Many years ago, my dad found an old teddy bear in with the stuff that remained after I left home. He dressed it his old baseball uniform, the shirt worn on his station’s ball team. Dad loved playing baseball and told me about the teams he had been on throughout his career – apparently Montreal had enough broadcasting stations with teams that tournaments were formed (think the Anchorman brawl, with fewer moustaches and more outs). Dad tried to instill that love of baseball in me, but failed miserably: turns out there is actually a LOT of crying in baseball. Anyway, dad loved baseball and dressed a teddy bear his jersey and the bear had a place of honour in the home for many years.

After my dad died, my mom kept it (.. because hoarding runs in the family, and we keep everything) and when she sold the house to move to her current weird ass-home, the bear came with. It retained a place of honour: the lounge chair in the living room. That’s the bear’s/cat’s chair.

Dad passed in 2005, and mom’s been in her apartment since .. 2007? 2008? A long time. Bear’s still there. We hung out in December.

I’m 3 months deep in a massive archaeological dig, and recently unearthed a huge teddy bear Ed had given me early in our relationship. I hadn’t decided what to do with it, so it hung out in the femur-sized pile of things in limbo: I needed to Deal with These, just .. later.

That said, today did start with a treasure hunt for a picture of a girl in a martini glass. We’re 6/7 in the quest when I found trove (look, this is pirate-themed now): yearbooks! amazing shoes! a single crystalline rose suspended in time! baby witch gear! copies of doom and doom II on floppy disk! an old t-shirt of my dad’s!

I think you can see where this might be going:

The shirt I unearthed was dad’s team shirt from his station in Victoria. I had claimed it after dad died, and stashed it away on a shelf I couldn’t reach.

Say hi to Bear next time you visit #halfwack.

I am exhausted from all of these feelings and onions.

I don’t know why I thought I’d be able to age gracefully – I haven’t done a single graceful thing in my entire life. Tuesday’s child, full of grace my ASS.

I’ve been trying, though. Over the pandemic, I grew comfortable leaving the house looking less than Full Kimli. I go outside all the time without makeup. Yesterday, I left the house wearing PANTS and a T-SHIRT and what the fuck is up with that? Anyway, I’m trying. I even stopped colouring my hair to rediscover my natural hair colour, because “unmitigated disaster” is too much to fit on a driver’s license. My brother and sister have both been rocking dad’s bright white hair, but my mother’s genes are too strong – I didn’t get the graceful plume of Gandalf hair that gleams from afar and flutters lazily in the breeze. No, I’ve got some sort of passive Medusa ombré vortex of black and white and .. orange? Great. I’m a fucking Halloween decoration, and I don’t even get to turn people to stone.

Ed says he really likes my grey hair, so I’ve been keeping it for him and not at all because I’m too lazy to figure out what I want to do with it. The grey has been growing on me (no pun intended), but I don’t love it – especially not in the current state of hopeless fuckery that it’s in. Luckily, summer is almost over, and I’ll inevitably be in a sequinned beanie from now until next June. That’s plenty of time to decide what I’m doing with my head, right?

During this latest bout of unemployment, I’ve been trying to streamline my life to make things a little less chaotic. I’ve finally had to admit to myself that keeping my passwords organized in my head is probably not the best way to go about it, so I spent most of my Saturday setting up a password utility to remember things for me. I suppose I’m really late to the game on this one, but I’ve always prided myself on having a good memory and lately I’ve just been .. forgetting things. Passwords, dates, why I went into a particular room. I’ve forgotten what I was doing while doing it. This is all new, and I don’t know if it’s simply a symptom of age or other, leafier reasons. I don’t want to make myself sick worrying about my memory, so I’m going to try using lists and tools to keep shit organized. Progress. Small steps. Prune juice.

I feel drab.

I never understood the appeal of colouring books. The perfectionist in me was horrified that I’d be responsible for, let’s face it, ruining how the image looks with my clumsy colouring skills, and my hands cramped in protest: I can’t physically write or draw or colour for long without my weird elf hands just seizing. I loved the aesthetic of beautifully coloured images, but hated the pain I’d have to go through to not even come close at making anything pretty. Nice idea, but not for me.

I also fucking love building pretty Lego sets.

There’s something deeply, intensely relaxing about letting go and following instructions for the sake of beauty and joy. If I do it right, my reward is this odd, colourful little piece of art that fits right in with my entire aesthetic and I can’t kill it. I am in control of the speed at which the project is completed and the preciseness of instructions followed, but not the beauty of the outcome.

Assembling Lego is my colouring book. It makes my world a little bit quieter and a little bit brighter at the same time. It keeps my hands occupied. I can listen to music. I don’t have to think or listen or focus or create, I can just tune out and accomplish something for fun. The end result affects, and is for, no one but me – and there is no pressure about it. It is, or it isn’t. That’s it.

Is that what true relaxing is?

Anyway, if this is the same reason people love colouring books, I totally get it. This is niiiiice. My brain is napping.

The irony of finding following instructions the most relaxing thing is like 3 extra layers of fucked up that I am not yet ready to face thank you.