January 1, 2018
New years are so exciting aren't they? New year, all fresh and clean, with so much potential. It is almost irresistible not making resolutions. SO I DID.
2018 New Year's Resolutions
Form a loose day to day schedule. Instead of waking up between 11am and 1pm everyday, crawling to the kitchen to choke down some yogurt before lurking on social media, I am now going to be a productive human being who is capable of remembering the day of the week as well as find more diverse places to exist besides the couch and my bed. New things inclusive to this schedule will be detailed in the rest of the Resolutions.
Limit my time-wasting screen-time. This is a little harder and much more insidious. See, I nearly always start off with good intentions - researching a place I want to visit, food I want to eat, something interesting that I heard that I'm positive is not actually true, etc. and then it spirals out of control into me watching kittens play with laser pointers for 6 hours on Instagram. You might think I'm exaggerating. I am not. The internet is ruining me as a person. So now, as a rule, I am literally going to allot time amounts and tasks for each internet related function, because, sadly, I am not adult enough to self-regulate.
Write more letters! Because I have the time! And everyone likes getting things in the mail that are not bills! (This resolution is almost exclusively just for Grandma.) 1 letter every two weeks.
Exercise every day for at least a half an hour. This can go in the schedule...Yay!
Art more. 20 minutes every day. It can be a doodle, or a sketch, or scribbles, but at least 20 minutes and every day. I will be documenting these daily so that there is some degree of accountability.
Write more. I'm going to shoot for 1 post a week but settle for at least sitting down and writing for 4 hours/week whether or not I end up actually posting anything.
Cook more. I'm going to not blame myself too much here for never doing this, but seeing as I am unemployed and my amazing boyfriend works very hard every day, it is really horrible of me to not cook more of the meals. In my defense, cooking for a professional chef is psychologically daunting. If we could have cookies and cake for dinner every night, that'd be fine. I suppose I'm going to be learning how to cook (better) this year. My goal is cooking 4 meals a week.
Visit one new place a week. This can be anything from a beach to a bakery to a park to a museum to a neighborhood. I'm in a different country and its not sleeting cold howling winds anymore. Time to explore.
Limit my salt. Grumble, grumble, grumble. I hate this resolution. It makes me angry when I think about it. It might ruin my life. There's no concrete amount here. If I'm even capable of adding less salt to anything I make or eat, I'll consider it a win.
Clean up the e-waste I have accumulated. Oh my god. There's so much. It is absolutely terrifying. I may never catch up. I have over a thousand unread emails in my assorted email inboxes. My desktop is littered with images of tater tots and downloads of invoices from Roseline Coffee from when I worked at Destroyer. I'm going to spend 15 minutes daily trying to reign the crazy in.
Well, that's it! 10 Resolutions. They don't seem too unreasonably difficult. I tried to make the goals as reachable as possible, seeing as whenever I know I'm supposed to do something that I told myself to do (like writing here, for example,) I kind of look at it sideways with my peripheral vision, acknowledge that I'm not doing it, and then watch YouTube. Which is the opposite of doing the thing. I'm going to start doing the things. Probably not all at once, because being really excited about something and being like "Yeah! New Sara! So productive! I'm so responsible and awesome!" usually lasts for about 3 days before it plummets into an inevitable failure-spiral.
So here's to the end of the failure-spiral! I can do it! It's not even really remotely challenging! Setting the bar low!
**Endnote: This post was way less about writing something that anyone would possibly enjoy, and way more about making something public in order to hold myself accountable so that I at least try. It was very me-driven. Good thing one of my resolutions wasn't to be less self-absorbed!