Hey! I don’t think I’m going to post this, but I don’t know how to write without addressing an audience, so uh, this is what we’re getting. Here’s a few things I want to work on in the coming year.
- Accept Cringe
I’ve been an old curmudgeon recently, and I can feel my youth slipping away every day. I’m okay with getting older. I feel none of that fear that viscerally grips a lot of people as they hurtle towards 30, but I DO fear losing my perspective as a younger human. I can feel small things that younger people do / say annoying me more and more recently, and I want to actively fight back against that.
The other aspect of this is that I want to be more comfy liking shit that’s kinda trash, and be less of a prick about the things that don’t immediately connect with me. There’s a whole lot of music / movies / games / experiences that I’m sure I’d love to interface with, if I’d just let myself approach it with an open mind.
- Eat better
Today is Saturday, December 27th. I went to Walmart this morning and spent about 150 dollars on various groceries. There’s enough food in my apartment to live off of for multiple weeks. And yet, as I write this paragraph, there are 2 chicken sandwiches, an order of mac and cheese and a side of fries from Popeye’s in my gut. That’s so fucking stupid.
I’m never going to stop enjoying fast food. It’s ingrained in the very fabric of my soul, and I’m okay with that. But I can’t keep doing this to myself. It’s horrible for me financially, and even worse for my health. I live an absurdly low maintenance life, working from home with almost zero commitments beyond that job. There’s no reason I can’t cook for myself at minimum four nights a week. Even that sounds pathetic on paper, but I’m nowhere near it currently.
The dumbest part is that I love a ton of the cheap / easy foods that people always point to. I fucking adore rice and beans. The one thing I do make with any real consistency is soup. These are easy options that I should be whipping up weekly. There’s so much money being pissed away, all so I can feel like shit after gorging myself on fried carbs. Just gotta break the habit.
- Run a 10k
So to my great surprise and shock, it turns out that I love cardio. I started dabbling with walking / jogging in May, and in November I ran an entire goddamn 5k. That rules. I want to keep that energy.
I doubt I’m ever running marathons, but I want to keep pushing myself in that direction. Ideally, this 10k would happen in the spring after a winter of hitting the exercise bike and getting out for a jog whenever the weather allows, but that’s the kind of tight deadline that I want to avoid. A looser one would be to get it done before I’m 30, but we’ll keep it to the calendar year just to be safe.
- Write fiction
I’ve always wanted to do it. I’m not getting any younger. It doesn’t have to be any of the “real” ideas, and it doesn’t have to be good. But if I want to say I did it, it has to exist.
- Consume real media
Death to doomscrolling, long live art. 2025 was Da Year Of Da Movie, and we can keep that energy going forward. Watch films, listen to records, beat video games, read books. I do not need to see an endless flood of men eating fast food in their cars and clips from podcasts I don’t listen to flash before my eyes, rapidly eroding my attention span via Youtube Short. I need to be enriched by meaningful artistic creations. It’s good for me.
I had a strange epiphany the other day while I was writing up my best of the year list. You can only love the things that you find. There’s a very real chance that the movie that would connect the most with me, that would fundamentally alter my soul in a spiritual way was already made years ago. And I’ll never know it exists, never get to form that connection, if I don’t get my ass in front of a screen to watch it. In this year alone, there are three separate directors whose work I’ve had that kind of experience with, yet I haven’t sought out any of their older films to see how I feel about those. You never know what you’re missing until you find it.
- Save money
Kinda an addendum to #2 rather than its own point, but I make legitimately decent money currently. There’s no reason that I should be even remotely close to living paycheck to paycheck, yet here I am throwing money at random garbage for no real reason on a weekly basis. I can do better.
Shortly after moving up here, I came up with the vague goal of buying a house by the time I turned 30. That’s not happening, but if I play my cards right and stop buying steam decks, it could become a reality by 2030. Close enough, right?
- Leave the apartment
Given how much I love Kalamazoo, I feel like I’ve barely experienced it. There’s a ton to do here, I just need to force myself out the door. I went on a date last week at a bar literally down the street from my apartment. I’ve drove past it a hundred times, literally parked in their parking lot to pick up calzones from the DP Dough it shares a building with, and yet it took someone else asking me to hang out with them to actually check it out. What a dumb way to live.
- Get a tattoo
Permanence is terrifying to me. The idea that anything is truly forever shakes me to my core. From burgers at long closed restaurants that I’ll never get to taste again, to relationships that I’ve destroyed, neglected, or cherished with people that are long dead that I can never reconnect with, if it’s something that I can’t change, I live in fear of it.
There’s a nearly double digit long list of ideas for tattoos that I want to put on my body. But the knowledge that once I do it, it’s there forever has always freaked me out. The older I get, the more I think I’ll never outgrow it. So at a certain point, I need to just do it. Probably start with something small, and see how I feel about it once it’s on my skin instead of in my head.
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Weird list huh? I think I am posting this, I edited out anything actively incriminating. Happy New Year everyone!
Flamoctapus 