NaBloPoMo Day 30: We Did It Joe

*checks calendar very carefully to make sure it is, in fact the last day of November, still isn't completely certain*

I had plans to make this a really good post, with all my points researched and supported, and maybe a scatter plot with a very robust data set (that's a lie, also a Brooklyn Nine-Nine joke). But I was away from home from FOUR WHOLE NIGHTS and had to take off my CPAP last night because it was making my nose bleed, and didn't get much done today and it got dark really early and the thought of going out into the cold and dark for bar night (or anything) made me feel like crying, but I did, because whining about having all these stupid awesome friends who actually want to hang out with you at least once a week is dumb, and it was really fun (it always is once I drag my ass out) but now it's late-ish and I don't think this is going to come out as structured and effective as I was anticipating.

I have had a general rule of thumb for arguing with people on the internet for about as long as I've been arguing with people on the internet. It is something like this: even if the person is belligerent and offensive, attack their faulty argument and not them personally; only engage if you feel like you have something to say that a bunch of other people have not already said; even if the person swears at you, don't swear at them. I am generally pretty articulate, and I felt like these rules meant I could dismantle the point of a bigot or troll while still remaining fairly classy. 

I was able to follow my own rules on Facebook or news articles. When Twitter came along, somehow I fell into considering that a lawless no-man's-land where I frequently just said "fuck" as many times as you could fit in 140 or 280 characters and either blacked out in an expletive-surfeited rage or got put in a 12-hour time out, which I had to admit was probably fair. 

I don't feel like this was all wasted time. Frequently I was trying to deflect trolls from friends in marginalized groups, both to draw some fire from them and so other marginalized people would see that they were supported. I have a vocabulary that can be useful for this kind of thing. But fairly recently I became aware that I had to alter the frequency of these interactions. I would almost certainly end up feeling worse than the people I was arguing with. I could end up spending too much time this way, and even if it wasn't wasted, it didn't feel well spent. 

I don't know what exactly the answer is. I don't want to leave hateful people unanswered. I don't want to stay in my little filter bubble and pretend the bigots don't exist. I do need to get back to not just answering hate with hate. Since I was quite young, whenever I read about people who answer vitriol "mildly", it always strikes me as something to strive for. It's really difficult - to argue with the hateful without leaping to anger, to stay measured when the dialogue is heated.

I had the phrase 'tikkun olam' in my head while trying to compose this post. I thought it was from Buddhism - it's actually from Judaism (sorry Jody, am dumb shiksa). I thought it meant "healing the world with kindness", and from what I read yesterday it's kind of that, but maybe not exactly? Oh wait, I just found a definition that says "acts of kindness performed to perfect or repair the world", I shall now ignore any evidence that does not prove me right. Anyway, I love this. It makes me feel like if I argue with someone who is being hateful or ignorant, I should do it not to best them or put them in their place, but to try to perform a tiny act of healing. It makes me think of people like Nicole (HI NICOLE) and Holly (HI HOLLY) who seem to embody this philosophy in nearly everything they do, whether people (including me) deserve it or not. 

Thank-you everyone who stuck with me this month - everyone who said they were happy I was doing this, everyone who read all the posts or just a few, everyone who commented and anyone who didn't. You all helped repair my world a tiny bit at a time, and I am inexpressibly grateful. 

NaBloPoMo Day 29: Eve's Residence Room Christmassed

 

The good part is I bought a couple of new things for her room and also brought her some stuff from home, and I remembered everything I wanted to bring and she loves it. The bad part is that I went through all the boxes the night before I was leaving looking for the tiny Christmas tree she always puts on her desk, and I was tired and sweaty and hurting my back and just as I opened the box and saw it..... I remembered that I bought her a three-foot pre-lit tree at Giant Tiger because I thought she probably had more floor space than surface space in her room, and she agreed. D'oh. 

NaBloPoMo Day 28: Pimping My Friends Out Once More

I read this out to Zarah and Sophie and Eve while we were hanging out in the hotel room before bed, to great appreciation and amusement. Eve said "on the other hand, Marianna (her BFF who is in theatre school in British Columbia) sent a text to our group chat today that just said "Mime final tonight", so that's pretty awesome too."

NaBloPoMo Day 27: In Which Eve Gets All the Red-Haired Little Girl Love

"I'm going to see so many adorable little red-haired girls today." Eve said on Saturday. "I mean... two. But statistically I feel like that's a lot".

We went and met Jean (my professor) and her granddaughter Fyfe, who has met Eve twice so far and is a big fan of hers. There was some swinging and some reading and some pretend tea-drinking (thankfully, since Eve hates real tea - I still laugh when I think about her expression as a child when she tried it for the first time and wondered why on earth anyone would put it in their mouth on purpose), and a round thing that looked like a doughnut but which was definitely NOT a doughnut, it was a BAGEL

and then Fyfe had to go for a nap, so she picked some light reading

So then we drove to Burlington to see my sister-in-law Laura and Lydia and Mitchell, my niece and nephew. There was more reading, and some colouring, and some walking down the street looking at Christmas decorations, and some running around in the back yard, and lots of hugs and it was lovely.

Eve though in this picture Eve looks like she's going to eat the kids rather than walk them

NaBloPoMo Day 26 Yes I KNOW I'm Behind

There was a time when I would have killed myself making sure I posted something every single day in November, even though I was driving a lot and visiting my YOUNGEST CHILD who lives FIVE HOURS AWAY NOW and only had my phone with which to ply my trade with fat clumsy fingers. That time is not now. I figure everyone will either forgive me or be glad not to have to muster yet another comment. 

When I visit Eve I stay at a very basic, pretty cheap hotel very close to campus. I like getting a room on the very bottom floor because those rooms actually have two doors, one that opens right to the parking lot so I can back up, open the door and easily unload or load up all the shit I travel with - besides the fact that I'm usually bringing stuff for Eve (including Christmas decorations this time) and for my niece and nephew and anyone else I'm visiting, when I'm on a road trip and not a flight I tend to treat my car as a big purse, which means my crap does not lend itself to scooping up and traipsing through a hotel lobby.

Eve usually comes and stays with me at the hotel, and it serves us well, it's un-fancy but clean, but we've had sort of bad karma as far as something weird happening every time. The last time she stayed, the fire alarm went off at one a.m. for no apparent reason - we weren't terribly worried because like I said, we could open the door and be right in the parking lot. But we didn't know what to do. There was no smoke smell, no one seemed to be moving with any urgency, no one was telling us to leave. But this frigging loud-ass alarm kept going off. I finally told Eve to pack her bag and I would drive her back to campus so she could get some sleep. Just as she did, the alarm stopped. They apologized the next day.

This time I picked her up, we got some dinner, went back to the hotel and were watching the season 3 finale of Rupaul's Drag Race UK. Fifteen minutes from the end, the power went off. We sat there for a few minutes, then I called the front desk and they said the power was off in the area. It was raining, but not thundering, so it was weird. We chilled for a while, Eve playing Animal Crossing on her Switch and me reading on my ipad. Then I set up a hotpot on my phone so we could find out who won Drag Race. Then we checked the power outage map and it looked like it could still be hours before it was fixed. We were getting ready for me to drive Eve back to campus so she could shower, and just as we opened the door to leave, the power came back on. So it was all good, except the drag queen Eve wanted to win did not. 

The next morning Zarah and Sophie drove to the hotel from Barrie. Zarah texted that they were on their way and say "see you at the Village Inn". We were at the Visitors Inn but I assumed it was a typo. I texted that we were in room 6. A couple hours later she texted that they were checking in and were on the second floor, and would come down to meet us. Then she called us confused because she thought she was at room 6 and it was empty and being cleaned. I had a terrible thought and asked what hotel they were at and she said The Village Inn. 

But they weren't, she just got the name of the hotel wrong and there was actually a 106 AND an actual 06. So things could have gone horribly wrong but didn't. 

We drove to campus and met my former professor - also Zarah's former professor, but mine first, I feel it's important to note that -- at the Faculty Club for lunch, and it was absolutely lovely. Sophie is considering an integrated science program at McMaster, but Zarah thinks if she'd had twenty more minutes Jean might have convinced her to also do Arts and Science like Eve. 

Sophie couldn't get into an actual tour of campus because they're all booked now that they're running again, but we walked around and Eve snuck her up to her room because she could pass as a student (Zarah and I not so much). 

If I stop now, I can turn this post into two posts and catch up. Therefore I am stopping now.

NaBloPoMo Day 25: Driving, Daughter, Diverting Discussion

Yesterday I set out for a drive I’ve done many times, several of them in the past three months. I felt unaccountably anxious this time. I asked for good thoughts on Facebook and drove a little more slowly than usual. I stopped at the third rest stop (I usually stop at the second one. I don’t really know why. I felt slightly superstitious about changing the routine. I tried to convince my loopy sense of superstition that it was GOOD to change the routine, which makes no sense either). I checked my phone and had multiple kind responses to my good thoughts request and I felt better. I ate my hamburger while driving without spilling ketchup on my white t-shirt, which was also a positive. 

I had been planning to stay alone at the hotel last night and see Eve today because she had school work to finish. She called when I was about an hour away and said screw that, she was coming to have a sleepover at the hotel. So I picked her up and we watched the season three finale of Rupaul’s Drag Race UK and it was sublime. 

Because this is short, I am also bestowing on you one of the exchanges from a running WhatsApp chat with our friend group. My friends are smart and weird and awesome and I present this without permission (and probably won’t get forgiveness. I like to live dangerously (refer back to the hamburger/white t-shirt situation).)

NaBloPoMo Day 24: By Hook or By Cook. Or Something.

I ended up skipping the chiropractor and book club tonight because I am exhausted and I didn't want to push myself before driving five hours tomorrow. I am trying to remember everything I want to bring for Eve and all the other people I'm seeing this week-end and still remember to pack underwear. I got home from work and thought about all the stuff I still had to do - pull out the Christmas decoration boxes and find some stuff to take down to Eve, get the presents ready for my niece and nephew, finish packing, bake cookies to take to Eve, etc. Instead I sat at the kitchen table untangling and organizing ornament hooks because I am very intelligent.

There was a lone safety pin in the mix. I feel like I used to constantly need a safety pin and could never find one, and now I can't remember the last time I needed one. Why is that? Never mind, it will probably just make me sad.

As for the other hatchling, a couple of days ago Angus was texting me at work in the morning saying he was going to try making chicken fingers from scratch that night and asking for pointers. He's at residence for part of the week with no food service because most people are at home for Thanksgiving break (he's at a friend's place tonight and tomorrow for dinner, and football, I guess? I am not well-versed in the finer points of American Thanksgiving, except for what I see on tv, which usually features someone almost dying or some kind of explosive family drama - I assume that's not the norm.)

I wasn't even sure he had cooking utensils or spices or anything, so I gave him some brief thoughts and told him to look up a recipe on-line. 

Later that night he texted me these:

I agreed that he should be proud of himself. We also had an exchange about whether to eat the edamame shells - the first time I was served them in a restaurant I thought they were snow peas. He said "am I supposed to eat the outside? Because I am." and I was like "No! Sharp!" At least he was alone when he made the same slightly embarrassing mistake.

Alright, I'm going to go try to drug myself into a half-decent sleep. Posts will be short and photo-heavy the next few days. 

NaBloPoMo Day 23: Fun With Internet Trolls

 I've been trying to decide if this post should come before or after my Trying Not to Be an Asshole to Assholes on the Internet Anymore post (I backslid a little last night, on a post that asked if people were nearly done their holiday shopping yet, which brought out the appallingly entitled Fake Christians with their 'what do you mean HOLIDAY shopping? Do you mean CHRISTMAS shopping?' bullshit.) 

I follow a personal blog page on Facebook called Cranky Fat Feminist, which I love. It's not a private group and not moderated, so a lot of the posts get considerable flak from anti-feminist dickweasels. A while back she posted about a study involving twins that suggested strongly that dieting is neither a one-size-fits-all (weak laugh) solution to obesity nor a necessarily effective one - in fact, dieting may very well cause subsequent weight gain. It was just a post, not an article or an insistence that this was one hundred percent correct, but for people (like me) who think diets are a scourge on the world, it really resonated. 

Naturally some diet-obsessed wanker piped up "this is ridiculous! Just because you FAIL at a diet doesn't mean it's the diet's FAULT, it's YOUR fault." This kind of thing makes me see red, as overweight people are constantly made to feel that it's their fault when they can't sustain unsustainable eating and exercise habits (The Biggest Loser, anyone?). I said as much, much more politely than I felt like. 

Naturally her next comment was "I had a peek at your profile. I can see why you'd want to believe the study." This did NOT make me see red. I'm a woman on the internet who expresses opinions from time to time, duh, I've been called fat and ugly more times than The Daily Mail has posted a "Skinny Adele goes about her life being skinny and clearly nothing else matters except the fact that she's skinny" headline. I responded "yeah, I figured you'd get around to calling me fat. I actually tend to believe scientific evidence whether it reinforces my natural biases or not, but go ahead with waving your little troll arms and legs around. It's probably good cardio."

I was pleased with this retort to a really unattractive degree, and ready to leave it there. Of course she lost all pretense to equanimity and started frothing that I sounded bitter and jealous and like I needed to get all my validation from social media. I calmly said that it seemed like she was the one who needed validation, which was why she was insisting on believing that dieting yourself to weight loss meant some kind of moral superiority. I said I was occasionally jealous of my friends, but usually because of their talent and kindness, none of which she was currently displaying, but hey, at least she was thin.

Someone else in the group then spoke up and said clearly this Jasmine character was bent on being spiteful and unwilling to hear reason, so why waste my breath? I said "yeah, I know. Don't feed the trolls. It's just that this one looked hungry. You know... because of all the dieting."

I KNOW it doesn't make me a good person that I'm proud of all this, but it seemed like a good one to go out on. 

It's not a troll, but it kind of looks like a bridge

NaBloPoMo Day 22: A Bunch of Random Stuff

 I'm not surly today, just really tired (pretty much zero sleep after the Cottage Girls Night of Awesome on Saturday and slept last night, but it wasn't enough, and my work day was super-gnarly today). This post from nine years ago was in my Facebook memories and made me both smile and miss Pam and my bonkers little girl who is now my bonkers big girl who doesn't live with me anymore (at least not in the winter time). I mean, look at the little smunchkin.

One thing that I've learned and found surprising since I started working in the school office is that apparently a lot of kids show up late to school every day. Part of my attendance duties include noting down all the lates, and I've been doing this somehow assuming that the copious number of late students had something to do with Covid. Then I looked up one day and said "hang on, are this many kids late every day ALL THE TIME?" and Heather said yep, pretty much.

I try really hard not to judge people when I don't know their situation, so I just won't here. It does really add to the craziness in the office and makes keeping accurate attendance records more difficult. The main reason it struck me is because both I and my kids would have had a nervous freaking breakdown pulling up to the school every day late. Who are these people that are so confident that the school day starts promptly for other people but not for them? (okay, that does sound judgy, sorry). Today a father called the school in the morning and told me that the woman letting the students in "wasn't cheerful enough". I refrained from saying that if his kid had gotten there on time she probably would have been at least ten minutes' worth more cheerful. I love the women I work with and they are generally extremely courteous and kind to everyone, but this kind of thing makes me think of when my kids were in school and sometimes the office staff seemed bitchy, and now I think OMG, THIS IS WHY. Maybe people could take a beat to remember that there are two or three people trying to keep track of the safety, comfort and whereabouts of several hundred children, and yours isn't the only one on our roster?

On the subject of maintaining professionalism under difficult circumstances, the office administrator recently went outside to the buzzer that people use to alert us that they're at the front door - the doors are kept locked all the time now because only students and staff are allowed in. This again creates a lot more work, because someone has to answer the buzzer, try to decipher what the person is saying through a mask through the staticky speaker, and then decide how to address the situation. We wanted to make sure that the person outside couldn't hear anything we say if we weren't pushing the button to answer them. To be clear, the worst thing is usually something like "no thanks, we're full" or "gee, who could have foreseen Oliver needing mittens on a minus twenty degree day" but still, better if no one else hears that. 

After we'd done this, I was working and dimly aware of Janis handing Heather something to try to fix. All I could hear was Heather saying "well I can't get the blade out. Wait, maybe the blade is supposed to stay in", and I burst out laughing and said "talk about things no one else should hear - like 'next person that drops off an unlabeled lunch gets shanked!'" Which was hilarious, especially because the principal had just come out of her office. It's fine, what are they going to do, fire me? we're desperately short-handed, the next person who buzzed the buzzer would have to get offered a job. 

Angus is staying in residence for Thanksgiving break instead of coming home because it would mean a Covid test and five-hour drive just a couple of weeks before coming home for Christmas break (will probably go a friend's place for actual Thanksgiving). He said he wants to learn how to season and marinate and cook meat when he gets home, but he's trying to cook chicken strips tonight. I asked a couple of rudimentary questions and he said "idk, I was going to look up a recipe, fail badly and then call you so we could laugh about it", so looking forward to that. 

My Purge All the Things Wave just crashed into Must Get Ready for Christmas Wave, which is distressing because somehow I had managed to go into complete denial about the fact that December inevitably follows November, and now I have to pause the Purging All the Things and shove the as-yet-unpurged things somewhere to make room for Christmas things. Oh well, many things have gone and I can keep going in January, provided the Purging Center in my brain has not gone dark, which we all know is a very real possibility. 

I'm going to Hamilton to see Eve this week-end! I leave on Thursday! I'm so happy! Prepare for my blog posts this week-end to be nothing but pictures of Eve and sappy platitudes about daughters. 

NaBloPoMo Day 21: Game Night, With Tequila

Yesterday was our annual Cottage Girls' Night (we had to skip last year, obviously), where we go to Collette's cottage an hour or so away, have lunch and do Christmas shopping in the nearby town and then settle in for a night of mild debauchery and board games. 

We played this one - I exploded every time, but also had one of my greatest game victories ever. Collette kept playing the card that meant I had to hold out my cards for her to take one, blindly. She wanted my Defuse card (because it defuses the exploding kitten), and three times in a row I put it in the same spot, to the extreme right of my hand, and she missed it every time. Then I told her about it so she could call me a bitch, as was her right.

We played this one - One question was which complex a psychiatrist said Nixon suffered from, and I said persecution complex but then talked myself out of it, and it was the right answer. SO annoying when that happens. 

We played this one - It became increasingly obvious that this edition was way too old for us to guess the answers effectively. There were categories like "detergents and cleansers", and half of them we'd never even heard of because they stopped making them twenty years ago. 

We played this one - okay, the drinking might have been part of it, but this game is effing hilarious. The worse you draw, the better. You write down a phrase, then pass the notepad to the next person to draw. They draw (usually badly), then pass to the next person to guess what the drawing is. It's like the game of Telephone crossed with Pictionary. Sometimes you can't make sense of the picture and end up trying to sell an expression like "Shark of the Forest Church" or "Duck Licorice". I drew a dong and everyone thought it was cherries, so then I picked the expression "cherry tomatoes" hoping someone would draw cherries and everyone would think it was a dong. Also, we found out that it's almost impossible to draw something that will make people think "mother in law" or "sugar daddy". I am really, shockingly bad at drawing the simplest things. Scissors. Feet. Footballs. So bad. Looking forward to playing this game with family at Christmastime. 

We walked and talked and ate and drank and laughed so hard, and I didn't take a single picture and I have no regrets. No wait, one picture, of this perfect Caesar in a Ghostbusters glass.

NaBloPoMo Day 20: To Card or Not to Card

 I just read Swistle's post about (among other things) Christmas cards and realized that it's November 19th and I could conceivably start writing Christmas cards right now or very soon. Last year I sent out a record number because I figured it was a rough time for a lot of us and happy mail would be a good thing. I put out a call on social media for anyone who wanted one to give me their address. I sent Christmas cards back to artisans that I ordered from through the online craft show (one was named Creepy Christine and that was too fun NOT to address a card to). 

I've gone through several permutations of how I do cards. I used to write at least a small paragraph in every single card. As time and hand strength became more scarce, that became unsustainable. I didn't want to do a one-letter-fits-all thing, so then I typed up messages and printed them out. That was kind of a pain in the butt too. I like it when people get photo cards printed, but I'm not even close to well-organized enough to do that in time. I usually go through our photos for the year and print a selection of wallet-sized pics and put one or a few in each card. I like this in theory, but it inevitably results in me ending up with way too many leftover photos, and also I have a Chromebook now and there doesn't seem to be a way to print photos to our printer, which I just remembered also doesn't work anymore.

Well, enumerating all the ways in which my Christmas card methods have failed, clearly I suck at doing Christmas cards, forget it, never again, shut up, don't look at me, I'm hideous.

Okay, deep breath. This year, I asked Jody (HI AGAIN JODY) if I could fraudulently use her Costco card to order some prints. I will strictly limit how many I allow myself to print. I will probably just write 'Merry Christmas' and our names, except for a few people who I don't see often and am not connected with on social media. And I will start soon so I can do a few at a time and not be a panicky mess with my hand frozen into a claw by December 20th. 

Ha hahahahahaha. Right.

NaBloPoMo Day 19: Expressions and Confessions

 Remember my tiny awesome little former prof? The one who's Eve's department head now? I was emailing with her about my visit next week-end and she told me that she had just run into Eve on campus and said "when I said 'only 3 1/2 weeks of term left!' she made an expression that looked just like you!" I was FaceTiming with Matt who was in San Jose and he said he wondered what expression it was and I said I was pretty sure I knew. Then Eve FaceTimed me to tell me about the same interaction and I said "was it this expression?" and made a face and she said "yes! That was it!"  

Angus came home at Christmas during his first year at his liberal arts college and asked me if I had seen Chi-raq, which was "a movie based on Lysistrata". I said "no, I...wait, you know what Lysistrata is?" Eve is being introduced to a lot of Classical literature in her first year too, and although she's generally been more into reading and writing than Angus, she hasn't been loving it all. She huffed at one point that she wasn't going to read Voltaire and I said "oh hell yes, you're going to read Voltaire, even if it sucks. It's first year university, this is the perfect time to read shit you don't understand and see how far you can get with it." So she read it.

In some ways I feel like her bullshit detector is set just a smidge high for this part of her program. She likes the math and science and stuff you can get one right answer for. When I went to university I was still kind of open to rhapsodizing about great literature and taking leaps of faith and theory and gazing adoringly at my professors as they waxed poetic about Ovid and Dostoyevsky. Eve is much more apt to read things quite cynically and keep a list of things her professors say that make no sense no matter how many times you try to parse them. That's okay. Everybody has their methods.

She did tell me proudly that she finished the first few books of Saint Augustine's Confessions and felt like she had a pretty good handle on what he was saying: "Basically the first part is 'Babies SUCK - they are selfish assholes that only care about their own safety and needs and comfort. The only innocent thing about them is their weak bodies.' I mean, I guess he's right but man, I've never heard anyone roast a baby so hard. The second part is 'I was a wicked horny teenager and my parents should have locked me up.' He also massively overuses the word 'suckling', in both the literal and figurative sense." Well okay then. Personally I've always loved the (possibly apocryphal?) Augustine quote, "God, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet". (I assume he was using 'continence' to mean sexual self-restraint rather than bladder control, because presumably no one would want to wait on that being granted).

I hope everyone has a great week-end, chaste and continent or otherwise. 

NaBloPoMo Day 18: The Eyes Don't Have It

I came across a suggestion somewhere on social media - I don't remember exactly where - that in the upcoming year everyone consider volunteering 1-2 hours monthly to a cause they care about. It's only .0027% of the year! Everyone can donate that much time, right? 

I mean, it sounds like a brilliant idea, but is it realistic? Are most organizations going to be happy with people saying they'd like to volunteer one hour every thirty days? Is that going to be useful or efficient or helpful? It annoyed me because it seemed like - not toxic positivity, exactly, but all chipper and chirpy about something that sounds good on the surface but not so much if you think about it for any length of time. I already work much less than full-time, and that's awkward in itself - many people seem to find it kind of weird, and assume I would take full-time work if I could get it. So many volunteer organizations are desperate for help - how easy would it be to do a couple hours and then either not be asked to do more or, if asked, to refuse? 

I went to the eye doctor a couple of weeks ago (my eye doctor is really cute - this is not relevant to the plot, but I feel like it bears mentioning anyway). A few months ago I started having a harder time reading paper books with my glasses on, which was irksome because I do the majority of my book reading at night after I've taken my contacts out. In bed I could only read an actual book if I focused my reading lamp right on the page at the highest brightness, which wasn't super fun for my husband who was trying to sleep beside me. 

The last time I went to the (really cute) eye doctor I had told him that I used my older, weaker-prescription glasses to read and my newer stronger ones for walking around in the world looking at further-away stuff. He said "that's great if that works for you, you might never need bifocals". When this system started failing me I was like "shit, I need bifocals". But I didn't want bifocals. I couldn't picture myself reading for three hours at a time focused downwards through the bottom half of my lenses. I got pretty panicky about this, and kind of blurted as much out in the first thirty seconds of my appointment. 

Quite predictably, my eye doctor (cutely) reassured me that he was not about to strap me down and forcibly affix bifocals to my face. He actually recommended a dedicated pair of reading glasses, which will be fantastic for reading and extremely perilous for anything else. 

This was a massive relief, although I'm not filling the prescription right away, because just before I went to the eye doctor (have I mentioned he's really cute?) I was reading in my chair, looked speculatively at the reading glasses sitting on the table beside me, picked them up and tried slipping them on over my regular glasses, and cue the halleluia chorus - so clear! so easy! I look like a massive dork, but who cares?! I'm more embarrassed that I didn't think of it sooner than anything else.

Of all the signs of aging, I think this one bothers me the most, even though it doesn't hurt. My husband caved to the need for reading glasses before I did, and I found it kind of annoying how he had to whip them out for every little thing I tried to show him on my phone or whatever. I got by by holding things further away or just reading through the blur (which probably came easier to me because my eyes have always been crap and I walked around without glasses when I desperately needed them for years). Then I gave up too and it's sobering to realize that without this stupid little construction of plastic and wire I am ill-equipped to parse the world of words around me. Which is dumb, because I've been at the mercy of vision correcting devices since I was seven, and it's a massive privilege that I've always been able to access them.

In summation.... um, the world will not be saved by facile proposals, aging is hard (but better than the alternative), and my eye doctor is really cute? 

Into every NaPoMo a Little Blo Must Fall

 I've got nothing much tonight. I'm tired and having a pain flare and feeling a tiny bit of self-pity  - only a bit, because I had dinner with Jody (HI JODY) and her sort-of step-mother-in-law (HI B.T.), both of whom I adore, and we ordered breaded cauliflower bites and most of them looked like little Accidental Dongs (dammit Jody, why didn't you tell me to take a picture?) so we could literally say "eat a bowl of dicks" and then do it and they were delicious. My husband is due home late tonight after ten days, so Lucy might stop crapping on the stairs every night in protest, and I won't have to deliver her to my parents' place for babysitting before I go limp around the school all day. It will still be Darkest November and it's supposed to rain all day, but -- no, I've got nothing for that, that sucks. 

Let's all regroup and meet back here tomorrow, okay? In the meantime, have a.... picture of Eve's friend Alison with her headless but sharp-dressing boyfriend. 

And some dictionaries that I catalogued.

NaBloPoMo Day 16: The Quarterback is Toast

 While trying to decide what to title a post about breakfast, I remembered that there was a book years ago called Much Depends on Dinner. I assumed it was a cookbook, but it turns out it's more of a historical/anthropological book about how and what people eat. I also came across this delightful quote from it:

“In Athol Fugard’s play, The Island, an African eats an orange whole; at the play’s opening night in London, the audience sat coolly through the nude scenes on stage, but there were gasps of horror at the sight of a man enjoying a whole unpeeled orange.”
― Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal

What prompted this post was that I was toasting an English muffin. As it browned in the toaster I thought about how I always forget about how awesome toast is until I make toast again. I almost titled the post "Toast is The Quarterback", but that seemed even more obscure than the first reference (it's a Die Hard thing, in case you completely justifiably didn't get it). 

When we lived in residence, I remember sitting in the tv room and hearing someone in the kitchen through the thin door. He was making toast, and bouncing around the kitchen singing "toast toast toast toast toast" and it was hugely enjoyable (I don't think he was high, I think he was just really excited about the toast). Once a few of us ended up with a loaf of bread and a couple of pounds of bacon, but we didn't have any lettuce or tomatoes, so we ran around our floor delivering 'bacon toasts' to everyone. 

There was a quote about how vastly superior toast is to plain bread in a book I read recently. I just went through all the quotes I pulled from that book and then realized, duh, I didn't actually copy down that passage, even though I noticed it and remembered it, because it's about toast, and I didn't know I was going to be writing a breakfasty toast-praising blog post at that point. Also, I think untoasted bread is often very nice - they are two separate and equally agreeable things (unless you have celiac disease).

I don't usually have bread products at breakfast, which is why I probably forget about toast a lot. I usually have yogurt and fruit. When I started having yogurt for breakfast, it was always vanilla Liberte. This went on for years until I went to visit Zarah (HI ZARAH) and she only had plain yogurt. I didn't throw a spoiled-brat fit or anything, but plain yogurt has always seemed sour and unpalatable to me. I ate it, though, like she does with maple syrup and toasted almond slices, which was a game-changer. I came home and ate Greek plain yogurt for years, with maple syrup and toasted almonds. Then I went to visit my mother-in-law and her husband, a few months after she had been diagnosed with the cancer that would take her from us. They were out at the hospital, and I checked the fridge for yogurt. They only had yogurt with the fruit at the bottom, which I never eat, but it was blackberry and I ate it and it was wonderful. My mother-in-law has been gone for almost a year and a half, and I still eat the yogurt and think of her every morning, which makes it sweet and also bitter.