I miss you.
I miss me.
I just checked in to see if my IFTTT link was working and uploading my copious Instagram content here (it was not), and it was like seeing a school crush after years; you get that same rush of adrenaline, break out a jaw-straining smile, and start waffling like someone short-circuited your brain... but you're not quite sure how to fill in the gaps between now and the last time you saw said crush.
Too much has happened in a year when, ironically, little did, and when it did, it was super-tentative. And ironically again, having read over everything I wrote just over a year ago... not much has changed, or has it?!
I don't even know any more!
I tried blogging a couple of times this year, but it just felt unwieldy and time-consuming to try to encapsulate literally months' worth of content into one wibbly little post.
And the unwieldiness was, let's face it, why the blog toppled over somewhat in the first place.
Curse my wild social whirl in those carefree, pre-panini-press days.
But, I miss it. I really do, and I know I said this over a year ago and did sweet nothing to remedy the situation but this time, to quote Donna Summer, I know it's for real.
I miss having a regular writing outlet. I miss my own hilarity, for starters (because if you're not writing for your own amusement or benefit in the first instance, why write at all?).
So, I may have to give this malarkey another go, and a proper go again this time, but make it manageable.
That's not to say I can in all good conscience promise to resume the Sunday Summary on the sort of weekly basis that 2017-era QB used to manage.
But sometimes when the muse calls, she isn't always asking after an accident that wasn't your fault, and she actually wants to hear what you have to say.
So, what now?
At some point over the last thirty... million... days of pandemonium, lockdowns, relentless swabs up noses and down throats, and an unfortunate, positive result that had me bedridden for a week, I made a strange sort of peace with the whole arrangement, a sort of acceptance that the New Normal is Here and It's Citing Squatters' Rights.
And while I've long held a belief deeply-rooted in the 1990s film Mermaids that, yes:
Life is change; death is dwelling on the past or staying in one place too long
which I've managed to counter quite happily, and quirkily, for the last 31 years (sheesh), the New Normal has decreed that actually change is the new black...
...and that if I'm to breathe any sort of new life into this here blog, and into my life itself, then its whole prerogative needs to change. It needs to work for me.
Be my assistant to the regional manager, if you will.
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| I love Dwight Schrute in a wild, unhealthy way. |
At this point it's probably important for you to know that not only did I review several films, series, books that I'd viewed or read since November last year, I've also fallen hard for The Office US which has rendered most everything else irrelevant. (I mean, the series ended in 2013 so that's how current my viewing habits are.)
📺🎥
And I will probably never understand the rationale behind the monumental Fall of Jan Levinson (except that she/the marvellous Melora Hardin had a full credibility glow-up and ended up in The Bold Type which for two of three series was decent).
But none of my considered critiques (ha) seemed relevant after a couple of months, and so to the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky they were duly consigned.
I then spent a good deal of the summer trying to fix myself.
💓🍏
A couple of concerning symptoms (and a couple of visits to possibly the dishiest doctor I've ever had the fortune to be in the presence of) resulted in me deciding that now was as good a time as any to get my life together, and so began reading such discerning texts as this:
from which I picked and chose the information I was happy to take on board; it being written by an American doctor, everything was autoimmune:
and there was no direct consideration of conditions that may be congenital (hi there, my CHT posse – baby, you were born this way...).
And I was fully aware that whatever I ate wouldn't ever 'heal' the thyroid but may perhaps help with the resultant crummy metabolism...
Enter my new regime.
And for the purposes of circumventing what may be construed to be triggers, I'm not going to go into too much detail about the events of the last five months but I made some big changes and they paid off.
📚
I'm currently reading something considerably safer:
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| Far from the Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy |
which is taking me for, like, ever... but where's the rush?!
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And as those of you who were still very kindly, indulgently, politely checking in this time last year may remember, I am still somewhat in the thralls of a clutch
of productivity/decluttering gurus << I'm not having that argument with myself again. YouTube, then, is where I get a lot of my viewing fodder these days.
That said, of course, while it's all well and good to fall down the sort of rabbit holes that lead to you cultivating a weekly meal planner (which by the way I live and die by; no regrets) and sticking motivational stickers in your Filofax (in the manner of Queen Marquita of At Home with Quita who remains one of my favourites: her voice alone is pure ASMR...), and laminating a chart of weekly housework chores (guilty, m'Lud), I've become quite aware of what I'm calling the Cult of Drudgery on social media.
What is the Cult of Drudgery, I hear you ask?
Well, reader, within the CoD it seems that every day of a YooChoober's life entails them uploading a pseudo documentary in which they talk you through every facet of their decision-making process before "going ahead and" cleaning their kitchen counters/taking out the bins, power-washing the patio/decluttering their pantry/"switching out" one gadget or one acrylic storage box for another, to the point where it seems like housewifery is literally all they do and where are their partners in all of this?!
I mean, we didn't push through a century of suffrage and feminism for some overly chirpy Canadian girl to tell us that ultimately our duty in life is to clean and empty our sinks before bed or die, amiright?!
Life is too short and as long as Kim and Aggie wouldn't send Environmental Health in about the state of your counters then you're probably doing OK at life and you don't have to spend every day armed with a bottle of Microban checking off chores like some sort of downtrodden 1950s Stepford spouse.
Likewise, a word to the productivity poppets of YouTube: while a life reset once in a while is probably a necessary expression of self-care – a time to regroup and recalibrate – if you're resetting on a weekly basis then surely you've given yourself no time to let all your new systems and routines kick in.
And all you're doing is navel-gazing and reflecting when ultimately you can only truly move forwards.
Which is probably how I came to scrap most of the content I'd written over the last few months while coming to the ultimate conclusion that, ironically, I need to find a system, a process, a formula, a structure that works with the way my life is now, so that the blog is a part of a routine without overwhelming it, and taking up more time and causing more stress than it deserves.
Leave that one with me.
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Until then, allow me to paraphrase Slade:
Look to the future, now; it's only just beguuuuuuuuun...
qb xx
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