New Year

Today’s topic is actually about New Year’s Resolutions, which I do not make, mostly because if I want to change something about my life, I do it when I think of it, not on some arbitrary and imaginary date line. But still, the moving forward of time does give one pause, and by “pause” I mean “let’s stop and think about what the f*ck we’re doing and do we want to keep on doing that?” So here are a couple of things I decided I would or would not be doing in the year 2019. It’s up to you to determine now, 5 years later, which resolution(s) I actually kept:

2019

1) I will no longer be distracted by things when I’m having a serious conversation with someone. For example, once I was speaking with a colleague in my office when I realized that there was something in my boot, like a small piece of gravel or a large piece of lint. Mid-sentence, I reached down, took off my boot, shook the gravel out, looked inside the boot, put it back on my foot, and continued with the conversation. I’m extremely fortunate that I worked with people who didn’t seem to care about things like that, but still, it must be disconcerting to find yourself in the middle of a performance of Waiting for Godot. Or maybe my colleague was impressed by my multi-tasking skills. Another time, I was in a meeting, and someone said, “It’s like an icebox in here” and I started thinking about what if we were actually holding the meeting IN an icebox, and would there be sides of beef just hanging there, and could we see our breath and whatnot instead of focusing on performance measures. I didn’t say anything out loud–I’m not that weird (or maybe I am–don’t judge me). Either way, I feel like it’s a slippery slope from boot examination to toenail clipping. Ken said he had a similar situation once when he was talking to a woman who, during the conversation, reached up under her skirt and hoiked up her pantyhose. I asked what he thought, and he said, “I guess it was really bothering her. I mean, you do what you have to do, right?”

2) I will continue inventing words. You may have noticed that, in the previous paragraph, I used the word “hoik”. I use this word all the time. It means “hoist and yank”. I thought it was a real word until I used it once when I was telling the very nice gentleman I worked with about my roommate and how she had broken my toilet:

Me: She must have really hoiked on that handle!
Very Nice Gentleman: Did you say ‘hoik’? What does that mean?
Me: Hoik? You know, like this! (*mimes hoisting and yanking and makes the appropriate hoisting and yanking sound, which is ‘hoyk’*)
VNG: I’ve never heard of that word.
Me: Well, I didn’t just make it up.

Turns out that I did. I googled it and there’s no such word. But it’s a damn good word, useful for many occasions, and since I am very good at the made-up words, I will continue to invent them. Another one is “stabscara”, which is when you poke yourself in the eye with a mascara wand, as in “Oh my god! I just stabscara-d myself!!”.

Friend: I love your new eyepatch.
Me: Yes, I happened to stabscara myself but it all worked out in the end. Arrr, where’s the rum?

3) I will stop being so bad at potlucks. We used to have potlucks at work all the time, and now that I’m retired, I still attend them occasionally. When I was living in Toronto, I didn’t have a lot of fancy cooking equipment and whatnot, so whenever there was a sign-up, I just put “Drinks”. And while you might think that would make me popular, I learned my lesson after the liquor-filled chocolate meeting snack fiasco of 2017, and when I say drinks, I now mean 2 cases of Perrier, which is terribly boring and probably a let-down for everyone who saw HOW I had signed up for this particular workplace potluck in what appeared to be a very boozy way:

I arrived at this potluck and people were bringing in crockpots and crystal trays and poinsettias and wreaths, and I was like, “Here. Stow these babies in the mini-fridge”. Well, they all got drunk—the cans, not my colleagues. In the future, I will try to be a little more creative, like putting bows on the Perrier boxes or something. Also, I would love to have the confidence of the person who simply wrote “Something Special”:

Me: So what did you bring to the potluck, Cathy?
Cathy: Something special.
Me: Processed cheese on Ritz Crackers?
Cathy: It’s special.
Me: But it’s just–
Cathy: SO SPECIAL.

4) I will continue to write. My only purpose in writing this blog is to make people happy, so I will keep on trying to do that. I am nothing if not resolved.

If you guessed 3 and 4, you win a Fandangly Award to do with what you will. Because it’s almost 2024, and I THINK I’m better at potlucks now (you’ll have to ask the neighbours) and I’ve definitely kept writing.

And now, just like 5 years ago, here are three questions for any of my friends to answer:

1) What is the most wonderful thing that happened to you this year?
2) Star Trek or Star Wars?
3) What would you bring to a potluck?

Happy New Year to all of you and yours!

The other morning, I came out of my bathroom. Slight tangent: to clarify, I was styling my hair, because I haven’t had it cut since last March. My hair is very fine and thin and the downside of growing it out that it also takes longer to make it look nice. I would get it chopped off right now, except that Kate is growing hers out to, and I’m trying to be supportive. And to support ME, Ken and Kate got me a very expensive hair straightener for Christmas which I could never use on short hair, so I’m stuck until the damn thing is paid off. Anyhow, I came out of the bathroom and sniffed the air:

Me: Ken! There’s something burning!
Ken: I don’t smell anything.
Me: Were you cooking something? Seriously, it smells like something was on fire out here!
Ken: I don’t know what you mean. (*sniffs air*) Nope, smells fine to me.
Me: You seriously can’t smell that? It’s like when the fireplace motor almost went up in flames!
Ken: It must be your imagination.
Me: It’s worse over here by your office—wait a minute. Do you have a cup of COFFEE in there?!
Ken (abashed): Maybe…

Now, this may shock some of you, but I hate coffee. I mean, I really despise it. The taste and ESPECIALLY the smell. In fact, one of the reasons I married Ken in the first place is because he DIDN’T drink coffee. I’ll admit, I went through a strange phase in university where I drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, but all my friends were doing it, so chalk it up to peer pressure. Once I graduated, that fell by the wayside, and I haven’t had a cigarette OR a cup of coffee in over 35 years. And I really thought Ken was on the same page as me, but when we went into lockdown last March, suddenly he became a coffee drinker. I put up with it for the first few mornings, but one day, the stress of lockdown combined with the outrageous smell of burning garbage caused me to have a complete meltdown and scream, “NO! No more coffee if you want to stay married!”

I’ll be the first to admit that I may or may not have overreacted, but Ken, being the good soul that he is, switched from the deadly bean to green tea. At least for the time being, apparently, and now I have to wonder how long he’s been sneaking around behind my back, having cups of coffee when I was out getting groceries or driving to our antique booth in Delhi.

But it’s not like I eschew hot drinks or caffeine altogether—in fact, I drink copious amounts of green tea myself, and Ken and I have a ritual on the weekends where I get up and make us both cups of hot chocolate. I just have never understood how some people are so obsessed with coffee, although I know that caffeine is addictive. But there’s caffeine in LOTS of other things, so why are the lockdown lineups outside of Tim Horton’s or Starbucks twice as long as the liquor store? It simply confirms my theory that coffee also contains opium. There’s no other explanation for anyone wanting to drink something that smells like Satan’s breath and tastes like Satan’s *sshole.

And I know I’ll take a lot of flak for my anti-coffee sentiments, but aside from that, I’m a pretty nice person, and I will always make a cup of coffee for my dad, because he’s my dad.

Also, Happy New Year. I don’t do resolutions or retrospectives, especially not this year. The only thing I’m hoping for is that 2021 is better than 2020, not just for me but for everyone. Even the coffee drinkers.