Category — Uncategorized

All summer long, we’ve been compiling a list of possible colleges as a family. We started closest to home, filling out a spreadsheet with key facts about each school, and then we circled outward, farther and farther from home.

College Night is always an exciting night in the sense that it’s fun to watch the twins mentally try on schools and see if they’re a good fit. But it’s also a bittersweet night. College signals the start of the next chapter of life.

I am having a really hard time with it. I’m also right there with them, swept up in the dreaming.

A few schools are emerging as early favourites, but I keep reminding them not to get their heart set on a single program. They need to keep a handful of different options open as equally good if they don’t want to have a miserable time waiting to hear where they get in. And then I secretly go and Google those schools to try to imagine my kids that far away. Hanging out at that campus. Starting this next stage of life.

I just want them to be happy.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, so I wrote this early knowing that I probably wouldn’t go online except to attend… you guessed it… Zoom services. This is our second round of holiday services via Zoom. There are the pros and cons.

Pros: Protected from COVID-19, can attend in our pyjamas while drinking coffee, no issue if we enter late, and Beorn can be part of the activity.

Cons: We are trying to have a meaningful community experience from our living room.

But something is better than nothing, so we’ll participate in our pyjamas, facing the houseplants, while Beorn wheeks in the background.

Happy new year!

In the same vein as what your favourite book says about you, is the flipside: The books you read shape who you are.

The implication, of course, is to fill your head with good stories that will lead you to good thoughts and good actions. “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.”

It’s a long opinion piece, but the main message in it is lovely: “The children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.” So arm yourself well with books to save the adults around you.

We saved the final Schitt’s Creek for Sunday night. I know! We waited almost 18 months to watch it. We were on the final season at the beginning of the pandemic, and it broke my heart to think that there weren’t more episodes. So we kept putting off watching those final scenes.

But Sunday seemed like the right night because it was the end of Part 1 of the pandemic. I think of the last 18 months as a single chunk of time, beginning with the twins coming home from school (just for two weeks!) and ending with the twins returning to school. In between, there was also the vaccine milestone. But… I don’t know. I feel like Part 1 ended on Sunday night, and Part 2 began on Monday morning.

We watched it at the perfect time because there’s something Alexis says in the episode— that she’s glad they lost the money because they got to have all of this time together. And Moira states the other side—that’s the silver lining but the cloud has been all of the financial stress.

That is sort of how I felt about Part 1 of the pandemic. It was awful, stressful, upsetting, and I was ridiculously happy to have that extra time with the twins. To have them close and to see them throughout the day. I want the pandemic to end, but I will always look back at that silver lining and remember it was there amongst all the many many many clouds.

I hate back to school on a good year. That day is my hardest day, and I usually avoid social media because I feel very alone in feeling sad. I was happy they were with their friends and happy they got to return to some semblance of normal. I hoped that they will have a good year. I hoped that they will get to experience some of the fun parts of high school and not just all of the work.

But I was so sad for myself. Because I miss them a lot.

Every day, I am faced with an obstacle course to get to content: I need to enter a password or click on a link, and I feel nothing about it until I get to a CAPTCHA image to prove that I’m not a robot. All I need to do is look at a picture and click on the squares that fit the requested information (all squares showing cars or traffic lights or crosswalks). Once again, I am doing the EXACT SAME THING that I do when I click other links to enter a site; it’s just a lock on a door to content that I want (like a password), and it’s a pretty simple lock to open (click on the pictures).

But you feel something when you encounter CAPTCHA pictures. And now someone has explained why.

I’m not sure any of this is true, but this article sent me down a deep rabbit hole Googling session. I never noticed that CAPTCHA images usually do not contain people. “Each CAPTCHA depicts a world blasted by a neutron bomb, where the objects survive but none of the people do.”

And the images are at weird angles, almost as if the picture taker is hovering in mid-air.

He writes, “They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.”

Such an interesting thing to finally notice.