Tuesday, January 17, 2012

2012: Resolutions & Goals

Oh my goodness! 2012 is upon us! And I have no resolutions or plans yet! Time to change that. First to note a key difference between resolutions and plans. This is probably a distinction that exists only in my mind, but I always think of resolutions as being a change in habits, while goals are, well, goals. To use a common example, a goal might be to lose weight. The resolutions would be to eat better, work out more, etc. I hope that explains the seeming dichotomy between the two.

Onto the resolutions then!
1) To be more in the moment. I worry. A lot. A huge amount of my processing time and allotment goes to 'but what if this happens', and it's rarely in a positive or productive way. I've been getting better at shutting it off and just focusing on the task at hand, but there's still miles to go, which leads directly to resolution two.
2) Not to get discouraged. If I teach my kids one thing . . . Wait, I need a problem statement. One, assume children. Idealized, spherical children for computational purposes. Okay, moving on. So if I teach my hypothetical one-day children one thing, it'll be not to get discouraged. If I can think of one thing that's slowed me down in my life, kept me from achieving certain goals, it's the fact that I get pretty easily discouraged. For a long time, my default response to when I was having a problem with something was to basically whine and moan and say 'oh, why am I not good enough'. Mature, right? Anyhoo, I've been working on it, but I still occasionally catch myself slipping back to my old ways. I wish there was something more I could do to measure this particular resolution of mine, but I can't actually think of one. Ah well.
3) Eat out less. Since going to grad school, I've been eating out a lot, as it's rough to carry all your food for a day around with you in addition to books, a laptop and various other sundries. This quarter I'm planning to brown bag more often, and also to bring a wide variety of snacks to school so I don't wind up buying so many of Espresso Roma's delicious, delicious cranberry muffins. Also, I'm currently implementing my 'bring coffee to school' plan already, which should save me a fair bundle. Seriously, I drink a lot of coffee. I estimate that if I bring my own coffee to school every day, I'd save a billion dollars. I may also be bad at math, but you get the idea.
4) Blog more! Which in turn means doing more things with my life that are worthy of being blogged and suitably recording them.
5) Keep in better touch with my extended family. I've done a pretty crap job of this over the years, it's about time I got on the stick about it.

And now for goals!
1) To earn my B rating in foil. This is gonna be a rough one, I've been a C now for about three years, and there are very few B level competitions in my area. Plus, my skill in actual competition is still hanging me up a bit. In a brief recap of my last major tournament (Duel in the Desert), I was beaten like a red-headed step child. It did not go well. So I'm gonna have to up my game this year if I want to get that shiny new rating.
2) Get started on my master's thesis. I'm on my second quarter of grad school, so I've got to get a project picked and started soon in order to be out in a reasonable amount of time. This will probably be the most involved project of my life, so I'd like to get started on it sooner than later.
3) Various interpersonal goals that you're probably not interested in.

Next week, robot stuff! And less self-indulgence!