books, classes, and New Years Eve toasts

This was the first year I can remember where nobody bought me a single book, so of course I bought a couple for myself with holiday money. I only bought two, which is an entirely reasonable number of books, okay subconscious? Shush. That is as many print books as I read in the second half of last year, so really I have almost reached a book equilibrium, I just need to work on the "sell old books back to the secondhand bookstore" part of the equation, especially now that I am reading more library books on Libby.

I am currently trying to find a good, free, text-to-speech reader that will do PDFs so I can listen to the reading for my qualitative research design coursework while knitting. But! I just turned in my first week's assignment, and so consider myself Officially A Student again, just in time for the old year to depart.

So let me lift my small glass of tawny port and toast the changing of the years:
May we be better people, people we love to be and make each other happier for it.
May we embody the kindness and accountability we need the world to reflect.
May we live, laugh, and love unironically, and be the kind of basic that mediocre white men secretly envy.
May we celebrate the lives of those who came before us, those whose lives ended this year, and those whose existence is a fragile reflection of the systems we have been forced into - and may we take a half-brick in a sock to those systems.