Toronto celebrates No-Fun Awareness Week
2014 has been a year of triumph, if one goes by the City of Toronto’s proclamations calendar, which I do because I love every specially named ceremonial city day for its own stately self. The list of days leaps upward like a mountain goat, encouraging citizens to expand their knowledge and lift their social game. It is a long list.
If it isn’t Toronto’s Internal Audit Awareness Month (May), which celebrates the building code, or Meetings Industry Day (April 18) “to create awareness of the value of the meeting and event industry to government and business leaders in an effort to underscore the breadth of impact meetings have locally . . .” and then they ran out of breath, it’s Red Tape Awareness Week (it’s in January because the popular months were booked up) which is really just the Canadian Federation of Independent Business getting huffy, followed by Bob Marley Day (Feb. 6) when everybody gets high and the mayor dances.
There are grimmer lessons than “rise up, stand up for your love.” Toronto has days to mark bodily failure — multiple system atrophy (March 15), myalgic encephalomy- elitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and multiple chemical sensitivities (May 12), tuberous sclerosis complex, (May 15) syringomyelia & chiari malformation (July 17) — and this citizen grows sad. I had not known of these terrible diseases. How stark.
I had heard about lung cancer and Alzheimer’s so there is no need of Lung Cancer Awareness Month (it’s now) or Alzheimer Awareness Day (if only they were) or even the admirable but pedestrian Oral Health Day (April 4) when the Don Mills Rotary Club promotes Brush-amania in local schools. I grow anxious. Never mind, Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours Awareness Day (Oct. 7) is all about compulsive nail-biting, hair-pulling, skin-picking and cheek-biting (one’s own cheeks, I hasten to add). Food for thought.
Though I still eat lipstick, I have stopped biting my nails and now just strip the polish obsessively. Scrape, re-apply.
While Toronto may sing the body electric, its emotions still run high. We celebrate Parental Alienation Awareness Week (April) which I initially thought was my mother talking about me, but turns out to be a contentious matter publicized by Alec Baldwin, who did not have a good divorce from his first wife. Then there’s Middle Childhood Day (Jan. 21), which is just typical. The oldest child is adored and the youngest runs riot but the middle child gets its own day? Excuse me? You’re saying it’s a day to consider ageappropriate out-of-school programs for children aged 6-12? If you’d told me earlier, I wouldn’t have opened that particular can of worms. In November, which is Pulmonary Hypertension Month and contains National Survivors of Suicide Day . . . never mind. World Plumbing Day (March 11) “inspired” — people use that word a lot — my bathroom reno. Do you know what it costs to get whirlpool jets in a bathtub? I am not paying $3,000 for bubbles. I will sit in my own dirt, thank you very much, which is what a bath really is when you think about it. The day wants you to consider piping infrastructure generally. Message received. April is the best. It is Dig Safe Month, which is another tube-related event, with days set aside for School Crossing Guard Appreciation (April 16) and Administrative Professionals (April 23), which sounds erotic but is not. Last year the whole month celebrated Foot Health but feet fell by the wayside, it seems. Ethnicity is very big on the Toronto calendar, with days and weeks devoted to the Irish, Sikhs, Asians, Greeks, Italians, Simcoes (if that is an ethnicity and it may well be) and Hispanics. June is Seniors Month for all ethnicities, I take it, and then there are people like me, Canadians of Scottish-Indian heritage, always searching for their own special day, good luck with that. I could combine South Asian Heritage Month and Highland Creek Heritage Day. Ironically, Highland Creek is the ratty suburban neighbourhood where I once spent a squalid week in a motel that has since been torn down. What times I had! I don’t recall them — happily I was intoxicated at the time — but the event is rather like the entire list of Toronto celebrations, almost all proclaimed by Mayor Rob Ford, or Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly when Ford showed up late for work. It is a parade of misery, people being nudged to recall things they’d rather forget.
I’m not saying Toronto is inaccurate. We are a quiet morose people. I checked my gardening diary to see how I celebrated Elder Abuse Awareness Day (“bought 30-meter garden hose!” it reads) and during Funeral Professionals Week I installed new latches on the garden shed “to prevent lonely death.” On Wrongful Conviction Day (Oct. 2), I returned from a vacation in Madrid “still unable to use arms properly” and I have no idea what I meant by that.
I suspect other cities throw parties — I know Madrid does — and take the day off, put up bunting like the Brits and eat special biscuits. The U.S. has 175 food holidays including National Buffet Week. We have nothing.
It was the Star’s City Hall bureau chief, the great Daniel Dale, who alerted me to all this, so I would proclaim this Daniel Day but everyone will just go “You mean Lewis?” I give up. The next big weird holiday is Nov. 16, which is Louis Riel Day. He was a great man. We hanged hmallick@thestar.cahim.