August 2008 Archives

In the 'still not dead' files, my apologies for the lack of posting this week. The last seven days have been varying degrees of unpleasant and busy.

What I've been up to:

Tuesday: Got an extremely large filling, to fill an extremely large cavity (which had been previously filled, but apparently not all that well). This involved roughly 40 minutes of drilling, with less than a millimetre's worth of tooth matter between drill and nerve. That's very important for later on. Once the freezing wore off, I was introduced to new and exquisite levels of pain. Thankfully, I still had all that codeine left over from having a wisdom tooth out in March, took 120 mg, got stoned off my ass and left work early.

Tuesday evening: after sleeping for two hours and waking up both much less stoned and in far less pain, went to see Avenue Q with some friends from work. Aside from wanting to occasionally strangle Friend #1 for having an annoyingly loud laugh, I have nothing bad to say about that show. It's hilarious, and the puppets/puppeteer interaction is astoundingly expressive. Everyone should go see it.

Wednesday: more pain, more codeine, though less than Tuesday. Generally unhappy with world. Am assuming, given the amount of drilling in nerve-proximity on Tuesday, that this is just bruising and will eventually go away.

Thursday: more pain, moving on to Advil. Long and annoying meeting at work. I feel that meetings are the parasites of productivity, particularly when certain people use them as an hour long justification of how they do everything except what's covered in their job description. At least we had a nice lightning storm. I like lightning. I also managed to arrange my schedule in such a way that I will not be on the late shift for the next 16 weeks, thus facilitating a social life (I've spent roughly the last six months on the late shift, and have gotten quite tired of it).

Friday: More pain, still on Advil. Total lack of productivity at work due to generally crappy state of being. Boyfriend came to meet me at work and provide me with sushi. Boyfriend is also a total enabler and gave me an anti-anxiety pill, which meant that I still wasn't getting anything done, but at least I was feeling calmer about it.

Saturday: Lots of pain! So much pain that I slept all afternoon. Less pain when woken, which was good, since Saturday evening was the Birthday Keg-a-que for a friend. 58 litres of Keith's, a big ol' pile of meat, and about 20 people makes for a good birthday. This was also the first instance of Boyfriend and Husband being at the same social event at the same time, making me fairly apprehensive, but all went well and they kicked me out of the car and apparently bonded in manly fashion.

Sunday: Hangover! Insert appropriate over-blown metaphors here. While attempting to secure breakfast at the Cora's in Markham, Husband and I discovered a M. Felix & Mr. Norton, which provided me with much cookie love. I didn't realise there were any stores in Ontario, so this made for a pleasant surprise and put me in a very good mood for the drive around the GTA looking for apartments which are not horrifically overpriced. I can't help but compare housing prices here to the ones in Montreal, and the difference is painful. Then there was Ravenloft, with more tooth pain, and more codeine. I am secure in my geekiness.

Monday: More tooth pain. I am by now sick and tired of the whole experience, and contact dentist demanding emergency appointment (also, coincidentally calling in sick to work). Dentist spends about ten minutes whacking at my teeth with the butt end of the drill, and announces that the nerve is inflamed and if the swelling is not reduced post-haste, we're on the gravelly road to root-canal city. Yay! I now have a prescription for ten days' worth of 600 mg of ibuprofen every six hours. A 600 mg dose of ibuprofen comes in a pill roughly the size of my thumbnail. We are in awe at the size. Proceed to Boyfriend's, watch The Princess Bride for the first time ever (geek points revoked), enjoy lightning storm.

Today: I have learned never again to disregard the warning labels on medication, particularly the ones saying 'take with food'. If my stomach lining is intact ten days from now, it will be a miracle.

What's a good way to eat your brain? Getting home from work at 1.30 am and then deciding to  . . . do more work. Oh yes.

Not that the day was so good that I want to keep it going. Apparently my gloating over the magic dress completely blew my wad in the fashion karma department. Yesterday my favourite bra sprung a wire, so this morning I grumbled my way over to the specialty shop to replace it. After a few minutes in the changing room it became clear that something was not right. That would be the cupsize, which apparently has incremented up one, as it has done like clockwork every year for the last five. I am now officially an 'H' cup. I fear that I will soon run out of letters. All together now, can we spell macromastia?

I need to find myself a kitchen scale, I'm curious about how much they weigh now.

The constant dilemma of the office-worker's morning: take the time to iron a pair of pants? Or take the time to shave my legs and wear a skirt? In terms of hassle, they take about the same amount of time, and one of them can be done while in the shower. Skirt it is. Option C, finding a pair of pants that does not require ironing, is simply too ridiculous to be considered.

I am getting all excited about Star Trek Online. If ever there was an excuse for me to get off my ass and scrape up the money to put together a new desktop, this is it. I eagerly await Cryptic's announcement of release date and hardware requirements. The STO forums are currently host to a 47-page thread that consists of entirely of people from the old Star Trek RP room on the Webchat Broadcasting System checking in. That room and those people were my life for four or five years in high school and college, and I still talk to quite a few of them.

Does anyone else think that handing people invisibility technology might be a bad idea? I seriously worry about the non-overtly-military-but-still-governmental usage of this. And then, of course, you have your garden variety criminals and perverts. Call me a photon chauvinist, but I would like everyone to stay fully visible, thank you. Fortunately this is still a long ways off being useful, so my worrying is probably premature.

It's kind of sad, but everytime I read this post from the Language Log, all that runs through my head is Weird Al's 'Close, But No Cigar'. Go find it on youtube. It's funny, even though the animation is terrifyingly remniscent of Ren & Stimpy (after typing that, I went and looked it up - turns out the video is animated by the same guy. Ah, us whacky Canadians). 

"A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp." - Joan Rivers

Last week I promised an entry on casual sex and the definition of the word slut. This week, signed and delivered. I'm going to do one of these mega-entries a week. Every Monday, profound pontifications from Pepperbar. Now that your daily dose of alliteration is out of the way, read on.

Dictionary.com gives us six sources for definitions of the word 'slut'. All of them except one include, as either the first or the second entry, 'an immoral or dissolute woman; prostitute.'. Princeton's WordNet rephrases it as 'a woman adulterer'. Webster is the only one who sticks to the strictly hygenic meanings; promiscuity does not make the list.

Tied in with the other most common definition, 'a dirty, slovenly woman', one can assume that to be labelled a slut is not a positive thing. By extension, 'a person, especially a woman, considered sexually promiscuous' is probably not someone you want to invite home for dinner.
Some people disagree with this definition. Dossie Easton and Catherine Lizst wrote The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, and defined 'slut' as follows: "To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you."

I like it. It's simple, the words are short (mostly), and it gets to the point. I have one problem with it: nobody actually uses 'slut' as a complimentary term. I am an extremely sex-positive person, but my hackles rise whenever that word comes into play. I have a lot of sex, I grant you. By some people's definitions, I am loose. But I'm not easy. I'm not promiscuous. I'm extremely picky about who I sleep with, and while I have had my regrets (nobody is a perfect judge of character, after all), by and large my experiences have been positive. I like who I am, I like the way my sex life fits into the rest of my life, and I don't like when someone uses a word that historically and not so historically associates me with dirty, unhygenic and immoral adulterers.

So, since slut appears determined to be pejorative, let's redefine slut. Obviously, the simple act of having sex with someone is value-neutral. Sex itself is not a positive or negative thing, it simply is. Quantity is likewise irrelevant. Motivation is what matters. Sex with someone that you like, because you like sex and you like your partner and vice-versa: positive. Sex with someone that you don't like, that you are having out of pity or because you're afraid they won't like you otherwise, or because you're trying to hurt someone else, or are using it as a way of keeping score: negative.*

A woman or man who has sex, be it a little or a lot, be it with one person or a hundred, is not a slut or an immoral individual, as long as they are having sex with the goal of making all involved parties feel good and happy about what they're doing.

A slut is a man or woman who ignores that basic tenet, regardless of numbers. It's possible to be married and monogamous, and still be a slut.

On to the concept of 'casual sex'. As noted above, I have no problems with people having sex with whomever they choose, as many times as they want. What goes on between consenting adults is none of my business. Public opinion often seems to be divided between 'no sex until marriage or you're going to hell' and 'have as much sex as you possibly can, at every opportunity'. Both of these positions lack nuance, I feel.

To be honest, I'm not really sure there is such a thing as 'casual' sex, at least in a non-slutty (by my definition above) context. Sex and all the acts related to it are extremely intimate, and it's always been my suspicion that if you end up in a 'coyote ugly' kind of situation you're doing it wrong. If you're doing it right, it's not really casual - which doesn't mean it has to be epic and life-changing. Sex is not a commitment to anyone. People who choose not to have sex until they're married or in a long-term relationship are not knee-jerk conservatives out to roll back feminism and the sexual revolution. Somewhere in the middle lies a happy medium, where people can have sex or not, as they desire, and end up having the amount of sex that's right for them. Whether that means polyamorous and open relationships like my own where everyone can fuck like bunnies with multiple partners, monogamous marriages in which the spouse is the first and only partner, or people who just don't want to have sex at all doesn't matter; everyone does what they want to do without pressuring anyone else and we all live happily ever after.

It all boils down to respect, eventually. Respect yourself, respect your partner(s), and enlightenment follows.

---

*Note well that this does not include sex workers, who are having sex for money as a career. I got no beef with prostitutes, so long as they're safe, professional, and are upfront about their transactions. Everyone needs to make a living.

This morning a propane plant exploded in northern Toronto, forcing residents to evacuate and shutting down the highways in the area and generally inconveniencing the hell out of everyone in the area, including me trying to get home from Mississagua to Scarborough.

When I originally started writing this post at about 1 pm, only minor injuries had been reported, and so I felt okay about being disgruntled about the state of the highways this morning. Then I found out that a firefighter had died, and the perspective alters drastically. As of two hours ago, the firefighter's family still hadn't been notified; the article linked above does not name him for that reason.

BlogTO's coverage is rather less confusing than the Globe & Mail article, and includes videos of the biggest explosion.

One of the things I do not recommend that anyone do is cut one's own hair in the bathroom mirror. I don't appear to have done too much damage though - my hair was a shaggy unstructured mess before, now it's a slightly differently-shaped shaggy unstructured mess. I'm thinking I'll get a hair dresser to poke at it before the wedding Husband and I are attending at the end of August, so I'll have an actual hairdo to go with the magic dress I bought yesterday morning. Shopping is normally a painful and drawn-out experience for me, being shaped rather more like a 50s pin-up girl and rather less like the athletic clothes-rack which is so popular today. Also, I'm short, which just makes it even more fun. But less than 20 minutes after a despairing phone call to my mother, I was walking out of the Eaton's Centre with a dress that is beautiful, a lovely colour, and fits so well I don't even have to wear a bra (this is an event so unheard of that it makes Halley's comet look like a weekly occurence). The gods of fashion took pity on me yesterday, that's all I can say.

There is no more music sorting for me this week, since Boyfriend has made off with my external drive, but at least he returned my iPod. Since he claims he intends to return the drive with another 200 gb of music, I may be coming out on top here. I do still intend to have that sex thing ready to post tomorrow at some point.

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as schadenfreude. 'Don't ask, don't tell' always kind of made sense as a concept, since the government's got no business asking and you don't need to tell people unless you're planning to hit on them, except for the part about them firing you when the word slips out. Serves 'em right.

I feel the need to point out that one thing you should not say to your lovely wife, ladies and gentlemen, is 'you've got bags under your eyes. Like, big ones', lest you really want her to creep upstairs an hour after you've gone to bed and shove ice cubes into your boxer shorts.

Due to circumstances beyond my control (or even comprehension, some days), I probably won't get a whole lot done site-wise this weekend. There is some time to make up at work, and some shopping to do. Clothes shopping is painful, particularly for formal dresses. I may not survive. I have managed to move and relabel about 5 gb of music, though. My poor laptop is looking forward to the day it can stop sucking in its digital gut every time I need to install something.

I have come to the conclusion that my body works on a 26 to 28 hour cycle. Such a shame that the part of the world that signs my paycheques runs on the standard 24. Left to my own devices I'll stay up an hour or three later every night of the week. Efforts to convince my manager that this is an efficient way to run the office are so far fruitless. Next week we move from logic to bribery; I'll keep you posted.

Experimenting today with RSS feeds - I read a lot of blogs and so many of them have these RSS things now, so I figured it might be simpler. So far I'm liking FeedReader. It's incredibly easy to use (learning curve = flat) and has a nice simple old-school-email-gui look to it. It also sits quietly in my system tray instead of taking up yet another slot on my already over-crowded taskbar, which is a plus. Once I get the MT coding figured out, I might add a blogroll somewhere on here.

With regards to MT coding, that may not take as long as I was expecting. Like so many things based on good engineering principles, what looked incredibly complex and intimidating was simply not being explained well. The whole 'module-template-stylesheet' relationship was pretty murky until I read the idiot-proof step-by-step instructions for adding SiteMeter (the instructions were actually for MT 3, but I am thankfully clever enough on a good day to adjust for that small detail). "Oh," I said as the little overhead lightbulb went from 60 to 100 watts. "That's why it's set up that way." So expect changes soonish. Maybe Sunday. I am still technically employed fulltime, after all.

One link before I go to bed - some people will turn anything into a status symbol. 

Things discovered today: I have almost half my laptop's hard drive tied up in mp3s. That's a lot of music (and yet nothing compared to the friend who has over 100 days of music stored on an FTP server - my library tops out at about 12.5 days). Thankfully this is not a huge crisis; I've got a 500 gb external drive just waiting for me to pile stuff on it. And it will be an incentive to organise my music in a way that makes sense. For the record, iTunes? Do not ever let it organise your music for you. I've got folders and files with names trimmed for no reason, empty folders, compilations split up into seven different folders - there is no love. None.

My love for McSweeney's Internet Tendency grows with Dionysus: Party Clown. I feel that more of the Greco-Roman pantheon needs to be brought into the 21st-century labour force in this manner. I see Zeus as an aging bouncer in a strip club who hits on all the dancers, Hera as a sorority mom, Athena as the scary librarian who chases all the teenagers out of the reference room, and Apollo and Artemis as high school gym teachers.

Incidentally, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks that the best way to accept an apology is not to complain that it wasn't loud enough. Way to go, Surrey! I'm really impressed at the way you managed to totally overshadow the events being apologised for by acting like self-righteous bourgeois twits.

It has been over a year since Kathy Sierra's blog Creating Passionate Users has updated. Ms. Sierra was the victim of serious online harassment, up to and including death threats, via anonymous comments in her blog and posts elsewhere revealing personal details about her such as her SSN, and false accounts of her career. It prompted her to cancel a speaking engagement at a tech conference, made her afraid to leave her house, and eventually drove her to give up blogging all together.

Anonymity is a privilege, not a right. Privacy is a right. One has every right not to have the details of one's personal life spread around without consent. One's name is not, however, private. A method of contact (not even a home address or phone number, specifically) is not private. Like it or not, we are members of a public society, and the most basic requirement of participation is that people know who you are and how to get in contact with you.

The internet is a little different. It's a society in the making, and the social consensus of acceptable and/or required behaviour is still being worked out. Until it is, we can only fall back on the rules we've brought with us from the 'real' world, and this particular rule is even more vital. The information-based society ceases to function without accountability and credibility, and anonymity undercuts both of these values. How can data be trusted when the source is unverifiable? Who can be turned to for correction, clarification, or elaboration?

When anonymity is abused, to attack, slander, and or harass another, it loses any redeeming qualities it may have had. To abuse the privilege of anonymity should result in loss of the privilege. Mike Krahulik had it right when he put forth John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory: take away accountability, and lose coherence, accuracy, and even basic courtesy.

Kathy Sierra's experience catalysed the Call for a Blogger's Code of Conduct, which in the short form demanded that people take ownership of the words they write. I feel that it should be taken a step further. Just as in real life, acts of this nature should carry social consequences. People who behave in anti-social ways lose the privilege of a social circle. Unfortunately the nature of the internet and most message boards, blogs, and free or cheap email services means it is too easy for the cowardly to stay anonymous or appear under another name, free of the baggage they accrued with their first persona.

My personal policy has always been that people should police themselves; one's own sense of self should prevent acting like a jerk, even if no one knows who committed the act. Sadly, this appears to be inadequate. If the status quo were otherwise, I wouldn't be writing this. Anti-spam measures such as requiring authorisation to comment, via TypeKey, OpenID, or others are a start, but what more can be done?

The members of the blogosphere need to be more willing to pierce other's veil of anonymity to protect their own privacy. IP address logging can help pinpoint an abuser's ISP, and harassment complaints can be made. Surely there are other steps that can be taken?

I don't know where my cat picked up this idea that sour cream was meant for feline consumption. We had tacos for dinner, I forgot to put the lid back on, and skinny cat was face first in the sour cream as soon as I left the kitchen. Aside from the cat being a twit, the tacos were lovely, but the lettuce tasted kind of weird. I'm not sure why.


Having just read The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, one of the things that really leapt out at me is Deresiewicz's comments on the fear of failure. It is amazing the lengths that people will go to in order to avoid failure -- everything except actually doing whatever it was they were supposed to be trying to succeed at.

For fans of the bard, we've unearthed the Facebook News Feed edition of Hamlet. My favourite: "Hamlet posted an event: A Play That's Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family".

I really want one of these. The idea of a beanbag chair the size of my couch appeals to me enormously. I like furniture I can fling myself on and then sort of flop over the side.

I'm told it's a civic holiday here in Ontario. I've forgotten that fact at least twice in the last week, including during one really impressive conversation with a customer in which I forgot her name, told her she'd be getting a delivery on Monday (today), and generally sounded like a blithering idiot (which, just to be completely clear, is not usually the case).

This is kind of depressing. Is becoming a 'black' disease a step up or a step down from being a 'gay' disease? Does this garner more or less attention for people suffering from AIDS? I have to wonder, given the penchant for being on 'the down low' that I keep hearing about, maybe the reason there isn't more attention being paid is that a lot of black American men don't want attention for being HIV-positive or having full-blown AIDS. Or maybe it's And the Band Played On all over again.

While I'm on the topic, the Black Coalition of Quebec is going ahead with plans to launch a new drug-fighting initiative despite a lack of public interest. Dennis Muhammed, who has apparently set up similar programs in Detroit, is mobilizing adult community members to patrol the streets and act as watchdogs to deter gang members and drug trafficking. They'll also report anything they notice to the police.

I'm really not sure I like the idea - it smacks of vigilanteism to me, even though it's a community effort rather than a solitary or small group of whackos. And community effort is good. In any case, I remember when I was living in Montreal not so many years ago, and Little Burgundy was not a place I would want to walk alone at night. Or even during the day, sometimes. As long as I can remember, the neighbourhood has been a sketchy, dangerous place, and anything that reduces that is a good thing.

I will cheerfully admit that I know nothing about Moveable Type beyond filling in the blanks in the template. I want to know more! So of course Learning Movable Type, the website recommended inside the Movable Type updating interface, is down. Of course! Good thing it's down for server issues rather than coding, or we'd have a textbook definition of irony on our hands.

Today's Questionable Content drove home to me that I am really starting to get tired of Hannelore.

Her first appearance had her as an world-smart take-no-prisoners kind of chick. I really liked that Hannelore. Now, 700 comics later, she's become a refugee from a children's TV show, constantly being scarred by all things rated PG and up. Show me more Faye/Sven, dammit! I like Faye's issues. They mutate and evolve. Hannelore just devolved and then got stuck.

Interesting read here. Casual sex is a topic on which there are a lot of assumptions made and conclusions leapt to, and on which a huge amount of frothing at the mouth is done (oh yes, I've done a fair amount of frothing on the subject myself). I think my opinions on that will be saved for the day that I bust out my stipulative definition of the word 'slut'. Next Monday! Be there or be quadrilateral.

In other news, Stephen Harper manned up and apologised for the boatload of Calcutta refugees that were denied entry to Vancouver in 1914. Unfortunately, his apology is
apparently insufficient. I have to admit, I don't really get why. The Sikh community of Surrey, BC is demanding that the apology be repeated in the House of Commons. From my (uninvolved, third-party) perspective, the fact that Harper went out of his way to go and make his apology where the spiritual/ideological descendants of our victims would actually have a chance to hear it says a lot. I also feel the need to point out that the average Canadian (who is apparently the target audience here, since the people to whom it was actually addressed were evidently inadequate to hear it) tends to ignore politicians unless they are speaking in public. I've tried to sit through the House of Commons broadcast feed. There is more entertainment to be found in watching linoleum peel. Very few people would be dedicated enough to hear that apology. It might not even make the news.

There is a cause more noble than any battle being upheld here. That cause is 'teh funny'. Also, mockery of idiot 'professionals', and the idiots who hire them. My favorite are the three cakes that give one a sugary stand-in for cannibalism - I can see how a baby would seem like a good decoration for a baby shower cake in theory, but the execution is deeply creepy.

I saw Hellboy II again with the boyfriend today (I had previously seen it the opening weekend with the husband), and still enjoyed it. It's a decent action movie with some snappy one-liners and some beautiful fight choreography, plus I really liked the wooden doll animation of the story of the Golden Army. I consider that to be the hallmark of solid entertainment - not necessarily art, in the way that say, a Kubrick film is a work of art, but the kind of thing that one enjoys watching over and over again. Contrast to The Dark Knight, which despite being a damn good movie - and one I'd go so far as to describe as 'art' - I don't think I'd be able to watch repeatedly. Boyfriend and I saw it last weekend, and were both so overwhelmed by the intensity of it that we had to find something ridiculous to watch when we got back to his place, and it was several hours before either of us was feeling settled again. Cristian Bale and Heath Ledger played off each other beautifully, Aaron Eckhart was genius and totally believable as Twoface, and Maggie Gyllenhaal - well, at least she didn't phone it in this time. I think she's cute, and I liked her in Stranger Than Fiction, but I'm just not feeling her as Rachel Dawes. Of course, I really wasn't feeling Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes either, so maybe it's just the character. I'm glad Husband has no particular interest in seeing it, so he'll wait for the DVD, by which time I'll be about ready to watch it again.

Breakfast today involved scouring the condiment graveyard Boyfriend calls a fridge (Boyfriend has the worst damn case of bachelor-fridge I have ever seen), and realising that the bacon was only a week old. Boyfriend said 'bacon and eggs is it', at which point I helpfully informed him that a) throw in some cheese and we'd have a nice omelette, and b) I had no idea how to make an omelette, so breakfast was all on his shoulders. Aren't I useful?

I've been leveling a new character in World of Warcraft, a warlock named Helke.

I've tried leveling warlocks before; from a lore perspective, they are incredibly interesting. Sadly, after getting my warrior to 70, it feels like all the fun went out of it. I play on Earthen Ring, which is a fairly mature server (meaning the bulk of the playerbase has hit maximum level on one or more characters), and it's hard to find people to level with whose answer to everything is not 'Let me get my main, we'll burn through this place'. I miss the time when my friends were at roughly the same point in advancement as me.

That being said, I'm still enjoying Helke. Soloing at low levels involves a lot of not terribly interesting quests, giving me a lot of time to think about her backstory. I plan to roleplay with her, but I haven't quite got her fully fleshed out. Thankfully, roleplaying doesn't have level requirements, so gaining experience while I ponder is no harm done.

I'm using Helke right now as the character to hide out on. I've been having a lot of those days when I want to play, but I don't want to deal with the attention that logging on to my main character attracts from guildmates and old friends (I have it easy, people just want to say 'Hi'. I have a guildmate who needs to beat off the raid invitations with a stick every time he logs on with his paladin). In some ways, divorcing myself from the more social aspects of the game has made it more enjoyable for me again.

Something to think about.

First things first:

I am not French-Canadian.

I'm not francophone. I was not born to francophone parents. I wasn't even born in Quebec. But I spent 15 years, from age 8 to age 23, living, studying, and working in Quebec. I speak French fluently (writing it is another story). I have had friends and colleagues and lovers who were francophone, even separatist.

Secondly:

I do not have a university degree. I have roughly a quarter of a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature. I have a non-entry-level position at a company in a field entirely unrelated to my higher education.

Thirdly:

My personal politics are a strange mixture of liberal and conservative. I like to think of them as pragmatic. I am not affiliated, ideologically or officially, with any political party.

Just keep this in mind when reading, for future reference.