January Cram Sesh

 It should come as no surprise that I don't like to set New Year's Resolutions.  It's not that I take issue with the spirit of it, but rather the nomenclature.  Much like I can't abide the term bucket list, whether applied seasonally or to one's life as a whole.  A docket of shit to do sounds truer, and less desperate.  It says, "Yea, I plan to get around to this stuff, but if I don't, well, maybe something more pressing came up."  It doesn't say, "I am slipping into the void unfulfilled, and will be required to forever walk the spirit realm bemoaning my failure to go apple picking and post about it on Instagram, woe is my incomplete bucket list."

Same with resolutions.  They sound so binding and formal, rigid even.  How about intentions, or goals?  If you are truly resolved to do something, if it's so critically important to you, why are you standing around with your thumb up your ass waiting for the calendar to turn over before you begin?  

All the same, I like to start off the year with a sense of accomplishment.  It feels invigorating to really hit the ground running with a smug sense of superiority, but not for the reasons you might think.  January isn't the entry point to a newer, shinier me.  It's just manically front-loading a year's worth of effort into one short burst so I can go back to my regularly scheduled garbage-human programming for the next 11 months.  

So what did I cram into January this year, asks exactly no one?

Well.  In addition to my annual Dry January, I did Yoga With Adriene's 30-Day yoga challenge, Suleika Jaouad's 10-Day New Year's journaling challenge, a 1-week workout challenge from Fitnessista, AND I read 11 books.  

But wait, there's more!  I already did our taxes!  

Does any of this matter?  

NO!

Well, the tax part does, because if Uncle Joe and Auntie Kamala want to send us some stimmies, it's important to make sure they know where to find me and my new checking account thanks to, hi, that time our outgoing mail got stolen.  But the rest of it?  You're like, hooray for you, you self-indulgent monster.  And you're not wrong.  But in the moment, it felt like it was productive, so now I can rest on my laurels for the remainder of 2021.  If you need me, I'll be soaking in the bathtub with a tumbler of bourbon and a bag of Funyuns.  [None of that is accurate.  The last thing I wanna do is swim in a pot of me soup, and I plan to go to my grave not knowing what a Funyun tastes like.]

Just for posterity, here's that big fat reading list from the first month of the year of our Lorde two thousand and twenty one.

In order of completion:

1. Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser Akner  (fiction)
2. Kim Ji-Young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-ju  (fiction)
3. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio  (non-fiction)
4. Rich and Pretty by Rumaan Alam  (fiction)
5. Cleanness by Garth Greenwell  (fiction)
6. Death In Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh  (fiction)
7. Deacon King Kong by James McBride  (fiction)
8. Little Eyes by Samantha Schweblin  (fiction)
9. The Sea Wife by Amity Gaige  (fiction)
10. The Midnight Library by Matthew Haig  (fiction)
11. The Best of Me by David Sedaris (essay collection)