14yo, as we’re leaving the theatre after seeing Marty Supreme: “Wait, was that the guy from Shark Tank?”

I know I’ve been posting a lot of churchy stuff this year. It’s been a really crummy year (with some highlights), and I’ve been going to mass more often. Sometimes my main motivator is that I feel so off my rocker and don’t want to be alone, but also don’t want to have to interact with anyone.

Nice acquaintance. Auld?

On the other hand, Veuve Cliquot really was a widow named Barbe-Nicole Cliquot who ran a champagne business (in fact, she was the first female champagne producer). Champagne facts!!

Rest in peace, Mother of a Thousand Memes. We owe so much joy to you!

Have you ever gone to confession and your priest is like, “well, I don’t know if that’s a sin, but I don’t think you should do that anymore”. Haha, me neither! Anyway.

Great moments in high comedy: during Christmas Eve mass, when the priest held up the host and said, “behold, the Lamb of God,” someone’s toddler started chanting “lamb! of! god! lamb! of! god!” The priest just had to grit his teeth and get through it.

This man is my Roman Empire. I often wonder how he is doing and whether his toilet works yet.

Will delete in a hot sec, but here’s 14yo as the front legs of a camel in our church’s Christmas pageant. The woman who made these camels is incroyable, they’re a show-stopper every Christmas, I love everything about it, etc, but it also tickles me to tell people that my kid is playing half a camel

We went to see Spirited Away at our local independent theatre (shoutout to the Screening Room, who do amazing work), and my favourite scene remains this one, where Chihiro and No Face take the train through the watery twilight to Zeniba’s house. 14yo says, “of course you like the train scene.” 🙄

For my Christmas present, 14yo did a watercolour painting of Joan of Arc

One of my new favourite things is looking up books that I vaguely remember reading as a kid (but that left a strong impression on me) on archive dot org. This led me to re-read Plague 99, an 80s YA book about a pandemic that decimates London/the UK, and it was kinda horrifying but great!

14yo: the Catholic Church needs to get with the times. No one cares about shamrocks anymore 14yo: they should say that the Holy Trinity is like a 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner, and body wash 14yo: it won’t be great, but it’ll get the job done

Have you ever met a cat who has never experienced a bad day in his life let alone any kind of trauma and he is happy to just do … whatever this is? Anyway, I’m very happy for my extraordinarily large friend Benedict and wish him all the best success in life

14yo: people NEVER talk about the medieval period Me: I feel like that’s not true? 14yo: all they care about is ANCIENT ROME and WORLD WAR TWO Me: oh, you mean military-wise Me: still, I feel like that’s absolutely not true

reading, and what should come across but the STUNNING art for @annetheriault.bsky.social's Broadview piece on contemplative spirituality. This is so worth getting in print if you can. broadview.org/modern-mysti...

I went to a special mass on Monday for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception (sorry, sorry, I know, weird Catholic shit). Anyway, we sang this one hymn to Mary whose tune was driving me absolutely up the wall because it was SO familiar … and it turned out it was from Holst’s Jupiter. Go figure!

Me: … and that contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire 14yo: do you mean the WESTERN Roman Empire? Me: yeah 14yo: then you should say that, because in Constantinople … Me: yeah, of course, obviously 14yo, talking over me: BECAUSE IN CONSTANTINOPLE THE EASTERN EMPIRE CONTINUED FOR CENTURIES

☹️

Let’s goooooooooooo

Trying to compose a smart yet funny yet relatable tweet that’s basically just “I’m so tired of myself, and I’m sorry if you’re tired of me too”

Jesus - and I cannot stress this enough - Christ

Advent is a thrilling time when the clergy is decked out in purple, there’s a special candle situation, and you get to sing absolute bangers like O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

A thrilling experience: my youngest and least intelligent cat just accidentally flushed the toilet and a panicked chaos ensued

You know you are living in a university town when someone is monologuing at their friends on the sidewalk outside your house and they use the terms “Marxist dialectics” and “ontologies” in the same sentence

Me: … and she’s referred to as the Madonna of the Apocalypse 14yo: what does madonna mean? Me: “my lady” 14yo: 🙄 oh, ANOTHER Our Lady, what a surprise for the Catholic Church (You have to read this in the driest, most sarcastic teenage delivery possible)

Happy tenth anniversary to the time my kid staged a nonviolent protest on a Toronto sidewalk because he was tired of walking and I said I couldn’t carry him all the way home

Girl Guides of Canada has made a statement, likely in response to the cowardly decisions of Girlguiding UK. 🏳️‍⚧️

I’m reading a Spanish novel (in translation, obviously) set in the mid-1940s. One of the characters is an intrepid lady journalist from Toronto who writes for the Globe and Mail. Excellent CanCon!

Genuinely unfair that my body’s reaction to stress is intense insomnia. Like, come on, this is when we need sleep the most! Anyway, I slept for three hours last night, and two hours the night before. Hot poubelle.

Ms. Thériault once again hooks me with a topic that otherwise wouldn’t cross my mind because it’s not a prior interest. But Anne is just such a *writer* that I was all in after paragraph one—and so you will be, and you’ll be entertained as well.

I wrote for @broadviewmedia.bsky.social about modern contemplative Christianity in North America — its roots, how it’s practiced, who’s practicing it. This was a fun piece to work on and it led me to interview a lot of fascinating people!

Years ago, when I still wrote for SPIN, the great @danielkohn.bsky.social let me write about "A Long December", so of course I wrote a little about death and sadness and choosing to believe things can get better. www.spin.com/2021/12/a-lo...

This is a really great article to read, almost as a practice prompt. There is lots of good discussion about how to practice, and also she quotes Rob Christ on a topic I can really relate to: the problem of spiritual rigidity and the damage it does to your ability to develop and maintain faith.

What a weird, lazy scam - this account is tagging tons of lefty writers/academics/etc in hopes of getting visibility for this blatantly AI-generated “book”, with the end goal of getting people to spend $4.99 on an ebook full of bullshit

A genuinely fun thing about writing this article was that one of the people I interviewed was a Presbyterian pastor named Rob Christ. Trying to figure out how to quote him without making it sound like I was quoting Jesus Christ, was an interesting challenge. Also, talk about nominative determinism!

PSA: there are two churches on Bloor Street called St. Paul’s*. If you are speaking at an event at St. Paul’s on Bloor Street, I highly recommend actually reading the address and not just being like “oh yeah, I totally know that church, no problem” *I know one of them is Trinity-St. Paul’s. I KNOW.

Today in I’m Very Bad at Self-Promotion, this article that I wrote about the rise of contemplative practices in contemporary Christian contemplative practices just came out. This was really fun to research and write! I could write a whole giant essay about my dude St. Benedict and his Rule.

Exciting thrift store find: royal blue velour housecoat (dressing gown? peignoir???), embroidered details on the collar and cuffs, made in Canada. Wearing it tonight with one of my large white cotton April Cornell nighties and I feel like a very Canadian princess.

Thrilled to announce that 14yo will once again be part of a three person team operating a giant camel puppet in this year’s pageant

Someone just told me that Maggie Nelson quotes me in her new chapbook The Slicks (about Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift) and I’m sorry, I am screaming, crying, throwing up?????

Mildly infuriating: the train is stuck in Port Hope because there is an apparently abandoned car on the tracks. Man, it’s always something!

Mildly interesting: they just did a land acknowledgment on the Via train, which is the first time I’ve ever experienced that

I really need to practice saying “what a weird, rude thing to say” to the people who say weird, rude things to me

I always wonder what doctors make of influencers who are filming their children going through medical crises (or even non-emergency health stuff). Like, it cannot feel normal to have someone be like “hey, I’m just going to set up my phone to record me tearfully helping my kid with their CT scan”?

Me: what was your favourite breakfast that you had in Spain? 14yo: I want to say the ones that involved pastry and chocolate, so I guess that was all of them.

There are a bunch of retired teachers from my sisters’ high school who volunteer with me at the meal program that my church runs. I was telling one of them this story about how my middle sister got in trouble for kissing her boyfriend in the school hallway and got sent to the principal’s office …

14yo: if St Patrick was alive today, he’d probably try to explain the Trinity through men’s products that are like shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. It’s three in one and the only thing you need in the shower! Just like Jesus!

Representation (of Acadian trash) matters ✨

Someone recommended this novel (The Time In Between by María Dueñas) for me to read while I was in Spain, and I thought it wouldn’t be my thing but I’m really enjoying it! I got it from the library as an ebook on the Libby app, really putting my household’s 15 year old Kobo to work.