goals

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Five for Friday

Today, I’m taking a page from Stephany’s book and using blog posting as a distraction from the ongoing endless current heavy news. Losing myself in the mundane is soothing, in its way.

If you need a genuine smile, Michelle’s post about photo doodles was magic for me. In the meantime, here are five inconsequential things on my mind today.

  • Watch Me: I am having an Extremely Reactive Skin Situation this week. My underarms are itchy and inflamed, my lips are dry and peeling, and my face is sporting multiple spots and blemishes (including a Rudolph-esque cyst on my nose; a little late to be festive, no?). Plus, my Apple watch band is leaving an angry, painful red blotch on my wrist. Well, wrists plural, because I switch arms every day to give each wrist a break. I love my Apple watch and use it for various timers and alarms, and to track my steps, my exercise, and my sleep. Honestly, no wonder my arms are getting tired of it. But my wrist-swapping method is not working as it once did, so I need a new solution. My husband uses a leather watch band during the workday, and a nylon watch band for working out. I just use the silicone band that came with my watch; maybe I need a nylon watch band? Of course, as with everything, I am spoiled for choices… this one is utilitarian and simple and cheap. This one comes in fun colors/patterns. Or maybe I want a new silicone one, like this? I would prefer a watch band I don’t need to swap out every time I exercise (although if I do need to swap it out, I would be tempted to try a stainless steel band for non-exercise time. How can I choose? Do you have an exercise watch band you like? Or some way to prevent the skin reaction?
  • Everybody Plays the Fool: Some people in my life believe that I anthropomorphize my cat. Which is entirely true. I feel like he is a person in the purest, most universal sense of the word. Sometimes I get the feeling that he is trying very hard to see me as whatever the cat equivalent is for “person.” But I am so very stupid, and have such a very difficult time understanding his clear and simple wishes. Even though I do not understand his clear and simple wishes, I understand his frustration, and just how patient he is being with me, and just how very stupid he thinks I am. I mean, look at this face. I am the recipient of this face multiple times a day. This morning, he sat there staring expectantly at me for a good ten minutes before he gave up in disgust and left my office. I never did figure out what he needed.
  • I Won’t Back Down: Yes, yes, I know I made a big ol’ deal about how I’m FINE with giving up on books that aren’t working for me. But right now I’m reading two books – one with my eyes, one with my ears – that aren’t doing it for me, and I’m just unwilling to let them go. The audiobook is a mystery, and it’s kind of boring, and I don’t really care at all about the narrator/protagonist… but I’ve already given up four hours of my life to listening to it, and I’m more than halfway through it, and I just want to figure out who the murderer is and be done with it. Multiple times a day I tell myself, “Just Google it, and start something else!” and yet I keep plugging away. WHY. The other book is one that SO MANY PEOPLE seem to love, and I want to love it too, and yet it just isn’t striking the right tone with me. To be fair, I haven’t given it much of a shot – a few pages, at most – but I have no desire to pick it up. Seems like an obvious DNF… Except that I WANT to like it. There have been a handful of times when sticking with a book turned out to be worthwhile. I remember thinking The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a drag for at least 100 pages, but then I ended up really loving it and enjoying the entire series. Of course, the best example is The Goldfinch, which I hated right up until the very end, when the book transformed itself into one of my all-time favorite novels. What if I give up on one of these two books and miss out on another Goldfinch?!
  • Take a Picture: When I was putting together a holiday card this past December, I found plenty of photos of the three of us, and tons of photos of my husband and daughter, but it was extremely hard to find any pictures that featured me and my daughter or me and my husband. I have only one or two very loose goals for the year, but one of them is to appear in more photos with my husband and child. The thing is, I’m not exactly sure how to accomplish this. My husband is a wonderful and prolific photographer, but he’s not always inclined to take photos of people – his eye is on scenery and artistic groupings. Plus, I’m usually the one who insists on taking photos on more mundane occasions. Like, he’s fine taking pictures when we go to Paris, but has no patience for pictures of all us around the Thanksgiving table, you know? I did announce my goal to both husband and daughter, and asked them to help me accomplish it. They seemed receptive, but time will tell. Of course, the other obstacle is me. I do not tend to enjoy seeing myself in photos. If only I can remember that I *do* like seeing myself in photos, long after the fact. My critical eye is kinder with the passage of the years. It is well worth the teeth-gritting of appearing in photos today to achieve the pleasant nostalgia I will feel when I see them in two or five or twenty years.
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Houseplant History and Satisfying Plant Update

One of my gentle aspirations for the year was to repot my house plants and I am pleased to report that I have (halfway) accomplished that goal.

It seems irresponsible that I, a known plant murderer, should persist in owning houseplants. And yet I LOVE them, and I have strong feelings of affection for them. 

I still remember the jade plant my mother bought me when I was a freshman in college. My mother, who is excellent at keeping things alive, has always had a jade plant in her home, and I have fond memories of the enormous jade plant in the room in my childhood home we referred to as The Library. It sat in a massive pot on a plant stand and its leaves cascaded nearly to the floor like the glorious mane of a beautiful woman. It was extraordinary. So it felt almost like I had a little piece of home with me, setting that jade plant in my dorm window and mostly neglecting it.

Each summer, I would take the jade plant to the dean’s office and they would look after it for me. Each fall, I would reclaim the jade plant – which always seemed to have grown and flourished in someone else’s care – and it would live in my room. After we graduated, my then-boyfriend and I drove to his home town where we lived and worked for the summer; the jade plant came with us. My housing situation was, in retrospect, a little precarious. My then-boyfriend’s parents had arranged for me to house sit for a family friend. But the friends had moved out of their house and were actively looking for a buyer. WHY was this a good idea? WHAT did I think I would do if they sold the house??? HOW did the realtor explain to potential buyers the evidence that a squatter was inhabiting the house??? Anyway, I think my furniture included a mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms – not the primary bedroom, because the realtor or maybe the homeowner discouraged me from staying there – and maybe they had left a couch in the living room? Or did my then-boyfriend bring over a couple of lawn chairs? I can’t remember. But I had my jade plant there, too. 

Once summer ended, my then-boyfriend and I drove across several states to move into the apartment we’d rented, sight-unseen, while I attended grad school. We had driven all day, with a U-Haul attached to my then-boyfriend’s car, and I had my jade plant in my car with me on the passenger side floor. We did get slightly lost in the worst part of the unfamiliar city – this was the age of MapQuest and printed directions, folks – but we eventually found our way to our apartment without being robbed or murdered. Only to discover that there had been a massive ceiling leak, which had a) filled up a ceiling light until it was so heavy it collapsed part of the ceiling and shattered onto the floor and b) created a mold field on the carpet and in the walls of the tiny closet that counted as a laundry room. CLEARLY the apartment had not been cleaned or prepped for new occupants – the bathroom in particular was a filthy disaster – which was not the best introduction to the city or to our scandalous life of premarital cohabitation. 

We ended up staying in a hotel while the leasing company remediated the problem, and we had to stay in the hotel so long that we ended up unloading our U-Haul into a storage unit and then having to reload it into a different U-Haul when we were finally able to move in to the apartment. I remember our parents being extremely helpful about the whole thing, even though they were all strenuously against us living together. (It worked out okay.) 

But our new city was very hot, and in all the chaos I forgot about my poor jade plant and it died in my overheated car. 

Perhaps this incident has instilled in me a crawling anxiety about plant care, as well as an intense internal pressure to never kill a plant again. And yet, despite the emotional intent to be a good plant owner, I am not, in fact, a good plant owner. I try, I really do. I try not to be overbearing, and I try not to be neglectful. But I fear that I overcompensate in both areas.

Currently, I have five houseplants. 

This is the whole sad crew, including the jade plant in the red pot whose health has since declined precipitously, and the very already dead cactus in the light green pot.

One is a small, spindly palm tree that has survived for nearly twelve years, which is when my mother gave it to me as a housewarming present. The African violet that was also part of the original basket succumbed to my black thumb several years ago. The long drapey plant that I think may be a philodendron persists. The palm tree looks increasing full of despair. (Although it recently sprouted a new head/branch/limb? So perhaps it is preparing for a second wind?) 

I also have a jade plant that is really circling the drain. I have tried a lot of things, and I am coming to the sad conclusion that perhaps I am just not meant to be a jade plant owner. I can’t even bring myself to take a photo of it for you; I am too embarrassed. Consider the state of the little palm tree and then ask yourself what a plant must look like for me NOT to post it.

My orchid was a thank-you gift I received for being Carla’s room parent in kindergarten, so I have a strong sentimental attachment to it because it represents both a moment in time and time’s unrelenting passage. It has flowered several times since I brought it home, in November of 2021, April of 2022, and most recently in December of 2022, which is reassuring unless flowering is a distress signal. But it got to the point where it appeared to be attempting to crawl out of its pot and far, far away from me.

The orchid, listing violently to the right and readying itself for ambulation.

The anthurium is one in a long line of anthurium I have had and killed since I moved to this house. This is the first one I’ve kept alive long enough for it to re-bloom. Based on pictures, I think I have had this since at least July of 2021.

Anthurium in a too-small pot; orchid limb photo bomb.

The fifth plant is really Carla’s. It is a replacement cactus; replacement because we bought her a cactus last summer and promptly killed it. I didn’t even know you could kill a cactus? Well, we managed. But we saw this orchid cactus at the plant store and couldn’t resist buying it. Carla is in charge of its care even though it lives in my office; perhaps she will turn out to have a greener thumb than I do. 

Orchid cactus. It can only sit in that little plant stand in that exact position because the plant stand is stupid.

One of the problems with my poor plants is that they need repotting. And yet I am so terrified of killing them that I cannot bring myself to do it. So when this adorable plant store opened just down the street, and I discovered that they will repot the plants FOR YOU, for the extremely reasonable price of five dollars, I knew that was my solution. 

After a couple of false starts – for instance, Carla was off school on a random Monday, so we loaded the plants into my car and drove the plant store only to discover it wasn’t open on Mondays – we finally made it to the plant store and they REPOTTED MY PLANTS.

Well, they repotted the two I brought in – the orchid and the anthurium. It was such an easy process and such a relief that I am trying to get up enough nerve to bring in the palm tree/possible-philodendron and my ailing jade plant. I am a teeny bit afraid that one they see the jade plant, they will send someone to repossess all my plants.

Here are the plants immediately after the repotting:

I undertook this repotting exercise at the very end of March. And the plants continue to thrive (except for the jade plant, my god the state of that poor jade plant).

My orchid and anthurium are SO pleased. The anthurium is in bloom and has sprouted a bunch of new leaves. The orchid looks fuller and prouder of its situation, and much less like it wants to escape. And the cactus is cactusing along nicely. I am looking forward to the time when it decides to bloom. 

So happy!
Not quite as stunning a transformation as the anthurium, but trust me that this plant is MUCH happier.
Orchid cactus; anthurium in the background, trying to pretend it doesn’t want all the attention.
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Some Gentle Aspirations for 2023

As has become my start-of-year habit, I am going to list out some gentle aspirations that Today Me believes are important to pursue in the new year. I recognize that Today Me and End of December 2023 Me may have different priorities, so I am not forcing anything on either of us. This may sound wishy-washy, and it is. I do like to strive to make improvements in my life, where possible. But sometimes, my best guesses at what will make my life seem better or easier or more fulfilling don’t result in improving anything, in which case they were fun experiments. Sometimes, they become real upgrades in my life, a source of happiness or pride or relief. I wonder which of the following will turn out to be which?

I broke these aspirations into categories, and there are quite a lot of them. That doesn’t daunt me; I’m guessing a few of them will naturally drop off as I complete them or forget about them completely. 

Personal / Self Improvement

  • Aspiration: Read 70 books. I read 86 books in 2022 and 74 in 2021, so I think this is doable. I don’t see my reading habits changing a whole lot, although there are of course the unplanned and agonizing reading slumps that happen every now and again. If I only read 50, I will be fine with that. 
  • Aspiration: Get a massage. My mother-in-law got me a massage gift certificate for my birthday in 2020 that I have not yet used for, I hope, obvious reasons. But I love a massage and it would be a fun treat to have one this year.
  • Aspiration: Give my line-a-day journal another go. I started tackling this aspiration early in the morning of January 1, and immediately made a mistake. I wrote a few little lines about the last day of 2022, but I did so – in pen – on the first day of 2023. Also, I wrote “Saturday” (IN PEN) above the date, and then had to cross it out and write Sunday above it. So I have already made a huge, indelible (totally unimportant in the grand scheme, I realize this) mistake and I am going to have to fight so hard against my impulse to never open the journal again. Maybe I should just buy a new one. My husband thinks I am ridiculous, and suggested I just skip a day and then start again as though I hadn’t made the mistake. So I am trying that. But I can feel the mistake, infecting the entire journal. (He also suggested copying the text into the correct day, then using whiteout on the mistake, and starting fresh, which – just so you understand completely my particular brand of irrational – does not erase the mistake. It just buries it there under white goop.) So we’ll see whether I buy a new one or continue with line-a-day journaling at all or somehow resist all my innate tendencies and forge on with the inalterably ruined journal.
  • Aspiration: Read more poetry. I burnt out early on poetry last year, but I still find it holds enormous value in my life. Maybe I just shouldn’t put so much pressure on reading it daily.
  • Aspiration: Master two Chopin songs on the piano. I have been working on relearning the Raindrop Prelude, which I could play flawlessly in high school, and my dad has been learning Waltz in A Minor and I love listening to him play it, so I want to learn that one too.
  • Aspiration: Buy some cute date-night-appropriate shirts. This means not falling into the trap of finding nothing appealing so instead buying yet another long-sleeved T-shirt/sweatshirt/sweater that is fine for hanging out at home but not great for Feeling Cute and Dressy and then feeling like I did buy the shirts I am looking for when really I didn’t.
  • Reach Aspiration: Try to keep a spreadsheet of these goals, for tracking purposes and also purposes of not forgetting them until December 31. 

Health 

  • Aspiration: Do a sweets revamp. This is a family goal. The three of us have developed some very bad habits and I really don’t like how they are affecting Carla. She chooses sweets first, always, and I think this is because we always have cookies and candy lying around. A sweets revamp does not mean No Sweets Ever. We can even set a weekly family goal to go get ice cream or buy a candy bar or whatever. On Valentine’s Day and Easter, I will probably lift the restriction for a day or two of unbridled sweets eating. It just means getting them out of our immediate orbit so that they are available when we could be eating other things. Yesterday I collected all of the sweet things I could find and threw them away or put them in a “to donate” bin. (I did leave three – why do we have three???? – unopened bags of chocolate chips in the pantry, but I could choose to donate them at any time.) So that’s Step 1. Now I just need to complete Step 2, which is to keep sweets out of the house for the rest of the year.
  • Aspiration: Do what is necessary to make my feet feel as good as they can. The combination that has had the best results in terms of limiting pain has been stretching my feet morning and night, religiously, combined with walking. Not-walking seems to result in more pain than walking. I haven’t figured out the ideal amount of walking yet, but getting at least 10,000 steps seems to help. 
  • Aspiration: Spend ten minutes outside every day. This seems outlandish considering I haven’t set foot outside in days, but it’s something I really want to prioritize.
  • Aspiration: Buy some winter boots I can walk in.
  • Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. I am doing this for myself, and by extension influencing my family to eat more vegetables (the benefit of being the family meal planner, grocery shopper, and chef).
  • Aspiration: Figure out a skincare routine that doesn’t make me want to claw my face off. My face is driving me out of my mind. It is simultaneously excruciatingly itchy, to the point that I need to take Benadryl regularly to curb it, and constantly broken out. Every day there is a new pimple or five on my face. At the risk of oversharing (I would never), I am currently on Day 5 of enduring a cystic zit that is so enormous and so painful I feel embarrassed when even my husband looks at me. I DO NOT LIKE THIS. I have an appointment with my dermatologist for early February (sob) and I don’t think I can get anything earlier, and honestly don’t have high hopes that he will help. But I need to figure out some way through this. I am kind of attached to my face.
  • Reach Aspiration: If I am reading/writing blog posts, I am walking on the treadmill. I have gotten pretty adept at this, over the break. I’m not sure if I can keep it up (right now, I am typing this while waiting for my tea to brew, and then I don’t want to drink tea while walking on the treadmill because that seems like a disaster waiting to happen), but if I can pair the two activities in my mind, just think how much more of both I will do! 

Connection

  • Aspiration: Get a pedicure with Carla. She’s at the age where I think this would feel like a fun treat. Although I’m guessing she’ll enjoy the foot-sanding portion of the pedicure as much as I do. (Carla, however wants to do a mani-pedi, mainly, I think, because she likes the term “mani-pedi.” She is working on not biting her nails this year, so I am hopeful that she will succeed and we will get a mani-pedi together. Or a pedicure and then a mani-pedi some other time!) 
  • Aspiration: Put my phone away when Carla and I are together. Why it is so hard to choose chatting with my lovely, fascinating daughter over knowing exactly what’s happening on Twitter/Instagram/Wordle right that second is beyond my powers of comprehension. But the days when she wants me to pay attention to her are surely numbered, and also I want her to remember me as an engaged mother not as someone addicted irrepressibly to her phone, so this is something I really, really want to work on. 
  • Aspiration: Find a way to see my grad school friend in-person. We have A Plan, we just need to implement it. 
  • Aspiration: Go on ten dates with my husband. During the early days of the pandemic, we got out of the habit. But now we have two great babysitter options and both feel more comfortable about being in restaurants, so there’s nothing stopping us from going out more often.
  • Aspiration: Get together with two friends a month. This one makes me nervous, because I have a tendency to feel lonely and isolated and then overschedule myself and then get overwhelmed and become a hermit for several weeks and then feel lonely and isolated etc. etc. etc. But maybe if I plan, in advance, to get together with two friends a month, it will feel more intentional? Also, a couple of friends like to go for walks together so that’s a good way to meet two goals at once. Efficiency in action. 
  • Reach Aspiration: Invite neighbors over for coffee/wine/snacks. We have the sweetest, kindest, most generous-with-their-time-and-dogs neighbors. I would love to get know them better, and I think I can (maybe) invite them over, one household at a time, for a few minutes of connection. Maybe. I hope. (I can already feel my socially anxious soul straining away from this idea. And also how do I convey that I would like them to come over without their dogs?)

Work/Finance

  • Aspiration: Finish my in-progress manuscripts (and don’t start another one!!!!). I can do this if I put my mind to it. I am good at writing lots of words. I can do this. 
  • Aspiration: Revise my completed manuscript. I am so very tired of my completed manuscript. But it needs some revision and A LOT of trimming, so I need to tackle it again. 
  • Aspiration: Query 100 agents. This sounds like a ton, but it is fewer than two agents a week. This is doable. 
  • Aspiration: Make good use of the writing accountability team a friend and I set up last fall. We met twice, and only once did we write, but the intention is to meet every week and spend a short time walking together in nature and then devote two hours to writing or writing-related projects. If I complete this goal, it will mean I am making good progress toward my other writing goals. 
  • Reach Aspiration: Take a class in short story writing. This is a Big Scary Goal, but one I would really like to attempt. Maybe when my writing partner returns from his six months abroad, so we could do it together?

Home/Property

  • Aspiration: Repot my plants. A new very cute plant store opened up just down the street and they will repot your plants FOR YOU for FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS apiece. I have resisted repotting my plants, even though they are all on death’s door, because I am so sure I will kill them. Now I can pay to have someone else do it! Someone who knows what they’re doing! This should be an easy goal to accomplish.
  • Aspiration: Fix the freaking closet door. We have the materials necessary for fixing the door, because we bought them more than a year ago with the idea that we would use them to fix the door, we just need to FIX THE DOOR.
  • Aspiration: Try, again, to find someone to repaint the trim. Why is it so infernally difficult to find a person to do a thing when that person’s job is to do the very thing you want to pay them to do?
  • Reach Aspiration: Gallery wall. My eternal dream, always just out of reach.

Well, there you have it. Some gentle aspirations for the year. Looking at these aspirations, all together, I am wondering if my word of the year should be “consistent.” It’s a word I resist, because consistency is not my strong point; perhaps that is an even stronger reason for allowing it to exert whatever influence meditating on one theme for the year will exert.