Just got back from an exciting/tiring Mexico vacation with the family. I'm sure there will be upcoming posts about it, but for now I'm recovering. Thanks for the continued reading, and I'll have something new up soon. :-)

j

Me vs My Gender-Neutral Name

Short hair, still a girl.

My name is Jamie. I’m a girl. I know that in the past I’ve had short hair, but that’s ok, I’m still a girl. I only say this explicitly because you would not believe the number of times this has seriously confounded people who meet me for the first time.

When I screw up a gender-neutral name and wrongly assume male or female, I find the best tact to take is something along the lines of “Oh sorry”. Frankly, it’s probably happened to them before.  Disappointingly what I have frequently gotten is “Oh, you’re a girl? But that’s a boy’s name”.  Gosh, thanks. I’ll let my parents know they did it wrong. Good thing you were here to point that out!

To me this is a special kind of ass hattery. In a world where names like Sealice exist (and yes, this can be read as either Sea-lice, or as Viagra’s less popular erectile dysfunction pill competition, Cialis), I think that a girl named Jamie is hardly something to be that concerned about.

I also recognize that some people think I spell my name the “boy” way. As I’m in fact a girl, I would argue it’s also the “girl” way. To be fair I don’t add a lot of extra vowels (Jaimie or Jayme, which ironically get red squiggly lines on my spell check), but I rarely have people stare quizzically at the name while wondering how to pronounce it (For example La-a, also known as Ladasha….yes, really).

Because people often just assume Jamie is a man, my gender-neutral name offers a unique perspective on the quiet gender discrimination that Jennifers and Stephanies are unlikely to even realize is happening.

The first really blatant time this happened I was as a teenager applying for my first job. As if it isn’t already a miserably hard task getting a job with no job experience, enter gender discrimination.

I applied to be a delivery driver with a pizza company. I got a call from a woman asking to talk to Jamie. I said that was me and her response was “Jamie? I thought Jamie was a man. We don’t hire females to be drivers”. I was speechless. And as if that wasn’t enough, she tried to placate me by telling me it was for my own safety.  Thanks. I’m glad that some faceless harpy on the other end of the phone has nothing but my best interests at heart. I’m sure it has nothing to do with liability at all.

Ten minutes later she called back, asked for Jamie AGAIN, and then said “Oh right, you’re a girl. Never mind” and hung up. Just wow.

I really think that so transparently and unapologetically using gender discrimination in your hiring practices is shameful. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s not supposed to happen. I get that if I applied to be a male model, I would be turned down for lack of penis, but that should be about the only one. I’m pretty sure I can drive a pizza around. Is it the safest job, maybe not, but I applied for it and should have at least been given a chance. Hell, find me unqualified due to my terrible disposition, but not because I have a vagina.

Frighteningly this wasn’t an isolated incident. A few years later I was looking into becoming a helicopter pilot and attended an information session at one of the local schools. I took my husband with me, and when we walked in the instructor looked at him, shook his hand, and said “You must be Jamie”. I looked at him and politely informed him that no, in fact I was Jamie, and was here for the info session. Without missing a beat he looked me up and down and said “Oh, I guess we’ll have to discuss female issues now”

….Like what issues exactly? How my period will cause the plane to fall spontaneously out of the sky? How my breasts will get stuck in the steering mechanism causing erratic flight patterns? (I have nowhere near enough boob for that, btw) Or maybe they worry about how my femininity will cause all the men in the logging camps to refuse to fly with me (to which I say tough shit, get in or walk up the mountain).

He told me flat out that I would have problems getting hired because logging camps didn’t want to put in the effort to accommodate women. They wouldn’t tell me that, but that’s what would happen. Well, there went my confidence out the fucking window.

Despite all the ridiculousness that I have to put up with given my name, I’ve come to really enjoy it. There are definitely some perks.

My favourite is the ability to make all telemarketers feel incompetent. Depending on how my day is going, when they ask for a Mr. Jamie, answers will range from no one here by that name to breaking into a tirade about how they shouldn’t make assumptions based solely on names. What if I was a boy named Sue?!?

It also made middle school a bit more entertaining. For most of my grade 8 year, my mother would get almost weekly phone calls notifying her that I wasn’t in school. This would cause my mother to panic because she had dropped me off in the morning, and the school would then be scrambling to find me.

I was always in school. Every. Single. Time.

One day the secretary called (again) to tell my mother (again) that I wasn’t in school. The difference was that she said “Your son Jamie isn’t in school”. My mom asked (somewhat confused) if they were aware that she didn’t have a son, and that Jamie was her daughter. It appeared that no, they did not know that, and that for most of a year they had been looking for a non-existent, but apparently highly truant, boy named Jamie. HE was never in school.

To really bring the whole gender-neutral name issue home, I managed to marry a man with an uncommon and gender-interchangeable name. This makes calls to utility companies very easy as we can both pretend to be each other without difficulty. Yeah, sure, he’s Jamie this time.  

Finally to keep the tradition going, we accidentally did this to our kids as well. I personally don’t find Avery a traditionally boy name, but apparently it is. I’m sure she’ll survive. It’s her name now. And Gabriel….well, I would personally spell it Gabrielle if it was a girl, but that hasn’t stopped innumerable nurses from being surprised that I had a baby boy.

Basically I think that it doesn’t matter. Name your kids something you like, try not to be too evil about it, and I’m living proof that we’ll sort it out for ourselves eventually.

Me vs The Shopping Mall

Since moving out of the big city, I’ve found very few occasions to visit a mall. This is good in that I’m slowly divesting myself of shit I don’t need. However in those instances where I do legitimately need something, I am finding the mall a daunting, foreign place full of fanatical bargain hunters and teens dressed clothing made for dolls.

In a world where I am able to get pretty much everything I need (and don’t need) online, I very rarely find it necessary to go to a shopping centre. When it becomes unavoidable, I’m usually with two small children who like shopping even less than I do, and who make a point of letting me know that as loudly and as frequently as possible.

Just recently I was liberated from the screaming necktie I call my toddler and his diva sister counterpart who wants EVERYTHING she sees, and was offered the opportunity to have a day of shopping alone.  I love my kids. I don’t love shopping with my kids.

Prior to embarking on this adventure I was excited. It had been a long time since I’d had a day to myself to get things done without the whining that usually accompanies my 5 yr old on errands. I spent the weeks leading up to it planning my shopping list so as not to forget anything, and I was ready. I was so ready.

Until I got to the mall.

Now I haven’t lived outside of the big city for that long, but getting hit in the face with the shameless commercialism of a giant mall is overwhelming if you haven’t dealt with it in months.  If I hadn’t had a list, I would have walked around in a daze of neon pants and ugly hats for an eternity. It’s like some kind of fairy kingdom where you lose time and come out years later.

Before I found my way out again, I made a number of observations that I presume I had ignored or repressed during my days of having a mall only a stone’s throw away from where I lived.

Firstly, teenagers (and I’m sure there are exceptions) are blind. I have to assume that they get up in the morning, stumble unwittingly into their younger sibling’s closet, and accidentally put on their clothing, as everything is size tiny and hideously patterned.

One girl came out of the dressing room in what was possibly the shortest dress I’ve ever seen. It might have been a top. It should have been a top. I desperately wanted to go up to her and say “Excuse me, but your vagina is showing”.  

Now I like short skirts. I’m not 109 years old and getting my sensibilities offended, and I’m not saying that we need to get out the ruler and measure fabric distance from the ankle before leaving the house. That said I think most of us would agree that if your clitoris is visible, your dress might be too short.

The next thing that really jumped out at me was how terrible the clothing actually was. The fabric was some combination of cheap, scratchy, and stiff, the neon patterns induced seizures, and there were way too many appalling floral prints. Now I know that 1990’s fashion (and I use the term fashion ironically) has been creeping back for a while now, but seriously? As a teenager I used to get near identical clothing in Mariposa.

This takes me back to my first point about teenagers being blind. I look back at photos of myself in the actual 90’s and am horrified by what I considered wearable. Apparently the fashion sense of this age group hasn’t improved much since then.

Finally, I think customer service has really started to phone it in. I realize that disenchanted students staff most of the stores, and they are pretty much just following the script given to them, but can we all at least agree to aim for a bar that’s a little bit higher?

I walked into a store that sold nothing but flip flops. Not shoes, not a variety of sandals, JUST flip flops. The girl looked up at me and said hello, how am I, etc (This is good, greet customers, high five). I get 10 steps in and she looks at me and asks if there was something specific I was looking for?

I could only buy flip flops in this store. What kind of specificity was she looking for exactly? While this was probably just what she was supposed to say, I found it hysterically funny. I was tempted to ask if she carried flip flops just to see what her reaction was.

Suffice to say I left the mall losing 3 hours of my life I couldn’t get back. I can’t believe that there was a time in my life that “going to the mall” was an actual activity. At some point in my life, this even constituted a dating situation. So sad.

On the up side, I did manage to achieve some level of shopping success, and while it was trying, at least it was free of wailing toddlers and 5 year olds asking me why that person over there has such ugly hair. Loudly.

Next shopping trip: online.

 

Me vs Overly Realistic Dreams

Pretty much everyone dreams. I mean, don’t quote me on that. I didn’t fact check or anything, but I’m guessing it’s mostly true.

Husband rarely remembers his dreams, while I have them pretty much every night and can remember them, for the most part, in more detail than I usually care to. I can’t always coherently articulate them, but I know what happened.

Sometimes this is good….I learned to fly and some hot famous guy was offering me ice cream and other euphemisms for sex, and other times it isn’t…..I’m trapped in a small cabin in the woods surrounded by bears my only means of escape is through a maze full of dinosaurs. True story.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be more often the case. 

As far as I’m concerned, I have more than my fair share of nightmares that wake me up in a panic, end in a murder, involve alien takeovers of the world, or have me discovering severed heads in a fridge in the basement of a haunted house where I’m being chased by all manner of unpleasantness. I usually don’t sleep well.

There have even been a few dreams that would have made amazing story lines for a book or movie….now if I only had the patience to write more than a few hundred words at a time. And dialogue. I suck at dialogue.

All this said, the real pain in the ass dreams are the ones where you’re not really sure if you’re awake or not. Where you can’t be 100% sure if you are driving a rally car or if what you’re driving is actually your unimpressed cat, who is being used as a makeshift steering wheel. It’s the dreams where you are just asleep enough to be nonsensical, but still be fully committed to whatever it is you’re doing.

To date, I don’t think I have ventured so far down this path as to enter the hazy world of sleepwalking, but regrettably, this doesn’t mean that my own sleep difficulties haven’t impacted Husband to some degree.  And while driving the cat was the first recorded incident of my acting out while being only sort of awake, it was by no means the most dramatic, although I imagine that cat would have disagreed with me.

There have been a number of nights where I’ve woken up and been convinced something has happened that hasn’t. For example Husband  did not actually take up smoking or move in with a gay dance instructor, so it probably wasn’t necessary to yell at him first thing in the morning. I see that now.

And then there was the night a few years ago when I woke up, started screaming at the top of my lungs (I’m sure the landlord living upstairs LOVED that), threw all the blankets off the bed and sat on my pillow shrieking incoherently.

Husband, who at the time was sleeping like a normal person, jumped out of bed looking thoroughly confused and tried to get me to use real words to describe what had happened. All I could manage at the time was to screech and point at the jumbled pile of our blankets at on the floor at the end of the bed.

Being the remarkable (and extremely tolerant) man that he is, he began shifting through the mess of sheets looking for….what? Finally he looked at me (I was still curled up on my pillow stammering and pointing like a fool) and said “I can’t find the spider. It’s probably gone now anyway”

Small cat, big spiders

Back story…..our basement suite where we lived at that time had HUGE fucking spiders. Big like small cats. I put one through the washing machine once and was a bit concerned that it wouldn’t die. It did, but that’s beside the point.

I stopped dead and looked at him like he was the crazy one in this situation. “Spiders? No. There were snakes coming up the bed. I threw the blankets off so they wouldn’t get us.”

Yeah. Snakes. A fuck ton of them.

The weird part for me is that and as soon as I said it out loud to him, I knew it was insane, but at the time it was incredibly real. It’s like my brain had temporarily forgotten the part where I woke up. My brain is an asshole.

The next time this happened I was ready for it. There I was lying in bed and one of those big ass spiders came crawling out from under my pillow and went right under Husband’s.

I think the rational response to this would have been to scream at the top of my lungs again, wake Husband, and let him deal with it….I will take care of normal spiders, but these things were more like 8 legged tanks on methamphetamines, and no thank you.

But no. I’d been here before, and there was at least a 50% chance that I was imagining this, and the hulk-spider wasn’t real. But could I take that chance? 

Maybe. It was going AWAY from me after all. And who knows, maybe it wasn’t real. Or it was and it was plotting to eat me and my cat. You can't just go to sleep after that…what if it comes back. But I didn't want to wake Husband for no reason….

And on and on this internal struggle went.

Finally I arrived at what I determined was a perfectly sound and logical solution. 

I got out of bed, got a pair of socks, and shoved them under his pillow.

I have no idea what I thought this would accomplish. I’m guessing my sleep-addled brain determined that I would take away the spider’s little spider highway, and it wouldn’t come back. The socks would stop it. It never once occurred to me that a single pair of socks shoved under a pillow was in no way a foolproof spider trap, especially when it only blocked one direction, but fuck it, I went back to sleep.

The next morning Husband was rather confused as to why there was a pair of socks under his pillow. My explanation did nothing to alleviate that confusion, and there was no spider to confirm my sighting. To this day I truly don’t know if I dreamed it or if the spider was there and simply outwitted my one way sock trap.  Creepy.

Happily to date there have been no more of the uber-realistic dreams where you are fully convinced that there is a flesh-eating wombat crawling towards you dripping in unicorn tears, and the only reasonable response is to yell at it in broken Japanese. I still have incredibly weird and scary dreams, but at least I wake up….and know I’m awake.

Me vs Online Self-Diagnosing

I tend to be a bit of a hypochondriac. I get the flu, and I’m probably dying of consumption. So I’m not coughing blood yet, but I’m convinced it’s coming. I get a cramp, well that probably means a hernia and will likely result in a trip to the doctor (which is surprisingly difficult to do in a small town) and a terribly painful procedure to fix it, and then I’ll probably get an infection which will eventually lead to my untimely death. Or it’s cancer. Or I didn’t drink enough water today. 

Whatever.

Suffice to say, it’s possible that I jump - just a teensy bit - to the worst possible conclusions about my family’s health. Unfortunately this doesn’t stop me from eating terribly, getting too little sleep, and 

getting less exercise that I should, but nobody’s perfect. Don’t judge me.

The difficulty that I’ve faced in the past is that while I become ridiculously paranoid about non-existent ailments (no, you’re right, I probably don’t have leprosy), I don’t relish going to the doctor on a regular basis. I don’t want to be THAT person. And while I know it’s unlikely that I have encephalitis, some part of me just wants a more qualified person to tell me that.

~Enter the enchanting world of online self-diagnosis websites~

At first glance, these seem like a great idea. You have a concern? Look it up and the sites will tell you if it’s benign or something that you should probably see a professional about. Great!

The reality: Oh, you have a stomach ache? It could be overeating, constipation, gas, or you might have STOMACH CANCER. You have a headache? Might be stress, you need to get more sleep, but it’s more likely a BRAIN TUMOR!!!!

Stub your fucking toe? Yeah, you have toe cancer now.

It’s pretty much reached the point where Husband has vetoed my use of these websites if I’m ever, you know, curious about a lingering cough or what a possible case of the plague might look like. This prohibition includes my health, my kids, and the pets.

Did you know that a change in your cat's appetite can mean they’re dying of kidney failure? You do now. Or they're full. But it's probably kidney failure.

The tipping point came when I totally convinced myself that our baby had cystic fibrosis.  Why? Because he wasn’t gaining weight and I made the critical error of looking that up online.

Failure to thrive is an actual problem, and he actually did have that. He didn’t gain any weight to speak of for the better part of 2 months, and his hands turned a creepy colour blue at random intervals. This was legitimately concerning. That said, there are a multitude of non-CF-related reasons why this could have been happening.

If you start at the beginning of the list of causes for lack of weight gain in infants, what you get is that your baby may be tired and is falling asleep before he gets enough milk(http://www.babycenter.com). 

This is perfectly reasonable and completely straightforward. 

This same list follows with reasons like incorrect formula preparation (I may be paranoid, but I can read), a cleft palette (pretty obviously wasn’t the problem), and not enough milk production on the mother’s part (yeah, that’s never been my issue).

Nearer the bottom of the list is where they keep the stuff of nightmares….cerebral palsy, lung problems, heart defects, and good ol’ cystic fibrosis.

I have no idea why I decided he had cystic fibrosis (perhaps it was that the cleft palate and illiteracy reasons were obviously not applicable). He was otherwise healthy and thriving in every way…just really, really small for his age.

Now to be fair to my fixation, we did get him tested for a number of health issues, as a child that doesn’t gain weight is having some sort of problem. The paediatrician, however, did look at me like I was touched in the head when I mentioned my fear of cystic fibrosis.  

This was....messy

In the end it turned out that he just wasn’t eating as much as he needed to. We figured this out by increasing his caloric intake and literally feeding him butter. Yes, our doctor recommended butter. Once we started him on more solids and he decided that was better than breastfeeding, he put on the pounds. Well, ounces.

Basically, the online pseudo-doctor is now totally off limits for me. If I am really desperate, I can apply to Husband to do the online research for me and weed out the parts that are totally insane and completely unrelated to what is actually the problem. He provides a rational set of eyes, as compared to my worst case scenario goggles. It means I’m less panicked, and he doesn’t have to talk me down off the proverbial ledge. He alone likely saves our health care system thousands of dollars in unnecessary doctor visits.

So to summarize, I am no longer allowed to use the internet to look up anything that could be in any way related to the health of any member of my family, human or otherwise, because if you read far enough down the page, everything is cancer.

My guess is that if I had a fish I wasn’t particularly attached to, Husband may make an exception to this rule, but that hasn’t happened yet. Probably for the best.