Don't know what you got till it's gone

Yesterday someone pointed out to me that small local newspapers, like the one for which I work, have a precarious foothold on existence in the world of Facebook where local news travels like wildfire. Social media's entrance into the 'news' business has impacted every news gathering agency from small town newspapers like mine to the big boys at the New York Times. We in the business know this and have been trying to counter the social media affect by getting in on the action ourselves (I tweet at GysboroJournal...rarely). I am not sure if this is the correct approach. Perhaps what we should really be doing is trying to educate the public as to what the difference is between Facebook posts, tweets and citizen journalist.

What is the difference? It should be fact checking, a non-biased point of view and a critical look and presentation of both sides of any story. Unfortunately, much of the major news media groups seem to have forgotten that this is what sets them apart from the rumor mill that is social media.

Two weeks ago the federal government of Canada implemented changes to the Employment Insurance (EI) program affecting workers nation-wide. The changes were outlined last spring but when they were enacted two weeks ago the reaction was swift and negative. Within days I saw the following message on the newsfeed of several friends:

With the new EI changes in effect, you are supposed to call at least 1 place per day looking for work. I suggest that you call your MP's office every day and ask if they have a job for you and ask them to write down your information and keep it on file that you were looking for work in their office. The new rules state...s that a business must keep track of everyone who calls or comes into the their business looking for work so the EI police can call to check if you are seeking employment. I'm sure the businesses will enjoy having to take down 500 peoples information a day and keep it on file for maybe a year or so. I suggest that you then call your local PC MLA and ask them if they have a job for you and to keep track of you calling seeking employment. COPY AND PASTE SO OTHERS CAN SHARE IT AS WELL!!! This should go over like a bag of hammers...

I posted this response:

Do you know anyone who has actually been asked to do anything different under the new EI rules? I don't. I am on EI and have not been notified of any additional hoops that I am required to jump through. I am afraid that there is a lot of misinformation out there about what is now required of EI claimants.

No one posted a response claiming to have first hand knowledge of anyone actually being required to make calls, or having received notification that this would be a requirement in the future. Since the EI changes have come into effect I have filed another EI report, received my usual cheque and have not been notified of any changes necessary to keep my claim active. I have spoken to two other EI claimants in the area and they too have received no such notifications.

This stands as the prime reason that real news media, real journalism is still necessary in this world of social media saturation. Misinformation. Social media has a tendency to fuel hysteria; it's left to the real media to set the record straight. But will anyone be listening? How many false news stories have to make the rounds before people will realize that Facebook and twitter don't amount to the modern day equivalent of news but are actually the modern day version of back fence gossip. Declining readership indicates that the people won't wake up to the misinformation they've been consuming at least not yet. Will they wake up in time to save real news? I doubt it. I'll just keep humming this song and see if anybody hears it.

Don't it always seem to go

That you don't know what you've got

Till it's gone

They paved paradise

And put up a parking lot

(thanks Joni)

You're so vain

…. you probably think this post is about you.

Well it is about you, in a way. It's about whether or not you; my friends, family and acquaintances, are reading what I write.

In truth this is about my vanity and my need to check my post statistics feverishly after I upload a new blog entry.

It's about instant gratification and stroking my artistic ego. It's about popularity and presence. It's about thinking I have something important to say.

It's about always wanting to reference that great Carly Simon song in my everyday life.

Cheers and thanks for bringing my stats up. 

What I am missing

Today as I proof the paper I read an 'In Memory' ad from a wife about her deceased husband. I remember this woman coming in to the office for the past two years to place similar ads in the paper on the anniversary date of her husbands' death. She's not a woman you would take note of if you were walking down the street: she's a senior lady, who, if anything comes across as a bit androgynous. But in her resided a great love and now a great memory of the love she and her husband shared. When I think of her, I think of what I am missing.

I have had thoughts of what my life as a single woman would mean emotionally those two previous years when her 'In Memory' ad came across my desk but this year, those thoughts are tinged with a new potency due to a recent break up I had with a short-term boyfriend. While this relationship was not long, only a few months, it did open my eyes to a life that I had pretty much assumed was not part of my path; a life with a companion.

For a long time I have made my peace with the idea that I would be a single person, then as life happened, that I would be a single person with children.

Being single is what seems simplest to me. I haven't had to accept all those little things that inevitably drive me crazy, or make time for another person other then my children. I have not had to deal with complications, awkwardness, deceptions and other things that often accompany a 'relationship'. I have been able to focus on my little family.

But sometimes I feel I need a break from my little family and that is when new men typically come into my life. For the past five years any relationship I have had has always been one that was outside of my regular life. The men I have dated have not become part of the fabric of my day-to-day life. When I was with them it was like I was a tourist on holiday. And as they say, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

That being said, this latest and shortest relationship, was something different. First of all, he didn't annoy me. And that is a big step forward for me. In any man I have ever been involved with there have been minor things that they did that drove me to distraction; things as simple as how they would pronounce a word with an elongated vowel to as crushing as dirty socks on my side of the bed (you can see now why I have never been married). This man let his dog eat off the dishes—I didn't care. He used double negatives—I didn't care. And most importantly, he didn't read my work-- and I didn't care.

So I felt like I had made progress, had gotten past some of my 'issues'. Unfortunately, maybe he had not gotten past some of his.

Today as I read the 'In Memory' ad from a loving wife I felt a little sad that I wouldn't have this man to tell the days tales to, wouldn't call him this evening to talk about his trip to the city, and wouldn't have a day when I would be missing the love I lost.

The good news is I wrote this.

On the wrong side of Remembrance

Today when the girls were putting on their poppies to go to the Remembrance Day service Suki asked why we had to wear poppies. Hannah told her it was because soldiers fought for Canada. This is the simplistic view of what the poppy can and should stand for; a view that as she grows older she may find difficult to reconcile with her Japanese heritage.

 I explained that the poppy was for soldiers on all sides of the war. The soldiers who Canadians fought against were no more evil then our own soldiers; they didn't want to kill people, they didn't want to die. I told her that Japan was in the war—this is something that, in this country, we don't talk much about—the war in the Pacific. I told her that the war was started by rulers not by soldiers and that soldiers had to follow the instructions of the rulers or would be killed by their own people.

She wanted to know why the rulers wanted to go to war. I showed her a world map and described the wide spheres of influence both Germany and Japan had in the early 1940s and explained to her that they wanted all the land they could get and so sent their soldiers to invade other countries.

She wanted to know if Baba and Jiji (her grandparents in Japan) were in the war. They weren't but their fathers were as far as I know. Many Japanese don't talk much about the war but I did have some conversations with my in-laws about it while I was in Japan. They were young children during the war and were evacuated to the country-side where they were reduced to eating bugs and grass due to lack of supplies. They showed me pictures of their fathers who were in military uniform. I was too polite or cowardly to ask what had happened to those stern-faced men. Men that would be forever linked to my family. Men whose crimes or bravery would never known to me.

 It's odd to feel that some part of you is the enemy. That on Remembrance Day people are remembering their victory over your people. I hope that when people are remembering the sacrifices of their soldiers they also remember soldiers are commanded by their political masters.

Keep on keeping on

Yesterday was a disappointment. After almost 1 ½ months of running every morning I started having those familiar bowel obstruction pains.

Bowel obstructions are a chronic condition I have been living with since I was born due to massive amounts of surgery to fix a birth defect. Painful obstructions are the price I pay to be alive.

But I thought, this running thing might finally keep them at bay and solve my life long problem. Being active everyday is suppose to keep things moving - but it seems it was a false hope.

Yesterday, perhaps worse then feeling sick was the loss of hope; the hope I briefly had that I might be able to beat this condition that has caused me so much pain over the years.

I got through the night without a trip to the emergency room. The kids slept in my room- probably because they know through experience that I might disappear in the night to be replaced by a relative. They wanted to keep an eye on me; know where I was.

This morning after some coffee I ran slowly for 20 minutes. I'll have a liquid diet for a few days to a week and then hopefully things will go back to normal.

It's been a little depressing to realize there is no way to fight this thing.

Sisters, are you free to choose?

“It's my choice,” I heard a young woman say recently and it made me wonder how much choice we really have in our lives as women and how much is socially dictated by gender roles. 

Often when  a woman falls in love she'll do anything for her man hence the song, Stand By Your Man. But dispite similar song lyrics for the men's perspective in, When a Man Loves a Woman, I have rarely seen men make the same degree of sacrifice that women seem to typically make in a relationship. 

As I sit here and think about past relationships, past sacrifices, I feel disheartened when I see, what I think is, someone making those same mistakes.  I want to take women shake them, yell and tell them to run towards their own dreams rather than sacrifice them for love. Often those sacrifices seem to be justified by monologues we run in our heads convincing ourselves that love is worth the sacrifice. We make the choice to make the sacrifice but often it seems to be the only choice that will allow us to maintain the relationship. 

But this is a mistake that we, as women, make all too frequently. We think we have a choice when really we know we don't. When there is a conflict between a couple as to where they should live due to employment availability- it always seems that the man wins the argument. Further down the road, when it comes to kids and whose career should take the hit that automatically comes with the pressures of child rearing, it is inevitably the women who CHOOSE to stay home with the children. It's their choice, but it is not a choice their husbands would have made, leaving women with no choice at all, just an illusion of choice that disappears like a dessert mirage the closer one approaches.

How far have we really come? There isn't equality in pay or expectations for women. Women still sacrifice their careers, dreams and the ability to make the best choices for themselves when they commit themselves to a man, to children. A wedding ring is still a slave collar hidden beneath the gold; only now it is wrapped in the false pretense of choice. 

Run

The past week and a half I have done something that I had always aspired to but had, in almost 40 years, never managed to accomplish: I started to run. About two weeks ago I stopped thinking of my treadmill as an expensive dust bunny generation unit and decided to throw caution to the wind and see what thrills awaited on the sleek black band of the running board. I'm not sure what caused this sea change; perhaps the excitement of the coming summer Olympics or perhaps a photo posted on facebook of a friend of mine completing a race under the sweltering Southeast Asian sun, whatever it was, I looked upon it on the seventh day and saw it was good.

I've always wanted to be a runner and I am not quite sure why- maybe because it just seemed like such an impossible thing to do-the more I tried the further away I was from my goal.

In my teens my main running disability was located on my chest. My cups runneth over and prevented me from running comfortably. It's only in recent years that I have found training shirts that literally bound my breasts to my chest, allowing no uncomfortable and painful wiggling and wobbling. But 20 years ago, there just didn't seem to be the sport wear technology that there is today and I was severely handicapped.

In university I tried very hard to learn to run. I knew the correct way to train and work up to a longer and longer run but I could never do it.

My second foray into university taught me a lot about running and fitness and once again I tried hard to be a runner. I was enrolled in Dalhousie's Kinesiology program and almost everyone in the program was a confirmed jock which is something I would never call myself.

I did exercise labs, learned about muscle fibre types, the best training regimes for endurance, speed, weight loss ecetera but I never managed to learn how to be a runner myself. I did learn a lot about weights and trained to be a person weight trainer but left the country before taking my final exam for certification.

In one exercise lab the professor took my stats; blood pressure, heart rate, lung capacity and he turned to look at me and said, “You must be quite an athlete.” I didn't tell him that compared to my classmates I was a couch potato. My heart rate and blood pressure have always been preternaturally low and my lung capacity I chalked up to several years of playing a wind instrument. So I continued to longingly watch runners ply the streets around the university; always a spectator never a participant.

Despite not running I was/am a pretty active person. I could walk all day and not get tired. I walk fast. The longer I walk the faster I go. I seem to just get into high gear after one hour on the road. And of course there was a time when I was queen rat at the gym, lifting weights three hours a day every day. But no matter what I bench pressed, I still wasn't a runner.

So what was different this time around? Why do I call myself a fledgling runner now? How did it happen? I will give credit to The Nature of Things.

About a month ago I watched a show entitled The Perfect Runner which explored the bio-mechanics of barefoot running. This was something I had heard of before and it really seemed to make sense. So almost two weeks ago, against all the manufacturers recommendations, I started running barefoot (actually just with socks). And it worked. All the manuals for treadmills say, “wear appropriate footwear.” For me it seems the appropriate footwear is none at all. In the past, during my many attempts at running, lacing up my shoes seemed to automatically increase my workload by 100 percent. Running barefoot makes me feel like I am running on air.

From that first day last week, I ran/jogged 15 minutes without stopping. Five days later I ran 30 minutes without stopping. I am steady at 30 minutes (I don't have time for more than that) but have increased the speed to 5mph from 4.5mph and added an incline of 2 degrees. 

Now, after all these years, I think I have finally broke my body code; bound breasts and no shoes seems to have corrected all past wrongs and allowed me to run like I never have before. To finally reach a goal that you have attempted and failed to achieve so many times is a true victory.

In addition being top heavy and shoe encumbered, part of my problem, I believe, was pacing. I am an all or nothing kind of person and when I started to run I just put in as much power as I had thus hitting my exhaustion point very quickly. In school I had been good at sprints and hurdles but nothing that required endurance. On the treadmill the pace is set and there is no jack rabbit start zapping my energy.

I am still just a treadmill runner and don't know if/when I will run in the out of doors. There I'll have to wear shoes, face road conditions, and weather but I will give it a try at some point. For right now I am happy to be a indoor runner.

In some ways I feel like I have started a new life. Running is my new addiction. I feel good.