2021 resolutions reflections
My 2021 resolutions:
- Be more goal-directed/intentional in my activities
- Publish my master’s thesis
- Read a personal book per season
- Write one blog post per month
- Establish an online presence
- Heal my knee!
- Take a bold summer trip
- Write and record four complete songs
Reflection:
1: Be more goal-directed/intentional in my activities
I actually paid attention to my new year’s resolutions over the whole year, so good for me for that! Other than that, this resolution was not accomplished.
2. Publish my master’s thesis
It did get published, sort of, at a paltry conference I don’t care about (rejected from the actual important conference). I did not really get the results I wanted on the project, for a number of reasons including struggling with procrastination and poor self discipline. Maybe in 2022 I will try to tackle the project again, but I’m not sure.
3. Read a personal book per season
I set a reasonable goal for myself here and accomplished it. The books were Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, The Overstory by Richard Powers, Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, and About love and other stories by Chekhov.
4. Write one blog post per month
I wrote a few, but not one per month. In particular, I didn’t write any substantial posts like I imagined myself doing. Turns out I’m not a very good writer!
5. Establish an online presence
This is a work in progress. I meant to post to FB and instagram about going to Cornell, but shied away from doing so, partially because I was unhappy with the picture I had. Maybe I should still do so. My website still needs to get made. I made an academic twitter but am not really using it properly.
6. Heal my knee!
This one I did well, and I’m proud of it. I could definitely have healed it about twice as fast, I think, if I knew what I was doing better at the start, but I worked hard at this and have kept at it. Still a lot of work to go!
7. Take a bold summer trip!
Accomplished! Costa rica with Skylar, including a few days by myself. In retrospect, I spent way too much money on this, but I’m happy I went for it and it was a great time.
8. Write and record four complete songs
This did not happen. At the end of the year, I tried writing some lyrics to at least wrap up a few demos of songs I had, so I did get four demos up on Soundcloud the first week of January. Now that Vorpal is trying to do remote music, I’ve gotten a ton better at recording music, so the possibility of actually fleshing out a real song is more feasible. But we’ll save that for 2022.
Overall, I am very happy with how things went.
