Resolution and intention

I want my life to be a giant "fuck you" to hedonic adaptation.

Not sure how 2014 is going to fit into that, yet -- who knows what awesome things will happen that I'll try not to adapt to? -- but I do have a resolution. Actually, one resolution and one intention. The intention is single-tasking (I notice as I type this that I'm also eating breakfast, hmmm) since I'm pretty sure it decreases anxiety and also improves efficiency. It just never feels like it will. (I stop to take a bite of oatmeal.)

Last year's intention was to really take feedback well, ACT on feedback, do my damnedest to change something if told to change -- rather than going "hmm, well that's just where my ribcage wants to be" when Bender tells me something about my handstand. There was, of course, a painful irony in this:



but I think it worked pretty well. We get too defensive of inefficient behaviors, I think, we identify them with ourselves when really they're a thing we do. And my handstand has improved, for what it's worth.

Anyway, my unspeakably painful-to-me resolution is to get up on the first beep of the alarm clock, every day that the clock is set. No more snoozing, and ferfucksake no mindlessly turning the clock OFF and diving back into bed. You may not know this about chronic oversleeping unless you do it too, but it's really anxiogenic to not actually know when your day will begin. I've missed workouts and showers and meetings that way. And yes, I've tried this before, not as a New Year's thing. Usually I start out strong and then fizzle. So here's what I'm doing this time:

• Changing the song in my CD alarm clock often, probably every 3 days
• Hanging my nice new bathrobe next to the alarm clock, slippers on the floor underneath
• Setting up the coffeemaker the night before (but I haven't actually done this yet)
• At least in January, a contest with norwoodbridge, who's trying to be in bed at 11:30 every night.

I'll probably need some other way of staying accountable after January, maybe just posting my success rate here every month.

And in case you didn't notice the theme, these are both in service of making my life less stressful. I don't have an anxiety problem that any shrink would bother acknowledging, but I do stress more than I should; likely more than I have to; more than my co-workers do. If it's not necessary at this level, then self-identification and "I've always done it" be damned -- I'd like to cut down.

And as for the holidays...

I baked fancy cardamom rolls, got sick with an evil norovirus along with tons of my friends, didn't work nearly as much as I planned to, and visited Seattle for a few days with heisenbug. Then we flew back early, on a red-eye, to beat an incoming storm that was trying (successfully, it turns out) to cancel our scheduled flight.

Next year I want to work more of those dead-quiet between-holiday days. When nothing's incoming the to-do list actually gets smaller, and that's magical. I had an amazing day on Friday the 27th once I got rolling.