Monday 1/1/24
I know someone who gets drunk every New Year's Eve and texts me. I have the sound off on the phone. Last night I went to bed at nine, and got up at exactly twelve, when the fireworks went off over the harbor. Are those hours typical for me? I'm sure people try and figure it out. I don't have some daily, consistent awake/not awake schedule. But chances are, whenever it is, I'm awake. I don't so much as sleep as I grab a three or four hour nap, and then resume. Sometimes, after a bunch of days, I'll sleep more. Six, seven, eight hours.
This person means well. They know the deal better than anyone. The ins and outs of what I'm facing right now and have been for a long time. They know how twisted and sick it is. What's being done. It impacts their life, because it's just so evil. As they'll say, what's being done is worse than criminal. And it is. They know where things are at.
But each year I get up when I do get up on New Year's Day and I see where they've said the exact same thing to me that they've said for over a decade now: It's going to be a great year for me. And I wonder if it's just the alcohol, or their lack of self-awareness and lack of recall regarding what they said last year, and the year before, and so on, or a matter of what they want for me, what they know I deserve more than anyone has ever deserved anything, bleeding through; or just that they figure they'll be right one of these years.
To tell you the truth, I couldn't look at it right away today. Or I thought it'd be counterproductive. I had to get a bunch of things done first.
Obviously I wrote what I wrote on here. While I was doing that, I wrote and sent two long letters to publishers. I took a lot of care with these. I've been thinking about them for a while.
Then I did 100 push-ups. Ran 3000 stairs at City Hall. Big line of people waiting to run those stairs--must be all of the New Year's resolutions. I'm kidding, of course. Just me.
You know what I read yesterday? I don't know how this could be true, but I'm pretty sure I understood what I read correctly: If you do fifty stairs a day, your chances of heart disease--which is the biggest killer--go down twenty percent. So said a big study.
It didn't mean run up and down fifty stairs repeatedly. It just meant that at some point in your day, if you walk fifty stairs--which I think they said was three flights or four--then it makes that much of a difference with heart health.
That seems crazy, though, doesn't it? For instance, the City Hall stairs are fifty stairs. So you walk up those once a day and this is the dramatic effect?
Yesterday at the ballet I was taking my pulse. Well, best I could. Sort of counting along. I couldn't tell. I want it to be like sixty beats per minute. Somewhere between sixty and seventy. I think it was in that range, but I wasn't sure.
I didn't get any of the Christmas blend at the Starbucks this Christmas season. It's my favorite kind. I like to get a bunch of bags and drink the Christmas blend throughout the year. I waited until after Christmas because it's usually fifty percent off then, but no stores had any, like they all get rid of it at the same time. I did get a nice Boston Ballet beanie, though.
Yesterday marked 3730 days, or 390 weeks, without a drink.
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