New Year, New (and old) Ambitions

Four days into the new year, and I’M BACK!

This has been one of the longest breaks I’ve taken from my blog. 2014 wasn’t the best year for Bite Me. In fact, 2014 wasn’t the best year for me creatively. I didn’t dance much, utterly failed to finish my second draft, and dropped off a cliff with my body chain production pretty much the moment I created the Etsy page. Rough.

2013 was tame compared to 2014 for me. 2014 was…everywhere. Severe ups, severe downs. I went from a very repetitive lifestyle—wake up, work, go home, write, bed by 11, free weekends—back to the sporadic, breakneck-paced schedule of a college student. I finally had the strength to bring a long overdue end to a relationship, and I even started a new and wonderful one, breaking a bunch of rules of mine, including ‘I will never date a younger guy.’ Luckily it’s already the best relationship I’ve ever been in, reminding me that it’s important to reevaluate your own rules from time to time.

Who wouldn't break their rules for this man?

Fun side note fact...remember my post way back in 2012 about the Pic Heard Round the World, where I was slut shamed for a picture of me making out with some hot guy? Well, that hot guy is now my boyfriend!

My life took a complete 180 in 2014, and I’m absolutely terrified, but I’m also surprisingly optimistic about 2015. This is the first time in a long time I’ve felt the same overly-ambitious hope that everyone seems to about the new year. This is especially surprising because this is the first time I’ve had no real plans for the future. I have no idea what I’m going to do once I get my long-delayed degree in August. I have a few ideas, but nothing at all is concrete. I know I need to start making some sort of plan, but for now, I’m going to focus on the little things I can do to make 2015 an awesome year no matter where I end up. So, with that in mind, I’ve made my resolutions for this new year small and doable, no matter where 2015 ends up taking me. For those who care, they are:

Finish Draft Fucking 2: I have no excuse. I could blame it on the move, I could blame it on the breakup and all the emotional fallout, but the minute I moved to BG, I stopped working on my second draft, and I didn’t have to. I could have buckled down and forced myself to work on it. Moving killed the pattern I had formed that had kept me writing every day (notes during downtime at the office, writing in the evening), and I just didn’t form a new pattern. Well, I’m going to now. Demetrius is invading my dreams, and I’d rather that psycho be on paper than in my subconscious. My goal is to finish the second draft in 4-6 months and have a very select few people that I trust actually read the project I’ve been working on for so freaking long. This is fucking happening.

Eat better. Not necessarily well, but better. My diet is never great, but since returning to my wonderful Neverland (BG), it’s gotten oh, so much worse. I could lay out a plan for this, but I’ve done it before so many times, so I know what I have to do. Doing it has never been particularly difficult for me. This year I just plan on sticking to it all year, rather than slipping down the junk food rabbit hole when it starts to get cold outside.

Keep belly dance in my life/exercise more. Though I love belly dance, my involvement with it has always fluctuated wildly. I want to keep it a regular part of my life. I’ve been searching for a place to teach since November, but so far BG has been less than accommodating…for instance, the community center won’t even rent out a room to me. I thought that’s what community centers were for! The search continues, but if I can’t find a place to teach, I will at least continue my personal self-training and construct choreographies. Also, when it gets warmer, I plan to teach in the park if I haven’t found a space.

Stop speaking ill of people. I can’t tell you how often I hear friends and family members say negative things about people in general: things along the lines of “I hate people,” “90% of people are morons,” etc. Dislike and distrust of people, focusing on the negative (the person who cut them off in traffic, the one pissy customer they dealt with at work) seems to be the default setting for many people currently in my life. I’m exactly the opposite. I love people. I’m happy to be around them. I love meeting new people, and it takes a lot for me to dislike someone. But I do have a tendency to vent to those closest to me when I do get irritated with friends/family/acquaintances/passersby. I know everybody does it, but I don’t like it. I love the people in my life, and even if they drive me nuts sometimes, I feel like I shouldn’t bitch about it to someone else. This year, I plan on toning down my occasional rantfests, especially when I get snarky. My snark is good for movies, TV shows, and social issues, not for people. I don’t like gossip, so I will no longer contribute to it. I’m happy to listen to others vent, but I’m not going to chime in this year.

Sicily...ohhhh, I wish.

Travel somewhere. I’d love for that ‘somewhere’ to be exotic and faraway, or some ocean beach, but I probably won’t be able to afford that, so I’ll settle for somewhere I haven’t been before, or a place I haven’t visited in a long time, like Chicago. I went nowhere but Cleveland and BG in my two years in Columbus, and I want to explore a little.

Because everyone references this movie when I
tell them I'm trying ceramics.

Keep art in my life. Two of my resolutions have to do with dance and writings, so this one shouldn’t be too hard. I’d like to go further into jewelry making, or even try my hand at a new art (I’ve signed up for a ceramics class spring semester!) I’ve learned that the more creative I am, the less bouts of depression I seem to have. It’s economically unfortunate, but art is the bedrock of my life, and it should always be my number one priority. I can survive crushing poverty, debt, and fruitless job hunts, so long as I keep my creative juices flowing.

That’s all of them this year; short and sweet and, for the most part, easy to accomplish with a little discipline. And though I won’t make it one of my resolutions because I’m going to be busy as all fuck, I'm going to do my best to post regularly on Bite Me. Some months I may hammer out a post every week, but I'm going to shoot for at least two posts a month. It's coming up on the fourth year of this blog, and that's pretty impressive for a blog about nothing in particular, so I'd like to keep it going!

Cheers to the new year, my beloved invisible/imaginary blog followers. 2015, you're going to be my bitch.