Coyote

 I think I saw a coyote the other day when I was out for my morning walk.  It wasn't completely unexpected.  I live near a park on the edge of a wooded area, so it makes sense that there might be some wildlife about. The last time I saw a coyote, it was crossing Centennial Parkway on an early morning before things got busy.

Anyway, I was alarmed.  It, thankfully, seemed alarmed as well.  It was about to cross my path, but turned back when it saw me.  As I approached the spot where I saw it, I looked to where it had gone and saw it stuck around, just far enough away from me.  I turned to continue my walk, but instinct (smart or not, I'm not sure) made me walk backwards away from the coyote for a 100 m stretch so I could keep my eye on it and not be surprised by a sneak attack from the rear.  Eventually, I turned to walk forwards and finished my walk unscathed.

When I returned home, I googled "coyote daytime" and learned that coyotes are not nocturnal, and in the spring are likely out hunting rodents to feed their young.  The next time I walked past that area, I noticed a spot where one of my neighbours leaves birdseed and saw a gathering of puffy tails where a dray of squirrels was enjoying brunch.  Seems like a good brunch spot for coyote as well.  I also learned that coyotes who live in proximity to humans are not afraid of us and are more likely to attack.  Concerning.  

The last thing I learned is that, according to Google and not independently verified, the Navajo believe that a coyote crossing your path is a sign of bad luck or misfortune to come and you should turn back to avoid it.  Though I'm not necessarily one for flights of google-based fancy, these unprecedented times have made me fairly bad luck-averse.  I did worry a bit about what misfortune would come my way after this encounter.  Then I remembered that the coyote was about to cross my path, but then IT turned back.  Maybe the coyote believe that a human crossing your path is bad luck, too.  

They're probably right. We ruin everything.

The L Word

It was Valentine's Day not too long ago.

I'm trying to think of the first time someone told me they loved me, romantically.  And what did that mean to me?

Upon reflection, I'm usually the one to say it first, and I'm not sure how I feel about that.  If I squint really hard and remember back, I can remember the breathless butterfly feeling leading up to it all.  That nervous energy was just vibrating throughout my body and it needed somewhere to go, I think, so it just came out of my mouth as a blurted, "I love you."  Now I'm not sure if what I was feeling was actually love, or just the excitement of someone reciprocating my attraction to them.

While I say that, I'm trying to look back with as much objectivity as possible.  I've said a romantic "I love you" to four people in my life, and three of those relationships ended, so obviously the loving feeling ended for one or both of us at some point.  And it's not as though I didn't truly love each of them at some point in our relationship.  But the more I think about it, that first declaration probably had more to do with my feelings for me than it did my feelings for them.

I can pinpoint my insecurity to a particular year in school.  I don't remember being popular, although being popular is not traumatic, so it probably didn't register if I ever was.  That particular year, though, I was emphatically not popular. It feels really strange to say that my premature professions of love to men actually have to do with girls, but here we are.

Those girls were mean and they made me feel like garbage. They would make fun of how I looked and talked and dressed.  Once, one of them offered to tell me a secret, then shrieked directly into my earhole.  On more than one occasion, some girl I knew to dislike me would quietly inform me that some boy who had never given me the time of day had a crush on me.  Even at the time, I was certain this was a plot to get me to approach the boy so they could watch him recoil in horror at the idea of being romantically linked with me and then point and laugh.  I never took the bait.  

I didn't make it hard for them. Because of an infestation of lice the year before, I wore my hair in braids, which I was unfortunately not particularly skilled at styling.  I wore skirts and lace-collared blouses and floral stirrup pants my mother bought for me that year, which happened to be in the thick of the grunge era when everyone else was wearing ripped jeans, plaid shirts and bodysuits.  My parents thought nirvana was a state of perfect quietude.  I didn't have my finger on the pulse of the most popular music, although truthfully, the mean girls didn't either.  We had a local AM radio station that played mainly country music  One of them had a cousin in the city who would send her tapes of CHUM FM, which we were allowed to play at lunch on the classroom tapedeck.  In my mind, Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" is followed by Ace of Bass' "The Sign" is followed by The Proclaimers' "500 Miles" because of one of those tapes...in the same way I think most early millennial Canadians start humming the intro to "Semi-Charmed Life" any time they hear "Song 2" by Blur.  They know why.

ANYWAY, the whole thing is that I didn't think I was cool enough, cute enough, fashionable enough for someone to love me.  When it seemed like someone even MIGHT love me, the unbelievable excitement of the idea would bubble up from that spot in my stomach, past my larynx and out my mouth.  Because maybe if I let them know I was serious, they'd stick around.  

They always said it back, though.  And they usually did stick around for a good while.  Maybe because they had endured similar abuse to their developing egos in their formative years and felt the same excited vibrations I did.  Maybe because they didn't want to be rude.  Maybe they actually did love me but were too nervous to say. But in the end, there was always an end.

This doesn't seem very uplifting, and I'm sorry about that.  The moral is that eventually, I learned to exercise some control over that crazy vibration I was feeling and to be more considered about when I actually brought the L word to the table. Part of that came from acknowledging that those girls were just not being good people and that I was worthy of romantic attention. So, that's good, right?

The answer, by the way, is my grade 9 boyfriend, in a note he wrote to me, in which he says that if it's true that I love him, then the feeling is mutual, which is kind of a cop-out. I didn't see it that way at the time.

The Pre-Release

 I am always meaning to write more. It's in my to-do list to spend a little bit of time writing every 3-4 weeks or so.  I know many writers (the ones with a capital W) actually challenge themselves to write something every day, no matter how good or bad.  I like to write about the goings-on in my life and the feelings I have when the ons are going.  I give myself a few weeks for things to happen and for feelings to develop about those things.

Unfortunately, lately, the goings-on have been pretty mundane.  I can't go anywhere or do anything worth chatting about.  I spend most of my days in a pretty same-y routine; wake up, work, go for a walk, do some yoga, begrudgingly complete a trx workout so when I go back to the gym I can tell my trainer that I did things, read internet articles and cross chore-type things off my to-do list, watch some streaming serials, fall asleep to the sound of a headspace sleep story followed by white noise.  It's been this way since Christmas...and probably before Christmas.  

I'm not looking to change it up.  I'm pretty comfortable in my routine.  I'd love to be able to break it up with visits with friends and family, but I'm not going to bemoan our current situation any more than this one point: it doesn't make for good writing...at least not in the way that I write.

ANYWAY...One of those articles included 52 creative writing prompts.  Normally, I would read through such an article, deposit the gems in my mind palace to collect dust, and delete the tab forever.  But this time I saved it.  I thought that, given the current climate and the very likely likelihood that my routine is going to be pretty much the same as I described above, the pre-selected prompts might give me the opportunity to search my mind palace for dusty items I could reflect upon.  

The first handful of prompts were fairly lacklustre, although I am using one right now, so perhaps they're not as bad as I'm making them out to be.  The one I chose was about releasing resolutions; I was supposed to write about a resolution I did not reach.  I looked back in my blog history to find a New Year's Resolution-type entry.  I could not find one in the last five years.  This is not to say that I haven't made resolutions, nor is it to say that I have reached all the resolutions I've made.  I recall resolving to learn to play the guitar some ten years ago.  Turns out, the unprecedented times of 2020 provided exactly the environment that would allow me to finally make some headway on that resolution.  I'm not campfire-good yet (which is to say, I'm not very good at all), but I can string a few chords together and my husband can sort of tell what I'm playing. I found an app through an(other) article I was reading that broke it down in a way I could understand and internalize. I find that habits are made when intention and environment meet serendipity.  Possibly more on that later.

But back to the writing.  When I first started blogging, I had a small cult following.  They were mainly friends and frenemies engaging in a certain degree of schadenfreude as my main focus at the time was to turn my sometimes disastrous navigation of the single life of my mid-twenties into comedy.  A few months after I started writing, I moved to a new city to start a student work experience placement.  I recall, sometime in June, receiving a message from a friend/fan looking for my next entry...it had been weeks (WEEKS!) and surely my next one was due soon.  What I knew and know, both then and now, was that you can't force your particular art.  I couldn't make my life, which at that time was a combination of learning-to-be-a-professional by day and trying-not-to-die-of-boredom-in-a-strange-town-with-no-car-and-no-money by night, into something prose-worthy.  

I guess, with the writing prompts and the scheduled writing time, I'm trying to go against what I know.  That I can't force good prose about my life when my life is on hold due to a worldwide pandemic.  I read another article (I found it in a dusty room of my mind palace just now) about setting intentions for 2021 instead of resolutions.  I'm not going to link the article because it described intentions as mini-goals to set for yourself on the road to completing a major goal, which might be useful for many people, but when I read the article's title I had thought of intention in the more woo-woo meditation/yoga sense and that turned a light bulb on for me.

Instead of setting a resolution to write more, I'm setting an intention to write more.  And in the woo-woo meditation/yoga tradition, I'm going to go about my intention without judgment of the outcome.  Sometimes my mind palace will be empty.  Sometimes the thing I find and dust off might actually be kind of junk.  The point is just to try to write more.

My New Year's Resolution

This year was a dumpster fire.

In truth, the year featured a lot of actual fires: Australia, California, probably other places I don't know about.

But the general consensus I'm gathering from my various social media feeds is that this year was a particularly hard one, and that is the truth for me too.

Aside from having to completely rearrange my life around a global pandemic and then watch tens of thousands of people die because of people who would not do the same, concerning myself with the business of extinguishing the world's actual fires, and experiencing the collective stress of extremely publicized race-based violence, the sadness that goes along with that, and the inherent discomfort in reflection about my own contributions and participation in systemic racism.  Aside from all that, I enjoyed some significant personal struggles through 2020 as well.

And I see many of you out there starting that inhale so that in just over 12 hours you can let it all out in a collective sigh of relief.  

I won't be joining you.

Though I have often felt in the past that flipping the calendar year over has signified some new beginning, this year, I'm not holding my breath that moving from zero to one is going to make any impactful change in the problems I've been facing, some alone and some with the rest of the world.  In fact, I am confident that I will still experience strife through 2021.  

So, if there is a new me in the new year, it's not one that is going to start losing weight or eating better.  It's not one that's going to be more fun and enjoy life more.  Truthfully, I spent a lot of 2020 losing weight, eating better, and stopping to smell the roses when I could find them.  I'm going to keep doing that stuff.  And that's really what the new me will be all about.

My New Year's Resolution this year: I'm just going to persevere.  I'm going to resolve to have resolve.  I'm going to just keep going.  Because 2021 is going to come at me with all the same challenge as 2017, 2018, 2019, and yes, even 2020. All I can do is keep going.

Having said that, I acknowledge that there may be those of you out there reading this with worry that I've given up on life or that my outlook has darkened.  It may be the case that I'm approaching the coming year with a certain level of resignation.  But if it makes you feel better, take heart.  I assure you: if 2021 has roses, I'll smell them.

The Longest Day

 It's my birthday this week.  I had a dentist appointment recently that got cancelled.  2020 has been the longest day ever.

I say that because it really feels like yesterday that I was turning 36, and I don't mean that in an "Oh, time flies!" kind of way.  It literally feels like it happened yesterday. (Time does fly, though.  I accidentally wrote 26 there instead of my actual age and then felt wistful when I realized I was 10 years wrong).  My cancelled dentist appointment was a yearly follow-up which I recall was followed closely by a root canal, the pain from which had been necessitating that I consume several bottles of ibuprofen every week.  I only just realized that my back bottom right molar has been in its current state of endodontic repair for almost a year and not, as I had previously believed, just a few weeks. I have this terrible feeling that I blinked and I'm a year older.  While most years feel like a whirlwind or a rollercoaster, this time it just felt like warp speed.  Like we started in March 2020 and now it's November somehow.

At the same time, I feel like we've been doing this quarantine thing since forever.  

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Anyway, around my birthday, I try to set some goals.  

This past year I've been working on getting my (figurative) house in order. I've been prioritizing better sleep, meditation, yoga and exercise and I think its made the quarantine more manageable.  

With the hope of a vaccine coming sometime in the next 6 months, I think this is time to consider how I want to fill the time that's been vacant (or, more accurately, filled with extra work) all this time.  Normally, I feel like my life is a whirlwhind or a rollercoaster.  It's thrilling, but I when I get to the end of the year my brain feels pretty jiggled and my hair is in a crazy windswept beehive.  This year moved equally fast, but the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as far as stimulation goes.  I think what I'm after is some kind of metaphorical rail journey.  There's no slowing the speed of time, but at least this way I get to enjoy the scenery without accidentally swallowing a bug.

I Needed a Win

 It's been a hard week.

The second wave has finally arrived in Niagara and it's raging through one of my long-term homes like a wildfire.  You know what that means.  I'm feverishly refreshing my referral page to get food, fluids and supplements into sick people in the hopes that maybe they make it through their illness.  The guilt that I get to do this from the comfort of my home is palpable. I can feel the cortisol coursing through my body right now.  

Between trying to extinguish a COVID outbreak with jello and supplements and an email from a senior colleague at another job letting me know about some documentation I missed from a client interaction several weeks ago, I haven't felt like a particularly competent dietitian.  

Because I'm fighting those fires I mentioned above, I haven't really had time to do the other things I find rewarding.  Exercise and leisure pursuits have been difficult to get to and difficult to enjoy when I do have time for them because I feel guilty that I'm not doing more for the people I work for.  Even though I objectively know that I can't pour from an empty cup, taking the time to refill feels like time I should be spending pouring.  

Tuesday rolls around and I realize I'm also experiencing the collective anxiety of the unknown that awaits us as millions of people head to the polls just to the south of me.  I recall the morning of the first Wednesday in November 2016, driving to work at the southern tip of the Niagara Peninsula looking at the Buffalo waterfront some 1000 meters across the Niagara River from me and thinking how lucky I was to be living on this side of that water where the Great Pumpkin could never hurt me.  How wrong I was.  Though his governance hasn't had a direct impact on me (in any way that I could quantify here, anyway), I hurt from the divisiveness and hate of which he is a symbol and which he seemed not only to condone but also to incite.  It's been a hard week, but it's been a hard four years.

Point is, I needed a win this week. I got one yesterday.

I'm not foolish enough to think that this solves everything.  I'm almost ready to begin my relaxing bedtime routine so I can be fresh to keep fighting that COVID fire.  That's not going to go away tomorrow because a few states turned blue.  And neither is the divisiveness and hate that's made me and millions of others feel so hopeless.  But watching the results roll in from Tuesday to Saturday at least made me feel like the hearts and minds of a few more people have changed enough for me to hope that there might be a few more wins to come.  Time to fill my glass.

Sick

 Remember when having a cough was something that just happened randomly from the months of October to April?  Your friends might bring you soup if you were really laid up.

Now we're in this weird place where every sniffle is an alarm bell that we might be ground zero for a super spread.  My husband developed a cough on Thanksgiving weekend; we had felt safe visiting with our relatives that we had included in our bubble throughout the pandemic because we generally have been maintaining a pretty consistent bubble, social distancing, and masking.  Nonetheless, my husband started with this croak-y cough on Saturday evening.  I was mortified.  If I think about the real, non-COVID world, this seems like a really trivial thing to be mortified about.  How many times had I gotten the flu over the Christmas holidays when I was a university student?  But now, it's not.  It could be life and death.  Luckily, my husband was able to get a same-day COVID test as soon as we got back and the next-day results were negative  We had only passed on a minor virus to my mother and her husband to battle in the following week.

This week, it was my turn.  I started Monday with a sore throat.  It was my only symptom, one which is a classic sign of a week-long sinus infection for me, and the pre-screen for work told me I should still attend, although I did get a call from infection control on the way to tell me I had to get a COVID test ASAP.  I already had one pre-booked for another job.  It took longer for my result to come back. It was negative, as I suspected it would be.

But the wait period in-between onset of symptoms and when I finally got my test results back was odd.  Messaging people with whom I had pre-planned meetings and appointments to discuss my symptoms and the likelihood I would have my test results back by meeting time seemed like the right thing to do, but also seemed like a strange conversation to have in the context of a non-COVID world.  I wonder if it's something we'll continue to do when this whole weird world eventually resolves.  

What I have learned: wearing a mask with a head cold is harder than wearing a mask without a head cold, sneezes have smells and they're not great, and most people are appreciative of a pre-meeting symptom discussion.