More power

I have been lifting weights for three years now.  When I look back at the spreadsheet I maintained at the start of all this it tells me how much I lifted at the beginning and I can easily compare it to today, so my progress is charted relatively precisely.  At the outset my gains were extremely rapid, of course, and these days things are much slower, but improvement has not stopped.  Last summer I decided that I should add 10% to my reps for each exercise every so often, and I did that in August, October, and then again in February.  By the time this coming summer arrives I am sure I will be able to do that again, so I am on pace to add 40% to my rep count in a single year, which is a lot given how long I have been doing this.

I started out doing sets of 9 pushups, and now I am up to sets of 34.  My weight training has generally shown an increase ranging from 150% improvement to 200% improvement, and I can't argue with the numbers, but tripling my original strength does seem kind of nuts.

One reason these gains are strange is that my weight and size doesn't seem to track along with them.  I have added on about 13 kilos to my weight, just shy of 30 pounds.  That muscle is obvious, but my weight and size peaked more than a year ago and hasn't continued to rise.  I am still getting stronger, but nothing is changing visually, and my weight on the scale is generally flat.  I suppose that adding on more size is easy at the beginning, but eventually you have to rely on practice and training to improve the muscle you have, which is why improvements in performance take a LOT longer once you have been at it awhile.

The adjustments when I do push to increase my reps are hard though.  This past couple of weeks I have been adding in that newest set of increases and workouts feel terrible.  I have been nauseous and feeling gross a lot of the time during the workout because my body simply doesn't want to do this much in the time I am allowing for it.  This has happened before though, and I have always pushed through it and eventually gotten back to normal.  It just takes time to get accustomed to the new load.  Still, it sucks while I am doing it, no doubt about that.

I do find it odd to examine my motivation at this point though.  Since I am not getting bigger the motivation to look good is not really there.  I know that I can just cruise at the level I was at last year and look exactly like I do now - there isn't any impetus to work harder on that account.

I also have no need to push harder for health reasons.  I walk a lot and I lift for 40 minutes a day.  Lifting in general is good for me, lifting heavier is not bringing me any longevity or health.

All this increase in reps is doing is satisfying my desire to get numbers up and see regular improvement.  It isn't as though that extra strength becomes important in my day to day life - the world is not designed to require someone who can bench 350 pounds, a 300 pound bench is *plenty*.

But I keep on pushing for more.

I think that just maintaining what I have may be a difficult thing for me.  I want that improvement, those numbers going up, and eventually I will hit a wall.  I haven't yet for certain, but you can't just keep on adding 10% more reps every 4 months forever!  My age and physical limitations will stop me at some point.  I wonder, when I finally get to the point where more progress is simply impossible, if I will happily settle into a maintenance routine, or if I will stop at that point.  I suppose I will have to wait a couple of years to find that out.

Let's Talk

Bell's Let's Talk campaign is over.  This is a thing Bell does ostensibly to try to raise awareness and tolerance of mental health struggles, but which obviously is just an attempt to raise profits by improving public perception of their brand.

I have conflicting thoughts on this issue.

I do like the ads that Bell runs with people talking about their struggles with mental illness.  The stories may be fabricated, but they represent real sorts of problems and have an authentic feel.  Corporations trying to send a message of understanding and acceptance of mental health problems is good, I suppose, but the end goal isn't helping people, it is money.

So they end up spending tons of money not doing the thing they say they are doing, but just trying to find ways to impress people and get their brand out there.  They made lots of Bell Let's Talk hats, which is good for Bell, and rubbish for actually helping people.

It makes me think that we obviously can't rely on corporations to do good things.  They display traits and priorities that would be considered psychopathic in a human, but are simply accepted as the default state of a corporate entity.  My response to seeing splashy, expensive ad campaigns is that if companies have enough money to waste it buying enormous billboards and television spots then they need to be taxed more so that all that extra cash can be spent on useful things instead.  The existence of advertising is, to me, a confirmation that our model of economics and our assumptions about people's ability to make good decisions for themselves are deeply flawed.

This is especially telling when you read articles like this about the wretched ways that Bell treats its employees, disregarding mental health struggles, and in fact even creating them.  Shouldn't come as the least bit surprising though.  Bell, like all companies, exists to make profit.  Employee suffering doesn't change profit margins, so it is ignored.  If profits can be improved by punishing employees, then punish them, or so goes the corporate manifesto.

Talking about mental health is good.  Normalizing mental health struggles is positive.  Having a corporation do this, and do it to try to more money out of customers while not actually doing anything internally to promote good mental health, is a sad sign of the problems we all collectively face.

Big talks

It is hard to figure out how people will respond to my posts.  Sometimes I say things that seem like they will be controversial and nary a peep emerges, and sometimes I talk about some obscure philosophical point that I figure nobody will care about and it will turn into dozens of pages of impassioned argument.

Yesterday I posted about me cutting my uncle out of my life and all the years of terrible behaviour on his part that lead to that choice, and I wasn't at all sure what would come of it.  I could have had a bunch of people telling me that I need to give him more chances or time, denial of my memories, or even a direct, furious response.  I had no idea.

But what I got was a lot of comments and direct messages supporting my decision, as well as some people who have gone through similar things relating their stories.  I heard from a bunch of relatives and friends I speak to rarely telling me that they have my back, and that they were glad I did what I did.  No negative comments appeared at all.

This blog is sometimes just me posting for comedy, sometimes me trying to be educational, and sometimes me using it as therapy.  I hate secrets, and I will not be pinned into silence, keeping secrets to avoid people abandoning me.  If they can't accept what and who I am, then I have no use for them being around.  They like some other guy, someone who isn't me, and that isn't the sort of community I want.  They don't have to *agree* with me on everything, but I have no interest in misleading anyone important to me.

Yesterday was about therapy.  Putting the things I have been feeling for years down on digital paper gets them out of my gut, stops them from twisting me up, and gives me a feeling of tranquility.

I feel better for having done it.

But the responses I got also showed me that we need to do more of this as a culture.  There are people out there who desperately want to do what I did, but cannot for various reasons.  Those reasons are often relatives or 'friends' who will cut them out completely for refusing to put up with abuse, or talking about the effects it has.  Burying the shitty behaviour and refusing to address it is unfortunately really common, and it just ends up with abusive people who get even more awful because everyone collaborates to protect them.

I am going to struggle with the consequences of my choice at times, of that I have no doubt.  But after reading all the messages, both public and private, I am even more sure it was the right choice.  Pushing back has to start somewhere, and I cannot ask anyone else to do it if I won't.

Damage that never quite healed

I have had a lot of struggles and drama in the past few weeks.  It all surrounds my uncle Gary and my relationship to him.  I have a long history with him, much of it bad, and after my visit to my parents this January I finally snapped and had to do something.  People I have talked to about this have remarked on how this has big similarities with a lot of the #MeToo stories that have come to light over the past year or so.  I am a man, so it isn't going to be the same because the gendered element is important, but there really are a lot of parallels.

My uncle Gary has been an abusive bully to me as far back as I can remember.  Some really early memories I have of family celebrations involve him grabbing me, pinning me down, and jabbing at my stomach and chest hard enough to make me scream.  I am extremely ticklish so I was laughing and begging to be let go and wailing all together.  It was horrific to me, but he was always laughing, smiling, and seeming to have a wonderful time of it.  He seemed to particularly enjoy letting me go, pretending it was over, and then when I ran he would jump up to catch me just before I could escape and then pin me down and start it all over again.  I feared him then, because I never knew when it would start.  Like all long term abusers he figured out how far he could push it - if he did it constantly every time he saw me people would have stopped him, so he only did it occasionally.  You can't just go around punching strangers, because society prevents it.  But if you are generally likeable and friendly you can get away with regularly punching people you know because otherwise you are such a fun fellow - could it really be that bad?

But it was always there.  I was always frightened of going near him because sometimes he would lash out, grab me, and pin me down and make me scream.  The half of the room he was in was always dangerous, and he made it worse by regularly lunging at me but not actually grabbing me.  He thought it was hilarious that I flinched and jumped away, and made out like it was a game.

A little kid who is hurt by someone like that does not see it as a game.  It is terrifying, and the fact that he played it up just made sure that when he was around I was constantly worried, constantly on edge.  He had fun with the fact that he could make me jump and freak out any time he wanted.  He could just ignore it and focus on something else if he felt like it, but I couldn't.  If I ever stopped looking I would end up on the ground begging to be let go.

Things changed as I got older, of course.  He would sneak up behind me and pinch me or jab his hands into my sides or back. Sometimes when he came in from the cold he would grab my sides with his freezing hands, just to watch me jump and yelp.  He was quite strong so he took great pleasure in hurting me by crushing my hand when I had to shake hands with him, and body checking me into things.  I won't forget his face, and the feeling I got.  He sent the message that was stronger than me, that he was going to use it to cause me pain, and there was fuck all I could do about it.  It always felt to me like half of the reason he did it was to keep me constantly worried and paranoid so I could never quite relax.

Gary is a joke teller and a goof.  He loves to play the clown and entertain people with ribald humour, often poking fun at them directly.  If you are the sort of person who wants to insult people and is okay with being insulted back I can deal with that - my relationship with Naked Man is a lot like this.  But Gary, while he loved to insult others, has a very thin skin.  The few times in my life I tried to play back at him when he mocked me or belittled me he got angry and violent, making everything worse.  I learned not to do that, and that the only way to get by was to take whatever he was dishing out.

Once I tried to talk to him about it, to explain how upsetting it was, hoping that it would help, that he would see my point of view.  I don't recall the response precisely, but the gist of it was crystal clear:  The world is harsh, the things he was doing were just a game and not serious, and I need to get tough and deal with it because it wasn't going to ever be any different.

What do you do when faced with that?  When you tell someone things they are doing are hurting you, and they tell you that it is your fault for being hurt, and you know that you cannot win a fight against them, should it come to that?

You just put up with it, is what you do.  I couldn't get away, and I couldn't fight, so I gave in.  I learned to dissociate, so have that distant, grey, unreal feeling that allows people to cope when they are being hurt and they can't deal with the hurt.  Of course it isn't at all reasonable to lay it entirely at Gary's feet - the great majority of my pain and struggles in my early life were the horror that is other children.  But this sure didn't help.

As an adult the way he interacted with me changed, but the fundamental feelings did not.  I always felt a distinct unease, knowing that he would push boundaries, do things that I did not like, and that when he did my only option was to simply put up with it.  Over the years there were a couple specific incidents that enraged me but which I could do nothing about.

As an example, after Pinkie Pie was born we were visiting my parents and things were really terrible.  We were barely sleeping and were not functional.  Wendy had finally gotten Pinkie Pie down to sleep with me in the bedroom and she was crashing on the couch, desperate for sleep.  Gary came over to visit, was asked to be quiet because she was sleeping, and yelled and shouted to wake her up.  Gary has kids, he knows what that awful exhaustion feels like, but her suffering was irrelevant.  It was funny to him to refuse to let her sleep, and to stay around to visit, making sure she stayed awake.  What do you do with that, when you can't even tell someone "Hey, that hurt me" because they obviously only did it *because* it hurt you?

This past week Wendy, Pinkie Pie and I were visiting my parents.  Gary showed up unexpectedly.  I was not impressed, but I decided to try to just get through the visit and hope nothing bad happened.

But that was not to be.  Wendy was starting to go sledding down a steep hill and Gary rushed over to push her down faster.  She told him not to.  He did it anyway.  I just stood there, shocked that he would do that.  I shouldn't have been, of course, as this is the way he always is, but somehow I didn't react.  I knew that Wendy had brakes and could slow herself down so she wasn't in danger, but the raw disregard for her wishes made me angry.  Then when we went inside I was showing Gary my chest tattoo, trying to find some common ground to have a civil visit, and he called his girlfriend over and reached out and grabbed my nipple and twisted, hard.  I just stared at him and didn't flinch, feeling that familiar dissociation sealing me off from the pain, just like in years past.

Later on a few people were in the hot tub and Gary decided the thing to do was to throw snowballs at everyone.  Of course we couldn't throw back as we were in the tub, so he took great joy in pelting the kids right in their faces.  They were upset and didn't like it... but he thought it was absolutely grand. 

That is what prompted me to write this.  I can take all the nipple grabs in the world now, if I have to.  That primal fear is gone, because I am big enough and strong enough to fight him if required.  But what I can't take is the look of fear on my wife's face when someone lays his hands on her after being told not to.  I can't ignore the upset and worry on my daughter's face when she realizes that a man feels entitled to hurt her and she knows that if she objects he will just do it more.

Worse than that, she knows that her father didn't do anything to protect her.  That makes my gut twist, and that feeling is one I cannot allow to continue.  It isn't like the things that Gary did these few weeks ago were so hideous.  It isn't like Wendy or Pinkie Pie asked me to do this.  But the combination of my history and these actions is beyond what I can or will endure.

I am fucking DONE.  I can take Gary's childish abuse when only I have to endure it.  But I will never again stand by and allow him to hurt people close to me in the name of family unity.  I am cutting him out of my life for good, because the alternative is watching him go after my wife and child again, and having to choose between just watching them get hurt, or starting a fistfight.  Gary has made it clear that asking him to stop doing something is utterly pointless and a brawl will only make things worse, so this is the only option left to me.

You might ask why I bother to write this if I am going to cut him out.  What is the point?  The point is that when someone is like this, they usually hurt lots of other people too, whoever they can get away with.  I want them to know that they aren't the only ones, that it is Gary's fault, not theirs, and that they will have people on their team if they choose to do something about it.  Our society spends way too much time worried about the reputations of abusive men, and not nearly enough time confronting them with consequences for their actions, and this is part of my step to finally start fixing that shit in my own life.

Writing all this was gut wrenching and hard.  It wasn't hard to talk about the bad stuff that happened to me.  The hard part was figuring out what not to say.  I don't want to give a shit about Gary's reputation, but I don't want to exaggerate or give impressions that aren't true.  When the subject of men abusing kids comes up, everyone immediately jumps to 'pedophile!' but that isn't at all applicable in this case, and I don't want to suggest that it is.  On the other hand, why the fuck, after all these years and all this garbage that happened to me, am I the one twisting myself up trying to protect this guy from inaccurate accusations?  Why isn't that *his* problem?

There are always excuses.  Gary grew up in a rough and tumble household, with a father (my grandfather) who loved to sneak up behind people, grab them, and yell loudly to make them jump and scream.  He did that to me any number of times, so I know that this is how Gary lived at home.  But you can learn any number of things from this sort of upbringing.  Gary learned to tear down people who couldn't stop him from doing so.  The shit that happened to me taught me that you only touch people when they confirm that they want you to, because I know what it is like when you are on the other end of unwanted, violent touch.

I have no interest in excuses, apologies, or reasons.  At some point my question becomes "Can I live with this?" and for a long time I could.  I didn't like it, but I could live with it.  Now I cannot.  I am the sort of person who works hard to make things smooth, who puts enormous effort into finding ways around strife, but when I am finally pushed so hard that I simply cannot, I fucking burn those bridges.  I am done begging for mercy, I am done asking for kindness, and I am done enduring.  The pain and struggle of coping with a family member I am refusing to be around is less than the distress and upset of living with him, so that is what I am going to do.

There will be casualties of war, in this.  I know that family relationships will be pushed and strained.  I don't like that.  But I know that despite those challenges, I am looking forward to finally hitting submit on this beast of a post and having that decision be done, out there.  There will be a real sense of relief in finally having done what I have wanted to do for literally as long as I can remember.

Villainy

This past weekend I finished watching season 3 of Daredevil.  I loved the show up to that point, and the majority of season 3 itself was great.  The highlight of the show is definitely the villain, Kingpin.  The actor who portrays Kingpin does a fantastic job of being terrifying and evil while showing us a person who can be charismatic and smooth when it suits him.  Kingpin has no special powers aside from being extremely strong, so the fear he instills is about his ruthlessness, his audacity, his will, and his intelligence.  He is terrifying not because of magic or hand waved science, but rather because of his mind.

It is amusing almost to compare Kingpin to villains in other comic book shows.  In the Flash the villains are usually ridiculous and love to engage in standard terrible tropes - monologues, absurd threats, bragging, and other silliness are constant.  You can't be scared of them because they come across as so frivolous.

A real supergenious villain doesn't need to brag to the hero about how smart he is.  He just goes about his plans.  It is the oldest bit of advice in the book for writing - show, don't tell.  Having the villain tell the hero that the villain is super smart and dangerous is boring.  Write the villain doing something horrible and have his intelligence defeat the heroes easily - that is how you get me to believe.

Villains are honestly way more important than heroes.  I can get along with all kinds of heroes, but if the villains are weak, I lose interest.

Unfortunately the end of Daredevil season 3 was weak.  Kingpin goes back to prison, and the heroes celebrate.  But the entirety of season 3 taught us that in prison Kingpin rules all the prisoners, runs his criminal enterprise, and murders whoever he likes.  Prison only slightly slows down his crimes and body count.  So how is putting him back there a triumph?  It is obvious he will just do it again.

In a more cartoony version where nobody dies and a villain creates a doomsday device that the hero disarms just in time, prison feels like a reasonable solution.  In a gritty world with constant carnage, with a villain that still does whatever he wants from behind bars, how is prison a solution?  That conclusion was unsatisfying.

It seems other people agreed with me, and Daredevil was cancelled.  I guess that grittiness and darkness doesn't appeal as broadly as I had thought it would, or perhaps there was just something else that didn't resonate with people.

For those of us addicted to Netflix MCU superheroes, we can still count on The Punisher and Jessica Jones to deliver.  Admittedly The Punisher is more carried by the hero than the villains, but the first season of Jessica Jones is all about her foil, Killgrave.

I wonder if people would generally prefer my sorts of villains over the silly generic ones that so many shows produce.  I know what I like, but perhaps that isn't actually what most people want when they flop down on the couch at night.

Quinzee

I don't know if I am spelling quinzee right.  It is the sort of word that is usually said, not written.  A quinzee is made by piling up a stack of snow and letting it sit for a long while, usually a couple of days.  Eventually the snow packs tight and gets really solid and then you can dig it out.  We built a quinzee on my trip this past week, and it worked perfectly.

You can't see it here, but our quinzee had three doors in it.  We had some fun crawling through it, but pretty quickly we decided that it is cold outside and we should go back in.  I suppose we need some more kids around so they can spend all day zipping through the thing from end to end having no end of fun.  As an adult I had fun building it, but then was mostly done.

I really like the light in this shot.  I didn't take it though, this is Wendy's work.

I do enjoy getting to do this stuff in the snow outdoors.  Toronto has splashes of snow, just enough to make lots of slush and be annoying, but not nearly enough to do proper winter things like this.

On the other hand we don't have to cope with -35 weather either, and that is just grand by me.

Seven Fallen Feathers

On my trip last week I read the book Seven Fallen Feathers.  It uses the stories of seven young Indigenous people who died in Thunder Bay over only a handful of years to explain something much bigger - the way that Indigenous people in Canada have been terribly mistreated over many generations.

The book does not paint a good picture of Thunder Bay, my hometown.  Thunder Bay is the hate crime and murder capital of Canada.  Those hate crimes are overwhelmingly targeted at Indigenous people, and racism, when you are in Thunder Bay, generally means anti-Indigenous hatred and bigotry.

I knew that was true, to an extent, when I was younger.  I just didn't realize quite how bad it was.  Reading about how the kids who had to travel from far away reserves to Thunder Bay for high school were pelted with garbage from passing cars on a regular basis just sickened me.  Worse than that, a Indigenous woman died when people threw a trailer hitch out of a car at her just a few years ago.  It isn't just cruelty - this bigotry spills over into murder.

The way the police and other officials treated these cases was tragic.  When they found a Indigenous kid dead in the river, the police instantly declared it an accident and moved on.  Maybe it was an accident.  Hard to say, sometimes, and information was sketchy.  But they police made it clear that they weren't declaring it an accident because they did everything possible to determine the cause and that was the logical conclusion.  They declared it an accident because investigating the death of a Indigenous kid just wasn't worth their time or attention.  Those deaths didn't count.

When people call for Indigenous people to just work harder, get better, fix their own circumstances, they completely ignore things like this.  How do you get a job when people refuse to hire you?  How do you build a network of professional contacts in a big city when you have never seen things like a streetlight?  How do you trust in the police and other authorities when you know that if you were murdered they would just shrug, call it an accident, and forget about it?

All of that is compounded by the long term destruction wrought by residential schools.  Whole generations of kids were taken, literally at gunpoint, to schools where they were regularly starved, beaten, raped, denied their names, culture, and family support, and then dumped back in reservations at the end.  Even if they escaped the medical starvation experiments (conducted on Indigenous kids without knowledge or consent of them or their parents, naturally) and didn't die at school (many thousands did), how do you then build a life after that?

How the HELL do you excuse thousands of children dying at school?  I can't comprehend it.

Seven Fallen Feathers gives both an understanding of the history that led to the challenges Indigenous people face now, and current examples of how that situation plays out.  It is a hard book to read, but an important one, especially for white people in Canada.  Atrocities are not something that only happens in other countries.  They have happened here, and they continue.  We need to do more to repair the mistakes of the past, and prevent more tragedy in the future, and understanding the problem, both past and present, is key to that.