A Rain of Frogs

I know we always ask children what they want to be when they grow up. I know I’ve written about that before, too.

But serious, what career paths interested you when you were a child? What sort of job piqued your curiosity and captivated your imagination?

For me, I very seriously considered a career in architecture. I wanted to design environmentally sensistive houses. And bridges. I’ve always been fascinated by bridges – a physical metaphor for the process of joining two different ideologies together. I took several years of technical drafting in high school, in preparation for this career in architecture.

Unfortunately other things intervened, matters for a different story. I’ve subsequently learned that it takes a lot of school to become an architect. Not as much as becoming a medical doctor or anything, but school plus an internship is not to be sneezed at.

And I was surprised to learn that architects do not make a lot of money. I expected them to be among the higher-salaried group – maybe not like doctors, dentists or lawyers, but certainly more than marketing execs or computer programmers. Turns out I was wrong. Architects salaries are on par with office administrators and part-time plumbers.

I am both a web developer and a musician by trade, and though neither of these were in the running for things I wanted to do when I grew up, this is where I am for now.

Who knows for how much longer, though.

Are your interior walls beige? What about your furniture? You couldn’t commit to that striking rusty-red color, could you. Couldn’t choose a startling black leather sofa, that’d be making a stand. It might even be Saying Something!

For the love of life, will someone take a freaking stand?

I grew up in a beige house. Taupe walls. Sandstone leather sofas. Great sky above, I remember my mother trying to choose between beige and ecru. I think I at one point I pointed weakly to the paint chip strip and indicated zinnwaldite.

“Oh, we’ve painted!” she told me once when I went to visit. I looked around, nodded knowingly at the beige walls, and said it looked good. She went on to explain how much richer and fuller the buff walls were – a decided improvement over the off-white they had been before. As far as I am concerned, those walls haven’t changed color in 25 years.

I dare you to guess what color her very expensive Audi A4 is. Go on. I double-dog-dare you!

Beige is not a color. Beige is a state of mind. Or rather, a non-state of mind.

Beige is the color of indecision. If you could use a hung jury to mark a canvas, you’d be marking it beige. You painted the siding on your house beige instead of a real colour like blue or yellow – or god forbid – red?!?

Good god, what would the neighbors think?

“Provoking a response is different from saying something significant.”

I read this somewhere today. It made me think.

Let me make this perfectly clear, just in case any of my readers own powerboats: People on sailboats do NOT like it when you buzz by us!

That’s right. We do not enjoy having you scream by at 30 knots. We do not enjoy the rumble of your engines. We do not enjoy waving at you like we think you’re cool, cos we don’t and y ou aren’t. And we most definitely, most especially, do not enjoy the massive wakes you raise.

It makes our boats rock side to side. It makes out sails rattle and snap themselves in a way suggesting we will shortly have to replace these fine canvas wings at great personal expense.

It makes us have to steer carefully as our boats dip alternately one rail and the other in the water. It makes us have to hold on for dear life while we’re trying to flake sails. Sometimes it necessitates an impromptu man-overboard. Note the lack of “drill” on the end of that statement.

We do not begrudge your presence on the lake. Hell, it’s Lake Ontario, it’s HUGE! Well okay, we do begrudge it, but there’s more than enough water for all of us. And to be fair, not all powerboat owners are ignorant. Whenever I see one that isn’t – and anyone who’s sailed with me will back this up – I’ve sung that captain’s praises.

Your hobby consists of burning fuel, of polluting water with noxious fumes and diesel soot. It consists of noise (in the case of one boat in my marina) so deafeningly loud that fish, concussed by the noise, die and float to the surface. You should see the poor cat jump. Often, your hobby consists of you being blissfully unaware of collision regulations recognized THE WORLD OVER. And in all three cases and others, it is often accompanied by that other great Canadian pastime – being drunk.

But its a big lake, and we’re willing to share it. But it IS a big lake. There’s no need for you to swamp us with your wakes. There’s no need to blast by only feet from us making so much noise that we cannot talk to each other in the cockpit of our slow but quiet sailboats. There’s no need for a jet-ski to blast by us and soak us with its spray.

Sometimes I consider mounting a cannon on my deck, like the tall ships of yore. I’d load it with powder but no projectile. It would go BANG! Just to make a huge noise and scare the hell out of any passing powerboat.

Turnabout is fair play, after all.

When he was little, only five years old, my oldest son came home from school one day. We had just moved to a new town in the middle of the school year, and introduced him into a group of students that had already spent a year and a half of schooling together. From a social aspect, breaking into such a tightly-knit group of kids would have been hard for the most outgoing, gregarious child.

My oldest son wasn’t the most outgoing, gregarious child. While he was (and still is) very bright, and has always had a grasp of mechanical and mathematical things that staggers the mind, he also spent the first three and a half years of his life deaf. Though this had been corrected and he could hear fine, it meant it had to endure some very intense extra-curricular speech and language therapy.

Now, as a cheerful 12-year-old, he speech and language abilities are enviable. The kid reads books like most people drink water. He makes me very proud. But back then, when he had just started attending this new school, he had only been hearing for 18 months at the most. He processed language differently than most other children – a trait which often confused adults, who didn’t think he was paying attention. I worried about how he would fit into his new social environment.

One day after school, he was playing around outside with his little brother and sister, and to my horror, I heard him singing the same small snatch of verse over and over again:

“Nobody loves me, everybody hates me…”

Over and over. My heart broke, I was overwhelmed with pain and concern for my little guy. My mind raced. How dare they hate my child! No child should ever feel like he is hated, let alone sing about it! I talked to him about the song, and he explained to me that it was a song the other children in class had taught him. They would go around singing it at recess time when they were outside playing.

I asked him what the whole song was, but he didn’t remember. He just said that he only knew the first part, the part he was singing. It also became clear that this was a song his teacher had taught the class, not something the other students had imposed upon him. He seemed happy enough, so I left him to his playing and eventually the worry passed. Years later, I now know he was just singing a song.

Yesterday, just as the children were preparing to return home from a weekend with me on the boat, I overheard my girlfriend sing that same first line of the rhyme and it made my heart clench with that same old feeling of worry and pain. It also reminded me of what amazing people my children are, and how very proud of them I am.

Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, Think I’ll go and eat worms. Long ones, short ones, fat ones, thin ones, See how they wriggle and squirm.