About a month ago - in fact, almost exactly a month ago - this corner of the Internet turned thirteen years old.
When I was thirteen years old, I was heading into the eighth grade, had a major obsession with the Sci-Fi-for-Teens show Kyle XY on ABC Family, and was relatively confident that this was the year I was finally going to have my first kiss (I did not). Only four years later, when I was seventeen years old, I started this blog.
Had I given birth to a baby - that stale and boring summer between Junior and Senior years of high school, when I would reliably boot up the shared computer in my parents' room every afternoon, to check the handwritten list of URLs I had curated in the back of a notebook - instead of a blog, I would have a middle schooler on my hands. If the Disney Channel Original Movies of my youth are to be believed, this would have been the year they found out they were secretly a mermaid.
Thankfully, instead of back-to-school shopping for training bras and awkward conversations around a well-worn copy of American Girl's The Care and Keeping of You, I get to spend my days pursuing such self-directed insanity as sending 40+ slide PowerPoint decks dedicated to sections of Shakespeare's The Tempest to my brother, compulsively reading backlist mass market paperbacks about vampires and aliens and psychics falling in love, developing a dangerously dependent relationship and pseudo-retail-addiction with my local secondhand store bookshelves, and occasionally remembering to actually talk about it all on this blog.
Again, I celebrated this anniversary a month ago, and this is the first time you're hearing about it. Clearly, if anything has managed to develop in the space between my ears within the last twelve months, feeling some kind of obligation to regularly update my blog on my various daily goings-on is certainly not one of them.
(In the spirit of transparency: I've been doing a mind-warpingly awful amount of travel, have been dedicating quite a lot of time and attention to my OTHER internet project, and most recently, in the spirit of "seasonal transitions give me depression," decided to read five-and-counting Romance novels off of my Kindle within the space of a week. Just in case you were feeling left out.)
So, you might be wondering, how did I spend my bloggoversary this year?
I listened to a bookish podcast while getting ready in the morning, before I realized that I have an extremely limited amount of mental capacity to listen to just about anything while I'm cooking. Certain playlists on my Spotify have the ability to make getting out of bed a minutes-long affair, rather than a nearly hour-long one, but I don't think that I'll ever be able to effectively navigate my morning to the sound of people talking. And then there's the other issue: the difference between a podcast about books, and conversations with friends, is that you can't interrupt the other person when they unleash a blisteringly bad take.
I read for an hour while my zucchini bread was baking in the oven. While there absolutely - at least, in my experience - is a documented and significant correlation between those who enjoy reading and those who enjoy baked goods, no one ever really talks about how great of an excuse having something in the oven is when you just want a little bit of time to yourself. The ten-minute bouts between batches of cookies are especially good for delegating some attention to other kitchen chores - you can unload a dishwasher in ten minutes, spend another ten clearing off countertops, and then another organizing the fridge - and at the end of it, you are rewarded with not only fresh cookies but a clean kitchen, which generates the kind of euphoria in my brain that others might find only accessible through hard drug use. Zucchini bread, on the other hand, requires over an uninterrupted hour of baking, which makes for a great reason to sit on my couch and pick up a novel, while the entire floor of the house begins to smell of delicious things.
I went to Barnes and Noble. Shocker! I do this every year for my bloggoversary, for the celebratory purpose of picking up some of the books I've specifically saved for that occasion. Thanks to the traditions of years past, my bloggoversary had become one of the only times a year I can justify paying full price for hardcovers, and thanks to choices made during my Fifth Bloggoversary, I typically pick up five titles each year. However, much to my chagrin, arriving at this well-known establishment quickly revealed to me that they had, once again, decided to reorganize all of the shelves and store layout. This, coupled with some pretty dramatically bad shelving mistakes, means I only ended up purchasing three books:
Emily Wilde's Encylopaedia of Faeries: A Novel, Heather Fawcett
The Way Home: Two Novellas from the World of The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
The Best American Food Writing 2022, ed. Sohla El-Wayly
At only three titles, that still ended up setting me back $80. How on earth are some people only buying books new? I maintain that reading is one of the most cost-effective past times you can pursue as a general hobby - thanks to things like The Library, secondhand and discount retailers, ebook sales, and lending books with friends - but damn, aren't these publishers and bookstores making it difficult?
I bought myself some reading snacks from Trader Joes. I had originally restricted myself to a short list: at the age of 29 years old, I know myself well enough that to roam untethered in a Trader Joes is to suffer a short blackout and emerge from the mental fog back in the car with multiple bags of groceries in the backseat, so I knew that some kind of structure was necessary. I had optimistically thought that tags like "something bubbly," "something spicy," and "something creamy" would direct my focus a little more intentionally, but I ended up scrapping it completely and just picking things up that looked good. Meringues, s'mores bars, strawberry beverages, buffalo almonds, pickle cheese curds, and more...
I scooted over to my local library to pick up a hold of mine that had just come in: The Fourth Wing, by Rebecca Yarros. It has undoubtably become one of the buzziest books of the year, thanks to BookTok reviewers, and what seems to be a universal penchant for books about dragons and love triangles. Billed to me as "Horny How to Train Your Dragons," I had originally placed a hold after a handful of confused conversations with my brother about how seemingly everyone on the Internet was talking about this book, then dedicatedly waited over two months for the hold to come in. (Naturally, the other 44 people waiting for their own holds after me ended up weighing far too much on my conscious, and I ended up returning it early.)
I worked on the final slide deck for my Sibling Book Club I have with my brother, where we spent the month of July reading The Tempest together. It was a tremendously rewarding experience, one I'm still debating on dedicating a higher word count to on this blog later, so all I'll say at this point that one of the most beneficial things I think you can do for yourself before 2024 hits in about four months, is picking one of the funniest people you know and deciding to read Shakespeare with them.
And while that was the extent of my actual Bloggoversary Day celebrations, it didn't end quite yet. Because I had only picked out those three books from Barnes and Noble, I made myself the promise that if I was able to locate any of the other titles on my list while on vacation, I would be allowed to purchase one or two more at an independent bookstore of my choice. Thankfully, while in Sunriver, Oregon, with my family, I was able to track down Lost in the Moment and Found by Seanan McGuire, much to my immense relief.
And how do I feel about it?
Maybe it's because I've been doing this all for so long... maybe because I've been checking out a lot of library books this year, during my Book Buying Ban of 2023, so picking things up new doesn't hold a lot of shine for me... maybe it's because we're so busy, that my brain is already more subsumed under a million other focuses... I don't know.
At certain points, it felt like less of a special occasion, and more of an obligation, which is a bummer of a way to feel about a happy anniversary.
It doesn't help that I'd been massively trapped in a Summer Slump since the very beginning of July, and had barely gotten through three books in total that month. I'd only managed to publish once on the blog, which meant that it didn't feel like there was a ton to celebrate in that arena, either.
Yeah, I celebrated my thirteenth bloggoversary a month ago. It's pretty cool that I've had something to call solely my own for that long, and that I've kept it going while so many other hobbies have still managed to fall by the wayside as I've gotten older. Whether I'll ever be the maintainer of the "perfect" blog I desired - the kind I'd painstakingly stalk through that summer before I started Senior year - it's a space that has just as much to say about me and how I've grown up, as the stacks of journals I've been keeping in notebooks since I was in middle school. It's telling a whole story on its own, beyond the ones I talk about in its text.
Happy Thirteenth Year, Playing in the Pages.
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