my year in lists

Jan 01 2024

I'm not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of "My Year in Lists" by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.

However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years of gaining weight and developing some really negative patterns of self-talk around my body image, I decided to join a gym. Of course I'd like to see the number on the scale go down, but the main goal was just to get healthier and develop healthier habits. I started running, because that's what I used to do (not well), and eventually convinced a friend to join with me. Together, we set the goal of running a 5K, and we did our first in May of 2023, in about 41 minutes (in our defense, it was an extremely hilly course, but also progress, progress¹). We ran three more as the year went by; my most recent was November, where I finished in around 36 minutes.

I'm still not happy with the number on the scale, but I'm also trying not to focus on it too much.

I've made a new gym buddy (adding, not replacing) who is rigid in her visits, so I'm hoping that will help me continue to progress. I'm also doing a weekly volleyball rec league with some friends. And, always, I have the oblique goal to eat healthier.²

2023 was also the year I bought a house with my partner. We're still unpacking, but I'm excited to finally feel rooted in one place. We've lived in the same general area for the last seven years, but always in apartments that left me feeling transient. I hesitated to decorate because I worried about what would happen when we moved on to a new place (case in point: I decided to break this habit and bought $500 in rugs last year; a month later, I was under contract on my house). Now that we're in a more permanent spot, I don't feel as much like a visitor.³

And finally, speaking of homes, I want to try to make this space my new home on the internet. I've had a strange relationship with the internet; I was on it near constantly as a teen. I ran a large fan forum for years, dabbled in web design and hosting, and posted regularly in a LiveJournal blog about the minutiae of high school life (no, I will not link to any of it; I've scrubbed a lot of it, and much of it has been lost to time, but there are traces).

I like writing. I like journalling. I like blogging. I find them to be cathartic, to be outlets, to be mementos, and I want to commit to doing it all more often. This last year especially, I've grown negative in my feelings toward the internet and have been making efforts to decouple from "big" social media. But I still yearn to connect, to put my voice and words out there. This feels like the healthy path: independent, small web. A space for me, by me, controlled by me.⁴

But the question has always been what to write about. I'm inspired by the calls of others (EveryoneShouldBlog.txt, Write every day), and I've considered taking on a challenge like #100DaysToOffload (if I do, consider this day one). But about what? And are my thoughts really that interesting? Does it even matter if they are or aren't?

I see blogs often by folks who are engineers and programmers and developers, writing about their web projects or how they fix problems using tech. Selection bias exists; of course those are the folks writing on the web. I'm a middle school English teacher. I never feel like that's an interesting thing to write about, passionate as I am about it. Teacher blogs have always struck me as performative (and ugly), but given what a big piece of my life teaching is, perhaps there's more there than I think.

Internet privacy is important, so I've hesitated to blog about events of my personal life. Also, as a public space — albeit one I don't openly advertise to friends — it feels weird and wrong to write about my personal relationships, like I'm mining the experiences I have with others for #content (I'm overthinking this) without the consent of my friends.

And then I get caught in the idea that if I am to write something, it needs to be fully-formed, long-form thoughts. It doesn't. Being an English major really did a number on me.⁵ What matters is the writing, the thinking, the reflecting — and satisfying my urge to feel heard, to catalog my life in some way.

So: this is day one of this year. This is what I plan to do.

#exercise #internet #life #meta #teaching