(Note: if you missed my last post about spinning a year of yarns, here it is. I hope to be writing in something like real time reasonably soon, and this is the first of my catch-up posts.)
The year did not start off great. I woke up on New Year’s Day with a beast of a cold that lingered through the entire month. But on the upside: lots of time to start my year in books, and to cultivate my new crochet habit hobby!
So there’s January’s reading, much of which was done on the couch, with tea and tissues on hand. And those are my first granny squares for the year’s book blanket (or whatever this will become). Actually, they’re my first granny squares ever! I have a lot to learn and practice, but love trying different patterns and selecting yarns to represent the covers. I haven’t “blocked” them yet, so most of them are pretty gollywompus, but they’ll eventually get coaxed into actual squares. Six books is an unusually high volume (for me), but again, there was a lot of couch time. Januarys are usually heavy in nonfiction selections, and this year was no different.
Last fall, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia after a couple of mystifying years of chronic pain, the symptoms of which were hard to tease out from those of depression and peri-menopause. (It’s been … a time.) I admit to hanging on to a lot of stigma around fibromyalgia. I resisted the diagnosis that my primary care physician was pretty confident about for over a year while we ruled out other causes, and tried different medications and pain management techniques. But when she got me to a therapeutic dose of a medication that calms down the reactivity of the central nervous system and I finally found some relief, I was convinced. I spent a few months reading about the syndrome, and ways that different people manage their various symptoms. When the year started, I was already feeling much better due to a combination of medication, focusing on improving my sleep, daily stretching and movement, and learning to pace myself. No earth-shattering revelations there: just taking thoughtful, gentler care of myself.
January’s highlights
Once the cold eased up and I was able to peel myself off of that couch, I took the introductory crochet workshop that I wrote about before, and started learning the fundamentals. And so began my yarn collection …
Some friends and I “pitched” our dear friend Vanessa, in which we developed a five-minute presentation that we delivered to a bar full of single people about our friend, in the hopes of finding a match. It’s a really fun experience, and if Pitch-a-Friend exists in your city, I highly recommend it! An affirming, uplifting night out, and a great way to show someone how much you love them. And maybe help pick out their next date!
At the end of January, I went out to NYC for a long weekend to visit with my friend Sarah for her birthday. We participated in a “one day choir” with the Gaia Music Collective, an experience that I am still struggling to adequately to describe with my silly, inadequate primate words. In the span of a few hours, a group of a couple of hundred strangers (most of whom, including myself, had no choral experience) connected through sound and movement, learned about our voices, and then were led through learning a six-part arrangement of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” culminating in a gorgeous sing. It was not a performance; we had no audience but ourselves. I think back often on how we filled that empty warehouse with smiling, moving people and joyful song, and wonder how to create more space like that in my daily life, with the people and the places that are all around me. I haven’t stopped singing since.
brain dump 