12/24/02
Three DJ shifts later--and, honestly, not much else that I can even remember, aside from showing my mom around Jackson Heights and going to Andrea and Jay's place to meet Pearl and Steve and their lovely and chin-grabbing baby daughter Juliane--I'm trying to clear away the mental fog and work out some kind of plan for next year. (I'll be in Florida for the next few days; travel both assists plan-making and gives me access to VH-1, both fine things.) This site will be getting a makeover for sure, as I mentioned, but that's just one facet of the cosmetic surface. It's instructive, at a moment like this, to look back at my resolutions for the past year and see how I did with them (short answer: not well, not hopelessly). Here's what I wrote in early January, and what happened.
Debating applying to that arts-journalism fellowship again this year; maybe I should switch media and present myself as the guy who writes seriously about comics. It'd be different, anyway.
Well, this one worked out...
Daily: exercise (yoga counts); write in my diary (which is not this, incidentally).
The exercise turned into more like twice a week, but it happened (mainly thanks to yoga class). Now to up the frequency and intensity. I must become Buff Douglas. The diary lasted well into August before I hit the wall; I'll be, er, relaunching it shortly, I think. I also secretly decided to do the origami from my daily calendar every day; I did it faithfully, then hit a wall in early August. I still have private visions of blasting through the remaining 120-odd origami projects in the last few days of the year.
Weekly: finish reading a book. (I'm not demanding about what kind of book, except that it has to be primarily text.)
Did decently but not perfectly with this one, too--the total for the year is probably going to end up around 40 or so, and that's counting books I read for classes. Someday, I will be Lauren, but not yet.
Monthly: complete some sort of relatively large-scale creative project; release something on Dark Beloved Cloud, not necessarily a recording.
Large-scale creative projects completed this year number, er, three by my count. (And they were my favorite things I did this year, too; the problem is thinking of them more than getting into the work.) DBC releases... there've been nine of them this year (!), but three were clustered into this month. That'll be stabler next year.
In general: keep the outbound flow of CDs greater than the inbound flow; aim to do work that's challenging and rewarding rather than easy and repetitive; defy the ways I tend to circumscribe my experience.
Failed spectacularly at the first of these, thanks to my accursed habit of holding on to anything that might someday be useful or interesting--and that's despite donating around 3000 discs to charity. Despaired of the second for some months, then got into the NAJP, which did the trick nicely. As for the third, I made a little progress on it; a long way to go yet, though.