Resolutions

Most of the time, New Year's resolutions are really all the same old plans of quitting, losing, learning, making things that all fall through in the end. This year, I tried to be more thoughtful about how my life has changed in the past year, and what changes I want to see in the coming year. I think these are all both feasible and actually important for me, in order for my soul to grow.

1) Surround myself with people who inspire me. I love my friends at school, but not all of them really push me or challenge me in any significant way. I think I'm realizing more and more how your social networks have a noticeable impact on every aspect of your personality - from your politics to your eating habits to your fashion sense - even if it's on a purely subconscious level. Given that, I want to make sure that I'm shaped into the person that I want to be anyway (if that makes any sense). Even if it's hard to find the right people in the school and city I'm in, I just need to spend more time thinking, WWTPIAD -- What Would That Person I Admire Do?

2) Take myself seriously. Nobody really cares about what you almost did or are thinking about doing. What's really important is what you DO. A lot of my lack of action in the past has to do, very simply, with laziness. So: I need to not fuck up my sleeping schedule for stupid reasons. I need to eat well, exercise, and take care of my body. And I need to take care of the rest of me by write write write write writing. I have all the tools I need to do all these things, so I only need to not squander it all through laziness, idiotic excuses, and poor decision-making. Not that difficult, really.

3) Do what I want. This past semester was just a dark, dismal time. Taken over by a crisis of purpose, I added an economics major and started taking all these courses that I didn't give a shit about, that didn't really get me going intellectually, and that drained away all of my time and energy. I stopped going to my job at Gerontology because I think I just got really weary of having to do the same quantitative data analysis bullshit over and over and over and over and over again. I need re-evaluate my daily activities and make sure that every hour of every day is spent doing something that is good for me, something that allows me to actually improve myself. If I feel like a certain activity is a waste of my time, I need to be able to just say no.

4) Be less of an asshole. I'm becoming more and more aware of the fact that, under the guise of sarcasm and humor, I am often kind of a dick. To "get real" about it, I think it all just stems from a whole lot of insecurity and a need to be the "funny guy", which leads me to just say whatever shitty thing pops into my head at the moment. I mean, I don't want to compromise my sense of humor, and there are right places and times to bust balls and joke around. I just need to be more thoughtful about the things I say, why I say them, and what effect they're going to have on others.



All of these items can be summed up fairly simply, actually:

BE MORE THOUGHTFUL.