I lay in the sun for a while and then went for a long walk down the beach. The sun was shining and it was hot! I could feel my skin slowly changing colour under the hot rays. When there’s sun I like to take off my shirt and shoes and hat. I like to soak in as much of that beautiful energy as I can. 

I walked around for another couple of hours after getting back from the beach. My skin is a nice red colour now. Give it a couple of days and it’ll be a sweet tan, or that’s the idea.

I’ve been told that too much sun exposure can be harmful and cause cancer. I’ve also heard that sunscreen lotion can cause cancer. These days it seems like everything causes cancer. I’d rather take my chances with the all natural god given sunshine than putting a bunch of highly processed chemical compounds on my skin. So yeah I don’t use sunscreen.

I also avoid sunglasses, unless they are necessary for whatever style I’ve got going for the day. But I rarely use them, because I think the sunlight is so good for your eyes as well. For example it’s such a great way to wake up in the morning.

Get some sun in your eyes and on your skin today!

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Without an airplane most human flight would simply be straight down. Without boats one’s water travelling would be limited to the distance one could swim. Tractors make short work of jobs that would take ages if done by hand. 

There is something beautiful about a man having a machine. Almost like there can be a relationship between them. Some people will and have disagreed with me, but we all have a unique experience in life so that’s fine. 

Whenever I have owned a car or motorcycle or even a bicycle, it’s always felt like more of a friend than just a bunch of inanimate material formed into something useful. When I drive my car, to me it is a relationship. I am capable of wrecking the car if I do something wrong, so it trusts that I will take care of it. Conversely something out of my control could happen at any moment leaving me helpless, so in turn I trust that the car will hold onto its end of the deal.

I maintain the car in exchange for a more reliable ride. The car gives me a place to go when I need some alone time to collect my thoughts. 

I will say that this analogy does fall apart when we reach the part where cars are bought and sold. I’m not sure what to say about that. 

Regardless, there’s something I still love about the power of machines.

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I have always loved driving. I grew up driving a lawn mower around in the summer, and got my licence as soon as I was old enough. I bought a car when I was sixteen and drove all over the country roads and into the nearby city, hanging out with friends at the beach or driving to work. When I wasn’t driving anywhere I would even just sit in my car, it felt like a safe space for me.

Where I grew up in Canada the roads were pretty straightforward and simple. The city was not very big, and didn’t have too many confusing intersections. But it was big enough to have lots of traffic and lots of different kinds of driving situations. I lived a ten minute drive from town, but I often worked downtown. I got a good exposure to country and city driving from an early age, which has been great for me. I’m just as comfortable driving at 135km/h down a highway as I am crawling through big city gridlock. 

When my family moved to Nicaragua I was eighteen, and I bought a small motorcycle as soon as I could. My Dad also owned a couple of pickup trucks, which all had manual transmissions. I learned to drive manual. A dying art these days. Many North Americans have only driven with an automatic car.

My little 125cc Yamaha motorcycle was the source of a lot of very good memories for me. I would recommend getting a motorcycle to anyone looking for a cool mode of transportation. I went exploring all over the dirt roads in the hills of Western Nicaragua. Some of the roads were made of brick, but for the most part they were just packed dirt, which was incredibly dusty in the dry season. I would ride on the beaches and bunnyhop over the little dunes left behind by the outgoing tides. I went to places you couldn’t access by car. My brother and I had all kinds of adventures riding around together, him on his own bike. 

I came back to Canada when I was nineteen, and I bought an old Honda SUV from my Dad that he had left behind when we left for Nicaragua. I proceeded to drive it out to Vancouver, from Ontario. It’s a few days of driving, and I made the most of it. I hardly had any money, but I stayed with friends where I could and eventually found a job in Vancouver for the Summer.

I later drove back to Ontario, and then with a friend to Montana for a few weeks. Highways in the USA are fun to drive on, they often have higher speed limits than in Canada. Before my trip to Montana my mechanic advised me not to go, my car was not in great shape. I consulted my friend and we decided that whatever happened would make for a great story so we took off. We didn’t have power steering and the wheels were almost ready to come flying off the car, but we made it out west and back with no major issues. 

I moved to Ireland recently, and here they drive on the opposite side of the road. I haven’t had a chance to drive here yet, but it still catches me a little off guard every time a car comes up the road on the opposite side I’m expecting. It’s a little hard to wrap my head around after spending my whole life one way. Some of the roads here are so narrow as well, there’s really only space for one car to go by. One car often has to back up for the other one to get through. I’m so used to wide roads with multiple lanes and big shoulders. Here if you pull off the road you’ll either hit a stone wall or fall down an embankment. The drivers here seem quite cooperative though. 

I have always loved driving. People all over the world have places to go, and driving gets them there. The vehicles and roads are different everywhere, and that’s part of the joy of exploring the world. 

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I don’t have official answers to these questions. I’ve never studied language formally in any way. When I meet someone from a different culture I always like to learn a word or two in their language. I always felt like as a Canadian I have a fairly neutral accent. Somewhere between Southern Twang and good old British. I guess we must all feel that way because our own accent seems normal to ourself.

An accent gives you a story. I recently moved to Ireland, where most people here have a beautiful thick Irish accent. And now I am the odd one out. As the guy with an accent, everyone wants to guess where I’m from. They want to hear about me and why I’m here.

I love talking to people who speak my own language but with an accent. From the fairly conservative Northwest accent of North America, to the thick southern drawl of the Southern States, to the completely different and beautiful accents of the British Isles, to the incredibly different twists of English in the Caribbean countries. 

I also love trying to understand how English as a second language is affected by the speaker’s first language. I’ve had the pleasure of learning a little bit of Spanish, mostly from some time I spent in Nicaragua, in Central America. I learned what I know almost completely just through conversation, picking up more bit by bit. I surprised myself how quickly I picked things up naturally without the need to study formally in any way. But I started to see how if your ears are used to certain sounds, you’ll continue to use those sounds even when learning a new language. It can be hard to hear subtle differences between two completely different words that a native speaker would have no trouble with.

In my time learning Spanish and since, I began to notice subtle accent differences within that language. The people of Spain speak Spanish in an accent that is considered by the Latin-Americans to sound more refined or fancy in a way. Similar to how the British accent might sound to a Canadian or American. I once visited an incredibly remote area in the hills of Western Nicaragua and met some people who possibly had never talked to a native English speaker. They even had their own dialect of Spanish that was incredibly difficult for me to understand!

In this day of constant and instant connection, just from sitting on a couch we can be exposed to accents of people from all over the world.  I believe there is something important and beautiful about preserving accents. What a shame it would be for everyone to just melt into the same form of speaking. Isn’t it a beautiful thing that wherever we go in the world we can represent our home just based on the way we speak?

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