Being a rainbow when everything's black and white.

Recently, I had someone come to me and ask for advice on how to survive. Specifically, how to come ‘out’ to the family about their sexual orientation. This person has expressed concern about having been previously treated as a pariah, sending this person – not compassionately – to counseling as a way to ‘purge’ this information from this person.

This… is a delicate matter. There are a lot of people who don’t agree with this lifestyle, and there are a lot who do. It’s been a constant source of contention for many, many years, probably centuries. But, sticking with the modern era, and with some of the crusty old political types trying to force us back into the 1950s, well, I can see the concern as being quite valid.

Colour is all around us, but... Where do the different names come from?

Colours. Everywhere we look, our vision is assaulted with a riot of colour, screaming and demanding our attention. Whether it’s that guy at the post office rocking the especially LOUD Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, right down to the socks full of holes poking out of his sandals, to the colourful packaging that holds our favourite things we purchase at the grocery store, there’s literally zero escape.

Love hurts when it ends. But, why?

Love. There are varying definitions of that word, but I want to talk about romantic love, and specifically, why does it hurt so much when a relationship ends?

My niece asked me to try to answer this question. I told her I would do my best. I won’t go into the specifics behind her reason, but I will say that there’s not been one person I know who HASN’T gone through the blistering heartache of a breakup. We all have, regardless of how amicable (and in some cases, toxic) it was.

Alright, so here we go.

'The Devil beating his wife' - what does that even mean?!

I don’t know about you, but I use a lot of really old (and sometimes cliche’ [don’t judge me!]) phrases and sayings.

For example: last week, my neighbour and I were sitting on her patio talking, and it was raining. At one point, while it was still raining, the clouds opened up, and my neighbour commented, ‘Oh, no. The Devil’s beating his wife now! The sun came out and it’s still raining!’ We sat and watched the weather shift a little and she and I pondered about the origin of that statement. How did it even come about? WHY would someone say such a thing? The devil wasn’t ever married … was he? Is he? I don’t think so. Given what he is (species), as far as I’M aware, there’s no such thing as marriage for him or any other angels.

Earworms - Frustrations of the human brain!

Let’s talk about earworms. You know what earworms are, right? If not, let me sum it up for you:

Earworms are those little fragments of a song (sometimes just irritating theme music from bad telly programming) that get stuck in your head, seemingly on a never-ending loop. No matter HOW HARD you try, you can’t seem to shake it. Like right now, I’ve got that annoying song, ‘Shake it off’ in my head, just because I said ‘shake it’ in the previous sentence. See how easily they can be triggered? Yeah, I know you get it. I see that look in your eyes, that look that says, ‘Oh, yeah, I getcha, girl. I am right there with you!’