Is God Still Laughing?

First things first. We did have Chinese food on Christmas Eve.

We were going to choose the “fancy” place near us, a chain called Han Dynasty. But due to confusion over whether they were open or not (apparently the internet isn’t perfect, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to talk to someone on the phone), we opted for another well-reviewed restaurant, Chengdu Famous Food. I ordered General Tso’s (my Americanized Chinese food staple), while my wife ordered shredded pork with bamboo shoots, with some fried potstickers and steamed dragon eye buns for us to share.

The food was better, but to be honest it was a pretty low bar. And since it was more expensive than our previous disappointments, it wasn’t much of an improvement. The buns were dry and rubbery and the potstickers lacked flavor, and with no dipping sauce, there was no rescue. My General Tso’s was also pretty bland, although still an improvement over the ketchup flavor of the first restaurant. And the pork with bamboo…also bland, except for the building heat, which my wife does not care for.

The upshot? Chinese food in West Philadelphia isn’t worth it. I’m sure we’ll try and find something better at some point, probably across the Schuylkill, if only to have a better culinary experience next Christmas. But after three weeks of bad Chinese, I’m ready for a hamburger.

Still, for what it’s worth, we managed to hit our goal of having Chinese on Christmas Eve. With the new year quickly falling upon us, the season of goal-setting and resolution-making is ramping up. So I thought I’d take the chance to look at some goals that I set myself back in September.

If you’ll recall (and I know you will), I wrote a post at the beginning of September discussing my difficulties organizing my life. I had just set up a calendar and established some goals, which I kept close to the vest to spare myself the public embarrassment in case of utter failure. Now that we’re four months on from that point, I figured it was time to do some reflecting.

I hate New Year’s resolutions. I understand the appeal of making big promises to yourself at the start of a new year. It feels like a chance to wash the past away and start fresh, like hitting the reset button or cleaning the chalkboard—with water.

But the reality is that New Year’s Day only means something because we decided it does. There’s nothing magical or mystical about it. On New Year’s Day, you’re fundamentally the same person you were the day before. Since New Year’s Day only comes around once a year, it becomes a long cycle to try again. And this year, even gyms won’t profit from these flights of self-improvement fantasy.

So why am I revisiting my goals now, on the eve of a new year? Two reasons. First, you have to evaluate your goals at some point. If you don’t take the time to look back at how well you’ve performed in working towards your goals, then they’re not really goals at all—they’re slogans. Personal propaganda. Sure, they may have a kind of inspirational use, but propaganda is about advancing false narratives. If I say my goal is to get healthier but my only metric is that I “feel like I’m being healthy,” I might feel better about myself, but I probably haven’t changed a thing. If anything, I’d be less healthy, treating myself for doing “so well.” Like, all the time.

The second reason? I only made my calendar through the end of 2020.

Back in September, I kept my goals pretty much to myself. I’m going to lay them out here and go through how I did. Then I’ll set out my goals for the coming year, so you can judge me next December. It’s like a game. A game of judgment. You’re welcome.

Physical Goals

I broke my goals down into some broad, basic categories, mostly for my own purposes. I started with some physical goals. We moved to Philly in June, and at that point I was at a physical nadir. Despite months of training, I had failed hard at running the virtual Baltimore 10-miler, and I hurt my toe in July, preventing me from running in our next virtual race. Add in the sheer exhaustion from moving, and I was not doing well. Plus, with Caitlin back at work, I didn’t have much going on, so I spent a lot of time sitting on couches.

I started with a simple activity goal, looking to get active at least three times a week. Running, spinning, yoga, even long walks, any activity that got me off the couch and engaging my body. After a couple months of regularly hitting this goal, I increased the amount to four times a week. This I’ve been less successful with, partially because winter hit. In some ways, though, the fact that I’m struggling tells me four times is probably the right number. If it’s not a challenge, then it’s not much of a goal.

I also set a mileage goal for the week. Back in New York and Baltimore, I would hit 10,000 steps a day almost without fail. Between walking to and from work and the physical demands of my job, I was on my feet a lot. But my walking distance has fallen off a cliff with the pandemic restrictions, and I wanted to get back to moving more. It took a long time for me to get used to the physical rigors of walking in New York, and I don’t want to completely lose that. While I started with a goal of five miles per week, it became clear very quickly that I could hit that in my sleep, so I upped my goal to ten miles per week. Even that has been more than manageable.

Finally, I started tracking my weight. At the beginning of the COVID crisis, I was doing…okay. Not great, but I had my weight more under control. Not surprisingly, as time went on, my eating habits deteriorated while my activity level plummeted, and I packed on the pounds. Not at first, mind you. I had a decent amount of muscle to convert to soft, pliant fat. So I started weighting myself just before bed, and then tracking my weekly average, hoping to simply be lighter than the week before. As I suspected, it was easier early on, but I’ve hit something of a plateau. I’m not too concerned, but I also know I could do better.

Social Goals

Being in a new city, in the middle of continuing social restrictions, I was feeling increasingly isolated, a feeling that only increased once Caitlin went back to work in July. I decided that I needed to start reaching out to other people, to connect to friends and keep my social skills from atrophying completely.

For the past six months or so, we’ve had a standing game night on Saturday evenings with some of my friends from college, and it’s been quite the blessing. We usually play Jackbox games, although we’ve played some other games, like Scattergories or Burgle Bros. While there are occasional weekends when we can’t get together, for the most part we’ve been remarkably consistent.

But I felt like I needed more. I had previously enjoyed the weekly happy hours sponsored by the production department at Baltimore Center Stage. But once I moved to Philly, and technically no longer employed by BCS, I felt a little weird continuing to attend. I’m sure it would have been fine, but I don’t think it would have had the same positive impact for me.

Luckily, near the end of September, a group of my friends from Ohio* started a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. As you might remember from one of my least-viewed blog posts, I’d been anxious to play D&D again, to reconnect with my inner nerd, and Peter was happy to oblige, setting up our campaign and hosting our weekly meetings via Discord.

* To be clear, these were friends I made in Ohio. While many of them still live there, many others like me live elsewhere, like North Carolina or New Jersey. There’s a lot to hate about the internet. This is one of the things to love about it.

I also made a goal of reaching out to friends more frequently, just to catch up and to talk. In this I’ve been moderately successful. While I would like to do this more, there’s also the question of finding the time. By and large the daytime belongs to me. But for most other people, their days belong to work and parenting. So while I had previously set a goal to connect with someone once a week, I’ve since pulled back. It was too much pressure.

One last goal, which is kind of social, was to experiment more with cooking. During quarantime, I cooked more than ever before. Even with more businesses open for delivery and carryout, we still eat out much less, mostly because it’s just easier—although the savings have also been appreciated. But after a while, I had run through all our standards, and I needed something else. I decided to try making two new meals per month, which I managed handily. What’s more, we discovered some really tasty dishes. And Caitlin—sorry, Santa—gave us a cookbook specializing in meals for two, so there are many more (hopefully) tasty dishes on their way.

Writing and Reading Goals

When the COVID quarantine started, I thought if nothing else I’d finally have time to write. Well, I did have time. But did I? No, not really, and that’s something that I really regret. But it’s also illuminating in a couple ways. First, it showed me just how important it is to not only have specific goals, but to actually hold yourself accountable to them. Second, it reminded me how much I love being done with something, rather than the act of doing it. Would that I could cross my arms, nod my head, and make it so. Alas…Third, there’s more to writing than sitting in front of a keyboard—although that is, in fact, the main thing.

I started with a reading goal. It’s easy to forget how important reading other writers is to writing yourself. I set myself a goal of 50 pages per day, fiction or nonfiction, and most of the time I did pretty well with it. I read fiction, history, and nonfiction books about editing, hoping to learn more about a field I’m very interested in. It was refreshing to just sit and read, knowing I had a goal I was hoping to reach, but often blowing right past it. However, in mid-December, my page rate fell off a cliff, which I’ll get to in a moment.

As far as writing goes, this blog has been my most consistent output. I started writing this as practice and as a challenge to produce weekly content, and so far I’ve done pretty well on both, if I do say so myself. Other content, though…Let’s put it this way. I challenged myself to submit my work for performance and publication, sending one piece out every week. But after five weeks, I was out of material. I may have had some poems I could have sent out, but frankly I wasn’t convinced they were ready, especially since I wrote most of them more than 15 years ago. I just didn’t have enough product to make weekly submissions feasible, especially with the slow response rate most submissions have—I only received my first rejection this past week.

I also put my job search under this category. I had challenged myself to apply for at least three jobs per week. Although I easily exceeded this goal, I received virtually no responses, and the ones I did receive felt like scams. This is one of the aspects of the internet I hate. I also challenged myself to look for freelance work on Upwork, but after my first proposal turned out to be another obvious scam, I was less interested.

Still, one week I decided to just go for it, and as it turns out I’m glad I did. My first proposal in earnest returned a great opportunity, and since mid-December, I’ve been doing freelance writing, creating content for websites. I’m making some income and gaining experience, and every day I get to increase my potential portfolio. While it’s not a forever job, it’s a great opportunity to do some work, and to start transitioning to another way of earning a living.

But transitioning back to some semblance of a workday has been more challenging than I expected. I suppose after eight months of my day essentially being my own, it shouldn’t be a surprise that having to work other obligations into my day hasn’t been easy. Yet some things have fallen by the wayside, specifically my reading. My volume has dropped precipitously, mostly because I haven’t adjusted my daily flow properly. It’ll come, I’m sure, but it’s a little disconcerting how quickly those pages dropped off.

Looking to 2021

So that’s where I’m coming from. But where am I going? Well, to start, I’m still aiming for four physical activities per week. And I’m going to stick with my goal of walking ten miles per week, so I’m not putting more pressure on myself than I need to. I’m also keeping my weight tracking goal, just to reduce a little each week, and not freaking out if I go up instead.

My social goals are largely going to stay the same as well. Connect with someone twice a month, keep up our weekly Jackbox sessions, and continue our D&D campaign on our long road to Waterdeep. And I’m looking forward to trying some new meals from our cookbook for two. I might increase my target for new meals at some point, but for now I’ll stick with two.

It’s writing and reading that are going to adjust the most, I think. I’ve already reduced my daily page target from 50 to 40. It seems like a small adjustment, but when those pages come from books like The Chicago Manual of Style, it means a lot. I’m also planning on continuing this blog for the foreseeable future, although I may consider expanding it as well. I have a list of movies that I feel I should have seen, and if I actually get up the gumption, I’d like to watch them, and write about them on this blog (under a different section, so you don’t have to read them if you’re not interested).

With this freelancing gig, my writing goals will need to change as well. I’ve dropped my job application goal from three per week to a much less onerous goal, one that’s focused more on a job I want, rather than anything that pays me money. It also gives me the cover to work on my own writing, like plays, poems, short stories, what have you. While we weren’t hurting financially, bringing in some money and gaining some experience helps get over the mental block that I shouldn’t be “wasting” my time on projects.

That’s the big one, though, producing more content. It’s not a matter of milling out as much junk as I can. But it’s important to get some stuff out, even if it’s absolute shit that I have to burn in a fire. Sometimes you have to clear out the crap, like running a snake down a clogged drain. The water runs cloudy for a while, but eventually it clears up. I’ve got ideas, I’ve got the beginnings of several stories, I have an outline for a goddamn novel. But if I don’t get myself over myself, then I don’t have anything at all.

That’s actually a pretty good way to wrap up all of this goal talk. It’s easy to get lost in making or tracking goals. But I think it’s most important to remember why you made the goals in the first place. Goals aren’t there to be punitive. If you set goals that are too high for your time or your abilities, you’re not going to end up where you were—you end up much further back, covered in dust and bruises.

The best goals are aspirational and organizational. They push you to try and be the best person you can be without making you feel like a failure. Sure, you’re going to miss your goals here and there. But a good goal (or the right attitude) gives you the opportunity to learn from those failures, and the best ones offer you the flexibility to adjust them on the fly. Just like how a budget is a statement of values, goals are a way of organizing your behavior, of focusing your efforts in a way that helps you feel better about how you’re spending your time.

I’m as confident I can hit most of my goals as I am that I will fail miserably at some of them. But I’ll be moving in a direction rather than flailing at the future, hoping to luck into success. And maybe, just maybe, once I’m vaccinated near the end of 2021, I can come out of COVID a better person, primed to take the next steps in my life and my career.

How’s that for a goal?