I’m not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.
However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years of gaining weight and developing some really negative patterns of self-talk around my body image, I decided to join a gym. Of course I’d like to see the number on the scale go down, but the main goal was just to get healthier and develop healthier habits. I started running, because that’s what I used to do (not well), and eventually convinced a friend to join with me. Together, we set the goal of running a 5K, and we did our first in May of 2023, in about 41 minutes (in our defense, it was an extremely hilly course, but also progress, progress1). We ran three more as the year went by; my most recent was November, where I finished in around 36 minutes.
A friend of mine is a big fan of Florence + the Machine. I confessed to only really knowing (but liking) her hits, “Dog Days” and “Cosmic Love.” I asked which album she would recommend I listen to; she said How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015),1 and I texted her about some of the songs on it. She asked if I was listening to the whole thing given the back to back messages; I said yes, and I started to consider how I like to consume music.
The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.
In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. 1
Barbie - I was underwhelmed. There’s been lots of chatter, and I loved Lady Bird, but Barbie didn’t hit for me; too much Ken (to be the hundredth person to whine about it) and the ending felt unearned and thematically confused. This was more of an homage to Barbie as a product than it was an homage to womanhood, but it pretended to be the latter.
Games
Vampire Survivors - I originally played Vampire Survivors for my video game podcast, Pitch & Play (on hiatus but will come back!); my friend and co-host Ross recommended it to me. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I got into it given that I don’t really have nostalgia for this sort of game, but I played several hours of it and then became distracted by life. While moving this month, I was without internet for quite a while and had not hooked up my consoles (or my PC, still). To kill some time while my body recovered from lifting boxes and scrubbing surfaces, I downloaded Vampire Survivors onto my phone and went deep into it. It’s a fantastic game that I’ll come to associate with my early days in the house.
Books
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech - I read this book originally as a child in the fifth grade. I remember loving it but little else. I have been looking for a text to add to my curriculum and wanted to try Walk Two Moons out. I enjoyed reading it and was surprised by how much of it came back to me even though I am (nearly) twenty years out from reading it the first time. I do think the Native American set dressing might be problematic given that the author is not, by any account I’ve read, actually Native; the plot is also predictable, but perhaps that is because I’m an adult reading a book written for children and because I’ve read it before. I’m not sure it’s the book I’m looking for, but it’s not a bad read.