I went to see North Country last night with Julie. Last night I was horrified by the violence and harassment perpetrated on these women, yet I woke up this morning remembering exactly why it is I never went into the trades. Julie did comment during the film that I could’ve expected that if I had gone into electrics, and sadly she was right.

Back in grade 8 while we were selecting our courses for the next year at the new school – high school! – we’d be going to I was completely drawn to the idea of taking the Tech 2 course. See, within each year at school you’d only really have one or two electives, and in the case of grade nine I could take a focused shop stream that would take both of mine, so I did. I also was being advised by Mr. Ashley, my junior high shop teacher.

I always had pure amazing tech teachers right through my schooling experiences, starting with Mr. Ashley. I seem to remember that he was thrilled to have someone with an aptitude and a love for woodworking in his class. I wonder if in some part the fact that I’m a female made that even more of a positive experience for him. The poor man (and my poor sister) was so disappointed when my girly-girl sister hit his shop class.

So, grade nine I’m in Tech 2 as my elective and I’m the only girl in my class. There’s a group of us, about 20-25. It was not appreciated that I was sitting in that room with them, let me tell you. Joe was the ringleader for the most part – the guy who expressed how unimpressed they were with a girl sitting in there midst. I should note that most of my tech teachers were incredibly supportive and just thrilled to have me in their classes; the only exception was my auto shop teacher to whom I was just another student.

The sexual harassment that Joe dealt to me and the other guys either tossed comments in or turned away from was only on my peer level. Most of it was laughable, for example the time in auto shop that Joe grabbed his crotch and asked me if I wanted to “suck on [his] chili dog”. For the most part the comments were that I was fat and nobody would ever want to fuck me, or that obviously I was a whore since I was in tech. The mindset being that no girl would want to take tech for its own sake, because she enjoyed it, that she would only be there to pick up the guys. Please.

For the most part I would make little comments back or ignore it, but that never seemed to make it go away. I knew that I could ask my teachers to stop it and they’d take me at my word, but that it would never stop when they weren’t looking. Just the way it was.

So it finally came to a head one day when we were working on the house wiring unit. The electrics classroom was awesome, above the rooms at the back of the room the frame of what would be a decent apartment had been built for the sole purpose of being able to practice wiring in a practical setting. So the bunch of us were up there and Joe’s holding the drill. He came up behind me as I was working and *as the drill was running* thrust it at my crotch, to simulate fucking me with it, I suppose.

I lost it. I could ignore the harassment but at this point it was crossing the line from words and gestures to potentially hurting me. I grabbed the drill out of his hands and I think I dropped it on the floor, then put both my hands on his chest and shoved him as hard as I could. He went down into a pile of wires. I seem to remember saying something like “are you a fucking idiot? You could’ve hurt me. Now STOP IT.” He did from that point on. No fun bullying someone who can and will kick your ass. After that day nobody harassed me again.

But it was always the same whenever I’d meet a new group of young men in the context of my being a techie. Not always sexual harassment, but always a level of isolation and mocking. In my experience to be a woman in a male-dominated area, you have to work twice as hard and be hard as nails. Eventually the respect will come and you’ll be one of the guys, but it’s an uphill, hard road.

Several years ago now my mom cut out an ad for a women in trades at the local college. I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life at that point, and from Mom’s viewpoint I’d always loved the trades, so why not. I told her that I’d never go back into tech in any serious way because I just didn’t want to deal with the sexual harassment all over again. She didn’t believe me that it would be that bad.

So she brought it up with my uncle Freddy over coffee one day since he owned an electrics company. She told him what I had said, and apparently in his quiet way, my uncle said “She’s right.” So Mom let the subject drop.

I keep thinking about situations in North Country and how I would’ve dealt with them at the time when I was in tech, or really even now. I’ll tell you this, if a co-worker was groping the breast of another in my presence, I’d be laying hands on him and shaming him. None of this “hey, come on” crap. Most people, most men, no matter how beastly they may act will fold to someone that in fury asks them how’d they like it if someone did that to their daughter, sister, wife, mother. How’d they like these same women they love to know that they behave in these ways? In my experience most of the games played in sexual harassment is all about show and dominance. Take away the show and dominate yourself, you can force a hand.

But women are taught to not make a scene. Taught to submit and let it go away. Whenever this comes up for me I’m reminded of a situation of a friend of Mike’s. She was being cornered by a guy on a dance floor in a club, touching her inappropriately, if I remember right. And instead of slapping him and making an unholy scene of “what the fuck do you think you’re doing. Get your hands off of me. GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME, NOW.” she looked for someone to rescue her from him. I’ve always been so upset by that story because it means in some way we fail each other in that we don’t teach our girls that they have the right to loudly and forcefully protect themselves.

Oi, almost 2 pages on this. I think I’m going to let it go now and post it.

I’m really starting to understand the resentment many young people have against “adults”. I’m back in the Atrium (or as I prefer to call it, the Greenhouse) which has un-posted but mainly followed rules of behaviour. Simply put this is a quiet space in which to work. There’s a group of middle aged women that descended upon the greenhouse and gathered around one of the larger tables in the middle of the space. Talking, eating and generally oblivious to the glares easily translated to “shut the fuck up” from the other students attempting to study.

Apparently not as oblivious as I thought, they just whispered to each other and left. Thank god.

It’s fascinating to realize that this area not marked in any way as a quiet study space is one and maintained as such through peer pressure. The only interruptions, that is uncorrected interruptions, have been created by adults. A couple weeks ago I sat here trying to get some measure of study done and resisting my impulse to murder while two older students wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

It’s a good space. Lots and lots of natural light – hell it’s a greenhouse. The temperature is usually nice and neutral and I can watch the world go by, well kinda. Right now it’s more watching the snow swirl around, then hit the ground and melt. I’d prefer to be at one of the tables where I can plug my laptop in, but you take what you can get around noon. I spent about 3 hours here this morning, but gave up my spot to go get lunch and check out the Athletic complex.

I think I’d rather stab myself in the foot than go to the AC for a workout, ever. My wander through and explore had skinny little teenagers staring at me like I had horns or something. I’m serious; a couple kids walked out of the gymnasium, saw me, and then double-checked me as if I was the strangest thing they’d seen in years. The hell. I’m going to stick with my expensive gym that has a million machines, an awesome hot tub and people of all shapes and abilities working out there. Without getting gawked at.

Ok, back to either transcribing my notes to the slide printouts or doing some grammar stuff. Ew.

The always great and wonderful Monday morning has arrived. Along with the every week sense of not getting everything I wanted done on the weekend. Granted my list of things I want to get done in my days is obscenely long and ambitious. I should simply be happy that I finally made it to Yoga class on Saturday. I wasn’t able to do the entire class – my back objected about midway through the “forward facing dog” or whatever she called it – but I went and did as much as I could.

I realized this weekend that my hand strength is getting more and more pathetic. I’m considering picking up one of those hand spring thingies that are designed to increase your hand strength from Dollarama. I think I’m losing muscle strength all the way around because of how bad my back hurts. I get all wimpy and overly careful about what I’m willing to do when I’m at the gym or even at home. Going to have to do something about that as well – losing muscle strength is just going to make my pain issues worse.

I think a goal I’m going to set myself for this week is to go explore the Athletic Complex here on campus. If I know where everything is and what’s available I might be able to convince myself to pop into the gym for a quick workout some morning. Fear of the unknown, baby!

I think as much as I want to be exercising my artistic self, it’s just not important to me right now. I’m looking around this gorgeous space (the science building atrium area) just filled with lines, trees and light and I see dozens of great photographs… and I don’t regret that my camera is at home. That does make me a bit sad when I acknowledge it, but not sad enough that I want to add the extra weight of the camera to my backpack load.

*ponder* Perhaps this is something the pain has taken from me. Hard to focus on beauty and capturing that beauty when there’s the fear that the pain is going to come back and steal my breath from me. But it also gives me a focus as well. I need to get my strength back, I need to make the pain go away, I need to take care of my physical self right now.

How incredibly boring. *laughs*

I bitch a lot about my back, especially lately but I rarely talk about how much of an impact it has on my life. For years now it’s been this roving area of discomfort and occasional extreme pain. Get my sciatica going, and my ability to walk is anyone’s guess. But all in all it’s manageable with painkillers, exercise and various tricks.

Not anymore. Over the past several months my right side of my back (my chiropractor says it’s the muscle that joins the lower part of my rib cage to my pelvis) has been tender and spasming. When it spasms it tightens at the top near my rib cage and then travels down towards my pelvis, over and over again. The pain is to a level that I actually cry out, grunt and hyperventilate until the spasm passes. I find if I tighten the entire area it hurts just a bit less but recently that’s just prolonging the spasm itself and the tenderness afterwards.

Today is a bad day. I woke up at 7am and in the process of turning over to get out of bed to turn off my alarm, I had a severe spasm. Got to the point that I spent almost an hour on the heating pad trying to convince everything in that area to relax (to no avail). I couldn’t even drive this morning, the simple action of shifting caused the spasms.

See most days I have to play this game of avoid anything that might start the spasms. I’m right handed, so I automatically reach for things with my right hand – spasms. Cough, sneeze, inhale too suddenly – spasms. Blow my nose – spasms. Try to wipe my ass – spasms. Go around a curve in the car at anything more than a dead crawl – spasms. Bend over – spasms. Lean to a side or backwards at all – spasms. Laugh – that really, really hurts. Worst of all, if someone touches, bumps or brushes against the muscle – spasms.

The last time I went to the gym, I managed 20 or so minutes on the treadmill and then I started feeling that tenderness that warns me that I’m about to enter spasm zone. I used to have hours at a time each day with just tenderness and the understanding that if I did too much the spasms would return. But right now, it’s almost 11 am and I know that I can’t move or lift or sneeze or breathe or laugh or else I’m going to get a lot of attention from the people around me. And this is the third day of this.

I just leaned forward about 2 inches while raising my left hand to adjust my slipping bra strap on my right shoulder and spasmed. And this is with doubling up on my painkilling medication, boys and girls. I’m fucking screwed. I think I’m going to make it to class and then go home. I’m in pain almost all the time now. Severe, crippling pain. I think I need to get a handle on this before I try any of my get back to the gym goals. I can’t even move within my daily, slow life, I can’t imagine what I’d do to myself by trying to step up my demands on my body.

I just want to stop hurting. Is that too much to ask?

So at 5 am this morning I was awake as I am far too often lately, lying in bed listening to my neighbour’s radio play through the shared wall and pondering homicide. I hate waking up that early since it screws me up if there’s *anything* that can take my attention away from convincing my body that sleep is good. Considering our neighbour “can’t fall asleep without [her] radio” I spend a lot of time losing the go back to sleep battle.

So off I stagger to my beloved couch and while I’m trying to convince my body that it’s quiet now, sleep good, please god, go back to sleep… my brain starts planning my day. “9:30 am tutorial, then a 1pm appointment with the writing centre, then 2:30 pm tutorial… I could fit a trip to the gym in that space… maybe… but two showers in a morning? Should I go to the women’s gym nearby or stop being a scaredy-cat and go to the laurier gym instead?” and so forth until I finally gave up and loaded up Morrowind on the Xbox.

It’s that space time and I’ve decided that I have no desire to go to any gym, sweat, shower and have to reapply the war paint for a second time this morning. I’m very aware at the same time that I really, really need to go to the gym. I guess I feel out of control again (already!) and pressured to balance everything. There’s a sense of nostalgia for last term and the few times I took my readings with me to the gym and went in the mornings before class. Plus I haven’t touched a camera in any artistically driven way yet this new year… and… and…

I want great, amazing grades. I want to be a great mother. I want to use my skills to take care of my family. I want to make time for my best friend. I want to be a photographer. I want to keep my equilibrium. I want to write and continue learning about myself and how I relate to the world around me. I want to build an audience for my thoughts and my pictures. I want to be healthy. I want to be strong, fit and energetic. I want… so very much.

But there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to do all of that. They weren’t kidding about the 1 hour in class to 3 hours out of class ratio. If I do the tricks that I know will increase my absorption of what I’m learning, we can add an easy hour or two to that number. Plus, I just hit a point where if I have to think anymore I’m going to go insane, so I stop.

I guess at heart I feel scattered and out of control of my own life. Going to university has changed my life so drastically that I’m just floundering. I keep making plans, lists, routines and they go to pot almost as soon as I put them into play. And I’m so tired. I mean last night, I got home from class and I was completely ready to crash for a nice long nap – but Sara had swimming lessons, for which she was unprepared and couldn’t find her swimsuit. So we end up running out to Kitchener to find a new swimsuit for her (she needed a one-piece suit anyways) and by the time we got home I just wanted to die. So insanely tired.

It’s not the tired of earlier last year when we were tweaking my meds, it’s just a “I’ve hit the end of today’s energy. Stopping now.” thing. There’s an idea, perhaps. If I track when I start getting tired and what I do throughout the day, maybe I can figure out what level I end up per day. No, no… not another thing to add to my list of shoulds.

When I was in therapy (the heavy duty shit) I would think of myself as having an allotment of energy each day and lots of it would go towards keeping myself stable. So the days when I’d be doing a lot of self-exploration I’d be exhausted much sooner than an average day. This holds true even now in terms of emotional expenditures sapping me of my overall energy. Maybe because of the PTSD and that I don’t honestly function well at a basic level, I am just simply using up a percentage of my daily energy keeping myself together here at school. I mean, as I said to Lindsay this week, there was a time not too long ago that I couldn’t leave the house because of the fear and anxiety.

I used to be unable to be in public without an extremely high level of anxiety. I needed to keep my back protected, sit in corners so I could watch the people around me for threat, never leave myself vulnerable to attack. It was just easier to stay at home where I was safe. Yet here I am, spending most of my day in an area *filled* with other people, teenagers for the most part. Teenagers are the ones most likely to viciously verbally attack strangers, in my experience. Verbally attack *me* -- not to put too fine a point on it.

Just poking at this and thinking about how severe and controlling my fear was is creating an emotional response for me. That usually means I’m onto something. So maybe I’m just expecting too much from myself on a daily basis by staying at school all day. Maybe I do need to try and work from home as much as I can so that I’m not forcing my subconscious to continually hold down the anxiety. I know if I allowed myself to feel the anxiety I wouldn’t be able to be here every day and I have long experience with suppression of emotions on a subconscious level. And now poking at it, it’s pretty damn obvious that my anxiety has to be running like a massive undercurrent to my days.

Interestingly, my back is tensing and feeling highly vulnerable now. Oh, there’s another line of thought… the continual knotted and tense state of my back could be a signpost as well. Fucking fear, fucking damage. I may accept that I’ll never be able to live completely without anxiety and fear, but I can still hate it with all my soul. It’s irrational and stupid. Pfft.

So, just finished my lunch and figure I might as well take a few to do a quick journal entry before I get back to my homework. My preferred place to work on homework now is the ‘greenhouse’, aka the atrium at school. I was here for most of the day yesterday, and I’m planning on spending part of my afternoon here too. I tried working at home, but that so doesn’t work for me. Tuesday and Wednesday I got home, had some lunch and passed out. Not that a nice long nap isn’t highly appealing to me now, trust me, it is… it’s just I find I don’t get done what I need to get done.

Today it’s taking my typed notes from yesterday’s class and writing them out by hand on the slide printouts. It’s my trick for memory and re-reading them. If I take some time to write as well as read it seems to stick a lot better in my brain. It’s part of my new plan on how to stay on top of my school stuff. Transcribe my notes, then re-read all my notes on the weekend, do my readings and take decent notes, re-read those on the weekend too. Ideally this means by the end of the term I’ll have the info like glue in my brain, baby!

I’m still very firm on once I’m home in the evenings it’s home & family time. Even if all we do is wander off and focus on our individual pursuits, it’s still really important I think. I think iit would be far too easy to get all cranky and whine about the work I have to get done. Which is silly considering how much time I have during the days after and before classes.

Ok enough talking about it, time to do it. :)

Waiting for my next class to start. I’m in a smaller lecture hall this time, but the seats are *awesome*. Going to have to figure out how to hold my laptop without dropping him in lecture though. At the moment I have him on my lap with the neoprene case acting as a leveler. Not bad, but definitely not ideal. I have visions of dropping my laptop and boom, bye-bye lots and lots of money. Paranoia is such fun.

I’m wondering how they’re going too fit nearly 200 people in this room though. I have the sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be sharing elbow space with someone. I have a far too huge personal bubble. I think I’ve decided to sit at the front of class from here on in at this point, it’s easier for me to get the room I want, I can record the prof more clearly, and most importantly, less people around me. Ew, people.

I hope the fog sticks around today. Last night on the way home from the gym, I was exhausted but so, so wanting to go on a photo shoot with my film camera and my new shiny tripod. I’ve wanted to do long night exposures for several years now. Just never had the tripod, but now that’s been solved. If it’s nice and foggy tonight again I’ll go take the shots I missed last night.

I think I’m going to do class then go home to work on my stuff from yesterday. I kind of let the bare essentials slide, which means I now have to do a full hour today to catch up. Whee, It’s kind of sad how much work I need to do to make up for some fucknut’s brilliant idea of “whole language”. Whole language, my ass. I have a fundamental lack of knowledge when it comes to grammar and how it works. I can obviously manage on a casual level, but that’s no longer good enough.

So it’s a goal this year too make up for what I’m missing. I’m counting on my ability to learn quickly here. That’s a bit naive, though. How can I reasonably expect too make up for 12 years of “grammar BAD!” within a year? Is this an expectation I can fulfill? We’ll see.

One of the big things I have to work on is my defensive reaction to being corrected. The lovely young woman that works in he WLU writing center pointed out how weak my sentence structure is. (and that right there is bad, I know it’s bad, I don’t know why or how to change my sentence so it doesn’t end with is) My reaction to that obvious, known fact being pointed out was shame and feeling like an idiot. I guess I expect that I should have known all this automatically.

So on one hand I condemn “whole language” for being a bullshit method of education, and on the other I still expect it to have worked. Unreasonable. Another little thing to add to my copious list of things to work on. Acceptance that through no fault of my own, I wasn’t given the tools to excel here. Accept that it’s a challenge to overcome and it doesn’t make me stupid or an idiot. I’m not sure if I can. It makes me question myself, question the years gone into writing for this journal. I thought I was a skilled writer… but how can I be skilled if I have no clue how a sentence is well constructed?

And that’s a rough 30 minutes and time for class to begin shortly. That is if the prof ever shows up. :)

Today is the first day of classes for the winter term. Hair’s done, the war paint is on, my backpack has all the various things I figured I’d need for today – I’m ready. Oddly enough I’m more nervous about classes today than I was in the fall. I wonder why. First class this week is History 109, the continuation of the history course I took last term. That’s a bit of a relief. I guess I’m worried that I’ll have people sitting beside me in the lecture hall and my other course (HI 102) is really popular and fully enrolled.

Those seats in the lecture halls are a wee bit squishy for me. There’s my motivation to lose a little weight – to sit in my lectures comfortably. I do want to lose a bit of weight this year, at least a bit of the quit weight. It’s still an immensely loaded issue for me, but I want to stop hurting so much. I’m pretty certain that part of my back issues have to be related to the extra weight I’m carrying. We’ll see.

I’ve been working on my uberlist for 2006 over the past week or so. Have a fairly substantial list, but not enough yet to post. I’m reminded as to why I wanted to work on it throughout the year. It’s hell trying to make a to-do list of over 100 items all in one go. I find it interesting looking at the assessment for last year’s list and realizing how little I actually got done. What’s funny is the items under ‘one time only tasks’ I figured I’d get done easily. You know, set aside an afternoon and go. Enh.

The other thing coming to my notice is that it’s really hard to get me to work with my photographs. From simply going out on a photo shoot to processing them for the photoblog to even posting to the photoblog, I just don’t seem to want to do it. I wonder why. I mean, I’m obviously skilled at it, I obviously enjoy it, why is it so hard for me to do it? I seem to give myself permission to shoot when I’m not at home. 5 rolls when we were in Ottawa for the weekend, the same amount on our road trip to Vermont and Nova Scotia. Perhaps some of it has to be shyness. Not wanting to pull attention to myself. Because someone with a camera wandering around taking pictures of fountain drains is very noticeable.

Plus I want a better camera. The digital started showing signs of dying when we were in Ottawa and that makes me very nervous. I guess I’d rather not take photos at all than have the digital die on me completely and make it clear that I *can’t* just go out and shoot. But the downfall is the digital I’ve decided I want is going for $550 before taxes on eBay and $700 retail. Might as well buy a good replacement if we’re in the market for a new digital camera. Enh, we’ll see. Maybe I’ll ask for it for my birthday. :)

So I’ve been typing this up sitting in a Timmies waiting for Mike to get done with his physio appointment on my new laptop, Mormallor. The typos are monstrous. I’m not quite sure how I can miss letters *and* do doubles at the same time. It’s most likely because I haven’t been doing a lot of typing on here yet. I hope it improves over the next term. Hah. A $1500 notebook so I can take better notes. That’s kind of sad.

Blah. Half an hour now and I’m written out. Time to clean up the typos from hell.