The Job: time to take "stock".

Another "let's all hate Wal-Mart" thread is going on in Reddit as I write this.

Hating on Wal-Mart is a popular thing to do. I've indulged in it once or twice myself (that last link, one of my better blogs, will take you into "my" store, six years before it became "my" store, for the 2009 incarnation of the anniversary sale that's currently running--not to mention a Sobeys store I had yet to work at in 2009 as well).

I have worked for the big blue behemoth for five and a half months now...just long enough to have some genuine insights into the culture of the place.

I should tell you first off that the Wal-Mart Supercenter I work at is atypical, just as the FreshCo I worked at  is atypical. Both stores have a solidly middle-class clientele, a far cry from the stereotypical 'trailer trash' Wal-Mart (and FreshCo, for that matter) customer base.  My Wal-Mart has two other peculiarities: As Supercenters go, it's quite small; and it's also one of five Canadian 'inbox' Supercenters, which for the customer means the grocery part of the store is front and center as you come in. (Most Wal-Marts keep their groceries towards the back of the store, "shielding" them with higher-margin general merchandise and clothing. Not in our store.)

Wal-Mart Canada pays its full timers a trifle below industry standard. Coming from a place which paid significantly above that standard, it's been something of an adjustment. There are, however, quite a few perks which many of my colleagues take for granted, but which are unique (or nearly so, in my experience) to Wal-Mart.

The biggest perk is the ten percent discount on virtually everything, immediately upon hire. You AND YOUR SPOUSE get ten percent off everything in your cart (virtual or real) so long as it isn't a clearance item. Ad-matched stuff included. It may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly. I think I have saved over two hundred dollars so far. By comparison, I saved the point equivalent of less than eighty dollars in three years of working for Sobeys: substantially less, when you consider just how much I had to overpay to buy some of the things I bought at Sobeys.

Other benefits (which, again, are sadly taken for granted by many) include free meals on stat holidays; popsicles and other treats seemingly whenever the mood strikes; a safety program which rewards accident-free days with successively more extravagant gestures (thirty days without associate or customer accident gets each employee a coupon for a free coffee and muffin at our McDonald's, and if we manage to go a year without such an issue we'll get a steak and lobster dinner catered by management...they almost made it one year, from what I heard).

But maybe the nicest thing about working for Wal-Mart is the recognition for a job well done. I have been both privately and publicly thanked, with real sincerity, more frequently in the short time I've been there than in the preceding fifteen years. I can only speak for my store, but at the same time it does seem to be imbued into the Wal-Mart culture: "Respect for the Individual" is a core value, and they live it there.

 They make a conscious effort at a diversified workforce: our associates are of all ages and every colour under the rainbow. Our backroom manager is female; as is about half our stocking crew on overnights. That's rare in retail, for reasons I've never really understood.

Only once have I been given more work than I could accomplish...and that was acknowledged before I started and my efforts were roundly praised afterwards (even though I felt terrible leaving the department in the state I had to leave it in). If I had been permitted to work straight through my shift, without breaks or lunch (as is -- cough, cough -- expected in more than a few other places) I might have actually got it all done. But you MUST take breaks at Wal-Mart. It's an absolute requirement, part of a health and safety focus that they take extremely seriously. You can trust your food hasn't been sitting outside the cold chain at Wal-Mart...not something I can say for other places. I miss not being able to listen to my music at night--that's part of the safety thing, they think I might not hear somebody coming by with a pallet, or the Zamboni cleaning the floors. (Wal-Mart doesn't contract out its floor cleaning: its own staff does it.)

Most of the assistant managers have spent some time on the night shift, as has my department manager, so there is a little more respect for what we have to deal with than I have found elsewhere. There is still some grumbling about days vs. nights "not doing anything", but grumbling is all it is. I've seen that fester into civil war.

I'm going to miss profit share this year (not eligible until I've been there twelve months) which is a real shame, because our store is going (growing) great gangbusters.

Okay, so those are the positives, from an employee perspective. There are a couple of negatives that are unique to Wal-Mart. I will keep them as diplomatic as I can.

One, the turnover on all shifts is ridiculous. This is partly generational (there are, sadly, more than a few younger people who seem surprised that they are expected to work at work)...but only partly, and Wal-Mart doesn't do much to mitigate it. My store hires in waves, three or four times a year. Each wave corrects what's been let to slip for lack of labour, and all runs well until attrition sets in; then, for a month or six weeks you're increasingly expected to do more with less until the next wave comes along.

I can't really tell what's worse, because other chains hire fewer people, pay them better, but give them crazy workloads all the time. From a business perspective, you want to keep your employees. Training costs money; training over and over again wastes it. For the customer...Wal-Mart simply needs more staff, I think we can all agree on that. An employee can be hard to find.

The other thing that's unique to Wal-Mart is paradoxical. In one sense, we are micromanaged to an absolutely crazy degree, and in another sense we are largely left to fend for ourselves. Every night, for some reason, we are reminded that we are to "zone" (face) the store, as if we didn't do that last night and every other night we've worked there (or anywhere else in retail). The maintenance crew is reminded at least three times each night that they have to pull empty pallets off the sales floor before the store opens, as if that wasn't a basic part of their job.
But if you want specific feedback on how you can improve your performance...good luck with that. I haven't even been told what expected performance is for my position, let alone where I stand, statistically, in relation to it. (I have a good idea, having been in charge of monitoring night crew performance in my previous job, but still...)

No, here's micromanagement for you: The break times at Wal-Mart are rigid, and it's my job to call them. 1 am break, 3am lunch, 5am break. Unless we're receiving a truck, there is maybe a minute or two leeway given, that's it. I didn't fully appreciate this when I started--I was used to not taking breaks at all, and if I had to, doing it when it was, you know, convenient--and my manager gave me crap for finishing off six cases of a frozen pallet before calling lunch. "I've got associates milling around here, they all know it's lunchtime, we're losing productivity, because you haven't called lunch."  
I stared at her. I couldn't help it.
"If they know it's lunchtime, why don't they just...GO PUNCH OUT FOR LUNCH?"
"Because you haven't called it."

I am not making that up.


I've been waiting now nearly two months to activate my Individual Development Plan and get my career going, and there never seems to be a good time to do it. I'm not allowed to stay after a shift, or come in on my night off, and there's too much to do on shift each night. Or my manager (the only one who can review my plan) is on holidays.  Or she's just too busy in some other part of the store. As soon as this current sale is over, I'm going to respectfully but forcefully demand we get it in gear. It's not that they don't want me advancing...it has something to do with that chronic understaffing problem I mentioned earlier.

Wal-Mart announces store sales and comp sales to last year twice a day...anyone who cares to listen will hear what, in every other chain I've worked in, is considered highly confidential information. This is intended as part of a team building exercise, to foster care in your own store. For most of us, it works. For some...really not. Just like the Wal-Mart cheer, which is almost universally hated online but which, viewed through the proper mental lens, is a great way to increase team spirit:



(We add our store slogan--"a foot in the city, a foot in the sticks" and also add, at the end, "Waddaya wanna be? ACCIDENT-FREE!")

I love leading this thing. It imparts sooo much energy.

______________

Their computer system looks like something out of the 1970s but it is immensely powerful, far beyond what other chains have. I can check whether another store has a given item using my handheld computer; I can also tell you where exactly that items is located in my backroom/cooler/freezer, to within three square feet. The annoying corollary: at other stores, if I bring a skid of overstock back to my cooler, the routine goes like this:

• find an empty spot on the shelf
• put an item in that spot
• repeat as necessary

At Wal-Mart, I must

• go get a printer and ensure it's loaded with blue label paper
• turn it on 
• wait for 3.6 eternities for it to boot up
• log into my handheld
• sync it to the printer by scanning a label on the reverse side of said printer (it often doesn't read properly so you have to log out of your handheld, log back in, repeat and perhaps enter the printer code, which looks something like ACA40DC50A, manually)
• page through some menus to get to "Bin Merchandise" (shelves are called "bins" at Wal-Mart for some reason nobody has ever explained to me)
• NOW find an empty space on a shelf
• scan a label on the shelf corresponding to the "bin" I want to put the item in
• scan the item itself (most of the dairy and frozen stuff has a label on the outside of the box, but you have to rip open cheese and a few other things to scan an individual unit)
• print a label
• mark on that label with a Sharpie marker the number of units in a box (even though it's already ON  the label!)
• mark the expiry date in the upper right corner of the box you are "binning"
• affix the label to the upper left corner
• put the item away
• repeat the last eight steps as necessary

Actually stocking something from the cooler doesn't require a printer, but God help you if you just grab it off the shelf and put it out, as I did my first night. You need that handheld and you have to "pick" your items out of the "bins"--scan the shelf code, scan the item, or alternatively pick from a list of what the computer thinks is needed, or create your own pick list.

What takes thirty seconds elsewhere might take closer to fifteen minutes at Wal-Mart. It's understandable out in the backroom proper, which seems to go for miles and which is three pallets high the whole way. But in my cooler, where I can at a glance see everything in it? Colossal waste of time.

That said, given proper data integrity (a problem anywhere computer systems exist), the system works remarkably well. I'd like to see more attention paid to out-of stocks--I've been trained to loathe "holes" on the sales floor--but I don't know as yet whether that's a computer failing, a personnel failing, or a little of both. I'm not encouraged to know this stuff. And I really want to. 

_______________

Some of the things I have berated Wal-Mart for in the past aren't viewed the same way when you work there. Anti-competitive practices are becoming de rigueur, for instance, in response especially to the fact that southern Ontario is one of the most competitive grocery markets on the entire planet. Much as you'd like to, you can't blame companies for taking every advantage they can manufacture.

Grocery chains are forever at war with their suppliers, trying to preserve a precarious balance between sales and margins. Because of sheer heft--Wal-Mart employs 2.2 million Canadians last I checked and serves, well, damn near everyone--they can and do set the market on many items.

I will grant you that Wal-Mart customer service is not where it needs to be. The same can be said of any generalist, really: how has your customer service been in Costco? Or Canadian Tire? Not to defend Wal-Mart here. During my training, when I was working days, I had an assistant manager actually chide me for taking a customer to an item she wanted...I was told I was supposed to just tell her what aisle it was in. I told that manager, as respectfully as I could, that I come from a customer service culture. She hasn't liked me much, since. Customer service is one of my strong suits and it's something I mean to fully mine when I finally get off graveyards in a year or two.

Labour: yes, they do pay pretty poorly below the level of store manager. I was making $20.03 an hour at Sobeys to do essentially the job I do now for a lot less.
Wal-Mart has a reputation of being viciously anti-union.  It's my contention that any workplace which treats its employees reasonably has no need of a union; the problem is that "reasonably" is subjective and in any case varies from store to store.  I would like to see a little bit of a pay boost to full time Wal-Mart staff in Canada, similar to what was granted in the United States last year. That's not just self-serving: I think the turnover merry-go-round would slow down with increased pay.

Many of the people there are wonderful: hard workers who are also friendly. I mean, I'm starting to actually make friends there, one of those things that still manages to surprise me every time it happens. They know I'm strange, and they accept me for it. Feels good.

In short, there's a lot to like and some things I can help to improve. And isn't that the ideal kind of job?

"He's Just A Kid..."

A 14 year old male is charged with arson, possession of an incendiary device and endangering human life after the Dollarama a couple of blocks from my home went up in flames the other day. The plaza housing this Dollarama was evacuated, surrounding streets were closed to traffic and area residents were told to keep their windows closed against billowing toxic smoke. (That store smelled poisonous as it was, I don't even want to imagine what it smelled like on fire.)

And some people think the 14-year-old should--well, yeah, I guess we have to punish him, but let's not be too harsh here because he didn't know any better.

Excuse me?

"Well, of course he would know fire is bad. But he probably had no idea of how fast the fire would spread".

Oh, okay. So he just wanted to set a little fire, maybe burn just one side of one aisle of the store. All righty, then.

"Healthy, well-adjusted 14-year-olds don't firebomb stores with people inside them."

No excrement, Mr. Holmes.

So  if he's not healthy and well-adjusted, we should adjust the penalty? Time off for abusive mother? Reduced fine due to absentee father?

And here's the thing. Yes, healthy, well-adjusted kids don't behave like this...to this degree. But supposedly healthy, allegedly well-adjusted MALE kids do enjoy destroying things. Destruction is celebrated in this culture for some reason. Watch Mythbusters: they get positively ebullient when they have a chance to blow something up. Hollywood blockbusters all too often involve wrecking buildings, cars, and anything else that might go boom real good. It's sickening...or at least I find it sickening.

Males, incidentally, comprise around ninety percent of arsonists. And eighty percent of drunk drivers, and 92% of serial killers, and 96% of child molesters...are we sensing a trend here?

Testosterone, supposedly. The real San Francisco treat. It seems to me like we can lay most of the world's problems at the feet of testosterone. I, apparently, didn't get much of it.


Meanwhile, we have this 14 year old kid.

Part of me wants to sit down with him, find out his five most favourite things in the world and burn them right in front of him. Part of me wants to fine his parents the full costs of fighting that fire. What I can not accept is this notion that he didn't know what he was doing. Maybe if he was seven. Maybe. Fourteen? He knew. He knew, and just didn't care.

Why I am so open about loving more

A couple of months ago, my father gently suggested to me that I am "too open" in my blogs about polyamory.  He was concerned that I was sharing details without permission, and to some degree that I was sharing details at all.

His first concern is unfounded. If a blog involves Eva in any substantive way, she reads it (or I read it to her)  before it goes live. In eleven years of blogging, she has yet to outright nix something, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she has suggested that I reframe a sentence. I've been married to her longer than I have been blogging. I know her, and our, boundaries.
And when others have made, or will make, an appearance in these blogs, the same principle applies. Any details I share here have been vetted and okayed.

There really haven't been that many details. I certainly haven't written anything, nor will I write anything of a prurient nature. Which is one of the points I want to make here.

It niggled at me, what my father said to me. Was I too open in some way? I started paying closer attention to my readership numbers, and I noticed something interesting. My "poly"-themed blog entries always attract more attention than my other posts...but they are also  the least commented upon. Any polyamory-themed articles, comics or the like that I share on Facebook are likewise never remarked upon (whereas most of everything else I share gets "likes" and comments, sometimes in abundance.

At first I wasn't sure what to make of this. People are obviously interested...but are they uncomfortable?

What prompted this post was someone asking for advice in r/polyamory, the polyamory subreddit (group) on Reddit. He had told his parents he and his wife were poly six months previous; as is often the case, one parent took it well and one didn't. Now he, his wife and her boyfriend were hoping to visit his parents, overnight and they absolutely forbade his wife to bring up, let alone bring, her boyfriend.  The mother did not want any reminders whatsoever of nonmonogamy. All three of them felt judged and attack.

You'll probably be happy to know the group consensus was that they should get a hotel room: asking his parents to accept an unrelated stranger who embodies the very thing that bothers them so much, is "a bridge too far". I agree, for what it's worth. At the same time, reading this and other 'coming out' stories where the entrusted person is acutely uncomfortable with "all that bedroom stuff"...it made me recall our own coming out, and some of the reactions we after explaining "multiple committed relationships with the knowledge and consent of all involved". "Oh, so you're swingers, then", said one relative, and...um...no. Really not. I honestly don't think I could be a swinger: it strikes me as objectification. If everyone consents to being objectified, who am I to say boo about it? But it's not for me.

A couple of other people reacted as if I had just spilled the details of some wild orgy: discomfort and thinly-veiled distaste. I had done no such thing. My sex life with or without Eva, and her sex life with or without me, is none of anybody's business. But our other relationships are important.

That's one of the things I want to stress. that IT'S NOT ABOUT SEX. I'll keep saying it over and over again until people process it. Sex may indeed be a byproduct of polyamory, the same way it's a byproduct of a romantic monogamous relationship...but the relationship OUTSIDE the bedroom is central. Those parents weren't denying a sexual plaything when they said "not under my roof!" They were denying an entire relationship. Two of them, really, since the husband was close friends with his metamour.

Yesterday, Eva and I went grocery shopping. Such a mundane thing, and yet every time we go it's an echo of our first date. We enjoy shopping together. After that, I went to bed and she went and did some housework at her boyfriend's place. Again, mundane; again, nevertheless invested with love. Those two things were the highlights of her day. You'll note the lack of screaming orgasms, whips and chains and silk handkerchiefs. Not that I'd tell you if any of that was there, but in this case I can tell you it wasn't.

So one of the reasons I'm open about polyamory is because I want to dispel the misconceptions that we're hanging from the chandeliers. We love, just like you do. We just love more than one person at a time.

Some people were concerned about "keeping score", and the fact I haven't found a partner to "balance" Eva's. Admittedly, I was concerned with that too, at first. My efforts at finding a serious partner were halfhearted at best, though: I think everybody would agree I had a whole lot of self-work to get through before I could even think of going forward with that.

I have a fairly large number of girl friends (note the space between those two words). I'm reasonably certain each one knows about the space between those two words. Some of them I love very much, but for one reason or another (usually but not always the fact that they are in committed monogamous relationships), the space is and will be preserved.

It's yet another parallel that polyamory has with being gay. Gay people often fantasize about 'turning' their straight friends...and if they're smart, fantasizing is where it begins and ends. Gay or poly (or gay and poly!), you have to "date within your species." Any other course involves broken hearts and possibly other broken parts of the body.

Another reason I am open about "this poly thing" is related to the first one I gave. Poly is normal. It doesn't seem normal to people not living it, but there is nothing objectionable about it. It's not cheating, it's not hurting anyone, and done properly it's incredibly enriching. I want people to see this life being lived, in all its quotidian boringness, because I want people to recognize polyamory as a viable option. Not necessarily for themselves--you will NEVER see me saying "hey, you should be poly!" outside my imagination--but in general.

A third reason is because polyamory is important to me. It resonates so very deeply with me on an emotional level...but it also seems very logical to me. There's no reason, outside of social conditioning, why we place artificial and arbitrary limits on how and whom we love. Why is it that only things can be "too good not to share"? Why can't people be that way?

I'm not sure if the reason I field so few comments on this is because people are uncomfortable, or if they just don't know what to say. Maybe they think they'll say something wrong, and offend me. Hey, say it wrong. Then at least we have something to edit.

Kim Davis

Canada is not a perfect country. The cost of living is crazy compared to the United States; the internet speed is pathetic and we pay through the nose for it; we can't (legally) get half the media or many of the products that Americans take for granted.
We have racism in spades up here, towards aboriginals instead of blacks, but it's here. I'll refrain from political comment since people are well aware of my views and polls suggest the current government has less than six weeks left in power.

No, Canada is not perfect. But we have a few things going for us. Gay people have been able to marry here since 2004 and next to nobody cares. Even if, hypothetically, Kim Davis was a Canadian, she would have been quickly and quietly fired. That's because most of our municipal officials are hired, not elected. Political parties simply do not exist at the municipal level here. I believe this to be a good thing.

Religion in Canada is a private matter, which in my opinion is just as it should be. It is remarkable to me as a Canadian that the freedom to practice your own religion, as guaranteed in the American First Amendment, so often magically morphs into the freedom to make OTHERS practice your religion.

My beefs with organized religion are every bit as well known as my political views, and I won't repeat them here either. Suffice it to say that what is supposed to be a unifying force is almost always instead divisive.

When Kim Davis first reared her head, I sighed. Rather loudly. It was inevitable--preordained, you might say--that someone would take her stand, go to jail (read: be martyred) for it, and come out famous. I didn't imagine she'd look quite so much like Annie Wilkes from Misery, mind you.

As has been discussed ad nauseam, the logical thing to do when your religious beliefs suddenly conflict with your job is to find another job. Many county clerks did so in the wake of Obergefell. One county clerk's office in Tennessee lost its entire staff. I respect these people who have stood by their convictions without inconveniencing others.

Not quite as much as I ridicule their convictions, of course. I do understand that beliefs inform actions, and that Kim Davis was acting in good faith, as it were, to refuse to issue marriage licenses in Rowan County, Kentucky. But she and those like her who are so ardently against same-sex marriage are incredibly selective with their Bibles:



And yes, I'm fully aware there are other verses condemning homosexuality. You may be interested to know that the word commonly translated as 'homosexual' in the New Testament -- the Greek arsenokoitai, which even LOOKS like 'ass-coitus', is a word coined by Paul, or someone pretending to be Paul...it doesn't appear in any Greek manuscripts before 1 Timothy (which may itself have been the work of a second-century forger). In any event, it's far from settled as to what arsenokoitai actually means. We do know that Jesus never uttered a word about gay marriage or gay sex, and the religion, last I looked, is called Christianity, not Paulianity. Paul never even met Jesus except in a dream, and he doesn't seem to know much about his Lord and Saviour. How ironic, though, that Paul should be credited with this verse:

Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. (Romans 13:2, NIV).

Kim Davis, take note.

 Exegesis is hard. Most Christians--most anythings--don't bother with critical examination of their holy texts: many don't even read them, beyond a few verses here and there.

You may wonder why I've made such an exhaustive study of this stuff. I'm not gay. But I have gay relatives and friends -- one of whom has been married almost as long as I have been. And it didn't escape my notice, back when I was a Christian, that many of that persuasion seem to be inordinately interested in three things: the beginning of the world, the end of the world, and sex, specifically gay sex. It seemed only fitting that I should determine my own opinion on these weighty matters.

(Briefly: I believe Genesis is a tribal creation myth, not universal; that neatly sidesteps all the facile 'who did Cain marry?' digs. I hold a Preterist view of Revelation, which is to say I believe its prophecies were fulfilled millennia ago. This last, Wikipedia informs me, is probably a product of my Catholic upbringing.)

And as to gay marriage?

There is no rational reason why two (or more, for that matter) consenting adults shouldn't be allowed to get married. There is no rational reason why anyone should feel threatened by same-sex marriage, or why the law that formerly made it illegal in the U.S.  was called the Defense of Marriage Act. There is no rational reason why Kim Davis -- four times married, adulterer, mother of twins conceived with her third husband while she was married to her first -- should be anyone's defender of the "sanctity" of marriage or anything else.

 But America is not a rational country. If it were, it wouldn't shrug off the weekly gun massacres, would it?

For better and worse, the United States of America is a nation based on emotion. "Energy in motion" is often a good thing, and always powerful: it has created the first global superpower, after all. But "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is a lovely sentiment until your happiness conflicts with somebody else's. Or worse, a whole class of somebody elses. Canada's unofficial motto is 'Peace, Order and Good Government", which is bland, boring...and rational. That's our national character.

Kim Davis has stirred a great deal of emotion, pro and con. I believe this was her intent, to a large degree. Stirring emotion in the United States can earn you a meal ticket for life, if you play your cards right. And she has, God love her (ahem). First, renounce your sinful ways (the public loves a redemption story). then take a moral stand on behalf of a group that believes it's persecuted because group membership is declining at the rate of more than one percentage point a year. (There is no authentic Christian persecution in a land where Christianity is still the dominant religion. There are only minorities seeking fair and equal treatment. But religious mindset is odd that way: it frames others as heathens and barbarians, and it manifests everywhere: politics, sports, musical tastes...)

At any rate, Davis has already become a celebrity.  Guest spots on Fox News await her, perhaps a full-fledged show. There will be at least one book written (probably ghostwritten) by her; there will be talk (if there hasn't been already) of her running for the Republican nomination in 2020. (I honestly haven't looked and don't care to). And she'll never have to work again, much less see any of those sinful gays. Uncloseted ones, at least.

Yep. Sure glad I live in Canada. Our government, as odious as I find it of late, at least hasn't seen fit to tie itself in knots over two people tying a knot.

Slut-Shaming

This blog was going to be one thing, and it turned into something else, presto-change-o, before I'd even finished researching it.

I was going to write a withering condemnation of those people who criticize women for exploring their sexuality. Then I actually sat down to read, and read up on, my source material...and I found myself mentally criticizing a woman, not for exploring her sexuality, but for how she went about doing it.

Here is a link to an article by Robin Rinaldi. She is a woman who wrote a memoir called The Wild Oats Project, about her year of open marriage. It should be noted that her open marriage has very little in common with my own. For one thing, she unilaterally initiated hers when her husband had a vasectomy (she had wanted children; he refused; she decided she'd have lovers instead, a leap of logic I don't quite understand).

She had at least twenty lovers over the course of that year, and from the sounds of it she had very little emotional attachment to any of them (though she tried to dress up her encounters as a journey towards "feminine empowerment"). Indeed, she had very little emotional attachment to anything, including herself, and she seems to have emerged from her year-long experiment more lost than she was going into it. Which is saying something.

Rinaldi couldn't bear to leave her husband, but she very much wanted to hurt him. He was, she writes, physically and emotionally lacking...and she goes into quite a lot of detail on that score. I feel bad for the guy, and I seriously wonder how they managed to last eighteen years. Needless to say, the marriage didn't see out the 19th year, though it is unclear whether all her extramarital sex or her attitude towards her marriage is more to blame.

In short, Robin Rinaldi is not even close to a role model for a new marital paradigm. I feel vaguely ill just reading reviews of her memoir: I think I'll give the actual manuscript a pass.

If she and her husband had discussed this at length before embarking on it; if her motives were more pure and had less to do with revenge for a life denied her; if she had concentrated as much on the "marriage" part as the "open" part...I'd be a lot more sympathetic to the hatred she has reaped online.

And she has reaped a LOT of hatred. Some of the emails and texts she has received:

filthy whore, I hope you caught the clap

you are one nasty skank ass. nothing but a cum dumpster. worthless with nothing to offer a man but a hole.

Sorry, @Robin_Rinaldi, in my world there is a word for “happily” married women who spend a year bedding many men and that word is #slut so how does it feel being a worthless degenerate? 

… hows it feel knowing your family line will die with you and you have no place in the world? hows it feel knowing you probably got herpes from the last 20th guy you slept with? its good youre already aging and your looks (which werent that great to begin with) are slooooowly fading away. soon youll be nothing but a whithered husk of a woman, sitting in your rocking chair unable to move without shit dripping down your ass, and wishing you had grandchildren to tell them about the time you were a total slut and made your beta weakling husband cry in his bed ... hope you get AIDS
That's ugly, isn't it?

Here's the thing, and it's the one overarching point she makes that I must defend, vigorously: women get emails and texts like this JUST BECAUSE THEY ARE WOMEN.  Never mind an open marriage: if you're a woman and you dare to say out loud that you enjoy sex with ONE partner,  the "slut" epithet will be sure to follow. If you are a woman and you suggest that women are not portrayed realistically or fairly in video games, you will get many, many rape and death threats and somebody will make a video game in which the object is to beat you up. If you are a woman, period, a man has probably called you a slut, a whore and a skank.

Geoffrey Chaucer used the word "sluttish"  to describe a slovenly MAN in 1386...but by 1402 the word "slutte" referred exclusively to a "dirty, untidy, or slovenly" woman. Kitchen maids often dirtied themselves in the course of their jobs, and so came to be called "sluts" (no pejorative): Samuel Pepys, in his Letters (1664),  said his maid Susan

"is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily, doing more service than both the others and deserves wages better.”

There is absolutely no sexual connotation to this usage at all. It persisted into the 1800s, and has all but died out today.

My etymological sources are screamingly silent on how a word that originally meant "ditty" or "ugly" woman should come to mean a woman with more than one sexual partner. It's one of those many self-evident "truths" that I don't quite get. Why should sex, which is intensely pleasurable, not to mention intensely spiritual, be something dirty or ugly?  Perhaps it has something to do with sexually transmitted diseases. It's worth noting here that Robin Rinaldi, in her year of living promiscuously, did not contract an STI. (And she's the kind of tell-all writer who would have told if she had.)

One of the iconic handbooks to open relationships is called The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy. It defines a "slut' as "a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." I like this meaning: I think it's a compliment, even high praise.

Contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing 'dirty' about sex, even lots of sex, even with different partners--provided you take precautions of one kind or another. Safer sex is the number one rule or boundary in polyamorous relationships and it is all but ubiquitous in other forms of ethical nonmonogamy such as swinging. Poly relationships  may progress to a point of trust wherein the partners will 'fluid-bond', but that's not how they generally start out.

Of course there's the double standard: men who have sex with many woman are called 'studs' by other men...and the derogatory words that women use for them, "cad", "rake", and "womanizer", are nowhere near as strong as "slut". This is because men have been culturally conditioned into believing that (a) they must have regular sex and (b) doing so is exerting power and control over their female partners. Women, by contrast, are supposed to "lie there and think of England", because sex is a "marital duty" and nothing whatever to get excited about.

Bull.

In the 1990s, I  met, and loved, a couple of women who identified -- proudly -- as sluts. I'll never forget what one of them told me about the difference between male and female sexual pleasure. "You have an itch in your ear, and you stick your finger in there and give it a good scratch. Now, what feels better, your finger or your ear?"

Some day I'm going to write an essay on Can't Help But Fly (The Poly Song). There is more wisdom packed into this song than you'll find in many relationship books. For now, I'll just  cite this tiny snippet:

'cause there's no better way to love me than through honesty and trusting 
it's not indiscriminate fucking, it's indiscriminate loving

And 'indiscriminate loving' is NOTHING TO BE ASHAMED OF. For either gender.

Divorce

I've been thinking a fair bit about divorce, lately.

Not mine, I hasten to add. Eva is every inch still the "wife of my days,
the companion of my journey,
the friend to my life",
as our vows predicted and affirmed she would be. But all around me relationships are either teetering or outright collapsing, and it's a heart-wrenching thing to watch.

I am a child of divorce myself: a bitter, acrimonious divorce far too personal to detail that happened when I was five years old. My mother kept exhaustive scrapbooks of the first seven years of my life; some of the stuff written in them for the year 1977 I can actually recall on my own, while other things are best viewed through the prism of a relationship dissolving in a house full of acid.

I still vividly recall thinking...no, knowing...that it was my fault. My five-year-old brain was certain that I was a VERY BAD BOY. I was repeatedly told, of course, that I hadn't done anything to cause this, so I decided if it wasn't something I did, it had to be something I was. Which was ever so much worse. Done things could be undone, even at five I knew that. Things that were...how could you make them...not be? Things that weren't, like my parents, together...how could you make them be, again? I didn't understand.

On some level, I think, I never did fully outgrow that perceived rejection, despite the best efforts of my mother AND father AND stepfather. I say this not to assign blame (there being none to assign): divorce was quite simply the only reasonable course of action for my parents and once I was old enough to really appreciate that, I became, and remain, IMMENSELY glad they took that course. And there is absolutely no reason, based on how I was treated during and after, for me to have internalized "rejection". Nevertheless, I think I did.

In my prepubescent and early teenage years I was rejected by virtually every one I came in contact with, and that was my doing, or rather my being,  to a very large degree. Once the 'nerd' label was affixed, I couldn't seem to peel it off, so I decided I would be the nerdiest nerd in all of nerdom. The god of geekery, the sultan of spaz, the...you get the picture. Why was I so nerdy? Well, to escape the drama playing out in my house when I was a little kid, I had two choices: I could go outside, or I could go upstairs, to my room where my books were. That was no contest. Outside was only one world. Each book was a world unto itself.

It all ties in.

Once I started to grow up -- way too late, considering I'm 43 now and I'm not entirely sure I've finished yet -- I gained a modicum of social grace and shed some of the shackles of the outcast. But I've always, always, been quick to feel rejected, unwanted, unneeded, unloved. Losing my job last year, for all my bluster about how I'm not my job, really sent that rejection-meter into the red zone. I mean, we're talking retail here. Retail, not rocket surgery.  I thought I was good at retail. ("It's a business decision", they told me. The store manager actually said "this is not because of anything you've done."

Yeah, right, I know how this goes.

That spiralled out. I suffered a very real, extremely painful rejection a couple of months later that took almost a year to get over, and since then I think everyone's been trying to walk on eggshells around me, which only breaks eggs. I had my own little pity-omelet going all year. Actually, an omelet that big is probably better called a full-fledged omel.

You'll be pleased to know I'm mostly quits with that thought pattern. I had an episode of it the other night and was right soundly rebuked for it...whereas even six weeks ago I would have taken the rebuke as its own rejection, this time I just shrugged, said to myself yeah, I guess I had that coming...and walked away.  I'm thinking at this point I can count on people to tell me when it's actually me, and if they don't, well...it isn't.

The pills really are helping, it's not my imagination. I was in a solid good mood all night last night. My step was light, I had a smile on my face that wouldn't go away, and I got a HELL of a lot of work done. I'm not naive enough to think it's all moonshine and rainbows from here on out, but I have noticed there is a floor to my lows, now. I don't sink near as low and when I do sink, my thoughts don't go into that corrosive loop that was so familiar and so exhausting.

------------------------

Divorce, though.

I ran across a story in today's National Post--evidently a reprint from here--about "conscious uncoupling" and the rise of the "divorce selfie". (God, I hate even typing that word 'selfie', but it's a word that defines an age.)

TL;DR:

"In all those scenarios, couples have essentially reimagined what divorce is: neither a tragedy nor a failure nor a source of shame, in their minds, but a natural, amicable point of transition. In the process, of course, they’re reimagining what marriage is, as well: a partnership that, counter decades of Western thought, is not necessarily all-important, all-fulfilling or immutable. "

I am of two minds about this.

It's pointlessly antagonistic, almost in the way so many divorces are pointlessly antagonistic, to call this new trend "a celebration of failure". How many marriages do you know of that are just struggling along, without any joy or passion in them? Are those marriages "successful"? I'd say no, and I'd say it emphatically. It is very common in our society to equate longevity with success. Here's another perspective (click to embiggen):

Kudos to a couple who can separate amicably, being true to themselves and recognizing their life's paths no longer align.

Pity about the kids, though.

No matter how you spin it, divorce is hard on children. "Shared custody" isn't quite like being able to get a hug from Mommy in the living room and another from Daddy in the kitchen. From guilt to powerlessness to anger, the feelings kids go through mirror their parents' and are amplified, the way everything is when you're a child.  Which isn't to say parents with kids should not divorce; that's not what I am saying at all. But while you should never stay married "for the sake of the children", you should certainly make every effort to stay parents for their sake. Which means being civil when the kids are present. Which means not badmouthing the other parent to your kids ("you're just like your father!" was the worst epithet my mother could hurl at me, and it wasn't until I was 28 that I could give that 'insult' the response it deserved: "Thank you.") Which means making every effort to be in your kids' lives as much as you can. You may not owe your wife anything (beyond a hell of a lot of money, that is)...but you owe your kids. Big time. If you feel you don't...listen to this:



There is something to say for love, even after it has curdled. "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." And hold those kids tight.

Is Canada a Refuge, Still?

More than four million refugees of the Syrian civil war have fled their country since the civil war began five years ago. It's the largest movement of people since World War One, and Europe is overwhelmed. Greece alone has had more than 800,000 people seek asylum by some counts.
And things like this keep happening: getting out of the immediate chaos is only the first hurdle for refugees. All too often they either die in the attempt to seek a better life...or they're turned away.

I've been hearing for years about how Canada has a "moral obligation" to confront ISIS. Strangely, we don't seem to have any moral obligation to confront their handiwork.

I think we do. I think Canada should be taking as many of these refugees in as possible.

I still remember every minute of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics opening ceremonies. Do you remember this part?

"I came to Canada as a refugee. Forty-five years later,  for me, Canada is a refuge, still."
--Joe Schlesinger, testimonial, Pier 21 museum, Halifax

Bring this up online and the reaction is immediate, hateful, and grounded in delusion. Here's one example:

"we can't even support our own pensioners yet we'll take in tens of thousands of these people and give them housing and thousands of dollars per month"

This is flat wrong. Refugees get money based on provincial social assistance (welfare) rates--if they have no funds of their own--plus a one-time start-up grant that's capped at $905. (Source) Hardly 'thousands of dollars'.

It's sad, but not surprising. People tend to VASTLY overestimate the amount of money governments spend on things that do not directly benefit them. Foreign aid is a good example: When Americans were asked what percentage of the government budget goes to foreign aid, the median answer was around 25%. The reality? About 1%.

Think about that a minute.

The same thing holds true for welfare fraud. Everybody claims to know a guy who knows a guy living high on the hog on the state's dime, but the actual amount of welfare fraud in study after study is found to be between 1 and 3%.

How many refugees does Canada accept? The total is between ten and fourteen thousand a year...out of an estimated 16.7 million refugees, in a country with more than 34 million people and a declining birthrate. A drop in the ocean.

How we can stand idly by in the midst of a crisis like the one continuing to unfold in Syria utterly baffles me. It's not as if we don't have the space in this country. Or the money. Or the shared humanity.

Here We Go...

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 different from how it is perceived.)

I believe, with all of my heart, that everybody should work retail at some point in their lives. The empathy quotient in the world would rise considerably. As it is..well...
 
The refrigeration systems in grocery stores have an uncanny ability to break down at ten a.m. on Christmas Day. And if you happen to be in the store at ten in the morning on Christmas Day, I have it on excellent authority that you will hear the phone ringing off the hook. If you pick up that phone, you will be greeted with "What time do you open?" "Why aren't you open?" "I only need a couple of things, please open your store."
 
On Christmas Day.
 
The funny thing is, if the store actually did open Christmas Day, it would hardly see any traffic at all. But that doesn't matter. The people who do come in feel entitled to shop when they want, where they want, employee time off be damned.

"Maybe the stores should be open," you're thinking, "but employees should have the option to work, or not, with no reprisals if they don't." Yes, that would work. Except when you're laid off two weeks after a stat holiday you declined to work on, you'll be told it was a "business decision",  and you won't have any proof otherwise.

"Competitive pressures", we're told. Except like everything else, grocery stores are now competing with the online world, which never closes. There really ought to be limits to convenience, I believe. If you need that salad or that salad spinner that badly, plan your week accordingly. Don't tell me you can't spare the time in your busy life, not when you look at a screen for twenty or more hours a week.

I am not religious in the slightest, but I wouldn't mind overmuch if we turned the clock back to a time when Sunday shopping was illegal. There's something to be said for a day of rest, especially in this consumerist culture. But that won't happen. Indeed, the very concept of "rest" is seen as a weakness nowadays. If somebody tries to bring a pill to market that eliminates or greatly reduces the need for sleep, I'm stating here for all of you to see that I will do my utmost to murder that person.  

I work to live. I don't live to work.

A Few Truths

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.
---------------------------

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's still true.) It doesn't feel like that in the heat of the moment, of course. But if I'm able to take ten steps back from the situation (and pry my eyes open--most of the time Eva's frustration at me is a product of glued-shut eyes), I will realize yet again that I am the cause of whatever is happening around me.

It's a vital lesson. It's something I know intellectually, but need to be forcefully reminded all too frequently. I AM THE CAUSE OF MY OWN DRAMA. Nothing "just happens". As my parents always said, "life is what you make it". It's all too easy to forget I am a creator.

This holds true with depression as well. My personality is susceptible to it. I've known that since puberty, if not before. By now I know the chinks in my armour that it seeks and exploits. The biggest one, by far, is the belief that the people who do not understand me, accept me, or care for me matter.

I know where that belief came from: a need to be needed. I have no idea why I allowed it to become as strong as it did. Somehow I managed to get to a point where the people who don't understand, accept or care mattered to me at least as much as the people who do. And that's no way to live a life.

I am not responsible for how clearly my messages are received, only for how clearly I send them. If I have sent as clearly as I can but my message of love is garbled into something it's not...the solution is not to try harder, but to accept and move on. Without feeling rejected. Without feeling worthless.

If I try to engage a Russian speaker in conversation using English, I'm not going to get anywhere. That's not my fault, or the Russian's fault. There's no fault. It just is. It won't help to speak loudly and slowly, or even to use simpler (English) words. I can simply accept that this Russian doesn't speak my language and move on in search of people who do.

While I'm at that, I need to remember that I AM SUFFICIENT UNTO MYSELF. This is a truth I set aside somewhere a year ago, and forgetting this has contributed mightily to the depressed state I have existed in.

Take...right now. I have two days off. (Nights, actually, but we won't quibble).  My standard approach to time off over the past year has been to wait for somebody to fill it, then feel terrible when that didn't happen. (And before I got my job, I was off every day...)
Oh, I wasn't just sitting here waiting for the phone to ring, by any means. I'm not quite that dense. : I'd often try and take an active role. "Let's get together", I'd say, and people would feel obligated  to agree. Not my intention at all, but it would come off that way, like they had to say yes for politeness' sake.  And so they'd (quite reasonably) bail, and I'd (quite unreasonably) feel miserable, forgetting both that I AM AT CAUSE and that I AM SUFFICIENT UNTO MYSELF.

My best friends, the people who understand, accept, and care without question--plans with them just sort of coalesce. What's more, I can go weeks, months, and in some cases years without ever doubting the friendship one iota. The next time I see them, the threads will be picked up as if they were never dropped.

THOSE are the people who matter. Knowing they are there gives me the security to fill my own free time up, without having to pester and bother other people to make time for me. The people who matter know that I am here for them, just as they are here for me. The people who don't...don't.

AND THAT'S OKAY.

Of course! But maybe...

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 adultery, let alone naivety?: Really?

ASHLEY MADISON DOES NOT VERIFY EMAIL ADDRESSES. So the data is suspect in some cases. Two other sites owned by the same company--one for "cougars" (older women seeking younger men) and another for 'sugar daddies'--ALSO had their client lists hacked and leaked. Neither site catered to cheaters, but the data will inevitably be conflated.

Furthermore, consider these cases:

• People who made an account for research purposes (social scientists of all sorts would have a field day);
• People who signed up out of curiosity, with no intent to actually use the site;
• People who may well have intended to cheat on their significant others, but decided not to and have since repaired or ended their relationship;
• People who created an account to try and catch a partner whom they suspected was cheating;
• Thousands upon thousands of 'scam' fake female profiles (which have nefarious purposes of their own that don't involve infidelity); 
• Poly people.

(NB: I do not have and have never had an account with Ashley Madison.) 

My first thought when I heard AM's client list had in fact been leaked was (of course) musical. If you're among my younger readers, you may never have heard "Escape" (The Pina Colada Song), the last #1 hit of the 1970s. It details the story of a married man seeking escape from marital boredom through the personals: the woman he pursues turns out to be his own wife. The song is pure cheese...but there are some real lessons about communication in there. 

From there it was a short hop skip and jump to wondering how many people like me may have signed up with Ashley Madison, which was founded in 2001. 

There are a dozen tiny poly-themed dating sites nowadays, probably more; also FetLife, which caters to anyone wanting anything, and OKCupid, which is easily the preferred online avenue for polyamorists. It wasn't always; polyamory is still a niche. But before OKCupid became poly-accepting, there were next to no online dating options for polyamorous people. And while polyamory is not about cheating, as I have said numerous times...the two are, often, the ethical and unethical sides of the same coin.

It turns out quite a few poly folks did sign up with AM with the full knowledge and consent of their partners. This leak will thus have no effect on their relationships...but it may well compromise their employment or some other aspect of their lives. There are a LOT of poly people who are not "out" in any meaningful way, because the stigma against this love style is just as strong (and in some cases, perversely, stronger) than the stigma against infidelity. 

Privacy is kind of like free speech...there seem to be many people who believe wholeheartedly in privacy so long as what's being kept private is something they agree with. I have to admit I fall into this category sometimes. It's occasionally useful for me to be 'of course! but maybe....'d' out of my sanctimonious little hidey-hole.

Is cheating itself ever justifiable? I'd have said no--I did say no--until I read this from Dan Savage. The whole thing is VERY much worth the read, but I will excerpt the part most relevant to my point:

Take a woman who has two children with special needs, who has been out of the workforce for 15 years, and who is financially dependent on a husband who decided five years into their marriage that he was "done with sex" but refuses to allow her to have sex with anyone else. The marriage is good otherwise, she and her husband have an affectionate, low-conflict relationship, their kids are happy and well cared for, but sexual deprivation is driving her out of her mind and threatening both her marriage and her children's health and security. What would you advise this woman—whose letter, coincidentally enough, came in today's pile of e-mail—to do? I would advise her to do what she needs to do to stay married and stay sane. (And until this morning I might have advised her to join Ashley Madison.)

I'm sure there are a sizeable number of people in such situations... dead bedrooms are sadly common. I'd still argue forcefully that communication is the way to go and that hopefully  some sort of arrangement can be negotiated, but as Savage notes above, that doesn't always work. So I've been "of course! but maybe'd" into accepting that as a last resort, an affair may be preferable to other action.

Regardless, we must put aside our schadenfreude and consider: AM was compromised by self-proclaimed moralists. What other behaviours. completely legal yet perhaps frowned on by some segment of society, might be next in line to be exposed? Any of yours? Are you sure?

Relearning

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'm still brooding--it's only been a week, after all--but some...no, quite a bit of the sting has gone out of it.

Can I tell you what was scaring me about going on antidepressants? Bearing in mind I was depressed at the time? That I'd still be just as worthless, only I wouldn't care. I'd be this vacuously happy drooling idiot.

Yep, that's the kind of channel my mind always seemed to fall into. For over a year.

It's...really odd. I can still feel my brain trying to fall into that kind of destructive pattern, but it doesn't...quite...get there. I'm still fixated, still initially registering innocuous things as rejections...but instead of digging the hole deeper with every pass, I'm...more like sanding rough edges. Which is a huge improvement.

My next goal is to de-cling. I'm trying to normalize my use of social media, particularly Facebook. I should be able to go some reasonable amount of time between hearing from people without thinking they don't really like you, they were just pretending all this time. Stupid depressive thoughts, where the hell do they come from? They make no sense. I lived some 35 years without Facebook, and for a majority of those years I sure as hell didn't consider myself friendless. Furthermore, I KNOW I have friends, quite a few of them, very good ones. That's a fact proven many times over. I'm not alone in the world, far from it. I shouldn't have to talk to you, let alone see you, to remember that: I carry a part of each of you with me, and it's well past time I recognized that and cherished it properly.

Another thing I was worried about...because apparently I worry about everything...is that some weeks into the course of treatment, I would have a really, really bad day, the kind of day everyone has from time to time, and...how would I deal? Would it still register as a bad day? Is it bad to have bad days? Am I supposed to be happy happy happy all the time?

I think I'm starting to suss out the answers to those questions. Yeah, I'm still going to have really bad days every now and again...and those days will hurt...but they won't kill me from the inside out. I'll be able to process the hurt and move on. Because that's already started to happen.

Thank God. Or Trintellix.

Polyamory and Depression

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 currently being treated for settled in on me right around the time we embraced polyamory publicly.  I'm sure some people may be thinking that's no coincidence.

Correlation does not imply causation.

I've been depressed off and on, mostly on, for a little more than a year. As I have said several times, I have been poly far, far longer than that. Being poly, incidentally, does not mean having more than one partner, any more than being bisexual means you must date a man and a woman at all times. Check out the official definition, bold mine:

Polyamory means "loving more than one". This love may be sexual, emotional, spiritual, or any combination thereof, according to the desires and agreements of the individuals involved, but you needn't wear yourself out trying to figure out ways to fit fondness for apple pie, or filial piety, or a passion for the Saint Paul Saints baseball club into it. "Polyamorous" is also used as a descriptive term by people who are open to more than one relationship even if they are not currently involved in more than one. (Heck, some are involved in less than one.)

--from the alt.polyamory FAQ on USENET, first published May 29, 1992: I was a tiny, tiny part of that FAQ's vetting process. I and my then-girlfriend became regulars on that discussion group.

There have been ups and downs since I came out for the second time. Some of the downs have really stung...and may well have pushed me down a little further than I might otherwise have gone, at times. But being true to myself (and learning how best to model that authenticity) is a lifelong process having nothing to do with depression. Actually, I can state with confidence that publicly proclaiming who I really am has been a huge net benefit in many, many ways...and those ways will only multiply, like love itself, as time goes on.

My doctor: "So what makes you think you're depressed?"

"Well, I'm no longer thinking about suicide," I shot back, daring him to press his point. What makes you think is such a confrontational phrase. There are so many better ways to ask that question. Why do you feel you are depressed? Tell me about your depression. What are you experiencing, how are you coping, describe your symptoms...any of those sounds much better than what makes you think.

He didn't flinch at my short-lived venom. He's unflappable, for one thing, and for another I just don't have the energy to maintain anger. Or much of any other emotion, including sadness. I've had a joke response to 'how are you' for about ten years: 'alive'. For the past year, that hasn't been any kind of joke. I've just been...there. Sort of. Explaining this to him evidently convinced him that I don't just think I am depressed, I am actually depressed.

So.

I am taking an antidepressant for the first time in my life. I feel no shame in this at all: it's far too common, and if I can deal with people criticizing me because I love too much,  people criticizing me for addressing a chemical imbalance can go suck lemons.  It's early, early days yet, far too early to draw conclusions.  Along with some expected nausea, I've had a small uptick in mood owing, I think, to the fact I'm finally doing something concrete about my mental state.

Oh, I've been trying to write myself better for a year now--look back on this blog and all the tools are there to make my feel good about myself. Reading them even works, for a while. just as the heartfelt love and support I have been given works, for a while. I have noticed over the past month or two that the effect lasts for an appreciably shorter and shorter period of time. It is precisely because I am aware of nearly boundless love and support that I have sought medical aid in adjusting my state of mind to better reflect my life's circumstances.

I'm not going to give you a blow-by-blow account of my healing process from here on out. If it turns out this pill does not work for me, I will try another, and so on, until I feel more in tune with the world, more deserving of the love I receive, and much less clingy. You don't need to see the nuts and bolts of this process: I figure it should be self-evident in the kinds of things I do write about, and the (likely reduced) frequency at which I imagine I'll be writing them. The Breadbin is not going away, trust me on that, but I hope within a short period of time it will go back to what it was before June of last year: a pleasure cruiser instead of a life raft. 

In which much is confessed, and even more explained.

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.

The next day, Nameless went to climb up there himself. It had rained during the night and everything was still slick. He made the first step of the first ladder.

He didn't make the second.

His foot slid off the slippery wood at that exact crucial fraction of an instant when he had let go of the ladder to take his next step. He fell backwards with a grunt--not a yell, he was only a couple of feet off the ground, a grunt--and he landed flat on his back.

Not quite flat, as it turned out. There was this protruding rock, see. Barely enough to notice if you were scuffling along on the ground. If you fell on it just so, it would paralyze you for life.

Most people would view that as a one-in-a-million freak accident. Little Kenny viewed it quite differently. Little Kenny decided then and there that he would never climb anything ever again without a damned good reason.

------------

You're thinking I've gone way off topic. You're wrong. I just had to get up a head of writing steam, because what I'm about to write is very difficult.

1987

Grade nine. Oakridge Secondary School, London, Ontario

There is a hierarchy in high school. Everybody knows it. The 'minor niners' are at the bottom, almost without exception. When you are a member of a despised class of people, there is a very strong inclination to subdivide yourselves, to find the weakest among your number and prove that at least you're better than him.

I am, of course, him. I've been him since the first day of grade four, so it shouldn't be anything new or unexpected. Except it is. Because Oakridge kids are different.

No longer am I thrown into lockers, garbage cans, or toilets. Nobody has squashed my lunch, broken my glasses, or stolen my notebook...not that by now there's ever much in it. My notebooks were stolen so often the past two years that I've pretty much stopped using them entirely. No bullies here, not in the conventional sense.
What there are instead are snobs. Lots and lots and lots of them. I am judged inferior not because I wear glasses or because I weigh eighty pounds sopping wet but because my parents' occupations aren't up to snuff. I brown-bag my lunch every day...everyone else seems to buy theirs. The labels on my clothing are so, so wrong that I'd probably fare better showing up to school buck naked. By the standards of Oakridge S.S, I am a dalit--untouchable.

The shunning started pretty much the first day and it has continued, without exception. I have no friends. That's not unusual--I've had one over the last six years, three schools ago. He goes to Saunders now, and ironically, his parents decided after three years of close friendship that I wasn't his sort of people.
I'm nobody's sort of people now. This is made clear to me every day at lunchtime:  the people at whatever table I choose to sit at get up as one and scatter to the four winds. It's unnerving: like I have some kind of super ultra mega leaf blower, or rather, four of them. This can't be just because I'm not as upper-crust as the rest of these people. I don't know why they treat me this way. I've tried asking. Once.

"If you have to ask, you'll never know."

Well, that's helpful. NOT.

So I sit in class and lose myself in the lessons. I go to band (I'm learning to play baritone, which is a small tuba) and I lose myself in the music. Then I go home and lose myself in my books, like always.

I'm lost.

February. Valentine's Day. Or rather, Friday the 13th. I was hoping to dodge the dreaded VD this year by virtue of it falling on a Saturday...but no such luck.

I hate Valentine's Day. I imagine lepers everywhere do.

You have to understand, I am a fully functional human male teenager. More than that: I never went through a "girls are icky" stage as a kid: from grade four or five on, if you were female and you shared a class with me, you shared a hell of a lot more than that with me in my imagination. I'm fifteen now and I seem to have hit what we may as well call Peak Boner. It's embarrassing as hell, all the more so since it's not like I'll ever get to do anything with it.  I haven't so much as kissed a girl--for real--since third grade. And I kissed quite a few girls in third grade. I am, in short, hornier than the proverbial hoot owl.


To raise money for the United Way, the school is holding a kissing booth. [2015 Ken intrudes: you're going to have to believe me on this. I know it's not the sort of thing you can even imagine a school holding today, but I'm telling you: it happened.]

Twenty five cents a kiss...

Oh. this is, like, totally gnarly.  I live in an apartment building almost next door to the school. There's a laundry room in our building. With washers and dryers. That take quarters. I happen to know where an entire roll of quarters is hiding.

There are three girls who volunteer to be kissed. Older girls, grades 12 and 13.  I don't remember their names, any more than I remember the name of the kid who fell from the first rung of a treehouse ladder and became paralyzed. I do remember one of them was tall and willowy and seriously cute. The other two were lovely as well--even then, I wasn't picky as to physical type--but the tall girl had a smile that could melt steel. Or smelt it.

At first.

------------


I wasn't even halfway through that roll of quarters when the smiles were gone. I'd like to tell you I stopped then, but that would be a lie. I did stop when the tears showed up, but by that point I was almost out of quarters.

Those tears brought me up short: my elation turned to ashes in an instant. At first, those ashes smouldered...god damnit, can't they at least pretend a little harder?  Then it finally dawned on me that all the other customers at the kissing booth had spent somewhere between a quarter and a dollar. I honestly hadn't noticed: I was too deep in a dream.

I withdrew in shame, and that shame intensified over the following days and weeks. Nobody needed to keep up the shunning charade: I started eating lunch in the music room, alone with a piano. Don't pity me: I earned every bit of my treatment that year, retroactive or not. Pity the nameless women, instead. They never asked for what I did.

I never did learn who those women were. I wanted, very badly, to apologize to them, but I also wanted, even more badly, to make sure they never saw my face again.

------------

And that was when I changed from your typical lusty teenage male to something a little harder to fathom: a guy who kept his every sexual attraction (he still had more than his fair share)  firmly in check until he was absolutely, a hundred and fifty percent sure it wouldn't cause tears. After enough years of that I stopped feeling sexually attracted to random people, no matter how pretty they were.

Explains a lot, doesn't it?

I have carried that guilt with me for almost thirty years. If there's ONE day I could obliterate out of my entire life thus far, Friday, February 13, 1987 would be the day I'd pick without hesitation.

Is it any consolation to those women that I learned something from my despicable actions? I doubt it is. I wish I'd had the guts to apologize. I really do.

The Silly Season

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 believe that governments ought to have a larger role in our lives than corporations do. I don't trust entities whose sole motive is to maximize short-term (monetary) profit at any cost, and the describes the vast majority of corporations.

Take the environment as an example. Corporations like to ignore the environment in which they operate, to the extent they can get away with doing so. The logic is sound from a purely economical perspective: externalizing your waste product costs, for example by, say, dumping your waste into the nearest river...well, it increases your profit margin, and it keeps the price lower for your customers. Win-win, right? No, not really. Because those costs you've dodged just get passed on to everyone who lives downstream. In Ken-world, governments would have, and use, the power to prevent this. In the real world, it doesn't happen near as often, nor to anywhere near, the extent that it should, and that is because corporations are larger than governments.

A similar effect is in play with wages. My blood boils every time I hear someone say that ___s make too much money. The statement is applied to everyone from  (unionized) retail cashiers to teachers to factory workers. Strangely, I don't hear it applied to hedge fund managers.

Retail cashier pay at one of my former employers is capped at thirty cents an hour over the minimum wage. I know people who have been stuck at that wage for fifteen years. You can say that those people should go to school and make themselves more marketable, and I'll ask you: using what for money?
Teachers: there are so many misconceptions about what teachers do and how they're paid to do it that the people spouting off really aren't qualified to have an opinion. Besides, if you believe teaching is such a cushy job...why aren't you a teacher?
Factory workers: the unionized ones do quite well, the non-unionized ones tend to make minimum wage or close to it. Same, or similar job. But it's always that the union folks make too much, never that the others make too little. I have always found that perverse.

You know what minimum wage is? Minimum wage is "well, we'd pay you less, but regrettably the government says we can't." Again, keeping wage costs low looks good on paper. Until you realize that your minimum wage workers can't afford to buy the products you produce, or contribute in any other meaningful way to the economy. Henry Ford, nobody's left-winger, understood this implicitly. There are a few today who do as well...but not many. It's a race to the bottom, and we're all losing. Who can arrest it, or at least slow it? Surely not corporations.  To turn a famous political quote on its head, corporations are not the solution, corporations are the problem.

From what I have written here, never mind what's in the rest of this Breadbin, it's pretty obvious I don't support our current government. The funny thing is, I don't doubt for a second that Prime Minister Harper truly believes he has the best interests of Canadians in hand and in heart.  He comes from a place of conviction...enough of his government's been convicted, after all.

Sorry, cheap shot.

I truly do not understand how anyone can support the man. Even if you agree with every policy of his government, the way he enacts those policies should greatly offend you. There is literally zero room for any competing viewpoint....on anything. Particularly if that viewpoint comes from an educated person. He has muzzled scientists, crippled his government's ability to collect data (supposedly in the name of privacy, which he later abolished under C-51), and he proudly, even defiantly, flaunts the Constitution. He will not take questions from Canadians unless they have been thoroughly vetted...and no more than five a day of those. He's shut down Parliament twice to avoid sticky situations. He routinely hides completely unrelated legislation in huge omnibus "budget" bills. I can go on and on, but I'll stop here: His solution to criminal wrongdoing in the RCMP was to rewrite the law and make it retroactive. 

That kind of behaviour is unacceptable in a leader...and I'd say that just as forcefully if it was a leader I had voted for myself. (Full disclosure: I did vote for Harper...once. I didn't like either of his predecessors much, either, and Harper initially campaigned on transparency and democratic reform. Ha. More fool I.)

The biggest problem in our country today, what really holds us back from getting anything done, is that if you disagree with me you're evil and if I disagree with you, I'm an idiot. What we need is someone who can work to bring differing viewpoints together.  

I will give my endorsement closer to October 19th, which is an insanely long way off, yet. In the meantime I will try to keep the political chatter in the Breadbin down to a dull roar: people do seem to like my personal posts more. But please understand that for me, the political is personal.

Cord cut. Snip, snip.

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 Internet deal operative. We had four: a landline, our cells, the satellite, and the internet itself. When it came time to try and trim our monthly bills, preserving that internet deal was imperative. We could cut one service out and still be fine.

Most of you would cut the landline, I imagine. In this day and age, landlines seem to be redundant...I mean, hell, you can't even text on one. I'm still leery of killing mine. Cells are far too easily lost/stolen/forgotten/shattered/depleted to zero charge...hell, my little iPhone sucks power as if it's actually a washing machine. I think we'll get to the point where I'm comfortable with just my cell (and if you told me six months ago I'd say that, I'd have cheerfully informed you that you were full of shit)...but I'm not there yet and I won't be pushed.

Oh, yeah, and is it just me, or are cell phone charger cables a new cash cow for the industry? In this house they seem to work reliably for about a month. Maybe. Then there comes a day when you plug one in and nothing happens: ch-ching, another twenty bucks down the rabbit hole. Landlines don't have that problem. Just saying.

Thanks to Apple TV, we could save almost a hundred bucks a month cutting out satellite, and that's what we chose to do.

Bell doesn't make it easy. You're on hold indefinitely (probably because they're dealing with so many other people abandoning them)...and then when you try to leave, you're told you can't, not without paying some kind of penalty.  As it turned out, either we misunderstood the three-services-gets-you-reasonable-internet thing or, more likely, they changed it. We were informed that cutting satellite would hike our internet bill by twenty bucks a month. This really pissed us off, but what can you do? It's communicated in such a way as to make you feel like you missed a few lines of fine print. For all we know, we did.

Still: saving eighty bucks a month and not missing anything. Until they start screwing with our Internet speed even more than they already do. We are severely throttled here: I have friends in Pittsburgh whose internet speed is roughly six times ours and so far as I can tell, we're paying about the same a month. It's pathetic....but it's part and parcel of being Canadian, I guess. Netflix still streams. For now. I fully expect at some point they'll throttle it to the point where you'll be forced to get their premium package in order to stream anything.

Anyway, Bell retention called us yesterday with a last-ditch effort to try to keep us in the satellite fold. They threw so many numbers and so much bafflegab at us, and they wouldn't give us a straight answer as to how much money we'd be paying them if we chose to accept any of their enticements. In the end we hung up in disgust. It sounded as if they were trying to give us the satellite for free at one point, which makes less than zero sense from their perspective. I'm sure there were untold snarls and traps in there designed to siphon ever more money out of our bank account.

I'm ready to ditch Bell entirely. Unfortunately, we can't do that until our cell phone contracts are up...and I just started one. They'll find a way to preserve their ridiculous profit margins at your expense. Trust me.

_______________

I am having trouble adapting to the new economy.

As I write this, I can look up and see what remains of my CD collection. I haven't listened to a CD in five years at least. The CD drive on my Mac mini is pooched and so is the under-cupboard CD player in the kitchen. The only other CD player I have access to is in Herbert the Pervert, our Hyundai Tucson (so named because his seats are shaped in such a way as to violate you as you climb into one). So far as I know, no CD has ever been played in Herbert.
Off behind me is our tiny DVD collection: three TV shows (Joan of Arcadia, Game of Thrones, and Saving Grace) and a handful of movies. It gets next to no use.
In front of me is my 64 GB iPod, about half full of music: mostly classical and French, with a smattering of many other genres. I'll admit to pirating some music...the stuff I can't find in the iTunes store. But usually I buy my music, dutifully sync it to my iPod...and then, more often than not, end up listening to it on YouTube anyway. I'm about to start the free three month trial of Apple Music, and in three months I suspect I'll be asking myself why I ever bothered to own music at all.
Upstairs there are at least a thousand books. They're going nowhere. I keep adding to them. And yet...sigh...give me five years and I just bet I'll have a tablet with an e-reader function...and I won't have to replace all my books because I'll just pay ten bucks a month for access.

Looking at this model from the outside, there's a lot to like about it. For the price of one or maybe two widgets a month, I can have unlimited access to all the widgets. If I was normally in the habit of purchasing anything close to one or two widgets a month, this seems like a no-brainer. But call me paranoid if you will: when you don't own the product but only access it, access can be restricted or withheld at any time for any reason. That's in all those end-user license agreements we all pretend to read. Things like this happen. And if you cross the U.S. border with certain e-readers, you'll find the content has been geo-blocked. I don't like that. At all.

I'm a cautious sort: always have been, always will be. I'm not one for headlong leaps into voids. I imagine that eventually, I will look back and scoff at myself...heaven knows it's happened many times already. I'm on record right here on this blog stating a whole bunch of absolutely insane objections to iPods. (Go back and read that one: it's entertaining.) Hell, I distinctly remember getting Internet access for the first time in 1991 and asking myself what I needed it for. Everything I want is on my computer already, why would I want access to other computers? 

Dumbass.

Premature Capitulation

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 happiness, energy and consciousness are self-sustaining in normal people. I wish I knew why they aren't in me. I suspect it's related to other things I am missing, namely direction and purpose. Why THOSE should be missing is something I've been circling around in this blog for the better part of a decade.

Oh, there have been many other reasons for writing this blog: to refine my thoughts on life and love; to share unorthodox views on both; to write out quotidian stress. But figuring out where my motivations lie, or indeed if I even have any, has been the unspoken raison d'être of the Breadbin since May of 2004.

Probably not a good idea to let my despair kill the Breadbin, just when I need the Breadbin most.

That attack was a bad one. Not the worst I've suffered--I had one last summer and another in February that were existential--but bad. And starting to get worse. I wasn't just going to shut down the Breadbin; I was trying to figure out a way to delete my  Facebook account as well, without attracting undue attention. Like I say, I loathe myself when I get like that, and the last thing I want to do is go pity-fishing. Oh, here comes Ken around for his monthly ego-stroke. Like he's even got any reason to be depressed. What a whiny, needy waste of space that man is.  It's strange, because deleting Facebook would rob me of most of my social connections...surely not a reasonable action for somebody feeling disconnected. But then very little about depression is reasonable.

As ridiculous as it sounds when the sun is shining, isolating myself completely comes with its own logic when the black clouds descend. I already feel isolated, so isolating myself is only stating what I feel to be true. And nobody really needs the burden that is Ken, depressed. I'm better off in a hole somewhere.

I even wrote about this the last time I wrestled with it. Rereading that, I can see the tendrils of my disease gripping between the lines. August was a bad, bad month for me.

Anyway.

I was struggling, trying hard to grasp positives, when -- as usual -- this time around it was a friend reminding me

you must realize there are people who love you and people who need you in their lives

that gave me a foothold in the murk. That's phrased as an imperative ("you MUST") and it reiterates the connections I have, connections that seem so tenuous when I can't see through the fogs.

Then I had a couple of great shifts at work, where my efforts were praised and promotions were spoken of.

Direction.

See, the thing that has masked my drift over the years is that I am internally motivated, at least when people are paying me to be. I don't do anything different in terms of work ethic at seven bucks an hour less than I was making two years ago. For the first time ever, I find myself working for a company that has noticed this and seems ready to help me exploit it, rather than exploiting me instead.

Now I have to fill out what appears at first blush to be a daunting Individual Development Plan. I admit to a fair bit of apprehension here: I'm pretty good at defining where I am. I've spent eleven years writing that out. I'm much less comfortable writing about where I want to go.

You see a lot of past in this here Breadbin. Quite a bit of present. Not very much future. Futures in my life have always been hidden. As a kid, I moved so damned often that I eventually couldn't look much past next Friday; I took a dead-end degree without any thought if what it might do for me, then dropped out in disgrace when I first got caught in the endless now of the internet. I aspired to stability--no more and no less.

I've got that. I've had that since I met Eva in 1999. We've been through and continue to go through life upheavals. Through it all we're building...something. I'm not sure of its final form, only that it will have one, and it will be multifaceted, because that's what both of us are.

But stability without strategy is stasis. It's like that woman who had sex in a swamp, did you hear about her? She's apparently six months stagnant now.

Having achieved stability, I was happy for many years, with only minor nigglings of what now? that I forcefully suppressed. If I was thinking what now, it meant I wasn't happy with my lot in life, right? And I was. Very much so. What would I change? We were living comfortably...not ostentatiously, but we'd gotten to the point where we could afford a real vacation every other year or so...just perfect for curious people who are nevertheless homebodies.  Keep me in books and internet and my material comforts are pretty much taken care of. I've always felt as if I had much more love to give, and even that has begun its own process of being addressed. Until I lost my last job, life was damn near idyllic.

Of course, there's a straw man in that paragraph. It is possible to be perfectly content with your situation and still want more. More responsibility, more chances to make a difference. And not to put too fine a point on it, more remuneration. The perks of my current job are exceptional; the pay is very, very ordinary.

And I am anything but content with nights, as I have said. While it's true that they're only as isolating as I let them be, it's also true that the amount of effort required to overcome that isolation is often overwhelming. You live on a different, darker plane of existence from everyone else.

I'm told I'll have to live with nights for a bare minimum of another eighteen months to two years. That's fine. My first career goal is to get myself to a place where I can afford to take the dollar an hour pay cut that foregoing nights will cost me.

The more I work in this environment, the more I feel I can bring to the table as a  manager.  Most of our staff are treated like five-year-olds and only a few of them deserve to be: I think it's a contributing factor to an insanely high turnover rate. I would be different, because one talent I have is recognizing people's strengths and weaknesses: playing to the former and working with people to address the latter. And I have found numerous opportunities for departmental improvement that have not been addressed by my superiors, probably on the grounds that I'm still green.

But I'm not. While I'm new to this company, I have many, many years of running my own department under my belt: even though 'manager' has never been a part of my official title, I've thrived under managerial responsibility.  I know what works and what doesn't.

And if there's any way I can work this

into my professional development, I'm going to try to do it. My store manager is Québécois: that can't hurt.

A promise to my faithful readers: If I go a long period without posting, it will be because I am busy living, not busy being sulky. I am seeking pharmaceutical help, to that end.

--Ken