[Yes, this is late, but time isn’t real. I’ve made a real conscious effort to not be dictated to by clocks and calendars. (This is just a way I can philosophically assure myself that being lazily productive is humankind’s ideal state.) Anyway…I can’t find many new pictures of my beloved Diana Vreeland, the woman you see featured at the beginning of each of these posts. I felt rather guilty just taking pictures out of books with my iPhone. So I think I’ll just feature something gorgeous instead. The spirit of Diana Vreeland is with us as always and ever as it always has been.]

Monday:

Why don’t you give into the hidden athlete that lives inside of you? I’ve always been enormously suspicious, and I’m not joking, that I am a naturally gifted and inevitable Olympian, but for a long time I refused to wear tennis shoes. I didn’t want to be a part of that world. This has surely hurt my chances for getting an ESPY. But, 2020 made me feel gross and fat so I bought a treadmill and enjoyed the workout videos so much that I ordered a bike. I’m going to do the Tour de France from inside the comfort of my library! Seriously, you have to get on iFit! I can’t wait to go running with my guides. I’m not even kidding. I walked 20,000 steps today for pleasure. I ran at eight miles an hour…FOR AWHILE…because I thought it sounded like fun. It’s insane. And it truly was fun. It’s like a cult, but I don’t think they’re dangerous. I might really end up in the Olympics. This is a new me, reader. I woke up this morning with my phone clutched to my bosom; bleary-eyed, I was confronted with a website dedicated to running shoes that I had apparently been researching in a mad rush of fitness in the depths of the night. Wild. 

Tuesday:

Why do’t you get a sleep tracking app? I fall asleep with my Apple Watch on most nights instead of charging it like I should. The silver lining of this is that it unexpectedly gathered detailed sleep data. I never knew. So I got a better app than the one built in called Pillow and now, when I wake up, one of the very first things I do is see what percentage of REM sleep I had compared to other sleep cycles and how often I’m awake. It’s awfully interesting, and I think that being conscious of sleep is making sleeping better, thought it was never really a problem. I love to sleep. I’m sleeping deeper anyway. (Though that might have more to do with the twenty thousand steps I’m getting in each and every day. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Wednesday:

Why don’t you tune into Joanna Lumley’s Home Sweet Home: Travels in My Own Land? You can easily find full episodes on YouTube. If you’ve been around me for any length of time, you know Joanna Lumley. She’s an icon and an exemplar of the kind of human I wish to be. She’s Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, a character I adore, but she’s also herself in travel documentaries. She’s been making them for decades, reader, and all of them are a masterpiece. They’re fabulous, like confections. Because of the pandemic, Joanna is traveling around England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and it’s just as fascinating as the time she was in Egypt trying to bewitch a camel merchant or in Tokyo looking at lucky cats or that time she was willfully stranded on a desert island or when she set off looking for the remnants of Noah’s Ark. Joanna Lumley is a planetary treasure. 

Thursday:

Why don’t you start randomly ripping your kitchen apart in an attempt to hang a picture that got wildly out of control? I’ve been avoiding my kitchen cabinets for years. I know just the ones I want to install, but I haven’t got around to doing it yet. So for far too long, I purposefully ignore my hideous cabinets. Unfortunately, I got a really good deal on something I’ve always wanted that I’ll tell you about later. I wanted to install it above the sink because that space has always screamed for a window but the window just wouldn’t work, but this WOULD. So I thought I’d better just check that it would fit like I thought and that it would function properly before the warranty expires or whatever. Needless to say, ever since I have been sanding and painting and cleaning and painting more and polishing and scrubbing…but now half of my cabinets are beautifully painted and I installed a sink myself. And a drain. And a faucet. All because of a nail in the wall. Life is exhausting, but it’s so worth it in the end.

Friday:

Why don’t you cry about Mars? This is an odd suggestion, but over the past year–remember that it is February–I’ve cried about Mars at least twice. Once when I could easily identify it in the night sky, which made me feel deeply connected to the universe. Isn’t that gross? And then the other day when NASA landed the Perseverance rover, I just totally lost it. Wasn’t anticipating that, but it was a thrilling moment. I am surrounded by people who are, I’ll be honest with you, not rocket scientists. Some of these lunatics firmly believe that Anderson Cooper feasts on baby blood to stay young and that multideminsional bird beings live in a transcendental space to guide our destinies. And reader, I’m not making any of that up. That’s what makes it so weird and scary. They really truly do believe in these things! And with that being said, I’m also willing to believe that anything in the universe is possible, but if you put forty Qanon losers in a room, I imagine they’d have a hard time picking who gets to sit where let alone accomplishing anything as complex as navigating outer space. The people at NASA all worked hard together using SCIENCE and REAL STUFF to craft a space ship and tools. They shot it into space at the perfect moment with just the right speed. It hurtled out of our planet’s atmosphere and arrived right on time at another planet that looks smaller than a pinpoint from here. As the rover descended to the surface, they released another camera on a parachute to capture the whole thing like it was the first Instagram thirst trap from the planet Mars. There were cranes and helicopters and all of this was happening on Mars seven minutes before we knew it was a success. And all of that was being controlled by humans from our decrepit home planet. I think it’s really wonderful what people can actually manage to do when they think together and try to do something good. Mars is 292.5 million miles away and they got there while taking a space selfie, but I have to use my car’s GPS to get to even the most obvious gas station. What a strange and wonderful Universe we live in.