I May Be The Only Person In The World To Get A Greeting Card Like This

Tags

awkward moment, funny greeting cards, greeting cards, miscarriage, strange cards

When I mentioned that there are no “sorry about your miscarriage” greeting cards, I forgot that I lived next to a greeting card artist.

My friend and neighbour has an Etsy site called Awkward Moment Cards, where she sells her hand-crafted and quirky greeting cards for all sorts of weird occasions. The stock changes as she gets new ideas and bored of old ones, but here are some examples from her current line up:

If you’re looking to announce that you’re gay, send someone a picture of Dr Phil wagging a disapproving finger, or a “Happy Birthday Freak” card (no comma because there is an actual freak on the card), you go to Awkward Moment Cards.

So I was delighted but not altogether surprised when I received what very well might be the world’s first Miscarriage Greeting Card:

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I Need Something More Healing Than Positivity

Tags

depression, loss, miscarriage, positivity

I’ve been avoiding Facebook lately.

Not for the reasons many people take a “break” from Facebook – privacy issues, fury at the commercialism, etc etc.

I love Facebook, privacy issues and all. 

It’s the positivity I can’t handle right now.

I find Facebook to be a relentlessly positive place.

People who I know are having relationship issues post lovey-dovey facebook statuses at each other. It’s weird when you see a couple bickering bitterly and then the next day read “So happy to wake up next to my husband! I love you honey bear!”

And other people, usually fellow depressives who are in denial, post these relentlessly, shamelessly inspirational images that make me want to smash things.

As Hyperbole and a Half points out, positivity looks really, really, fake when you’re feeling depressed.

And people keep talking about BABIES.

May has brought an explosion of babies. Oddly, one of my best friends just had a baby and I have NO problem with those pictures/updates. I love looking at pictures of her newborn, and it helps that it has mostly been just pictures, not statuses going “OMG HAVING A BABY IS SO THE AWESOME”.

But other people keep having babies too, and people are happy about them. Two of my friends have received new nieces in the last couple of days. Other statuses have enthused about even more remote babies – friend of friend babies, new puppies etc.

And I don’t want to read them.

I don’t know why I have no problem looking at my friend’s newborn babies, but can’t stand to hear about a friend’s friend’s friend’s new baby boy.

Maybe it goes back to the whole silent miscarriage thing. Social taboos keep me from Facebooking about my miscarriage, and so Facebook is a place where everyone pretends everything is all right.

Since I don’t like making fakey status updates when I’m miserable, and I’m not really supposed to Facebook about why I am miserable, I haven’t been posting.

Meanwhile, all the people who do know about my miscarriage are happily posting cheery Facebook updates and it just feels like the entire world is ignoring what just happened to me.

And it’s my fault, really, because I COULD go and Facebook about my miscarriage. I probably even SHOULD.

But that wouldn’t stop the fact that life goes on for other people, and they won’t and SHOULDN’T spend all their time gnashing their teeth and bewailing my unhappy fate.

Nor is it like I need more support.

All the people who I’m even remotely close to, physically or emotionally, already know and are here for me. Posting about my miscarriage now would just feel like needless moping/buzzkilling.

So I’m just not spending much time there, in happy positivity land. 

And I don’t mean that I’m moping – PH and I have been laughing a lot actually. We need it – it’s therapeutic. But the stuff that makes us smile is more cynical, more dark – something we are more akin to, right now.

Stuff like A Softer World, which is like instagram for depressives.

Some of it makes me smile:

And some of it actually does inspire me much more than the oppressively cheerful stuff does:

I have also restarted my antidepressants, which is helping.

When I take them I feel more accepting of my loss, more able to look ahead and go back to normal life. My baby died, it sucked, let’s make another.

But it still happened, and I’m not forgetting.

I don’t think I will totally lose all the anger until I am 10 weeks pregnant again and have a baby with a heartbeat.

Or maybe until I hold a new baby in my arms.

The Secret Reason For Bronies

Tags

addiction, animation, art, baby schema, brains, bronies, brony, cute, cuteness, friendship is magic, my little pony, oxytocin, toys

Well, I began my research a while ago now, and I think I’m ready to present my findings.

The show is fine. Every episode has at least one line that is recognizably clever, and it occasionally makes me laugh out loud.

I didn’t find it to be brilliant, though.

Basically, it’s just a cute kid’s show that doesn’t suck.

Sure, people will argue that I need to watch more, and maybe I will, but honestly, I didn’t see anything to obviously explain an enormous fandom of adults, including adult males.

…Except for one thing.

The CUTENESS.

Because, I admit, it is very, very, very, cute.

Sickeningly cute.

Like, “I can’t believe how shamelessly adorable they have made this” levels of cute, from the character design to the little life lesson that comes with every episode.

Now, I have always found My Little Pony to be cute, even back in the days when the ponies actually looked somewhat like real ponies.

But the new anime-style ponies are DISGUSTINGLY cute.

They took something that was already pretty adorable and they ramped up the cuteness by about a zillion notches.

I don’t know if they consciously followed the baby schema, but it worked.

The baby schema is a sort of list of characteristics that scream “baby” to mammals, and which is proven to trigger our instincts for parental affection. It includes characteristics like big eyes, tiny noses, large heads, small bodies, big foreheads and so on.

So, this, basically.

Teddy bears over the years have evolved to fit this schema. They went from looking like this:

…to this:

Well, let’s go back and look at that 1980s My Little Pony again.

Big eyes, big head, short nose… pretty cute, right?

Now look at the modern version:

Next to the Friendship Is Magic version, the eighties one looks positively adult.

So, here’s what I think happened:

The most famous emergence of Bronies as we know them today came from 4chan, of all unlikely places.

A bunch of dudes from 4chan started watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with the intention of mocking the show, after getting all riled up from a post about how children’s shows are made just to hock toys (as if that’s anything new…).

Except the guys got hooked.

They started posting pictures of ponies everywhere.

It started a whole 4chan flame war, largely one sided, where people mocked the Bronies, and the Bronies just responded with pictures of adorable ponies.

Someone has even graphed the emergence of pony presence of 4chan.

And after watching the show, I think I know what happened.

The cuteness messed with their brains.

I’m telling you, after watching a few consecutive episodes, I had serious Pony Brain.

All the next day, unbidden mental images of ponies flitted through my mind on adorable little wings.

And I’m not the only one to report this phenomenon.

Sites like My Little Brony seem to acknowledge it as known fact.

We’re all programmed to fall for cuteness. That’s how babies avoid getting hucked out the window after the third hour of consecutive midnight misery.

The excellent flash animation and the Baby Schema of the character design in MLP: FIM is like Cuteness Crack.

Our brains can’t help but get addicted the sheer adorableness.

Anyone who has fallen in love slowly with a newborn baby can understand this process. At first it’s like “yeah, ok, it’s cute,” and then you’re like, “let me take another look,” and pretty soon you’re like “my child is the cutest thing ever I can’t stop looking…”

And that’s what I found happened to me.

I started craving ponies.

And why did it happen to all of these 4chan males?

Well, honestly, how exposed is the average 30 year old man to cuteness?

Boy toys are much less cute.

GI Joe has adult features, so do Transformers. Most adult men don’t go to cute little baby movies. Most don’t even watch Disney flicks.

So imagine you take this population of people who are completely unexposed to cuteness on a daily basis and then expose them to multiple hours of this:

I think they get hooked.

It’s like exposing the Aztecs to the European diseases of the Conquistadores – they’d just fall in scads.

And I fell prey to it too. All I wanted to do was look at pictures of ponies, especially Rainbow Dash, who I like primarily because she is blue, but also because she’s not girly.

I wanted a little pet Dash to follow me around and live in my pocket. I wanted a little toy one that actually looks like the character instead of like the lifeless, personality-less plastic Hasbro crap.

In other words… I began to know what it is like to be a Brony, and to see why some of these Adorableness Addicts are willing to pay literally thousands of dollars for a toy pony.

And that explains, too, why Bronies have such a reputation for being positive and friendly, for responding to trolls with ponies instead of insults, and even for charitable donation.

Oxytocin (which is released in response to cuteness) makes us more trusting and kind to others.

So, they can justify it all they like by saying it’s the character development, or the voice acting, or the plot, or the humor. All of that is… fine. It’s not a BAD show. It’s cute. It’s occasionally funny.

But I think that the main reason that they like it is that Bronies are just addicted, just the way I am hooked on this face:

And I can tell you that I love Owl because he’s funny, and smart, and loving, and lots of other great things.

But really, I love him because of the oxytocin.

I’ve been off of My Little Pony for a week or two now, and my brain is returning to normal. The pony cravings have stopped.

But will I go back?

Yeah, probably. Even though I don’t think it’s that fantastic.

Just because it’s DARN CUTE.

I’m Not A Good Person

Tags

comments, facebook, negativity, positivity, quotes, snark, trolling

But I think I should get bonus points for managing to resist hitting “enter” on this comment I felt greatly tempted to make on Facebook the other day…

Let’s All Speak Out For Someone Who Is Still Alive

Tags

amanda todd, blaming the victim, online bullying, pitt meadows, rape, rape culture, rehtaeh parsons, teenage girls

…And another one falls.

I had to think for a while about what I could say about Rehtaeh Parsons. After all, what could I say about her that I haven’t already said about Amanda Todd, or the Steubenville rape case? What could I say that my fellow bloggers already haven’t?

So I’ve decided not to talk about her at all.

Instead of rallying around and calling for justice once the poor victim has committed suicide, let’s do it while the person is STILL ALIVE!

Because Rehtaeh wasn’t alone.

A very similar incident happened in BC, right around the time Owl was born.

A 16 year old girl went to a rave. Tsk tsk, I know, but teenagers do dumb things, like go to raves. This girl went with friends, and only had one or two drinks. She tried to be safe.

But the girl was drugged, and then gang raped. The rapes were video taped and photographed by onlookers, and by the next morning, they were all over Facebook.

The videos going viral seemed to be the focus of most of the news stories – not the fact that the girl had been raped, but the fact that PEOPLE POSTED VIDEOS.

There was immediate police action to take down the videos and photos, and charges were laid, and everything looked just fine.

Two and a half years later…

Only one guy was charged with the actual rape, and those charges have been stayed due to insufficient evidence. Sound familiar, to those people who know Rehtaeh’s story?

A couple of guys were charged with distributing child pornography – again a step up from Rehtaeh’s case, but wait:

The punishment for one Dennis Warrington was 120 hours of community service and a written apology. What is this, grade school? Say you’re sorry, hug and make up? That’s it?  FOR WATCHING SOMEONE GET RAPED AND PHOTOGRAPHING IT?

Apparently the victim felt the same.

“Dennis can tell this courtroom, your family and your lawyer 100 times that you are sorry for what you did and you can apologize to me but I don’t believe you are sorry for one second,” said the girl, in a voice flush with rage.

“You are not sorry for what you did. You are just sorry you got caught.”

The other one just had to write an essay on the harmful impact of social media. WHAT? NOT ON RAPE? Is this really a “know the risks of Facebook” issue?

So… let’s recap.

• The rape happened while the girl was drugged. The police said from the outset that it had been medically confirmed (I remember the original news stories mentioning injuries and such, I’m pretty sure she even had a rape kit done). 
• Lots of people watched/were involved.
• No witnesses have come forward to testify on her behalf.
• The people who photographed and distributed video and photographic evidence got slaps on the wrist for being so indiscrete. 
• The Crown says there isn’t enough evidence to prosecute.

The girl has said that this rape ruined her life.

Surprise surprise – she is being bullied on Facebook and Twitter by the friends and family of those people who received those shockingly minor charges. And guess what? It’s making her miserable.

“Honestly, it’s like being tortured on a daily basis and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,” the girl said.

“People say that it will get better and that the pain will go away but it’s been two years and it still kills me.”

The bullying that followed caused the girl to drop out of high school. To this day, she suffers from panic attacks and anxiety. She even turned to drugs and thought about killing herself.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Look. I don’t have a photo of her. I can’t show you her face. I can’t give you a name.

But can we rally behind her anyway? Can you please share her story? Can you please demand justice?

Can we try to support this one, defend this one, SAVE this one… BEFORE the worst happens?

Please.

For Amanda Todd.

For Rehtaeh Parsons.

Let’s not wait until the girl kills herself before we share her story.

Let’s celebrate her for NOT killing herself. Let’s celebrate her survival. Let’s HELP her survive.

Let’s share now.

Let’s demand witnesses to come forward NOW.

Let’s fight now.

NOW!

In which I change the direction of the blog

Tags

I should leave my blog logged out more often, so much hate, why does PH hate me

Dear reader,

I’ve decided that, now that I’ve been writing this blog for almost four years, it needs to go in a new direction. Your comments on this recent post convinced me of that.

So from now on, I shall be focussing the vast majority of my posts on…

Pinkie Pie!

She’s awesome. Just so awesome. I invite you to read through the link above and truly appreciate the hard work that went into creating a Wiki page that has that much information about Pinkie Pie.

I’ll still update occasionally about Owl, of course, but I really find that he’s taken a backseat in my life ever since I discovered this:

 

So thank you as always for your readership, and I hope you enjoy my new path. And remember…

 

The Ballad Of Henry – My Gift To A Friend With Thyroid Cancer

Tags

bad limericks, bad rhymes, cancer, cancer is hilarious, friendship, goiters, humour, nothing rhymes with Henry, poems, poetry, surgery, thyroid cancer

I would like all of you in the blogosphere to put out good thoughts for a good friend of mine, who is getting surgery today for her thyroid cancer.

My friend @Suminycricket has been one of my best friends since we were 13 years old. She’s a devoted friend who always makes me laugh, and an excellent auntie to Owl.

Back in November she shot me an email, saying

“I’m writing because I thought you’d be interested to know: I have a goiter. I kid you not! At first I thought I was undergoing an unplanned sex-change, but apparently it is my thyroid.  I’ve named the goiter Henry.”

We spent some time joking about Henry, but then in January she sent me an email sympathizing with me over the loss of my cat, and then casually throwing in, “Also, I just found out today that I have thyroid cancer!  It sounds awful, but is one of the most curable types around with a near 100% survival rate, so really it’s not so bad.”

While I and her husband and her mother and MY mother freaked out, my friend was sending me hilarious text messages about the Henry saga.

Then she got double-whammy news – Henry had a mate, they both had to be surgically removed, and when things were done, she wouldn’t have a thyroid any more. And the surgery? Scheduled for two days before her birthday.

So when I got this email, I knew that I couldn’t let her down:

“Will you write me a hilarious poem about thyroid cancer? I was trying to come up with a short poem, and the best I could come up with was “happy birthday to me, I now am cancer free.” 

It was a tall order, not the least because she had to suffer from a disease which is not easy to rhyme. Believe it or not, rhyming dictionaries were significantly unhelpful for words that rhyme with “goiter” or “Henry”.

Also, cancer is not the funniest of subject matter.

So the poem is pretty poor.

But it’s the best I could do, and hopefully it will give her a laugh.

The Ballad Of Henry

He started as only a bump,
A barely perceptible lump
And you said, “This is strange,
what is causing this change?
My neck is increasingly plump!”

But then it increased in its span
and you said “now I look like a man!”
It continues to grow,
and it’s starting to show,
I think I should go for a scan.”

The doc said “it’s good to not loiter,
but I can tell from my reconnoiter
It’s under your hyoid
on top of your thyroid
So likely it’s only a goiter.”

“A goiter,” you said, “well that’s fine.
I’ll just have to take iodine.
I’ll eat lots of kelp,
and I’m sure that will help.”
But Henry had other designs.

Poor Henry, he liked you a lot.
Your gland was just such a nice spot.
He meant you no harm
but the docs got alarmed
when they saw all the friends he had brought.

The doctors would not let things rest
til they put you through all sorts of tests
Then they said, “here’s the answer!
It turns out it’s cancer!”
“Well, that’s fucking great,” you professed.

“This cancer’s not bad,” they opined
“In fact, it is often benign.
And quick radiation
Will end Henry’s vacation
if it turns out he’s really malign.”

But Henry was far too prodigious
He was getting too big for his britches.
“We’ll take the whole gland
While Rob holds your hand
Before Henry can send out his bitches.”

And you said “are you sure this is so?
Is Henry really my foe?”
“You got too close when we
named this thing Henry
Trust us, he’s just got to go.”

So now you go under the knife
And Henry will give up his life.
One Henry is great
but not seven or eight
…So goodbye, Henry, fuck you.

If all of you could either tweet something miscellaneously hilarious to @suminycricket over the next few days, or leave a link in the comments, then that would be awesomesauce.

Blaming The Victim. Because, WHY NOT?

Tags

blaming the victim, consequences, drunk girls, extending logic, feminism, how to be safe, irony, logical but nonsensical conclusion, rape, rapists, safe living, safety, sarcasm, steubenville, taking responsibility, victimization

There’s a lot of talk right now about the Steubenville rape case right now, not because of the case itself – that sort of thing happens far too often. In fact the same thing happened to a girl in Maple Ridge, B.C., not too long ago.

The reason everyone is up and arms about is because a news anchor whose mother named her “Candy” (a good start right there) spend a lot of time bemoaning the consequences of the rapists’ sentencing, rather than talking about how what they did was wrong.

The clip pissed me off, of course, although I do think that it may be a good idea to emphasize the consequences of raping a girl – in case the teenage boys out there need a stronger motivation than simply “because it is wrong”.

But then I read the comments, and of course you have idiots saying things like this:

“there is no doubt that what these teen boys did was wrong in that making mockery of someone they had sexual contact with over social media. Was it cold, was it callous, was it stupid…YES YES YES…but was it RAPE? NO. However, as a mother of young daughters and sons I am appaulled that no repermanding of the girl or her family is warranted. As a society, we have a moral obilgation to say something to a young girl or woman young or old who drinks to the point of not knowing what they are doing or sayng. To say that a 17 year old male is suppose to make the moral call and say ‘naw you are to drunk to know wht you are saying or doing” is a bit much.”

“men will be men. the more that is known the better. carry mace, dont get smashed at parties, dont walk down a dark alley by yourself. im a man and i realize that although i may not be looking for trouble walking home after a night at the bar, i better not get smashed in case trouble is looking for me.”

“What those teen boys did was bad, and they deserve to be punished, but where is her responsibility for herself? Apparently drunk women have no need to take responsibility for their poor choices, whereas drunk males will have to pay for their mistakes for the rest of their lives. So much for equality.”

“i am in no way condoning the actions of these juveniles and they should be punished. but acting like the girl had no part in her being in this situation undermines the importance of being responsible when consuming alcohol.”

It’s the Amanda Todd thing all over again.

“Oh, sure, what those boys did was wrong, but it’s the girl’s fault too, because she put herself in that situation.”

For all the people who want to talk about the consequences of being raped for a girl (something that gets almost NO coverage, and which I think really should be, because a lot of men clearly don’t get why it is considered to be such a big deal), there are people out there who want to talk about how stupid the girl was to be there in the first place.

And at first, I got mad.

Then I thought about it, and I realized, DUDE, they are totally right.

I mean, the girl went out and got DRUNK with GUYS around. Who does that? What normal teenage girl drinks around BOYS? Wasn’t she leading them on by simply being  there, and then by becoming unconscious?

And why should we stop there?

Since the victim in the above case clearly is partially to blame for the consequences of her action, shouldn’t we be blaming MORE victims?

Take John F. Kennedy.

Stop blaming Oswald and look at the real culprit!

Anyone Out There?

Tags

Blogging, Polls

So, other than my usual volumes of booby-googlers, my blog has been fairly dead for the last couple of months. Some of my posts have gotten zero comments. Most get way less than they used to.

So I figure I must be getting boring.

If anyone is still stopping by here, what would you like to hear about?

 

Wreck It Ralph – Perfectly Built

Tags

disney, jane lynch, lassiter, movies, plots, reviews, sarah silverman, Stories, wreck it ralph

I’ve been meaning to write about Wreck It Ralph since Perfect Husband and I saw it in theatres back in November. I thought you’d want to know about it since it was TOTALLY WICKED.

That’s right. I have zero complaints.

Me, the one who has found several movies to be… unsatisfactory.

*cough*Brave/HowToTrainYourDragon/MiloAndOtis/HungerGames/

TheHelp/HalfBloodPrince/DeathlyHallowsPartI…*cough*

Zero complaints.

ZE-RO.

I think it would be a fantastic movie for either gender of child to watch, although, since there are guns and enormous carnivorous bugs, I imagine it wouldn’t be great for little kids.

I think it carries an excellent message that it conveys eloquently.

I think it is filled with retro charm.

I think that the characters are three dimensional ones who grow and change throughout the story.

I think the humour is witty and sometimes understated.

I think the main female characters provide excellent role models for young girls.

I think that the development of the plot was a delight to experience.

A plot is a difficult and challenging thing to build well.

Believe me, I suck at them. Too simple, and it’s boring to sit through a predictable and pedestrian story, like, well, most children’s movies and an awful lot of adult ones. Too haphazard and you get a story that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go, like Happy Feet.

But Wreck It Ralph is just… beautiful.

Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it threw a new wrench in the works. Every time I thought I knew how it fit together, it introduced a new twist. And yet everything did fit together, very well.

Yes, it had a couple of predictable bits, but then it was satisfying to see something so carefully constructed come to fruition.

I love Jane Lynch. Sure, she’s basically Sue from Glee, but I LOVE SUE FROM GLEE.

I love Sarah Silverman and the character of Vanellope. I even wore candy-striped hair pins at Christmas because they made me feel like her.

I love Ralph, of course.

I love the eye candy, by which I mean THE CANDY.

It’s just… perfect.

I can’t wait for Owl to be old enough to enjoy it. It has cars, it has candy, it has strong female characters, it has strong male characters, and only a couple of poop jokes.

Perfect.