Goals for 2020

Happy Monday! 😬

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve, which means that the idea of resolutions is being tossed about on social media and such. Usually this also signals the coming of the naysayers, those folks who turn out to decry the notion of resolutions never kept. I haven’t seen much of that this year, though I’m sure they’re still around.

I don’t know if it’s a matter of having surrounded myself with different people lately, or if there really is a drive to embrace this year’s end as a time of reflection. Perhaps the end of the decade has sobered the habitual curmudgeons, just this once.

Or maybe it has to do with the state of the world: it sucks real bad. We have an incompetent wannabe strongman in the office of president, and his party has “shown its whole ass,” as it were, by failing to curtail his ambitions at every step. The world is on fire and getting hotter (get the hell out if you’re gonna point at the snow today and say “global warming where?!?”). There’s not a lot of reason to be hopeful.

(I have historically stayed away from politics on here, but hoo boy, the last thing I would want is for anybody to mistake me as an ally to The Right. Their continuous failures on climate change, if nothing else, make them the enemy to all living things.)

Yet, somehow, there seems to be no shortage of hope. There is ferocious activism to take America back from the fascistic pirates who are at the helm. It is becoming a more mainstream idea that we need to dismantle the oppressive private healthcare industry which profits off of human suffering and death. Young heroes like Greta Thunberg are working hard to wake these idiots up about the threat of climate change and the adoption of existing green energy alternatives. It’s baffling, but so inspiring.

So as we round off the decade, I’m going to participate unironically in the listing of the resolutions. After all, what does it mean to make a resolution? In English, when someone holds to an unshakeable principle, we say that they are resolute in their beliefs. But the Latin root risolvere means “to settle, to solve,” often used to refer to repayment. To adopt a resolution is to identify a problem or a deficit in need of settling. May we all be resolute in our ambitions to fix the world in this new decade.

In 2020, I resolve to:

Make more time for creativity

I “won” NaNoWriMo 2019 handily, meeting some fairly ambitious goals and discovering a good chunk of my story. While it had to fall by the wayside in December, I’m going to publish this thing. I’m aiming to have the manuscript polished up in Q2 of 2020.

I also want to draw more. My fiancee is learning digital painting on her shiny new iPad, so I’d like to take the time to work up my fundamentals alongside her and turn out some pieces I can be proud of.

In general, I just want to make stuff. It makes me really happy to work on these things and share them with people, so I’d like to switch off the TV more often and tune into those creative energies instead.

Read more

I set a goal of reading 12 books in 2019, and I’m a couple books short. 🙁 I did some morning reading dutifully throughout this year, but again, I’d like to switch the TV off and pick up a book once in awhile. This will also help inspire me in my writing goals!

Get more music

One of the unexpected delights of this past year has been just… buying music. I finally picked up some Opeth, which has been just phenomenal. I’m exploring more Deathcore music, which has had highs and lows. More importantly, I’m expanding my horizons and finding a beautiful source of inspiration and peace in these albums, and I’d love to continue that in 2020.

Learn a bunch!!

I need to continue on my Japanese (which has fallen by the wayside again—not to shame myself too much 😅). This will be very important as I work on my Project .hack deep dive, given that at least one of the works in that series has not been translated to English. Moreover, it’s just a dang lovely language and I like a lot of Japanese media.

I also want to dive into electronics hacking stuff. Trixie got me a soldering iron for Christmas, which is exactly what I pestered her to get me (😅), so I’d like to use it to make some fun stuff. Part of that will be installing modchips in my Xbox 360 and maybe my PS2 so I can explore the innards of those systems. I love games, and I’d love to see what makes some of my favorite ones tick.

Be more true to myself

I’ve spent a long time denying aspects of my politics for fear that they are impractical. I had a brief spat as a “centrist” because I genuinely thought there was a way to make that ideology work—compromise, after all, is often touted as a virtue. And while it’s true that we can achieve good things by being agreeable in small settings like the workplace or the neighborhood or the friend group, compromise is also a symptom of a dangerous thing called “groupthink.”

We cannot compromise in this current political climate. To do so would be to give ground to an evil coalition that sees the poor and the middle class as mere cogs in a machine, that sees people of color as lesser, that would burn the world to cinders for an extra few million dollars. I won’t abide that.

Since I learned what the “communist ideal” was—that everyone be provided for, regardless of their circumstance—I have held it somewhere in my heart. I would often talk about my vision of a world where we are all united as one nation, borders erased as an imaginary source of conflict and nothing more. One earth, united for the prosperity of all humankind. I would love for that ideal to become a reality. That is why I think that the “correct” system for a better future is some form of socialism. I won’t shy away from that in 2020.

I hope we’ll all work towards a better world this year.

Thanks for reading,
Andrew