January Wrap Up

Hello random readers and blog followers from college. I haven’t written with any sense of dedication in almost a decade (not that I was particularly dedicated to consistent posting back then…) but just in case anyone was wondering what I’ve been up to over the past month, here you go. I’m committing myself to keeping better records of what I’m filling my brain with in my ongoing mission to stop my brain from getting too smooth.

Reading
Last year I started tracking my reading, starting on GoodReads and then switching to Storygraph in an effort to distance myself from Jeff Bezos. I read 18 books, which felt like a gigantic success. Until I saw a post from one of my best friends who happens to be a bookstagrammer. She read a whopping 120 or so books. But I’m still proud of my measly 18 books, and am setting a goal of 20 books for this year. 25 would be even better, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

So far I’ve read 2 books:

The Yellow Wallpaper – This feels like cheating because it only took me like, 10 minutes to read but it’s one that I could probably read over and over and find something new in it.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue #3 – I’ve been collecting McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern for a few years now, stalking online retailers to buy as many of the previous releases as possible but, as is my habit, I buy things in chunks and then don’t do anything with them (books, makeup, ramen, etc) and the 50+ books on my shelf have gone largely unread. So I’ve gotten into the habit of reading a few short stories before bed, so I can make a little progress on a daily basis.

I’ve gotten into the habit of reading a few books from different categories at a time so right now I’m reading:

• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham
• McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue #4

I’m halfway through a couple of the books already so this little grouping should take me into next month and I’ll have a new pile to get to!

I’ve also been subscribed to the New Yorker for at least 5 years and am miserably stuck in 2017 (what a crazy time, amirite?) so ideally I’d like to at least get through 2018 this year.

Watching
I’ve just accepted that I will never be caught up with any TV or movies unless I truly commit to watching as some sort of profession but my latest undertaking has been watching every anime series ever so I can justify paying for Crunchyroll premium. I’m watching Lupin III now, which is corny as hell but overall enjoyable. One day when I’m 95, I’ll finally get to watch Chainsaw Man and then I can go to my grave.

I also watch YouTube obsessively. I’m currently subscribed to over 1000 channels, which I wil also never be caught up on but just in case you needed some recommendations:

• Beatrice Caruso – hilarious and relatable, she’s helped me see my own journey to become healthier and accept my body in a new light and I definitely have a parasocial relationship with her and I wish we were friends in real life
• Solo Travel Japan – I watch this channel when I take a bath (another 2023 hobby I’ve been enjoying. Baths are amazing, 10/10 would recommend). It’s very relaxing and I love learning about Japan and maybe I want to live on a ferry now??
• Alice Capelle – Alice has been instrumental in my leftist awakening (as well as helping me add a plethora of lefty yt channels to my subscriptions). She explains things in a way that a dummy like me can understand, she provides tons of references and suggestions that I’ve added to my reading list and she makes me think about the world in a way that has helped me get out of my bubble more often.
• Sanna Vaara – It feels weird to go from a leftist commentary channel to a Scandi slow living channel, what with the weird connotations that Nordic-ness can have but I’m 99.9% sure that this lady is not a Nazi. Similar to Solo Travel Japan, I feel relaxed watching her videos. It gives me the same feeling as when I watch Studio Ghibli films. I don’t think I could ever move out of the city because I love convenience too much, but watching Sanna and the other beautiful blonde fairies of Scandi-tube makes me wonder if I could survive in the days of Polar Night in a cozy cabin (spoiler: I would not survive due to depression, seasonal or regular kind).

Listening (mostly podcasts)
Similar to my YouTube problem, I am subscribed to way too many podcasts. When I die, I am specifying that at my funeral, my phone must be playing in the background so I can continue to catch up on unplayed episodes in the afterlife. According to my Pocket Casts app I have 151,961 episodes to listen to but I also use a few other apps as well so…fuck my life. I’ve actually been using the Wonder app most often and have actually caught up on a good chunk of the networks older/no-longer-updated shows even though I could have probably done fine without listening to quite a few of them, but I am a completeist and I suppose a masochist as well, so I soldier on.

I’ve also been listening to the show Desert Island Discs and am currently somewhere in the 1970s so again, I have a problem.

I can however, wholeheartedly recommend a show that I am actually (mostly) caught up with in real time and that is Threedom. I can’t even put into words how much I love this show. I love Paul F. Tompkins and anything he touches and the combination of him, Scott Aukerman and Lauren Lapkus is golden. I usually listen to this during the 3 hour drive to my parents’ because it makes me literally laugh out loud and I feel like listening to smart, funny people could help me become smart and funny by osmosis (this is science, right?)

Other Endeavors
In the non-media consumption part of my life I’ve been knitting with some degree of consistency, flirting with vegan eating (but cheese holds too strong a grip on my heart…literally and figuratively), getting back into yoga and continuing to reduce the piles and piles of makeup I’ve bought over the years. I’ve declared 2023 the year of No Buying Makeup (unless completely necessary, like if I run out of an eyebrow pencil or something). If you’ve somehow gotten this far in the post, you will have gleaned that I have a hoarding problem and it applies not just my over-subscribed digital spaces but to my actual physical living space, mainly in the form of lipsticks and eyeshadow palettes.

As far as anything that is actually, you know, useful or productive, I am also trying to learn more about animation and motion graphics so I can maybe make a career change. But this is just a thought and not a true endeavor and jobs suck anyway so not much to say about this right now.

In conclusion, I’ve got a lot going on in my ol’ brain as I stuff it with as many forms of media as possible but hopefully this year it will help me become maybe .01% more smarter??

See you in February.