THE CATASTROPHIZER

I have been swallowed by school and sunlessness, so this post will be especially furry and fatuous.

When I have been swallowed by unpleasant things, I sometimes find myself committing very small acts of defiance in order to prove that I will ultimately be indigestible (I will pursue this analogy no further).

I have been surrounded by books balanced on other books balanced on empty bags of chips. Recently, I decided to salvage old pairs of earrings by redecorating them in odd and unpromising ways, so my coffee table is covered in jewelry and foam brushes and mod podge. My cat knocked over some books the other night, and I have not yet reshelved them.

So the other day, I decided to damn well take a little pride in my appearance and actually remove the cat hair from my pants before going across the street to the Loblaws. I got my little sticky rolling thing, and after some sticking and rolling, my pants were BEAUTIFUL. I left the room to get something, and when I returned, this is what I found:

Richard Cory

They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker's only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes:
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got.

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

Obviously I'm about to make the message of this song apply to self-pitying 30-somethings on Valentine's Day instead of poverty-stricken factory workers.

I'm sure many people are happy and in love and not taking each other for granted and weathering misfortune together with cheerfulness and understanding. But many people are also getting dressed up and going out for dinner with people they resent or overlook or compare unfavourably to the younger, thinner, happier-looking people at the next table. And many of those younger, thinner, happier-looking people are wondering where the passion went and when their boyfriend/girlfriend got so fat and depressed.

I highly recommend feeling better about one's own life by learning to fear the worst about everyone else's.

Many years ago, I lived in Kingston, Ontario, and spent much of my time trying to reconcile myself to that fact. I was desperate for street scenes that did not involve:

1) Queen's undergraduates in blackface

2) Queen's undergraduates setting things on fire, or

3) a man in a wheelchair being left outside his house on his own by his swearing wife, heaving himself out of his wheelchair, pulling himself toward his front door, and then screaming "Fuck off, you fucking faggot" in response to a pedestrian's offer of help.

So it was with relief and gratitude that one day I saw a beaming white-haired couple straight out of a plan-your-own-will commercial walking hand in hand toward me. They were clearly loving, caring people who proved that relationships endure, that old age can be wonderful, and that not everyone in Kingston wanted to comment unfavourably on how I had a lesbian haircut.

And just as I moved aside to let the adorable elderly people shuffle by lovingly, a car drove past us playing some hip hop, and the old man turned to his companion and said something stupendously racist.

I was reminded of this while riding the subway the other night. A kind-faced white octogenarian wearing a sweater vest struck up a conversation with a young black man who had up to that point been generously allowing us all to listen to very loud hip hop through his earphones. The older gentleman was absolutely not saying anything racist, so I allowed myself to relax into a sense of how wonderful, reaffirming, humane moments really can happen and the world is not all about bigots and worrying about the flu.

The young man had been to a Raptors game, and the old man wanted to talk about that, and I looked indulgently on, and then the old man got a little more insistent about something, and then he hissed, "What I'm saying is that they need a power forward. That's why I'm saying." And the young guy was reserved and polite, and the old man got more worked up, and it was extremely tense, and then it was my stop.

There should be a word for situations that promise initially to be inspiring and life-affirming and then turn out to be unpleasant; there should also, I suppose, be a word for situations that promise initially to be inspiring and life-affirming and then turn out to be unpleasant--but at least don't turn out to be surprisingly racist.

Strange and unlikely things happen all the time, but usually they're either obviously bad (kidney in his KFC! KIDNEY IN HIS KFC!) or kind of nice (I've been sitting here for a good five minutes trying to think of good stranger-created surprises I've heard about recently, but all I could come up with was that "pay for the coffee the guy behind you is buying" thing at Tim Horton's and I found that depressingly uninspiring when I read about it—so I've got nothing).

And when the strange and unlikely things that happen are the result of strange and unlikely people trying to scare or disgust people they don't know, I can generally figure out what they were intended to achieve (usually the creation of fear or disgust), because my experience of crime drama profilers has taught me a great deal about abnormal psychology (mostly that anyone who likes Blake or Poe should immediately be arrested).

But I simply do not know what to think about what my father found recently in his cereal box. He did not find a dead rat, a turd, or a manifesto in crabbed handwriting all about how Poe thought there was nothing more beautiful than the death of a beautiful woman--instead, he found:

1) Variable Winds at Jalna, by Mazo de la Roche (I had never before heard of the Jalna books, but just last week I found one in my building's laundry room, and the back cover informed me that they were "among the greatest literary accomplishments of the century." So that's something.)
2) The UCLA Story
3) a guidebook to Ontario ("includes Michigan, Quebec, and Western New York")
4) a photo of Lyle Lovett's head
5) a page with the words "your children's quarrels" and a picture of what I can only assume is one of those orange-y line-drawn 70s children.

And I when I say "found in his cereal box," I mean "found securely and professionally packaged inside his cereal box." Someone actually collected these things and managed to put them in whatever machine is used to seal cereal all up and then sealed them all up. And then went to the Hogg's Hollow Loblaws and put this on the shelf.

And, of course, when my father brought the box back to the Loblaws, the manager gave him many skeptical sidelong "we both know you put all these things in this box, sir" glances. The Loblaws manager declared that no one associated with Loblaws had ever read Jalna, and the people at Kellogg's also insisted no one there had ever heard of Jalna, but Kellogg's at least ended up giving him some vouchers.

I would almost be happier if my father had opened the box and found a turd covered in passages from Blake and grand claims about the reach and power of the Illuminati, because at least that I could understand.

This is going to be one of the most boring things I have ever written. I know this because it is one of the most boring things I have ever thought about writing (of course, I'm assuming I'm capable of assessing the boring-ness of my own thoughts, which is probably a stupid assumption.)

It might be one of the most boring things I have ever thought about writing—but never have I been more emotionally affected by and invested in my topic.

I made such a terrible dinner. It was genuinely awful. It was so awful, I feel as though it has spread a yucky layer of disappointment over my whole evening.

It's not even a dramatic and interesting failure. It's just that I've run out of tamari, and at some point, tamari appears to have become the foundation for all of my varied baked tofu dishes. So I keep thinking, for some reason, that because I'm now savvy enough to actually have ingredients I use for things, and recipes I've learned about those ingredients from, I can be one of those people who "improvises," and does things like substitute binder clips for capers, or inadvertently aged alcoholic cider for panko.

There's a delicious salad dressing I enjoy (that involves miso and tahini and mustard), and I thought "my background in the not-having of resourceful and successful food-related ideas makes me confident that baking tofu in this dressing would result in deliciousness." I only had medium-firm tofu, which I've used before and thought would be fine, and I just bought some cheap miso, which I was confident would not be disgusting at all, and so I used that too.

I baked it all up for a good forty minutes—I kept thinking the tofu would "firm up" given another five minutes, and yet it kept dissolving further into a giant puddle of squished grey-ish sloppiness. Aha! I thought (convinced that the one thing that would undo one misguided food plan was another food plan that would surely not turn out to have been misguided)—what this unsightly muck needs is to become fried unsightly muck.

So I fried up the tofu, and voilà! It had shape! And now also had an odd and unpleasant mealy texture!

I could have made three normal meals in the time it took to prepare this one, and I don't think I've ever eaten anything simultaneously so mushy and so salty.

I was indeed wise to stock up on frozen breaded mozzarella sticks: I will need them tonight.

2012 was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year--although as my father and I agreed just before the end of it, it's always possible 2013 will be worse, so best not to trumpet 2012's passing too showily. That said, 2012 will likely never come around again, and that's something.

I had an emphatically homebody-ish New Year's Eve, which I am going to describe because I am not the least ashamed of it. Not everyone goes out to discotheques or is unable to go to a discotheque only because it's impossible to leave the new baby.

My parents came over. We kicked off the night by driving to a Future Shop (I needed a longer audio cord), which was closed. We came back to my apartment, ordered some pizza, and then watched a good half hour of something called something like Senior Star, a Hamilton talent competition featuring aged lady fiddlers in sparkling lounge pants being assessed by a panel of judges who all appeared to be drunk.

Then my parents convinced me that Midsomer Murders is no longer quite so precious now that the first Inspector Barnaby is gone, and so we watched an episode. It featured a man's bare bum, so obviously I will not be watching that filth again.

For no apparent reason, I then forced my parents to watch a rerun of Psych, a show which, if I were an even slightly different person, would drive me nuts, but instead makes me feel delighted.

My parents left at 11:45, leaving me with a critical decision: Would I watch the Toshiba ball drop on Pepsi Anderson Cooper, or would I defiantly not care about midnight and read defiantly in bed? Would I be all "Oh...midnight? Is that when the new year began? (lazy laugh) I'm afraid I'd already turned in." Or would I decide it's more annoying to not care about midnight and defiantly watch one of those guys I think might have originally fronted a Christian rock band get John Lennon lyrics wrong?

As it happened, I made no conscious decision at all, because at about five minutes to midnight, George the cat rushed into the room and demanded attention, and so when the ball dropped and tragically crushed Kathy Griffin, I was busy lying on the floor being head-butted by a merciless purring tabby and missed the whole thing entirely (as did Stabler,

I've probably mentioned here at some point that I am lucky enough to be aunt to the two greatest young people who have ever existed. I was fully prepared to love them "no matter what," and to love them "through all the rough patches," and to love them "even if they became really annoying," but my magnanimity has as yet been untested-- they've now been walking and talking for years, and they're still likable.

My elder niece, who is in junior high school, has started a website about peculiar animals. It is funny and informative and features an acceptable number of capybara photographs and references to the kinds of creatures that live in volcanic vents and will be responsible for creating a new civilization after humans are destroyed by asteroids and overeating.

My younger niece is in public school, and her website, although it boasts less content, does have a photo she took of a flower, and that's awesome. She's not as devoted to website upkeep, because she seems always to be running unnecessarily long distances and battling a serious Minecraft addiction.

(Also, their friend started a website about failed inventions that's pretty great.)

So this holiday season, I give thanks for the fact that I spend time with my family talking about things like organisms that could survive in outer space, the kinds of virtual building materials one needs to construct an undersea video-game house, and the understated (but undeniable) gloriousness of Ringo.

I've been busy doing editing homework—so busy, it seems, that the integrity of my brain has been compromised. Instead of focusing on how best and most profitably to line edit dialogue between two imaginary people I already hate, I've been consumed by my quest for the perfect sentence. By "perfect sentence," I do not mean "sentence that by way of a few, well-chosen words communicates something profound about an aspect of the human condition"— I mean "sentence involving either curse words or scatological references that sounds funny when added to any work of fiction or non-fiction."

And I think I've got it.

I'm sure you'll disagree and argue on behalf of your own personal obscenity, but I like this one. See if you can spot it in the following passage from Henry James's The Wings of the Dove:

Really at last, thus, it had been too much; as, with her own least feeble flare, after a wondering watch, Milly had shown. She hadn't cared; she had too much wanted to know; and, though a small solemnity of remonstrance, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say such things to me?"

This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. "Because you're a dove. I shit you not."

You're welcome, Mr. James.

And here it is working its magic in non-fiction :

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way.  …if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.  We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – I shit you not – we’re better off that way.

All I did in that passage from Malcolm Gladwell's Blink was replace a "sometimes" with some far superior words. And voilà! One hundred per cent better.

You're welcome, Mr. Gladwell.

I think it works so well because there's something a bit fancy about it. It's kind of like what would happen if "I'm not shitting you" went to college and started affecting elbow patches and a tiny perfect bow tie.

I do not know why I'm taking editing courses: I am already the greatest editor of all time.

I have accomplished absolutely nothing in the past week. I de-stacked a stack of UPS shipping bills from 2010 Christmas presents and re-stacked them in a different place, but I'm not convinced that represents progress.

There is a reason I have not yet unpacked and settled in more completely; there is a reason I am not writing about this (although I suppose just noting that I felt ashamed for being delighted, and then just plain delighted, and then amazed that a full ten minutes had gone by probably sums up my response more than adequately). I have been shamefully unmotivated because I recently became a besotted half-wit. Here are five reasons I recently became besotted and half-witted: