Close Enough for Government Work?

So Matt was running around printing out passport forms and gathering needed information and signatures yesterday to get passport renewals for himself and the kids - I'm on a different cycle, and I said I was happy to take the kids' forms in but he's taking Angus to Florida next week-end for a baseball showcase so he said he might as well just do them all. We thought we had everything squared away, and he left this morning to go to the passport office.

As I was getting ready to leave for the gym, he swept back into the house on an immense wave of irritation, having gotten to the part where the preliminary person scans your documents and been informed that Angus is now an adult and needed the longer form filled out. Which is annoying, particularly since neither of us had noticed that that fact is mentioned in writing right at the top of all the passport forms, and reading is kind of supposed to be my thing - it's nice that Matt didn't mention that, now that I think of it. But government forms are kind of like online courses for me - no matter how many times I go over everything, details escape me - it is troubling and headache-inducing. ANYWAY. We printed out the longer form, I slapped my signature on where required, and off he went, because he was IN THIS now, and goddamn it, it was GETTING DONE.

It didn't get done.

I worked out, went down to get groceries and he called while I was going through the grocery store checkout. Turns out that since Angus is an adult, he has to apply IN PERSON if he needs express service. So, yeah, huge pain in the ass, but (plot twist) that's not actually the point to this story. As I'm walking my groceries to the car and unloading, Matt tells me the story of what happened as the forms which actually could be processed were being processed.

The white, middle-aged man at the wicket, looking slightly uncomfortable, says to Matt, "sir, it might be helpful for you to know that in six months there are going to be changes to the forms and there will be more options for gender categories". Matt says, well, great, wondrous diversity and all that, but....? The man then says hurriedly "....there's certainly nothing wrong with the way you're doing it now, I just..." Matt is increasingly baffled and doesn't know what to say. The man concludes ".... or this might all just be a huge misunderstanding." Matt looks at the passport and form in the man's hand, which are Eve's, and the man puts them down and points out the discrepancy.

And then we realized that we, two double-degree-holding university-educated reasonably intelligent (we thought) parents, had somehow managed to let our daughter walk around for five years with a passport that said she was male.

Which is not that big a deal, unless it had caused some kind of problems while we were traveling. But, well, nobody noticed, so whatevs. But now Matt is trying to figure out how to say this: "Can I say 'she's really a girl'? I guess. I shouldn't say 'she doesn't have a penis', because that doesn't necessarily mean... shit!" He settled on "yeah, that M was a mistake. Sorry."

So, you know, nobody's arguing that there isn't more work to be done to make people who don't fit into neat little categories feel accepted and comfortable in this society. But it gives me hope to think of these two middle-aged white dudes standing in a government office trying very, very hard to say and do the right things.

My Main Man Michael Marshall Smith

So I was all droopy and restless about what to read before Thanksgiving. I decided to reread something good, and went on the library website to see what I could get instantly as an ebook, so I started searching the names of my favourite authors.

So kind of funny thing about this author. I read this really cool science fiction book ages ago - it was called Only Forward and it was by Michael Marshall Smith, who I'd never heard of before. It was sort of part Blade Runner, part noir detective story and I really liked it. He only had a couple of other science fiction books, and I'm not sure if I even read them, although I meant to.

Years went by. I had a kid. That kid broke his leg while I was pregnant with a second kid. It was a stressful time. My parents came to help out and sent me out for a night of coffee shop and book store therapy. I came across this paperback mystery. Do you ever pick up a book, read the title and synopsis and just feel like it's going to be really good? Honestly, I never really have faith in that feeling because it's so easy to be misled, but I had that feeling immediately with this book, and I also noted that the author's name was Michael Marshall and wondered idly if it might be the same guy with the Smith lopped off.

I came home and read the book and was completely smitten - I love dark mysteries, and this was that with a little extra imaginative spin on it. It totally took my mind off the head-spinning shit show of having a two-year-old in diapers wearing a body cast. In fact, I wrote the author (it was the same one) a fan email - one of only three I've ever written. And he wrote back, and was lovely and gracious.

His publisher had reduced his name by a third because this was more of a mystery and for some reason they thought it should have a different name from his science fiction. I don't really care, I just think he's a standout as an author - original like it's really hard to be in a sea of fiction, smart and funny and with a wonderful ear for realistic dialogue. In my fan letter I wrote that I felt like his work was "suffused with a kind of hopeful melancholy" which he said he really liked.

So over Thanksgiving I reread Bad Things. Then I reread We Are Here, which features two of the characters from Bad Things, which I didn't realize the first time I read it because they came out three years apart and I read about a hundred books a year so unless BOOK TWO IN WHATEVER SERIES is emblazoned across the cover I miss stuff like that on the regular. Then I was desperate to reread The Straw Men, which was that very book I bought when Angus had the broken leg. I went to the shelf. I had the second two books in the trilogy. Clearly I had very ill-advisedly lent out the first one and never gotten it back. Well, no problem, I'd get it from the library, or order another copy from Indigo or Amazon. Except, no, because Michael Marshall Smith is British, no problem, I love the British -  crumpets, clotted cream, sticky wickets, big fan - but it makes his books INFURIATINGLY hard to source. EXCEPT except, the second and third books in the trilogy are actually available. Just not the first.

*head explodes*

So I spent the next few days buying up every available reasonably priced copy of everything I could find, and I'm waiting for my used copy of The Straw Men to arrive because I'll be goddamned if I will be prevented from reading some MMS whenever I freaking well feel like it. His short stories are also wonderful.

So there you go. It's not for the faint of heart, and it has a whiff of the supernatural, which judging by the Goodreads reviews some people really don't like. One reader also termed "cocky sarcasm" what I considered easy wit, so, tomato tomahto. And good luck finding The Straw Men. If you borrow mine I'm going to need collateral - possibly a hostage.

Scary Stories

Every once in a while there's a glitch in the Ottawa Public Library's ebook system, and a book that should be expired and inaccessible on my ipad just... isn't. It just sticks around until I tap on it to delete and return. It's a happy little gift from the literary gods for which I am always grateful. This time it is a massive tome called New Cthulhu: the Recent Weird, and if it hadn't gone all Overdrive Slipstream I never would have gotten through it on time since it weighs in at around 1100 digital pages.

As a fairly devoted horror fan, I'm not great at appreciating actual Lovecraft. Look, I relish tentacle porn and the unjudicious use of the word 'eldritch' as much as the next girl, but it's a little too on-the-nose for me - I just like my horror a tad more subtle. So it's probably not even technically allowed that I love Lovecraft-inspired horror fiction as much as I do. But I do, and most of the stories in this sprawling, wide-ranging collection are delicious, inventive and engaging with sometimes just a whiff of tainted sea air or the merest glimpse of a beslimed sea creature, sometimes more. Also included was Norman Partridge's bleakly superb Lesser Demons, which I had just been thinking about the other day without being able to remember either the title or the author (so much fortuitousness here!). Truthfully, I feel like the editor would have had to squint a little to get that one into a Lovecraft-inspired anthology, but I'm good with it.

I'm a bad rereader, I think I've mentioned that. The TBR pile is ever-growing, and much of the lure of reading for me resides in the pleasure of discovery. That's not a really good or defensible thing, though, not entirely. It's often why I pass over literary fiction in favour or sci fi and fantasy or horror, and the truth is that, for me, moderation and variety works the best in reading as well as in diet.

Wait, that kind of doesn't work for where I'm going next. Sod it, I'll leave it there anyway. After my last tear through a bunch of library holds that came in all at once, I was becalmed once again, with no idea what to read next and nothing really pulling at me. I wanted a sure thing, and as I'm realizing more and more, when you've read a couple thousand books and your memory is worse all the time, there's nothing like a reread for a sure thing - not only do you know already know you loved it, you can't really remember exactly why! Or what precisely happened! Or when!

And that brings us to about the length that my blog barometer tells me I would start getting bored after, so I'll tell you about who I've been furiously rereading tomorrow.

Visiting

Last week-end Eve and I and my parents drove down to London to spend Thanksgiving with my sister and her family (the boys stayed home because Angus was writing SATs Saturday here in town). This week-end I drove down to Waterloo with some friends to go to an Oktoberfest event with friends that had moved there in the summer (Matt went to Watertown with Angus for baseball - Eve had music camp at school and found it inexpressibly amusing that Matt and I were both going to places that had Water in the name. She's weird).

Both week-ends were great, except I'm getting worse and worse at staying at other people's houses. It's never been my favourite thing. I'm a weird guest. I use a lot of ice. I need a lot of showers. I hate getting up in the morning in a strange place. And I'm used to keeping my house a few degrees above a walk-in refrigerator's temperature and this fall has been unseasonably warm, so I was melting for close to the entire time. I don't know if the perimenopause thing has fully kicked in that way, but unless I was right out of a cold shower and standing in front of a fan I was uncomfortable - and other people were wearing sweaters. It makes me afraid that I'm going to turn into a weird(er) recluse who never goes anywhere. Is it just me? Everyone I was traveling with seemed to just take it all in stride.

Besides that, it was all great. Eve joined school band for the first time last year and had an amazing teacher who really encouraged her and it was a great experience. He invited her to volunteer at a band camp he runs at the school in the summer, which she did, and finished all her volunteer hours before she even started high school. But all my friends were kind of dicks about how she kept saying "band camp", so my sister and I told her to watch American Pie with my niece. She watched it. She said "screw all of you, I'm still calling it band camp". And this is why I love her. They also watched the first episode of This Is Us, and I got to be there when the penny dropped near the end of the episode and they were very satisfyingly open-mouthed and shocked and impressed and teary and it was an epic moment.

I haven't been to an Oktoberfest event since university when I went to a Waterloo bar that just put an '-ausen' on the end of its name and got drunk, so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Since we're older with more disposable income now, we bought tickets to a more authentic venue and it was really cool (Dracula jokes aside). There was a band that was a polka band and a cover band, and traditional dancing that was really cool, and traditional food that was delicious, and people in lederhosen and dirndls, and a mechanical bull that I didn't ride because I was wearing a dress (I have some regrets).

And now I'm home, and a comfortable temperature, and had a good sleep in my own bed, and I miss my sister and my friends. But Eve just came home and said "I have an egg test tomorrow so you're all getting poached eggs for dinner". And Angus made the honour roll again last year even though he went to Oklahoma for the Junior Sunbelt Classic one week before second-term exams. So there's that.

There Were Two-Ton Kangaroos Before We Came on the Scene

It's been kind of a crappy week. I'll spare you the gory details, except to say that perimenopause is not for sissies and my already-dire iron levels are in danger of plunging even further. That coupled with the suffocating, enervating heat and humidity meant Monday and Tuesday were pretty much a write-off. Which was okay, I didn't miss anything important, Lucy and I spent some quality time in my reading chair in front of a fan with some pretty good books. The problem is always re-entry. I end up feeling like Rip Van Winkle, unsure about the customs and expressions in this world that's continued to rush by as I lay fallow.

I dragged myself out to book club last night with ill grace, after apologizing to my husband for snapping more than once (I know it only seems like the worse I feel the dumber his questions get). It was good. We had read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which was splendid. He does an amazing job of making centuries of human history comprehensible and digestible, while also doing a fairly poor job of concealing that he thinks we are a complicated and fascinating plague on the face of the earth who should probably all commit ritual suicide. The title may as well have been Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Sucking Hard at Nearly Every Opportunity. This naturally led to a spirited discussion between the idealists and misanthropes in the group. Also, there used to be marsupial lions in Australia. Marsupial. Lions.

It's meet the teacher night. Why do I hate meet the teacher night so very much? It's at a reasonable time. The set-up sounds logical and minimally chaotic. The weather is fine. Is it because going back to school stirs up all my old insecurities? I seriously would rather have a root canal right now and I really don't understand why. Of course, I actually do have to make long-overdue dentist appointments for myself and the kids and I'm not doing that either. I can't remember how to talk to people.

Eve and I had a really great week-end at a cottage with friends. This Sunday I'm going hiking in Gatineau Park. This is just a blip. I'll be okay. Well, not in the long run because clearly we're all doomed.

In Which Defeat is Only the Tiniest Bit Agonizing

I have a friend who posted her engagement on Facebook a few years ago, and then confided that she felt stupid for having done so when it fell through. I told her she shouldn't feel that way at all, because her real friends wouldn't feel anything but sympathy and she had nothing to be embarrassed about. But I confess that I felt slightly the same way about broadcasting my first job interview attempt in twenty or so years in serene confidence that it would go positively and then.... well....

True, I could have slunk away and licked my wounds in private then. But in all honesty, people, is that ever how I roll? Let's see: depression posts; period posts; condom posts.... NOPE.

It's all very well to say that clearly I was overqualified and they were just afraid I wouldn't stay long. The bottom line is that I put myself out there and they said no thanks. And that stings a little. But it was still a good experience. Before I whipped that application together I was paralyzed at the thought of trying to put together a resumé after so much time. Now I know I can, and I can get a response, even if it's ultimately not the response I want.

Plus, now I can go to my friends' cottage this week-end instead of working. We all went to the bar last night (we do most Tuesdays, I wasn't deciding to chuck the employment idea and just become a barfly) and when they invited us to the cottage I said I would only come if I could get drunk and belligerent and tear up Indigo bookmarks. One of the hosts looked concerned and said I should bring my own because they don't have that many. (Silly. I wasn't really going to do it. One does not rip up a perfectly good bookmark even in the face of cruel rejection).

Also, I was going to have to call Zarah and say, in a good news/bad news kind of way, I can't do our girls' week-end this fall because I have a job. Now it's a bad news/ good news kind of thing. Which is good, because somehow circumstances have evolved to the point where I can only buy bras at this little shop in Barrie, and I need a new one. So, Zarah... call me.

A couple more things that happened this summer:

Zarah and the kids came for Bluesfest:

We all fell even more in love with Melissa Etheridge:

There was a lot of reading:




Oh, and Eve and Alex got haircuts.

Then we got ice cream. Obviously. 

In Which I Just Never Learn

I'm a helpful person. It's just how I'm built. I like to help if I can. People seem to sense it - in the grocery store, at parking machines, parked at intersections (I have given directions more than once through two open car windows, before the light turns green). It's mostly a good thing. Occasionally it's not the greatest.

Thursday afternoon I was at my group interview at Indigo. It was so much more fun than I thought it would be. It was a fun group of people and we all kind of clicked. The "team-building" exercises were silly rather than cheesy and made us all laugh and relax. The corporate schtick actually came across as fairly sincere. I thought it would all feel kind of fake and forced and it didn't.

In the second half, we were split into groups and a small group of us were out on the floor. Our first assignment was to take five minutes to grab two items, come back and describe why we liked them. On my way to the sci-fi and fantasy section, I apparently looked so much like I ALREADY worked there that an older gentleman asked me for help. 

It was a no-brainer. I was IN THE MIDDLE of a job interview. I could have easily just said "no, sorry, I don't work here". But I don't know, I spend a lot of time in that store, I know where a lot of things are, and he was older, with a nice face, and a bit of a tremor, and I'm apparently a bit of a moron. I said "sorry, I don't work here... but what are you looking for?" He was wondering if the "...for Dummies" series was all in one place or spread all over the store. 

Crap. Uh... I said "I assume they would be in different sections." There's, uh, a computer right over here". Did I then leave him to look it up in the computer? NO. I DID NOT. I typed "Cooking for Dummies" in. 

It said there was one in the store.

Double crap. Everybody who has ever worked retail knows this is the kiss of death. Six in the store? You're pretty much guaranteed to find a few on the shelf where they should be? Two in the store? Odds still in your favour. One in the store? Could be anywhere. Or nowhere.

Did I say that, and return to my assignment? NO. I DID NOT. I walked with him back to the cooking section and started looking at the shelves. 

FOUND IT. No. Wait. This is "Green Smoothies for Dummies". Probably not what he's looking for. Oh, FOUND IT. No. Wait. This is "Gluten-Free Cooking for Dummies." I look up, realize I'm in all the cooking SUB-sections. The seconds are ticking away, but what am I going to do, say "sorry, sucks to be you" and bolt? I have locked myself into the most absurd situation. And there is no Cooking for Dummies book on this shelf.

Finally, he looks up and says "well, I really appreciate you trying to help me anyway." I race over to the sci-fi and fantasy section, fail utterly to find a Neil Gaiman book, grab a copy of Ready Player One and on my way back to the group grab a pair of fuzzy reading socks. I was last, but they didn't look like they were waiting impatiently or anything.

Clearly if I don't get the job it's because I'm just TOO GOOD AT IT already.