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I live in the wrong place. Or maybe I live in the right place but in the wrong time. Wrong time not because I am plagued by nostalgia for a different era like Owen Wilson’s character in Midnight in Paris. Although, the 50s – am-I-right? But wrong time because the weather is going fuckin’ loco. I love Toronto. It is a city that literally never sleeps. And as someone who comes from a government town or as I’ve heard it called “the city that fun forgot” the liveliness of Toronto is exactly what I need. The weather though? Enough.

I remember driving from Ottawa to Toronto as a kid in the winter months and marveling at the fact that the closer and closer we got to the city, the less and less snow we saw. It wasn’t the snow-covered roads, five-foot high snow banks, and seven layer outfits, that I was used to. It was just enough snow around Christmas that Toronto could maintain Canadian status (because what isn’t more Canadian than the idea that we live in a snowstorm?) and once the Christmas trees hit the curb, the snow left the ground. It was, in a word: perfect. I needed to move here.

So I did. But after seven years of living in Toronto, I am broken-hearted. It is not the idea of perfection I once thought it to be. It’s turned into seven months of winter, plus one month of rain-shit-storms before and after winter. Really we have three months of sunshine, if we’re lucky. The reasons for this are clear. But this isn’t a post on global warming. It’s a post on change. Toronto has changed. And maybe it’s time I did too. The sunshine is calling me. And I’ve hit ignore on that call for way too long.

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I want to know what it is about being offensive that people find so alluring? We live in a culture that seems to celebrate assholes and it continues to baffle me. In the wake of the Weinstein scandal and everything that has happened since, I hope that it marks a shift, not only in how women are treated, but also how people are treated.

This week I heard a phrase that made me sick, “let the slut gates open.” Though the sentence was not said to me or even intended for my ears, I still found myself shocked that someone could (a) string words together in such a disgusting way and (b) expect everyone who heard it to accept it. This isn’t the first time someone has uttered words that have made my head hurt and I’m sure it won’t be the last. But the saddest thing to me is that they don’t see anything wrong with what they have said.

Just like anyone else, I have my shortcomings but I actively try to be respectful and attempt to surround with people who do the same. Unfortunately or fortunately, I tend to be known as the woman who speaks up. I am quick to say, please don’t say that word around me when people gleefully spit out “that’s retarded.” I do my best to correct my friends when they call themselves stupid. I don’t like when people use the word “gay” in a derogatory way. Because of that, I get labeled as difficult or a prude, uptight and uncool. If the definition of cool is to be disrespectful then I take pride in being anything but cool.