So, I’ve never made New Year resolutions before*. Mostly because I know myself pretty well and I’m only likely to do something that seems like a really good idea right when I do it (diet, fall madly in love and get married with no second-guessing, etc). I’m not really the sort of person that can say “I’m going to do this in the nearish future” and stick to doing it. It’s all or nothing with me. Before Stuart moved in and became something really nice to snuggle up to, thus prompting me to keep relatively regular sleep hours, I used to clean whenever the mood struck, and that mood struck around 1:30 AM about twice a month. Or I’d get into some really insane project, like reorganizing my dresser drawers or reorganizing my photographs. These aren’t things I plan, so resolutions never seemed like they fit my M.O.
But I want to commit to small plans that are manageable this year. So I’ve made some decisions that are resolutionish. They’re not really hard and fast rules, this is more like a tester year for the whole pre-planned decisions thing. Nonetheless, here they are, for posterity:
1. Get involved with people that need my help: this is something I’ve meant to do, year after year, but life gets in the way rather selfishly. I’ve always wanted to do volunteer work but everytime it seems like life is calm enough to find a project, life gets uncalm. And it’s not a good idea to dedicate yourself to something when there’s very little of yourself spare. But this seems like a good year – hopefully, this year I’ll be transitioning away from a nine-to-five existence and into something more flexible, and one of my promises to myself is that I will find useful ways to fill the time between school (hopefully), part-time work, and writing. So when Jen mentioned she’d joined NYCares as a volunteer, I looked into it. It’s a great organization in its flexibility and its wide scope of projects. Tomorrow night is my first project – reading bedtime stories to kids living in family shelters. I love children and I want to work with Barrie, eventually, on some literacy projects she’s got up her sleeve, so this seemed like a good place to start.
2. Be more attentive to special days: I’m not going to go totally insane and start crafting my own doilies or pincushions, but I’d like to start planning for friends’ and family’s birthdays and other holidays a little better. I’m good at the big holidays but I sometimes forget to do more than just call a long-distance friend on his or her birthday. It’s not hard to find a card and send it, so I want to start doing that more often.
3. Be more conscientious of daily routines: I’m a pretty good creature of habit but there are a lot of things I’d like to do on a daily basis – little things – that I sometimes slack on. Washing my face every night is a big one, because I’m currently lucky enough to have good skin and I shouldn’t take that for granted, taking care of it now will go a long way later. I also need to drink more water and put things away properly when I get home. These are three little tasks I’m going to try to improve this year.
4. Accomplish at least 2/3rds of these household projects: completely rehaul our hallway of picture frames, deal with the gross brown spots on our bathroom ceiling, repaint and restructure the kitchen cabinets, install a dimmer in the dining room, get a new bookshelf for the office, find a new ceiling light-fixture for the office, TOTALLY RE-ORGANIZE OUR LINEN CLOSET FROM HELL, frame Jason’s beautiful christmas card from last year before it starts fading, re-do the art in our bedroom, get our landlord to install a new front door lock to replace the really sticky current one, and solve the desk-space problem in our otherwise perfect office.
5. Do at least some of these things that I always say I want to do and aren’t hard to do but somehow never get around to doing: visit a vineyard in the NY area, go bike-riding in the city, go row-boating in Central Park, go camping again possibly with friends this time, go apple-picking in the fall, bake bread, walk across the Manhattan Bridge (I know!), go to the Bronx Zoo in the spring, and take more pictures with my Nikon.
I’m comforted by this last one, because I know I’ll get some or most of it done. If I’d made this same list last year, it would have had all those things on it but it also would have had things like: go camping, play tennis, get involved with Barrie’s summer Shakespeare, take at least one stupidly extravagant vacation, explore Queens, and write more, possibly for publishing. So, of all the things I didn’t get around to doing in the past year, I’ve done a fair amount of the things I wanted to. That’s encouraging.
What are your resolutishions?
* this isn’t strictly true. I made something like a resolution somewhat close to New Year’s last year, which was an incredibly huge accomplishment – Stuart and I started paying all our bills on time, on the same day every month. Then my dad, flushed with pride upon hearing that his daughter was committed to never again getting her cell-phone shut off, made me this totally awesome yearly spreadsheet where I could input the amounts paid every month to each company and the confirmation numbers I got online once the bills were paid. It meant that every single month this year, on that day in the middle of the month when our joint checking account was the fattest, I sat down with twenty minutes to spare and paid all five of our bills. Not having a credit card really helped this transition – so did Stuart getting a job. It’s a tiny accomplishment and we still don’t budget or save like we should (sorry, dad) but just paying our bills on time, all at once, every month, has given us a stability and preparedness that feels a lot like adulthood. You could say, sadly, that this was my most successful resolution. Today, when I copied and rebuilt dad’s 2005 spreadsheet into page two, 2006, I felt incredibly proud. Also, what a rockin’ dad, huh? You can borrow my dad if you need someone to build you a cool little spreadsheet that makes bill-paying fun.

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