December fuck-it-all

Good riddance to 2018 the year in which the last of my quartet of beloved black and white cats died all of whom were euthanized but none of whom had a good death and the year in which the last of the more-than-the-toes-on-a-polydactyl-cat strays I fed over the last 19 years disappeared without a trace and the year in which the two doctors who championed me at work both retired and I find myself wondering and worrying about what my future holds if I am catapulted off the teeter-totter since I am 58 years old and there are bucketloads of unemployed and much younger and more qualified PhDs who would be competing for the same jobs and please don’t tell me to follow my dreams for I don’t have any and even if I did dreams cost money and I don’t have any to spare and the year in which a friend and long ago romantic partner’s cognitive plummet was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s and the year in which someone very dear to me continued to burn and to cut himself and the year in which my house was broken into for a second time and my garage for a third time and the year in which my house’s foundation was revealed to be shaky and my figurative foundation often felt the same way and my home no longer felt like a home but a house haunted by a clowder of ghost cats and vengeful concrete demons and the year in which I lost two car keys and travelled twice to a town a two-hour round trip away to have a new key made only to be thwarted by the most fucking incompetent Toyota technicians who fucked up twice and GOD I HATE FUCKING TOYOTA and I still don’t have a new key and can this level of incompetence actually exist in a so-called functioning global corporation and don’t bother responding because I already know the answer and I also know these griefs and grievances of mine form but a nanoparticle of the infinitely vast global crapload that was 2018.

And then there was this blogging project. I was glad to renew old acquaintances—which should not be and were not forgotten, but just in case they ever should be forgot, here is something to bring them to mind—and to make new ones. And I am sad it is over, since you have been such a wonderful community of writers and readers and such a collective back flow valve against the effluent that constantly threatens to flood our house-of-card fortresses (OK, this is a shitty and possibly mixed metaphor or analogy or whatever it's meant to be, but remember, I'm in the middle of a shitty basement renovation). And yet I am also glad it is over, for I feel almost constantly overwhelmed by stuff that needs doing and posting something every day—although I actually averaged once every 1.99 days*—added to the stuffload. 

Alas, I was hoping to post a profound and poetic summation, not this stale, yammering ramble. Apologies… and a toast to loads of happier ramblings in 2019.

*Thankfully it wasn’t a leap year, which would have downgraded my posting performance to once every 2.00 days.

December free-for-all (#8)

Reading material I gifted to others for Christmas:

1. Neapolitan Chronicles to my younger nephew (last minute substitute for How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which I ordered on December 10 through our local bookstore but which still hadn’t arrived by December 24. If there was a novel titled How to Order a Book I would have gifted it to the store clerk.)
2. TIME magazine special edition on How Dogs Think to my sister-in-law, who lives with Millie the poodle and Maude the collie. Millie failed the towel test so the rest of the family thinks she’s a nincompoodle, but I see her as a free spirit who refuses to pander to the unwashed—and hence delightfully odiferous, to “normal” dogs—human masses.
3. Ottolenghi Simple to my older nephew and his partner. I debated at the bookstore whether to buy this cookbook or Jerusalem: A Cookbook. Fortunately I made the right choice, as my sister-in-law had hoped to buy them Ottolenghi Simple but the bookstore she went to was sold out and so she bought them Jerusalem: A Cookbook instead.
4. The White Angel  to my mother. She mainly reads mysteries and this one is a fictionalized account of the actual and unsolved murder of a Scottish nanny in Vancouver shortly after World War I. Bonus: I can read the book after she has finished it. 

Reading material others gifted to me:

1. The Haunting of Hill House, which I have already finished. I found it nearly impossible to put down, although I suspect Mark Twain would have laid it aside at times to go on a shooting spree (e.g., after reading this at the bottom of page 28 of the Penguin Classics paperback edition: “It had an unbelievably faulty design which left it chillingly wrong in all its dimensions…”). 
2. An Ocean of Minutes. Someone knows my taste in books, for I had reserved this from the library before Christmas (and was #32 on the waiting list, for those who like trivia).
3. The Love & Lemons Cookbook, in which all recipes feature one main fruit or vegetable—ratatouille and other such medleys are vegetabliis non grata (gratin?)—and are grouped by said featured fruit or vegetable, in alphabetical order. The recipes look simple and sound delicious. Best of all: each comes with a photograph of the finished dish. Cookbook porn. When I’m certain nobody is watching I am often to be found flipping through and fondling the pages. 

Summation: I got as good as I gave. 

December free-for-all (#7)

Is a spore-laden “grow your own mushrooms on your kitchen counter” sack of soil really such a bad gift?*

*Note: This is neither a rhetorical nor a trick question. 

December free-for-all (#6)

Dear Santa:

In May this year I went to FibreFest and spotted an adorably wee knitted dragon named Flytten. 

It—dragons are sexless, which makes for less discrimination in dragons’ dens and offices—was not for sale—dragons are firmly opposed to dragon trafficking—but I did buy a “knit a Flytten” kit (dragons do share humans’ love of consumerism). I decided a purple handknit dragon would be the perfect present for an artist friend who turned 70 (!!!!) in October, 2018. 

I was a wee bit dismayed when I opened the kit and discovered that giving birth to an adorable little Flytten required 10 pages of instructions. I laboured and laboured over techniques like magic loops and Kitchener stitches and obscure pronouncements like "graft snout closed." After having completed only two rows between May and August, I desperately tried to conjure up a dragon equivalent of the Immaculate Conception and an adept knitter named Mary to give birth to the damn thing. Alas, I was not successful and by the time October rolled around Flytten’s gestation had barely progressed, as can be seen by the ultrasound below. (And one might conclude from the fetus's alarming appearance that dragons are an abomination of nature, but the dragons who sold me the kit emphatically stated this is not the case... so emphatically in fact they singed my eyebrows.)

So dear Santa, please please please, all I want this year is time to knit purple dragons. (And $100,000 to pay for my basement renovation, but not at the expense of anyone’s death. And a firmer jawline.)

Thank you, and Merry Christmas,

Helen

December free-for-all (#5)

I just finished reading At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails. I probably still cannot tell you what existentialism is, although if you were to ply me with enough apricot cocktails I’m sure I would start throwing around some ill-defined definitions. But of all the philosophers mentioned in the book, I feel I would have liked Camus best: he never wavered from the belief that there could be no justification for torturing a baby, even if that act were to save countless others from dying. 

December free-for-all (#4)

As I continue to not write, I search for others' words to put in my mouth. Here are some flavory ones from At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails: That is why, among all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafes, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’ — and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it. 

December free-for-all (#3)

I’m sure I have mentioned this previously: I have the urge to write my Member of Parliament (MP) and ask him to table a private member’s bill to introduce an “unloved tax credit” for those of us who are single and don’t get to benefit from two incomes or the tax breaks available to couples. Of course, I suppose then MPs would be flooded with requests from their married and common-law constituents to introduce an assortment of other tax breaks, including a “having to compromise on every bloody decision” tax credit or a “having to constantly deal with <insert favourite ongoing grievance with partner here, e.g., the toilet seat being left up, incessant snoring at night, etc.>” tax credit.

At the very least, I feel I should be able to claim all the stray cats I feed as dependents. And/or receive a “crazy old cat lady” tax credit.

December free-for-all (#2)

I have been waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. every morning this week, panicking over my basement renovation and how much it is costing. The foundation repair, which will hopefully prevent my house from collapsing during my lifetime, was a unbudgeted expense and I am balking at spending tens of thousands of dollars on that and buying a $199 bathtub because I can no longer afford my dream vessel. So I took it as a sign this morning when I came across a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright (although maybe e.e. cummings or Benjamin Franklin actually said these words and they have been falsely attributed to FLW): As long as we have the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves.

December free-for-all (#1)

I just listened to a radio interview with Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist and author of Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital Age. There is now evidence showing that the medium is important: even among digital natives, reading a text in hard copy results in higher comprehension than reading the same text onscreen. 

This is extremely important, as all my blog content is. So please be sure to print out and consume my posts at a leisurely pace—perhaps whilst lounging in a tub full of aromatic bath salts, and accompanied by a glass of a fine vintage red—instead of gulping down the words onscreen.