Some despondent evening

So I decided to watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tonight, because it's a current affairs show, and thus rather time-sensitive.

I knew I was in trouble when a notice in red appeared just before the opening credits:  "This show filmed the evening of June 21st, 2025".

Oh gawd.  This meant, of course, it was filmed before the news about the Creature joining in the bombing of Iran came out.  

The show was pretty damn depressing anyway.  John Oliver devotes about the first ten minutes of his rapid-fire satirical/cynical/ironic commentary to recent events, followed by roughly twenty minutes of a chosen topic.

Tonight the topic was "AI slop", a term I hadn't heard before, although, naturally, it's been around for more than a year.  

I never claimed to be swift.

Nevertheless,  I've noticed, particularly in the past few months, that my social media feeds are less about the people and institutions I have voluntarily followed, and more about accounts that I have not invited.  So far, a lot of them seem to be associated with arts groups, but tonight, after John Oliver's show - which I really shouldn't watch alone, but the RFB is winging his way to Ontario as we speak - and spurred on by the CNN article in the above link, I went through my Facebook feed for a bit and systematically blocked a lot of accounts, as innocuous as most of them seemed to be.

Then I'll wash the dishes and go to bed.

Reading an actual book seems to be a good idea.

The world is grown to one vast drysaltery!

This notice appeared on the exit door nearest our condo a few days ago.

Oh god. Just what we need.

Victoria does have a rat problem; my Friend of the Right Hand got infested once, and one of our house-sits featured a large rodent, who basically scared younger daughter into representational drawing.

I'm not sure the Pied Piper is such a good idea, though.

"It's a horror story," I explained, years ago to a future godmother, who was planning a show of the Pied Piper for her drama students. "The people of Hamlin don't pay him, which is wrong, but he revenges himself by taking their children away."

Future Godmother stared at me for a long moment. She was a divorced mother of two, on not great terms with her ex-husband.

"I never thought of it that way."

Best to just keep that door closed.

Thanks a bunch, guys

Today was our first Thanksgiving in Victoria in nineteen years.

So I was really glad I didn't see this until bedtime, although whether I'm going to sleep now is debatable.

Just as long as I don't get two in a row

One of the tougher things about coming to Hades has been the more frequent occurrences of what I call "used years". I stole the idea from Charles Schultz, of course.

What's a used year? It's a year that diminishes you. You struggle through the quicksand of the approximate twelve months, only to discover that a better aspect of you has been scraped off: 2002 - 2005 - 2008...

I had used years in Victoria as well. The year my father left for the last time. My final year of high school - I barely got out alive. The year the Resident Fan Boy lost his job and his mother. Those years, however, had plenty of space between them. Since I came to Hades, it seems I've had a "used year" every two to three years, and frankly, the years in between haven't been something to write home about, which explains why my mother complains about not getting letters.

On the optimistic side (and by "optimistic", I mean "I haven't been killed, so I must be stronger --- right?"), I have coping mechanisms. You see a lot of them on this blog: art, music, drama, books. Anything beautiful. Exercise (believe it or not). Creative visualization. Family research. Getting out of the house. Accomplishing small goals. Reaching out to friends.

The last is difficult because my friends have their own problems, and I don't want to reach out and drag them under.

I don't want to drag you under, either. So I'll shut up.

That way, the water can't get in.

Without again

This is Elliott Brood.  It's the name of the group, not an individual.  This song doesn't describe my situation, but certain lines do.



The road divides ahead
Just wide awake in bed
Unaware of suspicious feelings happening again

His love went south, and he'll go west
A mountain of song couldn't fill that hole in his chest
That she left when she said that he was like the rest

So get up and get out
What're you down about?
Put it back on the shelf
Just have to go without again

Crossing the Emoticon

Yesterday, elder daughter posted a Facebook status regarding a week that has been rife with shootings, especially the mass ones at a block party in Toronto and a Batman premiere in Colorado:

"I wish all the guns would disappear."

Words seemed insufficient, so I posted an emoticon hug under her status. I checked it first and this is the one I chose:

({ })

According to several sites including chatslang.com, this is a variation of the common {} emoticon that represents a big hug; also the standard way to represent a hug on BlackBerry devices.


Early this morning, I found a text message waiting from elder daughter. It was gently put, although I could hear her eyes rolling from three times zones away: Hey Mum... Not sure what your comment on my recent status meant, but it's widely regarded as a vagina emoticon.

'Scuse me. A vagina emoticon??? Since when is a vagina an emotion? I did a quick check, feeling rather hesitant to type "vagina emoticon" into a search engine (though it might make a rather arresting name for an emo band...) and up came this, another one of those patronizing sites which suggests that anyone who has parented teenagers is, by definition, too stupid to use social media, or even computers, period.

It appears I'm not the first to make this gaffe. If you type the emoticon I posted at my elder daughter's Facebook wall into a Blackberry device, you will get something like this:

Shall we presume that someone at Blackberry has a sick sense of humour?

I went to my daughter's page at Facebook, deleted my comment (which I'm sure she had already hidden from her friends) and sent explanations by email and text.

Haha Love you, came the immediate reply.

I'll follow her example and just spell things out, shall I?

Melinoe on a half-shell

Oh, ouch. The tensions of the last week have found their way into my middle and lower back, into my jaw. Sometimes my hands shake. Tomorrow, we confront the teaching staff at younger daughter's school. We only plan to deliver the hereunto undeliverable homework, along with a reminder of our phone number and respective emails, but it may be an indication that things have already gone too far.

I comfort myself with music, with books, with movies, with memories. On one of our last nights in Victoria last August, my friend-of-the-right-hand offered to take us to Mount Tolmie to watch the sunset.

"Oh, could we go to a beach?" I asked. Six weeks had passed, and I had failed to stroll by the sea.

So she drove us down to Willows Beach. The sun had already slipped behind the park, and the mountains were mauve and misty. The water rippled in lines of silver and lilac. Younger daughter took off her shoes and waded into the gentle pearly ripples, while we filled our shoes with fine grey sand. A seal poked up her head, then slipped away unseen.

And I didn't have a camera with me. But I do have this picture of an abalone shell. That's something what it was like.

Keeping abreast of things

Seven years ago, I found a mysterious lump in my right breast, one that kept appearing and reappearing. The doctor zipped me off to have a mammogram which found nothing, and this apparently qualified me for the dubious pleasure of having more. I've had the experience of three mammograms so far. They're not exactly fun (squishing each boob in a sort of vise twice from different angles, for the uninitiated), but there are worse things.

This year, they've introduced a new wrinkle to the process at the breast screening centre here in Hades. Now, we're submitted to a very long, very thorough manual examination after the squishing. It involves sitting up, lying down, lying on one's side, raising arms, hands behind heads, left-turn signal elbows, etc. etc. etc., while being, not exactly pummeled, but being felt up in a very clinical way. For me it requires careful breathing to keep my reflexes under control, but on a discomfort level, it's somewhere between having one's teeth cleaned and having ultrasound on one's gall bladder.

The nurse was nearly finished. She had to be nearly finished; this had been going on for several interminable minutes. My eyes were shut in self-defense; I was, after all, lying topless with a women kneading my mammaries which is not an erotic situation but a rather awkward and intimate one. I did peek into her concentrating-like-a-concert-pianist face as I noticed her fingers kept returning to my left breast. She'd carefully prod the right breast in the corresponding area, then check the left, her movements slowing down.

Oh crud.

She had me feel for myself. It took a few seconds, but there it was, a hard knobble about the size, as she put it, "of a ball-bearing". I've kept going back to it over the past couple of days. Now that I know where it is, I wonder how I missed it.

Oh well. That's why they have screening clinics, don't they? I keep thinking of that oft-repeated slogan: The only thing worse than finding a lump in your breast is not finding it. Sometimes, that even makes me feel better. Most of the time, not so much.

To put this into perspective: Two of my friends have died of breast cancer. Both had family histories of aggressive cancers. I do not. My mother, aunt, and their cousins all went through a decade or so when they were finding benign lumps on a regular basis. My great-aunt did get breast cancer --- and died of old age years later.

All the same, Merry Bloody Christmas. I should be hearing from my doctor in a few days.