Five Years of Covid

Like many emergencies, things started slow, far away: a headline about a new, fast-spreading virus in China. A stock market dip. A growing sense of unease. We travelled to America on February 20, 2020 and had a great vacation, but by the time we came back a week later, I was hissing at my family members not to touch anything at the airport. Covid had arrived. 

March 1, 2020 was our last normal night: freshly back in Stratford, the three of us went to a close-down party for a local bar. It was busy—half-price hors d'oeuvres will really pack the house—and my funny four-year-old cut a dagger glare at the hapless waiter before collapsing into giggles over his sliced cucumber. March 11 was my last normal day, when a friend and I sat in a coffee shop, and I remember feeling subversive, as though we might be told to move along, like what we were doing was wrong. March 13, Noah came home from preschool for a "two week break," Mike somehow made his way from his Toronto office to his family in Stratford, and it all began for real. 

The first few weeks were dreamy, but I don't mean they were easy. They felt unreal. Everything was closed: the library, the coffee shops, the YMCA. I felt like we had fallen into a story, a false reality that we had all been primed for by movies like Twelve Monkeys and books like The Stand. There was so much information: numbers climbed, social media throbbed with misinformation and anecdata, sirens for health care heroes and otherwise healthy people dropping dead in emergency rooms. Italy, Seattle, New York, Wuhan. We were told to flatten the curve. Australia took a stringent approach; Sweden was relaxed. Toronto was somewhere in there, with confirmed cases and hotspots, empty subways and shuttered restaurants. Thank god my husband could work from home. Thank god my nurse friend was on maternity leave. Small mercies.

By 2020, my family had survived three rounds of cancer. We had a handle on that, kind of: suspicion, imaging, surgery, infusions, recovery, hallelujah, hallelujah. We are lucky to live in a place where healthcare is free, or close enough, and in a time when treatment is available and effective. So far, no one has died. But this? This new thing? We washed our hands until they were raw. We sat six feet apart. Eventually, we masked, first with fabric and then with N95s. But thing was, we couldn't see it. We didn't know we were sick until we ran a fever, a gorilla sitting on our chests, writhing with migraine or shuffling with fatigue. It was a respiratory illness until it was a cardiovascular one. People got Covid; sometimes, they didn't get better. 

Having lived through chaos before, it's hard to reconcile how much of your day is still taken up with normal things, even in the depths of uncertainty. You still put the baby to bed, you still eat spaghetti, you still watch TV. I worked in the garden, pulling weeds and turning over the flowerbeds, chatting to people as they walked by. I planted seedlings in our mudroom, half-convinced it wouldn't work. We ordered takeout every Friday—Thai food, to support an Asian-run business as Chinese people elsewhere were targeted. We watched Drag Race. But I also sat on the front porch and read the New York Times and felt my nervous system roil with dread, with the deepest anxiety I had felt in my life. 

Going from a long-distance marriage to one where we were together 24/7 was hard. I fretted about my parents, who lived in the country, and my brother, who lived in the city. Parenting was constant, a steady drip of snacks and screen time and guilt. On Mother's Day, I cried because my family joined me for a workout; all I wanted was to be left alone. I grieved the uncertainty of the future: would Noah start kindergarten in the fall? Would my work, which had dried up in the early days of the pandemic, come back to me? Noah made videos on my phone, warning us in a little-kid voice to mask up and wash our hands. 

I will skip through the subsequent years—my brother-in-law died that summer, and we grieved in strange, stunted ways. Trump was finally voted out of office, but not before George Floyd died, leading to mass protests in a time when we were discouraged from mass anything. Noah did start kindergarten, and then did online classes. Some friends became Covid deniers and cheered on the "trucker convoy" that invaded Ottawa, and others locked themselves away. We got vaccinated, and then again, and again. I wore a mask for a long time. Wordle, Duolingo, the crossword. Visits with family, sometimes furtive, sometimes not. It was hard to know what "right" looked like. Public health became political, and it turned out that I didn't like everyone's politics.

In April 2022, we were part of the massive second wave of illness that came when the Ontario government loosened public health restrictions, including no more masking in schools. Almost instantly, we were infected. Once it happened, I had a strange sense of relief—oh, finally—and dread—now what. 

Five years can be a lot, or a blink. Any parent can attest that five years is nothing—the baby is now in kindergarten, somehow?—and five years can be eternal. People change. Friendships fade. Relationships sour. Covid started when I was 36; now I'm 41, in another decade of my life. My child doesn't remember a time before Covid, but also, blessedly, doesn't really remember those early days. Noah has friends, extracurricular activities, hobbies, games. We still have a stack of masks by the front door. A normal childhood.

Five years later, I still feel anxious when my breath gets tight. Again? Will this be the one that lays me out?  I remember when walking to the grocery store each week and shopping into our bike trailer was my one big outing, but I've learned to drive and bought a car, and groceries don't take two hours anymore. My marriage ended. My parents are alive. I think about packing masks when I go to Toronto, and then forget them. I wrestle with health anxiety more than I like. I go for coffee.

 Things were weird, and so we all got weird for a while; most of us stayed that way, to be honest. Phrases like "antivaxxer" and "lockdown" entered the vernacular and the identity-politics arena. Covid exposed some of our raw edges and ugly parts, and it's hard to tuck those away again. Am I grateful to know which of my friends don't vaccinate their kids? Not really, no. Are they grateful to know I emailed my MPP to complain about the lack of wastewater testing? I doubt it.

Any good retrospective will tell you what we all learned—about each other, ourselves, and the world. I learned that we can withstand a lot, but that it will take a toll. We did come together; we also fell apart, collectively and individually. We live in a time when we are suspicious of each other, of institutions like government and public health, and it cost people their lives. This is not theoretical—thousands of people died because they didn't want to be vaccinated, they didn't want to wear a mask. Freedom, personal responsibility, collective action. Information, misinformation. Trust.

We might lose each other, in the withstanding. 

We might not. 

Image by Nathaniel Russell from the Fake Fliers series

Greek Love

Elspeth Diederix

In (late) honour of Valentine's Day, a meditation on different types of love.

Eros (sexual passion): Of course, our first entry is the one about sex. Most of my romantic relationships have been built on a foundation of sexual attraction; in the end, that attraction hasn't ever been quite enough to carry us over the times when Eros goes missing. When I was younger, sexual passion was a proxy for romantic connection: if he wants to get freaky, it must mean love. (As you can imagine, it has taken a lot to unpack that particular assumption, both in my own brain and in regarding the expectations I put on others.) And while I like and enjoy sex, there have been times, such as during the immediate postpartum and deep stress, when my sex drive is nil. When the times get tough and the sexual passion goes out the window, is there enough genuine affection and connection to maintain a bond?  What of eros then? When the fire of sexual passion banks down, are we left with glowing coals or ashes?

Philia (deep friendship): I met my bestie on Day One at the University of Toronto; we had a whirlwind friendship for a few months, a falling out that lasted another few months, and then a reconciliation that has stuck us together ever since. I met my bestie when a mutual friend connected us so I could help her with a sticky knitting project, and then we discovered that we have the same creative priorities. I met my bestie in the back of a school bus during a school trip to Toronto, and reconnected a few years at a local bar (me, drinking; him, serving). I met my bestie when our kids were in the same class, and I showed up crying at her house the day my marriage ended. I met my bestie in grade nine, and we have the same laugh about the same things. My top-tier, longstanding, deeply textured friendships? My god, my god, how lucky I've been. 

There is overlap between romance and philia, of course: the number of people who say "I'm marrying my best friend" is...a lot. Friendship, deep affection, deep love for the person as they are should be at the core of every relationship, but I don't think it's always there. The opposite of eros is revulsion; the opposite of philia is contempt. One-third of all marriages end in divorce. Make of that what you will.

Philia deserves a longer meditation from me, because it's truly been the through-line of my life. While, in my 20s, I yearned for a romantic partner, my friends were the ones who brought me the best joy. The heaviest griefs in my life have been around friendships gone sour—I mourned those for years, and still sometimes do. I am not downplaying my boyfriends and ex-husband, because those were important and often very good relationships, but my friendships ask different things of me, and deliver different things in return. Friendships don't have the relationship escalator that romance often includes; if you're very close, you might travel together or have a weekly standing coffee date, but most of the time, you're not trying to get to the next stage of friendship; you're just loving and enjoying each other. 

Ludus (playful love): This is the love I feel for my kid when they're being extra sweet at bedtime, and the love I feel for my cat when she plays fetch. This is laughing with my sister about the Connections at 11:47 on a Tuesday night. This is memes all day long. Deeply and meaningfully unserious.

Agape (love for everyone): Every so often, I have an experience that can only be called "being alive on this planet," and it fills me with awe, wonder, and a sense of cosmic connection. It's brought on by highlight-reel events like the solar eclipse or the aurora borealis, sure, but also by particularly beautiful sunsets and seeing fireflies at dusk. It's being in a dark room listening to music, or walking beside a body of water where I can't see the other side. It's the absolutely fed-up cashier taking a breath and saying "how can I help you?" when all she wants to do is hit the break room. It's walking through a gallery and seeing what we make with our hands, or the feeling of cashmere sweater, or listening to my dad laugh in another room. It is the sense that we're all in this together, on this little planet, and we are connected through sound and memory and touch and care. It's not particular, no me and them, just us, all together. It's earthy and sacred, just like we humans. 

Storge (family love): My last name means beloved in Polish. I've sometimes wondered when that was adopted or bestowed—what particular family was like, "Yes, we are beloved, it is who we are." I like being from people, my lineage of family members stretching back over time and space. I like my immediate family very much: the comfortable jumble of shared history, old grudges, half-remembered advice, hand-me-downs, jokes, affection, secrets, and connection. I like being a mother (but I will admit that single parenting is a sensory nightmare). I miss my grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles. I love when I am deemed an honorary auntie. The family bond is a sometimes weird one—would we choose these people? not always—but it has given me a place to learn what love is and what it can do.

Mania (obsessive love): When I met my first serious boyfriend, it was a love song: I had the physical sensation of falling, of electricity in my body, of feeling sick with it. I was not unprepared—I had been waiting to fall in love since my first encounter with Sweet Valley High—but I was not ready for the totalizing physicality of it. I was in love like it was a place. He was more experienced in relationships, and did not feel the same way—he liked me, yes, and we traded "I love you"s—I was into him in a way that was not totally rational. I loved loving him. When we broke up a year later, I was devastated; he moved on quickly. Obsessive love is not romantic; it was like being caught in a trash compactor. Reciprocal? Total insanity. One-sided? One-sided insanity. I don't know what my brain sparked on that made me feel this way—and I haven't felt it since—but that first boyfriend was my heroin and it fucked me up.

Pragma (longstanding love): Pragma obviously shares a source with the word "pragmatic," a matter-of-factness that defines the type of long-term partnership that comes after the fires of eros have burned down a bit. Pragma can feel a bit bloodless, focused more on rational action than emotional connection. But also: what is love, if not an verb? As in: who is picking the restaurant and booking the babysitter? What do you mean, you watched an episode without me? I will take out the trash if you finish the dishes. I got you a Fresca because I know you like it. You're a great partner. I'm proud of how far we've come. I'll drive for a while.

Falling Apart

Charlotte Chauvin

I am falling apart. I mean that physically, of course—there is a list of small complaints, from a touchy calf muscle that has pestered me since the spring, to the inevitable spectre of death that haunts us all—but also mentally and, to some extent, spiritually. 

The physical stuff is both the easiest and the hardest. I am 41 years old, a woman wading into the waters of perimenopause, which could be the cause of many or all or none of my chief concerns. I am fat, which could lead to high blood pressure, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease. Plus, I'm anxious, which means that in my head, I am already dead. My health tends to be where I put most of my existential worry; this is due to several immediate family members having had their own experiences with cancer, and the prevailing sense that none of us are safe from anything, ever. Each twinge and tremor is the big one. I second-guessing myself all the time—my pee smells like popcorn, but only once in a while; do I have diabetes or not? Should I investigate this scaly bit on my boob, or assume it's dry skin because it's January and so arid in my house that the cat and I regularly give each other static-electric shocks? Do I have a DVT, or do my boots just suck? When everything sets the alarms to blare, it becomes mightily hard to parse out the true fires from the regular human-body-nonsense smoke. 

I wish I could go to my doctor and be like, "what should my threshold even be?" but he will give me some line about trusting my gut, or he'll tell me not to worry (as effective a strategy as telling the wind not to howl), or he'll look at the lumps and the scaly bits and go "let's run some tests!" And then I will have to have tests, and wait for test results, and the process of doing that is so outrageously frightening that I might just die anyway of anxiety in the refractory period. If I was a different person, I would not fear the medical test result. I have so far (vigorously knocking on several different woods) avoided most major injuries, illnesses and diseases. My various lumps have all been benign. I know—I know—how lucky I am. And yet the fear remains.

Rationally, I can trace this feeling back to the one-two punch of my dad's brain surgery and my horrorshow of a labour & delivery back in 2015-2016. I know that getting slapped with the real torture of multi-day Big Pain absolutely rattled my relationship with my body. Hell, it took me years before I could exercise again, because breathing hard—like I did in labour—triggered panic attacks. My dad's cancer did the same thing, because sometimes, the lump is a big deal, and it is trying to kill you. Fear of death and fear of suffering walk hand-in-hand in Hieronymus Bosch's garden. 

I will acknowledge that aging does mean that the odds start tipping more towards serious stuff, when it comes to diagnoses, but historically in our house, age hasn't been the indicator it should be. My sister got her two cancer diagnosis before her 35th birthday—in cancer terms, she's considered a youth. So really, it could come for us at any time. And when I say us, I mean me. I have friends who blithely have mammograms and then just...put it out of their minds. This is not how I'm wired at all. I love my friends, but that is absolutely alien to me.

All of this to say: the process of aging, in this body, with this brain? I'm fucking terrible at it! So bad. I am constantly on edge. I'm also afraid of being a burden to the health care system by booking unnecessary appointments. I just braise myself in an oven of misery until I feel insane. 

Okay, so that's the physical stuff. The emotional stuff? Well, did you know that being a single mom is hard? The 1980s sitcoms were correct! I am grumpy as fuck. My kid goes to the city every other weekend, which is not a lot of time to do a full hosedown of my body, spirit, and house. I spend a lot of time nagging, which I fucking hate—I used to be a cool mom, and now I suck.

Really, if I'm being honest, I am still sort of sad about the end of my marriage? My ex moved on in about three months, which, like, fine. I decided to take longer, quite deliberately—I wasn't going to dive into a relationship that replicated all the issues of my marriage just because I don't like to eat dinner alone. I wanted to unpack, I wanted to reset. I wanted to feel like myself again. I like myself! Pretty much! Mostly!

And so I did that, and it was the right choice. But now I teeter—do I start dating again? Now? But I'm still fat and a little sad! I have wretched medical anxiety! I am a tenant, a member of the contract economy, and I sometimes shop at Walmart! Being separated makes me feel like damaged goods, and being a grouchy single mom, doubly so. I know my worth, but I feel like I should be on sale. 

(This doesn't even begin to touch on the sociopolitical grief that many of us, including me, are feeling. The recent Trump election and Elon's Nazi salute and the L.A. wildfires and the Neil Gaiman revelations and the looming sasquatch of Pierre Polievre and all of it are just such a collective head-squeeze. The phrase I can't even is overutilized on the internet, and really, we must even, but goddamn, I am so tired of bad men and climate change.)

My cocktail of medical anxiety—which comes and goes, through my life, but is really flaring up now—plus also feeling like *whisper voice* kind of a loser, plus, you know, the general state of the world, has led to a spiritual wailing. My life isn't hard, really, but it feels gritty—another cloudy day, a hair in my sandwich, late for school again. I'm a person who needs a fair amount of downtime, and my current life doesn't allow for much of that; or at least, not much that doesn't come with the shadow of what I "should be doing" cast over it all. 

And don't get me wrong: I am grateful for my body, even if it's constantly setting off alarm bells. I'm grateful for my kid, who will baldly tell me that I'm no fun in one breath and then leap into my arms with the next. I'm grateful for my work, my house, my family, my genetic legacy, those cloudy days, the walks to school even when we're late. I know I sound snide, or trite, but I truly do feel that way. But the gratitude is twined with feeling sad, and then feeling sad that I feel sad, and so on down the rabbit hole. I can't acknowledge the gratitude without saying: hey, it's been a hard time. I'm feeling rough. We're not doing toxic positivity in 2025, right? 

What this season of my life is teaching me is that I am not in charge. Not really. I can't control my body, or even how my brain reacts; I can only soothe the fretting parts of myself and do my best to get to the point of test results, even when it feels apocalyptic. I can't control my kid; I can only take a deep breath and remind us both that teeth need to be brushed and socks need to be worn. I can't control the weather; I can wear my best coat. And sometimes, my first response, my gut reaction, is small and mean; I can take a second to calibrate, even if that take a bit of energy. All those bit of energy add up, sure; but it's a muscle I'm building, not a battery I'm depleting.

Not being in charge feels like falling apart. It does not feel fun. But note: this is not a cry for help; this is for me to share the inside of my brain, to make it real, to externalize. I'm often scared to spit this poison out, especially because I feel stupid for having swigged it in the first place. This season of my life feels hard, like each fingerhold is being carved out of sheer rock as I reach for it. I hope that it is a mountain that I'm climbing. I hope the view at the top is good. I hope that when I get there, I can exhale.

Things That Happened in 2024

+January: We kicked off the year with a fair amount of struggling! Noah didn't want to go to school, I didn't want to go outside, our recently separated household was doing week on/week off parenting, which was too long for 2/3 of us, and it was all just sort of miserable. The winter was SO GRAY and we got barely any sun and everyone felt like we were trudging towards death's door. On the other hand, Noah did start therapy and that was useful, but sheesh, January was rough this year.

+February: My dad had a TIA so the doctor pulled his driver's license, and he decided to stay with me for a month. It was good, I think, for both of us: he could walk places and I could ferry him around, and it was nice for me to have another adult in the house to keep track of Noah.  I started the month in Toronto on a visit with friends and that was SO NICE; I ended the month by hosting book club and really swung for the fences with the snacks; that wasn't "nice," per se, but I do feel like I somehow won the non-competition that is book club hosting duties, even if it nearly killed me. (I made TWO ice creams! From scratch!)

+March: We went to Toronto for March break and stayed in a very generous friend's house! We went with our friends and so Noah had a playmate and I had an adult friend and it was mostly quite fun: we went to the AGO and the mall, and generally goobered around the city. Good times. My mom and I started remodelling the back room of my (rented) house: fresh paint and new floors. It was weirdly warm and everyone kind of freaked out about it.

+April: I saw an ECLIPSE, bro! This was intensely magical: the shadows got weird, it got chilly, and then the sun went away and then came back and both time the park full of people we were at cheered. It was extremely primal; if I was an Ancient People, I would have absolutely thrown a virgin in a volcano. Climate Momentum threw its third Earth Day Street Party, which was fun. I went dancing with friends and halfway through the night I was drunk and sobbing in the bathroom; 45 minutes later I lost my fucking mind to a Cure/Azalea Banks mashup that felt intensely healing.

+May: An apartment came up for rent in the co-op Mike and I put our names in for before we were even married, and after an agonizing week where he asked me repeatedly to move to Toronto, he decided he would do it himself. This was...devastating. I was shocked—the anger would come later—but it was clearly a decision that would have huge implications for everyone. Noah set up a "pink fizzes" stand and sold fake lemonade to neighbours. I caught a huge head cold and passed my G road test despite being absolutely cooked on Sudafed. I also went on my first, and so far only, Internet date—we talked for three hours, but 1.5 of them were about his fear of commitment. It was, as the kids say, mid.

+June: The car my parents had loaned me had died a slow death in May (not my fault, she was fifteen years old and had paid her dues). In absolutely serendipitous news, a friend connected me with a man who was selling his car, and with some savings and a loan from my parents, I became the owner of a Kia with a functional battery and air conditioning! Huge news. I did a 40th birthday do-over party in which only a handful of people came but I drank, and then spent three whole days feeling like absolute hot garbage. (I have not had a drink since!) Mike and I started mediation, which was expensive and, as I'm writing this in December, still not complete! :/ I went to a friend's wedding in a library and Noah surfed on a handtruck and ate cupcakes for dinner; it was pure magic.

+July: This was the interim period between Mike's decision to move and his actual move out date, so I was a little on edge. I went to the Beaver Valley and had an awkward time with an ex-friend (it was fine, but sheesh). (The Valley and the other friends remain beautiful, as always.) Noah did two weeks of dance camp and had a great time. I did an art project where I put enormous googly eyes on the downtown flower planters, which brought me GREAT JOY. July felt fine, except that it really wasn't fine. I was just holding my breath.

+August: Mike moved. Noah went to Toronto for two weeks and so naturally I had stomach issues for ten entire days, including three days in the city when I was literally relying on Gatorlyte and bananas to stay alive. I still don't know what the hell that was, but damn, it was painful. However, going to Toronto was otherwise pretty great—there is now an Ikea in the downtown core, it's thrilling. I also spent time at the beach with my folks and my sister, and it was a nice, normal time. 

+September:  The Usual Suspects came for Labour Day weekend and it was so nice. I started doing a Couch to 5K program, and oh man, I did not feel athletic! Noah started grade three and we had some new routines, schedules, and mindsets to tackle some of the ongoing anxiety; it's always a work in progress, and will probably be that way forever.

+October: We got a cat! Legal name Marshmallow, house name Masha.  She is an exceptionally sweet little orange tabby who sleeps on her back and will kill spiders for me, so she's THE BEST. I finally saw the Northern Lights, like, for real-for real, and much like the eclipse, it was pure magic. It was a heck of a year, astronomically speaking. I made Noah a Wolverine mask out of cardboard for Halloween, and it looked really cool. I continued to run, albeit very slowly.

+November: I finally got a CPAP machine, which took roughly 90000 nights to get used to. The American election happened; I always feel like a fool commenting on American politics, but goddamn, what the hell? I made a 'zine about community. I took myself out for a solo birthday dinner and had such a nice time with it.

+December: There was so! much! snow! I hosted the Kochany Christmas for the second year in a row, and everyone brought a lot of food and it was very nice. I went to the hospital with abdominal pain and it turned out to be epiploic appendagitis, which is a real, rare thing and will not kill a person, which is great. My wallet conked out, so I made myself a new one, and I love it. I also sewed a new hat and some neckwarmers, so maybe sewing is going to be a thing? Luigi Mangione became an internet sensation. Christmas at the cottage was very nice, and Noah was charming.

++YEAR IN REVIEW: This year, I did a lot of thrifting and spent a lot of time making art. I spent some time in percolation mode regarding physical fitness: I find myself struggling with motivation, and am hoping the new calendar helps me jump-start some new routines. I spent a lot of time with my parents, which was really good—they helped me get used to being a single mom, and gave me much-needed support in the earliest days. I also spent a lot of time alone, something that used to terrify me but I now treasure. Favourite hobbies like knitting felt thin, but I did some writing and some sewing. My work was great; my colleagues were supportive and generous with their time and energy. My friends were terrific, with check-in texts and sweet time together. I feel very lucky that I have so much rich love in my life.

+++2025 GOALS: I've been slowly trying to wrap my head around what fitness and health look like in this fifth decade of my life, so more progress on that. I want to return to making garments, but my knitting mojo is paused, and I need to just embrace that. I am trying to level up in my work life, so we'll see if that works out. And I want to try just an eentsy bit hard in my dating life: I feel a bit stuck in that regard, but I also know that too soon will be much worse than too slow. Creative goals in recent years were overwhelming, so I'm going to right-size the scale of them and try again. And honestly, in talking to a friend yesterday, I am so grateful to be myself—my messy, wondrous, hilarious, try-hard self—and just settling into the person I really am feels like a privilege. Count me in for more of that.

Postcards of Recommendation

 

Artist unknown

In the tradition of the New York Times Magazine, albeit homebrewed, truncated, and full of run-on sentences, I present: an incomplete list of things I highly recommend: 

Intergenerational friendships. I love being friends with my parent's friends and people my parents' age. I have managed true friendship only a few times, but I cherish it. I also love being friends with younger people, ranging from having beautiful little conversations with a five-year-old as we walk back from school together, to people who are just slightly outside of my own generation and who don't always get my cultural references but who indulge me nonetheless. One of the gifts of streaming culture is that all music is pop music and all TV is currently airing, so people will get your jokes. Turns out, we can all sing along to Kate Bush in the car together. 

Thrifting. God, I love thrifting. I like to shop if it's a turbo-charged treasure hunt that brings out my inner scavenger. I love getting weird clothes, like the gold sequinned jacket or the vintage one-piece that was designed for working in refrigeration. I love getting normal clothes, just armloads of Joe Fresh and Reitmans and Old Navy that I can integrate into my existing wardrobe. I love getting slightly fancy stuff for cheap, like a $90 pair of running shorts for eight dollars. And I LOVE unearthing a treasure. I bought a duvet cover for $16, and they sell for $300 new and are on the beds in the White House. I found a cashmere sweater that retails for $465 and someone had washed badly, bringing it from a XXL to a M/L—it's the softest thing in the universe. A block print from an esteemed Zambian artist cost me $5.99. I feel like I'm getting away with something. It's a rush. 

Neon yellow. It's my favourite.

Cats. The memes are true! Cats are great. They are goofy and serious. They communicate by blinking slowly and biting you. They watch the toilet flush like it's must-see TV. They sleep one thousand hours per day. They will hunt a random genera of thing—socks, pompoms, mice—and bring them to you while you sleep. They desperately want to be outside, even though that's silly. They also want to be in the refrigerator and the pantry and under your covers and in the basement rafters. Cats are great. 

Midlife crises. Okay, not the kind where you have affairs and blow up your family. Also not the kind where you buy ridiculous shit to prove you're still cool. I'm talking about the kind where you, like, go back to school to become a fashion designer. Or you move to Costa Rica and start your organic cocoa farm. You take a dance class because you always wanted to and never had. You start exploring your kinks or open up your relationship. You give in to your creativity. I'm sorry, did I call this a crisis? I meant a blossoming.

Lackadaisical prepping. With the most recent American election, and COVID nearing its five-year anniversary (what are we doing to celebrate?!), it's clearer now that we can't rely on each other to "do the right thing." It turns out that, for some people, that means wearing an N95 at the grocery store without complaining, and for others, that means racistly driving a hot tub into downtown Ottawa and blaring your horn eleven hours a day. I feel compelled to do some lazy prepping for whatever social recalibration is coming. In my 20s, we used to sit around and talk about our apocalypse survival skills; now, as we hamster-ball our way through this slow-motion apocalypse, those are just our regular day-to-day skills. I admire my friend who can butcher a chicken and entertain small children for months; I myself can knit socks and grow more tomatoes than a human should consume in a lifetime. I have friends who mend clothes, fix bikes, are nurses, raise chickens. All good skills! This a direct counterpoint to too-intense preppers, who are obsessed with guns and stockpiling MREs and installing tripwires on their compounds. No thank you. I want to bunk in with the artists in the conflagration, thank yew.

Weird cookies. My sister generally hates the cookies I make, and I don't blame her. I often include ingredients that are traditionally non-cookie, such as chili powder or grapefruit peel. But a weird cookie is a pocket crossword: just enough of a challenge to be interesting, but not enough to ruin your day, and often delicious.

The UUs. I started going to the Universalist Unitarian meetings (services?) in my hometown about six months ago, and it's been wonderful. I was raised in the Christian tradition, but always felt weird about it—I don't believe in the divinity of Christ, and they really want you to. But the UUs don't care. Their literature actually says, "We believe Jesus was a baby born to human parents," which feels like a relief. They are mostly very earnest middle-aged white people, which is fine—me too, me too—and they have a strong social justice and spiritual bent. I feel comfortable in a sacred space for the first time in my life, and I really needed that. 

Doing a shitty Couch to 5K. I've been working on the couch to 5K program, which is supposed to take nine weeks to complete, for over two months now. I have not progressed beyond week four. There are reasons for this—brutal fall allergies, terrible shoes, shin splints—but the reality is, I'm kind of lazy about it. I don't particularly enjoy running (although I do like swanning around after, looking at my step counter app, and feeling virtuous), but I wanted to get more fitness and running seemed like an easy way to do it. Anyway, I'm giving myself permission to suck at this, but to keep going, and that's been helpful. Maybe I will stay at week four forever! It literally does not matter, the running police will not come and put me in jail (I would be very easy to catch, I'm slow). Highly recommend this approach!

Extremely stupid crushes. I have a crush on a man I volunteer with, who is literally just a man-shaped human. Maybe he has great pheromones or I encountered him once while ovulating or his eyelashes are good, because I sweat this dude. I have no idea why. We literally never talk to each other. He is married. It's all so unnecessary. But I yearn! I have another crush on a man who works at a place I frequent, and I have overcorrected from being slightly too warm to slightly too chilly, because I literally don't know how to talk to anyone I want to kiss. I am terrible at having crushes! In high school, I would just stare at them during class, which, if you've ever been stared at, is SO obvious and off-putting. I never spoke to them. To this day, if I ever see them at No Frills, I literally hide! Why am I like this?! Anyway, now that I'm single again, I look forward to being an absolute disaster at early-stage dating. Everyone wish me luck!

Optimism Pop

Artist unknown

I recently read an article about Coldplay and Chris Martin that made me think. Coldplay is, of course, the globally known, highly lucrative band that first hit it big with their single "Yellow" in 2000 and then followed that up with about a zillion other hit singles. I still get a bit overcome when I listen to the piano riff from "Clocks," a song that was inescapable in the first few years of my 20s and is mystical and poppy in equal balance. Martin was famously married to, and then consciously uncoupled from, Gwyneth Paltrow, and the whole thing had a very earnest and wholesome aura. His daughter's name is Apple; the name evokes both crunch and shine, much like Martin, much like the band. 

The article's thrust was that Coldplay has become, "well, motivational," which Amanda Petrusich, the author of the piece, seems to find puzzling and, at times, corny. (Her word, not mine.) She contrasts Coldplay's straightforward motivationalism with bands like Bad Brains. The D.C. punks were able to capture an optimistic mindset in songs like "Attitude," in which they boast, at top volume and speed, of a "positive mental attitude" without losing their edge. The implication is that Bad Brains is more interesting, and maybe better.

I liked the article, and not just because it reminded me that Coldplay has been around for as long as I've been an adult, which is, quite frankly, weird. It also reminded me that our cultural conversation about happiness, positivity and art can be complicated.

When artists lean into positivity, it's easy to write that off as corny, because, you know, it often is. It comes across as unsexy. Coldplay's music evokes the starry eyes of infatuation but leaves out the primal sweat of the bedroom. In pop music, plaintiveness adds vinegar; yearning adds nettles; sexual aggression adds spice. These ingredients can be present in the musicality, like with Bad Brains, or in the lyrics, as in Taylor Swift's depresso-pop song "I Can Do It With A Broken Heart." Without those elements, music can become too sweet; some of the best pop songs are the saddest fucking thing you've ever heard in your life, sung over a glittery synth line. I don't dispute this. I'm dancing—and crying—alongside everyone else.

But we live in a tough world. The planet is warming, wealth inequality is real and growing, food and housing have become precarious for millions of people, and pop music is getting categorically sadder. Do we not, as listeners, deserve the option to escape into Chris Martin's Rumi-inflected cheer-up songs about love, possibility, and our place in the universe? For me, this conversation is also about when Beastie Boys got heavily into Buddhism: while developing a more cosmic understanding of themselves, they didn't sacrifice funkiness or style. Or Paul Simon, whose 2008 song "Love is Eternal Sacred Light" is written from the perspective of a playful God who wants nothing more than to go on a road trip. In fact, much of Simon's catalog could be filed under "optimism pop."

There's an critical implication that music that centres joy, or positivity, is somehow less worthy or serious that music grappling with darkness. I...reject this. I hate this posture. For me, there is nothing edgy about being on edge all the time. It is so easy to slip towards depression and to find media that reinforces that mindset, ending up in a sucking eddy of shitty feelings. I've seen it happen.

It can feel radical to lean into joy, connection, spiritual lift, community, and a sense of positive possibility. Coldplay music is but one avenue for this: for every Game of Thrones, we need a Ted Lasso. For every Thirteen, we need a 13 Going On 30. Our lives can't only be vinegar, nettles, spice. Deliciousness is in the balance.

I will never go see a Coldplay show—I'm nowhere near that level of fan—but I do admire the approach. Martin seems to take his job as mood-lifter and world-improver seriously. While he's still a musician and performer, he's also an avatar of possibility. If it's trite, well, then, so be it: things are allowed to be trite. We can like them anyway.

We live in a world where everything signifies something: there is nothing without political implication or cultural weight. I follow poetry accounts on Instagram and read articles about the meaning of Barack Obama's pants. It's nice when I can turn my brain off. It would probably offend Chris Martin to hear that his music is a bit of a respite from the constant thinking we're all doing, but I mean it as a compliment. We all deserve an escape, even for just a few minutes—say, the length of a pop song. Coldplay's music, and other optimism pop, is interesting without being a bummer, the lyrics are generally life-affirming, and the stance seems to be "this place could be beautiful, right?" Come with us, the music says, we can be different, for a while. If we want to be.

Your Fall HairyScopes

 

Sleight of Hand by Rokus Aleliunas aka Casual Polar Bear

 

As always, please feel free to read your sign, the signs of your lovers and children and enemies, the sign of the person you most admire, the signs you wish you were, and any other signs you'd like.

Aries: In 2013, normcore erupted. The proposal was simple: release ourselves from the hipster's aesthetic chokehold, reclaim the stonewashed denim and puffy white sneakers of the Seinfeld era, and relax into a deliberately sexless, ambiguously gendered, and defiantly unironic look. However! According to its originators, the artistic collective K-HOLE, they originally meant for the term "normcore" to simply mean wearing outfits that fit the context, regardness of if they fit your own personal style: wear pleather pants at a rave, wear a blazer to the office, wear a cap to the ballgame, because that's the done thing. (What we now refer to as normcore was originally called Acting Basic.) I am FASCINATED by this switch in meaning: is this what critical theory professors mean by the death of the author? In any case, I invite you to think about places where you act basic, where you reject the dominant mood, and whether or not you feel lonely or if you feel free.

Taurus: Every year, my town hosts upwards of a million tourists, most of whom come to see capital-T theatre. It's interesting to live here, because the million of people who come through have fairly specific tastes: they like a quaint downtown, a lovely riverside promenade, and lots of local shops. As a result, certain parts of the town can feel Disney-fied, with upscale women's clothing boutiques and nice cheese shops, but not a lot of places that feel weird. And you know, that's becoming true of a lot of cities! Even big ones like Toronto are shedding their music venues and Weird Malls in order to build condos. Taurus, it's easy to bemoan this, and I think we should: when our places see us solely as consumers, rather than as citizens, it can make the experience of living there rather flat. How would you inject new life into your town, Taurus?

Gemini: There's this idea in therapy that we need to look under the first feeling to get to the real feeling.  Because of socialization, a lot of men express anger when they're really sad, and a lot of women do the reverse; we tend to funnel our feelings into expressions that seem safer or more familiar. I've been paying attention to the layers of my feelings, and it turns out that I'm often sad, angry, and afraid all at the same time, and dropping down through them feels like spelunking. I try to figure out what my biggest emotional response is, and run towards that. Anyway, all this to say: what makes you sad, angry, or afraid?

Cancer: A few years ago, I wanted to have a more sustainable wardrobe. I coveted that breezy linen look—the boilersuits, the overalls, the shirtdresses—or the waxed canvas, or the denim twill. But, like, Cancer: do you know how expensive those sustainable fashion companies can be? I cannot, in good conscience, bring myself to pay nearly two hundred dollars for a pair of shorts, or seven hundred dollars for a sweater. I know! I admire those who can, even though, probably, whatever you're doing to be able to afford $200 shorts is not sustainable either, if we're being honest. Why are ethical choices so expensive? What kind of world have we built? And honestly, Cancer, I still want the good shorts.

Leo: I love zines. I love concert posters. I love mix tapes. I love magazines. I love shitty paperback novels. I love maps. I love photographs. I love calendars (my all-time favourite was 2014's Beautiful Sheep). I love cards in the mail. I love love letters. In the digital age, many of these things have been miniaturized and zapped into our phones, and I want some of them back. A friend sent me a DVD in the mail, and scrawled a poem of friendship to accompany it; I framed it. It's almost like a museum artifact, a thing that might have been so common once—a shard of pottery, a loaf of carbonized bread—and now it's rare and precious. Do you miss these things too, Leo? Or are you relieved to not carry around so much? Make me a mixtape and tell me all about it.

Virgo: Everyone is turning 40 right now! From the giant high school-style house party to the international trip, to the non-acknowledgement to the bona fide midlife crisis, I love seeing how people are choosing to mark the occasion. I myself had Covid on my actual 40th birthday last November, so I did a re-do party six months later and woooweee let me tell you: it's true what they say about alcohol. I had my first three-day hangover, an experience so wretched I have not had a drink since. I sort of like this sober summer, especially as a part of this weird first year of separated life. Self care doesn't always look like what I think it might, you know? And when will I want a drink again? I don't know. I'm not sure I will.

Libra: I've started framing the things that I know I should do, but haven't been doing, as self harm. These are little harms, not big ones: when I spend fifteen work-avoidant minutes scrolling on my phone, or when I reach for a simple carb for the fifth meal in a row, or when I don't reset before I do my child's bedtime and end up in a furious lather. I know the solutions—put the phone down, eat some green vegetables, take five minutes—and that when I shirk them, I feel much worse. It's easy to say, "oh, that's self-care, that's boring self-care," but somehow, that doesn't motivate me. But when I flip the avoidance of self-care into self-harm, then I know it's serious. I have come through serious self-harm behaviours, and frankly, I'm glad I don't do them anymore. Taking care of myself isn't always glamourous, and sometimes I feel like I have to trick myself, but I can be both smart and dumb at the same time.

Scorpio: God, I love cheese. I'm not a snob about it—I don't need your fancy imports or your farmer's market selections—but please, yes, give me the salty, fatty, creamy goodness. I especially love a good cream cheese and cottage cheese; everyone always goes for the upmarket hard cheddars or mould-laced stinky bois, but I love soft and a little sweet and salty. I don't what this cheesy affection reveals about me, but I suspect that we all have preferences we know are slightly downmarket. Do we stand in our affection, or hide in shame?

Sagittarius: In most astrology, Sags are flighty nomads, but this characterization annoys me because I'm a rare "please let me stay home" Pokemon variant. I haven't travelled extensively since I was a young kid; the travels I did take as an adult are all at least ten years in the rearview. I have never really felt compelled to book the trip to Stockholm, to take the redeye to Porto, to do a roadtrip to the Grand Canyon. Many of my Sag friends are wonderful at travelling, but I would much rather read a good book about a seaside vacation than actually take one. What a snooze! But also, what a dream to grow roots instead of wings. What a privilege. 

Capricorn: I'm single now. It's a weird feeling, to be single at 40. My ex-husband has a new girlfriend, and sometimes I roll my eyes about it and sometimes I pity them both, for different reasons. I care about this a little, and I wish I didn't care at all. For the first year of our separation, I could not examine the question of how much of what happened in our marriage was because of me. It was such a painful question, and impossible to answer, truly; it's not like my ex would say, "Actually, I will own 68% of these problems, and that leaves you with 32%, enjoy and good luck." I am culpable for some of it; I want to be accountable, because that will lead to healing and hopefully better relationships in the future. But I couldn't even start asking myself those questions for nearly a year. It's almost time, now. I can start soon.

Aquarius: Love is like bread, as the saying goes. It must be made fresh every day. Sometimes it's a feast, and sometimes only crumbs, but we do eat every day. Tonight, my child and I walked hand-in-hand and ate mango ice cream in the September heat. We were lovely, chatty and funny. Last night, I cried in the dark because I was too overwhelmed by single parenting, by another dinner rejected and uneaten, undone and unhappy. It was too much. And yet: the loaf of our love rose again, a little miracle. I have to trust that we will find our way back to mango ice cream, back to the warm loaf of our love for each other, because the miracle of parenting is that so far, it has happened every day. We rise again. 

Pisces: Poor Pisces. You are the last on the zodiac, and the sign I find hardest to spell (and I say this as a Sagittarius). I blow my writerly load on sexy signs like Scorpio and Taurus, and leave you to the end. On the other hand, you youngest children get away with stuff that the Geminis would never even dream of. I associate you with a certain silver sparkle—maybe your fishy scales, or your empathetic nature—and a dreamy quality that belies your steely undergirding. I think we forget the Pisces at our own peril, truly. Not that you would ever be vindictive (I don't think that's in your nature), but that you would simply leave us all in your silvery dust.