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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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Friday Five – National Book Lover’s Day

Posted in Books, Food, Friday Five, Health, Work on August 9, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It’s National Book Lover’s Day, so I encourage you to celebrate accordingly. It’s also the first day of Mean Green Move-In at UNT, so I am looking forward to going home to celebrate as well. Tomorrow is another busy day so the celebration may be cut short with an earlier bedtime.

Five things that grabbed my attention this week:

  • I think I’d be a great book butler. Maybe that will be my next career.
  • Joy the Baker is featured in Houstonia magazine. I love her and I love that she’s in Texas now. As a lifelong resident, I welcome her as one of our own. 
  • It is easy to find arguments online for food being either strictly for fuel or for health or for pleasure. Why not all three? I love this long read that reminds me of the importance of fueling my body by eating the things it’s craving and thus probably needs to replenish missing nutrients and to do the things I’m asking it to do.
  • I really appreciate everyone who has helped me feel like a human this year. I am also loving the Olympics but there are too many things I want to say about them to fit in this post. Just…Simone Biles, Jordan Chiles, Stephen Nedoroscik, Ilona Maher…love them.
  • And finally, in political news, I’m still extra liberal and not impressed with this middle-of-the-road, “at least we’re not the other guy” nonsense. The thing that stuck out to me most this week was Harris’s response to the protesters at her rally. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” Since she knows these particular protesters would not be likely to vote for Trump either, this comment seems designed to shush and shame, which is an interesting approach to asking for someone’s vote. I’m not sure it’s the best campaign strategy to win over those of us for whom continuing the current administration’s stance on Israel/Gaza is a dealbreaker. We gave Biden/Harris a chance for these past four years and they have proven that once they’re in office they don’t care what we think. So many of us need to see change before we vote for her again. If she doesn’t want Donald Trump to win, maybe it would be better to listen to liberals whose votes she doesn’t already have than to settle for a quippy sound bite.

    Edited to add: More of this. Also, just…more. But this was a better response than before.

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Friday Five – Off Days

Posted in Alive, Books, Friday Five, Fun, Health, Quiet, Work, Writing on August 3, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Welcome to August! The staff have been in training this week, and today was their big breakfast, so I went in early to cover the office so they all could go. I am glad I went in this morning, but after treatment, I was even happier to go home, have a leisurely lunch, run some errands, and check in with my stylist to tame these cute little tufts that are forming all over my head. 

I’m at the point in my treatment where the end is in sight. So even though I still feel fatigued and itchy and constantly on the verge of infection (I’m assured I’m fine – it’s just part of the fatigue – but I’m taking a ridiculous amount of vitamins and treating it like a precursor to a cold anyway), I’m starting to notice again how much I’m missing out on by just not having the energy to do more than the bare minimum. 

I don’t subscribe to a lot of paid Substack accounts, but Roxane Gay’s posts are well worth the small fee I pay each month for it. I get access to her book club discussions, and essays on things like learning to write again from a seasoned writer and educator. I feel like I’m learning to write again as well. I’ve been journaling, but it’s not the same as losing myself in fiction or poetry, and I’m pretty rusty. It’s been a bit of a slog, and I’m grateful to hear that this, too, is common and overcomeable (a word? I don’t think that’s a word. Welp, it is now).

Here are some other things I’ve enjoyed reading this week:. 

  • It is so hard to find a therapist. I feel this post in my soul. Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes is one of my main go-to sources for practical advice when it comes to self-care and rest. She echoes a lot of my own struggles in this piece.
  • I love Joy the Baker’s team and their Let It Be Sunday posts, and this past Sunday’s edition was especially good. I particularly enjoyed the pieces on how to cope with the social exhaustion of work (and I have needed these tips this week with all the training) and tips on travel (which is something else I may be interested in as I come out of my treatment fog. Maybe. We’ll see. Got some ideas for my birthday next March.). 
  • Mountain Ash Press is having a submissions contest. I don’t project having a manuscript that’s ready to submit by August 31 myself, but if you do, check it out and see if it’s a good fit!
  • The longlist for the Booker Prize is out!
  • I love the post from Modern Mrs. Darcy about one of my favorite mystery series. If I were to name a place in literature I’d like to visit, Three Pines would be at the top of my list. If you haven’t read any Inspector Gamache, here’s a good Louise Penny Starter Kit for you.

I hope that your week has been OK and that you have a good and restful weekend. Take care, friends!

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Not-Friday Five – Reading Boosts

Posted in Books, Food, Friday Five, Mental Health, Reading Challenges on July 21, 2024| 2 Comments »

I know it’s not Friday, but it’s July so all weekdays – Fridays especially – are out of control. So here we are on a calm, rainy Sunday, coffee in hand, eating maple whipped cream out of a bowl with graham crackers, leisurely letting you in on what I meant to post Friday.

A busy schedule means I need to be more intentional about downtime than I usually am, and nothing relaxes me and puts my whole life in perspective more than reading. So this week, I have been drawn to ways to boost my reading and give myself a little extra challenge. Maybe your reading needs a boost, too? If so, see below!

  • “Gratitude is not a solution to the problem of pain.” I love that quote from this short clip of Kate Bowler. Gratitude is a useful tool for perspective, but it is not The Answer. Also, enforced gratitude is the worst. Even if telling other people how to feel could make them magically feel that way, it’s still controlling and manipulative and I hate it so much. A while ago, a friend recommended Bowler’s book Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day! (specifically for coping with cancer treatments). And now I’ve bought it. It’s been refreshing and comforting.
  • I love musings about friendship, and this one on the medium friend is particularly good. I especially like this part – “Medium friends can thus be seen not as inferior to best friends but as delightful and beneficial on their own terms: a well-matched tennis partnership; a bond over breast cancer; a mentoring dynamic; a rediscovered childhood chum; a gamer buddy abroad. Relieved of the pressure to be ‘good,’ the friendship can flourish and serve each person as it is.” 
  • The National Book Foundation has a summer reading adventure. You click on the things that you do, fill out the short form below it, and submit by August 31, 2024. Since most of these activities fall under what I’m already doing, I’m in! Are you?
  • Also, if you love audiobooks, Libro.fm is hosting an audiobook challenge that goes until the end of this month. I am always up for winning more books and perhaps a mug, so I’m pretty stoked about it.
  • I always wanted a solid layer of pineapple on my pineapple upside-down cake, and this one delivers. My favorite line in this whole piece is “Like revenge, it’s a cake best served cold.” For the record, I would buy her cookbook so fast.

I hope you are having a fantastic weekend!

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