{"id":20383,"date":"2020-12-09T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T16:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=20383"},"modified":"2020-12-10T09:16:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T17:16:08","slug":"student-editors-letter-a-bath-water-holiday-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2020\/12\/09\/student-editors-letter-a-bath-water-holiday-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Student Editor’s Letter: A bath-water holiday season"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s after 9 am on December 8, 2020, and the sky is eclipsed with the still black of winter. Being the music and pop-culture geek I am, I woke up today thinking how today marks 40 years since John Lennon was shot dead outside his Dakota apartment. It\u2019s also the day after the holidays were cancelled for us here in BC.<\/p>\n

I spent last night huddled in bed with an ice pack around my neck, trying to be mindful of the sensation of the cold on warm skin. It wasn\u2019t working.<\/p>\n

The anxiety took a sledgehammer to walls of self-care, diligence, and resilience. It\u2019s not hard to be homebound for a week, two weeks, or even a month; but the better part of nine months? It\u2019s a covert, quiet kind of hard. And it will be hard to explain to successive generations why, exactly.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A bit of Christmas cheer at Camosun’s lonely Lansdowne campus (photo by Greg Pratt\/Nexus<\/em>).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After an appointment with my family doctor last December, we got to chatting about this new virus. He said that if we were lucky\u2014really lucky\u2014we might be starting to get doses of a vaccine by the end of the year.<\/p>\n

We got lucky: a woman in the UK just got the first vaccine today. We\u2019re lucky to breathe where we breathe, and, if you\u2019re anything like me, occasionally lose hope where we lose hope.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had hard holidays before; it\u2019s the hardest time of year for many people. And we\u2019ll have hard holidays again. But it\u2019s just one year; one holiday season, one tough time. In the end, we\u2019ll have a hard time remembering some of the specifics because the last nine months have, in our minds, been more or less all part of the same blurry clump of weirdness.<\/p>\n

This holiday season will be different, but some of your holiday routines don\u2019t have to be. For me, a Christmas routine that reminds me of a better time is reading The Catcher In the Rye (and that\u2019s saying something, because I read Catcher in Grade 9, and you couldn\u2019t pay me $10,000 to repeat that year). Regardless of what anyone says about it, it\u2019s one of the most culturally formative stories to ever be told. That goes for Catcher and the reality we\u2019re in.<\/p>\n

No one except you can catch you when you\u2019re falling. Catch yourself in the ways you know how, the ways that got you here today. If they\u2019re not the healthiest of ways, go easy on yourself. There are no points for style.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s even more important than usual to carry out the things that bring you solace. It\u2019s a dark time, a lonely time, so focus on those nuggets of simplistic contentment.<\/p>\n

Happy holidays. Or maybe this year, it\u2019s just\u2026 \u201cholidays.\u201d There\u2019s not as much to be happy about this year. Acknowledge that. Marinate in that. But there\u2019s a difference between acknowledging something and dwelling on it. Marinate in it like filthy bath water: as long as you need to, but not a moment longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s after 9 am on December 8, 2020, and the sky is eclipsed with the still black of winter. Being the music and pop-culture geek I am, I woke up today thinking how today marks 40 years since John Lennon was shot dead outside his Dakota apartment. It\u2019s also the day after the holidays were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-webexclusive","category-views"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20385,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20383\/revisions\/20385"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}