A Pixelated Mind

Did I accomplish all of my goals for this year?  Did I accomplish any?

This past year I stopped making 18 resolutions because I kept forgetting them and had less than a .500 batting average. I went down to seven in accordance with this post.

So here we go:

1. Issue (and meet) a Creative Challenge every week (to be announced here)
   FAIL! And miserably so. I got past January and was plowing through February when Hourly Comic Day came up and bit me in the ass.  I spent two solid weeks coloring and editing the comics, which left me drained for the rest of the month and unmotivated for the rest of the year.
   Still, I was creative enough this year.  I held a No Prospie Week series of celebrations, I drew comics every hour for a day, I started a podcast (To be announced and advertised later), I wrote some stories, I learned to design trophies, I shot and edited countless hours of video, and I made no less than three new websites. Among these was a website I designed for my best friend to help her on the job market and a full remodeling of this blog.
   Still, I failed at my stated goal.
2. Get back to the point where I can do a full four sets of 12 pull ups.
   Ambivalent! I say ambivalent because it’s not ambiguous. I unambiguously failed, but I got back into shape in a bad way. I started playing basketball several times a week until I broke a finger and a rib. Then I switched to the less violent sport of Mixed Martial Arts until a very fat man sat on me and tore (or sprained) several “nondescript ligaments.” I started running 5k every day until the semester started. And I started swimming or riding my bike regularly until it got too cold. Above all, I started going to the gym regularly. I improved my bench press and squat by 60% and 400% respectively. I never got to the point where I could do four full sets of pull ups, but I did improve greatly. I even lost 20 pounds at one point!
   Since I only chose that particular goal for the sake of improving my general fitness, I still consider myself a winner this year.
3. Pass my Future Research Statement and begin to work on my dissertation reading
   FTW. I passed my FRS, which is our third year exam, though one of my advisers did not show up.  It was an ego blow, but it worked. I began to work on my dissertation reading, but not anywhere near the rate at which I want to continue a goal similar to this in 2011.
4. Give good presents
   FTW!! I made a concentrated effort to give good presents this year and am proud of my selection.  Of course, I only ended up getting presents for a handful of people (6 or so), which is less than almost any other year. But I made them count, damn it! 
   
5. Continue posting on constrainedwriting.com at least every week
   … *ahem!* I failed pretty badly, but I’m going to fix this before the end of the year, so… maybe a success?
6. Organize my files digitally and the other way
   FTW.  I have some stray PDFs to label and some papers left to file that have accumulated in the past few months, but other than that I met this goal.
7. Continue writing a sentence every day
   Fail? Don’t bother making sense of this one.  I’ve never posted about it and not really told anyone. But I’ve been writing a sentence every day in the hopes that at the end of five years I will have a workable autobiographical novel.
   … It’s pretty much the biggest fail project yet. But I’m only halfway through, so… we’ll see?

Every year since 2005, I’ve posted sporatic memories here at the end of the year. The last few posts of a year and the first few posts of the next tend to be very mecentric and likely difficult for most other people to understand. But.. you’ll have that. Anyway, here are some random memories from 2010:

• New Year!  Yey!
• Driving home only to take a two-hour detour down a random highway in an attempt to think myself into a solution for why 2009 was so terrible and why I hated myself
• A two-month long depression I tried to hide from people but couldn’t.
• Deciding to change my wardrobe, diet, exercise frequency, and attitude toward life
• Finding the Sunday Vegan Brunch in an attempt to expand my circle of friends
• Ugh, I should probably mention that there’s this whole deal with a girl I dated last year and saw this year. Basically, we were in different places in life and fundamentally different people. Anyway, it had a huge impact on me throughout the year. There’s a lot of terrible memories there, but I sort of hate that part of my life, so I’m not even going to put it up here in case it helps me remember it later on in life.
• Hourly Comic Day!
• The death of my weekly creative challenges…
• Taking a comic-drawing class only to drop it because I feared it would look terrible on my transcript
• Piano lessons
• Lost nights with Bre, which were awesome not just because we had wine and got to discuss Lost, but because we got to hang out in a place that wasn’t a bar.
• Job candidate talks every Friday and parties or bar nights every Friday night
• The UNC Bib party (for passing their third-year exams) in which I bonded with Cathay about the terribleness intradepartmental romance.
• Dinner at Cathay’s house as she tried to set me up with her friend.
• Duke/UNC game in which I drank entirely too much rum, wept, got a stranger’s phone number (that later went on to sleep with two other people in the department), blacked out for two hours (in which I alienated much of the biology department, and went back to the office.
• Liz coming to the office to console me and also smooch.
• Going to DC to visit Trumpet Rob for spring break, learning about his terrible financial situation, and advising him to buy a house.
• NO PROSPIE WEEK!  (In which I had people generate character sheets and then participated in a series of events culminating in a party)
• USP interview weekend in which I refriend Andrea
• Going to Indianapolis for the Final Four and realizing I wasn’t nearly as much of an alpha male as everyone else, then subtly mocking and satirizing them for this fact.
• Getting a 2 a.m. phone call from the aforementioned girl in which she attempts to milk me for advice to make her new relationship with “Mr. Right” work.
• Receiving FutureMe.org e-mails from Pixel ©2009 in which he reminds me how miserable 2009 was.
• Playing basketball and Steve breaking a rib and a finger as a result.
• Going to the gym and improving more than I’ve ever improved in my life.
• Going to Arizona and New Mexico for my friend Mayra’s and Jason’s respective graduations… and missing my own girlfriend’s graduation in the process… (fuck!)
• Phil Bio Conference in Madison, Wis. in which I stay at a Twitter friend’s house and meet half of the philosophers of biology in the country.
• Throwing myself a 25th birthday party – spending way too much and stressing too much, but having the most fun I’ve had in years.
• I go to a Phil Bio conference in Montreal in which I give a great presentation and hang out with my little cousin’s best friend.
• My mom goes to visit my brother in Florida and convinces me to meet them there. They remark how fit I am and how fat my brother is (Oh, how the tables have turned!)
• I come back in time for Liz’s birthday
• Sarah left for Cambodia. And it was super friggin’ sad.
• I move.
• SUPER FRIEND BASH!
• Super good food, super good friends, and super great conversations and fun times in VISU (Vienna Institute for Science University)
• Going to Salzburg with Dave and hearing him complain all day only to brag later about how great it was.
• Watching the FIFA world cup with Austrians
• Drinking and going dancing with my new friend Amir
• Making tons of new friends at the dorms
• Daniel and Ben arriving and us leaving for Berlin the next day.
• Daniel’s lost luggage
• Ben insisting on going to the Hard Rock Cafe then insisting on taking taxis everywhere
• Going to see a few museums
• Bar 25 with Stefan (my German friend from 2005 in Australia)
• Nearly convincing Iris to jump in a river
• Prague!
• Going to an American bar in Prague!
• Walking the most beautiful streets of Prague!
• Drinking too much at the (free bar!) in the Hilton Cloud 9 lounge in Prague!
• Finding drugs on the train to Budapest and getting skeeved out
• Losing my passport (in my bag) and everyone but me freaking out
• Meeting spoiled Embassy kids at the US Embassy
• Staying at Ben’s friend’s awesome house
• Touring Budapest: seeing holocaust memorials, having okay food, going to public pools
• Coming back to Vienna for a last night with Christoph (an Austrian friend from Durham in 2009)
• Eating ice cream and going to a tourist trap Mozart-style concert
• Coming back home
• Ending things with Liz..
• A new friendship with Mike (from VISU)
• I start learning mixed martial arts
• Jcak comes to visit and hangs out with Mike and Iris and John
• Andrea leaves for Vancouver
• I attempt a backflip during MMA and land on my head
• Bre’s birthday. I make her a website (for job searching) and a BFF award
• I get a job at a local institute for Ethics (can’t link to it or say it because my boss has google alerts, but it’s a subset of the Duke website)
• I hurt my knee doing MMA
• I’m on crutches
• I work on a paper with a professor for my Systematics class final project
• I start kickboxing
• Hanging out with Bre before we both leave for home and she gives me an awesome scarf, BFF ID card, and beanie.
• … promptly losing the beanie
• I think I got either a stripper or prostitute’s phone number that night, too. I’m not proud of it. I didn’t ask for it. And I deleted it… but still.
• Going home and pissing my brother off tons.
• Borrowing my dad’s car, letting my brother borrow money from my mom, going to hang out with my friends, and bringing my brother along.  (My how the tables have turned!)
• Getting to see all my old friends together in a room again and laughing so hard for so long my abs hurt the next day.

Here’s a fun game: pick a friend you know really well then spend an entire evening pretending to be shocked by their normal behaviors as if you didn’t really know them at all.

Example using my friend Bre:

“Wait, you’re drinking? I thought your extremely religious convictions would be against that!

…You’re not religious? Oh, man, so you’re not going to thank me for erasing all of your Pearl Jam music?

… oh, wow. I’m so sorry. Please don’t be mad: I’m afraid you’ll hurt yourself or others!”

Humanities are also usually done terribly in movies. This is a synopsis of the movie with the worst humanities ever:

Jersey Jones is a sexy professor of comparative literature at a major private university. He teaches a 0/1 load. His major grants allow him to explore literary theories throughout the world. (more…)

Science is usually done terribly in movies. I know a little bit of science, I think. Enough to make a couple of good scripts. But that’s boring. What I want to see is the opposite. This is a synopsis of the movie with the worst science ever:

Impulsive and snappy high schooler Mikey McMoth is at the lab of local wacky scientist Prof. Jones. Jones disappears during a groundbreaking experiment involving gravitons. (Hypothetical particles that go faster than the speed of light and cause gravity to smack people.) Mikey then gets a letter from a future version of himself telling him that he needs to take Prof. Jones’ top-secret universal translator in order to stop an interstellar war. In the process this will save all the multiverse and allow Prof. Jones to return to the regular ‘verse.

(more…)