Tag Archives: goals

Taking and Making in 2018

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Longtime readers will be aware that I usually don’t make New Year’s resolutions. It’s too easy to cloak “restrictive rules” in the guise of “goals,” and I’m wary of doing that to myself. But this year, I’ve decided to try one of those daily accountability projects that are so popular. I take in a lot of pop culture and politics, but in recent years I’ve been putting out a lot less of my own stuff — writing, singing, things like that. This year, I joined a small community choir, which has made me happy and reminded me that being creative takes many forms, and that I want to do more of it.

So for 2018, I’ll be keeping a daily record of what I take and what I make. I may take in an album or movie or book or comedy night or an essay or play, and so on; I may make a blog post or song or poem or a good dinner, or I might make someone laugh or make a mess of something. The idea is to pay attention to what I’m creating and consuming, and not get lost in social media scrolling and procrastination. I’m not setting specific goals for what to create, just asking myself to be more proactive about the act of creation; there are no rules for what I can consume, just that I be more conscious about what I take in.

Here we go!

January 1

I took in:
Jessie Ware’s album Glasshouse (I particularly love “Your Domino” and “Alone”)
Traci Brimhall’s poem “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It” (from The New Yorker)
a NYE dance mix from Spotify
the “Hang the DJ” episode of Black Mirror (I kind of want that system for my dating life, if that’s the ending it’s going to have!)
the movie Belle (an excellent period piece that provides the simmering passions you love in a Jane Austen and also thoughtful, nuanced discussions of race and class that work as well for today as they do for the 18th-century setting of the film).

I made:
this blog post
a goofy dance to the Spotify dance mix
no attempt to be productive on this holiday.

east lansing michigan winter

 

Year in Review: What I Read and What I Hope to Read

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Books! I want to read them all the time, I always have at least one on the go, and yet despite all that and my two months of unemployment at the end of the year, I still barely made it to 52 books read in 2016. I suppose the rest of life holds a lot of distractions. Anyway, I read several excellent books last year, several good ones, and a few duds. I made a concerted effort to read mostly books by women.

Let’s break it down.

Books read: 52

Books by women: 46

YA fiction: 12

Non-fiction: 8

Adult fiction: 32

Series read or completed: 3

Books read because I wanted to evoke a certain time and mood while I was in a certain place: 2 (The Paris Wife and A Moveable Feast)

My favorite fiction titles: The Interestings, A God in Ruins, How to Be Both, My Brilliant Friend, All Our Pretty Songs, The Girl with All the Gifts, Texts From Jane Eyre

My least favorite fiction titles: The Quick, Burial Rites, The Heart Goes Last, My Life Before Me, Innocent

My favorite non-fiction titles: H is for Hawk, Notorious RBG

Non-fiction titles that surprised me by being disappointing, given how much I like the authors’ other work: Bad Feminist, Scandals of Hollywood

Hard copies read: 5

E-books owned: 3

So… e-books borrowed from the library: 44!

Books written before 1900: 1

Books written 1900-2000: 13

Books written 2000-2010: 1

Books written after 2010: 37

And with an eye to the future…

For 2017, I’m hoping to read:

  • 60 books
  • at least half by authors of color
  • at least half written before 2000
  • at least a third from cultures other than the US/UK

How about you? Any books coming out this year that you can’t wait to read, or authors who you’re hoping will do a Beyonce-like surprise release?

I keep track of the books I read on Goodreads, and I also write mini-reviews of nearly every book I read on there. If you’re on Goodreads, or if you’re looking for a way to keep track of what you read/what you want to read/what your friends recommend you read, feel free to add/follow me on there. There’s a link and a list of what I’m currently reading to the left on this blog’s main page, or down at the very bottom if you’re reading on a mobile.

Back in the States Update

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I’ve been back in the States for 8 weeks now, which sounds like a long time, but I’ve spent a lot of that time at weddings and catching up with friends, so it’s felt shorter. I’m settled in to my parents’ house, and I’ll be here ’til the end of the year. So what am I up to these days?

Today I took a look at my short-term goals from July, and I’m doing pretty well! 1) I bought catastrophic health insurance through Priority Health. It costs $72 a month, and that includes emergency room visits and not much else. Pre-existing conditions aren’t allowed (I cannot wait for the Affordable Care Act to be fully implemented so that kind BS is no longer permitted), and I pay full price for prescriptions and most doctor visits. But it’s one of the better plans I found, with a fairly low premium ($1,000), and I might not need it for very long, because… 2) I got a job! I start the day after I return from my sibling’s wedding in New York. I signed up with a local staffing agency, and they got me an interview at an auxiliary health care-type office. I’ll be doing data entry and a little proofreading, full-time, and the bosses seem very nice. It doesn’t pay a lot, but I’ve done the math and it should be enough to get me back on the road sometime next year. Also, I can walk there from my parents’ house, so I don’t need to buy a car.

I’m hoping that having taken care of #1 and #2 from the original list, I’ll be able to really dig into #3. Now that I’ve removed the stress of job hunting and hiding inside lest I injure myself and have no way to pay for recovery, I should be able to use my free time writing. The changing season will make that even easier, as the nights come faster and the days grow colder, and I stay inside and focus on writing. Fingers crossed.

Next week I’ll be in New York, helping set up for the wedding and then dancing the night away at said wedding. After that, I’ll be in an office for the first time in over a year. Wish me luck!

Now What? The Short-Term Goals After Nearly a Year Around the World

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I’ve been back in the States for a week, and I’m just now starting to settle in. It’s been a whirlwind of cleaning and organizing the stuff I carried around in a backpack for the better part of a year, meeting up with friends I haven’t seen in as long, going to one of my favorite weddings ever, and dragging my family along to my most-missed eating spots in town. But now it’s the second week here, the jet lag is behind me, and it’s time to think about what’s next.

Lots of this in my future

Lots of this in my future

As I’ve mentioned before, my long-term goals involve more travel and finding the money to make that happen. I will definitely be in the States through the end of September, and possibly through Christmas, depending on what kind of employment I find. But I’d like to skip winter again this year if I can, so in the new year (if not sooner) I’ll be heading off to Africa or Latin America.

In the short term, I’m readjusting to suburban America, which takes some doing–the politics, the modes of transportation, the distances from place to place, the foods, they’re all different. I’m also living with my parents again for the first time since I graduated college 8 years ago. That takes adjustment on both sides! We’re figuring out how to make it work for everyone; they’re quite content with their lives and I don’t want to get in the way of that, and they want me to be happy but also productive. Which sounds about right.

Here are my goals for the next few months:

1) Get short-term health insurance. This is easily the biggest difference between where I’ve been and where I am now. I’ve had health insurance through my various employers ever since I graduated college, and before that I was covered under my parents’ plan. If I were in the UK, I’d show the National Health Service (NHS) proof of residency and they’d assign me a doctor (who I could change if I wanted), and that would be that, no fuss. But as we know, it’s a very big fuss in the States. It’s scary to be without insurance here, so I’m shopping around to find a short-term plan that won’t charge a huge deductible or monthly fee. If you have any leads, let me know!

2) Find employment. If I stay through the end of the year, I’d like something stable, but I also don’t want to feel bad ditching after just a few months. I’ll be signing up with temp agencies, which will hopefully provide me with admin or data entry work, or something that will put some money in my pocket. Of course, I’m always on the lookout for freelance editing work, so I’ll keep that search up, and I might try pitching some pieces of my own to online magazines and such as well. Be sure to tell your friends and neighbors they can hire me for odd jobs, housesitting, babysitting–just about anything!

3) Focus on the writing. I’ve been cranking out blog posts for y’all Monday through Friday for all of 2013, as promised, and I’m happy I challenged myself to do that. I’ll continue to make that a goal, but I’m also going to try my hand at more in-depth essays and pieces that someone other than me might want to publish.

4) Keep within a budget. It’s easy to simultaneously feel like I’m still traveling about and should experience everything at least once and the extra dollar or two isn’t that much, AND to feel like I’m back on familiar ground so all the old spending habits can come back. But I do not have the steady job I used to, and the whole point of this interlude is to save up for the next adventure. I have to keep that in mind.

Of course, there are other things I want to do, too: visit my friends in Chicago, make the playlist for my sibling’s wedding, learn new songs to sing with my dad, take walks with my mom, enjoy the beauty of a Michigan summer, read new books, and finally watch the new season of Arrested Development.

It’s going to be a good few months.