Sarah McKenna Brown wrote her 2010 thesis on couchsurfing culture: Travel as Homemaking: The Building of Mobile Intentional Communities.

This thesis is a product of my interest in movement and social transformation. I was drawn to the practice of travel because of my desire to learn about the world and myself and to do this learning in the service of my commitment to social justice. Travel is a profound metaphor for the work of personal and social change; the journey that takes individuals and groups from one ‘place’ to another is a movement that can be physical, mental, or spiritual.

This project is an account of a journey I undertook to participate in and observe the phenomenon known as couchsurfing. The people whom I encountered while couchsurfing were engaged in processes of re-finding, expressing, and creating meanings. In my movement, I am self-reflective, processing what I observe and who I am, then reflecting it to others so that we have the opportunity to see multiple perspectives. Couchsurfers, the Rainbow Family, artists, and activists seek to imagine themselves as creative individuals, knowledge-makers, and relationship-builders. As activists, they believe in a world that will never be fully realized because it is constantly being made.

It’s an interesting read, one that reminds me that it’s the happenstance of travel that I miss most dearly.

I was in Amazon Rekognition this afternoon–their ”image recognition as a service” product–and notice a new “PPE detection” tab. I uploaded a masked photo of myself to try it out and, sure enough, it reported a 99.9% degree of confidence that I was wearing a mask. It also reported only 88.4% that my mask was covering my nose; I have a large nose, and a lot of it was showing, so I don’t blame the robots.

The mask I’m wearing, one I wrote about in October when I purchased it, was a Medium Rare-brand; it served me well until this weekend when the flexible wire nose piece finally snapped in two from metal fatigue. Unable to abide the glasses-fogging the resulted, and with The Cook’s Edge closed on Sundays, rather than replacing it I purchased two new masks, from Bentley, the luggage shop in the Charlottetown Mall of all places. If you can’t trust your luggage supplier to keep you health, who exactly can you trust?

I admire the spelling out of all the possible mat-exchange cadences. Although I prefer fortnightly in place of bi-weekly, as the latter can mean both ”every two weeks” and “twice a week.”

See also the same comparison from 2009.

A work in progress, next in the series of COVID-zeitgeist projects that started with TRY in 2020. They say you can’t print light-on-dark with a letterpress and get satisfying results; I’m setting out to discover this for myself, first printing with opaque white and following on with overprinting in yellow. Once I was done with the white, I noticed this glimpse of the GLIMPSE on the roller.

An episode of the The Widow We Do Now? podcast in August featured widower Treagan White, who talked about the life and death of his wife Kim White through cancer, and his life since. Listening to it over the last week — it’s almost an hour and a half long — I had a lot of “wow, you think that too!?” moments.

One of the things that confounds Oliver is making choices, and when you sit back and think about the number of things in everyday life that are choices—what clothes to wear? what to have for breakfast? lunch? supper? multiple choice tests, what’s your favourite? questions—it’s a tsunami.

The tsunami crested before Christmas when motherless Oliver was faced, for the first time, with buying Christmas gifts all by himself.

One day in late November I came home to find that Oliver had uncorked a prepaid Visa card he’d be given for for his 20th birthday. I asked him what he’d used it for, and he was cagey in that “don’t ask because it involves you” kind of way. He eventually admitted that he’d used it on a website that would take over the process of buying gifts.

Alarm bells immediately went off inside my head: a website that collects credit numbers and the names, addresses, and predilections of friends and family? That had danger written all over it.

While Oliver’s Visa was only worth $25, so his financial liability wasn’t great, his emotional liability was on the line, and so, treading the murky line between privacy invasion and duty of care that parents know well, I set off to find out everything I could about joyful.gifts.

Initial signs weren’t good: there was no physical address or location listed on the site, no social media links to follow, the domain name registration hid the contact information, and an initial email inquiry went seemingly unanswered. I feared the worst, and consulted brother Mike to seek confirmation of my paranoia.

And then a surprising thing happened: I got an email back from Mariam, apologizing for a tardy reply:

Yes! We are real :) We were so excited when your son found us. The internet is a huge place and it’s hard to stand out and compete against the Googles and Amazons of the world.

We exchanged a few more emails, and I learned they’re a small family startup near Bear, Delaware. Based on my experience, they added links to social media on their site, and I was able to follow those to the point where I was satisfied enough that they were on the up and up. So I handed over my credit card and waited for joyful.gifts to save Oliver’s Christmas.

And, as it turned out, they did exactly what they said they were going to do: they sent custom-tailored gifts to everyone Oliver specified, with a per-gift limit of $25 and a per-gift fee of $4.99, shipping included. The gifts arrived on time, with a gift card from Oliver, wrapped nicely in fabric bags. My mother received a music box, my brother Johnny a perpetual motion machine, and I received a USB-powered digital clock.

Oliver, miracle of miracles, pulled a Kobayashi Maru on Christmas.

Today in the mail I got a lovely handwritten thank you card from Jonathan and Mariam at joyful.gifts, and they asked me help spread the word about their enterprise; I’m happy to do so. If you too are challenged by choice (or time, or, during COVID, ability to shop), Oliver’s experience suggests that joyful.gifts might be just the site for you.

How do we develop our daily living consumable tastes? I have no idea. But I’ve been using Ban-brand antiperspirant for as long as I can remember, the unscented variety, as I’ve no wish to smell like “fresh cotton” or “satin breeze,” two of their other varieties. Here’s a photo I took in a Boston hotel in 2012 showing it as part of my gels-and-fluids collection in my luggage, along with toothpaste, hand sanitizer, gold printing ink and lip balm.

I’ve had difficulty locating Ban Unscented for the last year or so: sometimes it’s available a Sobeys or Shoppers Drug Mart and sometimes it’s not, and, more often than not, if it is available it’s only in “powder fresh” scent.

Ban is a brand of the Japan-based multinational Kao Corporation, which also owns other familiar brands like Curel, Biore, and Jergens. In other words, it’s not a small-batch artisanal deodorant maker.

Last I decided to get to the bottom of the apparent Ban ban on PEI and used the contact form on the Ban website to send a query. The initial response, an automated one, was curious for its inclusion of this mystical incantation:

In addition, please be advised that for increased efficiency, we use message preview panes that allow us to read your message without actually opening it.  If you track how your messages are handled, you may get a message that states that your message was deleted without being read.  Due to how we operate, the tracking message will not be accurate.  You can be confident that we read all correspondence that we receive.

Including that smacks of a “someone thought we deleted their email before we read it — get through to legal and make sure we’re protected!!” exchange at corporate. Regardless, this morning came the reply:

We are sorry that you are having difficulty locating our product.

Our products are now sold online only through Walmart.ca and amazon.ca.

Unfortunately, we are not able to sell directly to consumers due to licensing issues.

We hope this information is useful and we look forward to your continued interest in our products.

Sure enough, Amazon sells Ban Unscented for $8.17/container, and Walmart sells it for $3.98/container.

Has it come to this? Must I really go to Walmart for my deodorant?

How difficult it is to find non-payola mattress reviews online is perhaps the clearest example of how how the commercial internet fails us. At the same time, in a not-unrelated development, mattress technology and marketing has changed dramatically in the 15 years since I last bought a mattress, with the arrival of the compressed-bed-in-a-box disrupters and their “why do you need a showroom when we let you try it for 100 nights?!” entreaties.

I’ve a feeling my mattress is slowly killing me in my sleep: it’s a old school, not particularly well-made king size coil mattress set on a pair of twin box springs. From an earlier time. I have never loved it, perhaps in part because my experience of it before it was wrangled up our stairs by burly delivery drivers was a 10 minute test drive at Sears. For a time it was set on a prison-like wooden bed frame that ultimately fell apart; in recent years it’s just sitting on the floor.

So, dear readers, tell me about your mattress if you will. Where did you buy? What style? How did you choose? How do you sleep? Every body is different, yes; but I need to get the lay of the land in a forum outside of the influencer echo chamber.