Yup. All of Us.

More than a million posts have been written on the social media site, Twitter with the hashtag #YesAllWomen.

Even if you're not a twitter subscriber, (and 98% of us are not) this is a pretty impressive number of people weighing in on a topic dear to them.

To catch you up, a twisted teenager went on one of those all-too-familiar shooting rampages in the US on Friday, killing six people at the University of California campus in Santa Barbara. Beforehand, he posted a bunch of videos on Youtube, talking about why he was about to do it. He was pretty clear; he was mad at being a virgin at the age of 22, and wanted revenge on the women who had rejected him. He went to a sorority house, but didn't get in, so, thwarted, ran down some people, shot some others and then finally, apparently, himself.

Some Twitter users posted their thoughts with the hashtag #notallmen, making the point that not all men hate women.

Saturday night, someone created #YesAllWomen, as a reply to not all men. As in, maybe not all men are mean to women, but yes, all women deal with the fallout of men's behaviour toward us and here's an example.

The people post about being groped and grabbed, honked at and whistled at. The posters note young women are taught to avoid being raped but wonder how much effort is put into teaching men about consent, or that they don't have a right to sex. They write about how it's unfair how many of us are afraid to walk alone at night, fearful that a man will attack us. When alone in our homes, we worry about being attacked by a man. On a smaller plane, but still on the same continuum, when speaking our minds, we are often silenced. Men explain things to us, even when we know more about those things than they do. Yes, it's a wide range of experiences, from silencing all the way through some dumb jerk grabbing a boob, right up to rape. All women experience some of it. And yes, things are better in North America than they are elsewhere, but better doesn't mean right or fair.

So far, somewhere around 1.3 million people have posted. You should join Twitter, even for just a day, to read some of the posts, especially if you're reading this, and thinking, "But not all men are bad!" or, "But things are worse somewhere else," or really anything that begins with a "but". Let the million examples of small nastiness and big horrors women experience every day wash over you, and then think.

The Lines in Your Head

I almost burst out laughing during a newscast today, telling the story of a pair of alligators rescued from a backyard shed north of Toronto, where they were being kept as family pets.

I wasn't the story itself that made me laugh - it was the memory that came with it.

Nearly every time I hear the word, alligator, I am immediately transported back to the lazy summer days of my childhood, when lunch in our farmhouse was served promptly at 12:30, just as soon as Leave It To Beaver was over. The episode connected to the alligators is the one where the boys go to visit Captain Jack, the local keeper of the alligator farm, who told the boys if they were to fall into the alligator enclosure, the animals would not "chew your arm off, they would SAW it off!" Later, the children get their own alligator, and mayhem ensues.

I'm not sure how this particular line embedded itself in me, but it gets me, every single time.

The city of Red Deer also makes me giggle every single time I have to say it, but that's connected to a dirty joke.

Requiem for a Run

It's not just this blog I abandoned a few months ago.
I haven't been quilting or doing calligraphy or working in the garden or doing much that's very useful, for quite some time.

I blame Netflix and Mother Nature.

House of Cards, Happy Endings, Downton Abbey, My Boys, Mad Men, The Newsroom, (OK, that was borrowed from a friend...) House of Cards again, Portlandia and now, Bones plus movies and documentaries and TED talks galore: these are things that have occupied a lot of my non-working, non-sleeping moments for the last five months or so.

I have a huge cupboard full of movies, several bookshelves full of terrific novels and non-fiction works along with a tall stack of books I bought with my "Christmas money", but there's something about the Netflix that draws me in, day after day.

I don't want to be one of those tiresome and pretentious people who says they don't watch television, but I will say Sweetie and I haven't had cable or satellite television for nine years. We were over-the-air analog with about seven channels and now, with the digital revolution, we're down to three. No hockey, no baseball, no reality shows, not at our place; it's news and Netflix, and my house has never been dirtier or my running shoes so abandoned.

Because of my addiction to the tube and the snuggly blankets on the couch, I will have a painful, embarrassing and sore Sunday morning in Toronto.

In a reckless fit of optimism in January, I signed up for the Sporting Life 10K, a road race down Yonge Street. Not only did I sign up, I convinced my running buddy to come along.
AND I was doubly optimistic and signed up for a faster corral than last year, thinking I might improve my time from last year's race.

But I wasn't counting on the coldest winter in memory. Last week, there was still snow on the trail I run - yes, last week!

So, spare a little pity for me, even though it's my own fault that I will be puffing and huffing and wanting to die on Yonge Street Sunday, and likely a very sorry girl on Monday.

I'll recover with the rest of season three of Portlandia.