World Health Club

Okay for this one I should have listened to everyone else and never have joined a gym in the first place. We have all heard the stories. But it was such a good rate ($40 a month and only $199 if I chose to buy out), and I was determined not to get suckered in to any other deals, or promotions or programs while I was there, even though they came at me hard, and I could see myself going to this gym for a long time. Have I mentioned previously that learning the hard way is pretty much the only way I learn? Now we are moving out of the area and are going to be on a very tight budget so the other day I decided to go in one last time and buy out of my term.

Here is the complaint I ended up filing with the Better Business Bureau:

According to the BBB's records, all complaints filed against World Health Club have been resolved to the customer's satisfaction. I'll be going back to the gym tonight to see if they now feel more motivated to play fair.

You may get the impression after reading about US Airways, and Expedia, and Shaw, and now World Health, that I am an antagonistic sort of person. I don't know if that is the case. I've worked in a customer service capacity for over a decade and have a very good understanding of the service provider - client relationship. I know the expectations from both sides of the counter. I don't like this culture of consumerism that we live in, the materialistic nature of it all. But I think that you can choose to be a mindless consumer or an intelligent one. Consumers need to understand their power. We, as consumers, need to realize that we have the ability to control and demand the products and services that we want. Because if they don't give us what we want, we can find another provider who will. That's how this game works. So yeah, maybe I rake airlines or monopolistic cable/phone providers over the coals when I feel I am getting ripped off. I wish more people would. Long-term contracts and usage fees - don't even get me started. If more consumers understood their rights, these companies would have to bend to our will instead of the other way around.

Okay I am stepping off the soap box now.

In Which The Scholar Gypsy Finds A Home

I am moving again.

This time it is into our own home and so this, hopefully, will be the last move for a long time. I have gotten pretty good at it over the years - I count 17 in total. If you do the math that’s one move for every 19 months, although in reality I stayed in some places a lot longer than others. That being said, I’ve gotten pretty good at packing my life up and moving on. In fact I always kept the same boxes and knew exactly which items got packed in which box, and which box fit where in my car. I can tell you that if you put books in a duffle bag and clothes in a box you can carry more of each and more easily.

But two years ago, when my husband and I moved into our current place, I made the decision that I was going to ‘settle down’ - I was going to plant some roots. So I unpacked every bin. I threw out each one of those boxes that had travelled with me all those years and I intentionally didn’t keep good-looking moving boxes that I came across. I started buying furniture and picture frames and dishes. And now we are moving into a home of our very own and I’m looking around wondering where on earth all this stuff came from and how am I ever going to move it all! My only consolation is that this will be my last move for a long time.

I do want to say that moving is great opportunity to purge any useless, wasted, or unwanted items from your life; it’s a streamlining, a lightening of the load; it puts things in perspective. Who knows what we’ve managed to collect over the last two years and are these objects, these things, something that we really need? I know exactly what possessions are most important to me - they’re the ones I found room for in the cramped backseat of my car, the ones I deemed worthy of packing up and carrying with me each time I moved on.

It will be nice to build a nest, to create a home for myself and my family, to encourage that wandering spirit of mine to find a place to be at peace. I’m looking forward to the future, but in doing so, am reminded of my past.

In no particular order, here are a few of the places I have lived in (by lived, I mean have actually taken up residence and not counting the homes I lived in with my parents):

-         four apartments, for some reason each one a completely different lay-out than the others (I thought that would be pretty standard?) but each fairly decent

-         the upstairs of two houses and the downstairs of one

-         a hotel

-         a van

-         a house with 8 people and one bathroom. (I slept in the dining room. And often peed in the yard.)

-         An R.V. And not one of the big nice ones, one of those pop-up ones. A friend of mine slept on the floor and we hung our clothes to dry on the picnic table outside.

-     the basement of a house which I shared with two other people

-         a tar-paper shack. Yes literally, with a pump in the basement to bring in water which always seemed to break after I had lathered my hair.

They're not track marks, I swear.

Within a time period of about 5 weeks I will have:

-had one IV 'placed' (and by placed I more accurately mean jabbed into the crook of my arm - there was literally blood spurting all over myself and the bed, which apparently "happens sometimes")

-had multiple vials of blood taken on two separate occasions,

-been given three injections, and 

-done one skin test.

I seriously feel like if they keep poking all these holes in me I might spring a leak.

What's In A Name

Leading up to the wedding, I was asked a lot if I was going to change my name once I was married. If you asked me in my early twenties when I was still all fired up and "damn the man!" and quoting passages from the Vagina Monologues as a personal mantra, I would have said no to name-changing. (In fact, I would have told you I had never planned on getting married but that's a story for another day.) I've chilled out a bit over the last decade. And being engaged for eighteen months gave me a lot of time to think about identity, to think about marriage, to think about family - to think about names.

I like my name. It's a good solid name. Its unique without being awkward. I like the people it connects me to. I will miss it. But I will be changing it, and yesterday I finally mailed the paperwork to get the name-changing ball rolling. I'm not sure why I was hesitating, I guess I knew I would get around to it eventually and with everything I have had to do since getting back and settling in to married life, it hasn't really seemed like a huge priority. And honestly it is a huge hassle. It's not just filing your marriage papers and walking away with a new name. Once I get our certificate back I have change to my license, my passport, my health card info, my credit card, my bank cards, my cheques, my insurance, my hyrdo and electric, cable and various other bills, my emails, my work/payroll info etc. etc...  And who has time for all that?! There is an argument to be made for having the same last name as your children, but we don't have children. We have cats. And seriously, the longer that I keep my 'old' name the less I seem to care about changing it, so I feel like I should get it done now while I still feel motivated.

So why am I doing it?

Because I don't have to worry about my old family name dying out with me. Other members are producing offspring, the family name will carry on.

Because he has a good last name too. It has history, its old and solid while still being unique, like mine.

Because I like the family that it comes with. I like the people it connects me to. I like the feeling that I am a member of this particular family, and the bond that it creates.

Because I'm in this with both feet, I don't need to hold on to it as some sort of back door in case this doesn't work out. And hyphenated names sound stupid. I'm sorry but they do! Ours would sound especially ridiculous.

Because really, what's in a name? I'm 50% my mother and 50% my father. Do women realize when they are keeping "their" name, they are only holding onto their father's and the only reason they have that name is because their mother gave up hers when she got married? Wouldn't it be taking more of a 'stand' to keep your mother's maiden name?

Because I honestly don't think its that big a deal. I have nothing to prove. I'm unapologetically independent. I am strong as a woman and equal in my partnership; I don't feel a need to hold onto a surname as some sort of statement of rebellion against an oppressive patriarchal system.

Because it means something to him and he means a lot to me. If I really don't care either way, then why not change it. Yes, its a ton of paperwork and pretty inconvenient, but I've done stupider things for love.


* I know its a controversial issue, I'm not trying not to get political here and I'm not trying to start something. I'm just sharing my own personal reasons as to why I decided to make the switch.

One of these things is not like the other...

Amanda Knox                            Casey Anthony

If you pay attention to the news or pop culture at all you know who these two women are. They have both been through very public trials, each one having been charged with a murder. They both have had their entire lives - their families, their childhoods, their 'partying' days, their lifestyles, their secrets, their mistakes - revealed to the world and picked apart in microscopic detail under the unflattering light of a bare bulb. They both spent time in jail. And they both have recently been exonerated. 

The difference is that one of these women came home to a hero's welcome and is expected to quickly become a millionare; the other has been declared a villian by the public and will probably spend the rest of her life hiding out in Florida somewhere.

It leaves me wondering about the two similar women, the two similar stories, the two similar verdicts and the two drastically different outcomes.

Both of these young ladies were aquitted because, according to a judge, there were enough holes in the prosecution's case to cast a reasonable amount of doubt. The exact details at the time of death are sketchy in both cases. A lot of the evidence is circumstantial.

Let's take a bird's eye view: 

Although she did provide conflicting statements, Casey swears she wasn't there the day her child died, that she has no idea what happened that day.

Did Casey Anthony have something to do with it? Yeah, probably. 

Where was she when it happened? Nobody knows for sure.

Is she lying to protect herself? Prosecutors felt they could prove that she was. 

Although she did provide conflicting statements, Amanda swears she wasn't there the night her roommate was brutally assaulted, raped and murdered, that she has no idea what happened that night.

Did Amanda Knox have something to do with it? Yeah, probably.

Where was she when it happened? Nobody knows for sure.
 Is she lying to protect herself? Prosecutors felt they could prove that she was.

These women have both been found innocent.

It seems to me like public opinion hinges on how the media chose to present each of them. For the masses, Amanda Knox is fashioned in the media as a mistreated victim, a beleaguered hero and so that is how she will be treated, while Casey Anthony is painted as a selfish, irresponsible, unfit mother and deserves to be treated as a social pariah for the rest of her life.

How can audiences be outraged by one and not the other? Or sympathetic enough to look the other way in one circumstance, but not the other? Do audiences do whatever Nancy Grace tells them to because they just want her to stop yelling? Does no one take a step back and actually utilize some critical thinking skills?

Maybe we will never know what really happened. I'm sick of hearing about both of them. All we know for sure is that the life of a young Meredith Kercher and an even younger Caylee Anthony was tragically cut short. Why isn't our focus on them? On offering support to the families of the real victims here? 

"Why you have to go and make things so complicated..."

Well I was asking for it. Things just got a hell of a lot more convoluted. I have a seemingly pathological tendency to make my life unnecessarily complicated. I would like to say that it is unintentional; there is enough evidence to support that I come by this predilection genetically. At least then I would have some sort of excuse. At any rate, here I am again.

Will discuss more later, from a distance.