Resolutions

Happy New Years, everyone and I apologize for the late post. It turns out that visiting family and being social takes away from blogging time.

I don't make New Years resolutions every year and I think last year was the only time I kept all my resolutions because I only made one (I resolved to finish my thesis). This year I have free time so I'm feeling a little ambitious about this sort of thing. So ambitious, in fact, that I will not only make resolutions, but also share them publicly.

First of all, I resolve to read more books. I'm not sure how many books I read last year, but it might have been less than ten. I read a lot of papers, but those aren't quite the same. I think a reasonable goal is somewhere around 26 books (this is one book every other week), but since I'm feeling ambitious right now I'll set a goal for 30 books. In addition, half of the books I'll read this year will be written by women simply because women are severely underrepresented on my bookshelves at the moment. I'll keep a running tally of the books I'm reading/have read in the sidebar.

I also resolve to draw more by making a point to draw something every day (or spend some time working on a larger drawing every day). Here, I'd like to make a point of drawing things I don't usually draw and playing with techniques I don't usually employ (because I'm lazy). Granted, usually, I don't draw things if I don't think about them so it's not especially easy to think of what should be included in this list so I might ask for suggestions from time to time. I'll probably post some of them on here every once in a while.

I also resolve to run more. I've been working on getting back into a habit of doing this regularly in Japan (coming somewhere cold and snowy has not been helpful for doing this at all) and I would actually like to participate in a race this year. However, since I'll still be in Japan, this means I'm forced to make an additional resolution.

I resolve to study Japanese more. Based on some preliminary googling, the way to register for the small races in Japan involves being able to register on websites that are only in Japanese. As good as Google is for translating these, sometimes it does some funny things during translation. Also, it would be nice to be able to communicate effectively (for obvious reasons). Thus, I resolve to learn at least one new kanji a day and to spend some time every week practicing my reading/writing/listening/speaking.

Finally, I resolve to blog more. Starting either next week or the week after when we're back in Japan and things have settled down, I will include a post on Thursday as well as the regular Monday posts (or normally regular). I'll try to keep the Monday posts about interesting things that happened during the week and observations about living in a new place (or however you would describe the topics of my posts so far) while the Thursday posts might be about something else entirely (I have some ideas).