Happy new year, happy new decade. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about plans and goals, about change and renewal, about resolutions, though it feels obligatory now to disclaim these, to note how they always fail. There’s a lot of effort to rebrand them as “intentions” or something that sounds gentler and less binding (magazines aren’t letting go of their January content as easily as that), but that strikes me as semantic hair-splitting, the same way “clean eating” is still dieting.
Of course, any calendar we live by is arbitrary, and our bodies don’t wake up striving for change on New Year’s Day (far from it.) So why treat the start of January any differently from the start of June? I don’t have a good answer, but whether it’s habit or instinct or cultural pressure, it still feels different. It’s new. Something changes with the turn of the year, and something calls out to us to mark it, even if it doesn’t last.
I don’t think it makes sense to dive straight into resolutions, however; sometimes you need a minute to take stock of where you are and what you need, especially when the new year falls midweek. It’s taken me most of the weekend to get a new notebook and figure out this year’s version of the DIY planner/bullet journal/diary I like to use—even as I’m kicking around a pitch for an essay about how planners have evolved from tools into life coaches. So many inspirational quotes, so little time. The idea was partly inspired by this great Oliver Burkeman piece from the Guardian that Ali sent me, which rails against time management, connecting the depredations of industrial capitalism/Taylorism (how can we get these people to make widgets faster?) to our own self-imposed “productivity” obsessions (I should start a podcast!)
At the same time, life is messy and we have to make lists and remember stuff somehow, so sue me if I want to do it in a specially monogrammed notebook. You can get yer Leuchtturm monogrammed for $3 at Lockwood, my local fancy stationery store, and I was apparently the second person to get “jcs” this weekend, which is mathematically quite unlikely, enough that the guy working there showed me picture evidence on his phone. I can’t work out what it signifies, though—I guess I have a doppelgänger to befriend and/or kill now?
Anyway. I like allowing that January rejuvenation energy to work on me, while at the same time recognizing that time isn’t something to manage or control, but has as much to do with feelings and bodies as it does with clocks and numbers. My clearing-out-getting-organized drive is intensified right now because our baby* is due in late March, which feels at once far off and tomorrow, no longer safely tucked beyond the turn of the year and thus not truly imminent or real. I still have a book to write eventually, and about seven articles to finish in the next twenty minutes. Christmas was months ago, yet still going on. What even is time?
Cultural Pleasures
On Boxing Day I saw Little Women, which was everything I wanted and plenty I didn’t know I needed. So many nuances of women’s love and rage! Florence Pugh making Amy’s ambition and frustration just as real as Jo’s! A Beth who actually seemed like a flesh-and-blood person! Saoirse Ronan’s tweeds blending into the autumnal Massachusetts sunset! Timmy Chalamet’s blouses flapping in the breeze! The cinematography was glorious, so good at contrasting the firelight warmth of the early years, the joy and promise and warmth of the sisters together, with the cold attenuated blues of adulthood, the hard work of growing up and apart. I’ve been struggling to find a way to write about the film and I think I might have found an idea while procrastinating via this Twitter thread connecting the film to Gerwig’s interest, in her other films but especially Lady Bird, in what girls lose as they leave their teens. TBD.
My Writing, Elsewhere
Back in October I read and wrote about Lara Maiklem’s Mudlark, and then apparently Politics Books happened, so the review came out just before Christmas in the Washington Post. I loved the premise of this book about scavenging for historical treasure among the junk of the Thames riverbank, but felt it needed more of a sustaining thread—it takes a lot of poetic skill to write in vignettes and fragments.
*Needless to say I am still figuring out what/how/how much to write about this.