Get your comraderie out of my face - Pt 1

I just ducked someone at work.

I'm not innocent in this manoeuver. It happens, sometimes, that there is someone you just want to avoid. Or desperately do not want to deal with today, just not today, maybe tomorrow you'll feel up to it. So you close your door, or pretend to be on the phone, or take frequent, long bathroom breaks. These are all acceptable white lies we act out to spare uncomfortable office moments from creeping up and attacking us. It's a sad reality that there's a good chance we spend more time with our coworkers than with our spouses and loved ones. You won't tell her that dress makes her look fat ("It's just not the right cut on you, sweetie") in the same way that you occasionally play the avoidance game to keep from grabbing an industrial sized stapler and braining your colleague.

However, today I was not avoiding the person - who is for all intents and purposes quite pleasant. Whether this is normal for all offices, or just this one, but we seem to have a plethora of fundraisers. The weekly one is a raffle draw for a pot of money, that also raises cash for the end of year christmas lunch (buy a ticket, half the moolah goes to the pot, half goes to christmas food). Every week someone walks off with $60, $70, once it was $90. It's harmless. It's fairly unobtrusive. It gets you food once a year.

I have a problem with this. Actually I have a couple of problems.

First, I walk around as an un-medicated basket case. Most of the time my basket is pretty sturdy, a lifetime of learned coping mechanisms - some good, some bad - are my arsenal against the little bumps that threaten to destabilize my happy equilibrium. Finding myself in an unfamiliar environment still brings on the flop sweat, but I have a better than good chance of making it through alright, without freezing up, crying, vomiting or otherwise being a huge embarrassement. There are, however, a few buttons that still result in nuclear meltdown. I think part of maintaining the healthy is recognizing those buttons and avoiding the crap out of them.

This ticket fundraiser thing is a button. It's not the buying of the tickets or dealing with the woman selling them - who I've said is quite pleasant - it's the winning. The potential for winning. Money isn't just quietly dropped into your office. Oh no. A mass email is sent out. Sometimes it starts a big conversation thread of people laughing at how Mr. So-and-So always wins, or about how the drinks are on you now for the rest of eternity. Then there's the donuts. It's become an unspoken rule that whoever wins must buy baked goods for the rest of the floor. The pot is rarely under $60, so it's not like the baked treats will wipe you out. And it's not that I have any objection to feeding my coworkers warm tasty pastry. I'm a fan of tasty pastry. I'm not a fan of the sudden, abrupt spotlight.

At some point in the day, it will be announced that you won. Then you will be the center of attention for the rest of the day. Unable to even pee in peace without someone stopping to say congrats and laughingly wonder where their bleeding donuts are. Until it is announced, I sit in my office, dripping in flop sweat, watching my email like a hawk with one eyeball twitching, waiting for the moment when the ticket is drawn, the number goes out. The inevitable will happen and it will be my ticket. And I'll not only bring upon me the unwanted attention of a couple of dozen people, I'll have to announce that yes it is in fact my ticket. I'll have to invite this unwated attention into my life, at least for a few hours before I can escape.

Do. Not. Want.

But here's the rub. Try explaining that to your coworkers. See, I've learnt what some of my big red nuclear buttons are, and I avoid them when possible and break down crying when not. But the big red buttons are not always obvious. Hubby dearest used to throw up everytime the phone rang. There is nothing inherently threatening about a phone ringing (provided the voice on the other end isn't whispering about a serial killer being inside the house). Unless you understand the various forms of anxiety, how the brain can latch onto and make associations with the most innocuous of things to cause panic and chaos... it sounds a little crazy. It is a little crazy.

I was lamenting to a friend at work about this whole thing when he saw me duck the ticket lady. He knows about my anxiety, and when it's come up (which isn't often) I try to explain my thinking and what it means, hoping to educate at least one more human being about the intricacies of mental illness and the varying forms it can take. After I'd finished my diatribe about tickets and donuts, he nodded sympathetically. With a hint of wtfcrazy in his eyes. It became clear to me that unless you were in my head, ducking the ticket lady because I was terrified of winning sounded absolutely batshit. And if this person I'd worked with and shared lunch with for the past two years was giving me the wtfcrazy look (while compassionately staying silent and ignoring the fact that I just leaked crazy all over his office), there was no way in hell I was going to be able to explain it to the ticket lady or the office at large.

So when the ticket lady came by today, I was taking a very important phone call with the dial tone.

[Part 2 to follow]

And herein lies the hypocrisy. . .

Not that anyone in power is going to care about the valid, eduated opinions of academia... but I'm happy to see two female lawyers argue so effectively for something I support. Go read their article.

Why anti-john laws don’t work
Toronto Star, Wed Oct 19, 2011

"If Canada adopts the Swedish model, we can expect a disproportionately negative impact on street-based sex workers, the most vulnerable workers in the sex industry. Since the mid-1980s, street-based transactions have accounted for the lion’s share of prostitution-related charges in Canada. As many urban areas face the pressures of gentrification, street-based sex workers and their clients, homeless persons, and street-based drug users and sellers become common targets of police sweeps. “Not in my backyard” campaigns result in street-based sex workers and their clients being much more heavily policed than indoor sex workers. Criminalizing purchasers of sexual services would force street-based workers to continue to resort to furtive and isolated transactions with clients who are seeking to avoid arrest.
And herein lies the hypocrisy of the prohibitionist campaign. Advocates of “ending demand” claim the moral high ground by asserting that their efforts to eliminate commercial sex are motivated by a desire to end sexual exploitation and to protect women. But the evidence suggests that the Swedish approach in fact increases dangers for a significant proportion of these women."

Lisa M. Kelly, a Trudeau Scholar, is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and a Fellow in the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.
Katrina Pacey is litigation director at Pivot Legal Society in Vancouver and counsel in the constitutional challenge to prostitution laws currently underway in British Columbia.

Charts are fun. Charts about sex are funner.

I didn't go looking for something hilariously sexy to blog about, but it fell into my lap and I must share.

OKTrends, I gather, is a site that compiles data from OkCupid users in funny and insightful ways. Unfortunately, it looks like the site has fallen on hard times and hasn't been updated since April, but that doesn't detract from it's inherent value as an amusing time waster.

So I urge you to go read 10 Charts about Sex because you'll have a good giggle. And depending on your age group, be heartened that your sexual peak is yet to come, or saddened that your potential for finding rough sex passed you by a few years ago.

Although I am slightly perplexed as to why gentle sex and boating seem to have a correlation...

Aft Agley

Fucking migraines.

I've had migraines since I was a kid. Luckily their frequency has diminished in the last year, but I don't imagine for a moment that I will ever be "migraine-free". When I was smaller, it would be annoying but just another facet of life. Spend a couple of days in bed sleeping and being stilll. Now, they're downright frigging frustrating.

Whether it's because a couple of days off with a migraine as a kid meant a couple of days off school (I hated school, loathed it with a seething passion). I would happily trade excruciating pain for some time off school. Now, however, time is not a luxury I have. I have work and school, and dogs and cats and a boyfriend, all of whom demand little bits of my time until I get maybe an hour a day for me and just me and nothing else. Time to just be still.

So when a migraine crept into my brain lobes during class on Monday, my first thought was "Fuck. I do not have time for this." Followed by two more tylenol (it was 11am and I was already up to 6). Followed by a half a migraine painkiller (I can't remember what they're called, but they're big and blue and strong). Followed  by 50 some odd hours in darkened rooms stoned off my rocker. Which was a good time back in highschool, when I had the Luxury of Time.

I had some time to think, with my laying in the dark and trying to ignore the pressure building behind my eyeballs. We plan so much, we spread ourselves so thin, and all of it is brought crashing down by things completely outside of our control. Best laid plans, gang aft agley'ing. Yet we still plan and spread ourselves thin, as if we enjoy the Luxury not only of Time, but of Certainty that things will continue on unchanged until we decide to change them.

Which just isn't so.

On Restlessness

I'm restless.

This happens every now and again. I spent my childhood getting to do a fair amount of traveling, nothing terribly exotic but with all my extended family being elsewhere, visiting always involved a plane or a few days in the car. It's left me with a pressing need to be moving.

The last big trip I took to see family was four years ago (five? Oh god, time is slipping away). It was the first trip I'd taken in a long time that was just me, traveling alone. I loved it so much I did it again the next year, a trip just for myself. But I've been stationary every since and it's beginning to chafe.

My friends can be divided into two groups. Those who nod their head in sympathy, while quietly thinking that hours spent in an airport waiting for a flight sounds like the worst level of hell. And those whose eyes light up with an intensity of focus, saying Yes. Yes. Take me with you. It seems you have itchy feet or you don't.

And my feet are itching something fierce.

We Deserved Better

I was trying to explain to my mum what I was doing with my psychology degree. My ever-in-progress-never-going-to-get-done psychology degree. That my interest is in sexology (hur hur).

The first time I said that, she acted like I'd said a bad word. So I had to explain to her that I'm interested in the study of sex and relationships, not in becoming a sex worker. Although, lets be honest here, if I had the body of a dancer instead of an 18th century bar maid I'd happily be making my cash around stripper poles. As is, I'd probably cause eyeballs to bleed.

I'm digressing.

Sexology. So mum and I get to talking about it and she starts asking questions, because most of her initial reaction stems from a perception that she should keep me from swearing and talking about sex, but in reality her curiosity is greater than her sense of propriety. Thank god. Like when she asked me what a bong was. So I start explaining about my fascination, and my belief that the way in which we teach sex education in schools does a woefully bad job of accurately preparing our kids for the reality.

Which opens up a Pandora's Box of issues, like what should be taught in schools versus taught by parents. Schools only teach you (poorly) about the biology (barely), so maybe you should leave all the other stuff, the majority of what sex really is, to your parents to teach you. But parents were brought up in a the same woefully inadequate system, and may not have the information needed. The repercussions, the social stigmas, the emotional vulnerability, and the joy. Kids catch on pretty quick that sex is something that feels good, but heaven forbid any school would admit to that. The spider web of things surrounding sex get glossed over in an effort to scare the bejezuz out of our children so they don't become pregnant at 13 or catch some crotch-rotting disease.

Not that I'm advocating teenage pregnancies and STIs. Don't misunderstand me. I just think we're going about teaching sex the wrong way. So my mum asked me a question to which I had no quick answer: What would you teach then? Why don't you write a book teaching kids about sex?

Crap, I thought. She's right. I'm exceedingly good at bitching and moaning, but putting thought into action has never been my strong suit. How would I write a sex ed book? What kind of information would I want to impart?

I remember my sex education classes. And by sex education I mean: Here's some basic biology. Use condoms. Or better yet don't have sex at all ever. Unless you're married because when you're married you magically learn all the skills to have a successful and responsible sex life. And if you're a girl, your virginity is special and sacred and don't just give it to anyone.

I was 11 years old when I sat in my first sex ed class. By this point, I had already discovered period cramps, that some things felt good when you touched them, and was reading 1000 page historical romance novels. I'd already discovered The Joy of Sex on my parents' bookshelf and sneakily read through it all. I was ahead of the game going in, and immediately started questioning what this older woman with the dour face was teaching us. Not out loud, but silently disagreeing with things she said and wondering why she never talked about any of the good stuff. Masturbation seemed to be something only boys did. And the paper handouts of genitalia seemed to be lacking some key details, like this thing called a clitoris, who's existence I was prepared to defend. STDs (back then they were diseases, I'm getting old) were bad, and here's a bunch of pamphlets on why. This is a penis, these are testicles. This is vagina, this is a womb (I didn't hear the words vulva or labia until many years later).

How was this suppose to prepare me for the world? I knew where babies came from, I knew how you got them. And yes, I could accurately pick out a penis from a lineup. But never was there even vague conversation about the role that sex plays emotionally, that it plays in relationships, that it could be healthy. It was stigmatized into the realm of the forbidden. At least this wasn't abstinence education. At least I had parents who made an effort to teach me according to what I wanted to know, not according to what was appropriate for my age. And yet, I still found myself, more than a decade later, sitting in a 3rd year university level Human Sexuality class, screaming in my head: Why!? Why didn't I have this information 10 years ago when it mattered, when I needed to know all these things? When it could have actually helped me!

Maybe I will write a sex ed book for kids. When it comes to sex, they deserve better than what we've given them.

Helluva Week

It's been a helluva week..

[Alright, you know what, I had another train of thought I wanted to get down to, but I just looked up and saw on the news that "mumpreneur" and "unfollow" have been added to the Collins english dictionary. What the fuck, Collins? What are you doing to the english language? You hurt me, deep in my literary center. We can't be friends anymore. Moving on.]

Helluva week. My natural reaction to having a-helluva-week seems to be the deep seeded need to write. Catharsis is a beautiful thing.

Weeks like this one remind me forcefully what "mental illness" means. I understand in a visceral kind of way why it's the "last minority group against whom it’s socially acceptable to discriminate". I live with panic disorder, most of my close friends have problems ranging from the mild to the severe-needing-lifetime-treatment, and yet I still find myself mentally slipping into the "suck it up, buttercup" camp of thinking. Having dealt remarkably well (if I may say so myself) in going off SNRI medications and dealing with my own anxiety using good old fashion stubbornness, it's easy to delude myself into thinking everything is fine. Then I have a-helluva-week and my fragile little narrative comes crashing down.

But the week is over. Yes, I had a panic attack, full blown and awful. Yes, I took a day off work to mentally regroup. Yes, I drove the people around me to distraction.. But I also successfully took care of my hubby (who had a major dental emergency, and will be wearing his grumpy pants for a bit), successfully wrote my first exam in three years (returning to school is terrifying in an exciting kinda way), and have managed to avoid committing murder or alienating the people in my life.

Helluva week. But I'm still kickin'.