Welcome to 2012!

Traditionally the turn of a new year is seen as a chance for a fresh start.  Maybe you believe there is some mystical alignment of the stars that makes this time more viable to change your life than any other day of the year.  Or maybe the New Year just makes for a conceptual break in our lives that we can see as the closing of an old chapter and the beginning of a new one.

Assuming that you are not perfect and that you are willing to grow, this is the time to take stock of your life and reflect honestly on what you can do better.  This is not just about short term or superficial benefits like losing the weight that you gained over the holidays; it can also be about the small steps you can take toward becoming a better person.  If you don’t think there’s any room for improvement...well, you probably need to reflect a little bit harder.

There are many different areas that you can concentrate on, like improving social skills, working on character flaws, developing emotional intelligence, gaining physical self-awareness, building self esteem, overcoming your fears...the list goes on.  The trick is not to overwhelm yourself with too many things at a time, and not to feel discouraged if your list is long.  Make one or two realistic goals for your own personal growth, and stick to them as best as you can for the rest of the year.  If you’re lucky they’ll stick as a habit, and once you no longer have to think about them you can move on to different goals for next year.

Last year I talked about one of my own resolutions for 2011, which would fall into the category of gaining physical self-awareness.  Except for weekends and magazine deadlines, I have stuck pretty firmly to my goal of working out for at least half an hour every work day.  There were several reasons for me to do this: because of my diabetes, to help level out my blood sugars and gain better control; to improve my overall health; to give my body as much of a challenge as my work gives my mind; and yes, to gain some weight and muscle so that I achieve a physique that I’m happier with.  I’m not a muscle bear yet, but I’ve certainly gained some definition and noticed improvements in my strength and endurance.  I plan on continuing with this through 2012, along with a new and much more challenging goal that I’m about to explain.

Steve and I put ourselves through a lot running this magazine - I think we can probably agree, our individual workloads are more than the average person would be able to handle without coming apart at the seams.  Most weekdays, Steve works from 9am to 3am dealing with the hundreds of Emails, numerous phone calls, interview requests etc. that flood us daily; plus posting content on the GayCalgary.com website, and sending out notifications through social media.  I have my full time job from 8am to 5pm, I get home and maybe run a few errands like picking up groceries before I go back to working on magazine and website related stuff until 12am or later.  And then we work the weekends too, covering events in Calgary and Edmonton, not to mention magazine deadlines where we work ourselves even harder.  I don’t think there are many out there who can say they pull a 16 to 18 hour workday without having a proper break or holiday in 8 years, but somehow we’ve gotten used to doing this.

One might think the magazine is impressive enough, but that doesn’t even factor in that a good portion of what we do in the community doesn’t necessarily have a tangible result for the public to see.  Nevertheless it consumes our time and effort.  As a result, it has become frustrating when people still expect more out of us, and it is further frustration and guilt for us when our workload becomes a frequent excuse for turning people down, or making people wait on us for things we honestly intend to do.

But last month we had something of a wakeup call.  Steve lost two of his relatives, and unnecessary distractions from the community kept us from spending any time with them while they were still alive.  His grandmother was the only one of his grandparents that he ever had the opportunity to know, and he spent a lot of time with her when he was younger.  She accepted Steve and I as a couple without us ever needing to explain anything – she even taught me how to say "I love you" to him in Hungarian.  Even though we had several days of notice that her condition was deteriorating, we only finally arrived a few days before Christmas to see her, literally a minute or two before she passed away.  His Aunt passed away two days later, and we didn’t get the chance to visit her at all.  To add insult to injury, we had to work over Christmas day to make time so we could attend the funerals.

There is a lesson here that everyone should heed.  You never want to put yourself in a position where your life is so full of things that you are unwilling to give up, that you don’t have room for anything else.  There are times when life will inevitably demand more of you.  If you haven’t conserved some room for it, then it will force something else out that you care about, and you may not get to choose which thing that is.

We often hear the reminder that, no matter what, you have to put yourself first because nobody else will - I’ve written about it at least once in past editions of my own column (e.g. December 2009, "Balancing Holiday Charity with Reality").  With so many people in the community demanding our time and attention on a daily basis, it has been troublesome for us to do this.  We’ve sacrificed a lot in the way of having personal lives, sometimes neglecting friends and family, to try to keep up with what individuals, businesses, and organizations in the community need and expect of us.

Finally we’ve come to the realization that this isn’t fair to us, or to our friends and families who should come before our business.  We could go on feeling helpless and growing progressively bitter toward the people who make us shoulder an unreasonable burden, or we can sack-up and address the real issue here: that carrying a good part this burden doesn’t have to be our job.

Steve and I do still enjoy our work but we need better balance with the rest of our lives, and the opportunity to pursue some of our own interests on the side.  Furthermore, we start to get bored when we don’t feel like we’re moving forward, and for the past year we have been holding pretty steady.

So that is our New Year’s resolution, for us personally and for our business: to start committing to doing less of the unnecessary stuff so that we can concentrate more on ourselves and the things that matter most to us.  Maybe it sounds selfish, but after 8 years of running the magazine non-stop (20 for Steve, running GayCalgary.com), I think we’ve done our time.  If we haven’t built a solid foundation by now that can allow us to take a step back, then it can’t be done.

On the business side, Steve and I have already held discussions and made some decisions about what this should look like in the coming year.  We’re not ready to announce any specifics just yet, but in general we’re going to concentrate on developing ways to work smarter rather than harder, saying "no" a lot more often, returning to our roots, and continuing to innovate so that we keep up with the times.  It sounds strange but in this situation promising less will be a win for everyone (where "everyone" includes us).

Conserving our time and effort will mean that we can better focus on meeting the needs of our advertisers and providing a better product to our readers, while allowing us the leeway to live simpler and happier lives together.  Any roles that we may be stepping away from would be nothing that the community can’t adapt to – if anything it will leave more opportunities for others to participate and get involved with our local organizations.

In fact, we’ve already started taking more time for ourselves.  For the first time in 5 years we were in the same city for New Years Eve, and able to celebrate this occasion together as a regular couple would, which starts us on the right foot for 2012.

Now, stay tuned for my next Publisher’s column, in our milestone 100th edition, when we will be revealing further details about what we have planned.    On the whole, we’re quite excited about where the coming year will take us.

The Living Christmas Tree

It turns out that last year I had unwittingly started a new tradition by getting roped into the Living Christmas Tree fundraiser at the Calgary Eagle.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, basically one or two people volunteer themselves as "trees" (stripped down to their underwear), and funds are raised for SHARP Foundation by selling ornaments that people can use to decorate them.  The ornaments go onto bare skin with clothespins, so for the "trees" it’s a matter of enduring prolonged pinching, and the sting of blood rushing back to those areas when the clothespins come off.

This year wasn’t so impromptu; I knew ahead of time that I was going to be doing this.  Living Christmas Tree extraordinaire, Aiden (from our December 2007 cover) was back this year as the main attraction, and I was the "elf bitch" sidekick.  Anticipating the green latex body paint from the old days, Aiden had shaved his body hair to avoid having it all ripped out when the latex would get peeled off.  This was unfortunate because for several years in his absence, the Eagle has been using green body paint instead - still a first for me because last time I wasn’t painted at all.  Patrons had a chance to be a little artistic with the paint before filling everything in – I had a beautiful Calgary Eagle logo painted on my back, and thanks to Makayla, an Eeyore-ass-face painted on my front.  I couldn’t resist cracking a Hulk joke once my torso and legs were solid green: "You won’t like me when I’m angry!"

Western Canadian Leather SIR and boy, Sir Marc and boy Daniel, took care of leading us around the room and selling ornaments.  It’s not uncommon for some of the ornaments to fall off our bodies as we shuffle around, but some made a splash when they hit the ground.  That was how I found out that a few people were being clever and filling them with water for extra weight (and pain).  Weighted or not, people found some particularly sadistic places to put the ornaments.  I held up pretty well, but one round was enough for me, and spending more than an hour scrubbing green paint off my body was a pain in itself.

In addition to all of this, the Calgary Eagle also auctioned off a beautiful ornamental Christmas tree donated by Rubaiyat.  The Living Christmas Tree fundraiser brought in just over $600 for the SHARP foundation.