Welcome to 2018

I hope you had a wonderful 2017 and that you made it peacefully into 2018!

With 2017 behind us we move into 2018 and this is a year  have a lot of expectations to. I like the idea of a new year meaning a clean slate, but I also think this idea has been fairly romanticised. It sometimes seems like a new year automatically means that everything will be easier. Like it is any easier to quit smoking, just because the calender suddenly says 2018. Or that it is okay to keep doing something, you actually want to stop, just because there’s only three weeks left of the year, and then you’ll stop at New Year’s. But I do still see some sense in letting the new year become a divide between old habits and new ones. It creates a sort of calm in setting goals.

New Year’s resolutions

This year I have made some resolutions and I want to share them with you. I normally don’t make resolutions, because I think it is silly to make promises to yourself just because the year is ending and a new one begins. As you probably understood from the paragraph above. Except for this year.

Last year my friend Cecilie made some resolutions, goals so to speak, and she achieved every single one of them. This actually made me want to have some goals too. Then on December 31 I spoke with my boyfriend about it, and he said something (that I don’t remember), that made me rethink this whole resolution-thing again.

Therefore I have put together a little list of things I want to achieve this year.

Bookrelated resolutions

• I want to read 35 books in 2018. This is not really a resolution, but more of a reading goal. I just put it here, because I think it makes sense.
• At least 18 of the books I read in 2018 must come from my own shelves. I borrow way too many books from the library. I love to do this, but it also means that the books I actually buy just end up on my shelf almost as an accessory, because the library books need to be returned after a month.
• At least 5 of the books I read must be e-books that I read on my Kindle. I love my Kindle, but since I don’t travel very much I actually don’t use it very much. Yet I have a lot of unread books on it that I really want to read. It just never happens, ’cause my Kindle is packed away and probably low on battery.
• I will try to write a blog post every week. I love my blog, but I often feel I have nothing relevant to say, or that what I have to say is not enough to write an entire blog post. And then I write none, but stick to the long instagram posts instead. I hope that this resolution can help me to explore different post possibilities and force me into being creative (something I am just not by nature). But I am also afraid that this is the first of my resolutions that I will break… (yeah – I don’t give myself a lot of credit – this is also one of the reasons I don’t normally do resolutions; I tend to break them).
• I will become more organised. I have notes lying everywhere! Papers, books, clothes etc. lying everywhere. I can never find my things and I can never remember where I put the things I don’t want to loose – you know, when you put some things in a specific place so that they do not turn up missing. This resolution therefore means keeping my lists and notes in specific notebooks. I hope to be able to gather all my book notes and the likes in one place. All my sport notes in another place etc. So far I have gathered three journals in order to do so, but hopefully I will one day be able to keep all of my notes in one place.

Non-bookrelated resolutions

• For the first six months I cannot drink soft drinks. Soft drinks are my weak spot. I can go without candy, cake and other sugary items, but I crave soda pops often. I hope that after the first six months I will not crave soft drinks again – and maybe not even dink them, but in case this is proving very hard, I need to be able to look forward to a day, when I can binge drink sodas.
• I will do my best to get rid of my running injury. Lately I have been a little too laissez-faire in my rehabilitation, and at the same time I have been way too eager to run like I used to, but it has to stop now. I love to run, and I would like to be able to run without pain again. And then hopefully next year (or later this year) I can have actual running goals.
• I will work on bettering my exam performance attitude. Honestly, I never thought that this could be a problem, but I think it has become one for me. I don’t like finals. Nobody does, I know that – but I also don’t like them as in I don’t think they are the best way to assess my skills. I know it is the cheapest way probably. But I hate the fact that every thing I have done for the past eighteen months can be assessed in a 40 minutes oral test. A test in which I often perform badly, because I am so nervous, but also because I never seem to be able to grasp exactly what it is I am supposed to do. I just cannot seem to “knække koden” as we say in Danish – I’m sorry, but I don’t know what the English equivalent is. My dictionary says crack the code, but I don’t think it is used the same way… Well, anyhoues I need to actually try to want to perform well, because I know that that is what future employers will look at. They don’t know me and they haven’t seen me work. They just look at my test score. Reduce me to the numbers in my life. Okay. That was definitely not a change in attitude! I will work on that.

Wish me luck

Well, I ended up with quite a few resolutions… I will try my best to actually follow through on them. But hey – first post of the year in week 1 – that’s a good start!

What are your New Year’s Resolutions this year?