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There has not been five minutes that have gone by during the past few months that I have not been partaking of this video and the fruit held therein. I strongly urge you to watch it repeatedly until it hits home.
The Toronto SUN recently released a number of stories regarding the TTC and suicide, namely the subway suicide death toll and a TTC train driver’s account of a suicide. There has been quite a bit of chatter on some social media sites regarding the statistics and why they should have, or shouldn’t have been released.
Personally, I’m all for the release of any statistics – particularly ones that relate to suicide, depression and things that are generally (or frequently) left out of the discussion for whatever reason. Often they’re considered taboo within societies and are closely guarded to prevent copycats. I’m on the opposite end of the argument myself, having been suicidal for a number of years previous: The topic does hit close to home.
My argument is that suicidal people don’t need to hear these statistics to know that suicide by bus, train or any other method is viable: We already spend our days thinking of ways of killing ourselves, how it will affect our families, friends and those around us – or worse, concerns about how it won’t have any effect on them. What suicidal people need is more open discussion, thought, and the topic being less taboo so we have outlets and people we can discuss it with, without feeling alone.
Society needs to be social in order to help one another with their problems. Pretending they don’t exist is no solution, it only allows them to propagate.
Add your comments. **Sobering statistics: **
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for Canadians between the ages of 10 and 24
According to a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), more men in Ontario committed suicide in the past 10 years than died in car crashes
Halfway, somewhere. The internet and it’s effect on my attention spans & workload.
Overload, is what it comes down to. I’m writing this as I glance down at a book open in front of me: “An army of Davids”, by Glenn Reynolds. Great book – I’m partway through the third chapter and really loving it. Next to that book are two others (God’s Secretaries: the making of the king James bible and God&Empire, if you were so curious to know) while splashed out on my computer screen are 27 different firefox tabs. In the midst a few of them I’m partway through some writings, readings and viewings. In particular I’m halfway through two videos I’m watching while reading a couple of betanews & mental floss articles, auditing my phone bill and my recent paypal transactions.
So, here I am. Writing something different for a change - I contemplated completing any of the above and just decided to say forget it. I wouldn’t complete any specific task without moving on to the next without feeling as if I hadn’t gotten anywhere. And the truth is, I didn’t. See the truth is for the past year or so I’ve been dealing with what I call ‘internet overload’, an extremely (un)rare form of attention deficit disorder. I can’t stay on task and haven’t been able to since business began picking up - my full-time job (Fused Network, which I do love dearly) scaled from sixty to a hundred to twelve hundred clients in a short period of time. Since then, the barrage of emails, phone calls and tasks have left me inundated. The daily deluge, I like to call it - is actually relatively easy to escape. Often I simply ‘turn off’ and disappear for a few hours to the confines of a coffee shop, book or ice skating.
I have learned to cope with it in my own interesting ways. This past fall I took a train ride from Toronto to Vancouver, escaping my reality for a total of three days (And taking in mesmerizing sights) while my awesome-worker-bees took the brunt of most phone calls and emails. Just a few weeks ago I drove from Toronto to California and back. Three weeks in total.
And I’m here again, cleaving to my workload like some high strung sailor in the middle of a hurricane. The ship isn’t going down by any definition but learning to cope is a task. I’ve dug around the internet and tried to remedy the situation by reading (half, I never could complete any) of a million articles on defining tasks & completing them, organizing and structuring life and about halfway through every article I’d take three phone calls, make lunch, do laundry & acquire a company. And then I’d forget about the article only to return to it sometime next week disinterested or far too busy for it.
My task list does dwindle though - during the past week I’ve completed roughly 4 items on my list of 30, got 2/3rds of the way through about five books (Two on PHP & BASH programming and the three aforementioned ones). I cope.
Coping I often find ‘escaping’ simply the easiest way to cope. While I’m away out of the office I do often at the very least structure my thoughts, compile more thorough & feasible todo lists and make arrangements. It isn’t as though I’m that much of a mess when it comes to things to do – there’s simply far too many of them and far too little of me.
I’ve had a call out for additional positions that we’re attempting to fill at Fused Network, in particular the ‘personal assistant’ one but to this day out of 197+ resume applications I have only had time to audit two of them. Laundry, dishes, and over 110+ support tickets a day, of course, took precedent.
I’m busy planning my next attempt at an escape, admittedly though I don’t get far. I always have my 3g card and blackberry attached at my hip: readily available in the instant that I’m required to be available. This next one will either be to the Philippines (Blackberry rentals aren’t cheap there), Vancouver or maybe another stint in California. I’d like to go some place ‘seemingly’ less busy on the outside versus another few days in Chicago where things feel rushed.
I have no doubt that somewhere out there I can find a pill to suddenly generate copious amounts of attention to provide to a single topic or task; But I (for some odd reason) prefer my quickpaced life - I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I wouldn’t mind a nicer view or some sunshine at the moment but having 4,000 tasks keeps me busy, something I’ve always loved.
I need somewhere slow, where I can work fast.
The Epoch Times: Group Says ‘Big Media’ Suppressing Free Speech
The group that brought the world Buy Nothing Day, TV Turnoff Week and World Carfree Day has taken on Big Media. Adbusters Media Foundation, a global network of media rights and anti-consumerist activists, is suing CanWest Global, the CBC, the CRTC and the Canadian government over the right to air what it calls public service advertisements. At issue, says Adbusters, is the right of Canadian citizens to have a "reasonable opportunity . . . to be exposed to the expression of differing views on matters of public concern," as stipulated in the Canadian Broadcasting Act. "We want to air messages about some of the biggest issues of our time, including things like obesity, war, and media concentration, and some of our ads want to talk back against some very large corporations that we think are distorting our society," says Vancouver-based Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters.
Personally, I think that it’s up to groups like Adbusters to setup their own ‘competitive’ media distributions. And they do, but if they want people to hear their messages they’re going to need to propagate them on their own. I think they do a wonderful job with their ‘Adbusters’ release that frequents magazine shelves – but instead of concentrating on buying big media ads they should really resort to the internet – Facebook would be their primetime locale.