Goals and things.

Today in my teenage angst, I am oriented toward self-improvement. My friend Michelle is admirably always looking for ways to be better. She's a business grad so she's naturally geared away from laziness. I on the other hand am incurably lazy. So now, after a year of turmoil and self-doubt, I have made goals, plans and resolutions orienting myself toward self-improvement.

Resolutions

• Clean my bathroom every Sunday. Sunday is bathroom cleaning day. Even if I work. That's the deal. 
• Change my sheets every other week. This for real makes me sound like the most disgusting person. I'm not. I'm a little bit of a mess but I'm not disgusting. Changing my sheets is something I've never gotten into the habit of and will forget to do for gross amounts of time. So this year is good habit forming year. 

This picture represents incurable laziness.

Goals 

• My dad and I are running a 5K in May. We run but we don't enter races. This is a motivating tactic to expand our training and general running practices. A 5K isn't much but races are scary. So we're starting small. 
• Achieve 3.5GPA for both my semesters this year. I was close last semester and still might make it as I'm still waiting on one mark. This might be a bit of a stretch but having the aim on the outset of the semester gives me motivation to work hard from start to finish.
• Save tuition for my fall semester at Regina. This is a bigger deal because the school to which I'm transferring doesn't hold the provincial support and subsequent tuition subsidization as the school I now attend. So because I live at home and have generally small needs it's attainable but saving money still requires a decision every month to put that chunk of money away.
• Take my Harmony 4 exam in May or August. That's a vein of classical music theory. The variance in time depends on my teacher. She'll decide when I'm not too stupid to actually write the exam. Oh bless her heart for dealing with me. She's wonderful. 

2012 Book List
I'm always scared to make book lists lest I don't read at all. But I invariably read every night before I go to bed or I can't fall asleep. So I might as well be intentional about it.

• The Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins (we're off to a good start with this one as I literally devoured the first book on New Year's Eve)
• Miss Peregrin's Home for Peculiar Children - Ransom Riggs
• The Whole Truth - Kit Pearson
• Slaughter-House Five - Kurt Vonnegut
• Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
• The Alchemist - Michael Scott
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane - Kate DiCamillo
• The Book Thief - Markus Zusak 
• Wonderstruck - Brian Selznick
• Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell 

You'll notice the overwhelming presence of Young Adult and Juvenile Fiction. This is because I'm largely done with Adult literature. I'm of the opinion that it's a lot harder to write for younger age groups because their cognitive capacity is so much smaller. As a result books end up portraying highly imaginative and deeply philosophical ideas in a much greater light than an adult novel could. Plus there's nobody having sex. That's the best part. So. Anyway. I'm really excited about this collection of books. And it's only twelve. So I'm not over-expending myself here.

I'm really excited about the possibilities of this year. By the end of it I should only have three semesters of school left. I'll be 25. And if my goals list comes to fruition, I'll have accomplished a great deal. This shows me that even for the incurably lazy, having expectations of yourself is not scary, it's healthy. May you, also, expect as much as possible.