1/52 - New Year's Resolutions
It’s January 8, where are you with your family history and genealogy New Year’s resolutions?
I have two so far.
Resolution #1 - Learn how to bake a variety of cake rolls.
The reason this resolution is important is that if I ever run into Paul Hollywood in my travels, I need to have put in the prerequisite 10,000 hours of repetition to merit a handshake. I even bought a 15x10 inch jelly roll pan from Amazon to mark my commitment to this resolution. The results so far are mixed, as reflected in the attached photos. But they are getting better.
My primary challenge is that I am now in my own version of The Amazing Race. Which will come first? 1) Cake Roll Competency or 2) 300 pounds? The race is on.
Resolution #2 - Just freaking write SOMETHING.
One of the challenges of quasi retirement is that you suddenly have access to that most precious of gifts, that one thing you always prayed to have more of.
Time.
But like many gifts in mythology, there is a curse that comes with this gift. This is the curse that there are an infinite number of ways to waste this gift.
Here are ten good ones. Try them at home.
1 - See Resolution #1 above.
2 - Now that I have opened the TikTok Pandora’s Box in a shameless attempt to attract attention to my book on #Booktok (because there was a lady on the Today Show that did this), I have found you can waste amazing amounts of time scrolling endlessly. Ditto Instagram.
3 - Go on a bike ride. (OK, this does have some merit in mitigating the whole 300 lb thing and giving me extra time to achieve Cake Roll Nirvana.)
4 - After 20 years, try to remember how to play the piano.
5 - Bravely volunteer to go with Mary Glenn to Kohl's in my one holiday attempt to “help” her with Christmas shopping. This is a much longer story that I will save for another day, but let it be said that I performed heroically in this story.
6 - Go check the mail. In our new neighborhood, this requires driving up the block to the mailboxes. Well, I guess I could walk, but I don’t want to penalize myself too much on the whole 300 lb goal thing.
7 - Go to Twitter and make sure that my Trump anger remains fully stoked. (Pro Tip - This works equally well for those on the other side of the political spectrum.)
8 - Check to see whether the 500 shares of Hut 8 Corp I bought at $2 per share have made me a multi-millionaire yet. Why did I do this? First, I wanted to be cool at crypto. But really, I had $1,000 leftover money in the Schwab account earning .0001% interest that I couldn’t figure out how to withdraw.
9 - Watch the Today Show when Jenna Hager Bush does her monthly Read With Jenna book release and hope that by some mysterious process, she has stumbled upon my book. It is also a useful time suck to imagine that Tom Hanks has been booked to play me in the film version. And that I have been called onstage when he wins the Oscar to thank me.
10 - Investigate whether Nicola Walker has been in any other British mini-series that Mary Glenn and I somehow missed.
OK, but SERIOUSLY.
Many people have asked me whether there will be another book after Immigrant Secrets. I am assuming that this is because they liked Secrets. But if it’s just to be polite, don’t clue me in.
There are certainly a ton of family history/quasi historical fiction stories remaining to be told. But I have always been someone who needs a deadline to kick me in the ass and get moving. The whole getting started thing plays fundamentally and deeply into my long-established rivers of procrastination. Not to mention my important to-do list of ten items above.
My wife and I have been listening/reading Ann Patchett’s These Precious Days (https://www.annpatchett.com/). If you’ve never read her books, she’s terrific -- Bel Canto, Tom’s Lake, and The Dutch House are just a few to try. But These Precious Days is not a novel, it’s a collection of essays. In the opening, she talks about the liberation of writing essays -- no worries about characters and keeping them straight and whether they live or die. You just write about things you care about. And you can go back and look at things you’ve written before and if they don’t work, just rewrite them, something that can’t be done with a novel or a book of historical fiction.
The essays got me thinking about how Immigrant Secrets came to be. The whole exercise in finding my grandparents started as a series of Facebook posts. Because I had spent basically a lifetime (well 20+ years) writing over a thousand blog posts on records management and content management (Really? Hasn’t it all been said already?) I started porting these posts to a more bloggy platform on Medium. People started saying they liked them. Again, if you were lying, that’s OK. Don’t tell me now. That led to launching an actual website (https://www.searchformygrandparents.com/) to host the posts.
It was only then that the pieces started falling together for the book, and it was only via the self-imposed deadline of doing “something” with the pandemic that I managed to knit all of the previous writings into some semblance of a story.
So going back to my resolutions, I think what I need to do is just write stuff and see what if anything sticks to the wall and see if a book comes to mind. I need to subject all of you to this because if I don’t commit to putting things out, I will just spend the next few years making cake rolls.
So if you wish to ignore all of this, that’s OK.
But if you do want to play along, you can get the posts directly HERE (https://www.searchformygrandparents.com/subscribe) or using the subscribe button on this page (https://authory.com/johnmancini).
BTW - Here’s the best cake roll recipe so far. (https://bellyfull.net/chocolate-swiss-roll-cake).
