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Bipolar as Unexpected Gift
I’ll begin, here, with a caveat: bipolar disorder is hard, makes life harder, and really sucks a lot of the time ? but sometimes that makes the ways in which it’s a gift all the more startling and meaningful (at least, it does for me).
As such, take all of this with however many grains of salt your own experience requires at this time. Just because I feel like I’ve discovered a secret bonus doesn’t mean that’s everyone’s experience, or that everyone needs to feel the same way. To borrow an aphorism from the kink community, “Your Bipolar Is Not My Bipolar, And That’s Okay.”
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It has become somewhat de rigeur to talk about bipolar disorder as, perhaps appropriately, both a curse and a blessing.
With it come harrowing depressions and dizzying (sometimes terrifying) manias, instability that can wreck careers and lives, a powerful predisposition to addiction, the very…
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Canada’s National Disgrace
Two weeks ago, MacLeans, Canada’s only national news magazine, published an article that caused quite the uproar. Written by a former diplomat, Scott Gilmore, and entitled, “Canada’s Racism Problem? It’s Even Worse Than America’s,” it’s not hard to see why this upset people. Even better was the sub-title, “For a country so self-satisfied with its image of progressive tolerance, how is this not a national crisis?” I wish I had written this article, it says what I’ve been saying for a long, long time.
Aboriginal peoples in Canada get screwed. Have been since the first Europeans arrived, and still do today. And that’s not going to change any time soon unless Canadians do something about it. But, in my experience, they don’t care. Last year, I wrote a post about a funny sweatshirt that an aboriginal man, Jeff Menard, in Winnipeg (which MacLeans also called out as Canada’s most…
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Ironically
I spent much of my time in Ann Arbor in coffee shops, writing. Having conquered my guilt at working in cafes, occupying space which could be filled by more paying customers (truly, a Calvinist education never really leaves you), I embraced America, the land of the free Wifi. One of my favourite places for working was Mighty Good Coffee, a relatively new shop and café on North Main Street—about a three minute walk on the diagonal from Kerrytown—which is bright and airy and friendly, with lovely coffee and a fridge full of yoghurt.
It also sells artisanal toast. Curious, I tried first a slice of ten seed loaf (good), and then returned with friends and ordered sourdough with cherry jam (very good indeed). But what sets artisanal toast apart from ordinary toast? Was it made by elves, as a friend asked acerbically on Facebook? As far as I…
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Fully developed nation deeply regrets brief affair with Fred Durst
OSHKOSH, Wisc. — The United States of America, owner of the highest gross domestic product of any nation in the world, has quietly confided to close friends in recent weeks that it deeply regrets carrying on a brief yet torrid affair with Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst more than a decade ago, a source close to the world power indicated on Monday.
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The Beauty of Teens
Photo taken by (and used with permission from) my son Sevrin at his high school sailing team practice.
As I write this, there are seven teens asleep in my basement. My son and his friends came back from their high school dance in high spirits last night. Laughing and joking loudly, they boisterously descended on my kitchen, devouring everything within reach (even some chips that I thought I had hidden pretty well). These guys were the human equivalent of an invading colony of army ants, foraging insatiably through my refrigerator.
Now these boy-men are dead to the world, asleep in a puppy pile on my basement floor. And I have to be honest – I am loving every single thing about these teens. In fifteen plus years of parenthood, I have grown accustomed to – perhaps, in some ways, inured to – the many and diverse aspects of wonder in…
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The Internet: IT’S MADE OF PEOPLE
Time Travel on Facebook
I’ve written before about my aversion to some social media. Besides the conspicuous consumption of time, Facebook is how I found out that my best friend from 5th grade had lost the use of both her legs and arms in a car accident. Which led me to a search where I found out that another classmate and her brother were both dead in their early 40s. It was jarring and traumatic. These faces, frozen in my mind’s eye, were young and healthy and living happy lives in some far off world. Anything beyond that failed to reach my imagination.
When I was in my teens, we moved to a house, town and school far away from where I’d grown up. It was, in reality, only about 40 miles away, but rural miles. No public transportation or extra family car or cell phone plans to keep in touch with old…
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