1. I get to work from home on most afternoons, and it always feels like I’m getting away with something even when I work just as hard in my living room.
2. Coming home early means that I get to spend more time with Linda, who is happy not to be in a crate most of the day. Our noon walks are supposed to be short but always stretch out so that I have to rush through lunch.
3. I don’t have to pack a lunch most days.
4. I can take Linda to Maggie’s school to pick her up. There’s no day that can’t be improved by seeing a bunch of third and fourth graders go crazy over a dog.
5. The elimination of paper assignments means that I never have to tote around sacks of marking. My shoulders and arms are grateful.
6. Schedules have been rearranged so that each teacher has a unique classroom, so I get to hang out in my own space and listen to the radio while I work, rather than being interrupted by the photocopier or people looking for a quick chat.
7. My plants are thriving. They usually hate my classroom.
8. I am learning a lot about online teaching, whether I want to or not.
9. My Bitmoji game is tight.
10. The elimination of assemblies and extracurriculars isn’t fun but it is less to keep track of.

So, here we are again, rocking the QuaranTimes together. I’ve had to make some adjustments to the evolving situation: we had a warm spell a week ago and I started to get really paranoid about the amount of people out and about in our neighbourhood. We have a park path that goes behind our house, and with everyone at home, the number of people to avoid mushroomed. It got to the point that I didn’t want to run or take Maggie outside because I didn’t know how I could keep us safe.

Fortunately, Canadian Spring includes a number of “syke!”s and we’ve gone back to a cold snap that keeps most casual strollers inside. I also developed two coping mechanisms:

1. The one time I ran this week, I went to the high school track, which was deserted except for me and a million drowning worms. This is a big improvement over running on sidewalks and streets, for exactly the same reason I avoided running on a track in the Before Times: it’s repetitive and predictable. The sight lines are very long (no cars, no bushes, no driveways, no hidden turns) and people move in a predictable way on a track. Running on a sidewalk is a better life skill to build in an unquarantined time as it’s interesting and offers sudden challenges. That is NOT what I’m looking for right now. The rest of my life is interesting and challenging enough, thanks.


2. When Maggie and I go out these days, we either ride bikes (which offers fast getaways and more intense (therefore shorter) periods outside) or we walk with The Distance Stick. The Distance Stick is a branch that is 6′ long, and when I carry it it is not only a measuring implement, it carries an implicit threat. I understand Rey so much better now that I have The Distance Stick. Unfortunately, I let a small person play with The Original Distance Stick and it was abandoned with its stick siblings. Distance Stick the Second is doing admirably.

“give me 6 feet, motherf***er!!”

I’m starting to have flashbacks to my life in Nova Scotia. The parallels are striking: my “regular” life was abruptly replaced with something entirely new, I can only see or talk to my friends using technology, and I live with my only friend(s) for kms. Now I have a much better husband, a fun child and the ability to decorate the house however I want (hello, impulse area rug!) Missing from this iteration is the general anxiety of being freshly married and on our own, as well as the chance to meet new people. I also don’t use Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook (8th Edition, 1996) anymore, so my recipes with Cream of Mushroom soup as a base are greatly reduced.*

* How betrayed did I feel when I learned this year that not only have three new editions been pumped out, but that mine was the last to heavily recommend canned ingredients? I was like, “I thought rice, chicken and mushroom soup was the height of cooking, Betty! You USED ME!!”

No, this isn’t going to be a post about getting your side-hustle started or how to work on your plank endurance. This is a really shitty time to make long-term financial investments or to tie up the medical system when you pull something because of your overeager new exercise routine. Fuck that noise.

This morning I took a run with Blake, and when I got into the shower I had a series of insights as to why I seem to be less troubled than a lot of the people I have been speaking to. I’m going to start with a list, and then work through some of the more specific points.

Teacher powers

1. I’m good at following and enforcing rules I don’t necessarily agree with and controlling a group (the household)
   
2. Teachers are used to sudden changes of locations, time changes and technology fails. We know how to be patient through shifting circumstances. We know how to fill time and keep everyone calm.
   
3. We have a basic understanding of crisis management and child psychology, so we can (somewhat) understand the ups and downs of our own kids now that we’re in close quarters 24/7.
   
4. We’re researchers and used to learning and communicating new data in coherent packages
   
5. We’re used to relying on each other for emotional support above and beyond our families (maybe this is just my department)
   
6. We learn new skills well. I have been building domestic competence for 20 years, give or take, and I still have a lot to do in my home space.

Mental health powers: activate depression skills!

1. Every felt powerless to leave your house? Yeah, I have. Every year.
   
2. While stuck in your house, are you somehow exhausted but do you find it impossible to rest because your mind is racing at a million kilometres a minute? Yeah, that’s depression too.
   
3. Unable to predict your tempestuous emotions? Huh. Me too.
   
4. Feel like you have to put on a facade of normality so that you can function with your job, friends or family? You just won depression bingo.

We are all in the middle of a world wide depressive episode. Those of us who have done this already know that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. My depression is a punk-ass little bitch who doesn’t have the guts to kill me itself; I’ve beaten it every year of my career.

If this is your first time, you need to treat yourself like a convalescing patient. We are all heart sick, and it is not an imaginary disease. I bought the cartoon below at last year’s TCAF during a particularly bad depressive episode, and I feel that it will help you, too.

In the immortal words of Morrissey, we’re all Still Ill. Be gentle with yourself. Know that I love you.

*Blows away thick layer of dust*

*Uses a dirty sock to swat away the cobwebs*

*Sweeps up the dead bugs*

Eh, you get the point.

First of all, I’m not back. Writing on the reg isn’t something I have the time/energy for in this life stage, and I get better results from point form in my Real Life blue journal, where I can use real names and bitch about something without fully explaining it. What I want, tho, was a place to write about movies, because I leave the theatre with all these feelings and then I have no place to put them without spoiling my friends. Using this channel, I can spew my half baked ideas while not spoiling anyone’s experience.

Also, I’m home sick, which gives me an unexpected reservoir of time and the stubborn desire to please myself rather than do one of the insistent chores. So here we all are!

My summer school class is listening to Serial, a first for me. And all of the time we’ve spent thinking through 1999 inspired me to go back to see what I was consumed with on the day Hae Lee was killed.

I found an article enumerating my thoughts on fat as a feminist issue. I was appalled. It was terrible. Worst of all, it was written for (published in?) a campus newspaper. Gross. (I’m not linking; you’re free to do your own digging but I wouldn’t recommend it.)

But, in the spirit of the artistic challenge that encourages artists to redraw something, showing the progress that can be made with practice, I am going back to that writing prompt. Nineteen years later, am I less hacky? Well, I’m still self-publishing for an audience in the tens, so probably. But as Katherine Hepburn so memorably said in African Queen, “Never. Theless.”

During The Full Monty, the male cast is critiquing body type until one of the men reprovingly hisses, ‘Fat is a feminist issue!’ Blank looks are exchanged among our blue-collar heroes. ‘What does that mean?’ ‘I don’t know,’ the hisser replies, ‘but it is.’

When I first wrote this article, my understanding of feminism was more intuitive than academic. I related this almost entirely to my own body, and my own feeling about fat.

Pause to go to a Weight Watchers meeting with my mother, because I’m all about repeating imagery. We’re back:

I wrote it from the perspective of a young white girl who had pretty typical self-esteem struggles without ever losing thin privilege. I had grown up with an overweight parent and absorbed many of her self-hating attitudes without really examining them; they hadn’t surfaced because I wasn’t truly overweight and I stupidly thought I had transcended them. I had a steady boyfriend, who I would late marry and even later, divorce, and I had never wondered if my romantic successes or failures were due to fat. The Freshman 10 was sitting pretty easily on me.

So, what’s different, besides the fact that I am now nearly twice the age of that little fluff? For one thing, when I first wrote this piece I was in the last years before my depression surfaced. When that bitch finally came up and unpacked her bags, I was put on a medication that gifted me 20 pounds in little over a month. At the time I wasn’t sure if I’d ever lose the weight, so I gave up meat and started going to the gym. Neither of these drastic measures took hold in any meaningful way; as soon as I found I was pregnant with Blake I welcomed meat back into my heart (or more specifically, my gut). Going off that first medication to grow Blake changed the equation again, and I ended up converting all of that sweaty fear and midnight cookies into a baby, so that when he was born I was back to my pre-depression weight. And I more-or-less stayed there until I started dating Mason, who loves to cook with all of the best things: cream, butter, sugar, salt, meat, cheese. I was eating better quality ingredients but I was also just eating a lot, and I eventually made it back to my high point, this time without the medication to blame.

By the time I joined Weight Watchers I had spent almost 30 years with only a dim understanding of what was good for me and what would keep my weight down. I was running by this time, but running never takes off weight unless you’re one of those ultra-marathon birds, and the weight was making it hard to progress. I could run 10k but I felt ill-equipped to take on bigger challenges. And I was just tired of being out of control. How was it possible that I could eat so much natural, heritage, unsullied farmer’s food and still be this heavy? How could I be this smart and be defeated by my own belly?

I’m not here to talk about my weight loss as if it was particularly important to anyone but me. What it did teach me, though, was that bodies are complicated. And food is complicated. My food is intimately connected to capitalism, regardless of how many farmer friends I make or peas I personally plant, and I needed to understand exactly how insidiously the industry has exploited our most basic emotions to sell us garbage to shove in our pie-holes. I needed to gain weight, lose weight, exercise for fun and learn about food yet gain all the weight before I was ready to admit that I needed help to understand it all. I needed to lose 30 pounds and then gain 10 of it back to really get how complex it all is. And I needed to spend three years listening to other people, mostly women, talk about their own emerging understanding of food before I could start to understand how complex it is for each of us.

Is fat a feminist issue? Of course it is, because in a patriarchal society the anxieties of the culture are visited on the bodies of the most vulnerable. While we all try to get a grip on our addiction to chip dip and moose tracks ice cream it is the women who will bear the brunt of the helplessness and disgust. It is the women who will be blamed for our obese children. It is always the women who have to walk a finer line to be deemed worthy, and fat is just one of many make-or-break issues. Of course men will also suffer, because there is always enough suffering to go around, but the women will be the ones in the cross-hairs for years to come.

Fat is a feminist issue because fat highlights social inequities. Poor women and children are more likely to live in “food deserts,” where fresh and healthy food is just too far away to be practical. Poor women and children are more likely to depend on starchy food bank staples. Poor children are more likely to be fed whatever the school can afford in its breakfast program, foods chosen for their ability to keep well over time and be appealing (i.e. sweet and salty).

Fat is a feminist issue because fat is the end result of industrial food. The industry is not interested in healthy eating, it’s interested in profit, and profit comes from using cheap ingredients that are amped up with the sweet and fatty flavours our unevolved brains equate with survival. I’m not even going to start on the diet industry, as I have an obvious bias, but many “diets” are unhealthy scams that quickly fail and lead to a lifetime of desperate yo-yoing (cha-ching!) Fat can be the only issue a health-care provider is willing to see, endangering countless people whose real issues go undiagnosed because they “just have to lose some weight to feel better.”

Fat is a feminist issue because it is one the ways society judges women to be lacking. It is one of the ways in which society encourages women to tear others to shreds: skinnies on one side, fatties on the other; corporate zombies on one side, woke femi-bitches on the other.

But it is not a feminist issue because I was a little plush and I had a skinny boyfriend. Sorry younger me. You missed the boat on this one. See you next time I need to remind myself to keep working.

Here is a good summary of the inspiration behind this game from Electric Media here.

new twitter challenge: describe yourself like a male author would

— Whitney Reynolds (@whitneyarner) April 1, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

She dressed like a teenager, but her walk betrayed her advanced age. She had clearly allowed the brassy sun of experience to burn off the fresh dew of youth. Her eyes were locked behind glasses, her hands full of knitting. Her unpainted lips curved faintly at a joke I had yet to make. I noticed a well-worn Garmin watch on her slender wrist and made a mental note to tell her about my PBs.

I leaned in. “What are you knitting me,” I asked.

Yesterday at work I was reading Mason’s Dictionary of Literary Terms (I will not apologize for being so awesome), brushing up on the concept of Tragedy. I am in the midst of my first teaching of Hamlet, and I want to make sure that the dusty, half-remembered ideas of Tragedy have any basis in scholarship. Whilst learning about The Spanish Tragedy, I came across the fact that the European Middle Ages produced no formal Tragedy. The author of the entry suggested that the Passion of the Christ fulfilled the Christians’ need for high tragedy, which seems a little weak if you ask me. Why don’t we have any tragedy now, if that’s the case? But anyway, I had a chance to think this through today during the Good Friday service.

Reasons why this might be true:

• Jesus is a man of stature as both the son of God and the promised Messiah
  
• Jesus fits the mold of Tragic Hero in that he is concerned with ultimate morality, thoughtful and emotional, and prone to soliloquy
  
• All of the events in his downfall are connected: the reaction of the Priests, the betrayal of Judas, the arrest and mock trial, the crowd choosing Barabbas, the crucifixion and death
  
• His fate is connected to the fates of others, all others if you believe the Gospels.

Reasons why this doesn’t work:

• Jesus is born without sin?? So the idea that the tragic hero represents the hamartia or the bad decisions of everyone is less literally true than it is a part of the litany of faith, i.e. what he took on in his death.
  
• Jesus’ death represents a kind of catharsis, but his Resurrection either negates the initial catharsis or creates a larger one?? Again, it becomes about the faith implications of Jesus’ story rather than what is part of the narrative itself.

It’s kind of fun to see Jesus as Hamlet and vice-versa, especially if you imagine the Holy Spirit as the ghost that urges Jesus into revenging himself against the sinfulness of the world, and the parables as the play-within-the-play to catch the guilty. I don’t know that they would have gotten along, what with the whole, “there’s nothing good or bad But thinking makes it so.” I feel like Jesus wouldn’t have been down with that. But at least Ophelia/Mary Magdalene makes it out alive in this one.

I’m in the process of going through my drafts folder, finishing pieces that I wrote and stashed. If you’re getting notifications whenever I publish, you’re going to be confused as to why I’ve suddenly started to talk about TCAF 2015 or Jian Ghomeshi (especially with all the new shit that’s buried his scandal in the last year). I’m just tying to honour the stuff that was important enough to say but not important enough to remember. 😉

Having spent so long pouring over jokes, thinking about possible scenarios, reading theories and getting ready for anything, I was pretty excited to hit that opening score. The movie itself was a barrage of input, one I’ll need at least one more viewing to fully process. The sunny optimism of the new kids in TFA is gone, and I’m not sure I like Poe & Finn as much as I did. Ultimately, though, I don’t complain about stuff like this; it’s the story that has me hooked, and not liking characters quite as much is sort of like your uncle being a jerk one Christmas: you’re taking the long view, and he wasn’t why you came to dinner anyway.

Even in the worst of my Kylo/Adam fixation, I tried to keep myself from committing to any one version of his relationship with Rey, and TLJ gave me so much more to think about without fully shutting any narrative door. That throne room scene, oh my God. I could never have imagined that a Star Wars movie could make me that elated. People sneer a lot at the idea of “fan-service” – a term which is as overused as genius – but that throne room scene was clearly the work of someone who loved Star Wars and wanted to test the limits of what he was allowed to do with characters who had previously just been samurai set dressing. For a story to be any good, the writer needs to be a fan of the story, which makes criticisms like this particularly meaningless.

I almost wish that they had doubled-down on the Kurosawa influences, that Lucas has always claimed but rarely done justice to. I would have happily sat through a long, slow movie on Ach-To, a nearly-silent story of with the sky and the earth as much main characters as Rey and Luke (and Chewy and the porgs, of course). I loved the new characters but I was never that interested in the goings-on of Poe and Finn, not when there was blue milk to be guzzled. That said, the horse-alien jail break was magnificent, and Laura Dern killed it in her perfect purple ensemble (Hallowe’en!!) and Leia taking up a blaster once again was a sorely-needed punctuation.

But it’s the Kylo-Rey stuff that stays with me. Their indelible connection. How lost they both are. How much sense Kylo makes when he wants to stop the hero-god madness in its tracks, but still can’t free himself from the nonsense of wanting to be Darth Vader II, a stupid idea that Rey quickly shuts down. I had wanted this to be a definitive redemption for him, but I’m ok with the way it was clawed back. Ben Solo will have to work on himself for a long time before he’s safe to play with the other children; it would have been unrealistic for a few conversations with Rey to bring him back from spittle-flecked foaming mouth villany. For one thing, he needs to put on a towel. (I’m really amused by the shocked reaction to the shirt-less scene; it’s not like it’s hard to find pictures of Adam Driver without a shirt. That was kind of his deal for the whole first season of Girls.)

I’m left with a lot of lingering questions about the Rey/Finn/Poe dynamic. This movie seems to have walked back the gay/poly aspects of the characters, something that’s barely subtext in TFA. Is Rey going to reject the celibate Jedi thing as just one more piece of legacy bullshit? Does Poe fall in love with everyone because he was so traumatized by the First Order?

Ultimately, I’m glad I still have so many questions.

If you’re unfortunate enough to live in my house, you already know that a switch was flipped when I saw SW:tFA in late December. I plunged headfirst into a swirl of delicious obsession; at first with the new cast (taking a lengthy pause over Adam Driver) and eventually reaching back to my excitement about the original trilogy. I collected jokes and fan art on Pintrest. I used the Machete Order to work through 4 of the previous 6 (I still have RotJ to look forward to), which meant that I had to watch Revenge of the Sith for the first time. I traded batshit insane fan theories with my brother, who only reads SW novels and maintains a high level of investment/obsession at all times.
– an unpublished post from May 27, 2016 called “Sad Wars: the Sulk Awakens”

Seeing The Last Jedi on Saturday with two of my three boys at times verged on an out-of-body experience. I can’t remember 1999 very well, but I don’t think I’ve ever been this excited to see a Star Wars movie. Or any movie, really, with the possible exception of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I haven’t read all of the Lord of the Rings books, and I already knew exactly what was going to happen in the Harry Potter movies, so after the first one I wasn’t that thrilled. I had already gotten my story fix from Rowling, whenever a new novel came out. I needed to know what happened to those guys, and the Boy & I spent the intervening years speculating on what might happen to our little magical moppets. I’ve spent 6 years needing to know what happens next in the world of Percy Jackson but it hasn’t consumed me, exactly, in the way that The Force Awakens pulled me into a force-choke hold two years ago, one that has yet to relent.

I have always liked Star Wars, and even though I gave up halfway through the prequels, I knew I was going to see the Force Awakens in the theatre. I wasn’t expecting to be so thoroughly seduced by the sweetness of Rey and Finn finding each other, or the cocky bravura of Poe, or the brooding instability of Kylo. After that first viewing I started watching cast interviews, getting to know the actors who had touched me so profoundly.

Within a short period of time I fixated on Adam Driver, drawn to the awkward, mumbling mass of grey and black separates that seemed to lurk in the shadows of the brash and charming Daisy, John & Oscar. When he first took off his helmet, I couldn’t make sense of his face. I couldn’t stop staring. I went through his back catalogue in Netflix, hate-watched 4 seasons of Girls, found out when his other projects were released and went to see those as soon as I could, just to wrap my head around this mystery. I ended up seeing some pretty great movies, including Silence and Paterson, my first Scorcese and Jarmuch respectively (yeah, I haven’t seen Down by Law, I’m a bad Tom Waits fan.)

And through all of my subsequent watchings of the Force Awakens, I wondered what I wasn’t seeing, based on the layered performances I had seen elsewhere. Other people dismissed Kylo – my space friend – as a tantrummy brat, but I found his instability disturbing and magnetic in equal measures. As much as I hate Heathcliff and Catherine, Kylo is a space opera Heathcliff, and I was 100% there for future developments in the weird relationship he’d built with Rey, even if she was his sister. I have a whole line of thought on that. (And if she wasn’t related, she was the sensible Catherine we all deserved.)

“Wuthering Heights Part 2” from Hark! A Vagrant! by Kate Beaton

On Saturday, the very best moment was the first moment, when the title rushed across the screen and the John Williams score thundered the first cord. As with H2G2, I had a moment of apotheosis, knowing that this might be the best it would ever get. I was wrong, of course, because I didn’t know about the throne room battle then, but that first moment of delightful anticipation, of feeling that my questions would finally be answered, was sublime. And I love, love, love all the new puzzles to keep me guessing into the wee hours of the long nights.

Of course, being a story junkie means that this full almost-three-hour 8-ball would blaze through me and dissipate before we got home. I need more story and this is the maximum amount of time before a new Star Wars movie. But let me see this one three or four more times, just to take the edge off that realization.