Meh

Everything seems kind of digital these days. Either the fridge is overflowing with food and I can't figure out where to put anything and that's annoying, or it's nearly empty and there's room for everything but I'm panicky at the thought of having to go shop again. Either I get up and feel like doing multiple errands and accomplishing numerous household tasks or I can't summon up the will to do anything. Either I remember I have a blog or.... you get the idea.

I stared at the calendar for an uncomfortably long time trying to figure out which week we were in. Somebody tipped me off that my phone shows the date when it turns on, which was something I could have happily gone the rest of my life without knowing, but now it's essential. Angus and I have gone almost completely nocturnal - we sleep from four a.m. or so until noon or so. He gets up and Matt has left him a cup of coffee that is now cool enough to be iced with minimum effort. I get up and make lunch for everyone - no clue if anyone eats breakfast. Matt gets up early to work and goes to bed early. Eve ping pongs around between everyone's schedules. Sometimes she goes to bed early and sometimes she comes into our room at 1 a.m. because she can't sleep and Matt goes to sleep downstairs and she plays Animal Crossing beside me while I read. Animal Crossing is.... really weird.

I still have more sleep shame than I think I should. All the evidence points to the fact that my body just operates on a different schedule than the socially acceptable one, which should be fine if I still get my work done and take care of my family and right now who on earth should give a fuck when I go to bed or get up? And yet if my mom calls or someone drops something off at ten a.m. and I'm still asleep, Matt will say I'm in the shower or out for a walk, as if I'm in the bathroom doing cocaine or out kicking puppies instead of just slightly out of phase with the world.

Matt and I started watching Ozark on Netflix. I usually don't really like drug shows, but Angus said it was really good and I love Jason Bateman and Laura Linney, and we're enjoying it so far. Angus and I are still making our way through the Neeson oeuvre. We watched Taken and Taken 2, which I thought were better than their Rotten Tomatoes rating - I only like action movies if they have some black humour or a different twist on the formula, and I felt like these did. Then we watched Cold Pursuit, which seems to be a Nicholas Cage movie with Liam Neeson in the lead instead - it was quite odd, and very entertaining. Angus fell out of his chair laughing when someone said "they shot the messenger".

It's so weird. Sometimes I love the weird family-pajama-party vibe. Sometimes I'm just so happy to have Angus here at the dinner table being goofy and needling Eve. But he's not really supposed to be here. But he is here. Maybe my head hurts so much because of all the cognitive dissonance.

I caught myself thinking today that after this is over I will never turn down a chance to go out with my friends again. Then I remembered that last Tuesday night I couldn't be arsed to sit in front of my computer and drink for our regular bar Zoom thing because I had gone grocery shopping and I just wanted to sit and stare at a wall for a while, so it will probably only take a couple of weeks before I am back to my own lame introvert self.

Ugh, this post is boring and I do not have the wherewithal to fix that. I could go find my phone and add some funny pictures, but that would mean I would have to go and find my phone.

Face Stuff Part Two

You have questions? I have answers! Well, not really, only in a very narrowly limited way. So like Sasha, I have been doing a lot of Zoom or Google virtual meetings wherein it is extremely difficult to avoid staring at my own face, and I also do not enjoy it in the least. Everybody else seems to look roughly the same and I seem to look like Oliver Platt (who I'm sure is a lovely fellow). I'm trying to get over it. I also agree that when I look at my face ruthlessly it seems that it would require a goodly amount of liposuction. I always get upset that when I smile for pictures my eyes disappear and Eve says I'm being dumb because 1) if I tried to smile and keep my eyes open I would have crazy eyes and scare people and 2) many people have cheeks that squish their eyes closed when they smile and she thinks that's nice. I should be more like Eve.

Also, I think Botox used judiciously might be less jarring than the lip filler. That's what my friend (Eve's friend's mother) has done and it looks great, by which I mean it's unnoticeable and I like her face. I'm not in a rush to try it because I think it's mostly for foreheads and I have bangs. I often hate that I have to have bangs (have you SEEN that meme going around about no matter how bored you are during quarantine you don't need bangs? HURTFUL!) but since I do, might as well look for the silver lining. 

To answer Lynn's questions: The injection is hyaluronic acid, which is an ingredient in a lot of skin care stuff, they're just injecting it under the skin instead of applying it topically. It subsides over about six months. It's very noticeable to the touch at first and then gets less and less so. Right now I can barely feel it at all (when did I get it done? Hmmmm... checking....oh, ha ha, it was Valentine's Day, so almost two months exactly. Honestly, if I could get this effect right away, I might consider doing it again, but I don't really think it's worth the money or the hassle.

On other skin care fronts, I did realize that it was a little bizarre that I went directly from Dove soap and a dab of Oil of Olay every night to shooting crap into my lips, so I decided to try something a little less drastic. The first thing I tried was buying Retinol A in Mexico, which I never would have thought of except my friend asked me to get her some. Like a total noob I didn't read the instructions or look up how to use it, and after three days it was burning my face off. I asked my friend how hers was working and she said "fine, if you used it the right way". I was like "ha ha yeah totally, the right way is....?" and she said "once every three days" ha ha YEAH, THAT MAKES SENSE. Eve was mortified when she found out about this and thereafter referred to it as my "sketchy Mexican wrinkle cream" and I stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. 

Happily, the same awesome-mother-having friend's grandmother (by marriage) sells Rodan & Fields and is ALSO AWESOME, so I decided to try some of her wares, partly just so I could hang out with her for an hour. I bought a microdermabrasian paste, an under eye cream for night (actually I think I'm supposed to use it in the morning and at night, but I don't) and a big-ass tub of moisturizer, plus an "unblemish" mask for my oily t-zone. It took me a while to get into the groove of using it, but now that I am ( for a couple of months) I think I am seeing subtle results - my skin looks a little brighter and I'm comfortable going without makeup even when I'm dressing up to go out. This isn't a huge deal, since the most makeup I usually do it lipstick, mascara and a bit of concealer on the spider veins on my right cheek and the sides of my chin. Eve commented that my skin looked nice at Easter dinner. 

So yeah - maybe consider smearing shit ON your face before trying the shit that they shoot INTO your face. Thank-you for coming to my Ted Talk. 

Stupid Things I've Bought Lately: Facial Injectables

I thought I was going to make a series out of this, back when I posted one in November 2016 for NaBloPoMo, but as with many things, I did not follow through. I do, however, buy stupid things on not-so-rare occasion, so maybe it will still be a thing! Who knows?

Easter was nice, with obvious caveats. My mom cooked the turkey and stuffing. I cooked mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts. I feel like I got the better end of this deal, except that her house ended up smelling like turkey and mine ended up smelling like Brussels sprouts. I sent the boys over to do the food trade - we put our food down, ring the doorbell, back up two metres, they open the door, put down their food, we have a brief chat from the driveway, they pick up food and go inside, we pick up food and go home.

We also talk on the phone every day, but I hate that I can't squish them. 

We had a nice family dinner, and then I bottomed out really badly. I don't know if I was coming down with something (weird since I go basically nowhere, but there's the grocery store, I guess), or my brain hijacked my body, but I felt achy and flu-ridden and horrible. I went to bed to read and fell asleep before eleven, which is approximately four hours before my usual bedtime right now. Yesterday I still felt weirdly exhausted - like, needed to sit down and take a rest after finally dragging myself out of bed to shower - and today I feel much better. Also, yesterday I was sobbing because I felt like such a useless waste of skin and today I'm feeling like I should maybe have just trusted my body to know what it needed instead of always fighting against it. Sometimes I am dumb.

So. The face thing. I don't look down on people who do cosmetic surgery or botox, but I've never really considered it seriously, partly because I'm too cheap, partly because I couldn't see an easy path to getting it done, and partly because nothing I don't like about my face seems easily fixable. But a friend that I have because she's Eve's friend's mom (and YAY for Eve making that friend, because the friend AND the mom are AWESOME) does some stuff and is loud and proud and open about it (and looks great), so a couple of months ago I went on a ridealong, thinking that I might try something tiny if it sounded reasonable. 

We went for lunch first. At the end of lunch, our cute young waitress asked if we had plans for the rest of the day and we happily announced that we were getting stuff shot into our face, and joked about how we would be careful not to do the lip thing that makes you look like you stuck your lips in a bottle trying to look like Kylie Jenner. Ha ha. 

Sooo, we rolled up to the office and went in and I showed her the line above my lip that I don't like. She said I could either do a little Botox, which would make it hard to drink from a glass, or do half a syringe of lip filler. 

Like, WHAT? The thing that I JUST SAID I DEFINITELY WOULDN'T DO?? She explained why it would be the more obvious solution. I nearly walked, but then I thought, what the hell, I'll try it once just so I know, it'll be an experience. 

Jody held my hand because eeeeeuuuuaghhhhhh needles going into your lips is gross and painful. You know what else it does? Makes your lips swell up, EVEN MORE THAN THE EVENTUAL GOAL. By the next morning I looked like this:

Want to know the even funnier part? NO ONE NOTICED. I went out to dinner with friends the next day. I hung out with Eve and Matt all week-end. When I finally confessed to Eve she was livid that I hadn't told her, and I was like YOU'RE upset? None of my friends and family know what I LOOK LIKE!! (Is it possible other people are not as obsessed with the minutiae of my facial topography as I am? Barely). I feel like if someone I know had done this I would have noticed. I remember way back before I even knew that collagen injections were a thing, watching Star Trek TNG and thinking, 'the fuck's going on with Troi's LIPS?' 

Anyway, I won't do it again. It pretty much solidified the suspicion I already held that it's just not possible to fix your face just so it looks better or younger - if you mess with one part, it changes the other parts. It's very subtle, especially by this point, and the tiny line is gone, but I just don't quite look like me in the mirror, and I don't like it. I also hate how I can feel the little pockets of filler when I put on lipstick, *shudder*. It's cool, at least now I know. Back to Dove soap and a dab of moisturizer and fretting over the tiny line when it comes back - fretting less now, because clearly nobody I see regularly looks at me ANYWAY, I mean GOD. 

Random Crap

Angus posted this to our family chat: 

Eve has this problem on days when she doesn't go to school (which is now all the days) that if she gets dressed, Lucy thinks that means she's taking her for a walk. She follows her around nosing the back of her legs and if she stops she sits wagging her tail looking up expectantly. Mostly this is a good thing because it gets Eve out of the house and getting a little exercise every day. On the days when somebody else has already said they'll walk Lucy or it's raining and she really doesn't want to go, it's hilariously annoying. Sometimes I hear her yelling "I'm not getting dressed to take you out, I'm getting dressed so I don't GET DEPRESSION!"

Today she came down to do something in the kitchen and kept saying "stop looking at me like that! We're not going out!" "I'm ignoring you!" "She really thinks we're going". Then a few seconds later, "So... we're going, I guess". She maintained eye contact for too long. Rookie mistake.

I was trying to think of something I did when I was seventeen in a pandemic-less world. All I came up with was this bizarre memory of going with my boyfriend and my best friend and her boyfriend who was also my boyfriend's best friend (sorry) to some dance at the... legion, maybe? Why? Dunno. I felt like I looked incredibly hot in my peak late-eighties style - a magenta-purply sweater with like a kelly green collared thing underneath and a long jean skirt. Sexayyyy. My poor best friend had had to have surgery for some leg problem (she was a dancer) so she was in a cast and a pink Ralph Lauren sweatsuit. Her and her boyfriend did some remarkably creative chair dancing. At one point I was coming out of the bathroom at the same time as a fifty-ish man and he yelled "you're so drunk! -- oh! not you, sweetie, the old people." We got totally shitfaced and started writing stuff on Danielle's cast. Someone put a dot and wrote "they say this is a very sensitive spot" and then my boyfriend put an arrow to the dot and wrote "push here 4 orgasm". She thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen, but eventually realized that she couldn't go to our (Catholic) school like that so she whited out orgasm and wrote oranges. 

Usually at this point in a blog post I would look for a way to tie all this together. I don't think there is one, other than I feel pretty lucky to be shut in with the people I'm shut in with, and I miss my friends. And, looking back, I'm also pretty happy that I seem to have kept up my early talent for surrounding myself with weird people who make me laugh. 

New Post, With Ninety-Five Percent Less Porn

Although I did just get this notification from the library:

IT'S A MYSTERY, I swear!

I keep seeing people talking about how important keeping to a healthy routine is during all this. Exercise daily, eat at the same time, go to bed and wake up at the same time, etc. etc. I tried that and I felt like absolute shit. It just made me realize that much more how fucked up everything is. So that's great if that's what works for you. I started feeling better when I said fuck the routine. Start reading a book at midnight, finish at 6 a.m. and sleep until noon? Why the hell not? Cook eight things in one day so I don't have to make dinner every single goddamned night? Sounds good to me! (Eve said Matt came up and confided that he thought I'd gone slightly loony the other night when I was making three kinds of chicken, pulled pork, a vegetable stir fry and taco meat and biscuits. WHO'S THE LOON NOW, HONEY? (Still me, but we have lots of food, so...)

My arm has been agony and the chiropractor and physio place are closed, of course, so sleeping was rough along with everything else and I was feeling pretty disheartened. I've been trying not to overdo it on painkillers, which I finally realized was stupid because the whole point of them is to, like, kill the pain, so I took a hefty dose of codeine yesterday and what do you know, much less pain. I can't do that every day because it kills my stomach, but at least I know when I need a break from the pain I can get one. My hands have mostly gone down to their normal size and stopped buzzing too.

I just found out that one of the teachers at my school doesn't drive so I have offered to pick up groceries for her, which will finally make me feel like I have a use other than feeding my family and not going outside. Angus is home two weeks today and we're all symptom-free, which is good because we can get our own groceries now. On the other hand, if we'd gotten it and gotten better we would no longer be so worried about getting it. 

I'm going to go for a walk now (just because I feel like it, not because it's part of my routine! I am a three-year-old). Hope everyone is doing as well as possible under the circumstances. 

Content Warning

A couple of weeks ago I was on Twitter and I saw a hashtag that I wasn't familiar with - I think it was describing a disease. I punched it into the search bar, but instead of THAT hashtag, it gave me another hashtag that was in enthusiastic use in Gay Twitter. As in, I was suddenly face-to-NOT FACE with a close-up of an erect penis (I'm not being coy with the "it was an accident", if I was looking for dick pics I would cheerfully admit it). I snort-laughed because it was unexpected, but then I started reading the comments, and it was a thread of men complimenting each other exuberantly on their erections and saying "We should all destroy each other's holes!" It was all kind of.... wholesome.

A few days into near non-stop virus coverage, Eve looked up from her phone and said "Pornhub is giving isolated people in Italy free subscriptions! Isn't that nice?"

In non-penis-related news? Yesterday I had a lovely Twitter exchange with one of my favourite authors, who also answered the first fan letter I sent him seventeen years ago.

I'm always a bit disappointed but not terribly surprised when I find out that someone I admire as an actor or a writer is not as great as I have imagined them to be. It's really great, though, to find out that someone I admire as an actor or a writer is in reality just a really nice person. (And yes, I did later realize that it looks like I was pregnant with a broken-femur-having two-year-old and I did die inside a little, fine, are you happy, shut up, leave me alone).

Then I bitch-retweeted the former Governor General, just to make things that little bit more surreal.

Also, pornhub is now in my computer search terms because I looked to see if it was spelled PornHub. Which reminds me of when we were at our friend's annual huge Christmas party and the kids were all upstairs and we were having one of our typically wide-ranging discussions which somehow wandered onto whether p*dophiles have a gender preference. I tried to type "do p*dophiles have a gender preference" into my phone's search bar, an endeavour which I am shaky with at the soberest of times, which this was not, and I have no idea what I actually typed. Eve chose this moment to come down and see what was going on in the kitchen, strolled up and put her arm around me, glanced down at my phone and said casually "Hey Mom. Why are you on Grindr Gay Chat?"

Why yes, Grindr is now also in my computer search history. I should just worry less about spelling things correctly.

So. How's your pandemic going? Right for the junk, like ours?

Plague Diaries: Isolation Day 6

Yes, theoretically I have more time to blog now. Practically, I look at my computer with a grimace of distaste and think "what's the point?"

I am trying to overcome this feeling of overwhelming malaise. I am immensely comforted by the fact that we're all going through this together. I've commented on a couple of blogs, agreeing that it would be worse if this was a Terrible Thing that had happened to just one of us, or just one of our children, taking them out of college, derailing their hard-won successes, throwing everything into uncertainty, and then watching the world move on without us/them. That happens, and it must be such a lonely feeling. This is not that.

Eve has said that she's fine if she doesn't go back to school until next year, or even has to take an extra year of high school. "You always said we should still have grade thirteen", she observed, which is true. She is still working on a baffling English project - it's on the Life of Pi, and she had to draw a pie on a giant piece of paper and then fill in each wedge AND the rest of the paper with tiny writing on a variety of themes in the book. I keep wondering if this teacher has super-human vision, because even if she DIDN'T have to try to read it on the photograph that she's now going to be getting it makes my head ache thinking about trying to read that miniscule script. Not surprisingly, Eve is finding it difficult not to procrastinate - she takes frequent dance breaks in my room between wedges of pie.

We are all in self-isolation since Angus came home from New York Tuesday night (five and a half days and counting). Angus hasn't left the house at all. Eve, Matt and I have been out to walk Lucy and have not been within many metres of another person. It's both a little creepy and comforting to know that every day we do this is another day flattening the curve and protecting someone we might have infected (although no one is showing any symptoms, so maybe not on the second). We try to make sure we have a Family Time every day, because we are a family of introverts all processing the current weirdness and our house is spacious enough that we can all hermit excessively if we're not careful. We watched the second of the new Jumanji movies a couple of days ago which was hilarious (The Rock and Awkwafina doing Danny DeVito. Kevin Hart doing Danny Glover. People switching their avatars halfway through - y'all, there were some acting chops on display here). Matt got Eve to watch Escape from Witch Mountain on Disney Plus with him yesterday - oh my god I loved that movie and oh my god it does not hold up remotely. And as Eve said "you can just tell they thought they were KILLING IT."

We did a virtual pub night via GoToMeeting with seven friends. Even with the technical glitches it was pretty awesome. One friend drank four glasses of wine then passed out on the couch beside her husband still in view of the webcam. Some people couldn't stop moving and some people were so eerily still you'd keep thinking they'd frozen. We tried to take pictures of people toasting at the sides of their frames, but then realized that we were all in different screen positions on each other's computers and it was extremely difficult. One friend had to switch to her phone when her husband went to bed in the room with the computer, and on the phone you can only see whoever is talking instead of seeing everyone, and she was also kind of drunk, so she looked baffled and terrified, as if she was in one of those horror movies where everyone is in a group video chat and someone suddenly gets murdered.

Matt spent two days clearing out Angus's bedroom in the basement which was originally a spare room/office before he moved down there. Just as he had set up a good workspace for himself, Angus decided to come home. He has now done basically the same thing in Angus's old bedroom upstairs. I can't find the tweet now, but I saw one that said "You knew women working from home are on the couch with a MacBook Air and a cup of tea and men have a three-monitor set-up and the loudest keyboard they could find at Best Buy". I showed it to Matt. "I only have two monitors" was his defense. It's fine. I've decided when we can go out again I will do all the grocery shopping and anything else because he has to work and we can better afford for me to be sick. And since it's Angus's old bedroom there's a bed in his office if I need to be quarantined (there used to be both a loft bed and a single underneath, which prompted Eve to say "man, Angus has a lot of beds that he never sleeps in).

Okay, turns out I'm just as good at blathering about nothing as I ever was. Whew. Stay safe, friends. Stay away from other people if you can. Go for a walk unless, like here, it's FUCKING SNOWING. Way to add insult to injury, Mother Nature.