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Picture taken this weekend I've never seen myself as a "dance mum". With the equivalent "hockey mom" (in Canada) or "football mum" (when we just arrived in London), the term connotes, for me, a kind of relentless pushing of the child who may or may not be interested in the relevant sport. I was always a proponent of laid-back parenting, and when my daughter said she wanted to take ballet, I assumed this was an opportunity for her to stay an hour after school, giving me a bit

Photo by Ian Barsby  on Unsplash I finally got around (read: scheduled time) to reading Zadie Smith's excellent essay titled The Art of the Impersonal Essay . While I don't necessarily connect to her fiction, I think she's a very clear thinker, and I admire that. I've taken notes. I don't think I was taught how to write an essay at school, and in university, I mostly learned how to write academic papers, which aren't exactly the same. I loved the permission she gave writers t

Sakamoto Kaori at the team event When we lived in Ottawa, we discovered the Olympic Winter Games. When it's -26 degrees outside and pitch dark at 4 pm, anything would do. Plus, there's hockey . Despite the excitement, Olympic hockey isn't as good as NHL hockey, and when I watch the winter olympics I opt mostly for the more creative stuff: figure skating (although I can't connect to ice dancing, however hard I tried), big air (jumping with a snowboard), slopestyle (jumping wi

Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic  on Unsplash I was thinking about resting today, since it is Sunday. I've been trying to take Sundays off, with mediocre success (as evident by the fact that I'm currently writing). Now that the young people are no longer young children, the household rhythm has changed on weekends. We're no longer constantly on call, and so Sunday can be a day of rest. A sort of Sabbath, if you will. But then I thought about the word rest, and the two meanings

Ben Kingsley and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Trevor Slattery and Simon Williams I watched the whole first series of Wonder Man this week. Mostly, I was looking for a shorter commitment than the hour-long episodes of The Morning Show, which I started watching, but feel like I need to take time off to properly watch. Anyway. It's a very decent series. The performances are great. The episode about DeMarr "Doorman" Davis was both elegant and one of the weirdest things I've watche

Photo by Ricardo Viana on Unsplash I've been working on and off with The Dictionary of Obscured Sorrows. I started going through the entires and jotting down my own reactions for the words, sometimes little stories came out of that. The more I worked through it, the more I became acutely aware that the desire to catalog and define everything may be fundamentally opposed to what life is. But I completely get this desire (which Brené Brown talks about so eloquently). Just tod

I've been thinking a lot about the Traitors lately. Like many people, I became quite addicted to the show. My gateway was Celebrity Traitors. My dealer was, of course, my 14-year-old daughter. We love watching things together (it was Ginny and Georgia until we finished the last season). She said watch the first episode with me and then decide. We watched the entire season as close as we could to the live sessions (everyone will be talking about this at school tomorrow, Mum)

Image by Kilaarts on Etsy I'm trying very hard to let myself follow my curiosity. It has to do with being between books, letting the idea of the new book come to me when it's good and ready - something I adopted from Julia Cameron . Yesterday, through a newsletter, I came across  this dude on YouTube . Two hours later, I had to really run to make my appointment in the city. One of the problems with letting your curiosity lead you in this day and age is that you can be swallo

Photo by Micah & Sammie Chaffin  on Unsplash Today I've been thinking about taking risks. Society sends us mixed messages about risks. On one hand, we have the stories about mavericks who do things their way and have been celebrated, from Picasso through Mel Gibson's Riggs to Mark Zuckerberg; these stories are about men who behave in sometimes abhorrent ways, but they are forgiven because they're really good at what they do. We are supposed to idolise these people and want to

Photo by Sean Stratton on Unsplash I was thinking about private and public spaces today. I wrote not long ago that we need to be careful about processing our raw emotions in public, where we can trigger others and contribute to the escalation of general public mayhem. And this new collections adventure felt like blurring the boundaries between the private and the public. Am I adding any value, or just creating more noise? What I realised is that it's not a binary. There's

Image by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash Today I'm thinking, not for the first time, that secular modern science gave up too easily on spirituality. We consigned it to the religious institutions far to early. It is a blaspheme for a serious scientist to suggest things like researching spirituality, and as a consequence, all research of spirituality is done in disciplines and institutions that are not known for their rigorous scientific enquiry. Why does this matter? Because human

Image b y Tim Cooper on Unsplash I've been thinking about marketing lately. I want people to read my book. I want people to read my newsletter, and mostly, I want them to reply to the newsletter and tell me what they think. I'm a lousy marketer--I think--because I much prefer listening over talking. The social media state of people shouting to get attention exhausts me. But I also live in the real world, and I understand that there are people out there who would love my book