I finally had my television turned back on today…my credit is so poor that my TV, Internet, and phone service is in my father’s name – if it were not, Telus, my new provider, would require a $900 deposit from me, to be refunded in 6 months, even though my months bills are a fair $91.44. My already horrible credit (my first rapist, and also my first boyfriend, first spouse, and the first man to ever tell me I was pretty, maxed out a credit card I had been given by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce when I was seventeen. I told them I was employed, which was, indeed, the case, but I vividly remember the bank teller casually telling me, “Ah, that’s alright, we can just skip that part [referring to information about one's employer], just a signature here, and… here!” before mailing off the application that would result in the delivery of a credit card with a $1500.00 limit to me, still living at my dad’s house, in ten days. I paid off my bill in full for six months, and then I began dating Josh (for the second time – he had already raped me, telling me that he was thrusting his large penis into my dry, chapped, vagina, because “every woman secretly wants to be raped!!!”
What a guy, born with the knowledge of the thoughts that resonate from the minds of all women, and being given this gift, this ability to enjoy raping women so much that it would become his hobby after we broke up – raping my friends, raping men – thus fulfilling those secret desires that lie deep in all of our minds, right ladies? :eyeroll: 
:eyeroll: (I cannot speak to whether or not men share this dirty little secret) He raped me one week after I returned from my first year of university at McGill in Montreal, Quebec, during which we kept up a long distance relationship, which we did a damn good job of – I managed to get pregnant (I had my first abortion at the first abortion clinic ever to open in Canada, the Morgentaler Clinic, where to be let in you had to pass $375.00 in cash, it had to be cash, to an agent behind bulletproof glass). I told my dad I needed money for some expensive dental work and he did not question it, at least not to my knowledge. If he did, I’m sure he thought I was using it to buy drugs, as he assumes I’m doing when I need extra money for items such as bathroom mats and laundry detergent today, ten years and two months later. Yes, that’s it, father, I was just born with a penchant for putting things into my body that make it feel good for a short while and then really, really bad, sometimes for weeks, so bad that I, at seventeen when I was coming down off crystal meth, wished for death just as much as I feared it, as I felt my heartbeat pounding (you must be able to see it beating from the outside, I have to get out of here. This here, the next here, there, everywhere, anywhere, and always nowhere). He grew fond of giving head to his male roommates while I was away. But we were the model couple, in and out, until he dumped me a week after my return.
After a short period of sadness, I had the most amazing summer with my girlfriends – Jima., Maybe, and B., as well as our French male counterpart, Marc. We moved in together before school started in the fall, as I had decided to leave “The Harvard of Canada” for the U of Winnipeg after my dad told me that if I continued to go to McGill, he would have to sell his 4000 square foot house (at that time inhabited by two people, him and little sister).
Oh well, I cannot find a job here in Vancouver that pays $60,000/yr for spending most of the day surfing Facebook like my roommate from first year, Katrina, and my “best friend” from high school, Anna Koz, have, just because it says that they graduated from McGill on their resumé, with a respectable 2.2 GPA at that! I won a gold medal at my graduation from the University of Winnipeg, a gold medal, prize for best thesis, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada’s Master’s Grant, valued at $17,500, though it was spent on medical bills rather than research on medicine. I am not employable. I digress.
“I hear many people say, if they hadn’t had drugs they would have killed themselves. Do you feel that way?” a sympathetic Dr. Drew Pinsky asks a sex worker in the background, on the television.
The woman is every woman that has been raped multiple times, and there are millions of us, likely, billions, considering the large populations of China, India, and Africa, where rape is a daily expectation for many women who must walk several hours to fetch water for themselves and their children, along paths where men wait, fondling themselves in the brush, ready to threaten the next woman that passes by, ready with a machete to use as a tool of fear, a tool to make her do any sick request him or his compatriots demand. Ready to make her make sounds of pleasure. Ready to make her take it in all three holes. Ready to make her call him, “Daddy”. Here, in Canada, the questions are the same. I know because I’ve heard them, over the past seven years I’ve heard them countless times.
“Well, I was at a party and my guy friends raped me,” the woman on the television begins her story. The lack of emotion in her voice is disturbing, as I imagine the lack of emotion in my voice must be when I speak of my most recent rape. More disturbing is the lack of surprise on the faces of audience members.
It has become not only acceptable, but expected, for women to be raped by men that they know, whether boyfriends or not. Why are fathers not disgusted with their sons for thinking this is acceptable? Why are women not buying machetes of their own and cutting off penises? Why did he choose me, did I look like a woman who was used to being raped, aside from the appeal of my white skin and blonde hair? Why was I surprised that it happened again. I do not think anyone else was (my family being the people I was with at the time). Not only because of their general disinterest and the lack of emotion on their faces, but because of their comments that not only implied, but explicitly stated that I was somehow to be blamed.
“My best friend shot me up with cocaine, and after that, I started doing anything I could to get money for more. My boyfriend, I thought he loved me, was pimping me out. I was so happy with him, I was so in love.”
I remember the night in September, 2003, when I, drunk and being led back to Penner’s apartment for night, which of course would include sex, just like the sun rises each morning, said “Just tell me you love me already.” to my first rapist who had started calling our apartment a month earlier, and slowly and quickly worked his way back into our lives. He was still beautiful, and I still did not know I was much more beautiful. I did not know that he was ugly inside, a monster, a psychopath, a misogynist, a phoney, a plagiarist, a pimp in his own way.
The topic of the episode of Lifechangers, Dr. Drew’s latest show, that I do not have time to sit down and watch, is about how rape survivors trust people. It would seem a raped woman would trust no one, but instead, we trust anyone who shows us kindness. Some sick combination of Stockholm Syndrome, patriarchy, and dependence lead us to trust the worst people we could possibly select.
Then, the people that are supposed to really love us, our families and our friends, draw away, call us crazy, begin to hate us for making the same mistakes again and again and again – getting ripped off, conned by a snake oil salesman, a nice looking young man who makes a smart-sounding business proposal, a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing that looks like the opposite kind of fellow to us.
I don’t know which proposition I find more ridiculous: that we “put ourselves in situations” where rape is likely, or that there is no reason for us to be such poor judges of character, or the impossibility for those people that care so much, the fathers, the sisters, the best friends, to understand why we would want to get out of our heads for a little while, even with the assistance of a substance that could kill us – it’s not from a doctor, it could be rat poison of all we know!
How could we care so little? How could we care at all. How could we hurt our families again, and again, and again.
“Jesus, Christ, scars, what the hell is the matter with you?!?!?!”
I swallow the large white caplet in the bottle marked Combivir. It hurts as it inches its way down my esophagus.
). At least it ended beautifully, 
On Thursday I will take 75 mg Effexor along with a dosage of Prozac for one week, after which I will stop taking it…
local clothing, and my wardrobe became so much more unique and self-expressatory. When I go back to Winnipeg I stock up on “Made in Cambodia” basics at Supernosecuritystore. Remember the amazing bag I got from 
(That means you, 
Tammy, Bethany, Sarafin, Wendy, Holly, and of course I would Jima if she didn’t live in Spain 
by failing to mention the kitty episode. From the point of an outsider, this seems like a very blatant distraction from the only illegal aspect of the crash: the ounce of marijuana she had purchased the day before, and put under her seat. Of course, she removed it while she was “pinned in the vehicle”.
!
. My stepmom has been on a pension for nearly twenty years, unable to work because of emotional disability after the death of her son, so I must say, my father’s groaning and grieving over the loss of a six-figure income is quite annoying and inappropriate.
). But, not even half an hour into the first episode, I was fast asleep.
