Sunday Randomonstrosity

 It took everything I had not to just title this "Fuck It, I'm Just Going to Say Some Stuff", but apparently I'm still clinging to a modicum of civility. 

I texted Suzanne to tell her that her that her blog post made me feel better about how scattered and distracted and weird I am feeling, and then did that clumsy thing where you're saying "thank-you so much for being relatable, you made me feel so much less lame... wait, I don't mean that to say that you're lame...." Also, Suzanne is younger and still has a kid at home that she's managing to keep fed and clothed and driven around to places, which I do not. 

I went out for dinner with my friend Pam, who I used to be practically joined at the hip with when our daughters were younger and in elementary school with. We dropped the kids off at school and went for walks, or went to the gym, or went for coffee, or ran errands and ended up in ridiculous situations (for two middle-aged mothers of school kids, which is to say, still pretty tame.) We have to work more at getting together these days since the kids grew up (annoying) and we got jobs (total drag). She picked me up and asked me how it was going and I was suddenly yelling that I thought that at this point in my life, when my kids are grown and semi-launched, when I'm not responsible for shepherding two other bodies through the day somehow, I would be... better. Like, more organized and more productive and less neurotic and more together.

Super dumb, right? I wasn't any of those things before. I think I just felt like when I had the kids here the chaos was more permissible and it was fine to have glitter footprints on the stairs and spiderman figurines in the bathtub and someday when the kids left I would get my shit together. As it turns out, with the kids gone I am the same person, just without kids living here. And I eventually stopped showering with Spiderman. 

Which is fine, it's FINE. I'm making an effort to stop beating myself up and instead sort of view myself with a kind of amused indulgence, as if I am my own un-sleep-trained, bad-at-impulse-control, all-hopped-up-on-sugar four-year-old. This afternoon I realized I was getting nothing useful done so I put myself in a time out in the back yard so I could get nothing useful done while getting some Vitamin D. I didn't put on sunscreen and could feel myself getting a sunburn on one arm because of the way the chair faces. Turns out I'm crap at looking after my inner four-year-old's outer (I was a good at mothering my actual four-year-olds, I don't think Eve has ever had a sunburn. Angus played baseball, so those were not on me).

Good things that have happened lately:

- I had a birthday party for Collette last weekend because she's getting her kitchen renovated and she likes gin and I have about thirty bottles. 

I made a menu. We squeezed so many limes and lemons that not a single square-inch of the kitchen was not sticky the next day. I made fancy garnishes that I occasionally remembered to put on the drinks. I bought sloe gin for the first time solely so I could make a Sloe Comfortable Screw (that night I gave my inner twelve-year-old free rein, while also letting her drink) - not super crazy about the drink, but big fan of Sloe Gin.

I took a group photo and then Matt said to take a selfie so I would be in it. So I took a selfie without the self.

I am super good at selfies.

Just some party people being very normal. Michael threatened me with death if I posted this on social media. Mark said to go ahead and post it on his professional page. 

-I went for lunch with Pam and our friend Sonia, and then Pam took me to the library so I could see her Fake Book Geocache that lives there.

She is really very cool and I need to hang out with her more.

-I went to Ikea with Jody. And I only bought a fifteen-dollar blanket for the couch, which is practically like going to Ikea and having them give YOU money.

Jody bought the middle one, because the left one was not pink enough and the right one was TOO pink, but the middle one was JUST pink enough. 

-I am having a trivial and yet absolutely enraging issue trying to send a package to Angus which I will probably have to do a whole cranky post about (see you on Thursday for that) (that is quite different from See you next Tuesday for that, to be clear), but Matt was calm and assertive about it and I am now ready to let it go, after being cranky about it for the post, because otherwise what's the point.

-Eve is FaceTiming me less often, which is always good because it means she's busy and happy, and then when she does FaceTime it's really fun and we have a lot to talk about. She was telling me about how bad a week her tongue was having because she burned it, and I made sympathetic noises and she said "well, actually I made it worse" and then told me she was taking ice out for a drink and I said "oh god, you tried to ice your tongue and it stuck to the ice cube?" and she said "Yep!" And then she described peeling the ice cube off her tongue and being fascinated by the little row of taste buds on the ice cube, which I told her probably meant that she is really leaning into being a biologist. And then she said she rinsed the taste buds off and still used the ice cube, and I thought once again of how much less weird and awesome my life would be if I had not had these kids. 

Oh! Suzanne was talking about having weird dreams about other bloggers, which reminded me of when we were at my sister's and I went up to the attic where Eve was sleeping and flopped on her bed so we could share our weird dreams. Hers was about being mad at her friends because they kept making plans that didn't leave enough time for all the stuff they had to get done. Mine was being kidnapped by people who said they were taking me to a Gentle Hospital, and then when we got there I looked around and realized that they actually meant a Mental Hospital (like, RUDE MUCH, Subconscious?)

Sort-of Surly Thursday

I am a freaking disaster. I drove to southern Ontario twice in two weeks and it has taken me OUT. No, this does not seem reasonable, and yet here we are. I am sucking hard at cooking and exercising and blogging. Last week I made one pan of lime and cilantro black beans and we had bean and cheese quesadillas. Every day. For a week. I go into my yoga room and stretch and then I try to do actual yoga but anything involving hands and knees is out because of my, well, hand and knee, so I stretch and then watch TikToks lying on the floor with my legs against the wall. It's rained every damned day and even Lucy doesn't want to walk. 

I do this very rarely, but sometimes desperate times call for a morning Diet Pepsi

I haven't slept well the past few nights and I was hopeless trying to get ready for work this morning. It took me three tries to hook my bra properly and four to get my shirt over my head facing the right way. On work days I drive Matt and Lucy to my mom and dad's and he takes Lucy in and then either borrows their vehicle or walks the rest of the way to work. I like doing it this way for a number of reasons. It feels like a normal thing that normal couples do, and I seldom feel normal. It means he helps me stick all my crap in the car - my ridiculously heavy purse, my work bag with my chair cushion and water bottle and desk fan, in the winter my bag with my indoor shoes, and Lucy in her carrier. I thought I had another reason, but it has departed my mind. 

This morning Matt was loading the car while I was still trying to get organized and get my shoes on. This resulted in a complicated and amusing kind of dance where I was trying to find my shoes and get them on and tie them,  but also flattening myself against the wall when Matt came back in and reached past me to grab a bag. At one point I almost kicked him in the head with a shoe that wasn't even on my foot yet. 

Work was fine. I do consider myself very lucky in that anyone who 'manages' me is generally pretty far removed from my direct sphere of activity. I have so many friends dealing with terrible managers, and it can really blight an otherwise good job. I mean, yeah, the kids can be annoying, but the worst are usually grade five or six boys, and I only see them for half an hour plus they're young, there's at least the hope that they will eventually not suck someday. 

This is the part of the post where I cannibalize my friends' blog posts for ideas to not leave the post stuck at four measly paragraphs of random shit. Suzanne wrote about being caught out driving with her daughter when there was a tornado warning. This reminded me of a few years ago when a tornado ripped through our neighbourhood and we had no power for two and a half days, and then for the next couple of years we had frequent tornado warnings, which freaked me out the first few times, but then I lost the ability to sustain that level of panic. Which is fine, except it resulted in Eve and I doing a charming little Starbucks and bookstore date with Zarah and Sophie when they were visiting, and then driving a few streets over to the library and seeing garbage cans and tree branches and pieces of roofs on the street and thinking we should probably have paid more attention to the tornado warning. 

lolz, look at these complete idiots

Engie wrote about seeing two little kids on a roof and wondering why no other adult in the vicinity knocked on the house's door to inform a parent. This reminded me of when we were camping a few years ago, it was late in the day, and most people had left the beach to go get ready for dinner. I was still on the beach with Collette's daughter Rachel and her girlfriend. We were just sitting and talking, and then we noticed a small girl in the water - about a football field down the beach from us - who didn't look accompanied. We started to walk over, and then we saw a man who was way too far ahead of her walking out into the water turn around and see her. We stopped. He walked a few steps back towards her, and then motioned at her to go back onto the beach and turned around and KEPT WALKING OUT. She looked like she was two or three and we were in disbelief. We kept walking towards them, and the man finally turned around again and Rachel shouted asking if the little girl was his. He finally walked back far enough to pick her up, but for crying out loud. There were still multiple people on the beach and in the water and everyone was either oblivious or unconcerned. Bystander effect, I guess, but geez.

Funnily enough, I have another Rachel story that is pertinent to Engie's blog post. Rachel has always been extremely athletic, fast, strong, and fearless. This has been great for her various basketball teams, but was less overwhelmingly possible for the people trying to parent her early on. One day in the summer her father was out in the driveway doing some work when a neighbour approached him. The man stood right in front of him as Mark stood with his back to the house and said quietly "do not freak out, but Rachel has opened the window and climbed out her bedroom window, and is sitting on the roof." A land-speed record for getting in the house and upstairs was probably set, and after that the family probably needed a fire escape route that did not involve getting out Rachel's bedroom window. 

I started the Surly Thursday blog post series years ago in a bit of an effort to collect all my weekly complaining for one day and not complain in every single post. I let it lapse partly because I let everything lapse and partly because I was less surly for a while. I'm not extremely surly right now, but as usual, when I start posting about stuff that isn't totally positive, by the end of the post I find it amusing. 

Unsure What the Collective Noun Would Be

So this is some bullshit.

Pardon me, my good weather, what seems to be the fuck? 

Last week was a good week for Jody-ing. I have spoken before of the fact that I have a Jody here (HI JODY), whose daughter was practically conjoined with mine for the six years of middle school and high school and they are still very close, and naturally my glorious gifted daughter would find a friend who came with a friend for me attached - sort of like when you buy a bottle of vodka or rum at the liquor store (or the 7/11 if you're American, I don't judge) and it comes with an adorable tiny bottle of some other kind of liquor attached. And then I have a Jody six hours away with whom I shared consecutive womb space. As Matt puts it, "your sister Jody is tall and loud and opinionated. Your friend Jody is the same except not tall.") It's an embarrassment of Jody riches.

Friend-Jody had invited me to come to her house on Passover for the Seder she was doing with her brother and his family and her mom. I thought it sounded really cool but then the day of had massive social anxiety and hadn't slept well and actually nodded off at my desk for a few minutes, so I almost cancelled. Matt was in Thailand and I was driving my parents six hours to my sister's on Friday and I was just anxious and waffle-y and my hair was terrible and I didn't know what to wear and I was on the verge of bailing, and then I managed to give myself a stern talking-to and forced myself out of the house.

It was SO the right decision. The Seder was louder and swearier than I was expecting, which was silly of me because I know Jody. She sat me beside her and we did not behave decorously at all, which reminded me of when my mom would take me and my sister to church and sit between us because otherwise we were unruly and unserious. This might be forgivable for small children, but we were in high school at the time. At one point Jody's husband was reading his passage and he pronounced 'travail' the French way, which I think strictly speaking it would not have been in this context, which is such a dumb thing to get giggly over, but Jody and I did anyway, and he broke off from his "fleeing our persecution" sentence to hiss "STOP IT" at us and Jody said "that's what the Jews said to their persecutors, STOP IT" and then we lost it completely.

There was also the food element which was glorious. Jody's brother and his family were incredibly fun and lovely - I asked them if they wanted to drive to London for Easter on the week-end, they said they'd think about it. 

The drive with my parents went fine - the On Route we stopped at was insanely crowded but we just grabbed sandwiches from the market store and kept going. My dad's mobility is bad but he did okay on the one stop. I think the drive was hard on them anyway, and we may not get to do this again, but I think it was good of them to get out of their house for a few days and we didn't get to do Christmas all together last year so this was really nice. My nephew works fairly near to where Eve is at school, which is only about an hour from my sister, so he picked her up and they were already there when we got there. 

We hot tubbed and watched a couple of just unbelievably bad Blue Jays games (well, bad for us, not for the other guys), and a little bit of the Rubber Ducks game - we were confused about why the camera was on a guy driving a tractor but apparently it's a tradition for the tractor to deliver a box of -- balls? Game-day items? The team was 3-0 as of yesterday, so Angus is happy. 

We had dinner on Saturday so Eve could get back home on Sunday night to work in the lab Monday.

 We laughed about stupid things - Sunday night we started talking about music and my brother-in-law called up musicians my father remembered on the tv. One was Fabian ("he was good-looking but had a voice like a do-it-yourself violin kit" according to my dad) and the song that jumped out at us was Love Me, Love My Tiger. Listening to it in full did not make it make any more sense. Apparently he also had another song called just Tiger, which was very successful, so maybe he was still chasing that high. Still. Love Me, Love My Tiger? Wtf, Fabian? 

Eve and Jonah and my sister and I did the Connections puzzle all the days we were together, alternately swearing and crowing and giggling, to my parents' bafflement. I told them about the furries and then I opened Facebook and saw this and I legit hurt myself laughing.

Also there were cats. Miko was very into having company, Seamus not so much. 

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