1. No drama. I’m not sure why some people in this world feel the need to stir things up and play games in non-game settings when all I want to do is go about my business and be left alone. I’m being purposefully vague here, but it’s general enough: I have no energy for people who suck away at my soul like that. The problem with drama is that it’s catching and hard to eradicate once it’s been introduced, and I have only so much soul left.
2. Sleep. For various reasons I’ve been up a few times most nights in the last few weeks due to my blackberry going off about some database-er-other, and sometimes wasn’t able to get back to sleep for hours, and if you thought I was moody in the mornings before, stand back.
3. To remember what vacation is like. Note I’m not asking for a vacation, that would be silly. I just wish it were something I’d done more recently than 2006 so that when my friends go off on trips to Spain or New Orleans or whatever, the first thing that pops into my mind isn’t curiosity over what it feels like to be a normal person who takes time off work and goes places.
4. A nerdy tattoo. I can’t think of what; the symbol for a database is essentially a tin can and I am not permanently drawing a tin can on my ass (or wherever I’d put it, probably not my ass). Also you never know, I may give up database work someday if I ever learn about vacations.
5. Laser eye surgery. I want a nerdy tattoo in some place you wouldn’t see unless I showed you, but I don’t want to look nerdy to everyone. Also it is rare for me to feel as stupid as I do when I’m feeling my way around my apartment trying to find my glasses which I can’t see because I don’t have my glasses on.
6. For oil to not be spilling into the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate and killing all the plants and fish and birds. I have to not think about that because when I do I start to cry. Of course, as a database admin I have to wonder at companies which don’t set up proper disaster recovery procedures. Not to mention test them out. That’s DBA 101.
7. Someone to have brunch with me in Kelowna. Nobody does brunch here. Or if they do it’s like this rare-rare occurrence that’s precipitated by some sort of event worthy of celebration. As opposed to Vancouver where people go for brunch because it’s the weekend. I miss that so hard.
8. To be locked in a room full of kittens. Bonus points if I’m able to rub catnip all over myself first.
9. Sleep. Oh right I already put that in.
10. My favourite song. There’s always a next one, but I never know what it’s going to be. This one was close, but not quite:

11. For people to not feel I’m someone they have to “figure out”. It’s a special kind of discomfort to be so weird to the people around you, and I’m weird for Kelowna. It’s too bad, because I refuse to change.
12. World peace. Would we even recognize it if it bit us in the ass, I wonder.
13. To feel appreciated. When the default is being taken for granted, and your personal misfortunes are considered jokes to people, and because you don’t complain it’s assumed it’s okay to treat you in such a way. It’s time to start complaining.

This test was about “Communication Styles”, with the four possible styles being Analytical, Driver, Amiable and Expressive. Or, as I see it, Spock, Kirk, Uhura and Scotty, but you can read up the style descriptions here if you hate Star Trek and don’t mind character encoding errors on your web pages.

Because I’m the fucking sweetest nicest piece of ass this side of the Thompson, I’m Amiable. It sounds like such a cop-out category, as if this were a beauty contest and the best that could be said of me is that I have a good personality. If my most important characteristic is that I’m nice, I’m leaving.

People who have an Amiable style are [...] more likely to express emotion. Amiables are very loyal and tend to be excellent team players.

Fine, I’m emotional. I blame it on the ovaries and because life is crap sometimes. And I’m a team player because once in a while they give me rides home from work.

People and relationships are what are most important to an Amiable. [...] They tend to be very warm people.

Wha? I live alone with a cat. What’s most important to me is avoiding people and relationships, but I don’t think that’s what they meant. Plus this sort of reads like a horoscope, what with all the relationship talk. Your lucky numbers are…

In any case, it’s bollocks. It’s too extreme. I did a bunch of these personality tests back in high school, but longer ones, and the results tended to put me right on the border between sensitive and practical, because I am both of those. I have a music degree and a computer science degree, and I got the same grades in both of them (though it could also mean the grading system was rigged). That doesn’t mean everything but it doesn’t exclude anything either. And in this test I would’ve thought I’d be as likely to be written up as Analytical instead:

People who have an Analytical style are very thorough and detail oriented. They don’t mind working alone and will often go above and beyond for the task at hand. [... But] their focus on perfection can mean that those around them perceive Analyticals as not being as fast with their work.

That’s me to a T. That’s me most of the time on the job, doing extra work, focusing on the details, wasting time by failing at perfectionism. Not giving people hugs and reacharounds like your mom. But nooooooooo I can’t be Analytical because I answered that I leaned in when I talked to people. Even though it could just mean I’m deaf.

The reason that all this bugs me is that I’ve had to deal with people in my life who have questioned my career choices and used such test results as proof that I’m in the wrong job (thankfully not this time, but it’s grating). As if I’m somehow going against what’s natural in my daily life, and progressing in a career despite my temperament, not because of it. And let’s not get started on the hauntings of affirmative action.

It’s otherwise not that bad being a chick doing a guy’s work, because people in IT are generally nice and not likely to judge you on your lack of penis so long as you’re still able to operate a computer without one. But people outside of IT, well-meaning family members, conservative types, men who feel threatened by my ability to operate a computer without their penis, they think I’m supposed to find some nice 40-hour-a-week stress-free job because women aren’t supposed to work like this. Some of them think that would make me happier, but maybe I don’t want to be that happy. Or that sort of happy.

Of course I’m blowing this out of proportion (because I’m so emotional) as this test was about learning to communicate with others based on personality traits, and not about career path at all. But I don’t need to tally-up questionnaire answers to know I enjoy whining and complaining, so here came this rant. All I’m really trying to say is that I’m glad I didn’t listen to those people who wanted me to embrace my sensitive side and pick a typically feminine lifestyle over this one; and I hope others don’t put so much weight on these tests in deciding their lives. We are the sum of our choices as much as our character, and just like in elementary school, I’d rather go play with the boys.

And I’m shaped weird, with thighs bigger than my hips. Honestly, it doesn’t look that bad, and no guy has ever commented on my thighs being large or anything, so I’m still coming out ahead. I have the hip measurement of a supermodel, but otherwise the body of a person who eats regularly. If I was okay wearing skirts all the time, it wouldn’t matter, but t-shirt plus jeans is my life uniform.

I don’t know if my thighs have gotten bigger (a possibility; I haven’t been keeping track) or if it’s the fashion industry, but I have a hell of a time finding jeans that fit both my hips and my thighs. “Too tight” is the norm. If I can pull them up, there’s tons of room in the waist to let the rainwater in. If I find ones that fit my hips, I can’t get them up without acrobatic skills and a shoehorn.

The other day when I was doing laundry, I saw holes in the back of a pair of jeans, on the corners of the pockets. I didn’t realize it until now, but I wear jeans until they fall apart, and they always fall apart in the embarrassing areas, as I’ve mentioned before. I probably haven’t shopped for jeans in two years, but now was obviously the time, since it’s best to retire this pair before they give my workmates a show.

So I went around the mall. Kelowna has a pretty big mall, with most of the stores you’d find in the malls in Vancouver, so I was pretty confident I’d find something. I avoided all the juniors stores since young women have twigs for legs and skinny jeans are the status quo, but it still left a lot, and I went into all the stores I could find. And nothing. No luck, everything’s too tight, I’m losing feeling in my toes…

I ended up finding mom jeans at Reitman’s. Ugh. That was the only place in the entire mall that had wide-leg jeans, but of course the waist is up at my belly-button. But that’s not all I found: I tried on a bunch of other styles at that store, and got the shock of my shopping life when I tried on a pair of their “comfort jeans”: there’s no fly. No fly!!! They pull up like sweatpants, except they’re not, they’re jeans. It’s freaky. Please, God, please, let me never be forced to wear jeans like that; I need easy access to my genitals. You never know when I might need them, and can’t afford the extra milliseconds of yanking the pants down against the pull of the elastic waistband.

I’m not really sure why those jeans scared me so much, but when I put them on I felt like I was disowning my privates. There’s no door to the unknown, it’s just a wall. Nothing here, it suggests. Nothing you’d find interesting. It’d be like giving up. Besides, they were too tight.

I ended up finding some non-mom jeans that fit at Plum today, strangely enough, thanks to a sales clerk who was wayyyyy too loud and cheerful and blasting Abba in the store’s PA. But I was so happy, because I’d been feeling like the clothing manufacturers had all decided that I no longer qualify as a jeans wearer. I can’t wait until wide-leg or loose jeans come back into fashion, but it could be a while. Hopefully before I develop crotch holes in these ones.

Strangely I am okay with this; the truth is, in my line of work (sole DBA in a big organization) there’s no point being on break when some of the databases have the same idea as you; it is better to go away at a time when it’s unlikely you’ll be called on your vacation, and when it’s as unlikely you’re going to have a massive mess to clean up (more than usual, anyways) due to your being away a week. There’s never a perfect time to go, but this weekend turned out to be the worst possible time EVAH. Except maybe for last weekend. No, this weekend for sure.

I realize this won’t make sense to many of you, and some will think I’m a crazy workaholic who’s gonna die of a heart attack at 40 (that still gives me just under 8 years!). And that I don’t know how to say no, and I don’t know how to have fun, and whatever else. And that’s fine, because you don’t get me. I chose to stay, nobody made me. And I’m okay with that, because there will be a better time to party in the near future, and in the meantime I like my work.

Of course, the last-minute decision to cancel the vacation led some relatives of mine to worry that oh noes, Gillian must be depressed. Because depression makes you cancel a vacation to Hawaii that you already paid for, the night before (I’m sure it’s possible, but I don’t think I’ve ever been that depressed). I would like to remind them that just because I have a history of depression, it doesn’t mean that I’m on the brink of suicide whenever life throws me a curve ball. And that even though they don’t see me very much, it doesn’t mean that I spend my entire time away from them in despair. Maybe I’ve had a stressful few weeks, and maybe it’s been hard, but stress is not depression for fuck’s sake, it’s stress. And the cuts on my wrist are from my cat not wanting to go to the vet today.

I’ll be taking a break for sure, just a smaller one, probably in a month. Maybe just to Vancouver, where my peeps are at, because in the end I really wanted to see my peeps more than anything.

It’s a bit rude, #305, to have an orgy and not invite me, the person who’s been forced to listen in due to the rice-paper walls of this building. Granted I have ten years of experience on you and my good looks might be intimidating, but if you watch closely you might learn something.

Also, unlike you, I don’t have to fake it.

So Friday night was interesting. Now I know that the girl next door likes to be spanked. She had people coming in and out (*cough*) of her apartment for several hours, and according to my unintentional observations the evening went something like this:

10 TURN ON STEREO REALLY LOUD
20 TURN OFF STEREO
30 HAVE GROUP SEX
40 GOTO 10

Interestingly had it not been for instructions 10 and 20 I might’ve fallen asleep and never heard any of her un-Christianlike conduct, but because of the stereo I was up, and I discovered while brushing my teeth that my bathroom acts as an amplifier of the sounds next door. This is award-winning architecture, let me tell you, because there’s nothing I want more than to be serenaded by “YES YES OH OH OH… YES!” while on the can.

I was pretty pissed off about all of this at first but as I was moving my bed around yesterday I remembered myself 10 years ago when I got my first apartment, and realized that, well, I had a lot of fun too. Though not with so many people at once since I’m just not that organized. So I can’t really judge, though maybe I’m half impressed and half wondering if she’s recently turned to prostitution (that’s not judgment, that’s imagination).

I need to write her a note anyways asking that she move her stereo to a different wall and to not operate loud appliances in the middle of the night (she’s generally pretty good, but on average she probably bothers me one night a week) and I’m wondering if I should hint at the fact that I was made aware of her extracurricular activities on Friday. Would it help if I gave her a verbal high-five, and then suggested that her bedroom is a perfectly good location for that sort of thing?

There was a weird clerical error at work where they forgot to sign me up for health benefits. “Professionals” get health coverage from day 1, the rest after 3 months, but somehow my info got filed under “must be some customer support minion or something” and ignored*. When I asked about my health plan delay and they discovered the mistake the HR people were apologetic and said they’d get it sorted and would backdate the coverage to my first day of work.

I started on August 4th.

They backdated it to June 7th.

I thought that was odd and I reread the documents. I then looked in my personal calendar to find out the dates for the $4K I’d dropped in dental bills last summer. Ah, yes: June 9th.

I could’ve stayed quiet. I could’ve submitted those dental bills and gotten up to $3K of that money back. But nooooooooooooooooo. I’m a good person. GAWD.

Instead, I wrote an email to HR informing them of the date discrepancy. To which they responded with a thanks for bringing the problem to their attention, and that they’d get that corrected right away.

Damn.

I’m actually quite upset about this. I’m not entirely convinced that the shame I’d feel about submitting pre-job medical expenses would be worse than the feeling of just having said no to three thousand guilt-ridden dollars. I would’ve used the money for altruistic purposes (help support the economy through purchase of electronic goods) and probably would’ve felt okay about the whole thing in the end. But now I can’t.

I’m not sure I like me as a morally upright and decent human being. Maybe it’s this stupid niceness everyone exhibits around here that’s rubbing off on me. Perhaps I’ll go out and trip some old ladies on the sidewalk, just to even it up.

*Possibly because I’m too cute to be a database administrator.

Former Friend just answered the question ‘Do you think Gillian Gunson is selfish?’ about you. Click here to see more.

First of all: Fuck you, Former Friend. If you care so much that I’m selfish to the point that you’re filling out stupid Facebook quizzes over this, perhaps you could just just tell me how you feel directly. Or, if you wanted to let me know that you didn’t find me selfish, you could’ve just saved yourself the effort. I would have just assumed that, had I put any thought into it at all, which I didn’t.

I hate these Facebook apps. They just suck. Thank God for the “Hide” button (or, in cases such as this, the “Remove From Friends” link). I don’t care how good you are at Bedazzled, or which 70s TV star you’d be if its 20 bullshit questions had any actual basis in reality. Or how much you’d pay for me to be your prize pig on your imaginary farm or something. If you know me at all, do you really see me playing along with your delusions?

Just so you know, I don’t unfriend people because of one stupid online faux pas. It usually takes about 5 and a disregarded warning for me to consider the person not worth my time. Maybe this makes me come across as a bit tight-assed over the whole thing, but I am thinking about the other person too: they deserve better than to have a supposed friend see them as a complete dick with no internet manners nor a general sense of when to STFU. Just sayin’.

That show has been criticized, over the years, for being not exactly with the times in terms of societal issues or the changing norms. Hell, it is hard to believe that most of these characters all live and work in the same block, date and marry mostly within themselves, and only ever go to one pub… But I digress, it’s TV, you have to pretend it makes sense even though it’s not the 60s anymore.

So, yeah, Corrie is definitely behind. Their first openly gay character, their first teenage pregnancy, their first (well, only) transsexual were all in the last decade. Murders, extramarital affairs, these have been around for ages, but you know, teen pregnancy is so much worse. Welcome to the 20th century, people. Okay, maybe there are a lot of conservative granny types who’ve been watching the show since it was in black and white and perhaps you have to ease them into the real world at half speed so they never have to catch up.

Fine.

One thing that’s been bugging me for a year or so now (and, those in the UK will have to realize that the CBC is close to a year behind in our Corrie episodes) is that despite the acceptance of transgendered people, gays, teen mothers, and murderers, depression and anxiety disorders are still bad and wrong. Nice priority list, writers.

There was a murder trial in the show a while back, where a woman was on trial for killing her boyfriend. We totally knew she did it, but that’s beside the point. Both her mother and her neighbour were put on the stand as character witnesses, but their testimony was rejected because

1. The mother had had a couple anxiety attacks in the last week or so, ergo she’s crazy,
2. The neighbour had had postpartum depression (which is oh so rare in this world, right?) a few months previous, ergo she’s fucking crazy.

They couldn’t get the earlier postpartum depression right, either. Rather than having the woman be, you know, depressed, they had her get psychotic and take her baby back to the hospital, trying to return it for a refund (or, for exchange, I can’t remember). I know that’s more interesting to watch than having a woman lying about the house, but I think it’s incredibly insulting to the viewers to portray PPD this way, without any sympathy for the character, and with less sensitivity than they gave to, say, the gay characters. Like it’s wrong to be prejudiced against gays, transsexuals, and people of other races, but those with mental disorders are fair game? The long-gone PPD keeps getting mentioned, too, like the character’s always going to be chronically weird in the head because of that one episode.

Oh, and out of nowhere Dierdre had her first ever panic attack, being in her 50s and all (I was hoping it was a heart attack, but alas). She thinks she’s going to die and she’s taken to the hospital and is told it’s this thing called “anxiety disorder” (or a similar term). And when she’s back at home she reads aloud from the pamphlet she was given on the topic, because nobody has ever heard of anxiety before, so please enlighten us oh annoying TV show character. And then she goes around for a while afraid to do anything in case she has another panic attack, and is deemed nutso by various other characters. Ugh.

And even more: a long while back I remember this other mother asked her kids to go to family counseling with her to help them all get over the fact their stepfather tried to drown them all in a murder-suicide. But nooooooo we’re not going to counseling, counseling means you’re crazy, etc. etc. Yeah, ’cause having survived a murder attempt by a family member is totally the norm and nothing that one would be traumatized over.

Man, written out like this, the whole show sounds kinda stupid. If only I could stop watching!

Having dealt with depression off and on in my life, all this kinda pisses me off. I’ve been told by various people that this is how British society thinks anyways, that going to a therapist is admittance of failure and depressive disorders only happen to a few fucked up people. I hope it’s not this bleak, but I don’t know, since I’m not there.

Given the statistics, depressive episodes are so prevalent in modern society (but obviously not in England) that they might as well be considered normal and not fussed over. I have been surprised to find out that many with-it and happy-go-lucky friends and colleagues have suffered from depression multiple times in their lives; they just managed to hide it well enough so that others probably thought they had the flu or were on vacation or something. Hell, my last few episodes were so minor that people only found out when I told them, and I’m oversensitive and emotional. I’ve had much worse, but luckily not in recent years; I think I’ve gotten better at dealing with it, because I’ve sought treatment in the past.

So why is it so embarrassing? Why can’t we admit that it happens? Why can’t we accept that since it happens to so many of us, to a greater number than those who are hospitalized or on disability, that maybe it’s treatable and sufferers (prior or current) don’t deserve being stigmatized for it? Why can’t sufferers come forward and talk openly about their experiences?

And, just in my life, it annoys me that in retrospect I should never have told my previous company about my depressive episodes (which I never lost productivity for), since various management and human resources people bothered me about it. And perhaps I also shouldn’t have written it down on my more recent health insurance application form at the current job, since the insurance company insulted me with a “Nervous Problems Questionnaire” yet didn’t ask for further information about the knee and back problems also mentioned in the form. Why should I have to lie, or withhold information, if I’m not embarrassed about my mental health history? Why does society want me to feel embarrassed?

Perhaps I should just never mention my history with depression, Coronation Street or my cat, if I want to be seen as normal.

This rant has been on the backburner of my brain for a while now, but The Globe and Mail’s Breakdown series on the treatment of mental health issues in Canada reminded me of it. Go check it out. Maybe putting faces to the disorders and listening to experts will help just a little bit in getting these topics out in the open. Speaking of faces:

I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would be not one cheerful face on Earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better, it appears to me.

-Abraham Lincoln, 1841 (19 years before inauguration, quote found here)