Author Archives: David Truss

Appreciating true friends

I’ve had a couple really enriching conversations with two really good friends recently. They have made me contemplate the value of a true friend.

You can share who you are in full confidence. You can listen and connect in ways that are far beyond the banter of story for story or ‘that reminds me of’ conversations which are more on the surface.

You walk away feeling you know them, and yourself, better.

You know time in between visits won’t reduce the connection, but you also don’t want too long to go by before you connect again.

There is nothing quite like time spent with a true friend.

Sneaky text scams

You no longer just have to worry about email scams, now there are text scams coming your way. Yesterday I got this message:

I didn’t pay full attention to the address and went to the link. It looked totally real, with Canada post logos and the English was perfect. It said to get the parcel delivery rescheduled that I’d have to pay $1. That’s when I looked at the link address more closely and started to doubt the website.

What they want is your credit card number including the 3-digit code at the back. I’m sure they get it from many people.

I’ve also noticed a lot of text messages that seem like they are wrong numbers:

I used to try to be nice and respond to let them know they made a mistake:

But now I just block the number. I think they send these random messages to see if they get a response, then engage you in a scam.

It’s disappointing that we have to live in a world where we have to be so cautious of being duped by people. The moment I see a contest online or in my social media stream I think either scam or they are collecting data on me. I see a text from someone I don’t know and I think it was sent in bad faith. I’ve been weary of similar messages on email for a very long time. I have a contact form online that I’m going to take down because the only messages I’ve received in the last year are either trying to sell me SEO services or other inappropriate services.

Now the online scams are moving to text messages. I wish there was a way to fight this, but for now the only thing I can do is block them. I hope this acts as a warning to help others.

What’s your favourite movie?

This question was asked last night and I couldn’t think of an answer. There are movies that I’ll watch again and again like The Shawshank Redemption, The Princess Bride, Caddyshack, The Matrix, The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and The Breakfast Club. My wife watches Love Actually every Christmas, and I’ll watch it with her. We watch Elf as a family every Christmas too. But are any of these my favourite? I don’t know?

I think if you ask me this question tomorrow, a different movie might come to mind. Maybe The Usual Suspect, The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes, or a cult classic like The Cube, Bladerunner, or a comedy like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I think the challenge of me being asked this question is that there are not a lot of movies that I’ll ever watch twice. So there are countless great movies that I watched and loved and never went back to. Every one of the movies I’ve mentioned above have broken that rule… I’ve seen them many times and so they simply come to mind easier.

Are you someone that has an all-time favourite, or a top 3? Or do you bounce around like me?

Inequity analogy

Imagine you are a praying mantis. You are male and you mate with a female. You know there is a chance that she will decapitate you during mating:

You take a chance of dying every time you mate.

What an unjust world that one sex has so much control over another; that your life completely falls in the decision-making of the other sex. This might be ok for the praying mantis, but it would be completely unacceptable for humans.

Or would it?

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How does something like this happen in 2022 in a nation that is supposed to be a model for the free world? Free for who?

And they irony in using this analogy is that people were praying for this to happen.

No matter where you go…

More than half a life ago I had a girlfriend that was a fair bit older than me. She was very well travelled, including a solo trip to Africa in the early 80’s. While I haven’t seen her in almost 30 years, I still remember one of her favourite sayings, “No matter where you go, there you are.”

That saying is said by a lot of people, but I finally understood it when she said it. There is no escaping yourself. If you are kind in life, you’ll be kind in a sunny destination spot. If you’re a jerk, you’ll be a jerk at a touristy landmark. If you feel lost, you won’t find yourself on the peak of a mountain. You take whomever you are, wherever you go.

So whether you seek adventure, excitement, relaxation, or rest, it’s your own expectations and hopes that will determine what kind of trip you have. Disappointment because the room wasn’t quite what you expected, or although the room wasn’t what you expected the view was spectacular and made up for it? The food was more expensive than expected, or the food was pricey but you would have paid double for that red snapper last night? Are you looking for disappointment or are you looking for opportunities to see, hear, and feel positive experiences in a foreign land?

No matter where you go, there you are. Sometimes it takes travel experiences to truly understand what that means. As the world opens up, I hope people find exactly what they are looking for when they travel… just make sure you are looking for the right things.

Stress dreams

I had a ridiculous dream last night. I was with a couple family members and we signed up to go on stage and play instruments in front of an audience. I can’t play an instrument if my life depended on it. Can’t read music, don’t know any notes. And I think it was a clarinet or a flute I was supposed to play. Such a stupid dream, to volunteer for something I’m incapable of doing.

A bad dream for sure, very stressful. But that wasn’t the problem, after all, it’s just a dream. The problem was that I woke up several times after the original dream, between 2:30 and 4:30am and each time I woke up I felt the stress of having to perform in front of a live audience not having a clue what I was doing. I’d realize it was a dream, be relieved it wasn’t real… then go right back into the stress of it all over again until I woke up again.

I finally woke up at a couple minutes to 5am, almost 20 minutes before my alarm and realized that I might as well get up rather than jumping into the dream again.

Does anybody else do this? And if you do, what strategy do you use to escape the dream? I ask because this pattern of re-entering a dream I didn’t like is one that I seem to repeat again and again, and it really doesn’t lead to a good night’s sleep.

I’m open to suggestions.

The power of audiobooks

I just spent 3+ hours power washing my lower back yard and front porch. Normally that would drive me crazy with monotony and boredom but I had over-ear noise reduction headphones on and listened to an audio book the entire time.

I have about 5-6 more hours to go with my deck, but that will be next weekend. Although time flies while listening to a good book, my back is telling me I’ve done enough for today.

The last time I power washed, I listened to a podcast, Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, which itself is like historical novelettes. I find it so wonderful to be able to listen to stories rather than just reading them. I can imagine a time when there were no written words and stories told at campfires were the only method of sharing both history and imaginative tales of Gods, and mythological beasts, and of love, sins, revenge, and retribution.

A story well told is magical, and while I enjoy a good movie, I really feel like I can dive into a long audio book for hours at a time, and in the coming weekend, I’ll have at least 5-6 more hours to really devote to my current book.

A tribe of #FitLeaders

For the last month I’ve been sharing some workout photos and conversation with other #FitLeaders on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/pam_mahood/status/1518706635832578049?s=21&t=kGq3G-MX5cZrhqzNpeCdzw

I didn’t follow the schedule.

I’m not sure if anybody did, and that didn’t matter to any of us. What mattered is that we shared; We worked out; We knew we had each other to look to for support.

I’m not aware of anyone training for something specific, we are just looking to stay fit. Like I said in a tweet:

Fitness is a lifelong journey and the destination is a more healthy tomorrow.

Find your fitness tribe, and get active. Future you will thank you. As Kelly says:

Take care of body, mind, sprit, and connection.

We will never have time travel

I’m not a physicist and I don’t play one on the internet, but I believe that we will never have time travel. My premise is simple: if it was invented 50, 250, 500, or even 5,000 years from now, there is no way that the first time we’d ever discover someone from the future was 2022. Surely if it will ever be invented a time traveller would travel to somewhere in the past before us, and we don’t have evidence of that… so at no time in the future will a time machine be invented.

The only possibility that I see for a time machine to work is that we live in a multiverse and if a person did go back in time then they wouldn’t change our history, they would create another new history splitting the history we know and creating a new one that they know… and so in this case while I’d be wrong, you and I will never know.

In the future, if we don’t blow ourselves up and send the world back into the Stone Age, we’ll get closer and closer to traveling the speed of light. A very long time from now humans will visit other planets beyond our solar system. Those travellers will experience time differently than anyone who stays on earth. But while they will age less, they won’t be going back in time.

Time travel like H. G. Wells wrote about will never exist. It’s a fun thing to think about, but the reality is that if it ever was to be invented, we’d already know about it… we wouldn’t have to wait for some time in the future to learn about it.

Negative conjecture

Part 1: The world is out to get me

I was fairly new to administration and I was dealing with a student who had parents who seemed to believe the entire world was out to get them. Everything that happened to them and their child was not by mistake or circumstance, or by choices made by their kid or themselves, these things were planned and designed to make their life difficult. In my dealings with them I too was part of the problem, I was an extension to the system trying to knock them down. So were the teachers and youth worker. We were all, in their eyes, conspiring to make their lives miserable.

Imagine living your life thinking and believing that you were a victim of the world. How would that impact your daily life? What would your thought process be when something, or in your eyes everything, doesn’t go your way? Imagine believing that everything that happens today is simply evidence of the continuation of everything bad that has happened before.

Part 2: The things we didn’t do

I spent a lot of (younger) years wishing I had taken up karate. My uncles and an aunt trained and I watched them. Now decades later they are instructors and leaders in their club back in Barbados. I was a tiny 7-year old kid when they started, and my mom didn’t want me getting hurt. Later, in high school, I took up water polo and that led me to some amazing experience that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Coaching water polo is what inspired me to become a teacher. I’m not sure I would have followed either path had karate been my thing as a kid. I no longer look at this as a regret.

How many people do you know that define the world by what they didn’t do, on what they missed out on… on what could have been. How many people imagine the life choices they didn’t take, and see that life as so much better than their own?

I remember an English teacher in Grade 10 who told us how he was good friends with Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, and how Jim asked him to join along on this new venture. This teacher told us he didn’t regret his choice, but it was late enough in the year and we knew him well enough when he told us this, that we could hear the regret and disappointment in his voice. Strange that this is just about the only thing that I remember from this class.

Regret, disappointment. These thoughts define some people. People who live in a world that could have been, and never will be.

Part 3: The things that never happened

How many scenarios have gone through your head after you dealt with a scenario poorly? There was the thing you did and said, and there were so many other things that you could have done, could have said. ‘I wish, oh how I wish I could have handled that differently’. But your imagination doesn’t stop there. No, you go over the scenario again and again. Each time something different, something better happens in your mind. Your mind is filled with events that never happened; un-lived experiences; fictitious, more successful experiences.

Epilogue

Today is a new day, with new choices and new opportunities. We are shaped by our past, but our past is not our present. We learn, we grow, we make new choices. The world does not conspire against us. New opportunities will present themselves. Our choices we make can be different and better than the choices we made in the past. We are better off living our lives with positive conjecture… The world will conspire with us, not against us.