Leigh K Hoopes

Writer. Reader. Bibliophile. And now, novelist? Follow me on Twitter: @grrleigh. My other blog is a convertible. Kind of obsessed with beauty and skincare, too.

[leighkhoopes]

Leonardo, The Good Place, and St. Francis of Assisi

I had never been to a Catholic funeral before; the running gag over the last few decades was that my aunt and uncle had a Baptist wedding…

Debating on whether or not I want to start publishing stuff on Medium like a grown up. Regardless, I wrote this about my Uncle’s recent death after three years battling lung cancer, attending my first Catholic funeral, and pop culture as a coping mechanism. 

[leighkhoopes]

That feeling when

You have a new idea that’s finally coming to life and you’re really fucking excited about it and all you want to do is research it and write but then your day job rears its ugly head and you remember you have bills to pay but you’re still researching and jonesing to write so hard it hurts and it’s the first time you’ve felt this pumped to write in what seems like forever because it’s been actual years since you’ve been able to get anything down that’s been worthwhile

[leighkhoopes]

I went down the slide at Fat Tire Asheville and it was kinda great.

[leighkhoopes]

I met @roxanegay last night, and she is (as I suspected) everything. My favorite tidbit: "Do I regret anything I've written? No. I regret the things I don't write." 💖

[kateordie]

I realize I drew the Bi Pride Flag two different ways but… well, that joke writes itself.

This is a story about a little thing, and some big things. I have lots more on Patreon! I love you. Happy Pride.

[leighkhoopes]

This is so good. Happy Pride, indeed.

[problemglyphs]

Glyph: [WODU]

Problem:

Anonymous said:

November 25th 2013, 12:00:00 am

all i want to do is tell stories but fear keeps me silent. if i fail at my dream what is left?

(Problem Glyphs is supported by Patreon and donations)

[mkgaud]

[tcobeauty]

Confessions of a Beauty Hoarder: When #TreatYoSelf Goes Wrong

So I had been planning to do another Beauty Spend Freeze in April, following my failed 60-day freeze effort (I made it 45, which I thought wasn’t too bad, right?) in January/February. I’ve been hyper-aware of my seemingly never-ending and always-expanding stash lately, and I’ve been wanting to calm things down and streamline my routines for a while now, so just out of curiosity and because “TCO” doesn’t just stand for “Taking Care Of,” it’s also a business term that means “Total Cost Of” (the more you know, my beauties), I decided to go back through my 2016 spending and see just how much I dropped on beauty and skincare in a 12-month period.

You all, I spent more than $5,000 on skincare, makeup, and beauty products in 2016. That’s almost five mortgage payments. That’s a credit card I could have paid off, one of several across which I spread all that money to try to fool myself into thinking I wasn’t actually spending all that much (and clearly it worked). That’s 5/8 of the oral surgery I had back in January that I had to get a healthcare-specific line of credit to be able to afford, and that’s with both dental and health insurance through my employer. And because I’m a total masochist apparently, I decided to plow ahead and see how much I’ve spent so far in the first quarter of 2017, and I’m already at $1200. 

I am not a professional beauty blogger (obviously). I don’t get PR samples and free stuff to review–everything I buy and review and rate comes directly from my own wallet. And while I am a lot more privileged and in better shape financially than a lot of people in the world (I’m employed in an office job full-time with benefits, I don’t have a car payment, I don’t have student loan debt, I’m relatively healthy, etc.), I simply cannot justify spending that much of my income on products that are not tried and true and tested for me. Especially not with the increasingly mountainous hoard I’ve accumulated over the last several years of my beauty box subscription adventures and my lately discovered and constantly growing love of Korean skincare products. My beauty habit has proven to so far be continually innovative, interesting, and above all, effective, of course, in addition to super fun. But how long can you continue to spend money you don’t really have on things that you love and that ostensibly make you happy before it defeats the purpose of those things? What’s the cost/benefit of a love of beauty products versus deepening credit card debt?

There’s a line of undiagnosed but deeply obvious hoarding that runs on my mother’s side of the family. My great-aunt filled up an entire house with stuff, built a new house to live in once her stuff overtook her and her husband’s living space, and took to her bed for a week to mourn her stuff when some meth-heads burned down the stuff-house and reduced it to ashes and a chimney. No one was hurt or harmed, but her hoard was reduced to rubble and she had to go on tranquilizers in order to deal with it. The bathtub in her living-house is now unusable due to dozens of pairs of shoes piled up in it. The medicine cabinet cannot close due to crusty, separated bottles of nail polish that are probably older than I am. 

My grandmother, her sister, keeps a tidy house for the most part, but two back rooms are mostly stuffed to the gills with flea market finds, clothes that don’t fit and never did or never will, books that might get read when there’s time (and there never is), my late grandfather’s clothes and belongings, tucked away where they are not painful reminders of his absence, but reassuringly still there, just in case. She’s always kept Cool-Whip containers and McDonald’s straws to reuse until they fall apart. I always thought it was part of rural life, of being born and raised in the aftermath of the Great Depression, but somehow it seems like there’s always something more to it than that.

I’ve always held on to things for longer than I should, specifically beauty products. I’ve always been searching for new things to try, as much as I have already established a routine and system that clearly works perfectly fine, it’s never enough to just stick with that. Something else out there could be better, more effective, more tingly, more luxurious. Something could be a better deal and getting better rewards so I can get more products, more often.

I see shadows of this need to collect, to have too many things because you never know when you might need them, to be prepared just in case I need this one thing that I tried once and was okay but might come in really handy at some point in the future. There are murmurings of it in my own excessive and overflowing bookshelves with dozens of books I’ve bought with best intentions but haven’t looked at in actual years, my hopeful closet of pants with the tags still on them and shoes I love but that literally cut my feet apart with blisters that maybe I will figure out how to wear the right way someday, and my multiple cabinets and drawers and boxes of beauty products that aren’t really arranged or sorted in any way, shape or form but that I somehow manage to know where everything is without thinking twice. 

So this April spending freeze is pretty much indefinite for the foreseeable future. I need to use up this massive stash. I need to throw old and expired things out. I need to use the things that I know work. I need to try the bajillion samples I already have before I keep adding to them and trying to justify them by figuring out how ostensibly valuable they are. I believe in the power of beauty as a tool to define oneself in a world that seeks to define us in tiny boxes based on arbitrary rules and kyriarchal systems of oppression, but I cannot let debt as a result of this effort define the rest of my adult life, no matter how I claim to be able to couch it in terms of resistance or justify it as part of my feminism.

I believe in the importance of self care, the fun and specialness of #treatyoself, of the meditative elements of skincare rituals and customizing them to match your mood or the weather or how your face is feeling at that particular moment, but I also believe it’s important that we be honest with ourselves in terms of prioritizing things, no matter how much we tell ourselves that it’s for our own good, our self-improvement and self-image, for our health both physical and mental. I believe it’s important to examine the culture around beauty products both domestic and international, how we’re still conditioned by society to want to be “beautiful,” and even though those parameters have evolved somewhat, how they’re still cisgender, heteronormative, able-bodied, Eurocentric, and fatphobic. And I believe it’s important for us to take a hard, honest look at what these parameters are costing us, both financially and emotionally, on a daily basis and in the long run. 

So while I have a few backlog haul posts and beauty box reviews yet to post, the direction of this blog and of my own focus is going to evolve somewhat over the next few months. I’m still going to be posting regimens as I run through my stash, but look for more empties posts as I make an effort to use things up and reduce my hoard. There will be much fewer haul posts as I continue to keep my spending on lock in an effort to get my finances in order and focus only on making absolutely necessary purchases over the next few months. I’m going to try to do more reviews of products I know and I love and have been using for years instead of the latest fad or trends, and I’m going to be focusing more than ever on the real value of these products, how the packaging and the branding and the messaging can be interpreted (because yes, that shit matters), and how we can think about holding the beauty industry accountable and becoming more aware ourselves on the prices we pay to feel beautiful, and whether those prices are actually worth it. 

I started this blog so I could write about beauty products, something I know and love and use daily, and called it TCOBeauty because I personally like to take care of business, and I like beauty products that do the same. I started looking at the Beauty ROI of my beauty box subscriptions to see if I was actually getting my money’s worth on all this new stuff, and I started tracking my hauls to see if I was actually getting as good of a deal on these products as it felt like at the time (spoiler alert: not as often as I thought). The cost of beauty has never been more crystallized for me as it has at this point in my life, and I’m going to continue to be as up front and honest about it as I can. 

More to come, my beauties, as always.

[leighkhoopes]

I wrote about finances, the specter of hoarding, and the actual total cost of beauty over at my beauty blog. It was a hard thing to write and even acknowledge, but important for me nonetheless.

[audrelawwd-deactivated20171206]

[leighkhoopes]

There are things I want to write about but I don't want anyone to read them, ever. There are things I want to say, but I have no one to say them to. I am not good at a great many things, and it seems like right now I am even worse at all of them, with no hope or capacity for ever improving.

[leighkhoopes]

The first big meme of 2017 has arrived and it's List the Top 10 Albums That Influenced You As A Teenager. This was an almost impossible selection for me, so I gave myself some additional ground rules: these albums all came out when I was an actual teenager (13-19, to be precise) and I promptly wore them out something serious. These are also albums that I continue to listen to and enjoy to this day. I also took the *complete* album into consideration—almost all of these are total listen-throughs for me, even though there may be some other songs and singles that had more of an impact on my impressionable teenage brain. 

 So, here's the list, how old I was when they came out, and some thoughts, in no particular order: 

Sleater-Kinney - One Beat (2002) I was: 17, in between high school and college This was the first SK album I ever bought, and I'm not ashamed to admit that. It was on one of those listening stations at the local music store (RIP ear-x-tacy) and the opener with its urgent drums, spindly guitars and fantastic vocals and harmonies drew me in immediately. Apparently One Beat was their "political" album and that makes sense, but the infectiously jangly "Oh!" remains one of my all-time favorite songs to this day, and though I've listened to the rest of their catalogue, One Beat remains my favorite to this day. 

Christina Aguilera - Stripped (2002) I was: 18, college freshman Fun fact: I was one of those angsty teens who mocked pop music while hiding my secret shame at loving every bubblegum beat and boy band dance jam. When you're a teenager, you have to keep up appearances—I knew I wasn't one of the popular types, so I tried to be a "rock" kid and turned up my nose at what turned out to be some really great songs. My dear Ms. Aguilera changed all of that for me. I had already loved her first singles (You cannot deny "Genie in a Bottle," so don't even try) and her complete ownage of "Lady Marmalade" for the Moulin Rouge soundtrack, so when Stripped came out in all its sexual and bold yet vulnerable and honest glory, I found the soundtrack to the twilight of my teenage years. Everyone knows about "Dirrty," "Beautiful," "Can't Hold Us Down," and "Fighter," but have you heard the soft sensuality of "Lovin' Me for Me"? What about the deep piano soul of "Underappreciated"? This album is packed with both gems and jams, and remains relevant to this very day.

Eve - Scorpion (2001) I was: 16, high school junior I came late to the rap game, since I wasn’t allowed to buy CDs with parental advisory stickers until my senior year of high school, so I've made a lot of progress, but I didn't get the kind of hip-hop education most of my friends have besides what made it onto the radio at the time. This was post-Tupac/Biggie but pre-50 Cent, and the airwaves were mostly dominated by the aforementioned pop and its bad cousin pop-punk. So when Eve's basically flawless "Let Me Blow Ya Mind" featuring Gwen Stefani's damn near perfect hook and what I would learn is a quintessentially Dr. Dre beat dropped, all slinky and sexy and sassy, I was beyond obsessed. The rest of the album is on point, too: "Who's That Girl?" became an anthem for me because I could easily sing back "LEIGH's that girl!" (la la la-la, la la la-la); "Gangsta Bitch" was a sick collab with Trina and Da Brat; and "Got What You Need" is a great call-and-response banger courtesy of Swizz Beats and some other lesser Ruff Ryders rapper who is probably mad that Eve destroyed him on this track and probably in real life as well. 

The Kills - Keep on Your Mean Side (2003) I was: 19, college sophomore Somehow I got this CD for Christmas? I don’t remember how or where I heard about it, but this album for me is the perfect combination of sexy and scuzzy with raw guitars and sparse, swampy beats and endless, unbearable chemistry between VV (Allison Mosshart) and Hotel (Jamie Hince) that continues to this day. Fifteen years, four albums, and multiple side projects (and one very high-profile marriage and divorce) later, and I am one of those fans who firmly stans for them to live happily ever after in musical harmony and continuing rock n’ roll cuteness. They’re just SO PERFECT TOGETHER, OKAY? Anyway, this album is great, and you should listen to it if you haven’t already.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2001) I was: 16, soon-to-be high school senior If I had to pick ONE album that was the most influential to me of all of these, it would be Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ seminal self-titled EP. It dropped right before my senior year of high school, when I was finally starting to figure myself out a little bit and realizing that I liked loud music by loud ladies that I could dance to and scream along to, regardless of genre or format. The Strokes, The Hives, The White Stripes, and all their ilk were kicking off a new rock revolution, but there were so few ladies out there making as much noise as I needed them to. Karen O was not a great singer, but the way she whispered and groaned and wailed over the wall of sound that Nick and Brian created with just a guitar and a drumset was revelatory to me, especially after I got to see them live a few years later, smushed up against the stage at the Southgate House and rapt as the speakers pounded in my chest and Karen sprayed beer and spit on all of us, and she leaned down at the beginning of “Our Time” at the end of their set, when I was exhausted and enthralled, put the mic in front my face and together we crooned “To break on through-ooh!” YYYs continued to put out some great music and evolve their sound not-so-greatly in the following years (sorry, y’all, but Mosquito was not good), but nothing seared itself so firmly on my psyche as Karen and me covered in sweat, singing what should have been an anthem for the pre-1990 Millennials: “It’s the year to be hated / so glad that we made it.” If that doesn’t sum up everything everyone’s ever said about those of us born between 1980 and 1999, I don’t know what does.

Daft Punk - Discovery (2001) I was: 16, high school junior If there’s another album I had to name as one of my top all-timers, completely different but still equally influential, it’s Daft Punk’s Discovery. Daft Punk allowed me to embrace my love of dance and electronic music, and built a perfect unifying force among me and my friends, providing that anthem we’d been waiting for with “One More Time,” a song that still fills me with joy every time those first few beats fade in and I can’t help but smile when it drops and that surprisingly, beautifully warm vocoder voice comes in over the spaces between. The rest of the album is literally iconic as well, and really cemented Daft Punk as the arbiters of dance parties for everyone, all-inclusive, delirious and endlessly entertaining and ultimately joyful.

Le Tigre (1999) I was: 15, high school sophomore I’ll admit it: I missed the Riot Grrl movement by several years, so Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre were a new experience for me. I loved the edge and the anger in her voice, the fuzzy throwback sound and sampling that made it seem like something I could do if I just tried harder and wasn’t so shy and scared to raise a ruckus and my voice. One thing I’ve noticed about so many of these albums and groups is that I really liked stripped-down music with big sounds created by small groups of people: duos and trios make up the bulk of my favorite albums during this era. I got to see them live as well, when JD Sampson joined the lineup and became my introduction to confusingly, distractingly sexy nonbinary people, and it was at the height of the Bush era, in the middle of my college years, and while I didn’t feel the exhilaration of singing with Karen O, I felt the freedom of dancing my ass off and screaming until my lungs my ached, unafraid of who I might bump into with my unruly booty, unafraid of who I might offend with my burgeoning baby feminism. I was sad when they stopped recording and disappointed at their recent lackluster Hillary Clinton track near the end of the election cycle, but I’ve loved the resurgence of The Julie Ruin and the ongoing reinvention and determination Hanna continues to project in the face of so much bullshittery that permeates our world and culture today. 

The Mars Volta - De-Loused in the Comatorium (2003) I was: 19, college sophomore At the Drive-In was another band I missed out on the first time around, but The Mars Volta popped up in my circles of smartass potheads once I started to find my tiny tribe of people in the rural Kentucky college town in which I lived for four years. I’ve always loved a man unafraid to belt out an anthem, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala golden throat soared over Omar Rodruigez-Lopez’s prog-rock symphonies and movements, and it sounded just as good when I was stone cold sober as when I was self-medicating in the name of social acceptance and anxiety avoidance. I will forever associate them with giant spliffs and endless laughter, letting the discordant sounds wash over me and and Cedric’s voice burn through me, as well as making myself a zombie prom queen Halloween costume under a waxing moon after a bad breakup, working some kind of dark magic to transform myself into someone no one would recognize, even if only for a night. There was always a sadness that permeated these songs, something that got lost in their later, more esoteric albums I could never get into, and there was something on this album that made me feel okay with being sad, allowing myself to feel my feelings that I tried to keep hidden for far too long.

Ludacris - Back for the First Time (2000) I was: 16, high school junior Again, the most rap I had ever really listened to before high school was MC Hammer and Will Smith’s squeaky clean radio-rap, so Luda’s debut was a major eye-opener for overly-sheltered white suburban me. "What's Your Fantasy" and "Phat Rabbit" were titillating, sure, but also fantastic rhymes and beats, and "Stick 'Em Up Bitch" and "1st & 10" were darkly hilarious under their gangsta veneers. "Southern Hospitality" brought bravado to what could have just been another Neptunes beat, and throughout it all, Luda's flow was so sick and smooth, so full of wit and wordplay and unashamed sexuality, and I loved to blare it driving through my parents’ neighborhood, even after the speakers in my car blew out and sounded like nothing but surly vibrations as I dawdled on my way home for my 11pm curfew. If I had to come in at what I considered an unfair, oppressive time, I was going to wake up everyone else in the process. Yes, I was a not-so-secret dick when I was a teenager–weren’t we all? Side note: I'm kind of sad Shawnna never made it all that big, and this video is the absolute perfect time capsule of the year 2000.

Peaches - The Teaches of Peaches (2000) I was: 16, high school senior I’ll also admit this: I fucking loved “electroclash.” That amalgamation of punk and dance music was everything to me, the perfect blend of rock guitars and big beats that enmeshed everything teenage me loved about being loud and dancing like everyone was watching and not giving a fuck either way. Peaches was gross and vulgar and rapped about sex with no emotion but pleasure, and she got even dirtier as the years went on, but The Teaches of Peaches was seminal and shocking and just the kind of thing a slightly crazed and endlessly awkward, horny teenage girl needed to hear to start embracing my own weird sexuality and rampaging hormones and confused feelings, instead of keeping them locked away and shameful like I was supposed to. Everyone knows and loves "Fuck the Pain Away," thanks to its cameo appearances in Lost in Translation and the Jackass movies, but "Lovertits" was always my personal favorite from this album. The moment that breakdown takes over is pure brilliance and one of my favorite moments in any song ever. Peaches dancing in front of the mirror in this video is teenage me, always and forever, singing to myself when no one was looking and finally finding away to sing to myself in public, out loud, and not caring who heard me. I'm still working on it, but I think these albums did a lot to push me in the direction I've gone and to get me where I am now as a feminist and a lover of music and dance parties for life.

Honorable Mentions: 

Beck - Midnite Vultures (1999)

No Doubt - Return of Saturn (2000)

Madonna - Ray of Light (1998)

The Strokes - Is This It (2001)

N.E.R.D. - In Search Of... (2001)

[oldfilmsflicker]

[nudayrising]

John Waters 

[leighkhoopes]

6 Actions, 12 Themes: Goals for 2017

The fact that Mercury is currently in retrograde, as well as my general study of celestial bodies and related symbolism, has made me want to do more with my New Year’s Resolutions than I usually do. I don’t even think I made any resolutions for 2016, and I guess that’s a good thing to have set my bar so low for this year as to not achieve anything of note, right? My intention for this retrograde has really been resonating with me, too:

I will not be deterred by events beyond my control, but I will remain open to innovation, experimentation and recreation in the year ahead of me. 

So I've been thinking over the last few days and really trying to dig back into what I did and did not accomplish this year, what I can do better and/or more of, and tried to create some really concrete, realistic and achievable goals for myself. Since I set no real goals for myself in 2016, I didn’t really achieve or accomplish all that much, and I don’t want to repeat that again in the coming year. I need to be more focused on both work and play, attentive to the world around me, and more attuned to my own needs and self-care in the days ahead. I turned my goals into six (mostly) well-defined actions with two key words apiece, and hopefully these will help me stay on course and work towards another year closer to something resembling enlightenment.

1. ADJUST & AWAKEN: 

Create and maintain a new daily morning routine.

One thing that has become abundantly clear to me over the last year is that there is simply not enough time. There is not enough time to the work I'm paid to do, there is not enough time to the hobbies and activities I love to do, there is not enough time to sleep or relax or just exist in the world. I've been meaning to do this for a while now, consciously restructure my days and revise my sleep schedule to allow me more time in the mornings, and now seems like just the time to do so.

In January, I will start with one day a week of getting up early and establishing a morning yoga practice. This in particular has been something I've been wanting to do because I always feel better after I start my days with yoga: more grounded, more centered, more secure, and always more flexible. From there, every 60 days, I will add on one day a week to wake up early and work out and/or practice yoga. My goal is to eventually get to 5 days a week of morning yoga practice or fitness activities to get myself off to a positive start on those days, and also to prevent the inevitable disappointment that comes from working late and being too tired to do anything as soon as I get home.

I also want to start getting in to the office sooner so I can stop forcing myself to work late to make up for it. I work better when there are fewer people around me, and if I'm able to be more productive in the mornings, that will allow me to be more efficient overall and help build a better line of demarcation between my professional responsibilities and my personal life. I want to be able to come home and relax and not feel guilty about it, like I so often do when I can't will myself to workout after a 10-hour day and an hour commute. 

2. INNOVATE & EDUCATE: 

Learn and master a new software program.

It has been probably a decade since I've really and truly learned and mastered anything new that is remotely useful. I learned how to fold paper cranes for my wedding four years ago, and that's seriously the only new skill I can think of. So in order to stay on top of my professional game and ahead of the curve overall, I am going to learn and master one new software program in the next 12 months, specifically one for my UX group at work. I thought about learning to code, but there's not a lot of relevance that coding has to my life, personal or professional, whereas one of these programs can at least give me a leg up and let me lend a hand when (not if, when) my team gets inundated with UX projects.

Right now pretty much the only program I use on a daily basis is PowerPoint, sad as that sounds. And Outlook, but that’s a given. I used to know InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator with some level of proficiency, but three years in my current job and using those infrequently (at best) has made me feel rusty and not hip to what the kids are learning these days. I strongly believe you have to stay cognizant throughout your career if you want to keep succeeding–atrophy and apathy are two things that will destroy you from the inside out, no matter how comfortable and complacent you may be with your current paycheck.

3. EXPERIMENT & EXPERIENCE: 

Try one new thing (food, activity, etc.) or go to one new place a month, and write about it.

This one is a little bit more nebulous, but with reason: I want to consciously try at least one new thing a month, be it a kind of food or ingredient I've never tried, or an activity I've never done, or a visit to a place I've never been to. What's more, I'm going to challenge myself to write about these new things and experiences, whether or positive or negative. 

I need to write more, it is good for my soul and my psyche, and if I have to carve out that time with bloody fingernails, I will force myself to do it if only to have a record of these new things. My beauty obsessing writing has fallen off of late, which I'm planning on remedying in the new year as well. I also plan to submit pitches and finished to work to publications throughout the year, but until then, the very least I can do is set aside time and space and effort to broaden my horizons, step outside my comfort zone and my standard spheres of influence, learn about myself and the world, and share whatever knowledge I gain with the world, even if only a couple of people read it.

4. DEMONSTRATE & SELF-MOTIVATE: 

Be more proactive & demonstrative in my personal relationships 

This is another goal that has eluded for me for many years, but is something I've been aware I need to work on for just as many years. As an introvert, I do not have a lot of close friends to begin with; add to that my deep phone anxiety and conversational self-consciousness, and you have a recipe for someone who is not a great person to be friends with in the first place (aka me). I don't like to use the phone in general, but this year it is essential that I make an effort to reach out to and be a better communicator with my friends, family, and loved ones. I will call my mother and my grandmothers once a week; even if I don't have anything to talk about because they don't really understand what I do or the things I am into all that much, they probably do have something to talk about, and the least I can do is listen. 

I am also going to be sending more cards, letters, and general correspondence to my friends. I'm one of those old Millennials who still checks my snail mailbox every day, more out of habit than anything else, and I love getting mail that is not a catalogue or a credit card offer. I have tons of pens and markers and paper, so the least I can do is start putting them to good use. Who knows–if all goes well here, I might actually give my friends a call, just to see if any of them actually answer.

5. LEARN & SHARE: 

Read and review 25 books.

A couple of years ago, I managed to somehow miraculously read 50 books in a single calendar year, the most I've ever read. It was an amazing feeling to net out an average of almost a book a week, and it's one record I haven't been able to best or even maintain in the years since. So I'm still setting a reading goal for myself, but a more doable one given all the work, personal and family stuff going on that doesn't ever seem to let up. This year with a slight twist, however—I'm going to write reviews of each book I finish instead of just leaving star ratings and only reviewing the First Reads giveaway books that I'm kind of obligated to review. 

I want to give myself every opportunity to write, and sometimes writing about books is the most natural process that comes to me. I also just need to make progress on my To Be Read stacks, both physical and virtual, so I will not waste time on books that don't hold my interest in the name of completion. I don't have to read for anything other than pleasure anymore, and that's exactly what I intend to do.

6. RELEASE & GROW: 

Pay off one credit card completely.

This one is the biggest, scariest, and pretty much the most important of all my goals for 2017. I was lucky enough to graduate from college with no student loan debt (I also worked my ass off, but that's not the point), but I did not escape without a different kind of debt. I owe thousands on credit cards, and at pretty high interest rates, and I absolutely must put an end to it. 

I've been kind of maintaining for a little while, paying more than the minimum each month in a half-hearted "avalanche" attempt, and trying to curtail my spending, but I have not been trying hard enough, to be perfectly honest. I have four different cards and a mortgage, and that is no longer sustainable, if it ever even was. I owe a lot, and have a lot of interest to pay as well, and it's time to get that taken care of. Friends of mine are paying off their student loans, so it's time for me to put on my big girl pants and pay down my fucking debt. It's not going to be fun or pretty, but it needs to happen.

So, not too bad of a bad list overall, right? Six goals, twelve themes and keywords, ready to start in three days. Let’s do this, 2017.

[wordsnquotes]

I am overflowing with words I do not have.

Adam Falkner, “When It Matters” (via wordsnquotes)

[rainyday-recess]

[bibliochor-deactivated20170422]

“A man’s appetite can be hearty, but a woman with an appetite is always voracious: her hunger always overreaches, because it is not supposed to exist. If she wants food, she is a glutton. If she wants sex, she is a slut. If she wants emotional care-taking, she is a high-maintenance bitch or, worse, an “attention whore”: an amalgam of sex-hunger and care-hunger, greedy not only to be fucked and paid but, most unforgivably of all, to be noticed.”

— Jess Zimmerman, Hunger Makes Me

[wordsnquotes]

Do not resent my growth…

Anne Sexton , A Self-Portrait in Letters (via wordsnquotes)