To begin with

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That’s not my cat.

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Coping Strategies

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When I was a kid, my mother was always after me about coping. "You need to learn to cope!" she'd say when I hurt myself or something surprising caused me to cry. My Grade One report card noted that I "had a lot of potential but [cries] too much." Mum was sure that swimming lessons would help me learn to cope so I started as soon as I was tall enough to touch the bottom. I learned to swim but there always seemed to be a shortfall on the coping side. It stuck. I believed I was bad at coping until about five years ago. I almost coped myself to death that year while I managed a miscarriage mostly on my own. After I got home from the hospital and started to get over the shock, I kept thinking about how I had finally learned to cope. When I shared this insight with a colleague, he was SHOCKED. He told me that in fact I was one of the very best copers he knew.  Huh. I started looking at a lot of things and realized he was right. I completely let go of the idea that &qu
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Oh hello

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I bought a new laptop the other night. My old one was adopted by Dave before I got too attached and I've been trying to run my "real life" off my phone and iPad ever since. That seemed to work well enough but I ignored a lot of email and certain things seemed impossible; like writing anything more than 1000 characters long. Obviously, I haven't been writing either. I always chalked it all up to laziness; maybe that's part of it, but it dawned on me recently that I'm a touch typist and pecking things out on a screen-sized "keyboard" doesn't make any sense. It's fine for social media but it's no good for email or the rest of my "real life" writing and working.  Once I realized there was a genuine problem to solve and getting a laptop wasn't just a "want," I set out to fix it. I looked at my bank account, talked to people I know and trust well enough to help me evaluate what I needed in a machine, and I ran it by Dave
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Rebel Hair

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  One item on my list was missed.  My face.  Specifically, my moustache. * * * When I was in elementary school, the hairs on my arms stood up and out most of the time, adult-length'd arm hairs that made me self-conscious. No one said anything about them, but my subtle comparisons with others told me I was different. I shaved my arms in the tub and they all grew back, straight and tall, determined to be different. I gave up and at some point they mostly started to lie down. * * * When I was in junior high, "all" of the girls were shaving their legs and I was not allowed. I had been told not to, that I wasn't old enough, and besides my hair was so blond that no one could see it anyway. And yet when I stood waiting for the bus in my pale pink shorts and t-shirt from BiWay, the sun shone on my legs and I felt like every hair was highlighted, showcased for all to see. Look what a baby she is. * * * When I was in my 20s or so, I had my eyebrows waxed a few times and tried t
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