hello, 2014

This is the day of resolutions. But I want to remind you all that while it's fun to aspire to better things and work toward changes that improve our lives, we also should embrace who we are, where we are, and what we are. I've been working on this a lot this past year (and will continue to do so), and while I don't think self-improvement or resolutions or goals are anything to be sneered at, I also want to remember to celebrate what I already have in my life: good health, wonderful friends, and a promising career.

Of course, however, I do have some "resolutions," though Lance and I already have been working on them. I picked up this idea of a New Year's "theme" from a HuffPo article, but I've been abandoning the idea of specific resolutions for the past few years anyway, namely the ubiquitous health-related ones. Our current goal (and one we both agreed would be ideal) would be to stop procrastinating and spending mindless time watching TV or zoning out on the computer (ahem, Facebook and Pinterest for me).  Our strides in this direction have already been awesome, and we look forward to continuing them into the new year.

Personally, (and a related theme) is a goal of mindfulness. This means anything from actually texting/talking to humans instead of posting to Facebook and spending empty hours just looking at websites and watching dumb TV shows to being conscious of other choices I make daily that affect my  health and wellbeing. I like this idea because I've noticed how much time I spend on the internet doing nothing really when I could be using that time to be more productive both personally and professionally, from pursing my hobbies to writing articles to reading books for pleasure and for learning.

For some specific goals, I would like to spend some time daily reading and writing. The reading can be any nature (but should be more professional), and the writing can be this blog as well as professional writing (or an overlap of the two). Now that I am officially ABD, I need to begin cultivating better professional habits that will both help me produce a dissertation in a reasonable amount of time and work toward getting publications so that I have success on the job market. And working on my own writing craft, both personally and professionally, will help be to be a better writing instructor, not to mention keeping up with current scholarship.

Otherwise, I'm planning to continue toward overall simplification of my life and my belongings and continuing to work to improve my fitness with running and barre3. I started off today with a 10k run with my brother and his buddy, and I got to go to a delightful barre3 class this evening, kicking 2014 off to a great start. And with a bit of writing here, I can check off another of my goals!

Happy 2014, everyone. I hope 2013 was amazing, and here's to what's to come in the next year as well.