What makes a person beautiful

Come on in.  The gorgeous girlfriend made a chicken.  A farm fresh chicken!  Her parents gave it to us over the holidays.  Her parents are very cool.  But that's not what I want to write about.

Today was a strange day for me.  A lot of people around me expressed some serious and mind altering pain to me today.  Seems like everyone is having a bad go at things recently.  It made me think and feel and of course it made me realize something.  The realization is neat too because it happened due to a combination of things, including something I said.  Occasionally I can be profound.

See we started teaching short stories in the class I help out with.  And me and m'boss were laying out what makes a short story something special in literature.  And I said 'It is the one piece of writing that is so close to the reality of our lives.  It offers a brief glimpse, a snapshot, one moment of limited perspective.  It's how we are presented with life and in that way it best represents who we are as people.'

And once everyone around me had expressed their pain to me, it became a little seed that started to grow in my mind.  And I had a talk with said gorgeous and wonderful girlfriend which got me to actually express what my mind was brewing on.

Like my enjoyment of other people's annoying habits, the weird little peccadilloes that might set other people's annoyance factor up, I find it is not the great things people do that I admire.  Because really, every single person I know who has done something great, that skill, that drive came from choice and hard work.  These things are still impressive but it's nothing I find exceptional.  Everyone is capable of it.

No, what makes someone beautiful is the way they handle the pain involved with living.  The difficulties, the trials, the failures.  How someone can still stand, still smile, still love and laugh, enjoy life, even when something is occurring that causes them exceptional pain.  That makes a person beautiful.

In essence, it is our scars, our physical and emotional wounds, that make people beautiful to me.  My lovely love broke her arm as a youth and almost died from it, and now she carries a metal plate and a six inch long and half inch wide scar on her left bicep.  I love to touch it, run my fingers lightly along it.  It's proof she is meant to be where she is.  It is a sign of her own fortitude and beauty that even with something as large and disfiguring as this scar she is still so gorgeous, so attractive, so wonderful.

So to you my beautiful readers I offer this thought to you.  Are you beautiful?  I think that even at our worst, when we've done the most horrific things possible, we are still a reflection of the totality of existence and therefore wonderful to behold and worth all the effort and love that can be used to help heal those wounds.  So that we might recall the scars later as a point of loveliness.

Why TV Sucks

Come on in, I made this great baked pasta dish that is fucking brilliant!  Everyone enjoyed.  There's like ... five of us in the house right now, three adults and two teenagers and everyone enjoyed.  So you get some too!

So I spent most of today ranting about bad TV.  Bad writing, bad premises (premisi?) and just stupid fucking stereotypes.  Seriously, this one chick basically went on a rant about how it's no big deal she had doubts about marrying this guy and went to ask her ex if he still loved her because she's the one who always messes up and he knew that, so it's alright and he's the asshole for hooking up with his ex when she dumped his ass brutally a few months back.  WTF?!  Really?  Fuck you, you stupid cunt.

But most TV, and most movies, are this stupid.  I can't stand them.  And when there is an intelligent show it either doesn't get pushed enough or confuses people and no one watches except the intelligent folks and they get canceled and then I only get to watch reruns or on netflix and watch them over and over and over again because they make me happy and laugh.  Like Better Off Ted.  Watch that shit.  Or else.

On a completely unrelated topic, I love leeks.  I like cooking with'um, I like eatin'um, and I love the name cuz it's what I do with my penis.  Although I don't think about that while I'm cooking with them.  That would be kinda gross.  That's part of why the baked pasta was so good.  Enjoy!!

But seriously, TV, why does it have to suck so bad?  And then someone said something that made me go 'Well now we're fucked.'  Someone said 'I watch TV not to think.'  Damnit, why?!  Thinking is important!  It's part of the fun of the human brain.  We think some random fucked up thoughts that are rather entertaining, like putting a baby in a fish tank and taking a picture and then posting it on effbook so I can be disturbed and amused.  (On a side note, are thalidomide babies in SCUBA gear jokes in poor taste?) So people, stop watching TV to not think.  For fucks sake people:  THINK!!!

So to summarize:
1)  TV and movies suck because people want mindless entertainment and this is wrong
2)  Thinking is good
3)  Coyote will make bad jokes about everything!
4)  I'm an awesome cook.

Oh and my girlfriend is awesome too.  But that's an entirely different thing.

I need a new hobby

Come on in and enjoy the fire.  The winter has decided to come back with a bite so we've got some baked pasta for you here.  Very good.

So I've had a lot of different hobbies over my lifetime, and I've rather enjoyed them.  Of course they were more about the social aspect than the actual hobby.  I like people. Not necessarily doing anything.  I'm kinda lazy.  Actually I'm not lazy, I just like being sedentary most days.

So I used to collect comics as a kid.  I still love comics, but they suck so bad now, and cost so much.  It used to be good stories and some decent art... now even the 'cutting edge' comics are the same shit over and over.  I don't think I've read any decent stories in comics for a while.  If I'm wrong, please point it out to me and I'll go check it out.

I used to play sports.  A lot.  Football.  Wrestling.  Then paintball.  My last hurrah at sports recently was dodgeball.  I blew out my shoulder and can't throw.  I catch well but that's still only half good.  Kinda sucks.  And the shoulder is still right fucked.

I like RPGs, including LARPs.  That's Role Playing Games and Live Action Role Playing.  The RPG groups I was a part of have fallen apart, I am running a Deadlands game, but I wanna play!  :)  And the LARPs are fun, to a point.  It's so much effort, and I'm just not interested in putting in that kind of effort.  I'm kind of burnt on them.  Perhaps I'll try to run a larp.  I'd like to adapt a rule set to run a shadowrun LARP.  But it would have to be run a lot different than a standard LARP.

I used to play poker a lot more.  But that requires money.  I gots none of that.

And that's part of the problem with a hobby.  They all cost something.  I gots nothing.  Serious.

Well perhaps it's time I just start writing all the time, see what kind of crazy shit I can pull out of my as and make y'all giggle a bit.

Like this random thought:  I keep thinking about getting a twitter account but I don't like the idea of listening to tweets, twats or twits.  And I haven't seen anything on it worth signing up for yet another thing I'd have to check.  I totally need some cybereyes that have HUD.  I'd totally volunteer for that procedure to test it out.  And cyber legs, maybe some muscle replacement on the arm.

Damnit I really wanna play shadowrun.  Ringmaster, start a damn game!

New agey bullshit 'live in the now' annoyances

Come on in and grab some sammiches.  The lovely love who loves me has made some wonderful french bread, fixin's are in the fridge.  Make yourself at home in the den.

So I'm all for trying to make your life better.  And I'm a huge fan of short snippets of info that make you smile.  I love those little pics that have the cool sayings on them that populate the intarwebs and effbook and such.  I do indeed like them.  Except.  Except those 'ignore the past, live for right now' ones.  Those ones really make me annoyed.

Because y'know what, you have to carry the past with you all the time, not as baggage, but instead like a weightless library, a reference point to everything going forward.  Not only that, but without considering how your actions will reverberate into the future then you're being just a wee bit irresponsible.  Well actually a whole lot irresponsible.

The problem here isn't learning how to let go of the past, instead how to learn.  Y'know I could throw a metric fucktonne of platitudes and cliches at you about this concept but instead I'm going to break it down into a simple formula.

Doing + Failing = Learning.  Learning + Repeated Attempt = Growth.  Well as long as the repeated attempt is not identical to the first attempt.  Then you didn't learn.  See, there is one tiny part of that equation I didn't put in there, and that is the fact that you have to, you know, remember past events, and how shit happened like it happened so you can learn from it.

And yes I know, the idea isn't to forget what you learned from the experience, but to let go of the negative emotions, but again, I have an issue with this.  First off, why do we deem some emotions negative?  They're all useful, they all help us contextualize our world, remember, and give structure to our own perceptions and reality.  Maybe if we stopped using labels like negative or positive emotions folks might not obsess over this shit, and that is the real problem.  When behavior that could help growth is stifled due to not wanting to experience these negative emotions.

Well folks, we evolved these emotions for a reason.  They are a part of our social matrix and are just as valid as any other means we have to interact with the world.  We need to unbunch our collective panties and stop thinking that 'feeling bad' is a bad thing.  It's just a thing.  A thing we developed to help our species survive.  It's not the thumb, or the tools, or the intelligence that makes human beings different from other animals, it's the complexity of our social interactions that does.  And even then it doesn't make us 'better' than the other critters, it just makes us different.

Survival

Come on in and enjoy a respite from the cold.  I have some spaghetti for you, made with some nice healthy ground turkey and lots of onion and garlic.  Quite tasty.  And I'd like to tell you a story.

So the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is in Saskatchewan.  And at the First Nations University of Canada.  Which is where I work.  So I've spent some time listening to the stories being told to the commission. I'd love to say that what I heard was a beautiful thing of healing and coming to terms with the evils of genocide but that just wasn't the case.

I listened to an older man, probably one of the last generation to be put into residential schools.  He talked of the hate he felt, the damage he'd done.  He spoke of the guilt and pain he felt for knowing that his own hatred flowed into the world and that people in that very crowd, people he never knew, were damaged by his sons and daughters because of the hate he showed them.  He talked of how he was still damaged, still causing damage, still not quite a human because of the evil he was subjected to and accepted as a part of living.  I would love to be able to show you the true depth of his pain and suffering but it is his story, his life, and I doubt I could do it justice.

But here is the power of the First Nations culture.  I looked into the faces around me.  I watched the reactions of the people listening.  The faces were not filled with pity, nor were they filled with judgment.  Instead it was a mixture of understanding and determination.  A kind of power of witnessing the degradation of a person, of a culture, and not seeing it as something that needed vengeance, instead something that required understanding.  A kind of communal gathering of spirit and will to take part in the draining out of the infected and diseased parts of a culture and gain the knowledge required to fix it.

And then, as the lunch began, and the commission and sharing circles broke up, so did the massive clouds of pain and hurt.  Instead a community formed.  There was laughter, there was hugging and joking.  There was love.  That man who told his story sat among strangers and listened to their jokes, laughed and was a part of the whole.  And that is the beginning of true healing.

What a year.

Come on in, there is some turkey soup being made, I'm sure it will be done by the time we're all done here.  You can have a bowl once we get through this all.

So the about this time last year I was just getting geared up to finish my last semester of my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English with a minor in Indigenous Studies.  Today, I have that degree, and I've got a couple jobs associated with that degree.  One I got last year, one I start on Thursday that is brand new.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let's go deal with all this crap.

My New Years last year was spent by myself, playing The Force Unleashed.  I think I might have had a flirty call with the ex-wife.  The first one, Little Bear's mom.  I then threw myself into a nearly exhausting schedule, taking two honours/grad courses, two 200 level courses, and finishing the thesis paper.  Anyone ever wants to read it, well, I'm thinking about doing some more work on it, see maybe I can get that thang published.  Maybe the James Joyce quarterly.  That'd be sweet.

That summer I started looking for work, knowing I would be heading back to school in a year or so.  No one wanted to hire me.  I either wasn't a student anymore or I was too much of a student.  That rejection, and the issues at my current work place were starting to wear me out.  I was tired, I had drained the reservoir, so to speak, and I was heading for a crash.

I tried writing about that crash.  And I couldn't do it, not without it coming across as a PSA about mental health, or something overly poetic and dramatic.  I didn't want either.  So it go deleted tonight.  Instead I thought I'd sum up some of the things I learned in the psych ward where I spent a few weeks.

First off.  Control is a problem.  Particularly control of the self in relation to the world around us.  I guess I should take my own advice on what the world is like.  I didn't.  And so between personal issues with the second ex-wife, that'd be Little Crow's mom, my perceived failure with Little Bear, the work rejections, the inability to write, oh and let's not forget the excessive drinking where I repeatedly embarrassed my friends with my behavior, I decided I would finish things.  In case that's too obtuse for anyone, I decided one Tuesday morning to kill myself.

I had been hanging on to threads for so long, that when I had one fantastic weekend with my girls, I was good to go.  Had a wonderfully negative email exchange with the second ex (that didn't influence the decision, just kind of confirmed it, I'd decided when I woke up) and a call to my mother, I gathered my tools of destruction and was ready to go.  For the truly morbid, I had planned to inject myself with two complete vials of insulin, down half a bottle of glycon and glyburide (these help insulin work and help the body process it) while I sat on the football five man sled at my old school, and just riff on some tunes until the blood sugar was low enough to slip into a coma, and then the cardiac arrest would happen.

Instead, I didn't.  I remember giving up.  I remember a full and complete shrug of body/mind/soul/emotions of giving up.  Next, I remember talking to a woman on the health line.  The website for the number was up on my computer.  The cops came, and amid glaring eyes of my ex, the tears of my daughters, they hauled me off to the General.

I like to think that the grandfathers kept me going.  I gave up and they drove for a bit, let me find my soul, and get on with living again.  I wrote a couple things in there.  Well actually had a journal.  It's filled with all kinds of crap.  But there's a few good things.  And one great find.  Here they are.

     Six Reflections

     Standing across from
     the five images
     Variations of the same

     Not one is true
     all filled with lies
     Fractures of the mind

     Losing the self
     finding no firm place
     Symbols of the one

     Locked by panes
     with no common ground
     Death of the past

     A new prayer

     I thank the grandfathers for the wisdom to ask for help when I had cut off all else.  They gave movement
     to a thought and carried it through.  Without them I would die.

     I thank the family and friends who give me love and hope, especially two little girls who teach me as
     much as I teach them.

     I thank the hard times so that the good times are so much better, and so I may learn the lessons of my
     path.

     I must love myself, or these gifts are wasted.

I had some great visitors.  New and old.  They helped because y'know what, the loony bin is just that.  It's a big bin where they leave a buncha crazy people.  Don't get me wrong, I'm thankful I was there, but wow, there is a whole load of hurt in that place.  Once I was back to being kinda normal it was a bit painful to be in there.  I spent as much time off ward as I could.

Once I was out, there was a few other trials and tribulations, but that is someone else's story to tell if they ever want to.

One of the things I read, on effbook of all places, came from a brilliant young man I had the pleasure of getting to know back during the 'Year of Troubles' at FNUniv.  He posted it and I just about fell over when I read it.  'Depression is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign that you have been trying to be strong for too long.'  Read that over again.  If there is anything I can suggest to anyone else who reads this and might be having some mental health issues, it's that one line.

Depression is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign that you have been trying to be strong for too long.

So I got out.

And I had to deal with work.  Luckily I had a medical leave, which I knew they wouldn't fire me for, but I was expecting a lay off.  Which they eventually did, but I quit before they could dump my fat ass.  Always go out your own way right?

Because well, I was at home for maybe three days, my mom was there, when I got a call from someone at the FNUniv.  They wanted me to come down and interview for a job.  My interview consisted of the person hiring me saying 'The writing center, think he can handle it?'  to one of my profs, who went 'Yeah!'  And thus, I was hired.  Only part time but making almost as much as I did at the other job.  Because well, DEGREE!  Yah!

And then.  Well.  I decided to try to date.  Or at least try.  Y'know, casual, get to know a girl.  So I did, and it turned into a bit of a drama llama situation.  But strangely, it led to meeting someone from the past.  Someone who ... Well, long story short, she's lying down in our bed right now, reading and cuddling up with Pixie.  Pixie is Little Crow's cat.  It happened like a flood, came in and just sank into everything, washed away a lot of the crap that was there and brought in new healthy soil for growth.  I love this woman.  She's incredible.

And that brings us here.  To today.  In a couple days I start my second job, still have the writing center gig, as a teaching assistant to a high chief at the FNUniv, where I will actually get to do some teaching.  And I'm being encouraged to do so.  And life, while far from perfect, and this Coyote is far from totally healed, is life.  A beautiful thing full of hurt, work, joy, and wonder.

And so to you, my faithful readers who happened to stick around even though I haven't written much as of late (I hope to change this) I say, Happy New Year.  I wish you all the best and worst that life can give you.

Two years gone

Come on and grab a seat.  Got some almonds.  Chili & lime.  Tasty.

It's been two years since you left this physical realm and went south.  Two years and so many different things.  So much change.  Still miss you and am thrilled when you visit my dreams.  You are the definition of strength and acceptance to me and always will be.  So Grandma, I figured I'd give you an update.

I graduated.  got this nifty keen little piece of paper in a silly plastic folder (I should get it framed) that sez I know stuff.  And I say thank you to you, because you helped make it possible.  You provided so much support and love throughout my whole life it would be hard to imagine it without you, so thanks.

The girls are getting bigger, and so much more fun with each day.  Even through the challenges.  Little Bear still misses you.  I hope she carries on who you were, because she is so much like you.

I needed a rest.  Things got too much so I ended up cracking, but thankfully you were there to help with that too.  Thanks again.

I got a new job!  I love it, I'm the writing instructor for FNUniv.  It's so much fun.

And I met the most wonderful girl.  You'd love her.  Next time you come see me, come visit her too.  She loves my quilt.  She's a handy crafty type herself and recognizes just how great that quilt is.  And loves to cuddle up with me under it.

When I hear this song I think of how you were, how you worked and lived.  And what mattered to you.  And how what matters to me seems to be strengthened by that same ideal.  Love you Grandma.