Resolving for 2020

In addition to ranking (in related news, my top twenty lists for the year and decade upcoming on this blog soon!), another thing we're not supposed to be doing is resolving. As with almost everything, there is a replacement, of course: while resolutions are not good, intentions are. Yet it seems these are not really that different for everyone - intentions seem, often, to be a different shade of paint but the same furniture underneath. I read a piece from a planning blogger I follow (I know) who explained intentions as about the journey, not about the end result (unlike resolutions - okay so far) - but then their phrase for 2020 was "the year I get it done." That does not feel like the journey, but very much about the end result. I might be ungenerous here, but often "intentions" strike me as being akin to the wellness/diet conflation that is so prevalent (and is much more pernicious).

Anyway, I'm down with resolutions (for a while, I wrote a whole blog about them. Didn't stick to it). I think they can be a very useful tool for thinking about what you want to do and how you want to move through the world. It's not just about the end goal - but how would you do it? One thing I resolved to do for 2019 was to be able to do a pull-up. That will not happen for, well, many reasons physiological and emotional, but it was good to break it down - what does that mean? Follow a routine at the gym. Plan my time so that I can make it to the gym a certain amount of times a week. Make sure I'm on top of my organizing time and shopping so that I can have post-gym protein rich snacks. Get good sleep to help me repair muscle and be well-rested. All these things are what I want and achievable - one useful thing I have taken from the rather intense-bullet journal pieces I have read is that breaking down a goal helps one actually take the steps toward it, and that's helped me deal with some events and things (hosting Thanksgiving, for example) that I often find overwhelming.

I've already set out my intentions for plant growing this year. I've set up my air plants and put in place my alerts for watering and taking care of both those and my cacti.

I also went through the process of the Year Compass reflection and planning tool yesterday. A very dear friend and I got delicious food (crabcakes, plantains, and salad), then headed to a lounge to sip tea and work through the exercises in the booklet. A lot of it was tough - it's been a rough year in many ways - but it was so much fun to think about how I'm going to try to make my life more fun, cosy, and how I'm going to value myself more. This year I finally started to accept that my personality is not a flaw, but I can adapt things to suit me - problem solving to make my life smoother and more comfortable. I'm excited to meditate more, to read even more (and I did well with reading fun, interesting, and challenging books this year), to get strong and look after my mental health and my family. If it doesn't all pan out, sure - this year proved that you can't plan for everything and anything, and that you can be derailed. But trying is important. Trying to be good, trying to do better - both for yourself and for the sake of doing and being good. Although try not to make it about weight loss - for you, your friends, and society.

Ordering

This morning, as the day lightens and people are busily getting ready for their days, my kid is creating ginormous traffic jams on the dining table with his cars (is there any truer sign of a child born and raised in a city?) while I fight with my top ten albums of the decade list. TOH and I have been doing this for more years than I care to remember - writing down things we have loved and sharing them in a card to each other.

There has been pushback against ranking and ordering and pulling things apart to give them an ordinal value (that article was linked to in at least three newsletters I subscribe to, all of which I adore and value immensely). I get it, I do. I understand the arguments. And, apart from anything, how much weight should we really give to your opinion? I really do not care what most people think, particularly when they display what is dreadful taste.

But, to quote an inarguable truth:

The end of year (or decade) list matters to me (and others, I am presumptively inferring) because it is a time to pause, reflect, and think about where we were when we started. Yes, a decade is probably arbitrary, but I like the practice of going through how my life has changed and doing it through my cultural consumption. It's a chance for me to think more closely about what I consumed then, what I consume now, and why; what mattered to me, what songs really seem to resonate and hit hard and others that I listened to a lot that I barely think about now. I found a 2012 playlist and didn't recognize a couple of the songs; not just the names, but when I played them. It was as if I'd never heard them before. I was bewildered by them, and wondering what was going through my head to place them on a list when I no longer recognized them. 

Looking back at my decade, the early time of going out a lot - discovering (belatedly) how being a crowd of sweaty people and just dancing (as opposed to swaying at live music, something I've always loved) was a delight - you can see that in my musical choices and how much that has influenced the rest of the decade (particularly compared to the previous two, although those tendencies were germinating, clearly). It reflects the new friends I made, how I chose to spend my time with them. But also how much my tastes and life have changed such that albums that were super important to me at the end of the year came out are fond memories but not things that move me now. 

And yes, of course I've changed; I changed careers, my partner and I now live in the same place as opposed to commuting, we own a house, my mother died, I had a kid, friends have come and gone, politics has changed, things look so different. Time does that. But I don't think there's anything wrong with examining how and why, and that is what a best-of does for me. So when TOH and I exchange our lists in Christmas cards, it's one of the Christmas presents I value most - the time and effort gone into it, thinking about what has meant a lot to the both of us, how two people can spend so much time together, doing and listening to the same things and yet having completely different favourites. It gives me an insight into him and his life that I don't see because I'm not with him when he listens to some of these things. 

So make your lists, people! Or don't. Whatever. Listmaking might be in my top five things to do for Christmas. But you don't need to have a list. I promise. Just don't feel bad if you do like making lists; that's okay, too.

Nurturing

I kill plants. I do. It's a sad, sad thing to look at the ponytail palm in our living room, with its measly covering of green and mostly brown, drooping leaves. Outside plants fare somewhat better, although I haven't yet figured out how to get our wisteria to bloom (sulphate fertilizer, apparently, is the key?) and each time that shoots reappear in spring, I am surprised and inordinately pleased.

I am gearing up to a new goal for 2020: try to keep green things alive. A friend of mine, the Decider, has an apartment that is lush in its greenery and fills me with envy; she clearly is pained by our state of affairs, albeit gracious enough to generally keep her thoughts to herself. I, for one, conveniently blame my lack of care on the lack of light.

But no more! I have taken steps (all of which I shall post-fact put into my planner to make me feel accomplished) toward success. I have subscribed to a delightful newsletter, Houseplant Parenthood, and will try to take on board the benefits of the earned wisdom there (and on the corresponding IG account); the Decider has also shown me a delightful app that reminds you when and how your plants need watering and fertilizing and generally being taken care of; I have researched indoor plants that 1) do well in indirect light and 2) are non-toxic to cats (the Psychokitty doesn't need anything else to send her into a frenzy); and I may even download a gardening game or two to get me in the right mindset. All of this combined with my following of plant inspiration IG accounts and I'm sort of all set.

Clementine

Clementine. An insistent, persistent cat whose intense desire to have her head scratched was only matched by the loudness of her purring.

We got her when she was a few years old - I'm fuzzy on the details - and she lived with us in all the homes we've shared - Washington Heights, our first Brooklyn place, and now here. We soon discovered she was not a lap cat and hated being picked up, but loved being snuggled up next to us, scratching her head or cheeks. She developed a habit of tapping you repeatedly with her paw to get your attention so that you would bestow the head scratch.

She liked people far more than other cats or animals; her later years were marked by stoically attempting to ignore Lyra and our kid.


She was an idiosyncratic cat. She seemed to be happiest squished up in our paper recycling box, a suitcase, or in the shower, where she sat and drank running water. Her method of taking in liquid was strange, to say the least - she'd thrust her head under the tap, it would trickle down her face, and then she'd bat it into her mouth with her paw. We'd never seen anything like it. For a long time, while His Professorship was working in another city, she'd be my hot water bottle, snuggling under the covers with me for about 10 minutes until I was nicely toasty, and then surfacing to sit next to me.

We adored her, but we still probably under appreciated her because she was so solid and reliable. She definitely lost out in attention terms after we adopted a psychopathic (and I do not say that lightly) kitten and had a child. But she was such a reassuring presence. The house feels so much emptier without her. I'm glad we had the 12 years we did with her and grateful we had the time and means to say goodbye peacefully and with as little discomfort for her as possible. And we'll eat crab rangoon tonight in honor of the time she stole one from us and caused us to argue over who had nicked beyond their fair share. What a cat.

Heat

New York has been doing that thing that New York so frequently does at this time of year, and been absolutely glorious. It's been bakingly hot, but without the sting of the humidity that we get for so much of the summer. I've managed to be careless and have slightly reddened shoulders from wandering around the last couple of weekends.

Yesterday, the wandering took place at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where there was a chile pepper festival. Neither of the adults was quite sure what this would entail or how long different types of hot sauce would hold our interest, but it turned out to be a delight to mooch around the Cherry Esplanade, sampling different mango or habañero or spicy brown sauces (yes, the latter a nod to our beloved HP. It was a tad vinegary for my taste).  We ended up purchasing some absolutely delicious blood orange cooking sauce, ate our way through chocolate orange cardamom spiced cookies, and purchased some spicy honey to hopefully recreate the incredible dish we had at Misi a few weeks ago - slow roasted tomatoes, coriander, fennel seeds, and spiked honey that was unlike anything I'd eaten before. Dragonflies and mayflies droned around in huge numbers, and the kid potted and took home his first plant - a chile pepper that maybe, just maybe, will survive more than a couple of weeks.

Regathering

A lot has happened since that last post.  A lot.

The thing that is inescapable and pervading, despite my attempts to block it out, is that my mum died. Suddenly, yes; yet, it seems that we had been dodging it for years - the blood poisoning after an emergency hysterectomy, the breast cancer, the triple bypass. It seems that it only just happened and forever ago, as if it always has been; sometimes it feels as if I cannot grasp the life I had with her, it was so lacking in reality, and that is one of the most terrifying parts of this.

Grief is so deeply personal, and so hard to fathom when you are not experiencing it, I do not plan to spend much time on it specifically. But it is everywhere, at all times, with me in differing intensities, and always with the capacity to wind me, suddenly, in its sharpness - the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour on Yesterday, which I could not get through; the fiftieth reading of Where the Wild Things Are with the peanut which suddenly cut through me; the start of a football season without her.

I have a lot to work through, frankly. I do not want this to be the space for that, but it will seep in, inevitably. But what I do want to use this for is thinking about the good in my life, the things that I cannot share with her but want to, desperately.

I am not quite sure why I am doing this but putting it out in the world feels peaceful and calming. A way to somehow make solid everything that feels so shaky and insubstantial otherwise.