This past Saturday, I turned 29 years old. It was a rather anticlimactic birthday, no party or anything like that, just a dinner with Dan and our friend Brian. With a birthday so close to Christmas, it's usually not a big to-do and often gets lost in all the celebrations and travel that go on at the end of the year, so it takes me a while to realize that I'm a new number. I liked 28; it was a good year for me. I got engaged right at the start, lost a bunch of weight, got a lot stronger, earned my master's degree, and did some pretty fun stuff. But I also have a lot of goals and things about my life I'd like to revise. I've never been particularly afraid of turning 30, but I'm willing to use the "things to do before I'm 30" thing as motivation if it gets me going.
1. Be better about maintaining friendships - there's nothing like a 3-person birthday dinner (self and live-in fiance included) to make you realize that your social situation is kind of shitty. I've always been a hermit, preferring to keep to myself and stay home if it's up to me. When I have a free evening (or even a free Saturday) ahead of me, I don't think, "well, I'd better see what my friends are up to and make some plans to fill that time!" Instead, I think "thank god, a nice obligation-free period of time in which I can either be solitary or just watch TV with Dan." I know that seems unhealthy to some people, but those people don't know what an introvert is. Hanging out with people can be pretty exhausting for me, even though I do genuinely enjoy it, so I don't often seek out social interaction. The volume of interaction that occurs without me trying to do anything extra is just fine, so I let people come to me, rather than going to others. The problem is, when it comes time to count your friends, introverts may not find those numbers to be satisfactory. Although I don't know that it's within my power (or even preferable) to change my fundamental nature, but I can make a more concerted effort to maintain my existing friendships. Even if it's just sending a few e-mails every week or keeping up text messages, it's better than nothing.
2. Run a marathon - I've been training for the 2013 Providence Cox Marathon for a couple of months now, and it's starting to get serious. I recently ran 7 miles, the longest distance for me so far, and it's only going to get harder. To date, I've never run a distance so arduous that I've had to stop. It's kind of scary to know that, at some point, I'm going to reach a limit. Hopefully it won't be anything drastic or injury-inducing, considering I'm following a conservative training plan that gradually adds distance week by week, but I know that at some point, my body is not going to be able to do what I'm asking it to do. I hit limits all the time in my weight lifting, but that's kind of the point. Try to move something too heavy, back it off a little bit, then keep training until you can lift that heavy weight. With running, it's not quite the same. You don't try to run 20 miles, fail, and then notch it back to 18. That's not really how it works. Here's hoping that May 12th is a positive experience, chafing and busted knees notwithstanding.
3. Get married - Well, unless something really fucked up happens, this is going to occur whether I do a "good job" or not. But there's a lot of planning to do, and both Dan and I have been kind of lazy about it. We need to pick a JP, DJ, staffing company to serve food, alcohol provider, hotel for a block of rooms, and a bunch of other stuff. I'm buying a dress in February, but that's pretty much the only thing I've planned. The wedding is going to be pretty laid-back, but I need to be less laid-back about getting it sorted out.
4. Seriously examine employment opportunities - I love my job passionately, and I'm deeply invested in alternative education in Boston. That being said, there are two big reasons for me to start looking at other jobs. First, I'm very underpaid. With my degree and years of experience, I should be making something like $15,000 more than what I'm getting. It's not that my school doesn't value my services, but rather that they're broke as fuck and can't afford to pay a salary equivalent to Boston Public Schools' teacher salary. So the money thing is a big deal, especially if Dan and I plan to have kids and buy a bigger house at some point in the not-too-distant future. A second issue, and one that is harder to pinpoint, is the shift in my school's focus with regard to its population. Currently we serve "at-risk youth" from BPS, usually kids who have dropped out or maybe had a kid and they need a school where they can get back on track and graduate. Our students usually have a lot of complication in their home lives, and we have a counselor on staff during the school day to help kids refocus on school and process their issues enough to get back to work. But pressure from BPS and community organizations is shifting us to serve more of a SPED population, which is not something we're currently designed or staffed for. We don't have aides or paraprofessionals, and none of us are trained to teach special education students. I've never been particularly interested in working with that population, so it makes sense for me to start looking elsewhere before my school wastes its money trying to train me to teach a population I don't really intend to teach. Unfortunately, English teachers are a dime a dozen, and ironically, it's a lot easier to get hired if you're SPED certified. Sigh.
5. Complete a Run Ruckus with aplomb - I'm doing the 4-mile Run Ruckus in mid-June 2013. It's a month after the marathon and a month before the wedding, which I hope is enough time on either end. I know it will take a few weeks to recover fully from the marathon, but the Ruckus is certainly a very different sort of physical stress, so I'm hoping that I won't still be a worn-out wreck from the marathon, assuming, of course, I get to the marathon without injury and finish without dying. Two pretty big assumptions. The Run Ruckus will be a big opportunity for me to claim some of the glory I had hoped to achieve during May's Run For Your Lives zombie 5k. As wonderful as it was to finish the 5k and to feel the accomplishment of doing something I had trained for (for, like, 6 months), the race was not the experience I had been hoping for - it was short on obstacles and long on trekking through really deep mud. Fewer than 20% of the finishers had any flags remaining by the end (and were therefore "alive"), which meant that there was NO chance of me surviving, which was kind of a bummer. The theoretically dangerous parts were really simple and brief, and the theoretically less dangerous parts were actually super scary because it turns out that traipsing through muddy, hilly woods isn't super safe. Because we did a later race time, the obstacles were generally busted and the ones at the end had lines, which was a big let-down. Nothing like freezing your ass off and waiting 100 yards from the finish line for an hour to really get your adrenaline up, eh? The Run Ruckus seems to be a much more obstacle-centric affair, and will hopefully be less goopy. It's New England, so who knows, but fingers crossed. I picked a much earlier heat time after the 3pm massacre at RFYL. In preparation for the Ruckus, I'll be working on agility, interval training, grip strength, and lots of upper body work. It would be nice to be able to do a chin-up.
6. Push myself to keep learning - Whether it's keeping up with/relearning some of my Spanish, finally getting behind the wheel of a car (the most terrifying thing on the entire planet, as far as I'm concerned), or getting versed enough in one or more sciences to get certified to teach them, I need to keep learning. I've been done with grad school for a year and it's time to spend some of my free evenings putting things into my brain instead of allowing images to gently caress my occipital lobe. I also need to be more aggressive about reading. I have a backlog of, no exaggeration, 75 or 100 books, fiction and non-fiction, just waiting to be read. Stuttering my way through them on the subway to/from work is all well and fine, but a book every 2-3 weeks isn't cutting it. Some of the most profound experiences I've had in the last year have been through reading non-fiction, so I need to make that a larger priority for me. My goal is to read 50 books this year, of any genre and length. I'd also like to keep track of what I've read and what my thoughts are as I finish them. This would mean less time spent surfing the couch with Dan (unless he wants to read instead of watch TV - ha!), but I think it would be good for me.
If being 29 is even close to as great as being 28 was, I've got quite a year ahead of me. This last year wasn't entirely without its challenges, but my personal growth was pretty badass, and it's amazing how great the average day feels when grad school is over. I intend to ride this post-grad-school wave for a lonnnnnng time. Here's hoping for a fun, better-all-the-time sort of year. Happy New Year, people.
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