Along with trying to learn how to play bass and making art (which involves a glorious amount of mess), I also study Muso Shinden Ryu Iaido, which is a Japanese martial art involving drawing and cutting with the sword, and I sing, mostly jazz.
I was delighted the day I discovered transcription. It’s generalised work not involving specialised training as medical and legal do, that covers the gamut from short recordings of people’s dream diaries, to hours-long university lectures on sociology. If I hadn’t signed an NDA I could tell you the strangest thing I’ve ever had to deal with on that job. But it’ll just have to remain a mystery! It is the first time in my many decades on this earth that I have found work that suits my education, my life experience, my knowledge, and my temperment. Working from home on a contract basis also gives me a rare, and cherished, life flexibility that allows me to pursue other things–or simply to take a nap in the middle of the day if I want to.
I do have a severe vision impairment that has impacted my life from birth. But, while it has been a mighty struggle at times in more ways than I care to go into here, it hasn’t gotten in the way of everything. With my art, even, it’s actually been somewhat of a help. It helps that I like abstract art when sometimes I can’t see the details of what I’m doing!
You can find me online at the places below:
Keeping a journal, and personal writing in general, are topics very dear to my heart. Yet despite my love for the act of writing, I sometimes become stale, run out of ideas, and can find no story to tell. I am always on the lookout for ways to augment and enhance my writing, whether that… Read more »
There is a gap, aggravated by the government and media, between how welfare recipients are perceived and the realities of living on social assistance. I know because I’ve been there. I am still there. Comments from Canadian politicians illustrate a theory that these misperceptions are being used as an excuse to reduce welfare spending by… Read more »
Approximately 430,000 people world-wide are estimated to participate in it, with tens of thousands of them doing it every day for at least three to four hours at a time. It’s become so important to advance at it, that people are willing to pay large sums of money to do so. It has become such… Read more »
While the beauty of learning is that there is no set way to do it, two formally accepted ways of gaining educational accreditation are attending structured classes, or learning by correspondence. Which one proves more beneficial depends on the needs of each student, on their personality and their personal situations. The three main issues to… Read more »
I’m not a feminist (at least not in the more negative sense that word has taken on over time), but I do believe in as much equality as can be had between two such disparate species as men and women. What turns me off feminism as a system of belief and practice are the rabid,… Read more »
For Christmas someone gave me the DVDs of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and The Who’s Tommy; both exceedingly strange films in their own right – one a messianic pinball odyssey, the other a candy-coloured slap on the wrist to bratty children and the greedy. Watching them both made me very nostalgic for another… Read more »
The things that are most precious to us, our five senses, are things we very often take for granted. They are gifts whose ever-present status means we fail to notice, and perhaps appreciate, them in the same way we notice the novel and infrequent. Our senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch are our… Read more »
In the last century, the human race has made stunning scientific advances. One of the newest, most controversial of these is genetic engineering. It is an awesome power, but one that humanity is not mature enough to possess. Morally and medically, human cloning is too risky, and the human race too prone to selfishness, for… Read more »
If I were to tell you about the city I live in, what would I say? I’d say it’s a town built on work; a town built on industry; a town built on the grit of people who either didn’t want to, or couldn’t, deal with building the city of Toronto (our neighbour by one… Read more »
The benefit of travel is not simply the experience you have whilst doing it; the benefit is also the memories you take home from it. While most people simply carry along a camera for the purposes of capturing those memories, still others keep a travel journal of some sort. A picture may well be worth… Read more »