The Seated View

Today's Random post is a mix of links and questions. The latter due to having sat still and not done anything for the better part of a week, which bores me, so my brain tries to entertain itself and given that there was codeine involved, let's just say that things got unusual. I've been wondering about this one for while, actually. Why don’t pigeons get whiplash from that back-and-forth thing their heads do when they walk? And now I have an image in my head of a pigeon with a collar on, being spied on by an insurance company agent (likely a black squirrel with hardly any tail and several bare spots indicating being so down on his luck that he had to take the gig for peanuts). So our illustrious prime minister Stephen Harper (a pox be upon his name) has taken 1% off the GST . And admittedly I'm really bad at math to the point of possible innumeracy, but I was thinking... say I buy $400 worth of goods a month on which I would pay a GST. 1% of that is $4, right...

I've just made a new friend, who also has chronic pain and during a discussion of pain management techniques, I held forth with great confidence and rather alarming (and likely annoying) length about how important it is to 'listen to your body', 'work within your limits', 'save energy for the next day' and I believe that before I stepped off the soapbox, I also exclaimed fervently about how when you set 'attainable goals', you can make each day 'a success' and 'be able to do it all again the next day'. I'm hypocritical idiot. While I was busy saying all this, I was also very busy doing everything on my list, which included a significant amount of running around, photo editing, messing around with making cool new products for the shop for Valentines Day... (brief aside: considering how I normally feel that February 14 is a special circle of hell designed exclusively to torment single people - and yes, at some point I'll get ...

At the end of last week, I saw a reference to the Scientology training video with Tom Cruise that apparently has everybody snickering and commenting on "Mr. Looney Tunes"' latest exhibition of strange behaviour. So I hunted it down on Defamer and settled in to watch, prepared to witness the weirdness that is Tom these days. And before I continue it should be said that in the past, I thought Tom Cruise was pretty weird. I thought Tom Cruise was weird before it became trendy to think that Tom Cruise was weird. His intensity is a little unsettling and, as I once told someone when discussing his being cast as Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, he's got "too many teeth", three words which neatly sum up everything I feel about him. (although admittedly, he was alright as Lestat) That said, I would like to defend Tom Cruise. Or, more specifically, Tom Cruise in that video. I still think he might be a bit unusual in the rest of his life, but enough peo...

I wrote a post last night. Suspected it was one characterized by some rambling idiocy, but nevermind - I write posts like that all the time, right? However, this morning, in the bright light of day, the post revealed itself to be a) rambling idiocy; and b) rambling idiocy without a point. So it's been trashed. Which leaves me without a post and no time to write one, as the floors in the apartment across the hall are being varnished today and if I want to breathe, I should get out of here. But before I do that, I need your help. I was working on my next column and wanted to throw a little nifty factoid about women's history in there. More specifically, I am sure I once learned that when typewriters were first invented, only men were allowed to use them at work - women were thought entirely too delicate to pound the keys. That is, until it became apparent that typing was a low-wage job and then, suddenly, secretarial work became a female field. I googled, confident that I...

To Be Expected I was a teenager in the 70s. Back in those days, it was all about the tanning. About baking in the sun until you burned to a crisp, because you had to burn before you tanned and to facilitate this, you'd spray yourself repeatedly with water or use oil, thus literally frying yourself. I can't remember how many burns I've had, although I remember one particularly bad one acquired in Las Vegas when I sat too long next to a pool. I still have scars on my legs from that. You can see where this is going, can't you? Repeated burning, plus tanning, combined with a very fair complexion and I'm a prime candidate for melanoma. I had a large mole below my left knee. Along with two other, smaller moles, it created a neat sort of triangle, just below the scar from a long-ago surgery. I liked it – it was a little bit of balance in the middle of my leg. Part of me. In October, I went to a dermatologist for mole check. Not the first time I've do...

My brilliant pharmacist, who agreed to appear on the blog (given that this photo turned out surprisingly well) in return for free advertising (the blackmailer!). Main Drug Mart. Go there. Happy now, Hanna?

This week’s been beautiful in Toronto. Positively spring-like for a day or two and I was wandering down the street, most decidedly not wearing a jacket and whistling this song (which has been in my head for weeks now. Weeks) when I caught a man giving me an appreciative once-over in the chestal area. Which doesn’t happen often. Or if it does, I haven't noticed it. I 'm of two minds about the ogling. Well, not that particular ogling as the guy followed the appreciative look below my chin with some appreciative eye contact and it therefore became more a mutual moment than a creepy and objectified one. I'm of two minds about objectifying ogling in general. As a woman, I find it offensive. As a woman with a disability, I'm all for it. Because people with disabilities - and especially women with disabilities - tend to be viewed as asexual creatures by the public at large, to the point of invisibility. Some time ago, Kay over at The Gimp Parade posted about ...

I know a woman who is a relatively recent immigrant to Canada from Kenya. Last week, after the horrible events following the election there, I asked her how her family was, if anyone she knew had been affected by the unrest. Thankfully, most of her family are living far from the affected areas, although she does know people who were spending every day being very frightened and she knew of at least one acquaintance who’d been killed. I t got me thinking about multiculturalism. I grew up in a very homogenous country. It is a small one, characterized by generations and generations living in the same place for decades, even centuries and with very little influence from the outside. Everyone largely has the same experience and values and everywhere else is different and strange. Only in the 1970s did immigrants start coming into the country, requested by the Danish government to build up the workforce and then they came mostly from Turkey and what was then Yugoslavia. After gro...

Last week, there was a day of snow that looked like it does in the movies. Or a J acquie Lawson card. You know the scene - the village is quiet, warm golden light spills out of the windows in old houses with thatched roofs, decorations are everywhere. You hear the occasional hoot of an owl or muffled bark of a dog and all around, the snow is falling quietly, beautifully, slowly plumping up each branch and twig on each tree. The kind of snow that makes you believe in magic. I spent much of the day sitting by the window, awed by the beauty outside. And then, towards the end, I grabbed my camera, got out there and it was beautiful. My downtown street as still as an English village, every branch and twig in every tree fluffy with a covering of white. Magical. And the next day saw another kind of magic. Clear skies the kind of blue that warns of intense cold and all the snow on every branch and twig in every tree turned to ice and sparkling in the sun.

I don’t wanna. I'm not done. There hasn't been nearly enough sloth or lollygagging over the holidays, the quantity of sitting and drooling has been shockingly low and Tuesday evening, when I started writing a list of things I had to do this week and realized it made me want to cry…. Well. The break started well enough, but then a few things went pearshaped, I’m tired and as reality will arrive next week in a completely unavoidable way, I am feeling rather like a petulant child, prone to tantrums, pouting and stomping the floor while whingeing as annoyingly like an invisible mosquito. Sometimes, I hate being a grown-up. On the pro side, nobody but me is running my life. On the con side, nobody but me is running my life. And I need a vacation. So I'm going to take one. For the next four days, with the exception of occasionally venturing outside to procure sustenance, I am unplugging from the to-do list, quite possibly from the Internet, as well, although whethe...

I rarely post photos otehr than my own here, but on my new obsession (feeling down? Cranky? Upset? Go through 10 pages of "kitteh" pics and you'll laugh you way out of your bad mood), I found one that eloquently says everything about my hopes for this year. Follow the kitteh.