[cough] Blog [cough]. Also, [blog] cough [blog].

I hate it when people use that “[cough] word [cough]” construction when they’re trying to be clever, like writing something like “I hate bad reality tv [cough] Big Brother [cough].” You’ve never seen it? I have. Anyway, today’s post title is a little riff on it AND a reference to this damned cough (and associated sputum-iness) that I’ve been enduring for about a week and a half now. I caught this bug from Brian, who started to get sick right after I came home from Seattle, so I can look at him and see that a week from now (I started getting it about a week after he did, see), I’ll be not a whole hell of a lot better. In fact we seem about “even” in the cough arena, waking up hacking like mad. Is this H1N1? Could be, though neither of us had much in the way of fever and neither had any real nausea or diarrhea (these are apparently more common with H1N1 than with most seasonal flu), but we HAVE had massive, just massive, amounts of coughing and lots of wet coughing at that. Nothing like a “cold.” First couple days saw us both with wracking body aches too, which is of course more like flu. But it’s too late to test for it and in any case Alberta Health is saying that even if we feel we might have it, and this is good advice, if we’re not experiencing high fever or respiratory distress, no need to tax the system. Brian and I are both pretty much able to be out of the public realm, he because he works at home most of the time, and me because I don’t teach summers. Anyway, hopefully by my next post I’ll be back to normal, or close to it. Meantime: COUGH.

So I’ve been delinquent in the blogosphere of late; most of this is because I’ve been sick and not up to it, but a lot of this is due to my “where do I start?” feeling. I mean, so many things, personal and political, are upsetting me these days and I could write forever about them.

Personal? More online harassment. I’ve come to realise something, and this goes without saying and is a complete “I told you so” thing, so don’t tell me so, but I really wish I’d done a better job of masking my identity sometimes. Online, I mean. This is the thing: People know who I am. I use my real name all over the place, or I link to this blog in which I make zero effort to hide who I am, and the people who hate me–and gosh, there are lots of them–use this against me. They attack me and are themselves anonymous. Now, I had the happy occasion to find out the real name of the person who was leaving tons of hateful messages in my comments here; I say “happy,” because it wasn’t anybody I knew, no disgruntled former student or anything like that, just some unattractive, bespectacled nebbish who never learned how to turn his privacy settings on for his facebook account. Seeing the person behind that campaign rendered him harmless, and so I decided to try the same course of action (meaning to use my internet sleuthing skills) to find another, more recent hater, somebody who has been trolling comments of mine on skyscraperpage and skyscrapercity for about a year and a half, mocking my use of the term “cappo” for “cappuccino” or “resto” for “restaurant,” and yes, he REALLY HATED that I used these terms.

He took this vocabulary, which is nothing but convenient foodie shorthand for crappy foodie typists like me, to mean that I am arrogant and pretentious. And he found my blog to be, surprise, indulgent and just a terrible read. And he let everybody know it and proffered links to this blog to show the world what an arrogant bore I am. And he posted links to my youtube videos, the ones where I make espressos with my Leva, to point out what an obsessive and pretentious person I am. And he did this under the guise of three separate identities, so it could look as if it was more than just him (and this very angry misfit from Thunder Bay) ganging up on me. This went on all over the net, I found by searching his username. There were people on “british expats” being apprised of what a horrible “arrogant pretentious” person I am. A site devoted to reviews of Toronto escorts–yes, a whore review site–had entries where he joked about what a pretentious arrogant coffee person I am. I had to find out who this person was, to render him as harmless as I had done with that stalker from last fall. But no happy ending here, because as it turned out, this troll was one of Brian’s best friends, somebody who had been close enough to him (and, I thought, to us) to have attended our wedding, in Ottawa. Yes, somebody I know quite well. This hurt, it hurt badly enough to prevent me from sleeping for two straight nights, it ended one of Brian’s oldest friendships, and all because this guy couldn’t bring himself not only to bring these issues up with me directly if they offended him so much, but also to stop a campaign–no other way to describe it–against me, with stabbing comments peppered all over SSP and SSC about “I’m enjoying a cappo at a third-wave coffeehouse, wink wink, that’s what that PRETENTIOUS John Manzo would say, LOL,”  after I messaged him privately begging him to stop. The guy set up fake accounts for the sole purpose of harassing me. And while he’s acknowledged what he’s done, I don’t understand why, and I can say, claiming the status of morally superior here, that  I would NEVER do this to one of my friends’ spouses. It’s horrible and there can be no happy ending.

Lesson here? I am very good at finding people. Sometimes, I guess, I’d rather not know the truth. But you mess with me “anonymously,” and I find you. I found the student who was sending me gay-bashing emails a few years ago and it almost cost him his degree. I found my expletive-filled comments stalker. I found Brian’s ex-friend. I never do this anonymous cowardice and anybody who does should be ashamed.

Public? Oy, where to start? We got gay rights formally and explicitly added to our provincial human rights code in Alberta, 14 years after the federal government “wrote it in” following the famous “Vriend” decision. And to appease the PC party’s hard right–specifically, to appease the very hard-right Ted Morton, so he won’t jump ship and run for head of the ultra-right Wild Rose Alliance–they included a provision to allow parents to remove their kids from school when the curriculum addressed issues relating to religion, sexuality or sexual orientation. Okay, parents ALREADY had that right. Parents had the right to enrol their kids in Catholic or Christian or any other religious schools, as well as to educate them at home. What happens now is that if kids are exposed to the knowledge that same-sex couples can legally marry–and THIS is the point that gives Morton a religious hissy fit, let’s be frank–then, get this, the teacher can be brought before a human rights tribunal! It’s so twisted. So if Johnny calls Joey a “faggot,” the teacher can’t use the insult as an object lesson about tolerance and difference, because they didn’t get prior approval for it, and you know that radical right-wing nutbar terrorists like Focus on the Family are just champing at the bit to bring cases forth to scare those liberal-loving teachers. It’s sick and makes me so, so ashamed to be Albertan.

Other political stuff: Certain groups seem to be falling over one another to castigate the progressive members of Calgary city council these days, with the guns aimed at John Mar, Joe Ceci and especially Druh Farrell, because they actually believe that moving this city forward and making it a place to LIVE with public life and public amenities and curbside recycling, finally and thank God, is not in line with “taxpayers’ interests,” when we already pay the lowest property taxes in the entire country. There are too many people in this city whose interests are nothing but selfish and suburban and this backlash is really getting tiresome. All these people care about are car-friendly policies and screwing anything and anyone progressive: No funding for transit, no parks, no recycling, no high-density housing, nothing but wide-lot suburban me-me-me-me-me-ME. They are a cancer in every city and unfortunately for a unicity like Calgary, the suburbanites share the same municipality as we live in and we have to appease them. They choose unsustainable lifestyles and then complain because Calgary Transit won’t pick them up at their front door, tranport them to work, feed them and wipe their fat suburban asses. You want a better commute? LIVE CLOSER TO YOUR WORK. And don’t give me this “the inner city is too expensive” bull. Nothing is free, but when we moved to Calgary the inner city was a ridiculous bargain and near the best schools in the city to boot. I could go on and on but that’ll do. Somebody has to scream on OUR side, the RIGHT side, and I’m about to start it.