Life is like a...Tim Horton's coffee?

It's the end of the world as we know it.

The Globe and Mail says it's true, and as we all know, the Globe's writers never lie. So here it is. My life boiled down to a simple coffee order:



According to the inestimable Sarah Hampson, I am a single-single, and there's a lot I better get a move on doing, because apparently, single-single people share a lot of traits I don't seem to possess. I am letting down the single-single side.

All those decades I spent trying to develop some complexity, all the hobbies and quirky interests that just came naturally, all the work, the travel, the writing - all for naught. Apparently, if I could just be a single-single in Toronto, centre of the universe, cultural capital of the world, if I could just get my bloody act together, dammit, I too could be a single-single - properly conforming to the Globe's endless expectations of me.

Or more accurately, lack of expectations, since being single-single is, apparently, a fate worse than death. Thanks for rubbing that in. I'll be sure to get over my general satisfaction with life and be a total downer any day now.

A single-single, according to Ms. Hampson's article, is a person who lives alone and is not romantically involved with anyone. We may be divorced, widowed, or never married. We also: avoid cooking from scratch; buy frozen, not fresh, vegetables; live in dark, empty places; and lack interest in our own hygiene, paddling as we do about our homes all day in our PJs without brushing our teeth, because "no one cares". Apparently, in my newly-defined single-single universe, I no longer count for anything myself, and the simple fact that I like my teeth clean is abberant and noteworthy. Great. I'm sensing a chicken and egg dichotomy in the whole single-single analysis here, but perhaps that's a topic for another post, another time.

Oh. And another thing? We're "desperate to marry", which is certainly news to me.

BUT, and there's always a BUT, if I can embrace my inner single-single, I may paradoxically open myself up to becoming a double-double, since it isn't until I make the most of being single that I can attract the man of my dreams.

Which kind of goes against embracing the single-singlehood, but I digress.

Of course, the simple fact that people are slightly more complicated on the whole than a coffee order seems to be totally irrelevant to the Globe's central thesis, which is, wait for it, you're a sad, lonely, pathetic nothing without a mate.

I swear I heard my mother's voice in that last paragraph.

The fact that some of us genuinely like coming home to our own homes, and cooking for ourselves, and generally being the author of our own fortunes, whatever they may be, doesn't seem to count for much of anything in the Globe's Torontowalla universe. Which says more about it, I think, than it does about me.

And the teensy fact that, for most of my adult life, I have lived alone quite happily (not unlike the only childhood before it) would only confuse the issue. And we couldn't possibly confuse the issue, because then the little boxes wouldn't fit, and it would be all horribly inconvenient for the writer trying to build a neat little coffee-based theory of human relationships, instead of, you know, living their lives and letting the rest of us live ours. And what would the Globe run on the lifestyles page then?