The best chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream I’ve ever had I ate around ten years ago somewhere between Boston, Mass and Burlington, Vermont. David and I were driving to a Labor Day weekend wedding, and we stopped in a small town for a treat. The ice cream was luscious and thick, encasing chunks of cookie dough as big as cookies. The chocolate chips were thinly shaved melting in our mouths, and the sugar crystals in the dough ground between our teeth with a satisfying crunch.

I’m grateful for having tasted this ice cream but at the same time forlorn that the experience set the bar so high for any future chocolate chip cookie doughs I might encounter.

The towels on hand at our Airbnb in Brussels, Belgium many summers later set a similar lofty bar. They were bleach white, thin, and harsh against the skin, scraping off water and providing an invigorating exfoliation at the same time. We were only in Brussels for a weekend out of a trip of several weeks, but the memory of these towels followed me home to where my own towels, worn and soft from several years use, waited for me.

This year, as some of those same towels had started unraveling into threads at their edges, we decided to ask for replacements for Christmas. Thoughts of the standard setting Belgian towels occupied my mind as I composed my holiday wish list. I did a tentative Google search for “rough towels” in a regular browser (even though the term was titillating enough that I thought perhaps I should go incognito).

The results were unsatisfying. Turns out most every towel is advertised as soft.

I eventually settled on a thin waffle weave towel in pewter. Luckily, even though they were described as soft, the textured fabric provided enough roughness that I went ahead and ordered similar hand towels and wash clothes. Now for the first time in my life I have a full set of matching towels.

And all this talk of waffles has me wondering about one key detail of my ice cream experience that I can’t recall: did I choose a cup or a cone?

Two years ago I wrote a post about the challenges of improvement and how I found winning a Most Improved award somewhat embarrassing. In the time since that original post was published, I have continued to make improvements slowly but surely and mostly without embarrassment.

Enter 2020–the doorway to a new decade and when I hope to make another improvement to my life–an undertaking I’m referring to as the Onerous Self-help Challenge (OSHC) or the Onerous Self-help Task (OSHT). Calling it a challenge inspires me more than calling it a task, but I like how the latter acronym could be read as “oh sh*t.” Like “oh sh*t, I better take this on for the sake of my future self.”

The issue at the center of the “oh sh*t” is one I’ve been aware of for awhile but have had trouble making progress on because the work to address is it hard. Hence the O for Onerous.

In some ways, it’s like trying to accomplish a strict pull-up, another challenge I’ve struggled with over the past few years. I want to do a strict pull-up, and I’ve been close to doing it. But I’ve fallen off on my training multiple times because the work hurts (e.g., just gripping the bar can be painful).

In my original post, I talked about several obstacles to improving including not wanting to acknowledge the need for improvement. What I didn’t talk about then was the situation I’m facing now: being quite aware of the need for improvement but finding it formidable to undertake.

For me, it’s physically uncomfortable to grip a bar with my bare hands and hang for an extended period of time. But I have to be willing to bear that discomfort if I’m going to meet my pull-up goal. Similarly, it’s both physically and emotionally tough for me to confront my “oh sh*t” issue. I know that being able to sit with that discomfort is the challenge that lies ahead. It’s the skill I need to develop to tackle the “oh sh*t” and hopefully transform it into an “oh, okay” or maybe even into an “oh, yeah!”

Here’s hoping. Happy New Year.

Empty daily boxes. Months of vast blank space. On a giant poster size 2019 wall calendar meant to track my progress in adhering to daily habits. These would seem to suggest that I did not “WIN THE YEAR” as the heading of the calendar implied I should.

Although I started strong. With the January and February rows filled in with A’s and C’s–c’s for cleaning and a’s for my work on an art/social media project.

Long straight lines drawn with a blue fine tip dry erase marker after the fact signal the passage of time March through July. What if anything happened during this five month stretch with regard to my daily habits is left a mystery to the viewer.

I rallied for about a month and a half after my return from Europe at the end of the summer. That was when I tracked COW’s–(c)leaning, (o)nerous self help tasks, and (w)riting. The cute acronym kept me compliant until mid-September. Moo.

The COW’s could walk freely through the autumn months where next to nothing is recorded and stop to munch on the peach in the “I’m a Georgia voter” sticker that marks Election Day. I voted with only one issue on the ballot, which is a victory for democracy if nothing else.

The day that is most painful to me on the calendar is March 1st. There early in the year I’d written “LAUNCH” to motivate myself to make public my art/social media project. The one that was my New Year’s resolution.

But the launch date came and went without takeoff. Instead on March 6th, I gave up social media entirely for the duration of Lent, a victory for my soul perhaps, and progress toward another 2019 New Year’s resolution: use social media as a way to connect rather than compare. My fast helped me control the compare part, and the challenge of the connect part I’ll take with me into 2020.

I’ve written down New Year’s resolutions every year since 2015 and cut the paper into a 4×6 sheet I store in a photo frame that sits on my dresser. Sometimes I arrive at the end of the year to find a goal I’d hoped to achieved staring me down with its blatant undoneness like my art/social media project. But at the end of the year, I also take stock of what’s been done that wasn’t necessarily a resolution like running a marathon, visiting all the collections in the Louvre, and landing a job in 2019.

I’ve found making resolutions isn’t necessarily about meeting resolutions. It’s about taking the vague theoretical “maybe’s” or “one day’s” or “I know I should’s” and attempting to put them into practice. Some of my biggest growth breakthroughs have been trying to accomplish my “I think I should’s” and realizing they’re instead “I definitely should not’s.”

Setting intentions and making goals has helped me tackle a lot of low hanging fruit in building a better life. I’m increasingly finding that the work that lies ahead is higher hanging fruit, more painful to achieve. The kind that requires ladders and tenuous branches and temper tantrums where I assert just how much I don’t want to do (o)nerous self help tasks.

I’ll set my sights to victory in 2020 but I’m not sure yet whether I’ll record my progress on a giant gaping calendar I have to face from my bed every morning.

I write a lot about loneliness. Maybe a surprising amount given I’m married, I have a supportive family who I enjoy visiting, and I spend part of each day with other people whether that’s teaching classes or taking classes or leading tours or running with a running group or grabbing coffee with a friend.

I am not without people I care about and people who care about me. Yet, I can’t shake the nagging feeling that something is not right in my friendship world. And I think 90s and 00s sitcom television is to blame.

Because it’s the most obvious example, let’s consider Friends and the model of friendship it presents. Six people, three men and three women, form a tight circle. They know everything about each other, they’re there for each other no matter what, and they spend an inordinate amount of time gathered at a coffee shop.

The friendships that I have don’t fit this model. The people I feel closest too don’t necessarily know each other, and there’s no central place where I gather with them. My interactions are more one off or tied to a specific activity like a class or a show. They’re friendships of convenience to a certain extent, but does that necessarily make them less deep or worthwhile than the type of friendships portrayed on sitcoms?

I’ve spent time in my adult life deconstructing potentially harmful expectations around romance that I internalized as a child watching fairy tale movies about Prince Charming and dreaming of happily ever after. But until now, I haven’t given much thought as to how the models of friendship I was presented might have been unrealistic.

When the friends on Friends have parties, the other people who show up are for the most part completely unfamiliar to the audience–background extras who chit chat. Given the nature of most of my relationships, these are the characters that I identify most with. Up until now, I’ve considered this a shortcoming, an indication that I don’t really have friends. But I do have friendships, they just don’t look the way I expected them to when I was young.

It was Labor Day weekend, and I was consciously avoiding Facebook and Instagram. The year before I’d been bombarded with pictures of numerous acquaintances enjoying holiday weekend lakeside retreats that left me feeling friendless and inadequate. I was determined not to be subject to such jealousy again.

This past year, I’ve given up social media on all days but Tuesdays. On Tuesdays, I binge on my feed until I am overwhelmed with envy and hopelessness and am left wondering why I keep doing this to myself. Why not give it all up.

(Because my family is there. Because my memories are there. Because sometimes I find out about cool opportunities like this movement class I’m taking now. Because maybe it wouldn’t be so awful if I wasn’t such a self absorbed person. Because maybe I’m going to need to influence people again some day.)

The Labor Day weekend I withdrew myself from social media occurred before I’d developed my Tuesday rule, and it was a big accomplishment on my part to stay off of the platforms for a few days. I did it, waiting until all those happy boat pictures were buried down deep in my feed.

I was proud of myself, and then I went to pay someone for something on Venmo. Turns out, this platform has a feed it defaults to when you open the app, which shows you what things your contacts have been paying others for recently. Like freaking shared holiday weekend expenses. All that effort only to be foiled by Venmo!

Yesterday, which was a Monday, I needed to make a payment on Venmo. Of course, my eyes naturally scanned through the first few payments listed on the feed, and all of a sudden, I was swept up in the activities of people I barely know, some of whom I haven’t talked to in a couple years. They were paying each other back for food and drinks and outings to the movies (note: all of these were expressed as emojis and the amount of the actual payment was hidden). There were mysterious exchanges as well. For example, someone might comment the payment was for LOVE YOU (heart emoji).

I spent this past summer living in Paris and visiting all the collections in the Louvre. After I did this, it wasn’t apparent right away how this experience changed me. But one way I’ve noticed recently it did, and not to sound too snobby about this, was it made me realize how incredibly I could spend my time. I could give the minutes and hours of my life to learning about human history and witnessing the major achievements of artists throughout the centuries.

I’m no longer able to go to the Louvre every day, but I still want to dedicate 0% of my time to reading about the recent money exchanges of my Venmo contacts. Especially if they occur on holiday weekends. Especially if they’re going to make me jealous. Which they’re pretty much 100% guaranteed to do.