#15: Happy birthday to hell

Actual Updates

Ooooh, first things first, I just noticed the editing toolbar here has now added the ability to create footnotes. I’m about to become so annoying!

Alright, onwards, where are we. Well, we’re just about exactly a year into it, for me. From March 4th-6th, which was a Wednesday-Friday, my work went up to Killington ski resort for our annual ski trip. It was lovely, it’s always lovely, and it meant that my last normal night involved such now-unimaginable things as dancing! Sitting close together! Sharing sips of each other’s beers with friends! Experiencing happiness! And then we came back down, and over the weekend, work decided we would be going remote as of the Monday. So that was March 9th. I’ve been home ever since. And at first I would go out, you know, like normal; go to the store, take walks, all that - but that came to a screeching halt pretty soon afterwards. So: a year! A year. And it’ll be longer, too. Our state is doing a pretty shoddy job of the vaccine rollout, and I have no idea when we’ll reach the end of the line, where I am (which is fine! I should be at the end of the line! I don’t have risk factors and my job can easily be done remotely!).

I was going to talk about such mental-health-wrecking events this past month as review season at work overlapping with a doctor’s appointment for Hap, which is essentially review season for my other job, but honestly, any little thing is a huge sledgehammer to the heart nowadays. We’re all so far past running on fumes that it’s a miracle we’re running on anything at all, and I’m no exception.

One thing that’s sort of keeping the lights on for me emotionally is that we’re revisiting the idea of moving. Don’t get too excited yet - we’re still determining whether it would be possible, in terms of jobs and financials and so on - and then once we actually begin the process, if we do, I understand that that takes about a year. So I’m not going anywhere for over a year yet even if we decide it’s a yes. But I might be, eventually. It’s nice to think about moving home (or moving to an affordable suburb of home, more realistically; my hometown is famous for its out-of-control housing prices1); it’s nice to think about the places we could start going and the things we could start doing if we lived there, and what we wouldn’t have to worry about anymore. And, of course, what we would; nowhere is perfect and Vancouver is far from it, but the problems are different. Plus, if you’re familiar with the anxiety of picking the restaurant for dinner in case someone doesn’t enjoy it, well, moving to your own hometown is that anxiety writ large. Anything that doesn’t go well, anything that’s awkward or difficult or unpleasant, anything that isn’t available there, that’s going to be my fault. So there are pluses and minuses. But it would be nice to buy Shreddies at the grocery store again.

Some links

Illegal pants! But actually it’s not funny because it’s about systems of control and oppression, as expressed through fashion and regulating who can wear what. So, naturally, right in my wheelhouse. When Wearing the Wrong Pants Could Land You in Prison

Bank tubes!! (Note: I had no idea about bank tubes until moving here, because drive-thru ATMs are not a thing where I come from, and honestly it still seems like a weird idea) A Love Letter to the Lost World of the Parisian Pneumatic Post

Oh, you thought you were going to get out of this issue without an article looking deeply at gender? You thought wrong!! But in all seriousness, this was really powerful and I was really glad to have read it. Tracing the Seams

Related to the recent Britney Spears documentary, this article thinks about how women in the music industry do or don’t get to control their own image: Britney Spears: Another Pop Princess Trapped in a Man-Made Fairytale

So, disclaimer, I saw this article posted on Twitter, and some of the replies to this post were PRETTY DUBIOUS about it, saying it contains a lot of guesswork and so on, so take it with a grain of salt and all, but I do always find stuff about magnetic pole reversals extremely fascinating. They’ve happened! They could happen again! And how fucked would we be? Reversal of Earth's Magnetic Poles May Have Triggered Neanderthal Extinction - and It Could Happen Again

You may or may not be aware that royal mistresses (and royal side pieces in general; let us not ignore the men who are out there banging royalty on the side!) are a topic of some interest to me, and this article additionally checks the box of women being intellectuals back when that was largely frowned up, and (speculatively) the bis being at the forefront of knowledge and culture as per usual!! Restoration Influencer: How Charles II's Clever Mistress Set Trends Ahead of Her Time

This is a subject Matt and I talk about a lot! Or, rather, its sister subject, the 80s kids movie with swearing in it, which is the same idea. We Shed A Tear For The Demise Of The ‘Casually R’ Rated Action Movie

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

This Youtube video doesn’t say this is Rock City Crimewave, but it is; it also doesn’t say this is obviously the theme song of the past year, but it is. Good luck not thinking “SWEAT!!! Pants!” the next time you put some on. Which will probably be tomorrow. No judgment, at the moment I wrote this paragraph, I was wearing some myself. Upsettingly, this song is not on Spotify, so it won’t make the playlist.

So I was working on writing a trivia question that had to do with Halifax, and - in addition to suddenly getting a wild hair to move there, when I have never even visited (although the climate sounds like “what if Boston wasn’t a fetid swamp in the summer and the winters were a little more relaxed?”) - got the one line of this song that I remembered into my head: “I’m a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s privateers.” And then, of course, I found that it’s basically the national anthem of Halifax and if someone starts “Oh the year was 1778” you’d better as hell respond with “How I wish I was in Sherbrooke now!”23

I kind of forgot about how much I liked this song. DCDR used to be Dead Cats Dead Rats and maybe they thought that was too much of a bummer. Man, I’m going to really have to lean into the Boston network of friends-bands and friends-of-friends bands to stay interesting if we move. Living here, I can introduce someone to a song they’ve never heard just by picking some Can-Con; living there, that’s obviously not going to blow anyone’s mind.

This month’s top 5: A twofer!

A. Things I would look forward to if we do move to Vancouver

1. Being less cold - the damp is not NOTHING but spending a Boston winter working in an uninsulated room where it was routinely about 55 degrees F is, I think, worse

2. THE MOUNTAINS, THE BEACH, THE NATURE, all your stereotypical Vancouver outdoorsy things

3. Showing Hap all the places and things that were important to me growing up, and also teaching him to ski. And one day, teaching him the penny game on a ferry. Is that dirtbaggy? Well perhaps I am a dirtbag

4. The metric system

5. I already said Shreddies (and by extension, other foodstuffs I grew up on, looking at you, cheap, plentiful, and good sushi) so instead I’ll say GREEN. Year-round green. Lush green. Coniferous trees as the rule and not the exception. Not knowing that mosses are the first things to come back in the spring, because they never go away in the winter.

B. Things I would NOT look forward to if we do move to Vancouver

1. I don’t know if it’s still as hard to find clothes there that are bigger than a size 4, but that sure sucked the first time around. I am around what I weighed in high school, maybe 5 pounds more, and it was really depressing then. I don’t need help being depressed now.

2. The price of housing! The price of everything, probably!

3. Relatedly, having to live in a tiny place or a place with no green space outside for Hap to play in. That’s the opposite move from what everyone’s doing this pandemic - they’re all moving to somewhere they can afford a yard so their kids can play outside. We’ll (probably, unless we’re very lucky) be giving one up.

4. Losing half my friends instantly and having my friendships with the other half weaken and sag like a rotted-out porch

5. Having to look for a new job, more than likely

The act of moving is only not on that second list because it is not specific to Vancouver; it’s going to suck, and the whole “what do we do with our house” facet is going to be a huge pain as well.

Well, that’s me for this month. Don’t forget that people literally died in Texas because climate change and capitalism go hand in hand to create a murder machine, and if you’ve got a couple bucks to rub together, why not join me in donating to Rae Spoon’s fundraiser: beyond just having cancer, they’re now having very serious complications that are not only debilitating physically but also financially. Yes, this can even happen in Canada.