A Brief Have Done List
"But what have you been up to this year?" I have found it easy to get lost in these matters, in the exhaustion of this year, the exhaustion of quarantine, the repetitive nature of quarantine, the roteness of adult life, the repetitions of my to-do list which weekly sees me performing the same tasks over and over again. It's hard to see the good which has occurred when there's so much bad, and when the good is necessarily incremental, as most good things, I'd wager, are.
So, I wanted to write a brief have done list, to remind myself what I have done this year, and the type of pride I should have. There are no great accolades here. Very few Oscars or Emmys follow. But I like highlighting process, the slow monotony of getting better, and with some monotony I have gotten better.
Writing: I estimate I have written at least 150,000 words since the year began. I get this number from a few sources. The biggest contributor has been this blog, where I have written, according to my site analytics, 110,000 words. I then get another 40,000 or so from some fiction I have been writing on the side. That number is likely an under count, since I do spend a lot of time writing fiction and nonfiction that doesn't get published anywhere, and these pieces are written across a number of platforms, including my personal notebook, making them resistant to any type of accounting. Maybe it's closer to 90,000. Wouldn't that be something to brag about?
Word counts do not a writer make, and I remain hesitant calling myself a writer. I'm mostly a data analyst with a blog, and I think I'd like to keep it that way. Writers are a drab thing. But I'm certainly one of the more prolific non-writers out there, and likely more prolific than some actual writers of renown.
Web Development: I get paid to write code, mostly SQL code related to databases. And this year I wanted to branch out and learn web development, how to make interactive and interesting and beautiful sites. I had little-to-no experience in this venue prior. I had done some web development at my old job, largely troubleshooting why web pages were not working appropriately. But nothing I could call my own. I had, at the maximum, written ~500 lines of web code before this year, and most of that was hacky JavaScript.
Now, I have a really gorgeous personal website where I host a number of fun and useful applications, as well as personal details. I will say that I'm almost embarrassed by how good it looks given the relative paucity of content. I haven't done enough in life to have a personal website this good, and it sorta lacks useful content. It has half of a web game I've been tinkering with, and a little app that I use to speed up some rote technical tasks I have at work.
But, I built it myself. And that's enough.
Work: I am quite lucky to announce that I have a new job! I will be starting in mid-June. It is for an EMR company. I applied to 10 jobs a day for 6 months before I secured this opportunity. Out of all the things here, this is the thing most close to an Emmy or an Oscar, since getting a job has a level of external validation not necessarily present when writing a newsletter with 20 subscribers. This is the second job I have secured in a year's time, and the third job I've secured in my adult life.
Health: I worked really hard at it, and I'm happy to say that my most recent blood pressure reading was a petite 122/80. As someone who has been routinely in the prehypertensive bucket, I am very proud of all I did to achieve that number. It involved a lot of exercise and changes to my diet, and that I achieved it without needing to resort to medication is a good sign.
Additionally, I made it my project this year to improve my posture, and at this point I can say: "Mission accomplished." I really no longer have the back pain that I once did.
Social Media and Screen Time: It has been a minor goal of mine to reduce my social media use, and I have been rather successful here. I definitely spend a lot of time on YouTube still, but I have reduced my Twitter consumption to around an hour a week, and recently deleted Instagram from my phone. I don't think I have many tips here, outside of reading Nir Eyal's Indistractable.
Well, there's that! Me screaming in to the void of the Internet (and 20 inboxes) saying "I matter, notice me, I do important things, I am hard working and cool and productive and know a really cool dog or two." There are also some cool side projects that I didn't mention here, because they are nascent, but I think they'll be quite exciting when reveal them I can.