The days of the true rock concert experience are dying.

My 2009 summer concert list is getting rather unwieldy.

• Coldplay - tickets are bought (show is July 30th)
  
• Depeche Mode - tickets are bought (show is July 24th)
  
• Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction - tickets aren't on sale yet, but I have a crack team working on snatching up a few when the time comes (show is June 2nd)
  
• U2 - no onsale date yet, either (whyyyyy did they pick the lousiest possible venue??? Show is on September 16th)
  

And those are just the four major contenders; there will surely be others. Thank goodness I'm only actually paying for two of these at a time. And the Depeche Mode ones are actually a gift from my parents, which is a damn good thing, since they're $115 each. Compare that to the $50 apiece we paid for Coldplay, and it's outright despicable, really.



Oh, before I forget (and completely off-topic!), I'm putting out a call to all:
What's your favourite conspiracy theory?
Is there one (or more than one??) that you've always kinda thought had some merit to it? I'm doing a little research into some of the more popular ones, and was thinking of doing a few blog installments about them, so tell me which conspiracy theories fascinate you the most, or which ones are completely ridiculous (and why!), and I'll get around to compiling a few posts looking a bit further into 'em.


Back to the concerts thing, then.



Remember the good old days, when TRUE FANS would line up the night before or the morning of the tickets going on sale? When you'd befriend other fans in line and you'd see them again months later at the concert? Remember when people had to do more than sit on their lazy asses and click a mouse to go to a show? All of those things, that effort, really did add to the experience. Now scalpers get more tickets than fans do, and venues add an extra $20 to each ticket for "convenience charges" and so on. Mark my words: The days of the truly great rock concert are dying, my friends.

The craziest ticket-getting experience I ever had was the bitterly cold January morning when my boyfriend Doug and I lined up to buy Pink Floyd tickets. We were actually going to see Billy Joel that night at Maple Leaf Gardens (this was 1994), so having to get up that early on a Saturday morning and then make the trek in a blizzard downtown in 12 hours was...not an exciting prospect. Still, it was PINK FLOYD. It was the "PULSE" tour, in support of The Division Bell *swoon*, and nothing was going to stop us from getting those tickets. There was no such thing as Ticketmaster.Ca or .Com, but you could do it by phone, if you were a wimp. This was also before the random wristbands; you had to haul ass to prove you were worthy of those good seats, damnit. And there was also a limit of 4 tickets, EVER, per person.

What we didn't know, though, was that things were different that morning than they usually were when we'd gone to buy tickets at the record store. Usually the store employees would open the mall doors enough for us to at least wait inside for an hour or two, even while the whole place was still technically closed. So I hadn't dressed for -30°C temperatures. I had normal boots on, and a normal winter jacket, sure, but I didn't have a scarf or mittens or a hat, and the wind was bitter enough that I should have been wearing tights and extra-thick socks as well. We had to stand out there for two hours, after all...and that's enough to kill you if you're not dressed for it. (I was also a skinny little thing then - just shy of 5'6" and not even 125lbs. No natural insulation whatsoever.)

After the first hour, my feet started to hurt so badly that I actually began to cry, and my tears froze at the corners of my eyes. Doug had been holding me as close to him as possible, but that didn't help my feet, obviously. So he had to leave me there (I'd only gotten my driver's license a few weeks earlier!), drive to my house several blocks away, and ask my parents for whatever they could give him so he could rush back to me and wrap me up in layers. By now I was getting those telltale white spots on my face, and the pain in my feet....GOD, it was INDESCRIBABLE. The people in front of me in line weren't in much better shape; they were two college guys who were wearing blue jeans and their leather jackets from school. The three of us took turns shielding each other from the wind, but mostly they felt sorry for me, this pathetic little 17-year-old girl with big blue eyes and frozen tears who kept trying to sing "Comfortably Numb" along with them so none of us would pass out.

When Doug returned, he was the hero of the hour: My Dad had sent over a couple of extra sweatshirts and pairs of thermal gloves for the people around us, and my Mom had given Doug money to stop at Tim Horton's to get a whole tray of hot chocolate. Oh, it was bliss. He wrapped a scarf around my face, pulled a toque down over my ears (they hurt like a sonofabitch, too), helped me put on an extra pair of socks, and stuffed my hands into the biggest mittens I owned. He'd gotten 8 cups of hot chocolate, so everyone we'd befriended in this terrible melee was so grateful.

By the time 9:59 a.m. rolled around, and the line began to move toward the door, I could barely walk. Doug dutifully dragged me along, with the help of one of the college guys who'd gratefully taken one of my Dad's sweaters, and the normal inside temperature of the mall felt, comparatively, like we were entering the mouth of hell as we hobbled through those doors.

There was an unspoken code in those days: When you got your tickets and came back out of the record store, you would announce to everyone in line behind you which section you'd gotten, so everyone could calculate which seats were left and so on. Sometimes, if you'd spent enough time together and had become friends while you waited, you might even try your luck at getting tickets for all four of you - two and two, of course, to better the odds, but it still saved precious seconds from ticking away for those people behind you. In this case, though, we opted to go it alone. We wished the college boys good luck, and we watched like hawks as they stood at the Ticketmaster counter, trying to read the lips of the girl behind the register. As it turned out, we all got really good seats, and the guys waited for us outside the store to give back the clothes that had probably saved them from freezing to death. They promised they would remember this, and that they'd see us 7 months from now at the show and would make it up to us.

That night, while we sat at Maple Leaf gardens singing along with Billy Joel, I had to fight back tears because my feet and legs still felt like someone was stabbing them with red-hot knitting needles. But the concert was fantastic, and the fact that I enjoyed it anyway really says something.

Fast forward to July 5th, 1994. January was long forgotten, as was the miserable weather we'd endured to allow us to end up at Exhibition Stadium. It was a gorgeous summer night, and Doug and I were over the (dark side of the) moon about seeing Pink Floyd. We had watched A Delicate Sound Of Thunder on VHS so, so many times, and we were ready to have this experience firsthand. Our seats were breathtaking. And it was the final night of an annual tradition in Toronto - the Symphony of Fire - so we got to watch a most extraordinary fireworks show before the concert began. The stadium was right on Lake Ontario, and the moon was full, and it was just...idyllic.

Not long before the show started, I was startled when something landed in my lap. It felt like...clothes. I looked around and couldn't tell in the throngs of people who had thrown it. And then I lifted it up. It was the Division Bell concert t-shirt. Seconds later, Doug got hit in the face with one. And then we saw them. Our college guys! They were only about seven seats over from us, had spotted us earlier, and had gone to the concession to buy us these shirts. They hadn't forgotten the payback they'd promised. It was lovely. We convinced the couple next to us to switch with these guys, and so the four of us were able to bask in the glory of the opening notes when David Gilmour first came onstage.

It didn't hurt that they'd also brought the purest pot I have ever smelled. They offered, and we declined, but I was rip-roaringly high off the secondhand smoke, which made Doug laugh, because I kept bursting into happy tears and saying, "This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen!" whenever the lights turned into green lasers. (The inflatable pigs with the floodlights for eyes FUCKED ME UP, though.)

There were no email addresses to exchange back then - not really - so at the end of the show, we simply thanked our new/old friends for being so generous, and they thanked us again for rescuing them on that wintry day, and we parted ways. I still have the shirt, and so does Doug.

These are the experiences we miss out on nowadays. Hiding behind our computers, selling our tickets on eBay, waking up two minutes before the onsale time hits... It may seem perfectly normal to some of the younger folks reading this, but you're missing out. You truly are.



I have always wanted to tell that story. I'm glad I have. Am I the only one who's had such a fondness for the way getting tickets used to work???

On sexual harassment. And worse.

I don't update this thing for a month, and then I come back with this? Yes, you have permission to scowl at me for this. But it's timely. It's not my place to go into the details of why, but I'll give a very brief overview:

A friend of mine has a daughter who is...let's leave it at "middle-school age". I adore my friend, and I adore her daughter; I love how strong my friend is, how opinionated she can be without treading on others, and she's clearly passing that same inner and outer strength along to her young lady. But I don't think it's just my affection for them that has me so outraged over what happened to this girl a few days ago. It makes it worse, yeah, but I think I'd probably be sickened by any permutation of this. And I expect you will be, too, which is why I'm writing about it.

This girl - who we'll just call A. - went to school, as usual. While waiting for the bus to arrive at her usual stop at the end of the day, a few of her classmates - boys - approached her and started doing that thing that all adolescent boys do. You know, whatever the modern day equivalent to pigtails in the inkwell would be. Teasing, kidding around, kinda being jerks, but...whatever. It's all part of the experience of entering teenage-dom, right?

Right. Until the tone of it all changed and turned into something that no adult woman should have to tolerate, much less a girl, no matter how strong and smart she is. A girl just waiting at a bus stop, like any other day, in broad daylight, with other kids around. Lascivious remarks, graphic objectification, all culminating in actual physical contact that, while she wasn't harmed in a bodily sense, was way over the line of what any boy (or girl) should ever be allowed to do to a classmate.

Because I haven't yet gotten permission, as it were, to write this about A., I'm trying to refrain from going into too many details, which I know will make it hard to convey the horror of it...but I can draw a parallel for you between A.'s experience and something that happened to me when I was a few years older than her.

When I was about 16, I had a boyfriend. He and I got together when I was 15 and he was 17, and we were together into university. In our high school, there was nobody who didn't know we were a couple, and I think that probably insulated me from a lot of things that other guys might have chosen to visit upon me. But there was one guy friend who, out of nowhere, opened my eyes to the unpleasantness that can mark male-female relationships. He was a friend of my boyfriend, too, so it never struck any of us as weird that I would occasionally talk to him on the phone at night, after school, before bed, about class projects or pieces of music we were studying or our respective relationships.

But one night was different. One night, in the midst of him trying to explain how to get an A+ on my paper about A Tale Of Two Cities, he just changed the subject completely and started asking totally inappropriate questions about my physical relationship with my boyfriend. I deflected for as long as I could, and then he switched tactics. He asked me if I "ever got [my]self off". I think I laughed, either out of surprise or because I thought he had to be kidding. This wasn't something we'd ever so much as hinted at discussing before, and it sure as hell wasn't something I was up for talking about - with him or with anyone!

So I said the first thing that came to mind. I snorted indignantly and said, "Why? Do YOU?"

To which he responded, "What do you think I've being doing ever since we got on the phone?"



I think I'll take a moment to let the feeling of revulsion I still feel, sixteen years later, pass.


I hung up. We never talked on the phone again, and whenever I had to see him, at school or at parties or at music functions, I would dodge him as best I could. On a couple of occasions I had to come right out and tell him that I was ending my association with him. There was even an incident, later, where a group of us were walking back toward our high school on a lunch break, and he took it upon himself to smack me in the back of the head several times for no apparent reason (bear in mind that he was 18 by now); that resulted in my boyfriend grabbing him by the throat and holding him up against the chalkboard in our music room, threatening to kill him if he ever came near me again. The freezing-out process eventually led to him engaging in some really distressing stalker-type behaviour, including one night when he drove to my house in the worst imaginable blizzard to deliver my Christmas gift, and even as I hid in the living room, out of sight, with my boyfriend (who by now wanted to kill the guy), and let my father try to convince the scary bastard that I wasn't home, he wouldn't let up. He just wanted to come in for a minute; he just wanted to leave the box on the kitchen counter; he just wanted to leave a note; he just, he just, he just... My father finally made him go, back out into that hellish weather at 10 p.m. on a weeknight, and if I remember correctly, I turned to my boyfriend and started to cry, asking him, "What did I do to make him think this was okay?"

People who know me know that I'm no shrinking violet. If there's a "type" who would normally blame themselves for not reacting strongly enough to something, or for "letting" someone do or say things to them without punishing them immediately and painfully, I have never been that type. But that was probably the first glimpse I got into the other side, the dark side, where a girl realizes that she's not necessarily as prepared or equipped or defensive enough to deal with the things an arrogant, entitled, sick bastard will visit upon her when he gets the chance.

Many of you know that I have, unfortunately, come up against worse incidents since that high school situation. And in me turning to my family and friends for support and advice, I learned just how many of you, too, have stories that vary in detail but that all end in the same feeling of anger and helplessness and fear. We're all women who thought we should have reacted differently, that we ought to have visited bodily harm on the swine who thought they could take whatever they wanted from us, and we've all had moments when we beat ourselves up for not doing what we should have done. We all know that's just not right - that turning these things into our own fault is salt in our own wounds, and is simply wrong - but we do it anyway. We spend days, weeks or years asking why we didn't break the guy's nose or take him to court or even avoid whatever situation we found ourselves in, and it's a waste of energy. It's not our fault that there are people out there who'll wait for you to be vulnerable, even for a second,and then move in for the kill...whatever form it takes.

Of course, I can say this, but as some of you - those closest to the ordeal I suffered in April - well know, I've done exactly the same thing. I've run the gamut of self-blame and am still caught in the "it could have been worse; it could have been rape" cycle of thought. I know I shouldn't do that to myself, but it creeps in sometimes, all the same.

Back to A., then. She's younger now than I was then, and what she dealt with a few days ago was, in many ways, creepier than my Phone Call From Hell. She had to hear things like that from boys who were right there, physically, in front of her. And brava to her, because she did everything right, and with any luck those boys won't be bothering anyone again anytime soon. But my reason for writing this is simply to express my disgust and horror at what little girls are apparently having to deal with from their peers. Hell, I was freaked out by my situation at the age of 16, when I had a built-in protection system in the form of a football-player boyfriend; I simply cannot imagine how I'd have felt, going back to school the next day, had I been a few years younger or less insulated. How I'd have dealt with it had it been more than one creep, and was instead a group of friends who thought it was okay to say vile things to me and lay their hands on me. I'm so proud of A. for having her head on so straight; she's dealt with this beautifully, and I applaud her and her parents for just taking care of business and getting on with it. Here I am, days later, still furious and horrified on her behalf. Less than half my age, and the girl has more poise than I do.

So what stands to be gained from typing all of this? I don't know. Awareness, maybe, that these incidents are happening earlier and earlier in young people's lives. Commiseration, perhaps, among those of us who've had to deal with someone harassing or assaulting us, treating us like their own personal playground while we freeze up inside and are left with scars that probably never fully fade. Another friend of mine was brave enough to share her experiences with sexual assault in her blog some time ago, and I remember turning to her for advice and comfort when I had my demoralizing experience - first with the assailant, then with the police - this past spring. I guess my writing this is my way of saying that I hope I can do for someone else what that friend, and others, did for me in the sleepless nights that followed my assault.

And in all of this there is a young lady who's now been introduced to one of the most unsavoury parts of human nature, at such an early age, and she's dealing with it. It bothers me that we can't protect anyone from this sort of thing, because it's so...ubiquitous. Kids can't even just be kids anymore. They instead get smacked in the face - or the backside, if you will - with things nobody should have to confront, least of all a fledgling teenager who should still believe in respect and harmless crushes and pigtails in the inkwell.

It's heartbreaking.

"My heart belongs to Daddy": The Virginity Movement and "Purity Balls"

A friend of mine posted a set of unimaginably disturbing links about "the Courtship Movement", which, as she pointed out, is well-intentioned but has somehow managed to flip the "squick" button for a lot of us. I'll be borrowing liberally from the links she used (and I hope she doesn't mind!), and adding my own editorials as I go.

Preaching abstinence to teenagers is not inherently a bad thing. In this sex-crazed world, it's important for kids to know that they do have the option to JUST SAY NO, and that it is nobody's choice but their own. I was a teenager in the '90s, and I seemed to run with a bizarrely "pure" crowd (I do hate that word; as was mentioned in my friend's original post, it makes it sound as though a girl/woman who has chosen to engage in sexual activity becomes less valuable somehow - "used goods", as it were). Yes, there was sex, but everyone in my group of friends was paired off, most of us carrying our relationships into university, and some of us beyond and into marriage/cohabitational bliss. None of us drank underage, there were no drugs, no smoking, no sleeping around... It sounds utopian and probably outright untrue, but there it is. I was there. I know. We were an aberration, I suppose; those of us who chose to have sex were responsible and monogamous, and those of us who chose not to weren't looked upon as "lame".

But therein lies my problem with preaching only abstinence, which is the central theme of books such as "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", apparently a popular read in this Courtship Movement. Kids will be kids; covering their eyes and not educating them about all of their options, and the most responsible way to handle each of them, simply isn't realistic. (I was going to add, "...in this day and age," to that statement, but I suspect there was just as much premarital sex happening in Jane Austen's years as there is now; the main difference is taking a literal roll in the hay on ye olde plantation versus "all those clumsy, sticky fumblings in the backseats of cars" - thank you, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.)

Here's where the squick factor comes in. Long have we known of events like the traditional Southern Cotillions, the coming-out parties that announce a young debutante's "arrival" onto the scene. Now, though, there are glitzy bashes that, on the surface, look just like a cotillion or a prom, but are something altogether different. And are, in my opinion, freaky as all hell.

Introducing "Purity Balls", in which girls of various ages pledge their virginity. To their FATHERS. (Also known, according to the Wikipedia entry on the subject, as "Father Daughter Purity Balls" or "Purity Weddings". Just...ugh.)

A quote from the article to which I linked above:

In a chandelier-lit ballroom overlooking the Rocky Mountains one recent evening, some hundred couples feast on herb-crusted chicken and julienned vegetables. The men look dapper in tuxedos; their dates are resplendent in floor-length gowns, long white gloves and tiaras framing twirly, ornate updos. Seated at a table with four couples, I watch as the gray-haired man next to me reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a small satin box and flips it open to check out a gold ring he’s about to place on the finger of the woman sitting to his right. Her eyes well up with tears as she is overcome by emotion.

The man’s date? His 25-year-old daughter. Welcome to Colorado Springs’ Seventh Annual Father-Daughter Purity Ball, held at the five-star Broadmoor Hotel. The event’s purpose is, in part, to celebrate dad-daughter bonding, but the main agenda is for fathers to vow to protect the girls’ chastity until they marry and for the daughters to promise to stay pure. Pastor Randy Wilson, host of the event and cofounder of the ball, strides to the front of the room, takes the microphone and asks the men, “Are you ready to war for your daughters’ purity?”

Cue my gag reflex.

Until I read my friend's blog entry,I had no idea such parties existed. I'd always thought it questionable that nuns wore rings on their "wedding finger" to signify their marriage to God, and my stomach has always turned a bit at the sight of little girls walking down the aisle in miniature wedding dresses to meet the priest at the front of their Catholic church and become "confirmed" (which, to me, is synonymous with "owned") by the religion. But these are only my opinions; I feel strongly that everyone should have their own, and not have someone else's shoved down their throats (or in turn shove theirs down anyone else's). I am against organized religion (which is not the same as being against faith or spirituality; a lot of people make that mistake when I say such things), but I can, in many cases, understand why others choose to subscribe to a certain religion or set of beliefs.

This whole Purity Ball, thing? No. No. That I cannot understand.

To quote my friend's entry: "I'd be pro- these events, albeit with reservations re: the tackiness of turning an important private spiritual decision into A Public Display That Looks Like Yet Another Damned Prom, except for one thing: the girls don't make this promise to themselves, or to their God. They make the promise to their fathers (and here's an insider view that will explain why)."

She hit the nail on the head as far as one of the reasons this concept bothers me so much: These girls should be making this decision for themselves, or, if they're doing it in the name of their religion, making a promise to their deity. Wearing a ring that marks you as your father's property until you're married, though...? Oh, yep, there's that nausea again.

I realize that we incorporate parts of this into widely undisputed rituals in our lives already. The father who "gives his daughter away" at her wedding is, essentially, allowing his daughter to become currency that's exchanging hands, from one man to another. I'm quite sure it's not looked at that way by most of the people who do it - it's probably meant to be a sweet gesture, a moment where the little girl has grown up and left the nest, and her father is indicating that he trusts this new man to love her as much as he always has. But you see my point. And there's also the issue of a woman changing her name after marriage. She usually has her father's last name to begin with, and once the ink has dried on the contract wedding license, she takes her husband's name instead. (That too has always driven me INSANE, and mark my words: I will never change my name for any man, and my "chosen" name - the one I use as my pseudonym - is in fact my mother's maiden name.)

Anyway, back to the Purity Balls. (Doesn't that just sound wrong?) Here's an interesting article about these events also taking place for boys, and the differences between the two. As is pointed out early on in the piece, a woman's transition away from virginity involves an actual, tangible, physical change (remember all those lovely morning-after-the-wedding rituals that involve a man hanging his white sheets outside the honeymoon suite's window to show everyone the spot of blood, thereby proving he got himself a good one?), whereas boys remain physically "intact" no matter how much sleeping around he does. The article underscores the disturbing dissonance between a woman's purity (of body AND soul) and a man's integrity. Read it. It's...eye-opening.

All of this horrifies me. But I think my jaw hit the floor hardest when I got to this part of my friend's blog entry (in which she wisely points out that this guy can't write to save his life and makes it sound like he was 12 when he took his daughter out for a night on the town...): "Here's Jonathan Lindvall, explaining how he coerced his twelve-year-old daughter into putting him in charge of not just her sexuality, but her emotions: At age twelve, I took Bethany out to dinner one evening and presented her with a golden necklace with a heart-shaped pendant formed like a padlock. There was a small keyhole and an accompanying key. I presented the pendant and necklace to her and asked her to "Give me your heart" (Prov. 23:26). I explained that I wanted to keep the gold key as a symbol of her trusting me with her emotions. I specifically asked her to not entertain romantic thoughts toward any young man until she and her mother and I together conclude that he is God s choice to be her husband. (There is scriptural precedent for the young people involved to be consulted and consent to a marriage arrangement.) I explained that at the beginning of her marital engagement I would give the gold key to her betrothed, and that although she might not yet love him, she would then be free to aim her heart toward him. Bethany unreservedly entrusted the symbolic gold key into my care, and with it, her heart."

I'm well past nausea now. I think I'll have to ask my father about this. I expect he'll shudder and tell me he was just as happy NOT TO KNOW, thankyouverymuch. And where, might I ask, are the mothers in all of this???

I could go so much further in-depth than I have; my friend's entry certainly did, and provided even more astonishing - and, to me, disturbing - revelations about what's going on in my neighbouring country (and probably here in Canada, too, really). But I'll leave the links and those articles to speak for themselves, I think. And tonight, before I go to sleep, I will silently thank my parents for teaching me what I needed to know, and trusting ME to make the choices I needed to make as I went along, always letting me know they were there if I had questions or needed guidance. I am not betrothed to my father until some other guy comes along, nor do I have to feel guilty if and when I choose to enter into a relationship with a man, and for those privileges I thank my parents, not a god or a church or an organization that seems to be built around making independent girls feel like used up trash.

I don't know that I ever realized just how lucky I was until I read about the Purity Ball that never got thrown for me.

Musings on the Air India tragedy.

Being Canadian - well, being human - I have always felt the sadness and horror that has gone along with the Air India Flight 182 bombing that took more than 300 lives in 1985. I remember it surprisingly well; I guess I was just about 9 years old when it happened, before school was out. It's been especially intensified since there's never been any sort of satisfactory resolution to any of it; the families weren't even granted whatever little peace they might have found in the convictions of those behind it.

All of this was brought home in a big way, though, in the summer of 2005. I was sitting with the guy I was dating, at his kitchen table, reading a medical journal while he did chart notes. We were drinking coffee and lounging around on our day off together. It was bright and sunny, probably around 11 a.m., and I expect it was probably a Monday. Close to the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

I was reading The Lancet, I believe, when I came across an article about two doctors who had each lost much of their families aboard that plane. I spoke up, reading a passage of it to my boyfriend, and he stopped writing and looked up at me.

"Yeah. I read it." He said it so...flatly. I must have frowned or something, because instead of just going back to his work, he sighed and said, "I know both of those doctors. One's a really close friend, actually; she did some of her residency with me and Jim at Queens. Her sons were on that plane. They were young, too. Both of them under 16, if I'm remembering right."

Strangely, I only remember the name of the other doctor, the one my ex knows casually but hasn't seen for years; he called him Dr. Chandra. I wish I could remember the woman's name, though; her story was so much more personal to him, and because he knew her at the time this tragedy happened, he really put a face to it all for me. He clearly had a lot of respect for her, for carrying on in life all by herself, never remarrying, never having another child, and just throwing herself into medicine. Whenever I speak to him next, I'll have to ask him her name again, because I feel like I should spare her a thought, at the very least, every day when I'm feeling low or lost.

There was a documentary on CBC NewsWorld earlier about the tragedy, and god, it ripped my insides out. There were things I didn't know, or at the very least wasn't aware of all of the details, and a lot of it really shocked me. I did know that only one man, the man who built the bombs, has ever been or will ever be sentenced; the others were acquitted due to lack of evidence (or died before they could go to trial). What I didn't know was that a big part of this "lack of evidence" had to do with the Crown witnesses being murdered, or disappearing, or being put into relocation programs to save their lives.

And, of course, there's the added tragedy of just how long all of this took. The official inquiry didn't even begin until 2006. TWENTY-ONE YEARS LATER. How? How??? You can see what it's done to the surviving family members. It's etched into their faces forever.

I saw the woman - my ex's friend - but I missed catching her name. I didn't miss what she said, though. She was talking about how there is so much she still doesn't know how to process, like seeing their beds and knowing those people she loved will never sleep in them again, or reading recipes in her cookbook that she knows were their favourites, or smelling their clothes that still hang in their closets after all these years. And she said, "It's so full and yet so empty. What do you do with all of that?" I surprised myself by sobbing, out of nowhere. There was just something in her eyes that I felt, right through the TV screen.

ETA: Oh, my god - it just came to me out of nowhere. Her first name, anyway; I Googled her and now I know. It's Dr. Padmini Turlapati.

They also interviewed a woman who described how she was flying her father's body home on Canada Day, a week after the bombing. She said that the airline crew were trying to be celebratory, putting little maple leaf stickers on people's boarding passes and such, and this woman said she knew they couldn't know that this was the first father-daughter trip she'd ever taken...and that her father's body was being loaded into the cargo bay as she was shown to her seat. "The only time I ever flew with my dad," she said, "and he was already gone."

More sobbing from me. Because me and my Dad have never done anything like that together, and - fate willing - we will in only a few more months. God, how easy it is to forget what's important. To not know what you'll regret later.

It occurs to me now that maybe I have an answer to the question I ask so often: why do I seek out such horror? Why do I watch every documentary about every terrible thing that happens to people? Maybe it's because I want to be aware of what I stand to lose, and that I want to try to make the most of what I have while I still have it. And by that I mean everything: the friends in my life, my family, the health I do have, the freedoms I'm given just by being lucky enough to have been born in Canada, to have been born the "right" gender (meaning I feel right in my female body, when others suffer so much with their identities versus the hand dealt them by biology)... Everything. Even with the weight of the world on my shoulders sometimes, I am the luckiest goddamn person I know.