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Posted by Zoom! on June 14, 2007, at 9:27 pm |
 I got a brand new brother yesterday! Ok, maybe he’s not exactly a brand new brother, but I hadn’t seen him since October 23rd, 1982 when he was nine years old, and before that I hadn’t seen him since he was a baby. Now he’s 33, so it’s just like getting a whole new brother.
 I like him a lot. His name is Michael, he lives in Montreal, and he’s smart and interesting and has a good sense of humour. And he’s a left-handed claustrophobic real estate agent with a keen sense of smell.
He has a dog named Happy. How can you not like someone who names his dog Happy?
Whenever anybody asks me how many brothers and sisters I have, I never quite know what to say. It depends on who I count. The detailed list includes eight siblings: one full sister, one half-sister, two half-brothers, three ex-step-brothers and an ex-half-step-brother. (And before you ask, I’ll explain what an ex-half-step-brother is: his name is Jeff and he is my mother’s second husband’s first wife’s first child from her first marriage, which was annulled because her husband was married to two women at the same time.) I don’t know if you’re supposed to include ex-step-siblings though, so sometimes I just say I have two sisters and two brothers.
 Anyway, back to Michael, who is completely unrelated to the bigamist. Michael is my father’s son from his second marriage, which makes him my half-brother.
 Last night my dad and his wife Merle and Michael came to Ottawa for dinner. We met at Mexicali Rosa’s in the Glebe. We ate, we drank, we talked, we laughed, and we all got to know each other a little better. Aside from a couple of awkward silences as the evening was winding down and it was time to say goodbye, it was all good.
I sincerely hope we won’t ever let 24 years slip by again, because life is way too short for that.
Posted by zoom! on June 13, 2007, at 11:23 pm |
Today was an interesting day. I had a meltdown at the Riverside Hospital this morning and I got a brand new brother at Mexicali Rosa’s this evening.
Remember when the Mysterious Hematologist finally concluded that my immature red blood cells were being caused by Cold Agglutinin Disease (aka Cold Antibody Hemolytic Anemaia)? I assumed that would be the end of all the testing, but I was wrong. Today I went for a CT Scan so he could see if there was some underlying cause for the Cold Agglutinin Disease.
A couple of years ago he sent me for a CT scan of my head. It was a nice test. Just lie down and relax, and a few minutes later it was over. Later he told me the inside of my head looked normal.
“Which is good,” he said, unnecessarily.
“You’d be surprised how often they they don’t,” he added ominously.
So I blithely went into today’s scan expecting much the same thing.
It seems not all CT scans are created equal. This one involved sitting in a waiting room in a blue hospital gown, drinking lots of “clear, tasteless liquid.” Hmmm. Sounds like water, but if it was water they’d just say water, right?
After I’d drunk all that stuff that wasn’t water – which took an hour and a half – they hooked up an IV. There was no IV last time. They told me they’d be injecting a contrast material right before the scan, which might make me feel a bit warm. That sounded good, since I was freezing my ass off in my little blue gown in that extremely air-conditioned waiting room.
Finally they took me into the scan room and I lay down on the flatbed. Then they moved the flatbed into the scanner and left me all alone for about 10 minutes. I kept wondering if I was already being scanned or if I was on pause. I didn’t dare move. I started thinking about iron lungs and cancer and radiation, which led to equally pleasant thoughts of nuclear holocausts, cockroaches and rats.
I thought about Gail who had surgery on Sept. 11, 2001, only minutes after hearing about the twin towers. What if something like that had just happened, and all the hospital staff were glued to CNN at this very moment, and they forgot to turn the scanner off and I was at this very moment receiving a fatal dose of radiation? What if the world was ending and everybody knew it but me?
I kept my eyes closed. I know my eyelids cannot protect me from fatal doses of radiation, but this was my last line of defence.
Finally she came back, all cheery and chipper and apologetic for having left me alone for so long. And then suddenly my arm was on fire. ON FIRE! She was injecting the contrast dye and it was burning my arm from the inside out. This was not “a bit warm” as she had previously suggested it might be. This felt like they’d injected Cayenne Liniment Oil directly into my veins.
I started to panic, thinking I was having one of those very rare reactions to the contrast dye. I was obviously going to be part of the .00005 % of patients who die on the flatbed.
Then the burning in my arm started to subside, but suddenly my genitals were on fire. ON FIRE! Nobody ever mentioned anything about this possibility. I thought I was going to spontaneously combust.
And then, before I could say anything to alert her to the fact that I was having a rare and fatal reaction to the dye, she was gone again and the flatbed was moving and the scanner was scanning me and a disembodied male voice was ordering me around, saying things like “Don’t breathe,” and “Don’t move,” and “Don’t swallow,” and a female voice on the intercom was saying “Lift your arms,” and “Put your arms down.”
The burning subsided but I was still freaked out. I was trying to not breathe and not swallow and lift my arms and not move and not panic about the allergic reaction I was sure I was having.
“It’s just a CT scan,” I told myself, “It’s like a photograph. It doesn’t hurt. Don’t panic.”
But I couldn’t help it. And then tears started trickling into my ears and I didn’t dare move my arms to brush them away. And I was shaking and my teeth were chattering.
She came back in and seemed oblivous to my obvious distress.
“We have to do your neck again,” she said perkily, and fed me back into the machine.
And then, mercifully, it was over. Time to get dressed and get the needle removed and be on my way and drink my first coffee of the day and have a muffin.
I really hope there’s nothing wrong with me, because if I can get myself that worked up over a CT scan, just imagine what I could do with treatment. (I’m pretty sure there’s nothing wrong with me. He’s just “ruling things out.” The nurse today let it slip that one of the things he’s ruling out is sickle cell anemia. If I have it, that’ll bring me up to three different kinds of anemia. I’ll be in the Guinness Book of World Records as the Anemia Queen.)
That was the not-so-good part of my day. The day got much better and by the end of it I had a new brother. But it’s late and I’m tired, so I’ll write about my new brother tomorrow.
Posted by Zoom! on June 11, 2007, at 8:13 pm |
Do you ever feel like you’ve run out of things to say and maybe you should just be quiet for awhile?
I started blogging in October, 2005, with zero readers. I just wrote, and sometimes I wondered if anybody was reading it. After awhile someone left a comment, so I knew I had at least one reader. Over time, more and more comments were left.
I felt a little funny telling friends and family about my blog, so mostly I didn’t. But every now and then, if the mood struck, I’d tell someone. Some of them checked it out, and a few of them stuck around.
At some point I installed Statcounter, so I could track the number of visitors to the blog over time. I kept writing, and the number of visitors kept inching upwards. Then I set up a feed, so people could subscribe to the blog. I kept writing, and the number of subscribers kept slowly climbing.
It was all very motivating to see those numbers trending upwards.
About a month ago I was averaging a hundred visitors a day, and my subscribers peaked at 50. But then the trend suddenly reversed and the numbers started falling. Now I’m averaging about 65 visitors a day, and I’m down to 43 subscribers.
I know I shouldn’t be so concerned with the numbers, but it’s my nature. I’m into metrics. When I was running, I used a GPS system so I could upload my running stats after each run and see maps and graphs of my progress. I was a little obsessive about monitoring changes in my speed and distance. Now that I just walk, I wear a pedometer everywhere I go so I can try to walk a little further each day. I average about 13,000 steps a day, in case anybody finds this kind of thing remotely interesting.
It’s not so much the actual numbers that matter, but the direction the numbers are going. The fact is that momentum does motivate me, and losing ground does discourage me.
So why are my numbers down? Unfortunately the metrics can’t tell me that.
It could be simply that people aren’t spending as much time reading blogs because it’s nice outside. That makes sense.
On the other hand, what if the drop in numbers is accurately reflecting a drop in the quality of my blog? What if I’m running out of interesting things to blog about? Maybe I should just be quiet for awhile. Unfortunately, when it comes to blogs, silence means you just slip off the radar and lose all your readers. Which is worse: losing readers through silence, or losing readers because you’ve got nothing to say but you insist on saying something anyway so you don’t lose your readers through silence?
Okay, I just re-read this, and I don’t know whether to even post it or not. It’s got kind of a pathetic tone to it, don’t you think? It sounds like I’m trying to get you all to say encouraging things. I’m not, really. (But could you all hit refresh a few times before you go? That would inflate my numbers and cheer me up. Thank you.)
(I’m kidding about that last part!)
Posted by Zoom! on June 9, 2007, at 10:48 pm |
I used to go to the Merrickville Antique Show every year, but today was the first time since 2003. Talk about downsized. I think the antiques bubble burst in my absence. There were only about 25 dealers and maybe a hundred scroungers. Sad to say, the pickings were pretty slim. The stuff they’re now calling antique makes me feel old, because some of it is stuff I have in my home and still use. You know, stuff from the 80s.
There were some blatantly obvious reproduction ‘antique’ photos. Someone downloaded some old photos off the net, enlarged them without even adjusting the resolution, printed them, stuck them in frames, and tried to pass them off as antique photographs. You could see the pixels.
 It looked like I was going to leave empty-handed, but I found some interesting things in the second-last stall. The Scoop of the Day: three copies of Sexology: The Magazine of Sex Science (~mid-1930s) for $8. (Eat your heart out Nik!). I’ll write more about it later, but here’s an exclusive sneak peak at the table of contents:
Poverty and Sex Immorality (Illustrated)
Gonorrhea Mistaken for Appendicitis (Illustrated)
Radium Treatment of the Womb (Illustrated)
Pregnant Virgins
Sex Education of Savages
The Third Sex Disease: Chancroid (Illustrated)
Does Nudism Banish Shame?
Syphillis of the Breast and Rectum
The Self-Love Danger
Sex and Warfare
Homosexuality in Growing Girls (Illustrated)
The Danger of Petting (Illustrated)
Training Children for Sex Life (Illustrated)
Imaginary “Loss of Manhood” (Illustrated)
Sex Impulses of Old Men
The Heredity of Syphilis (Illustrated)
Sex Organs Show Race Mixture
What Causes Prostitution? (Illustrated)
…and much, much more!
I picked up the three copies immediately, so the dealer pegged me as a sex collector and started directing me to related materials. He thought I might like some erotic playing cards. They were repro minis, but only $2 and I could use them in art so I bought them. And then he tried to interest me in some Playboy magazines from the 1980s, which were stashed in a box under the table. Playboy? The 80s? I didn’t think so. But I did buy an old children’s book with lovely illustrations of Gollywogs and invalids. I cannot resist vintage political incorrectness.
After Merrickville I went to the Used Book Sale at the Experimental Farm, and bought a bag of semi-interesting books, but nothing as impressive as Sexology Magazine and Gollywogs.
At 4:00 I went to a 10-minute meeting at work, and then I had raspberries, salami and a Stella for dinner. All in all, it was a very good Saturday.
Posted by Zoom! on June 7, 2007, at 7:19 pm |
Well, it was kind of an anticlimatic game at the end of an anticlimatic series, wasn’t it? None of that adrenalin-fueled squirming on the edge of our seats, chewing on our nails, afraid-to-look-at-the-screen-but-afraid-to-look-away kind of stuff. Nope. The whole series – and especially the last game – was like falling off a high cliff in slow motion.
At least we had plenty of time to come to terms with our impending loss, as one puck after another plopped into the net. I kept doing the math: if we score a short-handed goal now and then score every two minutes for the rest of the game, we’ll win. And then we just have to win the next two games, and then we can have our parade.
I liked what making it to the finals did for Ottawa – all that flag-flying enthusiasm, all that partying in the streets, all that collective team spirit. Ottawa needs more stuff like that to get excited about.
The downtown core seemed a little deflated and hungover today, just like usual. Everything fizzled back to normal.
 But you know what? I’m not ready for normal. We might not have won, but second place ain’t too shabby either. If any of us won second place in the lottery or the marathon or even a beauty contest, wouldn’t we be celebrating? I say we should go ahead and have the parade and celebrate Ottawa’s impressive second place accomplishment. Whadya think?
Posted by Zoom! on June 5, 2007, at 8:33 pm |
More of us are petrified of public speaking (glossophobia) than of death (thanatophobia). I suppose if somebody held a gun to my head and said “Speak or die,” I’d start talking. But I am terribly phobic about public speaking and I am very good at avoiding it.
I wasn’t always that way. In elementary school we had public speaking competitions. I always took part because I loved writing the speeches. I just didn’t like delivering them. Nothing particularly humiliating happened, but by grade 9 my dislike of public speaking had progressed into a full-blown phobia and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I still can’t. I can barely handle those meetings where you go around the table and everybody introduces themselves.
My bull phobia is more unusual. It stems from an Incident. When I was 11, my grandfather and step-father decided to get up early one morning to go hunt Canada Geese in the back forty. I hatched a plan to stay up all night and then follow them through the fields and save the geese. I knew I’d get in trouble, but it would be worth it because I was eleven and therefore noble.
My plan, though elegant in its simplicity, was thwarted when I got chased by a herd of cattle. I saw them coming in the pre-dawn light: at first I literally did not believe what my eyes were seeing, because cows don’t stampede. It wasn’t until they were a couple hundred yards away that I finally accepted that cows do stampede. I have never run so freakishly fast in my life – my feet felt like giant springs. The herd, however, was faster. They caught up with me and formed a mean circle with me in the centre. I found myself face to face with a demented bull. (I learned later that the farmer had just rented the bull, and he himself would not set foot in the field while the bull was there.)
The bull was in a rage. He was snorting and tearing up the ground and his eyes were shockingly hateful. The cows weren’t acting very cow-like either. It was so surreal.
I took a step backward, away from the bull. The entire herd took a step toward me, and the circle got smaller. I took another step backward, and again, the circle shrunk. I stopped taking steps backwards. The bull was maybe 15 feet away from me, and he was preparing to attack me. I knew – right down to the core of my being – that my own gory death was imminent.
There was really nothing to do but shake, cry and prepare to die. And wet my pants.
But then something in me told me to start screaming. I’m a pretty quiet person; I’ve never been a screamer. It didn’t come easily or naturally to me, but I started screaming. I hated the horribly unnatural sounds coming out of my mouth.
My screams didn’t phase the bull or the cows, but they carried through that weird pre-dawn silence to the field where my step-father and grandfather were preparing to shoot the Canada Geese. They didn’t know who was screaming or why, but they came running back through the fields firing their rifles. And the herd, mercifully, got distracted and dispersed. I’m not sure what happened next, except I didn’t die that day, and neither did any Canada Geese.
I did get in trouble though. And I did acquire a permanent fear of bulls. There is a name for it: taurophobia.
Here’s a list of phobias, in case you want to name your fear and share it with the rest of us.
Edited August 2/2007 to add this awful photo of a gory goring:
Posted by zoom! on June 4, 2007, at 7:18 pm |
 I went to see Bodies: The Exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York. It uses real human corpses to illustrate anatomy. The bodies have been dissected and preserved using a polymer preservation process.
There are a number of full corpses, with their skin removed and various other parts removed or peeled back so you can see inside. There are also display cases containing other parts: bones, organs, and so on. There’s a lot of explanatory text.
It was interesting for awhile, but nine rooms of body parts is a bit much. I probably shouldn’t have read all the explanatory text. And it might have been better without the diseased bits, like the gallstones, cancers and birth defects.
A lot of people hear about this exhibit and think it sounds macabre and icky. It’s not. My mother thought it would be ‘beautiful.’ It’s not. It’s educational rather than artistic, and nothing smells.
I didn’t realize when I went to see it that it was a copycat exhibit. The original is called Body Worlds. There are numerous copycat exhibits, and there are Chinese factories which exist solely to prepare bodies for these exhibits. I knew there was some controversy about how the bodies were obtained and whether the ‘donors’ had given consent for their bodies to be on display. The different exhibitions are owned by different people and there’s a lot of accusations flying back and forth between them about nefarious goings-on.
Consent is an interesting concept. Do you still own your body after you’re dead? Do you have a right not to be posthumously skinned and displayed in a glass case? Does it matter if a cross-sectional slice of your penis is seen by millions of people if nobody knows who it belongs to?
Body Worlds is currently on exhibit at the Montreal Science Centre.
Posted by Zoom! on June 2, 2007, at 10:46 am |
I read about the Conservative Party’s new blog on Rick Mercer’s site, and thought he was joking. He wasn’t.
The Conservative Party should know better than to attempt to be funny – they’re just not made that way – and their blog illustrates perfectly what happens when a political party combines a lack of humour with a lack of class.
Posted by Zoom! on June 1, 2007, at 12:37 pm |
I bought my house last October, which was post-garden season. This is what I saw: a tiny backyard, maybe 12 feet by 10 feet, lined on two sides with empty flower boxes, and surrounded by a fence.
Not much, I thought, but I could grow morning glories and marigolds, squeeze in a barbecue and a table and chair, and be perfectly happy out there.
 I got my seeds started indoors a few weeks ago. The first batch committed suicide, so I tried again. By the time they were ready to transplant, my back yard had completely changed. I had hundreds of gigantic dandelions and other stuff growing from the cracks in the tiles. The flower boxes were exploding with life. My tiny back yard was suddenly full.
 You would think that in a back yard as small as mine, I would have noticed the trees before now. No. It turns out I have two trees.
I managed to make room for the morning glory seedlings. Within a day or two, the squirrels had dug them all up and left their limp little bodies everywhere. I’ve done battle with squirrels before, mostly on balconies. It’s an unwinnable battle because I have a job and they don’t. I have to leave my garden unguarded for nine hours a day. Still, I planted more seeds.
 As for the things growing in the flower boxes: I think they’re weeds. My unfortunate experience with gardens is that if something is doing very well, it’s almost certainly a weed. Some of the vine plants have climbed out of the flower boxes, scrambled across the tiled back yard, and climbed up the house. I tried to remove a couple of them, but when I pulled on their ropey stems, the entire flower box heaved and threatened to fall apart.
 My plan for morning glories climbing my fence has been thwarted not only by the squirrels, but also by something spilling over from the neighbour’s side of the fence – I don’t know what it is, but it has talons and it’s advancing a couple of feet each day.
My son gave me a barbecue for Christmas and it’s in the backyard. I don’t think there’s room for a table and chair after all. If things keep going the way they are, the vine things will probably claim the barbecue and seal the back door shut by July.
 The front yard: Most of my neighbours have tidy little flower beds lining their walkways. I have this wild jumble of something that is taking over my side of the shared walkway. Do you recognize it? Is it a good thing, or is it a weed on steroids? Should I take a machete to it? I fear it’s only a matter of time until my walkway becomes inpenetrable and the mailman stops coming.
 Here’s a close-up of it. I need someone to identify it before it’s too late.
(My previous gardening experience is limited to containers on balconies. I did have a house once, briefly, up near Wakefield, with an acre of land. However I was married to someone at the time who thought the only good garden was the kind that you paid someone else $5000 to plant and then referred to as ‘landscaping.’)
Posted by Zoom! on May 30, 2007, at 7:41 pm |
 This is my mailbox. It might not look like much, but it’s on a hot streak. I knew it was a lucky mailbox seven months ago when the very first piece of mail I received in it was an unexpected cheque for all those years of unpaid child support.
Here are some of the things I’ve been finding in it lately: my income tax refund, lots of art cards from artists around the world, a CD and a book!
 Yesterday I received an unexpected package from Susan Musgrave, the famous poet. It was an autographed copy of Jackrabbit Parole, written by her husband Stephen Reid.
Stephen Reid was a member of the Stopwatch Gang, along with Paddy Mitchell and Lionel Wright. They were Canada’s favourite bank robbers, well known for their non-violent tactics, their charisma and intelligence, and their uncanny ability to escape from prisons.
But eventually they all pushed their luck and paid the price. Paddy died in prison in January. Stephen is serving an 18-year sentence for bank robbery in British Columbia. Lionel, last I heard, is working for Corrections Canada.
I first read Jackrabbit Parole many years ago. Stephen’s a superb storyteller; I hope he writes more books. I love Paddy’s book, but Stephen’s is more polished and professional. I lent my original copy to my son’s friend, after extracting a solemn promise from him that he’d return it, and of course I never saw it again. But I don’t care anymore because this is an autographed copy, which is infinitely better.
Now if I can just get Greg Weston to sign my copy of The Stopwatch Gang, I’ll have the complete autographed set. (I’ll still envy Susan Musgrave though, as she is one of only three people on the planet with a copy of The Stopwatch Gang autographed by Mitchell, Reid and Wright.)
I also recently received a package in my mailbox from David Britten: it was an autographed copy of his new CD, which features The Ballad of Paddy Mitchell. (You can listen to the song on his website, www.davidbritten.com .)
It used to be that my best mail was from Paddy. Now, months after his death, some of my best mail is about Paddy.
There’s other good stuff in the mailbox too, totally unrelated to Paddy, like the steady stream of artist trading cards. And the cheques – more like a trickle than a stream, but definitely better than I’ve gotten from other mailboxes in my past. I really love this mailbox.
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I like him a lot. His name is Michael, he lives in Montreal, and he’s smart and interesting and has a good sense of humour. And he’s a left-handed claustrophobic real estate agent with a keen sense of smell.
Anyway, back to Michael, who is completely unrelated to the bigamist. Michael is my father’s son from his second marriage, which makes him my half-brother.
Last night my dad and his wife Merle and Michael came to Ottawa for dinner. We met at Mexicali Rosa’s in the Glebe. We ate, we drank, we talked, we laughed, and we all got to know each other a little better. Aside from a couple of awkward silences as the evening was winding down and it was time to say goodbye, it was all good. 
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