Category: Etiquette

Dominion Day Roundup

Stop gay marriage or straight women will have no husbands!!!! Eeek.

Folks, even if that is all true, how can the accompanying drop in the birthrate be bad for the planet? I love how bigotry gets dressed in ‘utilitarian’ arguments.  That said, any time I detect bigotry in others, I allow myself a quiet moment to reflect on my own.  Sigh.  It is hard to be a grownup.  PS, Mr. Berman (as reprinted by Mr. Klinghoffer), sex toy technology has come a long way since the Roman Empire.  Your concern for my satisfaction and prospect of landing a sperm donor is touching, but completely unnecessary.  After all, the POINT of marriage (the cart, after all, needing to come behind the horse) is BABIES.  And those I can get – did get – without recourse to marriage at ALL.

Oh look, Dan Savage linked to the above noted link and Klinghoffer says that Dan Savage can’t be a good father because he uses bad language!

One of these days I’ll have to find that bit of writing “How to Teach Your Children to Swear.”  What we didn’t teach the kids, back when, was that swearing is a class issue.  The very most self-controlled and self-willed people do not curse, because it shows either lack of breeding or lack of self-control. And self-control, narrowly defined, is a necessary precursor to maintaining control over others.  That’s what it’s all there for.  Swearing as far as I’m concerned is part of the palette of human communication; blunt, uncompromising, emotional, limbic, genuine.  Disgusting, disturbing, vile, creepy and disrespectful, too.  Swearing is a signpost toward the things we find most frightening and, let’s face it, human. As blasphemy, it is anti-hierarchical and owns of no master; as language charged with sexuality and excretions, it voices what we strive to keep silent in daily life; as racial and ethnic slur it speaks to how easily we fall back into our emotional enclaves to lash out at a world of strange/different/smelly&rude.

Best things about Canada.  Apart from Hockey, mea culpa, I’m in.

Look at that… Miss Margot has decided to like raspberry jam.  This is a cat from MARS.

I can now see large swathes of my bedroom floor, but more cleaning and laundry delights await me.  Later I hope to go to the Burnaby Village Museum – it’s free today, and in homage to John, who never paid for a damned thing he could get for free, and to celebrate being Canadian, I thought a step back into the days of my foremothers might not go amiss.

Cinnamon buns are medicinal.

Having said that, I’d better get a batch of bread dough on…. Jeff is highly suggestible about any hinted-at treats.  And I have to sign off so he can update wordpress.  Have a great Canada Day, everyone!

I have finally listened to John and Brooke’s album.  It’s really, really good.  It’s also, coincidentally, among the top sellers on CDbaby right now!  Katie and I listened in the CanCar yesterday.

Transphobia

Quoted from today’s tyee.ca:

 

Ten Signs of Transphobia in Our Culture, by Christopher A. Shelley

 

  1. Denial that the problem exists in the first place. 

     

  2. Inability to distinguish between categories such as queer, gay, lesbian, and trans. 

     

  3. Lack of meaningful discussion in educational and workplace settings. 

     

  4. Anxiety over not being able to tell if a person is male or female. 

     

  5. Crude jokes directed towards trans people or with trans-related content. 

     

  6. Refusal to accept trans people as one’s own teacher, doctor, politician, dentist, etc. 

     

  7. Thinking that being trans is OK but also dismissing the idea of ever dating a transperson. 

     

  8. Reducing trans to being merely and solely a psychiatric category. 

     

  9. Trivialization and media spectacles centred on trans-ness as an object of ‘fascination.’ 

     

  10. Refusing the fundamental claims of transpeople as being genuinely mis-sexed.

 

Book launch for Transpeople: Repudiation, Trauma, Healing. Event begins at 7 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 25, at Little Sister’s bookstore, 1238 Davie St., Vancouver. RSVP to awilson@utpress.utoronto.ca.

Grr

After my exalted state yesterday, OF COURSE I don’t get to keep it.  Instead, here it is 6:30 in the morning and raining comme un batard (I think I’m missing a circonflex in there) and I’m feeling ill and sad, because I just accidentally read somebody else’s correspondence on my computer.  I was looking for all the midi files on my Mac so I can fire them over to Mr. Music and he can sort through what he likes…. but smacked into Katie’s IM with Dax at midnight because it was the first thing that came up on the search.  How’s that for a coincidence?  Now that I’ve admitted I’m a jerk, I think I’ll have some more coffee.  I have no witnesses to the fact I did not go looking for this intel; I hope you’ll take my word for it.

Yup – Katie is visiting.  I’m not entirely sure how long she will be here, but I think it’s safe to say she will need a lot of love and support over the next little while.  She’s scheduled to start school at VCC in September; she says she’s looking forward to it and I believe her.  The rest is me being silent, but if you can visualize me squirming in sympathy, that’ll cover it.

I can’t get the Angstones version of the Lonely Goatherd out of my head.  That infernal yodelling!  It’s bouncing off the inside of my skull like a veritable Pachinko of billiard balls.

The CEO of a 17 billion Euro company is coming through the office today.  No, I’m not making that up either.  My response was to go to his corporate website, print out his picture, and stick it up over my desk with a cheerfully deflatory comment; I know that the cubicle police will come through at dawn and take it down, so I’m perfectly safe.  They will never comment.  They know what I’m like.  Hey, he said on his bio on the corporate site that he had a sense of humor (also that he likes white water rafting).  It’s everybody else’s reaction that I’m going for….

Jeff has once again improved the house, this time by putting sound dampening on the toilet lid.  NO, not fur trim.  Blech.  He put it on the toilet tank so that the bathroom no longer rings like a gong when you put the lid up.  We leave it down because the cats like to drink from the john, which we judge to be lacking in aesthetics and hygiene both.

Last night we fed Keith, Katie and Paul something of a feast.  It was very good to see all of them, and we watched a couple of NCIS episodes, which have Ziva in them, trying to gel with her new team…  Mike was supposed to drop over, but it’s like waiting for the bridegroom.  I have to keep the lamp trimmed at all times.  Or maybe he didn’t want to drop into a family gathering; that would not surprise me.

Back to the midi files.  Having revealed the cause of my unhappiness, I feel somewhat better.

20 hours and some thoughts about anger and hair.

It took 20 hours to convert the entire dvd from dvd format to mp4 format. It worked perfectly – but too slow. Anyway, after much agony, I can edit down the puppies and kids video. Part of me wants to kill the audio portion of it, which consists of, in a very boring way, Allegra saying, “Put the puppy down, put him down, put her down, put the puppy down, Keith don’t do that, that’s ignorant, Katie, sit down, put the puppy down, put the puppy down.” But I will avoid the temptation to do that. I can haz patience.

Continue reading 20 hours and some thoughts about anger and hair.

What a bleeping day

To preserve the dignity and privacy of those involved, I will not recount some of the events of this evening. Nobody was injured, the cats are fine, and I won’t speak for Jeff but I would describe my current mental state as “spitting out feathers”.

Jericho was fine; I heard my first ever submarine shanty, which really is a fine thing to be able to say, the other performers were wonderful, Ballyhooley was great, they did a kickass version of Wraggle Taggle Gypsies and one of them plays uillean pipes ver’ well.  And there was an octave mando and more fracking pipes with holes in ’em than you imagine one guy lugging around.

Paul and Keith showed up, and just as promptly, disappeared, due to scheduling issues. I hung til ten but I had to get the car back to Joyce Station.

One block north of Joyce Station, and may the laws of probability and a pterodactyl’s left great claw be thanked that I had my back turned to this jackass, I heard a guy who hawked up a throat oyster so big that it was carrying a cell phone with ease – I heard the sucker bounce on the ground – and then he made an even MORE incredibly loud noise which sounded like somebody trying to clear a vacuum cleaner hosepipe jammed full of liver with a toilet plunger, and I must repeat, really loud. Reverberating between two buildings, drowning out the car noise. Score one for the human capacity to be really fracking disgusting.

Getting used to changes / Bloomsday

In honour of Bloomsday, my mother who sent the link, and to demonstrate that I’m not a complete waste of space as regards littrachoor herewith the dummies guide to Ulysses.

Spent a bit of yesterday helping Katie find a part time job.  Yes, she’s living with Dax.  Yes, 1/2 an hour of our time yesterday consisted of listening to the two of them bicker over the phone.  (I had to say to her, “Quit calling him names!” at one point.  Because, you know, somebody with an anger disorder really responds well to that.  What a pair.)  Anyway her resume is up to date and that was my excuse for finding out where the hell she’s living so I can quit worrying about it.  And she applied to a number of places to work and I saw her do it, so that’s all good too.

Rest of the day spent hanging with Keith and Jeff, and Jeff cranked up From the Earth to the Moon (the first two episodes) and my gosh what great TV.  Hanks and Howard cooked up something good.

I made chocolate rice pudding yesterday, because I can.

Lazy weekend

You know it’s a lazy weekend when the most impressive thing you did was stack and unstack chairs at church. (Good service.) That and go rescue Season 2 disk one Deadwood out of the DVD player in the storage locker (Jeff had other, arcane power supply business in there as well). Both of the kids were here yesterday; Katie insisted that she had to drop off Suzanne’s laptop for TLC from Jeff (note to everyone in Vancouver… Jeff is not some free Geek Squad wannabe) and then leave and then stayed for porkchomps Paulegra and The Scent of Green Papaya.

You must understand… getting Katie to watch a movie with virtually no dialogue and subtitles is like telling ball lightning to pose for paparazzi. She entirely volunteered, but I was gobsmacked.

Keith just hung around (he left just before dinner) and either watched Nascar with his uncle or played non stop computer games. In desperation, Jeff is building him a ‘good enough’ computer out of various scraps to perhaps stem the Sunday tide. Every other day of the week Keith is very busy; Sundays he wants to blow his brains out on computer games. This would be okay but Jeff can barely use his room; I’ll let them sort it out but the parking at the computer combined with Keith leaving about half his coiffure in Jeff’s soap made for interesting times. No, I do NOT want to live in a sitcom; it just keeps happening with grisly regularity.

Back to work, where a group of senior managers has decided to manage by cancelling the one useful meeting we all attend once a week. I could expound at career limiting length on this subject, but we polled the attendees and we’re going to book the damned meeting anyway, and if the managers don’t want to attend for their own reasons, that’s no reason not to meet and exchange information and work our projects, which is what we were doing before. My manager supports the meeting, at any rate, and gave me a thumbs up on rebooking with the relevant attendees, so my precious heinie is safe for the time being. Heavy sigh.

Happy

I’ve been working on comedy routines.  The current one is “what happens when my inner Buddha meets my inner Hitler”  (hint, Buddha doesn’t always keep his teeth) and the inner Gord.  I am having lots of fun, as Gord just said something entertaining which I need to write down.

I’m off to visit the Luddite tonight and have food with him.  I tried to get him to cook for me but he made grim pronouncements about burning things so I think we’re going for Chinese.  It’s certainly a treat to meet somebody more optimistic than I am.
There’s another goddamned foot of snow on the hill here.  I am sure the ski operators are peeing their snowpants with glee but I had to heave a bundle buggy full of crockpot and crockery and food through it both ways yesterday.  I had to stop about three times coming back up the hill and check my pulse to make sure I was in the right zone for my fitness level.

Right now I am very happy.  I know that what I am about to describe will sound like the third circle of hell to some people, but my girlfriend Tammy phoned last night and we spent TWO HOURS on the phone, role-playing ‘difficult conversations with people we love’.  Tammy’s got more training in this than I do, so I’d say, blah blah need to talk to you about something are you ready to hear it, and she’d say.  Yeah.

So I’d say my thing, and she’d say, “You’re not quite getting it.  You need to only talk about one thing.”

“It is only one thing.”

“No, it’s two.  This and this.”

And I’d pout, and try again.

“You’re still trying to talk about two things at once.”

“F)ck, no I’m not!!”

“Yes you are.  There’s this… and there’s this.  Two separate issues.  You have to respect the person you’re talking to by only dealing with one issue, that you’ve thought through, at one time.”

“AAAAAAAAAAARgh.”  (More briefing?  More briefing.)
She’s right of course. I almost had the hang of one corner of it by the time we signed off.  And this morning I’m happy, because as I prepare for a ‘difficult conversation with someone I love’ I’m a little closer to getting my half of it right.  Is it a particular person?  A particular conversation?  Nope.  It’s just life.  Be prepared – and if you can’t be prepared, be present.

Pure evil

Here’s my comment about this Best of Craigslist post.  Safe for work.  Please note I like animals, but I have always been of the opinion that I could eat a domestic animal I owned if I had to, and kill, clean, cook and serve it to somebody else even if I couldn’t stomach eating it myself.  My ancestors didn’t survive by being either squeamish or sentimental.