Fall Break

 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 were really happy that Eve would be home for a week just six weeks after she started. As it turned out, it was maybe a bit too soon to be away from school for a week and then go back, and her re-entry was a little bumpy, but she got through it, so here is the whimsical montage of her fall break activities.

Getting smushed by Davis, who was home from McGill (and photobombed by her mom)

Meeting Davis's new bunny. His name is Angus.

Having (Canadian) Thanksgiving dinner with my parents

and Lucy

Going for ridiculously wholesome walks in the woods

I mean come on, look at this shit

Patio-ing

Doing calculus

Force-snuggling the dog




And now for some reason my blog editor is being an absolute jack-hole, so the pumpkin patch pictures will be a separate post. Try not to expire from suspense.

Repentant Tuesday

 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 September. Friday night soon after I got there we picked up my former professor and her daughter to go out for dinner. When I first had her as a prof I hadn't realized how new to professor-ing she was, and she said she thought I was brilliant and didn't like her, and we howled at the realization of our dueling impostor syndromes. I've known her kids since they were very small, and the fact that her granddaughter now adores Eve is both surreal to me and very lovely. We visited them all at their cottage in the summer when we went to Thunder Bay for the memorial for my mother in law.

Eve and my tiny professor, who is wearing a shirt I made her thirty years ago

I was staying in a hotel room near campus Friday night and planning to stay with friends close by on Saturday night because it was homecoming week-end and there were no hotel rooms available Saturday. While we were at dinner I got a text that the friends' ten-year-old daughter had possible been exposed to Covid, which made me staying there a problem. My professor said "no problem, just stay with me!" 

This was weird. This woman was once like a wise Olympic goddess to me and now I was sleeping in her house and using her dental floss? Weird. 

But it was a great week-end. Eve and I walked around the cute little town near campus and went shopping and replenished her snack supplies and then I hung out with my professor and talked about books and drank tea and I thought about how at one point I wanted nothing more than to live in Westdale in one of the charming old houses like hers, walking distance from campus where I would be working. And then I remembered that I didn't really want to be a professor, and those houses are darling but the bathrooms are old and I do appreciate modern plumbing. In a way this was the best of both worlds - a week-end in the charming old house being a pretend academic, then home to my bougie-ass house in the suburbs. 

We're so alike, and yet she loves candy corn. It's a mystery.

Surly Thursday (It's Probably Not Thursday, Time's Lost All Meaning)

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 uptight, if not outright hallucinating injustices. Everything hurts my feelings, and I suddenly have SO MANY feelings sticking themselves out just asking to be hurt. It would be funny if it wasn't... no, it is funny. And annoying. I really like fall, so it's super ironically irritating when my brain goes walkabout in precisely the season I'd really like to enjoy. You know what, that fall meme still pisses me off, you can dislike a season without saying that everyone who likes it is dumb. Wait, that's still being oversensitive, isn't it? Shit.

Our friends who always have the big fun Halloween party are having the Halloween party again this year, after having to cancel last year for obvious reasons. I have five days to come up with a costume. I don't think I'm coming up with a costume this year.

It's fine. It was foreseeable. Eve moved away, and I was focused on getting her settled in, then I went to visit, then I went to bring her back for fall break, then fall break was over. It was lovely to have her home for a week, but it was almost too soon, and we've both had a few bumps on re-entry. And it's been raining a lot (which is never fun in any season, it doesn't mean fall SUCKS, CAROL). And I have one of those headaches that never quite goes away. And I have some kind of issue with my hands (numbness, swelling, pain, tingling) that usually peaks around Christmas and I use the two weeks off to recover, but this year it's worse earlier, and I should have gone to the doctor about it oh, say, two years ago, but better ridiculously late than never, right? 

I will post some pictures from Eve's week at home and our super fun week-end houseguests tomorrow. I'm hoping now that I've processed the fact that I am one big unsheathed nerve walking around in a nerve-injuring world that I can start re-myelinating or something (ha ha, this metaphor is more tortured than my mood). 

Oh, while I'm riding a surliness wave, could people fucking stop telling me to delete Facebook? Some of the sanctimony from people who did it and then smugly assert that they "don't miss it" is really unattractive. Well bully for you, but if you don't miss it then how is this you making a brave sacrifice in the face (ha) of corruption? One of the things someone said after Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp went down and a bunch of people were saying "just read a book" or "just go outside" was "hey - how about not blaming users for the end result of a monopoly?" A lot of people rely on Whatsapp as a communication lifeline. Facebook isn't a matter of life or death for me, but it is a very important connection in a lot of ways. Never mind the delicious irony of the fact that some of these people are TWEETING that I should delete Facebook, when Twitter isn't perfect by a long shot. Me deleting Facebook isn't going to deal any kind of effective blow to Mark Zuckerberg, and I'm not into empty gestures. 

Also, my kitchen is full of fruit flies.

Hmph.

Cyclicality

 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 imminently perishing and I will feel better. 

But next year at this time, I will probably feel like crap again. Is it better that I know that? Probably. When I finally figured out that I get depressed every January, I stopped thinking that I was going to make a bunch of robust new year's resolution and make the coming year my bitch. If we were traveling, I gave myself a ton of time to prepare and acknowledged that I was probably going to have heightened anxiety beforehand. Sometimes I talked to my doctor and bumped up my meds. 

But it also feels a tiny bit like this is accursed knowledge - like it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, or like I'm going to spend some of my happily-swimming-along days bracing for the icy drop-off. 

Whatever, I don't know the answer, I'm just spitballing here. I try to keep an open mind about most things, which I think is a good thing, but sometimes it just results in a terminal case of wishy-washyness. Wishy-washiness? 

I feel like I need at least one more good paragraph for this post to be an acceptable length, but I'm out of words. Man, November is going to be tough. Or not - maybe I just won't do it this year, whatever, I'm breezy, *carefree laugh*. What? Shut up.