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This is a thought I am carrying into this new year, and I’m putting it here in case it helps you, too.

I am not fantastic about remaining in the moment, and I’m usually thinking about things ending just as they’re beginning. But maybe that isn’t a terrible thing. I’m just attuned to the passing of time, and maybe that can work for me as much as it takes away from the pleasure of the moment.

I recently read something that stuck with me in Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter about hoarding life:

Sure, you can have a hundred tea ceremonies. You can ever have them all with the same people. But you can only have that ceremony, that cup of tea, once. Then the moment evaporates forever.

You only get to live each moment once, just as you only get to drink each cup of tea once (even if there is a different cup of tea in the future). It’s the once-ness of it, that appreciation that you’ve gotten to have the experience at all vs. being sad that it’s over (when it has just begun), that keeps me — for a brief second — in the moment instead of floating mentally ahead. Just acknowledging that you get every moment just once.

For the past three years (2020) and (2021) and (2022), I set reading goals tied to the year — 20200 pages and 20210 pages and 20220 pages. As of December 25th (which is the date GoodReads last updated my reading stats), I hit 20207 pages with 60 books, but I definitely read more than 23 pages this week (to get to 20230) with my final book of the year. So I’m calling it a win.

I wish GoodReads would give you a running page count throughout the year.

To stay on-brand, I set 20240 as a goal for 2024.

My favourite things I’ve read this year:

• Tell Me an Ending (Jo Harkin)
• The Stranger Diaries (Elly Griffiths)
• A Tidy Ending (Joanna Cannon)
• La Belle Sauvage (Philip Pullman)
• Bad Summer People (Emma Rosenbaum)
• The Endless Vessel (Charles Soule)
• Death Comes to Marlow (Robert Thorogood)
• My Murder (Katie Williams)
• The Skeleton Key (Erin Kelly)
• Okay Days (Jenny Mustard)
• Grave Expectations (Alice Bell)
• One Puzzling Afternoon (Emily Critchley)
• The Christmas Guest (Peter Swanson)
• The Christmas Appeal (Janice Hallett)
• The Last Devil To Die (Richard Osman)
• The Three Dahlias (Katy Watson)
• The Windsor Knot (SJ Bennett)

What is on your list of favourite reads this year? (Feel free to list movies or television shows if books are not your thing.)

We still mask. Back in early November, we unmasked indoors for the first time since the start of COVID-19 to eat dinner at a Bat Mitzvah. We usually will go outside at a party or not eat at all, but we were in the prime vaccine booster zone and decided to take the risk because there wasn’t an outdoor space we could go, slipping back on our masks between courses.

But other than that time, we mask indoors. We mask in crowds. We go anywhere we want to go and do everything we want to do (except restaurants); we just do it in a mask.

Madeline Miller’s op-ed piece about COVID-19 is why we still mask indoors. Her long COVID stems from the pre-vaccine days, but we know too many people with long COVID symptoms who are vaccinated and boosted.

This is the part that made me say, “Me too.”

So how long am I going to do this? Until indoor air is safe for all, until vaccines prevent transmission, until there’s a cure for long covid. Until I’m not risking my family’s future on a grocery run. Because the truth is that however immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.

Thank you for saying it. And I post this because I always appreciate it when I see other people post that they also still mask.

Josh left Twitter long ago and halfheartedly set up a Threads account. I resisted even looking at Threads but finally broke down and set up an account. I followed three or four people I knew were on the site and closed it for the night.

Every few days, I opened the app again, followed another person or two, felt depressed reading the Threads suggested accounts, felt more depressed reading the replies under the posts of people I know, and then closed it down. I felt no fire to set it up, the exact opposite of how I felt back in 2008 when I joined Twitter.

Back then, I wanted to figure it out. I wanted to be part of the conversation. I wanted to hear from everyone all the time. Now, I only want to hear from some people some of the time.

I still feel the same about blogs as in 2006; that hasn’t changed. But social media feels less comfortable right now. Like a shirt I’ve outgrown but have to continue wearing because I don’t have anything else to put on at the moment.

We are going to have a quiet Sunday today. Everyone else is busy, and places will close down early if they open at all. It’s a day for curling up on the sofa with a book or rewatching Us. (Finally streaming on Prime after running on PBS many years ago.) Eating appetizers for dinner, and staying off of social media. Cocooning for 24 hours, with a fake fire playing on the television.