- GR and I will re-up the lease on our apartment, partly because we like our current pad but mostly because we don't want to have to move again already. We'll start making tentative, slouching moves towards homeownership (including but not limited to my figuring out why everyone is always complaining about property taxes).
- I'll get a full-time job. I'll also go on the academic job market again in the fall, for the third and maybe final time.
- I'll visit a new state, and/or explore a new major city of a state I've already visited.
- I'll keep working at those guitar lessons. I won't be consistent about practicing and will remain firmly at novice level, but I'll make some progress.
- GR and I will see Hamilton, courtesy of Broadway in Chicago.
- [Insert an extensive amount of angsty dithering about how or whether I should include on this list the don't-get-excited-it's-still-TBD possibility of GR and I "starting a family," which will likely become the subject of its own blog post. (The angsty dithering, that is. Why does it feel so fraught?)]
How prescient I actually was:
- Behold, possibly my wrongest-ever prediction. GR and I didn't re-up our lease and instead made aggressive moves towards homeownership that yielded a house by May, followed by months of renovation work that trickles on to the present day. I know so much about property taxes now that I personally contested our tax assessment when it came in during the fall. (I did not succeed. I fought the law and the law didn't "win" so much as "laugh dismissively at the idea that I thought myself capable of trying.")
- 50/50 on this one. I signed on full time with Beige, Inc. in February, and then quietly let this year's academic job market proceed without me.
- Success! In November, GR and I spent an extended long weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico (both a new state and new city for me), in which we experienced Meow Wolf, hiked through Tent Rocks, and burned our Midwestern tongues off with red chiles.
- Nope. Home buying, followed immediately by home renovation, became Linda's Dominating Hobbies of 2019.
- Had a couple of near-miss opportunities on this one, but ultimately: failure.
- A baby, guys! It's happening.*
* To be fair, though, I never did actually address the question I posed in my 2019 predictions list: Why did I feel so squirrely about saying "Hopefully I will get pregnant this year"? Even referring to it euphemistically and in brackets felt like nudging into a taboo. But why? Some theories:
1) The common gendered bullshit. Our nation boasts a long, rich history of deliberately making women feel uncomfortable about their own bodily functions, including fertility. (A fun/famous example: in the 1952 I Love Lucy episode announcing Lucy Ricardo/Lucille Ball's pregnancy, the show was barred from actually having the characters say the word pregnant, because it was considered vulgar by CBS's censors.)
2a) The desire to protect one's own privacy in the event of infertility and/or miscarriage. (It can be painful to state your intentions publicly to the world, only to have those intentions agonizingly frustrated.)
2b) The feeling that, if you were to experience infertility and/or miscarriage, these experiences are somehow shameful or reflect poorly on you and should be kept secret (see "common gendered bullshit," above).
3) The run-of-the-mill discretion most of us usually exercise when it comes to, ahem, intimacy/bedroom topics.
As far as I can tell, when you maintain the cone of silence around "family planning," you're simultaneously capitulating to sexist tradition and honoring the wisdom of approaching sensitive topics delicately. There's no right answer.
Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2020:
- Our baby will be born within a day or two of the estimated due date. GR and I will greet our newborn still undecided about their name.
- We will not take our baby on an airplane. However, we will travel with the baby to a different state. (Wisconsin counts but will be something of a cop-out way to fulfill this prediction.)
- In contrast to the 2016 Presidential Election -- every twist and turn of which I followed closely for months -- I will self-preservationally keep my distance from the 2020 election circus and will pretty much just show up to vote.
- I will spend fewer days in hospitals and/or rehabilitation centers than I did in 2019.
- I will either 1) go to one museum that I've never visited before, or 2) go to a concert for a band I've never seen live before.
- I will get an Instagram account, roughly five to seven years after everyone else jumped aboard that particular social media train. I will use it mostly for lurking and will actively avoid posting baby photos out of paranoid privacy concerns.
