Saturday, February 17, 2024

Kith

From peopleiveloved.com

If you had told me in my youth that the grand love affairs of my life would mostly be platonic, I would have been gravely disappointed, and that would have been wrong. I can honestly say that the people I've met in my 20s and 30s and now, in my earliest baby-steps of my 40s, are entirely amazing. 

In 2024, the depth and breadth of my community astounds me. I have friends in their 70s and friends in their 20s. I have besties of many stripes, volunteer-colleagues and work mentors, mom-friends and pen pals. I'm not fooling myself that all these friendships are deep, but they are all meaningful to me. I cherish the warm relationships I have with people, and when we do get to know each other better—the family drama, the hiccupy marriages, the health worries, the rich wormy compost of the soul—I fucking love it. I love it! What a gift, to get to know each other in this way!

And this is post-pandemic, after a period of time when we could only be IRL with people with whom we shared an address. To be able to cultivate a garden of friends during and after such a life-weirding, world-altering, emotion-boggling event feels like a goddamn triumph, you know? I don't know if this is a small-town thing, where we're all just in the soup together and unexpected relationships form out of sheer proximity. I don't know if this is a product of being "on the scene" in several key Stratford spots (hello, Revel, I love you). I know that having weak ties is important; I also know that people like people who seem to like them (especially more than others). But I think we're in a moment where many people, not just me, are hungry for connections. Is it post-pandemic cabin fever? Being in our 30s and 40s? Are we all extroverts with social anxiety? Have we relaxed our definitions of what makes a person cool? (I know I, for one, find the folks with showing-up energy to be pretty sweet these days.) Or is the secret that we're all just kind of great and people like to fall in love with each other, even platonically? I don't know; it doesn't matter. We're here, together, now.

I find this current friendship boom, borne of school community and small-town civic participation, so enriching. By walking my kiddo to and from school every day, I've made some incredibly meaningful friendships. Volunteering has led to some lighter connections, but it's also been great fun to get to know the baby boomers in my life. Not since university have I made this many connections in such a short period of time, and I don't even have to live in a dorm this time. 

That's not to say that there's never been friendship misery. Some of my most tender scar tissue is relational: fallout from two terrible years in middle school of being bullied full-time, of being picked up and then dropped and then ostracized. In my early 30s, two Very Important Friendships went belly-up, and I'm still feeling those reverberations nearly a decade later. I feel like any joyful reflection on friendship has to include these caveats, because I've had these spectacular friendship blow-outs, and it feels dishonest to not acknowledge them. 

And yet! And yet. The opportunity to learn from these friendship implosions has been deep indeed. The fact that those failed friendships in my 30s hurt so very damn much helped point me to the fact that I needed some actual therapy to help with the bullying aftermath, despite it being 25 years later. It woke me up to the fact that I feared those losses so immensely, and I fought against them so hard, and I was fucking awful while I was trying to "save" the friendships, and it was sort of no wonder that those friends bounced. Understanding that my behaviour came from a wound that could be examined with curiosity and tenderness, rather than shame and a frantic need to hide it under the guise of "being chill," has been very healing. (YES I KNOW THIS IS THERAPY-SPEAK, I did the therapy so I get to use the speak, right?!) Understanding this dynamic has changed my life, my relationship with myself. And if nothing else, I know, even if those old friends can't, that I'm not the same mangled human that I was 8-10 years ago. I can gently let myself off the hook for those disconnections.

What I like about this phase of friendship is that no one is trying to be cool anymore. We all like ourselves more than we did in our early adulthood. We all know ourselves a lot better. We're all a lot more relaxed. And most of have been through some shit that has softened our hearts and shown us the stakes of life—we all lose eventually, so why compete so hard? Maybe it's the latent co-operative board member in me, but collaboration is where it's at. I sometimes refer to proto-friendships, the phase where we obviously dig each other but we don't really know each other yet, as the "mutual admiration society," but I try to carry that energy into even the deepest and longest connections I have.

I love and admire the hell out of my friends. And they deserve that love and admiration: they're cool as anything, generous, thoughtful, funny, creative, wise, sweet and salty. Knowing them makes me want to operate on that level. We elevate each other, as all good relationships do. There's some part of me that knows I'm lucky to have so many amazing people in my life; there's another part, sweet and warm, that knows that I'm kind of amazing too. 

The oldest definition of the word kith, as in "kith and kin," used to be one's country, one's land. Our physical locations, the places where we root and grow. Now, it means our friends, who the other side of the coin to our relatives. I like to imagine my kith as somehow both: the people among whom I have planted myself, and where I bloom.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Culture Daze

Chandni Chowk

I spend a lot of time thinking about the ways I'd like city life to be better. I'm not a daydreamer, although I do give the occasional interview in my shower, pretending that I'm running for mayor. However, I am fascinated by the ways we design our spaces and places to reflect our collective priorities, especially when it comes to cultural life.

When we went to Iceland in 2012, I fell in love with the street art in Reykjavik. So many buildings are painted with huge murals of robots fighting or migrant caravans or cartoon suns, and it brought the city a sense of vibrant urbanism. Reykjavik is a small city in a small country—Iceland only has about 370,000 residents, and a third of them live in the capital city—but it was refreshing to see art, especially art associated with urban culture, prioritized in such a brash way. Toronto has graffiti and street art as well, but ours is famously hidden down multiple back alleys. Stratford, where I live now, has very few public art displays: we have one relatively recent mural in the downtown, and, yes, an alley that shared the history of the local music scene. It's big city-style art writ small. 

I think you can tell a lot about a city based on what it prioritizes. Toronto is a place of commerce, of course, and most people live close to a corner store or a shopping corridor. On the other hand, the city's quilt of public parks and playgrounds allows residents access to green space that may not be exactly in their backyard, but is at least within walking distance. Stratford's core is oriented mostly to tourists, so we have a fair number of restaurants and boutiques, but you'd be hard-pressed to pick up a non-artisanal apple in the downtown. And a playground or a place to get lunch with your kids? Forget it.

This is one of the major bummers about living in Stratford. Private homeownership and large-ish property sizes are common, so most of us do have our own backyard. The idea of the commons—places where we can go and gather, for leisure and social time—seems relatively foreign, and the places that do exist are designed for consumption. Visiting the relentlessly hardscaped Market Square, with its plastic picnic tables and sidelined greenery, is my showcase point. It's used and useful as a gathering place, but it's not beautiful for its own sake.

I'm not mad at Stratford for this, but I am frustrated. There are so many ways in which we could design shared spaces in order to maximize pleasure, beauty, and connection. The library desperately needs more square footage, and can't access it. Huge sections of town lack a playground within walking distance. The playgrounds we do have are often outdated and uninspired. The city's affordable housing is on the edge of town and looks much like affordable housing in most North American cities—that is, cheap and embarrassed by itself. Sure, there are gardens and a great-looking City Hall, but gardens are designed to be seen and not played with, and City Hall isn't a social site.

As a town, we've gotten a bit lazy. We've downloaded that beautiful streetscape onto private homeowners, creating an intense sense of keeping up with the Joneses and a singular "right" way to have a garden or a lawn. The culture that attracts tourists often comes from private organizations like Stratford Festival or the Chef's School, and while they are admittedly so much fun to attend, their priorities are driven by butts in seats. I'd love to see more art festivals like the Lights On event: a month-long celebration of light sculptures in our darkest months. We tend to play it really safe, because we don't want to alienate anyone. It's a bit....boring. And it's sort of baffling, given how many current residents and visitors come from bigger cities with diverse cultural landscapes! Semi-weird culture is accessible—and accessed—all over. We don't need to be so staid in our approach.

I think about what I had access to in The Big City and there's a sense of youthfulness, of experimentation. I once saw a light installation in an underpass! There are street festivals and community hubs, art outlets like the AGO and the Harbourfront Centre. Am I being unfair to Stratford, a place that has 1% of Toronto's population? Yeah, probably! But there is a sense of holistic lack, as though the city is only interested in me if I'm shopping at the boutiques or going to the theatre. My child, my need for fresh food, my desire for good housing, my yen for green spaces, are all much less served in Stratford's cultural core.

Some of this can be chalked up to the relative dearth of young people in Stratford. Iceland's average age is a youthful 36; Stratford's is 44, and Toronto is right in the middle at 40. Youth is a time of experimentation, of creation and identity-building, and young people often leave Stratford because there's not much here for them. I did it myself—I waited tables here a few summers in my 20s, but when it came time to start a career in non-profits, Stratford just didn't have the job market I was looking for. It didn't have the space to get weird in a way that felt primally necessary at that age. I wanted to fall in love, ride my bike at midnight, get drunk on a Thursday, walk kilometres gossiping with friends, quit a job six weeks after I started it. I wanted to be a writer, an artist, a designer, a board member, a student. I wanted to kiss my friends on their rooftops and watch as the sun came up over Bloor Street. Toronto in the late 2000s and early 2010s was romantic, dumb, inspiring—a transitional moment between David Miller's utopianism and the embarrassment of Rob Ford, before the vast majority of people in my generation were squeezed out into the hinterlands.

Stratford, on the other hand, is known for having the most secretive city council in the country. Make of that what you will. 

It's been a fascinating return to the city over the last five years, navigating the ways Stratford feeds and stifles its own community. For example: despite being a flat and dense little town, there is precious little cycling scene here—the drivers are too aggressive and the roads are too chewed up. The cycling champions here are rich-dad weekend warriors. There are no regular-gal cyclist scenesters, the kind who would bike to brunch because driving is for suckers. There are two movie theatres in town: one is a twee micro-cinema that usually focuses on private events, and the other is a cinderblock octoplex that never met a blockbuster it didn't want to screen. Live theatre is here, and might even be accessible if you snag tickets on sale, but there's no fringe fest, no comedy scene, and no regular live music venue. 

I'm not trying to dunk on Stratford, and believe me, by the time I left Toronto, I was ready to go. But it's funny to consider how "culture" manifests in different ways, on different scales. It's interesting to see whose perspectives and values get reflected, and how: are events free or paid? Are they family-focused or date-night material? What does "diversity" mean in a town that is mostly white, or where there are twice as many seniors as there are kids? 

Whose voices get heard when we talk about this?

We all want to live in a place that seems to want us back, right?

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Things That Happened in 2023

 

January: Oh man, 2023 started off with a bang! I got my G2 driving license and basically spent the next few weeks with the goofiest grin on my face—like, so proud of myself—and THEN I had a fibroid surgery that I'd been sort of on the fence about/dreading for the better part of a year, and it went....totally fine! It was totally fine. Starting the year with two things I'd been dreading and then aced was a huge boost! Noah turned seven and I finished my zine about knitting, so those were also pretty great things! 

February: Former Toronto Mayor and Noted Old Person John Tory resigned in a sex scandal! Responses ranged from Yuck to LOL, which is correct. We started watching Bluey on Disney+ and everyone fell in love with the Heelers. Nothing much happened, really: there was some weather and we went out with friends, but overall, it was February so we were all just trying to survive. 

March: March break, again, which was another trip to Toronto. In 2022, we went to a hotel and it was very Covid-fraught; this time, we went to my in-law's place and bummed around with friend and rock-climbed and it was much more chill. I did March Madness on the theme of theme of Strong Female Leads and it was sort of...meh? Like, there are definitely a lot of movies that I love with strong female characters, but it felt kind of flat to focus on them exclusively. Anyhoo! Noah also joined the garden club at school, so that was pretty cute!

April: Halfway through the month, I woke up with the fastest heartbeat I'd ever had in my entire life. I went and sat on the toilet—still half-asleep—and by the time I sort of realized what was happening, it was probably topping 200 beats a minute. To this day, and I write this in December, I don't know what that was or why it happened. Was it POTS? Menopause? High blood pressure? Allergic reaction? Stress? Anemia? Dehydration? Panic attacks? Sleep apnea? I don't know. I never found out. It kept happening for weeks. It was so stressful. I helped organize an Earth Day party and I went to Trashion Week for the first time ever, and both were just really nice moments of affirming community and my place in it. I've now lived in Stratford for five years and it's been exactly the right place to participate in civic life on a scale that feels meaningful—I sit on boards and volunteer and know my kid's principal and many of my neighbours. It's so nice to be embedded somewhere; technically, I know this feeling is possible anywhere, but it has manifested the most in co-op, in my 20s, and here in Stratford, in my 30s. 

May: I long-term borrowed my parent's very very old Prius and started driving for real this month. We started with a trip to the Beaver Valley in which the car broke down and it was very annoying (but ultimately totally fine). There was also Mother's Day and organizing Mike's 40th birthday party; I spent his actual birthday evening in the hospital because my heart rate would not calm down, and it turns out I was pretty dehydrated! Mostly it was just so nice to welcome the sun back in a meaningful way, to get some independence, and to gear up for the summer.

June: Mike's 40th birthday party, which was a backyard shindig and well-attended by many people who love him. Then: The Smoke. Remember when the air was absolutely disgusting with wildfire smoke from coast to coast? And the kids were encouraged to stay indoors during recess, and New York looked like Blade Runner 2049? It's moments like this when it's like, oh, man, right: we are living on a planet in great crisis, and it's so hard to navigate the grief of feeling like our Earth Mother is dying of a disease we gave her ourselves, and that we could do something about it (only the "we" in that sentence is concentrated to a few dozen members of the human race, and I'm not in that club). On the summer solstice, I walked a labyrinth and meditated on all the ways my body felt connected to the earth. 

July: Summer holidays! Trips to Toronto! Weddings! Landlord troubles! Grandma health concerns! Multi-day internet outages! Neighbour issues! Man, this was a month of high highs and very low lows. For a minute, I was convinced we were going to be evicted because we hadn't mulched our garden beds. It was stressful as hell, y'all. On the plus side, the Barbie movie came out and that was a fantastic moment for feminist memes and the Indigo Girls.

August: We spent two weeks at the cottage and that was really nice. Noah went to the hippie Christian day camp of my own youth; Mike and I went out on a date and ate Mexican food. I continued my months-long stretch of waking up in the middle of the night. When we got back home, Noah and I spent two weeks going to the library every day and helped build a city of recycled materials. August sort of felt like a hangover from the mayhem of July, to be honest. 

September: September is the dividing line in the "before" and "after" of 2023. In September, I got some explosive news about my relationship. And that was the end of it. It was the end of nine years of marriage, of five years of trying since the last explosion, it was the end of wanting to keep trying. I was shocked and appalled and anxious and sick about it. And I was also relieved, because now, finally, I could stop holding on to something that wasn't working. In the first few weeks, I would rage out or cry my eyes out—a remix of "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" had me sobbing for an hour—but my anxiety damped down and my heart stopped racing so much. I started sleeping through the night again. Marriage is hard work, but I think we made it harder than it had to be. I'm being deliberately vague because I don't want to ruin his life, or mine, but I'm not ashamed of what happened here. I hope we both get to move on from this. This was survivable. I am surviving. 

October: Okay, all that being said, Mike didn't move out until nearly the end of November, and the next couple months were not easy. I slept in my office, or he slept in the attic. I took a whirlwind trip to Toronto and told many friends about what had happened. Noah's anxiety started ramping up, as if mine was being transferred to him, and it was absolutely terrible to watch. October was a holding month, a month where I just counted the days until something would be different. My grandma passed away and it felt sad to say goodbye to the last of her generation. She was such a beautiful, complicated, interesting woman—just like my mom, just like me, although we each have totally different versions of beautiful and complicated.

November: Mike finally moved out after nine weeks of post-explosion co-habitation and I was sort of dreading being on my own, but I came to neutrality on it in fairly short order: I watched a lot of old Whose Line Is It Anyways? and ate at weird times, and my heart didn't explode and I even found myself enjoying it sometimes. Then I turned 40! I planned a birthday party, but two days before, I tested positive for Covid (!!), so I had to call it off. What a freaking bummer. Anyway, I had been sort of mildly convincing myself that I would die before my 40th birthday (#darkthoughts) so the fact that I didn't was GREAT.

December: Noah's separation/general anxiety was pretty debilitating and it was a ton of work to get him to school every morning. I got kind of bogged down in work things and will have to get caught up before everybody comes back online in early January. I hosted a Solstice party and I spent my first Christmas away from my kiddo. The intensity of single parenting means I need to find a way to savour our breaks, because I need them—I need them, and I enjoy them—and I also miss my kid when we're apart. I had a 24-hour trip to Toronto to see old co-op friends and fall in love with the city again. I tried some dating apps and quickly found out that that scene is wild—like, are the men okay?—and 2024 will probably bring some romantic mishaps, or maybe total radio silence on that front, or maybe new love?? Who even knows, because the idea of going on a date with someone right now makes me want to barf.

In a nutshell, 2023 had a lot going on! Like, a lot. Friends showed up in a lot of amazing ways, from couches to crash on to weddings and weekend hangs to just letting me cry in their backyards while our kids played together. I loved being in Stratford and the roots that I've been slowing growing here seem real and true. I got to see Toronto friends many times, and that was nice. I read books and magazines, I walked on the beach, I worried about things that didn't happen and things that did. 2023 felt like a watershed year—the end of my marriage, milestone birthday, important deaths, important friendships—but it also felt like a compilation of moments where I felt really proud of myself, or like I was growing in a direction I liked. I have no idea what 2024 will bring. I hope it's good!

Thursday, November 30, 2023

My Thirties: A Recap Post

 

1: marriage
1: child
1: eviction
1: global pandemic
1: death of my brother-in-law
1: separation
1: drivers license acquired
1: decade of a whole life

2: house fires (one serious, one not-very-serious)
2: boards served on
2: people in my immediate family who survived cancer
2: surgeries
2: original songs composed for my sweet baby
2: bouts of COVID

3: grandparents passing
3: friendship implosions

4: main work clients, whom I like all very much

5: moves
5: parent-teacher meetings 

6: attempts to change my diet, to ever-less-meaningful results

7: amazing new friendships launched or previous friendships deepened
7: Baby Dance Parties planned, playlisted, and executed

10: sweaters knit (two for my kiddo, eight for me)
10: seasons of Drag Race watched

30+: times listening through the Harry Potter audiobooks as I try to go back to sleep in the night

45+: Dungeons and Dragons games

500+: dollars spent annually thrifting 

several: hobbies that were considered/provided for and then abandoned (I will do a punch-needle craft...one day), mental health crises, cherished babies made by other people, game nights with people I love

many: hours spent in the bathtub, nighttime wake-ups, viewings of Back to the Future, fights with my spouse, laughs shared with a barista, hours spent volunteering, issues of the New Yorker that remain partially read, times to put my toes in the water at the beach, house parties, dance breaks, hours on the phone with my mom and sister, visits with my dad

uncounted: hours spent scrolling on my phone, hours spent snuggling with my child in the dark, memes exchanged with friends, Coke Zeros consumed, trips to the grocery store, hours spent worrying, hours spent laughing

unknowable: deep breaths taken in moments of agonizing anxiety, cockroaches killed in our worst home, recitations of Where the Wild Things Are, tidbits of gossip shared (both with and about me), pints of raspberries purchased, ways I have changed for good and for not-so-good, stabs of worry about some bodily ailment, teas purchased in lovely coffee shops and drank in the company of friendly strangers

some: regrets

more: truths uncovered, moments of joy, accomplishments I'm proud of, relationships I cherish, family time I wouldn't trade for the world, things I look back on with fondness because I knew that even though they didn't work out forever, they were good in the moment and the moment is all we really get, hopes for the future, interest to see where the next decade will go.

Friday, October 27, 2023

Fall Horrorspokes

Image by Maggie Carr

Aries
: I love marigolds. I love anemones. I love flowers that don't really get into the swing of things until the equinox, at least. The flowers that are still showing off when the first snow flies. I love the crocuses and the lilac bushes and the forsythia, of course: the harbingers of spring. Everyone loves those gals, the first ones to the show. But I love the ones that linger, the flowers that are keeping the party alive as the candles burn low. 

Taurus: I'm not very good at writing short stories. I want to be—it's a literary form I admire—but they typically turn out to be glorified character studies, and/or meandering, plotless little adventures. When I was in high school, a well-written short story was the ne plus ultra, proof that you were one of the writerly types, but even then, I turned in character sketches and poetry and free-form dialog and essays. And listen, babes: I can write. But what does it say about me that the things I'm good at are never quite as appealing as the things I don't do perfectly?

Gemini: Grief is weird. My grandma died and I'm trying to figure out how to mourn her. I want to put on nice lipstick and wander around Walmart, like she would have. I want to go to bed for three days. I want to scream into a mattress. It's not just my grandma. I didn't grow a garden this summer. I didn't knit a shawl this fall. I don't know what my life will be like in a year—does anyone?—and I grieve the things and people I will lose along the way.

Cancer: You know what I'm curious about? What it would like to be rooted. I'm talking ninth-generation whatever-whatever, the family farm of a dozen generations, the family business, the town with the streets named after my ancestors. Do you think that would be stifling? Would there be pressure to stay, to remain in that place? Or do you think it would be sweet, to have your roots networked so deeply into the soil? Would your memories be your own, or would it be like dreaming?

Leo: Doesn't there seem like there's something kind of wrong with Justin Timberlake? I feel like former boy band members should be forcibly retired at the age of 25; just put those dudes on a horse ranch in Oaxaca and make them do therapy, you know? And I know in early post-NSYNC days, he was hailed as the second coming of blue-eyed soul, a spiritual successor to MJ but without the ick factor. But now! As outlined in Britney Spears's new memoir! We have confirmed ick factor! Anyway, I am looking forward to JT's display of contrition and/or non-apology; either way, he'll continue to act like a dillhole. File this guy under "ugh, men."

Virgo: You are a corgi in the sunshine, an illustration of a frog wearing a hat, a mouse wearing figure skates. You are a platter of cheese and meat and handmade (slightly lumpy) crackers. You are grapes on the vine, sun on the water, the smell of campfire at sundown. You are handmade socks and homemade stew. You are little kids burying their feet at the beach. You and I are both Billy Collins poems. You are quilts and cotton sheets. You are a lovely gift to the world.

Libra: I recently set an app timed on Instagram, because I was spending hours—literal hours—every day, scrolling and seeking that sweet dopamine hit. On the first day, I hit the time by dinner time, and it was like, "Oop, see you tomorrow!" The next day, I was much more judicious with my time, and I did get it under two hours, my daily maximum limit. I still check it a dozen times a day; it is my favourite app for messaging, because I am old and weird. But I no longer habitually settle in for a nice long trawl, which feels like a victory. Managing my own brain chemistry can be weird and hard; I'm grateful for the posts that make me laugh and cry, and I'm grateful for the timer that means I don't do it all day.

Scorpio: It's nine PM, it feels like midnight, and I'm ready to crawl into bed. Autumn is hard, buddies. It's not all Halloween dance parties and pumpkin spice lattés: we have to accept that we are seasonal creature and we are slowing down. On average, we get 30 more minutes of REM sleep each of these dark nights: a dreamer's paradise. And even in this short days, we rise with the sunrise and stand under the October sun, a glorious golden gift that is one last hurrah before winter's cold light. Enjoy these short days; sleep the long nights; revive yourself when the time is right.

Sagittarius: We Sags have a reputation for being flighty monsters who don't care about anyone's feelings, but in reality, each of my Sagittarian friends (with the exception of, ahem, myself) is the hardest-working bitch I know. They're constantly producing 'zines and scuba diving, making radio shows and taking dance lessons. They are the definition of life-long learners. Sit down, Archers! I am of your number and I'm tired just watching your Instagram stories. In reality, I think it's less that we don't care about anyone's feelings, and more that we are comfortable being weird in a world that doesn't like that. So, you know: carry on!

Capricorn: I love a low-capacity meal. The first 18 months of my son's life, we ate bagged salad with chicken strips and oven fries about once a week, and I think of that meal with great fondness. Sometimes I feel guilty for how much I love boxed mac and cheese and frozen dumplings, but I think God gave us those things because she wants us to be happy. As we go into a low-capacity season, please remember that we have tools like bagged salad and freezer lasagna that lighten the load; eat them with abandon, my loves.

Aquarius: My favourite colour is a dusky red, a brown-coral that a friend once told me was called "Nantucket Red," and isn't that just the most evocative colour name you can imagine? My kiddo's favourite colour is blue, just blue: not a fancy sky-blue or aquamarine or teal or navy, but the blue of school binders and the eight-pack of Crayola crayons. My mom's favourite colour is teal, or maybe cyan, but the colour of a robin's egg, especially when she can match it with red. When I walk into a room she's decorated, I look for the teal, and I usually find it. We leave ourselves everywhere, don't we?

Pisces: If you could design a ritual, what would it be? I think you'd plan something Druidic, an event fit for Stonehenge. But I also suspect that you might be the kind of person who would secretly baptize your sister in the river when you were both kids. Where do you find your sacraments—in the holy water, or in the edges with the cattail, every part of which is edible? In the church, or in the light streaming through the windows on a February day? In a wedding ceremony, or in falling asleep to the sound of your lover's breath? Nothing can keep us from the holiness of everyday life. We don't need Stonehenge to make mystery and wonder.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

It's Called Fashion, Look It Up

Okay, it's time for our semi-annual fashion round-up! Did you know that all the Copenhagen Fashion Week girlies were wearing flip-flops this summer? And tiny neckerchiefs? And that Pharrel Williams succeeded Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, and his 2024 collection seemed pick up both ska and cigarette packaging as reference points? And Elle has declared fall 2023 the season of the sweater, if you can imagine a trend so bold? And also the colour red? And the romantic goth? And that our tops will be both off the shoulder and feature a plunging neckline? Somehow??

Phew, okay, sorry, I had to get that all out of my system. It's not that I no longer care about fashion—I do, very much—it's just that the concept of "fashion" has become so nebulous and theoretical as to be basically meaningless. 

For context, I grew up in a time when there were maybe a dozen ascendant fashion houses—Chanel, YSL, Ralph Lauren, Versace, and Calvin Klein come to mind—and each year, the major fashion magazines would get together and proclaim plaid to be in and menswear to be out, or hemlines were up, or down, or some other variation on some other theme. But you could pick up a handful of September issues and be like, "ah, a trend." The boutiques and department stores would then offer some passable facsimile of the runway version, and you would buy it and be fashionable. It was simple!

But all of this took place well before fast fashion like H&M or TopShop; before the rise of streetstyle blogs; before the diversification (and appropriation) of fashion houses to allow hip-hop influences; before the global fashion markets exploded; before the accelerating fashion cycle made seasonality defunct, and before the pandemic and normcore and Acting Basic.

Now, what we're left with, is a fuzzy squint of fashion. Everyone wears everything, all the time. There seems to still be trends—skinny jeans are out, wide-leg pants are back, and flares are in limbo, cowboy boots are everywhere—but the fashion trend and/or designer has been dethroned. And we are left to sort through the pieces, going, maybe a red boot? Could that be a thing?

The 90s is our fashion nostalgia moment right now, but I truly believe everyone is getting it wrong. Sure, some of us were wearing flannels and ripped jeans and were cool; when I was twelve, I literally wore a navy-blue blazer to the first day of grade six, and I do not see that being replicated anywhere (thank god) (this summer, all the cool teens wore sweatshorts with crop-tops and crocs; everyone looked like a tall sexy toddler and it was fucking weird). I remember when highwaisted straight-leg midwash jeans and an oversized Bart Simpson t-shirt were the only option for either gender, and I do not remember it fondly. 

The best I ever looked was probably 2003-2012, which is when the Marc Jacobs version of the 1980s was everywhere—the era of the scene kid, the hipster for which this very blog is named! I remember a lot of denim miniskirts and Converse shoes, little sundresses, and a lot of American Apparel. Am I conflating this fashion cycle with the hotness of my 20s in general? Maybe, yeah! But it was also a time before leggings were a going-out pant. The standards were different!

Now I'm in my last year of my 30s, and I've spent most of the last decade in a post-partum body: chubbier, fatigued, a bit paunchy. It's a body type that might have been fashionable in 17th century; today, when we're steeped in wellness culture and the legging is, indeed, a going-out pant, it's less so. I find myself bobbing between not wanting to ever be perceived, and wanting to be the hottest bitch at the school pick-up. When my body isn't willowy or cute, I still give it a go through fashion. 

And look, I am not one of those innately stylish people.  I own some truly spectacular garments, including a sequinned bomber jacket and a refrigeration suit. I keep wearing blue blouses and black tank tops and navy shorts. Yawn. I have friends of all ages, sizes, and income levels who can assemble A Lewk without breaking a sweat. They can pop on a bracelet, shrug on a cardigan, slip into the right shoes, and they look great! I am missing some key styling component, like bravery or a sense of adventure, and so I need inspiration. I need trends, stories, personas. I need to be able to look at someone else and be like, "I'm going to steal that for me." I know that is basic fashion, in all senses of the word, but I'm just being honest. 

Here is my very short list of things I'm turning to for fashion inspiration: solarpunk; Appalachian hellbillies (male variant); my friends Emily and Kat, who always look fucking cool;  Ojai visual artists; my Patagonia fleece, which I describe as "spendy ski bum." The vibe I want to cultivate is "the chillest exchange student at IKEA" or "someone who has read the Dr Bronner's bottle" or "the aging Canadian equivalent of the skateboarding Bolivian girls" or "could conceivably do some light homesteading, on a whim" or "Arconia resident (non-murdered variant)" or "can do a downward dog, no problem." 

The current vibe I give off with most of my clothes is "This person is a mom," and that is so BORING. If nothing matters and there is no trend cycle, then theoretically, anything I wear could be perfect. Why doesn't it feel like that? I'm a try-hard (see: that navy blazer), and fashion is supposed to be effortless and personal. 

Am I telling on myself when I say it's hard right now? That I don't feel cool? I feel like I missed the memo about which windbreaker jackets are okay and which ones are actually frumpy. I wear puffy vests. I don't look good in a boilersuit. I am not the hottest bitch at school pick-up. But I want to be! I want to be.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Blop Smulture

Image by Pedro Dimitriou

I feel like I've stepped out of the pop culture loop lately, and as a result, I have a weird form of writer's block. When I started this blog, I was tuned in across a lot of different channels—TV shows and movies, municipal politics in a major city, cycling, fashion,  trendy books, and just the culture cycle in general. And I would write about them! Early blog posts were often critiquing other people's creative work (my very first post was about Chuck Klosterman, which, I mean, okay). If they weren't critiques, they were response pieces—also known as a Hot Take—and then, at the bottom of the pile, musings. Later, when real things started to happen in my life, I added actual emotions to the mix, but I still write a lot about things like the perfect magazine and Wes Anderson movies.

But, as I've gotten older, mom-ier, and just sort of less cool in general (and less invested in being cool overall), I'm paying very little attention to things like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and the gotta-see-it TV shows; unwillingly, I give more to the ever-more depressing news cycle that comes from living on a burning planet and with an actual doofus as our provincial premier. I look at a lot of memes about cartoon toads living under illustrated mushrooms, and I feel like many of my friends do, too.

As a result, I feel very uncool when media topics arise. No, I have not heard that album—my latest "new" album is Portugal. The Man's Woodstock CD, which is from 2018 and which played on a loop in my car for three months. My binge-y shows are wholesome to the point of parody; I love the try-hard teachers of Abbott Elementary and the cartoon dogs from Bluey. I saw Barbie, of course, and I loved it, of course, but prior to that, I hadn't seen a grown-up non-Marvel movie in theatres since 2021's C'mon C'mon....which was about kids. I don't listen to podcasts unless they're about Harry Potter. I don't subscribe to any Substacks. I don't watch YouTube like it's TV; I barely watch TV, period. 

This is not a humblebrag or a weird flex. When people ask "What are you watching?" these days, we generally all start with Bluey, but then we're expected to be able to talk about Succession or The Idol or Wednesday or The Last of Us. And I just...cannot? I watch bake shows and gay-teen shows, and that's about it. Part of it is that TV is so fractured anyway—I don't have some of the key platforms, and the buzz that surrounds each individual show is often just as tailored to its viewing audience as any algorithm. I don't think there's been a truly culture-wide show since Game of Thrones wrapped up, and even then, not everybody watched it. And I'm just as likely to fall into a one-hour phone-scroll as I am to turn on a show; why watch one episode when I can watch sixty little reels, as a snack?

I am reading a lot these days, which is nice. I'm not on BookTok, but I suspect most of the discourse over there is about erotica starring various supernatural creatures, so, you know: pass. I did a monster Michael Chabon reading project, and then read a bunch of female authors to balance the scales; right now, I'm very into Becky Chambers, who writes affirming sci-fi and generally gives me something to think about. But unless someone picks it for book club, I'm just not reading the big blockbuster books of the day either. 

So there's 600 words about the things I'm not following, the stuff I'm not watching or reading. And I don't know—I'm not 23 any more, which is how old I was when I started writing in this little internet corner, all full of opinions and ready share. My priorities, my sense of self, have shifted dramatically. I just have less time; I have more real life to live (and recover from). I feel less voracious in my consumption.

When I was young, it felt essential to be so tuned in to the world. It was a process of creating myself: I like this, I don't like that. I found that my besties were similarly minded. We didn't have to love the same stuff, but the overall patterns were key—readers finding readers, concert-goers hanging out with other concert-goers.

Now, maybe that work is done, or less vital or urgent. Maybe I'm just more tired, or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of options to keep up with. Maybe I am, despite everything, just really boring. 

When I do consume, I want it to be stuff that reflects my needs and values. I gravitate towards wholesome TV—no murders (okay, Only Murders In the Building is an important exception), not a lot of violence, and preferably, the characters seem to like each other. I dislike reality shows that hinge on betrayal or that are platforms for billionaires (paging the Kardashians); I love the ones where people get to show off their cool art. I like a queer media experience, especially when it doesn't treat being gay as leading to inevitable punishment; I love that the gay-teen stories of today often choose joy, not fear, as their central theme. I have a long list of "kid's TV" that I find, not only palatable, but look forward to watching. So much of the last few years has been unpredictable, strange, unsettling and bad; is it so weird that I want my media to, you know, not be that?

But pity me at cocktail parties, because I literally have no fun fan theories, no undiscovered gems, no recommendations, no secret treasures. I'm not an expert on any genre, I don't have a password to a streaming site that I can share, I routinely quit shows that are boring or turn me off, and I am physically incapable of taking a recommendation, even if I know I will love it. 

So what am I going to write about now?