Where in the World is... Basically Anything

I've always been bad at geography. I don't remember directions well, I don't know which way is North at any given moment, I get lost easily. I had a terrible time with map tests. The car GPS system changed my whole life - I wouldn't have gone half the places I have without it, or not without a lot more anxiety barfing and palpitations. It kind of just became a thing, though, where I would say "I'm terrible at geography" and leave it at that. As if it was an irremediable condition. As if there was NOTHING AT ALL that could be done about it.

My friend Collette has really good directional sense. If she drives somewhere once, she knows where it is forever. And she knows where stuff is in the world too. "I learned it from television", she said once, and when I looked at her with blank incomprehension she said "You know, like, I learned where Korea was from MASH". I watched MASH faithfully. I had no freakin' clue where Korea was. It's just not an area of my brain that lights up when relevant information to it presents itself.

When Angus was going to Oklahoma last year, Matt immediately started trying to figure out if he could do some business in Austin and then drive up to Oklahoma for a couple of days, since Oklahoma was north of Texas. HE JUST KNEW THAT. Rather comfortingly, when I repeated that Oklahoma was north of Texas to a few of my friends, they hadn't known it either.

This summer when we were all camping at Sandbanks, a few of us walked from the beach to the café for ice cream. Collette got a coffee that had a world map on the cup. She started asking the kids where certain European countries were. Her kids knew almost all of them. Eve knew none (I didn't either, but fortunately for me she was only asking the kids). Eve and I decided this could not stand. We came home and started studying maps on the internet. You don't even want to KNOW how low my score was the first time I tried to guess where all the states were.

It's been really interesting. Being able to visualize where a state is on the map when it's mentioned for Matt's work or on the news is a whole new thing for me. Some things aren't as south as I thought they were. Massachusetts is shaped like a gun. I knew Rhode Island was small, but dude, it's, like, MINISCULE.

Then I started learning capitals. I was fairly confident that I would know some, if not most of those. WRONG. Now, am I wrong or should there not be a rule that if a city is a capital of one state it shouldn't be a well-known city in another state? No? Just me? Capital of Massachusetts? SALEM, I confidently typed. Nope. There IS A Salem, Massachusetts, but it's not the capital. Just like there's a Charleston, South Carolina, but it's not the freaking capital. Who the hell has ever heard of Columbia, South Carolina? Well, a great many people, clearly, but I still think it's bullshit.

Eve came down once when I was doing the capital quiz the other way, where you get the capital and have to pick which state it belongs to. When we got to Oklahoma City, she said "well obviously it should be Oklahoma, but is it a trick? Are you supposed to overthink it? I'm suspicious." For Jackson she said Mississippi and when I said "do you just know that because of Uptown Funk?" she said "well I'd say no, but it's playing in my head now, so probably".

Pierre and Bismarck are North and South Dakota, but I regularly mix up which one is which.

We went on to the rest of the world and now I'm fairly confident that I wouldn't be one of those people who gets stopped on the street by Jimmy Kimmel and accidentally goes to war with South Korea.

"Don't bother learning it all", Collette said. "Just learn something weird like Kazakhstan". I TOTALLY KNOW WHERE KAZAHSTAN IS. AND Turkmenistan.

Still keeping my GPS, though. And don't ask me which way is North. Not sure how to improve that, other than to have a compass implanted somewhere.

Cats and Cattiness

For Joe (HI JOE) and Nicole (HI NICOLE), the Schrodinger's cat joke: Schrodinger is driving along and gets stopped by a cop. The cop finds his behaviour suspicious and searches his car, including the trunk. When he opens the trunk, he says "oh my god, there's a cat in here and it's dead!" and Schrodinger says "Well NOW it is!"

Today: slept too late, made myself go to the gym. Came downstairs from the gym, went to grab a grocery cart. As I was pulling it back, someone walked into me. I half-turned around, about to say sorry, and saw this older woman, obviously rolling her eyes and pissed off. Because she had walked into me, while I was pulling out a shopping cart, which is what people do with shopping carts. And she wasn't leaving or going somewhere else, which might have meant her attention wasn't on the shopping carts, because she then pulled out her own shopping cart.

So I looked back and saw her being a bitch because she had walked into me. And I completely lost any ability to be gracious. I yanked the cart out and pushed it into the grocery store and mumbled a stream of invective and very obviously didn't smile at her when we bumped into each other (figuratively) again at the green juice.

Then I tried to turn my cart into the pharmacy aisle, but my arms were noodly from working out and I bumped a rack and a bunch of chapstick fell off. And this young employee who'd been talking to someone nearby came to my rescue and said consoling things about Monday and picked up all the lip balm while I apologized profusely and sort of cry-laughed.

I guess I could take some kind of lesson from that. Like, if I'd gotten up earlier I would have missed being walked into by an asshole. OMG, you guys - what if I've used up my Canadianness? What if I never apologize to someone who steps on my foot again? I honestly feel like I've reached some kind of threshold. Fear me.

Sub-Blogging

A former friend just tweeted that she has serious reservations about the mental health of people who can't cope with Daylight Saving Time.

I can't say I'm terribly surprised - when someone routinely says mean things the shock value wears off after a while. It just made me stop and think for a moment. I do, in fact, have mental health issues, and I do find that Daylight Saving Time makes them worse for a little while. I feel off-kilter, more anxious, never sure I'm in the right place at the right time, and tired. Which doesn't seem that weird, really. We literally CHANGE THE CLOCKS. By some weird decree from on-high, we take this huge fiction that our lives are quite literally built on, and agree by another enormous fiction that it's different now. For about six months, when we'll all (except our wise, wise sister Saskatchewan) change it back. How can this not have some effect on many people?

So, yeah. Sometimes something is true and saying it still makes you a huge dick.

I always find referring to Swistle's post helpful in this trying time.

I remember the cruel realization when we had our first baby, that Fall Back actually DIDN'T mean an extra hour of sleep anymore. It just meant your kid was now crying to get up at five instead of six. I have teenagers now, and I still sleep like one, so at least we have that back.

I wish I could think of something funny to add, but it's raining and dark again, the house is a bloody mess and... well, it's okay. I'm going to clean up the kitchen, put out the garbage, then go cocoon with Eve upstairs and read for a few hours until we have to figure out what time we should be hungry.

Also, while Googling desultorily about the evils of DST, I found an episode of the Powerpuff Girls where the girls are so exhausted from all the superheroine-ing that they fall asleep in school and the teacher tries to get them banned from saving everyone. Then the Professor realizes that it's Daylight Saving Time and everyone sets the clocks back so the girls get another hour of sleep. Dammit, I was going to say that DST almost stopped the FREAKING WORLD FROM BEING SAVED, but now I realize it's the opposite. Well what do you expect, it's a stupid cartoon. I'll bet Batman doesn't set his clocks back.

Ripping Off My Witty Daughter for a Blog Post. So Not Cool.

My Facebook memory today was about Eve learning a Schrodinger's Cat joke from Bones and rehearsing it every day to tell to Matt when he got home from Japan (he's in Florida right now. He comes home Monday. Tuesday he leaves for Singapore. Things have changed so much. NOT).

I read it out to Eve and she said "oh yeah, and the other day we were talking about that thing where if a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure if I ever take a philosophy class I'll never sleep again."

We also finally got her in to a chiropodist to order orthotics. She's had foot pain her whole life just like me, but we're lazy and procrastinate-ish and we kind of wanted her feet to stop growing to we wouldn't have to replace the orthotics every few months (lazy and procrastinate-ish and cheap, in plain talk). The foot guy said she had extremely tight Achilles tendons. She said "wait - are you telling me my Achilles Heel is LITERALLY MY ACHILLES HEEL?"

In Which Angus and I Keep Yelling "Choose Me!" to Various Bodies and Organizations

I'm still looking for a job, I'm just not being as much of a loud-mouthed schnook about it (see? I CAN SO learn stuff!). When I have spare time I go on job sites and noodle around looking at what's available in my area. Apparently if you want a job trying to sell cars it's really, really easy to get one. Unfortunately, I suck hard at selling anything. Back in high school I took singing lessons from a lovely older lady named Betty. For a while, my friend Rachelle took them too and we had consecutive lesson times. Betty said Rachelle was better at selling herself, and if we had to sell a pencil, Rachelle would have people in a bidding war over it while I would be standing there quietly saying "it's a ... pretty good pencil. It can make a decent mark."

There were a couple of openings for fork lift operator too. Now that I would like to take a crack at. As far as library openings, right now, "Hey!", I yelled to Matt, "I could drive the bookmobile!" He reminded me that I've cracked both a taillight AND a rear bumper on a vehicle that is significantly shorter than a bookmobile. We decided I probably shouldn't drive the bookmobile, for the comfort and safety of readers everywhere.

Then I came across an ad that said "straight truck operators needed" and yelled "Hey!" again, feeling super offended for Amanda, among others, and then.... oh. It's actually called a straight truck. Hmph. That's a little heteronormative, but fine.

We've signed Angus up with an organization that helps guide him through the college baseball recruiting process. He emailed a bunch of U.S. college coaches yesterday. He immediately got a response back from Princeton. It said "you have to have 1400 SAT scores and a 3.7 average for us to even look at you, but, you know....thanks for the email". DIDN'T WANT TO GO TO YOU ANYWAY, PRINCETON. Angus said "pretty much everywhere I looked at costs way too much. I could get a 95% scholarship and have to say 'still no way in hell....but thanks for the email.'" This kind of thing sometimes makes me feel like I've failed as a parent, because if I'd gone back to work sooner we might be in a better position financially. The problem with the unquantifiable benefits of having been a stay-at-home parent is that, well, they're hard to quantify. Angus seems pretty sanguine about it all, though. It's kind of a 'let the chips fall where they may' situation. I'm not sure why he can't just go to Western and live less than an hour from my sister and capitulate to our plan to trade kids for university (my niece could to to Carleton or Queens, everybody gets a little independence but not four thousand miles worth, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK??). Ahem.

The boys are in Florida for a baseball showcase. Angus asked me to look up the weather there last night. I said "twenty-eight, twenty-eight, twenty-eight, twenty-eight". He said "rain?" I said "No. And screw you."

Now going to walk my dog in the rain. Again. Happy Friday.

Dead Like Me

Hannah reminded me yesterday that BlogHer doesn't even EXIST anymore, and BlogHer was the reason NaBloPoMo existed, so now I feel kind of dumb. I mean, I never really did it as part of the big BlogHer thing anyway, I only added my name to the massive blogroll a couple of times and every time I found someone I liked via the massive blogroll they seemed to stop blogging three days later (presumably not just because I started following them, although, shit, now I'm worried that maybe it was just because I started following them). There were prizes, but you couldn't win them if you were in Canada. So it was just something I did, because after Halloween there was just this bleak Novemberish stretch of cold and rain and ennui until I started panicking about Christmas, and it seemed like a good distraction.

But also, BlogHer being gone is just another sign that blogging is dead, right? And yet, here I am, rambling and shambling on like I don't even know it. OMG, I HAVE A ZOMBIE BLOG. Kind of fitting, because I am in search of a brain - it just happens to be my own.

I watched the first episode of The Walking Dead, and at the end I felt like I'd looked away at a crucial moment and missed something and didn't really know what was going on. I didn't watch it while it was on last year, but my PVR kept recording all the episodes, so at the end of the season I watched it all, skipping over Glenn and Abraham dying, because although I used to pride myself on watching scary movies and never, ever looking away, I'm at the point in my life where I've realized that I just don't want to see some things. There were some good moments, but the series just doesn't hold me anymore. I also tried to read the graphic novels, but I think I'm just not really a graphic novel person, except for Alison Bechdel's Fun Home which, come on, is a work of absolute fucking genius. I kind of want to know how the tv series is different, though, so maybe I'll force myself.

On a sort of similar subject, I'm rereading American Gods, and it's the... the... you know, like the Director's Cut, but for books. And almost nothing I've read yet seems remotely familiar other than that the guy's name is Shadow and there are gods, and I'm wondering if this is because this version is substantially different or if my memory just really is that b.... never mind, I'm not actually wondering, I think we all know the answer.

I just took Lucy out for a walk because the rain was supposed to stop at noon for, like, twenty minutes or something. It didn't. I'm going to go have a shower.

MoPoBloNa Backwards

It's really unfortunate that NaBloPoMo isn't starting on a Surly Thursday because HOLY FUCK today is chapping my ass. It was stupid hot all of October, and I wished for cooler temperatures - apparently we only get those with apocalyptic amounts of rain and a wind that is basically a douchebag in weather form. Also, I cooked rice and it tastes like ass, and I don't even know if it's the rice or me, but at the moment I don't trust either of us.

Last year the volleyball team, including Angus, went to the final and he told us not to come but then said we probably should have because they bussed fans in and it was a really cool atmosphere and they won. So this year we figured we'd go, but (of course) Matt's going to be in Asia. And it's in the evening, at some far-away high school, and if I go I'll be alone, which I hate.

BUT I did have a lovely visit with a woman I used to volunteer at my kids' elementary school with and I think I'm going to volunteer for the Scholastic Book Fair just for fun. AND at the awards ceremony we found out that Angus got the honour roll last year and the award for the highest mark in grade 11 World History (pretty much solely because he had the most amazing teacher ever, who I wish would do a Boy Meets World thing and transfer to teach at whatever university Angus goes to next year.

I don't feel great. I feel like I can do one busy day and then I'm flat out for the entire next one. I guess maybe this is a slight improvement over the summer when I couldn't do more than one thing on any day. It's hard to tell at this point. My doctor retired and I'm sure her replacement is lovely, but getting down to where she is has been a massive stress trigger, so I found a woman doctor in a small town much closer to here, and she's related to Eve's best friend and I tend to be a big fan of Greek women, so here's hoping.

Remember when I said I was bad at rereading and making an effort to change? Well, it turns out (brace yourselves for a massive shock) that I'm also bad at moderation. This came (yay!):

So I read it, and then the next two in the trilogy. Then I went onto the library ebooks to see if anything was new or interesting and saw American Gods, so, well, maybe I'm just a rereader now. Who needs new books anyway? Such a high chance of disappointment.

This reminds me that Goodreads has also been pissing me off - I keep trying to show that I've read the books THIS year, while recording in the review the first year that I read them. I'm doing it the way they say I should, but they keep not showing up in my book list from this year. I finally figured out that I could delete them and re-add them, but I shouldn't HAVE to, and why can't things just FUCKING WORK?

In conclusion, if there was a month where I was going to force myself to blog every day, this is probably the worst possible choice. Cheers. Onward.