Tag: introspective

Three-and-two life goals for my thirty-second year

I turned 32 today. That number doesn’t really bother me, but getting older still has been pretty unpleasant this year. My birthday has always been somewhat linked with Election Day. I was born the day after President Reagan was elected to his second term. In 2002, the year Senator Wellstone died in a plane crash, I turned 18 the day after Election Day, so I was unable to vote in his memory. This year, any celebration would fall on a Monday, and be marred by being sandwiched between the disruption to sleep schedule due to Daylight Savings Time and the stress of the most frightening and disturbing election season I can remember coming to a head.

I’ve written about this year’s election here before, so I don’t really want to get into it that deeply. But I am scared about what this nation is becoming. I mentioned on Facebook that I was unable to continue my usual tradition of watching the film “V for Vendetta” on 11/5. The depiction of a totalitarian government that came to power by blaming a nations troubles on “immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals, terrorists, [and] disease-ridden degenerates” hit just a little too close to home.

But, I still want to turn this year’s implementation of $AGE++ into something more positive. So I’m turning toward one of the things that inspired starting this blog in the first place. Back in, I believe, fall of last year, actor/writer/blogger Wil Wheaton started a project of rebooting his life where he would attempt a series of life changes and document them on a monthly basis. His goals were:

  • Drink less beer.
  • Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
  • Write more.
  • Watch more movies.
  • Get better sleep.
  • Eat better food.
  • Exercise more.

I am not a writer nor an actor, so I don’t feel the need to write, read, or watch more movies. However, I have similar goals for health and overall holistic well-being. These are goals that can be worked on continuously and see progress over the course of a year (or approximately nine months, in one case), rather than some of the other single-event driven ones I still have (get a driver’s license, possibly find a better-paying job, etc.) I’ve decided these will be my focus for the next year:

Drink less beer.

I have been drinking 1-2 beers every night for the past few years. I’ve made attempts to cut back before, before that I was in the 3-4 range. As part of getting older, and of having success cutting back in the past, my tolerance for alcohol has been drastically decreased. If I have two beers in one night, it’s a 50-50 chance I’ll wake up in the middle of the night feeling ill as a result. There’s no reason to keep doing that to myself on a regular basis.

Make more music.

I sang in choirs for years throughout high school and college. I miss being a part of something like that, but I haven’t found something organized that I can fit into my schedule regularly with a travel time I would be comfortable with. I’ve heard that there’s a Unitarian Universalist church not too far from where I live that has a strong choir with a good director that I might look into, though. This doesn’t have to mean performance, though. The title of this blog was inspired by the digital piano I purchased around Labor Day and the funny looks I get from my cats when I practice. Just managing to fit in a few hours of practice during the week would help significantly toward this goal and exercise parts of my brain that I feel have atrophied a bit since graduating college.

Get better sleep.

This may develop simply as a result of the other goals on this list, or it may require special effort of its own. It somewhat remains to be seen. The last few weeks have shown the need to track this on its own, though.

Exercise more.

Every time I try to make running a part of my schedule, I seem to have it work for a few weeks, then somehow injure myself which puts me off the whole thing for entirely too long. Plus those good old Minnesota winters just make me want to huddle under some blankets as soon as I get off of work. My apartment claims to be working on updating their work-out room with modern equipment, though. I am hoping that once they do so, I will be able to make working out more of a routine without having to venture out into the wind and snow. Even if they don’t, I might wind up breaking out the old DDR equipment, since I live on the ground level with cement floors and nobody below me.

Finish three costumes by Con next year.

This is for exercising another creative part of my brain. I’ve discovered I really enjoy sewing, now that I have something a little more exciting than ordinary clothes to be working on. Last year, I managed two, but one was a nightmare of rushed work on spray-painted foam that I just don’t want to deal with again. This year, I have at least three in mind, all of which only take small steps out of the area I’m more comfortable with. An Imperial uniform from Star Wars, which is currently in progress and requires me to more thoroughly adapt a pattern or create my own than I’ve done in the past. Solas from Dragon Age Inquisition, which will require working with leather, or an acceptable substitute. And Lennier from Babylon 5, which will require creating a prosthetic headpiece. Fortunately, I’ve had some pretty thorough instruction on how to do that in latex from a family that created one for Galaxy Quest’s Dr. Lazarus, but it’s still something I’ve never tried working with before.

A number of these will inter-relate, and they will all make demands on my time that will require a little better time-management than I’ve pulled off in the past. But I think they should all be worthwhile. Though probably not easy.

How To Do Basic Shit

Stop Taking Pride In Not Knowing How To Do Basic Shit

This was the article that inspired me to start writing this blog. Someone “liked” it, or linked to it, or in some other way caused it to appear on my Facebook feed. I don’t much care for its holier-than-thou attitude, and I’m not sure I agree on some of the qualities that supposedly define “adulthood”, but it did make me take a closer look at how I’m living my life and what I would like to improve.

At first, I was somewhat defensive. I might well be one of those “[dudes with]…bare-bones furniture and empty walls and nothing in the fridge but beer, old pizza, and a crusty bottle of ketchup.” Then I realized that it’s not really about home decor or design aesthetic, but about taking charge and responsibility for your own life. After all, the reason my fridge is so frequently empty is because I live within a mile of three different grocery options, so on-demand shopping tends to be the name of the game.

So while that might not be a problem, there are three areas of my life that I would consider myself to still be “failing”, at least in terms of how this article might define adulthood. First, and least, driving. I had originally set a goal of earning my license before I turned thirty. That did not happen. My usual excuse is that my day-to-day life is such that I really don’t need a car. And this is true. I can walk or bus to work, shopping, entertainment, really 95% of what I need to. But for that last 5%, I do wind up feeling guilty for having to request car-pool solutions, or the fact that I can’t visit my parents without arranging them to meet me at least part way with a ride. That said, this is probably the lowest priority of things I would like to improve. Though I sometimes suspect I’m subconsciously holding out for improving technology to render the point moot.

The next two are somewhat intertwined, and probably stem back to the same personality flaw. One is financial management and planning. Right now I have no real financial safety net that doesn’t involve running up more credit card debt. I am not in any meaningful way saving for retirement. I’m not exactly just living paycheck-to-paycheck, though, either. In college and shortly thereafter, I made some financial decisions that were less than ideal. Additionally, I’ve had some health crises and pet-health crises crop up that have been more expensive than I would like. As a result, I’ve had to prioritize paying off old debt rather than starting new savings. I don’t know that there’s much I can do here other than what I’m already doing–try to get all of the high-to-medium-interest debt paid off within the next few years, then use the money I had been paying into those accounts each month to start long-term savings instead.

The key part to that will be avoiding taking on any further debt. Since most of my credit card and consolidation loan balance accumulated slowly as I didn’t quite keep pace with paying it off, that means keeping my normal daily expenditures under control and within the budget allowable by my paycheck. And making and sticking to a budget has never been something I’ve been that good at.

The final area for improvement is management of my health, both physical and mental. This ties into finances, because even with insurance, doctors and therapists are expensive. And I am fundamentally lazy, so if I am more or less getting by, why bother take the time to schedule a physical, or what have you. But I know I have at least one, possibly more undiagnosed, untreated issues, so if I took the time to actually go through with a course of treatment, I might see significant improvements in my general quality of life.

I’d say “just make an appointment”, but a couple of things need to happen first. I need to budget for it, first. Which means figuring out where I can trim my weekly expenses to set aside some money to avoid taking on more debt as discussed above. Also, I would like to find a doctor I feel comfortable with. I tried seeing someone more regularly back when I was living in Saint Paul, and couldn’t find a clinic that felt right. I’ve gotten some recommendations, but it turns out that they were for providers that aren’t in my insurance network. And I don’t even know how you’d go about finding a therapist. But I know it can be done.

So those are my goals, areas where I’m not exactly succeeding as a fully-functional adult. If I don’t address them, they might even blow up into bigger problems in the future. So let’s see what we can do, hey?