I have a weird history with dreams.
My first memory was a dream. It was when I was three, and in it, I fell down an escalator. I guess it’s kind of weird that my first memory wasn’t one of the conscious world. What’s even weirder is that it’s such an incredible metaphor for my life. I can’t say I’d recommend it.
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I have two loves — Forensic Files and podcasts.
Forensic Files is a non-fiction true crime TV show. It takes a “whodunit” approach to the cases it covers, so it starts with a victim and ends with a murderer. Of course, this means you spend most of the half hour coming up with your own theories as the show slowly drops more details. It’s addictive as hell, which is why I’ve seen every episode at least twice. The show is less about the gruesome and often salacious details of the murders than about the forensic science that led investigators to solve them. Everything I know about biology — which I’ll admit is not much — I’ve learned from Forensic Files. It’s the pinnacle of edutainment.
One of the most important things I learned in school is that if a word or term can mean anything, it also means nothing.
And so it is with “long-form journalism” in an age where web series, podcasts, blog posts and more can be created easily and quickly. Scrolling through social media I’ve had to ask myself, “What isn’t long-form?”
Languages have never been my strong suit.
An assumption many Canadians have run into abroad, myself included, is that most people in our country are bilingual. I’ve found that many non-Canadians believe this in spite of knowing that exactly one province in our federation is majority francophone.
“But isn’t it taught in all the schools?” they ask.
It is — poorly. At least, I felt it was taught poorly to me. I can’t pin all of the blame for my monolingualism on Ontario’s public school system: my dad actively discouraged my French language education. But I feel as though a pretty important element that nine year-olds should know before they’re taught a second language was conspicuously absent from my first French class in fourth grade.
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I’ve been back from Southeast Asia for about three weeks now. Many of you have wondered what’s happened to my serialized memoir on this blog. You’ve probably seen a lot of my posts on social media, so you might have a sense of my experiences over the past month or so, but little reflection on them. I’ve missed about 20-30 posts. I hope this one will make up for that. It’s just a more concise version of what I would have written anyway, and brevity is always a good thing.
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A lot’s happened since I last posted.
For one thing, I’m now writing to most of you from the other side of the world! Second, and more important, I just finished my first week training at an authentic muay Thai camp.
In less than 24 hours I’ll be off to explore a new continent, off to fulfill a decade-long dream. I would do the normal thing and say that it feels “surreal”, but it doesn’t. I don’t want to ascribe myself some sort of high-minded quest. I’m just a farang from the suburbs of Toronto trying to understand muay Thai in its authentic form for a couple of weeks.
