Anyone interested in attending some of the festival?

It would be five years before I heard a name for the issues I was experiencing: Borderline Personality Disorder. Even the name seems weird to me. I was already being treated for Bipolar Disorder at this point and the marked highs and lows, I had become accustomed to. But, I was still leaving destroyed friendships in my wake everywhere I went. I would often defensively try and convince myself it was all their faults. But, I knew. I knew, that I was lashing out and hurting those I loved.

To help you understand a little more about this mental health issue, here is an excerpt from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) page on Borderline Personality Disorder:

People with BPD often have highly unstable patterns of social relationships. While they can develop intense but stormy attachments, their attitudes towards family, friends, and loved ones may suddenly shift from idealization (great admiration and love) to devaluation (intense anger and dislike). Thus, they may form an immediate attachment and idealize the other person, but when a slight separation or conflict occurs, they switch unexpectedly to the other extreme and angrily accuse the other person of not caring for them at all. Even with family members, individuals with BPD are highly sensitive to rejection, reacting with anger and distress to such mild separations as a vacation, a business trip, or a sudden change in plans. These fears of abandonment seem to be related to difficulties feeling emotionally connected to important persons when they are physically absent, leaving the individual with BPD feeling lost and perhaps worthless. Suicide threats and attempts may occur along with anger at perceived abandonment and disappointments.

I have worked throughout the years on understanding these impulses and either suppressing them, or expressing them with the clear disclaimer that I know they are coming from disordered thinking. I have managed to repair many of the relationships, but some of the most important remain in shatters.

Tonight, an impulsive and aggressive mood was triggered via some comments I received on Twitter about my views on the Olympics (and, particular, hockey). While I still feel that regardless of what is going on, I maintain the right to express my opinions in public without fear of reprisal, regardless of how orthogonal they may seem to doctrine, I acted irrationally. I lashed out attacking several people, namely @markabell, @jamiecalder, and anyone else who said they would unfollow me. To them, I apologise. The second phase of this began when I felt that close friends were also working to hurt me and attack me while I was vulnerable. To these people, namely @gordonglenn, @outofshell, and @ALL_CAPS.

I realise that none of this excuses my behaviour, and I hope that you all come to realise that it is uncharacteristic of me, and accept my heartfelt apologies. If you have any questions or wish to discuss the matter, please do not hesitate to contact me.

• expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages
• removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions
• treats women as presumptive criminals and leaves them open to criminal prosecution

So, let’s get a rundown here, after making it virtually impossible to get an abortion within the state, the government wants even more control over the reproductive cycles of women residents. This legislation was spawned by the case of a 17 year-old girl who at 7 months pregnant paid a man 150$ to beat her until she had a miscarriage. Rather than asking “Why would someone be so desperate for an abortion that they would pay to be beaten,” Utah instead asked “How can we stop women from deciding what goes on with their bodies?”

This doesn’t even touch upon the issues with the wording of the legislation, it is kept sufficiently loose that women may be prosecuted for not wearing a seatbelt, not taking pre-natal vitamns or getting pre-natal care, etc.

Hey Utah, it isn’t 1869 anymore. Women are people. Just sayin’.

The New Men -- London Fashion week (via Stil in Berlin)

I don’t profess to know a lot about fashion, but when I stumbled upon the image above at Stil in Berlin of four models from London Fashion Week in supposedly fashionable garb, I laughed out loud.

Here is what I thought immediately: detective, pirate, porter, old gypsy woman (from left to right).  The two most “wearable” outfits would be the hat-cocked gay detective outfit and the short-coated, oversized purse porter get-up.  Am I missing something?

I also don’t like the pressure to force people into using their Google Profile as a central means of identifying themselves, as a hub, so to speak.  All of this I can deal with.

Everyone who knows me knows that my biggest concern was this insanely ridiculous tie in to GMail, requiring you to be logged into GMail to access your Buzz.  I wish from the get go that http://buzz.google.com would have worked as a stand-alone method to access the site.  I believe so much sneaky marketing/user integration went behind the choice to make it part of GMail.  1) have it seem like it’s part of a tool you use every day.  2) Attract people who wouldn’t sign up for something new, but would click on a weird Google thing in their GMail (my mom). 3) Show the intrinsic connectedness of your e-mail contacts and your buzz contacts (they are one and the same).

Despite all of this, I’m finding myself really liking it. I love the conversations that take place.  It’s much more conducive to discussion than Twitter, etc.  I love the integration with existing tools, Reader, Flickr, etc, while allowing a common framework for sharing and discussion.

I think Buzz is here to stay.  They’ll disassociate from GMail, provide more security and privacy tools (in response to the extreme outrage), but overall this tool will once again organise the world’s data in a way we are not used to, while facilitating discussion.

via Changing a society, one step at a time – Opinion, Paul Wells – Macleans.ca.

What I find most interesting is that in the history of the world, it seems (as far as the creators have estimated) that only 106 billion people have ever lived.

I have been rethinking the show and I will be aiming to have more guests, to do less discussion of television, more of news, politics, and general silliness.  I’m glad to report Stephen is on board for Season 3 and we promise it will be awesome or your money back.

Look for season three starting in late February 2010 on iTunes and here.

I recently have made several observations about the relative frequencies of intersentential and intrasentential code switching. Intersentential code switching, where the code switch happens between sentences or thoughts seems to happen more with speakers of Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan languages. Intrasentential code switching, where the switch happens within a thought, tends to happen more with speakers of Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European languages.

It is my belief that the disparate syntactical structures of Indo-European versus Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan languages makes intrasentential code switching prohibitively difficult except in single word code switches. I have observed that these linguistic groups generally code switch when the subject changes to a person who speaks the secondary language, at a change of participants, at location changes, and when discussing current events.

Intrasentential code switching is something that Canadians are all accustomed to. Anglophone Canadians will often state something and complete it with a “n’est pas?” We will often discuss someone possessing a certain “je ne sais quois.” Although our code switching is certainly not limited to the occasional word. It is common for fluently bilingual Canadians to intersententially code switch back and forth from French to English regardless of the mother tongue of either participant.

I think that large scale code switching environments (such as Ottawa) are conducive to the growth and change of the English language. English, being the largely common element here in Ottawa, and being as flexible as it is ends up amalgamating commonly code switched words from other languages. I believe this phenemonon must occur in any large multicultural city.

Interesting research in code switching is used for determining ethnolinguistic vitality, understanding the needs of polylingual societies, researching bilingualism, and, of course, keeping amateur linguists entertained.