But seriously.  I am procrastinating writing a up a case presentation for school because… here I make a confession… my work is currently so poor that watching the tapes of it actually causes my heart to stop beating.  (One cannot write up one’s session, including transcript, if one does not watch the fucking tape.  Obviously.)  It’s true.  I actually die from watching my work.  Die to death.

And can I also say this: it is unspeakably frustrating to know, let’s say, fifty units of knowledge about one’s field, but be only able to whip out and apply four when in front of an actual client.  I have this rather large gap between what I know and what I can do.  It makes me want to, I don’t know, fling myself off the balcony.  Or eat a steak.  Perhaps both?  “Oh my, this is delicious!” Splat!

So… instead of working on this write up, which will not write itself, ha ha, I am reading archives of a blog I like.  And contemplating a tub.  Husband has taken to tubbing with me, which is lovely, but does make it impossible to read.  Not only is it a little crowded in the tub now, but it is awfully distracting to have that cute bottom snuggled up right there (don’t judge, we’re married!).  So I have to have extra tubs, solo, to get in my quota of tub reading.

And to put off this work I should be doing.

There are few rules about this blog but one of them is that I shall not speak ill of my husband.  This is an easy rule to observe because both generally and specifically, he is a wonderful person, the sort of person who always knows the right thing to say and never complains about what I make for dinner.  Also he has very handsome feet and the most charming little bottom!  You should see it, it’s so nice!

Having said that, I am now forced to confess that, despite it all, he has, alas, feet of clay.  It’s something of a shock to discover your Adonis is really a person but there you have it - I’m a person too so we’re a good match.  At any rate, here is how I discovered his human frailty (and he will kill me for telling you this, but I can’t help myself):

This morning we were lounging on the sofa together, talking about buying a flat screen TV, which is something we do sometimes.  We were arranged such that his face was resting against my calf, surely a romantic position, when suddenly he narrowed his focus, discovered I haven’t shaved my legs in about a month, and uttered a totally spontaneous and involuntary “Ewwwwww!”

There are few things in life as crushing as having your romantic partner recoil in revulsion from your physical person.  If this has never happened to you, you can take my word for it: it blows.  It took about a minute for the full shame and horror to sink in, at which point I fled sobbing from the room, locked myself in the bathroom, and engaged in the most joyless round of leg-shaving ever in recorded history.

Many apologies were forthcoming - and no hard feelings maintained.  The comment was clearly not premeditated nor calculated to offend.  And I must agree, hairy legs are sort of gross on women, and to be surprised by them at close proximity is doubtless horrible.

Still, I think I’ll be shaving more often from now on.

I don’t know how to tell this story.  It was so bizarre, and so creepy, and in hindsight so hilarious, that I just know I won’t be able to do it justice in print.  Okay.  Anyway.

This is a story about the cab ride I had between Halifax and the Halifax International Airport, which is about a half hour drive.  I booked a cab the night before and it showed up right on time - which was the end of the good part of this story.  It’s pretty much all downhill from here.

You know how you chat with the cab driver?  I don’t either but in Halifax, you do.  I think it’s an east coast thing, this friendliness, and since I am trying to overcome my social phobia I went with it.  The cabbie’s opener was about the weather: a hurricane was supposed to hit the city that day but it never materialized, which we agreed was a good thing.  And then he asked me if I remembered the big snow storm that hit Halifax five years back - they called it White Juan.

I certainly did remember White Juan - it happened while Husband and I were engaged in cross country courtship, and I have digital photos he sent me of his glass apartment patio door totally blocked out with snow.  There was so much snow that you could walk down the sidewalks and your feel were at the same level as the tops of the parking meters.  So I said something like, “Yeah, I heard that was pretty terrible.”  And the cabbie says, “The snow was so deep you couldn’t see the hookers!”

Which is sort of weird, right?  Would you bring up hookers as your measuring stick for the severity of a storm with a customer who is a young woman and a total stranger to you?  But okay, not a big deal, the guy’s a little crude, but then again so am I.  I got so comfortable with the friend who put me up while in Halifax that at one point this week I actually found myself absent mindedly stratching my behind under my pajama pants while we chatted in the kitchen - it is a testimony to our friendship that he pretended not to notice me sticking my arm down the back of my pants to stratch my ass right in front of him.

So the next conversational move was the standard question about where I was flying to.  Vancouver, I say, and the cabbie gets really excited and says, “That’s where all those hookers were!”

Which struck me as pretty creepy.  Yes, we have a lot of prostitutes here.  There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of drugs and it all kind of goes together.  But you shouldn’t get so pleased by it, ya know?  But then I thought, oh, I know why he’s thinking of the hookers in Vancouver - it’s the Pickton case.  For those who don’t know, there was recently a trial in Vancouver of a man called Robert Pickton who, over a series of many years, abducted and murdered something like twenty prostitutes from the downtown east side of Vancouver.  He dismembered them and buried them on his pig farm.  It was a major scandal because, in addition to there being a serial killer in our area, these women had been disappearing for years and no one investigated it, because they were sex workers and apparently beneath notice.

Anyway, so I say something about that - “You must mean the Pickton case,” and then it starts to get seriously weird as the cabbie goes into a monologue which I will attempt to paraphrase here.  It is important that, as you read this, you keep in mind that the cabbie had absolutely no distress in his voice or on his face, and was actually nearly smiling the entire time: “Those poor hookers!  I found a website about them, the hookers, and it has all their pictures and their biographies, and I just read it and read it and I sobbed and sobbed because it is so sad that all those hookers got killed, what a shame.  Just because they’re hookers doesn’t mean they should be kidnapped and murdered.  I mean, there’s nothing wrong with hookers.  Hookers are just women.  And I can’t tell you how much I cried about those hookers on that website.  I keep going back there to look at those hookers because you should remember dead hookers, what a shame that was.”

I can’t replicate his words exactly but he probably said “hookers” over twenty times.  And as I say, despite the talk of how tragic and horrible it all was, he sounded a little excited and happy to me.  And this, my friends, is very fucking creepy.  I tried to change the subject but he cut me off to tell me about the time he drove to Vancouver for a visit.  He was at great pains to tell me about how shocking and “sad” it was to find himself in the DTES, “where all the hookers are.”  (He ended up there by accident, he reported.)  So once he found a hotel outside the DTES, he figured he was sufficiently recharged from a day of driving and took a walk back downtown to watch “the hookers.”

At about this time I started watching the highway signs with some nervousness, planning what I’d do if he took the wrong exit or otherwise revealed himself as the sort of person who, in addition to obsessing about murdered prostitutes, likes to murder fares.

Somehow or other the conversation did get moved along, and we ended up talking about his grow operations in Nova Scotia (he’s done indoor and outdoor), and also his drug convictions related to growing and selling marijuana.  Apparently he’s managed to avoid most of his jail time due to having a good lawyer, and the prosecuting RCMP officer being corrupt and having a lot of his cases overturned.  He told me these things in such a way that they were supposed to be stories about the incompetence of cops and the hilariousness of an officer getting busted stealing dope from the evidence locker, but all I was hearing was “jail time” and “drug convictions.”

Half an hour of hooker murders and criminal botany.  I have probably never been so creeped out by anyone in my life.  I mean, what do you do in this situation?  Challenge the obviously unhinged creepy dude who’s driving the car you’re stuck in?  Tell him what you really think?  Or try to stay neutral, which seemed to have the effect of encouraging him to talk about it more? I’m telling you, this guy made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up.  There is something wrong with him.

Gah.

Internet, have you forgotten all about me?  It’s true I neglect you.  It’s also true that scant-posting apologies from bloggers are exceedingly tiresome… nonetheless I feel compelled to offer some explanations.

1. I am sick.  I had a flu-ey thing recently that was of short duration and perhaps never went fully away because I am ill today and was yesterday and expect to be so again tomorrow.  Even Husband is sick, and in the four years of our acquaintance I have seen him sick exactly twice.  This is the second time.  We have the same thing.  I feel strangely justified in being sick if he is too - I mean, if the bug could get by his immune system, what hope did I have?

2. I am about to go away for a week to Halifax for a training thing, and I am trying to focus on not getting sicker, because I dread the thought of flying while sick (mainly because of the discomfort - I don’t care much about infecting others.  I’m an asshole.  There, I said it.).

3. The sick thing is making it harder to do everything, including clean my house, which is currently at that state where there is not a single clean room and I want to cry just looking around it.  I can’t relax in a messy house.  It totally freaks me out.  But I’m too tired and weak to clean up.  Honestly, I could cry.  And we’re supposed to host dinner for a friend from Ontario who is coming out on Sunday, which when I think of it causes me to die a little on the inside.  We can’t go out for dinner because one of the guests is under a year old and it seems these infant creatures do not adhere closely to rules of decorum at restaurants.  Which is just further proof that babies are assholes, in case you needed any, which you probably don’t if you’ve ever met one.

4. My practicum has started, and though it’s only three days a week, the amount of mental energy it consumes is simply shocking.  Part of this is probably the rather large amount of anxiety I’ve been having in anticipation of My First Clients.  Thank god that’s over because I didn’t enjoy the stress of having First Clients at all.  Of course now that I’ve ripped that band aid off I get to commence dealing with the stress of Learning To Ply My Trade, which is obviously going to be a much longer process than enduring The First Clients.

5. I am reading a motherfucker of a book, The Quincunx, which I am only finishing because I refuse to let it beat me.  At page 699 the protagonist got his first lucky break, at which point I couldn’t stop myself from shouting: “Thank Christ!” because before then it was one long relentless series of catastrophes and disappointments, truly an epic reading experience, and all the worse because it’s actually a very good book.  The reading process is definitely masochistic in nature, as I force myself to read with dread in my heart because I know it’s going to be a clusterfuck, and then have to force myself to stop because dammit I want to figure out this stupid mystery!  This may be the most evil book I have ever encountered.

6. We’ve started rewatching the TV series Deadwood and I am consequently walking around perpetually stunned due to the sheer number of times the characters say “cocksucker” and “c–t” which obviously is a lot.  We love this show and titter with glee all the way through each episode but I feel I should wash my mouth out with soap afterwards.  It’s hard to blog when you’re engrossed in a gritty western.

And finally, I just want to say I am craving a pizza like nobody’s business.

So Thanksgiving is coming up, and as usual, one of my sets of aunts and uncles is hosting dinner.  I love Thanksgiving at their house because it’s always a big, noisy affair with lots of people and conversation, plus my aunt always gets a little merry on the red wine and then makes everyone say what they’re grateful for.  I love it.

The only down side is this: my aunt seems a little weirded out by us being vegans, and always make strange productions out of it.  Here’s one example.  The last time we went to a party at her house, we brought an entree to share - I made a basic tex-mex style pasta and bean salad, with noodles, black beans, chopped onion and bell pepper, salsa, and cilantro mixed in.  Super simple, the kind of thing they sell in the deli of the grocery store, nothing weird, no tofu in evidence.  Food that omnivores would eat, for purposes of sharing, but also nutritious for Husband and me so we have a main dish for dinner.

But my aunt made a huge deal out of it, telling every person who arrived in the kitchen for dinner that “this is a vegan dish!” like it’s made out of the rarest and strangest of ingredients.  And of course everyone eyed it strangely, and I saw people tentatively take a tiny spoonful of it onto their plates to try it, and that really bugged me because there was no need to single it out as “weird” when it’s made of the most conventional ingredients going, and because it wasn’t even the only vegan dish at the buffet - the salad, the bread, the three different types of cooked veggies (in their pre-buttered state), the crackers and pickles and olives presented as appetizers - all vegan, all totally normal, all perfectly edible.  Everyone eats a little vegan now and then.

I don’t like being singled out as weird and strange for eating like I do.  As you know, I really try to make my veganism as easy on my hosts as I can - I always bring food, I never complain or fuss (even going so far as to eat a light meal before going over if I’m worried there really won’t be enough for us to eat), I never bring up issues of cruelty or anything related to veganism in company.  I am often asked about how we eat, and my policy when at functions is to stick to the positive aspects of my choice, never put down or appear judgmental of what others are eating, stay open and non-defensive as much as I can, and of course only discuss it if asked by someone first.  No preaching.  So here I am, doing my level best to be a good guest and and an appreciative one, and getting the “isn’t she bizarre?” treatment in return.

I know my aunt isn’t trying to be difficult.  She really is a lovely woman.  I think she just finds how we eat to be pretty odd, and isn’t quite sure what to make of it.  She has offered to prepare vegan dishes for me and Husband after she retires, which shows that she thinks it’s very complicated and hard to eat vegan (as did I, when I began, so I get this), and which also shows she wants to be considerate and welcoming to us.  I really appreciate this.  I don’t think she realizes she’s singling us out and making us uncomfortable.

But, it’s still weird.

Also, as someone who likes to cook and share the product, I get a little crushed inside to see people eyeing my contribution to the spread like it might be radioactive.  If they didn’t know it was vegan, they’d just eat it and probably enjoy it - or at least like or dislike it on its own merits, not because they had an emotional reaction to its label as “vegan.” It’s a little odd to me that people find vegan dishes so weird when we eat plants-only dishes all the time and think nothing of it.  Don’t they realize there is no fundamental diffference between the entree I brought and the salad?

I miss the food rituals of the holidays (sharing the turkey, for example), which I have excluded myself from by choice.  But the higher level ritual of breaking bread together as a family is a ritual I can still be part of, even if I don’t eat the bird.  Bringing a dish is my way of re-entering the circle; I feel exogenously excluded from this remaining part of the togetherness when the singling out of my food happens.

Anyway, I know this is coming again at thanksgiving and I’m a little apprehensive about it.  I’m just hoping that if the food I bring is very tasty, and presented without too much fanfare, it will gradually become accepted and can then go uncommented upon (except to say whether it’s delicious or not!).  It might take a few years but what the hell, isn’t that what family is about?  Gradual brainwashing over a series of years? 

Yesterday was one of those complicated, sad, difficult days that I can’t talk about here.  The only thing good that came of it was the feeling of connection to Husband, who as it turns out can crack me up even when I’m in distress and getting sick *and* hungry all at the same time.  I can’t say enough about how much my quality of life and happiness are increased by his presence.

Side note: we tried to go out for dinner last night, and had our first total veg flop.  We went to Nick’s Spaghetti House, which I fond memories of, but it turns out there is not a single vegeterian option on the menu!  All the pastas are meat sauced.  It was very hard to leave the delicious smelling restaurant in search of something else.  Of course the dinner we ended up having was a disappointment.

Today I might post a recipe since I’m going to be making one of my favourite soups of all time (fennel and white bean), but first I have to whip myself into a cooking frenzy because I am actually sick and my energy is poo poo.  If I end up reading on the couch all day, I guess I could post pictures of that instead.

About a week ago I was walking to the gym and had to cross the street to avoid a guy who was standing on the sidewalk in front of my building peeing.  Totally nonchalantly, not even trying to hide his penis.  Actually maybe that was the point - to make sure his urinating penis was on full display to bourgeois oppressors like me.  The worst part, I think, was that though he was pointing in the general direction of the raised flower beds our building maintains, he wasn’t peeing into them, but rather on the bench part where people sit to be close to the flowers. This transformed the act from one of convenience (there was no public toilet available, so I’ll use a bush) to one of sabotage (I’ll pee where people sit so they get my pee on them).

So anyway, here’s me, walking along and suddenly going, Holy shit, there’s some dude taking a pee onto my flower bench, like, fifteen feet away!  I think I didn’t notice sooner because a) I’m not very observant and b) he was so clearly not making furtive motions that might have alerted me to the presence of shenanigans so I really thought nothing remarkable was going on.  Until I saw the weiner.  And then I made an abrupt ninety degree turn and continued down the street on the other side.  A minute or so later, the guy cruised past me on his bike and stared at me for long enough that it became obvious he was getting some kind of thrill out of checking out the woman he peed in front of.  I guess he was checking to see if I’d react somehow, and though inside I was totally grossed out, a little scared, and anxious, I have learned from my many similar experiences to play it cool so I just watched him right back, straight faced.

Normally I like my neighbourhood.  It’s close to the skytrain and there’s a park across the street.  But this is the fourth time something like this has happened to me in the last, oh, three months.  I got flashed by a guy in a second story SRO, I saw a guy masturbating into a bush, and was lewdly propositioned by some skid on my way home from class (complete with explicit hand gestures made towards my crotch). And now this: the bench pee-er.

Living here is starting to freak me out.

There is a lot of freaky activity in my area but most of it blends into the background.  I’m regularly panhandled to, regularly see homeless people sleeping here or there, smoking this or that, shouting at him or her.  Once in a while I see an escort/stripper coming in or out of my building.  Someone in here is dealing hard drugs and now and then I get to share the elevator with a junkie clutching a little package.  These things have become part of the background and they don’t bug me.  But the sexualized stuff? I can’t handle that, nor do I wish to learn.

I generally say that I don’t feel I’ve experienced discrimination for being a woman, and with regards to things like education and work opportunities I really think that’s true.  I live in a nice bubble where I feel equal to anyone out there (in the philosophical sense - obviously people differ).  But all it takes is one unwelcome sexualized encounter with a strange man to drive home to me that I am not, in fact, equal.  I am, in fact, smaller, weaker, and incredibly vulnerable.  My equality is predicated on the men in my environment choosing to not exercise their physical capacity to do violence, because god knows if they wanted to, I couldn’t stop it.

This is what makes sexual violence or the hint of it so frightening.  As a woman, you are more or less entirely at the mercy of the potential offender to choose not to.  So when I find myself on the sidewalk with someone who obviously does not give a shit about upsetting me, and actively works to upset me and there’s sexual content to the act, well, that makes me feel like packing my shit and moving to anyplace without a huge contingent of sexually misbehaving inhabitants.  Unlike my neighbourhood.  Which apparently is full of them.

Sigh.  I don’t know where to go with this.  I’ll just say that now, I’m a bit afraid of living here, which I never have been before.  This incident with the peeing guy has somehow tipped the balance and I can’t laugh this one off.  I keep thinking about it, especially when I’m getting ready to leave the apartment or getting off the skytrain for my walk home.  We have a great apartment and we can’t afford to move… but yeah.  I might start driving more to avoid being out in the neighbourhood quite so much.

So my dad, as I wrote recently, has rheumatoid arthritis.  He’s had it for about fifteen years, and for most of that time it’s been pretty well controlled.  He skis, he golfs, he carries out strange construction projects around his house, that kind of thing.  But over the last six months or so the gold shots he’s been on have lost effectiveness, and his rheumatologist has been experimenting with different drugs for him.  Nothing’s really working well.  Once he had a dangerous hemorrhage from the medication he was on.  And in July, he basically became crippled with this recent terrible attack.  For the first time he’s getting those characteristic twisted, enlarged joints that people with RA get.  He can’t sleep, can’t do any sports, is ground down by constant pain.

Husband and I had done a lot of research about diet and RA because some of our vegan books had mentioned a low fat vegan diet can help.  We went to the medical literature and found that there are actually quite a few studies on this question, and what it boils down to is this: many people with RA who switch to a low fat (ie, no added oils, all fat coming from whole plants themselves) vegan diet experience significant symptomatic relief.  We printed off a bunch of articles for him, and a few days later, he told me he wanted to try eating like we do.

So last week I went out to his place and spent the day cooking.  I made five big recipes of food he could freeze in meal sized portions.  We talked all day about veganism - how to plan meals, what nutritional needs must be considered, how to shop, all of that.  It was an exciting but sadenning day for me.  This was the day he couldn’t unload the grocery cart.  He had to take a nap in the afternoon.  He could barely get up and down the stairs - he had to take them one at a time like a child, placing both feet on the same step before going on to the next.

And guess what?  Four days later my dad called me - he’s had a major remission in symptoms!  Yesterday he went out for a two hour walk that included stopping at the book store and visiting friends - normal things he hasn’t been able to do because of stiffness, pain, and exhaustion.  I was elated!  And so is he - he was really afraid of what his life would become if he was this housebound, pain-ridden creature for the rest of his days.  His quality of life has increased a lot.

There’s no way to know if the diet is the reason.  In the literature, people who get benefits from this diet tend to have them pretty quickly - within a week or two.  So my dad’s experience does fit with that picture.  But it might be coincidence.  And that’s how he sees it - he doesn’t credit the diet entirely (though he’s not going off it for now).  I think what will happen is a natural A-B-A-B experiment, wherein he falls off the vegan wagon, has a resurgence of symptoms, then goes back on it and feels better.  That would increase our ability to attribute his improvements to the diet.

But in any case I don’t care what the cause of it is.  As long as he’s feeling better I’m thrilled.

Sorry for the radio silence over here.  I’ve been so giddy with the end of my school work that I can’t focus to write.  In other words I’ve been too busy being happy to get into blogging!  However, two things have recently conspired to bring me back to you: one, I just burned the underside of my forearm while emptying a pot of boiling pho broth (and damn, for a little burn it sure hurts a lot!), and two, I saw my dad last night and he’s not doing well.  Both are very sobering.  But obviously the latter is worse.

I’m not entirely sure what to say about my dad, though it is very much on my mind.  He’s not dying or in serious trouble like that,  but he is slowly becoming crippled by rheumatoid arthritis that is no longer controllable by medication.  I’ve never seen him like this before - he hobbles around, and he’s permanently exhausted from the relentless pain and inflammation.  He’s always been very active, but when I visited him he was too tired and in too much pain to even unload his groceries from the cart to the belt at the check out counter.  And it doesn’t look like things have much chance of improving.  The new medication they’re trying him on is incredibly hard on his body, with fatal (though rare) potential side effects!  And anyway it isn’t working.  He’s been through pretty much all the different medications that are out there - there was only ever one that worked, and in this last year it has stopped being effective.

This isn’t much of a post but I don’t really know what else to say.  It breaks my heart to see him this way, and to think it might not get better.  He’s not old yet, he has a lot of years.  But what will they be like?

I’ve been thinking in the last two days quite a bit about negativity, mine, and how I’m not liking it very much.  I see it here a lot, because somehow writing blog posts distills all of my negative feelings into these posts that, after I write them, I am sometimes surprised at how angry I sound.  I don’t feel like an angry person.  But the proof is right here - post after post.

Sometimes I feel more a slave to the post than the post a slave to my reality - I think I’ve felt an expectation to be (or at least try to be) witty, and somehow I got the idea that witty is all about sarcasm and snark.  I still enjoy reading other people’s snark… but writing my own is beginning to exact a toll.  You know what they say about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.  This blog is kind of a downer.

So, I don’t know that I want to keep going in this vein.  It’s kind of a shame, because let’s face it, vitriol is much more entertaining than virtue.  But let’s also face it, I have a tiny readership, and even if I alienate every one of you, that doesn’t represent much of a loss (In numbers, people… your value is beyond measure and not to be trifled with.).

This is the thing: my life has a lot that is good in it.  More than good, actually, and also more than a lot.  I wonder what would happen if I stopped spending so much time each day really focusing in on what bothers me (which is what blog writing almost always is for me), and spent that time instead on what makes me happy, or makes others happy.  It’s not like irritation is a precious resource which must be carefully stewarded lest world stores of it become depleted.

It’s getting on to bed time and I am always most thoughtful at this time, and most serious, so maybe I’ll be back to feeling cheerfully ranty when I get up tomorrow morning… but I don’t know, maybe I really won’t.

And then I have to figure out what to do here.  Anybody got any ideas?