#2019 #yearinreview #eldercare #assistedliving #transition #americansignlanguage #ASL #signlanguage #patreon #developmentaleditor #selfpublishing #smallpress #rarebooks #dealer #thc #legalmarijuana #certification #topten #movies #books #recommendations 

Greetings, my long lost friends! And my apologies for not getting any new blog entries posted during the entire second half of 2019. There's a simple reason I wasn't able to do so, which is that my life suddenly got a whole lot busier starting last August, when my elderly parents officially began the transition that has eventually led to them moving into an assisted living facility, a move which is coming right after Christmas. It's been an event-filled six months, ones with lots of highs, lows, new knowledge about subjects I never knew anything about before, and weekly train trips between Chicago and St. Louis. The problem, though, is that the first thing all these eldercare guides say about eldercare is not to talk about eldercare online, because of there being just such an overwhelming amount of predators who are scouring the internet precisely to find out information about medications to steal, empty houses to break into, elderly people with diminished capacities to take advantage of, etc.

That's essentially kept me on a media blackout for the last six months, since all this has taken up so much of my time that I literally haven't had the space or energy to write about anything else; and this is not to mention that nothing else has really been going on with me anyway, in that I had to shut down my American Sign Language (ASL) classes and meetups during this process, barely got any freelance work done, acquired almost no new rare books, etc. But the process is nearly over, which means that I'm finally putting some ambitious plans together again for 2020, including turning this blog back into a more general one (as opposed to one specifically devoted to sign language, like it was during the first half of 2019), and with any luck getting a new blog entry posted every Monday throughout next year. I thought I'd do a little bulletpoint rundown of everything else I'm hoping to accomplish next year, but with fuller explanations being saved for further blog entries next month...

• To begin with, after years of friends encouraging me to do so, I have finally started a Patreon account, although with a twist; that since I don't want to go to the trouble of a bunch of new activities for high donation amounts, I'm only asking people for $1 a month, in return for a centralized newsletter each Friday that will share the links to all my latest book reviews, movie reviews, blog entries, Flickr photos, Instagram photos, and interesting news items at Twitter. Or, well, technically there's a $2 level as well, which gets you access to a second newsletter with original content not shared with the general public online; but I'll get into that a lot more with my next blog entry here, right after the new year.

• Again based on encouragement from friends, I've decided to once again pivot my freelancing goals for 2020 as well, and really dive heavily into the attempt at getting jobs being a “developmental editor” for self-publishing and basement-press authors. This is basically the job I did when I was running my own small press — I help authors take a big-picture look at their manuscript, identify general sections that need to be majorly reworked, then go in with them and edit the actual writing on a micro scale until it's finally ready to be published — which I've come to learn is a much sought-after skill among self-publishing writers these days, and in theory could earn me enough money that I could stop doing all other forms of freelancing, which would be great. Again, a lot more on this in a separate blog entry next month.

• And then when it comes to the other major way I make money in my life, by selling rare books at eBay, after upping my game in 2019 by starting to attend estate sales here in the Chicago area every Saturday (which literally kicked up my monthly revenue around 500 percent from what it was), in 2020 I'm leveling up again by finally joining the Midwest Antiquarian Booksellers Association, which will let me put together a traveling table setup and start selling books at actual physical events, like the annual Printers Row Book Fest here in Chicago and more. I have no idea what will come of this, whether it will be a highly profitable endeavor or a complete waste of my time, but I thought it'd be worth at least trying it out and seeing what happens.

• Oh, and the ASL lessons are back on, by the way, with the goal in 2020 being to finally get to a knowledge of 5,000 terms, a nice basic goal since this is typically the amount of terms a child learns through cultural osmosis by the time they're five and are ready to enter school and learn how to read and write. That should make me truly conversational in sign language for the first time; although with me only currently knowing around 1,500 terms, that means a schedule of ten new words a day, every single day for an entire year. Can I do it? Well, helping me out is the fact that I now run Meetup.com's one and only group dedicated to Chicago social meetups for ASL students and the larger Deaf community; and we'll be doing weekly practice nights all through 2020, in a variety of neighborhoods all over the city, so that should go a long way towards helping me stay active. If you're in Chicago and learning ASL yourself, please come out and join us!

• Let's see, and what else? Well, after three years of mediocre results, I've decided to finally get serious about getting good at home breadmaking; I'm planning on buying my first-ever electric bicycle; after a fascinating year of owning a Fitbit, I've decided it would be interesting to start doing a more comprehensive record of health stats, and am planning on acquiring home testing machines for blood pressure, glucose and cholesterol; and with marijuana becoming legal in Illinois on January 1st, I've decided to start exploring the wide world of non-weed THC consumption more, including edibles and dabbing, plus thought it would be fun to try growing my own plants for the first time simply because I can, plus am planning on obtaining the Illinois Dispensary Agent Certification, just in case I find myself with an opportunity to work part-time at one of the city's growing amount of THC stores. (Hint, hint — if you hire me, you can advertise a repeating day each week when Deaf customers are welcome.)

Like I said, the good news for all of you is that all this is precipitated on me getting a new blog entry up here once a week next year, so I hope you'll have a chance to come by regularly for the latest. And as an enticement to do so, I thought I'd end today by sharing my 13 favorite books I read and 13 favorite movies I saw in 2019, out of the approximately 150 of each that I made it through this year. I read barely any new books in 2019, so my best-of list for them is a mix of titles from throughout the years and decades; but the movie list I tried to limit to films that have only been released in the last year or two. I hope you enjoy, and here's hoping for a safe, fun and productive 2020 for everyone.

FAVORITE BOOK READS OF 2019

Adjustment Day, Chuck Palahniuk. This often misunderstood criticism of the alt-right gained controversy over being written as an alt-right fantasy; but as usual with the author of Fight Club, the reality of this book is much more complicated and subtle.

The Burning World, J.G. Ballard. As part of “The Great Completist Challenge” I do at Goodreads, I'm reading the entire oeuvre of New Weird author J.G. Ballard in order of publication these days; this is one of his first, on the surface a traditional sci-fi tale but hinting at all the craziness that would come a decade later.

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett. And along those lines, I've decided to read the entire “Discworld” series in order for the first time too. Here's the very first one; fans claim the series gets better as it goes, but I found this to be really great on its own, Lord of the Rings meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Ice, Anna Kavan. The Paris Review's website overview of underappreciated female writers throughout history is what brought me to this forgotten genius of Mid-Century Modernist science-fiction, with a tumultuous life that led to a short career that was intensely loved by a small cult audience, but buried by all the manly men authors and editors of the time who were so threatened by the success of women writers. 

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry. An 800-page, Pulitzer-winning traditional Western saga? Yes please! It's McMurtry, simultaneous author of sentimental titles like Terms of Endearment and hipster stories like The Last Picture Show, so you know he's going to do a surprising, engaging, captivating job.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb. The closest I got to reading a contemporary trendy title this year, it's an Irvin Yalom-type memoir from a psychotherapist who unpacks the therapy process in plain language, plus mixes in her own issues. Illuminating and charming.

Pop. 1280, Jim Thompson. A later-career noir classic from the guy who gave us The Killer Inside Me, which I specifically sought out because it's the next film adaptation from Greek surrealist Yorgos Lanthimos (The Lobster, The Favourite). The darkest story you'll read next year, the fact that it was published in the shiny Mid-Century Modernist early-'60s is even more incredible.

Revelation Space, Alastair Reynolds. Huge complicated hard-science space opera done right. A sweeping tale encompassing numerous planets and a head-scratchingly obtuse climax, it's just the start of a sprawling, fan-loved series.

The Revisionaries, A.R. Moxon. This just snuck in under the December 31st wire, the hugely impressive New Weird debut of this “The Wire Meets Haruki Murakami” author. It's super-long and sometimes gets super-abstract, but worth it for the incredibly inventive visuals and '80s-throwback “Illuminati!” conspiracy plot.

The Revolution Was Televised, Alan Sipenwell. I'm late to the game on this one, a historical and critical look at the rise of the “Peak TV” era in the early '00s. I'd already watched about half of these, ranging from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Battlestar Galactica; so the fact that the book convinced me to go back and revisit most of them over the last year is impressive.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, John Le Carre. Another author in my Great Completist Challenge, this is the spy author's third novel but the first to become a huge hit, from the same years as the start of James Bond but presenting an MI-6 that's much darker and more incompetent than that more famous franchise.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood. The much ballyhooed latest novel by the Postmodern master, which just happens to be a sequel to her more famous book, The Handmaid's Tale, which just happens to be going through a cultural renaissance because of the popular “#MeToo” TV adaptation currently being made of it. Surprise — it's funny, inventive, timely, and maybe one of Atwood's best books of her career, despite being written in her eighties.

Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. 2019 was the year I officially began to learn American Sign Language, because of my increasing deafness in middle-age; I read a ton of Deaf culture and Deaf history books as part of that, but here's one of them that's particular good for a general audience, in which a hearing woman whose father was a Deaf teacher reminiscences about the time she spent as a child and later an adult on the campus of a Deaf school where her father taught.

FAVORITE MOVIE WATCHES OF 2019

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary. The convoluted tale of this documentary, in which a supposedly dying comedy-magician from the '80s may or may not be faking every single thing he's saying to the cameras, is actually much more fascinating as a document of our American Downfall times, the perfect portrait of the exact kind of trainwreck combination of traits has led us to a world of President Trump. 

The Beach Bum. Indie weirdo veteran Harmony Korine continues his recent winning streak, following up his unexpectedly delightful and prescient Spring Breakers with this paen to Jimmy Buffet-like waste cases down in the grimy dark corners of Key West and Miami. Come for a spot-on perfect Matthew McConaughey, stay for the surprisingly astute politics and Snoop Dog cameo.

Brittany Runs a Marathon. A nice simple little character-study, about an overweight and unhealthy party girl who gets all aspirational and decides to run a marathon, then subverts all aspirational movie tropes by being a whiny weak person who constantly self-sabotages her attempts to get better. Cassavettes-style emphasis on complex, emotionally true characters, but funnier and more contemporary.

Good Time. A friend at Letterboxd got me turned on to this indie thriller from the Safdi Brothers, who just this month brought us the likely Oscar contender Uncut Gems. Continuing Robert Pattinson's post Twilight emphasis on challenging roles, it's a gritty noir actioner about two petty criminal brothers facing the most harrowing night of their lives.

The History of Time Travel. A great example of the no-budget super-indies that are nonetheless great that you can sometimes find at Amazon Prime Video if you go wading around in the unfiltered muck there long enough. A supposed documentary in the future about the invention of time travel, the details of the documentary shoot itself (both storyline and even costumes and newspaper headlines) change each time a new development in the time travel adventure continues, a brilliant way to explore sci-fi themes with no special effects at all.

Knives Out. Rian Johnson's ultra-clever followup to making a Star Wars film, a perfect recreation of a 1920s Agatha Christie whodunit but with a very contemporary, race-sensitive #MeToo-like twist. A great example of how you can honor an old, white-dominated story genre but still update it for a more diverse present, without pandering to anyone involved.

The Last Movie Star. Burt Reynolds' last role before dying, a sweet and touching indie dramedy about an elderly Hollywood star who gets invited to be honored at a Nashville film festival, just to get there and realize it's a fan-run underground no-budget fest that triggers an end-of-life crisis for him about his possible legacy. It has its problems, but in general is a tender and lovely way for the often wrongly maligned Reynolds to end his career on a high note.

The Lost City of Z. The best example this year of one of the few drawbacks of our streaming age, that gorgeous, sweeping big-budget extravaganzas can sometimes get totally overlooked if they're being primarily designed to be watched online. A visually haunting callback to '80s anamorphic fever dreams like Out of Africa, concerning the interesting subject of white people slowly mapping South America in the early 20th century.

Marriage Story. The latest by my personal favorite Noah Baumbach is a devastating character study of a couple in crisis, as an increasingly acrimonious divorce brings out the worst in both of them. So emotionally raw that people have been making funny memes of the climax just as a way of processing it, it's a shoo-in for a ton of Oscar nominations coming next week.

Mortal Engines. Glad I got convinced to read this surprisingly entertaining Young Adult novel, about a post-apocalyptic future in which cities have been placed on top of moving platforms to get away from volcanoes and things, but thousands of years later have become battling opponents for the decreasing amount of resources on the badly damaged planet. Doubly glad it convinced me to watch the gloriously batshit, undeservedly maligned adaptation by Peter Jackson, which is way more fun than what you've heard.

Parasite. Another Oscar shoo-in, this is the coming-of-age moment for South Korean horror, a timely look at class warfare as told through a convoluted and violent New Weird tale that will satisfy both Fangoria-loving teens and their NPR-loving parents. Protect yourself from spoilers with this one!

Thunder Road. 2019 was another amazing year for small, devastating character portraits, a growing legacy of our streaming age when not everything has to be a billion-dollar superhero epic to be profitable; and here's another of the best, a super-dark look at the slow mental and emotional breakdown of a young Southern cop who has just had too much real life heaped on top of him at once.

Triple Frontier. And finally, here's another Netflix original movie that got worse notices than I thought it deserved, a tight and lean military thriller set and shot in South America, with the clean look but moral messiness that recalls '70s downbeat actioners at their best. Don't let the Hollywood cast scare you off — it's a dark, intelligent clock-ticker.

*When you contribute as little as $1 a month at my Patreon account, you receive a centralized email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week. Get it all at patreon.com/jasonpettus.

Greetings, users! Like most other Twitter members, I’ve been seeing an alarming amount of tweets this week from all my friends about what a shitty 2018 it was for them, and how they can’t wait for it to be over and how they’re desperately hoping 2019 will be better. Unlike them, though, 2018 actually went pretty well for me, so I thought I’d get a journal entry up here on a quiet New Year’s Eve and review why, as well as look at my plans for building on these successes in 2019.

The main reason, of course, is that for the first time in 15 years, I actually generated revenue in my life during every single month of 2018; and that’s because, for the first time since attending a coding bootcamp three years ago, I finally gave up on the idea of trying to get a full-time job in the tech industry, and decided instead to try to make a living for the first time as a full-time freelancer. The simple fact is that, although I learned a lot of lessons about myself and about soft skills by attending DevBootcamp* in 2015, trying to get a job because of it turned out to be kind of an unmitigated disaster, for a variety of interrelated reasons — partly I was discriminated against for being in my late forties while apply for entry-level positions; partly I was old enough that I could see all the red flags at the various companies that did interview me; partly I was ethically disgusted with most of the positions I had even the tiniest chance of getting; partly those various positions started drying up a couple years after my bootcamp experience, as more and more tech companies started realizing that hiring bootcamp graduates was turning out to cause more trouble than help.

[*It’s also worth noting that DevBootcamp is now out of business, one of the half-dozen such organizations that bit the dust during The Great Coding Bootcamp Purge of 2018. It was kind of an open secret within these bootcamps, in fact, that the clock was already ticking as far as your window to get anything useful out of the experience; although the official line was that “There Will Be Endless Coding Jobs In Our Glorious STEM Future For Everyone!,” it was clear even in 2015 that the industry was soon going to reach a point of unsustainable critical mass, and this was even before the bloom fell off the rose of tech companies actually hiring bootcamp graduates, and realizing that most of them weren’t getting nearly the kind of education they needed to be decent ongoing employees.]

At first I decided to combat this by switching my job search to front-end developer positions, instead of the full-stack positions that DevBootcamp prepared its graduates for, since I’m already a veteran of graphic design, HTML and CSS; but it turns out that you can’t get a front-end dev job unless you’re competent at modern front-end Javascript webapp frameworks like React, Angular, Ember, VUE and others, which I’m not. Then after starting to meet people in the tech industry that were doing this, I decided to switch my focus again now to product management, since I already had self-taught experience in my life at helping creatives and tech people communicate with each other, the main thing that people in that position do; but unlike coding positions, no one wants to hire product managers based on them having a bit of self-taught experience, which meant I was going to have to go back to school yet all over again if I wanted any chance of getting even an entry-level position. And I had already spent $12,000 to attend DevBootcamp, so wasn’t thrilled by the idea of spending yet another $12,000 with still no guarantee of a job.

So out of desperation more than anything else, I decided back in January to sign up for some of these third-party freelancing websites, like Upwork.com and Freelancer.com, just to see if I could pick up some quick easy work doing my old pre-bootcamp jobs like personal assistant, copy-editing, proofreading, data entry, document layout and the like. And that’s when I discovered something interesting that I would’ve never guessed — that the eclectic set of random skills I’ve happened to pick up over the years because of my own personal interests (graphic design, website development, manuscript editing, marketing, mailing lists, managing people, high-level strategy, ebook creation, podcast production, etc etc) just happens to be the perfect combination of skills to bring to full-time entrepreneurs who are usually hiring half a dozen different people to fulfill these roles in their lives.

I’ve had a policy for many years not to mention online the people and companies I work for (people who get pissed off at me online tend to retaliate by trying to get me fired from my jobs, and I don’t need the headache anymore); but basically the kinds of people I’ve been picking up this year as ongoing freelance clients are what are typically called “thought leaders,” with Malcolm Gladwell probably being the most famous example — people who write bestselling books about the intersection of business and intellectualism, then use the books’ popularity to speak at events like TED and SXSW, then use the popularity of the events to get paid gigs consulting for C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies, then use those consulting connections to interview famous CEOs for their next bestselling book, thus starting the cycle over again once very couple of years. Despite all the successes, these people are essentially just doing what I’ve been doing over the years, going it solo and working from home and with no office peers to fall back on when it comes to things like maintaining their newsletter subscription lists, their personal websites, their booking calendar, their Google Adwords, their podcast, their blog, etc; and I’ve been finding a lot of surprise success at getting hired by such people to basically do all those things for them, a job category I would’ve never realized even existed if I hadn’t stumbled ass-backwards into it this year.

I also decided this year to up my game over at my rare-book dealership at eBay, with more success than I was expecting. I’ve been collecting rare books since 2011, mostly as a personal hobby, and over the years have had maybe 20 to 40 of my books for sale online at any time; but this year I’ve been making a concentrated effort to get all of them finally photographed and listed, a daunting prospect since it takes around three hours to do each and every listing (that is, to do it correctly, with a dozen high-dozen photos and deep research on the book’s history, significance and previous sales records). As of today, though, I finally have almost 200 of my 300 books now listed; and more importantly, sales for 2018 is going to top just about $2,000 by the end of the year, about twice as much as the thousand bucks I was aiming for. For someone like me who lives off just $25,000 a year, that’s a significant amount of money, and way more interesting than $2,000 worth of secretarial work, a positive experience I’m hoping to build off of in 2019.

And what else? Well, it was a good year for spending a significant amount of quality time with my friend Carrie’s twin sons, including one of them coming and living at my place full-time for two and a half weeks, which was a much better and more fun experience than I was expecting, despite the sudden preponderance of way more Kanye West in my life than I ever wanted to have. This is important to me right now, because the boys were 15 this year, which means there’s only a few years left before they’re off to college and will never live full-time in Chicago as kids again. That makes me want to spend as much time with them as I can these days, which directly clashes with most teens’ wishes to spend as little time around the adults in their lives as humanly fucking possible; so I’m glad that I got to have the experiences I had, learning about the videogames now in their teenage lives and the friends now in their teenage lives and the music now in their teenage lives, without having to pull any teeth to get the information.

And other than these things, you can generally say that 2018 was a good year simply because of maintaining the status quo in many respects of my life, which always counts as a positive merely from not slipping into a worser position. I didn’t get any fatter this year, for example, although I also didn’t really get any thinner (still hovering between 185 and 190 pounds, when the goal for years has been 175); I still got in my Fitbit step count and bicycling goals most days, although I didn’t come close to my weightlifting or swimming goals; I meditated a few days per week, although not the seven days a week I would like to achieve in a perfect world; I generally ate healthily, but not as healthily as I could; I got to travel a bit, but not as much as I wanted; I maintained an even keel with my elderly parents, and finally convinced them to take their first Uber ride as a hopeful first step towards the day soon when they’ll no longer be able to drive, although I failed at convincing them to let my brother and me make their home more elderly-friendly. And perhaps most importantly, I maintained another year of strong filters and bans on all my online destinations so that I didn’t receive a single bit of news about Donald Trump and his latest crazy antics, which I suspect is the number-one reason why so many of my friends at Twitter keep proclaiming that 2018 Was The Worst, Just The Fucking Worst. All these things count as positive experiences merely because I deliberately worked on them, regardless of how successful they were.

So what’s on tap for 2019? Well, as always, instead of New Year’s resolutions, I actually created an entire year-long three-page detailed plan for myself, so let me just run down it right now and share the highlights with you…

—A one-year pause on all web development. For years now I’ve been paying $115 every single month in order to have a series of Wordpress builds through the hosting service WPEngine, but then haven’t built out any of the actual sites; so I’ve decided this year to get rid of the account and put all my development plans into deep freeze for the time being, especially since I no longer plan on using these as portfolio pieces in trying to get a full-time dev job. That’s why, for example, my personal journal is still appearing here at Medium.com, when I promised in my last update that it’d be switched over to a dedicated Wordpress site by now. (Obviously if you're seeing this, you know that I've recently started trying the federation-friendly minimalist blogging platform Write.as; but more on this in another post soon.) Also, hardcore fans will notice that the website for my old arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, is now entirely offline, since I hadn’t updated it in years and it was essentially serving as an extremely expensive parking space for the 25 or so books that CCLaP still has for sale up at Amazon.

—New revenue opportunities. Inspired by my successes at “piecemeal revenue” in 2018, I’ve decided to push and expand in this direction even more in 2019. Specifically, I’ve decided to invent a new type of handmade bullet journal to sell at my Etsy store; although there’s a growing amount of mass-made notebooks for this suddenly hotter and hotter form of organizational system (which has gotten a big boost in recent months because of the inventor finally publishing his first full-length book on the subject), I’ve noticed that there are almost no cool crafty handmade versions, which I’m hoping will bring some new notice and new sales over at my Etsy store.

And I’m re-opening my personal chef service from my early thirties, “The Slacker Chef!” This was a little experiment I was convinced to try during one of my periods of unemployment when younger, basically cooking for other people’s dinner parties; the money was fantastic, but my heart wasn’t into it at the time because I wasn’t into all the work of going out and hunting up new clients every day. But now that I am in the habit of trawling for new clients every day, I’ve decided to revisit this idea for the first time in twenty years, and see if it can’t generate another couple thousands of dollars in revenue just like my rare books are doing. The more things I can do in my life that will make a thousand or two or three a year, the less I have to worry about freelancing in order to pay all my bills.

And speaking of which, I’m also going to try doing my first-ever physical live events as a rare book seller in 2019; specifically, I’ve decided to get a tax ID and join the Midwestern Antiquarian Booksellers Association, so that I can get a table at this coming year’s Chicago Book and Paper Fair and the Printers Row Lit Fest. I don’t have the slightest idea how much money events like these might bring in; but just to throw out a random number, if I could make a thousand dollars at each of these, that would effectively double my money next year from rare-book sales, from $2,000 to $4,000. That would be exciting, because collecting and selling rare books is easily the most fun thing I do for money these days, and I’d like to be doing a lot more of it if I could.

—New third-party tools to put it all together. Specifically, I’m signing up for a Shopify.com account in 2019, as a central place for selling everything I just mentioned; and I’ve already set up a weekly newsletter called “I Love You Robot” for disseminating new announcements regarding it all, since my activities are going to be spread out across so many different online and physical destinations next year. You can sign up for the newsletter right now at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot, which on top of everything else will include the most fascinating 10 or 15 news items I linked to at Twitter that week. (It will also announce new journal entries here at my blog, if you’re not a person who uses RSS.)

—The #JPCHI25 Project. Next year will be my 25th anniversary of moving to Chicago! To celebrate, I recently put together a list of 100 “core things” that everyone should do in Chicago at least once before they die, a mix between a bunch of touristy things I haven’t done in decades (go to the top of the Sears Tower; eat at the Billy Goat; ride the Navy Pier ferris wheel; attend the Chicago Blues Festival), semi-touristy stuff that even locals tend to enjoy doing regularly (attend late-night shows at the Green Mill and Buddy Guy’s; eat at the Walnut Room; walk the entirety of the Art Institute; watch a Cubs game from a next-door rooftop bar), a shopping list of various famous but semi-obscure locations to visit (the Driehaus Museum; the Lincoln Square pedestrian mall; Garfield Park Conservatory; the Robie House; Nelson Algren Fountain), and a bunch of weirdo unique things that are fun to say you’ve done at least once (visit the last Chicago street still paved with wood bricks; stop by the Obama Kissing Rock in Hyde Park; attend the turtle races at Big Joe’s; bowl at the vintage hand-set Southport Lanes; see a movie at Facets; have a Malort at Old Town Ale House). I’ll be taking copious pictures at each destination, and tagging them all at Twitter, Instagram and Flickr with #JPCHI25, so I hope you’ll get to follow along all year. And speaking of which…

—My first-ever 52 Week Photography Challenge. For those who don’t know, I received my first-ever DSLR camera as an early Christmas present this year, my first high-end camera since I was a photography major in college thirty years ago; so I plan on throwing myself heavily into this new hobby in 2019, including participating in my first-ever 52 Week Photography Challenge. There will be much more about this at Instagram and Flickr throughout the next year, so I encourage you to follow along at those places for it all.

—New wellness goals. I’ve decided to try a year of tai chi instead of yoga in 2019, which I’m looking forward to; I’m planning on buying my first electric bicycle, which will hopefully let me bike more often and for longer distances now that I’ll be turning 50; I’m going to take my first class in American Sign Language, which it’s just time for now that my hearing is continuing to get worse and worse each other; and perhaps most significantly, I’m getting a driver’s license again for the first time since 1989, almost exclusively so that I can drive around in my parents’ suburban-scrawl community during my increasingly frequent trips down there, but also so that I’ll have access to a car-share program in Chicago, for the rare times I need a car here like the book fairs I’ll be participating in. As always, more on all these things here in this journal as 2019 continues.

—And a new computing system in my life, both in equipment and attitude. Another thing that’s happened recently is that my ten-year-old Macintosh desktop finally died, which is sad but actually lasted longer than I was expecting it to. Even low-end Macs are now just so ridiculously fucking expensive that I’ve decided to try something brand-new for 2019 instead, which is to switch full-time to Linux and start moving more and more of my computing life to cloud services. That will involve buying one of those Windows laptops with a touchscreen monitor that can be flipped backwards to “convert” it to a tablet; erasing Windows and installing Ubuntu; buying a 4K television during Amazon Prime Day next summer to serve as a new home monitor; installing open-source versions of my usual Adobe Creative Suite software, the main thing I’m currently missing by using my cheap little Chromebook right now instead of my broken Mac; buying an external solid state hard drive as a central portable location for all my daily files; and moving my workflow for documents more and more to my Google Drive, and for music to Spotify instead of downloaded MP3s and iTunes. (I actually did this part last week, and am really blown away already by how amazing Spotify’s recommendation service works; this will likely be the subject of my new journal entry here.) Will this finally let me wean myself off the increasingly sour teats of Apple, Microsoft and Adobe? Well, it won’t fucking hurt!

So that’s pretty much it for now; although I should mention that another part of this plan is to start updating this journal a lot more often, now that I’m not sitting around endlessly waiting for a Wordpress conversion that will never come, so I hope you’ll have a chance to come by on a regular basis during 2019 for more. As always, I can be reached at ilikejason@gmail.com, and would love to hear from you about advice or invitations regarding any of these projects. Here’s hoping 2019 will be a chance to build on the successes I had this year, and that your own goes better than apparently the shitty 2018 most of you had!

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