Divorce-Blogging

No, not me. But the authors of two of the Big Fancy Blogs I read regularly, Get Rich Slowly and Dooce, announced this week that they are either divorcing (in the case of J.D. Roth from GRS) or trial-separating (in the case of Heather Armstrong from Dooce) their spouses. I was actually a little surprised at how emotional my reactions to both announcements were, but I guess I shouldn’t be. Reading someone’s personal blog for years doesn’t mean you know the person as a friend, but you do feel like you know at least some piece of them based on the way they recount their life.

So here I was reading these posts and getting a little upset, and it makes me want to pull my husband a little closer. We’d all like to think we’re immune, I guess.

Housing Markets

I might be moving again, or I might not. Let me explain.

Against Birthdays

In the spirit of Andy Rooney, I’ve got to complain: Large annual birthday celebrations for humans over the age of 21 are fucking ridiculous. Having a “birthday weekend” — or god forbid a “birthday week” — with multiple events takes the narcissism to a whole new level.

If I were king, anyone over age 21 would be permitted: a small dinner or happy hour with a handful of friends. The end, full stop. Maybe some Rock Band at home, though I’m no fan of Rock Band parties either. You could throw a larger bash on milestone birthdays, no more than once every 10 years.

I finally removed my birthday information from Facebook because the endless stream of insincere birthday wishes just got me depressed. This is not to say I fear growing older — on the contrary I’m actually pretty excited about it. But I think this neverending string of celebrations for not dying during another 365-day period is a bit grandiose.

It could also be because I’m just really, really bad at remembering my friends’ birthdays.

UPDATE: J. tells me that Patton Oswalt has a funny bit on this.

2012 Goals

2011 was the great lost year in terms of me achieving anything in the way of life goals. Because SCREW IT, I got married and a new job. But really the bigger problem was I didn’t set any clear-cut goals, see this post from January 2011. So I’m setting some goals for 2012. I want to talk more about each of these in future posts, but for posterity let me just get them down on the blog:

1. Yoga three times a week.
2. Exercise 150 minutes a week. And because I needed some sort of more specific goal-within-the-goal, I want to bench press 110 lbs. by the end of the year. Let it be duly noted this is a pathetic goal, but at the moment I can only handle 55 lbs for three short sets, so I’ve got a ways to go.
3. Read 1 book per week.
4. Get back to learning Spanish by completing all of the 13 CDs and accompanying exercises I have from a set I bought a few years ago.
5. Financial goals: Save up $xx,xxx in our down payment fund, and increase our net worth to $xx,xxx by the end of the year. The numbers aren’t important but I wanted to note these goals here too.

More to come soon.