Books by Doug Jordan
24.13 Grief Revisited
This July is the tenth anniversary of the start of Marlene’s journey with cancer. Ten years is a long time to grieve. But grief never goes away, it just gets quieter.
2024-07-13
Travels with Myself
A Journal of Discovery and Transition
Doug Jordan, Author
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.12 Dominion Day Revisited
Canada Day, despite the clumsy ring of the word on our tongues, should be a hallowed day of reverence, gratitude, appreciation, and celebration. Instead, vacuous tv and radio personalities juvenilely wish us all ‘Happy Birthday, Canada’. It is to weep.
2024-06-30
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.11 Settling In, Again
So it is that despite living with my Filipina partner for more than five years – more apart than together – my patterns get perturbated each time she joins me in Canada. It’s like the first time all over again. But different.
2024-06-15
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.10 Jet-lag
I’ve never been one to sleep on a plane, nor even in a car; even with the aid of a glass or two of wine, dimmed cabin lights, elevated levels of nitrous oxide from the other sleeping passengers, I don’t sleep. I squirm, and turn, and shift my weight yet again, trying to find some comfortable position for just a few hours. And it’s not just to have the health benefits of the needed sleep, but to have the relief of a few hours of unconsciousness from this interminable flight.
2024-05-31
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.9 Philippines Redux, 2
Here we are now in the third week of our seventh tour in The Philippines and the observations continue to pile up, some as echoes of 2018, some fresh and offering new perspective. Here are the Chapters: Checkers and Chess; Eating Order; Jasmine’s Graduation; Filipino Wedding; Montezuma’s Revenge; Mount Mayon Vulcan.
2024-05-16
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.8 Return to The Philippines
Philippines is a third world country, not as desperately poor and backward as many African and Asian countries but nevertheless dramatically different from prosperous Canada. Five years and five tours later it is just as desperate a scene as it ever was but somehow no longer shocking. I think to myself, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, but it does bring acceptance of a sort.
2024-04-30
Idiosyncratia
24.7 Eclipsed by the Solar Eclipse
I took a last glance at the eclipse, nodded to my neighbours, and the sky, and took myself back to my desk. This eclipse business had stolen many hours from my productivity goals working on R3 of ‘Alex’ Choice’.
2024-04-14
Idiosyncratia
24.6 Easter – The Moveable Feast
Christmas is fixed in our minds because it is fixed in the modern calendar – December 25, but with Easter, we have to look it up. The date is slippery, it falls somewhere in late March, more often in early to mid-April, but we never know for sure – we have to google it. Easter Dinner is a moveable feast.
2024-03-31
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.5 The Ides of March
If it wasn’t for William Shakespeare and his Julius Caesar, we probably would have no idea of this ancient Roman calendar marker. I suppose that’s a credit to the power of the cultural arts – to imbed memes in the societal landscape.
Even so, I hazard to guess most people, if they know anything at all about the Ides of March, know only that it portends foreboding.
2024-03-15
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.4 Heliocentric Revolution
The recognition that the calendar needed reform because of this calendar creep was centuries in the making. And who was the genius who figured this out and lobbied for the change? It wasn’t Pope Gregory, nor Phillip II of Spain – they just brought the political clout.
2024-02-29
Travels With Myself, Part V
24.3 Love is in the Air
February 14 is Valentine’s Day, that curiously celebrated day for romantic love, when the rituals of courting begin, or reset. We think of Spring as the time for awakening love interest, so why St. Valentine’s Day in mid-February, surely two months short of Spring Fever?
2024-02-15
Thoughts on Writing/Publishing
24.2 A Thing Worth Doing
In this sense, the adage, ‘don’t let excellence be the enemy of the good’ applies. It may also be variant on the Nike slogan: if a thing is worth doing, do it.
2024-02-02
Books by Doug Jordan
24.1 The Trouble with Quality
The concept of quality, and its derivatives – poorly, well, good, badly, worth doing – are largely subjective, and as such there is a certain relativism in the terms.
Every author, surely, wants to be ‘good’ writer, but this illusive standard can be soul destroying.
2024-01-15
