2011

Last year was a good year for me.  Not always a fun or easy year, but a year in which I accomplished a lot.  Most notably, I upgraded from a job I disliked and a career I was unhappy about to a job I enjoy and a career I'm excited about.  In addition, I had a unique travel experience, spending a month in France preceded by a few days in Iceland (truly awe-inspiring) and Frankfurt.  I also made significant strides in developing my local social circle in New York.

In 2011, I'm not looking for big changes.  A lot of what I want to do is consolidate my gains - learn the ropes at my job, make more friends.  But there are some areas in which I'm hoping for continued or renewed progress:

• Running.  I ran a lot in the first half of 2010, but in the last six months other priorities (travel, the new job) have taken precedence.  I'm not completely out of shape, but I haven't been training with any seriousness.  Since I'll be running a marathon in November, this will need to change - and soon, as I'm running a half-marathon in three weeks.  (I'm giving myself permission now to wimp out on that, but hopefully it will kickstart things for the year.)
• Travel.  I am planning a major trip in the next few months - a ten-day tour of Costa Rica.  I'm also hoping to take another major trip in the fall or early winter.  In addition, I'll be travelling to visit family and attend a couple of weddings.  This doesn't precisely count as travel, but I'd also like to join a hiking group and take a few days hikes (when it gets warmer) - I enjoy that sort of thing, but it's hard to organize by myself since I don't have a car or a ton of outdoor experience.
• Social life.  A girl can never have too many friends!  Especially in New York, where they are endlessly reshuffling and moving away.  At the moment I find that I have plenty of people to do things with, but fewer people I consider "real friends".  Hopefully this is just a matter of time.
• Clothing and other possessions.  I have noticed that I have slightly too much stuff, and that a lot of it does not make me happy.  There is resistance to getting rid of much of it because it is nominally useful, but it does not actually serve any positive purpose for me (i.e. I have some perfectly good clothes that I do not like, or that do not flatter me, or that I have been wearing twice a month for years and am sick of).  I am trying to gradually get rid of things, which is less stressful than doing a single massive purge, and to not buy anything that I don't love.  The idea is not primarily to have less stuff, but to have only stuff I really want to have.  

In the sense of making resolutions... well, of course I would like to get up at 5:45 a.m. every morning and go straight out of bed to the gym, and then eat nothing but whole grain flax seeds and unsweetened yogurt and go to bed at 10 p.m., but this is an ongoing effort.  More relevantly, I have noticed I have a tendency to avoid making decisions; this is a bad habit that stems from fear of making an uncorrectable mistake but often results in the even-less-correctable mistake of not deciding anything at all.  I am working on making decisions in small intervals to try to conquer this.