I’m still digesting Idlewild and am fully invested in a popular fantasy series to round out my 2023 reading. Vocabulary School will be back with new words next week! In the meantime, these are the things we’re celebrating, trying, and leaving behind in 2024. What should we add? Let me know in the comments!
In
Fresh pineapple
You will not regret bringing home a reasonably priced whole pineapple from the store. Do not buy one of those pineapple cutting gadgets, just sharpen your knife.
Adopting an internet stranger and becoming a respectful reply guy
Kindly interacting with someone online who appears to be figuring it out is a low stakes way that’s not unlike babysitting your friends’ children or petting a dog at a farm stand. Offering low stakes suggestions not only has the potential to be helpful, it also prevents you from screaming at the clouds which is very unhelpful.
Telling your friends you love them
I have always told the homies I love them, but this year it has been especially necessary. Friendships are just as important as romantic relationships so put the effort into them. If you are reading this, we are friends and I love you. Didn’t that feel great??
Hitting your writing goal (complimentary)
Wow, you made a goal and you reached it! You are so disciplined and that will pay off huge for you with whatever you’re working on! I’m so proud of you!
Brainstorming
We are all about metacognition in the new year! Get out your ideas and deal with the pile later. You are your own disaster mitigation administrator, you’ll know what to do once you’re looking at it. Mind map! List! Cloze sentence worksheets! Whatever gets you thinking!
Being kind to your younger self (including you from yesterday)
I had to interrupt my entire process this morning to listen to an album that was DEEPLY important to me the summer I got my driver’s license. I had an inkling to do it yesterday and the inkling would not be denied. Feed Teen Andrea, she’s starving for THIS BRILLIANT DANCE BY DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL and she can’t write her newsletter without it. I laughed so hard at my desk listening to this earnestness that burned in the chest of my teen self. The laughter was from a place of tenderness, not derision. Approach your past selves with tenderness because, after all, that person is how you got to today (neutral).
Reading whatever feels good to you
This morning while talking over breakfast, I told Michelle about a tweet I had seen about how someone disliked popular literary fiction because it’s too obvious. It's a shame that broadly popular literary fiction explains things instead of sending you a digest that simply reads, "Pain." Man, shut up! Do you like something you’re reading? Great! Keep reading it. Don’t let some grouch on the internet tell you something you liked is dumb because you bought it at Target or your mom also read it. Broad doesn’t mean bad, it’s just for more people, not just boring poetry lecturers on winter break.
Collaborating on a playlist
Right now, my friend is making a playlist for her inbound freshman niece to subliminally suggest ditching her high school boyfriend and I took it as my sacred duty to add my picks. Hint: I will always add “Scott Farcas Takes it on the Chin” by Less Than Jake to any playlist but it actually fits. The collaboration feels like pulling out my CD wallet, poring over the mix CDs while taping songs off the radio. We are chasing this feeling in 2024.
Giving into your sense of wonder
It might not feel like it, but the world is actually filled with wonder. Beautiful birds, gorgeous friends, loving families, vivid colors, cool breezes, seashells, outdoor beer gardens, trampolines, bagels, clever turns of phrase, kids in Halloween costumes, Italian television, fun-sized Mr. Goodbars, snow, sunrises AND sunsets, the moon, baseball, radio, wildflowers, cherry tomatoes, books written just for you, music that knows what the empty spaces in your heart sound like—wonder abounds and we will be appreciating it!
Expanding your vocabulary
You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to expand your arsenal of words, especially if you, like me, talk so much, everyone in your life is begging for mercy. It’s not a matter of being smart, it’s a matter of communication—why wouldn’t you want to make yourself clearly understood with exactly the right word?
Out
Putting off dental care
Please know that your dentist does not care if you live or die, so there’s no reason to be embarrassed. My year has been much improved by going to the dentist to face the music, so to speak. The relief on the other side (especially eating marzipan without a debilitating migraine) far outweighs the grief you feel now.
Needing to buy the best ingredients for a recipe
You do not work for the NYT Cooking section and if pork shoulder is on sale for 99¢, you should buy it and never think about it again. Alison Roman is not checking her instagram stories to clown on you for using the ingredients you source.
Getting bent out of shape when meeting someone for the umpteenth time
I look forward to lying to people who refuse to remember me until they finally do remember me.
Letting someone with more influence than you get away with saying something fucked up
You might be yelling into the void, but you also might get a 967 word apology email or production on an offensive shirt might cease because you said, “No, this sucks, actually.”
Asking what the parking situation is
Take public transportation or just go with the flow. We are not letting the parking situation dictate our lives, everyone.
Being embarrassed by your ideas and not sharing them
While taking any number of workshops with Amber Petty, she loves to remind people that there is so much stupid shit on the internet that someone was paid to write. There is so much stupid shit everywhere and we’re all better to remind ourselves of that because our ideas (probably) aren’t that embarrassing.
Hitting your writing goal (derogatory)
You can’t write every day. You can’t meet your goals every day. But did you eat? Is your underwear clean and you aren’t wearing a bathing suit? Some things are more important than a writing goal.
One-star reviews
Actually, if you don’t like something, I never want to hear about it. If it’s not wild, raving praise, it sucks and I don’t want to know about it. There are about 5 people I want to hear bad things from and they are all reading this newsletter. Keep it out of other people’s eyeballs-- who made you (or me) an arbiter of taste?
Letting anyone dictate how you feel about yourself
I have been alive, to middling success, for 38 years. I have earned the right to wear my jeans how I want, take pictures of my loved ones at a high angle and filter it purple if I choose, and part my hair wherever my cowlick decides without someone who has voted in exactly one presidential election calling my cringe. You’re goddamned right I’m cringe and I will be cringe until my flesh melts off my bones.
Telling someone with a skincare, cooking, or exercise practice that it “must be nice”
Spending other people’s money and time is a bad look. Your face will stick that way and the person you’re criticizing has a serum, a smoothie, and a stretch for that and they won’t tell you because you were mean to them.
Thank you for your eyeballs and attention this year. Can’t wait to grow our vocabularies one to two words at a time with you all next year (Monday)!
I leave you in this miserable year with my favorite New Year’s song— we’re not hearing the bad news and we’re going to win next year.
Oh, I’m just like you
I never hear the bad news
And I never will
We won by a landslide
Our troubles are over.
In The New Year by The Walkmen
Love,
Andrea
Thanks for stopping by Vocabulary School!
If you are enjoying Vocabulary School, please subscribe and pass it along by sneaking it onto a shrimp cocktail display, it could benefit from a dip in some horseradish heavy cocktail sauce.