They’re Both White Guys
This is a strange confession to make, but I constantly get Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp mixed up in my mind. Before you say anything, I know. I know! They are essentially opposites: one is famously kind, generous, and charitable, and one is absolutely not. One lost his longtime girlfriend in a car accident following the stillbirth of their daughter, the other is a domestic abuser. The only reason I can think of that they get mixed up in my head is that I watched them both on the big screen in my youth, formative movies like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Edward Scissorhands. They seem to be forever melded in my mind, which is terribly unfair to poor Keanu.
1984, Plus One
Engie (HI ENGIE) asked me what was the worst year of my life and although I don’t really like to relive or dwell on the past, particularly painful things, I will say without a doubt it was the year I was in fifth grade, 1985. It was, generally speaking, an upward trajectory after that. I’m not drawing any parallels here, but it’s interesting to note that Keanu came onto the scene in 1986, which was also the year of my favourite action movie of all time, Top Gun. Are these things related? Maybe!
The truth is that I think fifth grade is universally rough for girls, and it was terrible for me, and not just because I had an ugly home perm. (Engie also asked if I could erase one thing from my memory, what would it be, and that home perm might be up there, Steve.) But fifth grade. It was a time of friendship problems; I remember reading Cat’s Eye many years later and gasping because I felt so seen. Ten year old girls are absolutely vicious. Also, at that time I was wearing a bra and was the tallest girl and second tallest person in class, which might not seem like a big deal but it sure was. In the eighties, boys could run around, unchecked, snapping bra straps and making mean and bullying comments about girls and their anatomy, and that, in addition to the frenemies with whom I’d be best friends one day and then shunned the next, over and over, made that year miserable.
My cousin had a book called Girltalk, and I read it the summer after fifth grade. There was a section on friendship and to this day I remember this life-changing sentence: you don’t like everybody, so why should everybody like you? It was revolutionary and I still think about it all the time. Generally speaking I like most people, but it’s a good reminder that we are not going to be for everyone. I’m not saying my life completely improved because of that book, but it sure helped a lot.
Is This Really A Good Idea?
Speaking of the eighties, it looks like Netflix is rebooting Little House on the Prairie, and I have a lot to say about this. I know that I am a terribly pedantic person when it comes to adapting books to screen; I almost never think it is a good idea. The answer is almost always a teeth-gritting NO when I’m asked if I’ve seen the movie/ series/ show that was based on a book, particularly a beloved book. There are a few exceptions, of course, but generally speaking, I loathe the trend that everything must be adapted to be watched. Then again, should I ever be lucky enough to have my novel published and someone wanted to adapt it to the screen, I would sell out without a second thought. What can I say, I contain multitudes.
If you were a young girl in the late seventies and early eighties, it’s likely you watched the Little House on the Prairie series, and possibly you also read the books. I did both and it was an early lesson in the very loose way the words “based on” can be used. The television series was really a vehicle for Michael Landon to walk around as a shirtless hero; it was not at all like the books, except for the names of the characters. Or, I should say, SOME of the characters. There was a lot of artistic license taken here, for example, nowhere in the books was there a young girl named Sylvia who becomes pregnant after being raped by a weirdo blacksmith with a clown mask on, only to be saved from eternal shame of having a baby out of wedlock by falling off a ladder and dying.
I did love the books, because they were about a girl and her life, and if there is anything I want to read about in this world it is a girl and her life. I will not waste my one wild and precious life reading boring, male-centric stories. I just won’t! You can’t make me! But being charmed as a young girl reading about another young girl in a different place and time making “houses” beneath large maple trees is one thing. The grim fact is that Charles Ingalls deeply believed in manifest destiny and to that end dragged his family around the country, plunging them into hunger and poverty again and again, because he believed in his divine right as a white man to just displace anyone who happened to be living in the space he wanted to live in. Is this the message we need in 2025? I’m going to go ahead and say no.
I Have No Answer To This Question
Speaking of moving around, Elisabeth asked (HI ELISABETH) if you could live in one place outside of Canada for one year, where would you choose to live? Only three months ago I would have enthusiastically answered Maui, which is truly a paradisical place. But now I’m not sure the US is the best place for a Canadian. My husband and I have been planning a spring hiking trip to the Canyonlands, but sadly we have decided to cancel it. I don’t want our tourism dollars going to a government that shows outright hostility towards my country and dismissal about our national sovereignty. It also seems like a bad idea to have my physical body there. The long and the short of it is that I don’t know how I would answer Elisabeth’s question. I don’t have a backup answer to this hypothetical question, I guess another tropical island paradise that I have yet to visit. Or, Maui in (hopefully) four years.
Yoga Club Update
I just had to do some deep breathing after typing the above, which reminded me: how are we doing with Yoga Club? I hope everyone is making time to do one or more postures per day, and if that hasn’t happened, I hope that everyone is practicing loving-kindness towards themselves. There is a new three minute video on my humble little YouTube channel, demonstrating cat-cow in my kitchen; as an added bonus, Rex is featured! In all seriousness, cat-cow is a fantastic movement for spinal mobility, and I hope you give it a try.
Weekly Reading
Flowers in the Attic. Hands up if you also read this at age 12, or some other inappropriate age, hiding it from your mother! Did we all slip it in between the covers of our Trapper Keepers? This was such a wild reread. It has it all: incest, Oedipal complex, daddy issues, stepdaddy issues, child neglect, child abuse, child death, locking your own children in an attic in order to inherit millions of dollars from your weirdly religious father who disowns you for marrying your half-uncle. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to argue with the “maybe don’t marry/ fuck your relatives” part of the book. Not only does it have the most bizarre and over-the-top plot, it also is terribly written. I don’t know what’s worse, the over-explanation of every single detail, the excessively over-written descriptions of every scene, or the dialogue. The dialogue! It’s honestly the worst. I guess the key demographic – Gen X preteens – benefited from the multitude of explanatory details, being preteens, but wow, is this bad. It’s so bad it’s kind of good? I was entertained, if disturbed all over again. I mean, there is a kind-of-sibling-rape, there is the poisoning of children via arsenic powdered doughnuts, and there is the terrifying scene where the grandmother drugs her granddaughter and then pours tar all over her hair. Just writing that out makes me feel like I was in a fever dream while I read it.
Here One Moment. If you knew exactly when and how you were going to die, would you live your life differently? How much of life is pre-determined, and to what extent are we in charge of our own destinies? Those are just some of the questions raised by this novel about the travellers on a very delayed flight from Tasmania to Sydney; an old lady in an apparent fugue state suddenly stands up and goes through the entire flight cabin, telling each person how she expects them to die and at what age. Soon after, people do start to die in exactly that way. This was a really thought-provoking book for me, although I will honestly say that the backstory of the apparently clairvoyant old lady was pretty tedious, and it takes up about half the book. It all ties together very cleverly in classic Moriarty fashion; all in all I enjoyed it, with that one caveat. For those of us math-and-statistics nerds, there is a lot of really interesting discussion on probability, including a paragraph about the birthday paradox. I remember being in a lecture hall with two hundred other students, while my statistics professor had everyone stand up when their birthday was called, and sure enough, someone in that room shared my birthday. There is a very high probability that two people will have the same birthday when there are seventy-five people in a room, which I think is a very cool fact. Anyway, this is well worth the read, despite the boring backstory.
Well, will you look at that. I started this post thinking I have nothing to write about this week and here we are, 1700 words later. And it all started with Keanu Reeves! Thanks for reading, friends, and keep on practicing that loving-kindness! xo
