GalaxyBrain.ca - 11th Edition

 And here is Chapter Eleven of "That Looks Good on You! You Should Buy It!"

Starring Carol as Carol

UnGird Yer Loins! GalaxyBrain.ca's Tenth Edition Is Here!

 This one is chock-a-block, too, so enjoy!

galaxybrain.ca

True Canadian Stories

 

At first I saw my own kids in the faces of the kids in the photo below, just as I saw my middle one in the face of a little girl who died in U.S. border detention a couple of years ago.

But then I saw my own face, and my kindergarten class, where the worst thing that happened to me was getting the palms of my hands slapped with a ruler for holding hands with another little girl instead of being single file as directed.

I still remember the fear I felt when I realized my mistake, that it wasn't double file time, it was single file time. Then the sting of the ruler and the shame of doing it wrong and the humiliation of being punished for it in front of everybody else.

 

I remember, too, the shame of feeling relief when it wasn't me being punished for doing "it" wrong, but someone else. I hated it, that feeling of cowardice, helplessness, the lowering of my head, afraid to look up lest the adult in charge think I was asking for it.

No adult I was aware of growing up questioned that there should be corporal punishment in public elementary schools. Or that principals and vice-principals, who were all men and all powerful, should be in charge of meting it out.

 

For most of my public elementary school years the principal was a former boxer with a temper and he meted out corporal punishment plenty. And in the early 70s, that same principal caught my grade eight teacher, who doubled as vice-principal, sexually assaulting a girl in grade six.

Freddie, our next door neighbour, went to a Catholic school. He told me stories all the time about the priests and the nuns. It sounded shockingly violent to me and I was just glad we weren't Catholic and I could go to a public school where at least it wasn't like THAT.

Everybody knew about the principal catching my grade eight teacher in the act of sexually assaulting a student. And everybody knew the school board dealt with it by transferring him to another school. It wasn't until the late '90s that he would be sentenced to twelve years in a federal penitentiary for the increasingly violent sexual assaults against public elementary school girls he had gone on to perpetrate over his 25-year career. It was all a bit of a miracle, really, that there was any justice at all, but a miracle of over a dozen victims being tracked down and able to testify, while another dozen were not.

That was our culture, the culture I grew up in, a white middle-class kid in a mid-sized city in northern Ontario in the 60s and 70s. It was a better culture than the one our parents experienced as children in Canada, but we were still powerless in it. Adult violence was still our problem. We faced the consequences of it. Parents rarely got involved in what adults in positions of authority did to their own children, never mind someone else's. That would have been seen as interfering in other people's business. It's not very long ago our governments made it an adult's duty, if that adult is in a position of authority, to report child sexual abuse to.... an adult in a position of authority.

 

So I look at this photo, enveloped in empathy for these children, because I know what our culture was during my childhood, and I wonder if the trouble some Canadians have in acknowledging the pain of residential school survivors, is because they have trouble acknowledging their own.

 

Residential Schools

GalaxyBrain.ca - 9th Edition

Chapter 9 of "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!" by me, Kathryn McLeod, is now being featured (along with chapters 1-8) at http://galaxybrain.ca/

And remember - "TLGoY-YSBI!" is 13 chapters so gird yer loins.

Also, there's a bit of advice from me, Jim Diorio, and Jane Michelle Wilson, if you're looking for that sort of thing.

Click on all the images, though, because you never know what treasure you'll come across that you didn't know you were looking for.

What? It's a free county. I'll dangle a fucking preposition if I want to.

GalaxyBrain.ca - 8th Edition

Chapter 8 of "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!" by me, Kathryn McLeod, is now being featured (along with chapters 1-7) at GalaxyBrain.ca

"TLGoY-YSBI!" is 13 chapters, by the way, so stay tuned!

Sick Daze

It's the start of a new fiscal year so I thought I'd put it out here on my handy blog that the federal government, here in Ottawa at least, is run on temps and casuals, none of whom get paid sick days. Nor do we/they get paid holidays. Case in point: One Sunday towards the end of 2019 I had to go to emergency due to a sudden severe pain that turned out to be a kidney stone, itself the result of a minor injustice done to me, a stand-in for all the major injustices happening to others everywhere all the time, which my brain fixated on in an unhealthy way, dragging my body along with it. I really needed time off the difficult clerical job I was doing, but taking time off would have meant not being paid. So on Monday morning I was back at it, working alongside others like me, but also alongside others not like me, because, not only were they better paid, they had paid sick days and paid vacation.

Public Transit Blues

I've ridden on double-decker buses in Ottawa. To me they feel tippy and out-of-control at any speed and in any season.

I've ridden articulated buses in Ottawa, too. Every time they manage to pull away from a stop or get around a corner in winter feels like a miracle.

I stopped a bus by standing in front of it on one of Ottawa's rare snowy days in winter. It was the first to show up heading my way home (or even not my way home) after three hours of praying for a miracle re the articulated bus stuck around a corner several blocks away. The driver didn't want to let me on, never mind the steady stream of (mostly) public servants behind me, including a man with a cane and a woman with a baby. Why? Because the stop I'd just forced him to make wasn't on his route.

My ex once waited with a bunch of (mostly) public servants for a couple of hours in the middle of nowhere on one of Ottawa's rare bone-chillingly cold days in winter. When their bus finally showed up the driver barely stopped before opening the door and yelling, "You can't get on! The heat's not working!" Then he sped off. I mean, it wasn't just cold, it was cold for Ottawa in January cold.

A man in a suit got off the elevator at a place I was working not too long ago and with tears in his eyes shouted, "I HATE OC TRANSPO!!!" Nobody even blinked. Just nodded in sympathy.

Lightrail.

I could go on. I've lived in Ottawa for a while now and I take OC Transpo.

Also, speaking of corners (three paragraphs up), and lightrail - I've ridden it, too. A couple of times I got on at Rideau (famous for the Great Sinkhole of 2016) after descending (at least?) four very steep flights of stairs, so steep I experienced some vertigo. Going east there's a corner past Hurdman that feels like an engineering fail of almost epic proportions. But what do I know? Certainly I've been on circus rides that felt that way, too, and they were perfectly safe.

I think public transit is a swing and a miss in Ottawa because it's thought to be a favour to people who either don't have cars, don't drive, or don't want to drive their car to work downtown.

By the way, there are bus drivers here who regularly make the sunshine list. I mean, far be it from me to deny working class people the sunshine list, but for people who make three or four times as much money as most of their fare-paying passengers, they could stand to be nicer about it.

And it's impolitic, but I don't want to not speak up just because I have the luxury of working from home during this pandemic, so out with it - since COVID-19 riding the bus is unpleasant at best. Mask-less men exhibiting anti-social behaviour pretty much have the run of it now. I've been on the bus with a six foot Viking at my side and felt unsafe. My friend who had to go to an appointment one morning had to endure one man shouting at her about music and another man ranting about missing his stop and trying to pry open the doors on the transitway. Neither wore masks. They either got on via the side doors or got on with a mask they ditch as soon as they're past the driver.

Anyway, maybe it's the pandemic finally has me feeling the Debbie Downers, but I wish public transit was more about the people who depend on it and less about the people who don't.