Assorted Nonsense

A lot has happened since my previous post. Notably, a highly successful trip to Disney World (and Universal Studios) which I must say wasn’t quite as restful as I might have hoped, but which was tremendously enjoyable, and perhaps more importantly doesn’t appear to have completely bankrupted us.

I would blog more about that but it’s probably not all that interesting to anyone save us.

What is interesting, at least to me, is that I experienced another anxiety attack while public speaking.

Now, I have no intention of wearing this whole business of anxiety attacks on my sleeve forever and a day. I will not give this blog over to the subject; nor do I spend every waking hour mulling over the prospect of suffering more of these attacks. But it does merit a hair more attention because I firmly believe that a whole lot of people experience episodes like this and that for a certain subset of them it is significantly traumatic. I am hoping that if such people stumble over posts like this one it might help them.

So the last time I experienced one of these attacks was this past Wednesday in a staff meeting. Not the big staff meeting described in the previous post, this was a staff meeting of my own department, attended by about a dozen people and chaired by me.

The meeting began with staff filing into the boardroom and plenty of banter between myself and them. I felt good and was in a good mood. Everyone settled in and I began talking. I was talking about a point that I wasn’t entirely prepared to talk about, but saw it in my notes and thought it would be a good place to start the meeting. A couple of sentences in it occurred to me that I didn’t quite know where I wanted to go with it. I fell silent. The entire bloody room was staring at me. I experienced what a friend has since described as “time dilation.” It seemed like ages since I’d fallen silent. It became imperative to say something. And the physiological reaction of panic set in, racing heart, almost complete inability to focus my thoughts.

And I thought, this is bullshit.

So I set my pen down and said, “I’m sorry, I’m having a moment.”

After a second or two I went on. “I need to explain something to you all. Lately I’ve been experiencing anxiety hits. Some of you will have witnessed this at the big staff meeting last month. You’re witnessing one right now.” I can’t remember exactly what I said after that but the gist of it was that I lose my thread after experiencing an anxiety attack. I wanted my staff to know what was going on when they saw me blank out so that they would understand what I was grappling with.

One of them said, “You know, there’s a weed that really helps with that sort of thing.”

By this time I had recovered and I said, “Oh yeah, and you’ll supply me with this weed, will you?” (Not a route I would actually take…)

After some laughter, I said, “Does anyone else ever experience this sort of thing?”

To which one of my staff responded by starting to talk about a departmental issue and that was all that was said about the issue. I thought this abrupt change of subject was a little odd. The next day I was visited by one of my staff. He started by saying that, like me, he had found the abrupt change of subject odd as it suggested that no one in the room actually cared about what I had just said, and he wanted to say that wasn’t the case at least as far as he was concerned. (Myself I think it entirely likely that I had just made several people in the room uncomfortable by what I’d said.) This fellow told me that he had a lifelong history of anxiety issues and that he appreciated me bringing it up. We discussed it for awhile and I think both benefited from the discussion. He’s a solid performer and his anxiety issues do not compromise his performance (I don’t believe they compromise mine either).

So for better or worse that has become my strategy, or at least part of it. Deal with the issue head on, and honestly. Screw what people think. Because they probably think the wrong things. Searching this subject on the internet, I have not seen a single person recommend simply being honest about experiencing panic attacks in public. All the advice is geared toward concealing what is really going on. How is that helpful? The fact is it’s simply a normal physiological response to a situation perceived as stressful. (I’m not a doctor, this is simply my opinion.) It’s kind of like vomiting. Unpleasant, but it happens. You wouldn’t make up an excuse about vomiting. “I’m sorry, I just, uh, thought I’d really like to see those carrots again. See how colourful they still are?”

I’m not saying that I’m going to go around announcing to everyone that I’m experiencing constant anxiety attacks. I’m just saying that when I experience a bad one that I can’t conceal, I’m going to say, “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m having a little anxiety attack. It will go away in another minute or two and then I’ll be fine.” If it makes people uncomfortable, too bad for them. Believe me, it’s a lot more uncomfortable for me. But the longer we pretend that a significant amount of us don’t suffer from issues like this the worse it is for us. I’m absolutely positive that there are millions of people on this planet afraid they’re going crazy or becoming increasingly agoraphobic or depressed or even suicidal because they don’t know what is wrong with them when all they’re experiencing is a simple panic attack. I know this because I was one of them once, and it was horrible, and even now it continues to take an emotional toll.

No more.

Yesterday was a rather humiliating day. Afterwards I was advised to forget about it, pretend it never happened, and that may well be good advice, but I can’t do that. First because that is much easier said than done, but also because I’ve been meaning to write more about this particular subject for some time, and I’ve just been handed the perfect opportunity.

So what happened?

I was required to deliver a short speech in front of a room full of people and just as I began to speak, I had a anxiety attack.

I have no idea what it looked like to those watching. Probably like I lost my mind. But to me it lasted an eternity. Afterward it felt like a nightmare. It still feels that way, like it can’t really have happened, like I will wake up any minute and go, omigod, it was just a dream, thank God and then go back to work and deliver the speech for real, this time flawlessly. But wasn’t just a dream, I really did completely freeze in front of not just an ordinary roomful of people, but in front of the entire CBC maintenance department, at least sixty people, twenty of whom I supervise. Oh yes, and my boss.

So what happened? I wasn’t particularly nervous, I do a fair amount of public speaking. I’ve delivered speeches to Ryerson students, I’ve MC’d weddings several times, I’ve been the lead in lengthy plays that have run for several nights, I chair meetings all the time, I was an on air live radio announcer for six years. I do not fear public speaking, in fact I usually enjoy it.

This time I was tired, I’d been up late grocery shopping, of all things. I didn’t sleep well. Also, I was asked to deliver the speech in a way that I wasn’t used to. Usually when I speak in public I give a lot of thought how to make it entertaining. My speeches are usually pretty jokey. The last time I’d given this presentation I erred on the side of jokey, at the expense of legitimate content. So I was asked to dial down the jokes and up the content. As I was preparing the speech in my mind I kept thinking of jokes, but I felt I couldn’t use them. This shouldn’t have been an issue, but it turned out to be. I made a list of what I wanted to talk about and went over it in my mind. I thought I was prepared, but I must not have been prepared enough.

I went to the podium and found myself tripping on stuff behind the podium. Unable to stop myself, I cracked a couple of tiny jokes about lack of room to stand behind the podium. I started by talking about my department’s horizontal top priority list, which got at least feeble one laugh. Enough with the jokes, I thought, and started to talk about software bugs. And my mind went blank. Completely blank. I could not think where to go. I started to panic, and repeated what I’d just said. I may have repeated the same line about five times. I saw my boss, who had been sitting comfortably, tense and lean far forward in his chair. I saw the audience staring at me, seemingly stunned, possibly concerned. I felt my IQ plummet to about 30. It was as though my intelligence had suddenly been gated. I no longer had access to any higher brain functions. I was acutely aware that this was a roomful of perhaps the most intelligent people in the CBC, and I was coming off like a complete moron, and I was supposed to be management. Throughout it all though, I was determined not to run screaming from the room, to get through it to the bitter end, no matter how ugly it got. And it felt pretty darned ugly. Somehow I crawled my way kicking and screaming to the subject of troubleshooting. I thought, I don’t want to talk about this (I had decided earlier that it would feel like lecturing, and I didn’t want to lecture expert troubleshooters on troubleshooting). I almost said aloud, I don’t want to talk about this. Fortunately my boss came to my rescue and said, “I’ll be covering that later.” Thank God!

I limped my way to the end of my inane ramble and sat down.

Utterly humiliated. I wanted nothing more than to flee, but I didn’t, I remained seated, looking at no one, hearing nothing, and when it was over my friend Ori Joseph leaned over and said, “It’s easy to get nervous down there, isn’t it.” It was an attempt to reassure me which I appreciated.

I fled to the ground floor for a decaf coffee, but really, mainly privacy. But I went back upstairs quickly. I felt it was important to let everyone know that the experience had not reduced me to sitting in a corner in a puddle of my own urine. As I wrote earlier, I have little idea how it must have come across to the rest of the room. I can only imagine that it must have appeared pretty bad. Later my boss said, I’ve never seen you blocked before like that. I pray that it will be the last time he ever sees me like that. Sadly, it was not my first anxiety attack, nor will it be my last. It wasn’t even my worst. But it was the first in such a public context, and so was especially difficult.

I am experiencing the inevitable emotional hangover today, which will likely linger days. But it will pass.

And I am writing about it because people experience anxiety attacks all the time, in all sorts of contexts. It’s a part of life, a cross some of us must bear. I am not alone.

And neither are you.

How would you react if you looked up and saw people flying overhead?

The inimitable (I mean that in a nice way) Colleen Anderson has an amusing post on her blog about the time she met me at a World Horror convention.

Or did she?

Please watch this profound video from Karl Johanson about the proposed new SOPA Bill. Don’t know what that is? Don’t worry… the video will explain all:

Amen.

Yesterday I read an article in the Toronto Star by Heather Mallick about Robert Fulford of the National Post writing a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s latest story in the New Yorker, called Stone Mattress. The Atwood story is about a woman who was raped as a teenager by an older boy who gets away with it. This act sends the woman down a bad road in which she gets pregnant, becomes a prostitute, and then marries older men of ill health so that she can help them die prematurely and get their money. Ultimately she meets the man who raped her and exacts her revenge.

Fulford doesn’t like the story because he thinks it “comes across as a classic man-hating story.” Mallick doesn’t like Fulford’s review because she thinks Atwood is “entitled to fill her fiction with hateful men.” She also didn’t like that Fulford didn’t own up to once having been skewered in an Atwood piece, suggesting that his review of Stone Mattress was simply revenge, as if it’s not possible to dislike a story solely on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Mallick professes to have once adored Bob Fulford, “wisest and cleverest of older male journalists.” Now, she claims that Fulford has stopped regarding life with endless interest and even joy, and turned sour. This seems a harsh assessment based on a single review of Atwood’s story. When I read that line in her article it seemed so disproportionately harsh that I wondered what else must be informing Mallick’s revised opinion of Fulford.

As a reasonably decent man this whole episode struck a nerve. I’m aware that certain women don’t like men, or distrust them, and that because of the actions of some jerks they have good reason to feel this way. I have always tried to conduct myself in a way to give women reason to like men. I have three sisters, a mother, a wife and two daughters and many female friends and colleagues. I like women. I’m good to them. I treat them with respect. So it annoys me when I am confronted with women who think that, as Fulford writes, men are villains except when they are clowns. That’s just a different kind of hatred, and it’s no better than men disrespecting women. Understanding that there are men out there deserving of scorn, just as there are woman deserving of scorn because of hateful attitudes and actions.

So I am sympathetic to Fulford’s take on Atwood’s story, although Atwood is equally hard on women in Stone Mattress. The female protagonist, essentially a serial killer, is certainly no more sympathetic than the male schmuck she murders. But I’m more sympathetic to Fulford himself than I am to his take on the story because I’d like to know why Mallick has come to dislike him so much. Just disliking Atwood’s story, and not owning up to having been a victim of an earlier Atwood story, just doesn’t seem to justify it.

I once spent four days at Atwood’s house recording a series of interviews for CBC Radio. Surreally for me, the entire four days were spent conversing with Atwood and the rest of the crew in French, which I was in the process of learning at the time, having recently returned from several months of living in Aix-en-Provence, France. Apart from Atwood’s assistant at the time, Sarah Cooper, Atwood and I were the only anglophones. On the third night we all went to a restaurant together where circumstances contrived to place Atwood and myself alone together for about twenty minutes, and we conversed in English for the first time. The whole experience generated a certain camaraderie between us, or at least that was how it felt to me – I’ve met her several times since and she has never indicated that she remembers me. Although I consider this last point worthy of mention, I don’t hold it against her. I’m not sure that I would remember her much either if she were not one of Canada’s most famous authors, mentioned time and again on the CBC and in the rest of our national media. Impossible to forget, in other words.

However, I’ve never forgotten her friendliness at the time. She did not come off to me as the least bit man hating. Her characters and stories are fiction, after all, not necessarily representative of the author’s own mind set. The truth is I haven’t actually read much Atwood, apart from some short stories in a book she gave me on our last day together (Good Bones) and the aforementioned Stone Mattress. And a handful of radio drama adaptations of her work such as The Handmaid’s Tale.

No, if I had one bone to pick with Margaret Atwood it wouldn’t be her stance against men, it would be her stance against science fiction, which she seems to regard as less than worthy. Yes, she writes it from time to time, but when she writes it is isn’t science fiction, it’s something else, something better, “speculative fiction” maybe. I find this attitude inexplicable and insulting, and no I don’t feel that way because she has previously skewered me in her work, at least that I’m aware, not that I would be aware not having read much of her work.

So neither Robert Fulford nor Heather Mallick have done anything to alter my opinion of Margaret Atwood. I’ve never given Robert Fulford much thought but I feel rather sympathetic toward the man now. As for Heather Mallick, who’s work I have read from time to time in the Star, and to whom I haven’t given much thought either, I am now unduly curious about.

Just what the heck does she really have against Robert Fulford?

For thousands of years hardly anything changed.

Spears used by humans tens, even hundreds of thousands of years ago stayed the same for millennia. You could learn how to use it as a kid and the skills you learned would last a lifetime. Hundreds of lifetimes. Even in the last thousand or so years you could learn a trade from your father, or a particular skill, and trust that it would still be applicable years later to teach your own kid.

Not anymore.

Now everything changes. Constantly and quickly.

My parents grew up with no running water or electricity. Now that’s practically unthinkable, in this country at least.

I learned analog broadcast production skills in school. Now it’s all digital. I grew up with three channels to choose from on television. In black and white. Now there’s hundreds, all in colour. When I was a kid I had a real dog. Now I have a robot dog. No wait, sorry, that’s my future grandkid I’m thinking of. You think I’m joking? Just wait. (Imagine a dog smart enough to pick up his own poop… worth inventing! You’d make a mint.)

Much of this change is positive. Me, I’m all for hot showers and coffee at the flick of a button. But the sheer pace of all this change is starting to irritate me. Should it not be possible to purchase a computer with a particular operating system and trust that you won’t have to mess with it for ten or so years?

Apparently not.

I’m writing this on a MacBook I purchased in August 2006. It seems like yesterday to me. It’s running OS X 10.4.11. And all the new software I want won’t run on anything less than 10.5.x. So I have to go through the rigamarole of upgrading to Snow Leopard. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Do you have any idea how hard it is to catch a Snow Leopard? (There’s a great episode on Snow Leopards on the series Earth… took them weeks if not months to find one.)

Anyway, I guess you have to take the good with the bad. Hot showers and instant coffee = constantly having to upgrade your computer.

Okay, I know that once every five years isn’t exactly “constantly”. But if they could make a spear (or at least, a type of spear) that didn’t need to be upgraded for one hundred thousand years, why not a computer? And here’s a good question: might the day not come when we’ve gone as far as we can with computers? When they’re as good as they can be, and there’s no point in upgrading them further? And they stay that way for one hundred thousand years? Just doing what you need them to do without having to fuss over them constantly. Imagine! Bliss? Or boring?

Doesn’t really matter. Cause one thing’s for sure.

It ain’t gonna happen in our lifetimes.

I just finished watching the series Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays.

First a disclaimer. I used to work with the two stars of this series, Bob Martin and Matt Watts, back when I worked in Radio Drama for the CBC. Bob Martin was usually a voice down the line on Steve the First and Steve the Second (we would record him from a remote location) so I never got to know him. But I worked very closely with Matt Watts on Steve the First, Steve the Second, and then later on a show called Canadia.

A few words about Matt. We got to be pretty good friends working on these shows. In fact working with Matt on these shows was a dream. I have never felt so creatively in synch with anyone as I did with Matt. We almost always agreed on creative approaches and we both worked extremely hard to make the shows as good as we could possibly make them. We dreamed of a return to the golden age of radio drama, of content so entertaining and well produced that it could not be ignored.

Our dream never quite came true, but we did make some damn good stuff together in the time we had.

So now I’ve moved onto management at the CBC and Matt has moved onto TV. I regret that we may never be able to work together again creatively and that I may never again experience the creative synch that I experienced with Matt with anyone else. But I remain a huge fan of Matt’s work, and am delighted to discover that the move to television has in no way diminished that work. On the contrary, it has simply allowed a wider audience to experience the fruits of his labors.

So I’m obviously biased. But I think that any discerning critic watching Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday would agree that it is one finely honed show. The writing is superb. The direction is polished. The acting is note perfect. Even the music is appealing.

I wrote Matt at one point early in the season that I didn’t find the series exactly to my taste after watching the pilot episode. This feeling went away fairly quickly. The feeling was engendered by the prudish part of me, which responded somewhat negatively to the (initially) frequent sex between a couple of the main characters. I have some kind of a weird double standard thing going on there too, I have to admit, as I don’t have a problem with HBO fare like Rome or Game of Thrones. It was just seeing it on CBC, and the fact that it meant that I couldn’t watch the show with my eleven year old daughters, which would have made it infinitely easier to watch as the episodes aired.

Anyway once I got past that little peccadillo and was able to focus on the other elements I began to thoroughly appreciate the craft that went into this show. My rather egotistical appraisal can be summed up thusly: it didn’t require my involvement.

I should explain that a bit. I frequently watch shows and think, my God, why did they do THAT? Could they not see that the story required THIS? If only I had been allowed to participate in the creation of this show!

In fact, this is how Matt and I originally became acquainted. I recorded the pilot of his first ever radio show, episode one of Steve the First. My involvement was limited to recording the episode. Then someone else took it away and butchered the mix. When I heard it I was appalled, and I wrote Matt to tell him so. I told him exactly how it needed to be fixed (in my not so humble opinion). Matt complained to the producer, and I got to remix it to my satisfaction. I remained as opinionated throughout our working partnership, and as I’ve mentioned earlier Matt, to his enormous credit in my view, always took my opinions seriously.

Matt, Bob, Don McKellar and everyone else associated with the show got Michael: Tuesdays and Thursday right all on their own.

Well done guys.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Spectacular… I wish I’d been there to see it myself (though I did see something similar, if infinitely more modest, once…)

Yesterday — two days after Christmas — one of our cats died.

Brandy was named after the song by Looking Glass called Brandy, just because I liked the song, and the named suited her, somehow, or came to.  We can’t remember exactly when we got her, but it was something like fourteen years ago.

About three weeks ago we noticed she wasn’t looking great.  She had an unusually skinny tummy.  Her chest looked slightly enlarged, but perhaps this was just in contrast to her tummy.  We attributed her looks to her not eating her food, which consisted of crunchy pellets.  We thought she might have sore teeth, and just wasn’t able to eat the food.  So we switched her to moist food, which she took to right away, and we thought okay, now we’ll see some improvement.

But while she continued to eat the moist food for awhile, she eventually started eating less and less and started spending virtually all of her time sleeping in her cat bed.  Still, we didn’t really think the end was nigh, because she still moved throughout the house, upstairs and down.  But perhaps that was my own naivete.

So far a relatively straightforward story of the death of a cat.  Here’s where it gets slightly more complex.  It did occur to us to take Brandy to a vet.  We have friends that are vets.  But we didn’t want to, because we were afraid that it would cost us a fortune.  A fortune we do not have, especially after Christmas.

We were afraid the scenario would play out like this.  We’d take Brandy to the vet.  The vets are our friends, but they do not give us a break.  We wouldn’t expect them to.  It’s a business, after all.  There would be a fee for examining Brandy. A fee, or several fees, for a series of tests.  Maybe something could be done for Brandy, maybe something couldn’t.   But our collective gut told us that Brandy was fourteen years old, she clearly was not well, and we could easily envision spending a fortune having her looked at only to have her die anyway.

Our decision meant that she died at home.

Well, actually she died en route to the Emergency Animal Hospital where we took her when it became evident that she was in obvious distress.  And my intent there was just to do what I could to reduce her suffering, had she not died en route.

Ultimately her death cost us just over forty dollars.

As I stood in a private waiting room with her lifeless eyes staring reproachfully at, well, not exactly me, but somewhere near me, I had to ask myself if we’d done the right thing.  Initially I thought no, we screwed this up.  The cat suffered needlessly.  It had been dying for days, probably lamenting its inability to speak English, thinking you fools, can’t you see I’m wasting away here, don’t you care, DO something, HELP ME!

But apart from switching its food and petting it more than we usually did of late we did nothing concrete to help our poor cat.

I was angry with the vets, because we could not count on going to them for assistance with incurring potentially exorbitant fees, with little or no hope for a positive outcome save assuaging our guilt.

I thought of my grandfather, who once gave me a potato sack full of kittens and asked me to take them down to the cow trough to drown them.  I was eleven, the age my daughters are now.  Thinking that I had to do as he asked, I dutifully tried to drown the kittens through a veil of tears, but I didn’t think to put a heavy rock in the sack with the kittens, so when I placed the sack in the cow trough the kittens just cried piteously and scrambled en masse to stay afloat.

“Can’t do this,” I told my friend June Forrest, and I freed the kittens and ran away to hide until my sister found me and brought me back to my grandparent’s farmhouse, where my mother and grandmother asked my grandfather what the hell he was thinking before baking June and me a cinnamon apple to make us feel better about the whole unfortunate episode.

My grandfather clearly had a completely different attitude toward the fate of animals on his farm, and almost certainly would not have paid the forty some dollars I paid the Emergency Animal Hospital to dispose of my poor, dead cat.

Forty some dollars.  I was upset.  Not at the forty dollars, but at the death of my cat, and at the way I felt I had failed her, and as I stood there wiping my tears away I was fairly certain that when I die it will be equally miserably, or ought to be, because this was a living, feeling being, and why should I get to die any better?  Having failed her.

While I was wallowing in my abject misery a representative from the Emergency Animal Hospital came in and tried to sell me my cat’s ashes for eighty bucks or so.  And when she failed to sell me my cat’s ashes she tried to sell me my dead cat’s pawprints in an attractive memorial ceramic tile for something like two hundred bucks.  WTF?  (I suggest pronouncing the preceding out loud in full for the complete effect.)

They blatantly tried to profit from my cat’s death and my sorrow and my guilt.

I paid them the forty bucks to dispose of my cat and that was all.  I donated two towels to their cause.  Two towels that I had brought along ostensibly to make Brandy more comfortable, but really so that we wouldn’t have to touch her soiled body as we placed her in the cat carrier to take her to the hospital.

I was mad at the Animal Hospital for trying to profit from my cat’s death, and I was mad at our vets for creating a climate where we were afraid to take her in to be checked out for fear of being bankrupted.  And I was mad at myself for not being willing to do that and for feeling guilty about it.

It’s only a goddamned cat, my grandfather would have told me.

But dammit, I had liked that cat.

That afternoon we bought pet insurance for our dog, because we don’t want to go through this with him.  We didn’t buy it for our surviving cat, because she’s also fourteen, and also because we can’t afford it.  It’s over forty bucks a month for the dog alone, and there’s STILL a five hundred deductible for each accident/condition the dog suffers!

My grandfather would no doubt have a word for sentimental, animal loving folk like myself.

That word is fool.

Rest in peace, Brandy.

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to do more for you when you were alive.

You were a fine girl