Not Waving But Drowning

My least favourite public goodwill/branding exercise (HASHTAGBellLet'sTalk) passed by a few weeks ago, and I briefly thought about prying off that scab again and talking about the state of my mental health. The first post I wrote, about my time in the hospital, was a look back; this second post would try to look forward, as a way of figuring out why I've found it so difficult to move on from that episode.

Which is a great narrative, provided that I'm actually moving on--and not finding myself sinking back down again, as I have for the past four months. I could blame my job and I could blame school, but I often come back to blaming myself, and wondering if I don't have some congenital form of failure.

Right now I'm throwing medication and money (in the form of therapy) at the problem. It might be helping. But I haven't been writing. Unfortunately, most of what's been on my mind is me, which isn't a very interesting topic, and certainly not one I think there's a public audience for. I find a certain kind of toxic narcissism is one of the side effects of depression/anxiety/lack of resilience/whatever I have. However... however. Perhaps there's a reason I've kept my Blogspot going even as nearly everyone else migrated over to Tumblr. Maybe I need the outlet that early 2000s blogs, in all of their lumpy, barely monetized, confessional glory, can provide. So join me--won't you?--for a journey into the kind of surly, kind of whiny hallways of my mind.

Don't worry, there will still be knitting.

Poor Decisions and Long Vacations

Hmm, how to start. Howdy? Hello? I'm...alive? Well, barely. Turns out it is a terrible idea to try taking three grad school classes when you're working full time. Particularly if that work also entailed a relatively new promotion that involved both more responsibility and more stress.

That two sentence explanation is all you probably need to know about how I spent the time between the last blog post and this one. I learned a lot about ticks and tick-borne diseases though, in particular Lyme disease. Which is really neat and cool, I guess, until you start having intense anxiety dreams about blood-engorged ticks and angry patient advocacy groups.

I'm back now. But so is school. Hopefully I'll still manage to write more than once every four months though. 

Baby Talk

For one glorious season back in university, my roommate and I were devoted fans of a CBC show called MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives. Actually, we were probably its entire devoted fanbase, and we loyally referred to the show by both halves of its title. We would toss one line in particular back and forth to each other. It was wailed by the Nice Blonde Teacher, who was in love with the Nice Guy Hockey Player, but... let me just quote the line: "I want...BAYYYYBIES, but I can't have...BAYYYYYYYBIES."

We would make the "babies" particularly guttural and tortured and laugh. Though one night we did admit that we were scared that, if we ever admitted we wanted children, we would somehow be made infertile. In Sex and the City terminology, we would go from Mirandas to Charlottes; or the example of Friends,  we would magically be Monicas instead of Rachels. It always seemed like it was the woman who wanted kids who couldn't have them, whereas the shortcut to fertility seemed to be a casual ambivalence to the prospect. 

That roommate now has an adorable daughter, though I'm still holding steady at one (1) delinquent cat. This situation at least proves that some of our bizarre superstitions about fertility were unfounded, but it doesn't answer on key question. Do I want children?

That choice has been on my mind lately, since it seems like either decision (aside from the Rachel-Miranda School of Accidental Reproduction), triggers a certain amount of defensiveness. While the decision to remain childfree will bring you more direct censure, at least from grandmothers at family gatherings, having a child isn't always a shortcut to acceptance and cupcakes. If someone thinks you're too poor, too single, or too crazy, they may demand an essay where you justify this choice, before providing supporting arguments for any of the choices that follow (adopted or biological, homeschooled or public schooled, organically and dogmatically fed from scratch or simply fed conveniently.)  

I feel the strongest desire to be a parent when I'm close to Baby Gap and its itty bitty pea coats, or when I'm near a rack of Robeez slippers, considering which animals I want embroidered on my baby's toes (dinosaurs, I think.) I feel the strongest desire not to be a parent when I've come home from a 6:30-9pm class, only to realize that I still need to do dishes, make dinner, do those dishes, briefly consider an activity for personal fulfillment, then fall asleep instead. The thought of doing all that, but in increased quantities and with more responsibilities, is terrifying. I've also shown a real aptitude for being utterly terrible with my money, so any child of mine would be at a distinct disadvantage in this world. The Baby Gap's itty bitty pea coats would stay on their hangers.

But it's not even the responsibilities or the costs of having a child that scare me the most. I am most frightened of sharing a child with another person. I know there are alternatives, from adopting as a single parent to sperm donation, but those all seem to involve scheduling, and I am as bad with calendars as I am with money. I think my ideal would be a bittersweet reunion with my baby daddy after many decades have passed, complete with a heartbroken smile and hands held a second too long. I don't think that many people watched The Way We Were and said "there's my maternal role model!" but I did and I do. 

I also sometimes catch myself fantasizing about being a parent, but of a child who's successful and celebrated in particular. It's like some of us reach older age when we let go of our childish fantasies of fame and achievement, only to forego maturity by transferring them to our offspring instead.

So. This is me taking 400 words to say "I don't know."

My consuming indecision means that, however, I do want to know what other people chose and why. I won't judge, but I always want to ask. I'm selfishly hoping to hear an argument compelling enough, in either direction, that I'll finally make a choice. But it's too personal to ask these questions that often, and so I mostly work the same territory over and over in my mind.

Kristin Booth, the actress who played the Nice Blonde Teacher on MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives later appeared on another Canadian drama, Flashpoint. Once again, she was playing a woman struggling with infertility, proving that there's no niche too small that an actress can't be forcibly typecast into it. This time her character's inferitlity had driven her to kidnap her husband's pregnant lover; at least there are some choices that are easy not to make.

TMI: The Less than Incredible Journey, or a Return Trip to My Ovaries

You probably thought you were safe. A few weeks had gone by, and I had never once mentioned the words "transvaginal" or "ovary" on this blog. You probably thought I would never again invite you take a trip inside my lady business. 

WELL, YOU WERE WRONG. 

And you were wrong because I had a followup ultrasound a few weeks ago, and I want you to share in my misery. So sit back, relax, and take a deeply, deeply unsexy trip between my legs. 

I was a little slow in making my second ultrasound appointment appointment, both because I wasn't eager to relive the minutes I spent as a human joystick, and because my menstrual cycle didn't want to cooperate. Of course, all this misery started when that cycle decided to behave like a spoiled reality show star (i.e., it does what I wants!), so that was hardly a surprise. Eventually things settled down and I went in. The procedure was the same; the technician different, but still Eastern European. After it was all over, I was told that it would probably take 3-5 business days for my doctor to receive the results.

So, I was surprised when my doctor's office called me just two days later to schedule an appointment. "Uh, doesn't she want to wait for the ultrasound results?" I asked the administrative assistant. "Oh, we have them. That's why I'm calling. Can you come in tomorrow?" she replied "The doctor wants to discuss the results with you." This was... not the most comforting way to have a medical appointment made for you. I feigned indifference to my colleagues, but I was mentally preparing for whatever terrible news was surely headed my way. My most coherent plans were, first, not to cry in the doctor's office; and, secondly, to keep this from my work and my parents for as long as humanly possible.

Of course, the actual news was not so grim. "Don't worry!" was pretty much the first thing my doctor said. She probably realized that some assurance was required; I must have seemed ready to watch Terms of Endearment while taking notes. "The large cyst is gone. But they noticed several other cysts..." as she started to read from the notes the... sonographer? scientician? had sent her. The scientician's conclusion? I had "bulky ovaries" consistent with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). EVEN MY OVARIES CAN'T LIVE UP TO SOCIETY'S IMPOSSIBLE BEAUTY STANDARDS.

RIP Cysquo, we hardly knew ye; and for that I am very glad indeed. To have PCOS, though, you need to have more than chunky ovaries. You also need to show at least one of the two related symptoms. My answers to these questions were less conclusive than the ultrasound: Excessive hair growth? ("I'm Ukrainian and Scottish, so it's hard to tell.") Irregular periods? ("Not before the birth control.") So, no official diagnosis yet. But... I feel like if it's an inconvenience, I'm sure to have it. Even with PCOS though, I'm still healthy. Dubiously fertile, but healthy. It's a state whose worth I should have appreciated; whose fragility I also finally understand.

Image: PCOS from Wikimedia Commons. 

My Month-us Horribilis on the Bicycle

In happier times...

This winter felt like an endless concrete wasteland, with the exception of any time spent on the TTC, and then it was briefly a stinking jungle of sweat and GoreTex. So, you can imagine how happy I was to get my bike back a month or so ago. Bike freedom! The wind in my hair! Personal space! Being insulted by random drivers! Alright, the last one isn't so pleasant, but still. On the balance, cycling is better than transiting, and don't let a streetcar-themed hat or subway-printed tote bag fool you.

And then the universe decided to pop a squat on my happiness. First of all, I was horribly out of shape after a winter where my most active hobby was eating my feelings. My first ride was uphill, which quickly became a walk uphill. After a week of wondering if I was the slowest cyclist in Toronto (non-folding bike edition) I decided it needed a spring tuneup. 

But everyone else had decided the same thing, and so the bike spent a week in the shop. After I retrieved it, I had a glorious day and a half with my love. Everything was running perfectly, and the choir at the local Anglican church even burst into song as I pedalled by on my way to a friend's party via the Russell Hill bike path. I told Dan that, between the bicycle and the choral music, it was just like the opening of an Inspector Morse episode, and I half expected to turn up dead. 

Instead, on Monday, I had to solve The Mystery of Why the HELL Do I Have TWO Flat Tires? Because I live in Toronto, and I cycle, and the Sun and Star love publishing articles about the Menace II Society this makes me, my sense of persecution is overdeveloped. I called sabotage. Dan was less dramatic. His idea was that the shop just overfilled the tires.

We wheeled it to the local shop (a different one). There, three nice, young, and probably stoned men got really excited by my situation. "Double flaaaaaaaats" they drawled to each other. "Double fllaaaaats!" Twenty minutes later they were both fixed, the culprit identified as a piece of glass. From then on, I vowed never to call this shop "That Shifty Place", as I had done before, but "The Place that Looks Shifty, But Isn't."

A week later, I was texting my friend that I was late, but on my way, and should be there soon. "All hail the power of the bicycle!" I wrote, before I jumped on the bicycle and... nothing much happened. My chain was off, as another cyclist helpfully yelled out as he pedalled by. The chain guard, so helpful most days, wasn't being all that conducive to a roadside fix, which didn't stop me from trying. Instead, I gave up, walked it and my greasy hands to the closest bike shop (this would be yet another one) and threw myself on their mercy.

The heroes fixed it for free. "I'm not a hero," the guy insisted, "just a guy who works in a shop." Nope, he was a hero to me, and anyone else so inept with mechanics that they should probably just buy a car that's under warranty, and give up this cycling thing entirely. Oh well. There's always May. 

Big City Blues

I never really stuck to one dream job in my youth, but my ultimate goal was constant: get the hell out of Guelph and live in a big city. That Guelph was, comparatively, not all that small or boring was a discovery I was not prepared to make. It wouldn't have fit into the narrative I was attempting to write for myself, of a provincial, lumpy girl about to transform into a sleek and extremely cosmopolitan woman.

This meant going to school in Montreal and eventually moving to Toronto, though I've remained ever-lumpen throughout all of those moves. And yet, with my three year anniversary of Toronto residence having come and gone, I can confidently say that I've achieved my goal.

AND, OH DEAR GOD, I NEED TO LEAVE.

Why? Because Toronto is making me into a bad person. Or rather, Toronto is stripping away the veneer of sweetness I built up in smaller spaces, to reveal the angry hosebeast within.

Almost everything I experience in the city seems to go into my ledger of disrespect. People who walk two abreast and expect me to press myself against parked cars just so that they can pass. People who block the doors on subways. People who sit on the outside seat of public transit so their purse can have a window view, even during rush hour. TTC people who are rude. In fact, let's just say that the entire TTC experience is generally a giant checkmark in the "Go to Hell" column.

Because I'm young, female, and evidently unwealthy, I'm easy to ignore. However, because of most of those things I am also not actively avoided, and so the daily friction of interaction in this city is starting to take its toll. I've even found myself preparing to be irritated by someone, taking a certain gleeful joy in the thought that this time--THIS TIME--I am going to assert myself and stand up for my right to occupy space in this city! And then I'm actually disappointed when they step aside, and hold the door open for me, or even say sorry.

I started to reflect on my fermenting rage-ahol last Thursday, after an encounter with a TTC employee. I was trying to get to an appointment, was told my one TTC employee to use one gate only to get yelled out by another. While I would like to say that I responded with both kindness and yet an unwavering sense of self-respect, I did not. Instead, I was rather rude and snippy. 

And then the rest of my ride was filled with guilt.

See, the issue is that I have all of the rage inside me, but not quite enough self-confidence to keep the flames a-burning. Instead, I'm tossed between resentment and regret. "Oh! That person thought I could just be bodychecked off the sidewalk! OH! But now they think I'm mean because I glared at them. There's a stranger that thinks poorly of me. WHATEVER SHALL I DO?" What I should do: move to a smaller town. I'll have wide open spaces, homes I could potentially afford, and neighbours who express their aggression with savage gossip instead of face-to-face confrontation. Hooray!

BC Dreamin'

If you haven't gathered from the sheer level of bitching on social media, parts of North America have been really, really cold over the past few weeks. Seasonal lows. Frozen pipes. A pale rider: and his name that sat on him was Death, and so on.

I've been surviving as best I can, with wool socks, subway tokens, and warm thoughts of a return to British Columbia. It didn't help that Quill and Quire seemed to present the perfect out a few weeks ago. Galliano Island Books wanted a part-time bookseller.

Why, I thought, I could be that part-time slinger of literature!

While going from a full-time to part-time job may seem like a demotion to some, this one isn't. At least not in my mind. It would be going to a part-time job on Galliano-freaking Island. That's like working cash in paradise. Not quite perfection, but as close as you can get without also having health benefits or an RRSP contribution plan. There would also be books and, one would hope, a discount on those books.

I even started to develop a plan to supplement my part-time income. Rent would be fairly inexpensive, as I was planning to purchase and then live out of a Delica van. Even if the Delica was more expensive than a cozy little apartment. Would that apartment be able to drive me to the beach, or come with a rocking bullbar? Doubtful.

The Delica could also become the manufacturing centre of my second source of income, Marty's Foraged Jams and Preserves. BC loves that stuff. All I would have to do was to come up with a full line of flavours that forced local delicacies into increasingly bizarre couplings and retailed for $15 (open to a barter system though). Suggested varieties: blackberry and seaweed, cattail and spruce tips, currant and pot from the neighbour's grow operation.

I described this plan to people. They laughed, I laughed. I was emphasizing a certain BC skillshare mania for effect, though it probably applies to about 3% of the BC population. I never applied for the job. But. But, underneath the absurdity of the foraged jam operation (which would probably lead to a Delica-shaped inferno in the middle of Galliano Island) is a genuine longing for British Columbia. I've always wondered if I made a mistake moving back east. I wonder a little more when it's the coldest February in Toronto in over a century, of course. But, even in spring, I would probably move back if I was given reason enough to do it, or full-time hours.

Will I Ever Spreek Nederlands?

Maturity has sometimes seemed like a multi-year project of coming to terms with all of the things I can't do, whether that means things I can't do well, or things I can't do at all. I can't sing. I can't write music. I'm terrible at chess. And when it came to woodworking I try to make up in spirit what I lack in talent, an approach that never seems to lead to right angles. Except for the singing, all of these conclusions are predated by another: I just have no talent for languages.

I realized this halfway through high school, after ten years of French Immersion had just made me nervous using any verb tense past the present. I tried to give that language another try by moving to Montreal, but it didn't work. Even my backup plan -- hoping a nice Québécois man would teach me both the language of love and the official language of his nation -- failed. 

Now I speak French in the same way that I can swim: I won't immediately die, but I can't do it for long. 

I also tried learning Russian in Montreal. I had hoped my Ukrainian DNA would kick in and help me speak the somewhat similar language of our oppressor, but I bailed after my second-year instructor made me cry. I did enjoy writing in Cyrillic though, and I've never forgotten the Russian words for the following things: refrigerator, drugstore, and the phrase "I am listening to the Billy Joel cassette tape." So it wasn't an entirely wasted effort, as long as I plan to visit Russia in the year 1987. 

And yet, I beat on. Now I'm trying to learn Dutch, which my employer reminded me was pointless, "since they all speak English anyway." He's not entirely wrong. Dan's grandparents emigrated from the Netherlands in the 1950s, but the extended family sometimes comes over to visit, bringing their fluent English and high foreheads [NOTE: "Everyone is't fluent, there are those too old to learn it, some that are learning it now and some haven't bothered at all!" -  Dan]. Even ignoring the lack of practical applications for Dutch (unless Canada feels like posting me as the ambassador to Suriname*), it's a difficult language to learn. 

But I'm enjoying it, in a way that I never did with the other languages. Perhaps it's because my interest is purely personal, and I don't feel like I'm trying to become a dynamic, valuable Young Worker in Canada's MarketTM, like I did with French. There is no pressure to learning Dutch. Instead, I can just enjoy the process of learning and forgetting and re-learning words, including those that sound amusing to my Anglo ears. Like pork: varkensvlees! I hope to be fluent enough to visit the Netherlands in a few years and Dutch my way through the country, even though I'm sure all the people I meet will answer my "Hoi!" with a perfectly inflected "Why, hello there."

*Government of Canada: I'm available and eager!

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?

Protagitron: Editorial Assistant, With Kung Fu Changes Tracking Action!

Greetings from... almost a month after my last post! Good Lord. I didn't realize that the soggy post about crying at work would remain front and centre for over a month, or else I would have written about a book cover, or my cat, or anything else to push it down the page.

This September I turned 27, wound up with a different job at work, signed up for two continuing education classes, got some bad news, and bought a new bike. I'm now an editorial assistant, so it should be little surprise that one of the classes is for copyediting. The copyediting class is a humbling experience - I went through school when teaching the fundamentals of grammar was out of fashion. I've read enough that I can fake it sometimes, 'sensing' that things are wrong without being able to explain why. Now I have to face that my understanding of when to hyphenate compound words is quite shaky, best described as 'when it doubt, hyphenate.'

I also find myself quietly resentful of the online message board, which is full of people's well-articulated questions about cases and tenses, that is, well-articulated evidence that they probably aren't working 9-5 EVERY SINGLE DAMNED WEEKDAY.

Yeah, you heard me, "Ruth." Take five minutes away from the keyboard, sometime.

I think I will like copyediting though. Reading every word very slowly and constantly referring to the style guide capitalizes on my all-consuming anxiety. I also yearn for consistency, and have a certain megalomaniacal urge to turn chaos into order, so style guides are right in my wheelhouse. I'll just have to remember that I can't rewrite everything to sound like me: sentence fragments, caps lock, and chock full of puns.

Dispatches from Blue Valley

I've been struggling to write a few posts for the last few days. First, I wanted to write about detective shows, and violence, and how my Mom's fearful reaction to them both - she had just been for a visit and insisted on securing all windows and doors - affects me. But I couldn't.

Because I am depressed as fuck.

And then I struggled with writing about that too. Writing about all of that, the Big D, makes me angry. It's like the bitterness has become cystic, and writing slices it open. It might be cathartic, but the result is unpleasant. I also have a policy, a mostly reliable one, of not posting anything written through tears. The emotional tone is so embarassing the morning after, and there are so many typos that need to be fixed, that it's not worth the bother.

So I looked at the half-finished but already overwrought post, and deleted everything until the "fuck." There it is. I am depressed now, but I also know, as the benefit of so many trips to the emotional valley, that I won't be sometime soon.

Better luck tomorrow.

Alone Again (Naturally, Fortnightly)

Dan has left for a two week trip to Europe, which means I have our new apartment all to myself. 

So check Craig'sList while I try to unload Dan's vinyl collection in his absence for some sweet deals. I'll give all the Zeppelin away for free!

Oh, I couldn't be that cruel. Though I am scared enough of the record player that Dan will return to a two-inch layer of dust on the cover - I just look at vinyl, and it scratches. 

Instead, I'm enjoying life spread-eagled on the bed, with Marvin (the Demon Cat) making a shockingly quiet foot warmer. It's time to Netflix in bed and think about cohabitation. I'm kind of scared that Dan and I won't make it to six months, that we'll have to break the lease, find a sublet, chainsaw our Ikea Kallax shelf in two for equality's sake. I know that's the risk anyone takes moving in with another person, even in a strictly platonic context. Things might not work out. Familiarity will breed contempt, and the kind of resentment that leaves one counting toilet paper purchases and floors mopped for signs of inequity.

There might be hope though. I'm happy for the extra bed real estate, but I already miss Dan. I can't wait for him to fly home and sprawl out, which makes me think we can make it. 

If not forever, then at least until our lease goes month to month. 

The Caviar Fridge

Greetings from beautiful, overwhelming Forest Hill. 

Where the local grocery store has a tiny caviar fridge for all of your fresh caviar needs. 

And my caviar needs are great. 

Anyway, sorry for the lack of posting. Moving took up most of my time of course. There was also some professional disappointment mixed in there too, so as irritating as moving is, creating order out of chaos, packing box after box, had a therapeutic effect.

Of course, eventually the last box is broken down and the last piece of Ikea furniture (shakily) assembled. At that point I had to make some kind of accounting of myself, and my future in my current industry. And so the answers I arrived at were: "B for effort", "outlook poor", and (to an unasked question) "Why yes, it's time to open another beer."

Which means one thing... tomorrow Domestic (Beer) Thursday returns!

University II: Scholar's Revenge

Today my job shipped me off to the Congress of the Social Sciences and the Humanities, a yearly gathering of homo academicus. Every year it takes over a different university campus in Canada, hosting panels for a week, and leaving nothing behind but empty dessert trays and complimentary pens.

Or so the legend goes.

Sitting behind my company's booth, I wondered if it was appropriate to use newsie-style calls to entice the roving academics to pick up our book titles. Fortunately, I didn't have to startle them. We had dessert squares. The refined sugar did it all.

Some academics always seem hungry - like the memory of being a starving graduate student, and even hungrier sessional, has never died. Even post-tenure, they seem worried that someone will take it all away, and they'll be back with the rest of us, sunk deep in the dusty gutter of department-funded cheap wine and brie events.

A further observation: Roots Tribe Leather satchels and briefcases are the bag of choice for the ambitious young male academic.

A further further observation: The bag of choice for entrenched older male academics is whatever the hell they feel like. Now hand them a dessert square.

Wandering through the booths, looking at all the books I want to, but will never read, I felt a phantom pain for my imaginary scholarly career. With different choices I could have been reading that book, participating on a talk about that topic, dodging... that undergrad, and that undergrad's mother. Oh woe! I have the Roots bag (specifically the "Modern Satchel - Tribe"), but not the teaching contract to stuff inside it.

But I also never became a lawyer, or a doctor, or a writer, or any of the other careers I played mental dress-up before discarding. There's a persistent worry, three-parts Sylvia Plath's plums and one part Beast in the Jungle, that I will spend too much time trying to decide on what to be, to ever really be anything at all.

Persistent- but not overwhelming. I have always tried not to mix crises of being with events that have an official hashtag.

I shook it off, bought a book, and went back to the booth. I would have been a lazy grader anyway.

Facebook Official

Yesterday marked exactly one year since I first met Dan, aka The Suitor. We marked this momentous occasion (the longest relationship either of us has had so far in the following ways:

1. Dan bought me flowers
2. I bought Dan a vegetable peeler
3. We had dinner at the same pub as our very first date
4. Then we played trivia, because it was our regular trivia at Dave's, so it was convenient as well as cute
5. I finally changed my Facebook status to "in a relationship"

Anyway, we placed but fourth at trivia, which I hope isn't a bleak sign that the good ship MarDan is headed for the rocks. 

The Facebook relationship update, on the other hand, was very well received. Last count: 42 likes. The interesting post on gentrification I posted hours later? Two likes! Maybe my friends just felt awkward that they were checking their Facebook in a bougie cafe that had displaced a Colombian social club. Still, there is a striking difference between how Facebook handles relationship stuff, and how it handles any other sort of life event. 

Relationships, engagements, marriages and (I guess) break ups: "life events." All other things: mere "status updates." You get a big star on the life event posts, along with a little photo montage of the parties concerned. I dodged that bullet thanks to Dan not being on Facebook, so now it just looks like I'm delusional. 

Of course, I know I haven't hit "peak like." There are at least two life events and one status update that could still top this occasion. I could:

1. Give birth
2. Get married
3. Win some sort of major, international award (debatable)

Maps and Bar Legends

I just spent three hours playing geography quizzes online. This is, shamefully and honestly, more time than I ever spent studying for my one high school geography class. 

And what's it all for?

To do better at bar trivia, of course. It's not about bettering myself. It's about doing better than the three middle aged guys who always sit at the bar, Pinky and the Brains (formerly God's Particles.)

The trivia questions come from PubStumpers, an outfit that's clearly run by boomers for boomers, so the Brains have a natural advantage. They were all alive when Falcon's Crest, Dallas, and Dynasty were on; they can make meaningful distinctions between those shows. I count it as a victory that I can list them. My knowledge of celebrity trivia and eighties pop songs is no match for their lived experience of Dad culture.

I need to improve in other areas. Starting with geography, because Andorra... is not where I thought it was. I would have guessed the Caribbean. It's in Europe, of course. 

This is marginally less embarrassing than when I thought Guyana was a small island in the (again!) Caribbean. I don't know why the Caribbean has become the go-to destination in my brain for when I'm unsure of a country's location, like it's a global junk drawer and I'll find Andorra there next to some orphaned pen caps and a spool of kitchen twine. 

But there it is. So I either learn more about the world I live in, or I go to plan B: catching Pinky and/or a Brain in my honey trap. I'll excite them with my youthful energy, turn them into a double agent, and make them ID Marla Maples on the photo round so I don't have to.

Never Shop Drunk

I was going to do a book pile for my post, but then the most absurd thing happened to me tonight and I figured I would share:

My brother's a busy guy, but we were finally going to spend some quality spending time together last night. Since he's an East Ender, we had picked The Only Cafe to drink in, which only takes cash. Fresh out, I found a TD and withdrew $60. Broke one $20 on booze at The Only, and another on food at Square Boy. These two places are like night and day. Literally. One has neon lights that shine bright as the midday sun on a fleet of cranky Greek man of indeterminate old age, and the other is black as pitch with two young'uns pulling pints behind the bar.

Now in a slightly inebriated state, I went home, but stopped off at the grocery store first. I picked up a green pepper, some hummus, tortillas and fruit juice. Dropped the green pepper in line. Gave the cashier the split green pepper anyway, telling her I'll take it since it was my fault. Feeling pretty classy, I hand her one of the $10 bills I have in my wallet.

"Uh, I think this one's fake," she says.

This knocks me out of my stupor. Fake? Really? I handle the bill. It does feel kind of weird, and as I would later discover, is completely missing the holographs, though it does have the braille pressed on it - glad the counterfeiters care about accessibility!

"Oh weird," I say, "I just got that in change from somewhere."But I have my suspicions. Between the lights and the combined century+ of counter service experience, I doubt it was Square Boy. The Only, on the other hand? I probably wouldn't have noticed if they had returned a $100 bill instead of a $10, it's so dark. (though it later turned out to be genuine - see note below.)

I hand her my other, acceptable $10 and she hands me a bag.

"Don't take it into the bank," she says, "because they won't give it back." Weird, I hadn't asked for a bag, and doubly weird, why should I keep on trying to pass off a fake bill? Should I go to the cops or the bank? Would they care about a fake small bill, or should I just tear it up? These are the questions that keep me occupied all the way home.

So occupied that I don't notice how weird my bag feels. It's only when I'm almost at my house that I look at the bag and realize what's gone wrong. Either the cashier forgot to give the person her second bag, or she left it behind, because the lady in front of me had the multiple cartons of oat milk I noticed on the till, but instead of my tortillas, green pepper, hummus and fruit juice, I had:
One pack of bacon.
Another pack of bacon.
And a whole package of sausage.

So, I'm out $10, and my groceries. But I do have one thing:

MEAT

2/20 UPDATE: The bill was not counterfeit! The police said so. However, the ill-gotten meat remains in my fridge.

Protagitron Still Has a Cold

The cold has stuck around for a second day, which means I have moved on to watching BBC miniseries while chain drinking NeoCitran. Currently, I would be watching Wives and Daughters (though North and South is obviously the money Gaskell, because Richard Armitage) except my Internet connection is being moody. So I am writing to you.

And I will write about how it is COLD AS BALLS out there. After work, I left to wait for my chariot, the Spadina streetcar, which promptly arrived whenever the fuck it wanted. It was probably only five minutes, but with the windchill it felt like an hour. The crowd of human fleshicles shuffled on, and so the car was already half-full at King and Spadina, which meant it had reached uncomfortable levels of body Tetris by Dundas. This, as any TTC rider knows, won't stop people from trying to ram their way in by sheer will and persistence. Well, not so much will as a stubborn insistence that if you get on the steps of the streetcar, your face butt-level with the last person who tried this, and refuse to move eventually a hole will open in the space-time continuum and they will have space.

Strangely enough, it even works sometime.

So I was all excited to climb over the stacked bodies at Willcocks for a sweet breath of freedom. My joy curdled, or rather froze, as the wind hit me again though. Dear God, I thought, why not leave all this for a career as a toasty and carefree Morlock?

Hopefully this post will shame me when I start complaining about the heat.

Protagitron Has a Cold

I have a cold. This isn't as exciting as when Frank Sinatra had a cold. Since it developed on the bus back from Guelph (my Mom's birthday meant I've double dipped on family time this month), the only other creatures you can ask for an opinion on me and my cold are my cats. And they would only say that I'm terribly cranky, then ask for food. 

It's an ache-y kind of cold (or flu?) The kind that feels like it's living deep in your joints and head. I want to curl around a cup of NeoCitran and sleep for seven days. Unfortunately, tomorrow is the first day of what will surely be the second busiest time of year chez job. Why? Because I work with professors, and so January is a bit like a mini-September, except the weather is worse and most of the instructors are much less prepared. 

And so I dragged my laundry to Toronto's seediest laundromat, because I didn't want to wallow in my own filth.

A similar movement will be repeated with my own body tomorrow. Oh well. There's always the consolation that any anger at any issues can be solved by letting out a feeble laugh over the phone. 

Weekend Report

I don't know about you guys, but last week felt like a long limp towards an increasingly distant finish line. And so this weekend has been all about recovery, by which of course I mean "doing nothing but watching Scandal, only occasionally venturing forth to drink beer with friends."

Thus, not much to report. I did watch the Saturday night Habs/Leafs game at a Habs bar. I had to get the old Dryden t-shirt out of storage. Last year's strike really burned me on hockey, and I had maybe watched half of a game this season. But I'm glad I went. It might have been the wings, or maybe it was our 4-2 win, or maybe it was even the beer talking (it was totally the beer), but it was a lot of fun.

Now, I'm hoping for a more productive week. Because beer and addictive TV is great and all, but sometimes a girl's got goals.