Last week, when I said, “let’s get this shitshow started,” I did not expect the first full week of January to be such a literal shitshow. Like, god damn it.

Personally, I actually had a really good week. It was productive in an invigorating way, and I didn’t overextend myself, and there were a few (good/exciting) surprises in the mix. I’m torn because… that simultaneously feels like a poorly timed humble brag, but also… we absolutely need to be celebrating the wins, yeah? The personal victories, the glimmers, the baby steps towards progress, be they in our personal lives or our communities or beyond. But I do worry the expectation of moral perfection on social media, that we must all be using our platforms “for the greater good” at every available moment. I have absolutely caught flack from liberal righteousposters who were morally called to point out that how dare I post a cocktail I enjoyed on a night out with friends when there are people starving?! But until that genie bottle appears, I as an individual remain unable to solve world hunger. And I, as an individual, must still find ways to replenish my cup so that I can pour into others’.

The worst part of my past week (year? lol) has been my water heater dying. It’s not dead dead, but it’s on its way. My baths have been getting cooler and cooler, and right at the end of December I was washing my hair when I ran out of hot water… not very cool at all actually. But it’s old and sometimes temperamental, so I gave it a few days. Big mistake. 15 minute showers became 10 minutes and then dwindled down to 5 minutes of hot water at a time. And then I got sick and idk about you but when I’m sick, all I want to do is stand in a steamy hot shower, or smother myself with a hot washrag on my face in the bath. Welp! None of that for me. Which kind of added to my misery. But since there was still hot water, my building didn’t come through to review until Thursday. The verdict was that not only is it failing, but it was also installed incorrectly! So now the new unit is sitting in its shipping box in the apartment lobby, taunting me until their plumbing guy is available on Tuesday. Tuesday?! 😩 Ah, I really regret not filing a ticket sooner, my bad.

But it’s a lesson learned. I feel like 2025 had a lot of lessons, and I’m ready to not learn so much in 2026. Might fuck around a bit, sure; might find out. But enough with the lessons to be learned!

A year ago, my dryer died (*broke) in a fantastic, clunky-sounding fashion on January 2, and it took me until what, early October to find a suitable replacement?? That was a huge impact on my available energy last year. I live on the second floor of a lofted walk-up, so the laundry machines in the basement are not only expensive, but soooo very far away! That’s five-ish flights of stairs, carrying heavy wet laundry down to the dryer, making another trip mid-cycle to make sure my sheets weren’t all wound up into a ball of dampness, and then to collect the laundry again when the cycle was done and bring it back into my own upstairs. I wasn’t about to pay $2.50 to go for a hike every time I needed to de-wrinkle a backdrop, so I stopped shooting with backdrops. 😓 Yes, even used washer/dryer units are more expensive to buy and pay the electric bill for, but it was about creating an accessible-to-me system, not a morally superior cost-savings system (the costs I save with an in-unit w/d are ephemeral and rooted in disability management).

Okay that was kind of a random tangent but really my point was that my shit keeps breaking down right at the start/end of the year, and I think that’s rude. Not having a microwave for a couple weeks last December wasn’t a big deal; not having a full tank of hot water for a couple weeks in the middle of winter is kind of a big deal. Tuesday can’t come soon enough!

☑️ Done and Done - Slow start to the week as I finished recovering from whatever New Years Illness what got me. Happily back to my daily paper-and-fountain pen bullet journal practice, and I’ve locked in on a supplemental digital planner for work plots—then had one accidentally very late night working in said digital planner. House reset day on Tuesday was very productive and I fixed a problem that’s plagued me personally and impacted my work for over a year. Received said denim trench in the post and had a mini fashion show (might have to have an editorial moment about it?). Irma and I went on a good long walk on a “warm” (55.F) and sunny afternoon. Also emptied my downstairs utility closet so maintenance could access and assess the dying water heater. Wrapped the week up with a movie and beer with a friend.

📋 Coming up - Monday is the twice-delayed-by-illness trip to Ikea with my friend who moved in November, but last week’s house work lead to me needing to pick up a new drawer unit for myself so the delay works out. On Tuesday, maintenance should be through to replace the dying water heater, after which I will take the longest shower possible OR boil myself alive in a bath. Wednesday is my usual stream and content day and also I’m making a pizza (unrelated to content unless…?); might stream again on Friday but idk! I think Thursday I’ll try to touch up my roots maybe, with some desk time mixed in between hair doings. And then Saturday I might just pop up to Seattle for a meander; tentative but unconfirmed.

I know some of you out there are super into planner life and bullet journaling, and some of you are just getting started on your journal journey. Since we’re still in the early part of the year, I thought it would be fun to do a little break down of my journal/planner “kit”. So what if you haven’t started (or returned) yet, and we’re practically halfway through January? You can start a new habit/practice on any arbitrary date—on a Monday, on a Friday, on January 1 or on the Lunar New Year (February 17 this year!) or on your personal new year (birthday!). The dates do not matter, your intention does.

My daily bullet journal is the official Bullet Journal Notebook, a special edition journal with extra bullet journal-specific features, published in collaboration with Leuchtturm1917. I prefer the Bullet Journal edition for its thicker pages and grid features, but the standard Leuchtturm or any medium-sized (often called A5 format) dot grid journal (my preference) is going to be a fine start while you figure things out.

And I do follow the official Bullet Journal Method, albeit loosely. There’s an official book that I’ve heard friends say they found really useful; I haven’t read it. My bujo practice is a weird hybrid mix of the official concepts and whatever modifications are working for me, or that I saw on Pinterest and wanted to try out. There’s a lot of bullet journal/planner influencers out there; it’s okay to find inspiration but don’t set yourself up for failure by trying to BE an Aesthetic Journal Girlie (gender neutral) before you even have the habit locked in. Minimalist is fine; it’ll teach you the bones of the work and then you can start adding flourishes as you determine what you need (or want) to see in your notebook.

The reason I prefer the Bullet Journal edition Leuchtturm is because I use fountain pens, and the thicker pages result in less “bleed through” of ink visibility on the other side of the page. If you’re using gel ink pens or coloured markers, that might not be a problem. My daily writer is a LAMY Safari pen with an extra fine nib. I prefer fountain pens for their ergonomics, and using them has shifted my handwriting into a more elegant script and a less vice-like grip that results in hand pain (hello, Ehlers Danlos!). BUT I also use Staedler fineliners, Tombow dual brush pens, and various glitter gel pens for layouts, headings, etc. I’ve def played around with colour coding things over the years but I find that that simply adds a complication to the process of documenting and note taking and isn’t worth my time (But I do set up a different colour palette for each month). I also have a stash of the Muji gel ink ballpoint pens for when I need to do really clean- and neat-looking tiny writing in layouts; they’re really very good pens.

Now, the digital planner is the newest addition, and as such it’s been taking up a chunk of time to establish a new system and process, and make sure it’s properly integrated into and supportive of my work (because sometimes we romanticize the process regardless of whether it effectively supports us, yes? and then we end up with a beautiful system that we don’t use, which we don’t want). When I got my iPad 12.9” last year, one of the first things I bought for it was a Paperlike screen protector. I had very quickly found that the Apple Pencil was indeed too slippery on the glass surface, and the Paperlike does add the perfect amount of grip and control for the pencil stylus. When I bought this, I got a free copy of their Paperlike Pro Planner. At the time I didn’t want to pay for an app just to use this planner that I didn’t know if I’d actually use, so I would just screenshot any pages I wanted to write on and would paste them into the native Freeform app. But after six-odd months of copy+pasting, I decided to make it official in the new year and got the Goodnotes app to increase the functionality of the Paperlike planner and its navigational features; it even has Google Calendar integration, which I haven’t played with yet. This is still rather new to me so I don’t want to speak too much on it yet, but so far so good! I’m using this digital planner purely to manage and plan my spicy work and content, and having a visual calendar layout for Big Picture planning and then Weekly and Daily layouts when I need to go into more detail has been great. And, since it’s all digital, I don’t experience guilt about not using any of the pages.

All of this is run in tandem with my Google Calendar, which is what I use to plan and track events in my daily life. Webinars, social hangs, dentist appointments, even live streams and work blocks get added to my Gcal. I run multiple calendars for specific things (Personal, Home, Work, Notes, Holidays, etc.) so that I can keep everything colour coded, and can turn off calendars I don’t need to see when I’m trying to do more refined planning. For example, when I block off time to work with my houseplants, that goes on the Home calendar; doing my hair goes on Personal; streams or editing blocks go on Work, and I use Notes to keep track of everything from important astrological events to recurring billing. My general rule of thumb is that any block of time worth protecting gets added to my Gcal so I can reference it from anywhere.

Lastly. For my biweekly journaling practice that I keep aligned with full and new moons, I get a little boujie with it. And I can only justify this because it is a practice that I established and maintained for a set period of time with a cute little child’s diary I didn’t care about abandoning if I didn’t stick with it, and whatever pen I had available. Once I filled up that first journal, I recommitted to the ritual of the work and went all in, and for me that meant luxe. I picked up a black leather-wrapped journalino Grande by Cavallini & Co., and when this one is full (still a year~ out) I intend to move into their beautiful Roma Lussa notebook. My journal writer is a Pilot Custom 74 demonstrator pen (i.e. clear; my fountain pen collection skews towards demonstrators because clear shit is cool), and I swear these were much more affordably priced a few years ago! The premise for me was to have a very nice dedicated pen and a journal I loved to look at and touch. both as a reward and an incentive. It wasn’t about cost when I acquired either of these items, it was about experience.

In Summary (plus tips):

I wholly recognize that my personal system seems like A Lot a lot to the novice or initiate. It’s important to recognize that this is a system I’ve been honing and curating for close to a decade now, adding in new components as needed and occasionally stepping away when maintaining the practice isn’t aligned with my day to day. Journals and planners are meant to augment your productivity and mindfulness, not create obligations. So I hope my breakdown of my “journal stack” is useful if only to consider the potential of what may work best for you, or inspire you to try out a different approach! Or to maybe just introduce you to some fun new supplies, because let’s face it, buying accessories for a hobby habit is a lot of the fun. 😉

🎬 Watching - In my entire life, there’s only one movie I’ve ever walked out of the theater on, and that’s Congo (1995). Specifically because the first death scared me too much and I was like, nope. To be fair, I was 10. Idk why my mom thought that was a good movie for a 10yo! So when my friend asked if I wanted to go see Primate (2025), I very hesitantly said yes. Kinda just wanted to cap off the week with a little extra visceral escapism, you know? I did make it through the whole movie—as well as my whole bag of emotional support Peanut M&Ms—and even laughed at a couple parts of much needed levity. Kinda made me sad (poor Ben) but overall, for an indie horror it was effectively tense.

🐠 Gaming - I managed to tear myself away from Diablo 4 long enough to buy and set up my very own Tiny Aquarium. Y’all it’s so cute! Look at that little guy! True to its name, it is indeed a tiny aquarium that lives on the bottom of your screen… but it also plays full screen, and has a screensaver mode. It takes some time and effort to collect fish and decor, and you unlock different tank elements as you level up, but in a couple days you’ll have a wonderful cat-approved distraction on your monitor. Just make sure to “freeze” your tank if you won’t be checking in, or your fish will get super hungry and your tank will grow algae! Tiny Aquarium is on sale for $5.99 through Jan. 19.

🍺 Drinking - First beer of the year was a pint of Wayfinder’s Spectral Labyrinth Czech Pilsner. If you like light beers but not IPAs, it’s a good choice. Grab a can or a pour if you spot it in the wild! Wayfinder Beer is a Portland-based brewery so availability will vary the further out you get, but in general I like their stuff and recommend trying it.

🧥 Wearing - I got a new denim trench coat. I saw it online and was immediately like, yes. Also it was on sale. It came a few days early and kind of disrupted my afternoon with excitement. I have a leather trench coat that gives big 90s vibes, but this one gives sleazy 90s cyberpunk vibes. So I’m basically planning to make it my whole personality for the year, even though I also have a dope ass leather biker jacket. Honestly, jackets and coats are just one of my favourite core style elements, and based on the slight bend in the closet rod they’re all hanging on, it’s become a problem.

Since I’m finally making it out to Ikea this week for real, I wanted to leave you with this. I think it was almost two years ago I was looking at plants at Ikea, and keeping an eye out for broken pieces I might be able to save/propogate. I found a broken stem of a ZZ plant and tucked it in my pocket; it lived in water for idk how long, the leaves remaining green and a respectable amount of roots growing at the broken end. I transfered it to a little pot of soil, and it basically did nothing for a year. Now it’s got not one but TWO new shoots growing!

I was ready to call it good, thinking this little broken piece of plant wasn’t going to ever grow (it happens) and was just going to live its life as four green leaves. But my patience paid off, it’s clearly quite happy with its situation, and I have a free plant! In 20 years I hope it is continuing to thrive so that I can look at it and remind myself that we aren’t always in a season of growth… or that growth isn’t always visible from the surface. Sometimes progress is being made, we just can’t see it yet.

Patiently,