pellucid

I'm a few days late, posting challenge responses in tandem, and once again jumping on the January bandwagon in that oh so January way. But these were fun!

Challenge #2: Talk about your fannish origin story.

It was 1999. I had been an avid devotee of The X-Files for some years, but in the way of someone who has appointment television.

I was also fairly new to the idea of the internet in 1999, a little later than many: pre-college (I started in 1998), the internet was a fairly public thing. Short forays in the school computer lab, shared time on the home computer with my family. I got my first personal email address as a college freshman, and in 1999 was just coming to an awareness that you might use the internet for things other than schoolwork or IM-ing your now-long-distance friends from high school.

Anyway, some random day in 1999 I was trying to remember some detail from a previous X-Files episode, and it occurred to me that the internet might have, like, episode summaries. I did find that! And in the process also discovered that People. Wrote. Stories. About. Mulder. And. Scully. Mind bloooooooown!!! It had extremely never occurred to me that this could be a thing. College sophomore me was adorable.

College sophomore me was also busy and did not have an internet habit at all. So although I enjoyed discovering that fanfic existed, it was also the kind of thing that I would think about for a little while, and then drop for months at a time, and so forth.

Fast-forward to 2002 or 2003. I was starting grad school, developing more internet habits broadly, and still having a lot of feelings about X-Files season 9. I began to be more deliberate about finding fannish places (the Yahoo groups era?!?) and started to meet some people and even wrote a few terrible fics about Monica Reyes (mercifully now disappeared from the internet, to the best of my knowledge). By 2004 I had an LJ and had discovered Stargate, and the rest was history?

Challenge #3: Talk about a fannish opinion you hold that has changed over time.

More of an opinion about fandom, which has clearly coincided with the broader mainstreaming of fandom. Back in the 2000s when I was most active in fandom, I DID NOT talk about it with real life people. When I went to Dragon Con in 2006 I had a whole network of half truths ("seeing friends!") to avoid telling my roommates and my family where I was actually going. I watched Farscape, BSG, and Babylon 5 with one of my closest friends and never ever told her I was also spending hours a week at the same time reading and writing fic and talking about these shows with people on the internet.

Somewhere along the way, I loosened up a lot of that paranoia. Not long ago I told all of my colleagues that gabolange and I met in BSG fandom, even though for years we had a well-honed "through mutual friends" version of that answer. I have had plenty of other conversations about fandom with non-fandom people in the past decade or so. All that paranoia from years back about streams crossing feels much more distant now.

Sort of. I still carefully avoid any public connection of my RL identity and fannish pseud. I have never confessed to writing fic to a non-fan. Some things change, but perhaps some of us will to some extent always be products of our fannish coming of age eras!

I do appreciate the snowflake challenge's approach of "do whichever of these you want, whenever you want." Very much in my current wheelhouse. This one looked like fun, and it gives me a chance to talk about Russ and Clare: share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

My main media consumption for the past year+ has been mystery series on audiobook. On one hand, there is sort of a never-ending supply of this sort of thing. On the other hand, most of what I've read has been no better than average, and it turns out I have some fairly specific criteria that can be challenging to search for. Not too violent (which basically rules out anything labeled "thriller"), not too cozy (that is, needs to give due attention to the gravity of solving murders), decently written, and--this is the kicker--ideally fairly character-driven. It's very easy for the detective protagonist(s) in this genre to turn into little more than plot exposition mouthpieces; I want books that are about the characters. If there's a slow burn ship, who am I to complain. Oh, and because my audiobook budget is limited, especially for mystery series I'm going to burn through, my library needs to have them.

The one series that has ticked all the boxes and then some--by being not just being about the characters but by creating characters who are layered and nuanced and people I really like--is the Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne series by Julia Spencer-Fleming.

I quite like Russ, mostly because he is sort of the antithesis of the silent and emotionally repressed police officer that is such a common trope. He is, for the most part, self-aware and comfortable in his own skin, as well as compassionate and happy to let other people be smart and right. All with enough flaws and blind spots to keep him from being too perfect or idealized. (To compare him to a more famous detective from a series that's a solid almost for me, he's got a lot of Armand Gamache's good points without all the obnoxious too-perfect, always-right-ness of Gamache.)

But mostly I love Russ because he loves Clare, and Clare is the main reason I'm here.

Clare is an Episcopal priest who is very good at this in the ways that really count and also really bad at this in a whole host of other ways. I'm an ex-Episcopalian with very complicated feelings about Christianity and a lifelong love of characters with religious convictions who are portrayed realistically, so Clare had me at hello. She, too, is a compelling mix of compassion and conviction and flaws and blind spots, similar enough to Russ that they click instantly, different enough to be narratively interesting. Her storyline is also very much about the complexities of finding home and about how much of yourself you can shed and remake--or not--when you uproot your life. So basically, big flashing pellucid buttons. And then she goes and falls in love with a married man, which becomes a really fascinating thing to watch her negotiate in the context of her faith and vocation.

Beyond the main characters, the books, set in upstate New York, have a really strong sense of place, which I always love. (Though let's not talk about the amount of time I've spent on Google maps trying to figure out precisely where this fictional town is supposed to be. Some of the internal references to real places are contradictory...) There are some lovely and well-rendered supporting characters. The mysteries are for the most part well-developed and multi-faceted, neither too obvious nor too out of left field. And the writing is consistently quite good. Also, if you're an audiobook fan, the narrator is phenomenal.

And I don't know if this is a big caveat or an ultimate selling point, but over the course of the series, she deploys two of my absolute most hated tropes--each in a pretty big way--and while I definitely wasn't happy about it, it didn't keep me from continuing to read and enjoy. I think the thing that saved it, in both cases, was the willingness to commit to the implications. Yes, [obnoxious and in one case rather problematic trope] happened, but then there was a commitment to thinking about what these particular characters would do in this situation, in response to this set of circumstances. I mean, I still have canon divergence AUs running in my head for both situations, and if I should ever find myself in a fic-writing inclination for this, we're definitely going to fix the first thing. But handled differently I would have probably stopped reading, and i didn't, so take that as you will.

So that's my current love in search of a fandom. There are a handful of AO3 stories, which is better than none, but if anyone wants to actually come talk to me about these books, I would be delighted.

Um, hello! Apparently I have not posted since 2018, which is now somehow SIX years ago? But I guess there has been some stuff going on.

My (more recent-ish) stuff specifically: I have long covid, 16 months and counting. For me this has looked like chronic fatigue (I now have an official me/cfs diagnosis) with a side of traumatic brain injury. There were a number of months of full-time disability leave, followed by a number of more months incrementally clawing my way back to full-time work, which I have been doing, with heavy ADA accommodations, since September. So obviously that has all been super fun.

The good news is that I am (very, very slowly) improving, and I have been able to remain employed (thereby maintaining my medical care, because this country is dreadful) and to keep living independently. Much gratitude for my very supportive employer, as well as for friends and family for helping to prop up the independent living thing when everything was at its worst.

Still, this has been super isolating. In-person interactions remain extremely draining, and it's hard to have energy for much of anything after most of my available effort has gone to work stuff. And as a consequence of my brain being somewhat broken, I'm not really able to process the pace of 2020s-style online social interactions. Lots of scrolling, rapid-fire, multi-media and multi-thread stuff to process, basically your average day on tumblr or a busy discord server: very much a no-go. Does that make DW the broken brain equivalent of slow internet (a la "slow food" or whatever, not "lousy connection"), or going analog(-ish)? Maybe. Worth giving it a whirl, anyway. Because I do miss being able to engage with screen friends!

Not clear what I will be engaging about, to be clear. Broken brain also doesn't really like TV, and it's been a good long time since I've felt super fannish about anything. Generalized good feelings about all things Star Trek is as close as I'm getting lately--while also having failed to watch the last episode of Lower Decks for however long it's been since it aired. Peak nostalgia s3 Picard was right up my alley in terms of what my brain is able to deal with. I found s2 of Strange New Worlds extremely underwhelming (and heteronormative, ugh) after s1, though I was admittedly much healthier for s1. I will love Kathryn Janeway forever (but also fizzled out on an attempted Voyager rewatch). Idk. That's about what I've got. I mostly just read shitty mystery book series now (and occasionally some not so shitty ones).

But this *gestures vaguely* feels worth a shot, anyway. Hopefully some of the screen friends are still out there! (I have been lurk-reading DW off and on, even if I haven't been posting or commenting much?) And if there are interesting other folks, friends of friends or whatever, who are doing the DW thing these days, maybe make some recs or tell me how we find folks on here these days, especially absent a specific fandom motivator? A 2024 goal: figure out how to have enough energy to have friends. Here goes, I guess!

I've been thinking a lot about Farscape fandom lately. (Mostly as a contrast to Call the Midwife fandom, which is...a very long story that you can see some of, if you care to, by poking around on mine and gabolange's Tumblrs, and also on her journal. But as someone who has been around that fandom for a while confirmed to me yesterday, it really is the Stepford fandom.)

But anyway, my experience of trying to enter Stepford/twilight zone fandom, and sort of falling on my face a bit, because the floor isn't where you think it is, has made me think of Farscape, and what a tremendous fandom that was to join. I was late to it--the show had finished--and I was never in the thick of things like so many people were. The fandoms that brought me my lifelong friends were mostly not that one, though of course I know for many people their Farscape crew was what my BSG crew became to me.

But that didn't matter, and that's the brilliant thing. Even a bit on the fringes and late to the party, there was still that recognition of that--thing--that on one hand is true of all fandoms when they grab your heart but was somehow so much more true of Farscape. I'm never going to love anything ever again like I love this. Maybe it's because Farscape is so weird and uneven, and so many people back right out the door, that when it clicks, when it becomes your One True Show, that kindred spirit thing is strong. Back then, someone would discover it and post their first OMG Farscape!!! post. Some friend who was already into the show would see it and call in the puppy pile, and suddenly all these people were flailing about in your comments, showing you where the good fic was, and welcoming you to the fold.

And the fic. God. No other fandom I've known has had such a high proportion of astonishingly brilliant fic. Sure, there was also plenty of bad and mediocre fic, but there was SO. MUCH. good fic. So many amazing writers pushing the envelope at every opportunity, pushing it even further than the show itself, which is saying something.

For me it came at exactly a moment in my life that I needed to fall down that particular wormhole. And maybe if I'd found it at another time it would have been a little different (though I can't imagine any version of me not adoring it). But I'm never going to love anything ever again like I loved that. And I loved it alongside some really amazing people who felt the same way.

Last of the writing prompts, a few days late. (And at this point I've sort of given up on both the fic prompts, sorry! daybreak, we shall see on the Sister Bernadette thing. It tried to become a proper fic, and then I realized part of that, but not the part you actually asked about, was actually part of a different fic in the queue, so maybe the part you actually asked for will see fit to become its own ficlet one of these days. But mostly the point of this is I'm actually writing legit fic and have a queue, wtf?!?!? Party like it's 2008, apparently.)

But the last of the prompts not requiring excessive creative juices: gabolange asked for the top five places I'd visit in the world and why. This is surprisingly hard? Partly, I think, because my travel bucket list is as much about regions and combinations and time spent and all that. But hey, why not talk about that, too, I guess! In no particular order:

New Zealand
Because it's gorgeous and you don't have to choose between beaches and mountains! This also feels like a medium-sized, reasonably doable trip? Like, obviously it takes 20+ hours just to get there, so you want to stay for a couple weeks to make the jet lag worth it, but I don't know that it needs to be more than that. Couple days each in Auckland and Wellington, then to the south island for the hiking and the views and the beaches. Ideally there would be whale-watching.

Southern South America
gabolange and I were actually going to do the Peru part of this this summer, before her hip got borked. (Now we're going to Chicago instead--but we're seeing Hamilton, so that's practically like a bucket list trip, right?! :P) But when it comes to South America, I don't actually care a bit about jungle things. I'm sure Brazil is great, and I wouldn't not go, but it isn't a priority. However, Peru, Chile, and Argentina: yessssss! I would love to do a big trip that managed to get in the Andes and the Incan ruins, then Argentinian wines and Buenos Aires, and then total bucket list trip to Patagonia, mostly because it's gorgeous and would be cool to say I'd been to Patagonia. Could probably swing both whales and penguins. In reality this is probably two trips--the Peru trip we were already planning, and a separate Argentina trip.

The Mediterranean Grand Tour
Retirement or sabbatical bucket list trip: minimally across the south of France and Italy, the particularly awesome version would start in Spain and end in Greece, maybe. This is the slow, lazy trip with everything: food and wine, wandering around cathedrals and scenic little villages, cycling in the mountains, more food, more wine, more mountains. Some beaches. More wine.

Nepal
I love mountains. I would like to see the Himalayas before I die.

The Arctic
This has always been a funny fascination for me, because I hate the cold. But of course it isn't winter all the time, and summer in the Arctic has always seemed amazing. The wildflowers and the impossibly huge open spaces. The caribou, the sun that never sets. Narwhals! Among other whales. Various versions of this hold different appeal. In Canada I knew people who would drive from Vancouver to Whitehorse and/or on through to Alaska. I love a good road trip, so that one has always seemed like it would be pretty epic. On the other hand, hard to see whales on a road trip, so there's also a version of this involving the Hudson Bay, or Greenland and the colorful houses, and boats and terrifying little planes. There's also the much more accessible version of this, which just involves going to Alaska like normal people go to Alaska. But that feels perfectly plausible and less bucket-list-y? I would like the bucket list version of this trip to involve thousands of caribou, at least three kinds of whales, and zero overcrowded cruise ships full of tourists.

Hey, I made it a whole week before getting behind schedule! This feels like an accomplishment? Yesterday for writing in February, daybreak wanted an ep review of Sunday night's episode of Call the Midwife. But I've been sick this week, and that just absolutely wasn't happening yesterday. Fortunately, today was an empty day, so I'm now caught up!

So today we are going old-school with a DW/LJ episode review! Party like it's 2008, babies!!! ( spoilers for Call the Midwife 6.03 )

I'm stealing from chaila (and probably some other people) to get back in the habit, I hope, of engaging here. Pick a date in February, give me something to write about, and I'll talk about it: fandom, TV, books, work, dog, travel, life, maybe politics depending on how well I'm dealing with the dumpster fire on any given day, whatever. No promises because I'm REALLY rusty with the fic writing, but if you give me a fic prompt you might even get something of that sort (chances are higher if this is about Sister Bernadette/Shelagh Turner, because that's where my fannish brain is at the moment, but you never know!). Will lock anything personal, but I'm happy to grant access if you don't have it (and you don't seem like some creepy person I don't have some logical fannish connection to!).

So leave a comment with a date and a prompt (or plural, I guess, if you have more than one), and I'll update this post to keep track of everything, and hopefully this will be good for writing habits and engagement here, and so forth. I'll try to keep everything straight across platforms, because I know a number of people are still only at LJ, but if you're in both places, I'd be happier if you comment on the DW post.

February 1:
February 2:
February 3:
February 4: gabolange - What is the sexiest story you've ever read and why?
February 5: de23 - Tell us all about your current position.
February 6: daybreak - Last night's episode of CtM!
February 7:
February 8:
February 9: kernezelda - What was your most recent pet-related delight, or alternatively, what was the most recent thing or happening that made you grin like a happy loon, and laugh out loud, and brightened your whole day?
February 10: reserved
February 11: chaila - I would really enjoy if someone, hypothetically you, wanted to write us a bit of Cat/James subtext, maybe when she promoted him, or in a perfect world where she never left. ;) Or you know I'm alllllllllways down for some Sarah/Ellison post-canon.
February 12:
February 13: runawaynun - IT'S GALENTINE'S DAY. Describe the perfect galentine's celebration.
February 14: daybreak - The day Sister Bernadette took her vows.
February 15:
February 16:
February 17:
February 18: chaila - I am actually very curious about the new job! I know generally what it is, but what's a typical day like? Or if there's no typical day, a representative day? (I feel like I never know what people actually do at their jobs, and it's interesting to find out).
February 19: fallingtowers - Have you got any cute pictures /anecdotes of your new dog that you'd like to share?
February 20:
February 21: siljamus - A favourite work of art
February 22:
February 23:
February 24: siljamus - Talk about 'home' and what it means to you.
February 25:
February 26:
February 27: gabolange - Top five places you'd like to visit in the world and why.
February 28:

It felt more important to write another post (writing practice!) than to answer comments, but xoxoxoxo to you all for comments on the last post. People are still around!

Surgery is WEDNESDAY, which is exciting and a little scary and stressful all at once.

But enough of health stuff.

Last night I was scrolling through Netflix, feeling generally dissatisfied with all of my options, and I suddenly decided that what I needed to do was rewatch some late-season, Doggett- and Reyes-featuring X-Files. IDEK, except I always did love Doggett and Reyes, despite generally being of the opinion that the show would have done better just to end with season 7, or possibly earlier. Nevertheless, I watched a few of the episodes that I remembered as being less terrible than others, was kind of nostalgically charmed by them (though wow, is Annabeth Gish a bad actress, yet I still love Reyes liek whoa despite it).

The more interesting thing, though, was that this made me want to go find some old fic. Of course the particular things I was looking for never made it to Gossamer, and were instead on an old Tripod site that did not get sufficiently archived on the Wayback Machine, so I ended up spending my morning wading around in the archives of an old Yahoo Group, circa 2002. I'd been lurking for a while at that point, but this particular Yahoo Group--XFMU, appropriating Mulder's crack about being the FBI's most unwanted to refer to the X-Files' most unwanted characters, Doggett and Reyes--was the first time I talked, interacted, made friends, wrote stuff. And it's all still there, though I first had to convince Yahoo I wasn't trying to hack my own account, since it had been years and years since I'd signed in.

Those were my first wave fandom days, before LJ, and certainly before this current fannish diaspora where everything is mainstream across a million platforms and no one actually seems to do anything except post shiny pictures. All those arguments about what posts were appropriate to the list versus how OT (off-topic, for those of you who don't remember the lingo) was acceptable. The fights between the advocates of DSR (Doggett/Scully), DRR (Doggett/Reyes), SRR (Scully/Reyes), and so forth, so earnest and yet even at the time so aware that these were just faint echoes of the great shipper/noromo fights of X-Files years past. Spoiler space in posts that involved actually hitting return a couple dozen times, in the days before cut tags. Everyone promoting her own geocities fic site. And my personal favorite, the network of people mailing VHS tapes around the country to people who weren't able to catch the episodes for some reason.

Yet of course by 2002 this phase was already waning. People were moving to LJ, were starting to take advantage of platforms that required less coding skill and produced prettier results, not to mention that blurred the lines between fandoms, personal and fannish lives, and what was and was not OT. The heyday of the lists and the geocities sites were the late 90s, so there's something already nostalgic about those early 2000s lists that figure so prominently in my personal fandom nostalgia.

The fic I was remembering was bad and cliched and yet still great fun to reread after forever. The conversations were as they ever were, and continued to be, up until the point fandom stopped having proper conversations about things. (I gather that some of this sort of happens on Tumblr? Yet also not?) And in the intervening 13 years, fandom has changed a lot, as has the internet, as have I and no doubt all of the other fangirls (and a handful of fanboys) who used to populate those old lists. We used to have a great secret about how much we loved these shows and these characters (even the ones that no one else seemed to love--and perhaps it was the joy of finding those other people who did love Doggett and Reyes, despite all the hate, that made that particular list such a favorite of mine), and part of the great joy was finding these people out there in the world who shared that secret.

And I wonder if, in this current great fervor we have for rebooting old fannish hits--new Star Wars, new X-Files, new Gilmore Girls, new Star Trek--we're trying to recapture something of the way we loved those things, more, perhaps, than trying to recapture the things themselves. My great first fannish love, The X-Files, was as much about the experience of loving it with other people as it was the show itself: the great revelation that other people also felt this way, the shipper wars, the mytharc guesses and analyses, and so forth.

And I will DEFINITELY be watching the new episodes, but is there something lost in the fact that everyone else will be, too? In the fact that there will now be paid critics at highbrow organs of journalism leading the discussion rather than fangirls on a message board or Yahoo group or LJ community? I want to hear the opening music again, to see Mulder and Scully replay the same beloved scenarios, and so forth (Mulder will believe, Scully will be skeptical, Mulder will get depressed and question all he's ever known, Scully will declare she believes in him if not in the paranormal, Skinner will be awesome in the background, the mytharc will make no fucking sense whatsoever, and at some point they'll wave some flashlights around a dark room--if this is not the substance of the reboot, I'm taking my toys and going home). But will it really be the same if it's a major multinational phenomenon acted out specifically because of the nostalgia for something we know we've lost? Of course not. But it won't stop us from hoping, I suspect (and wailing that we knew better if it's terrible).

In the meantime, I'm trying to decide whether the selective XF episode rewatch should extend throughout the whole series. Or is that, too, better left as is.

Remember how I was going to write more this year? Ha!

Other of my January intentions went fairly well, though. I wanted to embrace some kind of fun, physical, childlike way of movement. I started dancing in my living room. I talked about parkour and jazz.

And then I went beyond talking and actually signed up for a beginner parkour class. Y'all, so much fun!!!! I was TERRIBLE!! Really, truly terrible, in all the ways you might expect for a short, overweight, 34-year-old trying to do an activity that is all about sprinting and jumping and climbing (without holds!) and so forth. But it was a fun terrible. The environment in the gym was fantastic and encouraging, and I could see myself improving. Most of all, I was doing all this crazy fun stuff that I hadn't done since childhood. Vaulting over boxes! Swinging on monkey bars!

You will note the past tense. The first thing we learned in parkour was how to land on the balls of our feet with loose knees, in order to minimize impact. So for five weeks, I landed a lot on the balls of my feet. On balance beams, curbs, the floor, etc. I didn't notice the first time it hurt. But soon there was a nagging pain in my right toe, in the joint around the ball of my foot. One day I wore shoes with just a bit of a heel, and I thought I was going to die with that weight on the ball of my foot. I figured I'd skip parkour for a couple of days and hope it would get better. It didn't. I decided to go to the doctor, who promptly sent me for an x-ray. By the end of the day I was in a walking boot with a fracture diagnosis (the sesamoid, which is the bone right under the ball of the foot) and strict instructions not to do anything high-impact for a long time. No running, and especially no parkour.

This could be worse, I keep telling myself. gabolange, of course, has been dealing with a much more severe foot injury (I swear I didn't do this out of BFF sympathy!). When you're injured, people start telling you their own injury stories, and I've heard plenty that were far worse than mine. For now, at least, I'm still walking, albeit slowly and awkwardly. I can take the boot off to sleep and shower. Crutches are a threat but not yet a reality. It's been painful but not nearly as painful as it might have been had I fractured something different. Etc.

All that said, however, it's been a tough month and will continue to be a tough summer, I suspect. I feel very stuck: just as I was starting to figure out how to move in ways I have always wanted to, I'm now not even able to move well at all. Most forms of exercise are difficult or impossible. Doing normal tasks like going to work or to the grocery store are suddenly much more difficult (I don't drive, and a work day that doesn't involve anything other than just going to work and coming home again still involves around 3 miles of walking). I wanted this to be the year I set my body free, and instead I'm more weighed down than ever.

So it's a summer of waiting to heal. There are other waits, too. I've been anxious to move for months, but my lease isn't up until August--so I'm waiting to move. There are some significant and I think very positive changes coming at work--in August. But in the meantime...

In the meantime, I need to enjoy my summer, to make it meaningful (not just to watch lots of TV, which has been the main thing so far). Maybe I'll get back to the plan to write more. Possibly I'll finally finish my very long overdue Galentine's Fic. I will read things and watch things, no doubt. But still--what does one do when the weather is splendid (or hot and swampy, depending on the day and one's pov) but going places involves walking and walking is a giant pain (literal and metaphorical)? When the obvious ways to go out and enjoy one's city involve, as gabolange calls it, the "museum shuffle," which is the worst thing for foot injuries? When reading and writing and watching are all lovely, but one also needs interaction with other humans, sunshine, fresh air, and movement? When one's favorite season has just been dampened considerably. I have higher hopes for fall, but in the meantime, I need to make something of my summer. Suggestions welcome!

This is my seventh post of 2014, the previous six all coming before May. Meep! One of my goals for 2015 is to write more. Just more, period, about whatever. Maybe (hopefully) fic, and fannish commentary and so forth, but probably also just a lot of whatever. Feel free to read and comment, or not, if you're still around anyway. But I'm getting rusty at writing, and I have this platform, so hopefully there will be more than seven posts in 2015!

Looking back, though, 2014 was somewhat uneventful for me personally. Less so for other members of my family: I gained a sister-in-law and a nephew, both in September, both completely awesome. But those are really the only big milestones, and given how eventful the past few years have been, that's probably okay. I did good work, I met good friends, I traveled to Kansas City, Kentucky (several times), various parts of California, New Mexico, Delaware, and Minneapolis at various points, both for work and play. California was awesome; Kansas City was not. I read whatever the hell I wanted to, just because, without ever having to teach or write about it, or do anything at all beyond making some semi-coherent book club comments, and it was marvelous. (My favorite book of the year: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.) I got a Kindle and have not yet decided if the lightweight and one-click-book-acquisition convenience of it outweighs the fact that it sort of conflicts with my fairly non-linear reading style, but I suspect I will soon be converted for most types of books.

Overall, 2014 was unobjectionable, but I do think I coasted a bit. I had noble intentions and did not realize a lot of them. I'm going to practice doing better in 2015. I really only have one overarching 2015 resolution: to do the things I intend to do. To write. To exercise. To eat less sugar. To wake up earlier. To meditate. To read more. To connect more with people. To take advantage of this cool city where I live. Not to coast. 2015: Year of Action. It won't be perfect, of course; I know myself too well to pretend that I can suddenly change such a deeply ingrained habit/aspect of personality (I've been a procrastinator forever, for instance). But I think I can practice action, and in practice get a little better. And hopefully the practice means I'll be around here more regularly.