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Pickle Me This

March 6, 2024

Transgressions

It had to happen sooner or later, because it hadn’t happened in more than a year, but my pool has closed “until further notice” due to a light falling from the ceiling and smashing on the pool deck, shards of glass in the pool which now needs to be drained, etc. etc. And instead of having a complete nervous breakdown like I did when the pool had to close for a few weeks in 2022 (I blame it on a period of precarious mental health and having recently read The Swimmers, by Julia Otsuka), I am being stoic and patient (okay, it’s only been 16 hours, but I’m hanging in there) and taking the bus to the community centre at Wellesley and Sherbourne to swim in the pool there, which is a great pool, but the point of this story is that has a universal/non-gendered change room. Which, when I used the pool previously, has been absolutely a non-story, and I actually appreciate the non-gendered aspect as opposed to my usual pool where people lie down naked in the steam room with their legs wide opened so I can LITERALLY see right up their butt holes. All butt-holes must be covered in the non-gendered change room, where we get changed in private stalls and everyone is required to be attired. But the other times when I’ve used this change room, it’s been the only change room available, by which I mean that there are actually two change rooms, but only one was open at a time. Today, however, both change rooms were open, and I felt slightly uncomfortable for being in an unfamiliar space where I’m not clear on routines and rituals, so I just tried to look cool and went into the change room before me. Except that everyone I encountered in the change room was a man. Now, this pool, for various demographic reasons, has way more men than women anyway, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d missed something and entered a men’s change room by mistake. And the whole point of all of this was JUST HOW MORTIFIED/EMBARRASSED/WEIRD I felt about potentially having done such a thing. How it tapped into something ancient inside of me that’s always been afraid of transgression, being in the wrong space, being the wrong body in the wrong space. Something ancient that doesn’t actually come up so often because inhabiting traditionally male spaces (like when I played the trombone instead of the flute, was loud instead of demure, used to get ridiculously drunk at the Pig’s Ear Tavern) has always been kind of awesome and empowering (I’ve long worshipped at the altar of Jo Polniaczek) but this was terrible and shameful for reasons I’m still not finished unpacking, and it was fascinating to experience this discomfort (as well as unpleasant). What a prison gender truly is in all kinds of ways I’m not even cognizant of.

February 28, 2024

Leaps

There is reference to an act of suicide in this post, which might not be okay for you right now. Please take care. And no, it’s not mine, Mom. I am fine šŸ˜‰

I like the idea of leap years, a bonus day, even if it happens to fall in February, 24 hours out of nothing with which I am welcome to use however I like (probably reading). But then the last time we had a leap year was, um, erm, 4 years ago, which was THAT YEAR, and I’ve always been a little bit superstitious, but THAT YEAR wrecked me (and everyone), and navigating the p.t.s.d. from that experience will likely be the project of the rest of my life.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been wanting to read this book called End Times, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I haven’t, because in February 2020, I read a book from the same publisher called The Towers of Babylon that had some “end times” apocalyptic vibes, and I’m worried that if a pattern emerges, I might trigger disaster all over again. Sounds normal, right?

Two years later, I’d be (nearly literally?) out of my mind after a lifetime in pandemic years, the chaos of the trucker convoys, and the onslaught of invasion in Ukraine, and I remember eating dinner in a pizza restaurant as the TV news reported attacks on Ukrainian nuclear reactors, and I was so deeply entrenched in the catastrophic thinking that nearly wrecked me and convinced that we were all going to die, imminently, and I didn’t understand how everyone was acting normal. This was around the same time that I was waiting at a red light on Bathurst Street when something crashed down from a tall building under construction, and it wasn’t until long after I’d driven through those lights, until a few days later when I was reading the news, that I learned it had been a person who’d fallen to the street that day. Who’d jumped. Who’d leapt.

I feel like February is a rutted driveway, and I keep returning to those same tire tracks, noting the different designs of the treads, the shapes and patterns they make.

It was around this time of year, 11 years ago, that a very large cyst emerged in my thyroid, when I was seven months pregnant with my youngest child. And while I was far less practised in catastrophic thinking at that point, I’m still me, so I went straight there, to the small percentage of thyroid lumps that turn out to be malignant, and the tiny percentage of those malignant lumps that turn out to be fatal, which was a devastating diagnosis to receive from myself, obviously. But it turns out that I’m not even a doctor, and that sometimes weird and disturbing things can happen that don’t necessarily lead to the end of the world, which has been an important education for me. I really had no idea.

But even still! The magical thinking. I went for my annual thyroid check last week, and my thyroid is forever in flux, some lumps growing smaller, new ones emerging, which is not actually so rare for thyroids, and all of this change beneath the surface that I’d not even be aware of had that cyst not flared up all those years ago, placing me under watch. And my tests were all fine, once again, and I knew they’d be fine, that they’d probably be fine, but I felt even to say so might be a trick, lulling me into complacency. It’s just when give up on your guard that they get you, so my ever present anxiety whispers in my ear.

Deadly viruses. Fascism. Bodies falling from the sky. Lumps beneath the surface. The creative leaps my mind makes to suppose I might have control over any of this, over the universe at all. That the patterns are even there, signs and omens. I still can’t believe I wrote a blog post on February 21, 2020 about how, after five years of anxiety, I was finally learning how to be calm. Naturally, I am still not convinced that my blog post didn’t start the pandemic, in conjunction with that Babylon book, never mind that Covid-19 (which the blog post doesn’t even mention among all the other things I was worried about four years ago, and what if the problem was that I’d failed to watch out for it!?) had been circulating for months by then. But then the whole point of this is my inability to accept that the world exists outside of my mind.

January 8, 2024

One Hand in My Pocket

I’ve been thinking a lot about Shawna Lemay’s New Year’s post, “Learning to Be Of Two Minds,” mostly because my own personal 2024 quest (which is to be more human) involves precisely that, I thinkā€”even if I also struggle with this sense that I possibly might not know my own mind, the voice in my head consistently taking down any coherent narrative I’m offering it, which is exhausting, flip-floppy, though maybe the problem is that I’ve not learned to be of two minds, but rather my two minds are forever in conflict, which is something I need to resolve, to learn to let those two minds be.

Shawna’s post (which quotes Alanis Morissette and Marilynne Robinson) spoke to me in two (of course!) central ways, both creatively stimulating. First, it made me realize that the title of the novel which I’m working to have a new completed draft of by the end of the month needs to be titled ONE HAND IN MY POCKET. Why? Because it’s about a character whose life is a work in progress, a woman for whom it all comes down to that she “hasn’t got it all figured out just yet.”

And second, because of how the idea of having one hand in my pocket (as well as not having it all figured out just yet) really speaks to me in terms of where I’m at personally, and creatively. I feel like I’ve spend the last 10+ years showing all my cards, sharing my process, all the time, and that kind of openness has become unsatisfying.

In a piece in The Toronto Star this week (promoting her new book Let It Go), author Chelene Knight writes: “When I share something painful or heavy, I ask myself what I need in return and ensure I share my pain in spaces where I can receive what I need. I’m grateful for my intentional community. This is why social media is more of a highlight reel for me ā€” the online world doesn’t get to have both my joy and my pain; they receive only the pieces I’m willing to give away because it’s unlikely Iā€™ll get back what I need. But sadly, we donā€™t always consider social media as an intentional exchange.”

In 2024, I want to be more thoughtful about such transactions, and keep more thingsā€”more the joy and the painā€”just for me, and the people in my life. Which is to say, I want to keep one hand in my pocket (and the other one is giving a high five. Or gathering sea glass. Probably not flicking a cigarette).

January 2, 2024

Returning to Myself

Something I’m grateful for is the way that selfies and Instagram have taught me to make friends with my face, with my appearance, which is no small thing when you’re a woman in your mid-40s (and I kind of wished I’d been able to do as much when I was youthful and 600% gorgeous but had no idea of the latter). For a very long time, I’d see pictures of my self and feel bad about not looking the way I thought I looked in my head. But once selfies became a thing, the face in the photo became familiar, somebody I recognized, even if she looked a little bit odd or the light was unflattering, but who doesn’t look odd, sometimes? How tedious to be the woman who freaks out about appearing in photos with the same face she walks around in the world with all the time.

There was also so much that was gratifying about Instagram’s algorithm’s favouring of faces, and bodies. The whole matter feeling particularly subversive since my face and body defy conventional beauty standards in some ways, and so I’d get to celebrate myself, to feel empowered and good inside my own skin, as though I was the one making the rules instead of catering to somebody else’s standard, and I was, I think, for a while.

Or maybe I never was, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that at some point it started to feel not good. That whenever I needed the dopamine hit of engagement with my posts, I’d post a photo of my face, and the LIKES would start coming. And is that any way to treat my friend? Something that started off feeling empowering and meaningful becoming a cheap kind of gesture, and I became conscious of that. I became conscious of everything, this performance of my self, my life, my tea cups, even. I did not like it anymore.

Instagram wasn’t a performance, in the beginning. Or if it was, I didn’t notice, because it was serving me, and the LIKES came easily, so I didn’t have to think of them. (There were never so many, but numbers aren’t the kind of data my mind clings to.) I’ve spent the last 23 years putting elements of my life on the internet, and so social media feels natural to me, and I’ve always been able to use it in my own way, creating my own template instead of contorting myself in order to fit into somebody else’s, which is part of the reason why I’ll always be obscure, but it’s also entirely the reason I’m still here.

But last fall, it stopped feeling good to me. Partly it was became I was working so hard to try to sell my book (which is to say, to try to sell myself) and the book wasn’t selling. Andā€”not unrelatedā€”I was stuck in a rut in general, doing all these things both in my actual life and on the internet simply because these were things I always did, and while it’s true that rituals add meaning to existence, it’s possible to ritual so much that the life gets sucked out of them. The small ceremony of #TodaysTeacup began to feel rote. Posting my face began to feel rote. And then, even worse, I was doing all these things by rote and getting less engagement than I’d ever seen before, and it made me feel really bad about myself and about everything, and what even is the point of that?

Last year I struggled a lot to feel present in the moment. I think a lot of it was anticipation about my book release, so much set upon that event that every moment before it just felt like counting down the days. In the summer I swam to the middle of the lake in my favourite place in the whole world, and it just didn’t feel like my head was there, which was terrible since immersion in that lake, in that moment, in any moment, really, is so essential to my mental health. Similar to Instagram, it felt I was performing my experience, doing the things I do because these are the things I do, rather than consciously deliberately doing them.

By mid-December, I was pretty miserable. I actually diagnosed myself with a low grade depression, but I think I was just getting my period. Or maybe I was actually depressed after all, but getting off Instagram did the trick of fixing what was ailing me. Instantaneously. I think I’d been exhausted from the effort of trying to promote my book inside my little sphere of influence, like a crazy maniacal tap-dance that absolutely no one on the planet cared about, and once I got to stop dancing, it felt like such a relief. No longer scrolling past everybody else’s literary end-of-year triumphs, all the while my novel hadn’t garnered a single review. (And yes, I know that there are many writers who’d be grateful for the opportunity/exposure/sales I’ve been lucky to have, which is part of the reason talking about this at all is hard, but…that’s not the point?). Being able to just take a mug down from the cupboard without thinking about it. Heading out with friends and family and not taking a single photo, or if I did, not showing it to anybody. Noticing something beautiful, and not needing to share that beauty in order for it to true. Merely living a day, instead of feeling like I had to document itā€”and there was nothing mere about it. It was so restorative, and meaningful, and felt like I’d got a part of my life back that was only just for me.

And this is what I’m hoping of more of in this new year, to return to myself, to connect with the moment, to live more offline, and live differently on it. To spend less of my time striving for external validation (so much of which is superficial) and more time doing things that are meaningful to me.

April 24, 2023

There Was a Good Man Named Paul Revere

On Friday evening, a raccoon got into my kitchen. (Not for the first time; also this was not the only raccoon intruder in the neighbourhood this weekend!). And whenever I told anyone about it, they’d ask how the raccoon got in, and I would reply, “It came in the door…” And then I’d have to resist the impulse to finish off the sentence with, “I said it before/ I think I’m over you, but I’m really not sure.” Which is a problem much more rare than Toronto raccoons are, which is that I am absolutely obsessed with the song “Summer Girls,” by LFO.

And the weird thing about this is that everyone else isn’t. I don’t get it. A few years ago, back when Twitter was not a terrible place, I shared my shocking discovery that two out of the three members of LFO (aka, “The Lyte Funky Ones,” whose “Summer Girls” was pretty much a one-hit-wonder in 1999, though they tried hard to follow it up) had died of cancer. Because what kind of a statistic is that? Cancer, robbing the world of 66% of the ones who were lyte and funky, and now there is just one. The Lyte Funky ONE, and I partook in such banter with exactly TWO people, and it seemed like nobody else on Twitter cared about LFO, or even remembered the song at all.

But the lyrics to that song are wired to my brain in a way that I just can’t kick, and I don’t even want to. Which is kind of ridiculous, because the lyrics are so random and weird, but unbelievably catchy, and I just can’t help walking around the house muttering lines like, “Call you up, but what’s the use?/ I like Kevin Bacon, but I hate Footloose.”

Part of the problem is that I have two amazing daughters, and so it comes up a lot, a line like, “You’re the best girl that I ever did see.” Multiple times a day, I’m not even kidding, to which my children reply, without missing a beat, “The great Larry Bird, Jersey 33!” And HOW can I not follow that up with, “When you take a sip, you buzz like a hornet, Billy Shakespeare wrote a whole lot of sonnets”? Not a single one of which I can recite, by the way, and yet I know all the words to this bizarre and remarkably song in which “hornet” and “sonnet” rhyme!

When I do online yoga classes, I’m sometimes instructed to “shake and wiggle,” which puts “Summer Girls” back in my head yet again...as if it even needed planting: “In the summertime, girls got it goin’ on/ Shake and wiggle to a hip hop song.”

And I don’t know a better expression of love than telling somebody, “There was a good man named Paul Revere/ I feel much better, baby, when you’re near.”

Stayed all summer, then went back home
Macaulay Culkin wasn’t home alone
Fell deep in love, but now we ain’t speakin’
Michael J. Fox was Alex P. Keaton

I honestly don’t understand why any other song has to exist!

I am not the only person who has thought quite extensively about this song, and Rob Harvilla “How ‘Summer Girls’ Explains a Bunch of Hitsā€”and the Music of 1999” was such a joy to encounter, explaining a lot about just how this song has been running through my brain for almost 25 years. (The summer of 1999 was one of the most vivid and insane periods of my life, and I remember every song that was ever on the radio, which was this one, and “I Want it That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, and “Living’ La Vida Loca,” and “If You Had My Love,” my Jennifer Lopez, and and and, and Harvilla does a formidable job summing up the absolutely bananas musical year that ’99 was.)

I had never heard of Abercrombie and Fitch until that song, whose video had a similar vibe to “Steal My Sunshine,” by Len, and we all watched videos then, and I put my hair in cute pigtails and wore tank tops and aspired to be admired by boys with frosted tips.

“One of the subtler pleasures of ā€œSummer Girlsā€ is that it exactly replicates the experience of trying to talk to a young human male, driven mad by lust but still driven to constant distraction. Heā€™s listening to you, baby, honest. Heā€™s doing the best he can.”

One day I’m going to be old and senile, and just repeating these lyrics on a loop.

Boogaloo Shrimp and pogo sticks
My mind takes me back there oh so quick..

March 6, 2023

Rereading Lucy Barton

This is a post about a lot of things. It’s about being wrong, and dismissing certain ideas and ways of being, and the question of how one knows what’s good, all of which are actually themes of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton books, which begins with My Name is Lucy Barton, and continues with the story collection Anything is Possible, Oh, William, and, finally, Lucy By the Sea.

I first read My Name is Lucy Barton in 2016 and, if you’ll recall, I did not like it. I wrote, “I bought the book in hardback, paid $30+ for it and felt Iā€™d paid a lot of money for something slight and unfinished. Which was inherent to the project, I supposed, but I was never able to quite figure out how, or what the point was, or why this wasnā€™t a novel proper.” At the time, I’d also noted that the book was short enough, however, that maybe I’d go back and read it again…but I didn’t. Even with the subsequent books, I was willing to let Lucy Barton go. But then the books started to be awfully celebrated, appearing on book lists, readers I admire a great deal declaring their love for them, and so this winter I decided to try them again. (No big chore either, they’re all very short!)

And I’ve got to tell you that everything I thought was weird and slight about the Lucy Barton novels is still right there. The downright unfashionableness of the project too, the quiet, the earnestnes, so many exclamation marks!! (!!). Telling, not showing. She’s breaking all the rules I know of how to write a novel well, and it’s my immediate instinct to dismiss these books again. I’m only considering them again because other people are telling me that they’re good, instead of me knowing that in my bones. And isn’t that everything we’re advised against as readers, as critics, as humans? Of following the crowd, reading like sheep?

I fervently believe that so much of what we regard as literary criticism is actually a matter of taste, and I also know that it takes all sorts, and books would be very boring if there were only one kind of book. Other people love books I loathe, and vice versa, and that’s precisely what gives books, and life, and the world, its flavour.

But still, to remain open. This is the object, I think. To stay curious. To look backwards and wonder if there is something you might have missed, some part of the puzzle you might have failed to understand.

What I missed about the Lucy Barton books in the first place is that I don’t think Strout was trying to write the novel as I know it anyway. (Similarly in her celebrated Olive Kitteridge, which was less a collection of linked stories [though it was also that] than an attempt to show the multitudinous of humanity and the universe, and the fundamental unknowability of another human being.) Strout’s books are less an exercise in narrative than one of character, and its variable layers, and the connections between them, and between places, ideas, and things,

Such as that Bob Burgess, who Lucy Barton meets Lucy By the Sea, has his own book, Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys, which I’ve just put on hold at the library. Or that Olive Kitteridge herself shows up, secondhand, in Lucy By the Sea, in conversations Lucy has with the cleaner from Olive’s apartment building. Or even just the way that one paragraph leads to another, leaping back and forth across time, between focusses and ideas, almost a randomness to their patternā€”which had been my impression when I first read My Name is… back in 2016. When I hadn’t known enough to trust that I was in the literary hands of somebody I could trust.

“One of the reasons I believe this memory to be true is, first of all, it was so strange.” ā€”Lucy by the Sea

It is the strangeness, and seeming randomness, of the Lucy Barton books that has me having real difficulty understanding it as fiction, has me struggling to believe that it is not true. Because the strangeness is so lifelike, as opposed to the constructedness of a literary narrative, the sense that a fictional world has to make, or so I assumeā€”and Elizabeth Strout does no such thing.

I had a hard time with with Lucy by the Sea, a novel beginning in March 2020 and set against the unfolding pandemic, which is to say that it got into my head and tapped into my own pandemic (small t) trauma in such a visceral way. I also loved it and found it riveting, because any work of art that can so effectively tap into one’s nervous system is a wondrous thing, but it was upsetting to live that story again, to recall the fear and uncertainty, how dire things were, which is easy to forget now that we’re so much farther down the road.

It’s a novel (like all the others, and Olive too) about relatability, about what happens when we think we know when we don’t, about the limits (maybe?) of understanding people whose life experiences have been different from our own. Or about the ways that knowing and being known can be a burdenā€”Lucy’s relationship to her sister, or even her own daughters, whoā€”she realizesā€”remain at a remove from her because their own sadness affects her too much.

Books like the Lucy Barton books are never finished, there is no THE END. As Lauren Leblanc writes, “Like in any relationship, there are times in reading these books when certain stories demand attention, and there are times when personal moments are concealed or suppressed. There is inherent pleasure in that mystery. Her books read like familiar friends: complicated, timeless, achingly human, and compassionate.”

Elizabeth Strout doesn’t write novels so much as chart constellations, connecting points of light, moments of grace.

February 27, 2023

On Conflict

Unless you’re someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter (and I’m sorry if this is indeed the case), Pamela Paul’s recent New York Times op-ed “In Defence of JK Rowling” might at first glance appear innocuous, even obvious. And because I’m now (blessedly) someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time on Twitter either, I don’t even find the op-ed remarkable. Nothing to see here, move along, which was what I was in the midst of doing when I listened to Amanda Ripley on the On Being podcast, which I found so deeply clarifying.

Now I’ve got to tell you that Pamela Paul has disappointed me. Former New York Times Book Review editor, and author of the bookish memoir My Life With Bob, which I loved and which actually changed my life, I’d sort of assumed that anybody so connected with books and reading would be far more interested and curious about the world in her columns than the Paul has proven herself to be, with hot takes such as, “Why Don’t Diversity Champions Champion Prime Minister Liz Truss’s Diverse Cabinet?”

Yawn.

(This may be the closest I’ve ever come to being one of those women who furiously post UNFOLLOWING when, say, for example, Reese Witherspoon posts a flattering profile of Michelle Obama.)

Paul’s schtick mainly seems to be appearing very reasonable while highlighting everything that’s silly/annoying/nonsensical/frustrating about identity politics, and while there’s a whole lot of material there to work with there, for sure, I’m bothered by the way that doing so plays right into the hands of right wing trolls, and is categorically programmed to generate outrage, to be click-bait. And I’m sure it’s not merely happenstance that the entire occasion for Paul’s JK Rowling piece is a podcast produced by the media company founded by one Bari Weiss, the OG schickster, who has made highlighting everything that’s silly/annoying/nonsensical/frustrating about identity politics into a lucrative career, playing the victim while railing against others who are supposedly doing the very same.

‘And when you introduce the notion of high conflict, you describe it as, ā€œthe mysterious force that incites people to lose their minds in ideological disputes, political feuds, or gang vendettas. The force that causes us to lie awake at night, obsessed by a conflict with a coworker or a sibling or a politician weā€™ve never met.ā€

What I loved about Amanda Ripley’s conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being was how it helped me understand what exactly it is about the Weiss’s and Pauls of our mediasphere that bothers me so much, why I find their posture of reasonableness so disingenuous and counterproductive.

Tippett: Itā€™s just a, itā€™s a manifestation of what you said, the qualities of good conflict. That it is movement. Right? Itā€™s growth.

There is no growth, no movement, no curiosity, no desire for understanding. Instead the same old arguments, treads digging deeper, over and over, and over and over, and even worseā€”it’s monetized, and stoking people’s fears and contempt for their neighbours. I don’t care where you lie on the political spectrum, or how reasonable you purport to beā€”that’s dangerous, and I hate that, and it’s also just profoundly uninteresting.

Ripley: “I think thatā€™s whatā€™s missing from a lot of these conversations is joy, wonder, hope, dignity, and faith.”

February 8, 2023

I’m Good At

This post is inspired by Kate’s, which made me think. Like Kate, I am also good self-deprecation, and I’m also good at getting irritated by inane social media posts with messages like, “You are good, and you have worth, you are beautiful, and I love you,” which just never means a lot coming from a complete stranger and directed toward the general public, you know? I always prefer to be admired in the specific, and so, to that end, and also because I could write a post about what I’m bad about that would go on and on all day and I’m much less practiced in the art of affirmation, I want to put my mind towards those things at which I am strong and capable.

I am good at managing my household purchasing and, without use of sort of spreadsheet or app, keeping us from ever running out of such essentials as toilet paper, tea and maple syrup. Butter and eggs I take no credit for, because these are delivered weekly, but there is a part of my brain that is tracking our current stock of jam, and it never ever fails me.

I am good at helping to hold my kids’ feelings when they’re sad.

I am good at driving, which is an extension of the fact that I am good at sharing space in general and negotiating my proximity to others (except when I am dancing, arms flailing, likely to strike somebody in the face). I am also good at sharing space in the swimming pool and letting faster swimmers go ahead of me

I am good reading, and staying focused on reading, and finding the pleasures of reading.

I am also good at understanding what a book is at its heart, which makes me good at reviewing books and interviewing authors.

I am good at going to bed on time.

I am good at ensuring there is always a tin of fresh baking in my kitchen for snacks and stocking lunches.

I am good at meal planning. I am good at making dinner for my family every evening. (I am also very good at eating whatever somebody else has prepared for me, in particular lunch by my husband, a near daily feature now that he’s been working from home for nearly 3 years.)

I am good at making bad times into something good and bearable. Sometimes I am good at this, literally, to a fault.

I am good at picnics. I am good at keeping the teapot full. I am good at getting the hard work out of the way so I can focus on the fun parts. I am good at delayed gratification. I am good at remembering to floss and actually flossing. I am good at doing big things in small pieces.

I am good at karaoke and knowing all the words to epic poems such as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and “If I Could Turn Back Time.”

I am good at supporting local independent businesses. I am good at putting my money where my mouth is and actually doing the things I say. I am good at meaning what I say and avoiding falsehoods. I am good at not pretending. I am good at being the same person in person as who I am on the internet.

I am good at taking it easy. I am good at booking holidays. I am good at buying myself the flowers. I am good at making special breakfasts and turning part of an afternoon into an occasion. I am good at finding the joy in extraordinary things, like flowers and sunsets. I am good at noticing the light and watching where it falls, and where it’s going. I am good at sittingā€”if I have a book I can sit forever.

November 23, 2022

Postcards to the Future

A few weeks ago, we received a postcard from our friends Paul and Kate who live in Vancouver. I will admit that I did not read the note on it very carefully (the image on the front was a diagram of the respiratory system?), but it read something along the lines of that they’d written the card at a street festival “where they mail postcards to the future.”

Which was kind of remarkable, I guess, but then aren’t all postcards letters to the future after all?

The salient part for me, however, was the way the postcard concluded: “…and we will eventually be there, in the future with you!” Because we haven’t seen Kate and Paul since 2019, but this month they’ve finally returned to Ontario for a whirlwind visit, and we’ve been lucky enough to be part of it, which is what I’d so been looking forward to when I received this postcard at the beginning of November.

Tonight we all sat together in my living room eating Thai food, celebrating Stuart’s birthday, Kate and Paul, and our friend Erin, and 3 year-old Clara whom we last saw as a baby, and her little brother Gabriel, who has just learned to climb stairs, and who we’ve been overjoyed to be meeting for the very first time.

“Oh, I got your postcard!” I exclaimed suddenly, remembering. Kate and Paul were both confused. They hadn’t sent us a postcard. “No, you know. The one from the street festival? Where you were sending a message into the future.” They had no idea what I was talking about. “It’s on my fridge!” I insisted. “Here, I’ll show you.”

I went to get it…and realized the most important thing I’d missed when looking at it before. The date at the top: June 23, 2018. The people at the street festival really weren’t kidding about the future thing. I realized too that the note was only signed from Kate and Paul, because Clara and Gabriel didn’t exist then. We hadn’t had a pandemic then. None of us had had any idea of what was coming. And yet.

“…and we will eventually be there in the future with you.” A line that might have hit very differently if this letter had arrived at any other moment during the last few years. But it was a promise.

What are the odds of this very postcard to the future arriving on the cusp of the first time we’ve all been together in so long?

But here we are. I feel so lucky. And looking forward to what other wondrous things the future has in store.

October 19, 2022

On Being Wrong About the Pandemic

For a while now I’ve been obsessed with the idea of what we’ve, collectively and otherwise, got wrong during the pandemic, an obsession that has manifested in conversation, direct messages, ideas about some sort of a Q&A project with political types (what a [n impossible] thing it would be to receive honest answers to the question of, “What did the pandemic teach you about the limits of your ideology?”), and thoughts towards a blog post that would definitely outline the numerous times I took things far too seriously, including the weight of my own actions, and that we probably could have spent Thanksgiving 2020 with my mom.

Last year Vivek Shraya published a short book (it was originally a talk) called Next Time There’s a Pandemic, a book I enjoyed, though it wasn’t enough “You’re Wrong About…” for me. (It was also conceived with the idea that two and a half years in, there wouldn’t STILL be a pandemic, so that was not the book’s fault, exactly…) But once the book was read, I wanted more interrogation, more reflection. In general, Shraya’s book aside, I wanted a whole lot less of, “Well, we did the best we could with the information we had in the moment,” partly because, while this is true, I think too many people have spent the pandemic being wrong over and over again.

Also because it’s been impossible for any one of us to get this exactly right, which has been one of the hardest things about the pandemic, the absence of concrete guidelines, rules to follow to the letter, because the mark of Covid-19 has been how it doesn’t follow rules at all, is as inconsistent as all get-out. It’s mild and it’s deadly, and in your gut and your respiratory system, and it doesn’t affect kids much and it makes kids really sick, and the vaccines are effective and they’re not, and it’s airborne/very contagious and you never got it, and it killed that healthy 32 year old but that asthmatic woman who is 106 was fine.

So anyone who thinks they got it right every time is wrong about that, which is only just the beginning…

And what I’m wondering about now is why all this means so much to me, why I need other people to join me in admitting when we’ve been wrong, where our judgment has fallen short, even when we were doing our best.

Partly because I think it’s really interesting…

And of course, I also think it’s important to celebrate what we got rightā€”I’m so proud of my community in all kinds of ways [see “About Last Spring: The Vaccine Narrative I’m Holding Onto”] but this celebration is only part of the picture, which seems important after a long time in which neighbours have felt so divided. And while the fact that more than 80% of Canadians stepped up to be vaccinated absolutely means there is far less division than all the noise would suggest (truck horns are very loud, this is true!), I think that making space for everyone to reflect on what they got wrong (without shame or judgment) creates space for reflection for those people who might benefit most from a bit of that thoughtfulness.

I think too, if we’re getting pathological, this means so much to me because of control issues, a strange compulsion to be certain about uncertainty…

But mostly, I think that acknowledging where we were wrong is to acknowledge our capacity to learn, to grow, to adapt and be flexible, traits that will prove to be our greatest assets in societal challenges that lie ahead of us.

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