Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously ruled that people who are of competent mind and have a terminal illness and consistently have indicated their desire to end their life should be able to employ the assistance of a physician in doing so.

This, this is hard.  The autonomy aspect of this is crucial; we don't believe (much) (yet) in this country in sentencing people to life in prison without parole, and if someone has decided that life isn't worth living, that's a kind of life sentence of possibly a very, very long duration.  It also has to be said that without legal assisted suicide, people will end their lives earlier, as they'll have to do it themselves, when they are physically more well than when they'd need to rely on assistance. 

And yet, it's really hard to listen to this whole narrative and wonder why it is that we as a society have made getting old or disabled so unappealing that people want to end their lives, and why it is that we don't devote more resources to fixing this problem.  (Instead, we have wars.  Yay.) 

In particular, a friend pointed me to this article on Facebook, and it notes something that should be obvious in the midst of this whole stupid measles outbreak: the people who are not vaccinating their kids (because they incorrectly believe that the measles vaccine causes autism) are valuing the possibility of their kid getting measles (measles!) over the (incorrect) fear of having someone autistic in their family. 

The narrative goes on and on.  There's the late Harriet McBryde writing one of the best articles I've ever read, about her arguments with Peter Singer about the validity of disabled lives.  There's an almost infinite amount of research that shows that community living makes old people's lives better and makes their decisions about end-of-life care ones that they are more satisfied with.  And so on.

I do think that on balance, letting people make decisions around their own lives is the only reasonable choice.  But the context of our society in which they make that choice?  It's pretty dreadful.

Six weeks ago, we visited my (American) family for (Canadian) Thanksgiving.

(Can I note that I don't understand why so many of my [Canadian] friends felt the need to be perplexed by this trip?  My parents are retired.  We can visit them whenever we want.  What mattered is not that it was Thanksgiving, but that we had time off, and it was a lovely time of the year to go to PA.  Well, really, every time is a lovely time of year to go to PA, except possibly winter.)

It feels remarkable that we were there six weeks ago, mostly because a week after we went to PA for three days, we went to Asia for two weeks.  The one trip kind of overshadows the other.

Anyhow, we went to the nut outlet, while we were there.  You know, the nut outlet.  And they had strikingly good prices on a lot of, well, nuts.  So there are a lot of nuts in my pantry now.

Our favourite nuts are macadamia nuts.  This is in no small part because we fell in love with good fresh mac nuts when we were in Hawaii in December 2012 and 2013.  The mac nuts we have found since we returned from Hawaii have been, well, mehcadamia nuts. 

But the ones from the nut outlet?  They were good!  I bought two bags.  This morning's pancakes caused me to finish the first bag and start the second.

And the nuts in the second bag aren't as good.  The last nuts from bag one (which has been sitting in a tupperware in the fridge since I opened it) taste much fresher than the first nuts from bag two (which has been sitting in the panttry).

Moral of the story: refrigerate your nuts. 

Meanwhile, tonight's dinner was excellent: composed baby spinach salad, with roasted butternut squash and brussels sprouts, Sichuan pepper duck breast, apple, pomegranate and flash-pickled onion.  Oh, and (less good) macadamia nuts.  We have to try harder in winter, but occasionally it's worth it.

We met with a representative from MCC today.  We love MCC.  We also donate a lot to them.

One of the standard measures of a charity's efficiency is, "how much of the charity's revenues go to program costs versus administration costs?"  Charities strive to be under 20% in administration costs, because those that spend lots on administration also often have serious ethical concerns (like overpaid senior staff, say).

MCC is pretty decent in size, but its programs are extremely efficient.  In particular, it has lots of semi-volunteer staff (who are often following whatever the Mennonite equivalent of the Quaker concept of a leading is) from the developed world who work for peanuts in developing countries (basically, they're paid their living expenses plus a tiny stipend), a small amount of professional staff in developing countries paid essentially Canada's minimum wage, and then lots of local partners paid whatever a fair wage is by local standards.  So that means that they're tremendously efficient, which is great!  They have all of these very cheap programs all around the world.

Except that the central (i.e., Canadian) cost of administering cheap programs is no lower than the cost of administering expensive programs.  And same with fundraising: it turns out that a funny consequence of spending so little on programs is that they can't, actually, spend all that much on fundraising either, because the money for hiring fundraisers is eaten up by administering all of their programs.

After spending a few years learning about how Waterloo does fundraising (it was very funny having her quickly learn that, no, I really do know this language), it was eye-opening to see how different things are for "real" charities. 

I'm reading Wolf Hall right now.  It's the first book of three in Hilary Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

It feels pretty much like standard historical fiction so far.  Because the back story is so complicated (dear me, but the 15th and 16th-century English royal family trees are confusing), she has lot of different tricks to give it to us: characters just recalling it as (boring) internal monologue, dialogue, legend.  It's well written, but feels anachronistic in parts.  You know, historical fiction.  In high school, to avoid 11th-grade English, I took a course called "History through Literature", which was basically a course made up of historical fiction (we did read some Shakespeare), and sure, at various times over the course of my life, I've read quite a bit of it, though my preferred English period is around 350 years earlier.

And sure, Thomas Cromwell is pretty cool to learn about.

But I can't help but think it's a little much that both this book and its successor won the Man Booker Prize. 

And yet.

There's gender afoot.  Basically, I'm saying that I don't think that historical fiction, as a genre, is really literature.  (That's probably true. I probably don't.)  But of course, it's a genre mostly written by women, while "literature" is more often written by men. 

And yet I think it's good genre fiction.  And yet, I like musical theatre, not opera, and I think that "Show Boat" is as important as any opera.

I keep seeing memes after last week's midterm elections that make me despair for how little Americans understand their own democracy, or, in many cases, respect it.

Most absurd has been, "now that people voted for Republicans, the Republicans have to X", where X is "govern" or "work with the President", or a variety of other verb phrases that mean, "get things done", because "that's why people voted for Republicans."

This is hogwash.

List of reasons to vote Republican, not Democratic in the 2014 elections:

• anger at Democrats
  
• preference for Republican point of view and for Republican policies to be enacted
  
• preference for gridlock / divided government
  
• dislike of local Democratic candidate
  
• affection for local Republican candidate
  
• strategic vote so that if Republican President elected in 2016, comes alongside large Congressional majority
  
• generic subcultural affinity for Republicans
  
• the benefits of incumbency
  
• interest in how Republicans might govern if given the chance
  

All of these are valid reasons, but their preferred outcomes vary dramatically.  Only some of them imply a preference

And that's okay! 

Similarly, there's been a striking number of people saying that 2014's election was "historically" bad for the Democrats, which shows a surprisingly tiny window of "historical" knowledge, given that the outcome was not exactly different from 1994's midterm elections, or (for a six-years-in election), 2006's.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-year_itch)  I realize that looking a whopping eight or twenty years into the past is a challenge, but I do wish political reporters and the people who transmit their drivel could do so. 

This morning's market visit quickly moved from, "gosh, plums in November?" to discussion of lamb sodomy with banana dildos.

As one does.

The current discussion of street harrassment has me somewhat interested.

You see, I talk to strangers. 

I do it a lot.

I did it in Boston, when I was an undergrad, mostly at coffee shops.  (God, I miss talking to strangers in coffee shops.  I miss it so much.)

I think I really started doing it when I lived in Ithaca, as a grad student.  One of the (many!) things I liked about leaving cold, miserable Boston for cold, welcoming Ithaca (you can't have everything) was the experience that I would walk down the street in Fall Creek (my neighbourhood) and people said hi to me, and I to them.

Over time, I suppose, I acquired a passing connection to these people, but for many of them, I didn't know their first names.  But nonetheless, for a really lonely 21-year-old who'd just moved in from afar, it actually helped me feel like I was part of humanity.

There are lots and lots of ways that I talk to strangers.  I say hello to people in cafes.  When people next to me in line are asking questions to their friends that their friends obviously don't know the answers to, I semi-bashfully say, "um, actually, it's not Rangoon any more, they built a capital in the middle of the country."  (Or whatever.  I don't do this often.  Which is to say I probably drive Daniel nuts with how often I do it.)  I pet their dogs.  (Really, that's probably half of it.)  I admire their scarves.  I laugh with them when I nearly decapitate them by talking with my hands and having them walk up behind me without me knowing they were there.  I say hello when I stand in line for transit with them.

I've stopped doing some of the talking to strangers I once did, and to be honest, I miss some of it.  I don't talk to strangers in coffee shops anymore, because everyone's staring at a screen and half of the people are listening to headphones.  I don't compliment black women on their hair anymore.  (Maybe I very rarely do?)  But I saw a movie a few years ago ("Good Hair", by Chris Rock), where it was made really clear to me that black women largely don't give a shit what white guys think of their hair, and that some feel it's dehumanizing or whatever-the-black-equivalent-to-orientalism is, to focus on the art on people's head.  [Oh, right: I compliment strangers on their tattoos, too.  Gah.] 

And, in general, I've tried to train myself not to compliment women on their appearance.  I honestly struggle with this.  (Example: two paragraphs ago, I noted that I admire people's scarves.  Probably mostly women's scarves.) No, I never did, "hey babe, you and me, how 'bout it", or the like.  [I do confess that I look at attractive people, under my sunglasses, at the beach.  You do, too.  Please don't judge me.]  But I have, over time, decided that complimenting most strangers on their appearance doesn't make the world any happier than just, "Gorgeous day, eh?" [Did you see that?  I have become Canadian enough that I can use "eh" successfully...] 

Again, I kind of regret this, and it feels complicated.  I do still compliment men on their clothes, sometimes, as, "those socks are so cool" or, "what a great hat!"  (In general, I guess I never really compliment men on any aspect of their bodies, while I might have sometimes complimented women on their outfits.  I can't imagine ever complimenting strangers on, say, their figures.)

I talk to strangers about music.  I talk to strangers about Muzak.  I give directions to strangers.  (Favourite single example: in Lille, "SEE VOOO PLAY?  EST KAY SAY..." "I speak English natively, and I don't speak French.  Are you lost?")

I guess I still probably do talk to strangers about how they look, sometimes.  And I probably still will.  I don't think I'm making an assumption about women's sexual availability by doing so; in general, I more feel like we're all in drag and I'm acknowledging other people have done especially fierce drag that day.

But this space is hard for me, and I feel I should acknowledge that fact.

I'm seeing people who are connected to BDSM communities post on other social networks or in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about how "that's not how we do what we do" in respect to the (believable) allegations that Jian Ghomeshi has been abusive to sexual partners, perhaps some in a BDSM context, others fairly clearly not at all.

I don't want to write about Ghomeshi (though I do note that my belief of what happened is in parentheses in the previous paragraph); what I find more interesting has been the "community response", noting that Ghomeshi (likely) doesn't follow standards around consent and safety. 

I wonder what fraction of people who practice consensual BDSM are currently, or indeed, have ever been, connected with a "community" of people defined by this behaviour.  There was a comment on a Facebook post that I saw where a fellow basically said, "you know, it was much better when it was hard to join the S/M community, back in the '80s", and my biggest thought was that, in a post-"50 Shades of Grey" world, lots of people probably aren't interested in joining such a "community;" they either want to find people to have consensual rough sex with, or (probably more common) they want to incorporate rough sex into their existing monogamous relationship/marriage.  Which is fine, of course.  Seeing this as a political or community affiliation is a leap, and a leap many won't make.  And really don't have to; it's not as though the knowledge that you can spank people while having sex with them (say) requires joining a group to acquire.

This means that the "safe / sane / consensual" motto (or other formulae) that "organized" kinky folk use could be tangential to the experience of many people who have rough sex as part of their relationships.

Obviously, the analogy to queer folk is salient to me; there was probably a high-water mark for gay organizations in the '90s, when AIDS was still killing hundreds a day in the US, our sex lives were illegal, closets were a little scary to leave, and finding sex or romance partners was something people did face-to-face, rather than electronically.  Nowadays, the politics are not nearly as lively (in many places, the most important issues really are those involving trans folk, and regrettably, many white gay men are happy enjoying their largely restored privilege rather than working for wider equality rights), and it's much more possible for a young person to come out, have sex, acquire partners, and so on without ever going to a meeting of a single group.  Moreover, even during that high-water period, every indicator of privilege (being white, being male, being educated, wealth, living in a city, etc.) meant a disproportionate probability that someone would join "a gay [or LGBT or ...] community group".

I've always been suspicious of "gay people do X".  I find I'm suspicious, now, of "kinksters do X", for similar reasons.