Corner of Bourbon & Division

I have no idea what Pride month is going to look like while the pandemic is still ongoing here, but it's important to mark it anyway, I think. Of course, I've spent all my life in Quebec and Ontario where we have Pride Week in August (don't ask why, I don't know), so who knows what any of it will look like. Last year, of course, we were all solidly locked down, but this year if the vaccination rates are high enough there's a non-zero chance that there might be some outdoor events. I will keep an eye out, anyway.

It feels super weird to me that I've been out as long as I have, even though compared to some it hasn't really been all that long. I officially came out when I was 24, and that was 18 years ago. Wild.


In dog news, I think Peggy will be sleeping in her crate tonight so that I can recover a bit. Last night did not go nearly as well as Sunday, because she hadn't zoomed around all day with Shadow. As a result she had a ton of energy and kept bouncing around the room and getting into things, and even when she sort of settled down on the bed she spent a good portion of the night kicking me, getting up and trampling me, jumping off and on the bed, and generally being the opposite of a good sleep buddy. She also had an accident on the upstairs carpet, which she didn't the night before. So clearly the secret sauce is to make damned sure she's good and tired before she's allowed to sleep in the same bed as me. I might be able to get her to sleep tonight, maybe, since she spent all day at daycare, but I am not 100% sure of it and I am very tired after not getting a restful night of sleep. Tomorrow she's going to train with Santo, so if she comes back tired enough we might try it again at that point. We shall see.


I was going to write about something else, I am pretty sure, but I don't remember what it was. Oh well. If it comes back to me I will post about it tomorrow. Good night, friends!

I had a productive day that didn't feel productive, and I ended up leaving the office well after 7pm, which is not ideal. Tomorrow is recycling day and I haven't actually dealt with the recycling yet, which means I have to do it before bed. I SWORE to myself I would do it today, because every time I put it off to the morning of, it never gets done, and now I am breaking that promise to myself because it's already past 9pm and because I went to bed so late last night I feel like I've run out of energy.

I will report back here tomorrow night, and if I haven't put out the recycling, you may ALL tell me "I told you so!"

Today is Peggy's birthday. My baby is two years old! I can't believe she's no longer the roly poly puppy and is instead a lean, long-legged grown up! She got a birthday cookie (shaped like a bone and which had "Birthday Girl" on it written in dog-safe icing), a new squeaky green ball, a new Kong Wubba, and a beef shoulder bone the size of her head. She has been very excited about all of her presents, which is very gratifying. I know my no-longer-a-puppy well, it seems.

In other news, my current NCO i/c (Non Commissioned Office In Charge) stopped by my office today to chat about our HR issues, and he brought up a thing which happened on Thrusday, which was kind of neat. So, background: he, my Director, the other sergeant and I were having an impromptu chat about something that had come up, and we all happened to be at the office in person that day. Anyway, my NCO i/c made a joke but in a way that made both me and my Director think he was serious (in the "no, no, I was pulling your leg!" sense, not in the "Schroedinger's Douchebag sense). Now, I have ALWAYS been the perfect mark for that kind of joke: if you tell me something with a straight face I will fall for it 9 times out of 10 if it's not patently absurd. So I pulled out my favourite "dad joke" that I used for situations like that:

"For a queer girl, I make a great straight man."

Anyway, that got a chuckle out of people, and we moved on. But today he made a point of mentioning it, and that he felt really happy and proud that I felt comfortable enough to say that out loud in a room full of policemen who in theory have a fair bit of say in how my job and career will go in the near future. He actually got a little teary, which was sweet. He's about 10 years older than I am, but we both remember a time when being "out" was a recipe for ruining your life. He also told me really proudly that his daughter's best friend (she's in high school) is a gay boy who's the most popular kind in school (and has TWO boyfriends!).

It was a nice moment, I must say.

In other work news, I am trying to plan out my days and my weeks better. Today both did and didn't work out the way I planned, but so far I'm managing to view everything that goes off-course as a learning experience. Forgive me while I toot my own horn for a moment, but I am pretty impressed with how well I have been managing my emotional and mental state these past four months. I am not sure that I would have been able to do this job as well four years ago: I would have tied myself into knots with anxiety, and second-guessed myself into paralysis. I'm not doing everything perfectly (that's impossible anyway), but I've kept all the important plates spinning, and there's been a minimum of broken crockery for the less important plates. I feel that I'm always making at least a little bit of progress, or learning something new, or making a new connection, and it's been very rewarding.

Tomorrow I will make a new attempt at planning out the rest of the week.


And the most exciting news of the day is that my mother got her first COVID 19 vaccination today! I am so relieved, I can't even begin to tell you. Now we just have to wait for the next appointment. My father is under 80 years old, so he will be in the next "wave" in their province, which I guess will be next month, maybe? Either way, my mother is the more vulnerable of the two, so this is a weight lifted off all of us. I am hoping she won't experience too many side effects, but no matter which way you slice it, this is excellent news.

 ... and thank goodness for that.

I have averaged about three hours of sleep per calendar day since Tuesday, and I am displeased. Yesterday it was my own choice, though, so I can't complain too much about that.

I dropped the ball about sending out the First Day School schedule on time, and therefore had to pinch-hit in the morning. Luckily, I had an old lesson "plan" from several months ago that I hadn't used because there were no kids on the day I was scheduled. I'd planned to read them the story of Daniel in the Lion's Den, which is what we did, followed by a short discussion about bravery and metaphors (maybe the lions weren't lions, but were symbolic of living through hard times and retaining faith/hope), which I think mostly went over the kids' heads. Luckily I'd also printed out a bunch of colouring sheets from the internet of the story, so we were able to occupy the rest of the time with colouring and more idle conversation.

Speaking of Meeting, last week I submitted a request for a Clearness Committee in order to become a fully fledged Member of Ottawa Monthly Meeting, and it was discussed today during Meeting for Worship for Business by the Members, who were all very enthused at the idea, it seems. I got assigned a Clearness Committee, and I'm going to be meeting with them after they've had an initial meeting without me. I'm not sure what to expect after this, but I suppose it will all become clear (see what I did there?).

I may be making new friends, or at least acquaintances, this week. There's a lesbian couple in my neighbourhood who've been facing extreme harassment by their neighbours, and someone at Meeting asked me if I'd like to be part of their support circle. The couple are planning to sell their house and move away due to the harassment, but in the meantime it helps for them to have people come over to the house and simply hang out for a while. It hasn't caused the harassers to stop, but it does apparently make them keep their distance a little more. Since I've been looking for other members of the queer community in Ottawa, this will serve as a "two birds, one stone" sort of thing. I mean, I wish we'd met under different circumstances, but I'm hoping we can become friends over time. I spoke with one of the women at length today over the phone, and she told me all of the circumstances, and frankly I can't blame them for wanting to move away: it sounds pretty damned terrifying.

I'm going to go on Thursday morning to spend a few hours with them, and then I've invited them over to my house to take part in the potluck dinner I'm hosting for some of the younger members of Ottawa Monthly Meeting. We're all trying to get to know each other better, and so every month there's a potluck at someone's house/apartment. This month I volunteered, since they have a distressing habit of scheduling the potlucks on nights when I'm working.

It's going to be a busy week: I have errands or appointments or commitments pretty much every single day starting tomorrow and not letting up until I go back to work on Friday morning. My one prayer is that the insomnia goes away so I can get some much-needed sleep. Otherwise, it's going to be an excruciatingly long ten days.

tx_cronopio asked me to talk about my own experience coming out. Most of you who read this LJ these days were there when I came out, but I suspect there are a handful of you who weren't, so I guess this might be new to you.

I feel like I should preface this with a few caveats. For one thing, everyone's coming out experience is unique, even if they share a few common elements. My own coming out story is even less typical than the ones you will usually find in North America, though it has nothing especially remarkable about it. In fact, my story is probably remarkable for the fact that it's wholly unremarkable, if that makes any sense.

( Out of the closet, into the fire. )

I don't know how I managed to get subscribed to OneNewsNow.com, but they've regularly been sending me emails telling me how awful Obama is, and now that the election is over they're spewing homophobic garbage.

I honestly don't know why it's taken me this long to unsubscribe. *shakes head*

In other exciting news, toughlovemuse found me knee-high rainbow socks.

My winter prospects have already brightened considerably as a result.

I shall wear them on Sunday to the Pride Parade.

This has been a busy week. I'm embarking on a couple of new projects, which I shall no doubt discuss in here when they become a little less nebulous in my head.

I got felled by a monster migraine Tuesday night at work. Around 7pm my body very decisively said to me: "You're going home NOW." There's no arguing when my body takes that tone with me. I excused myself to my coworkers, called my supervisor to tell him I had to leave, and left. I medicated myself to the gills and slept for 13 hours, and luckily woke up without a trace of the migraine except the usual residual feeling of being a bit fragile for a few hours.

The moral of the story is that I'm not allowed to do overtime anymore. The last time I had a migraine this bad was the last time I did overtime. I attributed it to the fact that I was doing a double shift overnight and thus messing up my sleep patterns, but that's not the case at all. It appears that my body will. not. tolerate. more than 40 hours a week of work. A few hours of overtime here and there is fine, but not the equivalent of an extra day's work.

I had a lovely luncheon yesterday with silly_imp, whom I have asked to initiate me into the whole being a vegetarian thing. We had a delicious lunch, and a fascinating discussion that ranged from vegetarianism to the kind of professional choices people make and why, all the way to religion (paganism and quakerism, especially). It was really lovely, and I'm looking forward to the next time we can have lunch together again.

Vegetarianism is one of the aforementioned new projects, since I'm getting into it. The way I see it, I am going to be a vegetarian when I cook for myself. I eat relatively little meat anyway, and being a vegetarian at home will be both cheaper for me and allow me to contribute to helping the environment. I don't really know much about where the meat at the supermarket comes from, and I doubt it's very healthy. A lot of it, I suspect, comes from the US, which generally speaking pumps its livestock full of growth hormones and whatnot. Also, locally-produced meat is not necessarily any better, and contributes considerably to the pollution of rivers and groundwater.

I also suspect that being a vegetarian will allow me to be healthier in the long run, and maybe even lose a bit of weight, if combined with exercise and other healthy habits. :)

I had a bit of a chat with my coworker (the one who was so concerned about my eating habits) about vegetarianism last night. She didn't understand why anyone would want to become a vegetarian, since humans are *meant* to be omnivorous (her emphasis, not mine). I explained that while humans *could* be omnivorous, it wasn't necessary, and that many different populations are almost exclusively vegetarian. I went on to outline my reasons for considering vegetarianism (see above), and she appeared quite impressed by my train of thought. It appears the only vegetarians she knows had only one reason, and that was: "OMG it's cruel to kill the baby animals oh noes!" I can understand how that would be annoying and unsatisfying as a response.

As I told her, I have no objection to killing animals, so long as it's done for the right reasons: food, clothing, and the occasional protection of the self. My main problem with supermarket meat, increasingly, is that I have no connection to it: it's packed in plastic and styrofoam and shipped from far away. I cited fearsclave as an example: he goes out, shoots a rabbit, comes home (waves it at his Wuh-Mun) and dumps it in a stew pot. I have no problem with this. It just seems to me that, on the whole, Western civilization has disconnected considerably from their food, its sources and the reasons for which we consume it.

Because my day is never complete without three or four really intense discussions, the same coworker brought up the issue of what it's like being gay. (There was a very amusing incident on Monday night in which one of the supervisors "found out" that I was gay —not that I was hiding it, but he just hadn't known, but essentially now it's public knowledge, as opposed to something I'm just not actively hiding)

So I spent the better part of two hours talking to her and the other guy on my shift about my experiences. They both don't know any gay people their own age, and have only stereotypes or (in the girl's case) older family members to go by. So I fielded the usual questions:

- Did you always know you were gay?
- How did you figure it out?
- Are you completely comfortable with who you are?
- Do your parents know? What do they think of it?
- Is it something you could change if you really wanted to?
- What if you fell in love with a man? Would that change how you identify yourself?
- If you were given the choice, would you *not* be gay?
- Do you want children?

Etc. They were very respectful in their questions, and I think I made some big inroads in dispelling some prejudices they didn't even know they had. The only question that irritated me slightly was: "If you were given a choice, would you *not* be gay?"

That was asked by the male coworker. He didn't mean it badly, but it's an absurd question, and I told him so. I explained it this way to him: You're essentially giving me a choice between having an easy time, and a hard time. The fact that I am sexually attracted to women has little or nothing to do with it. I told him that I was going to spend my. entire. life having *this* conversation with people, that I was going to spend all of my life "coming out" to people who don't know I'm gay, and working to change their perception of what a gay person is or should be.

If I had the choice, I would choose not to have to do that. I am not someone who enjoys the spotlight, and having people grill me with questions about my sexual orientation is not something with which I am especially comfortable. I answer all questions as openly and honestly as I can, because I truly believe it's important for people to understand, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

If being gay and being straight made no difference in terms of how hard my life would be (which is a moot point, because it's not true), then I said that I would flip a coin. If it didn't matter, then, by definition, it wouldn't matter which I chose. Who cares who I choose to sleep with? I am a writer, a musician, a dispatcher, a daughter, a friend, and any number of things, as well as a lesbian. The fact that I sleep with women changes very little about who I am, when seen in that light.

Anyway, I appear to have given them some food for thought, and that can only be a good thing.

Or not. You know.

Went to Boss!Man's goodbye party. Lost my watch, which sucks. Left my number at the restaurant, so hopefully I'll get it back when they find it.

Also, in the category of "This is why I'm not out at the office," we got subjected to Boss!Man holding forth loudly on the topic of why gay people (specifically gay men, but who's going to quibble over gender when you can condemn everything else?) should not be allowed to raise children.

There was debate, of a sort, with most people carefully abstaining. Three people were firmly in the "OMG homosexuality is unnatural and t3h g4yz shouldn't be allowed near my innocent darling children lest they corrupt them!" camp, and three others (myself included) attempted to argue the contrary. There was also one person who came out with the "But why won't anyone think of the CHILDREN?!?" argument, too, which isn't so much an argument as it is a cop-out. Obviously we're thinking of the children, dumbass.

We dropped the subject before it became too heated, but let's just say that at the end of that conversation my opinion of some people in the department had sunk considerably.

Bleah.

Mostly I'm upset because I lost my watch.

Weekend went great. More detailed update when I'm not rushing around like a headless chicken. Spent five hours dancing on Saturday, a little over seven dancing yesterday. I now have a sunburn (in spite of the sunblock) and my legs hate me.

Life is good.

Pride was awesome. I regret somewhat having not been able to see all the floats and displays, but I must say that dancing non-stop for two hours and riding the crowd's energy was like nothing I've ever done before. I am so going back next year if I'm in a position to do so.

Yesterday I learned that trying to organize sixty-odd gay people into a functioning group is a lot like herding cats. First, you have to take into account GST (Gay Standard Time) which means add on twenty minutes to whatever activity you're planning, and multiply that exponentially as your group gets bigger (the parade itself started something like half an hour late).

Of course finishing work at 5:00 meant that I spent all of last night running around like a headless chicken, trying to get changed, get to the parade, and snatch something to eat in the interim. I barely had time for the latter, but made a point of eating because I didn't particularly feel like passing out in the middle of one of the dances. It would have looked really stupid, not to mention left my dance partner in the lurch, and of course, I would have missed the parade.

Speaking of my dance partner, he was ten minutes late, which meant that he arrived twenty-five minutes after everyone else did (no matter what you say about the whole late start thing, almost everyone was there ahead of schedule. It was just like trying to get molasses moving uphill on a cold day).

We loitered and milled about for almost an hour before we even got close to being in position for the dance, and chatted and kibbitzed and practised one last time before lining up behind our truck. The jokes flew thick and fast, people shouted and whooped and flirted with the other groups who were also milling about waiting for instructions. A man raced around in one of those small street-cleaner cars, the ones that have a giant hose stuck on their end, making them look like a very weird futuristic impression of an elephant rendered by someone who's never seen an elephant in his life but was told once that they have a trunk. No one was very impressed, as all the guy was doing was spewing dust everywhere.

Still, everyone was in high spirits, and we had a great deal of fun when the Gay Autochtone society wandered by. I mean, there we were, in our jeans and cowboy hats, and there were "Injuns." Couldn't have been better. We danced, they mock-whooped, and more jokes flew around like plastic bags in a shopping mall parking lot. Much random silliness.

We danced in a circle for a while, since the parade wasn't going anywhere. We had the CIBC float right behind us for a while, although I'll admit I didn't even notice whether they were still in that position when the parade got underway. It was either them or Feygeleh, the Jewish GLBT group that was also nearby. Best poster of the day was theirs, I think: "I had to come out of the closet: my mother needed the space."

Finally, the whole shebang got moving, and after a few minutes of dancing almost by ourselves, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a teeming, cheering throng. The energy last night was electrifying. I've attended Pride the past few years, and the energy that you feel as a spectator is nothing compared to the experience of actually being in the parade itself. People screamed themselves hoarse every time the Shania Twain song we'd picked came on. They clapped and stamped and yelled and whistled, and somehow, even though we ran out of water and the end of the parade was rushed (we had to take it at a run instead of dancing), it was more exhilarating than I could ever express.

There were some low-ish points, I must say. My partner, for one, didn't seem to understand the concept of not wrenching my shoulder from its socket, and kept poking me because the people in our row were falling behind and he didn't want me to get too far ahead (never mind that I was perfectly aware of this anyway). The poking wouldn't have been so bad, except that his fingernails were sharp, and he kept scratching me. Enh. Whatever. It didn't mar my experience, so I won't dwell on it more than I have to.

Met up with some Bolo people who hadn't taken part in the Parade once it was over, and then about half of us staggered back to the club to get some water and decompress. Everyone was in very good spirits, and moaning good-naturedly about how they never, ever wanted to hear "Passadena" ever again. One of our older members, who wasn't dancing but was walking in the parade with us, had an unfortunate accident because the one restaurant that let her inside didn't have a working toilet, which was really too bad. It was supposed to be a good evening for her, and I can't imagine that having wet pants made it fun. She still seemed to be in good form, and people either didn't mention it or made light of it. It's fairly common knowledge that she doesn't have a strong bladder due to an operation she had a while back. The sad part is that this means she probably won't be in the parade next year, although her husband said he would be (yes, they're our token straight couple).

Anyway, after downing another litre or two of water (no, I'm not exaggerating), I eventually staggered to my feet and went home. The main problem with having the parade on a Monday night is this whole work-in-the-morning deal. Frankly, I might have asked for today off if L hadn't already reserved today herself. I have no idea what she's up to, but it's just me all by my lonesome all day.

I was too wired to go to sleep right away (*sigh*), so I read for a while and tormented the cats, and eventually fell into a restless sleep at about 1am. Woke up every two hours after that until 6:30 when I got up to go to work.

Somehow, everything today feels anticlimactic.