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I started this post the same way I start most of them: with too many words and a lot of unnecessary information, but I got tired about halfway through because it’s been a hard month and enthusiasm meter is on E. And that bummed me out! Because I consider myself an enthusiast and I don’t like when that’s taken from me!
So instead of dwelling or letting this post feel like a chore, I’m going to make it (kind of) short on words and (pretty) long on stuff.
- I turned off notifications — almost all of them! except texts and phone calls because I honestly don’t get that many and they’re mostly from my wife/family — in November of 2017 and even though it stressed me out initially, it’s one of the best dumb things I could have done for my mental health. Almost nothing needs your attention that quickly and it has helped me chill out about things I didn’t even realize I was manifesting anxiety about. Amazing.
- These Hanes sweatshirts that have held up amazingly and are still soft and warm as hell.
- NARS Powermatte Lip Pigment especially in Starwoman, Don’t Stop, Save the Queen, and London Calling. The most comfortable and most long-lasting lip I’ve ever worn.
- This cat fountain that my dog also loves. They sometimes take turns waiting in line to drink from it like it’s an elementary school bubbler.
- Kiehl’s Buttermask for Lips which can help my lips recover from ridiculous winter weather in a single night.
- These extremely sturdy, extremely non-stick pans.
- Kiehl’s Calendula Deep Clean Foaming Face Wash that makes my skin feel clean, but never stripped.
- I kept journaling and actually filled up a couple of my favorite notebooks. I wrote out a lot of pain and frustration this year and also kind of learned a bunch of stuff about myself that I was, I guess, kind of repressing? It’s amazing to be 33 and figuring out that there are things I want to and can articulate about myself that I never have before. It’s almost like humans are infinite? And have an infinite capacity for growth? Wild.
- These actually comfortable flip-flop that held up to a summer long beating.
- Clarins Instant Light Lip Comfort Oil in Mint which despite being really glossy, doesn’t slide all over my mouth or feel sticky, and actually moisturizes them.
- The turntable that finally made my records sound great while making the process of listening to them less annoying.
- Most of Amazon’s Daily Ritual plus line – everything that says ‘Supersoft Terry’ is worth buying. Seriously.
- This organizer that made my kitchen tool drawer way less terrifying.
- This beautiful puzzle by Charles&Thorn.
- I think live music saved my life this year, honestly. 2018 was rough for a variety of internal and external reasons and having a summer and early autumn full of live music to travel to really kept me going when I was completely rundown. From May 17th through October 27th we went to nine different live shows — The Used, Panic! at the Disco, Coheed and Cambria, Ben Folds & Cake, Fall Out Boy (twice!), and Ludo (thrice!) and the energy I absorbed from them is going to keep me chugging along for a good, long time. Crystal and I used to see SO MUCH live music when we lived in southern California and with the exception of Dolly Parton in 2016 (a spectacular show) we haven’t seen any live music since 2011. I think it’s the thing I love most in the entire world and I will not forget that again.
 
Previously
2K12 | 2K13 | 2K14 | 2K15 | 2K16 | 2K17
The new year can be a hard time for people, a lot of people, myself included. There’s pressure to renew and to change and to feel suddenly refreshed, to be a blank slate because the new year has come. But even more so it’s because we live in a world steeped in diet culture, in fatphobia, in orthorexia and impossible beauty standards and so there is immense pressure to make this the year you finally become the person you are told you should be. It’s exhausting and it’s stupid and you shouldn’t do it to yourself.
You were great last year and you’re going to be great in the next.
And if there ARE things that you want to change about your life, don’t let the pressure of the new year shape your goals.
Years are arbitrary! Months are made up! Time is fake!
Change or adjust or do things on whatever time feels right to you.
I have fallen prey to the new year a lot in my life, sometimes the new month, often even just the new week. It’s always a chance for a ~FRESH START~, right? Always a new chance to erase your mistakes and start over. But in 2018 I tried to remember that each mistake makes me better and my history is too valuable to be erased. I have woken up today; I couldn’t have without yesterday. I’ll keep trying to remember that.
Regardless, I think resolutions are ultimately mostly okay, if we can divorce them from the social standards and pressures and really think about them in terms of our own ~growth.
In 2019 I’d like to read more (30 books!) and write more (every day!) and watch and listen to new things. I’d like to keep journaling and use my planner more efficiently and reach out to friends more often than I do.
But most of all, I am going to try to focus on my ~word for the year, like I did in 2018.
2018’s word was unclench, which I tried to interpret in all the ways I could: physically and mentally and socially. To calm down and relax and release. It went alright. I definitely got better at noticing how physically tense I was and eventually getting better at releasing that tension. I got pretty okay at letting go of petty grievances and I made a valiant if minuscule effort toward unleashing myself on other people when the opportunity arose. Mild successes that I will gladly celebrate.
2019’s word is fortify.
While journaling and trying to listen to myself in 2018, I realized that I have felt desperately diminished in recent years, as though my personality has faded and shriveled, starved out because we live such an isolated life here. So this year I’d like to fortify myself, to shake out the husk of my once bombastic personality and try to figure out what that person looks like here and now when I stop unintentionally reining her in.
I want to fortify my mental health with journaling and meditation and the organization tools that keep me calm. I want to fortify my relationships by reaching out more often, regardless of the response, and getting back in to sending cards and letters. And I want fortify my cultural knowledge with new media, books and tv and movies and music.
I want to strengthen and secure and encourage myself and the world around me. Including you!
I hope 2019 is kind to you. I hope you feel love and joy that makes the pains and losses worth it. I hope you find peace and comfort. I hope you always know safety. I hope you grow in ways that you like. I hope that you’re able to summon the perfect, biting “Fuck you” when faced with someone or something that deserves it. I hope you share a memorable meal with someone you like. I hope you have a really fun nostalgia spiral about something you loved with all your heart when you were young. I hope you smile more than you cry. I hope you laugh so hard your body aches. I hope you remember that you are worthy of life and love and comfort and pleasure even when the world or the mean voice in your head is telling you otherwise. I hope to see you ring in 2020, whole and happy. I love you; I like you; I believe in you. 💜
For about a year in the late 2000s, I became intensely devoted to crossing myself whenever I passed a cross.
This started with a steeple cross that was visible to me from the freeway on the drive home from my college. I often sat in a little clutch of traffic near it and it was lit at night, so I noticed it frequently, hovering over the wall that separated the speeding 210 from the neighborhood beyond.
I’m not religious. I’ve been to church less than a dozen times in my entire life. I’m unbaptized, un-saved, uncircumcised. I’ve been to Catholic mass once and I spent the entire thing staring at how super naked Jesus seemed on the cross, hanging morbidly above the Filipino priest’s head. I’m religiously curious, so I know a lot about rites and rituals. Plus I’m a writer and I like characters of faith, so I’ve done a lot of research over the years. I’m an atheist though. No waffling here: I don’t believe in god and I have no interest in church.
But this cross, it haunted me. I could feel the pull of compulsion each time I passed it, the little tug at me, like there was something my body, my hindbrain NEEDED to do, but I wasn’t getting the message. It probably took a month of this drive, two or three times a week, for me to figure out what it was. My right arm wanted to make the sign of the cross.
This is 1. hysterical because with all that lack of religious upbringing, I had no idea how to accurately make the sign of the cross, and 2. disturbing, because it was a compulsion with an intensity I had not yet experienced. I’ve had intensely intrusive thoughts my entire life (flashes of sudden injury, the desire to drive into oncoming traffic, having to back up from a rail because I wanted to jump — all the regulars!) but this was not that. And it wasn’t like the compulsive need to touch and smell things that I inherited from my mother. (Thanks, Mom!) It wasn’t going all the way back to my apartment or dorm door to make sure I locked it. Twice. I knew there were consequences if I left my front door unlocked. I didn’t have any identifiable fear or consequence of NOT crossing myself, I just realized that I had to do it and I had to do it real, real bad.
So I did.
It became a thing. I drove by this steeple, I crossed myself. Probably incorrectly, but it got the job done. I felt compelled first in my upper arm, then my elbow, then my fingers as I neared the cross. I’d cross myself and I’d feel the minor flood of elation at having satisfied the compulsion. I only crossed myself when I was traveling on the westbound side of the freeway because, I don’t know, these things just happen and the universe in which I live has all kinds of rules I just obey because that’s how it is. I also always did it with my fore and middle fingers extended, which had no reasoning either. It just felt right.
It was weird, but it wasn’t dangerous and it was only once a day, twice a week!
But then it started happening when I was eastbound as well.
And then it started happening any time I passed a large cross. Then any time I passed a church. Then any cross. Then cemeteries.
I was living in a Los Angeles suburb and commuting into the Inland Empire. I spent a lot of time in the car and I saw a lot of crosses and churches and cemeteries.
I knew it had become a problem when I had to come up with a way to cross myself SECRETLY.
I had started crossing myself so frequently (There are more than 40 churches just in the town of 40,000 where I lived.) that doing it with other people had become unavoidable.
I have been an outspoken atheist since I was thirteen years old, I couldn’t let my friends and family think I had suddenly become weirdly and confusingly Catholic. Also, I still — despite having access to the entire internet at my fingertips — had no idea if I was crossing myself correctly and being seen doing it incorrectly would have been HUMILIATING, obviously. I think I didn’t look it up because the compulsion didn’t want me to. My crossing was organic and it wanted to stay that way.
I had learned in like, the third grade, that crossing your fingers for luck came from persecuted Christians giving each other the what’s up, so I tried that. I didn’t like it. First of all, it’s not really an action, it’s an adjustment. Second of all, it didn’t satisfy my elbow or my shoulder. My fingers were okay-ish with the deal, but the rest of my right arm was Not Having It.
So I started drawing a cross on my thigh. It allowed for the motion of my entire arm, it seemed semi-holy, and it was pretty easy to do inconspicuously. And I did it A Lot.
The best way to end this story would be to tell you that someone busted me and I had an embarrassing breakdown about how I was an adult woman who couldn’t control my own weird, compulsive, faux-religiosity. Or maybe that the compulsion started to make me feel too out of control and so I forced myself to break it. But, sadly, this story just ends the way most idiot problems I have do: it just went away on its own.
soundtrack for this post
Today is six months since Crystal and I got hitched!
I am still honestly amazed by how much I L-O-V-E-D getting married. A group of forty people I really love who all showed up in the same place at the same time to stare at and listen to me talk? What a fucking dream!
I honestly don’t know how I got lucky enough to not only find a woman who has loved and adored me for more than eight years (and finally got her shit together and figured out she was actually in love with me eight years ago this month!) but also agreed to stand up and declare her love for me in front of a big group of people and then also promised to stay with me forever? When she hates public speaking and attention focused on her? What a champ, what a gift, what a wife.
And forty people who showed up to Las Vegas on a Friday the 13th for a 7pm wedding to cheer us on and throw confetti and get drunk and eat mad delicious burgers with us until midnight? I’m drowning in heroes over here.
The year of planning up to the wedding was mostly fun, but also torture. I learned a lot of stuff in that year, most of which can be summed up with: shit happens. And all those things that seemed huge and difficult at the time ended up either working out fine or not mattering at all in the end. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY.
 
If you’re planning a wedding I have only one piece of advice: ELOPE. J/K. Mostly. Fuck it, nail it! It’s something I saw on a wedding blog (A Practical Wedding, probably) and immediately wrote on a post-it note I stuck to my computer where it still lives. It’s sort of become my life mantra, tbh. Need to make a decision? Say “fuck it” and nail it down.
And if you’ve found your person and you want to marry them? Do it!
PS: I uploaded a million more pictures and planned to make a way longer post with vendor info and all that jazz and I will (truly!) but we’re house-hunting right now and it makes me wish I lived in a cave with wifi, so you’ll have to forgive the continued delay! plz&ty you are the best
There are two different schools of thought when it comes to Resolutions for the New Year. The first thinks your goals should be concrete and measurable so that you can see what you’ve accomplished; the second thinks they should be intentions rather than goals so that you don’t get discouraged by numbers. Well, three schools I guess, since the third thinks they’re bullshit entirely. I used to be that third school! Now I’m a mix of the first two because turning thirty has turned me into the kind of woman who drinks lattes and sometimes reads motivational quotes, nodding her head like she feels it. Anyway, my goals last year went okayish, if not as well as I’d hoped, but I figure rather than giving up on all those refresh-and-renew New Year feelings, I’d just keep trying! Because trying is cool!
Since I’m trying to mix those two schools, I’m thinking of intentions as lofty, abstract, and aspirational, while goals are manageable, actionable, and calculable.
ADULTHOOD: Plan, execute, follow-through. Be a thirty-one year old adult. Kick being an adult’s ass. Be a Super Adult. Or like, at least be a better adult. Use your gym membership. Do laundry regularly instead of like you’re putting out a laundry fire. Plan meals for the week. Clean out the fridge and go grocery shopping. Develop a routine. Pick up your shoes. Floss. Make lists and actually do the things on them. You know, all that boring crap that actually makes your life better.
BETTER CHOICES: Choose better. Not perfect choices. Not even good choices, just better ones. Choose for the long-term instead of the immediate. If there is a choice, make the smarter one. If there are a lot of choices, narrow them down and make the smartest one. Making choices that make my life better and help me to take care of myself including meditation over griping, mindful eating over eating to survive, and moving my dumb body instead of slowly turning to stone. Choose well and above all, choose to be kind. To the planet, to others, and to myself.
FINANCIAL RESPONSIBILITY: Make thoughtful purchases instead of impulsive ones. Save money whenever possible, including the Reverse 52 Week Savings Plan. Avoid the unnecessary. I am not, nor will I ever be a minimalist, but good lord do I just have enough stuff. We are pretty good about picking through our things and making regular donations, but I want to be better about not buying back-ups and collecting things that just end up collecting dust. One In, One Out isn’t realistic for us, but I think Less In, More Out will be the way of the year.
JOURNAL EVERY SINGLE DAY: This sounds more like a punishment than a goal, but is something I want to do because I am getting old and I would like to maybe understand my feelings and also remember things that happen in my life. Crystal and I also got the Our Q&A to start around the wedding, but we are not good at follow-through, so that’s another thing I’d like to commit to and add to our routine. Feelings are gross and should be banned, but until then, this is how I will try to deal with them.
100 WORDS A DAY: I write so rarely now that I hesitate to even call myself a writer anymore and that bums me out, like, a lot. So I’m starting small. I probably story-tell well over 100 words a day already easy, but I have to put some of those words down on paper every day. Just 100 of them! This can include the journaling, but should also mean at least some prompted writing or work on one of my books.
55 BOOKS: I read 53 last year and got a butt-load of Amazon gift cards for Christmas, so I think this one is super doable.
3 SEASONS OF TV & 20 MOVIES: They have to be new to me because re-watching doesn’t expand my knowledge-base. I also just want to generally seek out more tv and movies that interest me. I watched some stuff I really loved last year, but not nearly as much as I have in the past. Part of that is just having a full-time job and not being so sickly that all I can do is sit on my couch and watch cool stuff (which is obviously awesome) and part of it is just laziness (which is not).
BLOG AT LEAST ONCE EVERY TWO WEEKS: I just, you know, need to get it together. This also includes revamping the look of this place to match my awesome new url/name and also just, like, because it hasn’t been updated in way too long and it’s starting to get super embarrassing.
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