Amplify: Seeking a cure for the January blues

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Lara Pingue is a programming editor at The Globe.

Last Tuesday, thousands of Ontarians spent their evenings digging out after an all-day blizzard. Walking around my snow-blanketed neighbourhood that night, it occurred to me that we’re all weathering some sort of storm right now – whether it’s home-schooling our kids, worrying about sick or lonely loved ones or coping with any one of the dozens of ways our lives have been upended by a seemingly never-ending health crisis. (As one person recently tweeted, talking about “when this pandemic is over” is starting to sound a lot like “when the Leafs win the Stanley Cup.”)

Of course, the winter blues were a reality long before the pandemic. Blue Monday, which falls on the third Monday of January, owes its name to a confluence of events that fall on or around that time of year: Christmas credit card bills come in, the reality of holiday weight gain catches up and, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere, the weather is probably awful. Plus, it’s Monday.

So I spent last weekend in escape mode, surrounded by glossy magazines and the long-reads that never fail to buoy my spirits. Here are some of the stories that keep me hopeful about our post-January – and post-pandemic – world.

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Come away with me (someday)

The near-term future of travel might look a little different when restrictions begin to ease: Travel bubble, anyone? As The Globe reports, the idea is that a group of family and friends, who share the same quarantining and physical-distancing practices, go away together when it becomes safe enough to do so. Everyone in the bubble takes the same precautions at home and on the road. Travel agencies are already looking ahead with “Book your Bubble” packages, offering experiences like hiking the Inca Trail in Peru or exploring Portugal.

So now’s the time to think long and hard about who you might want to go away with. Says one travel expert: “Make sure these are the same people you’d want to be stranded on an island with.”

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Making comedy out of tragedy

“I really haven’t slept this week, so I would cry at an AT&T commercial right now.”

So begins this Vanity Fair article about late-night host Stephen Colbert, who reflects on a tumultuous 10 months making a comedy show from his house (and in one case, filming from his bath tub). Here, Colbert lays bare the struggles of what must seem like an impossible task: making the world laugh in truly unfunny times. The interview was conducted in the uncertain days after the U.S. election, which Donald Trump was loudly contesting on Twitter. What Colbert didn’t know then was that there was a storm brewing on the Capitol, which would eventually lead to the former president’s banishment from social media and a history-making second impeachment. Still, Colbert is hopeful about a funny future, particularly one in which the president isn’t the punchline: “If Joe Biden is a pair of khaki pants inside a manila envelope, that would be great,” he says. “I actually don’t think you need to think about politics all the time. And one of the things I’m looking forward to is not.” Amen to that.

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Reconnecting to a lost culture

What happens if you’re disconnected from the values and traditions of your heritage? I love this story about Madeline Yapput, an Indigenous woman who missed out on the vital rituals of her culture while she was away in a residential school. Now in her sixties, Madeline is making up for lost time with the help of her son, Alley, who taught his mother how to bead and make moccasins like her own mother used to (Madeline’s mother, Clara, raised Alley and passed her skills on to him before she died in 2001). These days, Madeline is busy filling orders for her mukluks. She’s even received a custom order from as far away as New York – appropriately enough, it was for a matching set of moccasins for a mother and child. This tale is proof that it’s never too late to reclaim your history.

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Notes from a bus route

First Person essays are steadfastly among our readers’ favourite, and stories like this one by Michael Morgan is why. How else would most of us know what life is like for a former advertising man turned school bus driver? Here, he describes the pained moment when a mother worriedly helps her young son board the bus for kindergarten, a fraught time for any parent facing the prospect of unleashing their child into the world:

“I slowly drive away and I beep the horn twice to remind her that it’s all good, Mom. It’s all safe and we are all watching over your baby until he is grown. And that happens all too quickly. I will keep driving through fierce weather on these rocky rural paths, with no streetlights or sidewalks, grateful that I have a window into the little lives that put their trust in me to take them home.”

What else we’re thinking about:

Television is my primary escape right now, so I’m constantly on the hunt for new shows and movies to binge – the more untethered to reality, the better. That’s why I’m rewatching Younger on Amazon Prime Video, a glossy 25-minute-an-episode series that follows the life of a 40-year-old suburban mom who fakes her age to land a job at a New York publishing house. Of course, I don’t buy the idea that 26-year-olds have it easier than anyone else, but these days I’m sold on any show where the problems are low-stakes and can be solved in less than 30 minutes. Bonus: It’s set in bustling New York City, the perfect antidote to my living room.

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