Wednesday, January 4, 2012

(Not Really) Resolutions

Happy New Year!  This year is the year of the Dragon.  The Water Dragon.


I'm never one for New Year resolutions, normally.  Jokes about their futility have become a cliche at this point, so there are better investments to make.  Instead, for the past nearly-three years I've participated in the "101 in 1001" project: accomplishing a list of 101 tasks in 1001 days.  My 1001 days will be up on my birthday this year; I won't have finished all of the 101 by then, but there are a few I could reasonably achieve.

The List
  1. Clean out my music collection. This means listening to everything—everything—and deleting whatever I don't listen to or like anymore. The music library I have now is ten years old, surviving numerous life crises, laptops, and whatever else.  Not only have I accumulated a fair amount, I've also grown rather sentimentally attached to it all.  For nostalgia purposes as well as logistics purposes, it's going to be a tough slog.  Really, though, it needs to be done.  I have ninety-four top level folders to sort through, all told.  Tonight I finished one of them.  Every stop counts, right?

  2. Organize the music collection (after I clean it out).  Since my music library is a relic from high school, a rather nonsensical filing system has been fossilized in there.  It's like something out of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.



  3. Watch seventeen documentaries to get me to my goal of thirty-three (or, one documentary a month for 1001 days).
  4. Watch seventeen foreign movies—same goal as the documentaries.
  5. Read seventeen non-fiction books—again, the same goal.
  6. Complete the Couch to 5K program.  Just because.

Looking at it all written out like this, it seems pretty ambitious—more ambitious than anything I'd normally undertake at the beginning of the year!—but it also seems entirely doable.

I have a (private) account at the Day Zero Project to keep track of this and all of my other goals.  Come June, this list will be finished and I'll make a fresh account and share it here, so we can all follow each other!  It's been really fun, overall, and even if I didn't accomplish everything on the list, it did a lot not only to give me a sense of purpose, but also to serve as a surprisingly insightful snapshot of my mindset 1001 days ago.  

Join me, won't you?

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