A few good things about the pandemic (yes, there have been some): I’ve been getting to know Toronto the way I should have done when I moved here 15+ years ago; it’s a way cooler city than I’ve been giving it credit for; I’m becoming a not bad shot at left-handed recycling-bin basketball; I’ve become…
Bicycle accident(s)
I know Spring has really, finally arrived in Toronto because during a bicycle ride a few days ago, I became one of several moving hills upon which countless millions of gnats died. Runners and other cyclists shrieked their shocked way through these clouds as though this doesn’t happen literally every year (we’ve killed off many…
Epic naps of the apocalypse
I’m sleepy; are you sleepy? So sleepy. I’ve been working from home for over a month now because of COVID-19. Alongside obsessive hand-washing, only going outside to either exercise or buy groceries, eating a lot of comforting peanut butter toast, reading very little (sigh), texting and emailing and calling my friends all the durn time,…
Read as I say, don’t read as I read
I saw something somewhere, pretty recently I think, about how COVID-19 has changed and will continue to change our lives a lot, and that all the things people have lost are making them grieve. (My thesis supervisor, if she ever reads this, will die 17 times in succession and then come back from the dead…
On not drowning silently
I am very much in favour of using my own words to describe my own experiences; I have this belief, supportable or not, that the more widely a catchy phrase is adopted, the less meaning it comes to hold until it’s eventually just a mess of sounds unrelated to anything recognizable. Some such commonplaces (e.g.,…
Working out in the time of cholera
I saw on the news this morning that Ontario provincial parks are closing because of COVID-19…and I didn’t freak out at all. I got all my hysterical adjusting done in my previous post; but I think this is a good time to point out how wrong Thoreau was when he claimed, “The mass of men…
Have more sugar; these feelings aren’t going to eat themselves!
This will be the first of, one hopes (for obvious reasons), a series of dispatches from Toronto, or what I’m now affectionately referring to as Quarentown. No, we are absolutely not all in full lock-down like poor Italy. This morning, the premier declared a state of emergency, Parks Canada is closed, libraries are closed, we’re…
Hibernation
Winter has its charms, at least for those who’ve acquired a taste for it, but it must be acknowledged that, in spite of its lovely parts (the crunching and cracking of snow underfoot and the blintering* of the stars above on clear nights), winter also makes life more complicated. It takes a long time and…
Jam and Idleness 
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