NaBloPoMo Day 1: Surly Monday and Walking it Off

 As previously stated here, I have no good excuse for being shocked at how unremittingly hideous my mood is today. Facebook memories for previous November firsts include phrases like "mired in suckitude" and "November has hit like a migrainey wrecking ball". To be fair, there was also a memory of Eve and I watching tv with Matt and mocking him mercilessly over not being able to figure out what the expression "someone donged it" meant, even from context, and my friend Liz declaring that Matt should be given an award for not defenestrating his disrespectful wife and daughter, so it hasn't ALL been bleak.

I told Matt I wasn't going to stay up too late last night, and then I stayed up too late last night. Finally went to bed and had the worst episode of restless legs in months, for hours. Woke up SO angry. Decided to go for a stupid walk for my stupid mental health.

The trail was so beautiful it felt like a knife-edged line between benediction and ridicule (only because I'm an asshole). I got a little bit lost and did the trail a couple of times to have more river-adjacent time. I sat on a rock and stared at the water. I tried unsuccessfully to be Zen.

As I got back to the trail head and got in my van, a man with a gorgeous yellow lab carrying a log were coming off the trail too. The dog was off leash, and they both stopped. The dog dropped the log, the man slipped it's collar and leash on and then THE DOG PICKED UP THE LOG AGAIN for them to walk home. I tried to express to the man how utterly charming and life-changing this little scene was to me. I felt like the Italian man Lucy and I came across once on a walk. He was gardening, so he was right down at her level. He just kept petting her and exclaiming "I love! I love!"

Nice that this smol shithead can do the same thing for others that that much-better-trained dog did for me. 

Then I came home and also came across these memories, which would surely lift the surliest spirits:

I was about to make a joke about finding a couple of old LCBO gift cards in my wallet with a decent balance on them yet, but I don't really like making jokes about drinking as a coping mechanism. So now I have no funny last words, which sucks. I'll have to settle for telling you that the matching outfits on Eve and Winnie the Pooh included a pull-up, and later they were both wearing pajama hats. Have a good day, everyone. See you tomorrow, 

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. 

September

 I'm just going to park some pictures and some simple descriptions here because I am ping-ponging between keeping myself just-a-little-bit-too busy to avoid missing my kids and overthinking things during the time of year when I am extremely prone to overthinking things. Some of the things going on have been:

-Going for a canoe paddle with my friend Dani, something I've been wanting to do for a long time. I was a bit apprehensive because 1) I haven't paddled in probably five years and I am markedly out of shape and 2) I am clumsy and lack balance and I was afraid I would fall in the river. Dani assured me that I would have to work really hard to fall in the river.

I fell in the river.

Dani swears it was her fault. I think it was probably her fault, because I was just sitting in the front of the canoe and she jumped in the back and then I was in the river, but the fact remains that in an entire summer of people canoeing with Dani, only I fell in. It was a warm night and I was pretty comfortable for the sunset paddle even drenched as I was, and I was really glad I did it. I've been trying to say yes to things that scare me the past few years. On the one hand, it sucks that things that other people would find laughably easy scare me. On the other hand, I don't have to, like, wrestle a tiger or sky-dive in order to say I've done something that scared me.

-Going to Bluesfest with our neighbours. Eve and I have been going to Bluesfest in July since she turned 12 and we decided to see if we both liked it, even though we both hate crowds and music that's too loud. We did - turns out that it being outside makes all the difference, although there was one Lumineers concert in the pouring rain where if the girl standing beside me brushed my arm with her clammy rain poncho ONE MORE TIME.... anyway. The last two summers it's been kaput because of Covid, which sucked, but there was an abbreviated concert series sponsored by Bluesfest last week in a different location, which vaccine proof needed and limited tickets available. 

I don't usually drink at Bluesfest because I want to be clearheaded enough to enjoy the music and I hate having to pee at Bluesfest. We threw that caution to the winds this time (the tequila was mostly so less liquid would be involved) and since there were fewer people, the crowds and the lines for drinks and toilets were very short or non-existent. 

It was SO MUCH FUN. Everyone was SO happy to be there, the audience and the performers - they kept saying "It's SO GREAT to be in Ottawa. Or, you know, anywhere!" We saw MonkeyJunk (knew nothing about them, they were excellent), April Wine (main reason for going, did not disappoint) and Tom Cochrane (enjoyed it even more than I thought I would). 

-Our 25th anniversary. We traditionally both forget our anniversary entirely. Last year Matt had gone to bed and I got an e-card from one of my parents' old friends, so I made a Facebook post saying I had been reminded of our anniversary and I was going to text Matt Happy Anniversary so he would wake up and feel bad that he missed it and I didn't (I was joking. Sort of. I did confess that I had help remembering). This year I got the Facebook memory of me being an asshole, so in the morning I texted him a picture of the aged banana he had meant to take to work but accidentally left on the end of the counter beside my mini fan farm. "Is this my anniversary gift? You shouldn't have." So we called Bluesfest our anniversary date. I am bad at mushy love stuff, but considering my chronically low self esteem and the high number of not-good dudes there are in the world, I got really, really lucky snagging this one.

(The dude, I mean. Not the banana)

My mom flew to British Columbia to spend a week with her sisters. She was in quite a state about having to fly alone during Covid, but she did well, and we had some nice hang time with my dad, including on his 81st birthday, when we got fish and chips and drank a box of wine.

I went to Montreal with Eve's friend's mom for Eve's friend's 18th birthday, to take her out for dinner and buy her her first legal drink (Quebec drinking age is a  year younger than Ontario's). We went to a super cute and fun Mexican restaurant and told the waiter it was Davis's birthday, and he did tequila shots with us in her honour and when she asked if he wanted to see her I.D. he said "no, that's okay, I believe you" and then, at the look on her face, said "I mean YES, I demand that you show me your I.D. right now."

Tomorrow I'm driving to Hamilton for the week-end to hang with Eve and see my old professor for dinner and stay with friends. Then I come home for three days before driving back to pick her up for fall break for a week and then driving back AGAIN to drop her off. My sister in law said "wait, which week-end are you coming?" and I said "All of them".

Our regularly-programmed angsty overthinking will recommence presently. 

Walking and Moving and Listening and Trying Not To

 Things are pretty good. Angus is having a really good time being back at school, although he was questioning his life choices a bit when I talked to him Sunday (something about jungle juice with the team Saturday night, I didn't pursue it). He's set up some shadowing at the hospital in cardiology and radiology, trying to figure out what his path is after this year.

Eve FaceTimes me pretty much every night, so I still get the Daily Download, from classes to meals to the giant-ass spider that lives outside her dorm window - I originally thought it was inside and wondered why she was so calm about it. She has to wear a mask if she goes anywhere, but she CAN go places - to empty lecture halls to study with friends from her program, to meals, to bonfires and parties. It's not what it would have been pre-Covid, but it's not what it would have been last year. I just read something about how some people believe that happiness stems less from how well things go than from whether things go better than expected - maybe this is that. 

On the week-end I hung out with a fellow empty-nester friend - IKEA and tea on Friday night because we know how to party, and dinner on a patio on Saturday because patio. Then I went for a really nice walk with a friend in Gatineau and had gelato by the History Museum. Look at me, out doing stuff! in the world! with people! 

Monday I went to work. My first day back the computer wouldn't turn on, so I took the roughly four hundred books that had been returned since we locked down last spring and sorted them and made great, teetering, towering piles all over the desk and tables. The computer issue was then rectified (hee hee rectified) and yesterday there were carts and carts of books to shelve, plus we have new shelves for the early readers so I spent the morning moving great quantities of books from one place to another.

It was as I was methodically plucking and separating and alphabetizing and slotting books that I suddenly realized I had been working accompanied by a steady stream of heinously negative self-talk. I became aware that I had been sort of nodding along to it, almost like it was music that was not enjoyable, exactly, but familiar enough that it could be mistaken for it. It was almost funny, except for the whole fact of my own brain trying to make me feel worthless and inadequate.

The good part is that I recognize the narrative now, as something that's trying to pass itself off as authentic but isn't really. The bad part is that I can work on turning the volume down, but I can't quite turn it all the way off. 

I leaned into the whole book-moving thing, walked the dog down to the polling station to vote and weeded a bunch of flower beds on Monday. Got called in to cover in the office and spent hours in a half-crouch filing report cards - RIP legs and back. The office was, predictably, a shitshow, but in a mostly funny and entertaining way. I like being there - I've never worked in an office as an office-y person before, and it feels like one of the more normal things I've ever done, even though I frequently feel like a big loser there. I did walk in and announce that I had forgotten everything over the summer and would have to be re-taught, but I didn't really think it was true. Then the first time I took a call, I said I'd transfer her and then stared at the phone blankly trying to remember how to put her on hold and then transfer the call. I had to put the phone down and whisper over to the other desk to ask Heather how to do it, and then she was laughing so hard she pretty much blew my cover. 

The summer felt like a bit of a reprieve from Covid for us, even though I'm well aware that this pandemic is far from over. We may well be in the calm before (between) the storm, but of course, when aren't we? And I'm just going to leave it there before I wind up ending on a Finding Nemo reference.