…plus c’est la même chose:
This video is 41 years old and we still have the same worries and fears today as when it was recorded. If you haven’t read Morgan Housel’s Same as Ever, I highly recommend it. It’s easy to think we are in unprecedented times but more likely we are in precedented times, just repeating themselves.
Like “girl dinner,” “mom freezer dinner” is when you eat the stuff that has languished in small amounts in large bags in the freezer. What did I eat?
3 pork and leek dumplings
2 chicken & vegetable potstickers
1 all-beef hot dog
2 chicken nuggets
Please bow your head in silence & pray for my digestive tract.
No one tells you how amazing it is to have a child who can be a designated driver for you. So allow me: it’s AMAZING! Hilariously, she was texting me at 11pm and asking if everything was ok. Oh honey, mommy and daddy are at The Legion with friends to do a Trivia Night, of all of the unsafe situations I have found myself in, Trivia Night At The Legion doesn’t even make the top 100000.
But I digress!
When our book club disbanded we split into three groups: one group was for folks who enjoyed the trips we used to take as a book club, one for people who liked to go to a local park in the warmer months for dinner & drinks, and one group who enjoyed hitting up local pubs for trivia nights. Clearly, as someone who played Trivial Pursuit weekly during the pandemic with The Americans [1], I was ALL-IN for in-person quiz events.
We’ve pretty much played all over town at this point, but last week we invited partners as well and ended up with two separate teams. It was a fundraiser for a local charity and between dinner, drinks, and the entrance fee, Mr. Tucker and I spent $125 for an evening out (total – not each!). On top of that, we both won door prizes in a draw: I won a $50 gift certificate to a local steakhouse and he won a pint glass and a $10 gift card to Tim Horton’s. I am way more extroverted than Mr. Tucker but even he had to admit that it was a ridiculously fun time with our friends – and a great way to get out more.
I know I’ve harped on about putting yourself out there a lot this year but I think it’s a direct reaction to the insular, anti-social social media I have seen ramping up post-pandemic[2]. I have seen content about people not being polite to retail and restaurant workers, I have seen memes about how excited people are to have cancelled plans (NGL, I also have been excited to stay home in jammies), and I have heard stories from folks not wanting people to come over…and like, I get it? As someone whose disability forces them to manage energy in a completely different way now, I get not wanting to do things. We were joking at a party recently that someone asked their partner to do two things in one week and we all laughed at the audacity: two social events in one week?! How perfectly INSANE it is to ask that! I suppose it is because at midlife, we are just too old to be doing things more often. But as Mr. Tucker and I often remind ourselves: we always force ourselves to go to events and we always have a good time.
One of my friend groups is about 25 years old now. We used to go out almost every night in our 20s. We’d go to clubs, we’d go to pubs, or we would have impromptu gatherings at our old condo in The Market, aptly nicknamed Balconville[3]. Honestly, we were out almost 5 nights a week because in the early 2000s there was so much more going on. We were young, we had shitty jobs, and we eked out as much of an existence that we could carve with limited resources. We had a weekly Sunday night dinner with friends, we hit 80s (and then 90s! *sob*) nights on Sundays when the beers were cheaper and there was no cover charge, and generally we just made do.
Previously – in the 90s – I lived in a neighbourhood with my closest friends where it was normal to pop in to drink a coffee or play board games all night. In the late 90s I lived in a 14-bedroom Goth commune during university where I would constantly have some baked goods ready and a pot of coffee on the go because you never knew who would just pop in for a chat. After, I moved on top of a local pub where we would hang out, drink pints and play cards some nights. When we were poorer we always made do: nothing beats a $7 bottle of wine or a pot of tea on the stoop of your apartment. No one cared that our living quarters were all chaos and dirt: we mostly worked and went to school so no one had time to clean and so no one held each other up to an unachievable standard of cleanliness. It was a crazy social time and while I was an early adopter of the internet and had made a bunch of friends online, it wasn’t possible to carry your friends around in your pocket all day. At the time, it was completely normal to leave your house and to just drop in on folks. If they were busy, you just left. No harm, no foul. I often wonder if my kids would watch sitcoms from previous generations and find it absolutely wild that neighbours and friends would just pop in, unannounced? I have seen some older Gen-Z’s ask if it was normal and let me say: it absolutely was normal and it was absolutely amazing!
But now we have a social life right in our pockets. We don’t have to leave the house to have friends and our friends can be thousands of kilometres away. No shade to that – I 100% am grateful that I can do the Wordle with the Americans[1] every morning and maintain a connection with them that wasn’t as easy 25 years ago (but like, shoutout to livejournal!). But I have also written here that a lot is lost if we only have online friendships, and I stand by that. I think it is important to bring back the casual get-together. Even my kids do it: they are masters of the sleepover! Either they have friends over here or they go to someone else’s house every weekend. I have also noticed that a lot more parties are happening this year than in any other year they’ve been in high school and all I have to say is: GOOD.
While I have no skin in the game, I am really excited to read Chelsea Fagan’s new book Having People Over. She is the founder of The Financial diet and while a lot of the content is not geared towards my demographic, it’s still a great resource. I have been following her 30 day series on Having People Over and it’s been full of great info.
I did make the mistake of attending the livestream where people could ask questions though, and OF COURSE someone woman co-opted the conversation with her particular situation because she felt “attacked by Chelsea” because she dared suggest people take personal responsibility for their relationships and grow up. What horrible thing did Chelsea suggest? That it is your responsibility to tell the host/ess if you have any challenges with the event, notably, food issues. HOW MONSTROUS!
Look, as someone who has mobility issues, I would love to live in an ideal world where everything is 100% accessible and that folks could read minds about what food allergies everyone has, but we don’t. I have no problems asking questions – and my closer friends know how to accommodate me. If I have any concerns, I ask ahead of time. And don’t get me wrong: I absolutely hate having to call a restaurant in advance or email someone to ask about how many stairs there are or if there are railings. But I also understand that we don’t live in a perfect world, and so it is going to take extra legwork for me to figure out if I can go to an event. The alternative is that I don’t go out and do things and that I slowly let my friendships rot on the vine. But here is the secret sauce: people are generally happy to accommodate if they can. They will try their best to make sure that their event goes off without a hitch, so if you tell them your needs in advance, they will probably do their best to make sure you have what you need.
I really take umbrage at people who feel that they can just scream, “I have a disability!” and that it somehow absolves them of any responsibility to advocate for themselves. Like the chronically online white knights of the world, they are basically using it as a shield to not have to take any action – and not take any blame, either. But to those folks like the person above, I ask: ok, so what is the end result you want here? Do you actually want people to include you or do you want to be a perpetual victim to circumstance? Because sure, you can blame everyone else for being ablest til the cows come home, and maybe that is your kink: the warm fuzzies of self-righteousness. But long-term, I don’t think that really serves you. This person can scream and shout all she wants about victim blaming but she doesn’t have to be a victim: she could have nipped this situation in the bud by communicating like an adult. Can’t eat the food? Ask if you can bring your own. 9/10 times the host/ess would be accommodating.
Fundamentally, the world is becoming a colder and more isolated place and I feel like this is because people are giving up their agency in exchange for tropes. Short-form video is informing how we see the world and as we all know, algorithms favour the negative. Videos with a ton of views ask you to blame anyone who cannot mind read what your needs are. We’ve become people who cannot deal with any friction or any negativity without becoming hysterical about it. But all of the best things in life that are worth doing are difficult! Getting ready and leaving the house is difficult, making reservations and driving across town on a Friday is difficult, helping your friend navigate a divorce is difficult, signing up for a yoga class is difficult, making a healthy meal at home is difficult…but all of these things reward you in return a million-fold in good relationships, a healthy body and a healthy mind.
Like I said to Mr. Tucker when we got home from trivia, “We always balk when it is time to get ready to leave the house and go to an event but we never come home regretting that we went. We always say, ‘Damn, that was a good night! I am so glad we went out!’”
[1]These are my Americans, get your own.
[2]Yes, yes, if there even is such a thing.
[3] Balconville is an old francophone joke. It goes something like this, “Where are you guys headed on your vacation this year?” “Oh, we have a trip planned to Balconville!” It reflects the fact that most people just stayed home and bought a case of beer and sat on their porches because they were too poor to do anything else. There is a play of the same name. a G&M article about it
Things have picked up a little here at The Mullet and October is generally when things kick into high gear for our family. Now that we’ve settled into a school/activity routine it is time to think of more important things: HALLOWEEN. But first, Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving Day in Canada is the second Monday in October. So you get a lot of mileage out of Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers, at least from October 1st until November 10th [1].
We spent Thanksgiving with some of our closest friends and as usual, it was wonderful. We have rented cottages in the past and gone away with the our families over Thanksgiving weekend, but they’ve hosted it two years in a row and both times it’s been great. They did the turkey and pies and we brought some side dishes. After dinner we played games & chatted over drinks and it ended up being a very chill, very fun evening.
Bonus: they had so many leftovers from Thanksgiving this year that we ended up making a turkey pot pie the next day (and freezing it – we ate leftovers for like 3 days and that was quite enough turkey for one week!).
We gave up hosting ALL holidays during the pandemic and thankfully have never gone back to it, at least for family. Every year it was one drama after another and it had occurred to me during the downtime of covid that people only complained and judged us (“Oh, are these…paper…plates? What an interesting…choice!” Yeah, unless you’re offering to do dishes, we’re gonna go ahead and feed the 20 people stacked in our living room this year on paper plates. COPE.). Mr. Tucker and I were running ourselves ragged for people who didn’t appreciate the work we put into hosting *every* family gathering for years, even when we had two small children. The pièce de résistance was the troll who brought their own gravy one year because they didn’t like ours and who – while we were scrambling to get dinner on the table for 14 people – demanded we warm it up for them. As soon as covid hit, I realized how insane it was to keep trying and my instinct couldn’t have been more on point: no one invited us to their place for holidays post-covid. So it was clear they weren’t interested, either. Sometimes you have to stop trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
Saying that we are a “Halloween family” is grossly underestimating how much we lean into Spooky Season. As a recovering goth, I have imparted my love for the macabre onto my children. During the pandemic we used to decorate and watch #13daysofHalloweenMovies but now that the kids are older, we do a lot less family stuff because they do a lot more Spooky Season stuff with their friends.
I have seen a lot of pushback from folks who think Halloween is too commercialized and I guess that has become somewhat true. But it’s true in the way that *everything* seems too commercialized these days with the tiktok shop and obsession with keeping the social media eyeballs glued to apps. It also still has nothing on Christmas, if we are honest with ourselves. But it is the one holiday – and I will die on this hill – where you don’t really need to buy much to enjoy it. You can make a clever costume out of nothing, you can give away inexpensive candies, you can host a fun horror-themed potluck. I am also a big fan of bringing nature in from the outside: acorns, leaves, berries are all great autumn decor and can be had for the low cost of a walk around your neighbourhood, at least in Canada.
But despite this, I continue to put out the same old decorations that I got at 90% off from when I worked at Michael’s during Uni in the 90s. A few things from thrift stores and craft fairs have made their way into the Halloween box, but most of it is over 25 years old. Other than that, we have a few pumpkins we grew this year, a few giant pumpkins we bought to carve the week before & they just sit outside next to the two Chrysanthemums on the porch until that day, and finally a handful of gourds to decorate the table. Most of the yearly decor I bring into our lives in the fall, I try to ensure is compostable.
I also was clever last December and managed to nab passes to my children’s favourite Halloween event: Frightfest. It’s basically a haunted hayride in the dark and 5 haunted houses in one evening. The tickets were on sale for $21 each, one week before Christmas last year. Compared to the eye-watering cost if you wanted to buy them now: $63 *per person*. BIG YIKES. So I bought the kids 3 tickets each so they could take two friends with them. Basically, by planning ahead I got 3 tix for the price of 1.
This year The Eldest is re-purposing last-year’s costume & The Youngest is making her own, she has most of it but we have to seek out a few things up at the thrift store next week to fill it out a bit. Historically, we’ve always made pizza and been home base from which the kids & their friends started trick-or-treating. This year The Youngest is instead going to another friend’s neighbourhood & will sleep over there (ahh the awesomeness of a weekend Halloween!). The Eldest will probably stay in the neighbourhood and Mr. Tucker and I will stay behind & give out cans of pop to the trick-or-treaters (we have soooooo much pop & we rarely drink it). Then on Saturday night we are off to an adult Halloween party with friends, so I am still trying to figure out what I will do for a costume. We’re pretty good at scroungin’ ‘round these parts so I will come up with something this week.
(as I am writing this, a huge flock of murder chickens Canada geese are flying overheard, a harbinger of winter)
A fall recap:
September: apples and leaves month!
October: gourds and spooky things!
November: poppies (and then greenery after Nov 11!)
December: Solstice and Yule season!
To me, despite the darkness and cold, it is the best quarter of the year!
Today is my children’s most dreaded day: garden cleanup day. Each kid is assigned a garden bed to clean out & compost. Mr. Tucker brings in the kale to freeze and will pot some herbs too keep in the kitchen over winter. I already did the sundried tomatoes this week and a few more soldiers are sitting on the window ledge, ripening. This is the last of the outdoor chores for this fall. The patio cushions are away, my tricycle has been put away and now everything is prepared for living beneath the snow during the cold winter months.
[1]Yes, I am a no-decorating-for-Christmas-until-after-Remembrance-Day-girlie. Some people care, some do not, it’s just a thing I have always kinda had a rule about.
I would also frame it “as most of the global north fails.”
“…[I] looked around my room and saw how dull everything was, not because it was lacking but because of how full it was of stuff.
Stuff I didn’t particularly love. Stuff with no serious meaning to it. Stuff I didn’t care about. Stuff that, if you had secretly tossed, I wouldn’t even realize went missing. Stuff I bought because it was trendy at the time, because my friend had it, because I had seen attractive influencers my age brag about it on Instagram, and it made me think that I could be her.
So, I did a bit of Marie Kondo-ing and produced a few large bags of clothes and trinkets and stuff for donation. Standing in front of all my stuff, it hit me that all of it used to be money, and all of that used to be time. I was standing in front of the metabolic waste of my existence, materialized. I was looking at the amount of my time, therefore my life, that had been turned into garbage. ”
I have been following Norm and Tina for about 3 years now. This charming couple moved to Canada from the UK in the early 90s, raised a family and then sold their home and retired early. They then travelled and started a youtube channel: This is Our Retirement.
I came across this video when it started circulating on other channels by Financial Advisors where they broke down how to retire on just $300000, which got them a big following:
They always seemed so active and healthy: they walked every day, tried to watch their diet and they lived a generally low-stress lifestyle doing the things they enjoyed. So it was an absolute shock to me when Tina announced recently that Norm had passed away a day after his 70th birthday party, following a triple bypass surgery. I actually screamed and cried, “NOOOOO!” when I saw it, which just speaks to the power of parasocial relationships. I am devastated for Tina and their family.
But also: how great is it that Norm retired at 55 instead of 65? He had 15 years of retirement with Tina as opposed to 5 (or maybe even 0 for some folks). It just speaks to the idea that you never quite know what the future holds so you may as well take giant leaps of faith when you can.
To make it a bit about me, when I retired I was 42. I announced it to a small audience on social media. When reading all of the kind comments from friends, family and old colleagues I had the darkest thought: some of these folks who are concerned about me today may actually be diagnosed with worse things or pass away before me. This, of course, has happened in the past 8 years. I’m not trying to be edgy or goth about the entire thing so much as reiterate that there is no knowing about the future. We have to take things as they come and live our lives in the best way that we can.
In the end, I am glad Tina is carrying on with the channel and it is my heartfelt wish that she is surrounded with love and support both by friends and family. It’s also good to take a moment when these things happen and reflect on whether or not you are living your best life (given your circumstances). I wish you all, a very merry reflection on “…what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
Enjoy your weekend, friends.
I gave up most social media with never ending scroll news feeds and instead I focus on a few YouTube channels and Reddit feeds. It’s about an hour a day of entertainment for me and I ruthlessly remove any subs/channels that get too bogged down or repetitive. Recently, that was r/simpleliving.
Truthfully, it is because there were too many posts asking for advice. I realized that “simple living” content was trending a bit on tiktok, thus driving people to Reddit for advice on how to slow down. Cue myriad posts along the themes of: how do I get off of social media apps? How do I live a minimalist lifestyle? How do I stop shopping so much? I want to slow down but I have debt, help! How do I move to the country and start a homestead?
To summarize: these folks think simple living is moving to the country and having an *~aesthetic~* beige farmhouse where they own very few things, choose analog vs. Digital (except for, you know, their instagram reels), and instead of a job, they garden and feed their chickens in perfect makeup and unsoiled linen dresses. It’s basically what is being sold on carefully curated social media accounts (“Use my coupon code for 20% off a linen dress for the farmyard!”) and while it looks great, it’s completely unrealistic and most of these videos are unrelated to actually living a simpler life.
Can these things be part of a simple life? Yes, of course. Is it the only path to a simple life? Absolutely not.
I was writing about simplicity on livejournal in the late 90s/early 00s and I completely get the dream that lines up with the *~aesthetic~*. From my urban 500sq ft box in the sky, I dreamed of buying a farm that had a heritage farmhouse, sprawling gardens and farm animals. Centred around my bucoloic dreams was quiet – so much quiet! When we visited The Pharm[1] a few times a year I would soak in every moment in nature surrounded by rolling fields and a chorus of birdsong. The beauty! The nature! The quiet! Oh my!
As it turns out though, I never did move to the country. I ended up staying in the city, living in mid-century, quasi-urban suburbs. I was much happier being able to use public transportation and to live somewhere where I could walk or bike to the things I needed. When The Eldest was born, we didn’t even have a car. I walked to the grocery store, the library, the YMCA and playgroups. My kids grew up surrounded by friends and neighbours who would meet every day at the park for a few hours. In retrospect, that was a much more simple life for me than driving a half an hour to go anywhere. We now live even further from downtown than our old house was and I have what I really wanted all along: quiet & access to nature. We can walk to the river, the MUP/Trans-Canada trail and everything I need is within a 5 minute drive[2]. Both of the kids take public transportation to school and most of their friends live nearby. As it turns out, while the *~aesthetic~* of country living was appealing, I really do enjoy the amenities that come with living in a city. Of course, there is also the elephant in the room: being self-sufficient in the country is basically impossible if you are disabled. Had we even gone that route we would have absolutely have had to come back to the city in under less-than-ideal circumstances. But still, our life is generally pretty simple: we keep our formal activities to a minimum and focus on seeing our friends often but not in situations where we have to spend a ton of money. We may do takeout and a games night on the pricier end but we are also big fans of themed potluck get-togethers and homemade pizza and a movie.
For most people, the turn to simple living is not actually about the bucolic ideal or minimalism but instead the dissatisfaction with their own lives. Simple living can be all or a few of these things:
1 – Minimalism – including digital minimalism.
2 – Frugality & watching your conspicuous consumption.
3 – Meditation/being present.
4 – Prioritizing relationships over things.
5 – Living your values, faith or spirituality.
6 – Homesteading/self-sufficiency.
7 – Environmentalism/social justice.
8 – Working less/reaching Financial Independence.
…and so on.
At its core though, Simple Living is a philosophy. It’s a way to structure your life so that you aren’t getting swayed by shiny things that sap your time, money and energy that don’t really add value to the quality of your life. It’s about drilling down to figure out what truly makes you happy and then aligning your life to focus on those things and letting the rest go. If you say you really want to spend more time with your best friend, why do you never make the plans? If you want to take a sabbatical from work and travel for 6 months, why are you spending so much money on Uber Eats? The point here is not to shame or judge people – we all have different wants, needs, and resources. It’s perfectly ok to move to a cabin in the woods but still own a fleet of classic cars that you work on and that bring you joy. The modern world is designed to separate you from your resources to line the pockets of others and simplicity is a process of unpacking where you want to spend your finite resources of time (including attention), energy and money. You are making a conscious effort to step off of the treadmill and figure out what really does serve you and focus on realigning yourself so that you are prioritizing those things.
But like everything else, there is only so many short form videos you can watch or influencers you can follow before the realization hits you: you need to do the work. That’s where the problem lies. Consuming content often feels like praxis but don’t let that confuse you; consuming content is just another way for tech companies to seize your most precious resource: your finite hours on this earth. The irony of consuming short form videos on how to lead a simple life via digital minimalism is not lost on any of us, for sure. But ya gotta start somewhere and if some random tiktok video encourages you to get your eyeballs off of social media, well great. There is a kind of justice in the universe if these social media companies lead you down the Simple Living path though, and I am here for it.
[1]Before everything went to hell, a good friend of mine lived an hour outside of the city on 200 acres. She would host amazing parties on the Solstices where we would decamp to the country for the weekend. Some of my best memories – and best friends – are from this time.
[2]Walking isn’t my forte these days but I do have a trike I can also take, but I rarely do.
Monday night hot dates with dead intellectuals (from 1985)
Two nights ago the Northern Lights were out in full force. The Eldest and I headed outside (The Youngest wanted to sleep because she gets up early for Art School) and we OOOHed and AWWed in the dark of the backyard. It also helps that we are near the Greenbelt and we back onto a park. Mr. Tucker took these photos because my phone is an iPhone 8 which may as well be a rotary phone in 2025 (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is my motto!).
