Ten Years

Card by People I've Loved

I don't know how to start this one. I didn't know how to start then, if I'm being honest. Ten years ago, I had a baby, and I didn't know what I was doing. Truthfully, I mostly still don't. 

Let's start at the beginning, which is right now: my child is ten. Ten feels weighty. A decade old. A decade ago, Obama was still president, I still lived in Toronto, and I had been married for barely a year. My dad was recently recovered from brain surgery, sent home a month before I delivered. My sister had just moved back to Ontario after living out west. My brother was in his early 20s. And then: baby. A baby! A new person. I was one of the first of my friend group to get pregnant, and it felt like I was moving to an entirely new land, a continent I had seen on the maps, labelled Mother. Full jungle, documentary crews eaten. 

The early days were hard. I had a rough delivery, and it took me a long time to recover. Breastfeeding was surprisingly tough—I needed a few sessions with the lactation consultant, and plenty of coaching and trial-and-error. I was wracked with anxiety and intrusive thoughts, and resentful of the fact that it wasn't romantic and glowy. I had hot flashes when I nursed, and a new shape to my belly. The first night we were home, I had a nightmare about rolling over in bed and crushing our newborn, and I woke gasping and adrenaline-wrecked. NS didn't sleep well at all, and all the granola-mom advice about co-sleeping and sleep-nursing and relaxing were not applicable: the baby only slept on the move, which meant swinging the carseat like an enormous pendulum, or babywearing as I walked or bobbed, or pushing the stroller endlessly, both inside and out. It was constant, exhausting, tedious, and distinctly un-fun. 

Babyhood made me realize what a bill of goods we get sold, as parents. The idea that it will be easy is a lie: most of us are struggling with something, most of the time. Maybe it's the constant daycare sickness cycle, or night wakings, or a screaming-crying-throwing-up temperament, or sibling discord, or picky eating, or the work-life "balance," or sensory overload, or mom-guilt, or the constant demand of caring for someone who is very sweet but who cannot fill our cups in most ways. That first "I love you" lands hard because we've been pouring ourselves into this little vessel for years, and we have to wonder: is this working? Is any of this landing? 

But then we arrive at this moment: once, as a toddler, one of NS's tiny friends bit them in a fit of rage. After the other mother pulled her son way, I checked in with my small kiddo, who looked musingly out the window and said, "I'm going to bite Arthur." When I replied that, even when we're frustrated, even when they've done it first, we can't bite our friends, NS nodded understandingly and then said, after a moment, "I'm going to kick Arthur." And that is a kid I can really get behind, you know?  

My child has turned out weird and funny, brave and tender. NS uses gender-neutral pronouns now, a decision made several years ago and with surprising confidence. (Will it stick? Who knows. But it's who they are today, which we can honour.) School friendships seem to consist mostly of wrestling and talking about forbidden-at-home video games. At home, they bellow and gallop and shriek, and also lie on the floor and daintily assemble Lego for hours. We go through long media fixations on Cars, Pinky Malinky, Moana, Transformers, the Storybots, Mark Rober, and watch them on a loop, but if they are watching TV and catch sight of the neighbour kids out the window, they will dash out the door with "I'm going outside to play with my friends!" trailing behind them like a flag, TV immediately forgotten. They love and fear their skateboard. They chat with adults at church. They can be hideously rude and meltingly sweet, often in the same whiplash-inducing conversation. 

I separated from NS's dad two years ago, and I worry every day that I've done irreparable harm in doing so. It took a lot to work up the ability to leave. I worry that what NS saw during our married days will have ruined them for future relationships; I worry also that coming from a so-called broken home will have made them permanently sad. I read once that Kurt Cobain, whose parents divorced when he was seven, never got over it. What hope could I possibly have? 

On the other hand, we recently had a snow day that included several rounds of the card game Sleeping Queens, a romp in the drifts, a session of banana muffin-making, and a movie. It was just the two of us, and it felt like a victory that this normal day unfolded in front of us, scaffolded by nothing except our own habits and personalities, aligned, somehow, and perfectly in sync. There are days when parenting doesn't feel endless in a bad way—it feels expansive, light, and easy, like an endless day at the beach, or a morning reading quietly in bed. It feels beautiful.

I have spent a large part of my adult life terrified, and yet I find that I've also accomplished quite a lot. I single parented for two years in NS's toddlerhood, and then starting again when they turned seven. I've been a single parent for four of their ten years, and that math feels strange. I didn't expect to be a single mom. It has meant grappling with a double shadow: the dark parts of myself that show up in them, deserving of love but so crazy-making; as well as the behaviours and mannerisms that remind me of my ex, their dad, which makes me internally exasperated and forces external gentleness. NS adores and idolizes their dad, which is a dynamic that I find...frustrating. But I love them, so I try to make do in these strange waters.

Ten years of a person, ten years of parenting. I could share a million little stories, a mosaic of a life that is only just starting. Holding hands on the subway, babywearing in the kitchen, first days of school, midnight bed invasions, vaccine bravery, instant friends on the playground, weeping at storytime, clutching at bedtime. An endless flow of moments: parenting, childhood, living. 

When they were younger, I used to ask them, "What do you remember about being born?" And they would answer, "I pooped inside of you," and giggle maniacally, looking at me for a reaction, which I would always give—ew, yuck! And then they would say, quietly, "And then there was a big light."

And then there was a big light. 

Happy birthday, my sweet kiddo. I love you forever, to the edge of the galaxy, in every mood and every way. You are my red red robin, my wild thing, my sunshine, and my whole heart.  

Things That Happened in 2025

January: I started the year by falling down the stairs at a friend's house and absolutely murdering my own back and shoulder. Thank god I didn't have Noah for the first few days of 2025, because I was down for the count. I watched the entire run of Derry Girls in my convalesence. California wildfires burned parts of Los Angeles to the ground. We went to a silent disco in an art gallery, and Noah took drum lessons.
Best book: Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer

February: My dad came and stayed with me for the month, and that was lovely. We got about nineteen feet of snow—like, more than we had in years—and that was the big topic of conversation. Kendrick blew Drake away at the Superbowl and we all chanted "A MINORRRRRR" for a full week.  Trump started a trade war by putting tariffs on everywhere, including islands inhabited solely by penguins. Ontario had an election and nothing changed. 
Best book: Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

March: I brought March Madness back, and we did snacks this year! (Plain chips won, which is madness.) Noah and I went to see The Lion King onstage in Toronto, and it was very magical. I was a fraud victim when my taxi driver turned out to be a criminal who stole my debit card and PIN and then stole $2400 the next day! I was very stressed, because it was also tax season and my tax preparer initially told me I owed $7,000 more than I ended up paying. I subscribed to Dropout and it was worth every single penny. 
Best book: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

April: It was the 30th anniversary of A Goofy Movie and we listened to the soundtrack A LOT. (I'm not a Disney Adult but I was definitely a Disney kid.) There was a federal election and Pierre Poilievre, our capering troll-in-residence, did not win, thus delaying the Trumpification of Canada. Not much happened personally: the snow melted, my bestie came for a weekend visit, Climate Momentum put on our Earth Day Street Party. It was a cold spring. 
Best book: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

May: I baked a Neapolitan cake. Noah and I went to the Minecraft movie and Annie at the Stratford Festival. Out on a walk, I saw a bunny with no ears and felt a full-body chill: it felt like such a weird-bad omen, but when I looked it up, it turns out that some rabbit mothers will groom their newborns so aggressively that they lose their ears (or, sometimes, die), so when I saw that rabbit around all spring, I felt much more respectful of its survival. The police caught the people who ran the debit card theft ring, and I was told I had given a clue - cue my inner Harriet the Spy, stage left. The flowers started blooming and there was a new Pope. 
Best book: Home: A Short History of an Idea by Witold Rybczynski

June: Noah and I were both sick with head colds or allergies or some nonsense. I went to a library conference in Toronto and came home feeling so inspired. I took myself out to see The Phoenician Scheme alone in a movie theatre, the only non-kids film I saw theatrically all year, and it was a big hoot. Wildfire smoke returned. I went to the Beaver Valley for the annual Dominion Day party and it was great. ICE protests happened across the US. 
Best book: I read two books and didn't really love either of them, but I guess Come Like Shadows by Welwyn Wilton Katz

July: Summer! A heatwave kicked us off; I, house-sitting in Toronto in an un-AC'ed apartment, packed myself in icy gel bags from Dollarama and soldiered on. I ate a black garlic and miso bon-bon and flirted with the counter clerk at the local sando shop. Noah did a week of dance camp and then we defected to the beach, where we played in the sand and went to community theatre and started healing all the small wounds of the school year. Noah and I did a "yes day." I started reading a surf memoir and did not want to stop. 
Best book: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, and my favourite of the year

August: I spent barely any time at home: I was in Sauble, Toronto, seeing friends, being alone, being with family. Noah and I went camping with my cousin and her family and my mom, and it was medium-good, which is good enough that I would do it again. There was famine in Gaza. I tried to spend less time on my phone. 
Best book: The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which took me a long time to finish, but I got there in the end. 

September: As much as Dominion Day kicks off the summer, Labour Day anchors the end of it, and this year was plenty nice: much laughter and good food. Noah went back to school and immediately started begging to stay home; steps forward, steps back. I made a stained glass leaf and a new lampshade, and organized an equinox walk through the woods, plus three work projects, so I was busy. Charlie Kirk was killed in America, and the mood was grim. 
Best book: Circe by Madeline Miller 

October: Noah skateboarded a lot, which was cute as hell. I was part of a storytelling event in Stratford, where I talked about my decision to wear more colour and how it changed my life. We all got REALLY into baseball, except for those of us that didn't—I did, and following the Jay as they made their World Series run was great fun. I knit a hood and watched a lot of Dropout. We saw Anne of Green Gables at the festival and I cried the whole time.
Best book: Wild by Cheryl Strayed 

November: The Blue Jays played like heroes but ultimately lost the World Series, which was devastating. It was my mom's birthday, and I made her some neckwarmers. It was my birthday, and we ate parsnip ice cream. I got a new coat. It started snowing and didn't stop. I went for a bunch of medical tests and they all came back normal, and in some cases improved, so I finally started thinking about maybe worrying less about my health, which is a background drone of anxiety that sometimes (often) escalates into an internal scream. 
Best book: Art Work by Sally Mann

December: The run-up to Christmas was full of just rude-tween attitude, which I really struggled with. I got busy with work again, still. I finished a pair of mittens I started knitting in 2024, and made a bunch of Christmas presents. I made lasagna from scratch. The Epstein papers seemed to be released, heavily redacted, except maybe not? My family was together for Christmas and everyone lived, even the cats, who hate each other, so maybe there's hope for us all. 
Best book: The Language-Lover's Lexipedia by Joshua Blackburn

YEAR IN REVIEW: I read a lot; I also watched a lot of TV, most of it on Dropout. I gained some weight, and my 2025 fitness goals were largely unrealized—that fall at the beginning of the year took many months to heal from! My brother started hanging out with the family again, and my heart felt very full about it. I went on seven dates and those ultimately went nowhere. I saw a lot of theatre and thrifted some great stuff. Noah and I read The Indian in the Cupboard together, and they sobbed in my arms at the crying cowboy—a reminder that underneath their tough skin, they can be a real softy. I set a million goals and didn't do most of them. I sent and received great mail. I had great friendships. 

2026 GOALS: I told my mom that birthday goal this year was to "have more fun," and I really feel that. I've been operating from a place of "should": I should eat better, I should get fit, I should be a calmer and more loving parent, a softer and more understanding sibling, a more attentive daughter. I should be a less anxious friend, employee, person. And somehow—shockingly—I haven't yet managed to bully myself into being or doing any of those things. So next year, I'm going to try to have more fun, more levity, more yes, more laughter, more sweetness. I'm going to have more fun. 

Baseball in October

Ernie Clement print by Stephanie Cheng

The World Series is five games long, or four, or maybe six. This year it was seven, the full complement and then more: instead of a standard 63 innings of baseball, it took the Los Angeles Dodgers 74 innings to finally beat the Toronto Blue Jays. At the bottom of the eleventh of game seven, the Dodgers made a double play that routed two Jays off the field in less than three seconds, finishing the game, the series, and the season. The bar I watched the game in, which had been full of screaming fans all night, was oddly quiet as we paid our bills, filed out, and drove home. 

Being a baseball fan is not always fun, exactly. It requires summer games that stretch out over several hours in the blazing sun, or into the night. There is a byzantine farm-team and trading system that changes team composition all season long, with players coming and going. There are new rules added from time to time—the pitch clock, the runner on second in extra innings—and fiercely debated among fans who could be divided into Old Romantics (the love of the game!) and Young Upstarts (a game that takes three hours on a regular basis). Like many Major League Baseball teams, The Toronto Blue Jays is not a "locals-only" team, and is largely made up of international players, with a single Canadian citizen on the team. Mid-season play can feel languorous, because unlike other major-league sports, which typically play about 90 games each season, baseball teams play a whopping 162 games each year. They start in April. If they're lucky, they finish in October. 

This year, we went to a game at the SkyDome (sorry, Rogers, but it will always be the SkyDome to me), and watched several more at various sports bars in various cities. When I say "we," I mean my family—baseball is a family affair. My dad and sister are the ringleaders; they've gone down to Dunedin in Florida to observe spring training, and will often organize viewings, listen on the radio when the game is live, or stay attuned to their phones. They went to Game One of this 2025 World Series together, a feat that baffles and impresses me. The rest of us—my mom, my brother, my kid, and me—are along for the ride, gamely paying attention to the big plays, then pivoting to tease the players and rank them based esoteric criteria: best squat, meanest mug, craziest bling, best mid-season hairdo. Baseball is medium stretches of nothing punctuated by action, if you're lucky. Sometimes it's long stretches of nothing, punctuated by nothing. 

Things were different this fall. I watched the Jays advance out of the corner of my eye—don't look too closely, or they might stumble—and they rose to the top of their division, then the top of the American League. On October 20, George Springer clobbered a three-run homer out of the park, knocking back the Seattle Mariners in the American League championship and ensuring that the Jays would play the Dodgers in the World Series. The photos of Springer look like he's blasting off, just pure sports joy. 

Not having watched the Jays in their postseason so far, I wrestled with if I should start now. Sports superstition is real and will also make you sound insane—my sister once detailed her game-watching outfit, right down to her showered status, while I nodded knowingly. I also debated if jumping on the bandwagon was uncool, because "real fans" typically demand that you suffer the lows along with enjoying the highs. 

I will sidebar here and admit that I love a bandwagon. I want there to be real stakes and real skill, which is why championship games hit harder than regular season play. The athletes are at the top of their game, hungry for glory and exploring the edges of sports possibility. The fans start to cluster and clump, sharing knowledge and jokes. I watched the last two games of the Women's Rugby World Cup this year, based on the recommendation of a sports writer for the Toronto Star, who promised excellent athleticism and a heartwarming story. Did I know exactly what was happening at all times? Certainly not. But it was exhilarating to see the Canadians beat back the New Zealand Black Ferns in the semi-finals, and just as devastating to see them lose to England in the final match. 

So the chance to watch the Jays maybe, maybe, take home the biggest prize in baseball was too good to pass up. 

I cried during the opening anthems. We were at Montana's, a decidedly mid eatery, but there were other sports fans and cheap fountain drinks and the biggest TV I could fathom. Knowing that this was the first time in a generation that our Toronto Blue Jays were out there made me emotional. Knowing my dad, who is a long-time Jays fan, was in the crowd, made my heart feel tender. And then watching the Jays collect nine—nine!—runs in a single innings made me guffaw with disbelief, a smack in the face to the smug LA fans who swore the returning champion Dodgers would sweep the underdog Jays. 

Following a series as closely as we did paid off. I learned about baseball, sure—there are 26 players on a team, but also 40—but we got to know the personalities of the players. Ernie Clement, who set the league record for most postseasons hits, also told a reporter they were doing well because they had "the power of friendship." Trey Yesavage, who made his major-league debut in September, went on to become the first rookie to pitch multiple 10-strikeout games in the postseason, and made it look effortless. He was our favourite debutante at the ball, especially when he struck out Dodgers superbatter Shohei Ohtani. (I also loved watching Louis Varland pitch: he looks like someone plucked him from the 1940s and has the rolling gait of someone who knows how to rope a steer.) Addison Barger slept on David Schneider's pullout couch the night before the series started, because he didn't want to be alone (a story confirmed, hilariously, by Schneider's girlfriend). Oops, here's Vladdy doing the splits again. Here's Bo Bichette watching his out-of-the-park homer as it goes, not even bother to jog at first as the crowd goes nuclear. 

The series was about more than just baseball. Like all sports, it's a metaphor for life and the values that we hold dear. It was satisfying to see the Canadians hold their own. It meant something that the Jays pitchers wrote "51" on their caps, an acknowledgement that Dodgers pitcher Alex Vesia was off the field and grieving. When Ernie Clement openly wept after the game, saying that he wanted just a few more hours to play ball with his friends, I felt that. I always want more time with my friends, too.  

Los Angeles has poured big money into importing Japanese players, a strategy that has paid off and made the game much more interesting for the international stage, but it also created a narrative that the Jays were going to be easy to beat. They weren't: underdogs, maybe, but the team held their own incredibly well. Both teams playing produced beautiful, exciting baseball. My favourite moment was when Wrobleski, pitching for the Dodgers, clipped Giminéz at bat, a move that cleared both benches and threatened a brawl in the final game. Once the dust settled, and Giminéz took his base, Springer, next at bat, drove his hit directly into Wrobleski's leg. Everyone went nuts, and it was genuinely funny to watch. Baseball can be witty; this was one of those times. 

The sports commentariat has largely proclaimed this one of the best and most exciting World Series runs in recent memory, and while I have no real frame of reference, I agree that it was very exciting to watch and fun to be a part of. It was more than watching the games, although that was great; it was also trading memes and fan art, listening to interviews, reading up on the sports and its players. It's a cliché to say "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game," and doubly so when you happen to be on the losing side. But I genuinely believe that, while the Dodgers may have won the series, the Jays have won the game. 

Containers

Back in the early 2000s, in my late teens and early twenties, I rarely lived alone. I lived with my family, of course, when I was still young. Then I became a university student and lived in a dorm with dozens of other girls, mostly depressed, and several nuns, entirely repressed. When I, depressed, took a year off from university, I lived again with my family—two parents, two younger siblings—and then moved into a student housing co-op, where I lived with many, many people over the ensuing eight years.

The great gift of student co-op was that it was a container for a type of community for me. The resident makeup was decidedly mixed. Art weirdos shared a wall with silent computer engineering students, who shared a kitchen with Irish kids who could drink anyone under the table, who scrubbed the bathroom they shared with newly out lesbians, who left whiteboard doodles erased by depressed English majors. It wasn't all sparkles and sunshine: the houses were often dirty, the people often struggled with the typical afflictions of the early-20s crowd (addictions, mental health, heartbreak, student poverty, unemployment). But overall, the vibe was very much "young people living their own lives with each other."

For many years, I thought of myself as an introvert. I needed quite time, alone, to recharge. But compared to the vibrancy of early-20s co-op life, this new solo living felt—feels—muted. It feels colourless. 

I have that sense about a few different areas of my life. While there is literally no amount of money high enough to entice me back into an office, I do miss the camaraderie of office pals: the banter before and after meetings, the casual chit-chat as the clock winds down on Friday afternoon. Don't get me wrong, I also remember how excruciating those exchanges could be with people who were forever in the Colleagues column, who could never be moved over to the Friend-Shaped, Maybe? column. The ratio is better for restaurant or customer service jobs where subtly letting your freak flag fly out of sight of the Big Boss was a way of making lifelong friends. I know, I've done it. 

Likewise, high school and college were great containers for getting to know people. Give a kid a little bit of independence and a metric ton of hormones, and they will find a way to create social structures previously undreamed of. This doubled when I finally moved to an urban setting—Victoria, B.C. in the eighth grade—and I could do radical things like ride the city bus to the movie theatre and see a matinee presentation of The Beautician and the Beast on a date. Independence! Hormones! Public transportation! A witch's brew of possibilities. 

There has been a lot of online chatter about community lately, especially through the pandemic and beyond. The narrative has shifted in interesting ways: people are digging beyond the aesthetics of community, reminding each other that, if we want people to show up for us, we need to show up as well. If we want to host authentically, we need to be comfortable with people in our messy, imperfect, houses. Community is separate from friendship, but still deeply entwined in mutual respect; it's not a friend group, but people do want that too (hello, it's me, I'm people). Community is braided together with vulnerability: asking for help, offering it, showing our un-best selves. As the saying goes, if you want a village, you have to be a villager. 

But as I get older, the village seems to be getting sparser. I'm only 41, and I can feel the shift: friendships are more 1:1 than group-based these days, which means house parties are now more subdued afternoon affairs. I'm probably a scant year away from no longer walking my kiddo to school, leaving me without the afternoon check-in with my fellow-parents. I am currently unpartnered, and the dating pool in Stratford is...shallow? (In more ways than one.) (Ba-dum-CHA.) 

I think the twist is that we want more community, but we often want other people to provide it for us. And honestly, that's not unreasonable! It's hard to create containers from scratch. It's much, much easier to step into something pre-existing, like a school, or a summer camp, or housing co-op, or a job. I think it's one of the reasons that the Centre for Social Innovation got so much traction in its early days: plotting the future is hard work, and it's nice to have a buddy. 

Over and over, I find myself creating containers. I don't totally know why this happens, but it does! It feels almost comical at this point: I'll join a church and end up running a discussion group; I join a climate action group and end up running their family events. It's a very "if you build it, they will come" vibe. While it's work I like to do, it is work. And what's more, it take a long time to get traction for some of them. This winter, I hosted a "chips and dip salon," which was an invitation for folks to, uh, come and eat chips and dip in my house during the coldest months. When people came, it was in ones and twos, rather than the raucous event I might have imagined. The social container, the ritual of it, the form of it, is still being built. 

Here's the part that feels like whining but is wrapped in a thick cloak of good fortune. I am tired of holding containers. I want to step into someone else's community, some other person's events. I want to be welcomed with both arms, as I am, which is weird and needy, but also enthusiastic and warm and joyful. I want to walk, not at the front of the parade, but somewhere in the middle of the pack, surrounded and upheld. 

God, it feels weird to share that! It feels like I'm over-emphasizing my own place and role in what is, admittedly, a huge constellation of people who are making and doing community across my networks and places. I am not the sole convenor, and never have been. Like, tonight, my kiddo and I went to the library for their annual Boo Bash, and there were crafts and a zombie walk and an escape room, and it felt so nice just to step into something pre-planned and have a great time. 

But it does often feel like I'm reaching out, not being reached for. Is this a gap in friendship, or community? Or both? Is this the reality of nuclear family life, and the demands of late-stage capitalism? Is this just the state of things in our 40s, in the post-pandemic world, in the gig economy? Do other people feel this loss of the group, or does it feel like a relief to just be left alone with our spouses and kids? Am I just unpopular and unaware of it? (If I am, don't tell me.) Or is it just the human condition to feel slightly left out sometimes? 

There is a caveat here, which is, of course: I have amazing friends. I have incredible, amazing, intelligent, generous, superb people in my life, friends who make me laugh and lift me up, friends who I love and who love me. But this isn't really about friendship, per se. It's about...programming? Spaces? Planning? Energy? It's about how I accidentally fall into leadership roles, but so do a lot of people? Especially the people I love. 

I have no idea how to navigate this. Stepping back doesn't feel right—it feels like a "I don't even want to go to your party" vibe. Stepping more in also doesn't feel correct, because I'm just one person and I'm already busy. Maybe I need to get more adventurous in finding those pre-existing containers? Or, weirdly, choosier? 

Whatever the answer is, there is a part of me that also recognizes that nostalgia isn't the answer. My co-op days contained real challenges—friendships that cracked, roommates so mired in their won shit they were impossible to live with, and my own uncertainty at my place in the ecosystem. And yet, part of that nostalgia, and what I suspect people generally miss about their teens and 20s, are those containers for communities to grow. We are sorely lacking in petri dishes of the same type in our late 30s and beyond, and it's hard to build them from scratch. We need comrades as we do that work. Or, at least, I do. 

Photo by Zach Louw 

Toro(mance)to

I've been thinking a lot about civic placemaking. Stratford is an arts town—we have theatre, dahling, not to mention a festival of lights, independent shopping and dining, and gardens galore. We lack certain things, of course—playgrounds come to mind—but because the typical Stratfordite for both residency and visiting is older, moneyed, and retired, playgrounds are down the list of civic needs. They're simply not sympatico with the story Stratford tells about itself. 

I've been watching Dimension 20, the real-play D&D game that streams on Dropout, and right now I'm into The Unsleeping City, a story arc that's set in a magical New York City. It's masterfully good: funny, tragic, well-plotted, great characters, terrific improv. But the thing I'm most fascinated by is that this story is legible to me, an outsider, at all. It relies so heavily on knowing New York City. There are jokes that dunk on Staten Island, battles with the mythological alligators in the sewers, and the lion statues outside the New York Public Library have a speaking role. You know the ones. 

I've been to New York a half-dozen times throughout the years, and much of my media, from The New Yorker to The Royal Tenenbaums to Brooklyn 99, orbits the region. My favourite educational institution is the Tenement Museum, a living-history museum about immigration in the Lower East Side. I've been to Harlem and Brooklyn for concerts, I know how to pronounce LaGuardia, and I can confidently navigate the subway, unless it's an express. I've I know a lot about New York, but the funny thing is, I don't think I know more than the typical global citizen. 

Okay, let's pause there. Because as much as I heart New York—an average amount?—it's certainly not where I'm from! I'm Canadian, baby! I've lived in three provinces and visited four more. I've eaten poutine and maple syrup, skated on the Rideau Canal, visited Green Gables (and watched a kid throw up in a parking lot after an all-you-can-eat lobster buffet, which was actually much more impressive), climbed Mount Royal, hiked in the Rockies, and, uh, went on my first date in Victoria, B.C. (holla at Big Frank). Like all Canadian schoolchildren, I tried and failed to internalize the difference between Upper Canada and Lower Canada (they're not where you think!), learned about les coureurs de bois, and attended many Remembrance Day observances about the World Wars. 

Canadian national identity is often considered with a sense of slight desperation. We've had moments of cultural ascendancy—the Montreal indie pop scene, the Vancouver Olympic Games—but the sheer gravitational pull of America on global pop culture means drawing focus to Canada is nearly impossible. To keep it all in scale, I'll keep the comparison to Canada's largest city: Toronto. 

Compared to American cities, there is, I think, a lack of romantic narrative about Canadian places. We have avatars of American places: the New York socialite, club kid, rapper, or gangster, or cop. Other American places do this, too; consider the San Francisco hippie, or the Hollywood starlet. Hell, let's throw the Florida Man in there for good measure. But who is the Torontonian? A finance guy? A momo restauranteur? A soundstage actress? 

This extends into and beyond aesthetics. New York was being built up during an era when Art Deco was dominant; Toronto's big build sprint happened while Brutalism was big, so many of our buildings are, ah...blocky? Our skyline is recognizable: the Skydome (never the Rogers Centre, thank you) is a fun engineering marvel, and the CN Tower is still impressive. But there is no great writer who has taken Toronto as her muse, no great Toronto album, and very few movies in which Toronto gets to play herself. On the plus side, there are noteworthy galleries and museums, some very fine educational institutions, a hockey team that can't quite take home the cup, and a film festival that does carry water with the industry. When you live there, Toronto's great gift is that it is a series of neighbourhoods, but it does make it harder to figure out who we are when the vibe changes every few blocks. 

I'm not trying to put Toronto down. I lived there for a long time, and visit often. I'm picking on it mostly because my own small town isn't a known quantity whatsoever, and comparing Stratford to New York City is ridiculous. I also recognize that any competition with New York is challenging, because, like all global cities, it's singularity is what sets it apart. However, and maybe I'm too close to the source to judge, there is a lack of essence in Toronto that makes it difficult to distill. International cities have this—think of the social housing of Vienna, the royal buildings of London, the ancient cathedrals of Paris. There are people-types that go along with that: the socialist mayor, the English snoot, the French snob. So what is Toronto's person-type? 

Civic self-consciousness is important: what do we take pride in, as residents? What draws us as visitors? What stories do we tell about our place in the world, and how we live in it? New York has a romance to it because it has been stuffed full or artists, writers, and storytellers; urbanists, weirdos, meme-makers; historians, architects, and builders. It has been mythologized and narrativized. Maybe it's one of only a handful of places in the world with that level of story stuffed into it. Maybe it's unusual.  

What I want for us, for Canadians, is that same sense of importance. We're a notoriously nice people, but that doesn't have to come with tall-poppy syndrome. We deserve our stories. One of the wildest books I've read lately was Station Eleven, which opens in a theatre in downtown Toronto. The jolt I felt when I realized I had been in that room, I knew the very grocery store where the protagonist shopped, I could picture the swirl of snow over Yonge Street, made the city beautiful. I want to able to step into a story about Toronto, about Canada, and fall in love.  

Outdoorsy-ish

I am not what you would call "outdoorsy." I am not a person who rock climbs or skin dives. I like hotel pools; I like delivery pizza. 

While I am congenitally not the type of person who, say, hikes on glaciers, I want to be the type of person who does this. This wanting is rippled with many emotions: yearning for natural beauty; a mild shame that this doesn't come naturally; a sense of dread about being off-grid and all the disasters that might befall me; a deep sense of my proficiency gaps in things like fitness, survival, and resilience; a desire to borrow the aesthetics of outdoor adventure; knowledge that I haven't "earned" it in any way.

A case study: my only "real" wilderness excursion came in 2011, a few brief months after I started dating my now ex-husband. On paper, it was a lot: eight days of backcountry camping and canoeing, seven different sites, three couples and three singletons. In reality, it was way, way worse. My boyfriend's dad had died the month before and he was grieving. I had never canoed as an adult. We were both hideously sunburned by day two. There were real spiders and the threat of venomous snakes. During a pivotal entry into a river mouth, my boyfriend and I got caught on the shoreline rocks and it took 40 minutes to push ourselves out enough to move on. I had no close friends on the trip, and I felt like an outsider, a rube, and a burden. At one point, as we were squelching through the underbrush, my shoe came off and I had to reach into elbow-deep mud to retrieve it; it was the only time I laughed on the whole trip. It's easy to list all the things that sucked, but the overarching memory of that trip was one of deep loneliness. I was not cool, I was not outdoorsy, and to be exposed in this way for an entire week made me miserable.

It was formative, and deeply bad. I had zero fun and I didn't really want to ever go back into the wilderness. And certainly not on a canoe!

But again, I would like to be the type of person who has these experiences. My strain of outdoorsiness is a spiritual cousin to that quip about writing ("I hate writing, I love having written"): I hate adventuring, but I love telling self-deprecating/congratulatory stories about having adventures. (And, upon reflection, I've hiked on at least two glaciers, so make of that what you will.)

A different case study: when I was in the eighth grade, I started ordering the Patagonia catalogue. This was before the internet, so you would have to call a 1-800 number and give them your address, and four to six weeks later, a paper catalogue would arrive at your house and confuse your parents. The 1998 Patagonia catalogue—which I still have, archived in my magazine collection somewhere—was a treasure. It promised silky base layers and boxy windbreakers, with colours like chili and pansy and a print called p'op. The gear has always been wildly expensive—snowpants that retail for $559 today would cost $265 in the late '90s, a comparable price once adjusted for inflation—and I never ordered so much as a headband. 

But the clothes weren't really the point. The catalog was, in those pre-online times, one of the few places were I could see people engaging in outdoorsiness. Along with the flatlays of the clothes themselves, the catalogue included pictures of the garments in the wild—and I do mean wild. There were candids of people eating tinned beans in high-altitude camps, and long shots of women in hardy sports bras rock-climbing up a sheer face. There were high-powder ski photos, featuring those mortgage-payment snow pants, and even, for a few promotional cycles, a Patagonia Kids catalog, showcasing the same hard-wearing outdoor gear in the same wilderness, but in miniature. 

My family camped, sometimes, when I was a kid. Then we cottaged, more often. We were certainly not the family who was on the trails, the hills, the slopes. Outdoor activity was a day trip, then back to our cozy beds at night. Which is great, but maybe, judging by the Patagonia fetish, I was looking for more.

This summer, I devoured William Finnegan's surf memoir Barbarian Days and I can say wholeheartedly that he 100% percent deserved the Pulitzer he won for it. Finnegan received his first surfboard as a tenth birthday present, and spent his late adolescence and early twenties heading around the world in search of the perfect wave. He camps on a snake-infested island (the snakes, quick in water, are laughably slow on land, which doesn't make them any less venomous), pores over reef maps in Fiji, drives across the middle of Australia in a car with a broken water tank, and is hospitalized with malaria in Thailand. He hitchhikes, lives in bug-infested bungalows, works under a fake name but somehow receives a real tax refund, buys and trades surfboards depending on the local conditions, and drives his travel companion to distraction. Full of surf patois and technical descriptions, large sections of the book are borderline incomprehensible to a landlubber like myself, but still, I loved it. I laughed out loud when young Will, at the age of 20 and newly dumped, wrote a thousand-page apocalyptic novel to cope; I groaned when he ran over his surf companion in choppy waters.

And so why didn't I, like Finnegan, learn to surf when I was ten (where? On the Rideau Canal?), and then spend my 20s sleeping on snake-infested islands (or maybe I did, on that wretched camping trip) before coming home and becoming a journalist for The New Yorker? Well, I get nervous when I go into our local hiking area, which contains natural features like trails and, uh, a water treatment plant. And of course, Finnegan's trip, on paper, is romantic, hard-nosed, thoughtful, and funny; in practice, large swathes of it would be monotonous and miserable. So few people really live the lifestyle that Patagonia sells, of backcountry canoe trips or the competitive rock climbing, or of big-wave surfing. I hate adventuring; I love having adventures.

However, big news! I'm going camping again! This summer! This time, I'm going on easy mode: with my cousin and my mom, with electricity at the sites, with a paved road allowing us to drive right in. We're going to pack bikes and card games and string lights, and despite the fact that we'll be sleeping on the ground, I imagine it will be pretty fun. And if this is fun, maybe next time we do a camping trip where there's no hydro. And after that, maybe we add a little hike in to start. (But I certainly don't want to get back into a canoe, thanks.) I have a limited number of easily mobile and outdoorsy years left; I have a kid who seems interested in sleeping on the ground, and I have, finally, a number of Patagonia garments I can wear as unironic camp clothes. I am trying to heal something from that first miserable camping trip; I am also trying to figure out what it means to be outdoorsy, with anxiety, later in life. I will have an adventure. 

Image by Anna Syvertsson

Demigods and Outlaws

In a recent New Yorker article about the use of A.I. in post-secondary schools, the author Hua Hsu talks to one student, "Alex," about his approach to assignments. Needing to turn in a paper about a museum exhibition, "[h]e had gone to the show, taken photographs of the images and the accompanying wall text, and then uploaded them to Claude, asking it to generate a paper according to the professor’s instructions. 'I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with,' he said. After skimming the essay, he felt that the A.I. hadn’t sufficiently addressed the professor’s questions, so he refined the prompt and told it to try again. In the end, Alex’s submission received the equivalent of an A-minus."

You may note, of course, that nowhere in the article does it mention anything Alex learned about the art itself. Did he read the wall text? Did he look at the images? Did he retain anything from the essay he had prompted? Did the assignment deliver any kind of education at all? 

Of course! In one sense, Alex has deepened his understanding of how to use A.I., and is further on his way to becoming a very good prompt engineer, the human who cues the A.I. to produce what it does. In another sense, Alex has learned how to produce more efficiently: he doesn't care about the assignment, and this method of completing it frees his time for other things (elsewhere in the essay, Hsu reports that Alex has also asked ChatGPT if he can go running in Nike Dunks). The content of the assignment has not technically been learned—I would be surprised if Alex recognized his own essay even a day after turning it in—but a frictionless heuristic loop has been completed. 

Call me old-fashioned, but isn't the friction the point? 

It's hard to write a pithy lede about A.I. It's everywhere these days! It's having a moment! It's destroying the planet! It's disrupting our basic relationships! Narratives around A.I. are plentiful, from people falling in love with their generative chatbots, to the environmental cost of powering and cooling the A.I. data centres. A.I.-generated images abound on social media, with uses ranging from nefarious (selling products that don't exist) to wondrous (pictures and videos that make the heart soar with possibility). A.I. is highly integrated into our many of our lives: my social circle uses their A.I. accounts as proofreaders, editors, secretaries, sounding boards, idea-generation machines, diaries, collaborators, therapists, and as friends. 

I could easily spin off an essay about any of those uses. An especially fascinating application was the micro-trend of getting your A.I. account to "roast you": based your own previous conversations, the A.I. would spit out an internet-inflected takedown designed to call out your flaws and insecurities. It was a cheeky bit of subversion from a bot that otherwise addresses users with deference. A.I. is so programmed to "yes, and" our inputs that it can accompany people into psychologically vulnerable states. In fact, it will do this and lie to your face about it. 

Is lie the right word? After all, just because something is artificially intelligent doesn't mean it has real motivations. In Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, Mary, a human woman from our time and place, encounters the mufela, a strange, slow, utterly different species that Mary nonetheless comes to understand as people. Not human beings, but people. Is A.I. "people" in the same way?

A common refrain about A.I. in the creative process is that people should be able to see their ideas come to life. Hsu doesn't share what Alex is majoring in—what classes he might actually be "hella fucking with"—but if art history is nothing more than a checkbox on the way to, say, an engineering degree, then Alex was likely never going to retain the information or experience anyway. My own undergraduate career, which spanned eight years, contained many classes from which I have no permanent learning. Some of the things I do remember include what it meant to "suck teeth" in the Jamaican vernacular, that H.P Lovecraft is A Problem, and what a speech act is (I think). 

Many of the things I retained are far less tangible. What does it mean to read a text closely? Can we ever fully excise an author from her work? When we talk about themes, what are we saying? Who gets to own an idea? Who gets to speak for us? Grappling with these questions—continuously, imperfectly, and often times up to my hairline with boredom—was good for my brain. I use those skills in my work life, and they have formed some of my ethical scaffolding. The dream of the liberal arts college is alive at U of T. 

So when it comes to A.I. creative output, my main question is: why bother? What does this add to the world? There's an argument that says something like, "people deserve to see their ideas come to life," but if that's the case, I'm going to be very boring and old-fashioned and say: then they should work for it. 

I would love to take a specious Gladwell-esque position that A.I. cheats us of our 10,000 hours, leading to the illusion of mastery when none exists. It certainly cuts down on student work time, when an essay can be generated and refined in the time it would take me to rough out an outline. I actually don't know if that's relevant, because my actual thesis is closer to: sometimes the process is the product. And A.I. is all product, no process.

Right now, my kid is in the next room drawing a multi-page comic about a bone that has come to life. They are shamelessly borrowing from one of their favourite authors, Dave Pilkey, but the act of drawing out eight pages of sequential art is strengthening their patience, their fine motor skills, their storytelling voice, and their focus. It would be very easy to create a ChatGPT prompt that would create this comic book for them. But the fact that they're listening to a podcast, writing out a comic, and eating lunch in their "studio" (the dining room floor) means that they can conceive of themselves as an artist and author. 

I am not a Luddite, but I do think there are processes that are important as processes, and A.I. can rob us of that. Like, absolutely, please take on the medical imaging and double-checking our schedules so we don't triple-book our afternoons. Please analyze the soil for maximum food deliciousness and growth. Please compare nine different phone models and help me pick one.

But in the same way that knitting machines exist and yet I still knit with two sticks, I still want to write with my own hands. I want to make art in my own style, even if it's not as perfect as an A.I. could be. Doing the work is the whole point. The creative journey—figuring it out, troubleshooting, analyzing, editing, revising, and then finally saying, "yeah, this looks the way I want it to"—is valuable. It requires judgment, politics, and a point of view. An A.I. is designed not have one of those. It needs to borrow ours.

I understand that we live under capitalism, and the squeeze is real. We are expected to produce more work, more perfectly, than any other point in human history. An A.I. boost helps us do those things. The task is done. The assignment is turned in. What else do you want? 

In the future, when some percentage of human creativity has been handed over to the machines, the people who remain proficient in creative or intellectual process will be seen as demigods and outlaws, maybe both. There is something powerful about hanging onto your knowledge, both thought and embodied, and knowing how to do something. The underlying scaffolding the art history assignment is supposed to create—the discernment and expertise, created through the process of coming up with an opinion or a position—is wiped away. What takes its place? 

Image by James Fenner