Another effing goals post: physical edition

I just got a new app called "LoseIt" which makes me very happy. From what I can tell so far, it's pretty much like the cool Weight Watchers apps that my friends all have that make me jealous.
So - here's the thing. It's easy. I set a goal. And maybe I can achieve this goal?
And if I achieve this goal - I think I should get a tattoo. Because I've wanted a tattoo for a few years, but I've been too ashamed of my body to put something on it permanently.
Yay!
(tattoo idea is: <3 centered above my shoulder blades. alternatively, a Starfleet badge - but.... I don't know where that would go.)

I should be updating this blog more. Life is good. Vegas was fun. Nate is back finishing school.

Recent developments in personal goals

"Personal" goals:

• Write and send letters
• nothing here.
• Try writing fiction
• I had a good idea for a fanfic this morning - how all of the GoT's Stark family can be happy zombies at the end of book 7. :)
• Learn how to cook
• I had a good idea for this: enchilada casserole. They have something like this at the mexican restaurant near our house.
• Throw more parties/events
• We just need to set a date for the Star Trek: TNG murder mystery - and it will totally happen!
• Plan and take travels to: Grand Canyon, Alaska, Prague
• Aubrey and I are TOTALLY going to the Grand Canyon when we go to Vegas next month! Winning!

Goals update

On my other blog at the beginning of this year, I made a list of goals. As I'm about to enter a crazy month and my money is disappearing, so I want to take a tally of how this has gone.


"Professional" goals

• Make an album with my band.
• This is the one that's farthest along. We've been recording the album in most of our spare moments for the last seven weeks, though we have been sidetracked by Song Fu, concerts and a commission project. We're trying to continue having fun, but it's hard.
• The "recording" part is a bummer, certainly. But the good stuff is: album art - for which we hired a local illustrator and a local photographer - is going well! Now we just need to write the liner notes and line stuff up and hope everything is proofed and mastered in time for the CD to be ready at the release show.
• I didn't get the new songs done that I was hoping to have done. Argh.
• Learn how to make a web application & learn enough of a language to do a sample project. Do the same with web design.
• This is... happening. Ish. I'm doing a lot of reading still. There's a PHP book I like. I had been reading a PHP book that was doing a very poor job of appealing to my "learn stuff" senses. In general, learning without structure/classes/help is hard for me. Also, time. 
• Make a documentary (with filmmaker M_ V_- one of my informational interview subjects)
• I'm failing at this one! I'd like to blame the people who haven't called me back, but I can't really. I should call them again.
• Take classes in computer programming.
• I am doing this! Thanks to my Alma Mater and a crazy-awesome professor, I'm in a "learn Java by programming games" class that is both helping me learn how to program Java and getting my head around programming in general. I really like it.
• Train and volunteer in community radio.
• I give myself an "A" here. I have already had my voice on the radio *twice* interviewing people, and I am taking occasional trainings that are awesome. The people at the community radio station are a little scary at first, but I've come to like them a lot and I think they like me too. Which is awesome. I really like radio and I am learning a lot about it.

"Personal" goals:

• Write and send letters
• Try writing fiction
• Learn how to cook
• Throw more parties/events
• Plan and take travels to: Grand Canyon, Alaska, Prague

I haven't even started on any of these. Maybe I will "when I move into my new house," I tell myself.

Things I have done that I wasn't planning on:

• Social media consulting (for multiple clients!)
• Freelance writing (I could almost make enough money on this to pay rent! Unreliably!)
• Managed a band T-shirt sale- orders, production, and shipping.
• Plan band shows in California and British Columbia
• Find a new house, apply for and get it, thus creating a lot of work for myself in sorting/packing/moving everything I own.

Alright, this post was relatively useless other than as a way to track my own progress, which is important because yesterday I watched more than three episodes of How I Met Your Mother.

What is "not a race"?

Since it seems like I'm making an effort to make this blog a regularly-updated thing, how about we try for a little introduction?
"Not A Race" - this title - comes from a tale of my childhood. Apparently, when we (myself and my sister, or my dad and I, or something) would be running about from one place to another, and I would begin to fall behind, I would yell "it's not a wace!" in my adorable southern lisp. This is a thing that my family still does. Adorable.
But, like many good book introductions have taught us, this seemingly both simple and uninteresting anecdote has a more complicated and even less interesting translation into the rest of my life.
"Not A Race."
I'm a very competitive person: not in the way where I will try super hard to beat someone else out, but more in the way where I am constantly comparing myself to others (usually women around my age, but also everyone else) to measure my success. When I find myself lacking, I get sad.
This has led me to split myself in a lot of different directions: some people are good at music - I should try music - but then I'm not very good at that, so I should make sure I'm still good at math or something - but I'm not very good at that - so I'll be mediocre at languages as well... and so on.
Not a race.
Sometimes I need to remind myself that I'm happy and satisfied and doing things that make me happy - but what is an easier thing to do is to try to find people of my age or my alma mater and try to figure out how I'm more successful than they are. I think this comparison, or "competitiveness," as I generously like to call it, is probably the thing that makes me the least happy.
This post has taken a somewhat negative turn.

I promise this is a good thing, though. The more I learn about myself, my default ways of examining things and what makes me happy and sad, the better I get.
This "competitiveness" idea was a pretty big breakthrough when it happened. Similar to when I discovered that my parents were fallible, when I figured out my least moral peers were the ones in my sunday school class, and when I learned that the more someone tries to convince you to make the decision they made, the more they're really trying to convince themselves they've made the right choice.

So yes, this blog. Maybe if I slow down and think and track my own life and progress I can be happier in myself, instead of poking around looking at other people's blogs and Facebooks to see how I track. Because it's not a race, you see.

*thunderous applause*

Friend Want-ads

WANTED
Chatty female friend with whom to learn how to knit, while we eat fruits and raw vegetables and watch back-to-back episodes of Mad Men and/or Project Runway All-Stars.

WANTED
Mildly to moderately out-of-shape female to serve as my "work out buddy" in a twice weekly Pilates class.

WANTED
Someone to teach me the basics of PHP and web design during regularly scheduled coffeehouse/bar meetings. Banter desirable.