4 Goals for a Happy New Year

I don't like new year's resolutions. No one really does. They're the vapid outer shells of the spirit that should be guiding us to being better versions of ourselves. They're a way of saying look at me! without committing to yourself the changes that you may want.

Part of my issue with resolutions comes from the fact that they are so dependent upon a specific time of the year, the idea that one specific date in the year is responsible for magically turning us into fully realized humans, or at least has put us on that path. It's the same logic that I apply to birthdays and why I mostly downplay my own. When we want to change something about ourselves, it depends on so many factors that the time that we put into accepting changes and acting on it can and ought to happen at any point in the year, and at any point of life. Goals don't wait for the calendar to change, and neither should we.

This is not to say that I don't think using the new year as a means of reflection and refining goals that you've been working on, recently started, or have gotten ready to start is a bad thing—much the contrary. So in that spirit, my early year reflections have laid out a map of the goals that I have been coming into 2015 with, and in my case, they are mostly a refinement of the things I spent my time learning about and putting energy toward in 2014.

1. Work with video making and the site as a consistent project, posting content weekly and mapping out what will be posted.

This goal comes from the shift that I experienced last year both toward my writing on the site as well as to making videos. As I have come to have a clearer understanding of my developed interests (hobbies? pastimes?), I have begun producing things here, on YouTube, and scattered about in plenty of other places that has come to reflect that. Wine, food, traveling around, and learning new things about all of them has been the focus of my energies, so I want to double down and really get into more of the nitty-gritty of all of them. I want to learn more about wine and share my progress and discoveries with anyone who will watch, just as I want to cook more and discover more foods from more places, and share those as well.

On the other side of things, I want to learn to edit my videos more smoothly, refine my audio tuning, and learn how to do more things that I as of yet am not entirely sure how to do. I want to continue to learn how to translate the designs in my head into the designs I am capable of making on my computer and share them with all of you. And, most importantly, I want to do this regularly. By setting the goal of producing some sort of written and video content each week, I can get myself into a routine and get myself working with this goal for more time, more consistently. More hours means more expertise.

2. Upgrade technology in order to do better with goal #1.

This goal is self-explanatory. Whether it is upgraded audio, a new camera, or something else to help get to a better place with my creative endeavors, I aim to upgrade the tech that I'm using in 2015. I don't want to get a new camera or a fancy microphone just for the sake of it, but because as I've gone through the process of making videos and doing other things that involve audio and visual production, I have come to realize that my current equipment is inhibiting me from being able to learn how to do things that are essential to achieving better quality in what I'm working on. A DSLR simply has more manual control than a point and shoot and thus a wider range of possibilities for learning, to say nothing of the quality upgrade. Similar things can be said for everything I would like to get in 2015. Onward.

3. Be more outspoken about relevant issues that matter.

With Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the digitalization of our news media, it is no longer possible to be ignorant to at least some of what is going on in the world without actively trying. I spend quite a lot of my time reading about current affairs and learning about the context behind them, but considerably less time commenting on them and being an active part in them. That needs to change in 2015.

I am not a social justice warrior, and I probably never will be. Even still, there are plenty of issues that either affect me personally or happen in my surroundings in a way that makes them very relevant and important for me to have an opinion on and express it. Just the same, one of the big lessons that we all should have taken out of 2014 is that social progress is never complete. There is always something more to learn and some other barrier to break down in the name of freedom and justice for all. In order to recognize my understanding of my place in the issues of today, I increasingly believe it is necessary to speak up about injustices, take a constructive stance on issues, and be ready to learn and grow from issues that provide new understanding. I'm not a perfect person, I'm not always right, but I always want to be a better person, and there is no better way to do so than to get a little uncomfortable. For me, that means engaging, whether by tweeting or posting to people or writing on here, the point is that in 2015, I will take part in the conversation.

4. Be more courageous.

Whether it's asking clients for a better rate, hustling for more jobs, or being more communicative with friends and family, I consistently feel that I take a step back because I'm afraid of the adrenaline and uncertainty involved. In 2015, I want to take a step forward and be more proactive, letting go of some of my fears and embracing the head rush and blushed cheeks that come from being more assertive with people.

This goal is less tangible than the others, but it's perhaps the most important of them all. It is so much of what it means to me to be an adult that I almost feel as though the other goals will not be possible without it. Let's see where this year takes me.

My last goal, but not specifically for the new year, is to engage more with everyone who takes part in this big project with me. Whether you're watching my videos or reading this blog, following me on Twitter or chatting with me on WhatsApp, I want to know what you think and I want to hear from you more. What are your goals for 2015?

10 Things I've Learned as a Grad Student

1. Never have you known so much information and felt so much like you know absolutely nothing at all about what you're studying.

2. Never have you been so good at detecting when people are pretending like they know more about what they're studying.

3. Never have classes felt more redundant than graduate seminars, especially those that have some undergrad attendees and their habitual circular questions.

4. The above make for the best environment you can find to meet other people to talk about intelligent things and feel like you're being challenged, validated, and learning all at the same time.

5. The above make for the best environment you can watch number 2 happen in real time and watch people claim very sincerely that they know everything there is in the world to know, simply because they pondered it for an instant.

6. There will never be a satisfactory balance of 4 and 5 inside the university, there will never be too much of number 4 outside of it.

7. When no one else is around to talk to about your big revelation or help you work with ideas for a paper, wine is there for you. Grad school is actually a cover for a budding specialization in enology.

8. You can trick yourself into considering money a relative or abstract concept, rationalizing and theorizing its existence into something you are detached from, until you have none and bills are due.

9. You never realized that nuts, and not their legume impostors, and berries, were such a luxury and so delicious.

10. Your thesis is not so much a tangible thing as it is a relative concept, something that happens in phases you're only aware happened in a void of space, time, and wine consumption.

Ten Things About Staying at Home

I've been at home more days than not in the last ten since I got back from Barcelona, so here's a list of the things going on in my life in no particular order.

1. No, the dishes really won't just wash themselves. You have to get up and scrub them or face the passive-aggressive wrath of your otherwise less-hygienic roommate.
2. Resting on the laurels of your supposed levels of hygiene as an excuse not to shower for four days is unacceptable.
3. Coming up with new ways of making the same ten ingredients in your cabinet will make you feel like a rocket scientist, except that if you share your discovery on social media, no one will care.
4. You will not fuse to the sofa regardless of how hard you attempt to.
5. Any activity that warrants actually leaving the house calls for a bath in cologne, even just a stroll to the supermarket.
6. It is entirely possible to trick yourself into thinking that you've been productive because you found new music, watched a show, and cleaned the house one afternoon. Don't fall for this.
7. The more time you spend at home, the more enticing buying cheap trinkets to decorate it with online becomes. Don't fall for this.
8. You will suddenly find yourself in a routine and get bored of being in your routine with no seeming recourse from it. You will then get bored of being bored of it.
9. Inspiration will strike at random and run away from you just as quickly. Do something with it right away instead of thinking better of it and procrastinating on what you think you ought to be doing instead.
10. The more hours you spend on it, the more you realize that instead of interacting with people on social media, you're just interacting with lists and half-baked articles on blogs and "news" sites, like this one.

Ten Unglamorous Things About Traveling

1. Arriving to your terminal/gate too early only to wait for a flight that is delayed.
2. Missing your train to the airport by ten seconds only to wait for a flight that is early.
3. Schlepping through terminals only to find that your flight's gate changed for one on the other side of the airport.
4. Schlepping your bags that feel like they have bricks in them only to find that you didn't pack enough upon arrival.
5. Not having enough battery power in your electronics only to find that the only outlet within a ten kilometer radius of the gate is being occupied by a schlumpy man playing Candy Crush on his phone.
6. The dry excuse for a sandwich that passes for an in-flight meal.
7. Sitting between business travelers with an inflated sense of self-importance who insist on purchasing discount tickets but expect business-class service and don't shut off their phones at any point during the flight.
8. The person who insists on testing out exactly how far back the seat in front of you will recline, forcing it unnaturally further.
9. The person who insists on testing out exactly how far forward your seat will contract, forcing it unnaturally further.
10. Getting your passport stamped after standing in line for an hour, despite the image you project at home to your less well-travelled cohort.

Things I Wish I Could Do

(Or were better at)

1. Sing. I'm pretty sure I'm tone deaf. I'm pretty sure I misjudge how many people are in the house when I think I'm alone and thus also are pretty sure I'm tone deaf.

2. Drink coffee black. I've got this down with espresso, but give me a larger cup without (soy)milk at your own peril. Pass on the sugar, though.

3. Pretend to care about things that don't interest me better. I'm nodding my head and artificially adjusting my intonation laudably but my face is giving me away, ruining everything.

4. Throw side-eye/give the death glare. My mother is particularly good at this. I am not.

5. Schmooze. With antisocial academic types in particular. Never does my music sound better or the book I'm reading capture my attention more.

6. Set a schedule. Sometimes I go to bed at 11:30, others at 5 AM. I feel like I have no control over this. Some polite people have informed me that this is called "being a twenty-something", or variously, "being a (graduate) student".

7. Travel. I often look at flights to places I want to go, waiting for the money to pay for them to telekinetically appear in my account. Eating takes priority, though.

8. Be less clumsy. And when I at last throw stellar side-eye, it will be to anyone who can eat flaky, crumbly, delicate anything without getting it all over themselves.

9. Put my obsessive-compulsive quirks to productive use. Less organizing of my living space and earthly possessions, more workaholism.

10. Push all of the bumbling people around here out of my way. But that wouldn't be polite.

Things I Miss About the United States

I am at the juncture of being away from the United States for just long enough that, beyond appreciating differences, I am actively chafing at them. Wouldn't you know, even someone fraught with a case of wanderlust can show signs of having roots. Let's dive in.

• Food and the Culture of Eating Outside of the Home

The wide variety of flavors and textures from all over the world available in a matter of minutes, from which there is yet another array of options in which to take them is something I take almost for granted in the United States. If I want Vietnamese soup or Punjabi curry or sushi or soul food or Mexican dishes, whatever it is I'm in the mood for, it's available and not a hassle to come across there. Here, not everything is available—Vietnamese food is essentially nonexistent, Mexican food is Lusified to the point of not really tasting anything like Mexican food, and many of the other things I normally consume on a whimsy are either expensive or more of a hassle than they're truly worth it to find. Despite the fact of there being new and interesting things to try here, I miss being able to be bored by too many gastronomic options around me more than almost anything else. I miss being able to order things on menus with near-infallible reliability and the ability to order with minute precision; it is not uncommon for cafés and restaurants to be out of just one ingredient for something here, leaving options unexpected.

• One-Stop, 24-hour Shopping

Stores of almost any sort, any business enterprise for that matter, are not legally allowed to operate 24 hours a day in almost all cases in Portugal and across much of Europe. In the United States, the idea of a regular grocery store not being open 24 hours a day is something of an absurdity: take Wal-Mart, with its ubiquitous (if derided) presence in the country. Seldom is their modern store that is not open all hours of the day. 24-hour service is the norm, not the exception, and this has extended to the most common and largest grocery stores across the country, be they in the Kroger family, Safeway, or otherwise. Whole Foods is the only major exception I can find to this. Not only being able to go to the store at 2 AM on a whimsy, I can also find a surplus of varieties of every basic item I could possibly need at almost all of these same retailers, from personal hygiene and pharmaceutical needs to home goods office supplies, food, and everything in between. When we complain about a grocery store not having something in the United States, it's usually either because they don't have a particular brand of what we were looking for, or because we wanted a more obscure, niche-market item. I sometimes wonder about the availability here of things I wouldn't blink an eye about in Denver. I miss being able to get every small thing I need easily, without having to go to several stores, worry about the time of day it is when I'm going, worry about going on the wrong day of the week, or anything else along those lines.

• Sociability

The friends I have abroad are fantastic people doing interesting things in a plethora of fields, to the extent that my life is much the greater for having them in it. The day to day reality of living abroad, however, is that a lot of my interactions with friends and people in general involves surface-level linguistic interaction, difficulties in communicating, and in certain circumstances, contenting ourselves with the company of each other without actually communicating very much at all. I revolve around constantly learning from my environment and am prone to causing situations from which to learn from, to diving headfirst into things, and this includes language and the process of self expression, but perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned recently is that the art of communicating with someone who speaks the same language natively and similarly shares your culture is not to be taken for granted. The way I speak English is entirely different with non-native speakers out of reflex because I find it grating to have to repeat myself because I talk too quickly in my particular accent or my Americanisms are lost on even very competent English speakers. I miss having a cultural and linguistic foundation from which to be able to better get into the nitty-gritty aspects of my character and connecting more closely with friends.

All of this and I still can't seem to want to stay put for very long at a time.

Things I've Learned at 21

• There will always be something broken at the end of the wild night out, no matter how inconsequential.
• Some people are flaky. Others just need an ice-breaker.
• No matter how subtle you think you're being, your roommates will always know what you're doing.
• The moment you decide to eat less is the moment all of the most delicious and unhealthy foods suddenly appear in your life.
• Hangovers and sleep are inversely correlated.
• A lot of learning languages is the art of bullshitting your way through interacting with other people who don't really understand you but don't stop you anyway.
• A man who continues to pursue you even after seeing you at your autopilot worst level of drunkenness is either a winner or very frustrated.
• The moment your age becomes one number larger never feels any different than the moment right before it.
• Economics lessons in inflation become personal when the average cost of a decent bottle of wine rises from 1.85€ to 2.25€.
• You should always counterbalance your questionable life decisions with a general scheme for accelerating the otherwise good things you have going on.

Things Not to Do, from Leaving to Landing

1. Eat 500 calories worth of fries and nothing else before boarding.
2. Run to the restroom only when boarding is getting started instead of in the two hours you had prior to that.
3. Burn yourself on British Airways' thermonuclear chicken tikka.
4. Forget to bring any writing utensils for use over the next several months, thus being unable to write letters or thank you notes on the plane.
5. Nearly forget to take your overhead carryon bag with you when transferring terminals.
6. Spend £17 on wireless internet access at the airport during a layover.
7. Spend £6 on a mediocre "beef samosa wrap", which is really just a wrap filled with overcooked beef, a little curry powder, and flavorless vegetables.
8. Trip on the stairs leading from the plane to the overcrowded shuttle.
9. Say "thank you" to all of the Portuguese people when you know more than four words of their own language.
10. Drink an entire bottle of wine the night you arrive.

Miscellaneous Fuckery

• The primary reaction I get to mentioning Portugal to Americans is "oh, cool! I had a great time in Brazil when I was there!" Sometimes these things just write themselves.

• More fun with Google:
• Two observations from this: first, how obscure (read: irrelevant to the world) does it imply that the things I write about are that such a thing would list my blog in the top place? Second, can we just revel in the idea that some college student desperate for sources stumbled upon this blog looking for something to cite? I can only imagine the horror that might have ensued upon further reading. Published and added to JSTOR, I am not.

• I went from the beach to the weather alternating between actively trying to kill me by means of baking or drowning. At least pick one, and also, can I go back now?

• I still have yet to understand how so much food gets put onto the plates in restaurants, how that could possibly be profitable, and why on earth people actually consume all of it (including myself).

• For as much as I love El Corte Inglés in Lisbon for being the most "American-style" of all of the grocery stores, it holds not even the smallest candle to an average American grocery store in terms of sheer absurdity in selection and quantity of goods. My first trip to the grocery store was a nightmare of staring at 18 (I counted) different brands of essentially the same cereal, frozen between both the volume and the inflated cost of each one. Other products have not served much better.

• The upside to being back is that I have been reunited with my closest confidants with whom I can fret every possible detail of life away, not the least of which being how I will be able to afford to pay to fret my life away.

• Bagels. Who can live without them? Not I, Reader, for I have been consuming them voraciously and without seeming end.

• I discovered, to my own mixed reaction, that I acquired enough shirts in Portugal that I can wear a different one every day for almost two months before going through all of them. For someone accustomed to not owning more than two weeks' worth of clothing, this fact is hard to process. It could be worse, I have known more than one person to have clothing filling multiple closets, including years-old items that still have the shopping tag on them.

• Driving: can we just collectively chill the fuck out? You Denver drivers have it so easy.

• The United States: good for mobile batteries? My phone has had much better battery life on the exact same manner of usage here than in Portugal. Someone with greater technical knowledge please explain this to me.

That's all for today. It hasn't been quite long enough for the absurdity of things around me to normalize and allow me to focus on what isn't.

Things to Which I Have Not Yet Adjusted

There's a bit (or more than) of truth in all of this sarcasm, so take it with good humor.

1. Air conditioning. Why is the United States so cold in the middle of a hot summer?
2. The enormity of everything. We're not exactly hurting for space, are we?
3. Public niceties. Why is everyone smiling at me? I don't know you people.
4. Bad English everywhere. It's like I didn't leave a foreign country, except these people have less of an excuse.
5. Food portions. How is it that restaurants can afford to serve this much food to people per dish?
6. Prices. How is it that Listerine only costs $3 for 1.5L? That would be nearly 20€ in Portugal.
7. Coffee. What is all of this liquid, and what have you done with the espresso that's supposed to be in it?
8. Suburbs. Where did the city go? I can't find it.
9. Drinking. Why must I be prohibited from doing this? Life is not the same without beer and 2€ wine.
10. Geography and climate. Why is it so dry here, and where did the beach go?
11. Dogs at home. Why are these creatures so fat and smell bad? Stop licking me.
12. Customer service. Why are you so efficient, and why are you so friendly? You must be getting paid a lot to care so much.
13. Restaurants. See: food portions. Also, why can't I just pick where I sit? And why are you in such a hurry?
14. Diet Coke. Why do you suddenly taste so foul, what has my exposure to Coke Light and Coke Zero done?
15. Punctuality. No comment.

Things Everyone Should Expect to Hear from Me Upon Arrival

A small post in light of many recent long ones.

1. What do you mean I'm not legally allowed to drink in this country?
2. What do you mean the buses only come once every 30 minutes?
3. Where is the nearest Chipotle?
4. What do you mean I have to drive there?
5. What is that in metric? (also: what is that in Celsius?)
6. Why is a shot of espresso more expensive than half a liter of coffee?
7. No, they don't speak Spanish in Portugal.
8. What do you mean I can't watch this content in my country?
9. Olá-oh, uh, hi.
10. When does the grocery store clo–what do you mean it doesn't?
11. The drivers are so polite here!
12. Why are you eating dinner so early?
13. Why is there so much to choose from?
14. Everything is so big here!
15. It's so amazing that everyone understands what I'm saying here.
16. Where are the bagels?
17. I can pay for this with my credit card, really? Are you completely sure?
18. Why are there so many bills, where are the coins?
19. Yes, I know what I'm doing after graduation and no, I'm not telling you about it.
20. Ciao.