I get on these self-improvement kicks. If, by “improvement” I mean “indulgent.” Right now, I’m on this kick of watching lots of movies.
Every once in a while, I remember that I haven’t seen all of IMDb’s Top 250, or that there are still films on Sight & Sound’s top 50, or in Sackett’s Box Office Hits that I’d like to see. And then this gets me all revved up to satisfy my completest desires. This month, I’ve already viewed 15 films for the first time, and I am rationally confident that I’ll eclipse 20 by 11:59 on the 31st.
I can pinpoint the reason why I got on this particular kick. It’s because I keep all sorts of lists about my life. And the answer to “why now?” is because, every January, I need to update my lists.
Of course, some of the lists don’t need updating just because the new calendar year began. My lists of People I’ve Live With, Cars I’ve Owned, and Times I’ve Been on an Airplane don’t suddenly change just because the calendar did. Actually, the list of People I’ve Lived With hasn’t changed since Emmett was born over two years ago. Sort of. The final column in that lists indicates my duration of cohabitation with said person, but I have that column indexed to the World Clock, so simply opening that file on my computer updates it to the precise number of days I’ve lived with a given person.
Honestly, I derive a singular chunk of happiness from maintaining these lists – the point, even, that I will behave in a manner that allows me to alter a list to my liking. For example, when I first created my list of Professional Baseball Games I Have Attended, I had only been to four MLB games: two in the 1980s, and two in the 1990s. Over the next decade, I added two more games to the list.
It was then that I noticed something: I had attended two MLB games every decade. Each time, it was a Twins’ game, but they played a different team each time. Obviously, then, I knew I had to attend two Twins games in the 2010s, and that I should strive to ensure they play against teams I’ve not seen yet. So now I’ve been to 8 MLB games, two in each decade, with the Twins playing the White Sox, Tigers, Rangers, Orioles, Yankees, Royals, Athletics, and Indians; respectively. The Twins currently hold a 5-3 lead in their “Games with James” series.
And since the Twins are not the only professional baseball team within sane travel distance, I also track my attendance at Saints games. I only attend Saints games in Leap Years, to the point that I even turned down a friend to accompany him at a game in 2015. Sorry, Eric, you were a year early.
But January does mean I have to update my Timeline of My Life, in which each month is given its own row, and I color in cells to indicate life events that transpire over several months (such as employment, or places of residence) and fill in major life events (such as graduating, children, and vacations). It also means I have to update my Ultimate Calendar, in which I briefly note interesting activities in my life, and I bold line in between each year, and assign each year the next in a series of four rotating colors. 2017 is yellow. 2016 was green. It also means I have to update my Word of the Year list. I list one or two words or terms that I became aware of or that grew in importance for me over the past year. Terms I’ve listed in years gone include Flyboat, Doula, Geocaching, Dunnage, and KonMarie.
Ensuring my files were in an acceptable state for 2017 drew my attention to my list of movies and, well, here I am watching films nearly every night. Except tonight, since I am updating this. I know that just sounds like I’m spending my