1. Dampen a cloth with cool water and place it on your forehea… wait, wrong kind of fever.

1a. Dig a series of tunnels under your house. Maybe throw a bomb shelter in there while you’re at it. Why not? You have nothing else to do. All those underground tunnels will make it feel like you’re in another world without leaving the vicinity of your home. Maybe you’ll even find a secret society of dwarves.

2. You can go down, but you could also go up. Into the sky with tree-houses and catwalks and all kinds of phobia-inducing fun. If you’re scared sh*#less all the time, you won’t be bored!

3. Or if those things are too adventurous for you, you could just stay inside and shrink down to the size of an ant. Make sure to fill your bathtub before you do it, and install tiny ladders on all the stairs and counters before you shrink. Now you have your own obstacle course and giant swimming pool. Food will last forever and suddenly your house won’t feel so tiny and cramped.

4. Or if you prefer to keep your original size, you could harness that sci-fi power to travel to different dimensions. Maybe in some alternate world, your house is a mansion, or your backyard is filled with dinosaurs that never went extinct. There are endless possibilities. You won’t ever be bored, again!

5. Speaking of Dinosaurs, what about good old-fashioned time-travel? You can go back to the Cretaceous, Palaeolithic, Ice Age and more. Or jump forward and see what your house looks like in the future. Time will fly in every sense of the word!

1. I began to write before I could read...

Okay, not really. I scribbled on a page what I thought looked like writing, then showed it off to my mother. I actually thought I had written something, because it looked just like the scribbles I’d seen on paper, so I asked her what it said. I wanted to know what brilliant thing I had written in my scribbles. She just laughed and said, “it doesn’t say anything.”

Guess I really wanted to write.

Okay, real answer… I don’t know exactly. Ten at the latest. I would write journals in school, I wrote a short story called, “the haunted hotel”, and sort of half started another one about a girl who falls through a hole into a fantasy dimension. And I wrote a story about killing a giant that my teacher kept saying was too violent. Guess she’d never watched the Power Rangers.

Don’t remember what age I was for all of these, though. Relatively young.

2. Writing gives me an escape, the same way reading does. It’s an outlet, a form of expression, and a skill to get lost in. Immersion into anything I enjoy is a way to step outside myself and leave all the raging thoughts and doubts going on in there.

3. This one is pretty standard. I want to publish something that sells. Something that people can get lost in the way I get lost in my favourite books. Specifically, I have a working series I would like to publish one day. Sometimes, that feels out or reach. I wish my imagination could escape all my physical, ah, troubles, but it’s a struggle. Sometimes even reading is difficult. Still, the dream is there, however far away it may seem, most days.

1. Move to the moon, of course. You will instantly be six times lighter!

2. Change the gravitational pull of the earth. It’s easy, some measly supernatural power is all you need.

3. Transform into a small animal. Like a squirrel or rabbit. You can lose weight and look adorable, too!

4. Go skydiving for eternity. If you never stop falling, you will literally be weightless forever!

5. And of course there is the old classic, transform the very structure of your body. Turn your bones to feather, your flesh to wind. Who needs to be a solid form, anyway?

Just to add a few more to the list:

Wiin: Ojibwe. He/she him/her.

Wiya: Cree. Broad 3rd person term that can refer to people of either gender, animals, or objects. I thought this was an interesting one because it is so different from the way we catergorize things.

Two-Spirit: Is the general aboriginal term for a person with both a masculine and feminine spirit. Called “winkt” in Lakota.

Pain can wake you up.

Pain can shut you down.

It can fill you with manic energy.

Or leave you so exhausted you can’t think.

It can be fast and jarring.

Or slow and agonizing.

Fueled with numbing adrenaline.

Or nerves firing with the slightest move.

It can make you feel strong.

It can make you feel weak.

It is a double-edged blade.

Navigate the world? I still haven’t figured that out. Most influential? I can’t just choose one. There are just too many. Its dizzying. So many perspectives that give me a kind of funhouse rush of confusion. I don’t know which way’s up or down, or which direction to go, next. Like I am forever standing at a crossroads of ideas and perspectives. But, that’s part of the fun.

The Diary of Anne Frank: I read when I was close to Ann’s age and couldn’t imagine living through something like that. It made me sympathetic and sometimes angry in a way no picture or museum has done. Accounts of bravery and sacrifice, evil and betrayal to rival any fiction book.

The Classic Slave Narratives: Left the same kind of impression. I cringed and recoiled more than once when reading these vivid, personal stories. It is one thing to understand cognitively how terrible it was, another to almost feel it (even if on just a superficial level, as reading does not even come close to the actual experience).

Mama Lola: Took a mysterious and unknown Religion, and made it feel familiar. Showed me another way to try to understand and navigate the world. A way to cope with suffering and find strength in faith and each other.

Firebringer, The Sight, and Fell: A series that all takes place in the same forest. ‘Firebringer’, is told from the perspective of a deer, and his kind hates the wolves that hunt them. The Sight and Fell, make a shift to wolf perspective. Suddenly, I sympathized with predator instead of prey. Neither is right or wrong, really. They are just…trying to survive.

Enders Game: Where a child genius goes to space to become a solder, in a battle against an alien aggressor that is fought video-game style. Nothing is as it seems in this novel, including the perceived aggression of the enemy. I suppose life can be like that, too. One revelation, one tiny change or bit of new information, can change everything.

Hominids Series: A parallel universe is discovered where Neanderthals became the dominant species on the planet, instead of Homo Sapiens. I loved the subtle but important differences between the two species of intelligent primates. Like the fact that Neanderthals do not cry, but still display the same depth of sadness in their eyes.

All of these books have expanded my mind and reminded me to always try to see the world from every possible angle and viewpoint. For me, there can't be only one. Each book adds to a mosiac that creates a bigger picture, and my mosiac is nowhere near complete.

Sometimes, new and exciting is the best thing ever.

My new puppy: He makes everything feel lighter, and is so cute and enthusiastic about waking me up in the morning, I can’t even get annoyed about it.

3D building: Promises to be a better, cheaper, faster way to build houses. I hope this technology makes the housing market more accessible to millennials and gen z.

Sometimes, the old ways are the best.

Grass fed cattle allowed to roam in fields all day.

The traditional way of making olive oil.

Farmers markets and farm to table.

Or, a mixture can be amazing.

Old songs remixed by new bands.

A modern house that’s reminiscent of a log cabin.

These are some things I have appreciated, lately. ^_^