Salon post: August 31

[jenett]

It's almost September! Welcome to this week's salon post!


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Topic of the week
September is one of the possible 'new year' start points for a lot of people (like those of us tied to the northern hemisphere academic year!)

It's the start of a personal series of them: my birthday is September 22nd (another one), my ritual new year is October 31st, and then there's January. (which means by January, I usually have a pretty good grasp of 'things I want to do differently next time around the sun')

What marks the new year for you? Do you have any traditions or things you think about?

(As always, feel free to talk about anything else in the comments!)

What I've been up to
I have continued to be very busy with our new catalog, plus teaching staff coming back, plus a bunch of stuff that got pushed off

It has also been absurdly hot in Boston, so while I have AC in my bedroom (aka where I spend almost all my time at home), there has been a good couple of hours of "argh I had to go out in the ugh" once I get home


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Comments

[julian]

I don't really do New Year's things in January, and Samhain's more about the dead, for me. But the time of year surrounding Solstice, the turning, is just naturally a good time to be thinking about re-assessment and re-coordination.

I mean, I don't do *Resolutions*, as resolutions, but I tend to course correct. Focus more on exercise, or meditation, or whatever, just as a natural outgrowth of how I've been thinking/doing.

[jenett]

I do Samhain-to-Yule as a fallow period, so it's sort of 'end of old year, thinking about the new year, not doing anything about it yet'. But still, if you have to pick a pivot point, that's one.

I don't do resolutions either, but I do usually do a "Here's a thing I want to focus on more or get working better" which is then built into the rest of the ritual year.

[julian]

I have done that, in the past, and I think I'd like to build things *like* it into my regular practice. I've let it be more unstated and underground, the past few years.

[jenett]

I can talk in more length sometime soon about how I structure ritual year and some of what that means, if you'd be interested?

(i.e. not in a comment, but in the next couple of weeks? I need to write it up better anyway for students in the next couple of months, so.)

[julian]

Belatedly: always happy to read this sort of thing, yes!

[julian]

Also, I'm expecting this weekend to be chaotic, news-wise, since I'm going to the Adirondacks and will be netless, and the *last* time I did that, Charlottesville happened.

In more prosaic news, I didn't have my A/C set up most of this summer, and now that I've moved, I finally put it in, and wowwwww, what a difference.

[jazzyjj]

I am one of those New Year's Resolution types, but lately that's been rather dependent on my social life lol. But I think I've already got at least one thing in mind if it doesn't happen earlier. That is, better independent travel skills. This has kinda been a work in progress, but now that I have my first iPhone I *think* it should become reality. Or at least it has a better chance of becoming reality. There's one neighbor here in my building in particular who absolutely loves hanging out with me. He occasionally hangs out with other people, and those instances have increased just a bit. Don't get me wrong: he's a great guy and we love each other's company. But others have been telling me to get out more, and I want to do that. Or at the very least I want to go out more with friends and family.





I'm getting another new neighbor directly underneath me. I only met him briefly, but he seems like a nice guy. In addition, I was just informed that 2 other neighbors are soon going to move in together. They recently got engaged, and one of them has been living with another guy in my old apartment. But they're actually doing some apartment swapping, so the 2 who got engaged will be living in my old apartment and that other guy is taking her apartment. They are going to have the back room in the bigger apartment--which was my bedroom--made into a closet. We're not sure what will be done about the window in there though. But I never even mentioned this whole thing with the downstairs neighbors, lol! Nobody else here knows about it yet, but I've absolutely no doubt word will spread like wildfire.

[jenett]

That seems like a lot going on!

Negotiating the "I like spending time with you, but not quite this much time" is always awkward, I think. But the people who are actually my friends understand that.

(I limit my going out beyond work, absolutely necessary errands like groceries and prescriptions, and swimming for exercise very heavily, so I see none of my friends in person nearly as much as any of us would like.)

[pameladean]

I find January 1 a ridiculous time to start a new year, and try to ignore it. I foolishly resent the hell out of it as a time to start doing one's taxes. Ugh. I tend to have two minor new starts per yer, perhaps predictably in the spring and fall; it's all more tied to what one does or ought to be doing in the yard and garden, than to anything else.

P.

[jenett]

I like the idea of that! (It'd make mroe sense if I gardened, but!)

[pameladean]

I'm not gardening myself at the moment, but it's still a habit to take note of what's happening, when things emerge and bloom and so on. I've got a great book that divides the year into six seasons and says, wherever you are, if the snowdrops are blooming, that's pre-spring, and so on. So if you like observing things like that, it really works as well as gardening.

P.

[jenett]

In cheerful amusements, the motivational stickers arrived. (Here's the listing on Amazon)

I have an absurd amount of record editing and subject heading updating to do, so I am giving myself gold stars for editing journal titles (so they're consistent, and oh, not in all-caps) and motivational stickers for every 100 subject headings.

(My assistant snagged the sports ones out of this pack, and we split the rest. The penguins are adorable, also the turtles and bees, and I'm looking forward to a row of Halloween stickers for October. Like you do.)

[rmc28]

I work for the university I graduated from 19 years ago, and it starts the academic year on 1st October. Lectures etc start up a week or so after that, but many things on the student records system (which I support) kick off on 1st October.

1st October is also now my personal arbitrary "not dying of cancer" date; the first year I made a point of looking back at what I'd achieved, the second year I was too tired from work that day (which is its own kind of achievement in reclaiming my life) to do more than make a brief post of celebration. In general though, it has replaced the 1st January as my reminder to take a long-term look at my achievements and goals, and tweak my efforts accordingly, even if I don't do it exactly on the date.

A few years prior, I'd stopped finding making specific New Year Resolutions helpful, moving more to a "keep up the commitments you've already made, be cautious about adding new ones" frame of mind, and finding useful tools (shared calendars, Regularly app, specific blog posts) to stay on track with those existing commitments.

My employer shuts down from 25th December to 1st January, and is very firm about using up all leave in the calendar year, so I tend to get a long break from work at the end of December, but as that comes with a lot of extra childcare, it's never as useful for introspection and reflection as I'd like (plus there's a big social pressure to See Family combined with every means of transport being much harder to use because everyone is going to See Family).

[silveradept]

Work is really very year-round more than anything - the time period tends to alternate between "Story Time" and "Not Story Time", although we pay attention to things like the beginning of the school year or the calendar year.

I don't really have a personal new year as such, but I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I mostly have spent my adult life fitting in to other people's established traditions and not really making any of my own. And given the relationship I was last in, I never actually felt like I could establish those things as sufficiently important, because they would be subordinated immediately to the needs of the ought human and the pets should an emergency or an "emergency" appear.

I also don't really be much of a spiritual practice, either, which is something I think I want to get into, but because of a certain (trauma-based) hypervigilance about what someone else would think of it if they saw it, I've got a (possibly illogical and unreasonable) desire to keep that sort of thing well out of the view of anyone nearby.

The closest calendar of the year that I keep, I suppose, is the three seasons of sport - baseball, United States football, ice hockey. Which is funny, because most of the teams I follow don't end up on the post-season for very long at all, so there isn't much bleed from one to the other...

[alexseanchai]

I suspect your stated desire wrt visible spirituality is partly unreasonable. I am offering whatever assistance with overcoming the unreasonable bit that is reasonably within my power to offer. (you are certainly not obliged to accept)

And all things considered, I suspect that stated desire is partly totally reasonable! (see also: trauma.) I am not equipped to help with that part, but (bc this/that/the other; I bet you can guess) I empathize!

[silveradept]

Much of it is a "I'm not sure I actually know what I'm doing, so I don't want someone else around to make commentary on it." And some of it is, well, not knowing yet, so needing to get out and see some representative examples in the local area.

[alexseanchai]

Noted :)

[alexseanchai]

Religiously, I mark the New Year at Hekatombaion.01. (Today is 699.2.Metageition.19, until local sunset in a bit under 2.5h. We flipped from 699.1 to 699.2 when the sun set on Jul 13.) I led a ritual with Potomac Valley Palladium Demos of Hellenion the next day, in honor of the occasion; it went beautifully and—though, having moved to Oregon last weekend, the Maryland part of this will not be replicable next summer—I would quite like to make a tradition of it!

I also mark the anniversary of when Athena came knocked on my head, which is Jan 23. And because reasons, I just looked up the after-the-establishment-of-the-Olympics date of that occasion, and it's 698.2.Gamelion.3. I didn't realize the 3. The third of each month is sacred to Athena!

[cheyinka]

Some years ago I read a blog post by a Catholic priest that went something like, "Make your New Year's resolutions at the beginning of Advent, because that's when the new year really starts; waiting until January is like waiting to prepare for Christ's return until 8 days after he's already returned in glory", except not quite that diplomatically phrased. Making resolutions doesn't work out for me very well (executive dysfunction, autism, history of lack of family support) but I like the practice of thinking of the year as quote-unquote "really" beginning a month early, and when I do manage to keep a resolution from December whateverth until January first, it's one I'll typically be able to keep on keeping.

[artan]

Internal-personal-mystical year ends at Samhain(ish - not usually before 10/31, but there's sometimes a sort of death-throes period for up to 10 days) and starts on Winter Solstice.

Yes, this leaves a blank space. I would like that to be a inward-folding reflecting and considering time, but unfortunately it's usually filled with obligatory madness, from society, schools, or just anything else. On a deeper level though, somewhere in there, there's always a pause.

Start-of-year isn't sharp either. It starts in sort of newborn-fragile phase of to be celebrated but also not really able to manage much on its own yet. First-tradition at start-of-year is the sunrise greet, but after that things largely get swept along in the standard Christmasy++ festivities.

I don't do new years' resolutions. Change things now either as much as possible or sustainably. When they fail, change them now again.

[mrissa]

About 15 years ago I started making New Year's Resolutions on any day I thought of a thing I wanted to do better, on the theory that it could be the start of a new year. This has worked fine for me.