If only teen pregnancy was as easy as more birth control
March 16, 2007
I’m rooting for Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, and for anyone else who sets out to address the way we care for the 10,000 children in government care.
But the first challenge is to start thinking differently about the problem. And that means letting go of preconceived notions - like the one about how teen pregnancy will be solved with sex education and birth control.
As the province’s new representative for children and youth, Turpel-Lafond has the opportunity to do some powerful work over the next five years on behalf of the tragic figures caught up in B.C.’s troubled family-care system. And she’s right that it’s a heck of an indicator when girls in care in our province are four times more likely to get pregnant than other girls.
I just hope she goes deeper into that issue than her musings last week around whether children in care were getting enough sex education and birth control. If only it were that simple.
Sure, girls in care probably don’t get enough of either of those. But all the sex ed and birth control in the world can’t get to the heart of the complicated reasons for teenage pregnancy.
The question is simple enough: Why would modern-day North American girls continue to get pregnant in these sexually saturated, birth-controlled times? Perhaps because the underlying reason has nothing to do with knowing how to prevent a pregnancy.
Teenagers have, of course, always gotten pregnant. As a teenage mom myself, I can’t help but bristle at the popular notion that nothing good comes from early motherhood.
What has changed since my time, however, is an end to societal expectations that young men should take some responsibility for that.
Nowadays, girls are pretty much on their own. Modern teen pregnancy has thus become synonymous with poverty, failure and struggle. But virtually all of us have teenage mothers in our own family backgrounds from the days when it was accepted and supported.
So part of what has to happen is just plain old support. If boys are no longer to be held to any expectation around support for the girls they get pregnant, then somebody else has to help make that happen.
On some theoretical level, I think that’s supposed to be government’s job, but I’ve seen little evidence of that to this point. While pregnant girls from financially stable families do OK under the new world order, girls from struggling, marginal families - or worse, from the shattered world of government care - can barely catch a break in these mean times.
It’s within our reach to do something about that virtually immediately, and we ought to. Nothing good comes from leaving pregnant girls and women to scratch by on a $500 welfare cheque. If we’re serious about doing something to slow the rising tide of broken people in our communities, one of the most vital populations to care for is pregnant women.
But teenage pregnancy is also about hope, and it’s that truth that I suspect will pose the biggest challenges in reducing high pregnancy rates among girls in care.
For those girls, getting pregnant is about creating somebody to love them just as they are. It’s about the dream of what it would feel like to have a family - something that many will have barely experienced. It’s about a new tomorrow, in a different and happier life.
Pregnancy for a kid growing up in struggling circumstance rarely turns out as happy as that, of course. But that’s where a girl’s heart leads her sometimes when there’s nothing else to hold onto. Preventing her pregnancy as a teenager is really about helping her feel loved, connected and supported as a child.
Trying to accomplish that under the current system of care in B.C. would be a monumental task, but hardly an unfamiliar one.
After all, tens of thousands of healthy families out there know exactly what it takes to ensure their own children don’t end up as single moms on a welfare cheque. Fewer girls in care will get pregnant when the system more closely models the attributes of a real family - not an easy transformation.
But here’s the good news: We’re doing things so poorly now, there’s nowhere to go but up. With Turpel-Lafond’s recent appointment, we have an opportunity to open up a conversation with the children and families entangled in our care system and figure out how to do it better.
It needn’t be an impossible undertaking. Every day, in every community in Canada, people are capably raising their children into healthy adulthood.
Surely it’s within our ability to design a system that recreates those same family models for struggling families and their children, building trust between child welfare workers and families rather than pitting them against each other.
So yes, let’s get those poor kids in care some more birth control. But first let’s try to give them a real family.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
It all comes out in the wash
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
March 9, 2007
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
patersonatpeers@hotmail.com
On a recent laundry day, I inadvertently knocked the drain tube of my washing machine out of the pipe it drains into. The subsequent flood poured directly into a stored box of personal journals and sentimental letters.
With the exception of my treasured photo collection, I couldn’t have conceived of a worse thing to lose. You won’t catch me weeping over a ruined couch or anything like that, but there’s no replacing memories.
I briefly wondered if such a calamity was perhaps some signal from the fates that the time had come to free myself from the past. I toyed with the idea of jamming the whole sodden mess into a garbage bag and just letting it go.
But then I flipped through a few soaking pages of the intimate details of my life gone by. And that was all it took to get me scrambling to save what I could.
The scene in our basement for a few days was wall-to-wall wet paper. I draped my saturated letters and journals over chairs and sandwiched them between towels. Some were simply too wet to salvage.
Riffling through the surviving papers for the first time in years, it struck me that the real purpose of the flood was to remind me of that forgotten box of papers. To be immersed again in your past as told in your own words from that period is a powerful thing.
“You’ll always have your memories,” they tell you, but that’s not exactly true. While I’ve met people every now and then who are able to recall the smallest details of their lives as if it all happened yesterday, I’m not one of them.
The broad memories are intact, sure, but not the details. What my journals brought back for me were specifics from my life that I’d long forgotten about, and how I was reacting to the various stresses and successes.
I wrote about the time of year. The music I was listening to. The places I was travelling to. Men. Children. The food I was eating. My hopes and dreams.
I’m not at my best in my journals, mind you. For reasons unknown, I tend to be faithful about keeping up my journals only when travelling or in a state of high emotion. (Or both: See Cancun.) I can only hope that anyone who reads them after I die adjusts for the normal living that happened regularly in between my rather overwrought entries, and notes that years sometimes went by in which I didn’t write a single word.
So as a personal history, my journals aren’t too useful. Whole marriages went by unremarked. But enormous narrative gaps aside, there’s still nothing like your own writing from an earlier time to summon up the feelings of that period.
Browsing through my bits of wet paper, I found early exchanges between my partner and I that were giddy with the longing and adoration of new lovers. I’d almost forgotten.
On other pages, I found anger where I hadn’t remembered any, and work frustrations I can no longer recall. I found the roots of hurt feelings and hostilities that I hold to this day, but had lost track of why.
I worried regularly about my kids. About my parents. About how much I worried.
In between all the emotion were details on houses I lived in, pets I owned, people I once knew, and breathless tales of whatever crazy circumstance was unfolding in my life.
I’m heartened to realize that for the most part, I’m now living the life that I was longing for in years gone by, even if it did take a lot longer to get here than I’d expected.
And I’m intrigued to learn from my review that October appears to be a tough month for me. In years when I otherwise wrote barely a line, I still took pen to paper virtually every October to fret about how overwhelmed I felt - year after year after year.
Nothing in my journals is earth-shattering. Had they been lost forever in their cardboard box of soapy water that day, it’d be no big deal to anyone but me.
Still, it’s exactly the kind of history I’d have liked my own parents to pass along to me. Families tend to tell only the “good” stories of their lives, but I like the stuff that provides a more personal understanding of the people you came from. As someone who has loved, lost and in general stumbled her way through life, I take great comfort from the ordinary lives of my ancestors.
Whole sections of my journals were ultimately rendered unreadable by the great laundry flood of 2007. Even the pages that escaped the worst of it are now smudged and indistinct, leaving future readers having to work doubly hard to decipher my bad handwriting amid the water spots, wrinkles and ink transfers.
But hey, it’s my life, and I’m glad to have at least some of it back. Come October, maybe I’ll even do a little journalling about it.
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Restaurant calorie counts a weighty subject
March 2, 2007
In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much.
And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.
That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels.
The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the results would be that different in Canada. The study looked at six mid-range, family-style chain restaurants, and we have no shortage of those.
The dish that clocked in with the highest number of calories was a chicken and broccoli pasta from the Ruby’s chain. The dish had 2,060 calories - almost 100 calories more than what an average woman needs for an entire day. And that’s just one meal.
A burger from a different chain racked up 1,940 calories. No fries, no pop, no nothing - just a burger. The amount of fat in both the burger and the pasta was obscene: 128 grams for the pasta; 141 grams for the burger. That’s the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a cup of butter.
Could you have imagined a single burger incorporating the equivalent amount of fat as three-quarters of a cup of butter? Probably not, and there’s the rub. We simply have no idea of what we’re being served.
Staggering calorie counts are presumably not the norm at most restaurants, and many are downright healthful. But can you say that for sure about the places where you eat? That favourite pasta dish you regularly dig into at your restaurant of choice - have you got any idea how many calories are in it?
The places surveyed by the CSPI all had nutritional breakdowns available for their main dishes. They provided the information to the CSPI for its study, and would likely provide it to me or you as well if we could identify the right people to ask.
But that same information isn’t posted in their restaurants. The eateries said they didn’t want to confuse customers, given that menus change and people tend to customize their meals.
Recognized. But restaurants generally have a stable of steady dishes and sides that they serve. It’s hardly pushy of us to want to know what’s in them. When burgers start tipping the scales with the fat equivalent of three-quarters of a cup of butter, the public has a right to know.
Changing bad habits starts with education. And that means knowing what we’re eating. While nobody would benefit from some nightmarish new regulation requiring restaurants to feature all nutritional breakdowns on every changeable dish they serve, perhaps we could at least require that restaurants post details of their standard fare.
Some of the fast-food places are already posting their nutritional information, and I think it will make a difference over time.
Some of us will walk out of the door forever after being jolted by the calorie counts. Some will stay, but will choose the burger with slightly fewer calories, or the lunch without the fries and the mega-pop. And sure, some will carry on as usual, but at least they won’t be able to claim ignorance when the pounds start piling on.
More and more I see the parallels between our tobacco addiction of days gone by, and our modern-day food compulsions. Nicotine is addictive, but the same can be said of dietary fats and sugars once they’ve been torqued into the raison d’être of our food pursuits. Someone really had to put in effort to create a single burger laden with more fat than a person should be consuming in five days of eating.
So on the one hand, those who eat too much are indeed their own worst enemies. On the other, restaurant fare is in some cases scoring so high on the fat, sugar and salt scale that you have to wonder about the industry’s role as clever alchemist, happy to fuel our feeding frenzy with an overdose of high-calorie flavour.
Eat 500 calories more than you burn every day, and you’ll put on a pound in a week. You’ll need to run for almost an hour every day to burn off those same 500 calories. If you could easily find the details of every dish you ate, you’d almost certainly make some different choices.
Ask the restaurants that you frequent to make those details readily available to everyone. We can’t eat smart without it.
March 2, 2007
In this time of angst over how fat we’re all getting, the only real villain to this point has been our own gluttonous selves. Nobody’s out there making us eat too much.
And for the most part, that’s true. If people are putting on weight to the point that it’s having an impact on their health, then it’s up to them to do something about that. We have the right to good health care no matter what bad choices we make, but we still need to take personal responsibility for staying healthy.
That said, the astounding figures in a U.S. health organization’s newsletter this month certainly underline the restaurant industry’s significant role in helping North Americans lard on the pounds. We may be eating the stuff, but it’s the industry that has cranked up the calorie count to truly obscene levels.
The restaurants listed in the March newsletter of the Centre for Science in the Public Interest were all American, but I don’t imagine the results would be that different in Canada. The study looked at six mid-range, family-style chain restaurants, and we have no shortage of those.
The dish that clocked in with the highest number of calories was a chicken and broccoli pasta from the Ruby’s chain. The dish had 2,060 calories - almost 100 calories more than what an average woman needs for an entire day. And that’s just one meal.
A burger from a different chain racked up 1,940 calories. No fries, no pop, no nothing - just a burger. The amount of fat in both the burger and the pasta was obscene: 128 grams for the pasta; 141 grams for the burger. That’s the equivalent of almost three-quarters of a cup of butter.
Could you have imagined a single burger incorporating the equivalent amount of fat as three-quarters of a cup of butter? Probably not, and there’s the rub. We simply have no idea of what we’re being served.
Staggering calorie counts are presumably not the norm at most restaurants, and many are downright healthful. But can you say that for sure about the places where you eat? That favourite pasta dish you regularly dig into at your restaurant of choice - have you got any idea how many calories are in it?
The places surveyed by the CSPI all had nutritional breakdowns available for their main dishes. They provided the information to the CSPI for its study, and would likely provide it to me or you as well if we could identify the right people to ask.
But that same information isn’t posted in their restaurants. The eateries said they didn’t want to confuse customers, given that menus change and people tend to customize their meals.
Recognized. But restaurants generally have a stable of steady dishes and sides that they serve. It’s hardly pushy of us to want to know what’s in them. When burgers start tipping the scales with the fat equivalent of three-quarters of a cup of butter, the public has a right to know.
Changing bad habits starts with education. And that means knowing what we’re eating. While nobody would benefit from some nightmarish new regulation requiring restaurants to feature all nutritional breakdowns on every changeable dish they serve, perhaps we could at least require that restaurants post details of their standard fare.
Some of the fast-food places are already posting their nutritional information, and I think it will make a difference over time.
Some of us will walk out of the door forever after being jolted by the calorie counts. Some will stay, but will choose the burger with slightly fewer calories, or the lunch without the fries and the mega-pop. And sure, some will carry on as usual, but at least they won’t be able to claim ignorance when the pounds start piling on.
More and more I see the parallels between our tobacco addiction of days gone by, and our modern-day food compulsions. Nicotine is addictive, but the same can be said of dietary fats and sugars once they’ve been torqued into the raison d’être of our food pursuits. Someone really had to put in effort to create a single burger laden with more fat than a person should be consuming in five days of eating.
So on the one hand, those who eat too much are indeed their own worst enemies. On the other, restaurant fare is in some cases scoring so high on the fat, sugar and salt scale that you have to wonder about the industry’s role as clever alchemist, happy to fuel our feeding frenzy with an overdose of high-calorie flavour.
Eat 500 calories more than you burn every day, and you’ll put on a pound in a week. You’ll need to run for almost an hour every day to burn off those same 500 calories. If you could easily find the details of every dish you ate, you’d almost certainly make some different choices.
Ask the restaurants that you frequent to make those details readily available to everyone. We can’t eat smart without it.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Hard to stay positive when faced with our inability to act
Feb. 23, 2007
Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets.
It’s been something of a grim awakening.
Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004.
No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling.
I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s.
I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging people out of hospital when they didn’t need to be there, the project figured it out with a variety of strategies ranging from helping seniors with their household chores to developing mobile psychiatric care.
Yet less than a decade later, I checked back into the story and found the whole concept behind the project had been erased from the collective memory, to the point that the original problems had returned and the identical strategies were being talked about as if they’d never been tried.
I eventually lost count of the number of good initiatives that suffered a similar fate. It turns out we have a discouraging habit of identifying a problem, attempting a solution, cutting the funding before change can really take root, then reidentifying the same problem a few years on and doing it all over again.
Nothing positive comes from cynicism, that’s the truth. But boy, it’s waiting for you once you start paying attention to how little actually gets done about our most pressing problems.
It’s probably been close to a decade since I walked through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and realized it had reached the point where reclamation seemed an impossible dream.
Vacant and boarded-up buildings lined the streets. The handful of businesses still struggling to stay open couldn’t lure customers into the area. Sick and desperate people manouevered the sidewalks like drugged-out, heartbreaking zombies.
I was struck at the time by how fortunate Victoria was to have escaped a similar fate. To see a wonderful city like Vancouver with such devastation at its core is tragic.
But that visit of mine was a long time ago, and Victoria has lost considerable ground in the intervening years. We are not yet the Downtown Eastside, but neither are we even close to the healthy city we used to be.
We have real problems. If we can’t fix them, they will grow into profound ones. That’s the unassailable lesson of the Downtown Eastside, and one that we ignore at our peril.
Like the Downtown Eastside, the reasons for Victoria’s urban problems start with the closing of B.C.’s big institutions in the 1980s, and carry on through global economic shifts, the virtual end of social housing, cheap and readily available street drugs, relentless cuts to all social supports, and an equally relentless refusal to believe any of this is happening.
Add in the tendency of one troubled family to beget many, and you get the picture.
But homelessness need not be a condition of our times. Drug addiction and mental illness can be dealt with. Yes, we’ve left things a little late, but a better world for all is still within our reach.
How will the work be done? As always, one person at a time.
Were we to just get on with it, there could be a happy ending for everybody. We already know what it takes, and in some cases are already doing it. We just need to do much, much more, for as long as it takes to reach the point where we can see the difference in our healthy, happy downtowns.
Research typically shows that setting people up with the help they need costs virtually the same - and sometimes much less - as leaving them to rattle around in their personal disasters. But even if it cost more, it’s surely worth our while to fix our urban malaise regardless.
Why can’t we act? Perhaps it has to do with a culture that holds people responsible for getting out from under their own messes. I get the importance of the principle, but what we’re seeing in our downtown is how life turns out for the folks who just can’t make that happen. How long are we prepared to stand on principle?
Once upon a time, I would have thought that a wealthy, privileged city would stop at nothing to save its beautiful core from becoming just another disturbing example of failed social policy and inaction.
On my good days, I still do.
Feb. 23, 2007
Life on the front lines of a load of social issues these past three years has underlined for me the problems of a community that can’t come to grips with what’s going on in its streets.
It’s been something of a grim awakening.
Not the issues so much - 23 years in journalism had already introduced me to things like drug addiction, the sex trade and people living on the streets before I started working in the not-for-profit sector in 2004.
No, it’s my newfound knowledge - that we’re paralyzed with indecision about what to do about any of it - that has proved the most unsettling.
I sometimes fear I’m drifting into cynicism, which was certainly a risk even in my previous job as a journalist. On that front, I remain haunted by the ghost of the Victoria Health Project of the late 1980s.
I was a relatively new reporter in those days, and loved the strategy for its common sense. Tasked with finding a way to keep aging people out of hospital when they didn’t need to be there, the project figured it out with a variety of strategies ranging from helping seniors with their household chores to developing mobile psychiatric care.
Yet less than a decade later, I checked back into the story and found the whole concept behind the project had been erased from the collective memory, to the point that the original problems had returned and the identical strategies were being talked about as if they’d never been tried.
I eventually lost count of the number of good initiatives that suffered a similar fate. It turns out we have a discouraging habit of identifying a problem, attempting a solution, cutting the funding before change can really take root, then reidentifying the same problem a few years on and doing it all over again.
Nothing positive comes from cynicism, that’s the truth. But boy, it’s waiting for you once you start paying attention to how little actually gets done about our most pressing problems.
It’s probably been close to a decade since I walked through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and realized it had reached the point where reclamation seemed an impossible dream.
Vacant and boarded-up buildings lined the streets. The handful of businesses still struggling to stay open couldn’t lure customers into the area. Sick and desperate people manouevered the sidewalks like drugged-out, heartbreaking zombies.
I was struck at the time by how fortunate Victoria was to have escaped a similar fate. To see a wonderful city like Vancouver with such devastation at its core is tragic.
But that visit of mine was a long time ago, and Victoria has lost considerable ground in the intervening years. We are not yet the Downtown Eastside, but neither are we even close to the healthy city we used to be.
We have real problems. If we can’t fix them, they will grow into profound ones. That’s the unassailable lesson of the Downtown Eastside, and one that we ignore at our peril.
Like the Downtown Eastside, the reasons for Victoria’s urban problems start with the closing of B.C.’s big institutions in the 1980s, and carry on through global economic shifts, the virtual end of social housing, cheap and readily available street drugs, relentless cuts to all social supports, and an equally relentless refusal to believe any of this is happening.
Add in the tendency of one troubled family to beget many, and you get the picture.
But homelessness need not be a condition of our times. Drug addiction and mental illness can be dealt with. Yes, we’ve left things a little late, but a better world for all is still within our reach.
How will the work be done? As always, one person at a time.
Were we to just get on with it, there could be a happy ending for everybody. We already know what it takes, and in some cases are already doing it. We just need to do much, much more, for as long as it takes to reach the point where we can see the difference in our healthy, happy downtowns.
Research typically shows that setting people up with the help they need costs virtually the same - and sometimes much less - as leaving them to rattle around in their personal disasters. But even if it cost more, it’s surely worth our while to fix our urban malaise regardless.
Why can’t we act? Perhaps it has to do with a culture that holds people responsible for getting out from under their own messes. I get the importance of the principle, but what we’re seeing in our downtown is how life turns out for the folks who just can’t make that happen. How long are we prepared to stand on principle?
Once upon a time, I would have thought that a wealthy, privileged city would stop at nothing to save its beautiful core from becoming just another disturbing example of failed social policy and inaction.
On my good days, I still do.
Monday, February 19, 2007
If exotic dancers' money not good enough, don't count on mine
Feb . 17, 2007
When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too.
Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them.
Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month.
But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became obvious was that the same kind of thing happens all the time. Exotic dancers in particular have had a hard time of it.
The Windsor Star had a story about exotic dancers back in 1984 who tried to donate half of a night’s wages to charity. The local United Way wouldn’t take it, and the dancers finally ended up giving the $3,000 to a Windsor hospice.
Two years later, dancers at the same club raised $20,000 for two local hospitals. Both refused to take the money. It went to five other less-discriminating Windsor organizations instead.
Here in B.C., the interesting thing is that the very same charity that’s refusing the money this time out was being praised a year ago for bucking the trend and accepting money from the same group of dancers.
Up to that point, none of the main cancer organizations wanted to touch a donation from Exotic Dancers for Canada, unless they agreed to remain anonymous. Understandably, the dancers found that just a little demeaning.
The group launched its fundraiser in 2004 as a benefit for a colleague dying of breast cancer.
The following year, after the woman’s death, the fundraiser was staged again to benefit breast-cancer research. But organizer Annie Temple couldn’t find anyone willing to take the donation. As had happened in Windsor back in 1984, the dancers gave the money to an appreciative hospice instead.
The year after, Temple wrote such a compelling letter to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada that they agreed to accept the money from the 2006 event.
“Our bottom line is that any women can get breast cancer. It doesn’t matter what they do, what their profession is,” said cancer society executive director Rany Xanothopoulo a scant year ago.
Since then, however, “certain major donors” have made their displeasure clear. When the exotic dancers called Xanothopoulo this winter about donating the proceeds from their upcoming fundraiser next month, they got the news. Donations from “controversial sources” are no longer being accepted.
In this case, it’s especially outrageous because the dancers are legally employed. They ought to be applauded for their social-mindedness, not spurned for their offers of dirty money. Breast cancer kills more than 5,000 Canadian women a year, so good on them for trying to do their part for that ongoing battle.
The on-line debate around the Breast Cancer Society’s rejection of the donation reveals an overwhelming majority against the decision, although not without a number of people pointing out what a difficult position the society had been put in.
A “major donor” - someone able to provide a great deal of money for the cause, presumably - had made a fuss after the society had taken money from the exotic dancers last year.
The society could either stand on its principle of a year ago and risk losing a lot of money, or reject the donation from the dancers and give up a mere $3,000 or so. The decision makes sense when viewed as a financial dilemma.
I respect the right of the Breast Cancer Society of Canada to do what it has to do. While the Web site of the Sarnia, Ont., non-profit doesn’t breathe a word about the current debate, I have to presume that it did what it thought was necessary in choosing to pass judgment on its donors.
But an organization that does that also has to accept that it’s going to lose a donor like me when it all comes out, because I don’t want to go along with anything like that. If nothing else, this aggravating news of a charity turning away a donation will at least give me an additional thing to ascertain when deciding where to put my own charitable contributions.
Hooray for exotic dancers who care enough to raise money every year for breast cancer. May their money no longer go unwanted.
Feb . 17, 2007
When I first heard about a national breast cancer charity turning down a donation from exotic dancers in Vancouver, I got mad. I fired off a furious e-mail to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada, and suspect a lot of other people did too.
Being an exotic dancer is, after all, a legal profession. Up until 2004, Canada even had a special fast-track immigration category for exotic dancers to ensure the country never ran short of them.
Do we want our charities getting sniffy about taking donations from hard-working, fully legal dancers just because somebody disapproves of how they make a living? That’s what happened in this instance, when the cancer society rejected the proceeds of a fundraiser being put on by Vancouver’s Exotic Dancers For Canada next month.
But while I was poking around on the Web in search of insight into what could have possibly possessed the society to refuse the donation, what became obvious was that the same kind of thing happens all the time. Exotic dancers in particular have had a hard time of it.
The Windsor Star had a story about exotic dancers back in 1984 who tried to donate half of a night’s wages to charity. The local United Way wouldn’t take it, and the dancers finally ended up giving the $3,000 to a Windsor hospice.
Two years later, dancers at the same club raised $20,000 for two local hospitals. Both refused to take the money. It went to five other less-discriminating Windsor organizations instead.
Here in B.C., the interesting thing is that the very same charity that’s refusing the money this time out was being praised a year ago for bucking the trend and accepting money from the same group of dancers.
Up to that point, none of the main cancer organizations wanted to touch a donation from Exotic Dancers for Canada, unless they agreed to remain anonymous. Understandably, the dancers found that just a little demeaning.
The group launched its fundraiser in 2004 as a benefit for a colleague dying of breast cancer.
The following year, after the woman’s death, the fundraiser was staged again to benefit breast-cancer research. But organizer Annie Temple couldn’t find anyone willing to take the donation. As had happened in Windsor back in 1984, the dancers gave the money to an appreciative hospice instead.
The year after, Temple wrote such a compelling letter to the Breast Cancer Society of Canada that they agreed to accept the money from the 2006 event.
“Our bottom line is that any women can get breast cancer. It doesn’t matter what they do, what their profession is,” said cancer society executive director Rany Xanothopoulo a scant year ago.
Since then, however, “certain major donors” have made their displeasure clear. When the exotic dancers called Xanothopoulo this winter about donating the proceeds from their upcoming fundraiser next month, they got the news. Donations from “controversial sources” are no longer being accepted.
In this case, it’s especially outrageous because the dancers are legally employed. They ought to be applauded for their social-mindedness, not spurned for their offers of dirty money. Breast cancer kills more than 5,000 Canadian women a year, so good on them for trying to do their part for that ongoing battle.
The on-line debate around the Breast Cancer Society’s rejection of the donation reveals an overwhelming majority against the decision, although not without a number of people pointing out what a difficult position the society had been put in.
A “major donor” - someone able to provide a great deal of money for the cause, presumably - had made a fuss after the society had taken money from the exotic dancers last year.
The society could either stand on its principle of a year ago and risk losing a lot of money, or reject the donation from the dancers and give up a mere $3,000 or so. The decision makes sense when viewed as a financial dilemma.
I respect the right of the Breast Cancer Society of Canada to do what it has to do. While the Web site of the Sarnia, Ont., non-profit doesn’t breathe a word about the current debate, I have to presume that it did what it thought was necessary in choosing to pass judgment on its donors.
But an organization that does that also has to accept that it’s going to lose a donor like me when it all comes out, because I don’t want to go along with anything like that. If nothing else, this aggravating news of a charity turning away a donation will at least give me an additional thing to ascertain when deciding where to put my own charitable contributions.
Hooray for exotic dancers who care enough to raise money every year for breast cancer. May their money no longer go unwanted.
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