I guess I find it interesting when people who live their lives online and put themselves in a bubble of public eyes suddenly feel they have a right to privacy when things go to shit between you, yet you lived a lot of the good parts of your relationship(s) on a public blog. People, including myself, worry about their reputation, perceptions, pretend they don’t care at all, yet we all exhibit emotionally driven behavior to the contrary. Most of us today, because we so rarely actually speak to one another, would rather fire off a passive aggressive comment around on open forums instead of actually dealing with interpersonal problems.

There is a line in one of my favourite songs by Terry Reid, the song is called To be Treated, where he sings:

we are what we are when in danger and we are as we stand head in hand

The whole thing speaks to a place in me that just wants to be peaceful, doesn’t want to resent, to feel anger so strong sometimes it feels like my blood may boil over from my mouth, nose, eyes and ears covering me in my mistakes, disintegrating everything good I’ve managed to accomplish in its midst. The fight or flight feeling when I perceive myself to be in danger or feel I’ve been burned is normal but it doesn’t have to control me. I can’t control what other people do all I can do is continue to work on how I react to it.

In the big picture, when big problems happen in my life I don’t want to lash out, overreact, hold onto unhealthy thoughts, or allow myself to sit in the victim chair. I’ve been working on the big picture for coming on a year and it is still some of the hardest work I have ever taken on. It is up there with coming to terms and dealing with my relationship with my parents. It strikes me as incredibly odd and painful that I can forgive the man who came into my home in 2002 and sexually assaulted me and I can’t forgive two women who have wronged me from behind their computers. Why can I let go of so many other things in my life, why can I come so far with forgiving some yet have no love for a few?

I know that I like resolutions to things, I like to work things out, I can admit when I’m wrong, where I don’t think a lot of people can, it’s very freeing, like learning to laugh at yourself. I wish I could feel more compassion instead of anger, at times I do, but moving on is a struggle here. I think because I’ve been able to get my life on track regardless of how hard my depression gets in almost every other area I don’t understand why I can’t have a resolution to these two problems, I feel helpless and misunderstood, ignored, taken advantage of. I know I am NOT a victim, I’m not the only one at fault. I would assume I have to forgive myself as well, but if I had my relationship with myself listed on Facebook it would be complicated.

We all live in this technologically advanced world, even Adam and I who have only ONE computer (the horror!). Things move so fast the average person can not keep up. Yet we seem to be taking steps backwards in dealing with people and with the relationships that ensue. We act like adolescents when someone says or writes something mean about us, threaten to sue over the thought of a reputation. For real? By feeding into the trend of everyone living their lives online we don’t seem to be gaining any lasting enlightenment, we are limiting ourselves psychologically, I don’t need to even read a book or be a doctor to see that. A society where people don’t have to wear pants is doomed from the get go.

There was a time I thought that I would write extensively about the Vancouver 2010 Olympics while they were here, but when they arrived I found myself uninterested in writing anything on the actual games, anything positive I had to say I could have turned around and written from the opposite stand point. I’m always up for good clean sports though I was never what you would call an Olympic supporter, but I wasn’t a bitcher either. I did however vote NO for the games. I’ll never forget it it because it turned the vast majority of people in the office I worked in against me, I was one of the only people who lived downtown (small office), I was also the youngest in this particular place and I ran competitively at the time and due to being an athlete people were appalled that I would vote NO. The fact has always remained the same, I voted from a political standpoint, the part of my mind that believed and still believes that it was a joke that only Vancouver got to vote on something that our children’s children’s children will still be paying for was the appalling thing. Granted, not MY children. My debt is payed off when I die.

I spent most of the games feeling depressed and creatively blocked. I considered doing a wrap up post of 17 photos for 17 days but I didn’t take photos every day of the games, and even the photos I did take were pretty lacklustre, there aren’t many that I consider to be good photos. I did Tweet a lot, it went over pretty well for someone who doesn’t make a point to live Tweet a trip to the bathroom.

For me the only real highlight other than so many top ten finishes and fourteen gold medals for Canada was getting to go see the Canadian Men’s Curling team plus seven other countries. When the information on how the Olympic tickets were going to be sold and the prices were announced it became clear pretty quickly we wouldn’t be seeing any events. We didn’t even entertain the idea of getting to see anything anywhere but on a T.V., let alone see one live that both my parents and myself have played in the past and one that Adam and me watch. One that Adam is developing an odd obsession with, comparable only to when he discovered Tennis. (long story) So, when the opportunity arose from a friend who most graciously gave us, yes gave us Olympic curling tickets came to pass there was nothing else to do but go and to go wearing matching sweaters, something that we both agree is only acceptable on this one occasion. Adam wore my dad’s old curling sweater that I started to let him wear years ago because even though I love it, it is way too big for me. Oddly enough one of my closest girlfriends has the same sweater and lent me hers! Awesome. Getting to see Canada’s undefeated mens team second row right over the button is up there with best memories ever. Thanks again Steve!!

Adam went out exploring and people watching more than I did. There was also a time I didn’t think I would stay in the city for the games, and although I am glad I did, I think Adam would have had a better time had a I left. I hate that about depression, I’d been feeling so well and bam it just hit like a load of bricks almost a week in. I’m not in break down mode but I’m feeling really shitty.

It is nice that the helicopters are gone. I don’t miss the games at all, we watch golf. It’s over. We just changed the channel, there is curling on this weekend. But they left us with the cheque and the feeling remains that we are the province the country doesn’t care about. They came, they went, and now we pay.

Since Adam got laid off, we’ve both been a little down and have basically been sitting on our asses playing video games. Which doesn’t mean we aren’t looking for work, Adam has to deal through his Union and trust me, he’s been calling. We’ve had some good visitors though, had some more last night, SIL Smut and her fiancée came over to give us some gifts that SIL Saz sent us for Christmas but they were sent to SIL Smut and didn’t arrive on time and so we just got em. Plus because they are both great they made us dinner straight out of a cook book from Pouce Coupe, it was almost like we were UP north.

Because I’ve been talking about them more frequently, I will introduce them to you. SIL Saz is my older SIL though not older than me, Adam is the eldest of the three of them and I’m the oldest of all six of us if you count our spouses which to me is pretty funny because in my family I’m the youngest, youngest cousin, grandchild, only grandchild on the one side BUT my dad has six sisters and one brother so being the youngest is super cool. Back to SILS. SIL Saz you may recognize from my comments, she reads the Greeper. SIL Smut is the younger of the two and has gone through various name changes, first I started to call her SIL Deux. Deux meaning two in French, and then when I got back from Bali I changed it to SIL Dua. Dua meaning two in Indonesian. Even though I know that I meant no insult with the word Dua who the hell wants to be second and technically she was third born anyway which means if I were going to keep it accurate she’d be SIL Tiga. But before Christmas SIL Smut and fiancée came over for a Wii night, Christmas spirits type visit and I didn’t even realize until they left that she had called her Mii for the Wii Smut. I enquired, she gained even MORE has the best kid stories of the three of them points . She got another one the other day, SIL Saz left a comment which begged a story. If I told you stories they’d both kill me, but from the one story I was able to FINALLY solidify a name for Tiga born SIL Smut.

Before we had dinner last night we opened gifts. All we knew was that SIL Saz was excited. This could not ever be a bad thing. I received the best belt buckle on the face of the earth and this belt buckle here is pretty bloody hard to beat. Now I am basically The Scorpion Queen. Adam received a Pan Flute that he is already playing super sweet sounds on that are not in anyway annoying. Not annoying AT ALL. And she gave us a poo calendar a Monthly Doos the 2010 dog poop calendar. It will likely go in the bathroom. WHAT? a poo calendar? Yes, picture an Anne Geddes photo but instead of babies on the leaves there is dog shit. Brilliant.

Some of the time it isn’t like we want to sit on our asses, we’ve been trying to get for photo walks for days and the weather is refusing to cooperate. I do not have a problem going for rainy walks they are rather enjoyable but when you are trying to take photos rain and photo walks don’t mix and I keep forgetting to wear contacts and my glasses get covered in water spots. Even the night walk we’ve been trying to go on has been a no go. We managed to get out one day and I took a couple shots before it started to rain they are nothing special, I like the beehive picture I got and I really like the public art displays all over the city put on by Vancouver Biennale. The red man is one of many sitting in a big circle. When I first saw them I instantly thought of Bali because almost everyone there squats like these statues do.

This one is an older one I took of another display very close to us.

We want to go for walks so bad to catch some of the insane last minute preparation for the Olympics, the energy in this city is crazy simply crazy. I did walk by the art gallery where the Olympic count down clock is and as I walked past and saw the work they were doing on it ALL I could think of was a HUGE flowered moo moo that I wouldn’t even let my mother wear for her 100th birthday. I’m really hoping we get a chance to do a rain free day walk and night walk within the next two weeks here.

While looking for the above photo I realized that I have NOT shown you all a photo of Dr. Vegas in his BRAND SPANKIN’ knew WRESTLING SUIT [from Christmas] made for him by beyond awesome friends, what a seriously killer gift.

The rage I feel right now is nothing new. But the difference between what happened then and now is me, I am new, in a healthy head space. I am no longer suffering a clinical semi functional breakdown and the problem with being in a healthy head space and feeling this way is that I have to find new ways to deal with it. I can’t freak out and start throwing stuff or threatening to harm myself, I can’t just take a handful of prescription drugs and head to bed and forget about it because as I’ve stated over the past few months, I’ve been out of the year plus long breakdown and my head is finally above water. So all I feel right now is pain, and hurt, and anger. I feel betrayed, used, screwed over. I’ve been feeling like this since March and despite my best efforts I can’t hold it in any longer, even at the threat of charges being filed against me for alleged harassment.

This goes way back, in March 2008 I entered breakdown mode. I was hospitalized, it is all on the blog. I was also on the Bloggers Bowl for Big Brothers Team and was friends personally with all the bloggers on the team when it was formed; the main blogger running it, we’d been friends since new years 2006, off our blogs. The details are irrelevant except for the part where I threatened to throw down the gloves because things started to fall apart with this group right around this same time and I was upset, not even remotely in my own mind and made a stupid comment that has since that very day never ceased to be used against me when needed by the organizer and her husband. Having been friends for the amount of time we were, she and her husband knew full well the only person I had ever harmed with violence was myself. I apologized to everyone on the team even those who I had not insulted and took responsibility for what I said. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed that my depression and my temper where getting away from me to that extent.

Enter me early last year, still trying to recover from the breakdown which had originally been brought on by my relationship with my parents falling apart. Take a that a step further, my parents were now in Indonesia and at the time all we knew was that my mother was having a breakdown and was in the hospital and completely terrified of my father. Here came the hardest time I have ever faced in my life. For people who weren’t reading at the time, there is no Canadian Consulate in Bali, you have to deal with Australia but you obviously have to deal with them through Indonesian laws. To say I was dealing with a lot would be an understatement: Three consulates, foreign affairs, the hospital, and all the while trying to keep my dad from finding out our plans, which consisted of Adam flying to the other side of the world in under 72 hours to rescue and bring my mother home not knowing how she really was or what my father was really capable of under these circumstances. I did this with no help except from my husband and the legal contacts and dealing with my mother completely out of her mind and in hysterics. I was a wreck and at the time although I had no idea how to feel about my father, I was still an only child at 31, about to watch my parents go through a divorce after 39 years of marriage and after they had already retired to Bali.

Just for the record, i am not trying to condone my actions, only to say that both parties would have had to avoided twitter for weeks to be unaware of my state of mind, because they were both following me and I wear my heart on my sleeve.

March is Earth Hour month, and I realize now that we were both playing the keep your enemies closer card but we had agreed to work together on Earth Hour. The organizers were following myself, her, and one other blogger as the main people highlighting the event in Vancouver. The year prior my post was the first one up on the event in the city but by the time March 2009 rolled around my blog was just an alley compared to her traffic. I still managed to get my post up, it wasn’t as good as I wanted, I hadn’t promoted the event to the degree I had wanted to but I did my best given the situation I was in and when her post came out there was no link to me and I was livid. Were this just a regular post I wouldn’t have cared, she had done this to me before where she knew I was doing something that someone had done a talk on, for example, and intentionally left me off the linking of bloggers participating in whatever. But I never saw it coming, having the carrot yanked back over a CHARITY while I am in family emergency mode and nothing makes sense anymore.

I flipped, at first I was sort of calm, but for me this was the final straw, I’m sure she saw this as payback for a nasty post I had written within a day or two of the part of my breakdown where I was taken to hospital via ambulance having overdosed on clonazepam, seroquel and a bottle of wine. I never took the post down because I wanted it left as an example of what not to do when you have a massive fallout with someone and to this day I’ve spoken to numerous people who still have no idea who I was talking about as I never did use names. It was for the most part the depressed ravings of a mind with a raw deal.

I have all the emails exchanged between us but they are on another hard drive, and to be honest I only glanced over the response which unfortunately turned out to be the one that must have said something about me leaving her alone and not contacting her again, because when I sent her back her post with the exact line where my link should have been and she still refused to deal with me and honour our agreement, I made it a point to call her a cunt. But what I did read of her response was so insensitive and again, this is charity we were dealing with here, one that having been friends she KNEW meant A LOT to me. Where I completely fucked myself was when I couldn’t leave it at that. I could hardly see straight, Adam was watching this happen, he tried to get the computer away from me, but I was out of control, how does ANYONE do that to someone when they KNOW that their life is literally falling to pieces around them, for real not just blog drama bullshit, real life shit that my family is still dealing with; we are a family, but things are different. I couldn’t get control over the fact that she took advantage of me at a time where I was at my lowest, I didn’t get to be the person that Earth Hour dealt with because my blog wasn’t what it was back in 2006. I’d found Twitter and though I’ve always had a solid supportive reader base I’ve never wanted to be a social media maven, I just want to blog, I just want to write. That is all this is for me, and that is all it ever was, somewhere I could be myself and write, even prepare for a novel. But the small amount of popularity this blog brought me was so threatening to her that she had to shut me up for good, leaving me basically not allowed to even have opinions anymore and voice them. I just wanted to support a charity that I care about, I wasn’t trying to gain anything, I wanted to help spread the word. I couldn’t believe someone could be so cruel at a time of such disaster and I just couldn’t leave it at cunt, I was so distraught I do not remember exactly what I said but it was something to the effect of “don’t fucking fuck with me, I am so fucking sick of you fucking with me” or “if you fuck with me again… “. As a friend put it, “what did she think you were going to do, walk up three blocks and bang on her buzzer?”. I don’t know what she thought, but instead of calling my husband, or emergency medical services, or even just taking a step back and thinking of anyone but herself for two seconds, she missed the chance to realize that the Vancouver police may have other more pressing matters than breaking up a chick fight that never happened.

She wanted to charge me with harassment. If this same situation had happened in 1999 when people still talked face to face, it would have gone something like this:

me: so fuck you bitch you didn’t give me credit for that paper and you promised cunt face

her: don’t talk to me like that

me: i’ll talk to you however the fuck i want to talk to you, you fucked me over, did i mention yer a CUNT?

her: i’m leaving now you are scaring me

me: well then stop fucking me over

(no cops)

Cops didn’t arrest me, she just apparently didn’t exist after that.
I wasn’t charged with anything, but the officer’s suggestion to basically clam up was the real goal of her legal threat.
But see after she did this she continued to follow me on Twitter under other accounts she ran and for a while I let her, seeing if she’d come to her senses and we could talk like civilized people. I knew from the get go that she hadn’t unfollowed Adam, and still had him listed as a friend on Flickr, meaning he could see all of her photos, even ones blocked for friends and family only. I had taken her and her husband off my Flickr immediately. A few months went by and I realized that not only was she still following me on Twitter under a different account, my photos were appearing regularly on her husband’s Flickr homepage, and she still had my husband listed as a friend.

I messaged the mr, this problem was between the girls, and told him that what they were doing was malicious. Keeping me at bay while still accessing my life was having it both ways, I felt totally played but I cut contact as suggested all the while knowing that was what she wanted all along. I offered to drop the whole thing, and again, offered to act human. We both got dropped as requested, and they were out of our lives.

But you try living online and avoiding people.

This morning I woke up to find myself blocked from a contest that last year I won runner up in. If you read the comments on my Best of 604 post, the post by the blogger who finished behind me, and the comments made by the organizer herself, in most circles I am considered the winner. This in no way means that I can’t be nominated, but honestly I don’t feel I deserve to win, I didn’t blog for three months of last year, mostly due to this mind you, it was one of the most violating and cruelest things someone who actually knew me had ever done to me. But the fact remains I’m blocked. She is going to be interviewing past winners and well, I’d be one of those, the category I was in had the most blogs nominated and most votes cast and I didn’t even do one post on it, until after. I have never openly campaigned for anything I’ve been nominated for in my life.

If somebody nominates me this year, all I want is some maturity instead of the smoke show and tear gas. If we ladies can’t get along, how can we expect peace in the Middle East? We both got hurt, but it was a speedbump miles and miles ago, a dime on the horizon. It never should have come to this. And I am sickened by us both.