On making resolutions

[elfs]

Now that the new year is here and we've all had a while to come up with ours. I was thinking about what Alain de Botton said in a recent article about resolutions: that they pit something that is unfamiliar and unnatural, but held to a higher ideal, against that part of us that is familiar and natural but, to us, unattractive. Resolutions are about inner change against resistance, about holding off our natural inclination to be self-indulgent, narcissistic, and lazy in search of some more sublime and rewarding experience later.

So why resolve, in public? Because public resolutions are more useful than private ones. The potential for shame exists, even if it is hardly ever realized as everyone else is failing in their resolutions as well and so, in our age where we lack the will to judge our fellow man, the rewarding value of shame, at least to the community, goes untapped. Still, there's something to be said for announcing one's resolutions in public, and so I shall do so, and see what comes of it.

One thing I'm going to do about the resolutions is simple: I'm going to make them concrete. I'm going to associate them with numbers. I'm going to make some of them measurable. Here goes.

• I resolve to post an average of 4000 words per month in stories. This doesn't seem like a lot; don't I write 4000 words a week? Well, yes, but a lot of that is revision, and I want to put some energy into something other than web work.
• I resolve to write at least 100 words a day, even on weekends.
• I resolve to ride my bicycle at least 50 hours this year. Again, not a lot, but more than last year.
• I resolve to finish the last 30 lessons of Speak and Learn Japanese
• I resolve to learn 500 Kanji using the Reading Japanese series from Yale Linguistics.
• I resolve to spend 1 hour and 40 minutes every week drawing.
• I resolve to create and use 43 folders.
• I resolve to create a to-do list every day, and to keep my monthly schedule well in-sync with Omaha's.
• I resolve to include all of my children's scheduled school events on my calendar, even if I am unable to attend them.
• I resolve to do a weekly gather on Friday, at home, and figure out where I'm going in the following week.
• I resolve to create a Projects folder and to keep one short story, one novel, and one software project in there, and to not move them until they're done, dammit.