My sincere hope is that I’m not sitting down to hammer out these posts every night at 9:49 eastern, but I just botched tomorrow night’s dinner preparations so nothing left to do but dive into my 2023 goal. For those who missed yesterday, I am trying to craft one new post every day, for as long as I can keep it going.
What better way to attack my resolution of daily writing than to analyze exactly how badly I failed in my resolutions last year? No better way. Without further stalling let’s take a look at my failures from a year ago, as I make lots of excuses for those failures.
In my previous blog, I spelled out my 2022 resolutions if you feel like reading my various rationales.
Resolution: Write one blog post every week. Result: fail. I believe I dropped the ball on this one the very first week. If you’re going to fall on your face, might as well do it early. In my head, I was thinking of weekend mornings when we usually let the kids throw the TV on for awhile and Caryn and I tend to do stuff on our phones. I imagined that if I subbed the laptop for the phone, I could pretty easily hammer out a post once a week. I did not. It turns out I’m much better at having ideas for posts than actually writing them. We will see if I can translate those ideas into better productivity this year.
Resolution: Clean one little thing every day. Result: fail. I did this on and off and came reasonably close to the spirit of the resolution, but certainly didn’t do it on a daily basis. The idea of this one is to not be deterred by the immensity of cleaning/organizing the house and instead to break it down into manageable pieces. Which makes sense. Here’s where the idea falls apart. It assumes a sort of stasis with the things that have been cleaned already, allowing you to continue to make progress on other areas. Sadly, I find home maintenance does not work that way. Instead, you get buried under an avalanche of messiness and disorganization that prevents those small bits from making much of an impact. Again, I appreciate the essence of the resolution, but it works better in theory than in practice.
Resolution: Have fun with Rory. Result: achieved. Oh, Rory. The apple of my eye. The maddening little monster that drives me absolutely crazy. I do think he and I had more fun together this year. I don’t think it necessarily improved our relationship in the way I hoped, but if I think back on the year I can picture lots of fun things we did together. I will call this one of my rare successes.
Resolution: Patience. Result: fail. Yeah, the less said about this the better. Even in writing it last year I knew it was unlikely. It remains a needed area of self improvement. I will keep you all posted.
Resolution: Learn to play guitar. Result: fail. I took one guitar lesson! A guitar player, that does not make me. I give myself some credit for following through on the actual lessons, but unfortunately Declan’s therapy schedule changed, I couldn’t fit the lessons into my schedule anymore, and alas my burgeoning career stalls. This is another one I hope to revive in 2023. I will melt faces, damnit.
Resolution: Write a children’s book. Result: fail. Perhaps my most damning failure. I still really want to do this, but it turns out I’m not as creative as I hoped. I did create a Google Document! Titled it and everything. And then I tried counting how many words a bunch of my favorite children’s books have so I had an idea of what I should be shooting for. Turns out counting words in books — even kids books — is hard. Then I tried to Google how many words most kids books have. I think the results are in my Google Document. This failure legit bums me out, so I will move on. Here’s hoping I can find some inspiration this year, as Detective Declan deserves to have his story told.
Resolution: Study for and take LSAT. Result: fail. I determined this was maybe not the most well-thought-out plan. Still a possibility for the future, I suppose. I miss wearing a shirt and tie, but there are probably better ways to do that than becoming a lawyer.
Resolution: Run one road race. Result: fail. I did run a bunch more in 2022, but didn’t get my act together to run a race. There was one late in the year I actually almost registered for, and then was going to try walk-in registration. Then I realized the race was Saturday when I thought it was Sunday. I remain quite disorganized.
Resolution: Break 88. Result: fail. I played some decent golf early in the season, and felt like I was on my way to cracking that barrier, but as is often the case I didn’t play as much as I hoped and never really threatened it. A September 91 was the closest I came, though that round did feature a blistering back-nine 43, which is maybe my best-ever nine hole score.
There we go. Lots of failures, with plenty of things to strive for in the new year. In posting this, I’m at least 1-for-1 in my daily writing goal, so we’re off to a rollicking start.
“I will melt faces, damnit.“ - ☺️