To Be Determined

I have been chasing a rabbit. It's not by accident, though it may look that way. Leaving university at the end of 1987, when I was more than halfway through my degree, wasn't planned, though it suited my nature. I went to Quebec City, improved my French to bilingualism, joined a cult and got engaged. I left Quebec first, then the engagement, then the cult. I still have enough French to get by. Charlottetown was next. I knew I could write a little - my major had been English Literature - so I made a move towards a career in journalism. My mother had died in 1997 and I was anchorless; it was time to be a grown up. Again, I left school early. For a job this time, not a man. Off to British Columbia! (I graduated, I just wasn't there to collect my diploma. I regretted that.) When that blew up I landed in northern Alberta, though it wasn't new to me. Dad and Step-Dad were both military men and had had postings there. I had ambitions because it seemed that's what people di...

  This is not a post about Shakespeare, and it's not about Hamlet per se . It's not even about how Andrew Scott , one of the most wonderful actors today, is able to convey meaning with every word, despite those words being simultaneously obscure and overly familiar. This post is about the soliloquy itself. Hamlet, a character described more than once as  emo , has three ways of dealing with his current troubles: he can continue putting up with the whims of fortune or fate, he can try fighting the problem with the hope of resolving it, or he can die. Seems dramatic, doesn't it, seeing death as an option, as just one of many possible solutions to life's difficulties? It probably is drama, and it's also something I've done for almost 40 years. I still don't know how it will turn out. Hamlet talked himself out of choosing death by imagining a terrifying afterlife. I don't believe in an afterlife, so that's not an argument I use. What keeps me alive is th...