It is…Wednesday.I, uh, sort of fell off the wagon last week. Between an ear infection (which I still have) and completely over-committing myself socially, I allowed myself to make a million excuses for not hitting the benchmarks I set for myself. I am going to rinse and repeat and make next week a fresh start at “week #2” while I try to make the best of the remainder of this week. While I am displeased with my slackerdom, I am proud of myself for not allowing one shitty week to completely derail my progress. Also, I did manage to eat a lot of fresh produce and read quite a few books during my illness, so there’s that.
Beyond that, I don’t have much of note to report. There are quite a few things I suppose I could write about, but the passage of time has dulled their edges and left me with less of a burning desire to dump things out onto paper (screen, whatever). Perhaps at some point soon I will write a more focused entry on some of the other stuff that’s going on in my life and in my head, but I’m too lazy to do so now.
As I promised myself, I have returned to update on my quest to fall back into the best of my old habits. I rarely feel like writing in the morning, but I am going to a party tonight and I will likely return drunk, bathed in the glow of protracted socialization, and too lazy to write. Thus, here I am.
This week was by no means the triumphant resurrection of the best of me, but considering the circumstances, it was an okay start. Midweek ended up being pretty rough for me for a host of professional and personal reasons that I won’t go into (I have to preserve some of my privacy, after all), but thanks to the intellectual and social gifts of others, things worked out in the end (or are in the process of working out, whatever). I know some pretty smart, kind, funny, etc. people so I guess I can’t be doing too badly in life.
Today’s breakfast. Shoutout to my awesome roommate for the groceries and making the horseradish mayo!
Back to the subject at hand, I did okay this week, given how loose my goals for myself were. I finished reading three books and ate slightly less shittier and consumed more fresh fruits and vegetables (For example, today’s breakfast was baked avocado with smoked salmon, egg, and homemade horseradish mayo!). I didn’t really do anything astounding (or anything I shouldn’t have been doing all along, obviously), but it feels good to be forcing myself out of this limbo I’ve been in forever and a day.
Next week, I want to focus more on spending time working on some of the programming projects I’ve started and abandoned over the past few months. In particular, I want to work on productizing something I hacked together for my own use at work late last year; I figure the rest of my team might be able to get some use out of it and it would challenge me to actually make a GUI for something, so win/win. That’ll probably take me longer than a week, but I want to throw two or three hours at it next week. I also want to redesign both of my domains, but that will probably wait until I have a few days off at the end of the month.
My only other new goal for next week is to stop being a lazy fuck and taking the elevator up a single floor; I used to judge the shit out of people for doing that and now I’m one of them. Not cool, self! I have fallen far from my days of walking 2 miles each way as part of my commute and then jogging a (slow, indoor) 5k, but I’ll get back there.
My ~*concrete*~ goals for next week will be to read at least one book, eat /something/ that’s not processed every day, spend three hours hacking away on something, and avoid elavators for single floor trips unless carrying something fucking ridiculous. I am tightening the reigns on myself a little bit, but my goals are still pathetically easy. Baby steps!
I will be back next week to hold myself accountable. Writing (both here and privately) has helped a lot and made me feel more in touch with myself. I missed this.
I had higher hopes for myself this year, but I also had lower expectations.
At the dawning of 2015, I really only had one “New Year’s Resolution” for myself: to pick back up all the habits and hobbies that I had in 2011/early-2012 that made me feel like the most authentic version of myself I could possibly be. At the time, I was a complete hedonist. I did what felt good and natural to me without giving a shadow of a fuck as to what I “should” have been doing with my life. I read voraciously, averaging a book a week, and gave myself up willingly to the allure of escapism; I maintained a diet and exercise routine that consisted primarily of counting calories and walking and jogging as much as physically possible, simply for the pursuit of my own health and aesthetic goals, eschewing society’s thoughts on both; my fashion sense was probably the most evolved it has ever been, as were my makeup skills; I expressed myself daily, both in code and prose, and as a consequence, felt more intellectually alive than I have since; and, perhaps most importantly, I felt like I was living authentically and not out of convenience or laziness.
So, as last year drew to a close and I reflected on who and what I would ideally be at the end of this year, my mind naturally drifted back to this time in my life when I felt like I had both my shit buttoned up and my hair down. I started the year with grandiose delusions of slipping back into the self-control and serenity that I wore so comfortably in years past only to discover, much to my dismay, that it didn’t quite fit. Rather than letting out the seams a bit to make it work for me, I tossed it back into my closet and continued walking around wearing my current outfit of haughty apathy and, gluttony, and indifferent cultural consumerism.
Here is where I feel the need to pause and defend myself a bit. It’s not that accomplished nothing in 2015 (also, there are four-and-a-half months left this year!) The energy and attention that I didn’t focus on reeling myself back in was instead tossed into other things, to some measure of success: I got promoted at work, did some dating and figured out a lot more about myself and what I want in a guy, spent more time with my friends than I have in a long time, saw a ton of great concerts, got on a combination of medications that’s helped me more than I could have imagined, and developed a new hobby in board gaming. I have grown and made strides in a lot of ways that I didn’t expect to this year and I proud of myself for that, but at the same time, I yearn for the…motivation?…self-control?…to go through with my initial plans for myself this year.
Thus, I am going to pull the wrinkled old garment which was once so magestically dawned by my 23-year-old self out of the back of my closet and wear it in whichever ever way it fits me best for one week, starting on Monday; a low-stakes, high-reward foray into making the best of the back half of this year. Maybe I will end up just avoiding reddit and Buzzfeed for a week in favor or actually reading books or maybe I will work on a small coding project or dust off my Arduino, or maybe I’ll just end up counting calories for a week, who knows?
All I know is that when it comes down to it, what I’m really committing myself to is proactively seeking happiness for a week and just accepting the path of least resistance. So, I will venture forth and live deliberately and return next Saturday with an update as to how that’s working out for me.
