jacks needs a bill kurtis intervention

for those of you who don’t watch a&e like it is their lifeblood, bill kurtis is a guy (with a silky-smooth voice btw) who hosts and narrates a variety of crime-related shows on the friggin’ fantastic channel that rocks my world. i am currently obsessed with investigative reports (and have been since roughly 1995), where kurtis leads viewers through tales of intrigue and murder, often featuring the criminals and victim-families involved, that lend themselves to infuriating questions such as “should teens face the death penalty in murder cases?” i say infuriating because they take me back to high school when i would argue against the death penalty in opposition to all my classmates whose arguments were premised on seemingly biological categorizations of “goodness” and “badness.” in any case, i digress. in case you are not an avid watcher of all that is disturbing on television, a&e also has a program called intervention. intervention is a “reality show” that documents actual surprise interventions (the person who is being intervened upon agrees to participate in a documentary and then basically gets hijacked by their family with the help of an interventionist – for a synopsis look here) and, usually, the resultant recovery of the addicted person.

yesterday i was watching intervention when something in my stomach told me to stop. i didn’t. and then paid the price. the intervention was for allison – a young woman with a huffing dependency on computer duster (that she actually ingested – that is, blew directly into her mouth and lungs from.the.can) and who also was an anorexic cutter. in her both her sisters’ paraphrased words, allison is trying to kill herself as loudly as possible by inflicting physical pain on herself to demonstrate to her family and the world just how much pain she herself is in. usually, i get through an episode of intervention, having gone through the emotion of it, but satisfied with the recovery process and the epilogue that states the number of months the intervened has since been sober. allison has haunted me since and i think it has to do with a number of factors.

first, her youth. both her and her sister were young women, and very young when they were sexually abused (a reality that later resulted in all of allison’s addictions and problems). they were just regular girls, both hurt, and one hurt beyond recognition. second, her multiple addictions. i am not an expert in the field of anorexia, but i was recently reading about the advent of so-called “drunkorexics” who drink their calories instead of eat them. while this is a tenuous title, and one that many health experts might be wary of, it indicates the integrated nature of addiction – that anorexics often have substance abuse issues, and perhaps vice versa. and third, it makes me think about vancouver’s downtown eastside (dtes) and how all these issue coincide there: abuse and victimization, skeletally-thin addicted women (who i am not implying are anorexic, but are starving nonetheless), and just how easy it is – or would be for people like allison – to end up on the streets without caring people like her family, who of course, have to be in a position to be able to help. this post was originally intended to be about how the bodies of women in the dtes, those skeletal, emaciated bodies, ravaged with years of drug use and misuse by others, are actually held up as a beauty ideal in magazines (to make an obvious, if not disturbing, point). but instead, allison’s story, and damaged body, continues to haunt me, because it could have been me. it could have been any of us who someone decided to mistreat, in ways that are difficult to recover from.

i think it ultimately speaks to the correlation between treatment of our bodies and understandings of ourselves. and if one is too young to have autonomy over themselves and are mistreated, they will often mistreat themselves. a long time ago i was in a car accident and i was hospitalized for almost two months. at fourteen years old, my roommates fell into one of only three categories: anorexics and bulimics, cancer and accident patients, and suicides. i had one of each, although i got to know my roommate C., the best. she had survived not only rape, but her attempt to kill herself after that rape. i decided then, and was reminded now, that there is something wrong in a world where young women’s bodies are mistreated, by others, and themselves as a result of pain. pain over hurt, pain over not being perfect, pain over not being enough. it is often said that young girls live in a scary world, and they should be protected. but i am going to suggest that young women are the real survivors. they are the ones who have to contend with a world that denies them autonomy, and then asks them to apologize.

as you can see, i need my own intervention. an intervention to not watch intervention.

oh. and i’d like bill kurtis to host it.

livin’ on the eastside *makes an awkward "E" symbol with fingers of left hand*

so roughly more than a half a year ago i moved to east van. where the hip-est of hipsters live. you can live on main street (which is where hipsters now go to procreate) or you can live on cambie where it was once uber hipster-y to dwell. but the real deal on hipster-living is in east van baby, where commercial drive separates the hipster from the poser. for those who don’t live in vancouver, this distinctions between the hipster-ness of neighbourhoods is lost on you. but for those who live in the “couve” (an appellation given by a visiting ontarian friend who would not cease and desist calling it that no matter how much i insisted that it sounded like a euphemism for vajayjays), neighbourhoods really mean something. because the thing is, in vancouver, you pick a neighbourhood and then you live and die by its friggin’ greatness. wherever the individual vancouverite lives, it is the neighbourhood against which ALL other neighbourhoods pale in comparison. maybe this works similarly in other cities that insist on having way to many distinct and unique hoods. or maybe it is just because vancouverites have to be special no matter what form that specialness takes be it from their raw food diets, their insistence on climbing mountains for fun, or taking their equally unique and special dogs EVERYWHERE with them. i dunno. you decide.

so i moved from the westside to the eastside which is equivalent, to some, to moving from the beaches neighbourhood in toronto to scarborough (i would say the bad part of scarborough, but is there a good part? man, i’m a jerk). because the downtown eastside (dtes) is infamously known across canada as the WORST neighbourhood in canada, the eastside generally gets a bad rap, despite the vibrant community life that characterizes east van generally. i sympathize with the people that are fearful of the eastside because the dtes is perhaps the most unthinkable neighbourhood one could imagine – not because of crime or violence (despite widely held beliefs) but because of extreme grinding poverty and widespread addiction and mental illness – two things that invariably land people on the streets. when you live in pristine largely white and shockingly upwardly mobile neighbourhoods like kits and kerrisdale, the eastside begins about at granville street and characterizes everything thenceforth until you hit burnaby. so yeah, living on the eastside (no the dtes) means something very different, but perhaps more “real,” than the tony neighbourhoods that make vancouver so desirable. but what is weird is that vancouver is a young city and so the neighbourhoods, like kitsilano for example, used to be a hippie enclave where you could live a beach bum kind of existence – not too different from the commercial drive neighbourhood of now where hippies gather to exchange patchouli tips and advice about how to keep dreds bug-free. so this brings me full circle back to hipsters – those pioneeering souls who are on the forefront of gentrification – the few, the brave, the musically-obsessed and fashionably-conscienced.

so when i was in cincinnati i roomed with an extremely articulate and intelligent woman who just happened to be ridiculously hilarious. during said stay, she made a joke about hipsters and then abruptly stopped laughing, fearing she had insulted me, whose questionable hipster-like status had not be fully articulated nor denied. i was like, “no dude, that was funny. i’m not a hipster. i mean i don’t think i am. oh my god – am i?” i then evaluated the evidence: 1) we have recently purchased property in an up-and-coming neighbourhood. level of hipster-ness: HIGH. 2) i shop in little consignment stores and revel in the resultant questioning about where i got that shirt or those boots. level of hipster-ness: MEDIUM. 3) i recently cut my hair. i now have bangs. level of hipster-ness: OFF THE CHARTS. i had to face a scary truth. i might be a hipster. where did i go wrong?

after consulting the hipster handbook however, i was relieved to find out that while i might approximate certain hipster characteristics, i am not in fact a hipster. this is largely because i don’t ride a bike, i have never even heard of the word “deck” (except as a wooden object that surrounds pools), and i do not have less than 2% body fat. also, i own and love my television, which in hipsterworld is equivalent to worshiping the devil. so there you have it. i’m not a hipster despite evidence to the contrary. so suck it.

one final note, while i may not be a hipster, i do believe that my wardrobe is misrecognized in my new neighbourhood as something i like to call “streetworker chic.” however, i think the bangs are helping to remedy that. sweetass.