The Breadbin

How long before every day is just another day?

Independent grocers in Toronto are fighting for the right to remain open September 7, Labour Day. They argue that the city bylaw specifically exempts businesses that sell "prepared food" from having to close on statutory holidays.

Every full-serve grocer and many of the discount chains sell "prepared food".

Mark my words. This will spread, both geographically and throughout the year, until every day is just another day.

The perception of the company I work for is that it would invent new hours of the day for the express purpose of keeping its stores open. At least as far as my store is concerned, this is not true: we close earlier than any other store in our district. And although we opened on the Civic holiday--which is, contrary to very popular misconception, not a holiday, I was actually paid stat holiday pay for that day for the first time in my career.  (There will be an upcoming post on how my employer is very di…

Few people understand me.

AND THAT'S OKAY.

Fewer still accept me for who I am.

AND THAT'S OKAY.

Even fewer care.

AND THAT'S OKAY.
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I have said, and meant, that I love people to whatever extent is permissible, no less but certainly no more.  My actions haven't always aligned with those words. Out of loneliness borne of depression (or maybe depression borne of loneliness, I still haven't quite chicken-and-egged that), I've pressed a smidgen too hard, more than once, leading people to distance themselves, sometimes subtly and sometimes much less so. I have chosen to interpret this as their rejection of me. Ironic, since it's actually my rejection of them. It's me trying to make them into something they're not, rather than being happy with who they are.

It's funny, you know. Over the length of my marriage, any time tensions have risen, it's almost invariably been my fault. (Call me submissive or a pussy if you want: it…

Link to one of my favourite comedy routines...

So the people who hacked Ashley Madison and threatened to release their client list have made good on their threat.

"Made good." The glee has been palpable. I've shared in it myself. Cheaters deserve to be outed, right? And they deserve whatever they get. I said as much not even a month ago, and I stand by what I said. Of course.

But maybe...

There are over twelve hundred email addresses with .sa suffixes on that list. The penalty for adultery in Saudi Arabia is death by stoning for married people and  a hundred lashes for unmarried people. Homosexuality merits a death sentence (and at least one Saudi Arabian claims to have used Ashley Madison for hookups with men while studying in the United States).

Now, you can ridicule these people for naively believing they and their data would remain forever anonymous. But...the death penalty? A hundred lashes (which probably works out to the same thing, more often than not)? For adult…

Please pardon the introspection. These blog posts are therapeutic, and a couple of people have asked me for an update. It's a good opportunity to take stock.

I'm one week into my antidepressant. That's far from enough to have fixed me...but it is enough to have made a noticeable (but extremely hard to articulate) difference.

It was, you'll pardon me, a shitty week...the kind of week that would have sent me careening way downhill without these pills. Three sets of plans fell through in three days. That happened entirely too often over the past year, and it always set me to brooding...especially if I was the one who made the plans. I took it personally, as a rejection, and then blew it out of all proportion. Logically, I knew, and know, that it's pretty much never about me, but logic simply doesn't register when you're depressed. Either everything is about you, and it all sucks, or nothing is about you because you don't matter, never did and never will.

I…

Nice writeup here about how polyamory is becoming more visible, marred only by the description of polyamory as "ethical cheating". Cringe. Cheating means breaking agreed-upon rules, not abiding by your own set.
That aside, though, it's nice to see generally positive articles in the mainstream media. USA Today is about as un-obscure as media gets.

Pity about that comment section, though.

It's really nasty: worse than most I've seen, and that's saying something. The arguments advanced against polyamory are the usual: we are all sefish, narcissistic cheating commitment-phobic moral degenerates and walking cesspools of sexually transmitted diseases.

Ugh. So many willful misconceptions. As usual, I've waded in to try and set some things straight. I doubt I'll get anywhere, but the person I am demands I try.

The person I am right now is depressed, and I got to thinking I should set something straight here in the Breadbin as well. The depression I am current…

Is this okay? Is it really?

The number of people who say "yes, it's perfectly fine, lighten up" in the comments is truly astonishing. People? I meant men. The number of men who think that walking up to a random woman and kissing her without warning is completely acceptable...I simply can't believe it.

Ask Eva: most of my more, shall we say, "extreme" beliefs and behaviours have some grounding in childhood experience. I've said, for instance, that I never climbed a tree because I knew I would fall out of said tree and break my spine. That's true, as far as it goes. What you don't know is that I watched a kid at Cub camp do just that.

There was a really cool treehouse there. It had three, or maybe four levels, each one a good fifteen feet above the next, connected with makeshift wooden ladders. The view from the top was amazing. I know this because I climbed up there. Very, very carefully I climbed up there, with people laughing me all the way up…

We are in election mode.

My readership numbers tank whenever I get political. I understand that. Politics seems boring and irrelevant to a large number of people; to another subset of people, nothing I say is going to sway them from their candidate of choice. A third set already agrees with me, and...well, there is no other set.

So why bother?

Because like everything else, I take my politics personally.

I am a creator, a consensus-builder, and a rank idealist, that last to a fault. People have often called me naïve, and that's the one criticism that, for whatever reason, I'm able to shake off relatively easily. Sometimes my idealism backfires on me. Sometimes it doesn't. I still find it preferable to a philosophy of cold and cynical pragmatism.

I believe in power with, not power over; that people are fundamentally good (though often shortsighted) and that the word "profit" has more than one meaning. And furthermore--here's where the idealism comes out--I beli…

The Breadner household has made the move away from satellite television and to Apple TV.

This move has been a long, long time coming: we're not what you'd call early adopters. Frankly, I wasn't sure it would ever come...for many years, Eva has been wedded to the convenience of one bill for all our media and telecommunications...and for just as long, there wasn't a simple option to access the shows she likes to watch.

Enter Netflix, and especially Crave TV and Shomi.

Between the three of them, plus a streaming site for my baseball and hockey needs, pretty much everything we'd care to watch is available when we want to watch it, commercial free, and...oh, hell, this is old news to you, right? You've saved yourself thousands of dollars over the years by cutting the Bell and Rogers out of your life.

We've had a great-great-grandfathered unlimited internet plan at a not-too-obscene price: we'd been told that having three  services through Bell kept that Inte…

I'm back. Much sooner than expected. And for good this time.


Last week, I had an attack of despair. As usual, it came out of nowhere, for no discernible reason: there is nothing in my life remotely deserving of such a black emotion. Nevertheless, these attacks come on with disturbing regularity. All the happiness drains out of my world as if somebody pulled a plug. If if it goes on long enough, other things start to swirl down the drain as well: motivation first, then energy, and eventually, in a very real sense, my consciousness: I start living on autopilot, barely engaged with the world around me, with little sense of how I got so low and even less sense of how to climb out. And yet I always have climbed out, aided by kind words from friends.

I shouldn't need kind words from friends. Nobody should need them, and I loathe myself because I seem to. Even more so since they have a half-life of two or three weeks...even less when I sense rejection on any front.

I understand that …