Bibliomama

 When I went to university a fairly large number of years ago, we had a week off in February. For the past few years, I was dimly aware that at least some universities in Canada had also instituted a week off in the fall. I wasn't sure if McMaster had one, but when Eve got accepted we checked, and they did. Today I finally googled to see when this had become the new norm - according to this article it was around 2013, and it was to ease the pressure that students were under, with increased competition for graduate school and law or medicine. Between four and ten percent of students said they had considered suicide at some point. The article also says "suicide is the leading cause of death in Canadians aged 10 to 24, after car accidents", which seemed like a weird way to put it to me, until I tried to fix it in my head, and "suicide is the second leading cause of death in Canadians aged 10 to 24", actually, that would be better, wouldn't it? Anyway.  So we w...

 It's funny trying to balance on the line between healthy venting and just whining. I want to be honest here, and honest is that I am struggling, but I don't want to be struggling, and I don't want to post things that make all the comments begin with "I'm sorry" because I'm supposed to be funny, dammit, and it gives me morning-after vulnerability hangover, so for now I'm going to pretend Surly Monday didn't happen. At the beginning of fall I declared that I was going to sit in my swinging chair on the back deck and read more than I usually do. Until the rain set in, I was fairly successful in achieving this goal. For a while I could sit in the chair and read and then look up at the flowers that were still in bloom, and look over and see the sun sinking over my neighbours' yard. Sometimes the neighbours' dog (Lucy's older sister) would come over, and then it would be harder to read my book. I went to visit Eve in Hamilton near the end of...

A few weeks ago I started noticing something strange. We went to bar night and the group of people I hang out with regularly and adore seemed a little mean. Do we always make fun of each other so much, I wondered? Does our humour skew a little toxic? I went to work in the library, where I hardly interact with anyone, but the people I did interact with seemed a touch abrasive. Someone posted a meme on Facebook that said something like "Everyone wanted fall sooo badly. Here it is - your cold, wet, windy, miserable mud puddle. Hope you're happy". That's kind of rude, I thought. I don't enjoy the heat, but I don't post "hope you like your acrid armpit" to all the summer lovers. Wow, I thought. What are the odds that all of the people in my life simultaneously turned into assholes?  Oh, wait, I thought. Is it possible there's another answer? Is there some sort of common denominator here?  Oh crap.... So I am currently stupidly oversensitive and uptigh...

 Do I always get lazy about blogging in October, right before having to (rudely compelled solely by my own slightly obsessive sense of tradition, to be clear) blog every day in November? I'm going to say odds are good, because my Facebook memories and past blog posts have gradually made clear a pattern of... patterns. My seasonal depression is almost comically seasonal. If I'm feeling overwhelmed and exhausted in a particular week leading up to Christmas, a memory invariably comes up saying oh look, I felt exactly the same this same week last year.  This is both helpful and a little distressing. Do I have free will? Am I just a hamster on a wheel? In some ways it's comforting to see that my mood bottomed out just like this last year, and the year before, and the year before that, and I was so fatigued and miserable that it seemed like something MUST be medically wrong. And then I felt better, and nothing major was medically wrong, and this time I am also probably not immine...