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New Year’s Resolutions

I know that a lot of folks don’t like New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m a fan. There’s always stuff about myself that I need to change, but I’m capable of putting projects off forever without a deadline; the winter solstice and new calendar year¹ are a good time to start things and assess my progress.

First, I’m finally giving up dairy³, which I’m embarrassed to admit that I continued consuming long after I realized that I should stop. In an effort to not be too burdensome a partner, I’ve told my spouse that they can still use dairy in the meals that they prepare — so I’m not going to be a real vegan — but none of the meals I cook or foods I choose for myself will use any animal products. Sorry it’s taken me so long to do this.

My other resolution is tricky because I haven’t actually figured out how to do what I need to do, but I need to make some sort of change to the way I interact with the people who are the closest to me. I don’t know if I’m sensitive, or if I just have terrible coping strategies, but when a loved one is venting to me about anything stressful in their life, it just turns me into an anxious mess. The real problem arises if this happens enough times over a short period⁴, I feel like I have some limited capacity that gets used up, and I become irritable and eventually even mean. I’m spending the week with a lot of my family right now — too many people in too little space — and I’ve acted like a jerk a few times and this is exactly why. To be clear, I’m not blaming other people for my behavior; it’s my own approach to these situations that needs to change. I want to be a present and emotionally available without becoming anxious or exhausted by the experience. And I want to figure out how to do that before 2025.

I already started some new habits recently that I’d like to maintain, and there are some trends I’d like to see continue, but the above are the big changes I’ll be making for 2024. I would also like to make an HF radio contact and take a boat out on the water this year; these aren’t really “resolutions”, but I’m mentioning them here to give myself a bit of accountability.

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¹ I realize that aligning the calendar to the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice is the result of a political/cultural hegemony of which I don’t approve, but until we adopt a new revolutionary calendar or something² this is what I’m stuck with.

² We could definitely do better than the bourgeois French revolutionaries, but I invite people to consider how much they (as opposed to our rulers) actually benefit from precise timekeeping in the first place.

³ After initially publishing this, it occurred to me that it isn’t obvious that I’ve been vegetarian for decades. No changes there!

⁴ Whether it’s because somebody is having a particularly difficult time, or that multiple people are dealing with totally unrelated things.

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