Tag: politics

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.

When elections give me nightmares

Last night I donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Making political donations is not something I do often, or lightly. As I’ve written earlier, I’m trying to keep a close eye on my finances so as to get my debt under control and start saving for retirement. But this election feels more important, and thus more stressful, than any of those I can remember in my life thus far.

I am a straight, white, middle-class male, with full-time employment, able to afford my own place to live, food, and a certain degree of comfort and entertainment. Yes, I still worry about money, but really, I personally am highly unlikely to be directly affected by any governmental policy that comes out of the next four years.

Why, then, am I so concerned about the outcome of the next six and a half weeks? Because it’s about everyone else. It’s about who we are as a country. There was a running joke in my AP Humanities class back in high school that every culture’s rise in greatness was paralleled by a rise of the middle class. Well, we are at a turning point here. On the one hand, we can elect a reality TV plutocrat, who has tied himself to outright racist and hateful ideologies, and thus continue to oppress minorities and concentrate wealth in the hands of a mighty few, leading to our own collapse into mediocrity if not outright destruction. Or we can say no, we are better than this.

I may not agree with the entirety of Clinton’s platform. As someone with ties to the technology field, I am quite disappointed with how she’s handled her information infrastructure in the past, and look forward to the day when someone who grew up with the Internet and information technology as an integrated part of their lives is a viable candidate. I certainly don’t agree with her hawkish foreign policy stance or ties to the banking industry. But in these ways, Trump would be far worse.

I know some people I know would ask, why not vote for a third option? Because that’s not what this is about. We need to prove that we as a nation will have nothing to do with the hatred and bigotry that Trump advocates. To quote Wil Wheaton, “Trump has to be defeated in an historical landslide. He needs to be humiliated, and he needs to take as much of his party down with him as possible.”