Month: December 2020

2020 New Foods

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I made a resolution to try at least one new recipe or restaurant every week of 2020. This was easier some weeks (e.g. travel weeks) than others (e.g. deep in burnout, months into quarantine weeks) so there were a handful of weeks where I either only ordered from restaurants I’ve eaten from before or only cooked familiar old recipes.

This was a good exercise for me, as keeping this goal in mind did push me to try to order from new restaurants, at the very least, and to find new recipes to cook. But it did feel like a lot of pressure to try new things when I really wanted the comfort of familiarity during this difficult year. (For example, I would have liked to support restaurants more regularly, even though I don’t regret supporting different restaurants week to week.)

Here’s how I did, by week number of the year:

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2020 in Books

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Quarantine led many people to read more books than they’ve read in a long, long time, with so much time freed up and a re-dedication to supporting local bookstores. Book clubs were a big thing this year for staying social, too, as reading became a lot more trendy in the social media circles I follow.

Well, for me… my commute remains my primary dedicated reading time and space, so when I stopped having a commute in March, I stopped reading for a long time, too.

Needless to say, it was another year of falling disappointingly short of my books goal, coming up shorter on my Goodreads challenge than ever before. It stings a bit to think of the years that I far surpassed the number of books I aimed to read, and that those numbers far exceed how many I got through this year. But I’m not too beat up about it, I know how difficult this year was and the only reason I read as much as I even did was because of many bouts of stressed and anxious insomnia. Probably half of my reading was done between 2-6am this year, hours that I am usually not awake for at all.

Here was 2020 in books completed:

Collage of covers for books read in 2020
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2020 in Film

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So…
… it’s been a really rough year for movies, among other things. I can’t even really differentiate movies I watched in theaters and not, since movies stopped being shown in theaters a long time ago and many movies that I was looking forward to seeing this year have been delayed to next year.

In the olden days , I’ve noted the exceptions that were watched outside of their theatrical release, as in I had to watch them on a streaming service or even on an airplane. Well… this year, the only movies I saw in theaters were originally released in December 2020. Every new release I saw this year was on a streaming service. (I only saw 2 movies in theaters, back in January.)

But I did still watch a lot of movies, many of which were released this year.
(If you’d like to see every movie I watched this year, regardless of release year, you can check my Media Log.
I am thinking tracking movies on Letterboxd next year, after years of neglect, so let me know if that is something you use and you can add me!)

Without further ado, here are the 2020 releases I saw this year:

Collage of posters for movies watched in 2020
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2020 Media Log

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Inspired by my friend Ben Hong, who got the idea from Jen Myers, I am continuing the practice of tracking my media consumption this year. This will now be replaced with a 2021 media log, which I will update regularly on its dedicated page. Here are all the movies, shows, books, albums, games, and more that I logged this year.

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Looking Back on 2020

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… this year was an unconventional one, wasn’t it? I thought about not doing this post at all, as I was looking forward to it less than any of the other year-end posts (and I was… dreading doing any of the year-end posts, if I can be honest). But I had a very nice first 2 months of the year and the rest of the year could have gone so much worse. While the year had fewer milestones and events to look back on compared to years past, there are still little things here and there to remember. It’s good to look at the highlights of the year, no matter how difficult it was, perhaps in spite of how difficult it was.

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