Hemlock B Bootsalotta

( Questions of Days )


***

Problems only goths have: losing clothes whenever I do laundry because every single thing in the laundry basket is black. I'm missing a bunch of socks and I'm pretty sure they accidentally got folded into my bedsheets.

Guess I'll find them next time I make the bed.

***

I crossed sorting out the "medicine cabinet" off my list - it's actually a dresser drawer where we just toss things we don't have an immediate need for or where we have bought more than one container of something.

Things I discovered in the process.

•     A pack of nicotine gum that expired two years ago
•     One of those truck-stop energy shots that expired three years ago
•     A pack of nicotine patches that expired four years ago
•     A pack of allergy meds that expired five years ago
•     A bottle of ear-drops that expired six years ago
•     A pack of famotidine tablets that expired in 2007
•     A prescription jar of cortisol cream from 2002.
•     Three packs of sharps
•     And a partridge in a pear tree

Something suggests I should do this more often.

***

We got another air quality warning today, but I went outside and the air didn't smell like a campfire, so I took the risk of sitting on the patio for a while.

I read this article recently about how Ontario is having trouble keeping experienced fire fighters because the bill that restricts public employee's pay includes fire fighters and so people are saying "Fuck this, I can have a job where I'm not living in a tent for a month while I risk my life for shitty pay."

And here's the thing, we have so many fires going on in this country right now that the federal government is shipping people in from other countries to help. I have seen videos of South Africans arriving in Alberta. Spanish and Portuguese fire fighters are in Quebec. There are French and American teams in northern Ontario.

So let me get this straight, the provincial government cuts the funding to the firefighting program, cuts the pay of firefighters, cancels the carbon tax, sells large portions of the green belt to developers, cancels green energy programs, and builds a new fucking highway that we don't need right through our core farm country - and then federal money has to be used to fly people in from other countries to fight fires exacerbated by climate change?

How the fuck does this make any kind of sense?

Back in court with all the other rejects. Apparently everybody else has also figured out that these things never start when they tell you, I wandered in at quarter past and I was one of the earliest to arrive.

It's also quite comfortable in the waiting room today. I guess a building this massive just takes a while to cool off after a weekend of sitting empty.

*************************

I am so utterly done with this place and this climate. I'm spending $60 a month on medication just to try and breathe. I am done with feeling like I've inhaled a wet sweat-sock. I'm done with not being able to sleep, and migraines and skin rashes from the fucking heat.

We spent the first 10 years in this house using nothing fans and that was enough. But each year the summers get hotter and longer and I just can't fucking do it any more. And Canada obviously doesn't give a shit about anything but extracting as much money out of the ground as possible to make sure oil companies continue to turn a profit.

I don't even like air conditioning but it's now moved to the head of the list of things to spend money on the next time we have some[1]. I just wish to fuck I could charge the cost to the fuckers who just cancelled all the wind and solar projects.



[1]Ha ha ha ha. That's a whole 'nother rant.

So because my co-workers are lovely, they got me going-away presents. One of them was a pie, which was delicious and they helped me eat it.

The other part of the present was a gift card for Indigo, which is a Canadian book store. "Aha!" says I, "I can finally buy some of the books that are on my wish list." And because we are trying to reduce the number of Things, I went online and created an account on the Indigo website and bought the electronic version of some of the books I wanted.

Now the Indigo e-reader is called a Kobo. When I buy the books the Indigo website ports me over to Kobo to create an account there. This concerns me a little as I don't have a Kobo, I have a Kindle. Not to worry, says the website, you can convert the files using a free Adobe app. So I download the Adobe app. Then I try to convert them so they can be read on my Kindle. Adobe app says nope, those files have DRM. I do a search on the Adobe website, which says, well if you register your Adobe app you can share the files across devices. Fine, I didn't particularly want to have to create yet another account with a third company, but whatever. I register the Adobe app. I download the books again. Adobe app says that's nice, now you have two copies of the files but they still have DRM so I can't put them on your Kindle.

Axel downloads a DRM-breaker. DRM breaker says it could convert the files if it were the previous version of the Adobe app but not this new version.

We collectively say fuckit and torrent the fucking books.

Keep in mind that these are books that I legally purchased, and would like to be able to read on an existing e-reader that I already own, and after hours of nonsense we still couldn't get them into my Kindle. It took all of three minutes to just download an illegal copy, convert it, and bam I'm good to go.

And this is why people pirate shit.

Today's commute was an utter crapfest. I was coming in from D's place in the east end of town so I had to take the subway instead of my usual bus[1]. Six trains went by, all so full that there was no space to squeeze more than a single body into each open door.

At that point I went to the opposite platform and took a train going the wrong way until I got to a station far enough from the core that I could finally switch to one going the direction I wanted.

This is such bullshit. We needed a downtown relief line 20 fucking years ago. But taxes are bad, right?




[1] The bus that D calls "the honey badger". Because it just doesn't give a fuck.

I ended up having a gastroscopy yesterday - fortunately the doctor's office called me to remind me, with everything that's been going on lately it completely went out of my head.

It's something I have to do every couple of years for monitoring but it was my first time getting it done by this particular doctor - she's the same one who took out my gallbladder. The experience was very different. The previous doctor would knock me out and I would wake up feeling like I had swallowed a couple of yards of sandpaper. This time I was given a local and some gas and was completely conscious through the whole thing. I can tell you it feels weird as hell to have a hose going in and out of one's stomach. But my throat feels absolutely fine.

Whatever gas they gave me made me feel so sleepy I kept nodding off in Darrell's car while he was driving me home and and he ended up putting me to bed shortly after we got there. The rain started while I was sleeping and I woke a couple of hours later to find a large puddle on the window sill next to me. I cleaned that up and went downstairs just as Axel got home from work.

The two of us were noodling away on our respective computers and I started pointing out pictures people had posted of flooding all over Toronto. Then I recognized one of them as being from an railway underpass just south of our house. You could just see the tops of the cars poking over the top of the water.

We looked at each other. "Hey, have you been down in the basement yet today?"

Oddly enough, the bedroom was fine - there is a wooden floor built on top of the concrete and so it's just raised enough to prevent any damage. Every other surface was covered in water and mud. The storage room is also raised but obviously not as much, the water got into the low shelves where Axel had all his records stored.

So right now we have anything paper spread out over piles of towels to dry on our living room floor. Stuff that was in cardboard boxes and that we figure we can deal with later - like clothes that will need to be laundered - are propped up on tops of the plastic bins that survived the flood. Everything is covered in mud. It looks like a few lighter objects actually floated for a while as there are a lot of small things that travelled across the room. We have towels and tarps thrown across all the entry points so we don't track mud through the rest of the house.

It's just another day in the Once And Future Gin Palace.

I could have sworn I made a post about the trains behind our house, but I can't seem to find it. Oh well, if I did you get to hear about it again.

Anyway, our back yard ends where the CN/CP rail corridor starts. Legally we have no rear access to our property but our neighbours are pretty enthusiastic about finding creative work arounds to that and our "fence" is really just a bunch of boards and old doors hammered together. When we moved in our backyard was protected by a broad swathe of trees and some pretty heavy underbrush. All the wildlife I keep finding in my backyard took advantage of that thicket to travel along the rail corridor. It also provided a very efficient noise baffle against the sound of the passing trains.

Since then the province has decided to build a direct rail between the downtown and the airport and the obvious spot to put it was in the corridor behind our property. Fair enough, it's something we need. Heavy machinery appeared behind our house and about half the trees were cut down in order to make space for the new rail. They also put up this weird silver box that "chirps" every 2 minutes and that gets covered with fresh gaffiti every week or so.

Since the original plans were announced there have been a couple of things that have gotten the locals up in arms. One is that they are planning on putting in deisel trains instead of electric, which seems really stupid given that these are high-frequency passenger shuttles travelling a total of 30 km. Our objections have been answered with, "Oh we'll convert it to electric five years later," which sounds even dumber to me since it would require spending the money twice (or at least one-and-a-half times) on the same thing.

The second thing that is pissing people off is that they have decided to build a 15-foot wall along the entire length of the rail line. As a noise barrier. One would assume against those frequent-service deisel engines that people have said they don't want.

When I got up this morning there were people working on the rail lines chopping down the last of the trees behind my property. You know, those trees that I mentioned were so great at blocking the noise of the trains going by. I guess that's where they're going to put the wall.

The rule I decided on for sorting through my books was that if I ever wanted to re-read it I could keep it. Otherwise it goes out the door. Some books I can tell you the answer right away. Some I have to leaf through a bit or read the first chapter. Since I have so many books this process is taking a while. I have also filled two big boxes where the answer is, "Yes, but only the once." So these are the books I am now reading right away.

One of the ones I just finished is a paperback so old it is held together by an elastic band. It was published in 1964 - I was a year old. The events it describes as happening in the near future are already 20 years in the past.

That makes it kind of an interesting read even without discussing the worth of the writing itself. But what really jarred me out of the story was the language used to describe Africans and Asians - they were referred to as Negroids and Mongolians. There were two characters in the story with birth defects, both were called mongoloids by other characters. This was not the author trying to be cruel, this was the accepted polite nomenclature in the year the book was written.

In 2012 those words feel either archaic or give me an emotional wince that makes it hard to focus on the story. Since the early 60s the word "mongoloid" became an insult and an epithet and so we don't say it any more. It was replaced by the much more kind and scientifically accurate term "mentally retarded".

Except that now "retarded" is an insult too. So we've replaced it with... Developmentally delayed, I think? Mentally challenged? Neuro-atypical? Is it fucked up of me that I'm not even sure? I know I've heard "delayed" thrown around as insults recently, so if those terms are considered socially acceptable now I imagine they won't be for long.

And this right there is a big part of why I find changes in acceptable language to be problematic. The problem is not with the words. The problem is that dicks will treat a group of people as if they are an insult just by existing[1]. You can change the language as often as you want, the shit-heads will change right alongside you and pollute any new term you come up with.

I don't have a solution for this. Fewer shitheads I guess. Except I don't see that happening any time soon either.






[1]This post is brought to you by Ann Coulter and by the people who think they are insulting Ann Coulter by making jokes about how she used to be a man. You are not on my side.

I've been mulling over a conversation I had with my dad when I was at his place recently. I was ranting about our Honourable Wife-Beating Drunk-Driving Mayor (as I so often do) and how the hell could anybody actually be convinced to vote for the incompetent fuck. I am pretty strongly of the opinion that anybody who campaigns on the promise that they can lower taxes while simultaneously pretending that they won't then have to reduce the stuff that taxes pay for should instantly be disqualified from any position in public office. Because they are either too bad at math to be able to perform adequately at their job or they are just flat-out lying.

So my dad has this theory that part of the problem is that advertisers have been busy telling us for the last four-five decades that we can get stuff for free. "First month is free." "Free trial." "Buy two get one free." Of course everybody knows that none of this stuff is actually free. The cost is just getting shuffled onto something else. But the message has been drilled just a little further into our heads every time we've been exposed to radio or television. And now politicians have figured out that if they promise us stuff for “free” or for less money (taxes) then people will vote for them. Even though we should know that it's impossible. Even though it didn’t work any of the other times we voted for people who made us the same impossible promise.

Advertisers spend an awful lot of time and money figuring out how to get us to do stuff that we wouldn't otherwise do. I'm still thinking about this.

I have never been one of the Pretty girls.

Before anybody starts thinking this is a sudden onset of self-esteem issues, let me be perfectly clear that this statement has absolutely nothing to do with my appearance. The face in the mirror has it's good days and it's bad days, but mostly I'm pretty cool with it in a "It-may-not-be-perfect-but-it's-mine" kind of way. It appears that some pretty hot people also seem like my face just fine and I'm certainly not about to argue with that.

This statement is about identity.

When you're growing up people give you labels. Adults do it. Other kids certainly do it. And when I was growing up the label I got from everybody around me was The Smart One. The bookworm. The one who was destined to go to University.

My younger sister - now she was The Pretty One[1]. And man, was I envious. But the older I get, the more I think I really dodged a bullet by not getting that label slapped on me when I was young and likely to really internalize the things that other people thought of me. And let me be perfectly clear about this, I strongly internalized the way I was perceived. I don't know if it would be possible not to internalize the terms that people use to describe you, the qualities they praise you for, the thing that dictates the very way they relate to you.

The reason that I've learned to count myself lucky is quite simply because as I get older the things that people use to define me as "smart" don't really change all that much. I had to gave up precocious in return for a little wisdom-from-experience, but that's about it. Assuming I escape dementia or a debilitating head injury, I will probably get to continue thinking of myself as smart right until the end of my life. If my designated label was "creative" or "funny" or "green" I could probably say much the same thing.

But "pretty" is one of those labels that means some very specific things in our culture. And one of those very specific things is being young. And for the lucky ones, being young is something you eventually stop being.

That's the nasty fucking trick that gets played on the Pretty girls. It gets planted into their psyches that they are The Pretty One before they are even old enough to know what that means. It gets reinforced by the way they are treated by others the first 30-odd years of their lives - and people do treat others differently based on their perceived attractiveness judging them as more competent, more intelligent, nicer. It's held up in magazines and movies as both the ultimate goal and the natural state of all women. People treat them better or worse based on their appearance.

And then our culture starts to slowly peel away the very identity that's been pushed onto these women for the majority of their lives. No matter how accomplished intelligent, or surrounded by love a person is, no matter how many additional layers of "self" she has built for herself over the years - losing that first one? That's going to sting.

And I was lucky enough to escape all that.

I don't have to lie about my age. I can watch the gradual flowering of laugh lines across my face with fascination (and admittedly little trepidation). I can eschew expensive spas, painful injections, dubious skin treatments and creams that come in teeny tiny little bottles. I can eat what makes me happy and move my body solely to make myself feel good. I don't wax anything.

But man, suggest that you think I'm dumb? I'll probably eat your face.



[1]Years ago my sister said to me, "You know, when we were kids we were The Smart One, The Pretty One and The Nice One. Now we're The Weird One, The Fat One and The Bitch." I howled.