The Social Post (and some other stuff)

What more joy is there in the world than spending time with the other humans who know and love you? Really, pretty much everything pales in comparison.

These past four months have felt like a few weeks to me, but at the same time, certain things are creaky enough that I can tell it's been a while. All the same, some things just slip back into their old comfortable patterns, and this feels best of all.

Have been a perpetual guest at Janey's, stayed up obscenely late over tea with Doretta, done some writing brainstorming and riffed off some Archie comic jokes with Jeremy. The other night I saw Tobias, who I haven't seen in years. I can't remember how many. He seemed taller and I had forgotten what a happy giggly person he is. I finally heard him DJ something (after having been the kind of bad friend that, for years, never comes to your show) and it was great. Doretta and I fell asleep watching "M" (only cause it was 2:30 in the a.m) and the next night, I had the delight of sitting next to her as we watched "A Series of Unfortunate Events" unfold on the screen. She has this great, loud, assertive laugh that I think pisses everyone else in the room off and I get a lot delight out of this, and laugh loudly along with her. I love people who laugh loudly in theatres (Sarah! Genevieve! Alex!), it makes the movie ten times more fun. So this movie has been getting crap reviews, but just go see it anyway. Don't expect anything from the script, just go for Jim Carey calling the baby a "hideous primate" and saying "ba-na-na" to it.

Last week my mom had a party to go to on the same night her grade four class was singing in the Christmas concert, so I got to stand in for her. I like kids, and I think they're really funny, but trying to keep thirty grade fours quiet backstage when I don't know their names is less fun. One of the other teachers was obviously at the end of a very long term. She announced to the children that she was the "Noise Nazi" and that if they knew anything about Nazis, they knew that meant she had no tolerance for noise. Then she proceeded to buttonhole any child (even sweet nerdy quiet children) who even looked like make some sort of sound. This whole procedure left me particularly open-mouthed at an event that was unabashedly Christmas-fied and that contained not the slightest hint of any knowledge that not everyone digs on Christmas.

Anyway. Another shocking recent development is that I think my reading mojo is back. It vanished a year and a half ago (about the time when I quit my boring, get-a-lot-of-reading-done job), perhaps on account of upsetting myself by reading Coetze's "Waiting for the Barbarians" at work and feeling like I was being tortured? In any case, literary world, I'm back, having polished off Eden Robinson's "Monkey Beach" off in a week. Great book. My belief in the power of the written word has been resparked. Especially upon reading a letter that a distant friend posted on her blog about the advent of her sister's death three years ago. It contained so many details that are, well, cliches of the this kind of story, yet she managed to write about them with such a beautiful clarity and intimacy. Tragic and personal and utterly inspiring.