As always, let’s start with the numbers …

Physical Comics Read: 1 (31/32)
Digital Comics Read: 0 (471/471)
Trades/Graphic Novels Read: 0 (0/0)
Books Read: 7 (90/97)
Movies Watched: (/159)
TV Series Watched: 0 (49/49)
TV Seasons Watched: 1 (94/95)
Podcast Episodes Remaining: 83

I barely posted this month, and when I thought about that it seemed like I was barely doing anything and that’s not good because January should be the “good month”. Then I looked at these numbers and it was a lot better than I thought. I knocked out somewhere around 40 podcast episodes to bring my number 100 for the first time in years. And I read seven books. That’s really solid.

But … no comics? Well, except for the new ones I bought and the one back issue I found because it was on my want list (and which I forgot to review; I guess that will come soon). That’s not surprising because I find that I go back and forth on what I’m interested in on a regular basis. For instance, I’ll go for a couple of weeks where I don’t listen to a podcast episode because I’m listening to a lot of music. Similarly, I’ll set the comics aside for books or the books aside for comics. Since I got a few books for Christmas and had to read two books for Required Reading, I was really excited about what I had. And blew through some of those books very quickly.

But I was looking around the house yesterday and noticed how the “clean out” that I’d started at the beginning of the year had stalled. The reason is two-fold. First, all three of us had the flu in January and that meant putting those things aside for the suffering and recovery. Second, I have this habit of forgetting to finish things I put aside if there’s no mandate or deadline involved. I don’t know why aside from the fact that I usually get swept up in something that needs more immediate attention. On the one hand, I can get those immediate things done and done well; on the other, I’m complete shit at long-term planning. If you ask me what I want to be doing five years from now or what my plans are, I can give you a vague idea because I thought about it and may have written something down, but then there were appointments to make and papers to grade and errands to run, and and and … you get the picture.

I want to say that my lack of focus on the long-term is a common thing. Or at least I hope? I do feel sometimes like it’s a serious personality flaw even though it probably isn’t. I guess that’s what happens when you grow up around people who passive-aggressively criticize others for “not following through” or “leaving things unfinished” (and that also ties into my “I don’t tell anyone I’m starting something for fear of being asked about it when I don’t finish it” hangup). But I am getting to the age where long-term planning is important because we’re starting to hit some milestones in our lives and our kid’s life that are going to bring about pretty big changes in our day to day. Plus, as comfortable as some things are, there’s also the fact that might be something else out there.