It’s not hyperbole to say that reading this obituary was one of the best things that happened to me today (though kind of an indictment of the rest of my day). What a delight. 14yo, naturally, was thrilled to (belatedly) discover a fellow Olive Garden aficionado. Love the Bourdain cameo. A mensch.

My hobby is collecting fancy perfume samples, which I mostly use as encouragement for when I’m working through a long, tough day. Anyway, that’s why my ratty desk cardigan smells like Burberry Goddess at 6:30 am.

oh and hey, if you want MORE underage royal marriage content after listening to the pod, check out @annetheriault.bsky.social 's Queens of Infamy piece on Isabella of France! longreads.com/2022/06/21/q...

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New episode of the podcast with @annetheriault.bsky.social! Come sit on a beached whale (that’s what people did for fun in medieval Scotland) and listen to us talk about plucky heroines, actually scary witches, and a little light regicide! pod.link/1753505445/e...

Yes this is Sam, the last independent franchise of the record man 😭

14yo’s bedroom is in the attic on the third floor of our tall/narrow townhouse, up an absurdly steep set of stairs (like a ship’s ladder - I feel like there’s a specific name that I’m not remembering). Our house is from the 1860s, and these stairs definitely wouldn’t meet regulation anymore.

I am sure there are people who like it when they’re taking some kind of fitness class and the teacher is saying platitude-like encouraging things, but not me. Like, it’s 6 am, I’m here, isn’t that enough. Just let me suffer in silence while I try to make it through the next hour.

I was having A Day yesterday, so when a car with tinted windows started honking at me while I was crossing the street (with the light!) I turned and did the WHAT gesture. Anyway, turned out it was a nice woman I volunteer with and then I felt really bad.

There is a group of revered and feared women in my church’s soup kitchen referred to only as the nonnas. I haven’t met them yet, but I hear stories. The only person I know who stands up to them is a retired English teacher named Pat, who gets her power from being the daughter of Italian immigrants.

Listening to an episode of 99% Invisible where Roman is once again talking about flag design, and it reminds me how much I love the Toronto flag. The outline of the city hall towers! The T for Toronto, blue for the lake! Designed in 1974 by Renato De Santis, a 21yo George Brown student (pictured)

In the spirit of positivity, tonight I ate two of the most delicious sushi hand rolls I’ve ever had in my life — one avocado, and one salmon. I also had: some slices of brie, some sesame rice crackers with incroyable baba ganoush, some zucchini stuffed with veggies and rice. Doing my best.

14yo: is Noah a saint? Or just, like, a guy from the Bible? Me: I think he’s a biblical patriarch 14yo: because if he was a saint, he could be the patron saint of Pokémon 14yo: get it? because he’s gotta catch ‘em all?

I will delete this in a hot second, but we had a significant family trauma happen back in June that will continue to affect us indefinitely and I haven’t slept more than four hours in a night for nearly three months. I feel like I am going off my rocker.

New York’s hottest saint is Elizabeth Ann Seton. Born into a prominent Episcopalian family, this saint has everything: a dead mom, a divorced dad, life set against the backdrop of the American Revolution, TUBERCULOSIS, a religious conversion, the composition of a banger top 40 hymn, the War of 1812

I thought 14yo had an inch or two on me, but then I saw this photo and realized how wrong I was 🥴

Very tricky when recipes list things like “a pound of tomatoes, roughly chopped” as ingredients. Oh, so we’re not counting the time I spent chopping those tomatoes as prep time. Got it. That’s how it can be a ten minute recipe.

First day of high school 🥺

In the spirit of “Why do we bash “dead-beat” dads for not being there for their kids but never question if the child has bad vibes?” I pose the following: why do we assume the Bertrams are the villains of Mansfield Park but never ask if Fanny Price has bad vibes? Because she clearly has bad vibes.

14yo, having just seen Jaws for the first time: so when they make the muppet version of this movie, Statler and Waldorf should be the kids who freak everyone out by pretending to be the shark. And maybe the lone human should play the shark. (Also he loved it and says it holds up 50 years later)

“He died — of uncontrollable laughter at a joke by his jester, having just eaten a whole goose — with no surviving legitimate heirs, and the line which had begun with Wilfred the Hairy, Count of Barcelona in the ninth century, finally died out.” - Sicily: A Short History by John Julius Norwich

Parenting means trying to tell your kid that you’re thrilled about the delightful person they’re becoming at least as often as you tell them that they’re getting on your absolute last nerve

Sure, the schools teach your kids about the Pythagorean theorem. But do they teach them that he was a delightfully radical weirdo who founded a commune in Italy based on his beliefs in reincarnation, vegetarianism, and the beauty of mathematics? One wonders.

Happy feast day of Saint Augustine, whose mind was so blown by the sight of his friend and mentor Saint Ambrose reading silently (instead of out loud, the norm of the time) that he devoted a whole passage to it in his Confessions

This mom is serving all the hottest looks of the season: a button-down pyjama top printed with olive oil labels! Bright green Roots sweatpants from 2009! Pink wool socks and a forest green cardigan, both from La Maison Simons! Perfect for the office or, paired with a smoky eye, the club

Man, that first cup of tea of the day just hits different, especially on a chilly morning

How am I constantly doing things yet never actually getting anything done. A mystery for the ages.

14yo asked for a chicken quesadilla for dinner but without cheese. So it was just pieces of cooked chicken and sautéed veggies tumbling out of a folded tortilla. I was cheerful on the outside but inside I was making this face 😐

Everyone has a special talent gifted from god. Not to brag, but mine is that I can eat an entire container of baba ganoush in one sitting.

Today’s instalment of I Am One Thousand Years Old: 14yo recently watched SLC Punk (a movie that I loved at his age) and keeps yelling I AM THE FUTURE OF THIS GREAT NATION. Meanwhile, I’ve completely turned into the “very proud, so proud” mom.

As a Canadian, I have to admit that there are few things that a couple of days on a lake won’t cure* *ok, yes, there are many things, but it still amazes me how restorative sitting in the bottom of a canoe can be

Inside of you there is one, scheming, time-travelling wolf

Inside of you there are two wolves

Nothing makes me feel more unhinged than seeing pleather rebranded as “vegan leather”. It’s plastic! It’s bad for the environment! It will fall apart in five seconds! Whoever came up with that term is my enemy.

Thrilled that the Spanish DJ priest has reappeared on my tiktok timeline. This is genuinely a banger - even my religiously ambivalent kid agrees. Anyway, I’m dying to know what Mario has to do with Catholicism! Aside from Mario & Luigi being Italian and papist, of course. Is Bowser actually Satan?

Happy fête nationale to all my fellow Acadians. We’re here, we’re scrappy, we’re thrilled to be the third* most recognized Francophone community in Canada. I need to get a new shirt for my now teenaged kid, and maybe one of these lobster costumes for me. We survived the Grand Dérangement! *maybe

As a nation, we’re lucky to have luminaries like Leonard Cohen. Few people are brave enough to go to a Greek island, do a ton of speed, and ask the important questions like “what if you were horny for a 17th century Mohawk saint?”

I had almost forgotten about the time a bunch of circus elephants got loose in Newmarket, and the 911 audio is even funnier almost 20 years later

Glad my kid is home from camp so that I can finally send him all the memes and videos I’ve been saving up for him over the last two weeks

Was reading an article about the botched restoration of a Virgin Mary statue in Seville, and now I’m obsessed with this diva

I feel like there’s no one in my life who both knows who Kay Poyer is and cares about astrology/my Leo bullshit, so I am putting this on here for all of you

Anyway, on an unrelated note, my neighbours came over for dinner last night and this was plus ou moins the highlight of the meal (i chose the recipe because someone had given us cucumbers from their garden and peaches are very in season) cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1025...

Was thinking today about how, when I was pregnant, I told my sister that I was considering the name Emile. She said, “well, I’ll only call him Miles Gloriosus if you name the baby that” and she didn’t meant it in a good way. God, we loved that movie!

Got a letter from my kid at camp. It is signed “your offspring, [14yo]”. Teens, man. Anyway, apparently the food is better this year.

There has been so much shit going on in my life this summer and I feel like I am an absolute garbage mom, partner, writer, person, etc. I am really trying to push through it. Really trying to roll with the punches. Man, it’s hard. And sad! Feel like I’m losing out on summer, my favourite season.

14yo is at camp this week and the next, and man is it ever wild how much money I spend just so that I can feel anxious and adrift for two weeks every summer (while he has the time of his life, naturally)

Thanks to many friends weighing in over the years, I’ve accepted that my most Catholic subconscious opinion is that a little bit of suffering is good and productive for me, specifically. Like, how am I supposed to enjoy any kind of good event if I haven’t felt really, really bad before it happened?

It’s funny how we talk about the problems with therapy speak creeping into everyday language but also unironically call people anal because 120 years ago Freud theorized that people who experience problems during the anal stage of psychosexual development like to hold in their poo and be controlling