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 |    My primary Writing.com blog. |
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Logocentric (adj). Regarding words and language as a fundamental expression of an external reality (especially applied as a negative term to traditional Western thought by postmodernist critics). Sometimes I just write whatever I feel like. Other times I respond to prompts, many taken from the following places:  "The Soundtrackers Group"  "Blogging Circle of Friends " "Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" "JAFBG" "Take up Your Cross" Thanks for stopping by!  |
I keep meticulous track of all the books, scripts, and comics I read every year. Plus the podcasts I listen to. But the one thing I don't do very often is write about the things I watch. I don't really know why I haven't until this point, but I recently noticed that a friend of mine writes up a "media consumption" post on Facebook every month and I thought I might start doing the same. To qualify for the list, it has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, it just can't be reruns of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I won't list the stuff I lost interest in quickly, but I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish. So without further ado, here's January's watch list: Viewing in Progress  Mayor of KingstownMovies  Dune Encanto Hotel Transylvania: Transformania! Matrix Resurrections, The Ron's Gone Wrong Sing 2 tick, tick... BOOM!Television And Just Like That... Book of Boba Fett, The Cleaning Lady, The (DNF) Peacemaker Real Housewives of OC, The Sex Lives of College Girls, TheI enjoyed a lot of the stuff I watched this month. Except Dune and Hotel Transylvania: Transformania which were pretty meh. I'm also only watching And Just Like That... (which feels like a soulless cash grab) and the evergreen dumpster fire than is RHOC because those are my wife's guilty-pleasure shows. I highly recommend Encanto and Ron's Gone Wrong which are both really touching animated movies that both kids and adults can enjoy. Peacemaker is delightfully crude and funny. But I'm going to try to do a single "top pick" each month and January's is... TOP PICK: The Sex Lives of College Girls Continuing Mindy Kaling's strong run as a television creator, it follows four college freshman who end up sharing the same dorm room: a spoiled rich girl, a lower-middle class awkward scholarship student, a star athlete, and a wild child. The four of them have realistic roommate chemistry (they don't all get along right away) as they all navigate sex and relationships, being out on their own and adulting for the first time, etc. It's really well written, smart and funny. I highly recommend it, especially if you like Mindy Kaling's other shows like Never Have I Ever... and her work on The Office or The Mindy Project. |
It's not exactly a secret, but the housing market in California sucks. Especially where I live in Southern California. In my current city, the median home price last year was $1,130,000, which is nearly a 25% increase in value year-over-year. The average home sells in under three weeks, the majority (75%) going for 5-10% over asking price. In this area, there's a general presumption that if you can afford a house before you're 40, it's because you either: (a) come from wealth; (b) lived like a college student for over a decade after graduating to save up; or (c) inherited the house (or money) from a deceased family member. There is some truth to that. For the past ten years (i.e., my thirties), everyone I knew who owned a house fell into one of those three categories. It's admittedly a relatively small sample size, but I don't think I knew anyone my age from the middle class who bought a house the "old fashioned way" where they graduated, got a job, and saved up for a downpayment. As I mentioned in my notebook a few months ago, my grandmother passed away on Halloween last year. Since she's the last grandparent standing (my grandfather passed away a number of years ago), her assets got divvied up among her four daughters. And since my mom passed away in November 2020, my brother and I received equal shares of the assets that would have gone to my mom. It was a fairly substantial inheritance. Enough that, when combined with what we already have in savings, it puts us just about where we need to be in order to afford a downpayment on a place of our own. Before you get too excited, it's still a bonkers seller's market so we're not rushing into anything. We're going to wait until the market cools off and we don't have to get into a bidding war with other buyer to see who can pay the most over the asking price, but it occurred to me in a somewhat somber moment taking care of my grandmother's affairs that I now fall into that category of people who can only afford California real estate because we inherited money from a loved one who passed away. It's a strange feeling. In early 2020, we were lamenting that we'd probably never be able to afford a house where we live. Or if we did, we'd be paying off the mortgage until we were in our eighties. Two years later, we have the money to buy a house but are faced with the reality that not only are we only able to afford it because my grandmother (and my mom) aren't here anymore, but that they'll never see the home that we buy and grow into with our family.  Ultimately, I'd give the money back in a second if it could buy even one more day with my mom and my grandmother. We'd happily give up the dream of ever owning a home if we could see and talk to them just one more time. We don't actually have that option, though, so we're going to try to buy a house and live there in a way that will do them proud ... ... just as soon as the housing market cools off a bit. Because over a million dollars for a modest three bedroom, two bath, 1,500 square foot home is still insane to me, no matter how much money we have in the bank.  |
As I mentioned in "2021 Reading List" at the end of December, I spent a good chunk of the past year reading The Bible in its entirety. This was the first time I've read it all; prior to 2021 I had read bits and pieces and chunks of it (some way more than others) in concert with many church sermons over many years, and even read entire books independently, but this was my first foray into all 66 books.Most people are familiar with the "big" ones. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Acts and Romans. Genesis and Revelation. Exodus, and Job, and maybe even the one that Samuel L. Jackson quotes in Pulp Fiction (Ezekiel). I read them all. And all the Psalms and Proverbs. Amos and Obadiah. Habakkuk and Haggai. Titus, Philemon, and Jude. It was ... a lot. But I'm glad I did it. Last year, I used the bible translation I was most familiar with, the New International Version (NIV). It's a standard, middle-of-the-road translation somewhere between formal equivalence (a word-for-word translation into English from the original texts) and dynamic equivalence (updating the translation to take into account comprehension and readability for the target audience). It's the bible I've been carrying to church for years. This year, my church decided to read it all the way through (following the reading plan and supplemental videos from The Bible Project ) and has incorporated a Saturday morning bible study into our routine. This year I decided to read the New Living Translation (NLT), which is a popular translation with more dynamic equivalence, bordering on paraphrase. I'm really liking it so far. It's easier to get into the stories of the Bible with more straightforward text, especially for someone who didn't grow up in the church and isn't as familiar with the content.Me on Saturday mornings in 2022: This is actually part of a larger project I'm undertaking with my Bible reading. I decided sometime last year that I'm actually going to spend the next five years reading five different translations of the Bible. I'm going to read from both ends of the spectrum, both formal and dynamic equivalence, in an effort to get a better understanding of and exposure to the text. As the pastor at my church is fond of saying, even if you take the religion out of it, the Bible as a piece of literature is fascinating. It's one of the oldest, most diverse, most translated books in history. There are more than twenty popular English translations of the Bible, not to mention hundreds other translations in both English and other languages. While I don't take the religion out of it because Christianity is my chosen religion, I'm looking forward to studying different translations and comparing and contrasting. I didn't come to faith until my 30s, and even now I struggle with the specifics of what I took on faith and signed up for. Then again, it's supposed to be a lifelong pursuit of greater understanding and deeper faith, so I might as well see where this journey takes me! For those of you reading who also read the Bible, what translation do you read? What do you like and dislike about that translation? After 2022 I still have at least three more translations that I'll have to select.   |
I finally signed up for a MasterClass subscription. This has been something I've been interested in checking out ever since they first introduced James Patterson's writing class years ago. At the time, I think it was $99 for each class on a case-by-case basis. They've now introduced an annual subscription where you get access to all 100+ course offerings as part of the membership. When you sign up, it asks you to select all the courses that interest you so that it can get an idea of what you want to learn. I tried to be selective and still managed to bookmark 38 classes which is about a third of the total number of classes they currently offer.  But so far, I'm really enjoying them. I'm currently taking James Patterson's class on writing (it only seemed fair to start with the very first one that appealed to me), and Tan France's Style For Everyone. Each class is broken up into anywhere from one to two dozen different lessons, and each lesson runs about ten minutes. So it's perfect for watching in little bite-sized increments that you can stop and start as needed.So far, I'm really enjoying it. I've picked up a couple of tips from James Patterson that I'm going to try incorporating into my own writing process this year as I try to shake the rust off and jumpstart my creativity again, and I'm picking up a ton of fashion tips from Tan France which has been eye-opening because I generally hate clothes shopping and feel like I know so little about fashion that what's even the point. But I now know what a capsule wardrobe is, and am kind of excited to start putting one together!  They're adding new classes pretty regularly and, like I mentioned above, there are already over one hundred available. I can learn from experts in their field about everything from writing to fashion, from food/cooking to leadership, and from lifestyle to games/hobbies. For someone like me who has a lot of varied interests, this MasterClass thing is really  .I'll be curious to see if watching MasterClasses cuts into my reading and other media consumption time this year, or if it's just another input that I'll be adding to an always-growing, ever-expanding list. Knowing myself the way I do, my money's definitely on the latter. |
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