The Continuing Quest to Pee

It’s been away since I have discussed the state of facilities here in Canada though it occurs to me that I am perhaps being unfair in labeling the whole of the country a no-pee zone. It could be just an Alberta problem. For a province with a boom economy and a building streak that has buried an entire canola field under a slew of condos and houses in the Fort since I have moved up here, not much is being done to address the lack of public washrooms.

Americans are spoiled. I will admit that right up front. There are very, very few places one to go to that are not adequately equipped with restrooms. The need for elimination is sometimes covered to the point of overkill. Although I hadn’t thought of this before just now, it could be that Americans really are as incontinent as the dearth of commercials for ? would seem to imply. Or it could be that Canadians are just the camels of the continent in terms of bladder capacity. Rob’s girls assure him that the human bladder can only hold a litre of liquid. Rob doesn’t believe that as he was complimented not long ago in public restroom in Iowa on his capacity, but in retrospect that could be just evidence for my theory that Americans need to pee a lot. That could be a Pavol’s dog thing however. American’s have a lot of easy restroom access leading them to pee at whim which and thus retraining their bladders into wimpiness whereas Canadians often can’t find a public toilet and have mammoth capacity for storage and patience to wait as a result. Nah, Canadians just pee outside when they can’t find any place indoors. And believe me, that is the norm in public places.

Today, I was picking up photo reprints at the London Drug in Sherwood Park. It has exactly one washroom. Unisex. And you have to track down the guy who works in Electronics to get the key to open it. He is rarely behind the counter. When I asked for the key today, he informed me that someone was using the washroom. I went and waited by the door. Knocked. Waited. Jingled the doorknob. Heard noise faintly from inside. Waited some more. And finally in desperation I walked quickly back to my vehicle and headed over to the Safeway only to find that they too had one unisex washroom for the entire store. Fortunately it was not in use or this tale would have an embarrassing, for me, ending.

I am in awe of Canadians. There ability to forgo peeing when out in public spaces in something to admire and possibly even strive to emulate. I am not sure at all how to train myself out of the need to pee. I have tried not taking in liquid when I need to travel or be away from home in general. I end up with cracked lips and a bad headache however. One thing that still puzzles me though is why when there are so few of them to clean anyway are washrooms here always so dirty?

Reading posts at the YWBB

I still read the widow board sometimes. Thankfully the time I spend there is less and less. I just don’t have the time really and frankly, when I do read it either depresses or infuriates me.

Two things of late that I have noticed there that are eating at me for some reason. The first is the tendency of older board members to condone mean-spirited behavior from some of the members while scolding new members for objecting when they are the victims of this behavior. The prevailing attitude of the powers that are at the YWBB has always been that grief is the great “get out of jail free-card” and that a widowed person in particular can say or do just about any awful thing the want because it is part of the “grief work” and “leaning into the pain” as opposed, I guess, to dealing with reality and behaving like a normal person in spite of the fact that life has dealt you some painfully bad cards. In my opinion, based on what I have read, people who let themselves by driven by their grief are the people who never seem to regain a solid footing in the world.

There is one person in particular who uses the board’s private message system to send what amounts to hate mail to other, usually newer, members of the board. It is Internet bullying of the adult variety and it is tolerated and even condoned at the YWBB. Rob got a message from this person that implied hateful things about him and his late wife. He posted it along with his feelings that the PM’s (private messages) should not be a forum for expressing disapproval or offering advice to people who were nothing more than strangers to you. He was sounded chastised by the older members who felt that PM’s should also stay private even if the message was a harassing one. It is this kind of things that allows abusers to get away with victimizing people, but many at the YWBB are so blind to anyone’s needs but their own - they can’t see that. This person is harassing another woman right now who is bravely taking it public and is, naturally, being made the villain for doing so. Isn’t that always the case? Victims being re-victimized when they speak out? I feel badly for her, but not badly enough to register to defend her. I am not interested in being that kind of good samaritan anymore. It does sadden me a little to see people I know and like supporting the harasser though. I don’t think she deserves it. Sometimes I get the feeling that she may not even be who she claims to be and that much of what she writes is creative rather than factual.

The second thing that bothers me is an anonymous poster who claims to be recently remarried and her new husband, a widower, has cheated on her already. I don’t know why this bothers me so much. Perhaps because there were many marriages in and around the time Rob and I married and I knew some of the people’s stories and it saddens me to think that any of these couples could be experiencing such trouble already. Partly too because I wonder if anyone wonders if that is me posting. Rob wondered that too when he pointed the post out to me. It doesn’t matter what anyone at the YWBB thinks. But for a handful, they are strangers. It is just a sad post though Rob doesn’t have the same impression. He thinks there is something fishy about it. I guess it doesn’t matter and it is another sign that I need to curtail even the little bit of surfing I do there. If I am not posting, which I can’t as I am not registered, there is no reason to read.

Jennifer Love-Hewitt is Fat and Clinton won't be President

The current cover of People features a bikini-clad television actress with the protesting title "I am not Fat!" And she isn't, not by even the most twisted standards of beauty that have infiltrated our society and handed it new weapons with which to re-enslave women. Ms. Love-Hewitt is a size two, and I mention this only because I know someone will dispute her claim of a healthy weight (and me) and ask. It's sad really that 40 some odd years into (or after depending on your point of view) the women's movement, women in the United States are still objects. Which is why Clinton won't win the Iowa Democratic caucuses or be president. Because she is a woman and women in this country - like most of the rest of the world - are still just the sum of their pretty, or not so parts. Intelligence. Experience. Ability. None of this matters when the easiest way to put a woman back in her place, or at least remind her she is out of it, is to criticize her femininity via her appearance, martial status or commitment to her children.

While it is true that we are allowed to be as naked as we wanna be in the visual self-expression of how far we have come baby, answer me this - how is the fact that we are judged by our appearance and size and "femininity" any different than the Islamic obsession with covering women up? Or the French and Russian governments extolling their female citizens to patriotism via their birth canals? It's two sides of the same coin, and the coin of the realm is keeping women in their place as second-class and objectified-  with our complicity at times it seems because we don't help ourselves at all by playing into whatever the status quo may be. In western cultures women parrot the line that we are free because we can be blatantly sexual and can control our bodies, and chose to marry or not, parent or play working girl - all the while starving ourselves and fueling a beauty industry out of control, and reading Cosmo for man-snaring tips. Our pop culture thrives on female parts - in music and films that depict females and their sexuality as dirty and disposable. Beauty magazines that sell self-improvement in the form of diets and exercise programs. Fashion that is designed to accentuate beauty and expose those who are not.

In places like say, Saudi Arabia, women will tell you they don't mind being seond-tier, covering up and not being able to drive is fine because they appreciate being protected by their males and the society these males have created for them. The China and the India are dangerously unbalancing their gender ratios by scanning their unborn fetuses and aborting girls because sons are better for a family - at least until they are of marriageable age and their are no daughters for them to marry. French women are bearing children in the name of nationalism and unaware of that the racist sentiments that are slowly tearing at the seams of their country is the likely cause their governments are praising them for their efforts. But telling yourself you are in charge of your choices is not the same as being in charge. When there are no options to chose from but the ones carefully pre-selected and laid in front of you by others - how free are you?

So, what does this have to do with Hillary Clinton, you ask most patiently. Just that she represents what women are not supposed to know about or think about becoming. She is educated and articulate and didn't get where she is by conforming to the rules as they are written for women. She may have chosen the well-beaten path here and there, who doesn't? For example, remember her changing hairstyles back in the early days of her husband's presidency when her looks were being constantly criticized in the press - which by the way is one of the ways the media works for the system that wants all women to know that love and respect are reserved for the pretty and the closed-mouthed. Sen. Clinton plays politics the way the boys do and she isn't supposed to even want to play in the first place. John Irving called this being "sexually suspect" in his novel, The World According to Garp. Women who live their lives against the current. The current fashions. The current standards of beauty as dictated to us. The current standards of womanhood. 
The Register endorsed Sen. Clinton. It's unlikely to do her any more good than Ms. Love-Hewitt revealing her dress size. A woman is not likely to be the president of this country. Our sexism is embedded in our genes so deep that we don't even recognize it. We built our country upon the idea that all men, not women too, were created equal and never changed our minds. And don't think that our founding fathers didn't know what they were saying. John Adams wife Abigail railed at him for excluding women. Just as they knew they were in the wrong about slavery (Jefferson referred to it as "holding a wolf by the ears"), they knew what they were doing when they wrote "men".

I am not a Clinton supporter. I haven't even begun to make up my mind about the presidential field. It's a little early in the race and future presidents should be put to the test and made to show their stuff and stamina. Nobody has done that yet. But, the Catholic school girl in me can't abide those who will use the belittling tactics of the old parish priests when confronted with women who won't sit down, or shut up or just go away. It may be a man's world, but as someone pointed out to me recently they aren't the majority. We are. And perhaps it's time we decide where are places should be.

Sexism: The NY Times thinks Girls are too dumb to run a Newspaper

The New York Times ran a piece on the Des Moines Register stating that the paper’s endorsement is seen as a great prize among candidates running for president. The article also pointed out that for the first time, the top three editorial spots at the Register are occupied by women and wondered if this wouldn’t give Hillary Clinton an unfair advantage because as we all know, women mindlessly vote for their own kind regardless of qualifications and the issues.

What an infuriating piece of crap! Nothing raises my blood pressure more than sexist thinking like this. The fact that most men wouldn’t vote for a woman unless she was in a wet t-shirt contest rarely gets talked about, but when a woman actually runs for public office and manages to overcome the mean girl backlash and draws other female supporters, this is seen as some kind of herd mentality response. Men never seem to think that anything they think, do or say is influenced by their gender though there is a mount everest worth of reasons to believe that they are even more hormonally driven than their sisters, but anything under the sun a woman does is probably a result of PMS if she isn’t currently on the rag.

Although I don’t believe the Des Moines Register is a great newspaper (because it’s rather light on news beyond central Iowa and it allows the city’s elite to use it as though it were a high school publication), I am going to go out on a limb and guess that a person doesn’t get to be one of the top three there unless they have proven themselves in their field. Interestingly, though women are often accused of being tokens when they achieve positions like these, the truth is that women are usually held to much higher standards than the men who wind up in similar positions.

The Times should really be careful when it accuses others of bias. Aside from the ads, there isn’t a neutral thing printed in it ever, and I imagine that the East Coast ignorance about the Midwest played a role in the sexist conclusions that Mr. Zeleny, the piece’s author, came to write. Iowans are particularly plagued with Grant Wood images being superimposed over our lives and realities to the point where I don’t know if anyone out East even realizes that the majority of the state’s population lives in urban settings and that we have to organize field trips for our students to take them to farms so they know that milk comes from a cow and not from the AE plant on E. University. Shame on him still however, and shame on any who persist in the antiquated belief that when men vote for men it’s a result of thoughtful deliberation of the issues and facts whereas women only vote for the candidates based on their shared gender or because they have good personalities. Men are just as capable of casting their votes away as mindlessly as anyone and mindless voting is a result of just being stupid which is an equal gender opportunity judging from the NY Times piece.