Nothing to do with a resolution – it all just kind of happened. Like this blog post. Hey, I have a blog!

No visits at the door of the Awesome household this time around, so I have no personal account to draw upon to help me make my choice. As usual, I’m headed to the local polling station as a reluctant Liberal voter, wishing that I lived in a riding where a vote for someone other than the Grit candidate could be a vote that went to a winner. Here in Ottawa South, a vote for anyone but Dalton is really just a vote for the PC guy, whose party leader has failed to distance himself from the mistakes of our Mike Harris past. And given the day-to-day of what goes on in my household, where our reliance on health care and education services are pretty much the only things that matter, the prospect of a government that gives Tim Hudak a say in anything at all is pretty scary, actually.

Fortunately, I do have other ballot boxes that are worth stuffing. And you won’t even have to take a stroll to your nearest community centre, elementary school or seniors home to do it.

The Aviva Community Fund wants to give away some cash to initiatives that can prove themselves popular enough to gather a bunch of votes over the next couple of weeks, and there are a couple of causes, backed by important people who are near and dear to me, which I’d like to bring to your attention.

• Foundations for Functional Communication is a proposal from Mindy and Geoff on behalf of their son Connor, who has benefited greatly from the use of an adapted iPad to help him express the ideas and feelings and opinions that he can’t put into words. I’ve never met Geoff, but I have more than a passing acquaintance with Mindy and can vouch for her as a quality person, articulate and empathetic, and young mister Connor is a pretty wonderful little dude. Should these folks receive the funding to put their proposal into action, only great things will result.
• The Ottawa Rotary Home proposes an inclusive playground in Ottawa near their property on Bank Street near Leitrim Road. There are a couple of these things around town already, but they lack the sort of interested involvement and regular planning that would convert these spaces from playgrounds with weird swingsets into truly inclusive community gathering places, where kids of every age and ability could come together and, you know, be kids. The Rotary Home are already experts in this realm, staffed by caring and involved people who work with young people with disabilities every day, and I know that their inclusive playground project would be a highly beneficial and successful one.

If you’ve got a few votes to spare after supporting these funding proposals, you might also take a look at A Driving Force and Rack ‘em up, which will benefit bike-riding, granola-eating, tree-hugging hippies like the folks at Trips For Kids and my teen-aged nephew. Get a job, all of you!

If I vote every day, and you do too, these will win, and we’ll be the first to congratulate each other on our selfless community engagement. OK?

Listen: R.E.M., “Final Straw”

I can’t believe where circumstance has thrown me
And I turn my head away
If I look I’m not sure that I could face you.
Not again. Not today. Not today.

If hatred makes a play on me tomorrow
And forgiveness takes a back seat to revenge
There’s a hurt down deep that has not been corrected.
There’s a voice in me that says you will not win.

And if I ignore the voice inside,
Raise a half glass to my home.
But it’s there that I am most afraid,
And forgetting doesn’t hold. It doesn’t hold.

Now I don’t believe and I never did
That two wrongs make a right.
If the world were filled with the likes of you
Then I’m putting up a fight. I’m putting up a fight.
Putting up a fight. Make it right. Make it right.

Now love cannot be called into question.
Forgiveness is the only hope I hold.
And love – love will be my strongest weapon.
I do believe that I am not alone.

For this fear will not destroy me.
And the tears that have been shed
It’s knowing now where I am weakest
And the voice in my head. In my head.

Then I raise my voice up higher
And I look you in the eye
And I offer love with one condition.
With conviction, tell me why.
Tell me why.
Tell me why.
Look me in the eye.
Tell me why.

But we had a feeling that this day was coming fast, didn’t we? The Jack Layton we had come to know so well in Canadian politics for what felt like forever was not the same Jack Layton who announced that he had to step down from leadership of the NDP a few weeks ago. Cancer patients usually look either puffy and swollen or skinny and gaunt, and the latter was definitely how Mr. Layton appeared before us that day, like cancer had already destroyed ten or twenty percent of him. Or more.

On reflection this morning, it occurred to me that Jack Layton’s words and actions might have been at the centre of political dogma all this time. Yeah, it’s traditional Liberal territory, but the NDP rise to the rank of Official Opposition this year showed that what he was saying was finally starting to resonate, was finally starting to sound not like the extreme leftist stuff that the NDP brochure was always painted as (and never really was), and more like the kind of thinking that could put us where we would want to be, the state of mind that we’d like being Canadian to mean. What we’d like being human to mean.

After all, what is more human than to want to keep ourselves fed when others are hungry? What is more human than wanting to have a few more material possessions, even if it requires taking away from those with less? What is more human than fearing others with different beliefs or practices, even when we know that we all have the exact same blood and guts working away inside us?

This is the stuff of humanity. Gut, sentiment, feeling, belief based on instinct and precedent instead of knowledge and understanding.

It’s taken tens of thousands of years of evolution, generation after generation of inching away from our neanderthal origins, to put some distance between our modern selves and the animal inside that wants to give into instinct at every turn. And let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve traveled a great distance from that past, even in the year 2011. You, and I, our neighbors and friends and family and people we run into on the street – we’re all within inches of one another.

Maybe I’m too young to know better, but I felt like Jack Layton was about to help Canadians to take a big leap away from our primal, instinctual selves. We had already done some of it this year – not enough of it, mind you, and not enough of us, either. But more than ever before.

And I guess it’s typical and human to feel sad, and angry, and disappointed, that someone I admired and respected and wanted to follow is gone.

Gut. Sentiment. Feeling.

But I doubt Jack Layton would have wanted us to feel like this. I suspect he would have wanted us to continue on the path he’d been showing us all along, and continue to work for a better future for everyone who is Canadian, regardless of their place on the political spectrum, and not exclusively for those who were born in the right place and at the right time.

Maybe we still can.

• App Inventor for Android. Even in a WYSIWYG environment, I am just not cut out to program, design software, or any of that nerd shit.
• Creepy is a program that crawls the geolocation information on your tweets and Flickr photos, then spits out a file with all of that data with which you can make a map. Like this one. It’s meant to provide a cautionary tale to users of social media about the information they’re giving away, but I usually deliberately include that data when I tweet, so this was in no way scary or compelling. (The rogue tweet from the Gulf of Guinea shows that you can’t really rely on this kind of data anyway. Did I forge it? Did the program I was using just fuck up in its guess of where I was located? Did I actually visit the western coast of Africa one day? Secrets.)
• Samsung Kies, ostensibly required to perform updates and add files to your Galaxy Tab. Nerd shit aside, I was able to get the operating system upgraded to Android 2.3.3 without using Kies, so…
• There was a time when I could spend hours playing video games without this maturity delay being a drain on our household finances or parental sanity. That time is long gone. Farewell, Civilization V and your annoying friend Steam.
• And finally, Winamp, which will supposedly sync wirelessly with Android devices running their mobile application. I have Winamp installed on my Nexus S and Galaxy Tab, and love it – but the desktop software is a puzzle. I couldn’t get the wireless sync to happen, it wouldn’t scrobble to Last.fm reliably, and didn’t have UPNP support built in, and was slower and less intuitive than Foobar.

Anything running on your computer that you can live without? Go ahead and uninstall that shit, then tell me all about it.