Contextual belief (day 60)

I just listened to Peter Schiff speak in a somewhat desperate tone about the US dollar being devalued and on route to becoming worthless.  Hyperinflation.  He sounded scared or maybe a mixture of incredulous and desperate for people to wake up.  He sounded convincing perhaps in large measure because he's Peter Schiff, predictor of collapses.   I tried to imagine it was someone else saying these things and how much I believed it.  I do this kind of context test sometimes when I'm in a new city and feel like it's very different than where I came from.  I imagine that I'm actually in my home city, just somewhere I've never walked or driven before.  Where is it in the city?  Close to which neighbourhood?  I get curious about how much cognitive effort it takes to map the new city to my home city and how I feel about the new city afterward.   I do this as an exercise to see how clouded my perception might be by the assumption that where I am is totally different because it's thousands of kilometres away and the people dress differently.  I admit this may strike some people as odd (I know it).  But try it sometime.  It's actually a neat exercise to challenge contextual bias.   Once you start doing it in one situation, it's sort of addictive.  So back to Peter Schiff and his ilk - the people that speak with conviction and write books.  There was something in Peter's voice that was haunting, like a 'please wake up' quality.  I found myself thinking about context but this time in a different way.   Could the things that we are told about other incompetent or 'evil' governments apply to the United States?  And I'm not talking about the direct aggression.  I'm talking about the deliberate devaluing of currency combined with misinforming the public.  You know the type of behaviour that gets people clanging pots out of windows and into the streets, en masse.   I couldn't quite make the leap of context but I came close.  The changes are happening in slow motion so it's hard to understand the trajectory and harder to believe that it couldn't be stopped.  So far, Peter Schiff has convinced me that shifting money away from US currency is probably a safe and good idea.  But not convinced enough to call every one of my friends and tell them to do so.  Trust is so hard to come by.  One thing's for sure, extreme points of view are good at changing the context suddenly if not permanently.

A song for this post.

The one that got away (day 43)

I'm writing this post at my PC, not the laptop.  I mention this because I think it might make a difference.  You see, I bought this beautiful 24" lcd a little while ago and it doesn't fit in the computer desk which means it needs to sit higher than it should.  So I'm always slightly looking up at the screen -- like a reverent expecting look.  My seat is a little too low so my shoulders are always twitching to scrunch up to my ears.  I'm looking at the wall behind my screen.  Usually I'm looking at the living room through the kitchen.  Context is everything and now I'd like to talk about real estate.

In an interesting twist of fate we met some of our neighbours just a block away from where we live.  They were having a yard sale.  They live in the house that we tried to rent when we came back to Vancouver in 2006.  We ended up losing the bid to another couple probably because we were in Alberta and couldn't be there in person to properly represent ourselves.  The story is actually slightly longer than that but let's just say, since we moved to the area, we've been looking at the unit we didn't get with a somewhat nostalgic gaze. One of the tenants holding the yard sale is a screenwriter and musician from Newfoundland.  He  was delightful and played us a song on the guitar as we discussed the soul-sucking high rents in Vancouver and his choice of DVDs and soundtracks.  He is going back East.  The other tenants showed us their basement bachelor suite and we were stunned when they told us how much they're paying.  They seemed relatively happy to be going back to Florida.  Just as we were leaving the landlady came over and we were able to introduce ourselves. She was very gracious and arranged for us to see the suite that we didn't get.  It is gorgeous.  There is a chance that it may become available in the new year but it is a slim chance.  Having met the tenants, we wish them nothing but good fortune...which would mean they would stay in the suite.  Nevertheless, it was nice to close that loop, and re-open it all in one afternoon.

A song for this post.