Dumb Brains - Mine Too, But Mostly Theirs

 Yesterday was beautiful and spring-ish and I felt so good. Today is cold and raining and threatening freezing rain and more snow is forecast for Thursday and the light fixture in my entrance has launched itself out of the ceiling in protest, to which I say, Relatable.

You know when you've been feeling bad about yourself but you don't even realize it because generally feeling bad about yourself just feels like feeling realistic because, well, you feel bad about yourself so the bad stuff must be true? It has come to my attention that that is what has been happening with me lately. A while back - beginning of last year maybe - I set a goal to just live for a while, instead of questioning and over-thinking everything and assuming everything I was doing was because I was lazy, selfish, or otherwise bad. I should have pinned this goal to tangible steps - making lists of good things I did or writing down 'give yourself a break' every day or something. But I did not. And I am forgetful. 

Anyway, just getting that out here. I've gotten two really nice compliments in the past couple of weeks and just realized that I took them with a kind of rueful sympathy, like 'oh, that's so cute, they're so deluded'. WTF, brain. 

NOW, back to the whole 'backing into a parking space' thing. I don't want to go back there, believe me, I thought the post I did was already spending too much time on it. But then the lovely Anne sent me an article from the New York Times, saying she was surprised at the 'hard-line opinions' expressed in the article. I read it and was also surprised, and a bit indignant. The author of the article himself says that 'some people, including me, find the move annoying'. Oh, so you're abusing your journalistic position to get a bigger audience for your trash opinion? (I'm kidding. Mostly. If I was a journalist I would take every available opportunity to broadcast my trash opinions to the world.) 

He theorizes that it might be an expression of 'the ambient anxiety in our society', that rampant gun violence means that giving oneself an easy exit makes sense. Then mentions a woman who hated her job and wanted to get out of the parking lot as soon as possible. 

Neither of these is me. My anxiety in this matter is solely about driving and parking lots. It seems more likely to me that I will accidentally hit a car or person backing OUT of a spot rather than backing INTO one. 

Random picture of Lucy and my dad to distract you from how unhinged I am being over this

His sole concrete objection, rather than 'it's annoying' or 'it makes no sense' is that it is 'discourteous' to other drivers and causes congestion in busy parking lots. Well that's dumb. If the parking lot is busy and it's going to hold people up, I just DON'T DO IT. And I can't think of a time when someone else made me wait while they backed in, so it happens rarely to me, if ever. 

The points in favour include the fact that the American Automobile Association recommends it in their guidelines as being a good idea from a safety perspective. A 2020 study from the journal Transportation Research found that the pull-in back-out move has a higher crash risk. Against this actual evidence, the article's author Steven Kurutz, along with a random schoolteacher he consulted named Matthew Dicks, retaliate with the fact that they don't fully buy the (evidence-based) safety argument. Um, okay. Oh but also, they think backing in "makes no sense". DUDE, the things I do that make less sense than this would BLOW YOUR MIND.

I was talking to Collette (HI COLLETTE) about this and she said that after I mentioned being surprised at how vehement people were about this issue I was now sounding quite vehement about this issue. I'm NOT, though, I am vehement about people being vehemently against it for no good reason other than they don't want to do it so they think nobody else should either.

THERE. Please gods let this be my last word on the subject. 

For a palate-cleanser, some of my fun Facebook memories:

Hiiiiii

 It was March Break and my husband was in California AGAIN. I left town. I drove six hours to my sister's place and hung out with her (and her husband) without our parents being around for the first time in... decades, possibly? We held chaotic gabfests in the hot tub every night and said "we have to get out now" multiple times and were so incredibly pruney when we finally did. We went to her little neighbourhood theatre and watched Oscar-nominated animated short films with her friend who brought boozy juice boxes for us, and then went back to her house and watched the Oscars (the animated short film that one was far down on my list but oh well - MICHAEL B. JORDAN yes! I think Sinners should have won but I did like One Battle After Another. Amy Madigan was adorable, and her performance in Weapons was fire.) We went to her neighbourhood pub for St. Patrick's Day. We double-Facetimed our daughters who are doing masters degrees in two different countries. It was blissful. 

We're all wearing a green but you can't tell because IT FREAKING SNOWED AGAIN and we were walking to the pub.

Then I drove an hour and a half back in the direction of home and hung out with Eve for a few days. I took her and her former housemate out for dinner and the waitress said we were adorable and then we accidentally did some trivia and didn't suck as much as we expected. She presented a poster at a symposium and I walked in and watched her walking a professor through her experiment while she didn't know I was there and she looked so confident and professional and it was so weird. She wanted to go to McDonalds one day after I picked her up from the lab so we went and we punched in the order and then were standing at the counter and she said "do you want to sit down?" and I said "no, I'm fine, do you want to get a table" and she said "no, I mean you get the table" and I said "YOU'RE going to get the food?" and then collapsed laughing because she's 23 and I realized I was still treating her like a seven-year-old and HOW DOES THIS ALL WORK, I still don't know, should I ask her to do my taxes too? 

Matt flew in from California Friday and came to the Hamilton hotel, and Saturday we took Eve out for lunch and then drove to Toronto because there was a funeral service for Matt's aunt who died from lung cancer at 72, exactly like his mother six years ago. Which is stupid and sad, and we were in that 'seeing people we were happy to see, but for sad reasons' headspace. We went out for dinner with people Saturday night and I got to meet Matt's long-lost sister in person finally, and when the waiter asked what the occasion was we talked about that instead of the funeral thing. The number of wait staff in the Toronto area who now know this story is quite a bit more than zero.

Matt's cousin Mary (who I love) organized the service and gave the eulogy for her mom, Lorana. I didn't see Lorana often but she was lovely to me and amazing to my kids, and she had a great sense of humor.   Mary is spirited and funny and energetic and she gave the kind of eulogy I've told my kids I want  - 80% loving and complimentary, 20% loving roast ("Her apple pie was the best in the world. Her rhubarb pie was disgusting.") I read Engie's post about the laughter book this morning and it made me realize how much I love belonging to two families who approach every situation with as much humour as possible and usually more than is appropriate. After the speeches, a bunch of us compared notes and realized that when Mary said her mom hated green peas we had heard Greenpeace and were really confused about what her beef was with environmentalists. We laughed until we cried and then cried until we laughed, my contacts were shriveled by the end of the day and there was no moisture left in my body. 

The last time most of us got together was for Mary's wedding a few years ago, and it was the most joyful occasion, and we knew how fortunate we were to be together for something other than a funeral. It's easy to say we should all get together before someone else dies, but we are far-flung and busy and it is difficult, of course. I was pouring a small amount of bourbon over my feelings thinking that funerals are sad, but weirdly also joyful, because you feel closer to the people left behind, and aware of how precious our time together is. 

Anyone remember when we went to Georgia last May and it was Atlanta Furry Weekend? We got an email from the hotel in Toronto before we got there advising us that we would be there the same time as....... prepare yourself...... the Furnal Equinox. 

It was mostly great fun, other than elevator issues. A couple of people in full fur suits really fill an elevator. The hotel allowed the service elevators to be used for guests, which helped. We were on the 28th floor, which meant that (after a long wait) we were able to get on as the elevator started back down from the 30th floor, but then we stopped on virtually every other floor on the way down, until we were jammed up against each other and afterwards. This happened as we were on our way down to drive to the funeral, and got increasingly funny. The part of Engie's post about talking to strangers resonated with me because we all spent a good fifteen minutes together, and naturally by the time we got down to the main floor they knew we were going to a funeral and that I was appreciating the hilarity as a counter to the sadness. I asked one furry if I could snap a picture of her head to send to Eve, and instead she rode down to the main level (even though that was not her original destination) and got out to let me take a full-length picture, and then she asked if I wanted a hug. So that was amazing, and for increased amusement points, I looked up and saw my husband halfway across the main lobby pretending he didn't know me. Joke's on him, clearly I am going to be more present, creative, connected and happy. And also I will have better furry pictures. 

Things I've Said Lately

 One woman in our friend group has a birthday two days before Matt's, so we often celebrate them together - neither of them is big on birthdays, so sometimes we have to push a little. There was the time I threw them a joint party and accidentally made it look like I had six-year-old twins. This time we went out for dinner the day after Matt's birthday because he flew in from a two-week trip to Asia and Mexico the morning of his birthday and we wanted to leave a time cushion.

Eve Facetimed about twenty minutes before we were going to leave, so we were dressed and ready, and I was at the kitchen table talking to her while Matt puttered in the kitchen. He picked up a coffee cup and then fumbled it and dropped it in the sink and I said "What are you doing?? Why are you doing that while you're dressed up? Go and sit on the couch until we leave and don't get dirty!" And then Eve was laughing so hard she couldn't even say good-bye.

I only took one picture of them and it is very bad, I'm sorry. I think they were happy enough. 

Last night we went out for dinner with my mom and dad for Matt's birthday because it was the one night between him coming home and leaving again that worked. Except I realized a few days before that I had triple-booked myself for the night because I have lost my mind and time has lost all meaning. I switched my plans with Collette to tonight and figured I could join the other gathering a bit late because my parents like to eat really early.

In fact, I nearly got to the other place before the start time. I was meeting the moms of three of Eve's friends, and one of her friends was also in town because her boyfriend broke up with her and then we found out he was seeing someone else and now she is home until she gets her new apartment so we took the opportunity to play several rounds of Fuck That Guy, You Can Do So Much Better (also, as Jody says, "he ain't cute, he's just tall"). 

Then we were talking about how Jody (Davis's mom, who talked me through the snowy drive when I almost died) manipulated her brother into having a Seder on the proper day to placate her mother so she could have one a couple of days later so Davis could be there. Di (Marianna's mom) said "oh, it's like how they say the man is the head of the Greek household, but the wife is the neck, so she turns the head whichever way she wants", and I said "kind of, except Jody generally has her boot on the neck of the whole situation". And Jody asked me to blog that, so here we are. 

No trust me, she's very scary

Mildly NSFW

 When we moved into our house my mom sewed a blind for the ensuite bathroom window. I think the fabric matched our bedspread at the time. It was impressive work, with a cord that accordioned it up and down. A few years after we moved in the cord stopped working, which wasn't that big a deal, it's a bathroom, we don't spend a lot of time in there with the blind raised. A few years after that, it was obvious the blind should be replaced, but 1. we are procrastinators 2. there were other house improvements that were more pressing and 3. it's the kind of task my ADHD brain just freezes up at: How does one obtain a blind? I don't frequent blind stores. How do I know what kind of blind to get? I probably need to measure...something? Now it is starting to tear in the middle from humidity, and will soon just be half a ragged blind covering half the window, which probably means I should take some sort of action. 

Yesterday I was brushing my teeth before bed and Matt was in the bedroom. I yelled that I really needed to do something about the blind. I was really just verbalizing it to help me remember and maybe spur me to do something other than keep noticing it. 

My husband called something back from the bedroom.

Me (surprised, faintly outraged but willing to negotiate): "You'll do it for WHAT?"

Husband (also faintly outraged, but resigned to his fate because he's used to my bullshit): "I SAID that it could be a BLUE job."

Happy (Weird?) Things Friday

1.  The way my various school admins WILL persist in sending emails to the school conference about sports equipment with the subject line "Balls". Am I the ONLY juvenile? Are they testing me? Come ON.

2. It was the Hunger Games day for trying to reserve sites at Sandbanks on Sunday. I was convinced it was going to be a shit show (even more than usual) because an entire campground is closed this summer to upgrade facilities. Everyone else seemed adamant that it would work out, and in fairness to them, I am quite often certain and also wrong. However, in this case I was correct. Collette admitted afterwards that it was perhaps overly optimistic thinking we could reserve a third of one of the remaining campgrounds (many of the children come and book their own sites now because, you know, they big). 

They kept freaking growing

So we were all a little unsure about whether we should try to camp somewhere else, or do something else for the August long weekend, or just let it all go. Sandbanks definitely has the nicest beach, and a lot of the other stuff we do at camp we could do in our backyards, but there's still something nice about the enforced togetherness for a few days, and I think it's not a bad thing for me to have to survive without my perfectly adapted bed and bathroom at least once a year.

Last night I was on Facetime with Eve upstairs, folding laundry and getting ready to go to bed. Eve was on my iPad and I was seeing activity on the WhatsApp, so I picked up my phone and saw that Margot was proposing Voyageur Provincial Park as an alternative. Matt was in the air and not contactable, but I figured we were probably good to book - it's not hugely expensive and usually possible to adjust the reservation later. I was feeling a little panicky about trying to do it by myself, though, because my ADHD brain just does not deal well with that kind of thing - reservation websites, campsite maps, clicking all the right buttons (yes, I was a disaster during pretty much all of my online courses for my library tech diploma - I felt like I needed to get someone to stipulate to the program coordinator that I actually am quite intelligent in a lot of ways, because that did NOT come across). 

Happily, I am advanced enough in years and life experience that I have less of a problem admitting this, so I asked Margot if she could tell me precisely which site to try for like I was a literal child. I came downstairs to the computer and had Eve on my iPad to the right and Margot and her husband on my left on my phone, which was nice because then they could talk to each other. With my emotional support technological circle I managed to book a site - we were able to all be much closer together than usual, and didn't even have to do it at seven a.m., so clearly it will be inferior in some ways to Sandbanks, but it still feels right that we have a camping option.  

3. While I was at the computer I bought tickets for Eve and her friends to go see Wuthering Heights because I have a Cineclub Membership and I had so many free tickets banked. Naturally the website kept doing that thing where it asked for my location and I kept saying Shut UP Website, they're not FOR me, and then this note popped up and absolutely took me out for some reason (perhaps the fact that I had my cervix scraped and a painful physio session earlier in the day and I was just out of an Epsom salts bath and feeling a little loopy)

4. Eve had a Baby in the Lab day yesterday - these happen on a fairly regular basis. There is a toddler that loves her and it's always fun when he comes in, but there is also a six-month-old now who is Peak Chubby-and-Adorable baby.

A post-doc in the Lab was supposed to have a zoom call with the supervisor who is technically on paternity leave, but she texted him and said obviously she couldn't because there was a baby in the lab. So he Facetimed and put his own baby up to the screen so the babies could Facetime. Can you even stand it? Goddamn, if this lab was closer I would be there all the time, I would bring cookies, it would be terrible, they would hate me. 

5. Camille, the colleague of my husband's who drove me around San Francisco, sent me a picture of him on the last day of his trip - it's his birthday tomorrow. I'm not sure I should share it. Let me ponder for a moment. 

Okay, pondering done.

Camille is the best thing to happen to my marriage in a long time. 

Random Crap

 I just threw some laundry downstairs to the basement and pushed the door closed, but then realized as I was walking away that it didn't click shut and was too lazy to go back. So tonight when I'm up in bed alone and I hear a door on the main floor click shut, can someone remind me that that happens when I leave it open, and that it's not a serial killer coming upstairs to kill me serially? 

I'm in the middle of two husbandless weeks, and I'm getting weird. I'm at the part of winter where it's still winter but I have remembered that I need to get out of the house every day even if it's really, really hard. It got stupid cold again, but today is better - not so cold that Lucy won't walk but cold enough that the ice is frozen and not slushy and gross. 

I resisted the temptation to hermit on the weekend. I went to a movie on Friday (Send Help - very good. Amazing to me that they could make Rachel McAdams unattractive for any length of time. Dylan O'Brien has never struck me as a great actor, but he embodies the Ultimate Sleazebag Douche flawlessly.). Saturday Eve's friend Davis was coming home on the train for her study break. The last of the five friends moved away from Ottawa this winter, and Davis's mom (my friend Jody (not my sister Jody)) was in the Dominican for a couple more days, so I jumped on the opportunity to pick Davis up and take her out for dinner with almost unseemly enthusiasm. She is not only as Eve-adjacent as I get to be until March Break, but she is hilarious and adorable and smart and fun to hang out with (they all are), and it was lovely.

Sunday I had went to my mom and dad's for dinner. Nance asked if I always take Lucy there when I work to be dog-sat, and for the most part I do. Especially since Covid, Lucy does not love being left home alone, and I try not to leave her for more than a couple hours. My parents live close by and I feel like it's good for them too, and then I get a short visit in after work. There is a fun little moment every time where I open their door, which they often don't hear because they are both in their eighties and their hearing is not the best, and then I hear Lucy hit the floor from her perch on the top of the couch to wag her way over to the front door to greet me, and then I hear them both start laughing. My 83-year-old mom still shovels off the back deck so Lucy can get to the stairs and go run around in the yard, and takes her for a long walk when it's not too cold or snowy. My dad does not have great mobility, so she snuggles beside him on the couch and sleeps for most of the rest of the day

This post has been sitting here all week now and I can't figure out how to finish it, so I'm going with... not. Just got back from the doctor - is it just me, or once you turn fifty is it just a constant round of getting your boobs squished and your cervix scraped and that's just the infrastructure, not even body work (haven't decided on that yet.)

Back Up the Truck

 I was wondering how I would title this post and then this phrase floated through my head and I was afraid it meant something dirty, but when I googled it it actually means "signaling an extremely bullish sentiment to purchase a large amount of a stock or asset, often when prices are low" which, okay, "extremely bullish" sounds a little pervy but finance stuff is actually the opposite of sexy, to me at least. Except then I accidentally caught sight of another search result which was a Reddit post that said "Anyone else get turned on when they see their truck?" and, well, that was unfortunate. 

Anyway, Nancy was talking about backing in to parking spots (in your car, to be clear) and saying it usually seems useless to her, and is often done by men showing off. One of my very dear friends (who is a man) always backs into parking spots and, upon some fairly short and not very deep reflection, I would have to conclude that it is, largely, for purposes of showing off: I don't believe he actually think she'll have a pressing need to make a rapid getaway from bar night - his days of chucking ice at other patrons are a couple of decades behind him, after all. Honestly, I don't have a big issue with it, because people who can swiftly and effortlessly back into places is impressive to me.

I don't think I ever backed in anywhere before we got a vehicle with a backup camera. I decided I would start with our driveway because we live on a very quiet street so I would have privacy and not hold up anyone, and in the winter when leaving for work early in the morning (this was before we cleaned out the garage so I could park in it) if there was snow and ice it was nice to have the driver's door right outside the front door so I could just get in and go. The driveway often gets slippery and gross, and getting around the car to the driver's side was sometimes a perilous adventure.

The first time I tried to back in I looked at the backup camera the whole time, which resulted in vertigo and nausea. I realized that I should use it as a check rather than a comprehensive guide. 

A couple of times it has been pretty much necessary to back in to a parking spot. When we go to the National Arts Centre there are often parking attendants that direct you to which spot you are to park in, and there are multiple pillars which make many spots very tight. My eye doctor's office has limited parking and there is often weird construction going on which also makes for limited spots. I had to look this up as well, because sometimes I instinctively feel that backing in will be viable while driving in forward will not - apparently backing in allows the front wheels to guide the car which makes for better precision in tight or narrow spots. 

So I'm happy that it's now an option for me, although I still don't find it second nature. And if the parking lot is curved rather than straight, forget about it. For some reason my brain cannot process how to angle my vehicle between two straight lines within a curved space. The seniors center parking lot we park in for Bluesfest is like this - the outer spots are around a curved radius. Once I drove with Eve and Zarah, and tried to back in, and by the time I realized I should not have there were two other patrons trying to help me, which of course just made it all worse, and we all ended up in hysterics. The parking lot was up a hill from the Festival grounds, and much later when we were all walking around Bluesfest the couple saw us and pointed and laughed at me again - it was that bad. 

All fun and games until you have to park in front of strangers

I would not have guessed I could write this many paragraphs about this issue. I am an anxious person and I do not love driving or any of the associated tasks, and I am sort of grateful that technology has made this available to me. When I used to drive Eve places and then pick her up, if I waited in the car I would back in so I could see when she came out of basketball practice or whatever, and she would always compliment me on my backing-in job. Once Matt worked late so we took two vehicles to bar night and he said that watching me back in made him fall in love with me all over again. And that doesn't even hold a candle to GPS, which means I've been able to drive all over the province on my own or with Eve when Matt and Angus were occupied with baseball, without having a nervous breakdown or having us disappear never to be heard from again.