#WeAreArity Wednesday: Allan Lowson 

What do you do in your free time to help you relax?

It’s almost like a hobby, but I play bocce in a bocce league with friends. It’s relatively relaxing, social, and maybe not a vigorous exercise – but it’s a lot of walking and some bending over to pick things up.  

What do your family and friends think you do all day at work?

I believe they think I just talk on Zoom calls, and they’re right. I think that is a lot of what I do, and they get to see that over my shoulder if they’re walking by. It’s like, “Oh, you’re just on Zoom calls all day.” I’m like, “Yeah, we do talk about things and things get solved and whatnot.” Then, “Yeah, but you just talk all day.” I don’t think there’s a good understanding, and then I just point out to Katarina, my wife, that she talks all day too. But she’s a therapist, so it’s different. It’s more expected. 

Who was your childhood celebrity crush?

Maybe I had a thing for redheads when I was little because it might have been Annie and Anne of Green Gables. They were both from the original movies, not the remakes. There was an early ‘80s Annie, I think. And Anne of Green Gables was also in the early ‘80s. 

What movie do you wish you could watch again for the first time?

I would have to say “Brazil,” which is also from the ‘80s. Terry Gilliam directed it, and it has, I think, Jonathan Pryce. Anyways, it is a great film. It has some twists and turns.  

I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but I do remember seeing it in theaters the first time and being kind of amazed with it. It has a lot of pre-CGI, huge models built for some of the shots. And it’s a little dark, yet also fun because it’s Terry Gilliam. He was a member of Monty Python. It’s a little bit of a dystopian future world, like “1984”-ish. There are some great character actors in it, so I would recommend it. 

What was your best class in school?

I guess math was pretty easy — high-school level. Third-year university calculus kicked my butt, but all math in high school was really easy to the point where I didn’t even have a textbook.  

I could just kind of go do the tests, which bothered some people who were competitive. It wasn’t like I was at a high school that was just teaching the lowest-level math possible. It just seemed easy at the time, and then, like I said, it quickly got out of my league. 

What do you usually eat for a quick lunch?

Geez, without shaming myself, a quick lunch I usually have are veggie dogs. Quickly throw in some rye toast for buns, fry up a couple of veggie dogs, and I’m good. And it takes five minutes. I’m not vegan, so I might put some cheese on the veggie dog. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 15. 

Where is your favorite vacation spot?

There are different types of vacations. For a get-out-of-town, relax-in-nature vacation, I would go up to Lake Superior. But if I want to do a get-off-the-continent to hike, explore, and visit vacation, I wouldn’t mind going back to Northern Italy — somewhere in the Alps to do some hiking and biking. 

It was neat when we went two years ago. We flew in, took a train south for a couple days, and then we took a different train all the way up into the Alps. It was beautiful and really nice.  

We have talked about going to Japan, but it kind of requires a three or four-week vacation, I think. We were planning it and then the tsunami and the Fukushima incident happened and we were like, “Let’s not go now. They’ve got some stuff to work out.” We won’t go to Fukushima Prefecture for a thousand years, or whatever the half-life is. Kind of grim, but I still want to go. 

If you had to move to another country, which would you choose?

It would be Canada because I already have a passport — that and healthcare. I have dual citizenship, but now I have to bring two passports when I travel. I’m originally Canadian, and I just got my American citizenship last year. 

What is an easy way to do something nice for someone?

I don’t know about the easy part, but to make it easy, my wife bought me a daily affirmation notepad with check boxes, so I could go through and basically fill out a form and say, “Dear name, I appreciate—” and then “because check, check, check.”  

It’s helpful because sometimes you forget to say the things that you’re thinking. I think the daily affirmation is a lot easier with a checklist notepad, but the fact that the checklist notepad exists also reminds you to try to say something nice. Yeah, I won’t tell you she had to get it for me because I always forgot to say things – many of which I was regularly thinking all the time, but just wasn’t saying.