This has put me in the mind of other failings that this mortal shell of mine commits.  I am not the shrimpiest person you’ll ever meet but I am on the short side and this has always been something of a personal tragedy.  I have always admired tall women and when they start offering leg implants I will be first in line.  Just think of the advantages: for starters I’d be able to reach the high shelves in the kitchen, which in my case includes the liquor cabinet.  Also how awesome would I look if I were closer to six feet tall as opposed to my current proximity to five?  Answer: super awesome!

I would also like to have skin that could self regulate rather than my own epidermis which requires constant maintenance with moisturizer otherwise I turn into a lizard/raisin hybrid and become indistinguishable from a dessicated mummy.  Which is to say dry.  I like moisturizing as much as the next person but there are days when I would prefer to skip it but I dare not lest someone set me afire in an attempt to get my evil curse to end.

Also, this is really trivial, but I do wish I had nice long fingers.  I got my dad’s hands and though they have great utility for most tasks they will never make it as concert pianists.  They are boxy and a little on the stumpy side which causes me to do a lot of wistful sighing when I see women with long fingers.

Finally, I could complain about my eyes here but really, I have been wearing glasses since the fourth grade and I just don’t think of my vision as an issue.  Especially once I bought the super light frameless glasses, dealing with my short sightedness is almost effortless and the only time I have to think about it is when I come in from the cold and the lenses fog over and blind me.  Or when they get rained on, that’s a hassle.  But you know, I wear my glasses for more hours of the day than my underpants so they just seem like part of me.  And frankly glasses are less of a hassle than underpants because glasses never give you a wedgie.

I am a creature of habit, more so than most people I think.  When I hit on something I like I will stick with it for a long time.  For example if I really love a song I can listen to it over and over for hours at a time.  Or several hours at a time, every day for weeks in a row.  I have been ordering the same sandwich at Subway two to four times a week for the last three years.  I have certain books that I have been reading once or twice a year for over a decade.  I only use one brand of toothpaste, the brand I’ve been using since childhood.

What I am saying is I like predictability and on the personality scale “openness to new experience” I score low.  Travel is new experiences – travel upsets me greatly.  Even though I am staying with a great friend and even though I am on a fantastic course, I really just wish I was home.

Strangely, I used to live here (I am on the east coast), but that doesn’t seem to be helping.  In fact every time I see some familiar sight from my time here, I get a wave of loneliness that I just can’t explain.  So I am finding it very painful to be here.

Still, despite it all, I am glad I came.  I have had other experiences this week that have changed me for the better I think, and so it is not all gloom and doom.

Just some of it.  Particularly at this moment.

I was happy to get rid of a bunch of my clothes and other things I no longer use, but there were some things I didn’t even put on the chopping block.  I have some clothes I’ll never get rid of because I just love them too much – my navy Dickies trousers come to mind. They are several sizes too big because I wore them baggy back when I was much heavier, and when I tried to put them on recently they literally fell right off.  But I can’t get rid of them – they were central to my wardrobe in my metal days and I basically lived in them plus a beloved Ministry t-shirt which I did get rid of and have been sorry over ever since.

I also have a little horde of jewellery from those days – a thick leather wrist cuff and my wallet chain and, when I had my goth phase, a spiked dog collar.  I also used to wear a length of bicycle chain as a bracelet, a long trench coat (a nod towards my future self’s terrible luck with flashers?) and lots of fishnet, primarily as sleeves under other shirts – what can I say, I was terribly fashionable.

Speaking of flashers, really, it occurs to me that it’s been, what, two months since the last one?  I am due.  Attention perverts, I have not seen a stranger’s private parts in weeks, why are you slacking?

OH GOD how could I have forgotten?  I was not flashed BUT recently I think I may have been frotteured.  Did I spell that correctly?  I am not going to google it because sometimes google shows you things you weren’t prepared for and are shocked by and really, in this modern age, who cares about spelling?  I reference the time I tried to source a song for downloading by the band Big Black and leave you to imagine the sorts of things that google brought me.  Hint: NOT the song.  Also the time I hunted for material by the band Peeping Tom.  “Frotteured” it is.

A weekish ago I was on the skytrain with a friend, heading to his place for an evening of Errol Morris watching and beer inbibing.  The skytrain was pretty crowded so we weren’t standing together, which I think might have made a difference because he’s a man and I have this suspicion that skytrain perverts only target women they think are alone.  In any case, there was this big, beer belly-d dude standing down the aisle from me.  For no reason, he started wedging himself closer to the central pole, which I was holding on to, which brought his person into direct contact with my right breast.

Which, okay, things happen in crowded trains and whatever.  I have certainly done my share of pressing against other people in places we both regret but sometimes it cannot be helped.  So I edged away, as is polite.  And then he edged closer, reinitiating contact.  Which was starting to seem a little less accidental and a little more creepy, so I moved again, but was rapidly running out of room to move because the train was, as I say, crowded.

Unfortunately my move created enough space for him to now move decisively into the orbit of the pole and grab on, thus establishing his right to be next to me and once again press against me.  I turned fully away, but that just shifted contact from my breast to my behind, which is in a way less intrusive (I consider my behind less sexual than my chest) but in another way more intrusive, ie, closer to the, how do I say this?  Let’s say most private privates.

And then my friend signalled that we were at his stop so I had to squeeze past the guy to get out, which was unpleasant but at least it was over.  Through it all I had this sense that something wrong was going on, but not so obviously wrong that I could call him out on it.  I just felt icky and uncertain.  It was a relief that my friend had noticed it also – tremendously validating.  Which is sort of strange, I mean, why is it only “real” if someone else sees it?  But that is how I felt and while I am pretty sure there wasn’t enough time or contact for anything truly awful like ejaculating or whatever, there was definitely something intrusively sexual going on.

So the perverts are keeping right on schedule, I suppose.

So now I decide: do I never go to JBrydle’s house again because of its evil occupant, or do I return to the lair of the monster?  Both choices have consequences for the development of the phobia.

I am largely persuaded by learning/operant conditioning models of phobias.  This is based in notions of punishment and reward.  When something scares you, your anxiety rises.  Fleeing the scene of the frightening stimulus brings relief in the form of reduction of anxiety, and this is experienced as a reward.  The reward feels great, and increases the likelihood that next time you will be even faster to flee, or might flee from a lesser but related stimulus.  In this way the phobia becomes self reinforcing, and stronger over time.

The other option for phobia sufferers is to tolerate the anxiety and remain in the presence of the frightening stimulus until the anxiety extinguishes.  In this way, the reward from fleeing is absent.  Part of the definition of a phobia is that it is an irrational fear – truly, I have nothing to fear from a caged (or even loose!) tarantula.  Sticking out the anxiety can provide a new learning experience wherein my fear is demonstrated to be patently irrational, and I will experience the rewards of self efficacy and pride in ovecoming my hindbrain’s urging to flee.  In this way the phobia can be lessened over time.  But the key is tolerating the anxiety until full extinguishing, otherwise you are still rewarding fleeing from fear.

So last night I stuck it out, sitting on the couch in front of the spider’s glass tank and keeping a running monitor on my anxiety.  It lessened significantly as the evening wore on, but obviously there was lingering fear as demonstrated by a night of bad dreams.  If I want to  keep making progress on this fear, I should keep hanging out with Mr Spider – not my idea of fun but unavoidable if I want to stop being afraid.  And if I want to be free to visit my friend.  And this is the real crux – I don’t want to be prevented from living my life the way I like because of a stupid phobia.

As a side note, I don’t think learning models are the whole story for phobias.  They are tenacious buggers and tend to creep back over time – why should that be if there are no new frightening learning experiences?  In fact there cannot be new frightening learning experiences, because as I stated above, all phobias are irrational.  We use the word “irrational” because there is nothing objectively frightening about the feared object or situation – once the phobia is treated once, it should not be possible for the phobia to come back because the object/situation is not frightening and therefore cannot provide frightening new learning experiences!

But phobias do come back.  And learning models are pretty bad at explaining the genesis of the phobia, for the reasons in the previous paragraph among others.  I think it is much more likely that there is a psychodynamic component to the origin of the problem.  Analytical writers propose that phobias function as a sort of specialized displacement for certain types of unnamed or unacknowledged fears, and this strikes me as probable.  Learning models work if you commit to repeated, ongoing iterations of the treatment, but there is clearly more going on.  Another piece is the evolutionary element – only certain things can become phobias, and these are largely things that would have been dangerous in the early evolutionary environment.  Phobias probably represent an overactive state of something that was useful for our ancestors.  But we are still left to figure out why this person and not that, why this phobia and not that.

And, even though spiders are clearly still hateful, awful little monsters, I can sort of see why some very odd and maladjusted people might think they are cool and interesting enough to keep as pets.  Loathsome pets.  Which do not love you.

Maybe having a tarantula in my social circle will be good for me.  Who knows, I may overcome my phobia entirely once and for all.

In other news, you really need to watch Errol Morris’s documentary “Vernon Florida.”  It is possibly the best movie I have ever seen.  It is one solid hour of bizarre and I pretty much laughed the whole way through from the sheer hilarious oddness of it all.  You might enjoy it too.

Some hurried googling failed to net us anyone to call, so we decied we had to go deal with it ourselves.  I don’t even own a shovel – grabbing a cardboard box and an old towel we dashed back to the elevator and hurried to the street with only a half formed notion of what we would do.  By the time we got there, the bird had finally died of its extensive injuries.  Its intestines were splayed out around it on the concrete and there was blood.  I’m glad it died – it could never have lived through those injuries.  But it was probably in agony and terror for its final ten minutes of life.  I had made up my mind in the elevator that I would try to break its neck because watching it look around and try to drag itself off the road I knew it was in misery, but I have never done that before and was afraid of actually carrying out the act.  I admit I was relieved it was dead by the time we arrived.

Traffic was light and both cars could easily have avoided the bird, but chose not to.   Chris reports that the first driver actually gunned it and turned the vehicle to hit the seagull.  I don’t understand why anyone would do that – it’s so pointless and cruel.  I hope the second car was trying to euthanize it, but I don’t know.

And in my apartment right now are the four little finches I am still watching, well cared for pets, much less intelligent than the seagull – I don’t know quite what I want to say here, but it seems to me that stupid loved pets make much more sympathetic victims than seagulls.  The driver of the first car wouldn’t come into my apartment and crush one of these birds under his shoe, even though this is quite analogous to running over the big seagull with his car.  Are animals only valuable when they belong to a person?  Can we only empathize with animals we personally know?

And what kind of asshole deliberately crushes a bird under the wheels of his car?  This guy is out there.  I don’t know who he is but I’m angry with him.

2. My relaxed diet plan is failing and I am going back to starving, starting this morning.  I am sorry to bore you with these details but I find it motivating to put it in writing, so there you go.

3. I went hiking yesterday and it was awesome.  Except for the part where my shoes, which are not hiking shoes, rubbed all the skin off my right heel leading to bleeding and general grossness.  It didn’t hurt but when your hiking companions are giving you regular updates on the status of your pulped flesh you feel like you ought to do something about it, for aesthetic reasons if nothing else.  I applied a bandage and only then did I realize that actually it had been sort of painful, because all of a sudden it felt much better.  So hooray for aesthetics!  Or something.

4. I totally cheated on being a vegan yesterday.  I had a small ice cream cone at the base of the mountain, my first in nearly two years.  It was truly, deeply delicious and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Until I got a stomach ache, at which point I swore off dairy again.  Until dinner, when I had pizza with cheese on it.  Also delicious, but unpleasantly greasy and I don’t know if that’s because the pizza was unusually greasy of if that’s just the way cheese is.  In either case I am back to not eating dairy and glad to do so.  It was a nice holiday but… yeah.  All done now.

Worm class was fun even though the group work sucked.  (Doesn’t group work always suck?)  The leader of my group was an idiot who couldn’t follow instructions and I, personally, really like to follow instructions.  So we were not destined to become best friends.  It wasn’t even clear that we were destined to leave the class without bloodshed but in the end I kept a lid on it and no one was harmed.  But really… when the teacher tells you to move the straw aside and bury the food scraps at the bottom of the bin in one corner, and your response is to sprinkle the food all over the top of the straw, I think it really is appropriate to mentally sort you into the “idiot” category.  I wish her worms well but don’t have high hopes.

Also, I walked to class  because I like to walk and I am, as you know, constantly fretting about my level of fatness.  But when burdened with a 53L worm bin plus acccessories, it was not practical to walk home.  And now I will indulge in a favourite Vancouver activity: bitching about the busses.  It took me about 70 minutes to walk to class – and 90 to bus home.  That just shouldn’t happen.  I also shouldn’t have to stand next to the chatty bigmouth at the bus stop but life is not fair.  I now know more about the Translink dispute resolution system than I ever thought I would (did you know priority is for seniors and wheelchairs, and women with baby strollers can be asked to get off the bus if their stroller is preventing one of the former categories from boarding the bus?  It’s true, the bigmouth said so!).

So now I am working myself up the energy to walk from here (the dining room) to there (the bathroom) where I will lie in the tub and read my book and fantasize about how nice it would be if someone else made dinner tonight.  Considering I am unemployed and Husband is working something like 90 hours this week my odds are not good, but as my beloved grandmother used to say, it’s healthy to want.

Last night I went out to a restaurant with friends for dinner and drinks, which morphed into fries and drinks on a patio, which became watching the fireworks from the Burrard St bride, which became drinking rye and scotch on my deck until very late.  I had a great night until about 4am, when the hangover hit me like a freight train.  I counted – between 4 and about 9:30 in the morning, I was sick 12 or 13 times.

Just like the old days!  Ahh, sweet alcohol intolerant body!

So now I am feeling very tender and sore, from my stomach acid burned throat to my hard working, dry heaving abdominal muscles.  Today is given over entirely to lying on the couch watching movies and moaning about mah belly and my general state of physiological disorganization.  Might be the day to watch all those James Burke Connections series.

Not kidding!  My friend John was there and he was given 8 drinks in one hour, and he too didn’t blow over the limit.

Still not kidding!

I guess I had a pretty inaccurate idea of how much alcohol is permissable in drivers in that I thought the tolerance was lower.  I now realize that when someone is busted for driving while over the limit they are probably utterly shitfaced, because if little old 125lb me can stay legal on 5 drinks in one hour, then shit, you really have to be trying to be illegal.

Note: You can still be charged with impaired driving if you are weaving or driving unsafely with alcohol on board, even if you aren’t over .08.  Driving while impaired is a different charge than driving while over .08.  (And you shouldn’t drink and drive at all, ever.  I wouldn’t want anyone to take these observations as an encouragement to drink and drive because, hello, that is stupid and you are an idiot jackass if you do so.)

Still.  I am surprised at the findings.

And then I got hungover, which is no surprise considering how much I had all at once.  So in the end I was glad I went to the concert alone because I wasn’t required to talk with anyone, and I didn’t feel much like chatting.  More like sitting very still and monitoring the tender condition of my stomach for vomit potential.  Fortunately the worst had passed by the time the show started, and I had a really great time.  Clutch is great live and the crowd was going bananas.

I was disappointed that they didn’t play any of my favourite songs, which is saying something, because I have about twenty of them.  But they have something like 10 full length albums to choose from, including a new CD that they played heavily from, so my twenty favourites average out to two tracks per disc and, when you look at it that way, I guess it wouldn’t be hard to miss them when making one’s set list.  Nonetheless it was a great show – my non-favourite songs are still much beloved to me.  As an encore they played Big News I and Animal Farm from the first CD, which was awesome.  (These details are for Cousin Pat, who is also a fan but didn’t go last night.)

So the whole day was a bit odd but interesting.