Last night was rough. I expected us to be better. Smarter. Stronger. Instead we chose hate over love, exclusion over inclusion, bullying over cooperation.
I am glad that my daughter is too young to understand elections or politics. I don’t know if I am equal to the task of explaining this to her. Continue reading “Standing on the Side of Love, Redux”
There will be days when the mountain calls your name. Answer her.
Take the fun car.
The one that will zip you down to Highway One, to the place, where the hills open and the ocean shows through.
It doesn’t last long. The road twists through another switchback and you’re in the woods again. Keep driving.
Faster now. Down the side of the mountain, down through the redwoods, through the tourists and the Buddhists.
Here.
Where the mountain falls away, where you are left with grass and dune and blue.
This is how you know you are home. There is sand between your toes and water licking up your feet.
There will be days when the ocean calls your name. Go to her.
I’ve had this post sitting in my draft folder since I first started writing it on January 2nd. Some posts are like that. They sit, because I’m not sure what to say, or I don’t make time to write them, or I forget they’re there. About two-thirds of them stop feeling relevant after a bit, and end up in the trash. This post has stuck with me, nagging me quietly to go ahead and finish it already.
This isn’t a list of resolutions. It’s a list of goals I want to achieve, with milestones I can track. There’s an important difference between the two. A resolution is something you promise to do. A goal is a measurable, trackable, specific achievement. A resolution is nebulous; a goal is focused.
I’m posting these publicly to help keep me honest. My plan is to do a recap post once a month showing my progress in meeting them for that month, with a final post at the end of the year. If I’m feeling ambitious, I might even figure out how to put this information into Excel to spit out some pretty charts.
1. Write for at least 5 hours each week.
January: 8.68 hours over 8 days.
2. Finish Bronwyn’s story and shop draft to agents.
January: On Chapter 5 of draft 2.0
3. Continue writing the Monday blogs.
January: 4 blog posts total; 2 of 4 Monday Review posts
4. Finish 2 books and 1 audio book each month.
January: Finished two books and 1 audio book.
5. Read 2 non-fiction books this year.
January: None.
6. Read 2 books that I wouldn’t normally consider reading, and 6 books written by someone who is fundamentally different than me this year.
January: None.
7. Get moving for 5 hours a week.
January: Not quite. According to the Up app on my phone, I walked 21.1 miles but was only active for 3 hours and 17 minutes. I don’t think the active time is entirely right – I need to get better at logging activities – but it definitely wasn’t 5 hours/week.
8. Get to Yoga once a month.
January: Didn’t happen.
9. Go hiking once a month.
January: Didn’t happen.
11. Go to one country and one state I haven’t been to yet.
January: None; I’ve been to Mexico once before.
12. Go on two camping trip, with toddler.
January: None. California may be warmer than the East coast, but not that much warmer!
13. Go on one date a month with the hubby.
January: We went on two dates, one to see the new Star Wars movie and one to a 60’s mod costume party. We even dressed up for the second!
14. Go on three photo shoots or other adult type activities this year.
January: None.
And there you have it. Considering how January went down, I think 2 out of 14 – especially since 5 of the 14 are year goals rather than month goals. Things are looking a little better for February – but you’ll have to wait until the end of month post to see how much.
I like numbers. Not nearly as much as I like words, mind you. I won’t go so far as to say that numbers don’t lie, because you can manipulate numbers almost as easily as you can manipulate words. When used with the appropriate amount of caution, however, numbers do a pretty good job of telling you where you’re at. Let’s take a look, shall we?
Apply Ass to Chair
This year, I told myself I wanted to write more. That I am a better and happier person when I make that time for myself. Ultimately, though, I didn’t write as much as I had wanted to. We moved, I got out of the habit of waking up at 6, the words didn’t make it onto the page.
| Month | Days | Hours | Words | Blogging | Railroad |
| January | 28 | 21.40 | 9613 | 1 | 26 |
| February | 20 | 13.10 | 0 | – | 20 |
| March | 11 | 8.17 | 0 | – | 11 |
| April | 2 | 1.13 | 0 | – | 2 |
| May | – | – | – | – | – |
| June | – | – | – | – | – |
| July | – | – | – | – | – |
| August | 1 | 0.60 | 0 | – | 2 |
| September | – | – | – | – | – |
| October | – | – | – | – | – |
| November | 15 | 12.80 | 955 | 8 | 7 |
| December | 17 | 14.60 | 3323 | 8 | 9 |
| Totals | 94 | 71.80 | 13891 | 16 | 77 |
| Average | 13 | 10.26 | 1984 | 5 | 11 |
The result? I only wrote 94 out of 365 days this year. That averages out to about 1 in every 4 days. And the months I thought I was doing ok, particularly November and December, were slimmer than I would have liked. I’m also doing about as much blogging as writing, which is a bit surprising. The Monday posts usually take me about three hours to put together, so I need to get better at condensing that time or working on blog posts at night, to gra
b mornings back for novel writing.
Get Moving
I’d planned to go into Cardio Trainer, the app I use to track exercise, and pull out stats on how far I went, how often, and so on. Unfortunately, the app no longer links up with my Google account, and I had to hard reset my phone about a month ago. So it looks like I’m in the market for a new app.
Without data, I can tell you that my exercise numbers are the inverse of the writing numbers – I was out and about way more often in the spring and summer. I picked Z up from school on the bike a bunch of times, we did long walks in the stroller in the space between dinner and bed, and weekends saw us hiking the trails in town.
Reading
According to Goodreads,* I read 34 books this year. Most of those were sci-fi, fantasy, or historical fiction. I read one non-fiction book – The Bully Pulpit by Doris Keans Goodwin – and it took me the whole year to get through it. I have also pretty much entirely switched to reading eBooks. In fact, the only print book I recall reading is God’s War, by Kameron Hurley, and that was because I picked up the first two books of the Bel Dame series at Half-Price. I don’t have precise stats (although I’ll start doing this for next year), but from a scan of authors I read 1 book by a non-US authors, no books by non-white authors, and 22 books by female authors.
*You might have to friend me to see the link.
Travel
I traveled a lot this year – enough to earn elite status for the first time with an airline. Google maps says I took 26 trips, but when I break that down a lot of it is travel around town. Google also had a bit of a rough time with the move from NY to CA, telling me I took several trips to and around California in the first few months we lived here. My rough estimate is 8 trips, evenly split between business and pleasure. I went to four states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, and DC, and one country, Poland. The places I went most often in 2015 were my sister-in-law’s house, Z’s daycare, SFO, Target (!), various parks and playgrounds, JFK, and REI.
Final Thoughts
My biggest takeaway from this is that you get out of tracking what you put in. The writing stats don’t really show blog posts or word count from earlier in the year because I didn’t really track those until the last few months. My Goodreads count is a bit lower than it should be, largely because I’m not great at actually adding things to Goodreads. As for Google… well, it thinks I took a ferry ride that cut through El Sobrante and Richmond!
On a more serious note, doing this has helped me start thinking about my goals for 2016. I expect I’ll be putting that post up some time in the next few weeks.
On my way home from the office yesterday evening, someone stops me and asks if I know where the Metro stop is. I say I don’t, but point to the Metro signs across the street and tell him I’m pretty sure it’s there. A moment later, a couple comes up behind me, and the man proceeds to confirm for the tourist that Metro entrance is, in fact, in the same place as the Metro signs.
The light changes; I cross the street. Behind me, I hear the man say to the woman, “What?! You’re always telling me to be nicer to tourists. I was nice.”
“I’m from New York,” I say, turning around. “We eat tourists for breakfast.”
They laugh; I continued walking, quickly, as you do in New York.
At the next light, a young woman wearing a Macy’s name tag stops me and asks if I know where the McDonald’s is. I tell her I’m sorry but I don’t. Then, noticing the couple is still behind me, I say, “You know, he might know.”
The guy plays along. “Might know what?”
“She’s looking for a McDonald’s,” I say.
“Or a Dunkin’ Donuts,” she adds.
“You want a donut?” he asks. “Astro Donuts is right down the street, and they’re still open. You ever been to Astro…” his eyes flick down to her name tag “Diamond?”
She shakes her head.
“Nevermind. You can’t handle Astro, Diamond. It’s fried chicken on top of fried donuts with more fried donuts on top. It’s intense.”
Diamond nods.
“Let’s find you a Dunkin’ Donuts,” he says, whipping out his phone. “We’re at 12 and G, hey, there’s one right here, oh nevermind it closed at nine.”
At this point, I’m about in stitches, as is the woman with him. In fact, I’m enjoying this so much that when the light changes, I stay on this side of the street.
Diamond just looks sad that the Dunkies is closed.
“Hey, don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll find you another. Look, there’s one on 7 and F that closes at 10.”
Diamond looks doubtful. “I dunno if I can get there in time.”
“Of course you can,” he says. “That’s like, five blocks. Look, we’re on 12. You go 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, that’s five blocks, and turn right. You can make that in 45 minutes. I could crawl that far in 45 minutes.”
Diamond still isn’t sure about this.
“Look,” he says. “The subway’s right there. You could get on, ride one stop, get off at Gallery Place, and you’re there. Six minutes. But then you have to spend two dollars. You don’t really want to have to spend two dollars, do you?”
Diamond shakes her head no, she doesn’t really want to spend two dollars, and sets off across the street. The couple turns left, I cross the street and turn left as well, and Diamond continues down H Street in search of her donuts.
This, apparently, is not the end of my odd encounters for the evening.
A young woman and her mother get into the elevator at the hotel behind me, each carrying a number of shopping bags. As the elevator ascends, I ask the young woman where the Lush was.
“Georgetown,” she says.
I make a face of disappointment, because I know there’s no way I’m getting from the office to Georgetown anytime this week.
“You should go,” she says as I exit the elevator. “It was amazing. I met my soulmate.” The doors close on her with a soft ding, and I’m left to ponder the strange inevitability of meeting your soulmate in a cosmetics store.
