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mistressofmuses) wrote2019-01-01 10:18 am
Time and the passage thereof.
So, it’s 2019.
2018 was a lot of ups and downs, but ended better than it started on a personal level. (Having an apartment!)
While I’m not big on setting or tracking goals, I do have things I hope to do with the new year, and today is the collective cultural “reset” day.
So the things I hope to do:
1- Focus on more writing. I think I was more successful than not with this over the last year, and actually did put in a fair amount of work, though scattered over too many projects, and I still had too many long periods where I didn’t work at all.
I don’t want to set unachievable or unsustainable goals, but I want to write more days than not. By the end of the year, I hope to finish something original, and post at least one multi-chapter fanfic project. (Hopefully more than that!)
2- Be better at my job. I got an unasked-for “promotion” at work last month that changed my job description pretty drastically. While I am skeptical about some pieces of it, I also want to succeed and am trying to stay optimistic. I want to do better, and try to manage some of the executive dysfunction issues that make me freeze up and struggle to get things done.
3- Find and do some kind of physical activity that doesn’t make me hate every minute of it. I’m terrible at exercising, because I don’t enjoy it. Maybe this will be the year that Alex is physically able to go do more hiking over the summer, which is about the only physical thing I do really like. I’m not aiming for a certain weight loss goal or anything, but I would like to be less sedentary. And if we can hike, maybe we can venture a little further out, back up to the northern part of the state, or farther into the mountains.
4- Take a trip with Alex. I went to Oregon with my mom and sibling a year ago for my Grandmother’s 90th birthday, and in a few days I’m going on a trip to Austin with Taylor because their company does an actual weekend trip for a holiday party and they invited me as their plus-one (!). But it’s been several years since Alex and I could afford to go somewhere and I could afford to take time off. My new position at work comes with more PTO, and having an apartment means we’re actually able to save a little bit. I’d love to go back out to Maryland, or down to New Mexico, or up to the Pacific coast again, or maybe somewhere neither of us has been. I want to do that this summer.
5- Read more. This one shouldn’t be terribly hard. I have a monstrous to-be-read pile that I’m looking forward to, but I need to make the time to do it.
6- Do things I enjoy. Play video games. Watch a show on Netflix. Go to movies. (Read and write and hike, as covered above.) That same executive dysfunction issue haunts me and I catch myself scrolling aimlessly down facebook, watching the tenth nail art tutorial in a row even though I don’t paint my nails, or refreshing tumblr for the twelfth time and rereading the same posts, etc. Or I can’t decide what to do, so I just take a nap. I want to choose to do things I want to do.
Six is a weird number, but I can’t think of four more to get to a nice even ten…
7- Uh… get the rest of the furniture from my mom’s house so that our apartment isn’t just various piles of things.
8- Be more responsive to friends in person or on social media. Comment instead of just “liking”. Actually interact!
9- Do some unfuck your habitat type stuff on the regular to keep our apartment a non-disaster. Will be easier when there’s furniture so things can be put away, but I know my tendency is still to make clutter nests.
10- Go Do Things. The zoo! The museum! Concerts! Clubbing! All of these things are things I want to do and then fail to make the time for.
I do realize almost all of the above (more than half! arguably actually all of the above!) have to do with time, and spending it how I want. I know that there are only so many hours in a day, and trying to do all of the above every day is likely not possible. But I plan to try and be better.
There’s other stuff, like “be a good person” “keep working on my psychological health” “care about the world and do the things I can to make it better even in the midst of a national disaster” and the like, but those are less concrete, and not something I’m interested in trying to measure so much.
I hope this next year is a better one in so many ways. Cheers to everyone, good luck with goals if you have them, and progress of whatever kind is most meaningful to you regardless.
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If you'll be in Austin next weekend, maybe if you can swing up to Round Rock, we could meet for lunch somewhere! Maybe even Austin, depending. EEEEEE!
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Seriously, it's been longer than that, I think... I met you through fic posts of someone you knew and I followed, and that was... jeez, 2007? 2008? I'm pretty sure I was already up at UNC, but probably my freshman or sophomore year.
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Yeah, I met you through mypapou's (aka Susana) blog because she wrote (still writes!) Kingdom Hearts fanfic. And I met her in 2005 when I went back to college, and she and I were in a young adult lit class. She did her big presentation project on faniction, and I was the only one who could answer any of her questions. She told me, "I saw you at the beginning of the semester and just knew you were one of us." LOLOLOL