New Year

The past few New Years haven't felt like much to celebrate, and I'm not sure why. I've usually enjoyed the holiday greatly (with minor exceptions due to difficult circumstance), but I cannot understand why this upcoming year feels like it may be so different.

My disclaimer for my own ramblings like this are built on the notion that the 'left-brain' is a sufficiently good babbler, and can babble it's way into any required explnation or story needed to make reality mold to language. I do not necessarily believe my own words. Anything I state that seems factual needs a citation - I may have dreamt it.

Perhaps this is the first time in my life that I've felt like control actually fits within my hands. My career is progressing steadily upward, I'm continuing to learn and impress new knowledge to friends and coworkers, friendships are strengthening.

My feeling for optimism isn't dwindling despite every obstacle that has arose in the past 6-7 year. I can see those dangers on the horizon still, promises and looming threats. They are drawing close, but even if they come to meet me in 2023 I feel as though I may be better prepared to lose myself to the pain (and come back again).

I've been with myself long enough now to better appreciate my strengths and weakness intuitively. I still can hardly name them (the only weakness out of thousands I can name...) but I can adapt and improvise around them now.

I've lived so many lifestyles that this new year feels appropriate to remix and match new and old habits to drive new desires and productions.

Perhaps this upcoming year feels different because for the first time in at least 3 years (maybe more), the constant acceleration towards innevatible death seems irrelevant. I was always so preoccupied with optimizing my time and using to it's fullest - for school, for work, that I would frequently burn out and fail to meet my own objectives.

The punishing lesson has been a soft teacher of better ways to seek productions and success.

Though, in 2022 I feel as though I lost some of my drive. Work has pulled me under a few times, and the constant work it takes to keep myself afloat leaves me with no spare energy to work on the studies, experiments, and hobbies that fulfill me.

Yet that too is now changing.

Old habits are crumbling apart outside of my control. Doomscrolling Twitter took up a lot of my time daily life, too much for me to want to know. Thankful, that problem is solving itself - and I haven't found it's "replacements" to be as addicting.

I've been wanting to consolidate my microblogging here - something I didn't even use Twitter for. Currently, all of my ramblings and scraped ideas sit in a massive Obsidian Black Hole - or a reMarkable Black Hole. Perhaps this year, I'll break that content free.

The ability to watch ideas age like scrapbooked pictures is incredibly sobering for the ego.

In so many of my notes, I list problems and desires for project work I wish to take on. This year, I would like to solve the problem of conceptualize and breaking down those issues into tasks I can actually engage with.

This upcoming year is already set to be incredible. I've already been outlining a few trips to visit long distance friends and will continue to find ways to manage energy and intentionality.

2023 will be a year of "waking up" to many things I've said no to in the past. Solo hobbies are fun, but 2023 is sure to be an engagement with many much larger communities. If all goes well, I will become yet another node in the global conciousness layer in a few domains ;)

Some goals: - 365 Days of Chinese study - Get my ham technician license by July - 31 Days of ham study for January - Stash at least $12k so I can concurrently fantasize about land ownership - Bike at least once a week - Climb at least twice a week - Climb on an actual rock (learn to belay) before the summer ends - Blog more - Cook more - Explore, fish, hike, and camp more

I've got more work to do on goals - I've made a mess of a system I've been trying to build in Obsidian to track this kind of stuff. Sometimes the best way to plan is to think as little as possible and screw up as much as you can.

新年快乐！