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.