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Friday Five – Finding Hope in a Mad World

Posted in Beauty, Church, Denton, Friday Five, Fun, Getting It Together, Hope, Joy, Lucky, Mental Health, Wonder, Work on June 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Happy Friday, folks! June is up and running! We are three down/ten to go with orientation sessions for new students and their parents this week, so it’s been busy at work. And tonight is Pridenton’s Night Out, and my church has a booth, so that’s my Friday night. Luckily, I have a few days off next week to go hang out with my parents, so that’s something to look forward to.

Additionally, this has been a great morning:

  • My sister came to visit at work (she is going on a trip and wanted to take her friends some of UNT’s special coffee blend from Voltage) and we got to have coffee and bagels together.
  • I got some excellent news that is really going to make my financial life easier.
  • I was able to help two students who were struggling/anxious about housing next year get exactly what they need.
  • One of my staff who has been on a tour with the UNT acapella choir is back and I get to hear his stories soon.
  • I get to have lunch on the square with the office folk today.

Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading in the last few weeks (months? It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these):

  • As a member of Tori Dunlap’s 100K Club (shameless plug) (which I originally typed “shameless plum” – I’m so hungry and also I may have just given myself an idea for a children’s book), I have been thinking a lot about value categories when it comes to my budget. These are the things that aren’t needs but that I still make room for in the budget because they bring me joy or enrich my life in some way. When I first joined the community, I had office supplies + stationery + accessories on my list because I love them so much. While I have since begrudgingly admitted that maybe I don’t need a whole budget category for writing implements, gosh, I love a good pencil. 
  • I don’t know if “cozy” and “challenge” would be found together in any sentence I mutter (I lean more toward do-nothing cozy), but this list for summer is nice. Take your dog on a date? Come on, that’s adorable.
  • Joy the Baker’s guide to a joyful summer is more my speed when it comes to summer to-do lists. Gentle suggestions. Things that make life easier/more pleasant. And if you think I’m not looking for that banana malt icebox cake recipe in my inbox every single day, have we even met?
  • Everything about this is powerful and I love it and also I despise that we are living in times where two international students at Harvard singing “There’s a Place for Us” to honor Rita Moreno is especially poignant. I have a lot of feelings.
  • Speaking of things that give me a lot of feelings, OMG YAY.

I hope you have a lovely weekend full of whatever gives you the most peace.

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Friday Five – Valentines

Posted in Books, Food, Friday Five, Health, Mental Health, Nourish on February 14, 2025| 2 Comments »

Love is in the air. Or something. Maybe it’s smog. Or anxiety. 

On this arbitrary date that we celebrate love and consumerism, I hope you are surrounded by people who get you and know how amazing you are. Also, your hair looks nice, and I like your shirt.

Shout-out to Maggie, on this, her favorite day. It’s totally not made up. It’s a very real and special holiday, Magnanimous.

Here are some things I’ve read recently that I loved, and I hope you do, too.

  • I’m Cancer-Free, So Why Do I Feel So Depressed and Hopeless? by Maggie Hundshamer-Moshier via Bezzy BC – I’m feeling a lot of these things right now. The other day, I burst into tears at a mild inconvenience and turned to my friend and said “I think I’m depressed.” They smiled sweetly and said, “You…think?” Noted.
  • The Perils of Voracious Reading by Caroline Donahue – “The desire to read is as strong for me as the desire to eat.” I feel that. My favorite way of digesting what I read is keeping a commonplace book. In fact, since I read in more places than at home, I have one there and one that I carry around with me. They’re mostly full of quotes but also sometimes notes on how something made me feel or my gut reaction to a book/passage. The one I stash in my purse also often has lists, meeting notes, and doodles from meetings.
  • How To Read a Book by Monica Wood – I’m going to have to add Monica Wood to my favorite authors list. This is only the second one of hers that I’ve read, but both this one and The One-in-a-Million Boy were fantastic. If you like Fredrik Backman, or you enjoyed Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, you will probably love the stories Monica Wood tells.
  • What Goes With What by Julia Turshen – I will sit and read a cookbook cover to cover like it’s a novel, but with most of them, I start skimming about halfway through. Not this one. Turshen’s recipes and instructions are interspersed with memories, essays, and interviews about the role food plays in her life, and I adored it all. This would be a great book to give to a new cook who is just learning how to experiment and think outside the recipe, but I (a somewhat well-seasoned cook) learned a lot (and *cough* would like it as a gift *cough*), too.
  • Finally, an oldie but goodie – The Optimism of Uncertainty by Howard Zinn via The Nation (2004). “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.”

I hope you have a great weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – What a Year This Month Has Been

Posted in Alive, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Wonder on January 31, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Whew. What a year to explore wonder!  I mean, I guess I am, in fact, frequently astonished (Am I really? Or is it all playing out exactly as expected?) and full of doubt, both of which were phenomena featured in the definition. But damn.

My focus last year was technically learning how to embrace quiet but realistically, it was also a lot of trying not to die. My community was instrumental in helping me achieve that goal. Of course, people are only able to help others insofar as they have the spoons/energy/resources to do so. Therefore, in addition to capturing some wonder along the way, a big part of my mindset this year leans more toward getting my shit together so that I can be in a position to be there for those who are having their try-not-to-die year(s) now. I mean, I have been a moderately-functioning adult for a long time, and I have most of the adulting basics down, but there are areas I could be stronger. I find myself veering toward pieces that talk about cultivating sanity and joy and community and love and stability amidst *gestures broadly* so here are some of my favorites this week.

  • Reckoning with This Vicious World from Ask Polly, aka Heather Havrilesky – “Every opportunity to dance, to seek pleasure, to love with an open heart, to create freely, to show yourself without shame, and to celebrate what you are makes you stronger and more helpful to this struggling world.”
  • Power: What It *Truly* Is – Tori Dunlap with Kasia Urbaniak – “If you’re focused on how you’re being perceived, your attention is inward and you lose the power to lead the conversation.” 
  • This is Happening by Nadia Bolz-Weber – “…this is not the time to concede the faith to nationalists, and I do not want those of us who believe Jesus’ message was one of mercy, humility, hospitality and forgiveness to give into despair.” 
  • How Do You Know: The Consequences of a Lack of Media Literacy and Where We Go From Here by Ashlie Swicker via Book Riot – “We all know that the internet twists thinking and that this leads to large swaths of people buying into misinformation…Still, I think we imagine that this is happening somewhere else, to other people…We don’t hold ourselves accountable for the same kind of open mind and fact-checking that we demand from people who think differently than us.”
  • On HillmanTok University, Black Educators Are Sharing Invaluable Info by Kaitlynne Rainne via Her Campus – Professors dropping lots of knowledge on TikTok. They’ve posted syllabi, resources, etc., on everything from basic adult skills like budgeting and personal wellness to courses on literature and entrepreneurship. Teachers are going to teach, regardless of the hurdles they face. Love to see it. I also love that it’s called Hillman. 

I’ll leave you with this quote from Bernice King: “There’s a difference between being informed and being consumed.” I invite you to take that into your weekend and beyond.

Have a good one, friends!

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Friday Five – First Week Blues

Posted in Beauty, Books, Friday Five, Mental Health, Quiet, Resolutions on January 17, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Whew. This week. The first week of classes is always a wild ride but I am pretty sure this week has lasted 14 years. It’s been a lot. Add my own personal not-doing-great-mentally to the mix and…I’m just really, really glad this weekend has an extra day. I hope I’ll actually be able to take a mental break from work and to deal gently with all the other nonsense going on in the world so that the stress doesn’t just keep compounding. 

  • I love that Joy the Baker’s word of the year is joy. I also love a gentle January (which this one has definitely not been for me thus far), and this post is full of inspiration for unabashed moseying. 
  • I enjoyed this extensive list of ways to get involved if you are concerned about book bans. 
  • My friend is seeking legal assistance with getting her son the help he needs. Please donate if you can.
  • In light of my general overwhelm about financial…anything…I have enlisted the help of Tori Dunlap’s community, The $100K Club. It is way outside my comfort zone but in just the last three days is already helping me. The monthly membership fee ($47) is somewhat steep for my budget, but that is still less stressful than trying to piece together all this info myself and weed through all the advice people like to give (omg the mounds of opinions – most of them either completely irrelevant to me or just plain bad advice).
  • Susan Cain’s post about what she learned from her father on living a quiet life resonated with me. Today the encouragement to do beautiful things just for the sake of doing them was exactly what I needed. 
  • Edited to add this bonus because it’s so good and something I need to remember about myself this month as a reminder to breathe first and then respond. I don’t have to perpetuate bad history by making anger my default. People lash out when they’re sad.

I hope that you are well and that your weekend is easy/fun!

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Friday Five – Cultivating Joy

Posted in Beauty, Friday Five, Home, Joy, Revolution, Seasons on December 20, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I love transitional periods. This fondness makes today one of my favorite days of the year. The short last day of work before the break that starts another transitional period between the year we are finishing and the year ahead. Other than the time surrounding my birthday, this is usually my very favorite week.

It’s also joy season.

I mean, joy is for always. But I am paying particular attention to it these days, trying to find it wherever and whenever I can. I love this piece by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes where she shares her secret for finding joy, especially this quote: “I cultivate joy as a discipline, attentive to finding it in life’s everyday moments, determined to ride this thing until the wheels fall off. In a death-dealing culture, joy is a form of resistance. I am decidedly oppositional in my joy.”

Seeing joy as resistance to the junk of the world is a nice motivation to pursue it more assertively.

Here are some ways I plan to do that over my break from work:

  • Spending quality time with family and friends
  • Making art (writing, music, baking, crafts, etc.)
  • Reading for long, luxurious stretches of time
  • Cleaning out the parts of my apartment that seem cluttered to make them cozy and functional again
  • Unraveling my year and preparing for the new one

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – Biggest Lesson

Posted in Alive, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health on December 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Today is officially the end of the semester. All the students are moving out (well, all who are not staying for winter housing, which is a whole thing). I’m working tomorrow just to supplement the office/make sure my people are sane and fed. 

The prompt for Susannah Conway’s December Reflections challenge today is “Biggest lesson in 2024.” Always the overachiever, I’m listing five things I’ve learned this year. Some even have links. Enjoy!

  • Taking care of myself is not selfish. Or, even when it is, it’s the good kind of selfish – the kind that helps me be a whole person who isn’t constantly stressed out and mad at everything I’m doing for everyone else instead of taking care of my own needs and/or sanity. This lesson can be for you, too. Take care of yourself. Decadently, even. If you don’t know where to start, here are some ideas on romanticizing your life, some of which may seem extravagant (gentle pushback on that – is it actually extravagant, or are you a people pleaser?) but some of which are also just “remember to drink water.”
  • An important subset of taking care of myself – keep up with your health screenings. It literally saved my life this year. Here are some basics but you may need others depending on your personal health risks. That’s a good question to ask during your annual physical.
  • I can’t care enough for everyone. Still working on this lesson, particularly at work. My toxic trait is that if I feel like someone is not invested or caring enough about something, I try to care on their behalf. Turns out, caring does not work like that. It just makes me tired and stressed, and I do not need that in my life. “Find out whose business you’re in,” and get out of it.
  • Ask for help when I need it, and expect that it will come. My people showed up this year in multiple big ways, and I’m so grateful. I was afraid to ask for help, particularly financial assistance. I could have saved myself so much worry just by having more realistic expectations of my friends and family. This has turned out to be my greatest joy of the year.
  • It’s OK to feel multiple things at a time. I can be grateful and angry and resentful and hopeful and grieving and curious and awestruck at the exact same moment. This has pretty much been my mood since October, and I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. Side note: people do not know how to handle this. Side-of-the-side-note: people can learn how to handle this, or they can go away.

What has been your biggest lesson(s) this year?

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Friday Five – ‘Tis the Season

Posted in Alive, Books, Church, Friday Five, Health, Mental Health, Seasons, tagged , , on December 6, 2024| 2 Comments »

The season of Advent, that is. It’s (probably) my favorite season of the church year and one of the reasons I tend to say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” during most of December (you know, other than the usual reason of wanting my well wishes to others to be as unconditional, as free of strings and assumptions, as possible). I am especially glad today that the weather seems to understand it’s December and is behaving accordingly.

Here are five things I’ve read in the last few weeks that I thought you might enjoy, too.

  • How To Have Cancer by Cory Doctorow – I resonate with so much here. The hoops you have to jump through. The inevitable “I wish I’d done it this way to make it a little less stressful/more effective.” I’m glad Doctorow is OK. I’m glad we’re both (generally) OK.
  • A Brief What, Why, & How of Advent by Tsh Oxenreider – I was recently asked what Advent was about and I rambled a lot. Enthusiastically, but still so much rambling. Here is a much more succinct version. I don’t do everything on this list (and my tradition uses blue candles – for hope/peace/healing – rather than purple – for royalty/penance – during Advent), but this is a lovely explanation.
  • But How Do You Read So Much? by Pandora Sykes – “I will find ways, as I always do, to not do the other stuff, so that I can find time to read.” Yes, that’s it. That’s the big secret. I read so much because I really, really want to read so much. I thoroughly enjoy it. When I’m not reading, I’m usually thinking about what I have read recently and counting the minutes until I can get back to it. But if you only want to read as much as I want to do Pilates every day (i.e., only a little – usually more of an “I should” than an “I want” situation, unless I’m feeling particularly tight or sore in an area I know it will help), then maybe give yourself a break about how infrequently you read and focus on all the wonderful and life-giving things you do instead.
  • Why Walking Helps Us Think by Ferris Jabr – This piece was a fantastic motivation to take more walks. If you only get one free New Yorker article a month, this would be a good one to use it for!
  • “Comfort in, dump out.” This is a clear, easy lesson in How Not To Say the Wrong Thing by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman.

And a bonus bullet point this week – I joined Bluesky  – Roxane Gay said it best – “Some people don’t get exposed to other points of view in their day-to-day lives so they need social media for that. Some of us have friends and colleagues and family. And it shows.”

I hope you have a good weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – It’s Friday

Posted in Alive, Denton, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Lament, Mental Health, Revolution, tagged , , on November 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It’s Friday, everyone. We made it. 

I am anxious about my health, my job, my friends (especially those of us whom the prevailing culture seems to want to annihilate), my country, and the world in general. I am not ok.

This week has been a lot, and it’s Friday.

It’s Friday, and I love you, and here are some things I want you to remember to do.

I hope your weekend is restful, and I hope you get to spend it with people who have your best interests at heart.

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Friday Five – Extraordinary, Mundane Fall Bucket List

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Beauty, Bookshops, Coffee Shop Road Trip, Dance, Denton, Food, Friday Five, Home, Joy, Mental Health, Music on October 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“My bucket list of little things aims to live every moment as if it’s my first. To find the glory in what a seasoned eye might falsely consider mundane.”
Andrea Gibson, Things That Don’t Suck (Substack)

It has been a long week. Nothing particularly bad has happened. I’ve just felt puny and tired. The weather, however, is gorgeous. It was 52 when I left home. I am wearing a light sweater!

Today, I need a list of things to look forward to this season that aren’t super ambitious but still give me ways to ground myself and remind myself that I’m alive and meant to be living and not just muddling through.

  • Buy a delicious cup of coffee and drink it while browsing a bookstore. Take all the time I want.
  • Take shorter, more frequent walks. Not everything has to be hard all at once. A little bit multiple times a day is better than pushing myself and getting too exhausted to do anything else for hours.
  • Keep my hands warm and nimble with piano and knitting.
  • Make soup without rushing. Pan roast the veggies slowly. Add one ingredient at a time. Fill my home with cozy smells.
  • Take drives. Drive down winding country roads just outside of town and find the few trees in Texas that know what time of year it is. Drive down my favorite streets and let the memories of every time I’ve been there before flow over me.

This is what I want my season to look like.

What are you looking forward to this fall?

Reflecting on reading this month (and hopefully beyond).

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Day 11 – Friday (Not) Five – My Inner Hobbit

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Books, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Work, tagged , , on October 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I subscribe to quite a few blogs/newsletters, and that’s where a lot of my daytime reading goes. Here are my musings on three that stuck out to me this week. There were a couple others from Substack, but just as it was getting interesting, the prompt to become a paid subscriber popped up, so I’ll spare you those. I may have more to say about that later (not all bad…just…more).

  • Loving Your Inner Hobbit – Ask Polly (aka Heather Havrilesky). “The truth is, I think that most of us — even those of us who outwardly appear lazy or disorganized or prone to underachieving — hold ourselves to uncomfortably high standards. We’re plagued by guilt without consciously realizing it. We’re ashamed of our regular human urges. We feel like we’re letting ourselves down constantly, just by being human.” I have been feeling this a lot recently. I mean, I have overachiever tendencies all the time, but I’ve trained them to stay mostly dormant. Not right now, though. I have a lot of anxiety – mostly about work, but also about other things in my life that I feel like I’m missing the mark on. And as much as I would love to blame other people, the bulk of this stress really is just coming from inside the house. All the grace other people are extending to me seems to bounce right off this hard shell of expectations that I have for myself. I want to embrace my inner hobbit (that’s pretty much my whole personality, btw. Ultra homebody. I don’t know anyone who loves being at home as much as I do.); I just seem to have temporarily forgotten how.
  • Coffee Table Books – Ginger Horton (MMD Book Club). “Gift books and coffee table books—you know the ones, usually hardcover with loads of glossy photos or illustrations, probably picked up in that impulse section of your local bookstore, or even in a boutique or on vacation—provide some of my favorite reading experiences. And yet when a friend asks, ‘What are you reading?’ I’m prone to forget to mention that gorgeous volume on the nightstand that’s been flipped through many times or the little book of essays that sits in the breakfast nook.” This rings so true for me. Some of my favorite reading experiences are not the things I talk about the most. They’re not the books I read cover to cover and then mark as read on my reading tracker apps. They’re the design books in my living room that I thumb through when I need to see something pretty or the short humor essays I read (or re-read) when I need a quick laugh. As I get more shelves and reorganize my collection, that’s becoming more of what’s on my TV shelf – books that are best enjoyed in increments.
  • Bracing Yourself: How To Process Breast Cancer After Treatment Ends – Bezzy BC. “You won’t be told how to manage survivors’ guilt or how to respond to the continuous stream of messages that will no doubt flood every inbox you own. You won’t be prepared for the fake quick fixes your loved ones will tell you about because they heard it from a complete stranger in a grocery checkout line. You won’t be told how to feel when people you have contact with every single day drop off the face of the earth because your cancer diagnosis is too much for them.” Another thing I wasn’t told is that there’s this weird space between treatment and after treatment. I’ve rung the bell, signifying that the big three – chemo, surgery, radiation – are done. But I still have the port because I’m still getting immunotherapy treatments every three weeks, and I still have routine checkups and tests in the upcoming months to confirm that what we did actually worked. Is it really “after” if there are still appointments on the books? If I still feel the lingering symptoms from radiation and chemo (or maybe even surgery)? Part of processing involves knowing exactly where I stand, and I’m not really sure how to do that. The ground under me feels pretty shaky right now.

I am staring down the last few hours of work and then I am looking forward to a restful weekend.

Hope your weekend is everything you want it to be!

And I hope you’re enjoying my reading reflections this month.

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