Yeah, yeah, yeah: it took me very little time to break my “every Tuesday” promise. At least I had a slightly better excuse for August 6th: I was still happily overdosing on Olympics coverage.* Last week’s hiatus was nothing more than that old perfectionism:
I’ve already fucked up, so I’d better have something SUPER awesome or insightful to say for this “relaunch post”!
(And of course, I didn’t have anything super-awesome to say…)
DAMN, that self-critical voice is a vicious bitch.
Generated by OpenArt. Prompt: “inner self-critical voice”
And no, I absolutely do NOT pretend to have something super-awesome to say on THIS Tuesday night. (Spoiler alert!!!) I’m just leaning into the discomfort and writing anyways. So here we go!…
How on earth have I managed to get this far into JALC’s lifespan without talking about the Olympics and my embarrassingly high level of fan-girl-ness about them?
I mean, yes, there have lots of long gaps and hiatuses: nonetheless, this blog started 15 mother-forking years ago (!!!), which means that Paris 2024 is the 8th set of Olympic games that has taken place since I started writing here.
I still haven’t decided how much reportage I’ll be doing on JALC about the 2024 election hellscape-slash-battle for the soul of the nation. The older I get, the more aware I am of how minimal my “insights” are about these sort of political things: and so there seems minimal value to me going all pundit-like on here.
However, with the sort of momentous week like we’ve just had, I simply can’t restrain myself.
So I mentioned in last week’s “re-entry post” that I’m undertaking some “life renovations” during this latter half of 2024.* Some of that is referent to topics I’ve discussed here previously: self-care, healthful movement, mental health, decluttering.
And some of that is working on some things I haven’t mentioned in the past. For example, I’m trying to figure out what kind of paid work I want to do during the final act of my career and I’ve started learning about my (most-likely, though officially-undiagnosed) ADHD brain.
I’ll admit, typing my tongue-in-cheek title, has put Bey’s refrain firmly stuck in my head:
Bow down, bah-bow down, bitches…
(I was always pretty good at earworming myself…)
But however happy I am to have an excuse to embed a diva-licious video into a post–and I am always happy to have an excuse and to do so–let’s take a moment for some real talk before I proceed any further:
ain’t NO ONE need to bow down to me. For any reason. I’m just plain, little ol’ me.
A couple posts ago, I mentioned my theory about humans being wired for anniversaries. I still haven’t taken the time to consult with Professor Google to see if there is any science bearing out that theory—for tonight’s sake, I’ve decided that whether or not I’m right about humans in general being wired this way, I know from my own lived experience that I sure as shit am wired that way.
I think it started with all the moving around we did when I was growing up. A lot of my memories of growing up are organized on the internal string of beads I keep in my head tracking what town and house we lived in for what years, what school I was at, and what my classroom looked like at different ages.
The internal recollection of where I was when such-and-such a memory took place is one of my most vivid ways of being able to place when something happened and how that memory exists in the sequence of events that have made up my life.
So I expect I’ll be spending the next month or so being a little bit haunted by the recollection of “where I was a year ago.”
So back when I shared my 2021 Reading Challenge list and showed off my “jar o’ prompts,” I mentioned that there were 2 categories I’d exempted from my randomizing system: the very first category (“In the beginning…”) and the category about “a book that you associate with a particular season”—the latter because I had chosen a book that went along with my ongoing love for hygge and things hygge-ish, and I was determined to read that book while we had snow on the ground.
Well, our recent end-of-January/early-February snowfalls created the perfect atmosphere for cozy, cuddly, hygge-reading. So here I am with a book review!
I feel a little bit bad, though: I really wish I’d liked this book more than I did. ‘Cos I have every faith in Pedersen’s good intentions.
It’s just that her flavor of hyggereally doesn’t do it for me.
So I mentioned that I had a less-than-wonderful endocrinologist appointment near the end of January. Basically, my A1C level is elevated after however-long of being stable.
And it could be a post-2020 dumpster fire kind of anomaly. After all, my stress has been through the roof since last fall, what with a very COVID Christmas, the presidential transition (and insurrection) and coming up on the first anniversary of this COVID life.* And to be honest, I paid just about ZERO attention to monitoring my carbs or sugar intake during the latter months of the year. Plus the fact that I’ve been sedentary as fuck since this COVID thing started. Most of my activity in recent years has been of the “functional fitness” variety: walking from the parking garage to the office building, being on my feet at work, airport and city walking during my almost-monthly business trips, plus the recreational activities of play rehearsals and dance choreography. And none of that has been happening for the last 11 months.
So, the spike in my A1C level could be temporary. Or it could be a progression in whatever level of pre-diabetes/insulin resistance/whatever ethical doctors really call it I currently have.
Jury’s still out on that—more observation and follow-up testing over the next few months to see what’s what.
But regardless of what the diagnostic outcome is, feels like a good time to get my butt off the couch.
Which, alas, isn’t anywhere near as easy a task as that sounds.
Because this past week, I’ve come face to face with the depths of how diet culture has completely destroyed my relationship with healthful bodily movement.**
It all started Sunday night when I decided it was finally time to update JALC’s header image.
Strike that: it all started almost 2 years ago, when I recommitted to my blogging and decided to use my collection of “badass lady Pops” as a recurring motif in the pictures accompanying some of my posts. (One and two.)*
The first trumpeting of that motif was an attempt to use the full collection as the banner image here on JALC.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t properly thought through the actual proportions of the banner image in this particular WordPress template, so the banner image ended up being less the panoramic wonder I’d imagined and more of an awkward, semi-pixellated closeup of approximately half of my early-2019 lineup.
To wit:
Now I was kind of annoyed about it, but I’m also super-lazy, and I didn’t have a quick and easy way to rearrange the collection in two rows, especially since they were all arrayed at the very front edge of an overstuffed bookshelf. So that banner image continued to appear on JALC for all the intervening months between then and now.
But here’s the thing: this particular shelf is one of the bookshelves that gets cleared off annually so I can set up my Solstice Village. Which meant that I had a precise window of opportunity—after packing up the houses but before UNpacking the Shakespeare books—where I could jury-rig some display shelves and create a new banner image that better matched the template proportions.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 