I am finally taking the holiday cards down from around the kitchen doorway. I wait until I am GOOD AND READY. I do not rush it. If they are up until the next year’s cards begin arriving, SO BE IT.

LAST year I bought some reusable cloth gift-wrap bags, so THIS year I am cutting up some of the cards to make gift-tags for NEXT year. I have taken a break from this activity because it is feeling a little futile, in light of who I am as a person. I have cut up old Christmas cards to make gift-tags before; I even bought large specialty craft punches to make a nice decorative edge. Have I ever used a single one of those tags? No. Do I know where those punches are now, or the tags? No.

I am having trouble focusing on this task in part because I woke up at 2:45 a.m., and lay awake feeling fizzy and sick and having imaginary conversations with library management, and did not doze off again until after 5:30, and then woke up for the day at just before 7:00. There was a little feature on NPR the other day about how people who are sleep-deprived don’t realize they are acting irrationally; their behavior and feelings seem normal to them. Many people who claim they can get by on six hours a night, or four, are like people who are not getting unbiased external feedback on the efficacy of their natural deodorant.

I probably should have taken that into account when choosing to deal with an ongoing insurance issue. But, the thing is, I think it is the sleep deprivation that made me spring on it. I had HAD IT. I send blessings to the customer service representative who had to deal with me and my breaking, shaking voice and fragile disposition. I did stay civil, remembering always that she was a person and a representative of her company: she was not the company itself, nor its management, nor was she the previous representatives I have dealt with who evidently did not do what they said they would do, nor was she any of the many, many previous representatives I have dealt with over many, many years of dealing with insurance issues; and at the end of the call I thanked her for her help and also for her patience.

But for the love of god. I have had to make four separate lengthy phone calls, three to the provider and one to my insurance; and my insurance has also contacted the provider directly telling them I am not responsible for this bill, and I am still getting bills threatening me with collections. “CAN YOU SEE HOW MADDENING THIS IS??,” I asked the provider’s customer service representative at one point in the call. “…Yes,” she said. That calmed me more than anything else could have done—well, other than, for example, fixing the problem, which at this point feels like a fantasy. “IT IS STARTING TO FEEL AS IF BILLING IS NO LONGER CHECKING THEIR MESSAGES,” I said to her at another point, after she had explained that I could not contact Billing myself, but could only wait for her (as with the representatives before her) to “send this to Billing for review,” AGAIN. I want to remind you that this is for a bill my insurance company says I SHOULD NOT pay; and my insurance company has personally contacted the provider to “remind them of their contractual obligations not to harass the patient,” and a representative of the provider assured the insurance company that the balance would be wiped. And yet I am still getting threatening bills claiming I have not responded (NOT RESPONDED!!!!) to their requests for payment.

Meanwhile, the hospital where Edward goes for GI has utterly borked their own billing, so that we regularly get demands that we pay our delinquent account of $0 owed for a June 2019 visit. “THIS ACCOUNT IS PAST DUE,” with a big red block of ink around the text. You do not want to know how many times I have attempted to address this. “Wow!,” each representative says in turn, “That’s crazy! We’ll get that fixed for you!” The next month: another red, threatening letter. My hope is that whenever it goes to Collections, which it must have done NUMEROUS times by now over the years, Collections says “????” and puts it directly into the recycling. I hope they add an “Excuse me, WHAT?,” and maybe a big eye-roll, and maybe they show it to a coworker so they can roll their eyes together. Maybe they put it on a breakroom whiteboard for everyone to laugh at.

And then we got a delivery of oil; we have an oil furnace; it was here when we bought the house. In the last three weeks, we have used SO MANY HUNDRED DOLLARS’ WORTH of oil. This is not sustainable. We keep the thermostat at 65-66 degrees when we are home, and I am always cold; I wear a sweater over a shirt; I wear two pairs of socks and one of the pairs is wool; I have electric heating pads for my chairs; we have a down blanket on the bed in addition to another blanket and a quilt and flannel sheets. We have modern windows. I know there are places that will come out and do an evaluation to tell you where you are losing heat; we did this at our old house; probably we should do this at this house. I can barely make myself do things I WOULD enjoy doing, so it doesn’t seem likely that I will do that, but we should. At one point we had a geothermal guy come out, because we’d rather not be on oil heat; he persistently tried to talk Paul out of it, tried to sell him a gas hook-up. Gas is not better. We think it must have been a scam.

I had a brief conference with Paul and William while we were making our dinners. We are going to try using electric blankets and turning the heat much lower at night. When I stay over at my brother and sister-in-law’s house, they turn the heat way down at night and have wool blankets on the beds, and I sleep SO WELL. Getting up to pee is hell’s own torment, of course, but getting back into bed is delightful. We should have done this years ago, but we have had more than the typical number of bed-wetters, and also we have barfy cats, and so laundry has been a consideration. I think even if we have to throw away the occasional electric blanket, that will still be better overall.

I accidentally started two trilogies at the same time, one of which changed mid-trilogy from a trilogy to a series. Both have turned out to be the kinds of books I keep wanting to get back to, instead of doing what I am supposed to be doing.

First I read The Book of Koli, by M.R. Carey, but my library doesn’t own the second and third books so I had to order them from another library.

While I was waiting, I started reading Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir—a book I didn’t expect to like or finish, because it looked very Y.A. and the cover reviews mentioned bones and violence and “grotesque horror.” I thought I would just get it out of the way while I was waiting for the rest of the Koli books.

(image from Amazon.com)

Why, you may wonder, was I trying the book at all. It was because Paul had, in one of those internet rabbit-hole situations that started, if you can fathom it, with the “none pizza left beef” meme, found the book’s Wikipedia page and thought the “Style” section sounded like maybe we should get it for Henry for Christmas. But we already had enough books for Henry for Christmas so I got it out of the library for him, and he wasn’t interested but I thought I’d try it and see if I wanted to recommend he change his mind.

(screenshot from Wikipedia.org)

I DID like it, despite all the things I generally do NOT like, such as being thrown into a world where nothing makes sense, and where there is a lot of violence, and where fights are described blow-by-blow. Also, almost no one has a normal eye color. There is violet of course, and at least three kinds of grey, and golden, and something called “hurricane” (maybe that’s one of the greys?) and I just can’t adequately express how much I hate that—but it didn’t start until I was over 100 pages in and it was too late for me, and no one looked at themselves in the mirror to muse about their own eye color, so even that was well-handled as far as I was concerned. Like, if we MUST have purple and amber and storm-grey eyes, then let’s at least do it the right way. Also-also, it was in some cases necessary to the plot, so fine, FINE. But seriously, is there any universe in which we can just stop with the eyes.

There is no denying this is a book that includes violence, and confusing world-building, and annoying eye colors. But this is also VERY MUCH a book about characters and relationships and dialogue. For those who would find it relevant to their interests: this book contains the hate-to-love trope, and I felt it was done well rather than stupidly, and that it felt earned rather than contrived. Things never get explicit, and I’m not even 100% sure anything ever Happened In That Way. I have a nibling who likes to read but does not want to read sex stuff, and I would recommend this book to them. I think it would be fully possible to read this book and see only intense emotion and friendship. I think it is likely the author deliberately left some options in there for various kinds of readers.

The cover design amazes me, because while reading the book I went from deeply disliking the cover to LOVING it, and even spending time gazing at it affectionately. Think on THAT! I LOVE to look at that weird skull-faced person now!!

So there we were: I had finished Gideon the Ninth. By then the other two Koli books had come in for me; but also one of my coworkers, upon hearing I was reading Gideon the Ninth, said “If you’re liking it, I recommend getting the next two books right now: the people I know who liked this series REALLY REALLY LIKED IT.” So I’d brought home the next two books. And instead of returning to the first trilogy I’d started, I continued with the second. I read Harrow the Ninth and loved it, and loved the cover. Then I read Nona the Ninth, and learned to love the cover as I’d learned to love the cover of Gideon the Ninth.

Interestingly, the third book was supposed to be a different book. The author describes the actual third book as having “sucker punched” those plans. So now there will be a fourth book in the trilogy! Maybe more!

I should mention that after reading three books in the Locked Tomb series (that’s what the Tamsyn Muir series is called), I still have no idea what the hell is going on. This is what I mean about it being character/relationship-based, deep-down. If I were reading to understand what is going on with the world-building, I would have noped out, and long since. But I have GOT to know what happens with these PEOPLE. And I guess I would like to know what is happening with the war / revolution / deities??? / planetary soul energy???? / etc.

Reluctantly (because I wanted to start reading the next Locked Tomb book instead, which I can’t yet do), I went back to The Rampart trilogy, which is what the M.R. Carey series is called.

(image from Amazon.com)

Within about 15 minutes I was fully back into it. I finished the second book and have started the third, and basically that is my plan for this long weekend, which celebrates nothing I want to celebrate right now.

The Rampart trilogy is post-apocalyptic, where the apocalypse happened in a future one or two big steps ahead of our time—like, more-advanced technology and weapons and science had been developed than when we have now, and then most but not all of the human world fell to ruin. But aside from the better tech, the basic gist is familiar: the world ended because of climate change (described as the cities gradually going underwater inch by inch while politicians stood around and argued with each other about whether or not it was happening) and violence/war, and also by certain scientific advancements that were well-intentioned but turned against humanity (e.g., making trees more resistant to climate change accidentally made them evolve to consume humans and other animals by killing them and mashing their nutrients into the soil around their trunks).

People live in small villages again. There is a problem with villages dying out because their populations are too small for successful continued reproduction. There are diseases that no one knows how to treat anymore. The forests are alive with dangerous genetically-altered vegetation. People find old technology but they don’t know what it’s for and how it works; sometimes someone figures a piece of technology out, and that person is treated like a monarch/godlet. There are new religions that seem based on old religions, but in a way that makes all religion seem freshly strange. Things like that. I’m really enjoying it.

As with the Locked Tomb series, there is plenty of violence and death and hardship and scary things, but there is also a lot of character development and relationships and dialogue. There is a quest, and there is found-family, and there is a lot of stuff that feels PRETTY RELEVANT to our own times and our own issues.

I don’t know why it popped into my mind, but as I was folding laundry I remembered out of the blue how confusing and unhelpful the term “heavy petting” was for me as a pre-teen and teen. Honestly I still don’t understand it. I’m interested to know where I heard it, because I am pretty sure it was from dated teen fiction I checked out of the library AND ALSO from youth pastors AND from the Christian books for teens we had at my house. I had a mental picture of someone running their hand along someone else’s side, like from shoulder down to hip, WITH STRONG PRESSURE (to make it HEAVY). I was imagining this happening in a car: the teens would be on their sides facing each other from their respective seats in the car, seats tilted back, and I pictured the boy teen (I definitely, definitely, definitely pictured the boy teen being the one doing the Heavy Petting) running his hand down the girl’s side, repeatedly and probably kind of uncomfortably. It was hard to understand why God/parents/pastors/anyone would be so opposed—but it also didn’t seem like a temptation it would be very difficult to resist, so I did not worry too much.

I remember when I was in 7th or 8th grade, a couple of girls from the public school transferred to our Christian school. This represented a roughly 33% increase in the number of girls in our class, which was a combined 6th-7th or 7th-8th grade class, I don’t remember which year it was. These girls taught us right off the bat that knee socks (we all wore them) were NOT COOL, and showed us how to slouch them—and for this I thank them, even though my thin dressy knee socks WOULD NOT slouch properly. The next year I transferred to a public high school, and by then I had a nice full wardrobe of actual slouch socks.

These were also the girls we asked about French kissing. We picked our moment and asked during a sleepover, when it was dark and it felt like we could be bold. We instinctively felt they would know, and they did, though I don’t remember their explanation solving the mystery of why anyone would WANT to. We asked them if French kissing was the same as angel kissing (heaven knows where we’d found that term), and I don’t remember whether they said it was or whether they said they didn’t know, but either way I still don’t know what angel kissing is, if anything.

I am feeling simultaneously very smart and very dim, because of my winter coat. I have TWO winter coats, actually, because one of them looked great when I tried it on but it was very fitted and felt a little snug, and I am now a little larger than I was when I bought it, and it will not zip. So I bought a second coat on a good clearance in my current size, but I bought it online, and it will zip but it does not look good zipped: it was made for someone with somewhat different proportions, so there is plenty of room in the up-top but not so much in the down-below. Why, you ask, do I not get rid of both coats and buy one that fits? It’s because of the despair.

ANYWAY, normally this is not an issue: I am the indoors type, so I rarely need to zip my coat. And on the coldest days, if I DO want to zip my coat, I CAN zip it; it’s just not FLATTERING, or COMFORTABLE. So that’s fine.

However, now we are looking at winter protests. I need the coat zipped, and I need it zipped for a longer period of time, and ideally I need room inside for more layers. I put on my to-do list that it was time to conquer the despair and buy a bigger coat in the right proportions. It’s not as bad, shopping-wise, as shopping for jeans, but it’s pretty bad, and I dreaded it. Plus: it’s January, almost February, and the coat supply will be picked over if not gone entirely.

I fervently wished I had held onto my old coat, the one that fit a decade ago and then became much too big. It was a pretty color; it had a hood; it was flattering and comfortable. I cursed myself for having given into the idea that we shouldn’t keep things that no longer serve us.

This is when I had another thought. I have kept certain of my larger clothes, because we have a barn but no farm and therefore AMPLE storage space, and because I have had opportunities (the pandemic; post-knee-surgery) to be very grateful to my past self for realizing I might not be the same size forever. (It can be Quite Fun to buy smaller clothes; I find it much less exciting to buy larger ones.) Would I have…KEPT the coat? I remembered laundering it before donating it, but maybe I was instead remembering laundering it before storing it.

I made the freezing journey to the barn, and looked at the bins. Two bins are transparent plastic, and I could immediately see that there was no coat inside. The third bin, on the bottom, was opaque plastic and was labeled “t-shirts, flannel, hoodies”—not “coat.” I turned to go back into the house and then on to my dreaded coat-shopping trip—but then turned back, dug out the bottom bin just in case, and looked in it. THE COAT. THE COAT, RIGHT ON TOP.

So I felt very dim (Why did I get rid of the coat? and: I almost went out and bought a new coat!! and: How could I have forgotten I kept the coat?? and: I almost walked away without opening the bin containing the coat!!) AND very smart (I kept the coat! I remembered the coat! I found the coat! I did not waste time and money on a new coat! I can stay home instead of having to go shopping for a coat!).

Listen, if you get the opportunity to hang out with friends and at the same time protest the demolition of your country’s democracy, I vehemently suggest you take that opportunity. So heartening, on so many levels. Maybe, like me, you would rather stay home/warm/indoors. No, it turns out, you wouldn’t, not if you knew what it would be like. Imagine me putting my freezing hands on the sides of your face and looking earnestly into your eyes, while with my thawing toes I attempt to place an order for warmer winter boots and a selection of HotHands hand and toe warmers, so that I will be ready to attend future such hangouts. And, as I’ve mentioned before, but I think only on Bluesky: if you can’t attend a protest, but you can honk and wave as you drive past a protest, YOU ARE ATTENDING THE PROTEST. I’d never realized how bolstering and cheering that could be to the protesters, but it’s HUGE.

Also, make yourself a mental note to go out for drinks/snacks/treats afterwards, to reinforce the psychological payoff.

In the words of author John Scalzi: what a deeply embarrassing day to be a U.S. citizen, on so many levels.

Presumably in the future we will not remember which specific embarrassments went with this particular day, so I will pin an example: the U.S. president texted the prime minister of Norway, saying that because “Norway” hadn’t given him the Nobel Peace Prize, even though he had “stopped 8 Wars PLUS” (citation needed), he “no longer feels an obligation to think purely of peace.” He went on to say that he personally has done more for NATO than anyone else (citation needed), and that therefore NATO should let him “have” Greenland, which he has said we will take the hard way if we can’t get it the easy way, because we “need” it. I feel I should mention that the actual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize (a prize not in fact given by the government of Norway, as the prime minister of Norway said he has repeatedly explained to our president without effect), María Corina Machado, GAVE OUR TERRIBLE PRESIDENT HER MEDAL. This makes me feel like sobbing, gagging, and burning everything down, all at once.

Embarrassing doesn’t cover it. It is mortifying. Excruciating. Horrifying. Terrifying. Nauseating. We are afraid for our lives, of course, and for our country, and for our future, and for our children’s futures—but also for the lives and countries and futures of everyone else on this planet. We are on a rollercoaster driven off-road by a mad clown who does not have a valid driver’s license, and also is under the influence and not watching the road, and also that rollercoaster is headed directly for a nuclear device on the edge of a cliff, and also our mad clown thinks that cliffs and nuclear devices are Democratic hoaxes to make him look bad. It is not a good ride, in case you are wondering.

This situation, and by “this situation” I mean the one that began in 2016, has changed the way I talk about world politics. I should have changed sooner, but I’m embarrassed to say it took me that long to tune in. In the past, I would have said things such as “Russia is attacking Ukraine,” or “Germany attacked Poland,” or whatever. Now, I might still lazily slip into that kind of speech, because I am new to this and also not good with history or geography, and because of what William, who co-majored in linguistics, tells me is called “synecdoche“—but generally, when my brain is engaged, and when I remember how it feels to hear that “the United States” is trying to take Greenland, I now try to remember to say “The government of Russia is attacking Ukraine.” There is no reason the world should grant the U.S. similar grace as we ONCE-A-FUCKIN-GAIN overstep our bounds to step all over everyone else and rob them of whatever we can carry—but it would be so sweet if they would say that THE U.S. GOVERNMENT is once-a-fuckin-gain overstepping its bounds to step all over everyone else and rob them of whatever we can carry, or even more specifically that TR*MP is doing that. Some of our citizens would do it if they could—that’s undeniable! But the majority of us would not, and NONE of the citizens CAN do it or ARE doing it. It is our leadership that is doing it.

Imagine yourself, as you are, a citizen of your country. Now imagine how much power you personally have to stop your country’s leaders from doing whatever they choose to do. No, no: I know you are imagining you would RISE UP or whatever—but we ARE doing that, and our government is sending our own military to shoot us in the face, so what is the NEXT idea you have for stopping your own highest leader, and does it seem like it would…like, WORK? Picture YOU, or even you and a group of like-minded citizens…against your country’s leader. What power do you personally have? What SPECIFICALLY would you do to stop it, chosen not from Fantasy Dream Options but instead from Things You Could Actually Do That Would Stop It. Right. Right. Exactly. It is the same for all the world’s citizens against all the world’s leaders, except that some are even worse off than that, and get their homes burned down and their families shot for trying. A citizen can SUPPORT the actions or DENOUNCE the actions, but a citizen is not DOING the actions and has no actual power to PREVENT OR STOP the actions.

My inclination is to apologize for my country’s leaders, but of what use would that be? It’s approximately as valuable as the power I have to stop them, which I have just said is none. Nevertheless, for what it is worth, I do apologize. I kneel before you and put my forehead and palms to the ground. The behavior of my country’s leadership is shocking, shameful, reckless, irresponsible, offensive, disrespectful, callous, dangerous, disgusting, traitorous. I am so unhappy that this MUST, absolutely MUST, result in my entire country, including me and all the other people who oppose the leadership, being exiled from the world’s friendship. An alliance cannot stand when one member of that alliance is swinging its dick around and forcing other members to kneel and kiss it. I hope you will pardon my vulgar metaphor. It is hard to avoid vulgar language when trying to describe a vulgar leader taking vulgar actions.

I hope the citizens of other countries realize that many, many of the citizens of the United States not only support but CHEER other countries’ efforts to resist ours. PLEASE stand with Greenland. PLEASE stand with Canada. PLEASE support retaliatory tariffs, and sanctions against the United States. PLEASE do what you can to resist our country’s leader from the outside, as we do what we can to resist him from within. Insofar as you have any power, as a citizen, to affect anything our leaders do.

I went to my one-year-post-knee-replacement-surgery follow-up at the hospital building today, first for knee x-rays and then to the knee surgeon’s PA for a check-up. I’d estimate 90% of the people working at the hospital (info desk, receptionists, volunteers, medical professionals) were wearing masks. Approximately a third of patients were wearing masks. This was not in areas where many sick patients would be seen, such as emergency intake or regular primary care; this was x-ray and orthopedics. Nevertheless: significantly wider-spread mask usage than I’ve seen since early in the pandemic.

I went to the grocery store afterward, and saw four employees and approximately the same number of customers, all wearing masks. This is up from seeing, like, zero or one mask per grocery trip.

I know multiple people (one coworker, one coworker’s spouse, one relative) who have been sick with one of the worst viruses they’ve ever experienced. I have heard there is an unexpected flu strain going around, a mutation that appeared after the vaccines had been formulated. The local news has started reporting deaths from flu, and also mentioning that hospitals are near capacity, so please stay home unless you are experiencing life-threatening illness. This too is reminding me of earlier on in the pandemic.

My coworker with a sick husband said he was fine when he went to work that morning; mid-afternoon he texted her that he wasn’t feeling great; by the time he got home, he had a 103-degree fever, went straight to the couch, and she wasn’t sure he’d moved since then. This was the next day.

My sick coworker had a similar report: she said one evening she had a mildly sore throat and she sneezed twice; by the next morning she had a fever and could only get out of bed to use the bathroom. She came into work after being out for a few days, but was still very visibly/audibly sick. She wore a mask—and, for the first time in quite awhile, I wore one too, because some of my work had to be done in her vicinity. One of the upsides of not being very good at decluttering is that I still had several masks with me: in my lunch bag, in my coat pockets.

I also wore a mask to my appointments at the hospital. I didn’t wear one to the grocery store, but the hospital felt more clear-cut. As I was checking in, an elderly woman was checking in at the next desk over; both our receptionists were masked, as was a nurse behind them, as was I, but the elderly lady was not. The elderly lady asked in a jocular way if everyone was sick, and her receptionist said no, and the unmasked elderly woman said “Oh good! Because I don’t want to catch anything!”

I do like that mask-wearing, while still catching some unwanted attention/reactions, now exists as a thing in the United States. It did not exist in my area of the country before the Covid-19 pandemic; now it does. My coworkers frequently came into work when they were sick, but now some of them wear masks when they do; and now I can wear a mask when people around me are clearly sick, and people know what it is and why I’m wearing it. They might think I am the sick one, but they don’t wonder WHAT I am wearing on my FACE.

After I wrote the last post, about needing to find More (more to do, more out of life, etc.), I had a little panic. HOW am I supposed to find More, when there’s nothing I want to do and nothing appeals? When I’m getting older and doors are closing, and I don’t even care because I didn’t want those doors anyway, but it still feels weird? When I can’t seem to take any action anyway, or even keep my desk tidy?—a sick overwhelmed feeling. Then I thought, “Would I feel a little better if I made my desk a little more tidy?,” and started doing that. Within 30 seconds I was tidying a different area of the house (I’d noticed the reusable Christmas bags and realized they needed a home), but no matter: any and all tidying goes to the overall benefit of the mental health bar. (And I did come back around and end up tidying my desk.)

In finding a place for the reusable Christmas bags, I noticed some boxes that were in the storage area but seemed to be mostly empty. Empty boxes are good to have, but these looked at the end of their useful life, and had just a few scraps of easily-dispersed clutter in them: a packet of replacement Christmas light bulbs, a plastic Target bag, two Christmas ornaments with the clearance tags still on them—things like that. In the bottom of one box, there was a string of metallic garland beads—so pretty, but I haven’t put them on the tree in the whole time we’ve lived in this house (7 years), because they get SUPER tangled SUPER easily. And, happily, I recently saw someone post online that you do not have to keep all your holiday decor just because you once thought you’d use it. So I moved the beads, which I’d wrapped around a piece of cardboard with notches cut in the sides to keep them untangled, to the Goodwill bag.

And, under the cardboard panel of beads, the cardboard having created the illusion of being able to see the bottom of the box, I found my tree skirt. The tree skirt that has been missing since we moved. The tree skirt that this year I gave up on finding, so Elizabeth and I went to the post-Christmas clearance sales and bought a new one. I texted Elizabeth “I found the tree skirt.” “Bruh,” she replied.

The twins are on their way back to college. I am feeling bereft.

And actually, I tried to more accurately identify the feeling (Facebook has been serving me reels by therapists, which, harsh but fair), and there’s an element of grief and an element of panic. I think partly it’s because having all the kids home reminded me that my main job (taking care of all the kids), which has long-since stopped being a full-time position, is ever continuing to diminish—which makes me look around at what is left. I am a middle-aged woman who plays phone games, works part-time at a library for an increasingly intolerable supervisor, messes around online, and shops. I am going to need to find the More.

Commenter Leo had a fun suggestion on the New Year’s Eve post:

I recommend resolution bingo! 24 concrete resolutions arranged on a bingo board. Less pressure, cause if you fail one, oh well, you can still get bingo. Concrete goals (“read 25 books” instead of “read more”) so that you get to tick them off. I tend to fill it with things I’d like to do, but have never got around to. Highly recommend!

Some of my coworkers did this last year, and they even made a Bingo board for me (they were hand-drawing them, as a little art project); but last year it hadn’t been even two months since the presidential election, and I couldn’t face doing much of anything. I’m not sure I can face it this year, either, but I can face it enough to be interested in Alyson’s suggestion that we do a post to collect ideas for anyone who might want to try it.

My coworkers were doing a mix of resolutions, some more fun and some less fun, and scattering them strategically; so that, for example, they would need to do “attend session of [new exercise type offered at the gym they already attend]” in order to get a bingo on the strip also populated by “get ice cream at [new local ice cream place].” If I remember correctly, they put “make Resolutions Bingo Card” as the center square. Commenter BKC mentioned a goal of sending more birthday cards, which feels perfect for the bingo card: you could make it, say, “send three birthday cards,” so that you know when you can check it off. Or send ONE birthday card, or send EIGHT, depending on where your goal is.

Here are the other bingo squares I remember, starting with the ones I just mentioned so they don’t get lost separated from the list:

• try a new exercise class at a gym you already attend
• try a new ice cream place
• send three birthday cards
• try a new cookie recipe
• see a particular movie
• try a particular TV series
• clean one kitchen cabinet
• clean one drawer
• buy flowers
• plant tulip bulbs
• plant wildflowers
• choose a new comforter/quilt
• try ax-throwing
• try an escape room
• try a new restaurant
• try one non-fiction book, and at least skim all the way to the end
• try an audio book
• go out to eat with a friend
• go out for coffee with a friend
• write a physical letter to someone
• go to an author event
• hike three different trails
• get a tattoo

And of course, again, any of the ones that mention numbers can be changed to DIFFERENT numbers. Maybe you hike three different trails before February, so you need something more ambitious to be interesting. Maybe you already send a dozen snail-mail letters a year and want to increase it to TWO dozen. Etc.

Similarly, maybe you already plant tulip bulbs, but you want to expand your planting, so your square needs to say “expand tulip-bulb planting” to count. Maybe you already routinely buy flowers, so you want to change your square to “buy flowers for someone else.” Etc.

Also, remember you can use the same idea for more than one square, as long as they are DIFFERENT completions of the same task. So you can have “send three birthday cards” on there TWICE, and after you send three you can check off ONE of the squares, and after you send three more you can check off the SECOND square.

(I hope I’m not overly spelling this out. We had one coworker who was having a hard time grasping some of the concepts.)

I think this is going to be the real heart of the post: we would love to hear EVERYONE ELSE’S suggestions for square goals.

I saw a suggestion online that New Year’s Eve was a good day to go through your Facebook friends and do some editing. I went through mine, but didn’t have anyone to edit. I did notice I am now up to four Facebook friends who are…er, no longer with us. I do not want to delete them. But this is a new situation to figure out, as we get older and more and more of our Facebook friend list is…In Memoriam.

Speaking of New Year’s Eve: in Times Such as These, I can see going either way on New Year’s resolutions. I can imagine someone resolving to Take Action (Postcards to Voters! letters to Congress! the midterms!!), or I can imagine These Times serving as motivation for resolutions about getting physically stronger. I find myself on the side of I Can’t Face It. If I WERE going to make resolutions, they would ONLY be the small and/or fun kinds: like, I can sort of imagine resolving to spend five minutes on the exercise bike each day OR I can imagine resolving to subscribe to a monthly sticker club or learn to make a new cocktail—things like that. I’m not going to do even those small/fun resolutions. But I cannot imagine resolving to do anything harder or less fun.

Another year gone, and I can’t believe how many years of our lives have been dominated by a cruel fool. It has been good at least to go through it together, and to have hope of a different future. Let’s continue to stick together, and let’s keep two bottles of champagne in the fridge: one for the new year, and one for that special day. Onward into 2026.