Hello everyone!
I hope you are all getting a much-needed break right now,
and that you were able to enjoy whichever way you celebrate or don’t celebrate
the holidays and the coming end of the year! I’ve been enjoying a stack of new
books in addition to rereading some old friends (because really, books and
their characters totally count as friends!), and doing 1000-piece puzzles and
cooking.
This is an inter-session hello, and place to check in and
chat if you wish. I will be hosting the Winter session starting in January if
that is ok with everyone. I will put up the first post for that the weekend of January
8/9 and we will go for 16 weeks of check-ins to get us to the end of April,
with the final day wrap-up day being May 1st (for no reason other
than I like the date!). That should cover most of our terms/semesters I think?
In the meantime, I’m thinking about the new year… Not in a “New
Year’s Resolution” kind of a way because I’m pretty sure those are just
designed to make us feel bad about ourselves, more in a “what do I want to
bring along for the journey that this year might be”… So, if you feel like it, check
in below and share your thoughts on things we want to carry with us for the
year!
What do you want to leave behind from 2021? What do you want
to bring with you for 2022? What are you looking forward to? What will your
special superpower be in the year 2022? What do you want to do this coming year
to make room for joy and wonder?
Hello everyone,
ReplyDeleteWell, I just got a Covid vaccine booster, an mRNA one this time, so hoping to take better immunity into 2022! And I'd like to take being better at saying "no" with me, and shed a big chunk of workload...
Hooray for boosters!
DeleteAlso HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL!
ReplyDeleteHappy New Year for you too!
DeleteImproved immunity is an excellent thing to carry into the new year! Best wishes for the new term and all the chaos that will come with that. I hope saying no to some things helps with the workload too!
Happy New Year (belated) to you too!
DeleteHappy New Year everyone! Hope you are all doing what you want to for the night, and not what you feel you have to! I'm home in fuzzy pants watching movies and eating cookies and doing puzzles, so basically exactly what I want!
ReplyDeleteTo leave behind: some lingering bitterness about jobs not won in the last 18 months... Expectations from a particular project, both mine and those of others...
To bring along: excellent exercise and relaxation habits nurtured this year, good focus on projects I enjoy and feel are valuable...
Looking forward to: booster shots, maybe conferences and lab travel and field work later in the year,
Superpower: being calm and organized and doing things that help people in my academic community... I would love to say paper writing here, so will put it as an omen of things to come hopefully?
Wonder and Joy: kid, friends, books, music...
See you all in January!
I went to bed before ten and slept brilliantly. That's my idea of a fantastic New Year's Eve!
DeleteYour "to bring along" sound wonderful. Congratulations on the fostering of good habits.
Sounds like a great NYE to me, too! But we have neighbors who like to set off fireworks on every possible occasion, so it didn't seem worth going to bed just to be awakened later. I wound up staying up till 3 working on a jigsaw and am still trying to work back to a more reasonable bedtime.
DeleteI'm just going to pop in (for now) to recommend a book!
ReplyDeleteI'm midway through Ruth Ozeki's new novel, _The Book of Form and Emptiness_, and I can only put it down with great difficulty. HIGHLY recommend. Genre-wise, I'd classify it as a somewhat meta-fictional/postmodern literary novel, with possibly paranormal elements, although these may be all in the main character's mind. If that helps at all.
(Basically it's about a boy who starts hearing objects talk, and it's not clear [yet] whether that's in his head or an objective reality. It's set in a somewhat dystopian present, or maybe just on the dystopian side of the American pre-pandemic recent past? And the book is actually narrated by the book itself, if that makes sense. Well, it makes sense within the world of the novel. And Ozeki herself is an as-yet-unnamed character within the book. Anyway. IT'S GREAT, and it's all I can talk about, so I've come over here to talk about it and to spare my family for a while.)
I'll add that I've met Ozeki, who lives nearby. We were in a workshop together a few years ago, and she gave a guest lecture in one of my classes the following year; we had lunch afterwards. She is a wonderful, warm, delightful human being--also a Zen Buddhist priest!--which just adds to the joy of her being an incredible writer.
OK, commercial over! Looking forward to checking in with you all next week, and maybe even writing some new year's reflections before then!
Oooh I loved that book! And it is totally awesome that you have met the author and so great to hear she is just as lovely as her writing! Definitely a fan!
DeleteYay! I'm almost done with it--will likely finish tonight--it's been a while since I just spent a weekend reading a single novel. I also loved _A Tale for the Time Being_ and her very short memoir, _The Face: A Time Code_, which is what she lectured on in my course.
Delete("Lectured" isn't the right word--more of a Q&A--but you know what I mean.)
DeleteHappy new year! This morning I finished Jeffrey Euegenides' older book, Middlesex. It's not brilliant, but I realize how long it's been since missed the characters in a book I've completed. Now reading The Idiot by Elif Batuman, trying to slip in another longer novel during the break. The story begins with our protagonist checking in to her freshman dorm at Harvard, so maybe a good reminder of some of the absurdities of higher ed. This aligns with my goal of not feeling guilty about not taking things too seriously. See you here again soon!
ReplyDeleteI had a theme word for the year pop into my head while I was out for a walk: "Transitions." I was mainly thinking about how much more I get done when I work for 30-60 minutes on each of several projects, rather than burrowing into a single one until it's done---in some ways I really like to concentrate on Just One Thing, but efficiency really drops off---and how to manage the transition from one to another.
ReplyDeleteBut it could work on other levels, as well. I hope to make a transition back to something more like normal life, with travel, but we'll see. I do not intend to retire for a few years yet, but I also want to come up with a plan for how I'll spend my time when I do get to that point (and even the plan doesn't have to happen in 2022, just, I want to think about it). The things most people think about just don't appeal to me. I really like my job. OTOH I don't want to die in harness, and when I leave I want to really leave, not teach part-time as some of my colleagues have done, so I want to pay attention to what I want more or less of, and how I might get those things.
Thanks for offer to host the Winter session, Daisy! Jan-to-May makes a good stretch for me, with some summer time freedom and then the shift into the bulk of semester one.
ReplyDeleteI'm taking time on New Years themes and resolutions this year - I suspect the underlying foundation is trying to be more present, but in doing so I've been taking time with family, trying to keep travel as low stress as possible when rules keep changing, and now trying to frame the 'personal responsibility' debacle of the current local covid situation as a chance to hang with kids and declutter/deep clean. So what I will bring with me, I hope, is only what I have actively chosen to keep, and that's not a bad starting point in the continuing uncertainty.