It’s a new year, our third of the pandemic. I’ve never been one for new year’s resolutions, and things are about as unresolved as we’ve ever known them. Still, it’s worth reflecting on where I hope this year will take me.
Working on my book is my big personal goal. I’ve done nearly five thousand pages of reading for background research and assigned myself another nine thousand or so. As I read, new avenues open up, so the reading list may well grow. Still, I’ve set a goal of finishing all this research, including interviews with family members, by my birthday in September. As delightful as all this research is, at some point I need to finish and actually write.
And that will be a different challenge, one I’ve been putting off. I will be interested to see how far I get and what I can create once I begin.
Ancillary to that, I’ve also been poking around Twitter, following authors I’m interested in, making some little stab at connecting to the wider world. When (not if) this thing gets written, I want to publish it, and I want someone to read it. I don’t have much of a plan mapped out for that stage, but I figure having some writers who know who I am and think I’m clever is a first step.
Hopes
There are other things I want to do that are out of my control. I want to stand in a crowd without fear. I want to go to Gangnam and eat at Brick Oven Pizza. Above all, I want to visit the US and see my family.
Will that be possible? We really don’t know at this point. I was hopeful, last summer, that maybe this February would have been plausible, but now America is on fire with COVID.
But I miss my family. There are two babies I haven’t yet met. The other kids are growing up. My parents are getting older. I realize that these kinds of long separations were more common in the past, but we’ve never had to be apart this long. It will be good to be together again.
Also published on Medium.