all the good and golden things
Friday again. The weeks have been absolutely flying by! I find myself more than a little disoriented by the internal flash of light and color as June hurtles into July. And now I have to meet with the fact that we're halfway through the year & I only have so much to show for it.
Here is where I might usually lay into all of the ways I've fucked up my goals and plans for this year...but I don't feel like doing that right now!
I'm in a really good mood. So I wanna talk about what I feel like I've actually done a good job of this year!!!
Okay! Number one: I've been so social! This is probably the most social-butterfly version of myself I've managed to muster up in years. Maybe not so much throughout this month in particular, but I've been recharging from all of the events, reconnections, and hangouts I was navigating from January to May. Next month, I have two more relatively 'high-level socialization' things to tackle and then I think my social calendar (who the fuck am I?) is cleared up in the most beautiful way. Not that I don't love seeing people! I do. I have seriously been so thrilled about the relationships I've been nurturing over the past year - and even just the last few months! I just get overwhelmed super easily, so it's nice to have some time to myself again.
I think one of my favorite things in the world is when you meet up with friends you haven't seen in a long time (say five-plus years, right?) and not only do you click back immediately, but it's like they're really excited to see you? And they try to make further plans with you??? Like, holy shit, you want to hang out again? YES! I'm in, I'm totally in on this plan. I got invited to a reconnection-friend's husband's birthday party and I did a little dance in the laundry room, I was so excited. I'm birthday party material! Yay!
Also, I love getting to know newer friends on a deeper level? It takes time to meet people in all the varied layers of themselves, but it just makes me grin like an idiot when I get another little hint or tidbit about who someone is. I especially love when people start sharing things they like with me! It feels a lot like being a little kid again: your friend carefully passing you the stuffed animal they carry everywhere with them, and there's this moment where it's kind of like being trusted with a little piece of their soul, you know? What an honor! Even now! It's a warm, glowing thing to me.
…Moving on before I wax poetic about it for twenty more paragraphs. My tangents have tangents, when I really get running.
Oooh - another thing: I'm already more than halfway through my reading goal for the year. I set it at 20 books. Currently, I'm clocking in at 14 (and I'm almost done with another novel and another poetry book, so I'll hopefully be at 16 by the end of the weekend). If I can keep this momentum up, I might change my internal goal (but not my Goodreads or StoryGraph goals - I'll just take the win there, haha) to 50 books. Last year I only read 7 total, so I'm really pleased that I've more than doubled that number just from April to now. I love to read, but I often hit mental ruts where I can't bring myself to crack open a book; or, I can't keep up with a book long enough to finish anything, so I just end up hopping between dozens of them with no actual progress in any of them...that's pretty much what happened last year.
Also, as much as the change-up in my job has been a pretty frustrating ordeal, I can't say I'm not grateful for the fact that I'm able to tear through audiobooks again. When I started at my position, I was free to shut my office door, pop in my headphones, and focus up on my tasks. That was not as easily done once I was a little more settled in. Now that I'm in a weird, wobbly middle-ground, I'm back to relative obscurity and I don't need to keep an ear out for coworkers calling out for me throughout the day. There are times when I'm really glad I went with an audiobook version, too. Sometimes I think certain narrators really bring out the character in a way that I might not have explored with my internal narration.
Meanwhile, there are definitely cases where the narrator ruins things for me outright. (I put out a Libby hold for The Tale of Despereaux, which is one of my favorite books from childhood that I haven't read in yeaaaaars. I was like, Oh, this will be really nice to revisit! I'd love to see how they work with the characters! but when the narration started, I realized it wasn't the author reading it, but some guy????? My internal voice I'd always read it in was what my kid-mind imagined Kate DiCamillo sounded like, right? So you can imagine - maybe even just a smidge - my abject confusion and immediate woe upon this discovery. In hindsight, I should have just pushed on because maybe he did a wonderful job with the narration, but I was so thrown!!! Like, who are you??? What's going on here? Kate? Kate???)
Anyway, where was I?
Oh, yes! I've been playing the guitar again. More than I have in two years, even. I'd only picked it up a handful of times, which is a shame because I actually have a really gorgeous acoustic guitar. When I go too long without playing, I start to feel guilty that she's just stuck in the corner. I hadn't felt much like singing, either - not like I used to, at least. I used to sing pretty much non-stop: in the car, making dinner, drying my hair, out-of-breath while on a run, the entirety of my walk from my apartment to my workplace, when I got bored in the evenings. I really can't pinpoint when and where it fell away, but now that the desire is crawling out of its well, I've noticed its previous absence.
I don't know. I think it's good for me, to sing. It tells me I'm in a good headspace. And I've been sooooo brave with guitar (read: done something completely normal and not even a little bit scary) by pushing myself through my fear and loathing of barre chords. It's small victories - the smallest potatoes ever. Any yet, I'm proud to say that I have - finally, finally - successfully managed to stop substituting Fmaj7 for F. Please clap - I know, it's a tremendous feat. This has only been my entire guitar career in the making! When I tell people I'm "campfire-songs-good" at guitar, I think they believe I'm being modest, but it's a stone cold fact. I only get away with people thinking I'm passable because I can play stuff that gets everyone singing along, so they don't typically notice how well-and-truly I am fucking up the chord progression, haha. Still, I enjoy it! I think that's the most important part.
I really can't pinpoint why I'm in such high spirits today. It's been a murky, rainy day. Typically, that puts me in a bit of a mental slump, but I've got some kind of psychic shield up right now or something!
Big fan of whatever is going on in my brain space at this moment.
Here's a line of poetry I really enjoyed recently.
From Tuesday by Alex Dimitrov1:
And you can begin anytime
like this whole world began
out of nothing. You can walk out
tonight and feel totally new.
All you need is the right pair of boots.
Let's count this as my mid-year checkpoint. Pretty good things behind and ahead.
Good luck out there,
Eve
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