GC took me out for dinner at what I think must be Ottawa’s best-kept secret as far as restaurants go: The Buzz, on Bank Street near Gilmour. We had mussels, steak, sweet potato fries, lightly steamed veggies, creme caramel and cappuccino. Everything was scrumptious. I love that place. (Bonus: If you go on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, you can bring your own bottle of wine, and they’ll just charge you a $5 corking fee.)
I didn’t get my hair cut yesterday. After announcing my intention to do so, I decided to read back over your comments on the post where I asked for hair advice: Hair Today, Hair Tomorrow. I just wanted to refresh my memory so I’d know what to ask the hairdresser to do. As I read through the comments, I remembered that I’d wanted to try Meghan Dailey, Hairdresser to the Blogosphere. If there’s one thing you can say about Ottawa bloggers, it’s that they all have good hair. Every last one of ’em. I can’t think of a single exception. So I canceled my appointment at Hairmosa and scheduled one next week with Meghan at Le Spa.
I ended up staying home all afternoon and reading The Glass Castle. It’s a memoir by Jeannette Walls, who grew up in a family with wildly unconventional parents who moved constantly to avoid creditors, didn’t believe in rules, and let their four kids run free and learn from their own mistakes (even to the point of spending months in the burn unit after catching fire while cooking hotdogs, unsupervised, at the age of three). On the flip side of that tarnished penny, the parents loved them fiercely, taught them physics, astronomy, literature, art and marksmanship, and encouraged them to be self-sufficient, adventurous, creative and free.
It got me thinking about parenting styles. Supposing you had to go through childhood again, but with a different family, and you were offered your choice of two extremes at either end of the continuum. Would you choose outrageously unconventional, utterly irresponsible, nomadic, adventurous, creative, dysfunctional, dumpster-diving, death-defying parents that lurch from one crisis to the next? Or would you prefer rigidly conservative, ultra-responsible, middle-income, unchanging, unthinking, unimaginative, authoritarian, bland parents that never take any chances or have any problems?
Posted by zoom! on October 15, 2009, at 12:45 pm |
I’m having a very happy birthday today. For starters, I woke up and the migraine I’ve been living with since Tuesday was pretty much gone. Even though it’s been a brutal year, health-wise, the one bright spot has been headaches. Maybe it’s because of the drugs I’m taking, maybe it’s because I don’t have a job, I don’t know. But I’ve had far fewer migraines this year than other years. And there’s nothing like waking up without a migraine after several days with your skull in a vice-grip – you feel so much happier to be alive. You feel lighter and freer and more energetic and creative.
By 9:30 this morning I’d completed all my medical appointments for the day: wound check at the surgeon’s office (it’s coming along nicely, they said), radiation, and blood tests. (The nurse had a hot flash while taking my blood, and had to roll her forehead on the cool stainless steel tray for a bit of relief.) I had the pleasure of running into an old friend as I was leaving the hospital, so I even got a hug before I left.
GC picked me up and took me out for breakfast, which included an apple-cranberry muffin to save for later (I thought of you Laura – happy birthday to you too, and I hope you got your apple-cranberry muffin too).
I got a postcard in the mail from Woodsy – sent from the Elmdale Tavern! My Dad called! My Facebook wall was covered in birthday greetings! There’s a home-made banana-butterscotch-chocolate cake sitting in my kitchen. Everywhere I look, it’s my birthday!
But wait, there’s more! [Insert drum roll here]
I’m going to get my hair done today, and I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy about a haircut in my life. I haven’t been to the hairdresser’s since February. I figured there wasn’t any point since I had cancer, which meant chemo, which meant all my hair was just going to fall out anyway. But I was wrong, and now I have long unruly hair that needs to be tamed. I’m going to keep growing it for awhile, but today I’m going to get a good cut to shape it and give it direction.
The other exciting thing about going to the hairdresser is that I get to ride a bus for the first time in six months. (You know you need to get out more when the prospect of a trip on the #14 is a little bit thrilling.)
My blogiversary snuck past me! I launched Knitut.net on October 11th, 2005. I like to celebrate its birthday every year by taking a little statistical snapshot and highlighting any highlights from the previous year.
As of October 11th, 2009, there were 1013 posts on Knitnut.net, and 9458 comments.
# of POSTS
Year 1: 205
Year 2: 235
Year 3: 296
Year 4: 277
TOTAL: 1,013
# of COMMENTS
Year 1: 491
Year 2: 1136
Year 3: 3693
Year 4: 4138
Total: 9,458
(The 1,000th post, by the way, was the Appeal for Creative Writing Resources. Maybe I’ll have a contest for the 10,000th comment…)
Even though my total annual number of posts dropped slightly for the first time since I started blogging, you continued to comment in record-breaking numbers! I thank you for that…comments are the icing on a blogger’s cake. (Speaking of cake, tomorrow’s my birthday and I think GC is going to make me a banana butterscotch cake!)
Here’s a Statcounter graph of traffic to KnitNut.net from October 4 to October 11, 2009.
Statcounter Traffic Graph for Knitnut.net - October 4-11, 2009
Here’s my Statcounter monthly traffic report:
Knitnut.net Traffic Report: Oct.08-Sept.09
That big spike there in December was from the Bank Street Bully post, which was my most-read post ever, thanks to everybody who shared the link all over the world.
Four of the five most-commented-upon posts ever (as determined by the Popular Post widget over there in the left sidebar) were written in the past twelve months.
Here’s my quarterly traffic report from the beginning of 2006 to September 2009.
According to Feedburner, KnitNut now has 346 subscribers, up from 222 a year ago. I like seeing my numbers inching upwards. The actual numbers don’t interest me as much as the trend, but in this case I like the trend and the number.
Technorati used to be a pretty good indicator of how a blog was faring, but over time it seems to be have lost its usefulness and credibility. However, since I’ve been tracking it each year in my blogiversary snapshot, I’m including it. The rankings vanished with their recent makeover, but my Technorati “authority” increased from 40 to 128. This means nothing, since they changed their methodology without providing any explanation of how the new and supposedly improved methodology works.
According to Statcounter and Google Analtyics, the following search terms continue to draw droves of people to this blog: “ears squeak when I blow my nose,” “22-inch penis” (and its variations, including “21.2 inch penis”), “women’s change rooms” and “suppository stories.” A few more have been added this year, including: “ottawa police brutality,” “minto park monument names,” “how do you know if your cat loves you,” “how can you tell if your cat is intelligent,” big zucchini,” “tiny penis,” “Smarties colour distribution,” “naked bike ride,” and “Duncan, the Norwegian Forest Cat.”
Some of the more unusual search terms this year include: “how to reconcile with my boyfriend who sees me as a nut,” “decapitation on a double-decker bus,” and “knitted wasp nests.”
That about sums things up for the fourth year of KnitNut.net. Thank you all for reading, for leaving comments, and for giving me a reason to keep on writing.
Posted by zoom! on October 12, 2009, at 10:12 am |
Usually I have a pretty superficial relationship with Thanksgiving: it’s a day off work and a turkey dinner, which is reason enough to celebrate. But it occurred to me this morning, as I lay in bed snuggling with Duncan, that I have some extra reasons to be thankful this year.
I’m thankful for a nurse named Sarah, at the Ontario Breast Screening Program at Hampton Park Plaza, who discovered the tumour in my breast even though it went undetected by a mammogram.
At the time this didn’t seem like a lucky break. Quite the opposite. But if she hadn’t found it, it would still be in there, symptomless and undetected, gaining ground, growing more dangerous by the day. Instead, it’s gone.
I’ve had other experiences in my life that seemed like terrible luck at the time, but which I later realized were extraordinarily fortunate.
For example, I once found out, in the most bizarre way imaginable, that someone was cheating on me. While he was having sex with a woman in his car, she sat on his phone – right on the Last Number Redial button. His phone called my phone, and my answering machine recorded the next three minutes of what was going on his car, from the audio perspective of her ass.
As you might imagine, this was a harrowing message to listen to.
Even though it was irrefutable proof that he was cheating on me, when I confronted him later he tried to refute it with blatant lies. I realized not long afterward that he was a pathological liar. He had lied to me every chance he got, even when there was no advantage or benefit to lying. He just liked lying.
You know, it wasn’t even a good relationship, but I still felt crushed and betrayed by the cheating and lying. That kind of thing can really make you doubt yourself. You start wondering why you didn’t see the obvious signs, and if you were somehow complicit in the betrayal. How come you were so easy to deceive? How many other untrustworthy people have you trusted in your life? How can you ever trust yourself or anyone else again?
The whole thing rattled me badly, and after a couple of weeks I went to see a counselor about it. I told her the whole sordid story and you know what she said?
“Wow. Are you ever lucky!”
I looked up at her, startled. “What do you mean?”
“It’s almost like someone out there is watching out for you,” she said, “By making sure you found out what you needed to know.”
Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you all find something to be thankful for this year, even if you have to look in the unlikeliest of places.
Posted by zoom! on October 11, 2009, at 11:18 am |
Lying on the couch all the time – reading, writing, and knitting – is wonderful in its own way, but sometimes I have this burning need to go out and do something else, just to keep it wonderful.
Yesterday we did the Perth Autumn Studio Tour. It’s on today and tomorrow too, if you’re looking for something fun to do.
I love the studio tours because artists live and work in such gorgeous places. I get a contact creativity high just from being there. And this is the ideal time of the year to be driving up little dirt roads lined with flaming maple trees.
There are only eight stops on the Perth tour, but most of them feature several artists. We saw painters and potters and etchers and batik artists and photographers and jewelers and weavers and blacksmiths and woodworkers and furniture makers. (We missed a canoe maker.) My favourite was David Zimmerly, anthropologist, photographer, traveler and weaver.
On the Ottawa and Wakefield studio tours, the artists often put out cookies for their visitors. In Perth, they put out apples. They don’t look as good as store-bought apples, but they’re indescribably better, and they tided us over til lunch, which was the highlight of the day.
Brooke Valley School
We ate lunch at Brooke Valley School, which is a tiny cooperative school in the woods. This year there are fourteen students from grade one to six, and one teacher. GC and I took our chili and bread to the sunny upstairs classroom where we talked to a mother with kids in the school. If I was a kid I’d love this school. (Tim Wynne-Jones was a Brooke Valley kid and remembers it fondly.)
Artifacts unearthed
One of the trippiest things about Brooke Valley School is their archeological dig. The original school, built in the 1860s, burnt down in 1981. The current structure was built a couple hundred feet from the school that burned. The school has since turned the old site into a dig. The children carefully sift through the dirt in their section of the grid, and uncover objects from the old school – horseshoes, skates, nails, all kinds of things. They carefully document and preserve everything.
Rural Road Art
The other highlight occurred as we were driving along a winding dirt road, when we suddenly happened upon some unexpected street art! Right there in the middle of nowhere! Rabbits bounding through a field and across the road!
This installation is called Hares and Squares, but it’s only one of an ongoing series called Fieldwork. It’s described as an “open-air field ‘gallery’ for artists to install thought-provoking, site-specific work in a rural setting for the public to discover.” There’s a new installation each season. The project even has its own blog.
I’ve finished my first four radiation treatments, with fourteen remaining. I keep hoping something blogworthy will happen there, but the reality is that radiation therapy isn’t very exciting.
The most intriguing thing about it is that it’s in the basement of the Civic Hospital. To get there I have to go through a maze of tunnels (“a real rabbit’s warren,” as one nurse described it), through the utilitarian bowels of the building. I keep expecting to stumble into the morgue.
Once I find my destination (which, after four days, still feels like a bit of an accomplishment), I change, scan my appointment card, and join all the other cancer patients in the waiting room.
I’m assigned to Machine #18, even though there are only four of these machines at the Civic. There are four radiation therapists on the #18, and they work together in two-person teams.
On the first day of treatment, they made a little custom plastic thing which gets taped each day to the scar, where the tumor was removed. At first I thought it was a shield, but it’s the opposite – it amplifies or intensifies the radiation to that area.
I lie on my back on the table, and they tape that plastic thing on and then they draw thick heavy lines on my breast with green magic marker. They look like skylines. The radiation therapists asked me not to wash them off in the shower. (Hmph. I’m still not even allowed to have showers because of the back surgery complications. I’ve just been spot-cleaning for the last 15 days.)
Anyway, they line up everything: the five tattoos they gave me awhile back, their green light beams from machine #18, the magic marker lines, and the longitudinal and latitudinal numbers that they call out to each other. This takes about three minutes. Then they leave the room and I lie still while the big #18 radiation machine moves around me, quietly doing its job. I don’t feel anything, except cold; it’s a chilly room.
It takes about five minutes, during which I stare at the mural on the ceiling. Three ceiling panels have been painted with two clown fish, five tangs, two sharks, a turtle and a puffer fish. There’s a rectangle about the size of a playing card cut out of one of the panels, and two green lights live in the hole. Every day I wonder who painted that mural. The radiation therapists? Maintenance? A volunteer? An artist?
Even though it’s fast and easy and painless, I’m looking forward to the end of radiation. I want my body back to myself. The longer all this medical stuff goes on, the less my body feels like my body and more like a collection of body parts.
Besides, I don’t like strangers drawing on my breast with magic markers. At some level it feels demeaning. I know it’s not, and it’s a small price to pay, and I accept it…but I don’t like it.
Here are a couple of yummy little tidbits of upcoming fun.
Burlesque Life Drawing Comes to Ottawa!
When many artists think “life drawing,” they think of sterile rooms,
bad lighting, and bored, silent, models with nary a hint of
personality. Dr. Sketchy’s Anti Art School is here to change all
that.
Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School is the little New York art event that
became a movement. Started in 2005 by artist Molly Crabapple, the
concept is simple: artists bring pencil and pad and we’ll bring you
the most beautiful, extraordinary and outrageous models for your
sketching delight. We invite burlesque dancers, roller derby girls,
circus performers and we let you draw them for a full three hours.
Interspersed with posing are games and drawing contests where you can
win booze or prizes.
The debut session will take place on Monday, October 26, 2009 from
7:00 PM – 10:00 PM at the Mercury Lounge. Our models and
entertainment for the evening are the fabulous Sin Sisters, with
delectable treats by Little Cakes. Join us for an evening of art and
opulence!
Questions, concerns or expressions of joy about this event coming to
Ottawa? Wish to be added to the mailing list? E-mail us at
drsketchyottawa@gmail.com or find us on Facebook.
No Earthly Home
Four Canadian songwriters – Jay Linden, Jon Brooks, Rosemary Phelan and Joe Jencks – are coming together on Sunday October 18th at the Bronson Centre to provide an afternoon of family-friendly musical entertainment. All proceeds will go to Ottawa’s Alliance to End Homelessness.
Every November the Alliance puts on an absolutely first-rate one-day conference about homelessness in Ottawa. This conference is free and open to everybody because of fundraising events like this one.
You can get your $20 concert tickets at the Folklore Centre at 1111 Bank Street, or online here. (If you’re interested in attending the free conference, request a registration form from Lynne Brown at lbrowne@ysb.on.ca.)
Years ago, when my criminology degree was fresh, I did a volunteer stint as a court worker for the Ottawa Elizabeth Fry Society. My job, one morning a week, was to show up at First Appearance Court, keep an eye out for women who looked like they needed some help, and try to match them up with the appropriate community resources.
I remember one woman who was obviously at the mercy of a major mental illness. She didn’t have a lawyer – or anybody else – with her. She was immersed in her own reality, which seemed radically different from the ‘real’ reality. She was agitated, disoriented, paranoid and incapable of carrying on a cogent conversation.
The prosecutor, the duty counsel and the judge all shared quite a few laughs at this woman’s expense. I can’t remember exactly what was said, but it was clear that her mental illness – and their comments on it – were a source of great amusement to them. This took place in full public view, in a courtroom full of people, including the woman herself, and me. (I am ashamed to admit that I did not stand up and ask those men to stop mocking her. As an Elizabeth Fry volunteer, and as a human being, I should have. But I was intimidated, so I sat in appalled and complicit silence.)
If you’ve ever been up on charges, you probably already know how confusing it is. They talk their own language in court – a language not designed for the purposes of clearly communicating what’s going on to the defendant. In fact, I think it’s designed to obscure what’s going on, and to require the defendant to have a paid representative who will translate what’s going on into English. Unfortunately this translation is often half-assed and provided on-the-fly, after-the-fact, and while multi-tasking. If you’re poor, and your crime is on the mundane side, you can expect to be very poorly represented; you get what you pay for in the criminal justice system. After it’s all over, you’re lucky if duty counsel even takes a minute to explain to you What Just Happened.
I was reminded of that mentally ill woman when I attended the session on Mental Health Court at the Mental Health Symposium. She would have been the ideal candidate for this innovative program, which unfortunately didn’t exist at the time.
Ottawa became home to Ontario’s first Mental Health Court in 1994, and Canada’s first Mental Health Youth Court, in 2008. The adult court sits three times a week and the youth court sits once a month. It’s not enough, but courtroom real estate is at a premium.
Mental Health Courts emerged because some people working in the system recognized that our courts and jails had become dumping grounds for people with unmet mental health and social needs. People with serious mental illnesses (particularly in combination with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, developmental disabilities, addictions, homelessness and other concurrent disorders) were a huge drain on the system’s resources, and yet the system was failing them. The criminal justice system is an expensive and ineffective way to house people.
People weren’t just slipping through the cracks, they were getting permanently wedged into them. This is what happens when you effectively criminalize mental illness, poverty, and other health and social problems that are, at their core, not criminal in nature.
The Mental Health Courts work by trying to divert people with major mental illnesses away from the criminal justice system and towards the health care system. They try to get everybody who has been identified as having a major mental illness into a special courtroom which has a dedicated Crown attorney, judge, clerk and duty counsel. Participation is voluntary. If a defendant refuses, they are processed back through the regular court system.
Rather than approaching each case in the traditionally adversarial way (prosecution versus defense, or the people versus the accused), everybody in the courtroom works collaboratively from a case management perspective, and the individual’s legal problems are considered in the context of all their problems – health, financial, housing, social, etc. Case workers help clients link to appropriate community-based resources in an effort to ensure that their basic needs are met, because it’s unreasonable to expect people with major mental illnesses to be able to function well in society when their basic needs are not being met.
The goals of Mental Health Courts include reducing pressure on the regular court system, improving access to mental health treatment, improving access to other community services, making court more user-friendly, slowing the revolving door phenomenon, reducing recidivism, and ultimately benefiting society by reducing crime.
The keynote speaker at the Mental Health Symposium* was Dr. David Goldbloom, a psychiatrist with a succulent C.V. The subject of his address was mental illness and stigma.
In terms of how we talk about and treat people with mental illnesses, we’ve come a long way since the days of lunatics and asylums,but we still have plenty of room for improvement. According to a survey of random Canadians conducted in June 2008:
50% of us would treat a family member’s mental illness as a secret.
46% of us believe that mental illness is used as an excuse for poor behaviour and personal failing.
58% of us would socialize with someone with a mental illness
12% of us would hire a lawyer with a mental illness
11% of us would hire a doctor with a mental illness.
Hardly surprising, then, that many people suffering from mental illnesses keep it to themselves, even to the point of not seeking treatment. Or that those who recover from mental illnesses tend not to talk about it later, which in turn perpetuates the myth that people don’t recover from mental illness.
Did you know that deliveries of flowers, gifts and get-well cards to hospital psychiatric wards are about half that of other wards, largely because friends, colleagues and acquaintances are politely averting their eyes from the embarrassing spectacle of mental illness? This is stigma at work.
Dr. Goldbloom pointed out that the most popular show on TV these days is CSI, which depicts stereotypes of people with mental illnesses as axe-wielding psychotic murderers, even though this is clearly at odds with the profile of a typical person with a mental illness. He noted, too, that you’re at far greater risk of being murdered by your partner than by a mentally ill stranger.
Here’s an interesting bit of trivia. The 19th century equivalent of mental illness, in terms of stigma, was tuberculosis. The equivalent in the 20th century (or at least the first 70 years of it) was cancer. This got my attention! I had no idea that 40 years ago people wouldn’t mention cancer in public. People sometimes whispered “The Big C,” but avoided saying the word out loud. Patients were sometimes even protected from any knowledge of their own cancer by their doctors and families!
Times have changed for cancer, thank God, but not yet for mental illness.
The language of obituaries, according to Dr. Goldbloom, is the language of culture. You frequently read in the obituaries the phrase “following a courageous battle with cancer.” But the code for suicide is “died suddenly,” in combination with a request for donations to ‘the charity of your choice.’
In this way, says Dr. Goldbloom, the stigma of mental illness is perpetuated into death.
The Mental Health Commission of Canada just launched a 10-year campaign to destigmatize mental illness, which will focus, initially, on youth and health professionals. It’s called Opening Minds.
Statistics Canada will be conducting regular surveys of Canadians to determine the impact of the campaign on public attitudes about mental illness.
For some interesting reading about mental illness, see the Globe & Mail’s most popular series ever, Breakdown, and their current series about recovery, Breaking Through.
*The Mental Health Symposium took place on October 5, 2009, in Ottawa, and was co-hosted by The Canadian Mental Health Association, The Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, the University of Ottawa’s Department of Psychiatry, and the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Mental Health Research. This is the first of two or three posts about this event. The next one will look at Ottawa’s Mental Health Courts.
Yesterday I defied doctor’s orders, rose up from my couch, and went out into the world! I attended the Mental Health Symposium, which was a one-day conference held at the Coliseum Cinemas. It was co-sponsored by the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the University of Ottawa Department of Psychiatry, and the University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research.
I’m going to blog about the conference later on, but for now I just want to touch on a couple of peripheral matters.
When I got home from the conference, I checked for mail and found a package of four boxes of Smarties tucked between my front doors! I don’t know who left them, but the note said “From friends who are concerned that a lack of Smarties may lengthen your recovery time. xo.” Hmm. A tasty mystery! (Thank you, mysterious and anonymous friends with the pretty but unfamiliar handwriting…)
I immediately devoured a box of Smarties and curled up on the couch, under the Zoom blanket, with Duncan, and fell into a deep sleep for hours. I was exhausted from all that listening and sitting and concentrating at the conference. I had taken 29 pages of notes, mostly in darkened movie theatres, and maybe that’s what did me in. Or maybe it was because this was the first day in months that I’d spent away from home.
I’m feeling pretty well rested this morning, and I’m just about ready to head off to the Civic Hospital for my very first radiation treatment. I woke up around four o’clock in the morning and started wondering about radiation. How does something that can potentially cause cancer, prevent cancer? (You can only have one course of radiation in your lifetime because too much radiation can cause cancer.)
This is something I probably should have worried about before four o’clock on the morning of my first radiation treatment, but alas, I never got around to it. At any rate, since there wasn’t much I could do about it in the middle of the night, I woke GC up to talk about our novels.
GC has joined me in signing up for National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo). Neither one of us know anything about the novels we’ll be writing next month. We haven’t chosen our genres, thought up any plots, developed any characters or decided between first and third person. We are clueless. My first sentence is “Once upon a time there was a dark and stormy knight.” Or maybe not.
Can I persuade any of you to do Nanowrimo with us this year? You just have to crank out the first draft of a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. If you do sign up, I’m registered under the name of zoom – search me out and we can be Writing Buddies.
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