My problem hasn’t been an absence of subject matter, it’s been a problem of editing. It’s also been a problem of opportunity. There are fewer and fewer places to write for, fewer and fewer places taking my ideas (the nerve!), and frankly fewer places I even read regularly because I don’t enjoy yelling at screens.

At the same time, I feel saturated in the firehose of bullshit that defines mainstream approaches to discussing how it feels to be living through the current moment. The ‘good guys’ are asking me to view a vicious war on civilians, aid and health care workers as justified self-defence and the transparently obvious bad guys are launching similar attacks at home on the equally vulnerable: on LGBTQ children, immigrants, and women while shredding public education, public health and any one and any thing else that gets in the way of power and profit.

For me, it is all connected; foreign and domestic policy fusing into one egregious insult on intelligence and humanity.

The pandemic has evolved into an insidious corporate war on the most vulnerable populations and its reach has been destructive across the spectrum of our lives. It is this decline we continually refuse to take the measure of in mainstream media, which has always encouraged us to see the pandemic as a finite thing, an episodic blip for some unlucky folks that got in the way of the super-strain of greed that, like Covid, appears to be an intrinsic feature of our air now.

But the pandemic episode has become a long-running series, with illness and preventable suffering baked into our daily lives, along with reduced access to care. I can’t even conceive of how rapidly our expectations around our collective safety have changed since 2020. At work, in hospitals, at school, on airplanes. It is a dizzying accumulation of risks we are asked to take on for the exclusive value of shareholder reward.

But even if those connections aren’t made publicly, we do feel their terrible compounding effects every single place we go, including on airplanes where pieces can fall off mid-air now and be interpreted as a tough but necessary concession to profit-driven efficiencies. Pity the pundits that wonder why everything, including that booming economy we hear so much about, lands like another disappointment upon the population.

I did write this recently though for the film site Bright Wall Dark Room. It’s an appreciation of the 1999 Mike Judge comedy, Office Space, and the way in which it presents work experience as a psychological phenomenon that Work Culture writ large – which is defined, framed and codified by The Employer mostly — would have us infinitely repress if we want to maintain the increasingly miserable state of employment that most of us depend on to survive.

Being broke and disillusioned and restless is a shortcut to being a drag so I’ve been trying to restore those parts of myself that need to be reenergized, reinvented, and reminded that being this way is no help to anyone, least of all myself. The cheap and cheerful way I’ve always reignited my imagination is through reading so that’s what I’ve been doing.

Over the Christmas holidays, I fell into a Sylvia Plath reading gyre, that expanded and contracted as I found other books about her to read that fed my interest, which has endured since I read The Bell Jar in high school (Esther Greenwood 4 ever).

I started with Plath’s letters and journals, folded in Ted Hughes’ poetry, and jumped into Janet Malcolm’s book, The Silent Woman, about the overall problem of literary biography especially in relation to Plath (I’m still reading it; it’s pretty awesome). 

Volume two of Plath’s letters contain a handful of letters she wrote to her therapist, in the months before she died. And while I find the idea of publishing these intensely private letters to be mostly an unconscionable breach of trust between doctor and patient (it’s not clear to me how the letters came to be sold), I recognize that it is precisely the taboo nature of the contents that makes them such compelling reading.  

These letters are full of anger, and reveal a certain fascinating internal calculation as Plath tries to figure out what to do and how to love herself in her raw uncoupled form. It is an authentic, painful identity crisis and one I must admit to understanding in my own tangential way. There is nothing more cataclysmic than the shattering of one’s self-image and to sit in the ruins of your ego while trying to work and care for children — it’s a monumental ask of a human being. I wanted to time-travel to help her through it.

In these letters Plath recognizes the limited options for women in her position and angrily rejects most of them. My eyes lit up when she declared that one role she would not accept was that of “unfucked wife” just to keep the structure of her marriage together.

Unfucked wife is a helluva phrase. I read that letter more than once.

I re-subscribed to the New York Review of Books just so I could read Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1971 essay on Plath, On Sylvia Plath, which is one of the best essays I’ve read on her (yes, I realize I’m not saying something new here). 

I can’t think of a better compliment for a woman writer or poet than being dubbed never a “nice person” as Hardwick characterizes Plath or to have your work called “mean” and evoking the sensation of a “smash of a fist.” 

“Her work is overwhelming; it is quite literally irresistible,” writes Hardwick. And yet, as Hardwick notes, its power is a feature of her being alive: “I don’t see the death as a necessity for the greatness of the work. Quite the opposite.”

To delineate the furiousness of Plath’s talent, which can reach almost mythological proportions, and sprint past the death cult that’s grown around her to reclaim the living poet – damn, I love this almost 50-year-old essay. I really needed to read such a reclamation of the power of living, even in anger. It’s a fantastic essay.

So that’s what I’ve been doing: reading, rambling and ranting. I will apologize for the ranting but it’s indissoluble from the reading, the rambling and — I hope — some reinvention.

Some other essays that got me back to thinking, feeling and trying to write:

This essay by Pankaj Mishra in the London Review of Books, which subsequently forced me to pick up Primo Levi’s books, which Mishra references often as he advances his argument. It’s such a brave piece.

And this F1 essay by Kate Wagner. It’s an awesome piece in the vein of David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster but as applied to the grotesqueries of the obscenely wealthy. It’s so good it was taken down by the website, which says so much about its quality. To be too good to publish — now that’s an achievement.

My cats are an ongoing tree menace

Christmas was always the signature event in my family’s calendar when I was growing up. The circle-it-in-red-and-underline-it holiday that we looked forward to all year. We didn’t have a lot of money and the effect of doing the one thing we could never do – spend money for pleasure –was restorative.

I’m hesitant to say it felt spiritual, but it was kind of that, too.

Happy Birthday baby Jesus and all, but feeling rich was the true joy of the season for us, the warm-glow catharsis for the days and weeks and months and years of feeling nothing but broke.

I remain a sucker for the season’s core sensation, for its fusion of generosity and extravagance all wrapped up in a bow, and while I wouldn’t defend consumerism as a virtue, I don’t think I’ll ever shake its powers at this time of year.

Ensuring that the holidays are indeed happy goes well beyond just money. It’s a ritual exercise that demands a human sacrifice, too, someone willing to do the work of the season and an individual equipped with the emotional and psychological strength to cope with the stress of other people. Specifically, how many people mess with the festivities either through their bad intentions, bad moods or just bad manners (for the record, I’ve been all three and sometimes at the same time).

In my family the person who played the role of seasonal martyr was my mother. Every year she would suit up and assume the role of special occasion commander. She made special note of secret wants; she shopped, spent money she didn’t have, and cooked and cleaned relentlessly, endlessly, all the damn time [1]. When financial constraints meant she couldn’t make our Christmas wishes come true, she tenderly prepared us for disappointment and tried to compensate with other meaningful gestures.

The obstacles to joyful celebration that she had to leap over to achieve her goal were plentiful and they usually multiplied during the holidays. Tis the season for shit to rain down in people’s lives, too. For layoffs and surprise tax bills, for illness and painful family estrangements. Staying buoyant under the weight of those burdens is just part of the festive challenge.

I have nightmares I will wake up and find my cat tangled in lights

When I had my son in 2013 I assumed the position of happy holiday-maker for our tiny family. It was at the same time that I became conscious of the fact that motherhood is, among a million things, also at bottom a role — a part you perform with varying degrees of success and aplomb. There are days when the performance feels organic and entirely natural, and there are days when it feels like you’re putting on a one-woman show titled I Am a Good Mom FFS.

This year, I’m not feeling the holidays; not really digging playing the role of holiday-maker. Would rather be the sulky kid than the perky mother this time around. The pandemic’s cynical evocation of ‘you do you’ has not just been a way of destroying essential public goods and trusts, it’s been a destructive force within families, too.

And yet, I still want my son to have the best Christmas despite all that, despite the individual me who would rather stay in bed. Possibly because I still find something sacred in the effort of making the season special for other people. And possibly because playing the role of mother, which can feel sometimes feel like another weighty burden, can also offer the motivation — not to mention the technique— for keeping afloat.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday and Blessed New Year. And sending a shout out to my mother. You did it every damn year, Liz. You deserve a lifetime achievement award at the 2024 Oscars.

Flannery

[1] My dad did things too but only in the assistant-to-the-regional-manager vein. But it may improve your sense of justice to know that he has been the bonafide domestic manager in my parents’ 50-years-long partnership, cooking, shopping, meal planning etc, for the last decade in addition to being my part-time manny.

But while a few have dug into thinking about some of the broader, more complex factors that influence culture and behaviour, others just encourage us to worry that we as a society are harming children by not getting married.

The Washington Post took a swing at making sense of marriage rates within an increasingly fraught political climate this week. The editorial board issued a warning in the form of an op-ed entitled: ‘If attitudes don’t shift, a political mismatch threatens marriage.’

The op-ed flags an increasing ideological divide growing among young, single people. That divide falls along gender and political lines. Since Trump’s election in 2016, single young women have skewed more progressive in their politics while more single young men have shifted right.

The op-ed suggests that this chasm between young men and young women poses a potential problem to the heterosexual marriage market, which affects social stability overall.

“The problem with polarization, though, is that it has effects well beyond the political realm, and these can be difficult to anticipate. One example is the collapse of American marriage. A growing number of young women are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners.” 

The editorial cites Trump as a marker for this shift, but it doesn’t spend any time wondering why young women may feel a progressive political identity is pivotal to their wellbeing - if not their survival - in the increasingly anti-democratic political landscape in which they find themselves. They’ve seen a proudly vocal misogynist elected to office, witnessed their reproductive rights be dialled back in sadistic ways, and continue to watch a powerful political bloc rub their hands in glee with plans for more abuses of power.

These young women should be cheered on for standing as a bulwark against misogyny, racism, corruption, and creeping authoritarianism rather than framed as getting love and relationships wrong, don’t you think?

The foundations that may undergird young women’s progressive positions are swiftly passed by, but the piece does, however, flick sympathetically at what young men may be struggling with now:  

“As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives.”

It doesn’t make a direct connection between those struggles and a rightward lean as a psychological phenomenon, but it’s not unfair to wonder if the resurgence of certain conservative ideas among some struggling young men might represent a form of dysfunction – even pathology.

It’s not just how little curiosity the piece shows about the struggles, hearts, and minds of young people in the world they live in now, but the naïve simplicity of the solution it proposes to combat them that feels…. off.

The proposed solution to political polarization, and by extension, marriage market woes, is personal compromise.

According to the piece: “This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.”

We never get a clear answer about who that someone may be, but as one person on my Twitter feed pointed out, the op-ed makes a point of mentioning that Democrats are significantly more likely to refuse to date a person who doesn’t share their beliefs than Republicans. The implication, therefore, is that saving the stabilizing force of marriage for the world is largely a progressive young woman problem.

What’s the payoff of ‘compromise’ for young progressive women? According to the piece’s internal logic, you might win a vague shot at being less miserable than your single gal-pals.

According to the op-ed: “But, on the whole, while politically mixed couples report somewhat lower levels of satisfaction than same-party couples, they are still likely to be happier than those who remain single.”

That line ‘somewhat lower levels of satisfaction than same-party couples’ doesn’t exactly sell the sizzle of MAGA matrimony for me. Does it work for you?

It’s not a bad idea to stop and consider what this compromise might actually mean for the real lives of individual young progressive women, people who deserve good partners that share their values and go out and make the world a better place overall, and neither is it a bad idea to wonder what that kind of compromise might mean for the health and wellbeing of democracy, too.

What is the meaning of marriage in a political climate where women’s rights are vanishing as part of a conservative political agenda that has the enthusiastic support of some young men? And what does marriage to a guy who thinks your subordination is natural in the grand scheme of things in addition to that structural nightmare feel like, too?

All of the above sounds like the secret ingredients to nervous breakdown sauce for women.

So, stay progressive, ladies. Marriage doesn’t need human sacrifices to survive. You know what’s really at stake when you compromise in this climate.

To the average person it’s an insane request. To the freelance writer it’s a writing prompt.

Ooh, let me see if I have an 800-word regret that conforms to your outlet’s tone and demographics, thinks the journeywoman freelance writer.

But that primitive ping response may belong to another era of freelance writing too, i.e., the decades prior when writers – youngish women mostly – could make a decent living off tapping the personal vein. Where you might just get a book deal or a column from it. (The economic factors behind certain writing trends –behind entire genres of writing – could be an academic course. It probably is somewhere.)

But those days are over. The industry has shrunk like a cashmere sweater in the washing machine and we’re all gasping to wiggle our way in or out. Opportunities are scarce and ideas at most mainstream publications must be SEO-friendly, and packaged with headlines that prioritize online reaction rather than reader reflection. 

The freelance writer of today must ask herself if she wants her deepest darkest regret to be SEO-d to shit or manhandled by an overworked editor tasked with executing the workload of three editors.

And that’s if the pitch is accepted. Having your deepest darkest regret rejected is a whole other category of humiliation.

To be a freelance writer now is something like how I imagine it feels to be an orange at the Tropicana factory. A thing to be squeezed till empty and then tossed into a pile of damp carcasses who also thought they were catching a break when they were plucked off the tree on that brisk December afternoon.

Later, I saw another writer retweet the editor’s pitch callout with a caveat. I can’t find it and am too lazy to search for it and I would almost feel obligated to reach out and ask if I could use it, but it was something along the lines of ‘Writers beware. Don’t be baited by a byline. Really be sure it’s worth the risk of online exposure.’

It went on to talk about how clickbait-y these kinds of essays can be and how damaging that kind of disclosure can be to the essayist, which can often be the case.

I love a good caveat and this one is particularly savoury to me because it underlines vulnerability. I believe every adult should understand their unique vulnerabilities and when you’re a writer your main vulnerability is your desire to be read, a desire that can get you into trouble.

What will you do to fulfill that need? What won’t you do?

I also like to imagine the editor who made the callout finding their inbox filled with pitches that run along the lines of My Greatest Regret Was Making My Greatest Regret An SEO-friendly essay for $350.

That is a timely authentic essay that I would read. It’s one I would write. It’s an essay that could become a prestige limited series starring Keri Russell as The Writer.

The pitch callout, the caveat retweet, and my own personal feelings about writing – I can’t do anything else even as the opportunities pop like bubbles around me– had me thinking about the traps of writing about personal things and how that can lead to regret.

One of the things the personal essay genre rarely takes account of is how often the writer, i.e., me, may have written something personal and managed to get themselves and their actions completely wrong in that moment in time. You don’t have to be a writer to know how your understanding of yourself and your life alters as you get older and wiser and more self-savvy. In fact, it’s very much a part of getting older to realize how little you understood about yourself at the precise moment when you thought you had it all figured out and made the decision to commit that error in judgment to print.

This is where writing – when you’re not able to expand and indulge but kept within the confines of SEO or tone and demographics – may not be worth the risk.

But then again, maybe it is? This is part of the writer’s dilemma too.

That dynamic between self-knowledge and regret, understanding and ignorance keeps me writing and thinking, thinking, and writing. I like to remember how often I’m getting it wrong in practice and how often I’m driven to keeping going in that practice in the desperate hope that every so often I’ll get it right.

But what do I know? I’m just writing and thinking, hauling my carcass around in hopes of a timely squeeze.

The novel is about money and marriage – how both are made and unmade and the human cost of both. It takes the marriage markets of the upper classes as its subject and dramatizes the parasitic love/hate relationship that exists between the old money set and the new money set, which aren’t so much different as just variants of greed.

In the novel, it’s the reputation for wealth – even if you don’t have the actual means to support it – that’s valuable. The price of buying into the pyramid scheme is high for the sacrificial virgins bred to inject new life – or rather, new money – into the old scam.

The Buccaneers of the story are five young women who are catapulted, like crinolined human cannonballs, into the upper-class marriage market by their miserably married money- and reputation-obsessed parents.

The novel has been adapted for TV twice. Once in the 90s by Masterpiece Theatre and just recently in 2023. Apple TV has just made an updated version that debuts this week. (I haven’t seen it. The trailer is not making me want to see it. And yet, I will no doubt try the first episode despite the fact that it looks kinda terrible.)

I remember seeing the Masterpiece Theatre version when I was a kid and I loved it because it skipped past the story’s obvious painful criticisms about the dismal collision between wealth, money, and women’s lives to affirm some redemptive romantic features.

In short, it goes full fantasy. And when I was a kid I liked fantasy.

After seeing the trailer for the new adaptation and remembering the old one, I decided to read the book. I’m glad I did. It’s not my favourite novel of hers by any stretch of the imagination, but now that I’m older and have been dunked in the marital soup only to be pulled out gasping for air, I can better appreciate the tender complications of the story, of Wharton’s depiction of the limits of marriage and love and money – and how they must, do and will interact despite illusions that their influence is something you can control.

At this point, it’s not the young women – the lifeblood of the dramatic action – that compel my attention as much as it is the tertiary adult women characters that frame the younger women’s stories. They’re the mothers of the young women, the bitter wives of the boorish aristocrats, the disappointed governesses, the jilted social climbers. These are the distressed, denied and barely-hanging-by-a-thread adult women that act as Ghosts of the Future for the young women.

I don’t know why I like these characters so much. But in them you can see something like the effect of unopposed market forces on the human spirit. It’s not pretty and you wonder why so many of them push the girls into the same traps they narrowly escaped or fell victim to themselves.

It's easy to miss these figures in the TV adaptations or to take them for granted – the camera loves youth and I like to look at beautiful things too – but they’re central to the world of the novel.

This is a long way of saying, always read the novel.

Speaking of adaptations. This weekend I finally got to see Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which is adapted from the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann.

The book is awesome. I highly recommend it. It is the first book I’ve read that gives a visceral sense of the historical reality of settler colonialism – how that unjust project, once initiated by nations and governments, becomes manifest in terrible individual and collective actions.

The Scorsese film, which I am so-so on as a dramatic experience, does a good job of depicting how that malign project unfolds in a domestic sphere, in the grim union between one small, greedy man and his acutely vulnerable Osage wife. In a way, it’s a story that involves its own dark marriage market, too, albeit one forged by racism and opportunism and energized by a desire for erasure and extinction.

The film also has something interesting to say about how entertainment and history interact — or don’t.

There have been a lot of really great reviews of this film that I loved. Like this one and this one.

Other things I read / endorse this week:

This Vanity Fair piece on the Real Housewives franchise and Bethenny Frankel’s reality TV union push is mandatory reading for Real Housewives fans.  

This scholarly spin on Israel-Gaza and the ineffective logic of military ‘deterrence’

I got vaccinated this week and did these exercises immediately after which reduced my post-vaccination arm soreness by about 50 per cent. Endorse!

For those who haven’t seen it, the CBC investigation seriously undermines Sainte-Marie’s claim to Indigeneity and provides compelling evidence to suggest she wasn’t born in Canada or adopted out of the Piapot Cree reserve as has been assumed.

Before the show aired, Sainte-Marie issued a statement denying the allegation that she’s misled people about her Indigenous background and lamenting the hurtful nature of the investigation itself. Shoring up her support, Sainte-Marie’s Piapot First Nation family have publicly supported her and make it clear that, birth certificate or not, her claim to kinship has a firm basis. 

There is a very real case to be made that the CBC investigation is largely mean-spirited —Sainte-Marie is aged and boasts an inspiring dedication not only to advocating for First Nations communities but also in increasing knowledge of the harms Canada has done to those communities. It would be a tragedy to see those values undermined in service of simply more cynicism.

But one of the more interesting reactions I saw to the CBC investigation into Sainte-Marie’s claims, however, came via Twitter. 

Last week author Robert Jago tweeted about the CBC investigation: “They don’t mention the only really harmful fraud she’s actually guilty of – getting that Can-Con money. It’s weird that isn’t the story, impersonating a Canadian.”

That insight made me laugh because it’s such an obvious point, but an entirely meaningful one. A Canadian icon may not actually be Canadian but got away with selling that lucrative illusion for decades? Imagine that story? 

In addition to being an almost comic insight – I mean, who the hell is pretending to be Canadian — Jago’s point opens the discussion up to include more than just Sainte-Marie’s human complications or the complex realities behind the Pretendian phenomenon overall. By forcing the focus to expand beyond certain trending impulses that indiscriminately hurt the First Nations communities for whom Sainte-Marie is an ally and inspiration, it implicates the volume of media myth-making that went into weaving Sainte-Marie into Canada’s national identity in the first place.

Imagine the documentary that could result from drawing that aspect into the story? What a rich narrative it would be if CBC were to be reflective of its own status as both creator and destroyer of Canadian icons! Because Sainte-Marie may have had her story, but her mythology was a joint creation that was mutually beneficial. Sainte-Marie and media worked hand in hand – until they didn’t. 

The enduring question of ‘why tell this story now?’ thus becomes more complicated and interesting too. For its part, the documentary touches on some early media skepticism about Sainte-Marie’s claims in the 1960s and 70s. But it’s telling that no one thought that story was worth pursuing too far then, possibly because she was at the height of her fame or possibly because no one wanted a potentially messy and litigious truth to get in the way of a great story that appeared to be serving the greater good. 

These are the questions that remain uninterrogated in the CBC investigation. But they are nonetheless rich complications to contemplate whenever stories like these are told.

What kind of cultural timing does truth-telling need? And how does that timing compete with the impulses of storytelling overall? What does a legacy of goodwill built upon shaky personal foundations amount to in the long run?

Trying to answer those questions compels my imagination just as much as trying to untangle Sainte-Marie’s own complicated human story does. 

My paternal grandmother, Olive, was as salty as her name suggests. And as with her briny namesake, she was an acquired taste. Appreciation of the flavour of her company required specific ingredients to pull off. Plop her into the wrong mix and she would leave a bitter aftertaste. (She was also small and round like an olive, so the similarities begin to multiply in my mind.)

Olive and I were never pals. The main obstacle to forming a bond being her deep dislike of me from birth. I’m not sure why she viewed me as something alien to her, but by the time I was an adolescent the feeling had become mutual.

She’s been dead since the Noughties, but I think of her more now than I ever did when she was alive. Maybe it’s because she is dead, and it is infinitely easier to understand a dead relative than a living one. Living relatives are so damned alive, it’s hard to see their humanity.

As I’ve gotten older, I have begun to reimagine the minor key villains of my youth as human beings, adults dealing with the stresses and strains of marriage, children, work, and all while nurturing private desires and despairs that go ignored or mocked or some mix of both.

Where they fall short, I try and fill in the blanks. I hope someone will do that for me one day.

I may be giving her more credit than she gave me, but you can have it, Olive. So long as you haunt me with your vinaigrette recipe. I still haven’t cracked it.

Olive had an infuriatingly stock response to any complaints you brought to her for nurturing. That response: Get on your hands and knees and wash the floor. It was her belief that it’s better to clean the house than get stuck in your feelings.

It’s unhappy advice if you’re looking for consolation or acknowledgment but it’s the kind of response you might expect from a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and trying to survive it. Today, I can parse its wise necessity. To take an action that isn’t destructive when you want to blow things up is never a bad idea.

It’s a rich irony to me that I’ve called on that advice over the last decade of my life not just occasionally but as a form of survival, too, as I’ve cycled through some of my own adult challenges. I rely on it almost daily to get me out of my head and heart when they are places that need attention.

But I’m also conscious of its inherent stasis — the way in which coping strategies become pathologies of their own, never getting you anywhere but right back at the same spot. The nature of cleaning itself provides this proof point. You can spend three hours cleaning the kitchen and it will be entirely undone the moment someone comes in to make a sandwich.

Crumbs in the sink. Wet stinky knives. The milk-ringed bottoms of cups. The mess is always looming. The mess doesn’t even have the courtesy to wait until you leave the damn room. You did it and now it’s undone. How do you deal with that?

Lately, I’ve gotten better about leaving other people’s messes to themselves while I tend to mine in ways that give me joy or just better feelings. I’m trying to remember the things that get stuffed away in corners and neatly placed under folded laundry. The stuff you have to silence alongside the things that you want to forget. This Substack is something that has brought me that. I’m grateful to anyone who reads or subscribes to what is really a form of mind cleaning I enjoy, that I strive to get better at and make meaningful.

And now for some BITS AND BITES:

And here are some recommendations for the holy trinity of viewing, reading, eating. They are all things I enjoyed this week.

• Read this from the EIC of Jewish Currents and continue to think about it. Ditto this rich appreciation of dark humour as an approach to the way in which Palestinian life and death is viewed.

• This introduction to the ideas of Yeshayahu Leibowitz popped in my inbox and I read with interest.

• Read about the non-fiction work, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, via an interview Masha Gessen conducted with the author Nathan Thrall at Lit Hub and have put it on hold at the library. It tells the story of Israel-Palestine through the lens of a Palestinian father who lost his five-year-old son, Milad, in an accident made possible by the structural reality of the conflict. I really want to read.

• Watched Coleen Rooney: The Real Wagatha Story on Disney+ in desperation for something mindless and instead dug deep into psychoanalysis of WAGs. I’ve met a real-life WAG, i.e., a wife of an English footballer before and I don’t think they have easy lives. Or rather, I believe, the cost is something we don’t often see paid in public. This documentary hints at some of that and I would like to write about it for a publication that pays me, but we shall see. I may not get my wish.

And, as a last word, I’m advocating for the season of the Pomegranate. From now till January, I recommend throwing Pom seeds into salads, bowls with sliced banana and clementines, and everywhere else.

This rainbow snuck up on me this weekend and it’s too nice not to share.

When my dentist found out I was a writer he gave me a pen.

This is a dentist who understands the affections of a writer, I thought to myself as I pocketed the pen, a nice, capped one with a comfortable rubbered tip and generous rollerball glide.

The pen is bronze-coloured and, as I later discovered, branded. My dentist’s name, address, and phone number are printed along the barrel.

This, too, is a dentist who understands the power of targeted marketing.

I was at the dentist yesterday morning because I had a dental blip. The night before I was eating cereal in bed and at some point, during this beloved /disgusting evening ritual, the back of my front tooth broke and slid off. The enamel, heretofore assumed sturdy, shattered and fell, falling off the main structure like a serac slides off the surface of a mountain.

No one was injured in this catastrophic failing of my enamel —pretty sure I swallowed it —and you couldn’t see the damage by looking at my tooth from the front. But I could feel the jagged remnants of what remained of the back of my tooth with the tip of my tongue. The sensitive papillae were distressed by the texture and kept going back to the damaged area to verify that the smooth porcelain they had spent decades gliding over was gone forever, replaced by the texture of broken crockery.

The tongue remembers. The tongue does not forget. (Read this little tongue explainer from a McGill researcher if you don’t believe me.)

And so, first thing in the morning, I called the dentist to get my tongue some relief.

Repair took about an hour to accomplish and the dentist and the dental hygienist, who had the patient demeanour of a woman who knows far more than her ancillary position suggests and could be forgiven if she just said, oh, give me that drill already, were kind and chatty.

It’s interesting to have strangers’ fingers in your mouth especially when they belong to two people taking turns clucking about the overall state of your teeth.

Do you grind your teeth? The dentist asked me.

Do I ever, I answered.

Do you drink carbonated water or lemon water?

Yes.

Hmm.

Do you eat a lot of sugar?

Yes, I eat a lot of sugar.

And for some reason I added: Because I’m a kid.

I don’t know why I said this and felt immediately ridiculous but neither the dentist nor the hygienist seemed to notice the absurdity of a middle-aged woman expressing such a skewed sense of self. Maybe that’s because they were too busy stretching my lips to MAD magazine-like proportions and counting occlusions.

When I got home, I had to make up for lost work time, pick up my kid from school, and prepare to start my evening job. In between, I caught up on everything happening in the world. All the horrible human catastrophes that portend more to come. I listened to all the podcasts and read all the live updates and I scrolled.

I don’t find any peace in anger and I’m angry. Almost all the time. The endless challenge is to see my my way clearly despite that anger and the anger of others, which seems to come through in an endless stream as you scroll. I am struggling to behave as I want to behave almost every minute of every day.

To combat my own anger and cycle of endless reacting, I’ve been tapping other necessary emotions and restorative states of mind.

I’ve been reading poetry again and watching TV and movies recommended by people I respect and admire. I’ve been listening to people who have knowledge to impart. I’m such an inveterate loudmouth; but I do love to listen and be inspired by better minds.

I’m seeking catharsis in art, too, and I’ve been lucky of late. Especially because what I’ve watched restores some balance to my mind, reminding me how often I draw a despairing moral from failure, conflict or disappointment in my own life, especially, rather than look more tenderly at the circumstance and find a better, more complete thought.

A TV miniseries I loved for its tender POV is the BBC limited series The Sixth Commandment. I read about the series in the summer and bookmarked it as something I wanted to see whenever it landed here. (I watched it on iTunes but I’m not sure if you can see it here without paying for it. ‘Check your local listings’ as they used to say.)

The miniseries dramatizes the crimes of British conman and convicted killer Ben Field, who targeted elderly people, insinuating himself in their lives, homes, and hearts for money.

It sounds grim and it is but it’s not grim at all, too. It’s beautifully done and with heart. I give all credit to the screenwriter, Sarah Phelps, because she tells this story with such care and concern for the humanity of the drama’s central characters – the people targeted by Field, Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore Martin. The series doesn’t exaggerate or exploit their vulnerability but reclaims it for them as a necessary aspect of their humanity – their longing for love and connection is what makes them recognizably good even if it’s also what makes them prey. 

It’s also what makes them just like you and me.

I cried during the finale. Not like a kid who’s hurt. But like a middle-aged woman that needed to be reminded she has a human heart, too.

The pen given to me by my dentist sits atop the planter I bought myself because it looks like my cat.

This is the photo record of my beating a child in Tic-Tac-Toe. Twice. Attention must be paid.

Sitting in bed feeling unwell. And praying it’s not Covid again because my last bout in February of this year knocked me for a loop. It took me six weeks to get myself together after Kraken.

I splashed out on the expensive tests because they are said to be more accurate and they include testing for flu, which comes in handy because you and your kid get a lot of stuff during the school year and it isn’t always Covid.

Last year, I purchased Strep tests to add to my arsenal and they proved indispensable when my son developed a nasty Strep infection a few days after testing positive for Covid.

You could say I’m running a small pharmacy in my bathroom. But I’ve taken the ‘your-on-your-own’ message to heart.

Most people hate talking about Covid and I get it because it’s been twisted and turned into something awful: an opportunity to destroy public healthcare and any existing labour protections while making people crazy and worried with reams of lies. That state of affairs has obscured understanding of what it is in our lives: a flashing red beacon that public healthcare, labour protections and even marginally decent politicians are necessary to our thriving and survival. I wish we could time travel and rewrite how this story has been told.

But here we are.

I know how the pandemic has created serious pain points for people in their lives. It has caused fights, fissures and fractures in family dynamics, and once they figured they could get away with it, most employers have turned the screws on people in cruel and inhuman ways.

That’s discounting the agony felt by millions of people who have lost loved ones and those who are vulnerable to the virus’s most serious complications. I have a friend fighting cancer who has been saddled with the burden of protecting herself in an oncology ward.

This is a smart, hilarious, strong, compassionate special person that deserves to be protected.

I’ve written about vaccines and health protections during the pandemic and I’ve been disappointed by how the frame is pre-cut to suit an assumed POV of invulnerability and disconnection. As if vulnerability isn’t a human concern or responsibility. As if I don’t care about people who are most vulnerable (including my own parents and child) and am motivated only t to look out only for myself.

Fortunately, I don’t know too many people like that. But they’ve managed to infect the discourse.

This is not a new insight by any means and people have written extensively on this, but it has been instructive for me as a writer living through this time because I don’t care to duplicate that orientation. For one, it’s not accurate or based in reality and secondly, it’s not human.

My test reads negative. I’m taking that for a minor win.

Stuck in bed I decided to finally watch the movie She Said (2022), which tells the story of how NYT reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey reported out the Harvey Weinstein story in 2016. I recommend it highly. It’s a solid journalism explainer — I learned some things! — and as someone who has reported on sexual assault and domestic violence in the past, many moments hit me hard. It’s a massive responsibility to tell these stories and you never forget the people that trust you to do that. 

But can I be a tangential human being for a moment? It was the depiction of the minor characters — i.e. the husbands of Twohey and Kantor— that played on my mind after viewing, too. To watch them taking their kids to school and offering up active support of their wives’ careers — my head was exploding with the possibilities. 

I’ve read a bunch of Conservative pro-marriage-and-kids-drek in the past few weeks. And they would almost be able to capture my imagination if a) I didn’t know better and speak to real live women and b) if this was the marriage myth they were selling.

But it’s not. 

I encourage everyone to marry a great person. There are many. But women can have babies without marriage and given that violence against women is literally the global status quo a decent society might want to acknowledge reality over myth every once in a while and make motherhood outside of marriage and safe childhoods for kids possible too. 

Which reminds me of this awesome Rebecca Traister response to the Get Married push.

Other things I read and loved this week:

• This New Yorker review of a new book by the author of a viral Mom Rage essay. It’s a definite food for thought item. Reading between the lines, it reads like a generous review of a book that doesn’t sound like it hit its mark. As a personal aside, I don’t go in for adult rage no matter how it’s framed. 

• Lara Pingue’s chronic pain piece for the Globe and Mail. Lara’s back injury provides the backdrop for a deep dive into how we don’t know how to treat or cope with chronic pain in the country. As someone who ruptured a disc in March 2020, this one felt personal. 

Some rocks along the water near Bell Park in Sudbury, Ont. I would love to have brought this park home with me. But I only brought a weekender bag.

A family obligation took me to Sudbury, Ontario this weekend. It was a long drive. My working definition of ‘long drive’ is anything over 3 hours and 30 minutes and it took nearly 5 hours to get there so, like I said: long drive.

I’ve never travelled this far north before as I’m more of an East-West girl (the further east I move the happier I become), but once you get beyond the city of Barrie the scenery greatly improves.

Sorry, Barrie. You do nothing for me.

I like the huge, layered rock cuts that border the Trans-Canada highway, the A.J. Casson-style trees, and the many lakes – so many lakes. The lakes look happier and healthier the further north you go.

Sudbury is very rocky and cliff-y. I did not know that before we set out. And because I did not pay attention in geography class and clearly move through life in a state of ignorance, I had no idea that Sudbury was formed by a meteor that hit the area 1.8 billion years ago.

Lots of rocks here, I said to the hotel clerk when we arrived.

Everyone from Southwestern Ontario says that, he said.

It’s always painful to realize you are a cliché that says the same thing that countless others have said before you, but if I had known about the meteor before I had this conversation with the clerk, I would have handled it differently.

That was some meteor, I would have said to the clerk upon arriving at the hotel.

And he would have smiled and said, Wow, no one from Southwestern Ontario has ever said that.

The moral of the story: just a smattering of incomplete knowledge can invest small talk with a freshness that may reinforce the social fabric.

I had a strange feeling in Sudbury – or rather about Sudbury — and eventually I decided it was because the city reminded me of the town of Bedrock, the fictional city where the animated series, The Flintstones is set. I had to explain The Flintstones to my son who did not get the reference at all.

Here is a picture of a tiny brown Sudbury-based squirrel that provided a welcome moment of delight.

Here is a picture of the rock cuts along the Trans-Canada Highway.

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The hotel where we stayed had a pool and a much-hyped waterslide, a gnarly-looking plastic blue tube that had clearly seen better days and that shot kids out and into the water with varying degrees of force. Some kids flew out of the tube and skipped across the water like stones, others sort of tumbled out of the opening, little human alka-seltzers that went plop, plop, fizz to the bottom.

My son is still recovering from a head injury so we just bobbed in the water and watched the kids take their turn on the slide, taking bets on who would come out the fastest and travel the furthest.

A line formed for the slide and the kids became restless. One kid decided to drag his leg into the pool and kick a massive stream of water at his friend. Other kids responded in kind and the deck was soon soaked with splashes.

My son and I watched as the lifeguard, a curly-haired teenager, approached the splashing kids.

They’re going to hear from him now, we thought.

But he didn’t come to caution them. He came to join in the fun. He started kicking huge streams of water at the kids too.

This was no ordinary Southwestern Ontario lifeguard.

Thus sanctioned by a pool official, the splashing intensified and the deck became slick with water. One kid slipped and rubbed his backside. The lifeguard kept splashing.

My son and I exchanged exclamatory glances.

Where did this lifeguard receive his training? Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

In the end we agreed that this was:

a)   the most dangerous lifeguard we had ever encountered and needed to be spoken to seriously if not fired all together

And:

    b) such a clear disregard for pool safety could be exhilarating.

This teenage lifeguard is now lore for us. My son and I will be talking about him for a very long time for he is now a Character in our minds.

Giving Sudbury landscape a 9/10 for meteor decor, TV nostalgia and disruptor lifeguards. But happy to be home. And despite the attractions of chaos I remain deeply committed to pool safety.

I have not fixed my ceiling yet because this week because I had to tend to my child, who was injured at school. The injury – I gasped when I saw it — sent us directly to the emergency room to make sure he wasn’t concussed.

Lucky to have a children’s hospital nearby and like most parents I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. The ER was jammed and because it was so busy we were sent to wait in the mental health wing. Lucky again that we only waited an hour to be seen by the doctor who had a wry, dark sense of humour, my favourite type of personality to encounter in times of distress.

Fortunately, there’s no concussion and no broken face bits. Just two black eyes and a swollen lump in the centre of his forehead. It’s disturbing to look at.

I was scheduled to work that day – I have a remote night job on a digital desk – but managed to get someone to cover for me until I could get home from the ER.

When I’m stuck at home in Florence Nightingale mode, which feels like a very large chunk of my parenting time from September to June, I do a lot of reading, scrolling, and watching things to avoid feeling the walls closing in on me.

Some things I read and enjoyed:

The trad wife essay, Land Ho

I don’t follow any trad wives – I would yell at Instagram too much if I did —  but I enjoyed the insights and the writing.

Still reading: Jacqueline Rose’s On Violence and Violence Against Women. Just finished the chapter on Oscar Pistorious and Reeva Steenkamp. Rose offers one of the most interesting interpretations of the case, the evidence, and the defence that I’ve read. It is humanizing and ethical. Will stick with me for a long time.

Finally finished streaming my guilty pleasure: British TV crime-drama Ripper Street, starring Matthew Macfadyen as the moralizing and rigid obsessive English detective Edmund Reid. It’s set in the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper. It sounds hokey and ridiculous — and those are constituent elements of the drama to be sure — but it’s also entertaining and lively.

Which reminds me to recommend The Five, a solid book by historian Hallie Rubenhold which centres on the historical record as it pertains the victims. You feel their humanity so deeply.  Revelatory. Fascinating. Feminist.

Rubenhold also wrote a history of 18^th century brothels in London, called Covent Garden Ladies, which inspired my other TV guilty pleasure, Harlots, which they cancelled after two seasons, the bastards!

But back to Ripper Street. Wow. The ending! I won’t spoil it, but I admired it. It was different and dark and oddly fitting. It was a meaningful, unhappy ending and I liked that.

Promised a friend I would finally watch Barbie as it’s streaming now. I need to fulfill this promise this week. I don’t know why I don’t have the same energy to see Barbie that galvanized a huge population of humanity this summer but my complete lack of enthusiasm for seeing it has been a genuine obstacle to me seeing it.

But I will see it, I promise!

Speaking of movies, one I do want to see: Killers of the Flower Moon. To prepare for its release in October, I downloaded David Grann’s non-fiction book which is the film’s source material. The story is terrible and tragic and so contemporary in every way. It’s so good. Curious to see how the story is adapted.

And finally, a big thanks to the comfort foods that carried me, Christ-like, across the desert sands of this week. Thank you, Strawberry Pocky, Kettle Chips Salt and Vinegar, and an XL Dairy Milk (yes, it was Fruit and Nut but that was all they had at the store).  

Onward to next week. I splurged on a new dust mop at the grocery store today so things are already looking lively.

The hole in question.

I have a hole in my bedroom ceiling. I’m looking up at it now from the vantage point of my bed. It’s more like a rectangle, really. It’s not very big but it is looming large in my mind because it’s one more thing I don’t know how to do that I have to do regardless, like parenting or navigating separation and divorce.

This week a lot of things decided to go boom on me. Someone stole my green bin for reasons that I can’t conceive of and can only wonder over. The stove stopped baking (again) and the dishwasher stopped washing. In the early hours of Wednesday — 1:33 a.m., to be precise — the smoke alarms started beeping in the insistent nag-y way that I’ve come to understand means the batteries need changing.

I managed to change the batteries in two of the alarms (I keep a stash of batteries because of prior waking events like this), but the third one was too high for me to reach so I had to batter it with the pointy end of the broom like a Far Side wife to make it stop.

On Saturday morning the bathtub faucet – the hot water one, which is my favourite faucet; I simply can’t get enough of that one – underwent something like the human equivalent of a mental breakdown. Her threads stripped by overuse or ungentle handling, she wouldn’t turn off no matter how many times I tried to coax her into compliance.

When the sorrows of the hot water faucet did not respond to my kindness, I attempted to subdue her with brute force. I grabbed a pair of rusty pliers I found in the basement and applied them to her spout. You would think this would have ended the conflict, but as is always the case with the application of brute force, it only made the situation worse. The more I twisted the spout with the pliers, the more water started pouring out and in a few new directions, including up and in one straight shot directly against the wall.

We need a plumber, said my 10-year-old who had been quietly watching me swear and struggle with the spout for enough time to make this wise deduction. He dutifully picked up my phone and started searching plumbers.

I had no luck with the first two numbers, but fortunately the third emergency plumbing service bit on my distress. Within two hours a plumber arrived, a nice seeming youngish guy that didn’t make me nervous in my own home (a thing that many a service guy has done prior).

The plumber was fine but the news was not ideal: the person who installed the bathtub in the house didn’t do it correctly – i.e. they had not put a visible turn-off valve into the system — and so the plumber would need to cut into the ceiling beneath the tub or the floor beside the tub to locate the pipe so he could cap the line and stop the endless flow of the faucet. He wasn’t sure which and maybe he would have to do both.

Do you repair the wall or the floor? I asked.

No. We don’t do that.

And it costs an outrageous amount of money you don’t have in any of your two bank accounts to fix this one problem (the faucet) and the other problem (the holes) that I’m going to leave for you. (I’m paraphrasing / projecting that last bit.)

Fabulous. Here’s my credit card, I said.

The plumber went upstairs and cut a hole in my bedroom ceiling, which is just below the bathtub upstairs, and when he cut the hole in my ceiling he realized this was not such a good idea (no discounts for mistakes, alas) and went back upstairs and cut a hole in the floor next to the tub, which turned out to be the good idea because he was able to cap the line and the hot water faucet stopped pouring her heart out and up and against the wall.

Now I’m left with the unnecessary holes and the problem of how to fix them, which I’m assuming necessitates drywall-type skills for the ceiling and wood ones for the floor, both of which I am going to figure out, by god.

A couple of years ago I vowed to stop asking for help when it comes to home repairs if I was able to figure it out myself, or if I was able to Facetime my dad who would offer me advice on how to fix the issue.

Since that vow, I’ve hung a door, fixed a hole in the wall, erected a lean-to in the backyard, and put together every piece of tech and IKEA-based endurance trial necessary to domestic survival.

These are small victories maybe but why measure the size of a victory when you can count it instead?

It is an unrelenting source of satisfaction to me not to have to rely on any Dilbert-with-a-drill to help me (again, with the exception of my dad via Facetime who is no a D-W-D but an actual godsend).

I’m going to fix this damn hole – actually, rectangle – in my ceiling* this week. And the repair is going to look like shit because I’m not very good at home repairs but it’s also going to be wonderfully satisfying. Because the minor victory shit is wonderful as long as you count them and don’t measure them. And the unnecessary holes will be patched even if you aren’t sure how.

* I will think about the hole in the floor another day.

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