It’s Dump Decorative Gourds on the Street Season, Motherfuckers

Happy birthday my dearest @betarayben.bsky.social! It’s gross that we don’t live in the same city so we can share Ukrainian food and I can tell you drunken stories

It’s Oct 23 and I was just in a restaurant with full Christmas decorations and a load of garland waiting to be added. What is happening???!

Explaining the complexities of 90s anime fandom is both frustrating and kind of my kink

I don’t know what this little guy did, but I forgive him anything

Last night I went to a VIFF screening of the doc Are We Good? About comedian and venerable podcaster Marc Maron followed by a Q&A with the director and subject. The doc was touching and funny, mostly focussed on the sudden loss of his partner and how he processed grief on stage and on his podcast

My partner and I will be putting together an ikea dresser today. Please keep us in your thoughts

I saw One Battle After Another last night and it was brilliant and I feel like I need to see it again today just to put it all together in my head

Kids these days have it so easy with AI chatbots. I remember when you had to find real people on the internet to project your romantic feelings onto

So the news today is that if you take Tylenol while pregnant you can’t get raptured, right?

Influencer hell is where you made a joke one time and it really worked and then you have to keep making new permutations of that same joke for the next 5-10 years because now it’s your *brand*

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The best thing Roy said last night was about failure, how she considers both herself and Klein to be failures because they lose almost every fight they enter, and she’s proud of that. She considers failures to be more interesting and more powerful than successes that have given up on their ideals

Even from the very back row, I could feel the heat of these two brilliant minds in conversation

Occasionally I come up with a lesson plan idea so good that I look around expecting applause, but I know there won’t be any from anyone ever

I found this season of Strange New Worlds kind of pitchy and disappointing. I think the problem is that Star Trek used to be about something—philosophy or science or baseball or whatever. Now it’s just about Star Trek.

More and more I think that the purpose of contemporary debate as a kind of cage match between thinkers (often of wildly varying quality and understanding) is a waste of time at best and tool of aggression and obfuscation at worst. A meaningful conversation shouldn’t have a winner and loser.

No Canada Council grant this round, but I’ve got this sticky note on my laptop with a quote from a song by Austra to keep me going.

I was so tired after teaching yesterday that I dreamed about taking a nap in the middle of a stress dream

It never ceases to amaze me how many pundits are willing to call American conservatism “counterculture” when republicans hold power over literally every branch of government

I gasped with such force when this appeared in my inbox that it made my partner jump. Turned out it was just alerting me that the results will arrive within the next 10 days 🤣

Being a parentified eldest daughter means occasionally seeing a problem you could EASILY FIX, but you know everyone will hate you for pointing it out, so then you have to fight with the very core of your nature to stay quiet about it

I’m just a girl, standing before the Canada Council, asking you to open that damned portal already

It’s so rude that email occasionally brings you fun news but then the rest of the time it’s literally just bla bla bla bla

Oh god, what if I was actually a libra all along???! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Grab an issue of Prairie Fire and read the tragicomic tale of my first cigarette

Visiting writing friends like @betarayben.bsky.social is the best because they will let you leave their home with a book by the very specific author you’ve been looking for even though they haven’t read it yet. This is true writerly love

*Wrong answers only* I need someone to explain to me why I would pay $400 for salmon DNA injections (?) in my face.

Listen, Costco connector, you’re great and everything, but this is a crime against watermelon and maybe food in general

I love a random stop and chat with an acquaintance but lately I fear I’ve been overdoing it and now my neighbours are avoiding me: a poem

I wrote a little newsletter about reading Clarice Lispector and the comfort of making space for confusion in the digital age

I have questions for whoever wrote Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning. Many many questions

This Canada Day has a real first birthday party after friend breakup vibe

The building manager has gotten his revenge by decreeing that we are only allowed to do one load of laundry at a time from now on. One washer shall always remain empty

One of my favourite Japanese expressions is otsukare or otsukaresama. It’s used at the end of a work day or just at the end of a conversation to mean something like, “thanks for your hard work,” but literally means “you must be very tired.” It’s the perfect ending because often, yes, I am very tired

Ok, done! Generally a positive outcome (although I’d worked pretty hard to manage my expectations). Agreement achieved. Likelihood of being evicted is basically 0. What an adrenaline rush though. I feel like I’ve run a marathon

Tomorrow is my Residential Tentancy Board facilitation hearing with my landlord to contest a year’s worth of unreasonable noise complaints. Any advice?

This is not a one bedroom, sir. This is a bachelor suite doing bad cosplay

In better news, I finally have a rough draft of this volcano essay I’ve been working on for ages. Despite everything! A rough draft!

I mostly come to Bluesky to complain about stuff I don’t want certain people to see and I fear it’s creating an odd persona for me in this place. Like, who is this woman that’s just mad at her landlord and her family all the time?

I stopped doing the happy Father’s Day thing a while back because I realized that decades of swallowing hurt and anger to try to maintain a relationship with a man whose priority has always been himself was doing me more damage than good. I hope you find love that makes you feel valued and safe!

I thought this season of The Rehearsal would be less uncomfortable than the last but then it randomly reserected one of my most traumatic work experiences—working as a PA on Canadian Idol

I spoke to the OIPC and they weren’t able to give any concrete response but they pointed me to the PIPA guidelines around surveillance of tenants and this video seems like a pretty clear violation of our right to privacy both in the way it was collected and the way it has been stored and shared. …

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So I called the residential tenancy branch and they confirmed he’s not supposed to take video without consent. They suggested reaching out to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner. I’ve left a message. We’ll see where this goes!

I just received evidence in our dispute with our landlord and it turns out the building manager video taped my partner receiving his last formal noise complaint in our home without our knowledge or consent. Is this legal??? And beyond questions of legality, holy moly this feels invasive

At a publishing conference yesterday it was heartening to hear multiple agents & publishing pros say that trends are ephemeral. Today’s hot thing will probably be out by the time you bring your book to fruition, so you might as well write whatever excites you and let the chips fall where they may!

LinkedIn is like that aunty who wants to help your career but doesn’t really understand what you do suggesting you should apply for this random job as an anthropology professor because, you never know!

Well, the RTB facilitation hearing is scheduled, the evidence uploaded and the forms are in the mail to the landlord. There’s nothing left to do but worry. At least it’s out of my hands for a few weeks!

Just got my course offers for the fall and spring. What a relief! Solidarity with everyone who’s struggling to find stability in the hellscape of post secondary these days