I was going to blog every day, and now I have missed six [since drafting this, it has been several more — whee]. I am going to try to write back into that space over the next few days, but I want to meditate a bit on the last few days. The short answer to […]
Category: Life
Vignettes
I’ve spent a lot of today thinking about a viral article about how to make your kids “successful.” The definition of success was, of course, wealth, which is so depressing. The woman who wrote it can tell you all about her CEO kids and doesn’t spill a single word about whether or not they are […]
On Remembrance
All of my grandparents served in the Second World War in some capacity, especially on the Home Front in England. But when I think about Remembrance Day, I think most about my paternal grandfather, perhaps because as an academic and the only Canadian in the bunch, his experience in an alien war on foreign soil […]
How Are You?
… I do not have an answer to this question that anyone finds satisfactory. Least of all me. Today is three weeks. On a podcast I was listening to the other day, one of the hosts said that the thing he has noticed about experiences of grief is that somewhere around the three-to-four weeks point, […]
I’m Going to Miss Twitter
I know we all call it the hellsite and talk about how much Twitter is ruining our lives, but I’m going to miss her when she’s gone. Honestly, I already do. I haven’t seen a lot of follower haemorrhaging thus far, but I am feeling the tweaks to the algorithm. I have a small but […]
On Dad Jobs
Among other things around my childhood home, I’ve been putting the garden to bed these last three days or so. I’m sure this job shouldn’t take three days, but let’s be clear here: I’m bad at it. Real bad. But my dad’s passing has meant taking on a bunch of Dad Jobs in the hope […]
Ten Things I Now Know About Mourning
One. You need to laugh. People will say incongruously offensive things in their effort to be nice and you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to hold a grudge and you sure don’t have the energy for a zinger so just save it up, tell it to your people, and laugh. Everything you are experiencing is […]
Grieving, Writing, Thinking
A few weeks ago, I pondered on Twitter the value of undertaking a wee experiment this #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month, the month of November, a piggyback of the wildly popular #NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month): what if instead of undertaking my usual #AcWriMo project of moving one big project along, I committed instead to blogging […]