Chapter 17: Holiday Break
It is now a New Year. I can confirm this one simple truth because as I write this, I am cuddled up with blankets and coffee on New Year’s Day and nursing my yearly cold that tends to appear around the holidays on a holiday break. Due to the holiday season and the aforementioned illness, the first edition of Notorious Notes of 2020 is set to ring the New Year in with a whimper rather than a roar. It can’t be helped, so join me on this first bumpy ride into the whining twenties.
The holidays can be a trying time for some, especially those with seasonal depression. The lack of sunlight and stress of capitalistic gift-giving, plus the introspection of having to quantify how your year has gone while comparing it to others, can make one just want to hibernate until the weather improves and the hard stuff is over.
I do my best to combat these bad feelings by tanning and tempering expectations for the season. As a Christmas baby (being born two days after the sacred holiday), there is added pressure and stress for me this time of year.
For the last few years, I had resigned myself to spending my birthday with close family and achieving some personal goals as opposed to trying to have a get-together with friends. With every passing year, I’ve come to understand that getting friends together during the holiday season can be a daunting, stressful, and often disappointing task, especially because I’m already bad at planning social events, to begin with. This year I decided to go out on a limb and try to get some people together.
Holiday Break
All I really wanted was to play some board games with some friends but I decided to make a bit of an event out of it so I rented out a room at the local board game shop/bar called Mox Boarding House and put out feelers to friends I knew would at least appreciate some board games.
The room could only accommodate about ten people and it was a bar, which further limited the planning of such an event due to age restrictions. One thing I have learned since leaving college and going out into the adult world is that it is a very difficult task to plan events catered to everyone and/or find a time that people are available for.
I’ve had to accept and teach myself that It is okay to say no to an invitation if it doesn’t appeal to you and on the other side of the coin, it is okay to not invite everyone to your event if you don’t think they will enjoy it. Making the time to spend with friends or getting a group together to do an activity that you want to do has become more difficult the older I’ve gotten and it’s still a priority that I am trying to balance with the rest of my life. Anyway, the board game event went way better than I expected and I had a lot of fun.
I’m glad that I went out on a limb to try planning something new with friends for my birthday. I still took the rest of the weekend to do some more low key stuff that allowed me time to recharge from the big hard (but totally worth it) social event.
New Year’s Eve
Similarly, I tend to not go out for New Year’s Eve due to the loudness, overwhelmingness, and to be honest the overall danger of the even so I decided to ring in the first year of the 2020 decade (and coincidentally, the last year of my twenties) in a way that I love doing: playing Pokemon and watching Star Wars. Christmas was also a similar story because I am perfectly content celebrating major holidays in a low-key, calm nature with my partner.
But I didn’t just end 2019 with low-key celebrations and small get-togethers. I was also able to squeeze in one more wrestling match at Lucha Libre Volcanica, which ended up being one of my favorite matches of the year, and another venture outside the box when I performed with/for SpecScript, a podcast where performers read a script for an existing television show that was written by somebody who’s never seen it. Ran by the incredible Chris Khatami, the podcast was recorded at a small bar in the University District of Seattle and the script we read was for the reality show, Survivor.
This particular episode boasted a cast half full of people from the wrestling world, as Ethan HD and AEW referee Aubrey Edwards had also joined the reading.
Obviously there were also a bunch of comedic talents I met for the first time that evening (all of whom of which were very funny) and a few of them did some stand up for the pre-show. I was even allowed to read some of my poetry as part of the pre-show, so if you ever wanted to hear me actually finish a poem (or three), I highly recommend listening to the Survivor episode of SpecScript when it comes out, or just subscribe and listen to all of them because it’s a very funny show.
A Different Kind of Performance
I definitely had a lot of fun doing a different kind of performance and I look forward to hopefully doing another episode in the future. Anyway, that’s all from me for this week. I honestly almost forgot I needed to do one of these this week, so hopefully, it shook out alright. Thanks for reading and Happy New Year. (Oh and a BIG thanks to the people who sent me stuff from my Amazon Wishlist!) Hope you enjoyed this holiday break.
The world is your burrito!
Upcoming Dates:
- I have no confirmed January dates yet. Stay tuned!
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