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Watch my life unravel...
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Then I went for a walk, while listening to Lake Woebegone podcasts. The sun was shining, the snow was sparkling, and I felt inexplicably happy. Twenty years ago – the last time I was looking for a job – I read somewhere that every job hunt looks something like this: no no no no no no no no no no no no no no yes. Times have changed. Nobody ever says no anymore. Now they just ignore you. I spend at least a few hours applying for each job. I visit the employer’s website, I tailor my CV to the position I’m applying for, and I write the best damned cover letter I can. And then? Absolutely nothing. Not even an acknowledgment that the CV was received. I know, I know, everybody’s stressed for time and they get hundreds of applications for every job they advertise. I’ve been on the other side of the desk too, and I do understand. But it’s been over a year since I’ve even had an interview. (Well, there was that government job with the multiple tests that led nowhere. I never got an interview, but at least they eventually told me I’d been eliminated from the competition.) A couple of months ago I came close to getting something. It wasn’t a job, exactly, but it could have formed part of a patchwork quilt of mini-jobs. An editor at a local newspaper contacted me. He said he’d been reading my blog, and he made me a proposition. If I would write them an op-ed, they’d publish it, and if all went well, they’d offer me an occasional (once or twice a month) paid gig writing op-eds about local issues. I wrote it, they published it, and everything went well. But when I tried to follow up, my emails went unanswered. I later found out on Twitter that the newspaper, for reasons unknown to me, had fired the editor who made the offer. Can you believe that?? I think I’m on the right track though. I need to stop looking for a job, and start looking for work. Lots of smaller organizations can’t afford to hire full-time writers, so they contract out their writing work to freelancers. I need to become one of those freelancers. I’ve got one regular client. If I could get three or four more, I’d have the equivalent of a full-time job. You know what’s ironic? In my old job we used to conduct research studies about the future of work, which amounted to short term precarious employment, contract work, no security, no benefits. And that’s what I’m now aspiring to. I haven’t done any Christmas decorating or baking yet, and I’m not sure I’m going to. Maybe I’ll put a red bulb in a lamp. I’m not sure it’s even possible to shoehorn a tree into this living room now that there’s a giant parrot cage in the usual Christmas tree corner. The bird is green and red though, so Ho Ho Ho. As for Christmas shopping, I’m almost done. I did most of it online. It’s funny how some people are so easy to buy for and others are so hard. I’m not even sure why that is. My son is always hard. He’s a civil servant by day and a DJ by night. He has a very lived-in apartment and three cats. He’s not into clothes or cooking or home improvement or reading. He loves mixing beats, listening to music and hanging out with his friends over a few beers. Sometimes I feel bad because I can’t think of anything to get him – I worry it means I don’t know him well enough or something. But he doesn’t even know what he wants. I ask him for suggestions and he draws a blank. He says he’ll think about it and let me know, but he never does. Last year I even asked some of his friends and his former girlfriend, and they couldn’t think of anything either. So I bought him a gift certificate, which he still hasn’t used. He’s just not very stuff-oriented, I guess. Anyway. He’s tough. I won’t tell you what I got him, because he occasionally reads my blog. But it’s something he would never buy for himself. (Which means it could be anything except sound equipment or beer.) GC, on the other hand, is very easy to buy presents for. I think I’d be easy too. Every time I’m looking for a present for somebody else, I see dozens of things for me. Families are so different in terms of traditions and expectations. I guess we tend to think of our own families as typical, until we hear about others. For example, I remember my mother being indignant about a lettuce spinner she received from her father’s girlfriend one year. “And that was supposed to be my BIG present!” she complained. Everyone would always get a ‘big’ present and several smaller presents in my family. I thought that was normal until I grew up and celebrated Christmas with other people. One family I knew made sure everybody went home with a gazillion little dollar store items. Another family’s tradition was that nobody bought anything – they would make gifts or give things from their own collections of stuff. In another family everybody exchanged envelopes of money, which was weird. The other day I was listening to Kathleen Petty’s morning show on CBC, and I heard Lucy Van Oldenbarnaveld talking about what her mother got her for Christmas this year: scissors and deodorant. (And there was something about leeches or leeks, both of which seem like unlikely gifts, so maybe I heard that wrong.) Anyway. I’m not decorating, sending cards, baking or going out caroling. I bought a really cheap frozen Butterball turkey on sale at Loblaws a couple days ago. Just a few little stocking stuffers to buy, and the pets’ presents, then I’m done. How’s your Christmas coming along? I’m starting to feel ever so slightly sorry for the Ottawa police. Not all of them, mind you. Just the good apples. The ones who don’t abuse their power, kick homeless people, strip sex workers naked in public, beat anybody up, or sexually assault women in their custody. And honestly, I do believe that there are plenty of cops who do their jobs in a respectful and professional way. Nat did this a few days ago, and I’m going to do it today: I’m going to name three good apples in the Ottawa Police Services. I’ve seen all three of these cops doing their jobs in a professional and respectful way, and I hold them all in high regard: Abdul Abdi As for the bad ones? No sympathy here. They disgust me. They’ve gotten away with being bullies for far too long already. They’ve coasted on our collective blind respect for authority, which makes us doubt the credibility of victims before we question the conduct of police. I’m disgusted with the police union, too, urging all the cops to “circle the wagons.” “Please continue to support each other and reach out to those whose names and We’ve all seen the videos with our own eyes. Frankly, it’s hard to care about protecting the reputations of those who stomp on other people’s basic human rights. I understand that morale is low and decent cops are feeling unfairly tarnished by all the police brutality scandals that are surfacing. But blaming the victims and supporting bad cops is not the solution. If they want respect within the community, they have to hold themselves and each other to a respectable standard of conduct. To be a good cop you have to be a decent human being. I think that’s a reasonable standard to hold all cops to. It’ll be a month tomorrow since Kazoo, the Double Yellow-Headed Amazon Parrot, came to live with me. I love how he makes me work for our relationship. A dog will just love you instantly and unconditionally. A cat will give you plenty of opportunities to make yourself useful. But a parrot is still a wild animal. It doesn’t have generations and generations of domestic evolution shaping its behaviour. You have to give a parrot patience and time. You have to respect its body language and its personal space. You can nudge the boundaries, but you must do it very, very slowly and respectfully. You have to earn your friendship. Every few days, Kazoo and I have another little breakthrough. Each one makes me so happy. Here are a couple of examples: Kazoo permitted me to pick him up right from the beginning, but he only recently started letting me touch him. (When I pick him up, his feet touch my hand, but that’s it.) About a week ago he started letting me stroke his head, but only through the bars of the cage and only for a few seconds and only with my right hand and only at bedtime. I was so touched by that initial expression of affection and trust. A couple of days ago, he started letting me sometimes touch his head when he’s out of his cage. He’ll sit on top of his cage and I’ll stand on a chair and stroke his head while he chortles softly to himself. The night before last, he even let me cuddle him in my arms while stroking his head. I felt like Dr. Doolittle. Kazoo has a very different relationship with GC. He thinks GC is a lot of fun. Whenever GC comes over, Kazoo makes a great big noisy fuss and says all his words at the top of his lungs. And GC makes a great big noisy fuss too, and the two of them get all excited for a few minutes. But he doesn’t let GC touch him much. Kazoo eats dinner with us every night, because it’s important for flock animals to eat with their flock mates. He has a parrot stand at the table, and we put food in his dish. We’ve even started bringing Duncan’s dish to the dining room at suppertime, so he can eat with us too. (Duncan has always attended suppertime, but never with his bowl until now.) Kazoo is 13 years old and all he’s ever eaten is parrot pellets and peanuts. Every day I serve him a bowl of chopped fruits and vegetables (and a couple of peanuts) for breakfast, along with his bowl of pellets. Every day he eats the peanuts and pellets and ignores the rest. But one day he ate a snow pea! I can’t even tell you how thrilled I was. And now he’s eating wedges of Granny Smith apples too. He’s a surprisingly delicate eater, by the way. It takes him about 15 minutes to eat a wedge of apple. He holds it with his foot and takes tiny bites with his beak. It’s very sweet. In other bird news, Billie and Lester, the original grown-up lovebirds from the Humane Society, have laid five more eggs. They’re due to start hatching on December 18th. And Oboe, the littlest lovebird, has a new cage. He’s still in the same room with the other lovebirds, but he has his own cage. They all get out a couple time a day to socialize and play together. It’s working out well. Also, GC built Oboe a training perch, and now that I’ve got my voice back, I’m going to start regular trick-training sessions with him. I went to someone’s house a couple of days ago to buy some second-hand bird toys and accessories, and they have an African Grey, an Umbrella Cockatoo, some Quaker parrots, a Conure and some barking dogs. It was a very lively household! Police Chief Vern White has left the country to attend his own wedding and honeymoon. The timing is pretty awful, but he had no way of knowing in advance that his wedding date would conflict with the breaking loose of all hell for the Ottawa Police. David Reevely says the Chief should have stayed home. That’s why we pay him the big bucks. “Walking away from a crisis will haunt you,” he says. I often agree with Reevely, but not this time. I think the Chief managed the crisis as best he could while he was in town, and then he left it in the hands of a trusted deputy and those in charge of the investigation. This is a big problem and there will be ample opportunity for the Chief to continue dealing with it after his honeymoon. While Stacey Bonds was a catalyst for a crisis of public confidence, her experience was just one symptom of a more deeply rooted chronic problem with the Ottawa police. White wouldn’t be able to solve this problem by staying home and dealing with; it’s not something that’s going to be resolved quickly or easily. Besides, the last thing the Chief needs is to start his marriage off by not getting married. Then he’d have a crisis at work AND at home. The wedding was planned well in advance (I assume) and in another country…the cost to him, and all the guests, of a postponement would be formidable. Maybe his job ought to be his highest priority almost all the time – but I think his marriage should come first on his wedding day. What do you think? (If you’re reading this in a feed reader or email, you’ll need to pop over to knitnut.net to vote.)
Coincidentally, I know a family who, just a couple of weeks ago, were all planning to go to a wedding in Mexico. It was the eldest son’s wedding. His parents and siblings were all going, as were hers, plus friends and other relatives. The day before they were scheduled to fly to Mexico, the youngest daughter died. (She’d had lifelong health problems, and she died of natural causes, but I think her death at this time was unexpected.) So the family faced this weird dilemma. Go to Mexico and celebrate the wedding and try to delay grieving. Or delay the wedding and stay in Canada and grieve. There were complicating financial factors (none of them has a lot of money) and some of the guests had already arrived in Mexico. What would you do? Remember last week I said I had showbiz connections and they were going to be instrumental in catapulting Oboe and me to fame and fortune? Well, I was delighted to discover they just released their much anticipated Christmas video today, and it’s got everything you could possibly want in a Christmas video: creative genius, state-of-the-art puppet wizardry, a brand-new and very catchy Christmas carol, and a cowbell! All that and a knitting needle too! In other news, I went to the doctor’s yesterday and I’ve been high on prescription cough syrup ever since. I’m still coughing but I no longer care. POWER (Prostitutes of Ottawa Work Education Resist) today released a fascinating report about the conditions, context and challenges faced by sex workers in Ottawa, with particular emphasis on their experiences with the Ottawa police. In light of the findings of this report, POWER has asked the Ontario Human Rights Commission to conduct a public inquiry into the Ottawa police’s systemic discrimination against sex workers. “Sex workers are criminalized for providing consensual sexual services – something that is not criminal.” This report is based on interviews with a wide range of Ottawa sex workers, including those who work on the streets, as well as dancers, escorts, massage workers, and so on. It includes men, women, transgender, straight and gay sex workers, ranging in age from their 20s to 50s. Most sex workers in this study reported generally good working relationships with their clients. They describe their clients as “normal guys” and do not feel they are being exploited. Some individual clients may provide challenges, such as intoxication, poor hygiene, or blurring of the professional/personal relationship (ie he perceives it as more of a personal relationship over time, whereas she still perceives it as a professional relationship). For male sex workers, there can be issues around maintaining an erection when not attracted to a client. But the far greater challenge reported by sex workers is not the clients, but the police. 171 female sex workers were murdered in Canada between 1991 and 2004. Many more (especially street-based sex workers) were subjected to other forms of violence, including rape. Violence is, therefore, an issue of concern to sex workers. The report addresses the question of whether violence is inherently an occupational hazard for sex workers, or if it is, instead, a consequence of the criminalization, stigmatization and marginalization of sex workers. This is a critical distinction. Like the drug question: is it illegal because it’s dangerous, or is it dangerous because it’s illegal? The report also distinguishes between situational violence and predatory violence. The former may occur when, for instance, there is a dispute over payment and the client resorts to violence. The latter may occur when a predator poses as a client in order to gain access to a victim, with the pre-meditated intention of doing physical, sexual or financial harm. Predators target sex workers at least in part because they work in isolation and they work in a quasi-criminal occupational “grey zone” – ie, outside of police protection. If they are assaulted, they’re considerably less likely than most victims to report it. This is because some don’t know their rights, and many anticipate the “just a whore” mentality from police, which is often based on their own previous personal experience. This “just a whore” attitude may stem from social profiling, which is like racial profiling, but based on social status rather than skin colour. It occurs when police (sometimes inadvertently, sometimes not) classify people according to stereotypes, and then discriminate against them because of it. Sex workers are not the only group to experience social profiling; homeless people also experience it. Certain categories of sex workers experience it more than others. It’s ugly. Chapter Five of this report is particularly harrowing. Sex workers report being assaulted by police, as well as experiencing verbal and physical harassment, call-outs, outings, illegal detainment, violence, ‘starlight tours,’ seizure of condoms and theft or destruction of property at the hands of police. They describe being strip-searched by groups of male officers, as well as having their clothing physically removed by police in public places, such as outside the Shepherds of Good Hope, or on Bank Street, in front of Hartman’s. Because they are so poorly regarded and treated by police, street sex workers are understandably unwilling to turn to police for help or protection when needed, or to report being victims of crime. If you’d like to learn more, the official launch of this report will take place at Venus Envy on Lisgar Street, at 6:00 tonight. I’ve been flattened by some disease. I don’t know if it’s a cold or a flu, but it has all the bells and whistles – fever, sore throat, throbbing gums, blocked ear, soul-racking cough, occasional vomiting, laryngitis. And THEN – on top of all that – I got a colossal three-day migraine, which finally ended sometime yesterday. Today the inside of my head still feels bruised and tender from the migraine, and puffy from the blocked ear, and I still have most of the other symptoms, but I feel much, much better than I did when the migraine was in full swing. Needless to say, there’s not much news to report. I have, over the past ten days of illness, read a few books. The Tiger. Room. A Cure for Death by Lightning. Slow Fix. And now I’m reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog. And there’s bird news: 1) Oboe (the littlest lovebird) takes showers with me now. That’s it for now. There are two things going on tonight that you might want to know about. 1) The annual Great Big Smalls art show and sale is on at the Cube Gallery. This is my favourite art show of the year, and the vernissage is tonight. 2) (Prostitutes of Ottawa Work Educate and Resist) is launching a report tonight at Venus Envy. This report – based on interviews with sex workers – explores the context, working conditions and challenges of sex workers in Ottawa, including their experiences with the Ottawa Police Services. Should be very, very interesting…not to mention timely. Looking at my recent web stats – particularly the keyword searches that bring people to this site – I see that I’m getting a big spike in traffic from people googling police brutality in Ottawa. They’re coming from all across Canada, as well as the US and other countries. And they’re coming, of course, because of the Stacy Bonds case. Stacy Bond’s experience may be shocking to those who previously believed the cops really are the good guys. Unfortunately it’s not an unusual story. I’ve heard it – and worse – from a number of people who have been assaulted by police and corrections officers. The only real difference is that in the absence of video evidence, it boils down to ‘their word against yours’ and it’s a lot easier to give the benefit of the doubt to the police. After all, the police rank much higher on our collective hierarchy of credibility than criminals. I even find my own natural tendency is to give more weight to the police version of events, and I know better. In this case there’s video evidence to back up the prisoner’s version of events, along with a judge’s outright condemnation of Stacy Bonds’ treatment at the hands of the Ottawa Police. And this means that all kinds of people who previously believed in the system, and who believed that the police are the good guys, are having their eyes opened. Because if the police will gang up on and brutalize a small woman with no criminal record in full view of their own video camera, then they’ll do it to anyone, anywhere. Some people will still maintain that this is a case of a bad apple. If that were true, there would not have been five officers actively participating in the acts committed against Ms. Bonds. Some of them would have refused to participate, or would have objected, or would have reported the abuse after the fact. The fact is that every officer visible in that video was an active participant. This suggests that this manner of treating prisoners is common, if not routine. Conducting an investigation into the alleged brutality is a good start, but it’s not enough. If you look back on my Bank Street Bully experience, you can’t help but wonder how one tiny woman ended up unconscious at the hands of Ottawa police officers. The subsequent investigation resulted in no action taken against the officers involved, because there was no evidence. This is not unusual. An internal investigation that yields no evidence and results in no action is a typical outcome. Same thing with an SIU investigation. I very much hope that Stacy Bonds is the catalyst that brings some much-needed and long-overdue changes to the way people are treated while in police custody, the way the police are policed, and the way allegations of misconduct and brutality are investigated. Anything less will result in more of the same. |
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