There’s a lawsuit before the courts that bondage enthusiasts in the S&M community are watching with intense interest. The question they’re all wanting answered is just how this decision is liable to affect them legally when it comes to getting someone to consent to whatever it is that gets them off.

I wrote a posting on bondage long, long ago, a “beginner’s guide”, if you will, but I’m really not an expert, and don’t know if I’ll ever do much more than the very vanilla kind of bondage I’ve indulged in up until now. I like being tied up and doing the tying up, but I’ve not wanted to try out more elaborate knotting or anything involving much pain, as I’m a reward-not-punishment type of gal.

As time passed, I learned my beginner’s guide was lacking some relatively important information, even if I think one or two of the comment-leavers were somewhat dickheaded in their approach of pointing that out. (The comments are intact both here and on my original blog, The Cunting Linguist. I’ll put the links at the bottom, and I’ve never deleted the ones criticizing my posts.) The main thing someone pointed out was that you should never, ever abandon someone who is bound. You should always, always be aware of what’s going on with your bound playment, ‘cos things can go bad in a hurry.

That being said, even the amateur in me thinks these guys fucked it up pretty royally by binding this guy in the manner described in this story and then “leaving him alone” for a number of hours. It would seem obvious that the fellow who killed himself in remorse must have also felt they’d fucked it up, or else why did he kill himself and leave a detailed letter about it?

Still, I don’t like this American habit of suing people for things, even wrongful death. I realize how hard it is to lose someone, especially wrongfully. My mother died, I believe, as a result of malpractice, but suing over it goes against everything I believe. I’ve had bad work days, and like the man says, shit happens.

But ruling in favour of this claim would mean a massive loss in freedoms for an already-ostracized and greatly misunderstoon community in the sex world. S&M practitioners constantly face judgment, ridicule, and misunderstanding. The ridiculous Craigslist episode last year (where a dickhead posted a fake slave/submissive personal ad and then “outed” all the respondants on his blog) is just another example of where society seems to think they have a right to judge what consenting adults do behind closed doors.

Here in Canada we’re more liberal sexually, and even here you’ll find some of the judgment, but not as much as there was before the great Showcase (what Canada calls our Showtime network) series “Kink“, which aired for 4 or 5 years and followed the lives of a few different S&M Canadians of different levels as it spent a season in each of the biggest cities in Canada. (13 episodes each year, following several different real-life people as they explored the S&M world, from newbies to hardcore, old-school, long-time S&M types.)

I was certainly one of the people who thought S&M folk were freaks when I was younger. I mean, really freaky, I thought. I’ve come a long way from my narrow-minded, good-girl youth. When I first began watching Kink, I was somewhat repelled by what I saw, but then I became attached to the people in the stories and I realized that, for whatever their reason, they were as compelled to be that way as I was to eat, write, photograph, or whatever else it is that I feel makes me whole.

Had I heard about this story some years ago, I might have erred in believing the plaintiffs should win their case. I’m older, wiser, now and think anything but the kind. Trouble is, in a litigious society where lawsuits are the norm, it’s pretty fucking hard to feel free to do as you please without worrying whose toes you’ll be stepping on and how much they’re gonna want for new shoes.

And the thing is, yeah, it’s a wrongful death. Things got fucked up. Someone died. It happens. Should the rest of society be forced to pay the price with their freedom to act when something really just went horribly wrong? I mean, professional atheletes drop dead of heart attacks during games. Stockbrokers make bad predictions. Priests sin. Shit happens. Humanity is a bitch. As crass at it might sound, it really just does go that way.

Maybe these people could learn a little from the S&M lifestyle: Pain is something one needs to endure. The more you endure, the stronger you get. The more you endure, the more you can take. You don’t cry out for a saviour just because it gets a little tough, you suck it up and say “thank you, mistress”. Life is hard. Bad things happen. Blaming others isn’t going to change the fact that something went wrong, and winning their day in court isn’t gonna make that hurt be any less consuming. Their life will still be lacking a person they love, even if they’ll never understand how he wanted to be treated so “badly”.

‘Course, this all might have gone a little easier if the fuckwits hadn’t gotten all freaked out, tossed the evidence, and buried the guy. It’s like the man Hunter S. Thompson said, “In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.”

This is one case where people need to err on the side of protecting others’ freedoms by telling this family that they really do just need to suck it up, deal with the loss, and move on with life. The price the rest of us will pay will be far too high if this thing goes the way I fear it’s going, and even if I’ll probably never join the S&M community in that way, they too should have every right to practice what they like when they have consent between parties.

What are your thoughts?

My Bondage for Beginners is both here and at this blog’s original site, The Cunting Linguist, but the comments are different on both blogs. Click on where ya wanna go: part one here, part two here, part one on TCL, part two on TCL.

The hot photo was found on Jaeda DeWalt’s photography site, which you can go to here.

This is a way-long posting, but I think it opens a weird can of worms, and I’ve tackled it from a few different points of view. Tangents are fun. So, bear with me.

There’s a disturbing question before the law courts of Britain. A mother is petitioning for the right to surgically remove the womb of her 15-year-old daughter, who is severely disabled with cerebral palsy.

The arguments are along the lines of “well, she’ll never understand the blood and the discomfort” of her period and more or less “we’re doing her a favour”. (I’m paraphrasing, so don’t take me literally.)

This is a particularly freaky law case because I can understand both sides of it. I only agree with one. Guess which?

Now, you wouldn’t think, that as a Canadian, I’d have much scope on the ethical questions entailed when facing the barbaric practice of eugenics, but y’know what? As a Canadian, yeah, I do.

Here in Canada, in the province of Alberta, eugenics were in practice for 43 years. What are eugenics, Steffi? Oh, I’m glad you asked. In big, fat words, “eugenics” means the study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding, according to the smarty-pants over there at Answers.com.

But in little people layspeak, “eugenics” is when you use science to fuck around with DNA and manipulate unborn babies into what you wanna see… or, in Alberta’s case, “eugenics” means you spend more than 4 decades in the 20th century sterilizing people you don’t think are fit to breed.

What the fuck did she say, Gilbert? You heard me. From 1928 to 1972, the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta was a mandate that employed a four-person “Board of Eugenics” (way to cover up your motives, guys) that decided whether or not people were fit to have kids.

In 1972, the Sexual Sterilization Act was repealed, and the Eugenics Board dismantled. During the 43 years of the Eugenics Board, it approved nearly 5,000 individual sterilizations, and 2,832 procedures were actually performed.

Now, don’t worry. Not everyone had to go before the board to get approved to get knocked up or do the knocking, no sir. Only the really obvious ones — you know, like native indians or handicapped people or midgets and stuff. You know. The obvious ones. There was an IQ cut-off point, too. And we all know how valid the IQ test has been deemed to be, all these decades later. They never worked out too well for anyone not, you know, white.

Eugenics sound great when you’re arguing Darwinism and “for the good of all” and “raising the bar” and shit like that, but when little things about personal freedoms and the complicated process of being a parent, and who has the right to become one, come into play, that’s when you can’t leave this shit up to four people on a stupid right-wing board, or some judge in a courtroom to decide.

Rights and freedoms aren’t meant to apply SOME of the time. It’s not a “well, after 6pm you get half-off our personal freedoms -happy hour banquet” type thing. Come on! Freedoms oughta be all you can eat, all day, every day! You’re free 24/7, not because you scored well on your IQ test or yer so white you sunburn in February. C’mon!

There are indeed people completely unfit for breeding, let’s not kid ourselves. Most of ’em a drug addicts, alcoholics, sociopaths, or racists. Most of us, though, have parents who consistently fucked up the mix. Hell, most of our parents would have their asses as grass in this day and age if their parenting methods got leaked to the press. My ever-lovin’ rest-her-soul mother took a log — not a stick, not a branch, not even a 2×4 — a knobby, bark-covered, de-branched (but stumpy) big fucker of a log — to my ass. Half-a-dozen times. Why? I cut across the neighbour’s prize-winning rose garden again. I ain’t ever crossed anyone’s lawn in 2 decades since, not without an invitation, man. I learned my shit. But today my mother would be defending herself against a world that thinks they know better. And that’s the thing — we all think we know better than we usedta did, but the reality is, we’re always gonna know better. Twenty years from now, new light’ll be shed on many of our present-day standards and we’ll think “what the fuck were we thinking?” ‘Cos, you know, what the fuck are we thinking?

But today we’re just talking about a womb, right? Just ONE womb? Preventing this poor, unfortunate, palsied girl from having to sit there bleeding, confused, as her womb cramps up, just further compounding her already-troubled existence?

Why, yes, let’s fix her whole troubled world! Sunshine and rainbows for everyone! And, after lunch, COOKIES! Why, yes, let’s snatch out that womb and make her life so much more the better! Whoo! Face it. The argument of “she won’t understand” what’s happening can apply both ways — maybe she won’t remember what it was like when she didn’t bleed. Maybe “she won’t understand” means asking this question is pointless in the first place. Who are we to decide what life experiences she is better to do without?

Methinks it’s sad she needs to discover the unpleasantries of the monthly female bloodletting, but it’d be far sadder still if this little case wound up being the gateway case to allowing a return of eugenics anywhere in our “civilized” world. After all… if it can happen here, in Canada*, for more than four decades, three of those being AFTER the Nazis, well, it can happen any-bloody-where.

Hell, there are watered-down, spoon-fed varieties of eugenics creeping into our system already. People want having a baby to be like ordering a sweater from Nordstrom. Eyes? Blue. Check. Hair? Sandy– no, strawberry blonde. Check. You may think “Well, it’s my baby. I should be able to choose what it’s like…” but there are a lot of freaky destinations in the road ahead if we go opening that door even a crack.

God knows that me, with my health problems as a kid and my hearing troubles, etc, I never would’ve made the cut. Cute as a button, but definitely packing genetic weaknesses to the nth. I could’ve completely fucked that four-person board up. “Well, hell, she’s as smart as can be! But… there are the other issues. Oh, some days this job is just not as fun as I thought it would be. To mate or not to mate, that is her question.”

You can argue the benefit of eugenics any way you like, and I’ll still say Darwin has it right — let nature sort out shit. We’re bears of far too little brains when it comes to deciding such behemoth issues. And still, there’s that silly Charter of Rights and Freedoms mucking up the mix, too.

Think about it, man. One small womb might be one large backstep for mankind, in more ways than one.

*And, oh, we’re not alone. Sweden, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and a schwack of other nations have had some dalliances with eugenics of one kind or another. Canada had one of the longest state-sponsored programs, though, a real black mark on us.

The original story is here. A medical ethicist shares his two cents here.

I know scientific studies are funded so we can have “evidence” of things, but, really, how obvious does something have to be for that study’s evidence to be a waste of everyone’s time and money?

Case in point: A study in Great Britain has now deduced that unhappy marriages (or relationships) are bad for your heart.

Oh, okay. Good to know. So, when the sound of my lover’s voice makes my cringe, when I dislike being in their presence, when the sex isn’t hitting any of the right spots, when I’m looking for stupid chores to do to keep me out of the house for longer, these are all indications that maybe, just maybe, I’m under so much stress from the unhappiness that my heart might finally decide to disagree with my choices in an overwhelming kind of way? This is a bad thing?

Doh! Who knew!

Of COURSE doing things you dislike, being with people you dislike, living a life that feels like a lie are all things that’ll send your heart around the arrhythmia bend. Like who needs a fucking memo?

All the unhappy people living lives that make them unhappy, I guess. Here’s your wakeup call: Wake the fuck up. DING-ding-DING. Life is short! Live it the right way as soon as you’re fuckin’ able, ‘cos it’s all too damned short! Anything you’re doing that makes you unhappy is something that maybe needs undoing, all right? Common sense, isn’t it.

Look at me — six months in a job I hated and I’ve managed to gain back 15 lbs, let my house go in a complete disarray, fell out of touch with everyone, developed an overwhelmingly negative mindset, and lost focus on everything that used to be important to me. SIX MONTHS! That’s all it took! Granted, there were a couple years of instability before that, but the six months of doing something I just couldn’t handle doing really took their toll on me, and FAST.

It’s one thing to be unhappy while you’re chasing your dreams, but it’s another thing to have given up on everything and force yourself to live a life because you “chose” your path when you said yeah at the altar. Hello? What’s the statute of limitations on stupid decisions? Oh, right! There is none!

If you’re staying in a relationship or a marriage because the alternative strikes you as being “too hard”, well, maybe you should consider the ramifications of living with a daily sense of dread that you’re trapped and life holds no options for you. Yeah, change is hard. For a little bit. Then it improves. But staying in a shitty situation because you feel obligated? Well, that continues to suck ass for every fucking day you allow it to continue longer than needs be.

Me, I’ve used my failed job as an example of how far from a number of things I once loved that I’ve now strayed, and I’m using it as a reason to recalibrate everything in my life… but it’s only when we realize how far we’ve fallen that we can see the distance we need to travel. I’m not the first person to observe that, and I won’t be the last. Hell, Sufi mystics have been saying same for centuries now.

I just don’t get how some hundreds of thousands of dollars (or pounds) need to have been tossed frivolously into the “scientific study” pit to realize that unhappiness is bad for our health. There’s something for the “no shit, Sherlock” files, eh? Unhappiness hurts. Goddamned right it does.

Living in bad times because we’re too afraid to change our course is as sad a decision as it sounds. It’s pathetic, but god knows many of us are guilty. I was. You’re not doing anyone in your life any favours by sticking around for them when you’re no longer who you were back when you made those promises. I mean, if you’re bitter inside and resentful of the life you lead, how can you possibly delude yourself into thinking no one else is picking up on it — or, worse, that no one else is affected by it? What you claim you’re doing for everyone else’s benefit is likely hurting them as much as it’s hurting you, but y’all are too close to the picture to see any of the detail clearly, ironically.

Relationships are a crap shoot. We hope like hell that the person we’ve fallen for will be able to change and grow in ways that we can mirror. But when they don’t, and we can’t, then how is it doing anyone any good to stick it out?

I’m the product of a marriage that stayed together long after its expiration date. I’ve learned from the best (thanks, Mom! thanks, Dad!) how to avoid the truth, how to lie about feelings, how to suppress what’s inside in order to just get through a day. I learned from them that there were obligations and there were wants, and wants always took a backseat to obligation. Those are the legacies passed on to me by my parents, and at 34, I’ve spent my life trying to unlearn all those debilitating things they taught me.

Think of the consequences of your lack of ability to act for better change. Think of what you’d say if your best friend, or better yet, your child, one day came up and laid out a tale for you of similar particulars as the ones holding you back. Would you tell them they deserve better? Would you explain you know they can handle anything that comes their way? Now why don’t you deserve the same?

If you want to read the rocket-science brilliance behind this scientific study, then have at ‘er. Click here. Meanwhile, do what you wanna do today and enjoy yourself.

(Oh, and before it sounds like I’m advising everyone to drop everything that makes ’em unhappy and run for the hills, then screw on some common sense, bub. Obviously cutting-and-running is a last choice. Face your unhappiness, do what can be done to improve it, and if improvements don’t do it, then maybe it’s time to just cut your losses and leave town. There are steps you take. There are books that can guide ya. Look for ’em. Consider your options. But know this: You are far from trapped. You only choose to be trapped. Time to make new choices.)

These are the kinds of weekends one has to grow accustomed to when one lives in a rainforest. Ah, Vancouver. The world outside my windows is being soaked to the core by an omnipresent drizzle. There’s no definition in the skies overhead — it’s just a world of soft grey from the clouds on down.

It’s the first weekend where I’ve really noticed the odd red maple leaf soaked to the sidewalk. The autumn is upon us.

I’m keeping to myself after getting to sleep around 4am last night. Caught a gig, was good, got in late and did some me-time. Woke up at 10, looked around, figured I was still tired and nothing was pressing, so I went back to sleep and slept till 1 for the first time in a year or so. Sweet. 🙂

Going out last night kind of came at an awkward time. When my friend arrived, I’d just had one of those moments where I realized how hard I’ve been running, and for so long, and now here I am, literally back where I started… same job, same home, same income, same everything… and I’ve gone through so much emotionally, physically, and financially in the last three years, and it’s all because I lacked a little patience and had too little faith in “letting go, letting god”.

I am not a religious person. I guarantee you that I will never be a religious person. (Don’t get me started. I’m not about to follow some guy’s interpretation of what god is, nor follow some baffling systematic method of worship. I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I passed on the t-shirt, all right? So, don’t try to save me or convert me. You’re wasting your time.)

I am, however, spiritual. At one point, I was enormously spiritual. I always found the time to find myself in a forest, at a beach, hell, by a roadside. I would just stop and take in the whole world, whether it meant pulling off the side of the highway back from Whistler, in the mountains and by the water, to sit on the hood of my car in the middle of nowhere, my stereo blasting Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Little Wing on repeat in a world just silent as death on a mid-August night, or sitting above a valley in the Yukon as I watched the light changing on the land as the midnight sun swept deep and low over the land.

God’s never been about four walls and a church defined by man, not for me. Not since I was a kid in high school history thinking how wrong it was that the Catholic church once sold salvation, and the church of England was formed so that King Henry could have his divorce. Faith shouldn’t need parameters, you know? It is what it is. I don’t need to understand this ‘god’ or really have a clear idea of what exactly it is in order for me to feel just awe-inspired when I look at the world around me and be the kind of person who celebrates that daily.

But that’s the problem. Somewhere along the way, I’ve lost that. I’m basically coming out the other side from a long, dark tunnel I’ve been trapped in for a number of years. For the first time in a long, long time, I’m losing my sense of dread that the other shoe’s going to drop. When my mother died — as a result of so many mistakes by professionals and in the midst of a few years of hell for her personally — I lost my faith in everything and everyone, and sure as hell lost my faith in me. (If you’ve never read it, the best thing I’ve ever written was this posting about my mother’s death.)

When I started blogging, I did so because I had blown out my knee for the first of three times between ’03 and ’04, and living on the fourth floor of a walkup, I was more or less sent into recluse mode. Something snapped and I was able to write. It wasn’t until the next year that I really began digging deeper and writing hard-to-write stuff, exploring parts of me I didn’t often let out into the light.

Lately, I’ve been avoiding blogging for many of those same reasons, ironically. I’m coming to terms of late with the fact that much of the grief and trouble I’ve endured for the last three years are as a result of my probably making the wrong choices. Instead of realizing I could handle six or eight unstable weeks a year at work, and not trusting my own strength and the way of the world, I chose instead to try and find my way into the corporate culture. Years ago I told my friends I’d never be the career-type person. Work was work, a job and a necessity because the world had the nerve to demand we pay for shit, not something I’d do to find the value in who I am. I always said I wanted the trappings of success, but not the trap. The value in who I am comes from the home I’ve created, the writing I do, the photography I do, and the experiences I have. Work’s just a necessary evil… and I forgot that. I lost so much sense of self that I felt I needed to find it elsewhere, and that didn’t exactly work out for me either.

Now, funny enough, I’ve found out that it’s not uncommon for people with head injuries, who are rehabbing and getting well, to start questioning everything. It was six months after my serious head injury (almost died in a bike accident, yada, yada) that I ran into a lay-off at work. Suddenly I thought I was in the wrong career, etc. Instead, I could’ve opened up an EI claim, taken some time to myself, and gone back when things got busy again. (Read about that accident here, another one of my better works, imho.)

What happened to me, though, was that I spent the next 2 years chasing down jobs that would never be any more fulfilling to me than what I’d already been doing, and would all require more from me, meaning forfeiting more of who I really was for a job I deep-down knew would never mean anything more than a paycheque every second Friday. I can’t believe how hard I’ve been running in my hamster wheel, only to find myself back exactly where I started from.

In short, I feel like an ass.

But it’s been interesting, because, in all that time, nothing I did ever made me any happier. Everything I did, I did so without really listening to my inner voice. I was lucky and fortunate that I was able to keep it all together, never miss a rent payment, and not go deeper into debt, but nothing ever made me happier… and that’s been weighing heavily on me this week. Nothing made me happier.

I guess many of us have times when we just realize we’re pretty distant from where we wanted to be when we thought about our lives as youths. My recent birthday has made me realize, yeah, I’m getting older, but I’m still pretty damned young, and I’ve wasted enough of my time running in a hamster wheel that was getting me nowhere. And however much of my life has passed, I’m hoping it’s still a fraction of my future, and it’s on me to make sure it’s the best future it can be.

I’m also realizing that the world’s full of enough cynicism, and I’m tired of being a part of that. I’m the original Libra — I’m constantly in and out of balance, and I offer both cynicism and optimism, but I’ve been offering too much of the former of late. I want to rediscover my awe for the world. I want to rediscover that pause button. My priorities are completely changing, and all because I’m tired of not being the person I used to be. Now I can both be that person and be the new, more comfortable, more sure of self version. I want that youthful awe and this wise, appreciative “been there” mentality I know will help me value that worldview when I pull it back into focus.

This is the project I’ve set before me this winter: Rediscover the person I was before life came along and threw me wildly off-track. I’m done with the detour, man. I’m coming back to myself. What a fun journey this is gonna be. Right?

Slog, slog, slog. Squish, squish, squish. There goes the work week.

I’ve got a day left and it’ll be a chore, but I know I’ll be done at 5. I know I’ll have the energy to conjure a quick snack (soup’n’sammich, both homemade and upscale, but a real treat when I’m in a rush!), the smarts to have a primer drink, and the enthusiasm to go back downtown via transit, drink the night away, and enjoy a live show, and get my ass home around 3ish, if it all works out right.

Why? Because it’s that kind of a job. Gr-r-r-r-reat! So, even though the day itself will be frustrating and tense, I get to leave when I wanna leave. This is good. Beats the shit out of working until 7:30 on a Friday night and being too drained to take my ass off the couch… much the story of the last few months.

This past week, I’ve still been sick. Today I woke up feeling a million bucks, and had an all right day even though it’s been hard, but I’m still less sick than I was. This is good. Change is good.

My scooter, however, is sick. Poor scootie. It’s putt-putting up hills and making me feel like a victim waiting to happen as it chokes up at certain angles and loses 35% of its power with traffic hot on my ass like I’m showering in prison. Methinks it’s the carburator needing to be cleaned. If you’re a motorbike geek and know that answer, lemme in on it. It’s taking 10 minutes to warm up. This is new. This is bad. I feel all pathetic. The one thing that always rocked about my scooter is that it stormed the hills. Never lost power.VrrrOOOOm. But now, pUtt-pUtt. Ugh. So uncool. And unsafe. And ungood. So un.

So, is it the carburator? Gotta be, right?* Could probably change out the spark plug, too, eh? All of $2 to eliminate that possibility. Better than the $100 cleaning dealie for the carb. Cursed putt-putt.

Anyhow. Hey, look: It’s a weekend! Wow! I’ve always wanted one just like it! Gosh, thanks! And you have one too? Swell! Let’s both enjoy them, then!

(*The Fine Print: The Tech Shit. It’s a Yamaha Vino, 2003, classic edition, 2-strokes, 49cc, never been modified save for removal of the restriction washer in the muffler. Top speed was 65 km for the longest time, but I’m at 23,000km and around 17,000km it started going a little slower. in the last 1,500km, it’s really began to bog down on hills and such. Sounds like it’s groaning a bit. Top speed now is about 55km, and I can bog down for up to about 40 blocks from home after warming up 3 minutes before leaving, and bog down so I’m choking at 30km/hr up hills I ascended at 50 last month. After about 50 blocks, it gets more comfortable and performs a bit better, but it’s still compromised. There, is that more informative? Is it the carburator? Never cleaned it since I owned it, and I’ve had it since Sept. ’04, so 21,000km of the 23,500 it has now.)

After a week of being pretty badly hit by the cold making its way around Vancouver, I kept much more to myself on my birthday weekend than I’d planned to. The weather has been lousy, and I realized I wasn’t as flush with cash as I was hoping, so I figured I’d keep it simple.

Case in point, among the other exciting happenings of my life, in a few minutes I plan to empty out my refrigerator. I’ve been buying way too much way too infrequently of late, and it’s an ass-backward way to live a culinary life. Food has been on my mind this weekend because, well, I’ve been avoiding shopping. As a result, I’ve started thinking of how this can be a good thing.

So, deep in thought all weekend, I’ve decided to simplify my life in a number of ways, in keeping with returning to the old job and all. The biggest of simplifications will be in regards to food. I’m going to return to the Slow Food movement and start taking the time to pop in to the local markets a couple times a week and be inspired to create fresh foods, rather than trying to take the easiest way out. I want to really cook again. It’s such a great way to add meaning and dimension to your life. There’s food, then there’s soul food, then there’s food for the soul. Slow Food refers to the latter two.

The Slow lifestyle’s something that really appeals to me. (Read “In Praise of Slow” by Carl Honore.) I wanna be totally present in the here and now. You hear people talking about living their “best” lives, and it all sounds like so much new age bullshit sometimes. But they’re onto something.

Me, I’ve taken the most important step. I’ve quit the big fancy job with the nifty title and no down time in order to take the pressure-free, life-balanced job. Now I’ve spent my slacker weekend setting the groundwork for something I hope to bring me even greater work-life balance, my self-employment scheme. I’ve come up with a company name and spent my weekend working on personal branding and designed all the graphics that go with such things — business card, letterhead, invoices. It and looks pretty polished. Now I need to spend a week or two getting the rest of my life feeling a little bit more polished to go with. My home needs to be more Zen so I can make better use of my time and work smarter, not harder, as I try to get my life back under my own two thumbs.

The next several months will still be transitional. There are a few ways I see my life going, and I’m hopefully setting the stage for good things, but the only way we’ll know is when it all comes down the pipes. Life’s more fun when it’s unexpected, so I’m just trying to keep an open mind, ‘cos the whole controlling-everything thing wasn’t really working out for me, so…

Anyhow. Here’s how I’ve spent my birthday weekend, I guess… pondering what is and what might come to be, and trying to set a little something in motion towards that end.

Y’know, I’d have thought I’d have had it much more together than this back when I thought of what “34” would one day mean, possibly in my late teens. And, it’s weird, but as much as it’d be nice to have a nice, firm, predictable and together life… it’s kind of cool to know I’m just as open to adventures as I was a decade and a half ago, if not a little more so. Getting older’s mostly all about me not taking myself as seriously as I once did. I still have work to do on that, but it’s all good. What I do know is, being single, kidless, and mortgage-free, I sure as hell have nothing to lose. I’m just trying to think of what kinda license that gives me and what I oughta do with it. What fun.

So, I don’t want to get into anything deep, but here are the snippets flashing through my mind at this late hour.

(I have written… I will not edit. I am sick in the head. Go easy on me. I should edit. Considering I’d overlooked “this lat hour” until this late minute, I should edit. But fuck editing. I’m an adult and I can do what I want. Tomorrow I shall aspire to better grammatical correctedness, perhaps even stellar spelling. Tonight I aspire to sleep, so fuck all else. There: I came I saw, I wrote that ass.)

I had a moment watching a show tonight. I began to wonder just who of my dalliances would be the ones I remember in flashes and sensations when I’m at the end of my days? Who’s gonna rate? When I’m that much more wiser, I’ve travelled more, done more, had more, who is it that’s gonna stack up against The Rest? What am I most gonna remember about them? What gave ’em that memorable edge?

You ever wonder who’s really gonna be memorable at the end of 75 years? 85 years?

A kid died after crowd-surfing at the Smashing Pumpkins gig here in town last night. I’m gonna be 34 on Saturday, and one of the things I’m promising myself I’m gonna do this year is to get back into the live music scene.

Nothing fills the void like a wickedly energetic gig in a small venue.

But here I am, now, right? I’m 34. There was a time when I was front-and-centre at the gigs. I got the close up shots and could see beads of sweat melting into their t-shirts, y’know? Sigh. I don’t know if I have it in me to get into the mix with “kids today” and their “unruly state” and all. Throw this dude’s mysterious “no obvious wounds” death into the mix (drugs?) and I have the “hmm, maybe I’ll find a stool and power up the Bic” bullshit mentality creeping into my head.

I guess I’m starting to want to embrace my inner rebel this year. Hell, I said screw it to the man, quit my schmoozing, networking job for something lowkey and behind the scenes, and who knows what’s to come. First, I’ll get over this cold. 😛

In Argentina, a minor has won the right to have a sex change. It’s an interesting story, and one that I’ll probably look for more information on in the coming days. We like to think that kids under 18 are so ill-informed, but the thing is, we keeping lowering the bar, right? We’re looking at norms and averages, and perhaps a good many kids don’t have the savvy to make informed life decisions, but some do.

You can look at this two ways. One, life’s long. What’s the hurry? Let the kid wait till 18 or 21. They have the rest of their life to live in that body. Don’t rush the knife; it comes soon enough, yeah? Or, two, life is short. Why waste a single day? What if he/she’s hit by a car in a year, or is stricken with some rare cancer in the mid-20s? What then of the wasted days spent counting and waiting on something they knew was the only way they’d ever feel whole after a lifetime of feeling dysfunctional?

Yeah, they’re both great arguments. Who’s to say who’s right? I know what the safe, conservative answer is, but if I was safe and conservative, I’d have ridden out the last job for the usual year, but it occurred to me that I’d already lost a whole summer to overtime and fatigue, and I couldn’t waste another day. But this is a teenager, and how can a teenager truly know the range of emotion and need they might have? They think they’re going through horrors, but wait till their 40 and then let’s rate ’em outta 10, okay?

So, you see, complicated issue and I haven’t the foggiest whether I think it’s the right or the wrong action to take. I bet if I had a beer with the kid, I’d know within the hour what I felt, but going off tempered press, well, who knows anything, eh?

Hmm. So, I have a head cold and I’m going to bed now. Curse you, sinuses. Curse you, I say. But, hey, Happy Wednesday, y’all. Half way there, baby. (Three day weekend for little old me.)

Today I go back to my old job.

I worked there for about 6 and a bit years, and I’ve “returned” now a couple of times. This morning I have that same dread I’ve had at other times, but it’s tempered with more self-knowledge and understanding of the Steff Cosmoverse and how to navigate it, y’know?

The dread is this: “Oh, you can’t cut it in the real world. You need to go back to the safety of your little captioning cave. You couldn’t climb the corporate ladder, so here you are: Back.”

I think it’s unavoidable for someone to have that sense of “wow, I must suck because I’m back again” when returning to a situation like this, so I’m not giving myself a hard time for going there. I wish I wouldn’t, but I’m not going to pile onto the already-existing crap sandwich with more guilt and derision.

Hell, that’s the society we live in. I was raised on Bret Easton Ellis and the yuppyification of North America. We’re the original “me” generation. We came of age with cell phones, personal stereos (the three stages: Walkman, Discman, iPOD). We’re all about image, baby.

So, I go traipsing back to the old cubicleland and it’s natural Eau de Failure should be lingering about me this morning.

But then there’s the “fuck you, I’m 34 and I know better than that” voice that crops up and says “the rat race is for pussies who can’t make it out there without excessive approval”. It’s the voice of the chick who grew up listening to the Ramones and Dennis Leary, who thinks she’s seen both the workaholic life and the successful slacker life, and has the scars to show from each.

I mean, I’m 34 in five days. I saw my mother die at 57. This notion that every person gets a golden age, every person’s gonna retire by 60 and live a life of their choosing is a pretty fucking foolish notion. If I go early, I’ll be going after living a life on my terms. I saw myself looking at my most recent boss and thinking, “Wow. That’s what happens when you let life pass you by.” She works all the time. I remember her sitting in my apartment, looking at my intricately decorated pad and saying, “You have too much time on your hands” and realizing she, in a phrase, summed up the difference between she and I.

See, I always thought I had too little time on my hands. If I was unemployed for the REST of my life, I’d be able to fill every single day. I do not need to be validated by work. In fact, I often feel invalidated by work.

So, going back, tail between the legs, to this comfortable old job of mine is me literally putting my money where my mouth is and deciding that, right now, living life is more important to me than selling out. If I’m going to need to work for a living, then, well, this captioning job of mine is the literary intellectual’s equivalent of Kevin Spacey taking on a burger shack job in American Beauty when he decides he’s missed out on too much of life, and being 20 was the best he’d ever been.

Yeah, I’m cutting and running to the security of Easy Street. The question, though, is why aren’t more people?

PS: I’m fighting illness. I’m hoping like hell it’s just the bank of clouds and moisture over the Pacific that’s fucking with my head. Heroes is on tonight and I wanna watch! So, to steal strength and shore up motivation, I’m drinking copious coffee. The good thing about this job is, I go in whenever the fuck I want to. Means I can write when the whim hits. It’s 9:25. At 10 I’ll shower and go. Nice. 🙂 A week ago I’d already be slammed with customer demands and drama. Ha. Bliss.

I feel like that old woman in The Princess Bride who shouts down the princess bride in the centre of the square. Boo! BOOOOO! Hiss! That’s the story of me and my computer.

I’ve barely had the motherfucker on. I log on to Facebook or any other place that uses lots of cookies and shit, and presto — virus appears in the form of a trojan. I’m smart, I use Firefox, yet it still will cause IE to open and shower me with shitty websites.

And I’m no dumb girlie, either. I know my way around Hijack This, have downloaded all the so-called fixes, checked all the goddamned geek sites via Googling the names, etc. Yet still. I clean some 20 or 30 infections off this bitch each day and still they return.

I know I’m irresistable, but this is highly unnecessary.

I’m on the verge of Calling Professionals. Soon I’ll arrange for them to come by and save my persecuted ass.

In the meantime, you need to wait until I’ve sunny enough a disposition to battle friend and foe to make my way through this muddled web of mine and post a thingie or two on Blogger.

Fortunately for you, I’ve just that sort of disposition on this fine Indian summer Friday eve. I’m keeping to myself with a $9 fancy-ass ribeye steak I’m about to grill and indulge in a bottle of a 2003 Chilean shiraz. The phone goes to ignore. Then I have to decide whether I feel like watching the torrid tale of Rome or if I’m feeling smug and anti-establishmentish and want to watch Thank You For Smoking.

Hmm, indeed.

So, the weekend, a four-day week, and I change jobs. Giggle.

You have no idea how good it fucking feels to realize that I’m at the mercy of MY decision right now. I have taken control of my life. One little decision and my world has 180’d. Cool.

And I was all dodgy about quitting, thinking it’d mean I was losing a week of pay this month. Ooh, could I handle it? Penny-pinch? Know what? Everywhere I turn, there’s money. I’m not losing a week of pay; I’m gaining one! My paycheques are staggered. 🙂 Then I got my medical money back, and something else came, etc, etc.

Things are headed in precisely the right direction, and now, to top all that off, it’s Friday!

Tomorrow I’m cleaning house and shopping for obscure foodie treats at all the proper culinary shops here in town. Hell, I might even make some bread. There’s some socializing, etc. I may play it solo this weekend. Madness ensues for another four days, but I’m having a party next weekend so things’ll get fun in a hurry.

Life, in short, is good. I’m really, really looking forward to all the things coming down my path, whether it’s tomorrow, Tuesday, or two months from now, things look like they’re gonna get fun ‘cos I know *I* am definitely getting fun to be around. It’s a beautiful thing.

Have a bitchin’ weekend, minions. Lord knows that’s my plan. And fuck you, Virtumonde, Fotomodo, and all your cunty little trojan friends! 🙂

I quit my job. I’ve quit it for several reasons, but this is the one that really rocked my boat and inspired me to leave.

Towards the middle of July, my boss called me upstairs for a quiet chat. It turns out she had discovered my secret double-agent identity, that of a sometimes-sex blogger. She didn’t know what to make of it, she said. If clients found out, there could be problems. If so, she told me she didn’t know what her reaction would then be, nor what her cause of action might be.

I was concerned. Very. I didn’t know what I would do. I needed a job. I asked her if I had reason to be concerned. She said yes, in a roundabout way. She asked that I never write about my job, nor mention where I worked. I agreed that I could at least abide by that.

After hours, though, I approached friends and told them how concerned I was. I began asking myself how important my blog was to me, and whether I really felt like working where I thought I might have to put a cork in things and keep my mouth shut. I wondered whether I should get myself as far from my blogging life as I could, especially if it was going to be some stigma following me around for the rest of my life. I started wondering a lot, about a lot of things.

Still, I needed a job. If biting my tongue put food on my table, then that was the first concern. Complicating matters, though, is that I love most of the job. The bustle, the people, the chaos… it all works well with my personality. The more I began to think about it, though, the more I realized how much work was having an impact on my will to write. Worse – my writing, I thought, had seriously gone down hill. It wasn’t creative. It wasn’t inspired. Hell, I wasn’t creative. I wasn’t inspired.

I spent the next several weeks slipping into a funk. I had taken the wrong job, I began to think. (I had two to choose from; an opening came up in my old job the very day I was offered the one I’ve been working.) I was realizing now that I had taken a job that seemed right for me, but instead in was turning my life into everything I didn’t want.

And now I had to censor myself. It didn’t matter that, in my eyes, this blog’s more about me and my wrapping of my own head around the world and my ongoing journey of becoming myself, and not so much about the sex, but hey. Semantics, I guess.

My mind wrought with all these thoughts, I was just barely keeping my head in the game at work. I certainly noticed that my job performance was slipping something fierce. I chalked it up to fatigue.

The thought began to occur to me, however, that maybe all this fogginess I was enduring was because of this prolonged writer’s block I now acknowledged I’d been suffering. Maybe, just maybe, my focus would improve if I could get the writing thing happening. With that thought my priorities began to shift.

It was perfect timing then that my holiday was to begin on Aug. 25th. With my holiday in mind, my boss called me in for a “plan of attack for fall” meeting. At the end of the meeting she again brought up the blog and apologized for leaving me hanging, but reiterated that she still didn’t know what she would do if it got found out by clients and brought up as an issue. Dirty sex blogger…

Afterwards, I walked out of the meeting and into the street, heading off to find some lunch. Sure enough, there I saw a film crew shooting in a nearby store. “Sigh,” I thought. “I sure miss the film industry. Why’d I leave, again?” But I morosely put those thoughts out of my head and instead began planning for how to be organized at the office in the fall.

I got home that day, checked my email, and saw a letter from one of the best post production facilities in Vancouver’s awesome film industry, asking me if I was interested in a position they had available. They had my resume from when I was looking for work in ’06 and held on to it, it would seem.

Was I interested? It took 30 seconds for the answer to hit. Fuck, yeah. After a few emails back and forth, a job interview was lined up.

Then it just so happened that my first day of vacation, Saturday, coincided with when I was having my old bosses over for breakfast. I told them all the drama about work and this job interview and how I thought the time might be ripe for me to make a change. They were more than sympathetic. They gave me encouragement. They agreed that it sounded like my situation was precarious.

With their kind words ringing, I headed in for my job interview. Well, I didn’t get that job (and I’m now happy about it for complicated reasons) and went in to visit the old bosses again Wednesday and thanked them for the support while telling them it was a bust. That’s when they offered me my old job back.

I went camping, pondered it, decided to go for it, came back, and I quit. I’m thrilled with my choice and I’m looking forwards to reprioritizing my life and getting back to my creative roots.

Now, I want to address something before anyone jumps on my soon-to-be ex-employer’s back. A) I’m fucking lucky she’s the honest kind of person she is with the integrity she has. She didn’t need to tell me she knew. She could’ve fired me then and there. Instead, she let me know where her thoughts were, and has been great about my resignation. B) I could have had a fight worth fighting if I wanted to do the whole “freedom of speech” argument, but I decided I couldn’t do that to them.

Why? Because I’m not a hypocrite. I believe I have the personal freedoms to live my life as I see fit, and in the free world I want to live in, employers should have the right to hire the kinds of people that mirror their values and lifestyle (within reason), provided it doesn’t infringe on others.

Freedom is a difficult thing to balance and you sure as shit can’t ask for yours at the cost of denying others’ theirs. I’m mindful of that in my life.

My old employers not only know about my blogs, but approve of them and have read them. I have nothing to hide from them after working closely with them for seven years. We’ve been through some bullshit together and we’ve always emerged well and on the same page. There was some instability in the industry that coincided with when I barely survived a serious scooter accident that should have killed me, and I was sent into a couple years of trying to find out where my passions lie in the world.

After some trials, travels, and tribulations, I’ve decided that (for me) work is work, and the easier it is, the better it pays, the less I need to do of it, the better the rest of my life is. I’m not looking to prove myself in the corporate world. All I wanna do is write, I guess. You can keep your rat traps and rat races. I want all the trappings of success, just not the trap. This job I’m returning to gives me the work-life balance I need and the flexibility to pursue other avenues while working hours that work for me. It caters to writing’s spontaneity and unpredictability. Everything about that job caters to writing.

And now I can do just that. Oh, and get this: My first day back, September 24th, is seven years to the day that I first started there.

Anyone who tells ya you can’t go home again doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.