Every year around my birthday, I write an email to my future self, to be delivered on the following birthday. I’ve done this since college when I stole the idea from a classmate who went on to be an exec at Twitter. I wonder if he still does it…
Mine are always part reflection, part New Year, New Me Resolutions. I always start the letter describing the banal location from which I am writing it, which I really enjoy reading now. Apparently, at 23, I was “laying topless with an empty tupperthing of 2-day-old mac and cheese mixed with Sriracha to my left.”
Yum.
It’s interesting/sad how much the letters have NOT changed over the years1. There’s a “life meteorology” section where I try to predict where I might be in a year followed by things I would have like to have done. Last year, one of the goals was to learn how to play “Boil That Cabbage Down” on the banjo we bought on an early-pandemic whim. Sadly, I am still on day 4 of Eli Gilbert’s 30 day Absolute Beginner Banjo Course.
Another recurrent goal has been to read more. I’m not sure why I haven’t quite met this goal year over year. Probably because it hasn’t been a SMART goal but maybe there’s something more too.
I have always liked to read….at least, I think so? I can’t tell if my book-whoring as a teen was an actual love of the written word or yet another accolade-chase for an academic overachiever who was turned onto external incentives at an early age (Thanks a lot “Book It” campaign sponsored by Pizza Hut!). I sped-read through every single book on our reading lists every summer even though we only had to read 4 or 5. Maybe just to say that I did? There were some real duds on those lists.
Reading did serve me in a lot of ways. Fiction was my jam, fantasy especially. Books were a figurative and literal escape for me — my parents wouldn’t mind if I wasn’t joining in on whatever hellish vacation activity2 they had planned if I said I was reading for school. Cut to me absolutely annihilating the “Redwall” series3 while my siblings frolicked outside in Florida humidity while visiting my great aunt in Tampa.
Somewhere along the way, my tastes really changed. I developed a predilection for memoirs when I read Craig Ferguson’s Between the Bridge and the River at the behest of a crush who had an admiration for the late-night host. Addiction memoirs are particularly…addicting. I crushed Moshe Kasher’s Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 while on a flight from, hey, Oakland to Hawaii.
I began reading more non-fiction in medical school — I remember really enjoying The War for Late Night: When Leno went Early and Television went Crazy. Wtf? Maybe that college crush’s late-night obsession was contagious. No, I never slept with him, but I did catch Conan O’Brien-yphilis, I guess?
Fiction is still my jam, but I think non-fiction and memoirs especially are just easier to read? Not a lot of characters or worlds to keep in your head. A stop-and-go approach to the read is ok when reading nonfiction with very discrete chapters and no cohesive story.
My reading list lately has been, unsurprisingly, very practical. On my nightstand, I have How Toddlers Thrive, Cribsheets, Is this Working? The Business Lady’s Guide to Getting What You Want from Your Career. Actually, the book titles read kind of like a cry for help, don’t they?
My favorite book of the bunch has been, How to Keep House while Drowning - a gentle, pragmatic approach to all the little fucking things you have to do every day, day after day, to keep home not insane. I found the author’s thoughts on “division of rest” as opposed to “division of labor” to be quite revolutionary and am annoyingly touting that to every single person I meet (usually, other moms). Now, when anyone complains about a household chore, I say, quite irritatingly, “they’re not chores, they’re care tasks for your future self!” If you say so, bish.
I want to read more, and you know what, yes, I do enjoy reading. Maybe there’s a little niggling part of it that is aspirational jealousy — all my bookTok-worthy friends and the pretty book-cover posts they have of the 20 books they devoured this month.
I’m still a sucker for fiction but fantasy isn’t my thing anymore. I started Detransition Baby4 recently and have really enjoyed that but lost the momentum. Maybe you, humble reader(s?), will be my motivation and accountant.
I will:
finish Detransition Baby
by the end of July
by reading for 5-10 minutes before bed 3 times a week
Hopefully I’ll complete that faster than I learn how to boil that cabbage down.
I was saddened to find that the “call to flabby arms” to lose weight tracks way way waaaay back. My 30s letters have all been punctuated by the alliterative opportunity to be '“Thin by Thirty-….” I’m a sucker for word play, even at the expense of self-love/body-neutrality. There’s also a through-line of anxiety and imposterism through every letter that I shake my head at sadly now. I’m struck by the thought that perhaps 45-year-old me will look back on me now and smirk in the same way.
mostly, long road trips to visit mean old relatives and sit in their houses being force-fed cookies and tea while being told you are fat
anyone else into this series chronicling the adventures of anthropomorphic mice, moles, hares, and badgers inhabiting an old-timey Abbey frequently called upon to become warriors to defend themselves against marauding bands of vermin? No? Just me? What? you were actually fucking cool in middle school? OK
Ok, ally, *self-pat*, Happy Pride Queen.
My uncool middle school book series was a Nancy Drew knock-off called Trixie Belden!