January Recap

Normally I would write this on the last day of the month but I think I'm going to be too busy to write tomorrow so today it is. If it ends up I have time tomorrow then maybe I'll write some fiction, or work on the piece I need to submit to Dana this week. But today we will recap!

You want to know something funny? Normally January is the longest of long months. Like it drags by at a snail's pace. This year? Nope. And I mean I know it feels like the last 11 days have had a decade's worth of what the fuck in them, but at least it's moved fast. Maybe his term will fly by and we will all move very quickly with it and not feel like we are stuck in a vortex of non movement like the pandemic end to his last term.

The first half of January I was wishing for it to move more slowly. Digging my claws into the last bits of sanity that I knew were left. But that didn't work and we rolled quickly through it.

And here we are.

So how did my resilience and resistance themed joy do? I've got at least one sparkly star on each day in my calendar. A lot of three star days. A few two. But at least a star on each day. I've been refining my daily checklists and my monthly list as well. That's working out pretty well.

Reading every day. Added that positive thought book I told you about and an on this day in history book, along with my normal reading. I read 7 books in January, two of them nonfiction. I'm currently reading 3 books at once. One is a giant compendium of comics, one is a horror and one just regular fiction. I tend to make sure if I'm reading horror that I have a lighter book going at the same time. Horror during the day, light before bed. The compendium is an actual physical book and it's about 1000 pages long so I read it in little dashes. It's freaking heavy. I have three of them to get through to finish out that comic series, it's going to take a minute. Oh wait, I guess technically I have 5 books going at once with the history and positive books but I'm reading one thing a day and it will take all year to get through so I don't really count those. I won't even add them to Storygraph until the end of the year because it will bug me to see them sitting there in the currently reading list for that long.

Writing more days than not (as you know by the flood of emails in your inbox) I published 28 blogs (counting this one) and wrote two pieces for Dana. Though I'll be honest, I'm struggling a little with the piece I'm writing for her. It came from a dream, I woke up and thought, holy shit, that would be a good story and took some notes and have been trying for months to work my way into it. It's not going super smoothly but I'm trying and that counts.

Working out, lifting heavier weights and my elbow seems great. Had to make an appointment with my ortho though because my ankle has been giving me fits and finally fucked right off today in the middle of my run. Sudden and sharp pain is never good. It seems to have calmed down again but I'm going to try AGAIN to get a doctor to listen to me and figure out why I've had achilles issues since my 20s. Wish me luck.

I did lose a little bit of weight this month as well. Not a lot. Not quickly, but a few pounds is a few pounds. If it were to keep up all year I'd be where I want to be by the end of the year. I just have to decide how badly I want that. Right now I've gone back to being pretty tight during the week and not as loose on the weekends. I've gone to bed hungry but not starving. But it still makes me angry to have to be hungry at all. So far I've resisted the urge to start counting calories again, which is always a really bad road for me. To lose weight I have to watch what I eat tightly but not so tightly that it triggers me not eating. And I love food. And I have to live under a president that makes me want to hide in a cookie factory.

I feel like a toddler, that's not fair!

Which makes me think of Oprah in the 90s talking to her nutritionist/trainer about how it wasn't fair that she had to work so hard to lose weight and keep it off when other people didn't. His response was basically yeah, so? It doesn't matter that it's not fair, it just is. I wish I had Oprah's money to sooth my wounded sense of unfairness, but I don't and that also just is.

I miss my connections on Facebook but still believe deleting it was the right call. I can't do a lot to change the way the US is going right now. And I know that my small moments of protest don't really change anything either. But it's all I've got so I'll keep doing them.

Small moments of joy this past month? Brent and I saw a play last weekend that was really good. I had a moment of panic when we got there and I realized that the playwright actually wrote one of my least favorite books I read last year. Eeek! But the play was good. Had coffee with a friend, going to have coffee with another friend tomorrow. Talked with Katie about a movie that is foundational for her. And even smaller things. The cats are always good for a moment of awww... Brent's hair is gorgeous. There are hummingbirds outside the window right now. We had gorgeous sunrises and sunsets (the good part of a dry winter, the bad part will come later, but for now, the beauty brought joy).

Keep finding those pockets of joy.
Keep being resilient.
Keep your head on a swivel and survive.