I was religious with the sunscreen in Cuba, to the point where I was coating my teeth with it JUST IN CASE. That didn’t help my right shoulder though, which both Ed and I somehow missed on Tuesday. Of course, this was the area that was directly in the sun for about 9 hours solid on Tuesday, and was burned to an ever-loving crisp.

I can’t remember the last time I had a sunburn – I’m an anti-social nerd with gothic leanings; I don’t go out in the sun if I can get away with it. Unfortunately, I burned my right shoulder to dangerous levels and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Putting clothing on or off was a nightmare, as was sleeping. It hurt! I was bright red! None of this is any good at all!

.. I’d be red and cursing my clothing straps a thousand times over before I’d redo what came next:

behold the right shoulder of the damned

The burn was bad enough, but then it fucking BLISTERED. The whites – just the whites – of my lesbian tattoo blistered horribly, and was painful and hideous and terrible. It was disgusting – my shoulder looked like a monster from a B-movie with a surprisingly large makeup budget. The above picture was taken on Thursday evening and doesn’t come close to showing how awful it looked, let alone how much it hurt. I was quite scared that I had ruined my tattoo forever and would come away from Cuba with this permanent lumpiness on my shoulder, but the blisters – while numerous and gross – eventually disappeared (or popped, but I am NOT THINKING ABOUT THAT) and the skin flaked and peeled. It’s still uncomfortable, but it’s mostly just itchy – it feels like a new tattoo in the middle of healing, and I have to moisturize it nightly so it doesn’t get all tight and scaly. All my panicking was for not, but I was truly lost – I’d never burned and blistered like this, no one in our group had either, I couldn’t check the internet thoroughly for information, and there was no one I could go to and ask. I’m glad it turned out okay, but I never want to go through that again. I will take a regular old sunburn anytime, thanks. Blisters are disgusting.

I joked about the fact that I had no Diet Coke for over a week, but some quick math told me that I drank 2L of the delicious stuff the afternoon we got back from Cuba – I missed it, okay. I survived without it and didn’t complain at all, but it would take nothing short of a miracle to keep me off the stuff when I got home.

There WAS Coke available at the resort – they had some cans for sale in the gift shop, along with some Sprite. No Diet though, and I hate the taste of regular Coke so I ignored it. What’s a poor addicted girl to do?

Cuba is not without a national soft drink – everyone drinks tuKola:

this is what you get when you ask for coke or cola

It’s .. not bad. I mostly missed the fizzy bite of pop, so I would ask for a cola at dinner. It took a bit to figure out that diet cola simply wasn’t available in the restaurants; they were bringing me regular cola regardless of what I asked for. In retrospect, I’m enormously glad because THIS tasted like ABSOLUTE ASS:

"dietetica" is apparently spanish for UNGODLY EVIL IN MY MOUTH

I assumed that Cubans would have access to aspartame, which was foolish of me. They had their OWN non-sugar methods of flavouring things; a combination of three different sweeteners all with ominous names like “Sweetener 953”. Diet tuKola is fucking HEINOUS. I couldn’t come close to finishing the can; it sat in our room until the day we left and it made me hiss every time I passed it. It’s horrible. It’s an abomination. Never. Again.

I mostly drank water at the resort – a necessity, because it was very hot and I’ve HAD heatstroke with no desire at all to return. Shan stole me a lime on Day 2 so I could flavour my water, and I would troll the buffet several times a day and relieve them of their lime supply. I made use of dehydrated lemon packets and even some Crystal Light drink tubes I brought from home when I couldn’t find any limes to steal. Then, of course, there was the rum:

7 year havana club

young coconuts have sour water; adding rum did not make it tasty

i learned that i do not get drunk off pina coladas, at ALL

this, however, is another story - the mulata completely did me in and i got very drunk very quickly

The Pina Colada was the drink of choice last week, being delicious and baffling – it didn’t matter how many I drank; I would not get drunk. That was all fine and good, but I was drinking so much more than I ever do and not feeling the effects so it was time to step things up. I tried a bunch of different drinks – the Mary Pickford (rum, pineapple juice, maraschino, grenadine), the Rosa de Something or Other (rum, coconut milk, grenadine), and my ultimate doom: the Mulata (rum, creme de cacoa, lemon slush). I had grown used to not being drunk regardless of the number of drinks I had, so I downed three delicious Mulatas in rapid succession – and was amazed to find myself quite unable to walk or talk or make any sense. That night was an early one for me; I passed out right after dinner in a drunken stupor. I don’t feel so bad as it was my ONLY drunken stupor the whole trip, but damn. That be some crazy powerful drink.

Finally, I was thrilled to see Diet Coke on the plane’s drink cart on the way home. I eagerly asked for it, only to be served ..

what.

Coke Light is a curious cross between Diet Coke and Coke Zero, and tastes nothing like Diet Coke. Stranger still was the can, which came from the Belgium Coke Plant and was all weird and German:

seriously, what.

It was not my drink. I did not like it. Resigned, I had more water (and then had to pee 80 times) – but I would make up for my liquid indiscretions the instant I was through customs, and then some.

When we go back – and we WILL go back – I will be drunk ALL THE TIME off my new favourite drink, the Mulata. If I had access to a lemon slush machine at home, I’d drink them all the time. Delicious!

And that’s how I survived a week without Diet Coke while in Cuba!

Ed has a new game: Screen Cap the PVR!

WOOOOO

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

I am amused!

One of the interesting pieces of email I received while on vacation was that I had been accepted into the June 19th Blim Market! I’ll be selling Smuttons and Heart Shaped Blox from 12-5 at the Main Street Car-Free Day, so if you missed me at Got Craft earlier this month you should come by!

I need your help, though – this’ll be the first time I’ve had my own table, and I need a name for it. I’ve always just had my things as part of Miranda’s table, but this is my own and I need an umbrella name to cover the different things I sell (Smuttons, Heart Shaped Blox, Purl Necklaces, whatever else I decide to make). Normally names for things jump out at me, but no one awesome name has made itself known and I’m kind of at a loss. I’ve tossed about “Delicious Juice Dot Booth” and “Delicious Booth Dot Com”, but those are kind of misleading as my items are not edible and the name wouldn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t already know me. Also no good is “Porn and Lego”, because I’d scare people away and also get sued. So, please help!

What should I call my booth? Be creative on my behalf, and whoever suggests the name I end up using will get a prize pack of stuff I’ve made!

not shown: porn

I remember why I hate going on vacation now – everyone touches my stuff when I leave.

I’m somewhat territorial, and I HATE it when people mess with my shit. I came back to the office to find that one of the teams has taken over my corner as their new testing lab, and there are boxes and routers (fucking routers) EVERYWHERE, with all my things shoved to one side. Someone also messed with the intranet, and managed to delete my carefully crafted fake RSS feed and replace it with a chunk of copied text and a link. NO. BAD. DON’T TOUCH. No one should be editing that damn page but me – HANDS OFF. I’m mostly annoyed because I didn’t even get a courtesy email saying “oops, I tried something and it didn’t work” – no, it’s just broken and now looks like shit and now I have to fix it. GRRR!

You know what I liked best about Cuba? THERE WAS NO SHAREPOINT IN CUBA.

Someone also used my computer/desk while I was gone, but I am not really angry about that because the computer is a piece of shit and they were warned not to mess with my toys so everything is still in a state of organized chaos.

It does help that I came back to a mountain of packages; things I had ordered long before I left. Mail is fun!

Okay, enough freaking out about work – I really am happy to be back, if a little feral about my stuff. I’m going to blame that on the fact that I was an only child, and that I throw a little bit too much of myself into everything I do.

Hey, I wrote some words while in Cuba – pretend it is 9 days ago:

Monday

I haven’t done much flying recently – I pretend it’s to reduce my carbon footprint so Al Gore will grant me wishes, but the truth is I actually hate flying.  It’s expensive, it takes forever, “the Man” hassles me about my liquids and switchblades, and .. okay, I’m kind of terrified of it. However, when you’re looking to go 4500 km away from home and also to an island, sometimes you have to bite the metaphorical bullet (which we will refer to as a harmless pen from now on so I will eventually be allowed home).

Our flight didn’t leave until 11:55 pm, but I was adamant that we leave Sparta at 8. Ed tried to talk me out of it, but I wore him down and we headed to the airport via the Renee Shuttle of Awesome. We arrived just before 9pm, and were greeted by a massive lineup of travelers and no ticketing agents. They arrived for their shift at 9 on the dot, and began the arduous process of checking in a full compliment of excited Canadians on their way to adventure. It wasn’t even so much that we were all Canadian; we were obviously from Vancouver – every second person in the line was wearing yoga pants. Not me, though. I’m on VACATION.

Check in took a very long time, and we were almost at the counter when the rest of our party arrived. We got our tickets and headed to security – I wanted to find a seat and not move until boarding time, until I saw all the duty free shops *cough*. We made it to our gate without excessive spending on my part, met up with the gang, and sat until boarding time.

The flight itself was nothing special. We weren’t all sitting together, but we were all way too tired for excited plane dancing anyway. I immediately tried to go to sleep,  but it was kind of like sleeping in a tiny pointy torture chamber – during our six-hour flight, I maybe slept 90 minutes here and there. I might have finally fallen asleep, but then they served the in-flight meal which smelled horrendous – I wasn’t conscious for the serving, so I missed out on my choice of rancid chicken or veggie lasagna that smelled like KD on better days, a long long time ago. It did wake me up though, and I had to do the impossible dance of discomfort once again. I gave up on sleep entirely around 430 am, and instead watched the Lady Gaga episode of Glee until we finally landed in Varadero, Cuba at 9am local time.

More security (and uniformed women in fishnet stockings) met us on the ground, but customs was a fast affair with far fewer questions than I routinely get asked on a standard trip to 7-11. Luggage was collected without incident, and we boarded a bus to go to our resort, situated an hour or so outside the airport. The air-conditioned bus was new and bouncy – it literally made buttons on my shirt pop open – and we were official in Cuba!

The bus ride to the resort was jaw dropping; even more so when we rolled through Matanzas. It looks exactly like it does on TV – old awesome cars, gorgeous old buildings, friendly people everywhere. It’s completely amazing, and we hadn’t made it more than 30 minutes inland. We made one stop at an epic bridge, where I saw my first jungle cat and walls of Che merchandise. After the brief pitstop, it was time to go to the resorts. Luckily for us, our resort was the first stop – we were there by 11am, and it was time to drink.

The resort is amazing. It’s pretty much beyond words – directly on the beach, utterly gorgeous, and not at all crowded. We checked in, but were really early and our rooms were not yet ready. We had a plan for that though, thanks to our travel agent’s advice. We changed into the beach gear in our backpacks, grabbed a third round of drinks, and hit the ocean for the first time.

I held out for approximately 35 seconds before I was wading into the bright blue, bath-temperature water. It’s incredible out here, and it doesn’t at all seem real – places like this actually exist? And we’re here for a week you say? Sheer (but welcome) madness!

Our rooms were ready by 12:30, so I headed in to unpack and pass out. No sleep on the plane meant I was on my 32nd hour of consciousness, and that needed to be remedied immediately. I napped, and it was glorious – I highly recommend it.

I surfaced from my nap some time later, completely starved. I dressed and joined the others for more booze and exploring before the dining room opened, which we then descended upon with great hunger. We weren’t at all sure what to expect, but was happy to see the dessert table that proclaimed the evening to be Mexican Night – we loaded up on tacos, fruit, fish and salads, and dove in.

Yeeeeeah, the food was not at all bland – in fact, it was fantastic. Everything was delicious, the fresh fruit plentiful, and there was flan. I love flan! The amazing food was a wonderful surprise, as multiple people told us not to expect anything. We stuffed ourselves silly, then literally waddled off into the sunset to watch the sky turn orange and pink. The sun went down, but the night was still young – it was time to hit the pool!

Swimming at night may be one of my favourite things to do, ever. The pool was deserted and the night air glorious as we had our way with the water. Before long, the evening show started and we had music to accompany our private swim time. We could have – SHOULD have – totally been naked, but sadly the clothes remained on. I even volunteered to be a distraction should Miranda and Reilly want to have some pool sex, but it was all very wholesome for no good reason. See, I didn’t want to drink nothing but alcohol so every time I went to the bar, I scanned the menu looking for non-alcoholic options; reasoning that there had to be SOME options – what would children drink otherwise?

It wasn’t until my third trip to the bar and 8 hours into my resort time that I figured out the error in my reasoning – there WEREN’T any children. The travel agent, bless her heart, had booked us into an adults-only resort. That explained the 24-hour pool, free-flowing alcohol and utter lack of chaos – with the exception of no Diet Coke and no internet, this could very well be my heaven – so clearly, naked pool sex needed to happen given that there was no need for discretion. Off with the clothes!

Sadly, that didn’t happen and then it was time for bed.

Tuesday

Ed and I were up ridiculously early because it was just too hot – the AC in our room didn’t work, and by 7am we had to get up or roast. There was no plan other than meeting up with the others at some point, so we went for breakfast and lizard hunting before scoping out a wicked spot on the beach by 9. I napped and read while Ed snorkeled, and eventually the others joined us under a shady tree. We spent the entire day in that spot, taking turns snorkeling, paddle boating and going to the bar for booze. We didn’t even need to leave the beach for lunch; there was a BBQ right on the water and we ate our fill of pork, rice, beans and plantains. I am rapidly running out of ways to say it was amazing, but it totally was – I drank a coconut that a man machete’d open for me and filled with rum; I visited the Crocheted Hut for Tiny Ladies, and while my Kindle books didn’t have any pro-boners in them like Shan’s, I enjoyed reading the filthy secrets of 16th century royalty (the horny and treacherous lot that they were).

Sadly, a bitch of a headache laid me out around 3:30 so I retreated to our room (which I haven’t talked about, but was enormous and awesome) to sleep it off. I once again surfaced just before dinner, and joined the others just as the dining room opened. It was decorated with foam alligators and chickens and corn, but we had no idea whatsoever as to the night’s theme until we read the dessert – it was Cuban Night! Alright! The rice and beans were particularly tasty, as was the deep-fried and horrible to think about pig skin – it tasted like wonderful bacon, but was hairy and clearly of the pig we likely ate for lunch. Still, there was more flan, and we once again ate ourselves silly before retreating to the beach for the last of the daylight.

Once the sun goes down, we hit the pool. The resort was much more crowded today than yesterday, but not overly so – it’s technically off season, even though it is beyond spectacular out here. While we splashed about in the pool (without a ball this time; it was No Ball Tuesday), the show once again took the stage; this time to a much bigger audience. I took some pictures, Ed brought me a piña colada with little rum (they look at you funny when you ask for little or no rum, so I’ve spent much of my time tipsy), and it was another super awesome evening spent in friggin’ CUBA. We should do this all the time!

After the night swimming (oh how I’ve missed you), we retreated back to base camp for sleep. Not yet tired due to my many naps, I turned on the TV to see if the hockey score could be found (I may be on vacation, but I’m still Canadian). No luck – but something even BETTER was on: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, dubbed into Spanish. SCORE! I love this movie! Even in Spanish! Best. Day. Ever.

Now I sleep! Tomorrow is Lobster Night, and we’re booking our excursion to Havana for which I am so excited I could just pee!

Wednesday

We have a good routine going – someone in our party gets up early and camps out on the beach, and the rest of us show up at some point. Today Darren held down the beach fort, and Ed and I were the lazies who didn’t show up until 10:30. It’s a lot easier to sleep when the AC is working, so we caught up on much needed zzzzzs and took our time starting our arduous day of sitting on the beach drinking rum. It’s a tough life, being in Cuba.

Today I made friends with lizards. Lizards are the new snails, and they are great. I took so many pictures of them! I opted to not bring my DSLR on this trip; I’ve been using a pocket camera and my iPhone for everything. I sometimes get sad that I won’t have awesome clear pictures of our time here, but I console myself by pretending I totally wanted to do an iPhone photography excursion to Cuba and here I am. Expect many, many Hipstamatic images and a few Instagram ones to mix it up a little. Yeah! It’s ART!

I have spent my Wednesday being vastly uncomfortable, because I fail at sun: I burned the ever-loving fuck out of my right shoulder on Tuesday, even though I was excessive and generous with the sunscreen. It hurts to shoulder. Both Ed and myself missed my right backal area, and now I am aflame with red hot burning pain. I don’t remember the last time I had a sunburn, let alone a truly bad one like this – I am crispy and sad. I tried to fry my left side today so I would be somewhat evenly cooked, but I think I failed at that too (although my boobs are a lovely shade of red). Putting on a bra for dinner was the worst thing I’ve ever done – never before have I been so resentful of the tiny-breasted and joyously braless (you bitches). Owwwww.

It is early, yet it is time for sleep. Tomorrow we are taking a tour of Havana (both old and new) and visiting a rum factory and a cigar factory. I am crispy with excitement for adventure and intrigue!

Did you know: licking an olive sensuously directly leads to kissing men on the butt. Olives: the gateway orifice. Don’t do it, kids.

Thursday

It’s Havana day! And Shan’s birthday! I am up bright and early for adventure and also because my sunburn hurts. It’s also fucking disgusting – the whites of my right shoulder tattoo are blistering; they’re all puffy and hideous. I do not like sunburns! I do not like blisters! This is why I do not go outside – my people, the indigenous Gothic Nerds of Urban Canada, never get sunburns.

.. I stopped writing at this point, but later I will fill in the rest and also share pictures.

multi-che!

Domo didn’t have quite as many adventures as he did in San Francisco, but he had a good time nonetheless:

For prosperity’s sake, Ed and I are still in Cuba. Sure, the beach is a little further away, the jungle cats are surprisingly bold and exceedingly fat, and the breakfast buffet is nothing but cold pizza, but the bed is deliciously comfortable, Diet Coke is readily available, and there’s internet EVERYWHERE. I could get used to this.

In reality, we arrived home to SPARTA at 3pm yesterday, after traveling for 12 hours. We were somewhat exhausted but delighted to be back, and wisely dealt with the rather tasteless post-vacation chores immediately – we unpacked, did laundry, and put everything away. It’s like we were never out of the country, except I am a dozen or so shades darker than normal and Ed does not glow in the dark.

I wrote many words while in Cuba, but stopped writing daily logs after Wednesday – Havana was fresh on my tongue and I didn’t think I could adequately describe the awesome, and it’s really hard to come up with interesting ways to say “we laid on the beach for ten hours and read, drank, snorkeled, swam, and napped, then we ate and then we swam in the pool”. That’s not to say that I don’t have a lot to say – you know me; I can’t go to the bathroom without having a lot to say about it – but you’ll definitely see a pattern in my vacation words; eventually I just grew too content to be verbose and I don’t feel an iota of guilt.

Before I post my Cuban musings and share pictures though, I just gotta follow tradition – here is Cuba in Numbers!

Number of:

• Hours on a plane: 14
• Times drunk: 1.5
• Drinks consumed (by me): 25
• What the hell?: I can’t get drunk on pina coladas
• Drinks consumed (by our group): 200+
• Times the AC went out in our room: 6
• Amount we cared: 0
• Pictures taken: 982
• Pictures of lizards taken: 981
• Meals per day eaten: 3
• Diet Coke consumed between 11:30pm Sunday May 8th and 2:30pm Monday May 16th: 0
• Minutes out of international customs before I was drinking Diet Coke: 4
• Hot, glorious days in Cuba: 7
• Rain, in mm: 0
• Minutes left on the 1 30-minute internet card we bought by the time we left: 6
• Cigars smoked: 1
• Times we needed to use the Emergency Spices we brought: 0
• Lobsters eaten: 8
• Tragic sunburns that should have been administered to by a nurse in fishnet stockings: 2 (one on me, one on Josh)
• Love I have for Havana: SO MANY
• Olives sensuously licked by Josh: TOO MANY
• Days into our trip that we started planning our return trip for next May: 3
• Coral found tangled in genitalia: 1
• bps to be had over Cuban internet: 4
• Jungle cats met: 2
• Jungle dogs met: 4
• Our favourite Jungle Dog: Teata, aka Nips
• Men in budgie smugglers: 150
• Men with impressive packages: 1
• Naked boobs seen (not mine): 2
• Nipple slips (mine): 1
• Hours spent lounging on the beach without a care in the world: 70 or so
• Times almost killed by a chicken: 1
• Glorious sunsets seen: 7
• Glorious sunrises seen: 1 (sleep is delicious)
• Ominous numbered sweeteners in Cuban diet cola: 3
• Amount of resemblance to Diet Coke: -2402342

More later – we have no food in the house, and should probably fix that. It’s going to be really, really difficult to have to PAY for food – there’s a lot to be said about all-inclusive, and it’s almost all good.

I missed you, internet!

i plan to start drinking diet coke out of these at home

We’re on our way home from Cuba :( I’ve wisely booked tomorrow off as well as a recovery day; I will also endeavor to write and post pictures and share all my adventures. Hope you’ve enjoyed this tour through my archives; regular new content shall return as soon as I can get to the internet!

Still in Cuba! But this is actually a serious post – I got quite a bit of flack on election night for worrying a great deal about what Harper’s government is going to do to women’s health; something I am very passionate about. I’m sincerely worried about Harper’s US-style conservatism is going to do about our right to choose, and this is part of the reason why – originally posted on December 1st, 2008:

no more shame

The open book that is my life still holds a few secrets I’ve kept throughout the years. Some are just not that interesting, some are not wholly my secrets to share, and others I just haven’t been ready to share yet – like this one.

Yesterday’s post was truly about my feeling weird at having to defriend someone on Facebook for my own sanity, but I barely scratched the surface on WHY – so let’s start scratching!

Planned Parenthood is making gift certificates available for purchase. A great deal of women in the US go without regular checkups because of the sheer cost involved – an annual exam alone costs $58. The gift certificates, available in increments of $25, can be used for checkups, insurance co-pays, and medication such as birth control.

And yes, they can also be used towards an abortion.

The pro-life community is in an uproar over this, claiming that PP is making a “mockery” of the Christmas season. Headlines such as “Kill a Child for Christmas” and “The Perfect Gift for the Baby Killer on a Budget” are popping up, as well as charming quotes in the media from anti-abortion activists:

“The tragedy is that almost 6,000 fewer children will be celebrating a first Christmas this year because they were aborted in Planned Parenthood’s Indiana clinics,” said Mike Fichter, president and CEO of Indiana Right to Life. Planned Parenthood of Indiana operates abortion clinics in Indianapolis, Merrillville and Bloomington.

“They deserve coal in their stocking, not money for lethal gift certificates,” said Sister Diane Carollo, director of the Office for Pro-Life Ministry for the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

Awesome. Just awesome.

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I am fiercely pro-choice – I believe women should have the unquestioned right to choose if and when they wish to have children. I am thankful everyday that I live in a country that DOES give me that right, and it physically hurts my insides to know that this (and gay marriage) is so hotly contested by so many people. I just don’t understand how someone can claim they know what is better for me than I do – how? How can you know my situation, my life, my circumstances? Do you have so much hate in your lives that you actually see forcing women to carry unwanted children to term is a viable option and just punishment for sex, regardless of how it came to pass? I don’t understand.

I can talk pretty about choice all I want, but it’s more than just talk: when I was 18, I had an abortion.

It’s a fairly typical story: I hadn’t received enough education about birth control (I had no idea how to go about getting on the pill), and while we were strict with our condom use, there were incidents. I was 18, living with my boyfriend of less than a year in the basement of his parent’s townhouse, and in absolutely no way physically, emotionally or financially capable of having a child. We made the decision to terminate the pregnancy, and I have never regretted it.

Funny story, I found out I was pregnant by going to the ER for what turned out to be my very first bladder infection. To this day, I am abnormally paranoid of UTIs which also feeds my fear of alcohol – one of the side effects of alcohol in my system mimics the feeling of a UTI. Hilarious!

The act of terminating the pregnancy was not difficult, but dealing with other people was. I didn’t handle the news well, to say the least – even then I knew I was not destined to have children. As well, my doctor had been my doctor since I was 4 years old and being an old, old man from a completely different era, held the “very disappointed” card over my head and insisted on telling my mother. My shrieks of terror managed to dodge that spectacularly hot mess, but he was not happy about having to schedule me for the procedure. Nothing like disapproving old man guilt to make an already frightened kid almost delirious with terror – I am barely exaggerating when I say my mother would have killed me if she knew I was pregnant. Renee can vouch for me; she knows how it would have gone down.

Having an abortion at 18 was the best possible thing I could have done, given the circumstances. I had no job, no education, no real home, and no idea what I was going to do if I was forced to have that baby. While I was in a loving relationship, love alone is not enough to raise a child. I didn’t get pregnant because I slept around, or was promiscuous, or made stupid decisions. We used birth control, and it failed. We did the responsible thing for ourselves, not for the cluster of cells forming in my womb.

I’ve never mentioned the abortion on my site before, mostly because I didn’t want to deal with the backlash (real or imagined). A tiny part of me has been ashamed about it for years, but when reading the horrible things that were being posted by pro-life lunatics, I realized something important: the tiny piece of shame I once held is no longer there, and this is such a big issue that I feel so strongly about that I want my voice to be heard. Having an abortion does NOT make you a bad person, and I want every woman to have a choice beyond “choosing to not open your legs” or “choosing to wait until marriage”. Abortion is not “being lazy and using murder as the easy way out”. What kind of universe do we live in, where being forced to bring an unwanted life into this world is seen as a justified punishment for having sex? If children are as important as the pro-lifers think, wouldn’t they rather see those children cared for properly by people who love and want them instead of being stuck with it for life because of a mistake or a tragedy?

My name is Kimli, and I’ve had an abortion.

Thanks for reading.

abortions for some; miniature American flags for others

It’s Friday the 13th! How spooky! I better have some rum, just in case.

Originally posted December 14th, 2006

kimli’s secret shame

Disclaimer: You may have heard this story before. If so, I apologize – after almost six years of daily updates, I sometimes forget what I’ve written and therefore repeat myself. I don’t think I’ve told this story in its entirety though, so I will now tell you my shameful secret!

Ready? Here we go:

For all my verbal skills and penchant for using seven slyly descriptive words where a smaller one would definitely suffice, I’ve been hiding a fairly large secret from all but my closest friends. My own family doesn’t even know; so deep is my cavern of secrecy. However, in the spirit of the season I now invite you to explore my depths. Won’t you please come a-spelunkin’ in my caves?

I haven’t graduated high school.

I know, I know – in the grand scheme of the universe, this isn’t really all that shocking. Thousands of people haven’t graduated high school, and they don’t write auto exposés about it on the internet. Why am I so very special that I think my non-graduation is any different? Just who the hell do I think I am, anyway?

For starters, I used to be have always been one of the “good” kids. Our kind never dreamed about dropping out or being anything less than perfect in every way. We lived for parental approval, and teachers always left the class in our charge when stepping out because we were just that smart and good and well-behaved and all had excellent heads on our excellent, over-achieving shoulders. I was one of these people; extra curricular activities out the ass and enough volunteer work to be up for sainthood. Yes, we were nerds of every flavour, and old people adored us because we were just so very GOOD.

So, what happened? How can I have fallen from grace? Why did I not receive the standard form letter from the Premier congratulating me on my successful completion of high school? Why do I not have a diploma that at the very least would get me an excellent job manning the fry vat at the Burger King on the corner?

I did not graduate high school on a technicality.

Just over one month before my high school days were to be put behind me, I was called down to the principal’s office. The school administration had been going through all the graduate’s transcripts, and had discovered something odd about mine. I had more than enough credits to graduation – 22 over the required 52, as a matter of fact – but I was missing one thing: I did not take Consumer Education in Junior High.

In grade 9, I desperately wanted to take an additional arts course that was only offered in one block. Unfortunately, that created a schedule conflict with my required Consumer Education class, a government-mandated course that all BC students must take in order to graduate. I seriously did not see how spending an entire semester learning how to write a cheque would help me in the real world, so I went to speak with our guidance counselors, who called a meeting with the principal.

Given my excellent school record and shining example of what every loser nerd ought to want to be, the principal decided that I would be given an exception so I could take my band class and not the required Consumer Education course. He explained that the course was outdated and on its way out anyway, and by the time I graduated high school it would no longer be a mandatory requirement for graduation. He wrote a note to have my schedule changed, congratulated me on being such an excellent student and hapless loser (albeit with a giant rack), and sent me on my delighted way.

Fast forward to May of my graduation year. Consumer Education had NOT been removed from the required course list, and as a result, I would not be graduating high school. I begged and pleaded and cried, but rules were rules – I missed a necessary class, and I would not successfully pass Grade 12. With one month left in the school year, there was not enough time for me to take the class and I was utterly, fantastically, fucked. 74 credits and my extra curricular activities be damned! No graduation for Kimli!

I managed to keep this a secret from my parents. The graduation ceremony things had already been printed, and my name was on it – so they got to see me on the stage with the rest of my class, but that was it. If you check with the government of BC, it will show that I did not graduate high school. I didn’t drop out; I just didn’t finish on a technicality. In disgust and anarchy, I didn’t bother trying to fix what I saw as the School Board’s failing and have since let the issue lie, only bringing it up when I have nothing else to talk about (as demonstrated here).

I am a total fraud and a failure.

I have, however, graduated college with three designations. No high school, but definitely college. I don’t even know how I managed to get in, but I wisely chose not to question the decision and just went about my total fraud and utter failure of a way. My secret haunts me to this day, with my great job and frankly excellent life – it’s all built on a technicality of a lie, and one day the past is going to catch up with me and it’ll all be stripped away and replaced with a paper hat and a salt shaker.

And that’s my secret. I’ll understand if you totally hate me now.