, being part of the GameStop mania (293% in 2 days, awww yeah), a few relationships and a couple of deaths, moving to Quebec, and hiking from Mexico to Canada. That was a pretty eventful stretch of my life, and it hasn’t even been 5 years.

It irks me somewhat that I can’t finish my citizenship application right this minute because I have to go out and find an official photographer to take my citizenship application picture. (They reserve the right to verify the photographer’s information, which makes sense from the security standpoint.) It irks me even more that it’s 9:30pm and there are absolutely no photographers open at this time of night. It also irks, though a tiny bit less, to know that I’ll be charged an arm and a leg for a simple digital picture against some plain background. A whole lot of irking, in other words.

But meanwhile, here and now, wooooooo! Wooooooo, I say! I wooooooo in Ottawa’s general direction! To celebrate, I’m going to have an unscheduled cup of tea, followed by chugging some Grade-A Canadian maple syrup right out of the bottle. (Gotta start integrating into my new society, eh.)

Life is good.

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Giving away my brand new e-book! “Pacific Crest Tutorial: Your Handy PCT Guide”

Filed under: writing — Leave a comment

After months of writing, editing, re-writing, and re-editing, my newest brain baby is ready to meet the world. I present to you my Pacific Crest Tutorial: Your Handy PCT Guide! If you’re not in the US, please search for “Pacific Crest Tutorial” on your country’s Amazon site, and you will see it there as well.

As usual, I’m giving it away for free for 3 days. I’m doing the giveaway to help my fellow hikers, both the hopefuls and the returning ones. (And if anybody feels like leaving a nice review on their shiny new book, that’s a bonus!)

It will remain free until 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time on Tuesday, November 7th. Once the giveaway ends, I’ll remove the link from this post, so no one would accidentally pay for it. There are 2 buttons on that link: don’t click the yellow “Read for free” button at the top because that would start a Kindle Unlimited subscription, which would charge you $10 a month (and you wouldn’t even get to keep the e-book if you cancel!). (I mean, unless you already have Kindle Unlimited.) You’ll want to click the second, orange button that says “Buy now with 1-Click” right underneath the $0.00.

You do not need a Kindle to read this e-book: you can either read it using the free Kindle app on your phone, tablet, etc – or on your computer using the Kindle Cloud Reader. Unlike all the other PCT books, which are 100% advice and 0% journal, my e-book combines them both: it’s roughly 75% journal describing local towns, and 25% advice on everything else. The journal part is a travelogue with detailed descriptions of PCT-adjacent towns: the best and worst places to eat, where (and how!) to hitchhike, etc. It also has more subtle stuff, like making sure you don’t zero in Etna on a Sunday (the whole town shuts down!), or visiting Carson, WA, aka the friendliest PCT-adjacent town in Washington, though it doesn’t appear in most guides. And much, much more.

The other 2 sections consist of a loooong list of my PCT advice to aspiring thru-hikers, and a very detailed PCT FAQ. The FAQ has 92 different questions with a variety of answers, both my own and from all over the web. It covers topics from “Is it safe to hike alone?” to “How do I poop with all these mosquitoes?” – and everything in between.

My hope is that the end result is an e-book that would be incredibly useful for PCT hopefuls, or just for those curious about thru-hiking. The town travelogue, based on my 2022 thru-hike, should be useful to all those who hiked the PCT before and want to try it again. (As I myself will someday…)

I hope you enjoy my e-book, and I hope it proves useful on your amazing, mind-blowing, life-changing adventure. Please feel free to share the link with your friends or with PCT facebook groups (I hang out exclusively on Reddit). As always, I look forward to your feedback. 🙂

Happy reading, and happy trails!

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The time I spent a year studying French at a Quebecois community college…

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
November 4, 2023

It’s been over a week now, and anger has subsided. (See the earlier entry.) I’ll probably get even more perspective on this strange year-long adventure as more time passes, but I may as well jot down some notes here and now.

Quebec is a unique and interesting province, and it’s the only jurisdiction in North America where French is the official language. If you don’t live here (or in Canada), chances are you’ll never see any news reports about all the conflicts, reforms, and counter-reforms related to the French language, the pushback against Anglos (that’s the slang term for English speakers such as moi), and so much more. There’s a lot of rich history, and quite a lot of baggage, both historic and cultural.

You can learn the basics of the local francization program over here, but in a nutshell, the government offers free full-time French courses to all the newcomers, be they refugees, Anglo Canadians from other provinces, or immigrants. To sweeten the deal, they also pay $5 CAD ($3.66 USD as of this writing) per hour for attending those classes. That doesn’t sound like much until you remember it’s 40 hours a week, 10 weeks per course, and four courses altogether. With all the breaks and such, that comes out to exactly one year, and approximately $800 CAD ($586 USD) per month, which is pretty neat, actually.

The course was held at the cégep (a uniquely Quebecois type of community college) on the other side of town because, hey, that was the only opening when I finally got the call. Cégeps are used to educate teens right after high school, and train them either in hands-on skills (there were so many bright-eyed and bushy-tailed paramedic hopefuls!) or something more abstract, like philosophy. The entire francization wing was more or less isolated from the local students – in retrospect, kind of a shame.

The class itself was… slow. Very, very slow. To be fair, I’m not an average student: French was my sixth language (or an attempt at one, anyhow), after Russian, English, German, Spanish, and Japanese. Just about every other student in our class (the size varied between 15-19 students) was a refugee. Some from Latin America, most from Ukraine. (They didn’t hold the war against me after I made my feelings about Russia clear.) I had to constantly remind myself that they didn’t choose to be here: a couple of years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even imagined moving to the exotic French-speaking land just north of New York. Unlike me, they ended up here involuntarily, due to larger-than-life circumstances outside their control.

That is a very long and polite way of saying that there were multiple students who simply didn’t give a damn, or would do their best to disrupt the class, though sometimes accidentally. There was a young European guy with a raging case of… something, who delighted in yelling out his name and basking in the confused attention of the others. Every three minutes or so. There was a fellow American who had a bad case of ADHD and would constantly interrupt the class to say that “Ahh, and in the US, we do it like this” – stopping any and all progress for at least five minutes. (She’d do that about once an hour.) An elderly woman who loudly complained about each and every little thing, nonstop. A young Ukrainian guy who either deliberately trolled the professor or had a genuine learning disability, asking a question every 30 seconds on those rare occasions when we’d get an interesting presentation about local history.

And then there was the fact that one of our four professors was a power-tripping, emotionally unstable maniac. (Once again, see the earlier entry.) It had been 14 years since my university graduation, and the blatant power abuse (and a “shruggie emoji” reaction from the administration) strongly reminded me why I never continued my formal education.

All in all, the year-long course really helped my French – it was definitely more effective than Duolingo and other apps. But ye gods, it moved so slowly, and we received so little actual hands-on practice with oral comprehension… (Because you can’t exactly turn on the subtitles when the local talks to you and you don’t quite get what they mean.) I’m fairly sure I would’ve gotten the same amount of French (if not more) if I’d just taken a burger-flipping job at the local Tim Hortons for three months or so.

Toward the end of our fourth and final course, the cégep simply wanted to get rid of us as fast as possible. The final exam was a joke: not a carefully curated and strict affair like in the previous module, but a free-for-all where the professor looked the other way, and we were all encouraged to cheat and copy each other’s answers. Everyone passed, and I’m quite certain the low scores got fudged so that all 18 of us would get a passing grade and GTFO. Ho hum.

I’ve made a fair amount of progress, though quite a few others didn’t. A big part of that, I believe, was due to the fact that they never really tried to “francisize.” Each day, and constantly, there would be conversations in either Spanish or Ukrainian all around me, non-stop. That’s fine if there’s an emergency, but if you’re just blabbing on about the weather or what’s for lunch… Try saying it in French, eh? And then your friend will try to understand and reply back, and then before you know it, you’ll both get some much-needed practice! I was alone in my desire to speak exclusively in French, and that did not make me too popular. So it goes.

Some of the things I did while waiting for the particularly slow days of class to end:

  • manually copied (yes, by hand) Wikipedia’s articles on electromagnetism and the underlying formulas thereof;
  • wrote a short fantasy story;
  • wrote poetry;
  • read through my entire pocket English-French dictionary, found the shortest words, and wrote down my own mini-dictionary of said words in my notebook;
  • developed a swing-trading strategy for my stocks;
  • improved my doodling skills;
  • wrote down the full text of a beautiful French poem, then its English translation, and tried to learn the fancy book French by staring intently at the two versions;
  • devoured several science textbooks in an attempt to keep my brain sane;
  • compiled several Kindle e-books on my phone;
  • read multiple lists of quotes by my favourite writers and philosophers, then stashed the best of them into text files on my phone;

There was more, I’m sure, but these are the top ones. That should probably give you some idea how much free (or underutilized) time we all had. Ho hum.

Well… I’m glad this is over. No lifelong friendships had been made, though I did meet my amazing, wonderful, absolutely perfect partner back in March, and she (a native Quebecoise) helped keep me sane throughout all this. That alone means the year wasn’t a waste. We went on so many little adventures…

But I digress. Not every huge adventure ends up particularly fun or exciting, so this year-long project will almost certainly rank near the bottom of my eccentric ideas – but hey, at least now I speak passable French. Or try to, in any case. Salut!

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The Dune – my favourite quotes

Filed under: on stuff and sundry — Leave a comment
October 29, 2023

What a wonderful book. What a fascinating writer. A beautiful brew of unusual life experiences paired with a decade of editing. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

“animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual . . . the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe”

—-

“Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”

—

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

—

“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked. The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen, he nodded. “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

—

“He straightened, assuming an odd attitude of dignity – as though it were another mask, but this time clothing his entire body.”

—

”Humans are almost always lonely.”

—

“Paul looked up at the grizzled old man who stopped at a corner of the table. Hawat’s eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.”

—

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things . . . ” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “. . . the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing . . . ” She closed her fingers into a fist. “. . . without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

—

”She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.“

—

“I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.“”

—

“Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura.”

—

“His first encounter with the people he had been ordered to betray left Dr. Kynes shaken.”

—

“Halleck had spoken in Paul’s ear: “Odd sort of fellow. Has a precise way of speaking–clipped off, no fuzzy edges–razor-apt.”
And the Duke, behind them, had said: “Scientist type.””

—

“Kynes stared at him, seeing the water-fat flesh. He spoke coldly: “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.””

—

“Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.”

—

“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.”

—

“Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”

—

“And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning ‘That path leads ever down into stagnation.”

—

“Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.”

—

“The absence of a thing,” the Baron said, “this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we’re addicted to.”

—

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

—

“The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”

—

“Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.”

—

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.”

—

“It could be only the adab, the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself.”

—

“The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.”

—

“Fear coursed through Paul. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-now. This was death hanging on an infinite number of minuscule mischances.”

—

“Each day, some time each hour, brings change.”

—

“That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.”

—

“Walking a thing wire of peace with a measure of happiness.”

—

“The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions … ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.”

—

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

—

“But the test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.”

—

“He seemed too submissive to Paul, but then the Sardaukar had never been prepared for such happenings as this day. They’d never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself.”

—

“Isn’t it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?”

—

“The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”

—

“The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.”

—

“Before the lectures, though, he had to convince the Fremen. To understand how this came about, you must first understand the enormous single-mindedness, the innocence with which he approached any problem. He was not naive, he merely permitted himself no distractions.”

—

“It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy.”

—

“There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone. This is, of course, space travel – and in any discussion of religion, it deserves to be written thus:
SPACE TRAVEL!”

—

“Twenty delegates were recalled by their congregations. One committed suicide by stealing a space frigate and diving it into the sun.”

—

“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”

—

“To increase understanding is a laudable goal.”

—

“La, la, la – a Fremen cry of grief (“La” translates as ultimate denial, a “no” from which you cannot appeal.)”

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