ice water and ocicats

End-of-year thinking is rough this year as things wrap. Reddit and other places online are filled with "what are you proudest of in 2019?" and I'm like... nothing? What I wrote to summarize 2018 could also apply to 2019: "I got no promotions at Zillian, gained no press handstand, continued to see bug and Norwood and Lion, continued to play Pokemon Go, continued to get occasional zits. A lot of it was remarkably hard for me. Still, there was progress, and the no-news theme also includes my cat not dying and me not getting any major injuries or illnesses."

It's weird. I definitely try hard. It seems likely that I'm somehow catastrophizing, unlikely that a full year of nonstop effort would really include nothing that I can look at and say "aw, yeah". And so I am really trying to scrape things up:

• On my bio-kid's 18th birthday I gave her a well-curated set of books on sex. When she needs them, they'll be there for her. I would say it's I wish someone had done for me, except someone almost did: someone paid to give everyone in my college's freshman class a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Now I can pass it on.


• Nala is alive and she's okay. I took good care of her all year: fluids, appetite stimulant stuff, pills, food, emergency vet visits. She is 21 years and 8 months old, and again looking at what may be her last Christmas tree... or maybe she will outlive all of us. I wouldn't bet against a 22nd birthday at this point.


• Finished all the writing exercises from Steering the Craft (and so did apfelsingail).
  
• I treated myself okay. I took breaks and sometimes even asked for help. I made sure to take a long vacation without travel, and one overseas trip, and I didn't self-sabotage in any super obvious ways, and I got vaccinations and teeth cleanings and standard checkups.


• As of November I had added $276,000 to my savings accounts in 2019. That's not what the market did for me, that's what I did for me. I could live on that for a few years, in the event of Zillian shaking me off like a burned-out flea.


• Acro? I performed as an acro robot and people liked it. I think I'm proud of that. Then I went back to steady training with the Monk, and we learned a few new things that make me happy.


• I was consistent with all my physical-maintenance stuff. My 2019 sheet of when I do my ten basic-maintenance things shows steadiness far beyond what I have managed in previous years, especially my pike. And hey, I touched my elbow to my toe for the first time.


• Had nice, easy, light experiences with the bug and a couple of new sex partners. Nothing difficult there. Just a payoff for work put in during previous years.

It's not a lot but it's non-zero. I know that a lot of it is self-centric -- though possibly because that is the stuff I'm choosing to count, against a backdrop of taking care of three partner-type people in personal life and thirty people at work. It's still strange how heavily this year has featured people being very unhappy with me, and I wonder if that's a numbers game or me being an asshole or just bad luck.