A New Year

Usually I like to take this time to review the last year's resolutions and make some new ones.

Due to the breakup, most of my resolutions fell completely by the wayside. The only thing I accomplished was my reading goal. It was 40, I raised it to 50, and read almost 70.

Next year I hope to read 75.

So I failed all of my other goals. And on top of everything else, that makes me feel discouraged and indifferent (but defensive) by turns.

I guess I need to start form scratch. And I need a new year. This year has been such shit and I'm still so caught up in it. If only a new year was as clean a break as I would like it to be.

My goal this year is to get better. I am trying to eat a little better (mostly), keep going to counseling, and just get my life back in order and on track. I need to buy a new car and I need to start seriously saving towards getting my own place. That is my ultimate goal. It won't happen this year, but it is what I want more than anything right now.

To this end, I went through and completely organized my planner for next year. I will try to look forward more and not solve all my problems by buying books. That's where all my money goes right now instead of saving for car/home.

So that's that. Happy New Year everyone.

December Reading List and Challenge

I am participating in a couple of things this December. First of all is an initiative I have been following on Tumblr called #ReadWomen in which we are reading books by women during the month of December.

There has been a generally positive response from the people I follow, but there have been some negative comments from some. Apparently people interpret it as "man hating." I want to clear up now that this is not the case. But there are a ton of books out there by white men who are usually cis and privileged. While women are not the least privileged group out there these days, they do not get as much notoriety as they should. Plus, reading books by someone different is good for you. You may just learn something and expand your world view. Not everyone sees the world the same way as a white male. So reading books by women, women of color, trans women, et cetera, will give you a different look at things. And how is that bad?

One person wrote up a good response to one of the people against the challenge (movement, initiative, whatever you want to call it). Here is their response to someone calling the movement sexist:

I didn’t want to get in this discussion, and after seeing other posts by you I can see you’re not even open to the possibility that you are wrong. No one is calling for the boycott of male or white writers, or talking about a conspiracy, if you don’t know there is an imbalance then you are severely [misinformed].
“We looked at fall 2010 catalogs from 13 publishing houses, big and small. Discarding the books that were unlikely to get reviewed—self-help, cooking, art—we tallied up how many were by men and how many were by women. Only one of the houses we investigated—the boutique Penguin imprint Riverhead—came close to parity, with 55 percent of its books by men and 45 percent by women. Random House came in second, with 37 percent by women. It was downhill from there, with three publishers scoring around 30 percent—Norton, Little Brown, and Harper—and the rest 25 percent and below, including the elite literary houses Knopf (23 percent) and FSG (21 percent). Harvard University Press, the sole academic press we considered, came in at just 15 percent.” A Literary Glass Ceiling? I recommend you read that article is analyzing a study that shows that the overwhelming amount of books that get review are by men review by men.
Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin. Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books? only 57 by Latinos, 69 Asian Pacifics/Asian Pacific Americans X
I’m done with this discussion, I have nothing to say to a person that thinks that a black person reading only books by POCs is racist. X."

And who knows? Maybe in another month or two, we can read books written only by people of color or by people with disabilities. The point is to draw attention to the imbalance.

In this vein, I have complied my reading list for this month accordingly:

Books:
Soundless by Richelle Mead
Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich

Audiobooks:
Landline by Rainbow Rowell
And depending on time/how I feel either Cinder by Marissa Meyer or Hunter by Mercedes Lackey or a re-listen of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern because it is winter-y.

I have also complied some recommendations for books to read:
Tamora Pierce: anything she has written is great, strong women and POC
Diana Wynne Jones
Kate Forsyth
Anne McCaffrey
Janet Evanovich
Sue Harrison: several of her books are historical fiction about native people from Alaska and the islands in the Bering Sea
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
And there are so many more out there.

Lastly, I am going to attempt to participate in the December Reading Challenge by Books and Cupcakes:

So that is that! If anyone out there wants to participate in either of these challenges (or both!) I highly encourage it!

A Series of Firsts

I ran into an old coworker the other day and she asked about my ex and I had to tell her that we were no longer together. She was astounded, but shared with me a bit of wisedom.

She said that losing her mom was the hardest thing she had gone through and that it took a full year to start getting over it. Because she had to go through all the firsts. There was the first Christmas without her mother, the first time she didn't get a birthday card from her mom, and so on.

She told me that the firsts are the hardest. But once you make it through the firsts, it gets better.

This will be my first Thanksgiving, Hannukah, birthday, Christmas, New Years since the break up. And I've been pretty torn up about it. I don't even want to celebrate with my family because it's the first time I won't have my ex with me (we had been together over nine years, it's hard to remember before that, so give me a break, yeah?).

Even worse than that, I can't stand to be surrounded by happy couples. I'm still a shitty friend who is jealous of her friends' happiness. Not that I don't want them to have that, and I am happy for them, but I am also too full of sadness for me. So I try to be happy for them while I am away from them.

But this is the first holiday season that I've been single in so long, after having had so much love and happiness and losing that. And the first is the hardest, right?

I hope you will all forgive me if I am distant this holiday season. Sometimes it's just better for the people around me and easier for me if I am by myself.