As always, let’s get started with the numbers …

Media consumed # (remaining/total)
Physical Comics Read: 0 (2/399)
Digital Comics Read: 0 (487/539)
Trade Paperbacks/Graphic Novels Read: 3 (28/42)
Books Read: 4 (120/176)
Movies Watched: 1 (114/143)
TV Seasons Completed: 3 (96/101)
TV Shows Completed: 2 (31/38)
Podcast Episodes Remaining: 162

This is supposed to be the uncollecting, right?

June (and early July sometimes) always brings with it a little bit of accumulation each year because my birthday is at the end of the month and I usually get some sort of media, especially books and trade paperbacks, as gifts. This year was no exception, and the gifts were compounded by the four or five books I checked out of my school’s library as the year ended so that I could read them over the summer.

I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of reading of comics despite the zero that you see there. They’ve mostly been current books, though, as I got pretty slammed with work during the first couple of weeks of June and the books from my pull list piled up. So I’m almost caught up to those. I’ve also gotten a DC Infinite subscription, so I have spent my time reading comics from the mid-1980s that I have been wanting to read but don’t own. I’d originally told myself that I was going to wait until I finished out my Netflix DVD queue before getting the DC subscription, but the iPad I got for my birthday changed that.

All of this is to say that July 1 feels like the first start of a reset. Or, to be more specific, yet another reset. I had a vacation last week and decided to take a few more days off from all of the “habit tracking” I’ve been doing, mainly because it helped my anxiety not to be so hyper focused on all of it. So with the new month, I’ve got a new workout calendar, a new “uncollecting tracking slip” (read: a tally sheet written on the back of a Far Side desk calendar page), and time to do all of this.

The goals, of course, have not changed, but I am wondering what I should set as a benchmark for progress. I have a love-hate relationship with benchmarks. I obviously find them necessary in some way, because they help you do short-term check-ins and adjustments. At the same time, I am working hard to shake a very ingrained attitude of “all or nothing” or “really have something to show for what you’ve done”, kind of a “second place is the first loser” mentality, the hardest thing about which is that it comes from the culture in which I was raised and not one source, like a person. So what happens is that I’ll be happy that I, say, knocked a significant number of something off a list, but then will simultaneously say “But that’s not really enough, is it?” It’s the struggle of wanting to do things quietly for your own self-satisfaction vs the need for a moment of public validation, because somehow we’ve come to believe that’s the only validation that’s acceptable.