Wes Anderson, Ranked

 

I offer you: an extremely definitive ranking of the films of a one mister Wesley Wales Anderson, also known as Wes Anderson: a director, of course; a visual stylist rarely paralleled in contemporary Hollywood (maybe only Quentin Tarantino would be as easily recognized by a single frame); a whimsician to the highest degree; a North Star in my own personal cinematic constellation. 

Wes Anderson is, to me, a certain shade of pink; a particular font; characters in uniforms (either official or of their own choosing); a warm soundtrack, probably filled with both classical music and pop hits from the 1960s and 1970s; themes of family, escape, adventure, alienation, redemption, and death; lavish production design that is scrutinized down the dust jackets on the books; framing borrowed from French New Wave and signature shots that include the god's eye, dollhouse, and slow-motion. (Taken together, these elements have become easy to spot and easy to spoof.) He is the first director that I was aware of as a director, when I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums when I was eighteen, the first movies I claimed as being for me. We recently re-watched all ten of his films, stretching from 1996 to 2021, and developing a rating of enjoyment was, for me, a wonderful undertaking.

Let us begin:

Isle of Dogs (2018): A good litmus test for a Wes Anderson movie is considering what it would be like if this was the first Wes Anderson movie a viewer had ever encountered. In this regard, Isle of Dogs is probably a failure. It's a high-concept story about a retro-future Tokyo where the city's dogs, diseased and infected, have been exiled to a garbage island, and one young boy—the ward of a corrupt and cat-loving mayor—goes to retrieve his loyal pet/bodyguard, Spots. The movie drags in places; the voice cast, while superb, is hidden behind stop-motion animation and puppets; and half the movie is in untranslated Japanese. Worst of all, the decision to place the story in Tokyo reveals a weakness in Anderson's trademark whimsy: his visual heightenedness can easily turn to the stereotypical, and this movie is not so assured that that turn doesn't happen. Missable. 

The Darjeeling Limited (2007): One of the major through-lines of Anderson's work is "daddy issues," or his attempt to process whatever feelings he has about parents. Darjeeling is the clumsy, clunky version of this work. It's a mid-career movie that is so formalized that the emotion comes across like a telenovela or a 1920s drama: there's a lot of shouting, a lot of explication of emotion, and characters talk like they're in a play rather than than actually feeling anything. The Indian setting is utterly wasted on the three brothers as they whine and sulk their way across the subcontinent. This one is boorish to me.

Rushmore (1998): On re-watching Rushmore, I was struck by how much I never wanted to see Max Fischer again. Like, he's an asshole. On the other hand: this movie is the larval version of what was yet to come, and those elements are fantastic. We have Bill Murray in a sad-sack role; some improbably and extremely good high-school theatre; and a Scottish bully who calls Fischer a "wee dirty skidmark," an insult that is actually perfect, I have no notes on that. When I was younger adult, I was sort of charmed by Max's arrogance; now, older, I can see that it's 100% shitty, and the quick turnaround Max evinces over the last 20 minutes of the film feels forced and unearned. If the movie was about literally any other character than Max, I wouldn't have fallen out of love with it.

Bottle Rocket (1996): Anderson's first movie has some of his cinematic trademarks, like his in-camera slow-motion, and it also marks the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration with Owen Wilson. In all other ways, this movie is a generic love story/lazy heist movie. It's a bit slow, quite small, lacks a memorable soundtrack, and isn't all that quotable. I mean, it's based on his film school thesis, and it shows; it's enjoyable, but it's not really a "Wes Anderson" movie in the ways we've come to expect. I still liked it more than Max Fischer, though.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004): I once had a boyfriend for whom this was his fall-asleep movie, so I watched this twice-monthly for nearly a year, and reader, that is too many times. I remember being disappointed when it first came out—I found the quasi-meta-documentary set-up contrived, I missed Margo Tenenbaum desperately, and the animations were unserious—but considered next to Darjeeling, its daddy-issues duological twin, Zissou is more fun, has a stronger cast, tells a more cohesive story, and is probably one of his funniest films. Plus, the soundtrack is perfect, I have no notes on that.

The French Dispatch (2021): Anthology movies are tricky, because navigating shifts in cast, tone, and style can disorient viewers: here we were, having a nice time, and all of the sudden, that story is gone! Never to be seen again! The French Dispatch is filmed versions of stories appearing in a venerated New Yorker-like magazine: three main tales, plus an introductory section where Owen Wilson walks us through a faux-Paris where most of the action takes place (and, in my favourite joke, falls into a subway entrance). Like all anthologies, there are more and less successful segments: the first, a portrait of an artist told in flashbacks by the absolutely marvelous Tilda Swinton, is probably the best; the middle section, a student-uprising narrative ("the children are grouchy"), would be forgettable if not anchored by Frances McDormand and Timothee Chalamet; the last, a tale of food, queer loneliness, and a hostage situation, is about as meditative as Anderson can get while still featuring a chase scene animated in the style of Herge's Tintin. This is Anderson at play, which is fun! We like a not-totally-serious Anderson.

The Fantastic Mr Fox (2009): When Anderson first announced that he was going to be making a stop-motion adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl book, I was like [insert Scooby-Doo voice] "Ruuhhr?" But here's the thing about Wes Anderson: because he adheres so closely to his regular themes (family, alienation, and coming-of-age) and his cinematic style (French New Wave), introducing new genres or audiences can actually feel quite thrilling. Not having read the book since I was a child myself, I can't tell you how closely the film hews to its source material; what I can say is that Wes Anderson's entry into the genre of children's film is technically marvelous, yes, but also tender, warm, funny, and interesting: all things a children's movie should be. (Tied with Grand Budapest)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014): This was the first movie in seven years (!!) that Anderson made explicitly for adults. Ralph Fiennes is perfection in the role of M Gustave, the preening maitre d' of an Alps-adjacent hotel right before the start of not-quite-WWII. His young mentee, a lobby boy named Zero, will become his successor, and this is their story. The movie is a nesting doll: a tale inside a memoir at least two layers deep, and the cast, therefor, is absolutely riotous with Big Name Actors. If this movie has a failing, it is that, like Darjeeling and Isle of Dogs, the female characters are greatly underserved: few in number, and playing young-person or old-lady roles that shunt them to one side in favour of The Men and Their Feelings. But this is a darker, twistier Anderson than we've seen before, and it's rather delicious. (Tied with Fantastic Mr Fox)

Moonrise Kingdom (2012): I love this movie, and that is because of, and in spite of, it being thornier than some of the others on this list: the kids are moody young teens, the adults are swept up in their own extracurricular dramas, and the setting—a New England island before it's ravaged by a storm—feels cooler to the touch than Anderson's rumpled New York City or his extravagant hotel rooms. But I believe this movie is a bit of a trick: instead of being "for" adults, I actually think Moonrise Kingdom functions the way a young-adult novel from the 1960s-1980s would: high adventures, very interested in the process of becoming an adult (flawed though we may be), romantic without being super sexual, and keen to feel everything. It is dreamy and weird, and perfect for a phase in a young person's life where they themselves may feel dreamy and weird.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001): This is where it all began, for me. We saw this movie as a family in the theatre—probably on New Year's Day 2002, or a few months later in New York City—and where I fell in love. I was nervous to watch it again, as it had been a defining event for me in my late teens and early 20s, but I haven't watched it in at least a decade. The story of a fractured family of former geniuses who are duped by their ne'er-do-well patriarch into coming together for a last hurrah, I fell in love with the characters, from the rumpled glamour of secret-smoker/writer Margot; Ritchie and Chaz, the damaged brothers; Etheline, their no-nonsense mother, and Eli Cash, the drug-addled novelist who always wanted to be a Tenenbaum. Leading the charge is Gene Hackman as the irascible Royal, who is always running some kind of con or jibe; Billy Murray plays a key supporting role, as do a number of other Hollywood legends and Anderson regulars.

Rewatching it, I am struck by how much Anderson's movies benefit from having women at their centers; both Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelica Huston are perfect, and their stories anchor the whole plot, which is unusual for Anderson and very welcome. This the last movie Anderson did on a relatively small budget ($21M, compared to Zissou's $50M), and the whole thing feels more organic, looser, and playful than the ones that came next; it wouldn't be until 2009's Fantastic Mr Fox that Anderson would make a movie that feels as playful as this one. While most of his movies traffic in redemption narratives, this one sticks the landing: the characters start out bedraggled shadows of their former selves and end the movie, however, shakily, where they're supposed to be. It's a love letter to all the ways families fail us and lift us up, and all the ways life swerves and dips, and all the ways we are wounded and we heal. When one of his sons says to Royal, "Dad, you were never really dying," Royal replies waggishly, "Yeah, but I'm gonna live!" What better motto do we want?

Things That Happened in 2021

January: Welcome back to season two of COVID! It's horrible, honestly just the worst. January is full of terrible news: the long-term care facilities are doing very badly, the schools are closed, the weather is grim. After quarantining for two very long weeks, we kicked off the year up at my parent's farm, which was the right choice. Putting my feet into open-water Lake Huron on January first felt mystical and strange, like I'm a character in a book. The bulk of the month is spent sitting on the couch watching my junior kindergarten student flop his way through Zoom school—zchool?—and knitting.
Knitting project: Nurtured Sweater by Andrea Mowry

February: Uh, we started playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I put a lot of energy into creating a character? I take a crazed six-week-long swing at a grad school application that ultimately goes nowhere? I honestly have very little memory of this month, probably because most of it was just a holding pattern of knitting, cold weather, and Zoom kindergarten. It's a smear in my memory, a blur of short days that feel interminable. It's possible that February is swallowed up every year, but this one is especially gone.
Kitting project: Solasta Sweater from Pom Pom Quarterly

March: My sister moved in with her partner. While I missed her, it was also nice to have the workout space back, because while she lived with us, I worked out in the hallway outside the bathroom. I ran Movie March Madness for the fifth year in a row and continued to really enjoy it. Spring returned, which was a relief. It's weird doing these round-ups in Covid years because really, nothing happened, and I felt every emotion about it.
Knitting project: I designed my own stripey socks!

April: Noah came home and stayed home, which was annoying because I did a lot of paid work this month! We muddled through another half-semester of zchool, which was slightly better—the days were longer, we could all get outside, we took breaks and stopped giving a fuck about staying on top of EVERY session on EVERY day and just let things get a bit loose. I bought a million pink plants and created a kitchen windowsill fit for a hobbit. I emailed my MPP asking to fast-track the school-staff vaccines.
Knitting project: none, but I did get the seedlings started FINALLY

May: My work had a one-day online conference that look literally hundreds of hours to pull off, and it was exhausting. The remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in the ground; I cried for hours. I always feel weird saying that I was affected by that discovery, or by Kent Monkman's painting "The Scream," but really, histories of children being ripped away from their parents to experience brutal trauma and maybe die just...hits me where I live, you know? May was a shit show.
Knitting project: Ostensibly it was the Flax Sweater by Tin Can Knits, but with so many modifications that it's basically my own thing.

June: I got my first COVID vaccine and was a nervous wreck from the moment I booked the appointment to the moment I broke down crying while waiting in line. Medical anxiety is a real bummer, y'all. Anyway, I got it, and it was fine. I also ripped out literal tons of garlic mustard from our backyard—like, probably at least five hundred pounds of garlic mustard. I started going for evening walks with audiobooks and it was amazing; I highly recommend this as an activity, especially in the pre-summer stint when the solstice light is just right and the leaves are on the trees and it feels possible to exhale, a little.
Knitting project: None? I think? Huh, weird.

July: Mike's parents collected Noah for a weekend and we went up to the cottage to help my parents with their renovation: there was much paneling and spaghetti sauce-making, but it was also SO NICE to have a break from our darling, labour-intensive five-year-old. I got my second covid vaccine and felt something loosen inside my soul. Things grew in the garden; we went swimming at the pool; we ate ice cream and played on the skateboard; Noah played with his friends; I read the Percy Jackson books. It was all fine and pleasant. It felt like a regular summer.
Knitting project: Free as a Bird shawl by Andrea Mowry

August: My garden was weird this year. The tomatoes all got blight, the zucchinis underperformed, the bunnies ate most of the peppers (note to self: put them in pots next year!), but the garlic, squash, and pumpkins were all just fine. Gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is a skill that I covet, and over the last two years, I've grown some stuff—just enough to make me anxious about how much stuff I would have to grow if the shit truly hit the fan. We visited Toronto and saw some friends. I sewed a blouse. I heard back from MPP about school vaccinations for staff (see: April), which earned a MAJOR EYE ROLL.
Knitting project: Fluorite Socks by Andrea Mowry (wow, I knit a lot of her patterns this year!)

September: First, we had an excellent Labour Day weekend with The Regular Gang, some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly a year. Then: Noah's back to school! God, I love this part. I know Covid is still very much a thing, but sweet Lord, after five months of home school and then summer holiday, my very favourite child needs to be elsewhere for sustained periods of time. With him out of the house, I'm free to start working out again, which I do, and also to have naps in the middle of the day, which I also do. Septembers are always so nice.
Knitting project: Earth and Air sweater by James Watts

October: Work ramped up in a serious way. I got another client, which felt great, but I was also like, "I'm so busy!" and I felt overwhelmed. But the work I'm doing is good and interesting, and the people I work with are so smart; I'm learning something at every meeting (mostly it's just "slow down and be less frantic, you loon"), and so I don't regret it, even though it does feel like I'm treading water. We go swimming at Thanksgiving. I apply for the library board, but ultimately didn't get it. I started doing social media for a local climate-action group, which felt cool.
Knitting project: Pop Radio Socks by Summer Lee

November: I started driver training! After literally twenty years of having my G1, I'm finally ready to start driving, I guess? My classes was horribly slow and most of it comes down to "every other driver is incompetent, check your blind spots, and don't hit anyone" (there, I just saved you $700). I do an incredibly labour-intensive project for my anchor client and it totally burns me out—the debrief meeting is just me and the two other project leads chuckling sardonically at how much goddamn work went into this thing—and it makes me wonder when I will be ready to move on from this job. It's my birthday, I turn 38 on a Tuesday, who cares.
Knitting project: baby Pritchard sweater by Christina Danaee

December: Noah got his first covid vaccine, and things really felt okay...until they didn't. Most of December was wrapped up in rising omicron cases: when I took the train into the city on December 10 for friend-time and shopping, things were just starting to feel tense; when Mike went in six days later, ostensibly leading the way for Noah and me to join him a few days later, I was like, come home today. (And he did!) While we planned to host both sides of our families on Christmas, the dearth of rapid tests and high transmissability and general abdication of leadership by anyone in government—the same people who begged the electorate to let them be in charge!—led us to playing it safe-ish and hosting only Mike's parents for the big day. I did 100% of the Christmas dinner with a raging sinus infection.
Knitting project: Madrigal Mittens from Pom Pom Quarterly

I dunno, guys. We can all agree that 2021 was a weird year? There were some good times and some really terrible ones; we had a full fall semester of school, which was great, but the spring really kicked our asses (and early 2022 isn't looking so hot either). A few people I know went in very weird directions with covid and the whole corporate-control narrative, which was upsetting and alarming, but most people were pretty much on the same page as us: trooping through vaccinations and doing 95% of our socializing outside. I did a lot of knitting and some gardening; I also felt totally overwhelmed by our messy house, which I admittedly did very little to rectify. I got more work than I had in years, and I loved it; it also totally wrinkled my brain. The end of 2021 feels like a yawp into the void, a thousand mothers shrieking in fear and rage and frustration...but there was some really nice days, too, days that felt normal and sweet and funny and comforting. In a bad year, it's sometimes all I can ask for.

The Wheel

 One of my favourite fantasy tropes is when someone solemnly tells another character that everything turns according to The Wheel. It happens in the Dark Tower series, when Roland educates young Eddie that ka, roughly understood as destiny or universal force, only has one purpose—to turn—and that the many worlds are aligned along a wheel that is slowly breaking. It happens in the Wheel of Time series, when "the wheel weaves as the wheel wills," a statement that sounds so grand until you realize that it is, in fact, utterly incoherent. Even the much-satirized "time is a flat circle" line from True Detective can be read as a wheel metaphor, if you were so inclined, which I obviously am.

Regardless of how you gussy it up, the basic idea is: things come and things go. 

As I've gotten older, the idea of linear time has lost its sheen. Now that I've realized that adulthood isn't a destination one can arrive at (unless you count your own coffin, which is so grim), I'm free to the embrace the idea that I first encountered Katherine May's book Wintering. May takes the position that seasonality is a constant, that we all have our own winters—emotional, relational, physical, and, y'know, climatic—where we withdraw, slow down, and rest. We can emerge from these winters like bears from their dens, blinking at the buds on the trees that have been there, undetected but vital, since the previous autumn. Winter is a state of mind, a necessary slowdown, and a rebuke to productivity and hustle. 

By encountering winter, not as an apocalypse but as a slightly difficult gift, we can greet it as a friend when it arrives. This is a radical departure for me, because I don't really enjoy winters in the seasonal sense, and the emotional-physical variety are often hard for me to shake off. But it is possible, and once I do, I find myself revived and refreshed, ready to do and make and be with an energy I feel I've earned. 

Over the past few years, I've become more aware of the Wheel of the Year, a relatively ancient way of understanding time's passage. Each year is divided by eight major days: the two solstices and equinoxes, plus mid-holidays (Beltane, Samhain, Imbolc and Lughnasadh) that celebrate harvests and spring's return.  In the olden days, each spoke of the year would be a festival, communities coming together to remark that the end of October really is sort of spooky, or that we need a bit of coziness in mid-December. 

I like the Wheel of the Year. For one thing, it has its roots both in the Celts and the Slavs, which are the twined branches of my family tree. Following this tradition feels like it actually belongs to me, unlike some of the mashed-together rituals I've adopted because they are around me, but not inside me (although any excuse to eat a dumpling or a latke, am I right?). It has a relatively gentle pace. The days are spaced roughly seven weeks apart: just enough time for something to shift in the natural world, like the leaves coming off the trees, or the major job of harvesting and preserving the garden mostly done. 

In fact, it was my conscious effort to tune into the natural world that actually gave me more reason to pay attention to the Wheel of the Year. These eight little micro-seasons each have their own rewards and their own special beauty: who doesn't love the unexpected brilliance of a blue-sky day in February, or the crocus and forsythia popping out in early spring to reassure us that all is not lost? Daily walks with my kiddo over the last few years have brought my attention to these little changes, like the bushes that go from glossy green to neon pink over several weeks, or the dog-hot days where the only time to play outside is early morning or late afternoon? The grasses that grow in September, the snow in November, the brilliance of the night sky in August? The slow flow through the year means there is no beginning and no real end, either: it's just the next thing, and not too far off. 

Annual cycles are part of many calendars. The Christian liturgy even has its own seasonal colours (violet for Lent and Advent; black for All Souls' Day!), and the Hebrew calendar has a casual four New Years in its calendar, with two—Rosh Hashanah and Passover—being the heaviest hitters. Annual cycles show up in other places, too: when you're building a passive solar house, you have to be aware of where the sun will be and when if you want to keep your house cool in the summer and warm in the winter. And we still have vestiges of harvest season built into daily life, like the summer break from school that was originally for farm kids to go help out, or even Daylight Saving, which was satirically suggested by Ben Franklin as a way of preserving candles. (Ugh, dude.)

But my sense of the sacred isn't bound by stained-glass windows or tractor ruts. And of course, surprising no one who has been reading this blog for more than ten minutes, I do find myself yearning for community festivals, for weird rituals, for street dances and sidewalk dinners, for bonfires and midnight swims. The idea of roots so deep that time can't shake them loose can be very appealing, and while I likely will not be erecting a May Pole any time soon, I wouldn't say no if someone invited me to join them. 

What I like the best about it the whole idea is that nothing is permanent, and while that's a major downer in some regards, it can also be a huge relief. Difficult seasons will pass. The family in the throes of the terrible twos will emerge one day into blessed little-kid life. Illnesses have good days and bad days. I feel lonely and isolated one week, and celebrated and connected the next. The wheel turns long, as well: as our parents get older, so do our kids. We start over in jobs, in hobbies, in houses, in cities. We are beginners, novices, experts, and then beginners again. When things are wonderful, the urge to grab hold is strong; when things are shittier, we're more eager to move past it. Either way, the sun comes up.

I'm not a neo-pagan and I don't know where this wheel is rolling. But I do know that embracing the fact that everything comes and goes and comes again is giving me a sense of peace. I know that I will get older and things will change; I know my son will grow up and leave home; I know people I love will get sick; I know I will someday too. But when I remember that we always have the bright yellow shock of forsythia in spring, the quilt of the August starlight, the red sumacs in the ditch and the honk of geese as they wing back and forth in shoulder season, I feel startlingly reassured that all is not lost.

On Writing

Has there ever been an identity as fragile as that of "writer?" 

I have "been a writer" since I was in middle school, and my mom, exasperated with my daily habit of abandoning my nightie on the bathroom floor each morning, assigned me a page of writing every time I did it. Exasperated right back, I churned out nonsense stories about fairies and dolls come to life, a magazine where the cover model was a pig, and other from-the-brain-of-an-eleven-year-old masterpieces. I kept writing in high school, when I took Writer's Craft twice, earning a 95% in the class each time; I also journalled frequently, using loose leaf paper to try to figure out my friends and myself as though we were case studies in a psychoanalyst's training manual.

In university, I turned in papers that smelled a lot like the ones I'd written in high school—chatty, observational—and got barrel-scraping marks. No one told me that you weren't allowed to say "I" in university! No one told me that original thought wasn't done, and that any idea I had had to be cited from a previously published source. As someone who'd amassed a great deal of knowledge over the years about relatively obscure topics—Fatty Arbuckle, European graffiti—I was in the habit of being a voracious reader, synthesizing everything, and letting the source material fade. Plus, I was disappointed that university libraries didn't have a ton of texts on things I was into, yet seemed to have many linear feet of bookshelves devoted to, like, German Expressionist cinema, or Catholicism. Snore. 

But it was also in university when I started this blog. I finally had a place to install all my snarky thoughts and ramblings. Not trying to mold myself to the unversity-essay voice—striving for intelligence, and utterly devoid of jokes—I let my run-on sentence freak flag fly. In 2013, I wrote a fairly bad first draft of a science fiction murder mystery (!!) I have not yet had the heart to revisit; more recently, I've been trying to sort out my feelings about ritual in human life. At this point, my process includes long and animated shower discussions with myself, and precious little actual typing of words.

Despite the fact that I've never been formally trained as a writer (unless you count a lot of annoyed red pen from TAs who marked my essays) or as a journalist, I've done both and done them relatively well. I developed a real love of interviewing, which has introduced me to some fascinating people/characters. And I've been lucky enough to have some friends, editors, and clients who reach out and actually ask me to write for them, an event that never fails to both terrify me and boost me up. Writing has always kind of worked for me: I'm a much smoother writer than I am conversationalist, a much more organized thinker when I can get it down on paper, and I enjoy the process of turning "in here" into "out there."

I struggle with imposter syndrome, though. I struggle with the fact that for the last five years, this blog, and my writing career in general, has been a bit of a ghost town. Parenting, marriage, health, pandemic and, just, you know...life...has been overwhelming sometimes, and keeping 'er breezy on the blog has been a challenge. It's hard to be authentic and honest sometimes. Back n 2009, the biggest offense I encountered was Chuck Klosterman's book deals. Now, we've actually been through some shit. 

Every time someone else introduces me as a writer, I get a little squirmy. I haven't been paid to write articles for over a year now, and my professional time has been mostly administration and evaluation work—an area that I enjoy immensely, but doesn't activate my brain in a writerly way. (Again, very few jokes in those roles!) At what point do I stop considering myself a writer, or a future-writer, or a one-day-maybe writer? Someone with intentions to write isn't a writer, after all.

And then I think of the authors who take many years between books—decades, even. I think of all the writers who have day jobs, and there are legion. Of the many, many people who never make a buck off their writing and do it anyway: bloggers, fan fic authors, writer's-group members who produce work for a tiny audience. I think of the folks who write only for themselves, who finish a work, not by sending it to an editor, but by putting in a drawer. I think of my dad, who wrote haiku poems, and my mom, who writes beautiful emails. Those people are writers, too. They are my people.

Whenever I have an identity crisis about whether or not I'm a "real" writer, I try to remember that the vast majority of writers don't do it for money, prestige, or recognition. Their work is like drops of rain that nourish the soil of their lives, but are invisible on a sunny day. The garden grows regardless. In fact, it can't grow without it.

Even in fallow seasons, I'm allowed to call myself a writer. Even when I haven't been paid for it in a while—fuck, when I haven't done it in a while—I can understand that time as something that's still integral to the work. It's a period of gathering my thoughts, getting more experience, or paying attention to new ideas. It's reading time, which is incredibly important to writing. It's time to talk, to realize that my fumbling words need smoothing out. Even if the writing I'm doing is mostly on Facebook or letters, it still counts. 

Writing has never been my full-time job, but I'm not convinced I'd ever want it to be. I enjoy the loosey-goosey vibe I currently have with the process: sometimes it's a cyclone, and sometimes it's a drizzle. I can't rely on it to keep the lights on. But when it shows up—when I cultivate it to show up—I love the splash it makes in my life.

It Solves No Problems

When I was twelve, I somehow contracted parapertussis, a "less severe" form of whooping cough that still left me coughing so hard I would routinely vomit. Let me tell you: as a freshman high school student, brand new to the area and totally unacquainted with anyone at my new school, entering with a highly communicable and public disease is not really The Move. There is a childhood vaccine for pertussis, of course—it's part of the routine TDap-IPV shot, administered at 6, 18 and 48 months of age—but for this little-sister version, there is no vaccine. There's not even really a treatment, although antibiotics can help a little if you start them early. It's basically just cough until you stop coughing.

I'm going to get it out in the open: I'm pro-vaccine. I'm pro-medicine, generally. I'm not naive enough to believe that my position is universal—I know that for fat people, women, people of colour, poor people, and those with hard-to-identify and harder-to-treat conditions such as chronic pain, inflammatory disorders, fatigue, and rare syndromes, the experience of going to the doctor and emerging with an effective treatment is a wishful dream. But when surgery removed my dying ovary, or when experimental treatment saved my dad from certain death from melanoma, or when organ donation allowed my friend to give a stranger a second crack at life, or any number of routine and miraculous interventions occur in and around my life, from EpiPens and c-sections to spinal surgeries and chemotherapies, it's hard not to feel grateful for the fact that smart men and women are engaged in the practice of discovering, inventing, refining, and delivering some of the most staggeringly advanced medical care I could possibly imagine.

And truly, I believe vaccines are a part of this medical ecosystem. Like, jeez, do you know what measles actually do to a body? Why the fuck would I want that? Like all medical interventions, I know that vaccines are not a 100% foolproof endeavor on any level—people can suffer immediate and long-term side effects, bad batches have been made, and they are more "plate on top of the leftovers in the fridge" than "triple-layer Saran Wrap" when it comes to breakthrough infections, but by and large, the shine outweighs the shit. They're safe, effective, and they don't fucking cause autism. 

But we're now in an age when vaccines are under scrutiny again, and the quicksand is shifting, and things are bleak indeed. When I look back at this post in 2030—from the comfort of either my forest goblin-hut or my underground bunker, depending on how things are going—I'll be like, "Oh, right...Covid." Because Covid, as a general experience, has been chock-full of psycho-social mayhem, and people playing into and across type in sometimes-surprising (but often depressingly predictable) ways.

Take, for instance, the Ostriches: folks of any age with their heads in the sand, denying the fact that the world needs to change to accommodate this public health moment. These are the people who won't wear masks in sandwich shops and who stand too close at the bank; in their most terrible form, they protest at hospitals. They also include the Live-Forever Crowd, the 20-somethings who have never been really sick, and who are convinced that the virus is for old people. As someone who was exposed to sickness in my 20s, this gang really roasts my beans: it comes for us all! Get the jab, Jaxon! 

With the Anti-Authority folks, subsets include punks of all ages whose default stance is "you can't tell me what to do!" along with the former Noam Chomsky readers who see any alignment between government, health, and media—also known as "the story of why you should get vaccinated"—as some form of sinister collusion that they reject on principle. These people are often knee-jerk reactionaries, who might be convinced into coming around if enough of their punk/suspicious colleagues do so. They also might not! The Paranoiac is another subset of this; they're rejecting the vaccine as being part of a plot to control "the masses" as though the masses have not proven, over the last 18 months, that we're about as controllable as a bag of spilled rice. Also: they don't like being reminded that the Koch brothers don't know who any of us plebes are. Sorry! (But they really don't.)

The Amateur Statisticians have scrutinized "the numbers" and can tell you that the chances of them personally contracting the virus are very small. And even if they did, the chances of them actually dying from it are even smaller. And the chances of their kids dying from it is practically a speck, so why bother taking a day off work? And to this I say: you're not a goddamn scientist, Roseanne, and Long Covid is a thing. Even if you don't actually expire from the virus, fucking around with a disease that has some pretty heavy post-viral shit is a bad idea? And maybe passing it to your kids? Fuck off.

The women who rely heavily on their naturopaths and their crystal necklaces, and who have borderline orthorexia, are The Nice Ladies. These are the women who had a bad run with an inattentive doctor for a few years, resulting in a missed lump or an inflamed colon—extremely real reasons to be suspicious of re-engaging with mainstream medicine, as medical PTSD is a real thing—but who now eschew all forms of medical intervention in favour of the vitamin aisle at the local health food store. And frankly, these are the ladies who probably don't know many people who have dealt with Covid directly; they don't know a lot of nurses or warehouse workers or LTC facility staff. 

And finally, we have Trolls, who show up in comment sections with malignant glee, spouting off about vitamin D and ivermectin and saying "it's just the flu." Always, always block and ignore. They take pleasure in pissing people off, they're almost always male, and they're just people with dirty souls.

I have varying degrees of sympathy and compassion for each of these types. Nearly everyone is trying to ensure their own safety, weighing the value of their own personal position against the outcomes of getting well and truly sick. Sometimes they have more than one objection—they're suspicious of both western medicine and the CBC! They're sometimes installed in echo chambers, shrugging off dissenting views as being "brainwashed" and feeling the horror of realizing they're alone in their stance. They're isolated, often, and while being online might feel like a balm ("others like me!"), in the real world, the friction with those who regard them as selfish, misinformed, stupid, or arrogant is exhausting. Do I have compassion? Sure. I do.

But I also know that not one of these types, either as individuals or as groups, are scientists or doctors. They're often super intelligent, but they're just not trained in this stuff. They're not equipped to make a good call. Because: most of us aren't! It's not a value judgement—I'm not a bad or dumb person because I don't know how nuclear medicine works—but it does mean that I rely on medical experts to make decisions on my behalf. So I rely on governing boards and bodies to ensure that my medical experts are well-trained and ethical operators. And I rely on governments to regulate the governing bodies. And the system is imperfect—like, yes, it is shitty that Pfizer is earning twenty-six billion dollars this year in vaccine revenue, when people who worked on actual Covid wards reused masks all day and couldn't get a vacation day for love or money. I know that there are big, obvious, glaring problems with the whole system. I don't excuse that for one minute.

But you know what doesn't fix the problem with the system? You know what doesn't make Covid go away? You know what doesn't instill a sense of community, trust, and mutual uplift with the people around you? You know what designates you as unallied with the chronically ill, the medically vulnerable, the elderly and children in your life?

Refusing the vaccine. Refusing the vaccine solves no problems. So tell me: how are all these smart, wonderful, scarred, scared, isolated, paranoid community members going to solve Covid without it? Don't just cough until you stop coughing.

Your Late-Summer Horoscope

Listen, lovers: the wheel of the year turns ever onward, and we are between spokes now: Lammas just behind us, kicking off harvest season (as anyone with a garden knows), and the fall equinox in a few short weeks. For now, the summer is hot, the days stay long, and the sky is pink with smoke. It's the most beautiful apocalypse I can imagine. Let's dive into some made-up horoscopes for the coming months. 

Aries: My fantasy these days is that someone figures out how to plant billions—trillions!—of trees all over the world. Do they shoot them out of drones? Do they air-drop them the way they seed lakes with fish? Do we have to plant each one by hand? And what happens when they fail, as many seedlings do? My attempts to reckon with what the future holds for my sweet kid—the one who did not ask to be born on a hot and thirsty planet—and with what his adulthood will look like without those billions or trillions of trees, is something I grapple with daily. Maybe your homework this quarter is to plant a tree or two?

Taurus: I am constantly on the hunt for great YA stories. Books written with The Youth (tm) in mind are some of my favourites, and if there happens to be magic, great. I have read SO MANY magical-young person books, and I truly enjoy the genre: give me teen feelings, but gimme some stakes where someone might get blown up. If there's a semi-sentient castle or a lively juju bazaar or an alternate history where noted heartthrob John Calvin becomes the Pope instead of creating his own church, all the better! Magic-teen books are now slightly embarrassing, but honestly, you can keep your Elena Ferrantes because I am over here with my TJ Klunes. Anyway, Taurus: stop apologizing for the things that give you joy; in fact, seek out those not-very-cool things that you suspect will make your life much more joyful.

Gemini: The best thing I ever heard about grief came to me via a podcast, during which the guest remarked "grief is not an emotion. It is an attempt to reckon with that which cannot be undone. All kinds of emotions may attend that reckoning." This lands in my soul the way nothing else about grief has. It feels true to me, because my grief is often attended, not just by sadness or loss, but by rage, relief, tenderness, and surprise. Grief is often explained by mechanics or metaphor—the five stages, the ball in the box—but the thing that always startles me about grief is that I can be startled by it. I can read the opening of an article and dissolve into tears; look at a photo and feel my heart squeeze. I can't anticipate it the way I can other emotions, and that is grief's unkindest thing.

Cancer: I recently read this fascinating article about mother trees: mature trees in the forest that send out nutrients to other, less-established trees. Responsible loggers will do their best to find these mother trees and log around them, leaving them to remain in that role as new saplings replace older growth. I find this unbelievably beautiful and unbelievably sad: these trees are powerful givers, but there must be something to give to. I wonder if mother trees get lonely. Humans anthropomorphize everything up to and including electrical outlets, but these trees, alone in a denuded forest, create an ache in me that is hard to reckon with.

Leo: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is my favourite of the Harry Potter books, and let me tell you, that's not a popular choice! (Most people go for books 3-5, if you're curious.) The selling points of HBP are many: the introduction of one of my top-five character, Professor Horace Slughorn, who is a total Slytherin diva and I'm here for it; Harry, high as a kite on liquid-luck potion Felix; and the opening chapter depicting a series of conversations between the actual British PM and the Minister for Magic, the alternate head of state for magical folks. Rufus Scrimgeour (battle-scarred; yellow-eyed) takes over as Minister from Cornelius Fudge (hapless; wears a green bowler hat) and I have long been fascinated with Scrimgeour's portrayal in the books: slightly dangerous, highly experienced, and maybe also kind of a lion? I have no idea and I love it.

Virgo: The only way I can recommend Niagara Falls is if you go to attend a student-housing conference held in a hotel, get absolutely blotto, and then climb into a heart-shaped bathtub, fully clothed, with some of your conference peers. I can recommend Halifax highly if you go with your mother and she drives over a huge cardboard box, wedging it under your rental convertible, forcing you to slither under and de-wedge it. I can recommend Los Angeles if you take the subway while you're there: it's new and beautiful and entirely pointless in a city where 84% of people drive. The best part of anything is often unexpected, slightly deranged, and wholly ridiculous. Dress accordingly, Virgo: you don't want to get shmutz on your outfit.

Libra: "I was bullied in middle school" is a true statement that is also a total failure: I was bullied, it's true, but those six words do not exactly capture the experience of being ostracized and taunted when I was eleven, entirely at the mercy of my classmates and bus-ride peers, ignorant to what I had done to provoke the bullying (nothing) and what I could do to stop it (also nothing). When I did EMDR therapy a couple years ago, that period of bullying, which lasted about two years, was a huge wound, much more massive than I had ever realized. It was also foundational to understanding myself, especially in ways that relate to more recent friendship and relational pain, and the behaviour I do, both healthy and not, to ease it. Seek your wound, Libra.

Scorpio: Yours is the sign I associate the most with gothic lusciousness: you're all velvet bras and pan-fried mushrooms, red wine and black nails, embossed wallpaper and credit card debt. I love you Scorps because you're Morticia Addams in a RHOSLC world, and we need your arched eyebrows and affection for a centre part when things are overly sunny. However, every Scorpio I know is also a high-key ball of stress about what other people need from them, so know when to turn the flame all the way down—no, lower—and just...stop taking care of other people. Put on your velvet bra for yourself, Scorpio.

Sagittarius: When I turned 30, I held a Viking funeral for my 20s. At that point, I was like, "wow, I have been through some stuff," and while that's still technically true, the shit that I, personally, went through in my 20s was like a puddle compared to the emotional hurricane of my 30s. I think perspective is always a key factor in life: things will come in waves, and when you're being buffeted by the tsunami, you're just trying to hold on, to survive. You're not in it like, "ah, one day I will look back at this and marvel at my growth!" You're like, "what the actual living fuck am I cursed or just a bad person. WHAT IS HAPPENING." So, Sag friends, when you find yourself on an island where the water is calmly lapping at the shores, where there are no big waves on the horizon, when you can just sit and reflect? Do it!

Capricorn: One of the greatest gifts of the modern age is how fuckin' good children's television is. The vapid pablum of my youth, designed primarily to sell me merchandise, has been replaced by a modern wave of pure-hearted edutainment: our household flagship is Netflix's Storybots, but there are dozens more: Kid Cosmic, City of Ghosts (a true gem), Hilda, and even dumb shit like Booba and Oddbods. I watch a fair amount of TV with my kid, and this new crop has dispensed with much of the physical and verbal violence that was part of the 1980s-kid-show DNA: it's gentler, funnier, smarter, and more interesting. You, Cap, are on that path as well.

Aquarius: A love letter to my kid, who is being a huge turd for unknown reasons right now: I'm sorry we: let you watch TV; sent you to play with those kids who bullied you; fed you processed food; had so many fights in front of you; gave you a video game console when you were five years old; made you walk everywhere because we didn't have a car; didn't give you a siblings; didn't get you a pet; showed you the trailer for 2016's Ghostbusters and gave you nightmares; didn't enroll you in swimming lessons; didn't let you sleep in the car. We parents, we fuck up constantly. I hope you know you are so loved, even in the depths of turdliness, and we are here for when you surface and become the next version of yourself, as we all do.

Pieces: Did you know that pretty much all of the main characters in Finding Nemo are disabled or chronically ill? From limb difference and PTSD to addiction and memory loss, these are fish who have been through a lot. A lot! And they're not always nice to be around: Marlin is a nightmare, let's be honest. And yet Pixar is so casual about this, as though it's totally normal to populate a movie with characters we might turn away from if they were humans, and then demand that we fall in love with them (to the tune of $940M in box office). This is not wholly unproblematic, but Pixar has done a good job at depicting really complicated physical and mental states, from Carl Fredrickson's use of a walker in Up to Riley's depressive episode in Inside Out. I'm glad that we have these entrypoints for these conversations, for folks to see themselves onscreen, even if it's as a fish. Where do you need to see yourself, Pieces?

The Nine Types of Rest

The Nine Types of Rest was conceived by Steph Barron Hall in 2019, and was designed to correspond to the Enneagram types. Regardless of type, I find them useful as a checklist for needs and wants in times of overwhelm and stress; not everyone needs every type, but I will bet you a dollar that something on this list appeals to you. 

1. Time Away
Vacation time. Books from the library, websites, reviews. "You should definitely check out this restaurant." A flight, a bus ride, a long car ride. Mixtapes. Luggage. Arriving and unpacking into drawers, setting things on nightstands. A beer, a cocktail, a joint. Sitting on the porch, the deck, the patio. Stepping out into muggy heat, dazzling sunshine. A walk in the sand. Menus. Rain. Strip malls and bargain stores. Historic districts. Museums. Waterfalls. Babies napping in the carrier or in the stroller. Late dinners. Room service. Hotel pools. Sounds in the night. Really big parking lots. Souvenir shops. Tantrums. Endless photographs. The water tastes different. New transit systems. Coming home, smelling the way your house smells, getting under your own covers, dreaming again. 

2. Permission Not To Be Helpful
The best thing about going to my parents' house is that, at this point in the life cycle, being helpful feels like a choice. It's one I usually make—yes, of course I'll do the dishes, or round up the recycling, or put together a quick lunch. Of course I will look up the hours for the store, or help unpack the groceries, or flip the laundry. But there's also the luxury of knowing that if I want to, I can say no, or I'll get the next round, or I'll get to it later. Permission not to be helpful makes the choice to do so more of a gift than an obligation, and I appreciate that very much.

3. Something "Unproductive"
I refuse to monetize my hobbies. It's not that I don't think my knitting, pickle-making, or baking is "just okay"—on the contrary, I'm good at all that stuff—but the chance to do something that is only for me, because I want to, is a gift. It's not "unproductive" in the sense that nothing is produced, or even that it can't be leveraged (I have definitely traded knitting and canned goods for other wonderful things), but it's "unproductive" because anything I do with it is outside of capitalist time/goods-for-money systems, and that's the way I like it. It's a very, very small fuck-you to the endless yawp of hustle culture.

4. Connection to Art and Nature
I am not very good at remembering that forests are a thing, nor am I very good at walking around in them (my what-if brain goes into overdrive, offering up such goodies as "what if I roll my ankle and fall into the ravine and I can't get up and I die there" or "what if I pass a guy on the trail with my son and the guy turns around and murders us silently somehow" or "what if I forget my snack"), but every once in a while, the stars align and I enjoy my nature time. My 2020 highlight was a hike I did with my mom in the Dundas Nature Conservancy, where I allayed my anxiety by counting the number of 70-year-olds I saw hiking, and reminding myself that, if they could do it, then I, a 30-something with no underlying health conditions, could probably walk around for an hour under some trees. Anyway, I am not outdoorsy but aspire to be; this particular rest is not restful for me, really, but a girl can dream.

5. Solitude to Recharge
Sometimes, I just need to lie in bed and scroll through my phone. I read the archives of advice columns, I find weird Instagram accounts, I remember people I went to high school with and look them up. When I get bored of that, I lie in bed and do the crossword, or read stale magazines. I read library books that are due soon. I listen to audiobooks and doze. I pull the covers around me and punch my pillows down, flipping them to the cool side. I shove the covers away and stick my leg out, letting the breeze of the room soothe me. I keep my door firmly closed; the sounds of the house swirl around me, and I let them.

6. A Break from Responsibilities
Actually, I lied: the best part of going to my parents' house is getting to take a break from deciding what to cook for dinner. Even when I get pulled into the kitchen/offer my help, I'm off the hook for the planning. I don't have to shop for the stuff. I don't have to leaf through cookbooks, deciding on rice bowls or ramen or pulled pork or big salads. I can just show up, do some chopping, and then eat a meal! It's ridiculous how happy that makes me. I love helping without leading.

7. Stillness to Decompress
I am not really a "yoga person," in that I do yoga maybe 12 times a year and every time I'm surprised by how terrible I am at it: my hamstrings are like an overtuned guitar, and my stomach and boobs prevent some seemingly basic poses from being properly executed. But there's a moment in every yoga class, when the focus is on the breath instead of the movement, that makes my lungs feel like two huge balloons. The inside of my head is a cavern, instead of a buzzy hive. I stop thinking about what's next, what I have to do, or if I'm performing my own life properly; instead, I just breathe.

8. Safe Space
My favourite thing in the world is the sound of someone laughing from the next room; I like my own space, and knowing that someone else is nearby and happy.

9. Alone Time at Home
One of the biggest pandemic struggles, for me, was the fact that were were just together all the time. My partner worked from home; I was working from home and doing the bulk of the daytime childcare; Noah was attached to both us like barnacles; there was nowhere to go if we did go out. But I am a person who needs some alone time at home. I need uninterrupted time to write, to make things, to be creative. I like being alone during cleaning or big cooking projects. I chat to myself—it's how I process things that weigh heavy on my soul, or work through thorny creative blocks. I like to exercise in my underwear, which was less appealing when my home-gym was in the throughway for my sister's room. I try to give Mike a few hours a day of the house to himself—these are usually work-day hours, which aren't the same as true solo hours, but at least there's no kid in the background, weeping because the wrong kind of carbohydrate is on his plate. And I need that alone time as well, more than a few house a week, more than a day a month. All rest is like that, these days, but this one feels the most pressing, the most like there's a deficit.