But I guess it’s time for my annual rant against the Big Machine and the perpetuation of the belief that, hey, if it’s love, it’s worth going broke for.

I know men buy gifts because they feel obligated. I know women usually like receiving the gifts. I just wish both sides of this equation would get over the bullshit and just accept it’s not really doing a lot of good for either of them.

Relationships die because either people change or they just don’t want to work on the relationship anymore. Not because a diamond ring wasn’t forthcoming soon enough.

Having one big pompous night of obligatory romance isn’t going to save shit.

In reality, if you’re doing Valentine’s because the pressure is on, and you’re not really feeling it as a couple, going out and being around all the sickingly “happy” couples isn’t going to help you find your happy place, no matter how big your magnifying glass is.

If you want your relationship to work, it takes that effort week-in, week-out.

Here in Vancouver, it’s Olympics time.

The foolish people will still be trying to book romantic evenings out. Sure, great. Want to know how that’ll unfold? Rain’s forecasted. Parking’s virtually impossible as the Olympics OPEN this week with an expected daily influx of 4 Super Bowls worth of traffic. Oh, and it’s Chinese New Year Sunday, too, which, when you have the Asian population WE have, is a big thing as well.

In one of the most expensive cities going, prices everywhere are jacked for “special event pricing” for at least the next week.

Is it really worth it? Seriously?

It’s not too late to be non-traditional.

Order from indish.ca by tomorrow for a $92 gourmet meal for two with dessert’n'everything. You get it delivered, throw dinner together, throw your partner on the floor, shag like silly, and eat in between. Or maybe that’s my approach, but you can certainly wing something, I’m sure. I hear people like eating at tables, too, so you could always give THAT a try. Radical, I know, but…

Do an adventure day like ziplining. Be a tourist in your town. Try getting couples’ photography done by someone like Nordica here in Vancouver. By the end of it, you’ll have something that reflects an entire time in your life, or a great memory of a Different Day,  rather than a night that breaks your wallet and probably won’t be that original.

Or screw the calendar and commit to a date night a week for X amount of weeks instead — weekly connecting on a bigger level will pay off with bigger results. Communicate on purpose, plan ahead, make it fun stuff you’ve both been wanting to do, not your standard dinner-movie deal.

This year, maybe it’s time to have a real conversation about “Valentine’s” Day and see if it’s really something you need to bother with. Maybe you just need to re-commit to each other and make a decision to explore more fun sex on occasions, and discuss how you’d like to try that approach, or take the time to enjoy good homecooked-together meals, or just find a way to express each other’s value in words and actions, not just suffer maxed-out credit cards.

The Big Machine’s out there telling people like me we’re broken ‘cos we’re not scooped up by some fabulous lover already. It’s banging the message down our throat — a diamond is forever, you’re nobody till somebody loves you, yada-fuckin’-yada.

And every year people gripe and moan about it, saying, “Oh, it’s an unnecessary day! They’re just milking us!”

And, YET, like little lemmings and their sheepy friends, back out you go, buying the Valentine’s Day gift or sucking up the overpriced meal for a perceived “romantic” night spent in the company of complete strangers, being served by someone who’d rather be at home shagging their lover.

Yeah.

People fuckin’ baffle me. Don’t like the day? DON’T PARTICIPATE. Or else shut up about it. The hypocrisy is blinding me.

But, for the love of god, if you ARE in a relationship, know this: It deserves more, and better, than one stupid night of recognition.

If you have love in your life, cherish it. Show it the respect it deserves. Be the best partner you can be to your lover. And do NOT underestimate the importance of a GREAT sex life to keeping your relationship happy.

Anyone selling the “Oh, sexless relationships are good too” mantra needs a fucking reality check.

Sex matters. Communication matters.

Trinkets do not. Overpriced restaurants do not.

Be real with each other.

Maybe that starts with NOT doing Valentine’s like usual.

Maybe next year you can play with the big kids like me and realize it’s not a day you need in your life at all.

Especially if you know how to lock the doors, avoid the world, and spend a weekend wrapped up in each other with nothing but delivery food, fuzzy blankets, and DVDs you probably won’t actually see a lot of.

But, you know, you wanna fuck around with that four-star joint, parking when it’s nearly impossible, and stressing about making a reservation time instead of just enjoying each other? Okay. You do that.

When it comes to me sitting around wishing I had someone in my life, though, I won’t be wishing we could spend more time driving around parkades trying to find a spot or being proper with the fancy people as some annoying waiter tells me what the specials are.

When it comes around to me wishing what I had? It’d be lazy Sunday mornings burrowing into each other, or that night when cancelling all the plans in order to close all the curtains and lie around with each other just BEING there.

Well, I’ve always been a little odd. Maybe I’m the one who’s all messed up, ‘cos I still think simple things are the best things.

I’m so last century it hurts. But it’s an easier way to live.

Great thing is, you can choose to be that way too.

I’m moody and full of vitamin-Cunt tonight.

I couldn’t figure it out.

What’s eating me? Why am I spiralling into a darker and darker place? Why do I hate the idea of attending any of the 3 parties to which I was invited tonight? Why does the idea of just being civil to others fill me with a questionable revulsion I can’t fathom?

Why? Why? Why?

I couldn’t conjure happy-engaging Steff an hour or two ago, prompting a fella to comment that I didn’t sound very happy. Was my day just long? Where was I coming from emotionally?

BOOM. Then it hit me — snuck up and sucker-punched me, more like.

It’s the start of two weeks of Dead Mom anniversaries.

Next week, the 15th, is the day they found her cancer during a routine hysterectomy. “No, don’t worry about it! Only one in 10,000 fibroids is cancerous!” Like the grapefruit-sized one in you, you mean? The one that metastasized while the medical system was going through social-system strikes, you mean?

Yeah. Right.

And February 21st would have been my mother’s 68th. She died at 57.

As much as I want to pretend I’m past it all and healthy and good, even after 11 years, my heart fucking breaks sometimes at how much I KNOW I lost when she died.

She was my hero. She never realized that. I don’t have a lot of regrets with my mother, thank God, but I wish she knew more of how much I idolized her. She had no question I loved her, but her confidence problems might’ve prevented her from ever realizing the hero factor. That saddens me. She deserved to know.

But how many of us really believe the others in our lives when they tell us how much we impact them? Not many. So I take comfort in the fact that it’s more her humanity that prevented her from knowing that, than it was my failure to school her in it. Because I tried.

God, how flawed she was.

So many shortcomings and insecurities and places she never went in life. So many dreams she had that she never fulfilled. Flawed, flawed, flawed. Died broke, even.

And still she was my hero.

It’s who we are in the face of who we’re sometimes unable to be that really speaks volumes about our character. The things we stand for when just being on our feet is more than we could’ve asked for, that says infinite things about us.

And those deciding factors made my mother a giant amongst women.

She was the kind of person everyone respected and held in great esteem. She never had much money or “proper” social standing, but you couldn’t fault her on integrity. You couldn’t ignore her goodness and everywomanness. You’d be wowed by the vast array of people from varying walks of life she knew — even though she felt undereducated and too impoverished to mix with some of them.

There are a lot of ways in which I’m stronger, tougher, and more outspoken than my mother, but my core values — the goodness, the generosity, the truthfulness, my trustworthiness, my work ethic — these qualities were all, without a doubt, implanted by my parents. Whatever my parents weren’t, there was no doubt in their goodness.

Tonight I guess the loss has hit home for a rare night of sorrow. This doesn’t happen to me very often anymore. It’s 10 years gone now. For four or five years, I was just crushed.I was drunk more than sober, depressed 24/7, and not particularly motivated to change that.

But it’s not like I got a call from someone saying my mother was dying.

Unlike a lot of people my age who are motherless in the last decade, I was living with her and caring for her in the last months. I GUESSED she was dying before there was even a diagnosis. Three months before the “cancer” word even came up.

There is too much I saw that no child should see happen to a parent.

Like seeing things that can’t be unseen.

Nights like tonight are when those visuals flood back upon me, and what rises in me is an anger and a hatred that she ever needed to face those moments of humiliation and inhumanity.

A death like cancer isn’t fair to anyone. Least of all those doing the dying.

Especially when they lose their colon and have to shit into a plastic bag burrowed into their belly.

When they used to be a red-headed fashion model every guy crushed on.

Like Mom.

And that was only the beginning of the vanity-killers doled upon her. I don’t want to write the worst of what I saw. I don’t want it to be that real for me. Not now, not ever. I’d rather pretend, thank you.

My god, how well she dealt with the blows to her beauty. In a moment of weakness, she confessed to how ugly she felt.

And it broke my heart.

I was overweight, insecure, and the only thing I knew growing up was that my mom was GORGEOUS. Just GORGEOUS. I had HER genes. Wow! Lucky me. If I got my shit together, one day I could look like her.

To see her lose her self-esteem and feel so ugly and flawed before her death was such a sorrow. It crushed more than just my illusions.

I wonder now if my mood began this morning because my hair was falling a certain way and, when I looked in the mirror, I saw my mother’s features staring back at me. In my 30s now, after losing 65+ pounds, I’m finally starting to look a little like my mother’s daughter, the mother she was when I was a girl.

But, today, the first thing I saw was my mom looking back at me. Not me, but my mother’s features. And a pang hit me then.

I didn’t know it was growing, that pang of pain. But I guess it was.

I didn’t think I’d find myself in tears tonight when I chose to stay home from those parties. I didn’t know what was eating me. I don’t know how I realized it.

But now I know what’s eating me. The stream of tears down my face as I write this is pretty much all the evidence I need.

I know I’ll go to bed hurting and feeling alone tonight, angry at all the years and conversations and hugs and needs that have been robbed from me in those 10+ years I’ve been without my mother.

But I’ll wake up tomorrow and the sun’ll be shining and it’ll be a near-record-breaking warm February day and somehow, yeah, it’ll all be easier in the morning. It really will be.

Tonight, though, I’m a little lost in the things I’m remembering.

And that’s the least she deserves. Remembering.

Even if it hurts for a little while.

You know why CBS should have rejected the Mancrunch ad? BECAUSE IT’S A FUCKING STUPID AD.

It’s bad acting, bad writing, cheap filming, lame directing, and zero spent on production values.

The Superbowl is where the best commercials in the world come to play, not stupid frat-boy humour shot for $20 and a bag of Kush, all right?

Gay rights activists getting panties in a twist over this ad have got to give their heads a shake. Seriously. I cannot even BELIEVE this has become an issue.

First of all, it looks like shit. I could’ve filmed a better ad with a 7-11 rental video camera when I was 12, in 1985, okay? They raided a Value Village for wardrobe, stole furniture from a thrift store, and filmed it with the cheapest camera set-up they could find.

Second, it’s an absolute stereotype. It suggests being gay is “catching” or something that happens on a whim, and not something that is a biological condition one is born with. It reinforces the ideas in the Stupid Asshats who think that being gay is something that can be indoctrinated or deprogrammed, depending which way you’re wanting to go.

Third, the writing is crap. It’s total crap. There’s nothing witty, it’s not fall-down funny, it’s not shocking. It doesn’t even look pretty.  It’s just stupid. It’s like the guys at Animal House were asked to come up with their best idea of a dating commercial for a gay dating site.

If Mancrunch is serious, then come up with a serious ad. This is crap. Put the fucking bong away, and have some serious ideas. Respect homosexuality, give it a little credit.

This is NOT CBS assailing gay rights. This is CBS standing up for the reputation of the Superbowl having the BEST ADVERTISEMENTS all in one brilliant afternoon.

As a fan of great and witty advertising, I applaud them for maintaining those standards.

You want to play at the big boy’s game? BRING your game. Don’t fucking phone it in with crap advertising like this, then play the “OOh, poor us, we’re being discriminated against because we’re G-A-Y” record yet again.

Shut the hell up, Mancrunch. Get a real ad. Then we’ll talk. And, activists?

Use your fucking brains. You should be offended by this attempt, too. For all you’ve fought for, THIS is how gay romance is depicted? As a stupid whim that can only happen when alcohol and impulse kick in? That it’s always meaningless and just a thoughtless act that happens? Yeah. Way to look out for your agenda. Way to support the stereotype that gay men are promiscuous and think only with their cock and nothing more.

This is not a controversy.

That everyone’s already forgotten about Haiti, that’s a controversy. Or a scandal.

So let’s talk about the important issues. All right? This is not one.

[PS: I agree with others that this is an obvious attempt by Mancrunch to get free word-of-mouth advertising. Way to fall for it, media.]

“The sound of a cougars claws slipping down the slope called age.”

That was the comment in its entirety, aside from quoting the entire paragraph under the blockquote-box’s question.

It pissed me off. Why?

I’m the anti-cougar. I wear Chuck’s All-Stars, not stilettos. I like concert t-shirts and trendy shirts with nice cuts, not revealing tight-skimpy things. I’ve never had a microskirt or a tube skirt. You know? I don’t flirt much, as I wrote about in this piece I called Flirting Fail.

I’m not saying I’m fail. I’m just not the stereotype, is what I’m saying. I like myself just fine, thanks. The world has plenty of busty chicks in tube tops.

But let’s leave that aside. You know what really pisses me off?

That it’s the mere fact I’m a woman over 30 who has more than a passing interest in sex that has left me judged a “cougar” by this stupid ass.

Every guy out there wants a woman who’s a feisty beast in the bedroom and Doris Day outside of it, if my 36 years of experience on this planet has any validity.

The trouble is, the moment a woman becomes overt in her sexuality at all, she’s judged as being a Different Kind Of Woman. She’s in some other class. She gets hurt less, is easier, can be acted around differently. The stereotypes are fucking ridiculous.

And the further trouble is, the women who ARE overtly sexual at a younger age, so many of them are using that sexuality to compensate for what they perceive to be shortcomings in other areas, because the REST of the younger girls are all freshly raised to believe that Women Who Like To Do It Are Whores.

This is changing a little, but not enough.

Women are still defined morally by what they like sexually. Men aren’t. Women are.

It’s a huge hurdle for women to get over. Every chick probably can tell you an experience when they felt absolutely disrespected or judged for some small little thing to do with sex or how they were dressed. And when that happens, it reaffirms all those moralistic preachings by our suburban parents about just what it is that Good Girls DON’T Do.

If men want more women to be comfortable with their sexuality, this hypocritical bullshit needs to stop.

They need to stop judging averagely sexual women, or sensual women, as if their morals are somehow different just because the enjoyment level for sex is more obvious than with others.

Authentic cougars — you know, women who are all about the sex or who value themselves only according to how well their sex life is going, like “Sam” in Sex In The City — are a stereotype and can be mocked a little. Anyone who allows themselves to fit squarely into a stereotype kind of deserves a bit of mockery, honestly, whether a horticulturalist or a hussy.

But making the mistake of thinking you know someone’s ethics or morality just based on their views on sex is about as fucking dumb as it gets.

Me, I have a sometimes-sex blog. Sure. I got skillz. You betcha. I’m able to write about sex in a way that has edumacated folks in the past.  (Like some of the oral sex how-to’s on this page.) But I barely date. I don’t sleep around. I like relationships. I’m never very public about my sexuality apart from things I talk or write about; I don’t flirt particularly well. I’m not a seductress. I’ve never cheated on a man. I bake muffins for boyfriends, giggle at their jokes, and get along with their mothers. I say please and thank you, I hold the door open for old ladies. I pay my taxes. I keep in touch with my dad, cared for my dying mother. Used to sing in the choir. Was a Girl Guide Leader and a Pathfinder Leader. I sing a wicked “Kumbaya.” I don’t have a criminal record, I’ve never been arrested. I’ve never tried a drug harsher than pot or drank gin.

But, yep, sex is a good thing. In many, many ways.

If you judge me on the fact that I’m a little dirty-minded versus EVERYTHING else I am, you’re a fucking moron. Flat-out. Hands down. And you’re missing out on probably one of the best friends you could have, the sort of person who’s a lock for a 3a.m. body-removal crew. Ethically, morally, I live to a higher standard than most people I know. I’m so old-fashioned it hurts. I demand better from people in my life, because I’ll deliver it, too.

Still, that sex thang, man. Always a good thing. And often.

Now, I haven’t been laid for at least one whole calendar, and it ain’t doing me no good at all, but that’s life and it hasn’t been something I’ve really tried to change because I was very disinterested for a long time. It sure as hell disqualifies me from “cougar” running, that’s one thing I know.

But go ahead. Call me a cougar.

Insult me for advocating that ALL women should be more in touch with their sexuality.

Deride me for asserting that no matter how “moral” we are, sexuality’s an awesome thing to enjoy in life and necessary for a full life.

Mock me for believing that society would be a greater and more productive place if everyone put as much focus on their sex life and communication as they did on making money.

You want to know why so many women keep their sexuality closeted, or why so many women won’t bring themselves to even masturbate, let alone get crazy with positions or initiating things? Because they still get shamed too much of the time. If women aren’t comfortable in their sexuality and don’t feel encouraged to grow sexually, they won’t masturbate. If they don’t masturbate, they’ll never learn what works for turning them on, or gain the physical comfort level needed for women to reach orgasm, and that’s why so many women never even orgasm until well after their 30s.

Because of the bullshit being spouted by hypocrites — whether it’s from asshole moralists in pulpits or men who don’t have the guts to own their own sexuality, THAT’S why.

Why women have SO MANY hang-ups is because of the mixed messages we’ve received for centuries. Bend over/BEHAVE. The church has done it, our parents have done it, our lovers have done it, and society as a whole still does it.

Let’s embrace real, healthy, vibrant sexuality. Let’s realize that’s a completely different thing from the bubblegum whorey girls who are using sex to get somewhere because they have nothing else to offer.

Sexuality comes in many different styles. If you’re gonna judge anyone for being that way, you might just be missing out on what could be a pretty wild journey of discovery. All of us, every one of us, unfolds differently when it comes to being physical. This ain’t no mass-produced experienced. It’s a unique thing with each person.

Don’t judge. Be open.

Life’s a hell of a lot more fun that way.

And I’m not a cougar, dummy.

Most of it is of my own doing, too. Having burnt out with EVERYTHING last July, I just walked away from most of my obligations, organized  fitness, and social life. It’s been EXACTLY what I needed to do, but my back has been iffy from time to time as a result.

Fortunately, I’ve always sort of maintained my core to the bare minimum, and have had a lot of improvement with my back. It’s better, FAR better, now than it was last July when burn-out hit me.

I’m back, baby, and my back’s considering coming back too. I began last week with the simple goal of being active daily — not much, just enough. I’d started inconsistently the week before, but last week did honour my commitment to doing something physical on each day — even if only for 15 or 20 minutes. By the week’s end, I seized the day and had an 80 minute cycling adventure.

The last three days have been filled with uncertain moments for my back, though. Twinges and tightness, pricks and pains. I’ve been so looking forward to chiro. I’ve also been torn — do I rest this, or do I work it out? Resting wasn’t really working out for me, so I decided to pick up the weights.

Over the course of morning and evening, I probably did about 60-70 minutes with 10 lb dumbbells and kettlebells, and plyometrics. All I know is, I hurt when I went to bed — just whole-body fatigue and aching abs, burning thighs from squats and lunges.

This morning? Fantastic. A few downward-facing dogs and planks, I’m heading out shortly with a bike and a lighter workday ahead of me.

In this age of caution, padded playgrounds, and bubble-type children, most folks are probably more inclined to lick their wounds when pains and symptoms arrive, but that’s often just going to allow the status quo keep the power. Sometimes, throwing a new element into it, fighting it with everything you got, is exactly what you NEED to do when you think you ain’t got nothing left to give.

Case in point? When I began my holiday in Kelowna this summer, my back was all fucked up from riding with an improper bike set-up and a shit-ass 6-hour Greyhound bus trip before it. I wanted to do an 8-10k ride, thinking the wind was quiet and I’d be better if I “loosened up” a little.

Well, it was 34 degrees (95F), then the wind rose to 60k an hour, I was on a mountain, and my trip was misjudged thanks to bad scale on a “tourist” map — it was 18km with the last half being uphill. So, I cycled the final 9km up that mountain, into the 60km/hr winds, in that heat, with what I thought was a fucked-up back. I took turns walking for a couple blocks, cycling a few minutes, et cetera. It took me two hours.

Later that night, my back felt better than it had in months.

The moral of my story is pretty simple.

Believe in your adversities and your challenges, push them for all you can. You’ll often be surprised at the result, and whatever does happen, you’re almost guaranteed to be stronger for it.

Life’s too short to ride the disabled list by choice, man. Get in the game.

[DISCLAIMER: But don't be a fucking idiot, right? Monitor yourself. Pay attention to your body. Don't do anything that feels like something's off. And don't even think of holding me accountable for anything stupid you might do to yourself as a result of this posting. I mean, seriously, I'm not a professional, I'm a chick on the web with good ideas about living life, but I sure as hell am NOT diagnosing YOU for anything over the web. Your brain's the best weapon you have; use it.]

This past week, I’ve figured out a structure for my book, and the start of the order of content and how to make it marketably different from most of the non-fiction offerings out there.

I want my book to be profoundly literate. I want it to be the best thing I ever write. It has to reflect all I’ve accomplished so far, and all I’ll accomplish in the next two years, as I finish this life-change dream I cooked up in the fall of 2007.

Whoa! Holditaminutethere! What book?

Right. When I decided I wanted to change my life, I also promised myself that, if I got even halfway where I dreamed of getting, I’d write a book about my journey.

For the first year and a half, I didn’t bother thinking much about it, I was too busy working on changing myself. But, New Year’s Eve 2008, I was trapped at home thanks to my bad back and record snowfalls, and I wrote a promise to myself that I would now have to fulfill that goal of writing the book, so the time was coming up when I’d need to start figuring out HOW to do it.

Here it is, 13 months later, and I’ve figured it out. All in the span of about 8 days.

I’ve come up with a very sophisticated storytelling structure that is going to demand that my flow and transition be better than its ever been, and that my six-degrees-worldview be sharper than ever, too.

Truth be told, I think my flow and conversational ability to slip in and out of topics is one of my strengths, so I don’t think this challenging way of telling my story will hinder me, but rather bring me out at my best… if I commit to the time it’s going to require. Which I can, and will.

By coming up with the way of telling the story, it now makes all the goals I’ve set in my life for the next year absolutely pivotal to accomplish. Not only that, but the way I want to tell the story also helps me figure out the order in which I need to accomplish my life goals for the next 18 months as well. Also?

In the span of 8 days, I’ve gone from wondering daily “How the fuck do I tell this story?” to believing I can write a book worthy of sparking discussion and passion. I believe in the story now, and since the story is about me, I have to wonder if it’s going to change the passion and belief I have for myself, and for the better.

I will learn more about myself through this process than any other process I’ve ever endured. It’ll be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, because of the honesty I’ll be forced to put forth. The book’ll be the accomplishment I’ll smile about until the day I die, when I get it done like I think I can.

I’m not sure I’m ready to start the writing yet. I think I’m going to, though. I’ve spent some time this afternoon plotting things out in an old-school lined notebook (see inset) and I feel great about having a starting point at all.

I didn’t know where to begin. I’ve had a lot of people make their suggestions about it. “Start at the beginning,” meaning where I decided to change my life. Others suggested the point at which I almost died on my scooter. But none of those felt real to me. I’m not an unskilled enough writer that I have to do the beginning-middle-end approach to anything I write.

And my beginning? Was a VERY dark place. I don’t want to start from the darkness; I want to start from a point at which everything has changed and, for the first time ever, I come to really believe it in my heart, too. I know when that time will come, and I’m very, very close to it.

But I don’t want to start at the beginning. That sounded smart for a bit, until I realized it was a bleak and obvious place to begin from. “Bleak and obvious” is not how I ever want this book to read.

There are a lot of writers who’ve used brilliant structure in a few books I’ve been wowed by, and they are:

• Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety
• Pat Barker in The Regeneration Trilogy
• Martha Cooley in The Archivist
• Jim Crace in Being Dead
• Alex Garland in Coma
• Zadie Smith in White Teeth
  

That’s barely even scratching the surface. Sure, they’re all fiction, but so what? That’s good writin’ for ya. Yes, I prefer really contemporary writing, and I intend to write from more of a fiction feel.

To feel like I’ve finally come up with a structure that pays homage to all the sort of writing that’s blown my mind over the years, it makes me feel fucking fantastic. Finally. Few people can probably relate what it’s like to go over and over and over an idea or a challenge for more than a year, on a daily basis, and never make any headway, and then, suddenly, boom, in the span of a week or so you make more progress than you thought possible, when the idea of achieving that dream at all was beginning to die… which, for me, it was.

I feel like I could sleep for a year, I’m so at peace with myself in this perfect moment, here, now.

That’ll pass soon, I’m sure, but what a great headplace to hang out in, if even for just a night after so long of banging my head against my inner walls.

Fuckin’ A. Yeah. I’ll drink to that.

This year, when adversities come your way — and they will — remember that quote.

That’s the one piece of knowledge that has gotten me through every experience in my life.

I’m not a self-help guru. I’m not one of these preachers of positivity and “yay, MANTRA!” people. They have their place, sure, but it’s just not my bag. I’ve been through too fucking much to just think you can smile every morning and it makes it better. There’s some degree of control you have over what you go through, absolutely, but there are times when just surviving that thing is more important than being all “I’m a Believer!” about it. Sometimes just surviving is the greatest thing you’ll accomplish.

Because, sooner or later, it stops being about survival, and then it becomes about journey and technique. How you do it, where you go. Then it’s a choice.

The only thing you can choose to do from the outset, though, is to remind yourself that 20, 30, 50, 70 years is a long damn time, and the experiences can be more than you’ll ever imagine in those times, and you can suffer your way through them or you can learn your way through them. THAT is a choice.

Let’s face it, every time I think, “No, that’s the worst thing I’ll ever experience” or “That’s the last time I ever make that mistake”, I’m wrong. I trump it. One, I’m human. Two, my capacity is infinite. So is yours. I know, now, too, that adversity’s capacity is infinite. Life is hard. It’s really hard.

I marvel over life’s ability to be so cruel yet beautiful to each of us. Endlessly so. It’s like that passage from the English Patient in which the Count says, “Every night I cut out my heart, but in the morning it was full again.”

Just when you think you have nothing, if you look closer, you probably have everything worth having. Then you can close your eyes and remember what people in Port-au-Prince have this week, and the daunting futures they have ahead of them, and their refusal to lie down and die — some hanging on for a week under rubble. Remember what true loss and overwhelming odds are as you go forth, hold that image somewhere, and remember it when you think YOU can’t go on. Because THEY could.

Adversity is how each of us learns. It’s how we’re given the tools to reach our best. It’s how we prove to ourselves which group we belong to when Darwin wrote of the “survival of the fittest”.

I know that more shit will rain down on me before my life ends, hell, probably even before my week ends. But so what? The more it does, the more I enjoy Little Moments of Good, and I realize how much I enjoy the simplicity of life — a surprise sunny afternoon, the right night with a bottle of wine, sleeping in with a clean house, dinner at a friend’s, a spontaneous encounter with someone that makes my day, literally stopping to smell a flower, a small stroke of good fortune, unexpected kindness, happening onto good music when out in the world, that point of the bike ride where I’m all loosened up and just flying over land, a scooter ride on a warm April day, shelter from a blustery winter storm, or even just two minutes standing in my slippers on my balcony as I watch a red sunrise spill over the land.

Life doesn’t need to be big and perfect to be great. It doesn’t need to be in a four-star hotel or Zagat-rated restaurant. It’s not about that shit. Life doesn’t even need to be easy, man. It doesn’t have to be problem-free to be great.

It just needs you to look past your bullshit long enough to remember that, no matter how tough or how endlessly frustrating life seems, in the middle of all that you can find 2, 5, 12 minutes to change the landscape of any given day. It’s your choice to find something worth admiring, experiencing, tasting, or remembering on any given day. You own that ability to give value to those things that you come across. If you choose to see life as a series of routines and obligations, well, it will be.

Eventually you learn that adversity and experience are actually the whole of life. They are what life is about. And EVERYONE has them. EVERYONE faces hardship. Some feel it more than others, some live deeper and more entrenched lives than others, and some take bigger risks and get hurt far more as a result than others. But, at some base level, most of us can identify with each others’ pains.

Our pains aren’t what make us unique.

Our capacity to enjoy life in the face of them is what does.*

*Me, I’m better than I used to be at it. And getting better still. It’s a life challenge, though, isn’t it? And it doesn’t need to be won in the first half.

But calorie burning and world-domination isn’t my goal this morning. My goal’s pretty simple this week — I don’t care at all if I lose weight or gain tone or burn fat. This week, it’s just about routine-establishing. Every day, a little something active. Every day, two healthy meals at least. Every day, the house is spotless before work and before bed. This is all I wish to achieve this week — routine.

When getting fit and thin and fab, don’t set yourself up for fail by going full-on-mode right off the bat. It’s hard to maintain it longterm. If you start by doing 10-20 minutes of good exercise EACH DAY, you’ll find yourself ramping that time up very quickly, but it’s the pattern of working out DAILY that will most benefit you.

All the things I’m doing this week, I did in February 2008, before I lost 50 pounds that year. I got my home under control, I started systems I could manage on a daily basis, and soon I was having success with all areas of my life.

It’s not about results this week; it’s about laying a groundwork for a new way of thinking and a plan for maintaining control and having consistent forward-moving results from this point on.

That’s this week, and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s going this far. At least my period had the decency to come yesterday so I can be done with all my physical hurdles come Saturday. Just slowly implementing a plan like this — daily activity, structured cleaning of the home, planning healthy food ahead of time — makes me feel so empowered.

You will feel it, too.

Seems to me too many people are all shame-filled about their ADHD. What the fuck is that about?

Here, take your stereotypes and shove it. Know what my ADHD doesn’t make me do? It doesn’t make me run around like I’ve had 42 coffees and have been mainlining coke and adrenaline, all right? It doesn’t mean I freak out on people. It doesn’t mean I can’t have a conversation with you. It doesn’t mean I can’t get to appointments punctually. It doesn’t mean I can’t be an awesome employee.

What it DOES mean is, I have organizational challenges that negatively impact my life and leave me predisposed to feeling overwhelmed and constantly daunted by the life in front of me. But that’s biochemical. It doesn’t mean I don’t BELIEVE I can do it all.

In fact, I’m getting really pissed off at the idea that I should somehow not admit I have ADHD, like I should hide the condition and pretend I’m “normal”.

Fact is? Without my ADHD, I wouldn’t be the writer I am. I wouldn’t have the wide range of artistic abilities with the keen scientific grasp of logic and philosophy that I have in spades, man.

The paradox of ADHD contributes greatly to the paradox of me — my odd mix of sensibilities, unpredictability, humour, quirky observation, talents, and wicked attention to detail.

Without my ADHD, I’d just be another person seeing the world through ordinary eyes. For whatever grief and challenge my ADHD put on me, its reward is the madcap swirl of perspective and hobbies that I live my life enjoying.

If you follow my crap on Twitter, you know I don’t shut up a lot.

I’m not on Twitter to be current on all the links or friendy-friendy with everyone. I’m there because it’s an extension of my writing. I record the minutae that I see around me, I comment on everything, I say things I probably damned well shouldn’t, and I probably blurt a lot of things most people barely have the guts to think and never say. Again, my Twitter stream is here.

Without my ADHD, you’d probably hear about me being in bank lines and eating Cheerios for breakfast, and not much more. The irrepressible impulses I get and the spontaneous outbursts I often have are just part of my “condition”.

In addition to that madcap swirl of thoughts? I’m also a fantastic cook, a wildly original home decorator, able to wield power tools, and garden, great at speaking, and more. I’m versatile and creative in pretty much every area of my life. I come up with original solutions to tricky problems at work and home. That’s part of ADHD, too — versatility, inventiveness, creativity, impulsiveness. It’s often all good if one can manage the other stuff.

Let’s face it, people. We’ve got to take the good with the bad with anything in life, but there is SO MUCH good that results out of the supposed “bad” of ADHD that I can’t tell you I wish I didn’t have this condition.

I LIKE the quirky, odd, strangely bright girl that my ADHD makes me. I like the fact that I surprise myself and make myself laugh with my observations of the world, but that other people seem to enjoy it too. I wouldn’t ask for anything else.

I may not be my ADHD, but my ADHD has helped to shape me into a more unique, more interesting person than I likely would have been otherwise.

Moral of the story? Don’t fight who you are. Make yourself the star of a play that suits your style in life.

It’s taken me a long, long time to realize that the things I used to hate about myself are the reason that all the things I love about myself are so strong. I’ve spent my life hating that I couldn’t get past my disorganization to get to a place of success. I’ve spent my life knowing that I’ve got a wicked sharp mind, an understanding of the public most people in some industries wish they had, and a way with words they can’t teach in school. And, yet, here I sit. All because I never knew how to control the one side of my life so I could maximize the other.

Learning that the two can, and do, play well together, but that I need to coach it out of myself, has been a fantastic lesson. I’m still learning and it’ll take a while before I successfully put it all together in a way that yields the results I want, but… it’s coming.Knowledge is power, and I’ve got the knowledge now.

Knowing my ADHD is such a gift helps me ignore the more “cursed” aspects of it. Understanding how much of “me” wouldn’t be a part of me without my ADHD? Helps me really decide that I need to learn to control it, because I fucking love the good it contributes to who I am.

Welcome to my journey.

Oh. And this may contain swearwords. Be careful of your fragile little vocabulary thresholds now.

Trendy these days is the acronym “FML”, short for “Fuck My Life.”

No, fuck your attitude if you’re saying that crap.

Forgetting your lunch is not “FML.” Having to deal with a friend you find annoying because you’re too pussy to deal with it, that’s not “FML”.

That’s “fuck, I’m dumb” or “fuck, I’m a pussy.” You’re to blame either way. That ain’t “FML”.

I’ve been pissed off about seeing “FML” all the time for quite a while now. I see it from spoiled rich kids who have a bad day, or people with ordinary lives who have victim complexes about every little thing that happens. I see it from people with more good luck in a week than I’ve seen in a year sometimes, too. I see it from people who blurt it without really thinking about what it means a lot. People are whining on Twitter about forgetting their lunch and tagging the comment with FML. Seriously?

And this week, THIS WEEK, I’m done.

Shut the fuck up.

People in Haiti? No food, no water, 10% of the country homeless, and the rest, their life just went from bad to shit in an instant. Now, no roadways, dysentery and other diseases soon arriving, live people still buried after 6 days, tropical summer heat and no shelter or shade in the most populated regions, relief having trouble making it in?

THEY can say “FML” this week. They’re allowed.

95% of the people who use it, though, can just shut the fuck up, grow some balls, and face life like the grown-up they ought to damned well be by now.

They’re like the existentialist whiners I hated in college. “Why me? Why me?”

Why YOU? Because it’s your turn. There’s no big mystery here, pal. Sometimes you’re the pigeon, sometimes you’re the statue. Life’s tough, get a helmet. Time to break out the shiny clichés, ‘cos anything’s better than “FML.” Fuck, man.

Fuck your life? Bend over.

When I went through seven years of endless shit, I never whined about “why me” or thought along the lines of “fuck my life.” Maybe I thought “my fucking life”… but never FML. I knew I was getting dealt shit, but I took it for the dumb sequence of bad luck it probably was, and deep down inside I believe it makes the odds that much better that I’ll enjoy the opposite one day — year after year of confusingly good fortune.

But, at this point, I just know what 7 years of mostly shit feels like. And that’s okay. I’m not the only person I know who’s had year after year of tough stuff chucked her way in a row. It happens. It happens a lot more commonly than I wish it did. And I’m not the only person who’s had a pretty resilient attitude through it, either.

Now, though, I feel all John Wayne-y and shit. It makes me feel like a fucking survivor of The Great Depression compared to the weak-ass sissy bitches I see cluttering up the works on the internetz. It just kills me when I see people justify being whiny just because “everyone’s doing it.”

It’s not okay. Words matter. Attitude is everything. You’re fucking with the VIBE, yo!

FML is whining. It’s pathetic. It’s INSULTING to people who really are facing terrible adversities. Those people don’t have the LUXURY of thinking “fuck my life.” They have to get up thinking, “There has to be a way that I can survive my day. There has to be a way I can pay my rent. There has to be a way I can beat this disease. I have to make it through today. Today will be okay.”

Seriously. I could go on and on about this, but let me set an example for you and just shut the fuck up. YOU: Find a better way to complain that doesn’t insult people who really know what a “fucked” life is. Get over yourself.

Life’s gonna stay tough. Get that helmet. And shut the fuck up about “FML”.