Bailie.com

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Say No to Bullying day

Yesterday I wore the one pink shirt in my wardrobe for Say No to Bullying day.  Though I’ve never been a big fan of Christy Clark (remember the statistically impossible “all our children should be above average” remark?), this is one of her initiatives I can get behind. I have no reason to divulge this, at least not often, but I was bullied terribly from grade 5 to grade 11. For me, that was age 8 to 14, more or less. Being younger, shorter, and different in a lot of other ways from the rest of the kids made me a walking target. My parents were no help. My mother, a fundamentalist Christian, counseled me with the “turn the other cheek” line - today that would probably get me killed; back then, it just got me tormented. My emotionally absent father was ... well, he had his share of bully in him, as well, so it took me into my adult years to stare him down, let alone ask for his help.

What I think did me in, though, was being smart, in a geeky kind of way. I lived a pretty isolated life - on a farm, away from other kids, not encouraged to socialize with the non-believers. It was a rural school - we were all bussed in from our farms and villages - but the social situation was the same as in the city. No one explained to me that girls aren’t supposed to flaunt their brains after grade 4. But being younger and weaker, I couldn’t run as fast as the rest of my classmates, or reach as tall as them, or get permission to do the things they did (I couldn’t even get a driver’s license until my graduating year of high school!), but I did seem to absorb information without trying, and being ostracized meant that I could speed read a book a day, and went through the school library pretty fast. Which probably made things worse, in retrospect. Smart, geeky, and my mom drove the school bus. As much as I loved school, I hated the school yard, and would do anything to get out of field trips, group work, team sports, and anything involving hanging out in the school yard. Hallelujah for library club.

OK, it’s forty years later, and the schools are just getting around to recognizing bullying as a phenomenon that needs some attention. Better late than never. Count me in - I’m there for my grandchildren.

Sunday, February 24, 2008

The descent of Canadian media: when shoes trump budget announcements

Usually I like Pete McMartin’s columns in the Vancouver Sun, but this past week, his sense of judgment was way off, and I really had to wonder if poor old Pete’s sense of dollar value had calcified somewhere in the last decade, or if he just didn’t have a clue about the reality of women’s fashions. For my non-Canadian readers, a little context first. There is a quaint Canadian tradition whereby on the day that a new budget gets unveiled, the Finance Minister wears new shoes. For years, Finance Minister after Finance Minister would show the smooth bottom of his (always a him) new, generally black loafers, to the media. Now, we have Carole Taylor, former chair of the CBC and now the Provincial Liberal Party Finance Minister for British Columbia. By virtue of being neither a him, nor dowdy, she seems to be targeted for her footwear choices, at the cost of obscuring whatever is going on in the provincial budget.

At this week’s budget unveiling, Taylor chose to wear a pair of Fluevog Teapot Darjeelings. Green for economic prosperity and environmental responsibility. Fluevog as a Canadian company, and a choice that shows her to . A good choice, I thought. What is interesting is to see Pete McMartin falling victim to what I think of as American tabloid mentality – an entire column devoted to what he perceives as Carole Taylor’s inappropriate shoe choice. He mentions several times that he is spitting up wine reading about her shoes because they supposedly cost $249. (I checked the Fluevog site, and they’re currently on sale for $149, but I digress.) He had suggested she buy something from one of the local big box stores, something less pricey, something pedestrian, to use his words. Well, there are a few bones I have to pick with his argument, starting with the price.

Any of the shoes I’ve seen in the big box stores have been questionable-quality leather, imported from China, and likely made in a sweatshop there (Fluevogs are made in fair-wage facilities in western Europe). They have no support for the mature female foot, and women that buy them usually do so because they follow fashion trends, and intend to get rid of them after a season. Smart adult shoppers invest in good quality shoes (because I need orthotics, I favour Naot shoes, also around the $200 mark) that will last us more than a year.

So I don’t think the price of Taylor’s shoes was outrageous for a woman of her standing. If she’d worn $49 pumps from Payless, there would no doubt have been a hue and cry from the female reporters about how incredibly tackily she was dressed. I can see the column now: Taylor can’t even afford decent shoes on her salary – prediction of economic gloom in the province? And one doesn’t have to be middle class to have a pair of Fluevogs. When I think of the Fluevog wearers I know, they’re often students who invest in a good pair of fashionable yet comfortable shoes as a fashion statement, instead of having a half-dozen pair of cheap shoes that fall apart after a season’s wear.

And Pete, where were all your columns on the cost of the shoes the previous Finance Ministers wore? Now, it’s been a long time since I dated guys, but the my last relationship was with someone in that socio-economic range, and I know what he paid for shoes, back in the 1980s, and it was at par with women’s shoes, even back then. Just because they were boring black loafers that you couldn’t identify closely enough to look up the prices of on a website, don’t think that the previous Finance Ministers were shlumping around in $49 specials, either. But we never found out, because oh gosh, you were talking about their budgets instead of their shoes.

It’s often a lose-lose-lose proposition for any woman in the public eye. No matter what Taylor would wear, she would get slammed by someone. That’s the way it has always worked. Distract the public by commenting on their wardrobe. If not that, pick on their hair or make-up. If that doesn’t work, go for the weight. Claiming they lost or gained a few pounds will get them every time. It’s also ironic that Pete McMartin disparages the shoes as “exactly like the kind of indestructible footwear middle-aged tap-dancing instructors wear in class” - obviously out of touch with the last decade of fashion, there, Pete - which suggests to me that he’d rather have seen her in something more feminine, yet last year, I believe he slammed her for ultra-feminine Guccis she wore the year before.

I suppose I expected more – in fact, way more – from Pete McMartin, as he’s one of the columnists I actually like. This time, though, I think he’s out of touch with the double-standard that women have to live by. (For example, I dry-clean a woman’s shirt, it costs me 30% more than to dry-clean a man’s shirt. I buy a pair of running shoes in the women’s department, it costs me way more than those same shoes in the boy’s department – never mind that trainers, trainers, are well over $100 if you want any kind of support in them. And I suspect that even at that price, they’re manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, as well; try to find a pair that isn’t. But I digress.) Heck, if I were allowed to wear heels, I would buy a pair of Teapot Darjeelings, too.

And my advice to Carole Taylor? Next year, get a pair of men’s black loafers, preferably similar to those worn by previous Finance Ministers. The journalists will still comment on your shoes, but they’ll also have to figure out how to justify why they didn’t complain about the shoes of your predecessors Gary Collins and Colin Hansen. Actually, Fluevog has a pair that looks a lot like what your male counterparts probably wear, without media mention. They’re called Capitalist T.S.E., and cost only $295.

Thursday, February 14, 2008

The year of Me

This year, I wanted to do more for me. Yeah, yeah, it probably falls under the category of New year’s resolutions, but it’s been a long time coming and it’s here now. The changes may not seem profound but I feel they’re the start of a new phase:

• Do things I want to do - don’t guilt myself into staying home when I’m rather be out seeing a play or having fun doing something else outside the house
• Take care of my emotional health - don’t engage with people whose own inability to cope ends up projecting their drama onto me, be that anger, guilt, or other drama
• Take care of my physical health - Find physical activities I like to do, work with a trainer, and eat better

So far, so good. It did mean staying away from certain people completely and scaling back time with others. But I’ve compensated by going out of my way to make new friends or strengthen existing relationships with people whose company is easy and comfortable. It also meant getting a personal trainer, which I haven’t done since before my hip surgery, and it’s been great. Getting strong, building core, and losing weight already.

2008 should be a fabulous year; it’s looking up already.

Monday, February 11, 2008

Schlepping naches

Over the holidays I didn’t post much, and realize I haven’t shared some of the things I’m most proud of. One of my big pride moments is when my braniac grandson sent me a copy of his acceptance letter to a prestigious boarding school, Brentwood College. He has wanted to be in an environment that challenges him and where he’s among other students who are similarly motivated. And now he has that opportunity, after having done fabulously on his entrance exam. That’s motivated him more to bring him his first truly wonderful report card, which made me ask if he was working harder now, to which he replied, “Not really, I just have a reason to get good grades now.” Thank you, Harry Potter, for reviving the idea of boarding school!

Of course, we’ll are going to miss him terribly. It’s a long road from when he first came to live with me when he was 1, to when he was adopted by his fabulous dads, and ended up with, as he would always say, 11 grandmas, 3 dads, 2 sisters, and 1 mom. Of course, his dads find his acceptance a bittersweet moment - they didn’t adopt him to send him off to a boarding school - but he really wants to go, and I’m sure he’s going to thrive there. He’ll soak up the academic environment like a sponge, and we’ll all compete for his time when he gets time off from his rigorous six day-a-week, practically year-round program.