How did my 2013 New Year’s Resolutions go?
The Hell-Yeas!
Flossing
This is probably my most successful new year’s resolution ever. I started flossing daily, after I let my Facebook friends vote on my resolutions. I’m now totally addicted to flossing and it isn’t nearly as scary as I thought. When I went to the dentist this November, my dental hygienist said I had “practically no plaque to speak of.” Considering that we learned in the 2013 election that Portland thinks putting fluoride in our water is the worst idea ever, I’m very happy with this life choice. To flossing in 2014 and beyond!
Running
I started running in the summer of 2012, as a way to stay active when my wrist was broken and limiting the amount of biking I could do. At first I hated it, but eventually found running was a good mental health activity. My 2013 goal was to be able to run a half-marathon. I followed a training plan where the objective was “to finish the race in the upright position.” Considering that at the beginning of 2013 I had never run more than 4 miles at once, this seemed achievable but ambitious. I successfully ran my first half-marathon in October (dressed in costume, of course), and am now up to running about 20 miles a week, give or take a few. My next half-marathon is in February!
Some stats on this years running: I ran a total of 290 miles, my average pace was 10:30/mile (fastest sustained pace for a half-marathon was 9:03/mile), my highest elevation climb was 1,838 feet.
Graduating
Yea, well. I did graduate and finish my thesis this year. 7 colleges, 4 states, and 2 countries and nearly a decade of on-and-off student status, I wish I could say that finishing my bachelor’s was amazing and I accomplished all I’d hoped to with my thesis and my Reed College career, but the best I can say is that I drug my ass across the finish line to the registrar’s office with a thesis in tow. And I finished that whiskey thesis on the front lawn of Reed College wearing the golden plastic laurels they give you. And I couldn’t be bought back to my senses until I inhaled the air of an alcohol rehab.
No longer will “bachelor’s degree required” be a persistent barrier in my life.
New Custom Bike
Yup, and she’s beautiful.
The Somewhats
More Awesome Projects
This was a purposely vague resolution, and I feel like I halfway accomplished it. I did manage to pull off a brand merging and expansion of the podcast, a complete transition of the IPRC’s library catalog over to a new system, a project where I took 50 self-portraits the last 50 days of my college experience, and run the world’s first 24-hour zine cataloguing competition. But I also had yet another year where I failed to put out a single zine or comic or successfully release any of the video projects I’ve been mulling over this year. I guess that’s what 2014 is for!
The Nopes
Stretch Daily
This seems to be the new years’ resolution that I will never accomplish. I may have only lasted a single day.
Bike Tour in Europe
The hope was that I’d receive the Watson fellowship (for which I was a finalist but did not win) or run a successful kickstarter this year for a multi-country bike tour across Europe & parts of Asia. By the time I graduated, I simply didn’t have a energy to put together a big funding effort or push, and I didn’t have the money to fund a trip myself. But hopefully by this time next year, I will be able to say I accomplished this.
Ride Harder
I only did 4 bike tours this year, my second-lowest ever (after the year in which I broke my wrist and lived in Europe for six months.) Does not qualify as riding harder.
Overall: 60% unweighted success rate; 80% when weighted by importance
There’s a bunch of graphs for all of these if you’re interested; they’re in my 2013 Annual Comic (this year in graph & regressions!) If you’d like a copy, let me know your snail mail address and I’ll send you a copy before the end of the year.