My intentions for this year

22 Jan, 2025

I don't like making New Year's resolutions. Generally, I think that task-based goals do more harm than good, especially when they exist strictly on a personal level. Career and (well-intentioned) family and friends can all too easily slow or hinder these goals entirely, and then one finds oneself in an even worse place than before. Plus, now you haven't just failed some board member whom you'll never meet--you've failed yourself. That sucks.

So, to rip a page straight out of Clear's Atomic Habits, let's focus on some process-based intentions for the year instead. I've given myself three weeks to start this year off before stating my intentions to ensure that I'm not blowing smoke. All of these intentions are items which I have already begun doing, understanding that I didn't want to lay out a groundwork for a bunch of potential hard-stop goals on January 1, only to fail multiple of them right away. All of these have been begun, and have continued for three weeks. And even better, I've already missed multiple days in each one, but picked them right back up¹. In the spirit of transparency, while I will first share my intentions for the year, I'll also share what didn't make the cut.

What made the cut

1. I intend to make reading an integral part of my life (again). I've enjoyed slowly getting back into reading over the last year or two, but I didn't truly dig back into the habit until October of last year, thanks in large part to our family's new arrival in September. Turns out, reading is a really excellent easy habit to pick up and put down for 10 minutes between bottles, bouts of crying², diaper changes, the works. I've always loved reading, mostly fiction, and especially fantasy⁴. I've managed to keep the habit alive for the most part through my life, at a dirge-like pace of about one book a year, until things finally turned around this past year for the better. I'm juggling three books at the moment, most of them near-completion, and I intend to keep this up throughout the year.
2. (more of a 1a, really) I intend to fortify my reading habit with audiobooks. If I find myself unable to read regularly for a while, I intend to continue my "reading" habits via continued listening to audiobooks. While nothing quite matches a nice sitting session with a book in hand and a coffee on the side table next to me, cooking dinner or cleaning up the house with an audiobook going is a close second (and it has the added benefit of chores magically doing themselves while I learn something).
3. I intend to practice Spanish daily. My wife recently returned to work, and we are choosing to send our child to a public daycare. This is a weirdly fraught decision in the states (do NOT dive into that TikTok rabbit hole, you will be sorry, and angry, and sad), but I know it's for the best for a lot of reasons. Plus, we are choosing to send baby to a Spanish immersion daycare. Granted, the four-month-old isn't going to be learning many words any time soon, but the exposure at this age will be instrumental in getting comfortable with a second language. One of my greatest regrets in growing up in a lily-white part of the Midwest (from which I thankfully moved away) is that, not only was there no encouragement from our education system to pick up a second language, but there was really no reason to in the first place (hence the likely lack of encouragement). I have three years of high school Spanish under my belt, and I try to use it casually when I can, but with a potential fluent Spanish-speaker being developed in our home over the next several years, I want to be sure I can at least try to keep up with the conversation to the best of my abilities in the meanwhile (not to mention that it makes conversations with the daycare staff a lot smoother).
4. I intend to hone my coding abilities outside of work as frequently as possible. Hopefully self-explanatory given my entries in this blog's devlog, but to double down, I really enjoy coding, both as a career and as a hobby. It is not my intention for my hobby coding to make me a boatload of extra "side-hustle" money, but I do believe that coding what I want outside of work will only serve to help hone my abilities at work as well, even if the languages don't always align. With that, I intend to continue working on plots.club as well as any other projects or skill-building activities may come my way. And especially regarding plots.club, I'll continue to update my progress here. Speaking of...
5. I intend to continue updating this blog⁵. Out of all of my new habits, this has been the hardest one to keep. A look at my posting history shows that I am nowhere near consistent in posting here, though in a lot of ways, I feel that it's because I don't always have a lot to say. I don't like posting for the sake of posting, and maybe as I continue to develop my ideas, I'll be able to convey them in a way that is more palatable to the world, even in a way that I think is worth writing about regularly. But for now, even if I just post random catalog entries, or snippets of the code on which I'm working, I would consider this to be a win.

What didn't make the cut

If you've read my blog before, you may know that I am originally a musician by trade. I would even still consider myself a musician first, and a software engineer second (even though the latter pays the bills, and the former is just an artifact of my past life). That said, while I am a musician, I am more specifically a percussionist. And, as of late, I am pretty strictly a drummer. And a drummer's instrument, by its very nature, is loud. I even bought a pack of mutes for my kit (and have a separate electric kit that basically sounds like a kit made of practice pads).

A drum set retrofitted with mutes is a beautiful thing, and if you're not immediately in the room with it, you don't even need earplugs. But... it's still not quiet enough that it won't wake a sleeping baby. And with our child only being four months old at this point, it means that the only real free time we have--at least, the only honest-to-goodness, consistently available time that we have to ourselves without fail--is after baby goes to sleep. And of course, the only place in the house where my drums can comfortably be set up is the room immediately below baby's room.

So, this isn't a "goodbye" to music by any means (the cloud would never allow it), but it is a "catch you later" to regular, intentional near-daily practice behind the kit. I'm certain that I will still play the drums this year. Probably plenty, if I can help it, and often with our child awake (and wearing headphones), enjoying the experience alongside us. But I'm going to allow myself to step back from stating any sort of intention regarding the regularity of the practice. It's simply not feasible this year.

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⁵I'll allow myself one year of continuing to make meta-mentions of this blog, as it's a rite of passage for all inexperienced bloggers to talk about themselves blogging. 10 months to go!

#personal