Act Like You've Been There a Thousand Times Before

I had heard many horror stories about winters in Québec before moving here, so I braced myself for the worst before the move. I was glad that I was moving in June, since the summer would do a better job of acclimatizing me to my new home. Through December and January in Montreal, I thought that I was coping with the winter fairly well. It was colder to be sure, and we had already surpassed the amount of -20° days that we had had over the last 4 years combined in Ontario. There was more snow and the parks would often be deeper than the tops of my boots while I walked the dog. It sucked, but it was an incrementally worse version of what I was familiar with in Ontario. I could deal with that jump.

Then it snowed for two straight days this weekend. Like 45 centimeters! On top of that, it also hovered around -15° for the whole time. This combination of cold and snow was something completely foreign to me. I had never seen this much snow in my life. Cars were fully covered in the street. Most sidewalks were nonexistent. Snowbanks were up around seven feet. I was shocked. That storm was one of the craziest things I had ever seen.

THEN, it snowed even more this morning. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

Fortunately, I don't have any engagements today, so I can work on an abstract, do some reading, and beg students to come to a meeting over email. All things considered, that isn't the worst case scenario.

Two nights ago, I watched the finale of BoJack Horseman. The whole last season was wonderful and managed to deal with heavy subjects in a smart and compassionate way. Amazing stuff.

When the show first came out, I knew it as a "new Aaron Paul thing" because my friend Mark was a huge Breaking Bad fan and introduced the show to me in that way. It was a fun stonery and clever cartoon, but it also folded in some dark material in interesting ways. For some reason or another, I was always trying to convince myself that the show was worse than it was, probably because it was popular and I wanted to be ahead of the curve when it came to recognizing that it had fallen off. But it just kept being really good and ended up sticking the landing better than any show in recent memory. Kudos to its creators and crew as they made something wonderful.

Baseball is now on the horizon and I must admit that I'm a little less enthused about it than I have been in years past. The Jays seem to be making only slow progress in developing their young talent and building around and the part of me that used to revel in bad baseball is having a harder time digging into that long trudge. Part of it is due to being increasingly upset with how the game is run and how players are treated, the Mookie Betts trade last week upset me in particular, and part of it is due to the Raptors being just so good and so fun and so well-run, that the Blue Jays' future seems so much darker in contrast.

Maybe that will change in a couple of years. Maybe my intense love of baseball will emerge along with the grass once the snow melts. Maybe me even saying all of this, while I'm freezing in three feet of snow, is proof enough that it's still there.

I feel like my self-reflection and self-criticism skills aren't as sharp as they used to be and that is starting to show itself in my schoolwork. Why could that be? How do I get them back up to par? Think about myself more? That seems silly. Here's to hoping they magically come back around when I need them most.

Just anything to get me through this winter, you know?