Happy December 30th!
December 2024 newsletter
I’ve written and re-written this blog post in my head a dozen times, various pieces of it popping up in my Notes and my Google Docs like the scraps of paper they used to be, the Post-Its, the 4x4s before I had an iPhone. But it never formed a complete thought, because the last two months have been a bit of a blur. The last 90 days of the year always are, but where did the time go, this time? To the point where I broke my 75 week writing streak last week, Grammarly wondered if I had accidentally logged out, but in the same week, I had the highest step count of the year, averaging over 9400 steps a day.
We were at Disney World. And I wonder if Disney World and Christmas are confounding factors, or the amount of writing one gets done is inversely proportional to the number of steps one takes.
I guess, it doesn’t have to be, to the exclusion of everything else. And everything else right now, is my work takes up 80% of my time, my family takes up 90% of my time, and my side hustle of books, businesses, and…butts…? takes up the other 30%. No, I didn’t do the math wrong. I’m operating at 200% capacity.
And that’s okay, for a short while. That’s all of us, sometimes, isn’t it.
I was taking my toddler to the playground for the second time yesterday, but she had had a curtailed nap and was already petering out. She pushed her toy stroller, sans doll, to the end of the driveway, but shortly afterwards, insisted that I push her in the wobbly, three-wheeled, little big stroller, big enough for maybe one of her butt cheeks and we definitely couldn’t put the sun shade down. The hardest thing was, I had to fold in half to reach the handlebars because it was made for a two-year-old to push, not a 41-year-old woman of average height. So as I struggled to push her up the hill to the playset behind the Catholic church, we ran into our neighborhood friends.
“Looks Sisyphean,” the dad said. I paused.
“Yes, endlessly pushing a heavy object uphill,” I replied. Now, it was his turn to pause. He isn’t the only well-read person around here.
“Well, yes,” he finally chuckled. His Rothko comparison to our children’s chalk artwork was not entirely over my head, either. He says Lee Krasner, I say Jackson Pollack.
In any case, Sisyphus, these days, is always on my mind. The endless battle I fight, though, is that of time and balance. Having enough time, trying to balance everything, getting it all done before the end of the day.
I’m working on a new mantra, and I think I’ll have it down by Wednesday. In the meantime, today I’m posting the December post, and tomorrow, December 31st, I will post the November post that I meant to post (can I say post one more time?) last month. And on Wednesday, I’ll post for January, the first one of 2025.
We have some new things in store that I can’t wait to share. New website, new collaborations, new article features.
But for now, always go black tie.