Nothing I Like More

There's nothing I like more than sitting outside on a blanket, in a sun-dappled spot of grass, gossiping with some girlfriends or cuddling with my boyfriend.

There's nothing I like more than looking at beautiful things. I love magazines with luscious photospreads, cookbooks art-directed to within an inch of their lives, books with beautiful covers, clothes made with strange structures and odd angles, concert posters that evoke the essence of the show at which they were purchased, walls that hum with paint and wallpaper, and little tchotckes that can magically transport me back to a favourite memory.

There's nothing I like more than delicious food. The kind of restaurants that look like nothing special on the outside—their plates are made of melanine and their floors are covered in linoleum—but they reveal themselves to have the perfect jap chae, or the most perfectly spiced burrito. I like going to places a few notches up on the fanciness scale, too, where the waitstaff will fill up your water glasses and there's a prix fixe menu offering things like smoked salmon or cheesecake: the kind of thing that's fine when I do it, but transcendent in the hands of an expert. And there's the food we cook at home, too; all the dishes that we've perfected for our busy workday nights, and our lazy Saturday mornings, and for when people come over for board games, and for when it's just the two of us and we decide, hey, why not cook up some really interesting?

There's nothing I like more than running around with my friends. All the birthday karaoke, all the Korean lunch dates, all the coffees in Kensington market, all the trips to the various dim sum restaurants, lemonade stands, roti joints, brunch spots—not to mention everyone's porches, rooftop pools, kitchens, back yards, cottages, parents' houses, and fire escapes—all of them filled with stupid gossip, inside jokes, tearful secrets, half-drunk singalongs, advice, and updates, and all of that filled with the kind of comfort and respect that can only come from happy friendships.

There's nothing I like more than writing. I think about the stories I want to tell all the freaking time: I plot essays on my bike commute, daydream about my blog posts, and go on imaginary talk-show interviews in the shower so I can refine my novel ideas. Writing makes me feel sane. Writing makes me feel like my lungs are bigger, that I can breathe more.

There's nothing I like more than organizing stuff. It sounds trite, but the power of a well-organized spreadsheet can't really be undersold. I like having information at my fingertips, having a good filing system, throwing away old and unnecessary stuff (can I interest anyone in a Staples catalog from 2011?), and making everything feel clean and fresh and accessible. It's a total left brain/right brain thing, but working out a thorny data-management problem feels almost as good as putting down a really decent plot twist. (Almost.)

There's nothing I like more than spending time with my family—and in this, I include the family I'm making myself, with my fiance. The unconditional love, the willingness to learn (my parents and I had a surprising, and surprisingly great conversation about trans* identity a few weeks ago), the funny parts and the sad parts: they all come together in a way that is never perfect and yet somehow always is.

And, in the face of another demoralizing work week, when I have to ask myself if my job feeds any of the things I like, or any part of myself that I want to see grow, there's nothing I like more than a weekend spent with the people I love, surrounding myself with beautiful things, delicious food, amazing art, sunshine, cuddles, and love. There's nothing I like more than that.

Get Some Strange

 I read Infinite Jest in a week. Well, not quite a week: I read the first hundred or so pages in three tortuous months, resentfully flipping back and forth between the book's meaty prose and its spindly, wandering, essential footnotes. Then—and I'm not sure why—something happened. I began to read obsessively, maniacally. I lay in bed reading Infinite Jest (with a dictionary beside me as well, because the book, in addition to its irritating form, isn't known for an accessible vocabulary), sleeping occasionally, waking up, reading more. I burned through the whole book that way; it became a fever dream of tennis and public bathrooms and Canadians who are compelled to lift the heel of one foot slightly when they fart. I kept the lights dim and took frequent naps. When I came to the end of the book, I realized that the actual end of the story had happened somewhere several hundred pages before. I felt perversely satisfied with this infinite loop of story. It was a snake eating its own tail.

As my life moves more and more towards the mundane, predictable cadence of adulthood—with its work schedules and Outlook calendars and highly scheduled ladies' brunches—I rely more and more on the written word to give me a dose of funky, unexpected weirdness. I look to Pynchon and De Lillo, to Chabon's mid-career work and to strange, small-press children's books. I get plenty of strange, highly focused essays from Harper's, where the topics range from people suffering the delusions of probably-imaginary skin disorders, to an alcohol-soaked review of Room 237, a documentary about Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining and the various paranoid interpretations that have been floating around since that film's release in 1980. I read shifty short stories about haunted undersea caves. I could stand to read more poetry.

The stories are linked by a loosey-goosey approach to plot (sometimes, like in Room 237, the plot is basically nonexistent), but an animated and enthusiastic approach to observation. There are patterns in these stories: an attempt to scrutinize the things, mostly unseen, that run our humdrum world. Turn your head fast enough and you might see them out of the corner of your eye, but only if you're exceptional lucky...or is that unlucky? Finally seeing the face in the television static you've suspected has been there the whole time isn't exactly reassuring, you know?

Writers in this genre (psychoanalytically-obsessed metafiction? Postmodern worry-porn?) aren't out to reassure us. They want to make us uncomfortable, because this discomfort creates a space for really examining our normal lives. Reading De Lillo's White Noise, with its blended families and savvy teenaged girls, I had echoes of Ann M. Martin's wildly popular series The Babysitter's Club, albeit perverted and made strange. House of Leaves, an update to the Minotaur legend, uses different formatting tricks and strange appendices to create a narrative that expands and contracts in unexpected ways, like the titular house itself. The worlds are unstable. The form is unpredictable. The guy doesn't always get the girl, and not in that Nicholas Sparks kind of way where it turns out the girl is suffering from a fatal disease and will die attractively sometime in the final chapters. These books are completely bonkers, obsessed with what is "real" and what isn't, and sometimes kind of pointless...then again, life itself is sometimes pointless.

The one that I always come back to is The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon's slim little ode to Italian opera, shadow postal services, the Los Angeles underground scene, and tapestry. Yep, throw those ingredients in a bowl, add a half-baked conspiracy theory, plenty of drugs, and wildly unlikely character names (Oedipa Maas? Doctor Hilarius? Mike Fallopian?) and stir. The result is a short novel long on strange. I find it confusing, meandering, infuriating, and utterly absorbing. I've read it a half-dozen time, each time finding some new oddity. The book's world is a place I like to visit, because it's so structurally weird.

I love that. So many novels chug along at the prescribed novel pace, with a beginning, middle and end, with characters who have clearly defined needs and wants. My own writing is like this: serviceable, but not in the least bit weird. I could stand to use more weird in my writing. Hell, I could stand more weird in my own life.

But for now, I set my alarm for 7:20 AM, and I leave work at 5:05. We grocery shop on Monday nights. I eat one hardboiled egg for breakfast every morning. We ride bikes with other white people, swaddled in technical fabrics and protective helmets. We drink lemonade. We vote. We behave ourselves, and the world around is behaves accordingly. There is no strange. There is no unexpected.

We have to go looking for it.

Image via This Is Colossal.

Lakes

I've been struggling to write about unhappiness, not because I'm so damned happy, but because I don't really know what do say about being unhappy.


If my life is like Minnesota, the self-described "Land of 10,000 Lakes," then there are parts of my life where my happiness is like Lake Superior. My friends, my relationship with Mike, my sculpted body; sure, there might be a polluted beach or two, but for the most part, I can take pleasure and comfort in the depths of these things.

Other areas in my life? Not so much. My creative side, which started off vast like Rainy Lake, feels like it's slowly draining. As my personal time becomes more limited, writing and crafting - which bring me such pleasure! - are some of the first things to go. In the face of a full-time job and a rapidly-approaching wedding, when there are databases to update (despair) and caterers to harass, creative time feels like a luxury. Or exercise time, which I claw out of my limited time. Exercise doesn't really make me happy; it's more that not working out makes me feel so crazy and sad. There's a little bit of pleasure there, but it's the pleasure of an arm sore from a recent inoculation.

And the job itself? The joy I find there is a little puddle, maybe the size of Spoon Lake, which maxes out at six feet deep and is about the same size as Yorkdale Mall if you include the mall's interminable parking lot. I don't even really want to talk about the job.

People always chirp, "Do what you love and love what you do!" I did what I loved for just over a year: I freelanced, I ate lunch with friends, I played outside and went for bitterly cold winter walks. I also cried over money, and the impression that I would never find work again. Now, loving what I do means loving the hectic stress of an office in transition, loving the uncertainty of who my boss is or will be, and loving the mundane boredom of being alone for 80% of the workweek. It means finding joy by floundering in a sea of decontextualized and scattered information that someone needs right now, no please, no thank you, so go track it down and synthesize it and make it pretty. Now.

And I know how lucky I am to have a job. Any job. But is it good luck or bad luck? The more time I spend with this one, the more I feel like maybe this lake will someday turn itself into a swirling drain, and carry me down into a further darkness. Six feet is enough to drown in.

I need to get a little dinghy and stay above the muck of my little puddles, my unhappy lakes. They matter, because I can't see where to step in their muddy waters, but I can promise myself I won't disappear in their sludge. That much I can do.

I need to swim more often in the cold waters of my deepest lakes. They save me: the friends, the family, the partner, the fitness, the making, the eating, the sleeping. I can dive down to where the water will force the air from your lungs, and shooting to the surface is teaching yourself how to breath all over again.

Image: "Message," 2014, Shawn Dulaney 

Self-improvement

In no particular order, of either importance or weight, some things I wish I was better at:

• Managing my mood. I can swing between "cranky bitch" to "ice cream sundae-sweet" in less time that it takes the average sitcom to set up their opening jokes, and the effect, for both me and my partner, is one of emotional whiplash. I would like to be more even-keel, more predictable.
  
  
• Worrying! I worry all the time, about the weirdest stuff. I worry that I'll be broke forever, that we won't get into the housing co-op that we want, that zombies will rise and somehow get under my bed, that I'm gaining weight, that I'm getting acne, that I won't be able to get the stain out of that one shirt, that my kids will be deformed (emotionally or physically), that having kids will make me boring, that I already am boring, that I'm not good at the stuff I like doing, blah blah blah, FOREVER. It's a constant loop of anxious thoughts, varying from the mundane (why is my work computer not backing up its files?) to the sublime (what will happen to me when my parents die?). I would love to be one of those "que sera, sera" people, because worrying solves literally zero problems, and creates its own turbulence, but so far, it seems to one of my constants. Yay.
  
  
• Reading the books I buy. The Japanese call this tsundoku, or having an always-growing collection of unread books. My pile is probably up to my waist.
  
  
• Finding time for creative stuff. I don't know why this particular new job is kicking my ass so much, but since I started in March, my creative output has been pretty much zilch. I need to carve out the time, even if it hurts, because it hurts more when I don't.
  
  
•  Stretching. Self-explanatory.
  
  
• Managing my money. I am either spending it like it's 1922 and I'm Jay Gatsby, or I'm spending it like it's 1936 and I'm in a Dorothea Lange photo. Right now we're saving for our wedding, so everything feels very tight. We haven't had a drink in a bar or a meal in a restaurant in months; instead, cash goes towards bus fare out of town to meet with caterers, and deposits for rentals, and shoes I will wear literally one time, and all the zillions of little things that a wedding is. I feel like I'm underwater. Part of me thinks, "Oh, this is good training for when you have kids, and all your money will go towards their expensive-ass stuff"; part of me just wants to cry, because that's a very dim light at the end of this particular tunnel.
  
  
• Keeping up with music. Part of it is that the landscape has changed—there's no real MuchMusic for me to watch (even if I did have cable), Rolling Stone is a shadow of its former glorious self, and Spin is dead. Part of it might be that the genres I loved in in my youth have changed—does modern-day hip-hop have anything equal to Blackalicious, Talib Kweli, Mos Def or Wu-Tang Clan? All I see right now is Drake and Kanye, but that can't be everybody.
  
  
• Pancakes. I always flip them too early or too late. Mike is a pancake master, but I am B-grade at best.
  
  
• Sewing. My seams are never straight. 

Image via Fuck You Very Much

Mawwiage

There's no real way to mention getting engaged without coming across like a smug jerk, so here goes: I'm an engaged smug jerk!

About six weeks ago, Mike and I went for a walk. It was a gorgeous early spring day. The leaves were just starting to bud, I had just come from a brunch with a friend, and the sunshine was epic. Mike suggested a walk up to Casa Loma, which is one of our standard let's-get-out-of-the-house walks, so we hustled up the ten flights of stairs, paused briefly to take in the view of the city, and then settled in on a bench outside of the stables. I spent the next fifteen minutes making silly jokes about David Caruso's CSI: Miami cold opens: coming up with puns and then sliding my sunglasses on my face, screaming "yeaaaaah" into the blue spring sky.

Despite this, Mike still got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.

We're getting hitched in September. City Hall ceremony, then a reception at my parent's farm the following day. It's a whirlwind, really and truly: there seems to be five thousand moving parts to consider, about eight thousand people to meet with and emails to draft, and many thousands of dollars to spend. From the big picture (feeding 100 people for less than five grand should not be impossible, but it seems like it might be) to the fine details (what do our wedding favours really say about us?), there are hundreds of decisions to make, with factors like taste, time, and cost all coming into play. Just now, Mike turned to me and said, "What do you want to do about cake toppers?" I gave him a blank look in return. Cake toppers?

This is our life now.

A friend asked why we were getting married. He said it, like, why bother? It's a good question: we already live together, we're both Canadian citizens, and the current cultural landscape wouldn't judge us if we decided to have some bastard children in our rented apartment. So why get married?

Well, first and foremost, because we love each other. Mike is a wonderful partner, a wonderful man. He makes me feel better when I'm blue, and good about who I am. He is funny and passionate. He's a genre-movie savant, which both delights and confuses me. He is caring and generous. He does not let me get away with shit, and that's a good thing. He'll say things like, "I want you to have all the creative outlets you need," apropos of nothing, when we're just lounging in bed. He'll text me from concerts he's been looking forward to for months to say that he misses me. He reminds me to water the plants, and he still checks me out when he sees me on the street. He brings out the best in me: challenges me to be kinder, sweeter, less acerbic and more generous. He is genuinely sweet, and I am sweet for him. He's my best friend.

But there's more to it than that. We want the same things: we both work at non-profits, for example, because we both like feeling we're making a difference in the world©. We both want kids, and to raise them in a city we love (Toronto, duh). We have similar life goals: happiness over riches, appreciation for both the natural world and a city's cultural offerings, strong family and friend-community ties. We talk a lot about the future: the places we'd like to visit, the names we might give our children, the types of houses we would live in, and a million other things. Even just the pancakes we're going eat next weekend.

Plus, marriage just isn't the same as co-habitation. Living together can happen almost by accident. Maybe you just need a place to stay after your lease expires, and I happen to be getting tired of my roommate, and we'll just see how it goes for a few months while you look for something more permanent. Next thing you know, it's been a year, and we could technically claim common-law status if we wanted it. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it's almost like slumping into commitment. It doesn't seem intentional, like shouting from the rooftops, "Hey, this is my chosen person!"

Weddings are often showy, weird, ostentatious, incomprehensible, and wildly expensive. I've been to receptions where every single speech was about the bride, and only the bride; the groom barely had a cameo at his own wedding. They're also deeply personal, traditional, formative, and demonstrative of how the couple chooses to present themselves together. Our wedding is trying to reflect our deep intimacy (the private ceremony) and the commitment we also honour with our large and far-flung social circle (the larger reception). I'm trying to balance feeling like a bride and feeling like a greedy princess; so far, I've done this by avoiding all wedding magazines and wedding blogs except this one. I'm trying to remember that cake toppers don't say anything about us, per se; that not every wedding meal needs to be an elaborate buffet; that registering for things doesn't mean we're assholes.

Frankly, I'm much more excited about being married than I am about having a wedding. I once read a quote from a wedding photographer, who said, "you realize that photographing [a wedding] is like photographing the coin toss before a football game: Nothing’s actually happened yet." I firmly agree with this. I think our day will be an important day, but not The Most! Important! Day! Moments like graduating university, stepping off the plane to Europe, and the birth of your children had better be on that list, too. Celebrations, all.

And getting married will be fun. We're in the process of picking out songs, and talking about decoration, and finalizing our guest list. It's all work, but it's sort of fun work—like camping, or redecorating your bathroom. And it's going to be worth it: when the sun goes down and everyone is full, after speeches are over and before the dancefloor kicks up, there will be a moment, a sigh of contentedness, that will make all this worthwhile.

The Place Between

Back when I was dating my distaster-ex, I picked up Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. I was on a field trip to Michigan, and the night before, I drank one-third of a bottle of vodka (size: large duty-free), purchased (but did not eat) a white chocolate KitKat bar, and fell asleep under a pool table in my host's living room. When I awoke, I peeled back my sleeping bag to reveal splotches of melted white chocolate from my collarbones to my knees, and a monster hangover (size: Jack Torrance at the end of The Shining). I stumbled out of the house, past the frat boys in UMich lettermans jackets who were drinking beer on their front lawns, and tried to make it the conference.

I made it as far as the bookstore. I was, of course, still drunk, floating through the town of Ann Arbor on an unseasonably cold November day. I felt acutely aware of the eyes of the frat boys on me. I had never been to a "college town" before, had never seen how a town could orbit around the faux-Grecian university campus. The guys in their jackets drank beer out of red plastic cups and shivered in the wind. Some of them were eating pancakes. Their eyes moved as I did.

When I made it to the downtown core, near campus, I stopped for sanctuary in a bookstore. I don't remember the name, or why I picked up Stranger Things Happen. I was probably drawn in by the fake-folksy artwork. I read the back. The room swam. I peeled off an American twenty-dollar bill, marveled sickly at the American cover price, and left.

I spent the rest of the day trying to navigate the conference. Mostly, I hung out on the floor of whatever session we were in. It was a student conference about co-op housing, so the hippie/normals ratio was pretty high. People talked about radical bike organizations and how to have babies in a co-op setting. I saw someone drinking tea out of a mason jar. I watched as the carpet resolved itself from looking like the internal organs of a butchered animal into something more normal. The hangover faded, slightly. I still smelled like white chocolate.

It was in this headspace I was introduced to Kelly Link. Her work is uncanny, in the dictionary sense of the word: characters don't always know if they're alive or dead. People disappear into the ether, and reanimate from the grave. Purses contain Eatern European homelands, but only if you open them just right. But the stories are also grounded in humdrum reality. High schoolers shop for prom dresses. Gangs of friends watch TV. Little girls play hide-and-seek with their babysitters. But is the babysitter really a person? Or is she a ghost? Who's to say, really.

Link's books could be imagined as young adult literature—especially her most recent title, which had a strongly youthful bent to them. Adolescence is a time spent mired in the place between child and adult, when the membrane between both is permeable. It would be easy, then, to slip into some other world altogether, as so many of Link's characters do. It's like a hangover: not quite sober, not quite drunk. Some third, not entirely knowable, thing.

I just started reading Karen Russell's St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Russel is the author of Swamplandia!, a magical realism book set on an alligator wrestling attraction. Her writing, like Link's, is lyrical and strange. Unpredictable. When I write fiction, my role models are the sharp, direct words of Dashiell Hammett and Stephen King. But Russell's writing is nearly vegetal in its lushness. Whole pages are devoted to the way the swamp sounds under a particular kind of moon. Her characters, too, inhabit places between worlds. This is not always easy, either to write or to read.

I've also been reading Scare Yourself Silly, a feature series on The Toast. The author, Lucia Peters, takes something creepy or spooky—uncanny might the best term, again—from the dark corners of the internet, and shines a light on it. Her latest is a look at the 200 Phenomenon in the City of Calgary, which ideates that there is another, secret, hidden Calgary under the one we all know and tolerate. You can access this ur-Calgary by doing things like painting a door on a specific yellow wall using hazelnut oil; pushing through this door (now open) will lead you to rooms unknown. Peters looks at Boothworld Industries, which seems to be some sort of Murder Inc., and the true stories of people living undetected in other people's houses, usually in secret basement cubbies. The idea of that makes me want to vomit with disgust and anxiety. What drives her features is the question if these things are real or unreal, that we live in a world that science can't always explain. That sometimes we want to believe in those places between worlds, because we sense that things are not always real, but unreal isn't the right answer either. The membranes are thin.

Taken together, this coven of Link, Peters, and Russell is powerful stuff. I don't know what it is about women working in magic/horror, but they're so good. Maybe it's because we're used to blood and discomfort, to unexplained changes and strange smells. There is power in womanhood that doesn't stem from lipstick or high heels or leaning in or whatever. It comes from literally making food with your body, from being to withstand other people growing inside you. From all that blood, and from pushing down emotions until you too don't quite know if you're alive or dead; only that you're somewhere. In a world in between. A world filled with words.

Break in the Clouds

I was going to write a moody blog post about all the stresses in my life - money, wedding, new job, work/life balance, friendships hitting rough patches or maybe going off the roads entirely - but you know what?

I don't want to.

I'm going to take a deep breath and look at the trees, which are finally in that amazing stage of budding where the air around them looks like green mist. I'm going to hop on my bike and ride to the west end of the city, where I'm going to eat some sort of fudgey brownie and drink an upscale lemonade. I'm going to do a workout, and feel the movement of the muscles under my skin and feel sweaty and irritable; then I'm going to flex naked in front of a mirror and marvel at the work that I've put into my body and how it's paid off.

I've spent so much of life being anxious. Anxious about money, about men, about the health and welfare of family members, about my employment status, about whether or not my new shoes give me cankles. Sometimes, I'm anxious that anxiety is the only emotion I can really feel. It comes so naturally, in so many situations. I worry. Constantly. It is exhausting and leaves my soul and my brain feeling like they've been an Easy-Bake Oven all day long.

And then beams of joy break through the clouds, and they save me.

I get a text from a friend who's just had a baby, and despite how tired she is, she still gets excited when I tell her about wedding plans. I decide to walk my bike up a particularly gnarly hill, and instead of feeling like a loser, I choose to notice that my heart rate is still up and I still get to work on time. Mike and I make an elaborate meal, just for kicks, and then we eat it on the couch watching Game of Thrones in our underwear. (He saves me more than anyone else: relentlessly upbeat, and so full of love for me and his life.) Spring, finally, is arriving, and its bringing little flowers and buds and robins and green grass with it.

And while there are lots of big-ticket life things happening right now, including getting married and starting a new job, I think that's a good reason to double-down on finding joy.

It's amazing how much happier I was when I wasn't working full-time. Sure, I would occasionally have hysterical crying fits about my bank account, and I had a tendency to release a strangled yelp when people asked me what I did at cocktail parties. On the other hand, I saw my friends more, I was outside more, I was more physically active. That's a recipe for feeling pretty good most of the time.

Now, I have to pay careful attention to my joy-moments, because they are fewer and more fleeting. But they're still there. A new magazine in the mail. A quick coffee with a friend. Sleeping in with my beloved, and waking up slow in a still-dark room together. A fudgey brownie and a bike ride. A break, however fleeting, in the clouds.

Image via The Good Vibe.