Troubled Thoughts and Nightmares

Every couple of weeks, I do a gig typesetting several pages of an independent arts and culture newspaper. Timelines are tight and content often becomes available in the middle of the night and has to be ready for the early morning, which means getting up in the wee small hours and doing some work.

Tonight is one of those nights.

Mostly, I find this gig pretty fun – the typesetting is right up my alley: intricate and detail-oriented. Sometimes, it feels a bit strange to get up in the middle of the night to work. Today, I had a long and busy day, with over 10 hours of work on various projects. (I'm getting ready to go on holiday at the end of the week, so there is a lot that needs to get done.)

At 9:30 this evening, I had worked through all of the available content for the paper and decided that I would go to bed and have a nap. With the amount of work left to do, I knew I would need to get up around 1:30 am to make my 4:30 am deadline. I find I work better after some sleep than after none.

So I went to bed – I brushed my teeth and followed all of my evening routines. I put the mosquito net over me to protect myself from beautiful July's seedy underbelly and went to sleep.

I woke up at 11:30 pm from the worst nightmare I believe I have ever had in my entire life. I won't go into too many details, but it was set on a magic island and involved a loop of repeated murders, suicides and infanticides. For good measure, sabotaged computer hard drives and giant, dead birds were also prominently featured.

There is no way to combine those things pleasantly — and my nightmare didn't even try.

What's up with that?

I don't usually have nightmares. At all. My dreams are usually extremely lovely, actually: whimsical, weird, funny and definitely comfortable and friendly. I am a frequent dreamer. I usually wake up from my dreams feeling highly amused and/or intrigued by the wonders of my subconscious mind.

This sudden plunge into the horrors feels like a wake up call. It forces me to look at the fact that I've been focusing my mental energy in dark places over the past several months. I've been letting my mind wander a lot of the time and it's been journeying in mostly unhappy and mean territory: thinking about mistakes I've made, feeling resentful about some of my recent experiences, writing imaginary hate mail, listing grievances.

I had been making a good effort to be mindful about how I was thinking over the winter and especially in the first few months of the year. I knew I was struggling with depression and tried to be really conscious about not feeding the beast with malignant thinking. I read a wonderful book by Thich Nhat Hanh which a dear friend gave to me. I was meditating on kindness and forgiveness. I started to see improvements in my mood. But as summer came in, I fell off the mindfulness wagon, right back into my old habits of anger and resentment.

My nightmare tonight felt like a signpost that said: "The high road is over that away. The view is much better over there."

I get the message, loud and clear (it was a very emphatic dream!) I'm getting back on track.

I choose mindfulness and compassion

To adapt a meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Breathing in, I am aware of the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing out, I smile at the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing in, I am aware of my angry feelings.
Breathing out, I smile at my angry feelings.
Breathing in, I am aware of my resentments.
Breathing out, I smile at my resentments.
Breathing in, I am aware of my hurts.
Breathing out, I smile at my hurts.

It's amazing the impact of those four mindful breaths.

This is where I want my brain to be: free to fully appreciate the night sky, the warm summer days, all of the glorious pleasures of being alive, of being present, of letting my heart accept, forgive and be kind.

In closing, I must say thank you to that horrible, horrible nightmare for telling me something very important. Anger and resentment are powerless to make anything better. Especially the past. And the only person I am punishing with my dark thoughts — is me.

Breathing in, I am aware of myself.
Breathing out, I smile at myself.
Breathing in, I am aware of my mind.
Breathing out, I smile at my mind.
Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile at my heart.

And now, time for another catnap before more content is ready and the typesetting resumes.

Fingers crossed for a dreamless sleep!

Land Plan (Inch By Inch, Life's a Cinch; Yard By Yard, Life is Hard)

Here it is, mid-(to-late-)June, and I must admit that I have come very little distance in figuring out how I'm going to proceed with my land.

I'm almost resigned to the idea of renting somewhere again this winter – much as I don't want to. I'm just not sure how I'm going to get everything I need in place before the snow flies...

I'm trying to think about things one step at a time. Here is my step-by-step plan. Probably each one of these will warrant its own blog post at some point over the next few months. I'd appreciate any ideas or advice you care to contribute.

Step 1: Research and information/advice gathering

This is the stage I'm in now. It involves doing research and gathering advice and opinions from experts in a number of different fields, including:

• Site design
• Sustainable Forestry
• Infrastructure/Utilities – power, water, waste water, driveway/site leveling
• House design and/or effective winterization of my tiny home
• Financial advice about how to access enough money to complete this project

Step 2: Decision-making

After I've gathered all of the information, opinions and advice that I can, it will be time to make some decisions. I think this is going to be the most difficult part of the process. There are so many decisions to make! And so many possibilities for each decision! I am trying to remember to take these as slowly as I need to and again, one at a time.

Step 3: Skill acquisition

Next up will learning how to do some things I want to know how to do and identifying the right people to help me make this project a reality. I'm enrolled in a chainsaw course on July 18-19, and that will be a very necessary skill to enable me to contribute to clearing my own land. I have to admit that I don't have a great drive to gain many other skills for this project. I am not a handy person. Fortunately, lots of other people around here are.

Step 4: Resource acquisition

Once I have decided what needs to be done, and what parts of it I can do myself, it will be time for budgeting. I have little doubt that this is a project that is going to need to be done in phases, as the availability of money permits. This was a conscious choice on my part, to bootstrap my way into a house. I could have purchased an existing house and taken on a mortgage, but I decided that I didn't want to pay all that interest to the bank, or have a house that was way larger than I needed and painfully expensive to heat. I am only one person and finding a house for sale that is the right size for one person can be a tricky thing.

The more I think about it, the more I think that my financial situation will require one or more years of "roughing it" living in my tiny home on wheels without running water or much electricity. But – step by step – I don't need to jump to any conclusions just yet...

Step 5: Selecting collaborators

I am very fortunate that lots of my friends and community members are skilled and knowledgeable about so many aspects of land development, green energy and building. There are many people who will be able to help me accomplish tasks for which I do not have the skills, like back-hoeing and building and plumbing and wiring.

Step 6: Seeking approvals

Yes, I'm a by-the-book kind of person. Mostly because if I build a home, I'll want to insure it. If my home were to burn down, I wouldn't have enough money to replace it without insurance. That would be a problem. And, I believe that the rules, however cumbersome, are there for a reason. So, whenever it comes time to install the main aspects of the infrastructure, I will be seeking  the appropriate permissions from all of the appropriate people.

Step 7: Implementation

This in itself will be a multi-step process.

1. Access to the site (clearing trees, building driveway)
2. Infrastructure (electricity (on and/or off-grid), water, waste water, Internet)
3. Moving (and possibly winterizing) my tiny home on wheels
4. Building a fixed tiny home with awesome stuff like hot and cold running water and heavy-duty electrical service.

Where I'm at now:

Our summer solstice gathering this weekend blessed me with an even-greater-than-usual influx of advice from a number of smart and knowledgeable friends and neighbours. Some pieces in direct conflict with other pieces, of course – LOL! It will all need to be weighed and measured!

At the end of the day, I know that it is most important that this process and the decisions that come out of it are a comfortable fit for me. And I have to go at the pace that's right for me.

This is going to be my home. It needs to fit my heart.

Sexism #4: Gender Roles

I had a conversation about gender and sexuality this weekend that reminded me of something.

And since it is a chilly, rainy night in mid-June, it seems like a good time to write a blog post about it.

I'll begin with this true story:

Once upon a time (i.e. in the early 2000s), I worked for an organization that produced educational materials.

They had a mandate to represent male and female interests equally*. They also had a mandate not to spend very much money.

And so, in the creation of the educational materials, we used a lot of royalty-free clip-art. (For anyone who doesn't know what royalty-free clip-art is, it's inexpensive stock illustration that is available at sites like clipart.com.)

I remember one math problem that was illustrated with a clip-art silhouette of two people in a canoe. The people were shown on a slight angle with mostly their backs facing the viewer.

A request came back from editorial to make one of the people in the canoe a woman.

"One of them already is," I responded to my manager who had conveyed the request. I mean, for Pete's sake – they were silhouettes of the backs of two people in a canoe. Both of them looked the way most of my either male or female friends would look if they put on their camping togs and had their backs drawn in silhouette in a canoe.

Why did editorial assume they were both men?

"Don't be smart," my manager told me. "Just make one of them a woman".

"What do they want? One foot sticking out of the canoe with a high-heel on it?"

My manager grimaced. (I suspect managing me was not always the easiest part of her day.)

"Just make one of them look more like a woman, okay?"

I sighed and returned to my desk, muttering about tits, tiaras and high heels. And this most recent example of editorial's stupid, backward headspace.

I looked at the silhouette.

I sighed again.

And then, I made one of the figures have a narrower neck, made what was visible of its chin less prominent, and gave it a ponytail.

I'd like to think that I then imagined that one as the man (it certainly looked like a couple of the men of my acquaintance in the early naughts) and the other one as the women. But I think that possibility is only occurring to me now.

What does this story illustrate? 

Basically, that we have some really persistent and pretty screwy ideas about what women and men should be like – even when they are clip-art silhouettes in a canoe.

I identify as a woman. Despite failing to meet a "stereotypical standard of femininity" on a lot of different counts – while I definitely meet that stereotype in some other ways.

Despite the fact that I would look just like a man if you stuck me in a canoe and drew a silhouette of me from the back.

Here are just a few examples of my complex gender stereotype composition:

I don't like make-up or babies. I do like baking and knitting. I don't like high-heels or shopping for clothing. I do like pretty stationery and having long, deep talks about feelings. I don't like removing my body hair (and I don't).

I do like cursing and splitting wood. I don't like manicures or moisturizer. I do like having a drink and talking off the cuff. I don't like measuring twice and cutting once.

I do like sitting with my knees apart. I don't like order. I do like control. I don't like lies. I do like a firm handshake. I don't like macadamia nuts. I do like getting massages. I don't like pandering.

I do like hugging. I don't like making mistakes. I do like being a person of my word.

I feel like I'm supposed to feel confused of conflicted about all of this, but I don't. None of it makes me question my gender. Am I gender-queer? I can remember thinking in the past that that would explain – label – the ways in which I diverge from "typical womanliness". But today the question occurs to me – why would I need (or want) a label? I mean, why do we have to assign "male"/"masculine" or "female"/"feminine" to any human characteristics? Why does picking out throw cushions have to be a woman-thing and using a chain saw have to be a man-thing?

(I reference here, for members of the Free To Be, You and Me generation, Dan Greenburg's poem, My Dog is a Plumber, which ends with the line: "So perhaps the problem / is in trying to tell / just who a person is, / by what they do well.")

In my opinion, we, as a culture, are fundamentally messed up in the head about gender.

Like what you like. Do what you do. Be sexually attracted to the people or things or activities to which/whom you are sexually attracted. It doesn't have any impact whatsoever on your "masculinity" or "femininity". Those are constructs that don't mean a damn thing. Be "you-gendered". I'll be "me-gendered".

If only we could then all be exempt from judgments and derogatory comments and prejudice and discrimination when our behaviours and appearances don't line up with expectations other people have because of our anatomical appearance. As if any of it is anyone's business but our own...

*****

*It is interesting to me that while this organization was expected to represent equal numbers of males and females in their materials and while some attention was paid to racial diversity, there was no effort made to represent kids with different body types, abilities, etc. That would have been a fun challenge with clip-art, which tends to be bland, Caucasian and svelte. I wish editorial had been in the habit of coming back to me with requests like, "Put that person in a wheelchair," "put another 100 pounds on that person," "give that person a prosthetic leg". And I wish I had thought and dared to introduce that diversity myself – to send images up to editorial that were fat, pierced, naked or otherwise outside of the status quo. 

Now that would have been fun. 

I probably would have been fired. But in a fun way. 

(And given how that job eventually ended, being fired might not have been such a bad thing – but that's another story, perhaps for another rainy evening).

Last-minute tax agonies

I swore I wouldn't do my taxes at the last minute again this year.

And here it is, the day before the filing deadline for self-employed individuals and I am knee-deep in receipts. I'm hating every minute of it, too. 

(So much so that writing a blog post about it is a welcome procrastination technique.)

I swear (as I have sworn many times before) that it's not going to be like this next year. Now that I'm using my YNAB budgeting software, all of my expenses are getting entered electronically at least every two-three weeks. So next year, theoretically (i.e if I can keep up the good work), all I'll need to do is run a report, fill out my statement of business activities and file. 

Also, in theory, using YNAB means that I will have saved up enough cash to actually PAY my taxes on time, as well, which is not the case this year. 

I might even file on April 30 next year - or - gasp - earlier?

Well, a person can dream.

Despite my past failures to institute helpful routines for the financial administration of my life, I remain hopeful for the future. And steadfast in the face of the present moment. 

It is not easy. I have bags and bags of receipts, including things that didn't get found when I prepared my 2013 taxes, my 2012 taxes, even my 2011 taxes. 

There are some unhappy memories among those receipts. You wouldn't think something as innocuous as a receipt could be hurtful. But doing my taxes this year kind of feels like someone poking a pin into my heart - over and over again. 

Sigh.

Oh well, I have only myself to blame. If I had dealt with these receipts properly at the time - if they had been sorted and either recorded and filed or burned - I wouldn't have to be going through them now. 

I am hating this, but I am doing it. Even if I have to stay up all night, it will get 'er done and filed on time. That is one promise to myself that I will keep. 

I will never file my taxes late again. 

I swear.

Car Chaos

Yesterday was a beautiful day. The cold I came down with this week has been dragging on, so while I felt fairly energetic, I figured I better not expose myself to people who hadn't already come in contact with my germs.

Plenty of projects at home to take care of, I thought, and decided to tackle a big one: cleaning out my car.

As I believe I have mentioned before in this blog, I am a messy person. A chaos muppet. When faced with a clean-up job, I procrastinate. I doubt my car has been truly cleaned in a couple of years. Sure, I've loaded some things into it and unloaded others, but emptying it out to the floor mats just doesn't happen very often.

And, when you take into account that I have moved 3 times in the last 14 months, never fully packing or unpacking for any of those moves, you might have some idea of the strange assortment of things that had gotten forgotten, abandoned, eaten, drunken, neglected, stranded and/or ground to dust in my car.

Or do you?

Did I, even?

Not really. And so, to entertain myself during the boring task of cleaning out my car yesterday, I took an inventory of everything that was in there.

I find it a shockingly and hilariously long and varied list – with some of the items too numerous for individual mention graphed in a bar chart for your convenience – as an extra treat if you make it all the way to the end of this post. 

Here, for your entertainment and enlightenment, starting at the trunk and working counter-clockwise, follows a list of the contents of my car on May 29, 2015:

THE TRUNK

• 1 half of a large garbage bag of paper to be recycled (from my move out of my winter rental a month ago)
• A basket with the remnants of my land-warming toast (glasses, sparkling wine wrapper, etc, from May 16)

• 1 cardboard tube from a bottle of 10-year-old Irish whiskey
• 1 unopened box of Kleenex (in the plastic wrapping in which it was sold along with 5 other boxes, many months ago)
• 2 rolls of paper towel in their wrappings
• 2 stone book ends
• My purse
• 1 undergarment, 3 socks and a t-shirt
• 1 bag of used books to be donated to the Waldorf School book sale
• 1 bottle shampoo
• 1 bottle conditioner
• 1 guitar stand
• 1 string of fairy lights
• 2 Eco-friendly reusable produce bags
• 1 uneaten bag of Jelly Tots (which were immediately eaten)
• 1 empty (and punctured) bottle of sunscreen
• 1 container used to pour water into my steam cleaner
• 1 hot pink skate guard
• The plastic cover from a stack of blank DVDs containing my old glasses, hollyhock seeds, a short capo, dead batteries, used stamps for donation to the Lion's Club and other detritus.

• 1 copy of The Pocket Rumi
• Peppermint foot lotion
• 7 bungie cords (assorted lengths)
• 2 packages of beads and one of shepherds hooks to make earrings
• 1 ball of sock yarn
• 1 pair of thread snips ("antique" ones which have been in my family for years)
• 1 defunct stick of deodorant
• A scattering of loose coffee beans
• 1 bag of assorted rug hooking supplies
• The Little River Folk Society's banner
• 1 empty clementine crate
• 1 lighter
• 1 bag containing hand-me-down cat food from someone's finicky cat
• 1 pad of paper
• 1 pink owl barrette 
• 1 random L-shaped piece of transparent acrylic that says "Personal Stamp Exchange"
• 1 drug store bag containing foam ear plugs and a defunct Lipsyl
• 1 obsolete Canadian Tire Advantage card
• Empty packaging from some kind of gift cards
• A ziploc bag full of Chimes Ginger Chews
• The top of a tea tin (the tin, lidless and empty, is in my kitchen)
• 1 roll of green masking tape
• 1 flattened cardboard box
• 1 scrap piece of 3/8 inch plywood
• 1 random bit of wood

• 1 porn DVD (title withheld) that a hilarious friend of mine found lying on the street in Shelburne and left in my car as a hilarious joke (I didn't find it for months – and thought someone completely different had left it in my car – AWKWARD!)
• 1 empty paper potato bag
• 1 piece of driftwood
• 3 copies of my most recent CD, Blackbirds
• 1 wrapper from a ball of mozzarella (What the–?)
• Shattered fragments of mussel shell
• 1 (losing) bingo scratch card
• 2 black plastic bottoms from reusable shopping bags (one of them badly torn)
• 2 pieces of metal and 2 pieces of plastic with no known use

Mystery metal and plastic bits

• 2 toy "baseball" bats - one red, one blue
• 1 eyeglass case, containing my "old" sunglasses
• 1 loonie, 3 quarters, 2 dimes

BACK SEAT – PASSENGER SIDE

• 6 Blue beer bottles
• Several dozen quilting magazines, looking for a new home
• 1 Printer drum for recycling
• 1 Yoga bag containing 2 socks and nothing else
• 2 yoga mats
• 3 origami cranes: yellow, pink, orange 
• 1 bag from The Source containing two batteries for my guitar tuner
• 1 surplus phone I've been meaning to give to friends every time I've seen them over the past three weeks
• 3 pieces of throw rug undermatting
• Another undergarment
• Another t-shirt
• Paperwork from my recent land purchase
• The business card of buddy at the department of transportation
• 1 new package of blue-tack
• 1 dishcloth
• The USB and power cable from the printer I dropped off as e-waste last week
• 1 never-worn scarf that I've been meaning to find a home for
• 1 hoodie
• 1 unopened package of guitar strings
• 2 Hair elastics
• 1 Box of buttons handed down to me by my mom
• 1 eyeglass case (empty)
• Another undergarment
• 1 mitten
• 1 unopened package of what I still think of as "typewriter" paper (100% recycled)
• 1 plastic bag containing a sweater, a skirt, a package of earring backs, a Ziploc bag full of bay leaves, a dish scrubber and some unopened mail from 6 or 8 months ago (I have not idea how these items come to be in the same plastic bag)
• A bag from my last gig containing CDs, a patch cord and some general flotsam
• ANOTHER undergarment
• 1 plastic knife
• 1 broken windshield wiper and the packaging – and assorted unnecessary spare fasteners – from the new wiper
• 1 empty, clean sauerkraut carton (don't ask!)
• 1 copy of Canada's food guide
• 1 empty, flattened arrowroot cookie box
• 1 Tupperware container that belongs to the mom of one of my best friends from high school (which I have been meaning to drop back to her ever since I cleaned it out after enjoying BBQ leftovers late last summer)
• 1 seemingly clean Ziploc container inside a very dirty, sticky plastic bag
• The packaging for a 2 terabyte external drive
• 1 half-empty box of Twinings orange, mango and cinnamon tea
• 1 tuner pedal
• 1 dime

FRONT SEAT – PASSENGER SIDE

• Something that used to be fruit - it looks like it might have once been a pear or apple (I'll spare you the indignity of a photo)
• 1 emergency multi tool in unopenable packaging (the joke is you'd need one of those multi-tools to get it open)
• 1 map of NS
• 1 thank you card written from my mother to my then-boyfriend
• 1 battered William and Kate "collectible" postcard (I have NO idea where this came from)
• 1 unopened box of official Scrabble scorecards
• 1 container of Purel
• 1 tin of ginger mints
• 1 empty envelope
• 1 folding fan
• 2 twonies, 3 quarters, 1 dime, 1 nickel and 2 pennies

FRONT SEAT – DRIVER'S SIDE (in, around and under):

• 1 completely intact Remembrance Day poppy
• 1 Hair elastic
• The decimated remnants of the cardboard floor mat the Rust Check guys put there three months ago 
• 1 pair foam ear plugs in a plastic case
• 1 loonie, at least, I think it's a loonie:



It is a loonie! I shined it up with a little Coca Cola this morning

CENTRE CONSOLE

• 14 CDs and/or cd cases, mostly mismatched
• 1 Stick deodorant
• 1 Package of clasps for making necklaces
• Expired throat lozenges and cold medication
• 1 Empty, and somewhat crushed, paper wrapper from a roll of loonies
• 1 Package of thumbtacks
• 1 Small wooden figurine of an orange cat
• My wallet
• 1 orange sharpie
• What appears to be a solar universal phone charger - I did not remember that I had this and can think of so many times that it would have been useful over the past four years. 
• 1 roll of transparent Scotch tape
• 1 unopened eyeglass cleaning kit
• Defunct air freshener 
• 1 copy of Edgar Allen Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue

BACK SEAT – DRIVER'S SIDE

• 1 Broken hand fan
• 2 Small ziploc containers, one badly cracked (clean)
• 1 Pyrex food container with plastic lid (clean)
• 1 Bag containing an unfinished crochet project
• 1 "Frankenspanker"

• 1 Microphone "pop" screen
• 1 pillowcase 
• 1 small bag containing odd socks
• 1 piece of drycleaner's plastic containing one sock (Hunh?)
• 1 mason jar
• 1 facecloth
• 1 literary journal
• 1 
• 2 empty cardboard boxes which used to contain tea bags
• 1 long lost cookie
• 1 cordless phone
• 1 plastic cap of a USB thumb drive (I think I lost the drive a while ago)
• 1 quarter, 1 dime

EMPTY!

And now my car is basically empty. Here's photographic proof of the (almost entirely) empty trunk:

As long as this post was, there was still a fair bit more stuff that I found in my car. For the sake of efficiency, I have arranged the "too numerous to mention" items for you in a bar chart. 

And too numerous to even put in the bar chart (it would have dwarfed all of the other bars to insignificance) was the large amount of mail, both opened and unopened, mostly damp, puckered and stained. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of envelopes and flyers.

PS: Total amount of money found: $8.32. I plan to use all of that at the car wash. The outside of my car is just as dirty as the inside used to be.

Got land?

"It's the only thing they aren't making any more of," as my mom has been known to say.

(Will Rogers said that too, as I learned this week while reading Thomas King's amazing book, The Inconvenient Indian.)

I have had a bit of a rough spring in terms of living arrangements. I felt very displaced in March and April, although I've been feeling much better since Salinger and I were able to return to our Wholehearted House on May 1.

Putting down roots

In the midst of my spring of being under-housed, something in my heart snapped into place – or something in my brain just snapped – or maybe a little of both.

I realized that I've been perching, for quite a while now, unable to settle. Everything has felt transitional; I haven't been taking responsibility for my living situations and that has left me open to a certain volatility. Changes happening around me have had a bigger impact on me than I would have liked.

Last fall I was contemplating my great escape. I wanted to get away from the grief, depression and heartache that had settled on me. I was all for making a fresh start – going somewhere unknown to me and where I was unknown. (If you want to know more about what a familiar feeling this is for me, check out my song Run Away, written back in 2007.) 

Over the winter, I explored various options – some in Québec, some elsewhere in Nova Scotia. I even did a little research about what it would take to move to Argentina.

Introducing... The Land

For all of my dreams of new adventures, in my heart of hearts I know that what I really want is to put down roots. The thought of being responsible for – and in charge of – my own bailliwick called to me, loud and clear. After so many moves and so much uncertainty, I long to stay put for a while. I crave as much certainty as anyone can expect in this world. Knowing that I am always at the whim of the VERSE (Very Enormous Random Swirl of Events), I long to be only at its whim and my own. No other.

And then, a piece of land went up for sale in my neighbourhood (west of the LaHave River). It is not right on the water (I could never afford that!), but it's only an 8-minute drive to Crescent Beach. The sellers were motivated. I had some help coming up with the lump sum (Thank-you-very-much-to-you-know-who-you-are!).

I could see my way clear to making the investment.

So, I bought it. All it took was a realtor, a lawyer, some paperwork, some money and some time. The sale went through on May 13, 2015. I am a landowner. Or, as I prefer to think of it, the officially-recognized steward of 3 acres of Nova Scotia's south shore.

Alexandra Hickey, Esquire.

It's an awesome feeling and a strange feeling at the same time. The land is the definition of stunning beauty for me – home to a number of old, crooked pine trees like this one in the photo below.

I have named the three pines that are visible from the road Orwen, Orduu and Orgoch
in honour of the three Fates in Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain.
This photo is of Orwen. She's the kindly one with the wacky hair.

And at the back of the parcel there is a sluggish brook with wetlands which hopefully augurs wild mushroom harvests in the fall...

What now?

Understandably, I feel rather overwhelmed about the process of getting myself and my Wholehearted House situated on this piece of land – especially without disturbing those pines – or anything else on the land – more than is absolutely necessary. There is a lot to do to solve the challenges of access (to situate my house, car and any equipment temporarily needed to prepare the site), water, power, waste treatment, Internet access. In each case there are decisions to make about the type of solution: on or off-grid, all of the hows and whys, and of course, how much money will each part of the project take, and how quickly can I earn that money and earmark it for its purpose?

Many ideas are dancing around in my head: conventional and way-out-there, short-term and long-range.

It will take me a while to figure out my master plan. I'm going to do my best to take it one step at a time.

Fortunately, I have time on my side. There is no pressure.

Since they are not making any more land (apart from occasional harbour infill projects (which don't count, in my opinion) – we're lucky that the land we've got is not going anywhere anytime soon.

VERSE willing.

Sexism #3: Protagonism

Is that even a word?

Yes, it is.

protagonism:  the state, character, or activity of a protagonist.

What does this have to do with sexism and feminism?

 

Where we ("Western culture") are coming from

One of the fundamental beliefs of any patriarchal culture is that men are protagonists and women are auxiliary. In other words, men have lives and women (if they're lucky) have men who have lives. This used to be far more pronounced in Western culture than it is today. There were powerful stereotypes of women keeping homes for men and providing them with a safe and comfortable base while the men went out into the world and did things. And then came home to women who were there for them.

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal for the men, in my opinion. Granted, I'm sure there are some who would say that it was a sweet deal for the women, too, that women were "taken care of" under this system . 

This way of arranging things paired responsibility with power. Men were responsible for the people in their family/community, therefore, they had the power and called the shots. Women were not responsible and they did not have the power – they did what they were told or expected to do.

 

A Culture in Transition

Surely this is not what it's like anymore, right? I mean, feminism won, didn't it? And we're all equal now?

And yet, these unequal perceptions around who is a protagonist and who is not linger. They are obvious in our media, our politics, in the prevalence of rape and sexual violence and also in the day-to-day exchanges of many average and ordinary intimate relationships.

My personal experience

I'm a woman who grew up in the era of Free to Be... You and Me. This means that while I saw sexism all around me, I was simultaneously being indoctrinated in the belief that I could be anything I wanted to be. That I was "just as good as any man". I was taught to think of myself as a protagonist. I did not go to university to get my M.r.s. as many girls still joked back in 1990 (and perhaps still joke even to this day?). I went to get my B.A., dammit and I did. 

In my life, relationships have come and gone, while my sense of agency has only continued to grow. I was having a conversation with a friend a couple of months ago and she asked me what I wouldn't give up to be in a relationship. I knew the answer right away: my autonomy and my authenticity. If I have to give up either of those things, it's not worth it. I don't mind making compromises, but if someone wants me to adopt a position in which I have less than 50% of the power and responsibility in the relationship or less that 100% of my power and responsibility for myself (my choices, my circumstances, my thoughts, feelings and behaviour) – I'd rather be alone. 

(My friend's delightful answer to the same question was: yoga – which is also in my top 10, for sure).

Seems straightforward, and yet...

On one hand, it seems strange to me that there are people don't appear to believe that every individual is the protagonist of their own life, regardless of their sex (or race, gender, sexuality, age, ability, etc.). I mean, really? Isn't it just obviously true that every person is living a life that is theirs and that is just as valid and meaningful to them as my life is to me and yours is to you? 

But on the other hand, I have experienced the insidiousness of this bias that one's right to be a protagonist is relative to one's position on the hierarchies of our culture. Granted, due to intersectionality, this can be a complicated thing to figure out between race, sex, class, sexuality, etc.

But as a white woman who has had intimate relationships with white men, I have been shocked on several occasions in the past to find myself in an intimate relationship with a man who seemed to feel entitled to tell me what I thought, how I felt or how he wanted me to live my life. In a couple of instances, before I realized what was happening, I experienced some erosion of my sense of autonomy and authenticity.
 
I must admit that until recently, I didn't grasp that this was an outcropping of sexism.  On the outside, those men seemed like they held pretty good feminist/egalitarian ideals. So, I thought it was just a circumstantial thing. Something about them and something about me had combined to result in a blurriness around my autonomy and authenticity. 

What I now realize is that that "something" is actually part of a systemic problem arising from a culture that raises people to believe that men are protagonists and women are – not.  Women are left with the role of accessory (trophy wife), object (hottie, MILF, slut, whore, etc.), help-mate, second-in-command or junior partner (I well remember hurling that last phrase at a long-time lover in the final days of our relationship). 

Women who resist the subordinate role laid out for them are often labelled as bitches, harridans, nags, harpies, ungenerous, selfish, narcissistic, difficult, ball-breakers, control freaks, pains-in-the-tuckus, domineering, and on and on. 

This does not feel right or fair to me.

Can we change this?

I can see that we have already come a long way – and that we have further still to go.

It seems to me that, as a culture and as individuals, we have some work to do to get away from the victimhood and resentment stirred up by the loss of undeserved entitlement. And there is also work to do in clearing the barriers that make it difficult for women to claim their role as protagonists in their own lives.

Fortunately, there are women and men who are interested in trying to change this facet of our culture.

To me, this kind of change feels like it happens in an interrelated spiral between individuals and the culture at large. For every individual who rethinks their position and makes an effort to change the way they behave in the world, the culture changes, while every change in the culture opens up a door for more people to rethink their position and further change the culture. 

This feels hopeful to me because I believe that individual change is always possible. It is a simple (though also demanding) process of self-examination, honesty, decision-making and practice. And while many people will not go out of their way to change an unfair system – especially if it benefits them – some will.

If you are one of these people and you're a man, you can ask yourself: "To what do I feel entitled? And why?" If your entitlement includes having women in your life organize or reorganize their lives around you and your needs, it's time to ask, "Is that fair? Why do I feel entitled to that? Can I change that about myself?" 

If you are one of these people and you're a women, you can ask yourself: "Do I feel like someone else is entitled to tell me how to live, how to think or how to feel?" If so, it's time to ask "Is that fair? Why don't I feel entitled to decide those things for myself? Can I change that about myself?"

 

I think we can spiral this thing up. Let's get to it!

*****

PS: I've recently read a couple of great blog posts on this topic that I would like to share with you.
Your Princess is in another castle

Ben Pobjie's Wonderful World Of Objects: How YOU Doin'?

And on the other side of the issue, this rant about the agony of lost entitlement might clarify things for you if you're not even sure what I'm talking about, or if you don't think this is an issue worthy of a blog post.