Tracking 2018: What I Did In January and How I Recorded It

(Here's my monthly "hair-growth progress" photo. Um, not much progress yet.)

Happy February! I hope you're having a good 2018 so far. I am! Since I ended last year feeling like I couldn't remember much, I set up a system to keep track of my activities this year, and here's how that worked out in January.

I needed to come up with a system that I would actually use. While I like the idea of putting everything in a digital format, I know that I'm more motivated by being able to write things on paper. I like to make lists and cross things off, and fill boxes, and make check-marks. So just know that I recycle and buy recycled paper products and try to be as efficient with my uses of paper as possible. 

The system I came up with is a binder with three pages for each week: one page for noting how much time I spend on the activities I want to do, as well as ones I'm trying not to do as much; one page for nutrition (like how many servings I eat per day of fruit, vegetables, nuts, etc); and a page with spaces to write the notable events of each day of the week. This might sound incredibly tedious to people who are motivated differently than I am, and that's okay! But when I want to put in a certain amount of exercise each week, for example, I enjoy writing that I did it, and I find that I'm more likely to fit it in if I look at the page for that week and see that I haven't done it yet. 

I'm probably not going to post much detail about exactly how many minutes I did this or that, but I may sometimes write about how a certain category is working out, especially if I find it particularly helpful or particularly vexing and in need of an overhaul! 

Generally, I have an idea of how much time I want to spend on various things each day or week, such as blogging, reading fiction, reading non-fiction, making art (which can be either visual art or any artistic form of writing I'm working on), meditating, exercising, crafting, and doing "life maintenance chores" like cleaning the house and doing the dishes. I'm starting the year with just tracking what I do, and I hope to improve on my stats as I figure out better ways to arrange my time.

Anyway... In January I:

• Went on a six-day trip to Michigan to attend ConFusion SF.
• Finished reading four novels: Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson (which I had started to read in December), and the first three Dublin Murder Squad books by Tana French, which are In the Woods, The Likeness, and Faithful Place. I don't usually read mysteries, but my current favorite author, Jeff VanderMeer, posted that he had really enjoyed reading Tana French's novels. So I thought I'd better give those a try, and they turned out to be extremely good and hard to put down. One thing I especially like about them is that the main character is different from one to the next. You get to know them as a side character in one book, and then they become the main character in the next (and the impression you've gotten of them from the outside can change a lot once you get to see things from their perspective: this series is a master class in character development). Speaking of VanderMeer, btw, I am super-psyched to see the movie Annihilation this month, which is based on his Annihilation: A Novel.
• Got the new tires my car needed BEFORE going on a road trip in the middle of winter, because that's the way to be an adult in spite of much preferring the idea of spending that money on, say, ANYTHING ELSE.
• Also read most of Better than Before, by Gretchen Rubin, which is an outstanding book about making and changing habits, and I think it will deserve its own post after I finish it. It was a lucky find on the day that I was walking around while waiting for my new tires to be installed. Anyone who knows me understands that I can spend hours in Barnes & Noble. When I worked there (over 20 years ago! Jeez!) they said that they wanted to encourage people to read the books in the store. I have learned exactly how effective it is for their sales, when they let people get attached to a book and then feel the urgent need to buy it.
• Went on a few fun outings with my boys, mostly involving restaurant food, because that's what teen and tween boys are talking about.
• Spent many lovely hours with the man in my life, who is shy and doesn't want to be written about, but deserves the occasional mention for being awesome nonetheless. :)
• Achieved my goal of losing one pound this month. I'm trying to be more about changing my eating habits for long-term health, and less about dieting to get to a certain weight as soon as possible, but I think it's reasonable to adjust my eating habits to aim for losing a pound a month for a while.
• I exercised every week. Not quite as many times as I think I should (I want it to be three, and I mostly managed two), but that's better than not at all, ever. I'm trying to make my exercise about benefits other than weight loss. There are so many benefits, and it's more encouraging for me to focus on those. Maybe this philosophy will become another post!
• I meditated one single time in the whole month of January, right on the last day, because I didn't want to have to say I never did it at all. I don't know why I resist it. I like it when I'm doing it, and it's usually only ten to twenty minutes. So I'll be working on finding a good time and/or trigger to get myself to do it more frequently.
• Finally, I'm very pleased with the illustration I drew for the story I co-wrote with Maurice Broaddus, "What the Mountain Wants." I really want to post it to show you! But I'm saving it for a more impactful reveal sometime in the future. I may post a smaller detail portion of it before the full thing, though!

It was a good month! I do have ups and downs in my moods, and I don't want to give the false impression that nothing bad ever happens in my life. January was a happy time, though. :)

Don't Call it a Crisis

Hey, I'm in the middle-aged years of my life.

And this summer I've been doing a thing.

One might examine the characteristics of this thing I've been doing, and consider the implications of my age being 44, and think this thing might plausibly be called a "midlife crisis." But I don't think that's a very kind or fair label to apply to the thing, so I'm going to call it my Midlife Thing.

It's happening because of good reasons. I've survived to the age of 44 and a half! I've achieved many of the standard life goals for which one can find readily-available advice, such as having the relationships and children that I've wanted, and a series of houses. I've taken some trips that are widely considered to be desirable, to Italy and England. I've learned decent chunks of a couple of different languages. I've even done some things that are a bit less usual, like selling my original paintings at art shows, and publishing some of my short stories and the two original anthologies that I've edited.

My Midlife Thing is not coming from dissatisfaction. It's coming from the feeling that I've crossed off many goals from my original list, and I'm looking at the goals that remain on the list to see if they're still goals that I want to do. And I have this other blank sheet here, and a pen, waiting for me to fill it in with my next set of goals, preferably next-level challenging ones that will feel invigorating.

The way I noticed the beginning of my Midlife Thing - which probably started brewing quite a while before I noticed it - is that I suddenly had this SUPER INTENSE NEED to decorate my bedroom IMMEDIATELY. Summer is a hard time for me to write, because of loud boy-children living life echoingly no farther away than the room adjacent to the room I am in at any given time, so I tend to do more artsy, projecty stuff in the summer. But this need to decorate basically pounced on me, dug in its teeth, and consumed my entire personality for a few weeks there. The photo above is one I took when it was not even as decorated as it is now. YEAH. I've got this "if a goth discovered boho" vibe going on in the room. And I love it.

I love it! But after I did that, I wondered why exactly I needed to do that decorating, that hard, that minute. My conclusion is that I was subconsciously trying to invite in some more creativity so that I could do something bigger than what I had been doing. I was bored and I didn't have any big goals to attack, so I needed to create the kind of bedroom a creative, big-goal-attacking person would have. I just don't usually have to launch my own subconscious at myself in order to figure out things like that.

Once I got my motivations sorted out, I started to spend a lot of time in my magnificent pageant of a bedroom, reading books that seemed relevant and writing many questions and answers. I also started to watch YouTube videos made by some inspiring individuals. I don't even know how I found Marie Forleo's channel, but I watched a lot of her videos, especially her interviews with other people who had written interesting books. I recommend this course of action, because she's interviewed some fascinating people. The first book I read as a direct result of watching her interviews was Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I had picked up and put back down in bookstores I don't know how many times before that. It took seeing Gilbert being delightful in an interview to get me to read it, but at that point I was definitely in the right state of mind to read it. Apparently, despite not being particularly woo-woo oriented, I am in a state of willingness to try out acting as if some woo-woo thinking might work for me even if I don't thoroughly believe in it. Just putting on some woo-woo shoes to walk around in for a while and see if they take me somewhere good.

Which means I also found it useful to read The Fire Starter Sessions, by Danielle LaPorte. It's not ENTIRELY woo-woo, but it's, you know. Pretty spiritual, philosophically. At the same time, it's loaded with personality and good ways to figure oneself out in many areas of life, not just the spiritual side of it.

I CAN ALWAYS TAKE OFF THE WOO-WOO SHOES LATER.

I'm going to end this series of links with one to my new favorite human discovery, Brendon Burchard. He has a long playlist of short videos I've been tearing through. This guy has so much sparkle, it's like watching sentient glitter confetti tell you how to get your shit together. That's the kind of person I want to learn from!

I also have a huge new section of my list of things to read, and I suspect I'll tell you all about that as time goes by, but I've clarified my ambitions a lot already.

What I'm saying is that I've never written an entire novel before, and I still very much want to, and it's time. I don't know what other goals will go on the new list, but this goal is now written at the top. I even know generally which novel I want to start writing (some assembly will be required on the details). So that's my next-level big goal that I'll be working on when the kids are back in school.