Category: Blog

In an earlier post I remarked on the primness of the year 2017—and as I was setting up this post I had to go back and check to see when the last prime year was. Turns out it’s 2011.

I thought about the year 2011—thought about what I was up to then, what I was trying to accomplish, and if I ended up getting anywhere with it all. The answer: not really. And as I added up the years and years since then, the answer to the question of how things are going is consistent: not really.

Take today for example—March 1st, or as I like to think of it a year after a leap year, Feburary 28.25. I mean, we can’t call it that, well we could, but it would wreck a few heads, but the point stands—from now until 2020 each year will be accumulating just under an extra quarter of a day until we arrive at the magical and slightly silly day of February 29th. We do this because even though a year is exactly a year long and a day is exactly a day long the number of days occurring in our year don’t divide neatly into our year, so when you express a year as a number of days that number is 365.2422 days. And I wouldn’t even get into how the length of our day is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds—but it seems I already just did.

The only reason I’m thinking of any of this is because I was cleaning out old emails from last year, and I saw I’d sent in my applications for school on February 29th of last year. The phrase this time last year started rattling around in my head, and I realized that’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and it gets less and less accurate as you scale it up. This time yesterday is an easy time to dial back to. This time last week—fine. This time last month, well some months have 31, 30, 29, or 28 days. Are we talking a numerical date? Usually. On the 12th of this month, this time last month would be the 12th of the previous month. It’s not actually a month’s time that’s past, since an actual month is a variable and imaginary unit of time, but convention dictates we usually understand this fudging of accuracy for the sake of understanding.

This time last year though—already there are problems. It’s March 1st now, but this time last year, if we’re being true to fact, it was February 29th, because that’s the day after February 28th. If we want to say this time last year and be correct, we’d have to wait until it was March 2nd. But what sort of sense would that make? Likely as much sense as they thought spring starting in April did about 500 years ago when they realized the calendar had drifted by several days over hundreds of years—that’s when they figured out the need for leap years.

So now I’m thinking of all those news items and trivia posts—the this time last year ones—and realizing they’re all wrong because it wasn’t this time last year, not actually. Figuratively, yes. Again, for all intents and purposes we sort of get away with referring back to what we all kind of think happened around a particular time. But then it gets even sillier when you dive into the worlds of this time five years ago, this time 100 years ago, or this time 1000 years ago. I sometimes see articles on Wikipedia starting with On this day in 752 BC… and I immediately think—Nupe. No way that March 1st is anywhere near this March 1st.

This chaos in time is why I enjoy graffiti. Much like the passage of time—a curious illusion of gravity—graffiti cannot be reconciled into something defined and tidy, and I think that’s why some people don’t like it, but it’s exactly the reason I love it. Graffiti is the slightly less than a quarter day your perfectly created—or so you thought—calendar cannot reconcile. It sits there reminding you life’s clockwork isn’t always well‐fitted gears and springs ticking away the same perfect intervals. Sometimes the gears grind. Sometimes the motion is erratic. Tell me you’ve never felt a little over‐wound before and let’s see if I believe you…

The graffiti for this post is from a section of the Berlin Wall running through Mauerpark (Wall Park) and contains one of the larger sections of the still intact wall—the park itself is made up of land previously used as part of the infamous death strip between East and West Berlin. The day I visited the park I could smell and hear the paint as artists continued to spray away at the remains of a wall built by clockmakers gone mad. The sun was out, and the dogs were running and barking in the hunde area. It was a beautiful day.

Eisenstein called the distinction between past, present, and future a stubbornly persistent illusion. And it is through this idea I start to see despite our precise atomic clocks tracking each second accurate to millions of years, all we are actually tracking are moments relative to other moments—all we are tracking with any certainty is what’s happening now, a baseline to carry this moment into the next. This time last year as a concept is a symptom of this persistent illusion of time. It’s our own language alerting us to the strangeness that is our perception of time, a consequence created by the Earth’s motion through space.

Happy February 28.25th.

My plan for this and several posts to follow was to include some pictures from my trip so far, but despite living in an ever‐increasingly interconnected world I’m having trouble getting the little collection of technology I brought with me—an iPad, a digital camera, a mobile phone, and a wireless adapter—to talk to each other in a way my blog will understand. It’s stressing me out, and stress is baggage you’re not meant to pack on holiday.

One of the images I was able to transfer over is this one particular street sign from downtown Reykjavik. When I look at English and most French words I’m immediately struck by the meaning of the characters, but with Icelandic, in its otherness, the graphic nature of the type stands out first, and there was something immensely pleasing about the balance of these characters together.

This runs in stark contrast to the at times relentless flow of letters making up German words. They have a different otherness to them, a different weight and form for the letters as they are piled up beside each other. When I was in Italy there was enough sameness sneaking through from French I didn’t have the same experience of being a foreigner in my own alphabet—I’m delighted by the surreality of how quickly such familiar symbols become so unintelligible with only subtle changes in their configuration.

I love words and language, and this holiday away from Canada I knew would also be a holiday away from English—and I’m finding I love just as much being surrounded by shapes and sounds I don’t know.

I’m also finding out just how much French I actually know—a pleasant surprise, although not all together useful when I default to it when German is spoken.

I spent enough time in Iceland to know I will becoming back for more than an extended stopover of 1.5-2 days. I love it here, and the pictures—once I stop fighting with software—I am not sure do this place justice. The light is challenging. It’s harsh when the sun is out, direct and piercing. Unforgiving. Under clouds it softens and defuses all colour. Things are muted and contrast is drowned in grey. There is so much depth lost in my images of the landscape. And it’s hard to stop for any pictures on some of the roads I was on—there is no shoulder. Just volcanic rock and snow. Yes! I rented a car and spent today driving around. I was going stir crazy in Reykyavik. More on my snow adventures later…

For now, I’ve realized all I will be able to do is get a quick nap before I’m due at the airport at 4AM for my morning flight to Berlin—the main event! Knowing I was only here for a couple of days, looking back, put some pressure on me to make sure I was at maximum “take advantage of your time here!” mode, so with just over two weeks in Germany I can afford to take a little more down time and make sure I get enough sleep.

But I did get to see the Northern Lights—so happy! I needed a very long and very warm shower after freezing beside the ocean, but it was worth it.

Okay. Sleep time.

Except for some core words that look or sound just like they do in both languages, Icelandic and English are nothing alike on the surface—despite a common Germanic background—they diverged over a thousand years ago. English has been through at least three major shifts since then, and Icelandic, spoken almost entirely on just one island in the world (and in Gimili, Manitoba!), has remained almost the same since then. Icelandic is as close to Old Norse as you can get today. It’s interesting to listen to because every few worlds will kind of sound like something I think I can understand. It’s like listening to English being mumbled through a wall.

I like it here. It’s calm and quiet, but there is a lot going on at the same time. The weather, well, my phone’s summery of dreary is spot on. It’s unusually warm for this time of the year, around 8 degrees, so it’s all very Vancouver in the winter here at the moment. The air is damp and cold, everything is grey, and the position of the island on the planet and within the time zones means the sun comes up at after 10AM while I’m here. It was surreal eating a big, late breakfast and having it still be dark outside. No one, and I mean no one, is doing anything in the city until at least 8AM, and even then, it’s not until the sun is up that the city really gets going—none of this Ontario‐style leave for work before 6AM nonesense. Like I said, I like it here.

There are meant to be more pictures for this post, but it is after midnight in whatever time zone I’m in (I’m stuck someplace between EST and GMT) and want to see if I can get some actual sleep since I’ve not really had any more than a few hours since Sunday night. Instead, the featured image is a quick pic from my phone of where I had Iceland’s version of the full English breakfast—delicious eggs and bacon with some of the best bread I’ve had in a while, and, AND… yogurt that didn’t make me sick! I don’t know what they’ve done to yogurt in Canada, but they should stop.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, I’m going to visit a hot spring and see some of the countryside. Actually even if it’s still dreary I’m going to visit a hot spring and see some of the countryside.

Until then, góða nótt og sofðu vel.

p.s. — ð is pronounced like the th in the so the above is goh-tha no-ht og sov-thu vel or good night and sleep well. See? Like English through a wall 🙂

Half an hour to go before I get on the purple jet to Iceland. And—of course—time travel! I fly into the night first, and then into the dawn second. I fast‐forward five hours and won’t see them again until the return flight home.

Neat, right?