Well, I finished course number 8 of 12 in the master's and got a 94. I also finished the PBLA certification for the job I'm already doing. It took as much as or more work than the master's course. It was a slog but got another piece of Canadian survival paper. Here are my two latest in the land of certification:
I still feel like a stranger in a strange land in my own country. I downloaded the Tim Horton's app so I could choose 3 players a night in the NHL games and if they score goals you get rewards. I went 7 straight days with at least one guy scoring a goal for me and got a week of free coffee for it. Nice.
So I was walking to Timmy's to get my free coffee looking at all the shiny new nut storage holes (or "houses" we euphemistically call them), flashy new vehicles, and people scurrying around in them searching for more nuts to fill their homes. I just don't think I'll ever buy into this system. I will never feel like I NEED a beautiful new home or car. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I don't have a wife, kids, friends, co-workers, or much media hammering the idea into my head like a death of a thousand cuts. Well not a death per se, but certainly a slavery. And not a thousand cuts per se, more like a million.
Everybody here NEEDS the house and car and all the trappings (and I DO mean things that trap you) that go along with them like insurance, gas, repairs, taxes, maintenance, and don't forget all the necessary documents and certificates for both. They are but a few of the many cuts that contribute to the average Canadian's wage slavery.
I just watched an Indian movie that is really great! I wouldn't say it's that scary but it was suitable for our Halloween viewing. It's a really cool movie that starts with a Gandhi quote that I have paraphrased many times on this blog, "The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." I would go so far as to say the world has MORE than enough for everyone's needs. We could probably all have the nice homes and cars if resources were divided in anything close to an equitable way. The movie is called Tumbbad and it's the first Indian movie I've seen without some choreographed dance scenes in it. Way to go India! But it also has a timely message about greed and its pitfalls. Not just in Canada but in most countries we grow up programmed to spawn workers and consumers for the overlords and we so often self-program ourselves to believe that we join the rat race for our families. We scheme and plan and save and even cheat hoping that we can trick the gods using greed to overcome them. But they're smart. Smarter than us. We can't do it.
Then there are the folks who think they are even smarter and try to philosophize their ways past the gods using greed to get more than other folks because altruism just doesn't exist or something else the selfish halfwits' ingenious hero Ayn Rand might have said to describe objectivism. She was very educated and her ideas ring true to the tin ears of those who are looking to justify (or objectify) their greed, but they're not smart. They don't work the way they do in her books. Ever wonder what happened to Sears? I do! Especially around this time of year when I used to look forward to the Christmas Wishbook they put out. Well you can thank Ayn Rand almost as much as Eddie Lampert that kids can't do that any more. Despite what Ayn Rand and Gordon Gecko say, greed is not good. We did not stave off extinction because of ruthless, competitive self-interest, we cooperated and suvived as a species despite it. At least that's what science shows us. It follows then that the almost religious pursuit of the self and the demise of social lives and human contact is probably the best way to run our species into extinction. I see it all over the place here.
Just today my bro-in-law went into an alcohol-assisted rant about how he's just a paycheck. I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often. He IS. I believe life is about more than going to work and making money so you can pay the bills and maybe spend a few minutes with family on weekdays and possibly with friends on weekends. I already REALLY miss going out with friends, I mean friends who also have free time so they can talk about more than their jobs or the repairs or additions to their homes and yards. People who have time to go places, see things, and tell interesting stories about them. Where are all those people? They're not doing the dutiful Canadian thing. They're not living the lives they're supposed to be. A lot of them are overseas being forgotten by friends and begrudged by family. Maybe even envied by both. Friends and family like it when you come home for a visit but they can't go overseas to visit you, they don't have the time or freedom to leave their nut stashes.
I am really hopeful that I can make things work out with this job I have. It's a good opportunity for me. But it might require the kind of dedication and cult-like subscription to the standards and policies of people who are NOT educators. It might require a competitive self-interest and lust for money I am proud to have never acquired. It might require a re-emersion into a culture I don't want to be immersed in. It will most definitely require lots and lots more certificates!
Now that I'm off work till November 15th and not doing either course I have decided to get as many of the pieces of paper I need as I can. First I went to the nearby registry and asked what I needed to transfer my BC health coverage to Alberta health coverage. If I'm not mistaken it used to require nothing but a birth certificate. But our health coverage only USED to be good here. I also wanted to change my BC security guard license to an Alberta one. I brought my current BC license and my former Alberta one. Expired in 2014 but I thought, you know, since I had worked a couple months ago as a guard and had worked in Alberta 9 years ago in the hospitals all over Calgary, it might be more salient than a piece of paper. Nope.
I needed proof of residence. You can't work a job unless you're chained to a home payment of some kind. Nice for the employer. No matter what garbage wage they choose to pay you, they KNOW you desperately need the money for shelter. I also needed two pieces of ID and my passport. As for the security guard license I needed to fill out an application that is not easy to find online (though they'll tell you it is), get a criminal record check (which could take 6 months), a passport photo taken within 60 days, my training certificate (which I couldn't have gotten my BC license without), and my BC license. I also had to pay $109.00. The CRC is getting very expensive too. Last one I got was hundreds of dollars. Now they MIGHT know here in Canada that the ones from Ottawa are identical to the ones from any local police dept., but I don't know if I can count on that. I'll probably have to phone them back. Oh, and, (of course) the number I got for the place to do all this was not working. I got a fax machine sound. The email address wasn't useful either. I sent an email a week ago and it still hasn't be responded to.
So, if you did not understand the CDE (Canadian Defecation Etiquette) certificate at the beginning of this post, now you can understand it a little better.
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