Author Archives: lydias

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, poems, photographs, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

My Mother Knew How to Eat a Cupcake via mortalstewart. What surprised me the most about this post is how much certain things can differ from one family to the next. It’s truly interesting to see how other people’s families work.

Some Photos from the Cemetery to Bring You Comfort. I actually found all of these photos to be fascinating instead of creepy. How did you react to them?

Back Off. This is exactly how I feel from the end of October to the beginning of December.

All Summer in a Day. If you enjoyed the Ray Bradbury story I recommended last week, The Long Rain, you should definitely check this one out as well.

Privacy, Wherefore Art Thou? via AuthorIzzy. This is one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.

Coin-Op Cuisine: When the Future Tasted Like a Five-Cent Slice of Pie. I would have loved to have lunch at a Horn & Hardart during its heyday. Wouldn’t you?

From Winter’s Discontent via maskedpimpernel:

It comes a crumbling winter, wild of sky,
A howling in the leaves that sings of bones,
A tempest lashing down that shakes us dry,
And moon so bright it trembles in the stones.

What have you been reading?

Every once in a while my Twitter stream temporarily dries up for no particular reason at all.

I completely understand why people tweet less often on big holidays, after a tragedy, or during a storm that’s large enough to cause blackouts for a few hours or days.

When it happens on a completely ordinary day, though, I wonder what’s going on with everyone. The people I follow on Twitter come from many different time zones and countries. Many of them tend to share my interests in writing, science, and cute rabbit pictures, but they also have a wide variety of other obsessions.

It’s probably heavily influenced by confirmation bias, of course, but an amusing picture still forms in my head every time it happens.

Imagine an old, comfortable pub. Its hardwood floors are heavily scuffed from many years of use. The wooden panels on the walls have weathered the passage of time better, although they’re beginning to show a few, subtle signs of their true age as well.

Everyone currently missing from the online world is sitting around a large, round table eating delicious things like fish and chips. There’s a wide assortment of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, too.

“Lydia!” someone says. “It’s about time you got here.”

“What’s going on here?”

“Our secret Twitter meeting, of course.”

“Since when do we have secret meetings?”

“Oh, it started happening about the first time you noticed how quiet everyone was online that one day. We were hoping you’d figure out where everyone really goes on those days soon.”

And then we’d eat, drink, and laugh the night away. Maybe next time a few more old online friends will string all of the clues together and figure out exactly where it is we’re meeting and how to figure out the date and time in advance.

😉

What funny things do you imagine when you notice something slightly out of the ordinary?

One of the things I admire about photography is how many different messages a good photographer can share with his or her audience.

Take the knife away and this subject is unremarkable. I could walk past her on the street without giving her a second glance.

In this picture, though, she’s terrifying. I don’t know what she’s cooking in her kitchen, and I sure as hell don’t want to find out.

Are you a fan of photography? If so, what is your favourite picture?

Sometimes I give advice on this blog. Today, though, I’m going to ask you for it.

I’ve found myself so settled into a routine that I’ve gotten into a rut. I eat the same kinds of food and do the same sorts of things week in and weekend out. While a routine can be a good thing in smaller doses, it’s high time for me try something new.

To be honest with you, it’s hard to know where to start because one decision leads to another. Before I know it, I’ve repeated the same steps I followed last week even when I’ve tried to switch up a few things for variety’s sake.

How have you gotten yourselves out of a rut in the past?

What should I try?

What shouldn’t I try?

Is there a specific area in life that you find easiest to change when you feel yourself growing restless or bored with what you’ve currently been doing?

Is anyone else feeling this way? Part of me thinks it might be a mild reaction to how little sun Ontario gets this time of year. I do remember having similar responses to long, dark days in the past. If this is the case, the good news is that I only have about five or six more weeks until the winter equinox.

Talk to me!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Surprising Downsides of Being Clever. Fascinating.

Staying Mindful This Autumn via LondonMindful. This is something I struggle with during the cold, dark months of the year. These were helpful tips, though, and I will be using them this autumn and winter.

How Not Drinking Soda Has Changed Me via JamesSabata. I’ve had a similar revelation with sugary foods. Now that I’m not eating them very often, a lot of things I used to like have become unbearably sweet.

DIY Dentistry via nazmaniatweet. My mom accidentally cut her head once when she was a little girl. He father cleaned the wound and then stitched it up. It healed well. I thought about this family story while reading this post. Sometimes humans are a lot tougher than you’d think they would be (although I’m not planning any DIY medical care of my own anytime soon. Haha).

From The Long Rain:

From My Lief Living “Midwestern Nice”:

We should start with what it isn’t. It isn’t the feigned kindness of the South, where people sipping bourbons at cocktail hour reserve the right to boot-heel you when you turn your back. It’s not the abrasive honesty of the Northeast, where everyone speaks, as Don DeLillo once put it, in the same nasally, knowing cynicism. It is genuine, Midwestern Nice.

What have you been reading?

The idea for this post came from RageMichelle’s post 8 Things I Am Too Old For. She asked her readers to add to this list in her article, and I am more than happy to oblige that request.

I am too old to:

Wear makeup. There are excellent reasons why I stopped wearing it so soon after I started. It’s not something I ever plan to wear again. Life is so much nicer without it.

Stop for street hustlers. Toronto is full of people who want to introduce you to a new religion, collect donations for dubious charities, and sell you anything from used books to pencils to artwork. I have no time or energy to listen to any of these spiels.

Debate strangers online. Some people seem to thrive on getting into endless arguments about all kinds of topics online. I’m not one of them. I’ve never seen anyone’s mind change as a result of one of these fights. If anything, it seems to solidify whatever position you’ve already chosen regardless of what the topic is or what the evidence says. This isn’t even to mention that there are so many other ways to spend your free time. I’d much rather learn something about another planet that I hadn’t known before or make a new friend instead.

Explain things to people who don’t want to listen. Not everything in life needs to be  explained in full detail. Sometimes no is both a complete sentence and a final answer.

Accept gender roles I never signed up for. For example, I’m not a big fan of cooking fussy holiday dishes at all. I definitely don’t make them on short notice or simply because it’s expected of me due to the fact that I’m a woman. Cooking is only something I find enjoyable when I’m doing it without all of the added pressure to be a “proper” woman that can accompany big holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas.

What are you too old to do?

I’ve seen all sorts of unexpected things on public transit, but none of them can compare to what happens in this short film.

It’s come to my attention that at least one person has had trouble getting Disqus to work on this blog. Has it stopped anyone else from leaving a comment?

Please let me know if you’ve been having trouble. I seem to be able to use it just fine, but if multiple people are having issues I’ll look into switching to another commenting plugin.

If you’re having trouble and you can’t leave a comment, email me at postmaster @[this blog’s url].com instead.

Photo by Fredrik Matheson.

I’m going to be going into a social hibernation period soon. No, it won’t be absolute. There are a handful of exceptions I’ll be making for it, but for the most part I’ll be enjoying a lot of peace and quiet for the rest of the autumn as well as this winter.

There are several different reasons why I’m doing this. If any of them sound familiar to you, you might want to consider hibernating as well over the next few months.

1. My brain craves the downtime. I may come across as a social butterfly online sometimes, but I’m actually deeply introverted. It feels really good to me to have multiple weekends in a row when I don’t have any plans to see anyone at all. This has nothing to do with how much I enjoy my friends and everything to do with my inborn need for a lot of time alone. This autumn has included more socialization for me than normal, so I’m really looking forward to finding a better balance this winter.
2. I have mixed feelings about the holidays. Explaining why this is so would take up far more writing space than is available in this post. I might talk about it in detail in the future, but this isn’t a time of year I look forward to. One of the best tools I’ve found for making it a more pleasant experience for myself is limiting what I do participate in. I’d much rather do one small thing joyfully than ten things begrudgingly.
3. There’s not enough sunlight. Remember last spring when I blogged about waking up at 5 a.m. with the sun? Now I’m getting sleepy much earlier in the evening than I used to. My brain doesn’t quite understand that one can stay up hours after the sun sets, and that makes it difficult for me to go out in the evenings. (This makes me glad I don’t live in the Arctic circle. I would not be able to handle the non-traditional sun activity they have there at certain times of the year!)
4. My Netflix queue is full of fascinating shows. I want to watch all of them, and this time of year is a great time to do exactly that.
5. I don’t feel particularly social. No, I don’t mean this in a depressed or anxious sort of way at all. There are seasons for everything in life, and right now I’m in a place where I’m not really craving that kind of interaction. And that’s okay.

This won’t last forever. It never does.

For now, though, I am looking forward to all of the peace and quiet that comes with the short, cold days ahead.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, quotes, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful, for the way she thought. She was beautiful, for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful, for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul. – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Apple Varieties. What I found most interesting about this list is how much time people must have put into finding out which varieties of apples are best for everything from making applesauce to eating raw. This isn’t even to mention all of the time and effort they had to put into creating these different types of apples.  I like the Macintosh and Granny Smith varieties. None of the other kinds are that appealing to me unless they’re covered in sugar and spices and baked into a pie. Ha!

Self-Acceptance is the Key to a Healthier Self-Image via JeffreyGuterman. Jeffery specifically recommended this article to me a while ago after a conversation we had about what it means to be a good person on Twitter. It was a fantastic piece. Go read it for yourself.

Delete What No Longer Serves You via Jessica_A_Walsh. I absolutely love this advice.

Blogging: Look – You’re Simply Not Good Enough via GlasdragonFly. This is one of those links that you shouldn’t know anything about ahead of time, although I’m guessing that at least some of my readers have it figured out already.

In a Tiny Universe, Room to Heal. What a heartbreaking and fascinating story.

From Everything Doesn’t Happen for a Reason:

And then he utters the words. The words that are responsible for nothing less than emotional, spiritual and psychological violence:

Everything happens for a reason. That this was something that had to happen in order for her to grow.

That’s the kind of bullshit that destroys lives. And it is categorically untrue.

A friend of mine has been giving away free copies of two of her books. Go check them out if you like mysteries or science fiction. The giveaway ends tomorrow, though, so download them today if you’re interested!

What have you been reading?