Books read in June 2022

New: 

1. The Girl Who Speaks Bear by Sophie Anderson

2. The Menopause Manifesto: Own Your Health with Facts and Feminism by Jen Gunter

Reread:

 

1. Fantasy in death

Things They Should Invent: kitchen catchers shaped like grocery bags

As I've mentioned before, I routinely use plastic grocery bags as garbage bags. However, as I've been streamlining my shopping during the pandemic, I found myself running perilously low on plastic bags, so I bought some kitchen catchers.

Turns out they're inferior in every way!

They don't fit as nicely in my kitchen garbage can, and it's harder to get the top of the bag to stay hooked over the top of the bin. The absence of handles makes it harder to tie off (even with those thingies at the top that are supposed to be for tying it off) and makes it harder to carry to the garbage chute on days when I have multiple things to carry (which is most days, because my building has a tri-sorter chute). The perforation between the bags on the rolls is imperfect, so sometimes they rip open. Also, there are sometimes manufacturing flaws so a specific bag on the roll won't open up properly, or is cut crookedly and therefore unworkable.

In short, there is nothing that kitchen catchers do that grocery bags don't do better!

Grocery bags are already being manufactured and mass produced and put in boxes and sold to grocery stores. Why not put some of those bags on the shelf for consumers to purchase at retail price as well?

Not that there's anything wrong with that

The other day I saw someone tweet that cis Gen Xers need to talk more about how homophobic society in general was in the 80s and 90s. So my Pride post this year is a story from my small town adolescence in the 90s.

 

This story does not contain any violence, hate crimes, or actual homophobic acts, but it does contain extensive descriptions of my own thoughts and feelings from back when I knew nothing other than that culture and environment, and these thoughts and feelings do not age well.

 

***

 

In the Seinfeld episode "The Outing", Jerry and George are mistaken for a gay couple, and spend the episode flailing about vociferously denying being gay, each time qualifying their denial with "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

 

When I saw this episode at the age of 15, I was super confused: why are they saying "Not that there's anything wrong with that"?? Surely if you suggest that there's nothing wrong with being gay, people will think you're gay, and then Bad Things will happen! Why wouldn't they just say nothing??

That was literally the very first time in my whole entire life that I had ever been exposed to the idea that a person might not want to come across as homophobic. I'm not even getting as far as the fact that there's nothing wrong with being gay - I had never, not even once, been exposed to the fact that there are people in the world who might perceive you negatively if you're homophobic.

 

Absolutely 100% of life experience to date had suggested that the strategic thing to do in any situation would be to come across as homophobic. After all, my life experience suggested, if you don't come across as homophobic, then people would think you're gay! And then Bad Things would happen!

 

(I wasn't clear what these Bad Things were, but the way my classmates talked about the idea of Gay left no room for doubt that it was Very, Very Bad.)

I hadn't even thought as far as deciding whether or not to be homophobic myself. All I knew was that 100% of the empirical evidence to date suggested that it was unsafe to not be homophobic. So I proceeded accordingly.

When the Seinfeld episode ended without anything bad happening to Jerry and George, I was completely baffled. This was completely outside of my experience or frame of reference. The story seemed completely unresolved. I literally could not understand it.

And that's what 90s small town homophobia was like - it left a sheltered 15-year-old unable to comprehend a situation where people can just . . . not be homophobic, and that's okay.

***

 

What's interesting is how 15-year-old me reacted to this after giving the matter a little thought.

 

Jerry and George acted as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay, and nothing bad happened to them! Furthermore, no discourse about this had reached me - no one was talking about how it was bad or horrible or shocking that nothing bad happened to them for acting as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay.

This meant that maybe, for some people, in some parts of society . . . it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay? The characters on Seinfeld were clearly cooler than me, so maybe the parts of society where it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay are cooler than me?

Now, if, like 15-year-old me, you're an awkward, dorky, bullied teenager living in a small town, it can be strategic to give the impression that you have hidden depths, aspects of yourself that are way cooler and edgier than even have an opportunity to become apparent in such a limited and uncool environment than school.

This (brand new! unprecedented!) notion that there's nothing wrong with being gay provided this very kind of opportunity. Next time the idea of gay came up, I could proceed as though there's nothing wrong with it, as though it's unremarkable and not worth mentioning! Maybe I could even pretend to be confused about why people think it's a problem! Surely that would be a super edgy thing to do that vastly exceeds the cool potential of our small town!

So I tucked the idea away in my metaphorical toolbox, and proceeded with life.

The opportunity to use it arose a couple of years later.

I was sitting in the library doing my calculus homework and listening to my discman when a classmate sat down across the table from me.

I didn't know this guy very well. The periphery of his social circle overlapped with the periphery of my social circle, but we had very little in common. He had a beard, drove a pickup truck, seemed like he'd know where to buy drugs - way cooler and edgier than me, and the very demographic who is likely to bully me! But, despite these demographic indicators, he had never been unkind to me, and sometimes had been a touch more kind than strictly necessary.

He sat down across from me, pulled out his own homework, and asked me what I was listening to.

"Ani DiFranco," I replied.

"Did you know she's very popular with the gay community?" he asked.

I didn't actually know that. In fact, I hadn't the slightest clue! (My first Ani DiFranco album was Dilate, and I hadn't yet discovered the online fandom.)

I briefly panicked: Oh shit, now he's going to think I'm gay! And if I deny it, he's going to think I'm hiding being gay!!

Then I remembered: when you want to be cool and edgy, act like there's nothing wrong with it.

So I looked him dead-ass in the eye and said, "Yes, she is."

Then, with a level of savvy I didn't even know I possessed, I offered him an earbud. "Would you like to listen?"

He accepted the earbud, and we sat there doing our math homework and listening to Ani DiFranco. And no Bad Things happened.

And, in that small town in the 90s, that was what passed for progress.

The Boy Who Cried "No Wolf!"

I was talking to my doctor about the risk assessment of getting dental care (given that I'd need to remove my mask to do so), and he said that the hygiene and air quality standards for dental offices are actually high enough that it would be a safe environment to be unmasked in.

My immediate, visceral reaction was a shockingly strong "That can't possibly be true!!!"

I had in fact looked up the standards for dental offices and they did seem to have plenty of air changes, I looked up the specs of the hepafilter system the clinic I was considering going to had installed and didn't even know that level of air changes was possible, my doctor is better positioned than I am to determine what ventilation measures are sufficient . . . so why do I feel so strongly that it cannot possibly be safe?

After thinking this over a bit, I realized it's because there have been so many instances where they removed protections when it wasn't safe to do so (including, most recently, when they removed mask mandates and 90% of the people I love in the world promptly contracted COVID) that we have a critical mass of cumulative empirical evidence that "meets requirements" ≠ "safe".

It's like the opposite of Aesop's fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. 

 

In the fable, a boy repeatedly comes running into his village shouting that there's a wolf when there's really no wolf. Then, eventually, a wolf does come, and no one believes him.

What's happening here in Ontario is they're repeatedly telling us it's safe when it's clearly not. And if, one day, it ever is safe, I will have a very difficult time believing it.

 

 

The thing is, if everyone started doing absolutely everything absolutely perfectly in terms of COVID response, all indoor spaces would be like a dental office, with ventilation that makes it impossible for COVID to spread. And, unless something changes drastically, I don't see how I will ever be able to believe this and feel safe.

Now, you're thinking, if all environments become safe and make it impossible for COVID to spread, COVID numbers will drop! We'll see it in the data!

Except governments are publishing less and less data, even though the data is still necessary! We're left here squinting at the low-precision Y axis of the wastewater signal charts and trying to figure out how flaws in government-issued data might be affecting the results on various automated amateur data-viz websites. 

 

They never even restored PCR testing criteria to where they were pre-Omicron, so official R-value data is a big asterisk with "Currently, R(t) based on cases cannot be estimated accurately"

 

I think what they're trying to do is induce a feeling of "no news is good news!" in the public, but what's actually happening is they're creating a situation where promising numbers are increasingly implausible. Are case counts actually low, or is it just because of restrictions on PCR testing? Are active case numbers actually going down, or was there just not a data drop today?

***

I do realize this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist, and that brings up something else:

It's super weird that the existing conspiracy theorists aren't thinking this way!

Long before COVID, there were plenty of conspiracy theorists who thought there was a vast government conspiracy to kill or harm people.

And, somehow, they seem to look at the current situation where the government is changing policies in a way that increases the number of people killed or infected, and . . . don't think this is part of the conspiracy?

 

 

I do see why someone might not believe there's a government conspiracy to harm us. Maybe, from where you're sitting, you don't see any evidence, and it is quite the claim to make without evidence! Maybe you find the idea just too frightening to contemplate! Maybe you look at the people who do think there's a government conspiracy to harm us and think "Those are unpleasant individuals and I don't want to be like them!"

But if you've come into the situation already believing that there's a conspiracy, how do you arrive at "But this current situation where people are being killed and harmed because of government inaction is, of course, unrelated to the government conspiracy to kill or harm people!"

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.

 

Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.