Ok, So You Want to Talk?

For two weeks of 2012, I fell out of this world and into another one. This was no fantasy novel, though. My new world wasn’t conducive to adventure; instead it was a perpetual waiting room, quarantined from time, like being in an existential play but hey, it was real life.

This was my life in the psych ward of a major city hospital.

We weren’t barred from interacting with the outside world. There were 24 hour cable news channels on the TV, and a desktop computer. They gave me my phone back eventually. But why bother to try and contact anyone? The outside world didn’t offer much for me. Our breakfast, lunch, and dinners would have come at the same time, on the same plastic dishes. My world would have still been circumscribed to a building floor. I told my job I was sick and the hospital wouldn’t let me leave, I told my family the rest of the truth, but otherwise I was checked out of the real world for two weeks.

I have kept very little from that time. Even the memories are beginning to go. I can’t remember the name of the form that the hospital kept me on, or the colours of the wristbands and how they related to privileges on the ward. Until I started writing this, I had forgotten the minor-key crush I had developed on someone there, out of what I can only assume was a combination of desperation and boredom. The memories I do have seem mostly funny now: trying to spear a slice of pork tenderloin with my fork because they wouldn’t let me have a knife; completing puzzle after puzzle in the break room; covering for someone I knew was smoking in the “reflection room” out of loyalty.

The physical evidence is even slighter. I threw out the paperwork, so now it’s just my hospital card and a mask. That mask isn’t metaphorical. It was just one of the many activities offered by the hospital so we could, I suppose, busy ourselves into sanity. I made something vaguely inspired by Cthulhu. It seemed appropriate, inside of a modern-day madhouse, to make a mask of a being who causes madness.

With a collection of memories and objects like this to remind me, it’s easy to forget it all. And yet, here comes #BellLetsTalk Day, to remind me every year that I’m more than just a headcase; I’m also a marketing tool!

So, let’s talk about #BellLetsTalk. I’ll start: I hate it. I hate that it dominates our national conversation for one day, causing my newsfeed to become bloated with endless retweets of trite sayings and quotes photoshopped onto Instagrammed photos. I hate that Bell wasted four letters of the official hashtag pushing its brand forward. And I hate that I have to justify my hatred. This year, I noticed more tweets than ever criticizing those who would criticize this day, often along these lines:

I'm sure that for each cynical tweet criticizing #BellLetsTalk, the tweeters are donating generously out of their own pockets. Right?
— Peter Moorhouse (@PeterMoorhouse) January 28, 2015

I dislike this kind of argument. In seeking to derail criticism, it turns what is just one type of support (in this case, financial) into the standard of engagement. Instead of responding to what someone is saying, it questions their commitment to even say it. So, in the interests of confounding these critics (and to regain the moral high ground of this piece) I donated $15.00 today. That’s not a lot, but I would have had to tweet #BellLetsTalk 300 times before Bell would pay out a similar sum.

Still, there are those I can’t ignore, or undercut with a donation; they are the people like me. The ones whose experiences were just like mine, or even worse, and who still like #BellLetsTalk. Many of them have powerful stories of how this day has helped them, that seeing all of those tweets and shares made them realize that they were not alone. I can’t criticize that, but I-the personal, highly subjective I- I still hate #BellLetsTalk.

I hate it for more than the corporate cynicism of Bell, a stronger cynicism than even the harshest anti-hashtag sentiment could contain. #BellLetsTalk reminds me of how angry I was, and remain, over this time. First: I did talk. Hours before I walked into an ER, I tried to talk with a friend about what I was going through. Instead of hearing that I was suffering from too little happiness, she seemed to hear that I had too much desire, that I wanted too much.

She wasn’t the only one I talked to either. Reactions differed. Sometimes people would change the subject and deflect it to something more manageable. My family, my lovely and supportive family, would just become exhausted by the obsessive mantras of my depression. I’m an ugly, stupid failure, I would say, disgusting, repulsive, unlovable. Uglystupiddisgusting. Unlovablerepulsivefailure. And on and on, until I could hear how tired they were on their end of the phone. Remembering all of this sometimes makes me angry; but sometimes it makes me feel grateful, for whatever these people tried to give me before I exhausted their energy and sympathy. A more honest version of #BellLetsTalk would also talk about how difficult these conversations can be for all parties.

And, finally: I am angriest at #BellLetsTalk for reminding me, with every hashtagged tweet in my timeline, of who I am now. That I don’t feel solidarity with the person muttering on the bus, but guilt and shame that I'll back away from them like everyone else.  #BellLetsTalk reminds me that I’m not a person who can find strength or creativity in this experience. Mad Pride marches will pass me by, because my madness almost killed me. And it probes into that place where I keep all the rage for what I lost. Going to the hospital probably saved me, but it changed me. I was tempered into something stronger, but at the cost of the ambitions and the spark belonging to the girl who checked herself in. I don't miss her misery. But I sometimes miss her.

So. Who wants to talk about that?

Domestic Tuesday: Bad Hat, Okay Beer

Remember the last time I checked in on my handiwork, and worried that my big red hat was turning into a big red bag? Well, I was right to worry:

This blurry photo is the only evidence I could bring myself to keep of Clifford the Big Red Hat. He's the perfect thing for those "Bad Face Days" we all have.

It doesn't matter how many times I knit a myself a muumuu instead of a pullover, or an oven mitt instead of a mitten. I'll never learn my lesson: KNIT A FRICKING GAUGE SWATCH!

Clifford-sized failures require high-ABV beers to forget, which is why I was probably doomed to be disappointed in this week's beer pick, Duggan's Sorachi Lager (no picture, unfortunately.) It's only 4%, and the package tells me it's a light beer, so I shouldn't shock anyone with the revelation that it's hardly a taste explosion. I had bought a six pack after going to Duggan's new brewpub with some friends. Both their Parkdale Bomber and Hefeweizen were quite good, but this one was just fine. Not bad, just alright, a light beer with a little bit of lemon thanks to the namesake hops. I think that I would enjoy it far more on a patio than in the depths of winter, and wearing a sundress instead of an alpaca face cozy.

Then again, almost everything would be better that way.

Books by the Numbers: How I Read My Way through 2014

You know how some football players put a sticker on their helmet for every sack they get? Well, if there was a reader equivalent-- I imagine it being quirky buttons on a Walrus tote bag --I would have 51 of them for 2014.

A selection of the books I read in 2014.

But my book kill count is just one number in my reading life. I thought I would look at other ways the books I read could be classified and counted; partly out of boredom, partly out of curiosity, but mostly because of an open spreadsheet on my computer with GoodReads on another tab.

Before quantifying these books, I would have described my reading life as "that of a lonely British man in the 1960s, quietly drinking a weak cup of tea." In particular terms, that would be mostly English (both in origin and language) and mostly male, with the works largely published before 1960. This year though I made a particular effort to read more works by women. Would this be the year an out and proud feminist (i.e. me) finally reached gender parity in her books?

Unfortunately, no. Only 22 of the books I read were by women, for a 43% XX rating. Though I'm doing well by my country--for every UK book, I read over 2.85 books from Canada. However, I remain firmly rooted in the Anglosphere. 80% of my books were from Canada, the UK, Ireland or the USA, but only two of these were translated from another language, French. Looking at the whole list, only 11 were originally published in another language.

I looked at genre (mostly literary fiction, probably because that genre is the miscellaneous drawer of the publishing world), and I looked at publisher. I found out that I read more books released in the same calendar year that I started reading them this year than ever before. And then I tried to quantify the racial diversity of the authors I read, before getting a real-word lesson in the fact that oh, hey, race is a social construct when I was debating how to classify an author based on a tweet of his I read once. Still, whatever White is, my list is That.

And so I've concluded that my reading list is a little more like me (white, female, Canadian) than I expected, but not as unlike me as I would have hoped, leaving me to wonder how that could change in 2015.

I could give myself targets. But I once made a list of 50 books I could read in the coming year, where I tried to collect as many books that were Canadian, written by women, and by racialized/people/of colour. The goal was to count it and find 25 books in each category; most of them needed to be all three for it to work and still leave room for the odd NYRB selection. Shamefully, only about ten things from that list were ever read. My reading habits can be pushed, but I found that I can't be quite that programmatic. My brain balks at the rules, and decides it wants to read something about shark attacks instead. Still, it's worth trying some sort of intention.

And then I should honestly answer the question of why it needed to be set at all.

Domestic Tuesday: Bright Socks Meet Festive Lager

Greetings from 2015! I dusted off an abandoned knitting project in December, because you should greet the new year with bright socks and a full heart.

Or, in my case, bright socks and a surly disposition. Now I'm on to a hat, from the first St. Denis pamphlet. I bought the booklet back when the yarn was released, and forgot to knit anything from it until two years after that yarn was discontinued. Fortunately, a friend returned from Ecuador with some alpaca yarn during that time. Yarn crisis averted thanks to international trade. It will be a Snow Star Hat in red.

 

I have a sneaking suspicion it's tending towards goofiness, and I'll just wind up looking like Toad from Mario when it's finished though.

Will I be able to drown my sorrows in beer? My fridge has been a little bare when it comes to Ontario beer, but here's Railway City's Festive Cranberry Lager, unseasonably enjoyed after the holidays. I apologize for the fruity lager. Throw a whole kitchen's worth of spices, fruit and herbs into my ale; whatever, that seems reasonable. But I've always assumed that lagers would be pure and golden (in spite of historical and personal evidence to the contrary.)  So I was initially suspicious of this beer. I figured it would be like drinking cranberry juice that had started to ferment a little in the fridge. Not that I've ever experienced that directly, I swear. It wasn't that obnoxious, though--more like a shot of cranberry after a standard lager. Perhaps better suited to the summer than a more festive season though.

I will not, however, apologize for the glass. My grandmother was giving away my grandfather's barware collection. Since my Mom banned her 27-year-old daughter from taking home the "Bottom's Up" mug, complete with swinging ceramic butt ("That's gross!")m or the one with straight-up seventies peen on the side ("You're a LADY!") I settled for the Playboy goblets. And I'll always say a silent "bottoms up" to my grandpa when I use them.