The Awkward Girl's Guide to January

You make me sad with your eyes.

Jan 26, 2024

Hi, it’s Amber with The Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Month, your regularly-scheduled look at everything I’ve been reading, watching, buying, and otherwise obsessing over. This post is free to all subscribers, however a paid subscription will get you access to all of the other content on the site, as well as generally warming the cockles of my cold, stressed, January heart…

January is the worst. Seriously, isn’t January the WORST?

Actually, no wait, lemme just quickly over-think that by presenting to you…

A Completely Subjective List of the Months of the Year, Ordered from Best to Worst, According to Me:

June
July
August
May
April
September
March
November
October
February
January
December

You’ve no idea how hard this was. I mean, December was always going to be at the bottom, obviously, because, much as I enjoy Christmas Day itself, the run-up and aftermath is Introvert Hell, basically. But is January REALLY the next worst, or is it February: that dark, brutal little month that should really feel much shorter than it actually does?

This year, I’ve gone with January: mostly because the Christmas ‘holidays’ lasted until January 8th this year, and then seemed to drag on all month, with one social event after another, until I realized we hadn’t had a weekend to ourselves since the end of November, and I was completely and utterly burnt out from it all. I have an introvert hangover. Yes, it’s a thing.

Other things that sucked about January:

Multiple named storms!
Multiple migraines!
Health anxiety!
Scary work-related thing that is actually still not over, and I feel like I can’t really be expected to function properly until it is!
The Lurgy!
Having no money!
But having to pay to replace the fence that got blown down in storm Isha!
Ending all my bullet points with a cringe exclamation point!
Let’s stop now!

(I feel like the relatively high placement of November on the list might be controversial: it’s purely because November, although bleak and hellish, doesn’t demand anything of me — unlike October, say, which requires me to ‘Halloween’ all month, and to provide multiple costumes and treats for all of the events the month-long ‘holiday’ now involves.)

(February technically doesn’t require anything of me either, but February is shit, and it knows it. Yes you are, February…)

Anyway, I looked through my camera roll to try to jog my memory about some of the things I did this month, but it was literally just a bunch of videos of the pond near our house, which Terry and I try to walk around a few times a week in the name of exercise, and which froze solid this month, for the first time I can remember. So that’s how much January has sucked, and how little I have to say about it, really. Admit it: this is the post that has finally inspired you to take out that paid subscription, isn’t it?

As I write this I’m still recovering from The Lurgy, which started life as a throat infection, and then moved through various combinations of spiky temperatures and muscle aches before winding down to just a very bad head cold. It took me down, basically, which means this week has been a bit of a bust, really, and I’ve spent most of it either lying in bed like a consumptive heiress, or wandering around the house looking like Mr. Rochester’s mad wife. I do, however, aspire to wearing Real Clothes and makeup again by tomorrow, so that’ll be a relief for everyone, really.

All joking aside, though, I’m actually quite relieved that this particular lurgy struck when it did, because I spent all of December convinced I was about to get ill, and, horrible though it’s been, I’d much rather get ill at the end of January, when the social obligations have started to dry up, than in December, when I’d still have been expected to host 41 people in my house, while looking (and feeling) like I was in need of an exorcism.

Also, being ill at this time of year gave me some extra time to read, which brings me neatly onto the next part of the newsletter…

READING

I did not choose these books because their covers matched, but I gotta admit, I wasn’t mad about it either…

Ever After — Kate Eberlan

This is the sequel to Miss You, which I read last year; I finished this while sick with the throat infection from hell, and I ugly-cried at the end, so be aware that this isn’t really a ‘romance’ in the ‘guaranteed Happy Ever After’ sense of the genre, but it is pretty wonderful…

Bad Summer People — Emma Rosenblum

This book is set in a fictional small town on Fire Island, which is closely based on the real town on Fire Island where the author spends her summers, and apparently before it was published some of the locals got a hold of the manuscript, figured out it was based on them, and were incensed about it. I love a book that inspires that kind of drama, and I really enjoyed this one, which reminded me how much I aspire to be the kind of person who “summers” somewhere — although ideally not one of the people in this book, who really are very bad summer people indeed…

WATCHING

Saltburn

I feel like I’ve only read bad reviews of it, but honestly? I loved it. I mean, yeah, there were some bits I had to watch through my fingers, while shouting, “Please tell me he’s not going to… surely he’s not going to … oh God, he IS!” But, those bits aside, I found it thoroughly entertaining. Loved the Brideshead/Talented Mr. Ripley vibes. Loved the setting. Loved Rosamund Pike and Carey Mulligan. Hate that Murder on the Dancefloor is popular again because of it, though, because, man, I can’t stand that song, but you can’t have everything, can you?

Friends

I wrote about this last week, but, after Saltburn we discovered we’d completely run out of things we wanted to watch, so we started re-watching Friends for about the 20th time while we tried to figure out what to see next. Suggestions welcome…

TRYING

Simply Piano

As I mentioned in this post, one of my New Year’s Resolutions is to learn to play Cardigan by Taylor Swift on the keyboard my parents got Max for his birthday, and, to facilitate this, I signed up for the Simply Piano app secretly hoping that it would just show me how to play Cardigan, and I’d be able to surprise you all by rocking up to this month’s newsletter all, “how d’you like me NOW?”

Well, spoiler alert: NO.

(I actually did find a You Tube tutorial for Cardigan, but it involves The Black Keys, and I haven’t learned The Black Keys yet, so…)

But, another spoiler alert: MAYBE ONE DAY.

Because, surprisingly (for me), I’m actually really enjoying it so far. It’s challenging, yes, but not SO challenging that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to master it, which means I get to feel like I’m accomplishing something, without it having to be all stressful and… well, hard. Also, the app I’m using kind of gameifys the process by telling you how many notes you got right in each song you attempt, which means I can just sit there and play the song over and over again until I get a perfect score, and three gold stars. There’s something zen-like about it, which reminds me of that time I was briefly obsessed with playing Tetris, and would do some of my best thinking while attempting to align coloured blocks on a computer screen. I have done absolutely none of my best thinking while playing the keyboard, sadly, but I can upgrade the app to include guitar and singing lessons, so watch this space, people: watch this space…

BUYING

I’ve been trying my best not to buy ANYTHING this month, on account of the “not having any money” thing, but I did have a moment of madness where I slipped up and impulse-ordered a jogger co-ord, purely because I saw an influencer I follow wearing it.

In her jogger co-ord (Which you and I know simply as “a tracksuit”…) the influencer looked effortlessly cool, and ready for a productive day working from home.

I, meanwhile, looked like I was about to make my one phone-call, having been arrested and provided with a prison-issue grey tracksuit made for someone much taller:

This is why we can’t have nice things, folks. Or, well, tracksuits. It’s also one of the many reasons my career as an influencer failed. It’s all fun and games until you remember you’re 5’4”, right?

WRITING

So, the big writing-related news this month is that book number 5 has just been released — TODAY, in fact! Wild, huh? This is the sequel to The Accidental Actress, and I had planned to do a cute little photoshoot with the paperback, so I could show it to you, but my cold/lurgy decided to ramp itself back up again overnight, and now it’s all I can do to finish typing this senten….

Anyway.

Here’s the blurb…

The bad girl is back.

Lexie Steele is back in her villain era: and, okay, she might be down on her luck right now after a humiliating breakup with the love of her life, Jett Carter — to say nothing of the dead-end job she’s been forced to get to pay the bills — but when Jett returns to Heather Bay to film his next movie, there’s every opportunity for Lexie to turn things around and win him back. Or there would be, if he didn’t have his gorgeous co-star, Violet King in tow.

Can Lexie and Jett overcome all the obstacles and find their-happily-ever after in the Highlands? Or is Lexie Steele destined to forever be the anti-hero?

… and if you could imagine all of that set to the soundtrack of Taylor Swift’s ‘Better Than Revenge’, that would be awesome.

(Oh, and if you wanted to buy it, that would be even better…)

Other random thoughts inspired by January:

Only one month into 2024, and Max has already totally screwed up my Spotify Unwrapped for this year by repeatedly asking Alexa to play ‘Viva la Vida’ by Coldplay. When she’s done, for some reason she then always goes on to play ‘Killer Queen’ by Queen and ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John, even though I’ve never asked her to play either of those songs in my life, so I think Spotify reckons I’m an older man who enjoys a bit of 70s rock?
One of my Daylists this week was ‘Indie Microcore Tuesday Afternoon’, which included all of those tracks, plus ‘Bad Romance’ which was Max’s mid-2023 obsession. Yup, my Unwrapped is screwed…
So, so tired of being sent a constant stream of press releases informing me which date is “just around the corner”. For the love of God, PR people, please find a different way to say this…
I’m quite enjoying Threads right now. For some reason its algorithm seems to have accurately deduced that I’m more interested in seeing posts from indie authors and pro bloggers than I am in almost exclusively seeing posts from that one woman in America who I don’t actually follow, but who X is apparently obsessed with, and that suits me fine, really. I don’t actually say much there, because — as with Substack Notes — I am a as socially awkward online as I am in real life, so I worry about being shunned, but if you want to, you can follow me here.

And that’s all I’ve got for you, folks: or, at least until approximately 5 seconds after I send this newsletter, at which point I’ll immediately think of at least 10 things I wanted to tell you, but didn’t. Let’s blame the lurgy for that. Let’s blame it for everything, in fact.

Until next time,