Marching forth.

The winter flies past in a frozen heartbeat. It seems like you don't write anymore. Your evenings are filled with other things; things that seem inconsequential in isolation but together add up to form the bulk of your life. Going to yoga, talking to boys on the phone, getting halfway through the books you've been meaning to read and then abandoning them in favour of the shortest articles in the Atlantic Monthly and a Nora Ephron collection you've re-read a million times. Better than nothing, you figure.

As usual, spring fever hits early. Sadly, it manifests itself as a literal fever as well, and you spend ten days holed up in your living room, watching high quality television shows interspersed with season six of the Simpsons (arguably the finest season, or at least the one from which you've memorized the most lines), coughing until your lungs fall out, sleeping in long spurts. February's always the hardest month of the year. And somehow you survive it by spending the last half of it completely incapacitated. Not a bad plan, in hindsight.

And now it's March, that month of fickle weather and existential ambivalence. (Yes, yes, all months have that quality to you; no one's arguing with you on that one. We can come back to it later.) The clocks spring forward and you want your hour back. You can tell you're on the mend when you stop sleeping again--insomnia's almost a welcome friend at this point. There's this boy that you like and he's been writing these tiny quasi-memoir-y reviews of songs from the 90s and each one makes you cringe and grin as you learn more about him and think back on your own strange life and uncover more and more parallels between his road and yours. One night while you're talking to him on the phone you wander down to the basement and drag up an old box of your highschool mixtapes. I thought I'd lost these, you muse, thinking to yourself that sometimes things don't reveal themselves till you're really ready for them. (In some other universe this thought applies to something with much more gravitas than a box of mixtapes. That universe is not the one you're meant to inhabit.) You spend a few days listening to them, falling down the rabbit hole. Once more you feel the palpable uncertainty and strange exhilaration of your youth. You remember particular nights and particular roads, hands held and boys kissed and friends departed. There's a story in here, you think to yourself. One story, at least.

There's a lot you could write about, but you don't. Not yet. Usually when you're not writing it's because you're too far inside your own head to find a way out, but this time it feels different. This time it feels like, for the first time in a long time, you're all the way out, opened up and awake and tentatively ready. For what, you're not quite sure. There's a story out here, of that much you are certain. You just have to live through it first.

snow days.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
--Robert Frost

On this grey and quiet day, I'm thinking back to other snow days I have known.

January, 1999.

This was the year the mayor of Toronto frantically called in the army. Just down the road, we Hamiltonians kept calm and carried on. We had something like three snow days in a row that winter; it just kept on tumbling out of the sky all week. Friday was the third day, I think. It was only a couple of weeks before my final round of final exams. I was finishing highschool a semester early, theoretically to EXPLORE and GROW but realistically to sleep late and slack off and drive around aimlessly with my boyfriend. (For the record, I regret nothing.) I spent those couple of days hunkered down in my bedroom, studying. For all my slackerish posturing, I was fundamentally a do-gooder kid. I liked school, and I liked writing papers, and I liked doing well. I felt excited and somewhat existential about finishing highschool, and I took advantage of the extra study time with academic enthusiasm and mild melancholy. I'd wander down to the kitchen every couple of hours, sit at the island with my brother and my mom, then wander back up to piles of books and notes and a Joni Mitchell record on my recently inherited turntable. I have always been a top-drawer hunkerer.

By Friday night I was ready for a change of scene. My boyfriend was playing a concert that night--he was a drummer and percussionist in the city-wide youth orchestra, and every year the Hamilton Philharmonic would invite someone from each section to play in one of their performances. That January evening it was his turn. By some strange miracle the concert hadn't been cancelled and so I met his mom downtown in front of Hamilton Place and we sat together. I don't remember what pieces they played, but I remember where I was sitting--Orchestra level, stage left--because it was the same section I'd sat in with my parents through a million Sunday Symphony concerts. I remember watching him on that stage, a stage I'd played and sung on many times in choir concerts and mass string orchestra versions of the William Tell Overture. I felt proud of him and also personally relieved, for once a member of the audience instead of a part of the performance.

After the concert, his mom dropped us off at a friend's place in Westdale. Because of the snow and the treacherous roads and also, probably, the fact that we were the teenage equivalent of an old married couple, I was allowed to stay over at his house that night. Later on we walked home over the King Street bridge, down Dundurn to York and on to Inchbury. It was so quiet and still. We held hands and shuffled along and leaned into one another as we'd been leaning for the last two years. It's a good feeling, to feel so familiar with a person, to walk silently down streets you know well, to leave a trail of footprints behind you.

music to like boys to, volume 2: old days, new days.

In the old days, here's how it went. Boy meets girl. Boy has a bit of a thing for girl. Boy and girl tell each other all their best anecdotes and flirt shyly with each other across cafeteria tables and library study booths. Boy makes girl mix tape/CD. Girl listens to mix while lying on dorm room carpet or living room throw rug. Girl swoons quietly and asks boy if he wants to come over later. Boy says yes. Girl convinces herself that she can play it cool, oh yeah, for sure.



These are the new days. Here's how it goes. Girl sends boy message online. Boy responds. Boy and girl tell each other all their best anecdotes and flirt shyly across invisible fibre-optic networks. Boy moves out of province. Girl gets a little bummed out. Boy and girl spend an inordinate amount of time talking online and on the phone, forcing girl to confront her crippling fear of telephone conversations. As it turns out, it's not all that bad. Boy makes girl a playlist and uploads it online. Girl cannot for the life of her figure out how the hell to get playlist link to open. Boy calls girl. Girl and boy spend about ten minutes doing quasi-tech support, come up empty handed, and then talk about their respective prom nights and troublemaking pasts for two and a half hours. Girl goes to work the next morning extremely fatigued.

The next day, boy messages girl and apologizes for keeping her up half the night. Girl demurs. Boy vainly attempts, yet again, to help girl download the damned mix. Boy downloads Dropbox. Girl sifts through a zillion emails trying to locate her Dropbox account information. Girl manages to download playlist but can't upload it to her media player. Boy calls girl before bed and gently suggests she might need to upgrade her operating system. Girl and boy quote the Simpsons to one another for awhile. Boy tells girl he really wishes he'd asked her out before he left Ontario. Girl listens to playlist on an iPad she doesn't entirely know how to use. Girl swoons quietly and then moonily prices out eastbound flights. Girl doesn't even bother trying to play it cool, as it has never gotten her anywhere particularly interesting anyway.

A lot of things change, but the parts that really matter stay pretty much the same.

music to like boys to, volume 1.

You meet on the internet. It's 2006, and online dating hasn't quite reached its forthcoming ubiquity; it's still weird to admit that you do it at all. Over the summer you tried it out--you're in a new city, newly on your own for the first time in years, nearly recovered from an epic breakup. For the most part, the internet is a horrifying wasteland. You come up empty-handed but for a few great war stories of dudes who tell you they're falling in love with you on the second date, dudes who bring inflatable butt pillows to the restaurant, dudes who reveal their frontal lobe damage and twelve-step program attendance with an offhandedness that you find alarming. You spend some time feeling wildly sorry for yourself and drop out for a few months, then drop back in in November. It's late autumn in Ottawa and the days are short. You start to get the feeling that you'd be okay with something more, that something more might be out there.

You send him a message because he says in his profile that he's looking for a girl with good taste in music. Well hell, you think to yourself, I've got this one on lock.  He writes back soon afterward and you engage in the deceptively intimate exchange that comes from knowing someone only through words on a screen. He wants to meet, and you do too. You give him your real email instead of the dummy one you reserve for other suitors. You are cautiously optimistic.

Your first date is at a bar in the Market with the best jukebox and burgers in town. He's nervous, you can tell. He's sweet and shy and funny and you are charmed. You have a car, but you walked downtown in case you drank too much (you're not one for following the First Date Sobriety Rules). After dinner and a few tipsy pints the two of you walk slowly up to Rideau Street, talking about comic books and Thrush Hermit. Your shoulders brush against each other's in that tentative and  lovely way that is both purposeful and accidental. As each bus goes by you think to yourself, oh please, don't let this one be mine. Just a few more minutes.

You go out again a few days later, for brunch at your favourite pub on Elgin Street. You drink too much coffee and he offers to walk you home, and of course you say yes, because what else is there to say.  The two of you walk up Elgin and cut past the canal and over to First Avenue, climb the stairs up to your attic apartment, sit down on the couch, and kiss. It is the warmest you've felt in a long while. He has a tattoo of the X Men symbol on his shoulder. It's the middle of the afternoon. You feel a little dizzy. Later on he goes home and your best friend picks you up, and you drive to a party together and you tell her, I think this is something. Sure, she replies, having heard that song before.

A few days later you meet up with him again. He's made you a mix CD, and you're thrilled to discover that you love everything on it. Along with the mix is a list of the songs he picked, and the reasons why. Oh, my heart, you think to yourself. There's an obscure Plaskett song on there, an Interpol track you've never heard before along with the story of the time he saw them in New York City. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Folk Implosion, and oh my lord your favourite Dears song. Get out of town, you think to yourself. This is too good.

It is, and it isn't. The two of you will be inseparable for awhile. When you sleep over at his place he'll sometimes walk you home in the morning, snow falling from steely skies. He'll tell you he loves you and you'll echo his words as you've longed to for weeks. Then you will start to feel trapped and bored and nervous. Maybe a deep and silent part of you already knows all this is coming, as you lie there on the floor in the early days, listening to a Blur song you haven't heard in years. Maybe you're not ready to admit it. Not yet. 

Six months or so down the road you'll be the one who ends it, and as you do that same deep part of you will know it's a mistake.  You're still wounded from your last broken heart, though, and you tell yourself it's easier to do the breaking this time, rather than just wait around for him to shatter you. These are the stories we tell ourselves, over and over again.

Years later you'll still think of him in that fond, wistful way that is so tritely typical of all lost loves, as the one that got away, or maybe just the one you pushed away. You'll hold onto that CD for a long time. When you buy a new car you'll move it over from one glove box to another. You'll still listen to it every once in awhile, because you can't help but wonder. And really, regardless of all that mess, it's a really goddamned good mix.

winter break mix tape.

Given my previously explained love of the mixtape, I'm trying something new on the blog this year, in the form of occasional mixes for particular moments. Eventually I'm hoping to become tech savvy enough to create an actual downloadable file on some sort of a computer and post it here (I am told that such a thing can be done! I shouldn't have broken up with that DJ I dated last spring before he showed me how! Ah, regret), but for now, you're just going to have to live with a Youtube playlist.

Anyway, this first installment is music for a winter vacation. This year, for the first time since probably grad school, I had a period of time that actually resembled a Christmas break. Sure, I worked a day or two here and there, but there were no snowbound car-treks down the 401, no frantic rushes back to an underheated apartment and an ornery cat. I had the chance to actually settle into the holidays, and I even had a couple of days following Christmas with nothing but time to hunker down and hole up. It made me both nostalgic for Christmas breaks in years past (surreptitious trips to the park in the snow to meet pals from highschool, late nights in the basement watching television, the glow of the Christmas tree in a darkened front window) and utterly thrilled with my Christmas Present. So in that vein, here's a mix of songs, old and new, to celebrate the end of a long and lingering holiday, to anticipate with both dread and relief the dark days of winter ahead, to burrow, and of course, to dance like a motherfucking fool in your living room.



Here's the breakdown:

1. Pearl Jam--Corduroy (everything has changed, absolutely nothing's changed.)
2. Joel Plaskett Emergency--You're Mine (because he's always on my list.)
3. Jack White--Missing Pieces
4. The Lumineers--Classy Girls (a song I hope to live by this year).
5. M. Ward--Lullabye and Exile (a song for late nights and moony thoughts.)
6. Django Django--Hail Bop (I like some harmonies with my indie dance pop.)
7. The Flying Burrito Brothers--Wild Horses (oh man, oh man.)
8. Sloan--Bells On (the song that has always and will always slay me dead.)
9. Vampire Weekend--Taxi Cab (a song for a snowy walk at dusk.)
10. New Radicals--You get What You Give (the guiltiest pleasure.)
11. Robyn--Dancing On My Own (my JAM for 2013, mark my words.)


You can also listen here.

2012: once more, with feeling.

Inspired all over again by Jen's list, I realized that one Best Of list is never, ever enough. So here are some other things I learned this year, in no particular order, and with links.

1. It's hard to go wrong when you make the decision to travel the unpaved roads of Costa Rica in  a 6-man golf cart.

2. I'm not very good at being the Cool Girl. More on this in 2013.

3. I'm probably actually smarter and prettier than I'll ever allow myself to believe.

4. I miss Nora Ephron and Maurice Sendak. Quite a lot. Here are wonderful obituaries for each of them, by Lena Dunham and Tony Kushner, respectively.

5. I should spend more time re-reading. In 2013, I'm going to start with Kurt Vonnegut and Virginia Woolf, two authors who meant so very much to me at such particular points in my life.

6. There is no shame in going Full Margot Tennenbaum on a weekly basis (by this I mean tying a TV to your bathroom radiator and filling the bathtub and holing up with something embarrassing as you slowly boil yourself down to a human prune. I suggest Beverly Hills 90210).

7. Some movies are worth waiting months to see, if it means seeing them with the right person and in the right city. In this case, I am talking about Moonrise Kingdom, in Vancouver, with my Best West Coast Friend Tara.

8. My heart's so firmly and massively on my sleeve that I can barely fit a cardigan over it sometimes. Luckily (and somewhat inexplicably) it still keeps me pretty warm.

9. The path to my heart consists, at least in part, of you telling me the story of how and where and when and why you bought the last book in the Harry Potter series.

10. Yoga won't save you. Not the way you want it to. But as Tara said, it might give you what you need to save yourself (although rarely in the way you envisioned, and always with sorer hamstrings and less quiet minds than you'd hoped for).

11. There's a paragraph from Blake Nelson's amazing book, Girl (possibly my favourite book ever, by the by), that has long summed up my deepest anxiety, and I keep hoping that it will stop ringing so true, and this is it, slightly condensed, from the part where Andrea's making her way back from camp after losing her virginity:

"Then it was 2:00 AM. I was like in a trance, just so tired and cried out and used up. And we stopped at an overpass and I stepped off the bus and the night was so clear and cold and my brain was like a huge echo chamber, totally empty except for the last fading sounds of the summer. ...And as we pulled into Portland I had this horrible feeling of wanting to go back because what if that's all there was? What if that's as close as you got? And I called my dad from the station and he was freaking out because I hadn't called. SO then I just sat there waiting for him, staring at my dirty tennis shoes and thinking how incredibly stupid I was if I expected life to be anything else but failed love and mindless sex and crying all night in bus stations."

I don't know what I've learned about that per se, I just like to quote it whenever I can.

12. It's okay to want to be loved the way you were loved when you were young: quietly, adoringly, to a soundtrack of sensitive indie pop songs, under the stars, on a long late walk home. Gently, uncertainly, impossibly. Yeah, it's okay.

Happy New Year, my ducklings.

a year from the rearview mirror, 2012.

Well, I'll say this for 2012: It was not boring. I traveled a lot, and went out with a whole raft of weird boys, and lost friends, and learned a fair bit about what it is that I really need (that part's still a secret). Here's my usual random assortment of Bests for 2012; I would love to read yours, if you feel like it.

Joel Plaskett lyrics that best sum up my life, basically: "Got drunk at a party/Drinking red wine and Bacardi/My constitution ain't that hardy/And I'm not much good at mingling."

Most temporally jarring moment: Scanning through photos of dudes on OkCupid and suddenly realizing that this one is standing in the kitchen of the house you grew up in (I'd know that bright blue countertop anywhere). The guy had a bunch of photos of himself from inside my old house, so I figure he must've bought the place. I sent him a message, asking him if he lived there, but I never got a reply, which is too bad, because I feel like that could've been the start of a really interesting story. Also, given my penchant for both awkwardness and nostalgia, I really thought it would be hilarious to date a guy who now sleeps in the bedroom wherein I lost my virginity. 

Best way to tell, with absolute certainty, that it is time to break up with your boyfriend: When, on your birthday, the waitress at brunch does more to wish you well than he does. But seriously, huge props to the adorable girl at the West Town who so kindly stuck a candle in a single-serving peanut butter package--it was wonderful. Who knew that the straw that broke the camel's back could also be so whimsical and delicious? 

Best writing, self-deprecating judgement category: I guess I was pretty proud of how the Valentine Project entries came out. My greatest strength, in both writing and life, seems to be my ability to lay my heart bare; writing those posts made me realize there's nothing really wrong with that.

Best Joel Plaskett show: Oh, it's always a tie. I saw Joel three times this year: in April, in Ottawa, at the Charles Bronson Centre with Freya; in October, in Hamilton Place, on the stage I used to sing on with my children's choir; and in December, during a 5-night stint at the Horseshoe in Toronto. All three shows fucking ruled. Plaskett shows are like snowflakes, each one unique and lovely in its own way.

Best non-Joel Plaskett show: Man, this could go one of about a million different ways. I've gone to a lot of shows this year--32 really is the new 22 (wait, no one says that? Well they OUGHT to). I guess I'll settle on Sloan's Twice Removed tour in November. There are few things that feel better than hearing a band you've loved for a million years play through their best album in its entirety.  When they got to Bells On, I felt like I might throw up. When they got to I Can Feel It, I felt like my faith in humanity had been restored. Not bad for a Monday night.

Best outdoor concert: Harvest Picnic at Christie Lake on Labour Day weekend. A part of my heart lives at that conservation area, and for the second year in a row I was lucky enough to spend a long and sunny day there, listening to the Sadies and Gord Downie and Emmylou Harris, swimming at the beach, hanging out with my friends and my family, eating the best ice cream in the universe. It was a day that felt pregnant with possibility. The day after that show, my friend Kat and I got up early and drove up to her cottage for one last Indian Summer weekend on the lake, paddling our own canoe. It is a good way to live.

Best compliment from a dude:  "Honestly, if I made a list of all the cool things for a girl to be, I think you would be like Weird Science for me." (I am paraphrasing, but only very slightly.)

Best scene in Girls: Episode 5, when Hannah is at home in Michigan, and she's just gotten home from boning the pharmacist she knew from highschool. Adam calls her and tells her he wishes she were back in New York, more demonstrative and direct than he's been so far. She stands on her parents' front lawn looking really defeated and wistful as he tells her about the crackhead outside his window, and they fade out with the Fleet Foxes playing that song about how he's now older than his parents were when they started having children. I don't think Girls is a perfect show, but MAN it's got some really incredible moments that feel ripped from the pages of my own existential navel-gazing memoirs. The combined intimacy and distance of that phone call, that feeling of being so close and also so far, standing outside your parents' house in old pajamas, head hanging low. If you are nonplussed about Girls I hope you give it another shot, I really do.

Best musical re-discovery: Well really, I've been listening to these guys all along, but last winter, during a series of emotionally fraught bus trips back and forth to Toronto, I really felt like the Walkmen's album You and Me was just about the only thing keeping me sane. Sometimes it's just the right record at the right time, I guess.

Best literary reference in a young adult novel: A quote from Richard Hugo in The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green. Green always weaves incredible intellectual and emotional moments into his brilliant, tragic, hilarious writing, and Fault In Our Stars is no exception.  The Hugo quote is this:

"Say your life broke down. Your last good kiss
Was years ago." 

It comes in one of the many sweet and heartwrenching conversations between the star-crossed teenagers in the novel. Green wrote that it's his favourite line break. As a former English nerd, I love thinking about favourite line breaks. But mostly, I just love a perfectly placed, evocative allusion.

Best epigraph: This quote by Sandra Cisernos at the beginning of This Is How You Lose Her, by Junot Diaz (a book that will break your heart, incidentally, if you're in the mood for it):

"Okay, we didn't work, and all memories to tell you the truth aren't good. But sometimes there were good times. Love was good. I loved your crooked sleep beside me and never dreamed afraid. There should be stars for great wars like ours."

It's been a year of emotional learning, a year of heartache and joy and wistful nostalgia, a year I'll write about many years from now as a time when I became increasingly okay with the notion that my life looked exactly NOTHING like I had expected it to. I hope it's been as memorable for everyone else.