The dog days of mid to late April

We're a funny people, us Canadians.

It's been warm in Toronto for maybe a week or so, solid. Summer weather, after what many people have termed a winter from hell. (Does that hell has frozen over? If that's the case, I got lots and lots of sex coming my way!)

People are still complaining about the winter weather. People have been loving the warm weather. And then yesterday, it happened. I knew it would, but when it did, it came as a surprise.

During the winter my gal and I hadn't gone out on too many evening strolls. So now that spring is here, we've been trying to get out from behind our desks and outside. So yesterday, around 6ish, when the sun was starting to go down, we were out on the Danforth, waiting at a light to cross the street, when this guy steps up beside us.

He was panting heavily. His thick, round sun glasses were resting on his chin, for what reason I don't know. His thin grey shirt was covered with splotches of sweat, and he carried a much too heavy backpack over his shoulder. He came right up to us, and without preamble or or the slightest level of prompting, said, "It's too hot."

I looked at him in surprise. Huh? He looked at me, and perhaps sensing that I wasn't on the same page as him, said, "When you can't stop seating, it's way too hot." I have recently realized most people appreciate an attempt to understand their point of view, so I started a half hearted lie. "Yeah, I guess it..." and that's as far as I could get. I could not join this squat guy's moral outrage.

The light changed and he crossed the street ahead of us, obviously he had somewhere to be and he'd been going there for some time, in the blazing, mid April setting sun.

And that was it. The first person I heard complain about the warmth.

It didn't even take a month to go from voicing displeasure at the cold to assuring complete strangers that the Earth, shifting on its axis and adjusting the exposure of the northern hemisphere to the sun, was asking too much of us.

I gotta tell you - no one complains like a Canuck.

We should have that as a motto. I wonder how it reads in Latin?

Everything you wanted to know about... what was I talking about?

Email.

There's so much expressed in that one little compound word. To how many people reading this does this sum up almost the entirely of your job? Or your life?

People who don't know how to work that crazy YouTube have email. Our entire society has become organized by email. You know how frustrating it is when you want to get in touch with someone, say at some government agency or something, and you can't find an email address?

Here's a hint. Never send an email to some catch-all address like info@companyname.com. That email address is their excuse to ignore you.

I hate it when I get no email. I go mental when I get too much. Someday, I'm sure, I'll get some kind of Blackberry thing and loose my grip entirely. I know people who thrive getting 300 or so emails everyday. I would snap, no question. I'd be on some news magazine show in four or five years, in my prison orange, telling a sympathetic but ambitious reporter how I don't remember anything after clicking send and receive. But of course I would remember, I'd be lying for the sympathy of the viewers back home. What else do I have to do in prison?

Here's a horrifying thought. They got the email in prison now, don't they? Man.

I gotta say, I can't imagine doing my work without it. It couldn't have been too long ago that people in my field used things like faxes and couriers instead. Maybe I shouldn't complain. It's a little like some old timey oral storyteller complaining about the printing press. "It's a fad, it'll never catch on." Did they have fads then? I know for a while it was popular for men to wear leggings. Now we don't. Does that qualify as a fad that came and went?

Is there some way to tell the difference between a fad and a trend? What about a movement? Can a movement also be a fad?

My cat's cute.