Pleasing People

There's a reel that comes up in my Facebook feed of a guy who walks while dispensing life advice. He describes himself as a recovered alcoholic (AA people say "recovering" so he's making a statement with "recovered") and former people pleaser. His advice mostly boils down to taking responsibility for where we're at, no more whining, complaining, and blaming of others, and start putting one foot in front of the other to be who you want to be in this big ol' world.

A man in one of my classes went off on me in his van on a ride home. I was so shocked by it my body went into the freeze response. It was an awful experience. I felt like a little kid trapped in a van and being blamed for something I didn't understand by an incoherent and angry adult.

When I told a friend about it, she was quick to assure me I'd done nothing wrong. Because, of course, I was assuming I must have done something to cause this man, with whom I don't really have any kind of relationship, to go off on me as he did.

It took her saying it a few times and finally I got it. Of course I didn't do anything to deserve being treated like that.

"Well you must have done something." It comes from childhood, doesn't it. All of it.

Dr. Gabor Mate says to never ignore gut instincts. They're how we survive. Where I let myself down was ignoring my gut instinct about this man, which was that he was not who he was pretending to be, that the hand flapping insecurity was a veneer, and accepting a ride home with him. A few times.

In my defence, OC Transpo is either a no show or already packed with students at that time of day.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago I showed up for a different class, one I knew he wasn't interested in, but there he was. And he made a beeline for me, wanting to continue where we'd left off - me exiting a practically still moving van. So I ran into the hall and the instructor followed where she witnessed my panic at having run into him again. I told her I had to leave, and why, later informing the owner of the school that I'd have to drop out.

There was no way I could continue to be in an interactive class with this man.

I don't care about the money, which is good because I'm not being offered a refund, I'm being offered a credit for another class. Alas, I no longer want anything to do with the school because, as much as I enjoyed the classes I took, I'm done. And yet, until today, I felt like I should use the credit to take another class because that's what both the instructor and the owner want me to do.

They like me. I'm fun. I add a lot to the classes. And I recognize there's not a lot they can do about the situation and I'm not asking them to do anything anyway. I doubt this man would admit to his behaviour if they asked him about it and I don't want them to ask him. It's not like they could mediate a solution. I don't want anything to do with him.

Luckily, thanks to my people pleasing mentor popping up in my Facebook feed today, I realized I'd be using my credit to please them, not me, and so I'm not going to do it.

And it's all good because I've learned more expensive lessons than this to trust my gut too.😇

Talkin' 'Bout a Revo-o-loo-shuh-un

I need to share something a little birdie said to me while I was recovering from yet another day online: Social media is where people go to panic.

It helped me get a grip so I hope it helps you.

Now I look at our situation this way: We get to be the good guys fighting the bad.

How awesome is that, eh?

Someone on BlueSky suggested Howard Lutnick needs his ass kicked by a veteran laid off from his job and now missing his monthly social security payment.

It's what they all need. An ass kicking. Mano a mano. Bigger guys just taking them down one by one 'til they get the message: Fuck off outta here, Nazi assholes.

It's coming. They can't sustain this. And while the Democratic Party in the US may seem to be at war with itself, I don't think so. I think, rather, there's a changing of the guard happening.

Now is time for Bernie's revolution led by AOC. That's my take anyway. She has Zelensky level courage.

She's the little girl who grew up to save America.

So I've been baking, creating deliciousness from flour, butter, eggs, sugar. But also working on my cooking skills and I've become a pro at black bean taco salad, egg fried rice and tomato sauce. I hadn't been eating any meat at all but we're back to eating some.

We've bbq'ed once a week all winter. Certified organic, humanely raised, small batch, Canadian chicken (thighs) and, occasionally, beef.

I really want crickets to become available in grocery stores. It's important as we age, protein, and although I walk to and swim at the community centre (and I highly recommend joining one if you haven't already) I don't lift weights nearly often enough.

It's not the aging, it's the keeping up, but I want to set as good an example as I can for young people so they don't live in dread of older age, which, so far for me has proven to be quite the state of grace.

Don't look back, just look forward. The past is just a story we made up about ourselves. Dr. Wayne Dyer says to throw out the narrative. The past is gone. There's only now.

This helps in dealing with the wounds we suffer in childhood and may not even remember except in the body. I'm not that little kid anymore. I'm a senior with all the agency necessary to navigate this world.

It's taken me longer maybe than most of you to get it but I do. It isn't about me anymore. I can let go. No more having to prove myself worthy, fake it 'til I make it, check off the list of must dos or I'll be left out, miss out, be cast out.

Dr. Dyer again: Change your perspective and your perspective changes.

Eat, sleep, exercise. Be helpful when/where you can. Stop saving for the future, spread it around now. It's crazy how we've been raised to live in fear of not having enough money to live on in our old age, like we're 19th century pioneers, as opposed to swimming in wealth built up by generations of us.

Wish everybody well, even Conservatives, in trust they will see the light.

Shake off the roles we're assigned by society along the way and stop assigning them to others. It's the roles we play that get in our way.

Gender is a social construct of the Patriarchy. Period. End of. Embrace the freedom to be whoever you are. We're all the same human. Just look at babies and very old people.

I watch all the therapy reels that come up on my Facebook page and one guy who walks and talks his spiels describes himself as a former people pleaser. It struck a chord.

Living authentically is a real challenge for some of us but there's no other way to live.

The mother ego is the worst. Let me tell you. She is bad.

I've been reading and just finished the third in an erotic thriller series: Maestra, Domina, Ultima. They're by L.S. Hilton and excellent for taking the mind off and away to the world of fine art and serial killing. The twist is it's our heroine, or anti-heroine, I guess, who's the baddie. And if you're a fine arts aficionado you'll be in heaven. I'm not so it was a lot of art history to not really take in but the sex scenes are the best I've ever read.

Now I'm reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. It's giving me interesting dreams because it's existential time travel technology and not usually my thing but she's a good writer so I'm enjoying it. The premise is, our life here, on the moon colonies, is a computer simulation. The characters in the book, some of them, are experiencing a nostalgia for a time before technology took the living out of life.

Meanwhile, here in real life, we're in a war against billionaire technocrats who are using technology to destroy us and there's nothing for it but to defeat them.

And we will because we're the good guys.

In for a Penny, Out for a Pound

Protect your peace. Protect your peace. Protect your peace.

I've been thinking about this for a while, how denigrated working for the government has always been, even in this ludicrously large cold rock of a country with its population of sunny California, as if the jobs government employees do are somehow less worthwhile than other jobs.

Government employees themselves often share in the put downs.

I've only ever been an office temp, but a steadily working one, and I've had a lot of jobs, mostly in the government, but outside it, too. There's no difference in any of it from my perspective, although government employees do all swear an oath to service in the interests of the public.

All my life Conservative politicians, and their supporters, many of them in the business world of private profit, have referred to the government and the people who work for it as something we'd be better off without.

Well, what's happening south of the border should be their wildest wet dream come true, then, shouldn't it, employees of the government being fired en masse, entire departments axed, private business operators put in charge instead.

It will result in a massive transfer of public wealth to a handful of oligarchs, but I guess it begs the question: What kind of democracy makes it possible for individual citizens to become billionaires anyway?

But it's all been a big lie, the myth of rugged individualism south of the border, collective welfare on our side of it. Some 77 million Americans - the population of MAGA voters - are dependent on social security. Now the Orange Goon's gangster regime will steal it out from under them.

What are they going to do? Well, according to the CBC Ottawa interviews with middle-class residents in border towns that depend on Canadians for survival, most of them think it will work out great. The Orange Goon is a businessman, you see, and knows what he's doing.

Well yeah, he and his have shorted the market and will be richer'n God.

We have these myths here, too, the individual vs the community, the most egregious purveyor of which is Stephen Harper, who grew up in my time - we're the same age - with all the benefits of universal healthcare and public education, secured for us by the so-called Greatest Generation he pretends to honour, his first job handed to him by his oil company executive Daddy. His groomed protege, Pierre Poilievre, has only ever known a time of peace, order and good government, too, his only employment being as a Member of Parliament.

A tail end Boomer and a Millennial who had all the benefits of the Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments that made our country so much better than it had been for previous generations, most notably female citizens, and so much better than the richest country in the world whose diabetic citizens are left to die if they can't afford insulin.

Pierre Poilievre is an odious little shit and only a party as morally warped as Big Daddy Stephen Harper's Conservatives would elect him leader.

Canadians are idiots deserving of the great fall we will experience if he's elected Prime Minister.

I read an article the other day about the "Real America", the one steeped in Confederate politics. We can wring our hands on their behalf but this is what they want, a return to a more sexist and racist time, a rollback of civil and human rights, Big Daddy in charge of their lives.

Maple MAGA wants the same.

They don't care if we all go broke getting there, either, our middle-class hollowed out, fighting each other for every last dime while their gurus pontificate from their podcasts: Male = good, Female = bad.

Recently, CBC Ottawa interviewed Americans living in border towns dependent on Canadians for their economic survival. A couple of them, frustrated, knew it was all madness. But the vast majority are all in, true believers, the Orange Goon will make American great again.

They don't mean New Deal great, like in FDR's day. But they don't know what they mean, either. I doubt they even know they're in a cult, brainwashed to the gills, their leader a conman selling them out to a cabal of billionaire Peter Pans.

Speaking of, what's the point of being a billionaire if you still have to work for the man, and in the case of the billionaire Peter Pans currently on public display, have to smell his shit while thanking him every ten minutes for the favour.

We're not even a little bit real to them and yet here we are where life is good and we're free to live it as we choose, Orange Goon free. But we're not compromised up the wazoo by whatever billionaire Peter Pans get up to with trafficked children on private islands.

One wonders why they want to tear it down when it's worked out so well for them. I mean, why would they trade freedom and not having to work for the Orange Goon for fascism and indentured servitude?

Wouldn't you rather just pay taxes? I know I would. Democracy and public services for the win.

Milan Kundera wrote "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" about how hard it was for victims of Communist oppression to adapt to a life without it. I think this may be what's going on in the US, and to a lesser extent here. People are bored with freedom, or unable to handle it, and want Big Daddy to take it away and tell them what to do instead.

Just look at the billionaire Peter Pans. Grown ass men with all the money in the world and they're spending Saturday nights on call for Big Macs with the Boss at Mar-a-lago.💩

This Is Sadness, This Is Anger, This Is Grief

I realized the other day I can love another person without needing them to love me back. I can care about them, want them to be happy, even if they never give me a thought.

Or worse, wish I'd just fall down a well.

The other night I had a dream in which my middle child was a kid again and being difficult. All of a sudden she ran at me from across the room.

And locked me in a full body hug and I felt wrapped in love.

What does it mean? Well, our dreams are all about ourselves, and I know what I felt.

Loved. Self love.

I still remember coming upon my oldest child, she was kid age, pronouncing apropos of nothing, "I love myself." So pleased she was. My Gord it was inspiring.

I titled this piece "This Is Sadness, This Is Anger, This Is Grief" because I heard Brene Brown say it in a talk about endings and the need to feel our emotions over them or they'll just bite us in the ass later.

I was able to experience my mother in very old age and I think that helps us miss a person less, but my relationship with my former mother-in-law ended more or less with the end of my marriage to her son, and so I find myself missing her on occasion.

All times are difficult, I guess, many of them unnecessarily so, but right now is so stupid it actually does hurt, doesn't it. A friend, a philosophy grad who seems to remember it all - why can't I remember even a bit of what I learned in university? - takes a very long term view of it all. She's watching something on Brit Box about Tudor England and can draw parallels to now. No problem.

Hang on, I did become a bit of an aficionado of Elizabeth I in university, but the obsession really started when I was a kid, with a CBC six part series on her dear old dad, Henry VIII and his wives. I can still remember how devastated I was when he had Catherine Howard, wife No.5, killed.

Good acting. She was hysterical, uncomprehending. It was all so unfair.

I guess my problem is I don't have a clear eyed view of history to help me with now. I'm illogical that way. It all just makes me mad.

Speaking of mad, everyone's mad at the Democrats for not doing enough to stop the coup happening in the US, but Republicans could stop it today if they wanted. They're responsible for all of it, really. People talk now as if political affiliation is something we're born with, and not an entirely social construct, like gender.

No one has to vote Republican. They choose to. And the Republican Party didn't have to nominate the Orange Goon for President. They chose to. Twice. And they don't have to put up with any of this madness now. They could just vote no. End it all.

The older I get the more I love the breakdown of stereotypes, the freeing of each other from made up convention, people just being people. My mother, a woman who, at age 38, had to switch from a woman's world to a man's, used to say of teaching and nursing that women should be glad when men join their ranks because the pay and respect goes up.

Is that what worries men about women joining their ranks? The pay and respect goes down?

Was there ever a time in history when people didn't believe male was superior to female?

Why, then, do so many people believe men need the state to protect them from women making money? 

All that money for OC Transpo to improve services and still women won't feel safe waiting for, getting off, buses in certain locations at night. What's so hard about this? Shouldn't we all want public services to look after our most vulnerable citizens first? Why have them otherwise?

I want to set a good example for young people about getting old because I don't want them to fear it. So much of our way of life depends on looks and it's funny because, like babies, old people all look alike.

Old.

And we all have that same reaction to young people, whether we want to admit it or not, that they matter more than we do. It's not that we don't matter, we do. But young people matter more. Babies matter the most. We know it whenever we encounter one. And it's not a scary thing, it's a life affirming thing.

I'm not sure what we're witnessing right now, this perverse behaviour by so many people, a lot of them old. The cowardice, the bullying, the sycophancy.

The cruelty to babies.

What's happening right now in the US is an orgy of sexual perversion starring an old Orange Goon, cheered on by his equally perverse fans, while he and his sycophants and wannabes act out their deepest depraved fantasies of domination over people they pretend to themselves are lesser and so deserve it.

My advice to someone today was: don't watch it.

It's a snuff film.

We will prevail, but we may as well accept the fact now, we're going to have to go through some stuff first.

So save your sanity. Don't let the sadness, anger, grief take over. Process it now so you'll be ready to stand up to this madness when it comes for us.

Cryptonite

The longer the fascist coup in the US is allowed to go on, the more the Musk Rats will have to lose, and the worse it will get for anybody and everybody trying to stop them from destroying the US government while they transfer the public purse over to their private wallets.

Bitcoin.

It's on a roll.

I don't understand it. I know perfectly decent people who have invested in it, people who can afford a few grand to lose, even true believers who view it as the way to a more democratic world, as opposed to the fascist nightmare it appears to be facilitating in the US as I type this.

Good for you. You're rich in Bitcoin. Too bad about your friends and family sent to work the tarsands for our Musk Rat overlords.

Enjoy fascism. Don't worry about us. Worry about the guerilla warfare we'll be perpetrating now we've nothing left to lose.

The US will invade Canada if Americans don't/won't/can't stop the fascist coup taking place, a fascist coup facilitated by Stephen Harper, whose name desecrates the Canadian flag our five former and current prime ministers signed in celebration of its 60th anniversary.

The Musk Rats will take what they want and burn down the rest because we are nothing to the billionaire fascists Stephen Harper helped bring to power.

They're not even real to themselves. They can't begin to imagine we exist.

The other day a childhood friend phoned me in a panic. He'd borrowed several thousand dollars and sent it to a virtual stranger who'd promised him over the phone he'd transfer it to his crypto account. But then the virtual stranger stopped calling. So my friend, who had no way of contacting him, called me, thinking I might know someone who could help him get his money back.

I don't, of course, and even if I did, and I guess I do know a couple of people who maybe could, or at least understand what to most of us is an incomprehensible process, but - no. I've been through this before, the panicked phone call, the inarticulate explanation as to what's happened, the doubling down on the pyramid scheme.

I wonder how many lives have been lost to Bitcoin.

I despise Pierre Poilievre. Instead of working in the public interest, ever, he's spent his mandate recruiting young men to Stephen Harper's big Conservative Party tent of traitors, young men heavily invested in Bitcoin, young men who've been propagandized to believe democracy benefits everyone else at their expense, young men who desperately want the Musk Rats to defeat Western liberal democracy, so us, because they actually believe they'll be Masters of the Universe in a New World Order when they do, as opposed to (and here I paraphrase a good ol' Brent Butt joke) so many hood ornaments on the luxury car collections of their groomers.

Driving Miss Crazy

It's crazy-making, the deliberate chaos being caused by the Orange Goon, the billionaire Peter Pans, their Lost Boys, running amok in the US government.

They're our new overlords, not that we factor into their virtual world order. We're not even collateral damage. Collateral damage at least assumes some worth to society. We're completely irrelevant, left behind in the real world, the one where people die without ever having grasped the Holy Grail of Crypto.

They, on the other hand, are going to live forever. On Mars. Their God, Elon Musk, will make it so.

We should never have allowed our politicians to call us anything other than citizens. It was a mistake, allowing the slip into "consumers" and "taxpayers" and "hard working families". It made it seem like democracy was really just all about money, the more money, the more democracy we're entitled to claim for ourselves.

But how to compete with billionaires?

The Lost Boys, and there are millions of them, and who knows how many of them Bitcoin Billionaires themselves, have pledged their allegiance to Elon Musk. He's their God, the only one they need. Fuck Jesus. We see a Neo-Nazi, mad with power, out to destroy Western liberal democracy, they see who they want to be.

Freedom.

For years now young and not so young men have cloaked themselves in victimhood, angry at the world, arrested development at the teenage know-it-all stage, willingly propagandized by online groomers to believe that, if not for the rest of us getting in their way, they would be the Masters of the Universe their sex at birth decreed they should be.

Trans kids terrify the groomers, hence their targeting of this teeny tiny minority of the population, the cruelty always the point with fascism.

But trans kids put the lie to fascism, don't they, and the truth to democracy, which is all about the freedom to be who we are, not who we're told to be.

Funny how it's playing out though, eh? Individual lifetimes devoted to achieving financial security for ourselves and a bunch of fascist little shits who've only ever known wealth and privilege come along and pull the rug out from under us like we're not even standing on it.

Anyway, when we get through this, with our savings most likely gone, I say we learn a lesson and take all that power we've given up to money and put it into democracy instead.

Fault Lines

One more time. Then I'll pretend we're all in against Fascism again.🙂

So, just, you know, for the record, Liberal Feminists have been trying to defend our societies against a Conservatism that's moved increasingly Right everywhere in the world for decades now, and certainly in Canada after Mulroney stood up against Apartheid in South Africa and the racist woman-haters abandoned his Progressive Conservatives to create the Reform Party of Preston Manning, a Neo-Nazi.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but it's no accident virulent racist and woman-hater, the South African Elon Musk, is now running amok in the US government. Fascists from across the globe, including Stephen Harper, who simply changed the name of Reform to Conservative and voila! he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, helped get him there.

So many of us were accused of having Harper Derangement Syndrome back in the day, as if Marci McDonald hadn't written "The Armageddon Factor" detailing Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party's Christo-Fascism for all of Canada to read. It was maddening. Especially when his first order of business, after cheating his way to a majority government in 2011, courtesy robo-call operative, Pierre Poilievre, was to destroy our gun registry for his American NRA sponsors.

It was the same Fascism so many other men, American men, denied in 2015/2016, when they chose to spend the fight for liberal democracy blaming Liberal Feminists for standing in the way of our collective Socialist utopia on account of the Democratic Party establishment nominating Hillary Clinton over Independent Bernie Sanders for President.

And just prior to the rise of the Orange Goon, whose sponsorship by Christo-Fascist dictator, Vladimir Putin, couldn't possibly have been made more obvious, Canadian women were mocked for supporting Justin Trudeau, as if our support was because of his hair.

Well no. It was because he proclaimed the Liberal Party a pro-choice, Feminist party, taking away the knife men have been holding over our heads since abortion was de-criminalized, to say we're not debating this anymore, abortion is a women's health issue, and peppering his campaign with the dreaded "F" word, Feminist, like it was 2015 and not 1950.

Because it WAS 2015! And bringing a gender balance to Cabinet WAS a big deal. So was legalizing cannabis, actually a Feminist issue, because now women who wanted it could just buy it legally from a store, not need a boyfriend do it for us from some guy in a van down by the bridge.

And to pretend that didn't make him a target of every Fascist from our own Conservative Party to the US Republican Party to Russia's Christo-Fascist Mob in the Kremlin is just typical denialism of misogyny and gaslighting of women by men who will never admit THEY are the ones standing in the way of our collective Socialist utopia.

Fact: There was zero benefit to Canadians for Jagmeet Singh, who had all the power New Democrats claim to want working with Justin Trudeau, to "rip up" the NDP agreement to support the Liberal government, the most responsive and accessible government we've ever had. Zero benefit. But he did it anyway. Why? And his demand that Justin Trudeau resign - the same demand being made by Pierre Poilievre and every Christo-Fascist from here to there ever since he was elected Prime Minister - has been met. He resigned. And so we have our government dealing with a Fascist coup in the US while the Liberal Party holds a fucking leadership race, our own Fascists pretending the government of Canada is leaderless when it's actually, demonstrably, been standing up for Canadians from coast to coast to coast like no Canadian government has ever had to do, and against the US, a military and economic powerhouse currently experiencing a Fascist coup.

Meanwhile, in the US, Democrats are being excoriated for not doing enough to stop Fascism when it was Democratic Party voters who failed to do the bare minimum to stand up for liberal democracy and just fucking vote ffs.

The fact is, a lot of people decided they'd rather risk Fascism than support the most progressive and inclusive and just generally all around cool and happening person ever to be in the running for President of the United States, a female GenX Liberal Feminist. It was a five alarm fire the entire campaign and they pretended it wasn't happening because, deep down, they wanted blood in the streets, not a Socialist utopia, just like the Fascists do, tear it all down, burn it all up, anything but those no fun Liberal Feminists in power with their identity politics and drag queens and support for trans kids to live as they are.

And now we have a re-elected Orange Goon claiming us as a 51st state, Greenland as his, the Panama Canal as his, and Gaza as his, while a high-as-a-kite billionaire crackpot and his teenage droogs run amok destroying the US government from within, and Stephen Harper's disciple, Pierre Poilievre - who publicly stood with the Freedom Convoy Neo-Nazis WHILE THEY ATTACKED US AND WAVED THEIR F*CK TRUDEAU MERCH - is STILL poised to win a majority government.

So tell me again, guys and dolls, how Liberal Feminists are in the way of our Socialist utopia.🙂