New Year's and 33rd Birthday Plans for the Future

Right now, I am sitting on a train on my way to Canterbury, eating ham, cheese, double cream, and carrots and drinking champagne. Not a bad picnic to kick off my birthday! Since my birthday comes so close to the beginning of the new year, this time is doubly reflective for me. It’s not just the start of a new year; it’s the start of MY new year. I’m 33 today, so I am starting off my 34^th year. That sounds like a lot. J

My 2011 in Review post reminded me of how amazing last year was, how many adventures I had, how much progress I made in school and work, and how much I have grown and changed (for the better). Thinking about and writing this post is my chance to imagine the coming year and to make plans (I won’t say resolutions because that makes me feel all bound in by rules and laws.) for adventures to come.

Here are some of the adventures I intend to pursue this year:

The assistant director of the writing center job may come open this year, and I want it. I have been working toward that goal for the past semester as well, and I intend to keep learning how to be a better tutor, a better manager, and a better researcher to make myself more qualified.

Aaron and I are planning two big trips next year, and we are taking Livy with us (assuming she wants to go and is willing to get the required vaccinations for the second one).

This summer, we are traveling in the Northwest, probably through the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Wyoming, and a bit of Northern California. Livy has been a part of planning that trip, and I am sure she wants to go. We want to do a lot of hiking and stay mostly in the country in National Parks, but we’ll see a few cities too (Seattle and Portland are places I have always wanted to visit).

Over next Christmas break, we are planning a trip to Costa Rica, Bolivia, or Chile. All three destinations have been on Aaron’s list for years.  This is the trip that Livy and I will have to discuss. I think she’ll want to go, but will she want to go enough to get a bunch of shots? I sure hope so because I am dying to take her with us! I think she will love the kind of outdoorsy vacation Aaron wants instead of the looking-at-musty-books kind of vacation I really love. J

I want to memorize poetry. The few poems that I have memorized bring me a huge amount of joy, and I want to increase that store this year. One poem a week may be too ambitious, but I’m going to try that out and see what happens. If I don’t get that many done, no worries. These are not resolutions of things I have to do; they are pleasurable visions of what I want the future to hold. If they stop being pleasurable, I’ll get a new plan.

I bought a wonderful little pocket-sized anthology called The Ruins of Time: Antiquarian and Archaeological Poems at Blackwell’s Bookstore in Oxford. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect poetry collection for me? A quote from the introduction: “The distant past is brought to life in the brilliant mimicry of Kipling or Auden, or brooded on elegiacally by Housman or Larkin.” So, in honor of this new book and its contents that seem specially selected for me, I think my first new poem to memorize will be “Ozymandias” by Shelley. It is the poem in the collection I am most familiar with and the one I often desperately try to remember when thinking over “Dust in the Wind” and human mortality. (Yes, I do that often. No, not in a morbid way. No, it doesn’t make me sad.)

In preparation for our trip to Costa Rica or another Spanish-speaking country in about a year, I want to brush up my Spanish and see if I can reach a new level of proficiency. I’ll be using Rosetta Stone and trying to find native speakers to talk to, and I hope I can convince Livy to learn some Spanish along with me.

      After hearing Evensong so many times on this trip, I have decided that I need to get back into singing in some way this year, and in a pretty good choir. Singing in college in a great choir pretty much spoiled me for groups who just sing for fun and aren’t that great; I can’t stop hearing the wrong notes! I know of a good summer chorus, but I am going to look for something sooner than that. At the very least, I will go to more Sacred Harp singings until I can do the summer chorus.

      Finally, I don’t want to let the feeling that Ihad in Blackwell’s Bookstore slip away; I want to be more diligent about serious study outside of my research and classes. I am very busy, and when I am in school, it can be hard to add more reading and writing to my life. But I want to continue to read some classics (perhaps more ancient and medieval ones), do a bit of Latin (Greek will probably have to wait for its brush-up until I am out of school), and write consistently on my blog (particularly travel narratives, stories about my past, and things I want to ponder from books, school, conversations, etc.).

I love that I have finally found a career and a relationship that make me look forward to the new year with so much pleasure and so much hope. I have gotten so much better at saying no and not doing things that don’t make me feel great, and, finally, my life is full of things that I love and only getting fuller.