Bibliomama

I still have to use that rhyme to remember which months have 30 or 31 days (shut up February, ya freak). Well, here we are. Today was generally very good. I had an appointment to meet my new doctor, because my old doctor retired and I loved her but she was all the way downtown and it could take an hour to get to her office (where the parking lot was expensive and often full) and, especially in the winter, I would get massive anxiety about just getting to the appointment, never mind whatever it was about. Today was an easy thirteen-minute drive, to a small town nearby that I always mean to spend more time in anyway. The office is in a large mini-mall with a giant free parking lot. I was so giddy with happiness I started to feel afraid that I was going to get in an accident in the parking lot just because things couldn't possibly be going this well. Then I met the doctor (at only nine minutes after the time my appointment was scheduled for) and she was unbelievably awesome, and...

Not gonna lie, everything kind of feels like this right now. I was talking with a friend the other day about how I think I have to reassess my anti-depressant. I kind of feel like my emotions are blunted, like I'm feeling things, or know I should be feeling things, but not the way I think I would if they were unmediated. In the case of depressive feelings, this is a good thing, but it's less good if all the feelings are being indiscriminately shielded (I like to think that some rebel feelings are mounting an operation to get through a thermal exhaust port, but you can't really count on that kind of thing). It's a hard thing to recognize when you're stuck in it, but a friend's husband died a couple of weeks ago and I suddenly realized that I was sad, but not as sad as I should be. And yeah, the tragedy isn't about me, but the reaction is. I have absolutely no doubts about taking medication that helps me to function, if it makes me more like myself a...

I didn't get groceries yesterday - my usual day - because I wasn't feeling great. I still wasn't feeling great today but the cupboards were getting bare (yeah, that's not remotely accurate, the cupboards are overflowing with coconut milk and canned soup and about-to-expire tomato sauce, but my over-indulged brood were insisting on things like fresh produce and non-moldy bread ). I felt like I looked okay. I kind of like my grocery-shopping uniform - gray leggings, blue stripey shirt with cool handkerchief hem, work socks and boots. But my hair is in desperate need of a cut and colour - I was using this root spray that seemed okay for a while, but now it just makes me feel like one of those guys in those "spray paint the bald away" infomercials, and it just seems too sad. So I didn't feel like I'd make children cry or anything, but I was kind of hoping I wouldn't run into anyone I knew. So I got there and immediately ran into someone I knew. We d...

Eve came home from school and asked if we could go on a field trip to Indigo because yet another book in the School For Good and Evil had come out and she had a million gift cards - she offered to buy me a book for taking her, as if getting me to go to a bookstore needs additional inducement. We got there and I only mocked her a little when we found the book shelved in Fiction 9-12. I think it makes a pleasing contrast that she's going to be reading this alternating with It . Then we got hot chocolate and drove around to drop off some boxes I had for Facebook group members who are collecting stuff for the homeless or for their kids' school's Christmas bazaar, which was good because my usual M.O. is to collect a bunch of stuff, leave it sitting in boxes on my dining room table until the deadline for dropping it off has passed, chuck it all at Value Village and feel like a giant failure. On the way home, we were talking about cooking class and scary Italian Youtube cook...

Matt: "What are you making?" Me: "Trifle." Matt: "What for?" Me: "Remember? We usually go overnight to Collette's father's cottage, and go shopping and have lunch in Westport and then make dinner and play drunken Cranium at the cottage? But this year Collette can't come because they're going to the Grey Cup, and she wanted us to go to the cottage without her, but that seemed weird to us so we're just going for the day and then doing potluck at Janet's? And I'm doing dessert?" Matt: "Cool. Why two kinds?" Me: "I'm making the lemon raspberry because Collette doesn't really like chocolate." Matt: "...." Me: "Yep, I heard it."

I really like NCIS New Orleans. I love Scott Bakula, I love C.C.H. Pounder, I love Lucas Black (creepy child actor grows up and becomes surprisingly hot and speaks with a delicious New Orleans southern drawl) and Daryl Mitchell. The setting is really fun. I watch the original NCIS but for some reason I've never gotten into the Los Angeles one. They're all among the few shows that actually stay on On Demand in their entirety (rather than the earlier episodes disappearing, which I find infuriating), so I usually catch up on a half-dozen episodes all at once when I'm spending the day cooking or cleaning. So here's the thing about NCIS NO though: Bakula plays Dwayne Pride, the Agent in Charge of the New Orleans office. He is, predictably, a real stand-up guy, a little intense - okay, a lot intense, to the point of self-destructiveness. It's a well-known type (in sad fact, it's making me like the show a little less just thinking about this more closely). I'm g...

So last Tuesday evening was the city volleyball final for Angus's school team. He told us not to go last year and then told us we should have come because it was really exciting. So naturally I decided we would go this year if they made it that far. And naturally Matt was in Japan when it happened. It was November, and cold, and dark, and I wanted to leave the house about as much as I wanted to french kiss a cactus, but I love my son and I am always trying to be less weird, so off I went. It went well. My contacts were untroublesome, so I could read all the signs well. The route was extremely circuitous and downtown, which I don't like, but the traffic was fine and I got there easily. I found the gym with some difficulty (it was on the third floor, which seems weird, doesn't it?) It hadn't occurred to me that there would be an admission fee, and it was three dollars and I only had a fifty - cue feeling like an absolute tool. They were nice about it, and I don't ...

So as a direct result of seeing the play on Thursday night, Eve and I watched 10 Things I Hate About You and I now have half a dozen versions of Cruel to Be Kind on my ipod. I am now, predictably, sad again about Heath Ledger. But I'd forgotten that the hilariously irate English teacher was played by Daryl "Chill" Mitchell . I really liked him in Ed  (one of my very favourite tv shows ever), where he plays a bowling alley manager who's in a wheelchair. At some point - I don't even remember if it was before or after a really moving episode they did about his life in the chair - I found out that he had actually been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident in 2000. He's still acting (in NCIS New Orleans) and clearly thriving, but it was weird to see him standing in the movie. In the play it was a short little black kid that Eve likes - they had to give him a box to stand on behind the teaching lectern. He did a great job. World Trivia Night was fun and edifying and ...

World Trivia Night is over, Eve made a legendary club sandwich in cooking class today and we might get thirty centimetres of snow this weekend. However, that would mean it would happen just after my husband gets home from Japan, rather than just after he leaves, which is how it usually goes. Grateful for that. Good night. 

I went to see the play at Eve's school because her friends are in it. I went alone because she was supposed to have basketball practice tonight, but when they got there the gym was full of stupid ball hockey so they didn't, which is annoying because she was planning to go tomorrow night, and I can't go tomorrow night because of World Trivia Night (right Lynn?) So this is my week for going places alone at night and feeling like a big loser. Anyway. The play was pretty good and now I have to watch 10 Things I Hate About You tomorrow and feel sad about Heath Ledger. Also, I got home and Eve told me that the girl who played Kat broke up with the guy who played Joey halfway through the play and then she could have a real kiss with the guy who played Patrick instead of one where she stuck her thumbs in between their lips. So. There's your real drama.

Going to take the tip from Nicole , post twice today and say it makes up for the day I missed. So the other day on a Facebook group I follow - it's called something like Fat Loss Without Deprivation, but so far I'm just using it to deprogram from my fucked-up relationship with food - someone said something like "it's still really hard to think of eating as fueling myself for my activities rather than thinking of exercising as punishing myself for eating". I didn't gasp in recognition or anything, just nodded in recognition. Then today I took Lucy for a walk because our cleaning lady was here and it makes Lucy lose her mind and it's really embarrassing, and I'd planned to get out for a walk anyway. I headed out on our usual route. About fifteen minutes in, I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself. I felt like I was just wishing for the walk to be over soon. This seemed a little weird. It was quite nice out - brighter after the unrelenting gr...

So, after a Facebook discussion this afternoon wherein I admitted that my children were probably exposed to Cards Against Humanity younger than was strictly   speaking appropriate (my nephew was the youngest one there, my sister is a worse parent than me, HA), and confessed that I could stand to be a little more circumspect as a parent, Eve came home after school and grabbed a leftover fortune cookie. She ate it, then read out her fortune: "You have a keen mind and an active imagination". Naturally I couldn't stop myself from snickering in an extremely immature manner, and she pestered me until I told her about adding "in bed" to your fortune. She said "Oh. OH. Ew. Well, I'm glad you didn't tell me that before my last fortune. It said 'be spontaneous'."

This post came up in my Facebook memories today. It's slightly more comforting than depressing to be reminded that this is just what November is for me - less embracing than enduring. This is also about the time when I give up all pretense to witty and entertaining blog posts and start using this space as therapy, so let me just take a moment to thank you all. To everyone who shared weird and embarrassing incidents of missed appointments due to completely inexplicable time changes - thank-you. To Anonymous who encouraged me to start decluttering - thank-you (especially because seeing the tag Anonymous always makes me think I'm about to be offered penis enlargement or something). And to Hannah and Nicole , who have talked me down from one crisis or another repeatedly over the past week (because it turns out this is also, weirdly, becoming the part of November where my husband goes to Japan for two weeks and gets home on World Trivia Night) - all the thank-yous ever. I was wa...

Yesterday was the first time in .... (counts on fingers).... about nine years that I missed a day in NaBloPoMo. Not for any really good reason. I slept in, did a few miles on the treadmill, did some reading, went out for a nice dinner for a friend's birthday. Didn't drink too much, got home before midnight. Got ready for bed and realized I hadn't posted. Went through the dumbest mental debate imaginable: Should I go down and post something? Just to say I posted? Even though I don't have anything to say really and it would literally be a couple of meaningless sentences? But posting every day is literally the point. But it's really an arbitrary thing, nothing really important rests on it. So this might bother me for the rest of the month. This might mean NaBloPoMo is over for me. I don't know. I guess we'll see. I desperately need to get a bunch of stuff out of the house. I feel buried under crap. There is disorder in almost every single direction I look...

So. I don't know. Given that I always felt like I read all of the instructions for my online courses really well, multiple times, and still ended up at an open-book exam without the book, I'm kind of worried that my reading comprehension has drastically deteriorated in the past few years. Last night ramped up that anxiety by a factor of HOLY FUCK. I had an interview at six o'clock. In November. I was insanely, irrationally, stupidly nervous about the interview - not the interview itself, if that makes any sense, just the whole process. Because of this, I wasn't really concentrating on the getting-there part of it, and it didn't occur to me until far too late that six o'clock in November in Ontario would be dark. It was also rainy, as it happened, which didn't help. I should have done a dry run. The interview was at Greenbank Middle School. I knew that because I read over the email several times, SEVERAL TIMES, and asked my husband where Greenbank M...

I had a job interview today. I was weirdly panicky about the whole process, which was a little weird, and I don't want to say anything else about it for now, and I don't know how things will turn out, I'm just limp and noodly with relief that it's over. Eve is still at basketball practice and the temperature is plummeting and my head hurts and I don't have the energy to say anything witty or intelligent right now. The story of getting TO my interview is going to have you marveling (huh. Only one L in marveling? Okay then) at the extent of my ability to screw up simple tasks when I tell you about it tomorrow, though. Promise.

I've always been bad at geography. I don't remember directions well, I don't know which way is North at any given moment, I get lost easily. I had a terrible time with map tests. The car GPS system changed my whole life - I wouldn't have gone half the places I have without it, or not without a lot more anxiety barfing and palpitations. It kind of just became a thing, though, where I would say "I'm terrible at geography" and leave it at that. As if it was an irremediable condition. As if there was NOTHING AT ALL that could be done about it. My friend Collette has really good directional sense. If she drives somewhere once, she knows where it is forever. And she knows where stuff is in the world too. "I learned it from television", she said once, and when I looked at her with blank incomprehension she said "You know, like, I learned where Korea was from MASH". I watched MASH faithfully. I had no freakin' clue where Korea was. It...

For Joe (HI JOE) and Nicole (HI NICOLE), the Schrodinger's cat joke: Schrodinger is driving along and gets stopped by a cop. The cop finds his behaviour suspicious and searches his car, including the trunk. When he opens the trunk, he says "oh my god, there's a cat in here and it's dead!" and Schrodinger says "Well NOW it is!" Today: slept too late, made myself go to the gym. Came downstairs from the gym, went to grab a grocery cart. As I was pulling it back, someone walked into me. I half-turned around, about to say sorry, and saw this older woman, obviously rolling her eyes and pissed off. Because she had walked into me, while I was pulling out a shopping cart, which is what people do with shopping carts. And she wasn't leaving or going somewhere else, which might have meant her attention wasn't on the shopping carts, because she then pulled out her own shopping cart. So I looked back and saw her being a bitch because she had walked into m...

A former friend just tweeted that she has serious reservations about the mental health of people who can't cope with Daylight Saving Time. I can't say I'm terribly surprised - when someone routinely says mean things the shock value wears off after a while. It just made me stop and think for a moment. I do, in fact, have mental health issues, and I do find that Daylight Saving Time makes them worse for a little while. I feel off-kilter, more anxious, never sure I'm in the right place at the right time, and tired. Which doesn't seem that weird, really. We literally CHANGE THE CLOCKS. By some weird decree from on-high, we take this huge fiction that our lives are quite literally built on, and agree by another enormous fiction that it's different now. For about six months, when we'll all (except our wise, wise sister Saskatchewan) change it back. How can this not have some effect on many people? So, yeah. Sometimes something is true and saying it still makes...

My Facebook memory today was about Eve learning a Schrodinger's Cat joke from Bones and rehearsing it every day to tell to Matt when he got home from Japan (he's in Florida right now. He comes home Monday. Tuesday he leaves for Singapore. Things have changed so much. NOT). I read it out to Eve and she said "oh yeah, and the other day we were talking about that thing where if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure if I ever take a philosophy class I'll never sleep again." We also finally got her in to a chiropodist to order orthotics. She's had foot pain her whole life just like me, but we're lazy and procrastinate-ish and we kind of wanted her feet to stop growing to we wouldn't have to replace the orthotics every few months (lazy and procrastinate-ish and cheap, in plain talk). The foot guy said she had extremely tight Achilles tendons. She said "wait - are you telling me ...

I'm still looking for a job, I'm just not being as much of a loud-mouthed schnook about it (see? I CAN SO learn stuff!). When I have spare time I go on job sites and noodle around looking at what's available in my area. Apparently if you want a job trying to sell cars it's really, really easy to get one. Unfortunately, I suck hard at selling anything. Back in high school I took singing lessons from a lovely older lady named Betty. For a while, my friend Rachelle took them too and we had consecutive lesson times. Betty said Rachelle was better at selling herself, and if we had to sell a pencil, Rachelle would have people in a bidding war over it while I would be standing there quietly saying "it's a ... pretty good pencil. It can make a decent mark." There were a couple of openings for fork lift operator too. Now that I would like to take a crack at. As far as library openings, right now, "Hey!", I yelled to Matt, "I could drive the bookmo...

Hannah reminded me yesterday that BlogHer doesn't even EXIST anymore, and BlogHer was the reason NaBloPoMo existed, so now I feel kind of dumb. I mean, I never really did it as part of the big BlogHer thing anyway, I only added my name to the massive blogroll a couple of times and every time I found someone I liked via the massive blogroll they seemed to stop blogging three days later (presumably not just because I started following them, although, shit, now I'm worried that maybe it was just because I started following them ). There were prizes, but you couldn't win them if you were in Canada. So it was just something I did, because after Halloween there was just this bleak Novemberish stretch of cold and rain and ennui until I started panicking about Christmas, and it seemed like a good distraction. But also, BlogHer being gone is just another sign that blogging is dead, right? And yet, here I am, rambling and shambling on like I don't even know it. OMG, I HAVE A ZO...

It's really unfortunate that NaBloPoMo isn't starting on a Surly Thursday because HOLY FUCK today is chapping my ass. It was stupid hot all of October, and I wished for cooler temperatures - apparently we only get those with apocalyptic amounts of rain and a wind that is basically a douchebag in weather form. Also, I cooked rice and it tastes like ass, and I don't even know if it's the rice or me, but at the moment I don't trust either of us. Last year the volleyball team, including Angus, went to the final and he told us not to come but then said we probably should have because they bussed fans in and it was a really cool atmosphere and they won. So this year we figured we'd go, but (of course) Matt's going to be in Asia. And it's in the evening, at some far-away high school, and if I go I'll be alone, which I hate. BUT I did have a lovely visit with a woman I used to volunteer at my kids' elementary school with and I think I'm going to ...