He was harmless, in the way that they're all basically harmless as long as you're thinking of them abstractly. But when one of them is slithering in the place where you walk barefoot, it engages this innate fear that's hard to suppress no matter how many encyclopedic facts are at your disposal.

Fact: Garter snakes tend to be less than 4 feet long and very thin.

Fact: They're only "slightly venomous" , not usually dangerous for humans (bites just swell and itch).

Fact: They eat frogs (which we have in abundance) and are eaten by dogs (which we have in abundance).

Fact: I know that they are not "inherently evil", technically. Unless you're a Christian, I guess.

Fact: It still scared the fuck out of me.

He wasn't a total surprise. We've seen this fucker (or his brethren) before. We've also found his skins. But just catching a glimpse of this scaley motherfucker made my breathing come fast, unleashed my urge to flee, and stressed me right the fuck out. I don't want to coexist with this guy. I don't want to learn what it feels like to have him slime between my toes or grab me by the ankle. I don't want to reach for the "hose" and get a nasty surprise. I don't want to find Herbie with a snake hanging limply (or worse, not limply) from his mouth. I don't want to go for a swim and find an uninvited skinny dipper in the pool. So when I saw him, we were both startled, and we both took off, luckily not in the same direction. But when the dogs bounded over, he froze. He kept his head above the grass but did.not.move.a.muscle.  Do snakes even have muscles?

Fact: Yes, they do. Strong ones. And a whooooole lotta bones.

Anyway, I told Sean about my reptilian encounter later that night, and he reported that he'd had a brush with him himself just a day or two before. He was weeding in my hydrangea beds and actually TOUCHED IT! Eep.

"O.M.G.O.S.H. Did you scream like a little girl?"

Yes, he did. And let forth "a stream of curses." Of course, this being my Seanathan, his string of curse words can comfortably be reproduced in almost any church bulletin without the slightest bit of censorship:

"Shit. Shit Shit SHIT."

Can you even believe I married a guy who doesn't swear?
Neither can the snake.



UPDATE ON THE SNAKE SITUATION:

There is not a snake living in our yard after all.
There's a whole damn family of them!
I was weeding when I encountered a wee little snake. Still not happy to see it. Let out a yell. The kind of yell that Sean, who was out in the woods operating a chain saw, heard and came running for.
He got a stick for "snake removal."
He chased the baby snake around quite a while. The snake was uncooperative or else just couldn't fathom the plan. Snakes are probably not big-picture thinkers. Anyway, whether the baby snake was secretly "yelling" for help or perhaps just all the movements and prodding startled her parents, two quite large snakes then slithered out of their hiding spot - get this - from underneath the day bed where I read and sun myself all day long!
There is a nest of snakes under my happy place!
Well, it's not my happy place any more.
What use is a backyard if I cannot bear to set foot in it?

Fact: the mommies can give birth from 3 to 98 babies in one go. So the one that we saw? Definitely just the tip of the iceberg. But how many are there? Where are they hiding? Can they get in the house?

Sean assures me there are no holes in our foundation. The house is about 3 years old, and I know Sean probably looks it over pretty thoroughly since I put a caveat on our living here: if I ever, EVER see a single mouse in my house, it's for sale the very next day and we're outta here. And I never have. Haven't even seen one in the yard or in the woods or anything. But now I'm going to amend that clause to include snakes.

Meanwhile, I'm googling frantically to find out how we can tell the snakes to fuck off. And don't give me any guff about how they're "ecologically necessary" and how they're more scared of me than I am of them. This all may be true, but they're absolutely ruining my enjoyment of my own backyard. I know it was technically theirs first, but as far as I'm aware, they don't have the shadow of a hefty mortgage to show for it.

So if you know of a repellent that's super effective on snakes but not  also poisonous to small, curious dogs, let me know. So far I've been told to sprinkle the borders of my yard with fox urine and\or human hair, neither of which I have on hand, and neither of which are listed on the Home Depot website. Personally, I'm leaning toward a well-sharpened garden hoe. Not that I'm brave enough to do the hoeing.

Maybe I'm Born With It?

When I ran out of conditioner this morning, I had a second bottle in reserve, so it wasn't a disaster, but it was a surprise. I use a decent grocery-store brand, nothing too fancy, nothing salon, but I'm fairly loyal to it. I have an occasional fling with something else, only a dalliance here and there, but this is the one I always come back to, have for more than a decade now. But usually I use the blue variety, and this bottle was orange. It has been standing in the cupboard as back-up for too long for me to remember why I went orange rather than blue, but I knew as soon as I had a dollop of it in my palm that it was wrong.

It "uses the power of honey" which apparently is great for strong hair, so I can see why I might have given it a try. Once a month I bathe my hair in chemicals so strong they make my throat close, and then every day I all but light it on fire with extremely hot tools. And, after such torture, if a single strand still possesses enough of a rebellious streak as to not fall completely into line, I teach it not to have an original thought of its own by dousing it with treatments for frizz and flyaways. "Overprocessed" is the nice way of calling my hair what it is. Tired. Very tired. It's been told that it's never good enough, not the colour, nor the texture, nor its rate of growth, not even the way it lies on my head. So I have to prod it into assuming the qualities that a woman's hair should apparently have: lustre, shine, softness, fullness, and a flowery-fruity smell. Not unlike dessert, wherever possible.

I've been buying the blue bottle by rote for so long that I couldn't quite remember what it was supposed to have been - certainly not honey, but what? The empty bottle told me coconuts. Honey for strength, coconut for softness. Everything on a conditioner bottle is just a synonym for "nice hair". And I'm pretty sure conditioner itself is just latin for "hair placebo". At any rate, I read, as a child, probably 11 years old or so, that shampoo didn't matter because "soap is soap" but conditioner was where it's at. I have spent my life buying beauty products based on exactly that principle, which is a funny thing to do considering I lifted the advice from a magazine entitled Young Miss.

At any rate, I thought the coconuts must be a new development that I failed to pick up on. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think there used to be more jojobaness. More unpronounceables, intangibles, things that were probably made up just to flesh out the ingredient list on a bottle of conditioner and justify its pricetag.

I had a brief but torrid affair recently with the moroccan craze. Moroccan oil was going to save us all. It was at least 4 times the price, and didn't smell as nice, but if it worked, you wouldn't hear me complaining. Alas, it seems to have left my hair more or less as everything else does. Which is fine. It's fairly lovely, fairly soft, and it always smells nice. Faces have burrowed into it without complaint. But we always strive for better. After all, hair is neighbour to lashes that are always being told to be longer and lips that could aways be redder. They're all meant to be high achievers, and I buy into it. Not because I particularly want hair the consistency of glossy satin, but because for those four minutes in the shower during which I allow certain exotic oils to soak into my hair, I am giving myself a treat. A luxury. Candy for my hair.

I think this is what my grandmother means by "necking".

Last weekend was the season opener at the drive-in.

We go as often as we can, all summer long, it's our thing, it's our date night.

But drive-ins are a dying breed, and not many people are so lucky (or as interested), and those people are quite easy to spot when you say "We've been to the drive-in!" and they say "What did you see?"

What did we see?

Well, we did see something, and at the drive-in, it's always a double feature minimum, a triple feature on holidays. But when you go to the drive-in, it's not about the movie, it's about the experience. It's not what you see, but who you see it with.

We bring a chilled bottle of champagne, mosquito screens for the windows, a picnic of delectables (or a pizza if we're in a hurry), a blanket for discretion. We've got this date night down to a science.

We usually throw a lot of pillows into the back seat and tuck ourselves in. The windows are going to steam up no matter what you do, so you may as well make out a bit while you're back there. Or makeoutPLUS* as the case may be (like Hulu, the content of this blog will remain free but Saint Vodka is now offering juicy premium content for a small monthly subscription fee...stay tuned for details).

The first movie, at minimum, is a dud anyway. Movie studios learned long ago that pairing a non-starter with a blockbuster is a great way to direct a little more box office towards a flop. That's how I saw The Last Airbender. And Pacific Rim. And last week, Noah.

Not great movies, but you feel more forgiving if at least one of you has their pants around their ankles.

Either way, the movie is incidental. It's a social event. I remember seeing Crocodile Dundee as a little girl, all of us in our jammies to sleep through the less kid-friendly second feature. Armageddon with my mom and sisters, a van full of hormones and tears. Lost in Space with a handsy high school boyfriend.

Over the past few years Sean and I have learned about drive-in culture. Everyone starts honking their horns before dusk, to usher in the movie. Dogs get in free, and it seems that most people stuff the empty seats of their SUVs with pets, and then they trot them about during intermission, a little doggy parade between cars. The old guy who runs the place likes to interrupt the movies to tell us when the canteen is opening and closing - but don't worry, he always picks a climactic scene or important plot point to mute so you can be sure to find it on imdb the next day if you're still confused about something you missed. And he sometimes even remembers to turn the sound back on as he's finished his announcement. Not always. Sometimes the last 10 minutes of the film will be silent, but that's okay, because you didn't come to find out how the Harry Potter series wraps up once and for all (we did see the 8th and last Harry Potter movie at the drive-in but since neither of us had ever seen any of the others, it was fabulously out of context and mysterious and we didn't mind losing crucial scenes to our hanky panky-hokey pokey. Actually, I remember that the sound was abandoned for the final parts of the last Die Hard movie, but you don't need words to tell you what you already know: that John McClane is tough and sexy and loves making things explode. He'll get scratched up but will ultimately walk away victorious, probably from something fiery.

And when the lightning started crashing during Noah, we did worry for half a second about whether the weather would turn biblical. It seemed a bit ominous. But our rain cleared up before theirs did, and we had the benefit of a few well-timed twists of the wipers.

No matter what's playing on the screen, there is something inherently romantic about sitting underneath the stars, in your own little bubble. It's magic. It's nostalgic. And it's always two for the price of one.

This is my Gertie. She is a good dog. A very good dog. She has nothing but happiness is her heart and the only time she's not smiling is when you take her picture. She prefers to look serious in those. She wants everyone around her to be happy too, so she'll nudge you and kiss you and pat you until you forget your worries. She actually kisses away tears and is very attentive to illness.

She is such a bright spot in our lives with her little twirls, and her funny jumps, and her fluffiness, that even when she threw up on my laptop yesterday, causing the motherboard to fry, you can't be mad at her. There are a million similar computers at Best Buy, but there's only one Gertie.

Just look at that face.

Crossing Over

Last week we had a little jaunt down to my favourite place on earth, Manhattan. We take a fair number of trips, and a fair number of those are back to my mecca, good old NYC. It never gets old. And neither does going through the border.

Border agents are a special breed of person. They're not bad, they just have a tough job to do, a job that seems interesting as you're passing through, but is probably a weird mix of stressful and monotonous to actually perform on a daily basis.

Border agents like to ask all kinds of questions, some of them borderline silly, some of them completely 100% silly in an effort to knock you off your game, gauge your reaction, and judge whether you're breezing through guilt-free, or if you'll ever so slightly give away the secret fact that something's hiding in your anus.

Since we never have anything to hide, we tend not to mind the questions. We've encountered everything from the guy who wants to hear the band you're going to see, to the friendly dude who gives out restaurant recommendations, to the gruff lady who wondered why we can't just shop in our own damn country. If we're crossing by car, they always ask my husband who's car he's driving in kind of a judgy way (he's driving my Beatle). Sure they're trying to make you a little nervous, but they aren't trying to ruin your vacation, or even your day. They're just putting in their hours while also kind of defending their country. The friends we traveled with recently had their orange wedges confiscated by an overzealous agent. I realize nobody wants a food-borne illness to jump the border, but this wasn't a dozen cases in the trunk they'd intended to sell in Central Park. It was a baggie of orange sections for a pregnant lady to consume while travelling to hopefully avoid some morning sickness. It was 1 piece of fruit that was very probably grown in Florida to begin with and had possibly passed through the very same border crossing a week prior. But the USA does NOT want that orange back! The offending orange was removed from their possession and they went on their merry way.

It made me realize that we truly must have somehow become the most boring people on the planet because not even border agents want to harass us. Not that we want them to. Not really. I mean, maybe just a little good-natured bullying, or some condescension while fondling their tasers. Just a little something to make us feel relevant. Like we're not completely past our possible-sexy-smugglers prime. Like we maybe, just maybe, could possibly be part of some glamourous international crime ring that will one day be referred to by a snazzy nickname in the press. Like we pose just a fraction more of a threat than my grandparents do. We could be mattress-tag-ripper-offers. Or we might jam up highway toll machines by inserting pesky Canadian coins! Or we may incur lots of roaming charges that we pay only delinquently!

Okay, fine. We're boring. We're going to travel safely and responsibly while dropping lots of tourist dollars. We have travel insurance. We packed our own bandaids but not our own produce. We know how to convert currency and speedometers and colour to color. We're good little travelers. We keep our citrus to ourselves.

Shoe Envy.

I actually don't envy anyone's shoes because I have a quite fabulous shoe collection myself.
My problem is with the people who name the shoes.
Currently, in my "bag" (the little slice of internet where your shoes wait for you to pay for them and supply a shipping address) I have the Cosette and the Enetta. Every shoe must have a name. They can't just be the blue ones, or even the shiny blue ones with the straps and the buckles. They must be named. Proper names. Usually women's names. Some are very specific, depending on the designer. A quick glance at my shoe box collection shows I already own Carries. Ginnies. Oksanas. And Mary Janes, of course.

Designers now have to cast their nets so far and wide that even Samantaa has a shoe. And Lissa. Chantel.
Bonita! Phyllis comes in black and white OR nude and orange! Phyllis!

Of course you've already guessed there aren't any Jamies (and certainly not Jays). I know, I have an ugly name. It's not my fault. I didn't pick it. I've hated it more or less my whole life. I may have made peace with it now, but I'll still insist you call me Jay. So when a designer is devouring the baby name book like a woman with a 16 week old in one hand and a blank birth certificate in the other, and it comes down to Jamie or Phyllis because everything else (and all of their possible alternative spellings) is taken, you know they're not going with Jamie.

In the many, many years of my shoeddiction, I have not once come across a Jamie. Not even a plastic jelly sandal has been a Jamie. And to prove myself right, I've even googled it. And proven myself wrong.

But still mostly right, actually. Because the one Jamie shoe in existence is made by Dr. Scholl.  I mean, better they were dirt rags! Described variously as "laidback", "durable", "airy", and "sensible", they're everything you'd expect from a shoe that comes with a prescription! They're absolutely hideous of course, but get this - you get the convenience of a slide-on shoe with the look of a lace-up! Nurses have given them the thumbs up, as have sons buying them for their be-bunioned elderly mothers.  According to reviews, they are both "comfy" yet still require breaking in. One rave reviewer likened them to "a mound of chubby bunnies", which I have never actually stepped on, and I'm hoping to keep it that way - fingers crossed!

Frankly, my shoes tend to be more "torturous but sexy".  Right after giving me salivating compliments, my coworker likes to characterize them as "likely to induce hemorrhoids" and believe me, she doesn't mean that in the good way.  People often wonder how someone in so much pain can manage to walk around in heels that put me within kissing range of my 6 and a half foot tall husband. And the answer is: when your hand's in the fire, you barely feel the mosquito bite. Sometimes when you feel your worst on the inside, you want to look your best on the outside.

My grandmother, for as long as I knew her anyway, wore orthopedic shoes. Ugly, soul crushing things. Kleenex boxes would have been less obvious. And always in the same hue of "orthotic beige". And, as a terrible sufferer of flat feet, I have sometimes wondered what a pair of plain Janes would do for me as opposed to the Marys that I prefer. Was she a happier person because of her shoes? I doubt it.  Actually it makes me a bit sad. My grandfather would often make pointed remarks about the women he saw in church - well-appointed in a hat and heels. That, to him, was a woman. And that my grandmother could never be.  I'm not sure how necessary orthotics even are to a woman who spent much of her life at the kitchen table peeling potatoes like they were going out of style.  That's not me. I may sacrifice in comfort, but I am a person who strives to make the world a more beautiful place, and if I don't start with myself, from my head down to my toes, then I'm doing it wrong.

Unfashionista.

I can't even fathom what they mean by "structured handbag".
Also, I kind of miss the days when we just called them purses.

Not For Intended Use.

It's labelled for veterinary use and intended for hooves but in my house, it's just another hope and a dream!

Blues Hound

Ottawa Bluesfest has just announced their lineup for this summer and it's got so many of my favourite blues artists I can hardly believe it - Lady Gaga, The Killers, Blake Shelton, Snoop Dogg, Queens of the Stone Age....and some more vintage blues, like Journey, and Third Eye Blind. I mean, it's great that we're bringing in blues for the Glee generation, but Third Eye Blind?  Who knew they still existed? It's about to get all 1997 up in here! It's nice that they've really reached back to what some might consider the real heyday of blues. It was a rocky time - they let Billy Crystal host the Oscars again. Deep Blue won that chess game. Some hick had septuplets. Toyota taunted us with the Prius. No one was sure if Ross and Rachel would ever get together. It was rough,confusing time and so a lot of truly great blues music came out during that era. It hardly compares to the blues of today's youth. I mean, if you have to wear a dress made out of meat just to create conflict worth singing about, you probably don't have a legit case of the blues.

But wow. So many blues greats all on one stage. I mean, if you asked me to choose which among these is my absolute favourite blues artist, well, I just couldn't tell you! I'd be flummoxed . If I'm hard pressed though, I might have to go with the people who gave us some of the greatest blues lyrics every put to music: chickity china, the chinese chicken. That's some pretty hardcore blues shit right there. And if you're a fan, you can catch them here at BluesFest this summer.

Occam's Razor

Did I ever tell you about the time that I got into this sticky situation at a bar that ultimately ended in a only-slightly-disfiguring scar when I took a bottle to the face (stoically, if I say so myself) but managed not to bleed on my reindeer sweater?

Or how about the one where I got viciously attacked by the late, great parakeet named Rusty (black arm band optional) who didn't like the cut of my gib but DID love the taste of my sweet, sweet flesh?

If you recall me telling you either of these stories, or any other story that somehow involves me acquiring a scar on my nostril, please contact me immediately. I've been wondering about it for a while.

Let Me Take a Selfie

I'm super vain and quite self-obsessed, but I've never expressed it by flooding my instagram account with countless selfies because a) I do not have an instagram account and b) I cannot take a selfie.

I mean, I have a phone. It has a camera. I have occasionally used it to take pictures. Mostly of things, sometimes of places, occasionally my of dogs, and once in a blue moon, of my husband. But never myself. I do have a face, and it is photographable. It's not photogenic, but it doesn't break cameras. To my knowledge. I also have arms. But not, it seems, the required dexterity.

My sweet, stupid mother recently got on that bandwagon of "hey let's begrudgingly take a picture of ourselves without makeup and then blackmail others into doing it too!" People seem to have forgotten that this was supposed to be about cancer awareness. Somehow. I mean, I think cancer awareness is kind of overblown. Does anyone not know about cancer? Is anyone really unaware? I think we got the message. Cancer sucks. Often preventable. Honk your knockers, quit smoking, yada yada yada. I absolutely want to vomit pink all over the place that shit is so overused. But yes. Here's my bare face, and somehow that's related to cancer. Go team!

I was not overly thrilled to be under the gun for this picture, but it's not really gonna kill me. I'm too lazy to wear makeup all the time. Plus, all those beach pictures of me on vacation? Yup. Not wearing makeup. All those sunshiny summertime pictures? Soooo not wearing makeup. So these pictures already exist but apparently aren't good enough, because I posted them voluntarily and failed to point out that, whoa, fresh-faced lady here in all her ginger-ancestry hotness.

So just out of the shower this morning, while getting ready for work, I attempted to take a quick snap of me in my most natural state (well, I wasn't drunk, so I guess it wasn't technically my MOST natural state). It did not go well. You see, my phone has 0 physical buttons. They're all pretend buttons on a touch screen and they pop up depending which application is open. When I'm using the camera function,  I see the little square on my screen it wants me to tap in order to take the picture. Easy peasy. Except when I turn the screen away from myself in order to aim the camera at my own face. Now I'm tapping blind. I am tapping and tapping and I'm either taking tonnes of pictures or none at all and there's no way to tell (since the flash wasn't going off...that's another pretend button) until I bring the camera back in for a look see. It turns out that I was taking pictures, just not necessarily of my face. It's hard to aim a camera without a viewfinder! There were parts of me in most of the photos, but not whole parts, not anything you'd recognize. I must have taken and deleted 2 dozen of these stupid pictures before I tuckered myself out. No selfie.

So I wondered just how dexterous or determined or practiced all these selfie-slaves are. Because my Facebook feed does often clog up with "here's my face in this dark corner" and "here's my same face in a similar looking dark corner" and "here's my wonderful goddamned fucking face again" and "oh, look, me again!" and "man, I never get tired of looking at myself!". They're out there. And frankly, they don't seem to originate from the brightest bulbs, necessarily. So someone's figuring this shit out.

So I asked my husband, who has taken an occasional selfie (the occasion being: he finally got his sorry butt down to the hair place after I've been complaining about his yeti appearance for 3 solid weeks, and I want proof). So, he doesn't have a lot of experience, but I remember that not only did he include his whole head, but even the upper parts of his neck and shoulders! Perfect portrait. God, he's irritating when he's getting something right (especially when I'm not).

Anyway, it turns out that there's this other pretend button that tells the camera to flip around, so you can stare at your hot self in the screen, line up the perfect shot, AND see the pretend button to tap to take the thing! Well hello, beautiful!

Gosh, now I'm starting to see how this can get addictive! My apologies if I start flooding your account with not very original and totally gratuitous and unnecessary pictures of my face. It's just me, spewing my digital narcissism all over the place, doing my part to cure cancer.

Now You See Me

I am the face of disability.
It's not necessarily (hopefully not, anyway) the face you expect to see getting out of the car in a handicapped parking space, but not every disability comes with age, and not all are visible.

We call them "hidden disabilities" although if you have known me over the past 10 years, you'll know I have trouble hiding it, as much as I'd like to.

I have chronic pain. Deep and abiding pain. Pain that never gets better but does get a whole lot worse, at inconvenient times, and in surprising and sometimes humiliating ways. I have an incurable disease, an "orphan disease" which is a pitiable term meaning that there are no doctors in my country with any kind of knowledge of it, and there is no funding being allocated to rectifying that. When I meet a new doctor, I have to spell out my disease so they can Google it, and then I am their guinea pig while they throw treatments at me just to see if any stick. They never really do.

I wake up in pain every day of my life.
No, that's not quite true. Some days I don't wake up because I was in too much pain to sleep.

My good days are more than enough to keep most people in bed but I lived that life in the early years of my diagnosis, and it's not for me. Lots of people with my disease are on disability, but I'm trying not to be one of them. Instead, I structure my life around my pain in order to live as fully as I can.

I worry about everything. I start my day measuring my pain, and measuring my energy. Do I have enough energy to shower? Will the effort of washing my hair sap me? Will it waken some new pain, exacerbate an existing one? If I spend energy on my hair, will I still have some for drying it, and styling it?

I wear the same outfits too often because they're closer to the front of my closet, and that's easier.

I don't go downstairs for a glass of water. I wait until I'm hungry too. Fewer trips, as few as possible.

I don't shop. I used to like shopping, but now I get my clothes, shoes, and gifts mostly online. If I have to go to a mall, I plot out the easiest path between two points. I don't try stuff on. That kills me. Last week I needed to replace a pair of shoes, so I picked out ones I already had. The sales clerk retrieved them from the back and took them out of the box and placed them on floor for me to try on. I stood there staring at them until my husband picked them up and took them to the cash to pay. He holds all the bags because I don't need any extra burdens. He'll also carry my purse, and my coat. Constant infection means constant fever means overheating and possibly getting dizzy and passing out. I spend a lot of time waiting outside of stores, or looking for benches and a quiet place to meditate, or leaning on my husband while I catch my breath because I've just been wracked with pain and it literally took my breath away. I only shop on my "good" days, but I never know how long a day will stay good for. Pain can escalate extremely quickly. And sometimes energy just runs out - did that extra care taken to shampoo my hair come back to bite me? Maybe. And what if I'm in the middle of the mall when suddenly I just can't anymore? That's a long, agonizing walk back to the car.

I've stranded myself at work I don't know how many times. I did too much, pushed myself too far, and suddenly I find myself exhausted or too crippled to drive myself home. I long for privacy and a safe place to lie down, but I have to wait to be picked up by someone because I can't get there on my own. My car has spent countless "slumber parties" in parking lots, waiting for the day when I feel well enough to pick it up.

Sometimes I send something to the printer and then leave it there for a week while I try to work up the strength to go get it. I don't want to use up all my energy on a stupid print out and then not be able to get myself home. Sometimes I don't go refill my water bottle, not just to conserve the energy that the water cooler trip expends, but also the future energy spent on bathroom trips. I don't always have a chipper hello for everyone in the office because I have to choose between them and my clients, and I'm giving everything I have to my clients. I call my colleague to meet me in the parking lot so he can grab my bag. My husband drives to my office during his work day so that he can try to improve my parking spot for me. He knows that at the end of the day, I won't feel up to crossing the lot.

I avoid going over to someone else's house. I worry about my comfort, not just physically, although that will always play a part. I worry about looking weak in front of people. About letting them see me struggle to find accommodation in foreign surroundings. I don't like to sleep in someone else's home because I don't want to disturb them when I'm up all night. I don't want them to find all the bloody gauze in the trash. I don't want someone else's sheets scabbing into my wounds during the night.

Travel hates me. I love to see new things and go to different places, but getting there is agony. Long car rides mean I go deep into meditation just to survive. My husband feels like he is driving a corpse. We spend the first few days of our vacations trying to recover from the trip and the last few days dreading the return. And car rides are my best bet, because I can control things while limiting how many people can see my pain. I can't ask a pilot to pull over so I can stretch.

I keep the house barely above freezing (62ish, and my husband's toes are blue!) because it's the one time a year I can live comfortably, temperature-wise. I still sleep with the fan at night though, because the night sweats are terrible and the fever just doesn't stop.

I'm afraid to make plans because I'm afraid I'll have to cancel them. I don't want to be that girl, but I am that girl. I try to be optimistic about my health and about my ability to do what everyone else is doing. But sometimes, on that day, it's just not reality. I can't always keep up, but I try my best to fake it. People ask how I am and I lie and say I'm "fine" but actually, I don't even remember what fine feels like. People love to tell me I don't look sick, or that I seem better and I love to fantasize about punching them in the face. I know these people are actually mostly well-intentionned, but when I have had to struggle all day long just not to die, the last thing I want is for someone to invalidate that challenge and that triumph. I know my friends are all burnt out on my condition. Nobody wants to hear me complain, least of all myself. So I mostly keep it in. But just because I'm not crying doesn't mean I don't need to.

I don't want to hold up the group and I don't want anyone to notice I'm lagging behind. I don't need the pressure of extra attention or solicitousness. I know you mean well, but I'm trying to preserve my dignity. I change my bandages in private. I cover up my scars. I'm trying to pretend.

I come home shaking because of all the effort I've spent pretending to be human. By the end of the day, it's not just my diseased areas that hurt, it's my whole body. The healthy parts spend the whole day compensating for whatever can't pull its weight, and my muscles are sore and overworked but they can't take a break because they're all I have left.

If my pain level has been too high for too long, I'm on sensory overload and I can't take a single thing more. Don't talk to me, don't look at me. No, it's not you. It's me it's me it's me. Just give me a minute. My back aches but I can't go for a massage because I'm too sore to be touched. Or to climb up on a massage bed, for that matter. I'd feel better in the bath but I can't get into it. And if I do get into it, I overheat and have to be helped back into bed, with the fan on full-blast. The hot tub is tantalizing but even if I make it down the stairs, the cover is so heavy and I am so weak. All my clothes have bloodstains. My nightmares are vivid from pain meds. My face is swollen from the inflammation. My diet is severely restricted. I groan involuntarily. Sometimes I watch movies standing up in the back of the theatre. I fight back tears on long flights. I claw my husband's hand during a lengthy speech. I leave my groceries behind because the line was too long. I take breaks. I take breaks from walking, breaks from sitting, breaks from standing, breaks from reality.

I don't use a wheelchair. I don't even have a limp. But I have days where every step I take is pure torture. Where each step is another little squirt of blood that I can't really afford to lose. Another chance that the infection will spread and become life-threatening.

It's exhausting and overwhelming and degrading. And it's my life. It's not a bad one, actually. There's a lot of love, and a lot of joy. But everything comes with a price, and I pay it. Because people with disabilities don't really have a choice. We haven't asked to live like this, but we must. I have a disease that is potentially life-threatening but most people who have this diagnosis die by their own hands. Depression is rampant. Chronic pain is isolating, and lonely. We can only really be understood by each other. We suffer largely in silence.

Our hidden disabilities often come with another kind of pain - pain from being misunderstood. Left behind. Labelled "lazy" instead of "sick". Judged. I read once about a little boy with his own invisible illness who would wear an ace bandage around his wrist on his bad days to let the world know that he needed just a little bit of understanding on that day. I thought about what kind of badge I could wear, what kind of signal I could give to let others know that I too needed a little tenderness that day. But then I realized, it's as simple as this: am I breathing? Then I am hurting.


Please take the time to share this post.
Let the world know that disabilities come in all shapes and sizes.
Let the brave face drop just for one day.

With This Ring

I recently had the heady experience of designing my own engagement ring.
I have in fact been married for several years, but this isn't as backwards as it sounds.
This summer, I was at the cottage enjoying the heck out of a beautiful day when the brakes on my bike failed as I was zooming down a hill. I lost control, veered off the path into the forest, and hit a tree. Then I hit another. The second one stopped me dead.
It's funny (now that I've recovered and only have a few scars) because I can close my eyes and reexperience it in slow-motion: the rough ride, bumpbumpbumping all over the place, the fear and panic, all the brush whipping by me, and finally my tire striking trunk, my bike coming to an abrupt stop but my body continuing in its arc of motion. I distinctly remember the impact because it tasted exactly like my car accident. Is that the taste of fear? Adrenaline? Blood from my bitten tongue? I can only guess that in that split second before I myself made contact with the tree that I thought something along the lines of "not my pretty face!"
I don't remember having that thought, but I do know, as evidenced by 4 sprained fingers and a sprained wrist (and that's just on my left!), that I must have thrown up my arms in some sort of protective instinct.
Next I knew, I was lying on the forest floor, twitching uncontrollably, struggling to get my breath back, and deeply, terribly embarrassed.
Parts of my body had to be disentangled from parts of my bike. I was picked up and whisked away for treatment. I had to concentrate just to be able to list all the parts that hurt. I was missing a shoe, and a great deal of pride. My white pants were never to be pants again.
Anyway, I was still shaking as the rocks and twigs were being picked out of my wounds, but I looked down at my rapidly swelling hand and noticed - gasp! - that the diamond was missing from my engagement ring!
Sean was reluctant to leave my side, but I insisted that I was more likely to die from broken dreams than from bike injuries and sent him into the forest.
Yes, the forest. Poor Sean. He had the impossible task of scouring an entire forest for a nearly invisible pea-sized speck. "Fortunately", I had left scars on the tree as it had on me and Sean was able to pick it out amongst all the other trees. He merely looked down from the Jamie-sized dent in the bark, and there was my diamond, sparkling away, hardly traumatized at all.  (Meanwhile, I was frantically trying to grease up my sausage-fingers to get my leftover ring off before I'd have to have it cut off).

Weeks later, I realized that I didn't want to have my ring fixed because I'd always be worried about its fragility in the face of my surprisingly death-defying life. So I opted to do a re-design and found myself trying to convey my ideas in laymen-speak to a woman who loved her jeweler's goggles like nobody's business. She asked if I would like to reuse the gold from my setting or if I wanted to keep it. My setting was reduced to a wonky former-circle with bent, empty prongs. Did I want to keep that piece of garbage? No I did not. But I joked that I would keep it for my least-favourite relative to some day inherit from me. She kind of frowned at me like I shouldn't be making light of her very very serious profession, and she picked up the hunk of junk very gingerly with her little pinchers, and laid it very gently in her velvet-lined box. Because, you know, a sense of formality turns metals into precious metals worth thousands (and thousands) of dollars.

Fast forward another month. Sean picks up my new ring. Drops down to one knee, asks me to marry him all over again, you know, that kind of romantic junk, slipped it on my finger and it's lovely and perfect and very very sparkly. But in the bag is something else - it's the setting from my original ring. That twisted piece of metal. Somewhere in the city of Ottawa, there's a jeweler who believes I'm going to bequeath it unto the niece who displeases me most. And in the meantime, the ex-ring is living it big like a still-ring, sitting snugly in one of those fancy little boxes. The kind of box that will really fool someone someday into thinking I loved them.

People magazine has named Adam Levine the Sexiest Man Alive. For years now I have hypothesized that People uses a forgiving, perhaps even dubious definition of the word "sexy". And now I realize they do for "man" as well.

That feeling of dread.


It's that time of the year. Supposedly the most wonderful.

I've been at the mecca store which is filled to bursting with people buying things no one needs, trying to shop off a list that is sometimes too specific, sometimes too vague:

princess sticker book - check

20" plush tiger wearing apron - ?

oven-to-table corningware - check

something that will really knock his socks off but cost less than $50 - ?

A chunk of my life I can never get back floats by. I am at the densely-packed front of the store, my cart heaped with things I'll question later, trying not to maim anyone with unwieldly tubes of wrapping paper. I pick the line that seems the shortest but takes the longest. I have ample time to read all the headlines, resist all the impulses, and check out the latest in gum. I am overheating in my coat, and trying to keep my scarf out of the puddles melting off other people's boots.

I reach the cashier with time. She is wearing a vest, and weariness. Palpable weariness that smells like canned soup and cardboard. I don't mean to make her bad day worse, but the little slot in my wallet between my license and my points cards is empty. I perform an archaelogical dig down to the bottom of my purse, and then back up again, all to no avail. My card is missing. Heart in throat. People in line behind me look on with about as much sympathy as Kanye feels for the papparazzi.

Today I am that woman.

Annual holiday tradition of losing my debit card - check.

I did a dumb thing.
I was driving in to work when a heard a weird noise that I supposed was coming from my own car.
I immediately turned down the radio and diagnosed the noise as "not enginey".
I slowed down a touch but the noise seemed to increase. I wondered if perhaps the passenger door wasn't closed tight.
Then I felt my car pulling slightly to the right, hard little tugs on the wheel.
Uh oh.
I slowed down, way down, put on my four-ways and crawled along, unable to pull over because I was on the parkway, basically a shoulder-less miniature highway, but desperate to pull over because now I was hearing a metallic scraping noise that I further diagnosed as "not good" and "possibly the muffler?" because I know 2 things about mufflers: they fall off, and when they do, shit gets loud.
I pulled over as soon as it was humanly possible and called Sean.
"My car is fucked. It might be the muffler."
I was so proud to offer this little tidbit.
I got out of the car and went around the back to see if I could see anything metallic and draggy.
New diagnosis: "It's the tire."
It was TOTALLY the tire.
It wasn't flat. It was just a flabby piece of rubber that no longer had a relationship with the rim. None whatsoever. It has completely shredded and separated from the rim, and that's what I'd been driving on. I'd left a trail of rubber pieces behind me. My tired was now a one-thousand piece puzzle.
Aha!
It's the tire! And no, this isn't even the dumb part. Stay with me.

I called up my lawyer and told him I needed a tire change, and even though he's usually a desk guy, he came and got dirt all over his good pants. He changed it in record time too - probably because he had a crowd of onlookers, the kind with gray hairs sprouting out of their ears, who had lots to say about the whole rigmarole. Spare tire on, I was able to finally get to work, testing the big yellow warning sticker that seemed to be under the impression that doing under 80km\hr was a good idea. Bah.

Anyway, turns out the rim was amazingly undamaged, but because the universe doesn't really work that way, I had damaged both the emergency brake line, and the plastic casing on a shock. So into the shop went my car. A couple of days later, I ransomed her back for about a grand. Happy (enough) ending.

Sean drove me to the mechanic where we picked up my car and then each drove home separately, me in a hurry (because without a big yellow sticker, I could drive like I had a pulse, and also because I had to pee. Bad), Sean in a more meandering way since he had a couple of errands to run.

I got home, and as usual, I parked in the garage. The only time I don't park in the garage is when I'm low on gas and I leave my little Ruby in the driveway as a friendly reminder for my live-in gas attendant to go fill'er up. Since she had a full talk, I pulled Ruby into the garage and scurried into the side door, trying to decide if it would be quicker to run down the stairs to the downstairs bathroom, or up the stairs to the upstairs one. But wait! Foiled! Garage door is locked! Garage door is locked? This never happens. This never happens because I leave out the garage door in the morning, which means I unlock it but only close it behind me. I don't even know if we have a key that unlocks the garage. Today was an aberration because I didn't leave by the garage door - Sean and I had to carpool in, and he always parks in the driveway. Shit. I back my car out of the garage, and walk up the porch to the front door, which is also locked, of course. So begins the big search through the big purse. Root root root, no key. Sit down, take things out of purse, no key. Unzip zippers, turn out the lining, no key. When have I last seen this key? No idea. I never unlock anything. Sean has a key, I have a Sean, plus a garage door. What do I need a key for? Now that I think about it, I'm sure I never transferred my house key to this purse. But I don't remember seeing it in the last purse. So the last time I even had a key on me was at least 3 purses ago at the very least.

If you're wondering: yes, this is the dumb thing.

So I can't get into the house. Fine. I can sit and wait in the car.
Except there's still the matter of me having to pee.
Bad.
Can I pee in the garage?
It's private and it's warm, but it's also the garage. There's a drain, I think, but it's basically an extension of the house and it feels a bit weird to just pee on the floor. And then I'd have to hose it down. There's a recycle bin in the garage, maybe I can pee in a jar? But I don't want to go dumpster diving, blue bin or no. And then what do I do with the jar? I guess then it would technically be half-recyclable, and half-compostable. I guess I'd just have to go dump it out in the backyard...
Maybe better to cut out the middle man and pee in the backyard. It's fenced, I'd be more protected and there's no danger of Sean pulling into the driveway and the door lifting up to reveal his squatting, trickling wife. And no need to aim for the tiny opening of a Snapple bottle.
I let myself into the yard by the gate and begin to rethink my logic - yes the yard is fenced, but the houses are built on hills, and multi-storied, so if you're on the top floor, you've actually got a great view down into the yards, fence or no fence.
But there's no time to reconsider!
Pee. Bad!
So I wedge myself between the hot tub and the house, as sheltered as it gets, and let go. Ahhhhhhhh.  People are probably too busy making their dinner for a prolonged look out the window anyway. Right?
Figuring I was half naked anyway, I thought I may as well pass the time until my rescue in the hot tub. Which was a swell idea, daylight nakedness notwithstanding, for the first 20 or 30 minutes. But then between the heat and the sun, I soon because to realize I wasn't so much "relaxing in the hot tub" as "slowly simmering". Thankfully, just as I was leaving grape territory for raisinhood, my saviour with a key ring arrived and we all lived happily ever after.

The end.

The absolute most terrible thing is to be hit with insomnia just as you've gone to bed drunk. You deserve to pass out, but you don't. You just lie there, motionless and spinning, slowly trading the dizziness for a hangover inch by agonizing inch, tormented by the events that blacking out usually permit you to forget.

Adventures in Disturbia

This weekend, the little girl who lives next door was learning a song on her recorder. You know, those plastic flute thingies that cash-poor schools pretend are musical instruments? Her parents quickly grew annoyed with her and told her to go practice outside. The common outside. The outside we share with birds and trees and the childless couple next door who might want to enjoy their margaritas without the jarring accompaniment of the same 3 flubbed notes over and over. Note to parents: if you can't stand the noise your child is making, probably not a good idea to inflict her on the neighbours.

But this is a blip in what is otherwise a pretty decent neighbourhood. We don't even have much in terms of neighbours to contend with, as we have a protected forest in our backyard (which can never be developed, thanks to a certain species of bird who dwells there and sings ALL THE GODDAMN TIME) and in front of our house is an undeveloped piece of land that the builder who sold us our house told us would one day be a park We thought Oooh, park, some nice benches, a swing set, maybe a climbing structure if they were going the ritzy route. But for 2 years it's remained a fairly inoffensive pile of dirt. Until last week, that is,  when they started digging what looks to be so far a big concrete hole.

Dum dum dummmmmmm...

Yeah, we're hoping it's not a pool, but it's looking like a pool. Maybe it won't be a pool. It could be something else. Like anything else. Just not a pool. Please god do not let it be a pool!

Because the childless couple who don't really care for recorder rehearsals probably will also object to you know, 50 or so kids lined up and screaming for their turn on the diving board, the scent of chlorine and pee and popsicles wafting through the air, bunches of bicycles parked haphazardly across the road, swim lessons splashing away at 7am, children screaming from scraped knees and sunburns. And we can't even use the stupid thing. A grown adult simply cannot frequent a public pool without a child and not be labeled a pervert.

We love the neighbourhood for the exact reasons we sometimes roll our eyes at it - the parents accompanying tiny power wheels parades, the shy kids in unfathomable costumes at Halloween, the hectic games of street hockey, the little girl who rings our bell and asks to "check" our dogs. We're glad to live in such a vibrant, young neighbourhood. We just wish the kiddie pool was across from someone else's place. Fingers crossed. Will keep you posted.

Adventures in Suburbia

My life looks a lot different than it did back when I started this blog a million years ago.
A lot different, and a lot better.
Not that this is always apparent to me.

Just a couple of weeks after our return from our honeymoon, we packed up our downtown apartment and moved out to the suburbs where almost immediately I fell victim to a severe crisis of identity.

It did not feel like my home. It did not feel like it ever could be. It was so opposite to all that I held dear - the opportunity to go out, a diversity of experience, the busyness of life, the company of other people. And now here I was, in a beautiful and comfortable home 40 minutes from work where my dogs could run free but my spirit felt stifled.

I panicked.
Hard.

I would wake up in the new house feeling disoriented and alien.
I could hardly remember the time when on a whim just 2 months earlier I'd actually thought that buying a house was the right and grown up thing to do, couldn't remember feeling like this house, perfect as it seemed in all its newness, was a place where I could really be at peace.

But here we are, 2 years later, and we've just spent our weekend doing what homeowners mysteriously call "working on the house", a time suck impossible to avoid. I could not have imagined that instead of hitting up some boutique shops in advance of a pitcher or two on a patio followed by a night out of breaking in my newest pair of shoes, I'd be weeding flower beds in my little gloves.

We live straddling the city and not-the-city, with a wooded backyard, which runs into marsh, which runs into a nice little bay, which runs into a much bigger river. I like riding my bike around the quiet streets of our neighbourhood, where people wave as they do the same. We play basketball in the driveway and volleyball in the back. We splash in the pool to cool off and fire up the built-in gas oven from Italy when we're hungry. We have more bedrooms than people and a wine cellar in case of emergency. This is who we are now.

The panic attacks stopped. The house became my home. I still love nights out (although not the $60 cab ride home), but I also love a quiet weekend ensconced in front of the fire with a cashmere throw and a glass of wine. Even as we signed our names to the mortgage I never really realized that this part of myself existed. The part that prunes trees and collects paint chips and loves loves loves the dishwasher.

Did our house become us, or did we become the house?

Learn Truth

The world is a sad and dangerous place not only because of the guys who bring guns to work, but because of the people who knew there was a threat and didn't do anything about it.

So fucking tired and frustrated.