The Future (2020, at least)

Ed note: It took a little longer than I expected to get to it, but here’s the post about looking towards the future, also known as 2020. Which is 1/12th done now, but hey, another month of existential dread wasn’t that different from all of 2019, so I’ll just count it as a 2019 bonus round so I’m not behind. 😛

To think about the future, I did what any good and right-thinking person would do. I stole my friend Marianne Kirby‘s brainstorming diagram, changed a couple of bubble titles, and filled it out. Marianne is wise, and it seemed like a good format. Even if my handwriting is illegible by comparison. I’m not going to republish it here because it’s been a minute since I wrote it and I’m betting there’s some too-personal stuff scattered in there, but each section below is a bubble. So here’s my brainstorming for 2020.

Physical Health

I mostly have a number of milestones I want to achieve based on activities I know how to do already:
* Be able to squat twice my body weight (so about 380-390 lbs)
* Get back to being able to run three miles at a stretch
* Be able to run a single mile in under eight minutes. My best time in school was 6:54 but I’m literally a bigger, older person than I was then, and I want my goals to be achievable!
* Last, be biking to/from work 3x a week (it’s 10 miles each way).

The latter of those is likely to be the trickiest, simply because it’ll make my commute take longer and work isn’t exactly an exciting destination. But, but! It would result in…POWERFUL THIGHS. The ultimate dream! A sub goal of this is becoming a zippy biker, because I am slow af and it’d be nice to be able to go, like, 15-20 mph instead of my usual 9-10ish.

I would also like to get more flexible. I’m using being able to do an L-sit where I can get my chest to my knees, and being able to do a front split as my goals.

Mental Health

This is going to be a shorter list, but way, way harder:

• Get a better handle on my depression. A lot of this is going to be making sure to regularly do self-care stuff that I deprioritize. Even though I think the self-care concept is overused? But, like, having hair that isn’t a tangled mess makes me feel a lot better. So does exercising. And showering. You know, little things!
• Get a handle on my loneliness
• Improve my home environment so it’s real comfy and rejuvenating to hang out it. Sadly, I must ban myself from installing a pond in the living room. Something something “not collapsing the floor” something, I wasn’t paying attention.

Romance & Similar

Oh no I’m driving through a tunnel ksshurkkssssssh you’re breaking up ssssskushhhhhhhh looks like it didn’t transmit! Oh well! >_>;;;

Family/Friends

Most of this boiled down to relaxing around and being more open with other people. Being more friendly to random people, because you never know when you’ll make a friend and SOMEONE in Seattle has to try it before we’re just the control group for self-isolation experiments. Reinforcing my support network and building certain social things I love (casually coming/going over to hang out, playing video games together) into my life are also priorities. I’d like to work on building a sense of community, too. Which is a large and nebulous goal, but hopefully it will take shape as I think about it and try things.

Pure Joy/Fun

I did a bad thing and made a kind of catch-all category. I’m sorry, taxonomists!

• Get clothing that makes me happy and I feel confident in (and wear it)
• Start dancing again
• mumblemumble gender expression mumble
• Be joyful to others and lift them up with me (Ed note: What’s this self-help nonsense?) (Second ed note: Probably a good idea, that’s what.)

Adventure and Travel

I had to keep these super-modest because I am of extremely limited means. So no “backpack around Australia for six months” for me! Besides, we all know I’d get distracted by the first lizard I met and just spend the entire time trying to befriend it.

• Go camping, get out into the great outdoors
• Travel to another city in a different part of the state
• Go snowboarding? (I’m running out of time for this one, hmmm.)
• Rent a cabin somewhere, because I motherfuckin’ love cabins.

House

I need to learn to clean better. I need more plants, because plants are great. And my bathroom sucks and I should fix that. Somehow. Anyone have access to the “bigger inside” Tardis tech? That’d be a great start.

Learning

I would never, ever set overly ambitious learning goals. I have no idea what you’re talking about, and am also mortally offended.

• Achieve basic functionality in Scottish Gaelic (MODEST I SAY)
• Finish learning Python
• Learn more applied infosec and keep a blog about it, so someday I can get hired to do it or at least have a corpus of work to point at and go “I swear I know what I’m talking about!”
• Level up my fiction writing (SO MODEST AND SIMPLE)
• Learn how to use a game engine or roll my own, so I can make games with graphics and more complicated mechanics than “go north” and “use magic dildo on the CHEST OF DOOM”
• Learn more about copyright law so I’d know enough to publish reprints, and to self-pub my own stuff. The latter of this is easier than the former. But there’s a bunch of books out there that are out of print that I’d like there to be an ebook version of, at least. Examples include several old pulp novels, and the Foxfire books that teach you all sorts of neat skills and were printed once in the 70s and like never again.

Career

*muffled sobbing*

Just higher pay, higher morale, get work somewhere with a union, start a union, get a different job… Basically get out of the current pit I feel I’ve found myself in.

Creating

The final section! You made it!

• Start The Masc (a site similar to The Art of Manliness, but without all the cishet assumptions and mustache fetishists)
• Start a (small, tiny, extremely wee) publishing company. This is in part so I can share ISBNs with people if I buy a 10-pack or whatever, and so I can pursue the reprints thing mentioned above.
• Start a life skills website. A lot of people on Mastodon have said they’d love a website that goes over all the basic stuff that many people, for a lot of reasons, just totally miss growing up. Like how to do laundry. Write a check. Boil water. Rent an apartment. Pay bills. Stuff like that where, especially if you were in a not-great situation as a kid and/or left home early and don’t have a support network, it was easy to miss or never be taught.
• Collaborate with people! Get at me, let’s do a thing!
• Get Shivering Deeps out and querying. Which means finishing this draft. Shit. >> <<
• Release six small games. Because I love games, and I want to make them, and then I never finish stuff. THE WORLD NEEDS BUXOM HIMBOS FROM VENUS: THE TEXT ADVENTURE! Or, you know, a game based on a better idea than that.

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And that’s it! We did it! Yay! Those are my plans for this year. It’s a big ol’ pile, but acheiving even 25% of them would be rad as shit. So let’s get cracking.

What are your goals for this year? Tell meeeeeeeeee. In the actual comments section and not as a response on Twitter or Mastodoooooooooon. 😉