Horoscopes

Toronto Star: You don’t run away or give up on something just because it’s hard. Instead, you lean into the challenge. You’re adept at solving problems and creating actionable plans. Others often look to you for advice, leadership and support. You enjoy showing up for the people you care about. You know how to keep everyone grounded and safe. You’re patient, reserved and discerning. You know a good thing when it’s in front of you and waste no time in seizing the opportunity. This year, money may not buy happiness, but staying true to yourself and your values will.

 

Globe & Mail: For best results this year you need to be more of an observer. Instead of rushing into every new thing that comes along try standing back and watching what other people are doing. Learn from their mistakes and then do it right!

 

 

I love how these are almost opposites!

Horoscopes

Today I am 44, which is significant because I started working as a translator at 22.

Even though my birthday horoscopes stopped being accurate several years ago, I continue to keep track of them.

 

Toronto Star:

You’re perceptive, discerning and soulful. Skimming the surface of life isn’t for you. You would prefer to explore the depths instead. In relationships, you crave substance and integrity. Many would say you’re loyal and devoted to those you love, and you’d likely agree. You often achieve many successes and wins because you always stay prepared for any opportunity and are always willing to do the necessary work. You possess an enterprising spirit and a clever mind. You’re also patient, level-headed and resilient. This year, you will thrive with a glass-half-full approach rather than one where the glass is half-empty.

Globe and Mail:

Get serious about your ambitions and start making those small but necessary changes that will help clear a path from where you are now to where you most want to be. A succession of measured steps will add up to a massive leap forward.

Where I'm at on social media (literally and philosophically)

I now have a Bluesky account (@ImpudentStrumpet.bsky.social) and a Mastodon account (@ImpudentStrumpet@mastodon.social), and I continue to be on Twitter (@ImpStrump).

I've tried to move my follows over, but if I missed you it wasn't intentional.

 

I haven't made any decisions about which I'm going to use or how or how much. My communities seem to be leaning towards Bluesky, but its interface doesn't play nicely with my post-head-injury eyes and brain. I have discovered various web clients (turns out you can just search github for things you're wishing someone would code!) but nothing is consistently comfortable.

 

(I use a combination of GoodTwitter2 and Minimal Theme for Twitter to make Twitter comfortable. It looks like this. I'd welcome any tips on how to achieve this with Bluesky or Mastodon.)

***

I have been finding Twitter less useful lately. Either there are fewer tweets or I'm seeing fewer tweets. Quite frequently I pop in, idly scroll, and quickly reach the point where I last left off. (That hasn't happened for years!)

Previously, if I heard a weird noise or something outside, I'd search for "Yonge and Eglinton" (my neighbourhood) in Twitter and get other people tweeting about whatever weird noise I'd just heard. (e.g. they'd be saying something like "Why's there a helicopter circling Yonge and Eglinton?" and then I'd know it's a helicopter). Now, I just get real estate listings.

 

I'm finding more pornbots in my mentions and fewer actual people. I'm finding TV livetweeting hashtags less active. Basically, it's just not meeting my needs as well.

 

If my needs were just entertainment, I wouldn't be worrying about this. However, after nearly 15 years of curation, I've gotten to a point where my Twitter feed effortlessly provides me with new information that I didn't even know I needed and would never have thought to proactively seek out. 

From what it means when someone asks "What are your pronouns?" to the fact that COVID is airborne and can be mitigated with robust HEPA filtration, important things I didn't even know that I didn't even know reached me as I was idly scrolling for weather updates and puppy pictures, and I'm a more informed person better able to function in society because of it.

I fear that my social media might be doing that less well now, and I might not even notice.

(I'm also noticing something similar with Reddit - of stuff that's reaching me organically, the ratio of people who are less informed that me to people who have something to teach me is worsening.)

***

And the scary thing is how easy it would be for me to live in ignorance. I'm older. I'm established. I'm comfortable. I have leeway and credibility and social capital. I'm intrinsically pessimistic and secure in my flaws.

If someone asked me "What are your pronouns?" and I didn't know what they meant, I'd be flummoxed and baffled. Someone would explain what they meant, I'd tell them "she/her" and apologize with grace for not knowing what they meant on the grounds that I'm a milquetoast middle-aged lady. I wouldn't suffer any long-term consequences, and might even get credit for handling it with grace rather than harrumphing over it. 

And I wouldn't even realize I'd missed something - I'd just think this is yet another thing that didn't reach me until it reached me.

 

If I didn't know that the COVID protections currently being required by public health were insufficient and ended up contracting COVID as a result, I would shrug my shoulders and figure "Well, bad things happen. People get sick. Why shouldn't it happen to me?" Even if I developed Long COVID, my head injury has already taught me that life-altering medical consequences can happen for reasons completely outside your control. 

 

I'd be miserable, my life would be worse every day, and I wouldn't even realize I'd missed something - I'd think this is yet another bad thing that happens to people.

I'm sure there are already tons of things I'm missing, but I fear that the enshittification of Twitter is exacerbating it compared with if Twitter had continued to be run with the same competence as before the takeover.

***

I've also been thinking Tumblr a lot. 

Tumblr was bought out for a ridiculously high price in 2013 by disruptive management that made a lot of unpopular changes. It bled users, and was sold in 2019 at a massive loss. 

Conventional wisdom is that Tumblr is dead, but the fact of the matter is the community is still there.

I'm not on Tumblr (the interface and format never really met my needs), but I follow some people's Tumblrs in my feed reader, and a lot of Good Omens fandom happens there so I do keep an eye on it.

And the community is still there, still thriving, still being weird with their blorbos and their Goncharovs. They outlasted the occupiers and drove them off.

Maybe we can do the same thing with Twitter?

***

I've quipped that I don't call Twitter "X" for the same reason that I don't call Gdańsk "Danzig".

 

Gdańsk has, obviously, been through some shit over the centuries. Irrevocable harm was done, many did not emerge unscathed (to put it mildly).

And yet, today, it is unquestionably called Gdańsk. Not Danzig.

 

I haven't given up hope that we can do the same with Twitter.

But I've also hedged my bets and secured my pied-à-terre elsewhere.

Horoscopes

Star:

You never turn down the chance to try something new. You've got an adventurer's spirit; though, it's not just for the fun of it. You enjoy learning and exploring because it has its practical uses, too. You're loyal and kind, and you don't mind going out of your way to help people in need. You've got a big heart and an even bigger sense of humour. You find comfort and camaraderie in unique and interesting people, just like you. This year, a romantic connection or an exciting creative project might find you when you least expect it.

 

Globe: 

Domestic issues will be in the spotlight over the coming year and if you want to maintain a friendly atmosphere on the home front you may have to do things for loved ones that seem silly to you. Don’t worry, it will be more than worth it.

 

Both of these sound ridiculously inaccurate. My birthday horoscopes have been ridiculously inaccurate for several years (I don't remember if it's since the pandemic started or if it's since the head injury - time has no meaning) but I record them anyway

How the universe is mocking me

From time to time, charities I've donated to send me a fundraising letter with a small free gift, in an attempt to entice me to donate more. Usually the gift is something I can use, like a pen or address labels. But a while back, a charity sent me this reusable shopping bag.

Somehow, every single aspect of this shopping bag was irritating! It was too big to fit in my purse, while somehow also being too small to carry a package of toilet paper. The handles were simultaneously too short to comfortably put over my shoulder and too long to comfortably hold in my hand. The material had a particularly icky plasticky feeling while also not being properly waterproof. And the design contained butterflies that were unpleasantly realistic and detailed. In short, it had no redeeming qualities and I was rather resentful of the charity for sending me such an unhelpful object.

So I put it at the back of my pile of unwanted reusable bags, and proceeded with life.

Fast-forward to yesterday.

I had a few things that I wanted to take over to the charity box, and they didn't fit in the kind of plastic bag I'd normally put them in. So I dug into my pile of unwanted reusable bags, and came up with this one.

Perfect! I'd put my charity stuff in it, carry it over to the charity box, and dump the whole thing in the box, bag and all!

So I loaded up the bag, irritated once again at how it managed to have such an inconvenient shape and size and such an unpleasant texture. I carried it over to the charity box, irritated once again at how the strap is exactly the wrong length. And I dumped the whole thing into the box, bag and all, and returned home, rejoicing in the fact that I'll never have to deal with these irritants again!

 

On my way back up to my apartment, I detoured into the mailroom to check my mail. It contained a large envelope from a charity I'd recently donated to, likely containing another fundraising letter. But I opened the letter on the off-chance they'd sent me some address labels, and found...

...another reusable shopping bag, identical to the one I'd just gotten rid of!

 

(🎵 The bag came back, the very next day...🎵)

Not that there's anything wrong with that

The other day I saw someone tweet that cis Gen Xers need to talk more about how homophobic society in general was in the 80s and 90s. So my Pride post this year is a story from my small town adolescence in the 90s.

 

This story does not contain any violence, hate crimes, or actual homophobic acts, but it does contain extensive descriptions of my own thoughts and feelings from back when I knew nothing other than that culture and environment, and these thoughts and feelings do not age well.

 

***

 

In the Seinfeld episode "The Outing", Jerry and George are mistaken for a gay couple, and spend the episode flailing about vociferously denying being gay, each time qualifying their denial with "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

 

When I saw this episode at the age of 15, I was super confused: why are they saying "Not that there's anything wrong with that"?? Surely if you suggest that there's nothing wrong with being gay, people will think you're gay, and then Bad Things will happen! Why wouldn't they just say nothing??

That was literally the very first time in my whole entire life that I had ever been exposed to the idea that a person might not want to come across as homophobic. I'm not even getting as far as the fact that there's nothing wrong with being gay - I had never, not even once, been exposed to the fact that there are people in the world who might perceive you negatively if you're homophobic.

 

Absolutely 100% of life experience to date had suggested that the strategic thing to do in any situation would be to come across as homophobic. After all, my life experience suggested, if you don't come across as homophobic, then people would think you're gay! And then Bad Things would happen!

 

(I wasn't clear what these Bad Things were, but the way my classmates talked about the idea of Gay left no room for doubt that it was Very, Very Bad.)

I hadn't even thought as far as deciding whether or not to be homophobic myself. All I knew was that 100% of the empirical evidence to date suggested that it was unsafe to not be homophobic. So I proceeded accordingly.

When the Seinfeld episode ended without anything bad happening to Jerry and George, I was completely baffled. This was completely outside of my experience or frame of reference. The story seemed completely unresolved. I literally could not understand it.

And that's what 90s small town homophobia was like - it left a sheltered 15-year-old unable to comprehend a situation where people can just . . . not be homophobic, and that's okay.

***

 

What's interesting is how 15-year-old me reacted to this after giving the matter a little thought.

 

Jerry and George acted as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay, and nothing bad happened to them! Furthermore, no discourse about this had reached me - no one was talking about how it was bad or horrible or shocking that nothing bad happened to them for acting as though there wasn't anything wrong with being gay.

This meant that maybe, for some people, in some parts of society . . . it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay? The characters on Seinfeld were clearly cooler than me, so maybe the parts of society where it's okay to act as though there isn't anything wrong with being gay are cooler than me?

Now, if, like 15-year-old me, you're an awkward, dorky, bullied teenager living in a small town, it can be strategic to give the impression that you have hidden depths, aspects of yourself that are way cooler and edgier than even have an opportunity to become apparent in such a limited and uncool environment than school.

This (brand new! unprecedented!) notion that there's nothing wrong with being gay provided this very kind of opportunity. Next time the idea of gay came up, I could proceed as though there's nothing wrong with it, as though it's unremarkable and not worth mentioning! Maybe I could even pretend to be confused about why people think it's a problem! Surely that would be a super edgy thing to do that vastly exceeds the cool potential of our small town!

So I tucked the idea away in my metaphorical toolbox, and proceeded with life.

The opportunity to use it arose a couple of years later.

I was sitting in the library doing my calculus homework and listening to my discman when a classmate sat down across the table from me.

I didn't know this guy very well. The periphery of his social circle overlapped with the periphery of my social circle, but we had very little in common. He had a beard, drove a pickup truck, seemed like he'd know where to buy drugs - way cooler and edgier than me, and the very demographic who is likely to bully me! But, despite these demographic indicators, he had never been unkind to me, and sometimes had been a touch more kind than strictly necessary.

He sat down across from me, pulled out his own homework, and asked me what I was listening to.

"Ani DiFranco," I replied.

"Did you know she's very popular with the gay community?" he asked.

I didn't actually know that. In fact, I hadn't the slightest clue! (My first Ani DiFranco album was Dilate, and I hadn't yet discovered the online fandom.)

I briefly panicked: Oh shit, now he's going to think I'm gay! And if I deny it, he's going to think I'm hiding being gay!!

Then I remembered: when you want to be cool and edgy, act like there's nothing wrong with it.

So I looked him dead-ass in the eye and said, "Yes, she is."

Then, with a level of savvy I didn't even know I possessed, I offered him an earbud. "Would you like to listen?"

He accepted the earbud, and we sat there doing our math homework and listening to Ani DiFranco. And no Bad Things happened.

And, in that small town in the 90s, that was what passed for progress.

Cause and effect

In 2009, City of Toronto workers, including garbage collectors, went on strike because the employer was trying to take away their sick days and leave them with a much worse arrangement.

 

Media coverage at the time (including, bizarrely, the Toronto Star, whose stated principles explicitly include being pro-labour) villainized these workers, stoking public anger against them.

Rob Ford leveraged this anger to be elected as mayor.

Doug Ford leveraged Rob Ford's apparent popularity to be elected first as city councillor, then as MPP, and eventually as Premier of Ontario.

Where he took sick days away from workers in a pandemic, among many other disastrous policies.

Here in this third year of a pandemic that those in power have no desire to end, I wonder where we as a city and as a province would be if the City of Toronto hadn't tried to take away workers' sick days.

There wouldn't have been a strike. Rob Ford wouldn't have become mayor. Doug Ford would be running a label company (or would be city councillor at worst). Ontario would almost certainly have a government better suited to the task of getting us through a pandemic. (And also, Toronto municipal workers would have a better sick day regime and therefore be better able to avoid spreading COVID.) Toronto would likely have a different municipal government as well, since it was Rob Ford's mayorality that led to John Tory being considered even remotely palatable. (Remember in 2007 when Ontario rejected him for being too far right?)

***

On a personal note, there's one vital thing that would be different:

One change made under Rob Ford's mayorality was to contract out part of Toronto's garbage collection to Green For Life.

On February 17, 2018, at 2:30 in the morning, I was in bed fast asleep when I was frightened awake by a horrific noise.

I jumped out of bed, ran to the window to see what the noise was . . . and woke up on the floor with an enormous lump on the back of my head.

Every aspect of life has been more difficult since.

The source of the noise that frightened me awake? A Green For Life contractor seemed to think 2:30 in the morning is a good time to empty a dumpster into a dump truck.

Butterfly wings.

Horoscopes

Toronto Star:

The day brings a burst of energy and creative inspiration our way, which can bode well for work-related projects, as well as personal goals. However, as we head toward the afternoon, the vibe changes significantly, leaving us feeling a bit heavy or dejected. We can beat the blues by ramping up the self-care and focusing on what brings us joy. At the same time, it might be helpful to lean on the support of others when it comes to working through any difficulties. Being open to new experiences also can help us break out of a bad mood.

Globe & Mail: 

There may be a tendency over the coming year to go looking for conflict, most likely just for the fun of it. For best results, channel your aggressive instincts into positive and creative areas. Sporting and other physical activities will help burn off excess energy.

It's interesting how the Star horoscope just talks about today - no attempt to predict the year whatsoever!

Last year's Toronto Star horoscope made the bravely specific prediction that I would fall in love in May.

I did not fall in love with a person. But, if I do flail about trying to find an interpretation that makes this statement true, it's possible that I did fall in love with no working, as I took a full month off work for the first time in my life and discovered I didn't miss it at all. (Unfortunately, I still need an income and this is still the easiest and most reliable way for me to earn an income.)

I'm starting the new years with 2 full months off work. We'll see where that takes me...

My second COVID vaccine experience

My first vaccine was AstraZeneca, administered at a local Rexall. At the time, I was told to wait patiently and Rexall would contact me for my second vaccine.

However, the rules changed in the interim, so, when I was 8 weeks after my first dose, the current protocol was to find your own second dose.

I put myself on all the pharmacy waiting lists in my area, and tried the Ontario vaccine booking system (which is how you book Toronto Public Health clinics) several times a day. Unfortunately, the vaccine booking tool initially wasn't able to meet demand - I kept getting the walking man or error messages or no appointments available, and on the rare occasions when there was an appointment somewhere I could plausibly get to, the appointment would disappear by the time I clicked through.

Finally, after a week of vaccine-hunting (i.e. 9 weeks after my first shot), I was able to secure an appointment at the Toronto Public Health clinic in my neighbourhood (North Toronto Memorial Community Centre) for 11 weeks after my first shot.

There was a pop-up clinic for which I was eligible 2 days before my scheduled appointment (I didn't go because I'd rather attend a scheduled appointment just a couple of blocks from home than go all the way out to Dufferin to wait in line in the rain), but none of the pharmacies came through with an appointment before then.

***

I arrived at NTMCC at the appointment time, and was greeted by firefighters (I don't know why either) who offered me hand sanitizer, asked if I had an appointment (although didn't verify it), and instructed me to get out my health card. 

Then I walked into the building, and passed through a series of people who scanned my card and/or asked me screening questions. There was a long line (indoors, masked, social distancing stickers on the floor), but it was moving steadily.

 

They were offering Moderna to age 18+ and Pfizer to age 12-17. They made very clear at every point that I'd be getting Moderna that day. 

 

I passed through about six different checkpoints each doing different screening before I arrived at the table where I was injected with the actual vaccine. The needle went into my arm about 15 minute after my scheduled appointment time.

The nurse who issued a vaccination gave me a card indicating the time I was allowed to leave, then I was then sent to a recovery area to wait out my 15 minutes. It was a separate room with physically-distanced chairs for patients to sit in. There was an optional questionnaire about social determinants of health to fill out while we waited.

 

There was a large clock on the front wall of the room, and when the time indicated on the card the vaccinating nurse gives you has been reached, you can go to the desk at the front and check out. The vaccine receipt is issued when you check out (meaning if you sneak out early, you won't get proof of vaccination). I think they might also validate parking or something - they asked me if I'd parked in the underground garage, but since I'd walked I don't actually know where that line of inquiry was going.

 

I left the clinic 32 minutes after my appointment time, and 17 minutes after the needle went into my arm.

***

Various logistics:

- I had a specific scheduled appointment time, but I don't believe they ever confirmed my identity against the scheduled appointments. I was asked if I had an appointment, but I didn't perceive anything to be checking me against a list of names and appointment times. They did swipe my health card several times so it might have happened stealthily there.

 

- All the screening questions, and the injection itself, took place in open areas where you were visible to others and it was possible to be overheard by others. There was a sign saying that modesty areas are available upon request, but I didn't request one so I have no insight into how they worked.

- The proof of vaccination I received was printed on receipt paper, and doesn't seem very durable.

- Every single person I interacted with or witnessed was actively warm and welcoming and helpful, even though they were literally repeating the exact same interaction with hundreds of people over and over throughout the day. The nurse who gave me my injection was very patient with my enthusiastic chattering about the Euro cup final. (It was my neighbourhood's first collective sports experience since the Raptors won in 2019 and I got caught up in the emotion!) The staff in the recovery room were also very patient with the white lady ranting about how the (optional) questionnaire (where you could check as many boxes as you want and fill out an "other" blank at the end of every question) thought she was white when she Wasn't Really because There Are Different Parts of Europe. (Spoiler alert: she was even whiter than me and her ancestors have not spoken anything but English in living memory.)

***

After-effects and recovery:

About 3 hours after the vaccine, the injection site started hurting, way more than I expected.

I tossed and turned all night, maybe scraping together a total of 6 hours of sleep in 12 hours spent in bed. When I finally got out of bed (16 hours after the vaccine), my arm hurt so much I couldn't lift my arm enough to wash my hair. My temperature was 1 degree above my normal (37.2 on a thermometer that normally gives me a reading of 36.2).

I took a standard Tylenol (my doctor advised me to take Tylenol rather than my usual ibuprofen for vaccine symptoms, but also emphasized that this advice is not appropriate for all patients) and about half an hour later was able to lift my arm enough to shower. My lymph nodes became inflamed shortly afterwards, and I spent the whole day after my vaccine feeling a general malaise. It reminded me of when you have a nasty cold but take Dayquil or something - no specific symptoms, but a general feeling of under the weather.

I slept 12 straight hours the second night after the vaccine, and woke up on Day 3 with my armpit lymph nodes so inflamed that I could see them when I looked in the mirror. There was still some mild but appreciable pain in the injection site, but I had a full range of motion and full use of my arm.

I continued to be moodier than made sense under the circumstances for the next week or so, and my lymph nodes gradually shrank back to their normal size during that time. 

My period started right on schedule, 2 days after the vaccine, and was well within the range of normal.

 

The Rexall that administered my first vaccine contacted me 3 days after I received my second vaccine to book an appointment. I cancelled all the other waitlists as soon as I received the shot, so I don't know how well they did or did not work.

 

***

 

Overall, I preferred the experience of getting vaccinated in a pharmacy. I felt like I had more time and space to ask questions, and more thoughtful and personalized attention. (I likely could have asked questions at the mass vaccination clinic and I would have done so if my questions had been actionable, but I felt like I'd be delaying the whole process if I took the time to ask whether the vaccine would attack the spike proteins of other coronaviruses.) However, I do recognize that pharmacies would not be an efficient enough way to get the kind of vaccine rollout we need, so mass vaccination clinics are a key component of the vaccine strategy.

I found the side-effects of the Moderna less bothersome than the AstraZeneca. Even though the pain of the Moderna injection site temporarily limited my mobility, I found the alternating fever and chills that came with AstraZeneca more disruptive, and the heavy bloating that came in my subsequent PMS week more uncomfortable.

In which I do literally nothing for 4 weeks and then start doing stuff again

In April and May, I took 4 straight weeks off work, the longest vacation I've taken in my life.

I didn't accomplish a thing.

It was glorious!

I knew I could very easily fall into the trap of "Ooh, time off work! Time to get productive and catch up on stuff!" and then get stressed out because I didn't achieve enough. So I made a rule that there is no productivity obligation whatsoever for this time off. And I certainly lived up to that expectation!

I learned that, if left to my own devices, I sleep 9-10 hours every night and become extremely nocturnal.

I learned that, if left to my own devices, the amount of stuff I get done in a day is about equal to the amount of non-work stuff I get done on a work day.

I learned that it is literally impossible for me to keep up with all the Good Omens fanfiction being written, even if I do nothing else all day.

I learned that my system is in fact unsustainable - even if I weren't working, I would fall behind. I don't yet know what to do with that or how to change it.

 

I also learned that, in the absence of obligations or when I otherwise don't know what to do with myself, I default into following my system, so it would probably serve me better to come up with a replacement system than to just go systemless.

I learned that, emotionally and intellectually, I don't need to work. I didn't find myself missing employment or productivity or translation. I didn't end up translating random internet texts just to scratch that itch. I'm perfectly fine being completely unproductive and contributing nothing to society. (It would certainly have been interesting to do this experiment before my head injury and see if the results were the same! But I didn't know my head injury was coming - if I had known, I would have just stayed in bed to avoid fainting in the first place).

But, unfortunately, money is irritatingly finite and the most reliable way for me to make the money I need is with the job I currently have, so back to work I went.

I found that working is not particularly difficult, but it is irritatingly time-consuming. Every day there's some soupçon of frustration that it takes a non-zero amount of time to do my day's work. 

However, my experience with doing so little in a day when I was on vacation makes me less frustrated with how little non-work stuff I get done on a work day. Why on earth should I get more done on top of a full day's work than I do in the middle of a month off work in the middle of a pandemic when I have literally nothing else to do? I guess now I'm just . . . a person who doesn't get much done.

And maybe eventually I'll figure out how to work that into a new system.

My 2021 new year's resolution

 I hadn't been planning on making a resolution, but a simple and useful one came to me a couple of weeks ago:

While the coffee brews, I'll do something I've been procrastinating.

Normally, while the coffee is brewing, I stare blankly at the internet doing nothing - after all, I can't do anything productive when I haven't had my coffee yet!

So now, instead of doing nothing, I'll do something I've been procrastinating. Something small, because it doesn't take that long for coffee to brew. Empty the dishwasher. Break down a cardboard box for recycling. Make an online purchase.

Since it doesn't take very long for coffee to brew, I might not finish my task. I might just empty one rack of the dishwasher, or just manage to remove the tape from the box, or just add one item to my cart. That's okay. I can stop when the coffee is ready. Or I can keep up the momentum, whatever feels right in the moment.

This works well for me for several reasons:

1. I respond well to "sprints" - working full-out at a task until some external phenomenon interrupts me. (Yes, I've heard of the pomodoro method. No, it hasn't solved all my life problems.) Coffee brewing time is the perfect length for a sprint.

2. This doesn't require any additional time commitment. Not even the infamous "just 15 minutes a day!" Coffee brewing time was previously unused dead time, and I've found a way to make use of it.

3. It helps me address the things that fall through the cracks in my system. Some things pile up because there isn't a place for them in my system (which I never managed to figure out how to reboot), or because there isn't enough room for them in my system. This lets me make progress on those things without having to figure out how to revamp the system, or having to take the emotional risk of completely disregarding the system.

4. There are no specific "shoulds" or tacit prerequisites on my "to do while the coffee brews" list. Part of the problem with my system is I've inadvertently imposed prerequisites on myself. I keep falling into a trap of "I can't do the thing that really needs doing because the system dictates that I have to do other things first!" (Unfortunately, removing prerequisites isn't sufficient to fix the system and sometimes would bring its own problems.) But while the coffee brews, anything that needs doing meets the requirements.

I've been doing this for a few weeks already, and have made a noticeable dent in my tangible and mental to-do piles. (If you could see my piles, you'd be like "That's an after picture???" and the answer is yes, it is.) We'll see if it's enough to affect my quality of life in the long run.

40

I turn 40 today!

I think I am in a good place in life.

- Apart from the fact that I'm not married, I've done literally everything I imagined doing with my life. I have no bucket list.

- I'm weathering the pandemic well, and sustainably. I was sprinting at first and had to dial it back to a marathon pace, but I can keep this up long-term if necessary.

- So many of the life decisions I made when I was younger - so many of the life decisions people tried to dissuade me from! - have paid off during the pandemic. Obviously luck and privilege also contributed strongly to my coming through the pandemic well, but it's remarkable to me how basically every life decision people tried to dissuade me from paid off during this pandemic.

- My job comes easily to me. It's harder after my head injury, but still doesn't meet the criteria of objectively hard.

- Based on information to date, buying my condo was the right decision.

- My body continues to do what I need it to as well as it ever has. Any issues are head-injury-related, not aging-related. (Of course, I'd also love for the head injury to no longer be a factor.)

- I have social capital, at least in the circles I move in. At work, with family and friends, in the community, I can say "I think we should do X" or "No, I won't be doing Y", and I'm heard and respected. I can also say "I don't know how this works, what do I do?" or "I'm frightened and confused" or "I can't lift this", and people help. (Again, privilege is certainly a factor, but it didn't work this way for me when I was younger.) In non-pandemic times, people I know will let me hold their baby, and even strangers will let me pet their dog.

- I've been following a lot of younger people on Twitter, and it makes me feel confident about the future and quite content to step aside and let the youth lead. They tend to be more radical than people I encounter in the natural course of my life (most of whom are my age or older), and I feel good about this. I like the idea of a world where people like me are dated and old-school and things are growing and evolving beyond what we could even imagine when we were visiting geocities sites with our dial-up modems.

- I've recently stumbled into a new fandom (Good Omens!) and it's really good for me. I'm going through the same kind of growth and evolution as when I fell into Eddie Izzard fandom 13 years ago, and I'm looking forward to seeing who I become when I emerge on the other side.

Horoscopes

 My birthday horoscopes ceased having any remotely accurate interpretation with my head injury, but I'm still recording them here for my own reference.

Globe and Mail:

Artistic activities must be giving every chance to thrive over the coming year, even if it means having to cut back on work and getting by on less financially. You’ve been promising to create something amazing for as long as you can remember, so get to it!

Toronto Star: 

Profound, patient and prepared, you are in it for the long haul. A project you passionately believe in begins and succeeds brilliantly in 2022. Your strongly controlled emotions will find an outlet this year. If single, you tend to be solitary, but you do fall in love this year, in May. If attached, your relationship adds much richness to your life. GEMINI is light and almost ethereal compared to you.

As an aside, my horoscopes promise me love every year and it never materializes. This year's Globe & Mail horoscope is the first one I can remember that didn't promise me love.

(Also, absolutely everyone in the world is light and almost ethereal compared to me, and I'm not sure why that's in my horoscope.)

Current status

My Babcia (my grandmother) died last week.  I'm still processing.

I've never not had a Babcia before.

She didn't die of COVID, but the pandemic still fucks everything up. No one could sit with Babcia and hold her hand. She never got to meet her two youngest great-grandchildren, both of whom were born during the pandemic.

I don't know when I'll be able to hug someone.

Even without the pandemic considerations, this is completely different from other bereavements I've had. It's a completely different emotional arc. I think maybe every bereavement is different. No one talks about this.

Horoscopes

Toronto Star

IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY: What you can expect this year is the unexpected. Once you find your life settling down and working well, do not be surprised at the wave of excitement that falls on you. Children and loved ones could be involved. If single, you could be overwhelmed by a series of passionate love affairs; with each affair, you might believe this is the right person. Let time be the judge. If attached, you will not be able to complain about boredom. It will be as if you are newlyweds or new lovers again. SCORPIO encourages you to live life with passion.

Globe and Mail:

A Mars-Pluto link on your birthday will add a touch of iron to your nature and anyone who thinks they can bully you is going to realize you are not the pushover they thought you were. What happened to your easygoing attitude? Who knows, but it’s gone!

The Star one just sounds exhausting. The Globe and Mail one kind of already happened as I tried to figure out how to make a life after my head injury.

Not blogathoning this year

Traditionally, I blogathon on Remembrance Day.

However, this year's goal is to eliminate things that don't serve me well, and blogathoning would not serve me well in the current context.

I do have a quite a few posts half drafted and they will come along in due course, it's just spending an entire day on it that would be unhelpful.

How I made my sweaters stop acting like clutter

While searching for a different old post, I found this old post about trying to figure out a way to stop my sweaters from cluttering up my living room, and I realized that I've solved the problem at some point.

When I'm sitting at my desk and I have to remove a sweater, I stand up. Then, as I'm removing the sweater, I take two steps until I'm standing in the door of my bedroom. Then I throw the sweater on my bed.

This means I have to hang up the sweater before I can go to sleep because it's lying on my bed, but that isn't too much of an imposition because my bedtime routine already includes putting away clothes that have ended up on my bed in the course of the day. (For example, when I'm dressing in the morning, I tend to take off my bathrobe and throw it on my bed. If I change clothes when I get home, I tend to lie the old ones on my bed.)

Yes, a perfectly diligent person wouldn't leave clothes lying around on the bed and would instead put them away immediately. But we've already established that I'm not a perfectly diligent person, and throwing the sweaters on the bed instead of hanging them on my desk chair puts the sweaters closer to where they should be while preventing them from cluttering up the room where they shouldn't be.

I don't remember when or why I started doing this, but it solves my silly problem!

The tight bra chronicles

Just over a month ago, for the very first time in my life, I desperately wanted to take my bra off when I got home.  As soon as the apartment door was closed behind me, I reached up my shirt (not even bothering to take off my coat), undid the hooks, and felt the relief of more pain than I'd realized I was experiencing.  But there was still some residual pain floating around in my back even after I undid the bra.

I conducted experiments in the days that followed, and the correlation was clear: bras were causing the back pain. The pain worsened and worsened as I wore a bra, was immediately relieved when I unhooked the bra, but residual pain lingered even after I removed the bra.

Which is a problem, because I have the kind of body where my breasts hurt if I don't wear a bra!

The weeks that followed were consumed with bra shopping and bra testing and immersing myself in solutions to back pain.  And finally, after much expense and despair, I think I have a bra paradigm that's not exacerbating the pain, and, in the absence of bras that are exacerbating the pain, I think my back is healing.  I have gone as long as six hours without adjusting or thinking about my bra, and the residual pain is such that I wouldn't even be noticing it if I weren't obsessing about how my back feels.

And this makes me feel hopeless.

Not for myself specifically - all signs point to me, personally, being on an improvement trajectory.  Rather, it makes me despair for all humanity.

This is such a stupid problem that, despite over a quarter-century of bra wearing, I could never have predicted.  Yes, I could see with my eyes that the old bras were a bit snug, but before this has only resulted in unsightly bulges, not unprecedented back pain.

And then it took significant time and resources to fix - time and resources that were only available to me because of the privilege I have that is not available to everyone.  Many people can't drop everything and spend hundreds of dollars on bras - for quite a few people, it may well be a choice between a bra that doesn't hurt and food for their family. (The single cheapest available bra that didn't exacerbate the pain was $60, but I needed a fitting from a store where the cheapest appropriate bra was $80 to figure out the approach to solve my problem.) Most people don't have a comfy work-from-home situation where they can switch their bra four times a day, or sit around slathered with Icy Hot or Voltaren, or take frequent yoga breaks. Many people might have to pick up extra hours at work wearing a painful bra to make the money they need to afford a non-painful bra!

What if I had to choose between feeding my children and getting a new bra? What if I were a refugee fleeing oppression with only the clothes on my back?  What if I lived somewhere where I didn't have access to expert bra fitters, or the internet access and/or savvy to find out options on the internet? What if I didn't have a credit card that I could use for online shopping?

And this is just one of the zillions and zillions of stupid little problems that could come sneaking up and disrupt people's lives!  Not to mention the zillions and zillions of much bigger problems that some people reading this are having, as they sit there saying "Ha, she thinks a bra that hurts is a real problem!"

***

It was a year ago this weekend that I had my head injury.  My eyesight still hasn't completely resolved, and my vision therapy progress has been stagnant for so many months that I think it may never completely resolve.

The head injury falls into an annoying space that, before it happened, I never knew existed: an injury that hinders your quality of life, perhaps permanently, but isn't serious enough to count as a disability.

I'm fortunate enough to have disability insurance, so I figured if something happened to me, I'd be fine.  If I can't work, I'd go on disability.

But I can work with the head injury, it's just harder, and takes more out of me so I have less left for the rest of life.  If I wanted to take sick leave and my manager asked for a doctor's note (my employer's policy is that it's up to the manager's judgement), I don't know if I'd be able to get one.  I certainly couldn't get the documentation necessary to go on disability.  So, basically, life is harder, but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.

As I googled around the idea of back pain, I discovered that it's similar - not even as a question of whether it counts as a disability, but just for whether it counts as a problem.

Medical criteria for evaluating back pain ask about whether it affects your sleep, your range of motion, whether it affects your daily activities. This affects none of those. It's a 1 on the pain scale. Even WebMD doesn't think I need to see a doctor unless it persists for over 6 weeks (and they probably mean six weeks from when I stopped wearing bras that worsened the pain.)

And when I read up on what happens when you go to the doctor for back pain, the emphasis seems to be on pain management, not on solving the underlying problem. (There doesn't seem much that can be done to solve the underlying problem, except take care of yourself and maybe it will go away eventually.) It seems quite likely the doctor would say "It goes away when you take an Advil? Great! Keep it up!"

So this is another area where life becomes harder but not bad enough to be permitted a respite.

How many more things like this are going to happen???  And what on earth do people with real problems do?

Horoscopes

Last year was the first year when my birthday horoscopes couldn't be interpreted as reflecting reality, possibly because the head injury came and disrupted everything. (Is that statement going to be true for the rest of my life???)

But here's this year's, just to see what happens:

Toronto Star:

This year you will learn to handle your temper. You might be feistier than others realize. You also can be spontaneous at times. Try to curb unexpected actions or words. You might find that you often see both sides of a problem. If you are single, you could attract a strong group of admirers. Your temper and volatile style could be a problem when dating, though. If you are attached, the two of you experience more closeness than in the recent past. Perhaps you will pursue a mutually enjoyed hobby together. CANCER can be quite nurturing.

My mother's sign is Cancer and she's always quite nurturing, so nothing new there.

They say the same sort of thing about "if you're single/if you're attached" every year, and it never comes to pass.  Someone more ambitious than I could look into whether they say that for every birthday.

Globe and Mail:

A full moon on your birthday suggests you will need to make a decision that not everyone will be happy with. What really matters, of course, is that you are happy with it. It’s time to let go of the past and to embrace your glorious future.

I've never in my life made a decision that absolutely everyone was happy with, so that's basic reality.  However, I have already decided to throw away my system and start over, so hopefully that will give me a glorious future.

My 2019 New Year's resolution

So I've been feeling that turning 38 is the beginning of a new chapter in my life, and trying to figure out what it's going to be.

Then, in the past few weeks, things keep happening where being perfectly diligent results in bad outcomes, but being less than perfectly diligent results in good outcomes.

And I realized this needs to be my next new year's resolution: be less diligent.

The need for less diligence isn't just a result of the bad luck I've been having the past couple of weeks.  It's also a result of the fact that my system hasn't been serving me well.

My system was originally designed when I was 22 and unemployed.  Social media didn't exist then, and my personal care required far less diligence.

Since then, whenever something comes up that I need or want to be part of my routine, I've been adding it to my system.  But I never took anything out, because everything in there seemed just as necessary as it has always been.  I did notice problems with this approach, but I still continued it.

However, since my head injury, this has all been snowballing.  What with the massive amounts of rest I needed in the aftermath of my head injury, and the general need to scale back on everything, and the addition of vision therapy to my routine, I'm essentially 6 months behind. Parts of the system were designed to be cumulative, so if I don't finish the task today I have to do it tomorrow, but since the head injury it has gotten ridiculous.  I feel hopelessly behind, which is a stupid feeling to be living with every single moment of every single day when you're meeting all your work deadlines and paying all your bills on time and getting ahead on your mortgage.

So my project for the next year is to destroy and rebuild my system.

I will continue following the current system until my birthday, but for the purpose of gathering data. I will note what aspects aren't serving me and reflect upon how to fix those problems.

Then, on my birthday, I will erase my backlog so I'm no longer "behind", introduce any fixes I think of between now and then, and continue following the system for the purpose of gathering data.

The next year will be spent pinpointing which aspects of the system don't serve me, and figuring out ways to fix them so they do serve me. Then I will reboot the system again on my 39th birthday, to reflect everything I've learned in the interim.

And, hopefully, I will enter the second half of my life with a system that serves me well and reflects my actual needs, rather than punishing me for not meeting some completely arbitrary standard of diligence.