Anyway, I’m having blog angst.  So far blog angst has resulted in 100% blog closure so our odds aren’t good.  Here are the problems:

1. The personal stuff I want to talk about is too personal to write about publicly.

2. I’m Growing Up and getting an Adult Job (well, not immediately, but at some point in the next less-than-a-year) and since this blog is only really semi-anonymous, it seems sort of fraught with danger to call people assholes and otherwise beak off when it could be quite problematic for my future career aspirations.

3. If I cut out all the dangerous material I’ll basically be left with what I had for breakfast, which doesn’t make for good reading (leftover pasta, in case you’re interested).

4. Does anyone even care?  I know this will sound pathetic and like I’m fishing for compliments but truly, I am not - I’m just being objective.  I don’t know how many people visit this site (I lost my password for that part of the system) but based on the number of comments I get, only actual friends of mine ever read it.  In which case I could just talk to them instead, which similarly serves Problem 2.  Why put it in writing if you don’t have to?  I’m sort of a slow writer and it takes a lot of time to put up posts.  I love you guys but is the time worth it for all four of you?

5. There is no five, but five is my lucky number, so there you go.

Ponder ponder.

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.

Just sayin’.

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.

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.

But first I have to go drool on my pillow for many hours.

I for one say, Welcome Republican Overlords of the Future.

Here’s the link to the original screenshot from the Washington Post.

Under little known Chapter 11 of NAFTA, government is not permitted to interfere in such a way as to give a corporate entity from one nation advantage over its neighbour.

Up until now, big American health corporations have not been permitted in Canada because of our single-payer system.  Enter the False Creek Surgical Centre, which just happens to offer private health services, completely outside of the BC Medical Services Plan.

The surgical centre has operated in plain knowledge of the provincial and federal governments for years, and Howard’s argument is essentially that he is running into government roadblocks which Canadian private clinics do not have to face.  He might have a very strong Chapter 11 argument, which will force the government’s hand into opening up the playing field to huge US corporate interests, the same machine which has left nearly 50 million Americans uninsured, that many again underinsured; and health bills are the most cited reason for personal bankruptcy in the US.

Is this what we want of our health care system?

The part that’s most aggravating is that this was a totally forseeable outcome.  Canada has been in NAFTA for a long time, and the Prime Minister of Canada and Premier of BC are both smart enough to know the consequences of letting the surgical centre grow unchecked.  It was no better than a red rag to a bull.

Kinda makes you think maybe they were turning a wilfully blind eye the whole time.  Kinda makes you wonder what else is in NAFTA that we might get hammered with down the road.

Let ‘em know what you think:

Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper (Hmm, isn’t this guy up for re-election?)

Premier of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell

(A big shout out to all my homies over at Canadian Doctors for Medicare and their blog for tipping me off.)