But this essay isn't about the integration of microchips, human flesh and yarn - it's about how we connect (literally and figuratively) with our technology.

Let me throw this out to start: We like pretty things and sometimes we like pretty things over useful things. Yes, we would, in an ideal world, enjoy pretty, useful things, but we reach into our wallets and choose form before function, slickness is often prized over reliability.

Now, add to this a strong sense among users of technology to find the newest, sharpest edge. We strive to be unique in a digital world that is made uniform through its inherent limitations.

Case in point: Twitter clients.

Seriously, and I'm not trying to get all Soviet Union-y on all y'all, but why in the world are there more than, say, two Twitter clients (one of them being the Twitter web interface itself)? Simple: Everyone wants the newest, most überstylin' client and they want others to see that they're Tweeting from it. It's like the guy who will drink only vodka from Poland. Um, sir, vodka is flavourless and odourless. You are an aesthete, which is fine, but I have twenty clams on the fact that you have fine but weightless words to speak for the fine taste of your vodka brand.

And there's nothing wrong with interfacing with a rare vodka, or viewing one's laptop through a Lorax's sweater, or Tweeting from the client that went beta 38 seconds ago.

But if we scrape off the icing of the superficial and take a handful of cake (c'mon, you know you want to), we see that it's still just sugar and fat, no? Often when we use technology, we make the simple complex solely for the sake of complexity. I would argue that we should be striving for is making the complex simple for the sake of functionality.

So, yeah, I'd rather have one killer Twitter client than have to try 20, none of which work properly for more than a couple of hours. I don't want firefox extensions that I don't understand or remember how to use.

What I like are new ways to interface with my technology that change the nature of the relationship. That's why I love the iPhone app "Hipstamatic." It takes the iPhone's camera and turns it into a variety of real cameras, including a Diana. It takes insanely good picture. I use it tons, and it changes the entire way I interface with my iPhone and, more importantly, how the iPhone interfaces with me, the user.

As we drive technology forward and move to what I predict will be a silo-ing of relationships we each have with technology (we won't interface with twenty things, rather we'll interface with five groups of four things, which is an entirely different game) these concepts will become more important in defining what we do and how we do it.

It was big and heavy and I was afraid I'd lose it and never get to have another watch again.

And as happens so many times in life when we think we've just discovered something, I realized that I'd loved watches long before that Seiko. I remember that my dad had this rich, dark brown leather watch box in his bedside drawer. I found it when I was 6 and every couple of weeks I'd open it up and pull out the thin, gold Swiss watch he was given by my mom's parents on their wedding day. It was the most elegant thing I'd ever seen, certainly the shiniest, and I wanted it.

In one of the best TED talks out there, Sir Ken Robinson makes a passing observation about how today's young people tell time on their mobile phones. That's a reality and it's never going to change.

But to me, it's a huge shame because it's going to translate into a lost art - the art of watchmaking and watch collecting.

Here in Stockholm, not at all far from the Grand Hotel, there is a wonderful watch shop called Åke Falk. They represent a really skilled Swedish watchmaker, Sjöö Sandström, who makes these timeless, stunning, clean watches. To me, just staring in Falk's window (which I'll admit to doing weekly) is a pleasure; it's a few minutes of fantasy in a day filled with endless reality and responsibility.

The world in which we live has forsaken watches. In China, everyone has a mobile phone and very few people own a watch. I've been there over 50 times and, from my own observations, one in twenty people wear a watch. Nineteen of twenty have a mobile.

So until a couple of years ago, I would take solace in places such as Munich and Zurich, where the art of what a watch is and represents could never, I thought, be lost. But it is. There is still Wempe and all of the fine Swiss and German watch houses. I've visited Sinn in Frankfurt and it was honestly like an American kid going to Yankee Stadium. It was history and a little part of me.

Sir Ken was entirely right. As a matter of course, watches are redundant. I'm looking at my iPhone 4 right now. The time is digital. And big. And clear. And anyone who knows me knows that I'm always wired - I don't even know what "off the grid" means.

But I'm also wearing a watch. The one in the picture above. I took that picture yesterday (obviously while I was enjoying a coffee) with my Hipstamatic lens on said iPhone. It's one of the watches I own that I most like to wear - my Hamilton GMT. It gives me three timezones (probably five fewer than I need to keep track of every day, but it's better than one), it's neither too big nor too small, it's comfortable to wear, and in a country that I absolutely love, I can wear it and not feel that I'm bending the rules too much on Swedish "lagom."

It's a shame that fewer and fewer 13-year-olds are developing a love for watches. They won't do all of the geeky watch things I've done, like buy and sell on watch trading boards, have cold beers around the world with other collectors (wow - it's already sounding a lot more geeky than I assure you that it is), head to Basel for the annual watch exposition (yep, we're at supergeeky now) and just, simply, enjoy.

In a word that's so complex, everyone needs the time for simple pleasures. I'm just not sure I want to see that time on my phone.

I could draw a remarkably spiffy sandshark.

How I loved the WHA. Man, that was MY league. The NHL was for suckers, I reasoned, as a ten-year-old. The WHA was my terrain. Dude.

I've done business in the same way. I don't want old, established, slow. I don't live an in-person weekly meetings, a cubicle and committees business life and I never will. I crave lean and relevant and highly functional. I choose creative over dull. "zing!" resonates infinitely more with me than "meh."

I have a ridiculous number of passions in life. The art is found in multitasking the bejeezus out of them. I want my daily life to be a dashboard of each one of these passions and most days I give myself at least a solid "B" in being able to pull that off.

As for the passion that is sport, it's really broad. As I live a global life, and we have this Interwebs thingy, I can follow results from around the world. Just to give you a sense of how much of sport I love, here are the leagues I follow and my favorite teams. Somewhat pathetically, I've kept lists such as this since I was four, probably the year I became so passionately OCD

National Hockey League: Chicago Blackhawks (not a bandwagon-jumper, I suffered through the lean years)

Major League Baseball: San Francisco Giants

National Basketball Association: Miami Heat

National Football League: New York Jets

English Premier League football: Arsenal (This makes me reviled globally, but I'm a Gunner through and through. Let the hate mails flow.)

Swedish Eliteserien hockey: Djurgården

Indian Premier League cricket: Mumbai Indians

NCAA basketball: University of North Carolina Tarheels

Canadian Football League: Montreal Alouettes

German Bundesliga football: Bayern Munich

NCAA hockey: Maine Black Bears

Mexican Primera Division football: Cruz Azul

NCAA football: University of Southern California Trojans (as he hangs his head in shame and disgust)

Formula 1 auto racing: McLaren

Nippon Professional Baseball League Japan: Hiroshima Carp

While this may seem an exhaustive list, it's barely a dent because I've listed only major pro or college leagues. I love junior and minor league hockey, even follow hockey in developing hockey nations such as Malaysia and China. And I didn't even list individual sports, such as golf, tennis and, yeah, squash. I love playing and watching squash and I'm willing to bet that I can crush you on a squash court in fact, I have a beer riding on it.

Part of our attraction to sport is fantasy. Part is truth, part fiction. We love the escape, getting lost in the game. Most of all, I think, we love victories, large and small. We love watching the little guy win (we all remember Flutie's Hail Mary pass against the Irish) and we love watching dynasties (Jordan and his Bulls).

Most of all, we just love it because, well, there's just so much to love.

When I grow up I'm going to own the Québec Sandsharks, even if it's a "Junior C" team.

Just watch.

For me, traditional methods and modes of relaxation produce far more anxiety than they alleviate.

Really.

The idea of sitting by a lake on a wooden chair, staring at the still water makes me itchy. I will admit that I'd probably like it for between 90 and 120 seconds, then it would quickly become an irritant. Ditto to a quiet walk on a country road, an isolated off-the-grid cabin and fishing. I like fishing. At Barney Greengrass. For the sturgeon. And a dark-toasted dry poppy seed bagel.

In fact, as I look through websites listing all of the traditional methods of relaxation, very few seem that they might be borderline effective for me, the vast majority are cringe-worthy (and, yeah, all of the above are on these lists).

What works for me is a definitional opposite of dramatic irony: cities. This is something that no larger audience has ever appreciated; only I as the central character get it.

There must be a theory somewhere, though I can't find one, that speaks to the idea that the more external energy tat I am able to absorb will impact upon me in an inverse way. So, rather than deflecting the stressors of a city, or internalizing them in a stress-ful or stress-inducing way, I take that energy in as a fuel that calms me.

It's abstract, I know, and I wish I could explain it more scientifically or clearly or accessibly, but I can't. What I can do is say that in the same way as the earlier sitting by the lake scene might invoke feelings of calm in you and the idea of being in a taxi in Delhi during the morning rush might invoke feeling of great stress or even panic in you, it's pretty much the total opposite for me. There are exceptions - I'll freely admit to absolutely loving Bali, Indonesia and Da Nang, Vietnam. But the key is that I do so in very small doses, where I can thrive in cities for really extended periods of time.

Cities energize and relax me at the same time. There's something about the immediacy of anonymity in a vibrant city that really draws me in. I can be who I want to be by the way I dress, act, carry myself. I can draw attention or vanish. I can live like a native or a tourist and I can change that up in a minute.

So, in ascending order, here are the cities in the world that both energize and really profoundly relax me the most:

5. Mexico City: This city would have been higher on the list five years ago. I speak Spanish and learned to do so in Mexico City, so it's easy for me to fall into the pattern of daily life, aside from really late meals. It's simply not anywhere near as safe as it was five years ago. My comfort zone for walking, which used to be a pretty big triangle is now a small rectangle. It's a shame, as the culture and people and colours and feel is just so fantastic.

4. Kuala Lumpur: It's a really intense city and with three cultures literally slamming into each other in every inch of this amazing place, it's constant action. It's a place where I'm always off my bearings, which is good. Amazing food culture.

3. Ho Chi Minh City: One of the best cities to conquer on foot, if you're not afraid of noise, exhaust and motor-scooter-thingies. It's almost impossible to take a bad photo in HCMC, a city that truly never stops rotating on this real and profound axis. I've been there a dozen times, always hate to leave, always feel that the stay, no matter how many days, was far too short.

2. Stockholm: In my mind, Stockholm is the paradise of cities. For me, it's small, and slow and just wonderful in every way. As I've mentioned in other pieces, it's home in so many ways. I've extolled its virtues all over this great Internet - not hard to find how I feel about Stockholm.

1. New York: Yeah, I like to wake up in the city that never sleeps. It is a crush of humanity, of passion, of power, of history, of real-ity and real-ness. It is Fitzgerald. It is The Ramones. It is New York.

It's classic Wieden + Kennedy, the stuff we all say "Dude, I so could have thought of that," but, of course, we didn't.

Over 180 short videos later, featuring, of course, the contemporary "Old Spice Man," (yes, the guy in the towel) and a cast of others, including Alyssa Milano and even some "regular guy" who used the Old Spice Man as an intermediary to propose to his girlfriend (relax, she accepted and doesn't even expect to consummate the marriage with Mister Spice) and Procter & Gamble and Wieden + Kennedy have effectively "swaggerized" us all.

But what grabs me about this is how classic 1960s ad stuff this all is.

Think about it: While "they" (P+G+W+K, as mentioned above) have definitely lipstick-ed up the pig, as the Mad Men used to say, what has changed in what Old Spice is actually selling?

So, yesterday in Chicago, all in the name of research (and the fact that I left my Chanel Allure Sport deodorant in my Toronto hotel) I bought a container of Old Spice Swagger deodorant. While my image above is totally kosher re: Creative Commons, I can't find one that I'm allowed to use for Swagger. So, I drew one. I hope you like it.

The good news is that the product is excellent deodorant. Just as Old Spice has made excellent deodorant for all the decades that they've made deodorant. No better. No worse.

What does it smell like? Well, it smells like an Old Spice product. Vaguely perfumey...nice...kinda masculine but subtle. The usual. It smells neither like angels' breath nor like durian.

That's the beauty of this week's campaign: they took the absolutely mundane (a four dollar deodorant stick and lateral products) and made it cool. And celebrities were involved and they talked about it on TV and it's all over Google and people are asking whether the Old Spice dude is more fly than the Dos Equis dude and, well, I'm writing about it, trying to impress you with their collective brilliance/wisdom/vision.

And it's fun and we remember why we like advertising and, they're betting, why we like Old Spice.

i.c.stars* is an amazing charity with whom I've had the great good fortune to work for the past five years, since I was a student at Kellogg. Their mission is to work with inner-city young adults, give them training in leadership and technology, then nurture them into truly world-class community leaders.

Simple, no?

Miles from simple. There are infinite societal obstacles to the success of the program and the success of their graduates, yet both shine as bright as the sun on this hot Chicago summer day.

And it's hot.

It's exactly the kind of day Spike Lee portrayed in his epic "Do the Right Thing." But rather than the slow boil of the New York day erupting into a tearing down of community, tonight in Chicago is about building. Taking a foundation carefully laid over weeks of effort, study, team-building and projecting twenty years into the future. What can I achieve? Who can I be? How can I take the momentum from my time at i.c.stars* and reinvent my life? Reinvent myself?

The speeches themselves were remarkably moving. I can't pretend to put myself in the shoes of the amazing people who spoke tonight. I can't imagine that I would have had the fortitude to excel were our backgrounds reversed. I don't know what well of courage I could have drawn upon to deliver my Dream Speech and I certainly can't imagine moving anyone in an audience as I was moved tonight.

Every time I think of the i.c.stars* Dream Speeches, I think of Dr. King's speech. How this speech taken in its historical context represented the apex of his professional work, the embodiment of his own dream deferred, borrowing from my much-beloved Langston Hughes. And what I see tonight here at i.c.stars* - what I see and feel every time I am physically present (I always feel that a part of me is emotionally here, no matter where I am in the world) is massive potential.

I see agents of change.

I see hope.

I see futures.

I see stars.

When I declare, in the middle of summer "Yeah, I'm pretty much a true Northerner - summer doesn't do it for me," I can clear a room pretty fast. I've lived all over the world and experienced life in places where one season was it.  Sure, when I lived in Phoenix it wasn't always one-hundred-and-sixteen degrees Farenheit, sometimes it went down to ninety.  Or eighty-three.

And I know people who wouldn't trade life in San Diego or wherever for a place with real seasons but that's just not me and never will be.

You won't catch me one day writing a blog post for aronsolomon dot com from Galveston Beach, fine place that I'm sure it is.

Each season to me represents what it literally is: a rebirth.  At great risk of sounding excessively philosophical, we only get a certain number of springs and falls and winters and, yeah, even summers.  So, what we make of each season, how we process it and create our reality within it is a remarkably special thing.

But, still, to be winter's groupie smack dab in the middle of summer is akin to cheering for the Red Sox at Yankee Stadium, which I'm throwing caution to the warm wind and doing here. In no particular order, I'm going to list some cool (pun intended) reasons why winter rocks harder than Ted Nugent's "Intensities in Ten Cities":

• skating outdoors
• colourful scarves
• wool baseball hats with ear flaps and Gore-Tex linings
• pho (love it year round, but nothing warms like pho with a few squeezes of sriracha sauce)
• ice hockey
• winter jackets and fleece-y tops
• wearing two pairs of socks sometimes, just for the heck of it
• anything maple-flavoured
• seeing your breath after a workout
• the coziness of fireplaces
• boots

Perhaps part of winter's allure is illusory and allusory, a season born from stories of comfort against the cold just as much as Saabs are born from jets.

But my love for seasons extend well beyond winter.  Some of my best memories as a kid were from playing that late fall football or the first spring baseball games.  It was the smell of whatever was cooking at our country house or how the newly-cold weather marked another hockey and basketball season.

And, as an adult who travels so much, the anomaly of the seasons captivates me.  Santiago, Chile during North American summer is amazing.  Twelve hours on a plane and it's winter.  Remarkable.  Just as the seasons always have been to me.

When I was a kid, I lived in a world of brands. Everything around us was defined through brand affiliation. This was the early 1970s and it was the US of A. The grocery stores were doubling in size, well on their was to becoming today's hypermarkets. When we would go to the local Giant, we'd return with boxes of Kleenex (not tissues) and Popsicles and Sanka and Tang (hey - it was the 70s) and we'd put our food in the fridge (Frigidaire), having driven to the store in the Roadmaster.

And then when I was a teenager in Canada, my dad discovered the No Frills store. While popular today, this may have been Canada's first supermarket where all you could buy was unbranded products. What? The products were (and still are) branded "no name," which, then and now, represented a borderline sociopathy to me. How could I be better than my neighbor if I couldn't buy Green Giant peas? Was I really to be reduced to that sad yellow can, entitled "Canned Peas" (why, for the life of me, they felt compelled to write "canned" on the can eludes me to this day)?

I know why my dad shopped at No Frills. A can of peas is a can of peas. I get that. And the generic yellow can is probably just as good as the can with a giant or a fleur de lys on it and it's cheaper.

But part of why brands exist is because they bring affiliation and fun and, well, they're a hell of a lot more interesting than that sad icy can in your freezer marked "Orange Juice."

Yeah, I'm okay paying a little more for real Panadol instead of the generic. I'm totally down with buying a Tombstone instead of that yellow "Pizza comma Frozen" disc and I'm certainly not okay with buying a case of "Beer," which they still make and while it's, I'm sure, brewed by some major brewer, I'm not going to be THAT guy.

In grad school, I fell in love with the Lada, a small, cheap and insanely bad Russian car. As I was studying a bit about Russia at the time, I imagined myself navigating the steep hills and back alleys of Montreal in my own little version of the Volga. Then I bought a Volkswagen Fox because while I was pretty settled on throwing my money down the toilet on the Lada, the VW ads were so cool that they actually lured me to a dealership, which lured me to walk around the showroom, which lured me to test-drive the Fox which lured me to buy one because, let's be honest, only a madman would have bought a Lada to drive around Montreal in the winter. Dude.

As I travel the world, I deep dive into the world of brands. I read magazines and surf the Web and watch TV, all the time trying to determine what brands stand for what and who's at the top of the pecking order. Sometimes a giveaway is that it's an export brand (Tsingtao beer in China is the highest end brand as it's the only official export brand, though I think that Harbin and Yanjing are actually much tastier brands), it's packaging and colours and physical placement of the brand in the stores.

I often wonder if kids grew up in other countries as I did. Did Danone mean "yogurt" in some households? Did mom cook dinner on the Jenn-Aire?

If so, I, for one, think that's pretty cool.

The famous line from The Graduate in which Mr. McGuire counsels our young graduate, Benjamin Braddock, to wrap himself (pun very much intended) in plastic. Prescient counsel for a young man graduating in the 1960s, as the boom in plastics was about to hit.

I wonder how many Mr. McGuires counseled how many young Benjamin Braddocks in the late 1990s to embrace one word: Internet? I wonder how many young people took a leap of faith and left behind fear and the accompanying paralysis to enter the Brave New World of the Wild, Wild Web?

I have been described by more than a couple of people (three, I think ) as a bit of a futurist. Most often, I work in the areas of the future of education, schools, organizations, but I'm borderline obsessed with the concept as risk as catalyst for invention.

My mind always returns to the home microwave oven. I imagine the inventors/marketers/investors leaving behind something very safe and very cushy to drive forward a product that is (truth) now in more American homes than there are actually American homes (yes, some people own three or four microwaves because, heaven forbid, there should be a frozen burrito that needs "cooking" and the microwave is actually only in the kitchen. Dude, that's a long walk.)

When I graduated teacher's college (most useless year in school EVER, by the way) I took a teaching job along with my closest friend from the programme. It's over twenty years last and he's still at that first teaching job. And while my place is not to judge, I would have jumped into the sea ages ago, wearing my Billabongs and an anchor.

In The Graduate, Benjamin's post-adolescent angst was a product of a society's expectation upon what he was expected to become. And a life at a law firm - the golf course, the Scotch (experts of the film will recall that while bourbon was Benjamin's drink, no one would acknowledge his preference, so they all served him Scotch, which, as I hope you recognize, is no match for a fine bourbon), the quasi-arranged marriage - would have sucked whatever remained of Benjamin's will to be from his very soul.

Been there, done that. I left behind a cushy job for a risk, then I left behind a cushier one for a bigger risk then the cushiest for the biggest risk. My entire career has been this Sesame Street of risky, riskier, riskiest, cookie! Mmmm...coooooookie (do me a solid and imagine the Cookie Monster's voice here, please). And I wouldn't change that for anything, not because I need to live on the knife edge (I don't, actually, as I like reading Borges with a cup of green tea every once in a while) but because the omnipresence of change drives creativity.

And that must have been, in part, what Benjamin Braddock thought as he lay on the floor of his parents' pool as he looked through the brilliant water at an uncertain future.

Just one word. Plastics.

But if you're still here, I'll at least assume that you have a passing interest into why I think Sweden is such a remarkable place today and bound for so much more tomorrow. While I'm usually able to think and write in reasonably concrete ways, this is a much more emotional piece as Sweden is very close to my heart.

While I've never denied it, the million miles I've traveled over the past few years proved to me once and for all that I'm a true Northerner. There's no such thing as too North for me. There's something about the North that is simply home to me. As a native Montrealer, this shouldn't come as a massive shock, but Scandinavia resonates with me as nothing else ever has.

Why does one place resonate while another doesn't? I have no idea, really, but expect that it's tied to our personal and collective experience. As someone who is proudly multilingual, language is a huge factor for me. While my Swedish is very novice at this point (working on it) there is nothing more beautiful to my ear than well-spoken Swedish. I never tire of it, can't take in enough of its rhythm, cadence, tonalities, beauty.  Swedish is stunning to me, in every way.

I unabashedly admit to loving the Swedish weather and seasons. I should probably specify "Stockholm" here, as I'm not sure that daily life north of Åre is my bag. I love the short winter days, the insanely long, languorous summer ones and the fact that it never gets what I would call "hot" in Sweden, hot being defined by my experiences in Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur in the summers.

Swedish food never gets old to me. If there is such thing as too much herring or fresh fish, I've never heard of that. I can eat crispbread thirty times a day and I have never met a piece of Swedish chocolate that I didn't like.

Most importantly, there is something about the attitude of Sweden and Swedes that I find so compelling. I think of it as a humane entrepreneurial spirit, one that embraces the present, the future, and larger issues, such as the impact on the planet and generations to come. I have never met a more socially conscious group than the people of Sweden and while it's nearly impossible to generalize even in a relatively small nation of nine million, there is something about the global attitude of the people of Sweden that is highly compelling to me.

I hope that you visit Sweden soon and see what all the fuss is about. If you do, the herring's on me.