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This Was the Year, Except When it Wasn't: A Summary

At the end of each year, sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, Donnie and I sit down and recount the year month-by-month. We list the highs—the memorable things—and talk about how to build on those for the upcoming year.  I started this list of 31 things with that conversation in mind. I wanted to make sure that 2014 was a full year and that I would wrap it up with more life points in the bank than when I had started. 

(Maybe I also should have set a goal about points in the actual bank, but yeahhhh, next time!)

Also—and I know this is not a common thing to say—I had lots of time on my hands. No kids, a relatively stress-free eight-to-five. For so long, I had been in grad school and/or working two jobs, so I didn’t really know to treat free time. God forbid it go to waste. 

But really, how often do you have a year that you can devote fully to self-improvement without any distractions? If that is your 2015, grip it hard!

So in summary, here are the things from this year that will stick: 

1. Run a half-marathon:  This one ended up not being about racing as much as the pleasure of a weekly long run.  It only takes an extra forty-five minutes or so (on top of a regular run), but the sense of accomplishment lasts all week. Unfortunately, so does the desire to eat all of the cottage cheese in sight (even the non-organic kind, eww).

6. Study yoga:  I don’t want to get weird here, but the peace and awareness this brought were truly unexpected.  It's also super fun. 

7. Update my style:  This is still a work in progress, but I’m beginning to appreciate the value of cultivating a decent wardrobe.  

8. Go to the dentist every six months:  Ugh, why would you not? 

11. Join Toastmasters:  I had to drop out for now because the time didn’t work with my new job, but this is something I know I can always pick back up. It’s stimulating—like listening to TED talks—and confidence-boosting. Working on a speech is like writing a little essay, which is sort of fun. If you’re a total nerd. Or even a partial nerd. 

15. Join a bookclub:  Love, love, love, love, love our bookclub. I look forward to it all month. Gives me people to have serious conversations with and something to read at night other than Twitter. 

21. Eat at Boca:  Boca was good, but this item is more about eating out and trying new restaurants than eating at one particular place.  It’s about the importance of being attuned to local culture, and about supporting small businesses. A few other restaurants that I tried for the first time this year and LOVED were Emanu, M, Sotto, A Tavola, Zula, Salazar, Kaze, Swad, Riverside Korean, Elephant Walk, Mazunte, Meatball Kitchen, 50 West, the Sleepy Bee. Getting ready to make my “must eat” list for 2015.

22. Entertain:  I learned that it’s nice to have people you care about in your home. 

29. Build a stand-up desk:  It hurt at first, but now I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is so easy to do, look at the one I cobbled together at my new job:

30. Give up Diet Coke:  My dad had been telling me for fifteen years that the stuff is worse for you than cigarettes. I don’t know that I would go that far, but I certainly don’t miss it. Except with cupcakes. 

31. Give up cable:  Don’t miss this either. There are plenty of stupid videos to watch on the Internet. Like the one of people opening puppies for Christmas. Soooo stupid, but I watched it twice and cried both times. 

Here are the things I didn’t execute:

18. Take Donnie to Kings Island:  Forget it, not going to happen.  

17. See live jazz at Schwartz Point:  I still want to do this! Not sure why I couldn’t pull it off.

28. Finish A Peoples History of the United States:  No excuse, really.  High school kids read this in two weeks.  Just ask Donnie, who did just that and has reminded me of it several times. 

The other things on the list were either one-offs that were fun (taking a Cincinnati Tour, visiting Krohn Conversatory) or things that I tried but couldn’t really get into (baking bread, attending our Community Council meetings). Based on a four-point scale that I created (one point for “researched but didn’t execute” and four points for “became habit/mastered it”) I’m ending the year with an 87.10%.  Not bad if you think about this as a drawn out New Year’s Resolution that I posted on the Internet.

And in the end, these things didn't make me a better person, or even a different person. Together, they just made me a version of myself that runs a little further and does a little more yoga and doesn't wash it all down with a Diet Coke.  Turns out the important thing was always having something to work towards.  

Anyway, thanks for checking in and holding me accountable.  Cheers to 2015!  

-K. 

Style Tips, a Pumpkin Party, and Chucky Visits Yellow Springs

#7)  Update my Style:  Any respectable style update includes purging items that are decidedly out of style, such as these floral pantaloons that have always been too big. I guess I didn’t try them on when I bought them. Or I bought them on a day I had eaten a box of Triscuits and was suffering from the infamous wheat belly.

I also got rid of these yellow shorts.  They are authentically vintage, but are STIFF. Zola was sad to see them go before she had an opportunity to eat a hole through them.

I spent two days last week updating my work wardrobe with new basic blazers, tanks, jeans, and shoes.  I used my Pinterest style board and the “Style Guide” as inspiration.  Tonight I’m going to drink a couple glasses of wine and spend the evening styling and archiving about 20 no-repeat outfits.  I’ve always wanted to do this, and I read an article that drinking wine while styling inspires more creative combinations.  

Clearly, I was intoxicated when I got dressed for bed last night:

And stone cold sober when I accumulated a row of the same blue and white-striped menswear shirts:

#16)  Go Antiquing: Donnie and I spent a day last week in Yellow Springs, and found this mid-century modern antique store that lots of unique pieces.  Earlier in the day Donnie had randomly said to me, “You used to be as sweet as a baby doll, now you’re as sweet as a Chucky Doll.”  So when we saw the baby doll in the box on the red chair, we had a good laugh.  

For the record, the reason I had to act like a Chucky Doll is because what started as a lovely hike became a nightmare of getting lost in the woods right before a storm. The only way we found our way back was by listening for the road, climbing over the metal barrier, and then walking a mile back to the trailhead on busy street.   We also had to call up Google Maps on our phones for reinforcement.

This progression of photos demonstrates how my mood devolved over time:

#18)  Take Donnie to Kings Island:  Never made it to Kings Island this year. Turns out Donnie has as much interest in going to Kings Island as I have in going to a Michigan football game.  To put this in perspective, this is similar to the level of interest normal people have in going to the dermatologist.  Or being compared in any way to a Chucky Doll.  

I probably should have consulted with him before adding it to the list, but I guess it’s the kind of thing you do when you are a kid or have kids.  So this is not the year. Which means that on December 31, 2014, I won’t have a perfect score on my “This is the Year” tracking system.  DAMMIT.

Unless you are willing to give me credit for pulling into the “passenger drop-off” lane on the way home from Yellow Springs and making Donnie take his picture with the Eiffel Tower in the background.  

#22) Entertain:  I was looking for an excuse to try some of the #pumpkineverything recipes that were blowing up my Pinterest feed, so I planned an “All Pumpkin Dinner Party” for the second Saturday in November.  The menu included:

Fondue in a pumpkin

Brie with pumpkin-cranberry toasts

Pumpkin hummus

Salad with pumpkin seeds

Pumpkin curry soup

Pumpkin kale mac and cheese

Butternut squash risotto (pumpkin family!)

Pumpkin corn muffins with pumpkin butter

Pumpkin bread

Pumpkin brownies with pumpkin ice cream

Pumpkin punch and lots of pumpkin beer

Obviously, I didn’t make all of this stuff because it would have taken me ten weeks, but I hope the “pumpkin party” becomes an annual tradition.  

Orange clothing optional.

Chucky my ass.  

-K.

The Health and Wellness Edition

#2) Learn to Bake Bread:  I made that one really good loaf of bread  in April, so technically I learned to bake bread and can check this off my list. 

When I added this to the list  at the beginning of the year, we were in the habit of buying a loaf or two of bakery bread every week, which I would eat toasted with avocado or dipped in soup. We were also in the habit of buying a box or two of Triscuits every week, which I would keep at my desk and eat by the fistful.

Not only did I annoy my coworkers with the incessant crunching, every afternoon about 4:00 my stomach would bloat up like a balloon. I started researching the connection between wheat and bloating and AH-MAZING--when I quit the Triscuits the bloating stopped. And my coworkers started speaking to me again. .

I also stopped buying loaves of bread. Don’t get me wrong--we’re not gluten free in the least. We still drink beer almost every day and eat pizza about once a month. I still buy Trader Joe’s whole wheat pitas, bagels for Donnie, and the occasional pack of buns for veggie burgers. And after a long run I love nothing better than a foot-long Veggie Delite from Subway. You may not believe it after reading this long list of my favorite wheat products, but I’ve noticed that I feel better overall when I eat less wheat.  

This is a long-winded and borderline hypocritical way to explain why I haven’t bothered to bake any more bread.

#30)  Give up Diet Coke:  Diet Coke has been easier to give up than wheat. It’s been months since I’ve had one. The only way I could be convinced to drink one now would be if Lisa Leake posted that Diet Coke is the antidote to wheat belly.

If I use that standard, I’d say I’m as likely to drink DC again as I am to shop at 5-7-9. Related story:  I bought a sweet maroon homecoming dress there in junior high and then spilled Diet Coke all over it.

#29) Build a Stand Up Desk:  I’m starting a new job next week, so I passed the standup desk that I had built onto a coworker. I would have taken it with me, but I had scavanged the parts from the supply room and therefore GOVERNMENT PROPERTY.  

Because the desk was adjustable, I got into a routine that looked like this:  

8:00-9:30:  Stand

9:30-12:00  Sit on ball

12:00-2:00  Stand (for digestion after lunch)

2:00-4:00  Sit on Ball

4:00-5:00  Stand

I started by trying to stand all day, but it was hard to concentrate on my spreadsheets when my knees hurt. Also I am too short vain to wear flats, so that doesn’t help.  

#6) Study Yoga:  My yoga practice this year has taken me to the Cincinnati Yoga School, the Covington Yoga School, Modo Yoga, Yoga Bar, Move Your Hyde, and the Bikram Yoga studio on Red Bank.  Because I’m cheap, I mostly I relied on Groupons and  community classes (supplemented by free online yoga videos in my attic).

Because the Groupon fine print limits deals to “new students only” I knew that eventually the Groupon train would run its course.  So last week, I finally pulled the trigger and bought a full-price pass to Move Your Hyde.

After nearly a year of practicing yoga, I still can’t hold a handstand without falling into a panicky “Bridge”. But I definitely have a greater awareness of what’s going on in my body. I can feel individual muscles, bones, and sometimes even my organs. I learned to breathe. And focus. All of which makes up for the fact that my “Bird of Paradise” looks like a broken corkscrew and I don’t have enough rhythm to do “Standing Splits”.  

BTW, if someone had made me do yoga when I was a young gymnast, I probably would have gotten past level 1:

My best trick was falling off the balance beam.  

#1) Run a Half Marathon: Word on the street is you’re supposed to do minimal running the month or so after a hard race.  Like an off-season.  

Unfortunately for me, my running strategy is “run what’s in your heart” and my heart has been telling me to “run, KK, run.”  It’s getting colder though so I have the feeling that sooner or later my heart is going to be telling me to put on my pink sweatpants and sit cross-legged on the furnace vent for several hours a day.  

There you have it.  The health and wellness edition.  

Brought to you by Kay Kay, WebMD.

-K.

#9: Visit the Contemporary Arts Center

When I was eighteen, my dad took me to New York City for a college interview and for him to confirm that the city was safe enough for me to move to without having him worry constantly that I would be abducted on the street.  While were were there, I made him take me to the MOMA, and we laughed at an art installation that was basically a toilet in an empty room. This helped him realize that New York was probably an acceptable place for a naive young woman and so ten months later I packed my stuff and was off!

The trip to the MOMA inspired me to take some studio art classes my freshman year. In my “Intro to Sculpture” class, I decoupaged the torn pages of an old book all over the surface of a computer monitor I had found on the street. I had assembled this piece in my dorm room and had not thought through how I would transport it the approximately 28 city blocks to my classroom.

By the time I lugged it there, it was kind of f’d up. Clearly, I didn’t have the chops for a lucrative career in modern art.

Which is why I now spend nine hours a day looking at spreadsheets.

I tell this story because the three women who founded the Contemporary Arts Center were also inspired by the MOMA. But instead of Mod-podging a piece of junk they founded a museum in Cincinnati to showcase rotating exhibits of the world’s best contemporary artists. Some people have vision.    

 

The humiliation of my failures as an artist kept me away from the Contemporary Arts Center for the first seven years of living in Cincinnati, but I wanted to make 2014 the year to move past this. Actually, it was just busyness and lack of initiative that kept me away, but humiliation seems like a better excuse.

The CAC is free on Mondays and I’d been waiting for a free Monday to meet Donnie after work and check it out. The original plan was to meet for a drink first and then go to the museum, but this was the first day after the end of daylight savings time and so I felt like there was no time for a drink because I needed to look at the art and then get to bed pronto.  

 

The first exhibition that we saw was “Based on a True Story” by Duke Riley and Frohawk Two Feathers.  The theme of alternative histories overlaps with A People’s History of the United States (#28) and I left newly inspired to finish it by the end of the year.

 

 

Next, we saw “Unmade” which is about using blurred lines to veer away from “familiarity, convention, and habit”.  Love.

 

 

In “Memory Palace” we learned about a Greco-Roman technique of prompting memories by using visualized architecture.  Let me clarify: I learned about this technique, Donnie said he knew all about it and couldn’t believe I had never heard of it. Believe it or not, they didn’t teach this us this stuff in “Intro to Sculpture”.

 

Our favorite exhibit was the surrealist photography of Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs.  The photographs taken on road trips through the southwest reminded us of the early days of our relationship when we would drive back and forth between New Mexico and the midwest with three cats and a dog. On one of these trips we got engaged and then had dinner at an I-Hop.  

 

At about midnight (ok, ok, it was only 7:00pm but it was DARK outside) we wrapped up our trip with a quick tour of the children’s floor.

 

So, look. If you haven’t spent a Monday at the CAC, get yourself there. Actually, it’s probably better if you go on a day when you have to pay the $7.50 admission fee because art doesn’t grow on trees and somebody’s got to fund this stuff. Either way, check it out. There aren’t any toilets or decoupaged computer monitors currently on display, but the exhibits change all the time so you might get lucky.


-K.

Eminem Got it Wrong

November makes me want to stand around in the kitchen, make soup, drink wine, and listen to James Blake. And get reflective.  So here goes (minus the soup and wine, because it’s the morning and I’m just finishing my coffee). 

When I started my “31 things” project in January I wrote that it was a way to hold myself accountable for living the life of the person I want to be at this stage in my life. 

I wanted to do some grownup things like sharpen my knives and buy in bulk while upping my credibility as a true Cincinnatian by finally stepping foot inside the Krohn Conservatory.  I wanted to stretch myself to accomplish some of the life goals I may have otherwise put off for another decade like running a half marathon and joining Toastmasters.  At the same time, I wanted to improve my own well-being by studying yoga and learning how to “loosen up.”  Finally, I wanted to do things that would enrich my social life like joining a book club.

Alone, none of these things are life changing, but together they represent my attempt to live intentionally.

Now, I’ve never watched Oprah and I’m not one to read a lot of self-help books (unless Lean In counts as a self-help book, because I did read that one), so maybe there are better ways to approach this, but here is my general strategy for “living intentionally”. 

Step one:  Decide how you want your life to look and feel.  Notice that the verb is decide, not imagine.  Because there are lots of ways this could turn out.  Tradition and other social expectations might trick you into seeing one future, but there are many.  Pick the one that looks and feels the best for you. 

And don’t worry about making the wrong decision because you can always make a course correction.  Unless you’re 31 years old and realize that you probably should have gone to med school.  Because that ship has sailed. 

Step two:  List the things you need to add and subtract in order to live the life you’ve chosen. 

Subtraction is just as important as addition.  For me, eliminating the things that weren’t serving a purpose (Diet Coke) or that weren’t otherwise fulfilling (cable TV) made room for new things that I didn’t know I needed (H2O) or wanted (evenings spent listening to Johnny Cash albums). 

Step three:  Do it.

Don’t know what else to say about this one, except that coffee helps.  Turns out that water helps too, but I didn’t realize that until I gave up Diet Coke.  Carbs help.   

Step four:   Track it.  Measure it.  Talk about it.  I’m 81.45% of the way towards meeting the goals I set for myself this year.  Unless you’re a bona fide nerd like me you don’t have to use Excel charts and conditional formatting, but at least check in on your progress. 

There is no finish line because this is a process.  When you think you’re close to being done, celebrate with a few beers and then start over at Step #1.  Although Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” is one of my favorite songs, I have to disagree with his fundamental point.  It’s not true that you only get one shot, one opportunity to blow.  Every day is an opportunity. 

Now, it’s 11:30 AM and I’m still in my sweatpants so you might say I’m not exactly practicing what I’m preaching here, but I hope I made my general point. 

 

Now it’s time to put on some pants and get outside because the days are short and this year is flying by. 

 

-K.