Cold as ice

I am in Thunder Bay visiting family for the holidays.  It is -28C raw temperature here - with the wind chill and humidex and such it would be far chillier than that.  We decided to take a walk along the river today to watch the ice and see what shape it had taken; every year is different.  You really have to wrap up properly under these sorts of conditions and though I managed to keep the rest of me warm the tip of my nose was not pleased about hiking through the woods on such a cold day.

We found an area where the river had a little bay of sorts and the water in the bay was shallow and frozen over.  We walked out onto the ice and managed to get quite near the edge where the fast moving open water began and while perhaps it should have been a nerve wracking experience it didn't work out that way.  My dad has lived rural for nearly his whole life and he knows what is safe and what is not, though admittedly my mom has too and their assessments of risk do not always quite agree.  At any rate he assured us that the ice under us was quite thick enough to be safe so we stood on the ice just 2 meters from the edge of the water gazing at the ice formations all along the river.

At the river's edge, standing on the ice, we found a couple particularly interesting formations - giant slabs of ice that were halfway on the shelf that held us and halfway in the water.  They were 2 by 3 meters and a good 20 cm thick, with one end dipping into the river and the other tilted up in the air, with the whole slab carefully balanced on the edge of the ice.

Of course we couldn't leave those slabs of ice alone!  We tried pushing them into the river and levering them up but neither really worked - instead we ended up accidentally snapping them in half and watching the half that was up in the air come crashing down and break into hundreds of pieces.  I had to grab those pieces and hurl them into the river, using them to try to smash other chunks of ice free to get them to float downstream.  I smashed many chunks of ice to smithereens and freed up some enormous pieces to float down the river.

It was glorious.

I don't know why smashing huge chunks of ice to bits is so satisfying, or why I feel compelled to get the ice moving downriver.  Sometimes I need to dam rivers and sometimes I need to watch them flow and carry all the things away.  Usually the river isn't quite so dangerous as it was today though.

Walking in a winter wonderland indeed.

Instructional video

I went and saw the movie Professor Marsden and the Wonder Women this week.  It made a big splash in the polyamory community because it focuses on the relationship between three people that happened roughly 80 years ago.  Polyamory isn't well accepted now, and it was far more fringe then.  I don't even know that they had words for it at the time.  The title character, Professor Marsden, was also the original author for Wonder Woman, hence the title.

After I heard about the movie I read a review of it by Franklin Veaux, who is a bit of a polyamory celebrity.  His review was brutal and he made it clear that he thought the movie was a disaster, particularly in terms of how it portrayed polyamory.  I went into the movie expecting it to be pretty bad, largely on the basis of the review.

It wasn't bad!  I wouldn't give it a stack of awards or anything but I enjoyed it perfectly well.  One of the main things that ground my gears about the show was it portraying lie detectors as being extremely effective at ferreting out the truth, which they are decidedly are not.  They are unreliable and should not be used in law enforcement.

My review of the movie largely depends on the perspective a viewer goes in with.  If you expect it to be an educational treatise on how best to conduct poly relationships it is an utter failure.  The characters do all kinds of crappy things to one another and they don't do poly right.  In particular there are a lot of instances of couple supremacy where the established married couple place their relationship as far more important and permanent than their relationship with the third person involved and she ends up being badly treated.

But seriously folks, this is a movie.  Nobody going into a movie should expect it to be an educational video on how to live properly!  Romcoms aren't good education in how to run monogamous relationships either.  Everybody has to make lots of bad decisions for the thing to feel realistic and be entertaining.  Calm discussions about boundaries and good communication do not make great entertainment.

I think Veaux's problems with the movie generally stem from him hoping that it would be positive poly activism and it doesn't do that particularly.  It does show a poly relationship that works, mostly, and bring a lot of happiness, mostly.  If you go into it with the idea of seeing how such a relationship might work you will probably be satisfied with it.

The movie won't teach you how to do poly right, but it might give you an introduction that grants some perspective and normalizes it a bit and I am perfectly happy with that.  Personally I am just happy to see models of poly behaviour in mainstream media, even if they don't show it off at its best.

Unfortunately very few people will see the film as it flopped in theatres and is now stuck in a tiny run. I wish that it had done better as it could have been an positive vehicle for poly exposure, but I won't fault the movie for that. It was fine, though never brilliant.

So if you want to see a movie about a polyamorous triad, Professor Marsden and the Wonder Women does that.  Don't go in expecting model behaviour though, and please ignore all the nonsense about lie detectors.

The decisions

It is the decisions in parenting that get to me.  It isn't the work - diapers and cooking and walks to the park aren't really my thing but they aren't hard.  It is the constant need to come up with answers and the challenge of never knowing if I got it right.

There is a lot of physical work in the process of raising a child, and I even have a deformed ribcage from carrying her around on my hip while she was tiny, and the doctor expects that to stay that way forever.  (Pretty normal for women, rare for men, not actually a problem either way.)  But those things are trivial compared to the challenge of making all the decisions required to bring up a kid.

Pinkie Pie hasn't been feeling well the past few weeks and has missed some school.   Sometimes this sort of thing is easy - child is coughing and sneezing, keep them home till it stops.  No big deal.  The trouble is when it is 'my tummy doesn't feel right' and 'my head doesn't feel right'.  I want to take care of Pinkie Pie if she really isn't feeling well, but I don't want her to just start talking about symptoms that she knows I can't check on every time she doesn't feel like doing something.

Is letting her stay home when she just isn't feeling right the correct choice?  How much should I worry about her schoolwork?  Should I force her to sit down and do assignments when she is home sick if she looks up to it but doesn't want to do them?

This is the part of parenting that beats me down.  I try so hard to get every decision right and not only do I lack the information to do so, I can't even look at my choices afterwards and figure out if I did things correctly.

Being a good parent, making these choices properly, these are some of the most important things to me.  I know rationally that once I give Pinkie Pie all her physical requirements and love and reasonable chances at mental stimulation that doing everything perfectly won't do much.  It is easy to destroy a person by being a horrible parent, but quite impossible to make them perfect by doing everything right.

But I still struggle with the sense that I am getting all these day to day decisions wrong.

On the way out

In my home it is taken as a given that books are a sacred thing, to be cherished and protected.  That is pretty much fine by me, as I like books.

But Wendy and Pinkie Pie go beyond that.  They don't just want to keep their books in good shape and have them around... they want books stacked on all surfaces, piled high in teetering stacks, threatening the safety of bystanders.

For them, hoarding books is a matter of necessity.

But eventually I get to the point where I can't even add a new book to Pinkie Pie's room because the bookcase simply will not accept more.  I suppose the threat of not getting new books because there is no place to put them is a real one for the two of them, so they finally let me go through Pinkie Pie's books and sort out the stuff that has to go.

This is what we decided to part with:

Note that all of these books came off of a single bookcase, and that bookcase is still currently full.  If you wanted to add any new books to it they would have to be stacked on top of other piles in unruly piles.  How it is that this many books managed to come off a single bookcase that is still full is kind of beyond me, as it seems like that shouldn't be possible.  Yet there is the evidence in front of my eyes.

Wendy and Pinkie Pie both struggle getting rid of things.  I, on the other hand, would love to get rid of about half of our things but they won't let me. 

Long term I suspect we are in a pretty good place in terms of this compromise.  If we did things my way I would certainly end up needing things that I had thrown out.  If we did things the way Wendy and Pinkie Pie want we would be tripping over all of our junk and never be able to find anything in the heap.  Our compromise leaves us mostly fine, with nobody entirely satisfied.  That seems to be how compromises go.

If you have a kid age 3-10 and want some books, sing out, I have them just sitting here waiting to be read.

What I really want

Recently I decided I should go look at gym memberships.  The Good Life gym right beside my place was the obvious choice, as I certainly won't commute serious distances just to work out.  A crappy gym right in my building is far better than a great gym a long distance away.

I knew that the salespeople you talk to when you wander into a gym were aggressive and usually annoying but this experience was weird.  The woman trying to sell me on a membership referred to me as a monster on two or three occasions - in a complimentary sort of way, suggesting that I am strong and powerful, but it was offputting.  I don't want to be buttered up like that.

I didn't buy right at the time, but the sale was ending in 1 day so I was under pressure to sign up to get a free month.  The next evening just two hours before the sale would end I wandered into the Good Life to try to sign up.  I had finally decided that despite the annoying salespeople I should bite the bullet and get a gym membership.  Unfortunately all the salespeople were gone by that late in the day and they couldn't sign me up so they promised to extend the sale for another day for me.

I wasn't shocked that they could randomly extend the sale - I am quite used to prices being flexible and vary by the whim of the seller.  It sure did take the pressure off though.

But I felt crappy.  I went home and played my semi final Blood Bowl match and my terrible mood caused me to play badly.  I just felt all out of sorts.

Finally I figured it out.  Though I logically had reasoned through why a gym membership made sense, I *really* didn't like the idea emotionally.  My money demon is stronger than my desire to get big, it would seem.  More importantly though I realized that if I am going to spend $830 on a gym membership maybe I should figure out if there is anything I would rather spend $830 on that isn't a gym membership.

If the gym isn't even the top of my list of priorities then I ought to buy whatever is on top instead, and stop when my purchases stop making sense.

When I looked at it like that everything changed.  I can think of lots of things I would rather spend $830 on!  I would rather buy a bunch of board games and computer games.  I would rather buy flights to visit people far away.  I would rather get an awesome tattoo.

So if I have not yet done those things, then getting a gym membership makes no sense.  Once I reasoned this out and decided to just keep going to my building's crappy little gym I felt lots better.

Sometimes raw emotional reactions are a good clue to lead you to the correct decision.  One day I hope to be better at the skill of figuring out when to trust my impending sense of doom and believe that there are good reasons for it.