NoJoMo 23:2 in NoJoMo 2023

What are your goals for this month?

So this morning, I thought I wouldn’t have an answer to this question. I don’t “do” goals, much like I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, because I don’t think of anything in my life as endgame. I have things I want to do, but often no clue how to go about doing them. It’s like the Alan Rickman quote on my profile says, “I’ve never been able to plan my life, I just lurch from indecision to indecision.”

But this morning, I realized I want to pitch an article to Burlington’s free weekly newspaper, Seven Days. The topic, I’m keeping close to the vest, because (1) I’m not sure how it will pan out and (2) it’s a topic that tends to have a rather, shall we say, inflammatory response. (Okay, in the interests of teasing: It’s not Israel or Palestine. But that’s all I’m going to say right now.)

This would be my first publicly-accessible published piece. Technically, I’ve been published in an Indiana University pressbook before, when I took a class called The History of American Popular Music and, for my final paper, wrote a piece on the history of sampling and whether it’s made music better. (My conclusion: Yes it has. I will be taking no questions on this, at least until every still-alive member of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones publicly admit that they stole from Black blues and R&B artists and apologize for it.) Unfortunately, I don’t have the live link anymore and IUPUI -the satellite campus I attended for a year and a half- and I are not simpatico because… Honestly, it’s too long a story to get into here, but the conclusion is, “So I transferred to UMass Lowell in 2021 and finished my undergrad this past summer, and when I do become a wealthy and successful writer and IUPUI tries to claim me as a former student, I will smear them like a wall in the padded room in an old-timey insane asylum, and they’ll fuckin’ deserve it.”

So that’s a goal; or, as I prefer to think of it, “something I’d like to get done” this month. Other things I’d like to get done before December 1st:

-Not miss the re-enrollment deadline for my health insurance (we shall see if the government shuts down and how that might affect open enrollment)
-Set up a sleep test, as it’s come to my attention that I may have sleep apnea¹
-Pack like an actual adult for my vacation in Indianapolis for Thanksgiving
-Try and keep up with skin flooding

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¹Wouldn’t be a huge surprise, honestly: My mother has it, my sperm donor has it, and I’m pretty sure my brother does, too. But I won’t be able to think of my own sleep test without thinking of comedian Dave Hill’s story about his, in Dave Hill Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, where he snored so loudly that people throughout the entire floor could hear him.