End of Year Check-In

I have a lot of bad-to-mediocre years and some incredible ones, and in spite of the domestic and international shit-show as our world spirals into madness, 2018, as an arbitrary marker of the passage of time, marked a decent set of events of the course of my personal and professional last 52 weeks.

Here we are at the start of the new 52, so taking a quick look back, here are some highlights of the past year:

• I bought a sofa. (First time I actually sat on it and watched the television was 1/1/19, after my flight landed before I could finish season 1 of Mrs. Maisel on the plane. So sue me.)

• Touristed Tijuana, Tunisia, Barcelona and Valencia (quickly), Haiti, San Francisco, and a late-night bench in the Chicago airport when weather screwed up a flight connection. 

• Continued my ongoing explorations of LA area, including Highland Park, Anaheim, the DTLA Chocolate Shop, Randyland in Echo Park, the Garment District, Flower District, the LA River, Frogtown, Beverly Hills, Old Town Orange, Atwater Village, the SkySlide, Sequoia National Park, DTLA former speakeasies, and Long Beach retro row. 

• Learned (sort of ) to play my ukulele, handmade by my deceased friend Edward Readicker-Henderson’s brother.

• Used the Greyhound bus to move a table across the country.

• Finally crossed that age threshold where I have to worry about a deteriorating physical form and pay attention to food and exercise. Hooray. 

• Gave an inspirational (to me, anyway) speech to college students in Porterville. Spoke on the Women of Warner DC panel. Spoke on an inspirational video for LA high school students. Was held up as a professional example for young women via Refinery 29. Beat out the boss on an industry list, ha ha.

• Went to Provincetown to watch a theater group bring a comic I edited to life. (The great Snagglepuss, written by Mark Russell, also in attendance.) 

• Wrangled and paid for a private plane flight when a general strike ended my ability to travel by road in Haiti.

• And I won free waffles in supermarket Monopoly, which I then lost in the great refrigerator disaster of 2018.

For 2019, I’ve signed up for handbuilding pottery at the Burbank Rec Center, some basic yoga classes (gotta go back to the beginning since it’s been a while), a one-day backyard gardening workshop, and I’ve involuntarily signed up to learn about basement waterproofing in Hudson County, New Jersey. I’m hoping to get to Jamaica this year, and to Baja and Vancouver to take advantage of my location.

But mostly, I’m planning to stop prioritizing my job over anything I personally do, and force myself to make time for my own writing, so my entire life isn’t all about facilitating the creative impulses of others. Because the truth is editing is kind of brutal for hopes and dreams, and gently (or sometimes not-so-gently) ushering in the success of others at the expense of your own can be frustrating. No offense, creative partners. I’m proud of you, but I need to be proud of me too on occasion. So here we go, another 52 weeks to see what trouble we can get into. Let’s do this. Or rather, this is going to happen whether we do it or not, so we might as well proceed with some measured enthusiasm.