Life Stuff

Friday
I have the day off today and Mark does not. Normally I give the cats breakfast but since he was getting up as usual and I had the opportunity to sleep in, I asked him to feed them. He duly got out the wet food when he got up and everybody happily ate, and then mainly didn’t bother me while I slept. When I got up a couple hours later, however, Alice had a Pavlovian reaction to seeing me and started demanding food again, even though her belly should have been full of food. I don’t know why she couldn’t read her own body signals here, but it’s not like I’ve never been asked, “Hey are you hungry?” and responded, “I dunno, what time is it?” She freaked out so hard I eventually gave her second breakfast, which Mark made fun of me for. For those who have not followed my adventures on all other platforms, I will add that Alice got very sick and (in my estimation) almost died earlier this summer and now can pretty much manipulate any situation if she wants to. She could easily get up to 4-5 meals a day with the right amount of pathos—please don’t tell her.

Saturday
RR (lounges on couch)
MS (enters the room) I trimmed my beard!
RR: Cmere, let’s see.
MS (comes over to the couch, leans down over RR)
RR (reaches up to touch beard, gets distracted by a spot of grime on MS’s glasses frame, picks it off, touches beard, gets distracted by a stray hair, knocks it away, touches beard)
MS (pulls away) That was not the face I expected you to make looking into my face.
RR: Oh no, what face was I making?
MS (attempts alarming sneer, but starts laughing) It’s like you came upon a manhole cover that had come off and were unexpectedly looking into the sewer. “Really? That’s your face?”

Saturday (evening)
(RR and MS eat gelato sitting on bench)
RR: It’s like in that Lionel Richie song, “…all the same friends, and the same address.”
MS: I don’t know that song.
RR: “Happy to Be Stuck with You”? Is that what it’s called?
MS: Oh yeah. But that’s not a Lionel Richie song, it’s Huey Lewis.
RR: …ok. But are they really different people, though?
MS: Yes, yes they are very different.
RR: …
MS: One is white, one is Black, for starters.
RR: Oh really? Which one is Black?
MS: What is wrong with you?
RR: They are musicians from the 80s, I don’t know that much about them. I didn’t have Much Music when I was a kid, you know—just the radio.
MS: Lionel Richie is Black.
RR: Well, I didn’t know that. Now I do. Thank you for telling me.
MS: This is a new low, Rebecca.

Wednesday
Some actual professional news! My 2023 book, These Days Are Numbered, got nominated for a Toronto Heritage Book Award! I found out by my friend Kerry texting me as I was getting off the bus to congratulate me on my good news, and me not knowing what the news was and thinking she had accidentally texted the wrong person. That’s honestly the best way to get good news, just to be mystified for a little while and completely not expect it. To be honest, there have been a couple awards where I knew exactly when the longlist would be announced and was keyed up and wondering and that seems to never work. But being totally caught off guard works great for me, and is lots more fun too. The best example of this is from years ago, when I won a raffle at a literary event, and as I walked up to the front of the room to collect my prize, someone yelled, “And congrats on the National Magazine Award shortlist!” It had just been announced and I had no idea I had a story on, but since I was standing there winning something random anyway, everyone cheered and it was very funny and lovely. None of the stuff I set my sights on tends to work out, but sometimes other stuff does and it’s really the best anyhow.

Thursday
My husband, the one and only Mark Sampson—who has agreed in theory but not in practice to write a guest post for this newsletter—has a new short story forthcoming in this very cool and sexy-looking anthology with a lot of other awesome talents. Edited by AG Pasquella and Jeff Dupuis, Devouring Tomorow: Fiction from the Future of Food is forthcoming from Dundurn Press and looks fantastic, and suitably weird. It’s available for preorder from a variety of fine retailers, should you wish to do so.

Tips of the Day (I’m still doing this!)
1) Infornata olives are the best olives! These are the midnight black ones that are wrinkly. I saw a description of them that compared them to a raisin, which is terrible—in fact, they are like sundried tomatoes, although I saw in the internet they are oven-dried and somewhat moister, though the same level of savoury, more or less.

2) If you don’t want people to call you, take your phone number out of your email signature, off your website, and in general stop advertising that you can be called. Ditto for email addresses that “don’t really get checked.” No one who needs this tip will ever read or notice it. And yet I try!