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.

You are never going to believe this, but I have things to say about Turning Red.

The framework in which I make it all about me (part 1 of 2 – I have so many words): I don’t watch sad things. A whole lot of Pixar’s catalog is off-limits to me, but I made an exception so I could watch Turning Red. I actually timed how far I could make it into the movie before I started crying: 27:09:11.

Man I love data.

As a Chinese-Canadian woman, I am exercising my right – nay, my DUTY – to provide my unsolicited opinion on Turning Red:

Honestly, I did love it. It was spectacular to see myself represented as not only the main character in an animated film, but one set in Canada! My icy heart melted, and please excuse my Divine Ya-Ya squirting here but I’m so happy for all the women and girls that’ll experience the sheer delight of representation. It’s such an important thing. You can tell, because of all the white men losing their absolute shit at the movie. It mentions periods! The movie isn’t even ABOUT periods – it’s an analogy – but periods are MENTIONED and there are PADS and THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Obviously everyone’s first period story is different, but I honestly don’t understand any of the outcry. It’s a biological function that affects 50% of the population – that’s over 3.5 billion people – yet it’s “too personal” a subject to discuss. Yeah, get the fuck out of here with that bullshit. We were taught about periods in grade 5/age 10. Mine came in at age 11. Still waiting to turn into a panda, though.

I also watched Encanto recently, and while that movie made me cry sooner than 27 minutes in, I *sobbed* throughout Turning Red. Full on ugly cries. I wiped my tears away with a hot dog bun. I don’t recommend it.

It’s not just the main story that made me cry, though – so much of the film is so well done (minor spoilers ahead):

• The friendship between Meilin, Miriam, Priya, and Abby: I wish I had friends like that when I was 13. Hell, I wish I had friends like that now. Note: if anyone is looking to start a friend group, I will gladly be your Abby: I’m short, round, weird, and enthusiastic, and I probably already own pink overalls.
• The relationship between Meilin and her mother made me sob because I also had a Skydome-destroying fight with my mother, but we didn’t get our happy ending. And it was in Victoria. Ever wonder why they replaced Memorial Arena with the Save-On-Foods Arena? Yo.
• Elder relatives! I don’t know any of mine. More crying.
• Being “different” yet beloved? How does that even work? I cried because I want to light up rooms I’m in.
• Absolutely no big deal being made about Tyler being an annoying shit bully who is secretly probably gay and becomes the 5th member of the friend group by the end. I cried because it was cute.
• I skipped the boy band craze of multiple generations, so I cried because I was confused. This may have been where the hot dog bun came in, but my memories of the evening are soggy.

If you haven’t yet watched Turning Red, I recommend it. I love that Pixar is finally starting to tell stories from BIPOC POVs and from women – Domee Shi previously won an Oscar for the Pixar short Bao. I’m going to reuse a trick that went around at the height of Black Lives Matter campaigns – even if you aren’t watching the video, stream it in the background so it registers the view. More viewers = more chances for people to tell their stories. Hollywood is finally starting to realize that brilliant things can come from people who aren’t cis white hetero men, so let’s help that along any way we can.

TL;DR: Movie good. Feelings bad. Therapy coming.

Back in March of 2020, all we wanted was for things to go back to normal.

It’s February 2022, and “normal” is no longer a thing. We’ve all been told that this – whatever “this” might mean to you – is the new normal, so buckle up and sit still.

I don’t want 2020’s normal anymore. I can’t imagine actually going out into the world without a single worry about other people’s vaccination status or viral load. Crowds – even crowds full of my favourite people – are an alien concept. I’d no sooner volunteer to be in any kind of crowd than I would, say, gather up a station wagon full of idiots and caravan into the nation’s capitol to proudly declare on a global stage that I’m really *that* stupid.

What DOES bother me is how quickly the rules change, and how badly I want things to go back to .. something. Not “normal”. Each week, it seems like I’d be happy with what we had last week because it keeps being taken away. This time two months ago, we had plans to finally see our friends and were talking excitedly about spending Christmas together for the first time in two years. The week before Christmas, all gatherings were cancelled due to the surge in Omicron. Thanks to another climate disaster, we had a tiny loophole that allowed us to cross the border for essentials – in my case, packages and a long-awaited trip to Trader Joe’s. Then TJ’s was too risky – so many people! – but I could go to Safeway, right? Then that became too much, but at least I could get my packages and some yogurt from the dairy store and it was so little but it was good enough, until it changed again – now I can’t get packages OR yogurt OR groceries OR see my friends and fuck all I want is the few freedoms we had 6 weeks ago. Or two weeks ago. Or yesterday.

What’s left to take?

I’m speaking strictly from my own pity party, of course. We’ve all been negatively affected by the last two years of confusion and fear and mixed messages. I’m not blaming anyone for this current mess (except you, anti-vaxxers and mandate protesters – go fuck yourselves!), and I’m fully aware that it’s my own sense of mortality actually stopping me from just doing whatever the fuck I want. There are no physical barriers to me packing shit up and going .. anywhere. It’s logistically complicated, but I thrive on the logistically complicated so that’s not the problem. It’s that annoying little sense of “for the greater good” that I can’t seem to shake, which is not really a bad thing as that’s basically what separates us from them, good from evil, true Canadians from the freedom convoy, etc. I wish things were different. I don’t think we’re going to get there with trucks and nazi flags and ignorance.

At the end of the day there’s nothing left but patience but it’s so hard and I’m so lonely and I miss everything.

But I’ll keep calm, I’ll carry on, I’ll listen to a lot of sad weepy songs, I’ll cut some fancy vinyl signs with giant cocks, and this too shall pass.

Hopefully.

I’m sad and tired and lonely, but I’m alive and loved and safe. What more do I really need?

I basically only communicate by PowerPoint now, so you might as well just follow me on Instagram.