Things That Happened in 2022

January: Season three of Covid kicks off with a bang: Doug Ford, actual genius, decides that we will only be testing for the virus in high-risk areas and, oh, by the way, schools are conveniently no longer high risk! What a laugh riot. Noah is out of school for three weeks and Mike steps up in a huge way, for which I'm grateful. My dad turns 70 and we have a visit with them up at the farm—it is a massive relief to me that he has achieved this milestone, and for some reason I feel like I can breathe a little easier. We finish our Wes Anderson watch project with The Royal Tenenbaums and it's still a very cute movie.
Media experience: Wes Anderson rewatch project

February: Um, there is a war? Russia marched on Ukraine and Putin is very man-on-horse about it and the world is definitely like UM WAT when he is casually like, "don't make any sudden moves or I'm going to drop a nuclear bomb on you!" as though the Ukrainian populace has received instructions other than "idk molotov cocktails??" from their leadership.
Media experience: The Babysitter's Club (Netflix)

March: We went to Toronto for March break. The trip was a bit of a bust: our hotel pool needed to be booked ahead of time and was packed 24/7; it was rainy; Ikea was jammed; we basically kind of flopped around for five days. The big news story was the Covid mask mandates were slowly disintegrating before our eyes, which was crazy-making. I ran yet another March Madness and the Marvel Cinematic Universe was voted best franchise by a bunch of nerds. Writer's group kicked off, and seemed to promise some creative fruit.
Media experience: Turning Red (Disney+)

April: We got Covid! We got the fuckin' virus. It Happened To Me. Anyway, we were mostly fine, except Day One was sheer panic and Day Two was a migraine from the depths of hell; after than it was just trying to keep ourselves entertained and feeling disappointed and relieved that it had finally happened. I made an Easter meal from stuff we had lying around the house and it was good. Once we were healed, I helped put on an Earth Day event downtown for 150 people, and it gave me major Baby Dance Party vibes—doing nice things with/for nice people on a project I believe in.
Media experience: the Thor: Love + Thunder trailer

May: There was a shooting in Uvalde Texas and a lot of little kids died. I cried and I thought about it for a long time. The American Supreme Court drafted an overturning of Roe v. Wade, which was leaked and caused much uproar. I went to go see a friend in Montreal, and spending time with her and her family was an incredible experience of friendship and mutual admiration; I really love that we are still friends 25+ years after we met. I carry a lot of weird friendship trauma, and maintaining these nourishing relationships means so much to me.
Media experience: catching up on the Witch, Please podcast

June: The court officially overturned Roe v Wade and it was A Big Deal. Friends from America came and had a visit so I got to kiss their amazing cheeks and hang out with their lovely toddler and just bask in the glory of long-term international friendship. A friend had a baby and had a bad time of it, and I felt sad that she suffered and glad that her baby was here and well. School ended and NS graduated kindergarten and I felt like we were launching, but towards what? No idea.
Media experience: this blistering Jia Tolentino piece about Roe v Wade

July: There was A LOT of Stratford summer time around the house—I neglected to book any summer camps for Noah, leaving us desperately underprogrammed and with very few other children around to play with, so for the third summer in a row, we lived at the library, the coffee shops, and the splash pad. We went to a wedding in Toronto, which was fun. It was nice to get dressed up and wobble around on high heels and eat a panna cotta in the company of other step-cousins and family friends. Noah learned to ride a bike, which was thrilling.
Media experience: browsing Type Books for an afternoon and buying a lot of children's books

August: Cottage time this year was a bit tricky, because the first week was largely taken up by a work project deadline, so I sequestered myself in a bedroom and made charts for several days. Once that was done, though, we were free to swan around at the beach like usual—walk to the bakery, go play on the sand, help out with dinner, read on the deck—and that felt good. The cottage was under renovation and the farm was on the market, so things felt a lot less settled than usual, but it was good to be together when we were.
Media experience: seeing a Minions movie in a movie theatre

September: Back to school! September was a bit of a catch-my-breath month; after the hurricane of summer, it was nice to be able to watch TV in the middle of the day and have a regular wake-up time again. First grade started out well and then quickly transitioned to a litany of complaints; I'm not sure where we are with it now, but things seem slightly better.
Media experience: hoo boy, I binged Sex Education (Netflix) and loved it.

October: Thanksgiving, in which I cooked a duck for the three of us! The turn of the seasons! Wrapping up some excellent and fine TV shows! Getting a sinus infection! Buying a new computer! October felt productive and fun, with good weather and beautiful trees and nice family time. Noah spent the month fretting about what to be for Halloween, and ultimately decided on Ash from Pokémon. Also, the Queen died.
Media experience: Owl House (Disney+)

November: We went to Toronto and Noah started running a fever on the train; we were caught in the desperate hunt for Children's Tylenol for much of the weekend, which was an absolute bust. However...I had a great trip, with fantastic friend hangouts, museum wanders, thrifting alone (the actual dream!), and drinks out with friends. It was three full days of feeling like I was coming home to myself, and I felt, despite the fact that my family was sick while I enjoyed myself, very good about it. Later in the month we hosted friends for drinks at our house and stayed up until the middle of the night, and it was such a shock to the system that I felt giddy (albeit wretchedly hungover). November was a month of friendship the way it used to feel: chaotic and loud and hot-blooded.
Media experience: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (Netflix), one of my absolute favourites of the year

December: We had all been sick, off and on, since August, so this was the month that everyone looked like we had been deflated slightly. There was a school concert, in which Noah embodied that Dua Lipa "go girl give us nothing" meme. Then, right before Christmas, the sky poured snow for three days straight, and the wind howled, and the roads were closed, and my parents lost power, and it was One Of Those Storms where you take bets on if a tree is going to fall on your car. Everyone's Christmas felt sort of small and off-kilter, but at least there were no fires or emergency surgeries this year.
Media experience: endless, endless Christmas music 

Year In Review: Oh man, this year just felt like...sort of nothing? A lot of the family stuff felt a little weird for some reason—lot of transitions and changes and interpersonal dynamics coming home to roost, sometimes literally—and while work was good and I learned a lot, it was also sort of unpredictable in its busyness and demands. I really like the friends and community that came through this year—the school parents, the Writers Group people—and yet I still felt a bit isolated...almost as if the last 2.5 years are still percolating away, but now their panic has gone underground. I didn't do any of my planned creative projects, which made me feel a bit weird, but ultimately I'm chalking this up to being a year that neither asks questions nor answers. See you in 2023, probably!

Never Mind the Billionaires, Here Come the Solarpunks

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

After my son Noah was born in the mid-2010s, I experienced a profound and cumbersome eco-grief. This wasn't the first time in my life when the global future elicited terror instead of hope, but the news at the time was especially dire—rising temperatures and sea levels, catastrophic weather events as the new normal, and a general sense of unease and mistrust about what was coming. 

It was widely recognized that the wealthiest countries, companies and individuals were driving the bulk of the damage, and they were also the only ones with any real power to change the narrative. Would they? Well...Elon Musk has since distracted himself from Martian indentured servitude by turning Twitter into a zoo for our worst humans; Jeff Bezos has pledged to donate millions but towards what is still TBD; and it seems that billionaires, as a general class (sigh) tend to avoid environmental philanthropy (double sigh). It's become fashionable for us plebes to murmur "eat the rich" as we scroll through the news, but since wealthy idiots seem to think that interplanetary exit is a sane and viable retirement plan, that leaves the rest of us earthbound morons mired in brain-meltingly hot temperatures. I mean this truly when I say: I hope Mars is terrible and very boring! Go there quickly and forever!

While I know that I and my descendants will likely be insulated from the worst of any looming climate changes—a gift of geography and the luck to be born in a wealthy country—I cannot pretend that we will be unaffected. I know the summers are getting hotter, the storms off the lake more intense. There is nowhere on earth where the rainwater is still pure. It's coming for us all. 

When things are that bleak, what can we do? 

It's hard to live when you're stuck in shitty feelings, but there are techniques to soothe. My friend Terran shared her practice of radical optimism, which is helpful. I also started gardening at the beginning of the pandemic, which gives an illusion of control (at least until the tomatoes are blighted), and have several Pinterest boards devoted to an optimistic prepper vibe.

I have also, personally and as a coping mechanism, developed a few aesthetic antidotes to this whole end-of-the-world experience. Like, do you have a moment to talk about Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, my current TV obsession about a post-apocalyptic world where mega-mutant animals roam wild and humans have been driven underground, but it's hilarious and queer and hopeful and also the soundtrack is full of absolute fucking bangers? Or the Nsibidi Scripts book series, which explores magical-realist Nigeria and is a smart and solid rebuttal of the unrelenting Eurocentrism of most wizarding coming-of-age stories (ahem, Harry Potter)? Or my ongoing interest in solarpunk, the alternate-future visioning exercise that is giving me some modicum of hope in these troubled times? 

At its simplest, solarpunk imagines a world where the internal-combustion engine and fossil fuels have been replaced with green energy sources: windmills, hydroelectric dams, and solar panels. The images of solarpunk are often filled with greenery and brilliant blue skies. Unlike dieselpunk or steampunk, which creates alternate histories that feel dirty and individualist , solarpunk is clean, clear, and collective: a world where everyone has enough and our human relationship with Mother Earth is less, uh, extractive than it has been to date.

The first solar panel was invented in 1883, a fin-de-siecle experiment that managed to convert the sun's energy into electricity at the rate of about one percent. The first commercially viable panels hit the market in the mid-1950s, costing a whopping $300 per watt generated. These days, an Ontario homeowner willing to invest about $20,000 into a home array—the kind we see installed on roofs—would be able to receive all of his electricity from the sun rather than the local hydro company. Solar panels have evolved from bulky, inefficient contraptions to semi-ubiquitous installations that are nearly standard for a certain type of homeowner—maybe an eco-geek, or a luxe hippie, or a libertarian.

The solar panel isn't a poetic generator: it doesn't belch smoke or produce soot or feel warm to the touch. It doesn't have the romance of woodstoves or coal. It's also not haunted by the ghosts of failed solar panels, the way we have avoided nuclear in a post-Chernobyl world. They are silent, easily integrated into our everyday landscape, and small enough to be carried to a campsite or installed on a family rooftop. They have a bit of a beep-boop robot feel, but solarpunk's luscious greenery balances out the sterile feeling. The technology is improving every year, and prices have continued to come down. Green energy always has its challenges and detractors, but we desperately need to wean ourselves off cheap, destructive fossil fuels.

I have a Tumblr post saved on Pinterest that reads "Before we can live in a world of vertical gardens covering stained-glass skyscrapers, we need to build a world of backyard garden boxes made from reclaimed wood. Before we can cover every rooftop with solar panels, we need to equip every home with solar smokeless cooking made of scrap metal. The appeal of those green cityscapes in the pretty pictures isn't just that they're high-tech and clean, it's that they sprout from a society that values compassion, the environment, and human lives more than it values profit. We need to build that society first, and we need to build it from the ground up from what we have available." 

I believe this to be true. We know that corporations and the rich people who run them will not take care of the planet the way we desperately want and need them to, so it's up to us to cultivate our optimism in whatever ways we can. I envision buildings dripping with atmosphere-cooling greenery, so I start in the garden. I envision electric cars in every driveway, so I start by riding my bike. I want solar panels on the library, so I start by reading about solar dehydrators. I want a different future, so I start by dreaming.

How We Do Community

It used to be so simple—when we talked about "community" as a concept, I felt like I had a handle on what that meant. Like, my friends and my family and the people on my street and the person who teaches me yoga, right? A community was a Richard Scarry kind of place, where there is one of every kind of person, all living together in harmony and pigs deliver the mail. 

Now, I'm not so sure. I mean, I've been on Twitter. I know how echo-chamber it can be out there. It's not a simple matter of showing up at the water cooler or at church and letting myself breath the same air as someone who voted for Doug Ford; what does it mean to be in community with people? 

Obviously, file this under "yet another way Covid—and just modern life in general—has got us fucked up," but let's dive in?

 Not too long ago, Devon Price put up an Instagram post that kind of blew my mind a little bit. "Capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy drain us, dehumanize us, and alienate us from each other (and our own needs) daily. Forming a thriving, truly interdependent community can feel nearly impossible under this system. Our lives are set up to be as hostile to community formation as possible. Many of the things that we call community are not communities at all. They’re fandoms and friend groups or brand identities.” 

And pardon me if this wasn't just a whole paradigm shift for me. It spoke to why some of the issues in what I had considered "my community" felt like intractable interpersonal rifts—it's because they were. Friend groups are set up on the basis of people liking each other and their shared histories together, not on a vision or a common goal or a shared belief. Friend groups are often fundamentally incompatible with the complexities of community, because community sometimes asks us to exist alongside (and in close proximity to!) people whose personalities might drive us right up the wall, but who also want to achieve something we find valuable or important. Community allows us to actively dislike some members, while friend groups are really skittish about that.

I think is why "finding community" is sometimes so tough, especially as we age into our 30s and 40s. For me, this was a time in my life where I really started to question if I still believed in the same stuff I did in my 20s, and what I really do believe in, if not that. Things I took for granted in my 20s—the shape of my life, the family I wanted, the partner, the house, the kid, the job, the goals—all of that was upended and opened up by a series of wildly destabilizing catastrophes and losses in my early 30s. Coming out the other side, it turned out I was weirder, more tender, angrier, more open to joy, than I ever had been before. I had to be, because those are the things that let me survive that time. But those things are not universally beloved by all; in some regards, I felt like I was starting from scratch in both friendships and in community, and would have to build both back up. 

I have been driven to Google "what makes a good community," and it's not usually everybody gets along and there are snacks, although that does sound dreamy. Communities have roles and goals: people do specific things, for specific reasons. Communities have expectations and traditions: you're accountable to the people you're with, and you're often doing it with a sense of duty and meaning-making. Communities treat each other well, with kindness and fairness and transparency. Communities involve a diversity of people—elders and children, rich and poor, workers and volunteers—and value them in thoughtful and appropriate ways. And yeah, communities often do have fun, and people do like each other. But you can also be in community with someone who makes you want to sigh your loudest and most dramatic sigh.

For me, my vision of community is often centered around values: hope for a better and less scary world; that we can help each other, even when things are ugly; the power of laughter and joy in both those things. There are details that would make this a more beautiful vision—like, yes I would like to be living in a progressive oasis where billionaires are illegal, we have weekly potlucks, and the children actually learn about Black History Month and Pride in school—but we start with the basics, and they can be done from anywhere, with most people. It's amazing to me that they aren't universal, but, hey: communities exist for people who aren't like me, too. 

It has been so interesting to me the different ways that community has been present in my life. When I was in university, I lived in a student housing co-op, and my closest friends were the ones who really believed in the co-op's mission, the ones who put in time and effort and sweat to making the place we lived better. But the beauty of it wasn't that I lived only with my closest friends. I also lived with people I couldn't stand, people who were sometimes unsafe, people who were careless or rude or odd or just...so different from me. And for the most part, we all made it work. We got the dishes done and the leaves raked, and we threw parties and cleaned up after them. It hung together in some strange, beautiful way. 

And now, in a small town, there are people I see regularly whom I adore, whose work and lifestyle I admire, who aren't quite friends but who are colleagues in our respective life-project. There are friends I like very much and who are also so different from me, whose political leanings or parenting choices are very different from mine, but we find other ways to connect. And there are folks who are true friends, who make me laugh and laugh and who will also drop off a case of Coke Zero when we have covid. There is friendship in community, after all. 

I'm satisfied with this expanded experience of community—beyond just friend groups, fandoms, and brand identities—because it allows things to be weird and shaggy. Communities are the definition of imperfect, the embodiment of "I get up. I walk. I fall down. Meanwhile, I keep dancing" and in these days—with the disasters looming/regularly unfolding—we need all the dancing we can get.

Autumnal

It's the last day of summer, and tomorrow the days will be shorter than the nights. Ever the wheel turns, but also—ugh. I know that winter is coming because it comes every dang year, but every year I also harbour a secret wish that we somehow become the Golden Isles and the winters are mild (and we also get a Target). But alas, winter in southwestern Ontario is coming, and she is never pretty. 

My biggest struggle with this time of year, regardless of weather or the temperature, is when we start to lose the light. The days get shorter and shorter, plus the added insult of "gaining" an hour that really means that the sun is gone by 5 PM each day. The six weeks on each side of the solstices are the hardest for me, because they are just so dark. I am no sun worshiper, but I miss that stupid ball of radiation something fierce. I try to deploy as many wards against the night as I can muster—daily walks, exercise, eating well, sleeping (but not too much!), creative projects—but the reality is that I tend to white-knuckle my way from Christmas to Family Day, because it's dark and cold and I'm miserable. 

But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Because, first: autumn! Or as I like to think of it, Bad Summer. Like winter, summer is a real razzle-dazzle season; they have literally no/all chill, and extremes in both directions of emotion and temperature and solar exposure. Fall is milder, more temperate. Wind and rain, but not the tornado-watch thunderheads that fill the sky in August. No snow yet, or a very light and exciting dusting that melts within the hour. The garden bounty is coming to fruition—and while this is another personal ugh, since this year's garden was a proper disaster (I abandoned the tomatoes, my landlord ran over the raspberry cane with the lawnmower, and rodents ate everything else)—many other more dedicated and diligent gardeners are enjoying their crops. We get to rotate our sweaters and puffy vests back in, and I have never met a puffy vest I didn't immediately try to wear 300 days a year. Fall is golden light, orange leaves, and blue skies. 

Fall is also the time I commit to new routines. Something about that back-to-school energy that makes me want to take on a new version of myself, so I try to get that good vitamin regimen off the ground, or I start a new hobby, or I sign up for a class. I spent 23 years in the school system, and to me, September represents possibilities in learning and identity work. I like the predictability of school days and weeks with weekends. This year, I want to dive deeper in my creative goals; producing new work for my writer's group, taking a more adventurous approach to knitting projects, and actually completing the various projects that are languishing at the 80% complete mark (like the zine I made that just needs a cover, or the cookbook with three typos, or the knitting pattern that needs to be formatted, or the pants that need a new waistband, or or or orrrrr.....)

Aesthetically speaking, fall is all electronica and house music; something about those cool beats just hits me where I live, and it's much easier to dance when I don't feel like a walking hot flash. It's big sweaters and blankets. It's period movies about murders, and high fantasy on TV. It's candles on the table on Friday nights. It's stew and bread, cloth napkins and red wine. It's a few friends around the table, laughing after two glasses of wine or a fat IPA, the kids somewhere else in the house. I don't go in for "spooky season," which has been on the rise in the last decade or so as a dark corollary to basic-bitch PSL vibes, but fall is also dry leaves skittering across the pavement, mist in the air at midnight, and branches knocking against the window. It's a hunker-down sensation, a time of active burrowing and preparing for the upcoming winter. 

I know the secret of life is that nothing lingers, and that is the gift and curse of life here on earth. Hard seasons pass and we're glad to see them go; easy ones pass too, despite how hard we try to grab hold of them.  Fall is a reminder, to me at least, to pay attention to the turning of the page, the dusk and the dawn: the moments between the show-stopper, the big events, that's all our life as well.

We're in the final play-days of the year. Cool nights and warm days, and that golden light, makes being outside feel bittersweet—we all know the end is coming, we can sense it, but it's a lovely way to pass the time all the same. I love fall, and her final bursts of colour, of leaves, of exuberance. 

What a spectacular way to lose the light. May we all go into the darkness with this much joy.

Southwestern Ontario, 1995-2003

It's hard to remember just how the world used to be - 

that there truly was top-40 radio stations, and everyone listened to the same music, a hit was everywhere: on our mix tapes, on movie soundtracks, on the radio, especially on the radio, at least twice an hour, and we would know all the words, and if we didn't, they were printed on the inside of the CD booklet, so we could find them, learn them, sing along. 

that we would walk over the hill at Sauble Beach and end up at the roller rink on a Friday night, listening to top-40 country music and silly pop hits from the 1970s as we circled on the asphalt, holding hands and sometimes kissing, just kids in baseball hats and braces, quoting Monty Python and the Holy Grail, flirting endlessly, flirting that went nowhere because we were eleven, twelve, thirteen years old; sex was light-years away, something we read about in the pages of YM but never did, never even considered for ourselves, because how could we? We were kids at the rollerpark. 

that we took trips to the Keady flea market, the Mennonite girls with their strong forearms and bad teeth working the fruit and veggie stands, and us yearning for something delicious and wrapped in plastic, tarts and strudels that were homelier than anything from a restaurant but the ugliness just made it taste better; endless toys to pick over and examine, pop-culture references I would never understand, matchbox cars whose metal bodies were already hot under the July sun at ten in the morning; thirsty in the heat and the crowds; and then going over to the barns where the animals were sold and seeing the oldest-order Mennonite women wrapped in black wool capes, under black wool bonnets, with black running shoes, ancient already at 20 years old, and me turning self-conscious in my tank top and shorts, feeling the judgement of an old God on my bare shoulders; and then sticking my fingers into the rabbit cages and pulling them back out before they bit. 

that there were snow days in schools; that black ice on the roads held the country kids at home, unable to ride the bus; that the town kids would show up and teachers might not; and a harried-sounding faculty member might announce that people could study in the library or hang out in the gym, or that we could leave, and there was a great scraping-back of chairs on linoleum floors, and we would get out coats and snowpants from lockers and make plans—your parents won't be home, he has cable—and then we would just leave, go out into heavy weather, snow falling from a steel-gray sky, and sometimes we would go back to someone's house and eat bowls of cereal and watch music videos, but sometimes we would wade through hip-deep snow, through the cemetery, breathless and screaming with holy laughter. 

that the farmland of southwestern Ontario would feel like the centre of the world, the blue sky piled with thunderheads, the green boundlessness of corn spikes and the shock of electric-yellow canola, the perfect circles of bales and the shagginess of stooks, a lazy gang of dairy cows out in the field, lying down when it was going to rain and chewing constantly regardless of weather; that between farms were towns with drive-in movie theatres and Christian bookstores, and that those hills would feel like the most natural thing in the world, and eventually, mountains and forests and plains would become Away and those farms and little towns would be Here. 

that I could watch a thousand sunsets over Lake Huron and never get tired of them: the glowing peaches and thick reds and dreamy golds, the ripples of clouds reflecting oranges and cream, or cloudless skies where the whole horizon blazed with unyielding sun, with the fire finally dropping into the lake as the clock circled to ten at night, the sand under my feet cooling by degrees as I stood and watched the sky's colours fade to a spill of stars. 

that if someone had a camera, there was a one-in-three chance they would ever develop the film, that phone were attached to the walls at our homes and schools, that twenty-five cents could buy a call for parents to come pick us up from the movie theatre or a friend's house, but otherwise it was notes on the counter, notes passed in class, mailed letters, pictures torn from magazines, messages left on machines that the whole family might hear, and that we could disappear into the places between places, unseen and untracked and unfound and a certain type of free.

that we would haunt libraries, bookstores, school auditoriums, coffee shops that served BLT sandwiches for $3.45, empty classrooms, the hallways of school at 4:30 PM; places that were, it felt, just for us; kids with no money and nowhere else to be, who wanted to keep hanging out despite there being nothing to do; so we made plays, we wrote short stories, we traded mix tapes and burned CDs, we drew in each other's sketchbooks, we drew on bathroom walls, we cut up our clothes, we smoked each other's cigarettes, we kissed, we cried, we laughed, we told each other's jokes and each other's secrets, we thought we were inventing the world. We piled our stupid lonely teenage hearts together and sometimes, years later, despite everything, they stuck.

Your Summer 2022 Flowerscopes

Aries: It is amazing to me how little a thing needs to be scary before I am scared of it. From movie trailers to green skies, to sending a text where I have to say no (especially to a social invitation), I balk and quake at the slightest thing. Is this a trauma response? Anxiety? A reluctance to maintain my own boundaries? Well, it depends. Sometimes, things really are scary, and I'm having the right reaction to it. And sometimes, they're not. The trick is to know which one is which.
Suggested hobby: kickboxing

Taurus: When I'm not walking in the woods, I want to be. I crave light dappled through the trees, birdsong in the air around me, a pair of sturdy hiking boots. But when I'm actually in the woods, I get a little panicky. Why is that man behind a tree? What if I roll my ankle?? Who knows I'm out here, really??? But I want be outdoorsy, so either I need to find a place where I can see any would-be creepers coming a mile away—the Scottish Highlands? Iceland?—or I need to cultivate a community of likemindedly skittish forest nerds. Which do you think would be easier?
Suggested hobby: Dungeons and Dragons

Gemini: In 2024, the Olympics will introduce the sport of breakdancing to its roster of games, and I am thrilled. Breakdancing was one of the first things I ever used the internet for; my sister and I somehow found a page about "how to breakdance," and I still remember its black-and-white line drawing illustrations of the turtle. We were absolutely bad at it—poorly coordinated and lacking upper-body strength—but just trying it made us feel a world of possibilities. We could have been breakdancers, in 2000. We could have been anybody.
Suggested hobby: karaoke 

Cancer: Part of the problem—the "problem"—of modern life is that everything lasts forever. Songs from every era become TikTok jams, or pulled into hit TV shows, themselves set in some other age, from the Regency to the 1980s. Streaming services offer reruns of media from our childhoods. But it's not just media—your stupid ex is still Facebook friends with your friends, and there are pictures of everyone everywhere, starting in about 2008 and going...forever. I miss the days when the past was in the past. It makes it hard to look forward sometimes.
Suggested hobby: collage

Leo: I think we all felt it when Beyonce sang "I just quit my job" over a bouncy house beat, didn't we? Like, if Queen Bey is dropping out of the rat race, surely us mortals can take a nap. Over the lat six, four, and definitely two years, I have been craving rest like nothing else. I schedule breaks in my workday. I lie down after lunch. And still, it's not enough. What I need is brain rest, the kind where my thoughts are more like fluffy clouds and less like a red eyeball. I want soul rest, where I feel cared for and loved, even if it's just finding my way to back to myself.
Suggest hobby: cookie optimization

Virgo: In 2020, when the west was burning, a huge cloud of smoke found its way over Ontario, like a dirty contact lens over the dome of the sky. It was strange and terrifying—not the immediate terror of what was happening in BC and California, but that existential clench of oh, this is a dying world. But you know something, Virgo? The sunsets were fucking spectacular that month. It can be nearly impossible to find pleasure and joy in rawest existence, but that doesn't mean we should stop looking.
Suggested hobby: elaborate kitchen dance party choreography

Libra: Are you a grudge-holder? I'm a grudge holder. I come from grudge-holders, baby. It's an ugly part of me, for sure. I'm trying to unlearn it, because usually the person I'm grudged against either 1) has no idea or 2) does not give a single shit. The grudge hurts me and me alone, by letting the injury live in my head. But...at the same time...I don't know how to heal from some things. So what do I do with them?
Suggested hobby: DJing

Scorpio: You're supposed to be the sultriest and sexiest of the zodiac, the most lipstick-and-red wine among us, and I admire that about you, I do. But what of the Scorpios out there who like a pretty sundress and a white wine spritzer? Who spent their middle schools arranging their stuffed animals on their floral bedspread? You, who are no less serious, no less important, just because your heart is pink rather than blood-red. I see you, airy Scorpio. I love your light.
Suggested hobby: romantic comedies

Sagittarius: My favourite genre of music is something we might call "an absolute banger," the kind of song that, when you hear it, inspires you to throw down your hardest, to leave it all on the floor. This is agnostic to originator—an absolute banger is just as likely to come from an African artist as a UK one, from the pop charts and the indie studios, from a guitar or a drum machine. It's more about the feeling they inspire—slightly destructive but ultimately generative of blood, sweat, tears, love, energy, possibility, etc. It's music to have weird sex to. It's music to scream to. A banger.
Suggested hobby: writing erotica

Capricorn: There is someone in Stratford who has very posh taste in shoes; for whatever reason, they ditch their footwear after only a handful of wears, and instead of selling them on Poshmark, they just drop them off at the local Value Village. And then I find them! It is fascinating to me to be part of the thrifting ecosystem, where the hunt might surface nothing more than a pair of Joe Fresh flip-flops, or it might bring you something that feels like a literal gift. Our joy often spreads much wider than we ever consider.
Suggested hobby: knitting

Aquarius: Well, it's 2.5 years after the pandemic started and it's now unclear to me how we're all doing. I got boosted today and am waiting to see what the side effects are this time around—previous rounds have knocked me back, and I'm like ??? for this one. Collectively, our small talk game is really bad right now, and we're also definitely in a seventh wave, which everyone is treating as inevitable even though it was not. And also I miss my friends. So where are we, these days, really? What axis are we measuring ourselves along today?
Suggested hobby: Pinterest hairdos

Pisces: "The cure for anything is salt water; sweat, tears or the sea." Karen Blixen, an actual baroness, wrote those words under her pen name Isak Dinesen, and often when I'm having a hard day, I think of them. Research into depression has shown that submerging into frigid water can help the brain battle its darkness—hell, even dunking your face into ice water will do the trick. And when I'm maxed out on childcare, I will sometimes plunk the child into a bath, cool or warm, and watch with half an eyeball as he shrieks and dunks and splashes until he has reset himself and I have done the same. How do reset yourself, my dear little fish?
Suggested hobby: trying new flavours of sparkling water

Pocket Utopias

The other day, Noah and I were walking down the street when we passed by a truck stopped at an intersection. It was a family vehicle—bearded dad behind the wheel, a blank-faced tween in the passenger seat—the kind of truck people buy when they have very large dogs, or snowmobiles, or they like to camp. There was absolutely nothing remarkable about this truck, except for the trans flag that had slid down the dashboard and was peeking out the front windshield.

I have no idea if anyone in that family is trans. They might have attended the local Pride march a few weeks ago, stuck the flag in the truck, and then forgotten about it. They might have gone to a queer event—it is June, after all—as leaders, participants, or allies. There was nothing about that split-second observation—stop sign, truck, trans flag—that revealed any kind of story. 

And yet: I felt my heart get lighter. It's the kind of thing that would have been nearly impossible a couple decades ago, and difficult a few years ago. A casual show of support or of identity, jumbled in among regular truck-stuff, driving around in a small town in a blue riding. It's remarkable by being unremarkable. 

This has been a tough few years (hell, it's been a tough few days), and I find that the deluge of bad news turns me into a reluctant news junkie: analyzing the latest Supreme Court decisions from a country in which I do not even live, or trying to parse wastewater Covid graphs from my local health unit despite achieving no higher than a C+ in either math or science for most of my high school career, or reading the names of shooting victims or the location of another residential school mass grave. Being online means that I hear about this stuff; being a human means that it fucks me up.

So I live for these pocket utopias, these tiny signs that things are kind of good, maybe even great. 

An aside: this year, I made a decision to stop complaining about the summer. This season is challenging on many levels, from sun-triggered migraine to unhappy anniversaries to oppressive heat. I understand one hundred percent when people are unhappy from May to September; like, I get it. Plus, there's this existential dread that hangs over every hot day, like, "you think this is hot? You just wait" and then the heat-dome goblins come and turn everything into a 43-degree hellscape.

But at the same time? I have to take a step back from being miserable, because it's so easy to default to that. Besides, there are things to truly love about this time of year. The lushness of the season is a special luxury: the flowers and the backyard gardens, the leaves on the trees. I know that many things come with a dark side—hello, pollen, my old friend—but that also implies a bright side, no?

I'm not trying to be delusional in my optimism. I can credit mindfulness and radical joy for this shift in perspective. Mindfulness has given me the tools to actually notice all the microscopic loveliness in the world; radical joy gives me permission to celebrate them, even when things are certifiably shitty. And it's not a secret that things are bad! So many lines on the graph are heading up: food prices, ambient temperatures, number of people killed in mass shootings. I'm not trying to ignore that. But also, after two years of what feels like fairly unrelenting bad news...I'm ready to grab onto whatever positivity I can find. I'm ready to seek that shit out like it's drugs, baby. 

It's the reason I joined my local climate action group. I know, on an intellectual level, that there are zero things that I can do to stop the climate crisis. The people in charge know what they should be doing, and they just...don't? Instead, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on space rockets and buying social media platforms and union-busting, and it's bad. Or they run through another filibuster, or approve another pipeline, and it's also bad. And there's nothing we can do about! 

But it turns out that being together with people as we name the problem—grief, powerlessness, rage, bureaucratic inertia—can actually help a lot. I have felt a lot of climate grief in the last five years, and this little group of cycling nerds and retired pastors and policy wonks and gardeners has allowed me to feel like we can grieve together. It's not a quite a pocket utopia, but it's edging in that direction. 

A pocket utopia doesn't solve the problems of the world, or even the household—it is a tiny, beautiful vision of change and possibility, and a slice of an easier and more loving future. They are always all around us—the new world is coming, after all—if only we can see them roll by.

For the Love of a Good Magazine

I have to say, of all the print and written media I can access in my life, I love me a good magazine. I'm constantly looking for new titles and stores to browse, seeking out that perfect balance of tone and content and design that elevates a magazine experience from forgettable to one that I cherish.

Magazines are, by their nature, ephemeral. They're designed to be recycled, forgotten on airplanes, used as kindling. They're snapshots of a certain moment in time: our collective interests, hot takes, emerging trends, thought leaders, fashionable outfits, anxieties that ebb and flow as we discover new great and terrible things about the world, and, sometimes, a crossword. Intellectually, they stand in opposition to books, which are supposed be permanent and to signal a certain brainy rigor: a whole text, devoted to...whatever. Magazines are shorter, lighter, and skip from topic to topic with a charmingly dilettante approach. As a sidebar: this is an absolute blessing in the face of the phenomenon I call "the book that should have been a magazine article," which is exactly what it sounds like: a snappy, talented nonfiction writer trying to spin straw into gold for 180 pages, padding the content with repeated ideas and irrelevant quotes, instead of just accepting his fate as someone who should have written seventeen extremely good and memorable pages and not pressed his luck. Magazines win that round! Relatedly, books by start-up bros should be illegal.

If you're a freak like me, you keep your magazines. I have dozens of white boxes in my office, organized by topic and title: independent magazines like The Gentlewoman, parenting magazines I bought in 2006 (well before I had a child! I just liked the outfits, I acknowledge I am a monster), old issues of Wired that somehow feel timeless even though nothing on earth ages faster than an issue of Wired. I have magazines from 1980s Japan, archived because they ran advertisements featuring yours truly—I was, in fact, a child model in Japan, a thing about me that is very weird—and I have New Yorkers from just a few months ago, which I haven't fully digested. 

When I was in high school, you could find quality independent magazines at the gas station; I have a memory of picking up the inaugural issue of NYLON from a 7-11 because it ran a feature on Beastie Boys uniform chic. In our small town, we had a downtown store that was stacked with issues of Jane and US and YM, magazines about poetry and yachting and interior design and celebrities, magazines about DIY culture and fashionable parenting and homebrewing. The store also sold cigarettes, and with the decline of both print culture and the number of smokers, it should surprise no one that that address is now a fancy bicycle shop. I love biking, but I miss magazines. 

Blame the internet, as always: the magazine market lost about half its value between 2012 and 2022, declining at a faster rate than most information-sector segments—think books, movies, newspapers and TV—and many titles have transitioned to a less frequent publishing schedule, gone online-only, or folded altogether. And I get it: very few people want to keep an entire issue for a single look or recipe or project; that's why Pinterest exists and blogs get traffic. But I love being able to skip around in a magazine, discovering things I wouldn't have otherwise seen. It is hard to Google and get a true surprise, but magazines can be full of the unexpected and experimental.

I think I'm nostalgic for the of celebrity that prevailed in my teens and early twenties. I'm thinking about Rolling Stone covers shot by David LaChapelle and Annie Leibovitz, and when world-domination bands would share the reviews page with first-time indie artists, when they were still doing long-form articles about school shootings. I miss women's magazines, especially ones that had a snarky, irreverent, slightly shit-disturbing POV (think Jane and the radicalized Teen Vogue). I miss celebrity coverage from before the Perez Hilton era, when the tone really shifted from interested/laudatory into "I hope she falls down the stairs." There are gifts in living in the influencer age—the rise of hot, fat women, for instance—but the curse is that we are all products, all the time. Let me turn my gaze to a silky supermodel, not a craven entrepreneur/reality star/wellness guru. Let me be the object, not the subject. 

I am waiting for magazines to rise again, the way vinyl and cassettes did, because I feel like there's really nothing that compares. Social media moves too fast, a whitewater of information and images; websites are great but discourage cross-pollination (it's no surprise that my favourite post of any website is a link roundup: a chance to read some curated articles!); newspapers, because the world is a drag, are a drag; 'zines will continue like the punk phoenixes they are every generation, but have limited distribution. Magazines stand alone: beautiful, interesting, visual, intellectual. Weirdly disposable and yet nothing leaves a mark like they can. Join me in my weird archives any time.

And One to Grow On

I am going to be 40 years old next year!? In nineteen short months, I will forty fucking years old; my husband already refers to us as "middle aged," which Wikipedia tells me is incorrect and which drives me legit bananas, but my clicky ankles know better: it's coming, boys. These ankles know that in 580 days, I will enter my forties, the time when I am required by law to get a certain haircut and maybe have some sort of crisis re: death??

I have barely scratched the surface of anything at all; I spent most of my 20s and 30s trying to get my brain and body and life into a place where my choices weren't going to ruin me. I got my degree and worked at some good jobs; I no longer have an eating disorder and I got right with my relationship to alcohol and my desire to have a child; on the days I feel like obliterating myself, I no longer reach for the nearest thoughtless man. I've made progress! But I also miss some things from that era, like loud music at one in the morning as I'm kissing someone that might become someone; parties and pool-hopping and all-night art escapades; dumb outfits and good hair; feeling like anything might be possible, good and bad, like love was right around the corner and if this thing didn't work out, something else would. Remember those days? Before we felt locked into this track, a monorail life? Before I was tired all the time?

In the spirit of absolutely panicking about my encroaching mortality, here's a list of things I'd like to do by the time I turn 40 next year: 

1. Travel. I really want to go to New Zealand because it looks beautiful and like Small Canada, but I doubt that I'll get there by next year. I could probably pull off a trip somewhere a bit less antipodal, like Europe?
   
   
2. Decide what I'm going to do about my boobs. These things, man. I've had huge breasts since I was thirteen, and I'm pretty over them. They give me headaches and they never fit into bras; they look crazy in photographs and are just Too Damn Much. But at the same time, they're mine, I've never not had them, and I don't know how I feel about a breast reduction. So I should spend some time with the idea.
   
   
3. Sew fearlessly. I am always very scared about sewing, because I'm a perfectionist and I hate doing things when I'm bad at them; at the same time, I like the idea of sewing, so I should sew more. Practicing the thing! Doing the thing! 
   
   
4. Make more art. You know: stuff I can put on my walls that tells me about myself.
   
   
5. Commit to my body. I am the fattest I've ever been and sometimes that bothers me—like when I see a picture of myself and I'm like, "who is that?" At the same time, I love not hating myself for what I'm eating or what size I am. This would be more an act of care for my primal home, which needs tenderness and some ass-kicking now and then. I love feeling strong and feeling sexy. I love looking good, even when I'm heavy. I am vain! I am hot!
   
   
6. Commit to my friends. I am extraordinarily blessed that I have smart, amazing, creative, generous, kind, loving friends who have chosen me; I'm cursed with dumb jealousy and a tendency to dwell on the friendships that have soured, which really spoils the whole damn cake. This is a reminder to both pursue the people who feel good, and to revel in the relationships that work well now.
   
   
7. Audit and edit. I have many, many things: magazines from 2002, skeins of yarn with no planned project, clothes that may never fit again, habits that make me crazy, relationships that feel stilted or distant. Taking a hard look at all my things and deciding which should be mended and salvaged, and which can be thrown away, is a great turning-40 project.
   
   
8. Love my kid. Oh my god, I love my kid so much. I love his tender heart and his mean streak, his goofball jokes and serious play; his awful, beautiful, transcendent humanity. I love watching him with his friends and his grandparents. I love bedtime after we turn off the lights and he asks me to tell him a secret, after which he'll tell me a secret—a six-year-old confession of misbehaviour or a bad feeling, and I'll take the weight off his heart and carry it in mine. He's perfect, he's flawed, he's my absolute favourite person.
   
   
9. Publish some fiction. I just started a writer's group and maybe this will be the kick in the ass/support I need to actually submit some stuff? To places? That publish?? Also, just accept the fact that I will never be a Serious Literary Person and write what makes me happy, which is science fiction and fantasy, and I'll never be in the New Yorker and that is fine.
   
   
10. Write some non-fiction. I've been giving these really detailed and—I think—promising shower talks to myself about ritual and community, but when I sit down to actually write about these topics, I feel like a) an imposter and b) the weight of all the things I want to say are yoked around my neck and I need to get it right. What I actually need to do is just get it out, draft one, and then go from there.
    
    
11. Make a quilt. Specifically, a quilt made from Noah's baby and toddler clothes. No, you're feeling tender.
    
    
12. Decide on a home. I once read that "home is not where you're from; home is where all your attempts to escape cease," and so I don't know that I'm quite home yet. If Toronto called and invited us back, would we go? Will we buy a house? Will I throw my life into the sea in order to live in a yurt in the Scottish hillscape? Stay tuned!
    
    
13. Therapy? We are currently seeing a couples counselor; I have also seen my fair share of therapists and done everything from CBT and group therapy to EMDR. What I'd like is a therapist who focuses less on all my weird-bad thoughts and more on my weird-bad body feelings when I have those thoughts. Does this exist? I'm so tired of talking.
    
    
14. Sex stuff. I know my mom reads this so I'll just say: there are some things I'd like to do in my lifetime. They're on the list so I can check them off when I do 'em.
    
    
15. Hair and makeup. This is so vain, but I just want to look predictably good at some point in my life. This is a two-parter: I want to figure out my wild-n-curly hair, which is sometimes an angelic cloud of curls, but more often a donut bun I wear on my crown because I don't like it touching me. I also want to figure out what I need to do so that I feel super pretty but with minimal daily touching-up. Is this brow tinting? Lash extensions? Fake freckles? A chemical peel? Better sunscreen? Who knows? Not me! I could try harder.
    
    
16. Dance like a goddamn maniac. I love dancing. I love losing myself in a dark room, three drinks in, sweating, music too loud, going outside to cool down, going back in to ramp up. I love it. None of us have had in the last two years—most of us—and I didn't have it for a few years before that, due to solo parenting and baby-rearing and all the sundry parts of new-family life. But god, I just want to dance.
    
    
17. Eco-grieve. I feel many kinds of ways about being a person on planet Earth these days: worry, guilt, anger, rage, fear. I fret about how to keep Noah in a place that might become fundamentally scarier by the end of this century; I worry about how I'll manage when I get too hot or too cold or food comes off the shelf or whatever other disaster hurtles towards us. I need to feel this thunderous grief for our mother-Earth; ignoring it makes it worse.
    
    
18. Be with people. I don't even know what this looks like, but I do know that after two years of isolation and more years of feeling on the outside, I want to just be with people. Hanging out on the porch, digging in the garden, pushing kids on the swing, dancing on a hill, making art in a garage, volunteering, walking in the forest, trading eyerolls, all of it. 
    
    
19. Cure the clicky ankle. And not just the clicky ankle: the sore hip, the itchy boob, the jaw that doesn't open all the way on one side, the uterus with a fibroid the size of a whole other uterus, the intrusive thoughts, the sinus pain. Because of my family's tendency to be diagnosed with bad things when we go to the doctor, I often go absolutely insane in advance of very routine medical appointments, and I will sometimes just avoid the doctors altogether if I think I can get away with it. Tending to my body as I get older as a way of loving that I am getting older. Ugh! Forties! Yay!
    

The Baby-sitters Club and the Lonely Girl

To a lonely girl, books are a lifeline. It's a cliche, but it's true. The Wakefield twins, the Babysitters Club, Claudia Kincaid, Marcy Lewis, Turtle Wexler, April Hall: for the girls reading books between 1989 and 1996, that's a list of girl-heros and dreamboat high femmes, off on dates and running businesses, escaping their humdrum lives by moving to museums and, occasionally, the moon.

We moved around a lot when I was a kid. It wasn't until much later in life that I realized how much that had affected me: not having those deep roots, not hanging out in the same schoolyards with the same kids, and always feeling a bit like I was on the outside, not quite able to read the room. I was easily stressed and fairly anxious, laughed too loudly, used big words, and didn't always pay attention. I went to the same Brownie troupe for a year and didn't know a single other girl's name. I didn't know how to ask.

But I was a terrific reader. I read a lot, returning again and again to the same series, often the same books, until I had passages memorized. I wanted to live in their lives, astral-project myself into the pages of my favourite books. I wanted to be their friends, date their brothers, crash their motorcycles. Some books I owned; some I checked out many times from the library. Some were lost in moves or to leaky cottage roofs or fires. Some were lost to the merciless urge to rid yourself of relics from your worst years. 

***

Middle school was awful. I was bused to a collector school in another town—an hour in the morning, and an hour after school. In the first few weeks of grade six, I joined up with a group of girls from other elementary schools and for the first time in a long time, I had friends; by the time Halloween rolled around, something had changed, and I was out, baby. I wasn't allowed to sit with them, or talk to them. They made fun of me, my body, the way I spoke, and my confusion at their sudden cruelty. Because those girls were popular, others followed their lead; suddenly, I was the kid eating alone, the butt of jokes. Suddenly, I was the kid no one would talk to. I didn't know what my crime had been—a joke at the most popular girl's expense? A crush on the wrong boy? Did my boobs grow too fast that year?—but I was ostracized, persona non grata, and utterly marooned. The ones who rode on my bus put things in my hair, told me I smelled, kicked my backpack away from me. Written down, it sounds like nothing, it sounds like you could not be injured by this, but it was very bad.

This bullying went on for nearly two years, much of hidden from my parents until I was on the verge of collapse and wanting to die. Imagine that you are going through puberty and a friendship apocalypse at the same time. Imagine that you have acne for the first time and it is bloom, that you have braces and glasses and your hair has gone from softly straight to wildly frizzy, that your chest aches all the time. Imagine you know nothing about living in your own body; now imagine that your body has become a punch line to people you had considered friends. Imagine being bad at friendship in the first place. Now, not knowing what to say or how to say it is a life-ruining liability. Imagine being twelve years old and feeling utterly, completely, catastrophically alone.

In the intervening years, I've blocked out a lot of those middle school experiences. I remember the OJ Simpson verdict in 1995, someone listening on a contraband Walkman radio and then bursting into class, interrupting the teacher, to announce it: "Not guilty." I remember the South African girls whose parents made them wear long braids and long skirts. I remember Mark Bundy, small for his age, who would talk to me after all the other kids got off the bus, and I remember Kevin Jadayel, who teased me mercilessly as soon as he got on. I don't remember the names of the girls who shut me out. I don't remember the names of the teachers who watched it happen. I don't remember much. 

***

What I remember is reading a lot of Baby-Sitters Club books. I loved them. I read Sweet Valley High and a lot of Paula Danziger as well, but the BSC had a special place in my heart: I, too, babysat my siblings. I lived in a little town near a big city (metropolitan Ottawa!). But the differences were actually the key bit: they had friendships; I did not. 

I read them...a lot. For longer than I should have. I wanted to be carefree and sunny Dawn, or fashionable Stacey, or artistic Claudia. I was probably more aligned with reserved Mary Anne or bossy-ass Kristy. But they all loved each other, or liked each other, and even when they screwed up or flaked out or kept secrets, they stayed friends. This wasn't my experience: my friendships usually ended, either in that conflagration of abuse, or simply because we moved away. Here were girls who had been friends since they were babies, but who made a point of welcoming new friends. Here were girls who were humane. 

There was the 1995 movie, which I owned on VHS. There was rumour of a TV adaptation, which I never saw (HBO in Canada in the 1990s was some serious satellite-TV rich-person shit), and there were endless, endless books. There were super-specials about ski trips and putting on a play; Dawn moved away; new members joined; Mary Anne had a boyfriend and Claudia's grandma died. But the whole point was that they were each other's constants. Their web of friendship held them in dark times. I wanted that so badly. I craved it. If I couldn't have it for myself, these books were a dreamworld I could enter when I needed.

***

It's become trendy to talk about wounds in pop psychology—the kind of thing you would see an Instagram meme about—and for me, those two middle-school years of friendship and identity rupture were a big goddamn deal. Even writing about it today makes me feel sweaty, as though someone is going to read that I was once bullied and start the whole circus up again.  I almost never talk about it. Many close friends do not know this was something I went through. I feel ashamed of that part of my life. It left a huge scab on the part of my soul that deals with friendship.

In the intervening years, I have had that scab peeled off in a number of painful ways. I'm a human being with failings—I can be too direct, or make teasing jokes, and I struggle with jealousy—and I have had friendships end. In the aftermath, I've been made fun of. I've had former friends stalk me online. I've been left out of parties and fun things. And I've tried to let it all go, because I want there to be no wound. I want to be fine. 

But I'm not fine. That part of me will always be tender.

The last few years have been really tough. Like most people in their 30s, I still have a hard time making friends—I worry about coming on too strong, or not strong enough, and I have no idea how to be like, "so, what are your top three traumas and do you like your parents?" I'd probably be fine with dating—after all, there's an expectation of intimacy in romance—but in friendship, without an anchor like being classmates or colleagues or roommates, I drift. In Covid, we can't spend enough time together to draw close, compounding the problem. What would normally be a weekly playdate with our kids, or a regular coffee date, has become a "next year in Jerusalem" sort of timeline. We have been on hold for so long that it's hard to know where to restart.

 I'm lonely again. I crave friendship, again. I never really stopped, to be honest.

***

One of the things that got me through was the 2020 Netflix adaptation—now cancelled—of The Baby-Sitters Club. It is a very well-cast and well-written show, with very 2020 sensibilities (some very woke characters, some unexpected LGBTQ characters, et cetera), that has made me laugh out loud multiple times and covet several many outfits. And it's also just a really nice show. The stakes are fairly low. I don't feel stressed out when I watch it. The adult marriages are mostly okay. Alicia Silverstone plays a mom! I mean, it's just chill. We need more chill scripted TV these days. My nervous system is shot and I can only take so many baking shows, you know? 

But it's also been an enormously healing show. Seeing these healthy middle-school friendships embodied on the screen has been such a balm for the part of me that still hurts, 26 years later. These girls seem to like each other. They're connected. No one is sitting alone at lunch. I love that. I need to see that, again and again, to train my brain to believe that it's possible. 

The only other time in my life I've gotten as deep into a fictional universe as I did in middle school with the BSC was in 2018 with Harry Potter—a time when my life was falling to pieces, when I needed an escape hatch, and so I blasted myself into this alternate magic world. The BSC was another escape hatch, both then and now, and I think many of us desperately need more stories like it. 

I know this is a lot to put on a show about teenage babysitters, but the stories we come back to usually speak to a part of us that needs love. We need stories that heal us, that soothe us, that remind us that our stories aren't the only ones. Stories that remind us that friendship and love and connection are still possible.

The House in the Woods

I turn 39 this year, which means I'm edging ever closer to my midlife crisis. As Millennial nostalgia is now in high season and Gen Z is embracing trends from my own puberty (rude), I get to consider myself having Lived A Life and can start planning for the inevitable next phase—the crone years, the apocalypse maybe, or at least thinking about having a clean house. 

At the beginning of COVID, people were talking about the end of COVID as birthing a kinder, gentler, more community-oriented world. Two years later, as we stumble towards yet another checkpoint disguised as a finish line, it's harder to be assured that this kinder-gentler version of the world still yearns to be built. I have seen friends go into delusional wormholes about vaccines and mask mandates; I have seen Black people in America and my own communities rightly march in the street against police violence; I have cried, watching my son play in the our backyard, knowing that thousands of Indigenous children in this country were stolen and killed or allowed to die at school. As I write this, there is war in Ukraine, food prices in have shot up, and Canada is under the Emergency Act because protestors shut down the Canadian border with anti-science demands. It's a time, you guys. It is a time. 

Back in 2018, I had an appointment with a social worker, who listened to me for a while and then said, "Yeah, it doesn't actually sound like you have anxiety. It sounds like you're reacting appropriately to what's been happening in your life." She encouraged me to visualize a place of safety and security in my mind, one that I could visit any time I needed to, as an escape from my ongoing crises. This advice struck me as odd, since visualizing an escape is not usually productive. But I was into what my brain conjured up: a cottage in the woods, with a little garden and a trail down to the water's edge. 

I've long been fascinated with all the paths I could take but don't. Some other version of me is in a Master's program, or is a full-time freelance writer. There's probably a version who has three kids, or no kid; one that stuck it out in Toronto and one that never went there in the first place. There are versions of me with dogs, or short hair, or who still smoke and drink like a monster, or who went vegan in 2008, or who powerlift competitively, or who teach Nia, or traveled more, or who got divorced, or who told that guy about my feelings for him in 2010, or who never lived in co-op, or who still has those friends. There are so many ghosts out there: choices I made and didn't make. 

An aside: for many years, I wanted to be a gardener. Someone who could grow flowers, and, importantly, food. My paternal grandmother was the kind of gardener who grew corn in her backyard, and I admired that about her. But for most of my adult life, I didn't put much effort into keeping green things alive. Houseplants withered, outdoor garden space was nil, and so I just assumed that I wasn't much of a gardener. 

In 2020, like many people, I frantically put some seeds into potting soil in the spring, and was astonished when they actually sprouted. When I put them into the ground, they grew. I read about how to care for them and how to make them bear fruit. And several months later, we had a bounty of tomatoes and zucchini and pumpkins. 

It turned out, I could be a gardener, if I wanted it. If I tried. 

It turns out some paths are not permanently washed away. 

I keep thinking about the experiences I want to have in my life: are they a shopping list? Am I trying to become someone I'm not, or am I trying to expose the core of who I really am? When I look at lists of values, I think, "Well, these all sound pretty good!" and it takes me a while to drill down on what it means when I say I value, say, gratitude. 

And I also suspect my incipient midlife crisis could be both mild and deep: what I'm craving is beautiful landscapes, rest, creative time, and community. Some of those require a plane ticket and two weeks off; others require more serious work, a true deep dive into who am I and how I want to live out the back half of my life. (Side note: why does building true community feels exhausting and overwhelming at the best of times? In a post-pandemic world, when everyone's politics and personality defects have been on display for the better part of a year, it feels even more isolating to try to figure out how to create a web. And yet I feel the sort of loneliness that isn't met by a single friend or a partner—it's the craving for a network, a village, a circle. Why does that feel so weird and woo-woo and cringey to write about?)  

I know that the more I continue on as business as usual, the more time I spend on the work-kid-knit-cook-sleep-shower treadmill, the more entrenched I feel in this one version of myself. And I only get so much life to do it all. And I become more and more aware that those other versions are floating away, never to be born into being. 

What is the definition of a midlife crisis, and how do we meet it? Other than throwing seeds into the ground that have never sprouted before?

I keep thinking about that house in the woods. Sometimes it does look like a house in a thicket, with a path that leads to a stony beach and great tide-offerings of seaweed. Sometimes it looks like an apartment above a downtown shop, with tall windows and a tiny kitchen and bright white walls. Sometimes it's plane tickets and a beloved hand in mine. Sometimes it's an ecovillage or a yurt, a drinking tea in a shared kitchen, and dirt under my fingernails by dinnertime.

And sometimes it looks planting seeds in the earth, trying to expand who I am and who I could be. Growth, across the fields of my life.

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?