January 2, 2026
Friday

Holidailies has ended, not with a bang, but just a quiet closing of the portal by whoever ran the system this year. It’s maybe the one thing I can point to as having been a success in 2025, the year I lost so much. I set out to write and post a set of these “markings” every day from December 1 to January 1, 32 pieces in all, comments on the passing scene, a window into my life for anyone who might care to read them. And I did it.  Go, me!

So now what? To start, let’s take a look at what I was about in this online life ten years ago. Here’s an edited (for context) version of the piece I published on January 2, 2016.

Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it.
— Habbakuk 1:2

[. . . ] These are my New Year’s Resolutions, the same ones I’ve made for, oh, more years than I want to say.

The list began as a response to an exercise from Leséa Newman’s book, SomeBODY to Love: A Guide to Loving the Body You Have. The book is a lively and useful collection of writing prompts designed to get you to think about food and health and weight and appearance. One suggestion is to make a list of six or seven things you’d like to achieve in the next year or so. They don’t have to be weight related.

My own title, “The Six Goals of a Quality Life,” is a tribute to an accountability scheme that Pennsylvania educators had to follow some years ago. Every curriculum and every lesson plan had to have annotations showing how the activity helped students achieve The Twelve Goals of a Quality Education.

I wrote about The Goals and the origin of the name last year, and when I looked up the piece to get its URL I realized that I was about to write the very same piece! So not only do I make the same goals year after year, I write the same wry observations about not having achieved them and the same hopeful notes about being determined to change. Aack!! What is wrong with me!!

So I’m listing them one more time [. . . ]

The Six Goals of a Quality Life are:

1. 1. Lose weight and improve health.
   2. Fatten my Gallivanting Fund so that my trips are paid for two years in advance.
   3. Develop as a fiction writer.
   4. Complete art projects.
   5. Have more contact with friends.
   6. Declutter the house.

There they are, at least the bare bones of them. There are some vague words. What does “develop” mean? How much “more contact” is significant? And don’t they all come down to the same thing: Follow through, dwell in accomplishment instead of possibility, just do it.

I spent a good portion of today trying to clarify those goals. One I had already made known to my audience on Facebook; “Develop as a fiction writer” has become “I have opened an application for admission to an MFA program.” The response startled me. Nearly a hundred “likes,” and 18 comments encouraging me. I haven’t yet thanked every one of them directly, but I will.

And I thank you, reading this. I hope you will continue to follow me as I explore ways to use the platforms I have. I’ll end here with an observation I have used before, a tribute to Sylvia Plath, who wrote to her mother, “I am a writer . . .I am a genius of a writer. I am writing the best poems of my life. They will make my name.”