Oh dear! I really did mean to write before the calendar’s big odometer lurched forward to 2023, but time got away from me. What I was doing with that time, I can’t tell you. Anne Helen Petersen recently dubbed the week between Christmas and New Year as “the week to nowhere” and truer words, am I right??
This was a strange holiday season. My father-in-law died suddenly, which brought things down as you might expect. Like most of the country, we had a very bad winter storm and bone-breaking cold on December 23 and 24. My cousin usually hosts us for Christmas Eve dinner, but this year her husband was still in the hospital recovering from extensive surgery, so the dinner was moved elsewhere and we decided to just stay home.
This makes it sound like we had a bad Christmas, but it was mostly fine. The weather turned, and we took a walk in light jackets just a few days after leaving our taps dripping overnight. Our New Year tradition is to watch terrible countdown shows and drink champagne, and this year we mostly abandoned Ryan Seacrest and the ghost of Dick Clark for a Miley Cyrus/Dolly Parton/David Byrne fever dream. It was good but strange. Both shows made me feel my age, even with the septuagenarians.
Somewhere after the second glass of champagne on NYE, I decided I would follow an Instagram organizer named Jen into Mordor i.e. join her January decluttering challenge. The first day’s prompt was to go round up all your half-used toiletries and make an effort to use them before the month is out, and when I tell you this first foray into my bathroom vanity was SOBERING I am underestimating the experience. Why did I allow so many Dolce & Gabbana perfume samples into my life? Why does it feel bad to keep them and ALSO bad to throw them away?
There will be a number of things that are easy enough to dispense with – a single stray Tums, maybe an inch or so of CeraVe lotion – and then there are those perfume samples. I see the local buy-nothing Facebook group in their future. Sorry, Messrs. Dolce and Gabbana! (Or actually no I am not sorry. Get bent.)
I don’t really do “resolutions,” the energy I am bringing into 2023 can be summed up in my response to a recent teambuilding Slack chat at work:
However, in the interest of growing as a person, I will say that I wouldn’t mind completing this decluttering challenge, I would like to stop being Amazon’s bitch (this is going to be the hard one), I would like to drink more stupid water if for no other reason than to stop wondering why I look like Walter Donovan in the grail chamber right before he crumbles to the ground, and I guess a nice thing would be to spend less money on dog daycare and just walk/play with my dogs more. After all, that is why I acquired them, to be my companions. Plus dog school tuition costs a fortune when you consider they don’t even really learn anything.
I hope your Week to Nowhere was relaxing. Please note this email will have a different subject line as I felt it was time to do away with Pandemic Complaints. Only regular complaints from now on! (Until the next pandemic.)