Ho-Ho-Homo...

This is our first family Christmas card.

 

Tinkle and Marvin were in most of the shots, but they failed to make the cut. This was the shot we ended up selecting for our holiday cards. 

 

There are some special details I'd like to point out, in case you missed them on first perusal.

 

 

1. Lisa has her hands in the ASL sign for "I love you" which is both appropriate for the season and sensitive to cultural diversity.

 

2. I am wearing my fuzzy bomber style thingie, so this post ties in with last week's post nicely. How's that for continuity?

 

3. Our reindeer on the mirror are meant to look like us. The one with the wonky eye/crooked tongue is Lisa. The lovely symmetrical reindeer represents yours truly.

 

 

4. We made stockings. They match. And have rainbow hanging loops. How gay!

Enjoy the holidays... (watch this!)

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10152416373330157

Newfound-Homo Headgear

Once again it's been over a week since I've posted. This work thing is really getting in the way of my blogging.

Sheesh.

Anywho, there is a serious matter I've been pondering, worrying about, meditating on, discussing, mulling over (and comparing and contrasting in my head in essay form).

HATS.

This is the first in a series of posts about hats. I have lots of thoughts to share about headwear.

a) LESBIANS LIKE HATS A LOT.

See?

SEE???

SEE??????...
oh wait, nevermind.
That's not a lesbian...

b) NEWFOUNDLANDERS LIKE HATS A LOT.

See?

SEE??????

Living on the West Coast, I wore hats for aesthetic appeal.

Living in Newfoundland, I wear hats because my hair/ears/neck and jaw areas not covered by my scarf will die and drop off in the freezing wind if I don't.

On my 5 km forced marches to-and-from work (at 7 am and 8 pm...sucks to be me), I ponder the merits of the various hats in my collection (particularly the one I am wearing at the time).

The perfect hat is hard to come by.

Let's discuss our options (as both lesbians and people with cold heads):

HAT OPTION OF THE DAY: The GIgantic FUrry Bomber-Style ThIngie

First of all, I have one. It was a surprise, I-bought-you-this-for-no-good-reason present from Lisa and I love it.

-It is made from recycled polyester, so all the animals are still alive.

-It is a warm and sturdy and furry piece of head-loving goodness.

-It snaps under the chin, it muffles sound and makes it easy to ignore loud children and unpleasant strangers.

Well suited for snowy trips to the coffee shop. Also stellar for hanging out around the house on days when the furnace blows.

And best of all, this hat DOES. NOT. BLOW. OFF. Important when living in the middle of the Atlantic.

I also don't look at all like a lesbian in this hat, so I would wear this one to church.

Downside...and I learned this the hard way: this hat is not suited for physical activity of any kind. Panic will ensue, because you WILL feel all hot and sweaty and restricted. And arrive at your destination with sweat-soaked, plastered-down limp spaghetti hair.

Yep. Pretty accurate.

COminG Next WeeK... Fantasticle Lesbian Kristmas Speshul!

(and more hats...)

How many times until I'm really gay?

Well, I haven't posted in an entire week. I have a job.

 I was all worried about not having any work, and was concerned about my ability to contribute to my partnership and household and the community and society in general.

Now I'm working and I have changed my mind.

Working is less fun than I imagined.

I miss scheduling my days around coffee shop blogging (I'd finally found the trifecta of decent soy lattes, friendly queer baristas and fast wifi at Hava Java), runs and soup-making.

Lisa likes Hava Java too. 

Sigh.

So now I am working as a child and youth worker. Pay is okay. 12 hour shifts, so I work 7 shifts biweekly and have lots of days off...but there are incredibly sucky mandatory night shifts.

The first twelve hour overnight 'awake' shift wasn't bad initially. The kids were asleep, I was hanging out with a sarcastic, intelligent and interesting coworker, and they have all the movie channels. It was kind of like a sleepover. I couldn't believe I was getting paid to hang out and watch TV.

 For the first six hours. 

And then at 2 am I started yawning. And checking the time on my iPhone every five minutes. I tried sitting in uncomfortable positions, pinching myself, and contemplated taping my eyelids open in order to stay awake.

By 4 am I felt like crying, I was so exhausted. Apparently I am old, and my body doesn't want to do all nighters. I made it through, but was a zombie for two days afterwards.

I learned a few things: 

1. I must nap for at least two hours before shift, and at least two hours when I return home in the morning.

2. Bring lots of food and activities (though nothing involving any brainpower or fine motor skills). If you are going to make me stay awake all night, there had better be some gluten free brownies and trashy magazines involved.

3. If I can make it to 6 am, I'm golden. The end is in sight, children begin to rouse, and I start to get my second wind.

During that lethal period from 4 until 6 in the morning I would sell Marvin for a twenty minute nap. Well, I'd give him away actually, but you get my point.

It's an upside down Marvin! This is what we do instead of enemas now. Shake it out of him...

Night shifts are lame, but by far the most uncomfortable part of the new job experience is having to come out all over again to a whole new set of strangers on every shift. This coming out thing is new to me...and I am beginning to realize that divulging my sexual orientation is a constant and complicated process.

So far I've worked 10 shifts in 7 different homes with 10 different coworkers.

There is that inevitable question during the first half hour getting-to-know-your-shift-partner phase.

"What brings you to Newfoundland?"

Fair enough. St. John's is not really somewhere that people move to just for a change of scenery. I am here because my girlfriend is here, and I had nothing better to do than follow her.

End of story.

The dilemma comes when I have to decide whether to tell the truth, or make up some lame story about cheap tuition (a nice side bonus, but not ultimately why I am in St. John's).


Coming out over and over and over (and over) at work is tricky. At first it was like ripping off a band-aid. I was loud and proud and very upfront about my same-sex partnership, and pretended not to notice any awkwardness that I created.

But you know what happens when you rip off a band-aid in the same place repeatedly? Skin irritation. Chafing. Open wounds. Cascading rivers of blood.

It's uncomfortable, and I'm a wuss.

And because I'm a wuss, sometimes I lie by omission.

I lie by omission when I use the term "partner" to describe Lisa; it is gender-neutral term, and I use it when I want my sexual orientation to remain ambiguous. Because I don't explicitly state that my partner is a woman, whoever I'm talking to can create a story about me that makes them comfortable.

This makes me a bad homosexual, but it saves me the unpleasantness of having to work 12 hours with someone who is clearly either:

a) going to be convinced I am going to hell.

 or 

b) going to be convinced I am hitting on them. Because as a sexually deviant lady-lover, sitting too close, giving compliments, asking non-work related questions, smiling, any form of hair or clothing adjustment or making eye contact can all be interpreted as propositions.

or

c) both a) and b)

 What I need is some kind of non-invasive but easily recognizable queer identifiers... let my coworkers draw their own conclusions. Maybe I'll get some rainbow stickers for my laptop and cell phone. Or rainbow shoelaces, t-shirts and water bottles...hmmm.

How to give a Brain-Injured Cat an Enema

Last week Marvin just about kicked the bucket. It was exciting, for all the wrong reasons. 

Sunday: I knew Marvin was probably dead or dying when I woke up naturally to sunlight instead of feline carcass breath.

Marvin is barf-a-rific at the best of times. I think this has to do with his brain damage, and oversized teeth (and his consequent inability to chew properly).

But this time he was all pukey and listless because he hadn't been able to do his kitty business in the litter box in a while. A loooong while. And constipation is Marvin's #1 nemesis. Combine that with his tendency to swallow strange things and you have a vet's wet dream.

Now, Lisa has recently spent a ridiculous amount of money on this cat. Her cross Canada drive with cat co-pilots cost her a bazillion dollars
(she probably could have gotten a gold-plated Marvin likeness for the same amount she spent on vets).

So she was understandably unenthusiastic at the idea of paying another vet more hundreds of dollars to shove warm water and lube up Marv's butt.

Sunday night: Marvin hadn't moved or had anything to eat or drink all day. I was pretty sure he was a goner. Lisa finally phoned the vet, and she suggested we could try giving him an enema ourselves, if he would let us. Since he was barely breathing, it seemed a fair bet that he would let us.

I can haz enema now?

Some things we learned:

-Cat enema = two person activity

-Cat butts have two parts, the external sphincter and the internal sphincter. It's like a porch. If you only get past one door with the nozzle, you're just squirting in water to have it squirt out again.

-The feline patient's official human mother must attend to the nether regions during this two person process; stepmothers do not have to touch step-cat-child anus, regardless of how many suppositories they have administered professionally to humans. 

(Failure to respect this rule may result in a discussion where outside voices are used)

-One home enema is not necessarily enough. Nor is two. Or three.
As it turns out, Marvin likes enemas. Or at least he tolerates them while purring. Therefore, I suspect Marvin may be a feline of the homosexual persuasion.

In the end we had to take Marvin to the vet. In a Rubbermaid container, because he doesn't have a cat carrier (Lisa believes in attachment kitty-rearing). The lucky Marvinator got another (perhaps more thorough) enema. And had his anal glands squeezed.

And Lisa spent all of her birthday money a month before her birthday at the vet on Marvin's bum...

Gaydar lessons...

Today I started writing about Marvin's recent near-death experience (hint: it involves Marvin's devoted moms administering feline enemas, and explains why I haven't posted in four days), but I decided to save it for later. 

Because something awkward keeps happening to me, and I don't know what to do about it.

I can tell she's gay by the way she eats french fries with a fork.

It wasn't happening before, because I used to have no Gaydar. Lisa has been coaching me, by subtly indicating with an agreed upon hand signal (a sneaky little 'L' sign) every time we see a female member of a sexual minority.

Now my girl Gaydar is improving, and I keep seeing other lesbians. It happens daily now...

I am walking down the street and I spot one.

The Gaydar goes off. 

We make eye contact.

And we both know that the other one is gay, and that makes us have something in common, even if we have nothing in common.

The ability to identify gayness is new and shiny to me, like a superpower I want to exercise.

And I'm all like "Hey! Hi! There's another one! Hey! I like ladies too! Wanna be my friend?" (usually I keep this part to myself).

The dilemma is this: do I wave, wink or say hellooo, simply because we are both part of sexual minority? Or do we ignore each other, because to acknowledge each other would be to acknowledge that homosexuality is still a thing that needs acknowledging???

I'm conflicted because I hate labelling (even if it is fun when I accurately label people).

 None of this would even be an issue if I was a genuinely friendly person who was used to making contact with strangers. But I'm naturally pretty reserved, and wouldn't say hello to random heterosexual strangers. And I like my behaviour to be consistent.

Also, my Gaydar is a work in progress. Sometimes, I am wrong. And then I end up smirking knowingly, waving and winking inappropriately at straight girls who are innocently going about their daily lives.

And St. John's isn't that big. Soon I could become known as that aggressive imported bisexual who goes around lecherously tipping her cap at married women.
 

Ackkk.

All of this. Yes. That.

(I heart scrabble, only Lisa and I would be playing on our phones, because neither of us wants to clean up the letters after)

1/2 c Homo Milk.

People in St John's eat crappy food. It's a generalization, but it's a fairly accurate one. All of the supermarkets have teeny tiny dismal organic food and produce sections, and endless aisles of packaged, processed, diabetes/heart attack/obesity inducing foods.

On Wednesday, Lisa was asked to fill in teaching a cooking class at the Dominion (the big supermarket chain here). They have a community cooking program, and hold free classes. She did it because it was 100 bucks for two hours of work, and because she likes to cook. I was instructed to attend, and because I don't want to sleep on the couch, or in the furnace room with Marvin, I did.

I like to cook quite a bit, and I like to talk about food even more, so I ended up jumping in and helping teach.

We were given three recipes to create, none of which were vegan or gluten free. These dishes pass for Newfoundland health food.

1. Yam slices marinated in dressing and stacked with fried onions, flavoured cream cheese and toasted pecans

This isn't our version, but it looks the same. A chicken lasagna heart attack...mmmm...
But apparently it's diabetes-friendly!

2. Chicken lasagna noodle roll-up thingies with parmesan cheese sauce

3. Poached pears with Cool-Whip, nuts and graham cracker crumbs. Um. Edible oil products...I guess that's vegan?

The class was for Diabetes Awareness Week, and was sponsored by Kraft (The irony of this was not lost on us).

Lisa and I did our best work, talked about low glycemic natural sweeteners, and stevia and coconut oil and cinnamon and the importance of eating organic. Most old people are great students. They were there to socialize, but they were also there to learn, and they all hmmmed and nodded and diligently took notes.

All but one... 

Her name was Veronica, and she was at least eighty five. She had been dragged there by her daughter, was not there to learn to cook, and told me she was too forgetful to bother trying to absorb the health tips we were sharing.

She was there to make us listen to her, and to complain about the food. She cheerfully ignored my attempts to engage her with the cooking class, said she hated cooking, and prattled on about her life growing up on a potato farm (in a dialect that only remotedly resembled English).

Veronica told me her mother always cooked the food for her growing up, and then she had a daughter as soon as she was married and got her mother to teach her daughter to cook so she didn't ever have to. And she didn't intend to ever have to.

When it came time to eat the food, she couldn't find her fork, which was sitting beside her plate, and her daughter didn't seem likely to help her, as she was preoccupied with her own food.

So I sat down beside her, and handed her the fork, and waited while she simultaneously talked and toothlessly gummed her food.

While eating the yams, she picked out every single nut with a look of disgust on her face and put them in her napkin. She then turned to me and said,

"I dunno wot dem herd tings arr me love, but dem is not cooked troo"

And made a move to throw a pecan half at Lisa, who was still standing at the front of the room. Her daughter caught her and glared, and Veronica meekly lowered her arm, whispering to me,

"I better watch meself. Dat dotter of mine dere is in corrections, me love, and she might put her old maam away if I don't behave".

Veronica then proceeded to carefully pick around the green lasagna noodle in the rolls, and stage-whispered to me that she'd never seen chicken rolled up in potato skins, and didn't we know that you shouldn't use the green potatoes anyways. They were "tough as anyting" and "unfit to eat".

Her daughter tried to convince her that the green stuff was pasta, but Veronica wasn't buying it.

She also had complaints about the flavour of the chicken, the "little chewy red bits" (red pepper), the "spider's legs" in her poached pear (finely chopped rosemary).

At the end of the meal, Lisa asked everyone for feedback. Veronica plastered a big fake grin on her face, and chimed in enthusiastically and untruthfully,

"The best part was all of it! Twas all good!"

Old Newfoundlanders are good liars.

After the class was over, the coordinator asked if we would be into hosting more cooking classes, of the vegan and gluten free variety....Heck yes!!! And we get to pick the recipes we make. So we will go, make dinner, talk about making dinner, eat dinner, leave and get paid a bunch of money.

HOMO MILK! She gets a silver medal in lasagna roll up thingies!

 It looks as though the two of us have accidentally embarked on a side career as bona-fide cooking experts. Next project will be our youtube cooking channel (program name to be determined).

I think I'll ask Veronica if she would agree to a guest spot on our show.

HIRE A HOMO!

I've been looking for a job. For thirty nine days, I have been handing out resumes, filling out endless online applications (that want to know everything about me including what brand of dental floss my sister uses), writing cover letters and tweaking my resume fifty different ways to make me sound more capable than I actually am.

I have never had to apply for a job before. Not really. I've been asked to apply for jobs, by people who know me, and know that while I may be a bit socially/physically clumsy initially, I'll do a good job, because my momma raised me to be an upstanding citizen.

Thirty two online applications later, I finally accepted that applying for jobs online was a waste of my time, because no one knows me. It was a shock when I realized that no one will know who I am unless I tell/show them in person.

C'mon. Who wouldn't want to hire this?

Dang.

I did make it to the final round of interviews for a job I didn't want, that involved selling cars, and training other people to sell cars. I made the mistake of trying to explain during my interview the concept of run-commuting, and they didn't get it. I'm pretty sure I short-circuited my interviewer's brain with that one. I think I still coulda landed the job, but opted to withdraw my application...

Why?

Well, the salary sounded doable until I found out they expected management trainees to work 50 hrs a week for the first year. When I broke it down, that was 11.64/hr. yowza. Perhaps not. I also don't own a car, and know nothing/am not motivated to learn about them. And the branch was an hour and a half away by bus. Or an eleven km run-commute. And they wanted me to go to Halifax for ten weeks for training.

Or not.

 After some cajoling, and several tantrums, I let Lisa (who has gotten every job she's applied for since arriving here) edit my resume. And by edit I mean butcher. (*sigh*...it IS an improvement, okay?) And then after some serious whining, I printed out some real honest to goodness actual paper copies of my resume. And proceeded to "pound the pavement"

 It turns out my approach could use a little finesse.

EMPLOYMENT SEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:

HOME (it's a store) I don't really want to work retail, but they have amazing amazing home furnishings. And staff discounts. And amazing amazing home furnishings. mmmm....outrageously fluffy towels and teeny-tiny french presses and polka dot toasters. Yes please!

I entered the store, it was about to close. I was a little stunned by the bright lights and shiny things. I asked for the manager. As it turns out, the woman I was talking to was the manager. She was wearing a hideous polyester suit a-la-Suzy-Shier, looked like she was smelling something icky, and had a half-tube of bright pink lipstick smashed on her lips.

I introduced myself. She said, "uh huh" and shook my hand limply. Her hand was soft and limp and slightly soggy. Ew. It was unpleasant and immediately (irrationally) turned me off the idea of working there. I just wanted to leave. But she was staring, and I was stuck.

I got flustered. I blurted out what I wanted, stammering, and she continued to stare at me blankly. She took my resume and began to look at it. I stood there nervously, watching her examine my resume, waiting for her to say something else. She didn't.

The atmosphere was decidedly uncomfortable. I got all sweaty, and thought, 'Do I leave? Is she going to say something or just stare at my resume?' She looked up.

"Goodbye, then" 

OUCh.

My neck and cheeks burning, I mumbled something back, and then moved swiftly for the door. In the process, I knocked into the table by the door. A metal clipboard and two fancy looking pens clatter noisily to the floor.

I am an unemployed disaster.

On the upside, I am getting almost cavalier about the whole experience, and am actually starting to enjoy making people listen while I talk about myself.

But I was stumped on how to differentiate myself from the crowd to actually reel them in, until I came across this on the "Stuff White People Like" blog.

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/03/14/88-having-gay-friends/

And it got me thinking...this theory could stand for employers as well.

Instead of keeping my sexual status private, perhaps I SHOULD play the homo card.

Contrary to being discriminated against, maybe I am a desirable commodity.  If I'm presented with the right offer, these businesses too could have their very own bona fide gay employee!

HOME, eat your heart out!